Category: Old Dish

Mary Eberstadt, in her endless reply to the letters criticizing her “Pedophilia Chic” piece in the Weekly Standard, smears another person. This time it’s Wendy Kaminer, who wrote a piece in the American Prospect recently defending NAMBLA members’ right to free speech. Eberstadt claims in her response to the letters that, “just recently, writer Wendy Kaminer penned a classic example for American Prospect magazine called, casually enough, ‘Speaking of Man-Boy Love.’ Does anyone really believe that the same magazine would have licensed any writer to weigh the pros and cons of men having sex with little girls?” This is a good test of Eberstadt’s intellectual honesty since you all can read the Kaminer piece for yourself. Kaminer extends no sympathy whatsoever for “consensual man-boy love,” whatever that can possibly mean. Indeed, she puts it in quotation marks, which Eberstadt slyly removes. (For some reason, the title of the piece has been changed to “Speaking Of.”) Kaminer even finds consensual man-boy sex to be “absurd.” There is no discussion of the pros and cons of it in the piece, merely an examination of a lawsuit designed to prove that the very airing of such views should make NAMBLA legally responsible for a child rape and murder. Yet Eberstadt is able to imply that Kaminer basically endorses pedophilia or is anti-anti-pedophilia, when the sole point of Kaminer’s piece is pro-free speech. Another point. In her reply, Eberstadt argues that “there are plenty of [pro-pedophilia] books on the gay studies shelf [of any book store], as none of my critics deny.” Well, I do deny it. Perhaps if you looked really hard, you might find a reference or two somewhere. But pro-pedophile books or journals are simply a minuscule portion of gay fiction and non-fiction and I’ve never seen one in a gay bookstore. If any reader cares, let me know what your perusal of such a shelf shows up. I bet you: nada.

Finally, a self-defense. In my letter, I wrote that “child abuse is always and everywhere an evil of extraordinary gravity.” Eberstadt has the gall to thank me for this “clarification.” Clarification of what? She has no, repeat no, evidence that I have ever said anything even faintly different. Her only source is a piece I wrote in the New York Times Magazine about our cultural resistance to good news. It started with an account of the discrepancy between falling crime and pregnancy rates and our continued belief that we are still somehow in cultural decline. It went on to discuss Bill Bennett’s Cultural Indicators, as well as a much-reviled study that suggested that legalizing abortion in the 1970s had reduced crime in the 1990s, and a largely ignored paper that argued that post-Vietnam suicide rates were far lower than previously thought. For good measure, I threw in the APA paper on child sexual abuse. Here’s what I wrote: “An equally sour reception greeted a study published by the American Psychological Association. Assessing data on effects of child-molestation, the paper found that lasting psychological trauma among adult survivors of abuse, particularly for men, was much less than feared. The results from 36 peer-reviewed studies and 23 dissertations showed that victims of child abuse seemed on average only slightly less well adjusted by the time they got to college than their peers. A reason for relief? Of course not. Outraged members of the religious right accused the A.P.A. of tolerating pedophilia and launched a crusade to punish the organization. The authors stressed that their findings ”do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on the behaviors currently classified as [child sexual abuse] should be abandoned or even altered,” but the House of Representatives voted 355-0 to condemn the article anyway. That’ll teach them to look on the bright side.” So it’s your call. Was that a subtle endorsement of pedophilia? Was it even anti-anti-pedophilia? There’s only one fair conclusion, I think. Eberstadt defiles the noble cause of opposing child-abuse by tactics outside the realm of civilized discourse. I’m sorry to go on. But the record should be set straight.

“Now Bush has abandoned all pretense of governing from the center, and congressional Democrats are uncertain whether to muster wall-to-wall opposition.” – Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect. Bush has even abandoned the pretense of governing from the center? It’s statements like that that make you wonder whether the man has lost touch with reality. My favorite Kuttner moment, however, was a cover-story he did for The New Republic while I was deputy editor. It was written just as the last recession was ending and predicted the future of the economy in the 1990s. It was called: “The Abyss.” Doesn’t get any more prescient than that. Maybe he should get a job at the Economist.

“Thanks at least partly to Britney, the marketing of sexy clothes and makeup to prepubescent girls is booming. Rave Girl, a national chain, sells feather boas, leather pants and stretch flares to girls ages 7 and up. “Girls’ clothes started getting sexier about two years ago,” says Jaime Williams, a manager at a branch outside Chicago. “Basically, everybody wants to be a princess. Not like the ones in fairy tales, but a hot princess like Britney.” In Manhattan, designer boutiques like Betwixt and Infinity sell adult labels at adult prices in Alice-in-Wonderland sizes. “Age-appropriate behavior is something we’ve lost sense of,” says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, the author of The Body Project. “It’s appropriate to say to children that you do certain things–like drive, wear makeup–at certain ages. Otherwise, the line between childhood and adulthood will disappear.”” – Time magazine, this week. Man, if a gay guy said that, there’d be a whole issue of the Weekly Standard to ponder the consequences.

Hilarious tid-bit in the Chicago Sun-Times. Jesse Jackson’s relaxation vehicle of choice is a bath-house! “Like most of us, Jesse likes the experience of the heat room and the soap rubdown. And it’s a place to reflect,” says a fellow patron. Jackson apparently hides out there in semi-public when the proverbial doo-doo hits the fan. He was there when he was hunkering down after his recent difficulties with a former employee. And no pesky women to bother him with sermons about adultery. “It’s like a brotherhood, a sanctuary,” explains another patron. Now if he could only explain what’s up with black guys and those little soapy wash-cloths.

Doesn’t happen very often but Richard Cohen and Tom Friedman have both written the same column about the same subject from the same place – and they’re both lame! These two workhorses of journalism have schlepped all the way out to Davos, Switzerland, for some nitty-gritty street reporting about how maddening it is for jet-setting chin-strokers to have too many high-tech gadgets to use. Each uber-hack retails their own small self-deprecating anecdote. “I still have not mastered the radio in my car,” says Cohen, or is it Friedman. “I still can’t program my VCR; how am I going to program my toaster?” bemoans Friedman, or is it Cohen. For a true self-referential moment, Friedman even mentions Cohen in his own column! “As I fumbled around trying to figure out how [my hand-held PC] worked, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who was trying to do the same, said to me: “I have so many devices now to make my life easier that I need someone just to carry them all around for me.”” Awww. I’m sure Linda Chavez has someone to recommend for that. Or do they provide servants now for op-ed columnists, along with junkets to the Alps?

But honest, my saintly boss, Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, has a terrific little piece online pointing out a wrinkle in recent liberal angst. In the recent past, liberals have almost sanctified the Supreme Court as a way to push unpopular social reforms on a largely unwilling country. Likewise, during the Clinton years, liberals have come around to the undemocratic power of the Fed. Look, Bill, Eisenhower Republicanism works! But in the last couple of months, these two institutions have largely kicked liberal butt! First SCOTUS stops SCOFLA’s crazy shenanigans in the Florida recount hell; now the Fed is backing Bush’s tax cuts! What’s a good lib to do? Peter’s proposal is that liberals should return to their democratic roots, get engaged again with anti-Fed economic populism and with anti-SCOTUS democratic activism. Unfortunately, the supply-siders and pro-lifers are already there! But the more the merrier. Peter’s ahead of the curve again – Alice Rivlin in today’s New York Times also discovers that Alan Greenspan is a Randian human and not the Immaculate Misconception others seem to think he is. Of course, I don’t agree with either Peter or Rivlin. I’m a big fan of undemocratic institutions, especially if they’re in charge of the constitution and the money supply. You think the demos can deal with those?

Update on the stats behind the HIV stats. Can’t find them anywhere on the web. One of the researchers has invited me to go to San Francisco to sit down with him and go over them, but as yet, hasn’t shown me the analysis or directed me to where it can be found. A respected AIDS journalist emails to say that the timing of the announcement is suspicious: “It’s been my observation that alarming reports of HIV surges tend to pop up about a week or two before either a big AIDS Conference or a significant deadline in the federal budget process. Just so happens that the Retrovirus Conference opens in Chicago this weekend and, of course, one presumes Bush is putting his first budget together now.” The last report of this kind from San Francisco calculated HIV-transmission rates in part by analysing whether there are employment discrimination protection for gays, domestic partnership provisions, and so on, in any given area. Quite how these would help one figure out HIV transmission rates is beyond me, and I look forward to seeing the logic. But the b.s. detector bell is ringing off the hook.

Tom Shales can be a funny and tart tv critic, but his review of John Stossel’s populist take on big government strikes me as somewhat beyond the pale. The Washington Post often passes off leftist rhetoric as “Style-writing” (you should have read their description of Katherine Harris!) but this one was enough to make even me take a deep breath. Here’s a typical extract: “Many of Stossel’s revelations are … bogus unless you’re capable of being shocked by such scoops as the fact that taxes are too high. No! Say it isn’t so! … You’re unlikely to fall out of your easy chair, either, when you hear that the military establishment wastes money, that “billions slip through the cracks” every year? “Isn’t it time to try something new?” asks Stossel after ticking off more examples of government waste and error. What does he mean by “something new,” though – balkanizing the United States into a group of smaller countries? No, he’s advocating that risky old cure-all, privatization. Private enterprise thrives on competition, he says, and thus has more impetus to be efficient. The government, by contrast, is a lazy monopoly. Apparently Stossel hasn’t been following the news much lately or keeping up with the epidemic of mergers that is making giant companies into mammoth corporations into humongous conglomerates that are a virtual government unto themselves. The real government often seems powerless to oppose them, as in the debacle at the gas pump or the current power shortage in California. Would anybody but John Stossel argue for more deregulation at this point?” Er, yes, Tom. I would for one. Shales veers from saying that Stossel’s criticisms of government waste are a) old news and b) wrong. But he doesn’t show they’re wrong (in fact he implies they’re right); and he doesn’t prove that they’re not still relevant. Heck, I haven’t stopped paying taxes just because someone already did a story on government waste in 1995. And then there’s Shales’s simple political and economic illiteracy. Does he really think high gas prices are the result of “privatisation?” Does he even have a clue about why California’s half-assed deregulation of electricity failed? Or are his editors such knee-jerk liberals that they let this half-baked blather go unchecked?

You’ve probably read all about the sudden surge in HIV infection rates in San Francisco. It was all over the papers. Drudge ran it heavy. So did almost everyone else. The only problem is – none of the news stories had hard numbers in them. There’s a reason for that. There’s no mandatory name-reported HIV transmission statistics in San Francisco – so the Public Health Dept has to come up with all sorts of weird statistical analyses to arrive at some sort of number of alleged infections from an often unrepresentative sample from public health clinics. I’m going to try and dig up how these numbers were arrived at this week – and I’ll report back. But if they’re anything like as reliable as the hysterical statistics put out last summer (which were later largely retracted), I’ll be unconvinced. The latest real numbers of AIDS diagnoses and AIDS deaths in San Francisco (the only solid data we have) show an all-time low, as they do almost everywhere else. I’m sure unsafe sex is on the rise; I’m also sure that the likelihood of meeting an HIV-positive guy is higher now than in the recent past. The fact that there are new infections every year, and fewer and fewer of us are dying, means that the pool of possible infecters keeps growing. But it’s more complicated than that. The impact of our low viral loads, brought about by the powerful drug cocktails, may simultaneously make transmission harder. We have less virus in our bodies and therefore it’s harder to infect others. So an increase in unsafe sex, even between someone negative and someone positive, may not bring about the rise in HIV some fear. I got my own bloodwork back last week, for example, and the HIV in my bloodstream is officially “undetectable” even by the most powerful methods available. It’s been that way for four years now. My immune system is indistinguishable in large part from someone who’s HIV-negative. I have no intention of testing the theory, but I doubt I could infect someone easily even if I tried. So the bottom line on new HIV infections is: we just don’t know and it’s about as complicated as the Palm Beach ballot. Which is why it’s better for news organizations to provide actual statistics when declaring a new wave of AIDS, instead of relying on health departments with budgets to save and axes to grind. To be continued …