Category: The Dish

I remember once causing a ruckus at a Harvard lunchtable by getting up and moving when someone sat down next to me wearing a Chairman Mao t-shirt. If someone feels that’s a fashion statement, I don’t want to associate with them. I’m still amazed that people use the symbols of communist totalitarianism – CCCP t-shirts, Che Guevara ballcaps, and so on – as if they were just cultural bric-a-brac. If someone had worn a swastika to lunch, others would have moved too, no? Jeff Jacoby, it appears, has noticed the same thing. On May Day, the evil of communism needs to be remembered; and its millions of victims mourned and recalled.

Chicago’s highest-paid TV news personality sues a construction company for allegedly shoddy work on her $3 million mansion. She claims

the company "intended to take advantage" of [her and her husband] because they are black. They accuse the company of seeing a black couple as being "gullible and inexperienced in construction matters," so it could "deceive and take advantage of and defraud" them.

This victim of racism earns $2 million a year.

Some of you have asked me what I thought of Stephen Colbert’s speech at the WHCA. Sorry. I’m one of those people who leave before the dinner. I took a friend from England for the cocktails part; and then scarpered for a dinner with other friends, winding up on the couch falling asleep watching Chevy Chase’s "European Vacation". The fiance, fresh back from London, wanted to acquaint me with this important cultural artefact. So no review from me. But here’s Noam Scheiber:

My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left–until recently more common on the right–wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value. Jon Stewart often says he hates when his audience cheers; he wants them to laugh. My sense is that, had most of the bloggers complaining about the WHCD been around Saturday night, there would have been lots of cheering but not much more laughing.

I love Colbert; but perhaps he misfired. It happens.

It’s in decline; but people have been saying that for a very long time. What is it? Here’s a rough definition, drawn from describing the way Huck Finn conversed with Jim:

Both participants listen attentively to each other; neither tries to promote himself by pleasing the other; both are obviously enjoying an intellectual workout; neither spoils the evening’s peaceable air by making a speech or letting disagreement flare into anger; they do not make tedious attempts to be witty. They observe classic conversational etiquette with a self-discipline that would have pleased Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, or any of a dozen other old masters of good talk whom Miller cites as authorities.

This etiquette, Miller says, is essential if conversation is to rise to the level of—well, "good conversation." The etiquette is hard on hotheads, egomaniacs, windbags, clowns, politicians, and zealots. The good conversationalist must never go purple with rage, like people on talk radio; never tell a long-winded story, like Joseph Conrad; and never boast that his views enjoy divine approval, like a former neighbor of mine whose car bumper declared, "God Said It, I Believe It, And That Settles It."

This is taken from Russell Baker’s engaging review of a new book on the subject by Stephen Miller. Conversation is Oakeshott’s metaphor for free association; Michael Totten sees it as the antidote to terror on the Israel-Lebanon border. I’d say it’s a practice integral to liberal democracy. Which is why the more open-minded parts of the blogosphere have an important part to play in reviving it.

The president proclaims "Law Day." This year, the theme is: "Liberty Under Law: Separate Branches, Balanced Powers." Take it away, Mr Umansky!

Cato unveils a new study of this president’s war on limited government. Money quote:

Far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad … President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Conservatives are beginning to fight back in earnest. Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch, authors of the new study, were once fiercely critical of president Bill Clinton on similar grounds. But Bush has made Clinton look much more like a small-government conservative than Bush has ever been.

A reader offers a provocation:

You print a letter that says Boston, MA is more like a "foreign country", i.e. the UK, than it is like Arizona. Once again, the tired reactionary Rovian slur that red states are real America while blue states are "foreign".

Let’s set this straight. Here’s the letter you should be printing:

"I am a native of Boston, Massachusetts, the epitome of Bunker Hill, Minutemen, Thanksgiving blue state America. I also have traveled extensively in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other fundamentalist theocracies. I have lived in North Carolina for the past year, and it is very intriguing to realize that North Carolina, and indeed the entire Bible Belt, is culturally and even politically much closer to a foreign country – the theocratic Middle East – than it is to other contiguous parts of the same country like Massachusetts."

Remember: the Northeast was and is the cradle of American ideals. It’s the Bob Jones theocrats who are, once again, attempting to create a foreign country on U.S. soil.

Fighting words – more inflammatory than I think justified. I might add to my own observations that Blue State Britain is perhaps closest in sensibility not to Boston but to Seattle, if only for climate and cultural reasons. And to my mind, the most fascinating development of the last two decades has been the conversion of freedom-loving California from a Republican stronghold to a Democratic bastion. Reagan’s home became Clinton’s base. Tells you something about where Reagan conservatism now lingers, I think.

A picture in hypocrisy.

"I’m wearing Armani," – Valerie Plame’s stock response to most questions directed her at last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

One of the least remarked-upon facets of recent years has been the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the academic left. While they control many humanities departments, and have filled the minds of  many young people with idiocies it will take them years to shuck off, they have almost no substantive contribution to make to American society. Many enclaves of the academic left have actively longed for the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq; and are ambivalent between the West and its Islamist enemies. I think particularly of the gay academic left, so busy tying themselves into "queer studies" knots that they were utterly absent in the battles for marriage equality and military service. (And when they were not absent, they were busy criticizing advocates for gay equality for being "assimilationist.") Old-school lefty Todd Gitlin has a great new piece on their vacuousness in the Chronicle for Higher Education. Money quote:

[T]he academic left is nowhere today. It matters more to David Horowitz than to anyone else. The reason is that its faith-based politics has crashed and burned. It specializes in detraction. It offers no plausible picture of the world. Such spontaneous movements as do crop up in America ‚Äî like the current immigrant demonstrations ‚Äî do not emerge from the campus left. Neither do reformers’ intermittent attempts to eject the party of plutocracy and fundamentalism from power, to win universal health care, to protect the planet from further convulsions, to enlarge the rights of the least privileged. If more academics deigned to work toward reforms, they might contribute ideas about taxes, education, trade, employment, investment, foreign policy, and security from jihadists. But the academic left is too busy guarding the flame of nullification. They think they can fortify themselves with vigilance. In truth, their curses are gestures of helplessness.

Go read.