Category: The Dish

From the Washington City Paper, an almost-moving account of the former D.C. mayor and current council-member, Marion Barry. He has some interesting habits:

"’Sometimes I see him in the afternoon just walking back and forth to his car,’ Fullard says. ‘He‚Äôd walk to his car and then walk down the street.’ Fullard says she’d see him walk to where Douglass Place dead-ends, a spot overlooking Suitland Parkway and marked by Jersey barriers sprayed with a tag memorializing another neighborhood. There, Barry would turn left and disappear into the Sayles Place town homes’ parking lot.
Sometimes Barry, 69, would reappear five to 10 minutes later, Fullard says. Only this time he seemed like a different man. She describes the transformed Barry this way: ‘Like he could barely stand up. His eyes were half-closed.’

He needed help a long time ago. His supporters merely enabled him some more.

A reader writes about the movies:

All this talk of "Brokeback Mountain" and its cultural significance finally got me thinking again of my all-time favorite film, "Midnight Cowboy", and how much of a forerunner it is for "Brokeback". Besides the cowboy tie-in, there’s the struggle of two men to bridge the gap between them against the demands of their own repression. After having endured adolescence in Omaha (unfriendly environs unless you’re a straight, white, Catholic male), I saw Midnight Cowboy at age 18, and it, along with my burgeoning love of David Bowie, got me shaking with nervousness that I was gay. 

When I finally bothered to realize that I wasn’t attracted to men, it occurred to me that I was still carrying around received notions of how masculinity and heterosexuality were defined even though I knew how much damage those ideas had inflicted on me and the other non-macho boys in school and around town. What Midnight Cowboy and Ziggy Stardust did for me was to unmoor me from that awful, cowardly, emotionally stunted caricature of heterosexuality that I carried around because there were no indigenous alternatives in Nebraska. I love these works of art for beaming in those alternatives to people starving for them, but I think that point sells them short. I love them more because they taught me to be a better heterosexual, a better man, and a better person. The plight of gay characters in Midnight Cowboy or Brokeback Mountain or whatever else affects us not with the emotional blackmail of overwrought tragedy, as detractors surely assume, but by reaching for deeper commonalities that transcend categorization.  That is why it succeeds, and why other "gay art" remains, for better or worse, just that.

Amen about "gay art." If that’s what it calls itself, it’s neither. Speaking of movies, we watched "East of Eden" last night. I’d never seen it, but its deep themes of love versus truth, of sin and salvation, seemed more relevant than ever. What Steinbeck and Kazan seemed to be saying is that truth matters, but the ultimate Christian truth is love. When adherence to truth attacks love, it destroys itself. If I were forced to state the essentials of my own Christian faith, it would be something like that. Love before everything. And the more astonishing idea: that the force behind all of us, and all of creation, is … benign. That’s what Jesus came to prove. And what some of his followers occasionally forget.

It’s sometimes hard to get a grip on the spending issue. I’ve learned to trust Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation. Download his latest study here. It’s horrifying – for the next generation. So why should
Karl Rove care?

A pretty good summary of the situation.

A reader writes:

"Remember the ridiculousness after John Lennon mentioned how The Beatles were a bit more popular than Jesus Christ? They held vinyl bonfires, burned Beatle memorabilia, and generally acted the way religious idiots do when ‘offended’."

The fundamental issue is, of course, the compatibility of religion with liberalism. This is a profound one, and liberalism (I mean it in the classical sense) has succeeded, in large part, in taming religious conviction in the West, in privatizing it sufficiently, for democratic pluralism to work. What unreconstructed Islam represents – in its interpenetration with the West – is a delayed response of fundamentalist faith to liberal democracy. True fundamentalism is incompatible with liberal democracy. And that’s why, although at the moment the Christianists are nowhere near as intolerant or as violent as the Islamists, we have to be vigilant at home as well. I will simply note a recent comment by a fundamentalist about the casting of a gay actor in a Christian movie:

"[I]t would probably be an overreaction to firebomb these men’s houses. But what they have done is no mistake. It is a calculated strategy."

Note one word: "probably". That’s the difference between the Islamist and the Christianist.

A reader writes:

"You self-righteously assert in your column, ‘Your Taboo, Not Mine,’ that cartoons illustrating Islam’s prophet Muhammad as a terrorist and sword wielding fanatic are in your words, ‘rather tame?’ To you, the images might have been tame, but to many devout Muslims, including myself, they were the ‘mother of all insults’ constituting a direct attack, and a excruciating below the belt at that one, against my faith. It was on par with declaring a war against all that I hold dear. Because for many righteous Muslims, like myself, religiosity is not divorced from ‘secular’ life as is the case with many in ‘Enlightened Europe,’ to whom religion is confined to only on ‘Sundays,’ if even at that. Lack of religiosity doesn‚Äôt give one the permission to offend. The right to free speech is always coupled with responsible speech, which the caricatures of the holy Prophet were most certainly not. They crossed all red-lines and bounds."

I guess I believe in a country where you have the right to a religion of ‘only on Sundays’ or no religion at all.

Here’s an interesting Islamist cartoon – just published. It’s of Anne Frank after having sex with Hitler. Yes, the Islamists are making their point. And here’s another cartoon from the same website the next day. This time, it could easily have been used to illustrate the latest article from Stanley Kurtz.

Let the nominations commence.

The Supreme Court building has a visual depiction of Muhammad on it. Oh horror!

My Time essay on the issues behind the Danish cartoons. Money quote:

"Muslim leaders say the cartoons are not just offensive. They’re blasphemy–the mother of all offenses. That’s because Islam forbids any visual depiction of the Prophet, even benign ones. Should non-Muslims respect this taboo? I see no reason why. You can respect a religion without honoring its taboos. I eat pork, and I’m not an anti-Semite. As a Catholic, I don’t expect atheists to genuflect before an altar. If violating a taboo is necessary to illustrate a political point, then the call is an easy one. Freedom means learning to deal with being offended."