Category: The Dish

"When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?" – Ezra Klein.

The trouble is: Ahmadinejad is not trying to dialogue with us. He’s trying to propagandize by using us. That’s a distinction. Inviting someone to speak is not necessary. It’s a choice. As it is, the event seems to have confirmed Ezra’s hopes. Bollinger did good. And the laughter was priceless. How many times do dictators get laughed at in their own countries?

A reader writes:

Andrew, two things:

First, it is indeed true that Asians dominate Christian groups at elite US colleges. At Williams, my friends and I lived in a suite opposite six or seven Christian, Asian girls, very sweet and demure and renunciatory of things of This World: I know it bothered them living with four more or less Wild Men (like the figure of medieval popular mythology) who were constantly smoking pot, shouting, and carrying machetes (we used to play a game called Machete Ball, very wasteful and American; it’s pretty much baseball except one uses fruit for the balls and a machete for the bat — quite satisfying). Or rather, I do tend to think that along with the disapproval, there was a genuine amount of fear, which is not unreasonable.

So that statistic rings true.

Secondly, Harvard was not an evangelical institution in the 17th C., it was only in the 18th C., with the Great Awakening, that what we know as Evangelicals really came on the scene. The 17th Century types were much more grim and bloody-minded Calvinists, Cotton Mather style.

Sorry to be pedantic, but New England 17th and 18th C. History is my specialty.

That and machete ball.

Notice his refusal to be baited into homophobia, despite the forum. Says a lot for him, in my view.

Yes, Mr Dinner Jacket, they exist. And you execute them even as teens.

Sy Hersh celebrates:

"There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism. I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ’93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded. So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff."

The transcripts of his ramblings today can be downloaded from here.

Hairhan, Gobi Desert, Mongolia, 11.25 am.

From the email: "I work in a mining camp, designing a uranium recovery system. I stay in touch via andrewsullivan.com."

A reader writes:

In reading your excerpt from a rural Japanese woman’s attraction to hairy men, I couldn’t help but recall a scene from "You Only Live Twice" in which James Bond (the hirsute Sean Connery) climbs into a hot tub and delights a bevy of Japanese geisha types. Bond seems startled by the attention until his host, a hairless Japanese man, explains that

"bird never make nest in bare tree."

My feelings entirely.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"Bush and Rove are just longing for Clinton to win."

Jimmy Carter longed for Ronald Reagan to win the nomination in 1980, too.

One traditionalist is worried that the anti-scientific absolutism of the literalists is restricting Christianity’s appeal:

I want to remove the stumbling block to the Gospel message that is being created by a dogmatic presentation of Creationism. Not the belief in a young earth and creation without evolution per se, but the “either/or” teaching that comes with it. I am not here to argue for an old earth or evolution, necessarily, but against the false dichotomy that so often comes along with Creationism. More and more people are being taught that an old earth/evolution and Christianity are wholly inconsistent and that if you believe one, you can not really believe the other. Such a blanket statement puts two very distinct groups in crisis and I am convinced that souls are being lost to the Kingdom as a result. This may sound a bit over-dramatic, but I have seen too many people distracted from the Gospel message by this issue.

A seconding here.