Category: The Dish

Ian Buruma confesses ambivalence about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Money quote:

In Europe, even the issue of headscarves cannot be treated simply as a symbol of religious bigotry. Some women wear them to ward off male aggression, others because their parents insist on it, and some by their own choice, as a defiant badge of identity, even rebellion. Bruckner admires rebels. Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like? Or does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don’t like it, as long as they don’t harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.

To be tolerant is not to be indiscriminate.

(Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty.)

It fits the new party well:

"We’re going to get the band back together, and we’re on a mission from God."

More from CPAC here.

"When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that’s the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trade Center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.

This mirror of "What Went Wrong" wouldn’t be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled – and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.

Who were these people? They were us." – Bjorn Staerk, a European war-blogger, able to confront his own complicity in the mistakes we made. (Hat tip: Crooked Timber.)

Ixonia, Wisconsin, 8.50 am.

It’s this. Phillip Carter, meanwhile, explores the problem further at Slate.

Here’s a useful test.

Here is part of the presidential candidate’s long hidden senior thesis at Wellesley:

"A cycle of dependency has been created, which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy."

This was her assessment of Johnson’s War on Poverty. Quite a little neocon, wasn’t she, as president of the college Republicans in her freshman year? Those looking through the thesis for some kind of endorsement for its subject, leftist organizer, Saul Alinsky, will be disappointed. Clinton is not a radical. She’s a deeply pragmatic, high-minded centrist – much like her husband, without any of his charisma.

I’m not sure Barack Obama has sounded an off-key note in his campaign thus far. Am I swooning? No. I’ve learned my lesson. But read this NPR interview, where Obama has to walk through a racial and cultural minefield. He strides straight ahead, unflappable and sane. I think his appeal is precisely this. He is moving our narrative forward. He is able to speak of race and faith and politics without the usual ideological cant, and without the conventional cliche-ridden positioning. Compare him with Romney’s or Clinton’s parsed pirouettes. They just don’t feel fake in comparison; they feel old. Money quote from Obama:

NPR: Do you think that your life and your experience as an African American would cause you as president to pursue any particular policy differently than if you’d been white? Would you be a different president in some way?

Obama: There are certain instincts that I have that may be stronger because of my experiences as an African American. I don’t think they’re exclusive to African Americans but I think I maybe feel them more acutely. I think I would be very interested in having a civil rights division that is serious about enforcing civil rights laws. I think that when it comes to an issue like education for example, I feel great pain knowing that there are children in a lot of schools in America who are not getting anything close to the kind of education that will allow them to compete. And I think a lot of candidates, Republican and Democrat, feel concern about that. But when I know that a lot of those kids look just like my daughters, maybe it’s harder for me to separate myself from their reality. Every time I see those kids, they feel like a part of me.

Why do I keep feeling that he’s actually being honest?

One reader fisks another:

Do married men (fathers) go on demonstratively bragging?

Better question: do you have any friends at all? Straight men, married or single, fathers or otherwise, boast about their sexual ventures all the time. That is what we do. We brag, everywhere, in poker games and bars, overtly or through innuendo, for as long as we still draw breath. Duh.

Alva is saying that even if one’s lifestyle is degraded and perverted?

Alva is not saying anything of the sort. That is what you are saying. And most people – at least in the next generation – think you are full of it.

This is fake subterfuge and bluff.

You nailed it, Sherlock. You caught on to Eric Alva and his sinister, life-long plan. You see, ever since he knew he was gay, Alva has been trying to concoct a scheme to turn America into the Sodom and Gomorrah of his craving. And then, one night, while prancing around in all his gayness, he saw a commercial for the Army. He knew instantly what he had to do. He would join the Army, and use the social status to advance the cause of moral debauchery. Then Bush decided to go to war, unwittingly giving him the chance to execute his diabolical plan. There, in the sands of Iraq, he saw a protruding land mine, and he willingly jumped on top of it, becoming a martyr for gays everywhere. And to think he would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for your steadfast vigilance!

Look what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. The biggest strength any army has is its spirit. A joyous, unified, spirit to win, knowing they’re doing the right, just and moral thing.

You’re right, actually. The best asset of the army is its spirit – of comradeship, brotherhood, and unity. It is a spirit which overrules, or at least ought to overrule, all the taxonomies of civilian life: race, politics, class, region, and even, one might hope, sexuality. But if you actually believe our men and women in uniform can stand up to the most maniacal, barbaric, ruthless, and vile killers in the world, and still be flustered by – gasp – a gay person,  then you have officially exiled yourself from the frontier of reason.

It’s a movie that was made, shown and is now utterly lost. There are more of those than you’d imagine, though probably not as many as you’d like. Here’s the synopsis of its history:

The title character of this gay porn flick is none other than the Man from Galilee, whose interest in hanging out with the all-male disciples is supposedly more than mere fraternalism. Parallel to this is a contemporary story of a young gay male who finds new spiritualism by plumbing the gayer aspects of the Gospels for his own notion of loving thy neighbor (particularly if he’s a good looking hunky neighbor).

WHY IS IT LOST? The film would have probably been forgotten had it not been detailed in the 1980 book ‘The Golden Turkey Awards’ by the Medved Brothers. Despite an Internet debate that insists the film never existed, poster art from the movie’s original New York run has turned up to verify it did exist. The film itself, however, is believed to be lost (how the Medveds learned of the film is not clear, though the idea of Michael Medved watching gay porno for "research" is mind-boggling).

Not actually mind-boggling. Policing the culture can be cold and lonely work and someone’s got to do it.

[Update: Here’s an interesting summary of the debate about whether this movie ever existed or whether Michael Medved just made it up. Here’s an open question to Michael Medved. Was this your hoax? Can you tell us now? Did you watch this movie? Or did you make it up?]