The Dish

[Clive]

You may need cheering up after reading this review of a new study of racial divisions in Chicago. If so, Joel Stein’s extremely droll column about "the war on Hanukkah" should do the trick.

[Clive]

As my friends know, I never miss a chance to plug the music of Caetano Veloso, Brazil’s Renaissance Man. Imprisoned by the  military regime in the Sixties, he now enjoys god-like status. (His old friend, Gilberto Gil isn’t doing too badly either; he’s the Minister of Culture.) If I could keep only disc from my entire CD collection, it would have to be the tribute to the movies of Fellini. No sign of it on YouTube, alas, but I did just find an ingenious home-made clip which splices the hypnotic bossa nova cover of "Billie Jean" over stage footage of Michael Jackson. A weird yet strangely effective concept. (Why is Veloso so drawn to Jacko? Perhaps because they both have racially ambiguous personas.)

I don’t much like the latest release, called simply "C√™" –   it’s too close to rock for my taste –  but at least Veloso hasn’t lost his ability to spring surprises.

Reader JT with too much time on his hands uses college football to handicap the 2008 Presidential race:

John Kerry = Alabama, for some reason still thinks he should be considered anelite organization but each season becomes more and more embarrassing.

Barack Obama = Notre Dame, highly touted going into the season and will swayvoters based on name and mystique, but really no one knows if the praise is worthy and ends up unable to beat a quality opponent.

Mitt Romney = BYU, for obvious reasons.

Hillary Clinton = USC, one hell of organization, should contend for the title but could easily get derailed by a dispassionate offense and poor defense. Arouses mixture of loathing and envy from other teams’ supporters.

John McCain = Miami, has everything needed to be the one left standing but its been a while since the magical run and the pent up anger and cockiness can be the programme’s downfall.

Wes Clark = Penn State, just being good at defense doesn’t get you much.

John Edwards = Florida, quality, tier-one candidate but is he really good enough to deserve to play for the title?

Vilsack, Richardson, Giuliani = Rutgers, Louisville etc – lightly regarded going into the season, fan favorites by the end: good stories but not going to the big game.

There is no Ohio State this year.

[Alex]

Clive raises some excellent and important questions. There’s no doubt that the Bush administrations’ diplomatic style has been extraordinarily counter-productive. But, on these matters I find that I  have more sympathy for the British/European perspective when I’m in the United States and for the US view when I’m in the UK or Europe. (Maybe I just like arguing against the grain…)

Visiting the UK for the first time in a year I’m struck by the amount of fatuous, knee-jerk prejudice from people intelligent enough to know better. That obviously doesn’t include radio presenters or the Independent. The cliche of Americans as a bunch of overweight, blundering, gun-toting red-necked rubes seems to have run amok, sweeping everything else aside. People who tend to dismiss crude stereotypes in most circumstances are only to happy to wallow in them when such prejudice is applied to the United States.

Doubtless some of this will pass with George W Bush. But much of it will linger, especially since America’s welath and power is likely to endure for some time. Just as well, frankly, given the utter lack of seriousness displayed in many european capitals and from much of the British intelligentsia.

Tony Blair’s comments in Dubai this week are worth mentioning:

There is a monumental struggle going on worldwide between those who believe in democracy and modernisation, and forces of reaction and extremism. It is the 21st century challenge. Yet a great part of our own opinion either thinks there is no common theme to it all; or if there is, is inclined to believe that it is our – that is America and its allies – fault that this is so.

In any other situation in which terrorists with almost incredible wickedness butcher completely innocent people, provoke sectarian conflict, spread chaos and despair, in almost any other situation we would say well our response should be to stand up and fight back. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, but seeping across the board, voices instead say: we shouldn’t be involved: better leave well alone; it is none of our business.

Here are elements of the Government of Iran openly supporting terrorism in Iraq to stop a fledgling democratic process, trying to turn out a democratically elected Government in Lebanon, flaunting the international community’s desire for peace in Palestine – at the same time as denying the Holocaust and trying to acquire a nuclear weapon capability: and yet a huge part of world opinion is frankly almost indifferent. It would be bizarre if it weren’t so deadly serious.

We have in my view to wake up. These forces of extremism – based on a warped and wrong-headed misinterpretation of Islam – aren’t fighting a conventional war, but they are fighting one against us, "us" being not just the West, still less simply America and its allies, but "us", as all those worldwide who believe in tolerance, respect for others and liberty.

Whatever his other faults, Blair’ gets this right.

Nontheless, my impression is that much of the anti-Americanism so prevalent in Britain today is predicated on the idea that Britain has, cravenly, subordinated its foreign policy to the United States. There’s something humiliating about that, perhaps and the sense that Britain is not an independent country seems to unite much of the left and the old Tory right against the upstart Americans.

Harold Macmillan’s quip that Britain would play Athens to America’s Rome was breezily complacent. But it also overlooked the fact that though Greeks would educate young Roman noblemen, they were also their slaves. That feeling of subordination to Washington  – the sense that Britain really is th e51st state – seems widespread in Britain. (It’s not utterly nonsensicl either: "few people in Britain really understands how much we are almost part of the inter-agency process" a British official in Washington told me earlier this month.)

Let me throw something out there too. How about this: anti-americanism will not abate in Britain or europe until US hegemony is seriously threatened? ie, China becomes a global, strategic competitor and threat to western interests. That’s something to look forward to then…

On China, too, incidentally, we’ll see what Britain says next time the EU proposes ending the embargo on the sale of arms to Iraq. There’s a good chance the Germans will propose this soon and their position would privately, I think be supported by London. In public, however, it’s more likely that Britain will take the American view that this would be a bad idea.

[Clive]

David Irving’s nemesis, Deborah Lipstadt posts some observations on the latest twist in his career. She’s opposed to Holocaust denial laws, but with caveats:

1. Remember that David Irving went to Austria despite the fact that there was a warrant out for his arrest.
2. He announced that he was going. Seems to me he was "taunting" the Austrians or "asking for it."
3. In Austria, as the previous post notes, Holocaust denial has a different resonance than it does in the USA or other countries which are not directly linked to the Holocaust.
4. In a place such as Austria it is a political act that could be said to have incendiary implications and be close to incitement.

Therefore:
1. While I am opposed to such laws
2. I can understand the Austrian perspective.
3. Imagine if Ahamdinejad had decided to hold his conference in Vienna to save having to pay for Duke, the ridiculous rabbis et. al to fly all the way to Iran. There would have been a world outcry of unbelievable proportions.

I paid a visit to the courtroom during the epic Lipstadt vs Irving case back in 2000. A shrewd self-publicist, Irving had gone some way to portraying himself in the media as the hapless victim. For an instant, as I sat in the gallery, I caught myself feeling sorry for him: there he was, one rumpled, middle-aged man with an untidy pile of books and papers, taking on a team of some of the best legal minds in town.  Then I remembered what he stood for. It was only a split-second lapse, but it reminded me how clever he was at playing his game.

[Nb.  In my original  post, the last two sentences disappeared due to a problem with the formatting. Apologies.]

[Daniel]

Be careful.

A dead tree does not bring life to a room; it merely reminds us of the horrors of deforestation.

Want more advice like that? Read Spiked.

One of the joys of the British web scene is Spiked Online. This web magazine provides a daily assault on fashionable theories and media obsessions.

The dead trees quote comes from their delightful satire of ethical advice columns.

On the other hand, my Times colleague Anna Shepard argues that you would be happier if you worried about the environment more.

[Clive]

The scholar Marcus Cunliffe had this story to tell about veteran humorist Art Buchwald:

In August 1957 he placed the following advertisement in the London Times personal column: "Would like to hear from people who dislike Americans and their reasons why. Please write Box R 543."

The next week brought him over a hundred replies. Most came from British citizens, although one annoyed American woman wrote: "Obviously you have some grudge against Americans… If you are one of these half-baked Englishmen, then your grudge is most probably that the Americans get along better with the English girls and you are left with the leftovers. So much for your stupid advert, you squirming little Englishman." …Other letters dwelt upon American insularity, naivete and chauvinism of the "how-much-is-that-in-real-money?" variety…

Summing up this range of responses, Buchwald concluded that:

"If Americans would stop spending money, talking loudly in public places, telling the British who won the war, adopt a pro-colonial policy, back future expeditions to Suez, stop taking oil out of the Middle East, stop chewing gum,… move their air bases out of England, settle the desegregation problem in the South, … put the American woman in her proper place, and not export Rock ‘n’ Roll, and speak correct English, the tension between the two countries might ease and the British and the Americans would like each other again."

[Clive]

Here’s a question for Alex and Danny. Anti-Americanism is at a painfully high level in Britain. How much will it decline once George W. Bush leaves office? Obviously, there’ll be some sort of falling-off (touch wood). But has permanent damage been done to the transatlantic friendship? My sense is that Washington has been so ham-fisted in its treatment of Downing Street that we’ve reached a genuine watershed. (For heavens sake, even sending us a new ambassador appeared to be too much of an effort for a while.)

I don’t expect much from the Democrats either. Am I being overly gloomy?  There’s the alternative view – conveyed in that Art Buchwald anecdote – that America inevitably suffers the consequences of being top dog, and can’t do much about it. I definitely wouldn’t want to minimize the amount of hostility simmering away in Britain before Iraq and Afghanistan. In the days immediately after the Twin Towers fell I lost count of the number of people I met  who shrugged their shoulders and said something along the lines of "Of course it was terrible what happened, but what about Palestine, Kyoto, etc, etc?" That’s why I became such a keen reader of blogs like this one. It was one of the few places there seemed to be any sane conversation.

[Daniel]

This is what I had to say when Nazi apologist David Irving was jailed in Austria for denying the truth about the Holocaust:

It is difficult, even for me now, born in safety, free to bring up my sons as Jews, sitting at a desk typing my article in civilised Britain, it is difficult not to feel anger, rage at Irving. It is difficult not to wish him behind bars.

And I do feel rage. But I do not wish him behind bars, not for giving his opinion, not for delivering a lecture, however warped and horrible his opinion is. I still believe in the power of truth. And my belief in truth is what separates me from Irving.

And it is how I feel on his release. It should not be a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust.

Read the whole of my argument, here.

 

[Clive]

Remembering the great influenza epidemic of 1918:

Camp Devens, 35 miles northwest of Boston, was seriously overcrowded… The flu struck there with a suddenness and virulence that had never been seen before."These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of LaGrippe or Influenza, and when brought to the Hosp. they very rapidly develop the most vicious type of Pneumonia that has ever been seen," wrote Roy Grist, a doctor at the Camp Devens hospital."Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured man from the white….It is only a matter of hours then until death comes….We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day….We have lost an outrageous number of Nurses and Drs."

Scientific knowledge of the causes was sketchy. It wasn’t the government’s finest hour:

Surgeon General Rupert Blue, head of the U.S. Public Health Service, was aware that an outbreak of flu was possible. But in July 1918, he denied a request for $10,000 to be dedicated to pneumonia research, and he made no other preparations. Blue’s first public warning came in mid-September and included such tips as"Avoid tight clothes, tight shoes, tight gloves — seek to make nature your ally not your prisoner" and"Help by choosing and chewing your food well."

[Via Real Clear Politics]