The Dish

You might call this prep-hop. Or Abercrombie and hos. But urban style just reached the Hamptons/Kennebunkport set.

Here’s a little insight into the atmosphere in parts of D.C. Being away for a month and a half, I have to say it’s pleasant not to be assaulted intermittently by homophobic and racist slurs. Here’s a classic recent D.C anecdote from Frank Ahrens in today’s Washington Post:

Walking up Connecticut Avenue through Dupont Circle one night recently, I spotted a sidewalk saxophonist. Amid his free-form meanderings, I picked out some Brubeck. The busker was a black man, and looked about my age.

I was about to say something friendly to him about "Take Five" as I approached, but he beat me to the punch. He locked eyes with me, stopped playing and said, "After 42 years in this life, I learned one thing: White people suck!"

It’s rare to be confronted with such unprovoked, in-your-face malice, at least for a white guy. I was stunned and kept walking. But I was so angered, so offended, that I shot back — without really thinking — "[Expletive] you!"

"You can’t," he yelled after me, as I walked away, "you gay [expletive]!"

The punch-line, of course, is that Brubeck is white. In DC, as gentrification intensifies, my own inner-city neighborhood has become noticeably less friendly. I’ve lived on the same street corner as a major drug gang for fourteen years. They usually leave me alone, but in the last year or so, the mutterings of "faggot" as I walk my dogs each day have grown more common. Older African-American teens drag kids away from any interaction with me and the beagles. At a recent neighborhood meeating, one resident told the assembled throng (I heard this from someone who lives in my building) declared: "We don’t want any more white people here." I was sitting on a bus a couple years’ back and heard two black men talk about the problem with "faggots" in their neighborhood. "I can smell ’em," one said to the other, and cast a sideways look in my direction. Local black pastors have recently given sermons denouncing "faggots" in exactly that language, and remain in the mayor’s good graces. I should add: I couldn’t care less about the "faggot" remarks. Yes, they grate, and my other half finds them more distressing. As long as they don’t touch me, they’re welcome to their prejudice. It’s their loss, not mine. It’s just a shame that, once again, insecure male heterosexuals find the need to bolster their own fragile self-esteem by denigrating fags. One day, they’ll grow up and be, well, men.

My fears of imminent Armageddon just moved up a notch. Now imagine what Fox News would do to Kerry if they’d discovered that about him. Memo to Colbert: the threat is real. Even, er, existential. Memo to the president: a more appropriate Camus work for you right now might be: "The Myth of Sysiphus." Think Iraq.

Plano, Texas, 3 pm.

It could be done. How? By massive use of anti-retrovirals. The key point about the anti-HIV drugs often missed by non-experts is that they drastically reduce the amount of virus in blood and semen and so make HIV-infected people much less infectious. If you get a critical mass of people with HIV with highly suppressed levels of the virus, you can reach a tipping point at which the virus cannot spread. This approach, using drugs we already have, is far more feasible than all the money wasted on the search for a vaccine that will never exist. And cost-effective too. Here’s what I regard as a persuasive case by the president-elect of the International AIDS Society. Read it. It makes more sense than many other ideas.

A reader writes:

What the hell are you thinking Mr. Sullivan?  Is it just me or did you just call every single Muslim sick, pathetic and miserable (amongst other things)?  I am Muslim by birth and I assure you that I have never laid a hand on anyone in my entire life, never wished ill towards any human being and the mere sight of violence on TV makes me ill to my stomach.  I rarely watch Rated R movies for that matter.

I am deeply hurt and offended by this knee jerk comment and would at the very least expect an explanation.  For someone whose sexual orientation has lead to persecution, you obviously have little to no problem persecuting others, in fact billions, for the crimes of a few.  What if someone had posted that blog but had removed Muslim and replaced it with Jew, Homosexual or Native American? You just ruined my Friday and broke my heart.

Coming from a family of loyalists with ties to the Shah of Iran, many of my family members were killed by the Mullahs for their political allegiance to the crown during the Iranian Revolution, some went into hiding in basements for years and for a lucky few, like my father and I, had to flee to a strange new world and start anew with nothing in our pockets but our dignity.  To see you so haphazardly clump me in with the terrorist scum is emotionally devasting.

The sentence he is referring to is as follows:

"There is something terribly sick within the Muslim mind at this moment in history. It is Nietzsche’s ressentiment, but with God re-attached."

I did not write that Islam was sick. I did not write that all Muslims were psychologically sick. I have often printed and published emails and articles from sane and devout Muslims. I have great respect for Islam at its best. But something is sick within the Muslim mind at this moment in time, and it is not Islamophobic to say so. The major source of the mass murder and threat of mass murder in the world right now is rooted in Islam. It is waged in the name of Islam; it is justified by reference to Islam; it is a fundamentally religious movement.

Does it represent everything Muslim? Of course not. Go to Turkey or Indonesia or Dearborn or Manchester and you will find a very different form of Islam. I could equally say that at this moment there is something sick in the Catholic mind – and, in my view, there is. The toleration of massive child-abuse, the stigmatization of minorities, the policing of free thought, the acquiescence in the spread of HIV, the conflation of religion and politics among the theocons: yes, there is something sick in the Catholic mind as well right now. Ditto the Christianist temptation among evangelicals. As a Christian, I am not "emotionally devastated" by these criticisms. I regard them as essential to the resuscitation of a healthier, stronger Christianity. To my Muslim reader, I am sorry to have hurt your feelings. But my job is not to make you or anyone feel better. It is to write the truth as best I can.

And the sad truth is: no religion in the world right now has as many internal problems as Islam. The Muslim faith is being used to sanction mass murder; Islam is engaged in a civil war in which some Muslims are blowing up other Muslims’ mosques and holy places; Islamic regimes are hanging gays and enslaving women and putting diapers on goats, while holding the world hostage to their own desire to wreak havoc on civilizations that have surpassed Islam in power and democratic freedom. I’m sorry if the truth hurts. But I’m not interested in writing lies. If more Muslims were as "emotionally devastated" by the carnage wrought in their name as the words on a blog, Islam would have a much healthier future.

(Photo: Wisam Sami/AFP/Getty.)

Some Kissingerians believe that now might be the time for a Grand Compromise on all the Middle East issues. I dissent. But former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd makes the case here.

An interesting Q and A with the writer of "Forgive Us Our Spins," a liberal take-down of the liar and charlatan, Michael Moore.

One facet of the foiled London bombing is that the Brits succeeded. They succeeded through good intelligence – not dumb torture or invading countries. And this raises a broader question that deserves wider debate. A reader writes:

I generally agree with your post regarding the lack of a clear Democratic proposal to reform the Middle East. To take a step back, though, is it not a valid question to ask whether such reform is possible, at least in a broad sense and in a matter of years rather than decades? Your framing of the issue implies that any foreign policy agenda that does not include an ambitious reform effort is inherently defeatist ‚Äì here you seem to follow the RNC line ‚Äì and it is unclear, to me at least, what proportion of such an agenda you believe should rely on military force. Your comment emphasizes the need to use American soft power, but is the willingness to apply military force also a necessary ingredient? 

Would you be satisfied by a Democratic agenda, or a Democratic candidate in 2008, supporting political and economic reform and extensive counter-terrorism measures but recognizing that the use of military force in the conventional sense is likely to have limited value and much more downside than up? Iran is a difficult issue here, to be sure, but even the Bush administration seems to recognize that the military options is an invitation to apocalypse. Such a policy would of course model Baker/Scowcroft ‚Äòmainstream‚Äô Republican thought pre-9/11, with a heightened sense of the need to support measures counteracting radical Islamic fundamentalism and jihadist groups. Is such a policy squishy and weak, or is it simply realistic? 

My own view has adjusted over the last few years, though not changed dramatically. The Iraq fiasco has shown the enormous difficulty of using blunt force to create an organic democratic change in a few years. But the future is not written yet – and the Scowcroftian policies of propping up fast-failing  dictatorships (a policy that gave us the first Islamist government in Iran) was clearly insufficient after 9/11. So call me a chastened neocon, if you must: appalled by the execution, humbled by the unintended consequences, but still unable to surrender the belief that more democracy and liberal institutions in the Middle East is the only long-term solution.

What does this mean in practice? Redeployment within Iraq to regions where we truly can encourage democracy and prosperity, like Kurdistan. More "soft" support for democratic movements in the Muslim world – the kind of backing we gave Eastern European dissidents in the Cold War – is essential, if done subtly enough not to prompt backlash. Encouraging the entrepreneurial Gulf states to grow in wealth and influence cannot hurt; a serious non-carbon energy policy at home is part of the mix as well. The credible threat of military force is also vital – especially as far as Iran’s regime is concerned. And a much more credible homeland defense policy. If the Democrats could present a multi-faceted, hard-nosed approach to winning the war, a lot of us in the middle would give them a second look. But so far, not so good. I’m waiting for a leading Democratic nominee to pill a Sistah Souljah on the anti-war left, to call them on their irresponsibility and narcissism. Gore could do it. The question is: when will he start talking like a future war-president rather than an angry dissident?

(Photo: Jon Super/AP.)

Their mutual belief is that any criticism of a war-leader in the middle of combat helps the enemy and should be restrained. In Israel, they clearly don’t buy such an argument, and they are in an existential battle for survival. Cheney and Lieberman are full of it.