The Dish

It’s Orwell:

"I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. It was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and ‚Äî at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts ‚Äî a Fuehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory ‚Äî all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour ‚Äî all in one word, Stalin. God ‚Äî Stalin. The devil ‚Äî Hitler. Heaven ‚Äî Moscow. Hell ‚Äî Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the ‘Communism’ of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated." – George Orwell, "Inside the Whale."

I think something similar applies to those lefties like Stanley Fish whose sympathies lie more with those outraged by the Danish cartoons than with those who drew them; and also to those conservatives who couldn’t live with the golden era of the 1990s – the Clinton-Gingrich Settlement – because it didn’t energize them enough, didn’t give them the "politics of meaning" they so longed for. They needed a new faith – stronger than liberalism and not as restrained as market capitalism. Richard John Neuhaus, to take one example, had once been a Marxist and a believer in dialectical materialism. Why would he subsequently be content with a neutral public square, with social progress and economic and technological miracles? Bourgeois hooey. So he switched sides and now worships Benedict XVI the way previous generations worshipped Stalin – even to the point of resistance to what theocons have called the American "regime". Many Republicans have found the appeal of an unbending faith – Protestant fundamentalism – more emotionally satisfying than the challenge of rational and questioning belief. Others still have responded to the empty center of liberalism by flocking to a new cult of the leader who can do no wrong – Bush. Others still are so blinded by partisan loyalty they can call torture – torture! – by another name, and vie with one another to extend the reach and power of government. But there are many sane liberals and principled conservatives prepared to confront modernity’s empty center with skepticism, private faith, public moderation, and a commitment to limited government. They are becoming the real opposition to the muddle of fundamentalisms, passivity and hero-worship that now pass for establishment conservatism and post-modern leftism. And I have a feeling we have only just begun to hear from them.

(Hat tip: Gil.)

Or how Jonah Goldberg became an "authoritarian cultist." Enjoy.

What’s there to say? It’s hilarious, now that it appears the poor schmuck who got in the way is going to be okay. But if you’re going to find a spinner for the veep, why not Mark Levin? Hey, this guy can defend waterboarding, and beating the crap out of innocent detainees. A little buck-shot in a GOP big-shot is way below his pay-grade. 

What does a monarch do when one of his servants refuses to go along with the torture of military detainees? You fire him, of course.

Mickey goes for broke today in his campaign against Brokeback Mountain (now $100 million in global take). I should say that I’m not interchangeable with Frank Rich in this respect. I’m perfectly aware of the visceral resistance to gayness that many straight men feel, as I have spent my entire life around it (which is a little tougher than living fifty-odd years with a couple of moments of discomfort or, in Mickey’s words, a "visceral surface revulsion"). I think that assuming a huge, overnight shift in sentiment toward gay men is foolhardy. At the same time, the pace of change these past couple of decades is astonishing. And can I really be blamed for being heartened by the way in which so many people, including many straight men, now seem able to deal with the idea of gay love? That’s what Brokeback is about; and it’s what the marriage campaign is about: putting love at the core of gay identity, rather than merely sex (while not being anti-sex at the same time).

I guess I’m saying that Mickey’s own homophobia is not as widespread as he thinks it is, while not as rare as Frank Rich hopes. We’re in a period of cultural transition. (By the way, Mickey would do well to study how many people, back in the 1960s, described their feelings about inter-racial sex. Many more were opposed to interracial marriage in 1967 than are now against marriage for a gay couple. They all described their feelings as "visceral surface revulsion.") Still, there are benefits to the increasingly deep hole (no pun intended) that Mickey has dug for himself. You get to see him rant about anal sex and germs while brandishing a toy moose, for example. You don’t see that on Fox. And he even gets to concede that I was a "very good editor" of The New Republic. If true, one reason was my getting Mickey to write every other week. I liked his compelling honesty, and still do. Even when he embarrasses himself in the process.

"We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator," – from the Clergy Letter Project, in which hundreds of mainline Protestant denominations took  stand against the rise of Christian fundamentalism.

The same applies, however, to Muslim fundamentalists. It seems to me that one of the most urgent tasks for theological departments in Western universities is to pioneer scholarly research into the origins of the Koran, to deepen our knnowledge of its origins, and shed the light of reason on the claims of Muslim fundamentalists.

The brutal murders of some innocent Aghan prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, are a horrifying reminder that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not exceptions, but typical of much detainee-handling in the war on terror; that those committing them believed they were authorized to do so; that inquiries trying to determine who in the command structure was really responsible have been stymied; and that the perpetrators, because they were indeed trying to follow confused or liberalized strictures on prisoner abuse, have largely gotten away with murder. Money quote:

"[N]or did [prosecutors] mention a secret memorandum showing that around the time of the two deaths, interrogators at Bagram were using new, aggressive methods that were not authorized for use in Afghanistan. The 10-page memorandum, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was written by the military’s acting chief lawyer at Bagram, Lt. Col. Robert J. Cotell Jr., on Jan. 24, 2003. It indicates that interrogators there adopted some of the more extreme interrogation methods that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld approved on Dec. 2, 2002, exclusively for use at Guant√°namo Bay, Cuba."

And so you have a direct line from Rumsfeld’s approval of abuse to the murder of two completely innocent men, by having them hung from their wrists and their legs pummeled by a series of American soldiers until the legs were reduced to pulp. The harshest sentence in the Bush military for murdering innocents by this kind of method is five months. The vast majority have received no punishment at all. One soldier who confessed to beating the hanging man was given an honorable discharge. You can judge how seriously this administration takes the abuse of detainees by what they do about it. We just found out – in the clearest possible case. 

"Brokeback" now has an accumulated total earnings of $67 million in the US, is the biggest-earning movie in the top ten, where it has stayed for ten weeks, more than any other top-ten movie. And this is still almost a month before the Oscars.

My paper, the Sunday Times, has a must-read on how left-liberals in Britain created a world in which violent Jihadists were supported by tax-payers, while the p.c. elites forbade discussion of their aims and methods and the police were told to avoid offending Muslim sensitivities at all cost. Money quote:

"The authorities were wary of offending Muslim sensibilities, even in the case of Hamza. When police did finally raid the Finsbury Park mosque they treated the hotbed of terrorism with utmost respect. ‘Every precaution was taken to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities,’ Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, wrote in his autobiography. ‘All police officers who were to enter the mosque wore overshoes and headgear, and the raiding party included Muslim officers to handle copies of the Koran.’

Hamza had shown no such courtesy in his public rants. Instead he had described Britain as a ‘toilet’ and urged his followers to turn it into an Islamic state. He had urged them to ‘bleed the enemies of Allah’ and to ‘stab them here and there’."

I have no doubt the cops and the government were doing what they sincerely believed was for the best. But tolerance of intolerance soon becomes acquiescence to bullies, and allows extremists to intimidate moderate Muslims – with cover provided by p.c. orthodoxy. This pattern must be broken – sooner rather than later.

The New York Times, meanwhile, did us all a favor by printing the latest post-modern claptrap from Stanley Fish. For post-modernists, liberalism is just another ideology. It has no superior claim to our allegiance than, say, Islamism or scientology or Raelian metaphysics. It is not the product of centuries spent balancing faith and freedom, the achievement of the West that wllows for different beliefs to flourish alongside each other, in a constitutional order designed to protect freedom. Liberalism is just a religion; and its goal is to weaken other religions:

"This is, increasingly, what happens to strongly held faiths in the liberal state. Such beliefs are equally and indifferently authorized as ideas people are perfectly free to believe, but they are equally and indifferently disallowed as ideas that might serve as a basis for action or public policy."

Yes, Fish has read Nietzsche, hence his homage in the sentence: "The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously." But this is a distortion of liberalism, as Nietzsche’s was. The defense of free speech is not a frivoloous exercise, as Fish argues. In the context of a continent where artists and writers have been threatened with death and murdered for their freedoms, it is a deadly serious task. And maintaining support for the difficult restraint that liberalism asks of us – to maintain faith if you want, but to curtail its intolerant and extreme influence in the public square – is, pace Fish, not an easy or platitudinous path. It is the difficult restraint liberty requires in modernity. Fish, however, like many postmoderns, is skeptical of such ideas of liberty and, in a pinch, seems to prefer the Taliban’s authenticity to societies where writers dare to challenge religious taboos:

"[Liberalism] is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors."

What you see here is something very close to the surface among the postmodern left. They deny all truths, but somehow feel excited by being in the presence of true believers. It gives them a thrill, the way so many Western intellectuals once found Hitler’s and Stalin’s purism exciting. When it comes to a choice between fundamentalism and freedom, Fish is on the side of fundamentalism. The thrill of believing in something so much you are prepared to kill innocents for it! The authenticity of Jihad! How much deeper than the pallid Western defense of an insipid thing called freedom. Fish is a useful reminder of how hollowed out many of our intellectuals are. They have learned nothing from the 1930s; and seem eager to repeat them.