The Dish

A reader sends in a lovely little extract from the 1790 edition of the Falconer Dictionary of the Marine, a British reference work. Here’s the definition of “retreat”:

“RETREAT, the order or disposition in which a fleet of French men of war decline engagement, or fly from a pursuing enemy. The reader, who wishes to be expert in this manoeuvre, will find it copiously described by several ingenious French writers, particularly L’Hôte, Saverien, Morogues, Bourdé, and Ozane; who have given accurate instructions, deduced from experience, for putting it in practice when occasion requires. As it is not properly a term of the British marine, a more circumstantial account of it might be considered foreign to our plan. It has been observed in another part of this work (see the article HEAD) that the French have generally exhibited greater proofs of taste and judgment in the sculpture, with which their ships are decorated, than the English; the same candour and impartiality obliges us to confess their superior dexterity in this movement.”

A useful definition for the coalition soldiers in Iraq.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: Julie Burchill says goodbye to the Guardian. One of the things she will miss the least is the polite anti-Semitism that now seems such a growing feature of the Western left:

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it’s a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban.

I like the term “Judeophobia.” It’s the common thread between old-style anti-Semitism and new-style “anti-Zionism” that somehow manages to find excuses for murderers of civilians – as long as the civilians are Jews.

One of the sad aspects of the current Catholic hierarchy’s obsession with sex is that they give short shrift to friendship. I noted David Hume’s more balanced view of marriage over the weekend, but Hume isn’t the only thinker who sees how important friendship is in marital or non-marital life. One of my favorite authors is the tenth century Northumbrian monk, Aelred of Rievaulx. His little book on friendship is a classic and plays a central role in my own essay on the subject, “If Love Were All” in “Love Undetectable.” What Aelred also understood was how passionate deep friendship can be. Here he is writing about friendship. Tell me if you can find anything in here that woul;dn’t also apply to a deep and beautiful marriage:

“It is in fact a great consolation in this life to have someone to whom you can be united in the intimate embrace of the most sacred love;
in whom your spirit can rest;
to whom you can pour out your soul;
in whose delightful company, as in a sweet consoling song, you can take comfort in the midst of sadness;
in whose most welcome, friendly bosom you can find peace in so many worldly setbacks;
to whose loving heart you can open, as freely as you would to yourself, your innermost thoughts;
through whose spiritual kisses – as by some medicine – you are cured of the sickness of care and worry;
who weeps with you in sorrow, rejoices with you in joy, and wonders with you in doubt;
whom you draw by the fetters of love into that inner room of your soul,
so that though the body is absent, the spirit is there,
and you can confer all alone, the two of you,
in the sleep of peace away from the noise of the world,
in the embrace of love, in the kiss of unity,
with the Holy Spirit flowing over you;
to whom you so join and unite yourself that you mix soul with soul,
and two become one.”

All of that applies to gay couples as well as straight ones. Aelred did not share the vicious homophobia that entered the church in the twelfth century. Maybe soon Catholicism will recover some of its lost appreciation of same-sex love.

But it might just as well be. Money quote:

Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, said Mark O’Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance.

I’m sorry but these people are out of their minds. Suddenly, the German term Konsumterrorismus makes a certain amount of sense.

Robert George, a political philosopher at Princeton and chief intellectual guru of the Catholic right, laid out the case for banning all civil recognition of gay relationships in the federal Constitution last Friday. It’s such a tenuous case – and requires unbounded paranoia with respect to courts and a disingenuous attempt to argue that the Full Faith and Credit Clause applies to civil marriages (it never has). But he does offer a challenge:

No advocate [for equal marriage rights] has been able to identify a principled moral basis for the requirements of fidelity and exclusivity in marriage as they wish to redefine the institution.

First off, we do not wish to ‘redefine’ the institution. We simply want it to stop discriminating against a small minority of citizens. Currently, civil marriage exists. I don’t want to abolish it. But if it exists, it cannot arbitrarily exclude some citizens, while including others. On the second point, civil marriage licenses currently require no promises from the couple that they be faithful or exclusive. Some heterosexuals, as we well know, do not maintain complete fidelity in their civil marriages. In fact, fifty percent or more break their marriage vows by divorcing and often re-marrying others. Has George heard of Ronald Reagan? Or Bob Barr? Or Newt Gingrich? Or Bill Clinton? If he wants to make adultery or re-marriage illegal, he can propose an amendment on precisely those lines. He certainly believes that re-marriage is a grave moral sin; and adultery (unlike homosexuality) is even prohibited in the Ten Commandments. In other words, George’s standards for civil marriage may be admirable; but they are not enforced; and they are not abided by. They remain the ideal; and gay advocates do not intend to redefine that ideal. But neither should they be held to any higher standards than straight couples.

FIDELITY IN FRIENDSHIP: But George also makes what seems to me to be a point typical of some on the Catholic right. He thinks of sex as the crux of marriage. Senator Santorum even candidly declared that, in his view, marriage had nothing to do with love. And sex is certainly important. But any married couple will tell you that, after a few years, sex is not the sine qua non of the institution. What endures is shared commitment, sacrifice, daily devotion, familiarity, love, friendship. This experience between two people is, to my mind, the central feature of married life and it makes no distinction between straights and gays. I recommend David Hume’s sane little essay on marriage which, of course, doesn’t endorse same-sex marriage, but does argue against polygamy and divorce on grounds not related to sex or what George calls, in the most recent Ratzingerism, “sexual complementarity.” Hume sees that the essence of a good marriage is not breeding or even the romantic love that can blind while it overwhelms us – but a unique and profound friendship that is indeed to the exclusion of all others:

Love is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations: arising in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same manner. Such a passion requires liberty above all things; and therefore ELOISA had reason, when, in order to preserve this passion, she refused to marry her beloved ABELARD.

“How oft, when prest to marriage, have I said,
Curse on all laws but those which love has made:
Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.”

But friendship is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit; springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations; without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion. So sober an affection, therefore, as friendship, rather thrives under constraint, and never rises to such a height, as when any strong interest or necessity binds two persons together, and gives them some common object of pursuit. We need not, therefore, be afraid of drawing the marriage-knot, which chiefly subsists by friendship, the closest possible. The amity between the persons, where it is solid and sincere, will rather gain by it: And where it is wavering and uncertain, this is the best expedient for fixing it.

I couldn’t agree more. Fidelity and exclusivity are the outward signs of an inward bond. As long as the Catholic right keeps marshalling arguments obsessed by sex – George even wants to put the word “sexual” into the Constitution for the first time – they will fail to gain a real audience outside the world of celibates or Santori. In time the sexual expression of love in a long and rewarding marriage is a minor, not major, theme. Friendship, husbanding, the sharing of common duties and responsibilities – these are the civilizing human activities that marriage brings. Nothing suggests that they are the exclusive preserve of heterosexuals. So why should marriage be?

THE NIHILIST LEFT: A British liberal criticizes her own side in their assault on Tony Blair:

Bremner says his programme is a contribution to this Big Conversation. Historians should examine it as an encapsulation of the dinner party conversations of a metropolitan bien-pensant left. Blair is awful, the government is a failure, nothing works, everything’s worse, time for a change, we’re bored. Why the vehemence? The Iraq war and all its foreign policy disasters are reasons to censure Blair. But this nihilism set in long before the war.

Toynbee is one of the most irritatingly self-righteous pontificators in Britain. She’s wrong about the war. But every now and again, even she stumbles onto the truth.

A slightly different take than Cheryl Merrill and Dana Milbank:

Mr. Sullivan, I was present for the surprise visit by the President. It was truly wonderful to be there, and my buddies and I really are grateful that President Bush would take a real risk to come see u. He flew about 12 hours to spend 2 hours with us, he served food to the troops, but he never got a chance to eat himself, at least not until he got on the plane, I’d imagine. For 2 hours, the President walked amongst us, not a receiving line where we came to him, stiff and formal, but coming to us, reading our names on our uniforms and greeting us by name. He looked me in the eye when he shook my hand, he joked with some, whispered to others, spoke a little Spanish to my friend. 2 hours of almost non-stop motion, how exhausting after a 12 hour flight! He did it to be with us, and we appreciate it.

Thanks for the email – and thanks for all you’re doing.

It seems as if Dana Milbank, one of the most ferociously anti-Bush White House reporters, is mighty steamed by the president’s visit to Iraq. He did get Rich Bond to give him his nut graf, but when a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he’s scraping the barrel. The message to the Iraqis? Not that Bush is intent on victory. But rather that “Bush doesn’t think their country is secure. It underscores the insecurity, and it conveys insularity.” A president occupying a country thousands of miles away conveys “insularity.” Ohhh-kay. And the strong commitment to the task at hand would merely one day come back to haunt the president, as the “chaotic and dangerous situation” in Iraq eventually proves, er, Dana Milbank right. Memo to Dana: I know it was Thanksgiving yesterday, but you can sure make your anti-Bush screeds a little subtler than this one. Ask Pincus. He’ll help.

A classic deranged response from the anti-war left to the president’s Iraq trip. It’s a letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Editor — President Bush visiting Iraq for Thanksgiving? His arrogance and overblown self-importance really exposes him. Bush doesn’t do his job by bringing the troops home. Instead he flies for a photo-op with them to use in his re-election campaign. He was there a total of two hours.
These men and women in the military are not protecting me, and I do not want or need their protection. Bush should get off the big lie that they are there to protect me as an American. I would rather die than be protected in that way.
I am ashamed to be an American as long as Bush is in office.
CHERYL MERRILL
San Francisco

I’d love to see Cheryl go hand to hand with al Qaeda on her own, wouldn’t you?

“Concerning his ‘flight from Waco’ before heading to D.C./Baghdad, Bush mentioned that he and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice sat in the Secret Service car, dressed causually with baseball caps. What really impressed me is his accompanying statement that ‘we looked a normal couple.’
Even as a proud American, I freely admit that we have serious work left to us regarding race relations. That an American President (white) blithely compared his sitting in an official vehicle, while on a secret government mission, with his black female National Security Adviser, and compare the two of them with ‘a normal couple’ I think is a positive step for our society as a whole.
Granted, it is not monumental, it is not pushing aside Wallace to get black kids into the school house and get an equal education, but it is important.
I don’t even remember Bill Clinton ever feeling his way to say/do anything like that as President!”

We know the Bush family likes to keep secrets, to spring surprises on unsuspecting outsiders, to hold decisions close and unveil maneuvers and initiatives with some aplomb. But the visit to Baghdad was spectacular even by those standards. The president said what almost all of us feel: that those troops out there are doing enormously difficult work and they deserve immeasurable thanks. By also serving them dinner, he demonstrated something important: that even the president is essentially indebted to these men and women. He is their servant, not they his. It was a perfect visual sign. The president’s message to Iraqis was also important: we have to convince the Baathists that we will not falter an iota in accomplishing a peaceful transition to democracy. Some have interpreted the plans for some troop reductions next year as a sign that the president is micro-managing the war to time with his election prospects; or that we are about to pull a Clinton and wriggle out of a commitment. This trip is the best response to both doubts. It reaffirms resolve, raises morale, and asserts our intention to get this done right. It’s called leadership. And we just saw some.

From my correspondent who keeps his eye on the French media:

The evening news on the popular French TV station TF1 led with Bush’s visit to Iraq today, and its Baghdad reporter referred to the “anti-American resistance” in explaining why the trip was so dangerous. http://www.tf1.fr (streaming video under “20h” at lower right of “News” box). Evidently, this term is catching on as the French expression for those who hope to drive the Americans out and bring Saddam back to power. You know, like the French resistance that fought so bravely against their Nazi occupiers in the last war.
I believe this expression is pretty new. I googled “resistance anti-Americaine” (both with and without the accent mark on “resistance” and with and without the hyphen) and turned up essentially nothing except an old Vietnam reference and a November 13 article in the Nouvelle Observateur entitled “Iraq with the Anti-American Guerillas,” which textually refers only to the “resistance” in careful quotation marks.

Well, that’s why I’ve always put the term “French Resistance” in quotation marks as well. Meanwhile, French reporters have photo evidence of the recent Baathist attack on a DHL plane. The French had been hanging with the Saddamites for a few days before the attack. No word on whether the missiles were also made in France.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “As a fellow immigrant, I savored your musings about how Americans “resolve the nationalist dilemma.” May I add one little point beyond primary colors: This is the only country whose national anthem begins with a question and ends with a question. No bombast, no exhortation, no boast, none of the usual stuff of most national anthems, just questions. It must mean something, no?”

CANADA’S SANTORUM: Once again, the issue of homosexuality splits the conservative coalition. This time, in Canada.