The Dish

I guess it doesn’t surprise me that Tony Blair had to be hospitalized over the weekend with an irregular heartbeat. It would be difficult to think of anyone who has had a tougher political year. But even in the best of times, our major politicians lead punishing lives. The endless travel, the constant stress, the collapse of privacy: all these are terrible for the health. Is there some way we can tell these guys to take it easier? Far from believing, as some seem to, that president Bush’s predilection for long vacations at his ranch, attendance to sleep, and regular exercise, are forms of worrying idleness, I’d say his regimen shows an extremely shrewd understanding of what it now takes to be a public figure. Blair should take note.

TNR’s editors pen a statement that strikes the right note, I’d say. Mickey is razor-sharp as always.

A classic limo-lib comment from Joan Didion, former prose master, now, sadly, another generational scold:

Salon: When you remember your mother, more than 50 years ago, saying that California was too regulated, too taxed and too expensive, isn’t that exactly the same emotion that led to the recall?

Didion: Exactly. That’s what people thought in 1978 when they voted for Prop. 13. I mean, I was amazed this time. I hadn’t been out there for a while and I really hadn’t gauged the depth of the anger. I didn’t think all the people who had signed the petitions would show up at the polls. I just thought they were walking through the parking lot on the way to the car and they thought they could send a message. It was amazing to me that the actual recall happened. Somehow I thought there would be a separation between signing the petition and actually voting.
I mean, the car tax. I did not know what the car tax was. I had never heard of the car tax. Finally someone explained to me: It’s the vehicle registration fee! It’s just so insignificant.

Well, at least she recognizes her cocoon. But a big hike in a car tax is, for most people, not exactly “insignificant.” On a $30,000 car, the difference is between $195 before the hike and $600 after. On cheaper cars, the tax doubled as well. When you have to fork this out, on most wages, it hurts.

“I think 9/11 gave this generation an identity, and its identity is potentially fascist. My skin crawls when I think of the first week after 9/11. I was looking out of the window and there were people marching down the street carrying flags. It reminded me of spontaneous, angry Nazis and I thought, ‘Oh, man, we are in a lot of trouble’. There’s a whole bunch of people who have flags hanging from their cars and who are mistaking fascism for patriotism.” – Rickie Lee Jones, in the Guardian. Later in the interview, she is asked whether she would consider murdering the president, a new theme of sorts in the Guardian. “I guess the question is, would I kill anyone? And the answer is, no. But would I feel sorry if someone killed him? No, I wouldn’t. It would depend on who killed him, I guess.”

“I find it sad that you value your homosexuality more than your Catholic faith. You write that you “cannot participate” in the Church any longer, which I take to mean you are forsaking the sacraments. You are staging a spiritual hunger strike, starving yourself of the grace that you need to save your soul. This is tragic, and I pray that time will soothe your anger and change your mind. I believe that your rage is a symptom of a deep realization that Catholic teaching may be right about homosexuality, and that the Church and Christ embrace you nonetheless. We all have our crosses to bear, and I hope that you will not stumble under yours.
As for your slam at the Church and the parish that dismissed a pair of homosexuals from the choir, stop whining! The parish tolerated both of them for many years, and they repaid that tolerance by publicly defying Church teaching in a mockery of a marriage ceremony, a sort of Canadian charade that the Church has expressly condemned. And it turns out that both of them are not just innocent choir singers, but outspoken advocates of desecrating the institution and sacrament of marriage.
I find it instructive that the New York Times, which had barred your writing for many months, decided to restore you to the newspaper’s bigoted graces, to accommodate your anti-Catholic homily.”

“You’ve articulated the conclusion I came to about 3 years ago, and it’s that same conclusion that I wrestle with every day since. I’m considering sending it to my parents, since they ask me so frequently and unintentionally patronizingly, “Couldn’t you just go to mass?” No. Because there is no such thing as “JUST going to mass.” It’s the swell of hatred, fear, disbelief, and violent solitude that makes “going to mass” the exercise in emotional upheaval I now must avoid. The avoidance is not laziness (for I still feel those emotions strongly, just not so viciously like I do in church), but rather the understanding and perspective I now have that maintaining my sanity and my joy is a very important task if I at all want to live in gratitude to my Creator.”

It would be hard to beat David Brooks’ excellent summary of the different factions among the Democrats when it came to fulfilling this country’s responsibilities to the people of Iraq. But the New York Times editors ask the right questions today:

The candidates also need to tell Americans where they stand on the larger issue of preventive war. The prewar intelligence failures in Iraq and the failure, so far, to find threatening unconventional weapons strike at the basic premises of Mr. Bush’s alarmingly novel strategic doctrines. What alternative ideas do the Democratic contenders have for handling threats like North Korean, and possibly Iranian, nuclear weapons programs and for dealing with countries that give aid and sanctuary to international terrorist groups? And what would they do to keep Afghanistan, the scene of America’s first post-9/11 war, from falling back into chaos with a revived Taliban?
It is in the nature of modern campaigns to offer sound bites rather than substance. But voters have a right to ask for more and to press the Democratic candidates to present real alternatives to Mr. Bush’s policies in Iraq and beyond.

This applies also to the post-war debate about the pre-war. It is relatively easy to criticize the Iraq war, the intelligence behind it, and the post-war reconstruction. It’s another thing to say what you would have done instead. Memories are astonishingly short, but the notion that 9/11 did not and should not have impacted our entire defense doctrines is absurd. How we pro-actively tackle the problem of Islamist terrorism, and the morass of the Middle East from which it comes, is an urgent question. So far, very few of the Democratic leaders (with the honorable exceptions of Lieberman and Gephardt) seem to be prepared to risk a real answer rather than simply another partisan critique. As the election approaches, the need for a credible response to the threats we still face will have to be provided. Or not.

BLANK SLATE RE-WIPED: More evidence of the profound impact of our biological hard-wiring when it comes to gender and sexual identity. And yes, that goes for homosexuality as well. It is every bit as natural as heterosexuality.

I’m glad I posted Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in full. As some readers have impressed on me, it’s more interesting than the display of bigotry. It suggests that a leading Muslim sees exactly the problem with the Muslim world – its inability to adapt, its insulation from intellectual discourse, even religious discourse, its isolation from modernity and science. Through the hate and bile, this is actually somewhat encouraging, no? It suggests that some people are finally grappling with reality. One of the as-yet unexplored dimensions of the Iraq liberation is that Iraq’s long-deferred entry into the global market, the new porousness of its media, and the dynamism of its emerging market will all help expose the backwardness of other Islamic states. And that might indeed spur the move toward reform, which is our only long-term hope in the fight against Islamist terror. It may well already be occurring in Iran. These things take time. They require patience. In the short term, as Bush is discovering, they might lead to political costs. But they are infinitely better than the status quo ante, or than most of the alternatives.

“INSTANT THOUGHT”: I should really respond to Leon Wieseltier’s diatribe against blogging, voiced in the Los Angeles Times. Here’s what he said about his colleague, Gregg Easterbrook. He ascribed Gregg’s mistake as something due to

the hubris of this whole blogging enterprise. There is no such thing as instant thought, which is why reflection and editing are part of serious writing and thinking, as Gregg has now discovered.

Hubris? I think it would be hubris if one believed that somehow blogging is a superior form of writing to all others, or somehow revealing of the truth in ways that other writing isn’t. But I know of no bloggers who would argue that. It’s a different way of writing, one that acknowledges that it is imperfect and provisional and subject to revision. In that sense, it makes far fewer claims than, say, a lengthy essay published in the literary press. But, by acknowledging its limitations, it is also, I’d argue, sometimes more honest than other forms of writing, in which the writer pretends to finality, to studied perfection, to considered and re-considered nuance or argument, when he is often winging it nonetheless. Someone can say nothing in 10,000 words; and someone can also say something in ten. It simply depends on the quality of the writing. The truth is: every written word is provisional. The question is one of degree. But there is nothing less “serious” about a blogged idea just because it is blogged and not produced after fifteen edits by Cambridge University Press. As the philosopher once said, everything is true as long as it is never taken to be more than it is. Blogging is now a part of literature. And it deserves to be understood rather than simply dismissed. (By the way, there’s now an online petition to defend Easterbrook here.)

My dream tickets for 2004, explored opposite.

WHAT ARE THEY FOR? Conservatives and homosexuality, my Wall Street Journal piece, is now posted.

LOSING A CHURCH: But keeping the faith. My anguished attempt to remain a Catholic is articulated opposite.

Here’s the full text of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s recent anti-Semitic diatribe. The quotes in the media don’t do full justice to its bile. Thanks to Meryl Yourish for posting it in full.

BEHIND THE BBC: A fascinating story that shows the pressure the BBC is now under. In a radio interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, there was a prior agreement that the question of the Iraq war would not be raised. But John Humphrys, a major opponent of the Iraq war, was the interviewer and broke the deal. The BBC then agreed not to broadcast the relevant section. Not a huge deal, but I do think the excised exchange is revealing:

John Humphrys: Can I turn this conversation to Iraq? Before you were enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, you said, you signed a statement published in the Tablet, that said the war was immoral. Is that still your view?

Rowan Williams: At the time of course when I signed that statement there was no war. We were considering what might happen. Since that time I have commented on the possible risks of going to war before war broke out.

I have attempted during the period of the war to respect what’s going on and not to make idle or armchair pontifications about it. Since the war has drawn to a close of military operations, I have been reflecting on where we are now, and my view is still that there are major questions about that enterprise.

JH: Was it immoral?

(A 12-second pause)

RW: It seems to me that the action in Iraq was one around which there were so many questions about long-term results, about legal justification that I would find it very hard to give unqualified support to the rightness of that decision.

JH: You hesitated a very long time before you answered that, Archbishop.

RW: Immoral is a short word for a very, very long discussion.

JH: As Archbishop, do you not have an absolute responsibility as spiritual leader of this country to say very clearly, if we go to war, whether you believe that war is moral or not, and do you not have the sense that you are hedging a little here?

RW: No I don’t, because I don’t believe that the moral contribution that can be made by any spiritual leader is ever a matter of simply handing down something like the 10 commandments.

It’s a matter of trying to understand more deeply what sort of moral choices others are having to face, assisting with all the resource that I can bring to that and of course trying to live with the decisions that they make.

You can see what’s going on. The BBC interviewer wants another anti-war headline from the archbishop, who doesn’t want to go there. So he persists. The campaign by the leading media to distort and denigrate the liberation of Iraq continues. Even non-stories are now getting massive play to keep the pressure up.

MORE REASON: For Wesley Clark to become Howard Dean’s running-mate. It would be a great, centrist Democrat-Republican ticket.

PLUS CA CHANGE: Check out this post-war report. Grim news:

A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting. You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last was America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now. Never has American prestige in Europe been lower.

Except now, of course.