The Dish

When it comes to heterosexuals, no standard is low enough. But gay citizens still cannot apply.

THOSE SINGING EGGPLANTS: There is an explanation. Which kind of spoils it for me.

BERSERKELY: No, this isn’t Monty Python. A soccer match between the Anarchists and the Communists just took place. I have no idea how the anarchists kept it up for an hour and a half. Why didn’t they just destroy the ball?

FROM THE FRENCH: An email from my France correspondent, catching me up on the latest grotesqueries from perfidious Paris:

An article in this week’s L’Express pretty much lays bare France’s diplomatic aim on the US-Iraq-UN front, namely, to revamp the UN as a useful weapon against the US.-This poisonous article has to be read to be believed, but basically the theme is that Bush’s offer to get the UN involved again in Iraq is a “poisoned present” that only a “dupe” would accept, but that nonetheless the demarche offers a not-to-be-missed opportunity to restore both “credibility” and “diplomatic survival” to the UN and its Security Council, which alone can hope to control the “all powerful” US.-Anyway, here’s the last paragraph: “In the name of their credibility, and of their diplomatic survival, the UN and its Security Council can’t afford to miss the opportunity to bring back the all-powerful America into the fold and to retake some semblance of initiative on the critically important Iraq dossier.-But it remains to measure their hypothetical power, once more, by the measuring stick of concessions from Washington.” I reread the article, you know, looking for something about doing good work amongst people who could sorely use some, and found nothing.-And there’s nothing about bringing democracy to the Middle East either.-It’s all about bringing the US to heel.

And what else do the French care about?

For something completely different. Singing Japanese eggplants, courtesy of Dave Barry. Hey, it could be a slow day at the office.

A great email addendum to the Buruma essay. Some of you may know Albert Hirschman’s classic book, “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” in which he parses the tropes of conservative argumentation in Western culture. A reader reminds me:

Hirschman lays out 3 aspects of this rhetoric:
1. The Perversity Thesis: “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.”
Opponents of the war on terror claim that fighting this war will only lead to more terrorism. Toppling Saddam Hussein has only worsened the condition of the Iraqi people, etc. etc.
2. The Futility Thesis: “attempts at social transformation will be unavailing.”
Iraq can’t possibly become a democracy.
3. The Jeopardy Thesis: “the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.”
Fighting the war on terror will lead to the destruction of democracy at home.

Actually, I think this only covers the reasonable side of the anti-war crowd. The unreasonable side of conservativsm that is now in full flourish on the anti-war “left” includes anti-Semitism, isolationism, nativism and paranoia. I think that just about covers Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan.

The best reporter by far on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq unloads a devastating barrage against his fellow hacks in Editor and Publisher. The New York Times’ John F. Burns reveals just how compromised and corrupt so many journalists were in Iraq, how willing they were to hide the atrocities of the regime, how their own self-interest trumped the truth:

Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Saddam’s Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories — mine included — specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Who was that reporter? Why won’t Burns name him? If you still harbor doubts about the overwhelming moral case for the liberation of Iraq, you need to read this interview. It’s devastating about the mainstream media in the U.S., let alone mouthpieces for tyranny like the BBC:

Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It’s not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they’re actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it’s extremely revealing… I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It’s not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: “The universal spirit of sport,” “My esteemed colleague.” The world chose in the main to ignore this.

Of course they did. But they won’t ignore even a single guerrilla attack on coalition forces, will they? (Bonus point: leftist media blogger, James Romenesko, buries Burns’ piece and gives it the headline: “I was the most unfavored of all war correspondents.” He leads on the Bush administration’s alleged spinning. Figures, doesn’t it?)

My old friend Ian Buruma had a bracing essay in the Financial Times over the weekend. He baldly states something that is, to my mind, indisputable: the biggest force for conservatism in world affairs right now is the Western left. You only have to listen to what pass for their arguments about the remarakable experiment now being attempted in Iraq to witness the sheer Tory pessimism of them all. Their “anti-Orientalist” stance has robbed them of any means to criticize Arab or Islamist societies, or to support reform of them, even if it means temporary armed intervention. Their support for “peace” is really an argument for complete Western disengagement from societies and cultures where tyranny, genocide, terror and theocracy abide. How is it that one can scour the pages of, say, the Nation and not find a single essay marveling at the new freedoms in Iraq – of the press, of free speech, of religious diversity? Even when they do see the good side of, say, greater freedom for women in Afghanistan, their loathing of the Bush administration dampens much of their liberal conviction. Surveying the curdling of left-liberalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Buruma goes in for the kill:

The socialist debacle, then, contributed to the resentment of American triumphs. But something else happened at the same time. In a curious way left and right began to change places. The expansion of global capitalism, which is not without negative consequences, to be sure, turned leftists into champions of cultural and political nationalism. When Marxism was still a potent ideology, the left sought universal solutions for the ills of the world. Now globalisation has become another word for what Heidegger meant by Americanism: an assault on native culture and identity. So the old left has turned conservative.

Buruma is particularly acute in observing the parallels between old Tory bigotry about what those ‘colored people’ were capable of, and current leftist disdain for the whole idea of democratization in Arab countries.

PAT BUCHANAN MEET ARUNDATHI ROY: There is indeed a wonderful confluence of racist-right and racist-left in the attitude toward the liberation of Iraq. Both sides are desperately eager for the project to fail; they want it to fail so as to keep America – and its dangerous, universalizing ideas – at bay. That’s why Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan are now indistinguishable in many ways; ditto Norman Mailer. Buruma again:

The conservative right (I’m not talking of fascists), traditionally, was not internationalist and certainly not revolutionary. Business, stability, national interests, and political realism (“our bastards”, and so on), were the order of the day. Democracy, to conservative realists, was fine for us but not for strange people with exotic names. It was the left that wanted to change the world, no matter where. Left-wing internationalism did not wish to recognise cultural or national barriers. To them, liberation was a universal project. Yet now that the “Bush-Cheney junta” talks about a democratic revolution, regardless of culture, colour or creed, Gore Vidal claims it is not our business, and others cry “racism”… In the case of Gore Vidal, there has always been an old-fashioned isolationist screaming to be let out of the great man’s bulky frame. But Tariq Ali, and many of his readers, would surely consider themselves to be internationalists. They profess to care about oppressed peoples in faraway countries. That is why they set themselves morally above the right. So why do they appear to be so much keener to denounce the US than to find ways to liberate Iraqis and others from their murderous Fuhrers? And how can anybody, knowing the brutal costs of political violence, especially in poor countries split by religious and ethnic divisions, be so insouciant as to call for more aggression? Perhaps it is a kind of provincialism after all.

Yes, it is provincialism; and self-hatred; and a kind of intellectual blindness. I’m not speaking of legitimate liberal critiques of Bush’s foreign policy. I’m talking about the left’s desire to keep the developing world in thrall to its demons, because they view the West as no better – or worse. It is a form of nihilism, masked as moralism. That’s why so much is at stake in Iraq. It isn’t just the front line in the war on terror; its successful emergence from tyranny is vital if we are to keep the universal human value of freedom alive.

“Obviously part of the premise of my book is that this is not the most honest administration. So I don’t know what to think of his religiosity. I really can’t tell you – but I’m suspicious. I’m very suspicious of the way he uses it. I’m suspicious that it’s done for political purposes and that he really isn’t as religious as he makes out to be. But he might be. I don’t know.” – Al Franken, not even giving George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt about his religious faith. Is there nothing the Bush-haters won’t accuse him of?

Maybe you have been struck by how extraordinarily popular Elaine Pagels’ new book on the Gospel of Thomas has become. It’s not as scholarly as her previous books, but it’s no light read. My suspicion is that a great many struggling Catholics have bought this book, in order to find some help as to how they can maintain their faith in the Gospels, in the sacraments and in the people of God, while withholding obedience to a hierarchy that has so obviously lost its way. Pagels’ book is wrenching for its own spiritual honesty; and inspiring in its search for the message of Jesus buried under layers of church politics and power for so long. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it – at least as much for the questions it helps sharpen as much as any answers it might provide. Because the quality of the teaching priesthood is now, by and large, so execrably low, Catholics have long tried to understand their faith on their own. And it’s encouraging to see some of the frustrations many of us now have going back to the earliest days of the Church. I loved the story of Tertullian who saw both sides of orthodoxy and dissent:

Not long afterward, Tertullian, already famous as a champion of orthodoxy, himself joined the new prophecy and defended its members as genuinely spirit-filled Christians. Although to this day, Tertullian stands among the “fathers of the church,” at the end of his life he turned against what, at this point, he now began to call “the church of a bunch of bishops.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

J-LO – VICTIM: Yes, the Observer of London espies in the popular ridicule of Jennifer Lopez yet one more reason to loathe America – she’s targeted because she’s a minority:

No one but Lopez and Gonzalez could have known what was said during their two-hour meeting, no one except every journalist in the United States and beyond. ‘Voodoo psychic adviser to J-Lo blamed for stars axing big day’ screamed the headlines, which sounded utterly ridiculous to anyone in their right mind, although perhaps not to Jennifer Lopez herself. After all, she knows better than anyone what life in America is like for a Latina actress with ambition.

If that kind of money, fame and glamor is a function of “what life in America is like for a Latina actress with ambition,” then bring it on.

WOMEN AGAINST ARNOLD: No one has yet accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of sexual harrassment of workplace underlings or rape. So where were these “women’s groups” during the Clinton administration? Shilling for the abuser. And why didn’t the reporter ask about their double standards?

“I’m not sure how the ‘Flypaper’ strategy strikes most readers, but to me it-looks like the latest variation of a strategy dating back millennia-to Sun Tzu where I believe it was described as taking something-of great value from-your enemy and holding it.- Julius Caesar employed it in a campaign in Asia Minor were his army-aggressively-took control of the local food and water supply and switched to the defense and ultimately slaughtered a desperate enemy.- In our own history, the Confederacy’s last hope at Gettysberg was broken when Lee with little choice attempted and failed-to take the Little Round Top, a hill he could not permit the Union forces to hold.
-In more modern times it is described as being strategically aggressive and tactically defensive.- No strategy always works, but historically forces that employ this one tend to survive better than those upon whom it is employed.- Perhaps among your readers there is someone with amore expansive knowledge of military history who can expond in more detail.
-Meanwhile, I for one am convinced that who ever is behind the ‘Flypaper’ strategy knows his stuff.” – more reader feedback on the Letters Page.

MORE CONSERVATIVES AGAINST THE FMA: Here’s a shocker: some federalists and conservatives actually don’t believe that states should be denied the right to decide for themselves what is and is not a marriage. Here’s the link to the open letter to Senator Cornyn. Money quote:

The proposed amendment interferes with the rights of states, rights that have been consistently recognized since the founding of our Nation. Under our federal system of government, family law has long been the province of the states. A basic principle of American democracy and federalism is that government actions that control a citizen’s personal life and liberty — such as government actions that control people’s decisions about whom to marry — should be made at the level of government closest to the citizen, rather than by the U.S. Congress or by the legislatures of other states.
States already actively regulate marriage; for example, 37 states specifically prohibit marriage between same-sex couples. That is a choice that they are now free to make. The Amendment will wrongly deny those states — which is to say, the states’ citizens and their representatives — this choice.

But the religious right is not interested in people or states having the ability to decide for themselves! Where would that leave us? They might disagree with the fundamentalists. Here’s another interesting follow-up from Eugene Volokh. And a simple reality check: at the height of the summer backlash, before any real public discussion of the matter, the polls showed only 50 percent support for the FMA. That’s barely enough to credentialize a law, let alone an amendment to the Constitution.

THE PERILS OF PAKISTAN: Bernard-Henri Levy lays out the case for suspicion.

Another excellent blog reaches its one-year anniversary.

Why can’t most of the Democratic candidates see how Iraq and 9/11 are deeply connected?

ARIANNA: Chatting with an English friend on the phone yesterday, she reminded me of what they used to say about Arianna Stassinopoulos at Cambridge University: “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus.” Keep an eye on the Pacific Ocean.