The Dish

The Times outdid itself yesterday, running a viciously anti-American op-ed by one Regis Debray. It contained every supercilious canard about American crudeness, religiosity, lack of sophistication that the old Marxist European left has now learned to deploy. The slurs were as sickening as they were shallow. But that’s not news. What’s news is that Debray was absurdly identified by the Times as “a former adviser to President Francois Mitterrand of France, editor of Cahiers de Mediologie and the author of the forthcoming ‘The God That Prevailed.'”. I say absurdly because Debray is far better known as an old communist, a supporter of political violence, an unabashed admirer of Fidel Castro, and a guerrilla fighter alongside Che Guevara. His hatred of the United States even led him to defend Milosevic and Serbian genocide in the late 1990s. He’s a Pinter with blood on his hands. Isn’t this relevant information? Did the Times know this and decide to ignore it? Or were they simply clueless and eager to run any specious anti-American doggerel they could get their hands on?
UPDATE: Lileks fisks Debray!

A TRAFFIC SOLUTION: Early reports suggest that London’s new approach to solving traffic jams is a huge success. The British capital recently set up monitors at all the entrance routes into central London. If you want to get into the hub at peak hours, you have to pay a fee. If you haven’t paid the fee, you pay a fine. Cameras record number plates. If you live in the central district, you get 90 percent of the fees reimbursed. The result? A return in central London to the traffic levels of the 1950s. One thing you can always depend on in Britain: everyone is cheap. But what interest me more as a matter of media coverage is that all the praise for this initiative has gone (and rightly so) to Mayor “Red” Ken. But his solution is anything but red. It’s pure market economics to achieve a good environmental result. It’s Friedmanism for a traditionally liberal cause.

That Michael Jackson has had plastic surgery. “In related news, President Chirac said the U.S. had failed to show convincing proof that Jennifer Lopez has a big ass.”

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION WATCH: A special radio World Service arts program has been exploring the question of whether American culture, in the words of one French critic, “is a non-culture, a non-civilisation, just a way of life.” A radio comedy show gets its anti-French jokes edited out by BBC honchos. (Sample: “What do you call a Frenchman advancing on Baghdad? A salesman.”) Meanwhile, a viewer backlash is mercifully under way. Anger at anti-U.S. spin and bias has provoked “one of the largest reactions from viewers ever recorded.”

MRS MUGABE GOES SHOPPING: In Paris. Where else is the wife of an African dictator supposed to buy the essentials? With two Mercedes’ full of bodyguards to help her carry the shopping bags.

“In Binghamton, N.Y., Supreme Court Justice Andrew J. McNaught granted a divorce to Catherine Koppe from Lillian Beaumont on the ground that, since the partners were both female, the marriage was void. In March 1927, wearing a clown costume, a man’s wig and a van dyke beard, Lillian (“William”) Beaumont appeared with Catherine Koppe before the Rev. Francis T. Cooke, saying they had just come from a masquerade, wanted to be married. He obliged.” – from Time magazine, October 24, 1932. You see? This is hardly a new demand. For other examples of same-sex marriages throughout history, check out my anthology.

CLIP-CLOP: Here I come, riding into Armageddon. For the record, if I ever ride into the apocalypse, I’d rather just prance around and have a serf banging coconut shells behind me.

FREUDIAN SLIP: “We do not yet have, or, if we do, we have not yet identified the “X” article on the real nature of the threat which became manifest on September 11 2000.” – Martin Woollacott, in a piece debunking the terrorist threat in the Guardian. I know it’s a truism that Europeans weren’t as affected by 9/11 as Americans were – and that this gap in perception has an awful lot to do with our current gulf of understanding. But wouldn’t it be nice if they could get the frigging date right? It’s only a year and a half ago.

“No, the movie is set in Texas, which in a good year all by itself carries out half the executions in America. Death Row in Texas is like the Roach Motel: Roach checks in, doesn’t check out. When George W. Bush was Texas governor, he claimed to carefully consider each and every execution, although a study of his office calendar shows he budgeted 15 minutes per condemned man (we cannot guess how many of these minutes were devoted to pouring himself a cup of coffee before settling down to the job). Still, when you’re killing someone every other week and there’s an average of 400 more waiting their turn, you have to move right along.” – Roger Ebert, ostensibly reviewing a movie but interpolating his customary anti-Bush polemic while he’s about it.

OUTTA HERE: I guess I have to admit defeat and let you know I’m heading back to DC this week. I just couldn’t hack the isolation at the end of the Cape in February any more. I finished the essay I was trying to write, but completely failed to get any construction work done on my little wharf apartment. Getting everything organized – contractors, permits, plans, weather – eventually got beyond me, and now there’s not enough time to get all the work done before summer. So I’m out of here. I have mixed feelings. Taking time out of your usual context, forcing yourself into solitude, getting more in touch with the elements, even when they’re truly bleak, as with this brutal winter, is something I’d recommend to anyone. Saturday night, I took the beagle for a post-bar stroll on the water’s edge. It was an amazing vista. Somehow, vast blocks of ice had come loose from various dunes and lakes on the edge of Cape Cod bay, and suddenly a huge flotilla of floating ice crammed the harbor. It looked like the Antarctic, with boulders of white not only obscuring the dark, frigid water altogether, but dumped randomly on the beach like a crowd of rugged ice-statues. The tide was rising as we walked across the scene, but it was extremely quiet and the water completely stable – so stable that the ice-flow seemed to shrug its way silently toward the snow-covered dune grass. You just don’t get to experience that kind of scene in a big city, after a Jagermeister too many. But, at the end of two months of icy solitude, I decided to take that amazing sight as a farewell message. Besides, I’d gotten a bad case of boyfriend withdrawal; and an even worse case of frozen, er, behind. I realize that for all my general misanthropy, I actually miss people. Perhaps a week back in the capital will cure me of that.

Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter, has spent some time hob-nobbing with the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. And his fathomless snobbery has always led him to idolize the British upper crust. So it’s no big surprise that his magazine this month should produce a puff-piece about a sympathetic new miniseries, “Cambridge Spies,” about Britain’s Communist double-agents from the 1930s onward. The series is produced by the BBC, naturally, and recounts the story of how Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt betrayed their own country in order to support the mass murders of Joseph Stalin. Vanity Fair gives us the requisite, sepia-toned, boy-band-like group photograph. Its caption describes these supporters of totalitarianism as “glamorous turncoats.” The writer of the series is unabashed in his admiration for men who knowingly betrayed secrets that led to the deaths of their fellow-countrymen and who perpetuated a system that imprisoned thousands and condemned millions to death and terror. The four traitors were “devastatingly effective double agents who knew from the start that they stood or fell together,” opines writer Peter Moffatt. “Burgess is the loudest spy in the history of espionage. Philby is the most successful spy of the lot, becoming head of counter-intelligence in M.I.6. Blunt is cool, viciously funny and clever, while Maclean veers between being warm and friendly and drunk and difficult.” Now imagine a series being written and produced by the BBC and puffed by Vanity Fair that featured upper-class fascists who spied for Nazi Germany. Yet there is no relevant moral difference between that and these four treacherous supporters of Stalinist horror. The double-standard remains – buttressed by far too many “see-no-evil” liberals and leftists. But the last word goes to Vanity Fair itself, editorializing with breath-taking insouciance:

“Double agents are hard to root for – but ‘Cambridge Spies’ makes a splendid case. ‘It is controversial, portraying these guys as heroes,’ says [actor Rupert] Penry-Jones. ‘But to stand up for what you believe in the way they did is pretty heroic.'”

“Heroic.” What does that make Solzhenitsyn or Havel? Fools?

“Most of us have learned to simply accept the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. exists in the world, just as we’ve come to accept that there are terrorists among us, as well as people who scam grandmothers out of their savings.” – Keith Olbermann, Salon.
(Routine disclosure: I write a weekly column for News Corp.’s “Sunday Times.”)

CHIRAC’S WORLD COALITION: Mugabe signs on. The anti-war crowd have another dictator ont their side.

“Playwright Harold Pinter, speaking at last weekend’s rally, said ‘The US is a nation out of control,’ and ‘unless we stop it, it will bring barbarism to the entire world.’ He said America was ‘a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug.’ When Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. When US television broadcasts a speech with Billy Graham hosting an Excalibur replica from the Franklin Mint Collection, demanding the decapitation of Muslims, let me know. When George Bush grips the podium and beseeches American rock formations to give up the location of non-Christians so we can slit their throats, and it’s carried live on national TV by presidential order, drop me a line. It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache – and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.” – James Lileks, bleating like a lion.

Yes, some feminist Harvard students destroyed the giant snow willie. Here’s one of them owning up. The letter contains the classic and largely unanswerable statement: “No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.” In writing? Even one that’s melting? And what about a flaccid one? The final money quote:

Many women and men, including myself, are the victims of sexual assault, child sexual abuse and rape. The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat; it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not. There was nothing ‘challenging’ or ‘subversive’ about the penis. The only thing it did was create an uncomfortable environment for the women of Harvard University.

Oh, please. Is the Washington Monument safe?

Seems less outrageous now, doesn’t it?

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE I: “There is no other government on Earth with the same publicized aspirations to tyrannical control [as the US government]. Other countries, including Korea, Iraq, Russia, and China, maintain arms to defend their shores against invaders and those who would ‘dominate the weak and intimidate the world.’ The two governments that do not maintain armies and weapons solely for defense are the US Government and Israel, a coalition of pure evil intent on destroying human freedom.” – Ed Lewis, “Liberty For All,” February 16.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE II: “‘The times’ require us to give up some eensy-weensy freedoms, so we can duct tape our houses and our mouths and worry about that Code Yellow which followed 8 useless months of Code Orange. Code Red is right around the corner. Be prepared to give even more away. Ronald Reagan described to us the Republican ideals of what an “Evil Empire” is. I guess the last vestages of the Old Republic has been swept away. Because we have met the Evil Empire Reagan described… and it is us.” – Bob Bankard, Phillyburbs online magazine.

Democracy? Doesn’t look like it. A provisional American-run government, designed to foster reconstruction, humanitarian aid and a fledgling constitution, is a perfectly understandable idea. But a long-term de facto colony is surely asking for trouble – both in terms of actual governance and in terms of American public acceptance. Of course, these plans will change under the pressure of events, but I can’t be the only one concerned that democratic institutions do not seem very high on the Cheney wish-list (and it’s largely Cheney’s construction). The extent of de-Baathification is also critical. Krugman gleefully declares today that only “Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced.” The Washington Post, with a far better track record than Krugman, reports that

Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi government officials would be subjected to “de-Baathification,” a reference to Hussein’s ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows from the “de-Nazification” program established in Germany after World War II. Criteria by which officials would be designated as too tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials said. A large number of current officials would be retained.

Which is it? We’ll see. But the administration needs to be put on notice by its supporters as well as its opponents. Many of us signed onto this war not merely to protect the West from terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, but as an attempt to grasp the nettle of Arab autocracy. If we make no effort to foster democratic institutions, the rule of law and representative government in Iraq, then we will lose the peace as surely as we will have won the Iraq war. And losing that peace means losing the wider war on terror as well.