The Dish

Every now and again, I get an email telling me to recant my early suspicion that the anthrax attacks of last fall were probably terrorist-insprired. Every time the FBI suggests that a domestic source was responsible, emails come in telling me to drop my fear that Saddam or other foreign governments were involved. The truth, of course, is that we still don’t know. But the evidence unearthed by Michael Hosenball et al at Newsweek this week suggests that, whoever did it, he or she was a real pro. My suspicion is that it was a warning from Iraq that any attempt to disarm Saddam would lead to an immediate chemical or biological response in the U.S. I’m sorry, but that’s still my suspicion. I’d be happy and relieved to be disproved, but so far, the signs are nothing but ominous.

Safire has an invaluable column today on Saddam’s al Qaeda wing, attempting to attack and destabilize our Kurdish allies in the north. I have no doubt that the president is intent on removing Saddam from power. But I have much doubt that the C.I.A. is willing or able to help him, or that the know-it-alls at the State Department aren’t daily coming up with excuses for delay. I thought this was a race against time, guys. Those Americans who are in danger of being killed by a Saddam-Qaeda chemical, biological or semi-nuclear attack should keep reminding the administration of this. The current Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian initiative in arming Palestinians to murder their way onto our Middle East agenda should not affect our time-table in any way. If it does, we are simply inviting more such mischief.

TWO CHEERS FOR THE MONARCHY: “The reason we should try to feel emotion at the death of the Queen Mother is not because we knew her, or felt we knew her, or even had the slightest inclination to know her. It’s because she was there when our great-grandparents were there; she was there as an infant under Victoria; she was there as a teenager as the First World War destroyed a generation and as a depression laid waste to another. She was there when Britain was blitzed and when it rebuilt and when it staggered into decline and then revived. She was there when Britain was an empire and when it was a member of the European Union. Mourning her is not really about her; it’s about us.” A modest defense of a monarchy – in my latest piece, posted here.

A GIDDY THING: It’s been an exhausting weekend – about six hours of rehearsal a day. And have you tried memorizing lines like this one: “‘I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me.’ That’s as much as to say: ‘Any pains that I took for you is as easy as thanks'”? Maybe I’m a lot older; maybe I have ingested too many foreign substances over the years; maybe ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is a peculiarly ornate piece of dramatic rhetoric; but, boy, has it been tough getting these words to become completely automatic. My poor beagle hasn’t been able to get a word in edgewise for weeks. Still, it’s not as if I’m memorizing, say, Tony Kushner. My favorite Benedick line as of now is: “Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor?” Just the technical wonder of the deceptively simple composition – and the sheer sound of the words – thrill me. Actually, feeling my way gradually through the character of Benedick this past month – his emotional dysfunction, his wit, his nerve, his sexual confusion, his obnoxiousness, his honesty, his vulnerability – has been a wonderful exercise in how stupendously brilliant Shakespeare is. I know this is hardly news – but I know no better way to really absorb and appreciate Shakespeare than actually trying to act, speaking the words he wrote. With each rehearsal, you find something new. As you slowly leave the script behind and let the lines guide you forward, you find yet another – and another! – aspect of this complex, subtle human being coming into relief. Parts of him remind me of so many different people, and there are so many choices, and yet in the end you rest on the words themselves, and they create this extraordinary complex of feeling and perception between you, and your character, and his author, and anyone observing. Well, before I give myself a ‘poseur alert,’ I just have to say it’s a relief to be another person for while – even in play. We modern adults surely don’t play enough. And I don’t mean drinking or carousing or drugs or professional sports or whatever. I mean the kind of serious frivolity that children practice all the time and that allows them to grow. This play is seriously hard work, but its playfulness truly refreshes the spirit. Still, my weekend was made by dinner last night with Charles Francis (a supporter of the site) and Bjorn Lomborg, the current author of this month’s book club selection. We didn’t talk about the environment. But we had a great time and I dragged him afterwards to the best racially-integrated dance club event of the week in DC at the Lizard Lounge. He has to take part in a debate today, and I did my best to get him a hangover. But he’s a vegetarian teetotaller – so what are you gonna do?

THE ULTIMATE CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Kinsley fesses up about how his Parkinson’s disease inevitably affects his view of therapeutic cloning. I feel the same way about HIV and drug research. Of course I don’t want the government crippling pharmaceutical profits, because it will slow such research and mean I’ll probably die a few years sooner than might otherwise occur. Does this mean that because I’m HIV-positive, my view should be airily dismissed as too biased? I agree with Mike that this would be a bizarre inference. But the more interesting issue, of course, is whether Kinsley could have written this column with no conflict of interest before he had gone public with Parkinsons. I think that not disclosing such an obviously important piece of background material would have compromised the integrity of such a column. But I still believe that the right to privacy – especially about medical matters – would have and should have trumped that conflict of interest as a factor in ethical journalism. That’s because I believe in a pretty solid right to privacy. What I’d like to know from so many in the media who do not respect such a right is the answer to the following question: would they feel entitled to ‘out’ someone’s medical history in the event of such a column being written by someone who has kept their disease private? And if not, why not?

ANOTHER BROCK LIE? Did David Brock also partially fabricate his student journalism experience at Berkeley? A fellow student at the time, who worked with Brock in college journalism, thinks Brock did. At this point, to whom would you give the benefit of the doubt?

IN RETROSPECT: Fascinating data from Gallup on how people retroactively view various presidents. To my mind, the most interesting comparison is between the first president Bush and his successor, Bill Clinton. Clinton has the highest negatives (47) since Kennedy and the smallest net positive rating (+4), apart from Nixon. President GHW Bush gets a 69 percent approval rating, with a net positive of + 43. In general, I think the first Bush is a deeply under-estimated president. But the collapse in Clinton’s ratings is, I think, due to two basic things: the pardons and September 11. People have absorbed just how little he did, weighed against the gravity of the growing terrorist threat during his eight years in office. They get it. And, for all Joe Klein’s and David Brock’s spin control, they always will.

HOW CHURCHES DIE: Of all the material printed in the last few weeks on the current crisis in the American Catholic church, yesterday’s New York Times story on the near-collapse of the Irish church struck me as one of the more significant. What the story shows is that a combination of factors – modern, secular life, greater freedom for women, more awareness of homosexuals, economic success and growth – can hollow out traditional deference to church authority. Sex scandals – especially when they appear to be endemic and covered up – can deliver the coup de grace. It is perfectly possible that in the next few years, in the absence of radical reform, the Catholic church in America will become a rump of its former self. Perhaps among those communities that are as yet less touched by modernizing influences, such as the Latino immigrant population, the orthodox Church will endure. But what Ireland shows – and what the rapid spread of fundamentalist Protestantism in Latin America shows – is that even traditional cultures can suddenly abandon unthinking and unswerving obedience to a clerisy widely perceived as corrupt or psychologically warped. It will happen here. Rome won’t prevent it. And if American Catholics refuse to see their church go into radical decline, they will have to move toward some kind of schism to save it.

I’m sorry. I don’t see it. Reading through his speech on the plane back to DC, I was struck once again at how eloquent, powerful, and clear this president’s formal rhetoric can be. I could find nothing in the speech with which to disagree. Its clear and unmissable emphasis is the right one: that the prime responsibility for the violence in Israel and the West Bank in the last few months lies squarely with the terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and his accomplices. To say he has failed to live up to a single one of his promises to restrain violence is an under-statement. But it is equally true that re-occupation of the West Bank is not and should not be an option. Nor should maintenance of the settlements. The president significantly didn’t set a time-table for Israeli withdrawal – and Colin Powell won’t be in Irsael until the end of next week. So Israel has some lee-way, and should find a way to get out as effectively as possible. Besides, much has already been accomplished, not least of which is the rallying of Israeli will to fight for survival. I am no optimist about what lies ahead. My own view is that the pathology, delusions and hatred that now infect the Palestinian world is not unrelated to the manic terror of al Qaeda. I don’t think anyone will be able to talk them out of it. But it is equally clear that as a moral issue, we have to try. To have done so before Israel was allowed to have responded would have been a sign of weakness. To do so now, after thorough Israeli self-defense, is a sign of simple will. If some calm prevails, then it may be that our campaign against Iraq will fare better. For my part, I suspect that it is only after we have defeated Iraq and achieved a regime change in Iran that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be amenable to settlement, of even a provisional kind. But I don’t blame the president for trying. And I don’t consider this a “reversal.” I see no capitulation to terror in Bush’s speech, and much resolve to continue the fight. For this, relief. For Israel a difficult but noble task – to try again.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Though we at THE TIKKUN COMMUNITY oppose the outrageous and disgusting acts of terror against Israelis, we know that the actual level of violence is small compared to the number of Israelis who die each year in automobile accidents.” – Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun.

I flew to Ohio yesterday, to give a talk at Kenyon College. What a great group of people – particularly the kids (several of whom, it turns out, are devoted to the site). Hung out with all the poli-sci jocks in the college bar afterwards. Then had to pull an all-nighter for a big piece for the Sunday Times. And now – in the wee hours – my Internet connection appears to be down and I don’t have the energy to fix it. I want to figure out what I think of Bush’s Middle East statement yesterday, but I can’t get a transcript and I don’t want to rely on clips or paraphrases. I should be back in DC by this afternoon for a react. Meanwhile, here’s Paul Begala and more on that bloody poem. Oh, and check out the book club selection for this month, will you? I think it’s our most challenging pick yet.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “By the way, let me also take up for my colleagues in the Clinton administration. It turns out we were the most ethical administration in history.” – Yes, it’s Paul Begala! Interviewed on Buzzflash.com. The rest of the interview has some real beauts as well.

THAT POEM: Curiouser and curiouser. Emails are running clearly in favor of the view that the Frank Bidart poem I linked to yesterday is, in fact, a condemnation of the World Trade Center bombers. But I’m still not completely sure. Take another look, if you still give a damn. Here are two readers’
letters weighing in on opposite sides:

Amazingly (to me) this is the poem I first heard read by Bidart at St. Paul’s in Boston in November. Thirty or 40 of us poets were asked to read something (anything, really, I suspect) about Sept. 11, and there was Frank, who prefaced his reading of this ugly little piece of fractured free verse by saying, “Some people are made very angry by this poem.” That was it–that was all. Nada. No more explanation, then just the poem.I was stunned, and turned to a fellow poet in the audience and said, “Am I going nuts or was that thing Bidart just read a curse on the dead of the towers?” She allowed as how that was impossible. I remain convinced Bidart was having it both ways. I.e., why aren’t “we” (the evil West) able to use moral imagination to feel what the bombers felt? See what I mean? Clever.

Now here’s another letter from someone at the same event!:

I wanted to throw in my two cents’ worth on Frank Bidart’ s poem, of which I was unaware until you linked to it this morning. I see that others have written to you in the meantime to point out that the poem should be understood as the curse that it purports to be, and that it makes a good deal more sense that this curse is directed at the terrorists (or the fundamentalist mentality) and their “rectitude.” I know Mr. Bidart faintly, and his poems generally are as far from any kind of simplistic political oratory as it is possible to be. If the genesis of the poem is of any relevance, a colleague of Mr. Bidart tells me that the poem was written within a month or so after September 11. He was prevailed upon to read the poem at a college roundtable discussion of the attacks, which he did only with the greatest reluctance-he seemed genuinely taken aback by the anger that the events of September 11 had aroused in him and that found voice in his poem.
I recommend Mr. Bidart’s work to you-his first three books are now collected in a volume called “In the Western Night” and another volume, “Desire,” has also appeared-the poems are often intense and sometimes dismayingly graphic, but they are consistently rewarding.

I think I’ll stick to prose in future. But, Mr. Bidart, if you’re out there and have caught wind of this, would you write me to let me know? Or are we all too post-modern to care what the poet actually meant?

Norah Vincent knows why Alex Beam and Eric Alterman hate bloggers. It’s called real diversity.

Spinsanity, who nit-picked me for what they regarded as a misleading implication, have the real goods on Michael Moore. You wouldn’t believe what he makes up. Well, maybe you would. Okay, Brendan. You win the even-handedness award. What’s the betting that left-wing media hound Jim Romenesko won’t link?

The Amazon reviewer sums up our latest book club pick thus: “While I don’t claim that everything [Bjorn] Lomborg says [in “The Skeptical Environmentalist”] makes perfect sense, or that all his data are correct (surely he won’t deny his readers the right to apply skepticism to his own claims as well, and it is quite easy to use the WWW to check out his opponents’ arguments), this is a rare book that attempts seriously to consider all facts from a variety of angles, which tries to answer objections or qualifications from opponents, and which carefully connects all the variables into a global picture, incorporating the temporal dimension both past and future. Lomborg is truly skeptical, in the sense of taking nothing for granted and approaching all the issues dispassionately. These are, as Descartes told us in his Discourse on the Method, some of the conditions for true knowledge. Reading Lomborg one sometimes feels like the light has been turned on or the mists have cleared on many topics.” So let’s turn the light on in the environmental debate. You have until May 6 to read the book before the discussion starts. Lomborg will take part; we’ll link to sites critical of his work, and those supportive. If you want to get to the bottom of the environmental debate, this is your chance. Buy the book here, support the site, and feed your mind.

THE ASSAULT ON THE JEWS: Don’t miss this riveting and moving diarist from Jerusalem by Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic. It describes in searing language what this second Intifada has done – is doing – to the promise that the Jews could one day have a home. He writes:

The fear has not only forced us into our homes; it has locked us out of our national, communal space. In our dread of public places, notes Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, lies a threat to our collective identity. Striking at a seder–which celebrates the founding of the Jewish people–is an unbearable symbol of the war against the Jewish collective. We are in the grip of an experiment testing how long a society can endure under relentless terrorism before it begins to disintegrate. If the experiment continues unchecked, we will become a completely atomized society–or no longer a society at all. A state founded on the survival instinct of the Jewish people risks devolving into the survival instinct of the individual Jew. Rather than see Israel as the answer to Jewish survival, we are beginning to see it as a threat.

That is why this terrorism must be defeated. It is also why we must not equivocate in defending the last refuge for the Jewish people to live in peace and freedom as a collective nation. Israel, like all states, is not perfect. Its treatment of many Palestinians has been cruel and wrong. The settlements policy is, to my mind, a foolish provocation. But I hope I can recognize in my own generation a moment when an attack upon the Jews is yet again an attack upon civilization itself. We are at another such pivotal moment. And the same forces – from Europe and the Vatican – are counseling moral equivalence. But there is no moral equivalence between a free country protecting itself from terror – and a terrorist organization, exploiting the misery of millions in order to foment nothing – nothing – but more violence. And make no mistake, Arafat’s only historic achievement is the perpetuation of violence and subsequently his own thugocracy. Halevi comments acidly on those who sympathize with Israel but who still counsel that fighting back is not a solution. Oh yes it is:

In one sense, it hardly matters that this military operation won’t stop the suicide bombers. (Indeed, nothing short of destroying the terrorist infrastructure known as the Palestinian Authority is likely to contain the terrorist assault.) In this war for the survival of our public spaces, reaffirmation of our collective identity is itself a victory. The Zionist revolution has long since forfeited its ideal of the Jewish worker and the Jewish farmer; now, it is the Jewish fighter whose existence is in the balance.

May he fight. And may we go on to fight with him against the same dark forces that lurk just over the horizon – in Tehran and Baghdad.

SHE’S STILL HERE: Rumors of Margaret Thatcher’s retreat from public life turn out to be somewhat exaggerated. She can do a mean book-signing.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE? This time, a poem.
UPDATE:Hang on a minute. Several of you think the poem might actually mean the reverse of the meaning I first ascribed to it. Reading it again, I think you could well be right, although, like many poems, its meaning is not literal and so open to more than one interpretation. Here’s a reader comment on the poem’s possible meaning:

In fact, there’s more evidence to suggest that the curse is directed at the high-jackers. The repetition of the word “rectitude” supports this interpretation. The poem attacks and inverts the “rectitude” of fanatics who slaughter in the name of religion. The power of the poem’s curse (the power of the poem, really) arises from its envisaging the fundamentalists’ being infiltrated, suffused, and possessed by the spirit of their victims. It is this spirit which the terrorist has either sought to negate or never acknowledged. The poem concludes then with two moves: first the power of imagination is figured as a means of vengeance to be used _against_ the terrorists; second, the perverted quality of the terrorists’ “rectitude” is implicitly demonstrated to stem from a deficient power of imagination, from a failure to grasp the “secret of morals, the imagination to enter the skin of another.” It’s this imaginative entering of the skin of another that the fundamentalist mind cannot perform, and thus the appropriate punishment for a fundamentalist terrorist is to have this failure of imagination (and thus morality) turned against him in the afterlife, as he loses his own essential or “fundamental” being and becomes fraught by the beings and essences of his victims. Part of the strength of the poem and a chief attribute of its seriousness of purpose lie in its understanding of how imagination at its best is the condition of possibility for morality and mutual understanding; but in times of moral extremity, such as these months after 9/11, imagination must be transformed into an agency of vengeance and then of justice. The poetic principle here is similar to that of the contrapasso in Dante. This assumes that there’s a direct referent for the poem’s curse, and that the poem is about something concrete. Op-eds and public policy essays must have direct referents, and should be about something concrete. But certainly we shouldn’t demand that all poems meet these stipulations. If I’m wrong about this poem, and you’re right, then I’m distraught. The poem, in such a case, would be utterly vile, far more so than Sontag’s claim about the courageousness of the terrorists.

Okay. I guess this is a classic lesson in how poetry is far more ineffable than prose. See what you think. And thanks for alerting me.

CORRECTION: Rod Dreher’s approving quote of a Vatican source describing the Patriarch of Jerusalem as giving a “false, lyi
ng, asinine statement” did not refer to the Orthodox Patriarch but the Latin Patriarch, of the Roman Catholic Church. My mistake. But it actually makes my point more forcefully. Imagine if a gay dissident had described a church official as making a “false, lying, asinine statement.” Somehow I think there would be more disapproval of cafeteria Catholicism from some quarters. Dreher subsequently argues that differing with Rome on politics is not the same as differing with it on morals. Well, if the war against terror isn’t a matter of morality, I don’t know what is. And if the death penalty isn’t also a matter of morals, I don’t know what is. But if your Catholic cafeteria is on the right, and you back Israel and capital punishment, no-one seems to care. Here’s my concession: I won’t call Dreher a “Catholic hobbyist” for picking and choosing what he agrees with the Pope about. I’ll call him a man with a brain and a conscience.

GIVE THE GUY CREDIT FOR CHUTZPAH: Here’s an amazing, splutter-over-your-coffee quote, in the New York Times today:

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, told a conference at the University of Oklahoma today that he was frustrated that the Israelis had spurned the Arab peace offer, a plan the administration gave its support. “We’re offering the Israelis full, total peace and security in return for ending the military occupation,” he said. “You still have the Arab leadership ready to stick its neck out and say, yes, let’s have peace,” he added. But he warned of dire consequences if the situation remains unchanged. “I cannot guarantee this down the road, when everybody becomes a suicidal bomber.”

So this guy, who represents a country which has financed Islamo-fascism, gave us the citizens who killed over 3000 people in New York City, now threatens that there will be more suicide bombers, if Israel doesn’t capitulate to terror. And he claims that he and the dictatorship he represents were “sticking their necks out” to offer Israel a plan that would effectively destroy that country’s security. Are we on the same planet or what?

EPHEBOPHILIA IN VERSE: Reading some errant poems last night, I stumbled across one I’d long forgotten, that seemed apposite to our current discourse on the evil of lusting after the young. It’s called “Senex” by John Betjeman, a wonderful and under-rated English poet of the twentieth century.

Oh would I could subdue the flesh
Which sadly troubles me!
And then perhaps could view the flesh
As though I never knew the flesh
And merry misery.

To see the golden hiking girl
With wind about her hair,
The tennis playing, biking girl,
The wholly-to-my-liking girl,
To see and not to care.

I’m not sure I can reproduce the whole poem without copyright permission so I’ll stop there. Except for this wonderful metaphor:

Get down from me! I thunder there,
You spaniels! Shut your jaws!
Your teeth are stuffed with underwear,
Suspenders torn asunder there
And buttocks in your paws!

No I’m not approving of this. But it’s one of the best expressions of the ephebophile temptation I know of. At once empathetic and horrified. Easier said in poetry than prose, perhaps.

HITCH ON THE QUEEN MUM: I don’t agree with all of the caustic comments my friend Christopher Hitchens makes in this Guardian piece. But it has some great moments. Here’s one:

Not even Wyatt of Weeford disputed the essential facts in A N Wilson’s account of a dinner party that he, Wyatt, had given for the old girl. As the martinis and fine wines took hold, she reminisced about a poetry reading held at Windsor Castle in the old King’s day, when Edith and Osbert Sitwell had been present, and also an enigmatic other: “This rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem … I think it was called The Desert. At first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the King … Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank.” Of course the author of The Waste Land did work in a bank, and was somewhat depressing, but some of us who have our quarrels with Mr Eliot might regard this episode as a poor return for his lifelong monarchism and anglophilia.

Gay people are supposed to shut up, utter no dissent, keep their heads down or be regarded as bad Catholics. Rod Dreher can lambaste the Pope John Paul II on his anti-Israel rhetoric, quote a Vatican source describing the Orthodox Patriarch as giving a “false, lying, asinine statement,” and no-one bats an eye-lid. More double-standards from the Catholic theocons. Many of them disagree with the Pope on such major issues as the death penalty, the morality of capitalism, and the right of Israel to self-defense, but if someone else dares to dissent on sexual matters, they’re written out of the church. I’m not saying that Rod isn’t entitled to his heterodox views. I share some, if not all, of them. I just wish he would allow others to be entitled to theirs’.

Here’s an excellent recent review of Bjorn Lomborg’s book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” which is our book club choice this month. Check it out – and join the debate soon!

Yet another piece of evidence from Michael Moore himself that the notion that his book was published and unalterable by September 11 is simply untrue. Here’s a recent account of his own description of the process of publishing his book. Of course, Moore argues that he was resisting “censorship” by refusing to tone down his book or add any commentary on September 11. But even taking him at his word, this merely proves that it was ultimately his choice – albeit a tough one. It is not true that there was no possibility of amending the book after September 11. As to my hedging with the word “barely,” I know better than to state flat-out from one reading of a book that there is no mention of the war at all. Proving a negative is always hard. I might have missed something. Can you imagine if I had said there was no mention and he’d added something I missed. Romenesko would have linked within five seconds. I confess that in some of the chapters, I skimmed through some of Moore’s rants. You try reading this sub-literate screed word by word. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t factually wrong. I wasn’t. But the left-wing jihad continues.