The Dish

A real and present danger. See the article posted opposite. My apologies for being forced to write it.

A plucky Ontario doctor, Tom McGowan, has had the effrontery to tackle Canada’s lengthening waits for cancer radiation treatment by running his own for-profit radiation clinic. Under Canada’s socialized healthcare system, it’s getting harder and harder to get prompt radiation therapy, because like all good socialist systems, rationing is the main means to keep a lid on spending. Canadians who don’t want to die have had to go to the U.S. to get treatment before their cancer does irreparable damage. But thanks to Dr. McGowan, waiting lists in Ontario have now been cut from 16 to around 4 weeks, since excess demand has been mopped up by the private sector. McGowan’s reward? A notice pinned to his door with the words “Radiation Mercenary” written on it. A photo of the cancer doc was also pinned to the hospital bulletin board, with a devil’s horns and tail added, according to a story in today’s Wall Street Journal (sorry, it’s only for paid subscribers). Of course, what Dr McGowan is doing is not illegal in a free country. It’s just a recipe for social ostracism and hate mail.

HATE CRIME LUNACY I: Why would what appears to be a stupid prank by some kids who used some left-over white paint from a church renovation become the catalyst for a hate crimes law in Texas? A recent story from the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Observer is a classic. One night, a predominantly black church had some graffiti daubed on it, including a swastika. The paint used is a paint that matches some on a renovation project thrown into a dumpster near the church. The only witness of what might have happened has identified the culprit as a young black kid, and, according to the Morning News, “authorities have no evidence to suggest the vandalism was a hate crime.” But the “hate-crime” label stuck, legislators in Austin used the case as a reason for passing a law criminalizing bigotry, and were it not for some simple reporting, this particular prank would have been recorded for posterity as yet another example of indelible racism in America today.

HATE CRIME LUNACY II: A gruesome alleged murder by some young thug who allegedly targeted an older man because “he liked boys” just happened in Baraboo, Wisconsin. An evil crime which, if proved, should be punished. But a hate crime? Wisconsin authorities are apparently considering this measure under state law because, according to the local district attorney, “One of the areas for the hate crime is sexual orientation, and certainly an allegation that someone is a child molester goes to their sexual orientation. We believe that may support a hate crime enhancer.” Child abuse a sexual orientation? Excuse me?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “You lock the door and she [Hillary] comes through the window, you lock the window and she comes up the floor boards. This is like “Alien” – she lives in Tom Daschle’s stomach. Just as the music gets soft and the scene winds down you hear the wild “Eeek! Eeek!” and she bursts out of Tom and darts through the room.” – Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Tuesday. But who, one wonders, controls the mothership?

Idyllic Memorial Day in Venice Beach, California. Since San Diego was atypically gloomy, we decamped for the weekend at the Jolly Roger Motel in Venice and biked and roller-bladed up and down the coast trails to Santa Monica and back. Heaven – except for the sunburn. I love motels. When I first arrived here in America seventeen years ago, a buddy and I rented a car and drove through 30 or so states, from Miami to L.A. to Seattle to Boston. We often stayed in cheap motels. My favorite was one right out of a Coen brothers movie in Ozona, Texas – crazy owner, weird noises through the night, howling hounds in the back, and so on. Maybe it’s being an immigrant but I live for this kind of Americana. Perhaps for the same reasons, I also love Memorial Day. England celebrates its war-dead in far gloomier fashion – in November, with commemorative poppies, services, and so on. America does all that – but also takes the day off and celebrates the first day of summer. And what could be more American? The point of the sacrifice we commemorate, after all, was to preserve this country’s freedom, an inextricable part of which, for most Americans, is the ability to goof off, drag out the barbecue, or head to the beach. It’s memories of Memorial Days like these that probably kept many soldiers posted abroad vaguely sane over the years. Reminiscences like these are also probably what any American soldier always longs to get back to. Which is why the best way to commemorate them is to renew those memories each year; mint them anew – even in the Jolly Roger Motor Hotel.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Mr. Bush is proposing a diminution of the government’s ability to protect its citizens that is breathtaking in its scope. His environmental agenda would put more arsenic in the water and more pollutants in the air.” Yes, it’s Paul Begala and Jim Carville in their Sunday New York Times op-ed. Of course, what they mean by the government’s ability to “protect” its citizens means protecting Americans from the right to control and spend their own money without government funneling up record amounts of it. Another interesting nugget in the piece is the frank admission that fully funding a massive, open-ended prescription drug benefit for seniors will indeed destroy fiscal health unless taxes are kept high, and in the short term, raised even higher. But heck, you gotta win Florida somehow.

AFTERLIFE: The strange post-career of an ex-president, Bill Clinton. Check out the latest piece from the Sunday Times (of London) posted opposite. Back in D.C. later today. Post-Memorial Day service will continue as soon as I touch ground.

The Democratic Party line, faithfully repeated as “news” by Rick Berke in the New York Times, is that Jim Jeffords’ defection is a result of Bush foolishly governing “from the right.” Huh? The only hard evidence of conservatism is the budget deal and tax cut, which Jeffords supported. The other major legislative achievements poised for passage are the Education Bill – a deeply bipartisan measure crafted by Ted Kennedy and boosting federal education spending by 30 percent – and the campaign Finance Reform Bill, crafted by John McCain. Ashcroft’s tenure at Justice has been moderate, bordering on liberal. Environmental policy is barely distinguishable from Clinton’s, except for terrible p.r., and a belated recognition that we need more energy sources. On abortion, which Berke dutifully cites, the administration has been completely AWOL. There hasn’t even been an attempt at a partial birth abortion ban, perhaps the minimum measure sought by the religious right. The administration is strikingly diverse on racial and gender matters and has reached out to gay Americans. Berke hauls out all the usual blowhards – from Bill Kristol to Bob Strauss (remember him?) to make what is a completely unsubstantiated case. Is this a sign of what Howell Raines has in store for the whole paper? Propaganda disguised as news? At the very least, this is over-interpreting Jeffords. If he hadn’t been able to tip the balance of the Senate, this would be a non-story, a quirky little regional piece on a fickle leftie trapped in a Republican Party were he clearly hasn’t belonged for twenty years. Jeffords was fine with the Gingrich revolution but balks at Bush? Give me a break. All this does, as I said yesterday, is ratchet down the chance that Bush will drastically remake the judiciary; make a bipartisan approach even more important for Bush; and put some real pressure on Daschle to deliver. It’s the status-quo ante with a twist. Whatever else it is, it isn’t an earthquake.

RIGHT-WING DORKS UNITE!: Kinsley has a typically smart piece about William Hague and his ilk. Only in Britain do the dorks and weirdoes actually run for office. Here, they run think-tanks, editorial pages, and, er, weblogs.

GO WEST: Dragging my near-expiring lungs into an Airbus 320 for a long weekend in San Diego with the new squeeze. Postings might be sporadic for the weekend if things go well. If they don’t, look for a forthcoming tirade against the idiocy of romantic love. No-one can say I’m not trying…

The rumors tonight in Washington are that Jeffords may not do the dirty after all. Who knows? More to the point, who cares? Jeffords is a de facto Democrat on most of the important issues. He voted for HillaryCare, for goodness’ sake. His defection will help scupper some of Bush’s more extreme judicial appointments (good), won’t jeopardize the most important part of his agenda, the tax cut, (good), and will force W into more accommodations with moderate Democrats rather than with prickly liberal Republicans (even better). If Bush and Rove don’t panic, this can surely work to their advantage. The Democrats’ strongest weapon in 2002 would have been recapturing one of the two Houses. Now they’ll have to share the burden of leadership and, to some extent, responsibility for what transpires. They have already dictated the terms of Bush’s education bill, so I don’t see any drastic damage they can do in the months ahead. And the Republicans can go into the 2002 cycle with some fire in their belly, instead of in a defensive crouch. My only worry is that Jeffords represents a kind of political creature that largely destroyed the Tory party in Britain in the 1990s. The Tory Wets, as Thatcher dubbed them, were forever bleating on about their “conscience,” moderation, etc etc, while essentially supporting an ever larger welfare state and ever higher taxes. In the long run, best to get rid of them – because they are a treacherous breed who largely want to get rid of principled conservatives. And better to get rid of them before they try and get rid of you. Are you listening, Senator Chafee?

BURYING FETUSES: An interesting nugget from Britain, where National Health Service nurses are actually campaigning for the right to bury abortions and miscarriages. “Parents should be given the same choice on the disposal of fetal remains as for a stillborn child. They should be clearly and sensitively informed of the options available to them, both verbally and in writing, by trained health professionals,” the nurses’ report advised. They refused to be drawn on whether they were implying that the fetuses should have the status of a human life. They were merely arguing, they said, that these measures were necessary to be sensitive to grieving or traumatized parents. Interestingly, it is against the law in Britain to dispose of fetuses without burial if they are aborted or miscarried in the third trimester. I have no idea what the laws are here about it, and what the Medicaid and Medicare systems mandate, but I’d be interested to hear if any of you know about it. I wonder if NARAL would object in principle to treating dead fetuses with dignity, even if they’re quite happy to extinguish live ones.

“My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility. In vicious attacks like the one on Spitzer, gay activists, with all their good intentions, are aligning themselves with the forces of ignorance and repression. Too little reliable work is currently being done in homosexuality because free inquiry cannot be conducted in a politicized atmosphere of harassment and intimidation.”- who else but La Paglia, in Salon.

AND I THOUGHT JONAH GOLDBERG WAS RISQUE: Check out the Onion’s take on what Beijing is doing to impress the International Olympics Committee.

Where else but in Plymouth, Margaret Thatcher finally weighed in enthusiastically behind William Hague’s uphill battle to win the British election. Plymouth, as she put it in her inimitable style, “England’s historic opening to the world. [Where else but] Plymouth – from where Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Captain Cook set out to take the ways of these islands to the uttermost bounds of the earth? Plymouth – from where the Pilgrim Fathers left in that cockle-shell vessel on a voyage which would create the most powerful force for freedom that the world has known?” This is a classic speech, a reminder of what leadership is, a reminder of what conviction is. My favorite passage is her assessment of New Labour: “New Labour’s main appeal, when you get down to it, is quite simply that it’s not old Labour. And that’s true as far as it goes. I had some respect for the old Labour Party, which stood for certain principles – wrong as they were. But today’s Labour Party has no discernible principles at all. It is rootless, empty and artificial. And when anything real or human surfaces despite the spin – it’s the bitter, brawling, bully that we hoped we’d seen the last of twenty years ago.” Can’t she just come back and run for office?

Smart little piece by Vaughn Ververs, editor of the Hotline, Washington’s favorite addiction. He points out that John McCain’s interview in Rolling Stone, where McCain said he’d have accepted the vice-presidential nod if Bush had asked him, got barely any media buzz. (Ververs’ mention was the first I’d heard of it.) Not surprising, I’d say. With campaign finance reform apparently inevitable and the tax cut imminent, the Bush-McCain rivalry stories have little wind behind them. Then there’s the Republican maverick niche, which has now been adopted by the craggy Luftmensch Jeffords. For my part, I always felt that McCain was a party man, and not prone to Jeffords-like shenanigans. Look how he played along after he lost the nomination to Bush. And look how he hasn’t had a cow over the tax cut. (McCain likes tax-cuts. He’s a Republican.) There’s still the hideously named Patients’ Bill of Rights, which McCain could exploit. But my best bet is that McCain is biding his time for a while. Which to my mind is the smartest thing for him to do.

HAZE IN WASHINGTON: Bummer of a day. Woke up with a fever and a voice that sounded like a cross between Bob Dole and Diane Rehm. Turns out I have bronchitis. What to do but slump with the beagle and try and read the latest Philip Roth. I don’t know of any writer who does as well with sex. Somehow he manages to make it faintly unsavory and yet ennobling. It’s also so refreshing to read a man who writes so easily about his sexual attraction for women, especially young women, without any of the usual p.c. cant. Good practice for my interview with Penthouse tomorrow. (It’s on politics, mercifully.) The only problem is that if you’re actually sick, reading is hard. I knew I was desperate when I found myself watching the evening news for the first time in months. What dreck. The actual information you get from Rather-Jennings-Brokaw is somewhat less than a couple of pages of cliché-ridden type, filled with stock video images. What’s the point? Jennings was reduced to announcing that tomorrow they’ll have a special feature on gadgets for retirees. It’ll make a nice interlude between the ads for incontinence pads and Maalox. And they take themselves soooo seriously.

HOME NEWS: You may have noticed the link to C-SPAN’s RealPlayer video of my Stanford speech. So many of you asked for it that we just put it up. Good luck with the download. Sorry, there’s no transcript. I make it up as I go along. But most of the ideas are developed at length in Virtually Normal.

Finally forced by my inability to find any book I actually want, I tried to bring order to my bookshelves tonight. I’ve tried this from time to time – with always the same effect. I get asthma from all the dust and within about half an hour, I find an old book I’d forgotten I owned and start reading. This time, it was a collection of the poet Philip Larkin’s prose. I’ve always been a lover of Larkin’s painful, subtle and often hilarious poetry – but he’s also a brilliant raconteur and curmudgeon, much of which, it turns out, was for show. Anyway, I thought you’d all get a kick out of this interchange from the Paris Review. Larkin was famous for giving interviews to pretentious literary types and spending most of the time quietly making fun of them. Here’s a classic:

“You haven’t been to America, have you?
Oh, no, I’ve never been to America, nor to anywhere else for that matter… I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: the rest is a desert full of bigots. That’s what I think I’d like: where if you help a girl trim a Christmas tree you’re regarded as engaged, and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don’t call on the minister. A version of pastoral.”

So in the great red-zone vs. blue-zone debate, I think we know where Larkin would stand. Now, back to the bookshelves – oh, never mind.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WATCH: Browsing through the Washington Times over my Number 3 Supersized tonight, I came across a Bill O’Reilly column arguing that the pedophile group NAMBLA should be made illegal even for disseminating its views that under-age boys are old enough to have consensual sex. The First Amendment be damned – these people are evil! On the next page, I read that Alabama’s attempt to reform its marriage laws so that fourteen-year-olds can no longer legally marry has failed because of a filibuster. Fourteen? So let’s get this straight. In some states, what Mary Eberstadt would call a frightening new tolerance of pedophilia has been around and fully legal for more than a century. And Eberstadt didn’t even mention it in her recent Weekly Standard article on “pedophilia chic”? And O’Reilly is apparently unaware of it as well. One wonders why the religious right isn’t campaigning against a law which essentially condones child-abuse. And then one realizes that when pedophilia is heterosexual and in Alabama, some on the religious right couldn’t give a damn.

BUTCH ENOUGH: So-so piece in the L.A. Times on new research into the origins of homosexuality. But one nugget interested me: according to some researchers, gay men might be gay because they were exposed to higher than normal levels of testosterone in the womb. By analyzing how men and women hear differently, researchers expected to find gay men somewhere in between female and male hearing patterns. What they found is that gay men have hyper-masculinized hearing patterns – more attuned to “male” sounds than most straight men. Similarly, according to another researcher, the wonderfully named Marc Breedlove, the length of most gay men’s fingers suggests that they were exposed to greater-than-normal levels of male hormones prenatally. Breedlove also cites less reliable studies that show that gay men may have slightly higher levels of testosterone than straights and bigger genitalia. Hmmmm. We’re at such an early stage of understanding these things scientifically that I’m leery of making a call here. But my own experience would lead me to think that what might be at fault here is the single notion of homosexuality. Maybe there are homosexualities. Maybe some are more effeminate than usual; maybe some are more masculine. Hence drag queens and leather bars, flaming nellies and masculine bodybuilders. The fact that one can be attracted to members of the same gender doesn’t mean you have to be feminine; it might even mean you’re more masculine. How else do you explain the Marines?