The Dish

I just read Ron Rosenbaum’s breathless expose of the Skull and Bones ritual, the initiation hazing for the secret Yale society to which our current president belongs. Rosenbaum and a team of sleuths snuck their way into the ritual and recorded it with some kind of video equipment. From Rosenbaum’s heady prose, you’d think he’d uncovered the Pentagon Papers. In fact, all he finds is a generic, sophomoric frat ritual with its predictable obsession with secrecy, blood, gore, and anal sex. Here are the scoops. Sometimes, they yell, “OOGA BOOGA.” One of them pretended to be George W. Bush. Distinctly heard on the videotape are the repeated phrases, “Lick my bumhole,” “Remove the plunger,” and “Run, neophyte, run!” Sounds like after-hours at a leather bar. The only thing weirder than this kind of post-adolescent zaniness is the image of grown men actually finding it worth investigating and reporting. Slate’s Tim Noah predictably goes into ecstasy at this expose of Republican elitist iniquity. For people not consumed with class envy and paranoia, it’s just tedious.

An important factual discrepancy has been pointed out to me in the Washington Post piece. I was alerted to this problem by an email from an old buddy, Peter Sagal, who now works for NPR. He wrote the Post this letter: “To the Editor: I am writing to correct the historical record in regard to the anecdote Andrew Sullivan tells about his acting career at Harvard. While Elizabeth Shue was indeed a stage manager for the production of The Tempest in which Mr. Sullivan played Ferdinand, she did not apply the oil to his back to make him appear sweaty. I did. I played Antonio, and as such, was available backstage for the last-minute faux sweat application. I certainly understand why Mr. Sullivan might want to amend the story, perhaps even subconsciously, because it is far more entertaining for him to say that Elizabeth Shue greased his torso. However, it is also very entertaining for me to say, as I have for years, that I greased Andrew Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan must have thousands of amusing anecdotes about his odd encounters with the famous and influential. Please, let me keep the best of my paltry few.” But in a simultaneous email to me, Sagal’s memory is somewhat different: “Here’s my complaint: you say that Elizabeth Shue covered you with goop before your entrance in the wood cutting scene as Ferdinand in The Tempest. While the lovely Ms Shue may have provided a last second touch up spritz, the person who did the lion’s share of the goop application, backstage, was me. I’ve been dining out on this story for years, and I can’t have you or the Washington Post ruin it.” The latter is indeed true. Peter put the goop on me and Elizabeth sprayed me with a water mix. I actually enjoyed Peter’s libations more. I don’t know how the Washington Post fact-checker let that one through.

Hilarious piece in the Onion about Bush off-the-record. I’m looking forward to his ad hoc discussions of Spinoza soon.

Finally, some sanity in Britain over foot-and-mouth disease. One group of farmers is refusing to let their healthy cattle be slaughtered for no good reason. I hope it’s the first of many revolts.

SOLIPSISM EXTRA: Well I went to bed early last night and didn’t stay up as I usually do to read the next day’s papers. And at almost 3.30 pm I still haven’t read the Kurtz piece. For some reason I much prefer reading stuff about me that’s basically hostile, because then I can defend myself or get into an argument or debate. But according to everyone who’s read it, this was a fair, nice, pretty positive piece, which is all anyone can ask for in this business. But what can I say about it? I guess I’m most amused by my friends. Niall Ferguson says I’m a tremendous hater, according to a quote my friend Robert read to me on the phone. Niall is arriving here tomorrow for a few hours so I’ll give him shit about that. But the great thing about the friends I have is that they tell it like it is. That’s why I like them. I was at my regular lunch-spot today, C.F. Folks in downtown DC, the capital’s version of the soup nazi from Seinfeld, and they were razzing me about the photos. That one gazing out of the window makes me look like some sort of saint. Sorry. Having your photo taken is always tricky. Didn’t mean to look like Teresa of Avila. And, man, I’m bald. That always comes as a shock. Denial is a wonderful thing. From a glance at the web-page, it was also gratifying to be on the same page as Anne Robinson, the dominatrix of “The Weakest Link.” The headline for her profile was: “The Queen of Mean.” For one moment, I thought they were referring to me. Anyway, back to regular coverage. I’ll read it in full in a couple of days. If anything occurs to me, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, thanks, Howie.

Today is a day I wish we had our email section up. Thanks for all the emails about John Derbyshire. I can’t believe we’re still talking about him, but I guess in some ways we’re not. We’re talking about what bigotry might or might not be, what the line is between free and fair, if obnoxious, speech, and words that are simply designed to wound or dismiss. This isn’t the first time I have wrestled with this, and I’m grateful for your input. Here are two letters that made me sit up and think some more. Here’s the first: “If Derbyshire won’t read Proust because he is gay, that is both callow and bigoted. But I think you go to far on the evidence presented in suggesting that he is an anti-Semite. My mother is German, and I think it would be folly to deny that there are German “ways of thinking.” And once one identifies those “ways of thinking,” it is fair comment to express one’s approval or disapproval of those “ways of thinking.” One can argue about the correctness of a generality about a cultural “way of thinking,” and one can also take issue with the value judgment one makes with respect to it. But the mere making of judgments of that kind with respect to any ethnic group or nationality should not expose one to opprobrium in my view.” I agree with that. But when that very thing has been done before – and to the same group of people on the same grounds – in order to demonize and exterminate them, I think you might be a little careful about the echoes of your arguments. Derbyshire seems to revel in them. William F. Buckley himself ruled Pat Buchanan out of bounds for similar reasons. Yet he publishes Derbyshire proudly.

DERBYSHIRE COUNTY II: The other email that got me thinking was more convincing to me. It speaks for itself: “You’re probably right about Derbyshire, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. The dialectical interplay of post-Emancipation Jewry and European anti-Semitism in the rise of the left is a perfectly legitimate topic of discussion and research. Furthermore, it is a time-worn cliché among Jewish leftists themselves that socialism is the modern avatar of the Jewish prophetic ideal dating back to Amos and Isaiah. Most traditional religious Jews like myself stoutly oppose that notion, but Derbyshire is in fairly respectable company. But I can’t imagine how anyone could fit the non-political esthete Marcel Proust and his densely camouflaged prose into this picture, despite his mother’s tenuous Jewish roots. He is surely spinning in his grave at the very idea. In any case, the greatest and most enduring product of Jewish ‘world-perfecting idealism’ is Christianity, for better or worse. To be consistent, Derbyshire should boycott all literature by people of Christian cultural origin, not just half-Christians like Proust. Derbyshire’s own works, sadly, would fall under the same proscription.” Precisely. Derbyshire sees evil in products of Judaism, only when he has already judged them to be evil. Christianity or Kantian moral philosophy, which have their roots in some part in the same Jewish tradition of “world-perfecting idealism”, are not deemed Jewish in origin by Derbyshire, or at least they are simply ignored in his argument. There’s something fishy about the lacuna, don’t you think?

AND THEN THERE’S THIS: Do the following statements seem evidence of bigotry to you? Perhaps each on its own, to a very generous reader, would not – but altogether? “The U.S.A. is a conservative-Republican nation tilted over to the left by black people, who are overwhelmingly socialist…Racial profiling is common sense, and good, fair police practice…Gay is not just as good as straight. It’s against nature, unhealthy and antisocial… The Jews are a race. They are, on average, much smarter than the rest of us. They got that way by practicing eugenics for 2,000 years. And it is not anti-Semitic to point any of this out.” The man doth protest too much methinks. Yep, it’s our hero of the right. You can read the full column here.

In the lead this week is Congressman Pete Stark, D-Calif., who opined to the Alameda Times-Star that the entire Bush budget is “the embodiment of the anti-Christ…. [it] goes against all the teachings of Christ. It turns its back on the poor, it turns its back on education and health care for young children. At the holiest week of the year, to release this budget that flies in the face of all of Christ’s teachings is infamy.” Who said the religious right was doing all the political damage to religion?

DERBYSHIRE, CONTINUED: More emails defending Derbyshire. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you try. Simply saying he wouldn’t ever read Proust because he was a Jewish homosexual was not bigoted, some readers argue. It’s just a sign of how much reverence Derbyshire had for his Jewish friend. One reader even opined that he and his friends use the term ‘faggot’ quite frequently in private discourse, but in affectionate ways. And they make sure no homosexuals are present when they do. Such sensitivity. But back to Derbyshire. How about this in the same column? “At the same time, there are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted in the most fundamental premises of Judaism, has, it seems to me, done great harm in the modern age.” Now what do you think he means by this? As one astute reader pointed out, “How many people out there associate Judaism with some sort of destructive idealism? Is that the junction where people start to say that communism/socialism is some sort of godless mutation of Judaism, and therefore Eastern European Jewish intellectuals who’d forgotten about God are actually the ones responsible for the destruction of their own people?” I think my correspondent is onto something. Who else is still arguing in this day and age that communism was somehow a Jewish inspiration? Indeed, who but the Nazis and their odious fellow-travelers ever really did? It’s worth pointing out that there’s a legitimate argument to be made against the hideous p.c. pursuit of phony bigotry. I think I’ve got my credentials on that one. But that doesn’t mean that good old anti-Semitism, racism and hatred of homosexuals isn’t still out there – trawling for respectability in the pages of National Review.

The press is spinning the Bush administration’s back-to-back decisions to uphold tough new standards for wetland conservation and now lead emissions as a U-turn from a flurry of anti-environmental actions. But this is silly. One of Bush’s first decisions was maintaining a highly onerous regulation requiring petroleum companies to clean up diesel fuel – the decision most resisted by business interests. His decision on Kyoto had already been made for him – by the Congress and the recalcitrant Europeans last fall. His arsenic decision – to postpone implementation of tougher standards for a few years – was made so as not to be bounced into a decision made by the Clinton decision at the last minute. And Clinton’s decision had itself been delayed several years for exactly the same political reasons that Bush was worried about. I predict a small U-turn by the press on this. Gregg Easterbrook has a terrific piece out in next week’s New Republic (I got a sneak preview) that will lead the new CW. Bush is actually pretty green, when you take a deep breath and look at the substance. And if his energy commission comes up with a proposal to vastly increase our nuclear power capacity, he will deserve more support for backing real environmental health, rather than grabbing easy headlines.

SPIELBERG’S SCOUTS: The director Steven Spielberg has quit his post on the advisory board for the Boy Scouts, citing their continued discrimination against homosexual scouts and scout-masters. Good for Spielberg. The Scouts’ current policy is poisonous and irrational. They allow closet-cases to stay on in their organization, but boys and men who strive for honesty about their emotional orientation are booted. Lying is a virtue, argue the Scouts, in unholy agreement with the U.S. military. And please don’t give me the argument that gay scout-masters are all potential pedophiles about to rape children. It has as much validity as an argument that says the Scouts should ban Jews or Texans for the same reason. There is no solid correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia; and there’s no way to ensure that boys will be safe under an adult male’s supervision except by making a judgment about the character of the man himself, straight or gay. The current policy doesn’t do that. In fact, openly gay Scout-masters are the least likely to abuse their authority. They are courageous enough to state their orientation and aware that they are consequently subjected to more than usual circumspection because of prevailing canards about pedophilia. It’s the secretive closet-cases you have to worry about – exactly the people the current policy attracts and retains. Don’t get me wrong. I supported the Scouts’ Constitutional right to discriminate against anyone. But that doesn’t mean I have to support their reactionary politics. Spielberg also seemed to me to strike the right note – of sadness at this irrational and cruel prejudice and hope that this invidious policy will one day change to allow decent people to support the Scouts again, and all the good work they continue, despite the odds, to do.

GOVERNMENT BY COMMERCIAL: Orwell worried about it, but it took Tony Blair to turn the British government into a permanent media campaign. New statistics show that the Labour government is now the biggest single advertiser in the U.K., spending more than any private company, to inform and uplift its citizens. It spends over $160 million a year in propaganda, I mean, commercials, and its publicly financed spending peaked in February. No other major country, apart from Canada, has the government anywhere near the top ten advertizers. Hmmmm. There couldn’t be an election coming up, could there?

THE WEAKEST LINK: Maybe I’m dreaming, but I can’t help feeling that the brutal Darwinianism of shows like “The Weakest Link,” and “Survivor,” are partly ways in which our popular culture balances out the prevailing p.c. notions that winning is somehow suspect, that self-esteem matters more than academic achievement, that every Harvard student deserves an A or an A-. Watching the equivalent of Miss Jean Brodie send all those charming contestants into the oblivion of humiliating failure is a reminder of what good universities used to be like. But then you need teachers like Ms Robinson to be in charge, rather than the racist politburos that now seem to dominate most campus faculties. Well, I can dream, can’t I?

WELL, AT LEAST THEY’RE HONEST: “Conservatives Oppose Bush’s Inclusive Approach on Homosexuals.” – a headline from this morning’s cnsnews.com, formerly Conservative News Service.

The whole point of the New York Times’ endless, banal, and pointless series on “How Race Is Lived In America” was to win a Pulitzer Prize and yesterday they won it. Woohoo! Mazel Tov to everyone concerned. One small suggestion to the Times. Do you think in the future, you could simply skip the middleman, the poor reader, and send these stories straight to the Prize Committees? Even Mickey Kaus can’t summarize these interminable thumb-suckers.

ON THE OTHER HAND: If Dorothy Rabinowitz can win a Pulitzer, there really is a God. Her extraordinary work defending those falsely accused of child abuse is, to my mind, exemplary of the best kind of journalism: counter-intuitive at first, relentless, humane, and very, very brave. Here’s a link to some of her best stuff.

THEIR WORST MOVE YET: Indeed, the president didn’t milk the homecoming of the Hainan heroes. But that didn’t stop others. As reported in the Seattle Times, attending pols included: Gov. Gary Locke, D-Wash, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash. Clintonism is dead. Long live Clintonism!

PRAVDA IN DUBLIN: “In China genuine feelings of outrage over US assertiveness and hegemony were quite clearly a factor. It is a salutary reminder that Chinese public opinion exists independently of its state-controlled political system.” – from an editorial in the Irish Times. Who do they think they are, Tom Friedman?

BLACK COPS AND GUNS: Worthwhile number-crunching from FrontPage magazine on police homicides. From the Cincinnati riots to the real worries about racial profiling, we’re all used to the idea that white cops are somewhat trigger-happy with black suspects. Worth noting then that, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1998, “the black-officer-kills-black-felon rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers – much higher than the white-officer-kills-black-felon rate of 14 per 100,000 white officers.” This may well be partly explained by the preponderance of black cops in black districts. But it certainly complicates the simplistic view that white cops are gunning for black suspects with wild abandon. In fact, the rate at which white cops have been killing black criminals has been dropping for two decades. Tell that to Al Sharpton.

TIPPING JAR UPDATE: We’re $10,000 better off than we were when we started the Tipping Point, for which many thanks. We got a check in the mail today for a cool $1000. Amazing. And, at halfway through April, we look set for 130,000 visitors this month. Thanks again. The re-design should be ready within three weeks.

NOTES FROM P.C.U.: It may be old news at this point but the Horowitz ad keeps illuminating the reality out there in our universities. The Brown Daily Herald, for example, bravely published the ad, with criticism, and the University President defended publication on classic free-speech grounds. The opponents of the ad responded by stealing about a third of a subsequent print-run of the paper. And then this open letter was sent from dozens of senior faculty to the president. These professors argue that the president’s defense of free speech and “refusal to condemn the advertisement as a forum of harassment has – perhaps inadvertently – led to the silencing of many people of color on campus.” The argument here is that black students are so weak and inadequate that they are unable to argue against Horowitz’s arguments on their own terms, and are forced into silence. The professors go on to describe the theft of the paper as “the collective symbolic action by a group of students.” They go on to argue that the anonymous and sometimes scurrilous emails sent to the Herald by various students in defense of the ad should be investigated. “As you know,” the professors argue, “the University can use IP addresses to trace the source of every communication, anonymous or otherwise, on the web. Thus, we cannot help but wonder why, more than two weeks after the publication of the inflammatory statement by Horowitz, the University has failed to take strong action against the injurious racist insults and attacks on the BDH web pages.” Thus a university is actually urged not simply to suppress speech by its own staff but to hunt down and trace those who have made insensitive comments – even anonymously online – and punish them. It’s a brave new world, isn’t it?

NOTES FROM P.C.U. II: Columbia University launched its film festival yesterday, a reader informs me. Award categories are for Latino, Women’s and African-American movies. No whites need apply. Whatever happened to the “queers?”

HOWIE UPDATE: Some new signs from the Washington Post. He has spoken to Jeff Epperly, the Sullivan-hating editorialist from Bay Windows, who argued that I just kowtow to right-wingers and have never done anything real for gay equality. That forced me to cough up to Howie all the incriminating gay activism and fundraising I have done over the last two decades. Being Howie, he fairly asked me for people who might back that up. I know this sounds like a profile-writer-suck-up, but I’m pretty impressed with Kurtz’s diligence. He’s actually reporting this thing. Then I get an email headlined “another annoying question.” Uh oh. “Would I be safe in saying you’re not doing much dating these days, as you seemed to suggest?” Since my break-up a couple of months ago, that would be true, I guess. I’ve come to the conclusion that relationships, for me at least, are not particularly important. I’m quite happy single, with a laptop, friends and a beagle. What more could a man want?

I have to say that the most impressive act of President Bush’s young presidency occurred, in my opinion, this weekend. It was his refusal to greet the home-coming “detainees” from Hainan Island. He let them see their families again unmolested by politics – a classy, quiet move. Can you imagine Clinton staying away? He would have hugged every offspring and probably the sidewalk as well. Part of the slow process of restoring the dignity of the presidency after Clinton’s two terms will lie in gestures exactly like this. Less is so much more.

EASTER IN SAN FRANCISCO: Attended mass at Old Saint Mary’s yesterday, the oldest cathedral in California. One of the great joys of being a Catholic is that you can go anywhere in the world and celebrate the same Eucharist in any language and any style. I remember how comforting that was when I first came to the United States and discovered the sheer exuberance of Catholic life here – Irish, Italian, Polish, Anglo-catholic, Latino and on and on. It was so much more vibrant than the rather dour and defensive English variety I had grown up in. This Easter mass was a modern and simple ceremony. Almost every job – apart from presiding – was done by women, in the choir, as readers, ushers, and so on, which is how most parishes seem to cope with the Vatican’s dismaying refusal to let women be priests. It’s also refreshing to see Asian-American faces in Catholic churches – a rarer sight out East. Here, Asian faces read the Gospel and sang the responses. I went with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Doug Robson, a journalist whose father, John, has been nominated to head up the Ex-Im Bank in Washington. The Robsons, like the Cheneys, are Republicans with gay children, and, as such, are surely a deep reason for that party’s slow progress toward treating homosexuals with respect. Later, Doug dropped me off in the Castro, a neighborhood that never fails to amuse. It being Easter, the streets were dotted with the usual hairy-backed homos – this time in large, floral Easter bonnets. I saw one hirsute fellow dressed from head to toe in flamingo motifs. And they say it’s not a culture. The afternoon beer-bust at the Eagle, a San Francisco ritual, was, however, a bust. Rarely have I seen such a scary crowd – and in the full glare of the afternoon sun. At times, it seems that San Francisco is almost frozen in time – roughly 1977. Gay life in the rest of the U.S. is increasingly suburban, mainstream, assimilable. Here in the belly of the beast, Village People look-alikes predominate; and sex is still central to the culture. This can be fun for a tourist, but I’d go nuts if I had to live here full-time. My other complaint is everybody else’s. There are virtually no cabs. I’m sure some benevolent busy-body is responsible but I haven’t yet figured out exactly how.

NOT THE SOVIET UNION: Fareed Zakaria, an old classmate of mine in Harvard’s Government Department, has a strong piece on China in the Washington Post today. He makes a few of the usual obvious points – rebutting the increasingly isolated Kristol-Kagan containment policy. But one I hadn’t really thought about till reading his piece, was the ambivalence of China’s neighbors toward such a policy. “While all of Western Europe wanted the United States to help contain the Soviet Union,” Fareed argues, “no country in East Asia, other than Vietnam, would support such a policy against China. It would have been like trying to contain the Soviet Union with Belgium as your only ally.” Maybe not Belgium, though. Britain would be a less comforting and perhaps more accurate analogy. But the argument, I think, still holds.

LET THEM CUT PORK: “Giving the Washington Post and New York Times front-page ammunition on children, health care, and safety is totally counterproductive,” argues Larry Kudlow in National Review Online. He wants W to focus less on the spending side of government and more on the revenue side. Yes and no. In restraining government’s relative size, it’s obviously important to keep your eyes on lower marginal tax rates and incentives for investment and growth. But simply acquiescing in high domestic spending at the same time is clearly foolish. Bush’s attempt to keep the growth of government spending at 4 percent a year and then even lower in later years is precisely what sets his program apart from the worst part of Reaganomics. Targeting pork and corporate welfare is critical to these efforts. Yes, liberal media outlets will shriek about cuts. But they’ll shriek whatever you’re proposing. Why not give them something to really squeal about and go on the offense on things like archaic agricultural subsidies, corporate tax loop-holes, and the impossibility of truly ending almost any government program? These themes are popular if they can be presented cogently. Remember the appeal of Ross Perot? Bush’s deepest problem right now is not his budget itself, but his seeming inability to make a persuasive, coherent and constant public defense of it.

The winner this week is one Richard Stern, head of the Agua Buena Human Rights Association, for equating the production of life-saving drugs with mass murder. It’s from a letter to the president of the University of Minnesota: “I have recently been informed that the University of Minnesota is the patent holder on compounds used to produce the drug abacavir. The outrageously high prices of anti-retroviral medications is a reality which we in Central America assumed was the result of policies of multi-national pharmaceutical companies. Now, students at the University of Minnesota have informed us, that the University is also profiting from the prices of these medications. It is shocking to me personally that a University would be involved in this situation, which is really of genocidal proportions.”