The Dish

Amazon.com has just launched a new scheme to help pay for websites just like this one. It’s a form of honors system, where you can click on a small button on the andrewsullivan.com site, and get taken to an Amazon page where you can sign up to donate a micro-payment to support this site if you feel like it. The payments start at $1. I’ve been talking to people about web alliances and advertising and sponsorship in order to keep this show on the road, but one of the joys of writing for this page is the freedom from any of those constraints. No editors to please; no proprietors to flatter; no advertisers to worry about. I’ve been lucky so far. My friends at Fantascope, the brilliant designers who created this page, have largely carried me and my server needs out of charity so far. But soon, we will have to pay a server charge and think about finding a technical and editorial assistant of some sort. This costs money. Believe it or not, I do all this myself now with help from Fantascope in posting full pieces. So here’s a question. Is this arrangement something you readers would be comfortable with? The page would be free, as usual. The donation is entirely voluntary. It doesn’t have to be made every time you visit – or ever at all. Amazon takes a 15 percent cut of the donation to pay for the credit card technology and access fees and customer support. The rest goes to our expenses – modest but growing as fast as the readership. All in all, it’s a way to support sites like this in the post-dot-com world. Let me know if it sounds cheesy or inappropriate. But if I got a buck from one in ten of you a month, we’d be financially secure.

Try, if you can, to make any sense of the latest ramblings from the Bush-hating Texan. I guess she has one micro-point – about the gag rule for abortions abroad leading to possible increases in unwanted pregnancies – but the rest sounds like a drunk falling off his stool at the bar. She lampoons Rick Berke of the New York Times for tracking continuing Democratic Party denial that they actually lost the election. Her evidence for the absurdity of Berke’s piece is that a friend of hers is still in denial about Bush’s victory. Then she claims that, “the profoundly dumb people in Washington are going around saying, “Recessions are good for you.” I love this line of argument, especially from pundits who make more than $1 million a year.” Man, I’d love to be that pundit. But which million-dollar plus pundit has said something along those lines? Where? Oh, never mind. Then there’s this odd peroration: “The working people who never got ahead at all in the ’90s are the very ones who will be losing their jobs now, and the fatuous complacency with which the prospect is being greeted is another example of a disconnect so enormous that it’s funny.” Is she unaware of the recession-busting effort to slash taxes on Capitol Hill? Does she know that Greenspan has just cut rates again? And is this Clinton-Gore supporter who spent most of last year saying that Bush would wreck the prosperity now saying no ordinary people benefited? Has she looked at any economic data to support her claim? Oh, never mind, again. Arguing with someone like Ivins is not a felicitous experience. I wouldn’t care except that Ivins’ main claim to fame is her constant invocation of W’s alleged stupidity. But if W is stupid, what does that make Ivins?

I’m waiting for Terry McAuliffe to start protests over this week’s Israeli election. With a ballot just for prime minister, and only two candidates, some 78,385 votes were deemed invalid. That means, in Gorespeak, they weren’t even counted. The invalid votes comprise 3 percent of the voters in an election where only 59 percent voted. Suspicious, huh? That invalid rate is only a mite lower than Florida’s – and the turnout is amazingly low. I think Jesse Jackson should go over and protest all those people who were clearly intimidated at the polls, confused by misleading ballots – especially any Holocaust survivors he could get in from of a camera. Or send Ron Klain. He’ll get to the bottom of this. Maybe he’d stay a while as well.

That was our old nickname for Harvey C. Mansfield, my old political philosophy professor at Harvard. The more common nickname was Harvey C-minus Mansfield, because he was such a tough grader. I remember one grading session (I taught as a teaching assistant for several of his wonderful classes) when I sheepishly brought in my stack of student grades. “Are there any of these B-minuses we could turn into C-pluses?” he mischievously asked, a twinkle in his often smiling eyes. In my two years of teaching for him, I only gave out two As. For years, he resisted the rampant grade inflation at Harvard, a process begun, as he bravely points out, when some black students first began being admitted under racial preference guidelines. (Before that, African-American students won their places on their academic merits and had no need for the condescending racism that now passes itself off as affirmative action in most of our universities.) Now, he has accepted that that’s unfair to his own students and has decided to give out two separate grades for his classes – the meaningful one, representing their actual work, and the phony one, representing the new, lowest common denominator standards of Harvard and many other universities, in which 51 percent of students get an A or A-minus. Good for Harvey. The combination of racial sensitivity, the cult of self-esteem, and the decline of serious standards in the humanities have been fatal to meaningful academic standards. And it’s typically ballsy of the man to take it on alone.

The results are in. There’s no way Bush won the popular vote. He’s almost 600,000 behind. A couple of souls made some honest mistakes in early calculations. Thanks to those of you who set the record straight.

Priceless Drudge link to a story about Janet Reno’s butch return to Florida. She’s got a used red pick-up truck; she’s walking barefoot through the grass; she’s got Patsy Cline on the tape player; she’s looking to go kayaking soon in the Everglades. Good on yer, Janet. Just don’t forget your Birkenstocks.

“Since 1997, for example, the rate of HIV infections in San Francisco’s gay male population has more than doubled, a trend scientists fear is duplicating itself in other cities.” – Jessica Reaves, Time magazine this week. For why the statistics simply don’t bear this out, see, ‘The HIV NON-SURGE,” archived in the Dish in the link at the bottom of this column. But did she even read the report? I emailed to ask her. Watch this space.

To say that I was taken aback by the response to my little column on Ronald Reagan is an understatement. I wrote it quickly, on deadline, when another idea fell through. In fact, I didn’t realize how strongly I felt until I wrote it. So thank you for the hundreds of emails and thousands of visitors to this site – and to Rush Limbaugh who read it all out loud and got a lump in his throat at the end. I’m told it was even read aloud in the Congress today. Who knew? Anyway, I can’t think of any better way to celebrate Reagan’s 90th birthday than to reprint here some of the emails I received. They all form different perspectives on the greatest president of my lifetime. Their very diversity is a tribute to his extraordinary reach. Here they are.

NEW YORK CITY: “My family came to the U.S. from a communist country, and I will be eternally grateful to President Reagan for what he did. He changed the world. I’m not a sentimental person, but reading your piece made me cry. How does one thank President Reagan for understanding what it was like for the millions behind the Iron Curtain, and for saying it out loud, for decades, firmly and with resolve, to a cadre of mocking politicians and media.”

NORTH CAROLINA: “I served in the US Navy in the last year of Reagan’s presidency. In that year, our sense of optimism was so very high, and the world, in spite of (or perhaps due to) the Cold War, was a fairly predictable place. In my heart of hearts, I believe that it was the steady hand of Reagan on the national throttle that held the situation in check. After his departure, things were never the same. President Bush tried to keep it going, but with the notable exception of Desert Storm, the enthusiasm just wasn’t there.”

RUSSIA: “Hello, again from Russia. I just wanted to drop you a quick note on your ode to Ronald Reagan. I am freezing my ass off here, but the warmth of your tribute was as if I was reading it, seated in front of a cozy fire in a man and dog chair, covered in an afghan and sipping a hot beverage.”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “I saw on TV a few years ago an interview with the Secret Service agent who was with Reagan when he was shot. At first, Reagan didn’t appear to be hurt, and they started back to the White House. But then he complained to the agent (wish I could remember his name!) that, “When you jumped on me, I think you broke a rib.” The agent then decided maybe a trip to the hospital instead of going to the White House might be wise. Obviously, it was. The agent told the TV interviewer that when he was a boy, he had seen a movie about the Secret Service. He was so impressed, he saw it a few more times, and made up his mind to become an agent someday. Obviously, he did. Who starred in that movie? The subject of your marvelous Times’ piece, Ronald Reagan.”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “Reagan’s writing not only reflects humor but a pithy quality that evinces the care of his thought. The great problem today is that most so-called experts and pundits prefer the use of jargon which obfuscates thought to the uninitiated, but says little to anyone else. The sad fact of modern life is that very few writers are willing to put in the hard work of thought distillation required to write clearly. The most successful people are capable of explaining the basics of any idea to anyone without regard to the educational attainment of the listener or reader. Therein lay Reagan’s genius. Anyone can use jargon.”

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA: “There is one thing you forgot to mention about him. There was something else he did for us, something I’ve always thought was very special. I’ve never known a time in my short 47 years that I’ve seen the American people doubt themselves, but in the mid- to late-1970s they came close. I can remember the insane, 10-year debacle of Vietnam, dissolution with America’s institutions (that had as much to do with the arrogant, wicked Vietnam war as it did with arrogant wicked Nixon), and the rusting of America’s industries (This last one seems incredible now, but I can remember Donald Peterson of Ford taking a question from a reporter, asking what would happen if Ford had to stop making automobiles. He answered the question seriously.). Everything we knew was wrong, everything we did was in question, and it seemed for all the world that after 200 years of spectacular success, there wasn’t a thing in the world that we could do right. Ronald Reagan’s gift to us was that, while we may have doubted America, he never did. Even better, he was there for us at just the time that we needed him. On his watch, we exported American culture: our music, our way of life, and our form of democracy. America was exporting the light of Liberty and that meant that Communism didn’t stand a chance. We were back. We became the world’s “shining city on a hill,” or whatever term he used. In short, Ronald Reagan did nothing less than restore us as a nation. The restoration was so complete that not even the last eight years of abuse could diminish its luster. The only other political figures I can name from the last century that can compare with Reagan are Roosevelt and Churchill. I think that’s pretty damn heady company for somebody who co-starred in a lousy movie with a chimpanzee.”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “I didn’t really like Reagan until 1980 – his portrayal in the media was that of a washed up right wing actor dunce. I remember in boarding school in 1976 a teacher asked everyone at lunch who they wanted for president. One brave soul said “Ronald Reagan” and the teacher (a boob) led others in derisive and riotous laughter. The very notion!”

ADDRESS UNKNOWN: “I first saw Ronald Reagan and shook his hand when I was in Junior High School, but I had no idea how he would shape the lives of everybody in this country. How would anyone have known? He seemed to always bring an air of formality and strength to the presidency. I don’t think anyone after him has been able to match it. When Ronald Reagan spoke it seemed like everybody wanted to see what he had to say, unlike the Clinton crowd. I think meeting him was one of my fondest memories of growing up and when I think back that is usually one of the first things that pops into my mind. I can remember today just as clearly as the day it happened.”

Yeah, right. Look at the percentage cuts in Bush’s plan. The poorest earners get a 33 percent cut in their income taxes; the lower middle class gets a 46 percent cut; the upper middle class gets a 30 percent cut; the most successful get a 17 percent cut. That’s regressive? Why hasn’t this point been put across more clearly?

“There must have been a lot of gay men in Cuba who didn’t make their lives as impossible as Arenas did. Consider the character of Diego in “Strawberry and Chocolate,” the 1995 movie by the great Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea. The movie is set in 1979, Diego is clearly gay, and yet he lives more or less as he wants to, because he is clever and discreet. There is a little something of the spoiled masochist about Arenas. One would not say he seeks misery, but he wears it like a badge of honor, and we can see his mistakes approaching before he does. This is not a weakness in the film but one of its intriguing strengths: Arenas is not presented as a cliche, as the heroic gay artist crushed by totalitarian straightness, but as a man who might have been approximately as unhappy no matter where he was born.” This is hyper-liberal Roger Ebert reviewing “Before Night Falls.” Maybe he thinks there was a bit of a spoiled masochist in Solzhenitsen as well. And maybe Ebert thinks being locked up for being a gay writer is no big deal in Castro’s socialist paradise. You think he might enoy a tour of duty himself in one of Castro’s concentration camps? It’s all for the revolution, Roger. And only spoiled masochists complain about such things.