The Dish

Worthwhile piece by Michael Novak in National Review Online about Pentecostalism and the Church-State divide. Novak points out, intelligently, that John Ashcroft’s dissenting forefathers were among the most adamant of those who wanted government to have no role in religious life. The speaking-in-tongues holy rollers of Ashcroft’s faith had the most to fear from more mainline Protestants using the state to enforce orthodoxy. Novak’s point is well-taken. But the fear about Ashcroft is not that he will use his office to mandate ritual anointings with the Holy Spirit, but that he will use his religious faith to make unyielding political decisions which brook little dissent or pluralistic opposition. The problem is not that he will impose religion, but that he will impose a sectarian and often incoherent morality upon a pluralist country. Novak says these fears are unfounded, and I hope he’s right. At the least, I think Ashcroft and Bush should be given the benefit of the doubt, especially since the role of the attorney-general is not to legislate but to enforce existing laws. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t worry.

It’s getting to be pretty clear now what some people believe is the upshot of the razor-thin election result: George W. Bush may get to take the oath of office, but he doesn’t actually get to be president. Two liberal polemics highlight the trend. In today’s New York Times, Harvard professor Michael Sandel simply comes out and says it: ‘Even setting aside the dispute over Florida, the fact that Mr. Bush lost the popular vote means he cannot claim a mandate for a conservative agenda, or for the appointment of ideological proponents who would carry it out.’ In the New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg previews this argument. He says that Gore not only won the national vote but the Florida vote and that Dick Cheney only has the deciding vote in the Senate because of the ‘judicial fiat’ of the U.S. Supreme Court handing the election to Bush. (I wonder how many times Rick has used the term ‘judicial fiat’ when it has advanced an agenda he agrees with?) So having tried to use the popular vote argument to rig a vote recount to hand Florida to Gore, some liberals now want to use the same argument to strip the president of his rightful, constitutional prerogatives in picking whom he wants in his cabinet. Yes, the Senate has a say. But the Senate doesn’t have the right to de facto staff a president’s administration without violating separation of powers. And the point of presidential prerogative is not to undermine electoral legitimacy but to deepen it. A president, after all, is accountable to the electorate in four years’ time. So are his party’s congressional representatives in a mere two years’ time. Maybe it’s inadvisable for a president to appoint a fire-breather to Justice after such a close election. But that’s his call. Besides, if you don’t give the president the freedom to pick his own people, how can he be held accountable for their performance? How, indeed, can we have any real democratic accountability? This is what is at stake here and if Bush doesn’t knock this down now, only more trouble will ensue. Part of W’s agenda, in my view, should be to end the notion of a permanent campaign in which electoral politics infects everything in government, and in which special interest groups dominate how that electoral politics is pursued. There needs to be time and space for the man to govern in his own way with his own judgement. Then there will be space and time for the rest of us to judge. That space and time are critical elements in the proper functioning of a republic. More than W’s success is at stake if we let the sore losers extinguish them.

A staple of lazy magazine editors this time of year, especially with a new administration, are those ‘What’s Hot, What’s Not’ lists detailing the feel of the new era. Most of the time, these eras are fictions. But this year, things genuinely do feel a little different. With that in mind, I offer a brief, lazy list of ins and outs and invite y’all to submit other suggestions. What’s out is the first item, what’s in is the second:

Big Government / Big Hair
Tony Blair / Vicente Fox
CNN / Fox News
Bisexuals / Bifocals
Ellen Degeneres / Mary Cheney
Algore / Alcoa
Bimbo Eruptions / Missile Defense
Fat, ugly, gay guys in ‘Survivor’ / Hot, slim, straight chicks on ‘Survivor’
I Feel Your Pain / Se Habla Espanol
Salon.com / OpinionJournal.com
Ranch Dressing / Ranches
Distinguishing Characteristics / Distinguished Guests
Hitch / Hatch
Big Creep / Big Sleep
New York City / New York City.

One small irony of John Ashcroft’s speech at Bob Jones University is the fact that the Fundamentalists at B.J.U. are as hostile to Pentecostalism as they are to Catholicism. Why would they honor someone who, in their view, upholds near-Satanic practices such as speaking in tongues? Perhaps for the same reason they honored Patrick Buchanan, a fervent disciple of the ‘Whore of Babylon,’ as the BJU-ers charmingly call the Catholic Church. Perhaps BJU a) doesn’t really believe all that crazy stuff on its website or b) thinks the political benefits of advancing people like Ashcroft and Buchanan outweigh the danger of consorting with the devil. If a) I’m relieved. If b) I’m disturbed. What’s the use of crazy Fundamentalists if they’re not consistent and unrelenting? Have they succumbed to post-modern doubt like the rest of us? Say it ain’t so, Bob! I’m a traditional kind of guy in this respect. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, I like my beer cold, my homosexuals flaming and my bigots crazed and consistent. Is that too much to ask?

Two obits in the New York Times today: the wonderfully fickle philosopher, G.E.M. Anscombe, and Denys Lasdun, who designed, among other things, Britain’s National Theater complex on London’s South Bank. I came across both through their work when I was a college student. Anscombe’s tenacious interest in Thomism was a thrilling rebuttal to the secular language games of her peers, and persuaded me, in the same way that the idiosyncratic liberalism of Michael Oakeshott persuaded me, that thinking was not trapped in history and that absolute truth, while ineffable, was not inconceivable in modernity. At the same time, I was commuting regularly from Oxford to London to go stand-by for anything at the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Student stand-by theater-goers tend to get to know the building well, since we camped out there for hours often for standing room only, and Lasdun’s achievement with what looks like an ugly concrete bunker from the outside was to create a wonderfully open, unintimidating, uplifting space from the inside. I got to know each of the three theaters in the complex intimately, and in a few years, had seen most of Shakespeare’s best work. It became a kind of home to me – a public affirmation of the importance of drama, an escape from the suburbia I grew up in, a thrilling reminder of the possibilities of writing. Lasdun’s building subtly emphasized these themes, while never stepping on them: An under-stated and English achievement, which didn’t deserve the scorn it came to receive. May both philosopher and architect rest in English peace.

Could Bush have been clearer in his selection of Elaine Chao as his new nominee for Labor secretary? She’s married to Mitch McConnell, arch-foe of John McCain and of any attempts to rein in campaign finance abuses. Sure, she’s only married to the guy. But this is an administration that believes in loyalty from the beneficiaries of nepotism. By that I don’t mean Chao is unqualified – any more than Michael Powell is unqualified for FCC commissioner. But her connections can’t hurt, can they? And Bush’s choice is a signal all right. Bush is still eager for Asian-American support; and he’s not eager for campaign finance reform. Shrewd again. And swift.

Yes, Ashcroft is a terrible choice for attorney-general. But he should be confirmed anyway. Huh? See my latest TRB, posted opposite.

‘Senator Ashcroft played the race card. He played it by acting in the most racist way to deny a qualified African-American his rightful position on the federal bench. I know a racist when I see one. Senator Ashcroft acts like a racist, walks like a racist and talks like a racist.’ – Congresswoman Mazine Waters, October 21, 1999, after Ashcroft blocked Judge Ronnie White’s nomination. Ashcroft supported the vast majority of black judges that came before him while U.S. Senator or Missouri attorney-general.

In the situation of the Confederacy, ‘we certainly had bad facts in that case where we were defending state sovereignty by defending slavery. But we lost too much. We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the federal government gaining too much power over our lives.’ – Gale Norton, in a 1996 speech. This is the new smoking gun against a Bush appointee. Huh? She’s for federalism, states’ rights and a rollback of federal power. She explicitly distances herself from any idea that she supports or would have supported slavery. But she regrets in some part the federalization of the American polity that occurred after the Civil War. Does this make her the moral equivalent of David Duke? Apparently it does. ‘Her deeply divisive remarks suggest she lacks a vital instinct to protect what needs protecting, whether it’s wilderness or the rights of people of color,’ says Kenneth A. Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an activist environmental research organization. I don’t know where to begin in dissecting that statement. Any remark staking out a political position is inevitably divisive, since it splits listeners into supporters and opponents. And how on earth does a support for states’ rights in an environmental context mean either neglect of the environment or thinly veiled racism? The illogic is as remarkable as the moral posturing. At this rate, any candidate for office is going in future to have to be a tee-totaling, amnesiac virgin with the rhetorical flair of Jim Lehrer. I think I just became a fervent supporter of Gale Norton.

Breaking scandal in today’s Los Angeles Times about a bunch of marines earning extra money by appearing in porn videos and magazines, catering mainly to gay men. Posing naked is a criminal offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Top brass are hyper-ventilating. Not a huge scandal to my mind. Soldiers have always misbehaved. But what’s interesting to me is the light it sheds on the military’s alleged fear of homosexuals. These guys are happy to pose naked in front of cameras for anonymous gay guys’ pleasure but are freaked if someone openly gay is in the same unit. Can we say: cognitive dissonance? The truth is most servicemembers are not scared of other servicemembers’ sexual attraction, as long as it doesn’t get expressed on duty. These guys aren’t afraid of Saddam Hussein. You think they can’t function because a gay guy is in the bunk below? Not in a million years. The military gay ban, abandoned in every other NATO country bar Turkey without the slightest effect on morale or competence, is hanging by the thread of its own incoherence in the U.S. military. Pity it takes marines posing in gay porn to make this more than obvious.