'Scuze Me While I Disappear Saturday, July 31, 2004

To put all of the below another way: There are terrorists out there and they have committed acts of violence over the past two decades, with the exhaustively stated goals of instituting world-wide Muslim rule and wiping out the state of Israel. Our response to that is open to legitimate debate--but questioning the facts seems to me puerile and dangerous. On the extreme end you've got mainstream movies claiming the whole thing is the invention of a government contractor and public officials (the delightful Cynthia McKinney; the poet laureate of New Jersey) alleging it was all orchestrated from World Jewry's Secret Volcano Base.

That's just the outre stuff. On an everyday level, it has become a commonplace that Bush et al are "pumping up" the threat to "keep us scared." Looking at the other side's record of malefaction, as listed above, I think the Bushies if anything are downplaying the threat. But on this issue, they can't win: The same crowd that accuse them of sleeping through 9/11 now say they've overplaying the threat of future attacks. And the same crowd will be calling for the Bushies' blood if anything else happens on U.S. soil.

As for "keeping us scared": After 9/11, I had a performance review that turned into a moan about everything that had changed since the attacks (new offices fifty miles from home, etc.). My boss observed that what all of us wanted was the world returned to 9/10. I think that still holds. We want to forget about terror, we want another long, boring, prosperous decade (or, as that widely e-mailed poem put it, a "low, dishonest" one). In refusing to turn the terror fight over to the Proper Authorities (or the Usual Suspects), Bush seems to be prolonging the bad times, if not bringing worse ones on our heads.

Call me a chicken hawk, but I'd rather have war than Peace in Our Time. To wit, Evelyn Waugh, writing during World War II:

So to Virginia normality meant power and pleasure; pleasure chiefly, and not only her own. Her power of attraction, her power of pleasing was to her still part of the natural order which had been capriciously interrupted. War, the massing and moving of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners; all these were a malevolent suspension of "normality"; the condition in which Virginia's power of pleasing enabled her to cash cheques, wear new clothes, lave her face with its accustomed unguent, travel with speed and privacy and attention wherever she liked, and choose her man and enjoy him at leisure. The interruption had been prolonged beyond all reason.


I want peace like nobody's business; I want 9/10; dammit, I want my accustomed unguents. But peace, as it was on 9/10, isn't good enough anymore. Bush, for all his missteps, for all his chimpiness and smirking and gaffy tongue, is the only candidate to recognize that.

@ 8:12:00 AM, ,

I Wish I Had a Dolly Parton Tape

This is small, but it grates, and it signifies. Courtesy the irreplaceable Power Line blog:

The [Bloomington, Ill.] Pantagraph newspaper in central Illinois has sent a letter to[Michael] Moore and his production company, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., asking Moore to apologize for using what the newspaper says was a doctored front page in the film, the paper reported Friday. It also is seeking compensatory damages of $1.

A scene early in the movie that shows newspaper headlines related to the legally contested presidential election of 2000 included a shot of The Pantagraph's Dec. 19, 2001, front page, with the prominent headline: "Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election."

The paper says that headline never appeared on that day. It appeared in a Dec. 5, 2001, edition, but the headline was not used on the front page. Instead, it was found in much smaller type above a letter to the editor, which the paper says reflects "only the opinions of the letter writer."
I guess that's one of those tidbits that doesn't count as a factual finagle under the rules of "editorializing." Whatever. There are whole sites devoted to deconstructing the feints and half-truths in the movie; but the memes are out there, and no amount of bad press is going to kill them. Nor, indeed, will the 9/11 commission report, which spells out any number of facts damaging to Moore's case. (e.g., turns out that Afghanistan pipeline deal, which was supposedly Bush's causus belli, was hatched, and quickly nixed, during the Clinton administration. What else ya got, Mike?)

Whatever. Mark Steyn, whom all my friends have grown to love dearly over the past few months, came up with a great assessment of the situation a while ago, which I will quote at unconscionable length:

The other day I got a copy of the new book by British historian Andrew Roberts, Hitler And Churchill: Secrets Of Leadership, which sounds like some lame-o opportunist management techniques primer, but is, in fact, a very useful take on very familiar material. Most of us have read a gazillion books about the Second World War (when I say "most of us," I exclude the fellow in London's big demo last weekend holding a placard with the words "PEACE IN OUR TIME," and even then I kind of hope he was some waggish saboteur, since the notion that the peaceniks, though deluded, are that ignorant is a little mind-boggling). But, comparing Britain's and Germany's wartime leaders directly, you can't help feeling that victory and defeat were predetermined: As Philip Hensher neatly put it in his review of Roberts, "Churchill knew very well what Hitler was like, but Hitler had no idea what sort of man Churchill was."

Just so. When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood between him and world domination, they're just silly: Churchill was "that puppet of Jewry." OK, that's fine as a bit of red meat tossed to the crowd when you're foaming at Nuremberg, but as a serious evaluation of your opponent made in the quiet of your study it's simply . . . inadequate.

...

Hitler's problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He'd invented a universal theory--the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy--and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that theory's round hole. Thus, Churchill must be a "puppet of Jewry." As a general rule, when it's reality vs. delusion, bet on reality. That held true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like the playwright Harold Pinter insisted that America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But the traffic across the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards were not unduly overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The eastern bloc collapsed because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn't.

Well, the Soviet Union's gone now so Pinter no longer has to observe the pox-on-both-their-houses niceties. Addressing the demonstrators last weekend, he declared that the United States is "a country run by a bunch of criminals--with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug."

Got that? It's not Saddam who's the thug, it's Tony. It's not the Baathist killers from Tikrit who are the bunch of criminals, it's the Republican Party. It's not the million-man murderer of Baghdad who's the new Hitler, it's George W. Bush. It's not the Iraqi one-party state with its government-controlled media that "crushes dissent," it's the White House. It's not the Wahhabis who are the fundamentalists, it's Bush and Blair. It's not Osama bin Laden who's the terrorist, it's American foreign policy. Supporting the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is "pacifist," but it's "racist" for America to disagree with the UN, even though it's Colin Powell and Condi Rice doing the disagreeing and the fellows they're disagreeing with are a bunch of white guys from Europe.

The new Universal Theory, to which 99 percent of last weekend's speakers and placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame. In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a "puppet of Jewry," just like Churchill was--notwithstanding the fact that America's Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the first non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the world's woes, then logic is irrelevant. "America created Saddam"? No, not really, the French and Germans and Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn't destroyed it in the 1980s.

But, as even Colin Powell has learned by now, there's no real point doing the patient line-by-line rebuttal: Nobody's interested in French oil contracts or German arms sales or even Saddamite corpse tallies because it doesn't fit into the Universal Theory that insists that everything can be explained by the Evil of America.

How far are the "peace" crowd prepared to go? Well, they've stopped talking about their little pet cause of the 1990s, East Timor, ever since the guys who blew up that Bali nightclub and whoever's putting together those "Osama" audio tapes started listing support for East Timor's independence as one of the Islamist grievances against the West. But why be surprised? In fall 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn't stop the left defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed homosexuals. Yet these are the same fellows who insist that a secular regime like Iraq's would never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists, apparently requiring a higher degree of intellectual coherence from Saddam than from themselves.

You can believe all this if you want, just as Harold Pinter believed the Iron Curtain was only there to prevent fleeing Westerners from swamping Warsaw Pact social services. But it depends on keeping reality at arm's length or beyond: You're metaphorically driving around with the curtains drawn. Perhaps that's why so many of the "peace" crowd get ever so touchy if you question their slogans. If you ask a guy with an "It's All About Oil" sign what he thinks of the recent contracts signed between Iraq and France's Total Fina Elf, he looks blank for a moment and then accuses you of wanting to crush dissent. It's not fair, you're trying to pull back his curtain.

I bet on reality. If everybody thought like the marchers, it would be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality will be breaking in very soon. Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in San Francisco or Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's pathetic. ...


That's it in a nutshell: Bet on reality. (Phil, I think, said something similar: Reality is something that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.) People wrote me after my last posting a few weeks ago to tell me the terror threat was either exaggerated or cooked up entirely; that we went into Afghanistan and Iraq for bucks and barrels and all those other WASPy standbys.

Color me unconvinced, with three thousand dead in New York and Washington, and several hundred more in Madrid and Bali, to name just a few. Another fine blogger, James Lileks, put the question nicely: If Bush is exaggerating the terror threat, why all the security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs
up in Boston? Have Ben Stein and George Will formed a new Baader-Meinhoff gang?

I had more, but the roof is suddenly crashing in on me. Goodnight to all.

@ 12:14:00 AM, ,

Don't Call It a Comeback! Friday, July 30, 2004

Come on, what's three or four weeks between friends? Besides, I made them productive ones, as Connie Mack used to say on the old WSJ television show. The game, also known as Secret Thing #1, is done done done. It's actually just off to the editor, and I know a thing or two about counting chickens at this stage of the process ("I think it's great, but can you rewrite the whole thing?"), but everything after this point will, with any luck, amount to fiddling. Title and theme to follow, as soon as my fabulous publisher puts up a page, most likely in a few months.

Which will be around the time Baby WTJ arrives. His mother is in the zone, and looks lovelier than ever. His father looks and acts like the same old schlump, but he's quietly happier than he's been in many years. Even when watching the bracingly frank videos in birthing class. Hear me, America: There is no good answer to the question, "Do you want to touch the head?"

Apparently there's also some sort of electoral contest going on. I'm taking a pass on the conventions. The disingenuousness of the other side gets on my nerves, as does the flat-out dopiness and intellectual poltroonery of my own. I'm allowed; I'm not a goddamn pundit. And besides, there's music to listen to.

@ 10:17:00 AM, ,