Ned and John's London adventure

For years I've written nothing but political rants to friends. There's a reason for that. My own life was uneventful and depressing. I also found that I didn't want to phone friends because at some point the question would come, "So...um...how are you doing?"

Well, at last I've got something pretty super to relate: two weeks spent mainly in London, but with an overnight motor trip to Oxford, Blenheim, and the Cotswolds, the towns and villages of which I'd wanted to see for thirty years or more. The weather was lovely, not a day without sunshine---and during most days there was plenty of it--until the last two days, by which time I'd taken pictures of most of the places I'd gone to London to see.

None of this would have been possible without the aid and companionship provided by John Polhamus. He was superb. Having lived in London for ten years, he's a walking London A to Zed, and insisted on pushing me everywhere. After having had to push myself for twelve years, it was really cushy to be whisked from Trafalgar Square to Whitehall in a jiffy by a fellow who knew the shortest route and took it at good speed. One welcome fact: London, during the mayoralty of Ken Livingstone, has done a splendid job of providing curb-cuts at intersections and of re-grading cobblestones at alley entrances and such to accomodate wheelchairs. Even so, many occasions arose when John had to hoist me over curbs, and did so just like that. We also discovered that all city busses now have extendable wheelchair ramps amidships and space inside for wheelchair parking. Moreover, wheelchair passengers ride for free, as do their assistants. The tube is mainly off-limits, but the new Jubilee Line out to Sratford north of West Ham is wheelchair accessible, as is the Docklands Light Rail.

Me and London: When I was at Oxford in 1960-61 I think I got to London only twice, mainly because I simply couldn't afford to go there. I became acquainted with the city when I was teaching at East Anglia in 1968-69 and Beth and I would get down there once every month or so. It was the Scots architectural critic Ian Nairn who really introduced me to the city in his quirky, droll, and profound Nairn's London (Penguin, 1968), which I still have and took with me on this trip. I remember one lovely spring day in 1969 when Beth, my mom, and I took a Nairn-guided walking tour of the south embankment from the Royal Festival Hall all the way east to Bermondsey, with our destination being the Mayflower pub at the wharf from which the Pilgrims departed for America in 1620. Nairn said it had a fine porch from which to view the river, and so it had. In 1969 such a walk was for the determined architectural pilgrim, for as Nairn said of that whole sweep of the river, "apart from some half-finished and mediocre work, the area is in a chaotic muddle." Of the frontage between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, "Plenty of roads run down to the river, but a connected walk is impossible until Tower Bridge." And of the area farther on, he acknowledged the hazards but urged, "But try and follow the thread, however thin, because it is the city's real lifeline."

Now all is transformed. (Well, it was fourteen years ago when I took that same tour with my wife Mary, but now it's complete.) As London's Contemporary Architecture: A Visitor's Guide (purchased at the bookshop of the Tate Modern, and one of the few really first-rate things to be found in that monument to artistic bankruptrcy in the early twenty-first century) says, "The southern embankment of the Thames has become a promenade." What forty years ago was a tour only for the physically fit and the intrepid is now, but for sixty yards or so of the whole three miles, easily done in a wheelchair(and even that sixty yards John got me over lickety-split, up onto a narrow pavement, down onto cobbles over which shock-absorbers would have been handy, up on pavement again). London's back was turned to the Thames for centuries. Now the riverfront is a sort of urban riviera, what with the London Eye (the great ferris wheel) the new pedestrian bridges flanking the Hungerford railway bridge, the new Millenium pedestrian bridge connecting St. Paul's and the Tate Modern, and the continuous promenade from Vauxhall Bridge to Tower Bridge.

So, I wanted to take in all this stuff; I'd been dying to for fourteen years. In 1992 my life changed drastically and perpetually for the worse. London had been my oyster, mainly because John and Mary Whiting lived in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and I'd always had free lodgings there. When I was teaching at Frankfurt, 1978-1980, it was Christmas at the Whitings, dining on Mary's cookery, drinking John's wines, and sipping whisky from the Channel ferry duty-free. Jaunts to Bath and Bristol, football matches at West Ham, Chelsea, and Tottenham, museum going, pub crawling, the theater...

In 1987 my not-yet wife Mary and I spent two weeks with them. I treated to tea at the Palm Court of the Ritz! My Mary and I went to a matinee at the Haymarket of Simon Gray's made-for-Alan Bates play Melon (not up to his much earlier Butley), but it was Alan Bates, Mary's heartthrob, and she was thrilled. She and I came back for another two weeks in January 1991, taking advantage of low off-season airfares. I shot rolls of film of the new Docklands developments. She and I went to see a comedy by Corneille, forget the title, at the Old Vic directed by Jonathan Miller, quite enchanting. After that, Mary and I would joke about winning ten million from the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes and buying a condo at Butler's Wharf, just east of Tower Bridge, then being developed by Terence Conran. And we four would be friends forever.

That spring or fall I put on a slideshow of London architecture for the San Diego Friends of Architecture, an organization formed a few years earlier by the redoubtable Harriet Gill, an elderly woman I had met when we both had commentary slots at KPBS-FM, the San Diego NPR affiliate. One Saturday morning every month between September and May, a slideshow-talk by some prominent architect or town planner. I persuaded Harriet to give me one, and it went over very well and seemed in my mind to quite justify my going to London for two weeks in January.

Then disaster of course: my spinal cancer, Mary's breast cancers---different strains in each breast!--all confirmed in the same week, dual mastectomy for her, paralysis for me, unsupportable grief, estrangement, separation, divorce. Finis.

For years London seemed impossibly far away. No kipping at the Whitings' for one thing; lodgings a fortune. For another, no tube. No taking the bus to Golder's Green, hopping on the Northern Line train, getting off at Tottenham Court Road and taking the stairs three at a time up to Oxford Street and Charing Cross, and browsing bookshops. John visited San Diego for a few days in '95; we wrote, John phoned me every birthday, urged me to for God's sake to get on the internet.

This Spring I thought, "I'm going to be seventy in September. It's now or never." I had it in my bonnet that if Harriet Gill would give me a slot in the Friends of Architecture schedule for 2005-2006 then by God I'd find a way to get to London. I phoned her. She said, "Of course, you'll have a companion?" I said no, I'd be going by myself. She, sensible woman, rather doubted the feasibility of this project. I am not on the FOA calender for 2005-2006. Then my sister said, "Look, if you can get Bob Kiwala or John Polhamus to go with you, I'll pay his airfare." Kiwala couldn't go (as it developed, this was fortunate: it would have been Laurel and Hardy in London, us taking turns saying, "Well, what a fine mess you got us into this time!"). And it turned out that Polhamus could; no scheduling conflicts after July 8! Done.

Di cautioned me about planning thoroughly; type out an exhaustive list of everything to be packed, and tick them of as you pack. No repeat of my 1996 trip to St. Louis when I forgot my meds and she had to send my coumedin by express mail. Not to mention other misadventures. So I did that: everything going into a suitcase was included. What did not go into a suitcase, however, was my commode. It's lightweight, aluminum, but absolutely necessary. You see, not having legs, I have no way of lifting my butt to finger and stimulate the anus and then to wipe my ass. There has to be room between the seat and the top of the toilet for me to put my arm and hand underneath myself. In fact it was that commode that made a companion absolutely necessary, for how would I get it from the baggage carousel at the airport to the taxi stand without someone to carry it? We were on the airport shuttle when it dawned on me that the commode was still sitting in the bathroom. John said, "There's still time to go back for it," and there was, really, but I made the totally dumb decision to press on without it. When we finally got to the Premier Motor Inn in London it was instantly obvious that without a commode, I'd have to take a return flight pronto or go without a bowel movement for two weeks.

John was not discouraged. He spent about four hours racing around London and finally came back with a servicable commode that cost sixty quid. There remained the problem of bathing. In this "fully accessible" room there was a bathtub. No wheel-in shower stall, something unheard of, evidently, in England. So John had to hoist me from the wheelchair to the top of the bathtub and I'd lower myself into the tub. But how to wash my ass? This duty fell to my companion. I'd hoist myself by my elbows, and John would wash underneath. Through all of this he kept up a running commentary in the voice of a Pathe newsreel or BBC git (John is a wonderful mimic), jaunty and fatuous, who always at some point in the narration said, "Once again, Britain leads the way in" whatever it was. For this service, it was, "Regent's Ass Cleaners', keeping the British anus spotless for five genertations." I added, "By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II."

When we were driving through Oxfordshire, we came upon a direction sign, "Idbury-Foscot, 2 miles," and John had the perfect name for his announcer, Nigel Idbury-Foscot. Of the west Oxfordshire Idbury-Foscots. His other persona was my man Branston, after Crosse and Blackwell's Branston pickle, our favorite relish. An ordinary cheese and onion sandwich from Tesco's becomes a fine dinner with some Branston pickle on it, accompanied by a decent claret. Whenever he did something extraordinary for me, as he did all the time, I'd say, "I say, Branston, you're a man in a million," and he'd gravely reply, "Just doing my duty, sir."

My favorite Polhamus inspiration, though, came at Blenheim. Here we were in the forecourt, this stupifying elevation in front of us, flanked by wings with collonades, finials, towers, and I wanted to take a wide-angle lens shot of it. But there were three people in conversation in front of us. I waited for a while, they continued to converse, and I was almost at the point of asking if they'd mind steeping aside for a moment. Branston was inclined to be rather harsh with them. Branston would have said, "See here, you lot, the mahster is taking a picture of that building and you don't need me to tell you you're not in it! Now be off with you." Fortunately this was not said.

I might go on and on, regaling you with the splendid dinner we had with the Whitings at Rule's, London's oldest restaurant (same location in Maiden Lane since 1795) which was to be my treat until Mary Whiting grabbed the check. I'd been there once before, when a friend of Beth's took us in 1969; John Whiting hadn't been in fifty years, Mary Whiting never. John Polhamus had passed it many times but had never looked inside. It reminds me of Sir John Soane's Museum, all walls crammed with oils and prints (directly over our table a large oil of the Thames and the city near dusk, around 1870, in the manner of Turner, very fine). Sublime dinner. With dear friends I'd feared I'd never see again. All of this seemed to me something worth writing about.

On entering the blogosphere

The third editorial down in Friday's NY Times is headed "Measuring the Blogosphere." "Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 per cent of which remain active... The blogosphere..doubles in size every five and a half months. ...[A]t this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long."

Irate Codger, who so often feels a beleaguered minority of one, is pleased to learn that he's part of an irresistable, world-sweeping trend of frustrated, deluded egomaniacs, each determined to have his say, to contribute his own squeak, trill, or milisecond bass note to the ever-swelling cacaphonous din. There's another name for McLuhan's Global Village. Bedlam.

Further Rants by the Hermit of 4032

From the archives: May 31, 2005

So I pour a cup of coffee, put aside the front page and the Week in Review sections of the Sunday New York Times and turn to the Book Review. I'm confronted by a cover review (it goes on for five long paragraphs on the cover before being continued over to p. 11). I don't remember ever seeing such a thing before. The editors must have considered the book under review to be a matter of the highest import, and so the review of or sermon upon it is: no less than the Gospels as interpreted in the vivid style of Father Andrew Sullivan, the de-frocked priest.

"The Saint and the Satirist; A Monk Brought God's Love to Tony Hendra." This Hendra chap was the worst sort of reprobate imaginable. He was into "serial sex and drugs and rock and irony," sort of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Lite. But what we learn in reading Hendra's Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is that "these ideas of sin..are not really sin." Wait a minute, irony is sin? Perhaps it became sinful on 9/11/01; remember how the conventional wisdom instantly became that after such horrors, irony would forever be in poor taste?

"These ideas of sin that we have are not really sin," Sullivan writes. "Or rather: they are the symptoms of sin, not its essence. And its essence is our withdrawal---our willful withdrawal---from God's love." (italics added)

So that's why the world is in such an infernal mess! Reading this on the cover of the Book Review, a publication of the supposedly secular (or at least ecumenical) New York Times, was stunning, sort of like being bonked forcefully over the head by a bishop's crozier, and just two sips into your morning coffee at that.

Does this triumphalist Catholic screed---"oh ye sinners, come home to Jesus before it is too late!"--appearing on the cover of the Times Book Review mark one of those "watershed" events in the cultural history of this nation?

Yet more from the inimitable Friedman in this morning's paper. You remember the Golden Arches Doctrine of Conflict Resolution, and, of course, the Wal-Mart Corollary (wait, that was mine, wasn't it? I think I'll e-mail it to Tom, it's his, gratis, and the column will write itself.) Anyway, this morning he announces, "I have a 'Tilt Theory of History.'" Why the distancing quotation marks, Tom? Surely irony isn't intended? No, the quotation marks indicate only that the Theory hasn't been fully fleshed out as yet. The book will follow eventually; in the meantime, just off the top of Tom's head, it serves to make a point. The Tilt Theory "states" that countries don't change by sudden transformations. Instead, they undergo a process of gradual internal transformation, possibily lasting a generation (a quibble: why a generation? Why not five generations, or even ten? Oh never mind). The point is that the Wolfowitz timetable for Iraqi democratization may have been, as we see from the vantage point of hindsight, badly off. Revised timetable? We can "tilt in a better direction, so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want." Brace up, Americans; imperialism is no game for the faint of heart! Tom Friedman is in this for the long haul.

Did we all read Friedman's "Dancing Alone" column of Thur., May 13, in which he admitted that on some stuff concerning the invasion of Iraq, "I'll admit it, I'm a little slow," to which one disgusted letter-writer replied, "Tens of thousands of us were away ahead of you all the way, Mr. Friedman." What was spared scrutiny in the letters published was the manner of the confession. Where had Tom gone wrong? "My mistake was thinking that the Bush team," like Friedman himself, believed that it must rise above politics and do the right thing in Iraq "because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong." Further, "Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq..in a non-partisan fashion...I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong."

See, because Tom is a thoroughly decent guy, a gentleman, above politics, he assumed that Bush, Rummy, Karl Rove, et al. were equally high-minded and could be counted on to do the right thing, always. But he was wrong. Still, how can you fault a guy for simply thinking well of people?

Wait, the Irate Codger isn't quite finished. "When I hear the word 'culture,''' Hermann Goering famously said, "I reach for my gun." I confess to feeling the same vicious urge often when I spot the by-line of Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Last Saturday I had only to glimpse the title of the column, "Sticking Up For Rumsfeld," and my right hand was twitching to unholster my Luger--if only I'd had one. I should be more patient with Nick, I know. In many ways he's the anti-Friedman of the opinion page. Tom doesn't give a fig for the great unwashed. Nick lives among them, sharing their hardships, shouting their plight to an indifferent world. Tom lives the life befitting a gentleman journalist fortunate enough to possess the world's most generous expense account. Nick is likely to be found kneeling at the ancestral wok of his in-laws (his wife is Chinese) partaking of a humble meal no different from that of a billion other rural Chinese. Tom is a shit---he really is--and Nick is transparently decent. Albeit at times a little over the top in the Christian charity department. Remember his determination in Thailand to save two pubescent sex slaves from Bankok whorehouses, and hang the expence? I think in the end, he'd fairly rescued one while the other slipped back into her former life. As Katha Pollitt said, this did seem a little weird, considering the prostitute population of Bankok. I thought so to. It reminded me of William Gladstone, when prime minister, trolling among the harlots of Haymarket at night, cajoling a few into returning with him to his house for a good cup of hot soup from the missus, a sermon, and some elevating tracts. And, as Katha noted, Nick got four columns out of his noble rescue missions.

What gets me about Nick, however, are his scolding sermons to out-of-it liberals. In late April we were urged (column title) to "Hug an Evangelical." Let's do try to get over those easy liberal stereotypes--Tom DeLay and Jerry Fallwell are representative of evangelicals. Not so. Why,.did you know that there are plenty of evangelicals who aren't even fundamentalists? Well, no, I guess I didn't. On the other hand, did you know that while only 23% of Americans profess to "believe in" biological evolution, eighty per cent believe in the existence of angels? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? We must all endeavor to respect such convictions because they're the majority. So try to be more circumspect, less arrogant. What would a spirit of amity and concord require of us? Suggest that only the First Five Commandments be posted in American classrooms on a trial basis, to see if teen pregnancy rates and violent crime go down?

Stop talking down to people through your noses. Using fancy words. When Howard Dean observed that there'd been a contratemps over his rednecks with Reb flag decals remark, Nick wrote, "I very seriously doubt that anyone who uses the word 'contratemps' can ever be elected president of the United States." Then he advised Dean that he'd better learn to be "comfortable" talking about his "faith," advice Dean disastrously followed in confessing that he prayed every day and that his "favorite" book of the Old Testament was Revelation (which, as Mark Twain observed, was far the nuttiest thing in Scripture).

Nick then got on the environmentalists' case over snowmobiles in Yellowstone. Loosen up, he advised them: the new snowmobiles with four-cycle engines are ninety per cent less polluting than the old two-cycle engines, rapidly being phased out, and noise levels? The new ones purr like kittens. He ended with an account of how he recently took his two sons out on a nature trip on snowmobiles at Yellowstone, and how inspiring it all was for the three of them. Tender moment. Who would begrudge a father introducing his boys to the magic of the wild? Then I read an NRDC warning about these new snowmobiles: the "90 % reduction" figure comes from the Snowmobiles Manufacturing Association of America and is absolute bullshit; as for the noise levels, they're down, but not by much. Anyway, couldn't Nick and his boys walk?

But this last, rescuing Donald Rumsfeld from the liberal lynch mob, is the most Quixotic--to be kind--yet. "Frankly," Kristof writes, "I'm astonished to be speaking up for Mr. Rumsfeld." Well, I'm not astonished. It's entirely consistent. I can imagine Kristof agonizing over it: "Will no other liberal do the decent thing and cry for justice for Rumsfeld as Christ did for mercy even for the least among us?" No, none would. As so often in the past, it was up to Kristof to take the stand righteousness required. "Tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before," etc. Noble Nick. I say put a bullet through his brain and be done with it.

God and Man at the New York Times

From the archives: May 31, 2004

So I pour a cup of coffee, put aside the front page and the Week in Review sections of the Sunday New York Times and turn to the Book Review. I'm confronted by a cover review (it goes on for five long paragraphs on the cover before being continued over to p. 11). I don't remember ever seeing such a thing before. The editors must have considered the book under review to be a matter of the highest import, and so the review of or sermon upon it is: no less than the Gospels as interpreted in the vivid style of Father Andrew Sullivan, the de-frocked priest.

"The Saint and the Satirist; A Monk Brought God's Love to Tony Hendra." This Hendra chap was the worst sort of reprobate imaginable. He was into "serial sex and drugs and rock and irony," sort of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Lite. But what we learn in reading Hendra's Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is that "these ideas of sin..are not really sin." Wait a minute, irony is sin? Perhaps it became sinful on 9/11/01; remember how the conventional wisdom instantly became that after such horrors, irony would forever be in poor taste?

"These ideas of sin that we have are not really sin," Sullivan writes. "Or rather: they are the symptoms of sin, not its essence. And its essence is our withdrawal---our willful withdrawal---from God's love." (italics added)

So that's why the world is in such an infernal mess! Reading this on the cover of the Book Review, a publication of the supposedly secular (or at least ecumenical) New York Times, was stunning, sort of like being bonked forcefully over the head by a bishop's crozier, and just two sips into your morning coffee at that.

Does this triumphalist Catholic screed---"oh ye sinners, come home to Jesus before it is too late!"--appearing on the cover of the Times Book Review mark one of those "watershed" events in the cultural history of this nation?

Yet more from the inimitable Friedman in this morning's paper. You remember the Golden Arches Doctrine of Conflict Resolution, and, of course, the Wal-Mart Corollary (wait, that was mine, wasn't it? I think I'll e-mail it to Tom, it's his, gratis, and the column will write itself.) Anyway, this morning he announces, "I have a 'Tilt Theory of History.'" Why the distancing quotation marks, Tom? Surely irony isn't intended? No, the quotation marks indicate only that the Theory hasn't been fully fleshed out as yet. The book will follow eventually; in the meantime, just off the top of Tom's head, it serves to make a point. The Tilt Theory "states" that countries don't change by sudden transformations. Instead, they undergo a process of gradual internal transformation, possibily lasting a generation (a quibble: why a generation? Why not five generations, or even ten? Oh never mind). The point is that the Wolfowitz timetable for Iraqi democratization may have been, as we see from the vantage point of hindsight, badly off. Revised timetable? We can "tilt in a better direction, so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want." Brace up, Americans; imperialism is no game for the faint of heart! Tom Friedman is in this for the long haul.

Did we all read Friedman's "Dancing Alone" column of Thur., May 13, in which he admitted that on some stuff concerning the invasion of Iraq, "I'll admit it, I'm a little slow," to which one disgusted letter-writer replied, "Tens of thousands of us were away ahead of you all the way, Mr. Friedman." What was spared scrutiny in the letters published was the manner of the confession. Where had Tom gone wrong? "My mistake was thinking that the Bush team," like Friedman himself, believed that it must rise above politics and do the right thing in Iraq "because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong." Further, "Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq..in a non-partisan fashion...I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong."

See, because Tom is a thoroughly decent guy, a gentleman, above politics, he assumed that Bush, Rummy, Karl Rove, et al. were equally high-minded and could be counted on to do the right thing, always. But he was wrong. Still, how can you fault a guy for simply thinking well of people?

Wait, the Irate Codger isn't quite finished. "When I hear the word 'culture,''' Hermann Goering famously said, "I reach for my gun." I confess to feeling the same vicious urge often when I spot the by-line of Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Last Saturday I had only to glimpse the title of the column, "Sticking Up For Rumsfeld," and my right hand was twitching to unholster my Luger--if only I'd had one. I should be more patient with Nick, I know. In many ways he's the anti-Friedman of the opinion page. Tom doesn't give a fig for the great unwashed. Nick lives among them, sharing their hardships, shouting their plight to an indifferent world. Tom lives the life befitting a gentleman journalist fortunate enough to possess the world's most generous expense account. Nick is likely to be found kneeling at the ancestral wok of his in-laws (his wife is Chinese) partaking of a humble meal no different from that of a billion other rural Chinese. Tom is a shit---he really is--and Nick is transparently decent. Albeit at times a little over the top in the Christian charity department. Remember his determination in Thailand to save two pubescent sex slaves from Bankok whorehouses, and hang the expence? I think in the end, he'd fairly rescued one while the other slipped back into her former life. As Katha Pollitt said, this did seem a little weird, considering the prostitute population of Bankok. I thought so to. It reminded me of William Gladstone, when prime minister, trolling among the harlots of Haymarket at night, cajoling a few into returning with him to his house for a good cup of hot soup from the missus, a sermon, and some elevating tracts. And, as Katha noted, Nick got four columns out of his noble rescue missions.

What gets me about Nick, however, are his scolding sermons to out-of-it liberals. In late April we were urged (column title) to "Hug an Evangelical." Let's do try to get over those easy liberal stereotypes--Tom DeLay and Jerry Fallwell are representative of evangelicals. Not so. Why,.did you know that there are plenty of evangelicals who aren't even fundamentalists? Well, no, I guess I didn't. On the other hand, did you know that while only 23% of Americans profess to "believe in" biological evolution, eighty per cent believe in the existence of angels? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? We must all endeavor to respect such convictions because they're the majority. So try to be more circumspect, less arrogant. What would a spirit of amity and concord require of us? Suggest that only the First Five Commandments be posted in American classrooms on a trial basis, to see if teen pregnancy rates and violent crime go down?

Stop talking down to people through your noses. Using fancy words. When Howard Dean observed that there'd been a contratemps over his rednecks with Reb flag decals remark, Nick wrote, "I very seriously doubt that anyone who uses the word 'contratemps' can ever be elected president of the United States." Then he advised Dean that he'd better learn to be "comfortable" talking about his "faith," advice Dean disastrously followed in confessing that he prayed every day and that his "favorite" book of the Old Testament was Revelation (which, as Mark Twain observed, was far the nuttiest thing in Scripture).

Nick then got on the environmentalists' case over snowmobiles in Yellowstone. Loosen up, he advised them: the new snowmobiles with four-cycle engines are ninety per cent less polluting than the old two-cycle engines, rapidly being phased out, and noise levels? The new ones purr like kittens. He ended with an account of how he recently took his two sons out on a nature trip on snowmobiles at Yellowstone, and how inspiring it all was for the three of them. Tender moment. Who would begrudge a father introducing his boys to the magic of the wild? Then I read an NRDC warning about these new snowmobiles: the "90 % reduction" figure comes from the Snowmobiles Manufacturing Association of America and is absolute bullshit; as for the noise levels, they're down, but not by much. Anyway, couldn't Nick and his boys walk?

But this last, rescuing Donald Rumsfeld from the liberal lynch mob, is the most Quixotic--to be kind--yet. "Frankly," Kristof writes, "I'm astonished to be speaking up for Mr. Rumsfeld." Well, I'm not astonished. It's entirely consistent. I can imagine Kristof agonizing over it: "Will no other liberal do the decent thing and cry for justice for Rumsfeld as Christ did for mercy even for the least among us?" No, none would. As so often in the past, it was up to Kristof to take the stand righteousness required. "Tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before," etc. Noble Nick. I say put a bullet through his brain and be done with it.

Tom Friedman again

From the archives: September 5, 2004

It was vintage Friedman in Tom's column of May 6. Perhaps you will recall those times in the nineties when the robustly confident Friedman was forever imagining himself to be a confidential advisor to some world statesman or other, and would dash off "memos" to Yeltsin or the president of China. The champ of that genre came when Clinton, Netanyahu, and Arafat were huddled at the Wye River Plantation and Tom wrote a "Memo to Bill, Bibi, and Yassir."

The column of May 6 isn't formally titled a memo, but that's what it is, this one to George W. Bush. However, from the sharp tone taken with the president, it might better be called a "Marching Order." Bush must fire Rumsfeld "today, not tomorrow or next month, today." Next, he needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the Security Council (whether heads of government must show up, or foreign ministers would do is not specified), heads of both NATO and the UN, and Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Whew! One's mind goes back to 1979, when Jimmy Carter got Sadat and Begin to cabins in that leafy retreat and pushed through the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai (Sadat and Begin got Peace Prizes, and Carter the back of the Nobel Committee's hand).

But Tom's plan is much more ambitious. Imagine the logistics of it, the protocol problems! All there at Camp David at once: the president of China, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Lord Robertson, Kofi Annan, Mubarak of Egypt, Assad of Syria, Crown Prince whoever of Arabia, and King Abdullah of Jordan. Camp David's capacity stretched beyond any conceivable limit! It would be like the stateroom scene in "A Night at the Opera"! And what a security nightmare for the Secret Service ("Mr. President, I must warn you, sir, that one well-placed bomb...").

One oddity here: How come Ariel Sharon hasn't been invited? Is Tom hinting that Bush needs to go behind Sharon's back and make some sort of deal with the Arabs? Or is Tom implying that Israel has played no role in creating the current Middle East mess we find ourselves in? Or is it simply that Tom, writing at fever pitch, just forgot about Israel? Likely the last, scrupulous care in composition not being Friedman's strong point.

Now that he's gathered them all in one room, what must the president do? Simple. "He needs to eat crow, apologize for our mistakes..." What mistakes would those be, Tom? Friedman really doesn't specify (one suddenly recalls that he's been none too attentive to Iraq for months, instead positioning himself ahead of everyone else's curve by focusing in a dozen columns on what a bang-up job India is doing globalizationwise). But you may be sure those mistakes don't include invading Iraq in the first place. Above all, whatever rough patches we encounter in the next few weeks, Bush must keep uppermost in mind that "America's aspirations for Iraq and those of the Iraqi silent majority..are still aligned." So there.

But what would be the reaction to such good news of all those summoned to Camp David? I very much fear it would be, "That's what you called us here to say, you silly fuck-head?"

Another Friedman column that might better have gone in the waste basket. There have been so many.

The Wrongdoers of Abu Ghraib

From the archives: August 5, 2004

How appalling, how tragic, how deeply infuriating to all Americans of conscience and fair-minded, freedom-loving persons everywhere it must seem that a perverted few in an MP company at Abu Ghraib prison should have brought disgrace upon America's noble mission in Iraq! Oh, how we seethe when we look upon the despicable images of degradation staged by these ghouls for their own amusement, presumably as "snaps" to be taken home as souvenirs! The president rightly denounced them as "wrongdoers" (an epithet only slightly less powerful than "evildoers," which, of course, the president reserves for foreigners, especially the hordes of invisible Arabs it is our bounden duty mercilessly to crush). And Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke for us all this morning when he concluded his denunciation by calling down the worst curse on their heads our vocabulary provides us. What they did was "un-American."

No one has more eloquently expressed the disgust we all must feel than Christopher Hitchens. (Slate, May 4) Look, he writes, at what "this bunch of giggling sadists has done." They "defiled one of the memorials of regime change," Saddam's chamber of horrors, Abu Ghraib prison. They have "profaned the idea of women in the military." Worst of all, what they did was "like a shot in the back to the many soldiers..who fought selectively and carefully," always seeking to spare the innocent while stamping out terrorism in the streets of Iraq.

What, then, should be done with these goons? Perhaps, Hitchens writes, they were "acting on someone's authority." But if they were acting on their own, "they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot."

To which one can only respond with a soft but heartfelt "hear, hear."

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole dreadful business is the fact that the central figure (at least in the pictures) should be a fiend in petite female form, the infamous piece of trailer-park trash, Pfc. Lynndie R. England, a five-foot mighty-mite of evil, an instant symbol of wickedness as surely as Pvt. Jessica Lynch is of heroism. Taken out and shot? That would almost be too kind. Let this pregnant little whore and her paramour Gaynor be stoned to death by an Iraqi mob!

Would not such a salutary spectacle establish in the minds of the most hardened of Iraqi skeptics the truth of the president's words, "They didn't act for America"?

It would also do much to remove the moral stain of Abu Ghaib from the tens of thousands of soldiers and marines in Iraq who have lived up to America's highest standards of humanity and heroism. The men of the First Marine Division, for example, who went into Fallujah to avenge the murder of four innocent mercenaries and in doing so killed as many as seven hundred thugs and assassins. The brave Air Force pilots of F-16 fighters and F-14 and F-18 fighter-bombers who flew over Fallujah raining down on the city three dozen laser-guided 500-pound bombs in 48 hours. The courageous crews of the huge, slow-moving AC-130 gunships (fat targets for shoulder-launched missiles fired from holes by rat-like killers) avenging America's dead with the overwhelming firepower of their howitzers, turning cars and trucks into so many crushed beer cans with--it is to be hoped--burned corpses in them. And finally, the nerveless, steely-eyed pilots and gunners of Army Super Cobra helicopters blasting apartment blocks into bricks and dust with Hellfire missiles.

Yes, it is brave men and women like these whose honor would be restored by the sacrifice of the wicked few in their midst. Kill the Abu Ghraib wrongdoers!

John Hess and James Reston

From the archives: February 2, 2004

Reading John L. Hess's My Times: A Memoir of Dissent is abundantly gratifying. Nothing more gratifying, because bias-affirming, than his memories of James Reston (I can't call him "Scotty," for I didn't know him). Reston, the ultimate insider and toady, LBJ's useful Polonius ("LBJ occasionally consulted Reston on how his Vietnam policy would play and found him 'quietly approving' ((see Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant))," Reston, who was unfailingly able to deceive himself that he'd always opposed American policy in Vietnam, right from the very start.

"I do not question Scotty's sincerity," Hess writes, "That is how Scotty remembered it now." Then, "Scotty's writings contradict his recollection."

How was Reston able to do this, to write one thing, and to believe he was writing another? That's a question I was asking forty years ago. I wrote the following satire in the Spring of 1965. It was after reading yet another of Reston's "the mood in Washington" pieces:

From the Berliner Zeitung

April 14, 1942

"The Mood in Berlin"

by Reinhold Restonschmidt

There is a strange mood in Berlin these bright Spring days. Although the skies are blue, and the trees and flowerbanks along the Kurfurstendam are blossoming, the beer gardens are all but deserted, and strollers talk in hushed undertones. Indeed, there is an unseasonal bleakness in the air, and one hears phrases like "the winter of our discontent." Nor is it just the appearance of RAF bombers in our skies---in itself an ill omen. It goes much deeper than that, and is difficult to express, this new mood of the capital. It was put in a phrase, superficial but succinct, by a Hamburg reporter a few days ago. "People here have lost their old confidence," he said. The bright promises and the astonishing victories of three years ago are things of the past. Moscow, which only a year ago seemed within our grasp, is more distant than ever. And the recent entry of the Americans into the war, degenerate though they undoubtedly are, must give the seasoned observer pause. This chastened mood pervades the Reichschancellory itself, and is shared even by the Fuhrer. His old ready optimism is gone.

The average German citizen, spared the agonies of decision-making, cannot really begin to imagine the pressures that have been placed on the Fuhrer by events both at home and abroad in the past few weeks. Whether Adolf Hitler spends his days in the bustling offices of the Reichschancellory, or tries to find a few hours of peace and quiet in the mountain fastness of his beloved Bavaria, decisions must be made, new problems confronted daily, opposing counsels listened to. And finally, in the quiet of his nights, the bitter truth must be faced: he, Adolf Hitler, and he alone, must decide. No wonder then that the Fuhrer has been irritable and somewhat short of temper with the Berlin press corps.

Among the many problems confronting him is the pace of the Final Solution. Some advisers, particularly those in the S.S. under the determined Heinrich Himmler, have been openly critical of what they regard as the slow pace of F.S. They have charged that Zyklon B gas is simply not being produced in suffricient quantities to be effective. Some officers charge openly that they are being hamstrung, and these complaints are being echoed in the Reichstag. Not content with the liquidation of Jews, Gypsies, and elements hostile to the Reich, they are now demanding in increasingly strident tones that the Solution be extended to the degenerate Slav race as a whole. The eastern front, they assert, will not be safe until all traces of this blot have been eliminated.

On the other hand, the Fuhrer is assaulted by pleas that liquidation be sharply curtailed. Some high officials, particularly those in the Ministry for War Production and Forced Labor, charge that the Final Solution, while perhaps noble in conception and lofty in aim, is proving counter-productive. They cite statistics, some of them very persuasive, showing that labor battalion quotas simply cannot be fulfilled unless the Final Solution is slowed down. One harassed labor official expressed his exasperation to me recently. It was all very well, he said, for S.S. General Kurt von May to speak of "gassing the Slavs into eternity," but the general was not responsible for wartime production. Moreover, many officers on the Eastern Front privately express their disgruntlement with the zeal of S.S. Kommandanten in their areas. How are peasants th to be won over to a new life, a new loyalty, they ask, when great numbers of them are being shot, hanged, or gassed in the name of Race Purity?

Thus the Fuhrer is being assaulted by sharply conflicting advice, and with every day that passes, the lines of care seem to be etched ever more deeply in his face. He betrayed his apprehension last week in a meeting of the Weestphalia mayors' conference when he lashed out against "defeatists" and "those who would doubt the Reich." "We have no use," he said, with obvious anger, "for the man who panics at the sight of the first bomber in the sky."

But there is no doubt that a decision must be made, and made soon, regarding the Final Solution, and no one understands that fact better than the Fuhrer himself. Few quarrel with the ultimate objectives of F.S. But an increasing number wonder openly if it is not being pushed too quickly and if the Fuhrer, with his well-known impetuosity, is not the victim of his own high intentions. Thus Berlin waits in suspense. Only when he decides one way or the other will the old confidence return.

What liberal media?

From the archives: January 19, 2004
Last night I finished Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?, an indispensable book, brilliantly and--given the provocations--temperately argued, exhaustively researched and scrupulously documented. I'm sure Al Franken's Lying Liars is a lot more fun, but this is the one "every well-informed person," that mythical being, should read.

So I open this morning's Times, and how does America's newspaper of record choose to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday? Why, by honoring Ronald Reagan.
The essay, by one Kiron Skinnner, an assistant professor of political science at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, co-editor of "Reagan: A Life in Letters," and, oddly, "member of the Defense Policy Board" (hhmmm, how was it, I wonder, that an assistant professor of political science attracted the eyes of Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz to share space around that august table with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle? Interesting, but no matter...) is titled "The Odd Couple." Odd, indeed. Skinner's essay is about how it was that Reagan signed the bill making King's birthday a national holidy. Was it just politics? No, "something else was at work." Skinner, who has gone through all of Reagan's "writings" (God, what a task to undertake! All those speeches for General Electric, written in his own hand), now has read King as well, and endorses the finding of a Reagan speechwriter that "I kept finding passage after passage in King's work that Reagan might almost have written himself."

"Indeed," writes Skinner, "when one looks closely at each man's writings, it's clear that they shared an unswerving commitment to democracy, liberty and equality."

Totally in sync. Amazing, isn't it? Of course, what Skinner cannot acknowledge, what anyone then alive immediately remembers, is that four years before signing that bill into law, Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign for the presidency at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, infamous as the place where sheriff Lawrence Rainey, deputy sheriff Cecil Price, and four or five other Klu Kluxers murdered Mickey Schwerner, James Cheney and Andrew Goodman just sixteen years before Reagan spoke there and uttered the words "I believe in states' rights." I remember Schwerner's widow and Andy Goodman's mother speaking of their horror at what Reagan had done.

So now the Times gives this sedulous Reagan legend-builder editorial space on King's birthday just to show how impartial it is--no liberal bias here, by God!

Then in the same edition I find a full-page color ad for MSNBC, "Battle for the White House," full coverage of the Iowa Caucuses by "the team of pros who know politics from the inside out." MSNBC, "the network of record' (cheeky theft that, isn't it?), and the "pros" are Norah O'Donnell (never heard of her), Pat Buchanan, Keith Olberman (last I knew, a sports journalist at Sports Illustrated and ESPN), Chris Matthews ($2 million a year rightwing hatchet man and Hillary hater), Joe Scarborough (former Republican congressman from Arkansas, now talk-show ranter), Peggy Noonan (former Reagan and Bush speechwriter, coiner of "thousand points of light" and "the lift of a driving dream" ((which sounds like a luxury car commercial)), Wall Street Journal attack blonde--her latest, "Howard's End," on how the Democratic pros must stop Dean in Iowa, and author, most recently, of A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag: America Today (2003), and, oh yeah, one real journalist, Howard Fineman of Newsweek (who, come to think of it, nailed an exclusive interview with George W. and Laura on how they stood up to the crushing pressures after 9/11 and the way their Faith got them through it all, three pages in Newsweek).

Think of it, the "network of record," a line-up that might have been chosen by Roger Ailes or--what the hell--Karl Rove himself! Four rightwing hatchet swingers and three eunuchs. Well, at least they don"t say "fair and balanced."

The Imitable David Brooks

From the archives: January 21, 2004

A friend forwarded this to Alexander Cockburn for possible inclusion in Counterpunch. This was his reply: "Astonishing crap. Brooks is a total asshole. I'm shocked that you liked this." He didn't know it was a satire!

Conservative Columnist Brooks Takes Dead Aim at Neocon Conspiracy Myth

It seems the disarmingly impish, droll, often self-deprecating but always razor-sharp conservative columnist David Brooks is to be found everywhere in the media these days. More often than not the irrepressible Brooks will pop up in some liberal bastion, always looking cheerfully at home. Brooks' engaging columns appear twice a week in the op-ed pages of the leftist New York Times; he's seen every Friday night on PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," genially goading the grimly dogged Mark Shields; and he's heard every Thursday afternoon on NPR's "All Things Considered," merrily slicing through the liberal banalities of the oh-so-serious E. J. Dionne.

Last week, in a Times column aptly titled "The Era of Distortion," Brooks wittily skewered what is perhaps the biggest peacenik-left shibboleth of our era, the notion that somehow a conspiratorial league of neoconservatives has hi-jacked American foreign policy by taking us into an unnecessary war with Iraq, partly, it is darkly hinted, to serve the interests of the expansionist Israeli government of Ariel Sharon.

"Do you ever get the feeling that the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality?" the bemused Brooks began the column. "I started feeling that way awhile ago, when..all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith..and a bunch of 'neoconservatives'..had taken over U.S. foreign policy." Every day, it seemed, "Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an expose on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators." The usually good-natured but now more than a little ticked columnist had never heard of anything so wacky.

Brooks, speaking as a former staffer at William Kristol's Weekly Standard, where this conspiracy was allegedly nurtured with the formation of the Project for the New American Century in 1997, candidly tells us that "we'd sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept spouting" about the PNAC's sinister influence.

Take, for example, the one about arch neocon Richard Perle's insidious power over Bush administration policy towards Iraq and Israel. Brooks---surely aware that this will give the knee-jerk "hate Bush" crowd apoplexy---boldly denies that Perle has any influence at all!

This may give us pause. It does seem a bit, well, counter-intuitive. Richard Perle not influential?

Wasn't he, as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan twenty years ago, called the "Prince of Darkness" for his unyielding hostility to any treaties with the Soviets and his tireless advocacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative, now morphed under Bush II into the National Missile Defense system? Didn't Perle create the nexus between the American Enterprise Institute and the Department of Defense which led to the vacuuming up of a dozen or more AEI hawks to key positions in today's DOD? Didn't Perle's aide in the Reagan years, Douglas Feith, once he was appointed Undersecretary of Defense for Policy by Bush, turn around and appoint Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board, over, among others, Newt Gingrich and former CIA Director James Woolsey? Wasn't Perle's protege at the Pentagon in the 80s, Abram Shulsky, moved into the Paul Wolfowitz's super-secret Office of Special Plans to generate "intelligence data" supporting a war with Iraq, data the hapless CIA wasn't able to provide? Didn't Perle handpick Natan Sharansky, Israeli cabinet minister and settler advocate, to give the keynote address to the AEI 2002 annual conference, an address in which Sharansky laid down the "Arafat Must Go" line which Bush then obligingly made Stop One on the Road Map to Peace? Wasn't it Perle who pushed his old pal Ahmad Chalabi forward as the guy to head up the DOD-financed Iraqi National Congress, Wolfowitz's Iraqi government-in-waiting? And hasn't Perle been conspicuous for two years as Don Rumsfeld's point man roundly and very publicly dissing such DOD enemies as the CIA, the State Department, Schroder of Germany, Chirac of France, and Kofi Annan?

Perhaps. But now Brooks drops this bombshell: "I've been told by senior administration officials that Perle has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office." Period. End of story. With that astonishing revelation and a flick of his finger, Brooks collapses Perle the Menace like the liberal house of cards it always was.

Having disposed of that bogey, Brooks goes on to assert that while "the people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to world peace...they disagree vitpuratively on just about everything else. (If you ever read a story that starts with 'Neocons believe,' there is a 99.44 percent chance that everything else in that story will be false.)"

At first blush this would seem almost stunningly dubious. Skeptics must be forgiven for muttering "Well, you gotta give it to the guy for chutzpah."

But it is a testable assertion. Is Brooks simply "blowing smoke"? After an exhaustive Lexis and Google search through the usual neoconservative venues over the last several years--occasional publications from the AEI, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, articles in Commentary, the National Review, the New Republic, and the Weekly Standard, op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, etc., and the listed publications over the same years of the fifty or so leading neocons, ranging from prominent government officials to academics, columnists, and institute fellows, a tentative conclusion suggests itself, and, as they say in those teasers before commercial breaks on local TV news shows, the results may surprise you.

Here is a review of our examination of neocon views regarding major foreign policy issues which Brooks would surely include in that category "just about everything else."

Israel and the Palestinians. Here is the issue about which Brooks is most sensitive, and naturally so (anticipating the usual charges, he jokes that "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'"). Commentary and The New Republic, both under Jewish editorship, have for decades been staunch defenders not only of Israel's "right to exist," but of Israel's right to hold onto and to expand settlements in what they call "the disputed territories." Then too, Richard Perle (him again) is only one of several neocons who have served as advisers to the Likud party. Douglas Feith is not only Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, but also a fierce Zionist and sworn enemy of the Oslo Accords. And so forth.

But if you examine the record more closely, you will find that, just as Brooks says, far from being an ideological Flying V Wedge on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians, neocons are all over the lot, some thorough Israeli hawks, some considerably more dovish, and many openly sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. William Safire, for example, long typecast as a savage Likudnik, has written some impassioned columns over the years championing the right of Palestinian farmers to their ground water, and sternly indicting successive Israeli governments for slanting wells into aquifers under Palestinian land. Charles Krauthammer, although perceived as an unyielding Israeli hawk, fully ten years ago called for the recognition of an independent Palestinian state and has never retreated from that early---and at the time deeply unpopular---stand. Book editor Adam Bellow, son of the novelist Saul, recently joined the board of Americans for Peace Now. The list of neocon "renegades" from the pro-Israel camp is in fact a rather lengthy one.

American Unilateralism and the United Nations It is said that if anything unites neocons, it's their contempt for the United Nations and all its works, and their anger, particularly, with the Security Council and the member states within it that blocked the war resolution in 2002, France and Germany. It was during the fateful autumn of that year that neocon columnists--Thomas J. Friedman, Jim Hoagland, William Safire, on and on--fired broadside after broadside at those craven, pampered idiots in New York. Richard Perle, in a notorious column in the London Guardian, of all places, gleefully anticipated the imminent collapse of the entire damnable institution.

Yet, again, a closer look reveals a rather different picture. While it is true that some neocons openly call for the destruction of the U.N., others just as passionately insist that the U.N. is merely irrelevant and should simply be by-passed.

The Abrogation of the ABM Treaty and the Building of NMD It has been said since the days of Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson and the Committee for the Present Danger thirty years ago that if anything characterizes the true neocon, it is his hatred for the late ABM Treaty and his fanatical determination to prevent that "space Pearl Harbor" so feared by Donald Rumsfeld. On the necessity of getting a Star Wars capability up there, we know, all neocons are as one. Well, it's simply not true. The guys at the Weekly Standard may all join in the guffaws at conspiracy theories, but they are bitterly, yes vituperatively, divided into warring camps over this issue, and have been for years.

One might go on to consider other foreign policy matters, the unratified Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, for example, over which some neocons are not on speaking terms with one another, but the point has been made: just as David Brooks insists, there is a plurality of opinions on all important issues within the neocon community---if, in view of these deep divisions, it can be called a "community" at all.

If we look to domestic issues, the same "let it all hang out" debates over fundamentals are to be found, in no small measure because the American Enterprise Institute has always pursued a "big tent" philosophy of inclusiveness, welcoming the contributions of free marketers and Keynesians alike. Arguments over the wisdom of President Bush's 2.5 trillion dollar tax cuts within the AEI have been known to descend into raw shouting matches. And who would guess that the Weekly Standard staff, bankrolled though the journal may be by far-right mogul Rupert Murdoch, is deeply divided over this crucial issue too?

`Finally, if there were any danger of the neocons forming a "cabal," it would be obviated by the fact that they are, truth to tell, simply not very good at networking. As David Brooks says, they "travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another." It will probably amaze conspiracy theorists to learn, for example, that Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the two ur-matriarchs of neoconservatism, have in fact never laid eyes on one another. Elliott Abrams probably wouldn't know William Kristol if he walked into him.

As the amazed Brooks asked, "Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality?" I hear you, buddy. Tell me about it. I know where you're coming from.

Addendum

Irate Codger here again with some after-thoughts. The lead editorial in the NY Times this morning is "Constitutional Countdown in Iraq." I'll say. The first thing they can't agree on is what to call the country. I read in the Independent last week that the religious party of which the present prime minister is a member favors the Islamic Republic of Iraq, much to the exasperation of Donald Rumsfeld. Leading Sunni politicians like the sound of the Arab Republic of Iraq. For some reason the Kurds are holding out for the Federal Republic of Iraq.

One thing that seems almost certain if Tom Friedman's candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize has his way is that for half the population in the non-Kurdish areas of the country it's back to purdah. In the latest, amended, version of the constitution, according to the Times, "family law would still be subjected to clerical authority, with each family permitted to choose which religious sect's teachings governed their female members' lives." "The right solution," the Times sternly admonishes, "is to maintain all women's access to the civil law in these matters, as has been the practice in Iraq since 1959."

Since 1959. That is, ahem, since the Ba'athists seized power. Did you know that under the evil Saddam Hussein there was actually a thriving state-funded program of women's athletics? In the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was an Iraqi entrant in the women's 110 m. high hurdles. No such flagrant immodesty under the Ayatollah al-Sistani, you may be sure. You can't run the high hurdles in a chador!

Bad News and Worse News

The Irate Codger has not been in voice for many months, but a couple of pieces scanned today really got to him. The first is Judge Richard Posner's survey of the right-left media wars featured on the cover of the NYT Book Review, "Bad News." First, the introduction by "the editors," under the title "Up Front": "How does Richard A. Posner do it?" He's "inhumanly prolific, but he is neither formulaic nor superficial." In this review, he "weaves his way through the arguments of left and right with his predictable unpredictability, providing a surprisingly nonpolitical perspective on a very political subject."

Yeah, sure. You'd never guess that this Republican judge would have written a book finding that Bill Clinton was deservedly impeached and another making the case that the five members of the Supreme Court who made George W. Bush president in 2000 actually made the right decision, would you? Insofar as Posner bothers to notice the "Books Discussed in This Essay," here's what he has to say about them.

"It is hyperbole for Eric Alterman to claim in 'What Liberal Media?' that "liberals are fighting a nearly hopeless battle in which they are enormously outmatched by most measures' by the conservative media, or for Bill Moyers to say that 'the market place of political ideas'" is dominated by media ideologically linked to "an authoritarian administration.'"

On the other hand, "The bias in some of the reporting in the liberal media [NYT, Washington Post, CBS], acknowledged by [Daniel] Okrent, is well documented by William McGowan, as well as by Bernard Goldberg in 'Bias,' and L. Brent Bozell III in "Weapons of Mass Distortion.'"

Well documented by Bernard Goldberg. He's best known for his shrill accusation that the media almost always label conservative political figures as "conservative" while rarely describing well-known liberals as "liberal." Separate Lexis word-searches by the Daily Howler blog and Geoffrey Nunberg of Stanford revealed that Goldberg had it exactly wrong. Ted Kennedy was almost always described as "liberal," while Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond, and Phil Gramm got passes. I saw an ad for Goldberg's new book, titled something like "The 100 Worst Americans," which says on the cover, "Hint: Al Franken is Number 67."

The "liberal" NY Times has a set policy in its Book Review. A book on global warming by Jared Diamond is reviewed by...that good-news global warming skeptic and hack, Gregg Easterbrook. A puff biography of George W. by David Shrum is reviewed by David Brooks. And so it goes.

The other piece that got my goat was in the Nation. David Rieff of the New York Times magazine reviews Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq by Larry Diamond (published, I notice, by Times Books). Right off, I'm suspicious. Those liberal hawks at the Times magazine who were for the war in the first place--Rieff, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer--have no credibility with me. I heard Larry Diamond last year on TOTN interviewed by that lickspittle Neal Conan. Diamond, who had been a consultant/advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, was then earnestly hopeful that the occupation might still be pulled off if some tactical errors were rectified. He was identified by Conan as a professor of political science at Stanford. Dubious, I Googled him and found that he was a "Senior Research Fellow" or somesuch at the Hoover Institution. While the Institution is wholly independent of the University, its "fellows" are "by courtesy" listed as Stanford professors, much to the displeasure of Stanford faculty. Rieff describes Diamond as "a professor of political scence and sociology at Stanford and a leading figure in the academic subdiscipline of 'democracy building'..." Nuff said.

So how are things going in Iraq? Well, Rieff tells us, some on the right---Dick Cheney, Max Boot of the LA Times and Weekly Standard--have been wildly overconfident, while much of the "hard left, or what passes for it in the United States and Britain, has not been much better." For example, a woman writing in the New Left Review called Baghdad "Vichy on the Tigris." Hey, out of bounds! Despite the predictions of left-wing doomsayers, Rieff observes, there has as yet been no civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, "in no small measure thanks to the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani." (Rieff here seems to be in synch with Tom Friedman, who in April suggested the Ayatollah as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. "I'm serious," Tom said. Right. "Cover thyself, sister, and get thee home to thy husband, thou whore!")

So, how are things really going in Iraq? "The fact is, no one really knows how things are going to turn out in Iraq," Rieff says. I do. It's going to be the biggest debacle of American foreing policy ever, not excluding Vietnam. There, after killing three million Vietnamese in fifteen years, we at least got out, and now, thirty years later, relations between the two states are eerily amicable. The entire Islamic world is now arrayed against us, and will be for decades as a result of this. In the end, Rieff is disquieted that although Diamond "clearly has a fine mind and has written a serious and valuable book," he seems to have overlooked "the problem of empire." Oh. Rieff nowhere addresses the central problem--well, perhaps he alludes to it in speaking of Diamond's "kind of senior common room utopianism"---which is that the premise of the book, that there was a victory in Iraq to be squandered, is rubbish. I think Katrina vanden Heuvel is going to be hearing from more than a few readers about this one.