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many people know — and tease me about — Condoleezza Rice
is one of my favorite people in public life. I think that not only
Bush but the country and world are lucky that she’s the national-security
adviser. (How’s that for a worshipful statement?) But I am
not sure that what she did the other day was wise. She was the recipient
of an NAACP Image Award — and she happily accepted, making
a nice speech.
This is the
sort of thing, I’m afraid, that keeps the NAACP “respectable,”
when it is not, sadly, respectable. The descent of the NAACP mirrors
the descent of the civil-rights leadership in our time. The organization
in its modern guise could be seen in the 2000 election, when it
ran ads across the country virtually accusing George W. Bush of
being responsible for the lynching of a black man in Texas. It was
one of the most despicable things ever done in an election —
including LBJ’s “daisy” commercial.
The last thing
the U.S. needs is the exacerbation of racial tensions, and lies
about racism. And these are two of the things in which the NAACP
now specializes.
It may be that
the NAACP is like the Communist Chinese state: There is no getting
around dealing with it. Yet I know for certain that the NAACP doesn’t
represent all black Americans, and I’m not even sure it represents
most, which is why the administration, and Republican politicians
in general, should work hard at addressing black Americans without
bowing to the NAACP. To cling to the NAACP as a kind of official
black government is to slight the diversity of opinion among black
citizens — a diversity, it is true, that goes unreflected in
voting statistics.
Every time
we make nice to the NAACP — appear before it, nod to it —
we pretend that it hasn’t, in the last several years (and this
isn’t even to mention its bureaucratic and financial corruption),
placed itself outside civilized bounds. And it has.
 The
Salt Lake Olympics provided much to enjoy, and about the most enjoyable
thing it provided was Sarah Hughes: all poise, confidence, elegance,
exuberance, and precision. Everyone kept saying, “And she’s
only 16!” I kept saying, “No, silly: It’s because
she’s 16!” She doesn’t carry the baggage of failure,
anxiety, the sense of limitation, the sense of “This is difficult,”
the sense of “Time is running out.”
I remember
hearing about Isaac Stern, listening to a pre-teen violinist romp
through a ferociously difficult piece. “If she knew how difficult
that was, she couldn’t do it.”
At the post-competition
exhibition, Hughes — I should really call her “Sarah”
— came out and did a routine of Bob Fosse favorites, which
was a delight. But then she got set to pay tribute to “the
victims of 9/11.” I thought Uh-oh: Here goes. Something
treacly and awful. I’m gonna retch.
Sarah laid
down a bouquet of flowers on the ice. Then she started skating to
a recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” (Remember
when sophisticates laughed at Bob Dole for declaring that this was
his favorite song?) Everything was perfectly positioned to be gross.
And you know?
It wasn’t. Not at all. It was actual tasteful and moving. It
was just right. I couldn’t have been more surprised.
And I couldn’t
be more pleased about the emergence of Sarah Hughes, now in her
prime.
Before
leaving the Olympics, a couple of notes: A reader wrote to explain
the hilarious predicament in which NBC’s announcers found themselves.
It seems that an American woman won the gold medal in bobsled. She
was black, and this made her the first black woman ever to win a
gold medal in the Winter Olympics. But network announcers and other
elites — bound by the latest in P.C. — can’t say
“black”; they have to say “African American”
(which is separatist, absurd, and insulting, but that’s another
topic). So they had no way of communicating the truth: They couldn’t
say that the athlete had become the first black woman ever to win
a gold medal. They simply didn’t have the words. A few were
reduced to saying, “She’s the first African-American woman
from any country to win a gold medal”!
Couldn’t
have happened to nicer people. Oh, for the days of “Black is
beautiful” (“African American is affirming”?) and
“I’m black and I’m proud”!
My second and
final note is this: I was startled, seeing Prince Albert of Monaco,
because he now looks exactly like an Irishman from Philadelphia.
I had never seen it so clearly. Put him in a police uniform, and
he’d look perfectly natural. The Kelly has won out, big time.
The
Italian police foiled a plot to harm — to blow up or bomb —
the American embassy in Rome. I have been in that embassy; that
somehow — this is illogical — makes it all the more real
and sobering to me. All praise is due the police in Rome, as praise
was due to the police in Singapore several months ago: They foiled
a similar plot.
But the anxious-making
thing is that we have to rely on that crack, and perhaps lucky,
police work all the time. The terrorists have to get lucky only
once. This, of course, sounds like a line from a TV movie, but it’s
true.
And the point
applies in a larger way to the State of Israel. Not long ago, an
Iranian official remarked that a single nuclear blow could take
out tiny Israel, whereas an Israeli response would only nick a fraction
of the Islamic world. The civilized world — what remains of
it — came down on the Iranian for this; but he had spoken a
truth.
I’m afraid
I offer no comfort here; I can only voice something chilling.
Guess
what, y’all? Pennsylvania has a new sister state in Cuba: Matanzas.
Isn’t that wonderful? Now Americans and the Castro regime are
further allied, and a totalitarian dictatorship has been given fresh
legitimacy by free people.
According to
the account in the Philadelphia Inquirer, someone had the
goodness to question a state rep, Michael Diven, about Cuba’s
“tourism apartheid”: The likes of Diven stay in hotels
that are forbidden to Cubans, lest outsiders rub shoulders
with dangerous people, with dangerous truths to tell. Said Rep.
Diven, “Well, not all Americans can stay at the Beverly Hills
Hilton either. So, as Americans, we have to recognize that we have
many flaws too.”
Wasn’t
that a nifty and logical response?
In addition,
Diven said the following to Castro: “You said the goal of society
should be to keep people well and keep people out of jail. That’s
our goal in Pennsylvania too!”
It is an old,
continuing, and sickening fact that freedom is bestowed on so many
people with no appreciation of it. If only we could trade Michael
Diven for the thousands of political prisoners and others who long
to live, not under a Communist dictatorship, but in freedom.
As I said,
an old story.
But
here is some good news: the February issue of The New Criterion.
From time to time, I use this column to ballyhoo particular books
or particular issues of magazines. Readers may recall that I singled
out City Journal’s post-Sept. 11 issue as an extraordinary
achievement.
This New
Criterion is an extraordinary achievement too, led off, as it
is, by three essays of eye-popping brilliance: by Mark Steyn, on
“the survival of culture” (this is a continuing New
Criterion series); by Roger Kimball, on George Santayana; and
by Anthony Daniels, on the Italian Communist aristocrat Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli. All three of these writers can be enjoyed in National
Review, too, from time to time. To say that these new essays
are “anthologizable” is not to say nearly enough. They
drip with erudition, style, wit, subtlety, truth. Aphorisms seem
to drop from them like coins from stuffed pockets. Here’s a
line from Daniels: “Inside every rebel is a dictator trying
to get out.” If you read the February New Criterion,
you may be astonished that such writing is being done these days.
Conservatives in particular are prone to believing that all such
excellence is confined to the past.
It may be protested
that I myself contribute to The New Criterion: but, believe
me, my own offerings have nothing to do with the quality I’m
talking about here. If you imagine that I’m exaggerating, I
invite you to have a look yourself (and a good place to start would
be the magazine’s website, found here).
If you read these essays — and much more in this issue —
and still believe that I’m exaggerating, well then . . . but
to say what I would think of you would be insulting.
I’ve
written before about the glaring and dismaying absence of the Twin
Towers at the bottom of Manhattan: You look to where they’re
supposed to be, and they are simply gone. The first few times this
happened to me — from the air, or from one of the bridges crossing
into Manhattan — it was shocking and infuriating.
Two days ago,
on returning to the city, I looked to the place where the Towers
are supposed to be, and felt less shocked. The shock is wearing
off — it’s inevitable. I, like many others, have grown
used to the taunting sky, all that space where the Towers should
be.
No surprise
here: but this “growing used to” is a danger with wider
implications. To keep people pitched at war fever is not very nice,
you might say. But to forget the atrocities that prompted this war,
and the evil that we are fighting — and must fight, for the
next many years, presumably — is not very nice either.
You know what
I’m saying? I felt slightly ashamed, or at least distressed,
at my own adjustment to the new situation down at the end of Manhattan.
Can’t
end on that, can I? Must be something lighter. How about a language
note? I’ll make it quick. When I was a lad, I was taught never,
ever to say that one was “nauseous,” unless one wanted
to say that one nauseated other people. Feeling queasy, like you’re
going to throw up? You feel “nauseated,” not “nauseous.”
Something that makes you sick is “nauseous” — nausea-inducing.
To say that
you felt “nauseous” was a big joke — word freaks
would laugh at you.
So I was surprised
the other day when an excellent writer wrote me and mentioned that,
owing to an illness, he was “nauseous.” I couldn’t
believe that the writer would make such an elementary mistake. And
he hadn’t. I looked up “nauseous” in the latest dictionary
and found this: “affected with nausea; nauseated.”
Now, I wonder:
Is this a recent accommodation to a widespread and ingrained mistake?
I will still have a hard time with this “new” usage, if
it’s, in fact, new. That is, it will be hard for me to use
“nauseous” this way myself. But for all those who do:
Do so happily, without guilt (not that you ever felt any)!
And how ’bout
doing between two and 300 push-ups? You remember that one, don’t
you?
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