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Now comes a story out of Elk Grove, Calif., where the middle-school principal holds meetings for parents in strict accordance to race: blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites. That’s right, he holds four separate, and segregated, meetings. Every once in a while, the likes of Al Sharpton (are there likes of him?) will speak of “American apartheid.” The sad thing is, they’re not talking about practices such as this. The one question I’d have for the principal, Mr. Philip Moore, is this: “Do you regret that your school itself is integrated? That it throws kids of all colors together, as Americans?” It’s hard to joke about, but the return of separate drinking fountains and toilet facilities seems the next step.
“As recently as twenty years ago, French Jews had [a] vivid and painful reminder of the mainstream French tendency to conflate the smallest manifestations of Jewish difference with separatism. In October 1980, terrorists exploded a bomb outside the synagogue in the rue Copernic in Paris, killing six people, including gentile passersby. Centrist Prime Minister Raymond Barre rushed to condemn the ‘odious act,’ but he added that it was an act ‘which intended to strike Jews going to synagogue and which struck innocent Frenchmen crossing the rue Copernic.’ Barre is in no way an anti- Semite. In fact, he is one of the most decent and honorable of French politicians. And his general decency just makes the remark all the more telling and awful: even Barre, in a moment of stress, instinctively distinguished between Jews going to synagogue and ‘innocent Frenchmen.’”
“‘It’s been incredibly difficult to tell the difference between fighters and civilians,’ said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York, who evaded Israeli checkpoints to sneak into the camp. ‘I think it’s clear that in the end what actually happened in Jenin will fall somewhere in between what the Palestinians are alleging and what the [Israeli army] claims. But only an independent authority can establish what actually happened.’” Writes my correspondent, “As I understand it, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the refusal of combatants to wear uniforms and therefore to blend in with the civilian population is considered a crime on the part of those who do it, not those who fight them.”
“As far as I’m concerned, American civilization should take no heed, suffer no lectures, or entertain any advice whatsoever from Europe on any matter, large or small, regarding Jews and Israel. Indeed, I don’t think they have anything instructive to offer on the subject of tolerance and mixed populations living in harmony. Theirs is an unrelenting record of pogroms, persecution, and genocide against the Jews and others since there began what we could call a ‘Europe.’ Indeed, theirs is an unrelenting record of conquest, warfare, and purges against one another right up to the present. Absent an altruistic American intervention, they were perfectly content to allow the Yugoslavs to slaughter one another. They long ago disqualified themselves as moral judges. “None of this is Europe bashing. I thank God for Europe as a developmental phase of Western Civilization. But the above is all true and is precisely why there is a United States. Our forebears fled all that and purposely built a country to be a haven from it. . . . We are the evolution of Western Civilization: not just the keeper of the flame, but the torchbearer carrying it forward. We have the society where peoples from all over the world live in what is probably as much harmony as is achievable on earth. We are the last, best hope of man — so long as we remember that, and how we got that way.”
According to the Cleveland Free Times, “Castro and the Gonzalez family were grateful, so Joan, Jane, her husband Hunter Morrison and their two daughters were invited to the official state guest house.” Of course, the mayor had a nice long sit-down with Castro — the dictator even showed her Cuban public-opinion polls! And he kvetched about classroom size, just like back home in Ohio! Mayor Campbell brought up no icky subjects like human rights, of course, because “this was really about Elian and his family being very grateful for the fact that my mother had helped him be reunited with his family.” Of course.
This exercised ol’ “Chollie” Rangel, Adam Clayton Powell’s successor in Harlem, who said, “Armey is a nobody. He’s a lame duck. No one cares about you when you’re leaving. You can tell him I said that.” Yes, but Rangel’ll never leave, will he? He is a race-baiting, reform-resistant, money-consuming Poobah for Life, having already been in Congress for over 30 years. Yes, Armey is retiring, and so is that other indispensable Texan, Phil Gramm (probably my single favorite elective politician, in case you’re interested). Gramm is hands down the best interview in politics, and I could listen to him talk all day. Everyone says how “unlikable” he is — that’s why his presidential candidacy went nowhere. I say, a country that finds him unlikable is a country that’s absurd. Anyway, Gramm was asked about the prospective session in New York, and replied, “If I have 100 issues in front of me, including the lack of the budget, by the time I get to whether we should meet in New York, I’m asleep.” See what I mean?
And yet, Arthur Miller always goes and infuriates you — particularly every time he opens his mouth about politics. His recent Jefferson Lecture was appalling, a disgrace, as all of us far-right pundits insisted. Even so, he is an important American writer, so when I saw that he had a piece of fiction in the current New Yorker, I thought that, somehow, it was incumbent on me to read it. And do you know? It’s a phenomenally well-written story, and an engrossing one, too. Whatever we think of Miller, we see that it’s the work of no slouch. In addition to really beautiful prose, it has some “strangeness,” which I use in the Harold Bloomian sense to mean: This isn’t everyday. The New Yorker has generously put the story on the web, though, somehow, it doesn’t seem right to read fiction on the web, does it? While I’m on Arthur Miller, I might as well tell my favorite Arthur Miller story — at least, I think it’s an Arthur Miller story. I heard it once; don’t know whether it’s true. Miller meets an old high-school classmate in a restaurant. The classmate says, “Art? Art Miller? Good to see you. It’s been years.” He then asks Miller what he does for a living, which takes the famous playwright somewhat aback. Miller: “Um,
I’m a writer.” The classmate gets wide-eyed. For a few seconds, he can’t speak. Then he says, “You’re Arthur Miller?”
My favorite part of the story: The magazine badly wants young Kennedy to interview Oliver Stone, maker of, among other lunatic films, JFK, which retails nutty left-wing conspiracy theories. JFK Jr. was extremely reluctant to do the interview, but it was potentially important to his magazine, and he agreed to fly out for a dinner in L.A. with Stone — but not alone: He insisted on taking a magazine staffer with him. He would feel Stone out, that was all. In the event (as the British say — what’s our way of saying it?), the dinner was excruciating for Kennedy, and he cut it short as soon as possible. Writes Blow, “Back in New York, we met in John’s office and tried to come up with a replacement interview fast. John apologized to [another staffer], who could not mask his disappointment, but refused to contact Stone again. As John spoke, conflicting emotions flickered across his face, revealing his distaste for Stone, his guilt over letting us down, and his self-recrimination for doing something he didn’t feel comfortable with. He shuddered as he said, ‘I just couldn’t sit across a table from that man for two hours. I just couldn’t.’”
“The best name I ever encountered was that of the late president of Malawi, an absolutely enchanting, small, wholly insignificant country in southeast Africa, where my wife and I were Peace Corps volunteers in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The full title was ‘His Excellency the Life President, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda.’ ‘Ngwazi’ meant roughly ‘enlightened leader’ in his tribal language (Chichewa), and the ‘H’ was for Hastings, his Christian name. Unlike Al, though, he was an MD, trained at Meherry Medical College in Nashville, and he had had a successful ‘society’ medical practice in London before returning to then Nyasaland in the late ’50s to deliver his people from the bondage of the Brits. By then he had been gone for over forty years, and had to fake the Chichewa part. His English, however, was impeccable, and when I met him in 1969 he seemed the perfect Victorian gentleman. “Banda didn’t finally get ousted till he was well into his nineties, so the ‘Life’ part was almost true.” |
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n recent days,
we’ve been talking about an eternal and awful theme, racial separatism,
right here in the good ol’ U.S.A. For instance, Michigan State University
is set to hold its first blacks-only graduation ceremony. Isn’t that
special?
We
usually pronounce apartheid “apartide,” but its proper
pronunciation is “apart-hate.” As an authority pointed out,
years ago, when South Africa was big news, the pronunciation of the word
nicely reflects its meaning.
