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June 11, 2002 9:15 a.m. Don’t flatter yourself. A gem in Wales. An unfriendly policy. And more.

n a recent Impromptus, I related a tale about Norman Mailer, who said — at a conference on the Cold War sponsored by the New York Times — that he and his fellow American writers in the 1950s were “like the Russian dissidents.” Typical, I said, for the likes of Mailer to latch on to the achievements and sufferings of others. Mailer wasn’t anything like a Russian dissident. For one thing, he talked and wrote and agitated openly, without fear of arrest. The only thing he had to worry about was receiving two awards on the same day: which ceremony would he attend? Second, Mailer spent much of his career apologizing for the Soviet persecutors of the Russian dissidents; therefore, he effectively opposed those dissidents.

Anyway, when I spoke of this phenomenon to my colleague David Pryce-Jones — the phenomenon of false identification or false comparison — he instantly remembered an event in Budapest. The year was 1989, in the summer, just as things were breaking up. Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader who was killed by the Soviets in 1956, was being re-buried. At the gravesite, a member of the British delegation, one Christopher Hope, a novelist, spoke. He said (roughly), “Imre Nagy opposed tyranny, and we in Britain know all about tyranny, because we’ve lived under Mrs. Thatcher.” Typical stuff.

Then a remarkable thing happened. The leader of the Soviet delegation, the poet Andrei Voznesensky, got up and said, “What are you talking about? Mrs. Thatcher has been elected, more than once, by popular will. She is subject to all democratic processes. Britain and Mrs. Thatcher have nothing to do with what we’re talking about or commemorating here.” This was a member — the leader — of the Soviet delegation, mind you. Not even the Hungarian.

It was an electric moment. For all those Western leftists who now shed a tear, or have a kind word, for the Russian dissidents: Too late.

We are told that dear old McDonald’s is the scourge of the non-American world, and it may be so. We are always reading of protests, even bombings. While I was flying to Britain a couple of weeks ago, I saw something on the news (flashed on the screen in front of passengers). There was an ostentatious protest outside some new McDonald’s in some European city, with a bunch of people grandly and self-righteously serving and eating pasta or something. I don’t know where or when it was; I didn’t have the sound on.

But I certainly thought of it a few days later while visiting the annual literary festival at Hay-on-Wye, Wales. The event is headquartered at a homely school, and I was looking at some of the displays. One of them featured several notes and pictures from students, all about their town. There was one section headed, “Things That Are Special About Hay.” Another was, “Things That Are Bad About Hay” (one example was “Dog dirt,” complete with photo of said substance). There was “Things That Are Useful in Hay.” And also “Things That Are Missing from Hay.”

The first entry, written by a young hand, said, “I think we should have a McDonald’s, because lots of people like it.” So true. And there was a photo of an empty site where a McDonald’s might go.

Brought a grin to my face, I have to report — and made me think that President Bush was right: Europe is not a monolith (or at least is split between governing elites and more common types, like that tyke in Hay).

News of the Politically Correct, from England: According to the Daily Mail, the owner of a travel agency wanted to set up a coffee bar for his staff. So he wrote an ad, which read, “We require a friendly person with a flair for preparing fresh sandwiches and making soups for a team that deserves simple but special lunches.”

Anything wrong with that? Yes: that word “friendly.” As the paper reported, the travel-agency owner, Dominic Speakman, “was stunned when the local Jobcentre told him he could not advertise for a ‘friendly’ catering manager . . . because that would discriminate against applicants not lucky enough to have that sort of personality.”

Said Speakman, managing director of Travel Counsellors in Lancashire, “I’ve never heard a more ridiculous example of political correctness. We normally use newspaper adverts to recruit people and we always ask for friendly staff — it’s part of our philosophy. We’re a family-run business, and we have a pretty good atmosphere. We thought it was particularly important to find someone friendly to run the coffee bar — you don’t want someone miserable serving you sandwiches at lunch. You want someone who likes a bit of light-hearted banter, not a dragon.”

The ad was run without the offending word, “friendly.” Said Speakman, “We have to wait until the interview to find out whether people are friendly now, which wastes everyone’s time. Perhaps they’ll ban us from assessing whether people are friendly next — these people really aren’t living in the real world.”

Oh, yes they are: a world of their own making. Two years ago, this same Jobcentre told another employer that it could not advertise for someone “enthusiastic and hardworking.” Said a Jobcentre spokesman after the travel-agency incident, “We prefer it if advertisements avoid the use of personality statements in order to avoid any possible discrimination.”

Our own country is, of course, worse. A few years ago, we had the tragedy of real-estate ads: You couldn’t say “scenic views,” because that discriminated against the blind (or “sightless”). You couldn’t say “walk-in closets,” because that discriminated against the lame.

Folks, you can’t make this stuff up. We joke about it — and we should — but they are small steps on the way to 1984 (the society, not the year). The encouraging thing is that not everyone obeys. Shortly after reading about Mr. Speakman et al., I saw a sign in a shop in Cambridge (the teddy-bear shop, as it happened, where the daughter of my hosts wanted to go): It asked for an assistant who was “a lovely, enthusiastic person.” “Lovely and enthusiastic”! That must be grounds for a long imprisonment.

A moment ago, we were talking about the Soviets (the real ones, not the Western PC-ers): They were the master air-brushers of all time. When one official fell out of favor, why, he’d simply be removed — air-brushed — from a group photo with those still in favor.

But the Soviets aren’t the only ones who have done it. I was slightly amazed by the obit of Creighton Miller, appearing in the New York Times. Miller was, as the headline explained, a “lawyer and Notre Dame halfback.” For a time, he served as an assistant coach for the Cleveland Browns. Later, he helped organize the NFL players’ union.

As the Times’s Richard Goldstein wrote,

Miller reflected on early management-union relations in describing a Browns team photo of 1946, in which he appeared at the end of the second row, listed as “Asst. Coach Miller.” After the 1962 season, while visiting Art Modell, the Browns’ owner, Miller noticed something missing in Modell’s copy of the photograph. “I was walking around looking at the pictures on the wall . . . I came to the 1946 photo and told Art, ‘I was right there but I’m not there now,’ and Art said, ‘If you ever need somebody removed from a group photo, I know a guy who does expert work.’ The late Harold Sauerbrei of the Browns’ front office then told me that Paul Brown had it done. What Paul Brown did with the photo shows how most of the owners felt about the players association back then.”

A charming story — still, a creepy practice, that air-brushing.

Two quick reactions to the news that Kim Hong Gul, youngest son of the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, was indicted for bribery and influence-peddling. First, too bad that the president’s son engages in such activities. Second, what a wonderful country — what a powerful testament, that the president’s son could be indicted on such charges. In very few countries, sports fans, would a president’s son be indicted — particularly outside the West. Non-democratic presidential sons have been bad news for generations: You may wish to read about the Ceausescus’ son, a rapist and all-around horror, in Ion Mihai Pacepa’s Red Horizons (among other books). Saddam Hussein’s sons, of course, are murderous thugs. Middle Eastern sons in particular are to be stayed away from.

But score one for South Korea, whatever its problems.

Readers may remember the case of John Luttig and Napoleon Beazley. Luttig was a Texas man, the father of noted federal judge J. Michael Luttig; Beazley was the senior Luttig’s murderer. Judge Luttig wrote a shockingly powerful “victim-impact statement” about his father’s death. Beazley became a minor cause célèbre of the Left, journalistic and otherwise, because he was young, black, the “opponent” of a prominent conservative, and given capital punishment in Texas. That state has now finally thrown the switch.

The reporting on this story remains a little screwy. For example, the Associated Press article on Beazley’s execution said that he had killed Luttig “while trying to steal his Mercedes.” (Interesting that the make of the car should be mentioned, don’t you think? What if the vehicle had been a modest Plymouth?)

The AP story was misleading. Last August, this website ran a memorable piece on the Luttig case by R. Ted Cruz. As he explained, some journalists made it sound as though an honor student had accidentally shot a man in some horrible prank gone awry. But this is what happened:

As the federal court of appeals recounted, Beazley told his friends he wanted to kill somebody, he followed the Luttigs in their car for several miles, he observed to his friends that he was “going to have to shoot [the] driver,” he followed them into their garage, and he threw 63-year-old John Luttig to the ground, shot him once in the side of the head, ran around the car to fire at Bobbie Luttig, and then returned to fire another bullet at close range into John Luttig’s head.

Mrs. Luttig, “who watched her husband die, survived only because she feigned death and rolled under the car, while Beazley drove over her.”

Something a little less grim: A few weeks ago, I mentioned the course at Berkeley titled “The Poetics of Palestinian Resistance.” The course description included the warning, “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” Got an amusing letter from a reader: All this reminded him of “a hand-painted sign I once saw in an old codger’s yard, in southern Illinois — ‘Wanted: Woman to clean house and cook for me. Women’s libbers need not apply.’”

I wrote, too, of the impact that the assassination attempt on Reagan had on me, as I was wrestling with my view of the man and his movement. (For “The Conservative on Campus,” go here.) A reader says, “I became a conservative the day Reagan was shot. I had voted for him, but still retained a certain amount of queasiness over the act. On that day I was working as a waiter, and the first person I saw when I walked into the restaurant was the sous chef, a woman I had been flirting seriously with for the previous few weeks. I said, ‘Reagan’s been shot.’ She raised her arms and cheered. This was a good woman, a nice woman, a liberal woman, and that was her pre-rational reaction. I thought, ‘Jeez, what do I have to be queasy about?’ I’ve been very comfortable in my skin ever since.”

A Young Republican at Denison University reports that he was instrumental in arranging for David Horowitz to speak on that campus. A professor said to him, “Who’s next, David Duke or the Holocaust-deniers?” Yet, says the student, “I was also thanked by students, teachers, and locals for finally bringing some change to campus. [Horowitz] brought conservatives out of the woodwork and had [a large crowd].”

The student adds that “Angela Davis spoke to us at a mandated lecture on MLK Jr. Day.” Of course.

Yesterday, I made a few observations about the World Cup and soccer. Many of my readers weren’t exactly pleased with me: but they should remember that, when I spoke of soccer as a “project of the Left,” I was speaking of my own time and place, not more broadly than that. And I certainly don’t begrudge anyone else his enjoyment of soccer. I only wish I could be interested, to say nothing of enthused.

I have a new point — a final point — on America and the World Cup. Sort of came to me, as an obvious truth, or at least an obvious opinion: If we’re to be a World Cup nation — a soccer-participation nation — we might as well be the best. “In for a penny, in for a pound.” I admit that I don’t exactly dream of the U.S. as a World Cup power (and I’m talking the men here, because the women have already proved their excellence): but if we’re to have a team, we might as well win, not just be respectable — we might as well be dominant, and hated, as usual.

A reader quoted the ever-quotable Lewis Grizzard, who wrote, “I wouldn’t watch the World Cup if it was in my backyard and they served free beer.” A) I wish I had a backyard (here on the lower Upper West Side). B) A Cherry Icee would do the trick for me.

As a friend of mine said yesterday, a propos of a giving in to the World Cup and this country’s role in it, “Go team!”

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