October
21, 2002 9:00 a.m. Judenrein,
jawohl! A little dab doesn’t do them. Jeb and America. Etc.
have a correspondent who works for UBS, in Europe. UBS is the largest
Swiss bank, owning Paine Webber and other companies. They’ve just
opened a new office in Bahrain, and an interesting invoice surfaced, from
a German furniture company. I am in possession of a copy of that invoice.
Stamped on it are the following words:
“We herewith
confirm that [the] above-mentioned goods are not of Israeli origin, nor
do they contain to any degree Israeli components, nor have they been imported
from Israel.”
Lovely. My correspondent
says, “To sum it up: Fifty-seven years after Auschwitz, a German
company (no less) issues a paper certifying that its products are Judenrein.
Shouldn’t there be some outrage? Or at least some concern?”
Yes, but not in Bahrain
— where they like — no, where they demand that their
furniture be Jew-free.
Readers
may recall that, almost a year ago now, I did a piece
on Donald Rumsfeld, detailing and trying to understand the phenomenon
of him. I wrote that he was a throwback, standing for an older, glorious
America. He used words like “dickens,” which went with his “Vitalis-friendly
hair.”
Several days ago,
the New York Times ran a piece called “My Excellent Brylcreem
Adventure” — about hair-care products. The article included
the line, “Many of these brands evoke blank stares from anyone younger
than Donald Rumsfeld, who was mocked in a National Review article
for his ‘Vitalis-friendly hair.’”
Look, it’s no
big deal, but the man — the writer of the article — couldn’t
possibly have read my piece. It probably came up in a Nexis search of
“Vitalis” — the writer, or a researcher, failed to note
the context. Far from mocking Rumsfeld, the piece glorified him. It makes
you wonder about other things in the Times — in any newspaper
— that you don’t know so well.
I heard from someone
recently who works for a think tank in Washington. He said he stopped
reading the Times because it got so many things wrong, on the subjects
he knows very well. “So how could I trust the rest?” he asked.
An interesting question.
Shortly
after the 2000 election, I was abroad — in Egypt — and was asked
repeatedly, “How come Bush can’t win easily in Florida? I mean,
his brother is governor there!” These people were incredulous that
the Bush family couldn’t fix the election, just like that. (Of course,
some Americans are incredulous too; they are sadly ignorant, misled, probably,
by their teachers.)
I thought of this
when I read the following headline on Friday: “Noelle Bush Handcuffed,
Sentenced to 10 Days in Jail.” Noelle Bush is Gov. Jeb Bush’s
daughter.
America, folks, is
a great, great country — so unlike most of the other countries in
the world. That’s why many foreign peoples don’t understand
us. They miss the point of us, entirely.
I
want to urge on you the October issue of The New Criterion. Its
lead essay
is an astounding, powerful thing by Keith Windschuttle, an Australian
scholar. It’s about Clifford Geertz, one of the shapers of intellectual
life in the last half-century. I grew up with Geertz — was weaned
on Geertz — and I have never understood him so well, after Windschuttle’s
dissection of him. Windschuttle lets us know how “multiculturalism”
took hold and what it has done. The essay, again, is a tour de force,
one of the best I have read in many a moon.
I wish I had had
it back in college, when I was being force-fed Geertz.
Included in the pieces
available on the magazine’s website
— though you should really subscribe
— are Roger Kimball on Victorian
nudity (yes), our own David Pryce-Jones on Albert
Speer (hiss — no, not Alger), Anthony Daniels (who often writes
under the name Theodore Dalrymple) on book-browsing
in Dubai and Havana (yes), a nifty piece
by Martin Greenberg, brother of the late art critic Clement Greenberg,
and a very odd piece
on a very odd subject by a guy with an odd last name.
I
received a ton of mail about Congressman Charlie Rangel — and all
others who oppose war with Iraq on the specious and obnoxious grounds
that too many “black and brown” people serve in the military.
Most of the mail came from members of the armed forces. One soldier wrote,
“I can’t
tell you how angry Charlie Rangel’s comments make me. I can tell
you that, in the Army, there’s no black, no white, no yellow, no
red . . . WE ARE ALL GREEN. They drilled that into our heads from Day
One at basic training. My senior Drill Sergeant was black; I am a pasty-white
Nebraskan; and I’d follow him anywhere.
“Comments like
Rangel’s merely illuminate how little people such as he actually
know about the military. It is, in fact, the LEAST racist environment
I have ever experienced. It’s really about the only place where I
have truly been judged solely on my actions and my merits.”
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have a correspondent who works for UBS, in Europe. UBS is the largest
Swiss bank, owning Paine Webber and other companies. They’ve just
opened a new office in Bahrain, and an interesting invoice surfaced, from
a German furniture company. I am in possession of a copy of that invoice.
Stamped on it are the following words:
Readers
may recall that, almost a year ago now, I did a 
