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 kay,
lemme start with my boy, Gov. William J. Janklow of South Dakota.
I didn’t know he was my boy until I read the remarks he made
at the recent Republican Governors Association meeting: “We’re
in a war, with people who want to kill us. And somehow we’re
still talking about ‘arresting’ them and ‘bringing
them to justice.’ I don’t get it. We need to kill them
until the rest surrender. No lawyers and no courts. Then we need
to capture their leaders. We can try them — and then kill them.”
It was reported
that Janklow’s fellow governors applauded. And so do I. A little
bloodthirstiness can be a healthful thing, such as right about now.
You wanna know who else is my boy? Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
of Italy. He organized a pro-American rally in Rome the other day,
at which he said — among other stirring and apposite things
— “We are all citizens of New York.” He further said,
“Europe knows how much it owes to America. We have to remember
not to forget.”
I simply love
that, so profound in its simplicity: “We have to remember not
to forget.” This admonition applies to about a zillion things.
And much of the problem with the world — and with ourselves,
as individuals — is that we forget to remember.
Forza Silvio!
You wanna know who else is my boy? The actor John Ratzenberger,
who for years played Cliff Clavin, the mailman, on Cheers.
He recently criticized the state of our popular culture, saying,
“The language, the content — when children are listening
to this stuff, whether it’s from TV or radio, why shouldn’t
they get the impression that this is okay, that this is normal?
Well, it’s not normal.” (Well, it is normal now,
but it shouldn’t be.)
He then said,
“What should happen [after 9/11] is that we’ll start honoring
the people who actually hold this country together. When you look
at what happened . . . Those firemen who ran into that building
didn’t think for a second about whether they should do that
or not.” Ratzenberger hoped that, from now on, we would see
fewer “shows about whining yuppies.”
Go ’head,
Cliffie.
You wanna know who else is my boy? Donald Rumsfeld, of course. The
“cult of Rumsfeld” continues, that groundswell of admiration
for a straight-talkin’ hombre. Here he is with Jim Lehrer:
“Oh, these people couldn’t care less about international
law. I mean, they killed 5,000 people in the United States without
batting an eye. If they had had weapons of mass destruction, they
would have killed hundreds of thousands of people.” Asked Lehrer,
“No question in your mind?” Said Rumsfeld, “No, not
a bit.”
A dream secretary
of defense, in a situation like this.
Speaking of dream secretaries of defense, Caspar Weinberger has
a wonderful story in his wonderful new autobiography, In the
Arena. Actually, he has dozens of wonderful stories, but I will
relate only one now. Back in Reagan days, Cap accepted an invitation
to debate the Marxist professor E. P. Thompson at the Oxford Union.
The question was, “Is there a moral difference between U.S.
foreign policy and Soviet foreign policy?”
Weinberger
had been told to wear black tie and so was surprised to see Thompson
in the relaxed garb of a professor. Cap asked what gave. Thompson
responded that “he had never believed in black tie, that it
was just a mark of class distinction.” Weinberger answered,
“On the contrary: My father used to say that black tie was
the most democratic of all costumes, because everybody wore exactly
the same thing.”
Ah, Cap.
Okay, just
one more story — and this particularly for the enjoyment of
my friend Jonah Goldberg. There’s some contract that the Pentagon
has to award, and in the running are many firms, including British
ones. Eventually, the contract goes to a French firm. When next
she seems him, Mrs. Thatcher says to Weinberger, “Really, Cap,
I can understand our not getting it, but the Frrrrench!”
Weinberger
reports that he’d never heard an r rolled like that
— so disdainfully, so shudderingly!
Ah, Margaret.
By now you’ve heard of Chelsea Clinton’s big essay for
Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. Brown and other dizzy Democrats
say that Chelsea is an extraordinary human being, the cream of her
generation, a meteor streaking through the sky. Actually, she seems
to be a rather ordinary young woman of liberal Democratic beliefs.
There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily — it’s
just that . . . Look: She’s not Virginia Woolf or something.
Chelsea writes
that she feared for her life on September 11 (really?) and that
one of her first thoughts was of the Bush tax cut: Curse that cut,
which would deprive us of the money to help the victims and rebuild
the city!
That’s
how the Clintons’ daughter was brought up to think. That’s
what she knows about war, an economy, the nature of a people —
everything. She almost can’t help it. And yet, all that expensive
education!
Oh, right.
Osama bin Laden has now admitted his guilt in the September 11 attacks.
So this will dissuade all those Middle Easterners from believing
that actually the Jews committed the attacks, in order to
make the Arabs look bad? Hmmm.
A story in the Sunday Times began, “In many ways Somalia
is like another collapsed country across the Arabian Sea, one that
is under American bombardment. Like Afghanistan, Somalia is Muslim;
each country drove a superpower off its soil, and . . .”
Whoa, babe.
This is the kind of equivalence that just can’t fly. The Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of occupying and controlling
it — to further the Soviet Empire, to build on its imperialism.
The United States entered Somalia to . . . well, here is how that
same Times story put it, farther down: “[E]ight years
ago, . . . 18 American soldiers died on the streets of Mogadishu.
They were part of a mission of 28,000 troops sent in to distribute
food and aid in the midst of a civil war.”
One has to
be careful about these likenings. I remember when John Chancellor
did a Vietnam/Afghanistan equivalence commentary on NBC News: “Americans
called the site of their war ‘’nam’; the Soviets
call theirs ‘’stan’” — and so on. Oh, no: That’s
just too easy, and obtuse.
In the months and years before September 11, I must have seen Rudy
Giuliani appear on stage at about three concerts or operas. He was
always booed or hissed (because concert- and opera-goers tended
to be — not this mayor’s biggest fans). One time, he was
jeered in absentia: A proclamation was read at Carnegie Hall, and
it ended, “Signed, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani” — and
the crowd couldn’t help itself, booing.
Well, at a
gala concert at Lincoln Center on Sunday night — Veterans Day,
no less — Giuliani appeared to say a few words, and the audience
stood and cheered its head off. Charles Lindbergh couldn’t
have gotten so ecstatic, so adoring a reception down Fifth Avenue.
Just noting
it.
Jesse Jackson says, Hands off Iraq! In an interview on Black Entertainment
Television, he said, “Even to threaten [Saddam Hussein] in
this way is in fact to misread his own capacity to respond, perhaps
chemically and biologically.” It’s bad enough that Jackson
has to be all the things he is, but he has to be a mindless appeaser,
too.
Speaking of
Jackson, there was an extraordinary puff piece about him in a recent
issue of The New Yorker. I say “extraordinary”
because the press generally has begun to tire of him, and to catch
on to him. In the piece, Jackson is quoted as saying many grotesque
but revealing things, including that he is a fan — a two-cheers
fan, let’s say — of Marx.
Writes Peter
Boyer, “[Jackson] explained to me that in his formative years
he became an admirer of Karl Max: after visiting Marx’s grave,
he realized that Marx was not the evil force that ‘brainwashed’
Americans were taught to believe but, rather, was driven by an Old
Testament-style system of social justice. A problem with Marxism
was that it lacked the component of faith” — otherwise,
on the mark.
The brainwashed
among us continue to believe that Marx was poison for body, spirit,
and peace. Also that he had nothing to do with true justice, Old
Testament or otherwise.
Hey, did you read about Rep. Jim Moran, the Democrat from northern
Virginia? It seems he had a meeting with Bush aides at which he
said, “If the president doesn’t make an announcement tomorrow
that National Airport will open in a matter of days, I’m going
to introduce legislation to require that it be opened. And I have
a hundred co-sponsors.” It worked. Later, however, Moran revealed
that he had had only one co-sponsor. “I bluffed,” he said,
no doubt grinning.
This was reported
as an example of a delightful politician’s delightful tactic.
Moran says that he bluffed. I say he lied, which is disgusting.
Or is that
fuddy-duddy?
Two quick points about Bill Clinton’s dreadful speech at Georgetown:
He said, speaking of the Islamic world, “We ought to pay for
these children to go to school — it’s a lot cheaper than
going to war.” Sounds reasonable, even unquestionable, right?
But then you have to ask: What’ll they teach the kids
in those schools? If you know anything about what they are, in fact,
teaching, the answer is not heartening. Hell, some Muslims educated
here are going off to fight for “Osama.”
Second, there
was that classic, nauseating Clinton line, “Those of us who
come from various European lineages are not blameless.” Speak
for yourself, boy. I never terrorized anybody. The idea of responsibility
for the misdeeds of distant ancestors is repugnant to anyone with
a speck of true liberalism or enlightenment in him.
The New York Times is writing about Mohammed Atta as “Mr.
Atta.” What’s up with that? I thought that, after you
were dead, you lost the “Mr.” and it was just your last
name.
I have made the following observation several times in this column:
One of Israel’s problems is that many Americans feel that Israel
shouldn’t mind its dead so much. I mean, death-by-terror is
a way of life for these people. They chose to live in that rotten
neighborhood, and besides, there are those settlements in the “occupied
territories,” which inflame the Arabs so much. Whaddya want?
Over the weekend,
I started reading a story about Israel’s latest casualties:
women out shopping, children going to school on buses, young lovers
dancing at discos, whatever. And my eyes glazed over. I moved on
to another item, as though I’d just read about the sunshine
in San Diego, or the rain in Seattle.
And I stopped
myself: That’s the problem. The utter normalization
of the death-by-terror that Israel suffers. But alarm and appreciation
(of a monumental problem) should never cease. One’s eyes should
not glaze over.
Please listen about the fall issue of City Journal (a product
of the Manhattan Institute): It is quite simply one of the finest
issues of any magazine you’ll ever see. When September 11 occurred,
the editor, Myron Magnet, was putting an issue to bed. He set aside
that issue, however, and went about constructing an entire new one,
to answer the vital questions, What to think? How to feel? What
to do?
The issue he
and his team put together is a masterpiece of reflective and helpful
journalism. Every item, large and small, is intelligent and moving.
There are specific plans — complete with architectural drawings
— for how to rebuild, and how to memorialize the dead. There
is a fantastically moving piece about England right after the war
by Theodore Dalrymple. There is a lot more. The issue is
a remarkable blend of the spiritual and the practical (not that
the spiritual can’t be practical, believe me).
Lest you think
this is overpraise, pick up the current City Journal and
judge for yourself.
Last, I convey a Leonard Bernstein quote now making the rounds:
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely,
more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
Fine. May I
share my reply to violence? To destroy the people who have
murdered us, and want to murder more. This is what we owe the dead,
and ourselves — as Gov. William J. Janklow understands perfectly
well.
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