“The movement,” the Friend of Bob, Larry Summers blows it, &c.

January 10, 2002 9:30 a.m.

he other day, “the Rev.” Al Sharpton opened his West Coast office, and who should attend the party but Karin Stanford. Who is that woman with the funny “i,” you ask? That’s Jesse Jackson’s mistress, the one with whom he had a child. (He lied about it for a while, then was forced by both the media and Stanford to fess up.) Stanford is on the outs with Jackson now, and so is the Rev. Al — which is why Sharpton and Karin happened to be at the same party (a major dis to Jackson).

Something Stanford said caught my ear. A reporter asked her why she had kept quiet for so long about her child with Jackson. “I didn’t want to do anything to hurt him or the movement,” she said.

Those words, “the movement,” brought me up short. I had a flashback to Rep. Gus Savage (D., Ill.). You perhaps remember him: He was one of the great black haters — and one of the great haters, period — in Congress. On a visit to Zaire, he sicced himself on a U.S. Peace Corps worker, a young woman (black) who was supposed to drive him around and such. After all, he was a congressman on an official visit.

She refused his advances. He said to her — this is unforgettable — “Oh, come on, baby, when you help the shepherd, you help the whole flock.” That meant: “Do your black duty and give in to me.” He also said that she’d be helping “the movement”: Don’t think of it as submitting to me, this vile, exploitative politician; think of it as helping all the people in Watts and the Delta and Bed-Stuy.

Later, when the young lady “told,” Savage called her “a traitor to the black movement.”

When you hear those words “the movement” — and I speak to women in particular — reach for your gun, or at least call the cops. There is no movement, folks, at least none of a positive kind anymore (unless you’re talking about Ward Connerly’s or the movement for educational reform and genuine black uplift); but there are awful men doing anything handy or intimidating to take advantage of women.

Oh, I should include a P.S. here: Savage was eventually defeated in a Democratic primary by Mel Reynolds. Not too long after, Rep. Reynolds was arrested for preying on underaged girls. That Chicago district, unbelievably, hadn’t traded up.

The Bob Torricelli corruption case seems to be over for now, because outgoing U.S. attorney Mary Jo White, by all appearances, has screwed it up badly, as she has screwed up other investigations into Democratic and union corruption. But one point bears mentioning: Sen. Torricelli claims (depending on which report you read) that the businessman David Chang gave him expensive suits, jewelry, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash simply out of friendship — you know, just buds: That’s what buds do.

Now, I’ve been reading and writing a bit about friendship lately: Digby Anderson has produced a wonderful, provocative book called Losing Friends, which I have just reviewed for the forthcoming NR. (That book — not yet published in the U.S. — can be found and bought on the British Amazon.com, for which you “dial in” www.amazon.co.uk.) Friendship is a multi-faceted and many-splendored thing, for sure.

But listen: Do (male) friends give their (male) friends expensive clothing and jewelry? Let’s leave the tens of thousands of dollars in cash aside for the moment. You might give a friend a book, or a recording, or maybe a new fishing rod. You might even be willing to sacrifice your life for him. But does it occur to you — is it normal — to give your friends expensive suits? A Rolex watch? A briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills (oh, I said I’d leave that aside — sorry)? Do you think, “Gee, I really love Arthur: I’m going to go out and buy him an Italian suit. Not sure what size he is, so I’ll take him by the tailor”?

My point, obviously, is that these “gifts” don’t seem like real gifts, the gifts of one friend to another; they seem so much more in the nature of bribes — of buying off. Obviously.

Recently, Thomas L. Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, published a column under the title “Let’s Roll.” You know where those words come from: That’s what Todd Beamer was heard to utter on the Pittsburgh flight, Sept. 11. He meant: Come on, let’s fight these terrorists, and refuse to be passive in the face of what they’re doing to us.

The words quickly came to stand for an American resolution to combat terrorist evil. We at NR used the words on our cover (October 15) to bolster President Bush’s determination to do just that.

But Friedman seized on those words for a quite different purpose. After praising Bush as “a far better commander in chief than anyone predicted” (wrong: maybe better than anyone Friedman likes and respects had predicted), he wrote, “And now, I wish Al Gore were president” — because Bush was pushing “a narrow, right-wing agenda,” instead of a Gore-like agenda, presumably, that would include “nation-building in America.” To that end, he admonished Bush, “Let’s roll.”

This is a little like how, in the 1980s and ’90s, Democrats started saying that increased education spending was a “national security issue” and that free false teeth and everything else under the sun was a “national security issue,” because they had figured out that the phrase “national security” resonated, and that Reagan and other Republicans were cleaning their clock with it.

As far as I’m concerned, the phrase “Let’s roll” is one of the most stirring and meaningful in American history, certainly in recent American history. And it means something fairly specific. I think we ought to reserve those words for what their speaker meant.

Tom Shales is a talented and perceptive TV critic for the Washington Post, and he has been doing it for a very long time. He is as savvy and knowledgeable as anyone.

Which made what he wrote the other day so puzzling. He was slamming Bernard Goldberg’s new book, Bias, which exposes and analyzes the leftward slant in TV news (Goldberg is a veteran of CBS News).

Shales slammed him hard: “disgruntled has-been,” “addlepated windbag,” “no-talent hack.” I can’t remember the last time I saw a mainstream critic use language so vitriolic. I’m not sure I have ever done so, even when writing about Cecilia Bartoli (on whom I unloaded once shamelessly — not because she’s a no-talent hack, but because she’s a lavishly talented hack, which is a crime). (Also, I laced into the pianist Olli Mustonen once pretty violently — he’s another lavishly talented, or at least a talented, hack.)

One of the things Shales writes is that Bias, “appropriately enough, won the dubious honor of a commendatory editorial from The Wall Street Journal. And we all know how unbiased those Journal editorials are. Gosh, it is soooo hard to figure out where they’re coming from.”

So strange that Shales should have written that sentence. He knows that the Wall Street Journal editorial page, like all editorial pages, is an editorial page. He knows that it is the purpose of an editorial page to give opinion, often strong opinion. But we — Bernard Goldberg and we — are talking about something else when we’re talking about network news: the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” and all that. It is the responsibility of those programs to be as free of bias as possible, to present things as straight, and many-sidedly, as possible. They’re not supposed to do what we do at NR, or what the Journal does in its editorials, or what Shales’s Washington Post does in its.

It’s perfectly elementary. It’s 101. And Shales is so smart, and experienced. And what he wrote — regardless of his opinion of Bernard Goldberg — was so dumb (not to mention snotty and junior-high-girlish: “soooo”).

Weird.

Oh, it could have been such a breakthrough moment: If only Larry Summers had held firm. Summers, as you know, is the new president of Harvard, having come from the Clinton administration, where he was treasury secretary. Summers is a man known for independence, stubbornness, reason, and hard-headedness — at least he used to be known that way.

A few weeks ago, he held a meeting with Cornel West, the famous black writer and entertainer who holds the exalted title of University Professor at Harvard. (There are only 14 University Professors, out of a faculty of 2,000. That title has been reserved for the best of the best: geniuses, near-geniuses. Being a University Professor means that you’re considered above department, above discipline — a genius-at-large, able to teach anything, in the manner of Socrates, with wondering kids at your feet.) According to all reports, Summers was asking West to earn his keep: to engage in serious scholarship (West has recently made an asinine rap CD, as detailed by NRO’s Rod Dreher); to spend more time at the school (he is on the road a lot, collecting speaking fees, pushing Al Sharpton for president, and being a celebrity generally); and to conduct himself as befits someone of his rank. Summers also asked West to help the university do something about runaway “grade inflation”: Every other grade at Harvard is an A or A-.

And that’s when it hit the fan. Boy, did it. West made a cause célèbre out of what he regarded as Summers’s “insult.” He enlisted a lawyer in his dealings with the president — practically unheard of for a Harvard faculty member. Other black professors at the school got into the act, threatening to leave Harvard en masse if Summers persisted in treating West as he would any other professor. They demanded that Summers issue an “unequivocal statement” in favor of affirmative action (almost as though admitting that merit was irrelevant to the case). The Boston Globe and the New York Times ran screaming stories. Jesse Jackson demanded a meeting with Summers. Al Sharpton threatened a lawsuit (because West heads his presidential exploratory committee, and apparently Sharpton found the professor’s reputation damaged).

Yes, it could have been a breakthrough moment: Would Summers hold firm? Would he resist what amounted to a racial shakedown or mau-mauing? Would he refuse to be intimidated? Would he uphold academic standards? Would he have the guts to say, “Color has nothing to do with it: Standards are standards, and we will adhere to them”? Oh, it could have been good: It might even have changed things, a little — struck a blow against racial nonsense, and bullying, and fear. Summers could have been a national leader, just as presidents of Harvard were once expected to be.

But no: Summers crumbled, of course, like an ill-made cookie. And everything, overnight, got back to normal. Too bad. Leadership will just have to await a leader.

Two quick (further) points about Cornel West, before I go: His rap CD is called Sketches of My Culture. That’s the way he talks: always talking about “my culture,” pushing separatism, pushing “two Americas.” But that culture is our culture. To take black people out of American history and American culture is to render American history and American culture unrecognizable, false, and ridiculous. Yet West and the other racial bullies and fools are always doing it. I say, to hell with Black History Month, to hell with African-American Studies departments (what’s wrong with just American Studies?) — to hell with Cornel West and anyone else who would keep America a place of racial bitterness, division, and disharmony.

And the other point: A University Professor at Harvard University desires Al Sharpton to be president of the United States. Just think about that for a while.

Guys, I see that this has been a pretty earnest, pretty depressing, and rather humorless Impromptus. Let’s see if I can end on something light, or lightish. I’m checking my list — nope, all pretty grim. I have a Tiger Woods in New Zealand item, but I’ll save that for next time.

No, I’ll go ahead with it now (sorry to keep you). You may recall — you’d have to be a particularly dedicated reader — that I wrote long ago about the fuss some professional golfers made over Tiger’s “appearance money” at the New Zealand Open. (“Appearance money,” for the uninitiated, is money paid for simply showing up, regardless of winnings — earnings — in the tournament.) Some guys were fussing because Tiger’s appearance money was increasing ticket prices for the event. I was saying that every touring pro ought to thank his lucky stars — and kiss Tiger’s . . . — for what he’s done for them: boosting prize money generally (this stuff trickles down, what with TV revenue and all), increasing the popularity of the game among the young, etc.

Furthermore, Tiger needs the New Zealand Open like a hole in the head. It’s nothing but a pain for him. He’s doing it because his caddie, Stevie Williams, is a Kiwi, and it meant a lot to him (to Williams).

So Tiger’s down there now, and some of the pros — the relative scrubs — are still fussing. They still say that ticket prices are too high. But kids under 16 are getting in free.

There have even been terrorist death threats. Tiger’s playing anyway, though — calmly, stoically, like the total stud he is.

Okay, but here’s what I like about this story, so far. One Kiwi golfer, Craig Perks, is based in the United States, so he had to fly down. And he ripped the tournament organizers as follows: He said (according to reports) that a “mix-up” over whether his family could fly in business class along with him had nearly forced him to withdraw! Business class! Not just for himself, but for the whole family! From America to New Zealand! For this nobody scrub, Craig Perks! He said — this is a direct quote — “I think all the emphasis was put on Tiger Woods and they forgot about everyone else, which is a shame.”

And — the beautiest part — the guy’s name is Perks! Perks! Do you love it?

What a crybaby, spoiled, ingrate jerk. And if he loves New Zealand and the common Kiwi so much, why does he live in the United States, land of Tiger Woods? As most New Zealanders seem to recognize, the tournament is unbelievably lucky to have Tiger Woods, and they have him only because of the accident that his aide and friend happens to hail from this faraway place.

Ah, envy, ignorance, and ingratitude — all things that Tiger is used to, fortunately.

All right: Tomorrow, back to grimness, mostly.