Condi Rice, Sarah Hughes, a troublesome bobsledder, &c.

February 26, 2002 9:00 a.m.

s many people know — and tease me about — Condoleezza Rice is one of my favorite people in public life. I think that not only Bush but the country and world are lucky that she’s the national-security adviser. (How’s that for a worshipful statement?) But I am not sure that what she did the other day was wise. She was the recipient of an NAACP Image Award — and she happily accepted, making a nice speech.

This is the sort of thing, I’m afraid, that keeps the NAACP “respectable,” when it is not, sadly, respectable. The descent of the NAACP mirrors the descent of the civil-rights leadership in our time. The organization in its modern guise could be seen in the 2000 election, when it ran ads across the country virtually accusing George W. Bush of being responsible for the lynching of a black man in Texas. It was one of the most despicable things ever done in an election — including LBJ’s “daisy” commercial.

The last thing the U.S. needs is the exacerbation of racial tensions, and lies about racism. And these are two of the things in which the NAACP now specializes.

It may be that the NAACP is like the Communist Chinese state: There is no getting around dealing with it. Yet I know for certain that the NAACP doesn’t represent all black Americans, and I’m not even sure it represents most, which is why the administration, and Republican politicians in general, should work hard at addressing black Americans without bowing to the NAACP. To cling to the NAACP as a kind of official black government is to slight the diversity of opinion among black citizens — a diversity, it is true, that goes unreflected in voting statistics.

Every time we make nice to the NAACP — appear before it, nod to it — we pretend that it hasn’t, in the last several years (and this isn’t even to mention its bureaucratic and financial corruption), placed itself outside civilized bounds. And it has.

The Salt Lake Olympics provided much to enjoy, and about the most enjoyable thing it provided was Sarah Hughes: all poise, confidence, elegance, exuberance, and precision. Everyone kept saying, “And she’s only 16!” I kept saying, “No, silly: It’s because she’s 16!” She doesn’t carry the baggage of failure, anxiety, the sense of limitation, the sense of “This is difficult,” the sense of “Time is running out.”

I remember hearing about Isaac Stern, listening to a pre-teen violinist romp through a ferociously difficult piece. “If she knew how difficult that was, she couldn’t do it.”

At the post-competition exhibition, Hughes — I should really call her “Sarah” — came out and did a routine of Bob Fosse favorites, which was a delight. But then she got set to pay tribute to “the victims of 9/11.” I thought Uh-oh: Here goes. Something treacly and awful. I’m gonna retch.

Sarah laid down a bouquet of flowers on the ice. Then she started skating to a recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” (Remember when sophisticates laughed at Bob Dole for declaring that this was his favorite song?) Everything was perfectly positioned to be gross.

And you know? It wasn’t. Not at all. It was actual tasteful and moving. It was just right. I couldn’t have been more surprised.

And I couldn’t be more pleased about the emergence of Sarah Hughes, now in her prime.

Before leaving the Olympics, a couple of notes: A reader wrote to explain the hilarious predicament in which NBC’s announcers found themselves. It seems that an American woman won the gold medal in bobsled. She was black, and this made her the first black woman ever to win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics. But network announcers and other elites — bound by the latest in P.C. — can’t say “black”; they have to say “African American” (which is separatist, absurd, and insulting, but that’s another topic). So they had no way of communicating the truth: They couldn’t say that the athlete had become the first black woman ever to win a gold medal. They simply didn’t have the words. A few were reduced to saying, “She’s the first African-American woman from any country to win a gold medal”!

Couldn’t have happened to nicer people. Oh, for the days of “Black is beautiful” (“African American is affirming”?) and “I’m black and I’m proud”!

My second and final note is this: I was startled, seeing Prince Albert of Monaco, because he now looks exactly like an Irishman from Philadelphia. I had never seen it so clearly. Put him in a police uniform, and he’d look perfectly natural. The Kelly has won out, big time.

The Italian police foiled a plot to harm — to blow up or bomb — the American embassy in Rome. I have been in that embassy; that somehow — this is illogical — makes it all the more real and sobering to me. All praise is due the police in Rome, as praise was due to the police in Singapore several months ago: They foiled a similar plot.

But the anxious-making thing is that we have to rely on that crack, and perhaps lucky, police work all the time. The terrorists have to get lucky only once. This, of course, sounds like a line from a TV movie, but it’s true.

And the point applies in a larger way to the State of Israel. Not long ago, an Iranian official remarked that a single nuclear blow could take out tiny Israel, whereas an Israeli response would only nick a fraction of the Islamic world. The civilized world — what remains of it — came down on the Iranian for this; but he had spoken a truth.

I’m afraid I offer no comfort here; I can only voice something chilling.

Guess what, y’all? Pennsylvania has a new sister state in Cuba: Matanzas. Isn’t that wonderful? Now Americans and the Castro regime are further allied, and a totalitarian dictatorship has been given fresh legitimacy by free people.

According to the account in the Philadelphia Inquirer, someone had the goodness to question a state rep, Michael Diven, about Cuba’s “tourism apartheid”: The likes of Diven stay in hotels that are forbidden to Cubans, lest outsiders rub shoulders with dangerous people, with dangerous truths to tell. Said Rep. Diven, “Well, not all Americans can stay at the Beverly Hills Hilton either. So, as Americans, we have to recognize that we have many flaws too.”

Wasn’t that a nifty and logical response?

In addition, Diven said the following to Castro: “You said the goal of society should be to keep people well and keep people out of jail. That’s our goal in Pennsylvania too!”

It is an old, continuing, and sickening fact that freedom is bestowed on so many people with no appreciation of it. If only we could trade Michael Diven for the thousands of political prisoners and others who long to live, not under a Communist dictatorship, but in freedom.

As I said, an old story.

But here is some good news: the February issue of The New Criterion. From time to time, I use this column to ballyhoo particular books or particular issues of magazines. Readers may recall that I singled out City Journal’s post-Sept. 11 issue as an extraordinary achievement.

This New Criterion is an extraordinary achievement too, led off, as it is, by three essays of eye-popping brilliance: by Mark Steyn, on “the survival of culture” (this is a continuing New Criterion series); by Roger Kimball, on George Santayana; and by Anthony Daniels, on the Italian Communist aristocrat Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. All three of these writers can be enjoyed in National Review, too, from time to time. To say that these new essays are “anthologizable” is not to say nearly enough. They drip with erudition, style, wit, subtlety, truth. Aphorisms seem to drop from them like coins from stuffed pockets. Here’s a line from Daniels: “Inside every rebel is a dictator trying to get out.” If you read the February New Criterion, you may be astonished that such writing is being done these days. Conservatives in particular are prone to believing that all such excellence is confined to the past.

It may be protested that I myself contribute to The New Criterion: but, believe me, my own offerings have nothing to do with the quality I’m talking about here. If you imagine that I’m exaggerating, I invite you to have a look yourself (and a good place to start would be the magazine’s website, found here). If you read these essays — and much more in this issue — and still believe that I’m exaggerating, well then . . . but to say what I would think of you would be insulting.

I’ve written before about the glaring and dismaying absence of the Twin Towers at the bottom of Manhattan: You look to where they’re supposed to be, and they are simply gone. The first few times this happened to me — from the air, or from one of the bridges crossing into Manhattan — it was shocking and infuriating.

Two days ago, on returning to the city, I looked to the place where the Towers are supposed to be, and felt less shocked. The shock is wearing off — it’s inevitable. I, like many others, have grown used to the taunting sky, all that space where the Towers should be.

No surprise here: but this “growing used to” is a danger with wider implications. To keep people pitched at war fever is not very nice, you might say. But to forget the atrocities that prompted this war, and the evil that we are fighting — and must fight, for the next many years, presumably — is not very nice either.

You know what I’m saying? I felt slightly ashamed, or at least distressed, at my own adjustment to the new situation down at the end of Manhattan.

Can’t end on that, can I? Must be something lighter. How about a language note? I’ll make it quick. When I was a lad, I was taught never, ever to say that one was “nauseous,” unless one wanted to say that one nauseated other people. Feeling queasy, like you’re going to throw up? You feel “nauseated,” not “nauseous.” Something that makes you sick is “nauseous” — nausea-inducing.

To say that you felt “nauseous” was a big joke — word freaks would laugh at you.

So I was surprised the other day when an excellent writer wrote me and mentioned that, owing to an illness, he was “nauseous.” I couldn’t believe that the writer would make such an elementary mistake. And he hadn’t. I looked up “nauseous” in the latest dictionary and found this: “affected with nausea; nauseated.”

Now, I wonder: Is this a recent accommodation to a widespread and ingrained mistake? I will still have a hard time with this “new” usage, if it’s, in fact, new. That is, it will be hard for me to use “nauseous” this way myself. But for all those who do: Do so happily, without guilt (not that you ever felt any)!

And how ’bout doing between two and 300 push-ups? You remember that one, don’t you?