Victims and victimizers, just plain “Osama,” Columbia’s new prez, &c.

October 12, 2001 9:40 a.m.

once heard the liberal Democratic commentator Mark Shields tell the following joke on television: Two liberals are walking down the road, when they come upon a man in a ditch, who has been severely beaten, who is bleeding, broken, moaning, left for dead. The one liberal turns to the other and says, “We must find the people who did this. They need help.”

I have had frequent occasion to think of this joke, mainly in connection with our domestic-policy debates (crime, etc.). But it also popped into my head the other day, in thinking of certain reactions to “the events of September 11.” To some people, what the attacks meant chiefly was that we must be humbler before our enemies, and understand them better, and feel their pain. Of course, understanding is vital — but the kind of understanding that leads to victory, not to excuses and rationalization. We should be under no illusion that we can make our enemies love us. If they don’t love us now, after all we’ve demonstrated to the world, particularly from World War II on, when will they? What could change their hearts? The abandonment and subsequent destruction of Israel? Not even that could sate that hate, it seems.

And then on the homefront, there is racism, or, better, “racism.” Racism, we will always have with us. We will certainly have it as a staple, or the centerpiece, of our commentary. Some seem almost disappointed not to find a violent reaction against Arab-Americans, seem disappointed not to find an orgy of jingoism, to tut-tut over. And every slight, every hostile e-mail (you should see some of my mail!), every incident is played up, for all it is worth. Mark Singer’s piece on Dearborn, Mich., in the current New Yorker is a case in point. Oh, we must have victims in all this (and we don’t mean the dead in New York and Washington).

America the Racist is a consoling, salving theme for many on the left. We’re constantly told that, on 9/11, “everything changed,” and change, of course, can be scary (how many times have you heard that? especially when a liberal is pretending pity for a conservative?). Some, though, refuse to change, grabbing for the old, familiar blanket of racism: No matter what, they’ll always have that to fall back on. To them, Arabs and Arab-Americans are no good unless they can be victims. And thank heavens for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson! Without them to hate, one might have to concentrate on the terrorists.

It’s been said before, better than I can say it, but it ought to be said again: The only solution to rage, bitterness, and that peculiar, combustible mixture of self-hatred and self-love in the Middle East is freedom — the freedom of human rights, civil rights, democracy, pluralism, markets, the whole nine yards. Wouldn’t it be loverly.

Greg Robinson, in his new book on Japanese internment, By Order of the President, writes of one government investigator after Pearl Harbor who found that the poor Japanese-Americans were “pathetically eager” to join the war effort. They wanted, in large measure, to prove their bona fides as Americans — and be done with that cursed hyphen. It is pathetic, indeed, to have a situation in which immigrant Americans or sons of immigrants are “pathetically eager” to join a war effort — but what a contrast with the young people in Brooklyn interviewed in the New York Times and elsewhere who pledge to go fight for “Osama.”

Many of us who have always opposed a national ID card — shrunk from it as a step toward 1984 — are now having at least to take the argument for such a card seriously. Larry Ellison, in his recent op-ed on the subject for the Wall Street Journal, was serious indeed. This came up in the early Reagan administration, and there is a hilarious account of the president’s brushing it off in Martin Anderson’s book Revolution. (James Watt, the hated former interior secretary, was particularly adamant against a national ID card.) The idea of the card still gives a person like me the creeps — but the arguments for it are neither frivolous nor un-American.

A word about Bush, or “Bushie,” as his wife calls him. We hear that Democrats are increasingly glad that he is in the White House, rather than someone else, with a “D” after his name. Care for a little anecdote? I was talking last night with a friend who is a pillar of the New York cultural establishment, with all that that entails (Gore voter, “pro-choice,” etc.). He freely acknowledged — volunteered — that he was pleased that Bush was in office now, and that he was especially appreciative of the advisers around him. “My wife says that Rumsfeld scares her,” he said. “But I like his directness.”

How many conversations like that do you suppose are taking place around the country?

I don’t know about you, but I’m not crazy about the use of “Osama” — just one name, “Osama,” like “Cher” or “Madonna” (or, hell, “Newt,” or “Ike” ). It makes him into sort of an idol, I think. Then too, I didn’t much like “Saddam” — made him sound like a pop or cult figure. “Bin Laden” will do for me. The mobs in the Middle Eastern streets say “Osama”; that’s why I shrink from doing so.

Freedom-loving Cubans, of course, despise the use of the name “Fidel.” It is mainly Castroites and fellow-travelers who say “Fidel.” Freedom-loving Cubans also despise the use of “President” in reference to Castro — as though he had anything in common with democratic presidents. (Remember when American broadcasters of the Olympics insisted on referring to Communist East Germany as “the German Democratic Republic,” the regime’s chosen name? Every time Bob Costas said it, I wanted to ralph.)

Speaking of my Cuban friends, they’ve been desperately trying to remind people that, when it comes to terrorist states, Castro’s regime is high on the list — literally: the State Department’s list. Fidel (there I go) has long been a supporter of Arab terrorism, as of other terrorism (but most especially his own). So if Uncle Sam is in a mood to get tough with terrorists and their sponsors . . . ah, but that is too fond a dream.

My colleague John Podhoretz points out that, in the current drama, many people are playing to type — the Madison, Wisc., school system is (basically) banning the Pledge of Allegiance; the ACLU is going to war over “God Bless America.” Take heart: It’s not true that 9/11 changed everything!

The collective Arab governments have appointed the terrorist regime in Syria to sit on the U.N. Security Council, which reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s reminder: The U.N. is not the united nations, but united governments, or regimes.

You have noticed, I trust, that Ronald Wilson Reagan has now lived longer than any other president in history, passing the second president, John Adams.

I call your attention to a remarkable piece in Time magazine by one Hazem Saghiyeh, a columnist for an Arabic newspaper in London. It is titled “It’s Not All America’s Fault” (don’t you love that “All”?). The piece begins, “Millions of Arabs and Muslims hold U.S. foreign policy responsible for the calamity of Sept. 11 [I like that “calamity,” too — just like the San Francisco earthquake was a calamity]. Is it? The answer is: yes, but also no.” The piece continues in this vein, and I will not quote more. But what is noteworthy is that this must be Time’s idea of a moderate Arab voice — and who can argue with them?

Okay, a little non-war talk. A correspondent in Taiwan, Dan Bloom, alerts me to a fantastic recent item. I’ll let Reuters do the reporting: “Britain’s Royal Navy mistakenly flew a Taiwanese flag during an official visit by members of the Chinese navy, the Ministry of Defence has admitted. The incident happened on Monday on board the HMS Ark Royal, which played host to a delegation headed by a Chinese admiral on a goodwill visit to Portsmouth, in southern England. ‘The Ark Royal was preparing to welcome the party and for a short period of time the Taiwan flag was flown,’ an MoD spokeswoman said. ‘The mistake was pointed out to the navy by a Chinese officer and the flag was taken down.’ She said the commander of the Ark Royal had written a personal letter of apology to the Chinese admiral, who had accepted it as an error.”

Ah, but would that it had not been an error, but a thumb in the Red eye!

I’m sorry, but I just have to blurt something out: Is Rush Limbaugh great or what? If he’s not the coolest man in the country . . .

Then, to a man who is decidedly not the coolest in the country: Lee Bollinger is, instead, one of the most famous, and most notorious, academic administrators we have. He has been president of the University of Michigan, but he has moved up, accepting the presidency of Columbia. Bollinger became famous, or infamous, for promoting and defending admissions policies of naked racial preference. His devotion to race, and his opposition to equality of opportunity and colorblindness, would do the old Boer Republic proud. When it comes to judging people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, Lee Bollinger is practically unsurpassed.

But he is an amusing fellow. He gave an extraordinary convocation for incoming freshmen in Ann Arbor this year, as reported by the local paper, the Ann Arbor News (or, as we used to call it, Pravda West): “First, [Bollinger] told students, understand that the more you know, the less you know. Become comfortable with ignorance. It’s too easy, he said, ‘to ignore the depths of our dumbness.’ Four years from now, if the students understand this, the university will have done its job. . . .

"Second, he said, understand that the right answer does not exist. Like Hamlet and Moby Dick, things are complicated. ‘Don’t let yourself be trapped by the natural wish for the answer,’ he said.

“Students liked the third piece of advice. Don’t study too much, said Bollinger. . . . Fourth, he said, procrastination may not be as evil as its reputation purports. ‘Don’t underestimate the benefits of putting things off until the last moment,’ Bollinger said. ‘Certainly, it is our natural tendency.’”

The reporter concluded with an interview with a student: “Bollinger’s words helped ease the guilt of spending time away from the books, said Wheatley Coleman, a junior. ‘I liked the fact that he said we shouldn’t study too much,’ she said. ‘The stuff that you remember from college isn’t how you studied for organic chemistry for three hours.’” Well, that’s certainly true.

Really, Lee Bollinger is the perfect modern university president, and it is no wonder he is so sought-after. He is utterly, perfectly consonant with his age. No right-wing satirist — no Kingsley Amis — could make him up. He is beyond satire.

I have a tiny bit of personal experience with Bollinger. When he was dean of Michigan’s law school, I worked in the university’s athletic department, and one of the things I did was act as an attendant at the school’s Track and Tennis Building, where people would come in to jog. We altered the direction in which people would jog on the track, to give regulars a little variation. Bollinger, however, refused to go along with this. He insisted on jogging in the same direction always, no matter what the rule was for that day, complicating things and bewildering and annoying fellow joggers.

Now, you can look at this in two different ways (at least): It may show that Bollinger is an exemplar of good old rule-defying American independence, someone who refuses to run with the herd. Or it could simply mean that Bollinger is an inconsiderate prima-donna jerk.

I won’t let on which way I happen to lean.

A quick bit on the New York mayoral race. There is a woman here named Hazel Dukes, who is, to use the New York Post’s invaluable phrase, a racial arsonist. I first became aware of her in 1987, during the Robert Bork hearings. Sen. Moynihan of New York was saying he was undecided about the nomination, and Dukes, who was then with the New York NAACP, said that once she “got with his people,” Moynihan would step in line and vote to defeat Bork (which he did, for whatever reason — Moynihan just about never bucked the Left).

Well, Hazel Dukes is still Hazel Dukes, sadly. The leftist Mark Green, opponent of the leftist Fernando Ferrer in the Democratic primary, ran an ad that said the following: “At a time when our city is pulling together, Ferrer’s been criticized for running a campaign to divide our city.”

That’s it — the tamest stuff. And here is the response of Dukes, a Ferrer supporter: The ad is “the height of racism. I woke up and thought I was in Mississippi. This is what they do in Mississippi. They do lynching in the way they used to do hanging people, but they lynch you with news ads.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is why it’s pretty much impossible to have a discussion of race relations in the United States. The Dukeses are just too strong, and nuts.

One nice thing is that Americans from all over the country have expressed support for New York City. There has always been an anti-New York current in the land, and it seems to have gone away, at least for now. I saw a couple the other night — visitors to New York — sporting buttons that said “Oregon [heart] NY.” (The button included pictures of tall, Oregon-like trees.) I also enjoyed very much the cartoon in The New Yorker that had the American Gothic couple, standing there with their pitchforks and wearing “I [heart] New York” T-shirts. As for New Yorkers themselves, they love their city all the more, as exemplified by the new sign, “I [heart] NY More Than Ever!” These days, corny is cool (although, for some of us, it always has been).

Do you feel just a bit for Barry Bonds and Ricky Henderson, who have achieved such milestones, with so little attention or fanfare?

Look, I’m about as partisan and W.-loving as they come, but I have to admit that the Democrats have a point about the rebate checks: “Tax Relief for America’s Workers,” straight from “Austin, Texas.” That’s what I read on my own check. It is remarkable.

In August, or whenever those things started coming out, I had one liberal Democratic friend say to me, delightedly, “I got my George Bush check today! And I’ve already spent it!” She was un-ironic, unsarcastic — that’s what she called it, and she was just thrilled.

Seems a million years ago.

A little mail. In response to the previous Impromptus, a reader writes, “As a young soldier in the late 1970s, I was trained as an Arab linguist. To keep up with current usage, and to have non-classified stuff we could work with, we had Arabic newspapers and radio recordings. What we usually got was Al-Ahram and Voice of Cairo, which is the equivalent of the New York Times and CBS. And what was in there was vicious. Israel was referred to only as ‘the enemy,’ there were constant references to the ‘international Jew conspiracy,’ and the phrase ‘the final solution’ appeared so often we had a shorthand symbol for it in translating. And this was from the mainstream, official Arab press.”

Another knowledgeable correspondent wrote to say that, when Arab spokesmen and others say “Jews,” this usually gets translated “Israelis” in English, though, in Arabic, there is a separate word for “Israelis.” This all comes under the rubric of: We must, in this crisis, understand what is going on in the Arab world, in particular through its press, both official and unofficial. And we need to know without any mediating covering up or softening.

A correspondent in Canada contributes the following remarkable report: “I would like to share a racial-profiling anecdote with you. Last week, I participated in the Canadian equivalents of Talk Back Live and Crossfire. We discussed the highly charged topic of immigration reform in Canada. To give you some background, anyone who states he is in favour of stricter immigration rules is immediately branded a racist in the land of the True North, strong and free. Given my support of an overhauled and security-conscious immigration and refugee policy, I was accused of bigotry. After the show went off the air, one of the panelists who favour the ‘don’t worry, be happy’ approach to Canada’s immigration policy asked if I was an immigrant or if my parents were. I told her that my parents were immigrants. She then claimed that, according to my views, my parents would not have been allowed in Canada. At this point, I took great pleasure in informing her that she had racially profiled me. Based on the colour of my skin, she assumed that my parents had come to Canada from South Asia or the Middle East and told me as much. I painstakingly explained to her that, in fact, my parents had emigrated from England. Moreover, Canada and England have always had the same head of state (Her Majesty). She was quite shocked to hear this and apologized profusely. I graciously accepted the apology and told her that I expected no less from condescending, patronizing rainbow coalitionists.”

What a marvelous person, this correspondent.

Several readers took offense at the letter-writer who joked that, rather than Colin Powell, the luckiest man in the world was Ringo Starr. One reader wrote, “Anyone who put up with John Lennon for more than a weekend deserves anything he can derive from it. I met John Lennon at closing time one night (1973?) outside the Rainbow Club on the Sunset Strip. He was groping a young woman in a very crude manner. My fellow inebriate (we were 19 at the time) tapped him on the shoulder and inquired, ‘Hey, John. Are ya getting’ a little instant karma?’ That led to a torrent of abusive insults that I shall never forget. Didn’t someone once say, ‘Show me a poet and I’ll show you a sh**’? Well, Mr. Starkee might not have been the poet in that band; but I once heard him interviewed on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air,’ and he came across as nothing less than a perfectly likable gentleman.”

An NRO reader and a “Fresh Air” listener too!

Finally, in connection with terrorism, I mentioned the French adage, “Appetite comes with eating” (L’appétit vient en mangeant). A Shakespeare-minded reader wrote in to say, “There is a line in Hamlet (I, ii) when Hamlet says of his besotted mother’s relationship with his uncle,

Why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.”

This caused me to remember a line in the great “Age cannot wither her” speech in Antony and Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies . . .

My, ain’t we highbrow today!