A major cultural change, a little econ. lesson, the best, most imperiled nominee, &c.

November 20, 2001 9:00 a.m.

adies and gentlemen, the war is going pretty well. My evidence? Saturday Night Live — every (lazy) journalist’s cultural barometer — is ridiculing the press and making the secretary of defense look pretty cool.

Last Saturday’s show began with a (mock) press conference conducted by Rumsfeld. The press asked questions like, “We’re getting reports of U.S. Special Forces being dropped into Taliban areas with camouflage and night-vision goggles. This means that Taliban soldiers won’t be able to see our troops, but we’ll be able to see them. Is that fair?” Another reporter says, “We are being told that Northern Alliance forces are firing back at Taliban troops who have fired on them, even though the Taliban troops missed. Does the U.S. condone that?”

And so on. The look on Rumsfeld’s face is priceless — just like the real one. After the SecDef bloodies up these doofuses some, one reporter says, ruefully, poutingly, “Colin Powell’s nice.” Yeah, maybe: and he’s wrong, too, at least next to Rumsfeld.

So Saturday Night Live is “with us” — a dollop of good news, to go with the knocking off of Atef, etc.

Perhaps you, like me, were moved by a front-page story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. It was about exiled folk musicians from Afghanistan, trying to keep the flame of their culture and art alive in neighboring Pakistan. When Kabul was “liberated” — their word — they huddled around the TV, and they could scarcely believe their ears: “‘When I heard the sound of music, I cried,’ said Gul Zaman, a master of the harmonium.” The Taliban had terrorized musicians, along with everyone else, smashing up their instruments and forbidding them to make a peep. Said the reporter, Steve LeVine, “Now, for the first time in five years, the possibility of playing in their homeland again is suddenly at hand.” A second musician — Ghulam Haider — said, “I feel like a bird set free.”

Strange, all that grumping from the American press when Kabul fell — was liberated. A regime that won’t allow music is a regime that won’t allow most things good.

Remember when Reagan used to say that Lenin refused to listen to music, for fear it would make him go soft, make him lose his revolutionary zeal? I don’t know whether it’s true: but I enjoyed it when Reagan said it, and I think the spirit is right.

Take a look at this short news item, please, then permit me to make a brief comment:

“The state [of New York] has placed a rush order for 300,000 ‘I Love New York’ buttons — although it turns out the popular items are made in Mexico. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, demand for the buttons has been high, causing the state to place an emergency order with Promotions First, Inc., a Saratoga Springs [N.Y.] distribution firm. But while Promotions First provides the pins, they are manufactured in Mexico . . . The revelation left some New York button vendors [and others] incredulous.”

What leaves me incredulous is why other people should be incredulous, or the least dismayed. Once again, class: There is nothing un-American about trade, nothing un-American or unpatriotic about having our needs and wants supplied by those best equipped to supply them, no matter where they live. Buttons from Mexico — or Taiwan or Timbuktu — are as American as apple pie from Washington State or baseball at Wrigley Field. This story reminded me of the calamity of our elementary- and secondary-school economic education: There isn’t any, I guess.

It is the libertarian in me that adores (say) Thomas Sowell. It is the anti-libertarian in me that says: Americans should be forced to read Tom Sowell.

Christopher Dodd has vowed that Otto Reich will never get a hearing. Reich, as you know, is President Bush’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. Dodd is the leftist senator from Connecticut who was wrong about everything in Latin America in the 1980s — and is wrong still. Reich is a Cuban exile whose father had fled to that island from Nazi Europe — and had to flee again when the totalitarian and murderer Castro seized power. Reich is an experienced Latin America diplomat, a first-rate analyst, and an inspiring American patriot. He is ideally qualified for the position to which he has been nominated. Dodd, from his perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is committed to keeping him out — to denying him even the chance for a hearing.

There is only one thing that can save this excellent and vital nomination: The president needs to climb into his bully pulpit and yell for it, and so does the secretary of state, Colin Powell, who is the media’s favorite member of this administration. If they don’t do this — war in Afghanistan or no war — they are very wrong.

Lemme propose a candidate for Title of the Month: It is over a book review in The (London) Spectator, a review of a new biography of Peggy Guggenheim, the great art collector whose life was saddened by (what she thought was) an unfortunate schnozz, and a less-than-successful operation on it. The title? “Good Eye, Bad Nose.”

Sometimes I think there’s no difference between me and the guy down at the bowling alley with beer in his head and chili stains on his T-shirt, when it comes to certain political opinions (and T-shirts too, for that matter). And do you know what? We’re not wrong.

I thought of this — for the thousandth time — the other day when I spotted Edward Said at another of New York’s major cultural institutions. Here he is, this hater of America and glorifier of all things Arab and Third World, living his life in our principal city, flitting from concert hall to opera house to museum . . . and I’m thinking, “If he hates us so much — thinks we’re such a despoiler of the world — why does he live here, enjoying the fruits of liberty and capitalism and liberalism and pluralism and democracy and the rule of law and the other things he evidently despises? Why doesn’t he live in, say, one of the 22 Arab states, which he holds so innocent?”

V. S. Naipaul says that the present conflict involves Arabs and other Third Worlders united in one thing: the desire for a green card. It seems that famed and decorated professors, too, are happy to dwell in Satan’s bosom.

We are all taught to revile the simplistic, jingoistic “Love it or leave it” — but, now especially, it suggests a certain wisdom. If “Love it or leave it” is too strong, how about, “Don’t wish us ill and count us the bane of the universe — or leave it”?

I invite you on a brief walk down Memory Lane. As I have related in this column before, I was once enrolled in the Near Eastern Studies department of the University of Michigan, with the thought of being an Arabist. I had there a young professor named Joel Beinin, who was a Marxist hothead (and therefore distinguishable from no one). He had nothing but contempt for Israel, was well to the “left” of the PLO, and was perfectly representative of the extremism of his milieu.

One day, at a particular forum, he gave what I can only describe as a kind of beer-hall speech. Shouting and pumping his fist, he admonished the Arabs to forget any negotiating with Israel and to stay true to pure radicalism. (The crowd was full of students from the Middle East, who cheered raucously.) Later, an older professor said to Beinin, “No one gets Arabs riled up like you do.”

It was this sort of thing that sickened me, for it had nothing to do with scholarship, and was both intellectually and spiritually ugly. I left the department.

Why do I revisit all this? Because I read the other day that Prof. Beinin — who has spent the last many years at Stanford — is the new president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, a group that John J. Miller perceptively criticized in a recent issue of NR.

Oh, well.

The Nov. 19 New Yorker has an interesting piece by a Nasra Hassan on Palestinian suicide bombers. But it is a . . . weirdly non-judgmental piece. It is spookily dispassionate about these murderers. And in a case like this, extreme, clinical dispassion — or objectivity — can almost blur into sympathy.

The piece throughout refers to the question of why these men should “blow themselves up.” I couldn’t help thinking — each time I read this — “I don’t care terribly much about their blowing themselves up, although this is a curious phenomenon. I care about their blowing other people up, these [expletive deleted] murderers.”

Also in that issue is a piece by the great and magisterial Bernard Lewis, titled “The Revolt of Islam.” One passage in particular arrested me:

“One of the most surprising revelations in the memoirs of those who held the American Embassy in Teheran from 1979 to 1981 was that their original intention had been to hold the building and the hostages for only a few days. They changed their minds when statements from Washington made it clear that there was no danger of serious action against them. They finally released the hostages, they explained, only because they feared that the new President, Ronald Reagan, might approach the problem ‘like a cowboy.’”

That single passage says infinitely much: about foreign policy, about defense policy, about military relations, about human beings.

I have sounded this note before: After Somalia, after Khobar Towers, after the embassy bombings, after the USS Cole — why shouldn’t the terrorists have felt invincible, exempt from “serious action,” as Lewis says?

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert had an eye-catching piece last Thursday: “Poison Politics.” The title referred to racial politics — barely distinguishable from our politics generally — and it began, “Have New York Democrats learned any lessons from the mayoral debacle of 2001? Or are they crazy enough to continue drinking from the poisonous well of ethnic politics?” It ended, “Every group has a grievance. And sometimes it’s legitimate. But right now there are other matters on the table. Important matters. So let’s give it a rest.”

Speaking of giving it a rest, here’s hoping that Bob Herbert takes his own medicine. He has “drunk” many, many times from that “poisonous well.” In fact, that well is his mainstay. As Ted Cruz wrote in a powerful piece on our site, Herbert devoted two columns to the case of Judge Mike Luttig’s father, John Luttig, who was murdered by a thug in Texas. Herbert argued against the death penalty for that thug, and his columns were laced with racial arsenic (the murderer is black). Herbert even noted — gratuitously and nauseatingly — that the late Mr. Luttig had been driving a Mercedes-Benz at the time he was carjacked and murdered. (The murderer tried to kill Mr. Luttig’s wife, too, but she survived when, after she was shot, she pretended to be dead.)

Give it a rest, indeed — and not just in time of war.

In the current New York magazine, Michael Wolff has an absorbing piece on David Halberstam, one of the most influential journalists and writers of the last, oh, couple of generations. One thing rings false, however — is false. Wolff writes, “While they are at opposite political extremes, Halberstam reminds me of Dick Cheney. It’s their lack of humor, irony . . . It’s a certain pleasure they take in grimness. I wonder if, together, they don’t represent a new sort of man . . . No frills. No fun.”

I can’t speak for Halberstam, but oh, is Cheney fun, and absolutely hilarious — one of the wittiest men around. (Most smart men are witty; certainly all witty men are smart — we can debate these propositions another time.) Did you see Cheney in debate versus Lieberman? Not only masterly (not masterful — we’ll debate that one sometime later, too), but brilliantly funny.

P.S. Cheney at a “political extreme”? I would be happy to introduce Mr. Wolff to people waaaaay to the right of Richard B. Cheney. But he wouldn’t want to meet them, necessarily.

And now a word from Strunk & White: Said Colin Powell, on This Week this week, “It’s getting harder for [bin Laden] to hide, as more and more territory is removed from Taliban control. I don’t think there’s any country in the region that would be anxious to give him guest privileges if he showed up.”

Oh, they’d be anxious, all right! But not eager. (Good night, Prof. Strunk.)

Wanna see a bad news sentence? Okay, this comes from a recent article in the New York Times, about press freedom in Czechoslovakia (or the Czech Republic — what a pain): “[The prime minister] threatened to sue the magazine and put it out of business.” One couldn’t tell whether the prime minister had threatened to sue the magazine and force it out of business, as a result — or had threatened the magazine and actually succeeded in putting it out of business.

Just sayin’.

Ah, childhood, washer-away of all sins! Peter Bart is the “embattled Variety editor” whose career was threatened when he was reported to have made racist and anti-homosexual remarks. His ex-wife now comes to write in Los Angeles Magazine about Bart’s troubled, emotionally scarring childhood. Reminds me of what Hillary Clinton said about her husband in that notorious — and truly fascinating — Talk magazine interview/apologia: It all had to do with Mama and Grandmama.

If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, how ’bout a “scarring” childhood (and scars are healed wounds, of course)?

Democrats today are referring to conservatives as “the Taliban wing” of the Republican party. Some conservatives are actually complaining about it, instead of wincing and smiling weakly. I remember, back in the ’80s, when Lebanon was heating up, that Sam Donaldson, on the Brinkley show, would take great delight in referring to “the Hezbollah wing of the Republican party.” The smile on his face couldn’t have been prouder.

I thought it was wrong then. And it’s certainly tiresome now.

Now for a little mail. In a previous Impromptus, I mentioned the problem of MEGO — “My eyes glaze over” — when it comes to Israeli deaths-by-terror. Wrote one reader:

“Speaking of the MEGO factor, I think it is brilliant of the administration to keep making visits to Ground Zero and reminding people what took place there. I know you in N.Y. have it ‘in your face’ every day as this gaping, still-smoldering hole, but it is so important and so necessary that the rest of the country and the rest of the world have our faces rubbed in it, especially as a counterpoint to the appeasers, the war-wimps, and the carping ‘it’s not going well’ idiots who’d dilute our efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere. That’s why, in a time when the networks have banned the re-running of the planes-into-the-Towers footage, we need to see that pit over and over and think about those dead over and over, and why the Bush folks are doing so well at keeping the MEGO factor out, unlike, alas, those in Israel, who do indeed suffer from the ‘normalization’ of the wicked and catastrophic.”

Also, I mentioned that, after Hillary Clinton was booed by policemen and firemen in Madison Square Garden, a Clinton aide had said, “What do you expect? These are people who listen to right-wing talk radio all day and think Hillary killed Vince Foster.” I hazarded that maybe — just maybe — these men weren’t so crazy about lying, hypocrisy, lawlessness, egotism, etc.

A reader wrote: “While you have a point about their not liking lies and hypocrisy, in the case of the NYPD, there’s more. Recall that Ms. Clinton referred to the [accidental and tragic] Amadou Diallo shooting as a ‘murder,’ before the officers involved had even been tried. In addition, a color guard from the NYPD was heckled and booed at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. New York cops have long memories. The convention incident, particularly, is what makes me feel just slightly irked when I hear Democrats lavishly praising the valor of the NYPD. Sure, now you come around.”

Uh-huh.

And finally, a reader writes, “If you’re going to mention both Leonard Bernstein and Jesse Jackson in the same column, please, please warn your readers in the first paragraph. Just one of those individuals is enough to induce nausea and anger, and to encounter them both while eating lunch is just too much.”

Gotcha.