Author Archive E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Version

August 16, 2002 9:00 a.m. The day before. Goin’ West. Du Pont’s the man. And more.

hate to be so partisan. I really do. Many have been the times my grandmother and I have looked at each other and said, “Aren’t we such awful Republicans? I wish we could be more evenhanded.”

I, for one, wish there were an even greater difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, but the claim that they are Tweedledum and Tweedledee is one of the huge false assertions of our time.

Why am I feeling so bitterly anti-Democratic? Let me count the . . . No, seriously, I’m thinking of one issue in particular: This coming Sept. 11, the governor of New York is scheduled to recite the Gettysburg Address at an official commemorative ceremony. The governor of New York happens to be a Republican (George Pataki). We now learn that, the day before — Sept. 10 — the New York Democratic party will air a television commercial in which leading state Democrats — including the two candidates for that party’s gubernatorial nomination — will recite the Gettysburg Address. As the New York Post’s Fred Dicker noted, this is a major act of upstaging. The spokesman for the Democratic party said, “[The ad] is an opportunity for our Democratic office-holders to express condolences in a nonpolitical way.” Asked why no Republicans would appear in the ad, she responded, “This is on behalf of our organization of Democrats.”

As one old Democrat once said about his Republican rival: No class.

Can I give you a quick example of why I like George W. Bush — a lot? He can be prickly, and he’s a “needler,” as he likes to say. He said to the Associated Press last week — on the subject of vacations, must’ve been — “Most Americans don’t sit in Martha’s Vineyard swilling white wine.”

Ouch. This, no doubt, was an allusion to Bill Clinton, who loved to relax (and other things) among the Beautiful People, except during reelection year, when Dick Morris’s poll told him to go camping out West.

George W. Bush is not the kind of president who takes a poll to find out where he should vacation with his family. Say that for him, and more.

I may be simply in an optimistic mood, but it seems to me that more and more people — ordinary, non-ideological, non-political people — are waking up to the insidiousness of “affirmative action,” as we euphemistically describe race discrimination, “reverse” or not.

I direct you to this Tamar Lewin piece in the New York Times. It begins,

Three years ago, when Samantha Comfort asked to enroll her daughter, Elizabeth, in kindergarten at Sisson Elementary School [in Lynn, Mass.], near her day care provider’s home, she did not know that she was starting down a path to litigation that could determine the fate of hundreds of school diversity policies nationwide.

All she knew was that in this racially mixed city north of Boston the school authorities had told her that Elizabeth, who is white, could not go to Sisson.

“They told me there would be no problem if she were a minority,” Ms. Comfort said. “That just boggled my mind. I think it’s good for children to be exposed to all different kinds of people, and I don’t disagree with the idea of racially balanced schools. But I don’t judge people by their race, and I don’t think the schools should either.”

Affirmative action will be on the skids when Americans generally have the confidence to believe and say that they are not evil — not Ku Kluxers — just because they subscribe to the old liberal principles of colorblindness, equality, Americanness, and universality.

To continue in this vein: The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has written a column urging and celebrating an “African-American museum” on the national Mall. Its absence now, he says, is “a shameful omission.”

Well, forgetting that shameful appellation “African-American,” it is a shame that our society will almost surely be further Balkanized and racialized in this way. “African-Americans” — black Americans — don’t need their own museum; they are enshrined in the American museum. They don’t need their own “history month,” either; they are part and parcel of — inseparable from — American history.

Special pleading — the racial “look at me” — as I’ve written roughly 1.3 million times, is the current curse of this country. You could, to be super-affirmative actiony about it, have a museum to every single ethnic group in America on the Mall. But we have, instead, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, who represent us all, through their principles and ideals, even if those principles and ideals have not always been met in practice.

My usual prayer: Save us from race. A desire for a vacation from race — a long one — is not a denial of the racial factor which permeates all of American history; it is a plea for the lessening, and eventual transcendence, of that permeation — one that smells, and spoils life for us, in endless ways.

Let me give you a quick thought on this TIPS controversy. I find good arguments on both sides, libertarian and “conservative” (and I have no wish to start a definition war, believe me). I surely don’t desire a nation of snoops.

But we have said, some of us, that it’s incumbent on all of us to be involved, to fight this war, not merely to rely on the instruments of state to do it for us. (The same is true with crime, by the way — the POH-lees can only do so much.) “Ask not . . .,” and all that jazz.

The TIPS program is one way not to be a passive citizen — merely a “taker” — but an engaged citizen, knowing that our security is the responsibility of more than Don Rumsfeld and the glorious jarheads.

Y’know? A smallish point, but there it is.

Pete du Pont’s column on Wednesday, at OpinionJournal.com, reminded me of something basic: There must, must be a place for the Governor in the Bush administration. Let’s not let one term, and certainly not two, go by without including this man. He is one of the most valuable players we have.

Few people in public life are more admirable than Pete du Pont. He was, for my money — for the average Reaganite’s money, I would say — clearly the best presidential candidate in ’88, though he went nowhere. (So easy to poke class fun at him.) He is a person who genuinely changed his mind about things (I did too, for that matter): As governor of Delaware, he was fairly Rockefellerish, but the Reagan experience made an impression on him. The course of the world made an impression on him. He is not someone with his eyes closed, unwilling to learn, to re-examine.

Besides which, rare — rare — is the man of inherited wealth who understands how the economy works, how money is actually made, what must be done to make others rich. Steve Forbes is another such person. Both men — du Pont and Forbes — are miracles in this way.

As far as I can see, the average person of inherited wealth is more like Ted Kennedy, who says, “I’ve got my pile — was born with it — so now let’s socialize.”

Du Pont for . . . something.

Before going any further, I must direct your attention to a marvelous article in the current New Republic (that is, in the 8/19 New Republic). Called “Refugee Status,” it is by Yossi Klein Halevi, and it concerns the plight of gay Palestinians. It is, in a word, ghastly (their plight, that is). Palestinian gays living in the P.A. are having to flee — often, to flee with their lives — to Israel. Typical, isn’t it? If an Arab wants decent freedom, he has to go to Israel. Why this point is lost on so many, I’m not sure.

Anyway, the article is a must-read: and it is an excellent question why more is not made of the treatment of homosexuals in the Arab world. Our Left — and our establishment — make such a big deal of it here. It seems that, for every hiss of “fag” on a school playground, there are five marches and 50 op-ed pieces. But how many Matthew Shepards are there in the Arab world, or in Cuba?

Here is another right-wing pet peeve — another gripe of us far-Right loonies: that the vicious persecution of gays in Cuba is not enough — not remotely — to make our Left think twice about Castro (although the film Before Night Falls, about a gay poet, made a mite of difference, for a second).

Gertrude Himmelfarb, among others, said way back at the time of the O. J. Simpson verdict that “race trumped gender.” Similarly, to be an enemy of America — or of Israel, apparently — is to do with your gays whatever the hell you please.

Some more piece recommendations: The best thing I have seen on the iniquity of what Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe comes from Fergal Keane, writing in The Spectator. The Wall Street Journal’s Claudia Rosett is known as a China expert, owing to her experience there, but she is equally strong on Araby, as evidenced by this excellent piece on the lack of freedom and democracy in that region. Finally, don’t miss Myles Kantor’s interview with Juan J. López, at frontpagemag.com. López is the University of Illinois at Chicago academic who has been denied tenure essentially for being anti-Castro (or pro-democracy, pro-human rights — that’s a better way to put it).

Care for a book recommendation? It came to me while I was reading the recent obit of Duke Dejan, the old New Orleans jazzman. One of the best biographies I’ve read — about anybody — is Laurence Bergreen’s on Louis Armstrong, called Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. I wrote a long review of it, years ago (meaning, about six years ago — the book’s not that old, and neither am I — yet). It painted a picture of New Orleans in the first decades of the 20th century that’s hard to forget. And New Orleans itself, of course, is hard to forget. Everything about that biography is masterly, and “lingers on,” as the old song says.

Look, I can’t remember yesterday; if I remember that book, it’s something.

A final word: Has there ever — ever — been a more effective ad campaign than Apple’s against Microsoft? Both on television and in print. Absolutely devastating.

I have only one thought: It’d better be true. I hope to high heaven it’s true.

Sure, I know it’s advertising. “Truth in advertising”? Bah.

Still: It’d better be true. A campaign so utterly destructive, so utterly, evilly perfect as that — it’d better, at least to a significant degree, be true.

The campaign’s so good, it almost makes me feel sorry for the other product.