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October 7, 2002 9:00 a.m. “Patrice Lumumba Ford,” “What will the Gentiles think?,” Did Teddy pull a Clinton?, &c.

ou know, you just can’t make this stuff up: The news outpaces anyone’s satirical ability. One of the “homegrown terrorists” just apprehended? Patrice Lumumba Ford. Beautiful. And one of his confrères was taken into custody in Dearborn, Mich., our Arab-American stronghold and my old stomping grounds.

If I had put “Patrice Lumumba Ford” and Dearborn in some novel, you’d accuse me of crudeness and heavy-handedness. (And, frankly, it never occurred to me until this moment that Ford, the auto company, is, of course, headquartered in Dearborn.)

Ah, the associations. The reality.

By the way, certain Michiganders — of long standing and unimpeachable authenticity — pronounce the name of that city “Dearburn,” with the accent strongly on the first syllable.

Just so you know.

The Jews are worried sick again — worried that the world will blame them. They need not worry: The world will, as always. It never lets you down.

It is an article of faith among anti-warriors of the right and left (but perhaps mainly right) that the Jews are getting us into this thing. So Shimon Peres, Jewry’s foremost worrywart (is Rabbi Hertzberg dead?), tells an audience, “It’s not for us to appear that we are urging war. We should contribute very little by doing so. By being too vocal, we should only harm the U.S. position vis-à-vis the Arab world. I wouldn’t want any American mother to think the decision was taken because we urged them to do so.”

A nice thought, Shimon — but you’re blamed already. Just suck it up and deal with it. That’s what it means, in part, to be a Jew today — or most anytime.

Iran’s long-range missiles were developed specifically to hit Israel, the head of Iran’s missile program, Ahmed Wahid, revealed recently.

Always nice to be thought of, isn’t it?

In his column yesterday, Thomas Friedman expressed a common Democratic (indeed, socialist) point of view: that tax cuts are selfish, harmful, and, in a sense, unpatriotic. He said, “Where are the Democrats who are ready to argue forcefully that the future tax cuts that Mr. Bush pushed through are utterly reckless and need to be repealed — because they will erode the resources the government needs to remain a Great Power in this age of uncertainty? [Of course, these tax cuts have kept us out of even thicker economic soup.] And they send a terrible signal to our kids, corporate leaders and the world: that all that matters is short-term, me-first gratification.”

I have pressed this point before: To some people, every tax increase is an advance in civilization, decency, humanity; and every tax cut is a backward step toward barbarism, cruelty, night. According to this view — one must infer — a society with an income tax of 50 percent is better than one with 40 percent, or 49 percent. A society with a tax of 75 percent must be just a smidge better than one with 74, and a whole lot better than one with 40. A society that goes for the whole enchilada? 100 percent? That must be Nirvana.

I’ve often meant to ask such liberals (though it hurts to use that word, “liberals,” in such a context): What level of tax would you demand before you consented that America was a great and decent society? What level of tax would you like to see? Come on, now, no ducking — lay it out on the line: Gimme a number. I want a number.

And after we have this number — this level of taxation — we have to ask, “On whom will you impose it?” “Liberals” always mean to tax the rich — the big bad richies. But they tend to find that there aren’t enough richies to go around — to get the job done.

One of the reasons I favor a flat tax is that everyone pays — everyone contributes something, everyone’s part of the commonweal, not just a “taker” but a “giver.” Everyone pays the same percentage, fair and square. The kid at McDonald’s contributes his mite; and so does Sandy Weill (chairman of CitiCorp — or is it CitiBank? Ah, who cares).

But, of course, that sort of thinking causes some people to break out in hives — and, strangely, they’re usually the same people who regard themselves as nice ’n’ egalitarian.

Yesterday, the New York Times had a neat piece on famous (or infamous) political exits — this took off on the recent, and ignominious, Torricelli exit.

I was struck by Teddy Kennedy’s words, after Chappaquiddick (these weren’t all exits — some of them were behind-saving efforts, such as this one). On July 25, 1969, he said, “There is no truth, no truth whatsoever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers [Mary Jo’s] regarding that evening. Nor was I driving under the influence of liquor.”

I had a thought: Had Teddy pulled a Clinton avant la lettre? When he said “liquor,” was it because he was really loaded up on wine — and did not regard “the grape” as part of “liquor”? Pardon me for thinking this way, but our last prez conditioned me to it. He said, “I was never alone in the hotel with her” — of course: There were bellboys, clerks, other guests, etc.

Teddy went on to say, “Although my doctors informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion as well as shock, I do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either on the physical and emotional trauma brought on by the accident or on anyone else.”

Of course, in reciting these words, he was doing just that: deflecting blame. A tawdry technique. A tawdry speech. A tawdry man.

(Pardon the rhetoric.)

Another delightful Times piece, this one on how the longshoremen are getting richer and richer. I mean, really rich: In the words of Steven Greenhouse, “Full-time West Coast dockworkers who load and unload ships make on average nearly $100,000 a year, while clerks who keep track of cargo movements average $120,000.” And the average benefits package comes out to $42,000 a year.

But what really struck me was that they get Harry Bridges’s birthday off. He was the great Red leader of the longshoremen’s union. Of course, he was always coy about whether he was a Party member, but it hardly mattered. And now everyone has his birthday off. His is the christ of the longshoremen’s movement, and his birthday is their Christmas.

Perfect, I think.

Hartland DeM. Molson has died, and his Times obit is here. Molson was the Canadian brewer who also owned the Montreal hockey team. What I love about this, in particular, is that, for many years, the man in charge of the Times’s obits was a brilliant fellow named Robert McG. Thomas. So now, whenever I see an unusual middle initial (or more), I think of him. And I was quite taken with Hartland DeM. Molson, R.I.P.

I have just finished reading, and reviewing (for the forthcoming NR), Linda Chavez’s memoir, An Unlikely Conservative. It is — not to beat around the bush (or should I say “Bush,” in her instance?) — a brilliant book. Someone called David Horowitz’s memoir, Radical Son, the first great autobiography of that generation. Well, this is a second. I plan to write more about it in a future Impromptus.

Chavez came up through the ranks of the Left — in academia and politics — and was slowly but surely repelled by the Left. A thought occurred to me, not for the first time: Thank goodness the Left is so awful — it has driven so many of the best people to our side.

Which reminded me of something else: George W. Bush had, let’s face it, a dreadful first debate against Al Gore in the Fall of 2000. But Gore, miraculously, behaved like a complete jerk, kind of wiping out W.’s wipe-out.

Which led me to say: Thank goodness Gore’s such a $%&@# — he saved our bacon.

.

You’ve seen the Democratic cartoon that has Bush pushing a little old lady in a wheelchair down a southward line on an economic chart — the idea is that he’s plummeting her to her death by robbing her of her Social Security.

What interests me about the Dems, here, is how crude and brazen they’ve become about Social Security. I mean, they don’t make any pretense anymore about having an argument concerning the program. They just baldly scare hell out of old people. In the last presidential campaign, George Bush, audaciously, proposed Social Security reform. It was said that at long last a major politician had “grasped the third rail of American politics.” And the head of the DNC — guy named Andrew — actually came out and said, “We’re going to electrocute him on that third rail.”

I mean, at least no one’s trying to hide anything. But shouldn’t that take some of the sting out of the propagandist’s art?

A couple of nights ago, I heard the young pianistic sensation Lang Lang (we call him a sensation because audiences go wild over him — rightly or wrongly). In thinking about him, and his name, I was reminded of something Jimmy Durante liked to say, about the city in which I, and National Review, live: “New York, New York: the name so sweet, you got to say it twice.”

I relate something to you — from the New York Post’s Page Six — only because it’s weird and wonderful. Remember Joey Lawrence, the little kid on Gimme a Break — the one whom Nell Carter used to thrust into her bosom? Now grown up, Joey says, “I don’t really remember much, other than there was very little air, and it was really dark in there. It was sort of like reverting back to the womb.”

Don’t say you don’t get a mélange here.

Glad to see that there are protests in Paris against the government’s selling off of parts of state-owned companies. I didn’t know they were doing that — selling off, that is.

I have a new favorite group: the group of New York medical researchers who organized a conference in Israel called “Frontiers in Cardiovascular Science.” Now, I couldn’t care less about cardiovascular science (as anyone who just saw me eat dinner could attest): but these people held a conference in Israel at a time when the rest of the world — academic, scientific, etc. — was boycotting the country, or certainly keeping its distance. This is what “solidarity” means — it’s not just an empty word, or shouldn’t be.

A dip into the mailbag: In a previous Impromptus, I asked, basically, “Why are Democrats such schmucks?” Or, more elegantly, “Why do they circle the wagons around their schmucks — the chief one being Bill Clinton — when the rest of us would want to get rid of them as soon as possible, not wanting to be tainted or disgraced ourselves?”

A reader writes, “I voted for Bill Clinton twice. And it was witnessing just that circling of the wagons that you decry that got me looking seriously at the people I had been voting for. At first I thought I would support impeachment (in my mind, if nowhere else) as a way to remove the cancer of the Clintons from my beloved party; and if that meant cheering on the Republicans, well, sometimes the drug is, temporarily, harsher than the disease. But the more ridiculous things got, the more I realized that I had to ‘come home’ — to the Republicans.”

Finally, I was griping last week about the word “homeland,” which I thought was a little un-American, and had a few unsavory associations. A reader says, “It’s my understanding that ‘Homeland’ is actually jargon from the missile-defense program. A Homeland Defense is a system defending a country, to differentiate from Theater Defenses, like Patriot missiles, Phalanx gun systems, etc., which protect a battlefield or a ship. You’re right that it’s better than ‘Fatherland,’ but you don’t point out that it also beats ‘Motherland,’ which was the Commie fetish.

“Personally, I would prefer to call the thing ‘The Department for Preventing People From F***ing With Us,’ but don’t know if it would fit on the letterhead.”

A man after my own heart — and mind.