As Rome Starts to Smoulder

National Review Online, December 9, 2003

Human nature never disappoints in its capacity to dismay. The fact that, six decades after Auschwitz, there is, once again, anxiety about rising anti-Semitism in Europe is proof enough of that. Vandalized synagogues, desecrated graveyards, torched schools, tales of beatings, bullying, and thuggery in the streets bring a touch of the pogrom to 21st-century headlines. And then there are all those words, speeches, articles, and opinion pieces in the better papers. They are subtler than 60 years ago, with a more discreet viciousness, carefully calibrated and coded, no Stürmer stridency, no conspiratorial Protocols, just hints and insinuations — well sometimes a little more than that — of something altogether more primitive. In Holland, for example, there's Gretta Duisenberg, grim Wim's grimmer wife. Until recently, old Wim was in charge of the European Central Bank, busily presiding over economic stagnation and a destructive interest-rate policy. Compared with Gretta, however, he was a paragon of good judgment. Asked how many signatures she hoped to gain for a petition calling for economic sanctions on Israel, the charming Mrs. Duisenberg laughingly settled on this number: Six million.

A coincidence, she said later. Perhaps, but Europe has recently seen quite a few such coincidences, evidence, it is alleged, that the lessons of the Holocaust have yet to be learned in the continent that gave it birth. The thought that an old evil may be about to return is disturbing, but, for some, it's an image that is as convenient as it is frightening. To Europe's Left, the specter of the Third Reich has long been useful political theater, a bloody brown shirt to wave at its opponents and, these days, a handy device for suppressing any attempt at serious debate over mass immigration. Take Pim Fortuyn. He was a libertarian free spirit, but, for his comments on immigration and multiculturalism, he found himself denounced as a "xenophobe" and, mark of Cain, a "fascist." End of discussion and, as it turned out, end of Fortuyn too.

Meanwhile, to some Americans, particularly on the right, the notion of a Europe flirting with the worst of its past fits in nicely with their portrayal of a continent as depraved as it is decadent. Think back to the dramas of earlier this year. With the grotesque spectacle of the French foreign minister cynically articulating the case for "peace," what better way to puncture his country's pretensions of moral superiority than to focus on the apparent reappearance of anti-Semitism in the land of Dreyfus, Laval, and Le Pen? Anti-Semitism is bad enough in its own right, but it is also the sin forever associated with Vichy's moral squalor. To highlight its rebirth, particularly at a time when France was under fire for deserting old allies, was a useful way for Chirac's critics to conjure up memories of the period in French history with which it is usually associated, that epoch of white flags, a railway carriage at Compiègne, and, at times, all-too-enthusiastic collaboration.

And to complete that picture of treachery, betrayal, and capitulation, who should turn out to be France's closest ally in the struggle against U.S. "hegemony"?

The Germans.

Bringing this shameful era into the debate may have proved an effective, and not entirely unfair, tactic but it runs the risk of reducing the discussion to crude (if entertaining) stereotypes (full disclosure: I've done a bit of this myself). In reality, France's policy in the face of Baathist tyranny and Islamic extremism has been, like Vichy, a fascinating blend of spinelessness and realpolitik, repellent but more complicated than just another display of cowardice by a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

While it is, alas, true that Europe has seen some recurrence of "classic" (if that's the word) anti-Semitism, the idea that the continent is somehow moving towards a repetition of the nightmare of 60 years ago is an exaggeration even more absurd than France as chicken supreme. For proof, look no further than the furor over what is still a relatively small number of violent incidents. Despite this, however, there can be no doubt that something wicked is indeed afoot. To understand it, we should look closer at two topics often obscured by propaganda, prejudice, and political correctness. The first is European attitudes towards Israel, the second, extremism among Europe's Muslim population.

When a recent opinion poll found that nearly 60 percent of EU citizens believed that Israel was a threat to world peace, comfortably ahead of those doves in Pyongyang (53 percent), it seemed yet more proof that an old virus was already abroad in the land. Perhaps, but check the numbers and you'll see that the U.S. (also on 53 percent) was rated as just as dangerous as crazy little Kim. That's ludicrous too, of course, but it's evidence that this polling data reflects not gutter prejudice but something almost as insidious: Europeans' desire to accept any compromise so long as it could buy them a quiet life — at least for a while.

It's an attitude that used to show itself in the argument, once popular among large sections of the European Left, that there was a broad degree of moral equivalence between the Cold War's American (Holiday Inn, McDonalds) and Soviet (Gulag, mass graves) protagonists. It's an attitude that regards "peace" (that word again) as a good that trumps all others — so when Israel is labeled the worst threat to world peace, or the U.S. and North Korea are described as being as dangerous as each other, it shows only that Europeans, left powerless by years of relative decline, falling self-confidence, and shrunken military budgets, have realized that both Israel and America are more interested in self-defense than suicide. That these two countries may be fully entitled to take the positions they do is, naturally, quite irrelevant.

This is the context in which Ariel Sharon has taken to talking about "a great wave of anti-Semitism," but Americans — and Israelis — need to acknowledge that it is quite possible to be critical, indeed severely critical, of current Israeli policies without being in any way anti-Semitic. Indeed, even when they are manifestly unreasonable, contemporary European attitudes to Israel are generally best seen not as anti-Semitic, but rather as an extension of that self-loathing that seems increasingly to define Western cultural and political life. Go back to the 1960s and an impressed and remorseful Europe tended to see Israel as a plucky little country, filled with the survivors of the worst that Europe could do to them, cheerily working on their cheery kibbutzim to build a cheerily collectivist future that would in itself be a living rebuke to the reactionary attitudes that had made the Holocaust possible.

Prompted in no small part by Soviet propaganda efforts, that attitude began to change, particularly after the Six Day War and, even more so, in the wake of the 1973 conflict. Conveniently, some might say, in the light of OPEC threats to Europe's oil supply, Israel came to be seen as the oppressor, not the oppressed, a colonialist, "racist" (evil Zionists!) outpost of European savagery, rather than a refuge from it. As such, condemnation of Israeli policy was not so much an expression of European disdain for "the Jews" as yet another manifestation of Europe's hatred for itself. Combine that sentiment with today's televised images of the hard-line response of the Sharon government to the revived Intifada and it's easy to see that the anger now directed at Israel was almost inevitable.

But if it's a mistake to attribute all this hostility to anti-Semitism, it is also a mistake that to deny that European vituperation of Israel has now reached such a level that it may be tapping the wellsprings of a very ancient psychosis, as well as, it should also be admitted, the more "modern" anti-Semitism long associated with Europe's hard Left. Under these circumstances, it is unfortunate, to say the least, that so much of the imagery and the language used by Europe's harsher critics of the Jewish state recalls the anti-Semitism of an earlier era. Coincidence? Doubtless Mrs. Duisenberg would say so.

It is unlikely, however, that there can be any such merciful ambiguity (however stretched) about the curious behavior of the EU's "Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia," an organization that, appropriately enough given its rather Orwellian name, allegedly decided to shelve publication of a report commissioned from Berlin Technical University's highly respected Anti-Semitism Research Institute on the causes of the increased number of attacks on Jews in Europe. Why? The institute had come up with the wrong answer.

Naturally, that's not the center's explanation. Under intense pressure from its critics (which, with characteristic arrogance, the center is trying to spin as evidence of "how important and sensitive [its] work is"), it has now released the draft report on its website, while continuing to maintain that it is not "fit for publication." It is, they sniff, "neither reliable nor objective," This is a stance in line with its earlier claims that the report was of "insufficient quality," a view, unsurprisingly, the institute rejects. In essence, the Berlin researchers argue that the real objection to their report, which found, plausibly enough, that young Muslims (particularly immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa) were responsible for much of the rise in anti-Semitic incidents, was its lack of political correctness.

This rings true. The EU pursues a relentlessly multiculturalist agenda. Under these circumstances, the publication of data showing that young Muslims, rather than old Nazis, ought to be starring in Brussels's morality play was highly awkward. Inconvenient reality had, therefore, to be changed, or at least ignored, no big deal for a fraudulent (in all senses) "Union" that has long shown its contempt for the marketplace, the nation, history, tradition, and democracy.

So, it's no surprise that the EU's hacks ("independent experts...in the field of racism and xenophobia") repeatedly (according to the Daily Telegraph) attempted to persuade the Berlin Institute to tone down its conclusions. To its credit, the institute refused and we have seen what happened next. To the EU, combating anti-Semitism, it seems, is less important than preserving the dangerous illusions of multiculturalism, and, probably, recognizing the demographics of a Europe where there are more Muslims to appease than Jews to protect.

As a symbol of the dishonesty and confusion that surrounds this issue, that's hard to beat, but in the meantime, France's chief rabbi is concentrating on more practical matters. He's advising young Jews to wear baseball caps rather than skullcaps. Wearing a yarmulke, apparently, might make them a target for "potential assailants."

Not that Brussels would care.

Times Lied, Millions Died

National Review Online, November 24, 2003

So that's it then. Despite all the protests, the Pulitzer Prize board has decided that it will not revoke the award won by Walter Duranty of the New York Times for his reporting in Stalin's Soviet Union. This was not a decision that it took lightly, mind you. The board's members want everyone to understand that they only took their decision after "more than six months of study and deliberation." Six months — that's around one month, perhaps less, for each million who died in the holodomor, the man-made famine that Duranty tried so hard to deny. Here's how Petro Solovyschuk from the Ukraine's Vinnytsia region remembers that time:

I no longer lived in my house. I slept in patches of clover, in haystacks; I was swollen from hunger, my clothes were in shreds. Our house was torn down and they took everything to the collective farm. Only a pile of clay remained. And there is no trace of my family — not a grave, nor a cross. There are only these names: my father — Makar Solovyschuk, died May 1933; my mother — Oliana Solovyschuk, died March 1933; my brother — Ivan Solovyschuk, died April 1933; my sister — Motrya Solovyschuk, died April 1933.

Here's what Walter Duranty said in June of that year: "The 'famine' is mostly bunk."

To be fair, the board's argument is not without some logic.

In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the Board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931...In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, fall seriously short....

But what can the board mean by "today's" standards? The distortions, cursory research, and rehashed propaganda that characterized so much of Duranty's work even prior to the famine were a disgrace to journalism — then just as much as now.

The board adds that there was "not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that standard."

Quite how those circumstances are "different" isn't explained. Are we meant to believe that it was perhaps reasonable in those days to expect that the Five-Year Plan would be buttressed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning lie or two? The board does not say. As for trying to justify its inaction on the grounds that "all the principals are dead and unable to respond," let's just say that's an unfortunate choice of words in the context of a horror that left five, six or seven million (Khrushchev: "No one was counting") dead and, thus, one might agree, "unable to respond."

But the argument (with which I have some sympathy) that, however repellent they were, the events of 1932-33 should be irrelevant in considering a prize won for writings that predate them, can only be taken so far. Duranty's behavior in those later years is certainly relevant in coming to an assessment as to whether the flaws in his prizewinning work were the product of a deliberate piece of deception. And the evidence from 1933 is clear. Duranty was a liar. And if he was a liar in 1933, it's probable that he was a liar in 1931.

To make things worse, not only may Duranty have been lying, but also the New York Times may have known that he was lying. One historian has pointed to State Department papers recording a 1931 (note the date) conversation between Duranty and a U.S. diplomat in Berlin suggesting that there was an "understanding" between the New York Times and the Soviet authorities that Duranty's dispatches always reflected the official opinion of the Soviet regime rather than his own point of view.

Now, Duranty could have been lying about that too, or the diplomat could have misunderstood what he was being told, but, like so much of this story, it raises issues that need airing in something more than one brief press release. As the body responsible for administering journalism's most prestigious prize, the Pulitzer board ought to be advocates of openness and disclosure. We are told that it considered this matter for over six months of "study and deliberation." Assuming this is true, the board should publish its findings in full.

But if the Pulitzer Prize board can, in theory at least, make a respectable case for leaving the prize in Hell with Duranty's ghost, the New York Times, usually so exquisitely sensitive to the injustices of the past, is on less certain ground. To be sure, over time it has distanced itself from its former Moscow correspondent, but not (apart for some rather feeble cosmetic gestures) from his Pulitzer.

In response to the latest campaign to revoke the prize, earlier this year the New York Times commissioned Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen to review Duranty's work. He turned out to be no fan of a man who, the New York Times once said, had been on perhaps "the most important assignment ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable period of time." In the report, von Hagen describes Duranty's work from 1931, for example, as a "dull and largely uncritical" recitation of Soviet sources, but the report itself contains no final recommendation. Subsequently, however, von Hagen has argued that the prize should be withdrawn for the sake of the gray lady's "honor."

Honor? Well, when it comes to accepting responsibility for Duranty, the New York Times (usually so eager to be seen as being on the side of the angels) has always tended to be a little reticent, so perhaps it is no surprise that its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., seemed a touch unwilling to go quite as far as his historian. Oh yes, he did what he had to. He dutifully forwarded von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer board. He even sent a cover letter with it in which he condescended to "respect" whatever the board might choose to decide, but he just couldn't resist adding the thought that rescinding Duranty's prize evoked the old Stalinist practice of "airbrush[ing] purged figures out of official records and histories," a view, interestingly, that von Hagen does not share.

Sadly for Pinch and his paper, any airbrushing would likely to be ineffective anyway. Whatever was finally decided, the controversies of recent years have ensured that the historical record will always be clear. The 1932 Pulitzer, the prize about which the New York Times was so proud for so long, was won by a liar and a fraud, won by a journalist to whom genocide was not news that was fit to print, won by a journalist who by his silence made his newspaper an accomplice to mass murder.

If I were Arthur Sulzberger Jr., I would have begged them to take that prize away.

The Bloodstained Rise

Christopher Logue: All Day Permanent Red

National Review, November 9, 2003

Christopher Logue has been a dealer in stolen property (briefly), a prisoner in a Crusader castle (16 months), a pornographer (the book Lust), and, probably no less discreditably, an actor, a poet, and a writer of screenplays. As if this weren't enough, for over four decades this versatile Englishman has been engaged in a "reworking" of the Iliad. It is not, he is at pains to stress, a translation (he knows no Greek), but an episodic "account" of the ancient epic that has already taken far longer to produce than Troy took to fall.

And, as you read those words. I can hear you sigh. The prospect of yet another tawdry modernization of a classic that needs none seems like nothing to look forward to. Our age often shows itself too restless, unimaginative, and self-important to attempt a genuine understanding of our culture's past. Hot in the pursuit of some imagined relevance, we are forever reinterpreting and updating, here The Tempest as an allegory of slavery, there a few nipples to spice up that boring old Jane Austen. And if, in the process, the sense of the original is lost, we shrug, and settle for what is left: deracinated pap, bland at best, topically—and inconsequentially— "controversial" at worst. Only later do we bother to wonder where our literature has disappeared to.

But All Day Permanent Red is very different from the usual dross. Logue's previous work on the Iliad has been called a masterpiece (Henry Miller, not always a reliable source, described an early section as better than Homer): a devalued term these days, but, in this case, well deserved. All Day Permanent Red is the latest chapter and it doesn't disappoint. Here is Logue's description of the Greek soldiers rising to face their Trojan opponents:

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.

Add the receding traction of its slats

Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.

Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

Then of a stadium when many boards are raised

And many faces change to one vast face.

So, where there were so many masks.

Now one Greek mask glittered from strip to ridge.

In earlier installments—War Music (1981). Kings (1991), and The Husbands (1994)—Logue darted in and out of Homer's chronology, starting with the death of Patroclus and the return of Achilles, then taking his readers baek to the early quarrels between Agamemnon and Achilles, and then on to the single combat between wronged Menelaus and spoiled, lethal Paris. In All Day Permanent Red (the title is. wonderfully, borrowed from an advertisement for lipstick), Logue takes a step back—to the very first full day of combat between the two armies.

The language is as ferocious as its subject matter and, in its cinematic intensity, it's easy to see the hand of the former screenwriter:

Sunlight like lamplight.

Brown clouds of dust touch those brown clouds of dust already overhead.

And snuffling through the blood and filth-stained legs

Of those still-standing-thousands goes Nasty, Thersites' little dog.

Now licking this, now tasting that.

But there is more to this saga than a simple recital of slaughter. The savagery on the plains before Troy is echoed in the heavens above. Nowadays we tend to trust in the benign God of the monotheistic imagination or, failing that, in the indifference of a universe that does not actually set out to harm us. The men of Homer's time had no such comfort: "Host must fight host, / And to amuse the Lord our God / Man slaughter man."

The gods of antiquity were capricious - selfish, and vain, playground bullies or the smug members of the smart set in a high-school movie, monsters as often as they were saviors. Pitiless, dangerous Olympus is a recurrent theme that Logue, like Homer, has emphasized throughout his narrative, and this new volume is no exception. Here is Athena's response to a plea for help from Odysseus;

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly

Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face

Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked

"Kill! Kill for me!

Better to die than to live without killing!"

Logue's language, both grand and, at times, oddly conversational ("Only this this is certain: when a lull comes—they do— / You hear the whole ridge coughing"), brings immediacy to an ancient epic. His use of deliberately anachronistic wording neither jars (partly because most English-speaking readers, including this one, are not comparing Logue's work against the original Greek) nor does it break that sense of the past that is no small part of the spell of a tale thousands of years old. And, yes, the references to Venetian blinds, plane crashes, and even an aircraft carrier somehow work in this tale of Bronze Age fury. Their very modernity reminds us both of our vast distance from this saga, and of the extraordinary cultural continuity that its survival represents.

And if we want to understand why, beyond an accident of history, the Iliad has been remembered for so long, Logue's extraordinary, compelling poetry gives us a clue. The Iliad has as much to say about the human condition now as it did when Homer began to write, not least the destructive, glorious, inglorious love of battle that will endure until the Armageddon which, one day, it will doubtless bring about:

Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips.

King Richard calling for another horse (his fifth).

King Marshal Ney shattering his saber on a cannon ball.

King Ivan Kursk, 22.30 hrs, July 4th to 14th '43, 7000 tanks engaged,

"... he clambered up and pushed a stable-bolt Into that Tiger-tank's red-  hot-machine-gun's mouth

And bent the bastard up. Woweee!"

Where would we be if he had lost?

Achilles? Let him sulk,

A masterpiece? Of course it is.

Spells in the City

National Review Online, October 31, 2003

Be afraid! Halloween is here. 'Tis the season to be sinister, a dank, dark time of poisoned candy, apples laced with razor blades, Jamie Lee Curtis reruns, Richard Nixon masks, feral children asking for "treats," and, in a quiet corner of my local Barnes & Noble, a table piled with books that go bump in the night. Histories of hauntings lurk near volumes on vampires and a stray copy of Living History that seems, well, strangely at home. O.K., O.K., I admit it. I put it there. There are tales of devils and stories of ghosts, depictions of demons, and everywhere, orange, black, and nasty, the pumpkin's evil grin. And don't forget the witchcraft, except it's "Wicca" now, and slicker. The wicked witches of old, warty, cackling, and vile, slinking out of deep, dark woods to cast spells over crops, tiny tots, and the unlucky peasants' luckless livestock have vanished, only to be replaced by even creepier creatures. Heaped like kindling (unfortunate simile, I know), are books by and about those legions of women (and it is mainly women) who have taken to "magick," chanting, drumming, howling at the moon, and delving into the supposed wisdom of a largely invented past.

And, make no mistake; broomstick surfers take themselves very, very seriously these days. The age of lovely Samantha Stephens, sparkling and funny, more martini glass than cauldron, has faded away, replaced in our duller, more earnest era by the likes of Buffy's dour Willow, self-involved, self-important and, although this might be expected in sorceresses who like to chant, drum, and howl at the moon, utterly lacking any sense of the ridiculous.

Even the promisingly named How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad kit turns out to be for real (well, not the toad bit). Its publishers explain "that everything you need is right here in this fun kit: Use the mirror for a special spell to make yourself irresistible to everyone who sees you; the candles will help you to hot up your sex life and you can use the incense in its special toad holder to find your soul mate."  

Judging by the response of one Amazon.com reviewer (spelling has been changed in the interests of literacy) to the book on which the kit is based, toad holders may be just what the witchdoctor ordered:

This ...is a must-have for all women interested in witchcraft. Although some may see it as selfish, the revenge spells are great too, and they really work! (...Remember, when casting a revenge spell, you cannot inflict on your victim any pain that they have not given to you, so IT'S ONLY FAIR!). The "toad spell" is fantastic! I cast the "bring back my love" spell on my Internet love (who has been distant lately) and the next day he called for the first time!! The "lucky lottery" spell really works too...I can't wait to try every spell!

If mirrors, spells, candles, and toad holders don't catch their attention, younger readers can always pick up "the BIG book for Pagan teens," Silver Ravenwolf's Solitary Witch: The Ultimate Book of Shadows for the New Generation. Ravenwolf, "a Wiccan High Priestess and Clan Head of The Black Forest Family," has written everything, her publisher boasts, "that a teen Witch could want and need between two covers." That could be handy for some, but probably not for those who have already bought Ravenwolf's Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, or her To Ride a Silver Broom: New Generation Witchcraft, or, even, sigh, Silver Ravenwolf's Teen Witch Kit: Everything You Need to Make Magick!. The kit comes complete with "six magickal talismans (including a silver pentacle pendant), salt, and a spell bag," and, "best of all," its box "converts into your own personal altar."

But, for all the Celtic cornpone, Samhain kitsch and olde-tyme gibberish, there are still some reminders that this is a 21st-century magnet for the modern, the mercenary, and the motivated. Deborah Gray, "Australia's good witch," is keen to help these strivers out. Her Spells to Get Ahead Pack: All the Magic You Could Possibly Need in One Witchy Pack is out on display, witchy pack after witchy pack after witchy pack (each complete with "pouches and phials to add power to your charms, plus a special magic crystal") to help "the ambitious girl" in her quest to "be gorgeous, be rich, be avenged, be a winner!" Be avenged? Good witches, clearly, are not what they were.

And as that ambitious girl hops from meeting to meeting, magic crystal in her hand and vengeance in her heart, she won't want to mar her gorgeousness with a musty volume of spells, curses, and spooky old recipes. She'll be more comfortable toting another work from the Barnes & Noble selection, The Pocket Spell Creator: Magickal Reference at Your Fingertips. "There is simply no other book that helps you create, finalize and perfect spells easier or better. And, of course, faster!" It's magick — 24/7 and portable.

And even those who are already familiar with familiars, rites, redes, and scrying will be sure to learn something from A Witch's Book of Answers, FAQ for the broomstick set, a fashionably diverse crowd nowadays with a membership that includes psi-witches, kitchen witches, traditional witches, Gardnerians, Alexandrians, fam-trad witches, fluff-bunny witches, hereditary witches, natural witches and hedgewitches. The advice from its authors, Eileen Holland ("Wiccan priestess [and] solitary eclectic Witch") and the intriguingly monomial "Cerelia," is loopy, but largely benign — if unlikely to win many prizes from General Boykin.

Adding to the merriment, their inclusion of an extract from Cerelia's poem Cycles & Rain is good both for a laugh and as a reminder that the broomstick has landed on one of feminism's wilder shores.

come out to the forest clearings mistletoe and rowan trees if you have the heart who will you find there? women with their menstrual blood flowing down their legs women stamping, women steaming women singing in the rain women winding widdershins and banging tambourines

But don't worry, chaps. Cerelia is quick to reassure us that not every man is "corrupt and evil" (thanks!).

Some of the answers that the book provides are, in a sense, fairly conservative, "it is not possible for a Witch to fly or change into an animal on Earth (except in a psychic sense)", but there's a broadminded nod to Fox Mulder: "It may be possible for Witches to do so in other solar systems." Other revelations include a potential explanation for the recent blackout (if light bulbs burn out and street lights go off when you're nearby, "that's just part of being a Witch"), a hint of schism, "Witches can really get into a snit about...how to dress candles," and more than a little mystery: "chaos magic is big but sloppy."

Mumbo jumbo? Nope, Witchcraft, we read, is "based on science," leading Ms. Holland to the entirely reasonable conclusion that the "universe would fly apart without desire."

There's a lot less certainty when the discussion turns to Gerald Gardner. Gardner, writes Cerelia, "holds the distinction of bringing contemporary Witchcraft to the modern world." Indeed he does. Somewhat awkwardly for those who maintain that Wicca is descended from an ancient cult of the Goddess, this retired British civil servant made most of it up sometime in the 1940s and 1950s. The eccentric Mr. Gardner's pastimes were not confined to witchcraft. He was also a keen naturist and a fan of flagellation. Cerelia grumbles that many of Gardner's "personal likes and fantasies" may have crept into the rites that he developed. Indeed they did. As she notes, the insistence that witches had to be "skyclad" (naked) while practicing their craft was "probably" (probably?) his idea, and her description of the initiation ceremonies in Gardnerian Witchcraft does seem to include a remarkable amount of binding, blindfolding and "whipping with cords."

Interestingly (although you won't learn this from A Witch's Book of Answers), Gardner was also a former disciple of Aleister Crowley, once infamous as "the wickedest man in the world." His mother just preferred to dub him "the Beast." Not unreasonably (well, young Aleister did kill his first cat at the age of eleven) she thought he was the spawn of Satan.

Now, that's what I call a story for Halloween.

Stupid Pet Tricks

National Review Online, September 30, 2003

Even at the best of times there is something about a monkey that mocks our delusions of grandeur, and this was not exactly the best of times. The monkey, burdened with the name of "ET" and the undignified habit of chewing his tail, looked first irritated, then puzzled, then sarcastic, and then, quite frankly, appalled, as a striking sixtysomething Englishwoman peered intently into his cage, called him "sweetie pie," claimed to read his mind, mentioned some personal matters that ET would rather not have had aired on national television and then smothered his hands with kisses. Poor ET had just survived a close encounter with Sonya Fitzpatrick, America's most famous pet psychic. As for Sonya, she knew what was wrong. How could she not? ET had told her. There was a parasite under that much-chewed tail (pointing at, her, well, tailbone, Sonya explained that she could feel the parasite's energy — and the itching — here) that the vet had somehow missed. Her solution? Very dilute, it turned out. Something homeopathic would do the trick, but there was, Sonya warned, another problem. ET was missing his pal. Amazed, ET's keeper explained that the luckless primate had been picked on by most of the other monkeys ("he thinks they are extremely rude," interrupted Sonya sympathetically), and so had been moved to separate quarters. She did, however, remember that ET had got on rather better with one monkey, the accurately but unimaginatively named, Buddy. Sonya's remedy once again came in very small doses — from time to time Buddy should be allowed to come over to visit. Case closed!

And that's how it usually goes on The Pet Psychic, Sonya's TV show, 45 minutes of critter clairvoyance, menagerie miracles, and fauna trauma that stand out as some of the more intriguing viewing on the Animal Planet channel, no mean feat against competition such as Amazing Animal Videos, Animal Cops, Animal Precinct, Emergency Vets, Pet Story, Pet Star, Judge Wapner's Animal Court, and Total Zoo. The Pet Psychic is weirdly compelling watching, a chance to gape at poor dumb creatures and the odd bond they form with Sonya. I'm referring, of course, to the humans that agree to appear on the show alongside their pets, weeping, sniffling, shyly laughing, or revealing too much of their lives — they make a spectacle far more entertaining than anything that our four-legged friends could ever provide.

There's Lisette, for example, flirty in her apartment as she confessed the details of a love life that has, Sonya concludes, thrown her marmoset, Peyton, into jealous turmoil (Peyton fancied Lisette's ex) or the strain on Dawn's face when she revealed that the relationship between her husband and "her soul mate" (Boogie the show horse) had degenerated into outright violence — Boogie had bitten the poor man's backside — leaving Dawn to worry that (to quote the Animal Planet website) that "his actions could prevent him [the horse, not the husband] from performing."

Sometimes, there are life-and-death decisions to be made. "There's something with the bladder," suggests the great psychic, nattily shod in her trademark riding boots and staring intently at Kramer the dog. Indeed there was. Kramer looked humiliated, but embarrassment was the least of his problems. There had been talk that it was time to put this pooch to sleep. Everyone began to sob, while Kramer lay flat on the floor doing his best to imitate a canine corpse.

In the event, Sonya prescribed understanding rather than the needle, but even if the verdict had gone the other way, Kramer would have had nothing to fear. To Sonya, animals aren't dumb even when they are dead. As she explains in her book, What the Animals Tell Me, "animals are spiritual beings. When they die, they do not go off into a void...they go to a place of unearthly beauty [after swimming through "healing waters"], where joy, peace and happiness reign supreme; where memories of pain, care and worries fade into bliss." Later, after, presumably, consulting the angels that await them on that "golden shore," they may choose to reincarnate or, perhaps, just come calling, "understand that they have not left us; they are still with us and they visit us in their energy bodies." One way or another, Kramer will be back.

This may be dodgy theology, but it makes for a happy ending, and a cheerful — if usually tearful — conclusion to the segment of the show dedicated to pets that have "passed into spirit." The messages from the other side are usually upbeat and reassuring. Kerry the spaniel was grateful ("thank you, thank you") for the fact that he was put to sleep, and there was "a tremendous amount of love" coming from Sasha, a sub-Scooby Great Dane, who was "very happy in the spirit world" and quite understood that Maria, her "mum," did not have, ahem, quite enough time for her in her final illness.

Don't worry: The show doesn't only feature conversation with pets that have petered out. As we've seen from the cases of Peyton and Boogie, Sonya, a blend of Dr. Doolittle and Dr. Strange, claims to talk to living animals as well as dead, thanks to her innate telepathic skills (Good news: We all have them!), brought out in her case by profound childhood deafness. As animals, she says, communicate telepathically (Forget Mister Ed or garrulous, unsubtle mynah birds), it was no surprise that they became young Sonya's closest friends. Sadly, a bloody incident involving geese, her father, and Christmas lunch led her to force "a door shut in [her] mind for what [she] thought would be forever."

The door opened again over 40 years later in, rather surprisingly, Houston, with the appearance of first an angel ("large wings...beautiful and gentle face") and then St. Francis, both of who told Sonya that she was going to be working to help animals. It was God's work. And who's going to argue with Him? Not Sonya. She put two and two together and made a TV show, a writing career, and, at a reported $300 per hour, a consultancy business out of her long dormant skills, telepathic or otherwise.

Sonya has plenty of satisfied customers. According to the Animal Planet website she has "helped more than 3,000 clients worldwide in many capacities — to achieve a better understanding of their pets, to solve behavioral problems, and to cure their animal friends of physical ailments." Her show is filled with guests who are astonished by her insights. How did she know that Bill the cat liked to play with a "round thing"?

Hmmm, I grew up with one Clumber spaniel, two unfortunate hamsters, and a budgerigar. Excluding, perhaps, the moment that the budgie was killed by the dog, they were all a remarkably uncommunicative lot, so, on the assumption that the whole thing isn't rigged, my best guess is that Sonya is guessing. Viewers aren't told how The Pet Psychic is edited. The hits are shown, but not, I suspect, the misses. As for those hits, well, Sonya is a highly intuitive woman and thus, despite the occasional odd coincidence, they are probably the product of either luck, carefully vague language, or skilful "cold reading," the old carny technique of questioning the subject (or on this show the subject's "human companion") in a way that throws up the clues needed to come up with some miraculous "insight." TV's John Edward (a well-known human psychic) almost certainly uses the same trick, and it is no surprise to discover that he (and his dogs) have been on Sonya's show for a "meeting of minds."

Most important of all, Sonya benefits from people's willingness to believe in what she has to peddle. There's nothing startling about this. We live in an age where superstition seems set to scupper skepticism. Society's reluctance to assert that anything is false — a product of postmodernism, politeness, and, ironically, the decline of some of the more established churches — has left us prepared to accept that just about any old nonsense could be true, the more exotic the better, particularly when it comes clothed in vaguely "spiritual" dress and builds on the existing beliefs of the more credulous among us.

Sonya's angels and the chatter from beyond the pet cemetery are tailor-made for such an audience, while, like any savvy modern spiritualist, Sonya throws in just enough "scientific" language (all that talk of "energy," and even Einstein rates a mention) for her fans to be able to comfort themselves — falsely — that their regression to the pre-modern is not yet complete. Besides, telepathy is practically a mainstream science in a time of alien abductions, healing crystals, and the Kyoto treaty. Only the most pedantic will want to challenge Ms. Fitzpatrick's claim that a telephone call with a pet's owner may be all that she needs to make that crucial connection.

There will be very few such challenges, for Sonya tells people what they want to hear. Her practical advice on animal care is benign and — once back in the material world — generally pretty sensible. The rest of what she has to say, normally delivered against a backdrop of the sort of soothing, simpering piano music more usually heard in a New Age bookstore, is deeply reassuring for anyone who can't be bothered to think too hard. It's a fashionably humble philosophy (we can learn so much from the simple wisdom of the animal kingdom), but conveniently egocentric, too: Not only do we have hidden powers (it's the telepathy, stupid), but in return for a little kindness (or, in the case of Sasha, benign neglect) our cats, dogs, iguanas, and parrots will love us now, and for all eternity. It's also attractively optimistic. We all get to Heaven. We don't really die. Our pets don't really die.

And even this show is probably good for nine lives.

Iced Vice

National Review Online, August 28, 2003

First they came for the beef and cheese nachos. Now they have come for Cold Stone Creamery's Mud Pie Mojo. In a development that was as predictable as it is absurd, the killjoy cranks over at CSPI, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have issued a report denouncing ice-cream shops for hawking "coronaries in cones." Well, no surprise there. Writing in the July issue of Reason magazine, Jacob Sullum describes how the center (despite its name, it has nothing do with either science or the public interest) has a menu of menaces that must not be allowed anywhere near a dining room. These include fried mozzarella sticks ("just say no"), double cheeseburgers ("a coronary by-pass special"), and even fettuccine Alfredo ("a heart attack on a plate"). Hold the salt on those fries (Hypertension!), in fact, hold the fries too (Acrylamide! Cancer!), fly from buffalo wings, peel away from crispy orange beef and put down that "culinary equivalent of a loaded pistol," a baked potato with butter, sour cream, bacon bits and cheese.

Danger doesn't end with the main course. Desserts, such as the Cheesecake Factory's notorious carrot cake, have also come in for stern criticism: It was, clearly, only a matter of time before Ben & Jerry's, Haagen-Dazs, and even poor, bland, TCBY heard the knock on the door.

But does it matter? CSPI immodestly describes its researchers (even that seems too generous a word) as "food sleuths," but for now, these self-appointed calorie cops have no warrant. This does not mean that their critics can relax. The center may peddle hysteria, half-truths, and the guilty pleasures of self-denial, but they have a way with the media and in the lunatic world of the gathering "war against obesity" theirs is likely to be an influential voice. For that reason, if no other, their crusade against cones is worth a closer look.

Let's start with the hype. No campaign of this type is complete without a crisis. The Greens make Chicken-Licken look like an optimist, the gun-control crowd never cease to amaze with their tales of carnage and then, of course, there's "passive smoking." The junk-food jihadists are no less melodramatic. Sound the alarm! There's an "obesity epidemic"! Why call it an epidemic? Well, epidemics demand a tough response. If Americans can be convinced that they are in peril from a plague of pudginess, there's no saying what they won't agree to.

CSPI's ice-cream screed is a reminder that the center is a master of hyperbole, if not of science. Those "coronaries in cones" are capped by the warning that a Baskin-Robbins large Vanilla shake is "worse for your heart" than "drinking three Quarter Pounders," a disgusting image that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that no food as such is bad for your heart. What matters is the overall composition of your diet, the amount of exercise you do, and so on. This report won't tell you that. Instead CSPI's propagandists prefer to pursue their morbid rhetoric of heart disease ("you'll need… cholesterol-lowering …drugs" to cope with a Friendly's Caramel Fudge Brownie Sundae) and death (a "super" version of one of Friendly's Candy Shop Sundaes is for the "self-destructive"). Oh, please.

Hand in hand with the hype (indeed it's a corollary of it) is the assumption that Americans are not responsible for what they eat. This gives the fat police an excuse (if people can't control their eating then someone — usually government — must step in to do it for them) and the overweight an alibi — thus its appeal. At its most extreme this line of thinking manifests itself in the ludicrous claim that fast food is somehow addictive, but generally the girth Gestapo confine themselves to behaving as if the man at the lunch counter is not much more intelligent than the cow that went into his sandwich. He is, it seems, a dull, helpless dolt, unable to take a rational decision for himself, a clueless creature, powerless before the might of a well-crafted commercial.

This is the idea that underpins remarks by Jayne Hurley, a "senior nutritionist" for CSPI, that it is "as if these ice cream shops were competing with each other to see who could inflict the greatest toll on…arteries and waistlines." That's a good sound bite, but like a CSPI-approved diet, there's not a lot to it. In reality, the only people "competing" to put on the pounds are the vanilla-chasing ruminants who choose (and that's the word) to dine there. They may not know the exact number of calories involved (a key CSPI complaint), but, believe me, Jayne, the customers who opt for a Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey in a chocolate-dipped waffle cone understand that it ain't no health food.

The third, all too familiar, element in this drama is the feeble response of the food industry. In particular, management at Kraft Foods appears to have learnt nothing from the tobacco fiasco — despite sharing a parent company with Philip Morris. An essential part of any successful litigation against Kraft will be to show that the company owed a "duty" to protect its customers from their own greed. That's an argument that is laughable, but it's also lethal. The moment that the food companies concede that there's something to it, they are in deep, deep trouble. Needless to say, this is exactly what Kraft has done. The company's stock has fallen sharply, and deservedly so, since it made the announcement (about reducing portion sizes and calorie content) that will be a key building block in any case against it. Lemmings, of course, plunge in packs. PepsiCo and McDonald's are amongst the other food giants busily making the same mistake.

There are early signs that the ice-cream chains may turn out to be just as misguided. The correct response to CSPI-style criticism is to say that consumers — and consumers alone — are responsible for the results of their overindulgence. Period. No more discussion. Pass the creamy peanut-butter sauce. Instead, there was, so to speak, a touch of waffle in the response from the Cold Stone Creamery. This included the observation that "lower calorie options for our customers…are also made available in all our stores." So what? Even if the only treat on offer was regular sweet-cream ice cream with a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, roasted almonds, and hot fudge in a chocolate-dipped waffle cone (1,400 calories!), that shouldn't matter. No one is forced to buy it, and if you do, the consequences are yours and yours alone.

But if we have a leaner future ahead of us, the same is not true of trial lawyers. They may well have a very rich feast to look forward to. There is one obstacle they will have to watch out for, however. Tobacco litigation was in one sense relatively straightforward. If some wheezing patient could be shown to have puffed away at a certain brand of cigarettes for years, the first steps of a case against the manufacturer of those smokes could then be taken. Imagine, though, the difficulty faced by a lawyer confronted by the potential junk-food plaintiff who has just waddled in through his door. The fees could be as large as the litigant, but who to sue? To be sure, there are trenchermen who confine their eating to just one spot, but most do not. Apportioning the blame for super-sized portions won't be easy. Did the pizzas cause the damage or was it the pies, the pralines, the penne or, heaven forbid, the plaintiffs themselves? CSPI's executive director has acknowledged as much. The ice-cream extravaganza, he says, has "something to do with the size of Americans' pants," but "no one disputes that the obesity epidemic has many causes." True enough, and that simple fact could greatly complicate any litigation.

The best way for trial lawyers to avoid such difficulties will be to follow the precedent of that piece of extortion better known as the tobacco "settlement." Rather than have to prove the cases of individual plaintiffs, with those tricky facts and awkward questions of causation, it will be far easier to claim that obesity has "cost" state and federal governments countless billions of dollars. Rapacious and unprincipled governments (that's all of them, in case you wondered) will play along. It will be argued that the bill for obesity should be paid by the industry that allegedly created the problem. There will be dark talk of "misleading" advertising, "irresponsible" marketing and "dangerous" ingredients. As their legal expenses mount, companies will slim down menus, various tasty ingredients will disappear, and countless "advisory councils" on nutrition will be hired. It will do no good. Confronted by the power of big government and the greed of big law, big food will, so to speak, chicken out and negotiate a pay-off.

Get your Toffee Coffee Cappuccino Chiller while there's still time.

Horror Show

Joe Bob Briggs: Profoundly Disturbing -  Shocking Movies that Changed History

National Review, August 26, 2003

The title is reassuringly lurid and the cover comfortingly nasty, but, on opening this book, anxious readers may worry that Joe Bob has left the drive-in. Now that would be profoundly disturbing. Author, journalist, cable-TV stalwart, and former NR columnist, Briggs overcame fictitious origins and nonexistent competition to become America's finest drive-in-movie critic. He saw Nail Gun Massacre and he watched All Cheerleaders Die. Who else could take on that sort of responsibility?

He is the Zagat of the Z-movie, the one indispensable guide for those who like slaughter, sex, and lethal household tools with their popcorn. He wallows in the movies that other critics flee. Ebert on Shrunken Heads? Silence. Kael on Fury of the Succubus? No comment. But Joe Bob was there for them both. He's funny, well informed, and succinct (The Evil Dead is "Spam in a cabin"), and he tells his audience what it needs to know (Bloodsucking Freaks: "pretty good fried-eyeball scene . . . 76 breasts . . . excellent midget sadism and dubbed moaning"). If Joe Bob tells you to "check it out," that's what you do.

And when, as a result, you are watching man-eating giant rats starting their gory feast (Gnaw), you will still be laughing at the memory of what Joe Bob had to say. Yes, he both subverts and celebrates these films, but who cares? It's better to lighten up, grab a beer, and just see Joe Bob as someone who delights in rummaging through cinema's trash heap and telling us what he's found.

He does this brilliantly, in a style — Hazzard County, with a touch of Cahiers du Cinema — that is all his own; but, after all these years, is the drive-in still enough for Mr. Briggs? Joe Bob's Jekyll, the erudite and rather more suave "John Bloom," has been developing a journalistic career of his own, while Joe Bob himself has been spotted on stage and screen, and in the pages of Maximum Golf magazine; can the country club be far behind?

In spite of this, it's still startling to find that Briggs chose The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as the first movie to discuss in his new book. The fact that it's foreign isn't the problem. Joe Bob has written about plenty of foreign films; they usually feature kickboxing, kung fu, gratuitous violence, more kickboxing, incomprehensible dialogue, over-choreographed fight scenes, and the exploitation of attractive young actresses who manage to lose their clothes and their lives in the course of the movie. They are, in short, identical in almost every respect to the domestic offerings he reviews.

Caligari is different. Yes, it's a horror movie, but it's a coffee-on-the-Left-Bank, furrowed-brow unfiltered cigarette of a horror movie and, like a number of the other films described in this book, it's far from typical territory for the sage of the slasher pic. It's a German expressionist masterpiece from 1919, an allegory of totalitarianism often thought to have anticipated the Nazi terror to come. There are no nunchucks in Caligari. Still, there's more than an echo of the drive-in in the irreverent glee with which Joe Bob penetrates the Teutonic gloom. All too often, Caligari is shown with a melodramatic "silent movie" musical backdrop, rather than the modernist score envisaged by its makers. Perhaps worse still, it has also been relentlessly over-analyzed by film highbrows. To Joe Bob, this is like "trying to watch Schindler's List with 'Turkey in the Straw' playing in the background and a professor pointing out every shaft of light as a pivotal moment in German Expressionism."

Caligari is, Briggs argues, a film that "changed history," but in this book that can mean less than you might think. The movies in Profoundly Disturbing may all "have been banned, censored, condemned, or despised" at one time or another, but some of them wouldn't change the course of an afternoon, let alone history.

Perhaps this is why Joe Bob is careful to stress that, in a number of cases, the only history that has been changed is cinema history. How the films he discusses relate to the broader cultural picture is complex: Did a movie influence the culture, merely reflect it, or a bit of both? As he tries to find an answer to this question, quality can be irrelevant. Deep Throat is a terrible film even on its own terms, but somehow it managed to help shape the Ice Storm era and thus had much greater cultural impact than the far more artistically significant Caligari. Caligari may have warned Germans about the dangers of totalitarianism, but little more than ten years later Hitler was in power.

If Profoundly Disturbing doesn't always convince us that the movies it describes "changed history," it is, nonetheless, a hugely entertaining account of the frequently bizarre way they came to be made. Some of these films were made by people operating at the creative edge (the art director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre was, we learn, able "to indulge his lifelong fascination with animal bones") while others were manufactured by those who had hit artistic rock-bottom (Linda Lovelace for President) and didn't care. This is a cinema of desperate improvisation (the night before the "classic tongue-ripping scene" in Blood Feast, the victim still hadn't been cast) and even more desperate finances.

And then there's Mom and Dad (1947), a "sex education" movie that circulated for over 20 years through small-town America. This cautionary tale of the dangers of premarital naughtiness included footage of a live birth and hideous syphilitic sores. It grossed an estimated $100 million. Showings came complete with two women in nurse's outfits and a 20-minute lecture by "Elliot Forbes," an "eminent sexual hygiene commentator." At one point there were no fewer than 26 Elliot Forbeses, "most of them retired or underemployed vaudeville comedians."

If this all sounds like a carny stunt, it's because it was. Profoundly Disturbing includes a good number of more "serious" films (and Briggs writes about them very well), but the movies that make up its sleazy, captivating core are the successors of the freak show, the circus, and old-time burlesque. As told with gusto by an author obviously far from ready to quit the drive-in (whew!), theirs is a story of that wild, ludicrously optimistic entrepreneurial spirit that is, somehow, very typically American. Combine those hucksters, visionaries, and madmen with the dreams of a restless, somewhat deracinated population spreading across a continent and we begin to understand how this country's popular culture became the liveliest in the world — if not always the most elevated. Mencken was right: No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Why so much of that taste revolves around mayhem and gore (that sex has box-office appeal is no surprise) is a mystery beyond the scope of Profoundly Disturbing. Suffice to say that it does, and the result is a book that blends fascinating pop-culture history, first-rate film criticism, and learned commentary on the stunt-vomit in The Exorcist.

Check it out.

Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

National Review Online, August 18, 2003

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — It was a nightmare for commuters, the sick, and for anyone with perishable food to sell. In an age of terrorism, the darkened buildings, stalled, stifling elevators, and idled subway cars were a haunting and, in those first minutes of power failure, terrifying reminder of the vulnerability of a complex technological society to a single well-targeted blow. But, as it turned out, for many in midtown Manhattan the blackout was, let's admit it, really rather fun. As everyone now knows, the power went down shortly after 4 P.M. and, as the sultry summer afternoon drifted into an unusually authentic twilight, it didn't take long before Second Avenue was transformed into a sweaty, raffish playground, Bourbon Street on the East River, bars still open, their interiors only slightly darker than usual, drinkers lit by candlelight, forbidden cigarettes (don't tell Nurse Bloomberg) and one, two, three, four tepid beers, no one was counting.

And on the sidewalks entrepreneurs were quick to set out their wares, bags of ice (for a while), snacks, water, flashlights, and bottles of beer of a vaguely exotic brand, Sapporo, not Bud. Larger stores quickly gave up the struggle, but the bodegas never paused. The usual merchandise — the flowers, the packets of powdered vitamins, the groceries that you always forget to buy, the batteries (yes!), the cigarettes, the fruit, and, decaying even more rapidly than normal, that peculiar unidentifiable meat, was still for sale, all prices rounded up now to the nearest dollar, for cash registers were ancient history, useless relics of a vanished civilization, as dead as an air conditioner, a traffic light, or a refrigerator. Fortunately, the bodegas were made of sterner stuff than their hardware. The next morning, there was still no power but my local — it's run by the sort of Koreans who give Kim Jong Il nightmares — was still open and serving hot coffee, hamburgers, and other unimaginable luxuries. How? A gas stove. No problem. These guys would not shut up shop for the Apocalypse.

But back to Thursday night: As the hours passed, darkening, electric in a very different way, strangers swapped stories on stoops, sidewalks, and street corners, a touch of the old neighborhood in a part of town that never really was one. The men at the parking garage sat around their radio and, CNN for a day, passed on the news to those who wandered by. A fire on the West Side? A disaster in Canada? Lightning? Who knew? When's the power coming back? No idea.

At home we listened to the radio, and tried to make out the picture on, yes (don't ask), our battery-operated TV. No Friends, no Buffy rerun, no E! News Live, just Chuck Scarborough over on a blurry Channel 4. He was doing his best, calm through all the confusion (I read later that he was on for nearly nine hours straight). He was magnificent, our Ed Murrow, the voice of civilization, continuity, and reassurance — or at least he would have been except for the awkward fact that almost no one in the city could actually watch him (the battery-operated TV crowd is a very elite group). Oh well, never mind. On the radio, meanwhile, there was talk, news, gossip, the occasional press conference, speculation, and at one station a DJ with, he said, nothing but "a handheld mike and a CD player." It was enough.

Later, a group of cops patrolled the avenue, Giulianis on Bourbon Street, checking on those who had partied too hard and too long. Here and there, flashlights guided the way and, for the truly desperate, there was always the dim illumination of a cell-phone dial pad. On the side streets it was quieter. There were fewer people, and it was, somehow, darker, but the noisier of the two French bistros on 51st Street was, as always, busy; there was not much food, but plenty of wine; tables full, each with a candle, each with a couple. The candlelight was romantic, but feeble against the darkness — not that anyone seemed to mind.

That August night was a night for candles, their light flickered in the windows of high rises, a hint of the medieval amid Manhattan's concrete and glass, their smoke perfumed the air and added to the haze in the street. The mayor recommended flashlights. Safer, he said, prosaic, I thought. It turned out that Bloomberg was right: Candles were responsible for a number of fires that night, blazes that contributed to the death of one person and, yet again, the serious injury of a fireman doing what firemen do — protecting a city that still remembers the sacrifices of that bright blue September morning.

Up the street from the French were the Japanese. Empowered by a power cut, the usually reserved little sushi place had annexed a spot of sidewalk. Tables were set up with linen, neatly packaged snacks, and a small group of diners. Elegant paper lanterns glowed where streetlights once glared. We walked a little further. One block to the west is where the office buildings really begin to soar. They loomed, still blocking the sky, only more so. In the foreground Third Avenue cut through the gloom, still a mess of traffic: jammed, unmoving, cars, vans, trucks, headlights, noise, and anxiety. Will I get home? Is there enough gas? As for the buildings behind, no longer their usual glittering spectacle, they made for a slightly forbidding backdrop, massive, almost gothic hulks, dark now except for those prudently or neurotically (take your pick) managed few where emergency generators were producing light and, dare to dream, air conditioning.

There would, we knew, have to be enquiries, commissions, and allocations of blame. Fingers would be pointed, lessons would be learned, and precautions would be taken — just like last time. But that was for tomorrow. The night of the great blackout was not a night for recrimination, it was a night for strolling the streets, enjoying our city, and, just like visitors to New York are always said to do, gazing stupidly into the heavens. But we were no hicks. It was not skyscrapers we were staring at, but another, stranger wonder.

The stars.

Bullying Berlusconi

National Review Online, July 22, 2003

As Silvio Berlusconi has now discovered, publicly comparing a German politician to a concentration-camp guard is a really, really dumb idea, but the row that has followed has been out of all proportion to one very bad-tempered remark. With something approaching relish, Europe's grandees are citing this gaffe as another reminder that the Italian premier is not up to the supposedly immense responsibilities of the presidency of the EU council. Of course, critics of Berlusconi claim to have more to their case than one stupid joke. They grumble about his unpredictability, his imperiousness, and the way that he is said to use his extensive media holdings to influence the democratic process. Above all, they point to Berlusconi's continuing legal problems as evidence that he is unfit to represent that city on a hill, the Europe of Chirac, Schroeder, and the Common Agricultural Policy. Berlusconi's difficulties with the law — a tawdry, and seemingly endless, cycle of convictions, acquittals on appeal, and courtroom maneuvering — aren't pretty, to put it mildly, but they have to be seen in the context of a country where politically motivated prosecutions are far from unknown. What's more, they relate back to a period when Italy had yet to emerge from the grip of a political class so corrupt that, for many businessmen, the payment of bribes had become an inevitable, if unwelcome, part of everyday life.

Besides, it's not as if Berlusconi went around beating people up. That distinction is reserved for German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. These days he's a darling of the EU's elite despite (or, perhaps, partly because of) his extremist past. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fischer was part of a radical Left that was all too prepared to cross the line that divides legitimate protest from outright political violence. In 1973, Fischer took part in the brutal beating of a young policeman at a riot in Frankfurt. That moment of 'revolutionary struggle' was caught on camera, but most of his activities in those years remain clouded in somewhat sinister mystery. To take one example, after initial denials (attributed to 'forgetfulness') we now know that Fischer attended a 1969 PLO Conference in Algiers that passed a resolution calling for the extinction of the state of Israel. Fischer was there — an ugly place to be for a German less than twenty-five years after Auschwitz, and a gesture far more 'insensitive' than Berlusconi's ill-judged insult.

Ancient history, you say? Well, let's take a look at Lionel Jospin, a man widely respected across the EU for his "integrity." He was France's prime minister until last year, and the Socialist contender in that country's presidential elections — until he was beaten into third place by a neo-fascist (and people call Italy's politics a disgrace?). At about the time young Joschka Fischer was beating up a policeman young Jospin was an activist in a revolutionary Trotskyite group known as OCI. A youthful mistake? Perhaps, except that it was a youthful mistake that Jospin was to continue making into middle age. He maintained discreet links with OCI for another two decades. Jospin has said that he has no need to feel "red-faced" about his red past, but, strangely, he never chose to mention it to the electorate. Lionel's affection for Leon (a mass murderer, lest we forget) was only discovered a few years ago — after Jospin had become prime minister).

And then there's money. The wicked Berlusconi is not alone in having allegations of bribery and corruption thrown his way. Take a glance at Giscard D'Estaing, the man the EU hired to cobble together its new "constitution." This squalid blueprint for permanent bureaucratic rule was unveiled recently amid scenes of choreographed rejoicing that reached their apogee when one brown-nosing Green MEP hailed Giscard as a new Socrates, a description that would have had the Greek sage reaching again for the hemlock.

The notoriously vain Giscard was, doubtless, delighted to have a second chance to leave a mark on history. These days his one, rather lackluster, term as president of France is best remembered for a widely rumored affair with sexy Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) and, less impressively, for his habit of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds from Central Africa's cannibal-emperor Bokassa. Giscard has never really had much to say about those glittering pebbles, but then he has never had to. The French establishment looks after its own — Giscard was never charged with any crime.

Ah yes, some might say, and that's why Berlusconi is different. He has actually been prosecuted. Fair enough, but then so has Jean-Claude Trichet, the next chief of the European Central Bank. He was charged with approving false accounts for Credit Lyonnais, a bank that has cost the French taxpayer billions of dollars. He has, however, just been acquitted and is, therefore, free to take up his new job at the ECB in November. Now, an acquittal is an acquittal (unless it is Berlusconi who is being acquitted, in which case it doesn't seem to count), and we must--of course--assume that the unfortunately-named Trichet is innocent, but it says something about the EU that it is prepared to appoint a man with this shadow over his past to one of the most sensitive--and powerful--financial jobs in the world.

Matters may not end so happily for Edith Cresson. She is an undistinguished former French prime minister best known for her suggestion that one in four Englishmen are homosexual. She was the EU's 'research and education' commissioner between 1995 and 1999 and she is now facing criminal charges in Belgium of forgery and conflict of interest relating to her time in office in Brussels. The case has been under investigation for four years (not so long by Belgian standards for politically sensitive prosecutions) and is forecast to last at least another twelve months or so, after which the EU Commission will then decide whether to seek additional administrative penalties against her.

The commissioner responsible for investigating Cresson is, with nice symmetry, an undistinguished former opposition leader. Neil Kinnock led the Labour party to defeat against Mrs. Thatcher and, more remarkably, John Major. He is a man in a good position to know that the Cresson scandal was no isolated incident: Berlusconi's alleged wrongdoing is small beer compared with what has been going on in Brussels. In 1999 Kinnock and all his fellow commissioners, "accepted responsibility" by resigning after the publication of a highly critical report detailing fraud and corruption within the Commission then led by another undistinguished former prime minister — Luxemburg's Jacques Santer. The report had been prompted by the persistence of Paul van Buitenen, a Dutch whistle-blower from the commission's control department. He was suspended on half-pay and labeled a madman, but eventually his complaints grew too noisy for even the EU parliament to ignore and, somewhat reluctantly it authorized the independent inquiry that was to doom the Santer Commission.

Santer continued to describe himself as "whiter than white," but despite that, he was replaced by a slightly more distinguished former prime minister — Italy's Romano Prodi. Prodi remains "president" of the Commission today and is, we must presume, "whiter than whiter than white." Only boors will choose to mention that, like Berlusconi, the pristine Mr. Prodi was under criminal investigation on at least two occasions in the 1980s and 1990s. No charges were ever brought, but it's worth remembering that just as there tends to be something a little political about prosecutions in Italy, there can also be more than a touch of the political about decisions not to prosecute.

But back to Kinnock. As we have seen, he accepted his share of "responsibility" for the failings of the Santer Commission by resigning. He then agreed to accept even more "responsibility" by being appointed to the new Prodi Commission, promoted and being put in charge of "administrative reform." This is why the Cresson case has ended up in his in-tray.

Madame Cresson, meanwhile, is not going quietly. Her prosecution by the Belgians is, she says, an attempt to "damage the name of France" (no cheap jokes, please) and she has sent a letter to Jacques Chirac asking for the "protection of the Republic." That "protection" is something that Chirac, the toast of the EU parliament during the Iraq crisis, knows a bit about himself. The French government has now endorsed a law that will safeguard Saddam's old pal from prosecution for as long as he is president. This isn't unique (Berlusconi has secured similar immunity in Italy), but it may come in handy given certain characteristics of Chirac's time as mayor of Paris, which reportedly included both traditional and more exotic misbehavior including some $2,000,000, for example, claimed in reimbursement for food and drink expenses.

Neil Kinnock's "reforms" have, meanwhile, proceeded at a predictably leaden pace, prompting a despairing Van Buitenen to resign from the Commission in 2002, saying it was "unreformable." The EU's Court of Auditors probably agrees. It has been criticizing the commission's accounting for years. One of the few people who seem to really care about this is Marta Andreasen, the new chief auditor appointed to the EU last year. She went public with claims that the commission's chaotic and confusing 'system,' which is meant to track around $100 billion a year, might be open to fraud. She was promptly suspended, but on full pay — there has been some progress). In fact, Andreasen's comments were relatively restrained. The Court of Auditors has estimated that losses from fraud account for around five percent of the budget. To add to the drama, it turned out that the EU's internal auditor (another determined Dutchman, this time by the name of Muis) had been preparing a report of his own. It backed up much of what Andreasen was saying, not that that did her much good.

To his credit, Muis persisted, but only for a while. He has tendered his resignation citing the now traditional "slow pace of reform." There are suggestions that he was also frustrated by the Commission's reluctance to allow him to investigate the growing scandal at Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, a place where, it seems, nothing quite added up. The details are murky, but there's talk of secret bank accounts and siphoned-off funds. As usual the whistle-blower, (Danish, this time, not Dutch), was left twisting in the wind. She claims to have been bullied out of her job. Requests to that great reformer Kinnock for legal assistance were rejected. That, at least, has now changed. The case, a spokesman for Kinnock told the Financial Times, is "more complicated than we originally thought." Indeed it is.

Now, the point of reciting these tales of hypocrisy and corruption within the EU (and there are plenty of other stories where they came from) is not to exonerate Berlusconi. All those wrongs don't make a right. At the same time, they do make the indignation over the Italian prime minister look a little, well, selective. For an explanation, forget the dodgy dealings back in Italy. Berlusconi's real crime is something far worse — he is a capitalist, a conservative (of sorts) and, horrors, an Atlanticist, and in today's increasingly intolerant Europe the reward for such heresy is meant to be political and legal destruction.

And that's the real scandal.