Veil of Tears

National Review Online, April 21, 2004

"Islam," as Samuel Huntington wrote, "has bloody borders." True enough, but in an age of mass immigration where are those borders? Precise numbers are hard to come by, but there are now thought to be at least 12 million Muslims within the EU, territories where, no more than half a century ago, Islam was little more than exotica, a religion of far-off desert places, its presence a distant, if troubling, memory; the faith of the Ottoman empire that, at its peak, reached the gates of Vienna; the faith of the Moors, who swept through Spain, advanced deep into France, and ruled Andalusia for hundreds of years; the faith of the Barbary pirates, slavers and scourge. And then, when a booming postwar Europe started looking south and east for sources of new labor, history went into reverse. Muslims returned, but as immigrants this time, not invaders. Their stories vary from individual to individual and from country to country, but almost everyone can agree on one point: In France, where there are five million Muslims (about 7.5 percent of the population; other estimates are significantly higher), something has gone terribly wrong.

Even by the low standards of Western Europe, the integration of France's Muslim minority (which is predominantly of Arab/North African ancestry) has been patchy, to put it kindly. Isolated in the desolation of the cités, high-rise, dole-queue suburbs generally located a discreet distance from the principal urban centers, many Muslims are cut off from the French mainstream physically, economically, and psychologically. It's no surprise that the primitive—and reassuring—certainties of Islamic fundamentalism have found an audience. How great an audience is a matter of dispute, and, inevitably in the country of Le Pen's National Front, racist mythologizing. Pick an anecdote or a statistic for yourself, but whether it's rising anti-Semitism, or the horrifyingly routine gang rape of Muslim girls who step out of line, or increasingly politicized violence, they all suggest that a catastrophe is in the making.

And successive French governments have not had a clue what to do. The unspoken, and ludicrous, hope was that most immigrants—including, presumably, their French-born children—would return "home," allowing the problem to subside. They haven't and it didn't.

Affirmative action might (or might not) have helped, but it ran contrary to the founding notion of a republic where all citizens were simply French regardless of race or religion, and was never really tried. Equally, France's prickly sense of its own identity left less room for the sloppy sense of diversity that arguably bought (until recently) a broad measure of social peace on the other side of the English Channel. Meanwhile, high rates of ethnic-minority unemployment (25 percent or more in some areas) meant that the workplace was no longer the effective engine of assimilation that it had once been.

Prompted partly by post-9/11 panic, the government has at least acknowledged that all is not well, but its attempts to help have often made things worse. Last year the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, no bleeding heart, set up a "Muslim Council" (Sarkozy has also been flirting with support for affirmative action) as an equivalent to similar, and long-established, bodies for Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. A suitably safe moderate was selected as chairman, but when the process moved from selection to election, disaster ensued. Depending on how you count them, fundamentalists won at least one third of the seats. Designed to enshrine a moderate "French" Islam, the new council may in fact have helped legitimate extremists as an authentic representative voice of France's Muslims.

The position taken by the French government over the Iraq war only added to the problem. To the extent that Chirac's motive was to appease the country's Muslims, he failed. By radicalizing the debate, and bringing paranoia about America, "the West," and, quelle surprise, Israel onto center stage, France's president succeeded in inflaming the very hatreds his policy was designed to damp down. To be sure, there were signs, as the tanks rolled into Iraq, that even Chirac was becoming alarmed at the tone that the rhetoric, and worse, was taking. His emollient prime minister was dispatched to make a few emollient remarks: anti-Semitism was, Jean-Pierre Raffarin soothed, a bad, bad thing. But by then, it was too late.

When their policies are failing, politicians like to create a diversion. Jacques Chirac is no exception. A commission he set up last July to look at the treatment of religion in an explicitly secular republic came up with 25 recommendations, including, for example, the suggestion that Yom Kippur and Eid al-Kabir should be school holidays, but the French government has chosen to act on only one, that "conspicuous signs of religious adherence" should be banned from public schools. These include yarmulkes and "large" crucifixes but, given that neither Orthodox Jews nor Assyrian-Chaldean Christians (tiny community, large crosses) pose much of a threat to France's established order, adding these items is just so much multiculturalist window dressing. The real target of this legislation is Islamic head covering. In France that's usually a headscarf ("foulard"). Chirac's frequent references to the veil ("voile") are just demagoguery: The burka, I suspect, is rarely seen in Bordeaux. With opinion polls showing 70-percent approval, the new law swept through the national assembly by 494-36 in February, and then, a month later, was approved 276-20 in the senate. The new rules will come into force from the beginning of the school year in September.

Criticism has come from some very predictable sources. Bin Laden's number two, the nutcase doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri (or a mimic pretending to be al-Zawahiri) denounced the ban as "new evidence of the Crusaders' hatred for Muslims." Those comments, of course, should be treated with contempt, as should complaints from those Muslim countries that have themselves proved very hostile to public displays of any religion other than Islam. France, of course, has seen a significant number of protests, almost always featuring women in headscarves, lambs voting for Ramadan. Other critics have included, Human Rights Watch, senior United Nations officials, the United States, and even, obliquely, the pope.

There are indeed obvious—and compelling—libertarian objections to the new law as a restriction of religious freedom, but to characterize it as a simple expression of bigotry is to do it an injustice. In theory at least, the law is merely a principled application of laïcité, the state secularism that is roughly analogous to the separation of church and state in the United States. Seen in those terms the law is certainly no more oppressive than some of the more rigid First Amendment rulings seen in this country in recent years. What's more, if freedom is the issue, what about the freedom of those Muslim girls who choose not to wear the headscarf, a freedom increasingly under threat from fundamentalist bullying.

In a recent article, one member of the presidential commission recalled how, after initial doubts, he was convinced to support a ban. "Since 1989...and especially in the last two to three years, it has become clear that in schools where some Muslim girls do wear the headscarf and others do not, there is strong pressure on the latter to "conform."  This daily pressure takes different forms, from insults to violence...We received testimonies of Muslim fathers who had to transfer their daughters from public to (Catholic) private schools where they were free of pressure to wear the headscarf.... In the increasing number of schools where girls wear the hijab, a clear majority of Muslim girls who do not wear the headscarf...asked the commission to ban all public displays of religious belief. A large majority of Muslim girls do not want to wear the scarf; they too have the right of freedom of conscience. Principals and teachers have tried their best to bring back some order in an impossible situation where pressure, insults, or violence sets pupils against one another, yet where to protest against this treatment is seen as treason to the community."

To read those words is to understand that the post-Enlightenment West, where the principle of religious freedom has carried little cost in societies where religion was either in retreat, or at the very least accepted boundaries set by the state, is ill-equipped to deal with the challenge posed by an aggressive, growing, fundamentalist faith steeped in a very different tradition. In this conflict, Western notions of what is "political" and what is "religious" are next to meaningless. Seen one way, the hijab is nothing more than a simple expression of piety, seen another it is a political statement, no less threatening than the brown shirts and red stars of previous eras.

That said, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that, even where it does not topple over into absurdity (under certain circumstances, beards too, and even bandanas, can be banned), the new law will make a bad situation worse, radicalizing the previously indifferent, creating flashpoint after flashpoint, confrontation after confrontation and, ironically, turning the hijab, a symbol of repression if ever there was one, into a token of rebellion guaranteed to appeal to the very adolescents the law is designed to govern. Worse still, this move is highly likely to spur the creation of separate Muslim schools (which under French law would be eligible for generous government subsidy) where the headscarf ban would not apply, something that would deepen still further the intellectual isolation of their pupils from the French mainstream. To add to France's predicament, if there's one thing potentially more disastrous than the enforcement of this law, it would be its repeal. Repeal would be seen as an acknowledgement of French weakness in the face of the fundamentalists, empowering them still further, and would add to the mounting unease of the native French, the Français de souche, about the Muslims in their midst. Jean-Marie le Pen could not ask for more.

Yes, it's a mess, but that's the danger of trying to solve a deep-seated, difficult, and sensitive problem with a quick, politically expedient, fix. Halting the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in France is going to take time, determination, generosity, and, just as importantly, a willingness to fight the battle of ideas in a way that won't be easy in a country held in thrall to the PC bogeyman of "Islamophobia."

Don't hold your breath.

Ronald’s Bad Choice

National Review Online, February 5, 2004

Chicago, September 1989 © Andrew Stuttaford

Whoever thought up the weird blend of menu, sermon, and keep-fit manual that McDonald's has now dubbed "Real Life Choices," he has at least proved one thing. Creepy Ronald is not the only clown working under those famous golden arches. Thanks to this initiative, diners waddling into any branch of the burger chain located in the New York tri-state area can participate in a program designed "to help [them] stay on track with [their] diet regimen and incorporate McDonald's food without feeling guilty." However, before going any further in describing this latest insult to the nation's intelligence, I have one small request. Please get up from your chair and remain standing while incorporating the rest of this article. Thank you. I'll explain later. When a junk-food joint offers a "program" as well as a menu, it should stir suspicion even among its most gullible customers. (You remember them. They were the trusting fools that actually ate a McLean Deluxe.) And when that program is given a name so drenched in corporate saccharine as "Real Life Choices" only two things are certain: It will be a complete fantasy and there will be no additional "choice." An exaggeration? Well, let's look at that "choice." Speaking to MSNBC, a marketing director for McDonalds brightly conceded that, no, the program was not exactly a new menu option, but rather "a new way of ordering." Ah, I see.

This is how it works. Fearful of fat? Cautious about calories? Chary of carbohydrates? Well, the program will allow you to request standard menu items modified to take account of your specific dietary concerns. It really isn't that difficult. Feel free to tuck into six (white meat) Chicken McNuggets(r) and a side salad, but only use half a package of Newman's Own Low Fat Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing. I feel slimmer already.

The company has said that it is trying to "[teach] consumers how to eat the McDonald's food they love." Just in case any consumers are offended by the notion that they need teaching how to eat, McDonald's has added celebrity glitz to Real Life by recruiting Pamela Smith, "a leader in the wellness movement... best-selling author" and "wellness coach" to Shaq O'Neal, to help design the program.

Full details are set out in a handy leaflet. The advice is straightforward and insulting only to those with an IQ above that of a French fry. So, for example, fatphobic Chicken McGrill Sandwich ® fanciers are told to forget the mayo, but pick Picante, BBQ, or Buffalo sauce instead. The carbohydrate-averse are also allowed a Chicken McGrill Sandwich ® — so long as they drop the lettuce and tomato. But be careful! Dieters who prefer watching fat and calories to casting an eye over carbohydrates should add lettuce and tomato to their sandwiches. And what, you may ask, about desperate diners worried about fat, calories, and carbohydrates? What are they meant to do when confronted with the troubling dilemma posed by lettuce leaf and tomato slice? You may ask, but McDonald's has no answer. Those losers, clearly, are on their own.

But there's more to Real Life Choices than slim pickings. The program also boasts "tips for healthful living." Take advantage of "hum-drum tasks...by doing them with vigor!" Vigorously stand up to take a phone call (vigorously rising to your feet to read this article would, I reckon be just as effective), vigorously park at the far end of the lot, and vigorously wash your car by hand. "Any extra movement boosts the metabolism and burns calories better." There's no word on how many calories would be burned tearing up patronizing propaganda, but, as a service to readers, I'll pass on a few more of the ways in which McDonald's suggests that the hum-drum can be made more vigorous. Make sure you comply.

"Walk to a co-worker's desk, as opposed to calling them."

So, what's behind this nonsense? If we rule out theories that the tri-state McDonald's hierarchy has either descended into a form of collective insanity or been possessed by mischievous demons, the only possible explanation is that the company is trying to formulate a response to chatter about a supposed obesity "epidemic." The lawsuit filed against McDonald's earlier last year by two chunky children may have been dismissed for a second time (the judge barred the plaintiffs from re-filing, saying, rather tactlessly under the circumstances, that they did not deserve "a third bite at the apple"), but no one seriously doubts that there will be others in its wake.

"Use a carry-basket at the supermarket, as opposed to pushing a cart."

Equally ominous is the fact that legislators and bureaucrats are showing mounting interest in this issue. For example, last October Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson took time out from his doubtless demanding schedule to "commend" McDonald's and Burger King for introducing some lower-fat items on their menus. "It was," he condescended, "a step in the right direction of providing consumers with less fat." Meanwhile, there's draft legislation both in Congress and, locally, the New York state assembly that would oblige fast-food chains to post calorie counts on their menu boards. Over on the left coast, Oakland's mayor Jerry Brown, an always-reliable bellwether of the modishly bizarre, has come out in favor of a tax based on "the unhealthy quality of foods." Even poor old Joe Lieberman has tried to get in on the act. He wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the way that fast food and other snacks are marketed.

"Walk to pick up the morning paper instead of having it delivered."

The notion that the increasing rate of obesity is the fault of the capitalists who sell fast food, rather than the consumers who eat it is, has proved popular among many overweight Americans willing to blame anyone other than themselves for the aesthetic tragedies that are their stretch pants. Everyone loves an alibi. The cranks, busybodies, and lovers of self-denial now peering through our restaurant windows are only too happy to oblige. As Mary Wootan, the director of nutrition policy for the deranged, but influential, Center for Science in the Public Interest explained at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting last November, "we have got to move beyond personal responsibility."

"Make several trips up and down the stairs instead of using the elevator."

Happily, judging by the estimated $40 billion a year they spend in the pursuit of one diet or another, there are still plenty of Americans who disagree. Seen in this light, McDonald's Real Life Choices are nothing more than shrewd marketing, a canny attempt to make sure that the chain doesn't lose customers frightened by the flap over flab, and perhaps even to attract a few more. Premium salads introduced by the company last April have reportedly been something of a success. And, to be fair, it is possible to eat perfectly healthily at McDonald's. Contrary to the killjoys' shrill claims, there really is no such thing as "bad" food. What matters is a balanced — and moderate — diet. There's no reason that a cheeseburger (or two) cannot be a part of it.

"Use a push-mower instead of a riding mower to mow the lawn."

Likewise there's probably nothing, other than absurdity (and remember, laughter uses up a few calories), actually wrong with all those hints for a healthier humdrum. Yes, they are irritating, but following them wouldn't hurt. It might even help — a little. However, the irony for McDonald's is that in launching a program surely designed, at least in part, to head off lawsuits it may have actually increased its legal risk.

The company's most effective response to potential plaintiffs is the (entirely reasonable) argument that its meals are safe. If some folk choose to overindulge, the consequences are their responsibility, and theirs alone: It is not up to Mickey D's to police how much people choose to pile onto their trays. To use a legal term, McDonald's does not owe a "duty of care" to its clients' waistlines, arteries, or bathroom scales. Unfortunately, measures such as the Real Life Choices program, or, to take another example, the somewhat surreal decision to hire Oprah's personal trainer as a consultant) muddy the message. They seem, if only implicitly, to acknowledge that the company's critics may have a point. Any trial lawyer worth his salt (forgive the nutritionally incorrect phrase) will portray such steps as an admission by McDonald's that it bears some legal responsibility for the obesity "epidemic."

And even the details of such programs can, in the hands of a skilful attorney, be turned into a courtroom nightmare. If McDonald's believed that the program was necessary, why did it wait until 2004 before introducing it — and then only in three states? Worse still, were some of "the tips for healthful living," to use a dread word, "misleading"? After all, they included the counterintuitive, and undeniably self-serving, suggestion that diners should "plan ahead to have "power snacks" or meals every 3-4 hours, energizing choices such as fruit and yogurt or cheese, tortilla roll with meat or cheese, or sandwich [that] can do the body good!" Now, I'm no expert on the human metabolism, but recommendations that we should all graze our way to good health may raise an eyebrow or two.

There's not much more reason to think that the company's efforts will do anything to lessen the political pressures it is going to face. Indeed, by increasing the perception that the food giant is somehow to blame for our plague of pudginess, it may well worsen them. That the company is apparently so spineless in the face of these threats should be no surprise. All too often, the boardroom answer to ideologically driven criticism (and if you think the attack on fast-food restaurants is really to do with waistlines, I have a bridge to sell you) is appeasement. McDonald's, it seems, is no exception and, as that company is about to discover, appeasement never works.

O.K., you can sit down now.

++++

I talked to MSNBC about this topic here. 

The Fat Police

Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen:  Food Fight - The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do about It                

National Review, January 26, 2004

Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 1999   ©  Andrew Stuttaford

It is difficult to single out what is most objectionable about this hectoring, lecturing, and altogether dejecting piece of work, but perhaps it's the moment when its authors credit the rest of us with the IQs of greedy rodents. Quoting a study that shows that, presented with a cornucopia of carbohydrates and wicked fatty treats, laboratory rats will abandon a balanced, healthy diet in favor of dangerous excess, they draw a rather insulting conclusion: Civilization's success in creating so much abundance has come at a terrible price, a "toxic environment" so overflowing with temptation that, like those Rabelaisian rats, humanity will be unable to resist. We will eat ourselves if not to death, then to diabetes, decrepitude, and stretch pants.

The "obesity epidemic" is becoming a tiresome refrain and Yale professor Kelly Brownell is one of its most tireless advocates. Nevertheless, for those with the stomach for more on the fat threat, Food Fight is worth a look for what it reveals about the motives and objectives of the busybodies pining to police your plate.

But let's start with the "epidemic" itself. With a relish they are unlikely to show at the dinner table, the authors pepper their readers with data purporting to show that roughly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, products of a feeding frenzy that is dangerous medically and drives up health-care costs by tens of billions of dollars. Some of the numbers may need to be taken with a pinch of low sodium salt, but the trends they represent are a matter of concern. In this at least Food Fight is right.

Over the past couple of decades. Americans have indeed put on some pounds. All too often, heavy isn't healthy. The mere fact of being too fat (calculating what is "too" fat takes more, however, than a wistful glance at the pages of Vogue) can cause problems such as arthritis and a range of other, sometimes serious, diseases. Despite this, corpulence should be seen as symptom of ill health as much as a cause: Being fat won't necessarily kill you, but the sloth and the gluttony that got you there just might.

To their credit, the authors do cite research showing that fit fatties are at lower risk that unfit string beans. Still, they tend to concentrate on obesity as a problem in its own right - and, ironically, that's something that may be counterproductive. Befuddled by standardized notions of an ideal weight, Americans spend an estimated $40 billion a year in the generally unsuccessful pursuit of one miracle diet or another. The result is yo-yoing weight - something often less healthful that having a few too many pounds - and unjustified self-congratulation for a population that likes to tell itself that it is "doing something" about its health, when, in fact, it is doing anything but.

Highlighting fatness, that soft, billowing symbol of self-indulgence, reflects an agenda that has expanded beyond legitimate health concerns to embrace asceticism for its own sake. There's a hint of this in the way the authors respond to the idea that all foods can find a place in a properly balanced diet. While conceding that such an approach has "some utility" in individual cases, they see the argument that flows from it (that no food is intrinsically "bad") as a distraction. They are wrong. An emphasis on balance is the best chance of persuading this country to eat more healthily - and, importantly, to stick with this decision. To Brownell and Horgen, more comfortable with proscription and self-denial than compromise and cheeseburgers, this is, doubtless, dismayingly lax.

Their language too is a giveaway. There is tut-tut-ting over the "glorification of candy" and anguish over restaurants "notorious" for their large portions. Under the circumstances, it's no shock that the reliably alarmist "Center for Science in the Public Interest," an organization famous for its efforts to drain away our pleasures, rates frequent and favorable mention.

Asceticism often brings with it a sense of moral superiority and the urge to spread the joys of deprivation amongst the less enlightened masses - by persuasion if possible, by compulsion if necessary, and sometimes by something that falls in between. So Brownell and Horgen lament the lack of "incentive" for recipients of food stamps to purchase "healthy foods." Common sense, apparently, is not enough. Worse, these wretches might even be tempted into "overbuying." Who knew the food-stamp program was so generous?

With tobacco a useful precedent, it's not difficult to see where all this is going. Brimming with tales of carnage, soaring health-care costs, and the threat to "the children," Food Fight follows a familiar script. That's not to say its writers don't make some telling points. The ways, for instance, in which junk food is marketed to America's no-longer-so-tiny tots are troubling, but at its core this book rests on the unpalatable belief that even adults cannot be trusted with a menu. The authors' solutions include regulation, censorship. subsidies, propaganda, public-spending boondoggles, and a faintly totalitarian-sounding "national strategic plan to increase physical activity." Oh, did I mention the "small" taxes on the sale of "unhealthy" food?

Food Fight is a preview of the techniques that will be used to persuade a chubby country to agree to all this. There are scare tactics (death! disease!), a convenient capitalist demon ) "big food"), and, best of all, an alibi. It's not our fault that we are fat. Yes, the importance of getting up off that sofa is fully acknowledged in Food Fight, but the book's soothing subtext is that we are all so helpless in the face of advertising and abundance that we can no longer be held fully responsible for what we are eating. Even the ultimate alibi (food might be addictive!) makes a tentative appearance, but whether this theory is true is, readers are informed, not "yet" clear.

The notion that eating too much is somehow involuntary is ludicrous, but it fits in with the view repeated in this book that "overconsumption has replaced malnutrition as the world's top food problem," a repugnant claim that makes sense only if feast is indeed no more of a choice that famine. Anyone who believes that will have no problem in arguing that, as people cannot reasonably be expected to fend off Colonel Sanders by themselves, government should step in. And "if the political process is ineffective" (voters can be inconveniently ornery), Brownell and Horgen would back litigation. Such cases might be tricky, but even the treat of mass lawsuits "regardless of legal merit" could, they note, help "encourage" the food industry to change its ways.

And that thuggish suggestion is more nauseating that anything Ronald McDonald could ever cook up.

Killjoy Was Here

Eric Burns: The Spirits of America

National Review, December 30, 2003

Abraham Lincoln, a wise man and a brave one too (he was speaking to the sober souls gathered at a meeting of a Springfield temperance society), once said that the damage alcohol can do comes not "from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing." Drunkenness, not drink, was the real demon. Sensible words; yet, in their dealings with the bottle, his countrymen still lurch between wretched excess and excessive wretchedness. Moderation remains elusive. After the binging, there's always the hangover: dreary years of finger-wagging, sermonizing, and really, really dumb laws. Just ask poor Jenna Bush. Spirits of America, Eric Burns's entertaining history of the impact of an old pleasure on a new world, is rather like a Washington State cabernet sauvignon, unpretentious and thoroughly enjoyable. Burns, the host of Fox News Watch, is not a professional historian. His prose is engaging and relaxed, written in the rhythms of an accomplished raconteur rather than the jargon of the academic. In short, this book is about as dry as a colonial tavern.

To Burns, it's not surprising that the first settlers, as strangers in a strange and not always hospitable land, should have turned to drink: to beer, to whisky, to brandy, to rum, and even to an alarming-sounding series of proto-cocktails. Rattle-skull, anyone? Reading his account, it's easy to conclude that many of these early Americans spent most of the day drunk, proving once again (at least to this Brit) that they cannot have known what they were doing when, after a revolution fomented largely in those same taverns, they broke from the embrace of the mother country.

Needless to say, all this good cheer produced a reaction, and the greater (and most interesting) part of this book is devoted to prohibitionists and their long, far from fine, whine. It's a painfully familiar tale to anyone who has watched the drug war, the excesses of the anti-tobacco movement, or even the gathering fast-food jihad.

The parallels are telling. There's the junk science so shaky that, by comparison, "passive smoking" is as believable as gravity. Dr. Benjamin Rush, "the Hippocrates of [18th-century] Pennsylvania," linked drink to a wide range of health problems including scurvy, stomach rumblings, and, for the truly unlucky, spontaneous combustion. Around a hundred years later—and a century before the nonsense of DARE—the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was distributing an "education" program in schools that included the startling news that alcohol could lead "the coats of the blood vessels to grow thin [making them] liable at any time to cause death by bursting." Boozehounds should also watch out. Children were taught that even a tiny amount of this "colorless liquid poison" would be enough to kill a dog,

Like their successors today, these campaigners understood the uses of propaganda. Even the choice of that soothing word "temperance" (which ought to mean moderation, not abstinence) was, as Burns points out, nothing more than spin before its time. No less disingenuously, the name of the influential Anti-Saloon League camouflaged prohibitionist objectives far broader than an attack on the local den of iniquity, a technique that may ring a bell with those who believe that MADD is now straying beyond its original, praiseworthy, agenda.

Above all, what is striking is how, then as now, the zealots of abstention were unable to resist the temptation of compulsion. Burns is inclined to attribute the best of intentions to the "temperance" campaigners. He's wrong. The fact is that neither persuasion, nor education, nor even psychotic Carry Nation's hatchet was enough to satisfy the urge to control their fellow citizens that played as much a part in the psychology of teetotalitarianism as any genuine desire to improve society. From the Massachusetts law providing that alcohol could not be sold in units of less than fifteen gallons to the grotesque farce of Prohibition, Spirits of America is filled with tales of legislation as absurd as it was presumptuous.

Although he never holds back on a good anecdote (the story of Izzy Einstein, Prohibition Agent and master of disguise, is by itself worth the price of this book), when it comes to the Volstead years themselves. Burns gives a useful and, dare I say it, sober, account. Contrary to machine-gun-saturated myth, the mayhem (if not the corruption) was mostly confined to a few centers, and although Prohibition did clog up the justice system, enforcement, mercifully, usually tended to be less than Ness.

Even more surprisingly, while he doesn't come close to endorsing Prohibition, Bums is able to point to data showing that, in certain respects at least, the killjoy carnival was a success: Per capita alcohol consumption fell sharply, as did the incidence of drink-related health problems. But even these achievements may mean less than is thought. Other evidence (not cited by Burns) would suggest that, after an initial collapse, consumption started to rise again as new (illicit) suppliers got themselves organized, with often disastrous consequences for their customers. Winston Churchill, no stranger to the bottle himself, was told that "there is less drinking, but there is worse drinking," a phrase,  incidentally, that almost perfectly describes the impact on today's young of the increase in the drinking age to 21. As for the alleged health benefits, the 1920s also saw notable reductions in. for example, deaths from alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver in Britain, a country that saw no need for prohibition.

What Burns underplays, however, is the fact that this debate should be about more than crudely utilitarian calculations. There's a famous comment (cited by Burns, but, sadly, quite possibly a fake) widely attributed to Lincoln that sums this up nicely. Prohibition, "a species of intemperance in itself . . . makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. [It] strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our Government was founded."

Played Out?

National Review Online, December 29, 2003

However good the party, the morning after is always depressing. There will be cigarette ash on the carpet, half-empty glasses in the sink, and, usually, a baleful selection of uneaten snacks on the kitchen table, curling and discoloring as they begin to decay. Seen in the unforgiving light of the hangover dawn, even the memories soon start to spoil. Was that conversation truly so witty, that woman really so attractive? And so it is that studying Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Issue (yup, yet another tough assignment for NRO) left me, well, a little bit sad. Oh, Melba Ogle (July 1964, and was that really her name?), where are you now? Don’t get me wrong. For a while, a good long while, old Hefner’s wicked carnival looked a lot like fun. No, it was fun. Yes, as only a quick glance at the anniversary issue will remind readers, it was geeky (a caption tells us that “with thoughtful features on food and drink, Playboy assumed its role as a sophisticated handbook for the urban male”), self-important (“conversations with the likes of Fidel Castro, Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X established the Playboy Interview as the definitive print forum for the world’s most influential figures”), and responsible for more tacky artwork than the nightmare palettes of Hallmark and Thomas Kinkade combined; yet, for a while the brazen bunny’s mag was sorta, well, groovy.

We’ll never know whether Hef was smart or just lucky — probably a bit of both — but the launch, and the format, of his magazine turned out to be perfectly timed to take advantage of an era where declining (some would say) morals and a rising economy had created the ideal climate for aspirational smut. Even Playboy’s name (with its glamorous hint of cocktail, tuxedo, and blonde), changed at the last minute from the tawdry-sounding Stag Party, was inspired. Up to that point, glossier, designer erotica had been the preserve of the glossier, designer few, for Nick and Nora perhaps, for Frankie and Johnny never. Plebs had had to make do with grittier fare — stag films, Tijuana bibles, and the supposedly racy thrills of a range of forgettable magazines that veered between the clinically functional (if you know what I mean) and the nauseatingly coy.

But the man in the gray flannel suit wanted more than that. He wanted a velvet smoking jacket! He wanted silk pajamas! He wanted to know how to cook food on a sword! He wanted, no, he deserved cool jazz, hot women, and a swank apartment in which he could play. “A 12-page layout of the ultimate bachelor pad…generated hundreds of letters inquiring about the furnishings.” Eros had come to Levittown. All work and no Playboy made Jack a dull boy: In a new age of mass affluence, cheerfully promiscuous sex, or at least the goal of cheerfully promiscuous sex, had become another consumer good, succulently packaged in (or out of) that oddly fetishistic bunny costume, up there with the Cadillac and the color TV, all part of that gorgeous, greedy American dream.

For a neat, in all senses, example of this carnal consumer cocktail, check out the reproduction of a diagram from a 1959 issue illustrating a fantasy bed (or was it one of Hef’s?) — more Circuit than Sin City. Not Evelyn Nesbit, but a television set hangs enticingly from the ceiling, while the immaculately made bed itself, a fortress of solitude that will sometimes welcome visitors, is reinforced with hi-fi equipment, space-age speakerphone, fashionable electric clock, as well as the inevitable drinks cabinet, bottle opener at the ready. There’s no actual, um, girl to be seen (perhaps she was put off by what looks to be a small side table — for the booze presumably — strangely separating the his-and-hers pillows), but, in a reminder that this was the bed of a swinger swinging his way through the Eisenhower era, a pair of slippers is placed tidily to one side: his, not hers.

More than 40 years later, the magazine’s advertising is still following a similar theme, with advertisements for cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, beer, whisky, vodka, and for readers who can stay coherent after trying all that, mobile phones, motorbikes, trucks, DVDs, DVD players, a Panasonic DVD recorder for “total control recording,” and for those whose total control may not be what it once was, Testosterole Maximum, a “male hormone enhancement formula” with Wild Yam, Maca, Yohimbe, Avena Sativa, Androstenedione, and, ahem, Horny Goat Weed. The slippers have gone.

But the bachelor pad (“a hedonistic pleasure dome”) is back, designed this time round by Frank Gehry, the architect responsible for dumping clumps of crumpled metal on luckless cities all the way from Bilbao to Seattle. “The top floor is the bedroom,” explains Gehry, “there’s a pool on the roof. When you’re in bed, you look at the glass on the bottom of the pool. My sons did sexy murals for the walls. The whole place is colorful and has a lot of soft forms. If I were a bachelor…this could really work.” Sure, Frank, 15-feet high full-frontal nudes is always the way to pull in the chicks.

Turning with some relief to the soft forms of Playboy’s vanished heyday, (Avis! Terre! China!) it doesn’t take long to discover that other glories of that lost epoch are well represented underneath the shiny black cover of the anniversary issue. The Playboy jet! June “The Bosom” Wilkinson! The martini glasses balanced on June “The Bosom” Wilkinson’s bosoms! Lenny Bruce! The Playmate parties! The swimming pool! The mansion!

But, wait a minute, look who’s back. In a faint echo of Playboy’s storied literary past (Kerouac! Bradbury! Ian Fleming!), the anniversary issue boasts none other than “America’s leading literary light,” Norman Mailer (“the nation’s smartest — and ballsiest — writer”) and his “fearless platform for a brave new world.” “So why did Bush and company go to war?” The fearless, smart, and ballsy Mailer knows. Conspiracy! “The probable answer is that an escape was needed from our problems at home…An easy war looked then to be George W. Bush’s best solution. What he needed and what he got was a media jamboree that provided our sweet dose of patriotic ecstasy….”

Oh well.

But, if you prefer, there’s crazy Hunter S. Thompson ranting about “Richard Nixon and all the evil eggs he laid in the White House: Rumsfeld…Cheney…Kissinger…Schlesinger…Admiral Poindexter. They were all in Nixon’s inner circle. And then Reagan’s. And then Old Man Bush’s. And ye gods!…Now they are the closest advisers to Bush Junior. How long, O Lord, how long?”

Hunter S. Thompson’s unfortunate readers might feel the same way. For more, sigh, even more of the same, there’s Al Franken still talking about his ‘fight’ with Rich Lowry and, of course, the awful behavior of nasty Milhous, who was, for all his faults, “a better president than the one we have now.” David Mamet weighs in with the deep, deep thought that “any crime can and will be committed in the name of freedom. Some, however, you will note, will undergo a name change. Racial arrogance, murder and theft, being words with an unfortunate negative connotation, are often called patriotism…”

And if all this cranky liberalism sounds a little tired, that fits in nicely with a magazine that at times appears absolutely exhausted. The jokes are a snooze (“The soused spouse asked, “You want to know why I’ve come home half loaded? Because I ran out of money, that’s why.”), the cartoons are comatose, and the folks writing to the “Playboy Advisor” are simply asleep at the wheel. Here’s “J.H.” from Montgomery, Alabama: “Let’s say I collect my semen and freeze it. If my girlfriend inserts the cube into her vagina, could she get pregnant?” Let’s say Playboy’s urban sophisticates are not, clearly, quite what they once were.

But that should be no surprise. Playboy climaxed (no laughing in the back of the room, please) around the end of the 1960s. (This took a little while to sink in: Circulation peaked in 1972, but has since fallen by nearly sixty percent.) At its (soft) core, Hefner’s raffish mag was an outpost of Rat Pack hip marooned in the land that Woodstock built, black tie amid the tie-dye, martini more than marijuana (although in keeping with its consistent social libertarianism the magazine has, to its credit, long endorsed the legalization of pot), and by the time the yuppies started pushing the pendulum back towards a little retro chic, it was too late. The pornucopia had long since opened wide up — fans of the naughty no longer had to buy their nudie magazines “for the articles,” or, after the arrival of the VCR, and, later, and even more devastatingly, the Internet, buy any magazines at all.

And so, like ten-time cover girl Pamela Anderson, the Playboy spectacle has frayed a little around the edges. The trademark pinups remain a delight for the Onan set (if with more of the cyborg about them than in the old days), too saucy for Wal-Mart, although tame enough in the age of Abercrombie & Fitch, Jenna Jameson, and the Starr report’s small print, but the rest of its shtick seems just stale.

As for Hefner himself, his pipe is gone and his magazine is fading but, appropriately enough, like the Energizer bunny, the rest of him just keeps on going. Thank you, Viagra. So there he still stands, tatty, tacky, jaded, and, lets admit it, a touch laughable, but an American original nonetheless, 77 years old, an ancient satyr presiding over his anniversary issue — and pictured at a few parties too, no Brande, no Sandy, no Mandy (where did they go?), but Hef with six “girlfriends,” Hef with Tara Reid, Hef with seven “girlfriends,” Hef with Shannen Doherty, Hef with Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, Hef with “Bunny Victoria Fuller,” Hef with Thora Birch, Hef with Elizabeth Taylor (you can’t win ‘em all), and Hef with, of course, Pamela Anderson. Yes, yes, it looks very empty and somewhat desperate, and Hefner’s home life seems to leave little to be envied — if a lot to be desired — but, come on, the guy is 77.

It’s difficult not to cheer.

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.