The Week - News Briefs

-- Former president Clinton is advertising for interns. Well, President Bush did tell us to go on with our normal lives.

--The American Airlines flight that crashed after taking off from JFK in New York seems to have been the victim of mechanical failure, rather than terrorism. Small comfort to the passengers, almost all recent immigrants visiting relatives in the Dominican Republic, or to the Rockaway neighborhood where the plane crashed, home to so many casualties-firemen, policemen, Wall Street workers-of September 11. Pray for the newly afflicted, for the repeat sufferers, and for the tough battered city that is home to all of them.

-- Osama bin Laden claims he has nuclear weapons but-in a sudden burst of fondness for the civilized rules of warfare-would use them only to retaliate against an American chemical or biological attack. He's probably lying on both counts. But the U.S. should work urgently against the day when the caveman might be able to attain such weapons. While President Bush stares deeply into Vladimir Putin's soulful eyes, he should demand that he stop Russia's proliferation of missile and nuclear technology to Iran, Iraq, and other rogues, and secure Russia's "loose nukes." The administration, meanwhile, should help send Pakistan's nuclear weapons and material, like Dick Cheney, to an "undisclosed, secure location." As for bin Laden's boast, we should act as though it were true, and add it to the reasons to annihilate him and his allies as soon as possible.

-- In his interview with the journalist from the Pakistani newspaper Dawn (assuming it is authentic), Osama bin Laden used a lot of fancy footwork to almost take credit for his attack on the United States. "America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal. . . . We are carrying on the mission of our Prophet, Muhammed . . ." How will these semi-confessions affect the millions of Muslims in the Middle East, and elsewhere, who insist that Israel was responsible for the attacks? Not at all: They will continue to believe 1) that the Jews did it because they are evil, and 2) that Osama bin Laden did it because he is righteous. In the politics of fear and wish, the villains and the saviors are equally omnipotent; the childish spectator believes in both with equal fervor.

-- Republicans have no shortage of excuses for the defeat of their gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey: In the former, Mark Earley's campaign was invisible for much of the summer; in the latter, the September attacks made it hard for Bret Schundler to get his message out; the president was too busy to help either one. Much of this is true. But the Republican parties of both states also doomed the campaigns. The Republican establishment in New Jersey stiffed Schundler because he's a conservative reformer. Republican legislators in Virginia kept the Republican governor from delivering on his popular campaign pledge to end the state's car tax, and failed to pass a budget. The post-election spin is, as always, that Republican candidates lose because they are too conservative. But in these cases, Republicans lost because their colleagues were not conservative, or competent, enough.

-- Michael Bloomberg, who won New York's mayoral race, was pushed into the end zone by the endorsement of hero-mayor Rudy Giuliani, and by the passivity of Al Sharpton. The Rev declined to campaign for Democrat Mark Green. In a contentious Democratic run-off, Green supporters pointed out that Fernando Ferrer would give Sharpton the keys to City Hall: reasonably enough, since Sharpton backed Ferrer with just such hopes in mind. But Green, after profiting from the tactic, had to disavow it in the general election, because the rules of New York City politicking hold that criticizing any black leader, for any reason, is racist (Giuliani broke those rules, but he was an anomaly). Bloomberg said one perfect thing in his victory speech: "New York is alive and well and open for business." He promised not to raise taxes, and one hopes his business instincts will hold him to his pledge and indeed move him to cut taxes. He will have to develop good instincts for dealing with race hustlers, though. He shook hands with a grinning Sharpton after his victory. Better count your fingers, Mr. Mayor.

-- In the home stretch of the race, Green ran ads accusing Bloomberg of having told a pregnant female employee to "kill it, kill it" (meaning, her unborn child). The alleged quote surfaced in a sexual-harassment suit brought by the employee, and Bloomberg vehemently denied saying it. Why? And why should Green be angry if he had? Both men are down- the-line supporters of abortion-late-term, partial-birth, without parental consent, whatever. Why should one citizen fear to offer another the consolations of the law? Are we living in a theocracy or something?

-- After nearly a year of work, several of the nation's top media organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, have finished their recount of the Florida results. And the winner is . . . George W. Bush! The media chad- counters found that Bush would have won even if the Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the examination of so-called undervotes that Al Gore so desperately wanted. That's nice, but it's old news: The Miami Herald and USA Today published a definitive undervote recount months ago. As it turns out, the only news in the new recount is the claim that Gore "might" have won if a statewide recount of both undervotes and overvotes had been conducted. Unfortunately for Democrats, that was something Gore did not want, that his lawyer specifically rejected in court, and for which there was no provision in Florida law. The media recount almost disappeared amid real news about war, terrorism, and plane crashes. But no doubt President Bush, busy as he is, appreciates the fact that the Times, the Post, and the Journal have said he may remain in the White House.

-- Attorney general John Ashcroft moved, it is said, to "overturn" Oregon's law permitting assisted suicide. Critics, mostly liberals, say that his action demonstrates that conservatives are hypocrites when they defend states' rights. But that appearance is solely the result of an imprecise formulation. What Ashcroft has done is to say, in effect, Look, Oregon voters can decide what the State of Oregon will or will not prosecute. But they cannot nullify federal law. And federal law prohibits doctors from using drugs to kill people deliberately. For the same reason, state referenda cannot legalize the medical use of marijuana; they can only register disagreement with the federal prohibition. Opponents of federal drug law should work to repeal or amend that law. Until that time, the question to ponder is not whether conservatives have abandoned federalism-but whether liberals, in taking up the cause of nullification, should pay homage to John C. Calhoun.

-- The Justice Department reached a settlement with Microsoft that imposes some restrictions on the company but preserves its "freedom to innovate"-the bottom line on which Bill Gates has always insisted. But the case is not yet over. Microsoft's competitors consider the settlement too lenient, and they have persuaded the attorneys general for nine states and the District of Columbia to press on. It will be up to the courts to remind the AGs that the purpose of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not competitors.

-- Few high-wire acts are quite so death-defying as Yasser Arafat's. Time and again, he plummets to disaster, only for some kind soul to catch him in a safety net at the last moment. His latest resort to violence in the intifada against Israel has left a thousand dead, while at the same time he pretends to be painfully shocked by Islamic or any other kind of terror. President Bush favors a Palestinian state, but refuses yet to shake the hand of the double-dealing Arafat. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, tells him, "You cannot help us with al-Qaeda and hug Hezbollah." It's a new experience for Arafat that nobody is rushing forward with the safety net. If this continues, he may have to withdraw from the world-traveling terrorist circus.

-- "Blood debts have been repaid in blood. America has bombed other countries and used its hegemony to deny the natural rights of others without paying the price. Who until now has dared to avenge the hurts inflicted by unaccountable Americans?" So runs the voice-over in Attack America, a documentary that's flying off the shelves of book and video stores. Only the buyers aren't Palestinians, Pakistanis, or Saudis; they're Chinese. Even as Jiang Zemin smiled for the cameras with President Bush, his government's propaganda machine-through such outlets as Beijing Television, China Central, and Xinhua-was cranking out tapes, books, and games that praise the terrorist attacks as America's just deserts. Party officials, defending the materials, called them "educational." Many things changed on September 11. The fundamental nature of Chinese Communism, and of the Chinese regime, was not one of them.

-- The present war is drawing clearer the line between friend and foe. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi proclaimed November 10 "U.S.A. Day" and, despite pressure from anti-war groups and his own government's appeasers, held a pro-America pageant in Rome that attracted 100,000 people. In a 40-minute speech, delivered amid a sea of American flags, Berlusconi credited America with saving Europe from tyranny in both world wars and maintaining peace for the last half- century. Echoing John Kennedy, he proclaimed: "We are all citizens of New York." Bravo, Silvio.

-- The Council on American-Islamic Relations recently issued a press release complaining of an "Islamophobic smear campaign." It clearly doesn't know what a serious campaign is. During the First World War, hundreds of school districts quit teaching German, and the city of Cincinnati banned pretzels from lunch counters. The New York Times had this to say about German-Americans: "Never since the foundation of the Republic has any body of men assembled here who were more completely subservient to foreign influence and a foreign power and none ever proclaimed the un-American spirit more openly." In multicultural America, of course, no such thing can be said of a minority group-even when some hateful portion of it will not say a bad word about bin Laden. Most Muslim immigrants know, along with everyone else, that the United States is a welcoming, tolerant, and wondrous society. The only smear campaign that's being waged is against the American people by the self-appointed leaders of Muslim America, the bin Laden apologists at CAIR.

-- Here is one man's story: Mohammad Junaid was born and raised in New York. His mother was on the ninth floor of the World Trade Center, and escaped, with the help of New York's policemen and firemen. Junaid-26 years old-has now gone to Afghanistan to fight for Osama bin Laden. In an interview with British television, he said, "I did not feel any remorse for the Americans [who died on September 11]. . . . I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan. And I'll kill every American soldier that I see in Pakistan. . . . I do have an American passport, but at the end of the day, I'm a Muslim." He said that his family back home-including, presumably, his rescued mom-fully supports his decision. His grandfather had taught him that "your loyalty is with the Muslims. Even though you're in New York, your loyalty is with them." Let every American-especially those in the opinion- and policy-making class-contemplate Mohammad Junaid, and "identity politics," and immigration, and multiculturalism, and assimilation, and treason, and the quality of education-including what used to be "citizenship education"-and the meaning of America. This country could use not only re-moralizing, as the historian and social critic Gertrude Himmelfarb says; it could use re-patriotizing. Urgently.

-- Chelsea Clinton wrote an okay piece for Talk magazine about her experiences on 9/11 (she was in Manhattan that morning, about three miles from the World Trade Center). Thousands of 21-year-olds would have written better, tens of thousands would have written worse. What was gag-making about the piece were the comments of editor Tina Brown. "It has a kind of clarity, conviction, and honesty which really blew me away. She wasn't interested in spin or how did she look . . ." Why might she have been? Because celebrity pimps like Brown surround figures like Miss Clinton, waiting to throw bricks or strew rose petals. The latter response seems kindlier than the former (remember Talk's savage picture spread on the Bush girls' drinking), but it is equally dangerous over the long run.

-- Some fifty high-level executives from the entertainment industry met with presidential adviser Karl Rove at a Beverly Hills hotel to discuss how Hollywood might help the war effort. Topics discussed were along the lines of public-service announcements to be shown in cinemas ("Careless matches aid the Axis!" and so on), USO tours, and the showing of new movies on military bases and warships. Everyone was at pains to make clear that the administration does not want to dictate the content of movies and TV shows. All very well, but if those movie moguls want our two cents' worth, here it is: How about retiring the military or ex-military psycho character that has been a staple of U.S. moviemaking for 30 years or more (Apocalypse Now, Dead Poets Society, American Beauty, etc.)? Oh, and while we're at it, how about a moratorium on movies in which smart lawyers outwit thick-skulled military brass trying to cover up shameful malfeasances (A Few Good Men, The General's Daughter, etc.)?

-- In our previous issue, we addressed what is known as the "mainstreaming" of pornography (or the "pornographication" of the mainstream). A recent story in the New York Times built on the theme. It interviewed a stripper (and author) named Lily Burana, who said, among other interesting things, that she used to find outfits for her act only at "boutiques that catered to the sex industry" (as the Times put it). "By 2000," however-this is Miss Burana talking now-"I was buying my outfits at Contempo," which is a shopping-mall chain aimed especially at young people. "The clothes for teenagers have become so strippified. I was a little alarmed. . . . All of a sudden I had this mad flash of protective conservatism. It was a cultural marker." Exactly-and there are lots of them. Cultural markers. The whole country needs "mad flashes of protective conservatism."

-- Very few things the U.S. government has done in our time contributed more to the advancement of human knowledge and the lifting up of the human spirit than the unmanned-and therefore relatively cheap- exploration of the solar system. Forty years ago, our neighbor planets and moons were no more than fuzzy blobs in our most powerful telescopes. The remoter ones were not even that; they were mere points of light. Now we have closeup photographs of all the known planets but one, and of a comet and several asteroids. We have tallied dozens of previously unknown moons and rings. We have landed our clever little devices on the rocky surfaces of the moon and Mars and sent them plunging into the atmosphere of Jupiter. Only distant Pluto has remained unvisited by U.S. spacecraft. Now Congress has approved $30 million for a robot mission to Pluto, to be launched in 2006 on an eight-year journey. If successful, this mission will complete the mapping of the solar system: an adventure in pure knowledge that has been pursued-sometimes with more, sometimes with less enthusiasm-under every administration since Kennedy's, to the everlasting glory of the United States and her people.

-- A 53-year-old man rushed into a suburban high school on November 8, ordered a 13-year-old girl to lie face down on a table, then administered ten strokes to her with a cane. Oh, no: another school atrocity? Not exactly. The perpetrator in the case was Ghankay Charles MacArthur Dapkana Taylor, president of the West African nation of Liberia, and the victim of the thrashing was his daughter Edena, one of the younger of his 30 known children. It had come to the president's attention that Edena, along with a teenage boy, had been disciplined by her school in the Liberian capital for "displaying improper behavior" on campus. President Taylor's press secretary spun that the flogging was "symbolic" and stressed that it should be seen in "the context of African culture." Young Edena is left nursing her "symbolic" stripes, while we are left reflecting, not for the first time, that perhaps there might be something to be said for this multiculturalism business after all.

n Suppose you decide to embark on some research in higher mathematics. You will probably buy one of those software packages that allow you to do advanced symbolic manipulation on your computer-perhaps Wolfram Research, Inc.,'s Mathematica. Then you will need a textbook from which to learn the package: as it might be, the Cambridge University Press's Beginner's Guide to Mathematica Version 4. While slogging through chapter 24 of that book you are shown an example in which taking the wrong approach to a certain computation produces a number that is very wrong indeed, by a factor so large it would need over 800 digits to write it out. Note the authors: "If we didn't have the exact answer available for comparison, we might never know that our answer is off by 807 orders of magnitude. We might continue in blissful ignorance of how wrong we really are (say, as a Republican politician might). (See chapter 25 for an explanation of why one might actually want to have such a seemingly dangerous mode of computation available. We have no chapter on why one might want to have a Republican politician available.)" Well, perhaps one reason for having a Republican politician available is to explain to the editors of Cambridge University Press why sophomoric remarks about politics of any kind are out of place in a math textbook.

-- Ken Kesey, author, provocateur, died, age 66. There was an individualist impulse there-in the guying of Nurse Ratched, of course, but also in his portrayal of the villainous labor leader in Sometimes a Great Notion. There was something all-American too-not, as Tom Wolfe pointed out, of the American frontier or farm, which was the slot patronizing hipsters tried to put him in, but of empowered post-war teenagers. There was also too much: too many words, too many drugs, too much self-indulgence. Does Walt Whitman's good writing counterbalance all the American overwriting-by Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Wolfe, and Whitman himself-that his example has blessed? A delicate question.

COPYRIGHT 2001 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group