Nobody Out-Caballe's Derb!: World's first greatest fan of the Catalan sopranoDaphne,

You have “so many gay male friends”? Really? As Lady Bracknell said: “We obviously move in completely different circles.” I only have one gay male acquaintance, and he’s been living in France for several years. He is the world’s second greatest fan of Montserrat Caballé, me being the first. I have no gay friends at all. I had a lesbian personal trainer once. (Hi, Jennifer.) She was terrific—mean and pitiless, which is what you want in a trainer. Ex-military of course. (And yes, she rode a motorbike and played golf.) Right now I can’t even claim any gay acquaintances. But it’s true I don’t get out much.

As to gay marriage, I think Steve Sailer had the last word on it, as least as far as males are concerned: “Homosexuals don’t want marriages, they want weddings.” And of course, gay marriage is mostly a lesbian thing anyway. Where it’s allowed, the female-male ratio is at least two to one. These gals really need each other. I mean, who ever heard of “male gay bed death”?

I totally agree with your remark that “not that many people have truly interesting minds.” I’d go further: even people that do have interesting minds aren’t interesting very much of the time. I’ve met my share, and come away with more disappointment than dazzlement. I suspect that blogging is like modern poetry—far, far more producers than consumers. But yet, to quote Sam Johnson right back at you: “A man must do something.” Or, to quote him again (ain’t nobody gonna out-Johnson Derb!):

A transition from an author’s book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke. —Rambler #14 (May 5, 1750)

Fair Swain: Lolita all grown upI had a vague impression that the 1997 Lolita movie had been abandoned, the topic by then being thought too outrageous. Not so: IMDB has it listed. I bet there was a fuss, though I can’t remember anything. Dominique Swain, the title character, was 17 when the movie was released—escaped?—so presumably 16 when cast. Sue Lyon was 16 when the 1962 movie was released. I predict that in the next version of Lolita to be filmed, the actress playing the nymphet will be at least 25, and there will be a bigger fuss than ever.

Hitler “eternally of interest”? Yes, and this is odd, because he was a pretty dull person. Reading Speer’s account of his table talk, you wonder how on earth everyone stayed awake through those long Berchtesgarten evenings. But of course they did! It’s a good thing there was no blogging back then. Imagine a Hitler blog! (Someone probably has.)

I bet he was a heroic farter—vegetarians always are. It’s not just the beans, it’s any vegetable matter in large quantities. The upside is, the farts don’t smell as bad as meat farts. Totally the worst farts are dog farts. Have you ever had a farty dog? Oy oy oy. My dog weighs all of 22 pounds, but he could stink up the Superdome. Old Chinese proverb (no kidding): Bie ren pi chou, zi ji pi xiang—“Other people’s farts stink, but your own are fragrant.” This is relevant to blogging somehow.

Wasn’t the thing about one testicle confirmed by the Russian autopsy, whose details were in the newspapers 30 or so years ago? One still wants to know about Goebbels, though.

James Wolcott. Wolcott doesn’t seem to have posted anything since yesterday. Perhaps he is hiding from us. In lieu of a comment, I offer you Dorothy Parker’s poem on Gissing (from memory):

Those who’ve read Gissing

Say I don’t know what I’m missing.

Till their arguments are subtler

I’ll stick with Samuel Butler.

Reason. I’m still at the stage, when confronted with political comment, of making a bee-line for the Rudy stuff. Here’s Reason on George Will on Rudy: “Of all the ’08 frontrunners, Rudy can marshal the most proof of his economic conservatism. At some point, though, he has to talk about the role of the executive and the national security state. Not just reenact 9/11—talk about the powers of the president and the federal government.”

Yes, that’s what I want to hear, too. I’m sure we shall.

Why don’t the Reason people like McCain, though? He wants to ship the entire populations of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, etc. up here, same as they do. You’d think they’d be kinder’n’gentler with a fellow open-borders enthusiast.

But at least Reason noticed us. Not to very much effect; the comment veered off into something about the Sex Pistols.

Feck! Drink! Arse! Buggering! Buggering! Buggering!: Father Jack, Not John DerbyshireOne commenting reader grumbles that: “We don’t have that multicultural guilt. We are actually classical liberals. I guess the word ‘liberal’ really has jumped the shark.” Er, yes, honey, round about 1965. Another one allows that: “JD’s stuff isn't that bad, provided he avoids the word ‘buggering’.”

Buggering! Buggering! Buggering! Buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering!

Kesher Talk. The Kesher people noticed us too. We’re getting COVERAGE! It was back-handed, though: “John Derbyshire and Daphne Merkin … seem resentful and enervated by the whole thing.” Listen. mate: If you had two kids with combined ages 25, two cars with combined ages 24, no job, teeth falling out, a damp basement, a garage that needs painting, and taxes still to do in mid-March, you’d be resentful and enervated too. Whyn’t you try it? Huh? Huh?

On some actual substance: There’s a little gush about Zionism at the front of the blog. I’ll confess I didn’t quite follow the writer’s argument, not being interested in the topic at that level of detail. I only want to say, since a lot of American Zionists are blind on the point, how very peculiar it seems to us non-Zionists that so many people should be so passionately keen on a country yet not live there. I’m sure any smart Jew can give me a 10,000-word explanation—a smart Jew can give you a 10,000-word explanation of anything—but to the rest of us, I repeat, this seems really, r—e—a—l—l—y odd. I honestly don’t mean this in any negative way (“Go live in your stupid Arab-oppressing Israel if you like it so much, why dontcha?”) It just seems… odd.

Design Observer. Still no connection. These guys are really hiding from us.

Yglesias.Yglesias still hasn’t noticed us, which I’m glad about. He strikes me as one very smart Jew, who would probably chew me up and spit me out. I hate when that happens. He’s on Rudy’s case too:

Back in 1993, Rudy Giuliani plays the family card, deploying Donna Hanover's love and affection for him and his legendary skills as a father for political gain. [Then a video clip of Rudy doing family things 15 or so years ago.] Nowadays, of course, young Andrew Giuliani is a bit older and not on speaking terms with his father. The source of the fight seems to be that Rudy not only divorced Andrew's mother, but insisted on publicly humiliating her in that uniquely classy Giuliani way. Mitt Romney, famously, is the only practicing monogamist among the Three Stooges.

Is he son-of-a-bitch enough to win?: We like our righties mean and nastyThis got me wondering. If I look at my own reasons for favoring Rudy, part of it is my perception that Rudy is one mean, nasty son of a bitch. I like that in a President. After all, it’s highly unlikely that the meanness and nastiness will be directed at me personally. It will, one hopes, be directed at America’s enemies; and at our corrupt, dysfunctional, and costly federal bureaucracies; and (this was sure the case during his mayoralty) at the race-guilt shakedown lobbies; and at our moronic, venal, and cowardly congresscritters; and… Why on earth would anyone want a nice guy for president?

Really, seen in this light, the only question about Rudy is, does he have enough ornery meanness and nastiness to go round? Is he a big enough son of a bitch? Perhaps there’s some kind of hormone treatment we can give Rudy, to make him even more of a pitiless, sneering, devious, wife-dumping jerk. I sure hope so.

Do I still have Jennifer’s number? I could use a really harsh workout.

John 

To: Daphne Merkin
From: John Derbyshire
Subject: Human Nature, Zichrono livracha, Illegals, and Rudy

Daphne,

I’ll admit, I’m confused.  I want to do a proper (say 5,000 words) response to yours of yesterday, but we’re actually supposed to be discussing these blogs, and at 500-600 words for the lot.  Whoever it was (I’ve seen it attributed to just about everyone from Cicero onwards) who said “Sorry this is such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one,” knew everything you need to know about the art of writing.

Well, let me take up a couple of your points, then try to find something brief & snappy to say about Wolcott & Co.

Lolita.  I said everything I have to say in that piece the Jewcy folk very kindly linked to.  (Though I said some of it over again, in abbreviated form, for the National Review print magazine.  Heck, why waste material?)  If there are some points you would like to make, go ahead, and I’ll respond to them.

The gravamen of both my Lolita pieces—and of a great deal else of what I write—is that you can’t say or do anything intelligent about society, politics, or culture, unless you get human nature right; and we were closer to having it right 50 years ago than we are today—way closer, I would say; and that Nabokov’s book illustrates the point.  

About Human Suffering: He was never wrong; human nature, on the other hand...For heaven’s sake, didn’t we learn anything from communism?  Why was communism such an appalling failure?  Because it was founded on an utterly false view of human nature.  (Mao Tse-tung actually denied that any such thing as human nature exists.)  If you get that wrong, then everything you do is wrong—and eventually evil.

Terrible Yid.    That keys nicely into your skirt-clutching squeals of horror at Evelyn Waugh referring to someone (a third party! in a private letter!) as “a terrible yid.”  Now, Waugh was not a very nice person, and was furthermore a crashing snob.  (I tremble to think how he would have described me, in private, to a third party.  “A terrible oik,” very likely.)  I’m sorry but—get ready to clutch your skirts again—I don’t see anything wrong with him writing that.  

I’m a philosemite myself, and have a paper (and pixel) trail to prove it; but I don’t see anything wrong with disliking Jews in the generality.  There are things you can legitimately dislike—for example, the relentless hunting for a writer’s one mildly anti-Semitic remark, and the shrieks of triumph when you find it, and the fierce anathemas and readings-out that follow.  Though a disagreeable person (read his son’s memoir for the grisly details), Waugh was a superb writer with a perfectly normal range of prejudices.  

Of all the European countries, Britain has been the one in which Jews have lived most securely, have prospered best, have felt least excluded, for three hundred years and more; and all that has been in an atmosphere of mild and genteel anti-Semitism, of the sort illustrated by Waugh’s remark.  As a comfortable accommodation with the realities of human nature, this is hard to beat.  We are certainly not going to beat it by screaming and finger-pointing at every expression of negativity by one group against another.  Yet we are well on the way to outlawing such expressions.  This will not end well.  This will not end well.

Pbuh.  One more remark, though this one on my previous post, not yours.  I attached a playful “pbuh” to Ronald Reagan’s name.  A Jewish friend (it’s actually Noah Millman, who seems to have given up blogging, which, if the case, is a great pity) tells me that for Jewcy, a much more apt expression would be “Z’l” for “Zichrono livracha,” which (says Noah) means “May his memory be a blessing.” 

I like that.  We Gentiles could use something similar.  As the punchline of a well-known Soviet-era Russian joke goes:  Darn Jews get the best of everything.

OK, a quick scan of the assigned blogs.

Little Gissing: And his effect on writersJames Wolcott.    The answer to your question, Daphne (i.e. why a guy with all the print outlets he needs should bother blogging), I think the answer is:  He wants to be rude and obscene.  Rude?  Look at what he says about Judge Napolitano—“defrosted caveman.”  It’s true, the judge’s hair starts extraordinarily low down on his forehead—my kids always comment on that if in the room when I’m watching O’Reilly—but heck, the judge can’t help it, any more than Evelyn Waugh could his squint.  I find Judge Napolitano’s commentaries usually very sapient.  And by the way:  Is it just me, or does he look…  a bit…. Jewish?

Then I stopped reading Wolcott after making the mistake of clicking on the Gissing link and getting the Wikipedia entry for New Grub Street—a novel that, as Orwell said in his fine essay on Gissing, has the same kind of effect on a writer as a novel about sexual impotence would on any male.  My fault, not Wolcott’s. 

Reason.    Now I remember why I am not a libertarian:  They are morons on the topic of immigration.  (And those of us who disagree with them are of course “nativists.”)

Based on that data, the [March/April issue of Foreign Policy] concludes: “You can no longer argue that illegal immigrants are an excessive burden on U.S. healthcare.”

I don’t believe a word of it.  Come with me to the emergency room of Huntington hospital—if you can get in there for all the Salvadorean illegals using it as their primary health-care provider.  And even if it were true, so what?  They are here illegally.  Enforce the damn law, damn it. 

However, a very high proportion of American Jews are likewise morons about immigration, so I may be in trouble with the Jewcy readership here.  Memo to same:   The richest sources for current and near-future immigration are (a) Latin America, and (b) the Middle East.  Latin Americans don’t like Jews much—where do you think all the old Nazis retired to?  And some proportion of Middle Easterners—and, on recent evidence, some larger proportion of their born-in-the-West offspring—regard the killing of Jews as a holy sacrament.  ARE YOU PEOPLE NUTS?

Kesher Talk.    Couldn’t find much of interest today.  (Note:  Any text that includes the words “Plame” and “Libby” is ipso facto outside the compass of the expression “of interest.”)  I did catch this post:  “Of all the people in the world who ought to be careful about making insensitive remarks comparing Jews to Nazis, you think high among them would be German Catholic religious leaders.”  Well, I would say that Austrian vegetarian nonsmoking atheists with toothbrush mustaches and greased-down forelocks would actually be top of the list, but hey.

Design Observer.    “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.”  Did the tsunami of Jewcy readers crash their server?  Is “webpage” really a single word now?  Where do flies go in the winter?  Etc., etc.

Executive Prowess: Rudy for prez?Yglesias.    My eyelids were getting heavy again 15-20 seconds into browsing Yglesias, then I perked up.  More slagging off of my NR colleagues!—this time of my boss, no less.  Actually I thought Rich’s point about Rudy’s “executive prowess” was a good one.  Rudy came in to a city government with out of control spending and a swollen, corrupt bureaucracy.  He attacked both, fearlessly and relentlessly.  GWB, by contrast, having come into a federal government with ditto and ditto, vastly expanded the spending, and added fat new layers of bureaucracy.  That makes Rudy the anti-Bush.  That (I think) is Rich’s point, and it’s an excellent one.

But the to-ing and fro-ing among conservatives on Rudy and his record is the really interesting political conversation going on right now.  On a scale of political interesting-ness—for not-very-wonkish people like me, I mean—with the Plame guy at 0.001 on the scale and Election Night at 100, the Rudy debates are at least a 50.  I confess I haven’t yet read Prince of the City, but I know I must, and it’s top of my list.  In spite of having been a New York City taxpayer for most of Rudy’s mayoral term, I don’t know the guy as well as I need to—as well as we all need to.  It’s getting serious now.

John 

To: Daphne Merkin
From: John Derbyshire
Subject: Coulter, Lolitas, and Waugh

Dear Daphne,

Le style, c'est l'femme: Ann being AnnCoultergate! For heavens’ sake, it was just Ann being Ann. What a fighter the gal is, though! I saw her on Hannity & Colmes last night, totally not apologizing, blasting away at all the conservative weenies who, says Ann, are just letting liberals dictate the agenda. I’m with Ann on this point, while also somehow being at one with the liberals in finding Ann a bit... scary. Then some slagging off of my own blog-home, NRO, of K-Lo and Jonah. This gets my back up. I can give noogies to my NR colleagues, call K-Lo’s pet project a cult, or tell Jonah he doesn’t have a religious bone in his body and ought to come right out and say so; but I don’t care to see other people doing it. It’s family business. But then James Wolcott gets right back in my good books with an affectionate sketch of Clive James, of whom I’ve been a big fan since those Observer reviews Wolcott mentions. Loved Clive’s autobiography, too. His advice to schoolboys on what to do if you cack your pants in class was, I thought, invaluable.

I feel about Reason the way I feel about strenuous physical exercise—a jolly good thing, in the grand cosmic schema, but somehow not for me. The first headline I saw on Hit and Run amply, abundantly, confirmed that feeling: Pediatricians Continue to Resist the Government’s Urine Grab. Uh-huh. Then: “Can private-public toll partnerships revolutionize the way we drive?” Pass. Kerry Howley’s piece on the sexualization of little girls (thongs now come in kid sizes etc.) was nicely counterintuitive, and played right into my growing irritation with Give It Up, O'Reilly: You're ruining it for the rest of usBill O’Reilly’s furious jihad against “child abusers,” a category that, on the Big Mick’s expansive definition, would sweep up several harmless and really very nice old men of my own childhood acquaintance into the O’Gulag along with, to be sure, the very occasional genuine monster. And then—oh boy!—a YouTube clip of the old Soviet National Anthem! Priceless! The pop version (second link in that posting), by contrast, stank.

“News and views from a hawkish liberal Jewish perspective,” says the banner at Kesher Talk. I had Babelfish translate that into Hebrew and then the Hebrew back out into English. Funny—it came through as: “We’re guilty as all get out about blacks, Hispanics, and all the other people we are smarter and richer than, but don’t even think about messing with Israel!” Well, it’s nice to know where you are right up front. Some Judaic stuff—Rosh Chodesh Ellul, Simchat Torah—that all bounced right off my poor, and poor, gentile brain. Fair enough, it’s a Jewish site—just so long as they feel guilty about me, too. What else? Some talk about that Wilson gal & the Plame guy, pure insomnia cure as far as I’m concerned—I’d rather read about Rosh Chodesh Ellul. Then—Rudy! They got my attention there. A good, long, interesting post about Rudy’s dark side. Yeah, yeah, but the guy understands key things—e.g. that govt. spending is mostly squandered, that govt. bureaucracies are mostly incompetent, that govt. programs of every kind, including wars and “diplomatic initiatives,” almost always do more harm than good—and this is a new thing in our national life, at least since Ronald Reagan, pbuh.

At Design Observer, I found myself looking right into (so far as physical laws permit) the cross-eyed squint of Old Buzzard: What would Waugh make of Idi Amin?Evelyn Waugh, “as good a writer as it is possible to be while holding untenable opinions” (G. Orwell). (Imagine a stare-off between the late EW and the current President of Iran! It would rip the fabric of spacetime.) There followed a nice bit of Waughiana. Scrolling down, the next mugshot is of Idi Amin, who had a personality even nastier than Waugh’s, and who could not even write fiction. (At least Saddam Hussein tried.) And, nut job though Idi undoubtedly was, his random thuggery did less harm to Uganda, and killed fewer Ugandans, than the more systematic nation-wrecking of his predecessor and successor, the quasi-Leninist hack Milton Obote. Then a lot of postings about design—it’s a design website, duh. Where’s that Rosh Chodesh Ellul link?

Matt Yglesias is one of those names I’ve been hearing bandied about for ever, yet never really had much clue who he was—like the Plame guy, or Ludwig von Mises, or Jessica Simpson. Well, here I am, looking at his blog at last. Wall to wall political wonkery, lightly seasoned with some TV arcana. Must try, must try, ... zzzzzzzzz.

John

[Check back at the Daily Shvitz for Daphne's reply.]