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Monday, July 15, 2002
SHE'S BACK! : La Paglia just wrote a letter to the Guardian in response to Richard Goldstein's recent campaign against non-leftist homosexuals. Here it is: Richard Goldstein has waged a tedious, defamatory campaign against Andrew Sullivan for years (Rightwing gays are a new force in US politics, July 8) Sullivan has won an enormous following in the US because of the high quality and wide range of his writing, as well as his strong presence on television. He is witty, incisive, and erudite - everything Goldstein, a bilious mediocrity, is not.
To attribute Sullivan's national prominence to his having pandered to conservative prejudice against gays is rank nonsense.
Similarly, Norah Vincent, a rising star among syndicated columnists, is an independent who follows no party line. Like me, she is a libertarian.
Goldstein's attacks against me are laughable since he borrows so freely from my ideas. My championing of pornographers, prostitutes and drag queens is also well known. As for my politics, I am a member of the Democratic party who voted twice for Bill Clinton and, in 2000, for the far left Ralph Nader. Man, I miss her.
- 1:57:59 PM
A MAN: You can have all sorts of abstract debates about the meaning of masculinity. Or you can ponder the example of Pat Tillman. 25 years' old, he decided to enlist in the Army rather than get a three-year $3.6 million NFL contract with the Arizona Cardinals. He'd shown class before - turning down a $9 million offer to play for St. Louis because of loyalty to his home team. But this move - the first NFL player to go to war rather than play ball since World War II - is in a class of its own. Better still, he won't even give an interview about his decision. Real men don't gab to the press. They don't spin, they act. In an age when we read of CEO's robbing their own shareholders for obscene pay-offs, when the last president of the United States declared as ethical only what you could get away with, and when large swathes of the intelligentsia can find reasons to undermine a war to protect a free people from weapons of mass destruction, Tillman is a hero. And a man.
SURVIVOR GUILT: "Why not simply rip off the formulae of existing anti-HIV drugs and provide them to the developing world for free? One answer is that theft is theft. Another is that such an approach could actually lead to a resurgence of HIV. Whether we like it or not, developing highly sophisticated drug regimens is an extremely expensive and risky process. Although governments have a big part to play in financing basic scientific research, the biggest player in AIDS treatment is the private pharmaceutical industry. And these companies need profits to counter-balance the large research and development costs of such drugs. They also need big profits from their successful drugs to counter-balance the big losses incurred on the vast majority of drugs that never make it to market. If you simply confiscate these companies' profits when they come up with a successful anti-HIV drug, you may have a short-term gain in getting a new drug to people who need it. But you also destroy the financial incentive to come up with new drugs, kill off the investment capital that keeps HIV research going, and leave the next generation of people with HIV with next to nothing in the pipeline. With many diseases, this is a disastrous policy direction. With HIV, a virus that's always mutating and needs constant vigilance to keep up with it, such a policy could be catastrophic." - More reflections on the AIDS epidemic today in my latest column.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: "Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil." - John Pilger, The Observer.
SAFIRE'S IRE: Can't disagree with a word in his latest column. A smart friend, however, counsels that the Dow is headed for 7,000 on the heels of global deflation. Gedowdaheah.
THE TIMES' INCORRECT CORRECTION: Back in Ptown, I've had a chance to read closely the report cited by the Times as showing a 5.4 degree Fahrenheit increase in mean annual temperatures in Alaska over the past thirty years. No such figure is in that report. Anywhere. A reader even did a word search through all the PDF files in the report and couldn't find the alleged 5.4 degree increase. The head researcher of the Alaska Climate Research Center emailed me to say: The new value is still incorrect if we speak of the last 30 years. It might be that they refer to an earlier time period (1961-1990). I also looked up the web site and could not find the 5.4 F, however a paper (Chapman and Walsh 1993) which they quote, refers to an earlier time period. Further, the selection of the stations to calculate the mean increase will have some influence on it, but cannot explain the difference. While there has been a strong temperature increase in the sixties and seventies, the temperature in the last 20 years has not changed much in Alaska, hence, the selection of the time period is important. We stand by our analyses of the time period 1971-2000, as published on our web site. The values do not change much if the time period 1972-2001 is considered. We find about half the increase as the "corrected" quote by the NYT. So the only solid number for an annual average temperature in Alaska is still 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the bulk of which happened in the 1960s, far, far less than the Times' original "astonishing" (their word) revelation. To recap: the Times got it wrong on the front page; wrong on their editorial page; wrong in an op-ed column; and wrong in the Corrections column. Is it too much to ask that they eventually put it right? Or would that be too humiliating for what was once a paper of record?
TAKING LIBERTIES: With apologies to Maureen Dowd's latest column: Howell and MoDo are in the jacuzzi at 43d Street.
The two masters of the Sulzberger universe have had a great week. And now with wrinkles almost prune-like on MoDo's cellulite, they just had to swig back the Jack Daniels and the Cipro-laced bonbons MoDo loves so much, and review the high-points.
They always keep one eye on the Kid, who's been jogging circles around Punch's Upstate retreat for the past nine hours.
Junior is supposed to be inside practicing how to say "corporate synergy" without his eyes glazing over. But he doesn't want to. "How many African-Americans do I have to hire this year, Howell?" he just kept asking.
"As many as we used to down south," Howell slurred back, after his sixth Jack on the rocks, small little bubbles rising slowly between his thighs. "Jus' treat 'em well, Pinchy-boy, and you can write a story about yo' loyal help later on in life. Heck, I got a Pulitzer writing about mah mammy. Just write somethin' about that Bobbie Herbert, and you'll make it good, some day, sir."
"Righty-O, Howell," said Pinch. "Is Bobbie the chap who brings the Fedex in the mornin'?"
"No, sir," sighed Howell, while MoDo smeared on her fourth face-pack of the day. "He's that guy we hired a few years back to give the op-ed page some di-vers-ity. Good man, that Bobbie. Always cheerful, ain't that right, sweets?" His eyes crinkled into that knowing grin MoDo knew so well. She smiled back but her face-pack cracked all the way across her face and two small cucumber slices fell from her eyes into the water.
"Damn," she spluttered. "That's almost an entire cucumber down there somewhere."
"You bet, baby," joked Howell. "No shrinkage here."
Junior jogged over to the jacuzzi and tried to get the exec's attention.
"Mr Raines? Sir? Can't we do more nasty stories about Bush?" Pinch (or "O2" as they called him) asked, plaintively. "What does he know about anything anyway? He just got his job 'cause his daddy had it. How come he gets the 70 percent approval rating and all I get are private tutorials with Russ?"
"No shweat," Howell slurred, the Jacks beginning to have their usual impact. "We're on the case. We already got him for global warming - it's twenty degrees warmer in this hot tub than yesterday and goddammit, we all know what the real story is here! Same with the terrorists. Does he really think he can win a war out there?" Howell was off now and even MoDo knew better than to stop him. "Quagmire! That'sh what it is. We've gotta stop this war before it gets even worse. All those body-bags. Doeshn't he realize the gooks are gonna turn on us?" He slowly began to slip beneath the surface, MoDo's gas-mask and boiled cucumber fragments bobbing perilously near his jowls.
S tried again to get the exec's attention. "Mr Raines, sir?"
Mr Raines was too far-gone to notice. "Is it getting even warmer in here? Goddammit, Mo, do you have to have your personal trainer in the tub as well?"
"Don't worry, honey," MoDo replied. "He won't touch you. He's gay."
"Diversiteeee!" O2 squealed and jumped headlong into the jacuzzi. Sloshing over to MoDo, his tousled mop all mussed up in the steam, he asked plaintively, "Where's Joe?"
- 3:28:28 AM
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