A changed mind who wants to change minds: Duong Thu Huong

The New Neo Posted on by

In today’s NY Times (registration only, of course) there is a book review featuring a Vietnamese novelist who is new to me, Duong Thu Huong .

Huong, 58, is an excellent example of a changed mind, not to mention a courage and outspokenness that reminds me quite a bit of Oriana Fallaci:

In 1994, through the intervention of Danielle Mitterrand, France’s first lady at that time, Ms. Huong was allowed to come to France to receive an award. She was offered political asylum. “I said, ‘Thank you, but in my country fear crushes everything, brave soldiers have become cowardly civilians,’ ” she recalled. ” ‘That’s why I have to return. I return to do one thing: to spit in the face of the regime.’ “

Here’s a summary of Ms. Huong’s activities:

Her sins, it seems, are many. Her novels dissecting life under one of the last Communist regimes are published and well received in the West. She is a former Communist Party member who was expelled as a traitor. And above all, she is a dissident – a “dissident whore,” one party leader said – who refused to be silenced even after spending eight months in prison in 1991…her priority is to denounce the Hanoi government as irremediably corrupt and abusive…

“It is my mission to do so on behalf of those who have died under this shameful regime,” she said, speaking fluent but heavily accented French. “Because I have a small reputation abroad, I have to say these things. I have to empty what is inside me to feel my conscience is clear. The people have lost the power to react, to reflect, to think. Perhaps I will give people courage.”

It’s the changed-mind aspect of her story that especially interests me. Huong was born in North Vietnam and indoctrinated as a child in the party line. She became an actress during the late 60s, and went to entertain the troops:

“I joined a group of young artists performing for the troops and victims of the war. The slogan was: ‘Our songs are louder than the bombing.’ We would silence the screams with songs.”

But even then, she recalled, she noticed that party members enjoyed special privileges. A bigger shock followed when South Vietnamese prisoners arrived in her zone. “I discovered the truth that we were also fighting Vietnamese,” she said. “Yes, we were being bombed all the time by the Americans, but they were high in the sky and I never saw them. I only saw Vietnamese.”

She kept her thoughts to herself, as she did after the war when she met up with relatives in Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon was renamed) and realized that the defeated were better off than the victors.

Ms. Huong later was privy to some revisionist history on the part of the North Vietnamese, which fed her disillusionment:

One freelance job proved to be another eye-opener. Working for a group of army generals, she ghost wrote a history of the Vietnam War. “The generals would discuss among themselves how to correct my text to suit their interests,” she said. “They wanted to increase the number of Vietnamese who died to show that no sacrifice was too great for the people.”

After one of her novels was published in the 80s and became a source of some controversy for the Party:

“The party’s general secretary, Nguyen Van Linh, offered me a house of the kind reserved for ministers if I would remain silent,” she said. “I told him, ‘I fight for democracy, I place myself on the side of the people and would never agree to be like a minister.’ My principle is that you can lose everything, even your life, but never your honor.”

That last sentence is the key to the attitude that propels people such as Huong (and Fallaci, by the way) to take the risks they do. When faced with experiences and personal observations that contradicted her early indoctrination, she chose to jettison the belief system in which she had been raised, and to fight it with all her considerable powers of expression. Her sense of personal honor required such a course of action.

Terrorists feed off their hosts

The New Neo Posted on by

Today’s NY Times contained a fascinating article, remarkable also because it managed to talk at length about Islamicist terrorists in London while taking only one swipe at the US and Blair. Here is the article in question, (available to registered readers only, however) and headlined, “For a decade, London thrived as a busy crossroads of terror.”

The situation it describes is utterly appalling. Apparently, it has been well-known for some time that the Moslem community of London houses a large number of people who are quite vocal and open about their Al Qaeda sympathies, and who can count on a legal system dedicated to the preservation of their rights to freedom of speech no matter what that speech is saying, even if that protection amounts almost to a flirting with suicide on the part of that system. The British have even frustrated the French by their kindness to terror suspects–specifically, their refusal to extradite them.

There is a delicate balance that needs to be calibrated, both here and abroad, between the protection of those rights that have made the English-speaking world the hallmark of tolerance and freedom, and the need to preserve such freedoms from those who would use them as a platform from which to destroy them.

How very ironic and paradoxical: the terrorists in Britain pracice a sort of non-gentle type of jujitsu, using the opponent’s own strength and redirecting it back at him in order to try to bring him down. The opponents–the British and American systems of government, rights, law enforcement, and intelligence–must be nimble and flexible, not rigid, in order to strike back and win. How much do we need to adjust our legal systems to fight this particular menace effectively? How little is too little? How much is too much?

Reading the article, though, it is clear that the British have not done enough. Here are some excerpts:

Counterterrorism officials estimate that 10,000 to 15,000 Muslims living in Britain are supporters of Al Qaeda. Among that number, officials believe that as many as 600 men were trained in camps connected with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere…

Before Sept. 11, 2001, British officials monitored radical Islamicists but generally stopped short of arresting or extraditing them. After Sept. 11, the government passed legislation that allowed indefinite detention of terrorism suspects. But last year, it was overturned by Britain’s highest court, the Law Lords, as a violation of human rights law.

Complicating Britain’s antiterrorism strategy is its refusal or delays of requests for extradition of suspects by some allies, including the United States, France, Spain and Morocco.

Moroccan authorities, for example, are seeking the return of Mohammed el-Guerbozi, a battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan who they say planned the May 2003 attacks in Casablanca, which killed 45 people. He has also been identified as a founder of the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Group, cited by the United Nations as a terrorist network connected to Al Qaeda. An operative in that group, Noureddine Nifa, told investigators that the organization had sleeper cells prepared to mount synchronized bombings in Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Canada. In an interview last year, Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco’s chief of security, said Osama bin Laden authorized Mr. Guerbozi to open a training camp for Moroccans in Afghanistan in the beginning of 2001. Last December, Mr. Guerbozi was convicted in absentia in Morocco for his involvement in the Casablanca attacks and sentenced to 20 years.

But the British government has no extradition treaty with Morocco and has refused to extradite Mr. Guerbozi, a father of six who lives in a rundown apartment in north London. British officials say there is not enough evidence to arrest him, General Laanigri said.

The article goes on to list a whole string of similar cases. One wonders whether the British are now going to get serious about dealing with the terrorists in their midst, or whether even the London bombings were not enough of a wake-up call.

The following is also not encouraging; it almost seems to be a policy on the part of the British that is stark raving mad. Why is this man still being offered political asylum, as though he were some sort of Solzhenitsyn fleeing the Soviets? And the fact that he is living on welfare only deepens the irony. He is so bold that he makes no attempt to hide his hatred and contempt for the country that has taken him in and shown him such graciousness and magnanimity:

So far, there appears to be little effort to restrain outspoken clerics, including prominent extremists like Sheik Omar, who has reportedly been under investigation by Scotland Yard.

Sheik Omar, who remains free, is an example of the double-edged policies in Britain. He is a political refugee who was given asylum 19 years ago and is supported by public assistance. Asked in an interview in May how he felt about being barred from obtaining British citizenship, he replied, “I don’t want to become a citizen of hell.”

Not a citizen, no, but a resident on the dole is just fine, thank you very much.

[ADDNEDUM: After writing this piece, I picked up the book Immortality by Milan Kundera, which I had recently gotten out of the library. When I idly opened it at random (like the I Ching?), my eyes happend to meet the following words, which one character was addressing to another who has been engaged in dissing Eurpoean culture and history: You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. I started reading, and found the contents, published in 1990, strangely relevant. But that’s another post for another time. Suffice to say right now that I hope we, and the British, don’t turn out to be the brilliant allies of our own gravediggers.)

Bathing suit anarchy

The New Neo Posted on by

Now for something frivolous.

It’s summer, although the weather here is back in its “Seattle in winter” mode. But I’m planning a trip to California, so yesterday I went off to get a bathing suit.

It’s been a few years since I’ve engaged in that always-entertaining activity . I discovered that, while I was coasting on my old suits, the world of swimwear has undergone what you might call a sea-change. And I found it to be a very confusing one.

This time not only did I wrestle with that age-old confrontation between the ideal and the real, but I found that I don’t even understand the bathing suits of today.

Now, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person. I try to follow fashion enough to make it seem as though I haven’t given up on the whole endeavor. But these bathing suits had me stumped.

It used to be that there were two kinds: one-piece and two piece. Each had some variations on the theme, but the basic theme was clear. The two pieces of the two-piece ones, for example, were together on a little hanger, so you could see what went with what. The one-pieces came in two basic types–the maximal cover-up (skirted and trussed and rather formidable) and the non-maximal.

But now it seems that chaos has taken over. Two-piece suits are now sold piece by piece, like food at a very expensive restaurant with an all a la carte menu, or a sushi bar. It’s hard to understand what these pieces are–there are little shorts, for example, and long tops that seem to not quite meet those shorts, exposing what is no doubt supposed to be a boardlike midsection. There are things that could be put together to be bikinis, if one could find the bottoms that matched the tops. There are the large skirted cover-ups. But where, oh where, are the regular one-pieces, the ones I’m looking for? Few and far between (and rather ugly, I might add). And most of them seem to be geared for a figure type with which I’m not too familiar–the long-torsoed woman.

Now, I’ve been around long enough to have heard women complaining in almost every way about their bodies. It just might be our favorite sport. But somehow I haven’t ever heard too many complaints about long torsos. Perhaps it’s because I don’t know a lot of 5″11″ models. My guess is that, unless these women wear bikinis (which they no doubt usually do), they have a terrible time with their long torsos, poor dears. So my local Filene’s and Macy’s have decided to make sure that they will have a plethora of one-piece bathing suits from which to choose. As for the rest of us–well, we’ll muddle along, as we always have. And yes, I finally managed to find a bathing suit to buy, and it was even on sale. But don’t think it was easy.

The timing of the London bombings

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section, “camojack” made the following observation about the London bombings:

At least they didn’t time the attack in such a way as to influence Blair’s recent re-election. Had that happened, it may very well have had the desired effect…

An excellent point.

Back when the Madrid bombings occurred, it was immediately apparent that the goal of the terrorists was to influence the Spanish election. I was on tenterhooks for the few days between the bombing and the voting, and when the results of the latter came in, they seemed to intensify the grief and anger I felt about the bombing itself. Not only had all those innocent people been murdered, but the country’s populace (or, at least, the majority of it) had given their murderers exactly what they wanted. The precedent was a terrible one, tremendously empowering to the terrorists.

Before each of the subsequent elections: Australia, Afghanistan, United States, Iraq, Britain (I don’t know whether I have the order exactly right, but you get the picture) I wondered what sort of violence might precede or accompany them. After all, why not? It doesn’t seem so difficult to set off a bomb, or even to coordinate a timed attack like the one in London. All it takes is the will, some explosives, a timer, and some luck–you don’t even need a suicide bomber (not that that seems so hard to find, either).

So I was encouraged by the fact that these elections seemed to go off relatively smoothly. Even the one in Iraq, in which many people died in isolated attacks, was nowhere near as violent as had been expected. And, of course, I was also happy with the electoral results in the English-speaking world, since the trio of Howard, Bush, and Blair were returned to power.

But camojack’s question remains: why this bombing now? What not two months earlier, in an attempt to repeat the glory days of Madrid?

My guess is that it wasn’t for lack of trying. Perhaps earlier attempts were comprised in terms of security, perhaps coordination lagged for some reason–but it seems likely that the bombers would have dearly loved to have executed this attack prior to the election. Camojack’s next question: what would the British people have done in response?–is unanswerable, of course. Is there still enough of that Churchillian Blitz spirit to have avoided a repeat of Madrid? I hope so. But I’m very glad that, at least this time, it wasn’t put to the test.

Explanations vs. excuses, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

The coverage of yesterday’s London terrorist attacks has shifted somewhat from facts about the bombings themselves to reactions and analyses of those reactions. Many express solidarity with the British and make references to their history of courage in the face of those who have tried to break their will in the past. Others blame Bush and Blair’s recent Iraq policies for angering the Moslem world and providing motivation for the bombings.

Of course, I’m of the former group and not the latter. But I want to make clear that I am one of those people who actually is interested in the “why” of the bombings. I like searching for explanations; I find it valuable. Keep in mind the difference between explanations and excuses, a distinction I wrote about here.

To summarize the idea I discussed in that rather lengthy post: seeking an explanation for a phenomenon is a neutral process. The results can be used to make excuses for that phenomenon and its perpetrators–to blame others and fail to place the responsibility on the actors themselves. But the results can also be used to try to understand and to counter or change the phenomenon in the best and most efficient manner.

The entire “bring democracy to the Arab world” neocon enterprise is predicated at least partly in such an explanation. Whether that explanation ends up being correct remains to be seen. But the analysis goes something like this: why has terrorism in the world of Islamicist extremists reached such a fever pitch and acquired so many adherents? The neocon explanation–at least in part–is that the citizens of most of the countries involved are under the thumb of either doctrinaire brainwashing theocrats or brutal dictators, or in some cases both. Human rights are very compromised in these countries, exploitation is rife, the people have almost no say in their governments, and the economies are stagnant. If these things can change in the direction of people gaining autonomy and freedom, it is likely that the people will not only rise to the occasion but that these vicious ideologies will lose a great deal of the misery on which they feed and grow.

Well, that’s certainly an explanation, but it’s no excuse. With it comes a plan that emerges from the explanation. You are, of course, free to agree or disagree with the reasoning behind the plan as well as the likelihood of its being achieved.

Leftists offer another explanation: Western imperialism and occupation and exploitation leave the poor third-worlders with no options but to blow up people on subway trains in London. I won’t bother to argue the merits of that one–it’s been done many times before, and you either buy those arguments or don’t buy them; at this point I doubt I’ll change your mind. But this explanation is not just an explanation, it is an excuse. It excuses the perpetrators of the bombings and makes them into victims.

I believe that the explanation for the bombings that Amir Taheri offers in this column has validity. His summary explanation is as follows (and I urge you to read his column in its entirety for the details of the religious underpinnings behind this point of view–hat tip: Dr. Sanity):

But sorry, old chaps, you are dealing with an enemy that does not want anything specific, and cannot be talked back into reason through anger management or round-table discussions. Or, rather, this enemy does want something specific: to take full control of your lives, dictate every single move you make round the clock and, if you dare resist, he will feel it his divine duty to kill you.

I would add to Taheri’s explanation still another one, nonreligious in nature: a nihilistic rage and urge to wreak destruction, to be seen as (and to see oneself as) the most powerful and baddest dude on the block.

As for the motivations of those who make apologies and excuses for terrorist murderers, I offer the following, which appeared as part of this post by Neuro-Con. Neuro-
Con quotes a commenter named Michael McCanles at Belmont Club (and, by they way, if you have a moment, please read Belmont Club’s latest).

McCanles writes:

Fear of envy” (i.e., the “evil eye”) is for anthropologists a major embodiment of this narrative’s central obsession. Thus: Islam must hate us because “we” have robbed them of something that they want: thus the incongruous overlay of the marxoid group-conflict model on top of terrorist motivations. The nice thing about this narratival explanation is that it allows the teller a hidden modicum of control. If we can say “they are attacking us because of something that we have done, then all we have to do is correct it by giving them what they want, and all will be well. Thus we control the situation because our actions are the root of the evil being done us.” This is why leftists are so dedicated to scapegoating and fingerpointing.

An excellent explanation–not an excuse–for the behavior of so many leftists.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a quick-change artist

The New Neo Posted on by

A certain issue has come up several times in the comments section, so I thought now would be a good time for me to try to set it straight. It has been raised mainly by some resident quasi-trolls, and I’ve addressed it before, but only in the comments section, so perhaps most people didn’t see it. I’m spotlighting the answer here so that there will be no misunderstanding–although, somehow, my guess is that those who want to misunderstand will still feel quite free to do so.

In my “about me” section, I wrote the following fairly glib and surface explanation of my history:

I’m a lifelong Democrat mugged by reality on 9/11. Born in New York, living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I’ve found myself leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon. My friends and family are becoming sick of what they see as my inexplicable conversion…”

So, we have our theme: lifelong Democrat mugged by reality on 9/11 converts to neoconism and alienates others.

Then, up under the blog title, I used the phrase, “things changed after 9/11.” A similar thought.

A little personal history is in order here. When I first started my blog it was a very private thing, read by about two people, and one of them was me. I didn’t know what would happen over time in terms of readership. I knew the following, however: I wanted to write a lengthy and leisurely explanation and exploration of my political journey. It would start at the beginning and continue up through 9/11 and all the way to the present. It would be, perhaps not my “letter to the world that never wrote to me,” but my “letter to the friends and relatives who would not listen to me.”

I didn’t think they’d ever really read it–and, in fact, almost to a person, they haven’t, at least so far. That may not change. But I wanted to write it anyway. And so, from the start, with the name of my blog and my description of myself, I focused on the “change” aspect of my story without giving any details of it for quite a while. It took some time before I was ready to tackle it, and part of that process was coming to terms with trying to get a wider readership and getting disciplined about writing here more often than just a few times each month.

So I did all those things, and so far I’ve been extremely gratified and amazed by the readership I’ve gotten. Another early plan I had was to attract other “changers,” so that the comments section would evolve into a forum for them to exchange ideas and experiences, sort of like a support group (it’s the therapist in me :-)). And I’ve been pleased to see some version of that happening, too.

But those early flip pronouncements of mine about my change, using catchwords like “mugged by reality on 9/11,” simplified the story to the point where it can be easily caricatured by some such as a recent commenter who wrote, as part of a lengthy rant, “9/11 ‘high-jacked’ [neo-neocon] to the twisted world of American conservatism, where a hit against us changed the way she thought…”

Well, I don’t believe I ever used the word “high-jacked” (or even “hijacked”); I said “mugged,” which connotes something different. First and foremost, it’s a reference to the famous definition of a neocon offered by one of the originals, Irving Kristol. Secondly, it denotes a sudden act of violence to which one must react in some way, not an actual taking away of a person as in a kidnapping or hijacking. So let me clarify: 9/11 did not actually change my point of view, not at all. It merely acted as a strong and sudden catalyst, the starting point for what turned into a fairly lengthy process encompassing several years of incremental change.

In fact, as I think some of my most recent “change” posts have indicated, there were glimmerings of the change to come even way back in earlier decades, before 9/11. And of course I’ve not yet written of 9/11 and its aftermath, except very briefly. So if I’ve led anyone to think the change was sudden, let me make it crystal clear (Kristol clear? Sorry, can’t resist!) that it was not. Although I see 9/11 as the catalyst, the entire process was slow to develop, and took about two and a half years to reach the point where I could really accept what had happened–that I had actually crossed that gaping crevasse discussed in this post.

A great deal of my change had to do with my slow re-evaluation of the veracity and agenda of the media in regard to the events of the years following 9/11, and also a re-examination of the Vietnam War and the role the media played in the course of events there, and how the two tie together. But, as I said before, that’s a story that I will tell in subsequent “change” pieces–and, believe me, it’s not a short one!

Many, if not most, of those who think I underwent some magical “aha!” moment in which 9/11 happened, and presto! I changed, would no doubt prefer to trivialize the thought process I underwent. To debunk it makes it seem less threatening. But I also realize that I may have had a role in their misconception–the way I phrased things may have actually been misleading and led to the misunderstanding, so I wanted to do my part to correct that.

The technology of death vs. life

The New Neo Posted on by

I was watching a feature on CNN today that mentioned that terrorist bombers make a special effort to have their explosives go off in an enclosed space because it maximizes the carnage. Thus, today’s London subway bombers may have timed their bombs to detonate not only on the subway, but also while the trains were in a tunnel.

The report described some studies from Israel, a country which has experienced more of these terrorist events than anyone else (with Iraq no doubt taking a close second). Apparently, the Israelis have found that one of the advantages of having security guards posted at the entrance to nearly every public place is that bombers who are spotted by guards are often forced to set off their explosives prematurely, in an open rather than a closed area. In this way the guards often sacrifice their own lives to prevent more people from dying.

That’s certainly heroic under any definition of the word. I am amazed at how many people are willing to take on such a task. As much as the existence of suicide bombers depresses me and makes me wonder about the future of humanity, the presence of guards–as well as those volunteering for police duty in Iraq–reassures me.

In the first few months after 9/11, and during the later escalation of bombings in Israel as the intifada heated up, as well as the Madrid bombings, I often wondered what a nation can do to deal with such awful possibilities. In this country, we’ve been remiss about the need to have more checkpoints and guards, because we are loathe to surrender our freedom. In addition, over the nearly four years since 9/11, we’ve been lulled into what may be a false sense of security by the relative calm here.

I’ve heard the argument that security guards won’t do much anyway, because then the bombers will just seek out different targets and use other methods, such as blowing themselves up on a city street. And while that is no doubt true, today’s CNN piece reminded me that the presence of guards would still be likely to make it more difficult for bombers to kill the maximum number of people possible.

War and violence have historically been limited by technology, and as technology advances, the opportunities to kill advance. This has always been true, and defenses against weapons have always lagged behind the invention of the weaponry itself. For example, suicide bombings on a subway would not have been possible but for the invention of lightweight explosives–in the olden days, the sheer volume of explosives necessary would have made it impossible to carry enough on one’s person to do widespread damage.

We are still scrambling to figure out the proper response. I doubt it will be a single technology, and it won’t happen overnight. History tells us that human ingenuity coupled with human rage dictates that new technologies of destruction will be developed and used, and that we will always be scrambling to defend ourselves against them. So far, the forces of humanity and preservation have prevailed, but it hasn’t been easy, and the death toll has been high, particularly in the 20th century. So far, the 21st seems to be continuing the trend.

Thoughts on the terrorist strike in London

The New Neo Posted on by

Some disjointed thoughts from me on the abominable bombings in London, which were timed for rush hour to maximize the loss of innocent life:

Dennis Ross on Fox News just now. He expressed something that many of us have been thinking for some time now, but that one rarely hears a diplomat say (this is not an exact quote from him, but it is more or less what he said):

The War on Terror is a misnomer. Terror is just a method. This is really a war on Islamic fanaticism.

And Tony Blair used a word I’d been thinking of: barbarians–the type of word that just a few years ago I would have thought to be as archaic as the historic barbarians themselves. Blair looked angry, too, in his statement, a restrained but white-hot clenched-teeth sort of fury: The purpose of terrorism is just that–to terrorize–and we will not be terrorized.

Ross also mentioned another thing I’d been thinking about, that attacks such as these in London are paradoxical for Al Qaeda. They want to show us they are still active and determined to strike with impunity and great viciousness. On the other hand, attacks such as this on the civilian population, designed to cause a “Spain effect” (appeasement and withdrawal), can instead cause some who would otherwise sympathize with the terrorists and/or make excuses for them to harden their hearts and their resolve against them. Let’s hope for the latter from the Brits, who certainly showed a great deal of grit in the past when faced with the Blitz.

I am glad that there doesn’t seem to have been any of this “maybe it’s the IRA” business that would have paralleled what initially happened in Spain and that caused a backlash there in some of the populace against the government. This present attack had all the earmarks of Al Qaeda from the beginning. Unfortunately, from bitter repetition, we now know only too well what those earmarks are.

The terrible stunned and traumatized look on the faces of the bloodied survivors of the bombing also brings back 9/11 memories.
It seems an amazing coincidence to me that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in London today for the bombing. Who better to address Londoners and to empathize with how they feel right now? Watching him speak brings back for me those first days after 9/11, when he showed previously unguessed-at fortitude and leadership.

For more, Norm Geras offers a guide to local news on the subject of the London bombings.

Political change: unidirectional?

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Hitchens made some interesting statements in this interview (via Seekerblog).

Here’s Hitchens describing an experience he had while in Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War, at a time when he positively hated George Bush Sr.:

I was bouncing around in a jeep with some Kurdish guerillas at that point. And on my side of the windshield, there was a big laminated picture of George H. W. Bush. And I said to them, “Look, comrades, do you have to do this? For one thing, I can’t see out of my side of the windshield. But for another, I know quite a few reporters in this area and might run into one of them at any moment. And I don’t want them seeing me in a jeep that has this guy’s image on it. So do you have to?” And they said, quite soberly and solemnly to me, “No, we think we should have this picture because we think, without him, we would all be dead, and all our families would be dead, too.” And from what I’d seen by then in that region, I thought, that’s basically morally true. I don’t have a reply to that. I don’t have a glib one and I don’t have a sound one. It’s true. So at that point my criticism of the war became this: that it had not been a regime-change war, that the slogans of liberty and justice that had been used to mobilize it had not been honored. But if they had been, I would have been in favor of it. It’s a narrow but deep crevasse to cross, and once you’ve crossed it, I’ll tell you this, you can’t go back over it again. You can’t find yourself on the other side of it. Some of you may be in transition across this crevasse yourselves or be thinking about it. I warn you: don’t cross over if you have any intention of going back, because you can’t.

He is speaking of a specific position regarding the justification for the Gulf War, but I think he is also speaking generally of political change and political changers.

It does appear, for the most part, to be a one-way street (except for Churchill, who famously said “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat”). It’s certainly not a path that’s commonly traversed–one of the major topics of my “change” series is how difficult the negotiation over that crevasse can be. But, once crossed, that path seems ordinarily to go in one direction only (hint: it’s the same way we read, left to right).

Why is this? Those on the right would say it’s because the position of the right is more grounded in facts, logic, and experience, and that of the left on hopes and dreams and wishes. The former tend to be the province of maturity, the latter of youth. The former can overrule the latter more easily than vice versa.

It’s an oversimplification, no doubt, but I think it has a certain validity nevertheless.

Sluggish

The New Neo Posted on by

This spring/summer so far has been unseasonably wet. Although ordinarily we’re not troubled too much by them, the other day while I was doing some gardening one of these lovelies crossed my path:


Posted by Picasa

The photo doesn’t really do it justice. There was the largeness of the thing, combined with its more-than-generous quotient of glistening slime, not to mention my surprise at seeing it sashaying around right out there in the open.

My immediate response was to want to kill it. I knew it was going to be feasting on plants I would rather it not eat. But since we don’t have that many slugs ordinarily here, I’d never gone about killing one before.

It quickly occurred to me that there seems to be a top limit on the size of the sort of thing I’m willing to squish with my foot, and that limit had definitely been reached long before we hit “slug” on the ladder of the animal kingdom. The same thing is true with flying creatures–I can do mosquitoes and flies, but I balk at those large moths.

My Japanese beetle routine, which involves plopping them into a jar of alcohol, didn’t feel adaptable to something this large, either. Pouring salt on it and watching it shrivel seemed like a bad prospect, too, as well as the trouble involved in the disposing of the corpse. So I watched it slink on by and did nothing.

Looking it up, I see that the suggested solutions are varied, but none seem ideal. Here is the best description I’ve found that explores the available recommended and non-recommended methods for offing a slug:

Now, how to kill the little buggers. The beer-in-the-tuna-can method has never been at all effective for me. The slugs hang over the edge and sip at the beer, but very few have ever fallen in. (They do seem quite partial to beer, however.) As for salt, some say it is extremely cruel, a feature that undoubtedly makes it more attractive to many. But the main disadvantage is this: if you salt or otherwise chemically attack slugs, they dump all their slime in their death throes–years’ worth at once! The stuff is ineradicable and you are stuck with a yard full of repulsive silvery slime globules.

I once entered the yard of a neighbor and found eight or ten slugs, impaled on a shish kebab skewer, writhing upright in her garden. “A deterrent,” she muttered darkly when I questioned her about this grisly spectacle.

Geese and skunks alone among members of the animal kingdom are said to eat slugs, and some keep them for this purpose. To my thinking, the spectacle is too revolting to endure.

My husband, to prove himself manly, has used the following method: he picks them up with his bare hands (geeklike behavior, in my opinion), and when they roll up in a ball (the burnt sienna-and-orange variety that plague my yard change shape from banana to papaya when attacked), he hurls them out into the street. Then he runs back and forth over them with the car. Charming behavior which I hope was not genetically transmitted to my children.

Perhaps I should just hope we return to our normal amount of rain.

Left vs. right: mistaken vs. evil?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I want to recommend this post by Clive Davis. He quotes Roger Scruton as saying that those on the left consider those on the right to be evil, whereas the right considers those on the left to be merely mistaken.

I think that, as a generalization, this holds up fairly well. But there is no question that there are numerous exceptions. There is a vocal segment on the right that considers the left to be evil. Recall the group that thought Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, for example, and you need look no further.

Scruton writes that, ” if I can persuade [those on the left] that I’m not evil, I find it a very useful thing.” I recall a similar effort at persuasion on my part. It worked with some of my friends and relatives, but didn’t work with others. But I resent, and still resent, their idea that any supporter of a hawkish or conservative cause should automatically be regarded as “evil until proven not-evil.” This was a revelation to me, and not a pleasant one.

Davis’s post goes on to quote writer Nick Cohen as crediting (or blaming?) his own change of heart on certain topics to having read Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism. (Hmm, perhaps that’s next on my list.) Here’s Cohen on the subject of changing one’s mind:

I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies.

I consider it highly ironic that, in his autobiography Radical Son, David Horowitz fingers none other than that very same Paul Berman as having been one of his most most vicious attackers when Horowitz underwent his own neocon conversion (I plan to say more about this topic in a subsequent post). Life is an interesting journey, is it not?

Report on the Fourth

The New Neo Posted on by

How was my Fourth of July? Just fine, thanks.

To begin with, the weather, which had been fairly vile for weeks, turned magnificent for the entire weekend. Unless your goal was to swim (which mine wasn’t), it was perfection itself. Of course, being a few degrees too cool for ideal swimming has never stopped most New Englanders from doing so–there were plenty of people at the local beaches.

I did the classic things: went to the family party of some friends of mine (pool, barbecued chicken, homemade apple and strawberry-rhubarb pies, all ages from the very elderly through one-year-olds). I brought along my ninety-one-year-old mother, and I wish I’d brought a camera, too, to photograph her extremely red-white-and-blue outfit. At night, I watched a half-hour long show of fireworks over the ocean with a crowd of onlookers including other friends of mine, their grown children, and their two absolutely adorable grandkids, who were delighted to hold a series of small sparklers in their careful little hands.

How about you?