Big Apple Straw Poll; Up with the Elite; Newspeak: Diversity; Russian Chess Game
Back in 1949 George Orwell told the story of one man's struggle against a society that allowed no privacy or independent thought, where the past was rewritten to fit the latest orthodoxy and doublethink sloganeering became an instinctive habit of mind?War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength. The man is arrested by the Thought Police and warned that the Party is not interested in "negative obedience," but rather wants his very soul, so that when he finally surrenders, "it must be of your own free will." He submits of his own accord.
Fast-forward to 2001, Bucks County Community College, PA. An employment application for all faculty and staff positions requires applicants to "provide a brief statement of your commitment to diversity and how this commitment is demonstrated in your work," and to "certify" your understanding that "any false or misleading statement on this application constitutes sufficient grounds for dismissal." In other words, Bucks College?a publicly funded institution?will hire only those individuals who agree that the purpose of education is political rather than intellectual, and who are willing to swear that they will not deviate from the officially mandated theology of affirmative action ("diversity" is the latest code word for affirmative action forever).
Confronted with a lawsuit unless the question were removed, the college president at first insisted that this "is very clearly not a First Amendment issue. People are not being restrained in their speech. We ask questions of new candidates... [They] often volunteer this information." But why ask if people are volunteering to tell? Because the school officials are only following orders from their superiors, that's why. The accreditation body wants all colleges to achieve diversity. And besides, adds the president, a doctor of education, the question has been on the application for several years and no applicant has ever complained.
For reasons that may not be obvious to a holder of an advanced college degree, university education not being everything it's cracked up to be these days, the complaining was done by a longtime faculty member who brought the matter to the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group devoted to academic freedom. Fresh from a victory against Monterey Peninsula College in California, which rescinded its diktat that all classes address race, class and gender, the foundation wrote to Bucks College, referring it to constitutional law and citing the U.S. Supreme Court that "no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith [in it.]" Furthermore, the letter continued, asking applicants to recite a diversity pledge amounts to a "loyalty oath," which is "inimical to academic and intellectual freedom as any that arose during the sad days of McCarthyism."
With the threat of litigation mounting, the college caved in. The diversity oath, the sworn commitment to a proportional racial representation, is out, and those determined to transform Bucks or any college from a place of learning into a breeding ground for resentment and ignorance have to figure out new ways to achieve their goal. No doubt they will, for college administrators everywhere are gripped with race and gender fever, always on high alert for any whiff of heresy from their latest dogma that unless all races are proportionately represented in every school, learning suffers. It is surely a matter of time before they produce an avalanche of taxpayer-funded research "proving" that such is indeed the case, though, presumably, they will not have gathered their data from places like Juilliard or Caltech. Nor will they have drawn the data from Howard and argue that blacks can only learn when whites are present. The reverse argument, on the other hand, is not considered racist.
Let it be noted, however, particularly since this is not likely to be mentioned in many schools, that while the diversity oath is legally analogous to the loyalty oath, the now-discredited loyalty oaths have nothing to do with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The Loyalty Review Board was established in 1947 by the good Democrat Harry Truman years before the loathsome Republican McCarthy ever thought of asking anyone, "Are you now or have you ever been...?"
Today there are no government-imposed loyalty boards; the pressure to muzzle campus discourse comes from a powerful cadre of ideologues within academia itself. Far from being the locus of open discussion and a sanctuary in which truth and knowledge may be freely pursued, colleges are simply a collection of departments of sanitation determined to cleanse the hearts and minds of the politically impure. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here or study math or physics" may be a fair warning to all who want to avoid the stultifying homogeneity and sycophantic drool of the race commissars who control contemporary liberal arts education.
At Bucks College, the crudely worded commitment to affirmative action may have been officially eliminated, but one can be sure that the Party is watching. Its goal has always been not to destroy people but to capture their inner minds.
Patrick Leigh Fermor is one of the most fastidious and polished writers of English prose, a still sprightly and very good-looking man at age 85. Paddy, as he's known to friends, comes from grand old English stock, lives most of the year in Mani, on the Peloponnese, and is probably the most accomplished travel writer in the world.
He is also a war hero. In Crete, during World War II, he singlehandedly kidnapped Gen. Heinrich Kreipe from the Villa Ariadne at Knossos. After a long trek through rough mountain terrain the two stopped for a rest. The German general looked back at Mount Ida and recited a line of Horace: "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum, Socrate..." Paddy was relieved. "Thank God," he writes in his memoir, "it was one of the ones I knew... So I said nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes, geluque flumina constiterint acuto..." He went on to finish the poem, and there was a long pause before the general said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" Paddy just said, "Ja, Herr General."
The scene must have been extraordinary. Here's Paddy again: "It changed everything. As I wrote at the time, there was this feeling that we had drunk at the same springs, long ago, long before the war." After a while they stood up and Paddy, realizing he had to do with an officer and a gentleman, asked Kreipe for his word of honor that he would not try to escape. The German thought about it for quite some time and then gave his word. And kept it to the end.
The reason I thought of Patrick Leigh Fermor was an incident that took place in a Noo Yawk restaurant last week, the day after I returned from Switzerland. Someone at my table was discussing the Oscars when I politely asked him to change the subject, as I find all that hoopla degrading and intellectually low. A total stranger from the next table commented rather rudely that if we were intellectuals we should go to a library. After telling him to keep quiet or risk being horsewhipped, I switched to French. That was the proverbial straw that broke him. He hurriedly paid his bill and left, telling us to "go and f? yourselves, you f??? snobs." Even if I say so myself, I do have a talent for abuse, and by speaking French and laughing heartily when he told us to go and reproduce ourselves, we made the poor man apoplectic. Mind you, he was just a flashy bully, a white Puff Daddy type, but what struck me was his fury when the conversation turned from the Oscars to?dare I say it?Tom Stoppard, with whom I was going to have a drink that day, and whose play, The Invention of Love, premiered last week to fantastic reviews. (Incidentally, go see it; the New York production is 100 times better than the London one, and Sir Tom is our greatest living playwright by far.)
Unlike the general and the major, we had not drunk at the same springs with this particular gentleman. But even more important is the fact that no words arouse the wrath of our dumbed-down culture more than the words elite and elitist. Yes, he called us snobs, but he meant elite. Snobs and elites are yoked in a common pillory, but they are as different as Rambo and Rimbaud. Elitists are people who have gained distinction by their own efforts; snobs attach exaggerated importance to birth and wealth, look down on those with neither and claim unfounded friendship with those they consider their superiors. Elitism has been beneficial everywhere throughout the ages; snobbishness is unmerited and cruel.
Politicians like the grotesque Clintons appeal to a mindless egalitarianism, and stir up hatred and paranoia. But without elites and elitism, we would still be living in caves and eating roots. Every achievement of mankind is the achievement of an elite. Just think of ancient Greece and the Parthenon, Greek tragedy, Greek philosophy, all achieved by a few elite in the name of even fewer gods. Think of Florence, Rome and Venice in the Renaissance. The France of Versailles, Fragonard and Poussin before the revolution. It was a case of a privileged few commissioning the Parthenon to be built, or Michelangelo to decorate, or Fragonard to paint their mistresses. If people like the Clintons had been in charge since the beginning of time, you can be pretty certain none of us would have heard of Bach or Mozart, only of Puff Daddy and Eminem.
As Daniel Johnson, son of the great Paul, recently wrote, "Class is now the love that dare not speak its name. We are all middle class now, our leaders tell us. Or we are all classless." Once upon a time, educated people dressed up, slobs dressed down. No longer. Alas, my own children, having attended posh schools and with a mother who has never used foul language, speak like stevedores used to and like rap freaks do today. I blame it on the culture, but then?as an ex-sailor? I've been known to use salty language, too. Long ago, before Hollywood and those ghastly types on tv began to use the f-word nonstop, swearing was confined to the ranks of the inarticulate, uneducated people. Now television brings dull obscenity into every home. Children naturally copy it.
The truth is that language is all we have. It defines us and our humanity. It defined Kreipe to Leigh Fermor just as it defines the Clintons when they use the populist tricks they do. It defined the man at Swifty's who took umbrage when I said Oscar night makes Sarah Ferguson seem to possess plenipotential dignity by comparison. Let's have more elites, more Latin and Greek and to hell with downmarket populists. And more types like Patrick Leigh Fermor.
"Buses" was the answer given by a tall and blue-jeaned Mark Green backer when asked why her candidate was about to get shellacked in the Big Apple Straw Poll. She gave a wry smile. The poll had looked like a good Green event: seemingly aimed at liberal young Manhattanites (one volunteer from Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century, the sponsoring group, told me early on that "young professionals" would make up most of the crowd). Made to order for a man running against candidates with political bases in Queens (Vallone and Hevesi) and the Bronx (Ferrer). But long before the candidates spoke and votes were cast, the outcome was clear, as large yellow buses maneuvered for docking space in the rain outside the carpenters union hall on Hudson St.
Out of them trooped dozens and dozens of Bronxians, carrying Ferrer signs, some bullhorns, all shouting loudly, "Freddy, Freddy." It was an impressive display of strength by the Bronx machine, and if New York's next mayor is chosen on the basis of who can transport the biggest and loudest crowds around the five boroughs, Ferrer's frontrunner status should be beyond dispute.
Peter Vallone, the term-limited City Council speaker, ran a distant second to Ferrer in the noise contest. His backers seemed a slightly updated version of a Saturday Night Fever crowd, cute women with frosted hair and plenty of makeup, young men in black turtlenecks and leather jackets who gave wiseguy responses to journalists' questions. Vallone is one of the nicer people in city politics, who displayed flashes of great courage in the early 90s in countering demagoguery on several social issues. Today he seems like a man from another era. His organization had worked the straw poll well (he finished second), but no one seemed to listen to his speech.
Comptroller Alan Hevesi has the most polished delivery, and who could not be impressed by the number of turbaned Indians in his entourage? He ticked off his accomplishments and financial expertise, and was happy to signal that he is known as "the moderate" in the race, who generally got on well with Mayor Giuliani on budgetary matters. (He then stressed his social liberalism.) I suspect that for all the city-related legislation he has played a part in, Hevesi will go down in history for his use of his powers of office against Switzerland's banks and their purported Holocaust guilt.
Unlike the other candidates', Mark Green's supporters arrived individually or in small groups, and mounted no floor demonstrations. Something about them evoked Lindsay backers of years ago: the number of well-bred Manhattan girls, casually dressed, ebullient in their enthusiasm for Green and their desire to "do good" for New York. Green himself is a veteran liberal, proud to have "stood up" to Giuliani. But he has carried out a masterstroke in securing the endorsement of Bill Bratton, Giuliani's first police chief, thus associating himself both with the liberal anti-Giuliani reform spirit (the dominant mood in the hall and?sad to say?in the city's political culture at large) and with the most successful aspect of the Mayor's reign, the remarkable reduction in violent crime.
I would imagine a Green mayoralty staffed with the bright and young and idealistic, led by a man less charismatic than Lindsay but far more knowledgeable of city government, and of course not burdened by the terrible WASP racial guilt that so marred Lindsay's time in office.
But Ferrer may be the coming thing. However reasonable he is reputed to be in private, his campaign has a demagogue's aura about it: besides the busloads and bullhorns, the basic Ferrer stump speech about "the other New York" is pitched to stir up resentments of the city's poor against the middle class and rich. There could be a grain of truth to the charge that life in New York has improved more in the past decade for those who work in business or the arts than it has for those who live in public housing, and Ferrer does in the end say that he wants to "pull together" the two New Yorks. But his tone of class warfare is unmistakable, a tone that was not a part of David Dinkins' repertoire, nor of course those of Mayors Koch and Giuliani.
City politics is entering a new and uncharted era. The leading candidates for public advocate?the most visible sub-mayoral citywide office?are all running left-wing campaigns, stridently anti-cop and anti-Rudy. Term limits will force a complete shake-up in the city council, leaving that body without its moderate leadership (Vallone) and probably infusing it with some activist hotheads. The bottom line is that there will be many more voices within city government demanding that the city's banks and businesses pay more taxes for this and that and dumping on the "racist" NYPD.
For the past generation, New York has been led by two gifted and essentially conservative mayors, with an interregnum of one gentlemanly liberal whose worst trait was a reluctance to confront the left. We are about to find out how lucky we have been.
Our "friendship" with Russia brings to mind those hormone-charged couples who feud incessantly in public yet remain together out of some vaguely obscene private attraction. Why do we stay together? Despite a bug in the State Dept., nuclear sales to Iran, a spy in the FBI, 50 "diplomatic attaches" expelled? Among power couples this rivalry might expend itself in an almighty bout of cathartic sex. Between the U.S. and Russia, what? Let's face it, we're not allies, friends or consenting partners. We're not even attracted. They abetted Serbia in the Balkan war; they made a strategic military pact with China; they support Saddam?if we're not in a cold war, we should be.
During the second Chechnya war, like most journalists I was not able to get into Grozny. In fact, Russian authorities kept most independent observers out of the Chechen region altogether by denying internal visas from Moscow. They weren't about to lose the propaganda war for a second time. Most journalists ended up moping on the Ingushetia border watching refugee camps swell with shell-shocked children. I took an alternate illicit route up from Turkey through Georgia and the southern Chechen mountains. I got in, but not for long. Luckily I got picked up by friendly Chechens who dumped me over the Ingushetia border. I say luckily because the Russians were happy to kill journalists and blame the Chechens. Or they simply whispered to Chechen warriors that a journalist might be a Russian spy. Or you got flattened along with 50,000 others by the carpet bombing.
After Bosnia, this was the second anti-Muslim genocide of the 1990s by resurgent pan-Slavism. And the third Russian war of genocide against the Chechens?the last perpetrated by Stalin during WWII when he cattle-trucked half the population to Siberia and Central Asia. Yet nobody is asking for legislation in remembrance of the genocides committed by Russians in the past or in the present. (You can extend the list with the Kipchaks, the Tekke Turcomans, the Siberian tribes, the Crimean Tatars, the Cherkess and others.) Now that they're not communists, nobody expects Russians to meet minimal human rights standards against their own citizens. Among Russians themselves no one shows remorse, a la German-style guilt over Jews, or American laments over the Sioux, about what they've wrought on others. Yet we still can't stop our fondling of the Yeltsins and Putins. How is that possible?
One explanation is that they are fellow soldiers in the trenches against fundamentalist Islam. Hence the free pass on Chechnya. But closer inspection tells us that the Russians simply created this nightmare version of Chechnya. There's good evidence that I've aired here before that Yeltsin's Kremlin abetted the abductions of citizens and foreigners by Chechen gangster-warlords during the interwar years. Then, you will remember that the second Chechen war was provoked by a series of arbitrary "terrorist" bomb blasts in civilian apartment blocks around Russia. Much of the Russian population now believes those incidents were engineered by their own authorities to justify the war. Even if that proves to be paranoia, what does it say about a government that its citizens can plausibly suspect it of such acts?
Though I failed to reach Grozny, I did get a whiff from the environs of how precisely the scene was set for the next act. One knew the Chechens were doomed this time. One felt a web of new strategic deals in place that made it all possible. The Turks, for example, had supported the Chechens in the first war with weapons and funds and logistics especially from the Chechen exile community in Istanbul. No evidence of it this time. In return, the Turks already got the Kurdish terrorist leader Ocalan handed to them. The Americans, too, stayed out (no Stinger missiles against Russkie copters). The Russians had let them bomb Serbia, after all. Plus, some oil-sharing deal over the Caspian. Very important, this, for the Israeli lobby. The Israelis want a non-enemy source of oil for themselves and the world, and Azerbaijan offers the source. Suffice to say, the Russians played the chess game with skill and got away with murder.
Still, that, like the Gulf War, was a one-off calculus. And it had a lot to do with Clinton corruption. Marc Rich, Berezhovsky and others who hijacked billions out of Russia circulated the benefits to political parties in Israel and the U.S. Yeltsin, then Putin, looked the other way. In return, Clinton looked away from Chechnya.
That was then. Perhaps Dubya is about to change all that. Perhaps the recent spy and Iran-nuke scandals are a careful prelude. If so, Dubya will face stiff opposition from a broad coalition of pro-Russian lobbies within the U.S. In the newest world order, the great Gulliver of American foreign policy is tied down by myriad tiny minority interests. In the Russian corner: Russia, Armenia, Iran, Syria, Greece, Serbia, Cyprus, Lebanon, all in alignment. Some of these have very effective domestic American lobbies. In the other corner: U.S., Turkey, Israel, Azerbaijan. In this coalition the U.S. is at times the weakest partner, because its domestic lobbies can push it either way. The push for the Armenian Genocide Bill was probably a first shot in the intra-minority battles to come, an attempt to make Turkey too hot an ally for the Jewish lobby to espouse in the U.S. And there's another crack in the Turkish-Israeli alliance: Turks are Muslim and their sympathies often sway pro-Palestinian.
So the pro-Russkies look formidable. We may be ignoring their genocides for a long time to come.