Make love and war, or else the terrorists will have won:
During Valentine’s week in February, with war impending and the government elevating the terrorism alert, two of Wal-Mart’s hot-selling items were lingerie and duct tape. Talk about ingratitude: terrorists struck in Saudi Arabia. The war with Iraq went well, aside from the detail that the reason for it–weapons of mass destruction–has been elusive. The following is a complete list of all those fired because of the intelligence failure: _______.
While America was trying to acquaint 25 million Iraqis with democracy, 144.5 million Russians fell under President Vladimir Putin’s “managed democracy”–tsarism leavened by state-manipulated plebiscites. If only the world were more like California, where the people, groaning under the wicked choices of the electorate, chose a new governor to wrestle with the people’s chosen legislature over how to undo the damage done by voters in dozens of plebiscites.
In America’s “(court-) managed democracy,” judges began discovering a right to same-sex marriage. Forty-one years after the U.S. Army helped end racial discrimination in admissions at Ole Miss, the Supreme Court found nothing amiss in the University of Michigan’s racial discrimination in admissions.
That court, having said that the First Amendment protections extend to virtual child pornography and tobacco advertising, finally exclaimed “Enough!” In a 5-4 decision co-written by Sandra Day O’Connor, it held that concern for political hygiene justified Congress’s passing the McCain-Feingold legislation to restrict the amount and regulate the content of speech about members of Congress. Thus did a Ronald Reagan 1980 campaign promise (to appoint the first woman justice) result, 23 years later, in ratification of George W. Bush’s decision to sign a bill that he, while campaigning–before taking the oath to defend the Constitution–called unconstitutional.
The Academie Francaise, which never stooped to admit Flaubert or Zola, admitted Valery Giscard d’Estaing, author–sort of–of the European Union’s proposed 263-page Constitution, a screamingly funny political satire. Because of Jayson Blair, heads rolled at The New York Times, where all the “news” had not been fit to print.
American conservatives, controlling both elected branches of government for the first full year since 1954, used their power to… vastly expand the welfare state. The prescription-drug entitlement may cost $2.5 trillion over the next 20 years. Big deal. That sum amounts to only five years of deficits at the current level. Besides, Congress showed that it could act with dispatch against a menace that really annoys people: spam.
Howard Dean discerned what liberals want: attitude. In San Francisco, ground zero of Deanism, sensitivity police stipulated that pets’ owners shall also be called “guardians.” Kobe Bryant, impulse buyer, bought his wife a $4 million diamond ring. “Friends” headed for oblivion, American style: ubiquitous reruns.
Remember Henry Adams’s jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution? After another year watching their royals, the British could say something similar about the progress, so to speak, from Elizabeth I to the son of Elizabeth II.
Sen. Pat Moynihan, dead at 76, was America’s foremost public intellectual. Another giant of the Finance Committee, Russell Long, 84, was 16 when his father was assassinated, and not quite 30 when elected to the Senate in 1948. David Brinkley, 82, the most famous son of Wilmington, N.C., until Michael Jordan came along, said of television, “When there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”
This year the movie musical was revived with “Chicago,” and Sam Phillips died at 80. On July 5, 1954, at his Memphis recording studio, Phillips recorded a 19-year-old singing “That’s All Right Mama.” Elvis’s blending of white and black music helped end the world defended by Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond, dead at 87 and 100.
In 1951 the Boston Braves’ Warren Spahn, en route to becoming baseball’s winningest left-hander, stood on the mound, 60 feet 6 inches from a New York Giants rookie who was 0-for-12. Willie Mays homered. Said Spahn, “For the first 60 feet, that was a helluva pitch.” Spahn was 82. In the 1934 World Series, Tiger shortstop Billy Rogell’s relay to first hit Cardinal runner Dizzy Dean in the forehead. The next day a headline supposedly said: x-rays of dean’s head reveal nothing. Rogell died at 98.
At 114, Mitoyo Kawate was the world’s oldest person. She was working on her farm six miles from Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Jack Davis, 108, was Britain’s oldest veteran of mankind’s final war–the war to end war, 1914-18.
