Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,

And the Catholics hate the Protestants,

And the Hindus hate the Moslems,

And everybody hates the Jews.

But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week,

It's National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.

Be nice to people who

Are inferior to you.

It's only for a week, so have no fear.

Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!

--Tom Lehrer, "National Brotherhood Week" (1965)

You know, if you are going to accuse someone of predicting "cannibalism in the suburbs the day after tomorrow," the article you link to for support should, you know, actually say that, or something remotely like it. (Maybe Leonard meant the part where Kunstler says, "I think that we will return to many social relations and social enactments that we lost and that were of great value to us, such as working closely with other people on things that really matter to us"?) Unless, of course, you practice Ann Coulter standards of journalism.

Just a thought.

Both Laura Secor and (apparently) Mark Bowden adhere to certain self-serving conventions in retelling the Iranian hostage crisis. The first convention is to minimize as much as possible the sadistic violence and omnipresent represssion of the Shah's regime, in particular the US-trained SAVAK, when it is no exaggeration to say that the Shah was every bit as cruel as our other regional ally, Saddam. (Unless you think using a deli meat slicer on detainees' fingers--to pick but one small example--is just having a bit of a lark.) So much easier to demonize the Revolutionaries and their own indefensible abuses from a moral high horse, no?

The second convention is to always, always, always suggest that the hostage-takers were deluded paranoiacs with a cartoon vision of the US' role in their country's (and the region's) affairs, which is why no US account of the crisis is complete without a snarky reference to their characterization of the embasssy as a "nest of spies." In fact, the embassy was a nest of spies: the hostage takers proved that by painstakingly reconstructing hundreds of shredded documents during the 444-day takeover and publishing them to the world. These documents showed close collaboration between SAVAK and the US, as well as with Israel. In case you wondered why you don't know about this book, it's because it's suppressed in the US on grounds that it contains "classified documents". (For those interested, an extended account appears in Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilization".)

Secor tut tuts Bowden's superficial parallels between then and now, but herself fails to note one actual one, namely the continued determination by the United States to dominate the region's oil supplies while whitewashing the crimes it commits in so doing. And so history repeats, well past tragedy and farce, into uncharted areas framed by our chronic self-delusion.

Two things struck me about the Forbes' articles that apparently eluded your writer. First the notion that prostitution and marriage for a woman are straight out of 70s era feminism, albeit the more strident wing. (I am thinking Germain Greer, though my memory may be faulty.)

Second, it's pretty funny to read that the hazard of marrying a career woman is you get someone you can't keep down on the farm because she's now seen Paris. I thought the wingnut talking point was that career women are lonely, bitter and cut off from the one and only source of meaning for her?

It's must be difficult being a right-wing nutjob, keeping all these contradictory ideas in line. Relax fellas, and let go of your prejudices. We happy males with successful careerist spouses are here to tell you, it is possible to have it all.

Finishing his extended mea culpa, Sullivan adds: "But as you know from everything I've written, I have no sympathy either for the Michael Moore left, and I think that could lose the Democrats a lot of potential allies and supporters."

Oh, right, above all else we must abjure and marginalize THE ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING over the last 6 years. Not just that the Bush people might fuck up the war, but that the war itself was marinated in lies (Sullivan elides the overwhelming evidence of bad faith in the Administration's marketing of its Iraq policy) and driven by, yes, oil. I would argue that, if anything, the Bush Administration has exceeded the cynical standards set by "the Michael Moore left" in its breathtaking arrogance, mendacity and corruption, yet for some reason the one group with nothing to apologize for still lies beyond that pale. Meanwhile Sullivan admits to bending over backwards to give St. McCain the benefit of the doubt on capitulating to Bush over torture.

Andrew, we already know why you have no claim to authority on political matters; you really don't have to remind us all over again.