Chimps, The Cheshire Cat & The Fall of Tony Blair

National Review Online, May 26, 2005

When, after a great victory, a Roman general marched in triumph surrounded by plunder, captives, and, quite probably, hot chicks, he was always accompanied by a slave whose job was to hiss periodically in the great man’s ear the irritating reminder that he was only human, not a god. Something a bit like this (well, I don’t know about the plunder, captives, and hot chicks) happened to Tony Blair in the aftermath of his party’s triumph in the recent British elections. Within hours of victory, numerous Labour politicians lined up to tell Blair to get lost. Former foreign minister Robin Cook took time out from his usual bilious routine to report on the views of the nation’s boulevardiers. “Anyone on the streets knows we were not elected because Tony Blair was popular....” Another former, a former health minister better known for the elections he has lost than those he has won, said it was time for Blair to go. Former actress and current hysteric, the shrilly leftist MP Glenda Jackson chimed in with the claim that the “people have screamed at the top of their lungs. And their message is clear. They want Tony Blair gone.”

Well, Glenda, in case you weren’t paying attention, the people have just made Tony Blair the first Labour prime minister to win three consecutive election victories. While the party’s parliamentary majority was substantially reduced, it remains, well, substantial.

To the novelist and journalist Robert Harris (an old friend of Blair’s Svengali, Peter Mandelson, but a clear-eyed judge of British politics nonetheless), this all looked like madness: “it does not…require a political genius to see…that it is a thoroughly bad idea for a minority party-cabal to bring down an elected prime minister. The Liberals did it to Asquith in 1915 and have never gained power again. The Tories did it to Thatcher… and have since suffered three successive election defeats… Now Labour, like a chimp examining a loaded revolver, shows alarming signs of the same casual attitude to its political extinction.” Harris noted that an opinion poll conducted shortly after the election had shown some 83 percent of those who had voted Labour said that Tony Blair should stay on for at least another twelve months.

The same poll, however, revealed that over 60 percent of Labour voters want Blair out within three years, an indication, perhaps, that all is not rosy for Tony. And it’s not. Take a closer look at the stats: the Labour party’s share of the vote, a dodgy postal ballot or two over 35 percent, was the lowest enjoyed by an incoming government for nearly 200 years, and impressive as Labour’s haul of parliamentary seats undoubtedly was, it came in at well below the total secured in the previous two general elections. The number of votes cast for the party has slumped by a third since the 1997 election that swept Blair into power. For the first time in a decade, many Labour MPs are sweaty, anxious, and paranoid about their parliamentary futures, something that bodes ill for Blair’s.

It seems a long, long while since the bright, confident afternoon that Tony Blair first took possession of 10 Downing Street to the cheers of a supposedly spontaneous jubilant flag-waving crowd (in fact Labour-party workers and their families, but never mind). Years of spin, manipulation, and dishonesty, made all the more grating by relentless prime ministerial preachiness, have made Blair a deeply distrusted figure, part curate, part conman, all charlatan. Of course, there’s nothing new about the British loathing a repeatedly reelected prime minister—there were few politicians so disliked as Mrs. Thatcher at the height of her powers—but Blair has to contend with a threat that never really troubled the Iron Lady: the Labour party.

Once firmly established in Number Ten, Mrs. Thatcher could always rely on the adulation of her party’s rank-and-file and, until the Gadarene meltdown of November 1990, her MPs. Tony Blair cannot. As Labour leader he has filled an abattoir with the slaughtered sacred cows of party orthodoxy. This has won him elections, but lost him the love, affection, and loyalty of his activists. They, poor souls, remain trapped in a mindset that blends traditional working class belligerence with the idiot radicalism of a third-rate provincial university. To them, Tony is the outsider, the toff, Bush’s poodle (pick your insult), a necessary evil to be tolerated only so long as he brought in the votes.

And that means that Blair is now looking very vulnerable indeed. At the election Labour lost most ground in those parts of the U.K. where his emollient appeal had once been greatest. The affluent southeast has largely returned to its Tory roots. In England itself more voters opted for the Conservatives than for Labour. Labour is once again dependent on its traditional heartlands, the industrial north, and those grim socialist satrapies better known as Scotland and Wales, territories where Blair’s message has very limited intellectual, emotional, or electoral appeal.

Compounding his weakness, Blair has already said that he will resign before the next election. Quite why he chose to hobble himself in this way remains unclear. It’s probably best to ask Blair’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) and presumed successor, the sulky, scowling, and increasingly impatient Gordon Brown. In circumstances that have been obscured by controversy, mystery, and mudslinging Blair may (or may not) have promised to step down in favor of Brown at some time during his first term and he may (or may not) have promised to step down in favor of Brown at some time during his second. He may also have sold his chancellor the Brooklyn Bridge, a secondhand Pinto, and a three-dollar bill. Who knows? In any event, it’s 2005 and Blair’s still in office, but the trusting Mr. Brown has finally and painfully come to the same conclusion as the rest of the country. “There's nothing,” he told Blair, “you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe."

Eventually, Blair did what he always does (or may not have done) on the previous occasions that he needed to keep Brown onside: He promised to stand down at some point in his next term, but this time, there was a difference. He made that promise in public. The moment he did, the game was up. Politicians at Westminster, a British journalist told me, know that Blair is mortally wounded, “they can see the trail of blood all across the lobby floor.” Power, sycophants, and the ambitious are all ebbing from the prime minister, as Gordon Brown, whose fondness for some of old Labour’s more numbskull pieties has already made him the party’s darling, painstakingly cements his hold over the constituencies he will need to assure him the premiership, a union leader here, a key MP there, a friendly journalist here, a member of the House of Lords there. According to some estimates there are now three times as many Brownites as Blairites within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour party.

Superficially, Blair’s actions since the election seem to show that the maestro has lost none of his touch. The usual crop of meaningless, destructive, and plain dumb "reforms" have been announced, the House of Lords has been stuffed with another batch of cronies, dubious government appointments have been made and dissidents have been roughed up at a parliamentary-party meeting. But this is all flim-flam, flash, and empty glitter, a show that signifies nothing. A better indication of where power now lies comes from the fact that Blair was unable to push through many of the personnel changes he wanted in his new administration, a deeply humiliating rebuff for any newly reelected prime minister, let alone one who has been in office for the better part of a decade.

And the misery doesn’t end there. Blair has for a long time delegated large amounts of the domestic agenda to his chancellor (that was part of the agreement between them), but now, after Iraq, even his hold over foreign affairs is palsied, feeble, and pointless. Britain’s EU policy is a shambles, and so far as the threat from Islamic extremism is concerned, the idea that Blair could bring his party with him alongside the U.S. in doing anything that lacks the approval of the "international community," Hollywood, the Guardian and the New York Times is absurd. All that is left to Blair now is the peddling of a grandiloquent, if benign, idea—saving Africa—ripped off from a rock star.

The next step in Blair’s decline will be guerrilla warfare> against his government from the Labour Left, but this will not be enough to unseat him, and nor, probably, would Brown want it to. Despite a history of awe-inspiring and entertainingly destructive temper tantrums, Brown, like Harris, clearly understands that a coup could come at a terrible electoral price. He has resisted the temptation to play Brutus in the past, and he will do so again. He wants to inherit a united party. Ideally Brown wants that “smooth and orderly” handover that Blair is always talking about, but sooner, please, please, sooner, please, please, sooner, rather than later. So when might that be? Before the election, conventional wisdom was that Blair would oblige his impatient heir about three years into his final term, now the talk is that he might quit next year.

The problem is that there is still no obvious moment for Blair to go. Given his druthers, the prime minister, who is still only 52, would probably prefer to soldier on up to the last minute or, quite frankly, beyond. If he does have to go, this most theatrical of politicians will want it to be on a high note. The conundrum for Blair—and Brown—is that there aren’t many potential high notes around. It’s long been mooted that Blair should resign after tricking the Brits into voting for the EU’s draft "constitution" in the autumn of 2006, but so far his stubbornly euroskeptic countrymen show few signs of playing along. Of course, a British "no" might also signal the end of Blair’s show, if not quite so gloriously as he would have wished. Needless to say, all this may soon become academic: If the French and the Dutch reject the constitution in the next week any British vote may be shelved indefinitely.

The British economy won’t be much help either. After eight years in office, it looks as if Labour is finally going to have to start paying the price for the way in which it has squandered the golden inheritance of the Thatcher-Major years. Quite how this will reflect on Gordon Brown, as Chancellor the man most responsible for the coming mess, is hard to say, but increasingly unappetizing economic news will mean that Blair’s departure will look more like an exit from the scene of the crime than the glorious finale of which he must dream.

So nothing’s certain other than months, and perhaps, years of intrigue, febrile speculation and plots as Blair’s premiership fades, fades, and fades away until, like a New Labour version of Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, all that will be left is an oddly compelling smile, faint, strained, and insincere.

The Trouble with Tony

National Review Online,  May 3, 2005

It can be a lonely business being a critic of Tony Blair in this country — outside, at least, the fever swamps of the far Left. Speaking at a crowded debate in downtown Manhattan last week, my myopic eyes could only find one brave individual who agreed that the British prime minister did not deserve reelection As my solitary supporter (thanks Myrna!) writes for NRO, I suspect kindness to a beleaguered colleague played no small part in this welcome gesture of support. Perhaps my feeble, muttered oratory was to blame, or was it the arguments skillfully marshaled by my opponent?

Maybe, but it’s just as likely that this result was mainly a reflection of the American infatuation with Tony, the saint, the hero, the Churchill with hair, but no cigar. Whenever I post any criticism of Blair over on The Corner a few angry e-mails usually come my way. Their gist: Blair is a great, great man, America’s ally; don’t bother us with the internal squabbles of your miserable little islands. This misses the point. In understanding why Tony Blair deserves to lose, remember that he’s the prime minister, not of the world, but only of those unfortunate specks in the sea. He may have been good for America, but he’s been bad for Britain.

And yet, when Britain votes on May 5 Blair will win. The only question will be by how much. But this seemingly inevitable success will owe little or nothing to Blair the international statesman (it will not be a referendum on the war, which, however unfairly, has done little for Blair other than to bolster his reputation for untrustworthiness) and almost everything to an economy that appears, however deceptively, still to be ticking over quite nicely. Critically too, Blair benefits from the weakness of an opposition seen by most voters as unprepared for prime time.

Beyond the usual ragbag of Celtic nationalists, single-issue campaigners, maniacs, madhats, and cranks, there are two opposition parties that count, one worse than Labour, and one better. The one that is worse, the Liberal Democrats, is the successor of a party that has not won an election since it dragged Britain into the First World War (thanks guys!) and it is not going to now. Nowadays it is a pro-tax party of the left that calls itself centrist, defines itself by its opposition to the liberation of Iraq, and has an alarming tendency to appeal to the sort of men who like to wear socks with their sandals.

The Conservatives would, at least, be an improvement on Labour. They aren’t much, but they’ll do (come to think of it, that should be their slogan). After the traumas of recent years, they have been reduced to a rather tatty rump, led by a man sometimes compared to a vampire (well he has been endorsed by Christopher Lee), but, given the obstacles they face, this is inevitable. Nobody entirely normal would agree to take on the task of toppling Labour. That this is such a challenge is a measure of the Conservatives’ failure. Labour rule has been marked by sleaze, spin, economic mismanagement, relentless political correctness and a chaotic immigration policy, a record that, given more effective opposition, should be enough to ensure defeat.

Of all the blots on Labour, it’s the sleaze that is the most ironic. Accusations of "Tory sleaze" played a very large part in helping Blair to his 1997 landslide. These were often unfair, but sometimes deserved. The Conservatives had shown themselves increasingly prone to the petty — and occasionally not so petty — corruption that characterizes political parties in power for a long time. Throw in John Major’s ill-advised, and impertinent, family-values campaign (which opened the door to a relentless procession of revelations about naughty Tory MPs), and Tory sleaze, whether it was payments in brown envelopes, numerous adulteries, dodgy foreign donations or, even, an autoerotic disaster, became the media story of the day, the month and the year.

Labour was going to be different — and so it was if not quite in the way (“purer than pure”) that the electorate had been led to believe. Labour scandals may have actually exceeded anything associated with the Conservatives, and might even include the electoral process itself. In an attempt to boost turnout by its supporters Labour has made it much easier to vote by post. To the judge presiding over an election court (the first to be summoned to investigate corruption for more than a century), the new system is an “open invitation to fraud” — an invitation apparently accepted by a number of Labour politicians in Birmingham. And if it’s happening there, where else?

But the most important thing to understand about Labour sleaze is not that the entire national party is corrupt (it’s not), but what it reveals about a government that became too used too quickly to the exercise — and abuse — of power. In eight years in office it has wrecked civil-service neutrality, taken a chainsaw to the constitution, packed the House of Lords with its cronies, and never seen a freedom anywhere that it did not want to crush. Worried about overreach by the "religious Right" over here? Well, take a look at Blair’s plans to make incitement to "religious hatred," whatever that might be, a crime. Salman Rushdie is horrified and he is right so to be.

And then there’s Britain’s economic performance since 1997, supposedly the definitive proof that "new" Labour has shed the caveman economics of the party’s past. Writing a panegyric to Blair in a recent edition of the New York Times, Tom Friedman managed to conjure up a portrait of Britain so misleading that Baron Munchausen would have been proud to call it one of his own. In between sips of Kool-Aid, Friedman gushed about the strong economy “engineered” by Blair and his “deft” finance minister, Gordon Brown. New Labour had, he argued, embraced the free market with such gusto that the resulting prosperity had enabled the government to deliver much-needed improvements to public services: “And these improvements, which still have a way to go, have all been accomplished so far with few tax increases. The vibrant British economy and welfare-to-work programs have, in turn, resulted in the lowest unemployment in Britain in 30 years. This has led to higher tax receipts and helped the government pay down its national debt.”

Oh really?

Now, it is certainly true that Britain has continued to prosper since Labour took over, but with one exception — the bold decision to give the Bank of England operational independence — this is despite Labour, not because of it. In 1997, Blair and Brown took over an economy that was already in excellent shape. The only surprise has been how long it has taken them to mess it up. Contrary to the fears of many skeptics (including this one), they had learned from the failures of previous Labour governments. The traditional smash and grab has been replaced by something subtler, but the consequences will, in the end, be just as poisonous.

Much of the blame for this lies with that “deft” Gordon Brown, the oddball Scot to whom Blair has delegated control of the British economy. Brown is living, snarling, and sulking proof of P. G. Wodehouse’s observation that it is “never very difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” To cut a (very) long story short, Brown believes that Blair reneged on a promise to hand over the premiership to him at some point during his second term and, while he bides his time, impatiently waiting to play Brutus to you-know-who’s Caesar, he is taking out his rage and disappointment on the luckless British taxpayer.

Brown is an intense, slightly loopy son of the manse, a weird blend of Karl Marx and Ken Lay, whose term in office has been marked by messianic egalitarianism, exciting accounting and resistance to the real reforms needed to bring Britain’s crumbling public services into the 21st century. Rather than challenge the existing model (which dates back to the 1940s) his only remedy is to throw people and pay rises into what has become a bottomless pit. Overall public spending has increased by over a quarter in real terms since 1999, and there’s much, much more to come. Half the new jobs created since 1997 have been in the public sector, twice the rate of job-creation in the economy as a whole. The state now employs one in four Britons, a handy constituency, doubtless, for future Labour governments, but a powerful brake on future attempts at reform. Needless to say, Brown is beloved by Labour party loyalists and he will almost certainly be Blair’s successor. A vote for Blair now is a vote for Brown in a year or so.

Paying the bill for Brown so far has sent Britain’s tax burden heading for its highest levels in 25 years and government borrowing is accelerating alarmingly. In 2001 Brown forecast he would borrow 12 billion pounds over the following six years, the actual figure will be (touch wood) 112 billion pounds. Include Brown’s, um, off-balance sheet financing, and government debt has increased by 13.4 percent of GDP under Labour, a dismal achievement at a time of consistent economic growth. The tragedy is that all this spending has produced little in the way of results. Education standards have barely budged and productivity in the National Health Service may have actually declined. That’s not a lot to show for all those taxpayer billions.

And the cracks are beginning to show: crippled by one of Brown’s stealth taxes, the occupational pension system is in crisis, private savings have fallen by a half, inflation is rising (the day Brown took over it was 2.6 percent; it is 3.2 percent today) and the trade balance has deteriorated. Allocating all those resources to the public sector has taken its inevitable toll, made even worse by the imposition of a massive regulatory burden (now priced at £75 billion): productivity growth is slowing (2 percent to 1.5 percent), and GDP growth is slightly lower (2.75 percent) than in the Major years (3 percent).

And if, as Blair intends, Britain signs up for the draft EU "constitution," matters will only get worse. The U.K. will be forced to give up what is left of Thatcherite deregulation in favor of micromanagement by Brussels and the adoption of the Franco-German economic model, a sure route to economic stagnation.

Just as damagingly, once enmeshed within the EU’s constitutional system, Britain will rapidly lose the right to an independent foreign policy. It’s this freedom that has enabled Blair to stand so resolutely alongside the U.S. over the last few years, the stance that has won him so many admirers over here. To his credit, the prime minister has been prepared to react to the threat represented by Islamic fundamentalism far more forcefully than most European politicians and to his credit, and at considerable political cost, he also understood what had to be done in Iraq.

But taking such positions will be all but impossible once the UK is subject to the disciplines of the EU constitution. Article 1-16 commits all member states to a "common foreign and security policy." Member states are required to "actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's actions in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness." This is quite clearly designed to pave the way for a European defense capability owing little to the Atlantic alliance, and everything to the agenda of Paris, Berlin, and Brussels.

For Brits, that’s another good reason to reject Blair, and it even ought to make his American fans pause for thought.

Yelling Stop

National Review, April 25, 2005

Holland was once known for its freedom, not its fanatics. It was seen as a kindly oasis in an unkind world, famous as a fair, broadminded country, a tolerant land where anyone could speak his mind without fear of retribution or the midnight knock on the door. Not now. Not after the assassination in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken opponent of Holland’s ruling multicultural orthodoxy. That wild, extravagant aristocrat was demonized by the political establishment, denied (some say) proper police protection, and, finally, gunned down in the street. Tolerant? Not after the slaughter in Amsterdam last November of another heretic, Theo van Gogh, filmmaker, gadfly, and controversialist, shot, stabbed, and butchered like a sacrificial animal for daring to attack Muslim fundamentalism. Free? No, not really. Not anymore.

In the days after van Gogh’s murder, the Dutch government at last began to act. To lose one public figure might have been unlucky; to have lost another looked like carelessness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, two members of parliament loathed by Holland’s Islamic extremists, were whisked off to heavily guarded safe houses. In February, the Somalian-born Hirsi Ali emerged to complain that the authorities appeared incapable of making permanent arrangements for Wilders’s and her security. It turned out that she had been camped out in a naval base. As for Wilders, a fortysomething MP from the southeast of the country, well, he had been housed in a location that could only have been picked by someone with no sense of irony or, perhaps, with too much. He’s been living in a prison: to be precise, the jail within a jail where the Lockerbie bombers once awaited their trial. Those who threaten him remain outside, free to do their worst.

Stoic Dutchman that he is, Wilders doesn’t like to grumble. “I have to make the best of it,” he told me in a recent interview. “I have a kind of living room, which is quite okay. On either side, there are the cells where the two Libyans were held. In one cell I have my clothing . . . In the other cell there is my bed.” The prison is, “of course, a terrible place,” but his hosts have done what they can. “They put some lamps in and a TV,” small consolation, I suspect, for a life under siege.

We were chatting, not in the prison, but over coffee in a small, cramped office tucked away at the end of a long corridor somewhere in the depths of the building that houses the Dutch parliament in The Hague. A number of bodyguards sat nearby. Outside, it was a bright, brisk early spring morning, freshened by a North Sea breeze, the slightly surprising quiet punctuated mainly by the cries of the occasional seagull. The Hague looked its best, the understated capital of the timeless, civilized Holland of popular imagination, souvenir shops crammed with its symbols, Delftware, windmills, tulips, clogs, and Sint-Niklaas. Inside, Wilders, symbol of Holland’s new, more uncomfortable reality, describes the way that he is now kept alive.

The death threats, which, needless to say, include that latest cliché of a resurgent barbarism, calls for his beheading, are relentless, increasing, and chilling. “I would be lying if I said I was never afraid.” In an age of freelance jihad, even those rants that consist, probably, of little more than Internet bravado have to be taken seriously as possible incitements for someone somewhere to reach for knife and gun. The result is a life under constant guard, a “crazy, tough” life, a life with little privacy and less spontaneity, a life punctuated by visits to the police “five or six times a week,” a life where Wilders, in short, no longer feels free. It is almost impossible to see friends. Dining out occasionally is “better than eating in prison every evening,” but with a number of guards in tow, it is, inevitably, a “circus,” something, he explains, smiling, that can remove the romance from an evening out with his wife. “You have to whisper, or everyone from security can hear.”

Somehow Wilders has retained his sense of humor. A wry, thoughtful, somewhat intense man, he can still manage a laugh at the absurdities of his predicament. It’s only the occasional nervous gesture or the fleeting traces of tension that sometimes cross his face that betray a hint of the appalling pressure with which he has to cope. At the same time he obviously relishes the remarkable challenge he faces in attempting to build up a new political organization (Wilders broke with his old party, the free-market VVD, in September 2004), a difficult enough task under any circumstances, let alone those under which he now has to operate. No matter: “I have a lot of adrenalin going through my veins.”

Wilders’s new political group has, he believes, “a lot of possibilities.” Like most politicians, he is ambitious, “I’m not there yet . . . but I’m on my way.” It’s clear that he has sensed that the unease now enveloping the Netherlands could be his route to the top. As we chat, he proudly prints out new poll findings showing that the “Wilders Group” could expect to win around 10 percent of seats in the Dutch parliament’s lower house.

It would be a mistake, though, to see Wilders as an opportunist cashing in on thecurrent turmoil: His opposition to Holland’s seemingly perpetual soft-left consensus, stifling corporatism, and multiculturalist muddle can be traced back at least a decade, to his time as a speechwriter for Frits Bolkestein, the then VVD leader, who was one of the first to sound the alarm over the country’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority, a minority that is now about a million strong (out of a total population of a little over 16 million). Wilders himself went on to flourish within the VVD, rising to become its foreign-affairs spokesman. His departure from the party — the catalyst was his opposition to any invitation to Turkey to join the EU — might indeed turn out to be a shrewd move, but equally it could be nothing more than a leap into the wilderness.

His background in mainstream politics means, however, that Wilders is no outsider, and thus, unlike Fortuyn or van Gogh, he is not easy to caricature as a crank, a fascist, a racist, or a joker. He’s a pro, one of the grownups, respected (if not exactly universally loved) in parliament. Yes, it’s true that, despite his extraordinary hairdo, a pompadour in Billy Idol peroxide, Wilders doesn’t have the eccentric charisma of his two murdered predecessors: He has neither the extraordinary camp élan of Fortuyn nor the bad-boy charm of van Gogh (who never stood for elective office), but he more than makes up for this with a résumé that means that he has to be taken seriously.

And that’s exactly what he wants. During the course of the interview, Wilders is at pains to distinguish himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen and others on the darker side of the European “Right.” He is, he says, simply a “Tocquevillian conservative,” but a glance at his recent manifesto (the somewhat bombastically named “Declaration of Independence”) reveals a more complex mix, an eclectic blend of small-government conservatism, Atlanticism, free-market liberalism, Euroskepticism, and populism. But, above all, Wilders will be judged by his response to Holland’s failed and feckless experiment in multiculturalism. Sometimes this is subtle: He likes to connect the dots between the increasingly intrusive federalism of the EU and the dangerous consequences of the enfeebled sense of national identity within its member states. Sometimes it is not. Wilders is unapologetic in proclaiming the superiority of Western values. He is not, as he puts it, a “cultural relativist.” In an era of PC platitudes, Wilders can be bracingly blunt: “I don’t believe in a European Islam, in a moderate Islam . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible.” He is careful, however, to draw “a distinction between the religion and the people . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible, but Muslims and democracy are compatible.” Trying to change Islam is, in his view, a hopeless task; trying to win over its followers in the Netherlands is not.

To achieve this, he is recommending a program that features carrots and, unusually for Holland, sticks. It includes a five-year moratorium on immigration from “non-Western” countries, deportation of dual nationals convicted of criminal offenses, extra public spending to aid in the assimilation process, the closing down of extremist mosques, and preventive detention of some of those in the small hard core (“a few hundred”) reasonably believed to be planning terrorist attacks. Saving lives must, Wilders believes, come ahead of extending the full protection of Dutch law to those who would overthrow it. And no, he concedes, “this is not an easy concept.” Indeed, it isn’t.

Talking to Wilders, I was left with the impression of a work in progress, of a man still trying to think through the full ramifications both of the complex and threatening situation now facing his country and of the remedies he is proposing to resolve it. He does not have all the answers, and some of those he has may well be wrong, perhaps very wrong. But to his credit, Wilders is at least asking the right questions, something that few in Holland have been brave enough to attempt before. And, no, this stubborn, determined, man is not going to give up anytime soon. “That’s what the people who threaten me want me to do.”

Powder Keg

National Review Online, March 24, 2005

There's a menace abroad in the land, a lethal white powder that is being consumed by sensation-seekers all across America. And like meth and other fashionable horrors, this scourge is not confined to the mean streets of the big city, but can be found in the small towns, big malls and red states of the heartland. Worse still, there's disturbing evidence that many otherwise responsible people are being tricked into taking this substance; horrifying report after horrifying report of innocent and unsuspecting individuals swallowing food cynically spiked with this silent and seductive killer, a killer which is, some say, responsible for the loss of 150,000 Americans—that's nearly forty times the battlefield death toll at Antietam—each year.

The name of this killer? Salt. That's right. SALT. As in shakers. As on plates. As on fries. Good old, familiar, deceitful sodium chloride, unmasked at last as a Dahmer at dinner and a Bundy at breakfast, a smooth-flowing serial killer found lurking even in our morning cereal. And who has done the unmasking? Somehow I think that you can already know the answer. Yup, once again that bizarre collection of neurotics, nannies, killjoys, hysterics, and scolds better, if misleadingly, known as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has dreamt up yet another way to poison the pleasure that Americans take in their food.

At the end of February, CSPI published a new report, "Salt: The Forgotten Killer," and announced legal action against the FDA. Its lawsuit is designed to compel the agency to declare salt a "food additive", something that could be the prelude to mandating lower sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods. There is "no way", claimed CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, that the "FDA can look at the science and say with a straight face that salt is 'generally recognized as safe'".

To be fair, there is slightly more justification for the assault on salt than many earlier campaigns against just about anything that might cheer up a meal (caffeine, frozen desserts, fried mozzarella sticks, garlic bread, General Tso's chicken, alcohol, fettuccine Alfredo, meatloaf, cookie dough, the Cold Stone Creamery's Mud Pie Mojo, and so, so much more). Most medical professionals do indeed believe that too much salt in the diet can lead to high blood pressure (high blood pressure is a major contributory factor in cardiovascular disease), but there are dissenters. To Jacobson, those who disagree with his views are nothing more than noisy "contrarians" basing their conclusions on "flawed, misinterpreted" or "fragmentary" research, harsh words that, coming from CSPI, conjure up thoughts of stones and glass houses.

In fact, the science is somewhat less clear-cut than the Center's researchers would like you to know. Their report has nothing to say about a 2002 study published in The British Medical Journal that showed no decrease in either the death rate or the incidence of cardiovascular disease among the subjects of the study who reduced their salt intake. Jacobson is also silent about the fact that, despite years of research, links between lower sodium intake and improved health in the general population remain awkwardly elusive. As for those noisy "contrarians," their ranks include former presidents of the American Heart Association and the American Society of Hypertension, and, just last year, a number of Canadian medical groups including the Canadian Hypertension Society, the Canadian Coalition for High Blood Pressure Prevention and Control, and the College of Family Physicians of Canada.

Jacobson does, however, find time to bring his readers the good news about the Yanomami, rainforest Indians, who consume only 20 mg of sodium a day (less than one percent of the average American's intake) and "are healthy, do not gain weight as they age, and are totally free of high blood pressure." Curiously, he does not bother to explain that the Yanomami live in miserable Stone Age squalor, eat the powdered bones of their dead (mixed in with a banana soup, since you ask), and on average only just make it past the age of 40. Call me fussy, Dr. Jacobson, but I'll look elsewhere for nutritional inspiration.

Perhaps it's best to sidestep this controversy for now and just take time to savor Jacobson's jeremiad as yet another sample of how the CSPI's chow-time Comstocks manipulate the media, the science and the public in the interest of taking aim, yet again, at their real foe: fun.

As is its usual practice, CSPI begins this latest onslaught with tales of a spectacular death toll (those 150,000 hardy, but unfortunate, Americans who manage to escape the carnage brought by passive smoking, obesity and the Second Amendment only to succumb to a condiment) and then piles on from there. "This innocent-looking white substance" may, says Jacobson, a man clearly unaware of what anchovy can do to pizza, "be the single deadliest ingredient in our food supply."

And as usual, the language of these latter-day puritans resembles nothing so much as the darker, more lurid sermons of their stern black-hat/black-suit predecessors of three centuries before. The report is morbid and overblown; its author appears fixated on the horrible fate that awaits those who have sinned: "[T]he salt in our diets has turned our hearts and arteries into ticking time bombs, time bombs that explode in tens of thousands of Americans every year."

That's not to say that reading this grim, grating report is entirely without its rewards. The CSPI is justly celebrated for its obsessive exploration of the wilder regions of American food rococo, and, in this respect at least, Salt: The Forgotten Killer does not disappoint. While the appearance of that notorious repeat offender, General Tso's chicken (with rice, 3,150 mg of sodium), on CSPI's salty rap sheet won't come as much of a surprise, fans of extreme cuisine will be delighted to learn of the existence of two salt-mountainous treats from Denny's—the robust Lumberjack Slam (two eggs, three hotcakes with margarine and syrup, ham, two strips of bacon, two sausage links and 4,460 mg of Lot's wife), and the disturbingly-named Moons Over My Hammy (ham and egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheese on sourdough and a mere 2,700 mg of the deadliest single ingredient in our food supply).

Jacobson argues that those who feast on such delicacies are unaware quite how much salt they are consuming, an argument that dovetails neatly with CSPI's longstanding campaign to compel chain restaurants to list nutritional data on their menus. Eating out is, writes Jacobson, "basically a nutritional crap shoot", a statement that implies that most people are too dumb to understand that Moons Over My Hammy may not exactly pass muster as health food. But Jacobson's claims should come as no surprise. Without the assumption that Americans are incapable of deciding for themselves what to eat, there would be no room for the big government paternalism so relentlessly advocated by CSPI.

But, ironically, if consumers are unclear as to what they ought to be munching, it is organizations such as CSPI that must take their share of the blame. Jacobson half-acknowledges this when, in the course of bemoaning the fact that Americans seem less worried about sodium than they were some years ago, he notes that "the public's concern about salt's harmfulness has steadily diminished, as controversies over low-carb diets, trans fats, genetically engineered foods, and other topics have dominated the headlines," controversies (which Jacobson might have said, but didn't) in which his own center has played no small part. The constant food scares generated by the health mullahs at a time when average life expectancy in the U.S. has just reached a new high have done nothing other than increase consumers' confusion, cynicism, and the chance that genuinely good advice gets junked as junk science.

The best counsel remains, as it always has been, a balanced diet, moderate exercise and, good news, maybe a drink or two, but then that's the sort of common sense that would leave no room for a CSPI, let alone the overbearing measures that Jacobson would like to see imposed on the rest of us. It's revealing that the center is trying to bully the FDA through litigation rather than by more democratic measures, but its lawsuit against the government agency is doubtless only the beginning. If salt were to be no longer "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA, it would only be a matter of time before the usual cabal of "public interest" lawyers and the tort bar turn their attention to the food companies and restaurant chains and dig up a salt-scarred plaintiff or two.

And that would not be the end of it. Jacobson's report concludes with "an agenda for action" that includes mandatory sodium limits in processed food, and consideration of a "salt tax" (in addition, presumably, to the proposed Twinkie tax we have all read so much about). In short, therefore, the policy recommendations from an organization often misdescribed as a consumer group would, if implemented, mean less choice, not more.

They need to be taken with a pinch of you know what.

Constitutionally Indisposed

National Review Online, February 22, 2005

A little over two centuries ago, a small group of planters, landowners, merchants, and lawyers met in Philadelphia to decide how their new country was to be run. Within four months this remarkable collection of patriots, veterans, pragmatists, geniuses, oddballs and the inspired succeeded in agreeing the extraordinary, beautiful document that, even with its flaws, was to form the basis of the most successful nation in history.

On February 28, 2002, another constitutional convention began its work, in Brussels this time, not Philadelphia. Its task was to draw up a constitution for the European Union. The gathering in Brussels was chaired by Giscard D'Estaing, no Hamilton or Madison, but a failed, one-term president of France best known for his unseemly involvement with Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the cannibal "emperor" of central Africa. Giscard's convention was packed with placemen, cronies, creeps, and has-beens to make up a body where to be called second rate would have been an act of grotesque flattery. Only a fool, a braggart, or a madman would have compared this rabble with the gathering in Philadelphia. Needless to say, Giscard managed to do just that. The rabble returned the compliment. At ceremonies held to celebrate the conclusion of the convention's work, one over-excited Austrian delegate compared Giscard to Socrates, a remark that would undoubtedly have reduced that ancient, and unfortunate, Greek to yet another swig of hemlock.

Once the convention had completed the draft constitution, there was further haggling over the text by the governments of the EU member states. A final version was agreed in June 2004, and what a sorry, shabby work it is, an unreadable mish-mash of political correctness, micromanagement, bureaucratic jargon, artful ambiguity, deliberate obscurity, and stunning banality that somehow limps its way through some 500 pages with highlights that include "guaranteeing" (Article II-74) a right to "vocational and continuing training," "respect" (Article II-85) for the "rights of the elderly... to participate in social and cultural life," and the information (Article III-121) that "animals are sentient beings." On the status of spiders, beetles, and lice there is, unusually, only silence.

All that now remains is for this tawdry ragbag to be ratified in each member state, a process that is already well underway. In some countries ratification will depend on a parliamentary vote, in others a referendum. The final outcome remains difficult to predict, and it is a measure of the current uncertainty over the constitution's ultimate fate that there is now open discussion of the idea that the document may be forced through even without ratification by one or two of the smaller countries. In an editorial over the weekend, the Financial Times, a generally reliable mouthpiece for the latest Brussels's orthodoxy explained, "in theory, one state's rejection is enough to kill [the constitution]. In practice, it will depend on the state." Within the EU, it seems, some nations are more equal than others. Rejection by one of the union's larger members, however, will be enough to throw the whole process into richly deserved chaos. We can only hope.

And it is at this point that, rather surprisingly, the Bush administration has come into the picture. Speaking a few days ago to the Financial Times, Condoleezza Rice appeared, weirdly, to give the constitution some form of endorsement: "As Europe unifies further and has a common foreign policy—I understand what is going to happen with the constitution and that there will be unification, in effect, under a foreign minister—I think that also will be a very good development. We have to keep reminding everybody that there is not any conflict between a European identity and a transatlantic identity..."

In a later interview with the Daily Telegraph, President Bush himself appeared to steer discussion away from the proposed constitution, but he did have this to say: "I have always been fascinated to see how the British culture and the French culture and the sovereignty of nations can be integrated into a larger whole in a modern era," he said. "And progress is being made and I am hopeful it works because one should not fear a strong partner."

How can I put this nicely? Well, there is no way to put it nicely. Even allowing for the necessity to come out with diplomatically ingratiating remarks ahead of a major presidential visit to the EU, the comments from Bush and Rice are either delightfully insincere or dismayingly naïve.

The project of a federal EU has long been driven, at least in part, by a profound, and remarkably virulent anti-Americanism, with deep roots in Vichy-era disdain for the sinister "Anglo-Saxons" and their supposedly greedy and degenerate culture. Throw in the poisonous legacy of soixante-huitard radicalism, then add Europe's traditional suspicion of the free market, and it's easy to see how relations between Brussels and Washington were always going to be troubled. What's more, the creation of a large and powerful fortress Europe offered its politicians something else, the chance to return to the fun and games of great power politics.

They have jumped at the opportunity. Speaking back in 2001, some time before 9/11 and the bitter dispute over Iraq, Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson (who then also held the EU's rotating presidency) provided a perfect example of the paranoia and ambition that underpins this European dream. The EU was, he claimed "one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination."

Brandishing the American bogeyman was always inevitable. Condoleezza Rice may claim to have discovered a European "identity," but outside the palaces, parliaments, and plotting of the continent's politicians such an identity is a frail, feeble, synthetic thing. The preamble to the EU constitution refers to a Europe "reunited after bitter experiences," a phrase so bogus that it would embarrass Dan Brown. Unless I missed something in my history classes "Europe" has never been one whole. There is nothing to reunite. A Swede, even Göran Persson, is a Swede long before he is a "European." Naturally, the framers of the constitution have done their best to furnish a few gimcrack symbols of their new Europe (there's (Article I-8) a flag, a motto ("United in Diversity), an anthem, and, shrewdly in a continent that likes its vacations, a public holiday ("Europe Day") and perhaps in time these will come to mean something, but for now they are poor substitutes for that emotional, almost tribal, idea of belonging that is core to an authentic sense of national identity.

But if the EU has had only limited success in persuading its citizens what they are, it has done considerably better in convincing them as to what they are not: Americans. Writing in 2002 about the "first stirrings" of EU patriotism, EU Commissioner Chris Patten could only come up with two examples: "You can already feel [it], perhaps, in the shared indignation at US steel protection...You can feel it at the Ryder Cup, too." It's significant that when Patten gave examples of this supposed European spirit, he could only define it by what it was against (American tariffs and American golfers) rather than by what it was for. It is even more striking that in both cases the "enemy" comes from one place—the U.S. If Patten had been writing in 2005 he would, doubtless, have added opposition to the war in Iraq to his list—and he would have been right to do so.

This is psychologically astute: The creation of a common foe (imagined or real) is a good way to unify a nation, even, possibly, a bureaucratically constructed "nation" like the EU. Choosing the U.S. as the designated rival comes with two other advantages. It fits in nicely with the existing anti-American bias of much of the EU's ruling class and it will strike a chord with those many ordinary Europeans who are genuinely skeptical about America, its ambitions and, yes, what it stands for.

Insofar, therefore, as it represents another step forward in the deeper integration of the EU, the ratification of the constitution cannot possibly, whatever Secretary Rice might say, be good news for the U.S. How deep this integration will be remains a matter of dispute. In Euro-skeptic Britain, Tony Blair's government has denied that the document has much significance at all, but without much success. At the same time, claims that the ratification of the EU constitution will of itself represent the creation of a European superstate are overblown. It won't, but it will be another step in that direction, and, based on past precedent, we can be sure that the EU's fonctionnaires will use the vacuum created by all those helpful ambiguities in the constitution's text to push forward the federalizing project as fast and as far as possible.

It is, of course, up to Europeans to decide if this is what they want. Any attempt by the Bush White House to derail the ratification process would backfire, but that does not mean that the administration should be actively signaling its support for this dreadful and damaging document. Secretary Rice argues that the integration represented by the passing of the constitution would be a "good development." The opposite is true. If the EU (which has a collective agenda primarily set by France and Germany) does increasingly speak with one voice, Washington is unlikely to enjoy what it hears.

The constitution paves the way for the transfer of increasing amounts of defense and diplomatic activity from Europe's national capitals to Brussels. Article 1-16 commits all member states to a "common foreign and security policy." "Member states" are required to "actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's actions in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness." In a recent radio interview, Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero explained how this might work: "we will undoubtedly see European embassies in the world, not ones from each country, with European diplomats and a European foreign service...we will see Europe with a single voice in security matters. We will have a single European voice within NATO."

And the more that the EU speaks with that one voice, the less will be heard from those of its member states more inclined to be sympathetic to America. And as to what this would mean, well, French Green politician Noel Mamère put it best in the course of an interview last week: "The good thing about the European constitution is that with it the United Kingdom will not be able to support the United States in a future Iraq."

And would that, Secretary Rice, be a "good development"?

Waving The Bloody Shirt

National Review Online,  January 18, 2005

Gott im Himmel, what was Harry thinking? If you are a public figure, the great grandson of the last emperor of India no less, and you live in censorious—and camera-phone-saturated—times, attending a "Native and Colonial" party is almost certainly unwise. To do so in Nazi uniform is absolute madness. And after days of high drama, low farce, and massed denunciations, we all know the result. The "Clown Prince" and the Circus

To take just a brief selection of the criticism, Harry is now the "Hitler Youth" (the Sun, a newspaper that dilutes its moments of moral indignation with bouts of manic punning), "the most tasteless fool in the country" (London Times), and "an idiot" (Independent). Perhaps more worrying for the "clown prince" (Sun, again), the principal prominenti to rally to his support were David Irving (a historian often accused of Holocaust revisionism), a disgraced Tory MP, and Fergie.

It would have done nothing for the Night Porter, but Harry's has been the shirt seen 'round the world, the mother of all wardrobe malfunctions, a poor, sad scrap of bad taste, a feeble facsimile of an Afrika Korps tunic, garnished with a swastika armband, a touch that the late Field Marshal Erwin Rommel would, I suspect, have found somewhat vulgar.

And yes, it was a dumb, dumb thing to do. Stupid rather than malicious, but, particularly given Harry's status, it was clearly inappropriate—and genuinely offensive to many. Quite rightly, the prince was quick to issue an apology. That should have been an end to the matter. That it was not says plenty about modern Britain and contemporary Europe, little of it good.

To be sure, the British press was always going to keep the story alive for as long as it could. Royal scandals shift newspapers, and so do the Nazis. Combining the two was a circulation manager's dream. Even allowing for this, however, the torrent of humbug, hypocrisy, and hysteria that has engulfed the hapless Harry has been remarkable and, in some ways, rather more repellent than the wretched regalia that sparked the uproar in the first place. It also ignores the fact, critical to understanding this incident, that for many Brits, the Nazis have long been good for a laugh.

Now, Harry is not, by most accounts, much of an intellectual, so to claim that his brown-shirted burlesque was somehow a deliberate Producers-style satire is a stretch too far. At the same time, his dreadful choice of costume, however dimly, however unconsciously, reflected a national fondness for making a mockery of the pretensions of the Third Reich. On occasion this can be tasteless, but ridicule is not a bad way to strip the swastika of some of its malign power. The failure of neo-fascists ever to make much progress in the U.K. (unlike in some other European countries) can at least partly be put down to the fact that voters have been too busy laughing to take them very seriously.

Some press comment in Britain did allude to this tradition, but a good number of journalists took the chance to indulge in royal-bashing and class warfare. It was a wonderful opportunity to give the toffs a good kicking, while appearing to remain on the moral high ground. The Guardian is usually a good source for this sort of thing. It didn't disappoint. To take just a quick dip into the venom, we find John O'Farrell frantic and foaming over "pro-hunting upper-class twits," sly hints from Mark Lawson that the evil Tories are far more likely to dress up in Nazi uniform than their political opponents and a reminder from Duncan Campbell that Edward VIII had "admired what Hitler was doing in Germany."

In Germany itself, reactions were no less vitriolic, and, reflecting exasperation at the U.K.'s endless, and frequently crass, obsession with the Second World War, included some Brit-bashing for added flavor. The most weirdly entertaining response, however, came from a commentator in the mass-circulation Bild who scribbled this message to Harry. "You are...about as disgusting as a moldy piece of food. I vomit. It is high time that you were given serious medical treatment. You are a traumatized child."

Getting it exactly wrong, meanwhile, Der Spiegel described the uniform of the Afrika Korps as being "hated" in the U.K. because of British casualties in the desert war. In fact, the reverse is true. The soldiers of Rommel's army have traditionally been seen as the "good" Germans, worthy opponents beaten in a fair fight. If, as was apparently nearly the case, Harry had opted, God help us, for a SS uniform, the row would have been far, far worse.

Adding to the frenzy, and showing that, even now, after nearly six decades of democratic government, they do not fully understand the occasionally uncomfortable realities of free speech, some German politicians used Harry's gaffe to lobby for a Europe-wide ban on the display of Nazi symbols. Such a ban would be a mistake on a number of grounds, but it is interesting to see that there was no suggestion that it should also cover Communist insignia. Why not? Do the tens of millions who died under the hammer and sickle count for any less than those butchered by the Hitler regime? To look at this point another way, ask yourself if there would have been such uproar if Harry had come dressed as a Stalin-era commissar or clutching Mao's Little Red Book. You know the answer.

As if that level of hypocrisy was not enough, it seems that even some fascists, real ones, may be regarded as less of a scandal than the wayward Windsor. Le Monde has reportedly suggested that the furor over Harry may hit London's chances of winning the right to host the 2012 Olympics over rivals such as Paris, the capital of a country where some15 percent of voters regularly give their support to the National Front, a party headed by a man who has described the Holocaust as a "detail."

More ominously still, this wave of indignation over a spoiled and irrelevant young prince makes a revealing contrast with Europe's supine response to Islamic extremists, the brownshirts of our own era. But, perhaps we should not be surprised. How much simpler, and politically more convenient, to condemn one moronic 20-year-old, his unpopular social class, and (internationally) his countrymen, than to confront the real danger to freedom now developing among a section of the EU's Muslim minority. Facing this challenge will be a tricky task not easily reconciled with the multicultural pieties of Europe's ruling establishment, or, arguably, the pockets of anti-Semitism that may lurk within it. Symbolic solidarity with the vanished victims of the past is so, so much less demanding.

Ironically, however, these politics of the empty gesture reached their nadir with the suggestion by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (an organization which should know better) that Harry should be made to attend the commemoration at Auschwitz of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. Such a grotesque stunt, both morbid and meaningless, would have been an insult to those murdered in that terrible place. Thankfully, the idea was rejected.

In this squalid and sorry saga, it was a rare moment of dignity.

Dead Zone

National Review Online, December 8, 2004

Lily Dale, September, 2004 © Andrew Stuttaford

If the painter Thomas Kinkade has redesigned Heaven—and who’s to say that he hasn’t?—it might look a little like Lily Dale, a tiny community about an hour south of Buffalo. On a gentle-breeze, blue-sky, no-cares, endless-summer sort of day, gingerbread Victorian cottages doze alongside tranquil, flag-festooned streets. The houses’ colors—white, yellow, gray—are, like their inhabitants, mainly muted, gentle by design or faded by the years. Only occasional flashes of eccentricity—an unexpected plague of stone angels here, a rash of concrete cherubs there—signal to visitors that there’s something not quite right, not Shyamalan wrong, but odd nonetheless, about this idyllic village nestled so prettily against a quiet lake.

Even Lily Dale’s visitors (those that are visible anyway—I’ll explain that remark later) seem more subdued than the typical vacationing hordes, more Trappist than tourist, chatting among themselves in low tones as they stroll towards their destinations. Once—over a century ago—there was a Ferris wheel here, a bowling alley, dances, even (oh, the thrill!) speeches by Susan B. Anthony, but those excitements have passed, vanished into history and stiff sepia images. But guests can still wander under the shade of trees more than a hundred years old now, and, if they choose, across a series of small, perfectly kept parks—immaculately green as they sweep down in the direction of the lake, itself smooth, untroubled, and inviting, gently lapping up against the eastern edge of town.

And the sense that there’s something celestial about this place is only reinforced by a small white-pillared “Forest Temple” half-hidden amid some trees and by the “Healing Temple” that can be found nearby (yes, yes, I was “healed,” blue light discovered burning within me, long story). Bells toll at certain times of day summoning the faithful to meditation, ritual, and to quavering old tunes played on a quavering old organ, the singing of quavering old hymns of spirit messages and eternal light.

These people are, quite clearly, not Baptists.

To find out more, enter the cool, dark Leolyn Woods. Like so much in Lily Dale, they are unexpected survivors, a rare scrap of old-growth forest. Walk straight ahead. Don’t be tempted by the questionable attractions of the pet cemetery. Look instead for an ancient tree stump—Inspiration Stump, they call it here—and the people gathered there to hear from the hereafter. They have turned up for the daily “message service,” a séance, stand-up style, at the stump, starring the quick (a rapid succession of mediums) and the dead (a host of the dear departed—dads, moms, a brother or two).

If you’re ex, Lily Dale is in.

People have been bothering the dead in Lily Dale since 1879. That was the year in which a handful of pioneers, enthusiastic participants in the great wave of spookery and table tapping that gripped those supposedly sensible Victorians, first bought property here. It was to be a permanent site (only Spiritualists can own property in “the Dale,” even today) for enlightenment, and communication with corpses—a “White Acre,” wrote Mrs. Abby Louise Pettengill (its 1903 president), “where all may receive the benediction of the unseen world.”

She would have been pleased to see (and perhaps she did, who knows?) the small but expectant crowd waiting one Friday evening in Lily Dale’s Assembly Hall for a benediction from another world, in their case a chinwag with ET. Like Spiritualism before it, much UFO mythology is an attempt to reconcile mystical and superstitious impulses with the unwelcome realities of an age of science. And like Spiritualism it soon descends into mush-mutterings of otherworldly visitors, enlightened beings, and contact with the mysterious, thrilling unknown, talk which the late (or not) Mrs. Pettengill would surely have relished.

And when it comes to enlightened beings, there’s no better guide than the human speaker that night, writer and soulapath (don’t ask) Lisette Larkins. She’s the author of Listening to Extraterrestrials: Telepathic Coaching by Enlightened Beings; Talking to Extraterrestrials: Communicating with Enlightened Beings; and, alarmingly for those of us familiar with the work of Fox Mulder, Calling on Extraterrestrials: 11 Steps to Inviting Your Own UFO Encounters. After an hour or so of New Age banality and musical interludes that would have insulted Yanni, an alien turns up, but, dismayingly, via Ms. Larkins rather than in person. Repeatedly shaking her head from side to side, alien Lisette starts speaking in a slow, faintly mechanical voice slightly reminiscent of Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is purportedly channeling messages from our extraterrestrial visitor, but the vague beatitudes and something about “connecting” reveal only that this particular alien is from Planet Hallmark. That’s not worth the price of admission. For 30 bucks I expect Klaatu barada nikto or, at least, sexy Sil from Species.

Where flying saucers hover, other nonsense is never far behind. Sure enough, the Crystal Cove, Lily Dale’s gift shop, is a supermarket of superstitions, a casbah for the credulous, its pick-’n’-mix spirituality a perfect symbol of the intellectual confusions of our age. It’s all there: the supernatural bric-a-brac (Celtic crosses, misting bowls, chalices, spell books, fortune-telling kits, candles, Ouija boards, strange hanging things); the tarot (tarot of love, fairy-tale tarot, universal Waite tarot, basic tarot, spiral tarot, Lord of the Rings tarot, unicorn tarot, dragon tarot, tarot of the Sephirot, herbal tarot, renaissance tarot, quest tarot, tarot of a moon garden, Morgan-Greer tarot); cosmic kitsch (fairies, angels, fairies, unicorns, fairies, various goddesses, fairies, the goddess, yet more fairies, wizards); and the inevitable Native Americana, complete, naturally, with Native American tarot.

Despite that very contemporary willingness to accept any reassuring mumbo-jumbo, however ludicrous, so long as it can be wrapped in vaguely mystical garb, in its core Lily Dale clings to the traditions of its slightly off, determined founders, those earnest Victorians convinced that table-tapping, séances, and other conjuring tricks could give them what generations had dreamed of: proof, scientific proof, that we all enjoy an encore in a place some called Summerland. According to Spiritualism, nobody dies. We “pass,” we don’t die. There is no death, only a “transition.” Nevertheless, for a faith that revolves around eternal life, Spiritualism has always had a rather morbid fixation with that dicey moment that, as a pessimist, I still call, well, death. In all its prettiness, there’s a touch of the funeral parlor about Lily Dale, something a little oppressive, something too hushed, too over-scented, too much.

In a way this is inevitable. It’s death that brings the living to Lily Dale. Offer the grief-stricken and the lonely the chance, any chance, to talk to those that they have lost, and some will try their luck. And where there are the desperate, there will be those who take advantage of them. You can see their traces in Lily Dale’s museum, most strikingly in a collection of relics from the Gilded Age, a golden age, quite clearly, of bunkum. There are the slates on which the spirits allegedly scrawled their enigmatic messages, the spirit trumpets that floated through the air, even the peculiar, strangely compelling paintings that supposedly materialized onto canvas untouched by (living) human hand, paintings of the passed, paintings of spirit guides, even, helpfully, a painting of the spirit world to come. It looks, yes, a little like something Thomas Kinkade might have done, but since its artist was dead at the time, it’s churlish to carp.

In our scientific age, our time of reason and progress, our era of Kabbalah, crystals, alien abductions, Wicca, homeopathy, goddess worship, Al Gore, past-life regression, astral travel, psychic hotlines, recovered memories, Feng Shui, and creation “science,” all that old sideshow spiritualism seems somehow something of a relic, too crass, too embarrassing, too crude for an epoch so spiritually sophisticated that Madonna is a major religious figure. The trumpets have been stilled: “physical mediumship” is rarely practiced in Lily Dale these days, but the hunger that nourished it still remains.

You can see it—neurotic, compulsive, relentless, and not a little sad—in the capacity crowd packed into the Dale’s auditorium to listen to the medium James van Praagh “Making The Psychic Connection” between, ambitiously, “Heaven and Earth.” We’ve each paid $80 to hear him.

That’s more than twice the price of an extraterrestrial, but, in the dim galaxy of contemporary superstition, James Van Praagh is a star. Like Amy Fisher and Adolf Hitler, he too has been the subject of a TV miniseries (played by Ted Danson!), a cultural accolade matched only by his multiple appearances on Larry King Live. He’s a best-selling author and recording artist and a man who, judging by his website, survived a childhood that combined the worst of Jeffrey Dahmer (“an average child, he remembers having a tremendous fascination with death”) with the best of Joan of Arc (“an open hand appeared through the ceiling…emitting radiant beams of light”). Despite a weakness for the saccharine (“When a bright smile overcomes tears, it becomes a smile that can light up the world”), Van Praagh is also highly entertaining. He’s John Edward with good jokes, a Frank Cannon moustache, and a way with the ladies who make up the bulk of his beguiled and besotted audience.

Some are there just to gawp at the dead men talking (many spirits, yikes, are “here with us today”), while others have come to be soothed by Van Praagh’s soft-soap sermons. “Death” is painless, everybody’s immortal, and we all end up in Heaven. “Step into that world,” he purrs, “there’s no judgment.” It’s a perfect gospel for a society in full flight from the notion that we should ever have to account for our actions. Some spectators, sadder, unhinged, pleading, are there for the answers, and the comfort, that reality cannot provide. Sharon has survived “a couple of terminal illnesses” but is not satisfied with the advice of her doctors (she’s led away to speak to a “medical intuitive”), while others, weeping, choking up, voices cracking, tell of sick friends, of children killed in motorcycle accidents, of relatives lost to cancer, and the rest of the carnage we call daily life.

These are people who want to believe. When Van Praagh starts tossing out ambiguous communiqués from beyond, it doesn’t take long before someone can be found who thinks that these messages might be for her. Another quick succession of references, names, and clues follow, all seemingly precise, but in reality vague enough to allow the respondent to find something in it for herself and, in replying, give Van Praagh further, invaluable guidance for his next step, and, ultimately, “validation”: the supposedly specific factoid needed to prove that long-dead dad is indeed with us that day. It looks to me a lot like an old technique known as “cold reading.” All it takes is a quick mind, intuition, and (no problem here) an audience that has lost connection with reality.

Still, Van Praagh manages, there’s no denying, some remarkable hits: coincidence, or, perhaps, well…

Whatever the explanation, none of my dead relatives shows up. Much as I would like it to, this proves nothing. They were a reserved lot and none of them would have been seen dead in a place like the auditorium. With the thought that somewhere more discreet might be more inviting, I decide on an individual consultation with one of the many mediums that have set up shop in Lily Dale. She’s a kindly soul, a late middle-aged woman with twinkling eyes, a jolly smile, and 40 of my dollars. Within a few minutes, and, shall we say, some gentle prompting on my part, she has proof that both (a twofer!) my grandmothers are with us in the room. As they’ve been dead for nearly 30 years, that’s quite a family get-together, like a childhood Christmas back in England, even if I can’t actually see the guests.

And if I believe that, I’m the Christmas turkey.

It's Time

National Review Online, November 29, 2004

New York City, Saturday—In Manhattan, they say, everyone wears black, but not this Saturday, not in this plaza just across from the U.N. The demonstrators, perhaps 500, perhaps more, have turned up on this briefly glorious late autumn day in orange hats, in orange scarves, in orange coats, in orange sweaters, draped in orange blankets, wearing orange ribbons; anything, however small, will do so long as it is orange. Baseball cap advertising Land Rover? No problem. If it's orange, it's fine. Sweatshirt proclaiming the virtues of Steinway pianos? Why not? It's orange. Orange flags flutter, orange balloons bob against a clear, lovely sky that matches the blue on the other flag, pale blue and yellow, which flies this day. Blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine, and orange the color of the movement that might, maybe, finally bring the people of that country the decent government they have awaited for far too long. "Pora". "It's time." Indeed it is.

Banners, orange naturally, proclaim the loyalties of the crowd:

"Yuschenko—Yes!"

"A Criminal Should Not Be President."

"Putin, Don't Mess With Ukraine."

"Boston Ukrainians for Yuschenko."

"America and Ukraine Together."

"Kyiv, We're With You."

"Ukrainians Deserve Freedom Just Like You."

Indeed they do. In the 20th century, the people of the Ukraine, a land of two genocides, the country of Hitler's Babi Yar, and the nation of Stalin's broken, emptying starving villages, went through the worst that two totalitarian systems could do to them, the raw death toll, millions after millions after millions, supplemented by decade after decade after decade of more selective, careful purges, a cull of the best and the brightest, generation after generation after generation.

And yet, somehow, Ukraine endured.

But Putin seems to feel little or no remorse for the crimes of his Kremlin predecessors. There have been no real apologies, and no trials of those butchers who still survive. As the Russian president looks at those other far, far larger crowds in orange, the ones gathered for days in Kiev's Independence Square, he sees, doubtless, only irritants, troublemakers, hooligans, obstacles to be removed, perhaps even dupes, according to some in Moscow, of wicked Polish plotters. What he should be seeing are the countless ghosts of those that went before, victims of that Soviet past that even now he seems curiously unwilling to confront. That, however, would take a conscience.

In 1933 (wrote the writer Vasily Grossman) "horses pulled flattop carts through [Kiev], and the corpses of those who had died in the night were collected. I saw one such flattop cart with children on it. They were just as I have described them, thin, elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks...Some of them were still muttering, and their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: "By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too." There was, we should remember, more food in Kiev than anywhere else in the Ukraine that year. Five, six, seven million died in that Soviet-made famine, the Holodomor, maybe an even greater number: no one knows for sure.

Standing in that New York plaza I talk to one of the demonstrators, Marko, about what's going on. We touch on the past. "My father," he says, "survived the Holodomor." I look around at some of the older faces in the crowd, and wonder what they had heard back then, what they knew, what they had lived through.

Not inappropriately, perhaps, there is behind us a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who rescued thousands of Jews from wartime Budapest only to disappear into Stalin's hands. A small plaque reads that on "January 17th, 1945 Raoul Wallenberg was detained by the Soviet government. His fate remains unknown." Fate unknown. Just another ghost. Not inappropriately, perhaps, someone in the crowd is carrying a placard showing Putin in a KGB uniform.

Someone else has a sign announcing that she is from Donetsk, the city that is the heart of the Ukraine's mainly Russian-speaking east, an area that is likely to come into sharp focus in coming weeks—exaggerated it may have been, but there is no doubt that Russia's candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, has real support in that part of the country. Taras, a friend of mine who's also at the demonstration, is more optimistic. His father, from Ternopil in western Ukraine (the city where Viktor Yuschenko had studied as a young man) had just returned from Kiev. While he was there he'd talked to a few of the miners who have been shipped in from the East to rally support for Yanukovych, the second-round "winner." They were O.K. guys, he said, enjoying an all-expenses, all-vodka trip to the big city with no plans to stick around for long. We'll see.

But Saturday is not a day for such worries. The likeable crowd, mainly twenty or thirtysomethings, a blend of recent immigrants, visitors, and the diaspora, were festive, optimistic, excited, cheering the speeches, the singers, and the sentiment, pausing only to chant the only name that counted, the name of their president:

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

He's their hero, their man, their champion, and their best hope for the true restoration of a squandered independence. In fact, like many politicians that emerged in the rougher corners of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Yuschenko is not free from awkward questions about his past, or the nature of some of his support, but this is not something that anyone wants to think about this day.

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

An older woman points to a poster, a standard politician-and-child image, the usual fluff, and shakes her head sadly. "It's terrible what they've done to him." The man in the photograph is healthy, good-looking, fortyish. It's Yuschenko, and the picture was probably taken less than a year ago. His face looks nothing like the terrible, cratered wreck that it has become, the product, almost certainly of a poison attack, an attack that has transformed him into a martyr for the cause, the real cause, he now leads.

The crowd starts to sing a lovely, enchanting tune, verse after verse. They know the words, and they sing them smiling. "The national anthem?" I ask. "No", two women say, "It's like a pledge." "What's it called?" Thought. Pause. Embarrassed looks. "We don't know." And then they start to laugh.

It's time.

How Enlightenment Dies

National Review Online, November 12, 2004

Amid all the weird, wild wailing in Manhattan, amid the hot air and hysteria in Hollywood, amid all the crazy-lady shrieks of mainstream-media anguish (yes, Maureen, I'm talking about you) and the banshee howling of liberal complaint, Americans heard one overarching theme from the disappointed and distraught left—one meme, one fear, one insult that finally spoke its name. Jesusland (that's what they call it now) had won. The America of Jefferson and Madison had fallen, delivered by Karl Rove into the hands of ranting theocrats, holy rollers and the monstrous ghost of William Jennings Bryan. Writing in the New York Times, an overwrought Garry Wills had this to say:

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

The title of his article? "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out."

Oh really? If it was the fate of the Enlightenment for which Mr. Wills feared, he would have done better looking some 3,000 miles to his east, to lovely, wounded Amsterdam, a city once famed for its brisk, North Sea tolerance, a city that now mourns the death of an artist killed for speaking his mind. On November 2, the very day of the election that was to so sadden Garry Wills, an assassin in Amsterdam murdered the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh—shot him, stabbed him, and then butchered him like a sacrificial sheep. Van Gogh, you see, had transgressed the code of the fanaticism that has now made its home in Holland. And for that he had to die.

The movie that doomed Van Gogh was Submission, a ten-minute film shown on Dutch TV earlier this year. A collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and Muslim apostate who is now a member of the Dutch parliament, the film is a caustic attack on Muslim misogyny. Back in September, Marlise Simons of the New York Times described some of its scenes thus:

As she begins to pray, the woman looks heavily veiled, showing her eyes only, but her long black chador turns out to be transparent. Beneath it, painted on her chest and stomach, there are verses from the Koran. More women appear. A bride is dressed in white lace, but her back is naked. The Koranic verse that says a man may take his woman in any manner time or place ordained by God is written on her skin. The images roll on, now showing a woman lying on the ground, her back and legs marked by red traces of a whip. The Koranic verses on her wounded flesh say that those guilty of adultery or sex outside marriage shall be punished with 100 lashes. There are chilling sounds of a cracking whip; there is the haunting beauty of the Arabic calligraphy and soft music.

In a country in which Muslims account for nearly six percent of the population, there was predictable outrage from predictable sources. Ayaan Hirsi Ali added more death threats to her already substantial collection (she has been living under police protection for some years), and Van Gogh gathered a few of his own. Despite that, he declined the help of the cops. They hadn't, he pointed out, managed to save the rightist politician Pim Fortuyn from assassination back in 2002. Besides, he argued, who would think it worth their while to gun down the "village idiot"? And so this appalling, brave, obnoxious, and foul-mouthed provocateur, an opponent of religious intolerance whatever its source—an ornery chain-smoking contrarian who relished describing himself as a "professional adolescent, a die-hard reactionary"—carried on writing, filming, grumbling, grousing, and cursing.

With a horrible—and ironic—appropriateness, Van Gogh's final film was an investigation into the murder of the equally truculent Fortuyn, a killing that he blamed partly on the demonization of Fortuyn by "leftwing, politically correct...politicians." Like Fortuyn, he too was to die for his views and like, I suspect, Fortuyn, in those final terrifying moments Van Gogh would, despite his often-expressed fears for Holland's future (and, half-seriously, his own), almost certainly have been astonished that matters had really come to this—that the Netherlands had fallen so far. Forget the victim's evocative name (he was the great grandson of the painter's brother); even his mode of transport—the bicycle he was riding when the assassin struck—conjures up images of Holland, of the practical, somewhat earnest civilization that nurtured him: a kindly, almost painfully fair civilization so sensitive to the rights of the accused that the full name of the alleged murderer still cannot be officially disclosed; a tolerant, decent civilization that finds itself now threatened.

And who better to explain that threat, than B, Mijnheer B, Mohammed B? After, allegedly (we must, I suppose, use that word) shooting his victim, B started to stab him. In a last attempt to save his life, a desperate Van Gogh reportedly pleaded with his attacker: "We can," he said, "still talk about it." Talk. Dialog. Reason. In response, savagery. The murderer sawed through Van Gogh's neck and spinal column with a butcher knife, almost severing his head. And that, Mr. Wills, is how Enlightenment dies.

The killer then concluded the desecration by using another knife to pin a letter onto Van Gogh's corpse. This letter, which is addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a frenzied blend of superstition, anti-Semitism, and, as this extract shows, morbid obsession:

There is one certainty in the whole of existence; and that is that everything comes to an end. A child born unto this world and fills this universe with its presence in the form of its first life's cries, shall ultimately leave this world with its death cry. A blade of grass sticking up its head from the dark earth and being caressed by the sunlight and fed by the descending rain, shall ultimately whither and turn to dust. Death, Miss Hirsi Ali, is the common theme of all that exists. You, me, and the rest of creation cannot disconnect from this truth. There shall be a day where one soul cannot help another soul. A day with terrible tortures and torments, a day where the unjust shall force from their tongues horrible screams. Screams, Miss Hirsi Ali, that will cause shivers to roll down one's spine; that will make hair stand up from heads. People will be seen drunk with fear while they are not drunk. FEAR shall fill the atmosphere on that great day.

And what's in store for the rest of us?

"I deem thee lost, O America. I deem thee lost, O Europe. I deem thee lost, O Holland."

These, regrettably, do not appear to have been the words of a lone lunatic. A total of nine men, all of Middle Eastern or North African ethnic origin, have so far been arrested in connection with Van Gogh's murder. There is the usual, and not unconvincing, talk of shadowy international terrorist connections, perhaps even with al Qaeda. Meanwhile, two other Dutch Muslims have been detained in connection with the Internet posting of a video promising "paradise" for anyone who managed to behead Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician outspoken in his opposition to immigration.

Mass immigration, of course, played a part in creating the social pathologies that cost Van Gogh his life, but its effects were exacerbated by official Holland's embrace of multiculturalism, a dogma that made integration impossible and alienation a certainty. Crucially, the Dutch appear to have abandoned teaching the mutual tolerance, however rough-and-ready, that is essential to the functioning of a free society. Instead they opted for the walking-on-eggshells sensitivities of multiculturalism, and a state of mind in which open debate, if someone somewhere could deem it offensive, was a danger, not a delight. In a country that was drawing many of its immigrants from traditions where notions of tolerance had little or no part to play, the consequences should have been obvious. If liberal democracy is to survive in all its noisy acrimony, all of its citizens—even the most disaffected, even the most devout, even the B's—need to develop a thick skin. In Holland, nobody showed them how. To Van Gogh, multiculturalism was farcical. And for Van Gogh it was a farce that turned lethal.

In the aftermath of Van Gogh's murder people behaved in ways that were thoughtful, thuggish, moving, and almost certainly quite futile. There was tough talk from the government, an outbreak of arson attacks on a number of mosques, and a spontaneous 20,000-strong protest in central Amsterdam: The crowd banged pots and pans, the crowd blew horns and whistles. The noise symbolized Dutch freedom of speech and had been requested by the Van Gogh family. Silence was not the way to honor their Theo.

But for the responses to this crisis that give the best clue as to what will happen next, look elsewhere—perhaps to the decision by two Dutch TV stations to abandon their plans to broadcast Submission, or, perhaps, to the objections expressed by some leading politicians to the deputy prime minister's declaration of war against Islamic extremism. "We fall too easily into an 'us and them' antithesis with the word war," complained one, the leader of the Greens—words beyond parody that Van Gogh would have enjoyed parodying, had he lived long enough to hear them.

Or go, perhaps, to Rotterdam, and stare at a wall. A few days ago, a local artist reacted to the news of Van Gogh's killing by painting a mural that included the words "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill"). Fair comment, you might think. Apparently not. The head of a nearby mosque complained. The police showed up and city workers sandblasted the inconvenient text into oblivion. Rotterdam's mayor has since apologized, but the damage had already been done.

"Thou Shalt Not Kill." Erased, obliterated, unacceptable. Much like Theo van Gogh.

The Deer Hunter

National Review Online,  October 26, 2004

Carefully, silent lest he alert his foe, crouching, hunched, sometimes crawling, a camouflaged and heavily armed John Kerry makes his way across the harsh terrain. Later he emerges from this test by fire, this ordeal, to run for the White House on the back of tales of hardship and triumph, tales that some who were not there have the impudence to question, tales like this: "I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach. I track and move and decoy and play games and try to outsmart them. You know, you kind of play the wind. That's hunting" Yes, hunting. Did you think that I was talking about something else?

For reasons that have a little to do with the Second Amendment and a lot to do with Serotta John's need to bond with the Cabela's crowd, the Democratic candidate has been at carefully choreographed pains to show what a keen hunter he is—and always has been: "When I was a kid I used to hunt woodchuck, predators on the farm. I started with a BB gun, moved up to a .22, then a .30/30, and a shotgun. And I've shot birds off and on through my life, some game, rabbits, deer—I've been on Massachusetts deer hunts."

Yup. No nuance there, bub, no way.

Ah, but there is. Just in case some of Kerry's more sensitive supporters are offended by the thought of too many carcasses, nuance comes slithering back in: "I once had an incredible encounter with the most enormous buck—I don't know, 16 points or something. It was just huge. And I failed to pull the trigger at the right moment." And if that sounds to you just a teeny bit too much like that moment in The Deer Hunter when Michael Vronsky (a decorated hero of the Vietnam war, you know) gets a deer in his sights and decides not to shoot, well, you should be ashamed of yourself.

But, as Kerry tells it, this encounter seems to have been a rare armistice in his war against wildlife. For as his election campaign has continued, so have the bird bloodbaths and so, as the Washington Post's Laura Blumenfeld had the bad luck to discover, has the gory small talk: "Carve out the heart, he said over dinner, pull out the entrails and cut up the meat."

His victims? Well, there were the poor pheasants that perished in Iowa, a month or two before that state's critical primaries, and, most recently, the hapless geese butchered in Ohio just a few days ago (the New York Times noted that the Massachusetts Nimrod emerged from the fray with a hand "stained with goose blood"). Wisely, perhaps, in the context of a wartime election, Kerry has refrained from dove-shooting, but the senator still has fond memories of gunning down everyone's favorite bird of peace. According to the clearly traumatized Ms. Blumenfeld, this cornfield Krueger likes to watch doves "flutter and dart" before he fires. Then (PETA folk, look away) he will, he says, eat them. "You clean them. Let them hang. It takes three or four birds to have a meal. You might eat it at a picnic, cold roasted. I love dove."

Dove may or may not taste good (like the late President Mitterand, Kerry seems more like an Ortolan fan to me) but in stressing that he at least eats what he kills (the Iowa pheasants were, we were informed, sent to Kerry's home—the one in Boston—and two of the unfortunate Ohio geese, would, an aide told the New York Times, "soon be sent back to Mr. Kerry for consumption") the senator is almost certainly making a, well, let's use the word, nuanced, gesture to supporters such as the Humane Society of the U.S., which has somehow managed to endorse the great hunter despite, ahem, its own stern opposition to hunting and, indeed, its rather dim view of snacking on dove ("minimal sustenance," apparently).

If the Humane Society is comfortable with Kerry, many hunters are not. Some of them have been treating his hunting history with the same lack of respect that other naysayers have shown his stories of Christmas in Cambodia, the Boston marathon, and Chinese assault rifles. Doubtful about those Iowa pheasants? Well, check in with the ambiguously named website Sportsmen for Kerry/Edwards? There you can find Bush-bulge-style analysis of John Kerry's dog, John Kerry's thumb, and, to complete the murky picture, John Kerry's trigger finger. Other skeptics have claimed that no one, no one, would ever "hang" a dove (no, I really have no idea), while at least one blogger has even questioned whether any geese in those Ohio killing fields were really shot by Kerry.

But it was Kerry's claim that he crawled around on his stomach, "playing the wind," in pursuit of deer that stirred up the most suspicions. While this is what you do in Scotland (I write from sodden, scratched, and muddy experience), it is not the approach usually taken in America. To the NRA's executive director, Kerry's description was "so utterly bizarre" it made him "wonder whether Kerry has ever hunted a deer in his life." Anyone thinking of trying his deer-hunting tactics should "at least wear some blaze orange" so other hunters don't confuse him with "a snake slithering through the brush." And then there's Mark Steyn. Neither he nor "any of his New Hampshire neighbors" had "ever heard of anybody deer hunting by crawling around on his stomach, even in Massachusetts. The trick is to blend in with the woods and, given that John Kerry already looks like a forlorn tree in late fall, it's hard to see why he'd give up his natural advantage in order to hunt horizontally."

Sensing trouble over Crawlgate, the Kerry campaign turned for help not to his band of brothers, but, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel explained, to a cousin, one Bruce Droste, "who said he hunted deer with Kerry roughly half-a-dozen times in Massachusetts, most recently about seven years ago... The hunts were tied to an annual house party on private property, and the hunters used buckshot, partly for safety reasons, because of its short range. 'When you see (a deer), you absolutely freeze. Then the game is to see how you can get closer. . . . So you crawl along until you know you have a dead ringer shot.'" The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. You decide.

In reality, of course, the devil in this case is not in the details, not in the crawling hunter, the hanging dove, or even those notorious geese, but in the broader suspicion that Kerry's hunting fables are yet more evidence of a candidate unable both to be himself and to be elected. It's his awareness of this, more than anything else, that explains those infamous flip-flops, and it's that awareness—plus the understanding that Kerry needs the Hank Hill vote—that explains this odd, awkward, aloof pretense at being one of the boys.

Now, there's nothing too unusual about a politician who panders, but there is something disconcerting about what Kerry's outreach to outdoorsmen reveals about his view of their political sophistication. They are, Kerry appears to think, simpletons who can be won over by sportsman's tales, talk of his "beloved" Red Sox, and the illusion that the senator's supposed fondness for hunting signals a deep belief in the Second Amendment—an amendment that has, in fact, far more to do with the right of self-defense than the ability to chase, or crawl, after deer.

Meanwhile, the candidate's grimly entertaining and appallingly patronizing, pandering pastiche of a regular guy is likely to continue down to the wire. In Pike County, Ohio, the proprietors of the Buchanan Village Store were subjected to the newly dumbed-down grammar of ("Can I get me a hunting license here?") of the Yale intellectual who is fluent in French, but no longer, it seems, his native tongue. What will Kerry say if he goes on the campaign trail into deepest Appalachia?

"Squeal like a pig?"