I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, indulging in the polite chit-chat
beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is
sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. "Is he your only
child?" I ask. "Yes," she answers. "Do you have a child back in England?" she
asks me. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The
Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."
His piece in The New Republic (and excerpted here at Hullabaloo) is chock full of such hilarious nuggets of paranoia and hatred.
To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right
are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parker,
minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise
Northern tones. "You must live near the U.N. building," the Floridian says to
one of the ladies after the entrée is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her
head wearily. "They should suicide-bomb that place," he says. They all chuckle
gently.
The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you're a European,
one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the
cities she's visited. Her companion adds, "I went to Paris, and it was so
lovely." Her face darkens: "But then you think--it's surrounded by Muslims." The
first lady nods: "They're out there, and they're coming." Emboldened, the
bearded Floridian wags a finger and says, "Down the line, we're not going to
bail out the French again." He mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, "I
can't hear you, Jacques! What's that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can't
hear you!"
Now that this barrier has been broken--everyone agrees the Muslims are
devouring the French, and everyone agrees it's funny--the usual suspects are
quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is "almost a traitor." John McCain is "crazy"
because of "all that torture." One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she
gets on her knees every day to "thank God for Fox News." As the wine reaches the
Floridian, he sits back and announces, "This cruise is the best money I ever
spent."
[...]
Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the
preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, "The American
public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're
looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry
continues, "I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose.
But it's not."
No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people
avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to
hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The
aging historian Bernard Lewis declares, "The election in the U.S. is being seen
by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next." This is why the guests
paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing,
stooping ovation and break for coffee.
[...]
A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is
opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William
Buckley—two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party—begin to feud. Podhoretz
will not stop speaking—“I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks as if
I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants—and Buckley says
to the chair. Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a
smile, but with heavy eyes.
Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11
American conservatism, and they stare at totally different Iraqs. Podhoretz is
the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of
left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America’s power to redeem the world,
one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to
declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and
declaims, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ….This picture of a
country in total chaos with no security is false. It couldn’t have gone better.”
He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and “thank
God” for that.
Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded National
Review in 1955—when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental
affliction—and he has always been skeptical of appeals to ‘the people,’
preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with
Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his
eighties, he possesses a worldview that is ill-suited for the fight to bring
democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first,
appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and his is
fighting.
“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at
Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because
Dick Cheney convinced him that Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,”
Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War One,
the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is
“heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of
nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only
contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we are
winning.”
The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave
them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a
tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward.” His wife nods and says,
“Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest
dementia.
When the neocons are throwing William F. Buckley overboard, you know they've lost their way.
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