The Anchoress

You know the first night of the GOP convention has gone well when the talking heads are momentarily struck positive. I did a quick flip through the channels and saw Chris Matthews (who is a sucker for a good speech) raving about Rudy, and Andrea Mitchell, bless her heart, looking thoroughly whipped. Mitchell managed to choke out that John McCain should be the GOP candidate for 2008 (let’s get through today, shall we?) while Matthews wondered if it was not “Rudy’s turn”! I moved through CNN and Fox and it was much the same.

Rudy Giuliani was conversational. He stood there and he talked to us. He was your favorite uncle, or most gregarious neighbor, standing on the front porch and telling a story with great eloquence - moving, intelligent, thoughtful, funny, caustic, instructive and most of all: GENUINE. The man is of a piece, all through, and completely authentic. I was so pleased to hear him mention Leon Klinghoffer, to hear him castigate the world for quietly allowing terrorism to grow and flourish, to remind us that “terrorism did not begin on September 11, 2001″ as he, like a provocative history teacher, traced the scourge of terrorism back for decades. The DNC cannot complain that Rudy exploited 9/11. The man lived it. His speech was superb, and should be highlighted all over the place tomorrow. But it won’t be. He dared to criticise John Kerry (gasp!) and the press will very quickly call him a hate-monger. The press is like an overprotective mother hen where Kerry is concerned, constantly wagging its finger at anyone who dares to ask him a direct question, or to sign a standard 180 form, or to be consistant. And Kerry, of course, seems very happy to hide in the aprons and allow it. How sad. But back to Rudy the Great. Am I the only one who thought he seemed near tears when he finished his speech, overflowing with sincerity? He seems to me to have given himself utterly over to the effort to re-elect President Bush, without ego or self-promotion. My one word assessment: Tremendous.

Less impressive, to me, was John McCain who, as ever, seemed to me to be serving himself more than the president. I don’t want to seem ungrateful; he is doing his part for the president, and can definately help him with undecideds, and perhaps I am being a bit picayune and McCain only did what most politicians do. But where Giuliani seemed all about Bush and America, McCain, as he does all too frequently, seemed to be quite a lot about himself. I was only moderately impressed with his taking a jab at Michael Moore. McCain has never gotten over the adulation of the press in 2000 - the magazine covers, the ‘maverick’ label. He loves the cameras, he loves attention. How does such a one make certain he is going to capture the headlines on a night featuring Rudy, featuring the wives and sisters of the 9/11 dead? Throw out a line about another media darling who also adores attention. It was brilliant. It gave the crowd a cathartic release while protecting him from criticism that he was “too rough” on anyone. McCain’s jibe at Moore’s expense pleased Moore immensely, hurt no one and helped McCain dominate the event after-reports. If you turn on the television he’s on every channel, talking to everyone. Yes, brilliant. But I hope President Bush doesn’t show this man his back anytime soon. One word assessment: Opportunistic.

Debra Burlingame, Tara Stackpole and Deena Burnett, grieving family members, brought us right back to September 11, and made us remember what it felt like. Bless them. Although they are not professional speakers they were eloquent, dignified and strong. One word assessment: Class.

One word assessment of Day 1 of the GOP convention: JUGGERNAUT.

God bless him, he may have just destroyed his career, but what guts.

If anyone has any idea how one may write to the man, I wish they’d share it with me. I’d like him to know that lots of us understand what he just did - how he essentially sacrificed himself for a principal. Lord knows, he’ll never work in Hollywood again.

“You are such a shy person,” my husband said as we drove home from a long, pretty good concert this evening. “You stammer and get red whenever you meet a stranger. How is it you manage, time after time, to get into these loud, public brawls?”

Well, alright, there is all that Irish in me, and that might explain some of it, but my husband has a point and it makes me wonder about the vast difference between shyness and timidity. It is true that I hate meeting new people. I don’t hate the people, I simply hate meeting them. I hate not having a fluid grasp of all the social cues and niceties (there was quite a raucus, barbarian quality to my immediate family and early formation and so the social graces simply do not flow, at it were…)

However, for all of my shyness, I am not a timid woman. Rather, I tend to speak my mind too quickly when an interior censor would be advisable. It happened again tonight, at a YES concert at Jones Beach Theatre.

At intermission, as the roadies set up for the band, my husband left me to get a soft drink and I stood and looked appreciatively around the venue. Two men were also enjoying the play of full moonlight on water and we chatted amiably. One of them pointed out the VIP area, which looked comfortable and seemed to provide a wide variety of refreshment. The other fellow said, “it’s not worth the money, unless of course, you’re writing it off at Halliburton!”

Out of nowhere, perfect strangers talking, and this utterly stupid remark goes forth, and I cannot help myself, because I’m so sick of the mindless hate-zone so many people have fallen into without even realizing it. Calling on my limited gifts for diplomacy I say…I believe I said this and did not sneer it…”Yes, that eeeeeeevil corporation, Halliburton! Yes, they would just write off VIP tickets, wouldn’t they? Not like the rest of those companies throughout the nation and the world! Heck, not even like the corporate owner of this venue! Only Halliburton would write off entertainment. Halliburton, hiss, hiss!”

Things went downhill from there. I had to listen to how stupid America is, how materialistic, how shallow, how superficial. I heard that the Europeans were so much more sophisticated, so much more laid back, so much more soulful than Americans. “They are simply of a higher caliber, altogether,” one man sniffed at me, “than Americans. Although they are, perhaps a tiny bit too class conscious!”

“The beauty of America,” I said quietly as I tried not to explode, “is that anyone of any so-called class may ascend or descend to another simply by virtue of how much drive, energy and imagination they have, and how hard they are willing to work!”

“There you go,” the other man said, “it always comes back down to this idea of hard work - it’s so pathetic!” His voice began to rise. “It’s always about the time-card with Americans, it’s always about the job, about getting ahead, about the elite, it’s never about leisure, or family or art!”

I almost choked. America not about art? I looked about the amphitheater, old and graceful, surrounded by water, part of a Robert Moses-designed public beach. It is a little gem of community ownership. There is nothing at all elitist in the brickwork and copper architecture, but there is art. We were attending a rock concert - an artform descended from Jazz, the quintessential American music. The place itself is a testimony to imagination and hard work. I thought of all of the families who - when the beach was being designed and built in the early part of the 20th century - had a breadwinner employed by the venture. I thought of the houses and cars that were able to be acquired because of the jobs the design had created, and the tax revenues from those jobs which went toward building Long Island’s excellent public schools and public works.

The very beach on which we stood had been for many the motor which drove acquisition of wealth, education, lessons in dance, music, tennis, all of which fostered additional, continuing excellence. I saw all of this and thought about the everyday people who had punched their time clocks day after day to build such a treasure, and I felt such a sense of pride and admiration well up inside me that I couldn’t speak for a moment. When I could, I turned to the fellow and said. “Look around you. Are you blind? Look at America! This venue seats 14,000 people, on a waterfront, surrounded by something natural and wild that we worked to integrate! And it’s not here to serve elites who take themselves and their money seriously! This is a crowd of suburban people who worked hard all week and don’t particularly feel the need to go into Manhattan to affirm themselves or their lives when this excellent and beautiful theater is right here! You think Europe is so much better? More soulful, did you say?” I shook my head. “Both spiritually and philosophically, Europe is asleep, because it wants to be. But it’s a terrible sleep, because it is a sleep without dreams, and everyone knows that sleep without dreams leads only to madness and a terrible decay. At least America is not asleep.”

In fact, America is wide awake and bustling and busy and creating and building. Yes, I know, the hard work idea again…but a body at rest stays at rest. America is wide awake and moving and even still, somehow, she dares to dream. America is dreaming, even now.

My husband returned and lead me away, back to our breezy seats and the music. But the conversation with those two men stayed with me. And so has that sense of pride.

I expect those two gentlemen who so loved Europe over their own country are the sort to laugh and applaud the demonstrations and hate-filled displays which will be all over the news this week as the Republicans convene in New York City and the more extreme (or addled) members of the opposition do their best to insult, shock or harass the visitors. They won’t get it. They won’t see that the people being subjected to this classless treatment are the people who dream of public beaches with landmark towers and who build them while they sweat in blue workshirts. They see materialists groveling for a paycheck so they can buy something for their lover or their kids, and they sneer at it. I see a country that understands that what is not moving forward it is growing stagnant, a people who instinctively understand that a bridge and some beaches, and a pleasant environment and appropriate infrastructure, and music under the stars are good things and blessings - things which feed our souls, that these things do not add up to an environmental travesty that has made them impure.

I may hate meeting new people, but I love Americans. I love them with all of their faults and follies, because I know Americans; I know this one thing: there is greatness of spirit within them, and one needn’t stammer to meet them and know it as well. God bless ‘em all, I say, even the ones who don’t understand what a gift they have been given. God bless America.

And welcome to NY, Grand Old Party.

This is pretty shameful.

Candidate in this year’s American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US’ Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia “were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

But despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely.

Senator Kerry, how do you feel, seeing these words and knowing that your testimony in 1971 still being usedby the Vietnamese in their communist propaganda? (Hat tip: Ramesh Ponnuru )

Senator Kerry, how do you think American veterans and active-duty servicemen and women feel, reading this?

Senator Kerry, why won’t you sign a standard form 180? Why won’t you release your fitness reports?

Senator?

Senator???

Is it just me, or does Kerry seem to be transforming himself, before our eyes, into a Tennessee Williams heroine? He seems to me to be teetering on some eerie edge. In photographs, he looks like he is simply not all there, as though inside him there is some fluttery little voice talking only to John Kerry, and John Kerry alone.

Perhaps he will soon turn to a gang of friendly reporters and arch his eyebrows and claim he is ready for his close-up as he prances by.

Call it a gut instinct, my own antennea picking up an odd vibe from the man. I say this for the candidate’s own good: Something is not right. Beyond all of the controversies, all of the news stories, the shouting heads on cable, beyond everything else. Beyond his scarily disconnected appearance on The Daily Show…you simply look at the man and you can sense it…something is NOT RIGHT.

I think we’re going to see the man lose it in public. Seriously. I wonder whose name is actually going to be on the November ballot?

So, there I was, two days away from news, battling the mother of all stomach flus. I will spare you the details, although none spared me, and I come back to the keyboard to find that the mainstream press has finally co-ordinated their perspectives on the Kerry/Swiftvets story.

Apparently, they’ve decided that they needn’t ask Kerry anything at all about fitness reports, after action reports, medal citations signed some years after they were issued. Nah. They aren’t even going to discuss the Kerry ADMISSIONS that the Cambodia story was a lie, the first purple heart WAS a self-inflicted wound…nah. All of that is to be roundly ignored and removed from the public record wherever possible.

They don’t even seem to be the least bit concerned that under the thousand dollar-hair John Kerry seems to be a highly disturbed, sleepwalking, nightmare-afflicted, over-conflicted walking banana.

The problem with journalism is that it is equal parts nobility and ignobility. It needs a good disaster in order to show off its own diamonds…absent a real disaster, it will create a thousand conflicts so that it may keep shining…but it’s a tinsly shine with no depth. And when it is over-run by agendas, well, it becomes nothing more than propaganda. So far, the mainstream press in America is nothing for Goebbels to write home about - they’re still taking too long to form their collective on each story - but they are getting there.

I am sad to inform you of this, readers, but all of the heroes of journalism are gone. Even those last few you might have counted on to do the right thing, including the Mighty Russert, have tarnished their halos in this brutal and vicious campaign season. Russert is the biggest disappointment, to me. I used to love watching him move those Kennedy-esque jowls in righteous indignation or Irish merriment. Now Russert, no matter how boppy his cheeks, cannot move me with his work.

As a child I loved Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Nancy Dickenson. I was an adolescent who ate up every word Woodward and Bernstein wrote. Sadly, it seems even the best journalists are succumbing to the same virus that has created a truth-deficit within the whole news industry, and the dirty little host, or vector spreading the viral disease is nothing honorable - it’s just plain old, ignoble and ordinary hate. Political hate, which is less noble than any other sort.

When one is blessed with a gift, it is unwise to misuse it, and you folks are misusing your gifts. When a gift is misused it ends up being perverted into a grotesque parody of itself. Look at Bill Clinton, a breathtakingly gifted man who has so squandered his abilities that he now comes off, even at his most serious, like the bastard child of P.T. Barnum and Mae West. Something like that is happening to the craft of journalism.

When Sandy Berger shoved topsecret documents down his drawers, (whatever happened to that story, anyway?) I was horrified, but I was hopeful, too. I truly thought: the mainstream press can’t ignore this - this is too big, too serious an issue for them to underplay and spike…I was wrong. I’m rather heartbroken, and I have talked to enough people to know that I am not the only one grieving the state of American journalism. . I don’t think either Michael Kelly or David Bloom would much approve of the way the people in their profession have - particularly over the past year or so - completely lost the moral compass.

I believe that if Michael Kelly were alive today, the Berger matter would undergo a withering and truthful investigation by the man, and his beam of light would shine on everyone involved in the thing, for as long as it took to tell the whole tale. I know he would damn anyone trying to get in the way of the truth and, like Shane in the wonderful Gary Cooper film, he’d inspire others to clean up the profession. He would return Honor to the Town of Journalism, and save it, and Bloom would be his deputy.

Michael Kelly and David Bloom are not around, anymore, and the behavior of the journalists who survive them does their memory no honor. The news industry as a whole appears to be happy to slap back some red-eye with the fellers in the black hats, to look the other way as the big players slip some aces from their sleeves, and chuckle while the bad guys shoot bullets into the sky in appreciation (or not) of those purdy wimmin with the red feathers in their hair. You can’t do that when the good guys are still around.

I want to believe there are still some good guys left, that there might be one or two journalists out there who could still become the reluctant heroes who clean up the town. But it gets harder, every day, to keep the faith.

Shane, come back! Come back and make John Kerry sign a standard 180 and finally answer some real questions!

Over at Vodkapundit Stephen Green gives us a study in contrasts, linking first to a Boston Globe story from a year ago which quotes Kerry, and then to a speech last week by Colin Powell and his moving encounter with a recently wounded soldier.

Compare and contrast. One man has three superficial wounds and uses it to go home, the other loses a limb and wonders when he can rejoin his unit.

Now, in fairness, one can understand why Kerry would want to take advantage of his “three wounds and yer out” opportunity. War is not for everyone, and I can only imagine what it is like to wonder, everyday, if today is the day you will have half your head blown off, spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair or even die. Some men have enormous fortitude and courage and they can handle it. Some men do not and cannot. There is no shame, I guess, in being a man who cannot live in harm’s way. But I cannot help but think of Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 4. Hamlet confronts his mother, Gertrude, and even half mad with lust and grief he is still lucid enough to instruct her: