The amazing George W. Bush, miracle in a men’s room, “Merry Christmas,” &c.

December 17, 2001 9:00 a.m.

know the news is several days old now, but can we just pause for a second to acknowledge the amazing fact that President George W. Bush has pulled out of the ABM Treaty? I mean, he just said, “See ya.” He said, “We’re leavin’. Thanks, guys. Been a great 30 years (actually not). But we have to defend this country, and we can’t let a piece of paper that was always flawed — and that just happens to have been signed with a state that no longer exists — get in our way.”

Candidate Bush had talked about giving our six months’ notice to Moscow. He’d said, “When and if we bump up against that treaty, we’re going to have to give our notice, because the protection of this country from missile attack is the main thing.” He also said that we’d reform Social Security. But sayin’ and doin’ are two separate things, and many of us feared that the ABM Treaty would be with us as long as death, taxes, and Mary Frances Berry’s rule of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

But Bush went ahead and did it — said, “See ya.” Before we move on with life — and Lord knows we’ve got a lot to deal with — we should just acknowledge that awesome, head-shaking fact. I mean, not even Reagan did it — and he could have. Bush is, indeed, “A Different Kind of Leader,” as the old political slogan goes.

One cool thing now is that the Democrats have to come off as more pro-Russian than the Russians. Does it occur to you that Sen. Biden, Sen. Levin, and the like appear more pro-Russian than Vladimir Putin and his government? And if you were a Democrat, wouldn’t you be kinda-sorta embarrassed?

It’s a little like “bombing during Ramadan”: Look, the Muslims do it; have for years. Why should the American government be more pro-Muslim than the Muslims? Why should the foreign-policy leaders of the Democratic party be more concerned about the feelings of the Russians than the Russians?

If we are to be allies — and I’m talking about the U.S. and Russia, not the Republican party and the Democratic party — we should by no means fear a defensive system. It is time — “past time,” as political speechwriters for some reason love to say — to build.

Good to see that Bush has retained his sense of humor — that he remains himself. Did you catch what he said to Terry McAuliffe — “The Mac,” as he calls himself (really) — when McAuliffe went through a reception line at the White House? (“The Mac,” remember, is the old Clinton money-man and sidekick, and now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.) Bush said, “Welcome back to the White House. Try not to steal the silverware.”

Really, you gotta love him. You don’t, of course. But I do, put it that way.

Last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer argued for ever-bigger government, calling for a “new New Deal.” Sorry, babe, but that line’s been taken — by (among others, presumably) George W. Bush. When he was a candidate — going down the stretch before November 7, ’00 — he described his Social Security reform as a “new New Deal for America’s workers.” One of FDR’s grandsons stood with him in support of that reform.

Which, by the way, where is it? Come on, Captain Courageous: If you can pull out of the ABM Treaty, you can do this. Posterity, with their prosperity, will thank you.

I bring you some news from hip New York — that is, from a hip eating/drinking place that I happened to stop into (had to go to the john — they let me; new spirit here, maybe). Many have been saying there’s been a tremendous change after 9/11, that the country’s different. Some say that the country has actually been revealed, drawn out; others that the country has changed fundamentally. Whatever. And who knows how long it’ll last?

But I’m not interested in all that right now. Back to that john: In there, there was a prominent sign that said, “In God We Trust. United We Stand.” So what? you say. Awfully commonplace.

No, no: Not here, not in that spot, trust me. The idea of God invoked like that, in an establishment like that, was mind-boggling to me, and immensely heartening. A little earnestness and faith is such a joy after a long season of irony, cynicism, and smugness.

No, I don’t think a smidgen of good has come out of those horrible events: I think it’s all evil, and I recoil at silver-lining-ism.

But I was glad to have stopped in that men’s room, is all I’m saying. To have those words on one’s coins is one thing (who looks?); to have them up on that tiled wall is very much another.

I have picked before — and very recently — on King County, Washington, a very p.c. place. They’re terrible Castro-lovers. And now they’ve banned “Merry Christmas,” more or less. That is, King County executive Ron Sims sent a memo to all county workers urging them to do “Happy Holidays,” never “Merry Christmas” — so as to be “respectful, inclusive.”

I don’t really mean to knock this at the moment (well, I pretty much do, but hang with me for a second). It’s just that this little news nugget brought a memory. I was working for a large firm, that was very conventional: p.c., “appropriate behavior,” all liberal Democrats, the whole bitsy (as my grandmother would say). And all December long, it was “Happy Holidays, Happy Holidays, Happy Holidays,” in chirpy voices, until you wanted to cut your ears off.

One day — round about Dec. 20 — I was chatting with a dear friend and co-worker: not a right-winger, by any means, but a marvelous guy, hugely sensitive, with a deep understanding. I said to him, fairly quietly, smilingly, “Merry Christmas.” Those words sounded so weird. So subversive in that environment! He returned — also smiling broadly — “Merry Christmas.” We stood grinning at each other like a couple of idiots. Felt like we were passing samizdat in the old USSR or something.

I just love that memory.

Some people are a little annoyed with those of us -wingers who’ve portrayed the traitor John Walker — or whatever he’s calling himself at the moment — as a product of his liberal, New Agey, Marin County, anything-goes, Malcolm X-assigning environment. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote a typically stylish column saying, Gee, one guy, out of a nation of hundreds of millions, and the Right’s all hot to damn liberalism.

This argument sounds clever and decisive — until you think about it for about three seconds. Now, it’s not just John Walker, and his lonely joining-up with the Taliban. It’s all those, in California and elsewhere, who’ve been excusing him, rationalizing him, apologizing for him, defending him. That’s what we’re talking about, along with our Johnny. It’s not just one, poor, misguided kook; it’s the culture — or subculture, if you feel like being optimistic (from the conservative point of view) — that supports him.

Nice try, though.

Look: I’m about 90 percent certain that John Walker was never, ever taught why America is good — just about uniquely good, in fact — and worth defending. Why? Because I wasn’t, much, in my formal education (hometown: Ann Arbor, Mich.). I was taught, essentially, that America was racist, arrogant, destructive, insensitive, belligerent, reckless, undemocratic, imperialist, and poisonous. Who wouldn’t want to take up arms against a country like that?

Every other day or so, I glimpse an interview with a Palestinian in the street, and the guy is saying, “The rest of the world thinks we’re all terrorists. It’s so unfair. It’s so unjust. It’s so stereotypical. It’s so awful.”

One’s heart goes out. But when Palestinian terrorists strike, massacring innocents, does the guy — do the guys — say, “Damn those terrorists! Damn them for doing what they do, for giving us all a bad name, for blackening our reputation, for impeding our progress. Let’s get them, and stop them from continuing to disadvantage us.”

Oh, no. Oh, no. The guy, or guys, are more likely to be out in the street whooping it up, celebrating. And the more subdued, with microphones in their faces, will defend and justify the murders.

They shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways. Don’t want to be tarred with terrorism, or with association with it? Great. Deplore it, revile it, contribute what you can to stop it, to delegitimize it.

Thinking about the political situation in the Middle East is just about the most depressing thing you can do. The regimes, some of us have long figured, are — sadly, horrifyingly — better than the people. (The other way to put that is, The people are worse than the regimes.) Fouad Ajami speaks of a “thin layer” of ruling elites that holds at bay a seething, hateful populace. You recall the millions out in the streets for the mullahs in Iran. (Remember when they knocked Khomeini’s corpse off the bier? That was so cool.) The “Palestinian street” usually seems worse than Arafat. And so it is in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere.

But who knows? The Arabs, as individuals, as people, never get to talk. They never get to vote, in free, fair, secret, genuine elections. They never get to express themselves, never get a voice in their own destinies, never get to choose. What would they do, with a curtain closed and a decent choice? Vote for tyranny, and continual war with Israel, aimed at that country’s elimination? Maybe. But we can’t know: The Arabs don’t really get to talk.

And if they made a peep for democracy in public, they wouldn’t last very long.

I will repeat here an old point: The fact that strongmen such as Hosni Mubarak and the Assad family hold sham “elections,” that they win with 98 percent, is a kind of perverted tribute to actual democracy. There is a sense, there, that democracy is right. And wouldn’t it be nice if an Arab somewhere — somewhere outside of Israel or Dearborn — got a chance to participate in real democracy?

A question of the hour has been, “Do Muslims ‘believe’ the tape or not?” A lot don’t — that was as predictable as the sunrise. (Actually, that simile was as predictable as the sunrise — sorry. I’m rushing, and couldn’t do better.) A truth I — we — have learned from Bernard Lewis and David Pryce-Jones stays with me: Arabs have a talent for projecting themselves onto others. That is, they expect that you would do what they would do, given your power, or circumstances, or whatever. And in the Arab world, the truth — the factual, literal, straight, truth: the truth truth — is not exactly the highest value.

How dare I make such a horrible, sweeping statement, you say? Well, you could look it up: It’d take a while.

Hearing charges that the U.S. had doctored the tape, I immediately thought of the fact that modern Arabs themselves have proven ardent doctorers: You should see some of the films in the Egyptian military museum in Cairo! They have a version of the ’73 war right out of a crooked Hollywood studio, or Ollie Stone’s imagination.

And are we Americans so immune to such a thing: to a charge of doctoring when something valid appears that we don’t much like? Remember when George Stephanopoulos charged that Gennifer Flowers had doctored her tape proving that she and Candidate Clinton were more than jes’ friends? Ah, but Stephanopoulos is respectable now, and we’re not supposed to dredge stuff like that up.

How it must burn James Carville, Paul Begala, and Terry Lenzner, Stephanopoulos’s late respectability! They knew him when, when he was one of them.

In a Times article on do-the-Muslims-believe-or-don’t-they?, the Middle East Studies guy John L. Esposito said that Muslims were suspicious of the 9/11 charge — of the 9/11 fact — because Arabs had been accused, wrongly, of doing Oklahoma City.

Some analysts were, indeed, embarrassed when it turned out that a homegrown mass murderer had done that, and not Arabs, as they had guessed, or reasoned. But I could never be too hard on them. Why? Because many Arab or Muslim groups contacted media outlets to claim credit for the act. They lied that they had done it — that’s how desperate they were to be thought responsible, how envious they were of the real mass murderer, or murderers.

To have done it, or to claim to have done it, to have wanted to do it — what’s the difference, really?

So, Anthony Lewis has retired, after 32 years of columnizing. He has failed, in a way: Israel is still standing (though barely, you might fear, or hope). Remember when he said that Israel was trying to “exterminate” Palestinian nationalism? Nice word choice, Tony. Also, the Republican party still exists. The Khmer Rouge is gone, though. Lewis once called it “cultural arrogance” to deplore the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power.

Lewis’s America — as he proves in his last column — is one in which the black night of fascism is always descending, in which Susan Sontag or Noam Chomsky (or Anthony Lewis?) is about to be gagged for incorrect thought. It is an America with which I’m utterly unfamiliar; although I’ve lived in it less long than Lewis. Maybe I’ve just been in the wrong places.

Sad news. Really, no kidding: very sad news: The Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal has been made an honorary citizen of Paris. The Paris City Council, in a thrust by Communists, bestowed the honor. It is the first time a person has been made an honorary citizen of the capital of France since Pablo Picasso 30 years ago. Abu-Jamal is beloved by the Left because a) he killed a policeman and b) he is handsome, charismatic, and articulate. Oh, and c) he’s black, which helps a lot. In fact, it’s indispensable.

The man he killed, Officer Daniel Faulkner, was white.

I do not take this opportunity to be anti-French. Not at all. Americans are equally guilty, as far as I’m concerned, in that Abu-Jamal has been endlessly honored here, invited, for example, to give commencement addresses (via video hook-up, from prison) at Evergreen State College — a public institution in Washington — and Antioch College. At Antioch, Officer Faulkner’s widow, Maureen — who was there to protest — was jeered and taunted by the kids.

Thinking of this, I cannot fault, uniquely, the French. Too many motes in American eyes.

You have read, maybe, that Janis Besler Heaphy, the publisher of the Sacramento Bee, was booed at the mid-year graduation ceremony of California State University, Sacramento. What’s noteworthy about that? you say. Speakers on campus are booed all the time.

Yes, that’s true. When I was in school — on three different campuses, I believe — conservatives were horribly booed or heckled or otherwise smothered, when they were invited to appear. A conservative who could get through a speech was pretty much a unicorn — a mythical creature — in my experience.

But the difference at Cal State, Sacra., was that the kids were booing this lady for going on and on about how this new war on terrorism threatened our civil liberties.

I have two quick thoughts on this: The first is, that the kids — in a very healthy way — were sick of being lectured on this; that they know full well that you can combat terror effectively, including on the home front, and respect the Constitution. John Ashcroft, in other words, is not an un-American villain, and many of us are fed up to here with being told that he is.

The second is: What a shame. I always wondered about liberals — honest liberals, decent ones — Don’t they feel embarrassed that conservatives can’t get a hearing on campus, thanks to the leftists who shut them up? Well, they should’ve been embarrassed.

And wouldn’t it be lousy for “our” crowd to start doing it themselves?

I have a memory: Jeane Kirkpatrick — maybe while she’s U.N. ambassador; I can’t remember for sure — is speaking — or trying to speak — at Berkeley. The kids won’t let her. So instead of just standing there, continuing to try to speak over, or through, the rowdies, as dumb conservatives always do, she just left. Walked off. Said, “To hell with it.”

That was thrilling. And maybe even a few of the kids were embarrassed. But maybe not.

A beautiful flower bloomed a few days ago: Dissidents and human-rights activists started the first-ever oppositionist website in Cuba. But it was quickly destroyed: The Castro regime shut it down. And no one but a few nuts in Miami — and bleeding, desperate, tortured Cuba — cares.

(Memo to the literalist and obtuse: That line up there, about “nuts in Miami,” was meant to allude to the conventional left-liberal view.)

I have learned, just in the last week, that two different university alumni associations are offering happy tours to Cuba: the associations of the University of Michigan and Barnard College. Also, the Third Annual U.S.-Cuba Writers Conference will be held in Havana in March.

For tourists, of course, there is a completely separate Cuba: separate hotels, separate restaurants, separate hospitals, separate districts, separate everything. A Cuban-American I know visited the country a couple of summers ago, and stayed in a hotel-for-foreigners. Because he looked Cuban (naturally), state security checked his ID — his passport — every time he appeared. His cousins, when they came to meet him, couldn’t wait for him in the lobby; had to wait for him outside.

There is such a thing as “medical tourism”: People from around the world, particularly from the former USSR and South America, travel to the island, receive their treatment at the foreigners hospitals, and bask on the (foreigners-only) beaches. Meanwhile, Cuban doctors who actually treat Cubans . . . well, the story is hideously grim, as ample testimony has made clear.

Point is, Castro craves the appearance of normalcy that the carefully Potemkinized and Intouristed tourism provides.

To all those alumni dupes (or Reds) and those “writers”: Screw you.

Some of us talk about the Cuban political prisoners, the tortured, and they’re apt to seem an amorphous, nameless, faceless lot. That’s why I like to name them once in a while; I like merely to roll the syllables of those names off my tongue — they are not, altogether, forgotten.

There is a political prisoner in the Guantanamo provincial prison, Company 1, Ward A-500. (The information comes from human-rights activists in both Cuba and the United States.) His name is Ernesto Lucas Corral Cabrera. He is 27 years old, and a democratic foe of the Castro regime. He is deprived of all sunlight, and is repeatedly beaten. A sufferer from arterial hypertension, he is denied the medical treatment he requires. Because he mouths off about Castro — and condemns his torturers — he is repeatedly hauled off to the punishment cell. All of this is reminiscent of Armando Valladares’s Gulag Archipelago for Cuba, Against All Hope.

Oh, and Corral has a specific persecutor: one Captain Victor Reyes Cobas, a Castro henchman.

All right, then: That’s not much, but I just wanted to say those names, victim and victimizer. There are so many prisoners. And they are not faceless, nameless. Each one is a living, breathing, wonderful person — better than us.

Well, that’s not very cheery. But I will end. This’ll probably be the last Impromptus of 2001. In response to previous columns, I received a large amount of mail, especially regarding Hampshire College, the attitude of Europeans toward Americans, and Christmas albums. I hope to publish a sample of this mail later.

In the meantime, God bless you, every one. (Not an original line, but zingy, isn’t it?)