Jeremayakovka

The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell

** Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Political Party Poop readers. **
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In the early 1980s homosexual savages* [scroll to the end], inspired by 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar, made death threats against this influential opponent of gay civil rights, over 100 pages of recently released FBI files suggest. From the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog:

[Jerry] Falwell's FBI file contains a 1983 letter sent to his television ministry that concluded with the words, "Hoping you will die soon." It was accompanied by a small plastic box containing a live scorpion. One threat involved calls to Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg in 1983, warning that a $10,000 reward had been offered for Falwell's "assassination" and that it was to be carried out by "gays in Cincinnati." One caller advised, "I know this is true, because my brother is one of them." Said another, "I intend to be the one to collect that money."

As disturbing as these threats (and one attempt, if you count the scorpion) is that WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless. Called simply, "Exclusive: Jerry Falwell's FBI File," the blogpost begins:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell , founder of the Moral Majority, stirred up passions with his attacks on abortion and homosexuality. Now, the FBI's confidential file on Falwell, who died in May at age 73, reveals that he also stirred up death threats....[emphases added]

Think about it. No matter how much authority the verb "to stir up" implies, only something pre-existing can be set in motion. Which is to say that neither Falwell nor the Devil made those ostensibly "passionate" homosexuals do it. (Granted, the Reverend might have disagreed with my take on the Devil's role in the matter.) People prone to passion will be found on each side of any debate, but making death threats catapults one beyond the pale of what is acceptable (indeed, of what is possible) as civil discourse. Because death threats destroy civil discourse. Like the bullying which taunts and torments another who is perceived to be "different," death threats against a public personality convey an aggressive contempt for the targeted individual. They also convey a cowardly disdain because they attempt -- always in futility, I should add -- to coerce through terror what one shrinks from achieving through debate.
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Unfortunately WaPo's "stirred up" phrasing suggests that deficient from Falwell's manner were reason, civility, and a certain love that dare not speak its name in the mainstream media, Christian love. Yet among the first news reports after his death was, from Falwell's most prominent public opponents, testimony to the contrary.

Pornographer Larry Flynt:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person ... Jerry Falwell and I became good friends.  He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Openly-gay activist Rev. Mel White cried at news of the death of this adversary whom he also considered "a friend": 

"It breaks my heart," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. He had a huge presence in this town [White lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the vicinity of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church] and the country."... He said while Falwell often condemned him from the pulpit, he would say hello every time he saw him around Lynchburg.... White said if anyone needs to learn anything from his and Falwell's relationship, it's that people should get their private and public lives in sync.

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Should WaPo's 400-word blogpost take pains to refer to Flynt's and White's statements? Probably not, Gentle Reader, but I feel I have to, even if it takes three times as long. Because the way WaPo reports those death threats accommodates their intellectual violence, which compromises the information conveyed. Why does the blogpost state in its short space twice that no assassination attempt had been made? If any had, then the attempt(s) would already be public knowledge, and even part of the public lore. Long ago they would have boosted Falwell's visibility; vividly they would have been evoked during our public remembrances. Obviously none had been attempted. So why does WaPo overstate the obvious? To understate what it intends to be less obvious: that gay radicals are a philosophically violent lot with latent and at times overt tendencies.

Sometimes this violence turns against their own. Many Americans, for example, know that two assassination attempts were made against President Gerald Ford. Not many know that one of them was thwarted by Oliver Sipple, a man who happened to be gay (and closeted). Gay radicals, including Harvey Milk, urged the compliant mainstream media to out him, which they did. That led directly to Sipple's estrangement from his family, and indirectly to his precipitous health decline and premature death. Even a framed letter from the White House didn't help him much (not in this life, anyway). The lesson to be learned here is not the insidiousness and ubiquity of "homophobia," but that any movement desperate for heroes is also a movement desperate for martyrs.

Sipple's heroic intervention on behalf of President Ford (indeed, on behalf of the country) had been back in 1975. Responding in 1983 to one of the assassination threats against Reverend Falwell, the FBI managed to locate an "informant" within Cincinnati's gay community. The facts he provided, quoted verbatim in the blogpost (grammatical errors included), read as sardonic mockery of the Bureau's interest and ability in obtaining any relevant information, whether about attested assassination threats or about the gay community generally. The quoted passage concludes, Source restated the general dislike for Falwell within the Cincinnati area, before the blogpost paraphrases another document, [T]he informant led the agents through the history of New York City's Stonewall riots -- a watershed in the early gay rights movement.... Even without access to any of the 100+ pages of Falwell's FBI file (a portion available here), an inquiring mind would figure that the ones WaPo references are not those most relevant to unearthing who, exactly, was behind these assassination threats. For example, spelled out in at least one other document (imaged above) is that one potential assassin had been a candidate for Congress in Santa Cruz, California in 1982. Surely that deserves further attention.

Instead of sifting through the most salient details of these assassination threats -- including, in fairness, asking whether any were made by heterosexuals (or even closeted gays) seeking to defame LGBTetc. people -- the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog cultivates in the reader's mind the image of a presumably "powerless" homosexual presumably "speaking truth to power." Whatever the ideological or agitational purposes that might serve, serving them up in a disorienting sentimentality ignores, if only temporarily, real evidence of crime and real clues as to the crime's origin and magnitude. The contemporary LGBTetc. movement would call this "queering" the profession of journalism. It's also what that movement would call "queering" the civic duty of cooperating with the FBI. The effect of all this "queering" is to make WaPo refrain, counter-intuitively and unprofessionally, from asking hard-hitting questions about a number of blood-thirsty, presumably merry gay homosexual pranksters -- and potentially murderous plotters.

WaPo, WaPo, why hast thou forsaken truth?
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[*]: Some readers have expressed apprehension at the phrase "homosexual savages."

It recalls a point Robert Bork makes early on in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. (Chapter 1, "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians.") Whether "families, schools, and churches" civilize our young regarding LGBTetc. issues, or rather how they do so, is obviously a crucial dispute in "the culture war." Certainly anyone with an appetite for violence needs to be civilized.

I also have in mind two French films of the 1990s, Les Nuits fauves (Savage Nights) and, to a lesser extent, Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The latter, a slow-paced, art house triumph, is the delicate coming-of-age tale of four adolescents, one of whom is just recognizing his homosexuality. Savage Nights on the other hand is about a young bisexual man, HIV-positive, hellbent on avoiding maturity and mortality. Its succes de scandale was enhanced when writer-star-director Cyril Collard died of AIDS just three days before the film took home four Cesar awards (the French Oscars).

One of Savage Nights's more irksome moments is when it snatches a line from the notoriously homoerotic writer Jean Genet. Collard acknowledges who wrote the line while ignoring where it originally appeared. It's from "Violence and Brutality" (included here), an essay which has nothing directly to do with the story of Savage Nights, and which is, in fact, an apology for terrorism: Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man....  

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A Cassandra in Europe

* Updated (11/26) *

Gay expat critic, poet, and journalist Bruce Bawer appears to have recently launched a blog, Memo From Europe. The initial posts display political and cultural commentary, plus the occasional undying reminiscence. Check it out. If you like it, let him know.

* Update * Bruce emails that Memo From Europe has been up and running for some time. Here are links to MFE's archives from earlier in 2007 and from 2006. We should all feel fortunate that Bruce has a presence on the Internet (where I learned about him). The unique, erudite, and timely perspective of a gay American in Norway would have made Henry James and Orianna Fallaci equally proud.

His most current title is the National Book Award-nominated While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West From Within. Other notable works include Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy (editor) and A Place At The Table. He's also written the best demystification of Edward Said I've yet come across.

America Is More Christian Than Israel Is Jewish

When I point out that Jews have enjoyed unprecedented freedom and prosperity in a Christian nation -- namely, the United States -- my friends insist that it's not Christian. At which point, I have to laugh.

The fact that we're not a theocracy does not make their case, no matter how loudly they may insist on it. When we say that Turkey, for instance, is an Islamic nation and that India is Hindu and that Italy is Catholic, although none of them is a theocratic state, how can we deny that America, whose population is overwhelmingly Christian -- and is only 2% Jewish -- is Christian?!

Ave Maria for Maria Evita

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Other versions here.

Banned From A Site

This is what it feels like. At first, anyway.

Hillary Rodham Clinton Nixon

From the abuse and wrongful termination of White House staff to the FBI-enhanced intimidation of opponents, to the unethical solicitation of gifts and outright theft of White House property -- Ms. Rodham Clinton has seemed to me have earned, over the course of a long and mostly unofficial career, the epithet "Nixonian." It's an apercu I modestly toss out there when trying to upend a discussion with her supporters.

Yet according to this article, she possesses some of Nixon's better, or more packageable, traits -- which may help her ride to victory.

This article by Maureen Dowd reminds us of her substellar achievements:

[H]er self-portrait [is] as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.

September 11th Is A Date Which Will Live In Infamy

Partisan liberals are gearing up for their "stop Rudy" campaign. I can feel it.

Here are some choppily edited video clips, found at Dana Goldstein's blog (who found it at Talking Points Memo), of Rudy Giuliani's frequent invocations of September 11th during interviews, debates, and campaign appearances. Dana calls this a tick (as in, a nervous tick), whereas I would say it's a tack -- a strategy to remind Americans of his own leadership, certainly, and by extension of the leadership of many other Americans on that awful and awe-inspiring day.

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People who take issue with a leading presidential candidate, one who oversaw the most intense locus of that day's crisis -- oversaw it more directly than either the president or vice president -- should have to answer the following:

"September 11th is a date which will live in infamy."
Do you agree , or disagree, with that statement? (Yes or No.)

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If recalling September 11th really is distasteful to the good folks at TPM, I guess I could placate them by trying to convince Giuliani to invoke some other date. Say ... February 26th? That day in 1993, on the watch of then-President Bill Clinton and then-Mayor David Dinkins (both Democrats), saw the first attempt by Islamic terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center. The savages' spectacular plan included the intended release of cyanide gas into the tower's ventilation systems -- plus the wishful thinking that the tower's collapse would bring down its twin. So one good that conceivably could come out of a ticky-tacky discussion of whether to invoke or to not invoke September 11th would be to connect it back to February 26th.

February 26th turned out, as a matter of luck, not to be catastrophic -- loss of life and property were minimal -- though it was a precursor to September 11th. For Khalil Sheik Mohammed, an uncle and adviser of one of the plotters, went on to become the chief coordinator of the September 11th attacks. The lessons KSM learned from February 26th were: Never send a fanatical homicide bomber to do a fanatical suicide bomber's job and America might send in spooks and prosecutors, but she won't send in the Marines. What was for the civilized world, at the end of the day on February 26th, effectively a reprieve from catastrophic terror should in hindsight have been a clarion call. Whereas for Islamic fanatics it was a casting call.

Something often omitted from remembrances of September 11th is that, like February 26th, only strokes of fate and luck made that day somewhat less catastrophic than it otherwise would have been. The desperate courage and determined outrage of a few dozen passengers successfully (if tragically) diverted United Flight 93, which had been piloted (targeted) at the Capitol or the White House. That many WTC employees hadn't yet arrived to work when the first planes struck (and that many who had also had time to evacuate) drastically reduced the number of human casualties on that day.

All this is to acknowledge (and perhaps the Talking Points Memo crowd will find common ground with me here) that Giuliani's leadership should not be permitted to eclipse the near unimaginable bravery and stoicism of the many thousands gone on September 11th. Where we diverge is that I believe Giuliani is within his rights -- moreso, his duties -- to invoke our national memory of it. Actually I welcome the kind and gentle, but firm manner by which he speaks for all of us -- he exhibits a fundamental remembrance and pride, plus the littlest hint of grief and a whiff of defiance. And of grapeshot.

I have to wonder, what would partisan liberals prefer Rudy Giuliani do than revive memories of September 11th? Do they wish that he discuss Ms. Rodham Clinton's unreliable mentions of her daughter Chelsea's whereabouts in lower Manhattan on that morning? If that is the case, there may yet be an occasion for Giuliani to do so.

As American Thanksgiving Approaches, Think About The Islamic Colonization of Europe

From "Fjordman's Farewell to Little Green Footballs":

The [European Union’s] policy of deliberately Islamizing the European continent represents one of the greatest betrayals in the history of Western civilization. There is no other continent on the planet today where the indigenous peoples are being systematically deprived of their heritage, displaced in their own cities and subject to violence and abuse with the active involvement of their own authorities, yet where this is celebrated as a good thing in the media....

Later in the same post:

Islam isn’t reformable. The only possible solution then, apart from a global war to the death which nobody wants, is to separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. And by “we” I mean non-Muslims in general, not just Westerners. This entails completely and permanently stopping Muslim immigration in any form. However, in the USA, Canada and Australia, and certainly in Europe, simply stopping Muslim immigration is no longer enough. Some of the Muslims who are already here need to be expelled. There is no way around this. No, I have never suggested expelling all of them, but the most hardcore ones who push for implementing sharia laws here need to be deported, yes.

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A related discussion underway across the Atlantic: In NYRB Ian Buruma critiques Norman Podhoretz and World War IV.

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And some Norweigian backbone:

As Europe’s Islamization proceeds apace, the gap widens between ordinary folks’ growing recognition of the outrages that are going on all around them and the movers and shakers’ cynical insistence on pretending that everything’s just hunky-dory....

Fortuyn’s murder should have put an end to the character assassinations of the advocates of freedom. Nope. Instead they’ve only grown more sophisticated.

Romans 12

The whole chapter is so inspirational, I am moved to type it out and post it in its entirety.
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1 I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

3 For by the grace given to me I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. 4 For as in one body we have many members and all the members do not have the same function, 5 so we, though  many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; he who teaches, in his teaching; 8 he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who contributes, in liberality; he who gives aid, with zeal; he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. 10 love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Never flag in spirit, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; practice hospitality.

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; never be conceited. 17 Repay no one with evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."* 20 No, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
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*: a portion of verse 19 appears as the epigraph to Anna Karenina.

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan Debate Religion

Via lengthy email exchanges, at BeliefNet, "Is Religion Built Upon Lies?"

"He Understands The Need For A Conservative Judiciary..."

* Updated (11/19)*

If Giuliani is elected, and he doesn't appoint constructionist judges, those are the words Robertson will have to eat. But if Pat's glowing (and noticeably unreligious) estimate proves accurate....

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* Update *

Giuliani's 200 reasons

While Other Candidates Talk Tough On Border Security (And Act Gently), Tom Tancredo Gets Tough (And Talks Gently)

* Updated (11/16) *

"Open borders" = Closed minds

Hopefully the recent Tom Tancredo presidential campaign ad will compel not just Republican presidential candidates, but all the presidential candidates, to take complete responsibility for American borders and for laws and policies that govern all entry points into the United States.

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Note how Wolf Sheep Blitzer plays the "fear" card -- tossing out a loose noose for Tancredo to trip upon -- rather than acknowledging that his stern response to plausible and documented terrorist threats is worthwhile on its merits.

All the candidates should be held responsible for their positions on immigration and border security, no matter how much responsibility they take (or refuse to take). When Giuliani made a San Francisco appearance last summer, that's along the lines of what I tried to ask him.

Related: What would "Ann of Arc" do?

What is Western Civilization all about? and, Are we willing to defend it?
-- Tom Tancredo
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* Update (11/16) *

Diana West, "Tancredo's Raw Truth":
Yes, there is something surreal about the commercial, but not because of the content. What is surreal is the hysteria that has greeted it. After 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, Amman, Amsterdam, Baghdad, Bali, Beslan, Davao, Hadera, Haifa, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Nairobi, New Dehli, Sharm al-Sheik, Tel Aviv, Tunisia and more, what dolt doesn't wonder if and when jihadist cowards will attack our own trains, markets, hotels and restaurants? Tom Tancredo has only taken the mature and responsible course -- not coincidentally, also the politically incorrect course -- by raising this deadly serious issue with the American people. But for this he is castigated as a "fear-monger."

"Because The Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution Needs A New York Chapter"

Earlier this year the anarcho-pacifist Living Theatre, led by its surviving founder Judith Malina and current co-director Hanon Reznikov, celebrated its 60th anniversary. Here's a public reading of a poem Reznikov wrote for the occasion (hardly a poem, more like some well-spun "free association"...) which he and Malina recited at a dingy basement gathering.

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Almost 20 years ago on 3rd & C in the East Village, in a cabaret-style, black box basement storefront, I caught the Living's exuberant production of Else Lasker-Schüler's anti-Nazi allegorical play I and I. It was a night to remember. A high school friend, back from his first semester at Harvard, sporting first-growth sideburns and smoking Marlboro reds, joined me again in our native Manhattan. I'd bused in from Berkeley (3 days nonstop by Greyhound), having recently bought a $99 black motorcycle jacket and sticking to a still-pending "not guilty" plea for a minor charge incurred some weeks previously for civil disobedience. For two untested liberal New York Jewish teenagers to whom anti-Nazism was still the lone inherited pose of anti-fascism, I and I was, or seemed, just what die Frau des Doktors ordered.

The Living had decided to stage Lasker-Schüler's work -- a refashioning of Goethe's Faust as a condemnation of the acquiescence to Nazism --  as a musical. The musicality (choral more than instrumental) drove the play's points home that much more deeply. One reviewer quipped that Mephistophiles, played by a black actor, looked like Rick James in dreads and drag. Calling to mind Lasker-Schüler's ultimate years as a destitute German-Jewish refugee in Mandate Palestine, Malina (whose parents had fled Germany in the 1930s, little Judith in tow) played the small but by no means minor part of a withered, old, homeless woman. Barrel-chested and tight-fisted, under a single spotlight she belted out a sotto voce exhortation that put the rest of us more supply formed types to shame. (And, this more supply shaped type, to wonder....) Like a beggar's blessing or a mute's moan, it was a fitting theatrical gesture for the reigning grande dame of American anarchism. Since that time no cultural production I've taken in, other than The Living's I and I, has instilled such visceral resistance against the indifference, lassitude, resignation -- and betrayal -- which fascism starkly and in a way seductively imposes. Alas! If only I knew then what I know now about Islamofascism. If only all of us knew then. If only all of us knew now.

The Living Theatre is that most rare of anarchist groupuscules: people who (on their good days) love life more than they hate "the System." While the Left -- both long before and ever since that mesmerizing production of I and I -- has done so much more to discredit than to honor itself, I, me & myself confess an undying, wide-eyed admiration for much of what The Living has undertaken -- that is, envisioned -- during its exceptionally long run. To be sure their "program" (to the extent they have one) is unworkable and in hindsight politically suicidal. They picketed, for example, to spare the lives of condemned, guilty Soviet-American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and they were for nuclear disarmament from the get-go. Yet it would be disingenuous to act as if I don't know that their je ne sais quoi is a permanent gesture of earthy and even primal exhilaration delivered with bullish derring-do. With that The Living Theatre embraces the world, all of it -- the good & the bad, the beautiful & the ugly -- in an embrace as wide as it is firm. And also loose. To this day The Living Theatre remains, somehow like (and somewhere between) both desire and disease -- infectious.

Long live the spirit -- if not the letter -- of The Living Theatre!

Further reading:
* The Living Theatre's web site.
* Judith Malina's Diaries: 1947-57 and The Enormous Despair.
* About Else Lasker-Schüler.

Related (indirectly): "Arrividerci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well"

Roger Kimball Comes To Bury Mailer, Not To Praise Him (Really)

Roger Kimball must have been polishing this piece for months, if not years. He seems to have read every book ever written by and about the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and five-time marriage loser (also, one-time marriage winner).

From Kimball's "Norman Mailer, A Dissenting View":

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and [Wilhelm] Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

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Wow! I thought I had shrewd opinions about stormin' Norman. E.g., JMK on The Castle in the Forest: Adolf Hitler was more of a genius -- and more evil -- than Norman Mailer ever was or will be. And that may make Norman jealous. Previous JMK blog entries about Mailer here and here.  

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Most telling is to compare Mailer's recent major effort with that of one of his ex-friends and contemporaries, ex-liberal Norman Podhoretz. Norman M's final work is an exploration of the psychological formation of Adolf Hitler whereas Norman P's most recent work is the case for the destruction of Islamofascism. Mailer looks back at the 20th and even the 19th Century whereas Podhoretz focuses on the present and looks ahead to the rest of the 21st Century. It's more evidence that, post-9/11, so-called liberals are rather regressive and so-called neocons are rather progressive....

"All The People In Iraq, Muslim and Christian, Is Brother"

(St. John's Church, Baghdad)
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As reported by Michael Yon in Iraq.
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(H/T JMK friend Carolyn)