The Reactionary Utopian
                      May 17, 2007


YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS
by Joe Sobran

     Am I the only one who still remembers Manuel 
Noriega? He's one of the reasons we have a Department of 
Defense. When he was running Panama, the first President 
George Bush (am I the only one who still remembers him 
too?) decided he was such a threat, like Hitler (of 
course you remember him!), that we had to invade Panama. 
Remember? The Panamanians do.

     Well, we faced a stark choice. We could fight them 
down there, or we could fight them up here. President 
Bush didn't hesitate. It runs in the family.

     As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (whose name, at 
least, you surely remember) once observed, "Three 
generations of imbeciles are enough." Only one more 
generation to go! All the Bushes, if you ask me, are as 
eloquent as whoopie cushions.

     The senior President Bush was suspected, if not 
exactly accused, of anti-Semitism by the distinguished 
anti-Semite hunter Norman Podhoretz. The Podhoretzian 
definition of "anti-Semitism" is admittedly pretty 
comprehensive, roughly coterminous with "mankind" (he 
tends to say "anti-Semite" where most of us would say 
"homo sapiens" or "featherless biped"), except for a tiny 
sliver, who are mostly, one gathers, self-hating Jews. 
(If Podhoretz ran a charm school, most of the young 
ladies would graduate with cauliflower ears.)

     Of course there are gradations of anti-Semitism, 
running all the way from the bellowing Hitler at one 
extreme to the sly Ivy League critics of Israel at the 
other, with Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the pope 
(any pope), and Britney Spears falling somewhere in the 
middle. Not that they're really all that different, and 
neither, at least to the Podhoretzian mind, are you.

     Anti-Semitism is worse than misanthropy, of course. 
Bombing a city is merely misanthropic, whereas telling 
crude Jew jokes is anti-Semitic. Don Imus can explain the 
difference.

     And then there is homophobia, the benighted belief 
that anal intercourse with strangers is in any way 
immoral, unnatural, or unsanitary. It is to be carefully 
distinguished from violence against homeless people, or 
hobophobia. By now there must also be a special word for 
the hatred of gay homeless people, a national problem, 
but I've been out of academia so long I don't know what 
it is.

     Have we mentioned pedophobia? This is the bigoted 
view that it's wrong for adults to have sexual relations 
with children. Except when the adult is a Catholic 
priest. Then it is a praiseworthy view. But even priests 
should be allowed to be women, or marry women, or both. 
That didn't come out quite right, but I think you know 
what I meant to say.

     As Christopher Hitchens points out, the Catholic 
Church has a long record of promoting war and also 
opposing it, and likewise promoting pedophilia and also 
condemning it. You can see why he's upset that a church 
with such a sanguinary past is now against the Iraq war, 
which he favors.

     Listening to Hitchens (if he does), the Pope must 
feel like King Lear's Fool: "I marvel what kin thou and 
thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking 
true; thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I 
am whipped for holding my peace."

     Atheists can be hard to satisfy. Does anyone 
remember Stalin? He and Trotsky just could never seem to 
satisfy each other, and Hitchens, when I knew him years 
ago, was a Trotskyist, though I guess he has lately 
become disillusioned with Trotsky too. Well, who 
wouldn't? How about a little credit for those of us -- 
ahem! -- who never had any illusions about him in the 
first place?

     I also remember when Hitchens was humbly beseeching 
the Sandinista thugs to pretty please permit a little 
free speech in their little kingdom. Why didn't Noriega 
command that kind of deference from our bold, bad-boy 
dissenter? Well, neither did Mother Teresa. If every word 
he spoke were true, his demeanor would still be a lie.

     Anyway, reading the economist Henry Hazlitt in 
college, I realized that war is, morality aside, a huge 
waste of money. I'm no pacifist, mind you. When the 
jihadist camels are massed on our borders, I'll grab my 
musket as fast as the next man.

     The people who begin wars always lose them, and 
rightly so. Always, without exception. We know this 
because that's what the winners tell us when a war (alias 
"defense effort") ends. Has any victor ever said, mopping 
his laurel-bound brow in relief, "Golly, we were lucky to 
get away with starting that one"? Is that what Lincoln 
said? I think I'd remember if he had.

     When I started this column, that's what I meant to 
say. As you probably sensed.

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