Andrew Sullivan

In the New York Times Wednesday, he opined, as good ol’ boys might, that Lott has “been treated badly by the White House, I think he’s been treated badly by his colleagues, for what was certainly, in my opinion, not a hanging offense … The Democrats wouldn’t have kept it alive if conservatives had said let’s not keep it alive. The conservatives all piled on, and when the president in his speech last Thursday said what he did, that opened the door wider.” The last part is indisputable. The pressure on Lott was largely created by conservatives and Republicans. But Novak’s assumption is that Lott’s voiced nostalgia for segregation was no big deal, that it was a one-off gaffe. Is Novak aware that Lott had said just such a thing in public before? Is he aware of Lott’s almost bizarrely troglodytic voting record? Has he thought for a second what the implications of that remark were? After all, it wasn’t a gaffe, a joke. It was an argument. And a completely repulsive one.

There was more from Novak: “He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. The same [Republicans] were saying, ‘We can’t have a racist,’ then he comes out and says, ‘I’m for affirmative action,’ and they say, ‘Oh, we can’t have that.’” This statement assumes what some left-liberals assume: that your only two choices are to favor affirmative action or be a racist. But the whole point of the new conservative position on race is that there is another way — to empower minorities through greater choice in education, welfare reform, incentives for family cohesion, lower taxes and so on — that does not rely on quotas or crude racial categorization. If Novak hasn’t assimilated this, he’s as distant from the current conservative movement as Lott is.

The second fatuity came from Ann Coulter. She told the Times, “I don’t remember liberals being this indignant about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” This is just gob-smackingly weird. First off, what does it matter what “liberals” think about this? The question is: What does Coulter think about this? Was Lott right or wrong? Second, plenty of liberals were indignant about the 9/11 attacks — although a few leftists weren’t. To tar all liberals with the Sontagian brush is unfair. Some were indeed pusillanimous with regard to the Afghanistan campaign; many of the same people are being equally craven when facing down the threat from Saddam. But many other liberals saw what was attacked on 9/11 and are now part of the battle to protect the West. And it does no one any good to ignore this. Instead, we should welcome them aboard. Some of them, after all, were here from the beginning.

Bearism grew up in San Francisco at places like the revived Lone Star bar in the early 1990s and has metastasized since. From a bunch of heavy, hairy fellas getting together casually, it’s now a full-scale phenom, with “American Bear” magazine, a “bear flag,” bear conferences, a “Bear Book,” “Bearotica,” and on and on. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is physical appearance. “Bears” almost all have facial hair — the more the better. Of all the various characteristics of Beardom, this seems to be one of the most essential. The Ur-bears have bushy beards that meander down their necks and merge with a large forest of chest and back-hair to provide a sort of all-hair body environment. Bears are also big guys. Yes, I know that might come off as a bit of a euphemism. A townie friend of mine suggested making T-shirts for the week, with the slogan “Fat Is The New Black.” But obesity, while not unknown, is not that widespread. Bears at their most typical look like regular, beer-drinking, unkempt men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They have guts. They have furry backs. They don’t know what cologne is and they tend not to wear deodorant. One mode of interaction is the occasional sniff of each others’ armpits. Nature’s narcotic.

Bears are known secondly for their attitude. They’re friendly — more Yogi than “Bears Gone Wild.” They’re mellow. They’re flirtatious in a non-imposing kind of way. If a bear sees another hot-looking bear, his most likely expression will be the one word: “Woof.” (Yes, I know that sounds like a dog. But somehow it makes sense.) The sexual tension isn’t that tense, because the sexual imperative is less present than in other gay subcultures. This came home to me this year in Provincetown, because in a gay resort town in the summer, you get to see the various sub-subcultures intermingle or follow one another. The contrasts can be quite severe.

To give one example: We have what the locals call “Circuit Week” over July 4 when all the party boys and drug addicts show up to take drugs, dance and drink bottled water for days on end. I have no problem with that. But the perfect torsos, testosteroned rivalry, crystal-nerves and endless egg-whites all make for a somewhat overwrought time. When the bears arrive, all that unease evaporates. They’re cheerful; they don’t give a shit what others think of them; they’re more overtly social than sexual; they drink rather than do drugs; they seem, on the whole, older and far more grown-up than their party-boy cousins. They eat and drink and joke and cuddle and stroke and generally have a great time. And their mellowness is wonderfully infectious.

Whence the name? Well, it’s obvious in a way. They kinda look like bears. Big and burly and friendly, they are legions of Yogis, followed by quite a few Boo-boos. The smaller, younger ones tend to be known as “cubs.” The more muscular ones go by the name of “muscle-bears.” Some leaner types who aren’t that hairy but enjoy the atmosphere that follows the bears are known as “otters.” There are other nuances. Bears like to enjoy the outdoors and organize joint camping trips and festivals in the forests. They tend not to have kids; and they avoid politics. To the outside world, they are largely invisible, because they don’t fit the obvious stereotype of gay men, the kind that is featured prominently, and somewhat offensively, on “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” and “Boy Meets Boy.” These bears look more like the straight guys than the queer eyes.

But their masculinity is of a casual, unstrained type. One of the least reported but significant cultural shifts among gay men in recent years has been a greater ease with the notion of being men and a refusal to acquiesce in the notion that gayness is somehow in conflict with masculinity. In the past, gay manifestations of masculinity have taken a somewhat extreme or caricatured form — from the leathermen to the huge bodybuilders. Bears, to my mind, represent a welcome calming down of this trend. They are unabashedly masculine but undemonstrative about it. They are attractive precisely because they don’t try so hard. And they add to their outdoorsy gruffness an appealing interior softness. They have eschewed the rock-hard muscle torso for the round and soft and hairy belly.

As always, Camille Paglia gets it just about right, when she writes: “In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears’ fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell’s angel but the capacious bosom of the earth mother. They gay Bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.”

That captures something of their unforced maleness. But Paglia underestimates, I think, a rebellion among many gay men against both the feminizing impulses of the broader culture on the right and left and against prevailing norms in gay culture as a whole. In recent years, after all, men have come under withering attack — not just from the p.c. pomo left, which tends to view all forms of unabashed maleness as oppressive, but also from the nannying right, which views men as socially irresponsible sexual miscreants.

Bears are simply saying that they’re men first and unashamed of it. More, in fact. What they’re saying is that central to the gay male experience is an actual love of men. And men are not “boys,” they’re not feminized, hairless, fatless icons on a dance floor. They’re grumpy and kind and responsible, and also happy to be themselves. There is no contradiction between being a gay man and being a man as traditionally understood. And if that includes cracking open a six-pack and watching the game; or developing a beer-and-nachos belly; or working in a blue-collar job; or having the clothes sense of the average check-out guy; or preferring the company of men to women; then so be it.

But what bears also do, of course, is take this frumpy, ordinary image of undemonstrative masculinity and eroticize it. Instead of sexualizing the perfect abs or the biggest bicep, bears look at a mature man’s belly and see in it the essence of maleness and the motherlode of their sexual attraction. What women (and, now, the gay men on “Queer Eye”) often do to their men — clean them up, domesticate them, clothe them properly, groom them, tame them — is exactly what bears resist. Go to the Dug-Out at the edge of the West Side highway in New York on a Sunday afternoon, and you’ll find a den of cheerful, frisky, thick and hairy guys, all enjoying a few beers and their own gender. Or check out the club “XL” in London and find hundreds of big, fat, hairy blokes dancing to their hearts’ content until the early hours of the morning, without the slightest sense of self-awareness or embarrassment. In London, even the “pot-belly” is becoming formally eroticized.

Bears also resist the squeaky clean and feminized version of manhood that appears in most gay magazines and even pornography. Take a look at the Advocate and Out and you will barely find a man over 30 with a gut or a hairy chest anywhere. But that’s what most men — including gay men — end up like! Bears in this sense represent the maturation of gay male culture. For the first time, we have a critical mass of older generations of gay men who have always been out but who don’t identify with the boyishness and effeminacy of the old-school gay subculture. And they’re not looking to replicate or mimic the male-female relationship in any way. Yes. There are “bears” and “cubs.” But you are just as likely to find two mature, big guys who are simply into each other. As equals. As men.

Some of this aesthetic, of course, is rooted in class. Upper middle class and middle class bears tend to idealize the working class stiff; and working class bears, for the first time perhaps, find their natural state of physical being publicly celebrated rather than ignored. I made a point of asking multiple bears during Bear Week what they did for a living. Yes, there were architects and designers and writers. But there were also computer technicians, delivery truck drivers, construction workers, salesmen, and so on. Again, what we’re seeing, I think, is another manifestation of the growth and breadth of gay culture in the new millennium. As the gay world recovers from AIDS, and as the closet continues to collapse, the numbers of gay men keep growing and the diversity of what was once called the gay experience is exploding.

At some point, in fact, it might be asked if bears are a subset of gay culture or simply a culture to themselves. From Ptown, it’s pretty clear to me that the “circuit” set, for example, has next to nothing in common with bears and vice versa. Even the leather bars recognize bears as a discrete subculture. The impression of gayness that you get from, say, the New York Times’ “Sunday Styles” section, or the excrescent tripe in “Queer As Folk,” is light years away from what the bear subculture represents. In this sense, bears might be “post-gay” inasmuch as their fundamental identity is far more complex than any simple expression of their same-sex attraction.

And, as with most developments in gay culture, they could well influence straight culture as well. Bears, after all, are the straight guys in gay culture. Their very ordinariness makes them both more at ease with regular straight guys; but their very ordinariness in some ways is also extremely culturally subversive. Drag queens, after all, are hardly the cutting edge any more. Straight people love their gay people flaming, or easily cordoned off from the straight experience. Bears reveal how increasingly difficult this is. Their masculinity is indistinguishable in many ways from straight male masculinity — which accounts, in some ways, for their broader invisibility in the culture. They are both more integrated; and yet, by their very equation of regular masculinity with gayness, one of the more radical and transformative gay phenomena out there right now.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s a lovely exchange in the invaluable book “Bears on Bears” that captures some of the weirdness of trying to explain such a natural and cheerful development too abstractly. Rex Wockner, furry gay journalist, is talking to Wayne Hoffman, another Bear follower:

“REX WOCKNER: A few intellectual eastern bears may think it’s about subverting the dominant paradigm. Here on the West Coast, it’s about sex.

WAYNE HOFFMAN: It’s more about ignoring the dominant paradigm than rejecting it actively, in my humble opinion.

REX WOCKNER: It’s more about not using words like ‘dominant paradigm.’”

I take Rex’s point. In some ways, bears represent gay men’s long delayed embrace of their own masculinity in its simplest and sexiest form. In other ways, they represent gay men’s desire for normalcy, for a world in which their natural state of being men is neither constrained nor tortured nor contrived. In a strange and undemonstrative way, it’s therefore a sign of the extraordinary fluidity of a gay male culture that is changing out of all recognition before, perhaps, with accelerating integration, it disappears for good.

Check out Justice Kennedy’s moving description of the issue. The notion that it is merely about

“…the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim put forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse … When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.”

Wow. To tell the truth, I was surprised by the scope of the ruling. I had expected a far narrower decision based on Sandra Day O’Connor’s use of “equal protection.” But Kennedy seems to have won a critical majority around the notion that gays deserve the same privacy rights as straights. On the merits, he is surely right. Whether you agree or disagree with the notion that a right to privacy is in the Constitution, it’s been there for decades now and was inaugurated in order to protect straight people’s right to use contraception. Put another way, it was based on the notion that citizens have a right to non-procreative sexual intercourse in their own homes. And what is sodomy, if it isn’t non-procreative sexual intercourse? The remarkable thing about this ruling is therefore not that it occurred. It is that today’s Justices do not balk at simple logic in order to placate public prejudice.

Scalia’s withering dissent was intellectually weak, but its real impact may be to help the cause of full equality: that is, marriage rights. Scalia’s defense of the Texas law came down to two arguments: that an assertion of majority “morality” is justification enough for any law anywhere, regardless of its rationality; and that a law that covers only same-sex sodomy is not discriminatory toward homosexuals. Both ideas strike me as wrong. On the first count, surely the government does need to provide some kind of reasonable justification for a law expressing “morality” that doesn’t just rely on what people have always believed or always assumed. After all, anti-miscegenation laws had always existed and were supported by large majorities before they were struck down in 1967. And the central reason the Texas law was struck down was that its supporters couldn’t come up with an argument that justified the persecution of private sexual behavior, apart from the notion that stigmatizing gay sex was somehow good for families. How? They couldn’t say. Wouldn’t it be more supportive of families if it were extended to straights as well as gays? Again, no argument was given. Why? Because there is no credible argument.

After all, allowing sodomy for 97 percent of the population while barring it for 3 percent cannot possibly be defended as a law designed to prevent or deter sodomy. It was a law entirely constructed to stigmatize gay people. It had no other conceivable purpose. (It seems particularly fitting that it was used against an interracial gay couple in the case at hand.) And when “morality” is simply a rubric under which to persecute a minority, then we don’t really have the imposition of morality at all. We have the imposition of a prejudice. At least the Catholic Church makes no distinction between heterosexual sodomy and homosexual sodomy. In fact, I know of no religious or moral tradition that makes the distinction that Texas law made until today. Scalia is not therefore upholding any morality. He’s upholding bigotry.

As to his notion that the law doesn’t single out gays because two straight guys getting it on would be criminalized as well, that’s like saying that a law banning Jewish religious services is not anti-Jewish since gentiles are banned from conducting such services, too. It’s the kind of sophistry you need to deny the obvious intent of the Texas law.

But Scalia is right about one thing: Once you acknowledge the dignity of gays as a social class, once you have conceded that their private sexual and emotional lives cannot be reduced to a single sexual act, once you have made the law equal with respect to the private sex lives of heteros and homos, the logic of same-sex marriage becomes hard to resist.

To quote Scalia: “This reasoning leaves on pretty shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. Justice O’Connor seeks to preserve them by the conclusory statement that “preserving the traditional institution of marriage” is a legitimate state interest. But preserving the traditional institution of marriage is just a kinder way of describing the State’s moral disapproval of same-sex couples.”

Of course, that precise moral disapproval of same-sex couples — not sex acts, mind you, but couples — is precisely the “morality” that Scalia purports to uphold. It isn’t a reasonable morality, since it allows the “sin” of sodomy for the vast majority of people but denies it only to a small, stigmatized minority. It’s a system of social stigmatization that has its own circular, prejudiced rationale. But getting rid of that incoherent prejudice does make marriage the obvious next step:

“Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense at neutrality) ‘when sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring’; what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected under the Constitution’? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case ‘does not involve’ the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of the Court.”

Precisely. “Equality under the law” means something. And now, it inescapably means the right to marry — for all citizens and not just those with power. What happened June 26 was not just the closing of one awful chapter in social oppression. It contained the logic that will open a new era of dignity and equality for all citizens, regardless of sexual orientation. Celebrate. Rejoice. Remember.

And then re-energize the fight for marriage.

“There is no reason why an individual homosexual might not be a good and honorable person, any more than there is any reason why an individual heterosexual might not be a liar and a thief. In matters social and organizational, though, the sum is often greater than the parts, and it is not the one we should focus on, but the many. This, unfortunately, is a very difficult thing to get people to do in a highly individualistic culture like ours. ‘What about Joe? He’s homosexual, but a finer human being you could never wish to meet.’ Sure, we all know Joe; but his case tells us nothing about the probable behavior of an organization whose higher levels are 30, or 50, or 60 percent homosexual.”

So gay individuals can be OK. But give them any power or prominence in any institution, and all hell will break out. The inference from this is that gay men and women should simply not be appointed to prominent positions in our society; they should be barred — if they are “frank and open” — from positions of authority. “Pedophiles” and “pederasts” are just other words for homosexuals in Derbyshire’s world: “Please don’t send me e-mails arguing that pederasty has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality. I don’t believe it.”

According to Derbyshire, gays cannot be trusted. They have destroyed the Catholic Church; they will soon destroy the Episcopalian Church. They will, in fact, destroy any institution in which they are given a leading role: “Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality.” This last pitch is a truly worrying one. The religious right, having failed to convince society that the law should simply reflect their views because they believe them, have recently begun to argue that equality for gays is indistinguishable from oppression of straights. It’s completely zero-sum for them. Some of them even seem to believe that their own churches will be persecuted; that they will be denied the rights inherent in the First Amendment; and that compulsory sodomy is around the corner. They are — especially given the imminence of gay marriage and legalization of sodomy — afraid. So they exaggerate and hyperventilate.

Derbyshire equates “openly gay” with “proselytizing homosexual,” which seems particularly unfair to Jeffrey John, a new assistant bishop in the Church of England, who is openly gay but now celibate. The man is not only not proselytizing for gay sex; he’s given it up himself! His proselytizing consists entirely in his honesty about his sexual orientation.

Yet Derbyshire would have him break one of the Ten Commandments and bear false witness about himself. Notice further that a simple statement of fact is now interpreted as something aggressive, imposing, threatening. That is unhinged. I’ve been openly gay for a long time but I have absolutely no interest in whether anyone else is; I have never tried to persuade some straight guy to have sex with me or fall in love with me. I dare say I know a few more homos than Derb and very few of them see it as their mission to “proselytize” anyone. All they’re doing in being honest about their orientation is being honest about their orientation. It carries no more implications than someone telling me they have a wife or husband or kids, or that they’re Mormon or Italian.

But Derb’s belief that there is some more sinister motive at work is a direct result of some kind of fear. It’s very close to the kind of fear many used to have about Jews. Their very openness was a threat, even though they threatened absolutely no one. Even though most had no intention of proselytizing anyone, their very existence suggested proselytizing aggression to the majority. And when you read more of Derbyshire you find the same classic rhetorical tropes that once fueled fanatical anti-Semitism, i.e., that there were a few good individual Jews but, en masse, they threaten “good Christian families.” Put the term “Jew” in the place of “gay,” and you can see where Derbyshire is coming from: “The point is that open Jewishness is — not necessarily, but all too often — an infiltrating, exclusivist, corruptive, and destructive force.” “Any organization that admits frank and open Jews into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the Jewish ethos, and to excluding Christians and denigrating Christianity.”

You’d think that this would be the central story on the left in this country. As blogger Don Watkins explained: “Here are a bunch of brave souls fighting a tyrannical regime through the old liberal favorite of massive protests. Here’s the chance for them to get behind the cause of freedom without having to support war.”

So take a look at Indymedia, one of the activist left’s prime Internet Web sites. Blogger Meryl Yourish did. What did she find on the armed struggle against theocracy? Nada. Zilch. The top stories on San Francisco’s Indymedia site were as follows: “Rally & March Against War in Iraq, Philippines & the INS; Anti-war Movement Audio Retrospective — The Struggle Against Empire; Thousands at punk rock heroine Patti Smith anti-war benefit; Beat Generation Bookstore’s 50th Anniversary Draws Huge Crowd.”

Meanwhile, there’s a story to be told:

“It has become almost routine for us to go out at night, chant slogans, get beaten, lose some of our friends, see our sisters beaten, and then return home. Each night we set to the streets only to be swept away the next dawn by agents of the regime. Two nights ago, on Amirabad Street, we wrote ‘Down with Khomeini’ on the ground. Before long, the mullah’s vigilantes attacked us on their motorcycles. They struck a female student before my eyes so harshly that she was no longer able to walk. As she fell to the ground, four members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah surrounded her, kicking her. When I and two other students threw stones at them so that they would leave her alone, they threatened us. We escaped into a lane and hid in a house whose owner, an old lady, had left the door open for us. A few minutes later, we saw the young lady being carried away by riot police, her feet dragging on the ground, her shattered teeth hanging out of her still-bleeding mouth. At least three of my best friends have been detained; nobody knows anything about their fate.”

Where did this piece appear? The National Review, of course. In fact, the most comprehensive coverage of the nascent Iranian revolution has been on the right. Much of the antiwar left has sadly long since stopped caring about the actual freedom of people under oppressive regimes, except, of course, if their plight is a way to blame or excoriate the United States. The antiwar left’s blindness toward the evil of Saddam is now compounded by its refusal to grapple with the next great part of the struggle against Islamo-fascism.

Check out some of the more mainstream publications of the left: The Nation’s home page has nothing — nothing — about Iran on it. Search for Iran on its Web site and you get more results still gloating over the Iran-Contra scandal than anything that’s going on in Iran today. “What Liberal Media?” blogger Eric Alterman has said nothing as the story has unfolded. This magazine has been a little better — but not by much. The Boston Globe editorialized — but mainly against what it sees as counterproductive American support for the dissidents. The New York Times has covered the news but has yet to put its full weight behind the story. The BBC, to its credit, has provided several excellent reports.

The question is: Why? Could anyone on the left actually sympathize with the sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic theocrats in Tehran? Of course not. But it seems that many of them hate the American right more than they hate foreign tyranny. A revolution in Iran might serve to cast a better light on President Bush’s Middle East policy — and that’s so terrible a possibility that some leftists simply prefer to look the other way. Lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias let it slip that “these stories about the Iranian student movement have been so relentless hyped on rightwing sites that I think we on the left have been shying away from the story.” That’s an excuse? Mercifully for Yglesias, it isn’t.

If you want to understand better why the American left has been losing every debate it has joined recently, you could do worse than observe its indifference to the fight for freedom in Iran. The position reeks of myopia, self-regard and opportunism. Those qualities are not political winners, and they don’t deserve to be. Until the left attends to its principles as meticulously as it attends to its resentments, it will lose the battle for ideas for good. There’s still time to reverse this — and help the cause of human freedom as well. Let’s hope the left comes to its senses before the revolution is over.

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But Rich had an administration to bash. And in the wake of this extraordinary military victory, it was vital for left-wing ideologues to find something — anything — with which to denigrate the liberation. Rich had found his cause célèbre. And boy did he unload:

“Let it never be said that our government doesn’t give a damn about culture. It was on April 10, the same day the sacking of the National Museum in Baghdad began, that a subtitled George W. Bush went on TV to tell the Iraqi people that they are ‘the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.’ And so what if America stood idly by while much of the heritage of that civilization — its artifacts, its artistic treasures, its literary riches and written records — was being destroyed as he spoke? It’s not as if we weren’t bringing in some culture of our own to fill that unfortunate vacuum. It was on April 10 as well, by happy coincidence, that the United States announced the imminent arrival of nightly newscasts from Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer and Brit Hume on newly liberated Iraqi TV. Better still, the White House let it be known, again on that same day, that it was seeking $62 million from Congress for a 24-hour Middle East Television Network that would pipe in dubbed versions of prime-time network programming. Goodbye, dreary old antiquity! Hello, ‘Friends’!”

It was too tempting a target. When you’re a Manhattanite culture-macher like Rich, the one thing you know is that you’re smarter, more civilized and more intelligent than anyone who might ever call himself a Republican, let alone the mindless hicks now running the country. A chance to embarrass the idiot rubes in Washington was just too good to pass up. Rich wasn’t the only one. I averred that what appeared to have happened was close to unforgivable. But I didn’t say much more because it was still extremely murky. Was it an inside job? How many treasures had disappeared? How valuable were they? These kinds of questions are exactly the hard ones that people needed to ask. I figured we’d find out in due course once the dust had settled. At the time, Donald Rumsfeld opined to Tim Russert: “I’ll bet you anything that if they — when order is restored, and we have a more permissive environment, that there will be opportunities to ask people to return some of those things that were taken. We’ve already found people returning supplies to hospitals … And it isn’t something that someone allows or doesn’t allow. It’s something that happens.” For this, Rumsfeld was ridiculed in this very magazine by Joe Conason.

According to Rich, there were only two possibilities for interpreting the sketchy reports coming out of Baghdad:

“Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’?”

Rich’s hyperventilation continued:

“It’s hard to put a loss this big in perspective. I asked Mahrukh Tarapor, the associate director for exhibitions at the Met, to try. Ms. Tarapor has spent the past six years seeking Mesopotamian holdings from museums throughout the world for ‘Art of the First Cities,’ an all too timely exhibition that by coincidence is opening on May 8. ‘It’s almost a new emotion,’ she said, noting that she has felt it only once before, when the Taliban destroyed the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan two years ago. ‘One is almost conditioned to accept even human death as part of life. The destruction of art — of our heritage — goes very deep in our unconscious. To a museum person, the worst thing you can experience is damage to an object on your watch. For the magnitude of what happened in Iraq, you have no words. You lose faith in your fellow man.’”

So who was right — Rich and Conason or Rummy? Rummy, of course. He almost always is.

Check out the latest news from Baghdad, reported in the Washington Post and also by Channel Four in London, itself a left-leaning news organization. Here are the money paragraphs:

“The museum was indeed heavily looted, but its Iraqi directors confirmed today that the losses at the institute did not number 170,000 artifacts as originally reported in news accounts. Actually, about 33 priceless vases, statues and jewels were missing … ‘There are only 33 pieces from the main collections that are unaccounted for,’ [Donny] George [the director general of research and study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities] said. “Not 47. Some more pieces have been returned.’ Museum staff members had taken some of the more valuable items home and are now returning them … The confusion arose, in part, because many of the museum’s best pieces had been removed long before U.S. troops entered Baghdad, George said. In 1990, before the Persian Gulf War, 179 boxes containing the Treasures of Nimrud were hidden in a vault beneath the Central Bank of Iraq, where the items — gold and ivory pieces unearthed from four royal tombs in 1989 — remained untouched for more than a decade. The collection was unearthed this week after the basement where the vault is located was drained of sewage water that had filled it … George said a second ‘secret vault’ was used to secure many of the other exhibition-quality statues, figurines, vases, cups and clay tablets inscribed with hymns and homage to kings and gods. That vault was filled during the weeks before U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq in March. ‘It is all safe and sound,’ George said.”

So there you have it. Yes, there was a lamentable outbreak of looting — mainly of up to 3,000 minor objects of limited value. Yes, some 33 priceless artifacts from the main collection are missing, but some are being returned, meaning that Rumsfeld’s bet with Russert was once again a shrewd call on the part of the secretary of defense. “They won’t talk about it, but almost everything was saved,” John Russell, an Iraq expert at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art, told the Washington Post.

As to the critics — the Riches and Conasons who hyped reports they couldn’t confirm in order to trash the administration? A correction would be nice, wouldn’t it? Just because Maureen Dowd can get away with untruths and distortions with no corrections, why should Rich? Howell Raines has now left the building. Some kind of factual accountability should now be restored. Rich needs to correct, explain and apologize. But I won’t hold my breath.

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