Boxing Women; Armenian Holocaust; The Arab Vote; Impoverished Glamour
Mind you, I have not read the books and do not plan to. Kate Sekules and Lynn Picket took up boxing in their mid-30s, currently edit or write for glossy magazines and chose Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn to take out their anger against?well, Sekules against the boredom of Manhattan's aerobics industry, Picket against a cheating husband whom she had recently divorced. In the review I read Picket plans to revenge herself in the ring: "I'm full of rage and I want to beat someone up. I want to know what it is to have physical power over men. I want to inspire fear. I want to matter."
Now if any of you think comedy is dead, read the above quote and laugh your head off. Everyone, even the most ardent feminist, knows that the sweet science is a man's game, and for a woman to inspire fear in a man inside the ring is, well, as likely as Bill Clinton leading an infantry charge against an enemy machine gun pillbox.
This is how our Lord intended it. Women should compete against women, and men against men. Personally, I prefer to watch women's tennis, more variation in their game, but as they play only best of three sets, rather than best of five, I do not think they deserve equal prize money. (They get it because of feminist agitprop, not merit.)
But back to boxing. When I started as a young man, one never, ever saw a lady inside a boxing gym. There is something almost obscene about seeing women pummeling each other. Even more obscene is the idea of a man punching a woman in the nose. The female neck is slim, long and not made to withstand a hard jab, not to mention a right cross or a hook. A boxer's neck is his most precious commodity. It's the neck that decides whether one has a glass chin or not.
I switched from boxing and wrestling to karate and judo when I was in my early 30s. The latter were softer forms of combat. During a training session in Japan a long time ago, I came up against a woman karateka who charged into me with such fury I had to defend myself for real. I punched her midsection and she burst into tears. I immediately apologized and walked her off the mat. That is when her husband, a Japanese instructor, came up and asked me to spar with him. The irony of the hubby coming to her aid was not lost to the rest of the training camp.
Something similar took place in Gleason's Gym. Again, I quote from the book review in The New York Times: "Never tell a woman what to do if she happens to be wearing boxing gloves," writes Picket, the less sympathetic of the two. Picket punches a stranger who had brought his young son to the gym and was shouting unwelcome instructions to her while she sparred. "Ironically, when Picket really does need to defend herself, she can't: after her nose is bloodied by an overaggressive sparring partner, Picket drags her slight-bodied, sensitive boyfriend to the gym and threatens to dump him if he doesn't defend her honor by threatening her assailant." Some boxer! Some boyfriend! That's one lady I am not planning to date in the near future.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. The Japanese instructor who asked to spar with me had watched his wife, an American of course, use needlessly strong attacks during a prearranged one-on-one fighting exercise. He purposely left himself open so I could score against him. I held back and so did he. He was obviously trying to teach his little woman something he had failed to teach her at home or in the dojo. The strong do not attack the weak, not even at Gleason's, and women have no business sparring with men.
Having said all that, I think both ladies showed great courage in taking up the sweet science, because there's no sport that makes one feel more alone and vulnerable than boxing. As the great Joe Louis said when he was told a certain opponent (I think it was Billy Conn) would be impossible to hit, "He can run but he can't hide." These women chose not to hide, and that's good.
When was it ever different, you might legitimately ask. In much of feudal Christendom, families locked up their girls for fear of abduction by the squire. In the great empires of Islam pretty girls were flattered that they could be in the sultan's harem. Unfortunately, under the Ottomans, for example, the average age of harem women hovered around 17, due to the attrition caused by palace intrigues and supplanted sultans. In the waters below the seraglio, it was said, a forest of drowned wives swayed with the current.
Back to the present and seemingly a better world. When I did a story on prostitution and pornography in Russia not long ago, I found that Moscow housed more beauty per square mile than I'd seen in all my travels. And Russian women carried a whiff of romanticism and poetry in their looks, rather like European women in wartime. The phenomenon, I realized, derived from the fusion of youth with the early experience of sadness. Russian women had abundant reason to be sad, but then they always have. This time, they'd suddenly awakened to the post-Soviet collapse of male honor and competence. The vilest mafia ogres could earn livings as racketeers, while the educated, refined romantic lead of their dreams remained hopelessly ill-adjusted. Often they took money from their ogres and maintained their beatnik musicians on the side.
During my years in a boys' boarding school in England, we knew very few women, so we theorized a lot. We'd look at the Playboy offerings and imagine sex, but we sensed that life with such girls led to the closed, if luxuriant, circle of sensuality. The girls we'd marry would be different, we felt. We could look at them and through them beyond to the sonorous landscape of English culture, to sunlit lawns and country houses and church spires. They would know the high tradition of Shakespeare and Keats. Indeed, they would embody it.
Spare me the feminist egalitarian we're-all-the-same-under-the-skin dismissals. The fact is beauty throws up a penumbra of imagery around itself and triggers the synapses willy-nilly toward the sublime.
So when I went to Moscow and looked at the great concrete gulag of buildings and saw the lovely girls, I wondered what the men visualized when they fell in love. Indeed, I asked them?both the beatniks and the mafia oligarchs?and got no answers. Since all these girls came from gray cabins with cheap furniture and cracked toilets, and walked among dim poky corridors the livelong day sheathed in anomalous designer garb?what poetry and grandeur did their beauty evoke? And since the loveliest of them, at one time or another, took money for being "girlfriends" or "models," in what did the spousal imagination take refuge?
Which brings us back to Brenda Schad and our own predicament. Take another look at those pictures and free-associate. St. Barth's? East Hampton? Limos on 5th Ave. and the like? (My apologies to Ms. Schad, who may actually abide in a disused Gothic nunnery and collect Tibetan insects.) Point is, that's the glamour we're fed, and a pretty impoverished one, too.
The reality is even drabber. Office blocks, desktops, consumption, commerce and the Web. Okay, throw in cable tv. Good food and magazines. But as Wordsworth said, "whither is fled the visionary gleam?/where is it now, the glory and the dream?" When I asked Moscow girls about the morality of being professional girlfriends, most were robustly unashamed. Some didn't answer, thinking I'd never understand. Those who did said the same thing. How were they different from Western girls who tried to befriend or marry men with money or good jobs? Or good families, which amounted to the same thing? We called ours capitalism, theirs prostitution. Which sounded a bit like the old lesbian-feminist argument about marriage. Only that invoked shame on Western women for collaborating, whereas the Natashas felt no such thing.
It boils down to this: If we beseeched Brenda Schad?who is in fact a highly successful legitimate career model?to take her away from all this, what would we take her to, and from what? That penumbra of images should supply the answer. More limos and St. Barth beaches? Escape from commercial dross to commercial glitz with a commercial beauty? My suspicion is that Ms. Schad has supped full of such delights. So what transcendence have we to offer our great beauties, to take them finally away to that glimmer of azure beyond the reach of McDonald's cartons?
In Jerusalem the other day, I visited the Armenian Museum in Armenian Patriarchate Road between the Jaffa Gate and the Western Wall of the Old City. Its dusty shelves and overgrown garden testify to the fact that it receives few tourists or scholars, but it is worth seeing. It is not a holocaust museum, but a collection of artifacts from the first Christian kingdom in history: Armenia's icons, altar pieces, embroidered clerical robes, paintings, swords, armor and chalices. Midway through the many vaulted rooms of the stone palace housing the treasures, the genocide takes over. "On 24 April 1915," a card announces next to photographs of murdered Armenians, "prominent Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople were rounded up and massacred."
In fact, the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918 began much like the Russian and German destruction of Polish society, with the killing of officers. The Ottomans were fighting a war for the survival of their empire, because the Young Turks had foolishly entered the Great War on the German side. Armenians in the Ottoman army were taken out of their units in Feb. 1915, their hands bound, and slaughtered. Next came the intellectuals, clergy, teachers, rich traders and politicians in the prosperous Armenian colony that had thrived, like the Jews of Vienna until the Anschluss, in Constantinople. They were massacred on April 24, 1915, the date that Armenians have commemorated ever since as the beginning of their annihilation. Loyal subjects of the Sultan, Constantinople's Armenians were shocked to be singled out for murder. Due to Ottoman fear of Armenian demands for Allied assistance in establishing their own state in Turkish territory?the same demand made by Zionists and Arab nationalists?the Sublime Porte accused all Armenians of treason. Hitler later made a similar accusation of disloyalty against Jews in the Reich, calling them Bolsheviks, with about as much justification.
With 300 of the Armenian elite out of the way, the Ottomans turned on the rest of the population. The first to go were about 5000 poorer Armenians in the imperial capital. Other Armenians in the big towns were deported, again like the Jews in Germany, to the provinces?in this case to the deserts of Mesopotamia. Some of those who did not die of exhaustion or hunger were burned alive. In one incident at Deir ez-Zour on the Euphrates, the Turkish Governor tied up 2000 Armenian children, all of whose parents had already died, and set them alight on gasoline-soaked pyres. The American Military Mission estimated that the Turks killed between 500,000 and one million Armenians in 1916, a year after the massacres began and two years before they came to an end.
A month after the Constantinople killings of 1915, the Allied Powers, admittedly engaged in a war with Turkey, declared the genocide "crimes against humanity and civilization," the former a term they would use against another defeated power at the end of the next world war. Winston Churchill and other British leaders wanted the Turkish officials responsible put on trial for war crimes. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador, wrote to Washington, "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion." At the end of the war, Morgenthau and Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum that said 750,000 Armenians had taken refuge in Russia and were in desperate need of humanitarian care. Little was forthcoming, because newly Sovietized Russia was under an Allied embargo.
Most American presidents have recognized that the Armenians suffered what Morgenthau called "race extermination." The most recent was Bill Clinton, who on Armenia's memorial day every year lamented "the deportations and massacres of roughly one and a half million Armenians..." His concern, however, in a way that can only be described as Clintonesque, allowed him to persuade Congress to drop its resolution condemning the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Clinton put the truth, that unwelcome visitor to the Lincoln bedroom during his tenure, underneath a big bucket whose contents included American arms sales to Turkey, Turkey's permission for American planes to fly bombing runs over the Iraqi plains where so many Armenians died in 1916 from Incirlik Air Base, and Turkey's "strategic alliance" with Israel.
By refusing even to include the murders of Armenians among the official genocides, Tony Blair is imitating once again his mentor in Washington. Alas, poor Tony. Upon whose lack of integrity will he model his own when Bill departs? I suppose either Al or GWB is up to the job.
Zogby, a founder and president of the AAI, had the audience in his palm. He told of what he used to hear from local politicians in Dearborn, MI, 20 years ago, when Arab immigration began to accelerate. "They're ruining our darn good way of life," he said, mimicking the flat upper-Midwest accent as skillfully as a professional comic. But now, he noted, while they might feel the same way, they behave differently. They've given us the key to the city (he uses an Arabic term), and City Hall shuts down for Muslim holidays. They've learned to respect the power of our votes.
Other "community" speakers follow. Many tell tales of victimization, of prejudice encountered in jobs, with the police, the courts?the standard fare of contemporary identity politics.
But some formulations are striking, beautiful in the reach of their ambition. A young man, a University of Chicago grad student, injects ever so gently his thoughts about the dismal state of the Muslim nations, their stagnant economies, their corrupt and undemocratic governments. In America, he says, we can become a beacon, a force to regenerate the entire Muslim world. Nothing here about the melting pot or the difficult but joyous challenge of becoming American, but grand nonetheless.
The AAI held similar forums in Michigan, in Ohio, in New Jersey, in northern Virginia. In the Washington suburbs, the crowd was wealthier. Diplomats and second-generation immigrants mingled with yuppies with business cards. Instead of prayer, there is a moment of silence for those slain in the Jerusalem intifada, and a cash bar was open before dinner. I was touched when a young software consultant sought me out after my presentation to say that the American bombing of Serbia?done ostensibly to assist the Muslim Albanians?revolted him as much as the endless war against Iraq.
New Muslim immigrants and third-generation Arab-Americans alike are horrified by Israel's riot-control tactics; hungry for an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital; against the murderous sanctions on Iraq; and livid about the "secret evidence" provisions of American law that have led to the imprisonment without trial of several Muslim activists.
Muslim organizations claim six million faithful in the U.S., the same number as Jews; about a third are African-American converts. There are more than three million Arabs, the majority Christian. Because many are new immigrants, their vote doesn't yet match their numbers. But the number of Arab-Americans has increased by 75 percent since the last census. This year in New York, pro-Palestinian demonstrations equaled pro-Israel rallies in size. In 10 years, some politicians who stayed away will show up as well.
The data are not conclusive, but it appears that Arabs and Muslims (different but overlapping categories) were the only new "ethnic" groups to lean Republican in the last election. Despite his full-court press for Hispanic votes, George W. Bush's 31 percent rate nationally with them was lower than Ronald Reagan's; and in California, no better than former Gov. Pete Wilson's. Bush also lost with Asian-Americans, and was crushed by traditionally liberal blacks (9-1) and Jews (4-1).
But an AAI poll of Arab voters showed Bush carrying the Arab vote by 46 to 38 percent over Gore; Nader (of Lebanese descent) garnered 13 percent. And in a broader if unscientific survey of 1774 Muslim voters done by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Bush won 72 percent.
Latino immigration now provides America's largest stream of new "ethnic" voters; if it continues at current rates with no modification in the admission criteria, the GOP will gradually fade toward permanent lesser-party status, rather like it has in New York City.
By the same token, growth in Arab and Muslim numbers and political participation is likely to erode Israel's unique status in the U.S. Congress. In this election, for the first time, both news organizations and some politicians acknowledged that there's an Arab side to consider and voters to please. A generation from now, Washington may be no more concerned with its "special relationship" with the Jewish state than France is.
Followers of the New York intellectual battles will appreciate an irony here. Maintaining high rates of immigration, so obviously contrary to the GOP's political self-interest, has had no sturdier backers than the neoconservatives who began flocking into the Republican Party in the 1980s. Great swatches of neocon guru Norman Podhoretz's last book My Love Affair with America consist of polemics against WASP immigration reformers past and present; leading neoconservatives have lobbied fiercely beyond the scenes to banish immigration reform arguments from conservative magazines and newspapers. Usually they have succeeded, and their victories have turned the GOP into a high-immigration party.
Perhaps this shall be history's judgment on that celebrated band that emerged from places like the Trotskyist Alcove No. 1 at City College (Irving Kristol's old hangout) and went on to become the most influential faction of the postwar era: that they brought about the demise of both the Republican Party and American support for Israel.