OT; Ship of Fools

Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America's swashbuckling
neocons

The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth ?
and as for Guantanamo Bay, it's practically a holiday camp... The
annual cruise organised by the 'National Review', mouthpiece of right-
wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-
toting, God-fearing Republicans.

By Johann Hari

Published: 13 July 2007

I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and
burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing
Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks
nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. "Is he your only child?" I
ask. "Yes," she says. "Do you have a child back in England?" she asks.
No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The
Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

I am getting used to these moments ? when gentle holiday geniality
bleeds into... what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty,
scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of
Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear
her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake
up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand
lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise
the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off
to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America
at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and
smiles. " Then things'll change."

I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five
bars, a casino ? and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq
war has been "an amazing success". Global warming is not happening. The
solitary black person claims, "If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal
rights, then God bless them." And I have nowhere to run.

From time to time, National Review ? the bible of American conservatism ?
organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The
rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative
cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a
journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in ? and find out what
American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren't
listening.

I. From sweet to suicide bomber

I arrive at the dockside in San Diego on Saturday afternoon and stare up
at the Oosterdam, our home for the next seven days. Filipino boat hands
are loading trunks into the hull and wealthy white folk are gliding onto
its polished boards with pale sun parasols dangling off their arms.

The Reviewers have been told to gather for a cocktail reception on the
Lido, near the very top of the ship. I arrive to find a tableau from
Gone With the Wind, washed in a thousand shades of grey. Southern
belles ? aged and pinched ? are flirting with old conservative warriors.
The etiquette here is different from anything I have ever seen. It takes
me 15 minutes to realise what is wrong with this scene. There are no big
hugs, no warm kisses. This is a place of starchy handshakes. Men
approach each other with stiffened spines, puffed-out chests and
crunching handshakes. Women are greeted with a single kiss on the cheek.
Anything more would be French.

I adjust and stiffly greet the first man I see. He is a judge, with the
craggy self-important charm that slowly consumes any judge. He is from
Canada, he declares (a little more apologetically), and is the founding
president of "Canadians Against Suicide Bombing". Would there be many
members of "Canadians for Suicide Bombing?" I ask. Dismayed, he suggests
that yes, there would.

A bell rings somewhere, and we are all beckoned to dinner. We have been
assigned random seats, which will change each night. We will, the
publicity pack promises, each dine with at least one National Review
speaker during our trip.

To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my
right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era
Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue,
they explain in precise Northern tones. "You must live near the UN
building," the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the
entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. "They
should suicide-bomb that place," he says. They all chuckle gently. How
did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six
seconds?

The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you're a European,
one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries
on the cities she's visited. Her companion adds, "I went to Paris, and
it was so lovely." Her face darkens: "But then you think ? it's
surrounded by Muslims." The first lady nods: "They're out there, and
they're coming." Emboldened, the bearded Floridian wags a finger and
says, "Down the line, we're not going to bail out the French again." He
mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, "I can't hear you, Jacques!
What's that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can't hear you!"

Now that this barrier has been broken ? everyone agrees the Muslims are
devouring the French, and everyone agrees it's funny ? the usual
suspects are quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is "almost a traitor".
John McCain is "crazy" because of "all that torture". One of the Park
Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to " thank
God for Fox News". As the wine reaches the Floridian, he
announces, "This cruise is the best money I ever spent."

They rush through the Rush-list of liberals who hate America, who want
her to fail, and I ask them ? why are liberals like this? What's their
motivation? They stutter to a halt and there is a long, puzzled
silence. " It's a good question," one of them, Martha, says finally. I
have asked them to peer into the minds of cartoons and they are
suddenly, reluctantly confronted with the hollowness of their
creation. "There have always been intellectuals who want to tell people
how to live," Martha adds, to an almost visible sense of relief. That's
it ? the intellectuals! They are not like us. Dave changes the subject,
to wash away this moment of cognitive dissonance. "The liberals don't
believe in the constitution. They don't believe in what the founders
wanted ? a strong executive," he announces, to nods. A Filipino waiter
offers him a top-up of his wine, and he mock-whispers to me, "They all
look the same! Can you tell them apart?" I stare out to sea. How long
would it take me to drown?

II. "We're doing an excellent job killing them."

The Vista Lounge is a Vegas-style showroom, with glistening gold edges
and the desperate optimism of an ageing Cha-Cha girl. Today, the scenery
has been cleared away ? "I always sit at the front in these shows to see
if the girls are really pretty and on this ship they are ug-lee," I hear
a Reviewer mutter ? and our performers are the assorted purveyors of
conservative show tunes, from Podhoretz to Steyn. The first of the
trip's seminars is a discussion intended to exhume the conservative
corpse and discover its cause of death on the black, black night of 7
November, 2006, when the treacherous Democrats took control of the US
Congress.

There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few
moments to realise exactly what it is. All the tropes that conservatives
usually deny in public ? that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is
fighting a class war on behalf of the rich ? are embraced on this
shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are
fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won't let the weak-kneed
liberals lose it. "It's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but
who's 'we'?" the writer Dinesh D'Souza asks angrily. "The left won by
demanding America's humiliation." On this ship, there are no Viet Cong,
no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D'Souza
says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, "of course" Republican
politics is "about class. Republicans are the party of winners,
Democrats are the party of losers."

The panel nods, but it doesn't want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork,
Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from
beneath low-hanging jowls: "The coverage of this war is unbelievable.
Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying.
Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing
them."

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the
preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says, "The
American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational
reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is,
as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, "I wish it was true that, because
we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that
people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they
return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like
their editor. The ageing historian Bernard Lewis ? who was deputed to
stiffen *** Cheney's spine in the run-up to the war ? declares, "The
election in the US is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on
a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for
whatever comes next." This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is
what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break
for coffee.

A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is
opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and
William Buckley ? two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party ?
begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking ? "I have lots of ex-
friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on
the right, too," he rants ?and Buckley says to the chair, " Just take
the mike, there's no other way." He says it with a smile, but with heavy
eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11
American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs.
Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who travelled
through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in
America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a
bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has
been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims: "There were
WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in
total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It
couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He
is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and " thank God" for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the
National Review in 1955 ? when conservatism was viewed in polite society
as a mental affliction ? and he has always been sceptical of appeals
to " the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of
Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless
Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world view
that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world.
He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly
to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps
at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war
reluctantly, because *** Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD
primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were
shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was
hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "
rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was
nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to
the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning." The audience
cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them
confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a
tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and
says, " Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to
suggest dementia.

continues:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2766040.ece

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