Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Enough is enough! Lazaro's a strutting bullyboy, Marisleysis is a hysterical narcissist; Ralph Nader may get my vote; and Phyllis Diller vs. Gloria Steinem.
Apr 26, 2000 | At our Easter family reunion this past weekend, there were loud cheers and applause as we watched the first footage of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents storming into Lazaro Gonzalez's house in Miami and escaping with the weeping Elian in a white van. When that strutting bullyboy, Lazaro, or his hysterical narcissist of a daughter, Marisleysis, appeared onscreen, we hissed en masse.
Enough is enough! Thanks to the shilly-shallying of the clumsy Clinton administration, the American people have been subjected to five endless months of the farcical Miami melodrama. But please, ye gods, spare us the further manipulations of Republican politicians, who want to drag the damned thing out through the election season.
This column has maintained from the start that the then-5-year-old Elian, who had just seen his mother drown in her failed flight to Florida, should have immediately been returned to his father in Cuba. I have never been an admirer of either Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, who was naively lionized by so many members of my generation, with their bourgeois-liberal guilt.
But nature trumps politics. A traumatized boy's biological relation to his sole surviving parent should have automatically determined his disposition by U.S. authorities. My reasoning here parallels that of my militant support of women's reproductive freedom: Every conception, in my extreme (and atheistic) view, belongs to a woman by right of mother nature. Society, embodied in the father, may make its claims only at birth, when the fetus becomes a citizen and falls under civil protection.
Feminism has been dealt a serious blow by the inability of Janet Reno (the first female attorney general) to effectively strategize during either the 1993 standoff at Waco, Texas, or the Cuban-American stalemate in Miami. Both incidents escalated out of control, needlessly inflaming and dividing the public.
Reno's appointment was an affirmative action scheme (oiled by Hillary Clinton's ne'er-do-well Florida brother) that shows the limits of feminist finagling. Equal opportunity for women must be followed by first-rate performance. But as generalissimo of the Department of Justice, Reno has screwed up again and again, inevitably postponing the day when an American woman can become a credible candidate for commander in chief.
Reno humiliated herself and her office by flying to Miami to dignify that creep Lazaro with a face-to-face appeal -- as if he were the pope. And her battle plans stank. Though I support the pre-dawn raid, I think there should first have been a calm, pro forma attempt to pick up the boy in daylight hours, ideally by a small cadre of unarmed female agents in street clothes. Had they been rebuffed, the troops should then have been marshaled for a surprise assault.
Like the rest of my Italian-American family, I find pathetically laughable Reno's notion that the warring Gonzalez relatives could ever (then or now) sit down in a room and "come together as a family" to resolve their differences. The touchy-feely "Oprah" style of therapeutic schmoozing is light-years removed from the smoking scorched earth of the vengeful, honor-driven Latin temperament.
For months, Reno obtusely misread the macho, intransigent Lazaro Gonzalez in exactly the way that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright misread the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, who faced down all of NATO's firepower. The conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, slammed the Argentine generals back on their heels during the 1982 Falkland Islands War. We must lay the groundwork for a female president right now: As I told Paula Zahn on Fox News Channel's "The Edge" last week, ambitious young women should avoid the ghetto of women's studies programs and focus instead on military history and strategy.
Elsewhere on the political front, many readers have asked why, as a libertarian Democrat who cast my primary ballot for Bill Bradley, I am looking at Green Party candidates this fall rather than supporting the Libertarian Party. Over the years, I've gotten many rather dreary mailings from the Libertarian Party, including invitations to speak at its conventions and even to compete for its presidential nomination. (But I'm just a cultural analyst, an on-the-sidelines observer and coach with no more talent for political office than -- well, Hillary Clinton.)
While I do agree with many of the platform tenets of the Libertarian Party, I'm troubled by its failure to highlight social responsibility as an ethical principle. Communism and socialism (in its purest form) have been historical failures, stunting both economic and intellectual development. I support capitalism as the nurturer of free thought as well as the liberator of women, who have financial independence for the first time since mastodons roamed the Earth.
But I passionately feel that every affluent society must respond to those in need. Yes, taxation is at root an infringement of private rights by the state. But an enlightened education would develop social conscience in the young, so that businessmen would not loot their corporations by inflated executive salaries or ravage and befoul the environment. Moderate regulation will always be necessary to safeguard the public health.
While I oppose state intrusion into private behavior (the foundation of libertarian philosophy), I admire the public-works projects of my ancient Roman ancestors and feel that the state should guarantee decent living conditions, core education and basic medical services for its citizens. This does not mean (in the Kremlin-esque Hillary model) government-controlled health care: On the contrary, we need a mix of private practice and public services to maintain the unparalleled quality of the American medical system.
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