Dan Swanson

A study by public-health researchers at Johns Hopkins says that estimates of deaths in Iraq since we did that nation the great service of bringing them democracy are way low, that the likelihood is 600,000 have died. Though they say the number could be as low as 400,000 and as high as 800,000.

The study suggests once again that we have little idea what's going on in Iraq. Yesterday Gen. George Casey Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said he doesn't imagine the death toll is higher than 55,000. That's a tenfold difference, between 55,000 and 600,000. But not a controversy in the papers. What if people on the Upper East Side said they thought 20 people, not two, had died in the Corey Lidle plane crash yesterday, wouldn't the discrepancy be in the headlines?

I wonder if the press's general indifference on this study doesn't reflect its inhibitions about describing the Iraq war: if we come out and call it a disaster, then there will have to be major consequences domestically, and we're not ready for that. Too many important people are implicated.

Even more significant, as the writer Dan Swanson points out, the argument against withdrawing completely has been that U.S. forces are all that's preventing a bloodbath. These figures suggest that that argument is an imperial vanity.

I am a Yankee hater (I grew up in Baltimore). My friend Dan Swanson is also a Yankee-hater, of the Chicago White Sox variety. I polled him on his feelings following the Yankees sweep of the world champions this past weekend in the Bronx:

I don't worry about it. I barely paid it any attention. I did record all the people who made nasty comments to me or left messages on my answering machine. I will retaliate at a time of my choosing. At a time of my choosing.

A smirk is alright. Or saying, Hey what happened to you guys? But the people who make nasty comments are people who are sure that their team will win all the big games. They should know that the time to gloat is not in July. The time to gloat is the end of the season, when you have a whole winter's gloating before you.

This fan looks at the standings. The White Sox are the second best team in baseball right now. The Indians are below us, but a few mistakes and we could be in their position. I have sympathy for you; we have never been a losing team for ten years in a row. Your fortitude is remarkable. But Yankee fans have a sense of entitlement, based on their being in the playoffs every year since '95. They don't have gratitude for that, as you or I would. We are thankful just to get into the post-season, they think that's their right. They've been in every year, including two years ago, when they had what most people would agree was the biggest collapse in the history of sport.

Commenter Rowan Berkeley has accused me of "Jewish Orientalism." It's not the first time; my friend Dan Swanson (author James North) has accused me of orientalism on a number of occasions. What do I cop to:

I think there's a clash of cultures. Western culture (which I believe is based on Judaeo-Christian teachings) has at this point anyway assimilated certain values that are higher than certain Islamic values, in the free speech and literacy and women's rights departments. (Some of these beliefs come from observations during 4 weeks of travel in Syria and Morocco that no one can persuade me out of—nonpresence of women in public life; nobody reading.) I think Bernard Lewis is on to something when he talks about Islam's fall from grandeur, and I pray, well, pull, for reform in the Islamic world. I see some of my own attitudes toward Islam in Sam Harris's (yes: deeply-arrogant) The End of Faith. Those guys in their robes and beards and women in their burkas, their rules about art being nonrepresentational and their devotion to one text which seems to me from the occasional glance to lack poetry—it all scares me.

I imagine that some of my attitude is Jewish, notwithstanding my effort to assimilate. I grew up with feelings of Jewish superiority I haven't gotten over because I see evidence for it: I think Jews in western societies tend to be, for whatever reason, and actually mostly cultural, better than other peoples at the logical/conceptual/symbol-manipulation that produces good SAT scores and wealth and media power. I say tend to be. We have a lot of company, but we're the A team. (Cf, my big influence, Yuri Slezkine, author of The Jewish Century: in modernity everyone must strive to be Jews, to be merchants and priests, no longer princes and peasants.)

To take a slightly defensive turn, I'm different from my fellow Jewish orientalists Bernard Lewis, Paul Berman, David Frum and Thomas Friedman (and Sam Harris, who I sense is Jewish; with a kind of intellectual depravity, he immunizes Judaism from any real criticism in his nudnik book attacking all religion) (and probably, to toot my horn, different from most people of any hue or dogma) inasmuch as I think it's important to acknowledge the role of my Jewishness in my politics; I feel I should interrogate my own attitudes and privilege, and I don't think a pogrom will result from my doing so. Also, maybe it's my Shiksa wife, who comes from a Protestant tradition that includes, hosanna, abolitionists; but I have been granted by this country a humanist egalitarianism that expresses itself in a romance: in modern America, because of their emulable success, Jews have been compelled to share their gifts. Many of them seem to resist this process, I don't. And duly, their gifts are being shared. I note that when James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute goes on CNN to deplore the Israeli overreaction in Lebanon, he demonstrates what I regard as Jewish qualities, logic, clarity of thought, restraint, precision of expression, married to a regard for human life no matter the color or religion....

I heard the Yankee fans booing Randy Johnson yesterday, something The Times today did not mention. It makes you wonder whether the combination of New York's unique fanbase (a lot of jerks), the in-your-face media, and Johnson's own doubts about his quadragenarian talents won't result in a meltdown.

Yankee-haters like myself (Baltimore Orioles fan) welcome these developments. My friend Dan Swanson, a White Sox fan, says that booing Johnson is like leaning on the horn when you're seven back in a traffic jam: It only happens in New York, and it will only worsen the situation: "It is defeatist and unintelligent. If they want to help the guy, they should cheer him."