NEW STUFF ON MY WEBSITE

I don't know whether this critique of my zig-zagging erstwhile hero, Andrew Sullivan, is any good or not. I wrote it in a few hours out in the courtyard on Tuesday night. I'll come back to it in a few days and make a judgment. But "Bringing Neoconservatism Home," from last May, is a gem. Please please please read it! :) In part it's a Bush campaign manifesto, but what I like best about it is the way it draws the link between Iraq (giving people freedom at the expense of the ancien regime principle of sanctity of borders) and immigration (giving people freedom at the expense of the ancien regime principle of sanctity of borders.) Here's the key passage:

And we see millions of immigrants living in an undocumented, vulnerable, sub-legal situation while they try to feed their families by providing services that our economy needs. If dark-skinned Third World nations were once persuaded by communist propaganda that portrayed white Americans as exploitative bourgeois pigs, it was because white Americans were behaving like exploitative bourgeois pigs towards dark-skinned Americans here at home. Likewise, if the images from Abu Ghraib strike hundreds of millions around the world the world as an accurate symbol of America, it is because scenes like those at Abu Ghraib are enacted every day in US embassies all over the world. No, there is no stripping naked and no hooding. But foreigners who pay us the compliment of wanting to come to our country are rewarded by being frisked and hustled through military checkpoints, crammed in endless lines, finger-printed, background-checked and eyed with suspicion like criminals, charged huge fees which will never be repaid even if the visa is denied, then have their lives and futures subjected to the arbitrary power of an official of Colin Powell's State Department, questioned and told to wait, left hanging with no information for a while, then, usually, denied, barred from a job or an education or a visit to friends and loved ones by US brute force. If they have to come illegally, they are deprived of the protection of the law and of basic life needs like a driver's license, deprived of the "inalienable rights" which the Declaration of Independence (written, significantly, by the slaveowning hand of Jefferson—this hypocrisy is a long tradition) proclaims. Of course, the American-born, who know they will never suffer the immigrant's indignities, tend to look at all this differently. But it is no wonder that Arabs, Iranians, Russians, Africans, Indians and Chinese find the images of Abu Ghraib so poignant, so symbolic, so familiar, so true.