Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  Which is why, outside a cluster of easeful lands, the recreational ordeal is not wildly popular. In America, people run for fun. In Beirut, they run for their lives. People there listen not for the starter’s gun, but for the sniper’s. In some parts of the world, when a man runs 26 miles it’s because he’s come from Marathon and he’s strictly on business.

  Time, May 14, 1984

  CHAPTER 3

  PRIDE AND PREJUDICES

  THE PARIAH CHESS CLUB

  I once met a physicist who as a child had been something of a chess prodigy. He loved the game and loved the role. He took particular delight in the mortification older players felt upon losing to a kid in short pants.

  “Still play?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “What happened?”

  “Quit when I was 21.”

  “Why?”

  “Lost to a kid in short pants.”

  The Pariah Chess Club, where I play every Monday night, admits no one in short pants. Even our youngest member, in his twenties, wears trousers. The rest of us are more grizzled veterans numbering about a dozen, mostly journalists and writers, with three lawyers, an academic and a diplomat for ballast. We’ve been meeting at my house for almost a decade for our weekly fix.

  Oh, yes, the club’s name. Of the four founding members, two were social scientists who, at the time we started playing, had just written books that had made their college lecture tours rather physically hazardous. I too sported a respectable enemies list (it was the heady Clinton years). And we figured that the fourth member, a music critic and perfectly well-liked, could be grandfathered in as a pariah because of his association with the three of us.

  Pariah status has not been required of subsequent members, though it is encouraged. Being a chess player already makes you suspect enough in polite society, and not without reason. Any endeavor that has given the world Paul Morphy, the first American champion, who spent the last 17-odd years of his life wandering the streets of New Orleans, and Bobby Fischer, the last American champion, now descended John Nash-like into raving paranoia, cannot be expected to be a boon to one’s social status.

  Our friends think us odd. They can understand poker night or bridge night. They’re not sure about chess. When I tell friends that three of us once drove from Washington to New York to see Garry Kasparov play a game, it elicits a look as uncomprehending as if we had driven 200 miles for an egg-eating contest.

  True, we chess players can claim Benjamin Franklin as one of our own. He spent much of his time as ambassador to France playing chess at the Café de la Régence, where he fended off complaints that he was not being seen enough at the opera by explaining, “I call this my opera.” But for every Franklin, there is an Alexander Alekhine, who in 1935 was stopped while trying to cross the Polish-German frontier without any papers. He offered this declaration instead: “I am Alekhine, chess champion of the world. This is my cat. Her name is Chess. I need no passport.” He was arrested.

  Or Aron Nimzovich, author of perhaps the greatest book on chess theory ever written, who, upon being defeated in a game, threw the pieces to the floor and jumped on the table screaming, “Why must I lose to this idiot?”

  I know the feeling, but at our club, when you lose with a blunder that instantly illuminates the virtues of assisted suicide, we have a cure. Rack ’em up again. Like pool. A new game, right away. We play fast, very fast, so that memories can be erased and defeats immediately avenged.

  I try to explain to friends that we do not sit in overstuffed chairs smoking pipes in five-hour games. We play like the vagrants in the park—at high speed with clocks ticking so that thinking more than 10 or 20 seconds can be a fatal extravagance. In speed (“blitz”) chess, you’ve got 5 or 10 minutes to play your entire game. Some Mondays we get in a dozen games each. No time to recriminate, let alone ruminate.

  And we have amenities. It’s a wood-paneled library, chess books only. The bulletin board has the latest news from around the world, this month a London newspaper article with a picture of a doe-eyed brunette languishing over a board, under the headline “Kournikova of Chess Makes Her Move.” The mini-jukebox plays k.d. lang and Mahler. (We like lush. We had Roy Orbison one night, till our lone Iowan begged for mercy.) Monday Night Football in the background, no sound. Barbecue chips. Sourdough pretzels. Sushi when we’re feeling extravagant. And in a unique concession to good health, Nantucket Nectar. I’m partial to orange mango.

  No alcohol, though. Not even a beer. It’s not a prohibition. You can have a swig if you want, but no one ever does. The reason is not ascetic but aesthetic. Chess is a beautiful game, and though amateurs playing fast can occasionally make it sing, we know there are riffs—magical symphonic combinations—that we either entirely miss or muck up halfway through. Fruit juice keeps the ugliness to a minimum.

  The Washington Post, December 27, 2002

  OF DOGS AND MEN

  The way I see it, dogs had this big meeting, oh, maybe 20,000 years ago. A huge meeting—an international convention with delegates from everywhere. And that’s when they decided that humans were the up-and-coming species and dogs were going to throw their lot in with them. The decision was obviously not unanimous. The wolves and dingoes walked out in protest.

  Cats had an even more negative reaction. When they heard the news, they called their own meeting—in Paris, of course—to denounce canine subservience to the human hyperpower. (Their manifesto—La Condition Féline—can still be found in provincial bookstores.)

  Cats, it must be said, have not done badly. Using guile and seduction, they managed to get humans to feed them, thus preserving their superciliousness without going hungry. A neat trick. Dogs, being guileless, signed and delivered. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  I must admit that I’ve been slow to warm to dogs. I grew up in a non-pet-friendly home. Dogs do not figure prominently in Jewish-immigrant households. My father was not very high on pets. He wasn’t hostile. He just saw them as superfluous, an encumbrance. When the Cossacks are chasing you around Europe, you need to travel light. (This, by the way, is why Europe produced far more Jewish violinists than pianists. Try packing a piano.)

  My parents did allow a hint of zoological indulgence. I had a pet turtle. My brother had a parakeet. Both came to unfortunate ends. My turtle fell behind a radiator and was not discovered until too late. And the parakeet, God bless him, flew out a window once, never to be seen again. After such displays of stewardship, we dared not ask for a dog.

  My introduction to the wonder of dogs came from my wife, Robyn. She’s Australian. And Australia, as lovingly recounted in Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, has the craziest, wildest, deadliest, meanest animals on the planet. In a place where every spider and squid can take you down faster than a sucker-punched boxer, you cherish niceness in the animal kingdom. And they don’t come nicer than dogs.

  Robyn started us off slowly. She got us a border collie, Hugo, when our son was about six. She knew that would appeal to me because the border collie is the smartest species on the planet. Hugo could (1) play outfield in our backyard baseball games, (2) do flawless front-door sentry duty and (3) play psychic weatherman, announcing with a wail every coming thunderstorm.

  When our son Daniel turned 10, he wanted a dog of his own. I was against it, using arguments borrowed from seminars on nuclear nonproliferation. It was hopeless. One giant “Please, Dad,” and I caved completely. Robyn went out to Winchester, Virginia, found a litter of black Labs and brought home Chester.

  Chester is what psychiatrists mean when they talk about unconditional love. Unbridled is more like it. Come into our house, and he was so happy to see you, he would knock you over. (Deliverymen learned to leave things at the front door.)

  In some respects—Ph.D. potential, for example—I don’t make any great claims for Chester. When I would arrive home, I fully expected to find Hugo reading the newspaper. Not Chester. Chester would try to make his way through a narrow sliding door,
find himself stuck halfway and then look at me with total and quite genuine puzzlement. I don’t think he ever got to understand that the rear part of him was actually attached to the front.

  But it was Chester, who dispensed affection as unreflectively as he breathed, who got me thinking about this long-ago pact between humans and dogs. Cat lovers and the pet averse will just roll their eyes at such dogophilia. I can’t help it. Chester was always at your foot or your hand, waiting to be petted and stroked, played with and talked to. His beautiful blocky head, his wonderful overgrown puppy’s body, his baritone bark filled every corner of house and heart.

  Then last month, at the tender age of eight, he died quite suddenly. The long, slobbering, slothful decline we had been looking forward to was not to be. When told the news, a young friend who was a regular victim of Chester’s lunging love-bombs said mournfully, “He was the sweetest creature I ever saw. He’s the only dog I ever saw kiss a cat.”

  Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal—indeed, deeply human—to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision—a creature—of the purest sweetness?

  Time, June 16, 2003

  IN DEFENSE OF THE F-WORD

  I am sure there is a special place in heaven reserved for those who have never used the F-word. I will never get near that place. Nor, apparently, will Dick Cheney.

  Washington is abuzz with the latest political contretemps. Cheney, taking offense at Sen. Pat Leahy’s imputation of improper vice-presidential conduct regarding Halliburton contracts in Iraq, let the senator know as much during a picture-taking ceremony on the floor of the Senate. The F-word was used. Washington is scandalized.

  The newspapers were full of it. Lamentations were heard about the decline of civility. The Washington Post gave special gravitas to the occasion, spelling out the full four letters (something that it had done only three times previously). Democrats, feeling darned outraged, demanded apologies. The vice president remained defiant, offering but the coyest concession—that he “probably” cursed—coupled with satisfaction: “I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it.”

  The Federal Communications Commission just last year decreed that the F-word could be used as an adjective, but not as a verb. Alas, this Solomonic verdict, fodder for a dozen Ph.D. dissertations, was recently overturned. It would not get Cheney off the hook anyway. By all accounts, he deployed the pungent verb form, in effect a suggestion as to how the good senator from Vermont might amuse himself.

  Flood-the-zone coverage by investigative reporters has not, however, quite resolved the issue of which of the two preferred forms passed Cheney’s lips: the priceless two-worder—“[verb] you”—or the more expansive three-worder, a directive that begins with “go.”

  Though I myself am partial to the longer version, I admit that each formulation has its virtues. The deuce is the preferred usage when time is short and concision is of the essence. Enjoying the benefits of economy, it is especially useful in emergencies. This is why it is a favorite of major league managers going nose to nose with umpires. They know that they have only a few seconds before getting tossed out of the game, and as a result television viewers have for years delighted in the moment the two-worder is hurled, right on camera. No need for sound. The deuce was made for lip reading.

  Which makes it excellent for drive-by information conveyance. When some jerk tailgater rides my bumper in heavy traffic, honking his horn before passing and cutting me off, I do a turn-to-the-left, eyeball-to-eyeball, through-the-driver’s-window two-worder—mouthed slowly and with exaggerated lip movements. No interlocutor has yet missed my meaning.

  Nonetheless, while the two-worder has the directness of the dagger, the three-worder has the elegance of the wide-arced saber slice. It is more musical and, being more clearly spelled out, more comprehensible to the non-English speaker (a boon in major urban areas). It consists of a straightforward directive containing both a subject and an object—charmingly, the same person.

  According to the Post, the local authority on such matters, Cheney went for a variant of the short form, employing the more formal “yourself.” And given the location, the floor of the Senate, it seems a reasonable choice: Time was short, and he undoubtedly reserves the right to revise and extend his remarks.

  Ah, but the earnest chin-pullers are not amused. Cheney’s demonstration of earthy authenticity in a chamber in which authenticity of any kind is to be valued has occasioned anguished meditations on the loss of civility in American politics. Liberals in particular have expressed deep concern about this breach of decorum.

  Odd. The day before first reports of Cheney’s alleged indiscretion, his Democratic predecessor, Al Gore, delivered a public speech in which he spoke of the administration’s establishing a “Bush gulag” around the world and using “digital brown shirts” to intimidate the media. The former vice president of the United States compared the current president to both Hitler and Stalin in the same speech—a first not just in hyperbole but in calumny—and nary a complaint is heard about a breach of civility.

  If you suspect that this selective indignation may be partisan, you guessed right. But here’s an even more important question. In the face of Gore’s real breach of civil political discourse, which of the following is the right corrective: (a) offer a reasoned refutation of the charge that George Bush is both Stalinist and Hitlerian; (b) suggest an increase in Gore’s medication; or (c) do a Cheney.

  The correct answer is (c). And given the circumstances, go for the deuce.

  The Washington Post, Friday, July 2, 2004

  THE CENTRAL AXIOM OF PARTISAN POLITICS

  To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

  For the first side of this equation, I need no sources. As a conservative, I can confidently attest that whatever else my colleagues might disagree about—Bosnia, John McCain, precisely how many orphans we’re prepared to throw into the snow so the rich can have their tax cuts—we all agree that liberals are stupid.

  We mean this, of course, in the nicest way. Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe—here is where they go stupid—that most everybody else is nice too. Deep down, that is. Sure, you’ve got your multiple felon and your occasional war criminal, but they’re undoubtedly depraved ’cause they’re deprived. If only we could get social conditions right—eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the ozone, arrest John Ashcroft—everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced, rocking back and forth to “We Shall Overcome.”

  Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything.

  Liberals suffer incurably from naïveté, the stupidity of the good heart. Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: “Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.” But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.

  Accordingly, the conservative attitude toward liberals is one of compassionate condescension. Liberals are not quite as reciprocally charitable. It is natural. They think conservatives are mean. How can conservatives believe in the things they do—self-reliance, self-discipline, competition, military power—without being soulless? How to understand the conservative desire to actually abolish welfare, if it is not to punish the poor? The argument that it would increase self-reliance and thus ultimately reduce poverty is dismissed as meanness rationalized—or as Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.) put it more colorfully in a recent House debate on welfare reform, “a cold-blooded grab for another pound of flesh from the demonized welfare mothers.”
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  Liberals, who have no head (see above), believe that conservatives have no heart. When Republicans unexpectedly took control of the House of Representatives in 1994, conventional wisdom immediately attributed this disturbance in the balance of the cosmos to the vote of the “angry white male” (an invention unsupported by the three polls that actually asked about anger and found three-quarters of white males not angry).

  The “angry white male” was thus a legend, but a necessary one. It was unimaginable that conservatives could be given power by any sentiment less base than anger, the selfish fury of the former top dog—the white male—forced to accommodate the aspirations of women, minorities and sundry upstarts.

  The legend lives. Years ago it was Newt Gingrich as the Grinch who stole Christmas. Today, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman declares the Bush administration the moral equivalent of Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s far right, xenophobic, antisemitic heir to European fascism. Both apparently represent the “angry right.” But in America, writes Krugman, it is worse: “Here the angry people are already running the country.”

  This article of liberal faith—that conservatism is not just wrong but angry, mean and, well, bad—produces one paradox after another. Thus the online magazine Slate devoted an article to attempting to explain the “two faces” of Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal. The puzzle is how a conservative could have such a “winning cocktail-party personality and talk-show cordiality.” Gigot, it turns out, is “Janus-faced”: regular guy—“plays basketball with working reporters”—yet conservative! “By day he wrote acid editorials … by night he polished his civilized banter [on TV].”

  A classic of the genre—liberal amazement when it finds conservatism coexisting with human decency in whatever form—is the New York Times news story speaking with unintended candor about bio-ethicist Leon Kass: “Critics of Dr. Kass’ views call him a neoconservative thinker.… But critics and admirers alike describe him as thoughtful and dignified.”