Dear Joel,
About Elián: Don’t you hate grown-ups who pretend, when it’s convenient for them, that children’s wishes are all-important? Giving a child too much power is one of the worst things you can do to him/her, and it’s doubly destructive when you’re manipulating the child at the same time. Picture Elián’s Miami relatives three years down the road, in the unlikely event they win custody of him: No you can’t go to the park today, Goddammit. Because I said so!
But my favorite story today is historian Deborah E. Lipstadt’s total victory, in a British court, over Hitler apologist David Irving. Although she is American, Irving, who is a Brit, sued her there because England’s libel laws are so much more favorable to the plaintiff than ours. He claimed that she erred in calling him a “Holocaust denier,” which is what he plainly is; the judge wasn’t buying it. This is a real victory for plain truth.
Earlier in Irving’s career, his archival research in Germany earned him some genuine regard as a military historian. My father was his editor at the Viking Press (I teased him to his dying day about having written, in the flap copy for Hitler’s War, that it would “stand athwart the annals” of somethingorother), and always claimed that if you told David Irving that you had just been shot and were bleeding to death, he would reply, “Hmmm, yes, well, as I was saying, Himmler then said to Goebbels …” Every year, when my parents went to London, they had to endure the dread ritual of Dinner at the Irvings: “We are girding loins for dinner with David Irving,” my father wrote home in November ‘76. “Do hope he doesn’t bring out X-rays of Hitler’s skull until dessert.” It was always hot in the Irvings’ flat, where they were served (this is my mother now) “the same horrible thing–German champagne well-laced with Campari.” And while Irving was bending my father’s ear, Mrs. Irving would lead my mother to the kitchen for unsought confidences about the Irving connubial life. “David is as strange as ever,” my mother wrote. “All he is really interested in is his Book(s), so that he looks at Alan as a kind of extension of his Hitler book, and just puts him under glass and gazes at him fondly. I do believe Alan could spit in his face and he would just say, ‘Oh, yes, jolly good,’ and go on gazing.”
Even then, when Irving was regarded as respectable and had not yet flatly denied the reality of the Final Solution, my father always sounded a little defensive about publishing him. Ron Rosenbaum has a great op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal about the fallacy of fellow historians who praise Irving’s fact-gathering while disowning his conclusions. Research and conclusion are ultimately inseparable, Rosenbaum argues, “Can one praise a fact gatherer who somehow has failed to find the facts of mass murder behind Hitler’s pattern of denial?”
On fluoridation: I want you to you know that my home is graced with a fabulous plaque from the American Dental Association, awarded some time ago to my husband, a k a Mr. Chatterbox, for writing a very similar story on fluoride. Are all the old fears of right-wing nuts now the fears of left-wing nuts and vice versa? (The right now hates government, whereas the left now hates one-world government.) Once the extremes have all cycled through every conceivable form of paranoia, can we just get on with life?
Maybe you’ll find out at the anti-WTO rally. I’m anxious to hear your report. But if you’re really planning to go to get your car inspected, I’m not holding my breath. Didn’t you read the “Metro” section story about how the lines are four blocks long?
Regretfully,
Marjorie
