Ann Althouse talks about the dust-up at National Review Online, where an editor objected to something that Mark Steyn wrote and posted what I’m sure he thought was a gentle rebuff. Steyn reacted exactly the way you’d expect him to, and in the end the editor got a chance to polish up his resumé for his next position. As an addendum to the original post, she quotes from William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a rather jarring example of how much society’s attitudes to homosexuality have changed (for the better) since the early 1960s:
The point of the Rat Pack joke — “How do you make a fruit cordial?”/ “Be nice to him.” — wasn’t that it’s funny. It’s that not too long ago junk like that was the norm. It was probably considered sweet, gentle and even gay-friendly. Steyn is paying attention to how cultural norms change. This is something I’ve been talking about too, and I am confounded by what a hard time people have understanding this subject.
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ADDED: Here’s something a little different that corresponds to that Rat Pack joke, not in the realm of comedy, but in a best selling history book that was published in 1961 and got high praise in places like The New York Times Book Review and won the National Book Award. It’s William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Listening to the audiobook, I was struck by the references to homosexuality, made in an offhandedly negative way that you’d never encounter in a book published today by a respectable publisher and an author who meant to be taken seriously. Examples:
A tough, ruthless, driving man — albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual — [Ernst Roehm] helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A., the army of storm troopers which he commanded until his execution by Hitler in 1934….
Such was the weird assortment of misfits who founded National Socialism…. The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the “spiritual” foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler… who took the lead….
“I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.” This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past — or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes….
But the brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can….
No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him…..
