Only Nixon...

If you're old enough, you know how to complete that phrase to make a sentence: "...could go to China." Back in the early 70s, any liberal or Democrat who suggested normalizing relations with mainland China (or "Red China," as it was called back then), inevitably at Taiwan's expense, was dismissed as a lily-livered sellout by conservatives and Republicans. When President Nixon, not yet crippled by Watergate, went ahead and actually did it, his party took it like men, retroactively deeming it a needed, Realpolitik counterweight to the badder-still Soviets. It usually takes one of your own, not one of "the others," to change your own's mind. Three news items this week remind us how true, and important, that is.

• J.K. Rowling, author of the hugely successful Harry Potter series, recently announced that "Dumbledore is gay." What does that matter? Here goes:
  

Rowling, finishing a brief "Open Book Tour" of the United States, her first tour here since 2000, also said that she regarded her Potter books as a "prolonged argument for tolerance" and urged her fans to "question authority." Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.

• It appears that the sexual abuse of minors is a problem even more pervasive in the nation's public schools than in the Catholic Church. The news licensing that inference comes from The Associated Press, a redoubt of the secular liberal media. Of course, when defenders of the Church said as much, they were dismissed as special pleaders lacking evidence. Well, now a truly disinterested party has said it. I wonder how much of a stink will be made about the ugly reality. I'm not holding my breath, or my nose.

• In his hard-hitting book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, a liberal humanities professor at Yale has blamed the parlous state of the humanities in our universities on three factors: "the research ideal," "political correctness," and "constructivism" (that third one is otherwise known as "post-modernism"). Conservatives have been complaining about PC and pomo for years, earning mostly ridicule in secular academia. Now that a liberal on the PC/pomo payroll has registered much the same complaint, perhaps the ridicule will let up. Well, maybe tone down a bit.