I believe we were absolutely right to oust Saddam. I think most who call themselves classical liberals agreed. Once we were rid of the man, were we supposed to pack up and leave and say "Good luck"? No nation building for us.
This is certainly not a conclusion that I entertain lightly. I concede that a case can be made that toppling Saddam was justified by his offenses against us, although I cannot see it as very convincing. Some well-placed bombs in Libya caused the formerly bellicose Col. Khadaffi to stop supporting terrorism, and although Saddam Hussein seems to have had greater ambitions, a few more well-placed bombs would probably have accomplished the same there.
Moreover, even if we concede that ejecting Saddam Hussein from power was justified, limitations on engagement should have been clear. After a decent period of staying on to get a new government in power and on its feet, any possibly justifiable military involvement for us there was surely finished.
Our government's job is to protect the American people from imminent or at least truly plausible threats. That means nothing more nor less than destroying our opponents or intimidating them into inaction. Toppling Saddam surely accomplished that, if he was truly a threat to us.
Yes, once "rid of the man" we should indeed have packed up and said "Good luck." That is all that we could rightly do. And that is what the American people expected the Bush administration to do, which is why his poll ratings fell so swiftly and stubbornly. The idea was that we would get rid of Saddam Hussein, hand the keys to a new government, and then let the country work out its future according to its own desires. We would help them set things in place, but then we would go. It would be their country and their problems, not ours.
That was what I understood Bush to be suggesting in his initial justification of this venture, and I strongly believe that that is what most Americans thought he meant. And if that is so, the Bush administration is responsible for either not being clear about its true aims or changing its plan after it got the people of the United States committed to intervention. Neither of those options reflects well on our government or the people who elected it.
I understand that leaving Iraq at this point could make us seem weak. However, we are going to have to leave at some time, and whenever we do, that country is probably going to be a mess. Our concern must be our own national interest, and our interest is surely best served by taking a principled approach to foreign affairs and tending to our own very significant problems.
In addition, going hard after Al Qaeda (which most certainly is justified) would mitigate any impression of weakness, and a strong and appropriate response against the next nation or extranational group that harmed us would prove that we are willing to stand behind our principles and use our great power when we are wronged, while also showing that we respect other nations' sovereignty just as we expect and indeed require them to respect ours.
This seems a real stretch, given that the Democratic Party not only survived Vietnam but in fact routed the Republicans just one presidency later.
But the situation for the Republicans is indeed dire, as Buckley argues in referring to the chances of a positive outcome for the United States in Iraq:
General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, “I want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort.”
The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.
The problem for the Republicans is simple, actually. The appeal of their party is mainly to classical liberals (which is the political position to which Buckley has most often adhered), and their conduct in Iraq has entirely contradicted the classical liberal worldview. Nation-building is simply not a proper function for government, according to classical liberal thinking.
Here is why.
Classical liberalism holds that government should not intervene in voluntary agreements, and that its proper role is in fact to help enforce them. A government should intervene in human actions only when they harm others. Then, and only then, does government have a reason for action.
The classical liberal position would be as follows:
Every nation is sovereign.
Every nation is entitled to conduct its own affairs as it chooses unless its actions affect other nations.
When actions affect other nations, those nations have a right and indeed a responsibility to their own citizens to remedy the situation. The obligation on the part of the reacting nation is to conform its response to redress the offense and ensure that there will be no imminent repetition of it.
An affected nation responding to a wrong has no right to impose major consequences on a nation, even if the intended effect it so ensure that the offender will not resume the offending activities beyond the immediate future.
That is clearly a principled position that provides a definite guide for action against foreign aggressors while upholding the principle of national sovereignty that is crucial to the protection of any people and their government.
Just as obviously, this is not what the United States has done in Iraq.
Changing Iraq's government and overseeing their writing of a constitution certainly stepped well over that line. Assisting the new Iraqi government in pacifying the nation and policing it were grossly unjustified and remain so.
But is there anything we can do now, now that we're in Iraq and have no way of getting out without that very unhappy place very likely descending into even greater chaos and madness?
Yes, there is.
It appears to me the only logical and justifiable course for the United States is to leave Iraq and to let the Iraqis work out their problems themselves.
If that results in imminent or real harm to the United States and its citizens, appropriate intervention will then be justified—but only then.
If it results in violence within Iraq, that is unfortunately the nature of that place at this time, and will differ only as a matter of degree from what is now happening there and what was going on while the previous government, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, was in power.
Will the United States bear some responsibility for any ensuing problems there? Certainly. Will Iraq have some reason to call upon us for help? Yes. Should the United States respond with help? Yes, in the form of money and humanitarian aid. But nothing else. We have no right to impose a new government on them, and any military activity would only be a means of doing so.
Would a military pullout from Iraq leave us with egg on our faces?
Yes, of course.
But it would still be the right thing to do.
After taking the wrong course, going farther in the wrong direction will not bring one closer to one's correct destination. Only a return to the right course will do that.
Upon leaving Iraq, eradicating Al Qaeda is the international action on which the United States should concentrate.
Leaving Iraq, however embarrassing it would temporarily be, would put the United States on a principled course in international affairs. That is far more important than any immediate political considerations, either national or international.
FCC Urges Congress to Ignore Bill of Rights—So What's New?
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The Federal Communications Commission, created by Congress and administered by the President, seems to think that this does not apply any more.
Concerned about an increase in violence on television, the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday urged lawmakers to consider regulations that would restrict violent programs to late evening, when most children would not be watching.
The commission, in a long-awaited report, concluded that the program ratings system and technology intended to help parents block offensive programs — like the V-chip — had failed to protect children from being regularly exposed to violence.
As a result, the commission recommended that Congress move to limit violence on entertainment programs by giving the agency the authority to define such content and restrict it to late evening television.
I, too, am concerned about an "increase in violence on television," as well as the increase in sexual content, vulgar and obscene language, and general stupidity. However, Congress has no right to regulate such things.
That right is reserved to the states and the people.
Congress does have the right to regulate indecency, and this could be construed as being such an instance, but the measures being contemplated—requiring broadcasters to limit such programming to particular times, forcing programming distributors to offer channels a la carte, and most importantly, defining the problem as depictions of violence and leaving sexual content and obscene language alone—suggest that getting rid of indency is not the object, but the point instead is to ensure the availabilty of indecent programming by restricting it to those adult individuals who want it.
The requirements could be seen as falling under Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce, but that is false, given that such authority was in the Constitution when the First Amendment was passed, and hence is overridden by the Amendment. Thus, Congress has no authority to abridge the freedom of speech under any prior constitutional grant.
The Times quotes FCC Chairman Kevin Martin as saying, "Clearly, steps should be taken to protect children from excessively violent programming. Some might say such action is long overdue. Parents need more tools to protect children from excessively violent programming."
Perhaps, but this is a matter for the states. Period.
I doubt that the telecom industry wants to be regulated by 51 different local entities, but that's their problem, not ours. Congress and its creations have no business regulating TV programming.
Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday.
Lee, 18, a straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.
Neither police nor the school would release a copy of the essay written Monday. School officials declined to say whether Lee had any previous disciplinary problems, but said he was an excellent student. Authorities said Lee had never been in trouble with the police.
The charge against Lee comes as schools in the Chicago area and across the country wrestle with how to react in the wake of the massacre at Virginia Tech. . . .
"The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content," [Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio] said.
The teen's father said he understood concerns about violence but not why a creative-writing exercise resulted in charges against his son.
"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said Albert Lee. But he added, "I don't see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions.
The teacher should be fired for giving such a lame writing assignment, as well as for ratting the kid out to the cops.
This is always the way of things in our society in recent years. Let everything go wild, and then lurch in precisely the opposite direction. Let a seriously disturbed young man roams the streets and buy guns and then kill a bunch of people, then arrest a boy for writing a class essay.
And then start the process over.
This is what happens in a society that does not have an agreed-upon set of shared values and a moral code based on them.
Ratings Down for Top Network TV Shows—But Viewership Remains Steady
The networks' top evening TV programs suffered serious viewership ratings losses in the past few weeks, with several shows reaching record lows, USA Today reports.
However, there is more to the story. . . .
First, the losses. The Nielsen ratings showed that programs such as Lost, Desperate Housewives, ER, My Name Is Earl, The Simpsons, Two and a Half Men, CSI: Miami and Heroes had their worst ratings ever. "Still others," USA Today notes, "such as 24, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and American Idol, had their worst ratings in two years or more."
Although ratings are down, viewership has held fairly steady. What is happening is that increasing numbers of people are watching the programs later on DVRs. USA Today reports:
"If you look at live plus seven-day viewing, those declines for several shows start to vanish," says Fox's Preston Beckman. Lost lost 14% of its live viewing this season, but when time-shifting is factored in, the show is down only 1%. The Office, down 10%, is actually up 2% with delayed viewing included.
Advertisers, however, don't pay for viewers watching on DVRs, because they believe—undoubtedly correctly—that such viewers regularly skip commercials. As a result, Nielsen is taking steps to measure the viewing of commercials.
In any case, although it is incorrect to cite the ratings numbers as suggesting that the appeal of these popular programs has fallen, they do indeed indicate that the revenue structure if commercial television is crumbling rapidly.
Like most such trends, this will probably result in short-term misfortune for both producers and consumers of televised entertainment, but will probably bring long-term benefits for both.
ABC Television has announced that Rosie O'Donnell, controversial host of the daytime show The View, will be leaving the program, as her contract has not been renewed.
O'Donnell said on her show today that ABC wanted her to stay on for three years, but she wanted to commit to only one.
The tenure of the pathologically unbridled O'Donnell as host of the program proved that a big mouth and penchant for irresponsible statements offered with intense sincerity and regular bouts of uncontrolled rage can make for a lucrative career in television.
O'Donnell frequently brought much attention to herself—and higher ratings for her show—by her bizarre and paranoid claims about various U.S. policies and her continued championing of an out-of-control, thoroughly demented, and corrosive entertainment culture.
Her behavior was thoroughly egregious, but the fact that she used politically correct language and represented modern liberalism enabled her to avoid the fate of Don Imus, which she certainly deserved.
Indeed, one would enjoy seeing the other many relentless blowhards now on national television fail to "have their contracts renewed."
It would be a happy thing indeed, but it is not going to happen.
In a society with widely distributed access to media and no set of shared values, what I call the Omniculture, there is a mad din of voices at all times, and the loudest ones will typically gain the most attention.
For a time, that is.
Eventually we tire of those particular nitwits and move on to other asinine loudmouths—usually even louder ones. This is what passes for a culture today.
O'Donnell's departure from The View may indeed be, as she suggests, entirely of her own volition, or it may not. Regardless, there will surely be a place for her on some other ratings-starved outlet such as MSNBC or CNBC.
The fact that being loud and stupid is a moneymaking proposition in America today means that more Rosies and the like are in our future.
If you ever doubt the power of popular culture to affect events, just consider Britain's mid-century film comedies. A movie I had never seen until yesterday illustrates this well.
In Penny Princess, a fizzy 1953 comedy from the Rank Organization (shown early this past Sunday morning on Turner Classic Movies), the tiny, fictional European country of Lampidorra has based its economy on smuggling for hundreds of years. They produce nothing of value, and economic innovation is nil. In addition, their concept of civil rights is hazy at best.
When the country decides to go legit, exporting a cheese called Schneeze (it becomes wildly popular because it contains schnapps and makes people tipsy), the surrounding nations of France, Switzerland, and Italy impose crushing tariffs.
The country's sovereign—a young American female (Yolande Donlan); this is a comedy, all right—decides to make it state policy to smuggle the schneeze into those countries, to avoid the protectionist tariffs and enable the country's economic innovation to thrive. As a result, Lampidorra becomes the only fiscally solvent country in Europe. It's a delicious lesson in the superiority of market competition over government fiat and corporate rent-seeking.
Originating from several different studios and a multitude of directors and writers, numerous film comedies produced between the late 1930s and early 1960s swam strongly against the leftist cultural tides of the time. These films illustrated and indeed openly expounded the values of free markets, individual initiative, low taxes, social mobility, individual generosity, the rule of law, the value of religion and sound moral values, and the humble joys of bourgeois life. They roundly satirized government interference and incompetence, and they ridiculed the nation's complacent, sclerotic cultural institutions.
The Ealing studio sent out a stream of excellent comedies, several of which starred Alec Guinness as an English Everyman who battles corrupt government, business, and labor union interests. The Man in the White Suit and All at Sea are among the studio's finest and most overtly economically liberal films (in the classical sense), and Whiskey Galore, Passport to Pimlico, and The Titfield Thunderbolt stand out in their support of local political sovereignty as well as the importance of economic freedom and the unleashing of individual initiative. Films such as Hue and Cry, An Inspector Calls,Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers,The Lavender Hill Mob, and others upheld the rule of law and showed that both goodness and evil are found in profusion among all social classes.
The Boulting Brothers produced a splendid run of satirical comedies mocking Britain's sclerotic mid-century socialist state and promoting classical liberalism. I'm All Right, Jack, starring Peter Sellers and the also brilliant Ian Carmichael, is at the peak of their achievements and a true film classic. In fact, I'd say it's one of the essentials.
The Rank Organization put out numerous films of the same sort during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, including Penny Princess. And numerous other small producers did likewise.
This flowering of culture supporting classical liberal ideas—free markets, individual initiative, local sovereignty, and solid middle-class values—was the world in which Maggie Thatcher and those who elected her spent their formative years.
We could certainly benefit from a turn toward such principles among our current cultural artisans.
In the meantime, we have these fine old movies to keep us laughing and start us thinking.
[I ran across a DVD of the movie Batman Begins recently and was reminded of how representative it is of much of today's movie culture. So, for your enlightement and delectation, the following is reprinted from my review for Crux.]
What Batman Begins says most powerfully is how bad the earlier films in the series were—and how crippled by stylistic cliches today's Hollywood action films have become.
The best way to experience Batman is still to read the original DC comic books from years ago and watch the TV cartoon series. This one ain't bad, but they're the real thing.
I remember that the various filmmakers involved in Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Whatever, and Batman Yadaa Yadda Yadda were uninamous in pointing out how much more serious their films were than the 1960s TV series, as if seriousness precisely equalled intelligence, and as if being more serious than the Batman TV series were some sort of accomplishment. I could do that while telling knock-knock jokes in a tutu.
As hard as they may have tried to capture the essence of Bob Kane's comic book series (well, that's what they said they were trying to do), the Batman films were frequently silly and usually not very interesting. The first one, Batman, was endurable, although I think Jack Nicholson was incredibly boring as the Joker. OK, he's angry, we get it. Now can you try to do something interesting? At least the TV show was fun, and the actors playing the villains were first-rate and managed to find the right tone for their performances. Excellent performers such as Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, Julie Newmar, Anne Baxter, Reginald Denny, and the like all seemed to be having as much fun as the viewer (and not more!). The movie series, by contrast, was like some kind of career graveyard. Remember Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face? Alicia Silverman as Batgirl? Is it any wonder their careers went into the dumper after those stinkers? Heck, even Michelle Pfeiffer has pretty much disappeared, and I thought she did an excellent job as Catwoman.
Batman Begins is much better than that. Christian Bale is actually a decent Batman, although the affected, Dirty Harry-style growl he uses when in costume is, well, rather embarrassing for him after a while. But he's good, overall. The supporting cast is largely excellent, with Gary Oldman giving a standout performance as Sgt. Gordon (who will eventually become Commissioner Gordon, we presume.) Katie Holmes misfires in a poorly conceived role as an assistant district attorney, but Cillian Murphy is terrific as Dr. Crane/the Scarecrow, Rutger Hauer is splendid as Bruce Wayne's manipulative business partner, and Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson, and Liam Neeson lend their formidable presences in other important supporting roles. The acting is one of the real pleasures of this film, and Bale holds his own within this powerhouse cast.
In addition, Batman Begins actually has some consistent themes that are worked out in a surprisingly comprehensible way—such as the ways the theme of fear and human reactions to it comes up in different situations throughout the film. Well done, that. And it really does present the issues of vigilantism, justice, personal responsibility, and the role of government in a rather thoughtful manner.
That, however, is also one of the problems with the film. It is awfully slow, with more expository dialogue than a documentary on how to caulk bathtubs. Do really really need to see another version of how Batman obtains all his Bat-weapons and Bat-whatnot? (Hint, the answer starts with an n and ends with an o. Multiple explanation points are optional.) Do we really need to waste a lot of time watching Bale and Freeman reprise the Q-James Bond relationship? (That has become extremely wearisome in the Bond films, for goodness sake.) It's like showing us long, boring scenes from the early years of Hercule Poirot. OK, he can solve crimes, we get it. Gee, just let us see the dang Bat-things in action and we'll figure out that he must have got them somewhere. Who but an obsessive geek weirdo gives a darn where he got them from, anyway? Save that for the novelization.
And what's up with those early sequences in Asia, stolen from the film version of The Shadow and done a heck of a lot better there? It's all way much more than we need to know. We already understand the situation, people! He's a vigilante but he's conflicted about it. We can puzzle that out without watching him fight multiple Asian prison guards simultaneously or climb an unnamed mountain to get to some ancient hideaway for global vigilantes. We don't need to know about that, so just skip it. Now can we just get on with the Batarang-throwing?
OK, I understand it's Batman Begins and you feel obligated to show his beginnings, which is acceptable as a premise even though we've seen his beginnings some 55 times before, but that doesn't mean it has to Batman Begins with a Whole Bunch of Boring Dialogue and Puzzling Fight Scenes Shot in Close-Ups So That You Can't Tell Who the Heck Is Doing What or Why. That's another pet peeve for me: the fancy-schmancy tendency of Hollywood directors to cut the fight scenes up into close-up shots lasting approximately three tenths of a second apiece, quite obviously to disguise the fact that the actors couldn't fight their way out of a preschool birthday party. Man, make them learn the moves and then step back and let us see them fight it out a little.
Hong Kong directors use brief shots, too, but at least they know how to make the fight comprehensible by pulling the camera away from the protagonist's elbow or bad guy's ribs once in a while. In Hollywood films, the only way you know who's winning a fight is by how far we are into the movie: the good guy typically loses early and wins late. And in the climactic fight, he has to look like he's losing until the bad guy does something really dirty and then the good guy gets all morally outraged and wins really quickly.
Maybe if you'd let us actually see the fight, we wouldn't have time to think about how hokey the whole situation is. Just an idea, which I give you for free.
And by the way, a note to Hollywood's fine stable of directors and cinematographers: dark, muddy cinematography does not equal depth of insight. It equals dark, muddy cinematography, and that is absolutely all. You can see everything perfectly clearly in a David Lean film or an Anthony Mann epic or a John Ford drama, yet there is never any sense that the director is stupid and just doesn't know how to make us have to squint to figure out which character is the protagonist, which is the antagonist, which the leading lady, and which is actually a lamp emanating a dull, brackish nimbus. Actually allowing the viewer to see what's happening could even be thought to be an advantage, or at least common courtesy.
So, could you people buy some lights? I know, I know, that will mean that your actors will actually have to act, as the audience will be able to see their stupid, bovine facial expressions all too easily, but what you'll lose in employability of bad actors you might well gain in the ability to express the occasional insight into the human condition. At least, that's what Lean, Mann, Ford, and the like managed to do. Tom Cruise and John Travolta have enough money and can afford to be tossed aside for people who can actually act a little. Besides, they can always do some reality TV.
Nevertheless, even though Batman Begins was photographed through a jar of Smucker's Plum Preserves, includes the most boring love interest character of all the films in the series, steals ideas and scenes from countless other movies, and is more unreal than the average Wagner opera, it's a fairly thoughtful film with some real conflicts, tough moral choices for the characters, important themes and ideas, and good performances. Those things make it worth seeing. But it certainly would have been much better if it had avoided the silly stylistic cliches that blemish most of today's Hollywood action films.
The episode marks the transition from previous leader Mickey "Bricks" Stone, played by the now-departed Adrian Lester, to Danny Blue, played by Marc Warren. Warren does a good job of characterizing Danny's interesting combination of ambition and lack of confidence, and the other performers do nice work as well.
Robert Wagner provides an excellent villain, a vulgar, greedy, corrupt businessman from Los Angeles whom the gang decide to fleece in order to teach him a lesson (after deciding to fleece him just to get the money). The weakness of the episode is in the contrast between Danny's freewheeling, improvisatory approach and that of the previous leader, Mickey, who thought things through meticulously before proceeding on a con.
Either way can be fun to watch, but this new approach definitely changes the dynamic of the series. In the previous episodes, the viewer had a chance to try to guess what Mickey's plan was. In the present case, without a concrete plan to start with, the viewer is really just along for the ride. And once a plan does coalesce, in the last ten minutes of the episode, it is easy to guess what the team is going to do.
And if it's easy for us to guess, it should be easy for the mark to figure out. Still, things turn out well in the end as the wicked Wagner (who is finally beginning to show his age, alas) gets his comeuppance.
The moral complexity of the show also seems to have suffered a bit as we lose the tension between Danny's and Mickey's approaches to the con and their interesting discussions of motives and values. It seems possible that this tension will return when new team member Billy Bond (Ashley Walters), a former delinquent youth, joins the gang. He did not appear in the season's initial episode.
The new dynamics of the show may take some getting used to, but Hustle is still very entertaining and well worth watching.
Discussing the Virginia Tech authorities' opposition to a proposal to remove the campus exception to the state's concealed carry laws—which would have allowed qualified adult citizens to carry firearms on campus, and which could certainly have prevented many of the deaths in the VT killer's rampage—Thompson writes:
The logic behind this attitude baffles me, but I suspect it has to do with a basic difference in worldviews. Some people think that power should exist only at the top, and everybody else should rely on "the authorities" for protection.
Exactly. These are the two mentalities of modernity: statism and classical liberalism, respectively.
An interesting article from the Associated Press indicates what was going on in the VT killer's mind.
It was hatred, pure hatred.
AP reports:
He delivered a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich ''brats'' and their ''hedonistic needs.'' . . .
'Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats,'' says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington. ''Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.'' . . .
Cho repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.
''You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience,'' he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. ''You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.''
As I noted in my earlier item on this situation, this is pure egomania. Comparing himself to Christ!
The AP story and other sources make it clear that numerous people observed that this man was dangerously disturbed—what any sensible person would call evil—and urged him to "get help."
That was an entirely ill-conceived reaction.
A person consumed with hatred does not believe that he needs help. He believes that others need to change. When they do not, he reacts with violence. He believes his reaction to be entirely justified.
This is precisely what the VT killer expressed in the videotapes made between his two bouts of murders. In addition, it is precisely what he expressed in the months beforehand.
The suggestion that he needed "help" is something to which such a person would never voluntarily submit. It is a delusion of our theraputic culture, the notion that people do what they do entirely because of a string of causal events and experiences, and that finding the key will reverse the conditions that led to the "pathology."
But hatred is real. We late moderns seem to believe that there is no such thing. But there is. People who have been brought up in "bad" environments know this all too well, and the fact that our media increasingly consist of individuals who have come from relatively privileged backgrounds and not risen from the streets and farms (as was common in the first half of the last century) means that the reality of hatred is entirely beyond their understanding.
They are under the Rousseauian delusion that everybody is good at heart and corrupted only by the rules of society. In fact, as we Christians know, the very opposite is true.
Hatred is real. It is not a generalized feeling toward some abstract "class," as political correctness codes and the delusional claims of media "experts" and social activists suggest. It is a powerful, personal antipathy toward others that seems to the individual to require corrective action. When society does not take action, the individual does.
The VT killer saw his prosperous, happy neighbors as enemies who deserved punishment and whom society was unjustly allowing to go about unscathed and in fact rewarding for their iniquity. This, in his mind, had to be rectified.
Hatred is a choice, not an unfortunate illness. No pill will cure it, and no amount of talk will send it away. People filled with hatred mean it, and they mean to do something about it.
We must understand that and be prepared to respond wisely and judiciously when it manifests itself—before it results in horrors such as the VT murders.
AOL announced yesterday that it is introducing a slate of programs positioning it as a broadband television network.
That seems a very generous description of the venture, given the nature of the programming AOL is presenting. It consists largely of horrible-sounding "reality" shows and commercial tie-in projects.
The AOL slate sounds awful even in comparison with the current debased condition of the broadcast TV networks and the ghastly inanity of much cable/satellite TV today. (Networks such as Current, Fuse, and Fox Reality have taken narrowcasting to the extreme of presenting programs virtually no sane person can bear watching.)
Slate will include projects from reality giant Endemol USA, production shingle Telepictures and a continued relationship with Mark Burnett Prods., which produced AOL's "Gold Rush" skein.
Company also announced a competition initiative with DreamWorks Animation for upcoming "Shrek the Third," in which AOL will unspool a number of movie-related games that will be produced by Burnett along with AOL and DWA.
Many of the programs skirt the line between interactive gaming and nonscripted programming; they can be categorized as either reality television with consumer participation or an online game with video components.
One of the most ambitious TV-style programs is "iLand," an online community in which players compete for dominance of a group.
Series, which is produced by Endemol USA and set to air in the second quarter of 2008, will eventually spill into the real world as contestants move to an island and try to assert power there; those competitions, hosted by thesp Brooke Burns, will be broadcast online.
AOL also is teaming with sister Time Warner production shingle Telepictures, which supplies Warners distribution with content, for a tie-in to "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." Online programming will draw from user-generated content about viewers' hometowns; some content will make its way to the syndie show.
And it will continue its Burnett collaboration with a new edition of "Gold Rush," titled "Gold Rush Goes Hollywood," focusing on industry and celebrity trivia. Series is set to bow in the summer.
Team leader Mickey "Bricks" Stone will not appear in this installment of shows, as the actor who portrayed him so well, Adrian Lester, could not fit the show into his busy schedule, a direct result, one suspects, of his excellent portrayal of this interestingly complex character. Stepping up to become the new team leader will be Danny Blue, a cocky Cockney played by Marc Warren.
The other team members will return as well, and a new character will join: energetic, hotheaded Billy Bonds, played by Ashley Walters (Get Rich or Die Tryin').
Hustle, created by Tony Jordan, who wrote several of the episodes, is a laudable addition to the long line of popular fictions about confidence tricksters who are on the wrong side of the law but the right side of morality. Erle Stanley Gardner specialized in this type of writing before embarking on his hyperpopular Perry Mason novels (and Mason, too, can be seen as one of these characters, especially in the first decade's worth of novels about him).
The stories of Gardner's con-man series characters Lester Leith, Ed Jenkins the Phantom Crook, and Paul Pry are well worth reading, although mostly difficult to come by today. The mystery-fiction publisher Crippen and Landru is reportedly planning to release a volume of Lester Leith stories, but no date has been set yet.
"Meet the Robinsons" Returns to Disney's Glory Days
The latest animated movie, Meet the Robinsons, released by Disney, marks a return to the Disney studio's wholesome past.
That is meant as a compliment.
Most recent animated films, including those from the Disney studio, have adopted a deliberately "cheeky" attitude and attempted to send messages of the "be yourself" variety.
Of course, the admonition to be oneself, though it sounds good (and sounds much better when expressed by Shakespeare: "to thine own self be true."), is no advice at all for a child. (In Shakespeare's play it is addressed not to a child but to a young woman.)
After all, young children are naturally egocentric and respond more to rewards and punishments rather than internalized moral rules. That is why we have to teach them the difference between right and wrong.
In Meet the Robinsons the filmmakers give kids two solid lessons: family is central to a happy life, and what you do matters.
Both of these messages are sent strongly in the narrative, and the latter is also conveyed by the repeated admonition that the protagonist should "keep moving forward."
The narrative is rather complex, and appealingly so, dealing with time travel and some interesting questions of identity. Parents should be able to explain it all to their children as necessary. In addition, the film includes vividly imagined characters (especially the comically exaggerated villain, the Bowler Hat Guy), many zany visual images, and funny dialogue.
The repeated phrase, "I'm not sure how well this plan was thought through," is both funny in context and sends a good message about the importance of considering the possible consequences of one's actions, a prerequisite for all moral thinking.
The film upholds values such as perseverance, compassion, benevolence, and diligence.
It's a fun movie, and a good one, a return to the values of Disney's pre-1970s animated films while taking advantage of modern stylistic and technological devices.
Only weeks before the shooting, Virginia's legislature "shot down," according to a January 31 report on the Web site of the Roanoke Times, a bill that, as the paper put it, "would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus." The story reported that a spokesman for Virginia Tech, Larry Hincker, was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure," the paper quoted Mr. Hincker as saying, "the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."
Today, however, the question hanging over this tragedy is whether the legislature acted wisely or whether, in fact, the campus would have been safer had the students and others been permitted to keep and bear arms in the dorms and on the greenswards. It's not a theoretical question. In 2002, according to a report on CNSNews.com, a disgruntled student at the Appalachian Law School, Peter Odighizuwa, allegedly shot and killed the school's dean, a professor, and a student on campus. He was subdued, CNSNews.comreported, only when two students reportedly ran to their cars to fetch their own guns and returned to confront the killer, who surrendered.
This led the president of the Second Amendment group at another school, George Mason University, to start looking into reforming bans on weapons on campus. That issue, already alive on campuses across the country, will grow only larger in the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It will be an important debate. We don't believe any public policy will be able to expunge from society the kind of insanity or evil that leads to the kinds of acts witnessed yesterday. But we do believe that Americans have the capacity to reason out their own choices about how to defend themselves. And to reach out in their thoughts and prayers to the families who lost loved ones on the campus of Virginia Tech.
Look at the last sentence in paragraph one of the quote and note that there is a big difference between feeling safe and being safe.
Wouldn't you prefer that you and your loved ones actually were safer from such attacks instead of merely being deluded into thinking they are? This is an empirical matter, and the evidence appears to be strongly against those who want, however benevolently, to ban law-abiding people from having guns.
The mass shooting at Virginia Tech University will certainly bring a long and laborious discussion of causes and suggestions for averting such incidents in the future. That is necessary and good, but if history is any guide, most of the suggestions will be thoroughly ineffectual.
What is most important to bear in mind is that America has a long history of violence. It is our way. Yet in the past, the violence was largely political in nature—unions rioting, anarchists setting off bombs to terrorize the population, fights among racial groups, and the like.
Such violence, while wrong, at least makes some sense. Those who engage in it—such as early twentieth-century anarchists and Timothy McVey and his helpers in the Oklahoma City bombings—at least believe that their activities are meant to result in some ultimate good, however repugnant and evil their chosen means of achieving it.
What is new in the past half-century is the rise of mass violence caused by personal problems. The deadliest such rampage previous to yesterday's was that of Charles Whitman at the University of Texas at Austin, in which he killed sixteen people by shooting at them with a sniper rifle from a campus clock tower.
Like many such subsequent events, this was an act of personal violence toward strangers. Whitman had no real agenda other than a desire to kill a lot of other people before taking his own life.
One suspects that yesterday's rampage will turn out to have similar origins.
How, then, to prevent such incidents?
Reducing the number of guns in circulation will not accomplish this. Madmen will always be able to get guns—or make bombs, or use poisons, or spread diseases, or use other, more inventive means—to kill others if they wish.
In fact, a greater presence of guns in the hands of law-abiding people would prevent or at least greatly reduce the number of innocents killed in situations such as yesterday's.
But of course no one is going to offer that as a simple, common-sense solution.
No, guns will be blamed, and the psychological causes of this sort of violence will be wrongly indentified and dissected endlessly, resulting in even greater confusion and inanity.
What, then, is at the root of such mad acts as yesterday's?
Only a powerful egomania, in which the destruction of oneself represents the destruction of the entire world, can explain it.
The question then becomes, is there something about the past half-century of American society and culture that fosters an increase of such egomania?
I believe that there is, and that it is a natural outcome of the Omniculture, the devaluation of all values. Such killings are occurring in increasing frequency in other nations as well, most of which have developed similarly individualistic, self-regarding cultures in the past half-century—Scotland, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, etc.
The self-esteem movement and its roots in the hyperindividualism of post-World War II America, particularly the decline of family closeness, are clear contributors to the kind of egomania that leads to such killings and multitudes of other unhappy things about modern America.
Those values must be replaced by ones that work to create real communities and a greater sense of voluntary commitment to one another. And the voluntary nature of such commitments must be a point of emphasis.
The only real way to reduce the number of such incidents both large and small will be for the society to agree on a common set of values that place the individual in his or her proper context as a member of society, and for those values to be taught in the schools and reinforced throughout the culture.
That proper place can only be found in the Judeo-Christian roots of our society.
Until our schools and culture teach those values, we will continue, as a society, to have to resort to force, instead of consent, in keeping such order as is possible among a people of increasing self-regard and disregard for others.
This is evident in the recent case of radio host Don Imus, whose incessant verbal cruelty ultimately resulted in widespread public disapprobation and dismissal from his job. Imus was only doing what is increasingly common in American society today, and shouldn't be.
A society cannot be held together by force. It must cohere by consent of the governed, and that consent is possible only if people accept the premise that their behavior should be governed.
Until we get to the roots of the problem, in what our schools teach our children, conditions will not impove.
This is a good time to have that discussion and make that choice.
Rutgers Team Accepts Imus's Apology—Now That He's Been Canned
The Rutgers University ladies' basketball team has accepted Don Imus's apology, AP reports.
Coach Vivian Stringer read from a prepared statement, and after noting the team's acceptance of Imus's apology, said that they are "in the process of forgiving."
Stinger went on to reiterate her and her team's original complaint. "We still find his statements to be unacceptable, and this is an experience that we will never forget," she said.
She then expressed why this thing had become so intensely important to the mainstream media: "These comments are indicative of greater ills in our culture. It is not just Mr. Imus, and we hope that this will be and serve as a catalyst for change. Let us continue to work hard together to make this world a better place."
As I noted earlier on this site, the reason Imus's words drew such attention was the belief among the media and among all fashionable individuals that American society is rife with unabashed hatred of certain groups of people, and I don't mean Christians or Republicans.
Stringer's statement confirms and exemplifies this reality.
Finally, it is interesting that the team did not accept his apology until he was fired by both his radio and TV outlets. Apparently they had a good deal to think about before doing the right thing....
Syndicated columnist Mona Charen unearthed a brilliant gem of insight from the great philosopher Snoop Dogg, in his reaction to the Don Imus controversy. Mr. Dogg says that some people can use some words, and others can't, because some people are real and others are not.
If Mr. Dogg's line of thinking sounds familiar, it's because it is. It's from George Orwell's Animal Farm. It is articulated, you'll recall, by the villains: the pigs.
A more telling example of the phony cult of authenticity and the arrogance of modern-day celebrities could hardly be imagined. Charen writes:
Snoop Dogg has helpfully explained that his use of the term “ho” differs from that of Mr. Imus: “First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them [expletive] say we in the same league with them. . . . [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing [expletive], that’s trying to get a [expletive] for his money. These are two separate things.”
Someone, ideally his father, should have told that degenerate that just because something comes out of his mind and soul does not make it legitimate or edifying. In fact, his principal job in life is to see to the hygiene of his soul. But no one tells the young that anymore. We’re too busy pushing wads of cash into their hands for being “as nasty as they want to be,” to quote a now-passe rap album.
As stated here two days ago (see below), radio host Don Imus's characterization of the Rutgers ladies' basketball team was odious and entirely unacceptable. He should certainly be punished for it, and I believe that a suspension is appropriate.
Bowing to advertisers' pressure, MSNBC has announced that it is dropping its TV simulcast of Imus's program. That is entirely their prerogative, although I should have thought good business sense would have told the channel's executives simply to wait it out and see whether Imus and the show can recover from the troubles of the past few days.
It is not as if MSNBC has a lot of great, audience-grabbing programs waiting in the wings, or else they'd have replaced much of their other unwatched lineup of boring , inane chatter.
The cultural issue at hand, however, remains an interesting one. The reigning double standard regarding offensiveness is peculiarly evident in the present case.
Whenever people complain about there being too much sex and vulgar talk on television or radio in general, the nearly universal reaction among commentators afforded access to mainstream media outlets is this:
You don't have to watch or listen to it. Just change the channel.
In the present case, however, as with the Tim Hardaway controversy (covered in detail on this site), just not listening is not an acceptable solution.
The difference, of course, is that in cases in which rude, offensive, and insensitive behavior (as TV and radio vulgarity most certainly are) explicitly undermine Judeo-Christian values, they are applauded by the vast claque of new age weirdos that have infested the media for the past half-century and have become increasingly distant from the vast majority of people in this country.
The reason, then, that characters such as Imus and Hardaway are singled out for destruction is that they do not openly oppose Judeo-Christian values. Imus, for example, may undermine these values every day with his vulgarity and frivolousness, and his characterization of a group of female basketball players as undistinguished prostitutes is certainly un-Christian in the extreme, but what makes his vulgarity in this instance most distinctive is that it can be easily characterized as derogation of two accredited victim groups.
This characterization is entirely false, of course, unless it is to be suggested that all people with very curly hair are ugly and all women are prostitutes. To anyone who does not think such repulsive thoughts, and who does not believe that a great number of other people think such thoughts, Imus's statement is just another instance of idiotic blather from a big-mouthed clown.
That, of course, is the point. The clever folk in the media do believe that most Americans generally look with disdain on blacks, women, and many other groups of people. And that is what the mainstream media are working so hard to prevent by attacking people such as Imus and Hardaway.
It is not harsh words that they are trying to prevent, but ideas that they dislike. The fact that in Imus's case the ideas are ones that virtually nobody holds and that have in fact been made illegal by the federal and state governments is of no moment.
And the fact that in Hardaway's case the ideas are ones that have been held by nearly every human being throughout human history is likewise no obstacle to their effort to make reality conform to their dreams.
It has been announced that the Rutgers University ladies' basketball team will appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show today. This is an excellent opportunity for these young ladies to show precisely what they're made of and thereby knock Imus's characterization of them aside for all time.
The way to do that, of course, is publicly to accept Imus's apology, without reservations, and forgive him fully.
In addition, they can show magnanimity by asking others to forgive Imus and forget about this thoroughly regrettable incident.
This would change these young ladies instantly from victims to heroines.
And it would of course be the Christian thing to do.
Today we'll find out whether they prefer to be seen as victims or as heroines.
It will be an interesting test, one even more challenging than participatiion in the NCAA finals game.
Last Charges Against Duke Lacrosse Players to Be Dropped—Case Still Not Over, However
AP reports that North Carolina officials have decided to drop the remaining charges against the three Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused of rape, kidnapping, and sexual offense and indicted by prosecutor Thomas Nifong in an obvious bid to garner votes from a certain class of persons in his reelection campaign:
State prosecutors have decided to drop all charges against three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexual assaulting a stripper at a team party, a person close to the case told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The North Carolina Attorney General's office, which took over the case in January after the local district attorney was accused of ethics violations, said it would have an announcement on the case at 2:30 p.m.
That's the right thing to do, but there's much more work to be done. Nifong must be brought to account for his despicable misdeeds in the Duke false prosecution scandal.
All appropriate civil and criminal charges should be filed against him as soon as possible. In addition, the accuser should be brought under criminal charges.
Nifong and the accuser must be held accountable for the anguish, humiliation, and huge legal expenses they imposed on these young men who were entirely innocent of the wrongdoings of which they were so obviously falsely charged, and for the effect on these men's families.
The actions of which the North Carolina bar has correctly accused Nifong—making misleading and inflammatory comments about the Duke players charged in the case, withholding evidence from defense attorneys, and lying to the court and state bar investigators—are criminal offenses and should be prosecuted to the full extent that North Carolina law allows.
This case, then, is far from over. The true criminals must be brought to justice.
A commenter asked for our thoughts on the Don Imus affair, and we shall be happy to oblige. As you probably know, Imus, who has a syndicated radio program which is simulcast on MSNBC, last Wednesday referred to the Rutgers University ladies' basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." The predictable cries of racism and sexism were sent through all the land, and Imus has been condemned by all and sundry. Imus apologized, and his bosses have suspended him for two weeks.
That, of course, is not nearly enough for professional grievance-mongers and moral superiors such as Al Sharpton, who have demanded that Imus be fired altogether. Whether a return to use of the stocks or the lash is soon to be called for, one can only wonder.
What Imus called those young ladies is stupid and insulting, and I cannot think how he could possibly have imagined, even for a moment, that they merited such scornful treatment on national radio and tv (not that anyone actually watches MSNBC).
Even worse, Imus's choice of words was neither clever nor amusing. Like Ann Coulter's backhanded reference to Sen. John Edwards as a faggot, Imus just shot his mouth off without giving a moment's attention to his wording so as to make it interesting and amusing.
That is a misdeed not to be forgiven.
I mean that.
I can think of a myriad of witty ways to describe a group of basketball players whom I don't like, but I shall keep them to myself at present, this being neither the t nor the p.
The real insult here is the insult Imus and other such jabbering tomcats offer day after day: the insult to our intelligence and taste.
Disrespectful and ignorant descriptions of the sort he blurted out last Wednesday have long been his stock in trade. His show is vulgar and stupid on a regular basis, and always has been so.
He should have been canned long ago for being a bore and a philistine.
To fire him now, however, would send a bad message to everyone. The message is, it's OK to insult anyone in any way you want, except for two classes of people.
To do so would designate these two groups of people as too weak to defend themselves in a fair duel of wits.
That is an outrageous characterization and is antithetical to a just society.
It is, in fact, just as bad as anything Imus can be thought to have suggested in his epithet.
Hence, this is not the right time to fire him.
The right course should be to wait for the next outrageous statement he makes on the air, and then fire him.
Then it will be clear that he is being fired for the right reasons, and the action will send the right message to everyone: be as snide and creepy as you want, but at least put some thought into it.
Turner Classic Movies is featuring actress Rita Hayworth this month, and there's a very good one coming up tomorrow.
At 11 a.m. EDT, Hayworth stars as the title character in Raoul Walsh's delightful 1941 comedy The Strawberry Blonde. Set in Gay '90s New York City, the film features excellent performances by Jimmy Cagney, Olivia DeHavilland, Hayworth, Alan Hale, Jack Carson, and George Tobias. Plus, if you look quickly, you'll see future TV Superman George Reeves as a snippy college boy.
The Strawberry Blonde is a charming, heartfelt comedy that tells the story of a feisty New Yorker (Cagney) whose pursuit of lofty ambitions brings him very low, but who finds that the life he settled for, with a seemingly second-best girl (marrying spunky Amy, played by de Havilland, instead of the beautiful Virginia Brush, played by Hayworth) is far, far better than the one of which he had dreamed.
This is a classic film comedy, funny and meaningful.
There's more than one sucker born every minute, and most of them born in the past few decades are decidedly green, or so the U.S. business community is increasingly coming to think. (And they should know.)
As numerous companies increasingly market "green," supposedly environmentally friendly products, the U.S. business community is doing what free people always do: admirably adapt to changing conditions, however farcical the situation may be. The vast majority of scientists are convinced that (1) the world is warming naturally today, slightly, as part of a natural warming and cooling cycle that has existed since the atmosphere was formed; (2) that human activities contribute negligibly or not at all to this effect; and (3) the slight level of warming that we get in this go-round of the cycle will be entirely beneficial to human, animal, and plant life.
Despite these facts, countless influential politicians and other celebrities have decided that a scare over global warming is a great way to take more control over the economy and erode our minuscule freedoms even further. Businesses initially opposed the global warming movement, but many have backed off their support in the past year.
Clearly, they have realized that they simply cannot beat the Greens, with their political and media power, and have decided to join them.
It's a tragedy, and one that we will see as such in future decades, but for now it is the reality.
The latest manifestation of the power of this entirely irrational movement is yesterday's announcement that the Discovery TV channel operation will start a "Green channel." The New York Times reports:
Discovery Communications, the cable channel operator, plans to start a 24-hour channel focused on eco-friendly living, as part of a push into the rising environmental movement.
The company, based in Silver Spring, Md., will next year rebrand its Discovery Home Channel with a name that has not been selected but will reflect its position as the centerpiece of an initiative called PlanetGreen.
In addition to the cable channel, which will be carried initially in 50 million homes, other Discovery outlets including its flagship Discovery Channel will carry documentaries and other programming highlighting the new green lifestyle channel, said the chief executive, David M. Zaslav. . . .
PlanetGreen is one of the biggest efforts that a media company has made to tap into the growing movement that has spawned everything from green cars, food and architecture to green weddings and talk of a green Olympics. . . .
In addition to satisfying the interests of viewers, Mr. Zaslav said that advertisers now have distinct green budgets in the same way that they have online budgets.
Tragic. Stupid and tragic.
The best antidote to this nonsense, regarding the media, is still Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear. Purchase it here.
Our politics are derived from our culture. A culture, after all, is a place where minds live. And what shapes those mnds will shape our decisions.
That's why I think it crucial that we foster a culture in which wise, sensible values will predominate. And although I often report on positive trends, it doesn't take too much investigation to see that our culture is currently riddled with the premise that people aren't in charge of their own destiny and that we need the benevolent guiding hand of government to make things right.
I think that this notion breeds nothing but evil. On the other hand is a powerful tide of narcissism arising from the premise, inherent in philosophical relativism, that there are no universal moral standards to which each individual should adhere.
Together these two notions make for a mentality that is both selfish and defeatist. This is what our culture and society all too often foster, according to the following item, which was sent to me by Steve Stanek, who works with me as managing editor of Budget and Tax News, published by The Heartland Institute. This brief essay is used with the author's permission.
Monuments to Narcissism
By Steve Stanek
I feel very defeated these days. We have a Supreme Court that apparently views the Constitution as an obstacle or irrelevance; state and local governments that keep looking for ways to spend gobs more money and push people into government programs, thus reducing choice and freedom; and a federal government that makes my blood boil just thinking about it -- and that was before the Democrats regained power!
What is the role of government? Should it be doing these things? What about the lives of citizens? Is it good for citizens to be forced into government dependency? To be told what we may or may not eat? Does anyone in power ask such questions?
My state senator -- a Republican whom I have known 27 years -- recently introduced a bill to ban goose liver pate from Illinois. She's on board with a statewide smoking ban, too.
Meanwhile the federal government pays farmers to grow tobacco.
Is it good for citizens to depend on government for education, health care, retirement? Why not also for shoes and socks, cars and trucks, pants and shirts, plumbing repairs, car repairs, a new furnace for the house, a new roof for the house, a new house, vacation getaways, nice restaurant dinners? Where will it end? Will it end?
I remember a time when heroes were good and humble; when heroes did great deeds or selflessly risked life and limb; and when they did these things without expectation of reward or adulation. Real heroes were rare, and on rare occasions a road or bridge or building would be named after a hero, usually a man or woman whose life was ended and evaluated and shown to have been good and worthy.
The selfless hero who shunned adulation -- Shane, The Lone Ranger, Marshall Dillon, The Magnificent Seven -- was a staple of movie and fiction lore when I was growing up.
Now look at what we have. Here in Illinois we have Stroger Hospital in Cook County; Elfstrom Stadium in Kane County; the Thompson Center in Chicago. The McHenry Lock and Dam near my house -- a great name because it describes the facility and where it is located -- was renamed the William B. Stratton Lock and Dam a few years ago because Stratton -- in the 1960s! -- was Illinois governor when the state provided funds to fix up the place. We have Don Young's Way and Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Alaska, Mike and Janet Huckabee Lake in Arkansas, the Trent Lott Center in Mississippi, the Robert C. Byrd BioTechnology Science Center (and dozens of other things named after Byrd) in West Virginia.
These are all edifices named after politicians who did nothing more than get the funding for them. Elected officials apparently see themselves as heroes. And politicians everywhere are doing this. The newest major road in my county is Rakow Road, named for the county road commissioner who was in office when the project was begun.
I wonder if we will ever again see an O'Hare Airport, named in honor of a young and brave Navy flyer who died in action in World War II?
The contemptible sons of bitches now running this country build physical monuments to themselves that people can see, and with programs like universal health care and universal preschool and universal this and universal that, they build monuments to themselves that people can feel.
The politicians say it's for us, but it's really for them, and millions of citizens fail to see this. I fear we have slipped into a national case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The politicians are the narcissists; we are the victims who feed their narcissistic needs.
Last night's episode of the Fox TV drama House presented another of those powerful ethical dilemmas for which the show is justly renowned. And it presents one of the most powerful pro-life moments ever seen on a fictional U.S. TV series. Probably the most powerful, in fact.
House, of course, wants to take the unborn child from the womb and end the pregnancy—immediate delivery is the only known treatment. The child is not yet viable, however, and will die if removed from the womb. The mother is insistent that the child not be taken.
Cuddy argues strenuously against the terminatin, and House finally agrees to try to perform an operation on the baby in the womb. During this procedure, the baby grasps House's finger, and he is stunned. Cuddy has to prod him to resume the operation.
You can view the clip here. (It's preceded by a commercial.)
In the end, the woman and baby both survive, but House returns to his harshly analytical approach, telling Cuddy that they did the wrong thing, that they should have saved the mother because the odds were very much against what they chose to do being successful. Cuddy essentially tells him that the sanctity of life is the most important factor in any calculation.
The moment in which the unborn baby—a child which we know not to be viable outside the womb—grasps the doctor's finger, is a stunner. It says so much, through a simple gesture.
This is one of those instances where a fictional drama can really challenge people's conceptions.
I'll give this one a full review soon, and for now I'll just say it's absolutely glorious, and soli deo gloria. Neal Morse is one of the great popular music composers of our time, and this is the best work he has done since the Spock's Beard album V, which was released in the year 2000 and is one of the greatest rock albums of all time, in my view.
(Our friend Carl Olsen gets a mulligan on Sola Scriptura, as it was not yet released when he wrote his article mentioned below.)
The Rocket Scientists are one of my favorite bands, and it's a pity that they only manage to release an album every five years or so. (Brutal Architecture, from 1999, is one of my absolute favorite albums. I still listen to it regularly.) The Rocket Scientists produce a strongly Beatles-influenced, highly melodic form of prog rock, driven by Mark McCrite's warm voice and precise guitar and Erik Norlander's great keyboard virtuosity. (Norlander is truly in a class with Emerson and Wakeman.)
The band moved away from their more melodic, almost pop form of prog that made Brutal Architecture so unusual and beautiful, toward a heavier, harder-edged, more guitar-oriented approach for the 2003 album Oblivion Days, which took away some of the uniqueness of their sound but still made for a very good album. With Revolution Road, the band has reconciled these two sides splendidly. With additional vocals by David McBee on the more metal-oriented cuts, Revolution Roadis more overtly melodic and pretty than Oblivion Days while replicating that album's power in all the right places. The music varies from acoustic-guitar-led ballads to melodic metal to Norlander-led symphonic grandeur, with several other interesting stops in between. The album is more enjoyable with each listen.
Available on ITunes only. Steve Babb and Fred Schendel purvey a great form of symphonic rock with classical and medieval touches. This release collects GH tracks not released on official GH albums during the past few years. "The Narrow Way" has some of Fred's great Hammond playing. "A Is A" is unusually heavy and guitar-based for this band and is a nice, tuneful change of pace. "The Morning Song" has some nice piano arpeggios from Fred and appealing harmony and counterpoint vocals by the band. The symphonic version of "Heroes and Dragons," employing only voice and orchestra, is very pretty indeed and even more moving than the original version on Lex Rex. The epic song "In the Court of Alkinoos" is one of the band's best compositions.
Spock's Beard has weathered Neal Morse's 2002 departure rather better than one might have expected, and this, their ninth album, has all the things we expect from the Beard—great melodies, inventive arrangements, passionate singing and smart harmonies, superb musicianship, provocative and interesting lyrics—and all without Neal Morse.
Very good 1970s-style symphonic prog. The musicianship is topnotch, though the band would benefit greatly from stronger vocals. The compositions and lyrics, however, are sufficiently intelligent and salutary to overcome this deficiency.
The stupendously talented 1970s Dutch band Focus (remember "Hocus Pocus"?) returns with a new guitarist and their classic blend of mostly instrumental progressive rock with strong classical and jazz influences. (Thijs Van Leer plays a mean jazz flute, even better than Ron Burgundy.)
Focus 9: New Skin is a worthy addition to this band's catalogue, with plenty of their customary tunefulness, instrumental virtuosity, sheer performance energy, and jovial sense of humor. The songs don't break any new ground, basically reprising the styles of their best compositions of the past, but they're very nice variations on classic Focus themes, and the album is just great fun to listen to.
Our friend Carl Olsen has an amusingly pointed and insightful piece on recent music, at his home at the Ignatius Press website. I particularly like Carl's recommendations of Dream Theater, Kevin Max, Muse, and Frank Sinatra. Bach's Concerti is a fine choice in the classical section, and the mentions of Kate Bush, Charlie Peacock, and Keith Jarrett are downright laudable.
The one thing I disagree with his awarding of Best Prog Rock Album to Porcupine Tree for Deadwing—it's not a bad album at all, but there were several other much better ones released in the prog realm in the last year, in my view. See the article directly above for a list of some worthy recent releases.
All in all, however, it's a very interesting list, with some likeably eccentric categories such as Best Nordic Jazz Album. Read Carl's article here.
Blades of Glory, the new comedy starring Will Farrell and Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), is a very funny movie, both verbally and visually. As is the case with Farrell's movies in general, there is a huge amount of vulgarity and grossness, and the movie's ideas and values are very good indeed, as is also typically true of Farrell's films.
The film opened strong at the box office, finishing number one over the weekend with a U.S. take of $33 million. What was perhaps more surprising is that it received relatively good reviews. In this instance the critics were right—but there is one important angle they must have missed, or they would surely have hated the movie.
Blades of Glory tells the story of two male figure skaters who put aside their intense rivalry in order to have one last chance at winning—by skating as a pair, becoming the world's first male couples team. The film obtains the expected humor from this central concept, but it also provides a good deal more.
One impressive thing is the amount of wordplay in the film. Farrell has always enjoyed the use of vivid and surprising combinations of words, and Blades of Glory provides many good examples. For example, when the team's coach asks, "What do you guys have that no other pairs team has?" Farrell's character replies, "Two baloney ponies?"
The film also uses the chemistry of Farrell and Heder to great effect. In one amusing exchange, Heder's character says, "Get out of my face!" Ferrell's character replies, "I'll get inside your face!" Later, when the two are partners and living in the same room as they train together, Farrell says he needs special consideration because "the night is a really dark time for me." Heder replies, "The night is dark for everybody, you douche!"
Such exchanges superbly use Heder's sardonic, exasperated persona to excellent effect, as he plays off of Farrell's blustery, narcissistm.
The film was directed by the pair of young men responsible for the GEICO caveman commercials, and has an impressive amount of visual humor, from the ridiculous peacock costume Heder wears in his solo skating act early in the film, to "The Grublets," the horrendous, cheesy ice show Farrell's character participates in after being banned from competitive figure skating, to the shot of Farrell's character practicing the team's signature move with a mannequin, which results in a series of decapitations and Heder's horrified reaction.
One interesting angle, of course, is the central idea of two men skating together, and the implications that might have for some highly incendiary current social and political issues. One could easily imagine Hollywood playing this same-sex skating couple as a matter of liberation, trying to convince us that a male-male couple is just as good as a mixed one in every way, and not just in skating. And although the film makes the valid point that the two men have an advantage over a male-female couple in that their roughly equal physical strength would enable them to accomplish some moves that a mixed pair could not, the film actually makes a much stronger impression that the two men being together in this way is highly unnatural. They really look just awful. That's what makes it funny. In addition, by frequently showing the two men together in very intinate physical proximity, often involving what used to be very private areas of the body, the film evokes a strong yuck factor that says more about homosexuality than a thousand sermons ever could.
It's almost certainly unintentional on the filmmakers' part, but it is an unavoidable truth of Blades of Glory and a very interesting and potent political statement.
The Value of Plot; plus: Guest Review of "Night of the Wolf"
A few weeks ago I eagerly purchased a copy of the new book Night of the Wolf, a collection of stories by the French writer Paul Halter. Halter writes mystery novels and short stories, and he follows in the grand tradition of John Dickson Carr, creating thorny "impossible crime" puzzles in modern settings fraught with surrealistic events and gothic-style tension.
What makes Halter popular in France and in translation in several other countries is what has probably held him back from achieving popularity in the United States thus far: his thorough and unapologetic devotion to plot-driven fiction.
This tradition of fiction writing—which animated authors as brilliant as Charles Dickens and the other great Victorian-era novelists, before the advent of Modernism placed character (and in particular amateur psychology, nearly always ineptly executed) above all other considerations — is my own preference in fiction, as it was for both G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, two of the most brilliant literary critics of the past century.
The publisher's description aptly expresses why I am looking forward to reading Halter's stories:
Coffins dancing in a hermetically sealed crypt, a tunnel that murders people, a werewolf killer who leaves no trace on the snow, a victim killed by an invisible hand at the top of a guarded tower, a homicidal snowman that kills in front of witnesses. . . . There cannot be a rational explanation for these and other hideous crimes; and yet there is. Each story is a glittering example of the brilliant plotting and atmosphere of foreboding that characterized the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Halter writes in his native French, and none of his novels has been released in an English translation yet. I have read a couple of his stories, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine a year or so ago, and they are gems. I'm greatly looking forward to reading Night of the Wolf, but the press of business makes it unlikely that I'll be able to do so soon.
However, a friend of ours, Bob Schneider, has written a review of Night of the Wolf and has kindly given us permission to use it. Here, with our sincere thanks to Bob Schneider, is his review of Paul Halter's mystery story collection Night of the Wolf:
This is the first English Translation of Paul Halter's short mystery fiction. The book consists of ten "Impossible Crime" stories written mostly in the 1990's. Mr. Halter has received both popular and critical acclaim in his native France for his atmospheric, plot driven stories written in the tradition of John Dickson Carr's best work. Carr (1906-1977) was a prolific American mystery writer who lived for several years in England. He is considered the greatest practitioner of the "Locked Room" or "Impossible Crime" murder mystery. He specialized in stories that featured a crime (usually a murder) that occurred in a locked or watched room into which there was no apparent access. An "Impossible Crime" story would run along similar lines in that a murder would be committed without any apparent means by any of the possible suspects.
Halter deploys at least three different detectives to solve his crimes. Owen Burns (a sort of Sherlock Holmes/Oscar Wilde combination) for stories set at the turn of the 19th Century, Irving Farrell (an elderly man who has a knack of encountering unusual crimes in 1920's England) and Dr. Alan Twist (a criminologist often called upon by the police to solve unusual crimes in mid to late 20th Century Europe).
Several of these stories take place during or just after a snowfall, which allows Halter to work his literary trickery with footprints (or the lack thereof) in the snow. Architecture plays an important role in his stories either by setting a mood or by playing a key role in the mystery itself. Though the stories often have supernatural overtones, most of the solutions to the crimes are logically explained and a careful reader might, by correctly interpreting Halter's clues, be able to solve the mysteries before the detectives offer their explanations.
Whether Halter is describing a murderous snowman, a dancing corpse, a modern "Lorelei", an avenging ghost or a werewolf as seen from both the lupine and human perspectives he often evokes the best of not only John Dickson Carr but the mastery of Agatha Christie and the artistry of G. K. Chesterton.
By Bob Schneider, used with permission.
Additional Info:
For an excellent article on Paul Halter, by the astute mystery fiction expert John Pugmire (who co-translated Night of the Wolf with the justly acclaimed and admired impossible-crime-mystery expert Robert Adey), click here.
This seems a real stretch, given that the Democratic Party not only survived Vietnam but in fact routed the Republicans just one presidency later.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows:
A student in a Chicago suburb has been arrested for writing an essay that allegedly frightened his teacher.
The networks' top evening TV programs suffered serious viewership ratings losses in the past few weeks, with several shows reaching record lows, 
ABC Television has announced that Rosie O'Donnell, controversial host of the daytime show The View, will be leaving the program, as her contract has not been renewed.
If you ever doubt the power of popular culture to affect events, just consider Britain's mid-century film comedies. A movie I had never seen until yesterday illustrates this well..jpg "A typically gloomy image from Batman Begins movie")
[I ran across a DVD of the movie Batman Begins recently and was reminded of how representative it is of much of today's movie culture. So, for your enlightement and delectation, the following is reprinted from 
Former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson aptly characterized the two minds of modernity: liberalism and statism, in 
The excellent AMC/BBC-TV series Hustle returns tonight at 10 EST. Tonight's episode commences the fourth annual series of six episodes of 
In Meet the Robinsons the filmmakers give kids two solid lessons: family is central to a happy life, and what you do matters.
A commenter asked for our thoughts on the Don Imus affair, and we shall be happy to oblige. As you probably know, Imus, who has a syndicated radio program which is simulcast on MSNBC, last Wednesday referred to the Rutgers University ladies' basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." The predictable cries of racism and sexism were sent through all the land, and Imus has been condemned by all and sundry. Imus apologized, and his bosses have suspended him for two weeks.
Turner Classic Movies
Neal Morse: 
The Rocket Scientists: 
Glass Hammer: 
Such exchanges superbly use Heder's sardonic, exasperated persona to excellent effect, as he plays off of Farrell's blustery, narcissistm.
A few weeks ago I eagerly purchased a copy of the new book 
