Cats And Dogs Living Together
Ed Morrissey writes that the New Republic is praising President Bush's efforts in the Middle East: In fact, as [TNR'S Martin Peretz] concludes, the greatest irony about George Bush and the Middle East is that history may show that one of the most conservative administrations in ages (Peretz' opinion) managed to be the first to actually spread liberalism throughout a region most liberals thought to be hopeless. Wouldn't be the first time, actually.
Well, He Was Caught Red-Panted
"Former national security adviser Sandy Berger will plead guilty to taking classified material from the National Archives", AP reports, adding, "The charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison and up to a $100,000 fine."
I love this bit: Many Democrats, including former President Clinton, suggested politics were behind disclosure of the probe only days before the release of the Sept. 11 commission report, which Republicans feared would be a blow to President Bush's re-election campaign. I guess for AP, it doesn't matter that a former national security advisor was caught with classified documents in his trousers (And possibly other things...), what matters was the motive behind investigating him.
CNN: Pope Given Last Rites
"Pope John Paul II was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church late Thursday night as his health deteriorated, a Vatican source has told CNN."
R.I.P.
Terri Schiavo, dead at age 41.
The Corner has a tip for how to decipher some of the pronouncements by the media.
Mark Steyn places the last week and a half into sharp perspective in England's Spectator. (Use Bugmenot.com if asked for a password.)
Update: Jim Geraghty has some thoughts (and lots of links) on how ugly and circus-like the last couple of weeks have been: The Elian mess was bad. But somehow, this all seems much nastier. Marked by more out-and-out hate.
Maybe it’s me. No, that seems like a fair assessment.
A Silicon Valley Operator's Manual
Via Steve Green, Rich Karlgaard explains what makes Silicon Valley politics tick.
For one primer as to how it got that way, check out this Tom Wolfe essay on Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel, who's mentioned at the beginning of Karlgaard's piece. And this mid-'90s classic by Virginia Postrel on how the weather shapes the Silicon Valley mindset--one that's very different, from, say, Boston--is also well worth reading.
Oh, and what the heck, using Postrel's Future and its Enemies model, here's my piece from Tech Central Station on the difference between Silicon Valley Dynamists and Hollywood Stasists.
Which Came First: The Chicken, the Egg, or the Abattoir?
Orrin Judd has had several recent posts that have highlighted the darkest aspect of what the Terri Schiavo drama could portend: that Germany's obsession with euthanasia, and eventually wholesale assembly line-style slaughter in the 1930s and 1940s, actually pre-dated the rise of the Nazis, just as anti-Semitism was present long before as well. The Nazis simply stoked both ideas and then perfected the dark technology to carry them out.
This is actually consistent with much current historical thinking about pre-WWII Germany. In the past, most historians viewed the Nazis as a strange alien virus that subverted the will of the peaceful and enlightened Germans, as Orrin himself wrote a few years ago: When it comes to popular history on the Nazi era, a subject about which very little deviation from the norm is tolerated, the one book that you'll most often see cited is William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, this book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. Current thinking seems to be quite different: as Ian Kershaw described in his two-volume biography of Hitler (full disclosure: I haven't read Vol. 1 yet), Hitler was accepted quite enthusiastically by the bulk of the German people, at least until the invasion of Russia went south.
Scientists in particular led the way for much of Germany's culture of death, as Mark P. Mostert noted in the fall 2002 Journal of Special Education:
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Prior to World War I, the German eugenicists concurred with their American and British colleagues regarding a scale of human worth, dividing the German population into those who were superior (hochwertig) and inferior (minderwertig). Thus, eugenics asserted that the "feebleminded" (a generic, inaccurate term covering everything from mental retardation to alcoholism) were almost always so because of inherited inferior characteristics. From these assumptions, they "saw the cause of the social problems of their times, such as alcoholism and prostitution, as inherited feeblemindedness, and viewed the manifestations of poverty, such as intermittent employment and chronic illness, as a hereditary degeneracy" (Friedlander, 1995, p. 6).
However, without the political heterogeneity that encouraged diverse views within the genetics movement in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in England, German eugenicists' views were much more radically homogeneous. Until Germany's defeat in World War I, the German eugenicists concentrated on "positive Eugenics," through the encouragement of higher birth rates among superior populations, which reflected the German eugenic concentration on class rather than race. However, a precursor of future troubles appeared in a eugenic faction that favored the concept of the Nordic racial ideal and despised its inferior counterpart, the anti-Nordic (Friedlander, 1995). It was this concept that eventually dominated German eugenic discourse and became enshrined in the Nazi idea of Aryan supremacy.
The two genocidal markers of Social Darwinism and eugenics were firmly in place in the professional and lay psyche when the National Socialists, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, were elected in January 1933. Thereafter, German acceptance of humanitarian inequality mixed with Hitler's racist convictions to produce the political ideology of the "Thousand Year Reich," a major component of which was the elimination of those deemed inferior (Friedlander, 1995). Furthermore, these two markers became the bedrock of increasingly coercive official policy, eventually killing thousands of people with disabilities. These two genocidal markers were then enacted in the real world, first by involuntary sterilization. Read the whole thing, it's quite staggering.
Am I suggesting that Terri's death will be a slippery slope into the abyss? Not necessarily. (And this is not to suggest that America is on a path to becoming Nazi Germany--or the Weimar Republic for that matter. That's Chutch's schtick.)
However, it's important to note that path that previous cultures and their scientists took, observe the landmarks along their way, and compare them with the road signs appearing in our windshields. « Close It
All Your Doomsday Are Belong To Us
Tim Blair notes that the world--and Boston--is doomed in the next few years.
Meanwhile, even before that happens, Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi has given the US only two more years before the kaboom--the earth-shattering kaboom "a great sin will cause a huge flood in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans".
Which means that life won't imitate art--it will imitate a really, really cheesy Kevin Costner film.
The horror. The horror.
(That was Coppola, dude!--Ed Hey, it's hard enough to end these things.)
Behold The Hell That Was The 1970s
I think this is a video produced by 1970s Euro-disco musicians called The Tommy Seebach Band.
I do know that it's the very definition of suck-tacular.
You were warned...
(Thankfully, Zladko was right around the corner to revolutionize not just videos, but pop music itself.)
Red Dusk? Don't Hold Your Breath
In the Wall Street Journal, Bridget Johnson has an essay titled "Red Dusk", in which she writes that it's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism: What feature films have showed the true nature of communism? There was "The Killing Fields," showing families torn apart, cities emptied, forced labor, bones littering the Cambodian landscape. Adding to the authenticity was its star, Oscar-winner and real-life survivor Haing S. Ngor, who would have been summarily executed had his intellectual background been discovered by the Khmer Rouge. As a cinematic achievement, it ranks as one of the best films of all time. As a historical testament, it shows that communism had nothing to do with betterment of the masses but stripped away everything that comprised the individual. Though this film should be required high-school viewing, not much else springs to mind that could counter the effects of pro-Marxist cinema.
I'll bet the big studio execs have never thought--or cared--to do a big-screen adaptation of "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression," by Stephane Courtois, et al. The book's 1997 publishing in France touched off a firestorm of controversy--mostly from offended French commies--and it stands as an astonishing comprehensive account of what this political ideology has wreaked on mankind in less than a century. The film version of this 800-plus-page account would be excruciatingly long and painful--too long for a 32-ounce soda and too nauseating for popcorn. So since Hollywood is all about franchises now anyway, the book could be adapted into several movies, each covering a corner of the globe and that region's own unique suffering under communism.
How about a film on the Soviet Union, beginning with Lenin and the 1917 revolution, droning on to Stalin's purges with hundreds of thousands executed by firing squad, and millions forced from their homes or carted off to labor camps? We'd see Soviet bloc countries strangled under communist rule, Berlin divided with concrete and snipers, Nicolae Ceausescu destroying historic Bucharest. We'd see Soviet terror exported with the scorched-earth policy in Afghanistan.
Red China would make a stellar film that lacks a happy ending--for now. Viewers would see Mao Tse-tung turn the colorful Chinese culture into a gray, bleak "worker's paradise" steeped in hunger and executions. We'd see the Great Leap Forward to devastating famine, murder and destruction in Tibet, women forced to abort their children, and the blood of student demonstrators spilled on Tiananmen Square. Complete the Asian film series with the "re-education" by terror in North Vietnam, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal that has killed thousands, and the hellish nightmare that is North Korea.
Some brilliant young director would have to tackle Africa's woes under communism, such as the starvation in Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam. And we can't forget the Latin American films, highlighting Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorists. And, of course, add a stark motion picture on the fall of Cuba--to be directed by anyone but Oliver Stone--that, though bloody and tragic, can end on a slightly lighter note (and an ovation) with Fidel Castro's fall down the stairs last October. It's worth noting that Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley wrote an article with an almost identical theme for Reason five years ago.
My take? It will never happen--at least not in my lifetime. TV's gotten a little closer: HBO's Stalin (starring a heavily made-up Robert Duvall in the title role) showed us the evils of the man, and their production of Robert Harris's Fatherland was a thinly-disguised parable on the moral implications of our period of detente with the Soviet Union--even if its filmmakers didn't know it. The British production of Harris's Enigma tacetly highlighted the Katyn forest massacre (where the Soviets shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel at the start of World War II), but there's just no way that Hollywood will ever do a big-budget theatrical film that focuses squarely on the evils of the Soviet Union.
One reason why, as Billingsley's article details, is that Hollywood has its own alternate view of history to protect: that the 1950s blacklist of admitted communist screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo was the single greatest evil ever perpetrated by mankind. And their deep-seated view that former Warner contract player Ronald Reagan was, as Clark Clifford famously described him, "an amiable dunce"--even as he looked for ways to win the Cold War in the years before he became president.
For Hollywood to portray communism as evil would be to look deeply into its own soul--and question much of its last 60 years. As I said, it won't happen.
Although I'd love to be proven wrong.
(Via Betsy Newmark.)
Update: Betsy was nice enough to link to my piece, along with an addendum in which she offers some ideas for Hollywood: The more I think about it, the more it seems like Hollywood is missing out on some great possibilities. And they wouldn't have to all be downer stories. What about a romance taking place against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain? How about a movie about some of the brave Soviet writers who risked everything to publish their samizdat literature? Or life in Romania leading to the fall of Ceausescu? Some actress who wanted a great Oscar-wortby role should commission a movie based on the life of the great poet, Anna Akhmatova. What a great movie of courage and suffering her life would make. Once Hollywood finishes cranking out a spate of films about our brave boys in Iraq that match all of their great World War II films, they'll get right on those, I'm sure.
Dirty Laundry
Johnnie Cochran died yesterday of a brain tumor. Jim Geraghty has a good recap of what his 15 minutes of fame meant to America: Here's news that shocks me — Johnnie Cochran dead at 67.
Hard to believe the O.J. Simpson trial was a decade ago. It feels more like ancient history. Was all of American news obsessed with one salacious celebrity murder trial for an entire year? Did race relations really get torn asunder over one abusive ex-jock? In retrospect, what the heck had gotten into us?
Actually, in light of other recent media obsessions - the Michael Jackson trial, the Scott Peterson murder case, and even the Schiavo controversy... we can conclude that the U.S. media, in particular the cable news networks, love covering court cases. Even though the only visual is usually the suspect walking in and out of the courthouse, it works, as Michael Jackson has found a way to turn even that routine into an unpredictable spectacle, weirder than a David Lynch movie.
The thing is, covering salacious trials are cheap, easy, and full of what many news producers think is "human interest" i.e. — the same tearjerking schlock they added to the Olympics a few years ago. Real news - like a bunch of guys overseas plotting to kill us, or the spread of democracy in the Middle East - is hard, expensive, and complicated to cover.
Sorry, I've got Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" playing in my head... I think that's exactly right--and one of the reasons why the long drawn-out set-piece type stories like the Terri Schiavo case and its wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage by cable feel to many like the calm before the storm of another 9/11 or Oklahoma Federal Building bombing.
This Just In
Howard Kurtz notes that college faculties tilt remarkably to the left.
(Also just in: sun sets in west, rises in east!)
In other collegiate news, Betsy Newmark writes that Princeton (home of Peter Singer and Cornel West) has seen quite a drop in donations this year.
She also notes that at Harvard, home to the man who sent West packing to Princeton, and who's now under-fire from its remaining professors for daring to say the bloody obvious, a poll finds that student satisfaction ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private schools.
Strange days for academia. Of course, this still ranks as the strangest indeed.
Chutch's Fried Chickens
Ward Churchill spoke in San Francisco on Friday; his most ardent supporters wore chicken hats on their heads.
Say what? Just click, and it will all be come clear. Nuts, but clear.
When Douglas Kern created the chickendove meme for Tech Central Station last month, I never thought it would catch on so quickly. I also like this comment on Charles Johnson's blog: Looking at this, I remember a comment from Uncle duke in Doonesbury years ago when Bush I was in office. "I stopped taking drugs years ago. Who can tell the difference?" And how!
Update: Not sure if it's included in this videotape--it may have been commercially released before Churchill spoke last week. Maybe the next the volume.
The Bonfire of Vanity Fair
This past August, I linked to a story about an Esquire author who was struggling valiantly to shrug-off the deeply engrained case of Bush Derangement Syndrome that permeated much of the New York publishing and magazine world--and only got worse as the election neared. Back then, I wrote: Magazines like GQ , Vanity Fair and Esquire, published out of New York (you know, one of the two cities where 9/11 happened), are built around an assumed sense of New York Times-style elite liberalism that's a very different mindset than that of most of its readers in "flyover country". Maybe someday they--or their advertisers--will figure this out. (Or at least figure out that at least half their readership doesn't think of John Kerry as a "political badass".) In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery writes that Vanity Fair's advanced case of BDS finally caught up with the magazine last fall: ON MARCH 6, THE Drudge Report noted the fact that newsstand sales for the magazine Vanity Fair had plummeted by 22.5 percent during the last half of 2004, attributed by the editor to three successive covers that showed pictures of . . . men. What Drudge did not cite is the parallel fact that this slide tracks exactly with the mutation of the magazine from a great escape read of the guilty-pleasure variety, the place to go for fatuous film stars, Princess Diana, and society murders, into a Bush-bashing rag of the fiercest variety, one that at times last year seemed almost possessed.
In the July issue (out early in June), readers looking for their quick fix of high life and low morals were startled instead to read a hatchet job on Bush's female appointees and relations, a glowing account of Iraqi insurgents ("mothers, teachers, and seasoned warriors"), and a big wet kiss bestowed on former counterterror-chief-turned-Bush critic Richard Clarke. Subsequent issues featured an attack on Don Rumsfeld (by a media critic!), an even larger wet kiss bestowed on Joe Wilson (the publicity-hound spouse of outed spy Valerie Plame), attacks on the role of the church in the culture, claims that Bush's indifference had caused 9/11, claims that Bush's agriculture department had poisoned small children, an unreadable rant about the horrors to come should Bush be reelected, and a hilariously indignant and one-sided account of the Florida recount that only Al Gore could take seriously.
By September, in order to get at the good stuff--like the tale of an heiress who dropped dead in a health club--one had to wade through no less than four Bush-bashing pieces, including the editor's letter, two different pieces decrying the neocon chickenhawks, and one very long story depicting the president as a dark reading of HenryV--a born-again wastrel and drunkard who led his country to eventual ruin via an ill-advised war. Every month, the magazine found new ways to kvetch about the president. Bush dodged the draft! Bush was mean to John McCain in the 2000 primaries! Bush stole the election in Florida, and--watch out for those touch-screens!--is planning to steal it again. No one can really know what causes a rise or fall in magazine sales, and it is always possible that large numbers of readers were so repelled by the sight of Jude Law (cover boy on one of the poor-selling issues) that they fled screaming. But it also seems likely that not a few readers took a quick look at the table of contents, and dropped the thing back in its rack.
The new Vanity Fair is a story the old one might have wanted to cover, as it points up an interesting trend: The really fierce strains of anti-Bush feeling come less from established political sources than from what might be called the "glitz-based community"--people connected to Hollywood, fashion, or celebrity media, who produce diversions and lifestyle advice. At the shallower end of the pool of arts and intellect, they tend to produce the facile and transient; they make TV shows, or write them; make clothes, or write about them; try to become, or failing that tend to the needs of, celebrities. I used to read GQ, Esquire, and to a lesser extent, Vanity Fair fairly religiously in the 1980s. I'd start reading them again, if I thought their coverage would be a bit more balanced. In the past, Manhattan's magazines ( and newspapers) were cognizant of having a fairly diverse audience, including their flyover country readers, and didn't try to obviously preach to them.
Of course, in the past, liberalism didn't tilt as far left as it does today, either.
Teleological Existential Agnosticism
Edward Feser explains how to mix religion and politics, and reminds us that the two are not matter and anti-matter: It will not do either to try to justify the liberal double standard concerning religion by regurgitating tired and tiresome clichés about religion's tendency to lead to wars, persecution, Inquisitions, Crusades, Galileo's house arrest, etc. For one thing, most of those who appeal to such clichés know very little about the actual history of the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the Galileo episode, and about how beholden the simpleminded popular image of these events is to Reformation and Enlightenment era polemics rather than to serious and objective historical inquiry. For another thing, the body count generated by such committed metaphysical naturalists and secularists as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other acolytes of the Marxist counter-religion is far higher than anything even the most fanatical jihadist has been capable of.
Finally, it is no good either to suggest that since we live in a pluralistic society, religious believers ought to keep their convictions off the table where public policy is concerned. For this point cuts both ways. Traditional religious believers have far more in common with each other, after all -- at least on questions concerning abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality, and the like -- than they do with secularists, and they are more numerous then secularists, at least in the United States. So why, if we are going to play the "pluralism" card in the first place, shouldn't the secularists be the ones required to keep their deepest convictions to themselves and out of the public square? And if it is legitimate to mix secularism and politics, pluralism notwithstanding, how can it be any less legitimate to mix religion and politics?
This is not to deny that the fact of pluralism poses a serious political problem: it does, and I frankly confess that I have no idea how to solve it. But then, neither does the liberal, whose favored "solution," as I have argued elsewhere, basically amounts to the proposition that all views in a pluralistic society can be tolerated only so long as they submit themselves to the liberal's own idiosyncratic and highly contestable conception of justice. That this peculiar brand of liberal intolerance ought to be regarded as superior to the religious variety is a proposition the liberal seems strangely uninterested in trying to justify. Perhaps he bases it on faith. Not a light, easy read, but well worth it.
If Man We're Meant To Fly
He'd remember to fasten his seat belt: Forty-nine people aboard a Taiwanese flight to Japan were injured Monday evening when the plane encountered sudden turbulence over the Pacific Ocean.
The incident occurred aboard Ever Air Flight 196 around 6:11 p.m., immediately after a flight attendant announced that the aircraft would soon begin its descent and the captain turned on the seat belt signs, the Mainichi Shimbun reported Tuesday.
The plane, bound for Japan's Narita Airport from Taipei, was flying at an altitude of almost 33,000 feet.
Some passengers who had not fastened their seat belts were thrown against the ceiling or the floor. Parts of the ceiling and walls were damaged, and baggage stored in overhead compartments was scattered on the floor.
About 20 minutes later, the aircraft, an Airbus A330-200 jet with 251 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, made an emergency landing at Narita Airport.
The 49 injured people, including nine crew members, were rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Talk about flying the unfriendly skies!
"The Boogeyman from Jesusland"
The Mudville Gazette debunks the source of much of the hysteria from the left regarding Terri Schiavo.
And yes, I'm aware that there's been plenty of hysteria from the right as well. I've tried not to blog this topic into the ground, if only to not add more to the swirling vortex of noise. But I do think this is a good tangential point: The Democrats' embrace of post-election denial was painfully obvious to everyone who saw it. Most observers turned away wincing, hoping to spare them some shred of dignity. Now in the Schiavo case the specter of the Boogeyman of Jesusland rises up again and folks from all over are eager to believe. The left again, of course, but they are eager to believe virtually anyone or anything that trots down the pike under the banner of notBush. But for others there's a different sort of catharsis involved. Having sided with the powers that be for so long they need redemption, they must do something - perform some act of contrition to show they aren't becoming that way. Kicking an imaginary Boogeyman from Jesusland seems like a fine tonic for those who still haven't completely come to accept that whether one is a progressive or an entrenched zealot or something in between has nothing to do with degree of religious faith, any more than one's degree of gullibility does.
Speculation about a 'fracturing coalition' of libertarians and conservatives then follows.
To blame the political abuse of the "religious right" for the prolonging of the drama surrounding Terri Schiavo is to ignore the fact that responses to the case are no doubt the most personal of feelings, coming from some deep well of the human soul where politics can't reach. Whether you're for or against sustaining Terri Schiavo's life is no predictor of your demographic; political, religious, geographic, or otherwise. For most the decision is tough. Perhaps more so for those who'd say "let her die". It's hard for fundamentally decent, caring people to reconcile their humanity with letting someone starve to death, so it helps to create a Christian boogeyman that they can oppose. Starvation is certainly preferable to what the Boogeyman from Jesusland has in store for her, after all. Read the rest. And for some background about how we got to this point, click here and follow the links.
(Via Hugh Hewitt, who seemed surprisingly cool and moderate this afternoon--particularly when many of his callers weren't--at least for the 45 minutes or so I was able to listen in.)
Update: In a related post, Betsy Newmark writes: It's strange how the media portrays this all as a GOP action and seems to ignore how the Democrats voted for this. In a way, it is the media that is striving to portray it along political lines. Maybe that is because they are most comfortable with looking at events through a political prism instead of any other way to look at an event. Update: More here.
Turning The Corner?
Power Line has good news about Iraq; a topic that Glenn Reynolds notes is apparently unfit to print in The New York Times.
If Adventure Has A Name...
It must be Jim Geraghty, who's posted lots of cool photos from his new home: Turkey. Just keep scrolling.
Talkin' 'Bout My G-G-Generation
Joe Gandelman, the Blogosphere's Moderate Voice, links to this interesting post by Steven Donohue, an 18 year old college student, who laments the demise of popular culture by the baby boomer generation.
It's kind of ironic, because my father frequently lamented the demise of the popular culture of his day (the 30s through the 1960s) by the baby boomer generation as well.
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I'll never forget the time (I think I must have been in my mid-teens) when I was listening rapturously to "Moonlight Mile", the last song on the Rolling Stones' 1970 Sticky Fingers album. I thought (and to a certain extent still do), that the combination of percussion, guitars, strings, and Jagger's vocal was pretty stunning. My father walked into my room, stood there, listened as well, and when it was over, said, "That's just brutal". That was a somewhat popular phrase of his to describe rock music, but he kept it in reserve for what he felt were the worst offenders. I'm pretty sure "Layla", by Eric Clapton (masquerading as Derek and the Dominoes) was similarly destroyed by Dad with a "That's just brutal". Thankfully, dad and I eventually found common ground with Les Paul, and later, Miles Davis.
Of course, such complaints are nothing new. As far as back as 1920, author John F. Carter, Jr. wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: In the first place, I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, 'way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof. But I understand Donohue's complaint. While I'm a thoroughly a child of the rock and roll generation (I can fake my way on guitar through loads and loads of Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones and Who songs), I also understand that what was seemingly bulldozed by rock wasn't too shabby: great songwriting, and the swing music of the 1930s to the early 1950s.
But there was an interim step between the two, as Mark Gauvreau Judge discovered in his fun If It Ain't Got That Swing, written in 2000. Rock only took off in the 1950s because bebop helped to destroy jazz's popularity in pop culture. Bebop was far more complex, and evolved into all sorts of fertile terrain such as cool jazz, modal jazz, and free jazz--but by and large, you couldn't dance to bop and its successors. Having felt abandoned by jazz, Judge writes, kids in the 1950s simply took to a new form of popular music that they could easily dance to: rock and roll.
In the early 1960s, Berry Gordy invented Motown, and gave black America a music that they too could easily dance to. By the middle of the 1960s, Motown's Hollywood-style assembly line of songwriters, crack session musicians, and star vocalists gave the world tunes of surprising sophistication. "Just My Imagination", just one of many examples, will take your breath away with its beautiful melody, vocal harmonies, backing score and lyrics.
Gordy's entrepreneurial skill allowed black music to flourish in the 1960s and '70s, and paved the way for the funk of James Brown, the sophisticated songwriting of Curtis Mayfield, and other great musicians.
But just as swing self-immolated into bebop, black pop music by the end of the 1970s also seemed to give up the ghost, and rap took off in its place. Gone was a sophisticated vocabulary that fueled the songwriting of the '60s and '70s, multi-faceted and at times complex and rich arrangements, and great vocalists. It was replaced by a combination of drum machines or drum beats "sampled" from the previous generation's recordings, chanted vocals, tape edits, and slick production effects.
Was it better than what it replaced? Not in many peoples' books, hence Donohue's lament.
But was it entirely unexpected? Probably not. If its anything like previous genres of pop music, it too will eventually implode, and be replaced with a different form of music--which itself may or not be better.
What of rock? I think it's possible to look back at 1985's Live Aid concert, and see it as both the peak of mass media pop culture, and something of a dead-end as well for it.
MTV had only just debuted four years earlier. But shortly after Live Aid, it would begin to deliberately air less music videos, with the goal of using long-form programming to keep more young viewers around to watch the ads. It would also alienate much of the audience it built from its early commercials featuring musicians such as Bowie, Pete Townshend and The Police by emphasizing rap and hip-hop over rock.
Live Aid featured Madonna very early in her career, and as she went more and more for raunch and shock, MTV trended in that direction with her. It’s amusing to watch MTV’s first videos rerun on VH1 Classic, the spin-off channel of MTV’s first spin-off channel, and see how innocent and non-offensive they were, which was reflected in the bulk of the music played at Live Aid.
More and more, it seems like rock and popular music are sort of marking time these days, even though, paradoxically, production and recording techniques have never been more sophisticated.
I hope things reverse themselves. But I'm not counting on it any time soon. « Close It
Mid-Atlantic Men
Interesting convergence of views from Mark Steyn and Andrew Stuttaford. First up, Mark Steyn on the difference between America, England and Europe on religion:
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America is the last religious nation in the Western world, the last in which a majority of the population are practising believers and regular attenders of church (or synagogue, or mosque). So Bush praying is only a joke to foreigners like Pax’n’Max. No Democratic candidates have been suicidal enough to mock him on those grounds, and even in the party’s more decadent precincts it’s understood that the hard math of electoral politics requires campaigners at least not to appear ungodly. God-wise, to the American people, Bush is normal, not weird. Going to church is normal. Going to Bible study is normal. Buying albums of sacred songs by country singers is normal.
Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europe’s radical secularists despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion. They’re both right. The free market enables Hustler to thrive. And the free market in churches enables religion to thrive. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Ireland, Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into a bunch of wimpsville self-doubters, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely.
‘When men cease to believe in God,’ said Chesterton, ‘they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!’ The anything most of the Western world’s non-believers believe in is government: instead of a state church, Europe believes in the state as church — the purveyor of cradle-to-grave welfare will provide daycare for your babies and take your aged parents off your hands. The people are happy to have cast off the supposed stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. The French government’s recent headscarf ban — which, in the interests of an ecumenical fig-leaf, is also a ban on yarmulkes and ‘large’ crucifixes — seems the way of the future, an attempt to push all religion to the fringes of life. A couple of years back, a Canadian ‘human rights commission’, in its ruling that a Christian printer had illegally discriminated against a gay group by turning down a printing job for pro-gay literature, said he had the right to his religious beliefs in his own home but he had to check them at the door when he left for work in the morning. Who’s in the closet now?
Last year, I had a long talk with a ‘senior EU official’ and I was amazed at the way, quite unprompted, he used the phrase ‘Europe’s post-Christian future’, presuming that I would agree with him that this was a condition to aspire to. Europe’s quite post-Christian enough, and most of the horrors of our time came about through the most prominent expressions of its post-Christian state, Nazism and Communism. And yet faith in secularism is indestructible. And here's Andrew Stuttaford on Britain and the US: On British and American conservatism: there are two key distinctions to be made. The first is the most important. Basically, American conservatism grew up in response to the failure of the American right to organize an effective response to the FDR years. It developed a specific ideology, which defined itself as much against its fellow travelers on the right as it did to the enemy on the left. Like any ideology, it comes with ideologues, and ideologues are always uncomfortable with dissent.
Contemporary British Conservatism, by contrast, was far less of a conscious creation. It evolved in response to the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Labour Party in the UK and grew to encompass just about anyone (with the exception of that collection of freaks and misfits better known as the Liberal Party) who rejected Socialism. It was a broad church. It had to be. Broad churches have little room for narrow ideologies. Add to that, the native British distrust of ideological rigor and idle philosophical speculation, and you are bound to get a far fuzzier ‘conservatism’ than its equivalent in the US.
And then there’s religion. Much of the intensity of the US conservative response to the tragedy of Terri Schiavo (and other matters) can only be understood as a reflection of the way in which much of American conservatism is intertwined with a strong sense of religious faith. This intertwining was in part deliberate (American conservatism was also a response to the perceived failings of the increasingly secular nature of mid-century America) and, of course, was also a reflection of the fact that America always has been a profoundly religious country.
The Brits, by contrast, have long been more secular than their cousins across the Atlantic, and have a tradition of suspicion of those who are too enthusiastic in professing their religious belief (Blair’s open religiosity undoubtedly costs him votes). There are any number of reasons for this, but a good place to start would the country’s experience during the 1640s civil war and its aftermath, but now is not the time to go into that. Suffice it to say that British conservatives are thus less interested in the specific teachings of the church than the role that it can play a maintaining a reasonably decent, adequately functioning, tolerably orderly society. Actual ‘belief’ was not, and is not, required of Conservatives. Winston Churchill explained that he was not a “pillar” of the Church of England, but a “buttress”: he supported it from outside. That seems to me to be an entirely sensible point of view.
Finally, hysteria. Traditionally, I would have said that the Brits did put more emphasis on restraint, moderation and that most maligned of virtues, emotional repression than did the Yanks, but then Princess Diana died… That last item was the launching point for Peter Hitchens' (yes, he's Christopher's brother) superb 2000 book, The Abolition of Britain. « Close It
Happy Easter!
Happy Easter!
(Oh, and the New York Times wishes you Happy Easter as well. Glad to see them following Peggy Noonan's advice.)
Long Past The Shark Jump
As I wrote the day after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "Nipplegate" wardrobe malfunction: Perhaps with Madonna's success in mind, MTV decided it needed to shock--really shock--people. Instead, ultimately, it merely anesthezied them. And once Madonna released her Sex book, shocking the masses was pretty much passe, anyhow. Speaking of Madonna and passe, just click.
A yawn, an eye-roll, and a softly muttered "whatever" are sure to follow.
They Flutter Behind You, Your Possible Pasts
It's fascinating to read of the large minority of both Russian and German citizens who want to relieve their totalitarian past. It just seems bizarre to me that they'd want to go back.
But actually, it's not that bizarre, all things considered.
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Quick caveat: I'm one of those folks who view both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as twin creatures of the totalitarian left. (See this article for a sense of closely the two ideologies are intertwined.) I view the political spectrum, as it proceeds from left to right, as going from totalitarianism to moderate liberalism (which in this case, I'm defining in the broadest sense of the word, running from JFK to Reagan), to libertarianism, to, finally, anarchy. As this biography of Friedrich (no relation to Salma) Hayek says: English intellectuals--promoters of central planning--claimed socialism was the opposite of Nazism, but Hayek insisted that socialism, communism and Nazism were part of the same collectivist trend which had gathered momentum during the 20th century. [ UPDATE 8/13/05: John Lukacs' The Hitler of History also explores these connections in detail.]
Hopefully, that will help to place these two recent stories about modern Germany into perspective.
First up, Betsy Newmark links to this Telegraph article, which describes the increasing rise in interest in Germany, 60 years after World War II ended, for material about their National Socialist past: New titles about Hitler are flooding the bookshops to satisfy the hunger for revelations about the period in time for the 60th anniversary of the end of the 1939-45 war.
One columnist has likened the plethora of publications to a "garish circus of commemoration".
"Sixty years ago the Third Reich perished," wrote Jens Jessen in Die Zeit. "Now one gets the impression it is being resurrected on a daily basis."
One new book, A Strawberry for Hitler, is based on the true story of a horticulturalist who wants to name one of the fruits after the Nazi leader.
The books are, on one level, a parable of Nazi domination of everyday life under Hitler. But their grip on today's publishing industry sometimes seems just as tight.
From Hitler's Berlin to Death in the Bunker, from private diaries to coffee-table books with shocking and previously unseen pictures of bombed-out German cities, the craving for new material is enormous. I can't help but think that the sentiments behind this Reuters piece, also about Germany, are more than a little related: Nearly a quarter of western Germans and 12 percent of easterners want the Berlin Wall back--more than 15 years after the fall of the barrier that split Germany during the Cold War, according to a new survey.
The results of the poll, published Saturday, reflected die-hard animosities over high reunification costs lowering western standards of living and economic turmoil in the east.
The survey of 2,000 Germans by Berlin's Free University and pollsters Forsa found 24 percent of those living in western Germany want the Wall back--double the eastern level.
In Berlin itself, 11 percent of westerners and 8 percent of easterners said "yes" when asked: "Would it be better if the Wall between East and West were still standing?."
The Berlin Wall was breached on Nov. 9, 1989, paving the way for the unification of Communist East Germany with the West on Oct. 3, 1990. But billions of euros (dollars) spent rebuilding the east have failed to prop up the depressed region, which is plagued by high unemployment and a shrinking population.
The poll also found that 47 percent of the easterners agree with the statement that the West "acquired the east like a colony," while 58 percent of the westerners back the statement that "easterners tend to wallow in self-pity." And of course, if we go even further east, a surprising amount of those who lived in the USSR long for their Soviet past.
Part of the challenge of freedom is that it involves the messy vitality of individualism. And a big part of the attraction of totalitarianism is its order. Long before he entered the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan knew the Soviet Union was a third world economy hiding behind an enormous and powerful military. It's easy to look at millions of hulking men in black boots and assume that their force equals the sum total of a nation's vitality. And there's obvious order in those images (see: Riefenstahl, Leni).
They're seductive surfaces, even though what was under them was so rotten. And its obvious that even as the former Russian, East German--and even West German people and their leaders struggle with moving forward, their dark, but ordered pasts can be an awfully attractive alternative.
Update: I love the title of this post by Arthur Chrenkoff: "Mr. Gorbachev, bring back that wall!"
Heh, as the Professor would say.
« Close It
If I Was A Film Director...
This is the kind of cast I'd like to work with. They're sweet, you can yell at them, even bite their heads off, and they never utter a word of complaint!
Caption This!
Caption This! has lots of fun with, well, photo captions. Just keep scrolling.
(Found via Young Pundit.)
Who Watches The Watchers?
Michelle Malkin notes that big media watchdog Howard Kurtz is falling down on the job when it comes to smoking out the actual source of the recent claimed-to-be-Republican memo on Terri Schiavo. Why? Well, as Michelle writes: All Kurtz has to do is ask ABC News and his colleagues at the Post whether their sources told them the memo was written or circulated by Republicans. Unfortunately, it appears that Kurtz (perhaps mindful of who signs his paycheck) didn't even bother to ask these basic questions. She credits Power Line for predicting it would be thus.
(What's with the "thus"?--Ed I dunno, I thought it sounded kind of classy.)
If You Ever Plan To Motor West
Steve Conover of The Skeptical Optimist is looking for ideas for his leisurely drive down the California coast this spring.
It's an obvious one, but you could do far worse than a "trip to nowhere" and a surprisingly first class dinner or lunch on the Napa Valley Wine Train.
(Found via Villainous Company.)
Perceptions and Reality
Ed Morrissey writes that Dan Glickman, the new president of the MPAA, and probably someone who would consider himself part of the "reality-based community", has a problem with, well, reality:
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The new president of the MPAA met with Christian Toto of the Washington Times to discuss the challenges of replacing the only other man to hold that position, Jack Valenti, in the changed political climate in which Hollywood finds itself. Dan Glickman, former Agriculture Secretary under Bill Clinton, acknowledged that working with two Republican-controlled branches of government would present some difficulties, but it seems the first hurdle for Glickman might be reality instead:The president of the Motion Picture Association of America says Hollywood must build a bridge to the Republican-controlled Congress in order to deflate perceptions of a liberal bias. ...
"There's no question in the general world there's the perception that the entertainment community is to the left of the country as a whole," Mr. Glickman told editors and reporters at The Washington Times yesterday. "I've got to build bridges with the people who run the show."
The former congressman dismissed the notion that the movie industry acts as one entity, but admitted that's precisely how the public reacts whenever a handful of liberal actors back Democratic candidates. No sir, that is how the public reacts when it is given a steady diet of films and television entertainment which relentless portrays Republicans as Snidely Whiplash characters and Democrats as the heroes. Watch such highly-regarded fare as West Wing, The American President, and The Contender -- all well-financed and A-list productions -- and tell me that Glickman can't see a trend. Michael Douglas provides the stirring climax at the end of TAP by loudly proclaiming every leftist talking point known to mankind in response to Richard Dreyfuss' one-dimensional portrait of a comic-book Republican attack dog. Gary Oldman -- who later complained that his attempts to moderate his portrayal were edited out of The Contender -- gets to play a creepy, loutish, and hyopcritical GOP leader while Joan Allen portrays a martyred VP nominee and Jeff Bridges plays a courageous, cigar-chomping Democratic president in one of the most politically biased A-list dramas I've ever seen. And those are just the political dramas. Let's not forget last year's The Day After Tomorrow, with its ridiculous disaster-flick treatment of global warming, complete with its own eeeeeevil Dick Cheney clone.
And Glickman ignores completely where the power brokers in Hollywood put their money. We're not talking about a "handful of liberal actors" supporting Democratic candidates. People like Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and others who have the money and power to get films made put big money into Democratic coffers while Hollywood Republicans have to hide in the shadows to get work. Michael Moore strings together a series of lies and dishonestly edited clips to make his paean to Leni Riefenstahl, Fahrenheit 9/11, and the Hollywood community hails him as a hero, while conservative Mel Gibson makes an apolitical movie about Jesus Christ -- and gets figuratively crucified for it. Meanwhile, Brent Bozell reads this week's Time magazine cover story (which is titled, " Has TV Gone Too Far?") so you don't have to: Parents across America should thank Time magazine for putting the issue of indecency in broadcast and cable television front and center this week, asking the question, "Has TV Gone Too Far?" The poll commissioned by Time suggested the majority of Americans believe this to be true. Most Americans want a change.
Time’s poll found more than half of America's TV watchers — 53 percent — think the Federal Communications Commission should place stricter controls on broadcast-channel shows depicting sexual content and violence. An imposing 68 percent believe the entertainment industry has lost touch with the moral standards of the audience.
So much for Hollywood’s cushiest defense: We only reflect society. Society is now responding, loudly and unambiguously: No, you’re dramatically out of touch.
The numbers condemning Tinseltown cascade: 66 percent said there is too much violence on open-air TV, 58 percent said there’s too much cursing, and 50 percent found too much sexual content, the Time poll said. So upset is the public that about 49 percent, agree that FCC regulation ought to be extended to cover basic cable, which includes raunchy reality shows on MTV and the over-the-top FX shows "The Shield" and "Nip/Tuck" on many cable systems. Bozell adds, "This is no fluke. Other polls have found similar results", and provides examples of them.
One reason why Hollywood has gotten so far out of touch with the families and reasonable people that make up the bulk of its audience is that its undelying core of modern liberalism itself has as well, to redefine "the reasonable man" to champion the farthest elements of society.
And of course, Hollywood's Ponzi-style accounting helps to cushion its many bombs, but sooner or later, as the record industry has found out the hard way, film and television's lack of touch with its audience in middle America has to start rebounding. « Close It
From The Home Office In Crawford, Texas...
Ace of Spades goes deep, deep inside the VRWC to examine the "Top Ten Exposed 'Republican Talking Points'".
Forbes On General Motors: "And Now, News of Fresh Disaster"
Earlier this week, Steve Green had some thoughts on GM's many problems. In an article titled, "GM: It's Worse Than You Thought" Forbes writes that it is indeed, worse than you thought. Columnist Jerry Flint (that rare man who looks good wearing an ascot) says that the situation reminds him of the early days of World War II, when the BBC would seem to be regularly announcing, "And now, news of fresh disaster": Vice Chairman Bob Lutz was quoted in the March 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal as saying GM could "phase out" Pontiac or Buick if such "damaged brands" fail to improve. "I hope we don't have to do that," he was quoted as saying at a conference. Lutz has been in the industry too long to be suckered into this kind of quote. Whether he meant to or not, he has put the divisions in play. What critics don't understand is that the best thing GM has is its dealer force. You kill the dealers if you kill such well-entrenched nameplates as Pontiac and Buick, and you kill GM. It's that's simple. As somebody whose father was a partner for decades in a large suburban Chevrolet dealership, this is bad news for GM indeed.
The Blogs We Kept To Ourselves
For the past few years, CNN has had a track record of dissing blogs on their Website, even as those same blogs were fact checking CNN within an inch of its life (see: Jordan, Eason).
They've since moved on to dismissing them on the air as well, as Patrick Ruffini writes: I have to say, I find most cable news segments on blogs to be just incredibly dumb.
By far the worst offender is CNN's Inside Politics, and its' "Inside the Blogs" segment. How do they report on the fun, exciting, technologically-savvy world of blogging? By having two on-air reporters read printouts from selected blogs to each other. Bloggers' opinions are treated as a world onto themselves. No critical comment is ever made. The worst part is that it's disturbingly similar to way viewer e-mail is presented on air: uncritically, as just another voice in a loud cacophony, and oh! -- aren't we special for airing our viewers' e-mail and blogs?
If you think segments like this are a good thing, ask yourselves this: would David Brooks and Paul Krugman be treated like this? When their writings are put on air, it's to make news, it's to challenge politicians on a statement they just made. Bloggers should strive for the same level of credibility and influence. It's all too easy for MSM to think of the blogosphere as the yapping chihuahua, as a world onto itself with its own internal validity, but with little or no impact on the real world of commentary and opinion. In contrast, Patrick notes: MSNBC's Connected Coast to Coast at least gets it somewhat right, by putting bloggers on air, encouraging real cross-pollination and news-making from blogs to cable news. That's a start at least.
Just Click Already
This is terrific. As is its predecessor, which is even funnier.
The Fickle Finger of Food
Man-oh-man, am I glad I didn't go to this San Jose restaurant for dinner tonight.
(As Mark Steyn noted last fall, strange things happen when it comes to Wendy's and chili. I think it must be the Bermuda Triangle of fast food entrees.)
I'm Shocked--Shocked! Super Bowl Steelers on Steroids
In God's Coach, his 1990 tell-all history of the Tom Landry-era Dallas Cowboys, Skip Bayless wrote that Randy White, the Cowboys' Hall of Fame defensive lineman, started bulking up on steroids in the mid to late 1970s. He quotes White as saying he started using them after lining up against the Pittsburgh Steelers' hulking offensive linemen. "Man", White said, "I'd look across the line at those Steelers with their sleeves rolled up on those huge arms, and well, I had to do something. I figured they were using steroids too."
Former Buffalo Bills linebacker Jim Haslett, who's now head coach of the New Orleans Saints said yesterday that it was actually the Steelers of the 1970s that introduced the rage for 'roids into the NFL:
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New Orleans Saints coach Jim Haslett says he used steroids when he starred as a linebacker in the early 1980s, and claims the Pittsburgh Steelers' use of the drugs during Super Bowl championship seasons in the 1970s brought steroids into vogue around the NFL.
Haslett, the Steelers' defensive coordinator from 1997-99, made the comments Wednesday in Hawaii, where the league is holding its annual meeting. They were published in Thursday's editions of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Los Angeles Times.
Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who ran the team during the 1970s, denied the Steelers pioneered steroid use in the NFL.
Haslett played in Buffalo from 1979 to 1985, and finished his career in 1987 with the New York Jets. He said he used steroids for one season early in his career.
``It started, really, in Pittsburgh. They got an advantage on a lot of football teams. They were so much stronger (in the) '70s, late '70s, early '80s,'' Haslett said. ``They're the ones who kind of started it.''
Rooney rejected Haslett's claims, noting the Steelers were known for smaller, quicker linemen who ran trap plays that required they be agile, not bulky.
``This is totally false when he says it started with the Steelers in the '70s,'' Rooney told the Post-Gazette. ``(Then-coach) Chuck Noll was totally against it. He looked into it, examined it, talked to people. Haslett, maybe it affected his mind.
``Chuck Noll told the players, 'Hey, this stuff doesn't do you any good. If you just do the work, lift, things like that, you'll be all right,''' Rooney said.
At least one Steelers player from that era has admitted using steroids. Steve Courson, a part-time starter on Pittsburgh's last Super Bowl title team in 1979, has blamed a heart condition on steroid use. Courson has also said that teammates such as Jack Ham and Jack Lambert adamantly refused to use them.
Haslett estimated half the league's players, and all its linemen, took steroids in the 1980s before they were banned by the league. The league began testing for steroids in 1987, but players weren't suspended for using them until 1989. The league started using random, year-round drug testing in 1990. Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, I'm shocked--shocked!--that the Steelers helped introduce steroids into the NFL.
Oh, and for a bit of incidental irony, it's probably worth noting that these days, the NFL encourages an entirely different kind of drug use amongst its largely male fan base. « Close It
Drinking and Legislating
Radly Balko writes, "In an effort to get 'get tough' on drunken driving, lawmakers are not only needlessly carving into our civil liberties, they're actually making our highways and roads more dangerous than they were before": "Americans are more aware than ever before of the dangers of drinking and driving," [a press release issued last week by the National Transportation Safety Board] begins. "Few realize, however, that drunk driving fatalities continue to rise -- and that thousands of them are caused by extreme or repeat offenders known as "hard core drinking drivers."
The study goes on to point out that these "hard core" offenders account for 40% of traffic accidents but account for just 33% of drunk driving arrests.
It's actually worse than that. If we look at "fatalities" instead of "accidents," drivers with a BAC above .10 account for 77% of the alcohol-related body count. And the average BAC in fatal accidents involving alcohol is .17. Put another way, motorists with very high blood-alcohol levels account for an increasing percentage of highway fatalities, but a decreasing percentage of arrests.
Clearly, we're allocating limited law enforcement resources toward the wrong pool of offenders.
Yet the first bullet point in the NTSB's "Recommended Model Program" for dealing with hard core drunken drivers is "frequent and statewide sobriety checkpoints" -- the very policy that in all likelihood is responsible for the uptick in traffic fatalities to begin with.
And as these policies continue to erode highway safety and spike fatality statistics, lawmakers will inevitably use those very statistics as justification for not only continuing and extending the same bad policies, but for passing even more laws aimed at stripping drunk driving defendants of criminal protections, and at restricting the sale, marketing, and consumption of alcohol. No wonder there's an increasing backlash at MADD.
Over And Out?
The Supreme Court has rejected the Terri Schiavo case.
It's apparently down to Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush, but his options are rapidly dwindling as well.
Update: Ed Morrissey has updated information in a post succinctly titled, "All Over But The Dying".
Sound Advice
Jami Bernard suggests, "This time, miss 'Congeniality'".
East St. Louis Toodle-Oo
Last fall, we linked to numerous examples of voter fraud and intimidation coming from the left side of the aisle. It looks like some of the chickens are slowly coming home to roost.
Ed Morrissey links to an ABC News report that says that "Five East St. Louis Democrats were charged in a scheme to buy votes in November's election in a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday."
Morrissey adds: It sounds like their co-conspirators cut a deal in order to reduced their jail time, which means they're looking to find bigger fish to fry. The seven committee members fit that bill, but it wouldn't surprise me if the investigation doesn't stop there. Stay tuned. There was so much weirdness happening last fall, that I would have been surprised if there weren't at least some repercussions from it.
The Return of the Son of Fake But Accurate?
Is the media trying to cook the books once again? Power Line (not surprisingly) is on the case.
Update: More here at PoliPundit.
Another Update: Speaking of which, Lori Byrd says she loves the above title. Nice to get something out of all those years of listening to Frank Zappa...
Meanwhile, Will Franklin has an extensive amount of links within a long, detailed post about this latest memo controversy.
One More Update: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers. Michelle asks, "Did the MSM learn nothing RatherGate?" Power Line succinctly responds: "yes". Which is why Glenn Reynolds writes that, "ABC joins the list of networks that have broadcast bogus memos".
God and Man at Dupont University
Jeff Brokaw writes, "These are scary times for college-bound kids with actual working brains, and for their parents. I.e., those who are not looking to get brain-washed by aging liberal hippies": You shouldn’t have to pretend to be an America-hating radical lefty, just to avoid pissing off your professors. Nor should you, as a normal student or as an esteemed University president, have to pretend that women are identical to men in every way, just to avoid pissing off touchy feminists and their sisters-in-arms.
The fact that some kids feel they must do exactly that is a big problem all by itself, without even addressing the actual damage done to our kids by these people. On the flipside, Stefan Beck of The New Criterion says that exposure to such hardened leftists is actually a plus for incoming conservative college kids: As I've written before on this blog, the predominance of these blue-state academics on campus is a problem--but hardly for conservatives. It is a problem for liberal students. These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature. Meanwhile, conservatives are given every opportunity to "know the enemy," and they can test and strengthen their own opinions in the process. They ought to be thanking their instructors for providing a daily object-lesson in enemy S.O.P. Of course, there are always those kids in the middle: I was fairly apolitical when I arrived at college--in today's times, where public school is politicized seemingly from kindergarten on, I wonder how many of today's kids arrive at universities that way.
The Battle of the Bloggers
There's little in this UPI article that will be of news to our long-time readers. But it definitely confirms a number of trends we've been discussing over the past three years: "There is a democratization of media going on before our eyes," said Scott Anthony, co-author of "Seeing What's Next" (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), and a partner in Innosight LLC in Watertown, Mass. "A small number of people used to determine what was, or was not, newsworthy. Now, it is an online collective that says this is interesting, or not interesting, news."
Anthony said this is an example of "disruptive innovation" in the media business, which has a parallel to the rise of the personal computer back in the late 1970s.
"Disruptive innovation uses relatively cheap, relatively simple technologies to give people what they want," Anthony told The Web. "Look at the early days of the computer industry. Back then, Digital Equipment Corp. looked at the (personal computer) and saw no reason why anyone would want one in their home -- but people were delighted with product."
Anthony predicted that 20 years from now, there will be an entirely new industry based on blogs. [I thought 2014 was the target date--Ed] Just a few years ago, he noted, when eBay was launched, it was selling novelty items, such as Pez candy dispensers. Today, it is a major retail force that even sells automobiles.
"The established media companies are going to have to deal with the blogs," Anthony said. "This pattern of starting simply and expanding will have profound effects. Thirty years ago, Digital Equipment had delighted customers, and sound management principles, like listening to their customers, but the wave of change caused by the PC overwhelmed them." Kind of ironic: this latest wave of change will overwhelm the PC.
(Since it was found in a post that Steve Green titled, "Linky Love", it's only fair to credit him for the link.)
Blogs and Small Business
Had a fun telephone interview with Hugh Hewitt earlier today on the subject of blogs and small to medium-sized business for an upcoming article (details to come). As I told him, when I first read Blog, I was quite surprised at what a business-oriented book he had written.
Expect many, many small businesses to incorporate weblogs into their marketing strategy--if only to get themselves into their clients' consciousness more frequently (to generate additional sales and referrals), while saving a fortune on postage.
The Strange Death of the Liberal West
Mark Steyn wonders, "What's the point of utopia if it's only for a generation?"
Downfall: Entering The Nightmare World
Downfall, the new German-produced film about the last days of Hitler, is playing this week at The Village cinema, and Nina and I saw it earlier tonight.
DANGER! SPOILERS AHEAD!! DON'T READ IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WORLD WAR II AND/OR YOU'RE PLANNING TO SEE THE MOVIE!!! AHH-OOOGA!! AHH-OOOGA!!!
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OK, still here?
It's a fascinating, not to mention horrifying movie.
Fascinating in that it has a surprisingly clinical, almost documentary-like feel, with near-forensic accuracy to detail about life in and around the bunker, and horrifying because, well, it's Nazi Germany.
Three quarters of the story's plot should be familiar to anyone who paid attention in high school history class, watched the endless reruns on The History Channel, or saw the previous attempts at filming Hitler's last days in the 1970s and early 1980s with Alec Guinness and then Anthony Hopkins each taking a turn wearing the tiny moustache.
The Definitive Culture of Death
From its start, Nazi Germany was (arguably along with the Soviet Union), the 20th century's definitive Culture of Death. In Downfall, when Hitler realizes that the Russians are closing in, he has his personal physician prepare several glass cyanide capsules, and asks the doctor to explain to him the most lethal way to blow his own brains out in the instants remaining to him after biting down on the glass, but before the poison takes effect.
To test their effectiveness, Hitler first gives one capsule to Blondi, his German Sheppard, and clenches her jaws shut to force her to bite into the glass; she immediately keels over.
As soon as they showed the dog standing near Hitler and the physician, I knew this moment was coming--but even so, I found myself physically grimacing and recoiling in my chair, perhaps because it dredged up memories of four years ago when we put our 16-year-old retriever to sleep.
Or maybe I just don't like seeing an innocent dog sucking on a glass vial of cyanide, no matter how evil her master is.
It was then that I sort of mentally kicked myself--by that point, the film had depicted dozens and dozens of deaths, and of course, the real life Nazis themselves had killed 50 million people by 1945. But until Blondi's death, I become increasingly numbed by the cumulative amount of horrors depicted on screen.
Blondi's death sets the next segment of the film into motion: she's quickly joined by her master and his newlywed bride, and then in perhaps the most chilling scene in the film, the Goebbels' children, whom Magda Goebbels first coolly slips a Mickey, and then one by one, after they're asleep, puts a glass cyanide capsule between their teeth and squeezes their jaws closed, before she and Joseph blow their own brains out shortly afterwards.
While Hitler and Goebbels are two of history's most evil men, their women were also warped in their own unique ways: Downfall depicts Eva Braun as being almost as manic-depressive as Hitler (although given to more subdued mood swings rather than Hitler's alternating boiling rage and zonked-out depression); and there is no more evil a mother than Magda Goebbels.
(Somewhat astonishingly, this book, which I found at the top of a Google search when double-checking how Magda spelled her full name, claims that her fascination with Buddhism lead her to believe that killing her kids would be fine: they would all be reincarnated back to a better life.)
Risky, Somewhat Anti-Climactic Ending
As I said, all of these elements are well known, and most films about Hitler's last days end, logically enough, shortly after his body is torched with Nazi Germany's last few remaining gallons of petrol. It took a certain amount of nerve for Downfall's filmmakers to risk a somewhat anticlimactic ending, by showing what went on after his demise.
Even with loudspeaker-equipped trucks roaming the streets telling Berlin's citizens and its remaining soldiers to put down their guns and surrender because the Fuhrer was dead, its few remaining diehard Nazis were hanging or shooting their own soldiers (by that point mostly most old men, young boys, and even a handful of women), and even civilians deemed to be disloyal or unwilling to fight.
Beyond The Nightmare World
Today's Germany has a myriad of problems, but they all pale in comparison to the nightmare world that died on May 7th, 1945 when the Nazis surrendered to the Allies.
And it's worth noting that while Downfall's Hitler mutters something about western democracies being decadent and weak, they've (read: the US has) done a pretty reasonable job of cleaning up the mess left behind by totalitarianism in Germany, Italy, Japan--and yes, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well.
I only became interested in seeing Downfall because Victorino Matus of the Weekly Standard raved about it. While its underlying story is known to virtually everyone, overall, the film does a superb job of telling it--not the least of which is because its cast delivers fine performances portraying the most evil of men--and one astoundingly evil woman, as well. « Close It
I'll Second That Emotion
Eric Felten of the Wall Street Journal looks at Bobby Short: For those who never had the chance to see Bobby Short in person, he will probably be best remembered for his cameo performance in "Hannah and Her Sisters." Woody Allen's character drags his coke-snorting date to the Café Carlyle. And there is Bobby Short, the urbane antidote to nihilism, singing Cole Porter's "I'm in Love Again."
I was lucky enough to hear Bobby Short twice. The first time was a decade ago, and frankly, the evening was nearly a disaster. I hadn't made a reservation--Mr. Short was at the Café Carlyle every night for months on end, after all, and I was taking my date to the late show at that. How crowded could it be? Crazy crowded.
The discreet application of cash to the maitre d's palm assured a table. We sidled into a dim banquette and, cocktails in hand, settled in for what I expected would be a low-key performance. Wrong again. Backed with bass and drums, Mr. Short launched into a song. His arms flew up from the keys and into the sort of triumphant gesture gymnasts make when they stick a landing. His voice was a raspy clarion, hoarse from a lifetime of belting it out. The abandon in his voice was also on his face: Mr. Short's sheer exuberance was as blinding as a stadium's worth of klieg lights.
Ever since then, I had wanted to hear Mr. Short again, and got the chance last November. My friend, saxophonist Loren Schoenberg, has led the little big band that backed Mr. Short for the last several years. He was as much a fan as a fellow musician: "My parents took me to hear Bobby when I was 13," Mr. Schoenberg says. He invited me to come up to New York to see Mr. Short from a different vantage point, by sitting in with the band. At 80 years old, Mr. Short was every bit as electrifying as he had been when I first saw him. Entering the packed room to an ovation, Mr. Short didn't coast for a second--he sold every song. I remembered Mr. Short's grin from seeing him 10 years before; what I noticed this time, sitting in the band, was the way he put that same smile on the faces in the audience. When I saw Bobby Short in 2001, he must have been 75 or 76 years old. He looked almost desperate for the audience's approval--and rejoiced once he realized he'd earned it with that night's performance. This from a man who had been playing at the Carlyle--and for presidents-- for nearly 40 years.
Schoenberg, Short's band leader, suggests it was because his boss became famous relatively late in life. Whatever reason, it was supremely infectious.
L.A. Times Changes Leadership
After reading the story below and its immediate predecessor, with its sympathetic look at North Korea, this is somewhat welcome news.
To be honest though, just as when their east coast namesake changed editors, I'm not expecting miracles.
Update: Welcome Columbia Journalism Review Daily readers.
Red Sunset
The L.A. Times, which earlier this month had nothing but kind words to say about communist North Korea, looks at a financially struggling rest home for aging communists--in downtown Los Angeles!
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A lot used to be different. Sunset Hall was full and thriving as recently as three decades ago.
There was a waiting list. Many residents were recently retired, in their 60s and 70s, still with sharp minds. They included blacklisted screenwriters, editors of communist newspapers and confidants of Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer who in 1934 almost became governor of California.
By the 1980s, though, it all had begun to fade. The neighborhood around Sunset Hall grew dangerous. The nearby First Unitarian Church was struggling, and fewer of its members moved in.
Worse, for the fate of Sunset Hall, a generation of radicals that made some Americans fear the "Red Menace" were dying off.
"There's no denying it," says Larry Abbott, a retired teacher who is president of Sunset Hall's board. "The dissolution of the left, that's taken its toll."
By the early 1990s, when only 18 residents remained after four died in two months, the board tried to sell the property. Only a last-gasp push by supporters and angry residents, along with the judge's restraining order that held off a sale until the membership could vote on it, prevented Sunset Hall from closing.
Looking to fill its rooms, which cost about $1,800 a month, the home began courting elders who cared little for politics. It didn't help.
In February, after reviewing a $300,000 deficit and an operation running largely on gifts and loans, the board once again recommended putting Sunset Hall on the market.
Caputo, the director, has spent recent days breaking the bad news. Most of the residents can't grasp what is going on, she says. "It shocks them. Then it just fades away." Sort of like being airbrushed out of history, I guess.
The closing paragraph is priceless: "We tried," Manpearl replies, leaning back. "Things didn't exactly turn out the way we wanted. But we did do some good. The eight-hour workday. Women's rights. Things like that…. Just think of the world we would have if people didn't spend money on bullets. If everybody had enough to eat, a good job and a roof over their heads. Just think." Walter Duranty, call your office! « Close It
Not Just A Good Idea Department
Betsy Newmark writes: Gee, the French have discovered that they can't rescind the laws of economics. There law mandating a 35-hour work week didn't spur employment and just ended up hurting lower income people who needed that extra income. Funnily enough, employers didn't leap to pay the same salaries for 35 hours that they had paid for 39 hours. People found, quelle horreur! that they were earning less. And employers didn't run out and hire more people to pull up the slack, especially with all the state-mandated benefits that any employee must receive. Who knows--maybe they'll be able to leave the seventies soon.
The Selling of the First Amendment
Ryan Sager and John Fund have some thoughts on how Campaign Finance Reform was sold to the American public and Congress. Sager writes: There are dozens of stories -- literally dozens -- to be done on this scam. It is massive in terms of its scope -- especially in terms of who is implicated.
Let’s just say it is next to impossible that straight-talker John McCain didn’t know exactly what was going on.
Will anyone call him on it?
Will The New York Times touch this story with a ten-foot poll?
They have a responsibility to. Of course. And they'll give it exactly as the same kind of prominence as they have the UN's Oil For Food scandal.
Update: Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has a few thoughts about the other half of the McCain-Feingold duo.
Cats And Dogs Blogging Together
Jim Geraghty (now blogging in Turkey far, far, far from the madding crowd) is praising Jonathan Klein of CNN, the man who gave the Blogosphere its pajamas.
Terri Schiavo
In between playing and working this weekend, I tried to keep up with the Terri Schiavo case, mostly via Fox News on my hotel's cable TV and the Blogosphere. I think that this piece by Herb Meyer in The American Thinker has the right take: in many ways, the Schiavo case is the second coming of Elian Gonzales: In each case, the victim is under the legal control of a man who is no longer living with the victim, who in fact has run off with another woman and fathered her children, and who no longer plays an active role in the victim’s life. In Terri’s case, this is her husband. In Elian’s case, it’s his father. Moreover, in each case there are people willing and able to care for the victim – Terri’s parents; Elian’s relatives in Miami. Yet in each case, the man with legal control insists that the victim be harmed – Terri killed, Elian shipped back to Castro’s Cuba. Numerous pundits made the case in late 2000 and early 2001 that by shipping Elian back to Cuba, Bill Clinton paved the way for Al Gore's narrow defeat in Florida, which puts double pressure--at least symbolically--on Republicans on this issue.
Update: James Taranto asks, "What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?": Why do those of us who aren't right-to-life absolutists side with Mrs. Schiavo's parents, who want to keep her alive, over her husband, who wants her dead? It's a fair question, and it raises another one: What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?
According to news reports, Mr. Schiavo lives with a woman named Jodi Centonze, and they have two children together. Surely any court would consider this prima facie evidence of adultery. And this is no mere fling; a sympathetic 2003 profile in the Orlando Sentinel described Centonze as Mr. Schiavo's "fiancée." Mr. Schiavo, in other words, has virtually remarried. Short of outright bigamy, his relationship with Centonze is as thoroughgoing a violation of his marriage vows as it is possible to imagine.
The point here is not to castigate Mr. Schiavo for behaving badly. It would require a heroic degree of self-sacrifice for a man to forgo love and sex in order to remain faithful to an incapacitated wife, and it would be unreasonable to hold an ordinary man to a heroic standard.
But it is equally unreasonable to let |