The other day in The Wall Street Journal, my friend Fred Barnes deposited a few thoughts on journalism provoked by the discovery to a mother lode of left-wing bigotry, screeds and semi-literate gibbering. He hastened to tell his readers that there was no conspiracy behind the journalists’ “tilt” to the left, but rather, “The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal.” Then he filed a caveat, noting that “hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.”
Well, let me address Barnes’ thoughts before jumping on the JournoList controversy. I rather doubt that journalism was ever a conspiracy. In fact, I doubt that journalism was preordained to be dominated by liberalism. There was a day, before the New Deal, when there were plenty of journalists who were not guided by left-wing ideas or any motive at all. The clever journalist, usually, just wanted to get a good story. Yet the New Deal came along and then the war and, finally, television. At first, it was humanitarian to be in sympathy with the New Deal. Then it was patriotic to be in sympathy with what was a growing homogenization of views among news gatherers. Finally, it was good sense to be a liberal newsperson. By the time television came into its own, liberalism was the corporate mentality of the news gathering business. Hence you can take television news gatherers or print news gatherers and plug them in interchangeably.
But by the 1990s, this corporate mentality had begun to change. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes saw a market. They dissented from the media’s corporate mentality and presented the news from a conservative perspective. Talk radio came along and presented a conservative talk venue. Now Fox News alone brings in more revenue than the combined revenue of CNN, MSNBC and the network news shows on ABC, NBC and CBS. The corporate mentality was suddenly in trouble.
Instead of breaking up along reasonable lines, it has tried to remain coherent and viable against the odds. Though Murdoch and Ailes at The Wall Street Journal and Fox have employed ideologues and entertainers, the media’s stalwarts are all “true” journalists who have continued gathering the news, pronouncing on it and covering their glutei maximi when some poor wretch, such as Dan Rather, proves to be an embarrassment.
Recently there proved to be another embarrassment. I have in mind Barnes’ “hundreds” of journalists. They were indeed sedulously advancing “liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.” Yet with admirable sang-froid, Howard Kurtz, who watches over the corporate mentality of journalism like a mother hen, tsk-tsked, “(Some of these messages) show liberal commentators appearing to cooperate in an effort to hammer out the shrewdest talking points against the Republicans—including, in one case, a suggestion for accusing random conservatives of being racist.”
Did you say “liberal commentators,” Howard? They were all left-wing commentators. One of the reasons the keepers of the news’ corporate mentality no longer can be taken seriously is they cannot identify a “left-winger.” There is no sense of symmetry in their world. The products of Murdoch and Ailes can be called conservative, but no product of ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times or The Washington Post ever can be called liberal, to say nothing of left-wing. Call them the products of the corporate mentality.
Typical of those with the corporate mentality—any corporate mentality—they lack wit, humor, any form of urbanity. Here is a sampler preserved from The Daily Caller by Peter Wehner of the sort that aroused Barnes’ initial thought on journalism:
Laura Rozen: “People we no longer have to listen to: would it be unwise to start a thread of people we are grateful we no longer have to listen to? If not, I’ll start off: Michael Rubin.”
Michael Cohen, New America Foundation: “Mark Penn and Bob Shrum. Anyone who uses the expression ‘Real America.’ We should send there (sic) a—to Gitmo!”
Jesse Taylor, Pandagon: “Michael Barone? Please?”
Laura Rozen: “Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich (afraid it’s not true), Drill Here Drill Now, And David Addington, John Yoo, we’ll see you in court?”
Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker: “As a side note, does anyone know what prompted Michael Barone to go insane?”
Matt Duss: “LEDEEN.”
Spencer Ackerman: “Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace (sic) Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the f—- up, as with most bullies.”
Joe Klein, Time: “Pete Wehner ... these sort of things always end badly.”
Then there was a National Public Radio producer who wrote that upon hearing Rush Limbaugh had a heart attack, she would “laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out. ... I never knew I had this much hate in me.”
Meet America’s elite thinkers.
Strange things are happening.
In the stifled, constipated political discourse of the modern West, there are quite wide categories of facts that are rather obviously true, but which it has for decades been considered gross bad manners to mention aloud. Now, suddenly, we are seeing those facts printed in respectable organs of news and opinion. Early signs of a paradigm shift? Or just a momentary aberration?
The first such instance that registered with me was David Frum’s May 3 piece on CNN.com. Frum tackled the issue of illegal immigration from one of the verboten angles: human capital. He cited some references to the fact that Mexicans don’t do very well in U.S. society, even after three or four generations.
Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility, from great-grandpa stepping off the boat at Ellis Island to a present generation of professionals and technology workers. This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans.
Frum quotes a 2002 paper on the subject by Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger which replicates the findings of some different researchers ten years earlier, quoted in the late Samuel Huntington’s 2004 book Who Are We?
The lackluster average quality of the human capital we have been importing in the tens of millions from Mexico should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Mexico is a lackluster kind of country. Quite inconsequential nations—Hungary, for example, which has one-tenth Mexico’s population and one-twentieth its area—have contributed more to the sum of human civilization in a few decades than Mexico has managed in 500 years. (Questioned recently on this very point, former Mexican President Vicente Fox came up with… the taco.)
The reasons for Mexico’s very low level of civilizational achievement presumably lie buried in the tangled feedback loops of history, geography, and population genetics, one key misfortune having been colonization by Europe’s own civilizational backwater.
(It is worth noting, before leaving the topic, that books about Mexican-American under-achievement have been written from the left as well as from the right. The leftist analysis naturally puts it all down to “racism.”)
Then came Jared Taylor’s July 20 interview in the Washington Examiner. Remarkably, Jared was allowed to put forward his common-sense “race realist” position at length (over 1,250 words). It doesn’t look as though there was much editing. I’ve known Jared as a friend for some years, and can testify that that’s his voice you’re hearing. The news-twisters of Journolist could learn a thing or two from the interviewer, Jamie Hines, and her editors at the Examiner.
JH: Describe the current state of race relations in America.
JT: Race is, and always will be, a serious social fault line in this country. Relative peace is maintained because whites tolerate “affirmative action” and massive non-white immigration. They do this because they are browbeaten and bamboozled into thinking it is wrong for whites to act in their own interests. This will not always be the case, and race relations will get worse as more and more whites begin to resist dispossession.
The third storm petrel to come fluttering by (if that is what storm petrels do — I am not very clear) was Democratic Senator Jim Webb’s July 22 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, pointing out that affirmative action and nondiscrimination laws have highly negative and discriminatory effects on poor whites.
A recent [National Opinion Research Center] Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8 percent of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1 percent, a Jewish average of 73.3 percent, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9 percent.
The thing Senator Webb pointed out is even more obvious than the low human capital of Mexican immigrants, or Jared Taylor’s assertion that “racial diversity is a source of constant conflict” (which Jared says is “blindingly obvious,” a turn of phrase worth dwelling on for a moment or two in this context). Like those other “hate facts,” though, it belongs in the category of things respectable people have to pretend not to notice.
What’s going on here? Is the worm turning? Are bright shafts of self-awareness striking through the inspissated gloom of white ethnomasochism? Is it the case, as Jared Taylor says, that “more and more whites” are beginning “to resist dispossession”? Has the patient, whose coma should by now be moving peacefully towards death, suddenly awoken, ripped the IV from his arm, and leapt from his bed roaring for a steak dinner?
My hopes are not high.
There is much to disagree with in Senator Webb’s editorial. Race is not an “artificial distinction,” but a natural one; nondiscrimination laws do not need extending, they need abolishing; and so on. The Senator has, however, mentioned a key fact that neither Frum nor Taylor remark on: the fact of white diversity.
Race is indeed, as Jared says, “a serious social fault line.” It is not the only one that matters in this context, though, and may even not be the most important one. Divisions among whites matter, too. There is even an extreme position—I don’t hold it myself, but you sometimes see it expressed on race-realist websites—that black Americans are too few in numbers and too helplessly dependent to matter at all, and that the race issue in the U.S.A. is entirely a status contest between different groups of whites, with blacks and Hispanics as passive tokens.
I don’t myself, as I said, believe this is the whole truth; but it is some of the truth. I am speaking here of “the narcissism of small differences.” It is my experience that among white Americans of all regions and classes, feelings about black people—much less Hispanic people—in the generality are never as strong as feelings about other white groups. The passion you can hear from a liberal college professor in Massachusetts when he is talking about, say, NASCAR fans, far exceeds anything he will exhibit in regards to black people, if he ever thinks about black people at all. And vice, to some degree, versa. This is the dark lie at the heart of all the babble about “racism.”
(Jared once told me that when he speaks to mixed audiences most of the angry vituperation comes from whites. Blacks more often listen to him with interested curiosity, and come up afterwards to ask thoughtful questions. I note that Ms. Hines, his Washington Examiner interviewer, is black.)
That is why I look skeptically on some of the enthusiasm generated among race realists by the recent appearance of taboo-broaching articles like those I have quoted. To Jared’s hope that “more and more” white Americans might “begin to resist dispossession,” I would ask: More and more of which whites?
Perhaps, to return to my previous metaphor, the patient is indeed stirring restlessly from his coma. Wait a short while. Along will come the nurse to twiddle the feed control on the IV for a stronger dose of sedative. Now the patient sinks back motionless again… before he can notice that the nurse is just as white as himself.
Athens. As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud, and like many frauds he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred sight and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors Freud dreaded that the real thing might not live up to his expectations, but it did and continues to do so today. Unlike other cultural icons—the Mona Lisa, the Pyramids—the Parthenon never disappoints, and even a philistine like Bill Clinton has been photographed misty-eyed between the columns.
Mind you, the one that takes the booby prize is the American lassie that years ago yelled, “Look Ma, from here you can see the Hilton.” I suppose it’s the symmetry and the proportions that make the Parthenon the wonder that it is, and if a certain Lord Elgin had never existed, the place would be even more exquisite than it is. I just read a book by Mary Beard on the Parthenon
The Parthenon and its new museum aside, things are not looking good for the Olive Republic. It is impossible to measure the extent of the damage done to Greece’s image abroad by recent events. The ongoing blockade of ports by disgruntled seamen has seen thousands of tourists canceling their travel plans. Tourism is Greece’s biggest industry, and at times it seems the country’s small economy simply cannot bear anymore blows. A foreign friend of mine lamented about a beautiful country inhabited by unpatriotic vandals, assorted barbarians and uncivilized mobs. There wasn’t much I could say to him in defense of Hellas.
“For me, the inheritance of a Greek legacy is what the modern world is all about—we understand more about Titian if we know about a horrific episode in Greek mythology, and our mythological legacy begins with Homer.”
Yet a couple of hours away from the urban jungle that is Athens, along the Peloponnese coast, I am building a house to see out my days. Seeing the sun set over the mountainside of, say, Epidauros, evokes the deepest feelings of awe. The spell of the ancient world is everywhere. The amphitheatre of Delphi, the theatre of Epidauros with its perfect acoustics, the profound humanity of Sparta’s village people—that’s what Greece means to me, not the sordid mess back in the capital and its crooked politicians. The Peloponnese is royalist to the core, and King Constantine is building a house up above the coast across Spetse. I will be his neighbor, but the first thing I will do now that the contracts have been signed is build a wall around the house. My last properties in Zante were slowly but surely stepped on by neighbors who appreciated my absence to such a degree, they decided to grab my lands for good. I spent my time paying for lawyers to get them back, but absentee landlords do not get much respect in Greek courts of law. I sold the lot fifteen years ago. Now I want to go home again, anchor Bushido below, and, Penelope-like, wait for some lost love to return.
Only kidding, about waiting, that is. Although it is commonplace to talk of the treasures of antiquity, for me the inheritance of a Greek legacy is what the modern world is all about. For example, we understand more about Titian if we know about a horrific episode in Greek mythology, and our mythological legacy begins with Homer. Homer makes Shakespeare and Goethe look like soap opera hacks, although I must admit more soap operas have been inspired by Mr H than the Englishman and the German. Greece has always been a place for the real and the imaginary, “Istoria kai mythologia,” as they say in Greek. The Greeks invented politics as we know them, and are among the most political people in the world. The trouble is no Greek ever suffers from self-doubt, and no Greek will ever admit to be wrong, which makes it very hard to run a country. The only time a Greek city-state ran like clockwork was 400 years before the birth of Christ. Ultimate authority was given to an assembly of Athenian citizens chosen at random, which 2500 years later confirmed Bill Buckley’s conjecture that New York would be better run by taking names out of the telephone book at random, than the frauds that were elected by the know nothing masses. It was an extraordinary experiment which worked perfectly until certain Athenians got too big for their boots—like today’s neo-cons—and took Athens down Swanee for good.
I am off sailing again, this time with American intellectuals on board, so next week prepare yourselves for the new, improved Taki, a man with many redeeming vices.
Tories perturbed by the party’s lackluster election and shacking up with the Ludicrous Democrats were mollified by the inclusion in the Cabinet of William Hague as Foreign Secretary. Since those delicious Brown-defenestrating days, the straight-talking Yorkshire darling of the grassroots has been given an opportunity of setting his own rightwing stamp on the Coalition’s coition.
Hague the Younger was admittedly objectionable, starting with a cringe-making speech to conference aetatis 16, all floppy hair and free trade. Later, there were artfully sideways baseball caps, his max respec’ for Dubya-, Serb-, and Saddam-bashing and, in between all this, utterly unconvincing rhetoric about Britons “living in a foreign land” or us having “three weeks to save the pound.” Such sallies caused 66% of voters in a famous 2001 poll to conclude that the then Leader of HM Loyal Opposition was “a bit of a wally,” and 70% of them to agree that he “would say almost anything to win votes.”
Except, of course, that many party rank-and-filers found his rhetoric utterly convincing. Because he said things they wanted desperately to hear in nice North Country tones, because he performed well at the dispatch box, and because “She” was said to like him, many Tories looked upon “Our William” as Younger Pretender to The Lady. He may have been follically challenged, they murmured, but he was “one of us.”
“His policy is, we are informed, a radical departure from the policies pursued by Messers Blair and Brown. It’s just as well we are told this, as otherwise we might never have known.”
He was acclaimed as leader after the ’97 only to lead them to disastrous defeat in the ’01, after which he went into exile, a Baldie Prince Charlie, from where ensued workmanlike studies of Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce. Our William slowly reinvented himself by touring the TV studios and showing us his sores. The Older Younger was soon welcomed aboard the Good Ship Cameron as it set sail towards The Big Society, calling at the islands of Decontamination and Coalition. Finally, after his long and eventful voyage, he is showing us the fruits of his wilderness-garnered wisdom.
His policy is, we are informed, a radical departure from the policies pursued by Messers Blair and Brown. It’s just as well we are told this, as otherwise we might never have known.
It starts off promisingly. The Coalition wants a policy which “unashamedly pursues our enlightened national interest.” “Enlightened” sounds ominous to those able to decipher political code, but he goes on innocuously enough. New diplomatic efforts in the Far East and Southern Hemisphere: combining security and economic interests, preventing nuclear proliferation, a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, more bilateralism, protecting the “unbreakable alliance” with the US. We know he favors renewing Trident, admires the army and always opposed the freeing of the Lockerbie bomber. So far, he’s a sort of Conservative Cavour.
But then, the Eurosceptic of legend (it was always legend) metamorphoses into a Euroseptic, seeking to expand not just Britain’s role within the EU, but the EU itself. And not just to take in those few renegade European countries that have so far resisted the EU’s proffered possets, but also Turkey—which, he appears not to have noticed, tends to be in Asia. This is no whim, as he is an avid supporter of Conservative Friends of Turkey—a dubious distinction he shares with Defence Secretary Liam Fox, another “rightwinger” manipulated to persuade the grassroots that behind the chinless Cleggerons there are still “some of us” who just might, if we all keep voting Conservative nicely, some day, when the time is right, do something about something.
We are dismayed to discover that “human rights and poverty reduction” are “at the irreducible core” of the new policy. As neither of these irreducible items are ever defined, we are unsure exactly what this means. But it is not reassuring to learn that we are all “beneficiaries” of globalization, and that a Hagueian priority will be to “further that process.”
Using our ideological Enigma machines to crack all these complex ciphers, it soon becomes obvious that the Tory Talleyrand is actually a sort of Toynbee—and that the net effect of his new foreign policy for Britain will be to make Britain even more foreign.
After 39 years of not being 40, I decided to give it a try. Being two score is unlike anything before it so I feel it would be prudent to warn you about a few things…
1) YOU DON’T CARE WHAT PEOPLE THINK
In my late 20s, I asked a cab driver what it was like to be 40 because that’s what he was. “It’s real mellow, buddy” he responded in his funny accent, “You don’t vorry so much.” As an angry young man, I had a lot of trouble understanding how you could not care what people think. “What if someone came up to your window right now and called you an ass?” I asked. “I vould say, ‘Oh my’” he said, “then vind up the vindow and drive off.” Before I could question his manhood, he added, “Now, if it vas ten or twenty years ago I vould get out of this cab and say, ‘vat did you say moderfocker?’ and stuff like these—but now. Nothing. It’s not vorth it.” I finally get what he was talking about. I’m precious cargo. I can’t be jeopardizing my kid’s father just because some irrelevant psycho is in a bad mood. Sticks and stones still break your bones when you’re 40 but unless it’s a peer giving constructive criticism, you honestly don’t give a tenth of a pube what people think.
Moshing to Cerebral Ballzy at my 40th Birthday Party
Which brings me to another point. You become a lot less critical of other people’s work when you’ve actually done some of your own. Hey, Friends was on for 10 years. I never got a show on the air. Courtney Cox did all right. O.A.R. sound queer to me but they sell 80,000 tickets a night and I can’t even play the guitar. Good for them. Not to get all Baz Luhram on you, but: The more you accomplish, the less you trivialize other’s accomplishments.
More moshing dads. We had forgotten how exhausting it is and collapsed soon after.
2) URINATING IS WEIRD
Dostoevsky once said, “No matter how you shake your peg, the last wee drop runs down your leg.” You could helicopter-shake that thing with the centrifugal force of an astronaut initiation and—bloop—a yellow drop comes out the second you place it in your underwear. I’ve even tried faking it out and pretending I’m done shaking to see what happens but he waits until he’s positive there’s cotton there and then barfs out a drop. There’s a generation gap between you and your dink at this age and he will do everything in his power to thwart you.
For the most part, women and men separate at grown-up parties.
3) YOU NO LONGER HAVE GAME
I have ran into women that I used to defile (and I mean d-e-f-i-l-e) in my single days but when I talk to them now, I sound like the dude from The Wonder Years resisting the urge to flatulate. After you’re married, women become human beings for the first time ever and it’s like meeting another species. “Um, hello, do you like music?” You can try flirting but with nothing to back it up, you come across as a pugilist in a wheelchair.
This is the nature of marriage. In 1978, Lee Gratton told me, “When you get married you get to see your wife’s knockers whenever you want.” He was right. Only, they’re your best friend’s knockers. You don’t have any game when you’re married because you’re in a new universe of love and talking to your sexual alma mater feels like going to a preschool reunion.
4) NEWSPAPERS MAKE YOU FURIOUS
In your 20s, you have to force yourself to read the paper. In your 30s, it finally gets interesting and each article reads like your favorite book. By your 40s, you’re actually smarter and more experienced than most of the authors and you catch yourself crumpling the sides going, “Why are all these liars saying Mark Ruffalo’s terrible new show is so great? Just because there’s gays in it? What a bunch of ridiculous phonies.”
5) YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR LAWN
Bill Hicks has a bit where he says, “What is it about men where they wake up one day caring about their lawn?” Then he talks about dads walking around in a bathrobe yelling, “Who wants sausages? I’m makin’ sausages for breakfast?” These quotes have gone from comedic banter to a documentary about my life. I care so much about my lawn, I wish it had a birthday so I could buy it presents. I even have dreams about the bald spots. Scotts EZ Seed is way better for patches than that stupid pulp they sell but if you’re in an area with a lot of pines, you’re going to have to lime the hell out of it before any seeding solutions—and do it in the fall so it gets soaked in as the snow melts. Hey, where’d everybody go?
6) CONSTRUCTION IS FASCINATING
What young men consider a noisy nuisance is a giant bowl of eye candy to a 40-year-old. “Oh they’re using those planks made out of recycled bags,” you think as you peer through the fence, “those are way too slippery for a deck.” You’ll also catch yourself worried about foundations and insulation and even asking carpenters what particular brand of thread lock they use.
Before and after
7) COUNTRY MUSIC SOUNDS COOL
25 years ago, if you told me I’d get chills from hearing Willie Nelson and Toby Keith sing about feeding alcoholic beverages to their horses, I’d ask you what a time traveler is doing going to punk shows and talking to little kids. What used to sound like hillbillies yawning over unplugged guitars now sounds like a soothing pile of heartfelt stories I could listen to all night. I still like Southern rap and anarcho-punk but it’s now tempered with heaping portions of Merle Haggard.
8) HANGOVERS BECOME INTENSE
Forget foxholes. Try finding an atheist in an old man’s hangover. I have sat there with my head in the toilet for hours explaining to Jesus why I’ve never been to church and swearing to his dad I will start this Sunday. Cross my heart and literally hope to die because that would be an improvement over this parade of gut-wrenching, head-pounding, dry heaves. Here’s how 40-year-old hangovers usually go: When you wake up, it feels like a Transformer took a dump in your head. Then nausea grips your whole body like a barf snowsuit and your skin feels like a doctor accidentally gave an AIDS patient chemotherapy. This lasts, without respite, until you go to bed and is even kind of there the following morning. I would love to party as hard as I used to but Pavlov won’t allow it, so, that’s it. I didn’t quit drugs. Drugs quit me.
9) YOUR PERVERSIONS ADVANCE
As a fellow old person recently put it, “I went out with a girl who had droopy tits when I was 20 and I wasn’t into it but I sure wouldn’t mind messing with them right now!” For young men, it can be shocking to see how gigantic a woman’s ass gets in her 40s but when you get here you think, “More dessert please.” Queefs, butt hairs, blemishes and even those strange lady smells are all more grist for the mill and you finally understand why Napoleon forbade Josephine from showering the week before he got home. While this is happening, scantily-clad girls go from sluts you catcall to young ladies who had better get a coat on or they are going to catch the death of a cold.
10) THE PARTY’S OVER
Well, it’s not “over” per se. It’s just drastically different. With all due respect to doing coke in the basement of Lit with Paul Sevigny all night, that’s no longer my idea of a good time. I mean, it was real, it was fun, but it wasn’t real fun and although I wouldn’t trade those days for the world, I just traded them in for a whole new world. Honestly, if two decades of decadence doesn’t get your Ya Yas out, you have some serious emotional baggage.
Today, two-thirds of my roommates came out of my soulmate’s genitals and that means I feel a much stronger bond with them than someone with similar tattoos and the same taste in music. I still get high but it goes like this: Getting a drawing from my daughter feels like doing a bump. Hearing my son say “Take dat Beezo” after punching his Bozo Bop Bag makes me laugh like I just smoked a bowl. Having a toddler fall asleep on your chest feels like heroin. Seeing a little kid fly his first kite is as exciting as amphetamines, and building a Lego robot that takes all evening feels better than a Maker’s on the rocks next to a perfectly poured Guinness.
I’m not saying anyone should skip the party stage. It’s just that I’ve seen 15 friends live fast and die young because they took “I hope I die before I get old” more seriously than The Who. Hey dead guys, there’s a whole other universe out there after the party phase and it makes all the other phases look like they were just a phase. I’m pouring out some of my beer for you—but not too much.
A toast: To the bliss of matrimony and the joys of Fatherhood. Salut!
We won the Cold War two decades ago. Do we yet know why?
As T.S. Eliot noted in Gerontion
The Cold War offers a trove of gripping and unfamiliar stories. Slowly, European filmmakers have begun turning their attention to the biggest story that happened on their continent from 1946-1991. For example, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film about Stasi surveillance in East Germany, The Lives of Others, was, to my mind, the best movie of 2006.
Farewell, an engrossing French spy movie in which Ronald Reagan is one of the heroes, is perhaps the finest film of this year. Veteran character actor Fred Ward (astronaut Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff) plays Reagan in a supporting role, while Willem Dafoe (the Green Goblin in the first Spider-Man film) portrays his CIA director William Casey.
Farewell makes the audacious claim that our Cold War victory was substantially hastened by a lone KGB colonel codenamed “Farewell.” In 1981, Vladimir Vetrov, a fed-up Russian engineer, began copying KGB technology documents and delivering them to the French equivalent of the FBI. Socialist François Mitterrand, who had been elected president that year with the help of the Moscow-controlled French Communist Party, demonstrated his anti-Communist bona fides by personally passing along the “Farewell Dossier” to Reagan on July 19, 1981.
In French director Christian Carion’s Farewell, Vetrov (somewhat fictionalized as “Sergei Gregoriev”) is played with perpetual bemusement at his world-historical role by the charismatic Serbian director Emir Kusturica.
The Francophile KGB man didn’t ask his French contact for money, just for a few Parisian luxuries to remind himself of the halcyon years he’d spent spying in France. And some Queen albums for his beloved teenaged son, an engineering prodigy for whom Vetrov wanted a country of “careers open to talent” rather than Brezhnev’s regime of hereditary privilege and incompetence.
Vetrov did not betray hard-earned Soviet technological advances. By the 1980s, there weren’t many. Instead, he revealed that—to an extent that surprised even Reagan—the Soviets were remaining competitive in the Cold War only by purloining Western breakthroughs.
This had been subject to debate within American intelligence circles for years. The mainstream CIA view was that the Soviet planned economy was a formidable rival, a model of rational centralization. Heretics such as Stefan Possony and Jerry Pournelle countered that from what they could see in satellite photos, the Soviet Union was actually “Bulgaria with missiles.”
Farewell was mostly filmed in the grand heart of Czarist Moscow, so what the movie shows us of Russia looks pretty good. Moscow’s endless suburbs of shoddy worker’s housing projects are omitted, making the cinematography easier on the eyes, but obscuring what seems to have been a key point of Vetrov’s motivation.
In reality, as P.J. O’Rourke reported after taking a 1982 Nation magazine cruise down the Volga with nostalgic old American lefties, “The place just wears you out after a while. There is not a square angle or a plumb line in all the country. Every bit of concrete is crumbling from too much aggregate in the mix, and everything is made of concrete.” Vetrov is depicted as a Russian patriot motivated less by ideology than by a proud nerd’s disgust that the Party, which had put the first man in space when he was young, could now only come up with new ideas through theft.
In 1982, Vetrov handed over the names of hundreds of Soviet industrial espionage agents operating in the West. They were rolled up, leaving the Soviets flying blind.
In the film, the Americans gain confidence from Farewell that they can win the Cold War through technology competition. We see a young Mikhail Gorbachev watching Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech. In reaction, Gorbachev conspires with an alarmed Air Force general to shake up the Soviet system.
Perhaps to simplify an already complex plot, Farewell omits the amusing sabotage campaign organized by Gus Weiss of the National Security Administration. He explained in 1996: “Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline… The Soviet Space Shuttle was a rejected NASA design.” There’s a rumor that American disinformation caused an immense explosion in a Soviet natural gas pipeline in 1982.
How much of this is true? It’s well documented. But are the documents disinterested? (Mitterrand came to believe it was a CIA plot to test his loyalty.) As of 2010, all I can be sure of is CIA counterintelligence czar James Jesus Angleton’s observation that spycraft is, in Eliot’s metaphor, a “wilderness of mirrors.”
Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to the lowest level of any institution since Gallup began asking the question in 1973. One-half of all Americans have little or no confidence in the Congress.
Only 11 percent have a “great deal” or “a lot of” confidence in what is, given its place of primacy in the Constitution, the first branch of government and the branch most representative of the people.
The house of such giants as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Henry Cabot Lodge, the greatest legislative body in the world that was home to John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” who decided the questions of war and peace, Reconstruction and civil rights is now looked upon with pervasive mistrust.
Of the 16 major institutions of which the question was asked, Congress’ closest competitor for the least trusted was HMOs.
And this poll was taken after President Obama achieved what is being hailed by his party as the greatest legislative accomplishment since Medicare and Social Security.
Not only is this bad news for the Democratic Party this fall, it is reflective of the disdain if not contempt in which the nation’s political class is held by those they govern. Three times as many Americans have confidence in the Supreme Court as have in Congress.
And though Obama has been through a rough patch, three times as many Americans retain confidence in his office as have confidence in the Congress. Even when Bush was at his nadir, in 2008, 26 percent professed a high level of confidence in the presidency, more than twice those who today have confidence in the institution led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
This would also seem to be bad news for democracy, as the closest competitor to Congress in public disregard was the 2008 Congress that enjoyed the trust of only one in eight Americans.
But the poll reveals even more about us as a people.
Only three institutions of the 16 have the solid confidence of the nation with more than 50 percent saying they have high confidence or a lot of confidence in them: the military at 76 percent, down from 82 percent a year ago, small business at 66 percent and the police at 58 percent.
All three institutions tend to be male-dominated, conservative and hierarchical. Two of the three feature men with guns—the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who defend us from foreign enemies, and the thin blue line that defends us from the predators at home. Americans have a far greater appreciation of those who risk their lives to defend our country than for those who write its laws.
When one recalls how the military and police were regarded in the 1960s, the former being trashed for “the dirty and immoral war” in Vietnam, and the latter being called “racists” and “pigs” for battling campus radicals and urban rioters, what a difference a few decades can make.
What these surveys suggest is that the New Left of the 1960s was and is over-represented in the media depictions of that era. Some baby boomers were indeed in the mud at Woodstock. But others were in the mud at Khe Sanh. And large majorities of baby boomers helped deliver to Ronald Reagan his historic landslides in 1980 and 1984.
Half of all Americans yet retain confidence in organized religion, an institution not wildly popular with our cultural and media elites. Yet, the churches retain twice the level of confidence of the newspapers, and more than twice the level of confidence of television news, which ranks just below “the banks” at 22 percent.
This explains why the public is less enthusiastic than the press about enacting “shield laws” to protect journalists’ sources.
While the number of those having a high measure of confidence in the medical system has risen from 36 percent to 40 percent during this year of debate on health care, confidence in the public schools fell from 38 percent to 34 percent. Despite immense infusions of federal cash, the public schools are still bleeding public esteem.
As for Big Business, confidence there is not one-third that of small business. Washington, Wall Street, New York—our media and financial capital—and the Business Roundtable are not beloved.
If one takes only those institutions generally regarded as liberal and Democratic—newspapers, TV news, unions and Congress, not one enjoys the high confidence of even half of those Americans who have confidence in the church and religion. Even the honored office Obama occupies has lost one-fourth of the confidence it inspired a year ago.
In short, the Gallup Poll showing soldiers, small businesses, cops, preachers and pastors to be trusted, while journalists, bankers, big business, unions and congressmen are not mirrors the message of polls showing that conservatives now outnumber liberals two-to-one.
Those institutions in society perceived as dominated by liberals are also, perhaps not coincidentally, the least trusted in the land.
The pendulum is swinging back.
When I encounter facts that run contrary to my beliefs, I embrace the facts and abandon my beliefs. I wish the rest of the world was like me.
I was around eight years old when the evidence against Santa Claus became too overwhelming for me to continue believing in him. My arrogant and dickheadedly precocious mind had figured out that it would be physically impossible for Santa to fit enough toys for all the world’s children on a single sleigh and then deliver them over the course of one night. After hammering at this line of questioning with my mother, she finally relented and admitted she’d been lying to me for eight years about Santa Claus.
I didn’t enjoy learning she’d lied to me. And I stopped believing in Santa Claus.
I was around sixteen when I stopped believing in Jesus Christ as my savior. I reached the point where I’d read enough of the Bible to realize it contained several items that couldn’t possibly be true simultaneously. For instance, no infallible God would establish an “eternal” covenant, only to change His mind, revoke it later, and then suddenly pull a New Covenant out of his ass. A perfect God simply wouldn’t roll like that.
I was angry learning I’d been lied to about Jesus. And so I ceased being a Christian.
I was in my late twenties when I stopped identifying myself as a liberal. When evidence started mounting that shot machine-gun holes through the block of liberal cheese I’d purchased at the local liberal co-op, I concluded that liberalism was not a logically consistent belief system.
But it wasn’t only liberal illogic that caused me to dump the whole program—much of it had to do with gradual changes in liberal attitudes and behavior. I’m old enough to remember when liberals were free-speech absolutists and conservatives tended to be the book-burners. But historical forces can blur, erase, and often invert party lines.
Over the years, I watched as liberals slowly became the group most likely to flat-out refuse discussing certain topics and answering certain questions, their purportedly “open” minds snapping shut like a giant clam. They became the group most likely to try and silence their opponents by shouting them down, defaming them, assaulting them, and even urging legislation to ban the use and expression of certain terms and sentiments. They became the group most disposed toward emotional appeals, double standards, wishful thinking, and wretchedly malodorous sanctimony.
Up through my teens and twenties, I had considered liberals to be the most open-minded and free-thinking group in America, only to watch them morph into the most ideologically rigid pack of true believers I’d ever seen. With modern American liberalism, it’s as if their cute, multicolored, and sincerely curious little 1960s caterpillar had blossomed into a hardened grey butterfly fossil. Liberalism had become an emotion-driven folk religion that somehow had convinced itself science and logic were on its side.
These days, I suppose I’d rather hang out with conservatives than liberals, if only for the fact that I offend conservatives less, and it’s a drag to hang out with people who are always getting offended.
And unless I suffer from blind, chronic denial, I like to believe that my political journey has been free of the cognitive dissonance that afflicts ideologues of every stripe.
A study recently published in Political Behavior addresses the topic of cognitive dissonance as it regards political beliefs. Titled “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions,” it is an amended version of a paper originally presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
The study, written by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, focused on four separate experiments in which college students were presented with mock news articles containing items of misinformation that were subsequently “corrected” by the researchers, who presented the students with hard evidence that contradicted the initially bungled facts. The researchers found that being fed corrective information failed to budge their subjects’ opinions and that, disturbingly, it often caused them to strengthen their erroneous beliefs. The researchers refer to this defensive tendency to double-up on disproved beliefs as the “backfire effect.”
This troubling phenomenon—of people stubbornly believing what has been certified as unbelievable—is as old as humanity. A farmer named William Miller gained religious followers by predicting the world’s end in 1843. When it didn’t end and he didn’t lose any followers, he predicted it would end in 1844. When that didn’t happen, his cult only gained believers instead of withering away. It still exists today and is known as Seventh Day Adventism.
In his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, author Leon Festinger infiltrated another cult that claimed to have nailed down Doomsday’s exact date. When Doomsday came and went without doom, the cultists were duped into believing space aliens had granted a reprieve in order to allow the cult to spread their mission. Naturally, the cult only gained strength. Twenty years later, a book called The Psychic Mafia detailed the imbecility of a group who refused to believe that a psychic named Raoul was a fraud even though Raoul himself admitted as much to them. The book’s author, M. Lamar Keene, wrote, “I knew how easy it was to make people believe a lie, but I didn’t expect the same people, confronted with the lie, would choose it over the truth….No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie.”
Although Nyhan and Reifler’s recent study takes a few token stabs at objectivity, it stinks a bit of what is known as Expectation Bias, seeing as the authors repeatedly make a distinction between “conservatives” and “more knowledgable subjects” and suggest that their study “may provide support for the hypothesis that conservatives are especially dogmatic.”
However, I like to cut slack where slack deserves to be cut, so I should mention that the authors tossed in the following: “It would also be helpful to test additional corrections of liberal misperceptions.”
I agree that it would be helpful. I propose an additional study where subjects are read the following factual statements, most of which directly contradict prominent liberal misinformation:
• Communist governments killed perhaps a hundred million more people than the Nazis did.
• Women commit acts of domestic violence at a higher rate than men do.
• Blacks commit interracial violence at a rate far in excess of their representation in the general population.
• Sex has a lot to do with rape.
• Race is a biologically quantifiable reality in addition to something that can be manipulated as a social construct.
• Black-on-black murders in the USA every year are roughly double the total number of blacks lynched in America throughout history.
• Islam is far more misogynistic and anti-Semitic than most white male Christians are.
• There is not a shred of evidence to support the idea of innate cognitive and physical equality between human ethnic groups.
• Many of the nations that wound up being colonized were not innately peaceful and were only subjugated due to their inferior defensive technology.
• Collective, intergenerational guilt is a fantasy that doesn’t exist.
• The ends do not justify the means.
How would most self-identified leftists react to such “corrective information”? Would they immediately alter their beliefs? If my suspicions are correct, they’d be displaying the “backfire effect” like it was fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Conservative or liberal, the documented reality of human cognitive dissonance does not bode well for the idea of democracy, because a well-informed public doesn’t stick to the facts when it doesn’t quite care for them or doesn’t have the brain power to process them rationally.
That’s why I don’t look right or left—only up and down. When I look down, I see hard-line ideologues and weak-willed compromisers. When I look up, I see skeptics, who are our only hope. Skepticism and curiosity, not Jesus and Mary, are what made the West great. We need to elevate our skeptics and demote our ideologues. Our national motto should be “Don’t stop disbelievin’.”
I feel this way because refusing to allow emotion to rule over logic is of tremendous emotional importance to me. One should never have the courage of their convictions—they should have the courage to abandon their convictions to find some newer, better convictions once their convictions have been proved wrong.
And that’s why I’m no longer a liberal.
It goes without saying that Prince William is considered by many to be the most eligible bachelor in the world. He’s handsome; he’ll inherit the Crown Jewels; the Queen is his granny; Prime Ministers and Presidents will bow before him. Clearly, he’s a catch.
And yet, he’s stuck with Kate Middleton.
There are still some who relish the prospect of Catherine (as she has requested friends now call her) becoming a member of the Firm—but as time passes, the less goodwill she seems to enjoy and the more ambivalent the general public becomes. Hardly an ideal position for a future Queen.
You’d be forgiven for mistakenly considering the job of HRH to be the best in the world, but let’s be clear: it is a job. Those in Prince William’s circle know this. His mother Princess Diana didn’t. (Glamorous? That’s what Lady Di thought in 1981, too, after only a handful of dates with Prince Charles followed by a whirlwind engagement.)
Diana Spencer wasn’t the first woman Prince Charles proposed marriage, to, however. According to Tina Brown’s unputdownable The Diana Chronicles, that dubious first honor went to second cousin Amanda Knatchbull. She turned him down.
A precedent had already been set by previous girlfriend Lady Jane Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s daughter, who quipped to reporters while dating Charles, “I don’t want another title—I’ve already got one.”
Jane and Amanda understood what Diana didn’t. To be a senior royal is not a VIP pass to an endless succession of glittering parties (although there are, of course, glittering parties aplenty). To the contrary: it means daily duty, a regimented schedule, no room for spontaneity, hundreds of charity appearances a year, mind-numbing small talk, a perma-paste smile, crushing responsibilities, 24/7 surveillance, zero privacy—and dwindling respect and appreciation from a public who doesn’t understand your immense contributions and increasingly views you as a tax burden.
During his infamous break from Kate in 2007, Prince William saw a succession of other women, but quickly found that those outside his social circle (the good-time gals he met at bars and clubs) would not only never fit in, but were often all too eager to sell their stories to tabloids (“Royal Picture Sensation: Come Back to My Palace!” trumpeted one). Those within his circle, meanwhile—well-bred, moneyed English beauties like Arabella Musgrave, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe and Olivia Hunt—have learned from Princess Diana’s legacy, reportedly feeling like Jane Wellesley before them: give up an already-abundant life for stifling duty, no privacy and the chance to briefly wear a heavy crown in Westminster Abbey? No, thanks. (Leave that to somebody who actually has something to gain—like an upper-middle class girl from Berkshire, perhaps.)
There are only a couple of European Princesses around Prince William’s age who would be attractive prospects to his discerning eye: women like Sweden’s gorgeous Princess Madeleine, brainy, Brown-educated Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark, and the sublime Charlotte Casiraghi, daughter of Princess Caroline of Hanover and Grace Kelly’s granddaughter. Considering his lifelong tendency to insulate himself with fellow next-gen Sloanes and Hooray Henrys, however, it’s unlikely that somebody not born in the UK—somebody who didn’t understand the complex social rules of his set—would make the cut, title or no title. After all, the days of intermarriage between European royals to benefit foreign-policy are long-gone, so at this point it’s all about—gasp!—love and friendship, not dynasty-building. Even were William and Charlotte to bond over a shared love of horses, her Catholic faith takes her out of the running. (Oh, you pesky Act of Settlement 1701!)
The name that repeatedly pops up is that of Kenyan adventuress Jecca Craig, who reportedly enjoyed a “pretend engagement” with Wills in their youth, was the Guest of Honor at his 21st birthday party, has remained close with him through the Kate Years, and who unexpectedly called off her own wedding last year. She represents a rare chance for William to replace Kate with somebody long-known (and approved of by his friends) who is neither blinded by the Crown’s gleam, nor horrified by its restrictive weight. The fact that St. James Palace once denied their relationship, however—the only would-be girlfriend ever to benefit from such a statement—implies that theirs has only ever been a deep friendship. And just in case, clever Kate has made sure to befriend Jecca. Keep your friends close, after all…
So, Waity Katie—with so many secrets locked up behind that glossy mane—has steadfastly watched and learned, thwarting the notoriously stubborn English class system to brilliantly rise above her station. She’s proven to be the rarest of companions: somebody loyal who is also willing to play the same game that unhinged (or disinterested) so many before her. And unlike Diana, she’s been granted nearly a decade to fully understand what she will be marrying into.
There is nobody else. Catherine Middleton it will be.
The Catholic Church raised me. The Immaculate Heart nuns who supervised my education from the age of six through thirteen were, for the most part, conscientious educators. They loved us, possibly as surrogates for the children they did not bear. Theirs cannot have been easy lives, cloistered after hours in a small house among other women and forbidden the company of men. They wore their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience with dignity. If they were occasionally cruel or deranged, it was within the accepted limits of the time: whacking us on the backside with ping-pong paddles when we became insufferable (which we certainly did) and purveying the anti-communist phobias of the time. (“What would you do,” our principal, Sister Mary Immaculata, would ask, “if the communists burst into the school right now, put a gun to your head and ordered you to deny Christ?”) I realize now that these women, whom we regarded as holy sanctuaries of chaste love for Christ, lived in fear: fear of eternal damnation, fear of the priests who oversaw the parish school and fear of censure by the community. No one ever told me of a single case of one of them harming a child, touching a child inappropriately or neglecting a child who needed help.
The parish priests, under Monsignor James Dolan, were stern men and fair. If Dolan had a fault, it was the good man’s fault of drink. He, Father Machler and Father Mayer drilled us as altar boys in the Latin responses of the Tridentine Mass. Most of us who served at the altar also spent time singing in the choir loft, our contralto voices somehow regarded as approaching the divine in our worship. We served and sang at weddings, funerals, High Mass and Low Mass, on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, as well as novenas and saints’ days. (The Khmer Rouge had nothing on Catholic indoctrination of the 1950s.) In all that time, no priest, as far as I knew, attempted to touch any of us. That is not to say it never happened or that, if it did happen, the boys involved would not have been so traumatized that they would be unable to denounce their tormentors. It was a possibility of which we were unaware.
When I went off to a boarding school run by the Society of Jesus in San Jose, California, in the autumn of 1964, I again found clergy devoted to my wellbeing and education. At the airport in what was then a farm town, a Jesuit scholastic named Jack Flynn picked me up and drove me through elm-dappled avenues to a run-down dormitory. Jack was the brother of Harry Flynn, my father’s old schoolmate and colleague at the bar (both types, I fear), whom I had known all my life. Jack, who found his vocation in his mid-thirties, had been a senior radiologist at UCLA Medical Center. Becoming a Jesuit late, he had to teach for a few years as a scholastic, among other duties, before taking holy orders. While avoiding any favoritism to me, he took an avuncular interest in my progress at the school. The other scholastics and the priests were good teachers, especially of Latin and mathematics, although they failed to give us anything approaching an education in art and music.
Like the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, the Jesuits were creatures of their time – but of a more modern time than the nuns’. They tended to the liberal end of the spectrum, and I argued with them freely and frequently on behalf of a dying, pre-Vatican II Catholicism and an idea of America that should have vanished long before then. Although the visiting retreat master, Father Newport, had us all believing there was no destiny for any of us outside hell, the young Jesuits supported Cesar Chavez and the farm laborers who were denounced elsewhere as communists. The school had no Negroes, as ten per cent of the American population were called then. The younger (and a few older) Jesuits mobilized to establish scholarships for black young men to integrate our all-white environs. This was opposed by many of the students, including (I am ashamed to say) me, on the spurious grounds that scholarships should be awarded on merit rather than race. (None of us had any idea how much our black contemporaries were deprived of basic education and thus of any opportunity to prove their merit. In Los Banos, where I used to go duck shooting on schoolmates’ farms, the black part of town was universally called “Niggertown.” That was our world before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The clergy at our prep school were well in advance of the reactionary young men they were attempting to educate. If any of them behaved immorally towards a boy, no one ever mentioned it.
I later transferred to another Jesuit high school in Los Angeles, where I did not have to board. There was a collection of characters among the faculty, only one of whom was ever accused of impropriety with a boy. He was not a priest, but one of the lay teachers – actually, one of the best teachers in the school. The accusation against him, made years after I left, was that he had made a suggestion to a student that they might pursue an extramural relationship. No one charged him with actually touching the lad, but he was dismissed anyway.
I remember two of my teachers with much affection, Sister Mary Veronica, who taught me in the seventh and eighth grades, and Fr. Eugene Colosimo, S.J., who taught algebra and was my confessor. I occasionally visited them and maintained a correspondence with them both until they died. It is with them in mind that I write now to condemn the Catholic Church, its hierarchy up to the pope, as well as many school and parish authorities, for deliberately ignoring and denying the harm done to children whom the clergy betrayed. It is no good to say that laypeople also raped and otherwise abused children. The laity did not have the protection of an institution that a large part of the community trusted to care for, rather than harm, their children. Child abusers from outside the Church were not hidden away by a global organization that routinely sent corrupt priests away from schools to parishes where they were not known. Child molesters who were not part of the Church could not rely on priestly omertà to conceal their crimes. (The Church needs a new Reformation, but that is another story.)
I detest those clergymen who abused the trust of children, because of the harm they did to the children and because of the ill repute they brought on the vocations of decent clergy like Sister Veronica and Fr. Colosimo. Priests like Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J., who has devoted his life to the suffering Latinos of East Los Angeles, and the Jesuits who were murdered for their commitment to the poor of El Salvador do not deserve to be classed alongside the perverts and tormentors of children within the Church’s ranks. The Church did not deal with the criminals in its midst harshly, and it did not treat the victims fairly. It took the courts in America, Ireland and elsewhere to redress in financial terms injustices that cry out for more severe punishment.
The least any confessor could and should have done was to demand, as penance for any priest demanding absolution for that particular sin, that the offender turn himself into the police and take his punishment. If he rejected that penance, he should have been drummed out of the priesthood. Mark’s Gospel attributes to Jesus the words, “For whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea.” As Cool Hand Luke did not say, what we have here is a failure to excommunicate.
After last week’s nonstop Mel news, with explosive tapes being released daily, this was a relatively quiet week—until now. Now the witch hunt begins: who exactly sold the tapes to RadarOnline.com? One report points the finger at the younger sister of Oksana Grigorieva. Oksana has denied leaking the tapes, but now one source says “I suspect that if the authorities look at the sister [Natalie], they’ll find a wire transfer or a check to her from the website.” If Oksana was involved, she could be found in contempt of court. She’s also in hot water over a text message she sent Mel that could prove extortion.
Meanwhile, there are more reports of Mad Mel spewing hatred. Oksana claims Mel told her “I want Jew blood on my hands” after his anti-Semitic rant was leaked years ago, and that he hired a team of private investigators to follow a famous Hollywood figure and wanted him “stripped naked, kneecapped, and left in the heat.” Turns out that “Hollywood figure” is TMZ’s Harvey Levin, who’s led the charge of anti-Mel coverage for a few years. But it also seems Oksana’s camp, who told Levin about the “plot,” had a few details wrong, making the validity of the violent story suspicious.
Moving on from kidnapping to bribery: Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone (who, it should be noted, is 87 years old didn’t like negative coverage of one of his upcoming shows involving an all-girls band named the Electric Barbarellas, and called to let the reporter know it. Redstone left a rambling voicemail message demanding to know the source of the story. “We’re not going to kill him,” Redstone says, “we just want to talk to him” and he promises the reporter will be “rewarded” for spilling the name. Now the voicemail is all over the Internet, but Redstone doesn’t seem to mind. A Viacom source says Redstone is “loving” the scandal and “he likes people to know he’s still alive.” If a little press is doubling as his Fountain of Youth, expect Redstone to be making more calls.
Even though Tinsley Mortimer’s show High Society was canceled before its second season, we were at least relieved she could find solace in the Hamptons all summer with boyfriend Brian Mazza. She was seen nearly every Saturday at a club owned by the company Mazza works for, but last week, she was suspiciously out of the picture—and Mazza was seen chatting up a “beautiful Brazilian model” and “seemed quite smitten.” For Tinsley’s sake, we hope they were just talking business.
Finally, someone who’s having a decent week: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have settled their lawsuit against the News of the World tabloid. The paper reported in January that the couple was about to split (but hasn’t everyone been claiming the same thing?) and that they visited a divorce attorney. The A-listers struck back and won, with the paper agreeing to publish an apology and settle for an undisclosed amount. Unsurprisingly, the money will go to the Jolie-Pitt foundation. And everybody’s a winner!
This is the way all classic love stories begin. Former Dancing with the Stars winner Julianne Hough, who’s currently dating American Idol‘s Ryan Seacrest in the latest hush-hush Hollywood romance, said she turned down all his advances in the beginning because she “thought he was gay.” Hough, who is 22, also said the metrosexual host was after her since she was 18. Seacrest, who is 35, “wasn’t her type” but she went on a date because he was persistent and their relationship blossomed from there. Funny how things can change on a dime.
And the summer of love rolls on. Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr are now married after a “secret” wedding earlier this week. The couple, who have been dating for three years, became engaged last month, and the rush to the altar has raised some suspicions that the Victoria’s Secret model is pregnant. In the past, Kerr has said, “I have always been very open about wanting to be a mother one day and I’ve always thought Orlando would be a great dad.” Well, he hasn’t starred in a decent film in ages, so maybe settling down in the right way to go.
Simon Cowell is in trouble again. A disgraced contestant from Britain’s Got Talent is trying to sue the host for publicly humiliating her. Fifty-four-year-old Emma Czikai is seeking $3.8 million because Cowell allegedly broadcast her awful rendition of “You Raise Me Up,” even after she wrote to him saying she suffered from a medical condition that made her unaware of how terrible her performance was. She wants to retrain “self-respect and dignity” with the suit. More likely, it will result in her song being viewed millions of times on YouTube.
Start the royal wedding countdown. Notorious playboy Prince Albert of Monaco has set a date to wed South African Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock. The religious ceremony will be on Saturday, July 9, 2011, with the civil marriage ceremony taking place the day before. Consider this your save the date. But it’s not all wedding plans and roses for Prince Albert. A lawsuit against Monaco filed by a California writer named Robert Eringer is moving forward. Eringer claims he was retained as a “spymaster” for the prince and is suing over back pay. Hardly the type of thing one wants to deal with before marital bliss.
In other royal news, Queen Elizabeth II had a private sitting with renowned photographer Harry Benson. Benson, who first photographed the Queen in 1957, visited Scotland to snap a few for the Scottish parliament.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” So King Solomon told us (Proverbs 22.vi). A great many parents, down through the ages, must have responded to that with a sigh, or a hollow laugh, followed by the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, or other-language equivalent of: “If only!”
You can number me among those parents. Behold Danny Derbyshire, aged six-and-a-half, playing the piano.
Neither my wife nor I had any musical training in childhood. We were determined that our own children should not be similarly deprived. We started them early: Nellie on the violin, Danny on the piano. We purchased the instruments; we hired the instructors; we supervised practice sessions; we encouraged and exhorted.
Nellie, who has a complaisant personality, stuck with it, and now plays for her high school orchestra, though without any very great distinction or enthusiasm. Danny, who has a will of forged tungsten, resisted from the start. Notice how his fingers are splayed flat on the keys in that photograph. That was after a year or so of dogged efforts to get him to curl those fingers in the proper manner for piano-playing, including some piano-teacher tricks like balancing coins on his knuckles. No: he was going to play flat-fingered.
He went on in that style for another four years, at which point he refused to have anything further to do with the piano. Neither bribes nor threats had any effect. The piano now sits forlorn and unused—and, I am sure, badly in need of tuning—in a corner of the living room.
So much for training up a child in the way he will go. If you get lucky and have trainable kids, you might pull it off. That, however, is only to say that it depends on the kid—on what Hazlitt called “the first predisposing bias.” If the first predisposing bias is towards the stiff-necked contrariness of a Danny Derbyshire there is no training to be done, other than to train one’s own self to resigned fatalism—assuming, of course, that one’s own first predisposing bias does not lean in that direction already.
I should say at this point that while I have given up hope of much influencing the future course of my son’s life, I am not in despair of his prospects. He’s healthy and smart, and can be personable when he chooses to be. I’ll even confess that his determination to kick against the pricks (Acts 9.v—I’m having a fire sale on biblical allusions this week), when it isn’t annoying the heck out of me, moves me to a mild sort of admiration. Annoying, yes, but not the stuff that good slaves are made from.
These thoughts followed on Richard Friedman‘s piece in the July 12 New York Times. Friedman, who is a professor of psychiatry, tackles the “bad seed” issue—the issue, that is, of kind, competent, and loving parents who turn out sociopathic kids. He gives us the case of “an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s” who is driven to distraction by her wayward son. The boy had, she said, acquired a reputation for being mean.
I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.
The simple-minded Solomon-ism that is most people’s default position on child-raising—if you do this, the kids will turn out like this—fails here, as these same parents had raised “two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys.” That there are bad parents, nobody doubts. What does one say, though, about parents who have raised two good and wholesome citizens and one sociopath? Here’s what Dr. Friedman says:
Everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment.
Which is pretty much what Hazlitt said back in 1821.
That it still needs saying, in the science section of a respectable daily newspaper, is a consequence of a very odd fact about human intellectual history. In between Hazlitt’s time and our own the human sciences took a long detour through wish-fulfillment fantasy—a dream of human malleability and perfectibility. The dream had many episodes, some very horrible (New Soviet Man), some sinister (the rat-in-a-box behaviorism of Watson and Skinner), some merely bizarre (Freudian talk-therapy), some just silly (Baby Einstein).
We seem to be coming to our senses. You will hear people say that this is a result of advances in genetics, but that isn’t really true. We currently know very little about the genetic mechanics of human personality—how these genes cause this behavioral tendency, with all the links of the causal chain filled in from meiosis to neurosis.
We do, though, have a wealth of information from family studies—genealogies, siblings, twins, adoptees. What it tells us, and what every new result just further confirms, is that Hazlitt and Dr. Friedman are right, while Marx, Freud, Skinner, the marketers of Baby Einstein, and well-nigh every education theorist and politician in the land, are wrong. The individual human personality has contours of bedrock laid down by biology, on which is scattered a soil, thicker or thinner, of early habit and training, in which grows a vegetation of taste, culture, acquired knowledge, and chance variation.
It all sounds depressingly deterministic. At one level, it is: that forged-tungsten will of my son’s was not learned, acquired, or instilled. It was there from the beginning: “the first predisposing bias.”
However, it is still the case that sheer will can make things happen in the world. Possibly, at some abstract metaphysical level, it is bound to do so, but that is a level at which our everyday beliefs can never operate for more than a strained few minutes. Hazlitt may have held glumly deterministic views on the individual human personality, but his great personal hero was Napoleon Bonaparte.
It is that time of year when we depart for summer vacation. We head for the woods and mountains. Unless we planned to visit the Gulf, we head for the beach. Oh, what the hell. Even if we planned to visit the Gulf, let us head for the beaches. All the beaches I have seen there look pretty clean. So let us hit the beaches there, too. It is cheap! America is a vast continental country, so we have various locales to infest during summertime vacation. I prefer the beach, but maybe you prefer the mountains or even wander off to one of our great cities to tour. Barack Obama headed off to Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine for a few days. Good for him. Unfortunately, he came back.
Yet what are we going to bring with us on vacation? Lotions, picnic baskets, toys for the kids, high-tech and otherwise? If you are like me, you will want to bring a book. I am always surprised when debate begins among Americans about the educations of our young. Only a minority of American adults read, so why are we surprised that the young falter in school? Few Americans stress reading, and reading is essential for success in school. But you knew that or you would not be reading this column. What books will make up your list? Let me suggest a few for you.
Pre-eminently, I suggest “The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide,” by Seth Lipsky, the founding editor of The New York Sun. Seth is a legendary newspaperman, but he is something more, a first-class writer and a student of the Constitution. As he says, “the country is in a constitutional moment.” Limited government is the bedrock of our way of life. “With the Congress and the White House expanding government’s grasp, we have only the Constitution to protect us.” The Arizona immigration law, health care issues, gun control, gay marriage—“all,” Lipsky says, “are coming down to the Constitution.” Lipsky has written a very readable explication of it, and it comes down on the side of the tea partyers, as the Founding Fathers would expect.
“Only a minority of American adults read, so why are we surprised that the young falter in school?”
“Brief Lives: An Intimate and Very Personal Portrait of the Twentieth Century,” by the British historian Paul Johnson, is worth a read. Asked to write his autobiography, the great man demurred, but he did serve up glimpses of great figures he has known, from Margaret Thatcher to Princess Diana to Gerald Ford to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, with all manner of man and woman thrown in between. The book begins with two paragraphs devoted to Konrad Adenauer and ends with two more on Woodrow Wyatt, whom I did not know. We Yanks need not know who the minor figures are to enjoy this book. Its observations about public figures are instructive. On Reagan, he writes, “He was friendly to all. ... At a certain level, he was ice-cold.” In telling yarns and observations about figures he has known, he tells us much about himself and the art of the historian.
Books are coming out about William F. Buckley, but none is better than one by Buckley himself. For a taste of his wit and analytical prowess, I suggest you savor “Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations: A William F. Buckley Jr. Omnibus,” edited by Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball. In the years ahead, dubious fellows are going to write on Bill. Bridges and Kimball preserve the master’s voice and let him speak for himself. One who has us all apprehensive is Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Recently he wrote an article in The New Republic, “Conservatism Is Dead,” which he liked so well he elongated it with padding and published it as a book, titled “The Death of Conservatism.” It even was reviewed in the Sept. 29, 2009, issue of the paper. Naturally, I felt that when I met him head-on a few months later with “After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery,” he would defend himself, especially when I wrote “(conservatism is America’s) longest dying political movement” with him in mind. Not at all—he completely ignored the book—and that is why liberals are so smugly stupid. They take no notice of those who oppose them. Let me suggest my book and Sean Hannity’s “Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda.” I offer a little more on where we came from intellectually. Hannity offers a little more on Obama. Both are better than Tanenhaus, starting with the observation that conservatism is not dead.
Finally, before letting you go, let me suggest a novel, Ian McEwan’s “Solar.” It sends up the whole global warming movement. It is riotously funny. McEwan seems to understand how the pliant government, the environmental movement and venal scientists work, and he explains it. Now if only it would cool off.
The first time we spoke she walked past me, pointed at my feet without breaking her stride, and sternly said, “Good shoes.” By the time I thought of something to say back she was on the other side of the building. It’d be weeks later before we would first make eye contact. Was I, the lowly magazine assistant, allowed to say things to her? I had no idea, but I was desperate to find out.
I went into her office with a stack of photocopies she didn’t need and took a look at her watch. It was a Must de Cartier Vermeil Tank with a manila yellow face and worn leather band akin to what Jackie Kennedy sported during the Camelot years. I had some knowledge of wrist wear and took advantage of the opening. “Is your watch vintage!?” I rabidly asked in a half-mumble, half-shout. What an exceptionally in-the-know reference, she’s going to love me for this, I thought. Next I’ll ask her if she scored it on eBay or, better, at the iconic LA re-sale shop Decades. I’m a genius!
“Technically, yes, it is vintage, I’ve had it since I was 13.” My boss sauntered off in skyscraper heels and a Marni dress chuckling at both the idea that she was “vintage” and how preposterous it must have seemed for me.
That was the moment I realized I was part of Generation Y.
On a weekly basis I’d overhear hundreds of references coming from her—and others in my office—that would continually fly over my head. If ever given the option, which was a rarity, I either pretended to understand them or nodded my head, praying no one would ask me any follow-up questions.
Still, as time went on I adapted. I became expert at Wikipedia-ing on the fly. As she and other Gen X-ers hovered in the hall talking about the 2005 Bauhaus Resurrection Tour, I, with one eye and both hands on my computer casually piped in with, “Yeah, love their Ziggy Stardust cover.”
It was risky and scary, but, it kind of worked.
Seemed like all I had to do was study and I could make-up for lost time. For due-diligence after office hours, I YouTubed films like Metropolitan, Heathers, and About Last Night; downloaded NWA, Depeche Mode, and Duran Duran hits; googled images of Benatton rugby shirts and Tretorn shoes; and started collecting albums on vinyl. I felt like I was cheating, knowing Gen X didn’t have the same luxury of being key strokes away from the cultural-know or rare-used records for that matter, but the ethics of the equation didn’t bother me. I was ready to contend.
Just when I was feeling up to speed with the Gen X-ers in the office, another one of my bosses hit me with, “I’m thinking of getting my hair cut like Errol Flynn, what do you think?”
“Errol Flynn?” Who the hell was he? Was he the gay guy from Reality Bites? I googled him in an angry fury, feeling like a teacher had unfairly quizzed me on something that wasn’t on the study guide. The Errol Flynn bit was not a blip. It became clear to me these Gen X-ers not only had a handle on their own generation, but they could speak for hours about 1970s samurai films, Ian Fleming novels, Japanese citruses, arcane Catholic theology, The Thin Man, and Belgian fashion designers with the casual meter I expected people to talk about an episode of Friends.
I realized then that my generation’s problems were much deeper than the fact that we grew up listening to Chumbawamba and Third Eye Blind. Yes, worse than that, we were the first generation to grow up with the Internet. For almost as long as we can remember there’s been free and fast access to everything we’ve wanted to know about anything. With all that info right there, why would we look into it? It certainly wasn’t going anywhere. There’s never an urgency or hunger to understand something because access is never ever fleeting. And, as a result, there is something vastly different about how Gen X and Gen Y experience culture.
Gen X-ers rode their bikes to the local music shop, paid cash for an album (album being a key signifier) and brought it home and listened to it in their room, over and over. We click iTunes, search for a single song, export it to our iPods and iPhones and listen to it in a random sequence with thousands of other singles. Just think of all the B-sides we’re missing because we have the technology that affords us to. The mathematical analogy would be how graphing calculators made algebra class a breeze for us. We knew how to solve equations by pressing the right buttons on our graphing calculators, but I can guarantee that knowledge has flown out of most of our ears. Our predecessors who were forced to solve those same equations on a slide rule not only endured exponential frustration and learned the true meaning of patience (something Gen Y has a big big problem with), but those slide rule sons of guns sure know their math inside and out, they had no choice.
Marketing experts agree that Gen Y is satisfied with understanding things in their shallowest form and have a tendency to multi-task to a fault. Facebook status updates and Tweets informing others of their going-ons being the perfect examples—a benign status update as simple as “Kenneth Noland at The Guggenheim rocks!” really implies “I’m looking at art, and clearly also on my mobile Facebook app!” How can this Gen Y status updater be expected to soak in the painter’s shift from abstract expressionism to plain ol’ minimalism with one eye on their phone and half their brain working on constructing a 140 character or less summary of how they feel about it, let alone have the capacity to actually enjoy the experience? 140 characters or less!? No Gen X-er I know would dream of giving something such little thought. They thrive on a thorough, deep understanding of culture that they dissect and mull over with care. For us, it’s “I need to digest this into a headline-length thought ASAP so I can reply to the three G-Chats I have open right now.”
So even for those of us Gen Y-ers who have been freakishly diligent on their cultural homework over the past five years, even if it is mostly (ok, solely) in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, we’ll never be able to go toe-to-toe with Gen X. Not only do they have a decade or so on us, they’ve also had the huge cultural advantage of not growing up with the Internet.
Which evokes a romantic memory better, a fragrance or a melody? The latter, I am sure, despite the times I’ve felt a tug at my heart when some sweet young thing breezed by me followed by the aroma of Chanel no 5, the favorite scent of my first great love back in the fifties.
Music and lyrics are a hell of a combination for nostalgia nuts like myself. In fact they are as lethal as a left-right combination from the great Ray Robinson, the original Sugar Ray, whose boxing during the 40s, 50s and even 60s turned a brutal sport into what’s known as the sweet science. I recently purchased a book, a catalogue really, about the complete lyrics of Johnny Mercer, to go with my other books on Cole Porter’s words, Irving Berlin’s, Lorenz Hart’s and Oscar Hammerstein 11.
Mercer is less well known than Porter or Gershwin, but he was more prolific and he outlived most of his famous fellow lyricists. The reason I buy these books is because they remind me of my youth and the girls I went out with. It is as simple as that. Each tune reminds me of a girl and a certain time of my life, just as certain “quartiers” in Paris do. Take for example Mercer’s “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” I was in school, frustrated as hell, if you know what I mean, and my parents took me out to a restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut for dinner. A beautiful 17 or 18 year-old was dancing with her beau to that song. I was 15 and fell madly in love. She never gave me a glance, but her memory stayed. So every time I hear Johnny’s Cool, Cool, Cool in the Evening song I’m back being 15, in a beautiful New England restaurant watching “Daisy Buchanan” fox trot.
“And the Angels Sing” saw Mercer at his most chameleonesque, but to me it meant one thing only: Juan Les Pins, 1952, and Mary, who was 18 to my 16, but it was my first time in the South of France and first time lucky, as they say. Mercer was not as witty as Porter or Hart, but knew how to incorporate the slang of the day into his songs. “Jeepers creepers! Where’d ya get those peepers?” caught the mood of a victorious America and the emerging Negro jive. He was also the master of the economical line, with “Laura” and Autumn Leaves” being prime examples. The latter used to bring instant depression. Autumn meant only one thing. The summer was over and I had to go back to boarding school.
But there were other songs that made one dizzy with happiness. “That Old Black Magic,” which Billy Daniels made his own, referred to Mercer’s romance with Judy Garland, including a concealed allusion to her sexual preference, but to me it meant one thing only: the first time I was free to drink in a nightclub in New York, and a free swinging blonde model that came with me once I had told her I was 30 and independently rich.
Mercer collaborated successfully with my great hero, Hoagy Carmichael, a jazzman from Indiana, whose wife, Rita, I fell madly in love with when I was 20 and she was in Miami Beach waiting for her divorce from him. “Why do you want to divorce a man whose music you listen to non-stop?” I asked her one day. Rita told me I wouldn’t understand being just a kid. She was part red Indian and so sexy I couldn’t play tennis when she watched me. I never saw her again after that great winter of 56 in Miami, but every time I hear Hoagy at the piano I think of her and suffer as no one has ever suffered before.
So, all you romantics out there. Stop listening to what I call “vuvuzela” sounds, that cacophony which young people today refer to as pop music. It has no melody, no romance, no tune, no quiver, no mood, no love, no nuthin, as they used to say down south. More important, however, is the disconnect with love and that long-lost girl from one’s past. What kind of woman would she be if you remembered her from a Mick Jagger noise? Or that ghastly Alice Cooper or the even ghastlier John Lennon? Music stopped for me when the Beatles arrived in the early Sixties, as did my nostalgia for anything past those years. Stick to “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” “Blues in the Night,” “One for My Baby,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and other great favorites of the 40s and 50s and the girls you were in love with will come back to you, as fresh as they were back then. Trust me on this. Nostalgia is the neatest trick of all. No one gets old, it’s Shangri-La all over again but you can travel. And if any of you are younger than me, which most of you are, then use your imagination and follow Johnny Mercer’s song which said: “Ac-centchu-ate the Positive.” Good luck.
A wise old t-shirt once said, “If you don’t like this country, you should probably leave at some point.” Another, even wiser piece of clothing then added, “When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.” They’re both right. This country was built on rebellion and as an anti-racist, environmentalist, feminist, vegetarian, atheist, I am running out of things to patriotically rebel against. Half a century ago, when Marlon Brando answered, “Whaddya got?” to “What are you rebelling against?” there was a stupid rule begging to be broken everywhere you looked. Today, I ask America, “Whaddya got?” and it turns its front pockets inside out with an embarrassed shrug.
I discussed the lack of true racism last week so I’m going to go straight to the environment. Too much of American environmentalism is celebrities like Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who works with groups like Heal the Bay and The Nature Conservancy) delivering pearls of wisdom like, “Bringing your own mug to Starbucks is a possibility, although I must shake a finger at myself, because it is something that I very often forget to do.” Not exactly the stuff of super heroes.
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Feminism in America is equally dull. Where the Middle East gets the oppressive burka, the best we can come up with is high heel shoes. I know they hurt and everything but the part where women adore the living shit out of them kind of takes the zing out of their oppression.
Then there are the Europeans and Canadians who are always telling me how “scary” America has become since the religious right took over. If that’s true why did David Kuo of the White House’s “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” write a book railing on the president for treating Christianity as “naïve and simplistic?” Atheists like Richard Dawkins aren’t rebels in America. They’re rock stars.
Maybe an animal rights activist could fill his To Do list without getting on a plane. Nope. They eat a lot of meat here but they do it relatively humanely and a dog’s life is at the point where punk rockers like Justin Theroux are doing PETA ads saying it’s unnatural to let your dog sleep outside. I want to rebel, not cuddle.
If rebellion is patriotic, then loving this country means hating it a little bit. And if you can’t muster up enough hate to at least make it a hobby, leave. So I’ve decided to spend $3,000 on a Round the World ticket and find something I can really sink my teeth into. Move over Doctors Without Borders. Make way for Anti-Racist Environmentalist Feminist Vegetarian Atheists Without Borders.
My first stop will be Malaysia. These guys are so racist they named their government The National Front! After rooting around in American subconscious ness for metaphorically institutional racism, I can finally enjoy railing against a racism that is literally institutionalized. In Malaysia it is against the law to hire an Indian over a Malays regardless of citizenship. That’s called Apartheid and nobody’s denying it. Malaysia is probably the most segregated country in the world with 94% of them agreeing their country is racist. Fighting prejudice here is going to be like shooting tapah in a barrel.
After freeing the Nelson Mandela of Malaysia, I’m going to head over to Central America to save the environment. In 1975, Olaf Wessberg was murdered in Costa Rica while fighting to create the Corcovado National Park. Locals wanted to sell the area for parts and didn’t like hippies telling them what to do. Today, the nearby province of Puntarenas spits on Olaf’s grave every time they dump their waste. This consists of driving a tugboat a quarter of a mile out and dumping it all in the Pacific Ocean. In your face, Elaine, you cunt. I’ve got the entire Golfo de Nicoya full of combs, flip-flops, old shoes, and broken toys (ironically, plastic bags do the least damage because they sink). These beaches are truly threatened and if you want to protect them, you better be carrying a gun.
Wait, can I take back that c-word? I forgot I’m a feminist. I’ve already bitched about how easy it is to find sexism in the Middle East so let’s travel outside the box on this one and head to Eastern Europe where the number of sexual slaves outnumbers all previous instances of slavery, combined. The numbers are difficult to calculate but range from a few hundred thousand to a global total in the millions. In places like Romania, these women have no identity, no passport, no ID, just a serial number tattooed on their arm like dispensable cattle. Picking cotton sucks but being raped several times a day with no other human contact takes sexism (and slavery) several light years past Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 and into horror movie realms.
Speaking of eating out, leaving your bitch outside is not juicy enough animal cruelty to get me off so my next stop will be oriental. In China, it’s perfectly acceptable to cage dogs on top of sweltering hot apartment buildings their entire lives—then eat them. Even in the supposedly civilized and communist-free Taipei, it’s not unusual to see blood-soaked dogs driven mad with heat and confinement biting each other through their tiny cages. The Chinese believe: The more an animal suffers as it dies, the more delicious it is. You don’t know animal cruelty until you’ve seen a guy drag a two-legged dog down Zhongxiao Road like it isn’t even alive. No wonder the country has bred so many vegetarians.
After marching arm-in-arm with Chinese Buddhists and screaming at the carnivores, I’m going to satisfy my atheist appetite with a big hearty meal of religious fanaticism in Africa. As Nigeria’s Isaiah Oke explains in his eye-popping exposé of Africa’s Ju Ju obsession Blood Secrets, “Everyone in Africa practices Ju Ju. Muslims and Christians may pray in their mosques and churches but behind closed doors, the Ju Ju tradition grows stronger every day.” The half a dozen or so abortion doctors American Christians have killed is all right and the gallons of innocent blood Islam has on its hands is OK but if you want to decry ridiculous fundamentalism, you can’t do much better than Ju Ju. Mistakes made in the name of god(s) are so prevalent throughout this continent, Hitchens’ rapier sharp wit would be worn dull in by dusk. There’s the Ju Ju initiation of slitting a baby leopard’s throat and drinking its blood, plus South Africans dismembering albinos for the spiritual power of their limbs. And hey, what about the time a Ju Ju’s claim to make a Kenyan baby invincible was tested by locals shooting the baby? It didn’t go well. Oke describes a ceremony where they peeled off a white man’s skin in long strips until he bled to death to usurp the man’s Ju Ju. Then he gets into their three-day rituals which almost always lead to unwanted pregnancies and ultimately, babies abandoned in the jungle. And we thought Christians were weird for having dinosaur doubts.
So, goodbye, America. Fighting injustice here is a painfully pedantic plod I’m no longer prepared to suffer through. You’ve got stats and debates and PDFs disproving everything the other guy said. We’re down to minutiae. Travel a few miles outside our borders however and injustice becomes a Horn of Plenty where an activist’s wildest dreams are met with bad guys right out of the comic books. Why so many so-called rebels are satisfied with staying here and fighting fake noose incidents, coffee cups, uncomfortable shoes, chilly dogs, and how raptors affect the rapture, I’ll never quite get. Doctors Without Borders are insatiable, so why aren’t, say, the netroots? The answer is simple: Today’s activist’s are only pretending to be hungry.
Judging by the hijinks and makeup on display at the recently-concluded World Cup, soccer, of all sports, certainly has the most crazed fans. Good for them. But I find it almost as boring as baseball. At the other extreme, the game of croquet is one that comprises few fans and only a handful of players. By comparison to soccer, croquet must be considered hermetic. In the popular imagination, it is a sport for the rich and the effete. To its initiates, however, croquet could not be more serious and down-to-earth.
American six-wicket croquet is a relatively new game, dating from the 1970s. It was invented by New York industrial designer Jack Osborn, assisted by money man S. Joseph Tankoos Jr., who owned the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan and the Colony in Palm Beach, and by Herbert Swope, Jr, whose father’s expansive lawns in Great Neck and Sands Point, Long Island, had been the focal point of American croquet on the east coast in the twenties and thirties.
The Algonquin Round Table crowd—especially Alexander Wollcott, George Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, and Harpo Marx—played at Swope Sr.‘s place regularly on the weekends in summer, trading shots with millionaires Averell Harriman and Ogden Phipps. Swope Jr. remembered that the house guests would line up their cars, cut on the headlights, and play all night long. They used heavy Jaques mallets and wickets imported from London.
On the West Coast, Daryl Zanuck and Sam Goldwyn, in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills respectively, presided over a parallel croquet boomlet starting in the late thirties which extended well into the fifties. The Hollywood croquet contingent included Tyrone Power, Howard Hawks, George Sanders, Moss Hart, Louis Jourdan, and the bicoastal Harpo Marx. In those days, everything was up for grabs. For example, the courts were without assigned boundaries; opponents’ balls could be launched into the woods or down the road on purpose. Goldwyn’s two courts were laid out with sand traps. Rule books which did exist contradicted one another and were ignored. It was a free-for-all.
Jack Osborn was a newcomer to this world. His encounter with croquet began in 1959 in Westhampton, Long Island, on a Sunday afternoon at a friend’s house, down by the waterfront, when someone produced a “backyard croquet” set from the garage. As Osborn reminisced in the 1990s: “We must have enjoyed ourselves tremendously. We came back and did it again next weekend….” Soon he and his friends organized the Westhampton Mallet Club, decamped from the first venue because too many croquet balls were being lost in the drink, and invited Kennedy and Nixon to do battle on the Club’s lawn at a local inn during the 1960 election. This publicity stunt made it into the press.
Events carried forward in a tongue-in-cheek fashion until Osborn encountered the British, six-wicket game in 1967. The Brits sent over a contingent of players, including their champion, John Solomon. They ran circles around the New Yorkers, and showed them moves they had never dreamed of. The following year, Osborn and his gang visited the Hurlingham Club in London, the Vatican of international croquet. Osborn was spellbound. He said later, “...there is no question that the trip to England in 1968 was the turning point in my appreciation of the sport. When I saw them practice at Hurlingham, I recognized how great a change this [the English rules] would make to our game, and I was determined to master it as best I could.”
The problem was, few of his compatriots in hidebound Westhampton felt the need to drop the American 9-wicket layout for the English 6-wicket layout. And no one wanted any part of the English rules. Osborn was stymied. His idea was to adjust the American game to the British six-wicket format, not to import the British game in toto. He resigned from Westhampton Mallet Club. He had cofounded the New York Croquet Club with Joe Tankoos in 1967. He began to implement his ideas in Central Park, and reached out to players in Palm Beach, Spring Lake, Southampton, and Bermuda. Thanks to the leadership of Jack Osborn, croquet evolved into the game played in America today under the aegis of the U.S. Croquet Association.
Osborn promoted and adopted the contact rule from the English game, which rule made running a break possible. He imported the six-wicket, English format in its entirety. The American 9-wicket game was relegated to the backyard for good. Osborn wisely retained the American rule of strict ball rotation (blue-red-black-yellow) and most importantly, the carry-over deadness rule after ending one’s turn. These relatively minor adjustments revolutionized croquet in the colonies, and made the new game the best of both worlds. In fine, Osborn invented a new sport.
Fast forward to the 21st Century. After a hiatus of over thirty years, two full-length articles appeared on the subject of competitive croquet in the New York Times in the summer of 2007, both written by Harry Hurt III as part of his regular Saturday column “Executive Pursuits”.
The first involved an invitational tournament in Southampton entitled “Wild Wickets of the East”. I was lucky enough to win first flight in that tournament. An action shot appeared in the paper, due to my colorful suspenders. I had just missed a wicket shot, and was doing some ridiculous footwork in reaction to it. Spectators were horrified. The second article was entitled “Ah, the Genteel, Civilized World of Croquet” about the 2007 national championships, also in Southampton later that year. Not so genteel, according to Hurt, who appears to have a love/hate relationship with croquet, which is normal for those who play intermittently. Here is Harry’s description of the American game, which is the most concise I have come across:
The object of the game is to hit both your balls through a course of six wickets, first in a clockwise direction and then in a counterclockwise direction. You earn one point and one extra stroke by making a wicket. You earn two extra strokes by hitting your ball into another ball. But you are prohibited from hitting into that same ball again until you remove your “deadness” by making your next wicket. Once you’ve hit both your balls through all the wickets, you can win the game outright by knocking them against the center peg before your opponent does for a total of 26 points.
Two more crucial features distinguish competitive croquet from 9-wicket backyard croquet. In backyard games, the wickets are made of wire, and shaped in wide half-moons. In competitive croquet, the wickets are made of cast iron, and shaped in rectangles only an eighth of an inch wider than the diameter of the balls. In addition, there is a time limit of 90 minutes a game and a 45-second shot clock, which pressure a player’s shot making and decision making.
It is little wonder that newcomers become discouraged. Not long ago in Palm Beach, I saw a championship-ranked player botch a game-winning shot by missing the ball entirely. He took a swing with the mallet, but never made contact. He was trying too hard. On another occasion, I observed John Osborn—Jack’s son and one of the greatest players of the past ten years—go through the wrong wicket, one that he had already made several minutes before, and methodically get 3-ball dead to do it. He somehow recovered from this debacle to win the match. Usually, such a mistake would be fatal at that level. In croquet, top players are not immune from gigantic blunders.
Recently, one of the American greats passed away at the untimely age of 54. Jerry Stark—known affectionately as “The Barbarian” because of his ferocious appetite and long, reddish-blond beard—worked on the assembly line at General Motors in Kansas City, when he came into contact with “real croquet” in 1982. The encounter changed his life. He quit his job, and ran off to play the six-wicket game. He ended up as the pro at the Meadowood Resort in Napa Valley, won five national titles, and got inducted into the USCA Hall of Fame. In December 2009, Jerry Stark was the captain of the only American team to beat the Brits for the Solomon Trophy, an annual tournament between America and England inaugurated by John Solomon in 1988.
Then there is my friend in Greenwich, Connecticut. His dream in life is to win the Nationals. He may yet do it. He loves to attack his opponent over long distances unexpectedly. It is unnerving, because he often succeeds. We were playing at a magnificent private court in nearby Ridgefield one afternoon a few years ago. All of a sudden, he stops swinging the mallet, and looks around, as if awakening from a dream. He was an executive at IBM. He says, “Is this a great game, or what?” It was out of the blue. I nodded my assent, “Indeed, it is.” He went on to proclaim in a completely serious manner, “Let’s just hope the golfers stay clueless.” I reassured him that his hope would be fulfilled, and that those of us in the elite world of croquet were in no danger of being overwhelmed.
Picture: Patrick Foy
A decade ago, activist Ron Unz conducted a study of the ethnic and religious composition of the student body at Harvard.
Blacks and Hispanics, Unz found, were then being admitted to his alma mater in numbers approaching their share of the population.
And who were the most underrepresented Americans at Harvard?
White Christians and ethnic Catholics. Though two-thirds of the U.S. population then, they had dropped to one-fourth of the student body.
Comes now a more scientific study from Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford to confirm that a deep bias against the white conservative and Christian young of America is pervasive at America’s elite colleges and Ivy League schools.
The Espenshade-Radford study “draws from ... the National Study of College Experience ... gathered from eight highly competitive private colleges and universities (entering freshman SAT scores: 1360),” writes Princeton Professor Russell K. Nieli, who has summarized the findings:
Elite college admissions officers may prattle about “diversity,” but what they mean is the African-American contingent on campus should be 5 percent to 7 percent, with Hispanics about as numerous.
However, “an estimated 40-50 of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants,” who never suffered segregation or Jim Crow.
To achieve even these percentages, however, the discrimination against white and Asian applicants, because of the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, is astonishing.
As Nieli puts it, “Being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white ... equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1,600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310-point SAT advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.”
“To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”
Was this what the civil rights revolution was all about—requiring kids whose parents came from Korea, Japan or Vietnam to get a perfect SAT score of 1600 to be given equal consideration with a Jamaican or Kenyan kid who got an 1150? Is this what it means to be an Ivy League progressive?
What are the historic and moral arguments for discriminating in favor of kids from Angola and Argentina over kids whose parents came from Poland and Vietnam?
There is yet another form of bigotry prevalent among our academic elite that is a throwback to the snobbery of the WASPs of yesterday. While Ivy League recruiters prefer working-class to middle-class black kids with the same test scores, the reverse is true with white kids.
White kids from poor families who score as well as white kids from wealthy families—think George W. Bush—not only get no break, they seem to be the most undesirable and unwanted of all students.
Though elite schools give points to applicants for extracurricular activities, especially for leadership roles and honors, writes Nieli, if you played a lead role in Future Farmers of America, the 4-H Clubs or junior ROTC, leave it off your resume or you may just be blackballed. “Excelling in these activities is ‘associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds on admissions.’”
Writes Nieli, there seems an unwritten admissions rule at America’s elite schools: “Poor Whites Need Not Apply.”
For admissions officers at our top private and public schools, diversity is “a code word” for particular prejudices.
For these schools are not interested in a diversity that would include “born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower- and middle-class Catholics, working class ‘white ethnics,’ social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children or older students just starting into college and raising children.”
“Students in these categories,” writes Nieli, “are often very rare at the most competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League.”
“Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers” at the elite schools. They are rarely accepted. Lower-class Hispanics and blacks are eight to 10 times more likely to get in with the same scores.
That such bigotry is pervasive in 2010 at institutions that preen about how progressive they are is disgusting. That a GOP which purports to represents Middle America, whose young are bearing the brunt of this bigotry, has remained largely silent is shameful.
Many of these elite public and private colleges and universities benefit from U.S. tax dollars through student loans and direct grants. The future flow of those tax dollars should be made contingent on Harvard and Yale ending racial practices that went out at Little Rock Central High in 1957.
In April, I noted that television ratings indicate that sports audiences skew Republican and entertainment audiences Democratic. “Which is more useful to control for propagandizing for your Party: the games or the stories?” I asked portentously.
An astute reader pointed to Italy, however, where Silvio Berlusconi is now enjoying his third terms as a center-right Prime Minister. Certainly, no politician enjoys leading his country more than the cruise-ship crooner turned TV and soccer billionaire, at least not as measured in number of prosecutors and magistrates who have fruitlessly investigated his complex dealings (789, according to the Prime Minister), albums recorded since 2003 (three), and public letters to the editor from his prima signora complaining about his relations with young ladies, such as his nominating TV starlets as candidates for the European Parliament (three).
When commercial television was finally legalized in the mid-1970s by an Italian court, Berlusconi bought up the main commercial networks, flooding them with soccer matches and cheap game shows. Berlusconi then purchased the AC Milan football club and made it the best in Italy. In 1994, he invented his own political party to replace the compromised Christian Democrats, naming it “Forza Italia” after the chant of supporters of the national soccer team. It’s as if a less grumpy George Steinbrenner, the late owner of the Yankees, had gotten himself elected President of the United States.
So, I went to see a screening of a Swedish television documentary about Italian television: Videocracy. It’s an attempt by a half-Italian, half-Swedish killjoy named Erik Gandini to explain his native land’s television/politics to his friends in Stockholm.
The leftist documentarian is peeved that the conservative media mogul stands foursquare behind traditional Italian values, such as big-breastedness. Gandini suffused his Michael Moore-style documentary with dire music and ominous slow motion footage of veline, the celebrated showgirls who dance on Berlusconi’s equivalent of The Daily Show, to intimate that while they may look like the fiancés of famous footballers having the times of their lives, they are actually, if you stop to think about it, the real victims of patriarchy.
Gandini complains that Italy has uniquely junky television, yet it resembles a topless version of American Spanish-language networks, such as Univision, just with better-looking dancers. The Nordic self-righteousness of Videocracy becomes tiresome, as does Gandini’s low-brow condescension—in his English version of his narration, Gandini always refers to Berlusconi as “the president of Italy,” presumably believing that us American morons would be confused by the unfamiliar term “prime minister.”
The root of the half-Scandinavian’s resentment appears to be his awareness that to be a star in Italian television you need a big, extroverted, Berlusconi-sized personality. That’s not news. Italians pretty much invented celebrities. Tuscany alone produced Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Galileo, along with numerous other one-name wonders.
Still, it’s worth putting up with Gandini’s Swedish drabness because Italy is always entertaining. Videocracy introduces us to a Sylvester Stallone-like lathe operator who has spent years trying to get on TV by singing the greatest hits of Ricky Martin while performing the karate kicks of Jean-Claude Van Damme. He explains that he hasn’t become a celebrity yet because TV wants too many girls.
We visit the Costa Smeralda villa of a television agent close to the PM. He could make the mechanic a star, although not many girls can be seen among the reality TV stars sunning themselves by his pool. We meet a sinister protégé of the agent, a papparazo who always seems to be tipped off to where the TV personalities will be that night. The blackmailer explains, “I am like Robin Hood. I steal from the rich and I give to myself.”
The highlight of Videocracy, though, is Berlusconi’s own 2008 campaign video, in which the women of Italy sing a hymn to him entitled “Thank God that Silvio exists.” (Berlusconi went on to win easily.)
In contrast, many Americans who enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are now vaguely disappointed that he has turned out not to be as epic as the President Will Smith character they thought they were electing. Instead, they wound up with a part time law school lecturer and part time state legislator who needs his golf. Hence, the Democrats are now terrified that the young and star-struck won’t turn out to vote in 2010 like they did in 2008, unless maybe the Democrats get a new Will.I.Am video.
At the end of The Big Lebowski, cowboy actor Sam Elliott comments upon Jeff Bridges’s character: “The Dude abides. I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners.” A lot of Italian voters seem to take comfort in knowing that Silvio’s out there, enjoying life for all Italians.
It’s only dire necessity
That’s taking me to war;
And if I were a moneyed man
I wouldn’t go for sure.
-Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by John Rutherford), Penguin Books, 2000, page 651.
The time has come to justify anew the war in Afghanistan, and excuses for keeping American and other NATO troops in combat there are coming hot and heavy in Washington and London. Last month’s trillion dollar mineral bonanza was not enough. Nor was the changeover of military command from an apparently insolent general to one who minds his Ps and Qs. Uncertain successes on the battlefield are not doing much to help. So, how can the Obama administration sell this despicable war to an increasingly wary public? The latest rabbit in the magician’s top hat is the creation of “local police units,” home guards to keep the Taliban away from the villages. Announced with great fanfare in Kabul and Washington, a new plan calls for village militias to turn the tide. (If you believe that, please send me a check for $10,000 for the name of the next Kentucky Derby winner.) These militiamen are unlikely to do anything more than denounce their traditional enemies to death squads, making them as unpopular as the Green Berets they are going to serve under.
Minerals, new commanders, new local collaborators, new strategies. All are failing, not only to win the war, but to persuade the American and European public to support it. What else is left? Alas, women. Just when you thought there was no reason to prolong the nine-year war in central Asia, along comes a new excuse. A CIA memorandum of 11 March, “Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission – Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough,” (posted on Wikileaks) puts the propagandists’ case: “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.” Hey, if no one is marching to Washington’s drumbeat on defeating terrorism, why not change the tune to “I Am Woman”?
Representative of the latest barrage of Afghan apologetics was a recent op ed in the International Herald Tribune (15 July 2010) by Thea Garland, who urged the US to stay the course in order to protect Afghan women. She quotes Hilary Clinton, “Women’s rights are human rights.” This would appear to justify the expenditure of lives and treasure in a land that has an unlimited capacity to absorb both. Ms. Garland reminded readers of the Taliban’s reprehensible record on women: denying them education, abusing them for laughing aloud, forcing them to dress in a certain way and even executing some in a football stadium for minor infractions of Taliban rules. That such things happened under the Taliban is true, just as it is likely a restored Taliban will behave no more humanely than did the shock troops of Mullah Omar. However, Ms. Garland and others make no mention of the abuses of women by Afghan society at large and especially by the militias of the Northern Alliance who allied themselves to the United States in 2001. One of these, General Abdul Rashid Dustom’s Uzbek militia, systematically raped women in the Pashtun district of Balkh. Neither the American force commanders nor President Karzai objected to Dustom taking a place in the Afghan cabinet or maintaining control of his fiefdom in the north, where torture of men and women is a fact of daily life. Another rapacious enemy of women was the Hazara militia of Muhammad Mohaqiq, now another respected leader of the pro-American polity in Kabul.
Back in the 1980s, the Soviets urged Afghan men to accept female equality, sponsored schools for girls and permitted women to work. Where are those schools and jobs today? Well, the militias that overthrew the pro-Soviet regime of President Mohammed Najibullah eliminated them. Under Najibullah, women exercising their civil and sartorial rights feared no one more than the “freedom fighters,” who sprayed their uncovered faces in acid. Material and propaganda support for those lovers of freedom came from the administration of President Ronald Reagan, Charlie Wilson’s buddies in Congress and that great liberal democracy with a record of unparalleled service to womankind, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Any element in a society that depends on an unwelcome foreign occupier becomes the object of revenge when the occupier departs. This happened to the right-wingers in post-Vichy France, the Harkis when the French left Algeria and to the Hmong when the US pulled out of southeast Asia. It will happen again to Afghan women, because no one remembers their suffering after the Soviets left them to the mercy of the mujahedeen that the US and Saudi Arabia helped into power. Post-Soviet Afghanistan under America’s friendly warlords descended into such deadly chaos that much of the public demanded rescue from groups of students who came to be known as the Taliban.
“We must not abandon them again,” Ms. Garland writes of Afghanistan’s beleaguered women. Yet who are we? We are not an army of feminist Hilary Clintons, risking our own lives for our beliefs. Instead, we are young Americans without jobs in a failing American economy. We are the youth of America whose only means to an education and an income is to kill and die on behalf of an enterprise that will not empower and assist Afghan women one day longer than American forces remain in the country. Waging the western onslaught against the Taliban in their name will make Afghan women appear as collaborators with the foreigners most Afghans want expelled from their country as soon as possible. To use Afghan women’s plight that cynically is the worst betrayal.
Every year, AskMen.com comes out with a list of the “top 99 most desirable women.” They are allegedly chosen democratically: they claim six million votes were tallied for this contest. I have to wonder at this, as, well, my tastes differ. Either I’m a madman in need of spectacles, or there are six million Americans who don’t know a desirable woman from a mantis shrimp. Alas democracy either way.
This contest is apparently limited to “celebrities,” which I guess means people who spend a lot of time in Los Angeles. Since Los Angeles is a land of cocaine, herpes, rubber bazooms, all night booze ups, and group gropes, I guess it isn’t much surprise some of the results aren’t particularly edifying. What boggles me is how people seem to accept it uncritically. Oh sure, these women aren’t fat slobs, and most of them aren’t completely deformed, but they don’t look like the top 99 of anything to me.
Think I’m exaggerating? Consider number 97, hipster porn star Sasha Grey. Like most men who have access to the internet, I’ve seen Sasha Grey naked. Unlike some of these men, I never understood her appeal. She looks like an 18-year-old girl who smokes a lot of meth; a sort of commodity found in many trailer parks nationwide. Her clothed photos are worse; in the one I linked to, she looks like some kind of alien being with painted-on eyebrows and a mouth misshapen from hoovering miles of male genitalia. In her blurb she claims, “It’s a pleasure to be considered this year along with Conan O’Brien…” Either Miz Grey is confused as to what the AskMen top 99 most desirable women contest is, or ... what a woman is. Somewhat surprisingly, Conan O’Brien was not among AskMen’s top 99 most desirable women, but he may as well have been.
Think I’m picking on the homely ones at the bottom end? Well, let’s look at the number 14 most desirable woman in the dystopian AskMen world. Erin Andrews looks like someone left her out in the sun too long. Really, someone should tell these ladies that tanning ruins the skin. I mean, look at the flesh on her chest; I can feel my naughty bits retracting back into my abdominal cavity while contemplating it. What’s wrong with her face in this photo? The masculine brow ridges ... the squinty, beady eyes, the mouth lines; chrikey, she looks sort of like my cousin Lucas when he had long hair. Is she the 14th most desirable woman in the world because she likes sports? Many women like sports, and don’t look like roadkill in a wig. Yes, yes, perhaps I am being too hard on her, but this photograph is horrific. The girl who served me the coffee which fueled this tirade is far more natural, sweet, and pleasant to look at, has better skin, and I have her telephone number.
Moving up to number two in AskMen land, Marisa Miller. I mean, the athletic development of her abdominal muscles is very impressive, but it isn’t real, well, feminine. Neither is her jawline in this photo. Erm, or in any of the other photos, which verge on skeletor freaky looks. Marisa Miller is probably really attractive to the type of gay fellow who is attracted to an adolescent boy, but she looks positively weird to me. Sure, she’s striking: strikingly weird. Her features are asymmetric, her jawline masculine and her bodyfat composition not particularly female. Sure, she’d make a better date than the average Americano tub of lard, but ... second most desirable woman in the world? Not in my world.
Miz Miller brings up an issue I’ve noticed with more than one female celebrity: there often seems to be something, well, endocrinologically wrong with these women. They have ... square jaws, arms, deranged avian expressions on their faces, masculine brow-ridges; they look, well, male. I’m no endocrinologist, but I do have a few speculations about this; and I thoroughly believe these women have testosterone levels higher than most male physicists I’ve worked with.
How did they get this way? Well, I know for a fact that lots of female athletes and celebrities take anabolic steroids. Why would they do this? Well, for one thing, the more androgens you have in your body, the easier it is to shed body fat. That’s why teenage boys are so skinny. An agreeable side effect of androgen use is they also make you insanely horny. Probably, this makes hot tub parties more fun. Again, think about teenaged boys for example. Because I’m pretty sure what you’re looking at in a good fraction of AskMen’s top 99—genetic females who are endocrinological teenaged boys with plastic jahoobies sewed on. While it’s probably fun sleeping with women who hoover anavar off of Brad Pitt’s forearms, the long term results aren’t pretty. Unless you like women whose jawline you can exfoliate on.
This state of affairs wasn’t always so. Women in the golden age of cinema were amazing creatures. Hedy LaMarr, in addition to oozing feminine sexuality, was a bona fide genius. She invented spread spectrum radio transmission along with composer George Antheil. What modern “empowered” Hollyweird celebritard has done anything remotely approaching this? Veronica Lake, despite being respectably clothed in all of her appearances on the old movies was a sex goddess. Through the mists of time, her high cheekbones, sultry looks, lovely figure and natural gushing femininity arouse my admiration far more than any of the women featured in AskMen’s list.
These women of yesteryear were lovely, elegant, feminine and sexual without being trashy. They didn’t have personal trainers, plastic surgeons or even much in the way of makeup compared to today. Heck, they didn’t even have proper brazierrres in those days; yet these old school movie stars are far more attractive than the modern celebritards. You might argue I’m taking some exemplars, but go look at the lady sidekicks on a three stooges movie: obscure women from the golden era of cinema. I’d take any of ‘em over the entire AskMen top 99 slathered in crisco and delivered on a fork truck to my chambers.
I don’t know how this state of affairs came about. Were I the paranoid type, I’d wonder if this wasn’t some fiendish plot cooked up by planned parenthood or the Bilderberg group to keep the population down. Looking at the weirdoes who are supposed to be “top 99,” I’m not inspired to slay dragons, build a civilization, or even engage in any reproductive acts. They mostly make me want to crawl into a cave and pray for deliverance. Is everyone so exceedingly sensitive they can’t laugh at the freakshow foisted upon us as avatars of femininity? Is our culture so deranged they actually think these women are attractive? Does the glamor of the television machine fool people into thinking name-brand women well past their expiration dates are still hotties? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know that my perfectly pedestrian, nerdly social life contains more beauty than AskMen’s silly list.
Plus, Australian crime thriller Animal Kingdom, The Bolshoi Ballet, Talking to Girls About Duran, and more culture to devour this week
Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins, Los Angeles Museum County of Art, July 25 - October 17
Thomas Eakins is one of the most famous American painters of the 19th century. Whether he was best know as a portraitist or as a painter of athletic activities is today being challenged by The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eakins was from Philadelphia, and trained in Paris. He was one of the first fine artists to explore the world of sports, which characterized modern life in the the late 18th century, with the increase in wealth and leisure time for the middle classes. Spectator sports grew with the growing demand for entertainment. Eakins’ paintings examined activities like wrestling, sailing, hunting, boxing, cycling, and horse riding. This is the first exhibition to focus solely on his sporting works.
Taki’s Noughties: The Spectator Columns 2001-9
If you’re reading this, you probably already know about Taki. You might also know that he has written for The Spectator since the early 70s. His High Life column is, by now, an institution of its own. His latest book, a collection of Spectator essays edited by Takimag’s own, Charles Glass, is a best of the best from the past decade. The book was published by Quartet in June, and did so well, it is now in its second printing. So don’t walk, hustle, by the book, a bottle of whatever makes you happy, and sit down for a hilarious ride through the weird, wide, wonderful world of Taki!
Animal Kingdom
Move over, Tony and Carmela. This small-time crime family makes the entire genre feel blazingly new again. Animal Kingdom, a shockingly intense Australian thriller, follows seventeen-year-old J after he is taken in by his mother’s family after she overdoses on heroin, landing him in a primal, survival-of-the-fittest world marked by theft, murder, and one lethal lady—namely his grandmother, Smurf. The head of the family’s crime business, Smurf (Jackie Weaver) is a bawdy, pint-sized blonde who kisses her three grown sons on the lips, exuding a deadly, trapping embrace. J longs to escape, to be a part of his girlfriend’s wholesome middle-class household—but his presence puts them at risk. He is offered witness protection—but can’t accept for fear of what Smurf would do to him. Lest we forget auteur David Michôd’s excellent writing and direction, note how we captures Melbourne in vivid colors, a startling contrast to the film’s dark violence.
The Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera House, London, July 19 - July 31
The Bolshoi Ballet is back in London with Yuri Grigorovich’s epic Spartacus, pairing Ivan Vasiliev and Svetlana Zakharova. No word on whether or not these dancers are really spies, but one thing is certain, if you love ballet, you can’t do better than the Bolshoi. Of course, Spartacus is an epic character who lead his gladiators to rise up against ancient Rome, and has become one of the top ballets for contemporary dancers. The Royal Opera House isn’t bad either, if you’re into that sort of thing. Also on the program are Giselle, Don Quixote and a triple bill of Paquita, Petrushka and Alexei Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons.
Film 4 Summer Screen at Somerset House, London, July 29 - August 8
If you live in London, and are stuck in London for the summer, you simply don’t miss the screenings at Somerset House. But even if you’re just visiting, what could be better than a picnic on a hot night, in an open air cinema beneath the stars, surrounded by a beautiful 16th century building? Somerset House has become a hub for learning and the visual arts, housing the Courtauld Institute of the Arts and Gallery. A few years back the central courtyard was opened to the public, it had been a car park for civil servants. Now in winter skaters can take a turn on the ice, and in summer one can take a step out of time to see a film. This summer’s lineup includes: Cabaret, Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, and a Vampire Night double bill of Let the Right One In and The Lost Boys.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran
Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield’s brilliant new coming-of-age memoir is perfect for anyone with a twinge of nostalgia for the 1980s and forgotten synthesized relics such as Haysi Fantayzee’s “Shiny Shiny.” Sheffield is one of the funniest and sweetest narrators around: a prequel to his best-selling debut, 2007’s Love is a Mixtape (the sincere, tearjerking tale of the loss of his first wife), Talking To Girls is a series of vignettes that explores lighter material from Sheffield’s youth—namely anything and everything pubescent boys need to know about how to interact with the opposite sex—including dating etiquette and grandma’s advice (with input from Ray Parker, Jr., of course) about table manners and toilet paper. But it’s the section on Madonna, girls and Irish Catholics where Sheffield’s writing is deeply introspective and thoughtful, not just entertaining.
Rubicon, premieres August 1
Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and now… Rubicon. AMC, whose tagline promises “story matters here,” delivers yet again. If the pilot (which previewed earlier this month and can be viewed online here) is any indication, Rubicon promises a puzzle-like, conspiracy-centric style of storytelling and subtle, tightly-wound character development. The series follows Will Travers, played by The Pacific’s nuanced James Badge Dale, a professional code-cracker with disheveled hair and the stoic gaze of a man who knows too much about something. There’s little to learn by way of plot details in the pilot (incidentally directed by HBO’s brilliant Allen Coulter), but its ambiguity is in the sly interest of bating the audience to come back. Plus, the cast—which also includes Miranda Richardson and Dallas Roberts—is absolutely stellar. Regardless of its opacity, Rubicon is posed to be fresh, harrowing, and very adult—a welcome addition to these glory days of cable television.
Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917, MoMA, New York, through October 11
When The Art Institute of Chicago decided it wanted to conserve Matisse’s Bathers by a River, in preparation for its installation in the Modern Wing, it was decided that an exhibition dedicated to this brief yet critical period in the artist’s life following a year-long trip to Morocco was in order. The show is comprised of over 120 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures from this period and the years immediately preceding it. The work is heavily influenced by the outbreak of the First World War. Matisse had volunteered but was turned down because of his age. The show can now be seen in New York, at one of the city’s best museums, which has also recently undergone a major renovation.
Dance With Camera, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, August 7 - October 17
Dance With Camera, which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, is an exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. Meant to exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space, it features art works in film, video, and still photography; screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films.Dance with Camera begins in the 1960s with seminal works by Bruce Conner and Bruce Nauman and moves toward contemporary work, including the modern music video. Can’t make it to Houston? This rare exhibition will be in Scottsdale, Arizona starting January 15, 2011.
Tomboy
Noah Lennox, or Panda Bear as he calls himself in the music world, isn’t afraid to go old-school on you: instead of releasing his newest album, Tomboy, all at once like every other musician would, he’s releasing a new seven-inch vinyl every two weeks featuring two songs from the album. (Purchase the vinyls here.) Of course, the full album will still be available on iTunes come September, but don’t wait till then for more of P-Bear’s ecstatically layered Brian Wilson harmonies. Call it a fitting way to celebrate some of the most soul-stirring songs ever to come out of a white boy from Baltimore—or just call it an excuse to act like 16-year-old record-store rats again.
Almost all the celebrity news this week centered around Mel Gibson and his explosive taped phone conversations with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. Five tapes have been released, trickling out every day through RadarOnline. Mel huffs and puffs and berates the mother of his child, with a lot of demands for him to be “blown.” In one he even admits to hitting her while she holds their child. With the public favoring the Russian beauty, Mel’s camp is striking back, claiming Oksana tried to extort $10 million to keep the tapes secret. They are also claiming the tapes were tampered with, which would make them inadmissible in court. Meanwhile, a photo has surfaced of Oksana with knocked-out teeth, allegedly taken after a fight with Mel. Can the Mad Max star ever recover from this story? It looks unlikely.
In happier news, it looks like Amy Winehouse may be making a comeback of her own. A new album of songs, four years in the making, could be released as soon as January. One source calls the songs “very raw and very personal” for the 26-year-old singer.
Across the pond, George Clooney just spiced up a Milan courtroom. He testified in a fraud trial against three defendants who were accused of illegally using his name and likeness to sell their clothing line. Plenty of fans and well-wishers were outside to catch a glimpse of the Sexiest Man Alive.
Susan Sarandon celebrated a lovely Bastille Day with her business partner/rumored boyfriend Jonathan Bricklin. A group from their pingpong club SPiN played the French lawn game petanque in SoHo earlier this week. They’re really not doing anything to stop the rumors they’re a couple.
The other big news of the week: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston decided to get engaged without the blessings of their parents. They reunited three months ago while Levi was visiting their two-year-old son, Tripp, and the romance was quickly back on. But what’s this? The couple is rumored to be shopping multiple reality shows about their upcoming wedding. Levi, Bristol, a ploy for money? We’re shocked. One question: Will Sarah make an appearance?
With a little over a week to go before the Mad Men premiere, January Jones, who plays America’s favorite troubled housewife Betty Draper, has been spotted on a number of dates around Los Angeles. January was seen at lunch with Saturday Night Live funnyman Jason Sudeikis, and they were also seen “cozying up” backstage at the ESPY Awards this week. Jason was last linked to Jennifer Aniston (which she denied) and January was supposedly dating Adrien Brody as recently as last month.
Is Lady Gaga moving to the Hamptons? It sure looks that way. This decade’s Madonna is said to be eyeing a $26 million mansion in Sagaponack, complete with a wine room, sunken tennis court, and restored 18th-century barn.
The biggest loser of the week (besides Mel, of course) is socialite Tinsley Mortimer. A report says her High Society reality series has been canceled after just one season. Apparently, Tinsley, her mother, and sister complained about how they were depicted on the—this must be emphasized again—reality show. An insider says Tinsley was upset about “being put in situations where people were manipulated to act in a certain way.” All this is bad news for Courtenay Semel, Brittny Gastineau, and Lady Victoria Hervey, who were reportedly game for Season Two. Oh well, surely Tinsley will turn up elsewhere.
Chelsea Clinton is set to wed her longtime boyfriend in Rhinebeck, New York, later this month, but what happened to the royal engagement of the summer? Prince William has yet to pop the question to Kate Middleton and a report says “Waity Katie” is horrified after one of the Queen’s advisors said she’s expected to “turn a blind eye” when (not if) William ever cheats on her.
And finally, remember Fergie? After the Duchess of York was caught in an embarrassing scandal selling access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew, it seems things couldn’t have gotten worse. But wait, there’s more! Her money troubles have forced her to fire most of her staff, including her personal assistants and driver. Luckily, she has a book coming out later this year, maybe that will be enough to pull her out of the red?
Like most people, I love the sea. Though I often fear what lies beneath–more so now than ever, what with all the pollution, oil spills, and cruise ships.
Now that summer is here I find myself daydreaming about bathing in a cool blue sea more and more. But my fantasies of late quickly turn to dread when I think of cooling off in an ocean tainted as it is by rampant pollution. The defilement of our beloved oceans is infuriating and has become impossible to ignore. Sometimes I wonder if I am the only idiot who realizes it. One hears little murmurs here and there but no drastic improvements are reported. Swimming and the prospect of swimming is becoming less and less appealing. Even fishing, or eating fish, can produce pangs of guilt that spoil the pleasure I derive from the ocean.
Despite the evidence of pollution, that has been around ever since I can remember, I have been going on long swims since I was a child. My brother and I have a little mantra we chant when our fear of the big deep overtakes us. We have to, swimming is practically in our blood, we are Greek after all, and summers have always been spent on the water.
Despite its depth and enormity, there is something about the sea I find deeply calming. I always have. For some it is the mountains, for others it is the desert. Being near an ocean makes me truly happy. I could sit for hours and watch the water without a hint of boredom. I often do. All my worries seem to float away.
There are still places in Greece that are pristine, especially when the currents are right, though one can almost always find a floating plastic bag or an old soda can along the beach or the ocean floor in seemingly unspoiled areas. I wonder why no one picks them up. I always do, though I imagine another bit of garbage soon replaces what I am able to collect. Same goes for the rest of the Mediterranean, which is only getting worse. Cruise ships, mega yachts, jet skis, and dirty or infested waters rife with trash, sewage, oil, runoff, and infestations of jelly fish seem to be on the rise.
The plastic mass in the Pacific, the effects of over-fishing, and the monstrous disregard for the ocean one encounters across almost every over-built coast is a sign of what’s to come. The outlook is grim, and anyone who denies this is bananas. A young English aristo, one David Rothschild, seems equally troubled by the issue. He has gone so far as to navigate across the Pacific on a catamaran made of plastic bottles to bring attention to the growing mass of waste. Lets hope his journey makes a difference. If all else fails, perhaps he should use his money and influence to get other billionaires to do the right thing and buy sailboats for their jaunts in St. Tropez instead of mega yachts.
The ongoing BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico is blood-curdling. Apparently the best engineers in the business are working on capping the leak. But I wonder if it isn’t Mickey Mouse down there. Neither the government or BP have found a solution. One can only assume they are part of the problem. There is no indication to think otherwise. The slick has hit the coast. The toll on the environment and the people along the coast who depend on those waters is going to be huge. There hasn’t been much of a scandal. One wonders why.
As always, it’s really all about money. The cost to the environment is second because so many depend on rivers and oceans for business and survival. In one way or another every industry is contingent upon shipping, and so unless businesses by some miracle become interested in sustainability rather than profit, minimizing the effects of pollution are unlikely.
It saddens me to think of what our aquatic resources will look like in twenty or thirty years time. More and more chemicals are getting dumped into the sea. Strange customs like the annual baby seal slaughter in Canada continue. Thousands of pounds of unconsumed marine life are killed and dumped back in the sea. Oil spills and the like will continue. Few people want or know how to give up or moderate the pleasures they enjoy from the ocean. Human populations are increasing at an alarming rate. Soon there will be nothing left unspoiled. What is a girl to do?
The first thing you need to know about pitching TV shows is, you are not going to get a show. Television is 1,000 burn victims trying to seduce a supermodel; what was considered an OK deal ten years ago looks like a lottery win today. The good news is, you get paid for each rejection. In fact, many of us burn victims make pretty good money getting rejected. Eventually, most throw up their hands and agree to work on someone else’s show but that’s giving up. So here’s ten things I’ve learned about the Sisyphean stage before that.
1) YOU NEED AN ENTOURAGE
Before you even get started, you need to get like Tyson and surround yourself with people who are going to take your money. Give an agent and a manager 10% each and throw a lawyer another 5%. They get this until you die. If you try to pitch a show without an entourage and it works, weird things will happen like your credit card will stop working and restaurants will tell you they’re closed even though you can see people in there, eating (people who play the game).
2) GET AN ARC
I could write a funny show about accountants with AIDS or a group of teenage girls in Bavaria. I don’t give a shit what the context is because it’s just a springboard for jokes. Unfortunately, “Who cares what it’s about?” doesn’t exactly blow minds so you need to know each character intimately, have a dozen hilarious anecdotes about each one, and know how they’re going to evolve over time. The easiest way to do this is to actually go out and write the thing. It’s only thirty pages. Just don’t tell anyone it’s finished because that’s what you’re trying to get paid to do.
3) GET A PRODUCTION COMPANY ON BOARD
You need someone who’s done this before at your pitch meeting because when the show flops, the guy who gave you the check needs to prove to his boss he didn’t throw money away. This means the production companies wield enormous power and you have to actually go pitch them and get them interested before you can go pitch the networks.
Special note: Once you choose a producer, there’s no turning back and you have to take them to all your meetings so figure out what network is most likely to say yes to your show and choose a production company that network already likes.
4) DAZZLE THEM IN THE PITCH
Don’t panic. Network execs do not have high hopes when it comes to meetings. It’s usually just the writer reading his pitch aloud from a piece of paper and even when a celebrity comes by it’s usually just to say, “Hello there.” If you rehearse the shit out of it and treat the whole thing like a Carrot Top show, you’ll get a pilot. I know of one guy who just got a pilot-development deal because he built a miniature model of the town the sitcom will be in.
Of course, it’s not unusual for the network to take a pitch meeting just because they’re bored. I was pitching a “Jackass 60 Minutes” show with Johnny Knoxville and we met with Spike/Comedy Central head honcho Doug Herzog. About two minutes in I realized Herzog only took the meeting because he wanted to talk to Knoxville about how awesome Willie Nelson is.
5) MENTION IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA
I’m not exactly sure why but broadcasters are into this show like zombies are into brains. If you mention it in a pitch, you will see eyes light up like fluorescent balloons and ideally, it will be the only thing they remember when they think of your name.
6) CATER TO THE BROADCASTER
Every network wants something very specific so cater your pitch accordingly. If there are kids in the show, cut them out of it when talking to an everyman network like Comedy Central. “Family” is their No word. Cut all the female characters out of your pitch when talking to Spike and if you’re at FX, make it appealing to everyone over 40. IFC is becoming a comedy network so if you make them laugh their asses off, they’ll figure something out. And MTV will most likely say yes if you agree not to swear and can cater to 16-year-old girls but when a broadcaster’s paying upwards of $5k per pilot, they can’t afford to be choosy. Pitching MTV is kind of like a burn victim hitting on a supermodel burn victim.
Mainstream networks like NBC, CBS, etc. are obviously not interested in rookies but you’d be surprised at how completely and totally impossible it is to even go near HBO. Despite their raucous content, the pitch room over there is more like the LGBT department of the yearbook committee complete with clipboards and scowling faces. Jackass was originally pitched to them and the tension in the room is the stuff of legend today.
7) THERE ARE NO HIGH FIVE MOMENTS IN TV
Did the pitch go amazing and everyone was on the floor in tears? Sorry, no high five. If it’s time for a cowboy show and that’s not what you pitched, it’s out of everyone’s hands. If they say yes to a written pilot, you can sort of high five but it still doesn’t mean they’ll want to shoot it. If they decide to shoot the pilot the odds are still very high it won’t go to air so, again, no high fives. Finally, say they buy a few episodes and it goes to air. You still need to keep your fives low because they may still kill it by quickly moving it to a new slot as Comedy Central did with David Cross and Jon Benjamin’s Freakshow (back in “Killer of Comedy” days). The only real high five moment in TV is when it gets picked up for a second season but as Zach Cregger from The Whitest Kids You Know put it, “At that point, you’re so beat, you just say, ‘All right, back to work.’”
8) FAILURE IS SUCCESS
I shot a pilot for Showtime that went nowhere. Did the same for Current TV and it was rejected. I developed a show for Planet Green they didn’t want, wrote a pilot for Adult Swim that got a “No” and received the same response for the one I gave Comedy Central. However, simply writing a pilot usually garners about $25k. Shooting a pilot nobody wants does even better. The networks OK about 50 pilot scripts for every one they take so failing is a given at this point. It’s a job that’s based on being fired. In fact, I know writers who don’t even want their show to be picked up because they don’t want to move to LA. Dan Harmon is one of the few writers to crack the code and went from co-creating Sarah Silverman’s show to getting his own show on NBC called Community. But even Harmon admits the job is ridiculous and created a website/short film festival called Channel 101 that lampoons the whole process by airing fake failed pilots and cancelled shows.
9) THERE’S NO MONEY IN COMEDY
Before it was cancelled, the hilarious Sarah Silverman Program cost $1m per episode and garnered 200,000 viewers. Demetri Martin’s show is their other big hit and it gets about twice that for a slightly lower cost. One of the funniest shows on television, Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job, is lucky to get a tenth of Sarah’s viewers. Take a show like History Channel’s Pawn Stars on the other hand, and the network’s looking at shelling out $250k for 5 million viewers.
10) HAVE HALF A DOZEN SPINNING PLATES
Once you get an OK on your deal, know that it is going to sit on a lawyer’s desk for the better part of a year. I’ve tried ripping the contract out of the lawyer’s hands so I can solve the problems myself but got lost after the first, “Heretofore the second party not withstanding shall, at the behest of the subject whence it cometh…” This is especially frustrating because without a finished contract, there’s no check. I remember seeing a writer (who won’t let me use his name because his show’s still on the air) exasperated about the rent his credit card was spending waiting for his show to go through legal. He had booked a production company and was also paying for them to wait around. “What the hell do other people do,” he asked, “move back in with their parents?” We both realized what everyone who’s trying to make money in today’s economy has realized: You gotta hustle. In other words, the only possible solution is to have tons of shows on the go at once.
That’s right. You have to assume this show isn’t going to go past the written pilot and start getting conflicting deals simultaneously. If, by some unprecedented piece of super-luck you find yourself with networks wanting to make several of your shows at once, you can deal with it then but tell me, when was the last time you saw a burn victim with too many supermodels on his hands?
A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about “how we’re all WASPs now” made me realize that Brookhiser’s statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he’s saying. A journeyman author, long associated with NR, Brookhiser, to all appearances, is an upper-class WASP endowed with all the proper manners and tics. Nonetheless, for decades he’s been in the employ of the neocons, people who would hardly qualify as bon gratin.
A scene involving one of their leaders, John Podhoretz, sticks vividly in my mind. While in the employ of the Washington Times, where Arnaud de Borchgrave entertained him lavishly as a favor to his parents, the present editor of Commentary was known for his crude table manners and general loutishness. I recall seeing him in Borchgrave’s office slouched over his chair and (dare I be so frank) picking his nose while in conversation with the apparent boss. (Actually it was Norm and Midge who called the shots at the WT then.) But people like John Podhoretz are precisely the ones whom Brookhiser and other WASPs, and particularly those at The New Criterion, have been kissing up to for years.
This subordinate position certainly does not demonstrate the assertion that “we’re all WASP patricians now.” The fact is members of our onetime dominant ethnicity and its onetime social elite are down on their luck. They’ve been reduced to menials serving at the beck and call of other groups, and in the journalistic and media world, this means working for Jewish liberals and Jewish neocons.
Such a situation should distress the new class of menials (perhaps it does!), but as I’ve indicated in more scholarly venues, their fate is entirely deserved. Elites that melt into spasms of guilt or niceness and which fail to continue to produce figures of the caliber of George Kennan, the Tafts, Robert E. Lee, Henry Adams, etc are not going to continue to be around as social, political, and cultural leaders. In doing research for my book on multiculturalism, I encountered statistical information that showed the decline of WASPdom since the middle of the last century in just about every area of human endeavor. The exception here (and it’s nothing to be proud of) is the disproportionate white Protestant representation at the public trough, and particularly in the ranks of the GOP. The last significant WASP patrician in public service was our recent, unmissed president, George W. Bush, someone whose ancestry is almost as noteworthy as the evidence of his verbal ineptitude. Needless to say, W took orders, whether or not he understood them, from neocon control-persons.
Clearly we’re not all WASPs now; and in my book Encounters
Even that over-the-top critic of Jewish power, Kevin MacDonald, has hardly scratched the surface in delineating the nastiness with which the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants clawed their way to the top of the academic-media industry, on the backs of those they often despised. And all the while they appealed with brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.
This tactic worked like a charm because of the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of those doing the climbing and because of the mentality of those they supplanted. Apparently WASPs suffer from an onerous sense of guilt toward others whom their ancestors excluded or were alleged to have discriminated against. Other groups, particularly Jews, blacks, Irish Catholics, and Latinos, consider themselves to have been the victims of discrimination, and they therefore happily associate with the Democratic Party, as an in gathering of victimized ethnicities.
One may attribute the WASP’s far deeper sense of social guilt to any number of causes, but his ancestors were hardly worse than those of the groups whom he now worships as designated victims. Did African blacks treat their slaves better than did American slave-owners? What about the Muslims who dragged captured blacks eastward, to Arab countries, well into the twentieth century, when they weren’t enslaving European Christians, whom they captured in naval raids? When one of my students, who himself is predictably WASP, noted in class that his ethnic group lost influence in the US “because they practiced discrimination against other people,” I asked somewhat impatiently: “How the hell did everyone else get into the country?”
Certainly many other groups have been more oppressive than American WASPs. Human history is full of them. But no other group, except for their pathological German cousins, seems to enjoy quite as much as WASPs the ecstasy of wallowing in guilt. And no other group seems quite as easily swayed to engage in moral crusades, perhaps to atone for their past sins as racists, sexists, or whatever. Unfortunately these crusades show our WASP population at their worst, trying to save the rest of the world with confected “human rights” after laying waste to their countries. If there’s anything WASPs should feel inexpressibly guilty about, it is this Jacobin fervor that causes them to unleash wars on other societies in order to bring them the gift of American democracy. But for some reason my Republican WASP neighbors think such devastation is alright and may be redemptive for its victims. After all, blowing up non-democrats is not reprehensible in the same way as refusing to let other ethnicities into WASP country clubs or being against affirmative action for Australoid transvestites.
Although I’ve loads of respect for their Protestant antecedents, I can’t say that I like or respect this present generation of WASPs. And least of all can I understand why their elites, by the time I was in my teens and early twenties, began to feel guilt toward those who hated their guts. As a great Italian thinker Pareto pointed out about a hundred years ago, ruling classes fall not so much because of opposition from below as they do from disintegration from above. Or as the Russians put it, the fish rots from the head on down.
“The car has already hit the tree and the bumper is already in the process of buckling inward, so there is no time to turn the wheel or fasten seat belts. It is too late to do anything but scream.”
Thus writes Vox Day in his recent book The Return of the Great Depression
I’m betting that they are. That’s a novice bet, as I am not a trained economist. I base it on a complete lack of seriousness among our political classes. It is obvious that our governments, at all levels, are spending far too much; yet there is little evidence of anyone being willing to do anything about it.
Item: New York state legislature, after years of chronic financial crisis caused by overspending, has just approved another budget bloated with spending increases. This was in the teeth of opposition from Governor Paterson, who has sworn to veto every single slice of pork in the budget. (There seem to be around 6,900 of them.) The Governor is a Democrat, and Democrats dominate the legislature.
Item: The U.S. Department of Labor has a new program called We Can Help. In a promotional video on the department’s website our current Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, assures us that “every worker in America has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.” Her department will hire 250 new field investigators to make sure that standards are enforced.
Item: Pat Quinn, the Governor of Illinois, is boasting of having confronted his state’s problem of unfunded pension liabilities. (Which is also, of course, the problem of many other states.) The retirement age for state employees has been raised to 67, and the salary used to compute pensions has been capped at $106,800 a year, indexed for inflation. However, says the New York Times, “Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired.” So for the tens of thousands of workers currently on Illinois payrolls, it’s “Party on, dudes!”
Item: The big news event of the past few days has been the dismissal of General McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan, with General Petraeus taking over. Petraeus is said to be a “long war” man, who will press for the administration to drop its plans for a winding-down of the war next year. I have read at least thirty articles about this, written by commentators of the deepest brow and highest respectability. Not one of them mentioned the cost of the war, currently around $100 billion per annum. All assume blithely that we can afford any war we care to fight, even a war as pointless as the one General Petraeus has just acquired.
Item: The youngest of the Americans who fought in Korea are now in their mid-seventies, yet we still have 28,500 military personnel there at a cost to us (South Korea chips in) north of a billion a year. Nobody talks about that, either. What’s a billion any more, in the age of the trillion?
Item: Vox Day’s not an outlier. Nor, any longer, are Peter Schiff nor even Marc Faber. Here’s Paul Krugman in the June 27 New York Times: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression . . . The cost—to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs—will . . . be immense.”
Item: California’s state-employee pension funds are short half a trillion dollars. State legislators don’t care, any more than New York’s do: “Mr. Schwarzenegger pointed out that he proposed pension initiatives a year ago, but lawmakers never followed through.”
Item: With unemployment nudging ten percent, we’re accepting the now-normal million-plus a year legal immigrants for permanent settlement. We are also taking in the usual 65,000 “regular cap” H-1B visas for “specialty occupations.” An example of an H-1B visa holder would be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, sponsored by Elizabeth Arden to do “a low-level accounting job.” You may not mention this. To speak in public about illegal immigration is just barely borderline respectable; if you try to start a discussion about legal immigration, people just stare blankly, as if you had lapsed into Tibetan. What is he, crazy?
And on, and on, and on. There’s a 40-foot tsunami in plain sight on the horizon, and we’re playing beach volleyball. Can Petraeus turn Afghanistan around? How unpopular is the healthcare bill? Will the feds sue the state of Arizona? (What’s that distant rumbling sound?) Is Turkey a friend or an enemy? Should Rahm Emanuel go? Is Elena Kagan gay?
A few days ago I wrote a column critical of the FDA, which is trying to stifle personal-genomics startups on the grounds that (a) big biotech firms, fearful of competition, are pressing them to, (b) the political Left harbors a strong suspicion that the less we know about the human genome, the better for their ideological coherence, and (c) like the scorpion in Aesop, they can’t help being what they are—an enterprise-hostile governmental bureaucracy.
That column got me one of the most depressing email-bags ever. This is now a simply terrible country in which to start an imaginative new enterprise. Several readers reminded me of the quote (which I can’t find on the internet, but seems to be well-known) by one of the founders of Home Depot, that such a business could not get off the ground today. The iron triangle of regulation, taxation, and litigation is killing off American business, fast.
From just one of those emails, sent by a very successful entrepreneur now living abroad: “Capitalism is dead in the US . . . The US was not destroyed by the Russians, the Chinese or even the militant Islamists. They did it to themselves . . . The $104 trillion debt is beyond any possible means of repayment. The only way out will be to monetize the debt by hyperinflation . . . I’m now watching the final days from 8,000 miles away . . . In November 2008, half of the US electorate put a loaded ballot in their mouth and pulled the trigger . . .”
I favor aerodynamic analogies over Vox Day’s merely automotive ones. So: Heads between knees, arms over heads, hold that position. Pray if you’re inclined to. Brace for impact!
The Greco-Roman egghead view was that events do not occur at random according to the whims of the Gods, but according to a repetitive cycle. Just as life followed birth and death followed decline, monarchy decayed into tyranny, leading to aristocracy, which decayed into oligarchy, which led in turn to selective democracy, followed by anarchy and finally back to monarchy. However one looks at it, it all begins and ends with monarchy, a very good thing as far as I’m concerned. When I was young and dumb, I flirted with republicanism, but then a very wise Greco-German proved to me that the worst King is better than the best president, at least in the highly politicized climate of the Olive Republic.
Just look at the tranquility of the political situation in Scandinavian countries, in Holland, Belgium (a split in half nation) and right here in merry old England. Even Gordon Brown saw this and retired with his dignity intact. Almost. Most historical people began with a King. Human nature being what it is, it caused decline and eventual barbarism, but then monarchy returned. Monarchy encouraged refined manners, the rise of politeness, and opened up our true nature as rational, social and moral beings. Wise guys like Rousseau praised noble savages, but he was pretty much of a savage himself, starting with his own children.
Though modern Greece has been an intermittent monarchy since 1830, and although the monarchy was abolished by a government in 1974 after a referendum that was rigged in everything but name—King Constantine was called a collaborator with the military junta that ceased power in 1967, yet he was the first to mount a coup against it and left the country as a result—there is no realistic prospect of its restoration. The Greek royal family had to endure endless vilifications while political hacks led the nation to the ruin of today. Greek politicians fear the King and they fear monarchy even more. Presidents can be appointed and expected to pay back, Kings are not and do not.
And it gets worse. Vilification aside, the Greek royal family’s lands were confiscated—lands that had been bought by the family in the early 19th century and not handed to them by a grateful nation—and after judicial review in the highest court of Europe, appraised at one hundredth of their value. The Greek King gave the funds to a Greek charity and has never complained. The fact that the Greek King and his family have always acted impeccably when the nation has been in danger does not seem to matter. Envy is a Greek trait, and the envious among them cheered at the unfairness of it all. Basically, the Greek left never forgave the present King’s father and mother for fighting against the communist guerrillas who tried to take power through force of arms back in the Forties. Greek journalists are, like everywhere, men and women of the left. Punto basta, as they say in the land of pasta.
Which brings me to the present. The King is now planning to move to Greece and last week he celebrated his 70th birthday. His son, Prince Pavlos and his wife, Princess Marie-Chantal, threw a wonderful dinner to celebrate it. Their house is near the river and has a garden to end all gardens. A clear-sided tent had two long tables allowing intimacy, and drinks beforehand were indoors, where some of us could rub shoulders with the royals. And royals were there galore. The Queen and Prince Philip, the Queen of Denmark and Prince Henrik, the Queen of Spain and her son Prince Felipe, the Queen of Greece, of course, and all her family. Princess Anne, the Duke of Gloucester, Prince Michael and Marina of Greece, Princess Alexandra, and Prince Andrew, in a particularly jovial and pleasant mood.
The first speaker was Prince Pavlos, who spoke movingly about his father and the dignity he has kept throughout a volatile period, and I was happy he mentioned that the King as Crown Prince had won the first Greek Olympic gold medal in the post war Rome Olympics. Then came Pavlos’s young son, who in his childish voice told his grandfather how he and his brothers wished him a happy birthday, er—then he got kicked by his sister—and added, and my sisters too. That got a big laugh and I thought to myself, there goes a real Greek. Girls don’t count in the land of macho and moustaches. Queen Anna Maria followed and then it was the King’s turn. Seated next to Queen Elizabeth—on her other side was my very old friend Nicholas Soames—Constantine talked about the “spring of my senility,” and made us all feel included. It was as graceful as it was touching, and he mentioned Princess Chantal of Hanover, who was also celebrating her birthday.
Who else was there? I’ve already done all the name dropping I will ever do, but it’s not every day that a King turns 70 and does it in such style. Bob and Chantal Miller, the Carringtons, the Bismarcks, the Frosts, the Hoares, many Greeks, and little ole me. Afterwards I had a drink with Prince Nikolaos of Greece and as I walked back home I thought what a sign of affection for the Greek King Queen Elizabeth and the rest of the royals showed towards a very nice man who has always deserved better. Oh yes, I almost forgot. I did not see who dropped coffee on the Queen’s dress, but I sure have my suspicions.
My friend Andrew Roberts has inherited the title of “historian of the English-speaking people” from Winston Churchill. Churchill wrote his four-volume history up to 1900. Roberts took up the story from there and has written his stupendous “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.” I commend it to you.
In the book, Roberts says that there is something about English-speaking people that encourages a certain number among them to speak ill of us. He does not think that their criticism is legitimate for the most part, and I do not, either. But it is a characteristic of certain of us. You never find that captious quality in Russia. Would Vladimir Putin say the kinds of things about Russia that, say, Barack Obama says about America? Would Hugo Chavez say such things about Venezuela, Fidel Castro about Cuba, Hu Jintao about China? Roberts’ case is made, and the Democratic Party and Labour Party offer plenty of examples to fortify his point.
Yet lay that observation aside for another day. He makes another case in his book worth mentioning. English-speaking people love liberty. I thought of this the other day when I read a piece in The Washington Post about the revival of fox hunting in Britain and the desire to legalize it once again. Ian Farquhar, an English hunter, leads the piece by saying, “I felt—we all felt—they were spitefully taking away the very essence of our liberty” when the 2004 ban on fox hunting went into effect. Now the Conservative government is back, and the law is up for repeal. What will happen I do not know, for the Conservatives are in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and only a minority of them are with the Conservatives on this one. However, that is not the issue. Rather it is the question of “the very essence of our liberty.” It is a part of British tradition. Some have it. Some do not.
We have the tradition here, and it is seen by many as “the very essence of our liberty.” The right to keep and bear arms is actually written into our Constitution, in the Second Amendment. Guns are seen as essential to liberty by many of us. In many communities, we can actually carry guns. There are studies that show that gun ownership and law abidingness correlate. There is a robust debate in America over gun ownership, but robust as it is, it is unlikely that the gun controllers ever will outnumber the gun rights people. We are safe with our guns.
Yet let us look at another matter, the hunt itself. Over in Britain, it is all tallyho, handsome attire, follow the pack. An occasional fox gets mauled, but that is one fewer fox for a farmer to gas or shoot, to trap or snare. If the hunt is legalized rather than restricted—as it is now—there will be a few more foxes to be mauled. But attendant with the hunt are the festivities, and there are jobs for the keepers of kennels and stables and the land managers. There is equipment to be maintained. The Countryside Alliance claims 45,000 members in some 300 clubs. During the winter months, the countryside comes alive with activity. I say good show!
On this side of the Atlantic, we do, of course, have the tallyho set. There are the hounds and horses and stylish dress. Yet there is much more. North America is a continent and a pretty raw continent when the great outdoors is at issue. Some hunt for trophies, some for the feast after the hunt. I am numbered among the latter. I freely get up before the sun is in the sky and set up for turkey, deer or even bear. But I am not a particularly avid hunter. Once when with my partner I shot a bear—or, likelier, he did—I had to follow the critter for two hours or more before it dropped. Not much fun—but when we got back to camp, we told some great stories, and there was a stupendous feast that night.
The important thing on this side of the Atlantic or the other is that English-speaking people find liberty in the air. We relish our freedoms, and one is to hunt. I hope the present ban on fox hunting is repealed over there. Possibly I even will join in the fray. Though if I do, I shall ride at the back of the hunt. I would not want to incite a dog to carnage.
A year ago in Cairo, Barack Hussein Obama addressed the Muslim world with the same buttock-splayed obsequiousness he exhibits toward all of America’s blood enemies. Citing “civilization’s debt to Islam,” he credited Mohammedan culture with the development of algebra, the magnetic compass, the writing pen, and basic medical advances in healing. Never mind that the Greeks developed algebra, the Chinese invented the compass, the Egyptians and/or Indians gave us the pen, and most Islamic medical “advances” were swiped from the ancient Hellenists.
Last month, former astronaut and current NASA Administrator Charles Bolden toured the Middle East in commemoration of Obama’s speech. He sat down for a televised interview with the Al Jazeera Network. When asked why he was visiting the Islamic world, this was his reply:
When I became the NASA administrator—or before I became the NASA administrator—[Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.
Bolden’s statement marks what is perhaps the first instance of this curious notion of “third and foremost” in world history, but it’s strangely apt. In claiming that a PR campaign to toss a few warm-’n’-fuzzies at the Islamic world is the top priority of an organization founded in the 1950s to encourage space exploration, he admitted that the agency’s main goal now has nothing to do with space exploration. NASA has been instructed to take something entirely irrelevant and make it their tippy-top priority. Thus, “third and foremost.”
Bolden spilled the beans to Al Jazeera about the administration’s Islamic-outreach plans even before he’d informed Congress about them. After Bolden’s comments led to some mild media grumbling, the White House promptly threw Bolden under the Space Shuttle. On Monday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that Bolden had possibly misspoken and that it’s “not the task of NASA” to make Muslims feel better about their history. Gibbs did not, however, say that Bolden was lying about what Obama had instructed him, and it strains belief that Bolden would entirely fabricate such a story.
Beyond this inscrutable welding of Islamic self-esteem to space exploration is the strange idea that Muslims need to be encouraged to take pride in their historical scientific achievements, whether real or imagined. Anyone who has spent more than five seconds listening to a Muslim propagandist is well aware that not only do they obsessively focus on the alleged scientific and mathematical advances that mysteriously happened to cease advancing about a thousand years ago—they arrogantly, chauvinistically, and enthusiastically rub such claims in the faces of the Westerners whose culture and science leapfrogged over the Islamic world, oh, about a thousand years ago.
Most of us have heard that the Arab world bequeathed its numerical system and the concept of “zero” to the West, but the truth is that the Arabs acquired all that from the ancient Indians. And although it’s true that Muslim scholars preserved many remaining scraps of antiquity’s literature while most of Europe was flailing about in the Dark Ages, it’s also been established that much of the academic work performed during the Islamic Golden Age was done by Christians and Jews working under Muslim domination.
It’s also telling that much of Islam’s Golden Age occurred directly after Muhammad’s warriors carved out huge tracts of soil for themselves and absorbed other civilizations’ riches and learning. Once the Koran—reputed to be the Last Word on Everything, which by its nature discourages all forms of scientific inquiry—took root in these subjugated lands, Islam entered a millennial Dark Age that continues into the present.
For the past 1000 years, the Muslim world has given us almost nothing in the way of math or science. It has, however, given us a slave trade that predated the Atlantic slave trade by seven centuries and shackled nearly twice as many black Africans as the Europeans did—a fact that continues to get lost on black Americans who cozy up to Islam. The Arabic slave trade also enslaved an estimated million-plus white Europeans, a fact that is lost on nearly all white Americans probably because it has not been reported to them.
For the past millennium, the Muslim world has been a science-hostile warrior empire that, according to some estimates, has murdered up to 300 million infidels while forcibly converting the rest. It has given us innovations such as female genital mutilation, honor killings, and religious decapitation. It has been such a beacon of scientific advancement that, although Muslims outnumber Jews by roughly 100 to 1, Jews have outpaced Muslims in Nobel Prizes at a clip of 136 to 2.
“Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over,” Barack Obama declared in April of 2009. He then canceled NASA’s Constellation program and abandoned America’s plans to return to the moon, leaving American astronauts to hitch a ride with the Russians if they ever hope to escape Earth’s orbit. In direct contradiction of his statement, he almost entirely abandoned science while dragging ideology into a sphere where it clearly doesn’t belong.
I am unconvinced that Barack Obama is able to distinguish between the objective and subjective realms. How else to explain his alleged plans to transform an organization devoted to space-age scientific research into a psychological daycare center to help make Muslims feel cool with their bad selves?
I am entirely convinced that Barack Obama doesn’t realize that “self-esteem” and academic achievement don’t go hand-in-hand. Scientific American went a long way in debunking the “self-esteem equals achievement” myth back in 2005, as did an exhaustive 2000 study that revealed black American schoolchildren scored higher than white children when it came to self-esteem despite their lagging academic scores.
In the end, Obama’s main contribution to our solar system may lie in taking the world and turning it upside-down. Over my lifetime I’ve witnessed America’s wingspan shrink to the point where our arms are now undeniably too short to box with God. We used to reach all the way into outer space, and now we’re reaching out to shake hands with our sworn enemies. And the way I feel about all this apparently doesn’t matter, so long as Muslims feel good about themselves.
My last week in London felt like end of school term, bittersweet. I was glad to be flying off to the sun, but sad to leave good friends and very good times behind. Mind you, the last night following the Speccie summer party descended into farce when my Low Life colleague and I were photographed at 5 a.m. having a spirited discussion about the human condition. Jeremy wrote about it last week but he chose to forget certain details. Both he and I had been boozing for at least ten hours, but thankfully had not started until after we were presented to a very gracious and friendly Prime Minister. When a driver pitched up to pick me up for the airport I was in a bad way. Tim Hoare, whose house Jeremy, Charlie Glass, Andrei Navrosov and I had invaded, offered his driver to take Clarke to a hotel. “Where do you want him to take you, Claridge’s, the Savoy..?” “Er, actually the YMCA at King’s Cross,” stammered Jeremy, “they usually give me a bed there.” “In that case I think you better stay here,” said Tim, a very generous host. Thus Jeremy was found by Hoare’s butler a few hours later walking around semi-naked trying to boil an egg.
My problem was getting through security drunk. That’s where my darling daughter came in. Lolly is smart as a whip and very pretty to boot. She explained to the staff that her father suffers from dementia, gave them a killer smile, and led me through with no one the wiser. Three hours later I was on board my boat and sleeping soundly after a few choice remarks from the mother of my children, something to do with shame and age, but nothing particularly interesting or original.
But let’s get one thing straight. If anyone should feel ashamed it is the deputy editor of the Spectator, who not only cut her hair, but also forgot to show up for our wedding following the summer party. As did Georgie Wells, who missed the dinner following the wedding that never was, and who disappeared in deepest Badminton leaving me a double cuckold. Oh well, no one’s perfect, except Kara Walker, who actually made my London stay worthwhile, and not the way any of you with dirty minds might think.
Kara is very beautiful but towards the end of dinner she informed me and my buddies that she had just got engaged. Groans all around but I didn’t mind. The reason for my nonchalance is that Kara works for the Centre for Social Justice, which in my not so humble opinion is the most important think tank in Britain. Although this space is usually reserved for jokes and high jinks, I ask you to take what follows seriously because it has to do with the future of the country. Here is the bad news: The UK scored lowest for child well-being out of all OECD countries for which data was available. The Social breakdown costs society £102 billion a year. Britain had the highest divorce rate and highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. Britain also has one of the highest, if not the highest rates of benefit dependence.
Earlier in the day I had been at the Telegraph offices which the chief executive of the media group and the editor of the paper had around 12 of us for lunch. The main speaker was Iain Duncan Smith, minister for work and pensions. He explained what the Centre for Social Justice stands for and how important it is. Rarely have I heard a man explain Britain’s problems in a clearer and more articulate manner. IDS knows his stuff like no other politician I have ever encountered. Poverty, according to him, is more than the absence of money. Labour chose to ignore the problem by simply throwing money at it, making it a lot worse by trapping people in worklessness and dependency over several generations. The CSJ has studied the problem and has come up with the only solution possible. Earning money through gainful employment is the only way out of the trap. With more than 2.5 million Britons soon to be officially unemployed, the need to reform the benefit system is more pressing than ever. Past policiesy have made it pointless to return to work, hence incentives are all important.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Britain is partly broken and the benefits trap is mostly responsible. I was very impressed how IDS described the hopelessness and near impossibility of getting out of a sink estate and into normal society. When Tony Blair left office he went all out to make money. When IDS stood down from the Tory leadership he decided to devote his life reversing the social breakdown and established CSJ. No comment needed. The CSJ is non-partisan and a not for profit think tank. It relies entirely on donations, but with a difference. Every penny you give goes to helping the problems which blight the poorest. In an intelligent and original way. What I’ve decided to do is not only help in a modest way, but try and find sponsors for this most important of tasks, how to save a once great country that socialist policies have brought to the brink. Throwing moolah at it is not the answer. That’s what LBJ did in America and killed off the black family.
Despite being left at the altar, despite being betrayed by Lord John Somerset, and despite Kara Walker’s engagement, I remain in a very happy mood because of my discovery of the Centre for Social Justice. I hope all of you look into it.
It is plain that no U.S. administration of any party is going to build a wall along our nation’s southern border. “Can’t be done,” our leaders tell us, shaking their heads in mock despair, while feeling under the desk for the envelopes full of benjamins being passed from cheap-labor lobbyists and race-grievance shills. “Too much border . . . mountainous terrain . . . impossible to patrol . . .”
They are of course lying, but I can’t bring myself to care much any more. So far as buildings walls is concerned, a wall along the southern border would in any case be my second priority. If I had my druthers, and there was a 40-foot concrete wall to be built, I’d build it around Washington, D.C.
There would be planning decisions to be made here. Do we build the wall just around the District’s boundaries? I’d actually go for a bigger perimeter—the Beltway. You have a good concrete base there already; and you avoid the problems associated with the long river section along the Potomac. Furthermore, you not only capture within your Beltway wall the major parasites—congressmen, lobbyists, judges, Assistants to Deputy Assistant Secretaries, White House staffers, diversity-obsessed generals, and the rest—but also a good slice of the supporting hangers-on—the two-christmas-tree folk about whom Peggy Noonan wrote so expressively a year or so ago.
I understand of course that there would be grave logistical difficulties in getting the wall up. The government people would surely resist; and they control some formidable forces. Those forces might need to be thoroughly subverted before such a thing was possible.
Or perhaps a deceptive strategy might work: pitch a wall to the DC-ers like Tom Sawyer selling his fence-painting work, as something to their advantage. It wouldn’t (we could tell them) be motivated by any animosity on our part. Not at all! It would only be a humble recognition, by the common people of the U.S.A., of the loathing that government people rightfully feel towards our worthless selves. Think (we’d say) how delightful it would be for them never again to have to venture out among us—to be able to pass their bills, appropriate their funds, launch their lawsuits, dispatch their troops, and issue their rulings without ever having to look at our warty prole faces or smell our vile bodies! If we pitched it like that, they might fall for it.
Passing over the difficulties of getting the thing done, imagine the benefits for us non-Washingtonians when it was done! We’d have the government people trapped in there, able to exercise authority only over each other. We should of course allow a few openings in the wall: perhaps one at each major compass point, like a medieval walled city.
But then questions of ingress and egress arise. It would be humane to allow basic foodstuffs in, conditional of course on the D.C.-ers henceforth leaving us alone. We should not be too easy-going, though. There is good soil in this area and the inhabitants should be encouraged to practice some self-sufficiency. At the time of Warren Harding‘s inauguration—which is within living memory, just—there were 200 working farms within the D.C. boundary. President Taft kept a cow in the White House stables (which had stood empty since the coming of the automobile). I mention these facts only to show that the walled-in D.C.-ers would not be without resources.
Others wishing to enter would be subjected to some scrutiny. Do we let in the Middle-Eastern-looking fellow with a panel truck full of fertilizer and nitromethane? Personally I would—one less for us to worry about—but I understand others might feel differently.
As for those wanting to leave, I think we should be generous towards the very young and very old. Towards others, too. Even among the working population of the District, no fair moral evaluation would find every single one complicit in the nation-destroying activities of the federal government. In a previous anti-Washington fantasy I apostrophized the Angel of Death to
. . . spare the lesser worker bees,
Federal and private employees,
Working for meager salaries
In government Hell.
The real fun of the thing is of course to dream of the reprisals we could take should the walled-in Washingtonians attempt to re-assert federal power over us.
The simplest thing would just be to shut the gates. If they had not taken the hint from President Taft and moved to agricultural self-sufficiency, the D.C.-ers would soon be reduced to cannibalism. The obsessions with power and status that drive the city would then be turned upside-down, and the phrase “pecking order” would have a whole new meaning. You could not, for example, get much more than a sandwich out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg; but Sonia Sotomayor—Mm, mm, good! The first would be last and the last, first—Barney Frank more sought-after than Nancy Pelosi.
The last days of D.C. would make great reality TV. The citizenry would sit back with complacent pleasure to watch K Street lawyers, congresscritters, GS-15s, and defense lobbyists tearing into each other’s sleek, plump flesh with teeth and nails.
Those with stomachs too weak for the spectacle could comfort themselves with the reflection that our nation’s capital would soon be calm and quiet, ready for us to start over. The fine monuments and statuary would surely be left intact for our future enjoyment. What could the government people do, in their dying rages, to harm them? Trash the Lincoln Memorial by whacking at it with their blackberries? Kick down the Smithsonian with their wingtip brogues?
How sweet it is to dream! But then you wake, and the armies are still marching to nowhere, and the tax-men are drawing up reams of new forms, and the lawyers are stamping out the last few embers of state autonomy. Washington D.C. is glowing with health; the government people wax ever more numerous and wealthy. We’re stuck with the buggers. Where is Alaric the Visigoth when we need him?
The American civil calendar is not alone in being festooned with holidays celebrating political factions and the central state. Most famously, perhaps, the chief French holiday is today, le quatorze juillet: July 14, Bastille Day.
By chance I read a celebratory squib last July 14. I objected that Bastille Day merits no celebration, that it symbolizes a series of events that bathed Europe and much of the rest of the world in blood. According to family lore, my four-greats-grandfather died in his early 20s at a north Prussian site in 1806. It seems likely to me that Murat’s invading French horsemen had something to do with that poor fellow’s untimely death.
The standard patriotic account of the French Revolution and the associated wars (and I include the Napoleonic Wars among them, as I’ll explain momentarily) holds that they overthrew a corrupt old regime. That regime deserved its fate, the story goes, because the king and nobles, along with the bishops, abbots, priests, monks, and nuns, were soaking the common people dry. The burden of this iniquitous social structure had to be thrown off, and finally it was.
Polls in France show that only some percentage of the population in the low teens considers itself monarchist. Such people generally favor restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, still the ruling dynasty in Spain and long the ruling dynasty in France. The government, whether led by socialists or Gaullists, propagandizes on behalf of the Revolution’s egalitarianism and enforces its anti-clericalism. Guillotines, aggressive wars, official atheism, and Napoleon I? Ah, if you want to make an omelet, you must first break a few eggs.
Historians commonly distinguish between the Revolution and the First Empire, the Age of Napoleon, which supposedly followed immediately. Their attitude is that of the attendant who asked the ex-emperor in his end-of-life exile why he had betrayed republicanism and made himself a monarch. (Napoleon’s answer, interestingly, was that, “We can’t all be George Washington.” How right he was.) Surely this was a great turning point.
I tend to accept instead the judgment offered by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his fascinating essay “Napoleon; or, The Man of the World” (1850). Napoleon made himself emperor, yes, but he was a new kind of emperor. In fact, the emperor of the French (note: not “emperor of France”) scoffed at old-fashioned, hereditary monarchs such as the Habsburgs. He intentionally insulted the Hohenzollerns.
As Emerson puts it, Napoleon was a representative not of the conservative, but of the democratic class. He stood not for the inherited, the traditional, or the timid, but for “the class of business men in America, in England, in France and throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill.” One might have thought this a self-evidently ignorant judgment. Was it not Napoleon who contemptuously (or impotently) referred to the English as a race of shopkeepers? What useful insight might Emerson have had in referring to Napoleon as a man of the democratic rather than of the conservative class?
Seemingly, he had in mind Napoleon’s solvent effect on everything he touched, his feeling that he must replace whatever he encountered with something new and more sensible. Not 300 German states, but a few. Not separate courts in Italy for commoners and nobles, but one set of courts. Not a hodge-podge of law in France, but the Code Napoléon. David as court painter, scientists on his Egyptian campaign who discovered the Rosetta Stone, everything worthy of inquiry.
The soldiers in Napoleon’s armies were told that there was “a baton in every knapsack.” Emerson has Napoleon boasting that he made his generals from mud, and, with a few exceptions, it was true: merit, not descent, was his chief criterion of preferment.
Soon enough, other European countries felt compelled to follow. So, for example, after the disastrous war in which my ancestor seemingly was killed, Scharnhorst pushed through reforms in Prussia theoretically opening all military ranks to commoners. The German states were never again disaggregated, and soon enough, “Italy” and “Germany” would no longer be merely geographic designations.
To Emerson, this all amounted to a kind of triumph of the common man. He seems to accept Napoleon’s argument that he had been the emperor of the Revolution. So do I. As Emerson put it:
His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the industrious masses, found an organ and a leader in him.
In the field, then, Napoleon commanded as an autocrat, but a particular kind of autocrat: a popular autocrat.
As the armies of the First Republic became those of the French Empire, and as their brilliant chieftain and his able lieutenants (Davout, Suchet, Berthier, Lannes, Murat, and the rest) subjected Europe to French rule, one saw playing itself out the authentic spirit of the Revolution. Political imperatives had become interchangeable with morality, and the soldiers of the grande nation represented those imperatives. If some Gutzmann had to die in a remote part of northern Prussia, so what? It was glorious! And the French deserved what they could take from the denizens of benighted monarchies, anyway.
What does Bastille Day represent? Ultimately, it represents the elevation to power of the classic man on horseback, a representative in his tastes, aspirations, and (Emerson again) “intellect without conscience” of the democracy. It represents ideology as license. Napoleon took what he wanted in power, things, people … everything. For him, fame was virtue. This was the principle of the French Revolution writ large, of the new class whose ascendancy was aborning, in France and elsewhere.
What is there to celebrate in that?
As the cooling winds of austerity move in across superheated Britain, one gallant group is arming for war. The large trade unions, headed up by the so-called “Awkward Squad” of leftist leaders, are on the move.
It is time, the Awkward ones believe, for another Hunger March, another General Strike, another Grunwick. It is time for new Scargills to arise from the ashes of the labour movement, and man the barricades against the stormtroopers of the Tory regime. It is Marx against Gradgrind, flat cap against top hat, Doncaster against Eton, Walthamstow Dogs against Royal Ascot, football against croquet, egg and chips against funny foreign food.
The carking Bob Crow of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) spelt it out in his carefully retained Shadwell accent. The self-proclaimed “communist stroke socialist” wants “general and co-ordinated strike action…in the teeth of fiscal fascism.”
Mark Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services Union wants “a massive campaign of resistance against…the deepest, most damaging public spending cuts since Margaret Thatcher sharpened her axe.” And Dave Prentis of UNISON has threatened “stiff resistance…just one of many fights that face us.”
These Marxian maquisards have assembled a “war chest” of £25m. It makes one’s heart swell with egalitarian ecstasy to see all these poor man’s Parsifals girding their loins to slay the myrmidons of Diabolic Dave (Cameron, not Prentis)—on behalf of a generation of honest-toil-begrimed equality monitors, swimming pool beauty therapists, Gypsy and Traveller Liaison Officers, Healthy Schools Advisors, and Sustainability Engagement and Events Officers.
How insensitive, then, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance (those Poujadiste running-dogs) to choose such a moment to release The Trade Union Rich List. The capitalist lackeys have identified “38 general secretaries and chief executives of trade unions whose annual remuneration package is in excess of £100,000.”
On this roll of honor are one David “Dave” Prentis (£127,436), one Mark Serwotka (£111,112) and one Robert “Bob” Crow (£105,679). It is so unfair to highlight the gross disparity between such salaries and those of the workers represented by these idealists.
It is not as if the union members do not get value for money. In recent decades, the unions labored 24/7 to safeguard British jobs, preserve shipbuilding and manufacturing, improve local communities and generally better the lives of British workers. To see how successful they have been in these endeavors, just look around.
Their left-field methods have been the key to their achievements—give support to a Labour government or parties even further Left wedded to free trade, outsourcing and mass immigration; ignore dry socioeconomic analysis in favor of satisfying resolutions about sexism, racism and Iraq; write for the Guardian and reluctantly accept management-scale salaries. One wonders when rank-and-file union members (many of whom do useful jobs) will realize just how successful their delegates have been.
But for the moment, the downturn is allowing these functionaries to present themselves as crusaders for social justice “in the teeth of fiscal fascism” (fascists are of course well known advocates of shrinking the state). Unbeknownst to them, the union leaders’ wild speeches may even be encouraging anarchists further down the food chain who would like to exploit the downturn to bring about Athenian-style uprisings, complete with democratic shopping and the detonation of a million People’s Petrol Bombs.
The rankly partisan carks of all the Crows are distorted, diminishing echoes of a failing tradition—destroyed as much by Labour as by the Tories. A whole segment of England has been laid waste—with all its family traditions, economic security, local identity and pride, racing pigeons and pints of mild, Low Church respectability, brass bands and hand-sewn union banners that combined the iconography of class and nation. The tough, proud class of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning has become the class of The Royle Family—welfare-dependent and TV-enthralled, living on sink estates beset by crime, with no real hope for the future other than maybe one day being able to leave England for ever.
Faced with this devastation, all the “Awkward Squad” is offering is more of what is already offered by their supposed Labour friends and supposed Tory enemies. Far from helping the workers, too many trade union leaders are instead helping the politicians to export British jobs to the world and to import the world into Britain. But it seems what interests them most of all is helping themselves.
Not since President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock and JFK sent U.S. marshals to the University of Alabama has the federal government seemed so at war with a state of the union.
Arkansas and Alabama were defying U.S. court orders to desegregate. But Barack Obama’s war on Arizona is not a war of necessity. It is a war of choice—an unprovoked war, undertaken not to defend constitutional or civil rights, but to pander to his party’s left and Hispanic voters.
New Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson, himself Hispanic, gave the game away. At the Boston governors conference, he assured colleagues, nervous over the administration attacks on Arizona’s immigration law, that “Obama is popular with Hispanic voters, and this is going to be a popular move with them nationally.”
Eric Holder fended off criticism of his Justice Department suit against Arizona that alleges the state usurped federal responsibility by saying he has not ruled out a second suit for “racial profiling.”
Rather than work with Arizona to secure the border and send the illegals home, the Obamaites are taking Mexico’s side against Arizona, and against the faithful execution of U.S. law.
In a shocking and telling episode in the Rose Garden, Obama stood by mute as Felipe Calderon attacked the Arizona law as “discriminatory.” The next day, Democrats in Congress, with Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano joining in, cheered the Mexican president’s slander that Arizona introduced “racial profiling to law enforcement.”
There was a time when such an insult to a state of our union, on U.S. soil by a foreign ruler, would have produced a diplomatic crisis, if not pistols at dawn.
Some of us recall Ike walking out of a Paris summit with Nikita Khrushchev rather than apologize for sending U-2s over Russia, and JFK, after the Bay of Pigs, retorting to Khrushchev that the United States did not need any lectures on intervention from people “whose character is forever stamped on the bloody streets of Budapest.”
Democrats cheer as Arizona is attacked by a Mexican leader whose country treats illegal entry as a felony and illegal aliens with a brutality no American would tolerate.
And what exactly is at the heart of the Arizona law?
Simply this: Being in this country illegally is now a misdemeanor in Arizona, as it is in U.S. law. And as a 1940 U.S. law requires resident aliens to carry their green cards or work visas at all times, Arizona will require police to request such identification if, in a “lawful contact”—a traffic violation or altercation—the officer entertains a “reasonable suspicion” the individual may be here illegally.
Is this really Nazi Germany? Does this really justify the hysteria? And if this is the Gestapo, why did Holder not make this feature of the law the grounds for his Justice Department suit?
Answer: Calderon and Obama notwithstanding, racial profiling is prohibited by the Arizona law. Nor is there any evidence racial or ethnic profiling will be condoned by Arizona. The law has not even taken effect.
Unlike San Francisco and other towns that declare themselves to be “sanctuary cities” and refuse to cooperate with U.S. immigration authorities, Arizona is not challenging or usurping U.S. law, but trying to assist the U.S. government in enforcing the immigration laws.
Why is Arizona under attack for simply trying to help enforce our immigration laws? Because the Obama administration cannot, will not or does not even wish to see those laws enforced.
The U.S. government is today derelict in its constitutional duty.
And this is approaching an existential crisis for America. For there are in Arizona 450,000 illegal aliens, a population of law-breakers in a single state approaching the size of the entire U.S. Army.
Though we have 15 million Americans unemployed, near 10 percent of our workforce, with a higher share of African-Americans jobless, we have 8 million illegal aliens holding jobs. And last year the administration handed out over a million green cards and work visas to foreigners to come and take jobs that would have gone to American citizens.
In communist countries in the Cold War, all understood that the government did not represent the people. The state was at war with the nation.
That idea is taking root in America—the idea that our government no longer seeks to represent us. And as one watches Obama and Congress take the side of a foreign leader attacking an American state, and the government refuse to do its duty and defend the borders or send the illegals back home, questions arise.
In this ongoing invasion of the United States that has brought 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens into our midst, whose side is the government on? Ours or theirs? What is the reason for the refusal to secure our border?
Why do Democrats insist that the illegal aliens be put on a “path to citizenship”?
Is the real objective the abolition of the old America we grew up in?
The limited-release comedy The Kids Are All Right has driven critics into paroxysms of praise. For instance, the normally low-key A.O. Scott enthused in the New York Times as follows: “superlative,” “outrageously funny,” “heartbreaking,” “canny,” “agile,” “thrilling,” “vertiginous,” “anarchic energy,” “novelistic sensitivity,” “close to perfect,” “precisely measured,” “honestly presented,” “great,” and “extraordinary.”
Is this low-budget comedy truly the second coming of Lawrence of Arabia? If not, why does Scott appear to be plundering adjectives willy-nilly from Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers’ well-thumbed thesaurus of newspaper ad-friendly verbiage?
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore star as middle-aged lesbians whose domestic routines are flummoxed when Bening’s 18-year-old daughter and Moore’s 15-year-old son, who are half-siblings, contact their anonymous sperm donor father, played by Mark Ruffalo.
This film by television director Lisa Cholodenko (The L Word) may have been partly inspired by two stories notorious on the Hollywood lesbian gossip circuit: the vastly publicized Ellen DeGeneres-Anne Heche affair of the late 1990s and the quieter rumors about the conception of the two children of Oscar-winner Jodie Foster.
The deeply feminine Bening, who is best known for finally getting Warren Beatty to put a ring on it, strives manfully to master the role of the short-haired paterfamilias, the gynecologist breadwinner of the household. Bening, though, ends up sounding passive-aggressively peeved.
The red-haired Moore, who has four Oscar nominations, plays a vague, Annie Hall-like fading beauty, the de facto housewife of the supposedly liberated pair.
Casting as lesbians the girly Bening and Moore, who have four marriages, six children, and seven Oscar nominations between them, continues an old Hollywood tradition going back to the first gay domestic drama, 1969’s Staircase, which featured ladykillers Richard Burton and Rex Harrison (eleven marriages total).
The more formidable (and never married) Jodie Foster, who is said to have conceived two children by sperm donation, would have been better at being butch than Bening. Yet, Foster also would have been unlikely to accept the role.
Ruffalo’s character somehow exists in a mellow seventies bubble. He’s the laidback chef and owner of a happening Silver Lake restaurant, lives in a hilltop house with a 360-degree view of Los Angeles, owns an organic farm, and sleeps with his waitresses, including a gorgeous black girl with an immense Pam Grier Afro whom he calls “Foxy.” He seems wholly oblivious to the post-1970s question that hangs gloomily over the heads of most other Los Angelenos, fictional and real: “How can he afford that?”
When gold-chained Ruffalo roars up on his Harley to hang out with his biological kids, Bening’s character is distressed to notice that the father of her child isn’t the scholar she’d expected from the paperwork he’d filled out at the sperm bank 19 years ago. (The Fleet Street press, which is less muzzled by the strictures of access journalism than the American media, asserted that Foster searched for months before deciding upon a tall, handsome scientist with a 160 IQ.)
Meanwhile, Ruffalo’s arrival has Moore’s character rethinking this whole lesbian business. She comes to feel that, outside of the fantasies of teenage boys, lesbianism is basically Diet Sex. She is soon doing the real thing with the father of her son. In turn, he gets to wondering if it’s not time to settle down. After all, his son could use a dad.
The film’s premise is promising, and it builds momentum whenever the male characters are on screen. Moreover, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice tiny hints of satire about the realities of lesbian life. For example, even lesbians find each other kind of dull; lesbians reproduce eugenically; and rich lesbians try to use their money to win more feminine but flighty girlfriends, who often betray them by going back to men. Recall how the politically promoted DeGeneres-Heche relationship turned to fiasco when the pretty but erratic blonde dumped the comedienne in sensible shoes to marry their cameraman.
Unfortunately, the screenwriters appear so self-satisfied by their courage in making minute deviations from the lesbian party line that that they feel no need to develop ideas. Soon, they’re fleeing back to the kind of cheerleading that is a staple at the annual LGBT “Reel Affirmations” film festival. The title and tone are reminiscent of the recent “study” announcing that lesbians raise children better than heterosexuals do (according to the lesbians, not according to the kids). It ends predictably with an affirming group hug that was sappy on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Worse is The Kids Are All Right’s sit-commy lack of skill. The screenplay doesn’t rise to middlebrow and the direction is TV hack-level. If gay marriage weren’t a sacred cause these days—or if this movie were about a heterosexual couple—poor Mr. Scott and the other critics wouldn’t feel obligated to make fools of themselves in the name of Culture War solidarity.
Until recently, I had never heard of Liliane Bettencourt, the sole heiress to the L’Oreal fortune and France’s richest woman. I can’t say that I care much now that I have, even though it seems like all of France is in a twist over her billions. As it happens, Bettencourt gave away one of her nine billion shekels to her photographer friend, Francois Marie Banier. He produced a beautiful book of his photographs about ten years ago, which I have and still admire. (Johnny Depp is on the cover.) The big brouhaha started when Bettencourt’s daughter, Francoise Meyer, freaked out over the little gift, and filed a suite against Banier, claiming he had taken advantage of Liliane, who Meyer says is gaga. Whether she is or isn’t seems irrelevant now, as Bettencourt knew Banier well. They were certainly intimate, the rumor is Banier had been her husband’s lover.
Since Bettencourt was widowed three years ago, she and Banier have been inseparable. According to most sources, Banier’s got a lot of moxie, which probably kept Bettencourt amused while she was grieving. Soon she bought Banier a house, a lot of valuable art, and gave him some cash and insurance policies, totaling about one billion euros. Seems a bit excessive since they weren’t related, but when you’re that rich, isn’t everything excessive? One can see how a homosexual aesthete who was never wealthy, yet spent his life around mega rich people, could become nasty, greedy, and relentless in his pursuit of life’s pleasures. Bettencourt’s generosity could have easily gone to his head. Of course, in his defense, people say not all the money went into his pocket, a lot of it was for the arts, and other causes. Whatever the “causes,” I doubt they were protecting tigers from extinction or saving neglected children.
Speaking of, at the heart of this imbroglio is Francoise Meyer, the concerned daughter. When she spoke to Le Figaro last week, Meyer said: “This is a tragic story of which my mother is the victim. It is my duty as her only daughter to protect her.” Most newspapers claim the mother and daughter were estranged. So at best, they have a complicated relationship. Meyer is in her 50s now, on the board of L’Oreal, and rich in her own right. Why bother going to court, then? Bettencourt hadn’t blown all the money on furs and frivolity. Furthermore, the billions are Bettencourt’s, and no one else’s. Therefore, I doubt this is really just a story about a concerned daughter. We all know family fights over money are never really about money. Perhaps Meyer was angry at her mother. She could very well have been forsaken as a child. What else would cause a daughter to open up such a huge can of worms in public? It’s not very smart. Now there are accusations of tax evasion.
Then the ubiquitous butler got involved, because he was, of course, concerned for Bettencourt’s well-being. Or perhaps hoping to blackmail someone in order to get a palace of his own. He recorded Bettencourt’s telephone conversations. One of his tapes reveals Bettencourt had become frustrated with Banier’s demands, alluding to the possibility that Banier was indeed manipulating her. On another call, Bettencourt’s financial advisor was allegedly heard revealing that his client had 80 million hidden in Switzerland, and that he had met with a presidential aide. There was a subsequent reference to a French minister, whose wife worked for a company that managed some of Bettencourt’s money. And just like that, a full blown political scandale! But this isn’t the really juicy part of the story, political corruption is old hat, even if there is something there
Enter: Francois Marie Banier, the recipient of Bettencourt’s munificence. Takimag’s Bunky Mortimer sent me an illustrative email when the story broke on Banier. He has given me permission to share it with you here:
Let me tell you a thing or two about Francois Marie Banier. I first met him during the late 60s in Paris, when my old friend Jimmy Douglas, an American expatriate in the City of Light, brought him to my flat in the Rue du Bac. Banier was a poseur to end all poses. He muttered something about my butler being a stupid dwarf because the poor man dripped some water on his outrageously flared trousers. The “Tout Paris” used to go bananas over Banier’s looks, but I always thought he had the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. He preened like Dorian Gray, pursing his lips and smoldering against his Gitane cigarette smoke, a gay Bogie straight out of Casablanca fame. Actually, he had the crabbed malice of a lesbian witch. He was also memorably rude, but never to me as he knew I would have applied instant sedation with a right cross to his sculptured jaw. He was always on the make, and he once tried his lizard-like charm on my aunt, Nonie Phipps, but got nowhere. Behind his back many of my friends like Jimmy Douglas and Kim D’estainville referred to Banier as a painted, perfumed gigolo, who concentrated on old rich ladies. He knew how to bring them in, rudeness being one of his ploys. I can see him actually telling La Bettencourt to buy back the island she gave him while gaga and for 500 million dollars to boot. Banier was and continues to be a hustling gigolo, a talentless spiv whose good looks were embraced by a lot of very rich people with too much money and too few brains. He was and is a semi-trained polecat that feasts on the half-dead bodies of old rich women and men. The quicker he ends up in the clink the better!
Wow! Well, perhaps Banier is capable of such outlandish villainy. But even if he is, I still have trouble finding much empathy for these folks. They live in a world of luxury most people will never know. None of them are really suffering, except perhaps, Meyer, the troubled daughter. She should spend her time more productively, perhaps in a shrink’s office, like all poor little rich girls. The one who really deserves the blame is Bettencourt, even if she’s gaga now. Whatever the truth may be, her problems are of her own making. She should have known what sort of character she was up against, she and Banier had been friends for over twenty years.
The Freedom Riders did black Americans a great service by calling Kennedy on his bullshit and actually testing how abolished Jim Crow laws were in the South. They got their asses kicked, brandished firearms and fearlessly laughed in the president’s face when he begged them to stop. They were barricaded into hospitals by angry racists only to be busted out by cool black dudes in Studebakers. Then they partied all night and did it again. There are few pictures from this time because cameras were included in the beatings but that one shot of Jim Zwerg covered in blood with his tie clip still on makes James Dean look like Johnny Weir. Even if you didn’t agree with their politics you have to admire them for proving how ineffective Northern Laws are when imposed on the South. How can you get more badass than that? You can’t. Unfortunately, their badassness is exactly why their actions were such a huge disservice to white Americans. Namely, how can we even come close to that level of awesome?
I want to walk into a mob of angry racists and get my ass beat for freedom. It’s just not easy to find them. Believe me, I looked everywhere. Janeane Garofalo told us the Tea Partiers are a bunch of uneducated racists and I heard they yelled “nigger” at a bunch of black congressman. I’d like to walk into one of their rallies holding a black girl’s hand and ask them about it as sweat poured down their lily-white racist faces. Oh crap, I just saw Andrew Breitbart is offering a $10,000 reward for any evidence of the racial slur and Janeane Garafolo is a dropout.
It’s discouraging work trying to match the righteousness of the Freedom Riders. When the NAACP had a funeral for the N-Word, I was ready to pound the living crap out of anyone who dared resurrect it. Unfortunately, I live in Brooklyn and if I fought everyone who used that word I’d be punching blacks and Hispanics in the face ‘til I was blue in the face. Besides, all my favorite songs use that word like it’s going out of style. Listen to the beginning of “Tight Pants” or “Playstation” for example. Am I allowed to sing those in public? I recently learned it depends on who says the word, what context it’s in, and whether it ends in z, a, or er. I’m hunting for racists, not grammar lessons. Can we get some real deal racism up in this bizzatch?
I got really excited when I heard the racist megacorporation Hallmark had put out a greeting card that said “Watch out for black whores!” I started to rally the troops for Freedom Riders II. Maybe we could all get in a bus and burn their headquarters to the ground. When the NAACP went on TV to talk about it however, I couldn’t help but notice the card said, “Watch out black holes” and was a reference to an ambitious astronomer. What about that word though? “Black” hole. Isn’t that kind of racist? Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price thought so and demanded an apology when it was used in an analogy about lost documents. Turns out it’s called black because it’s a region of space “from which nothing, including light, can escape.”
There has to be a sea of racists out there. It’s the most go-to criticism since fat, stupid and ugly, and I see a sea of those every day. I checked in with some civil rights activists but still couldn’t get anything worth taking a bus to go fight. James Kirkpatrick, the Commissioner of the Department of Human Rights over in Minnesota is more focused on sexism these days and had recently outlawed Ladies Nights for discriminating against men (a not uncommon practice).
College campuses seem like a better place to “locate the hate” as Jesse Jackson would say. This is where they indoctrinate the youth and there’s always swastikas and gay bashings and stuff like that, isn’t there? Well, the Jewish student at GWU who reported seeing swastikas on her door, put them there herself. Same with the “Die Fag” written on the wall near the lesbian’s locker at Tamalpais High School. The noose at UC San Diego was an impromptu lasso innocently left on a desk and even the noose that was the supposed impetus for the Jena 6 incident has turned out to be a stupid cowboy joke.
Middle Americans, megacorporations, young Americans, and Outer Spacists weren’t giving me enough to change my white face into a black and blue one but what about the goddamned pigs? They had a huge part in the Freedom Rider beatings and there’s no reason to assume they’ve changed their racist ways. I was thrilled to discover Abner Louima is a genuine example of unmitigated police brutality—only, I can’t find proof it had anything to do with race. I looked into that other guy, Amadou Diallo but it turns out he refused to put his hands up and eventually reached for a black wallet police mistook for a gun. Even Rodney King was an unstoppable lunatic who was hysterically resisting arrest after a high-speed car chase through a residential neighborhood. Then I learn, Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty after all. I still think cops are racist though. You can just tell.
If this Easter Egg hunt was going to pull up some truly racist, white eggs, I was going to have to go deeper into the core of America. Like, what about their laws? The Arizona immigration Law is a good place to start. Apparently it says you can throw anyone who’s not white into a paddy wagon and send them back to Mexico. I’m going to go down there with a bunch of Hispanics in sombreros and get arrested on purpose. Maybe they’ll call us spics and beat us and we can get a picture in the paper smiling with blood all over our teeth. How cool would that be? Hang on. Just read the law. It says the person has to be committing a crime and the officer, “May not solely consider race, color, or national origin.” SHIT! I just got so frustrated, I punched a hole through my wall; which actually felt pretty good because it’s white.
I know there are racists out there. I can feel it. The New Black Panthers claim there are white devils on every corner so I delved into the FBI’s hate crime statistics to get some cold, hard facts. Unfortunately, these polls are about as impossible to understand as Ghostface Killah lyrics. The FBI reports more hate crimes against visible minorities but then they tell you it’s just because they now have more agencies reporting cases. The PDFs are a slog to get through and although there are more anti-black crimes than anti-white crimes, nobody seems to factor in that blacks are about 14% of the population whereas whites are more like 75%. Doesn’t that mean there’s more anti-white hate crime per capita? Plus, “one out of every 45 white on black attacks is classified as a hate crime, while the corresponding fraction for black on white attacks is an astounding 1 out of 1,254.” And that’s not including black on Hispanic crime and vice versa etc. etc., Oy vey! The numbers are complex but it’s starting to look like everyone is equally racist and even then it’s not that much, or something? All I know is, I got on a silver Greyhound looking for a showdown and ended up on a yellow bus headed to math class.
Just when I was about to give up hope, one of my many liberal pals schooled my white ass on what’s really going down. Dig this: First, the anti-white crimes are a sham and as Jill Tregor, executive director of Intergroup Clearinghouse, says, “They are an abuse of what the hate crime laws were intended to cover.” In other words, fuggedaboud em. They don’t count. Second, there is an institutional racism that isn’t visible to the naked eye. It lies deep within the system and it goes even deeper than the laws which is why we can’t see it. Look around you. There are racists in this room. You might be racist and not even know it. Shit, even babies are racist! Racism is walking next to you everywhere you go. See those footprints on the beach behind you? That’s racism. See the part where there’s just one set of prints? That’s when racism was carrying you. Once I understood that racism is as ubiquitous as Jesus, I realized why I was having so much trouble finding it. Racism is just as prevalent as it was when the Freedom Riders rode through the South and the scariest part is how deep into our thoughts it has crept. The only way we can fight it effectively is to let the proper authorities into our minds and root around in there until they find it. Who’s first?
UPDATE: The NAACP jumps on board the “Tea Party is Racist” train yet, bizarrely, their president praises Tea Partiers as a group worth emulating. Jealous much?
Noam Chomsky’s new book, Hopes and Prospects
Chomsky’s conservatism, with its explicit distrust of politicians and corporate managers, may explain why his most strident critics are to be found among liberals. Two of Britain’s liberal newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, attack him more regularly than the right-wing press does. Chomsky may have earned their ire by pointing out from time to time mistakes made in their news pages, particularly in war zones. Observer reviewer Rafael Behr summarized Hopes and Prospects and concluded that Chomsky should recognize “the irony that he owes his considerable success to the system he despises.” Let us suppose for a moment that Behr is right, that Chomsky’s considerable success is an achievement of the system rather than of Chomsky’s genius and insights into the nature of language that have transformed modern philosophy and psychology as much as they have linguistic studies. Would he have said that Andrei Sakharov “owes his considerable success to the system he despises”? Sakharov became a victim of the Soviet system after his discoveries in physics, but the importance of Sakharov as political critic (rather than as physicist) was that he criticized a system that he believed was harmful to world peace, human dignity and the society of which he was a beneficiary. The same can, and should, be said of Chomsky.
The liberal intelligentsia cannot bear Chomsky because, in this book as in many earlier publications and speeches, he calls their bluff. He compares contemporary liberal “humanitarian military intervention” with the rhetorical justification Adolf Hitler used when his duty to protect the German minority obliged him to invade Czechoslovakia. Conquerors invariably claim the moral high ground, like schoolyard bullies who beat the smaller kids “for their own good.” Columbus claimed the high moral purpose of bringing Christianity—that is, salvation—to the Caribs, Arawaks, and other peoples of the Caribbean who were soon exterminated. The French brought civilization to Algeria in 1830, coincidentally taking—as the British would soon do in other parts of Africa—the most fertile land for white colonists. The American Army burned villages in Vietnam to save them. Many in the public, thanks to effective propaganda, believe the justifications and avert their eyes from the harm done in their name.
That all conquerors have something in common (the means and will to conquer others) somehow goes against faith in America’s exceptional status in world history. Chomsky writes that “the doctrine appears to be close to a historical universal, including the worst monsters: Hitler, Stalin, the conquistadors—it is hard to find an exception. Aggression and terror are almost invariably portrayed as self-defense and dedication to inspiring visions.” When the US does what other powers have done, it usually does so in the same way and with the same excuses that ought to be examined more closely. After all, the US is a democracy in which the public can—through protests, boycotts and occasionally votes—influence its nation’s policies. Public demands rather than direction from Washington and Wall Street ended legal racial segregation, allowed homosexuals to live without fear of imprisonment, brought women into the workplace on a more equal footing and brought the troops home from Vietnam. That activism was soon called “an excess of democracy” by the liberals in Jimmy Carter’s administration and was slowly strangled in the years that followed—thanks, in no small part, to the destruction of free associations of working people in unions and their steady loss of income.
Chomsky—as well as pointing out that Ronald Reagan increased the power of the state in many areas and often intervened in the economy on behalf of certain interests—goes after the pantheon of liberalism. His deconstruction of Woodrow Wilson’s idealism will warm the hearts of old conservatives who would like a recount of the 1916 presidential election to give victory to Charles Evans Hughes, a decent statesman and jurist who was more likely to have kept the country out of the First World War. And his take on Barack Hussein Obama is more coherent and scathing than anything the Fox hounds have come up with to date. He compares Obama’s “grass roots army,” which he can call upon to sell his policies but not to influence them, unfavorably with real grass roots armies in Bolivia and Brazil who sent people into power to represent them and not the plutocracy that has run their countries since independence. In fact, it is in grass roots movements in Latin America that Chomsky finds the hopes and prospects of his title most evident. They bear a stronger resemblance to the revolutionaries who threw kingship out of North America and wrote the first Bill of Rights than does the resident in the White House.
Robert Rubin, as Bill Clinton’s economic czar, forced through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act, “which had separated commercial banks from financial institutions that incur high risks.” When Rubin left the US Treasury, he sailed into the chairmanship of Citigroup and proceeded to gamble with publicly guaranteed deposits without being prosecuted under the Ethics in Government Act. Chomsky notes wryly, “Not surprisingly, Citigroup was a leading beneficiary of the Bush-Paulson bailout.” Not surprisingly, he and his partner in crime, Larry Summers, are advising Barack Obama on illnesses they helped to inflict on the body politic. Irony or business as usual? It is not hard to see why the worshippers of the Wilsonian idealism that led to the invasion of Haiti in 1915 and Obama’s mishandling of the economy and pursuance of wars he did not have to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan do not like Chomsky. He is the bane of the liberal aristocracy, and they punish him whenever they can.
Chomsky, though, can take it. I am not sure he can take this though: since the death of Senator Barry Goldwater, no one is more deserving than Noam Chomsky of the title Mr. Conservative. Death to empire, power to the people of the republic.
Plus, Olivia Munn makes you laugh (until you cry), Pitchfork launches a new music blog, and Australia celebrates winter
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, through October 17
This year, Hyde Park’s Serpentine Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary, and with that, a new pavilion designed by renowned French architect, Jean Nouvel, who has built the Copenhagen Concert Hall, the Ferrari Factory in Modena, Italy, 40 Mercer Street in New York, and the extension to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among hundreds of other buildings. The commission, for the Park Nights series, had a six month deadline, and is part of the Serpentine’s unique and ambitious architecture series, this is the tenth commission, and the architects first British project. Nouvel made use of lightweight materials and metal cantilevered structures. The building is red, likely inspire by iconic British images of telephone boxes and double-decker buses. The building is a series of geometric forms, large retractable awnings and a freestanding wall that climbs 12 meters above the lawn, sloping at a gravity defying angle. Nouvel has used fabric, glass, and polycarbonate to create a versatile system of interior and exterior spaces. Around the pavilion, red ping pong tables, chess, frisbees, and kites are available for the public throughout the summer. Tonight, July 12, Nouvel discusses his cutting-edge design at a free event in the new pavilion.
Gilbert & George: The Paintings, Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands, through November 21
Those mad London artists Gilbert and George are at it again, but this time they are not exhibiting their best-known photos but their rarely seen paintings. The Paintings (With Us in the Nature) is a single work consisting of six large-scale triptychs produced in the winter of 1970-71. A recollection of the the previous summer, the triptychs are about seven meters wide, each one depicting the two artists in the “overwhelming presence of nature”. The venue, which is situated within 5,000 hectares of woodland within the Hoge Veluwe National Park, is seemingly appropriate given the subject matter of the work. The museum, referred to by staffers as the “museum in paradise”, designs much of its collection as a reflection of the landscape. The Kröller-Müller Museum is attempting to purchase the work from the artist, but as a condition of negotiation, the artists demanded an exhibition before any sale could be finalized.
Slake: Los Angeles
Former LA Weekly editors Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly are determined to change the landscape of print media with the launch of their new literary magazine, Slake. Its debut edition, Still Life, is perfect-bound and a hefty 232 pages—designed to make a statement: that print is beautiful and long-form journalism is viable. It’s meant as a collectible, not disposable; destined for the bedside table instead of the recycling bin; and so seductive in its looks and content that readers will find it irresistible. Some of the nation’s finest writers, photographers, and artists have contributed to Slake, including Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold, House of Leaves novelist Mark Z. Danielewski, and author of the drugs-and-Alf memoir Permanent Midnight Jerry Stahl. Still Life also features photos from Sandow Birk. Find a copy in a local LA bookstore or order it online, and look for readings, gallery shows and other events with SLAKE writers and artists throughout the summer.
Mad Men: Season 4, premiers June 25
Plot details about the shows highly-anticipated fourth season have been kept mum (despite the fact that reviewers have received screeners, creator Matthew Weiner has a tight gag on the who, what, when, where), but this much we do know: it will be good, and it will not be disappointing. In a sense, this season premiere is much like a second series premiere—so much of the game has changed. The old business hierarchy is gone, a fresh new company is in place, and—wait for it—Don is single. But while much of the external experiences for the characters have changed, the characters themselves haven’t, and watching our beloved and nuanced mad men (and women) cope with said changes should be nothing short of delightful, if the show’s history—never mind all its accolades—has anything to do with it.
Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, New Museum, New York, through September 19
Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander’s latest exhibit spotlights her distinct contribution to Brazilian conceptualism and reveals her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary practice—which merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, collaborative actions, and participatory events. Three of the installations involve direct visitor participation, the most compelling of which is “First Love.” Neuenschwander hired a forensic artist to sit with visitors and draw portraits as they describe old boyfriends and girlfriends from memory; the portraits are then hung on the walls of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Also included are two immersive installations, Rain Rains, an environment of leaking buckets that are controlled from flooding by a Sisyphean recirculation tended to by museum staff in four-hour cycles; and The Conversation, pays homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s revolutionary 1974 film of the same name. Neuenschwander’s work is oddly charming. Don’t miss this chance to leave your own mark on it.
Baalbeck International Festival, Lebanon, through August 7
If you’ve ever been to the Roman temples of Baalbeck on the outskirts of Beirut, you know that they are among the most beautiful. Walking around the site one is struck by how magnificent the ruins must be lit up at night. The mystery of the stones, and the history of the country only add to the intrigue. Of course this is nothing new to chic Lebanese, who have been attending this now classic cultural event for some time. Whether one prefers classical music, opera, rock or jazz, there is a concert for almost anyone. This year, performers include: Mika, the Kevin Mahogany Quintet, Odean Pope’s All-Star Nonet, the Krakow Symphony Orchestra to celebrate Chopin’s bicentenary, Boris Eifman’s Ballet Theater of St Petersburg performing Anna Karenina, and Naseer Shamma with the Arab Oud Orchestra. Don’t miss this, but if you do, make plans for next year so you get to see these amazing ancient stones under the night sky.
Roads to Arabia, The Louvre, Paris, through September 27
Visiting Paris? Sick of European art and architecture? Why not dip into more than 6,000 years of Saudi Arabian history? The exhibition features over 300 artifacts including statues, stele, jewelry, manuscripts, textiles, glass, and bronzes. The show seeks to dispel the idea that Arabia is a closed country. Conceived as a series of waypoints along trade and pilgrimage routes between Africa, Asia, and Europe, the show focuses on the region’s commercial and cultural history between ancient times, Arabia from 5000 B.C. until the advent of Islam; Islamic Arabia, from the time of Muhammad to the 17th-century; and the foundation of the current Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Most interestingly, archaeology in the Arabian peninsula is relatively undiscovered, though excavations of sites like Taymâ and Hégra have produced evidence of civilization. We know that with the rise of Islam, trade routes became routes of pilgrimage. In this exhibition, two sites in particular are examined%
It was finally judgment day for Lindsay Lohan, and the former Mean Girl is going to jail. After an exhausting day in court earlier this week, Lili was found in violation of her probation for not attending alcohol education classes on time, and was sentenced by the really-not-having-it judge in a Los Angeles court. Two weeks from now, she’ll be headed off to jail for 90 days—and that news was enough to send her over the edge in court, and tears were shed. Everyone stopped for a minute and felt bad for her, but all that good will was wiped away when up-close photos showed a manicure that spelled out “F—- U.” Lindsaydenies the curse word had anything to do with court, but it wasn’t the kind of image you want to project when you’re pleading your case. Also, this just in: her lawyer has quit.
Mel Gibson also can’t wait for the week to be over. When he and Russian ex Oksana filed restraining orders against each other last week, it seemed that would be the worst of it, but the star was allegedly caught on tape in expletive-ridden tirades against the mother of his child and, in one, admits to hitting her. A mistress who claims to have had an affair with the actor has also surfaced and is reporting his ugly behavior towards her—she was apparently so frightened of him she went into hiding for a month. Is a public flogging in Mel’s future?
In happier news, Kate Hudson has moved along quite nicely after her split from Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez. New boyfriend Matt Bellamy from the rock band Muse flew to Greece for a vacation with the actress, her son, and family.
Hey, Conan O’Brien, what’s the smell of victory taste like? Despite being unceremoniously ousted from The Tonight Show, his incarnation of the late-night staple was nominated for four Emmy nominations over Jay Leno’s version. In his signature irreverent tone, Conan celebrated via Twitter, saying “Congrats to my staff on 4 Emmy nominations. This bodes well for the future of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”
Melissa Etheridge and longtime girlfriend-turned-ex Tammy Lynn Michaels are locked in an ugly custody battle for their 3-year-old twins. The couple announced their separation months ago, but Tammy Lynn took offense when her famous partner filed for dissolution of their partnership, taking to her blog (where else) to complain, and saying she was “blindsided.”
Want to hear from a happier couple? Angelina Jolie is speaking out about her ideal life with Brad, saying “We’re very homebound. We’re very much Mommy and Daddy in our pajamas.” They don’t look like any mom and dad we’ve ever seen before, but that’s another story.
After her friend was caught with marijuana at a World Cup soccer game, Paris Hilton quickly distanced herself from the drama and apparently wasn’t at all involved in the drugs. Her friend was ordered to leave South Africa, while Paris continued to stay and enjoy the sport—and its shirtless stars.
In royal news, Queen Elizabeth waltzed into New York City this week, visiting the site of the World Trade Center and addressing the United Nations—and inexplicably visiting a BlackBerry factory, where she scored a new BlackBerry Bold and tried on 3D glasses.
Fresh off the news of his engagement to former swimmer Charlene Wittstock, Prince Albert II of Monaco attended an open-air concert with his future wife. ZZ Top and Iggy Pop performed. No word yet if they were auditioning for the wedding as well.
I’m a big fan of black hate groups, at least from a theatrical perspective. And when it comes to hateful theatrics, the New Black Panther Party are no slouches. These cats are so extreme, even the Southern Poverty Law Center won’t give them a free pass merely because they’re black.
Employing a blurry mishmash of Islam, communism, and full-throttle cracker-bashing, the NBPP is not an officially sanctioned successor to the 1960s Black Panther group and has even been criticized by members of the old guard. Founded in the late 1980s with FREEDOM OR DEATH as their motto, the new group gained momentum in the 1990s after making Khalid Abdul Muhammad—a dark-chocolate chrome-dome who was reputedly ejected from the Nation of Islam for making statements that seemed intemperate even to Farrakhan’s minions—its national chairman. Mr. Muhammad has since passed on to that Great Street Corner Soapbox in the Sky, but the New Black Panthers continue to agitate in a manner that, to this cracker at least, seems far less heroic and much douchier than that of their 1960s forebears.
The neo-Panthers’ Philadelphia leader is a man who actually calls himself “Minister King Samir Shabazz,” although I doubt that’s what his mother called him. He sports dreadlocks and wears a Guevara-chic beret with paramilitary garb. He even has the word KING tattooed over one eyebrow and SAMIR over the other. (Strain as I might, it’s difficult to take a self-appointed political figure seriously when his name’s tattooed over his eyebrows.)
Mr. Shabazz is not shy about sharing his feelings regarding the melanin-impaired descendants of European cavepersons: “I’m about the total destruction of white people…I hate white people! All of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him…You gonna have to kill some crackers! You gonna have to kill some of they [sic] babies! Let us get our act together!”
On November 4, 2008—the day American voters elected their first sorta-black president—Shabazz and fellow New Black Panther Jerry Jackson were filmed standing in front of a polling station in an overwhelmingly black Philadelphia neighborhood. Both were clad in military gear, but Shabazz, repeatedly referred to in court documents as “the shorter man,” was also toting what appeared to be a nightstick. A hand-held video of the pair standing menacingly outside the polling station was uploaded online and viewed by millions.
On that day, the pair o’ Panthers had also reportedly told Republican poll watcher Chris Hill that “white power don’t rule here” and had dubbed black Republican poll watcher Larry Counts as a “race traitor.” Others reported hearing the term “white devils.” A TV news report filmed at the scene shows an unidentified Caucasian man who claims the pair harassed him: “[After I went inside the polling station] they told us not to come outside, because a black man is going to win this election no matter what. So as I came back outside to see, the nightstick turns around and he says, ‘You know, we’re tired of white supremacy’ and starts tappin’ the nightstick in his hand, at which point I said, ‘OK, we’re not going to get into a fistfight here,’ and I called the police. The police came, and they removed the guy with the nightstick.”
Bartle Bull, a former Village Voice publisher and a civil-rights lawyer with a long history of lobbying for voters’ rights, was also at the scene that day in Philadelphia. According to Bull’s sworn affidavit filed in US District Court in April of 2009, “I watched the two uniformed men confront voters, and attempt to intimidate voters. They were positioned in a location that forced every voter to pass in close proximity to them. The weapon was openly displayed and brandished in plain sight of voters….I heard the shorter man make a statement directed toward white poll observers that ‘you are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.’...It would qualify as the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960’s.”
If one were wearing blinders, Shabazz and Jackson’s alleged actions would seem a clear violation of 1965’s Voting Rights Act, which makes it a crime to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote.” Justice Department lawyers under Bush originally filed suit against Shabazz, Jackson, and two other New Black Panthers in January 2009. When no New Black Panthers bothered to attend court hearings to respond to the charges, a summary judgment was filed against them.
Then, before a final judgment was delivered against the defendants, the Justice Department suddenly filed a motion to dismiss the case. Three of the defendants walked away unscathed, while Shabazz’s punishment amounted to a simple directive that he not carry any weapons into polling places until 2012—coincidentally, the next time Obama’s name will be on the ballot, at which point it will presumably be safe for Mr. Shabazz to tote weapons into polling stations.
In May of this year, J. Christian Adams, a pudgy and towheaded DOJ Voting Rights Section trial attorney, resigned from his post only two weeks after receiving a promotion. Adams claimed that his superiors had ordered the Black Panther case’s dismissal. Adams also stated that when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights began investigating the dismissal and subpoenaed him and other lawyers in his department, they were all ordered to ignore the subpoenas and be quiet about the case. Adams apparently resigned so that he could speak freely on the matter.
Adams says that one of the lawyers ordering the dismissal was Loretta King, a black Obama appointee. He claims that when King visited his department with Attorney General Eric “Nation of Cowards” Holder in 2009, she burped out the following verbal geyser in front of a large group: “I can’t tell you how excited I am every day when I come to work and I see pictures of two black men who are running the country.”
In a recent op-ed piece for the Washington Times, Adams wrote: “Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment….Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims….Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases….Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it ‘payback time.’ Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.”
During an appearance before the US Commission on Civil Rights this past Tuesday, Adams claimed that the Obama administration has, “over and over and over again,” displayed open “hostility” toward prosecuting members of what Eric Holder has designated as “protected groups” for crimes against members of what are perceived as historical oppressor groups. Adams claims that his higher-ups stressed the importance of focusing exclusively on more “traditional” victims.
Naturally, the left side of the Web has sought to besmirch Adams by dubbing him a “longtime conservative activist” and a “conservative blogger.” Media Matters, which is obsessing over the case to a degree that suggests anxiety on their part, is freely tossing out terms such as “hype” and “unsubstantiated.” The Justice Department has accused Adams of making “willful misstatements” and of distorting facts to make “baseless allegations.” Naturally, they didn’t elaborate regarding what misstatements were made, which facts were distorted, and why his allegations were baseless.
As always, most of the left/right rhetorical to-and-fro involves one blind partisan side accusing the other blind partisan side of blind partisanship. One side’s clear agenda is to accuse the other side of having a clear agenda. One side gets blamed for using political tactics and political strategies to accuse the other side of politicizing matters.
The New Black Panther website addresses the case on their home page, characterizing Shabazz’s baton-wielding as “an honest error” and a “mishap.” Despite the firsthand accounts chronicled above, they claim “There is no evidence, not one statement from any person at the polling station that day to prove that any voter, regardless to race creed or color was intimidated from voting or offended in any way.” They blame the ongoing controversy on “Republican, right wing, confederate, Tea Party racists” who comprise “nothing more than a modern day racist lynch mob seeking to hang what you think are your modern slaves.” However, I have encountered no recorded evidence of them disputing that they used racial slurs on the day in question, and they have not replied to my emailed request for an interview.
I gorge on others’ hypocrisy and logical contradictions like a glutton, so it’s amusing to hear a group whose Philly leader has openly called for the slaughter of cracker babies to complain, without a sliver of irony, about “racists.” I’m not all that bothered by what’s known as “racism” no matter who’s expressing it, but double standards annoy the living shit out of me.
The left side of our national chow hall has for decades insisted that nonwhites cannot possibly be racist, since they don’t hold the power to oppress others. Focusing on historical crimes while turning a blind eye to current ones, they argue that nonwhites are protected by an invisible force field of generational oppression that protects them from all accusations of racist behavior. But when you work under a black president, a black Attorney General, and a black boss who orders you to dismiss a legal case you’ve carefully prepared, it grows more difficult to argue that blackness equals powerlessness.
The idea that historic crimes justify contemporary crimes is based on the logical fallacy known as “two wrongs make a right.” The chief danger with perpetuating this supposedly corrective double standard is that, unlike our troops in Afghanistan, there is no proposed withdrawal date for this policy. If what J. Christian Adams is saying is true, the double standard may actually be gaining strength.
As someone who has dabbled in crime and spent a lot of time with criminals, let me tell you what the real crime is here. It doesn’t involve a pair of sub-literate jerkoff schmucks with a nightstick and a lunchbox full of anti-white racial slurs. Americans are too easily intimidated these days as it is, and if that duo of bozos had tried to harass me, I’d have countered their aggression with a cheery fistful of obscure racial slurs that may well have disarmed them and earned their grudging respect.
No, the real crime here was committed by an administration that promised to usher in a post-racial era but instead has merely switched the Good Guy and Bad Guy cardboard cutout figures to foster a racial climate thicker with tension and resentment than at any time I can remember in my life.
There’s a pervasive idea, however unproved and implausible, that “we” can somehow ever manage to get “past” race. I doubt that this is true, but I’m also aware of the monstrous difference between the notion of innate, blank-slate human equality—which is a long shot—and the idea of treating humans equally. Although life is unfair and “justice” is ultimately unattainable, I believe it would help matters if the Powers That Be at least PRETENDED to apply their standards equally.
As things stand, justice obviously isn’t blind, so maybe it’s time we poked her eyes out.
Well, well, well, now it appears that even the Soviet—strike that!—Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is afflicted by the general mediocrity of the moment. There was never any reason to doubt that the Soviet grasp of the third-rate and meretricious should not survive into the Russian Renaissance. A ZiL, the cumbersome Soviet limousine, is still a ZiL—and no one ever buys a Russian computer, if there is one, or a Russian hamburger. Yet frankly, I had fears that, at least in espionage, the SVR, as the Russians call the foreign arm of their new KGB, had maintained standards for intelligence gathering and all the unseemly things that go with it. It was reputedly among the world’s best, right up there with the Israelis, the British and—on a good day—the CIA and the FBI. But now it appears, with the arrests of 11 “agents of influence,” that it is as amateurish as everything else associated with most governments worldwide, at least at the present moment. And to think, Putin is a former KGB officer and a pretty good one. It must be galling.
In London last week, where I was, the affair was played up much more splashily than it was here in the United States. The British journalists have a better sense for a news story, which is why British journalism is not in such dire straits as it is here. They played the femme fatale angle perfectly and the playboys, and they even discovered a grim business connection with some shadowy Brit and the tyrant Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. When I arrived back in the United States, July Fourth night, I had been fully advised on the matter by the London newspapers. It was astonishing how American journalists missed the mediocrity. Some of the Russian spies had gone native or almost.
Oh, sure, there were the true believers. The lefty journalist who wrote for El Diario/La Prensa whose cover was blown back on Jan. 14, 2000, and who has been implicating others inadvertently for years. Also her idiot husband, the prof, who, in self-incriminating testimony after his arrest, said he loved his son but “would not violate” his “loyalty to the ‘Service,’” even for his son. But then there were the “Murphys,” “Donald Heathfield” and his lovely wife, “Tracey Foley.” All the above names are either stolen or made up. Why did they have to take Irish-sounding names? Why not Goldfarb or Finkelstein? Is it the old Soviet residual of anti-Semitism? Yet they are perfectly serviceable names—especially if you are living in New York.
The “Murphys” certainly seemed to be going native, and I would worry about them if I were Putin. Remember all you have heard about “conspicuous consumption” and the Yanks? In 2009, the Murphys thought they should own their home in Montclair, N.J., and they gave their handler an earful when he objected. Earlier, an agent had lamented to Mr. Murphy, “I’m so happy I’m not your handler.” He distributed monies to these “agents of influence” and is now on the lam in Cyprus, or perhaps he has fled the island. As for the Murphys, they are now in custody. They were trained in a top-flight Russian “espionage school,” reports the Los Angeles Times. So maybe they will hold their tongues, but I am not so sure. That house in Montclair would be a lovely safe house for a couple of renamed Irish who might sing.
Of course, the spy who really attracted the Brits’ eyes and has got to have had the same effect here is the curvaceous 28-year-old, red-haired, doe-eyed beauty Anna Chapman, nee Kushchenko, whose father was from the old KGB and presumably knows a thing or two. Rather oddly, he directed her to the authorities. That was it. Before her arrest, she had cut an active figure on both sides of the Atlantic. She married a British citizen. Picked up with playboys and frequented Annabel’s and Tramp in Britain. After five years, she left for America, but not before working with the shady Ken Sharpe and her father for a company, Southern Union, with connections to Mugabe. Over here, she lived a similarly fast life of nightclubs, rich men, and connections that do not add up. Supposedly, she had 50 employees working for her company. Possibly it helped finance the spy ring.
What we do know is that after years of gathering information from these lunkheads, the FBI moved in pretty spectacularly. Something triggered the rapid arrests. Maybe we shall know in the months ahead, maybe not. What is obvious is that the FBI has had a good couple of weeks—and MI5, too. Their reputations glow. It is the KGB/SVR I worry about. This could be a PR disaster.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is visiting us here in Manhattan this week. As I write this, she has just got through delivering an address to the U.N. General Assembly, 16 of whose member nations have her as their head of state. The speech wasn’t anything very substantive, but then she’s a constitutional monarch. Non-substantive speechifying is what she does. She does it superbly well. She’s now on her way to lower Manhattan to open a memorial park for the 67 British citizens murdered in the 9/11 attacks. (Weren’t any citizens of her other 15 nations murdered too? But perhaps that’s been allowed for. I’m just reading from the news wires here.)
I can’t claim to be much of a monarchist. Since getting U.S. citizenship in 2002, I’ve left the old country pretty thoroughly behind. I didn’t even do the maneuvers to maintain dual citizenship, though several expat Brits explained them to me, and there are some minor conveniences to be got. Dual citizenship just seems wrong to me. How can you be loyal to more than one country? I’ve only been back to England twice since my naturalization: once business, once pleasure. The place has changed too much, mostly in ways I find disagreeable.
And yet . . . you never let go altogether of the place where you were born and raised. However much—however deliberately and thankfully and unrepentingly—you change your life, there’s still a craving for some continuity, even if only at a symbolic level.
Queen Elizabeth’s coronation (June 2, 1953) was the first large public event I was fully aware of. We had a street party. I was given a book filled with figures from the coronation procession that you could cut out and assemble as a table-top procession all your own. All the schoolkids in the country got coronation mugs, of course—my sister still has hers.
Thus are tuned the mystic chords of memory. If you’re human at all, you’ll hear them till you die, however faint, however unwillingly.
I only saw Her Majesty once in person. That was when she came to visit my home town in the summer of 1964. She drove through the center of town to the Guildhall in an open car, waving at the crowds of townspeople who’d come out to see her.
I actually hadn’t, and wouldn’t have, being a bit of a lefty republican at that time. This was my college summer vacation, though. I’d taken a job as a construction laborer, helping to put up a building right there in the center of town. (The building was still there when this picture was taken. It’s the square gray block in the middle. Ugly? Sure. Don’t blame me. I didn’t design the wretched thing, I just helped build it.)
We had a couple of floors up and scaffolding going higher, so all of us—common laborers, chippies (i.e. carpenters), brickies (bricklayers), steel fixers (handling the steel reinforcing rods for the concrete), masons (putting polished stone facing on the finished floors—I got to know one of the older masons, who told me he’d spent his entire apprenticeship on government work: cutting headstones for the WW1 military cemeteries), and the rest—all of us had a grandstand view of Her Majesty’s motorcade as it tooled past.
The common laborers were mostly Irish: big, rough, potato-fed lads from the back country, some of them Gaelic-speakers. They’d come over to England for construction work in the spring, then head back to the home village in Ireland to hibernate through the winter, when bad weather made construction jobs scarce. I always found them genial and good fun to work with, though you didn’t want to go for drinks with them after hours unless you enjoyed fist-fights and massive hangovers.
They were Irish, though, and this was the Queen, so there was a good deal of black humor flying around. “Hey Michael, where d’you put that violin case of mine?”—that sort of thing. It was light-hearted, as it could afford to be, the IRA being in a quiescent phase in the early 1960s. The Irish lads actually seemed quite keen to get a good view. So there we all were, up on the high scaffolding, watching the Queen ride past on her way to lunch with the Mayor at the Guildhall. It was exciting stuff for a little out-of-the-way English country town.
I would have denied that at the time, of course. If it hadn’t been for the simple curiosity of my Irish colleagues, in fact, I’d probably have stayed at my labors through the entire event somewhere out of sight, as a protest against the whole silly, stuffy, expensive, old-fashioned business of monarchy—“gold fillings in a mouth full of decay,” as Malcolm Muggeridge had referred to the royals a few years earlier. There was an election coming up and I was strong for Labour. Harold Wilson and his fellow socialists would soon sweep away all those relics of a regrettable, class-ridden, imperialist past! We’d soon cut the Windsors down to size—have them riding round London on bicycles, like the Scandinavian monarchs, and turn the Royal Yacht into a vacation home for retired coal miners.
Well, most of us have daft ideas at nineteen. With age comes wisdom. Nations, like individuals, need some continuity; and continuity-wise, a line that goes back (if you’ll tolerate some juggling by the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers) a millennium and a half to Cerdic of Wessex, is not to be sniffed at. Certainly it is not to be demoted overnight, not by a nation whose social resentments are constrained by layers of custom, sentimentality, irony, and forbearance.
Like the rest of us, Elizabeth was born into a world where certain things were expected of her, as a matter of duty. She went ahead and did those things doggedly, never setting a foot wrong, for half a century. How many of us can say the same of our own obligations?
Is the mess in order? May I propose the toast? Thank you.
Proposer: Mr. Vice, the Queen!
Vice: Gentlemen, the Queen!
All, standing: The Queen!
Mykonos. Lying northward of the sacred island of Delos, Mykonos is as profane as it gets. Largely barren, it used to be a brothel during ancient times, or so Herodotus tells us, and it continues its erotic, carnal ways as the mecca of gay and lesbian love. Sir Elton and lady John were just here, received like royalty by the gay community which is comprised mostly of foreigners. The locals are very liberal in their acceptance of “foreign customs,” as they call them, “as long as nobody comes near my children.”
The place was known only to a few of us back in the late fifties for its white-washed picturesque houses, 365 churches, and windmills. Then Cole Porter visited on a private boat, word got out about the clearest water in the whole wide Med, and then came the end: Jackie Kennedy arrived while her hubby was in the White House and went shopping. The next thing we knew a boutique selling sandals, fake Pucci blouses, and all sorts of trinkets popped up on the ground floor of every house around the port, soon to be followed by thousands of gays who discovered the greatest beaches to run around nude in this side of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Well, you can guess the rest. Gays and straights have coexisted peacefully ever since, while real estate sharks descended on the island and began to build houses for rich Athenians bored looking at the Parthenon year round. Mind you, although the place exploded with cheap tourism and cheaper nightclubs and restaurants, the local authorities kept to the island style, and no matter how rich and bullying the tycoon, the houses, some of them worth in the tens of millions, all have to adhere to the white-washed picturesque design Mykonians made their own long ago.
I used to write regularly about Mykonos as I would sail over from Athens every chance I got. I used to bring the Greek karate team over on my boat as the boys needed rest and recreation after our exertions on the mainland, and although I say so myself, we never lost a fight in a club throughout the 70s and 80s. And for some strange reason we always got the girl, or so we told each other. Then I got old, karate changed into a sport—people flicking at each other and getting points as a result—Mykonos got much too popular, so I started spending my summers in Gstaad looking at grazing cows. It was fun while it lasted but I quickly got bored. Cows are sweet but do not contribute much when engaged in a quasi-intellectual conversation. Back to basics, I told myself.
This is the second visit to Mykonos on Bushido, which I built in 2004. The first time I fell over in the dark onto two men engaged in you-know-what I swore at them, but they turned out to be two Russians sleeping al-fresco who did not take kindly to my insults. This time I’m over for my friend George Embirikos’s 50th birthday party which was held over three days—nights rather. Many of the 150 some guests came over on their boats, which the dreaded Meltemi—a wind that has been known to rip the horns off cuckolds—has forced into Ornos Bay, turning that particular cove into a tax collector’s wet dream. While government choppers have been hovering above photographing expensive houses with large swimming pools whose owners have declared tiny incomes, some wise guy inspector decided to shoot two birds with one cartridge and took pictures of yachts to boot. It got so bad that some of us decided our host must be a government informant. Still, I had a grand time, beating my record of 18 vodkas with ice and cranberry juice for the evening, and not a hint of a hangover the next day because of the Rubirosa rule of “Todo Liquido.” Which means do not mix your drinks and do not ingest any food, not even one hors d’oeuvres.
Joking aside, the birthplace of selective democracy is in a real mess. The rot began with Andreas Papandreou back in 1981 when he decided—like Gordon Brown—to bribe every Greek with state subsidies so he can remain in power forever. After twenty years of socialism, came a big blob of a man, Costa Karamanlis posing as a conservative, and his scandals were even worse than those of Ali Babandreou. After five years of cheating the electorate kicked him out and voted in the son of Ali Baba. George Papandreou means well but the Greeks are Greeks. The tax system has not been overhauled, the economy has not been streamlined, and growth has not been stimulated. Although the system is rotten to the core, cleaning out the Augean Stables by imprisoning ministers and politicians who have made great fortunes through kickbacks and out and out bribery is not in the cards. Papandreou hasn’t got the guts to do it. The great Greek thinker Taki says do it and the system will change. The people want it, Taki wants it, but those at the top haven’t got the balls to even begin.
Worse, the loyal opposition, headed by a bum called Samaras, is playing politics and saying we don’t need foreign help. In other words, let the country go to hell as long as we get our hands on government limos. Samaras is the lowest type of worm—I once beat him in the Greek tennis nationals 6-0, 6-0, and he asked the ref to put up 6-4, 6-4, on the board, and like a fool I agreed—who has betrayed everyone who has ever helped him. Poor old Hellas.
For those who can yet recall the backyard blast furnaces of Mao’s China in the 1950s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to re-instill peasant values in the 1970s, the news was jarring.
In 2011, said the Financial Times, China will surpass the United States as first manufacturing power, a title America has held since surpassing Great Britain around 1890.
Each year, China passes a new milestone.
Last year, China surpassed Germany as the greatest exporting nation. This year, China surpasses Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. This year, China became the first auto manufacturer on earth.
For a decade, China has been running history’s largest trade surpluses with the United States and has amassed a hoard of $2.3 trillion in foreign currency. She now holds the mortgage on America.
How has China vaulted to the forefront in manufacturing, trade and technology? Export-driven economic nationalism.
Beijing cut the value of its currency in half in 1994, doubling the price of imports, slashing the price of exports and making Chinese labor the best bargain in Asia. Foreign firms were invited to relocate their plants in China and told this was the price of access to the Chinese market. Beijing began looting these firms of technology, as she sent her sons to study in America. Industrial espionage and intellectual property theft became Chinese specialties.
And how has America fared in the new century?
One in every three manufacturing jobs we had in 2000, nearly 6 million, vanished. Some 50,000 U.S. factories shut down. We have run trade deficits totaling $5 trillion since NAFTA passed. The real wages of working Americans have been stagnant for a decade.
While China has resumed her 12 percent growth rate, the United States, with 25 million unemployed or underemployed, appears headed for a double-dip recession.
Yet, even as the end of America’s tenure as the world’s first manufacturing power was being announced, The Wall Street Journal admonished us to keep our eyes on the prize: a new world order where it does not matter who produces what or where.
“The pursuit of some ideal global ‘balance’ in trade and capital flows is an illusion. ... World leaders would do better to worry less about (trade) imbalances and more about whether their own nations are pursuing policies that contribute to global prosperity.”
There you have it—the conflict in visions between us.
For decades, America’s leaders have followed the Wall Street Journal ideology. We put a mythical world economy before our own economy. We put “global prosperity” before national interest. We forced our workers to compete, in their own country, against the products of foreign laborers earning a tenth of their pay. And we let in tens of millions of semi-skilled and unskilled immigrants, legal and illegal, to take the jobs of our countrymen.
And the Chinese? They put China first, second and third.
And who won the decade? And who is winning the future?
Inside the July 1 Washington Post is a small story about how the World Trade Organization finally ruled that European nations have been unfairly subsidizing Airbus—for 40 years.
While welcome, what good will it do now for scores of thousands of U.S. workers who built commercial jets for Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, which Airbus took down, or Boeing, which was outsourcing jobs even before Airbus dethroned it as the world’s No. 1 aircraft manufacturer?
Why did some U.S. president not tell the Europeans when they started this: Either stop subsidizing Airbus to kill our U.S. aircraft companies—or start defending yourselves against the Russians.
The day the FT reported that China was sweeping past us to become No. 1 in manufacturing, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the closing of the Whirlpool refrigerator plant in Evansville, Ind., and the loss of 1,100 jobs. The plant is moving to Mexico.
The Times spoke with Natalie Ford, a worker, whose husband and son also worked at Whirlpool, as had her dad, “This is all about corporate greed,” Mrs. Ford said, “It’s devastating to our family and to everyone in the plant. I wonder where we’ll be two years from now. There aren’t any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?”
“My mom and dad told me that when they were young, there were jobs everywhere. They said we had Whirlpool, Bristol-Myers, Mead Johnson, Windsor Plastics, Guardian Automotive, Zenith. Now if you want to find a job, there’s nothing around.”
“Free trade! Free trade!” said Henry Clay in the tariff debate of 1833. “The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child in its nurse’s arms for the moon or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It has never existed. It will never exist.”
It will only place us, said Clay, “under the commercial dominion of Great Britain.” Today, it is the dominion of China.
Believe it or not, it’s worth comparing a current box office smash—The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, a Mormon teen vampire romance—to a dud—Knight and Day, an expensive Cameron Diaz-Tom Cruise thriller parody.
Knight and Day is expertly made and consistently entertaining, while the Twilight episode is talky and amateurish. Yet, the public’s preference makes sense, because Eclipse’s bizarre ambitions and common passions makes it more memorable than Knight and Day‘s facile technique.
Both movies revolve around a young woman’s struggle to choose the man who will protect her in a savage world.
Eclipse is the adaptation of the third of Mormon housewife Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, the biggest bestsellers since J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Bella (pretty Kristen Stewart from last year’s
Adventureland) is a human schoolgirl whose (follow me closely here) especially tasty-smelling blood drives vampires wild with bloodlust. Her lively scent has won the heart of the undead Edward (tween heartthrob Robert Pattinson), a gentlemanly vampire who strives manfully to keep his lusts under control. When a less civilized vampire army from Seattle comes hunting for her, however, the icy Edward realizes that he must ask for help in protecting Bella from his warm-blooded rival for her heart, Jacob, a weightlifting American Indian werewolf.
I realize that this previous paragraph will likely strike you either as old news (if you are a 9 to 17-year-old girl) or as gibberish (if you aren’t). And I must admit to being baffled for long stretches of Eclipse.
A weaker novelist than Rowling, Meyer less understands the adolescent girl’s mind than shares it. Her Bella epitomizes teen self-obsession, the ambition to have every boy fight over you and every girl hate you for it.
Unlike Harry Potter’s world, which is so crisply-imagined that it’s a little limiting as metaphor, Meyer’s hazy imagination created a vampire cosmos where everything can symbolize anything. Sex, death, growing up, marriage, religion, race, family, whatever interests you, it will fit into Twilight’s cloudy cosmos.
For years, everybody thought Tom Cruise was the world’s greatest guy. Then, he nepotistically replaced his pit bull publicist Pat Kingsley with his sister. Soon, the hypomanic Scientologist was universally despised.
Nonetheless, no other star’s films are as consistently quick-witted. Of his last ten films, only Lions and Lambs was bad, while Minority Report and Mission Impossible: III were excellent. Cruise’s track record at picking scripts is so good that you might wonder if he’s indeed getting good career advice down at the Scientology Celebrity Centre International, at least until you ponder the screenplay choices of fellow cultist John Travolta.
It’s hard to market a movie in which Tom Cruise turns out to be the object rather than the subject. In Knight and Day, an expertly made and consistently entertaining soufflé of an action comedy, Diaz’s ditsy blonde has to decide whether Cruise’s character, an intensely competent and unflappably upbeat Eagle Scout turned master spy, is a terrorist maniac (like his ex-colleagues at CIA claim) or the man of her dreams, or both.
If only, during their preposterously lethal globe-spanning chase, he wouldn’t keep asking her to help him out in the countless fights. Contrary to all the butt-kicking babe movies, such as, say, Charlie’s Angels (which starred Diaz as one of the three martial arts mistresses), in Knight and Day it turns out that 110-pound blondes don’t make good unstoppable killing machines. Diaz mostly winds up shrieking comically.
Granted, no genre is more ripe for parody. Today’s butt-kicking babe films are particularly odd because current audiences also prefer girlier leading ladies than back in the Golden Age of such formidable femme fatales as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn.
Still, the public apparently doesn’t like to see its taste in movies spoofed. The tepid reaction to Knight and Day is reminiscent of the complaints about Kate Capshaw’s performance in Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom as a nightclub singer whose only contribution to the roaring action is to squeal. I can’t recall how many nerdy guys complained to me that Capshaw was a poor feminist role model compared to Karen Allen, who beat up bad guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark. All the fanboys hated Capshaw (although her director, Steven Spielberg, married her).
Female moviegoers, in contrast, don’t seem to care as much as males do about empowered heroines. In Eclipse’s funniest scene, Bella is livid after beefcake Jacob tries to kiss her, even though Jacob knows perfectly well that she loves Edward. So, like an Angelina Jolie heroine, Bella hauls back and socks Jacob on his square jaw. Jacob, whose neck is wider than his head, doesn’t even flinch, but Bella sprains her own wrist, leaving her whimpering in pain.
But that’s okay because everybody is soon fighting over Bella again, which she likes more than fighting herself.
There have been many signs of the apocalypse as of late. We have a war in the birthplace of the Lord as was foretold in The Omen III, Global Warming is causing sheep to shrink as mentioned in Ecclesiastes, and the oil spill in the Gulf is either the “behemoth of blackness” from Revelation 1:1 or the “sea of death” from Enoch, i.1, 2; x.2ff. However, none of these divine messages hammer us over the head as thoroughly as the prevalence of swim shirts.
How did we get here? A movie poster for the summer blockbuster Grown Ups unapologetically shows five beer-drinking dads enjoying a water slide while covering their breasts. A father used to be the head of the household and 100% of his existence revolved around making sure his wife and kids had a roof over their heads. Today he’s one of the providers and he’d like to keep the ball rolling but if they lose the house, they lose the house. The market’s a bitch. Besides, he has other stuff to worry about. Like what if strangers notice his middle-aged body doesn’t look as taut as it did when he was 18? This used to be the stuff of anorexics. Now the guy, “Wait til your Father gets home” is based on is so ashamed of his imperfect body, he goes swimming with his clothes on.
Now, I’ve heard some experts like my father-in-law (who also practices this bizarre ritual despite his 62 years of age) claim it’s to protect against sunburn. He can stick that theory where the sun don’t shine because I went to many indoor water parks this winter and even though the sun don’t shine there, the number of men wearing boob burqas was damn near 50%. These guys feel their bellies and breasts are too hideous to impose on the rest of us. Where they got this idea, I have no fucking clue. Not one person on earth has ever walked up to a dad and said, “Can you please put a layer of cotton over your hideous frame? It’s making me gag.” Even without this provocation, dads are politely protecting us from their disgustingness and it’s contagious. Inspired by their dad’s insecurity, you now see sons follow suit; even when they have a life jacket on, there will still be a long sleeved t-shirt underneath. That’s two layers of textiles covering their tits. Eat your heart out Islam.
I’m not talking about the Soho House during gay pride week. I’m talking about Madison, the Poconos, and even the retired cops in upstate New York. That’s what really makes this trend disturbing, it’s ubiquity. I can take metrosexuality in the city because this is the same place bars charge $1,000 for bottle service and have toilets with stirrups for bathroom fornicators (I’m serious). New York City is supposed to be a bizarre place that ostracizes the rest of the country. That’s why not one of the 50 families in Texas polled by Nielsen watch 30 Rock.
American men aren’t supposed to worry about how cool they look. Nobody cares. Even if a dad were to tattoo his entire body with a skull-faced jellyfish eating Chiang-Kai Shek and Fidel Castro, nobody would give him a second look (believe me, I tried it). This is because women don’t see dads as sexual beings. American Beauty did well in the box office but only a complete fool believed a young girl like Mena Suvari would be turned on by a fat, old man like Kevin Spacey. The good news for us Spaceys is we can do whatever we want and let our guts hang over our shorts with reckless abandon. I honestly don’t get how men cannot get this simple fact. Even young girls get it. That’s right, as their male counterparts fret over imperfect pecs, they bounce past with gut chub confidently hanging over their bikinis like a jolly muffin top. While half the population appears to have been abducted by gayliens and brainwashed into thinking they are meant to be gorgeous, the female half is so over it, they laugh after a fart instead of saying excuse me.
This is because Political Correctness has convinced us gender is a social construct and there’s no difference between the sexes. Dads have taken this distorted view of feminism and become as sensitive about their bodies as women should be. Women, on the other hand, are so empowered by this lie, they flaunt their obesity with pride and any objection is old-fashioned sexism. As Nikki Blonsky says in her new show Huge on ABC Family, “Everyone wants us to hate our bodies. Well I refuse to.” If only she could convince the dads in Grown Ups to feel the same way.
It wasn’t always this way. When Adam West’s barrel-chested Batman came into our living rooms in the 60s, he looked like Archie Bunker on Häagen Dazs. That was considered sufficient for a superhero’s physique. Cut to the Batman of today and the actor is forced to wear a plastic muscle plate on his chest to simulate our high expectations because they are physically impossible to duplicate. Up until five years ago, men over 30 knew they were invisible at the pool and they liked it that way. Women like men with balls, not abs. They want husbands who can provide for their families and maybe have weird facial scars they don’t like to talk about. Women don’t look at married men on vacation and think, “There is no way I would eat whipped cream off his stomach.” It seems the only men confident enough to take their shirts off these days are the ones who shrink their genitalia with steroids and spend all day at the gym. These curious alpha beta males are rewarded with Village Voice cover stories for the annual Queer Issue. The only time you’re good enough to be happy with your body is when you’ve reached the level of gay pin-up. Huh? The swinging dicks of the War Generation must be shriveling in their graves.
As I made very clear in my documentary Are Women as Horny as Men? (NSFW) we are not the fairer sex. Can you imagine a woman daydreaming about a man’s bag the way we daydream about vaginas? It’s impossible. Somehow however, men have decided to wear their shame with pride and have no problem dwarfing their daughter’s insecurities. The only thing scarier than the state of male vanity today is the fact that a mainstream movie poster can proudly scream, “I hate my gross body!” and nobody bats an eye.
Plus, Helen Mirren gets her sex on and Louis C.K. stages a comeback
La Maison Jean Cocteau
La Maison Cocteau at Milly-la-Forêt is open to the public after five years and €4 million. The poet, dramatist, painter, and film-maker occupied the house, which is less than an hour from Paris, from 1947 until 1963. Cocteau worked on some of his most important projects there, including the films “Beauty and the Beast” and “Orpheus”. The artist is buried in the nearby Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples. Pierre Bergé, partner of the late fashion designer and art collector, Yves Saint Laurent spearheaded the renovation. The house itself is a work of art, ceramics, tapestries, paintings and furniture are on display. The main rooms of the residence have been restored, and other parts of the house have been reconfigured to make exhibition spaces. Visitors can see various sculptures and objects from Cocteau’s film sets in the renovated gardens. A new exhibition is planned for each coming year, on subjects including Cocteau’s relationships with Picasso, the Nouvelle Vague film-makers, and Christian Bérard, the artist, fashion illustrator and designer. An outdoor restaurant under a pergola in the orchard planted by Cocteau will be open to the public. Take a day trip from Paris while the weather’s good.
Love Ranch
Back when Helen Mirren was a twenty-something on the rise at the Royal Shakespeare Company one paper dubbed her “Straford’s very own sex queen.” Her notoriety as queen has long gone undisputed; with Love Ranch, nobody will question the sex either. Mirren plays Grace, the madam of a booming seventies Reno whorehouse who, recently diagnosed with cancer and frustrated with an epically sleazy husband (Joe Pesci), starts a sordid love affair with a beefy boxer 30 years her junior. Mirren’s husband, Taylor Hackford directed the film, based on Nevada’s real Mustang Ranch. Mirren refused to spend a night there—in the name of research, her husband said—but no matter. She exudes power and sexuality like never before: in one scene she stomps on the throat of a prostitute who’s misbehaved. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that her lover is played with abundant smolder by Spanish newcomer Sergio Peris-Mencheta.
Sea Change, The Wassaic Project Summer Festival
Professionals and amateurs alike are invited to participate in a group photography show. New York area photographers, as well as out of state participants are invited to submit work for inclusion in Sea Change, a group show curated by Feature Shoot’s Alison Zavos. As part of The Wassaic Project Summer Festival, which will be held in upstate New York between August 13th and 15th, Sea Change offers a creative way to examine man’s relationship to the natural world. In light of the latest, and greatest environmental disaster in the United States—the BP Oil spill—check out the details for submissions.
Louie
Louis C.K. is living proof that you need to have multiple failures before you can succeed. The Saturday Night Live and Chris Rock Show alum’s first auteur attempt, Lucky Louie, was universally panned when it debuted four years ago. Now Louie—which he writes, directs, and edits—may be the next Seinfeld, only a tad more brutal. Louis plays a stand-up comedian newly-divorced and helping to raise two young daughters; each episode intersperses bits of Louis C.K. stand-up with vignettes from his life that illustrate how he might have come to those jokes. What makes the show truly stand out is not so much the funny (of which there is plenty), but the way the comedy is complemented by the true and painful misery that comes with being divorced, balding, and overweight at an age when each year is less fun than the one before. Somehow Louis C.K. makes the sad funny, and the funny cry.
Running of the Bulls, Pamplona, Spain, through July 14
In The Sun Also Rises, Papa Hemingway brought the encierro, or the running of the bulls festival, also known as the Festival San Fermin, to the world. Now, everybody knows about it, and many people hate it because they see it as animal cruelty, though most Spaniards don’t, and so this long-standing tradition continues in Pamplona, as well as in other Spanish cities, Portugal, and Mexico. Traditionally, six bulls are let loose to run through the city’s back streets. Apparently though, the original purpose of the event was to transport bulls from off-site corrals to the bullring for slaughter. Historically, young men would jump among them en route to show off their bravado. Some Spanish lore says the true origin began in North Eastern Spain during the early 14th century when men attempting to sell their cows at market would speed up the process by hurrying their cattle using tactics of fear and excitement. Whichever may be true, the Encierro of today is one of the main events of the Spanish summer. If you’ve got the guts for it, go battle it out with the bulls!
King Tut at the Denver Art Museum, through January 9, 2011
Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs explores 2,000 years of ancient Egyptian art and history, including temples, royal, and private tombs and the largest image of King Tut ever unearthed—a 10-foot statue of the pharaoh found at the remains of the funerary temple of two of his high officials. The DAM is dedicating 16,000 square feet of space in its Hamilton Building to the exhibition, which begins, appropriately, with a 90-second National Geographic documentary narrated by actor Harrison Ford. It marks King Tut’s first and last visit to the Rocky Mountains; most of the artifacts have never been to the United States before this particular tour. In addition to the historical items, the exhibit explores new scientific discoveries from a landmark Egyptian research and conservation project, including the first 3-D CT Scans of King Tut’s mummy. Not from Denver? Purchase a King Tut hotel package and make a weekend of it.
Vienna Music Film Festival
For centuries, Vienna has practically been synonymous with music. After all, the city was home to Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert, and Johann Strauss. The outstanding musical history continues to this day with various concerts and events throughout the year. Since 1991, July and August evenings in the square in front of Vienna’s City Hall have been turned into a grand open-air cinema for films featuring classical music: opera, ballet, and musicals. Vienna is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, if you like movies and classical music, don’t miss these hot summer nights. A movie and music along the streets of the Austrian capital will only be beat by the delicious food.
Telling Stories, Smithsonian American Art Museum, through January 2, 2011
This exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC is the first Rockwell show to highlight the relationship between his paintings and American film. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg independently formed significant collections of his work, but by no coincidence: like them, Rockwell was a masterful storyteller who could distill a narrative into a single frame. The exhibition showcases fifty-seven of his major paintings and drawings, and features new research into Rockwell, his work, and the connections between Rockwell and various movies. A 12-minute film, co-produced by the museum and filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau, is shown continuously throughout the galleries.
CDSea, Long Knoll, England, through September
Bruce Munro has installed his latest artwork in a field near Kilmington after collecting over 600,000 unwanted CDs from the public. Munro’s CDSea is the first of a number of self-funded installations using discarded or recycled materials. Over a weekend, 140 friends and colleagues, including Kevin McCloud and other celebrities from the design-art world, made the installation. Munro says it is an inland sea reflecting light from the sun and moon. His assistants created a footpath through the middle of the sea of compact discs in the shape of a wave. “I was very nervous about it” says Munro. “You never know how something will work out, but now I could not be happier. I’m so grateful to everyone who turned out to help. We had a magical weekend and CDSea looks amazing, like a giant painting on the grass.” From one side the CDs present a soft blue haze, but with the light ahead, they glisten like mirrors. The “play of light” transforms the artist’s mood, and perhaps the mood of those who visit the CDSea in the Wiltshire countryside.
Night Work
The Scissor Sisters’ latest album is their best yet, as in it makes their first two albums sound like throat-clearers for it. It’s well written, confidently performed, and focused. The non-stop dance album is twitchy, erotic, and mad; the group finally sounds like more than the sum of its sources, instead smartly referencing artists from Elton John to Paul McCartney interspersed with their own free-sex subject matter. Whether you love their in-your-face singles such as I Don’t Feel Like Dancing or are chilled by their tip of the cap to Pink Floyd with their cover of Comfortably Numb there is something here to please everyone.
My last week in London and it is just as well. One more would most likely kill me. The least frantic night was the one that Simon Phillips and Roger Moore threw in Harry’s Bar for Unicef, as worthy a charity as there is, following “Masterpiece” at the former Chelsea Barracks. I sat next to Britt Ekland, still sexy and still working, but my high moment was finally meeting Sir Roger’s youngest son, Christian. Many years back Christian had designs on some young blonde friend of mine, but I checkmated him by telling her she would end up in the pokey as he was 13 years old. (He was 18, and his now father-in-law, a most charming Syrian gent, has been reading the Spectator since the Sixties.)
Writing a weekly diary with metronomic regularity can, of course, bore the reader. In my 33 years of doing it in these here pages, I try to vary them. Two weeks of high jinks, one serious one, and one so-so. Mind you, we surely all agree that football is out as a subject. Italy and France have disgraced themselves, just as England has. The rest of the teams are not much better. I am referring to the phony writhing and elaborate pantomimes of agony practiced by every team except that of the United States and possibly Germany. How can these bums take themselves seriously when caught time and again by the instant replay, untouched by an opponent, pretending to be mortally wounded? Is there another sport where such blatant cheating is accepted? Don’t these thugs have any pride? I’d rather die than writhe in false agony in front of millions. Or in real agony, for that matter. The Italians started it, the South Americans perfected it, the Africans ditto, and now it’s as much part of football as running and kicking. But as I said, no more football, just football as a metaphor.
A wonderful physiotherapist here in London told me an amazing story. He treats many of the stars, including some Frenchmen, and three of the latter told him that playing for France was for the birds. In other words, they didn’t feel French and never would. There was no professional pride involved, no desire, in fact the contrary. Many of them are Islamic converts, and most of them refuse to mouth the French national anthem. The French governing elite has pulled the wool over the peoples’ eyes yet again, pretending that the secular state has integrated every immigrant, starting with the ninety percent black football team. Well, they have not and never will.
Thiery Henry demands an audience with Sarkozy, and the dwarf grants it immediately. Has the dwarf no pride? Can any of you see Charles De Gaulle agreeing to meet with a footballer? (“Mais qui est Monsieur Henri? Un depute? Un general?”) The general opinion is that France is confused about her identity and uncomfortable with the growing numbers and the attitude of its poorer, darker immigrants and their children. Well, who filled the country up with them, I didn’t. And if the extremely rich players like Patrice Evra refuse to sing La Marseillaise why should extreme poor unemployed youth do? One French philosopher, with the almost absurd name of Alain Finkielkraut, called the French team a gang of hooligans that knows only the morals of the mafia.
One thing is clear. As Jean Le Pen said, the national team was picked for its color, “a flag of anti-racism instead of sport.” Trying to weaken the Far Right, Sarkozy and his gang turned French sport into an anti-racism theme park. The dwarf’s policies are as shallow as he is, but the electorate has a very short memory. Unrestricted immigration is the worse plague that can be inflicted on a country, and Europe’s elite have not only encouraged it, but demanded it. Complaining of lack of patriotism now is a bad joke.
But just take a look how countries south of the North American border treat immigration. Mexico, for example. An illegal immigrant in Mexico can land in prison for years. Up north, in Uncle Sam country, it is a misdemeanor, and illegal immigrants regularly protest under Mexican flags. In Mexico, immigrants are not allowed in who could upset the equilibrium of the national demographics. In the United States immigrants regularly boo the national anthem and root for some banana republic playing Uncle Sam’s teams. In most south American countries the booers would be lynched. The state of Arizona passed a law that suspicion of illegality as far as immigrants are concerned is enough to warrant a search by the fuzz. The law was passed in order to try and cope with an army of half a million illegal aliens living in Arizona. By the outcry against it, one would think new Jim Crow laws were passed segregating Mexicans from native whites. But Americans always had to have identity cards, all students had to flash them to get a drink, and we always had to produce a driver’s license the moment a cop requested it, in or outside a car. And we also carried draft cards. What’s wrong with asking a possible illegal to produce his documents? The poor little Greek boy had to do it, why not they?
Europe has been overrun by immigrants, the equilibrium of our national identity has been changed, yet all we hear and read about is how some rock star is organizing a concert against racism. Starting next week I shall be reporting to you from the birthplace of deficit spending, a place where everyone retires early in life, and I shall also be reporting how the rich Greeks are coping with the terrible controls imposed on us by the beastly Germans. Deutschland Uber Alles.
“The car has already hit the tree and the bumper is already in the process of buckling inward, so there is no time to turn the wheel or fasten seat belts. It is too late to do anything but scream.”
Thus writes Vox Day in his recent book The Return of the Great Depression
I’m betting that they are. That’s a novice bet, as I am not a trained economist. I base it on a complete lack of seriousness among our political classes. It is obvious that our governments, at all levels, are spending far too much; yet there is little evidence of anyone being willing to do anything about it.
Item: New York state legislature, after years of chronic financial crisis caused by overspending, has just approved another budget bloated with spending increases. This was in the teeth of opposition from Governor Paterson, who has sworn to veto every single slice of pork in the budget. (There seem to be around 6,900 of them.) The Governor is a Democrat, and Democrats dominate the legislature.
Item: The U.S. Department of Labor has a new program called We Can Help. In a promotional video on the department’s website our current Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, assures us that “every worker in America has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.” Her department will hire 250 new field investigators to make sure that standards are enforced.
Item: Pat Quinn, the Governor of Illinois, is boasting of having confronted his state’s problem of unfunded pension liabilities. (Which is also, of course, the problem of many other states.) The retirement age for state employees has been raised to 67, and the salary used to compute pensions has been capped at $106,800 a year, indexed for inflation. However, says the New York Times, “Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired.” So for the tens of thousands of workers currently on Illinois payrolls, it’s “Party on, dudes!”
Item: The big news event of the past few days has been the dismissal of General McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan, with General Petraeus taking over. Petraeus is said to be a “long war” man, who will press for the administration to drop its plans for a winding-down of the war next year. I have read at least thirty articles about this, written by commentators of the deepest brow and highest respectability. Not one of them mentioned the cost of the war, currently around $100 billion per annum. All assume blithely that we can afford any war we care to fight, even a war as pointless as the one General Petraeus has just acquired.
Item: The youngest of the Americans who fought in Korea are now in their mid-seventies, yet we still have 28,500 military personnel there at a cost to us (South Korea chips in) north of a billion a year. Nobody talks about that, either. What’s a billion any more, in the age of the trillion?
Item: Vox Day’s not an outlier. Nor, any longer, are Peter Schiff nor even Marc Faber. Here’s Paul Krugman in the June 27 New York Times: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression . . . The cost—to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs—will . . . be immense.”
Item: California’s state-employee pension funds are short half a trillion dollars. State legislators don’t care, any more than New York’s do: “Mr. Schwarzenegger pointed out that he proposed pension initiatives a year ago, but lawmakers never followed through.”
Item: With unemployment nudging ten percent, we’re accepting the now-normal million-plus a year legal immigrants for permanent settlement. We are also taking in the usual 65,000 “regular cap” H-1B visas for “specialty occupations.” An example of an H-1B visa holder would be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, sponsored by Elizabeth Arden to do “a low-level accounting job.” You may not mention this. To speak in public about illegal immigration is just barely borderline respectable; if you try to start a discussion about legal immigration, people just stare blankly, as if you had lapsed into Tibetan. What is he, crazy?
And on, and on, and on. There’s a 40-foot tsunami in plain sight on the horizon, and we’re playing beach volleyball. Can Petraeus turn Afghanistan around? How unpopular is the healthcare bill? Will the feds sue the state of Arizona? (What’s that distant rumbling sound?) Is Turkey a friend or an enemy? Should Rahm Emanuel go? Is Elena Kagan gay?
A few days ago I wrote a column critical of the FDA, which is trying to stifle personal-genomics startups on the grounds that (a) big biotech firms, fearful of competition, are pressing them to, (b) the political Left harbors a strong suspicion that the less we know about the human genome, the better for their ideological coherence, and (c) like the scorpion in Aesop, they can’t help being what they are—an enterprise-hostile governmental bureaucracy.
That column got me one of the most depressing email-bags ever. This is now a simply terrible country in which to start an imaginative new enterprise. Several readers reminded me of the quote (which I can’t find on the internet, but seems to be well-known) by one of the founders of Home Depot, that such a business could not get off the ground today. The iron triangle of regulation, taxation, and litigation is killing off American business, fast.
From just one of those emails, sent by a very successful entrepreneur now living abroad: “Capitalism is dead in the US . . . The US was not destroyed by the Russians, the Chinese or even the militant Islamists. They did it to themselves . . . The $104 trillion debt is beyond any possible means of repayment. The only way out will be to monetize the debt by hyperinflation . . . I’m now watching the final days from 8,000 miles away . . . In November 2008, half of the US electorate put a loaded ballot in their mouth and pulled the trigger . . .”
I favor aerodynamic analogies over Vox Day’s merely automotive ones. So: Heads between knees, arms over heads, hold that position. Pray if you’re inclined to. Brace for impact!
Robert Byrd, after living nearly as long as Methuselah and having served in the US Senate since shortly after Brutus stabbed Caesar, has died. Throughout his unpardonably lengthy stint as a public servant, he represented the rollingly rural hills of West Virginia, America’s third-whitest state.
Upon his death, Byrd was the only living member of Congress known to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. But despite that, and despite his white-knuckled opposition to Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, and his characterization of MLK as a “trouble-maker,” and his impenitent use of the “N-word” (i.e., “nigger”) on TV as recently as 2001—his public legacy remains only slightly tarnished rather than the character-murder he’d have faced if, say, he’d been a Republican. Since he apologized, and since he was a Democrat, he’s been forgiven.
After all, Byrd claimed to have been affiliated with the Klan for only a year. Then again, it was enough time for him to have ascended to the roles of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops, both of which sound frighteningly authoritative to me, who has never been so much as invited to a Klan meeting. At least three years after Byrd purportedly severed ties with the dastardly Hate Group, he wrote a letter to a Grand Wizard in which he stated, “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.” Byrd also didn’t seem all too fond of darkies when, in opposing integration of the US Armed Forces, he wrote, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
A full two decades after leaving the Klan, Byrd led the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, foaming and frothing and fulminating for over 14 hours until Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen—a Republican and one of the law’s authors—invoked cloture and passed the bill through Byrd’s intolerantly knobby knees. By the by, a much higher quotient of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than did Democrats. Same thing happened during the next year’s Voting Rights Act.
I’ve often heard the terms “Republican” and “Klansman” used as if they were synonymous. But who actually birthed the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, the Red Shirts, and the countless other white-supremacist organizations who terrorized, torched, and lynched blacks during and after Reconstruction?
Though hearing this news might hit you like a knee to the groin, these mobs were all organized and supported by the Democrats—at a time, mind you, when nearly all black voters were Republicans and the Party of Lincoln was electing black legislators in, um, spades.
Who wrote the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws? Democrats. Who fought against the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments? Democrats. Who consistently opposed anti-lynching legislation? Democrats. Who endorsed Anglo-Saxon destiny and white racial purity? Democrats. Who came up with the poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and wholesale disfranchisement of the poor? Democrats, And which party did the Solid White South vote for starting from Reconstruction all the way up to the 1960s? Democrats, Democrats, Democrats.
Of course, you never hear about any of that. The way history is spun these days, Richard Nixon cynically concocted racial politics with his “Southern Strategy” sometime around 1970. Truth is, the Democrats had been rolling with their own “Southern Strategy” for a full century prior to Nixon’s presidency. But unlike Nixon, their strategy involved beatings and lynchings and voter fraud.
Who was that dude who opposed those integrated lunch counters in South Carolina? Why, it was Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings. Who stood in front of an Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”? That was Alabama Governor George Wallace—also a Democrat. Who was that fella who wielded an axe handle at Negroes and permanently closed his Atlanta restaurant rather than serve them? That would be Lester Maddox, a Democrat who eventually became Georgia’s governor. And who used his own state police to block the integration of a Little Rock high school all the way back in ’57? We all know the answer to that one— Democratic Arkansas Governor Orval “Born With a Racist-Sounding Name” Faubus.
“But that was then and this is now,” you say. Yes, yes, I get it—times have changed. These days, the Democrats are all about Ghetto Luv. But for a huge chunk of their history, they were the Klan’s Best Friend. And through it all, they’ve been so fixated on race, it’s as if they’ve impaled themselves with it.
I give props to the Democrats for successfully selling the Big Lie that they always have been, and will always remain, the post-racial party. By casting Republicans—a group founded in 1854 primarily to end slavery—as The Racist Party, the Democrats appear to have pulled off one of the most impressive cases of large-scale guilt-projection in political history. Really, it took a jumbo-sized set of donkey balls to accomplish what they’ve done.
“If you have nothing else, you have your principles,” Lady Thatcher told me when things were pretty tough at The American Spectator in the late 1990s. Sharks were circling the ship, and there was blood in the water; I was getting anxious. She was serene, having just flown back from Beijing, but she was adamant. “You have your principles.” They endure, and they fortify you when things are dire.
Doubtless, Conrad Black has had his principles, too, and they are not much different from mine, though he is Canadian. For that matter, if you are reading this, they are not much different from yours: the sanctity of the individual, individual liberty, limited government, the rule of law. Now, because he has resisted being put away in a dark place for 6 1/2 years, the rule of law is more secure. On June 24, all nine Supreme Court justices sided with him. The “honest services” statute of a 1988 law that has been used ever since to prosecute white-collar crime is too vague and unconstitutional. The court has remanded Black’s conviction back to a lower court for reconsideration. I hope it is just a matter of time before his long ordeal is over.
He has lost his company, which provided an alternative to the mainstream media around the English-speaking world. He lost his fortune and many friends. To the friends, I would say au revoir. They were not much anyway, and besides he has Seth Lipsky, Ira Stoll, Roger Hertog and thousands of others who have proved their mettle by sticking with him. And most emphatically, he has his principles.
Through the years he has fought for his freedom and the 27 months he has spent in prison, I never have seen him waver in his confidence in eventual vindication. Nor have I seen him lose faith in the American rule of law or the Constitution. He got a bad break, but he recognized that in the American system of justice, he still had a chance. Nine justices have spoken. He has his chance. Now let us hope that the lower court does the decent thing and lets him go. He has had one of the most brilliant constitutional lawyers of his generation, Miguel Estrada, who himself might have been on the Supreme Court had it not been for the partisan poisons out there. Estrada will be hustling to get him out on bail while he awaits reconsideration.
I had the opportunity—it would be a stretch to call it a pleasure—to visit him in prison at Coleman, Fla.‘s, low-security prison. I was not the only one. Hertog visited him regularly, sometimes under very unpleasant circumstances. And the excellent Lipsky put in an appearance. Lipsky was like me: “What the hell am I doing here?” But it was the least we could do. We were paying our respects to a great newspaperman, and he was full of fight.
Prison is no place to be. If people talked more about it, not so many people would be trifling with such places today. Conrad did not belong there, but that was beside the point. He wanted to talk about the things we always talked about in the past, but first he directed me from the sun court. I thought I could at least get some sun. He directed me from the heat and saved my hide. He talked about elections, great people and great issues from the present and the past. He speculated on the future and talked about economics and the sorry state of American industrial output. He never dwelt on his own condition. That was the great war of the lawyers.
Through the last few years, he had time on his hands, and seeing an opportunity, I asked him to write for The American Spectator. He is not only a gifted publisher but also a very energetic student of history—and a noted biographer of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. He did a long essay on George W. Bush, FDR, and the consequences of Bush’s re-election. Later he wrote on Sean Wilentz’s book The Rise of American Democracy
Now he sits in Coleman, Fla., awaiting a lower court’s orders. He was tried on 13 counts, and he beat nine of them. He was convicted of three counts of fraud and one of obstruction of justice; he had agreed to his former company’s request that he empty his office. That was construed by our government as obstruction. The hope here is that he will be cleared on all counts.
An anxious nation awaits. Yes, it’s Labour leadership contest time—in which all the thoroughly untarnished candidates from this highly responsible party vie to inherit the glorious mantle let fall by that great statesman and patriot, “Cincinnatus” Gordon Brown.
There are four ex-ministers in the lists. Of these valued veterans, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband is favorite amongst the turf accountant fraternity. Like us all, the bookies clearly cannot wait to see him become “a great unifying force on all shades of centre left opinion in this country”—so obviously what the country needs after 13 years of centre left government.
The BBC tells us that David’s “intellectual ability is widely admired” (although not by whom). As Foreign Secretary, he presided over such triumphs as Iraq and Afghanistan and the devastating chiding of Russia over South Ossetia, after which the crushed Russian foreign minister asked him, “Who are you to f***ing lecture me?”
David has other qualities. According to the Daily Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon, writing last April, he has a “charming boyishness that appeals to one’s maternal side…he always appears so handsome…when I watched him on Question Time…it was a bit like porn.” That fine judge of men Hilary Clinton is equally smitten, saying in 2009 that she found our hero “vibrant, vital, attractive, smart.” There are two Facebook groups called “David Miliband is HOT,” one with 91 and one with 252 connoisseurs of male attractiveness.
Operating against these innumerable pluses, however, are undoubted minuses—a reputation for prevarication and poor presentation, being disliked by the left, being liked by Peter Mandelson, and worst of all what the Independent of June 10 described as “a little rabbity tuft of hair going up in front”.
As part of his unifying mission, David will need to start with his own family, because sibling Ed is also standing for the coveted post. David maintains that “brotherly love will survive,” but progressive prognosticators are concerned about a “Cain and Abel struggle” between “the Milkiband Kids.” Again according to the ever-insightful Independent, Ed is “Cuter than David…Gonk to his brother’s Geek.” Against these obvious merits must be placed his authorship of the 2010 Labour manifesto, and being liked by Neil Kinnock.
Next is another Ed, Balls (insert punctuation where appropriate) who, quoth the Independent, “passionately wants to win”. Sadly, Ed would appear to be almost the only person who wants him to win. He will be damaged by his reputation for bullying and what Alistair Campbell called his “awful” strategies and his “drivel” at meetings.
Next is Andy Burnham, who is, says the BBC, “affable…[but] his youthful appearance and lack of wide experience” will count against him. His chief asset is that he is the least unpopular candidate—but this may be because no one knows who he is.
He is the last of the “male, pale and stale” contenders (to quote the Guardian of June 9). But mercifully there is a female, sun-kissed, fresh alternative, in the generous shape of Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black woman MP and a voluble commentator. She has been especially opposed to selective schooling—for other people. She attended Harrow grammar school, then Cambridge. She later sent her son to a £10,000 per annum private school, which she admitted was “intellectually incoherent” But then, as she explained, non-West Indians “wouldn’t understand”. This ultimate outsider has also been a civil liberties campaigner and TV reporter—despite being what the Independent termed “a bit bonkers on the box”. One can only imagine what heights she might have attained had she not been a black woman!
Her candidacy has energized the proletarian commentariat, with the Indie’s Simon Carr calling her on June 11 “The gatecrasher who can save the party,” while the ever-reliable Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is half in love with the “strong, dark mahogany face” of the “uppity” Abbott who will, she hopes, “lead the resistance” to the despicable Tories.
It is now up to Labour supporters to make the historic choice, to be announced in September. The rest of us can only wait, and hope they select the leader they so richly deserve.
Is the grindingly low scoring in the World Cup soccer tournament a bug or—as I’m finally starting to suspect—a feature? Could it be that the World Cup’s global popularity is not so much despite all the nil-nil draws as because of the grimness of the scores?
The three-match mini-season that opened the 2010 World Cup set a new record for futility with the 32 teams scoring only 101 goals in 96 tries, or just 1.05 per team per game.
The American team, despite seemingly not noticing that its games had started until about a half hour had gone by, was, relatively speaking, an offensive juggernaut, scoring four times in its three group stage games. The only squad the USA managed to beat, Algeria, didn’t score at all in 2010. Portugal, led by the world’s most celebrated striker, Christiano Ronaldo, tied Argentina for most goals with seven, but all were notched against North Korean famine victims. Portugal’s other two encounters each sputtered out 0-0.
Six of the 48 games ended 0-0, thirteen 1-0, six 1-1, and six 2-0. In contrast, there was only a single 3-2 game, the final score that naïve American viewers would typically pick as the ideal balance of entertainment and rigor.
Why was scoring down in 2010?
Perhaps the victory of the unheralded Italian squad in 2006 reminded coaches of the success Italy has enjoyed (six Final Fours out of the last eleven World Cups) despite a low birthrate.
Much of the pleasure of the World Cup comes from seeing national stereotypes validated (methodical Germans, fun-loving Brazilians, etcetera), but the Italians have been disconcertingly devoted to winning ugly. Rather than playing like Benvenuto Cellini-style supremos showing off individual brilliance while plunging into collective anarchy, Italian teams have traditionally emulated a contrary regional archetype: the cunning, miserly peasant family. (This year, with even more teams playing like Mediterranean farmers stubbornly conniving Jean de Florette out of his irrigation water, the Italians went home early.)
Although the 2010 World Cup established a new mark for ineffectuality, it’s not as if 1.05 goals per game is anomalous. I’ve been following World Cups since 1970, and they’ve been like this my entire lifetime. The last time World Cup teams averaged over 1.5 goals per game was in 1958.
Scoring trends have diverged in the cousin sports of soccer and American football. In the American cool weather game, scores have gradually risen as competence increased. In the 1970 NFL season, for instance, teams scored 3.5 times per game: 2.2 touchdowns and 1.3 field goals. (I’ll ignore point-after-touchdown conversions as vestigial.) That was 2.4 times the 1970 World Cup scoring rate of 1.48 goals per team per match.
By the most recent year, NFL teams were up to 4.1 scores per game (2.6 touchdowns and 1.5 field goals), while World Cup teams were down to 1.05. Hence, the NFL now sees almost four times as many scores as the World Cup.
Yet, both enterprises have flourished extravagantly over the last four decades. In a world that smugly congratulates itself on its purported increasing diversity, tastes in spectator sports have been homogenizing: football in America and soccer elsewhere.
It seems likely that the two kinds of football, in their different but both triumphant evolutions, are giving the people what they want. Hard as it can be for Americans to believe, people like soccer’s offensive ineptitude.
The appeal of high-scoring American football—with its action, expertise, and comebacks against the clock—is as obvious as the appeal of American summer movies.
In contrast, low-scoring soccer fulfills other human desires: such as, to not lose. Americans find it derisible that of the first 48 World Cup games, 14 ended without a victor. (As General Patton noted, “Americans love a winner.”) But that means that 65 percent of the time, fans avoided the national humiliation of defeat.
Bad offense also keeps hope alive throughout the match. If, say, England takes a 1-0 lead in the first four minutes, you can always hope their goalie will muff an easy one. Moreover, the narrowness of the margin gives you more excuse to complain that the referee cheated you.
The lack of proficiency also makes each of the few goals seem more epic, more worthy of being carved on the player’s tombstone: “Scored goal against Honduras in 2010 World Cup.”
Finally, low-scoring games are easy for fans to talk about because there isn’t much to recollect: a couple of goals and your favorite coulda woulda shoulda moment. In contrast, NFL games average eight scores, and, honestly, who can remember all that?
American games, such as baseball, tend to be described best statistically. Yet, humans don’t naturally like to think statistically. They like to think in narratives, and attribute outcomes (if they win) to the proper workings of moral justice, or (if they don’t) to sneaky villains, for which soccer is perfect.
Patrick Buchanan commented on Friday about the cashiering of General Stanley McChrystal. Buchanan focused upon the dissimilarities between Obama’s firing of McChrystal and President Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur in 1951. McChrystal is a special forces General, a technician dispatched to Kabul to implement a counter-insurgency strategy which Obama himself had ordered. They were on the same page. MacArthur and Truman were not.
McChrystal has been sacked in retaliation for a few off-the-cuff remarks in an overly long magazine article. McChrystal and his gung-ho staff disparaged certain members of Team Obama, including Obama himself. This indiscretion could have easily been overlooked in the interests of the presumed greater good of winning the Afghan war. Every top official in NATO and President Karzai advised against booting McChrystal. But evidently Obama was afraid of looking like a weeny if he only took Stan to the woodshed, and then sent him back on the field.
Stanley McChrystal is a spooky, special operations guy, a cog in the killing machine known—during the co-presidency of Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush—as GWOT, the global war on terror. He was transferred from Iraq to Afghanistan to replace the more traditional four-star General, David McKiernan, whom Gates had abruptly dismissed in May 2009.
McKiernan was in charge of the ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At that time he was the superior officer of both future war heros, David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal. McKiernan did nothing wrong in Afghanistan, but he made the mistake of observing that Afghanistan was far more complex than anything he had encountered in Iraq and that it might take fourteen years to pacify the country. Obama wanted to be successfully out of there before reelection time 2012. Who can blame him?
So this makes the second combat General in a row, charged with the US/NATO mission in Afghanistan, to be relieved of command by Gates and Obama. This suggests to me that the miscalculations of Cheney/Rumsfeld and G.W. Bush have come back to haunt us, and that Robert Gates and Team Obama have only made matters worse. They have spread the fire to neighboring Pakistan and helped further traumatize the region. Concurrently, they are embarked on a nonstop campaign to destabilize Iran, using the dubious premise that Iran is working on an atomic bomb to blast Israel off the map. Shades of Saddam’s WMD.
Take a look at the big picture. It is easy to get lost in the weeds. Obama, Biden, Gates, McChrystal, Petraeus, the Washington Neoconartists and their “Liberal” Democrat fellow travelers—Hillary Clinton being the most prominent—are all trapped inside the same box of interventionism and empire. They can’t see beyond it; their careers depend upon accepting the circumstances at hand. Most Americans are unable to pick Afghanistan out on a map of the world. Why should they? Full disclosure: I do not regard Afghanistan as worth the life of a single U.S. Marine. It is on a par with Washington’s ruinously expensive misadventure in Iraq.
At this stage, everyone should take a deep breath and read Professor John Mearsheimer’s essay, entitled Hollow Victory, posted in November of last year on the Foreign Policy website. It is refreshingly honest, although grim and a little scary. A sample: “The real tragedy of Vietnam is not that the United States lost, but that it became involved in the first place.” Mearsheimer graduated from West Point in 1970 and served in the U.S Air Force five years, before heading to Academia. Further on: “In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, it simply does not matter whether the United States wins or loses. It makes no sense for the Obama administration to expend more blood and treasure to vanquish the Taliban. The United States should accept defeat and immediately begin to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan…. As was the case in Vietnam, more American soldiers and many more civilians are going to die in Afghanistan. And for no good reason.”
Bear in mind that “the mission” in Afghanistan is not a declared war. This is yet another Presidential war, with a blank-check authorization by a feckless Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. Every official folly in the world has been justified by reference to 9/11. Why did the U.S. and NATO become engaged on the ground in Afghanistan in the first place? The answer is, the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. This is the card Obama played in his important speech on December 1, 2009 at West Point in spelling out his new strategy: “Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them—an authorization what continues to this day…. The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan an Pakistan.” One might ask, to where exactly? How does this crusade end?
Which brings me back to Patrick Buchanan. There was an interesting exchange on the night of June 18 between him and fellow conservative, Monica Crowley, of the McLaughlin Group, about why the entrance to the Supreme Court has been permanently closed. John McLaughlin set it up:
MR. McLAUGHLIN: ....no more can Chief Justice John Roberts or anyone enter through the massive sculptured bronze doors, each weighing over 12,000 pounds. The reason? National security, a terrorist attack.
MR. BUCHANAN: John, they’re turning this city of mine that I grew up in into a big fortress. Why? Because of the threat of terrorism. Why are we threatened by terrorism? Because we are not a republic, we have become an empire; we are all over the world, fighting with people, shooting people, and they’re coming over here to kill us.
MS. CROWLEY: We’re a target of terrorism because we’re a democracy. It’s the ideals for which we stand. And we have radical fundamental Islamic terrorists who have targeted us since 9/11, before we were in Iraq, before we were in Afghanistan…
I like Monica’s looks, but her thinking on foreign policy is often irrational, and it puts her into the Dick Cheney/Neocon camp of irreversible myopia. Do people actually think that 9/11 came from out of the blue, or happened because Arab terrorists hate American democracy?
While it is true that we were not in Iraq or Afghanistan prior to 9/11, we were in Saudi Arabia and Palestine, where reside the three holiest sites of Islam: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Everything bad that Tel Aviv has done in the name of Zionism since 1948, and especially since 1967, is viewed by the Arab world to have been achieved thanks to Washington’s complicity. With minor speed bumps, that policy continues under Obama, Hillary and Joe Biden. As for Saudi Arabia, we were there pre-9/11 because George Bush Sr. twisted the arm of King Fahd in 1990 to allow the stationing of American troops inside the Kingdom to counter the hyped threat from Saddam Hussein. King Fahd was very reluctant to do that. He understood the implications.
After defeating Saddam and wrecking Iraq in “Operation Desert Storm”, American troops stayed put in Saudi Arabia. Iraq was placed under a murderous economic blockade, similar to what today is being done to Gaza. Concurrently, Bill Clinton presided over an interminable “peace process” between Yasser Arafat and Israel, which charade enabled Tel Aviv to expropriate more land and water from the powerless Palestinians on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, and move in more “settlers”, financed by the U.S. Treasury. These were the proximate causes of 9/11. It is called blowback, the unintended consequences of unwise U.S. foreign policy.
The blowback continues. What the Mujaheddin did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980’s is being repeated today, roughly speaking, to the lone surviving Superpower. Thanks to the gratuitous sideshow known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (aka the three trillion dollar war) and thanks to the rag-tag Taliban’s comeback in Afghanistan, and to all the ramifications flowing from the larger “war on terror”, Washington is on the verge of going bust. Do we need this? It should have been avoided at all cost. The firing of Stan McChrystal is little more than a footnote to this national tragedy.
President Obama is being hailed for toughness in his firing of Gen. McChrystal and brilliance in his replacing him as Afghan field commander with Gen. David Petraeus, who managed the George W. Bush “surge” in Iraq that saved this nation from an ignominious defeat.
Herewith, a dissent.
By firing a fighting general, beloved of his troops, Obama just took upon himself full responsibility for the McChrystal Plan. The general is off the hook.
As of now, the plan is not succeeding. And given the inability of Kabul to deliver the “government in a box” to Marja, after Marines supposedly de-Talibanized the town, the McChrystal Plan is failing. The Battle of Kandahar has not yet begun, though the June D-Day has come and gone.
Should we be in this same bloody stalemate in December, Obama will be blamed for having fired his field commander who devised his battle plan, and was carrying it out, over some stupid insults from staff officers to some counterculture magazine.
More critically, Obama just made himself hostage to a savvy general who is said to dream of one day holding Obama’s office.
Consider the box Obama just put himself in.
In 2009, he sacked Gen. David McKiernan and replaced him with his own man, Gen. McChrystal. Now, he has sacked McChrystal and replaced him with Petraeus.
The former community organizer and acolyte of Saul Alinsky cannot now possibly fire the most popular and successful general in the U.S. Army, who accepted a demotion to take command of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, without a firestorm that would consume his presidency.
If Obama has not noticed, the neocons, who want a “long war” in the Islamic world and a new war with Iran, are celebrating the Petraeus appointment with far greater unanimity than Obama’s own staff.
Why is the War Party celebrating? Petraeus is one of them.
And the untouchable general’s demands have begun to come in.
Clearly, Obama has been told he must back away from his declared deadline of July 31, 2011, for beginning withdrawals of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. And Obama is already moving to do so.
Vice President Joe Biden’s statement in Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise” that, “in July of 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out, bet on it,” has already been challenged by Defense’s Robert Gates.
No such decision has yet been made, said Gates.
Look to Obama, soon, to walk back that July 2011 date and declare that any withdrawal of U.S. troops will be “conditions-based”—another way of saying that if we are not winning the war in July 2011, we are not coming home.
Here is the likely scenario.
At the December review of the Afghan war, Petraeus will argue that, while progress is being made, we cannot meet our goals by July 2011. Years more of combat will be required to win the war.
Petraeus will ask the president for more time, perhaps years more, and perhaps ask for more troops, 20,000 or 30,000, to complete the mission and ensure Afghanistan is not again a sanctuary for al-Qaida.
Thus, in December 2010, Obama becomes LBJ in December 1967, when Gen. William Westmoreland, with 500,000 troops in Vietnam, came to the White House to ask for 200,000 more. LBJ said no.
And as the Republican right hammered him for not bombing Hanoi and blockading Haiphong, Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy entered the primaries against him from the left.
Richard Nixon, saying five years of unsuccessful prosecution of a war called out for new leadership, was marching to the nomination of a party he had helped reunite after the Barry Goldwater disaster.
The outlook bleak, his party splintering, LBJ declared on March 31, 1968, that he would not run again.
If Obama repudiates his July 2011 date for first withdrawals of U.S. troops, if he agrees to any new Petraeus troop request, his party will split and he will face a primary challenge from the antiwar left.
But if he stands with Biden and says the July 2011 date holds, and the troops start home in July, Petraeus would likely put out word that his hands are being tied and he will not fight a no-win war.
Should Petraeus resign his command under such circumstances, he would become a Douglas MacArthur-like hero to the GOP, and could wind up as No. 2 on the ticket. And that could send Barack Obama home to Chicago.
Obama should have left McChrystal to succeed or fail with the McChrystal Plan. Had he succeeded, Obama also would have succeeded. Had he failed, Obama would have been free to relieve him and tell the nation: “We gave it our best shot, with our best general, with all the resources he requested. Regrettably, we did not succeed. Now we are coming home.”
That option was closed when he fired McChrystal and made himself the political prisoner of Gen. David Petraeus.
Brilliant.
Something happened to British architects after the Second World War. Rugged Howard Roarke-like geniuses and obscure mediocrities alike shared an aesthetic that, for some reason, no one outside the profession understood. Perhaps the architecture schools gave them sets of glasses that made them to see the world in a way the rest of us cannot. I have yet to meet a British architect who does not believe that the Trellick Tower, a 31-storey socialist-realist monstrosity that dominates the northern reaches of Notting Hill, is beautiful. I have never met anyone else who would not prefer to see it erased from the skyline that it disfigures. I curse the Irish Republican Army for accepting a ceasefire before it brought the damn thing down. Blowing up pubs in Birmingham and churches in the City of London (London’s centro storico, not to be confused with Greater London) rather than Trellick must have been Ireland’s punishment for seven centuries of British colonial rule. Ian Fleming hated the Trellick Tower so much when it was commissioned in 1966 that he named his most famous villain for its designer, Erno Goldfinger.
Goldfinger lived in an old brick mansion in leafy Hampstead, even as he confined the proles to concrete prisons that resembled nothing so much as multi-storey car parks. (Trellick became a magnet for criminals, who dealt drugs and raped women in its darkened stairways. It cost millions in “security improvements” to make it marginally safer for the residents who were forced out of their old neighborhoods and made to live there.) I don’t know a British architect who actually lives in a house built in his lifetime. Richard Rogers’s domicile is in a Georgian terrace in Chelsea, and my old friend Tchaik Chassay inhabits a large flat in a Victorian building in Notting Hill. Yet they are creating a world for the rest of us that ruptures our ties to the type of houses in which they choose to live. If I try to see the world as they do, and I have out of consideration for our friendship, I fail. It is hard to contemplate the sublime attributes of the tower blocks south of the River Thames, the indecipherable cement maze that is the Barbican Arts Center and commercial developments like Canary Wharf.
In this, I find myself in the company of the great mass of Britons, with whom I disagree at least 99.9 per cent of the time, and the Prince of Wales. I don’t really like siding with the majority, who are invariably wrong. Finding myself allied to a crown prince sits uneasily with my lifelong republican (not to be confused with Republican) sentiments. Yet I must thank Prince Charles for blocking a project to replace the old Chelsea Barracks along the River Thames with modern steel and glass apartments for billionaires that would have made the north side of the river as unappealing as the south. (The only good thing about living on the south side of the Thames is that your view is of the north’s Georgian and Victorian masterpieces. People who live in the Trellick Tower say its only compensation is that it is one of the few vantages in west London from which you cannot see the Trellick Tower.) The prince has saved a stretch of the Thames from the fate of much of the rest of this city, and nobody is thanking him.
For those of you who do not spend much time in England, a little background. A recent trial in the High Court involved Prince Charles, the architect Richard (now Lord) Rogers, property developers Christian and Nick Candy and the royal family of Qatar. The lawsuit was brought by the Candy brothers’ company, CPC, against a company called Qatari Diar. The Candy brothers, whose love of Britain obliges them to avoid paying tax in the country that provided their wealth by taking up residence in the Principality of Monaco, sued Qatari Diar. Qatari Diar is the investment company of the royal family of Qatar, said to hold the most valuable property portfolio in the world. Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani , somehow finds time while governing his country to act as chairman of the family property empire. Qatari Diar, to the annoyance of its partners in CPC, withdrew its application for permission to build a complex of luxury apartments at the Chelsea Barracks site that it had purchased for £969 million. The whole project was said to be worth £3 billion. CPC filed a lawsuit that alleged the withdrawal had cost it £81 million. The architect was, as he had been on another Candy-Qatar project in Knightsbridge beside the Hyde Park Hotel, Lord Rogers. The plans were, in common with the rest of Rogers’s oeuvre, modern in the extreme. The buildings on the site would have resembled nothing in the neighborhood and would have contrasted sharply with one of the capital’s masterpieces, Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital, nearby. Chelsea residents were opposed, but their views (based on past experience) did not count.
As the project was coming up for approval or rejection by the planning committee of Westminster council, Prince Charles wrote a letter to Sheikh Hamad. Dated 9 March 2010, the letter asked the sheikh “to reconsider the plans for the Chelsea site before it is too late.” The prince wrote, “I only mention this because, quite frankly, my heart sank when I saw the plans that had been proposed for the old Chelsea Barracks site, opposite the Royal Hospital, by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment.” Nine weeks later, Sheikh Hamad found time between cabinet meetings to respond to Britain’s heir to the throne. His letter defended Rogers’s design and said the project would go ahead. Soon after, Prince Charles invited the Emir of Qatar (confusingly called Hamad as well), Sheikh Hamad’s cousin and sovereign, to tea at Clarence House. After that tete a tete, Qatari Diar withdrew the plans.
When it emerged at the trial that Prince Charles had intervened, the architectural establishment and the press put on their self-righteous hats and complained of interference in the democratic process. Ruth Reed of the Royal Institute of British Architects said, “No individual should use their [sic] influence in public life to influence a democratic process such as planning.” Anyone who has ever applied for planning permission to enlarge a bathroom in London knows the process is about as democratic as awarding oil contracts in Saudi Arabia. Architects, developers, estate agents and landlords all weigh in with whatever influence they can muster to make sure the bureaucrats come to the decision that will make them the most money. (You need only look at what the developers did to the sites graciously cleared for them by the Luftwaffe in 1940 to understand that democracy – which was manifested in most people’s desire to live in terrace houses with gardens among the neighbors they knew – has not played a major role where property and money are concerned.)
The Guardian’s Robert Booth intoned in terms shared by most of his colleagues, “The case has raised serious questions over whether the prince overstepped his constitutional role by becoming involved in a democratic planning process…” Yet Prince Charles did not overstep his constitutional role (whatever that may be, given that he is a crown prince and not a king) by attempting to influence politicians. He dealt with two businessmen, the Emir of Qatar and Sheikh Hamad, in their capacity as financial backers of scheme the prince believed would blight an area of London whose architectural majesty he did not want to see diminished. He did not lean on Westminster’s local council or its planners (although he appears to have considered doing so). There was nothing improper about a man who happens to be a prince lobbying businessmen to drop a project he did not like. The businessmen were free to deny his request, as Sheikh Hamad intitially did. It would have been odd of the prince, if he felt so strongly about the Chelsea Barracks site, to have remained out of the fray.
The Prince of Wales spoke for everyone in London who has wearied of modernist architecture and its grip over local planning departments. No one likes to see architects, with their peculiar aesthetic, bulldozing of whole neighborhoods to erect temples of vanity to themselves, their patrons and Mammon. One thing is certain. If Prince Charles had not spoken to the Emir, ground would be broken for a scheme that would have disgraced the Royal Hospital and its gardens. Take a look at One Hyde Park, the Candy brothers glass block that obstructs the view of Hyde Park from Knightsbridge and will soon be complete. When its predecessor building, Bowater House, came down, I silently rejoiced. It was a space age (remember the space age?) brute whose only redeeming features were a wonderful Jacob Epstein sculpture of Pan with the family of man and a passage that permitted a sight of the park from the south. Then I saw the drawings for its replacement. As the months went by, I watched it go up, pane by pane. This is where architecture differs from the other arts. If I don’t like a painting, I don’t buy it or hang it on my wall. If I dislike a composer, I don’t go to his concerts. But a building cannot be avoided. It is what you see every day. It fashions your environment. You have a right to be heard if you don’t want your world altered beyond recognition.
Rowan Moore wrote recently in the Observer about the Sussex farmhouse, Hancox, in which he grew up (and where I was a sometimes guest): “A house shelters a family, but it also represents it… The rambling corridors and stairs were perfect for shoot-outs with visiting cousins.” The modernist block houses for thenouveau riche might be perfect for shoot-outs, but more likely between the private security firms who guard them and the mobs clamoring to tear them down.
When the monarchy is abolished, as I hope it will be, Westminster Council must offer Prince Charles a place on its planning committee. There, I am sure, he will do his best to spare us the excess of architectural fantasy. He could do more good there than sitting in Buckingham Palace, keeping his mouth shut and obeying politicians.
If ‘censorship is to art as lynching is to justice,’ artist Gregos Theopsy temporarily sported a loose noose around his neck—and not of the fashionable variety. Little did Theopsy imagine that the killing of three bank employees on May 5 in Athens would have any bearing on the presentation of his hand-crafted bomb in the Palais de Tokyo during the same week.
As Pericles once said, “just because you don’t take an interest in politics, doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” It was deemed appropriate to postpone the presentation of his bomb, titled “Revolution Now!” lest the sensitivities of the public be provoked.
According to Theopsy, Revolution Now! was conceived more by his reflections on time rather than the crises that regularly engulf his country of origin, Greece. Indeed, the ambiguity between the radical action of displaying a bomb in Paris’ museum of contemporary arts—and the object as a symbol of time—is so well preserved by the artist that its duality creates a myriad of aspects to meditate upon.
More than being a powerful reference to political violence, which the artist considers a banal and irrelevant notion, Theopsy explains how creativity has always been a valid means of redemption as salvaging the unsalvageable:
“I wanted to make a bomb because it incarnates the tyranny of fear and the tyranny of time. I don’t like to be afraid and I don’t like deadlines…that’s why I made a bomb with my own hands, and put it in a display as a toy or an object of art, or even a souvenir…or whatever makes it look unreal enough. Anyway, it won’t explode…that’s the whole point: it never does explode.”
Much like the role experiential theatre plays in Gestalt psychotherapy, by creating Revolution Now!, Theopsy is practicing freedom from fear and is provoking his audience to do the same. Indeed, even though Theopsy points out that the bomb ‘won’t explode’ because he disabled the detonator, he chose the context of his object carefully in order to recreate a confrontation with urgency and risk: rather than placing his convincing installation in the gallery of the Palais de Tokyo where people expect reassuring make-believe, he placed his object in its gift shop, the notorious Blackblock.
From behind its plexi-glass container, the bomb’s timer, set at 9999 units, decreases furiously and relentlessly, “true only to nature’s commitment to destruction and evolution.” The plexi-glass container itself reinforces the feeling that though we may witness the impending ravages of time, it is inaccessible to our control and indifferent to our instinct to suppress the uglier reality of the human condition—the inevitable process of aging, loss of beauty, loss of independence, loss of dignity, loss of love, and finally, the unpredictable transition to the ultimate unknown, death.
Nonetheless, Theopsy continues:
“This piece is just a still life you know… Just like the oranges and grapes you will see in the Louvre a little further down the Seine. These oranges were made to look good and fresh forever. Except that oranges are boring today while a bomb is not boring.”
Oranges and grapes, however, are hardly the tools of contemporary asymmetric warfare. And so, knowing how hard-pressed Theopsy was to comment on his own work and his penchant for red herrings, it is difficult to accept that to him, “this piece is just a still-life” or a mere mischievous attempt to see what he can get away with in a world increasingly oppressed by political correctness.
Indeed, unlike Duchamp’s Fountain stunt, where a ready-made object relies solely on its gallery context to have the status of “art” conferred upon it, Theopsy’s bomb was created by hand and using plastic parts from China and his imagination (Google couldn’t translate the instructions). More importantly, it was made to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible—showing full awareness that though aesthetic experience may begin with the senses, it does not necessarily end with them.
After all, man’s vulnerability and fear of time invoked by Theopsy’s “terroristic” bomb is the same gripping fear that terrorists have capitalized upon to cost-effectively win priceless concessions from the public. While Theopsy’s bomb blurs the line between real and unreal in order to show the pervasiveness and uncontrollability of time, terrorists have successfully blurred the line between civilian space and conventional battlefield to create this same overriding fear to get people to give up precious freedoms for a semblance of control and predictability over their safety.
Only as recently as April, after a group called ‘Revolution Muslims!’ warned South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker that they will likely “wind up like Theo van Gogh” for their depiction of Mohammed, Comedy Central grossly censored their 200th episode and even went so far as censoring a speech at the end “about intimidation and fear.”
Toward the end of the interview, the hesitant Theopsy, whose bomb-making skills was hitherto unknown, gives the only tangible clue to the real message for Revolution Now!: “Have you ever felt the luck of the beginner? Because you see, like Heraclitus puts it—time is a child that plays backgammon. So to play with time, you must become a child too.”
Our agent provocateur appears to tell us that it is a child’s abandon and indifference to taboo, and their innocent ability to see things as they are—not censorship or pedestrian political correctness—that defuses our fears and loosens the noose placed upon us by bombs, real and unreal. Children after all, say the darnest things.
Plus, The Railway Children come to Waterloo and the Blue Boat goes up for auction
She & Him
Unlike, say, Lindsay Lohan, Zooey Deschanel can act, write songs, and sing. She & Him, the duo Deschanel formed with M. Ward, just released their second album
Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Movies With A View
Typically, if you live in Manhattan, you stay in Manhattan. But we swear, Brooklyn’s outdoor film series is worth crossing the bridge, if only for the magnificent view alone. Imagine watching Annie Hall with the Manhattan skyline as the backdrop, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade while picnicking. Plus, unlike Bryant Park, your films won’t be interrupted by the sounds of harried commuters and Times Square-tourists. DJs from Brooklyn Radio kick off each night at sunset, followed by a short film before the feature presentation.
Vidiots Annex
Forget film school. Starting this July, Vidiots, Los Angeles’ venerable indie video store launches its film studies program taught by industry pros, historians, and critics. Debate censorship controversies throughout Hollywood history, examine comedy from the silent era through today’s talkies, or geek out over the mythology of superheroes and robots. Take group (starting $128/four weeks) or individual classes ($40/sesion), and sign up for the Saturday night film club for evocative flicks followed by even more evocative discussion with fellow cinephiles.
DailyCandy: Speakeasies ‘round the world
Summer may just be the best time to drink in secret, and as our friends over at DailyCandy have pointed out, there are some exceptional places to do it too. Whether you’re in Cleveland, Toronto, Melbourne, or Paris; whether you’re looking for rare-label wines or seasonal cocktails, there is a hidden spot for you. We at Takimag are especially intrigued by Amsterdam’s Reguliersdwarsstraat 74. As the saying at the top of their menu says, “life has to have some rules, otherwise you might as well go and live in France.”
Somewhere
Since Marie Antoinette, we have long-awaited Sophia Coppola’s next film. And now we’ll have to wait a little longer, the flick doesn’t come out until December. Still, the trailer‘s worth a look. Unexpectedly, it stars Stephen Dorff, the shrimpy party animal who made his name in the 90s, and Elle Fanning, Dakota’s little sister, who plays his daughter. The film is rather Hollywood, about a film actor living at the famed Chateau Marmont, who suddenly finds himself having to look after his kid. Lets hope this one’s as good as Lost in Translation. It does make us wonder, though, about Coppola’s daddy issues; she seems to pair girls with men an awful lot. At the very least the soundtrack will be worth a listen, Coppola’s baby daddy and his band, Phoenix, do the music.
The Blue Boat
Designer boats seem to be all the rage since Jeff Koontz decked out some flashy Greek’s yacht a few years back. If you have a few hundred thousand to throw around, now you can have one too. The RAL5105 goes up for auction on July 20 at the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte Carlo. The Parisian Artcurial is putting the latest masterpiece of multidisciplinary artist Xavier Veilhan on the auction block. John Dodelande invited Veilhan to think about creating a boat, and so Veilhan worked with the 80-year-old Frauscher shipyard in Austria, to make it a reality. Potential buyers have a chance to view it in Saint Tropez (June 15 to July 12) and then in Monte Carlo until the auction. The 6.9 meter, eight-person blue beauty is equipped with a MerCruiser 220 HP motor, and will surely turn heads. Looks like a whole lot of flashy fun in the sun, if that’s your thing, but don’t fret if you miss out on this blue baby, you can always hire a vintage Riva to cruise the Cote d’Azur.
H20 by Axis Mundi, Barcelona
New York architects Axis Mundi have been hired to retrofit the exterior of this office building in Barcelona. Designed for a bottled water brand, the facade will be made of a polymer composite, suspended on steel trusses attached to the existing building, located close to Antonia Gaudi’s residential masterpiece—Casa Mila. The concept is based on the interference patterns that are created by the flow of water surfaces. In physics, interference is the addition of two or more waves that result in a new wave pattern. If only more such patterns were superposed in order to deal with bad architecture. Looks like a big hit, but then, most Barcelona architecture is.
Alexander Calder in Focus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opens July 28
With any luck a gentle breeze will blow through the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago when an exhibition of more than 60 works by Alexander Calder opens. They will stand alongside 20 new works by young sculptors who have been inspired by the American artist. The seven artists, in their early forties, who have embraced Calder’s hands-on approach to color, balance and movement, include Martin Boyce, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and Kristi Lippire. Many of these artists regard Calder as the “godfather of Green art”, though no one is claiming Calder was a Green artist. During the 1940s he turned to materials at hand when sheet metal was in short supply. The show will travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (11 December-6 March 2011) and then to the Orange County Museum of Art in California, and the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina. Don’t miss this, we absolutely love, love, love Calder!
John Baldessari’s In Still Life 2001-2010
This free, interactive artwork allows you to create your own still life by rearranging the 38 objects in Abraham van Beyeren’s Banquet Still Life (1667). Each object has symbolic meaning; for example, lobster suggests abundance and earthly prosperity, but may also warn of the dangers of gluttony. Peaches, on the other hand, are a symbol of salvation and truth, as well as fecundity. As Baldessari says, “still lifes are about the fleeting things in life.” The work brings Baldessari’s original In Still Life into the 21st Century. In 2001, he hung van Beyeren’s Banquet Still Life on the wall next to an empty frame at LACMA and invited exhibition visitors to digitally rearrange and remove the objects in the original 17th century Dutch painting, thus creating a new still life of their own.
The Railway Children, Live at Waterloo Station
After two sell-out and critically acclaimed summer runs at the National Railway Museum in York, The Railway Children arrives in London. Join Bobby, Peter, and Phyllis as they come to terms with the mysterious disappearance of their father. See their journey of discovery, friendship, and adventure as they become The Railway Children. Best of all, witness Phyllis averting disaster as she waves her red petticoat in front of a real, moving steam train at a specially built theatre in London’s Waterloo Station. The redundant Eurostar platforms will have the audience seated on two sides of the steam engine. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the classic film, Railway Children, based on the book by E Nesbit. Profits from the play are going to the Railway Children Charity, dedicated to changing the lives of children living on stations and streets in India, East Africa, and Britain.
Is the clock ticking for Al Gore? After explosive allegations were made public earlier this week that the former vice president groped a masseuse in 2006, the woman is now threatening to surface and tell her story if the price is right. An unidentified Portland woman filed a police report against the environmental activist, saying he took a scheduled massage way too far and groped and kissed her. After remaining silent for four years, she’s supposedly shopping her story around for $1 million. While she’s waiting to see if any media outlets bite (and oh, they will) we’ll keep trying to scrub our minds of the image of Gore acting like a “sex crazed poodle” and blasting “Dear Mr. President” on his iPod during the alleged encounter.
Mel Gibson is also having trouble with the ladies. Remember when he dumped his wife of 30 years for aspiring “singer” Oksana Grigorieva? Seems the relationship has soured—Mel has filed a restraining order against the Russian beauty, who gave birth to his daughter Lucia seven months ago. The couple split in April. How do you think Mel’s ex-wife, Robyn, feels about the Oscar winner’s recent love troubles? It has to be a tiny bit self-satisfying her ex’s new girlfriend turned out to be slightly unhinged, no?
Where were you when you heard Joe Jackson filed a wrongful death lawsuit over Michael’s death? One year to the day that the world unexpectedly said goodbye to the King of Pop, his father is suing Dr. Conrad Murray for unspecified damages over his death. Jackson’s complaint charges that the not-so-good doc “tried to clean up the scene” before EMTs arrived at Jackson’s home on June 25, 2009. This is all just so ugly. Can’t we turn on Number Ones and mourn properly?
The biggest mystery in Hollywood, nay, maybe the world, is what exactly is going on with Lindsay Lohan‘s SCRAM bracelet. Last week she whined about her alcohol monitoring bracelet falsely going off, and now it looks like another one of her vices may be to blame. Apparently, a chemical in spray tanning can cause a false reading, but that hasn’t stopped LiLo from getting her signature orange glow once or twice a week.
Tiger Woods might have a good excuse for his abysmal performance at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. One recent report says his divorce from wife Elin is “about to be official” after the couple agreed on all points. Elin’s payout? A massive $750 million. We should all be so lucky to marry a golf superstar, have him cheat with a dozen mistresses, and then take him to the cleaners. It’s truly the American dream.
Jason Bateman may have lost a few fans just because he wanted a new iPhone 4. The Arrested Development and Juno star was waiting patiently in line with 2,000 people in Los Angeles for the new gizmo before an Apple employee plucked him out of the line-up and ushered him into the store. Not such unusual treatment for an A-lister, right? But those diehard Apple nerds waiting in line booed the sheepish star on his way out.
And in royal news, after years spent wooing everyone from Naomi Campbell and Brooke Shields to Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Schiffer, 52-year-old man-about-town Prince Albert II of Monaco is finally settling down. The lucky lady is South African former swimmer Charlene Wittstock who, naturally, is 20 years his junior. The couple, who have been dating since 2006, attended the extravagant ceremony for Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling last weekend, and perhaps took notes for their own as-yet-unscheduled nuptials. The prince has two children, aged six and 18, born out of wedlock.
And another one bites the dust, as Piers Morgan quietly tied the knot with Celia Walden this week in an intimate ceremony. The 33-year-old bride, who’s a writer for the Telegraph, wore a daisy chain headband to their wedding in front of only a handful of guests. Simon Cowell, who did not attend, said he’s “absolutely thrilled” for the couple, and has no idea how Piers pulled it off. Perhaps the two were in a rush to get married because a cross-country move is next? For weeks, rumors have swirled that Piers is in line to take over Larry King‘s slot on CNN.
And finally, before Prince Harry prepared for his three-day trip to New York, he said in an interview in South Africa that the memory of their mother keeps him and Prince William going. “I particularly always wonder what she’d think, what she’d be doing if she was with us now,” he said. Meanwhile, Harry and longtime girlfriend Chelsy Davy split after she announced she’s moving back to Zimbabwe. They’ll be no shortage of women during his stay in New York this weekend at the Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic. We’re sure he can scoop up a new girlfriend—or maybe a summer fling?—in no time. Just make sure the paparazzi are looking the other way.
In confiding to Rolling Stone their unflattering opinions of the military acumen of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, Dick Holbrooke and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff were guilty of colossal stupidity.
And President Obama had cause to cashier them. Yet his decision to fire McChrystal may prove both unwise and costly.
For McChrystal, unlike Gen. MacArthur, never challenged the war policy—he is carrying it out—and Barack Obama is no Harry Truman.
Moreover, the war strategy Obama is pursuing is the McChrystal Plan, devised by the general and being implemented by the general in Marja and Kandahar, perhaps the decisive campaign of the war.
Should that plan now fail, full responsibility falls on Obama.
He has made the Afghan war his war in a way it never was before.
If the McChrystal strategy fails, critics will charge Obama with causing the defeat by firing the best fighting general in the Army out of pique over some officers-club remarks that bruised the egos of West Wing warriors.
And though those remarks never should have appeared in print, they may well reflect the sentiments of not a few soldiers and Marine officers on third and fourth tours of duty in the Afghan theater.
Had Obama, instead of firing McChrystal, told him to shut up, can the interviews and go back to fighting the war until the December review of strategy, he could have shown those soldiers he is a bigger man than they or McChrystal’s team give him credit for.
And if success in Afghanistan is the highest goal, how does it help to fire the best fighting general? Do you relieve Gen. Patton during combat because he vents his prejudices or opinions?
This city may draw the parallel, but the Obama-McChrystal clash does not remotely rise to the historic level of the collision between MacArthur and Truman.
Truman had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ordered the airlift that broke the Berlin blockade, and produced the Marshall Plan and NATO. He had won election in his own right with a legendary comeback in 1948.
Obama has nothing like Truman’s credibility as a war leader.
And MacArthur was the most famous U.S. soldier since Gen. Grant. No. 1 at West Point, he was a legendary commander in France in 1918, leading troops out of the trenches with a swagger stick.
Driven out of the Philippines in 1942, he had declared, “I shall return,” and led the liberation of the islands in 1944. He conducted the famous island-hopping campaign up the archipelagos of the South Pacific and took Japan’s surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
As military proconsul, he presided over the reconstruction of Japan, wrote her constitution and converted her into an ally.
When North Korea invaded the South and drove the U.S. Army into the Pusan perimeter, MacArthur landed Marines far behind enemy lines at Inchon in a flanking maneuver that destroyed the North Korean army and will be studied at military academies for centuries to come.
In late 1950, MacArthur was stunned by the intervention in Korea of the armies of Mao Zedong, lately victorious in China’s four-year civil war.
MacArthur’s clash with Truman was not over something so trivial as a gossipy article in Rolling Stone. MacArthur’s hands had been tied by Truman.
He was not allowed to bomb the Yalu bridges over which Chinese troops were pouring into Korea. He was not allowed to bomb Chinese troop concentrations and munitions dumps in Manchuria. He was not allowed to use Chiang Kai-shek’s armies on Taiwan. He was not allowed hot pursuit of enemy aircraft into Chinese or Russian airspace.
MacArthur was being restricted to fighting the war Mao wanted to fight, a war of attrition against the world’s most populous nation, and largest army, while China was allowed to remain a privileged sanctuary, off-limits to U.S. bombers like those that smashed Germany and Japan.
In his address to Congress, after his firing by Truman, MacArthur put it this way: “‘Why,’ my soldiers asked of me, ‘surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?’ I could not answer.”
MacArthur’s letter to Rep. Joe Martin, in response to a letter from the GOP leader, was indeed a challenge to Truman’s policy of avoiding any risk of a clash with Russia, even if it meant U.S. soldiers would pay the price of Truman’s timidity.
Events would prove MacArthur right.
Truman’s restrictions would ensure a “no-win war” for two more years that would cost tens of thousands more American lives, and Harry would be sent packing with the lowest rating of any president in history.
Gen. Eisenhower would take office, two years after MacArthur’s firing, and threaten the exact escalation MacArthur envisioned, ending the Korean War in six months.
Obama and his party may be celebrating his cashiering of Gen. McChrystal as a macho moment, but by firing the fighting general, for his foolish remarks, Obama has deepened the gulf between his party and the U.S. military.
It was precisely Feb. 5, 2009, when I broke my self-imposed rule. It was not a very old rule, but it was serious. I had told myself that I would not criticize the new president of the United States, Barack Obama—at least not for a few more months. But I slipped up. I could not completely swallow the fact that a community action leader with almost no experience at the national level had become president. There were already complaints coming in from foreign parts. The Indians warned against his sticking his nose into their dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and to the president’s offer of talks with Iran, a low-level spokesman, Gholam Hossein Elham, replied, “This request means Western ideology has become passive.”
Yet since those halcyon days, the flubs and near disasters have gotten worse. They have gotten worse for two reasons. To begin with, there is the experience factor. President Barack Obama is less experienced than any modern president, and I am not sure he has had any more experience than any president, period. Maybe Millard Fillmore was less experienced. I shall research the matter and report my findings.
Now think about what this means. He has had no experience in foreign affairs, intelligence gathering, the workings of the Treasury or any other aspect of the federal government. He does not know how to deal with a gigantic oil spill or, come to think of it, a small one. We are left thanking the stars in the heavens that this president has Joe Biden at his side! Maybe we are even reassured that Rahm Emanuel is there, if one does not mind a sharp elbow in the ribs, and David Axelrod and that someone by the name of Valerie Jarrett can be counted on to keep watch while this president flies off to foreign parts.
Second, Obama is wedded to the politics of the far left. He thinks that because there is someone to the farther left of him, he is a moderate. But as things stand, there are people to the right of him, too. As I see it, there are at least three-quarters of the American people to the right of him, possibly more. These people matter. It probably was imprudent of him to go to the baseball game last weekend, even if the Chicago White Sox were playing. And the next day, he should not have played golf, even if Joe Biden came along. Not even if Saul Alinsky had written about golf back in the 1960s.
There is something very dated about the ideology that this president takes so seriously. The progressives thought they were electing a forward looker. They were getting an antique merchant. In fact, they are antique merchants. Even the Chinese and the Indians think Obama is backward. The Canadians’ view of the world is light years beyond his. Now even his supporters are beginning to talk. The president is dangerously out of touch, and he is incompetent.
The other day, Mortimer Zuckerman wrote an ominous piece. In U.S. News & World Report, he cited widespread talk in Britain of the end of our “special relationship” with that country. He cited French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s speaking ill of Obama, and he noted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s contempt for a number of our president’s views. Zuckerman went on to cite problems that the president had had with China, Middle Eastern leaders—particularly the king of Saudi Arabia—Turkey and Brazil. Of course, in his tour d’horizon, he mentioned Obama’s problems with Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Then he said it: “A critical mass of influential people” in the world “are no longer dazzled by his rock star personality and there is a sense that there is something amateurish and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U.S. power.”
Now, I have not always been an admirer of Zuckerman’s, but there is something solid about his piece. He wrote it clearly worried about the path that lies ahead, and when he spoke of that “critical mass of influential people,” he knew what he was writing about. This is why officials in Washington are taking a fresh look at Joe Biden. They note his gaffable presence, but they clearly are fortified by his presence. After all, who else is there, Axelrod, Emanuel and Jarrett?
(Please contact your local newspaper if you would like to see the R. Emmett Tyrrell column in your local paper.)
We WASPS have a long tradition with the London “Season.” The Chelsea Flower Show, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley, Glorious Goodwood in mid-summer, it’s very old hat to us. It began during Victorian times, when rich in land but poor in cash Anglo aristos came over to our shores across the pond and landed our daughters. Eastern seaboard American money built plenty of English stately home roofs, and we got some funny looking people with handles in their names to call cousin.
When I was younger, I remember my parents, Popsy and Topsy Mortimer never missing a London season. More often than not they stayed at Blenheim Palace, with the then Duke of Marlborough, Bert. He was an awful bully and all that, but he was very friendly with my parents. They reciprocated by having the old goat stay with them in Palm Beach for months on end, especially during those post war years when England had no central heating and the coalminers strike had frozen the tight little island solid.
Needless to say, things ain’t what they used to be. Too many Americans, n.o.c.d’s actually, (not our class, dear) have discovered the joys of the season and are - as I write - overweight, overfunded, and over here. Last week I told you about Ascot, and how the gratin has been removed. At Wimbledon this week, while having my tea and strawberries, I found myself in a sea of sweaty, loudly dressed Americans, none of whom I recognized. No one like Bill Clothier, of the old Philadelphia Clothiers, none of the Woods of Long Island, not even another Mortimer. Names like Schwartzman, Richard Wiseman, a friend of John McEnroe’s, and others new to mention, if you know what I mean.
Mind you, change is inevitable, and London itself is not the London I knew as a child. Great hostesses like Lady Hartwell no longer entertain. We now have one Rena Sindi, an Iraqi woman of a dark hue that tries to lure celebrities to various parties but they’re much too horrible to even entertain attending them. Instead, I headed down to Devon, where the Hanburys had their annual cricket party and weekend. One of the Hanbury girls is married to David RockSavage, Marquis of Chomondelay, pronounced Chumly for you not in the know, the other, Marina, is engaged to be married to Ned Lambton, Earl of Lambton, so you get the picture. People like Tom Parker Bowles, Ben Eliot, son and nephew of Camila, the Marquis of Worcester, Bunter to us insiders, and the spiritual head of Takimag, Taki himself, were some of the 80 odd weekend guests.
A word of caution. I like and admire Taki a lot, but he’s much too old to be playing cricket with 25-year-olds, and, worse, far too old to be chasing 20 year old girls around the grand house all evening – as he was seen to do. Still, it was the loveliest of weekend house parties, and now I’m back in London for the second week of Wimbledon and the grand party of Lord and Lady Derby.
When the Right wants to antagonize the Obamaniancs, they draw a picture of Batman’s Joker with the word Socialist below it. This makes the Left particularly incredulous because they don’t see that word as a bad thing. As the Ethicist put it in last Sunday’s New York Times, “How does it defame a person to call him a ‘socialist’ — a set of ideas many advanced Western democracies find congenial, what with the accessible health-care, affordable higher education and good public transportation?” Come on, Randy. You don’t really believe that do you? Surely, this is another case of, as Orwell put it, “Left-wing parties making it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.” Nobody really believes socialist policies are good for us. Deep down, we all know getting laid isn’t even almost as fun when your mom set you up with her and that’s assuming dates like that even get you laid in the first place.
I’m not going to deny socialism is the cooler looking of the two. They have those neat-o pins with the hammer and the sickle and let’s face it, Che Guevara is about the handsomest revolutionary since Malcolm X. It makes you feel like an intellectual to discuss Marx’s dialectic and giving money to the poor puts you in the same peer group as Santa Claus. Capitalism has no pins, no fancy books, and the heroes look like my dad’s beta-male golf buddies. Has anyone ever worn a Milton Friedman shirt? His name sounds like the guy from Mad Magazine.
Capitalism is not even remotely cool but it works. And it’s fun. Being part of a new enterprise that’s going somewhere is a rush the big government lackeys need prostitutes to synthesize. I took my family to Brooklyn Bowl the other day. This is a local business some maverick recently poured his savings into and business is booming. The place was packed as managers, busboys, and waitresses enthusiastically ran around the place with such vigor, I didn’t get to place one empty drink on table without it being swooped up. When our lane broke down, it was repaired in a matter of seconds. I’m not exaggerating. These people weren’t paid by commission and they weren’t living in a climate of fear. They were just excited to be part of something that was new and thriving. They smelled opportunity and it invigorated them.
Compare that to an all-inclusive resort in Cuba where glum servers will literally drop your gray dinner on the table and walk away without even looking up and it becomes painfully obvious what gets people out of bed in the morning: culpability. As the Alfred E. Friedman put it: “The effect [of big government] is to instill in the one group a feeling of almost God-like power; in the other, a feeling of childlike dependence.”
The “no pain no gain” philosophy of an unregulated economy is what made America what it is today. It’s also what made America’s Got Talent what it is today. I don’t care if you’re an adorable old lady with breast cancer singing The Star Spangled Banner with all you’ve got. If it sucks, the buzzer goes “brrrrnk” and you’re out. No bailouts. No second chances. The fans don’t enjoy seeing her fail but it’s that failure that makes the fat, black opera singer’s victory so damn victorious.
Throwing money at a problem sounds cool but like giving a stripper your paycheck, it never gets results. No matter how much money we give schools for example, the grades stay exactly where they’ve been for decades. Even sluggish bureaucracies like the IMF admit, “A tax induced distortion in economic behavior results in a net efficiency loss to the whole economy.” Go to an Indian Reservation and talk to some of the locals about their plight. After a few beers, most will admit free money is the new blankets with small pox. My kids are American Indians and I dread the checks they’re going to get when they turn 18. Free money at that age is more damaging than heroin and I’ve seen it permanently swallow ambition time and time again. Eating out of the garbage in your early 20s and taking any job that even almost pays is not just a great lesson. It makes you feel alive. It’s Darwinian. The employees of Brooklyn Bowl were pumped because their DNA was reminded of the times we were on a successful hunt and knew catching this wooly mammoth was going to be a feast beyond feasts.
We’re told Northern Europeans are the happiest people in the world and a heavily socialist system is to thank for this bliss. When I ask about their preposterously high suicide rates, I’m told that’s only the very top of Europe and it’s due to lack of sunlight. Well, Estonia is on the top of Europe and they’re too busy having beer festivals to slit their wrists. They’re also one of the only countries to make it out of the USSR alive. Know why? Because Estonia is about the only European country to let the invisible hand of capitalism’s fingers do the walking. Meanwhile, the rest of the continent is moping around cafés in socks and sandals talking about how scary America has become. Pussies.
Does anyone really believe this European utopia anyway? Does anyone really want to move to Denmark? DENMARK! Despite socialism’s delusions of grandeur, a recent Harris Poll shows Americans are in fact, more optimistic and happier with their present standard of living than Europeans. This is confirmed by Europe’s hatred of babies. After all, Isn’t bringing more of you into the world a good indication of how happy you are to be here?
Fashion trends like socialism are a lot of fun but the Third World doesn’t have time for fun right now. Genetic food sounds as gross as it sounds square and Norman Borlaug looks like a dead racist but “Frankenfood” saved a billion lives. Swallow your pride and let them eat cake for fucksakes. In the past quarter century, only about four countries have been stupid enough to resist economic liberalization and they have remained as poor as they are a bummer. On the other hand, since 1950, extreme poverty has been reduced from 20% to 60% in developing countries and this is almost solely based on their ability to trade with movers and shakers like us. The World Bank also attributes an open market to the remarkable 200 million people pulled out of absolute poverty in the past twenty years. I hate the World Bank too but I hate bullshit more. Would Vietnam be where they are today if they hadn’t abandoned their Socialist ideals? Nope. They’d be North Korea. I want to blame corporations and sweatshops for Third World suffering as much as the next guy but India is poor because it can’t work, not because it works too hard. There’s something about Adam Smith’s tough love that no government program can duplicate and if India had a Guy Fawkes to blow their parliament into the sky, there’d be a lot more George Jefferson’s there with “deluxe apartments in the sky.”
The Free Market is exhilarating because people get a good feeling when they bust their ass. The ones that didn’t get this rush are extinct. If the Lefties really cared about the poor, they’d ignore capitalism’s ugly heroes, focus on freedom, and let the poor control their own destinies. It may sound as uncool as Crocs but big business is not holding back the poor, big government is. So, step out of the way, Obama. As the great Chairman Mao said, “It’s time to let a thousand flowers bloom.”
While Saddam Hussein was still ruling Iraq, he went to a village to award a new Kalashnikov rifle to a young boy. The boy had come to the tyrant’s attention after reporting the private conversations of his mother and father to the secret police. It seemed the parents had criticized the tyrant, whom the youngster had been taught in school was the beneficent father of all Iraqis. The boy received a Kalashnikov and praise from Saddam for his loyalty. His betrayal of family left him a ward of the greater family, the state as incarnated in Saddam Hussein.
Saddam’s substitution of family ties for loyalty to his person was one of the reasons that many of us despised his regime, lobbied for his indictment before an international tribunal for crimes against humanity, and gave what moral support we could to his democratic opponents. (This was when the US government supported Saddam to the extent of denying, along with other crimes, his murder of thousands of Kurds with poison gas in Hallabja in 1988.) I wondered what happened to that boy, who must be a middle-aged man now, when I read an Associated Press report from Baghdad about a young man who shot his father dead in Samarra on June 18. The father, Hameed al-Daraji, had worked as an interpreter for the American military. To the son and the cousin who helped him commit the murder, working for the hated American occupier was treason. In its way, executing the father was an honor killing.
On the opposite side, a man named Khudair Hamad al-Issawi denounced his two sons to the Iraqi government for joining an anti-government insurgent group, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Mr. Issawi, who lived in Fallujah, would have known what the treatment his sons could expect as “terrorists” in the custody of the Iraqi security forces. The documented cases of torture and murder by Iraqi police and troops are too numerous to have left the father in any doubt what his sons’ fate would be. He did not live to find out, because someone took revenge on him—killing not only Mr. Issawi, but also his wife and two other children.
“Not in the short space of a catastrophe will the nature of man be modified,” Rebecca West wrote in The Meaning of Treason
The scars that Saddam left on Iraqi society have yet to heal. The conflict between loyalty to the family and loyalty to the state persists, and neither the American occupiers nor the new Iraqi state have done anything to create a harmony of interests between family and state. Fathers betray sons and sons kill fathers. In the American Civil War, families were split and blood was shed. In Vichy France, many families had sons who stood by Maréchal Pétain’s collaborationist regime and others who fought for the Resistance. It was not unknown for people to denounce members of their own families to the police for “terrorist” acts against German troops and for helping to hide Jews from both the Nazis and the French version of the Gestapo, the Milice. These themes played themselves out in most of the post-war anti-colonial tragedies, when indigenous populations were divided between those who supported the colonial occupier and the rest who believed in liberation. Many Algerians fled to France after independence, because their neighbors could not tolerate them for having collaborated with the enemy. To this day, the Hmong in southeast Asia are punished for having fought beside the American occupier.
It is wrong, I believe, for the state to encourage disloyalty within the family. If the family is the microcosm and foundation of the larger social relations that constitute the body politic, its stability reinforces the coherence of the state itself. I remember a young boy who turned his parents into the police for smoking marijuana in the United States more than twenty years ago. President Ronald Reagan, then embarking on the country’s divisive and disastrous war on drugs, praised the boy. This is unhealthy, and I somehow doubt Reagan would have reported his own children to the police for smoking marijuana. A father has duties to his children, as children do to their parents. Sending your own youngsters to jail for a trivial offense violates an important trust. It is for that reason that Common Law does not require spouses to testify in court against each other. Familial bonds normally supersede duties to the state, because breaking those bonds means the dissolution of the state itself.
Rebecca West, whose book I recommend for its perceptive understanding of twentieth century treason as committed by Communists and Nazis against their own countries, wrote,
Children sometimes go away with strangers who offer them cakes and sweets; and the ending of that story is not usually happy… They know well that they have done wrong. A person should be loyal to his father and mother, to his brothers and sisters, to his friends, to his town or village, to his province, to his country; and a person should do nothing for a bribe, even if it takes the form a promise that he should live instead of die.
Iraq has yet to create a society where a son can be loyal to both his father and to his government. The government, despite elections, could not exist except by force of foreign arms. It has not created a credible structure over which the citizenry exert control, in which the money they pay in tax is not stolen by elected politicians and the basic services destroyed in Saddam Hussein’s three wars (against Iran once and America twice) and a dozen years of international sanctions have been restored. The money and the popular will are there to bring back the electricity supply, irrigation systems, water treatment and medical services. Instead, citizens must fight for the government, against the government, for the Americans, against the Americans, in the hope that one side or the other can set things right.
All that Iraqis know now is war, and in war it is every man for himself.
During my book party one month ago—rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well—I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdie recognized the name immediately. “You brought cheer to the plains of India,” he told Naresh Kumar, quoting a headline of more than fifty years ago. Mount then went on to quote from one of his own dispatches: “As the shadows lengthened in the centre court of Wimbledon, the soft touch and tricky lobs of Kumar-Krishnan tied their opponents in knots,” or words to that effect. Naresh Kumar was one of the most popular players on the tennis circuit during the mid- and late-fifties. A gentleman through and through, he played in 101 Wimbledon matches and actually did bring cheer to the plains of India. He and I were friends on the tour, although I was more often than not unemployed after the first round, whereas he was always working, including the weekends. In a tournament in Deauville in 1958, Kumar drove his French opponent crazy with dinks, slices and top spin, something extremely hard to do with wooden rackets and the dead gut of the day, and the Frenchman quit. Naresh was surprised, but shook the quitter’s hand and never talked about it. I compared it to the ghost of the Ligne Maginot returning, and my Indian friend thought it unkind.
Last week Naresh and Sunita Kumar gave a wonderful dinner at Mossiman’s, where we ate like kings and reminisced about the good old days on the circuit. (Sunita is a leading painter in India and she’s having her exhibition here on June 30.) The chairman of the All-England club was there, as was my old friend Lord (Greville) Howard, as mad about tennis as he is about politics. I told a story about my pursuit of Mimi Arnold in 1957, a rather cute 16-year-old American tennis champ, who embarrassed the hell out of me when I took her to Alexander’s, a then trendy King’s Road restaurant, and she ordered a carrot for dinner. Then she refused to sleep with me on the grounds that I had asked other girls on the tour to marry me. The chairman remembered her. “She was rather short and stumpy,” he said. I’m afraid he was right, and I had let my romantic image of her run away, ignoring her colorific indulgence that had her eating a giant carrot at dinner and chocolate bars in between meals and matches.
Then came Ascot and disaster. In my host’s Tim Hoare’s box, I asked his 17-year-old daughter Cate for a tip, and she told me Rip Van Winkle could not lose. “What do you base this on?” I dared to ask. “His buttocks,” said Cate, “a race like this will go to the one with the strongest buttocks.” So I put on the biggest bet ever, and saw a horse named after a character who fell asleep for twenty years fall asleep right in the middle of the race. Needless to say I am now living in a council house having taken a 17-year-old’s advice on the importance of buttocks.
Worse was to come. I continued to double up betting with Pug’s president Nick Scott. After every race, having bet on horses whose names were not even revealed to me, I would ask Scott whether we had won only to be met with sepulchral looks and a negative shake of his head. A funny thing struck me, however. Dr Gimlet, as Nick is known among us Pugsters, never once showed me a stub or anything resembling. He simply shook his head and demanded more funds for future bets. Oh well, it could be worse. I could lose the council house basement flat with the crackdown on the unemployed. Nick Scott, in the meantime, has ordered a large Bentley and taken a very large boat for the summer, a boat that I will hole below the waterline or my name is not Taki.
So we come to the end of a disastrous week with the annual Goldsmith-Hanbury cricket match in Wembury House, Devon. Some of you may remember my description of the drunken orgy, sorry, house party of last year. This year it was even better. Never have I seen so many pretty young girls in one setting, even if Georgie Wells was missing. Best legs Lucy Day, best figure Mrs. Sebastian Lee, best all round Stevie Winwood’s beautiful daughter, sexiest CH, whom I pursued all night only to wake up fully dressed next to her sister FH, also fully dressed. Oh yes, I almost forgot. The cricket came down to the last ball after both sides had 30 overs. We lost to the Goldsmiths by one run, which was a moral victory in view of the fact Ben Goldsmith had loaded his side with ringers. Most unpopular, one called Forbes, an umpire who raised his hands with no purpose having watched cricket on TV. Biggest teaser a tall blonde who gave one the common in pursuit of illegal substances. Most romantic, Ned Lambton and Marina Hanbury. Man of the match Dave Hanbury, bust of the match Taki, although defensively a Thermopylae in motion. Captain of the match, John Parry. Most debauched weekend ever, this one. Most sleepless weekend ever, this one. Biggest collective wet dream ever, this one. See you all at my wedding July 1.
We need to do our part to let BP know there are consequences for causing something like this… The more costly their punishment, the more money they will spend to make sure disasters like this don’t happen again. It’s plain and simple capitalism.
—Jonathan Davis of rock group Korn, who is refusing to gas up his band’s tour bus with BP fuel this summer and who also wants you to know his band is touring this summer
The stars are falling from the sky to save Planet Earth again. Uninvited or not, Hollywood’s fantasy clowns have chosen to send themselves into the middle of yet another real-life catastrophe. The red carpet is unrolling itself right into the sticky-icky Gulf of Mexico to address the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.
Though nearly all of them are technically little more than entertainers, Tinseltown’s luminaries are conscious and aware and engaged and involved in this issue. As philosopher Ashton Kutcher has opined, “I mean, we have to be conscious, like this is, this is not a right, it’s a privilege to be on this planet and using its resources, and we have to be smart about it.”
These self-consciously smart and privileged entertainers know that countless baby shrimp are suffering and that several pelicans are unhappy. They want to halt the impending dolphincaust, shrimpocaust, and pelicaust. They long to crouch down in the dirty sand and tell every last oyster that it’s going to be OK. They lose sleep at night knowing that already-endangered sea turtles are now facing even more danger. And what about the baby crawfish? Do these corporations not care about baby crawfish? No, because these corporations put PROFITS before the baby crawfish.
They know, man, that it’s like, not cool, dude, what’s going on in the Gulf. They hazily understand that this is a “political” situation. And that the environment is, like, a righteous cause to support. And that corporations are, like, not cool to support, whether or not mega-corporations support them for a living. As Kevin Costner, the dubious fistful of brains behind Waterworld, recently waxed so eloquently, “I’m just really, uh, happy, that, uh, the light of day is being, uh, has come to this and I’m very sad about why it is, but this is why it was developed, and like anything that we all face as a group, we face it together.”
Together we face these stars as they face us, all of us facing “it” together. They are here to help. They are here to heal. They are here to be photographed. They are here to clean the dirty oil out of our souls. They will sign petitions. They will make pledges. They will appear on posters. Above all else they are certain, however blurrily they define the terms, that they are doing good and the other guys are doing wrong.
And this is why they stink like dead pelicans to me. They are infusing a tragic situation with bilious brown geysers of sanctimony. They spew so much nauseating, holy-rolling, oilier-than-thou self-righteousness, you couldn’t clean it with one of Kevin Costner’s giant centrifuge machines. You couldn’t plumb its depths with James Cameron’s entire fleet of underwater robots.
Verily, who is more equipped to deal with real-life problems than people who are paid to pretend they’re someone else?
Monday night on CNN, Larry King, a living fossil who apparently knows a lot about fossil fuels, hosted a telethon called “Disaster in the Gulf: How You Can Help.” It was the most half-assed, lifeless telethon I’ve ever witnessed and should have been called “Disaster on the Tube.” The opening montage featured the compulsory images of an oily pelican whose facial features looked remarkably like Larry King’s.
Ultimately, some good will come of all these efforts—namely, these performers will feel good about themselves. And then they will fly home on giant, energy-efficient butterfly wings.
Not that the high-class yobs at British Petroleum have helped their own case, what with feigning concern “about the small people” and attending yacht races and whining about wanting to get their lives back. But it serves none of their reputedly rapacious corporate greed to let the leak continue. The leak is destroying their company while it muddies the wetlands. They have enough money and can buy sufficient numbers of scientists to have been able to plug this leak already…if anyone on Earth actually knew how to do it. Would anyone less flaky than a Hollywood star seriously believe that anyone is purposely dragging their heels about plugging this hole?
Unlike George Costanza on Seinfeld, I do not pretend to be a marine biologist. Unlike all the performers on Larry King’s telethon, I’ll concede that I know absolutely nothing about what caused the leak and what will stop it, so I can’t pass judgment about exactly who is right and wrong in this situation. I have read the Wikipedia entry about the sequence of attempts that have already been made to try and stop the leak, and it gave me a headache. I fear there may not be anyone alive who has a definitive answer and that the oil may only stop flooding the sea after a torturous process of trial and error.
Yes, corporate greed can be very ugly. But the same is true for theatrical vanity and uninformed arrogance. It’s been said that “real bad boys move in silence,” and the same can be said for truly good people. I suspect that in most cases, anonymous philanthropy has purer motives than the kind you see on TV.
A lot of unlistenable songs and unwatchable documentaries are going to come out of all this. Is it too much to expect that, at least once in a man’s lifetime, Hollywood celebs will simply shut up and not comment on matters about which they’re not qualified to comment?
Human beings who think they can save the Earth remind me of terminal patients who think they can save their life-support machines. In their blind egoism, they completely invert the natural state of things. We depend entirely upon the Earth, while the Earth could get along fine without us. We are but fleas on the Earth’s balls—one scratch, and we’re all gone.
But try telling any of that to a Hollywood actor.
Did you know that Osama bin Laden has twenty-five children? And that his Dad had fifty-four? (Osama seems to be number 17.) Bin Laden Sr. was careful never to have more than four wives at a time, though, divorcing older wives in order to marry younger ones, thus staying within the proper Koranic bounds. Like his son, he was a pious man, his great worldly success notwithstanding.
Fifty-four kids! Piety will do that for ya. It is a commonplace observation that religious populations are more fecund than irreligious ones: and that within religions, it is the most devout and most fundamentalist subgroups that have the highest fertility. A lot of us have been wondering how the demographic consequences of all that will play out across the coming decades. Will secularization and attrition contain the swelling numbers of the devout? Or will the religious inherit the earth?
Eric Kaufmann’s new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
Kaufmann got my attention with a previous book, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America
That repudiation was followed by the logically consequent triumphs of multiculturalism, affirmative action, mass Third World immigration, romantic xenophilia, and other manifestations of Euro-ethnic self-negation.
(Kevin MacDonald, the Judaism-as-a-group-evolutionary-strategy guy, took on Rise and Fall on VDARE.com last year. MacDonald’s view is that Anglo-Protestant America did not commit suicide, as Kaufmann claims, but was murdered by you-know-who. Kaufmann made a spirited reply which in my opinion gets the better of the argument. For my American Conservative review of MacDonald’s Culture of Critique
Kaufmann brings the same good analytical sensibility to his new book. He addresses the title question region by region: the U.S.A., Islamia, Europe, Israel. There is not much good news for secularists, nor even for liberal and moderate believers. Secularism is at present advancing steadily in the U.S.A., for example, but mostly at the expense of moderate congregations with birth rates close to those of the secular. Neither group is anything like demographically competitive with fundamentalist Protestant sects like the Quiverfull movement.
In the Gospel Community Church of Coxsackie, New York, the pastor has eight children, the assistant pastor eleven and parishioner Wendy Dufkin, to take just one example, thirteen.
Not quite up to bin Laden standards, but impressive none the less. And as newer groups like this establish themselves, older ones like the Amish and Mormons maintain their demographic vitality and low rates of attrition.
So it is elsewhere. Israel was, at its founding, quite aggressively secular, the intensely religious Haredim a mere trace element—one, furthermore, that regarded Zionism as a form of idolatry.
The founders of the new Jewish state considered the Haredim a fading relic, but they worried that anti-Zionist Haredi agitators would sway the Great Powers towards the Arab side…
Hence the many civic exemptions and privileges enjoyed by the Haredim. They were a mere relic, their numbers small—what did it matter if (for example) they were exempted from military service? As late as 1977, religious deferments numbered just 800. In 2007 they were 55,000—one in nine of the eligible age cohort. The social and political strains caused by swelling Haredim numbers are reshaping Israel. That the Haredim are easily out-breeding Israeli Arabs is a point in their favor, from the point of view of secular Israelis, but a small one.
One piece of good news is that the myth of “Eurabia”—a Europe with Muslim majorities by mid-century—is not supported by rigorous demographic analysis. “Most large Western European countries will be between 10 and 15 percent Muslim in 2050, though Sweden may approach 20-25 percent.” Bad enough, but not as dire as the predictions of the Eurabia propagandists. Even this forecast assumes that current rates of immigration will continue; but the recent electoral advance of Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands throws that assumption into question, pushing the Eurabia specter even further away.
Kaufmann’s book makes clear that the acute conflicts will in any case be not between Muslim and Christian, Jew and Arab, or religious and secular. They will be between the intensely devout on the one hand, with their Total Fertility Rates of four point something or five point something, and the nominally religious or irreligious on the other, with TFRs of one point something.
The secular-Jewish Kaufmann does not believe that fundamentalism can be stopped. His answer to the title question is yes, the religious shall inherit the earth. What an astonishing development in human affairs! Cultural historian A.N. Wilson (God’s Funeral
Looking into the future, what is doubly astonishing, if Kaufmann is correct, is that the religion dominating the world of our grandchildren will not be the subtle intellectualism of Christian seminaries—of a Tillich, a Niebuhr, a Küng. It will be the literalist-fundamentalist obscurantism of Muslim Salafis, Jewish “Ultras,” Young Earth Creationists, and Mormon splinter sects. In a world dominated by these closed-minded babblers, what place will there be for literature, science, free inquiry, or freedom of any kind?
God help us! Though of course, if fanatical devotion is what He wants, he’s more likely to help them.
In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel noted that silicon chips had been quickly doubling in transistor density, and forecasted that computers would continue to get twice as powerful every 18 months to infinity and beyond! (Or words to roughly that effect—”Moore’s Law” soon entered the realm of urban legend.)
Pixar’s computer animated Toy Story 3, released 15 years after the first mature computer animation movie, 1995’s landmark Toy Story about a little boy’s playthings who come to life when he’s not looking, has thus benefited from about ten subsequent doublings in computer firepower. So, is the latest sequel 1024 times better than the original?
Advances in technology eventually call forth artistic geniuses, but the lag time is unpredictable. The first commercial electric guitar, for example, went on sale in 1932, but it was initially used mostly to just make louder plinking sounds. It was 35 years until Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Arts apparently progress in S-shaped curves. At first, nothing publicly notable happens (for instance, the electric guitar’s 1930-1940s). Then there’s a rapid takeoff (rock music in the 1950s-1970s). And finally a period of diminishing marginal returns (the 1980s-2000s).
Unlike the surprising ascent of the electric guitar, the potential of computer animated movies was relentlessly foretold. By 1982, computer graphics mania had built to such a peak that Disney’s Tron was both the first heavily computer animated blockbuster and the first film whose preview was reviewed on the financial pages. (The Wall Street analyst’s verdict on Disney’s stock: Sell!)
Thus, 1982 turned out to be too early for computer-dependent movies. Yet, 24-year-old Disney cartoonist John Lasseter was electrified by Tron. He pitched to his bosses a computerized version of the nerdy kids’ book The Brave Little Toaster about five household appliances at a summer cottage who feel lonely when their beloved young master departs. Disney immediately fired him.
Lasseter wound up at a Lucasfilm spinoff called Pixar. Their hit movies (Toy Story 3 will be the eleventh straight to make at least $162 million domestically) always remind me of what Pixar’s oldest employees must have endured in the 1980s: heroic boredom.
I began writing two decades ago because my attention had been permanently distracted from corporate work by the tedium of waiting for early personal computers to recalculate spreadsheets. While my computer labored, I’d sneak a look at the newspaper op-ed page, and soon become engrossed in the logical flaws in some poor pundit’s essay.
Lasseter, I presume, is a man of steelier concentration.
By 1984, Lasseter’s team showed they could achieve a fuzzy sort of 3D solidity in the short Andre and Wally B. In 1986, Pixar delivered 90 seconds of perfection with Luxo Jr., a father-son tale about table lamps playing catch. In retrospect, it established Pixar as the guy alternative to Disney’s gay pandering to the daddy’s little princess market. Pixar movies are made by men who have managed to extend their childhoods (Lasseter says, “Every animator is a child at heart”) into fatherhood. Lasseter, for instance, has five sons, now ages 10 to 29.
It took nine years from Luxo Jr. until Toy Story, a period in which computers became, according to the most popular version of Moore’s Law, 64 times faster. Over that decade, everybody in show biz knew that eventually somebody was going to figure out what to do with computer animation. As I was walking my kids down the theatre aisle to see Toy Story on Thanksgiving weekend 1995, I could see—before we had even sat down—that Pixar had pulled it off.
Toy Story was an ideal match of subject (cheap plastic toys) to the computer technology of the mid 1990s, meaning that the exquisite effects available now barely matter. So, no, Toy Story 3 isn’t 1024 times better.
Still, Toy Story 3 is awfully good. Andy is going off to college, so Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and the gang get reluctantly donated to a daycare center. They’re welcomed to the idyllic Butterfly Room by a seemingly grandfatherly teddy bear (Ned Beatty) and his right hand man, Barbie’s beau Ken (Michael Keaton). But the old con-boss shunts them off to the Caterpillar Room to be pounded on by toddlers.
The prison escape plot mostly exists to give the toys something to do before the gorgeously sentimental conclusion has the audience sniffling. Yet, Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is now so confident that they show off by making a memorably complex character out of Ken.
Still, is it necessary for every Pixar film to strive to be a poignant masterpiece of mature wisdom? Yes, it’s churlish of me to complain, since they succeed so often, but wouldn’t it be fun if you didn’t know walking in that lately every Pixar film ends up bittersweet?
In a perfect world, we would be stuffed together in plastic tents under the hot sun, breathing in the dust, absorbing the music. We would gorge on carnie food, smoke dope, snort coke, eat mushrooms, ecstasy, and acid, hydrating with cans of beer. We would strip down to birthday suits +1, meet sexy strange lovers and copulate in the moonlight. We would purchase and consume and toss the containers as if the Earth herself were hungry for more garbage. We would band together into loose-knit tribes, wandering mile upon mile, day after day, an endless parade of ogling eyes and perked ears searching for that perfect moment—the song that hits so hard you burst into tears.
American music festivals are a long-standing tradition, a postmodern rite of passage is rooted in pilgrimage and peak experience. The blueprint for Bonnaroo—one of Woodstock’s more well-known offspring—was laid back in 1967, when fifty thousand kids were drawn to San Francisco for the Monterey Pop Festival. These kids were California dreamin’, yearning for a perfect world beyond stiff suburban routine—peaceful, egalitarian, in harmony with Nature. Two years later—when Woodstock enticed over 300,000 kids to turn a tiny New York farm town into a mud-spattered orgy porgy, pulsating to the beat—music festivals attained quasi-religious status. From Altamont’s acid-fueled ultra-violence later that year to Wozniak’s tech-savvy US Fest in 1982; from the gentle nomadic culture of Grateful Dead tours to the jock-driven rape scene at Woodstock 1999; America’s wide array of summer events caricature the many faces of each generation.
From my perspective as a temple technician, today’s faces wear a blank expression. I climb the stages during the day, then wander among the people as night falls—doing as the Romans do. I’ve been with Bonnaroo from the beginning, watching her evolve from a neohippie free-for-all into an elaborate, biomechanical pleasure machine with a finely-tuned money funnel. Like Las Vegas casino culture or Disney World, Bonnaroo’s temple of Entertainment is a parody of society at large.
In the upper middle class, fans populate a sprawling suburbia of tents and RVs, crawling out every morning to drop dollars on the central marketplace. 80,000 fans are worth $20 million in tickets alone. Once you add up prices that resemble dire inflation predictions—$6 pizza slices, $12 bug spray, and $40 t-shirts, not to mention phenomenal spending on gasoline, portable luxuries, and an avalanche of drugs—you start to see this sun-blistered target audience through the steady crosshairs of corporate interests.
For instance, Chase Bank credit-card holders were granted access to the “Chase Freedom Lounge,” where they could enjoy cool drinks and air-conditioning. There was the Ford Fiesta live video feed, or the Wheat Thins “Crunch Den” where you could get your picture snapped while munching free crackers (courtesy of the Altria Group). A boomtown economy has grown up in Manchester, TN, with such trusted names as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and BP providing for the created needs of festival-goers. As Bonnaroo co-promoter Jonathan Mayers told Billboard.biz: “We continue to grow our relationships with Fortune 500 companies.” Rock n fuckin’ roll.
Which begs the question: Is the integrity of Art compromised by corporate interests?
When I saw Rage Against the Machine play at Lollapalooza back in 1996, their backdrop was an inverted American flag tagged with “666.” It was an ominous warning that a predatory hegemony loomed on the horizon. A decade later, bands played Lollapalooza on the “Bud Light Stage,” the “MySpace Stage,” and the “PlayStation Stage.” Of course, Rage Against the Machine played the “AT&T Stage” in 2008. Is that why they call it a revolutionary act?
As the helicopter circled overhead throughout Bonnaroo—filming everything—I couldn’t help but wonder what fantastic behavioral studies are being done around this clever social experiment. A human ant farm, swarming from this stage to that stage. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether you see the logos or not—the logos see you, and they’ve got your number. Like the medieval Catholic Church or the visionaries of Silicone Valley, marketers are getting more and more creative at selling dim shades of your perfect world.
Of course, even the New Jerusalem needs a working class. Will they be stuffed into circus tent ghetto blocks, like those found backstage at Bonnaroo? Will broken air-conditioners create moldy saunas, will muddy drainage seep from the floor? Only God knows, but let’s hope that the Messiah’s balance of generosity with His bottom line shows more grace than AC Entertainment and Superfly Presents.
So why do people choose to work Bonnaroo, serving the coddled hordes? The same reason anyone goes to work in the morning. Whether peering over the fence at Patrician partygoers or polishing Nero’s toilet at the Hilton, there is an understanding that your “cool shit” is our bread and butter. As one of the better-paid stewards of the Church of Entertainment, I have to appreciate the fact that my checks don’t bounce.
Of course, workers who consider the finery of artist hospitality—the palatial regalia, fine liquors, and porcelain thrones of the 1%—may grow goblin green with envy.
Not me. I was invited to stay in The Grove. Founded by Atlanta riggers and surrounded by barbed wire, The Grove is sacred ground for a tribe of misfit elitists. I fit right in. It was us against all others. Climbing the main stage—we hang that badass Bonnaroo sign, by the way—was a sweat-drenched playground, as always. I loved the steel like hippies love crystals. I loved The Flaming Lips and The Crystal Method like superstars love clean cocaine. I loved Terrible Ted’s smoked brisket like Terrible Ted loves karaoke. From my reinforced bunker, I fell in love with the world, carving my own little niche on the dark side of Utopia.
I hope a good time was had by all.
When you’re losing bad on Afghanistan’s plains
And the critics dare to question your gains
Just roll to your geology and use your brains
And go to your gold like I told yer
—With apologies to Rudyard Kipling
Now that the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey have uncovered $1 trillion worth of stones in Afghanistan, the big question is: why didn’t the Afghan geologists burn the old Soviet maps the US used to go prospecting? If they had, Afghanistan could stay as it was. Now, it stands to be Afghanistan with Saudi Arabia thrown in. A gruesome thought. There is always the hope that the Pentagon’s experts are exaggerating. It wouldn’t be the first time the military (encouraged by eager politicians) played loose with facts to rekindle love in a war that the public no longer wanted to pay for.
Blame the Afghan geologists, who found mineral survey maps the Soviets left behind in 1989. (The Russians took the tanks, the missiles, the vodka and the troops. Why didn’t they take the maps?) Instead of destroying the diabolic documents, the geologists hid them from the warlords and Taliban throughout the 1990s. When the US invaded in 2001, they handed them over to the Americans. The rest, as they say, is mystery.
Lo and behold, the US—I mean, Afghanistan—is sitting on an estimated trillion dollars worth of gold, copper, silver, graphite and cobalt. There is also lithium, which may come in handy to treat depression among those who will be ordered to die for the new wealth. Let’s suppose for a moment there really are minerals worth $1 trillion dollars waiting to be plucked from the Afghan earth. (I love the figure $1 trillion. It smells like… victory.) Nobody is going to get his hands on all that rock without a fight. Not in Afghanistan.
Politics aside, it won’t be easy. They will have to dig through miles of earth to get at the stuff. They’ll need workers willing to, as the British say, “go down the mines” in a country where independent tribesmen don’t hire themselves out as day laborers. Then they’ll have to move the stuff down mountains without roads, past tribesmen who will take a cut, through the hands of government officials who will take a larger cut (did someone mention Karzai’s brother, Billy?) and then over one of the borders to the sea. Which borders are those? Well, the shortest route is through Iran. Uh, oh. The other way out is via Pakistan, whose president and his relations in Sindh will demand a hefty slice of everything shipped out of Karachi’s port. The rocks could go through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, whose stable and democratic governments will facilitate transport to… Russia. The only other way out is a tiny land corridor to China. But it seems the US has already leaned on the Afghan government to keep Chinese mineral contracts to a minimum. (The minimum is, I believe, zero.) The New York Times reported that American officials alleged that a recent Afghan minister of mines had taken a $30 million bribe to give China the right to dig for copper. Karzai fired him, undoubtedly because he did not ask for enough.
If the roads prove problematic, they could fly the gold, copper, and marble out of Baghram air base. The sound of all that wealth flying out may console detainees during water-boarding sessions. However, the cost of shipping heavy metals by air may cut profit. And surely this is about profit. In what I can assume was a tongue-in-cheek calculation, Alissa J. Rubin reported in the New York Times (“Afghan Officials Elated by Minerals Report,” June 15) that local reporters figured that dividing the $1 trillion bonanza by 29 million Afghans would yield $34,482.76 per citizen. Not bad for a country where $250 a year is big money. Yet, as you and I know, wealth in Afghanistan isn’t usually spread around in equal shares for everyone. I’d put it more like this: Karzai and family, $700 billion, warlords $250 billion, American and European middlemen the chump change. That would leave 28,999,005 Afghans with, well, exactly what they have now. Nothing.
Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks may not get along, but they can count. So, I suspect, can the Taliban, who will not be slow to point out imbalances in the distribution of mineral wealth. (Their Saudi benefactors have been getting away with it for years, so they may decline to make wealth sharing a general principle.) This is where the hordes of American civilian do-gooders and Army civil affairs officers come in. They already explain to Afghan villagers why the US military blew up their villages, how they should give birth, treat their families, raise their children, grow their crops (except opium, which they knew how to grow before George Washington planted his first hemp seeds) and generally behave as good Afghans. So, they might as well tell them they are better off if their country becomes a new kind of minefield yielding bounty for the Karzai brothers but not for them. They might even persuade them to head into the pits with flashlight hardhats and canaries.
It took the British and the Americans about two years to discover they could not govern Italy after they invaded in 1943, and Italy was not as foreign to them as Afghanistan is. Norman Lewis, a British intelligence officer in Naples, spoke Italian and had good relations with people of all classes and professions. Eventually, though, he gave up trying to police Italian corruption because he realized that “these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us.” Mussolini had said years before, “It is not impossible to govern the Italians—it’s useless.” The same could be said of the Afghans—with or without the supposed cornucopia lurking in the country’s bowels.
A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about “how we’re all WASPs now” made me realize that Brookhiser’s statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he’s saying. A journeyman author, long associated with NR, Brookhiser, to all appearances, is an upper-class WASP endowed with all the proper manners and tics. Nonetheless, for decades he’s been in the employ of the neocons, people who would hardly qualify as bon gratin.
A scene involving one of their leaders, John Podhoretz, sticks vividly in my mind. While in the employ of the Washington Times, where Arnaud de Borchgrave entertained him lavishly as a favor to his parents, the present editor of Commentary was known for his crude table manners and general loutishness. I recall seeing him in Borchgrave’s office slouched over his chair and (dare I be so frank) picking his nose while in conversation with the apparent boss. (Actually it was Norm and Midge who called the shots at the WT then.) But people like John Podhoretz are precisely the ones whom Brookhiser and other WASPs, and particularly those at The New Criterion, have been kissing up to for years.
This subordinate position certainly does not demonstrate the assertion that “we’re all WASP patricians now.” The fact is members of our onetime dominant ethnicity and its onetime social elite are down on their luck. They’ve been reduced to menials serving at the beck and call of other groups, and in the journalistic and media world, this means working for Jewish liberals and Jewish neocons.
Such a situation should distress the new class of menials (perhaps it does!), but as I’ve indicated in more scholarly venues, their fate is entirely deserved. Elites that melt into spasms of guilt or niceness and which fail to continue to produce figures of the caliber of George Kennan, the Tafts, Robert E. Lee, Henry Adams, etc are not going to continue to be around as social, political, and cultural leaders. In doing research for my book on multiculturalism, I encountered statistical information that showed the decline of WASPdom since the middle of the last century in just about every area of human endeavor. The exception here (and it’s nothing to be proud of) is the disproportionate white Protestant representation at the public trough, and particularly in the ranks of the GOP. The last significant WASP patrician in public service was our recent, unmissed president, George W. Bush, someone whose ancestry is almost as noteworthy as the evidence of his verbal ineptitude. Needless to say, W took orders, whether or not he understood them, from neocon control-persons.
Clearly we’re not all WASPs now; and in my book Encounters
Even that over-the-top critic of Jewish power, Kevin MacDonald, has hardly scratched the surface in delineating the nastiness with which the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants clawed their way to the top of the academic-media industry, on the backs of those they often despised. And all the while they appealed with brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.
This tactic worked like a charm because of the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of those doing the climbing and because of the mentality of those they supplanted. Apparently WASPs suffer from an onerous sense of guilt toward others whom their ancestors excluded or were alleged to have discriminated against. Other groups, particularly Jews, blacks, Irish Catholics, and Latinos, consider themselves to have been the victims of discrimination, and they therefore happily associate with the Democratic Party, as an in gathering of victimized ethnicities.
One may attribute the WASP’s far deeper sense of social guilt to any number of causes, but his ancestors were hardly worse than those of the groups whom he now worships as designated victims. Did African blacks treat their slaves better than did American slave-owners? What about the Muslims who dragged captured blacks eastward, to Arab countries, well into the twentieth century, when they weren’t enslaving European Christians, whom they captured in naval raids? When one of my students, who himself is predictably WASP, noted in class that his ethnic group lost influence in the US “because they practiced discrimination against other people,” I asked somewhat impatiently: “How the hell did everyone else get into the country?”
Certainly many other groups have been more oppressive than American WASPs. Human history is full of them. But no other group, except for their pathological German cousins, seems to enjoy quite as much as WASPs the ecstasy of wallowing in guilt. And no other group seems quite as easily swayed to engage in moral crusades, perhaps to atone for their past sins as racists, sexists, or whatever. Unfortunately these crusades show our WASP population at their worst, trying to save the rest of the world with confected “human rights” after laying waste to their countries. If there’s anything WASPs should feel inexpressibly guilty about, it is this Jacobin fervor that causes them to unleash wars on other societies in order to bring them the gift of American democracy. But for some reason my Republican WASP neighbors think such devastation is alright and may be redemptive for its victims. After all, blowing up non-democrats is not reprehensible in the same way as refusing to let other ethnicities into WASP country clubs or being against affirmative action for Australoid transvestites.
Although I’ve loads of respect for their Protestant antecedents, I can’t say that I like or respect this present generation of WASPs. And least of all can I understand why their elites, by the time I was in my teens and early twenties, began to feel guilt toward those who hated their guts. As a great Italian thinker Pareto pointed out about a hundred years ago, ruling classes fall not so much because of opposition from below as they do from disintegration from above. Or as the Russians put it, the fish rots from the head on down.
Sting’s ‘Symphonicity’ Tour
If his (somewhat troubled) reunion with the Police was more nostalgic than it was inventive, Sting’s current tour—with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra—is a liberating reminder of his extraordinary talent as a musician. While on some levels he is simply setting old songs (“King of Pain”) to new arrangements, Sting, along with New York bred-conductor Stephen Mercurio, have found ways to breathe new life into classics like “Russians” by prefacing Vince Mendoza’s stirring arrangement with the clamorous coronation scene from Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” giving the song a terrifically ominous setting. Symphonicity goes on all summer, and a studio recording will be released in July. Don’t miss it; Mercurio, for one, gave up performing with Rome’s Teatro L’Opera to be there.
The Kids are All Right, opens July 9
Lisa Cholodenko is the rare writer/director whose sex scenes are never gratuitous; in her latest film—starring Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo—sex once again complicates when one half of a long-term lesbian couple finds herself powerfully drawn to the previously anonymous sperm donor who fathered her two teenage children. Despite the fact that this is a movie about gay parents, it has no political agenda. Instead of preaching about alternative family, Kids stands apart as a story of middle-aged coupledom, casting an alternately fond and sardonic eye on its comforts, habits, and resentments. The characters are unexpected; the writing is not typical of mainstream Hollywood. Watch out, this could just be Oscar-worthy.
Midsummer Night Swing, Lincoln Center, New York City, June 29 - July 17
The twenty-second season of this al fresco dance party opens with a bang: a battle of the bands between George Gee Orchestra and the Bill Elliott Swing Orchestra. Can’t make opening night? Dance your feet off to the tunes of the Time Jumpers (July 1), the New Orleans Moonshiners (July 6), or the Wycliffe Gordon Sextet (July 10). And if you’re looking for something less jazzy, try the electronic tango of the Argentinean band narcotango (June 30), a bhangra night with D.J. Rekha (July 8), and Afrobeat with Femi Kuti and Positive Force (July 12). Where else can you dance in the fresh air with world-class musicians leading you on? Added bonus: each party is preceded by a dance lesson, so there’s no excuse for cold feet.
Los Angeles Film Festival, through June 27
Unlike Cannes or Sundance, the Los Angeles Film Festival hasn’t captivated celebrities, the media, or even the local news. Also unlike Cannes or Sundance, LAFF genuinely nurtures young filmmakers instead of co-opting them, and encourages conversation instead of auctioning off potentially hot properties. This year’s festival will see 200 features, shorts, and music videos from more than 40 countries including the Pat Tillman documentary, The Tillman Story; Focus Feature’s The Kids Are All Right; and Revolución, a collaboration by ten renowned Mexican filmmakers. LAFF also screens short films created by high school students and has a special section devoted to music videos. And don’t forget the Filmmaker Retreat, Ford Amphitheater Outdoor Screenings, and Poolside Chats—this is one Hollywood gathering definitely not to be missed.
Whirl
Fred Hersch isn’t just one of the most talented jazz pianists out there, he’s also the most resilient. Two years ago he developed AIDS-related dementia, fell into a two-month coma, and lost all of his motor functions. Now, after intensive therapy to retrain himself to play, he’s back with Whirl—and how. While Hersch has traded some of his candor for a more temperate fluidity, the album maintains his unconventional rhythms, disdain for cliché, and ear for fashioning heaven-sent melody. The true gems are the title track, a vibrant homage to ballerina Suzanne Farrell, and “Still Here”—technically a tribute to saxophonist Wayne Shorter but also an almost heartbreakingly tender composition that amounts to a ballad of self-assertion.
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
True, there are plenty of addiction memoirs out there already, but what makes Bill Clegg’s specific version stand out is the riveting manner in which he convinces the reader he can, indeed, fall deeper and that somehow, we don’t know how, he will survive this horrific and terrific time. The story goes something like this: Clegg was a successful literary agent who moonlighted as a crackhead, then one day the crack took over, and his boyfriend keeps trying to save him. Predictable, but nonetheless, the author keeps us on our toes—if nothing else, he counts for one Clegg worth caring about.
miShare
At last. Now you don’t need a PhD in hacking to share your music with friends. Plus, it’s simple. Just connect two ipods to this device, and presto. Unless, of course, your files are DRM (digital rights management) protected. The only other hitch is that iPhones and the iPod Touch are not compatible, though apparently a firmware update is forthcoming. This puppy was developed in Brooklyn, New York and is currently being shipped to all corners of the world for a meager 100 bucks. Let the sharing begin!
OHWOW Book Club
The black-and-white tiled floor and the turquoise walls were inspired by a classic pre-war NYC water closet. Designed by Rafael de Cárdenas, the OHWOW is a creative collective spearheaded by Al Moran and Aaron Bondaroff. The OHWOW Book Club is located below street level in a historic brownstone on Waverly Place in Manhatttan. OHWOW’s vision is to create an arena for cultural projects, where people from the art/music/fashion/design/publishing worlds can expand their practices into different media and modes of production. OHWOW is a creative hub where artists can put forth their ideas and find the community with the necessary experience, skills, and resources to realize the project. According to their website, “OHWOW becomes brand becomes identity becomes community.”
Stagecoach (The Criterion Collection)
For the second time in four years, John Ford’s Stagecoach, the 1939 black and white B-western that made John Wayne a star and Monument Valley an icon, has been remastered and reissued in a two-disc DVD package. The eyes of Ford and Wayne lovers should thus light up like those of Doc Boone. The new release by Criterion includes a strange 1968 BBC interview with Ford, interviews on Ford’s colonization of Monument Valley and the death-defying work of stuntman Yakima Canutt, some Ford home movies taken aboard his yacht, and a radio adaptation starring Wayne, and Ford. The main reason for purchasing the Criterion edition is the superb transfer from the best existing prints (the original negative having long disappeared).
Alfred Stieglitz: the Lake George Years, Art Gallery of New South Wales, through September 5
Over 100 photographs by the pioneering American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) focuses on his career from the 1910s to the 1930s, a period during which he explored the people, landscapes and skies around Lake George, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where he spent the summer. Many of the images are on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to which his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe (pictured), gave the bulk of his work after his death. Stieglitz is best known for his effort towards making photography an acceptable art form, as well as for the galleries he ran in New York in the early 20th century where he introduced avant-garde European artists to an American audience.
Between Art Basel, the Royal Ascot, and the World Cup, most of the boldfaced names have fled New York this week. Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was naturally a fixture in Switzerland this week for the premier contemporary art fair, which gave a much-needed jolt to the floundering market. At the Design/Miami Basel show, Roman scooped up a sculpture titled “The Unbearable Lightness” by Tomas Libertiny. He was accompanied by flawless girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, who manages to juggle a dozen jobs and causes and take care of their young son. Oh, and the couple’s got another brand-new toy—a $486 million super-yacht that he’s trying to get up to his standards.
Lindsay Lohan is still haggling with her probation department over reports earlier this month that she set off her alcohol-monitoring bracelet. Lindsay tweeted foul, saying she didn’t have any drinks, and now one report is backing her up, claiming she visited Los Angeles police the next morning and tested negative for alcohol. And yet, there may be more than meets the eye. A conflicting report says Lindsay’s alcohol level was .04 when the bracelet went off—and that the pesky SCRAM was tampered with. If she did violate bail, she could be headed to jail. Tick tock, Lindsay.
It really is a summer of love and no one can avoid the royal wedding of the year. Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling are finally getting married this weekend, and the guest list is a worldly A-list affair. Set to attend Saturday’s wedding in Stockholm are Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Margrethe II of Denmark, Harald V of Norway, and Albert II of Belgium, Prince Albert of Monaco, and King Constantine of Greece, among others. The couple has been dating for eight years—and, if you’ll remember, Daniel used to be Princess Victoria’s personal trainer until his transformation into princely material. Princess Letizia of Spain and Victoria’s younger sister, Princess Madeleine, will also be there for the weekend-long celebrations, making this one of the year’s events to watch—at least from afar. 
Jude Law and Sienna Miller may still be going strong, but is there bad blood between the reunited couple and Jude’s ex-wife, Sadie Frost? Sadie allegedly tweeted an angry outburst after her nine-year-old daughter received a haircut when out with Sienna. Sadie wrote “I think ya should get ya own child and then cut their hair,” then refuted the message and deleted her entire account. With Jude and Sienna hot and heavy again—and some saying they’re next to walk down the aisle—it might be wise to leave the tweeting to the young ones.
There’s a report out that Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s daughter will soon undergo a sex change operation (a la Chaz Bono) after living as a man. Eighteen-year-old Kathlyn Beatty, who’s attending college in the U.S., supposedly has a Facebook page under the name Stephen and told her parents she wanted to pursue her life as a man. One friend of the longtime Hollywood couple said Annette is still very close to her daughter, but the revelation is “crushing” Warren Beatty.
Paris Hilton has been relatively quiet lately, but that must be because she’s pursuing a new man. After breaking up with Doug Reinhardt amid reports that he was using her to get a reality show, Paris has been spotted for the past month with Cy Waits, the club owner of Las Vegas hotspots XS, Tryst, and Drai’s. At least she’ll always have a place to party?
Speaking of prospective couples, Richard Branson’s daughter Holly was snapped out with Glee star Matthew Morrison this week while the crooner was in town promoting the smash first season of the show. The two certainly make a good-looking couple, but would Mr. Schu get the OK from Holly’s billionaire father? We imagine he has high standards.
Sad news out of Hollywood: Despite being engaged, Rachel Bilson and Hayden Christensen are taking a break from their relationship. (Does that ever work?) Rachel walked the red carpet on Wednesday sans wedding ring, and when asked about summer wedding plans, she said “no, nothing.” Hayden might do well to patch things up with his bride-to-be. The one-time heartthrob’s press hasn’t exactly been good in recent years.
Now that Ugly Betty has ended, its gorgeous star has found a new project: marriage. America Ferrera is engaged to her boyfriend Ryan Piers Williams after dating throughout their time at USC. Ryan even cast her in his student films while in college. Aw, Betty.
And finally, after eight years of dating and a 16-month engagement, Calista Flockhart and Harrison Ford finally tied the knot earlier this week at a quiet ceremony at the home of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Indy finally found his lady. We bet this one will last.
Islamophobia—the tendentious term trips off the tongue full of clinical condescension.
The word implies that the “phobe” has a neurological problem, and that the accuser is a doctor. Islamophobia, it is suggested, is akin to those other irrational fears that we all carry within the darkest whorls of our cerebral cortexes—agoraphobia, claustrophobia, vertigo, arachnophobia, xenophobia, Oedipus Complex, and penis envy (the latter not to be confused with homophobia).
Many non-Muslims do feel an instinctive aversion to Islam. Ghostly green banners flutter at the margins of Europe’s consciousness—shivery folk-memories of the horns at Roncesvalles, catastrophe at Constantinople, Barbary slavers harrying coasts from Ireland to Greece, or the janissaries sweeping up from Anatolia to stab at Austria before being turned and broken by the Lion of Lechistan.
The continent that gave humanity humanism usually cannot comprehend Islam’s impersonality (the simplicity, rigidity, and aridity redolent of the desert), the droning avowals of orthodoxy (the architectural-puzzle, music-less mosques with their profusely patterned but un-peopled ceramics and exhortations in straggling script), a whole world of ‘empty’ exoticism associated with alienation, occupation, and oppression. G K Chesterton once said that if the world was a stage, the East would supply the scenery and the West the characters.
But despite these irresistible inferences, and modern disapproval of Islam’s ideas on women, homosexuals, and Jews, too many tie themselves in neurotic knots trying not to be “phobic”—writhing with guilt trying not to express thoughts they know they must not have, smiling ever more broadly while their eyes glitter with guilt.
“Islam is a religion of peace,” politicians and churchmen intone, out of happy ignorance of history, hunger for leverage, or in order to persuade themselves. Cynics who subject every Christian fable to scrutiny or satire—metaphorically tearing up the Turin Shroud, exposing venerated viscera as having belonged to rabbits, photographing crucifixes in urine or telling jokes about nymphomaniac nuns or pedophile priests—always stop short of extending their critique to Islam.
We do not see in BBC news reports “The Messiah Christ” or “The Grand Piano L. Ron Hubbard”, but we do see “The Prophet” inserted as a reflex before every “Mohammed” as if the 7th century warlord’s very personal visions were axiomatically true and above examination. In a May news story about the Islamo-obscurantists who assaulted a lecturer at Uppsala University, the reporter was at pains to point out they were protesting depictions of “The Prophet” Mohammed with the body of a dog.
An exhibition at the Science Museum, “1001 Inventions—Discover the Muslim Heritage in our World”, tells us that Muslims devised stone arches and carpets 2,000 years ago—which shows great foresight, considering that Islam itself would not be invented until the 6th century. Muslims also allegedly named the stars and told us the earth was round—although these astronomical arcana were lifted from earlier Greek texts. And the exhibition dodges the killer question—what have they done lately?
In 2004, in a speech advocating Turkish EU membership, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw differentiated between “so-called Christian heritage states” and “Islamic heritage states.” He knew what everyone knows—that adherents of the “so-called” religion invariably roll over and play dead, whilst some adherents of the other try to ensure that critics don’t just play dead.
Similar motivations may have operated on a later Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, when he agreed with Home Office mandarin Sir John Gieve that there should be no official inquiry into the 7/7 bombings in London. According to papers just released, Gieve felt it could cause “community tension…if it was believed that it focused negatively on the Muslim community…We want something low key and probably non-statutory.” Would Clarke have been so cautious with Christians?
Speaking of criminals, on June 8 the Times reported a study by the Chief Inspector of Prisons which found prisoners are converting to Islam to obtain status or perks—like being excused work in order to attend prayers. There are dark rumors that some prisoners are being intimidated into converting, but others gave pleasanter reasons for their new-found interest in spiritual matters, such as “I’ve got loads of close brothers here. They share with you, we look out for each other” and “Food good too.”
“Islamophobia” is a mischievous misnomer and in any case the real or alleged “phobia” is not the point. At its heart, the bitter battle now beginning over Islam is an old-fashioned question of force majeure and comparative advantage—a question with sadly all too much relevance for Europe’s future.
It was like seeing a handsome woman of a certain age turn into a monster, her wrinkles gone, her skin cranked once too often, rendering her unable to wink or blink. This is Ascot – only nouveaux riche refer to it as Royal Ascot –a once great social and sporting meeting, now a place for the vulgar, the pulled and the very nouveaux.
Never have I been as disappointed, at least not since meeting Shirley MacLaine in person. (You stepped on my foot, ya fuck,she said to me. I should have stepped on your foul mouth, said yours truly.) I used to attend every year with old friends like Lord Lucan –infamous for his ancestor’s role in the Charge of the Light Brigade, and even more infamous later on for murdering his nanny while trying to murder his wife – Charles Benson and the sporting baronet, William Piggott-Brown. Everyone who was anyone was there, but actors, celebrities and other such lower professions were not given access. Toward the mid-Seventies things began to change. I noticed a trendy tailor- Michael Fish – and an actress, my old girl friend Joan Collins, both in the royal enclosure, as it’s called. There one has to wear tails and a top hat, while ladies need headwear and not too much skin exposure.
It’s been all downhill ever since. Last Tuesday – fortunately I was in a private box so I didn’t have to mix with hoi polloi – I watched as the Queen rode in her carriage and was cheered by the crowd. That crowd was straight out of a pop concert. Men wore their tailcoats and top hats but looked as comfortable in them as I would in a kibbutz. The women were ugly, trashy and very vulgar. Like many Brits, most were drunk. Ivana Trump looked like a German princess compared to some of the slags attending. Ivana herself was complaining about the cold and having lost her hat, a conversation which was intellectual compared to the other comments I heard.
Ascot’s downfall is due to sponsorship – the most dreaded word in English –and the fact that polite society no longer counts, only money does. Every spiv I’ve ever wished to get away from seems to have been at Ascot on Tuesday. I placed a few bets, lost, and then ordered my driver back to London. Never again. I even saw the girl who cuts my nails there, and she greeted me in her marvelous cockney manner, “Oi, Bunks, isn’t this great?” Well, no, it wasn’t and it will never be.
The May 31st kerfuffle over Israel’s interception of ships headed to Gaza brought forth some predictable reactions from the paleo-Right: Pat Buchanan, Stephen Walt, Ron Paul, and many others.
Of this crop, Steve Sailer took the most defensible position—one that at least did not willfully distort reality, or demand that Israel practice a forbearance that no rational nation could practice:
I haven’t had anything to say previously about that fatal Israeli naval encounter with the Gaza-bound flotilla on May 31, 2010—because I don’t much care. Israel is not the 51st state; it’s one of a couple of hundred other countries. If Israel wants to push around the Palestinians, well, that’s their business much more than it is my business.
Even that strikes me as somewhat disingenuous, though. Does Steve really think like that? Does anyone?
Here’s Steve-1 tomorrow morning opening up his newspaper. Headline: Population of Israel Wiped Out by Mystery Virus.
Meanwhile here’s Steve-2 at the identical moment in an alternative universe. His newspaper headline reads: Population of Tajikistan Wiped Out by Mystery Virus.
Are Steve-1’s and Steve-2’s reactions to those different headlines precisely the same? I don’t believe it.
Each of us has a mental map of the world colored by partiality, some of it reasonable, some merely emotional. If we are patriotic, we will feel more warmly towards a nation that trades fairly with us, cooperates to some degree in international projects we undertake, and shares some commonality of history, culture, or values with us. Contrariwise, of course, if you believe, as a liberal once told me he actually did believe, that your country is the most evil that ever existed, you will feel affinity with foreign nations whose leaders share that view.
At a level below all that, there are sentimental attachments of the blood-and-soil type. Even third- and fourth-generation Americans who disdain to hyphenate themselves will, when reading of events in the Old Country, hear some faint echoes of grandma’s stories, see shadowy images of old photographs in the mind’s eye, recall a childhood visit to great-grandad’s home village.
Our attachments ripple out in overlapping chains of diminishing concentric circles: family, extended family, town, state, religion, ethny, nation. The ripples don’t, for most of us, stop at our nation’s borders.
I’ll speak for myself here. America’s my country, and the only one I’d be keen to fight and die for if the peril was great enough to need my sorry old hide set against it. I feel strong extranational attachments, though: attachments on behalf of which I’d be willing to give up money or time—or even, under conceivable circumstances, want to see my country commit warlike acts.
There’s the Anglosphere, that great collection of British-settler nations, together with Britain herself, in which I feel most at home, and which, in my opinion, have attained the fairest, freest, and least corrupt systems of government ever known to man.
Beyond the Anglosphere there is Western civilization—nations culturally descended from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Germania, Byzantium, medieval Christendom, and the Enlightenment.
Out beyond even that is civilization itself: human beings living in organized nations or empires under rational government, with schools and libraries, doctors and engineers, judges and policemen, commerce and scholarship. I believe I can imagine fairly well what life is like under barbarism. I don’t want any part of it. (Though I do understand that for some people, in some historical circumstances, barbarism can be the better choice.)
Sure, there is plenty to be argued about in this zone.
* Should we give cash aid to Israel? (Me: No—I’m against foreign aid in almost all circumstances, and I don’t believe our aid does anything for Israel that Israel couldn’t do for herself. Many Israelis agree with me.)
* Does the skill and wealth of pro-Israel lobbyists cause undesirable distortions in our foreign policy? (Me: Probably; though given constitutional protections for lobbying, it’s hard to see what can be done about this. America’s traditions of romantic optimism and missionary endeavor in any case generate far more and bigger distortions.)
* Does the high proportion of Jewish Americans in the senior punditocracy distort the national discourse on geopolitical topics? (Me: Possibly, though a lot of them are leftists who wouldn’t sit on a diner stool next to Benjamin Netanyahu.)
* Does Israel spy on us? (Me: Of course. Everybody spies on everybody. I hope we spy on them.)
* Would Israel act against our interests, if they thought it was in their interests to do so? (Me: Duh.)
It remains the case that any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles. It is also indisputably the case, as has often been said, that if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest were to lay down their arms, there would be peace in Palestine, while if Israel were to lay down her arms, the Israelis would be slaughtered.
At some level, I’ll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me—how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it.
That just takes us back to Steve-1 and Steve-2, though. The Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It’s an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I’d like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.
There’s an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo.
Is there anything worse than listening to those hucksters in South Africa going bananas over the ugly game called football? Modern society is dominated by emotion and propaganda, not to mention profit, and when all three are combined what we get is the World Cup. Technicolor pictures of fat men and women jumping up and down while blowing into a contraption called vuvuzela dominate the front pages, as if an order had come from up high to feature the most boorish and the fattest, cheering for the most foul mouthed and overpaid.
Posturing peacocks spouting gibberish go on ad nauseam about the brilliance of holding the cup in South Africa, a once wonderful country whose people will revert to murdering white farmers and each other the moment the hucksters move out. Papa Hemingway said that one goes broke slowly, then suddenly. The same goes for culture. It started in the sixties, whiteness becoming a bad thing, and it’s been downhill ever since. All those who stand in the way of political correctness and Third World immigration are on the firing line, with special protection for racial minorities, alternative lifestyles, feminists, and whatever else the Left is about nowadays being paramount.
I must admit I snuck a look. I’ve never liked the game, although I was captain of my school team in my senior year, and goalkeeper to boot. So I felt badly for the England goalie, but the new ball is playing tricks. (FIFA and Adidas change it every four years in order to make more moolah.) I am fascinated by that swollen-nosed, non-stop f-worder Wayne Rooney, a man obviously conceived by a chimp with a dose of the clap. He sure can play, but he is to vulgarity and crudeness what Hogarth was to squalor. His torrent of obscenities against all and sundry is a shining example for our youth. Otherwise, it’s one big bore. Greece vs. South Korea was as boring and bad as Slovenia against Algeria, and Serbia playing Nigeria was no better.
FIFA is a con, a money-making con which pretends to be a link between nations and cultures. It’s nothing of the sort. FIFA is the Goldman Sachs of sport, the Olympics being JP Morgan. Too many teams is the problem. The World Cup should be 8, possibly 16 teams, and it should take two weeks at most. The rest is all about moolah, political correctness, and the opportunity for hacks (Rob Hughes, a very knowledgeable football scribe) to write such immortal lines as the following: “He is 25, born after apartheid ended, and quite possibly he was meant to score this goal…The nippy winger, just 5 foot 7 inches, tall and slender as a reed…” Gee, and I, at 5 foot 9 inches, have always thought of myself on the short side. But I’m not black, nor South African, and I guess that makes me one of the short, the bad, and the ugly. Black is beautiful, although my old buddy Jean Marie Le Pen may disagree. Le Pen caused outrage when he pointed out that the French team that won the Cup in 2002 was nine-tenths black, but Christian charity saved him from the hangman.
But enough about football. Back here in old England, things are looking up. An annoying wordsmith midget complains about becoming a grandfather and it becomes big news. I have good news for him. Another midget across the channel has banned tall bodyguards, so if words ever fail Martin Amis, he can always get a job acting as a heavy for Sarkozy. And speaking of politics, if there is a Greek general around with some ambition, I have an idea for him. A military coup. Yes, yes, I know, those things don’t happen in Europe any more, but hear me out. The Greeks are angry and ready to revolt. The rescue by the EU bankers is to be borne by the debtors, while the French and German banks become the beneficiaries. Why should the Greeks suffer in order to save foreign banks, is the ambitious general’s cry to the people. Why not quit the EU, default, repudiate the euro, restore the drachma, and devalue? He moves the tanks toward the parliament building and his tankers are showered with flowers by the mob. He then takes over the TV stations and addresses the Greeks. “Our exports will become competitive as I speak,” he roars. “Greece will become the site for everyone’s factories overnight. With our currency devalued we will once again become the most attractive destination for the world’s tourists.” The place goes wild and he then asks the exiled King to assume the throne. Constantine refuses, but by now the game is up. The next day I am named minister of propaganda, and my first speech contains such gems as “ For far too long the global elites who seek to reduce our nation to ethno-cultural enclaves in a new world order run by bloodless bureaucrats, have had it their way. Their loyalty is neither to the land nor people whence they came. This government will restore your sovereignty. I swear it, or may I die trying.” I am mobbed on the way to my favorite taverna, and get very drunk on retsina, the peoples’ drink.
Well, it ain’t gonna happen. Greek generals are too fat and too soft and they retire much too early with a good pension. Mind you, it would be the most popular coup ever. Next week I will tell you about a great Indian tennis player who played 101 matches at Wimbledon and is a great friend.
The first thing you need to know about pitching TV shows is, you are not going to get a show. Television is 1,000 burn victims trying to seduce a supermodel; what was considered an OK deal ten years ago looks like a lottery win today. The good news is, you get paid for each rejection. In fact, many of us burn victims make pretty good money getting rejected. Eventually, most throw up their hands and agree to work on someone else’s show but that’s giving up. So here’s ten things I’ve learned about the Sisyphean stage before that.
1) YOU NEED AN ENTOURAGE
Before you even get started, you need to get like Tyson and surround yourself with people who are going to take your money. Give an agent and a manager 10% each and throw a lawyer another 5%. They get this until you die. If you try to pitch a show without an entourage and it works, weird things will happen like your credit card will stop working and restaurants will tell you they’re closed even though you can see people in there, eating (people who play the game).
2) GET AN ARC
I could write a funny show about accountants with AIDS or a group of teenage girls in Bavaria. I don’t give a shit what the context is because it’s just a springboard for jokes. Unfortunately, “Who cares what it’s about?” doesn’t exactly blow minds so you need to know each character intimately, have a dozen hilarious anecdotes about each one, and know how they’re going to evolve over time. The easiest way to do this is to actually go out and write the thing. It’s only thirty pages. Just don’t tell anyone it’s finished because that’s what you’re trying to get paid to do.
3) GET A PRODUCTION COMPANY ON BOARD
You need someone who’s done this before at your pitch meeting because when the show flops, the guy who gave you the check needs to prove to his boss he didn’t throw money away. This means the production companies wield enormous power and you have to actually go pitch them and get them interested before you can go pitch the networks.
Special note: Once you choose a producer, there’s no turning back and you have to take them to all your meetings so figure out what network is most likely to say yes to your show and choose a production company that network already likes.
4) DAZZLE THEM IN THE PITCH
Don’t panic. Network execs do not have high hopes when it comes to meetings. It’s usually just the writer reading his pitch aloud from a piece of paper and even when a celebrity comes by it’s usually just to say, “Hello there.” If you rehearse the shit out of it and treat the whole thing like a Carrot Top show, you’ll get a pilot. I know of one guy who just got a pilot-development deal because he built a miniature model of the town the sitcom will be in.
Of course, it’s not unusual for the network to take a pitch meeting just because they’re bored. I was pitching a “Jackass 60 Minutes” show with Johnny Knoxville and we met with Spike/Comedy Central head honcho Doug Herzog. About two minutes in I realized Herzog only took the meeting because he wanted to talk to Knoxville about how awesome Willie Nelson is.
5) MENTION IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA
I’m not exactly sure why but broadcasters are into this show like zombies are into brains. If you mention it in a pitch, you will see eyes light up like fluorescent balloons and ideally, it will be the only thing they remember when they think of your name.
6) CATER TO THE BROADCASTER
Every network wants something very specific so cater your pitch accordingly. If there are kids in the show, cut them out of it when talking to an everyman network like Comedy Central. “Family” is their No word. Cut all the female characters out of your pitch when talking to Spike and if you’re at FX, make it appealing to everyone over 40. IFC is becoming a comedy network so if you make them laugh their asses off, they’ll figure something out. And MTV will most likely say yes if you agree not to swear and can cater to 16-year-old girls but when a broadcaster’s paying upwards of $5k per pilot, they can’t afford to be choosy. Pitching MTV is kind of like a burn victim hitting on a supermodel burn victim.
Mainstream networks like NBC, CBS, etc. are obviously not interested in rookies but you’d be surprised at how completely and totally impossible it is to even go near HBO. Despite their raucous content, the pitch room over there is more like the LGBT department of the yearbook committee complete with clipboards and scowling faces. Jackass was originally pitched to them and the tension in the room is the stuff of legend today.
7) THERE ARE NO HIGH FIVE MOMENTS IN TV
Did the pitch go amazing and everyone was on the floor in tears? Sorry, no high five. If it’s time for a cowboy show and that’s not what you pitched, it’s out of everyone’s hands. If they say yes to a written pilot, you can sort of high five but it still doesn’t mean they’ll want to shoot it. If they decide to shoot the pilot the odds are still very high it won’t go to air so, again, no high fives. Finally, say they buy a few episodes and it goes to air. You still need to keep your fives low because they may still kill it by quickly moving it to a new slot as Comedy Central did with David Cross and Jon Benjamin’s Freakshow (back in “Killer of Comedy” days). The only real high five moment in TV is when it gets picked up for a second season but as Zach Cregger from The Whitest Kids You Know put it, “At that point, you’re so beat, you just say, ‘All right, back to work.’”
8) FAILURE IS SUCCESS
I shot a pilot for Showtime that went nowhere. Did the same for Current TV and it was rejected. I developed a show for Planet Green they didn’t want, wrote a pilot for Adult Swim that got a “No” and received the same response for the one I gave Comedy Central. However, simply writing a pilot usually garners about $25k. Shooting a pilot nobody wants does even better. The networks OK about 50 pilot scripts for every one they take so failing is a given at this point. It’s a job that’s based on being fired. In fact, I know writers who don’t even want their show to be picked up because they don’t want to move to LA. Dan Harmon is one of the few writers to crack the code and went from co-creating Sarah Silverman’s show to getting his own show on NBC called Community. But even Harmon admits the job is ridiculous and created a website/short film festival called Channel 101 that lampoons the whole process by airing fake failed pilots and cancelled shows.
9) THERE’S NO MONEY IN COMEDY
Before it was cancelled, the hilarious Sarah Silverman Program cost $1m per episode and garnered 200,000 viewers. Demetri Martin’s show is their other big hit and it gets about twice that for a slightly lower cost. One of the funniest shows on television, Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job, is lucky to get a tenth of Sarah’s viewers. Take a show like History Channel’s Pawn Stars on the other hand, and the network’s looking at shelling out $250k for 5 million viewers.
10) HAVE HALF A DOZEN SPINNING PLATES
Once you get an OK on your deal, know that it is going to sit on a lawyer’s desk for the better part of a year. I’ve tried ripping the contract out of the lawyer’s hands so I can solve the problems myself but got lost after the first, “Heretofore the second party not withstanding shall, at the behest of the subject whence it cometh…” This is especially frustrating because without a finished contract, there’s no check. I remember seeing a writer (who won’t let me use his name because his show’s still on the air) exasperated about the rent his credit card was spending waiting for his show to go through legal. He had booked a production company and was also paying for them to wait around. “What the hell do other people do,” he asked, “move back in with their parents?” We both realized what everyone who’s trying to make money in today’s economy has realized: You gotta hustle. In other words, the only possible solution is to have tons of shows on the go at once.
That’s right. You have to assume this show isn’t going to go past the written pilot and start getting conflicting deals simultaneously. If, by some unprecedented piece of super-luck you find yourself with networks wanting to make several of your shows at once, you can deal with it then but tell me, when was the last time you saw a burn victim with too many supermodels on his hands?
I live in Georgia. My congressional representative is Hank Johnson, a Democrat whom I am unafraid to call stupid. In April at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, Johnson expressed genuine concern that sending more personnel to Guam would cause the island to “tip over and capsize.” After watching that comment issue from Johnson’s lips, I was certain he was the most mentally impaired politician in recorded history.
Since I live in Georgia, I can see South Carolina from my kitchen. After last week’s Palmetto State primaries, it is now apparent that Hank Johnson was merely John the Baptist announcing a frightening new idiocratic covenant—a dim-witted little voice in the wilderness prophesying the arrival of a figure whose cognitive deficiencies are so vast that they transcend mortals’ understanding.
Unemployed Army vet and accused sex offender Alvin Greene (D-SC) burst onto the national political scene last week with all the wit and charisma of a musk ox, trouncing his more-established and melanin-deficient opponent Vic Rawl. Greene had run little or no campaign on what apparently was little or no intelligence, yet he clocked 59% of the votes and will face Republican Jim DeMint in November.
Greene reportedly has served as an Army intelligence specialist. He is also South Carolina’s first black candidate for US Senate from either major party since Reconstruction. Despite all that, his epically stammering and not-all-there TV appearances since winning the nomination have revealed a man for whom the term “intelligence specialist” might not be entirely appropriate…a man with, at best, a very cloudy and heavy-lidded awareness that he’s in a room somewhere, answering somebody’s questions.
In fact, Greene appears to be so undeniably under-endowed in the brain-cell department that even those who’d normally support him are scrambling for ways to explain away or even invalidate his candidacy.
Greene seems so monumentally stupid that even Keith Olbermann couldn’t pretend everything was hunky-dory. When CNN’s visibly flustered Don Lemon mentioned that some politicos had suggested Greene was mentally impaired, all Greene could muster was a defensive, “They’re the knuckleheads.” Well, nyah-nyah to you, too, mister.
Greene evinces a once-in-a-lifetime stupidity that is so in-your-face, there is no explaining it away. When Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) asked whether the Mars Pathfinder took pictures of the flag that Neil Armstrong had planted on Mars, the story was gently buried. When Hank Johnson worried about Guam capsizing, that embarrassing li’l blast of “brain fog” was quietly blamed on his Hep-C treatment regimen. But after Greene fathered countless pregnant pauses live on national television, it’s absurd to deny it—Alvin Greene is, as Fred Sanford would say, a dummy. He “takes it to that ‘nother level,” as the blacks are fond of saying.
He even breeds stupidity, because now I feel like an imbecile for being incapable of figuring out why he comes off so stupidly.
Alvin Greene is so inexorably, unavoidably, ineluctably stupid that even liberal-leaning people are doing what might have been unthinkable a decade ago—calling him dumb although he’s black. They’re demanding investigations to unearth the shady redneck Republicans who planted this black idiot as their stalking horse. They speculate about dark conspiracy theories wherein cruel and guffawing white hatemongers set up this mentally handicapped black man to run for the US Senate as if they were high-school pranksters asking Carrie White to the prom.
Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) went so far as to suggest that “shenanigans” are afoot. One blogger hinted that “skullduggery” may be to blame. There are also whispers that chicanery, double-dealing, hanky-panky, and a fair degree of furtiveness may somehow be involved. However, Gavin McInnes insists that Greene is not a plant—he merely has the IQ of one.
In a week we’ll probably know more answers, but for now all the unanswered questions are what make his case so compelling.
The most obvious question is one that I’ve seen no one come straight out and ask:
What if he’s simply very stupid and the South Carolina voters were sufficiently stupid to nominate him?
What if there are no strings being pulled, no back-room deals, no subterfuge, and no Manchurian Candidates in this equation? What if Machiavelli sat this one out and the blame lies squarely on a lot of very, very dumb people?
There are some simpler explanations for Greene’s nomination that don’t involve intrigue, manipulation, and electronic fraud:
• His name was the first one on the ballot.
• His opponent was the demonstrably Caucasian Vic Rawl, and, as impolite as it may be to suggest, black voters tend to vote with their skin.
• At least one voter says she picked Greene because she thought he was singer Al Green.
Is it too much to think that maybe Alvin Greene and his supporters can’t think too much?
What if he and his supporters are simply a bunch of simpletons?
What appears to be the most ghastly and imponderable scenario may also be the least complicated and most sensible: Alvin Greene became South Carolina’s candidate for US Senate not due to a handful of smart people pulling strings, but because of a hundred thousand dumb people pulling levers.
Even lifelong Democratic pol Steny Hoyer, majority leader of the U.S. House, is balking at Barack Obama’s latest bailout proposal.
“I think there is spending fatigue,” said Steny. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”
Hoyer was referring to Obama’s weekend letter to Capitol Hill calling for a $50 billion bailout of state and city governments, to spare our elected politicians the pain of balancing their budgets with their own tax revenues.
Obama calls it an “emergency” measure to prevent “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters.” Yet, none of the 20 million state, county or municipal workers can lose their job unless an elected legislature and a chief executive agree that they should go.
Obama is calling for a taxpayer rescue of the political class to which he belongs, to spare it the painful duty tens of thousands of business executives have had to perform. Private employees—25 million of whom are out of work, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs—may be expendable, but government workers are not.
As America is running a second consecutive deficit of $1.4 trillion, however, the U.S. government has no tax revenue to send to the cities and states. We would have to borrow the $50 billion from China, Japan and the Persian Gulf nations.
Obama is thus asking Congress to deepen America’s fiscal crisis and put the next generation on the hook for another $50 billion so today’s mayors and governors can get an exemption from their political duty.
Where is the justice here?
Government workers enjoy far greater job security than private-sector workers. At the state and local level, their average pay and benefits, about $40 an hour, far exceed the $27 per hour in the private sector. The federal worker has it even better, receiving $30,000 a year more in pay and benefits than the average worker in the private sector.
Obama’s proposal is thus about taking care of his own and the Democratic Party’s political base.
Consider. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union of America and other government unions in the AFL-CIO are all powerhouses of the Democratic Party.
Obama is proposing a $50 billion payoff for his own voters.
Democrats are the Party of Government. The more government programs and agencies there are, the more government bureaucrats and beneficiaries there are. As government grows—it now consumes close to 40 percent of the entire economy—the larger and more solid the base of the party becomes.
In Washington, D.C., the largest employers, far and away, are the U.S. and D.C. governments. They dominate the city, which is why city elections are so one-sided. The district has the only three electoral votes never to have gone for a GOP presidential nominee.
Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, in their 49-state landslides, did not carry 20 percent of the district’s popular vote. John McCain got 6.5 percent.
As Democrats are the party of government, Washington, D.C., is the capital of the Democratic Party as well as the nation. When the rest of America suffers a depression and recession, Washington knows prosperity. An economic crisis for the country means job opportunities here.
But there is a more critical reason Congress should reject Obama’s “Save-Government-First!” policy.
The fiscal crises gripping Europe and America, which could portend a crisis of Western democracy, was caused by the unbridled growth of government. And it cannot be cured without a rollback of government programs and a downsizing of government workforces on both sides of the Atlantic.
As Greece is staring at unpayable debt because of government’s conferring of jobs, benefits, salaries, pensions and health care the tax base could not sustain, California and New York are in the same boat and headed for the same reef.
Once the richest and most populous of states, both now face a steady exodus of business and taxpayers. But, of the people coming in to enjoy the cornucopia of benefits these states provide, many lack the skills, education or earning power of those departing.
And why should states like Virginia, that said no to many benefits, have to bail out the spenders in Sacramento and Albany who could not say no?
For the U.S. government to bail these states out again, as Obama did with his $800 billion stimulus, would only be to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning, to deepen the federal fiscal crisis and to raise the odds further that America herself will one day have to default.
In the recession of 1981, Ronald Reagan, with his across-the board tax cuts of 25 percent, bet the ranch on the private sector—and won his gamble.
Obama, with his $800 billion stimulus, bet it all on the public sector. It appears not to have worked. Now Obama wants to double-down.
The astringent new romance film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky might be the arthouse equivalent of that often-proposed high concept blockbuster Superman & Batman. Instead of “Who would win in a fight: Batman or Superman?” Dutch director Jan Kounen delivers: “Who would win in an affair: Stravinsky or Chanel?”
In the 1913 prelude, the ambitious young dress shop owner attends the most celebrated classical music event of the last century, the Ballets Russes’s Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring. To her bemusement, a riot breaks out between the avant-garde claque who had received free tickets from the wily impresario Sergio Diaghilev and the paying customers, who are outraged by Vaslav Nijinsky’s angular choreography and Stravinsky’s polyrhythmically pounding score.
Ever since, “Le Massacre du Printemps” has been portrayed as inaugurating a new golden age of music. Yet, looking back from the 21st Century, The Rite seems more like the grand finale of two centuries of musical glory, the greatest run any civilization has enjoyed in any artistic field.
In 1920, the White Russian composer is back in Paris, down at the heels after the Bolsheviks stole his homeland. At a party with Diaghilev and a man named Dmitri, he meets Chanel. She offers to put him, his tubercular wife, and their four children up at her gorgeous Art Nouveau villa in the suburbs.
At first, he refuses due to the impropriety. Although The Rite’s debut was the most famous triumph of the bohemian motto “spatter le bourgeois,” Stravinsky was himself a starchy bourgeois, a modernist man of the right like T.S. Eliot, whose 1922 poem The Waste Land was likely influenced by The Rite.
Stravinsky eventually agrees to Chanel’s offer for his children’s sake. Mrs. Stravinsky, however, is not happy with being domiciled with France’s most chic exemplar of the liberated woman. Coco pursues him, and eventually Igor teaches her to play the simple right hand part in his new Les Cinq Doigts. Soon, they are making beautiful music together.
She gains the confidence to choose her new perfume—vial No. 5, not surprisingly—while he overcomes his composer’s block to venture into a neoclassical style that reflects her understated taste in clothes.
They break up, but she secretly gives Diaghilev the money to mount a triumphant revival of The Rite.
The last scene suddenly shifts to the early 1970s, when the protagonists are elderly celebrities separately inhabiting neoclassical hotel rooms (rather like the one in that unnerving scene near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the astronaut encounters his aged self). They pause to think briefly of each other.
A recurrent problem with musical biopics is that by the time the musician—whether Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, or Igor Stravinsky—finally triumphs over his personal demons, he’s over the hill creatively. Both Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Chanel (1883-1971) were vastly famous for the rest of their lives, but his peak was 1913. In contrast, she went on to make her greatest contribution, the invention of the Little Black Dress, in 1926.
This hazy bit of cultural history about the couturier and the composer furnishes director Jan Kounen with justification for an exercise in old-fashioned modernism, stylistically reminiscent in its enigmatic elegance of 2001 and its Soviet rival, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Stanley Kubrick used the fanfare from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss to anchor his ponderous and baffling classic about killer apes and space aliens, so why shouldn’t Kounen build his love triangle movie around The Rite’s polished primitivism?
Personally, I was held rapt for two hours by Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. I was enthralled by the Russian’s music, the Lost Generation clothes, the decor of Chanel’s villa, and by Anna Mouglalis’s self-assured performance as the designing woman.
On the other hand, most of the audience found the movie too austere, too reticent, too eerie. Nor does it help that the tall, handsome Dane Mads Mikkelsen plays the squat, funny-looking, self-promoting Russian as if he were the monolith in 2001. The soundtrack is superb but emotionally opaque, which is the way the great man wanted it. Stravinsky, who endlessly expounded to the press on the Meaning of Modernism, asserted that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all…”
The Modern Age is over, replaced by the Information Age, when expensive movies aspire to resemble documentaries. The abstraction of high modernism is now off-putting unless time-honored.
It’s hard in 2010 to watch this unforthcoming film without being pestered by a need for more data. Who are these people? Why isn’t there a narrator informing us of their back-stories? For example, who is this minor character named Dmitri?
Five minutes at home on Wikipedia reveals that he is Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, one of the assassins of Rasputin.
Now, that’s interesting.
It’s complicated to be simple. Neither in art nor in life does it come naturally.
Re-reading my thi