Arts & Ammo

Academies Without Creeds

That title could refer to just about anything touching higher education these days, creeds of any sort being deemed a chill on the intellect. This view is held especially by people who think themselves much smarter than everyone whose earthly life is over, who seem to think history is populated with dupes and fools and wisdom was discovered yesterday.

In this case, however, it refers specifically to Sandhurst. “Sandhurst” is shorthand for the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst where British Army officers are trained.

The Chaplain of Sandhurst, Reverend Jonathan Gough, has decided that the Apostle’s Creed must go lest religious minorities be offended. Cranmer doubts the rationale:

For Cranmer is just ever so slightly curious to know if, in fact, the Reverend Jonathan Gough had received any complaints at all. And if he had, to which faith group did the offended cadet(s) belong? And did he ask this/these offended cadet(s) if they might be prepared to forego their own declaration of faith, lest their colleagues be offended?

Sandhurst’s senior chaplain has withdrawn the Creed simply for fear of offending non-believers and ‘to stop upsetting cadets who do not believe in God’. And Cranmer would bet his withered right arm that no offence had ever been reported and no cadets had ever been upset. The Reverend Jonathan simply wants services in the Royal Memorial Chapel to be ‘more inclusive’.

Rev. Gough is simply one more intellectual lemming fascinated by the idea of replacing Christianity with soft and spongy “faith systems.” It is very much the creed of the modern intellectual to view truth as subjective and personal. That creed is zealously enforced in academic circles.

The apparent goal is to bring up an officer corps with no particular belief in anything other than their personal whims. To this budding generation of nihilists we will hand the keys of aircraft carriers and the nuclear arsenal.

Fortunately, the officer corps has always placed a premium on honoring its traditions, but we could have said that about the Church of England until recently. For now, I take some small comfort that academics and vicars do not have command of a single warship or missile silo, and I hope that the people who do can recite the Apostle’s Creed.

January 31st, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Ammo, Religion | no comments

Military, Welfare, and Tricky Dick

J.D. Pendry writes a blog from the perspective of a retired Command Sergeant Major. There are fools in the Army, but as a general rule they do not become Command Sergeant Majors. I enjoy J.D.’s writing and have cited it on this blog occasionally.

Recently, J.D. crushed his heel and went in for surgery. One of his readers, Will, took him to task for criticizing government social programs when J.D. himself benefited from government pay and benefits. J.D. wrote back:

You know Will, when I was working those long hours, holidays and weekends and moving my family lock, stock and barrel around the world every few years existing pay-day to pay-day and often on wages less than some received in welfare payments, I did not see it as participating in a “social” program. Although, I must admit, many politicians sharing your worldview attempted to make it so over my 28 years. I assure you, that the average American Warrior facing down our (your) enemies does not view his service as a social program.

But Will persists in the notion that any check from the government is a social program. According to Will:

Also I am sure you receive a monthly retirement pay check from the U.S. Government for you years of service to this wonderful country. Of course that again is another social program given freely by the tax payers for your service. I do remember you stating you have over 20 years in the military, I thank you for that, I also believe the taxpayer gladly paid you for that service with pay increases ..cost of living or promotions… Again the military is just another socialized program to take care of the men and women such as yourself for doing the service you have provided.

So all government workers are indistinguishable from welfare recipients, be they military personnel, FBI agents, Forest Rangers, judges, or members of Congress. (Well, okay, you can only take sarcasm so far.)

But if Will is right, and it’s all the same thing, then I’m sure he would have no objection to the government attaching a work requirement to all government benefits. Which puts Will in the same camp with Richard Nixon as an advocate of workfare.

So, it’s Friday, and I propose a get-well toast to J.D. The drink for today is

“The Tricky Dick”
Makers Mark
Sloe Gin
Peach Bitters

Ask a bartender at the EM Club for a free one, since booze there is dispensed from the government tit.

Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons

January 30th, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Leisure, Politics | no comments

Thermostatic Transparency

We were promised transparency and we should demand it. Here’s Obama’s policy:

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

But now we have this:

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat. “He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.

The answer is simple. Obama promised “‘unprecedented measures,’ including Internet postings, to allow the American people to see where the streams of dollars are flowing.” I suggest another site, www.whitehousethermostat.gov (don’t bother clicking just yet), that will constantly display the thermostat settings and indoor temperature of this government building.

After all, if the planet is at stake, then even a president should be able to tolerate slightly cooler temperatures. You betcha!

More at National Review’s Corner and Power Line.

January 29th, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | no comments

Suing for Depravation of Fantasy

Reality is cruel. Consider the case of Joe Hart. Reality delivered a bloody nose to Hart – literally – when he rode a U.S. Airways flight into the Hudson River two weeks ago.

It could have been worse, but that’s beside the point.

In addition to recovering losses, Hart says he’s concerned about having trouble flying. He’s flown on six planes since the accident, and each flight has gotten “progressively more difficult.”

He says he was tense, sweated and “felt every bit of turbulence” on a Los Angeles-to-Philadelphia flight last week, though it wasn’t that turbulent a flight.

Hart probably knew that stepping into an aluminum tube along with copious amounts of highly flammable kerosene in order to propel yourself cross country at 600 mph and an altitude of 30,000 ft carries with it some risk. But, like a lot of us, he preferred to pretend that the laws of physics and probability will never intrude. He wanted to sit quietly in his allotted 4 cubic feet in absolute certitude that the worst possible eventuality would be cold coffee, or no peanuts, or finding that a prior passenger already worked the crossword puzzle.

But after ditching in the Hudson, Hart can’t shake the feeling that flying is an unnatural pastime.

Surely the law will redress this and compensate Hart for the loss of his comfortable fantasy. Few things are more valuable than fantasies.

While Hart contemplates the making the legal system even more frivolous, I wonder if some PETA activist is considering suing all aboard that flight for conspiracy to murder geese.

H/T Kraalspace

January 28th, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Law | no comments

Those Were the Days?

Obama said in his interview with Arab TV:

“America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.”

But what we had 20 or 30 years ago was not a partnership, and even if we could restore it, why would we want to? Max Boot reminds us of the details of that “partnership”:

It turns out that in 1989 U.S. fighters shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, creating a vacuum that would eventually be filled by the Taliban. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death for “blasphemy.” Hundreds died in Lebanon’s long-running civil war while Hezbollah militants were torturing to death U.S. Marine Colonel William “Rich” Higgins, who had been kidnapped the previous year while serving as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon.

And 1979? That was an even darker year-in many ways a turning point for the worse in the Middle East. That was, after all, the year that the shah of Iran was overthrown. He was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who launched a war against the West that is still unfolding. One of the first actions of this long struggle was the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and all of its personnel as hostages. The same year saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the growth of the mujahideen, some of whom would later morph into Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This was also the year that Islamic militants temporarily seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an event that drove the Saudi royal family to become ever more fundamentalist.

Boot concludes that Obama needs to take a longer view and give up the easy analysis that the past administration created the tensions in the Middle East.

January 28th, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | no comments

Morning on the Mississippi

These photos were taken this morning.

January 24th, 2009 Posted by The Strafer | Visual Arts | no comments

Prosecuting the Messenger

A young Dutch writer discovered about 64 years ago provided a brutally honest account of her oppression and came to symbolize what Roger Rosenblatt described as “the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings.” In today’s Holland, Anne Frank might be prosecuted for such temerity.

The appalling decision to try [Geert] Wilders, the Freedom Party’s head and the Dutch Parliament’s only internationally famous member, for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” against Islam is indeed an assault on free speech.

Bruce Bawer chronicles the fall of a country that contributed much to Western art and culture. Pim Fortuyn, on the verge of becoming prime minister before his assassination, spoke out against the country’s accommodation of sharia law. He was labeled a racist and loathed by the liberal establishment. Theo van Gogh, another filmmaker to criticize Islam, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. Queen Beatrix skipped his funeral in order to visit a Moroccan community center. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, scriptwriter and member of parliament, tossed off the shackles of Islam and promoted women’s rights. She was deemed a “disruption.” She now lives in hiding in Amsterdam. Sound familiar?

In Dutch Muslim schools and mosques, incendiary rhetoric about the Netherlands, America, Jews, gays, democracy, and sexual equality is routine; a generation of Dutch Muslims are being brought up with toxic attitudes toward the society in which they live. And no one is ever prosecuted for any of this. Instead, a court in the Netherlands—a nation once famous for being an oasis of free speech—has now decided to prosecute a member of the national legislature for speaking his mind. By doing so, it proves exactly what Wilders has argued all along: that fear and “sensitivity” to a religion of submission are destroying Dutch freedom.

Dutch liberalism is moving beyond the useful idiot category and proving to be a whole class of Quislings.

January 23rd, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Film, Law, Politics, Religion | no comments

Change We Can Believe In

Eric Holder, Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, played a key role in the inexcusable pardon of Marc Rich in the last days of the Clinton presidency. Universal condemnation of that pardon caused Holder to take the position that he just didn’t know enough about who Rich was. A case of ignorance. Oops, sorry.

That was Holder’s story then, and it was his story in confirmation hearings last week.

Andrew McCarthy adds some well-documented facts that everyone seems to be ignoring:

To be clear, years before the pardon scandal convinced him it was in his interest to make like he barely knew Rich’s name, Holder had bragged to the media about how his office was cracking down on Rich, an international fugitive who had duped the government out of loads of cash. Contrary to his congressional testimony that he’d never heard of Rich before 1999, Holder had unquestionably been aware of Rich’s name and history four years earlier; in fact, it was solely because of Rich that Holder extracted a $1.2 million settlement in a federal civil action.

In “Unpardonable: Holder’s Marc Rich Shuffle,” McCarthy uses Holder’s own court filings and public statements to refute his protestations of ignorance. Holder knew exactly who Rich was. The only question is why Holder engineered a pardon so astonishingly at odds with the interests of the United States and so embarrassing to the outgoing president. (Well, okay, I guess you can’t embarrass Clinton, but it did cast a cloud over his last days as president.)

Oh, and there’s also the question of whether Holder’s prior testimony needs to be revised.

January 22nd, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Law, Politics | no comments

A Secretary of Unamerican Art

Creating a cabinet post for “Secretary of the Arts” is an idea born of a bad understanding of the cabinet and a worse understanding of the arts.

The idea is gathering steam, and I have been asked by several friends and colleagues to sign a petition supporting this new cabinet position. I decline.

The idea seems to have been advanced by well-meaning people, notably Quincy Jones, who believe that the creation of the post of Secretary of the Arts will somehow raise awareness of the importance of the arts. But other than the pure symbolism of elevating the arts to cabinet status, what is the purpose of a new cabinet position and what would be the government’s role?

The cabinet is not a collection of lobbyists. It is comprised of the heads of agencies and certain administrative offices, each with a mandate to further certain policies of the United States. These cabinet posts were not created to make a statement about what we think is important. The Secretary of Defense exists to manage the United States Military, not to advocate militarism. The Secretary of State is charged with conducting diplomacy, not simply reminding us to be diplomatic.

A cabinet position is not about symbolism, but power. Government agencies have rule-making authority. Agency rules have the force of law and are given great deference by the courts. In order to justify a position pertaining to the arts, Congress would necessarily create an agency and give it a mandate. What purpose would Congress espouse, and what rules would a Department of the Arts make?

Rules affecting the content of arts would likely run afoul of the First Amendment. The new agency might well venture into the funding of the arts, but that is already being done by NEA and NEH. Would it be a grand curator? The United States already boasts the largest repository of artistic creations in the world, The Library of Congress. Any new agency, unless it is totally ineffectual, would have some effect on commerce in the arts and would necessarily boost some artistic efforts while placing others at a relative disadvantage.

One advocate suggests that we need to bring our various artistic and cultural agencies under one umbrella – the NEA, NEH, Library of Congress, Copyright Office, etc. Other countries, he says, have ministers of culture, and we have nothing equivalent. So? Centralization may be prevalent in other countries, but is it better and is it appropriate for the United States? David Smith makes the counterargument that one of America’s greatest cultural strengths is, in fact, its decentralization.

Our artistic heritage is very much a product of our political and geographical history. It was not created under any centralized process, and I don’t see anyone making a coherent argument that either preserving what we have or creating something new would be better accomplished under some central authority.

Art reflects its patronage, whether the patron is the early church, the courts of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great, or the NEA. It responds to historical events. The harpsichord fell from favor as the guillotine fell on its owners’ necks. The individualism of the Romantic era did much to break the bonds of institutional patronage, and America came of age in this same spirit of individualism.

The cultural richness of American art owes much to decentralization. Cities like New Orleans, San Francisco, San Antonio, and Nashville revel in local arts that could never have been created with a central office overseeing things. Our art reflects the migration of new ethnic groups in distinct regions. The pioneers moving west took the bare necessities in their small wagons, which usually meant sacrificing the piano. The instruments of American music tend to be portable.

The greatest influence on American music over the past century has been a scientific one – our growing ability to reproduce, preserve, distribute, and commercialize it. We made an unfortunate transition from a music-producing society to a music-consuming one. Our latest great patron was the entertainment industry, the gatekeepers of commercial success, under which music was canned and distributed efficiently but without much concern for aesthetics. The industry is now undergoing catastrophic change as previously unfranchised individuals find it much less expensive to produce and distribute music on their own, and we seem to be entering a far more diverse and democratic era in music and film.

So this seems like a curious time to call for a national “czar” for the arts. Government is ponderous, not creative. It can patronize, but it cannot create, and what it patronizes, it owns and controls.

American art is like Americans – freewheeling, frequently brash and bumptious, revolutionary and democratic in the best sense. We attempt to coral it at our peril.

Any new agency can be expected to go the way of all bureaucracies. It will be populated initially with a combination of artistic luminaries and hacks, and we can be sure the hacks will take over in short order. The agency will become sclerotic and dysfunctional.

And so, if this proposal for Secretary of the Arts wins out, it will be a very enfeebled art, an art unmoored from its American uniqueness, that sits at the cabinet table a few feet down from the Oval Office.

January 19th, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | one comment

Another Stimulus Package

The sex industry is now lining up for a government bailout.

They say sex sells, but erotic trade federation official Uwe Kaltenberg is asking the German government for financial help as sex shop owners and erotic film makers feel the pinch in tough economic times.

Schade. The proliferation of porn on the internet is taking jobs away from more traditional channels of trade. “German porn films are on a significant decline,” Kaltenberg said.

The article also notes that the Germans got the idea from Larry Flynt of Hustler fame and Joe Francis, publisher of the “Girls Gone Wild” series. Those two called on Congress “to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America.”

Congress taking charge of our sexual appetites? I suspect Congress has enough trouble with its own sexual appetites. And I don’t think Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are quite up to the task.

And besides, Larry Flynt may have done more to dull the appetites of his audience than anyone, pioneering a no-holds-barred approach to porn that shows everything, everywhere, all the time. He took the mystery out of sex, the peep out of peep shows, the tease out of striptease.

Flynt is spent. He has nothing left to offer, and it’s not for lack of money but rather lack of imagination.

January 17th, 2009 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | one comment