“America is no longer what it could be.” Res ipsa loquitur.
Pull that Ad. Greyhound is canceling an ad campaign about how peaceful it is to ride the bus: “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’” Bad timing. A passenger riding from Edmonton to Winnipeg is accused of beheading and cannibalizing a fellow passenger. Rage is everywhere, it seems.
MSM R.I.P. Tim Rutten of the LA Times says the old media have been dethroned. They allowed The National Enquirer and bloggers to do the real reporting on John Edwards, while they buried the story, applying a clear double standard that favors Democrats. Edwards then admitted the facts:
With that admission, the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.
Why Do These Words Sound So Nasty? Terry Teachout takes on the revival of Hair 40 years later:
So how does “Hair” look 40 years on? Pretty thin, alas, though the damn-the-torpedoes staging and choreography of Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage and the impassioned singing and dancing of the cast (Caren Lyn Manuel and Patina Renea Miller are especially good) succeed in making it seem marginally fresher than it really is. Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, has written yet another of his eye-rollingly fatuous program notes, this one assuring us that “Hair” was “a contemporary play influenced by the sweep and scale of Shakespearean dramaturgy.” The truth is that “Hair” was and is a poorly crafted revue whose second act disintegrates before your eyes. James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who collaborated on the book and lyrics, didn’t know the first thing about how to write a musical, and their idea of scintillating wit was to rhyme “pederasty” with “Why do these words sound so nasty?”
Solzhenitsyn and Moral Equivalence. Eamonn Fitzgerald reminds us why Sozhenitsyn mattered:
Reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker: “To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency.” Like so many left-wing intellectuals (American and European), Steiner was in denial and could not bear to read the message that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote when he presented the “Worker’s Paradise” as it really was: a hideous lie. Solzhenitsyn robbed the anti-West of its most cherished illusions and he cruelly exposed the moral equivalency of the Eric Hobsbawms and lesser-know Stalinist sympathizers and fellow travellers. In The Gulag Archipelago, the USSR functionary was revealed as being every bit as evil as his Third Reich counterpart.
August 10th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Literature, Music, Politics |
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Eamonn Fitzgerald posted the following at Rainy Day and, at my suggestion that it fit nicely on this blog devoted to Arts and Ammo, he has graciously given permission to reproduce it.
There we were, at the Imperial War Museum in London, standing under the barrel of a 15-inch naval gun. In 1914, this was the most powerful of the big guns used by Royal Navy battleships. It weighed 100 tons and, at maximum range, could fire a 2,000 lb (876 kg) shell 16.5 miles (29 km). It was used on D-Day to shell enemy positions around Caen, but it also saw action in 1920 during the Greco-Turkish War. Which led to thoughts of that famous 1571 naval battle with the Ottoman Turks in which 32,000 died and Miguel de Cervantes fought alongside the “lean and foolish knight” he would later immortalize in Don Quixote.
“Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath / (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.) / And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, / Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain, / And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade… / (But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)” Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton
May 23rd, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Ammo, Literature |
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Stefan Kanfer reviews David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America in City Journal.
In the mid 1950s, comic books became the social villain. Psychiatrist Frederick Wertham mounted a crusade, arguing that comic books presented children with images of violence, racism, and sexism, and incited them to crime and anti-social behavior. The result was an industry Comics Code Authority. The Code turned the comics bland and reduced the titles available dramatically.
The publisher of Educational Comics—which specialized in horror and suspense titles—wrote a sarcastic editorial: “We give up. WE HAVE HAD IT! Naturally, with comic-book censorship now a fact, we at EC look forward to an immediate drop in the crime and juvenile delinquency rate in the United States. We trust there will be fewer robberies, fewer murders and fewer rapes!”
The coarsening of culture, of course, continued.
Hajdu believes that “the comic-book war was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in America, and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight.” But those who look at the current fare in films, TV, the Internet, and newsstands might wonder what was gained in the victory. The history of comics reveals, wittingly or otherwise, how much we have lost. The Ten-Cent Plague does, too.
May 9th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Literature |
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For those who doubt that the university has become a very inhospitable place, take a look at the case of Keith John Sampson. Sampson, an employee of Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, was disciplined for reading the wrong book in public. His co-worker was offended by his choice of literature.
In November 2007, Sampson—who works in the school’s janitorial department and is ten credits away from a degree in communications—was notified by Lillian Charleston of IUPUI’s Affirmative Action Office (AAO) that two co-workers had filed a racial harassment complaint against him. The AAO alleged that by reading a book on the KKK in the break room, Sampson had engaged in racial harassment. Sampson attempted to explain that the book, written by Todd Tucker, was a historical account of the events on two days in May 1924, when a group of Notre Dame students fought with members of the Ku Klux Klan. His explanation was dismissed, and he later received a letter from Charleston that determined he was guilty of racial harassment. Charleston wrote that his failures included “openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”
For those who think the content of the book matters, here’s a snippet from Amazon . . .
Book Description
The riveting tale of the clash of two powerful institutions Notre Dame and the Ku Klux Klan that changed both institutions and America forever.
In 1924, students of the University of Notre Dame and members of the Ku Klux Klan faced off in a violent confrontation in South Bend, Indiana. This shocking and true hidden chapter in Catholic and American history is recounted in Notre Dame vs. The Klan, the story of two uniquely American institutions that rose to power amidst rampant anti-Catholicism and collided during a riotous weekend.
About the Author
Todd Tucker received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Notre Dame and served as an officer in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine force. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana with his family.
. . . and a comment by the author:
Anybody taking five minutes to assess the contents of its page on Amazon could determine rapidly that the book is enthusiastically anti-Klan. You could perhaps argue that this shouldn’t matter - a college campus ought to be a safe haven for exploration of ideas. But I do think it makes this situation even more outrageous that the good people at IUPUI’s affirmative action office didn’t care about that. My more recent book has as its heroes religious pacifists during World War II - I think it’s safe to conclude I don’t have any kind of right-wing axe to grind.
But if the author did have a right-wing axe to grind, then the university might have had a more difficult time admitting its mistake. Fortunately for Sampson, the Affirmative Action Apparatchiks were so demonstrably stupid in this case that it took only six months and the intervention of the ACLU and FIRE to clear Sampson’s record.
May 3rd, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Education, Law, Literature |
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Roger Kimball’s essay in the latest edition of New Criterion is worth the read: “Rudyard Kipling unburdened.” Virility (now a subject pretty much confined to male-enhancement spam) was in sharp decline before Kipling’s death.
When he won the Nobel Prize in 1907—the first English-language laureate, and still the youngest—the citation mentioned not only his “power of observation” and “originality of imagination” but also his “virility of ideas.” By then, in the aftermath of the Boer War, the “virility” of Kipling’s ideas was already a stumbling block; by the time the First World War was over—a war that Kipling had foretold with uncanny accuracy and in which he lost his only son, John—the nation was in wholesale retreat from Kiplingesque virility. (Today, of course, it is unimaginable that a Nobel citation—or most any other, for that matter—would commend someone for his “virility of ideas.”)
Kimball chronicles the celebrity of Kipling, his politics, and the criticisms of his poetry by contemporaries such as T.S Eliot and Oscar Wilde:
Eliot notes that one is usually called upon to defend modern poetry from the charge of excessive obscurity: with Kipling the culprit is “excessive lucidity.”
Acknowledging Kipling as the unofficial laureate of Imperial Britain, Kimball concludes that Kipling was primarily a defender of civilization.
Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, “believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.”
We could use some of that excessive lucidity today, and virility, in defense of civilization. As Kimball notes, the folks of Berkeley might even learn something from Kipling’s “Tommy”:
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.
April 2nd, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Literature |
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