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March 28, 2006
Cynthia Carr's "heroic achievement "
In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.
. . .
Like too many other journalists writing books these days, Carr is under the impression that how she got her story and how she feels about it are more interesting (and, implicitly, more important) than the story itself. She could not be more wrong.
"A journalist returns to her hometown to uncover the meaning of a horrific lynching," a review by Jonathan Yardley of "Our Town" by Cynthia Carr, The Washington Post, March 26, 2006
Posted at 06:27 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Bigotry
March 25, 2006
Lillian Hellman - mean girl
The saga of Dottie and Lilly may be sad, but it's almost comical, too. Probably the first to smile about it would be Parker herself. She always imagined the hereafter as paradise, a sort of luxury hotel with hot and cold running dogs. Little did she imagine that settling permanently would require a Homeric journey of twenty-one years. More galling, her real-life coda—afterlife in a tin can—doomed her to spend fifteen of those years hanging around Wall Street, the symbol of everything she hated, followed by eternal rest in Baltimore, another place not to her taste, a short distance from a parking lot (Parker didn't drive). One of her oh-let's-kill-ourselves verses (aptly titled "Coda") concludes with the polite request: "Kindly direct me to hell."She should have been a lot more careful about what she asked for.
"Estate of mind," by Marion Meade on Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, BookForum, April/May 2006
What I remember most vividly about Lillian Hellman are the American Express commercials she made ...
Posted at 07:47 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: America
March 19, 2006
Demanding the "cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision."
The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose.They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.
We shall track down those responsible. States that shelter them will know no peace. Communities that shelter them do not take forever to discover their mistake. And their sordid love of death is as nothing compared to our love of London, which we will defend as always, and which will survive this with ease.
"We Cannot Surrender: States which shelter these killers will know no peace," by Christopher Hitchens, Mirror.co.uk, July 8, 2005
Posted at 07:57 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Nihilism , Terrorism
March 15, 2006
Las Vegas and America
The best piece explaining the ethos of Las Vegas (and the American West more generally,) is a short essay by Joan Didion entitled "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles." In it, she explains that Howard Hughes founded modern Las Vegas in 1967 because he, a reclusive insomniac, couldn't find a place to buy a cheeseburger in L.A. at three o'clock in the morning—so he created a whole city to cater to that need. It had nothing to do with sin or sex, but rather the perpetual American desire to reinvent oneself in a place where conventional expectations don't apply. Hughes' transformation of Las Vegas cleaned the city up: Mob influence was eliminated, and the Nevada Gaming Commission put the whole casino industry under tight regulatory controls (not necessarily tighter, of course, than the way prostitution is regulated in Amsterdam or Hamburg). Today the Bellagio, the Luxor and the MGM Grand are more like family-friendly theme parks than gambling halls. So it's ersatz and safe, but it hasn't pretended to be anything else for many years now. The Mormons, after all, are the religious group with the deepest roots throughout Nevada.What you see when you stand in a buffet line in a Las Vegas casino is the real America: ordinary working- and middle-class Americans, with kids in tow, who want to be entertained. (You remark that you had a hard time finding America's "fat epidemic"; try a buffet.) Many sophisticates from the East look upon all of this with horror, but it's not Las Vegas they're reacting to. What they find distasteful is the American demos itself, with all of its excess and energy.
"It Doesn't Stay in Vegas," a discussion between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Francis Fukuyama, The American Interest
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
Joan Didion, U.S. essayist. “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Posted at 06:17 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: America
March 14, 2006
Equality of outcomes ... watch your thoughts
These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.
In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).
"Leaving the left - I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity," by Keith Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2005
Posted at 04:37 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Bigotry , Ignorance , Nihilism , Politics , Stupidity
March 13, 2006
Song Lyrics - The Bricklayer’s Lament
The Bricklayer’s Lament (also named Dear Boss) (Traditional Irish)
Dear Boss I write this note to you to tell you of my plight.
And at the time of writing I am not a pretty sight.
Me body is all black and blue, and me face a deadly gray.
And I hope you’ll understand why Paddy’s not at work today.I was working on the 14th floor, some bricks I had to clear.
And throwin em down from such a height was not a good idea.
The foreman wasn’t very pleased, he bein an awful sod,
He said I’d have to take em down the ladder in me hod.Now shiftin all those bricks by hand it seemed so awful slow,
So I hoisted up a barrel and secured a rope below.
But in my haste to do the job, I was too blind to see,
That a barrel full of buildin’ bricks was heavier than me.Now, when I came down, I cut the rope and the barrel fell like lead.
And clinging tightly to the rope, I started up instead.
I shot up like a rocket and to my dismay I found,
that halfway up I met the bloody barrel comin’ down.Now the barrel broke me shoulder as to the ground it sped.
And when I reached the top I struck the pulley with my head,
I still clung on though numbed and shocked from this almighty blow,
While the barrel spilled out half the bricks, 14 floors below.Now when the bricks had fallen from the barrel to the floor,
I then outweighed the barrel and I started down once more.
Still clinging tightly to the rope, I headed for the ground.
And fell among the broken bricks that were all scattered round.As I lay there moaning on the floor, sure I thought I’d passed the worst.
And then the barrel struck the pulley wheel and didn’t the bottom burst.
A shower of bricks came down on me sure I hadn’t got a hope.
And as I was losing consciousness … I let go the bloody rope.Now the barrel it being heavier, it started down once more,
It landed right across me as I lay there on the floor.
I broke three ribs and my left arm, and I can only say,
That I hope you’ll understand why Paddy’s not at work today.
Posted at 06:07 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Humor
March 12, 2006
The Taliban and prostitutes
Joking how the prophet Mohammed is running out of virgins because so many suicide bombers are standing at the gates of paradise is dark and mean. And, given the reality of global attacks, lamentably effective (just as a side note). But I did not find it especially funny that the misogynous Taliban availed themselves regularly of prostitutes. Or publicly "executed" video recorders and televisions in order to watch pornos in privacy.
"'What next, bearded one?' Our traditional values have been trampled on and we are offended. A wake-up call," by Sonia Mikich, signandsight, February 7, 2006
Posted at 08:49 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Gynephobes , Humor , Nihilism
March 08, 2006
Marxism: The "greatest fantasy" of the 20th Century
Marxism also spoke powerfully to mankind’s unsatisfied utopian impulses. How imperfect a construct is capitalist society: how much conflict does it abet, how many desires does it leave unsatisfied! Can we not imagine a world beyond those tensions and conflicts in which we could realize our full human potential without competition, without scarcity, without want? Sure, we can imagine it, but there is a reason that "utopia" means "nowhere." Kolakowski shows how Marxism speaks powerfully to those unrealized, and unrealizable, utopian dreams. Marxism, he wrote, was the "greatest fantasy" of the twentieth century, not because it offered a better life but because it appealed to apparently ineradicable spiritual cravings.The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. ... In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
Posted at 05:27 PM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Marxism , Nihilism
March 03, 2006
"Islamic truths" - 4
But to look at angry Islam's reaction on television each night forces the question of what might be possible if all the lost energy of thousands of rioting Muslims went into the villages of Aceh to rebuild lost homes or into Kashmir to construct schools.In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam's mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected the very system Islam's holy scriptures urged them to learn and practice. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize those of us in the West and to try to bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate or house.
This is not Islam. And the faster its truest believers stand up and demonstrate its values and principles by actions, not words, the sooner a great religion will return to its rightful role as guide for nearly a quarter of humanity.
"Islamic truths," by Mansoor Ijaz, Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2006
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March 01, 2006
Civil Society
[C]ivil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient.
"Cartoon Debate: The case for mocking religion," by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, February 4, 2006
Posted at 06:57 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: America