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Ella, again by Thomas Fleming

Let me second Tom Piatak.  I think the best way to start appreciating Ella is by getting (off iTunes, for example) the various songbooks she recorded–Cole Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart.  In these she sings mainly straight without a lot of jazzing around.  My wife generally dislikes most jazz (except George Shearing and a few others) but she is always asking me to play the lady with the beautiful voice.

Google Gets One Right by Tom Piatak

Google often gets grief over the events and people it chooses to honor.  Much of this criticism is justified.  But sometimes Google gets one right, as it did today, when it honored Ella Fitzgerald.  Here is Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, recorded in 1956.  Popular music does not get any better than this–the finest vocal rendition of one of the finest songs written by an American.  (Of course, Artie Shaw’s instrumental version is terrific, too, in addition to having the distinction of being one of Taki’s favorite songs).

Watch Trifkovic Interview Live Today by Webmaster

Chronicles‘ foreign-affairs editor Dr. Srdja Trifkovic will be interviewed live on RTTV shortly after 1 PM CDT (2 PM Eastern) regarding the Islamic/Chechen connections of the Boston bombers.  Click here to watch live.

Butchery in Philadelphia by Tom Piatak

Several commenters have decried the lack of media coverage of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia.  Gosnell is charged with the deaths of one pregnant woman and seven children who were born after botched abortions; those children were killed by having their spinal cords severed.  Witnesses have testified that many more babies were also killed that way.

The reason for the media silence is obvious.  Shining a spotlight on Gosnell’s butcheries might cause people to raise questions about abortion, something the media has long treated as a sacred right.  As pro-lifers have argued, there is no logical dfference between killing a child late in pregnancy and killing a child shortly after it emerges from the womb.  Gosnell’s grisly deeds drive that point home.  Indeed,  infanticide enjoys considerable support in the same elite circles that cherish abortion.   When the Reagan Administration sought to protect handicapped infants from being left to die in hospitals, the New York Times was outraged.  Barack Obama, back when he was an Illinois state senator, opposed legislation to give legal protection to children born following a failed abortion.  Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer has argued that parents should be able to kill children up to the age of two.  And just recently a Planned Parenthood representative, asked in the Florida legislature what should happen to a baby born after a failed abortion, replied that the doctor and the mother should be the ones who decide what happens to the baby they had tried to kill.

The blunt truth is that what went on in Gosnell’s abortion mill differs only in degree, not in kind, from what goes on in all the “clinics” operated by people who enjoy the unqualified support of all the purveyors of respectable opinion in this country.  After all, one of Barack Obama’s signature issues in the last election was his support for Planned Parenthood, an entity that kills hundreds of thousands of unborn children in America year after year.   What happened in Philadelphia is the inevitable result of viewing abortion as an inalienable right.  But what the Gosnell case shows is that you won’t encounter facts supporting that viewpoint on NPR or the network news, or in the New York Times or Washington Post.

A Misnamed Magazine by Tom Piatak

The American Conservative has had dozens of articles and posts on gay marriage.  The general tenor has ranged from arguing that gay marriage is inevitable to criticizing opponents of gay marriage to arguing that support for gay marriage is the conservative position.  What has largely been absent is any opposition to gay marriage.

There is, of course, nothing conservative about support for gay marriage. Gay marriage is an utter novelty, with no historical precedent.  Gay marriage seeks to enshrine homosexual acts, but those acts have always been condemned as immoral by Christianity, a condemnation echoed by most other religions and reflected in American law until only recently.  Gay marriage also completely severs marriage from procreation, even though marriage and the families it naturally creates have been the means by which human culture is formed and transmitted.

Gay marriage is not only antithetical to Christianity. It is antithetical to the natural law, to tradition, even to Darwin. Those arguing for it should at least have the decency to drop the pretense that they are conservatives.

The Quiet of Easter by Tom Piatak

In recent decades, the public profile of Easter in the United States has diminished.  Americans now spend more on Halloween than on Easter, and the public attention Easter receives is largely negative.  Google observed Easter Sunday by celebrating Cesar Chavez’s birthday, and public references to Easter are often excised, just as “Christmas” is often replaced by “holiday.”  My subdivision had an “egg hunt” for children on Saturday, and none of the materials advertising this “egg hunt” even mentioned Easter.  Network television, which used to observe Holy Week and Easter by airing such programs as Franco Zefferilli’s “Jesus of Nazareth,” was largely devoid of religious programming this year.  Easter has become rather quiet in America.

But this quiet holiday still offers many simple pleasures.  The beauty of Easter shone forth in the church my wife and I attend, with the sanctuary filled with candles and awash with flowers.  The contrast with Good Friday, when the sanctuaty was bare, the statues were veiled, and the tabernacle was empty, could not have been more stark.  I enjoyed seeing our church filled to overflowing, even though I know I won’t see some of the congregants next Sunday.  Many people were dressed up, another welcome contrast with an ordinary Sunday.  And then there was the welcome quiet coming from all the closed stores and restaurants.  Even though most of the chain stores and restaurants were open, the family-owned businesses were not.  Easter, then, is a reminder of what Sunday used to be in America, when most people made an effort to go to church and to dress up and commercial activity largely ceased.   It is not what Easter used to be in America, but it is still a pleasant contrast with what American life has become.

May all the readers of Chronicles continue to have a Blessed and Happy Easter.

Serbian Tutor Wanted in Rockford by Thomas Fleming

Serbian Language Tutor wanted for 1-2 hours weekly of study and conversational practice.  Lack of English proficiency is not a problem.  Sessions will be held in our office.

Please send  resume and  stipend requirement to serbian@chroniclesmagazine.org.

Immer Dummer by Thomas Fleming

Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance.  Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song:  Illegitimum non carborundum that he posted a link on his blog.

Archons of Athens!

Some old geezers will remember the gag Latin, “Illegitimis non carborundum est,” facetiously translated as “Don’t let the bastards wear you down.”  The joke lay in giving it the appearance of the gerundive of obligation with the subject (illegitimis) in the dative case.  But, what had been a semi-literate gag in the 1960′s is now impenetrable to the brain trust at the Weekly Standard.  Dative shmative.

I remember once telling Pat Buchanan about some political prediction the young Kristol had made.  Pat laughed his laugh, saying “That guy–he never gets anything right.”

Pat was right.  If we do not laugh at these poor fellows, we shall have to cry for the Americans who actually read them.  If only their mistakes were confined to the grammar of dead languages and did not extend to the grammar of dead Americans and Iraqis.

Unpatriotic Liars by Thomas Fleming

Here is poor David Frum pretending to have second thoughts about the Iraq War for which he shilled.  Obviously, the only people who are capable of having  second thoughts had to have first thoughts, and there is no sign that Frum has ever done anything but pound a keyboard and recycle other people’s lies.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/18/the-speechwriter-inside-the-bush-administration-during-the-iraq-war.html

The friend who sent me the link queried: “Lemme see.  To whom does he NOT apologize?”

A halfway decent person who had worked for a propaganda regime responsible for so much devastation would have trouble sleeping at night.  Be assured:  Frum gets ten hours of untroubled sleep every night.  For neoconservatives, unconciousness is always just minutes away.

Neocon 101: Art of the Pooh-Pooh by Aaron D. Wolf

That stalwart set at National Review known as “The Editors” has done what it always does to a genuinely conservative display in the halls of power.  Far from a radical denunciation, which may invite a more thoughtful reading of events and sentences, they’ve taken to light pooh-poohing.  Rand Paul is providing “great entertainment,” and “We salute his brio.”  Yet please, they snortle: Drones are “suddenly the world’s most feared weapon”?  And just imagine the absurdity of a drone strike on Americans “at cafes”!  (Paging Janet Reno!)  Obviously, obviously a President who ordered such an attack would be impeached.  Senator Paul is “tilting at drones” and “fighting a phantom menace.”

Reading that pooh-pooh reminded me of a key passage from Sam Francis’s “Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution” (collected in his indispensable book Beautiful Losers):

“Neoconservatism rejected all forms of extremism and all suggestions of a need for far-reaching change. . . . Moderation, gradualism, empiricism, pragmatism, centrism became the watchwords of neoconservatism, whereby confrontation with the fundamental mechanisms and tendencies of the managerial system and fundamental changes suggested by either the Right or the Left were avoided.  In the neoconservative view of America, there was nothing seriously wrong with the society and government that had developed between the New Deal and the Great Society, and it was the goal of neoconservatives to communicate the soundness of the managerial system to the adversary intellectuals of the Left and to co-opt the militant activists of the New Right.”