Archive for October, 2010

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. . . . And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.” The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy.

Stomping Women

This is politics in America.

Item One:  NBC’s Matt Lauer asks the the California gubernatorial candidates if they will stop negative ads, and when Meg Whitman declines, she is booed by women.  This is supposed to mean something, when feminists and lesbians boo a Republican woman.  But feminists hate women and to the extent they are women–a debatable proposition–they hate themselves.  They were looking for an excuse to boo her.  What Whitman should have done is to turn the tables: “Is NBC going to end its sensationalist stories  and start reporting the facts?  What are the networks but purveyors of terrifying disaster stories and heart-warming human-interest,  from which the viewing audience learns nothing of any importance?  When is the last time anyone learned anything of significance from NBC, much less from Matt Lauer?  Lauer’s question is what Aristotle called a complex question, of the type: “When did you stop beating your wife?”  His question assumes the candidates are guilty and that negative ads are inherently bad.  What if a “bigot” ran for office.  Would anyone object to slandering him?  Whitman could not make this retort, because she, while less crazy Jerry Brown, is as much a victim of American education as Matt Lauer, meaning they are both incredibly dumb.

Item Two:  Rand Paul volunteers pull aggressive protestor to the ground and one of them, Tim Profitt, shoves his foot on her neck to restrain her, as other volunteers are shouting, “Get the police” and telling Profitt to back off.  The incident is inevitably described as a stomping and suddenly  Rand Paul is guilty of violence against women.  Profitt, immune to common sense or common decency, thinks he is owed an apology for attacking a frail boyish female.  He does have a point:  She is a MoveOn professional protestor seeking to disrupt a lawful political event.  I don’t know why such people are not routinely arrested.  Don’t like Rand Paul or Hilary Clinton? Vote against them, support their opponent, but do not attend a rally where you are not only not wanted but where you intend to make trouble for people you do not know.  Rand Paul was right to dismiss Profitt, who is a typical American jerk of the New Order, but the networks, in giving Lauren Valle the chance to promote her pathetic career as leftist agitator, show once again why they should not be permitted to cast stones against politicians of any stripe.

If democracy ever existed in America, it required a responsible and informed electorate. who had some means of getting they information they need in order to evaluate issues and events.  But the net effect of all  American media–networks, newspapers, blogs–is to make people stupid, frightened, arrogant, and rude.  As I said years ago, “Tune out, turn out, and drop in,” that is, turn off the tube and the computer, tune out their lies, and drop into real life, which is too short to waste on the likes of Matt Lauer,  Tim Profitt, and Lauren Valle.

Nazis in the Strangest Places

Last night, on the recommendation of friends, my wife and I went to see Secretariat. We both thoroughly enjoyed this wholesome, well-made movie, that manages to be suspenseful even though most moviegoers already know that Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973.

I should have realized that any movie I enjoyed would make someone else angry. In this case, the angry person is movie critic Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com, who found Secretariat a work of creepy, half-hilarious master race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.” In his review, O’Hehir accused the film of “presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord.” O’Hehir was bothered by the movie’s quoting from the Book of Job and featuring Gospel music, and was especially upset by the portrayal of Secretariat’s groom, Eddie Sweat, described by O’Hehir as belonging to “a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol’ horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life.”

I saw nothing sinister in the movie. But I did sense that those who made the movie do not hate America’s past, which increasingly is all it takes for those like O’Hehir to detect whiffs of the Third Reich. Most of the film takes place on a farm in Virginia’s horse country, in a Denver suburb, and at various race tracks. Hollywood has long depicted the South as creepy and fascistic. Hollywood isn’t fond of suburbia either, and the wretched American Beauty, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1999, even depicted Nazism as commonplace in suburbia. I am not aware of any movie highlighting the incipient fascism of Churchill Downs, Pimlico, and Belmont, but I am sure that any aspiring film maker up to that task would win plaudits from such as Andrew O’Hehir.

Eastern Europe Versus the Open Society

Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its dark, intolerant past.

Ground Zero Mosque: Correcting the Non-Debate

Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding.

Women’s Work II

It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. By work is not meant so much the routine tasks of the household—the storage and preparation of food, the making and cleaning of clothing, and the household chores of sweeping, cleaning, and tending children—but the degraded and degrading concept of work as a job for which one is paid or even something one would not do except for money.

Tea Party Tory

Before the Tea Party philosophy is ever even tested in America, it will have succeeded, or it will have failed, in Great Britain. For in David Cameron the Brits have a prime minister who can fairly be described as a Tea Party Tory.

Tribalism Returns to Europe

Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.”

An Ambiguous Victory for Wilders

The news just in that Dutch prosecutors have changed their mind about prosecuting Geert Wilders for the Orwellian crime of “discriminating against Muslims” and “inciting hatred” is prima facie a victory for free speech and all that. In fact it is not nearly as good as it may seem.

Women’s Work I

It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. Even the most “patriarchal” writers have not denied the significance of a woman’s work within the home. But in speaking of a woman’s work or a woman’s place we have to be very careful about making distinctions.