September 2007
A Tattler’s World
The Diana Chronicles
by Tina Brown
New York: Random House;
481 pp., $27.50
A Russian joke of relatively recent vintage comes to mind. “How could you, a Stakhanovite dairy worker, with two Red Commendations to your credit, with the Regional Party Committee foursquare behind you,” a collective farm boss shouts at the terrified girl in his office, “how could you ever become a Moscow hard-currency prostitute?” “I guess I was just lucky,” stammers the errant milkmaid.
The Atheist’s Redemption
In my last appearance in this space, I wrote erroneously that Christopher Hitchens had favored both Anglo-American wars on Iraq. In fact, he strongly opposed the first one, back in 1991. I remember this so vividly (I was delighted with him at the time) that I can’t understand how I could be so embarrassingly forgetful when I wrote as I did. I owe him an apology, which I cheerfully offer.
Trusting Whitey
On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end. After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, including a Spanish-language-immersion school and an environmental-science academy; white and middle-class flight from the district; declining test scores for all students, but especially minorities; decreasing security for students and for teachers; several years of illegal taxation; and almost a third of a billion dollars in taxes extracted from a city of 150,000 souls, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals determined that District 205 had fulfilled both the spirit and the letter of the lower federal court’s integration order (no easy feat, since the court kept changing the target).
I Love My Mother
Sicko
Produced by The Weinstein Company
Directed and written by Michael Moore
Michael Moore calls his films documentaries, but they’re really sockumentaries. He is cinema’s heavyweight master of the sucker punch. Behind his slovenly, shambling flabbiness, he packs a vicious left hook. That’s politically left, of course. Now, some suckers deserve to be pounded by sneaky lefts. That’s the case in Moore’s latest match, Sicko. Fighting on behalf of socialized medicine, Moore wallops America’s haphazard, systemless healthcare, bloodying his hapless free-market foe again and again. It’s a mismatch: His careless opponent hasn’t bothered to develop his skills and clearly needs a lesson in ringmanship. So you cheer for Moore until the late rounds, when he begins to showboat unforgivably.
Counting People and People Who Count
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it is money and power they are seeking, but I have never been able to discover what educators have in mind. The worst of them babble statistics—IQs, achievement-test scores, minority percentages, word counts in first-grade readers. None of it amounts to much more than counting—counting words or counting people.
Citizen Murdoch
If Rupert Murdoch gets his way, all Earthlings will read one newspaper and watch one television station. And Murdoch will own both. So even before the Media Monster That Ate New York and London had the Wall Street Journal for dessert, the liberal-media elite flew into a rage worthy of the Tasmanian Devil. He’ll interfere, they bayed. He’ll wreck the newsroom, they barked. He’ll put profits before good journalism, they brayed. Whether any or all of these calamities come to pass, the liberal-media elites, as one would expect, opposed Murdoch’s acquisition of the Journal for the wrong reasons.
Evangelical Theologian
Harold O.J. Brown fell asleep, as Our Lord puts it, on July 8, just two days after his 74th birthday. This magazine’s religion editor since 1989, he was a contributor before that. The title of my column in Chronicles was inspired by his most significant book, among several significant books, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present. He died of cancer, which had plagued him for years, receded for a time, then came roaring back in June.
END AS A MAN: September 2007
PERSPECTIVE
Counting People and People Who Count
by Thomas Fleming
Domesticated humans.
VIEWS
Sex, Propaganda, and Higher Education
by Tom Landess
Inside the opinion mill.
The Faces of Men
by Jack Trotter
Education and masculinity.
Virtual Education Reality
by William Barr
Facilitating democracy.
