The Quiet Revolutionary
By Richard Miniter
12/12/2003
One of the extraordinary things about Robert L. Bartley, who for thirty years was the editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, is that he had legions of admirers -- few of whom could pick his face out of a crowd.
Bartley did not become influential or famous through any conventional means. He rarely appeared on television. He gave relatively few speeches. He was not a regular on the talk radio circuit or a star in the blogosphere. Nor was he vaulted to popular attention by public-relations men, publicity stunts or fawning articles in the nation's press. He did it the old fashioned way: He developed an intense following simply through the power of his ideas.
And the ideas that Bartley championed -- which he summarized as "free men and free markets" -- were hardly popular at the time. In the dark days of the 1970s even "conservative" Republican President Richard M. Nixon proclaimed "We're all Keynesians now."
The Modern Editorial Page
And what ideas! Bartley had ideas about journalism, economics and politics -- and he had the guts to give them a go. Bartley essentially invented the idea of the modern editorial page. Before 1972, when Bartley became editor, most papers ran unsigned editorials, letters, a few syndicated columnists and that's it. As for those unsigned editorials -- the official voices of the newspaper -- they were full of opinion and humor, perhaps, but no reporting, no new facts. Bartley wanted editorial writers to find facts, preferably new or overlooked ones. How else can you persuade someone? That meant making phone calls and going places. It meant hard work. The idea of a reported editorial (known internally as a "rando," short for Review AND Outlook) was a signature Bartley innovation and it gave the editorials of the Wall Street Journal a unique authority and a new power. Believe it or not, no one had done this before.
And while the New York Times invented the "op-ed" in the Nixon era, Bartley's response was the "editorial page feature." These were bylined articles that might have looked like op-eds, but did not read like them. These features were rarely written by professional columnists -- those paid opinion-slingers -- but by outsiders who had developed an expertise and gathered the facts to present interesting and important arguments. This made the Journal's features a must-read. Again, no one had done this before either.
In these two small but significant ways, Bartley changed the journalism trade. The taciturn Midwesterner had gotten America to give facts and ideas pride of place over rhetoric and wordplay. If this were all that Bartley had accomplished, it would be worthy enough monument.
But, as it happened, Bartley was just getting started.
In the parlance of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, there is a category of editorial feature known as "dull but worthy." In the early 1970s, Bartley began identifying dull but worthy ideas. The ideas were "dull" only in the sense that few commentators were willing to study economics (let alone question the Keynesian consensus). But Bartley, along with his first hire, Jude Wanniski, was willing to listen and learn. And, importantly, he wasn't afraid of math.
From Michael One to the Reagan Revolution
Meeting at a little known restaurant in lower Manhattan called Michael One, Bartley met a growing number of young or dissenting economists. One was a Columbia University economics professor, Robert Mundell. (Mr. Mundell would later be the "father of the euro" -- Europe's new single currency -- and win the Nobel Prize in economics.) In the early 1970s, Mundell was a relative nobody with a career that was going nowhere. But he had brilliant insights. One of his mantras was "the only economy is the world economy." That meant that while U.S. policy could simultaneously penalize petroleum production and subsidize oil consumption through price controls, such policies would ultimately fail because the world market would set the prevailing price. Another element of Mundell's insight about the single global economy was that protectionist barriers would simply punish the nations that taxed themselves to subsidize domestic producers; meanwhile the world market would keep functioning according to a global price mechanism, regardless of how many billions France or Indonesia spent subsidizing or protecting home-grown favorites. While this sounds obvious to us now, it was an heretical thought in the 1970s, when economists believed that somehow competition stopped at national borders or that goods that could be substituted for each other did not actually compete with each other. That meant that the U.S. economy was headed in the wrong direction, retreating behind protectionist walls, subsidizing failing industries like Chrysler, and regulating to death successful ones like IBM. And Bartley wasn't afraid to say it.
Inflation was another big problem in the 1970s. For the first time since the American civil war, Americans were suffering from inflation north of five percent, were seeing the value of their wages and savings disappear, creditors lent less because inflation eroded the value of the money to be paid back. Unions demanded double-digit wage increases to stay a step ahead of inflation. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that inflation was simply an increase in price, and if prices could somehow be restrained, inflation would just go away like a bad dream. But Bartley and the economists who became his friends soon began to take on an older, more subtle explanation of inflation -- that it was a function of the money supply. Therefore, money-supply measures (such as M1, M2, M3) could accurately predict, using well-established formulas, future inflation rates. Treating inflation as a problem of excess printing of money meant that the solution to inflation was not what the chattering class recommended (wage and price controls, "excess profits" taxes, and other baleful measures) but the opposite. A freer economy to stimulate growth and higher interest rates to mop up the excess capital. Bartley repeatedly laid out the intellectual case for his position in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Some in business and journalism and academia listened and understood. But many more scoffed. They thought that Bartley had fallen for the old-time free market religion and that modern men, who knew better, realized that his solutions were dangerous and destructive.
But, in 1981, a reader and a some-time correspondent of Bartley's was sworn in as president of the United States. Ronald Reagan adopted the ideas advocated by Bartley and the world knows the result -- the longest peace-time expansion of the United States economy in its history up to that point. Reagan arrested inflation and no U.S. president has dared to let it out on parole. Bartley deserves some of the credit for that.
At those long dinners at Michael One, Bartley would listen and cross-examine to see the value in what later became known as the supply-side. He published many editorial features by Art Laffer, Richard Rahn, Jude Wanniski, Bruce Bartlett and other supply-siders who argued that tax cuts would spur economic growth and boost government revenue. Bartley was always careful not to say that the "tax cuts would pay for themselves," only that government revenue would increase. And history has consistently shown that income-tax cuts have boosted government revenues. Bartley and the Journal deserve a large dollop of credit for putting and keeping tax cuts on the top of the national agenda for the past two decades.
One of the enduring myths about Bartley (and the Wall Street Journal editorial page in general) is that it somehow favors "big business." Bartley never did. If you'd ask him, he would say that he favored free enterprise and he was savvy enough to know that, more often than not, big business is quite happy to collude with big government and big labor against free competition and the little guy. Bartley had the vision to know and the tenacity to say that the future is almost always with open competition and the emerging entrepreneur -- not today's industrial behemoths. Capitalism is not for the rich and if it were, capitalism would not long survive. It has few true friends among the trustfund set. Capitalism's true constituency is among the strivers and the punters, the guys with little money and big ideas, the guys willing to bet their house on a tiny invention in their garage, the women willing to save money in a shoebox for years to take a chance on a new idea. These entrepreneurs willing to roll the dice, take the risks and accept the consequences; they like the revolutionary nature of capitalism and its switchback sense of fortune. And, in America, there are millions of these people. Many read the Journal's editorial page.
Legions of Admirers
Which brings us back to Bartley's legions of admirers, his many fans who would gladly invite him to dinner but couldn't pick out his face on the street. Many had never seen his face or heard his voice or even saw his name in print. But they knew him, liked him and admired him because he was willing to champion these unfashionable ideas, ideas that just happened to be right, that just happened to save America from stagflation, unemployment, humiliation and hopelessness. And these were ideas they shared. Maybe they didn't know all of the academic curlicues or mathematical complexity that supported Bartley's supply-side ideas, but they liked Bartley for showing them the respect to make a serious intellectual case for those neglected ideas.
For many years, I was one of Bartley's admirers. I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page in grade school, high school, college and beyond. I'd never seen Bartley's face. I'd never heard his high-pitched voice nor sat through his sudden silences. But he was a hero to me and it was his example of what journalists could do that led me into journalism.
I wasn't alone. On the day that Bartley died, I received e-mails and phone calls from journalists in America and Europe. Here's what Chicago-based journalist Gene Koprowski wrote to me: "His writing and editing were an inspiration to me since college. Not many conservatives in journalism school. ... I can remember being an undergrad, and reading the WSJ edit page in the college newspaper newsroom and being quite the curiosity. This was 1985 or 1986. I learned how to write -- really write -- from that edit page."
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Bartley and getting to know him when he hired me as an editorial writer and sent me to Brussels. As it turned out, I was one of the last people Bob ever hired. I can't say that I knew Bartley very well on a personal level. I had had maybe a half-dozen conversations with him. None was particularly deep. Once when I was describing a Saigon hotel, Bartley came up behind me and asked if they still served cocktails on the verandah. It turned out that he had been there in the 1970s. And while others can write about their long and close friendship with Bartley, I think the thing to remember about him was not that he was a good man, a religious man, a pioneering journalist, although all of those things are true. The thing to remember is his ideas and his willingness to take risks for them. That's Bartley's true legacy.
There's a convention at the Wall Street Journal editorial page to refer to every man, save the vilest dictators and terrorists, as "Mr.," but after they are dead, to simply refer to them by their last name. Reflecting on the vast reach of Bartley's ideas, it saddened me to pick up the editorial page and, for the first time, to see Bartley's name without the "Mr." I know there were millions of others who felt the same way.
Mr. Miniter is the author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror," (Regnery, 2003). He was Wall Street Journal editorial page writer in Europe and a columnist for the editorial page's OpinionJournal.com. His last article for TCS was on the Iraq-Al Qaeda connections.
Saturday, December 13, 2003
Thursday, December 11, 2003
A remembrance of the late, great Robert Bartley:
PEGGY NOONAN
Freedom's Best Friend
Bob Bartley was conservative when that took courage.
Thursday, December 11, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
What a great man Bob Bartley was. He had guts and he was honest and independent and he worked hard. He was living proof that journalism doesn't have to be a vanity production. It can be big. It can change history. He did.
It is hard to convey, in the age of the conservative ascendancy, what it was like 30 and 40 years ago for conservatives of Bartley's generation. There was no Rush, and no hundred conservative magazines, and no top 10 conservative radio shows and no cable. It took guts to stand where you stood. There was a Democratic Party lurching left and a Republican Party dominated by pale and chubby men who had reluctantly or eagerly embraced liberalism because, as they used to say, they knew what time it was. They knew liberalism was the unstoppable future, and they understood that a good blow-dry haircut is more or less what you need to lead in the modern era. They liked being liked by what was then Georgetown.
There were a few strange-o's like Barry Goldwater and his fans, and Reagan running for governor out there in California, but otherwise nothing was happening within the conservative movement. As a matter of fact the phrase "conservative movement" didn't exist, because there really wasn't one. Only hardy Bill Buckley's witty and impassioned National Review, which was not only the gold standard but just about the only conservative organ grinding out ideas and observations.
Until Bob Bartley. And the cluster of economists, firebrands and policy intellectuals who gathered to him, and who lit the pages of The Wall Street Journal's editorial section with a light so bright it became a beacon. Under Bartley, true freedom of speech came and reigned in a great modern American newspaper. The new supply-side economic theory? Tell us your facts. An argument for the end of post-Vietnam era American defeatism? You can talk about it here. The culture getting coarser? Pull up a chair. You didn't have to be a standard doctrinaire liberal to find a voice here.
That sounds like common sense. But it was an achievement. It was Bartley's.
As a personality I've never seen such a disjunction between manner and status. He did not take himself seriously but took the great issues that roiled our country seriously, and he took it on himself to be a combatant, and then a leader. And he was honest about it. Startlingly honest. He didn't respect liberal journalists who made believe they weren't liberal, and he wasn't going to go that route. He declared what he was--a supply-sider, a conservative, a believer in the legitimacy of American prestige and power--and allowed the reader to judge his views and opinions through an honest lens. That was something kind of new, too.
He was by nature mild, soft-spoken, and possibly shy. I was never sure. When you sat and talked with him he was direct, humorous, probing, unself-conscious. That doesn't sound shy. At the same time he maintained a certain reserve and wasn't given to the spontaneous spilling of emotions, secrets, insights or gossip. I always thought it interesting that he didn't care if anyone knew who he was. He didn't care if you were impressed. Part of this, I think, is due to the fact that he thought that if the waiter in the restaurant didn't know he was the great Bob Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal, he'd have a more authentic experience with the waiter. And if you had to have an experience it might as well be an authentic one. I also think he was constitutionally incapable of vanity.
At the same time he knew who he was. (Maybe that's why he didn't have to have strangers know.) He didn't care if he was at the hot party or meeting or event. When I spent time with him and his wife at the 2000 Republican Convention, we had dinner in an outdoor pizza place, with paper plates and plastic forks. He sat and quietly watched important journalists run by on their way to the convention floor to see the action. I don't think Bob thought that's where the action really was. I think he thought that in his head was where the action was. I think he was right.
He was unillusioned and yet optimistic, felt human agency could change a great deal, and loved America in a way so Midwestern and ingrained that he never had to mention it or show it. It was just there, like his soft gray hair.
He was one great man. He was a great American. The Founders would have loved him. So many of us are grateful that George W. Bush, earlier this month, gave Bob the presidential Medal of Freedom, our country's highest civilian honor. Well given. Freedom never had a better friend.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
PEGGY NOONAN
Freedom's Best Friend
Bob Bartley was conservative when that took courage.
Thursday, December 11, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
What a great man Bob Bartley was. He had guts and he was honest and independent and he worked hard. He was living proof that journalism doesn't have to be a vanity production. It can be big. It can change history. He did.
It is hard to convey, in the age of the conservative ascendancy, what it was like 30 and 40 years ago for conservatives of Bartley's generation. There was no Rush, and no hundred conservative magazines, and no top 10 conservative radio shows and no cable. It took guts to stand where you stood. There was a Democratic Party lurching left and a Republican Party dominated by pale and chubby men who had reluctantly or eagerly embraced liberalism because, as they used to say, they knew what time it was. They knew liberalism was the unstoppable future, and they understood that a good blow-dry haircut is more or less what you need to lead in the modern era. They liked being liked by what was then Georgetown.
There were a few strange-o's like Barry Goldwater and his fans, and Reagan running for governor out there in California, but otherwise nothing was happening within the conservative movement. As a matter of fact the phrase "conservative movement" didn't exist, because there really wasn't one. Only hardy Bill Buckley's witty and impassioned National Review, which was not only the gold standard but just about the only conservative organ grinding out ideas and observations.
Until Bob Bartley. And the cluster of economists, firebrands and policy intellectuals who gathered to him, and who lit the pages of The Wall Street Journal's editorial section with a light so bright it became a beacon. Under Bartley, true freedom of speech came and reigned in a great modern American newspaper. The new supply-side economic theory? Tell us your facts. An argument for the end of post-Vietnam era American defeatism? You can talk about it here. The culture getting coarser? Pull up a chair. You didn't have to be a standard doctrinaire liberal to find a voice here.
That sounds like common sense. But it was an achievement. It was Bartley's.
As a personality I've never seen such a disjunction between manner and status. He did not take himself seriously but took the great issues that roiled our country seriously, and he took it on himself to be a combatant, and then a leader. And he was honest about it. Startlingly honest. He didn't respect liberal journalists who made believe they weren't liberal, and he wasn't going to go that route. He declared what he was--a supply-sider, a conservative, a believer in the legitimacy of American prestige and power--and allowed the reader to judge his views and opinions through an honest lens. That was something kind of new, too.
He was by nature mild, soft-spoken, and possibly shy. I was never sure. When you sat and talked with him he was direct, humorous, probing, unself-conscious. That doesn't sound shy. At the same time he maintained a certain reserve and wasn't given to the spontaneous spilling of emotions, secrets, insights or gossip. I always thought it interesting that he didn't care if anyone knew who he was. He didn't care if you were impressed. Part of this, I think, is due to the fact that he thought that if the waiter in the restaurant didn't know he was the great Bob Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal, he'd have a more authentic experience with the waiter. And if you had to have an experience it might as well be an authentic one. I also think he was constitutionally incapable of vanity.
At the same time he knew who he was. (Maybe that's why he didn't have to have strangers know.) He didn't care if he was at the hot party or meeting or event. When I spent time with him and his wife at the 2000 Republican Convention, we had dinner in an outdoor pizza place, with paper plates and plastic forks. He sat and quietly watched important journalists run by on their way to the convention floor to see the action. I don't think Bob thought that's where the action really was. I think he thought that in his head was where the action was. I think he was right.
He was unillusioned and yet optimistic, felt human agency could change a great deal, and loved America in a way so Midwestern and ingrained that he never had to mention it or show it. It was just there, like his soft gray hair.
He was one great man. He was a great American. The Founders would have loved him. So many of us are grateful that George W. Bush, earlier this month, gave Bob the presidential Medal of Freedom, our country's highest civilian honor. Well given. Freedom never had a better friend.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
Great message indicting one of the false religions of the Left.
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
San Francisco
September 15, 2003
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithely call "the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven't been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
Thank you very much.
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
San Francisco
September 15, 2003
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithely call "the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven't been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
Thank you very much.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Once again, Michelle Malkin is absolutely right:
Lee Malvo, Muslim hatemonger
Michelle Malkin
December 10, 2003
From the moment John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested in the Beltway-area sniper case last fall, the media and Muslim activists wanted us to believe that the serial killings had absolutely nothing to do with Islamic terrorism.
CNN downplayed Muhammad's religious conversion -- calling him by his old name, John Allen Williams, when his identity was first revealed. Malvo was cast as a clueless dupe with no true convictions. Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) argued: "There is no indication that this case is related to Islam or Muslims." Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper railed against conservative commentators such as the indomitable Mark Steyn, who had taken note of Muhammad's Islamic faith and his reportedly expressed anti-American sentiments after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Roeper also ridiculed National Review columnist James Robbins for astutely observing that the sniper was acting "like a jihadist warrior." Roeper smugly concluded: " . . . an awful lot of conservatives really, really wanted the snipers to be terrorists. But they were wrong. I'll say that because they never will."
Now it is time for Roeper, CAIR and the militant Religion of Peace propagandists to face the facts once and for all. A chilling stack of evidence, introduced by Malvo's own lawyers last week at his capital murder trial, exposes accused sniper Malvo as an unrepentant Muslim extremist. He may not have been a card-carrying member of al Qaeda, but as Claremont Institute fellow John Hinderaker notes on Powerlineblog.com, Malvo was more of a "freelance" Islamofascist -- as legions of aggrieved fanatics around the world are.
Malvo's violent drawings and anti-American and anti-Semitic rantings show him to be every bit as blood-thirsty, hatemongering and martyr-craving as any Sept. 11 hijacker or Palestinian suicide bomber. Among Malvo's jailhouse artwork, (online at http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/courts/cases/malvo_defendant_exhibits.htm ):
Exhibit 65-006: A self-portrait of Malvo in the cross hairs of a gun scope shouting, "ALLAH AKBAR!" The word "SALAAM" scrawled vertically. A poem: "Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why."
Exhibit 65-013: The word "INSHALLAH" above a portrait glorifying "Muammar Kaddafi" as "The Liberator" dressed in full military regalia.
Exhibit 65-016: A portrait of Saddam Hussein with the words "INSHALLAH" and "The Protector," surrounded by rockets labeled "chem" and "nuk" (sic).
Exhibit 65-043: Father and son portrait of Malvo and Muhammad. "We will kill them all. Jihad."
Exhibit 65-056: A self-portrait of Malvo as sniper, lying in wait, with his rifle. "JIHAD" written in bold letters.
Exhibit 65-057: A drawing of the Twin Towers burning with a plane flying toward the buildings. Captions: "JIHAD ISLAM UNITE RISE!" along with "America did this" and "You were warned." Portrait of Malvo as sniper labeled "Believer" and portrait of Osama bin Laden labeled "prophet." A poem: "Our minarets are our bayonets, Our mosques are our baracks (sic), Our believers are our soldiers." The American flag and the Star of David drawn in cross hairs.
Exhibit 65-067: A suicide bomber labeled "Hamas" walking into a McDonald's restaurant. Another drawing of the Twin Towers burning captioned: "85 percent chance Zionists did this." More scrawls: "ALLAH AKBAR," "JIHAD" and "Islam will explode."
Exhibit 65-103: A lion accompanies chapter and verse from the Koran ("Sura 2:190"): "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you and slay them wherever ye catch them."
Exhibit 65-109: Portrait of Osama bin Laden, captioned "Servant of Allah."
Exhibit 65-117: The White House drawn in cross hairs, surrounded by missiles, with a warning: "Sep. 11 we will ensure will look like a picnic to you" and "you will bleed to death little by little."
Exhibit 65-133: Reference to "Islamic counter attack force . . . ICAF."
Exhibit 65-114: Self-portrait of Malvo as sniper. Rant says "they all died and they all deserved it."
Exhibit 65-101: Malvo's thought for the day: "Islam the only true guidance, the way of peace."
Ten Americans were murdered at the hands of the Beltway-area snipers. Malvo's lawyers say he was insane and "brainwashed." No more so than your average madrassa student in Jeddah or America-hating cave dweller in Tora Bora. Malvo is, in his own words, a "believer" of Allah and a "soldier" for "JIHAD."
Stop telling me Islam had nothing to do with it.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Lee Malvo, Muslim hatemonger
Michelle Malkin
December 10, 2003
From the moment John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested in the Beltway-area sniper case last fall, the media and Muslim activists wanted us to believe that the serial killings had absolutely nothing to do with Islamic terrorism.
CNN downplayed Muhammad's religious conversion -- calling him by his old name, John Allen Williams, when his identity was first revealed. Malvo was cast as a clueless dupe with no true convictions. Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) argued: "There is no indication that this case is related to Islam or Muslims." Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper railed against conservative commentators such as the indomitable Mark Steyn, who had taken note of Muhammad's Islamic faith and his reportedly expressed anti-American sentiments after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Roeper also ridiculed National Review columnist James Robbins for astutely observing that the sniper was acting "like a jihadist warrior." Roeper smugly concluded: " . . . an awful lot of conservatives really, really wanted the snipers to be terrorists. But they were wrong. I'll say that because they never will."
Now it is time for Roeper, CAIR and the militant Religion of Peace propagandists to face the facts once and for all. A chilling stack of evidence, introduced by Malvo's own lawyers last week at his capital murder trial, exposes accused sniper Malvo as an unrepentant Muslim extremist. He may not have been a card-carrying member of al Qaeda, but as Claremont Institute fellow John Hinderaker notes on Powerlineblog.com, Malvo was more of a "freelance" Islamofascist -- as legions of aggrieved fanatics around the world are.
Malvo's violent drawings and anti-American and anti-Semitic rantings show him to be every bit as blood-thirsty, hatemongering and martyr-craving as any Sept. 11 hijacker or Palestinian suicide bomber. Among Malvo's jailhouse artwork, (online at http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/courts/cases/malvo_defendant_exhibits.htm ):
Exhibit 65-006: A self-portrait of Malvo in the cross hairs of a gun scope shouting, "ALLAH AKBAR!" The word "SALAAM" scrawled vertically. A poem: "Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why."
Exhibit 65-013: The word "INSHALLAH" above a portrait glorifying "Muammar Kaddafi" as "The Liberator" dressed in full military regalia.
Exhibit 65-016: A portrait of Saddam Hussein with the words "INSHALLAH" and "The Protector," surrounded by rockets labeled "chem" and "nuk" (sic).
Exhibit 65-043: Father and son portrait of Malvo and Muhammad. "We will kill them all. Jihad."
Exhibit 65-056: A self-portrait of Malvo as sniper, lying in wait, with his rifle. "JIHAD" written in bold letters.
Exhibit 65-057: A drawing of the Twin Towers burning with a plane flying toward the buildings. Captions: "JIHAD ISLAM UNITE RISE!" along with "America did this" and "You were warned." Portrait of Malvo as sniper labeled "Believer" and portrait of Osama bin Laden labeled "prophet." A poem: "Our minarets are our bayonets, Our mosques are our baracks (sic), Our believers are our soldiers." The American flag and the Star of David drawn in cross hairs.
Exhibit 65-067: A suicide bomber labeled "Hamas" walking into a McDonald's restaurant. Another drawing of the Twin Towers burning captioned: "85 percent chance Zionists did this." More scrawls: "ALLAH AKBAR," "JIHAD" and "Islam will explode."
Exhibit 65-103: A lion accompanies chapter and verse from the Koran ("Sura 2:190"): "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you and slay them wherever ye catch them."
Exhibit 65-109: Portrait of Osama bin Laden, captioned "Servant of Allah."
Exhibit 65-117: The White House drawn in cross hairs, surrounded by missiles, with a warning: "Sep. 11 we will ensure will look like a picnic to you" and "you will bleed to death little by little."
Exhibit 65-133: Reference to "Islamic counter attack force . . . ICAF."
Exhibit 65-114: Self-portrait of Malvo as sniper. Rant says "they all died and they all deserved it."
Exhibit 65-101: Malvo's thought for the day: "Islam the only true guidance, the way of peace."
Ten Americans were murdered at the hands of the Beltway-area snipers. Malvo's lawyers say he was insane and "brainwashed." No more so than your average madrassa student in Jeddah or America-hating cave dweller in Tora Bora. Malvo is, in his own words, a "believer" of Allah and a "soldier" for "JIHAD."
Stop telling me Islam had nothing to do with it.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Anybody see Al Gore's endorsement of HoDean this morning?
Practically the first thing Al says after the obligatory thanks is the non-sequitur: "I played basketball the last time I was in Harlem." Then he played the banjo while he had white gloves and a big floppy bow-tie on. Okay, he really didn't do the last. But he might as well have.
They kept hammering him for the basketball take on Imus this morning but, predictably, I haven't heard it mentioned anywhere else. Priceless.
A Google search to see if I could find a mention of the old
hoopster's comments took me to a Newsday article that
reported:
"Gore, warming up the crowd Tuesday before his endorsement of Dean, said he felt a special bond with Harlem.
"It's great to be back in Harlem," the ex-vice president said. Then, pointing to Harlem City Councilman Bill Perkins, Gore said, "We shot basketball the last time I was here." They played the pick-up game on 118th Street in July 1998 when Gore was in town for the Goodwill Games."
So the remark wasn't entirely unprompted. You'd think he might have worked in a mention of the Harlem Renaissance or
something about the history of the neighborhood. I guess he thought his pickup basketball game reference would be easier than ripping off a "Yo, I'm kizikin' with HoDean fo' shizzle."
Anybody see Al Gore's endorsement of HoDean this morning?
Practically the first thing Al says after the obligatory thanks is the non-sequitur: "I played basketball the last time I was in Harlem." Then he played the banjo while he had white gloves and a big floppy bow-tie on. Okay, he really didn't do the last. But he might as well have.
They kept hammering him for the basketball take on Imus this morning but, predictably, I haven't heard it mentioned anywhere else. Priceless.
A Google search to see if I could find a mention of the old
hoopster's comments took me to a Newsday article that
reported:
"Gore, warming up the crowd Tuesday before his endorsement of Dean, said he felt a special bond with Harlem.
"It's great to be back in Harlem," the ex-vice president said. Then, pointing to Harlem City Councilman Bill Perkins, Gore said, "We shot basketball the last time I was here." They played the pick-up game on 118th Street in July 1998 when Gore was in town for the Goodwill Games."
So the remark wasn't entirely unprompted. You'd think he might have worked in a mention of the Harlem Renaissance or
something about the history of the neighborhood. I guess he thought his pickup basketball game reference would be easier than ripping off a "Yo, I'm kizikin' with HoDean fo' shizzle."
As posted on Fox News:
Springsteen’s Joyous Xmas Gift to His Hometown
Monday, December 08, 2003
By Roger Friedman
Rock star Bruce Springsteen just came off a year-long world tour, so you’d think he’d had enough of performing for a while. But you don’t know Bruce the way the people of Asbury Park, N.J., do: He is their local hero. Last night he gave them the second of three shows to raise money for a host of civic improvements, including uniforms for their high school’s marching band. The third show is tonight. You should not miss it.
It’s an understatement to say he put on a show, too. At the Asbury Park Convention Hall, a run-down edifice in a decaying beach community, Springsteen organized guest stars including another rock star, Jon Bon Jovi, legendary R&B star Sam "Soul Man" Moore, cult fave Garland Jeffreys, up-and-comer Jesse Malin, and a couple of prominent members of the E Street Band, Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren. The band was the Max Weinberg Seven, which is the house band for Conan O'Brien’s TV show and happens to feature Springsteen’s E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg.
This is the third year (he missed last year because he was out of town) Springsteen’s held this Christmas bash. I should say holiday bash because even though a gigantic wreath and big fir trees ornamented the stage, there were menorahs, too. And while the highlight is his famous rendition of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” — Danny DeVito played Santa on Friday night – the overall effect is to raise much-needed funds for a town that is so poor it didn’t even plow the streets around the Convention Hall last night after Saturday’s huge snow storm.
“This is Beirut,” Bon Jovi, a Springsteen neighbor, said backstage of the town, and he was only partially kidding. Not only is Bon Jovi also helping out Asbury Park, he’s raising money for Pop Warner football in a nearby community where there are no funds. His 8-year-old son is on the team and this year they got underwriting from Nike. Now they’re undefeated. “I want to write them and say, 'Clothes do make the man,'” Bon Jovi joked.
Lesser men would have picked up their families and moved to Greenwich or Bedford Hills by now. (Don’t fear though: Both rockers live in more upscale neighboring towns in mansions.)
But back to the show. After a rousing opener by a local gospel choir, the evening belonged to Springsteen. He almost never left the stage during the three-hour-plus show, playing with all the guest stars and singing with them, too.
Freed from doing a regular set, Springsteen got to perform some songs he never gets to do during his regular shows. There were gems last night that the diehard fans went wild for: “So Young and So in Love,” “Thunder Crack,” “The Wish” and “Kitty’s Back” drew cheers from the several thousand who were jammed like sardines on the Convention Hall floor.
Springsteen is a loyal man, that much we know by now. When he loves you, he loves you for life. Jeffreys, who is almost a cult pop star in New York, a musicians’ musician, came on after Bruce performed three songs and wowed the crowd with “Wild in the Streets” and “R.O.C.K.” Jeffreys —on the verge of a tremendous career spurt in 2004 after laying the groundwork all this year — is the kind of artist Springsteen is not. He is impossible to pigeonhole. His music runs from reggae to salsa to rock and pop with tinges of Tin Pan Alley and the Lower East Side. The beauty of it is that it is eclectic. Springsteen knows that. Holding him tight on stage he said, “We started out at the same time. He was on Epic, I was on Columbia, so there was a little rivalry I guess.” He later ordered the audience, “Buy his albums.”
He introduced Moore with no less a pronouncement than, “This is the greatest soul singer on the planet.” (He’s also the greatest soul singer on the planet without a recording contract, something that should be remedied ASAP.) Moore — who just returned from taping a TV special in Hollywood with Al Green — lived up to this heavy burden by leading the band through his best-known songs from the era of Stax soul: “Soul Man,” “Hold on I’m Coming,” and “I Thank You.”
The two men did what amounted to a duet on “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” turning Sam and Dave into Sam and Bruce. I hope it turns up one day on a Springsteen live set. Moore, who is 68, continues to astound. His voice is in better shape now than ever.
There was a lot more, too: Van Zandt gave a Christmas tribute to Joey Ramone. He also played with Springsteen and Southside Johnny — he of the Asbury Jukes fame, an E Street Band spinoff in the mid '70s. The only people in the world who probably even know Southside Johnny’s songs were all in the same room last night, and they were thrilled to sing along with “I Don’t Want to Go Home” and “This Time It’s for Real.”
Lofgren got to pull out his own mini-masterpiece “Shine Silently,” and Bon Jovi, who ambled about on stage all night, helping out and looking like a movie star, showed off his own voice with “It’s My Life.”
Asbury Park is an hour-and-a-half drive from New York, and not a particularly inviting place even when it hasn’t been snowed on for two days. Even so, I spotted “Sopranos” creator David Chase in the crowd, as well as “The Nanny” star Fran Drescher and sports commentator Bob Costas. They just sort of mixed in, since there wasn’t much of a VIP situation to fall back on. They were visitors, for the night, at a very parochial event, like a grange supper, only with a horn section. To wit: At the end of the night, right before the whole gang on stage sang Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny Bout Peace, Love and Understanding,”
Springsteen — sweat pouring off him — spouted off a list of places where the money raised from the night was going. He also read off a list of holiday activities in town, and a number of local sponsors and businesses from bakeries to hair salons to florists.
“Oh, they’re sick of us by now,” Bon Jovi told me later, facetiously, about the constant fund-raising he and Springsteen have done in the area. “They’re always saying, 'What are they doing now?'”
Something tells me the people of Asbury Park aren’t sick of them at all. Every town should be so lucky.
Springsteen’s Joyous Xmas Gift to His Hometown
Monday, December 08, 2003
By Roger Friedman
Rock star Bruce Springsteen just came off a year-long world tour, so you’d think he’d had enough of performing for a while. But you don’t know Bruce the way the people of Asbury Park, N.J., do: He is their local hero. Last night he gave them the second of three shows to raise money for a host of civic improvements, including uniforms for their high school’s marching band. The third show is tonight. You should not miss it.
It’s an understatement to say he put on a show, too. At the Asbury Park Convention Hall, a run-down edifice in a decaying beach community, Springsteen organized guest stars including another rock star, Jon Bon Jovi, legendary R&B star Sam "Soul Man" Moore, cult fave Garland Jeffreys, up-and-comer Jesse Malin, and a couple of prominent members of the E Street Band, Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren. The band was the Max Weinberg Seven, which is the house band for Conan O'Brien’s TV show and happens to feature Springsteen’s E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg.
This is the third year (he missed last year because he was out of town) Springsteen’s held this Christmas bash. I should say holiday bash because even though a gigantic wreath and big fir trees ornamented the stage, there were menorahs, too. And while the highlight is his famous rendition of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” — Danny DeVito played Santa on Friday night – the overall effect is to raise much-needed funds for a town that is so poor it didn’t even plow the streets around the Convention Hall last night after Saturday’s huge snow storm.
“This is Beirut,” Bon Jovi, a Springsteen neighbor, said backstage of the town, and he was only partially kidding. Not only is Bon Jovi also helping out Asbury Park, he’s raising money for Pop Warner football in a nearby community where there are no funds. His 8-year-old son is on the team and this year they got underwriting from Nike. Now they’re undefeated. “I want to write them and say, 'Clothes do make the man,'” Bon Jovi joked.
Lesser men would have picked up their families and moved to Greenwich or Bedford Hills by now. (Don’t fear though: Both rockers live in more upscale neighboring towns in mansions.)
But back to the show. After a rousing opener by a local gospel choir, the evening belonged to Springsteen. He almost never left the stage during the three-hour-plus show, playing with all the guest stars and singing with them, too.
Freed from doing a regular set, Springsteen got to perform some songs he never gets to do during his regular shows. There were gems last night that the diehard fans went wild for: “So Young and So in Love,” “Thunder Crack,” “The Wish” and “Kitty’s Back” drew cheers from the several thousand who were jammed like sardines on the Convention Hall floor.
Springsteen is a loyal man, that much we know by now. When he loves you, he loves you for life. Jeffreys, who is almost a cult pop star in New York, a musicians’ musician, came on after Bruce performed three songs and wowed the crowd with “Wild in the Streets” and “R.O.C.K.” Jeffreys —on the verge of a tremendous career spurt in 2004 after laying the groundwork all this year — is the kind of artist Springsteen is not. He is impossible to pigeonhole. His music runs from reggae to salsa to rock and pop with tinges of Tin Pan Alley and the Lower East Side. The beauty of it is that it is eclectic. Springsteen knows that. Holding him tight on stage he said, “We started out at the same time. He was on Epic, I was on Columbia, so there was a little rivalry I guess.” He later ordered the audience, “Buy his albums.”
He introduced Moore with no less a pronouncement than, “This is the greatest soul singer on the planet.” (He’s also the greatest soul singer on the planet without a recording contract, something that should be remedied ASAP.) Moore — who just returned from taping a TV special in Hollywood with Al Green — lived up to this heavy burden by leading the band through his best-known songs from the era of Stax soul: “Soul Man,” “Hold on I’m Coming,” and “I Thank You.”
The two men did what amounted to a duet on “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” turning Sam and Dave into Sam and Bruce. I hope it turns up one day on a Springsteen live set. Moore, who is 68, continues to astound. His voice is in better shape now than ever.
There was a lot more, too: Van Zandt gave a Christmas tribute to Joey Ramone. He also played with Springsteen and Southside Johnny — he of the Asbury Jukes fame, an E Street Band spinoff in the mid '70s. The only people in the world who probably even know Southside Johnny’s songs were all in the same room last night, and they were thrilled to sing along with “I Don’t Want to Go Home” and “This Time It’s for Real.”
Lofgren got to pull out his own mini-masterpiece “Shine Silently,” and Bon Jovi, who ambled about on stage all night, helping out and looking like a movie star, showed off his own voice with “It’s My Life.”
Asbury Park is an hour-and-a-half drive from New York, and not a particularly inviting place even when it hasn’t been snowed on for two days. Even so, I spotted “Sopranos” creator David Chase in the crowd, as well as “The Nanny” star Fran Drescher and sports commentator Bob Costas. They just sort of mixed in, since there wasn’t much of a VIP situation to fall back on. They were visitors, for the night, at a very parochial event, like a grange supper, only with a horn section. To wit: At the end of the night, right before the whole gang on stage sang Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny Bout Peace, Love and Understanding,”
Springsteen — sweat pouring off him — spouted off a list of places where the money raised from the night was going. He also read off a list of holiday activities in town, and a number of local sponsors and businesses from bakeries to hair salons to florists.
“Oh, they’re sick of us by now,” Bon Jovi told me later, facetiously, about the constant fund-raising he and Springsteen have done in the area. “They’re always saying, 'What are they doing now?'”
Something tells me the people of Asbury Park aren’t sick of them at all. Every town should be so lucky.
Monday, December 08, 2003
The 18th championship by the greatest sports dynasty and the greatest team coach in history. Yes, I remember the Yankees, Celtics, and UCLA and no, I'm not crazy.
For Heels, it was a Dorranation
By NED BARNETT, Staff Writer
CARY--At SAS Stadium on Sunday, the sky was pure Carolina blue and the team in sky blue was pure Carolina.
Bringing new vigor to an old dynasty, the Tar Heels women's soccer team drubbed Connecticut 6-0 in a NCAA championship game that was more a coronation than competition.
Connecticut, in theory the second best team in women's college soccer, played 90 minutes and did not have a single shot on goal. Carolina had 15. The Tar Heels could have played without a goaltender and won by a shutout.
Carolina cut through this tournament like Mia Hamm through a high school tryout. The Tar Heels set a tournament record for goals (32, old record 22) and did not give up a single goal as they reeled off six consecutive shutouts.
The final outcome surprised even the one who contributed the most to those shutouts, Catherine Reddick, Carolina's senior defender.
"You never come out in a national championship game and think the score is going to end up like that," Reddick said.
Carolina's perfect 27-0 season capped by a flawless tournament was something more than domination, but there may not yet be a word for it. How about a new word that honors Carolina coach Anson Dorrance who has presided over this amazing record for 25 years.
Call it Dorranation.
The All-Americas come and go at Carolina, but the result stays the same. The NCAA has held a national championship for 22 years. The Tar Heels have been in 20 of the championship games.
On Sunday, Carolina took home its 17th NCAA championship. Dorrance has enough rings for both hands and all but three toes.
In the last two years, there was a glimmer of an end to the dynasty. Carolina did not make the championship game last year. But when the Heels returned to the final Sunday, they beat more than the Huskies. They defeated the hopes of all would-be champions who thought they saw a new era of parity in women's college soccer.
"I wish I had played them a year ago. If I played them a year ago, I think I had a chance," said Connecticut coach Len Tsantiris, who has lost to UNC in four NCAA finals, "I wish I played them in '95. Those were their down years. We've gotten them in years that they have a very good team."
Tsantiris could be waiting a long time for the next down year. Other teams are not catching up. Carolina is pulling away. The tournament bracket was stacked to stopped the perfect Heels. It included Purdue, Santa Clara and UCLA. Carolina rolled over them like speed bumps, winning 7-0, 3-0 and 3-0. Then came the 6-0 blowout in Sunday's final.
The only rivals this Carolina team has are Tar Heels teams of the past. But this 2003 version may even be better than the legendary 1992 squad that included Hamm, Kristine Lilly and Tisha Venturini that went 25-0.
"Obviously, the game has evolved since '92," Dorrance said. "These two teams are in a similar, elite class. This team is more mobile than '92, but '92 had personalities that would just take over. ... But there's no question the '92 team and this team are absolutely extraordinary soccer teams."
Now they might get better. The 2003 team will lose only five seniors. Of the four stars brought out to the media after the game, one was a senior, Reddick. The rest were underclassmen: sophomore Lori Chalupny, who set the tone early with an an assist and a goal; freshman Heather O'Reilly, the offensive player of the tournament; and sophomore Lindsay Tarpley, who scored twice Sunday.
If there is a dark cloud in this pure blue sky, it is that Dorranation may be good for Dorrance, but not for the game. All sports need suspense and underdogs who win. Carolina has taken away both.
Dorrance has heard that complaint before and he's ready when asked.
"People that don't understand what builds interest in a sport, they don't appreciate the dynasties," he said. "The media pays attention to dynasties.
"The best run in the NBA was when the Bulls were rocking. The best run in baseball was when the Yankees were rocking. People that think that parity builds sports don't have any clue of the history of the development of athletics. So this isn't bad for the game."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2003, The News & Observer Publishing Company.
For Heels, it was a Dorranation
By NED BARNETT, Staff Writer
CARY--At SAS Stadium on Sunday, the sky was pure Carolina blue and the team in sky blue was pure Carolina.
Bringing new vigor to an old dynasty, the Tar Heels women's soccer team drubbed Connecticut 6-0 in a NCAA championship game that was more a coronation than competition.
Connecticut, in theory the second best team in women's college soccer, played 90 minutes and did not have a single shot on goal. Carolina had 15. The Tar Heels could have played without a goaltender and won by a shutout.
Carolina cut through this tournament like Mia Hamm through a high school tryout. The Tar Heels set a tournament record for goals (32, old record 22) and did not give up a single goal as they reeled off six consecutive shutouts.
The final outcome surprised even the one who contributed the most to those shutouts, Catherine Reddick, Carolina's senior defender.
"You never come out in a national championship game and think the score is going to end up like that," Reddick said.
Carolina's perfect 27-0 season capped by a flawless tournament was something more than domination, but there may not yet be a word for it. How about a new word that honors Carolina coach Anson Dorrance who has presided over this amazing record for 25 years.
Call it Dorranation.
The All-Americas come and go at Carolina, but the result stays the same. The NCAA has held a national championship for 22 years. The Tar Heels have been in 20 of the championship games.
On Sunday, Carolina took home its 17th NCAA championship. Dorrance has enough rings for both hands and all but three toes.
In the last two years, there was a glimmer of an end to the dynasty. Carolina did not make the championship game last year. But when the Heels returned to the final Sunday, they beat more than the Huskies. They defeated the hopes of all would-be champions who thought they saw a new era of parity in women's college soccer.
"I wish I had played them a year ago. If I played them a year ago, I think I had a chance," said Connecticut coach Len Tsantiris, who has lost to UNC in four NCAA finals, "I wish I played them in '95. Those were their down years. We've gotten them in years that they have a very good team."
Tsantiris could be waiting a long time for the next down year. Other teams are not catching up. Carolina is pulling away. The tournament bracket was stacked to stopped the perfect Heels. It included Purdue, Santa Clara and UCLA. Carolina rolled over them like speed bumps, winning 7-0, 3-0 and 3-0. Then came the 6-0 blowout in Sunday's final.
The only rivals this Carolina team has are Tar Heels teams of the past. But this 2003 version may even be better than the legendary 1992 squad that included Hamm, Kristine Lilly and Tisha Venturini that went 25-0.
"Obviously, the game has evolved since '92," Dorrance said. "These two teams are in a similar, elite class. This team is more mobile than '92, but '92 had personalities that would just take over. ... But there's no question the '92 team and this team are absolutely extraordinary soccer teams."
Now they might get better. The 2003 team will lose only five seniors. Of the four stars brought out to the media after the game, one was a senior, Reddick. The rest were underclassmen: sophomore Lori Chalupny, who set the tone early with an an assist and a goal; freshman Heather O'Reilly, the offensive player of the tournament; and sophomore Lindsay Tarpley, who scored twice Sunday.
If there is a dark cloud in this pure blue sky, it is that Dorranation may be good for Dorrance, but not for the game. All sports need suspense and underdogs who win. Carolina has taken away both.
Dorrance has heard that complaint before and he's ready when asked.
"People that don't understand what builds interest in a sport, they don't appreciate the dynasties," he said. "The media pays attention to dynasties.
"The best run in the NBA was when the Bulls were rocking. The best run in baseball was when the Yankees were rocking. People that think that parity builds sports don't have any clue of the history of the development of athletics. So this isn't bad for the game."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2003, The News & Observer Publishing Company.
Outstanding column from Tech Central Station:
I Feel, Therefore I Am
By James Harrigan 12/08/2003
At some point in the late 20th century the English language underwent a silent revision. The verb "to think" was replaced by "to feel," and as a result feelings have overtaken thoughts in American public discourse.
By the time this silent revolution in language was complete, what has been termed the Oprah Winfreyization of America was a foregone conclusion. In the vernacular of present-day America, the phrase "I feel" dots the linguistic landscape, and when it is uttered the unspoken assumption is that all feelings are equally valid, no matter how unwarranted those feelings might be. This pernicious trend invariably finds its fullest expression in the context of race.
The most recent example of this began innocently enough in May 2003, when a black employee in Los Angeles county's Probation Department filed a discrimination complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance in response to labels on a videotape machine marked "master" and "slave." How these labels warranted a charge of discrimination is not entirely clear, but in this, the Era of Bad Feelings, definitions rarely get in the way when a complaint is lodged. Joe Sandoval, a division manager in the Internal Services Department, didn't miss a beat.
In a memo dated Nov 18, 2003, with "Los Angeles County" in the "from" field, Sandoval wrote that "The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived."
Actual or perceived?
Apparently complaints of discrimination need no longer be based in anything as elusive as reality in Los Angeles County. All one needs in order to be justified in leveling a charge of discrimination is the perception of "discriminatory influence." In short, feelings are all that matter.
The memo outlined a new consciousness for county administration, asserting that "it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature."
"One such recent example," the memo continued, "included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words "Master/Slave" appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label."
One needn't be concerned that "master" and "slave" are, in this case, technical terms denoting the nature of a relationship between pieces of (non-human) equipment. As such, no "discriminatory influence" could have possibly been intended. No… the only thing that matters is that these words damaged someone's feelings. As a result, these specific words are now presumably off-limits for all time regardless of context, if only in Los Angeles County.
Los Angeles County is hardly an anomaly in this respect.
Take, for instance, America's on-again off-again hate affair with the word "niggardly." A word meaning "miserly" is by definition pejorative, but the actual meaning of the word scarcely matters when feelings are concerned. The real problem with the word niggardly is that it shares its first four letters with the granddaddy of all racial slurs. That the words derive from different roots and thus mean different things is quite irrelevant. The simple fact is that the term in question sounds like an offensive word, and this is enough to warrant punitive measures when it is uttered.
Washington, DC Mayor Anthony Williams believed as much when a white staff member, David Howard, had the temerity to actually use "niggardly" in a staff meeting in 1999. A black official took offense at Howard's language, thinking it racist, and Howard was relieved of his employment. The mayor explained that although Howard didn't say "anything that was in itself racist," the term could be misunderstood, and this was like "getting caught smoking in a refinery with a resulting explosion."
Soon thereafter, a University of Wisconsin student called for the banning of the word on campus after a professor used it in a discussion of Chaucer. The fact that Chaucer himself had used a form of the word in Troylus and Cryseyde was apparently irrelevant. And then there was the case of Stephanie Bell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, who in 2002 had the nerve to use the offending term in a classroom discussion. A parent, Akwana Walker, claimed offense. Ms. Bell was ultimately forced to apologize to Walker, whose child was transferred to another (presumably less literate) class. Bell was also, according to her son, formally reprimanded for "lacking sensitivity to the school's diverse population of students and not being aware of cultural differences." In order to become properly sensitized, Bell was required to attend sensitivity training.
One wonders why the school board, principal, and offended parent were not compelled to take English lessons.
Or consider Federico de Jesus' recent tirade against scholar Victor David Hanson. De Jesus, a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, accused Hanson of being a racist at a recent Capitol Hill briefing. Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece and professor at California State University-Fresno, was introduced as "a classicist" before his remarks. De Jesus, unable to distinguish between a "classicist" and a "classist," accused Hanson of harboring a bias against immigrants, thereby proving himself a racist. De Jesus stormed out of the room, stopping only long enough to help himself to a pizza, no doubt in a gesture of protest.
One is hard pressed to see how any of these are properly understood as racial issues, but the feelings of the offended are all that matters. And these feelings are valid, in beautiful circularity, simply because they are felt. In the end, common sense, civility, and language are held hostage when all feelings are equally valid, and we are all slaves to our unthinking, if sensitive, masters.
James R. Harrigan is a Visiting Professor of Political Science at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York.
Copyright © 2003 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com
I Feel, Therefore I Am
By James Harrigan 12/08/2003
At some point in the late 20th century the English language underwent a silent revision. The verb "to think" was replaced by "to feel," and as a result feelings have overtaken thoughts in American public discourse.
By the time this silent revolution in language was complete, what has been termed the Oprah Winfreyization of America was a foregone conclusion. In the vernacular of present-day America, the phrase "I feel" dots the linguistic landscape, and when it is uttered the unspoken assumption is that all feelings are equally valid, no matter how unwarranted those feelings might be. This pernicious trend invariably finds its fullest expression in the context of race.
The most recent example of this began innocently enough in May 2003, when a black employee in Los Angeles county's Probation Department filed a discrimination complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance in response to labels on a videotape machine marked "master" and "slave." How these labels warranted a charge of discrimination is not entirely clear, but in this, the Era of Bad Feelings, definitions rarely get in the way when a complaint is lodged. Joe Sandoval, a division manager in the Internal Services Department, didn't miss a beat.
In a memo dated Nov 18, 2003, with "Los Angeles County" in the "from" field, Sandoval wrote that "The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived."
Actual or perceived?
Apparently complaints of discrimination need no longer be based in anything as elusive as reality in Los Angeles County. All one needs in order to be justified in leveling a charge of discrimination is the perception of "discriminatory influence." In short, feelings are all that matter.
The memo outlined a new consciousness for county administration, asserting that "it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature."
"One such recent example," the memo continued, "included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words "Master/Slave" appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label."
One needn't be concerned that "master" and "slave" are, in this case, technical terms denoting the nature of a relationship between pieces of (non-human) equipment. As such, no "discriminatory influence" could have possibly been intended. No… the only thing that matters is that these words damaged someone's feelings. As a result, these specific words are now presumably off-limits for all time regardless of context, if only in Los Angeles County.
Los Angeles County is hardly an anomaly in this respect.
Take, for instance, America's on-again off-again hate affair with the word "niggardly." A word meaning "miserly" is by definition pejorative, but the actual meaning of the word scarcely matters when feelings are concerned. The real problem with the word niggardly is that it shares its first four letters with the granddaddy of all racial slurs. That the words derive from different roots and thus mean different things is quite irrelevant. The simple fact is that the term in question sounds like an offensive word, and this is enough to warrant punitive measures when it is uttered.
Washington, DC Mayor Anthony Williams believed as much when a white staff member, David Howard, had the temerity to actually use "niggardly" in a staff meeting in 1999. A black official took offense at Howard's language, thinking it racist, and Howard was relieved of his employment. The mayor explained that although Howard didn't say "anything that was in itself racist," the term could be misunderstood, and this was like "getting caught smoking in a refinery with a resulting explosion."
Soon thereafter, a University of Wisconsin student called for the banning of the word on campus after a professor used it in a discussion of Chaucer. The fact that Chaucer himself had used a form of the word in Troylus and Cryseyde was apparently irrelevant. And then there was the case of Stephanie Bell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, who in 2002 had the nerve to use the offending term in a classroom discussion. A parent, Akwana Walker, claimed offense. Ms. Bell was ultimately forced to apologize to Walker, whose child was transferred to another (presumably less literate) class. Bell was also, according to her son, formally reprimanded for "lacking sensitivity to the school's diverse population of students and not being aware of cultural differences." In order to become properly sensitized, Bell was required to attend sensitivity training.
One wonders why the school board, principal, and offended parent were not compelled to take English lessons.
Or consider Federico de Jesus' recent tirade against scholar Victor David Hanson. De Jesus, a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, accused Hanson of being a racist at a recent Capitol Hill briefing. Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece and professor at California State University-Fresno, was introduced as "a classicist" before his remarks. De Jesus, unable to distinguish between a "classicist" and a "classist," accused Hanson of harboring a bias against immigrants, thereby proving himself a racist. De Jesus stormed out of the room, stopping only long enough to help himself to a pizza, no doubt in a gesture of protest.
One is hard pressed to see how any of these are properly understood as racial issues, but the feelings of the offended are all that matters. And these feelings are valid, in beautiful circularity, simply because they are felt. In the end, common sense, civility, and language are held hostage when all feelings are equally valid, and we are all slaves to our unthinking, if sensitive, masters.
James R. Harrigan is a Visiting Professor of Political Science at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York.
Copyright © 2003 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com
An excellent take on HoDean from George Will:
Howard Dean -- the thinker
George Will
December 7, 2003
WASHINGTON -- Howard Dean is no fool. He is, however, not much of a thinker. His talk flows as rapidly as a mountain brook, but is no deeper than one of those.
He is the candidate of America's professorate and others whose strongest passion is as much aesthetic as political -- intellectual contempt for George W. Bush. But Dean's bantam-rooster pugnacity is not unlike Bush's shoulders-squared jauntiness that critics consider an enraging swagger. Bush's imperturbable certitude infuriates Dean's supporters because they believe it arises not from reflection but from reflex. Actually, Dean really resembles his supporters' idea of Bush.
Appearing on ``Hardball'' with the human Gatling gun, Chris Matthews, Dean said that in terms of legal rights there is no practical difference between same-sex civil unions and marriages. Matthews: ``So why are we quibbling over a name?'' Dean: ``Because marriage is very important to a lot of people who are pretty religious.''
So, the argument about the public meaning of marriage is merely a semantic quibble important only to the ``pretty religious''? Dean has said of his faith that ``I don't think it informs my politics,'' and that he became a Congregationalist ``because I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church about 25 years ago over a bike path.'' Fine. His faith, whatever it is, is his business and no disqualification for the presidency. But his qualifications supposedly include a searching intellect. Where is the evidence?
Asked by Matthews whether he supports state right-to-work laws protecting the right of workers not to join a union, Dean said no. But he also said ``I very much believe that states ought to have the right to recognize -- to organize their own laws. So I'm not likely as president ... to order states to change them.'''
Order states? Imagine the media derision if Bush ever suggested such an understanding of federalism.
In his next breath, Dean said that if Congress sends to his presidential desk legislation denying states that right that he ``very much'' believes they ought to have -- the right to have right-to-work laws -- ``I'd sign it in an instant.'' This is the intellectuals' candidate?
If Osama bin Laden is captured, Dean says ``it doesn't make a lot of difference'' whether he is tried in America or the International Criminal Court. After all, ``we are allowing the Bosnian war criminals to be tried'' in the Hague. Question: Is it relevant that the Bosnians' crimes were not committed in America?
Dean promises ``to break up giant media enterprises'' -- General Electric, News Corporation, etc. -- because there is ``information control'' that ``is not compatible with democracy.'' Question: Given the Internet and other new media, and the consequently declining importance of broadcast networks and other traditional filters of information, has there ever been less reason to use ``information control'' as an excuse for expanding government regulation of information media?
Asked to name his favorite philosopher, Dean named Lao-Tse because ``my favorite saying is, `The longest journey begins with a single step.''' That might make a better bumper sticker than anything David Hume said, but if that measures the depths of Dean, he and his supporters should take a sabbatical from deriding Bush's supposed shallowness.
America needs what Dean seems intellectually and temperamentally ill-equipped to provide -- truly thoughtful opposition in an election that should turn on two huge issues. One is: How do we guarantee economic growth sufficient to generate tax revenues to finance a welfare state whose entitlement menu is being substantially expanded just as 77 million baby boomers are about to retire? The second is: Can America's security be attained without adopting foreign policy goals of unattainable grandiosity -- nation-building, regional transformations?
Dean has provided no reason to expect from him especially elevated reasoning about these things. He seems to be an Everett Wharton. ``The Prime Minister,'' one of Anthony Trollope's parliamentary novels, introduces Wharton, who was, Trollope wrote, ``no fool'':
``(He) had read much, and although he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his reading certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects. It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself -- but he thought that he thought.''
Dean seems like that, which is not surprising or disqualifying: Most political leaders are not people of reflection, but of ambition-dictated action, living off borrowed intellectual capital. Given the accumulating evidence, the professors' pin-up should dismount his intellectual high horse.
©2003 Washington Post Writers Group
Howard Dean -- the thinker
George Will
December 7, 2003
WASHINGTON -- Howard Dean is no fool. He is, however, not much of a thinker. His talk flows as rapidly as a mountain brook, but is no deeper than one of those.
He is the candidate of America's professorate and others whose strongest passion is as much aesthetic as political -- intellectual contempt for George W. Bush. But Dean's bantam-rooster pugnacity is not unlike Bush's shoulders-squared jauntiness that critics consider an enraging swagger. Bush's imperturbable certitude infuriates Dean's supporters because they believe it arises not from reflection but from reflex. Actually, Dean really resembles his supporters' idea of Bush.
Appearing on ``Hardball'' with the human Gatling gun, Chris Matthews, Dean said that in terms of legal rights there is no practical difference between same-sex civil unions and marriages. Matthews: ``So why are we quibbling over a name?'' Dean: ``Because marriage is very important to a lot of people who are pretty religious.''
So, the argument about the public meaning of marriage is merely a semantic quibble important only to the ``pretty religious''? Dean has said of his faith that ``I don't think it informs my politics,'' and that he became a Congregationalist ``because I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church about 25 years ago over a bike path.'' Fine. His faith, whatever it is, is his business and no disqualification for the presidency. But his qualifications supposedly include a searching intellect. Where is the evidence?
Asked by Matthews whether he supports state right-to-work laws protecting the right of workers not to join a union, Dean said no. But he also said ``I very much believe that states ought to have the right to recognize -- to organize their own laws. So I'm not likely as president ... to order states to change them.'''
Order states? Imagine the media derision if Bush ever suggested such an understanding of federalism.
In his next breath, Dean said that if Congress sends to his presidential desk legislation denying states that right that he ``very much'' believes they ought to have -- the right to have right-to-work laws -- ``I'd sign it in an instant.'' This is the intellectuals' candidate?
If Osama bin Laden is captured, Dean says ``it doesn't make a lot of difference'' whether he is tried in America or the International Criminal Court. After all, ``we are allowing the Bosnian war criminals to be tried'' in the Hague. Question: Is it relevant that the Bosnians' crimes were not committed in America?
Dean promises ``to break up giant media enterprises'' -- General Electric, News Corporation, etc. -- because there is ``information control'' that ``is not compatible with democracy.'' Question: Given the Internet and other new media, and the consequently declining importance of broadcast networks and other traditional filters of information, has there ever been less reason to use ``information control'' as an excuse for expanding government regulation of information media?
Asked to name his favorite philosopher, Dean named Lao-Tse because ``my favorite saying is, `The longest journey begins with a single step.''' That might make a better bumper sticker than anything David Hume said, but if that measures the depths of Dean, he and his supporters should take a sabbatical from deriding Bush's supposed shallowness.
America needs what Dean seems intellectually and temperamentally ill-equipped to provide -- truly thoughtful opposition in an election that should turn on two huge issues. One is: How do we guarantee economic growth sufficient to generate tax revenues to finance a welfare state whose entitlement menu is being substantially expanded just as 77 million baby boomers are about to retire? The second is: Can America's security be attained without adopting foreign policy goals of unattainable grandiosity -- nation-building, regional transformations?
Dean has provided no reason to expect from him especially elevated reasoning about these things. He seems to be an Everett Wharton. ``The Prime Minister,'' one of Anthony Trollope's parliamentary novels, introduces Wharton, who was, Trollope wrote, ``no fool'':
``(He) had read much, and although he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his reading certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects. It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself -- but he thought that he thought.''
Dean seems like that, which is not surprising or disqualifying: Most political leaders are not people of reflection, but of ambition-dictated action, living off borrowed intellectual capital. Given the accumulating evidence, the professors' pin-up should dismount his intellectual high horse.
©2003 Washington Post Writers Group
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