Almost always accurate and laugh out loud funny. Coulter's recent columns are starting to make Tyrrell's writing from the 70s look tame by comparison.
The Democrats' Forced Conversion
By Ann Coulter
January 8, 2004
When they were fund-raising, the Democratic candidates for president all claimed to be Jewish. Now that they are headed for Super Tuesday down South, they've become Jesus freaks. Listening to Democrats talk about Jesus is a little like listening to them on national security: They don't seem terribly comfortable with either subject.
To ease Democrats into the Jesus thing, the Democratic Leadership Council is holding briefings for Democratic candidates teaching them how to talk about religion. The participants were warned that millions of Americans worship a supreme being whose name is not Bill Clinton. As has been widely reported, the DLC gingerly suggests that Democrats start referring to "God's green earth."
Democrats never talk about believing in something; they talk about simulating belief in something. Americans believe in this crazy God crap that we don't, so how do we hoodwink them into believing we believe in God? It's part of the casual contempt Democrats have for the views of normal people.
What is arresting is the Democrats' fantastic habit of openly talking about how they plan to fake out the American people. The Democrats candidly say: How do we make sure the Americans don't know what we're really thinking? Let's get a Southerner, let's talk about Jesus, let's talk about NASCAR – white Southern guys seem to like that. Let's see ... If we could get a general on the ticket, Americans will forget how much we hate the military and long to see America humiliated.
Never has a major political party talked so openly about their plans to fool the voters. It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen. They seem not to realize the people they are talking about are listening and might not be fooled.
In the current New Republic magazine, Peter Beinart points out that the capture of Saddam has hurt the anti-war cause and left the Democrats with nothing to say. He proposes that Democrats pretend to support the war on terrorism by calling for a massive campaign to catch Osama. Yeah, let's try that. That'll fool 'em.
In the debate this week, John Kerry responded to a question about how he would appeal to Southerners by saying he could put a Southerner on his ticket. As Howard Dean has explained, they're stupid enough: It's just a bunch of white guys in pickup trucks with Confederate flags.
Dean himself has recently made the fascinating discovery that a lot of Americans believe in God. Hold the phones – the Democrats have a soothsayer in their midst! Next, Dean will be announcing that he's just discovered how important this sex thing is.
Before the poll numbers came out on religious belief in America, Dean said, "We have got to stop having our elections in the South based on race, guns, God and gays." Higher taxes, gay marriage, abortion on demand and surrender in Iraq – that'll do the trick in Mississippi!
Then about a month ago, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a poll showing that people who regularly attend religious services supported Bush 63 percent to 37 percent, and those who never attend religious services opposed him 62 percent to 38 percent. When you exclude blacks (as they do in Vermont), who are overwhelmingly Baptist and overwhelmingly Democratic, and rerun the numbers, basically any white person who believes in God is a Republican.
The only Democrats who go to church regularly are the ones who plan to run for president someday and are preparing in advance to fake a belief in God.
Though Dean is pursuing the Jesus thing with a vengeance, the results so far have been mixed. In Iowa last week, Dean said, "Let's get into a little religion here," and then began denouncing Christian minister Jerry Falwell. "Don't you think Jerry Falwell reminds you a lot more of the Pharisees than he does of the teachings of Jesus?" I don't even know what Dean means by that. I am sure his audience doesn't.
Rapping with reporters about God on the campaign plane, Dean said, "[I]f you know much about the Bible, which I do" – and then proceeded to confuse the Old Testament with the New Testament.
Dean illiterately claimed his favorite book of the New Testament was the Book of Job. (He said his least favorite was the Book of Numbers and then explained how he planned to balance the budget.) Having already complained to DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe about other Democrats attacking him, Dean recently said, "I'm feeling a little more Job-like recently." That's comforting. A few snippy remarks from the likes of Dick Gephardt and Dean thinks it's the wrath of the God of Abraham. Yeah, that's definitely the guy we want leading the nation in perilous times.
Dean's epiphanic religious awakening occurred over a bike path – and that's his version of what happened. He was baptized Catholic and raised an Episcopalian, but left the Episcopal Church in a huff when he finally found his true religion: environmentally friendly exercise.
The Episcopalians don't demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages – it's much like the New York Times editorial board. They acknowledge the Ten Commandments – or "Moses' talking points" – but hasten to add that they're not exactly "carved in stone." After Bush said that the most important philosopher to him was Jesus Christ, the Episcopal bishop in Des Moines, Iowa, C. Christopher Epting, pronounced the answer "a turnoff." So there isn't a lot of hair-shirt-wearing and sacrifice for the Episcopalians.
But the bike path incident was too much for Dean. A key tenet of the Druidical religion of liberals is non-fossil-fuel travel. So Dean left the Church of the Proper Fork because the Episcopal Church in Montpelier hesitated before ceding some of its land for a bike path.
On CNN, Judy Woodruff asked in amazement, "Was it just over a bike path that you left the Episcopal Church?"
Dean: "Yes, as a matter of fact it was."
Dean waxed expansive on the theological implications of bike paths, saying: "I didn't think that was very public-spirited."
But recently, Dean has leapt even beyond the DLC-recommended "God's green earth" and begun talking about Jesus, saying, "He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it." Gosh, Jesus is giving Oprah a run for her money. Also, Christ died for our sins, but let's not get into the hocus-pocus part of Christianity. The gist of the New Testament is about bike paths.
Dean's relationship with Jesus is a little like David Lloyd George's relationship with the Slovaks. At the Treaty of Versailles conference, the British prime minister was heard to whisper: "Who are the Slovaks again? I can never place them."
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Here's a great piece that serves as more eloquent argument against those who would have the USA retreat into a full bore isolationism.
Bravery Needs No Translation
December 17, 2003
LTC Sherman R. McGrew
Writing from Iraq
It was an incredible day, an historic day, a day for freedom. Saddam was captured. The streets were filled with jubilant Iraqis. But this is not a story for me to tell, for I am a guest in this country. Better to have an Iraqi tell it in his own words.
The only way the US army can operate here in Iraq is with the help of our Iraqi interpreters. This is the story of one of them. For security purposes, I cannot tell you even his first name or show you his picture. He is incredibly brave. He literally risks his life every single day that he works for us. I may not agree with everything he says, but this is his story, not mine. These are his own words...
No matter where the U.S. armed forces go, interpreters always play a crucial role.
Under the old regime, I was a teacher of English and English Literature for three to four dollars a month. Now I earn $15.00 a day as an interpreter. I was also a conscription soldier. There was one small loaf of bread for two soldiers for breakfast, if you were lucky. There was no lunch or dinner provided. You had to bring food from home or buy it from shops. It was a miserable life. The army did not take care of its soldiers.
The American army treats its soldiers very well. They give food, equipment, a place to live and medical insurance for their soldiers. I saw that the air conditioners were given to the enlisted soldiers first and then the officers got them. Lt. Col. McGrew asked me if this would have happened in the old Iraqi army. I just laughed.
I have seen recordings of how the Fedayeen were trained. Small children would be executed in front of them to harden their hearts. Dogs would be set on old people and criminals with the same purpose. Saddam paid them good money, which is why they served Saddam.
If they took money from Saddam Hussein, believe me, they are your enemy now. An entire generation has been raised under Saddam. He washed the peoples' minds. Just like Osama Bin Laden, he had his special group. People are still worried about Saddam and that he will come back. He is considered a nightmare. People are afraid that there will be civil war in Iraq if Saddam comes back.
We study history and see what happened to South Vietnam when the USA left. South Vietnam was left alone and North Vietnam came to kill them.
Cuba is so close to you, yet nobody can do anything for Cuba, therefore some Iraqis don't trust the USA. Why the USA not get rid of Castro? Why come over so many oceans to Iraq when Cuba is so close?
Other dictators are worried now because Iraq is free. There is no democracy in the Middle East. Not in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Egypt. If America does democracy in Iraq and gives us the freedom and make life better, then the neighboring countries will ask America to come and give democracy to them. That is what the Presidents of Arab countries are afraid of.
If Saddam comes back or USA leaves too soon, I will be killed, without any doubt.
Three interpreters were recently killed. More have been wounded. I cannot walk in the market free. I have to be very careful.
The only people who are against the Americans now are those who were rich before. Now they know that they can't sit at home and get wealthy. They will have to work and they don't like it. They lost the power and authority. It is very dangerous.
How are the Americans doing? Good, but it could be better. In Iraq we say, "One hand cannot clap." You need to work with the Iraqis more.
We are looking for heavy industrial projects, basic projects for us to grow strong. Our country is like a treasure. We have the two rivers, agriculture, gas and oil. We need to be an industrial country. We need to be a good country.
I just learned yesterday that Saddam is captured. Lt. Col. McGrew has asked me what the Iraqis think of this.
I came home to my town yesterday and I knew something had happened. There was so much celebration. When I got to my house, my family said, "You will not believe it! USA soldiers captured Saddam Hussein!" I can't believe it. Mr. Bremer said, "We captured him." I looked on the TV at him getting medical tests. I can't believe it! This is Saddam Hussein!
There was a big celebration because these people suffer so long under him. People were in the streets laughing and celebrating. This was a message for those who follow Saddam Hussein-You will end up like this-that your future is like this son of a b----.
I am sad for us because a coward ruled our country for 35 years. He did not even have enough courage to kill himself. Now he will face the justice he prevented us from getting all these years.
My people want Saddam Hussein to be tried here by our people with an Iraqi judge. All the people want to see his defense and what he will say about all the claims, the crimes against humanity, the use of chemical weapons in the north and the south of Iraq.
He was a war criminal in Iran and Kuwait. He took Kuwaiti hostages and killed them. He imprisoned hundreds from my village and killed some of them. He killed more Iraqis than anyone else.
The future is now in our hands. My people are afraid of civil war. We don't want the USA to leave us alone because another dictator could come. We want, by ourselves, to chose our president by election. I want to feel as if we have rights, and, more importantly, duties of citizens.
What would I say to the families of those US soldiers who have died? I am embarrassed because they are killed by my people. God bless them. My family prays to God to protect USA soldiers.
(He paused then, obviously emotional). We write down on a piece of paper the names of the US soldiers that we want God to protect. We place them in the Koran and ask God to help and protect them.
What would I say to the American people? You have to be proud of your sons. You have to be proud of your army. They are fighters for freedom.
© 2003, U.S. Army. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
Bravery Needs No Translation
December 17, 2003
LTC Sherman R. McGrew
Writing from Iraq
It was an incredible day, an historic day, a day for freedom. Saddam was captured. The streets were filled with jubilant Iraqis. But this is not a story for me to tell, for I am a guest in this country. Better to have an Iraqi tell it in his own words.
The only way the US army can operate here in Iraq is with the help of our Iraqi interpreters. This is the story of one of them. For security purposes, I cannot tell you even his first name or show you his picture. He is incredibly brave. He literally risks his life every single day that he works for us. I may not agree with everything he says, but this is his story, not mine. These are his own words...
No matter where the U.S. armed forces go, interpreters always play a crucial role.
Under the old regime, I was a teacher of English and English Literature for three to four dollars a month. Now I earn $15.00 a day as an interpreter. I was also a conscription soldier. There was one small loaf of bread for two soldiers for breakfast, if you were lucky. There was no lunch or dinner provided. You had to bring food from home or buy it from shops. It was a miserable life. The army did not take care of its soldiers.
The American army treats its soldiers very well. They give food, equipment, a place to live and medical insurance for their soldiers. I saw that the air conditioners were given to the enlisted soldiers first and then the officers got them. Lt. Col. McGrew asked me if this would have happened in the old Iraqi army. I just laughed.
I have seen recordings of how the Fedayeen were trained. Small children would be executed in front of them to harden their hearts. Dogs would be set on old people and criminals with the same purpose. Saddam paid them good money, which is why they served Saddam.
If they took money from Saddam Hussein, believe me, they are your enemy now. An entire generation has been raised under Saddam. He washed the peoples' minds. Just like Osama Bin Laden, he had his special group. People are still worried about Saddam and that he will come back. He is considered a nightmare. People are afraid that there will be civil war in Iraq if Saddam comes back.
We study history and see what happened to South Vietnam when the USA left. South Vietnam was left alone and North Vietnam came to kill them.
Cuba is so close to you, yet nobody can do anything for Cuba, therefore some Iraqis don't trust the USA. Why the USA not get rid of Castro? Why come over so many oceans to Iraq when Cuba is so close?
Other dictators are worried now because Iraq is free. There is no democracy in the Middle East. Not in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Egypt. If America does democracy in Iraq and gives us the freedom and make life better, then the neighboring countries will ask America to come and give democracy to them. That is what the Presidents of Arab countries are afraid of.
If Saddam comes back or USA leaves too soon, I will be killed, without any doubt.
Three interpreters were recently killed. More have been wounded. I cannot walk in the market free. I have to be very careful.
The only people who are against the Americans now are those who were rich before. Now they know that they can't sit at home and get wealthy. They will have to work and they don't like it. They lost the power and authority. It is very dangerous.
How are the Americans doing? Good, but it could be better. In Iraq we say, "One hand cannot clap." You need to work with the Iraqis more.
We are looking for heavy industrial projects, basic projects for us to grow strong. Our country is like a treasure. We have the two rivers, agriculture, gas and oil. We need to be an industrial country. We need to be a good country.
I just learned yesterday that Saddam is captured. Lt. Col. McGrew has asked me what the Iraqis think of this.
I came home to my town yesterday and I knew something had happened. There was so much celebration. When I got to my house, my family said, "You will not believe it! USA soldiers captured Saddam Hussein!" I can't believe it. Mr. Bremer said, "We captured him." I looked on the TV at him getting medical tests. I can't believe it! This is Saddam Hussein!
There was a big celebration because these people suffer so long under him. People were in the streets laughing and celebrating. This was a message for those who follow Saddam Hussein-You will end up like this-that your future is like this son of a b----.
I am sad for us because a coward ruled our country for 35 years. He did not even have enough courage to kill himself. Now he will face the justice he prevented us from getting all these years.
My people want Saddam Hussein to be tried here by our people with an Iraqi judge. All the people want to see his defense and what he will say about all the claims, the crimes against humanity, the use of chemical weapons in the north and the south of Iraq.
He was a war criminal in Iran and Kuwait. He took Kuwaiti hostages and killed them. He imprisoned hundreds from my village and killed some of them. He killed more Iraqis than anyone else.
The future is now in our hands. My people are afraid of civil war. We don't want the USA to leave us alone because another dictator could come. We want, by ourselves, to chose our president by election. I want to feel as if we have rights, and, more importantly, duties of citizens.
What would I say to the families of those US soldiers who have died? I am embarrassed because they are killed by my people. God bless them. My family prays to God to protect USA soldiers.
(He paused then, obviously emotional). We write down on a piece of paper the names of the US soldiers that we want God to protect. We place them in the Koran and ask God to help and protect them.
What would I say to the American people? You have to be proud of your sons. You have to be proud of your army. They are fighters for freedom.
© 2003, U.S. Army. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
A brilliant column by Michelle Malkin on the idiocy of Bush's new amnesty for illegals plan.
The criminal raid on Social Security
Michelle Malkin
January 7, 2004
My 8-week-old son's Social Security card recently arrived in the mail. On the back, there's a stern warning: "Improper use of this card or number by anyone is punishable by fine, imprisonment or both."
Welcome to the world of government theft and selective enforcement, my boy.
While innocent babes who have yet to earn a penny are threatened with jail time for misusing Social Security cards, the Bush administration appears set this week to turn the ailing government pension program into an international relief fund for illegal alien workers who used counterfeit Social Security cards and stolen numbers to secure illegal jobs.
Unlike the bedtime stories I tell at night, I am not making this up.
This belated gift to the open-borders lobby and Mexican President Vicente Fox is part of a larger amnesty plan that has been in the works since before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. So, why exactly are we rewarding a country that has been obstinately opposed to the War on Terror? Go ask Mr. Brilliant, Karl Rove. This I do know: It couldn't have come at a worse time from either a fiscal or national security standpoint.
According to Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, benefits paid to retirees will exceed revenues in just 15 years. The pay-as-you-go system could go belly up as early as 2030. These projections don't take into account the economic impact of the Bush proposal, which would allow untold millions of illegal aliens from Mexico to collect full cash benefits for themselves and their families from their home country -- without having to work the required number of years that law-abiding American citizens must work to be eligible for payouts.
Reporter Joel Mowbray, who first exposed this treachery a year ago, noted that this raw deal may well cost overburdened U.S. taxpayers $345 billion over the next 20 years. Probably much more. As we know from experience, Social Security projections are notoriously off the mark.
The bureaucrats call this scheme "totalization." Try total prostration. The proposed agreement is nothing more than a transfer of wealth from those who play by the rules to those who willingly and knowingly mock our own immigration and tax laws. What are we doing promising lifetime Social Security paychecks to day laborers in Juarez when we can't even guarantee those benefits to workers here at home?
Unbelievably, the White House is trying to convince us to embrace this global ripoff because it "rewards work." No, it rewards criminal behavior. The plan will siphon off the hard-earned tax dollars of American workers who may never see a dime of their confiscated earnings and fork it over to foreigners guilty of at least four acts of federal law-breaking: crossing the border illegally, working illegally, engaging in tax fraud and using bogus documents.
Giving money to scam artists will simply result in more fraud -- not only by Mexican agricultural workers, but also by Middle Easterners such as Youssef Hmimssa, who provided fake Social Security numbers and fraudulent drivers' licenses to members of an accused terrorist cell in Detroit. "If you have the right connection, you can get anything," he testified before the Senate last fall.
The door is now open for all illegal aliens to collect retirement benefits using bogus Social Security cards. What's next: survivors' benefits for the families of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers?
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
The criminal raid on Social Security
Michelle Malkin
January 7, 2004
My 8-week-old son's Social Security card recently arrived in the mail. On the back, there's a stern warning: "Improper use of this card or number by anyone is punishable by fine, imprisonment or both."
Welcome to the world of government theft and selective enforcement, my boy.
While innocent babes who have yet to earn a penny are threatened with jail time for misusing Social Security cards, the Bush administration appears set this week to turn the ailing government pension program into an international relief fund for illegal alien workers who used counterfeit Social Security cards and stolen numbers to secure illegal jobs.
Unlike the bedtime stories I tell at night, I am not making this up.
This belated gift to the open-borders lobby and Mexican President Vicente Fox is part of a larger amnesty plan that has been in the works since before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. So, why exactly are we rewarding a country that has been obstinately opposed to the War on Terror? Go ask Mr. Brilliant, Karl Rove. This I do know: It couldn't have come at a worse time from either a fiscal or national security standpoint.
According to Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, benefits paid to retirees will exceed revenues in just 15 years. The pay-as-you-go system could go belly up as early as 2030. These projections don't take into account the economic impact of the Bush proposal, which would allow untold millions of illegal aliens from Mexico to collect full cash benefits for themselves and their families from their home country -- without having to work the required number of years that law-abiding American citizens must work to be eligible for payouts.
Reporter Joel Mowbray, who first exposed this treachery a year ago, noted that this raw deal may well cost overburdened U.S. taxpayers $345 billion over the next 20 years. Probably much more. As we know from experience, Social Security projections are notoriously off the mark.
The bureaucrats call this scheme "totalization." Try total prostration. The proposed agreement is nothing more than a transfer of wealth from those who play by the rules to those who willingly and knowingly mock our own immigration and tax laws. What are we doing promising lifetime Social Security paychecks to day laborers in Juarez when we can't even guarantee those benefits to workers here at home?
Unbelievably, the White House is trying to convince us to embrace this global ripoff because it "rewards work." No, it rewards criminal behavior. The plan will siphon off the hard-earned tax dollars of American workers who may never see a dime of their confiscated earnings and fork it over to foreigners guilty of at least four acts of federal law-breaking: crossing the border illegally, working illegally, engaging in tax fraud and using bogus documents.
Giving money to scam artists will simply result in more fraud -- not only by Mexican agricultural workers, but also by Middle Easterners such as Youssef Hmimssa, who provided fake Social Security numbers and fraudulent drivers' licenses to members of an accused terrorist cell in Detroit. "If you have the right connection, you can get anything," he testified before the Senate last fall.
The door is now open for all illegal aliens to collect retirement benefits using bogus Social Security cards. What's next: survivors' benefits for the families of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers?
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Fantastic posting, once again, from Dean Esmay at Dean's World.
My Intolerant Friend Sam
My friend Sam, who was born in, and lives in, Estonia, runs his own weblog, which you should check out. His English is quite excellent. He recently left a comment in my thread on why I hate Communists.
By the way, yes, I really do hate them. Seething, burning animosity of the kind that would likely make me spit in someone's face if not punch them. Furthermore, I consider that hatred to be utterly healthy and positive. I wonder about your sanity, your decency as a human being, if you don't hate them too. It was all I could do recently not to rip a commenter a new arsehole when he said that Marxism is an "outmoded" system.
Anyway, my Estonian friend Sam recently wrote this in my comments, and you should read it so I'm re-posting it:
Why do I hate them?
Because when I was a child, our family had to celebrate Christmas behind thick curtains, and couldn't talk about it outside our home.
Because my maternal grandfather gave directions to Finnish tourists on the street, resulting in their home phone being bugged for the next fifteen years.
Because ten percent of my country's population was sent to Siberia. Imagine 28 million Americans torn from their homes, men, women, children, infants - loaded on cattle trains, and moved to a bitterly cold, barren wasteland thousands of miles away.
Because everywhere I look in my country, I see the scars the bastards left behind.
Because my paternal grandfather was loaded on one of those cattle trains and deported to Siberia. He, unlike the thousands around him, managed to stay alive, and eventually found his way back. He lost all toes on both feet to frostbite.
Because my maternal great-grandfather was blacklisted his entire life under Soviet occupation, an educated man kept from working as anything but a janitor. They did this because at age 17, he fought against the Red Army in the Estonian Independence War (and won).
Because he died in 1987, a year before the blue, black, and white flag of Estonia was unfurled on the streets again, after 47 years.
Because he died before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
Because he died before we regained our independence in 1991.
Because during their famines, people ate their children, because hunger drives you mad.
Because their hands have the blood, screams, and torment of one hundred million people on them.
If you take a pen and start writing down the names of every single person who starved, froze, was beaten to death, was raped, shot, hung, stabbed, sobbed in despair and realized there was no hope, and then slowly but surely died, you'd go through countless pens, boxes and boxes of paper, and your goddamn arm would fall off.
That is why I fucking hate them. I've hated them as far back as I can remember, and as years go by, I've come to hate them even more.
And if I ever run across someone who actually defends these vile, repugnant monsters, I will hospitalize them.
All I can say is: I'll help.
You might want to check out Sam's weblog.
My Intolerant Friend Sam
My friend Sam, who was born in, and lives in, Estonia, runs his own weblog, which you should check out. His English is quite excellent. He recently left a comment in my thread on why I hate Communists.
By the way, yes, I really do hate them. Seething, burning animosity of the kind that would likely make me spit in someone's face if not punch them. Furthermore, I consider that hatred to be utterly healthy and positive. I wonder about your sanity, your decency as a human being, if you don't hate them too. It was all I could do recently not to rip a commenter a new arsehole when he said that Marxism is an "outmoded" system.
Anyway, my Estonian friend Sam recently wrote this in my comments, and you should read it so I'm re-posting it:
Why do I hate them?
Because when I was a child, our family had to celebrate Christmas behind thick curtains, and couldn't talk about it outside our home.
Because my maternal grandfather gave directions to Finnish tourists on the street, resulting in their home phone being bugged for the next fifteen years.
Because ten percent of my country's population was sent to Siberia. Imagine 28 million Americans torn from their homes, men, women, children, infants - loaded on cattle trains, and moved to a bitterly cold, barren wasteland thousands of miles away.
Because everywhere I look in my country, I see the scars the bastards left behind.
Because my paternal grandfather was loaded on one of those cattle trains and deported to Siberia. He, unlike the thousands around him, managed to stay alive, and eventually found his way back. He lost all toes on both feet to frostbite.
Because my maternal great-grandfather was blacklisted his entire life under Soviet occupation, an educated man kept from working as anything but a janitor. They did this because at age 17, he fought against the Red Army in the Estonian Independence War (and won).
Because he died in 1987, a year before the blue, black, and white flag of Estonia was unfurled on the streets again, after 47 years.
Because he died before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
Because he died before we regained our independence in 1991.
Because during their famines, people ate their children, because hunger drives you mad.
Because their hands have the blood, screams, and torment of one hundred million people on them.
If you take a pen and start writing down the names of every single person who starved, froze, was beaten to death, was raped, shot, hung, stabbed, sobbed in despair and realized there was no hope, and then slowly but surely died, you'd go through countless pens, boxes and boxes of paper, and your goddamn arm would fall off.
That is why I fucking hate them. I've hated them as far back as I can remember, and as years go by, I've come to hate them even more.
And if I ever run across someone who actually defends these vile, repugnant monsters, I will hospitalize them.
All I can say is: I'll help.
You might want to check out Sam's weblog.
An excellent column about Pete Rose by Red Sox fan Peter Gammons.
Rose shows lack of respect
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Peter Gammons
Special to ESPN.com
I have always maintained that if Bud Selig decreed Pete Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame pending the vote of the Baseball Writers Association, I would vote for him as a player. Now I hear Bud is going to issue a two-year probation and make Rose eligible only by the vote of the veterans' committee. Fine. Because these last two days have made me rethink my initial decision to vote for him.
First, in betting on baseball as manager -- a position that demands standards higher than those for players -- Rose demonstrated a complete lack of respect or caring for the game.
Then came this week. Turning around on Bart Giamatti? Despicable.
Also, the fact that he has orchestrated the release of his book and his admission of guilt at a time when Dennis Eckersley and Paul Molitor -- two great people who overcame a lot, which Rose hasn't yet -- are being elected is a bold statement that he has no respect for Cooperstown, and that he wants to be in the Hall for one reason -- to make money to feed his addictions.
This is a man who admitted something in a forum in which he can make money. He has no remorse, no respect for anything but his next bet. Rose is perhaps the lowest figure in baseball in my 32 years of covering the sport.
Fay Vincent, a very good man who deserves all of baseball's apologies for the way he was treated, refuted that "the fans want Pete in Cooperstown" argument by pointing out that, in 1947, 15 of 16 owners voted not to allow Jackie Robinson into the majors -- and 85 percent of Americans were against such integration, too. Well, what Branch Rickey did against public opinion, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, is the single most important moment in baseball and sports history, proof that it's not about what the majority wants at one moment. It's about what's right.
And until Pete Rose proves to me that he cares about something other than Pete Rose, he does not have my vote.
Eckersley had addiction problems, admitted them, confronted them and became a Hall of Famer. Same with Molitor.
What they did never impaired the integrity of baseball.
As far as I'm concerned, Rose can go to Cooperstown and sign tawdry items for those who, like him, have no respect for integrity, baseball or the Hall of Fame.
Rose shows lack of respect
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Peter Gammons
Special to ESPN.com
I have always maintained that if Bud Selig decreed Pete Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame pending the vote of the Baseball Writers Association, I would vote for him as a player. Now I hear Bud is going to issue a two-year probation and make Rose eligible only by the vote of the veterans' committee. Fine. Because these last two days have made me rethink my initial decision to vote for him.
First, in betting on baseball as manager -- a position that demands standards higher than those for players -- Rose demonstrated a complete lack of respect or caring for the game.
Then came this week. Turning around on Bart Giamatti? Despicable.
Also, the fact that he has orchestrated the release of his book and his admission of guilt at a time when Dennis Eckersley and Paul Molitor -- two great people who overcame a lot, which Rose hasn't yet -- are being elected is a bold statement that he has no respect for Cooperstown, and that he wants to be in the Hall for one reason -- to make money to feed his addictions.
This is a man who admitted something in a forum in which he can make money. He has no remorse, no respect for anything but his next bet. Rose is perhaps the lowest figure in baseball in my 32 years of covering the sport.
Fay Vincent, a very good man who deserves all of baseball's apologies for the way he was treated, refuted that "the fans want Pete in Cooperstown" argument by pointing out that, in 1947, 15 of 16 owners voted not to allow Jackie Robinson into the majors -- and 85 percent of Americans were against such integration, too. Well, what Branch Rickey did against public opinion, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, is the single most important moment in baseball and sports history, proof that it's not about what the majority wants at one moment. It's about what's right.
And until Pete Rose proves to me that he cares about something other than Pete Rose, he does not have my vote.
Eckersley had addiction problems, admitted them, confronted them and became a Hall of Famer. Same with Molitor.
What they did never impaired the integrity of baseball.
As far as I'm concerned, Rose can go to Cooperstown and sign tawdry items for those who, like him, have no respect for integrity, baseball or the Hall of Fame.
First Vestal Goodman, now Jake Hess. The giants are slowly leaving us.
Gospel Quartet Singer Jake Hess Dies
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Jake Hess, 76, a four-time Grammy winner who sang with some of the premier quartets in gospel music and influenced the career of Elvis Presley, died Jan. 4 at a hospital in Opelika, Ala. He had a heart attack last month.
Mr. Hess is best known to contemporary audiences as a regular member of Bill Gaither's Homecoming Friends.
He joined the John Daniel Quartet in 1943 and reached stardom with the Statesmen Quartet. He was founder of the Imperials and sang with the Masters V. Each of these groups is enshrined in the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame, as is Mr. Hess.
As a teenager, Presley was a regular at Statesmen concerts. Later, Mr. Hess was a backup singer on several of Presley's Grammy-winning albums.
When Presley died in 1977, Mr. Hess sang at his funeral, as he had at the funeral of country legend Hank Williams in 1953.
Peter Guralnick, author of a two-volume biography of Presley, said the rock star always wanted to emulate the voices of Mr. Hess and Roy Hamilton. "They were such virtuosos," Guralnick said. "Each had a voice that Elvis never felt he could fully emulate. What he did seek to do was to emulate the feeling they had in their singing."
Mr. Hess received Grammy awards in 1968 for best sacred performance for "Beautiful Isle of Somewhere"; in 1969 for best non-classical sacred performance for "Ain't That Beautiful Singing"; in 1970 for best sacred musical performance for "Everything Is Beautiful"; and in 1981 as part of the Masters V for best traditional gospel performance for "The Masters V."
Gospel Quartet Singer Jake Hess Dies
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Jake Hess, 76, a four-time Grammy winner who sang with some of the premier quartets in gospel music and influenced the career of Elvis Presley, died Jan. 4 at a hospital in Opelika, Ala. He had a heart attack last month.
Mr. Hess is best known to contemporary audiences as a regular member of Bill Gaither's Homecoming Friends.
He joined the John Daniel Quartet in 1943 and reached stardom with the Statesmen Quartet. He was founder of the Imperials and sang with the Masters V. Each of these groups is enshrined in the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame, as is Mr. Hess.
As a teenager, Presley was a regular at Statesmen concerts. Later, Mr. Hess was a backup singer on several of Presley's Grammy-winning albums.
When Presley died in 1977, Mr. Hess sang at his funeral, as he had at the funeral of country legend Hank Williams in 1953.
Peter Guralnick, author of a two-volume biography of Presley, said the rock star always wanted to emulate the voices of Mr. Hess and Roy Hamilton. "They were such virtuosos," Guralnick said. "Each had a voice that Elvis never felt he could fully emulate. What he did seek to do was to emulate the feeling they had in their singing."
Mr. Hess received Grammy awards in 1968 for best sacred performance for "Beautiful Isle of Somewhere"; in 1969 for best non-classical sacred performance for "Ain't That Beautiful Singing"; in 1970 for best sacred musical performance for "Everything Is Beautiful"; and in 1981 as part of the Masters V for best traditional gospel performance for "The Masters V."
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
An immensely thought provoking column from Asia Times.
Tolkien's Ring: When immortality is not enough
By Spengler
Alone among 20th century novelists, J R R Tolkien concerned himself with the mortality not of individuals but of peoples. The young soldier-scholar of World War I viewed the uncertain fate of European nations through the mirror of the Dark Ages, when the life of small peoples hung by a thread. In the midst of today's Great Extinction of cultures, and at the onset of civilizational war, Tolkien evokes an uncanny resonance among today's readers. He did not write a fantasy, but rather a roman-a-clef.
I spoke too soon when I wrote a year ago that a "reasonably faithful cinematic version" of Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, was the "cultural event of the decade" (The Ring and the remnants of the West, Jan 11, '03). With the third installment in cinemas, it appears that director Peter Jackson has buried Tolkien's mythic tragedy under an avalanche of tricks. One wants to hiss along with Gollum: "Stupid hobbit! It ruins it!" We are left with a crackling good adventure, but have lost something precious.
Despite his huge readership, Tolkien during his lifetime never published The Silmarillion, the tragedy of immortals that underlies The Lord of the Rings. Instead he hit upon the genial device of leading the reader to the elements of his story through the eyes of the Little People who are entangled in it. It is as if Shakespeare had published something like Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead rather than Hamlet.
The mortality of the peoples
Tolkien took by the horns the great ideological beast of his time. After the Great War, the newly-hatched Existentialist philosophers were shocked to discover that human beings fear for their mortality. In fact, it is quite a commonplace thing to die for one's country, provided that one believes that one's country still will be there. The pull of cultural identity is so strong that men will fling themselves into the jaws of death if they believe such actions will preserve their culture. But what if culture itself - the individual's connection to past as well as future - is in danger? Now, that is really being alone in the universe. Death to preserve one's people is quite a tolerable proposition. The prospective death of the entire people along with its culture is what creates a particularly nasty type of existential angst, the sort that produces a Hitler or an Osama bin Laden.
Small peoples of the Dark Ages, such as Beowulf's Geats, had to think about such things because extinction was the normal outcome. As it turned out, Tolkien's early medieval sources (he had translated Beowulf) mirrored the existentially-challenged world after the Great War, precisely because the subject of national extinction had forced its way back to the surface. The theme of national extinction permeates the entire work. "It is not your own shire," the High-Elf Gildor reproaches Frodo at the outset of his journey in the forests of the shire . "Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more."
A people vanishes from the earth when its language no longer is spoken. Tolkien did not simply invent languages, but recreated the linguistic maelstrom of the early Middle Ages, when the high speech of great civilizations faded from memory while the dialects of small peoples dissolved into larger language groups. Tolkien's great philological skills created a unique means of portraying the temporality of the nations.
As a foil to human mortality, Tolkien invented a deathless and noble race. His Elves suffer from saiety with immortal life. They no longer reproduce. We meet no Elf younger than a millennium. Tolkien's Fair Folk, endowed with marvelous powers of mind and body, possessors of a radiant high culture, merely mark the time before they must leave Middle Earth. Mercifully we are spared their private thoughts. Imagine what dinner-table dialogue would be like between Elrond and daughter Arwen, who will renounce immortality to marry the mortal Aragorn. "Why do you have to date Aragorn? What happend to that nice Elf boy you were going out with in Lothlorien?" "Daddy, I'm three thousand years old and I've dated all the Elf boys. They are so boring!" Minas Tirith, for that matter, houses only half the population it could comfortably hold, as its ancient race of men fails to bring children into the world. Gondor's military weakness stems from its declining population; the army Aragorn leads to the Black Gate in the last battle numbers fewer than the vanguard of the army of Gondor in its prime. Mordor encroaches because Gondor cannot man its borders.
Declining population and crumbling empire is a theme as old as Rome, of course. Nor is it only Latin. In Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon sources, the extinction of the nation lurks behind every setback. The old woman's lament at Beowulf's funeral pyre, for example, foresees the destruction of his Geats after the death of its hero and protector. From the vantage-point of the trenches of the Great War, though, this echo of the Dark Ages took on a new and terrible meaning. The peoples of Europe came out to fight for their predominance and nearly annihilated each other.
Today's Europeans are willing themselves out of existence (see Why Europe chooses extinction, Apr 8, '03). The two world wars of the 20th century destroyed the national illusions of the European peoples, their pretension to strut and swagger upon the world stage. France was the first nation to misidentify its national interests with the fate of Christendom (The sacred heart of darkness, Feb 11, '03), emulated in far more horrible form first by Russia ("the God-bearing nation" in Dostoyevsky's words) and then by Germany. Why is it that radical Islam yet may defeat the West? Migrants from North Africa and the Middle East may overwhelm the shrinking population of Western Europe, without ever assimilating into Western European culture. Collapsing birth rates in formerly Catholic strongholds (including Quebec) coincide with negligible church attendance, and demoralization within the Church itself.
When immortality is not enough
Here is a summary of the mythic tragedy behind The Lord of the Rings: Immortality was not enough for Tolkien's "Light-Elves" (Licht-Alben, precisely what Wagner calls his gods). Possessive love for their own works led them to tragic errors, first among which is Feanor's ill-advised quest for his stolen jewels, the Silmarils. That motivates the Elves' exile in Middle-Earth. Later, the Elvish Smiths of Middle-Earth accept the assistance of the evil Sauron in forging the Three Elven Rings of air, fire and water. In some way or other, the vague association with Sauron contaminates the Three Rings, such that when Sauron's One Ring is destroyed, the power of the three rings must fade as well. That means the end of the magical wood of Lothlorien, which Galadriel has preserved in a sort of perpetual spring, and the demise of Rivendell, which Elrond maintains as the last bastion of lore and art. Presumably Gandalf, who bears the ring of fire, will lose some of his power as well. Sauron furthermore corrupted the Numenoreans, a noble race of Men, by convincing them they could wrest immortality from the Valar (the gods) by invading their Blessed Realm, Valinor.
The Nine Rings granted to mortal Men produce a vampire-like caricature of immortality, as the bearers fade into wraiths. The One Ring bestows a perverse sort of immortality upon its owner, whose body ceases to age while his soul decays, like Dorian Gray's portrait. It is a warped version of the Elves' immortality within the mortal world of Middle-Earth. Once touched, it cannot easily be relinquished; Isildur, heir of the Numenorean "faithful", cannot bear to destroy it. The Hobbits' great virtue is the inner strength to part with the Ring. But all of the three Hobbits who have borne it, Bilbo, Frodo, and Samwise, ultimately must abandon Middle-Earth. Immortality, once tasted, poisons the joy of Middle-Earth even for Hobbits. Galadriel redeems herself by renouncing her works, although in consequence she and her people must leave the mortal realm, that is, Middle-Earth. She refuses the offer of the One Ring ("I will diminish, and remain Galadriel"). The "faithful" survivors of the ruin of Numenor, of whom Aragorn is the heir, accept mortality and thus are redeemed.
Tolkien clearly stated his intentions in his correspondence: "Anyway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire ... It has various opportunities of 'Fall'. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as 'its own', the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator - especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, - and so to the Machine (or Magic)."
The Faustian bargain and its resort to Magic were themes long elaborated in Western literature, but Tolkien added a terrible new dimension. In Middle-Earth, as in Europe during the Great War, it was not the mortality of the individual, as in Goethe, but instead the mortality of nations. No serious critic will give Tolkien a place in the literary canon, because his characters generally are stick-figures speaking in stilted declamation. But that is beside the point. He has little time to waste on the petty concerns of the sort of character that populates modern fiction. His concern is the doom of peoples, or, to coin a phrase, the decline of the West.
Europe's decline
Immortality was not enough for the Europeans. That is, Christianity in the confessional, and universal Christian empire in politics, offered the Europeans a form of immortality beyond the existence of the nation. Europe fell from grace when its great constituent nations decided that this sort of immortality was not enough for them, and that they should instead fight for temporal dominance upon the earth. Exhausted from their wars, the peoples of Europe sank into a torpor that is destroying them slowly but with terrible certainty.
Jackson's portrayal of Denethor, the feckless Steward of Gondor, doubtless reminded Americans of European defeatism with respect to Iraq and other venues in the Middle East. Out of context, the character has little motivation. Perhaps Jackson will provide the missing background of Gondor's decline in a future extended version.
It is tricky, of course, to draw analogies between the pride and folly of Feanor or the Numenorians in Tolkien's fantasy, and the pride and folly of the European nations in World War I. But it was a commonplace observation after 1918 that the great European tragedy began with a misguided attempt to cheat mortality through the assertion of national supremacy. One cannot make sense of Hitler's rise to power without observing that many Germans believed with all their heart that the existence of the Volk was in jeopordy. Martin Heidegger gave (and never retracted) his wholehearted support to Hitler, believing that immersion in the Volk was a legitimate answer to the Existential crisis.
A tragic flaw was set in Europe's foundations, in the form of its Faustian bargain with paganism (Why Europe chooses extinction). Christianity offered salvation in another world; the Europeans wanted a taste of immortality in this one. By allowing the pagans to syncretically adopt their old gods into the new religion, Christianity left the Europeans forever torn between Jesus and Siegfried. Richard Wagner returned to the old pagan sources and found in them a foretaste of the Nihilism that would ravage Europe during its Second Thirty Years' War of 1914-1944. Repudiating Wagner, Tolkien hoped to link an ennobling pagan past and the Christian present. In this respect he failed utterly. He is reduced to elegaic yearning for a lost agrarian past. He is a reactionary looking backwards, for his vision is too clear to allow false hopes for the European future.
Tolkien kept faith with the original Christian message. Man must accept not only his own mortality, but the mortality of his nation, the extinction of his culture, the silencing of his mother-tongue, and look instead toward salvation beyond all mortal hope. That is what Christianity offered the pagans during the Great Extinction of Peoples after the collapse of Rome. Frodo knows that the entire race of Hobbits will become extinct. He begins his journey with Gildor's warning that one day others will dwell in the shire when hobbits are no more. Gildor is the first among the High-Elves he meets as he rides toward the Havens, in the company of Elrond and Galadriel, who, along with Gandalf, finally are revealed in their true capacity as the bearers of the Three Elven Rings.
But the European nations threw off the bonds of universal Christian empire and, through Wagnerian nationalism, sought immortality within the mortal realm - the tragic flaw of Feanor, Galadriel and the rebel Eldar. The Great Wars and the fall of Europe were the consequence. Except in the imagination, there was no going back.
The sea-passage to the West, in Peter Jackson's interpretation, represents death. It might just as well represent immigration to America. Unlike all other peoples, Americans need not fear the extinction of their cultural identity, because they have none to begin with. That is America's great weakness but also its abiding strength. It is the reason that America well may endure for all time while the Kulturnationen dissolve into the dust of the libraries. Americans bridle when told that they have no culture. But what can they name whose loss would destroy their sense of national identity? Erase the memory of Homer, and what becomes of the Greeks? Forget Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and even The Simpsons, and Americans still are Americans. If German or French no longer were spoken, the concept of "Germany" or "France" would become meaningless. At the time of their revolution, Americans considered German as a national language. A century from now they might adopt Spanish. America can withstand the loss of the English language itself. As long as America's political covenant remains intact, Americans can change their "culture" as often as convenient. America may fulfill the Christian project, as an assembly of individuals called out of the nations, cut loose from their heathen heritage - an outcome Tolkien could not have imagined.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Tolkien's Ring: When immortality is not enough
By Spengler
Alone among 20th century novelists, J R R Tolkien concerned himself with the mortality not of individuals but of peoples. The young soldier-scholar of World War I viewed the uncertain fate of European nations through the mirror of the Dark Ages, when the life of small peoples hung by a thread. In the midst of today's Great Extinction of cultures, and at the onset of civilizational war, Tolkien evokes an uncanny resonance among today's readers. He did not write a fantasy, but rather a roman-a-clef.
I spoke too soon when I wrote a year ago that a "reasonably faithful cinematic version" of Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, was the "cultural event of the decade" (The Ring and the remnants of the West, Jan 11, '03). With the third installment in cinemas, it appears that director Peter Jackson has buried Tolkien's mythic tragedy under an avalanche of tricks. One wants to hiss along with Gollum: "Stupid hobbit! It ruins it!" We are left with a crackling good adventure, but have lost something precious.
Despite his huge readership, Tolkien during his lifetime never published The Silmarillion, the tragedy of immortals that underlies The Lord of the Rings. Instead he hit upon the genial device of leading the reader to the elements of his story through the eyes of the Little People who are entangled in it. It is as if Shakespeare had published something like Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead rather than Hamlet.
The mortality of the peoples
Tolkien took by the horns the great ideological beast of his time. After the Great War, the newly-hatched Existentialist philosophers were shocked to discover that human beings fear for their mortality. In fact, it is quite a commonplace thing to die for one's country, provided that one believes that one's country still will be there. The pull of cultural identity is so strong that men will fling themselves into the jaws of death if they believe such actions will preserve their culture. But what if culture itself - the individual's connection to past as well as future - is in danger? Now, that is really being alone in the universe. Death to preserve one's people is quite a tolerable proposition. The prospective death of the entire people along with its culture is what creates a particularly nasty type of existential angst, the sort that produces a Hitler or an Osama bin Laden.
Small peoples of the Dark Ages, such as Beowulf's Geats, had to think about such things because extinction was the normal outcome. As it turned out, Tolkien's early medieval sources (he had translated Beowulf) mirrored the existentially-challenged world after the Great War, precisely because the subject of national extinction had forced its way back to the surface. The theme of national extinction permeates the entire work. "It is not your own shire," the High-Elf Gildor reproaches Frodo at the outset of his journey in the forests of the shire . "Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more."
A people vanishes from the earth when its language no longer is spoken. Tolkien did not simply invent languages, but recreated the linguistic maelstrom of the early Middle Ages, when the high speech of great civilizations faded from memory while the dialects of small peoples dissolved into larger language groups. Tolkien's great philological skills created a unique means of portraying the temporality of the nations.
As a foil to human mortality, Tolkien invented a deathless and noble race. His Elves suffer from saiety with immortal life. They no longer reproduce. We meet no Elf younger than a millennium. Tolkien's Fair Folk, endowed with marvelous powers of mind and body, possessors of a radiant high culture, merely mark the time before they must leave Middle Earth. Mercifully we are spared their private thoughts. Imagine what dinner-table dialogue would be like between Elrond and daughter Arwen, who will renounce immortality to marry the mortal Aragorn. "Why do you have to date Aragorn? What happend to that nice Elf boy you were going out with in Lothlorien?" "Daddy, I'm three thousand years old and I've dated all the Elf boys. They are so boring!" Minas Tirith, for that matter, houses only half the population it could comfortably hold, as its ancient race of men fails to bring children into the world. Gondor's military weakness stems from its declining population; the army Aragorn leads to the Black Gate in the last battle numbers fewer than the vanguard of the army of Gondor in its prime. Mordor encroaches because Gondor cannot man its borders.
Declining population and crumbling empire is a theme as old as Rome, of course. Nor is it only Latin. In Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon sources, the extinction of the nation lurks behind every setback. The old woman's lament at Beowulf's funeral pyre, for example, foresees the destruction of his Geats after the death of its hero and protector. From the vantage-point of the trenches of the Great War, though, this echo of the Dark Ages took on a new and terrible meaning. The peoples of Europe came out to fight for their predominance and nearly annihilated each other.
Today's Europeans are willing themselves out of existence (see Why Europe chooses extinction, Apr 8, '03). The two world wars of the 20th century destroyed the national illusions of the European peoples, their pretension to strut and swagger upon the world stage. France was the first nation to misidentify its national interests with the fate of Christendom (The sacred heart of darkness, Feb 11, '03), emulated in far more horrible form first by Russia ("the God-bearing nation" in Dostoyevsky's words) and then by Germany. Why is it that radical Islam yet may defeat the West? Migrants from North Africa and the Middle East may overwhelm the shrinking population of Western Europe, without ever assimilating into Western European culture. Collapsing birth rates in formerly Catholic strongholds (including Quebec) coincide with negligible church attendance, and demoralization within the Church itself.
When immortality is not enough
Here is a summary of the mythic tragedy behind The Lord of the Rings: Immortality was not enough for Tolkien's "Light-Elves" (Licht-Alben, precisely what Wagner calls his gods). Possessive love for their own works led them to tragic errors, first among which is Feanor's ill-advised quest for his stolen jewels, the Silmarils. That motivates the Elves' exile in Middle-Earth. Later, the Elvish Smiths of Middle-Earth accept the assistance of the evil Sauron in forging the Three Elven Rings of air, fire and water. In some way or other, the vague association with Sauron contaminates the Three Rings, such that when Sauron's One Ring is destroyed, the power of the three rings must fade as well. That means the end of the magical wood of Lothlorien, which Galadriel has preserved in a sort of perpetual spring, and the demise of Rivendell, which Elrond maintains as the last bastion of lore and art. Presumably Gandalf, who bears the ring of fire, will lose some of his power as well. Sauron furthermore corrupted the Numenoreans, a noble race of Men, by convincing them they could wrest immortality from the Valar (the gods) by invading their Blessed Realm, Valinor.
The Nine Rings granted to mortal Men produce a vampire-like caricature of immortality, as the bearers fade into wraiths. The One Ring bestows a perverse sort of immortality upon its owner, whose body ceases to age while his soul decays, like Dorian Gray's portrait. It is a warped version of the Elves' immortality within the mortal world of Middle-Earth. Once touched, it cannot easily be relinquished; Isildur, heir of the Numenorean "faithful", cannot bear to destroy it. The Hobbits' great virtue is the inner strength to part with the Ring. But all of the three Hobbits who have borne it, Bilbo, Frodo, and Samwise, ultimately must abandon Middle-Earth. Immortality, once tasted, poisons the joy of Middle-Earth even for Hobbits. Galadriel redeems herself by renouncing her works, although in consequence she and her people must leave the mortal realm, that is, Middle-Earth. She refuses the offer of the One Ring ("I will diminish, and remain Galadriel"). The "faithful" survivors of the ruin of Numenor, of whom Aragorn is the heir, accept mortality and thus are redeemed.
Tolkien clearly stated his intentions in his correspondence: "Anyway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire ... It has various opportunities of 'Fall'. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as 'its own', the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator - especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, - and so to the Machine (or Magic)."
The Faustian bargain and its resort to Magic were themes long elaborated in Western literature, but Tolkien added a terrible new dimension. In Middle-Earth, as in Europe during the Great War, it was not the mortality of the individual, as in Goethe, but instead the mortality of nations. No serious critic will give Tolkien a place in the literary canon, because his characters generally are stick-figures speaking in stilted declamation. But that is beside the point. He has little time to waste on the petty concerns of the sort of character that populates modern fiction. His concern is the doom of peoples, or, to coin a phrase, the decline of the West.
Europe's decline
Immortality was not enough for the Europeans. That is, Christianity in the confessional, and universal Christian empire in politics, offered the Europeans a form of immortality beyond the existence of the nation. Europe fell from grace when its great constituent nations decided that this sort of immortality was not enough for them, and that they should instead fight for temporal dominance upon the earth. Exhausted from their wars, the peoples of Europe sank into a torpor that is destroying them slowly but with terrible certainty.
Jackson's portrayal of Denethor, the feckless Steward of Gondor, doubtless reminded Americans of European defeatism with respect to Iraq and other venues in the Middle East. Out of context, the character has little motivation. Perhaps Jackson will provide the missing background of Gondor's decline in a future extended version.
It is tricky, of course, to draw analogies between the pride and folly of Feanor or the Numenorians in Tolkien's fantasy, and the pride and folly of the European nations in World War I. But it was a commonplace observation after 1918 that the great European tragedy began with a misguided attempt to cheat mortality through the assertion of national supremacy. One cannot make sense of Hitler's rise to power without observing that many Germans believed with all their heart that the existence of the Volk was in jeopordy. Martin Heidegger gave (and never retracted) his wholehearted support to Hitler, believing that immersion in the Volk was a legitimate answer to the Existential crisis.
A tragic flaw was set in Europe's foundations, in the form of its Faustian bargain with paganism (Why Europe chooses extinction). Christianity offered salvation in another world; the Europeans wanted a taste of immortality in this one. By allowing the pagans to syncretically adopt their old gods into the new religion, Christianity left the Europeans forever torn between Jesus and Siegfried. Richard Wagner returned to the old pagan sources and found in them a foretaste of the Nihilism that would ravage Europe during its Second Thirty Years' War of 1914-1944. Repudiating Wagner, Tolkien hoped to link an ennobling pagan past and the Christian present. In this respect he failed utterly. He is reduced to elegaic yearning for a lost agrarian past. He is a reactionary looking backwards, for his vision is too clear to allow false hopes for the European future.
Tolkien kept faith with the original Christian message. Man must accept not only his own mortality, but the mortality of his nation, the extinction of his culture, the silencing of his mother-tongue, and look instead toward salvation beyond all mortal hope. That is what Christianity offered the pagans during the Great Extinction of Peoples after the collapse of Rome. Frodo knows that the entire race of Hobbits will become extinct. He begins his journey with Gildor's warning that one day others will dwell in the shire when hobbits are no more. Gildor is the first among the High-Elves he meets as he rides toward the Havens, in the company of Elrond and Galadriel, who, along with Gandalf, finally are revealed in their true capacity as the bearers of the Three Elven Rings.
But the European nations threw off the bonds of universal Christian empire and, through Wagnerian nationalism, sought immortality within the mortal realm - the tragic flaw of Feanor, Galadriel and the rebel Eldar. The Great Wars and the fall of Europe were the consequence. Except in the imagination, there was no going back.
The sea-passage to the West, in Peter Jackson's interpretation, represents death. It might just as well represent immigration to America. Unlike all other peoples, Americans need not fear the extinction of their cultural identity, because they have none to begin with. That is America's great weakness but also its abiding strength. It is the reason that America well may endure for all time while the Kulturnationen dissolve into the dust of the libraries. Americans bridle when told that they have no culture. But what can they name whose loss would destroy their sense of national identity? Erase the memory of Homer, and what becomes of the Greeks? Forget Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and even The Simpsons, and Americans still are Americans. If German or French no longer were spoken, the concept of "Germany" or "France" would become meaningless. At the time of their revolution, Americans considered German as a national language. A century from now they might adopt Spanish. America can withstand the loss of the English language itself. As long as America's political covenant remains intact, Americans can change their "culture" as often as convenient. America may fulfill the Christian project, as an assembly of individuals called out of the nations, cut loose from their heathen heritage - an outcome Tolkien could not have imagined.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
From Dean Esmay, more eloquent testimony to the morality (or more accurately, lack of same) that inheres in the philosophy of Steve Earle's hero.
The Legacy of Karl Marx
During the years 1958 and 1959, China experienced what was hailed by Marxists as the "Great Leap Forward." During this time, Mao's regime was directly responsible for between 30 and 40 million deaths.
Please re-read that last sentence, and contemplate it for a moment.
How many people live in your state?
As it happens, I now live in Michigan, whose total population is about 10 million. The cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Lansing, plus all the other communities, total about 10 million.
And so I repeat: During "The Great Leap Forward," which happened within living memory, the Communists killed between 30 and 40 million people, in a two year period.
Starting in 1966 (the year of my own birth), a lesser pogrom known as the "Cultural Revolution" began, with a new wave of terror and torture that killed mostly-uncounted numbers of people.
Mao Tse Tung was, quite simply, the greatest mass-murderer in human history. Funny how most people don't know that, isn't it?
Want to know more?
"In the summer of 1966, in Beijing alone more than 1,700 people were beaten to death openly by the Red Guards. On the surface, the persecution of 1968 was not as severe as that of 1966. Some people were still beaten in public but usually were beaten to death only behind locked doors. "
"...They hacked Liu's hair, put dirt into her mouth, and beat her. [She] was forced to crawl on the playground and repeatedly say: 'I am Liu Meide. I am a poisonous snake.' ...After a journalist of the Beijing Daily took a photograph, the student kicked Liu from the table to the ground. Liu was pregnant at that time. Her baby died from prenatal injuries soon after the birth."
"At the Shanghai Foreign Languages School, after the Red Guards from Beijing came and beat teachers...during the next day students of this school followed the example of Beijing students and beat their teachers. After some teachers were wounded and bled, they forced the teachers to lick the blood on the ground."
---
Youqin Wang, who teaches at the University of Chicago, has created the Chinese Holocaust Memorial. All that I've written about and more can be found on her terribly important web site.
She is also attempting to construct an online memorial for the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Like the famed American Vietnam War memorial, she is simply listing the names of every person beaten to death or otherwise executed during Mao's second and third waves of terror in the 1960s. The horror is, no one knows all their names. She has made it part of her life's work to find out as many names as she can. She has "only" several thousand so far. But viewing it is still a powerful and heartbreaking experience.
Youqin Wang is a true champion of human rights, and one of my heroes. Here's her site again: Chinese Holocaust Memorial.
Make a point of visiting it. It's important.
By the way, not long ago, someone said to me, "Communism is not Marxism." Even more bitingly amusingly, to me, someone actually recently called me an "anti-Communist bigot."
To the latter point I merely say: Guilty.
Guilty as charged. You Commie prick.
The Legacy of Karl Marx
During the years 1958 and 1959, China experienced what was hailed by Marxists as the "Great Leap Forward." During this time, Mao's regime was directly responsible for between 30 and 40 million deaths.
Please re-read that last sentence, and contemplate it for a moment.
How many people live in your state?
As it happens, I now live in Michigan, whose total population is about 10 million. The cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Lansing, plus all the other communities, total about 10 million.
And so I repeat: During "The Great Leap Forward," which happened within living memory, the Communists killed between 30 and 40 million people, in a two year period.
Starting in 1966 (the year of my own birth), a lesser pogrom known as the "Cultural Revolution" began, with a new wave of terror and torture that killed mostly-uncounted numbers of people.
Mao Tse Tung was, quite simply, the greatest mass-murderer in human history. Funny how most people don't know that, isn't it?
Want to know more?
"In the summer of 1966, in Beijing alone more than 1,700 people were beaten to death openly by the Red Guards. On the surface, the persecution of 1968 was not as severe as that of 1966. Some people were still beaten in public but usually were beaten to death only behind locked doors. "
"...They hacked Liu's hair, put dirt into her mouth, and beat her. [She] was forced to crawl on the playground and repeatedly say: 'I am Liu Meide. I am a poisonous snake.' ...After a journalist of the Beijing Daily took a photograph, the student kicked Liu from the table to the ground. Liu was pregnant at that time. Her baby died from prenatal injuries soon after the birth."
"At the Shanghai Foreign Languages School, after the Red Guards from Beijing came and beat teachers...during the next day students of this school followed the example of Beijing students and beat their teachers. After some teachers were wounded and bled, they forced the teachers to lick the blood on the ground."
---
Youqin Wang, who teaches at the University of Chicago, has created the Chinese Holocaust Memorial. All that I've written about and more can be found on her terribly important web site.
She is also attempting to construct an online memorial for the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Like the famed American Vietnam War memorial, she is simply listing the names of every person beaten to death or otherwise executed during Mao's second and third waves of terror in the 1960s. The horror is, no one knows all their names. She has made it part of her life's work to find out as many names as she can. She has "only" several thousand so far. But viewing it is still a powerful and heartbreaking experience.
Youqin Wang is a true champion of human rights, and one of my heroes. Here's her site again: Chinese Holocaust Memorial.
Make a point of visiting it. It's important.
By the way, not long ago, someone said to me, "Communism is not Marxism." Even more bitingly amusingly, to me, someone actually recently called me an "anti-Communist bigot."
To the latter point I merely say: Guilty.
Guilty as charged. You Commie prick.
Monday, January 05, 2004
Another wet kiss for a Communist leader. This time it's by Arthur Miller in, surprise, The Nation.
"...We entered an anteroom leading into the dining room and suddenly there was Castro, not in uniform as one always sees him in photographs but in a blue pencil-striped suit that, unpressed as it was, must not have been worn very often. Despite the suit, my quick impression was that had he not been a revolutionary politician he might well have been a movie star. He had that utterly total self-involvement, that need for love and agreement and the overwhelming thirst for the power that comes with total approval. In this crowded antechamber his retinue, as with most leaders everywhere, were supremely agreeable and one sensed immediately their absolute submission to the Leader. Whatever else he is, Castro is an exciting person and could probably have had a career on the screen.
Luers, in effect our senior shepherd, introduced our members in Spanish, and Gabo added a few words of explanation to identify us for Castro. GarcÃa Márquez is quite short and the rest of us men are six feet or over, so that he stood looking up at Castro and the rest of us like a new younger boy in school. His friendship with Styron and his English started things off fluently, so that between them and Castro's conversations with Luers and Wendy, his wife, and Patty Cisneros and Inge, a loud hubbub banged against the walls. Suddenly Castro looked at me over the heads of the others and nearly shouted, "What is your birthday!"
"October 17, 1915," I replied, pretending I was not astonished at the question.
He now pointed his long index finger at his right temple. All went silent. An expression of deep-delving sagacity settled over his face as he kept the finger pressed against his head. I sensed hambone overacting, but then recalled paintings of Cervantes's Knight of the Sad Countenance, the heaven-directed gaze, the scraggly beard, the slanty eyebrows, the immemorial dark Spanish mournfulness, and Castro began to look normal. Now he raised the finger to point upward like a censorious teacher. "You are eleven years, five months and fourteen days older than I." (I can't recall the exact figures, but this will do.) Congratulatory laughter burst out and brightened the air. There was something almost touching in this childish demonstration of his calculating ability, and one recognized again his boyish hungering for the central distinction in a group. I thought of his idolization of Hemingway, another star who I am sure had felt the same driving need in himself. It was easy to imagine how they must have appreciated each other."
"...We entered an anteroom leading into the dining room and suddenly there was Castro, not in uniform as one always sees him in photographs but in a blue pencil-striped suit that, unpressed as it was, must not have been worn very often. Despite the suit, my quick impression was that had he not been a revolutionary politician he might well have been a movie star. He had that utterly total self-involvement, that need for love and agreement and the overwhelming thirst for the power that comes with total approval. In this crowded antechamber his retinue, as with most leaders everywhere, were supremely agreeable and one sensed immediately their absolute submission to the Leader. Whatever else he is, Castro is an exciting person and could probably have had a career on the screen.
Luers, in effect our senior shepherd, introduced our members in Spanish, and Gabo added a few words of explanation to identify us for Castro. GarcÃa Márquez is quite short and the rest of us men are six feet or over, so that he stood looking up at Castro and the rest of us like a new younger boy in school. His friendship with Styron and his English started things off fluently, so that between them and Castro's conversations with Luers and Wendy, his wife, and Patty Cisneros and Inge, a loud hubbub banged against the walls. Suddenly Castro looked at me over the heads of the others and nearly shouted, "What is your birthday!"
"October 17, 1915," I replied, pretending I was not astonished at the question.
He now pointed his long index finger at his right temple. All went silent. An expression of deep-delving sagacity settled over his face as he kept the finger pressed against his head. I sensed hambone overacting, but then recalled paintings of Cervantes's Knight of the Sad Countenance, the heaven-directed gaze, the scraggly beard, the slanty eyebrows, the immemorial dark Spanish mournfulness, and Castro began to look normal. Now he raised the finger to point upward like a censorious teacher. "You are eleven years, five months and fourteen days older than I." (I can't recall the exact figures, but this will do.) Congratulatory laughter burst out and brightened the air. There was something almost touching in this childish demonstration of his calculating ability, and one recognized again his boyish hungering for the central distinction in a group. I thought of his idolization of Hemingway, another star who I am sure had felt the same driving need in himself. It was easy to imagine how they must have appreciated each other."
A great column from a couple of days ago about obnoxious creep Pete Rose.
Pete Rose doesn't change, but his story does
By PHIL SHERIDAN
Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA - Pete Rose wants us to buy much, much more than his new book.
When it hits stores next week, Rose's "My Prison Without Bars" is likely to include an admission that its co-author bet on baseball. That buzz has been reinforced by no less an authority than former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who wrote an op-ed piece for Friday's New York Times. Earlier in the week, another anonymous baseball official told the Times that Rose admitted betting on baseball in a 2002 meeting with current commissioner Bud Selig.
This will come as a shock only to people who bought Rose's last book - "My Story," co-written with the respected but obviously gullible Roger Kahn - and believed what Rose had to say then.
Here's hoping you saved the receipt.
That was in 1989. At that time, Rose believed it was in his best interest to say he didn't bet on baseball. Now, Rose apparently has decided it is in his best interest to say that he did. If money were on the table, one assumes, Rose would say pretty much anything.
And that is exactly what makes him such a despicable figure.
There are people who believe his on-field achievements, becoming baseball's all-time hit leader while playing the game as if it were a matter of life and death, earn him grace points against his transgressions. Really, it should be the opposite. It is precisely because Rose was such a great player, and such an enormously popular figure, that his damage to the game was so profound and lasting.
If some journeyman with a .225 lifetime average was betting on baseball games, who would care? He would deserve the same punishment, because the rule was and is specific, with its penalties clearly spelled out. But there's no doubt that Rose's stature made his actions worse; it's the difference between the president committing an impeachable crime and the mayor of East Nowhere, Iowa, committing the same crime.
Let's say you could set aside the fact that Rose, while managing the Cincinnati Reds, bet on games involving his team. That's really quite a reach, but let's just say for a moment that you could.
What about the damage he's done to the game over the last 14 years? What about all the lying? What about constantly positioning himself as a victim and detracting from major events such as All-Star Games and Hall of Fame inductions? What about the people who believed Rose and put their credibility on the line for him?
If gambling on baseball didn't warrant a lifetime ban - and it does - then all of Rose's actions over the last 14 years certainly should.
He's bad for the game. As great as he was for the game at one time, he's that bad for it now.
Even the timing of his book is cynical. Originally scheduled for release in March, the book has been moved up to Thursday. Why? No doubt to coincide with Tuesday's announcement of the 2004 Hall of Fame class. Two days after Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley are likely to be declared brand-new Hall of Famers, Rose will begin a blitz of "exclusive" TV interviews and a quick publicity tour.
Rodale Press, the Emmaus, Pa.-based publisher, has ordered an initial pressing of 500,000 copies of "My Prison Without Bars.'' The publisher has gone to great lengths to prevent any advance leakage of the book's contents.
So we will soon be overwhelmed with images of the new, contrite Pete Rose. After 14 years of defiant dishonesty, he will no doubt recast himself as the victim of a terrible gambling addiction. He will say that he has beaten that addiction, even though he remains a regular in Las Vegas and a recent Los Angeles Times column by T.J. Simers began, "Ran into Pete Rose at Santa Anita on opening day."
Santa Anita is a racetrack. Rose reminded Simers that betting the horses "is legal. There are 35,000 people here today, and I don't think I'm the only one making bets today."
No, Pete, but you are the only one of those 35,000 who needs to convince the commissioner of baseball that you are a changed man. It is legal for an alcoholic to be in a tavern at midnight, but that doesn't make it smart.
Selig is expected to review Rose's status soon. The commissioner hasn't solicited any advice, but here's some anyway.
Allow Rose to be put on the Hall of Fame ballot. If he is elected, insist that his plaque tell the full story of his career and downfall. Then tell him he is free to pursue a job in major-league baseball - in 2018.
That will keep him ineligible for exactly as long as he continued to smear baseball by lying about gambling. Rose will be 78 by then. That's only a few years older than Jack McKeon and Don Zimmer are now. If that sounds harsh, good.
Pete Rose hasn't changed. Only his story has.
Pete Rose doesn't change, but his story does
By PHIL SHERIDAN
Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA - Pete Rose wants us to buy much, much more than his new book.
When it hits stores next week, Rose's "My Prison Without Bars" is likely to include an admission that its co-author bet on baseball. That buzz has been reinforced by no less an authority than former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who wrote an op-ed piece for Friday's New York Times. Earlier in the week, another anonymous baseball official told the Times that Rose admitted betting on baseball in a 2002 meeting with current commissioner Bud Selig.
This will come as a shock only to people who bought Rose's last book - "My Story," co-written with the respected but obviously gullible Roger Kahn - and believed what Rose had to say then.
Here's hoping you saved the receipt.
That was in 1989. At that time, Rose believed it was in his best interest to say he didn't bet on baseball. Now, Rose apparently has decided it is in his best interest to say that he did. If money were on the table, one assumes, Rose would say pretty much anything.
And that is exactly what makes him such a despicable figure.
There are people who believe his on-field achievements, becoming baseball's all-time hit leader while playing the game as if it were a matter of life and death, earn him grace points against his transgressions. Really, it should be the opposite. It is precisely because Rose was such a great player, and such an enormously popular figure, that his damage to the game was so profound and lasting.
If some journeyman with a .225 lifetime average was betting on baseball games, who would care? He would deserve the same punishment, because the rule was and is specific, with its penalties clearly spelled out. But there's no doubt that Rose's stature made his actions worse; it's the difference between the president committing an impeachable crime and the mayor of East Nowhere, Iowa, committing the same crime.
Let's say you could set aside the fact that Rose, while managing the Cincinnati Reds, bet on games involving his team. That's really quite a reach, but let's just say for a moment that you could.
What about the damage he's done to the game over the last 14 years? What about all the lying? What about constantly positioning himself as a victim and detracting from major events such as All-Star Games and Hall of Fame inductions? What about the people who believed Rose and put their credibility on the line for him?
If gambling on baseball didn't warrant a lifetime ban - and it does - then all of Rose's actions over the last 14 years certainly should.
He's bad for the game. As great as he was for the game at one time, he's that bad for it now.
Even the timing of his book is cynical. Originally scheduled for release in March, the book has been moved up to Thursday. Why? No doubt to coincide with Tuesday's announcement of the 2004 Hall of Fame class. Two days after Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley are likely to be declared brand-new Hall of Famers, Rose will begin a blitz of "exclusive" TV interviews and a quick publicity tour.
Rodale Press, the Emmaus, Pa.-based publisher, has ordered an initial pressing of 500,000 copies of "My Prison Without Bars.'' The publisher has gone to great lengths to prevent any advance leakage of the book's contents.
So we will soon be overwhelmed with images of the new, contrite Pete Rose. After 14 years of defiant dishonesty, he will no doubt recast himself as the victim of a terrible gambling addiction. He will say that he has beaten that addiction, even though he remains a regular in Las Vegas and a recent Los Angeles Times column by T.J. Simers began, "Ran into Pete Rose at Santa Anita on opening day."
Santa Anita is a racetrack. Rose reminded Simers that betting the horses "is legal. There are 35,000 people here today, and I don't think I'm the only one making bets today."
No, Pete, but you are the only one of those 35,000 who needs to convince the commissioner of baseball that you are a changed man. It is legal for an alcoholic to be in a tavern at midnight, but that doesn't make it smart.
Selig is expected to review Rose's status soon. The commissioner hasn't solicited any advice, but here's some anyway.
Allow Rose to be put on the Hall of Fame ballot. If he is elected, insist that his plaque tell the full story of his career and downfall. Then tell him he is free to pursue a job in major-league baseball - in 2018.
That will keep him ineligible for exactly as long as he continued to smear baseball by lying about gambling. Rose will be 78 by then. That's only a few years older than Jack McKeon and Don Zimmer are now. If that sounds harsh, good.
Pete Rose hasn't changed. Only his story has.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Wow.
We Stand at Armageddon
by Adam Yoshida
There is a great and growing danger of complacency among Republicans. As it becomes increasingly clear that President Bush will probably win re-election this November, and probably do it by an overwhelming margin, there will be an urge to let up. There will be a temptation to, in the interests of making sure everything runs something, run a positive and relatively quiet campaign. Some will, out of a natural sense of sportsmanship, seek to reign in the more rabid Republican partisans.
We need to resist these temptations. We need to resist complacency and over-confidence. I do not deny that I believe the eventual victory of the President to be certain: but there is much more at stake than that. This is a war and, in this war, we must expand our aims. Before we fought for a limited objective: the re-election of George Walker Bush. Now we must aim higher. In this, the two thousand and fourth year of Our Lord, we have a chance to annihilate the Democratic Party once and forever. We must either have their unconditional surrender, or we must grind their bones to dust. Republicans should consciously set out to make the 2004 campaign the most vicious in memory: there must be no surrender, no retreat and, most of all, no quarter for our enemies. The Democrat Party needs to be wiped from the face of the Earth.
Democrats will not approve of such talk. They refer to it as ‘eliminationism’ and seek to use it to tar Republicans with the brush of fascism. They weep about the suppression of ‘dissent’. What they have forgotten is this: the difference between dissent and treason. It is not treason to have a dissenting opinion on tax policy, abortion, gay marriage, or any of a multitude of other issues. The opinions held by a majority of Democrats on these issues might be execrable, but there is nothing disloyal about them.
The Democratic Party must be destroyed, not because of its opposition to tax cuts but rather because, in this war, the party as an institution has become nothing less than a tool of the enemy. A symbiotic relationship has developed between the Democrats and the enemies of America. For a Democrat to win the election, America’s enemies have to be successful in attacking America. For al-Qaeda to win the war, a Democrat has to be successful in winning the election.
Think about it for a moment: if Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III is elected next November, who will benefit the most? The French? Iran’s Ayatollah’s? Kim Jong Il? Yassir Arafat? All of them stand to gain from the election of a Democrat to the White House. The last three Democratic Presidents have been national security disasters. Lyndon Johnson took us into Vietnam, but lacked the will to win. Jimmy Carter allowed a massive Soviet build-up, lectured Americans about their ‘fear’ of Communism, stood by as the Ayatollahs seized power in Iran, and finally let the Moslems humiliate America by holding the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran hostage for a year. Bill Clinton withdrew from Somalia (thereby inspiring Osama Bin Laden to launch is war against America), failed to react to numerous al-Qaeda attacks, allowed Saddam Hussein to defy America for eight years, and (with the help of Jimmy Carter) appeased the North Koreans, thereby allowing them to acquire nuclear weapons.
So, who wins if Howard Dean wins? The answer is obvious: al-Qaeda does. At the present time Osama Bin Laden and Howard Dean have exactly the same objective: the defeat of George W. Bush. From this perspective, it is hard not to conclude that every vote cast for Howard Dean is a vote for al-Qaeda and, indeed, nothing less than a pair of bullets fired into the brain of some future American who will be doomed to die in a future terror attack as a result of the cowardice of a Dean Administration.
Now, some might admit to the truth of this but respond with that old truism: one should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to sheer incompetence. This might be true (and it certainly was true in the case of Lyndon Johnson). Certainly, a victory for the Democrats would be a victory for the enemies of America, but does that really make Democrats traitors?
The answer is simple: yes. Now, this does not mean that all individual Democrats hate America or are traitors: it merely means that the Democrat Party, as a collective entity, is indeed the ‘party of treason’. By now it ought to be obvious to any rational person that the election of a Democrat on the present platform of the Democratic Party would give “aid and comfort” to the enemies of America- yet Democrats persist in seeking to elect a candidate on that very platform. Why? Because the Democratic Party as a collective body has decided that issues are more important than country.
Go and look at the Howard Dean campaign blog. On the left side of the page you will see links to all of the various groups which have been formed to support the Dean. Gays for Dean, Environmentalists for Dean: all of these various factional groups for Dean. These are the very same factions that, together, make up the modern Democratic Party. In large part, that party today is little more than an agglomeration of single-interest groups.
Talk to a gay rights activist, or a minority activist, or an environmentalist. Listen to what they say and then ask yourself a single question: when it comes down to it, which means more to them- the defense of the realm, or their single issue? The experience of countless Presidents has shown that, most of the time, it is virtually impossible for a President to spend that much time or energy on domestic policy during wartime. The activists know this and, because of this, they seek to refocus the energies of the nation on their petty little issues. They place a higher value on the protection of buggery than they do on the protection of Boston.
We live in an age of terrible danger. Our enemies have, or soon will have, the power to wipe our greatest cities from the map and shall do so if we ever give them a chance. Yet, inevitably, if the normal state of politics goes on eventually there will be a Democrat elected who will give them just that chance.
Keeping this in mind, we must therefore understand that this is not an ordinary election. We are on the edge of the abyss, where we stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. Ahead of us lies the possibility of a better world and behind us rests death and nothingness. However dearly it comes, absolute victory must in the end be ours.
We Stand at Armageddon
by Adam Yoshida
There is a great and growing danger of complacency among Republicans. As it becomes increasingly clear that President Bush will probably win re-election this November, and probably do it by an overwhelming margin, there will be an urge to let up. There will be a temptation to, in the interests of making sure everything runs something, run a positive and relatively quiet campaign. Some will, out of a natural sense of sportsmanship, seek to reign in the more rabid Republican partisans.
We need to resist these temptations. We need to resist complacency and over-confidence. I do not deny that I believe the eventual victory of the President to be certain: but there is much more at stake than that. This is a war and, in this war, we must expand our aims. Before we fought for a limited objective: the re-election of George Walker Bush. Now we must aim higher. In this, the two thousand and fourth year of Our Lord, we have a chance to annihilate the Democratic Party once and forever. We must either have their unconditional surrender, or we must grind their bones to dust. Republicans should consciously set out to make the 2004 campaign the most vicious in memory: there must be no surrender, no retreat and, most of all, no quarter for our enemies. The Democrat Party needs to be wiped from the face of the Earth.
Democrats will not approve of such talk. They refer to it as ‘eliminationism’ and seek to use it to tar Republicans with the brush of fascism. They weep about the suppression of ‘dissent’. What they have forgotten is this: the difference between dissent and treason. It is not treason to have a dissenting opinion on tax policy, abortion, gay marriage, or any of a multitude of other issues. The opinions held by a majority of Democrats on these issues might be execrable, but there is nothing disloyal about them.
The Democratic Party must be destroyed, not because of its opposition to tax cuts but rather because, in this war, the party as an institution has become nothing less than a tool of the enemy. A symbiotic relationship has developed between the Democrats and the enemies of America. For a Democrat to win the election, America’s enemies have to be successful in attacking America. For al-Qaeda to win the war, a Democrat has to be successful in winning the election.
Think about it for a moment: if Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III is elected next November, who will benefit the most? The French? Iran’s Ayatollah’s? Kim Jong Il? Yassir Arafat? All of them stand to gain from the election of a Democrat to the White House. The last three Democratic Presidents have been national security disasters. Lyndon Johnson took us into Vietnam, but lacked the will to win. Jimmy Carter allowed a massive Soviet build-up, lectured Americans about their ‘fear’ of Communism, stood by as the Ayatollahs seized power in Iran, and finally let the Moslems humiliate America by holding the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran hostage for a year. Bill Clinton withdrew from Somalia (thereby inspiring Osama Bin Laden to launch is war against America), failed to react to numerous al-Qaeda attacks, allowed Saddam Hussein to defy America for eight years, and (with the help of Jimmy Carter) appeased the North Koreans, thereby allowing them to acquire nuclear weapons.
So, who wins if Howard Dean wins? The answer is obvious: al-Qaeda does. At the present time Osama Bin Laden and Howard Dean have exactly the same objective: the defeat of George W. Bush. From this perspective, it is hard not to conclude that every vote cast for Howard Dean is a vote for al-Qaeda and, indeed, nothing less than a pair of bullets fired into the brain of some future American who will be doomed to die in a future terror attack as a result of the cowardice of a Dean Administration.
Now, some might admit to the truth of this but respond with that old truism: one should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to sheer incompetence. This might be true (and it certainly was true in the case of Lyndon Johnson). Certainly, a victory for the Democrats would be a victory for the enemies of America, but does that really make Democrats traitors?
The answer is simple: yes. Now, this does not mean that all individual Democrats hate America or are traitors: it merely means that the Democrat Party, as a collective entity, is indeed the ‘party of treason’. By now it ought to be obvious to any rational person that the election of a Democrat on the present platform of the Democratic Party would give “aid and comfort” to the enemies of America- yet Democrats persist in seeking to elect a candidate on that very platform. Why? Because the Democratic Party as a collective body has decided that issues are more important than country.
Go and look at the Howard Dean campaign blog. On the left side of the page you will see links to all of the various groups which have been formed to support the Dean. Gays for Dean, Environmentalists for Dean: all of these various factional groups for Dean. These are the very same factions that, together, make up the modern Democratic Party. In large part, that party today is little more than an agglomeration of single-interest groups.
Talk to a gay rights activist, or a minority activist, or an environmentalist. Listen to what they say and then ask yourself a single question: when it comes down to it, which means more to them- the defense of the realm, or their single issue? The experience of countless Presidents has shown that, most of the time, it is virtually impossible for a President to spend that much time or energy on domestic policy during wartime. The activists know this and, because of this, they seek to refocus the energies of the nation on their petty little issues. They place a higher value on the protection of buggery than they do on the protection of Boston.
We live in an age of terrible danger. Our enemies have, or soon will have, the power to wipe our greatest cities from the map and shall do so if we ever give them a chance. Yet, inevitably, if the normal state of politics goes on eventually there will be a Democrat elected who will give them just that chance.
Keeping this in mind, we must therefore understand that this is not an ordinary election. We are on the edge of the abyss, where we stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. Ahead of us lies the possibility of a better world and behind us rests death and nothingness. However dearly it comes, absolute victory must in the end be ours.
A brilliant piece by an Orthodox rabbi defending the free expression of Christian faith at, guess what, Christmastime.
Religious Freedom is for Everyone-Not just Minorities.
By Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Toward Tradition
Well, 2004 has arrived which means that dreaded "C word" is behind us. Put politely, "the holiday season" has passed. Having shopped in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle lately and having listened to talk radio in each city I couldn't help noticing a startling double standard.
Overwhelmingly, store assistants and talk radio hosts bid farewell to Jewish guests with a cheerful "Happy Chanukah" while others, including those identified as Christians, received the generic "Happy holidays." With each passing year, secular fundamentalism more successfully injects into American culture the notion that the word "Christmas" is deeply offensive. Well, after watching this year's repeat of the annual "hate Christianity ritual" I think we may be mistaken in allowing this assault to go unchallenged.
Okay, maybe referring to it as a "hate Christianity ritual" is a little over the top. But it certainly is obsequious regard for faiths like Judaism and even Islam, while treating Christianity with contempt and disrespect. It is not that I want Judaism treated with less respect it is just that I think that Christianity deserves just as much respect. And I say this as an Orthodox rabbi who has spent a lifetime teaching Torah and devoting myself to the long term interests of Judaism.
I don't think that America's Jewish community does itself any long term good by denouncing every public expression of Christian faith as if it were a force-fed dose of castor oil. This anti-Christianism is not only unhealthy for all Americans; I think it is particularly destructive for Jews to be leading the extirpation of all signs of Christian fervor from the village square.
Palm Beach, Florida, prohibited a Christian group from placing a depiction of Christ in the manger alongside a menorah on public property. One of the plaintiffs, Maureen Donnell, told Fox News, "They've discriminated against us, they allow the menorahs but they have absolutely no interest in these Nativity scenes." Donnell and her co-plaintiff want the menorah and the Nativity scene to be displayed next to each other. But Palm Beach officials remained unmoved. Today, Palm Beach is a city with a large Jewish population. It would be wonderful to be able to believe that Palm Beach's Jews fought as valiantly for Christian religious rights as they have had to do in the past for their own.
Many Jewish parents, who remain indifferent when their children bop to rap music's obscene lyrics, recoil in horror at the same kids' exposure to Christmas carols. It is invariably a local rabbi who teams up with the ACLU to file a lawsuit against the school singing carols or the town unwary enough to allow a Nativity scene on the library lawn.
A music teacher in a Washington school removed the "C word" from the lyrics in Dale Wood's "Carol from an Irish Cabin" to read: "The harsh wind blows down from the mountains and blows a white winter to me."
Parent Darla Dowell, whose 7-year-old daughter sang the song, called the decision "absurd." "I think the most important thing that angers me is that they sent a message to my child that there's something wrong with Christmas and saying Christmas and celebrating it and performing it at her school with her peers," Dowell told Fox News. She couldn't understand why it's okay to exclude Christmas when her daughter was forced to sing Hanukkah tunes that included lyrics about the "mighty miracle" of Israel's ancient days. In that song, there were at least six mentions of the Jewish holiday.
Although I suppose it is possible, does anyone feel confident that Mrs. Dowell will think better of Jews in 2004 than she did in 2003? How exactly does this aggressively applied double standard help to maintain the mutual respect that used to characterize the relations between American Jews and Christians?
A 1989 Supreme Court decision in Allegheny County v. ACLU found a Nativity scene on the main staircase of the county courthouse to be unconstitutional. The court emphasized that the privately owned crèche which included a banner proclaiming "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" ("Glory to God in the Highest") was indisputably religious. In the same case, however, a five-judge majority found that a nearby display, featuring an 18-foot Hanukkah menorah did not violate the Establishment Clause. In the interests of truth and friendship, it ought to be the entire Jewish community protesting the court's actions. Instead, in a bizarre inversion of truth, many of us Jews triumph at Christianity's suppression as if we had just replayed the two millennia-old victory of the Macabees against secularism.
Holiday greeting cards also demonstrate this syndrome quite well. Don't take my word for it, step up to the greeting card racks in your local drug store and see what I mean. Virtually every Chanukah card is tasteful, well okay, deferential at least. Similarly, every Kwanza card is a paper paean to this rootless, recent invention. Cards intended for blacks and Jews are respectful. No sir, you won't find too many cards taking vulgar, humorous shots at those holidays.
Now check out the Christmas cards. Oh sorry, I should have said "check out the holiday cards" or "check out the winter season cards." You'll be hard pressed to even find a card that mentions the word "Christmas." It is as if word is deemed so offensive that casual card browsers should be protected from accidental contamination. Alongside the decent cards you'd expect, you will also find tasteless Christmas cards that mock the holiday. You'll even find off-color risqué Christmas cards that you'd be embarrassed to be caught looking at. What secularism seems to be saying is, if we can't completely banish Christmas, let's at least turn it into a bad joke.
New York City schools encourage their students to bring decorations that reflect Judaism and Islam but Christian decorations are prohibited. Yes, that is right. Holiday displays of the Jewish menorah and Islam's star and crescent are allowed in some 1,200 public schools in New York City, but the creche, or nativity display, are verboten. (The case is currently being heard in Federal Court in Brooklyn. The suit, which should have been brought in a spirit of brotherhood by a Jewish organization, doesn't seek to prohibit the Jewish and Muslim exhibits, but to end discrimination against Christianity.) Nationwide, Christmas Nativity scenes are banned from city halls and shopping malls but Chanukah menorah's are permitted. (They are only cultural symbols, not religious, you see.) Seattle city employees are prohibited from wishing one another a merry Christmas but permitted to say "Happy Holidays" or even, "Happy Chanukah".
The storm troopers of secularism who so diligently guard the rest of us from inadvertent exposure to the Christmas virus can rest for another year. Their work is done for now, but right after Thanksgiving, they'll be back, you'll see. Hey! I have a great idea-this year, let's be ready for 'em.
Radio talk show host, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, is president of
Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based, bridge-building
organization providing a voice for all Americans who defend
the Judeo-Christian values vital for our nation’s survival
Religious Freedom is for Everyone-Not just Minorities.
By Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Toward Tradition
Well, 2004 has arrived which means that dreaded "C word" is behind us. Put politely, "the holiday season" has passed. Having shopped in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle lately and having listened to talk radio in each city I couldn't help noticing a startling double standard.
Overwhelmingly, store assistants and talk radio hosts bid farewell to Jewish guests with a cheerful "Happy Chanukah" while others, including those identified as Christians, received the generic "Happy holidays." With each passing year, secular fundamentalism more successfully injects into American culture the notion that the word "Christmas" is deeply offensive. Well, after watching this year's repeat of the annual "hate Christianity ritual" I think we may be mistaken in allowing this assault to go unchallenged.
Okay, maybe referring to it as a "hate Christianity ritual" is a little over the top. But it certainly is obsequious regard for faiths like Judaism and even Islam, while treating Christianity with contempt and disrespect. It is not that I want Judaism treated with less respect it is just that I think that Christianity deserves just as much respect. And I say this as an Orthodox rabbi who has spent a lifetime teaching Torah and devoting myself to the long term interests of Judaism.
I don't think that America's Jewish community does itself any long term good by denouncing every public expression of Christian faith as if it were a force-fed dose of castor oil. This anti-Christianism is not only unhealthy for all Americans; I think it is particularly destructive for Jews to be leading the extirpation of all signs of Christian fervor from the village square.
Palm Beach, Florida, prohibited a Christian group from placing a depiction of Christ in the manger alongside a menorah on public property. One of the plaintiffs, Maureen Donnell, told Fox News, "They've discriminated against us, they allow the menorahs but they have absolutely no interest in these Nativity scenes." Donnell and her co-plaintiff want the menorah and the Nativity scene to be displayed next to each other. But Palm Beach officials remained unmoved. Today, Palm Beach is a city with a large Jewish population. It would be wonderful to be able to believe that Palm Beach's Jews fought as valiantly for Christian religious rights as they have had to do in the past for their own.
Many Jewish parents, who remain indifferent when their children bop to rap music's obscene lyrics, recoil in horror at the same kids' exposure to Christmas carols. It is invariably a local rabbi who teams up with the ACLU to file a lawsuit against the school singing carols or the town unwary enough to allow a Nativity scene on the library lawn.
A music teacher in a Washington school removed the "C word" from the lyrics in Dale Wood's "Carol from an Irish Cabin" to read: "The harsh wind blows down from the mountains and blows a white winter to me."
Parent Darla Dowell, whose 7-year-old daughter sang the song, called the decision "absurd." "I think the most important thing that angers me is that they sent a message to my child that there's something wrong with Christmas and saying Christmas and celebrating it and performing it at her school with her peers," Dowell told Fox News. She couldn't understand why it's okay to exclude Christmas when her daughter was forced to sing Hanukkah tunes that included lyrics about the "mighty miracle" of Israel's ancient days. In that song, there were at least six mentions of the Jewish holiday.
Although I suppose it is possible, does anyone feel confident that Mrs. Dowell will think better of Jews in 2004 than she did in 2003? How exactly does this aggressively applied double standard help to maintain the mutual respect that used to characterize the relations between American Jews and Christians?
A 1989 Supreme Court decision in Allegheny County v. ACLU found a Nativity scene on the main staircase of the county courthouse to be unconstitutional. The court emphasized that the privately owned crèche which included a banner proclaiming "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" ("Glory to God in the Highest") was indisputably religious. In the same case, however, a five-judge majority found that a nearby display, featuring an 18-foot Hanukkah menorah did not violate the Establishment Clause. In the interests of truth and friendship, it ought to be the entire Jewish community protesting the court's actions. Instead, in a bizarre inversion of truth, many of us Jews triumph at Christianity's suppression as if we had just replayed the two millennia-old victory of the Macabees against secularism.
Holiday greeting cards also demonstrate this syndrome quite well. Don't take my word for it, step up to the greeting card racks in your local drug store and see what I mean. Virtually every Chanukah card is tasteful, well okay, deferential at least. Similarly, every Kwanza card is a paper paean to this rootless, recent invention. Cards intended for blacks and Jews are respectful. No sir, you won't find too many cards taking vulgar, humorous shots at those holidays.
Now check out the Christmas cards. Oh sorry, I should have said "check out the holiday cards" or "check out the winter season cards." You'll be hard pressed to even find a card that mentions the word "Christmas." It is as if word is deemed so offensive that casual card browsers should be protected from accidental contamination. Alongside the decent cards you'd expect, you will also find tasteless Christmas cards that mock the holiday. You'll even find off-color risqué Christmas cards that you'd be embarrassed to be caught looking at. What secularism seems to be saying is, if we can't completely banish Christmas, let's at least turn it into a bad joke.
New York City schools encourage their students to bring decorations that reflect Judaism and Islam but Christian decorations are prohibited. Yes, that is right. Holiday displays of the Jewish menorah and Islam's star and crescent are allowed in some 1,200 public schools in New York City, but the creche, or nativity display, are verboten. (The case is currently being heard in Federal Court in Brooklyn. The suit, which should have been brought in a spirit of brotherhood by a Jewish organization, doesn't seek to prohibit the Jewish and Muslim exhibits, but to end discrimination against Christianity.) Nationwide, Christmas Nativity scenes are banned from city halls and shopping malls but Chanukah menorah's are permitted. (They are only cultural symbols, not religious, you see.) Seattle city employees are prohibited from wishing one another a merry Christmas but permitted to say "Happy Holidays" or even, "Happy Chanukah".
The storm troopers of secularism who so diligently guard the rest of us from inadvertent exposure to the Christmas virus can rest for another year. Their work is done for now, but right after Thanksgiving, they'll be back, you'll see. Hey! I have a great idea-this year, let's be ready for 'em.
Radio talk show host, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, is president of
Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based, bridge-building
organization providing a voice for all Americans who defend
the Judeo-Christian values vital for our nation’s survival
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