From The Los Angeles Times. Martin Peretz is editor in chief of the New Republic:
A Final Act of Stagecraft
Arafat's end was a lie, like his whole life.
By Martin Peretz.
Barbara Plett is the BBC correspondent in the West Bank. On Oct. 30, reporting on Yasser Arafat's sickbed departure from Ramallah to Jordan, en route to his Paris death watch, she confided to a Radio 4 news program: "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry." Quite an admission from a journalist of record. At least she was candid. But she is not the only reporter to have been enlisted in the personal drama of Abu Amr (his nom de guerre, which literally means "father of war") as a segue into making propaganda for his cause. ABC's Peter Jennings has been doing it for decades, going back at a minimum to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Palestinian leader's first great statement on the world stage.
The spectacle of Arafat's death was his last act of stagecraft, and it was a metaphor for his life. There wasn't an honest moment in the whole play. With doctors in attendance from France and several Arab countries that had not exactly been faithful to the Palestinian cause, no one told and so no one knew the exact nature of Arafat's malady. Some said he was dead, some said he was brain-dead. Others said he was talking.
Arafat's estranged wife, Suha, wouldn't allow his subordinates to visit, until she suddenly did — though not before she staged a shrieking fit for Al Jazeera. Much of the mayhem was about the succession for which the Palestinian Authority is utterly unprepared. More of it, probably, was about money — $1 billion or more, according to most estimates — the whereabouts of which (or much of which) may now be lost between the gray and white matter of his cerebrum.
The rais — or chief, as Arafat was known — was a cruel, conniving and utterly corrupt man. Yet despite all the multiple murders he had planned and paid for, including the deaths of U.S. diplomats as well as thousands of noncombatant Israelis, President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided at the end of the year 2000 to offer him a Palestinian state the likes of which no Israeli government will agree to ever again. (For what it's worth, I opposed those offers as perils to Jewish life.) But there was no one in the Palestinian polity to force his hand to accept them. Arafat was, in fact, a tyrant, much like his hero Saddam Hussein.
What he did achieve over the course of three decades was to keep the Palestine problem at the center of the world arena. But he sorely confused, as many Palestinian intellectuals also do, an endless array of anti-Israeli resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission with the real, meaningful, reasonable steps required to create a viable home for his people. Vibrant denunciations of Israel may be gratifying to the Arabs of Palestine; these may fuel their resentments and stoke their hopes, as the sheer shedding of Jewish blood also appears to lift their spirits. Tomorrow the world. But all of this is really a mirage in the desert.
Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, is said to have sired two nationalisms: the first, Jewish; the second, in imitation and opposition, Palestinian Arab. This is more cute than true. But, if a nation is galvanized by leaders, the Jewish nation was especially blessed and the Palestinians have been more than doubly cursed.
After Herzl and before statehood, there were three pivotal Zionist leaders. One was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis. His conversion to the cause swept American Jews into the Zionist orbit and helped convert Woodrow Wilson to the idea of the Jewish state. One of Brandeis' obsessions was that Zionist leadership and its financing needed to be democratically arrived at, transparent and open. In the teens and early '20s, the notion that a revolutionary movement would keep accurate accounts was, well, revolutionary.
Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born British scientist who later became the first president of the state of Israel, understood that what Jewry required was not a vast landmass it could not fill but a sovereign commonwealth to facilitate the flow of Jews from doomed European soil. He said he would accept a state "the size of a tablecloth," and to the dismay of many of his comrades, he did. Yet when the surviving Jews of Europe made their ways out of postwar displaced-persons camps, they had a place to go.
David Ben Gurion, who would be the first prime minister of Israel, was the head of the Yishuv, Jewish Palestine in the making. He was a headstrong man, combative and uncharitable to opponents. Nonetheless, he was a passionate democrat, and the Yishuv — its dispersed towns and collective settlements and its various institutions — was a model of democracy at work.
Three leaders, three achievements. Maybe this is too simple a claim, but on these rocks, a free and orderly society was born.
An independent Palestine will eventually emerge, too. But thanks in part to the leadership of Yasser Arafat from 1969 until today, its press will be intimidated. Its courts will not be independent. Its schools and universities will be centers of ugly racist and anti-Jewish doctrine. Its sciences will not be curious. Law will be determined by which faction is most cruel. Women will suffer the historical onus of their gender in Islam. Gays will try to escape to Israel. Its economy will be crippled because Israel will be wary of allowing Palestinians to come in and work. A fitting tribute to Yasser Arafat, his legacy to the Palestinians
Friday, November 12, 2004
From The New York Daily News
'Redneck vote' is a liberal myth
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 12th, 2004
In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained a USA Today headline: "Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP." Overnight, the revolt of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom.
At the time, I looked into this story line and found not a scintilla of evidence to support it. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory.
Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.
In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."
Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest? Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for President?"
It is a thin reed upon which to base a general theory of the '04 election. The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare plurality over the others.
Look at the choices: education 4%, taxes 5%, health care 8%, Iraq 15%, terrorism 19%, economy and jobs, 20%, moral values 22%. "Moral values" encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war.
The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: "war issues" or "foreign policy issues" and "economic issues."
If you pit group against group, moral values comes in dead last: war issues at 34%, economic issues at 33% and moral values at 22%.
And we know that this is the real ranking. After all, the exit poll is just a single poll. We had dozens of polls in the runup to the election that showed that the chief concerns were the war on terror, the war in Iraq and the economy.
Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. This is more nonsense. Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1% nationwide. In Ohio, the increase was 1% - less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.
This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals and from infecting the blue-state media. So once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat.
'Redneck vote' is a liberal myth
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 12th, 2004
In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained a USA Today headline: "Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP." Overnight, the revolt of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom.
At the time, I looked into this story line and found not a scintilla of evidence to support it. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory.
Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.
In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."
Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest? Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for President?"
It is a thin reed upon which to base a general theory of the '04 election. The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare plurality over the others.
Look at the choices: education 4%, taxes 5%, health care 8%, Iraq 15%, terrorism 19%, economy and jobs, 20%, moral values 22%. "Moral values" encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war.
The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: "war issues" or "foreign policy issues" and "economic issues."
If you pit group against group, moral values comes in dead last: war issues at 34%, economic issues at 33% and moral values at 22%.
And we know that this is the real ranking. After all, the exit poll is just a single poll. We had dozens of polls in the runup to the election that showed that the chief concerns were the war on terror, the war in Iraq and the economy.
Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. This is more nonsense. Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1% nationwide. In Ohio, the increase was 1% - less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.
This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals and from infecting the blue-state media. So once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Southerners find solace in ‘Dixie Lullaby’
By Jeri Rowe, Go Triad Editor
After at least four drafts, Mark Kemp kept asking himself, "Who in the hell is going to read this?" He was writing about growing up in Asheboro, fighting with his sports-loving father and seeing music from the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd as an escape hatch from a Southern world he saw as bigoted, narrow-minded and square.
He hated what he saw and heard. He left in 1987, bound for the bigger world in New York City. Yet, three years ago, after excelling at music journalism at Option magazine and later at Rolling Stone, MTV and VH-1 — and then seeing everything tumble because of his addiction to drugs and alcohol — he returned to North Carolina to finish a book about the South, Southern rock and himself.
He had secured a book deal with heavyweight publisher Simon & Schuster and later became the entertainment editor at the Charlotte Observer. Still, even after finishing his memoir, "Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in the New South" and going on a book tour across the South, he kept wondering, "Will anyone really care?"
He got his answer in late September in Nashville, Tenn.
"This girl in her 20s came up to me and asked me to read a certain section and I asked her which one and she said, ‘page 243,’ " says Kemp, 44. "And I said, ‘Wow, you read it,’ and she said, ‘It’s been important to me. I read it twice. I finally understood where my father is coming from.’ "
Finally, somebody has gotten it right. And he’s one of our own.
I still smart from working for a newspaper outside Boston 15 years ago, being the only Southerner in the newsroom and hearing one of my Yankee colleagues constantly ask, "Hey, Johnny Reb, did your family own slaves?" or "Hey Johnny Reb, don’t you all know the words of ‘Freebird’ by heart?"
I know I’m far from alone, especially after reading "Dixie Lullaby." Once, when Kemp was the music editor for Rolling Stone, the teenage son of magazine publisher Jann Wenner asked him who he thought was the most underrated band. Kemp told him Lynyrd Skynyrd. The son’s response? "No way! Those rednecks?"
I’ve always felt the rest of the country often saw the South as a bunch of Bible-thumpin’ yokels stuck in some time warp as we watched "The Dukes of Hazzard" and sang "Dixie."
But Kemp, a native North Carolinian, tries to give all of us some perspective. Can someone give me an "Amen"?
In "Dixie Lullaby," Kemp shows through his own personal lens how the South used music as its psychiatric couch over three decades to deal with its racist past and regional insecurities as it celebrated its own rebellious spirit. He writes about the icons of Southern music and Southern rock — the Allman Brothers, Lynryd Skynyrd, R.E.M. and the R&B machine in Muscle Shoals, Ala., — and puts the music in a broader context by showing how it represents the different faces of the South: the angry South, the melancholy South, the guilty South, the accepting South.
Readers have responded, especially Southerners in their 30s, 40s and 50s who came of age during desegregation. Kemp has received dozens of e-mail and letters from them, and almost every time, the sentiment is the same: "I thank you."
But the most refreshing parts of "Dixie Lullaby" come from Kemp’s own life. You see Kemp butting heads with his father over his rock ’n’ roll music and returning to his room to listen to the Allman Brothers’ "Dreams" where the lyrics, "Went up on the mountain/To see what I could see/The whole world was fallin’/Right down in front of me" zeroed in on how he felt.
Then, decades later, you watch him canvass the South in his mother’s Ford Explorer, conducting interviews for the book with his father by his side.
Their relationship has always been an emotional pressure cooker. But in that Ford, as they listened to everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to George Jones, father and son began to know each other. Not only that, they became friends.
Kemp sees his father Richard, now 71, at least once a month. He drives to Charlotte from Asheboro to have dinner with his only son. They talk politics, music, his golf game and Kemp’s old dog, Otis. And they also talk about his book.
You see, his father read every draft. He wanted to.
"You know," Kemp once told his father, "This may be painful for you to read."
"I don’t care," his father said. "I want to know it all. I want to know. I want to know everything."
• • •
Mark Kemp’s Southern Rock picks
By Mark Kemp
Only rock critics, journalists and music geeks are so obsessed with lists and categories. Most everybody else knows that those best-of lists that we're so fond of are only marginally useful and not at all organic. Who am I to choose for you the "Top 5" Southern rock albums?
For an idea of what makes great Southern rock, go out and listen to lots of music, then decide for yourself. Besides, it would take MANY more than five albums to list all the great music that's central to the development and evolution of Southern Rock -- works by such geniuses as blues pioneers Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and Muddy Waters; country pioneers the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and Johnny Cash; rhythm & blues pioneers Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett; rock & roll pioneers Elvis, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis... straight up to today's singer/songwriters like Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, and Southern hip-hop acts ranging from OutKast to David Banner and Bubba Sparxxx.
As the author of "Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South," I can, however, list a handful of albums that I believe made a particularly strong emotional, social or cultural impact on white Southerners in the decades after desegregation changed our lives.
Just don't look to this list as anything approaching a complete musical picture of great Southern rock.
Mark Kemp's top Southern rock albums
1) The Allman Brothers Band: "Idlewild South" (1970)
Some cite the live "At Fillmore East" album as the Allmans' best work, because it captures the band in its element: jamming, improvising live on stage. But it was the Allmans second album, "Idlewild South," that provided all of the raw materials for the band's free-form performances and social/cultural importance. The album's mix of country, gospel, blues, soul, free jazz and psychedelia expanded the vocabulary of rock and roll and inspired a generation of young southerners.
2) Lynyrd Skynyrd: "[Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd]" (1973)
On their first album, Lynyrd Skynyrd brought a ragged new sound to the blues-based Southern rock & roll. It was the sound of the simple, blue-collar singer and songwriter. Some say Ronnie Van Zant was a country singer fronting a rock band.
3) R.E.M.: "Fables of the Reconstruction" (1985)
The debut was more passionate and later albums were more mature, but it was on this ambitious album that R.E.M. really delved into their Southern-ness.
4) The Black Crowes: "The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion" (1992)
The Crowes' debut was rawer, but the music on this album was absolutely sublime. "Remedy" and "Thorn in My Pride" stand up to the best of the early Southern swagger from either Skynyrd -- or the Stones.
5) Drive-By Truckers: "Southern Rock Opera" (2001)
It took blood for the Southern rock of the early days to come full circle, beyond punk and beyond hip-hop. The Truckers' lead singer and songwriter Patterson Hood was a kid when his father David recorded with soul greats like Aretha Franklin and family friend Jimmy Johnson recorded Skynyrd's early demos. And that blood line -- coupled with an amazing ability to spin great stories -- makes "Southern Rock Opera" one of the absolute cornerstones of Southern rock & roll.
Southern artists to watch
Drive-By Truckers, North Mississippi All Stars, Kings of Leon, My Morning Jacket; ATL rappers including OutKast and Bubba Sparxxx and other Southern rappers such as David Banner.
Mark Kemp's dream Southern rock set list and why
I've been asked to create my dream Southern rock set list, but I've not been told the band that would be playing it. So here's what I would consider a good radio play list of important songs by post-Civil Rights Southern rock & roll bands. I could list a hundred, but I've given myself 10. Also, you won't find songs that I don't particularly like on here, because this has been defined as my "dream" list, not a list of important milestone songs. So here goes:
1) "Think" -- Aretha Franklin.
Southern rock? To me, yes. The musicians who backed Aretha on her scorching late-'60s hits were the architects of the gritty, soulful sound at the heart of both Southern soul and Southern rock. And "Think" -- with the young black woman's admonishment, "Think about what you're trying to do to me" -- resonated loudly at a time when America's greatest black leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had just been assassinated.
2) "Dreams" -- The Allman Brothers Band.
When Gregg Allman wails about going up on the mountain to see what he could see, you believed it when he reported that "the whole world was falling right down in front of me." The early '70s was a time of chaos in the South and this song showed the emotional toll it was taking on white kids. Times were changing. The sins of the dominant race were being exposed layer by layer. Young people were confused.
3) "Revival" -- The Allman Brothers Band.
The mix of gospel, Southern soul and rock on this uplifting song from the Allmans' second album showed America that young Southerners were as eager for social change in the late '60s as their northeastern and West Coast counterparts.
4) "Statesboro Blues" -- The Allman Brothers Band.
No guitar lick introduces its creator quite like the big, fat, bottleneck slide part that kicks off "Statesboro Blues." The moment you heard it, you knew it was the lanky Duane Allman. His presence and feel on a song -- whether it be Wilson Pickett's version of "Hey Jude" or Eric Clapton's original, electric version of "Layla" -- was unmistakable. This is quintessential Southern blues-rock.
5) "Simple Man" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd.
On Skynyrd's debut album of 1973, singer/storyteller Ronnie Van Zant immediately draws a line in the sand, exposing the gulf between the classes in the South. In this enduring ballad of blue-collar strength and wisdom, Van Zant takes his cues from classic country music, using the words of a mama to her wild son to remind young southerners of the importance of remaining grounded and honest.
6) "Sweet Home Alabama" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd.
On their second album, released during the summer of Watergate, Skynyrd ripped out its most famous tune, telling the rest of the nation to clean up its own backyards. Responding to other musicians who brow-beat the South for its history of racism, Van Zant asks, "Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth."
7) "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd.
On this tender ballad, Van Zant gives props to a forgotten, nameless dobro player. The fictional "Curtis Loew" never achieved the success or name recognition of a B.B. King or Muddy Waters, but to the scrappy young white kid who idolized Loew, this down-on-his-luck alcoholic was bigger and more important than any established blues titan.
8) "Absolutely Sweet Marie" -- Jason & the Scorchers.
When Jason Ringenberg and his Nashville punk band covered this Bob Dylan classic, it was as though the Ramones had met up with Lynyrd Skynyrd in some back alley. It was a brilliant adrenaline rush of gritty twangy Southern rock.
9) "Driver 8" -- R.E.M.
The punk-inspired art-pop band from Athens penned plenty of great songs (and at least one bona fide classic album, "Murmur") before putting out "Fables of the Reconstruction" in 1985. "Fables" was not a masterpiece, but its vaguely surrealistic songs presented literary snapshots of Southern characters and Southern tradition, making the album another important artistic transition from one generation to the next. The spare and melodic "Driver 8" summed up the South's continued journey in the aching, poetic line: "We can reach our destination, but we're still aways a way."
10) "Life in the Factory" -- Drive-By Truckers.
One line from this song -- a highlight of the Truckers' gritty masterpiece, "Southern Rock Opera" -- characterizes the blood, sweat and tears that went into Patterson Hood and company's masterpiece of storytelling. That line: "They named their band Lynyrd Skynyrd, after the coach who kicked them out of school./Practiced seven days a week, 'cause Rock's the only thing to save them from life in the factory."
By Jeri Rowe, Go Triad Editor
After at least four drafts, Mark Kemp kept asking himself, "Who in the hell is going to read this?" He was writing about growing up in Asheboro, fighting with his sports-loving father and seeing music from the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd as an escape hatch from a Southern world he saw as bigoted, narrow-minded and square.
He hated what he saw and heard. He left in 1987, bound for the bigger world in New York City. Yet, three years ago, after excelling at music journalism at Option magazine and later at Rolling Stone, MTV and VH-1 — and then seeing everything tumble because of his addiction to drugs and alcohol — he returned to North Carolina to finish a book about the South, Southern rock and himself.
He had secured a book deal with heavyweight publisher Simon & Schuster and later became the entertainment editor at the Charlotte Observer. Still, even after finishing his memoir, "Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in the New South" and going on a book tour across the South, he kept wondering, "Will anyone really care?"
He got his answer in late September in Nashville, Tenn.
"This girl in her 20s came up to me and asked me to read a certain section and I asked her which one and she said, ‘page 243,’ " says Kemp, 44. "And I said, ‘Wow, you read it,’ and she said, ‘It’s been important to me. I read it twice. I finally understood where my father is coming from.’ "
Finally, somebody has gotten it right. And he’s one of our own.
I still smart from working for a newspaper outside Boston 15 years ago, being the only Southerner in the newsroom and hearing one of my Yankee colleagues constantly ask, "Hey, Johnny Reb, did your family own slaves?" or "Hey Johnny Reb, don’t you all know the words of ‘Freebird’ by heart?"
I know I’m far from alone, especially after reading "Dixie Lullaby." Once, when Kemp was the music editor for Rolling Stone, the teenage son of magazine publisher Jann Wenner asked him who he thought was the most underrated band. Kemp told him Lynyrd Skynyrd. The son’s response? "No way! Those rednecks?"
I’ve always felt the rest of the country often saw the South as a bunch of Bible-thumpin’ yokels stuck in some time warp as we watched "The Dukes of Hazzard" and sang "Dixie."
But Kemp, a native North Carolinian, tries to give all of us some perspective. Can someone give me an "Amen"?
In "Dixie Lullaby," Kemp shows through his own personal lens how the South used music as its psychiatric couch over three decades to deal with its racist past and regional insecurities as it celebrated its own rebellious spirit. He writes about the icons of Southern music and Southern rock — the Allman Brothers, Lynryd Skynyrd, R.E.M. and the R&B machine in Muscle Shoals, Ala., — and puts the music in a broader context by showing how it represents the different faces of the South: the angry South, the melancholy South, the guilty South, the accepting South.
Readers have responded, especially Southerners in their 30s, 40s and 50s who came of age during desegregation. Kemp has received dozens of e-mail and letters from them, and almost every time, the sentiment is the same: "I thank you."
But the most refreshing parts of "Dixie Lullaby" come from Kemp’s own life. You see Kemp butting heads with his father over his rock ’n’ roll music and returning to his room to listen to the Allman Brothers’ "Dreams" where the lyrics, "Went up on the mountain/To see what I could see/The whole world was fallin’/Right down in front of me" zeroed in on how he felt.
Then, decades later, you watch him canvass the South in his mother’s Ford Explorer, conducting interviews for the book with his father by his side.
Their relationship has always been an emotional pressure cooker. But in that Ford, as they listened to everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to George Jones, father and son began to know each other. Not only that, they became friends.
Kemp sees his father Richard, now 71, at least once a month. He drives to Charlotte from Asheboro to have dinner with his only son. They talk politics, music, his golf game and Kemp’s old dog, Otis. And they also talk about his book.
You see, his father read every draft. He wanted to.
"You know," Kemp once told his father, "This may be painful for you to read."
"I don’t care," his father said. "I want to know it all. I want to know. I want to know everything."
• • •
Mark Kemp’s Southern Rock picks
By Mark Kemp
Only rock critics, journalists and music geeks are so obsessed with lists and categories. Most everybody else knows that those best-of lists that we're so fond of are only marginally useful and not at all organic. Who am I to choose for you the "Top 5" Southern rock albums?
For an idea of what makes great Southern rock, go out and listen to lots of music, then decide for yourself. Besides, it would take MANY more than five albums to list all the great music that's central to the development and evolution of Southern Rock -- works by such geniuses as blues pioneers Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and Muddy Waters; country pioneers the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and Johnny Cash; rhythm & blues pioneers Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett; rock & roll pioneers Elvis, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis... straight up to today's singer/songwriters like Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, and Southern hip-hop acts ranging from OutKast to David Banner and Bubba Sparxxx.
As the author of "Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South," I can, however, list a handful of albums that I believe made a particularly strong emotional, social or cultural impact on white Southerners in the decades after desegregation changed our lives.
Just don't look to this list as anything approaching a complete musical picture of great Southern rock.
Mark Kemp's top Southern rock albums
1) The Allman Brothers Band: "Idlewild South" (1970)
Some cite the live "At Fillmore East" album as the Allmans' best work, because it captures the band in its element: jamming, improvising live on stage. But it was the Allmans second album, "Idlewild South," that provided all of the raw materials for the band's free-form performances and social/cultural importance. The album's mix of country, gospel, blues, soul, free jazz and psychedelia expanded the vocabulary of rock and roll and inspired a generation of young southerners.
2) Lynyrd Skynyrd: "[Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd]" (1973)
On their first album, Lynyrd Skynyrd brought a ragged new sound to the blues-based Southern rock & roll. It was the sound of the simple, blue-collar singer and songwriter. Some say Ronnie Van Zant was a country singer fronting a rock band.
3) R.E.M.: "Fables of the Reconstruction" (1985)
The debut was more passionate and later albums were more mature, but it was on this ambitious album that R.E.M. really delved into their Southern-ness.
4) The Black Crowes: "The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion" (1992)
The Crowes' debut was rawer, but the music on this album was absolutely sublime. "Remedy" and "Thorn in My Pride" stand up to the best of the early Southern swagger from either Skynyrd -- or the Stones.
5) Drive-By Truckers: "Southern Rock Opera" (2001)
It took blood for the Southern rock of the early days to come full circle, beyond punk and beyond hip-hop. The Truckers' lead singer and songwriter Patterson Hood was a kid when his father David recorded with soul greats like Aretha Franklin and family friend Jimmy Johnson recorded Skynyrd's early demos. And that blood line -- coupled with an amazing ability to spin great stories -- makes "Southern Rock Opera" one of the absolute cornerstones of Southern rock & roll.
Southern artists to watch
Drive-By Truckers, North Mississippi All Stars, Kings of Leon, My Morning Jacket; ATL rappers including OutKast and Bubba Sparxxx and other Southern rappers such as David Banner.
Mark Kemp's dream Southern rock set list and why
I've been asked to create my dream Southern rock set list, but I've not been told the band that would be playing it. So here's what I would consider a good radio play list of important songs by post-Civil Rights Southern rock & roll bands. I could list a hundred, but I've given myself 10. Also, you won't find songs that I don't particularly like on here, because this has been defined as my "dream" list, not a list of important milestone songs. So here goes:
1) "Think" -- Aretha Franklin.
Southern rock? To me, yes. The musicians who backed Aretha on her scorching late-'60s hits were the architects of the gritty, soulful sound at the heart of both Southern soul and Southern rock. And "Think" -- with the young black woman's admonishment, "Think about what you're trying to do to me" -- resonated loudly at a time when America's greatest black leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had just been assassinated.
2) "Dreams" -- The Allman Brothers Band.
When Gregg Allman wails about going up on the mountain to see what he could see, you believed it when he reported that "the whole world was falling right down in front of me." The early '70s was a time of chaos in the South and this song showed the emotional toll it was taking on white kids. Times were changing. The sins of the dominant race were being exposed layer by layer. Young people were confused.
3) "Revival" -- The Allman Brothers Band.
The mix of gospel, Southern soul and rock on this uplifting song from the Allmans' second album showed America that young Southerners were as eager for social change in the late '60s as their northeastern and West Coast counterparts.
4) "Statesboro Blues" -- The Allman Brothers Band.
No guitar lick introduces its creator quite like the big, fat, bottleneck slide part that kicks off "Statesboro Blues." The moment you heard it, you knew it was the lanky Duane Allman. His presence and feel on a song -- whether it be Wilson Pickett's version of "Hey Jude" or Eric Clapton's original, electric version of "Layla" -- was unmistakable. This is quintessential Southern blues-rock.
5) "Simple Man" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd.
On Skynyrd's debut album of 1973, singer/storyteller Ronnie Van Zant immediately draws a line in the sand, exposing the gulf between the classes in the South. In this enduring ballad of blue-collar strength and wisdom, Van Zant takes his cues from classic country music, using the words of a mama to her wild son to remind young southerners of the importance of remaining grounded and honest.
6) "Sweet Home Alabama" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd.
On their second album, released during the summer of Watergate, Skynyrd ripped out its most famous tune, telling the rest of the nation to clean up its own backyards. Responding to other musicians who brow-beat the South for its history of racism, Van Zant asks, "Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth."
7) "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd.
On this tender ballad, Van Zant gives props to a forgotten, nameless dobro player. The fictional "Curtis Loew" never achieved the success or name recognition of a B.B. King or Muddy Waters, but to the scrappy young white kid who idolized Loew, this down-on-his-luck alcoholic was bigger and more important than any established blues titan.
8) "Absolutely Sweet Marie" -- Jason & the Scorchers.
When Jason Ringenberg and his Nashville punk band covered this Bob Dylan classic, it was as though the Ramones had met up with Lynyrd Skynyrd in some back alley. It was a brilliant adrenaline rush of gritty twangy Southern rock.
9) "Driver 8" -- R.E.M.
The punk-inspired art-pop band from Athens penned plenty of great songs (and at least one bona fide classic album, "Murmur") before putting out "Fables of the Reconstruction" in 1985. "Fables" was not a masterpiece, but its vaguely surrealistic songs presented literary snapshots of Southern characters and Southern tradition, making the album another important artistic transition from one generation to the next. The spare and melodic "Driver 8" summed up the South's continued journey in the aching, poetic line: "We can reach our destination, but we're still aways a way."
10) "Life in the Factory" -- Drive-By Truckers.
One line from this song -- a highlight of the Truckers' gritty masterpiece, "Southern Rock Opera" -- characterizes the blood, sweat and tears that went into Patterson Hood and company's masterpiece of storytelling. That line: "They named their band Lynyrd Skynyrd, after the coach who kicked them out of school./Practiced seven days a week, 'cause Rock's the only thing to save them from life in the factory."
Carolina Basketball Signs Four
A quartet of prep student-athletes will join the Carolina program for the 2005-06 season.
By UNC Athletic Communications
CHAPEL HILL -- University of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams signed four high school seniors Wednesday to National Letters of Intent. The four student-athletes include Bobby Frasor of Blue Island, Ill., Marcus Ginyard of Alexandria, Va., Danny Green of North Babylon, N.Y., and Tyler Hansbrough of Poplar Bluff, Mo.
Frasor is a 6-3, 185-pound guard. He plays for Coach Pat Richardson at Brother Rice High School in Chicago.
"Bobby caught my eye when he played so well in a tournament in Houston at which I was able to very closely watch him play four games in two days," says Williams. "Bobby is a gym rat and a fundamentally sound player. I like both of those qualities. He is a great student and a student of basketball. His savvy will really help him at the college level."
Ginyard is a 6-5, 205-pound wing. He plays for Coach Joe Wootten at Bishop O'Connell High School in Arlington, Va.
"Marcus is a young man we have known for a long time," says Williams. "He stopped by our office the first month or so we were here and got the recruiting process started. He's extremely effective on the defensive end of the floor and knows how to play the game. He's a guy everyone likes to play with. I always think that's a great quality." Green is a 6-5, 200-pound wing. He plays for Coach Tim Cluess at St. Mary's High School in Manhasset, N.Y.
"Danny Green has tremendous versatility in his game," says Williams. "He is a player that has no big weakness, and he does several things very well. His ability to shoot the ball from the perimeter and still do things inside will help us."
Hansbrough is a 6-9, 225-pound forward. He plays for Coach John David Pattillo at Poplar Bluff High School.
"We're extremely excited about what Tyler can add to our program," says Williams. "He has an amazing intensity level, which he maintains every day that he plays. He is a quality person and the kind of individual I'm going to enjoy being around, plus he's going to add so much to our basketball program.
"Overall, it's a fantastic group academically, and on the court they will give us a lot of versatility," says Williams. "They will be asked to make major contributions since we are going to be losing such quality performers in this year's senior class. It's a `nucleus' class. Our job is to build around them in the future."
A quartet of prep student-athletes will join the Carolina program for the 2005-06 season.
By UNC Athletic Communications
CHAPEL HILL -- University of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams signed four high school seniors Wednesday to National Letters of Intent. The four student-athletes include Bobby Frasor of Blue Island, Ill., Marcus Ginyard of Alexandria, Va., Danny Green of North Babylon, N.Y., and Tyler Hansbrough of Poplar Bluff, Mo.
Frasor is a 6-3, 185-pound guard. He plays for Coach Pat Richardson at Brother Rice High School in Chicago.
"Bobby caught my eye when he played so well in a tournament in Houston at which I was able to very closely watch him play four games in two days," says Williams. "Bobby is a gym rat and a fundamentally sound player. I like both of those qualities. He is a great student and a student of basketball. His savvy will really help him at the college level."
Ginyard is a 6-5, 205-pound wing. He plays for Coach Joe Wootten at Bishop O'Connell High School in Arlington, Va.
"Marcus is a young man we have known for a long time," says Williams. "He stopped by our office the first month or so we were here and got the recruiting process started. He's extremely effective on the defensive end of the floor and knows how to play the game. He's a guy everyone likes to play with. I always think that's a great quality." Green is a 6-5, 200-pound wing. He plays for Coach Tim Cluess at St. Mary's High School in Manhasset, N.Y.
"Danny Green has tremendous versatility in his game," says Williams. "He is a player that has no big weakness, and he does several things very well. His ability to shoot the ball from the perimeter and still do things inside will help us."
Hansbrough is a 6-9, 225-pound forward. He plays for Coach John David Pattillo at Poplar Bluff High School.
"We're extremely excited about what Tyler can add to our program," says Williams. "He has an amazing intensity level, which he maintains every day that he plays. He is a quality person and the kind of individual I'm going to enjoy being around, plus he's going to add so much to our basketball program.
"Overall, it's a fantastic group academically, and on the court they will give us a lot of versatility," says Williams. "They will be asked to make major contributions since we are going to be losing such quality performers in this year's senior class. It's a `nucleus' class. Our job is to build around them in the future."
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
No Party Man
I’m not the Republican Paul Begala.
by Jonah Goldberg
The other day I wrote a column offering some suggestions to the Democrats about how they could improve their plight.
In response I received a boatload of e-mail. (How many e-mails would fit in a boat anyway?) Many Democrats and liberals told me I should keep my advice to myself because, in the words of one, "Why would Democrats ever take advice from a right-winger like you?!"
Meanwhile, many Republicans offered a different point of view. "Why do you want to help the Democrats?" many asked. "Let them fail!" asserted the chorus to my right.
Well, here's the thing: I don't take any giant amount of pride in being a Republican. I'm a conservative.
This is a distinction lost on the mainstream media. Most cable-news networks consider conservatives, Republicans, and — even more egregiously — libertarians utterly interchangeable. I get booked to debate liberals on TV all the time. In about half the circumstances, my opponent is a Democratic-party operative, or "consultant." The same happens to liberal journalists who are booked with various GOP activists. The problem with this arrangement is that, by their very nature, party apparatchiks care about their party more than ideas.
Consider CNN's Crossfire. This landmark show deserves much of the credit or blame, depending on your perspective, for the shout-show format of cable news dominating all of the networks today. In its current iteration, it pits Tucker Carlson and Bob Novak on the right versus James Carville and Paul Begala on the left. The problem is that Carlson and Novak — whatever their faults — are conservatives and/or journalists first and Republicans second. Carlson now thinks the war in Iraq was a mistake, and Novak always did. That hardly qualifies them as White House spokesmen. Begala and Carville, meanwhile, are Democrats before anything else and spin for their party more than their principles. Or, to be more fair than I am normally accustomed, they see their party and their principles as one and the same thing.
Let me put it this way: I want the Democratic party to move to the center on cultural and economic issues. Yes, it would mean that the Democrats would win more elections. That's pretty much beyond dispute. Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president to be reelected since Roosevelt, and it was because he moved his party to the political center.
If the Democrats won more elections by moving to the middle, it would be bad news for the Republican party, to be sure. But it would be good news for America — if you believe, as I do, that America would be better off moving in a more conservative direction. Keep in mind that when the Democrats move to the left, the Republicans move leftward to the middle — that is, to the left. So Republicans who cheer the leftward tilt of the Democrats shouldn't be surprised when the entire political center of gravity moves to the left as well.
Remember when that court declared the "under God" portion of the pledge of allegiance unconstitutional? Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle immediately denounced the decision. I'm sure they were sincere. But even if they weren't, it was smart politics because no politician wants to run against the pledge of allegiance. Now, someone who puts the interests of the Republican party ahead of everything else would have been disappointed by the Democrats' maneuver. But no conservative in his right mind would have been upset about it, because the whole point of conservatism is to conserve those customs, institutions and values we consider essential for a healthy society.
Of course, during an election year the differences between conservatives and Republicans — as well as those between liberals and Democrats — become especially blurred. That's because elections force everyone to choose sides, to make the achievable good preferable to the unattainable perfect. Antiwar liberals held their noses and voted for Kerry even though he promised to fight harder than Bush. Small government conservatives contained their disgust for Bush's overspending.
But now the election is over, and I think you can expect to see a lot more daylight between conservatives and Bush. By all accounts, Bush and Karl Rove want to seal the Republican party as the majority for a generation. I'm all for it, but that doesn't mean I'll like everything the White House does to achieve this. The No Child Left Behind Act was a deliberate attempt to steal education from Democrats as an issue. It was somewhat successful, but that doesn't mean conservatives should suddenly cheer federal meddling in local education. The expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs was a fiscal train wreck.
The White House has many excellent ideas — tax reform, overhauling Social Security, etc. — that conservatives should get behind. But if the goal is to make the Republican party the majority party by making it the more "reasonable" big-government party, I suspect you won't find it so easy to confuse conservatives and Republicans in the near future.
— (c) 2004 Tribune Media Services
I’m not the Republican Paul Begala.
by Jonah Goldberg
The other day I wrote a column offering some suggestions to the Democrats about how they could improve their plight.
In response I received a boatload of e-mail. (How many e-mails would fit in a boat anyway?) Many Democrats and liberals told me I should keep my advice to myself because, in the words of one, "Why would Democrats ever take advice from a right-winger like you?!"
Meanwhile, many Republicans offered a different point of view. "Why do you want to help the Democrats?" many asked. "Let them fail!" asserted the chorus to my right.
Well, here's the thing: I don't take any giant amount of pride in being a Republican. I'm a conservative.
This is a distinction lost on the mainstream media. Most cable-news networks consider conservatives, Republicans, and — even more egregiously — libertarians utterly interchangeable. I get booked to debate liberals on TV all the time. In about half the circumstances, my opponent is a Democratic-party operative, or "consultant." The same happens to liberal journalists who are booked with various GOP activists. The problem with this arrangement is that, by their very nature, party apparatchiks care about their party more than ideas.
Consider CNN's Crossfire. This landmark show deserves much of the credit or blame, depending on your perspective, for the shout-show format of cable news dominating all of the networks today. In its current iteration, it pits Tucker Carlson and Bob Novak on the right versus James Carville and Paul Begala on the left. The problem is that Carlson and Novak — whatever their faults — are conservatives and/or journalists first and Republicans second. Carlson now thinks the war in Iraq was a mistake, and Novak always did. That hardly qualifies them as White House spokesmen. Begala and Carville, meanwhile, are Democrats before anything else and spin for their party more than their principles. Or, to be more fair than I am normally accustomed, they see their party and their principles as one and the same thing.
Let me put it this way: I want the Democratic party to move to the center on cultural and economic issues. Yes, it would mean that the Democrats would win more elections. That's pretty much beyond dispute. Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president to be reelected since Roosevelt, and it was because he moved his party to the political center.
If the Democrats won more elections by moving to the middle, it would be bad news for the Republican party, to be sure. But it would be good news for America — if you believe, as I do, that America would be better off moving in a more conservative direction. Keep in mind that when the Democrats move to the left, the Republicans move leftward to the middle — that is, to the left. So Republicans who cheer the leftward tilt of the Democrats shouldn't be surprised when the entire political center of gravity moves to the left as well.
Remember when that court declared the "under God" portion of the pledge of allegiance unconstitutional? Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle immediately denounced the decision. I'm sure they were sincere. But even if they weren't, it was smart politics because no politician wants to run against the pledge of allegiance. Now, someone who puts the interests of the Republican party ahead of everything else would have been disappointed by the Democrats' maneuver. But no conservative in his right mind would have been upset about it, because the whole point of conservatism is to conserve those customs, institutions and values we consider essential for a healthy society.
Of course, during an election year the differences between conservatives and Republicans — as well as those between liberals and Democrats — become especially blurred. That's because elections force everyone to choose sides, to make the achievable good preferable to the unattainable perfect. Antiwar liberals held their noses and voted for Kerry even though he promised to fight harder than Bush. Small government conservatives contained their disgust for Bush's overspending.
But now the election is over, and I think you can expect to see a lot more daylight between conservatives and Bush. By all accounts, Bush and Karl Rove want to seal the Republican party as the majority for a generation. I'm all for it, but that doesn't mean I'll like everything the White House does to achieve this. The No Child Left Behind Act was a deliberate attempt to steal education from Democrats as an issue. It was somewhat successful, but that doesn't mean conservatives should suddenly cheer federal meddling in local education. The expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs was a fiscal train wreck.
The White House has many excellent ideas — tax reform, overhauling Social Security, etc. — that conservatives should get behind. But if the goal is to make the Republican party the majority party by making it the more "reasonable" big-government party, I suspect you won't find it so easy to confuse conservatives and Republicans in the near future.
— (c) 2004 Tribune Media Services
From The New York Post:
FORTUNATE SON
By William McGurn
Forgive Mindy Evnin if she's not up for cake and candles today. Even if she knows how important this birthday was for her son.
On this day in a Philadelphia tavern, the Continental Congress gave birth to the Marine Corps almost a full year before the Declaration of Independence. More than two centuries later in Fallujah, America still looks to the Marines to do the job no one else can.
And no one knows better than Mindy Evnin the price: On a dusty Iraqi roadside in April 2003, her son, Cpl. Mark Evnin, gave his life wearing that same uniform.
But you hear only admiration for the corps from Mindy.
Until the Marine recruiter came to her home the day after Thanksgiving during Mark's senior year at South Burlington (Vt.) High, his mother didn't know what her son would do with his life. And once he did know, it was sometimes hard to explain to her social circles: "At a book club where the other mothers were all talking about which college their children were going off to," says Mindy Evnin, "I shared that Mark wanted to go to sniper school."
Mark's recruiter had given Mindy a Marine bumper sticker — which, he noted, she had no right to affix to her car until Mark had made it through boot camp. As she confesses over lunch in Manhattan, "I told Mark I wasn't sure then I could ever put it on my car."
Gradually, however, as she watched the changes in her son and his pride in his achievements, she realized that the little boy who wore fatigues to Hebrew school was finally where he was meant to be: with his fellow Marines.
In Iraq last April, a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent embedded with Mark's unit let him use his satellite phone to call home. Two days later, Cpl. Mark Evnin was killed in action while returning fire in an Iraqi ambush.
And that's when Mindy really learned about the Marines. When Mark's buddies came back from Iraq, they wrote her as they might their own moms, and Mindy flew out to the base at 29 Palms, Calif., to spend some time with them. The young Marine recruiter who was in Burlington when Mark was killed recently invited Mindy to his wedding — and insisted on seating her in the row reserved for his family.
The sergeant-major whom Cpl. Evnin was driving when he was killed invited Mindy to his wedding. And on the first anniversary of Mark's death earlier this year, Marines sent her a bouquet of crimson-and-gold. (Actually, they had them delivered the day before, so she wouldn't be disturbed that painful day.)
Mindy's done her own work. She tells me she was particularly taken with a book by novelist Frank Schaeffer, "Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary," written after his son joined a Marine Corps that was initially as alien to him as the Navajo.
"I was able to relate to him," she says, "because he describes himself as a Volvo-driving eastern-establishment parent who did not know anyone in the military before his son enlisted, and whose friends wondered what was wrong with his son's private-school education that allowed this to happen."
Like Frank Schaeffer, Mindy was well aware of the Marine reputation for ferocity in battle. Nothing either has learned since changes that. But they have also learned what few outside the corps seem to appreciate: That Marines' heroics have mostly to do with the courage and pluck shown in looking out for one's fellow Marine.
So, the next time you hear of a hopelessly polarized America, remember Cpl. MarK Evnin, USMC, and the life he freely gave for something larger than himself.
And on this special birthday, with Marines fighting for Fallujah, remember too the Jewish mother in Vermont, a self-described product of the '60s, whose car now sports a bumper sticker that not so long ago would have been inconceivable: Proud Parent of a U.S. Marine.
William McGurn, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review and the Far East Economic Review, is now writing a weekly Post column.
FORTUNATE SON
By William McGurn
Forgive Mindy Evnin if she's not up for cake and candles today. Even if she knows how important this birthday was for her son.
On this day in a Philadelphia tavern, the Continental Congress gave birth to the Marine Corps almost a full year before the Declaration of Independence. More than two centuries later in Fallujah, America still looks to the Marines to do the job no one else can.
And no one knows better than Mindy Evnin the price: On a dusty Iraqi roadside in April 2003, her son, Cpl. Mark Evnin, gave his life wearing that same uniform.
But you hear only admiration for the corps from Mindy.
Until the Marine recruiter came to her home the day after Thanksgiving during Mark's senior year at South Burlington (Vt.) High, his mother didn't know what her son would do with his life. And once he did know, it was sometimes hard to explain to her social circles: "At a book club where the other mothers were all talking about which college their children were going off to," says Mindy Evnin, "I shared that Mark wanted to go to sniper school."
Mark's recruiter had given Mindy a Marine bumper sticker — which, he noted, she had no right to affix to her car until Mark had made it through boot camp. As she confesses over lunch in Manhattan, "I told Mark I wasn't sure then I could ever put it on my car."
Gradually, however, as she watched the changes in her son and his pride in his achievements, she realized that the little boy who wore fatigues to Hebrew school was finally where he was meant to be: with his fellow Marines.
In Iraq last April, a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent embedded with Mark's unit let him use his satellite phone to call home. Two days later, Cpl. Mark Evnin was killed in action while returning fire in an Iraqi ambush.
And that's when Mindy really learned about the Marines. When Mark's buddies came back from Iraq, they wrote her as they might their own moms, and Mindy flew out to the base at 29 Palms, Calif., to spend some time with them. The young Marine recruiter who was in Burlington when Mark was killed recently invited Mindy to his wedding — and insisted on seating her in the row reserved for his family.
The sergeant-major whom Cpl. Evnin was driving when he was killed invited Mindy to his wedding. And on the first anniversary of Mark's death earlier this year, Marines sent her a bouquet of crimson-and-gold. (Actually, they had them delivered the day before, so she wouldn't be disturbed that painful day.)
Mindy's done her own work. She tells me she was particularly taken with a book by novelist Frank Schaeffer, "Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary," written after his son joined a Marine Corps that was initially as alien to him as the Navajo.
"I was able to relate to him," she says, "because he describes himself as a Volvo-driving eastern-establishment parent who did not know anyone in the military before his son enlisted, and whose friends wondered what was wrong with his son's private-school education that allowed this to happen."
Like Frank Schaeffer, Mindy was well aware of the Marine reputation for ferocity in battle. Nothing either has learned since changes that. But they have also learned what few outside the corps seem to appreciate: That Marines' heroics have mostly to do with the courage and pluck shown in looking out for one's fellow Marine.
So, the next time you hear of a hopelessly polarized America, remember Cpl. MarK Evnin, USMC, and the life he freely gave for something larger than himself.
And on this special birthday, with Marines fighting for Fallujah, remember too the Jewish mother in Vermont, a self-described product of the '60s, whose car now sports a bumper sticker that not so long ago would have been inconceivable: Proud Parent of a U.S. Marine.
William McGurn, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review and the Far East Economic Review, is now writing a weekly Post column.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
An ominous Specter
By Thomas Sowell
President Bush had barely finished celebrating his election victory when Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania fired a shot across his bow, warning the President not to send judicial nominees before the Senate Judiciary Committee to be confirmed if they were the kinds of judges who might restrict the right to an abortion.
More is involved here than just one headstrong Senator with his own policy litmus test.
After more than half a century of escalating judicial activism -- judges imposing their own beliefs instead of applying the law -- our country is at a crossroads. There is an opportunity -- one that may not come again in this generation -- to make judicial appointments that will restore the rule of law.
The issue is not whether judges will impose liberal policies or conservative policies. The larger issue is whether they will destroy the voting public's control over their own destiny. Too many generations of Americans have fought and died to preserve the right of democratic self-governance to let judges continue to erode that right and become judicial dictators.
Expressions of outrage from many quarters have caused such an uproar over Senator Specter's statements that some have questioned whether he should become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as he would by seniority in January. These outcries have led the Senator to backpedal from his statements, no doubt to try to save his prospects of becoming committee chairman.
The real question is not what Senator Specter says now but what he would do as chairman of this key committee that judicial nominees pass before during the confirmation process. That committee has become a place for character assassination against judicial nominees who believe in adhering to the written law.
The key turning point was the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 and the massive smear campaign against him. No nominee to the Supreme Court was ever more qualified than Judge Bork but Senator Specter voted against him.
At one crucial point, Senator Pat Leahy took a cheap shot at Judge Bork by saying that he had earned large consulting fees in some years, when he was a law professor, as if that were something dishonorable. What was not revealed to the public was that those were years in which Professor Bork's wife was fatally ill and he needed that money to do all that he could for her.
Judge Bork was obviously deeply distressed by having that painful period in his personal life dragged into the political arena and his actions in those years twisted and distorted beyond recognition. When Judge Bork rested his head in his hands and covered his eyes, Judiciary Committee chairman Joseph Biden -- to his credit -- called a recess.
But, when it was proposed to end the hearings for the day, Senator Arlen Specter refused to agree. He wasn't prepared to wait to get his shots in against Judge Bork. Senator Specter's agenda was more important to him than common decency.
As the hearings went on, it became clear that Senator Specter's agenda was also more important to him than the Constitution's separation of powers, for the Senator was clearly judging Judge Bork not on his high qualifications but on whether or not he was likely to uphold policies that Senator Specter liked.
He demanded to know "where's the predictability in Judge Bork." He asked: "Where's the assurances for this committee and the Senate of where you'll be?"
Judges in general, and Justices of the Supreme court in particular, are supposed to be impartial and independent in judging the specific merits of whatever cases arise -- not predictable. What does the separation of powers mean if one branch of government can prescribe in advance what members of another branch of government must do on specific issues?
Then and now, Senator Specter has been one of those to whom what matters is not a judicial nominee's qualifications but how they are likely to vote on abortion, anti-trust laws, or whatever.
Senator Specter is also one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. He has mangled the meaning of such basic concepts as "judicial activism" and "original intent." It would be a tragedy for him to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he could mangle nominees and in the process mangle the Constitution of the United States.
By Thomas Sowell
President Bush had barely finished celebrating his election victory when Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania fired a shot across his bow, warning the President not to send judicial nominees before the Senate Judiciary Committee to be confirmed if they were the kinds of judges who might restrict the right to an abortion.
More is involved here than just one headstrong Senator with his own policy litmus test.
After more than half a century of escalating judicial activism -- judges imposing their own beliefs instead of applying the law -- our country is at a crossroads. There is an opportunity -- one that may not come again in this generation -- to make judicial appointments that will restore the rule of law.
The issue is not whether judges will impose liberal policies or conservative policies. The larger issue is whether they will destroy the voting public's control over their own destiny. Too many generations of Americans have fought and died to preserve the right of democratic self-governance to let judges continue to erode that right and become judicial dictators.
Expressions of outrage from many quarters have caused such an uproar over Senator Specter's statements that some have questioned whether he should become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as he would by seniority in January. These outcries have led the Senator to backpedal from his statements, no doubt to try to save his prospects of becoming committee chairman.
The real question is not what Senator Specter says now but what he would do as chairman of this key committee that judicial nominees pass before during the confirmation process. That committee has become a place for character assassination against judicial nominees who believe in adhering to the written law.
The key turning point was the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 and the massive smear campaign against him. No nominee to the Supreme Court was ever more qualified than Judge Bork but Senator Specter voted against him.
At one crucial point, Senator Pat Leahy took a cheap shot at Judge Bork by saying that he had earned large consulting fees in some years, when he was a law professor, as if that were something dishonorable. What was not revealed to the public was that those were years in which Professor Bork's wife was fatally ill and he needed that money to do all that he could for her.
Judge Bork was obviously deeply distressed by having that painful period in his personal life dragged into the political arena and his actions in those years twisted and distorted beyond recognition. When Judge Bork rested his head in his hands and covered his eyes, Judiciary Committee chairman Joseph Biden -- to his credit -- called a recess.
But, when it was proposed to end the hearings for the day, Senator Arlen Specter refused to agree. He wasn't prepared to wait to get his shots in against Judge Bork. Senator Specter's agenda was more important to him than common decency.
As the hearings went on, it became clear that Senator Specter's agenda was also more important to him than the Constitution's separation of powers, for the Senator was clearly judging Judge Bork not on his high qualifications but on whether or not he was likely to uphold policies that Senator Specter liked.
He demanded to know "where's the predictability in Judge Bork." He asked: "Where's the assurances for this committee and the Senate of where you'll be?"
Judges in general, and Justices of the Supreme court in particular, are supposed to be impartial and independent in judging the specific merits of whatever cases arise -- not predictable. What does the separation of powers mean if one branch of government can prescribe in advance what members of another branch of government must do on specific issues?
Then and now, Senator Specter has been one of those to whom what matters is not a judicial nominee's qualifications but how they are likely to vote on abortion, anti-trust laws, or whatever.
Senator Specter is also one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. He has mangled the meaning of such basic concepts as "judicial activism" and "original intent." It would be a tragedy for him to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he could mangle nominees and in the process mangle the Constitution of the United States.
From The Telegraph UK:
We weren't dumb enough to vote Kerry
By Mark Steyn
Last week, you may recall, I quoted Bob Kerrey - not the Kerry who was running for president, but a fellow senator and Vietnam veteran and a big backer of his near-namesake. This Kerrey was on television a couple of days before the election and claimed to have the pulse of the man in the street.
"I was in Gallia, Ohio, down in the southeastern part of Ohio," he said. "They don't give a damn about the war in Iraq. They're terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions. That's what's bothering them."
I begged to differ: "In fact," I wrote, "the people - in Gallia, Ohio and many other places - understand the relevance of Iraq and Afghanistan to their well-being rather more clearly than the Democratic leadership do."
Just for the record, on Tuesday, in Gallia County, Ohio, George W Bush won 62 per cent of the vote.
It wasn't the economy, stupid. It was the stupidity, stupid. No man is an island, but the Democrats expect voters to act as if they are. Don't think about national security and war and Iraq and Iran and North Korea - that's all way beyond a loser like you. You're too "terrified" about your job to be bothered with the foreign pages. It's practically the Depression out there.
OK, it's not. But it's a recession. OK, it's not. But there aren't any jobs out there. OK, there are. But they're not like the jobs you used to have, when you could go to the mill and do the same job day in day out for 45 years, and it made it so much easier for us come election time because there were large numbers of you all in the same place when we flew in for the campaign stop. But the point is: you are an island, stick to "pocketbook issues", think about yourself.
The Left always used to accuse the Right of appealing to the voters' selfishness, but this year the Dems did and it got them nowhere.
I think there are a couple of lessons here. First, when you're cursed to live in "interesting times", a party has to have something interesting to say. It has to stand for something; it has to have a core identity, not just wonkish programmes. The Dems do have core beliefs - abortion, racial grievances, gay marriage, etc - but unfortunately they're not the kind of thing you can talk about at election time.
In Britain, alas, it's the Tories, under their current Kerrykaze pilot, who are distressingly Democrat-like: full of itsybitsy policies for this and that, irrelevant on the big picture, deeply evasive on Europe. They're also far too timid on the British equivalent of America's "cultural values" - crime and the other "quality of life" issues.
Secondly, assume for a moment that Bob Kerrey was right - that voters in Gallia County really were "terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions". Even if that's true, do you want the government to do anything about it? In many Continental countries, it's all but impossible to lose your job - which is why so many companies are reluctant to hire anyone and Germany's unemployment rate is twice that of America. And once healthcare and pensions are the province of the government, the basic relationship between the citizen and the state is altered. By 2040, Greece's government pension liabilities will be 25 per cent of GDP, as opposed to 6.8 per cent for America, which is quite colossal enough, thank you.
So even if I was "terrified" of losing my job, healthcare, pension, etc, I'd be reluctant to let the government relieve me of my terror. On the Continent, the mainstream parties of Tweedleleft and Tweedleright, having spent half a century ruling more and more issues beyond the subject of debate, can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth to the voters about the looming crisis.
They reckon that the masses have become too used to 35-hour work-weeks, two months of holiday, you leave college at 36, take early retirement at 47, etc, and that they won't take kindly to being told the jig's up. The Daily Mirror may think American voters are "DUMB", but I'll bet in the chancelleries of Europe there are plenty of officials who wish their own electors would occasionally disdain "pocketbook issues". Once you've turned citizens into junkies for government crack, it's very hard to wean them off it.
Thirdly, after listening to John Edwards's Dickensian tales of "two Americas" for months on end, I'm convinced that any red-state county knows more about business than your average Massachusetts senator, tenured Harvard professor or Boston Globe editor. When John Kerry gets his hair done at Cristophe's in Washington for somewhere north of $75, that high-priced stylist is an employee. If he'd ever stopped to have it done for $10 by DeeDee in a hair salon in a small town, he'd discover that she's a one-woman business.
When he goes to his favourite restaurant in Washington, the waiter's an employee. When he drops by a diner on Main Street in some nowhere burg to pretend to eat a hot dog for a photo op, the waitress might well be like the lady who served me lunch on Sunday: she has her own house-cleaning business, but does some part-time work at the local school and a couple of shifts at the diner for a bit of extra cash.
She's a small business, and she knows more about her tax return than Teresa Heinz Kerry knows about hers. Mrs Kerry farms it out to the best advisers money can buy, and they do a grand job: she's one of the richest women in the world and she paid 12 per cent tax last year. It makes no difference whether the tax rate is 20 per cent, 50 per cent or 88 per cent: the Kerrys of the world will still pay 12 per cent.
The American people don't want to be condescended to by ketchup heiresses, billionaire currency speculators, $20-million-a-picture Hollywood pretty boys, and multi-millionaire documentary-makers posing as bluecollar lardbutts.
The Democrats keep talking to people as if they're like John Edwards's 40-year mill-workers, but that's not what work is any more, and a 23-year-old hairdresser can know enough about starting and running a business to be unimpressed at a few footling tax credits dangled in front of her by a 60-year-old lifelong "public servant" lucky enough to be living a grand old life thanks to his billionaire wife's first husband.
We weren't dumb enough to vote Kerry
By Mark Steyn
Last week, you may recall, I quoted Bob Kerrey - not the Kerry who was running for president, but a fellow senator and Vietnam veteran and a big backer of his near-namesake. This Kerrey was on television a couple of days before the election and claimed to have the pulse of the man in the street.
"I was in Gallia, Ohio, down in the southeastern part of Ohio," he said. "They don't give a damn about the war in Iraq. They're terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions. That's what's bothering them."
I begged to differ: "In fact," I wrote, "the people - in Gallia, Ohio and many other places - understand the relevance of Iraq and Afghanistan to their well-being rather more clearly than the Democratic leadership do."
Just for the record, on Tuesday, in Gallia County, Ohio, George W Bush won 62 per cent of the vote.
It wasn't the economy, stupid. It was the stupidity, stupid. No man is an island, but the Democrats expect voters to act as if they are. Don't think about national security and war and Iraq and Iran and North Korea - that's all way beyond a loser like you. You're too "terrified" about your job to be bothered with the foreign pages. It's practically the Depression out there.
OK, it's not. But it's a recession. OK, it's not. But there aren't any jobs out there. OK, there are. But they're not like the jobs you used to have, when you could go to the mill and do the same job day in day out for 45 years, and it made it so much easier for us come election time because there were large numbers of you all in the same place when we flew in for the campaign stop. But the point is: you are an island, stick to "pocketbook issues", think about yourself.
The Left always used to accuse the Right of appealing to the voters' selfishness, but this year the Dems did and it got them nowhere.
I think there are a couple of lessons here. First, when you're cursed to live in "interesting times", a party has to have something interesting to say. It has to stand for something; it has to have a core identity, not just wonkish programmes. The Dems do have core beliefs - abortion, racial grievances, gay marriage, etc - but unfortunately they're not the kind of thing you can talk about at election time.
In Britain, alas, it's the Tories, under their current Kerrykaze pilot, who are distressingly Democrat-like: full of itsybitsy policies for this and that, irrelevant on the big picture, deeply evasive on Europe. They're also far too timid on the British equivalent of America's "cultural values" - crime and the other "quality of life" issues.
Secondly, assume for a moment that Bob Kerrey was right - that voters in Gallia County really were "terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions". Even if that's true, do you want the government to do anything about it? In many Continental countries, it's all but impossible to lose your job - which is why so many companies are reluctant to hire anyone and Germany's unemployment rate is twice that of America. And once healthcare and pensions are the province of the government, the basic relationship between the citizen and the state is altered. By 2040, Greece's government pension liabilities will be 25 per cent of GDP, as opposed to 6.8 per cent for America, which is quite colossal enough, thank you.
So even if I was "terrified" of losing my job, healthcare, pension, etc, I'd be reluctant to let the government relieve me of my terror. On the Continent, the mainstream parties of Tweedleleft and Tweedleright, having spent half a century ruling more and more issues beyond the subject of debate, can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth to the voters about the looming crisis.
They reckon that the masses have become too used to 35-hour work-weeks, two months of holiday, you leave college at 36, take early retirement at 47, etc, and that they won't take kindly to being told the jig's up. The Daily Mirror may think American voters are "DUMB", but I'll bet in the chancelleries of Europe there are plenty of officials who wish their own electors would occasionally disdain "pocketbook issues". Once you've turned citizens into junkies for government crack, it's very hard to wean them off it.
Thirdly, after listening to John Edwards's Dickensian tales of "two Americas" for months on end, I'm convinced that any red-state county knows more about business than your average Massachusetts senator, tenured Harvard professor or Boston Globe editor. When John Kerry gets his hair done at Cristophe's in Washington for somewhere north of $75, that high-priced stylist is an employee. If he'd ever stopped to have it done for $10 by DeeDee in a hair salon in a small town, he'd discover that she's a one-woman business.
When he goes to his favourite restaurant in Washington, the waiter's an employee. When he drops by a diner on Main Street in some nowhere burg to pretend to eat a hot dog for a photo op, the waitress might well be like the lady who served me lunch on Sunday: she has her own house-cleaning business, but does some part-time work at the local school and a couple of shifts at the diner for a bit of extra cash.
She's a small business, and she knows more about her tax return than Teresa Heinz Kerry knows about hers. Mrs Kerry farms it out to the best advisers money can buy, and they do a grand job: she's one of the richest women in the world and she paid 12 per cent tax last year. It makes no difference whether the tax rate is 20 per cent, 50 per cent or 88 per cent: the Kerrys of the world will still pay 12 per cent.
The American people don't want to be condescended to by ketchup heiresses, billionaire currency speculators, $20-million-a-picture Hollywood pretty boys, and multi-millionaire documentary-makers posing as bluecollar lardbutts.
The Democrats keep talking to people as if they're like John Edwards's 40-year mill-workers, but that's not what work is any more, and a 23-year-old hairdresser can know enough about starting and running a business to be unimpressed at a few footling tax credits dangled in front of her by a 60-year-old lifelong "public servant" lucky enough to be living a grand old life thanks to his billionaire wife's first husband.
Monday, November 08, 2004
From Conservative Punk:
France Shows Some Backbone
But did they ask the United Nations?
The Associated Press
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in its former West African colony, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners.
Ivory Coast produces 40% of the world's cocoa every year. NO BLOOD FOR DELICIOUS HOT BEVERAGES!
France Shows Some Backbone
But did they ask the United Nations?
The Associated Press
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in its former West African colony, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners.
Ivory Coast produces 40% of the world's cocoa every year. NO BLOOD FOR DELICIOUS HOT BEVERAGES!
From The San Francisco Chronicle:
The history of Philly Soul
- Reviewed by Joel Selvin
Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
A House on Fire
The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul
By John A. Jackson
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS; 338 PAGES; $35
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who sit silently at the center of "A House on Fire," were the songwriter-producer architects of the so-called Philadelphia sound -- a sleek, revolutionary semi-symphonic approach to rhythm and blues that broke through to a white, mainstream audience in early '70s records by groups such as the Spinners, the O'Jays, the Stylisticsand Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
The Sound of Philadelphia, as Gamble and Huff liked to call it, flourished from 1972 to 1975 on the duo's own Philadelphia International label and then vanished beneath the tidal wave of disco. With roots extending back to Philadelphia's rich doo-wop and "American Bandstand" scenes of the '50s, Gamble and Huff emerged as nouveau soul producers starting in 1968 on independent productions with Jerry Butler ("Only the Strong Survive"), Wilson Pickett ("Engine No. 9"), Dusty Springfield ("Brand New Me") and others, their string-laden, rather sophisticated rhythm charts distinguishing their productions from the prevalent Detroit and Memphis soul templates of the day.
John A. Jackson, who wrote previous exhaustive accounts of the careers of broadcasters Alan Freed and Dick Clark, assiduously chronicles the story arc of the songwriting-producing team, which was little known outside the music industry, in "A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul." Neither Gamble nor Huff would grant him interviews, but Jackson makes do splendidly with the accounts of people surrounding them, chief among those Thom Bell, the arranger and producer who represented the third pillar of the triumvirate of Philly soul.
The classically trained Bell borrowed the trademark falsetto lead vocal of Philadelphia doo-wop for glossy, celestial productions with the Stylistics, featuring the silken lead vocals of Russell Thompkins Jr. ("You Are Everything"), which paved the way for the arrangements he did with Gamble and Huff on Philadelphia International smashes and his own hit productions with the Spinners, the Delfonics, even Johnny Mathis and Elton John, who both sought out Bell for Philly soul makeovers.
As Jackson carefully details the emergence of the Philadelphia production style, almost record by record, and enumerates the previously largely anonymous contributions of various behind-the-scenes engineers, arrangers and musicians, an almost boring predictability sets in. After the first flush of their breakthrough collaborative success, kingpins Gamble and Huff grow increasingly remote from their creative associates, maintaining a disproportionate amount of the money for themselves and tightening control over the mushrooming enterprise. Frustrations and resentments emerge and the talent exodus begins, eventually leaving the pair scrambling for whatever pitiful morsels remain for them in the marketplace after the label's one surviving star -- Teddy Pendergrass, the former lead vocalist of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes -- is left paralyzed from a car crash.
Pianist Huff is portrayed as a strong, silent partner, most at home in the studio, while Gamble comes across as an enigmatic and often obtuse self- styled visionary. He scattered quasi-religious liner notes across the label's albums, always including his motto, "There's a message in the music," and eventually converted to Islam and changed his name to Luqman Abdul-Haqq, a transformation that happens outside the boundaries of Jackson's narrative.
Jackson carefully threads through his story the changing backdrop of soul music and society in general, but it's what's happening in Philadelphia that drives the account. He skillfully charts the growth of the Philadelphia music scene from the Cameo/Parkway days of Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Fabian and Chubby Checker (Gamble, Huff and Bell bought the downtown office building that once housed the Cameo and Parkway labels) and follows the movements of such supporting players in the drama as arranger-vibist Bobby Martin, Sigma Sound engineer Joe Tarsia, the tragic lyricist Linda Creed, R&B eccentric Bunny Sigler and a dozen others.
Like Motown Records before it, Gamble-Huff's Philadelphia International was a victim of its own excess. The disintegration of the creative team behind such records as "The Love I Lost," "Love Train," "Me and Mrs. Jones," "I'll Always Love My Mama" and another couple of dozen big hits may not be surprising, but Jackson tells a fascinating tale nonetheless. •
E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.
The history of Philly Soul
- Reviewed by Joel Selvin
Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
A House on Fire
The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul
By John A. Jackson
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS; 338 PAGES; $35
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who sit silently at the center of "A House on Fire," were the songwriter-producer architects of the so-called Philadelphia sound -- a sleek, revolutionary semi-symphonic approach to rhythm and blues that broke through to a white, mainstream audience in early '70s records by groups such as the Spinners, the O'Jays, the Stylisticsand Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
The Sound of Philadelphia, as Gamble and Huff liked to call it, flourished from 1972 to 1975 on the duo's own Philadelphia International label and then vanished beneath the tidal wave of disco. With roots extending back to Philadelphia's rich doo-wop and "American Bandstand" scenes of the '50s, Gamble and Huff emerged as nouveau soul producers starting in 1968 on independent productions with Jerry Butler ("Only the Strong Survive"), Wilson Pickett ("Engine No. 9"), Dusty Springfield ("Brand New Me") and others, their string-laden, rather sophisticated rhythm charts distinguishing their productions from the prevalent Detroit and Memphis soul templates of the day.
John A. Jackson, who wrote previous exhaustive accounts of the careers of broadcasters Alan Freed and Dick Clark, assiduously chronicles the story arc of the songwriting-producing team, which was little known outside the music industry, in "A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul." Neither Gamble nor Huff would grant him interviews, but Jackson makes do splendidly with the accounts of people surrounding them, chief among those Thom Bell, the arranger and producer who represented the third pillar of the triumvirate of Philly soul.
The classically trained Bell borrowed the trademark falsetto lead vocal of Philadelphia doo-wop for glossy, celestial productions with the Stylistics, featuring the silken lead vocals of Russell Thompkins Jr. ("You Are Everything"), which paved the way for the arrangements he did with Gamble and Huff on Philadelphia International smashes and his own hit productions with the Spinners, the Delfonics, even Johnny Mathis and Elton John, who both sought out Bell for Philly soul makeovers.
As Jackson carefully details the emergence of the Philadelphia production style, almost record by record, and enumerates the previously largely anonymous contributions of various behind-the-scenes engineers, arrangers and musicians, an almost boring predictability sets in. After the first flush of their breakthrough collaborative success, kingpins Gamble and Huff grow increasingly remote from their creative associates, maintaining a disproportionate amount of the money for themselves and tightening control over the mushrooming enterprise. Frustrations and resentments emerge and the talent exodus begins, eventually leaving the pair scrambling for whatever pitiful morsels remain for them in the marketplace after the label's one surviving star -- Teddy Pendergrass, the former lead vocalist of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes -- is left paralyzed from a car crash.
Pianist Huff is portrayed as a strong, silent partner, most at home in the studio, while Gamble comes across as an enigmatic and often obtuse self- styled visionary. He scattered quasi-religious liner notes across the label's albums, always including his motto, "There's a message in the music," and eventually converted to Islam and changed his name to Luqman Abdul-Haqq, a transformation that happens outside the boundaries of Jackson's narrative.
Jackson carefully threads through his story the changing backdrop of soul music and society in general, but it's what's happening in Philadelphia that drives the account. He skillfully charts the growth of the Philadelphia music scene from the Cameo/Parkway days of Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Fabian and Chubby Checker (Gamble, Huff and Bell bought the downtown office building that once housed the Cameo and Parkway labels) and follows the movements of such supporting players in the drama as arranger-vibist Bobby Martin, Sigma Sound engineer Joe Tarsia, the tragic lyricist Linda Creed, R&B eccentric Bunny Sigler and a dozen others.
Like Motown Records before it, Gamble-Huff's Philadelphia International was a victim of its own excess. The disintegration of the creative team behind such records as "The Love I Lost," "Love Train," "Me and Mrs. Jones," "I'll Always Love My Mama" and another couple of dozen big hits may not be surprising, but Jackson tells a fascinating tale nonetheless. •
E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.
From The Manchester NH Union Leader:
How Michael Moore got Bush elected
By Jay Ambrose
GEORGE W. BUSH received more votes in Tuesday’s election than any Presidential contender in the history of the United States, and I would like to believe Michael Moore was partly responsible.
Here, after all, was not simply a film director whose “Fahrenheit 9/11” emitted a vile propagandistic stink, indicating something contemptible in the mindset of its creator, but someone who went trotting about Europe telling the adulatory press that Americans “are possibly the dumbest people on the planet.”
While some Europeans may still be slapping their thighs at such cleverness, it should not be surprising that some Americans may have taken offense. They may have figured, for starters, that they have the mental edge over someone whose anti-Bush film neglected to distinguish facts from malicious fantasy, but there is a much bigger point.
It is that literally millions of the hard-working, responsible, decent citizens of this nation just may have had it up to their eyebrows with those Hollywood types and others who disdain their intelligence, mock their religion, dismiss their values, deprecate their lifestyles and disparage their social contributions.
These citizens may suppose their lives add up to at least as much as the lives of celebrities taking time from their divorce schedules to issue morally superior pronouncements about issues they don’t understand.
They may further suppose they have a better grasp of everyday political truths than the ultra-privileged who don’t have to deal with such problems as how to pay their monthly bills when unexpected expenses leap out of nowhere and grab their wallets.
Yes, yes, celebrities have every right in the world to be active in politics, and even should be: Leave politics to the politicians and democracy will race from the room. And no, no, not every celebrity can be squeezed into some narrowly conceived stereotype; many are thoughtful, respectful and humble, I would guess, and I would also guess that many are as far from debauched as the average denizen of small-town America.
What I would like to stress is that a certain belittling, Hollywood-fostered stereotype of small-town, rural and suburban Americans — and especially the stereotype of religious Southern and Midwestern Americans of a conservative disposition — is itself an absurdity overlooking the strength they lend this country.
These Americans are a mix of many things, of course, and I don’t want to replace one stereotype of small-mindedness and dim-witted intolerance with another that overreaches and is too sweeping; any large grouping will include some number of the stupid and the morally careless, even the downright criminal, along with the brilliant and morally upright, even the downright saintly.
It seems to me, however, a safe, supportable generalization to say that these Americans mainly do a good job of raising their children, that they are mostly productive in their jobs, that they are by and large generous in their giving to charity, that their word is reliable and that they are more often than not kind to those they encounter.
I take particular umbrage at the caricature some paint of the religious. When you listen to someone like the TV comedian Bill Maher ridicule Christianity, for instance, you wonder whether he has any notion at all of tenets residing at the heart of the faith: that we can experience forgiveness if we ourselves first forgive, that we can find redemption even when our lives are in tatters, that nothing less is demanded of us in our dealings with others than sacrificial love. This is the stuff of satire?
Another proposition of the faith is that confession is good for the soul, and I have to confess that I am not in a very forgiving mood. It delights me to suppose that Bush-despising Hollywood lefties may actually have aided his cause in their excessive rhetoric (check out actor Richard Dreyfus’s speeches someday) or their middle class-alienating vulgarities (see comedienne Whoopi Goldberg’s jokes about the President).
I get special joy — I must get over this — in contemplating the hell Michael Moore might go through if he dwelled on the possibility that he contributed to the Bush victory by so unmistakably signaling his elitist attitudes.
Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers and can be reached at AmbroseJ@shns.com
How Michael Moore got Bush elected
By Jay Ambrose
GEORGE W. BUSH received more votes in Tuesday’s election than any Presidential contender in the history of the United States, and I would like to believe Michael Moore was partly responsible.
Here, after all, was not simply a film director whose “Fahrenheit 9/11” emitted a vile propagandistic stink, indicating something contemptible in the mindset of its creator, but someone who went trotting about Europe telling the adulatory press that Americans “are possibly the dumbest people on the planet.”
While some Europeans may still be slapping their thighs at such cleverness, it should not be surprising that some Americans may have taken offense. They may have figured, for starters, that they have the mental edge over someone whose anti-Bush film neglected to distinguish facts from malicious fantasy, but there is a much bigger point.
It is that literally millions of the hard-working, responsible, decent citizens of this nation just may have had it up to their eyebrows with those Hollywood types and others who disdain their intelligence, mock their religion, dismiss their values, deprecate their lifestyles and disparage their social contributions.
These citizens may suppose their lives add up to at least as much as the lives of celebrities taking time from their divorce schedules to issue morally superior pronouncements about issues they don’t understand.
They may further suppose they have a better grasp of everyday political truths than the ultra-privileged who don’t have to deal with such problems as how to pay their monthly bills when unexpected expenses leap out of nowhere and grab their wallets.
Yes, yes, celebrities have every right in the world to be active in politics, and even should be: Leave politics to the politicians and democracy will race from the room. And no, no, not every celebrity can be squeezed into some narrowly conceived stereotype; many are thoughtful, respectful and humble, I would guess, and I would also guess that many are as far from debauched as the average denizen of small-town America.
What I would like to stress is that a certain belittling, Hollywood-fostered stereotype of small-town, rural and suburban Americans — and especially the stereotype of religious Southern and Midwestern Americans of a conservative disposition — is itself an absurdity overlooking the strength they lend this country.
These Americans are a mix of many things, of course, and I don’t want to replace one stereotype of small-mindedness and dim-witted intolerance with another that overreaches and is too sweeping; any large grouping will include some number of the stupid and the morally careless, even the downright criminal, along with the brilliant and morally upright, even the downright saintly.
It seems to me, however, a safe, supportable generalization to say that these Americans mainly do a good job of raising their children, that they are mostly productive in their jobs, that they are by and large generous in their giving to charity, that their word is reliable and that they are more often than not kind to those they encounter.
I take particular umbrage at the caricature some paint of the religious. When you listen to someone like the TV comedian Bill Maher ridicule Christianity, for instance, you wonder whether he has any notion at all of tenets residing at the heart of the faith: that we can experience forgiveness if we ourselves first forgive, that we can find redemption even when our lives are in tatters, that nothing less is demanded of us in our dealings with others than sacrificial love. This is the stuff of satire?
Another proposition of the faith is that confession is good for the soul, and I have to confess that I am not in a very forgiving mood. It delights me to suppose that Bush-despising Hollywood lefties may actually have aided his cause in their excessive rhetoric (check out actor Richard Dreyfus’s speeches someday) or their middle class-alienating vulgarities (see comedienne Whoopi Goldberg’s jokes about the President).
I get special joy — I must get over this — in contemplating the hell Michael Moore might go through if he dwelled on the possibility that he contributed to the Bush victory by so unmistakably signaling his elitist attitudes.
Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers and can be reached at AmbroseJ@shns.com
From The Pittsburgh Pst-Gazette:
Confessions of a 'moral issues' voter
I am no Republican, but I had to go with Bush this time
By Eric Miller
I am a white Protestant American male, who lives in and is native to Western Pennsylvania. I belong to an evangelical, Presbyterian church. I have a Ph.D. in American history. I am a husband and father of three. And I write this, on a rainy post-election Thursday, to try, as one bewildered aide to John Kerry put it on election night, to "connect" with any Democrats who may still be listening.
I voted for George W. Bush on Tuesday. As I left the house with my 9-year-old son that afternoon, I told my wife that I was about to cast the "sorriest vote of my life." I am not a Republican; I did not vote Republican in the last presidential election. Twenty years ago as a college freshman, I traipsed across a cornfield to a little elementary school and scored one tiny but ardent vote for the Gipper. But that was a long time ago, believe me. The decision-making two decades later was tedious and tortured right to the end. I knew full well, as I was driving down the hill to vote, that I had no confidence in the ability of the GOP to, in that enduring phrase, "get America going again."
While the young African-American woman working the table at the polling place joked around with my son, I knew that I was about to vote for a party that, whatever its rhetoric, has not distinguished itself on many of the concerns she and her family likely have. I did not enter (or exit) the booth smiling.
The next day the mood was low at the college where I teach, at least among the faculty; many were Kerry supporters, and, more to the point, Bush despisers. As we soaked in the day together, it hit me hard that I, like them, would have preferred (if often not by much) to see a Kerry administration taking the lead on many pivotal issues: race relations, the economy, environmental policy, the deficit, the war, health care, Iraq.
But I could not vote for your side, not this time. And that makes me, in what passes for political parlance in our country, a "moral values" voter, one of the stealth evangelicals who came out of nowhere to turn the election upside down.
A phalanx of strategists, pollsters, social scientists and politicians will be trying to figure out people like me between now and 2008. But it might accomplish just as much if you'll allow me a moment to speak not as an object of "analysis" but as a fellow citizen, maybe even a neighbor.
If you will kindly listen, perhaps my testimony will be of some use.
I believe that all of life finds its source in the divine, and is sustained by the grace of a God who finds pleasure in our guarding and nurturing of this world, his world. He has filled the Earth with gifts beyond our capacity to imagine, gifts that merit our joyous, careful gratitude. Among these gifts are our very lives, and with them our individual and collective ability to respond freely to him and his world. We, his creatures, are free to make choices. But not all of our choices are equal; neither, within the structures of reality, may all choices be sanctioned, let alone celebrated.
Herein lies the heart of my quarrel with the Democratic Party. In the vast arena symbolized by the single word "abortion," your party is not only permitting a category of choice that humans must not sanction, it is intent on enlarging that sphere to permit a kind of experimentation that will only further diminish our experience of being human. To be complicit in such conduct is not just to despise the gifts of the creator. It is to despise him.
"Abortion" and its accompanying cluster of concerns, to put it differently, are not "issues" to me. They are practices, practices whose effects are far from "private." As public and social acts that have to do with the treatment and definition of human life in its most elemental, unprotected forms, they demand the most careful evaluation and judgment of the body politic in whose midst they are taking place.
Such moral and philosophic deliberation lies at the heart of democracy, and of democratic freedom itself, as I understand it. But the Democratic Party has committed itself to stifling any form of deliberation on these matters. We Pennsylvanians know this better than some. When the party rigidly denied our pro-life Democratic governor Robert Casey the opportunity to address these concerns at its 1992 convention, it shut down the very conversation that might have retained many old friends and brought new ones into your midst, including people like me.
You may of course find the perspective I've limned to be beyond embrace. I am no "progressive," to be sure. I do not believe that in the big scheme of things one of the two parties represents the "good guys" and the other the "bad guys." The world is what it is: ever in need of justice and the incarnation of goodness. You, Democrats, have much to offer in helping us to pursue these high ends. You would have much more to offer, I believe, if you took a few steps this way.
Eric Miller is an assistant professor of American history at Geneva College, where he also directs the Humanities program (ejm4place@aol.com).
Confessions of a 'moral issues' voter
I am no Republican, but I had to go with Bush this time
By Eric Miller
I am a white Protestant American male, who lives in and is native to Western Pennsylvania. I belong to an evangelical, Presbyterian church. I have a Ph.D. in American history. I am a husband and father of three. And I write this, on a rainy post-election Thursday, to try, as one bewildered aide to John Kerry put it on election night, to "connect" with any Democrats who may still be listening.
I voted for George W. Bush on Tuesday. As I left the house with my 9-year-old son that afternoon, I told my wife that I was about to cast the "sorriest vote of my life." I am not a Republican; I did not vote Republican in the last presidential election. Twenty years ago as a college freshman, I traipsed across a cornfield to a little elementary school and scored one tiny but ardent vote for the Gipper. But that was a long time ago, believe me. The decision-making two decades later was tedious and tortured right to the end. I knew full well, as I was driving down the hill to vote, that I had no confidence in the ability of the GOP to, in that enduring phrase, "get America going again."
While the young African-American woman working the table at the polling place joked around with my son, I knew that I was about to vote for a party that, whatever its rhetoric, has not distinguished itself on many of the concerns she and her family likely have. I did not enter (or exit) the booth smiling.
The next day the mood was low at the college where I teach, at least among the faculty; many were Kerry supporters, and, more to the point, Bush despisers. As we soaked in the day together, it hit me hard that I, like them, would have preferred (if often not by much) to see a Kerry administration taking the lead on many pivotal issues: race relations, the economy, environmental policy, the deficit, the war, health care, Iraq.
But I could not vote for your side, not this time. And that makes me, in what passes for political parlance in our country, a "moral values" voter, one of the stealth evangelicals who came out of nowhere to turn the election upside down.
A phalanx of strategists, pollsters, social scientists and politicians will be trying to figure out people like me between now and 2008. But it might accomplish just as much if you'll allow me a moment to speak not as an object of "analysis" but as a fellow citizen, maybe even a neighbor.
If you will kindly listen, perhaps my testimony will be of some use.
I believe that all of life finds its source in the divine, and is sustained by the grace of a God who finds pleasure in our guarding and nurturing of this world, his world. He has filled the Earth with gifts beyond our capacity to imagine, gifts that merit our joyous, careful gratitude. Among these gifts are our very lives, and with them our individual and collective ability to respond freely to him and his world. We, his creatures, are free to make choices. But not all of our choices are equal; neither, within the structures of reality, may all choices be sanctioned, let alone celebrated.
Herein lies the heart of my quarrel with the Democratic Party. In the vast arena symbolized by the single word "abortion," your party is not only permitting a category of choice that humans must not sanction, it is intent on enlarging that sphere to permit a kind of experimentation that will only further diminish our experience of being human. To be complicit in such conduct is not just to despise the gifts of the creator. It is to despise him.
"Abortion" and its accompanying cluster of concerns, to put it differently, are not "issues" to me. They are practices, practices whose effects are far from "private." As public and social acts that have to do with the treatment and definition of human life in its most elemental, unprotected forms, they demand the most careful evaluation and judgment of the body politic in whose midst they are taking place.
Such moral and philosophic deliberation lies at the heart of democracy, and of democratic freedom itself, as I understand it. But the Democratic Party has committed itself to stifling any form of deliberation on these matters. We Pennsylvanians know this better than some. When the party rigidly denied our pro-life Democratic governor Robert Casey the opportunity to address these concerns at its 1992 convention, it shut down the very conversation that might have retained many old friends and brought new ones into your midst, including people like me.
You may of course find the perspective I've limned to be beyond embrace. I am no "progressive," to be sure. I do not believe that in the big scheme of things one of the two parties represents the "good guys" and the other the "bad guys." The world is what it is: ever in need of justice and the incarnation of goodness. You, Democrats, have much to offer in helping us to pursue these high ends. You would have much more to offer, I believe, if you took a few steps this way.
Eric Miller is an assistant professor of American history at Geneva College, where he also directs the Humanities program (ejm4place@aol.com).
Now if we can just start getting some of the reaction described below in the United States,
Van Gogh Murder Backlash Begins
By Murdo MacLeod
scotsman.com
IT PRIDES itself on being the beating liberal heart of Europe, but the murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh has convinced many in the Netherlands that the nation’s legendary tolerance has now reached its limit.
Van Gogh’s execution last Tuesday, which has been linked to Islamic extremists, has brought calls for a crackdown on fundamentalists and renegade preachers that would previously have been unthinkable.
Once liberal commentators now want Muslim hardliners to be thrown out of the country, even if they have Dutch passports, and greater surveillance of the wider Islamic community.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest Muslim populations in Western Europe is fearful of being tarred with the extremist brush by a nation which increasingly feels it is being taken advantage of.
Van Gogh, who had made a controversial film about Islamic culture, was shot and stabbed in Amsterdam as he cycled to work. A five-page letter addressed to a female Somali immigrant who scripted the controversial film that Van Gogh directed before she entered national politics, was pinned to his body with a knife.
A Dutch-Moroccan has been charged over the incident, and also with membership of a group with "terrorist intentions and conspiracy to murder a politician".
The 26-year-old accused, identified by Dutch media as Mohammed B, was also charged with attempting to kill a policeman and a bystander.
The killing has revived memories of the shocking murder of anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn by an animal rights activist in 2002.
Prior to his death, Fortuyn’s views had been condemned by the liberal media. But the slaying of Van Gogh has had a cathartic effect in a country where racial tension and hostility towards foreigners is on the rise.
The leading liberal Amsterdam broadsheet, The Telegraaf, has led the charge with a hard-hitting editorial that would never previously have been published.
"There needs to be a very public crackdown on extremist Muslim fanatics in order to assuage the fear of citizens and to warn the fanatics that they must not cross over the boundaries," the newspaper said.
"International cash transfers must be more tightly controlled; magazines and papers which include incitement should be suppressed; unsuitable mosques should be shut down and imams who encourage illegal acts should be thrown out of the country.
"This should also apply to extremists who have dual nationality. They have no business here. In addition, the range of extremists to be kept under surveillance needs to be expanded. If more money is required for all this, then that money must be made available. It is more than worth it for the sake of the citizens’ safety."
Volkskrant, published in The Hague, declared that while Muslims might be infuriated by Van Gogh’s film, they should have taken the film-maker to court rather than engaging in acts of violence.
It said: "Muslims will have to learn that, in a democracy, religion, too, is open to criticism - this applies to Islam no less than to Christianity. Theo van Gogh, in this respect, always purposefully went to the limits of decency.
"Many have regularly had reason to feel hurt or offended by him. In a democracy, those who want to defend themselves against this can go to court. Any other curtailment of free speech is inadmissible."
The daily Algemeen Dagblad challenged the nation’s Muslims to take to the streets to condemn the killing and "cleanse" themselves as a community in the wake of the murder.
It said: "The has to be the time when voices from the Muslim community must say a massive ‘no’ to this kind of madness. A mass protest made by Dutch Muslims could be the symbolic beginning of a needed cleansing within the self."
The rising tension in the Netherlands has led increasingly to calls from white Dutch people for Muslims either to accept Western ways or leave the country.
Prior to the killing, a poll found that a third of Dutch people felt threatened by Islam in their midst.
Barry Madlener, a councillor in Rotterdam, where half the population is foreign-born - many from Muslim countries - said: "If you say: ‘I reject the Western lifestyle and I don’t want to fit in your way,’ then I say: ‘Keep away.’
"When the children of these people cannot fit into our society, then the problems will grow."
The murder has made allies of both freewheeling liberals and traditional church-goers who normally condemn the nation’s drug culture and sexual licence.
Justice minister Piet Hein Donner, regarded as a stern Calvinist with little in common with the ultra-permissive outlook personified by Van Gogh said: "If this is what has happened to this man, who did nothing but express his opinion, then one can no longer live decently in this land."
A backlash has begun. In the central town of Utrecht, several fires broke out on Thursday at a new mosque belonging to a Moroccan religious association. A police spokeswoman said no evidence had been found of fire-raising but this was still under investigation.
The Dutch cabinet, meanwhile, has made it clear it is considering new ways to tackle Muslim extremists, including stripping criminals with dual citizenship of their Dutch nationality, increasing police powers and boosting the budget of the security service.
Gerrit Zalm, the deputy prime minister, says the cabinet also considered taking action against a mosque in Amsterdam regularly attended by Mohammed B.
Van Gogh, whose great-great-grandfather was the brother of artist Vincent van Gogh, has been described as the Netherlands’ Michael Moore.
The film, Submission, may have been only 10 minutes long, but it caused uproar in the country when it was broadcast at the end of August.
The outcry centred on the stories of four Muslim women who were beaten, raped and forced into marriage, and were asking for Allah’s help.
On their bodies were written verses from the Qu’ran describing the permitted physical punishments for women who "misbehave".
Van Gogh claimed that he had been deliberately cautious, and would have made the film differently if he really had wanted to shock.
Nevertheless, death threats were soon received.
In a recent interview, Van Gogh was asked how he felt about the threats. Laughing, he replied that no one would believe it worth their while to shoot at the "village idiot".
As all of the Netherlands now knows, Van Gogh got that one badly wrong.
Van Gogh Murder Backlash Begins
By Murdo MacLeod
scotsman.com
IT PRIDES itself on being the beating liberal heart of Europe, but the murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh has convinced many in the Netherlands that the nation’s legendary tolerance has now reached its limit.
Van Gogh’s execution last Tuesday, which has been linked to Islamic extremists, has brought calls for a crackdown on fundamentalists and renegade preachers that would previously have been unthinkable.
Once liberal commentators now want Muslim hardliners to be thrown out of the country, even if they have Dutch passports, and greater surveillance of the wider Islamic community.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest Muslim populations in Western Europe is fearful of being tarred with the extremist brush by a nation which increasingly feels it is being taken advantage of.
Van Gogh, who had made a controversial film about Islamic culture, was shot and stabbed in Amsterdam as he cycled to work. A five-page letter addressed to a female Somali immigrant who scripted the controversial film that Van Gogh directed before she entered national politics, was pinned to his body with a knife.
A Dutch-Moroccan has been charged over the incident, and also with membership of a group with "terrorist intentions and conspiracy to murder a politician".
The 26-year-old accused, identified by Dutch media as Mohammed B, was also charged with attempting to kill a policeman and a bystander.
The killing has revived memories of the shocking murder of anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn by an animal rights activist in 2002.
Prior to his death, Fortuyn’s views had been condemned by the liberal media. But the slaying of Van Gogh has had a cathartic effect in a country where racial tension and hostility towards foreigners is on the rise.
The leading liberal Amsterdam broadsheet, The Telegraaf, has led the charge with a hard-hitting editorial that would never previously have been published.
"There needs to be a very public crackdown on extremist Muslim fanatics in order to assuage the fear of citizens and to warn the fanatics that they must not cross over the boundaries," the newspaper said.
"International cash transfers must be more tightly controlled; magazines and papers which include incitement should be suppressed; unsuitable mosques should be shut down and imams who encourage illegal acts should be thrown out of the country.
"This should also apply to extremists who have dual nationality. They have no business here. In addition, the range of extremists to be kept under surveillance needs to be expanded. If more money is required for all this, then that money must be made available. It is more than worth it for the sake of the citizens’ safety."
Volkskrant, published in The Hague, declared that while Muslims might be infuriated by Van Gogh’s film, they should have taken the film-maker to court rather than engaging in acts of violence.
It said: "Muslims will have to learn that, in a democracy, religion, too, is open to criticism - this applies to Islam no less than to Christianity. Theo van Gogh, in this respect, always purposefully went to the limits of decency.
"Many have regularly had reason to feel hurt or offended by him. In a democracy, those who want to defend themselves against this can go to court. Any other curtailment of free speech is inadmissible."
The daily Algemeen Dagblad challenged the nation’s Muslims to take to the streets to condemn the killing and "cleanse" themselves as a community in the wake of the murder.
It said: "The has to be the time when voices from the Muslim community must say a massive ‘no’ to this kind of madness. A mass protest made by Dutch Muslims could be the symbolic beginning of a needed cleansing within the self."
The rising tension in the Netherlands has led increasingly to calls from white Dutch people for Muslims either to accept Western ways or leave the country.
Prior to the killing, a poll found that a third of Dutch people felt threatened by Islam in their midst.
Barry Madlener, a councillor in Rotterdam, where half the population is foreign-born - many from Muslim countries - said: "If you say: ‘I reject the Western lifestyle and I don’t want to fit in your way,’ then I say: ‘Keep away.’
"When the children of these people cannot fit into our society, then the problems will grow."
The murder has made allies of both freewheeling liberals and traditional church-goers who normally condemn the nation’s drug culture and sexual licence.
Justice minister Piet Hein Donner, regarded as a stern Calvinist with little in common with the ultra-permissive outlook personified by Van Gogh said: "If this is what has happened to this man, who did nothing but express his opinion, then one can no longer live decently in this land."
A backlash has begun. In the central town of Utrecht, several fires broke out on Thursday at a new mosque belonging to a Moroccan religious association. A police spokeswoman said no evidence had been found of fire-raising but this was still under investigation.
The Dutch cabinet, meanwhile, has made it clear it is considering new ways to tackle Muslim extremists, including stripping criminals with dual citizenship of their Dutch nationality, increasing police powers and boosting the budget of the security service.
Gerrit Zalm, the deputy prime minister, says the cabinet also considered taking action against a mosque in Amsterdam regularly attended by Mohammed B.
Van Gogh, whose great-great-grandfather was the brother of artist Vincent van Gogh, has been described as the Netherlands’ Michael Moore.
The film, Submission, may have been only 10 minutes long, but it caused uproar in the country when it was broadcast at the end of August.
The outcry centred on the stories of four Muslim women who were beaten, raped and forced into marriage, and were asking for Allah’s help.
On their bodies were written verses from the Qu’ran describing the permitted physical punishments for women who "misbehave".
Van Gogh claimed that he had been deliberately cautious, and would have made the film differently if he really had wanted to shock.
Nevertheless, death threats were soon received.
In a recent interview, Van Gogh was asked how he felt about the threats. Laughing, he replied that no one would believe it worth their while to shoot at the "village idiot".
As all of the Netherlands now knows, Van Gogh got that one badly wrong.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Steyn Again: From The UK Telegraph
Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush
By Mark Steyn
The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."
Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.
In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up with.
Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there seem to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James, who told The Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?' "
Mr James is a clinical psychologist.
If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers indefinitely, they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing mornings-after in the 2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election, 2010, and beyond: America's resistance to the conventional wisdom of the rest of the developed world is likely to intensify in the years ahead. This widening gap is already a point of pride to the likes of B J Kelly of Killiney, who made the following observation on Friday's letters page in The Irish Times: "Here in the EU we objected recently to high office for a man who professed the belief that abortion and gay marriages are essentially evil. Over in the US such an outlook could have won him the presidency."
I'm not sure who he means by "we". As with most decisions taken in the corridors of Europower, the views of Killiney and Knokke and Krakow didn't come into it one way or the other. B J Kelly is referring to Rocco Buttiglione, the mooted European commissioner whose views on homosexuality, single parenthood, etc would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic 30 years ago. Now Europe's secular elite has decided they're beyond the pale and such a man should have no place in public life. And B J Kelly sees this as evidence of how much more enlightened Europe is than America.
That's fine. But what happens if the European elite should decide a whole lot of other stuff is beyond the pale, too, some of it that B J Kelly is quite partial to? In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate.
As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James's mum.
The restrictions on expression that B J Kelly sees as evidence of European enlightenment are regarded as profoundly unhealthy by most Americans. When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.
And, if Americans do "hate abortion", is Mr Reade saying he loves it? It's at least partially responsible for the collapsed birthrates of post-Christian Europe. However superior the EU is to the US, it will only last as long as Mr Reade's generation: the design flaw of the radical secular welfare state is that it depends on a traditionally religious society birthrate to sustain it. True, you can't be a redneck in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per couple, there are no sisters to shag.
What was revealing about this election campaign was how little the condescending Europeans understand even about the side in American politics they purport to agree with - witness The Guardian's disastrous intervention in Clark County. Simon Schama last week week defined the Bush/Kerry divide as "Godly America" and "Worldly America", hailing the latter as "pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical". That's exactly the wrong way round: it's Godly America that is rational and sceptical - especially of Euro-delusions. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshrivelled in its birthrates, Bush's redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet. Europe's media would do their readers a service if they stopped condescending to it.
Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush
By Mark Steyn
The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."
Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.
In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up with.
Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there seem to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James, who told The Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?' "
Mr James is a clinical psychologist.
If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers indefinitely, they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing mornings-after in the 2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election, 2010, and beyond: America's resistance to the conventional wisdom of the rest of the developed world is likely to intensify in the years ahead. This widening gap is already a point of pride to the likes of B J Kelly of Killiney, who made the following observation on Friday's letters page in The Irish Times: "Here in the EU we objected recently to high office for a man who professed the belief that abortion and gay marriages are essentially evil. Over in the US such an outlook could have won him the presidency."
I'm not sure who he means by "we". As with most decisions taken in the corridors of Europower, the views of Killiney and Knokke and Krakow didn't come into it one way or the other. B J Kelly is referring to Rocco Buttiglione, the mooted European commissioner whose views on homosexuality, single parenthood, etc would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic 30 years ago. Now Europe's secular elite has decided they're beyond the pale and such a man should have no place in public life. And B J Kelly sees this as evidence of how much more enlightened Europe is than America.
That's fine. But what happens if the European elite should decide a whole lot of other stuff is beyond the pale, too, some of it that B J Kelly is quite partial to? In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate.
As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James's mum.
The restrictions on expression that B J Kelly sees as evidence of European enlightenment are regarded as profoundly unhealthy by most Americans. When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.
And, if Americans do "hate abortion", is Mr Reade saying he loves it? It's at least partially responsible for the collapsed birthrates of post-Christian Europe. However superior the EU is to the US, it will only last as long as Mr Reade's generation: the design flaw of the radical secular welfare state is that it depends on a traditionally religious society birthrate to sustain it. True, you can't be a redneck in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per couple, there are no sisters to shag.
What was revealing about this election campaign was how little the condescending Europeans understand even about the side in American politics they purport to agree with - witness The Guardian's disastrous intervention in Clark County. Simon Schama last week week defined the Bush/Kerry divide as "Godly America" and "Worldly America", hailing the latter as "pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical". That's exactly the wrong way round: it's Godly America that is rational and sceptical - especially of Euro-delusions. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshrivelled in its birthrates, Bush's redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet. Europe's media would do their readers a service if they stopped condescending to it.
The first of another prime Steyn doubleheader:
Condescending Dems still don't get it
By Mark Steyn
Mustn't gloat, mustn't gloat. Instead, we must try and look sober and reflective and then step smartly to the side and let the Democrats tear themselves apart.
I'm reluctant to intrude on family grief, especially as the Dems are doing such a sterling job all by themselves. But, when big shot Democrats look at Tuesday's results and instantly announce the reason they flopped out was because . . .
Whoa, hang on a minute, my apologies. There's been a clerical error here: That was my post-election column from 2002. My post-election column from 2004 goes like . . . well, actually, it goes pretty much the same. It'd be easier just to take the second week in November off every two years and let my editors run the timeless classic whither-the-Democrats? column. All that changes is the local color. In 2002, I was very taken by the band at Missouri Democratic headquarters attempting to rouse the despondent faithful with Steve Allen's peppy anthem, "This Could Be the Start of Something Big,'' and noted that the party faced the opposite problem: This could be the end of something small.
As they've done for a decade now, the Democrat bigwigs worried about it for a couple of weeks and then rationalized it away: In 2000 they lost because Bush stole the "election"; in 2002 they lost because of that "vicious" attack ad on Max Cleland. The official consolation for this year's biennial bust hasn't yet been decided on, but Tom Daschle's election-eve lawsuit alone offers several attractive runners, including the complaint that Democrats were intimidated by Republicans ''rolling their eyes.'' Could be a lot more of that if this keeps up.
So it seems likely -- just to get my 2006 post-election column out of the way here -- that in a couple years' time the Democrats will have run on the same thin gruel as usual and be mourning the loss of another two or three Senate seats. You want names and states? Well, how about West Virginia? Will the 88-year old Robert C. Byrd be on the ballot in 2006? And, if he's not, what are the Dems' chances of stopping West Virginia's transformation to permanent "red state" status?
It also seems likely -- just to get my 2012 post-election column out of the way here -- that in eight years' time the Dems will have run on the same thin gruel as usual and, thanks to the 2010 census and the ongoing shift of population to the South and West, lost another five House seats and discovered that the "blue states" are worth even less in the Electoral College -- though in fairness their only available presidential candidate, the young dynamic Southerner 94-year-old Robert C. Byrd, managed to hold all but three of Kerry's states.
I had a bet with myself this week: How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was. Or as London's Daily Mirror put it in its front page: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"
Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."
Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.
More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and a lot of their friends just did: The Kerry campaign and its supporters -- MoveOn.org, Rock The Vote, etc. -- were awash in bazillions of dollars, and what have they got to show for it? In this election, the plebs were more mature than the elites: They understood that war is never cost-free and that you don't run away because of a couple of setbacks; they did not accept that one jailhouse scandal should determine America's national security interest; they rejected the childish caricature of their president and paranoid ravings about Halliburton; they declined to have their vote rocked by Bruce Springsteen or any other pop culture poser.
All the above is unworthy of a serious political party. As for this exit-poll data that everyone's all excited about, what does it mean when 22 percent of the electorate say their main concern was "moral issues"? Gay marriage? Abortion? Or is it something broader? For many of us, the war is also a moral issue, and the Democrats are on the wrong side of it, standing not with the women voting proudly in Afghanistan's first election but with the amoral and corrupt U.N., the amoral and cynical Jacques Chirac, the amoral and revolting head-hackers whom Democratic Convention guest of honor Michael Moore described as Iraq's ''minutemen.''
At some point in both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, your typical media liberal would feign evenhandedness and bemoan the way the choice has come down to "two weak candidates.''
But, in that case, how come the right's weak candidates are the ones that win? Because a weak candidate pushing strong ideas is better than a weak candidate who's had no ideas since Roe vs. Wade.
Condescending Dems still don't get it
By Mark Steyn
Mustn't gloat, mustn't gloat. Instead, we must try and look sober and reflective and then step smartly to the side and let the Democrats tear themselves apart.
I'm reluctant to intrude on family grief, especially as the Dems are doing such a sterling job all by themselves. But, when big shot Democrats look at Tuesday's results and instantly announce the reason they flopped out was because . . .
Whoa, hang on a minute, my apologies. There's been a clerical error here: That was my post-election column from 2002. My post-election column from 2004 goes like . . . well, actually, it goes pretty much the same. It'd be easier just to take the second week in November off every two years and let my editors run the timeless classic whither-the-Democrats? column. All that changes is the local color. In 2002, I was very taken by the band at Missouri Democratic headquarters attempting to rouse the despondent faithful with Steve Allen's peppy anthem, "This Could Be the Start of Something Big,'' and noted that the party faced the opposite problem: This could be the end of something small.
As they've done for a decade now, the Democrat bigwigs worried about it for a couple of weeks and then rationalized it away: In 2000 they lost because Bush stole the "election"; in 2002 they lost because of that "vicious" attack ad on Max Cleland. The official consolation for this year's biennial bust hasn't yet been decided on, but Tom Daschle's election-eve lawsuit alone offers several attractive runners, including the complaint that Democrats were intimidated by Republicans ''rolling their eyes.'' Could be a lot more of that if this keeps up.
So it seems likely -- just to get my 2006 post-election column out of the way here -- that in a couple years' time the Democrats will have run on the same thin gruel as usual and be mourning the loss of another two or three Senate seats. You want names and states? Well, how about West Virginia? Will the 88-year old Robert C. Byrd be on the ballot in 2006? And, if he's not, what are the Dems' chances of stopping West Virginia's transformation to permanent "red state" status?
It also seems likely -- just to get my 2012 post-election column out of the way here -- that in eight years' time the Dems will have run on the same thin gruel as usual and, thanks to the 2010 census and the ongoing shift of population to the South and West, lost another five House seats and discovered that the "blue states" are worth even less in the Electoral College -- though in fairness their only available presidential candidate, the young dynamic Southerner 94-year-old Robert C. Byrd, managed to hold all but three of Kerry's states.
I had a bet with myself this week: How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was. Or as London's Daily Mirror put it in its front page: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"
Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."
Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.
More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and a lot of their friends just did: The Kerry campaign and its supporters -- MoveOn.org, Rock The Vote, etc. -- were awash in bazillions of dollars, and what have they got to show for it? In this election, the plebs were more mature than the elites: They understood that war is never cost-free and that you don't run away because of a couple of setbacks; they did not accept that one jailhouse scandal should determine America's national security interest; they rejected the childish caricature of their president and paranoid ravings about Halliburton; they declined to have their vote rocked by Bruce Springsteen or any other pop culture poser.
All the above is unworthy of a serious political party. As for this exit-poll data that everyone's all excited about, what does it mean when 22 percent of the electorate say their main concern was "moral issues"? Gay marriage? Abortion? Or is it something broader? For many of us, the war is also a moral issue, and the Democrats are on the wrong side of it, standing not with the women voting proudly in Afghanistan's first election but with the amoral and corrupt U.N., the amoral and cynical Jacques Chirac, the amoral and revolting head-hackers whom Democratic Convention guest of honor Michael Moore described as Iraq's ''minutemen.''
At some point in both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, your typical media liberal would feign evenhandedness and bemoan the way the choice has come down to "two weak candidates.''
But, in that case, how come the right's weak candidates are the ones that win? Because a weak candidate pushing strong ideas is better than a weak candidate who's had no ideas since Roe vs. Wade.
From New Musical Express:
MACCA JOINS BAND AID LINE-UP
PAUL McCARTNEY is to take part in the forthcoming BAND AID single.
The former-Beatle will play bass on the re-recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, according to reports in today’s (November 3) Sun newspaper.
"It's great Macca is involved. He is a real statesman and will give this record even more clout," a source said.
"He’s the most famous bass player in the world and was keen to support the project. It will hopefully raise a huge amount of money for victims of famine in Africa.
It’s a great way to commemorate 20 years since the first singe and help raise awareness of the famine for a whole new generation."
U2’s Bono will also take part, singing his infamous line from the 1984 recording. He is the only artist involved from the original line-up.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin is believed to be opening the song, Supergrass’ Danny Goffey is to play the drums, while Travis’ Fran Healy is to play in the guitar section.
Robbie Williams has reportedly recorded the whole track, leaving producer Nigel Godrich to chose which of the pop star’s lines he wishes to use in the song.
Williams recorded his section in LA on Monday (November 1) as he won’t be available for the live recording session in London. Dido is also believed to have done the same.
Snow Patrol and Keane have also confirmed their contribution to the charity single.
The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins, Jamelia and Sugababes will also be taking part.
The single, which is being recorded under the official name Band Aid 20, is tipped to go straight to the top of the charts following its release (November 29) and stay there to take the Christmas Number One spot. Bookies believe that the song could be the biggest seller since ‘Candle In The Wind '97’.
MACCA JOINS BAND AID LINE-UP
PAUL McCARTNEY is to take part in the forthcoming BAND AID single.
The former-Beatle will play bass on the re-recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, according to reports in today’s (November 3) Sun newspaper.
"It's great Macca is involved. He is a real statesman and will give this record even more clout," a source said.
"He’s the most famous bass player in the world and was keen to support the project. It will hopefully raise a huge amount of money for victims of famine in Africa.
It’s a great way to commemorate 20 years since the first singe and help raise awareness of the famine for a whole new generation."
U2’s Bono will also take part, singing his infamous line from the 1984 recording. He is the only artist involved from the original line-up.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin is believed to be opening the song, Supergrass’ Danny Goffey is to play the drums, while Travis’ Fran Healy is to play in the guitar section.
Robbie Williams has reportedly recorded the whole track, leaving producer Nigel Godrich to chose which of the pop star’s lines he wishes to use in the song.
Williams recorded his section in LA on Monday (November 1) as he won’t be available for the live recording session in London. Dido is also believed to have done the same.
Snow Patrol and Keane have also confirmed their contribution to the charity single.
The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins, Jamelia and Sugababes will also be taking part.
The single, which is being recorded under the official name Band Aid 20, is tipped to go straight to the top of the charts following its release (November 29) and stay there to take the Christmas Number One spot. Bookies believe that the song could be the biggest seller since ‘Candle In The Wind '97’.
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