From Christianity Today:
Kinsey Repugnant
by Jeffrey Overstreet
Hollywood has been known to offer us ethically misguided heroes in the past. James Bond, for example. But Kinsey may take us to a new low. To make matters worse, this individual's outrageous exploits weren't fiction, even though the movie that pays tribute is full of half-truths.
Director Bill Condon's film celebrates a "scientist" whose research-gathering methods involved child molestation, shoddy experiments, and survey methods that break the rules of credible investigation. From these methods, he came to champion all manner of sexual misbehavior as acceptable animal behavior.
Liam Neeson is earning Oscar buzz for his performance as Kinsey, and Laura Linney's winning raves for her role as his wife. Most mainstream critics, apparently unconcerned that the film is a whitewash of a fraud, are calling this one of the best films of the year.
But religious press critics are doing what they can to draw attention to the film's tendency to cover up details that expose Kinsey for the deceiver and manipulator that he was.
R. Albert Mohler, Jr. (Crosswalk), president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, offers an extensive account of Kinsey's work and influence in his assessment of the film. "The movie is really not a true portrait of Alfred Kinsey at all. The real Alfred Kinsey was a man whose own sexual practices cannot be safely described to the general public and whose interest in sex was anything but objective or scientific."
Tom Neven (Plugged In) addresses ways in which Kinsey's research was flawed, pointing out the poor and selective surveys he conducted. "People willing to talk to a total stranger about their sexual behavior … can hardly be considered a representative sample of the American public. Moreover, Kinsey used questionable statistical analyses to reach his conclusions."
He also analyzes the problems with the movie, which he says are "too vast to itemize." He calls it "propaganda" and says, "The film completely glosses over the immoral and damaging methods Kinsey and his associates used in the course of their research. [The book] Sexual Behavior in the Human Male … contains studies about the sexual response of infants, toddlers and other children. (Kinsey's assistant Wardell Pomeroy has basically admitted that the studies involving children were derived from Kinsey's own experiments.)" He also points out that Kinsey and his wife were "serial adulterers," while the film only acknowledges single affairs. And he concludes that the worldview of the film is "insidious. It says 'science' (as defined by its practitioners) is the only way to know truth; all else is mere opinion and superstition."
Morality in Media President Robert Peters (Christian Spotlight) says, "In Kinsey's mind, man was merely an animal with a high degree of intelligence; and at the end of the film, in the midst of the credits, we are treated to scene after scene of animals having sex. In Kinsey's mind, apparently no sex was abnormal; and among the types of sex that Kinsey is shown engaging in or endorsing in the film are adultery, bisexuality, homosexuality, group sex, pornography, sadomasochism, and swinging."
He adds, "In the film Kinsey interviews a man who molested hundreds of children, but there is no other indication (unless I missed something) that Kinsey's data about child sexuality came from pedophiles."
David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, "Defenders will view the picture as a sober portrait of the man credited with emancipating sex from the shackles of Puritanism. Conversely, critics will question not only the movie's accuracy, but the appropriateness of celebrating a man who many blame for jump-starting the sexual revolution by redefining societal mores and jettisoning inhibition and traditional morality to the relic heap of Victorian prudery."
Saturday, November 20, 2004
From EdDriscoll.com
The Man, In Full
By Ed Driscoll
Tom Wolfe spoke yesterday in San Francisco, at the Herbst Theatre, an early 1930s, 916-seat auditorium. He was introduced by Michael Lewis, who began by describing a visit to New York in 1989, shortly after Liar's Poker was released.
"Tom Wolfe really loves your book", his agent said.
"Oh suuuure, he does", Lewis replied to his agent, who said, "No really, he does. And he'd like to meet you for lunch".
"Well, I'm staying at the Algonquin. Tell him to give me a call", Lewis told him.
"The next day, the phone rang. And a voice said, "Hi, I'm Tom Wolfe. I really loved Liar's Poker. Where do you want to meet for lunch?"
"Well, where do you go if you want to make a splash in this town?", Lewis replied.
"The Pool Room of the Four Seasons", Wolfe replied.
Lewis told the audience that this room, so named because of the enormous marble fountain in the middle of it, was where so many of the movers and shakers of the 1980s met. And how he arrived there, was escorted by the maitre d' through "Picasso Alley" until he saw a man at the other end. Lewis described him looking like as a negative image version of the famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole's Lawrence first meets Omar Sharif. Sharif began that scene as
After that knockout of an introduction, Lewis brought Wolfe onto the stage at the Herbst Theatre.
He asked Tom questions about his new book, how he wrote it, how he managed to get so many lurid details of modern day college life into it (through going onto campus and interviewing lots of lots of students Wolfe replied), and then questioned him about how he got started, the origin of the white suit, etc.
Having read Conversations With Tom Wolfe several times, I was struck by how many of these stories of his younger days Wolfe fires off like a shot. Because he's interviewed and profiled so many people in his non-fiction, Wolfe is a remarkably careful speaker himself, for fear of giving out some detail that could be used against him. Some of his stories last night are virtually word for word identical to anecdotes he gave reporters 35 years ago.
Afterwards, the audience was invited to ask him questions. Two men each asked him variations on (and yes, I'm paraphrasing extensively in this post, and writing strictly from memory), "Mr. Wolfe, I'm a father, and my daughter is going off to college. I don't mind if you lie to me, but tell me it's not going to be Sodom and Gomorrah U."
My favorite though, was the small nervous fellow who sat in front of me. When he first took his seat, I nudged my wife to check him out, and she told me he looked like Mike Myers' Dieter character from Saturday Night Live's "Sprockets" sketch.
"Yeah", I said to her. "Except that Dieter was kind of cool in an expressionistic Bertolt Brecht Weimar Republic kind of way. Do me a favor, don't touch this guy's monkey, OK?"
Dieter Jr. looked like he was about 40, 5'7, 150 pounds tops. His dirty sandy-colored hair was receding on top, but curled around the base of his ears. I'm pretty sure he wore some kind of John Lennon-style glasses. He had on a black cable knit sweater a size too small and several inches too short, so that it just met his blue jeans. He wore some kind of sensible Birkenstock style shoes, and came in with the obligatory field-issue urban prole backpack. In other words, he's approaching middle age, but doing his damndest to look like some kind of dark, moody college student: Woody Allen through an German expressionist Playdough fun factory.
When handed a radio mike by one of the ushers, he said, "Mr. Wolfe, in Hooking Up, you wrote that our souls had just died, and I thank you for that", in a tone that was sneering, but also implied that Deiter was quite happy with science's latest pronouncements that we're all soulless automatons.
"Can you tell me", he continued, "What's going on with the radical religious right out there in the American South?"
Paraphrasing his essay, Wolfe began by explaining to him that while the current scientific theory is that we're essentially programmed at birth and have no free will, it merely follows other theories by men such as Darwin and Freud, and will no doubt be followed by newer theories in the future, "and in the meantime, people like me will be having lots of fun writing about them".
Wolfe then launched into variations on some of the quotes he gave England's Guardian and London Times around election time earlier this month. He told our wannabe-Dieter that "the people in the south aren't the Religious Right-they're just religious. And these people are America. They've been that way for 200 years, and they'll probably be that way for 200 more. They regard attacks on religion as attacks on them. If you try to take away their guns, they'll remind you of the second amendment and tell you you'll be staring down the barrel of one of their guns if you come for it."
Wolfe urged the fellow--and by inference, the entire audience--to read James Webb's recent book on the Scots-Irish and try to understand these people.
The whole thing reminded me of the Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk explains to a marooned Zefram Cochrane that there's a whole, growing galaxy out there teeming with life that he can explore. Except that Wolfe was essentially telling an insular and emotionally walled-in left to go visit America for themselves.
Channeling the 150th anniversary Harper's cover, and given Wolfe's immaculate off-white double breasted suit, light blue shirt, with French cuffs joined with bright silk knots, thin white lisle socks, black and white faux-spats, and a black and white pocket square, I was struck by how the evening reminded me of what it must have been like for audiences to see a reading by Mark Twain 120 years ago.
Except that when Twain arrived in San Francisco, audiences in the post-gold rush western hinterlands would no doubt eagerly await his pronouncements on what life was like--out there--in the rest of the world, or at least, the rest of America.
I can't help but think that "Dieter" was indicative of a lot of Blue Staters: they don't want to know what's going on out there, they don't want to know about Red America, they just wish it would all go away, either through the ACLU, or die on its own accord.
Although, give 'em credit: the audience loved Wolfe, laughing and applauding during numerous moments in his speech. Of course, I don't think they realize just how conservative he is.
Or they wouldn't have shown up to see him.
The Man, In Full
By Ed Driscoll
Tom Wolfe spoke yesterday in San Francisco, at the Herbst Theatre, an early 1930s, 916-seat auditorium. He was introduced by Michael Lewis, who began by describing a visit to New York in 1989, shortly after Liar's Poker was released.
"Tom Wolfe really loves your book", his agent said.
"Oh suuuure, he does", Lewis replied to his agent, who said, "No really, he does. And he'd like to meet you for lunch".
"Well, I'm staying at the Algonquin. Tell him to give me a call", Lewis told him.
"The next day, the phone rang. And a voice said, "Hi, I'm Tom Wolfe. I really loved Liar's Poker. Where do you want to meet for lunch?"
"Well, where do you go if you want to make a splash in this town?", Lewis replied.
"The Pool Room of the Four Seasons", Wolfe replied.
Lewis told the audience that this room, so named because of the enormous marble fountain in the middle of it, was where so many of the movers and shakers of the 1980s met. And how he arrived there, was escorted by the maitre d' through "Picasso Alley" until he saw a man at the other end. Lewis described him looking like as a negative image version of the famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole's Lawrence first meets Omar Sharif. Sharif began that scene as
Wolfe, standing in the entranceway to the Pool Room, was a small squiggly line in white, getting larger and larger as Lewis approached. Meanwhile, everyone in the room was staring at the Man In White and wondering whom the young fellow Wolfe was meeting for lunch was.
After that knockout of an introduction, Lewis brought Wolfe onto the stage at the Herbst Theatre.
He asked Tom questions about his new book, how he wrote it, how he managed to get so many lurid details of modern day college life into it (through going onto campus and interviewing lots of lots of students Wolfe replied), and then questioned him about how he got started, the origin of the white suit, etc.
Having read Conversations With Tom Wolfe several times, I was struck by how many of these stories of his younger days Wolfe fires off like a shot. Because he's interviewed and profiled so many people in his non-fiction, Wolfe is a remarkably careful speaker himself, for fear of giving out some detail that could be used against him. Some of his stories last night are virtually word for word identical to anecdotes he gave reporters 35 years ago.
Afterwards, the audience was invited to ask him questions. Two men each asked him variations on (and yes, I'm paraphrasing extensively in this post, and writing strictly from memory), "Mr. Wolfe, I'm a father, and my daughter is going off to college. I don't mind if you lie to me, but tell me it's not going to be Sodom and Gomorrah U."
My favorite though, was the small nervous fellow who sat in front of me. When he first took his seat, I nudged my wife to check him out, and she told me he looked like Mike Myers' Dieter character from Saturday Night Live's "Sprockets" sketch.
"Yeah", I said to her. "Except that Dieter was kind of cool in an expressionistic Bertolt Brecht Weimar Republic kind of way. Do me a favor, don't touch this guy's monkey, OK?"
Dieter Jr. looked like he was about 40, 5'7, 150 pounds tops. His dirty sandy-colored hair was receding on top, but curled around the base of his ears. I'm pretty sure he wore some kind of John Lennon-style glasses. He had on a black cable knit sweater a size too small and several inches too short, so that it just met his blue jeans. He wore some kind of sensible Birkenstock style shoes, and came in with the obligatory field-issue urban prole backpack. In other words, he's approaching middle age, but doing his damndest to look like some kind of dark, moody college student: Woody Allen through an German expressionist Playdough fun factory.
When handed a radio mike by one of the ushers, he said, "Mr. Wolfe, in Hooking Up, you wrote that our souls had just died, and I thank you for that", in a tone that was sneering, but also implied that Deiter was quite happy with science's latest pronouncements that we're all soulless automatons.
"Can you tell me", he continued, "What's going on with the radical religious right out there in the American South?"
Paraphrasing his essay, Wolfe began by explaining to him that while the current scientific theory is that we're essentially programmed at birth and have no free will, it merely follows other theories by men such as Darwin and Freud, and will no doubt be followed by newer theories in the future, "and in the meantime, people like me will be having lots of fun writing about them".
Wolfe then launched into variations on some of the quotes he gave England's Guardian and London Times around election time earlier this month. He told our wannabe-Dieter that "the people in the south aren't the Religious Right-they're just religious. And these people are America. They've been that way for 200 years, and they'll probably be that way for 200 more. They regard attacks on religion as attacks on them. If you try to take away their guns, they'll remind you of the second amendment and tell you you'll be staring down the barrel of one of their guns if you come for it."
Wolfe urged the fellow--and by inference, the entire audience--to read James Webb's recent book on the Scots-Irish and try to understand these people.
The whole thing reminded me of the Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk explains to a marooned Zefram Cochrane that there's a whole, growing galaxy out there teeming with life that he can explore. Except that Wolfe was essentially telling an insular and emotionally walled-in left to go visit America for themselves.
Channeling the 150th anniversary Harper's cover, and given Wolfe's immaculate off-white double breasted suit, light blue shirt, with French cuffs joined with bright silk knots, thin white lisle socks, black and white faux-spats, and a black and white pocket square, I was struck by how the evening reminded me of what it must have been like for audiences to see a reading by Mark Twain 120 years ago.
Except that when Twain arrived in San Francisco, audiences in the post-gold rush western hinterlands would no doubt eagerly await his pronouncements on what life was like--out there--in the rest of the world, or at least, the rest of America.
I can't help but think that "Dieter" was indicative of a lot of Blue Staters: they don't want to know what's going on out there, they don't want to know about Red America, they just wish it would all go away, either through the ACLU, or die on its own accord.
Although, give 'em credit: the audience loved Wolfe, laughing and applauding during numerous moments in his speech. Of course, I don't think they realize just how conservative he is.
Or they wouldn't have shown up to see him.
Friday, November 19, 2004
From RatherBiased.com.
The Man Who Started It All
Reed Irvine, the indefatigable founder
of Accuracy in Media and one of the
very first people to question the received wisdom of the news media,
passed away last night. He was 82.
As a media critic, Reed Irvine was a
trailblazer. While much of America was still blinded to the still
fairly new notion that journalists could rise above their human
nature and deliver the news without even a scintilla of bias, Irvine
knew better.
Decades before the internet and talk
radio, Reed Irvine set out to change that. Little did he know that
his fledgling group Accuracy in Media would grow up and that a legion of
others (both conservative and liberal) would follow in its footsteps.
Today, there is an entire cottage
industry devoted to criticizing the New York Times, something that
Irvine made a name for himself doing back in the 1970s, showing up at
shareholder meetings demanding fairness in the news and in his
newsletter, the Media
Monitor. He also did the same with the Washington Post, jokingly running for chairman of its board of directors.
Irvine was also one of the first to
question the-then "Tiffany Network." His group, along with
another started by then-North Carolina senator Jesse Helms and future
media billionaire Ted Turner, started a drive back in the 1980s to
"become Dan
Rather's boss." Their tagline was "CBS: Rather Biased."
Even today, they still sell that vintage
design on the AIM site.
Whether you agreed with his critique or not, Reed Irvine was an American original
who truly changed the course our country's history. He will be
missed.
Other reactions from around the net:
The Man Who Started It All
Reed Irvine, the indefatigable founder
of Accuracy in Media and one of the
very first people to question the received wisdom of the news media,
passed away last night. He was 82.
As a media critic, Reed Irvine was a
trailblazer. While much of America was still blinded to the still
fairly new notion that journalists could rise above their human
nature and deliver the news without even a scintilla of bias, Irvine
knew better.
Decades before the internet and talk
radio, Reed Irvine set out to change that. Little did he know that
his fledgling group Accuracy in Media would grow up and that a legion of
others (both conservative and liberal) would follow in its footsteps.
Today, there is an entire cottage
industry devoted to criticizing the New York Times, something that
Irvine made a name for himself doing back in the 1970s, showing up at
shareholder meetings demanding fairness in the news and in his
newsletter, the Media
Monitor. He also did the same with the Washington Post, jokingly running for chairman of its board of directors.
Irvine was also one of the first to
question the-then "Tiffany Network." His group, along with
another started by then-North Carolina senator Jesse Helms and future
media billionaire Ted Turner, started a drive back in the 1980s to
"become Dan
Rather's boss." Their tagline was "CBS: Rather Biased."
Even today, they still sell that vintage
design on the AIM site.
Whether you agreed with his critique or not, Reed Irvine was an American original
who truly changed the course our country's history. He will be
missed.
Other reactions from around the net:
"The Legacy of Reed Irvine,"
by AIM colleague Cliff
Kincaid
"Farewell to a True Life
Hero,"at Canadafreepress.com
"Reed Irvine, RIP," by
the former director of Irvine's other organization Accuracy in
Academia, Dan
Flynn
A tribute from Redstate.org
founder Mike
Krempasky
Alan Henderson's farewell
toast to Irvine
"Goodbye to an Original
Watchdog," by Mary
Katherine Ham
Obituary at World
Net Daily
Farewell from Media Research
Center's Tim
Graham
Thursday, November 18, 2004
From washingtonpost.com:
A German Lesson for Remaking Iraq
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Yesterday Germans celebrated the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or, to put it differently, yesterday Germans marked 15 years of what has been the most peaceful, most comfortable, most orderly transition from totalitarianism to democracy ever -- the polar opposite of the transition now taking place (if it is taking place) in Iraq. There was no violence, no unrest. There was no looting or pillaging.
There wasn't even much shouting. In fact, the odd thing about Berlin, 15 years ago this evening, was how quiet it was. When I arrived in the city, after driving all day and much of the night, the champagne corks had all been popped. There was a big, tipsy crowd of West Germans sitting on a small section of the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate, occasionally taunting the guards, but not doing much else. There were East Germans milling around McDonald's in West Berlin, looking scared. The eastern half of the city was eerily dark.
I was not the only one who found it odd. At a dinner given in her honor this week, Marianne Birthler, a former East German dissident who runs the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police, agreed that, in retrospect, the peace that followed the fall of the Wall seems almost incomprehensible. By way of illustration, she told the story of a woman in Mecklenburg who learned, after the Wall fell, that the citizens of other East German towns had occupied their local Stasi headquarters. Since everyone else in Mecklenburg was otherwise occupied -- people still had to go to work, take care of children, clean the house -- the woman walked up to her local Stasi headquarters alone, knocked on the door, and said she would like to occupy the building. The guard solemnly handed over his pistol, gave her the keys and let her in.
In the years afterward, the West German government built on the peaceful revolution with an unprecedented transfer of wealth. The East Germans received roads, infrastructure, welfare benefits and investment. While the rest of Eastern Europe struggled with new constitutions, amateurish bureaucrats and fly-by-night political parties, East Germans were simply handed the West German legal system, the West German political system and the West German civil service on a plate.
And yet despite all of that, there are those who feel, more strongly than ever, that the transition has been disastrous. As Birthler put it, the "honeymoon" is long over -- if it ever started. Fifteen years later, not only do easterners feel disenfranchised, nearly one in five tells pollsters that they wish the Wall had never come down. East Germany remains poorer, unhealthier and unhappier than the western half of the country. East Germans remain more prone to political extremism. The neo-communist political party has recently made a stunning comeback in regional elections, and neo-Nazi parties do well in the East too.
The lesson of the East German transition after 15 years should, in other words, be phrased as a warning: Even if it is possible to get every political and economic element right, even if it is possible to avoid violence entirely, the psychological transition to liberal democracy from a regime ruled by fear is one that takes at least one generation, if not two. Few people are able to walk from a closed society into an open one without self-doubt and discomfort. Few people find it easy to readjust their thinking overnight, even if they want to. Few people are able to look at themselves in the mirror, tell themselves that the first few decades of their lives were all a bad mistake, and go out and start living new lives according to new rules. It was no accident, a wise teacher once told me, that God made the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years before bringing them to the promised land: That was how long it would take them to unlearn the mental habits of Egyptian slavery.
In a week in which U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are fighting one of the bloodiest and most difficult battles of the whole Iraqi conflict, it doesn't sound terribly comforting to write that "these things take a long time." But they do, and for Americans accustomed to fast results, it can't be repeated often enough: East Germany is proof that it is possible to do everything right and still leave millions of people feeling cheated by liberation many years later. I don't know whether Iraq will ever be a "success," but even if it is, we may not know for several decades. If it was a grave misjudgment to ignore that fact before the Iraqi war began, it would be no less catastrophic to do so now.
A German Lesson for Remaking Iraq
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Yesterday Germans celebrated the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or, to put it differently, yesterday Germans marked 15 years of what has been the most peaceful, most comfortable, most orderly transition from totalitarianism to democracy ever -- the polar opposite of the transition now taking place (if it is taking place) in Iraq. There was no violence, no unrest. There was no looting or pillaging.
There wasn't even much shouting. In fact, the odd thing about Berlin, 15 years ago this evening, was how quiet it was. When I arrived in the city, after driving all day and much of the night, the champagne corks had all been popped. There was a big, tipsy crowd of West Germans sitting on a small section of the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate, occasionally taunting the guards, but not doing much else. There were East Germans milling around McDonald's in West Berlin, looking scared. The eastern half of the city was eerily dark.
I was not the only one who found it odd. At a dinner given in her honor this week, Marianne Birthler, a former East German dissident who runs the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police, agreed that, in retrospect, the peace that followed the fall of the Wall seems almost incomprehensible. By way of illustration, she told the story of a woman in Mecklenburg who learned, after the Wall fell, that the citizens of other East German towns had occupied their local Stasi headquarters. Since everyone else in Mecklenburg was otherwise occupied -- people still had to go to work, take care of children, clean the house -- the woman walked up to her local Stasi headquarters alone, knocked on the door, and said she would like to occupy the building. The guard solemnly handed over his pistol, gave her the keys and let her in.
In the years afterward, the West German government built on the peaceful revolution with an unprecedented transfer of wealth. The East Germans received roads, infrastructure, welfare benefits and investment. While the rest of Eastern Europe struggled with new constitutions, amateurish bureaucrats and fly-by-night political parties, East Germans were simply handed the West German legal system, the West German political system and the West German civil service on a plate.
And yet despite all of that, there are those who feel, more strongly than ever, that the transition has been disastrous. As Birthler put it, the "honeymoon" is long over -- if it ever started. Fifteen years later, not only do easterners feel disenfranchised, nearly one in five tells pollsters that they wish the Wall had never come down. East Germany remains poorer, unhealthier and unhappier than the western half of the country. East Germans remain more prone to political extremism. The neo-communist political party has recently made a stunning comeback in regional elections, and neo-Nazi parties do well in the East too.
The lesson of the East German transition after 15 years should, in other words, be phrased as a warning: Even if it is possible to get every political and economic element right, even if it is possible to avoid violence entirely, the psychological transition to liberal democracy from a regime ruled by fear is one that takes at least one generation, if not two. Few people are able to walk from a closed society into an open one without self-doubt and discomfort. Few people find it easy to readjust their thinking overnight, even if they want to. Few people are able to look at themselves in the mirror, tell themselves that the first few decades of their lives were all a bad mistake, and go out and start living new lives according to new rules. It was no accident, a wise teacher once told me, that God made the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years before bringing them to the promised land: That was how long it would take them to unlearn the mental habits of Egyptian slavery.
In a week in which U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are fighting one of the bloodiest and most difficult battles of the whole Iraqi conflict, it doesn't sound terribly comforting to write that "these things take a long time." But they do, and for Americans accustomed to fast results, it can't be repeated often enough: East Germany is proof that it is possible to do everything right and still leave millions of people feeling cheated by liberation many years later. I don't know whether Iraq will ever be a "success," but even if it is, we may not know for several decades. If it was a grave misjudgment to ignore that fact before the Iraqi war began, it would be no less catastrophic to do so now.
What you won’t see in the ‘Kinsey’ movie
By R. Albert Mohler Jr.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--Brace yourselves. The movie, “Kinsey,” opened in theaters Nov. 12, introducing a new generation of Americans to the infamous "father" of sex research in America. Yet the movie is really not a true portrait of Alfred Kinsey at all. Instead of portraying the twisted and tormented mind of this propagandist for the sexual revolution, the movie presents Kinsey as an angel of light who brought America out of repression and darkness.
Reviewers greeted the movie with excitement. A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, declared that "Bill Condon's smart, stirring life of the renowned mid-century sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey has a lot to say on the subject of sex, which it treats with sobriety, sensitivity and a welcome measure of humor." Mr. Scott neglects to mention that the movie treats its "subject" without an adequate measure of truth.
Rather than expressing outrage that a scandalous individual with a well-documented pattern of sexual perversity is being celebrated, Mr. Scott sees the movie as a mixture of entertainment and enlightenment. "The director addresses sexuality with candor and wit, but it is the act of research as much as its object that imparts to Kinsey its flush of passion and its rush of romance," Scott celebrated. He went on the gush: "I can't think of another movie that has dealt with sex so knowledgeably and, at the same time, made the pursuit of knowledge seem so sexy. There are some explicit images and provocative scenes, but it is your intellect that is most likely to be aroused."
The reviewers for Newsweek acknowledged that "Kinsey's methods were far from perfect," but they nevertheless celebrated both the movie and its central character. Indeed, they commend Kinsey "who shattered any vestiges of Victorian modesty, leading curious Americans from bedroom peephole to upfront view between the sheets." In a sidebar, a Newsweek writer declared that the movie "is a celebration of diversity; it’s about the solace knowledge can bring." Writing in The Wall Street Journal, reviewer Joe Morgenstern declared that Kinsey doesn't try to sell or exploit sex. According to Morgenstern, the movie "does remarkably well as a cultural history of a vanished time" and "is intelligent to a fault."
Alfred C. Kinsey is one of the most controversial figures in American history -- and for good reason. An entomologist by training, Kinsey turned from his intense fascination with the gall wasp to the study of human sexuality. He burst upon the American scene with his pioneering 1948 volume, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” Eventually, Indiana University was to establish the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and the name "Kinsey" was to be associated with progressivist sex education, opposition to traditional sexual morality, and liberation from fixed concepts of "normal" when dealing with human sexuality. The Kinsey Institute has what many consider to be the world's largest collection of pornography, sexually explicit art and various sexual objects. What the institute does not advertise is its links to data gathered by child molesters and sex criminals.
By any measure, Alfred Kinsey was a tormented and conflicted figure. Raised by a puritanical father and a withdrawn mother, Kinsey's adolescence was marked by sexual turmoil and experimentation. As is now well-documented, the young Kinsey was involved in sadomasochistic sexual behaviors and was driven by homosexual desire.
In a groundbreaking biography published in 1997, James H. Jones blew the cover on the Kinsey myth. According to this popular and pervasive mythology, Alfred Kinsey was a scientist who brought his rigorous scientific skills and objective scientific interests to the study of human sexuality. The real Alfred Kinsey was a man whose own sexual practices cannot be safely described to the general public and whose interest in sex was anything but objective or scientific.
From the onset, Jones recognized Kinsey's central role in the sexual revolution. "More than any other American of the twentieth century," Jones acknowledges, "he was the architect of a new sensibility about a part of life that everyone experiences and no one escapes."
Nevertheless, the real Kinsey was hidden from the public. Jones describes his project in these words: "As I burrowed into more than a dozen archives, read tens of thousands of letters, and interviewed scores of people who knew Kinsey in various capacities, I discovered that his public image distorted more than it revealed."
As Jones reports, "The man I came to know bore no resemblance to the canonical Kinsey. Anything but disinterested, he approached his work with missionary fervor. Kinsey loathed Victorian morality as only a person who had been badly injured by sexual repression could despise it. He was determined to use science to strip human sexuality of its guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality, to soften the rules of restraint, and to help people develop positive attitudes toward their sexual needs and desires. Kinsey was a crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual morays and sex offender laws of the United States."
There was more to it than that, of course, and Jones marshals an incredible mountain of documentation to prove this point. In the first place, the adolescent Alfred Kinsey was deeply involved in masochistic self-abuse. In Jones' words, "Somewhere along the line, he veered off the path of normal development and was pulled down a trail that led to tremendous emotional conflict and self-negating physical abuse."
Driven by wild sexual fantasies and determined to overthrow what he saw as a repressive sexual morality, Kinsey eventually dropped his study of insects and turned his study to human sexuality. Tragically, Jones acknowledges that the world of science "would have been better served had Kinsey not allowed his lust for data to obscure his judgment."
What exactly was Kinsey up to? He and his close band of young male associates went about collecting an enormous body of data on human sexuality, first looking at male and later at female populations. In his research on the sexual behavior of males, Kinsey brought his ideological and personal passions to the forefront of his supposedly scientific work. He arbitrarily decided that human beings are to be located in a continuum of development between heterosexual and homosexual poles. He developed a six-step chart and argued that men and boys are arrayed all along this line between absolute heterosexuality and absolute homosexuality. He would later argue that almost 40 percent of all males would have some homosexual experience. Of course, hidden from public view was the fact that Kinsey was doing his very best to rationalize his own homosexuality -- or bisexuality as later commentators would explain -- and was not at all the objective scientist collecting neutral data from a responsible population base.
Among the many problems inherent in Kinsey's research is the fact that he relied upon reports and sexual studies taken from prison populations, including sex criminals. Therefore, Kinsey's notion of "normal" was drawn from a decidedly abnormal population sample.
The most troubling aspect of Kinsey's research is the data he collected on the sexual response of children -- especially young boys. Chapter Five of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male considered the sexual experience of boys, including infants. Kinsey wanted to prove that children are sexual beings who should be understood to have and to deserve sexual experiences. In this chapter, Kinsey is largely dependent upon the data contributed by "Mr. X," a man who had molested hundreds of boys ranging from infants to adolescents. As Jones explains: "Viewed from any angle, his relationship with Mr. X was a cautionary tale. Whatever the putative value as science of Mr. X's experience, the fact remains that he was a predator pedophile." Over decades, this man abused hundreds of young boys, tortured infants and, as Jones explains, "performed a variety of other sexual acts on preadolescent boys and girls alike."
Kinsey did not condemn this man, but instead eagerly solicited his "data." As a matter of fact, Kinsey went so far as to attempt to pay Mr. X for further research and once wrote to him, "I wish I knew how to give credit to you in the forthcoming volume for your material. It seems a shame not even to name you."
Those words betray a moral monster of the most horrible depravity and assured criminality. Alfred Kinsey celebrated the fact that this man had sexually tortured children and, as Kinsey's own published work documents, had sexually abused two-month-old infants.
All this was explicit in the data published in Kinsey's 1948 volume, but he was nonetheless celebrated as a sexual pioneer and as a profit of sexual enlightenment.
Unbeknownst to the general public, Kinsey also was involved in sex acts with his staff and in the filming of hundreds of persons involved in sexual activity -- including footage taken of his own masochistic sex acts. He and his colleagues paid adolescent boys to perform sex acts on film and turned the Kinsey house into a studio for pornographic documentation. In one incredibly weird twist on the story, Mrs. Kinsey, or "Mac" as she was known, is remembered to have brought refreshments to the participants at the conclusion of their sex acts and video sessions. She was herself filmed in various sexual situations and Kinsey encouraged his associates to engage in sex acts with his wife.
What does the cultural elite now make of all this? The New York Times review acknowledges that the movie takes a great risk "in attempting to deal frankly with its hero's own sex life without succumbing to prurience or easy moralism." In reality, however, the movie doesn't deal frankly with Kinsey's perversions at all. The reviewer concedes, "Sometimes his scientific zeal shaded into obsession, and his methods went from the empirical to the experimental in ways that remain ethically troubling."
Ethically troubling? Is that all The New York Times can muster in response to Kinsey's own self-documented and published reports of child molestation?
In “Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey,” Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy laments the fact that Kinsey is not given the respect of his fellow scientists that he believed he deserved. Nevertheless, even Gathorne-Hardy acknowledges, "The recent digging up of Kinsey's private life, incidentally, is not going to help him" in this respect.
Gathorne-Hardy wrote his book largely in response to the damage to Kinsey's reputation inflicted by Jones' biography. Amazingly, Gathorne-Hardy claims: "Wherever we know something of his sexuality it is at once apparent that, while it hardly ever, if ever, impaired his integrity as a scientist, it had a decisive effect on his work. And where it does once or twice seem to impair that integrity, the effect is either not very significant -- or else it is obvious. There is a transparency."
This is moral nonsense. Of course, this author attempts to make lemonade out of Kinsey's lemons in more than one way. At one point, Gathorne-Hardy goes so far as to claim that Kinsey's bisexuality was a great asset for his scientific work. "Kinsey was bisexual," Gathorne-Hardy notes, "an almost ideal position, one might think, for someone who was studying sexual behavior in both sexes." Who might think this?
We have become a society that celebrates men like Alfred C. Kinsey and produces movies that present such a man as an agent of enlightenment rather than as a tortured soul fighting his internal demons while soliciting data on the sexual molestation of young children -- and filming any number of persons involved in any number of perverted sex acts.
In a letter he once wrote to his associate Clarence A. Tripp, Kinsey conceded, "The whole army of religion is our central enemy." Kinsey knew what he was up against, and his ambition was not merely to collect data, but to overthrow the entire structure of Christian morality in the realm of human sexuality.
Instead of being rightly classified as a criminal along with the likes of Dr. Joseph Mengele and other Nazi scientists, Alfred C. Kinsey is now lionized and celebrated in a movie starring Liam Neeson as the supposedly heroic figure. What does this say about Liam Neeson? What does this say about us?
R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. For more articles and resources by Dr. Mohler, and for information on “The Albert Mohler Program,” a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio Network, go to www.albertmohler.com.
By R. Albert Mohler Jr.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--Brace yourselves. The movie, “Kinsey,” opened in theaters Nov. 12, introducing a new generation of Americans to the infamous "father" of sex research in America. Yet the movie is really not a true portrait of Alfred Kinsey at all. Instead of portraying the twisted and tormented mind of this propagandist for the sexual revolution, the movie presents Kinsey as an angel of light who brought America out of repression and darkness.
Reviewers greeted the movie with excitement. A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, declared that "Bill Condon's smart, stirring life of the renowned mid-century sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey has a lot to say on the subject of sex, which it treats with sobriety, sensitivity and a welcome measure of humor." Mr. Scott neglects to mention that the movie treats its "subject" without an adequate measure of truth.
Rather than expressing outrage that a scandalous individual with a well-documented pattern of sexual perversity is being celebrated, Mr. Scott sees the movie as a mixture of entertainment and enlightenment. "The director addresses sexuality with candor and wit, but it is the act of research as much as its object that imparts to Kinsey its flush of passion and its rush of romance," Scott celebrated. He went on the gush: "I can't think of another movie that has dealt with sex so knowledgeably and, at the same time, made the pursuit of knowledge seem so sexy. There are some explicit images and provocative scenes, but it is your intellect that is most likely to be aroused."
The reviewers for Newsweek acknowledged that "Kinsey's methods were far from perfect," but they nevertheless celebrated both the movie and its central character. Indeed, they commend Kinsey "who shattered any vestiges of Victorian modesty, leading curious Americans from bedroom peephole to upfront view between the sheets." In a sidebar, a Newsweek writer declared that the movie "is a celebration of diversity; it’s about the solace knowledge can bring." Writing in The Wall Street Journal, reviewer Joe Morgenstern declared that Kinsey doesn't try to sell or exploit sex. According to Morgenstern, the movie "does remarkably well as a cultural history of a vanished time" and "is intelligent to a fault."
Alfred C. Kinsey is one of the most controversial figures in American history -- and for good reason. An entomologist by training, Kinsey turned from his intense fascination with the gall wasp to the study of human sexuality. He burst upon the American scene with his pioneering 1948 volume, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” Eventually, Indiana University was to establish the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and the name "Kinsey" was to be associated with progressivist sex education, opposition to traditional sexual morality, and liberation from fixed concepts of "normal" when dealing with human sexuality. The Kinsey Institute has what many consider to be the world's largest collection of pornography, sexually explicit art and various sexual objects. What the institute does not advertise is its links to data gathered by child molesters and sex criminals.
By any measure, Alfred Kinsey was a tormented and conflicted figure. Raised by a puritanical father and a withdrawn mother, Kinsey's adolescence was marked by sexual turmoil and experimentation. As is now well-documented, the young Kinsey was involved in sadomasochistic sexual behaviors and was driven by homosexual desire.
In a groundbreaking biography published in 1997, James H. Jones blew the cover on the Kinsey myth. According to this popular and pervasive mythology, Alfred Kinsey was a scientist who brought his rigorous scientific skills and objective scientific interests to the study of human sexuality. The real Alfred Kinsey was a man whose own sexual practices cannot be safely described to the general public and whose interest in sex was anything but objective or scientific.
From the onset, Jones recognized Kinsey's central role in the sexual revolution. "More than any other American of the twentieth century," Jones acknowledges, "he was the architect of a new sensibility about a part of life that everyone experiences and no one escapes."
Nevertheless, the real Kinsey was hidden from the public. Jones describes his project in these words: "As I burrowed into more than a dozen archives, read tens of thousands of letters, and interviewed scores of people who knew Kinsey in various capacities, I discovered that his public image distorted more than it revealed."
As Jones reports, "The man I came to know bore no resemblance to the canonical Kinsey. Anything but disinterested, he approached his work with missionary fervor. Kinsey loathed Victorian morality as only a person who had been badly injured by sexual repression could despise it. He was determined to use science to strip human sexuality of its guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality, to soften the rules of restraint, and to help people develop positive attitudes toward their sexual needs and desires. Kinsey was a crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual morays and sex offender laws of the United States."
There was more to it than that, of course, and Jones marshals an incredible mountain of documentation to prove this point. In the first place, the adolescent Alfred Kinsey was deeply involved in masochistic self-abuse. In Jones' words, "Somewhere along the line, he veered off the path of normal development and was pulled down a trail that led to tremendous emotional conflict and self-negating physical abuse."
Driven by wild sexual fantasies and determined to overthrow what he saw as a repressive sexual morality, Kinsey eventually dropped his study of insects and turned his study to human sexuality. Tragically, Jones acknowledges that the world of science "would have been better served had Kinsey not allowed his lust for data to obscure his judgment."
What exactly was Kinsey up to? He and his close band of young male associates went about collecting an enormous body of data on human sexuality, first looking at male and later at female populations. In his research on the sexual behavior of males, Kinsey brought his ideological and personal passions to the forefront of his supposedly scientific work. He arbitrarily decided that human beings are to be located in a continuum of development between heterosexual and homosexual poles. He developed a six-step chart and argued that men and boys are arrayed all along this line between absolute heterosexuality and absolute homosexuality. He would later argue that almost 40 percent of all males would have some homosexual experience. Of course, hidden from public view was the fact that Kinsey was doing his very best to rationalize his own homosexuality -- or bisexuality as later commentators would explain -- and was not at all the objective scientist collecting neutral data from a responsible population base.
Among the many problems inherent in Kinsey's research is the fact that he relied upon reports and sexual studies taken from prison populations, including sex criminals. Therefore, Kinsey's notion of "normal" was drawn from a decidedly abnormal population sample.
The most troubling aspect of Kinsey's research is the data he collected on the sexual response of children -- especially young boys. Chapter Five of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male considered the sexual experience of boys, including infants. Kinsey wanted to prove that children are sexual beings who should be understood to have and to deserve sexual experiences. In this chapter, Kinsey is largely dependent upon the data contributed by "Mr. X," a man who had molested hundreds of boys ranging from infants to adolescents. As Jones explains: "Viewed from any angle, his relationship with Mr. X was a cautionary tale. Whatever the putative value as science of Mr. X's experience, the fact remains that he was a predator pedophile." Over decades, this man abused hundreds of young boys, tortured infants and, as Jones explains, "performed a variety of other sexual acts on preadolescent boys and girls alike."
Kinsey did not condemn this man, but instead eagerly solicited his "data." As a matter of fact, Kinsey went so far as to attempt to pay Mr. X for further research and once wrote to him, "I wish I knew how to give credit to you in the forthcoming volume for your material. It seems a shame not even to name you."
Those words betray a moral monster of the most horrible depravity and assured criminality. Alfred Kinsey celebrated the fact that this man had sexually tortured children and, as Kinsey's own published work documents, had sexually abused two-month-old infants.
All this was explicit in the data published in Kinsey's 1948 volume, but he was nonetheless celebrated as a sexual pioneer and as a profit of sexual enlightenment.
Unbeknownst to the general public, Kinsey also was involved in sex acts with his staff and in the filming of hundreds of persons involved in sexual activity -- including footage taken of his own masochistic sex acts. He and his colleagues paid adolescent boys to perform sex acts on film and turned the Kinsey house into a studio for pornographic documentation. In one incredibly weird twist on the story, Mrs. Kinsey, or "Mac" as she was known, is remembered to have brought refreshments to the participants at the conclusion of their sex acts and video sessions. She was herself filmed in various sexual situations and Kinsey encouraged his associates to engage in sex acts with his wife.
What does the cultural elite now make of all this? The New York Times review acknowledges that the movie takes a great risk "in attempting to deal frankly with its hero's own sex life without succumbing to prurience or easy moralism." In reality, however, the movie doesn't deal frankly with Kinsey's perversions at all. The reviewer concedes, "Sometimes his scientific zeal shaded into obsession, and his methods went from the empirical to the experimental in ways that remain ethically troubling."
Ethically troubling? Is that all The New York Times can muster in response to Kinsey's own self-documented and published reports of child molestation?
In “Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey,” Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy laments the fact that Kinsey is not given the respect of his fellow scientists that he believed he deserved. Nevertheless, even Gathorne-Hardy acknowledges, "The recent digging up of Kinsey's private life, incidentally, is not going to help him" in this respect.
Gathorne-Hardy wrote his book largely in response to the damage to Kinsey's reputation inflicted by Jones' biography. Amazingly, Gathorne-Hardy claims: "Wherever we know something of his sexuality it is at once apparent that, while it hardly ever, if ever, impaired his integrity as a scientist, it had a decisive effect on his work. And where it does once or twice seem to impair that integrity, the effect is either not very significant -- or else it is obvious. There is a transparency."
This is moral nonsense. Of course, this author attempts to make lemonade out of Kinsey's lemons in more than one way. At one point, Gathorne-Hardy goes so far as to claim that Kinsey's bisexuality was a great asset for his scientific work. "Kinsey was bisexual," Gathorne-Hardy notes, "an almost ideal position, one might think, for someone who was studying sexual behavior in both sexes." Who might think this?
We have become a society that celebrates men like Alfred C. Kinsey and produces movies that present such a man as an agent of enlightenment rather than as a tortured soul fighting his internal demons while soliciting data on the sexual molestation of young children -- and filming any number of persons involved in any number of perverted sex acts.
In a letter he once wrote to his associate Clarence A. Tripp, Kinsey conceded, "The whole army of religion is our central enemy." Kinsey knew what he was up against, and his ambition was not merely to collect data, but to overthrow the entire structure of Christian morality in the realm of human sexuality.
Instead of being rightly classified as a criminal along with the likes of Dr. Joseph Mengele and other Nazi scientists, Alfred C. Kinsey is now lionized and celebrated in a movie starring Liam Neeson as the supposedly heroic figure. What does this say about Liam Neeson? What does this say about us?
R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. For more articles and resources by Dr. Mohler, and for information on “The Albert Mohler Program,” a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio Network, go to www.albertmohler.com.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Questions for Rice's confirmation hearing
By George R. Will
WASHINGTON -- Condoleezza Rice, a sports buff, knows that, as a professional basketball player has said, "It's not going to be peaches and gravy all the time." Herewith some hard questions senators might ask in her confirmation hearings:
Did you see the television coverage of Yasser Arafat's funeral -- riot as mourning, gunfire as liturgy? Is it reasonable to expect that in the Jan. 9 elections to choose Arafat's successor, the Palestinian polity will select what the president called (June 24, 2002) a necessary condition for progress -- leadership "not compromised by terror"?
The president says it is "cultural condescension" to question "whether this country, or that people, or this group, are 'ready' for democracy." Condescending, perhaps, but is it realistic? Tony Blair says it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture." Are there cultural prerequisites for free polities? Does Iraq have them? Do the Palestinian people, after a decade of saturation propaganda inciting terrorism and anti-Semitism? Does the United States know how to transplant those prerequisites?
Should the Sunnis, Iraq's tyrants for decades, be allowed, by boycott or insurgency, to delay the Jan. 31 elections?
If, knowing what we now know about Iraq's weapons programs, you still think pre-emptive war was justified, what other nations might, by the same criteria, merit pre-emptive action?
Is the Constitution's war power clause (Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power to ... declare war") an anachronism? If so, why? If not, to what sort of situation might it pertain? In January 1991 the Senate voted 52-47 to authorize President George H.W. Bush to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Would a formal declaration of war have been appropriate? If the Senate had defeated the authorizing resolution, and Bush had gone to war anyway, would that have been a legitimate exercise of an inherent power or the presidency? If so, return to the first question (re: anachronism).
If you had been secretary in 1991, would you have advocated regime change -- driving on to Baghdad?
In 1991, the secretary of defense, explaining the unwisdom of regime change, said: "Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shiite regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?" Was Dick Cheney right?
In 2000, before becoming George W. Bush's national security adviser, you questioned the use of U.S. military forces in peacekeeping operations: "Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." Are current non-combat operations in Iraq degrading U.S. military capabilities?
You have said that it would be "unacceptable" for Iran or North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons. What, if anything, does that commit the United States to do if negotiations continue to be unavailing? Or if, as some intelligence reports suggest, North Korea already has several such weapons?
Does the Genocide Convention require a more forceful response to the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or is it, like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war many wars ago, a waste of paper?
Should the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China) be changed? Should France (population 60 million) be included rather than India (1 billion -- soon to be the world's most populous nation), Indonesia (238 million, the world's largest Islamic nation), Brazil (184 million, the most populous nation in Latin America) or Japan (127 million, and the world's second-largest economy)?
The European Union, the product of "pooled" national sovereignties, will soon have its own foreign policy, foreign minister, embassies, ambassadors and diplomatic service. Why not replace France with a single EU representative?
When, during World War II, Winston Churchill criticized Charles de Gaulle's intransigence, de Gaulle replied, "I am too weak to be conciliatory." Does this partially explain some European attitudes toward U.S. policies?
Such questions are difficult, but there will also be peaches and gravy.
By George R. Will
WASHINGTON -- Condoleezza Rice, a sports buff, knows that, as a professional basketball player has said, "It's not going to be peaches and gravy all the time." Herewith some hard questions senators might ask in her confirmation hearings:
Did you see the television coverage of Yasser Arafat's funeral -- riot as mourning, gunfire as liturgy? Is it reasonable to expect that in the Jan. 9 elections to choose Arafat's successor, the Palestinian polity will select what the president called (June 24, 2002) a necessary condition for progress -- leadership "not compromised by terror"?
The president says it is "cultural condescension" to question "whether this country, or that people, or this group, are 'ready' for democracy." Condescending, perhaps, but is it realistic? Tony Blair says it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture." Are there cultural prerequisites for free polities? Does Iraq have them? Do the Palestinian people, after a decade of saturation propaganda inciting terrorism and anti-Semitism? Does the United States know how to transplant those prerequisites?
Should the Sunnis, Iraq's tyrants for decades, be allowed, by boycott or insurgency, to delay the Jan. 31 elections?
If, knowing what we now know about Iraq's weapons programs, you still think pre-emptive war was justified, what other nations might, by the same criteria, merit pre-emptive action?
Is the Constitution's war power clause (Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power to ... declare war") an anachronism? If so, why? If not, to what sort of situation might it pertain? In January 1991 the Senate voted 52-47 to authorize President George H.W. Bush to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Would a formal declaration of war have been appropriate? If the Senate had defeated the authorizing resolution, and Bush had gone to war anyway, would that have been a legitimate exercise of an inherent power or the presidency? If so, return to the first question (re: anachronism).
If you had been secretary in 1991, would you have advocated regime change -- driving on to Baghdad?
In 1991, the secretary of defense, explaining the unwisdom of regime change, said: "Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shiite regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?" Was Dick Cheney right?
In 2000, before becoming George W. Bush's national security adviser, you questioned the use of U.S. military forces in peacekeeping operations: "Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." Are current non-combat operations in Iraq degrading U.S. military capabilities?
You have said that it would be "unacceptable" for Iran or North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons. What, if anything, does that commit the United States to do if negotiations continue to be unavailing? Or if, as some intelligence reports suggest, North Korea already has several such weapons?
Does the Genocide Convention require a more forceful response to the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or is it, like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war many wars ago, a waste of paper?
Should the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China) be changed? Should France (population 60 million) be included rather than India (1 billion -- soon to be the world's most populous nation), Indonesia (238 million, the world's largest Islamic nation), Brazil (184 million, the most populous nation in Latin America) or Japan (127 million, and the world's second-largest economy)?
The European Union, the product of "pooled" national sovereignties, will soon have its own foreign policy, foreign minister, embassies, ambassadors and diplomatic service. Why not replace France with a single EU representative?
When, during World War II, Winston Churchill criticized Charles de Gaulle's intransigence, de Gaulle replied, "I am too weak to be conciliatory." Does this partially explain some European attitudes toward U.S. policies?
Such questions are difficult, but there will also be peaches and gravy.
WHY BUSH WON
by Joe Sobran
November 3, 2004
Both guys blew it. Maybe Kerry blew it worse.
President George W. Bush had the advantage of
incumbency, fortified by a crisis that gave him an
opportunity to consolidate his support and increase his
popularity. The makings of a second-term landslide were
all there.
Instead he launched a wrong-headed war that divided
the country, turned out to lack the justifications he
claimed for it, and became a frustrating and scandalous
occupation. It will create problems for America around
the world for the foreseeable future.
Then the Democrats gave him an opponent with all the
excitement of a scarecrow -- a lackluster Massachusetts
liberal Bush might have prayed for. But Bush lost ground
as bad news poured in from Iraq and, after partly
rebuilding his lead, lost it again in the presidential
debates.
In the end Bush won his second term almost as
narrowly as he had won his first term in 2000. He richly
deserved to lose. He has given conservatism a bad name,
vastly increased government spending, and made this
country hated as never before. As a spokesman for
American principles, he is simply painful to listen to.
The fear and loathing Bush inspires were Kerry's
chief asset, but Kerry inspired little confidence in
himself. His notorious "flip-flopping" was really a
series of attempts to befog his dismal and robotic
liberal record, which hasn't been inconsistent at all.
Kerry too wasted opportunities. During the first
debate, for example, he brilliantly pitted Bush the
Younger against Bush the Elder, whose memoirs explained
why he cut the 1991 Gulf war short: to avoid trying to
occupy a bitterly hostile country with no exit strategy.
But Kerry didn't press this point; he rushed on to
something else. He could have simply asked, "Hasn't the
president read his father's book?" That would have been a
powerful campaign theme, embarrassing Bush and helping
give Kerry's vague position some definition and force.
Instead, Kerry allowed Bush to do the taunting, with
the charge that he had "no plan" for the occupation of
Iraq. But as Peter Beinart of THE NEW REPUBLIC has
observed, this amounts to accusing Kerry of having no
plan for cleaning up the mess Bush himself has made! If
true, and it is, it's more an indictment of Bush's
policies than of Kerry's inability. Bush has created an
insoluble problem. But Kerry didn't dare say that. It
would have sounded pessimistic, "defeatist," which is of
course un-American. Only optimism is patriotic.
But Kerry ran a joyless, wholly unimaginative
campaign, and in an important respect he is even less
eloquent than Bush. Bush is clumsy, but he at least uses
simple, highly charged words that move people. Kerry
talks like a committee report, earning an undeserved
reputation for "nuance" when he just bores and confuses.
You know what Bush stands for, even if you don't like it.
You still don't know what Kerry stands for, even if you
think you know what he might do.
The Democrats made the mistake of thinking that
because Kerry lacked definition, he was "electable." The
truth is that because he lacked definition, he lacked
positive appeal. Even his liberalism seems more
perfunctory than passionate. His bleatings about his
"faith" were empty and unconvincing.
The most preposterous moment of the campaign was
surely Kerry's recollection that his dying mother, only a
couple of years ago, told him, "Remember: integrity,
integrity, integrity!" It tells you a lot about Kerry
that he would even tell that story, expecting anyone to
believe it, let alone find it edifying. A dying woman
feels it urgent to tell her middle-aged son about
integrity? This must be the weirdest bit of mother-son
dialogue since just before Janet Leigh stepped into the
shower.
But that's Kerry for you: a bit weird. Somehow he
just doesn't add up. He offers his brief war record as
proof of his fitness for power, his having been an altar
boy as proof of his piety, and never mind the rest of his
puzzling life since then.
This was a hard election to call, and it remains so
even in retrospect. The outcome was no more inevitable in
2004 than in 2000. It was another fluke. Both candidates
were terrible, but one of them had to win.
So why Bush? You might as well ask why a coin toss
turned up heads.
by Joe Sobran
November 3, 2004
Both guys blew it. Maybe Kerry blew it worse.
President George W. Bush had the advantage of
incumbency, fortified by a crisis that gave him an
opportunity to consolidate his support and increase his
popularity. The makings of a second-term landslide were
all there.
Instead he launched a wrong-headed war that divided
the country, turned out to lack the justifications he
claimed for it, and became a frustrating and scandalous
occupation. It will create problems for America around
the world for the foreseeable future.
Then the Democrats gave him an opponent with all the
excitement of a scarecrow -- a lackluster Massachusetts
liberal Bush might have prayed for. But Bush lost ground
as bad news poured in from Iraq and, after partly
rebuilding his lead, lost it again in the presidential
debates.
In the end Bush won his second term almost as
narrowly as he had won his first term in 2000. He richly
deserved to lose. He has given conservatism a bad name,
vastly increased government spending, and made this
country hated as never before. As a spokesman for
American principles, he is simply painful to listen to.
The fear and loathing Bush inspires were Kerry's
chief asset, but Kerry inspired little confidence in
himself. His notorious "flip-flopping" was really a
series of attempts to befog his dismal and robotic
liberal record, which hasn't been inconsistent at all.
Kerry too wasted opportunities. During the first
debate, for example, he brilliantly pitted Bush the
Younger against Bush the Elder, whose memoirs explained
why he cut the 1991 Gulf war short: to avoid trying to
occupy a bitterly hostile country with no exit strategy.
But Kerry didn't press this point; he rushed on to
something else. He could have simply asked, "Hasn't the
president read his father's book?" That would have been a
powerful campaign theme, embarrassing Bush and helping
give Kerry's vague position some definition and force.
Instead, Kerry allowed Bush to do the taunting, with
the charge that he had "no plan" for the occupation of
Iraq. But as Peter Beinart of THE NEW REPUBLIC has
observed, this amounts to accusing Kerry of having no
plan for cleaning up the mess Bush himself has made! If
true, and it is, it's more an indictment of Bush's
policies than of Kerry's inability. Bush has created an
insoluble problem. But Kerry didn't dare say that. It
would have sounded pessimistic, "defeatist," which is of
course un-American. Only optimism is patriotic.
But Kerry ran a joyless, wholly unimaginative
campaign, and in an important respect he is even less
eloquent than Bush. Bush is clumsy, but he at least uses
simple, highly charged words that move people. Kerry
talks like a committee report, earning an undeserved
reputation for "nuance" when he just bores and confuses.
You know what Bush stands for, even if you don't like it.
You still don't know what Kerry stands for, even if you
think you know what he might do.
The Democrats made the mistake of thinking that
because Kerry lacked definition, he was "electable." The
truth is that because he lacked definition, he lacked
positive appeal. Even his liberalism seems more
perfunctory than passionate. His bleatings about his
"faith" were empty and unconvincing.
The most preposterous moment of the campaign was
surely Kerry's recollection that his dying mother, only a
couple of years ago, told him, "Remember: integrity,
integrity, integrity!" It tells you a lot about Kerry
that he would even tell that story, expecting anyone to
believe it, let alone find it edifying. A dying woman
feels it urgent to tell her middle-aged son about
integrity? This must be the weirdest bit of mother-son
dialogue since just before Janet Leigh stepped into the
shower.
But that's Kerry for you: a bit weird. Somehow he
just doesn't add up. He offers his brief war record as
proof of his fitness for power, his having been an altar
boy as proof of his piety, and never mind the rest of his
puzzling life since then.
This was a hard election to call, and it remains so
even in retrospect. The outcome was no more inevitable in
2004 than in 2000. It was another fluke. Both candidates
were terrible, but one of them had to win.
So why Bush? You might as well ask why a coin toss
turned up heads.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
From The New York Times:
'Moral Suicide,' à la Wolfe
By David Brooks
t's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel; hundreds of people do it every few years. First, out of the thousands of sociological details Wolfe gets right, you pick out some he gets wrong (thus establishing your superior hipness). You mention that he obsesses over the superficial details of life while you ignore his moral intent (thus hinting at your own superior depth). Then you graciously allow that many of Wolfe's scenes are hilarious, while lamenting that his characters are not fully developed. Then you call it a day.
But since Wolfe takes risks in his novels to describe the moral climate of the age, it seems only fair that we at least take the chance his books offer to debate the more serious things he's trying to get at.
His latest, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is about a young woman who leaves Sparta, a small town in North Carolina, and enters an elite university. She finds all the rules of life there are dissolved: the rules of courtship, the rules of decorum and polite conversation.
The social rules have dissolved because the morality that used to undergird them dissolved long ago. Wolfe sprinkles his book with observations about how the word "immoral" now seems obsolete, about how sophisticated people now reject the idea of absolute evil, about a hypermaterialistic neuroscience professor who can use the word "soul" only when it is in quotation marks.
Wolfe describes a society in which we still have vague notions about good and bad, virtue and vice, but the moral substructure that fits all those concepts together has been washed away. Everybody is left swirling about in a chaotic rush of desire and action, without a coherent code to make sense of it all.
Charlotte, like other Wolfe-ian heroes, is caught in a maelstrom. All these anarchic social patterns are blowing about her and engulfing her - the mixed-up world of hookups, coed bathrooms and white suburban frat boys trying to act gangsta.
Within the Hobbesian war for status, Charlotte lacks some solid spot to plant her feet and get her bearings. She is unable to step outside her immediate circumstances and judge her life according to some set of firm criteria.
All her life she has been a mannequin who racks up accomplishments. In a culture that prizes young people for how they can perform certain tasks, she has been adored, at least by adults, and given prizes, scholarships and expectations.
Honed to excel in academic settings, she's unprepared to face the moral tests thrown up by her sexuality and the sheer formlessness of her new life. She has never really even thought about the question of who she is and how she should actually live, because what she's really addicted to is the admiration she gets when she achieves what others expect her to achieve. When moral judgment and courage are called for, she's unprepared.
So she goes off in the middle of the book and commits what Wolfe calls an act of "moral suicide." Something inside her lets her know that she has committed a great wrong, and she's left alone and depressed with no one and nothing to guide her.
I don't agree with all of Wolfe's depiction of campus life. He overestimates the lingering self-confidence and prestige of the prep school elite. He undervalues the independence of collegiate women, and underplays the great yearning to do good that surges out of most college students. Life on campus isn't really as nasty as Wolfe describes it. Most students are responsible and prudential and thus not as ribald as Wolfe makes them out to be.
But he's located one of the paradoxes of the age. Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone. And they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity, where it's not clear if you're going out with the person you're having sex with, where it's not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.
In other words, we have constructed this great apparatus to fill their minds - with thousands of Ph.D.'s ready to serve. But when it comes to courage, which is the pre-eminent virtue since without it nothing else lasts, we often leave them with the gnawing sense that they really should develop it, though God knows how.
'Moral Suicide,' à la Wolfe
By David Brooks
t's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel; hundreds of people do it every few years. First, out of the thousands of sociological details Wolfe gets right, you pick out some he gets wrong (thus establishing your superior hipness). You mention that he obsesses over the superficial details of life while you ignore his moral intent (thus hinting at your own superior depth). Then you graciously allow that many of Wolfe's scenes are hilarious, while lamenting that his characters are not fully developed. Then you call it a day.
But since Wolfe takes risks in his novels to describe the moral climate of the age, it seems only fair that we at least take the chance his books offer to debate the more serious things he's trying to get at.
His latest, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is about a young woman who leaves Sparta, a small town in North Carolina, and enters an elite university. She finds all the rules of life there are dissolved: the rules of courtship, the rules of decorum and polite conversation.
The social rules have dissolved because the morality that used to undergird them dissolved long ago. Wolfe sprinkles his book with observations about how the word "immoral" now seems obsolete, about how sophisticated people now reject the idea of absolute evil, about a hypermaterialistic neuroscience professor who can use the word "soul" only when it is in quotation marks.
Wolfe describes a society in which we still have vague notions about good and bad, virtue and vice, but the moral substructure that fits all those concepts together has been washed away. Everybody is left swirling about in a chaotic rush of desire and action, without a coherent code to make sense of it all.
Charlotte, like other Wolfe-ian heroes, is caught in a maelstrom. All these anarchic social patterns are blowing about her and engulfing her - the mixed-up world of hookups, coed bathrooms and white suburban frat boys trying to act gangsta.
Within the Hobbesian war for status, Charlotte lacks some solid spot to plant her feet and get her bearings. She is unable to step outside her immediate circumstances and judge her life according to some set of firm criteria.
All her life she has been a mannequin who racks up accomplishments. In a culture that prizes young people for how they can perform certain tasks, she has been adored, at least by adults, and given prizes, scholarships and expectations.
Honed to excel in academic settings, she's unprepared to face the moral tests thrown up by her sexuality and the sheer formlessness of her new life. She has never really even thought about the question of who she is and how she should actually live, because what she's really addicted to is the admiration she gets when she achieves what others expect her to achieve. When moral judgment and courage are called for, she's unprepared.
So she goes off in the middle of the book and commits what Wolfe calls an act of "moral suicide." Something inside her lets her know that she has committed a great wrong, and she's left alone and depressed with no one and nothing to guide her.
I don't agree with all of Wolfe's depiction of campus life. He overestimates the lingering self-confidence and prestige of the prep school elite. He undervalues the independence of collegiate women, and underplays the great yearning to do good that surges out of most college students. Life on campus isn't really as nasty as Wolfe describes it. Most students are responsible and prudential and thus not as ribald as Wolfe makes them out to be.
But he's located one of the paradoxes of the age. Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone. And they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity, where it's not clear if you're going out with the person you're having sex with, where it's not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.
In other words, we have constructed this great apparatus to fill their minds - with thousands of Ph.D.'s ready to serve. But when it comes to courage, which is the pre-eminent virtue since without it nothing else lasts, we often leave them with the gnawing sense that they really should develop it, though God knows how.
Monday, November 15, 2004
How goes the culture war?
By Patrick Buchanan
Evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics who trooped to the polls in 11 states to reject the legalization of marriage between homosexuals are celebrating a great victory in America's culture war. And understandably so.
With "moral values" the surprise issue in campaign 2004, the Red States and George Bush prevailed by 3.5 million votes. Onward Christian soldiers.
Yet, within the West, in the ancient struggle for moral supremacy between secularism and Christianity, Christianity remains in retreat. Consider the moral condition of the cradle of the faith, Europe.
The very week gay marriage was being rejected here, Rocco Buttiglione, a devout Italian Catholic, was forced to withdraw his nomination as justice minister for Europe. Buttiglione's offense? He told the European Parliament that while he would enforce its laws against discrimination, he still believes homosexuality is a "sin."
Buttiglione added that single motherhood was an inferior way to raise children, that children needed both a mother and father.
Not long ago, such comments by a European politician would have been unexceptional – indeed, expected. But, across Europe, a firestorm erupted at Buttiglione's restatement of his Catholic beliefs. Greens, communists, socialists and liberals in the parliament warned commission president Jose Manuel Barroso that his entire slate would be rejected, were Buttiglione not removed.
The Economist explained the conflict thus: "A gulf has opened between mainstream European thought on a range of social issues and the unyielding Catholicism of Pope John Paul."
But the teaching of the Catholic Church on the immorality of homosexual acts is not an invention of John Paul II. This has been taught as Catholic doctrine for 2,000 years and held by all Christians to be moral truth until the late 20th century. The pope could not change this article of faith if he wished. His duty is to defend it.
Now, either Christianity has been teaching bigotry for 2,000 years or "mainstream European thought" is the pagan immorality of the old Roman Empire, all dressed up in lipstick and rouge.
Indeed, Europe has turned its face against its Christian past. In the new constitution of the European Union, just signed in Rome, all mention of Europe's debt to Christianity has been blotted out, just as out-of-favor Bolsheviks were erased from photos of Lenin and Stalin. As in Orwell's Ministry of Truth, the true heritage of Europe is being put down the memory hole.
In 1996, a proposed celebration of the 1,500th anniversary of the conversion of Clovis and the Franks to Christianity was canceled at the insistence of communists and socialists.
Europe is a continent where the churches are emptying out and the mosques filling up, a land of aging and shrinking populations and immigrant invasions. The Mother Continent is now being invaded and converted by the once-colonized.
Europe today has little in common with Red State America. For, even as Americans were rejecting gay marriage, Spain followed Holland and Belgium in granting homosexuals the right to marry, divorce and adopt.
But how far are we behind Europe in entering this brave new world?
Since World War II, divorce has become routine in the United States. Cohabitation among unmarried couples increased tenfold in the last 30 years. Abortion and sodomy are now constitutional rights.
Gay marriage has become the civil-rights cause of the college campuses. California has voted to fund embryonic stem-cell research. Assisted suicide has been voted into law in Oregon. De-Christianization of our public schools and institutions, begun half a century ago, proceeds apace, sanctioned and ordered by our federal courts.
Prime-time television has become a cultural sewer, but a swimming pool compared to cable and the Internet.
We live in a different country than the one some of us grew up in.
As Bob Dylan wrote, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The moral and social revolution of the '60s has set down permanent roots in our culture and claims as converts our elites from Hollywood to Harvard Yard.
What is happening is the ascendancy of the values of the French Revolution over the American, of the French Enlightenment over the church it set out to destroy, of the values of secular humanism over the values of family and faith.
Today, the Episcopal Church accepts homosexual marriage even in its hierarchy. The Catholic Church is largely silent on a Catholic candidate's embrace of abortion on demand. A Republican president declares himself in support of civil unions. His first lady opposes the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Traditionalists won a battle on Nov. 2, not a war.
By Patrick Buchanan
Evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics who trooped to the polls in 11 states to reject the legalization of marriage between homosexuals are celebrating a great victory in America's culture war. And understandably so.
With "moral values" the surprise issue in campaign 2004, the Red States and George Bush prevailed by 3.5 million votes. Onward Christian soldiers.
Yet, within the West, in the ancient struggle for moral supremacy between secularism and Christianity, Christianity remains in retreat. Consider the moral condition of the cradle of the faith, Europe.
The very week gay marriage was being rejected here, Rocco Buttiglione, a devout Italian Catholic, was forced to withdraw his nomination as justice minister for Europe. Buttiglione's offense? He told the European Parliament that while he would enforce its laws against discrimination, he still believes homosexuality is a "sin."
Buttiglione added that single motherhood was an inferior way to raise children, that children needed both a mother and father.
Not long ago, such comments by a European politician would have been unexceptional – indeed, expected. But, across Europe, a firestorm erupted at Buttiglione's restatement of his Catholic beliefs. Greens, communists, socialists and liberals in the parliament warned commission president Jose Manuel Barroso that his entire slate would be rejected, were Buttiglione not removed.
The Economist explained the conflict thus: "A gulf has opened between mainstream European thought on a range of social issues and the unyielding Catholicism of Pope John Paul."
But the teaching of the Catholic Church on the immorality of homosexual acts is not an invention of John Paul II. This has been taught as Catholic doctrine for 2,000 years and held by all Christians to be moral truth until the late 20th century. The pope could not change this article of faith if he wished. His duty is to defend it.
Now, either Christianity has been teaching bigotry for 2,000 years or "mainstream European thought" is the pagan immorality of the old Roman Empire, all dressed up in lipstick and rouge.
Indeed, Europe has turned its face against its Christian past. In the new constitution of the European Union, just signed in Rome, all mention of Europe's debt to Christianity has been blotted out, just as out-of-favor Bolsheviks were erased from photos of Lenin and Stalin. As in Orwell's Ministry of Truth, the true heritage of Europe is being put down the memory hole.
In 1996, a proposed celebration of the 1,500th anniversary of the conversion of Clovis and the Franks to Christianity was canceled at the insistence of communists and socialists.
Europe is a continent where the churches are emptying out and the mosques filling up, a land of aging and shrinking populations and immigrant invasions. The Mother Continent is now being invaded and converted by the once-colonized.
Europe today has little in common with Red State America. For, even as Americans were rejecting gay marriage, Spain followed Holland and Belgium in granting homosexuals the right to marry, divorce and adopt.
But how far are we behind Europe in entering this brave new world?
Since World War II, divorce has become routine in the United States. Cohabitation among unmarried couples increased tenfold in the last 30 years. Abortion and sodomy are now constitutional rights.
Gay marriage has become the civil-rights cause of the college campuses. California has voted to fund embryonic stem-cell research. Assisted suicide has been voted into law in Oregon. De-Christianization of our public schools and institutions, begun half a century ago, proceeds apace, sanctioned and ordered by our federal courts.
Prime-time television has become a cultural sewer, but a swimming pool compared to cable and the Internet.
We live in a different country than the one some of us grew up in.
As Bob Dylan wrote, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The moral and social revolution of the '60s has set down permanent roots in our culture and claims as converts our elites from Hollywood to Harvard Yard.
What is happening is the ascendancy of the values of the French Revolution over the American, of the French Enlightenment over the church it set out to destroy, of the values of secular humanism over the values of family and faith.
Today, the Episcopal Church accepts homosexual marriage even in its hierarchy. The Catholic Church is largely silent on a Catholic candidate's embrace of abortion on demand. A Republican president declares himself in support of civil unions. His first lady opposes the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Traditionalists won a battle on Nov. 2, not a war.
From National Review:
Gettin’ Our Scots-Irish Up
Country music reflects America’s spirit.
By Mac Owens
I am fortunate to have been given the opportunity to review Jim Webb's magnificent new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, for NRODT. It is a wonderful social history of an individualistic, stubborn, rebellious people responsible for creating America's strongest cultural force.
A particularly powerful component of this culture is country music. Webb calls country music "a uniquely American phenomenon," a "hypnotic and emotionally powerful musical style" that evolved from its Celtic origins in the mists of Scotland and Ireland.
Country music is at the heart of the Scots-Irish culture....In the hollows through those earlier years the dulcimer found its plaintive notes, the traditionally exquisite violin turned into such a hot fiddle that some warned it came from the devil [think Charlie Daniels: "The Devil came Down to Georgia"], and the banjar, a native African instrument made with a gourd, evolved into the hillbilly banjo.
Indeed, anyone who wants to understand the Scots-Irish in America would do well to begin by listening to this genre.
It is no accident that Webb describes the importance of country music for the Scots-Irish in his chapter entitled "Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray." Country music is about real life, about "hard living, cheating hearts, and good-looking women." It's also about sin and redemption. Country music teaches that actions have consequences, and no one has ever conveyed this reality more clearly than the hard-living, hard-drinking George Jones. The titles of his songs tell it all: "From Hillbilly Heaven to Honky-Tonk Hell," "Hell Stays Open All Night Long," "The Man that You Once Knew," "He Stopped Loving Her Today," and "I've Had Choices."
I've had choices, since the day that I was born.
There were voices, that told me right from wrong.
If I had listened, no I wouldn't be here today,
Living and dying, with the choices I've made.
Country music teaches these lessons in a way that puts to shame most of what passes for poetry these days. Consider what I believe to be the greatest country song of all time: "Amarillo By Morning," by the incomparable George Strait.
Amarillo by morning, Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got, Is just what I've got on...
They took my saddle in Houston, Broke my leg in Santa Fe
Lost my wife and a girlfriend, Somewhere along the way....
Amarillo by morning, Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got, Is just what I've got on
I ain't got a dime, But what I've got is mine
I ain't rich, But Lord I'm free
Amarillo by morning, Amarillo's where I'll be.
Or "Whiskey Lullaby," by Brad Paisley and Alison Krause:
She put him out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette
She broke his heart, he spent his whole life tryin' to forget
We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
Until the night.
He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away her memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees.
Country music can be overtly religious, which, of course, scares the dickens out of secular elites in this country. Consider Jimmy Wayne's "I Love You This Much":
He can't remember the times that he thought
Does my daddy love me?
Probably not
But that didn't stop him from wishing that he did
Didn't keep from wanting or worshipping him
He guesses he saw him about once a year
He could still feel the way he felt
Standing in tears
Stretching his arms out as far as they'd go
Whispering daddy, I want you to know.
Chorus
I love you this much and I'm waiting on you
To make up your mind, do you love me too?
However long it takes
I'm never giving up
No matter what, I love you this much.
He grew to hate him for what he had done
'Cause what kind of a father, could do that to his son
He said 'damn you daddy', the day that he died
The man didn't blink, but the little boy cried.
Chorus
Half way through the service
While the choir sang a hymn
He looked up above the preacher
And he sat and stared at him
He said "Forgive me father"
When he realized
That he hadn't been unloved or alone all his life
His arms were stretched out as far as they'd go
Nailed to the cross, for the whole world to know.
Chorus
But even a man of faith can lose it — at least for a while — if the burden is great enough. The next time you get a chance, listen to Alan Jackson sing "you left my heart as empty as a Monday-morning church" about a man who has just buried his wife.
As Webb observes, when the Scots-Irish aren't praying, they are often fighting, singing, or sinning in other ways. Despite the admonition of countless fire-and-brimstone preachers from time immemorial, the Scots-Irish have lived the, ahem, secular life to the fullest. As an old Marine, the drinkin'-and-fightin' strain of country music has always appealed to me (not that I have ever engaged in such rowdy behavior, of course). To my way of thinking, there's nothing like the in-your-face music of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Jr., Aaron Tippin, and Toby Keith.
And we shouldn't forget the rowdy girls. I love the ladies — Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, June Carter Cash, Reba, Faith Hill, and the rest — but I have always had a soft spot for the wild ones: Tanya Tucker and my latest favorite, Gretchen Philips, the redneck woman who's here for the party.
I may not be a ten but the boys say I clean up good
And if I gave 'em half a chance for some rowdy romance you know they would.
The Scots-Irish have a 2000-year-old military tradition, so it's not surprising that country music is also overtly patriotic. Who can forget Alan Jackson's 9/11 musical memorial, "Where Were You?" or Toby Keith's moderate response to the terrorists, "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" ("we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way")?
Country music looks to tradition for continuity. There's nothing like a "ghost of Hank Williams" song. So Alan Jackson sings about "Midnight in Montgomery":
Midnight in Montgomery, silver eagle, lonely road
I was on my way to Mobile for a big New Years Eve show
I stopped for just a minute to see a friend outside of town
Put my collar up, found his name, and felt the wind die down
Then a drunk man in a cowboy hat took me by surprise
Wearing shiny boots, a Nudi suit and haunting haunted eyes.
He said, "Friend it's good to see you, it's nice to know you care"
Then the wind picked up and he was gone
Was he ever really there?
'Cause it's midnight in Montgomery
Just hear that whippoorwill
See the stars light up the purple sky
Feel that lonesome chill
When the wind it's right, you'll hear his songs
Smell whiskey in the air
Midnight in Montgomery
He's always singing there.
Of course, the elites in this nation hate country music just as they hate what Webb describes as the Scots-Irish culture. So after the elections, novelist Jane Smiley wrote in Slate that
The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. . . . Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. . . . Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are — they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. . . .
Well, to Ms. Smiley and her fellow "elites," from us country-music fans: As Aaron Tippin sings in a different context, "Jane — kiss this!"
— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
Gettin’ Our Scots-Irish Up
Country music reflects America’s spirit.
By Mac Owens
I am fortunate to have been given the opportunity to review Jim Webb's magnificent new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, for NRODT. It is a wonderful social history of an individualistic, stubborn, rebellious people responsible for creating America's strongest cultural force.
A particularly powerful component of this culture is country music. Webb calls country music "a uniquely American phenomenon," a "hypnotic and emotionally powerful musical style" that evolved from its Celtic origins in the mists of Scotland and Ireland.
Country music is at the heart of the Scots-Irish culture....In the hollows through those earlier years the dulcimer found its plaintive notes, the traditionally exquisite violin turned into such a hot fiddle that some warned it came from the devil [think Charlie Daniels: "The Devil came Down to Georgia"], and the banjar, a native African instrument made with a gourd, evolved into the hillbilly banjo.
Indeed, anyone who wants to understand the Scots-Irish in America would do well to begin by listening to this genre.
It is no accident that Webb describes the importance of country music for the Scots-Irish in his chapter entitled "Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray." Country music is about real life, about "hard living, cheating hearts, and good-looking women." It's also about sin and redemption. Country music teaches that actions have consequences, and no one has ever conveyed this reality more clearly than the hard-living, hard-drinking George Jones. The titles of his songs tell it all: "From Hillbilly Heaven to Honky-Tonk Hell," "Hell Stays Open All Night Long," "The Man that You Once Knew," "He Stopped Loving Her Today," and "I've Had Choices."
I've had choices, since the day that I was born.
There were voices, that told me right from wrong.
If I had listened, no I wouldn't be here today,
Living and dying, with the choices I've made.
Country music teaches these lessons in a way that puts to shame most of what passes for poetry these days. Consider what I believe to be the greatest country song of all time: "Amarillo By Morning," by the incomparable George Strait.
Amarillo by morning, Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got, Is just what I've got on...
They took my saddle in Houston, Broke my leg in Santa Fe
Lost my wife and a girlfriend, Somewhere along the way....
Amarillo by morning, Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got, Is just what I've got on
I ain't got a dime, But what I've got is mine
I ain't rich, But Lord I'm free
Amarillo by morning, Amarillo's where I'll be.
Or "Whiskey Lullaby," by Brad Paisley and Alison Krause:
She put him out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette
She broke his heart, he spent his whole life tryin' to forget
We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
Until the night.
He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away her memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees.
Country music can be overtly religious, which, of course, scares the dickens out of secular elites in this country. Consider Jimmy Wayne's "I Love You This Much":
He can't remember the times that he thought
Does my daddy love me?
Probably not
But that didn't stop him from wishing that he did
Didn't keep from wanting or worshipping him
He guesses he saw him about once a year
He could still feel the way he felt
Standing in tears
Stretching his arms out as far as they'd go
Whispering daddy, I want you to know.
Chorus
I love you this much and I'm waiting on you
To make up your mind, do you love me too?
However long it takes
I'm never giving up
No matter what, I love you this much.
He grew to hate him for what he had done
'Cause what kind of a father, could do that to his son
He said 'damn you daddy', the day that he died
The man didn't blink, but the little boy cried.
Chorus
Half way through the service
While the choir sang a hymn
He looked up above the preacher
And he sat and stared at him
He said "Forgive me father"
When he realized
That he hadn't been unloved or alone all his life
His arms were stretched out as far as they'd go
Nailed to the cross, for the whole world to know.
Chorus
But even a man of faith can lose it — at least for a while — if the burden is great enough. The next time you get a chance, listen to Alan Jackson sing "you left my heart as empty as a Monday-morning church" about a man who has just buried his wife.
As Webb observes, when the Scots-Irish aren't praying, they are often fighting, singing, or sinning in other ways. Despite the admonition of countless fire-and-brimstone preachers from time immemorial, the Scots-Irish have lived the, ahem, secular life to the fullest. As an old Marine, the drinkin'-and-fightin' strain of country music has always appealed to me (not that I have ever engaged in such rowdy behavior, of course). To my way of thinking, there's nothing like the in-your-face music of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Jr., Aaron Tippin, and Toby Keith.
And we shouldn't forget the rowdy girls. I love the ladies — Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, June Carter Cash, Reba, Faith Hill, and the rest — but I have always had a soft spot for the wild ones: Tanya Tucker and my latest favorite, Gretchen Philips, the redneck woman who's here for the party.
I may not be a ten but the boys say I clean up good
And if I gave 'em half a chance for some rowdy romance you know they would.
The Scots-Irish have a 2000-year-old military tradition, so it's not surprising that country music is also overtly patriotic. Who can forget Alan Jackson's 9/11 musical memorial, "Where Were You?" or Toby Keith's moderate response to the terrorists, "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" ("we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way")?
Country music looks to tradition for continuity. There's nothing like a "ghost of Hank Williams" song. So Alan Jackson sings about "Midnight in Montgomery":
Midnight in Montgomery, silver eagle, lonely road
I was on my way to Mobile for a big New Years Eve show
I stopped for just a minute to see a friend outside of town
Put my collar up, found his name, and felt the wind die down
Then a drunk man in a cowboy hat took me by surprise
Wearing shiny boots, a Nudi suit and haunting haunted eyes.
He said, "Friend it's good to see you, it's nice to know you care"
Then the wind picked up and he was gone
Was he ever really there?
'Cause it's midnight in Montgomery
Just hear that whippoorwill
See the stars light up the purple sky
Feel that lonesome chill
When the wind it's right, you'll hear his songs
Smell whiskey in the air
Midnight in Montgomery
He's always singing there.
Of course, the elites in this nation hate country music just as they hate what Webb describes as the Scots-Irish culture. So after the elections, novelist Jane Smiley wrote in Slate that
The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. . . . Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. . . . Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are — they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. . . .
Well, to Ms. Smiley and her fellow "elites," from us country-music fans: As Aaron Tippin sings in a different context, "Jane — kiss this!"
— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
From The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Keith Olbermann's Dan Rather moment
By Bill Steigerwald
So, America, what's sloppier?
Our shaky elections system or the jayvee journalism practiced on Keith Olbermann's fake MSNBC news show "Countdown With Keith Olbermann"?
I cast all of my votes for Olbermann.
The recovering sportscaster is openly liberal and his irreverent, run-and-quip offense is easy to detest. But I kind of like him and his fast-paced infotainment show, which has the fatal misfortune to occupy the 8 p.m. time slot opposite Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor."
Olbermann, however, really made a Dan Rather of himself last week.
He never directly charged that Republicans stole the election or demanded that Karl Rove should be picked up for questioning by the U.N. But for 15 minutes on Monday, Olbermann pointed to a "small but blood-curdling group of reports of voting irregularities and possible fraud" from across the country, topped it with some vague partisan innuendo from Democrat Congressman John Conyers, and acted like he deserved a Peabody Award for Civic Journalism.
On Tuesday I checked out some of Olbermann's claims. Using a high-tech personal communication device professional journalists refer to as a "telephone," I called an elections bureau person in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (greater Cleveland), where, as Olbermann pointed out, 93,000 extra votes had been inexplicably cast Nov. 2.
It turns out the votes were "a computer anomaly" that didn't affect or reflect the official vote count. And those 18,472 votes Olbermann said were counted in Fairview Park, a Cleveland suburb that had only 13,342 registered voters? Absentee ballots from many precincts had been grouped together by the computer and credited to Fairview Park, where 8,421 voted.
But what about Florida, the Vote-Fraud State?
Olbermann had made a big sinister deal about 29 counties whose registered voters were predominantly Democrat "suddenly" voting "overwhelmingly for Mr. Bush." He slyly left the impression that massive vote-stealing could have been perpetrated by ballot tabulating companies like Diebold, whose bosses were known Bush allies.
I called Baker County, Fla., Olbermann's first example. Yes, twanged the cheery election lady, 69 percent of voters in her rural county on the Georgia border are registered Democrat. Yes, "Mr. Boosh" got 78 percent of the vote and trounced Kerry, 7,738 to 2,180.
This was nothing new or untoward, she said. Folks in Florida's Panhandle are conservative, especially on social and moral issues. They mostly register as Democrats and vote that way on local issues, but in national and state elections, they go Republican. Been doing so for years.
I heard the same explanation from election ladies in the tiny and large counties of Calhoun, Lafayette, Escambia, Highland and Liberty, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by as much as 9 to 1. Yet Bush beat Kerry in every one.
If they had cared, Olbermann and the producers of "Countdown" could have discovered these facts before they began flogging their sloppy Internet-spawned conspiracy Monday and Tueday nights. Non-Republican journalists on Salon.com and Slate.com. had no trouble explaining/debunking it. Nor did bloggers.
By Wednesday, Olbermann's fever had cooled. But he had abandoned the Florida conspiracy angle, explained Cleveland's oddities and mostly was yukking it up about a Unilect computer that ate 4,000 votes in North Carolina.
Still, he and his guest enabler from the grownup world of journalism, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, were concerned about the wussiness of the news media. Why had no major print or electronic outlet pursued this shameful story?
I don't know, boys. Maybe it's because before they start making wild charges of "vote fraud," real journalists pick up a telephone.
Keith Olbermann's Dan Rather moment
By Bill Steigerwald
So, America, what's sloppier?
Our shaky elections system or the jayvee journalism practiced on Keith Olbermann's fake MSNBC news show "Countdown With Keith Olbermann"?
I cast all of my votes for Olbermann.
The recovering sportscaster is openly liberal and his irreverent, run-and-quip offense is easy to detest. But I kind of like him and his fast-paced infotainment show, which has the fatal misfortune to occupy the 8 p.m. time slot opposite Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor."
Olbermann, however, really made a Dan Rather of himself last week.
He never directly charged that Republicans stole the election or demanded that Karl Rove should be picked up for questioning by the U.N. But for 15 minutes on Monday, Olbermann pointed to a "small but blood-curdling group of reports of voting irregularities and possible fraud" from across the country, topped it with some vague partisan innuendo from Democrat Congressman John Conyers, and acted like he deserved a Peabody Award for Civic Journalism.
On Tuesday I checked out some of Olbermann's claims. Using a high-tech personal communication device professional journalists refer to as a "telephone," I called an elections bureau person in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (greater Cleveland), where, as Olbermann pointed out, 93,000 extra votes had been inexplicably cast Nov. 2.
It turns out the votes were "a computer anomaly" that didn't affect or reflect the official vote count. And those 18,472 votes Olbermann said were counted in Fairview Park, a Cleveland suburb that had only 13,342 registered voters? Absentee ballots from many precincts had been grouped together by the computer and credited to Fairview Park, where 8,421 voted.
But what about Florida, the Vote-Fraud State?
Olbermann had made a big sinister deal about 29 counties whose registered voters were predominantly Democrat "suddenly" voting "overwhelmingly for Mr. Bush." He slyly left the impression that massive vote-stealing could have been perpetrated by ballot tabulating companies like Diebold, whose bosses were known Bush allies.
I called Baker County, Fla., Olbermann's first example. Yes, twanged the cheery election lady, 69 percent of voters in her rural county on the Georgia border are registered Democrat. Yes, "Mr. Boosh" got 78 percent of the vote and trounced Kerry, 7,738 to 2,180.
This was nothing new or untoward, she said. Folks in Florida's Panhandle are conservative, especially on social and moral issues. They mostly register as Democrats and vote that way on local issues, but in national and state elections, they go Republican. Been doing so for years.
I heard the same explanation from election ladies in the tiny and large counties of Calhoun, Lafayette, Escambia, Highland and Liberty, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by as much as 9 to 1. Yet Bush beat Kerry in every one.
If they had cared, Olbermann and the producers of "Countdown" could have discovered these facts before they began flogging their sloppy Internet-spawned conspiracy Monday and Tueday nights. Non-Republican journalists on Salon.com and Slate.com. had no trouble explaining/debunking it. Nor did bloggers.
By Wednesday, Olbermann's fever had cooled. But he had abandoned the Florida conspiracy angle, explained Cleveland's oddities and mostly was yukking it up about a Unilect computer that ate 4,000 votes in North Carolina.
Still, he and his guest enabler from the grownup world of journalism, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, were concerned about the wussiness of the news media. Why had no major print or electronic outlet pursued this shameful story?
I don't know, boys. Maybe it's because before they start making wild charges of "vote fraud," real journalists pick up a telephone.
From The Christian Post:
Pro-family Groups say New Kinsey Film Leaves a Story Untold
Katherine T. Phan
The film on Alfred Kinsey gleans over the child sex abuse and pedophilia in Kinsey's experiments and falsely glorifies the researcher, say pro-family groups.
A new movie about a entomologist turned sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey, is drawing sharp criticism from pro-family groups who say the film falsely glorifies him and covers up the devastating reality of his erroneous research.
The movie titled, ”Kinsey, Let’s talk about sex,” which is scheduled for screenings beginning Nov. 12 before being released nationwide next week, is based on the life of Alfred Kinsey, whose controversial sex experiments, involving both children and adults, spurred the sexual revolution, according to some pro-family groups.
“What Hollywood isn’t telling the public is, well. . .very telling,” explained Matthew Pinto, co-founder of Catholic Outreach. “The movie portrays the life and work of a man who was almost single-handedly responsible for dismantling many of the sexual mores that governed American culture for two centuries.”
Director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture & Family Institute Robert Knight, who directed a 1995 documentary about Kinsey's research on child sexuality, said the movie is not telling the complete story.
“The film paints Kinsey as a flawed but sincere cultural hero,” Knight said. “However, “it ignores the massive fraud, Kinsey’s sado-masochistic practices, and barely touches on his use of data on children in sex experiments.”
One of the most highly controversial pieces of data within Kinsey’s 1948 published work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was “Table 34” showing the results of sexual experiments on children as young as 2 months old. Kinsey then published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.
Critics say Kinsey either manufactured the data on child sexuality or sexually abused children in the name of science. They also question its validity since the majority of male participants in Kinsey’s study were pedophiles and prison inmates, whose results cannot be extrapolated to reflect the entire population.
"Research has since revealed that Kinsey solicited pedophiles from known pedophile organizations to assist in child sex experiments," said Michael Craven, the National Coalition's vice president for Religious and Cultural Affairs.
"Kinsey did not even attempt to conceal these facts as they are included directly within his infamous reports on male and female sexuality released in 1948 and 1953, respectively,” Craven continue. “These 'reports' are quite possibly the most cited and less read research ever conducted."
Family Research Council has produced a documentary on the children who were used in the experiments, titled “The Children of Table 34,” and has made it available on its website (www.frc.org).
Catholic Outreach said it is planning to protest the film screenings in several cities. It also has created a website, KinseyOutreach.com, and published “The Kinsey Corruption: An Exposé on the Most Influential "Scientist" of Our Time” to expose the misinformation surrounding Kinsey’s research.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), organization of 2,400 state legislators, said Kinsey’s research has also affected legislation concerning marriage and unions. ALEC published a report last month that examines the influence of the controversial Kinsey sex studies on the formation of legal and educational policies across the United States.
Former ALEC president Ray Haynes said, "As Kinsey intended, contemplated in the current debate are calls for 'discrimination' laws to protect the full range of sexual activities including transvestitism, transgenderism, polygamy, bestiality and the like and, in education, whether to teach our children all 'alternate' sexual acts as normal — or to teach chastity and abstinence until marriage."
In the report’s introduction, Haynes wrote: "Today, Kinsey's 'junk science' is the unquestioned foundation for all the legal, legislative and media debate on marriage and civil unions," said Focus on the Family's manager of abstinence policy, Linda Klepacki, noted that sex education in today’s classrooms stemmed from Kinsey’s findings.
"The basis of comprehensive sex education has been the fact that Kinsey 'proved' that we are sexual beings from birth," Klepacki said. "Kinsey's sex crimes have been covered up by zealous colleagues to further their agenda of free sex with any age at any time. . . We see it everywhere today in our expansive media and in public school sex education."
“Instead of being lionized,” said Knight, “Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist.”
katherine@christianpost.com
Pro-family Groups say New Kinsey Film Leaves a Story Untold
Katherine T. Phan
The film on Alfred Kinsey gleans over the child sex abuse and pedophilia in Kinsey's experiments and falsely glorifies the researcher, say pro-family groups.
A new movie about a entomologist turned sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey, is drawing sharp criticism from pro-family groups who say the film falsely glorifies him and covers up the devastating reality of his erroneous research.
The movie titled, ”Kinsey, Let’s talk about sex,” which is scheduled for screenings beginning Nov. 12 before being released nationwide next week, is based on the life of Alfred Kinsey, whose controversial sex experiments, involving both children and adults, spurred the sexual revolution, according to some pro-family groups.
“What Hollywood isn’t telling the public is, well. . .very telling,” explained Matthew Pinto, co-founder of Catholic Outreach. “The movie portrays the life and work of a man who was almost single-handedly responsible for dismantling many of the sexual mores that governed American culture for two centuries.”
Director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture & Family Institute Robert Knight, who directed a 1995 documentary about Kinsey's research on child sexuality, said the movie is not telling the complete story.
“The film paints Kinsey as a flawed but sincere cultural hero,” Knight said. “However, “it ignores the massive fraud, Kinsey’s sado-masochistic practices, and barely touches on his use of data on children in sex experiments.”
One of the most highly controversial pieces of data within Kinsey’s 1948 published work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was “Table 34” showing the results of sexual experiments on children as young as 2 months old. Kinsey then published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.
Critics say Kinsey either manufactured the data on child sexuality or sexually abused children in the name of science. They also question its validity since the majority of male participants in Kinsey’s study were pedophiles and prison inmates, whose results cannot be extrapolated to reflect the entire population.
"Research has since revealed that Kinsey solicited pedophiles from known pedophile organizations to assist in child sex experiments," said Michael Craven, the National Coalition's vice president for Religious and Cultural Affairs.
"Kinsey did not even attempt to conceal these facts as they are included directly within his infamous reports on male and female sexuality released in 1948 and 1953, respectively,” Craven continue. “These 'reports' are quite possibly the most cited and less read research ever conducted."
Family Research Council has produced a documentary on the children who were used in the experiments, titled “The Children of Table 34,” and has made it available on its website (www.frc.org).
Catholic Outreach said it is planning to protest the film screenings in several cities. It also has created a website, KinseyOutreach.com, and published “The Kinsey Corruption: An Exposé on the Most Influential "Scientist" of Our Time” to expose the misinformation surrounding Kinsey’s research.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), organization of 2,400 state legislators, said Kinsey’s research has also affected legislation concerning marriage and unions. ALEC published a report last month that examines the influence of the controversial Kinsey sex studies on the formation of legal and educational policies across the United States.
Former ALEC president Ray Haynes said, "As Kinsey intended, contemplated in the current debate are calls for 'discrimination' laws to protect the full range of sexual activities including transvestitism, transgenderism, polygamy, bestiality and the like and, in education, whether to teach our children all 'alternate' sexual acts as normal — or to teach chastity and abstinence until marriage."
In the report’s introduction, Haynes wrote: "Today, Kinsey's 'junk science' is the unquestioned foundation for all the legal, legislative and media debate on marriage and civil unions," said Focus on the Family's manager of abstinence policy, Linda Klepacki, noted that sex education in today’s classrooms stemmed from Kinsey’s findings.
"The basis of comprehensive sex education has been the fact that Kinsey 'proved' that we are sexual beings from birth," Klepacki said. "Kinsey's sex crimes have been covered up by zealous colleagues to further their agenda of free sex with any age at any time. . . We see it everywhere today in our expansive media and in public school sex education."
“Instead of being lionized,” said Knight, “Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist.”
katherine@christianpost.com
From washingtonpost.com:
Arafat's Legacy
He was single-minded, but not about statehood or a real peace.
By Charles Krauthammer
Monday, November 15, 2004
The outpouring of tributes to Yasser Arafat is marked by two themes: (1) his greatness as creator, sustainer and leader of the Palestinian cause, and (2) the abrupt opening of an opportunity for its success now that he is gone.
The fawning world leaders saying this seem oblivious to the obvious paradox. If he was such a great leader, how is it that he left his people so destitute, desperate, wounded and bereft that only his passing gives them a hope for a fulfillment of their deepest aspirations?
Arafat's apologists explain this by saying that is because he had one weakness: indecisiveness. In the end, he just could not pull the trigger. When offered the deal of the century by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000, he was somehow too conflicted, too ambivalent to say yes.
Ambivalent? Nonsense. Yasser Arafat was supremely decisive and single-minded. He was not complex and, regarding Israel's fate, never conflicted. Indeed the reason for his success, such as it was -- creating the Palestinian movement from which he derived fortune, fame and reverence -- was precisely his single-mindedness. Not about Palestinian statehood -- if that was his objective, he could have had his state years ago -- but about the elimination of Jewish statehood.
That was the theme of his entire life. Yes, he signed interim deals to get a foothold in Palestine. But that was always with the objective of continuing the fight from a better strategic position. It was never to conclude a lasting compromise or real peace with Israel.
That is why he died so far from his promised land. This promised land was never the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat founded Fatah in 1959 -- eight years before Israel even acquired these territories. His objective then, and until the day he died, was a Palestinian state built on the ruins of an eradicated Israel.
Bill Clinton was astonished when Arafat rejected the offer of a West Bank and Gaza state, turning down the opportunity to be its George Washington. Americans never understood that Arafat saw himself completely differently: as an anti-imperialist revolutionary in the mold of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Like them, his motto was "revolution unto victory." Total victory. No half loaf. And given Israel's stubborn refusal to die, Arafat's cause became sustaining the struggle -- the revolution -- indefinitely, almost as an end in itself.
It is for this reason that, while Arafat's death does open a first chance for peace since he took over the Palestinian movement four decades ago, that chance remains remote. Why? Because the revolution continues. Arafat made sure it would survive him. He created Palestinian nationalism and shaped it in a revolutionary mold that will take years, perhaps decades, to undo.
It is a legacy in two parts: means and ends. The means? Violence. Arafat invented modern terrorism: airplane hijackings, kidnappings and the spectacular mass murder, like the Olympic massacre of 1972. Others had tried it. Arafat perfected it. He turned terrorism into a brilliantly successful political instrument, a vehicle to international recognition and respect. The man who murdered more innocent Jews than anyone since Hitler died an international hero. The president of France bowed to his casket. The secretary general ordered U.N. flags to fly at half-staff.
Arafat also bequeathed a legacy of ends: uncompromising, irredentist ends. He didn't just reject any settlement that would leave Israel intact, thereby setting a precedent that any successor dare not violate. He also raised a new generation to ensure that rejection. Deploying every instrument of propaganda -- television, radio, newspapers and, most importantly, schools and summer camps for children -- his Palestinian Authority fed his people a diet of such virulent anti-Semitism and denial of the Jewish connection with the land that no successor will even be in position to contemplate breaking Arafat's rejectionist precedent.
Arafat's most cherished achievement was to so poison the well that the revolution -- until total victory -- continues long after he is gone. As soon as he died, the most murderous terrorist wing of his Fatah movement, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, changed its name to the Yasser Arafat Martyrs Brigades.
They understood their master. Which is why the prospects for peace upon his death are far more distant than the naifs (who got him wrong all through his life) now insist. Arafat's legacy -- the romanticization of violence, the rejection of Israel, the indoctrination of a new generation in intolerance and hatred -- will require a long time to undo. It will require years, perhaps even generations. It will require brave new Palestinian leaders who are the very antithesis of Yasser Arafat.
Arafat's Legacy
He was single-minded, but not about statehood or a real peace.
By Charles Krauthammer
Monday, November 15, 2004
The outpouring of tributes to Yasser Arafat is marked by two themes: (1) his greatness as creator, sustainer and leader of the Palestinian cause, and (2) the abrupt opening of an opportunity for its success now that he is gone.
The fawning world leaders saying this seem oblivious to the obvious paradox. If he was such a great leader, how is it that he left his people so destitute, desperate, wounded and bereft that only his passing gives them a hope for a fulfillment of their deepest aspirations?
Arafat's apologists explain this by saying that is because he had one weakness: indecisiveness. In the end, he just could not pull the trigger. When offered the deal of the century by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000, he was somehow too conflicted, too ambivalent to say yes.
Ambivalent? Nonsense. Yasser Arafat was supremely decisive and single-minded. He was not complex and, regarding Israel's fate, never conflicted. Indeed the reason for his success, such as it was -- creating the Palestinian movement from which he derived fortune, fame and reverence -- was precisely his single-mindedness. Not about Palestinian statehood -- if that was his objective, he could have had his state years ago -- but about the elimination of Jewish statehood.
That was the theme of his entire life. Yes, he signed interim deals to get a foothold in Palestine. But that was always with the objective of continuing the fight from a better strategic position. It was never to conclude a lasting compromise or real peace with Israel.
That is why he died so far from his promised land. This promised land was never the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat founded Fatah in 1959 -- eight years before Israel even acquired these territories. His objective then, and until the day he died, was a Palestinian state built on the ruins of an eradicated Israel.
Bill Clinton was astonished when Arafat rejected the offer of a West Bank and Gaza state, turning down the opportunity to be its George Washington. Americans never understood that Arafat saw himself completely differently: as an anti-imperialist revolutionary in the mold of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Like them, his motto was "revolution unto victory." Total victory. No half loaf. And given Israel's stubborn refusal to die, Arafat's cause became sustaining the struggle -- the revolution -- indefinitely, almost as an end in itself.
It is for this reason that, while Arafat's death does open a first chance for peace since he took over the Palestinian movement four decades ago, that chance remains remote. Why? Because the revolution continues. Arafat made sure it would survive him. He created Palestinian nationalism and shaped it in a revolutionary mold that will take years, perhaps decades, to undo.
It is a legacy in two parts: means and ends. The means? Violence. Arafat invented modern terrorism: airplane hijackings, kidnappings and the spectacular mass murder, like the Olympic massacre of 1972. Others had tried it. Arafat perfected it. He turned terrorism into a brilliantly successful political instrument, a vehicle to international recognition and respect. The man who murdered more innocent Jews than anyone since Hitler died an international hero. The president of France bowed to his casket. The secretary general ordered U.N. flags to fly at half-staff.
Arafat also bequeathed a legacy of ends: uncompromising, irredentist ends. He didn't just reject any settlement that would leave Israel intact, thereby setting a precedent that any successor dare not violate. He also raised a new generation to ensure that rejection. Deploying every instrument of propaganda -- television, radio, newspapers and, most importantly, schools and summer camps for children -- his Palestinian Authority fed his people a diet of such virulent anti-Semitism and denial of the Jewish connection with the land that no successor will even be in position to contemplate breaking Arafat's rejectionist precedent.
Arafat's most cherished achievement was to so poison the well that the revolution -- until total victory -- continues long after he is gone. As soon as he died, the most murderous terrorist wing of his Fatah movement, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, changed its name to the Yasser Arafat Martyrs Brigades.
They understood their master. Which is why the prospects for peace upon his death are far more distant than the naifs (who got him wrong all through his life) now insist. Arafat's legacy -- the romanticization of violence, the rejection of Israel, the indoctrination of a new generation in intolerance and hatred -- will require a long time to undo. It will require years, perhaps even generations. It will require brave new Palestinian leaders who are the very antithesis of Yasser Arafat.
From The Washington Times:
Mini clash of civilizations
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Published November 15, 2004
The Netherlands has long been Europe's most permissive society -- everything from window-shopping in Amsterdam for scantily clad hookers (50 to 80 Euros for 15 to 30 minutes) to hashish aroma in marijuana smoke-filled cafes. The government and the sex workers union protect some 30,000 women. The pimps are landlords and the aging prostitutes are quickly replaced with a steady influx from the former Soviet republics and East European countries.
A Dutch brothel chain is suing the government for failing to green-light the "Yum Yum Caviar Club" at Schiphol Airport "to cater to stressed travelers in transit." The government responded that plans for an airport bordello were on hold pending new building and space in the departure areas.
It was such Dutch tolerance, pragmatism and guilt about the country's colonial past that allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Muslim Indonesia (a Dutch colony from the 17th century until World War II) to flood into tiny Holland. Today, Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the Netherlands' four largest cities.
There are 1 million Muslims (6 percent of the population) now living in Europe's most crowded small country. Some 30,000 new Muslims arrive every year. They tend to live among themselves, with their own schools, mosques and restaurants. Most are horrified by what they view as sacrilegious in their own religion. Their imams speak no Dutch and know nothing of the Netherlands' history and culture.
Western Europe as a whole gets about half a million new Muslims a year. Most make their way from sub-Sahara Africa and North Africa, illegal immigrants smuggled by boat to Spain and Italy where they are free to travel with impunity to the rest of Europe. Thus, Europe's Muslim population has doubled to 20 million in the last 10 years.
The anti-Muslim backlash spawned far right-wing parties. Belgium's highest court this week ruled the anti-immigration Flemish Bloc party -- the most popular political force in Dutch-speaking Flanders -- will lose the government subsidies allocated to all parties, and is now forced to disband. It quickly renamed itself the Flemish Interest Party, and toned down its inflammatory rhetoric.
Europe's largest mosque is in Rotterdam, which is also Europe's busiest port. Half the people there are of foreign origin. Unemployment among the Muslims is high. And the Dutch live-and-let-live permissiveness made this nation, a quarter of it below sea level and protected by 1,500 dikes, ideal breeding grounds for Muslim fundamentalism and the kind of extremism that spawned one of Osama bin Laden's European fan clubs. But for years the government was in denial about Islamist extremism in what is otherwise a well-managed society.
Dutch Muslims, repelled by the freewheeling lifestyle, sought solace with radical imams in the mosques. There men outnumber women. And women are relegated to a part of the mosque where they can be neither seen nor heard.
What Dutch filmmaker and columnist Theo Van Gogh saw as the shabby treatment of females throughout the Muslim community led him to produce documentaries that portrayed Muslim men as tormentors of women, especially their wives. One recent scathingly critical Van Gogh film's carried the message that Islam promotes violence against women. Last week, Van Gogh, a grandnephew of the painter, was shot as he cycled to work. He managed to get up and stagger across the street to his building where he collapsed. The assailant followed him and slit his throat before pinning to his chest with a knife a five-page manifesto that called on Muslims to rise against the "infidel enemies" in the West.
Dutch security authorities launched a nationwide manhunt for the murderer of the popular Van Gogh. A hand grenade injured four policemen as they went after two suspects in a working-class district of The Hague. Air space over the capital was closed for a day as Dutch Special Forces lay siege to a building and the two surrendered after a 14-hour standoff.
Ten others were arrested, including the prime suspect, a Muhammad Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, who was charged with murder and suspected links to an al Qaeda group. A two-time visitor to Saudi Arabia, he had doffed Western clothes in favor of Arab dress.
Both Mr. Bouyeri and his close friend Samir Azzouz, 18, another Dutch Moroccan, moved between five apartments in an Amsterdam suburb favored by Islamist radicals. They were on Dutch intelligence's terrorist watch list as they communicated with like-minded extremist cells throughout Western Europe.
Last year, Mr. Azzouz was stopped in Ukraine and turned back as he made his way to Chechnya to fight the Russians. Released by the Dutch and then rearrested because bomb-making equipment and detailed maps of public buildings were found with his fingerprints, he is in jail awaiting trial.
Tit-for-tat terrorism quickly followed Van Gogh's assassination in widely scattered parts of the otherwise peaceful Netherlands. An arson attack against a Muslim school was followed in the same village of Uden by a Muslim attack against a primary school that was set ablaze and completely gutted. Then a small bomb damaged a Muslim school in Eindhoven. A score of mosques and churches were targeted by arson attacks in one week. Two young men were also arrested for putting a video on the Internet that promised 72 virgins in paradise for the "beheading" of Geert Wilders, a popular right-wing politician who decries the dangers of radical Islam.
Two years ago, Pim Fortuyn, a populist politician who called for a halt to immigration, by simply saying the Netherlands was "full," was similarly gunned down.
Over the past year, the presence of 1,300 Dutch troops in Iraq triggered repeated threats from Muslim groups. Last summer, a last will and testament was found when an 18-year-old man of Moroccan-born parents was arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in the Netherlands. The list of targets included the Dutch parliament, Schiphol and the nuclear reactor at Borssele. Floor plans of several public buildings were also found. The former student wrote in his will he wants his newborn son to live "in the spirit of jihad."
Described by a police psychiatrist as "fearless and fatalistic," the student "gradually fell under the spell of ideas about the oppression of Islam." During a court hearing, his family remained seated as all present rose when the judge entered. The mother was covered in a head-to-toe chador in Muslim fundamentalist fashion.
Islamist extremists even penetrated the Dutch intelligence service with a double agent. One officer was arrested last September. The government hastily drafted a Patriot Act-like law which enables it to strip citizens of their citizenship and deport them if they engage in extremist acts.
Could the Netherlands be a curtain-raiser for a wider clash of civilizations in the old Continent? Hundreds of thousands of young Muslims in Europe are potential jihadis, according to European intelligence chiefs speaking not for publication. They have been warning their political masters about the tinderboxes that many Muslim communities have become. Jihadi volunteers are known to have left for Iraq from a number of Muslim slums on the outskirts of major European cities.
Recruitment posters come on regular European and Arabic news programs -- from the Abu Ghraib prison pictures to the battle of Fallujah.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
Mini clash of civilizations
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Published November 15, 2004
The Netherlands has long been Europe's most permissive society -- everything from window-shopping in Amsterdam for scantily clad hookers (50 to 80 Euros for 15 to 30 minutes) to hashish aroma in marijuana smoke-filled cafes. The government and the sex workers union protect some 30,000 women. The pimps are landlords and the aging prostitutes are quickly replaced with a steady influx from the former Soviet republics and East European countries.
A Dutch brothel chain is suing the government for failing to green-light the "Yum Yum Caviar Club" at Schiphol Airport "to cater to stressed travelers in transit." The government responded that plans for an airport bordello were on hold pending new building and space in the departure areas.
It was such Dutch tolerance, pragmatism and guilt about the country's colonial past that allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Muslim Indonesia (a Dutch colony from the 17th century until World War II) to flood into tiny Holland. Today, Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the Netherlands' four largest cities.
There are 1 million Muslims (6 percent of the population) now living in Europe's most crowded small country. Some 30,000 new Muslims arrive every year. They tend to live among themselves, with their own schools, mosques and restaurants. Most are horrified by what they view as sacrilegious in their own religion. Their imams speak no Dutch and know nothing of the Netherlands' history and culture.
Western Europe as a whole gets about half a million new Muslims a year. Most make their way from sub-Sahara Africa and North Africa, illegal immigrants smuggled by boat to Spain and Italy where they are free to travel with impunity to the rest of Europe. Thus, Europe's Muslim population has doubled to 20 million in the last 10 years.
The anti-Muslim backlash spawned far right-wing parties. Belgium's highest court this week ruled the anti-immigration Flemish Bloc party -- the most popular political force in Dutch-speaking Flanders -- will lose the government subsidies allocated to all parties, and is now forced to disband. It quickly renamed itself the Flemish Interest Party, and toned down its inflammatory rhetoric.
Europe's largest mosque is in Rotterdam, which is also Europe's busiest port. Half the people there are of foreign origin. Unemployment among the Muslims is high. And the Dutch live-and-let-live permissiveness made this nation, a quarter of it below sea level and protected by 1,500 dikes, ideal breeding grounds for Muslim fundamentalism and the kind of extremism that spawned one of Osama bin Laden's European fan clubs. But for years the government was in denial about Islamist extremism in what is otherwise a well-managed society.
Dutch Muslims, repelled by the freewheeling lifestyle, sought solace with radical imams in the mosques. There men outnumber women. And women are relegated to a part of the mosque where they can be neither seen nor heard.
What Dutch filmmaker and columnist Theo Van Gogh saw as the shabby treatment of females throughout the Muslim community led him to produce documentaries that portrayed Muslim men as tormentors of women, especially their wives. One recent scathingly critical Van Gogh film's carried the message that Islam promotes violence against women. Last week, Van Gogh, a grandnephew of the painter, was shot as he cycled to work. He managed to get up and stagger across the street to his building where he collapsed. The assailant followed him and slit his throat before pinning to his chest with a knife a five-page manifesto that called on Muslims to rise against the "infidel enemies" in the West.
Dutch security authorities launched a nationwide manhunt for the murderer of the popular Van Gogh. A hand grenade injured four policemen as they went after two suspects in a working-class district of The Hague. Air space over the capital was closed for a day as Dutch Special Forces lay siege to a building and the two surrendered after a 14-hour standoff.
Ten others were arrested, including the prime suspect, a Muhammad Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, who was charged with murder and suspected links to an al Qaeda group. A two-time visitor to Saudi Arabia, he had doffed Western clothes in favor of Arab dress.
Both Mr. Bouyeri and his close friend Samir Azzouz, 18, another Dutch Moroccan, moved between five apartments in an Amsterdam suburb favored by Islamist radicals. They were on Dutch intelligence's terrorist watch list as they communicated with like-minded extremist cells throughout Western Europe.
Last year, Mr. Azzouz was stopped in Ukraine and turned back as he made his way to Chechnya to fight the Russians. Released by the Dutch and then rearrested because bomb-making equipment and detailed maps of public buildings were found with his fingerprints, he is in jail awaiting trial.
Tit-for-tat terrorism quickly followed Van Gogh's assassination in widely scattered parts of the otherwise peaceful Netherlands. An arson attack against a Muslim school was followed in the same village of Uden by a Muslim attack against a primary school that was set ablaze and completely gutted. Then a small bomb damaged a Muslim school in Eindhoven. A score of mosques and churches were targeted by arson attacks in one week. Two young men were also arrested for putting a video on the Internet that promised 72 virgins in paradise for the "beheading" of Geert Wilders, a popular right-wing politician who decries the dangers of radical Islam.
Two years ago, Pim Fortuyn, a populist politician who called for a halt to immigration, by simply saying the Netherlands was "full," was similarly gunned down.
Over the past year, the presence of 1,300 Dutch troops in Iraq triggered repeated threats from Muslim groups. Last summer, a last will and testament was found when an 18-year-old man of Moroccan-born parents was arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in the Netherlands. The list of targets included the Dutch parliament, Schiphol and the nuclear reactor at Borssele. Floor plans of several public buildings were also found. The former student wrote in his will he wants his newborn son to live "in the spirit of jihad."
Described by a police psychiatrist as "fearless and fatalistic," the student "gradually fell under the spell of ideas about the oppression of Islam." During a court hearing, his family remained seated as all present rose when the judge entered. The mother was covered in a head-to-toe chador in Muslim fundamentalist fashion.
Islamist extremists even penetrated the Dutch intelligence service with a double agent. One officer was arrested last September. The government hastily drafted a Patriot Act-like law which enables it to strip citizens of their citizenship and deport them if they engage in extremist acts.
Could the Netherlands be a curtain-raiser for a wider clash of civilizations in the old Continent? Hundreds of thousands of young Muslims in Europe are potential jihadis, according to European intelligence chiefs speaking not for publication. They have been warning their political masters about the tinderboxes that many Muslim communities have become. Jihadi volunteers are known to have left for Iraq from a number of Muslim slums on the outskirts of major European cities.
Recruitment posters come on regular European and Arabic news programs -- from the Abu Ghraib prison pictures to the battle of Fallujah.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
Cosby's on right track, sticking to his guns
by Sheryl McCarthy
November 15, 2004
'Let them stay mad," Bill Cosby told CNN's Paula Zahn last week.
He was speaking of the flak he's catching from African-Americans since he criticized the behavior of some low-income blacks last spring during a commemoration of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. He angered some black folks, who thought his remarks were insensitive and inflammatory, and that he resorted to ugly racial stereotypes.
But Cosby has no plans to shut up. "This is about little children and people not giving them better choices," the 67 year-old actor-comedian told Zahn. "How long you gonna whisper about a smallpox epidemic in your apartment building when bodies are coming out under the sheets?"
Cosby's onto something. Since May he's taken his no-nonsense message on the road, instigating town hall-style meetings in black communities, where teachers, ministers and other role models discuss how they can improve the outcomes of young blacks.
Among his targets:
Parents who teach the wrong values by buying their kids expensive clothes instead of educational aids.
Young people who who don't learn to speak proper English, thereby eliminating their chances of getting good jobs someday.
Black criminals who prey on others, but are then portrayed as victims by their communities.
At a Jesse Jackson confab in Chicago over the summer, Cosby kept up the scolding, despite being accused of airing African-Americans' dirty laundry in public. Cosby shot back that this dirty laundry is displayed on a daily basis by black youths who use profanity, call each other the "N" word, and think they're hip even thought they're barely literate.
He blasted blacks who hurl the same racial slurs at each other that are used by racist whites, and who don't take advantage of the opportunities that were so hard won by the heroes and heroines of the civil rights movement. And he offered no soothing words for black men who passed up the chance to get a high school education, but now vent their anger at not being able to earn a good living on the women in their lives.
Good advice, but it continues to grate on black sensibilities. At a conference of black newspaper columnists I attended in Cambridge, Mass., last week, some of my colleagues said they thought Cosby's criticisms unfairly blamed the black victims of racism for their situation. Mostly, however, they worried that his comments would fan white people's negative feelings about blacks, without forcing them to acknowledge the role that racism and unequal opportunity plays in causing this kind of behavior.
But I don't think Cosby needs any lectures from us on the hard times blacks have had in this country. And as Elmer Smith, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist, pointed out, we black columnists had spent a lot of time discussing Cosby, without discussing any of the issues he's raised.
We blacks tend to point the finger first and engage in self-examination later. In discussing our problems, white racism is often our default position, even though the real issue for many of us these days isn't lack of opportunity, but the failure to take advantage of the opportunities available.
We also need to get over our obsession with what white people think of us. Last week Cosby said he doesn't care what they think. "I'm addressing my people, period."
It's appropriate that the man who in many ways has become a father figure to both black and white Americans is now speaking to his immediate "family" in the way a tough, but loving father does. Which is to say, "Shape up and get yourselves together, or else stop complaining." I, for one, appreciate his counsel. And a father who tells his family the truth shouldn't worry about whether the neighbors like it or not.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
by Sheryl McCarthy
November 15, 2004
'Let them stay mad," Bill Cosby told CNN's Paula Zahn last week.
He was speaking of the flak he's catching from African-Americans since he criticized the behavior of some low-income blacks last spring during a commemoration of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. He angered some black folks, who thought his remarks were insensitive and inflammatory, and that he resorted to ugly racial stereotypes.
But Cosby has no plans to shut up. "This is about little children and people not giving them better choices," the 67 year-old actor-comedian told Zahn. "How long you gonna whisper about a smallpox epidemic in your apartment building when bodies are coming out under the sheets?"
Cosby's onto something. Since May he's taken his no-nonsense message on the road, instigating town hall-style meetings in black communities, where teachers, ministers and other role models discuss how they can improve the outcomes of young blacks.
Among his targets:
Parents who teach the wrong values by buying their kids expensive clothes instead of educational aids.
Young people who who don't learn to speak proper English, thereby eliminating their chances of getting good jobs someday.
Black criminals who prey on others, but are then portrayed as victims by their communities.
At a Jesse Jackson confab in Chicago over the summer, Cosby kept up the scolding, despite being accused of airing African-Americans' dirty laundry in public. Cosby shot back that this dirty laundry is displayed on a daily basis by black youths who use profanity, call each other the "N" word, and think they're hip even thought they're barely literate.
He blasted blacks who hurl the same racial slurs at each other that are used by racist whites, and who don't take advantage of the opportunities that were so hard won by the heroes and heroines of the civil rights movement. And he offered no soothing words for black men who passed up the chance to get a high school education, but now vent their anger at not being able to earn a good living on the women in their lives.
Good advice, but it continues to grate on black sensibilities. At a conference of black newspaper columnists I attended in Cambridge, Mass., last week, some of my colleagues said they thought Cosby's criticisms unfairly blamed the black victims of racism for their situation. Mostly, however, they worried that his comments would fan white people's negative feelings about blacks, without forcing them to acknowledge the role that racism and unequal opportunity plays in causing this kind of behavior.
But I don't think Cosby needs any lectures from us on the hard times blacks have had in this country. And as Elmer Smith, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist, pointed out, we black columnists had spent a lot of time discussing Cosby, without discussing any of the issues he's raised.
We blacks tend to point the finger first and engage in self-examination later. In discussing our problems, white racism is often our default position, even though the real issue for many of us these days isn't lack of opportunity, but the failure to take advantage of the opportunities available.
We also need to get over our obsession with what white people think of us. Last week Cosby said he doesn't care what they think. "I'm addressing my people, period."
It's appropriate that the man who in many ways has become a father figure to both black and white Americans is now speaking to his immediate "family" in the way a tough, but loving father does. Which is to say, "Shape up and get yourselves together, or else stop complaining." I, for one, appreciate his counsel. And a father who tells his family the truth shouldn't worry about whether the neighbors like it or not.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
Sunday, November 14, 2004
From The New York Times:
U2: The Catharsis in the Cathedral
By Jon Pareles
DUBLIN -- THROUGH the windows of Hanover Quay, the rehearsal and recording studio that U2 has called HQ for the last two decades, streetlights made rippling patterns on the Liffey, the river that runs through Dublin, matching the shimmering overtones coming from the Edge's guitars as the band ran through songs from its new album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" (Interscope).
Gearing up for a year of promotion and touring to follow the release of the album on Nov. 23, U2 was methodically at work, translating multilayered studio creations into songs that would allow four musicians to rock arenas again. U2 is to play a handful of small-scale shows this month, including an appearance Nov. 20 on "Saturday Night Live," and will start a world tour of arenas and stadiums on March 1 in Miami.
The Edge had two dozen guitars at his feet, and an assistant noted which guitar, which effect and which setting would be used for each section of each song. Larry Mullen on drums and Adam Clayton on bass were scrutinizing rhythm tracks, trying to strip away clutter without losing swing.
As the band plunged into "Vertigo" and "All Because of You," the sound of early U2 - the Who's power chords blasted into U2's own domain of spaciousness and yearning - was merged with an added 25 years of experience, experiments and world-beating success. Standing with one leg forward and one behind him, Bono rocked back and forth and belted, "I'm at a place called Vertigo/It's everything I wish I didn't know/Except you give me something I can feel."
Tensions between intellect and passion, and between pragmatism and faith, drive the songs on "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb"; so do burly guitar riffs, galvanizing crescendos and fearlessly emotional vocals. The album easily stands alongside the best work of U2's career - "Boy," "War," "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby" - and, song for song, it's more consistent than any of them.
U2 is almost alone now among rock bands in its determination to merge lofty ambition and pop impact. With songs that determinedly blur divine and earthly love, seeking grace as often as romance, the band doesn't pander to vulgar impulses. Yet U2 has no interest in being a hipsters' cult band; it has always aimed for audiences that can fill arenas, where its music is most at home. "At our very best, at anyone's very best, the great rock bands could always make a pop 45," Bono insisted.
Since the release of "Boy" in 1980, U2 has gone through musical phases that coincided with the decades. The group arrived with a wide-open, pealing sound that immediately separated itself from punk rock and metal, and has been imitated ever since. Next came an infatuation with American blues and country. Then, in the 1990's, U2 swerved from rootsy to futuristic, deliberately setting aside its old sound to toy with distortion, funk and electronics. Each metamorphosis produced at least one superb album.
"It's really more my fault than Edge's, the putting on of blinkers and going in a different direction," Bono said. "I felt that the spirit of the group was so strong that you could destroy it, that you could burn the flesh of it and still know who it was, and that's what we did through the 1990's."
In 2000, with "All That You Can't Leave Behind," U2 decided to stop fleeing its past and let its music ring more clearly. The four songs that start the album became anthems of hope and determination, particularly after Sept. 11, but the rest was anticlimactic. "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" also embraces the open chords and resonant spaces of early U2, but it has more punch, more abandon, some genuine grandeur and some glimmers of humor.
While the Edge's tremolo-picked sustained notes and arpeggios are familiar, the music is by no means a retreat to the chiming marches of early U2; instead, it encompasses grunge pugnacity, glam-rock stomps and the sudden benevolent fanfares of "Abbey Road"-era Beatles. The music scales dynamic peaks and dives into abysses and whirlpools, only to resolve into the next chorus. Every song is memorable.
As usual, the songs don't bother with petty topics: Bono sings about mortality, the meaning of life, social justice, fame, science and the heroic intimacy of love. For much of the album, particularly the slow-building ballads "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" and "One Step Closer," the lyrics reflect on Bono's admiring and contentious relationship with his father, who died in 2001.
Many of the songs ponder faith. The album's finale, "Yahweh," is nothing less than a prayer. When Bono was singing nonsense words to come up with a melody for the song, he found himself singing "Yahweh," a Hebrew name of God.
"There's cathedrals and the alleyway in our music," Bono said. "I think the alleyway is usually on the way to the cathedral, where you can hear your own footsteps and you're slightly nervous and looking over your shoulder and wondering if there's somebody following you. And then you get there and you realize there was somebody following you: It's God."
Bono's mother was a Protestant and his father a Catholic, and when he was a schoolboy he was severely beaten up when walking through a Catholic neighborhood in the uniform of his Protestant school. Speaking just days after the American presidential election, which might have hinged on the votes of evangelical Christians, Bono said: "I don't talk about my faith very much, because the people you might want to talk with, you don't want to hang out with.
"To have faith in a time of religious fervor is a worry. And, you know, I do have faith, and I'm worried about even the subject because of the sort of fanaticism that is the next-door neighbor of faith. The trick in the next few years will be not to decry the religious instinct, but to accept that this is a hugely important part of people's lives. And at the same time to be very wary of people who believe that theirs is the only way. Unilateralism before God is dangerous."
"Religion is ceremony and symbolism," he added. "Writers live off symbolism, and performers live off ceremony. We're made for religion! And yet you see this country, Ireland, ripped over religion, and you see the Middle East. Right now, unless tolerance comes with fervor, you'll see it in the United States."
That night, Bono was off to his other job, as freelance do-gooder. "Saving the world is now a daily chore," he joked. He was going to Madrid to appear at a fashion show for Edun, a company he and his wife own; the clothes are made in Africa from textiles manufactured in developing countries, a practical symbol of Bono's conviction that poor countries need trade as much as aid. He was wearing a pair of Edun jeans along with his ubiquitous sunglasses, a black sports jacket and a dark blue shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a wooden cross around his neck.
While the album was being made, Bono was juggling his political missions - among them debt relief for poor countries and getting AIDS drugs to Africa - with his duties in U2, which has always written its songs cooperatively. That left the Edge more time to work up structures and arrangements to await Bono's melodies and lyrics. "It turns out I'm much better in small doses," Bono said. "I don't need to be around for the mining," he added. "They put on these helmets with lights on them and they go into very dark places, and they're crawling around looking for a break in the plumbing or fixing wires. I have to go to a dark place also, but it isn't, ah, technical. It's a place of honesty. Call it soul, call it spirit, but it's the place where you're really living."
The other band members say they don't mind Bono's comings and goings. "I wouldn't trade my place with him for a billion dollars, not in a million years," Mr. Mullen said. "I make music, that's why I joined a band."
"When Bono's away there is a different chemistry," Mr. Clayton said. There's much more contact and interaction between the three of us than perhaps when Bono's there, because he has certain needs and demands. It can be like a benevolent dictatorship. But he works so hard on the band's behalf, and just because he's not in the room it doesn't mean he's having a better time."
While Bono was meeting with world leaders, the Edge was stockpiling aggressive guitar parts. "The album started off with a throwdown from Edge," Bono said. " 'O.K., you want rock 'n' roll? This is rock 'n' roll.' He had a whole bunch of guitar riffs up his sleeve, and believe me, that is not always the way. Him turning up with rifferama is just, 'Hello! Stop press!' "
U2 started working with the producer Chris Thomas, who had made albums with the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music, but the results didn't satisfy the band. "We wanted that directness, but in the end it felt too one-dimensional," Bono said. Early this year, U2 turned to Steve Lillywhite, who produced the band's first albums. "He understands how we improvise," Bono said, "and we went back to the playpen." As the album deadline neared, U2 also brought in some of its other past producers - Flood, Daniel Lanois, Nellee Hooper - and hooked up with a young keyboard programmer, Jacknife Lee.
Although it took a long time to work out structures for the songs, many of the performances were recorded quickly. "The paint is fresh, even though it took a while," Bono said. "It's just that there's a lot of mixing the ink." The vocal for "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," a song Bono had struggled with for years, was recorded in a single take during a visit to the studio from Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Records.
A conversation with Bono inevitably takes broad leaps from personal memories to economic theories to music, the state of U2 and the state of the world. More as citations than as name-dropping, Bono mentioned his discussions with, among others, Ethiopia's prime minister; Wim Wenders's cinematographer; Beyoncé Knowles; Johnny Cash; and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer. Apple is manufacturing a black-and-red U2 iPod with the album stored on it, and later this month its iTunes Music Store is releasing "The Complete U2," a digital album of 400 songs, including 25 previously unreleased. To inaugurate the band's partnership with Apple, U2 and its song "Vertigo" appear in an iPod commercial for which, Bono said, the band was not paid.
"My idea of selling out is when you do naff things for money," he said, going on to define "naff" as very embarrassing. "That's subjective, but I think it's quite clear: don't embarrass your fans, they've given you a good life. Our audience are thrilled about the Apple thing. They can't believe their band has its own iPod.
"I have a very strong sense of survival," he added, "and I know that 'Vertigo' is not the biggest pop song in the world. I know that riff has to be hammered home to become a pop song. With the commercial, we had a rock video coming on during the baseball playoffs in a way a record company could not afford.'"
U2's other response to the age of downloading is to offer a collectors' item for fans who want something more than a CD: a special edition of the album with a bonus DVD and a hardcover book including paintings by Mr. Mullen, photographs by Mr. Clayton, odd Internet finds from the Edge and handwritten lyrics and manifestos by Bono. One explains how to dismantle an atomic bomb: "Don't build a bomb!"
Before heading to the airport, Bono eased the band into "Original of the Species," a love song that also observes, "Some things you shouldn't get too good at/Like smiling, crying and celebrity." With a chuckle, he said: "I might try a little guitar - don't get upset. There's a very good reason why I'm the singer." He didn't disgrace himself, though, and after he took his leave, a visitor noted the neat lettering on the pickguard of his vintage Gretsch guitar: "The Goal Is Soul," it read.
U2: The Catharsis in the Cathedral
By Jon Pareles
DUBLIN -- THROUGH the windows of Hanover Quay, the rehearsal and recording studio that U2 has called HQ for the last two decades, streetlights made rippling patterns on the Liffey, the river that runs through Dublin, matching the shimmering overtones coming from the Edge's guitars as the band ran through songs from its new album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" (Interscope).
Gearing up for a year of promotion and touring to follow the release of the album on Nov. 23, U2 was methodically at work, translating multilayered studio creations into songs that would allow four musicians to rock arenas again. U2 is to play a handful of small-scale shows this month, including an appearance Nov. 20 on "Saturday Night Live," and will start a world tour of arenas and stadiums on March 1 in Miami.
The Edge had two dozen guitars at his feet, and an assistant noted which guitar, which effect and which setting would be used for each section of each song. Larry Mullen on drums and Adam Clayton on bass were scrutinizing rhythm tracks, trying to strip away clutter without losing swing.
As the band plunged into "Vertigo" and "All Because of You," the sound of early U2 - the Who's power chords blasted into U2's own domain of spaciousness and yearning - was merged with an added 25 years of experience, experiments and world-beating success. Standing with one leg forward and one behind him, Bono rocked back and forth and belted, "I'm at a place called Vertigo/It's everything I wish I didn't know/Except you give me something I can feel."
Tensions between intellect and passion, and between pragmatism and faith, drive the songs on "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb"; so do burly guitar riffs, galvanizing crescendos and fearlessly emotional vocals. The album easily stands alongside the best work of U2's career - "Boy," "War," "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby" - and, song for song, it's more consistent than any of them.
U2 is almost alone now among rock bands in its determination to merge lofty ambition and pop impact. With songs that determinedly blur divine and earthly love, seeking grace as often as romance, the band doesn't pander to vulgar impulses. Yet U2 has no interest in being a hipsters' cult band; it has always aimed for audiences that can fill arenas, where its music is most at home. "At our very best, at anyone's very best, the great rock bands could always make a pop 45," Bono insisted.
Since the release of "Boy" in 1980, U2 has gone through musical phases that coincided with the decades. The group arrived with a wide-open, pealing sound that immediately separated itself from punk rock and metal, and has been imitated ever since. Next came an infatuation with American blues and country. Then, in the 1990's, U2 swerved from rootsy to futuristic, deliberately setting aside its old sound to toy with distortion, funk and electronics. Each metamorphosis produced at least one superb album.
"It's really more my fault than Edge's, the putting on of blinkers and going in a different direction," Bono said. "I felt that the spirit of the group was so strong that you could destroy it, that you could burn the flesh of it and still know who it was, and that's what we did through the 1990's."
In 2000, with "All That You Can't Leave Behind," U2 decided to stop fleeing its past and let its music ring more clearly. The four songs that start the album became anthems of hope and determination, particularly after Sept. 11, but the rest was anticlimactic. "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" also embraces the open chords and resonant spaces of early U2, but it has more punch, more abandon, some genuine grandeur and some glimmers of humor.
While the Edge's tremolo-picked sustained notes and arpeggios are familiar, the music is by no means a retreat to the chiming marches of early U2; instead, it encompasses grunge pugnacity, glam-rock stomps and the sudden benevolent fanfares of "Abbey Road"-era Beatles. The music scales dynamic peaks and dives into abysses and whirlpools, only to resolve into the next chorus. Every song is memorable.
As usual, the songs don't bother with petty topics: Bono sings about mortality, the meaning of life, social justice, fame, science and the heroic intimacy of love. For much of the album, particularly the slow-building ballads "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" and "One Step Closer," the lyrics reflect on Bono's admiring and contentious relationship with his father, who died in 2001.
Many of the songs ponder faith. The album's finale, "Yahweh," is nothing less than a prayer. When Bono was singing nonsense words to come up with a melody for the song, he found himself singing "Yahweh," a Hebrew name of God.
"There's cathedrals and the alleyway in our music," Bono said. "I think the alleyway is usually on the way to the cathedral, where you can hear your own footsteps and you're slightly nervous and looking over your shoulder and wondering if there's somebody following you. And then you get there and you realize there was somebody following you: It's God."
Bono's mother was a Protestant and his father a Catholic, and when he was a schoolboy he was severely beaten up when walking through a Catholic neighborhood in the uniform of his Protestant school. Speaking just days after the American presidential election, which might have hinged on the votes of evangelical Christians, Bono said: "I don't talk about my faith very much, because the people you might want to talk with, you don't want to hang out with.
"To have faith in a time of religious fervor is a worry. And, you know, I do have faith, and I'm worried about even the subject because of the sort of fanaticism that is the next-door neighbor of faith. The trick in the next few years will be not to decry the religious instinct, but to accept that this is a hugely important part of people's lives. And at the same time to be very wary of people who believe that theirs is the only way. Unilateralism before God is dangerous."
"Religion is ceremony and symbolism," he added. "Writers live off symbolism, and performers live off ceremony. We're made for religion! And yet you see this country, Ireland, ripped over religion, and you see the Middle East. Right now, unless tolerance comes with fervor, you'll see it in the United States."
That night, Bono was off to his other job, as freelance do-gooder. "Saving the world is now a daily chore," he joked. He was going to Madrid to appear at a fashion show for Edun, a company he and his wife own; the clothes are made in Africa from textiles manufactured in developing countries, a practical symbol of Bono's conviction that poor countries need trade as much as aid. He was wearing a pair of Edun jeans along with his ubiquitous sunglasses, a black sports jacket and a dark blue shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a wooden cross around his neck.
While the album was being made, Bono was juggling his political missions - among them debt relief for poor countries and getting AIDS drugs to Africa - with his duties in U2, which has always written its songs cooperatively. That left the Edge more time to work up structures and arrangements to await Bono's melodies and lyrics. "It turns out I'm much better in small doses," Bono said. "I don't need to be around for the mining," he added. "They put on these helmets with lights on them and they go into very dark places, and they're crawling around looking for a break in the plumbing or fixing wires. I have to go to a dark place also, but it isn't, ah, technical. It's a place of honesty. Call it soul, call it spirit, but it's the place where you're really living."
The other band members say they don't mind Bono's comings and goings. "I wouldn't trade my place with him for a billion dollars, not in a million years," Mr. Mullen said. "I make music, that's why I joined a band."
"When Bono's away there is a different chemistry," Mr. Clayton said. There's much more contact and interaction between the three of us than perhaps when Bono's there, because he has certain needs and demands. It can be like a benevolent dictatorship. But he works so hard on the band's behalf, and just because he's not in the room it doesn't mean he's having a better time."
While Bono was meeting with world leaders, the Edge was stockpiling aggressive guitar parts. "The album started off with a throwdown from Edge," Bono said. " 'O.K., you want rock 'n' roll? This is rock 'n' roll.' He had a whole bunch of guitar riffs up his sleeve, and believe me, that is not always the way. Him turning up with rifferama is just, 'Hello! Stop press!' "
U2 started working with the producer Chris Thomas, who had made albums with the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music, but the results didn't satisfy the band. "We wanted that directness, but in the end it felt too one-dimensional," Bono said. Early this year, U2 turned to Steve Lillywhite, who produced the band's first albums. "He understands how we improvise," Bono said, "and we went back to the playpen." As the album deadline neared, U2 also brought in some of its other past producers - Flood, Daniel Lanois, Nellee Hooper - and hooked up with a young keyboard programmer, Jacknife Lee.
Although it took a long time to work out structures for the songs, many of the performances were recorded quickly. "The paint is fresh, even though it took a while," Bono said. "It's just that there's a lot of mixing the ink." The vocal for "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," a song Bono had struggled with for years, was recorded in a single take during a visit to the studio from Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Records.
A conversation with Bono inevitably takes broad leaps from personal memories to economic theories to music, the state of U2 and the state of the world. More as citations than as name-dropping, Bono mentioned his discussions with, among others, Ethiopia's prime minister; Wim Wenders's cinematographer; Beyoncé Knowles; Johnny Cash; and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer. Apple is manufacturing a black-and-red U2 iPod with the album stored on it, and later this month its iTunes Music Store is releasing "The Complete U2," a digital album of 400 songs, including 25 previously unreleased. To inaugurate the band's partnership with Apple, U2 and its song "Vertigo" appear in an iPod commercial for which, Bono said, the band was not paid.
"My idea of selling out is when you do naff things for money," he said, going on to define "naff" as very embarrassing. "That's subjective, but I think it's quite clear: don't embarrass your fans, they've given you a good life. Our audience are thrilled about the Apple thing. They can't believe their band has its own iPod.
"I have a very strong sense of survival," he added, "and I know that 'Vertigo' is not the biggest pop song in the world. I know that riff has to be hammered home to become a pop song. With the commercial, we had a rock video coming on during the baseball playoffs in a way a record company could not afford.'"
U2's other response to the age of downloading is to offer a collectors' item for fans who want something more than a CD: a special edition of the album with a bonus DVD and a hardcover book including paintings by Mr. Mullen, photographs by Mr. Clayton, odd Internet finds from the Edge and handwritten lyrics and manifestos by Bono. One explains how to dismantle an atomic bomb: "Don't build a bomb!"
Before heading to the airport, Bono eased the band into "Original of the Species," a love song that also observes, "Some things you shouldn't get too good at/Like smiling, crying and celebrity." With a chuckle, he said: "I might try a little guitar - don't get upset. There's a very good reason why I'm the singer." He didn't disgrace himself, though, and after he took his leave, a visitor noted the neat lettering on the pickguard of his vintage Gretsch guitar: "The Goal Is Soul," it read.
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