From VDare.com:

November’s Job Numbers: Good for immigrants; Bad for the Rest of Us
By Edwin S. Rubenstein

U.S. job market sprang back last month from a hurricane-induced slowdown as nonfarm employers added 215,000 workers, according to the government’s report on business payrolls.

But another report—the one based on a survey of households—reported a 52,000 job decline from October. More important, from our perspective, is the composition of that decline:

Non-Hispanic employment fell by 183,000;

Hispanic employment rose by 131,000.

Thus non-Hispanics bore the full brunt of the November job decline, according to the Household survey.

To be sure, the Household survey is dismissed by MSM pundits as quirky and unreliable. Yet over the past the past year it has closely tracked the more widely cited Payroll Survey: Both surveys report that about 2 million jobs were created over the past 12 months. But only the Household Survey presents monthly job data by race and ethnicity.

Neither Survey asks about immigration status. (Memo to Bush Administration: why not direct them to add this useful question?). But because about half of the Hispanics in the U.S. are foreign-born, we use it as a proxy for immigrant impact on American workers.

Note this statistical wrinkle: the overall Hispanic unemployment rate rose to 6.0 percent in November from 5.8 percent the prior month. The black unemployment rate increased even more—to 10.6 percent from October’s 9.1. The white unemployment rate fell slightly, to 4.3 percent from 4.4 percent.

The big difference, of course, was that Hispanics poured into the labor force (their labor force participation rate went up) while Blacks and whites retreated (their’s went down.)

After taking labor force participation rates into account, the real increase in the black unemployed is larger, and the increase in the Hispanic unemployed smaller, than their respective unemployment rates indicate.

In a word, November’s data paint a classic picture of Hispanics (and, by extension, immigrants) displacing and discouraging blacks and unskilled whites in American labor force.

Since the start of the Bush Administration in January 2001 Hispanic employment has risen by 2.9 million, or 17.8 percent, while non-Hispanic employment increased by 1.9 million, or 1.6 percent.

The ratio of the growth rates, which we call VDAWDI (the VDare.com American Worker Displacement Index) rose to a record 116.0 in November, from 115.0 the prior month.

Edwin S. Rubenstein is President of ESR Research Economic Consultants in Indianapolis.

From Carolina Blue:

Calm, Cool and (Mostly) Collected
Adam Lucas on the win over Kentucky.

Dec. 3, 2005

LEXINGTON, Ky.--As is his custom, Roy Williams wrote three things on the Carolina locker room board before Saturday's game against Kentucky. The first word was "poise."

Carolina held it all the way until about 3:15 p.m.

That's when Ashley Judd walked into the general aviation terminal at Lexington's Bluegrass Airport.

This is a team that can stand at the free throw line in front of 23,860 screaming maniacs and coolly deposit game-clinching free throws.

They can go into fabled Rupp Arena, where Carolina had never won a game, and pull out an 83-79 victory.

They can start an alleged "rebuilding" season 4-1, sending ripples across a college basketball landscape that included some preseason prognostications of missing the NCAA Tournament.

But let one of the world's most famous movie stars walk into the building and some of that poise vanishes.

Wes Miller had just played his third consecutive "best game as a Tar Heel," a streak that began against UC-Santa Barbara and continued against Kentucky with some devilish defense on the Wildcat backcourt. Tyler Hansbrough was coming off his first game as the designated bad guy, as his every move was booed by a crowd that apparently expected him to pick Kentucky over Carolina.

But when they saw Judd walk through the terminal, every pretense vanished.

Miller stood by the door to the runway, transparently killing time until Judd would walk by.

"Dude, tell her you just scored 12 points," someone told him.

"That is Ashley Judd," he said, apparently rendered powerless to do anything other than state the obvious.

His freshman partner in crime, Hansbrough, joined him by the door.

"Tyler, let's just stand here for a minute," Miller said with a smile bigger than any he had flashed in Rupp.

This is the kind of upperclassman leadership a team has to have.

Judd eventually walked by, having recognized that she was joined by the entire Tar Heel squad that had just vanquished her beloved Wildcats. She passed by Miller and Hansbrough on the way to the jet she was using. For the first time all day, they got tense.

She turned back to them on the way out the door.

"It's not nice to snicker," she said with just the right timing and just the right smile, and for the first time all day, they looked like a couple of college guys.

And then she was out on the runway, where she would pass by oblivious associate athletic director Norwood Teague, who would later utter the most famous words of the day: "No way, was Ashley Judd in there?!"

This, Tar Heel fans, is the definition of a pretty good day: you go into Lexington and win for the first time since 1968. You score a career-high 12 points, including three critical three-pointers and the new designation as the team's defensive stopper when the Heels go to offensive/defensive substitutions late in the game. And then you head back to the plane, where Ashley Judd smiles and talks to you on her way out the door.

Roy Williams left directly after the game to go recruiting, but he could have just filmed his team's last three hours, mailed it out, and saved himself the time. Come to Carolina, the film would say: we go on the road, we win, we hang out with Ashley Judd.

That's a Carolina basketball recruiting commercial right there.

It's a good bet that the players will remember the postgame experience much longer than the game. For the most part, they don't yet seem to understand exactly how impressive these first two weeks have been. Frasor and Ginyard, the two guys who spent one timeout Tuesday night against Illinois marveling at their good fortune at playing for Carolina, had a similar moment late in this game.

Frasor was at the free throw line with under 30 seconds to play. Kentucky had closed their deficit to five points and the game was still in doubt. Just a couple rows behind the baseline, one Kentucky fan screamed at the top of his lungs, "Everybody is watching, Frasor! Everybody is watching!"

But here's the thing: that seemed to make Frasor happy. He walked back to Ginyard, slapped him five, and said, "Hey, I'm going to make these."

Both players broke into wide smiles. And then Frasor dropped both shots cleanly through the rim. Carolina coasted in for the victory.

You're not supposed to make those shots. Not supposed to shoot 43 percent, get just four fast break points, allow the other team to shoot 51 percent, and win the game.

But this team doesn't know that. After the game, they were as interested in checking their Sidekicks for emails as they were in rehashing their impressive victory.

"Hey, we just came in here thinking we could win every game," Miller said. "We just want to compete and play hard and do the things Coach tells us to do. If we do that, we'll be in a position to win a lot of games."

Early in the second half, Kentucky made the run you knew they'd make and closed to two points with 15:57 to go. That's when Roy Williams decided to use the first timeout he's used all year in a stem-the-tide type of situation. He drew his team around him in a tight semicircle, got down on one knee, and preached one thing:

Poise.

"That was the biggest part of the game," Miller said. "Staying poised."

Now if the Tar Heels could just learn how to carry it over into airport encounters with movie stars.

From Human Events:

GOP Congress Earmarks $4 Million for Leftist Pro-Illegal Alien Group
by Amanda B. Carpenter

Posted Dec 2, 2005

Thanks to a congressional earmark, an open-borders advocacy group that pushes for driver’s licenses, free in-state tuition and healthcare for illegal aliens and bilingual requirements for state agencies and ballots is slated to get $4 million in new taxpayer money to add to the more than $30 million it has received from various federal agencies since 1996.

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), Spanish for “the race,” will get its latest grant through an appropriations bill passed by Congress on November 18. The Joint Explanatory Statement of HR 3058, available on the House’s Rules Committee website lists 1,100 plus earmarks in the bill, including La Raza’s grant under the Housing and Urban Development Department’s Self-Help and Assisted Ownership Programs. Under this account La Raza will receive four times as much as the Special Olympics, which won a $1-million earmark.

La Raza is the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy organization. It was adamantly opposed to the REAL ID Act, which will prevent states from issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens if they want them to be usable for federal purposes. It is also opposed to the CLEAR Act, which would grant state and local law enforcement agencies that wish to do so the authority to enforce federal immigration laws.

Spontaneous Spending

The Capital Research Center (CRC), which rates public interest groups on a scale of 1 to 8, with 1 equaling “radical left” and 8 equaling “free market right,” gave La Raza a rating of 2, the same rating it gave People for the American Way and NARAL Pro-Choice America. CRC reports that La Raza’s net assets totaled nearly $52 million in 2003.

La Raza Senior Vice President Charles Kamasaki explained in an e-mail that his group typically gets government grants three different ways: The largest awards probably come from competitive bidding processes for grants and contracts said Kamasaki. But other grants include congressional earmarks—such as the one in this year’s Housing appropriation—and discretionary funds allocated from agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which have all provided tax dollars to NCLR.

NCLR also employs an appropriations lobbyist who works to secure federal earmarks for the group. Tax forms available from CRC also reveal that La Raza spends about $1 million per year on lobbyists, fundraising and web design.

The $4-million grant in this year’s housing bill, which is the fifth in a series of similar congressional earmarks, wasn’t expected, Kamaski said. “This was a somewhat unusual year in that this earmark was not specifically requested,” he explained. He also said the funding is targeted primarily toward a La Raza subsidiary that has made over $40 million in loans to NCLR affiliates and other community based groups such as charter school facilities, heath clinics, day-care centers and affordable housing developments.

One person who would like to know how La Raza’s $4-million earmark got into the bill is Rep. Charlie Norwood (R.-Ga.) who, with Rep. Pete Sessions (R.-Tex.), sponsors the CLEAR Act. Jennifer Hing, communication director for Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R.-Mich.) who is chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that handled the bill, said the Senate inserted the earmark.

Norwood said he was told the money was stricken from the House version of the bill because NCLR has not used the money for housing they received last year. “But no matter what they did or didn’t do last year, we ought not to send taxpayer’s money to people who absolutely advocate perhaps using that money for this country not to follow the law of the land and not to secure our country’s borders,” he said. Said Norwood: “It sounds like they have a sugar-daddy in the Senate.”

One possible culprit is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) who sits on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that handled the bill carrying the earmark. In 2001, Reid sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting $5 million for La Raza’s housing programs. That same year Reid also received NCLR’s Capital Award for “his commitment to advance legislation priorities of the Latino Community.” In gratitude, Reid told NCLR, “La Raza is like the biblical David, fighting all these Goliaths.”

Reid’s office did not respond to calls asking whether he inserted or even supported the earmark.

Despite the significant federal assistance La Raza has received, Cecilia Munoz, the group’s vice president for policy, has rebuked the Bush Administration for not catering to the needs of immigrants. “We all know there is a wing of the Republican Party that will never like anything that treats immigrants well,” she said in June. “Any attempt by the President to move in the direction of those folks is going to be viewed as hostile to the Latino community.”

Commenting on the irony that a Republican-controlled Congress would send to a Republican President a spending bill that included a multi-million-dollar subsidy for a left-wing group, a GOP aide told Human Events: “We Republicans excel at funding or otherwise supporting our political adversaries.”
Copyright © 2005 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
The campaign against the company is about union politics.

Saturday, December 3, 2005 12:01 a.m.

It is a testament to the public-relations success of the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that the question above is even being asked.

By any normal measure, Wal-Mart's business ought to be noncontroversial. It sells at low cost, albeit in mind-boggling quantities, the quotidian products that huge numbers of Americans evidently want to buy--from household goods to clothes to food.

Wal-Mart employs about 1.3 million people, about 1% of the American work force. Its sales, at around $300 billion a year, are equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product. It is not, however, an especially profitable company. Its net profit margins, at about 3.5% of revenue, are broadly in line with the rest of the retail industry. In fiscal 2004, Microsoft made more money than Wal-Mart on just one-eighth of the sales.

The company's success and size, then, do not rest on monopoly profits or price-gouging behavior. It simply sells things people will buy at small markups and, as in the old saw, makes it up on volume. We draw your attention to that total revenue number because, in a sense, it tells you most of what you need to know about Wal-Mart. You may believe, as do service-worker unions and a clutch of coastal elites--many of whom, we'd wager, have never set foot in a Wal-Mart--that Wal-Mart "exploits" workers who can't say no to low wages and poor benefits. You might also accept the canard that Wal-Mart drives good local businesses into the ground, although both of these allegations are more myth than reality.

But even if you buy into the myths, there's no getting around the fact that somewhere out there, millions of people are spending billions of dollars on what Wal-Mart puts on its shelves. No one is making them do it. To the extent that mom-and-pop stores are threatened by Wal-Mart, it's because the same people who supposedly so value their Main Street hardware store find that Wal-Mart's selection, or prices, or parking lot--something about it--is preferable. Wal-Mart can't make mom and pop shut down the shop any more than it can make customers walk through the doors or pull out their wallets. You don't sell $300 billion a year worth of anything without doing something right.

What about the workers? In response to long-running criticisms about its pay and benefits, Wal-Mart's CEO, Lee Scott, recently called on the government to raise the minimum wage. But as this page noted at the time, Wal-Mart's average starting wage is already nearly double the national minimum of $5.15 an hour.

So raising it would have little effect on Wal-Mart, but calling for it to be raised anyway must have struck someone in the company as a good way to appease its political critics. (Bad call: Senator Ted Kennedy quickly pocketed the concession and kept denouncing the company.) The fact is that the company's starting hourly wages not only aren't as bad as portrayed, but for many workers those wages are only a start. Some 70% of Wal-Mart's executives have worked their way up from the company's front lines.

The company has also recently increased its health-care options for employees on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Starting in January, one of those options will be a high-deductible health savings account, which is a great way to insure yourself if you're relatively young, relatively healthy and yet want to protect against the onset of some catastrophic illness. Mr. Kennedy, who recently called Wal-Mart one of the most "antiworker" companies around, has been a chief opponent of these pro-worker, pro-market health insurance vehicles.

But suppose Wal-Mart did look more like the company its detractors would like it to be, with overpaid workers, union work rules, and correspondingly higher prices on goods. It would not only be a less attractive place to shop, and hence a considerably smaller company. It would drive up the cost of living for the millions who shop there, thus hurting those in the bottom half of the income-distribution tables that Wal-Mart's critics claim to be speaking for. One might expect this fact to trouble the anti-Wal-Mart forces, except that their agenda is very different from what they profess it to be.

As our Holman W. Jenkins Jr. pointed out in a recent column, the vanguard of the Wal-Mart haters is composed of unions that have for decades kept retail wages and prices artificially high, especially in the supermarket business. Those unions have had next to no success organizing Wal-Mart employees and see Wal-Mart's push into groceries as a direct threat to their market position. And on that one score, they may be right.

But seen in that light, it becomes clear that much of the criticism is simply a form of special-interest lobbying in socially conscious drag. And why an outside observer should favor the interests of unionized supermarket employees over those of Wal-Mart shoppers and employees is far from clear (unless you're a politician who gets union contributions).

Any company as successful as Wal-Mart will invariably run afoul of such vested interests. It is in the nature of the rise of a new giant on the scene that it disrupts established ways of doing things and in the process upsets established players. So it was with Standard Oil at the beginning of the 20th century, IBM in the middle and Microsoft at the end of the century. Wal-Mart, perhaps because it restricted itself to towns of less than 15,000 people as a matter of policy into the 1990s, at first avoided and later seemed blindsided by the attacks that have come its way.

The company has never been shy about defending its interests. But some of its recent ripostes--such as Mr. Scott's call for hiking the minimum wage or its gestures toward fighting global warming--seem to be addressed to the wrong audience.

Its customers don't need to be told what they like about Wal-Mart. But the company's management would do well to bear in mind that it is those millions of shoppers, and not the elites with which the company has sometimes of late been seen to be currying favor, that have made the company what it is.

From Carolina Blue:

Falling in Love
Adam Lucas on the loss to Illinois

Nov. 30, 2005

By Adam Lucas

There was 1:26 left when Bobby Frasor and Marcus Ginyard did something they had no business doing.

Carolina was down by two points to Illinois on national television. In all likelihood, everyone they'd ever known well was watching the game somewhere, somehow. The Illini had the ball and it was the most critical possession of the game.

That's when Frasor and Ginyard did this:

"We were coming out of the timeout and the place was going crazy," Frasor said. "We really needed a stop. The crowd was on their feet and it was a great atmosphere. And Marcus and I looked at each other and said, `This is why we came to Carolina.'"

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine the building nearly bursting at the seams, the pressure that awaited the final 90 seconds, and two freshmen out there smirking?

21,273 people fell in love Tuesday night in Chapel Hill. Not because these Tar Heels can jump high or shoot well or dunk hard. But because they compete. Not friendly competition. Teeth-gritting, floor-burning, charge-taking competition.

This is how you fall in love with a team. It is a young team looking blindingly young on some possessions in the first half and then following up those headshaking moments with jaw-dropping plays on the other end of the floor. It is Frasor, Marcus Ginyard, and Wes Miller running through endless screens to follow Dee Brown, Illinois' highly touted guard who finished 6-of-19 from the floor and 0-for-6 from the three-point line with 5 turnovers and just 3 assists. Brown didn't play particularly poorly. He just couldn't find room to breathe against Frasor, Ginyard, and Miller.


"Everything that we do has to be fueled by the defensive end of the floor," said Miller, who played his second consecutive stellar floor game. "They run a lot of double screens off the baseline and you have to shadow them and be there on the catch because they can shoot the ball."

And then Miller said something else. Something that might make a few more people fall in love with this team.

"It's a really tough loss."

It bodes well that after fighting for 40 minutes, after turning in an effort that many in attendance probably never expected, they still weren't satisfied. Miller was slumped in a chair and Frasor was over in the corner agonizing over mishandling the rebound with 13.5 seconds to play that might have given Carolina a chance to tie or win the game.

He didn't get it, and he didn't exactly know why. "I thought I had it," he said. "I should have had it."

Even down 64-50 with 7 minutes to play, the Tar Heels didn't seem particularly frazzled. Instead, it was Illinois who began to look tentative. As Carolina closed to 64-55, Illinois head coach Bruce Weber stood on the sideline thinking about calling a timeout. He'd touch his hands to his shoulders in the signal for a 30-second timeout, then he'd remove them before the official blew his whistle. Then he'd touch his shoulders again, then he'd remove his hands. His team seemed to mirror his indecisiveness, and eventually they threw the ball away.

There was some concern about how David Noel would fit on this team of youngsters. Would he try to do too much? Would he try to play beyond his capabilities?

You might have seen the answer when he dove on the floor to pick up a loose ball midway through the first half and then saved it to Byron Sanders, the kind of hustle play you simply can't coach.

The definitive answer, however, came with under 4:30 to play. Noel had spent the last couple of minutes on the floor with four freshmen. Carolina ran a set play, Illinois adjusted to it, and Noel had a brief opening at the top of the key. But Ginyard had an even better opening on the wing.

What do you do? You're a senior and you've waited for the chance to take the big shot against Illinois on national television for three years. What do you do?

You pass it to Ginyard, who drains the three-pointer.

"It would have been very easy for him to take that shot," Ginyard said. "That's why Dave is our leader. He understands that the fact that he's a senior and I'm a freshman has nothing to do with it when we're on the court. All he knew was that I was open and he had the ball. That's why he's David Noel. That's why he's our leader."

He leads, Carolina follows, and so far the combination has been perfect. This is a team that scratches and claws on the court. And then, when they leave the court, they do things like this: Hansbrough was sitting in the tunnel after the game with his brothers. These scenes happen all the time in major college athletics--disappointed player keeps his head down and ignores the world while trying to wind down from a tough game.

A new acquaintance walked up to the group. Hansbrough stood, made eye contact, shook hands, and politely introduced everyone in the group to each other. A little thing that spoke loudly.

These aren't players. They're people. Roy Williams types of people.

Something very strange happened when the final seconds elapsed Tuesday night: fans stood and cheered. It wasn't a polite sound of clapping as the final buzzer sounded. It was a loud, resounding ovation that followed the Tar Heels off the floor, into the tunnel, and down the hallway to their locker room.

It was unlike almost any sound you've ever heard in the Smith Center after a loss.

It was the sound of a fan base falling in love.

Muhammad Ali’s “Beautiful Soul”
By Daniel Pipes

FrontPageMagazine.com | December 1, 2005

In an article two days ago, “Muhammad Ali v. George W. Bush,” I castigated President Bush bestowing a prestigious award on former boxer Muhammad Ali and for lavishly praising Ali’s beautiful soul, his compassion, and his being a man of peace. I offered some evidence to the contrary and concluded by calling this incident “the nadir of his presidency.”

The column prompted a fair amount of comment, positive and negative. I’d like to note here two noteworthy responses. One is from Judea Pearl, father of the late Daniel Pearl, murdered by Islamists in
Pakistan in 2002:

When Danny was in captivity, we pleaded with Louis Farrakhan and Muhammad Ali to use their influence in the Muslim world and issue an appeal for his release. Farrakhan said: “Not ready.” Ali did not hesitate a minute and issued a plea that only Satan could resist; it was published next day in Pakistan. Ali further called me by phone and insisted on being invited to the party, once Danny is released. Jesse Jackson then made a statement, without our even soliciting him. At that point, Farrakhan came back and said: I am ready. But by then, it was too late. I appreciate Ali’s coming forward and, when I spoke at Danny's memorial (which Ali and his wife attended), I called him “a champion of humanity.” Later on, though, when we asked him to join the Honorary Board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, he declined on the grounds that he must focus his energy on his own foundation.

To which my response is this: I am delighted to hear that Muhammad Ali did these good deeds. But by 2002 he was far along with Parkinson’s disease, so his decisions were largely made by his handlers in his name. These do not provide real insight into his character.



That character, rather, was shown earlier, when Ali had full control of his facilities. To understand that better, I turn to Jack Cashill, author of the forthcoming book, Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream. Cashill sent me a copy of the book manuscript and it, to say the least, confirms my thesis about Ali’s poor behavior. Here is an excerpt, reviewing Ali’s negative accomplishments during his first crucial years in the public eye, 1960-75:

• Ali knowingly betrayed Malcolm X, a betrayal that led at least indirectly to Malcolm’s assassination.
• Ali publicly turned his back on his press secretary, Leon 4X Ameer, which led to Ameer’s death.
• When Nation of Islam activists executed five friends and family of the Hanafi sect—four of them children—Ali did not quit the Nation or even publicly protest. Nor did the media ask him to.
• For at least four years running Ali publicly degraded Joe Frazier, often along the crudest racial lines. “There’s a great honor about Joe,” says baseball great Reggie Jackson. “That was evident in the way he fought. And Muhammad ridiculed Joe; he humiliated him in front of the world.”
• Ali also verbally and physically abused Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell, two men who did not deserve it.
• Ali was an unapologetic sexist. “In the Islamic world,” he told Playboy, “the man’s the boss, and the woman stays in the background. She don’t want to call the shots.” He wrote this in 1975, three years into the doomed struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Feminists still wrestle over this one.
• While the black family was under assault, with its rate of unwed births nearly tripling during these fifteen years, Ali was fathering children out of wedlock with at least one teenage girl.
• He also was about to leave four of his children without a father in the home after rejecting their Muslim mother for a more glamorous, only marginally black eighteen year-old.
• Belinda Ali was the second wife he had publicly humiliated. Sonji was the first.
• Ali remained an unabashed racist, calling for an American apartheid and the lynching of interracial couples as late as 1975.
• In the years that mattered, Ali drove a wedge between the races. This may not have been evident to the cultural elite, but anyone who had been at Gary or like venues would know exactly what I mean.
• He routinely denigrated black heroes who did not share his point of view, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall among them.
• He continuously belittled and undermined Christianity, a bedrock of cultural stability in black America.
• Ali shamelessly courted some of the most brutal dictators on the planet: Qaddafi, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Nkrumah, Mobutu, Marcos.
• One of those dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Wa Za Banga, was complicit in the death of the black nationalist hero, Patrice Lumumba.
• Ali helped launch the career of Don King.
• And, oh yes, he rejected his country in its hour of need and expressed no regret at the fate of those millions we all abandoned. The man who compelled him to do so had conspired with the Japanese and cheered them on at Pearl Harbor.

With due understatement, Cashill comments that this summing up, “however unpleasant, sheds some useful light both on the young Ali and the generation that made him.”

I repeat: this is not someone suitable to be honored by the president of the United States.

Muhammad Ali vs. George Bush
By Daniel Pipes

FrontPageMagazine.com | November 29, 2005

George W. Bush honored the former boxer, Muhammad Ali, and thirteen others with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, called “the nation's highest civilian award,” on Nov. 9 at the White House. The president praised Ali for his sports accomplishments and called him “The Greatest of All Time.”

Fine, but he then proceeded to laud Ali’s exemplary character: “The real mystery, I guess, is how he stayed so pretty. It probably had to do with his beautiful soul. He was a fierce fighter and he’s a man of peace…Across the world, billions of people know Muhammad Ali as a brave, compassionate and charming man, and the American people are proud to call Muhammad Ali one of our own.”

In this giddy, fawning statement, Bush did not, the Washington Post astringently noted, “mention Ali’s very public opposition to the Vietnam War, which led the prizefighter to lose his boxing license for three years when he refused to serve in the Army.” Worse, his refusal to fight was not because he was “a man of peace” but rather because his allegiance was to the stridently anti-American, anti-white organization known as the Nation of Islam, headed by the malign Elijah Muhammad.

Forty years ago, Ali explained his draft evasion: “War is against the teachings of the Holy Qur’an. I’m not trying to dodge the draft. We are supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or The Messenger [i.e., Elijah Muhammad]. We don’t take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers.” A draft evader, incidentally, is particularly ill-suited to receive the Medal of Freedom, which was created in 1945 to recognize “notable service” in World War II.

The president also did not touch on Ali’s religious side, but Mark Kram did his 2001 book, Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier: “Ali broke every tenet of real Muslim law, from whoring to being truant at Temple service; he was a religious fake who abdicated his personal worth to the Black Muslims for their expediency and draft evasion, [and was] therefore, counterfeit down to his socks.”

As he aged, Ali did become more devout, but in unfortunate directions. He declared himself against “the entire power structure” in the United States, which he declared run by Zionists who “are really against the Islam religion.” He became so radical a Muslim that the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations, North America’s most powerful Islamist group, also honored him with an award in June 2004. As its press release stated: “Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, presented the first Malcolm X award to Muhammad Ali.”

(Ali was spectacularly ill-suited for this award too. Malcolm X had served as his role model until 1964, but when Elijah Muhammad ejected Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam, Ali ignored Malcolm X’s entreaties and turned viciously against him. He threw Malcolm X away, in the words of journalist Sunni Khalid, “like a pork chop.”)

Bush’s praise for Ali’s compassion, charm, and beautiful soul are horribly misplaced. (As were large donations from General Electric and Ford to the hagiographic “Ali Center” that opened days later in Louisville, Kentucky.) Ali’s unvarnished legacy is an exploitative personality, sordid career, vicious politics, and extremist religion.

Bush himself got an unexpected glimpse of the real Ali during their brief White House encounter. I’ll let the Washington Post describe the incident:

Bush, who appeared almost playful, fastened the heavy medal around Muhammad Ali’s neck and whispered something in the heavyweight champion’s ear. Then, as if to say “bring it on,” the president put up his dukes in a mock challenge.

Ali, 63, who has Parkinson’s disease and moves slowly, looked the president in the eye—and, finger to head, did the “crazy” twirl for a couple of seconds. The room of about 200, including Cabinet secretaries, tittered with laughter. Ali, who was then escorted back to his chair, made the twirl again while sitting down.

And the president looked visibly taken aback, laughing nervously. Was Ali making a political statement?

Awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Muhammad Ali gratuitously celebrated a man profoundly opposed to Bush’s own, his party’s, and the country’s principles. It represents, I submit, the nadir of his presidency

From National Review:

Don’t Fear the Designer
Competing philosophies and beliefs.

By Tom Bethell

My new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, addresses many topics, ranging from endangered species to the alleged warfare of religion and science. But two in particular have repeatedly come up in radio interviews: global warming and intelligent design (I have chapters on both).

Most on the Right are agreed on global warming: It's mostly politics dressed up as science. But what about intelligent design?

On this, conservatives are divided. Many — dare I call them the rank and file? — are skeptical about evolution and, I sense, are willing to throw it overboard. Others — I'll call them the chattering class — think things have gone too far, and that when it comes to evolution we should show Harvard and Yale a little more respect.

George Will recently said that the Kansas Board of Education (which on Election Day voted to amend science standards in favor of intelligent design) is controlled "by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people." Charles Krauthammer, too, wants to read evolution skeptics out of polite society.

But more than snobbish disdain will be needed to deal with the facts and arguments put forward by the proponents of intelligent design.

George Will tells us that evolution is a fact. Is it? It depends on what you mean by evolution. Add an antibiotic to a dish of bacteria, so that some die and some survive, and bacterial resistance may be seen. This is said to illustrate natural selection — Charles Darwin's great discovery and claim to fame — and, therefore, evolution in action. Charles Krauthammer is pleased to tell us that the advocates of intelligent design "admit" that natural selection "explains such things as the development of drug resistance."

Petri Politics
But what actually happens in the Petri dish? Some of the bacteria are naturally equipped with enzymes that give them immunity to the antibiotic. So they survive, while most of the bacteria die. Nutrients remain in the dish, and the resistant strain now has an ample food supply and multiplies. Before, it could hardly compete with the far more abundant strain, now wiped out. So the (pre-existing) resistant strain becomes more numerous. There is a multiplication of something that already existed. But as the famous geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan said about 100 years ago — he spent years studying fruit flies at Columbia University and was rewarded with the Nobel Prize — evolution means making new things, not more of what already exists.

Nonetheless, if you define evolution as a change of gene ratios, well, yes, there has been such a change of ratios in the population of bacteria. So, if your definition of evolution is sufficiently modest, then you can call evolution a fact. Others define evolution as "change over time." That's a fact, too.

But we know perfectly well that, to its devotees, evolution means something much more than that.

We are expected to believe — and I do mean believe — that evolution answers the important question: How did life, in all its abundance, appear on Earth? By the slow, successive modification of pre-existing forms, Darwin said. Go back far enough, to one of those warm little ponds Darwinians assume must have existed, and we would find that life started of its own accord from nothing in particular. Over the eons, atoms and molecules whirled themselves into ever more complicated structures. Eventually the best and brightest acquired consciousness, and started to ask: "How did we get here?" The usual answer was: "We seem to have been intelligently designed." Then others replied: "Oh, no, no, no, we all started in a warm little pond, way back."

Just the Facts
Whom to believe? Or maybe we should approach it more scientifically: What are the facts?

If we discount trivial examples like bacterial resistance or "change over time" or small changes in beak size among the finches of the Galapagos Islands, we don't know very much about evolution at all. We don't see it happening around us, or in the rocks.

In my book, I quote Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, telling a professional audience at the American Museum in New York that there was "not one thing" he knew about evolution. He had asked the evolutionary-morphology seminar at the University of Chicago if there was anything they knew about it, and, he said: "The only answer I got was silence."

Patterson, who died a few years ago, was an atheist and once told me that he regarded the Bible as "a pack of lies." There was no way he could be accused of Biblical primitivism. People would ask him, with a note of alarm, "Well, you do believe in evolution, don't you?" He would respond that science wasn't supposed to be a system of belief.

So let's look at the evidence adduced for evolution. The fossil record is sparse. Bats, for example — the only mammals capable of powered flight — appear suddenly in the fossil record, with their sonar systems already fully developed. "There are no half bats," as a world expert on bats once said. The experts have no idea what animal gave rise to the first bat.

The creatures that evolution purports to explain are fantastically complex. The cell, thought at the time of Darwin to be a "simple little lump of protoplasm," is as complicated as a high-tech factory. We have no actual evidence that it evolved — and yet we are asked, indeed obliged, to believe that it did.

In the human body, there are 300 trillion cells, and each "knows" what part it must play in the growing organism. To this day, embryologists have no idea how this happens — even though they have been trying to figure it out for 150 years.

Imagine an automobile company that came out with a new model that could do the remarkable things that living creatures do. How amazed we would be! The car would be able to repair itself, if not damaged too badly. Dent it and, in a few days, the dent is gone. It needs to rest for a few hours every day but it can keep going for 80 years on bread and water, with perhaps vegetables thrown in. And it can hook up with another version of the same automobile, and produce in a few months' time new, tiny versions of itself, which will then grow up to full-size autos with the ability to reproduce in turn.

We have been unable to do anything remotely like this in the lab. Yet we are surrounded by lowly creatures that do these things every day — and we express no amazement. We have been trained to be blasé about the marvels of creation. "Oh, evolution did that," we say. "It was just a matter of random mutation; nothing surprising there." "These things arose by accident and were selected for."

That phrase — "it was selected for" — is regarded as a sufficient explanation for . . . everything. The same mundane phrase is given as the explanation for everything under the sun. How did the bats get sonar? "It arose by an accidental mutation of the genes and was selected for. Next question?" How did the eye develop? "Piecemeal. There was a random mutation and it conferred an advantage so it was selected for. Then the same thing happened over and over again. Next question?" How did the camel get its hump? "Random mutations conferred some advantage and so they were selected for. Next question?"

This is the science before which all knees must bend? These explanations are no better than "Just-So stories" (as one or two Harvard professors have rightly said). No actual digging in the dirt is needed: The theorist merely contemplates the trait in question and makes up a plausible story as to how it might have been advantageous.

We fear questioning the evolutionist dogma. Someone might call us fanatical. "Intemperate" was the word George Will used. So we go along with the dogmas of materialism, lest we be considered ignorant or uneducated or driven by a religious agenda.

Charles Krauthammer tells us that Isaac Newton was religious and if he saw no conflict between science and religion, why can't we take our thin gruel of evolutionary science like good children and be satisfied, without dragging a Designer into the picture?

Because it isn't real science, Charles. Newton, in fact, thought that the "most beautiful system" of sun, planets, and comets could "only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." But the laws of physics that govern these motions are simplicity itself compared with the immense complexity of the biological machinery that governs the development, proliferation, growth, and aging of millions of reproductive species. These mechanisms have yet to be discovered or described. To believe that the feeble tautology of natural selection — laissez-faire political economy from the 1830s imported into biology — constitutes a sufficient explanation of the marvels of nature is to display a credulity that makes our fundamentalists seem sagacious by comparison.

George Will has made one accurate criticism of the idea he so dislikes: "The problem with intelligent design is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis." This is true; but he should have added that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable either. Darwin's claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted "survival of the fittest" as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the "fittest" that survive — by definition. This, just like intelligent design, is not a testable hypothesis. As the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper said, after discussing this problem that natural selection cannot escape: "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this." Popper was the first to propose falsification as the line of demarcation between theories that are scientific and those that are not; both intelligent design and natural selection fall by this standard.

The underlying problem, rarely discussed, is that the conclusions of evolutionism are based not on science, but on a philosophy: the philosophy of materialism, or naturalism. Living creatures, including human beings, are here on Earth, and we got here somehow. If atoms and molecules in motion are all that exist, then their random interactions must account for everything that exists, including us. That is the true underpinning of Darwinism. What needs to be examined in detail is not so much the religion behind intelligent design as the philosophy behind evolution.

But that is a sermon for another day.

Hold the 'holy' in those happy holidays
Jonah Goldberg

December 1, 2005

IN 1984, THE Supreme Court launched one of America's worst traditions: Christmas Agonistes. This is the ritual in which everyone goes batty about what to "do" about Christmas. The court invented it in the pages of Lynch vs. Donnelly, the upshot of which was that if someone is offended at a creche or Christmas tree at City Hall, they can go whining to a judge about it.

Just this week, the Capitol performed its own minor Christmas miracle of transubstantiation. At the beginning of the week, House Speaker Denny Hastert unveiled a "holiday tree." But a few days later, after some entirely predictable bah humbugs, he rechristened it a Christmas tree. (Similarly, when the city of Boston tried to unveil its official "holiday tree," the premier of Nova Scotia, which had provided it as a gift, called it a nifty trick because "when it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree.")

These miracles aren't exactly up there with keeping lamp oil burning for eight days, never mind rising from the dead, but they're pretty good for government work.

Personally, I take no offense at the government unveiling a Christmas tree on the grounds of the "People's House." Besides, a place that in love with pork is already traif (non-Kosher) in my book.

Lamenting the war on Christmas has become something of a cottage industry for conservatives, just as lamenting the perfidious intrusion of Christianity on the public square is a grand source of fundraising and TV time for segments of the left. Fox News' John Gibson has even come out with a definitive brief on the war on Christmas aptly titled "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought."

And, for some, it does seem like Christmas is under siege. Not just Christmas, of course, but religious expression generally.

Traditionalists of a certain bent are at a particular disadvantage because they have a handy label to define their morality: religion. And religion has a special status in our society.

Secularists, misreading history, claim that the Constitution requires that wherever government and religion intersect, religion must vanish. This is terribly wrongheaded in my opinion, but we've all heard those arguments before.

What I think secularists don't appreciate is how unfair this feels to religious people who believe that the secularists have, for all intents and purposes, a moral faith of their own. For example, back in the Dark Ages when John Ashcroft ruled with an iron fist, and decent people everywhere quaked at the prospect of borrowing "Catcher in the Rye" from the library lest they land in the gulag under the Patriot Act, Ashcroft was unable to ban a Gay Pride Month celebration at his own Department of Justice. I don't think that celebrating Gay Pride Month would lead to the end of civilization, but I don't think Christian Pride Month would either. And yet we all understand that Christian pride is a nonstarter on government premises.

The idea that liberalism operates — or should operate — like a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, rites and customs, has a very old pedigree stretching from ancient Rome to such modern figures as August Comte, Herbert Croly, John Dewey and Thurman Arnold up to the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty. Without wading out into those weeds, what I think secular liberals could work harder at understanding is that whether contemporary liberalism is a secular religion or not, for its non-adherents it might as well be.

Liberals use the state to impose their morality all the time, and they get away with it because their faith isn't called a religion.

Yet conservatives should be wary of launching a backlash. Just as it is counterproductive for a secular liberal to take offense at a well-intentioned "Merry Christmas," it doesn't help if a conservative says "Merry Christmas" when he really means "Eat yuletide, you atheistic bastard!" If you're putting up a Christmas tree in order to tick off the ACLU, you've really missed the point.

Of course, none of this would be a problem if judges in Washington minded their business to begin with. But that's the real heresy for some liberals.

From the Telegraph UK:

Reflections of a 'cheap warmaker'
By Danny Kruger

The desert road from Amman to Baghdad is drearily familiar to Canon Andrew White. In the days of Saddam Hussein, the Church of England's representative in the Middle East used to make the 12-hour trip every few weeks. Iraq was, he thought at the time, as bad as could be: stunted and cowed by tyranny. He was a strong believer in the need to remove Saddam, and in 2003 he wrote a book fitting the American-led invasion into Christian "just war" theory.

I accompanied Andrew on his first visit to Iraq after the war - thinking that "after" was a word we could apply to that conflict. The statue of Saddam had fallen a few weeks earlier. We were smilingly waved through the Jordan-Iraq border by fresh-looking American troops, and when we arrived in Baghdad we found it battered but welcoming. We wandered around the city quite freely, even entering the al-A'dham mosque and mingling with the worshippers.

The highlight of the trip came when Andrew, in full clerical rig, re-dedicated the Anglican church of St George's, long closed under Saddam. The service was chaotic, American generals and British diplomats maintaining their dignity on plastic chairs as Iraqi Christian children scampered about and their parents wept to see their church alive again.

Fast forward to now. Two months ago, the pastor of St George's, Maher Dakel, his wife and son, his deputy, Firas Raad, and their driver were on the road from Amman to Baghdad. They have not been heard of since. That road is now infested with bandits, and it is almost certain the team are all dead.

Andrew White is in Baghdad again this week, but he is unable to leave the Green Zone, the protected compound for the international administration. Any day now, the 100th British soldier will die in Iraq; already, the 2,000th American has. Untold Iraqis (literally, for no count is kept) are dead, be they innocents or insurgents, or some momentary blend of the two. Westerners cannot wander about.

If they do, they get kidnapped. One of Andrew's main jobs these days is hostage negotiation. On Saturday, another British Christian was taken, leaving a Baghdad mosque. Unlike Andrew, Norman Kember was never an enthusiast for the invasion. On Tuesday, Tom Butler, the anti-war Bishop of Southwark, explained that Mr Kember's visit expressed his "solidarity" with the Iraqi people, and showed that Christians were not part of "an occupying force". Indeed, reports suggest that he and his group, called Christian Peacemaker Teams, spent their time looking for evidence of Westerners' abuse of Iraqis.

Mr Kember went to Iraq not just for the Iraqis. He went for himself. "It has always worried me that I am a 'cheap' peacemaker," he wrote on a website a few months ago. "Being in Britain talking, writing, demonstrating about peace is in no way taking risks like young servicemen in Iraq."

That's how I felt, though on the other side: a "cheap warmaker". For me at least, the war was no more about WMD than (the antis' crude explanation) it was all about oil. Neither self-defence nor self-interest applied: this was pure do-gooding. I compared the war against tyranny and terrorism to the British Navy's campaign against the slave trade, and admired George Bush and Tony Blair for their readiness to use violence to defeat injustice. But "talking, writing, demonstrating about war" was not enough, which is why I went out there as soon as I could.

There is a well-known passage in Evelyn Waugh's Unconditional Surrender, the last novel in his war trilogy, in which a Jewish refugee says to the hero: " 'It seems to me that there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships to recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians - not very many perhaps - who felt this. Were there none in England?' 'God forgive me,' said Guy. 'I was one of them.' "

I was one of them, too; still too selfish and lazy actually to sign up and fight, but macho enough to take a peek, cowering behind a priest, at the battlefield. It seems Mr Kember was one, too, though as a Baptist and peace activist he has sublimated his "will to war" into its apparent opposite. Of course, his opposition to the invasion will cut no ice with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the celebrated murderer, should it be his bloodstained hands that Mr Kember falls into.

Britain is a democracy. And so, contrary to protestations, the war was done in all our names, and we cannot waive our responsibility with a placard. But some of us - the invasion enthusiasts - are more responsible than others. We stoked the will to war. Today I am haunted by a picture I saw last year, not quite inadvertently, on one of those ghoulish atrocity websites, of the body of a girl with her head staved in.

What have we done? This week, Colin Powell's former chief of staff accused Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al of "daydreaming", and perhaps he is right. It is easy to say, looking back, that the principle was good but the practice was bungled. But it is not enough to have a vision of liberty without an understanding of the mission to get there. For two years we have struggled to make the practice conform to the principle, and the time might be approaching when we must accept that the principle was always impractical, and the project should never have been attempted.

But that time is not just yet. Indeed, it might be never, and I hold out hope that the taking of Mr Kember represents the last kick of a dying monster. Iraq has a constitution drawn up and approved by its people. Sunni leaders are finally accepting their interests will not be served by haughty isolation, but by engagement with democracy.

The fall of Saddam began a chain reaction of liberalisation and modernisation, from Libya to Saudi, Lebanon to Egypt. In the Green Zone - his old presidential palace - the man himself is on trial for mass murder, in an Iraqi court.

Out of the grisly present, a promising future is possible. This week another, private, ceremony also took place in the Green Zone. Andrew baptised the son of Hana, the caretaker of St George's church, and his wife, Rema. The dunking took place in Saddam's own swimming pool.

From The Boston Globe:

In a related story
The brothers Lehane have a strong bond, and a new shared stage

By Bella English, Globe Staff

NEW YORK -- Boston writer Dennis Lehane had this opening sentence kicking around in his head for eight years, but no place to put it: ''Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat."

He couldn't for the life of him find the right vehicle for it; it just didn't fit into anything he was working on. Then he was asked to write a short story for an anthology, with one requirement: It had to have something to do with fathers and sons.

''Until Gwen" was also published in The Atlantic Monthly and was selected for both ''The Best American Short Stories" and ''The Best Mystery Short Stories" of 2005. Though the story has to do with a father and son, as it turns out, brothers figure prominently in it, too -- specifically, Dennis and Gerry Lehane.

Dennis, whose best-known work is ''Mystic River," has turned the story into a play starring his big brother Gerry. ''Coronado" opens in New York tomorrow for a three-week run at the Manhattan Theatre Source in Greenwich Village. It's a complex story of intertwined lives, of the thin line between love and hate, between sanity and madness.

Last week Lehane flew in from St. Petersburg, Fla., where he is a writer-in-residence this year at his alma mater, Eckerd College. It was eight days before show time, and the actors in this off-off-Broadway production were nervous. What would the playwright think?

Brothers in arts
At 42, Gerry Lehane is two and a half years older than Dennis. He's a veteran actor who trained at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before heading to New York in 1990. He is a member of the Invisible City Theatre Company. Dennis said he had Gerry in mind when he wrote the part of the father. ''He was always playing the Jimmy Stewart parts, and I was like, someone has to give him a Christopher Walken part," said Dennis.

In ''Coronado," Gerry plays the role of a violent, sociopathic father -- the opposite from their own dad, Michael. ''He's the sweetest guy in the world. He worked his whole life in Sears and Roebuck," said Dennis.

Gerry and Dennis are the youngest of five siblings; the next one, another brother, is six years older than Gerry. They grew up near Edward Everett Square in Dorchester and attended Boston College High School. Ironically it was Gerry who had the quiet introspection of a writer, while Dennis had the more gregarious personality of an actor.

''But he always wanted to act, and I always wanted to write, and I've long suspected that at some point we agreed on this unspoken contract where I'd never try his thing and he'd never try mine," said Dennis. The brothers grew up close. ''We always had each other's back," said Dennis, who credits the theme of loyalty, which runs through much of his work, to their relationship.

''Gerry always kind of looked after Dennis when they were kids, and I'm very proud of both of them," said their mother, Ann, who lives in Plymouth. ''Their success is great, but to me they're wonderful kids, they're good, they're caring."

Ann and Michael Lehane are headed to Florida for the winter, and will likely miss the play. Which is a relief to Dennis. ''It's very important my mother not see this play," he said, laughing.

Ann Lehane has long told her youngest that she loves his writing, but disapproves of the profanities. ''He writes great stuff, but he should leave the swears out of it," she said. ''I don't know where he learned to swear."

Shock to the system
Sitting in rehearsal space in an alternately drafty-then-stuffy fourth-floor walkup loft on the fringes of Chinatown last week, Lehane watched his play unfold for the first time. He was a study in concentration, squinting intently, leaning forward in his metal folding chair, scribbling notes on a pad. At times it seemed as if he wanted to leap onto the set himself. Sometimes he laughed out loud at one of his own lines.

In a pep talk before the first scene, he told the cast of nine to ''find the comedy" in the play, which is vintage Lehane: gothic, with patches of perverse humor. ''There's so much darkness in this world, we've gotta find the fun or otherwise the audience is going to be depressed," he said. Indeed, during the first scene, he wrote on his pad: ''Everyone is playing too loud, too angry."

During a break, Dennis told the cast to cool it with the overwrought Southern accents: ''It's making them go into caricatures rather than characters. We don't want to come across as a bunch of East Coast elitists making fun of the South. I've spent too much time in the South, and I love it." He told one woman to make a closing line stronger: ''Women have a way of delivering really killer lines as they walk away." And he told a guy that he didn't act ''nearly drunk enough" in another scene. At the end of the rehearsal he hugged a young actor and announced that he loved the entire performance.

It is impossible to view a loved one objectively -- especially one you shared a bedroom with growing up. Both brothers said it was only recently that they could judge each other's work with a professional eye. In separate interviews, each used the same word -- ''shocked" -- to describe their reactions to that work.

''Seeing my brother acting tonight, I was shocked," said Dennis. ''He was great. He went places [with a costar] I didn't know they were going. They played it far more emotionally than I wrote it."

Gerry said he has the same reaction to Dennis's writing. ''Sometimes, I'm still shocked at how good he is. I've had to take it on faith from other people who tell me he's terrific. He's my brother; there's no suspension of disbelief that's necessary to make a judgment."

In fact, Dennis said he has been unable to see Gerry's work clearly until that night's rehearsal. ''Seeing him, I thought, 'Oh, that guy's good.' Then, 'Oh, it's Gerry!' "

Sibling revelry
After the rehearsal, the cast headed to a nearby tavern for a late dinner. The brothers ordered burgers and talked about the play, and, with prompting, their relationship.

''It's been a blast working together," said Dennis.

''Being in two creative fields . . . in the back of my mind, I think I hoped it would happen," said Gerry. ''I think he has an ear for the truth." He turned to his brother. ''Even in your very first book there was a sense of this in how people would behave and speak."

''Thank you," said Dennis, sipping a beer.

OK, he's a good writer. But what kind of brother is he?

''He's a great brother," said Gerry.

Dennis laughed. ''And I have a pool table."

''And he lets me stay free," Gerry added.

In fact, it was during one of those free stays, last Christmas, that the play was hatched. Gerry had come to Boston to spend the holiday at Dennis's house, and had brought a couple of actor friends. Dennis gave Gerry a copy of his story to read. Gerry and his friends were to visit for only a couple of days. But once they started talking about the play, they stayed through New Year's Day.

''This idea started percolating, but we couldn't figure out how to put it on the stage," said Dennis, whose other novels include ''Shutter Island" and ''Gone, Baby, Gone." This is his first play. ''It had this whole feeling of, 'My Dad's got a barn, let's put on a show,' " he said.

Dennis, who is working on a novel about the Boston Police strike of 1919, said he would love to bring ''Coronado" to Boston. ''I'm waiting for the reviews, to see how much rewriting I have to do. I still consider it a work in progress. It's got way too many references to God in it." The play will have a one-night stand in St. Petersburg in January, at the end of a writers' conference Lehane is organizing, and will open there in March.

People have questioned why he has done the play; they've told him there's no money to be made. But the way he sees it, there's no pressure, either. ''If we go out and fall on our faces, it's OK. I never expected to be successful. I never cared about 'stuff.' Now I have the freedom to do what I want. If I want to write a play and make no money on it, it's OK. This was my dream, and I'm living it."

From Libertas: Commentary on the Walk the Line review below this post:

A Christian Take on “Walk The Line”
By Mark Govindini

Our friend Mark Joseph has written this thoughtful article on Beliefnet.com about “Walk the Line,” and what Christians feel is its downplaying of Johnny Cash’s religious faith. I’ve been thinking over what it is that makes “Walk The Line” a good, but not a great film (despite its excellent performances and music). I think Mark has hit the nail on the head - the missing element is the relative lack of attention paid to Johnny Cash’s religious faith.

A man of faith?

One can argue how much religious faith Cash did or didn’t have at the particular period in his life depicted in the film, but the bottom line is, religious faith permeated the American south and American music at this time. It’s sort of strange that the filmmakers would depict so little of it as part of the environment of the film, or as a motivating force for the characters. It’s nice that they show June Carter Cash leading Johnny Cash up to a church at the end as part of his rehabilitation and redemption, but that’s basically it. As powerful a role as June Carter played in Johnny Cash’s life, it doesn’t ring true that she would be the only force in his life to turn him around. People don’t generally change at the instigation of other people, no matter how much they may love them. They change because of some inner realization, some sudden awakening that seemingly comes from nowhere, and yet charges the soul with life-altering conviction. Throughout history, this sort of inner realization has generally come from a belief in God - and belief in God is still the wellspring for personal renewal and artistic inspiration in most societies around the world today.

Was love the only force in his life?

Why exactly is it so taboo in Hollywood today to depict sincere religious faith, even in a biopic? We all know that the industry is run by liberals whose religion is socialism, and who worship with irrational faith at the altar of such secular prophets as Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, etc. - but just why are they so afraid of depicting people of other faiths? If you think it’s just Christians who are treated badly by the left, just look at how leftists and communists treat Jews and Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Tibet & Southeast Asia etc. Wouldn’t it be interesting to liberal filmmakers to depict this hugely important aspect of human existence positively in a movie? Haven’t they the slightest curiosity about why faith is so important to so many people around the world? Or do they only consider it a sign of hopeless primitivism, an inconvenient obstacle in the onward march of progress?

From BeliefNet:

A Faith-Lite Johnny Cash

'Walk the Line' is a beautiful movie with a gaping hole--it separates the singer from one of his life's co-stars: God

By Mark Joseph

I was 19 when I fully understood that historians often can’t grasp the complexities of the characters they purport to speak of. It's something I learned once in a history class, when a professor suggested that George Washington was less than devout and merely used civil religion to unify the nation. When I raised my hand to question this, I was told to bring in evidence to the contrary--which I did the next day, reading aloud from Washington's diary, in which he expressed his deep religious faith in the manner less of a president and more of an 18th-century revival preacher.

"Who should I believe, your textbook or his diary?" I asked the professor.

"Walk The Line " the Johnny Cash biopic, features some truly inspired acting--and singing--by Joaquin Phoenix (playing Cash), and Reese Witherspoon (playing his wife, June), and some great music under the direction of T-Bone Burnett. That's the good news. The bad news is that it tries hard to do what no one was able to do in life and what my history professor tried to do to our first president: separate Johnny Cash from his God.

There were four great loves in J.R. Cash's life: music, God, June Carter, and drugs. But "Walk The Line" pretends there were only three. It is Johnny Cash for the secular set.

The Almighty, omnipresent in Cash's life amidst his struggles to fight addiction, is barely worthy of a mention in "Walk The Line." Imagine watching a movie about Kurt Cobain and hearing the name Courtney Love mentioned once or twice as an aside, or for that matter watching Bud Abbott's life story and never being introduced to Lou Costello. Such is the silliness of trying to tell the Johnny Cash story and leaving out either of his real-life co-stars, God or June Carter.

To his credit, Rick Rubin, the rock producer who took an interest in Cash and produced several brilliant records in Cash's twilight years--known as the American Recordings--understood this and never attempted to keep God out of the records he produced for Cash. It was Rubin who helped bring Cash's heretofore secular and sacred worlds together, allowing street-smart songs like "I've Been Everywhere" and "Rusty Cage" to co-exist on the same records with worshipful songs like "Redemption" and "Spiritual." But Rick Rubin didn't produce this film, and it shows.

Fortunately for those who have from experience learned to be suspicious of historians (or filmmakers), Cash, not unlike George Washington, left behind his own words to set the record straight.

"Walk The Line" is a love story, with June Carter Cash seeming to get all the credit for helping her man overcome his addictions. The message is a simple one: We are all just the right woman or the right man away from salvation. It's reminiscent of that singularly noxious line from the film "Titanic": "He saved me in every way a person can be saved."

The message is driven home by the film's relentless obsession with showing us over and over again how mismatched Cash was with his first wife Vivian and how deficient she was because of her inability to realize her husband's genius. Enter June Carter, whose determined love turned her man around. But in "Cash-The Autobiography," published shortly before his death, Cash made it clear that while June was a help, it was God who ultimately helped him overcome his addictions.

The key moment in Cash's turnaround happened when he tried a unique method of suicide--crawling through a cave hoping to never make it out alive. Cash wrote:

The absolute lack of light was appropriate, for at that moment I was as far from God as I have ever been. My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I'd felt over the years seemed finally complete. It wasn't. I thought I'd left him but He hadn't left me. I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity and sobriety. I didn't believe it at first. I couldn't understand it.... the feeling persisted though and then my mind started focusing on God.... there in Nickajack cave I became conscious of my destiny. I was not in charge of my own death. I was going to die at God's time, not mine. I hadn't prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn't stopped God from intervening…I told my mother that God had saved me from killing myself. I told her I was ready to commit myself to Him and do whatever it took to get off drugs. I wasn't lying.

In the wake of the box office success of "The Passion Of The Christ," 20th Century Fox and other studios are seeking to capitalize on the phenomenon by creating faith-friendly products, finally coming to the obvious conclusion that eluded them for so long: Millions of Americans want to experience media that affirms their faith instead of mocking or marginalizing it. What they don't yet seem to realize is that instead of creating an endless stream of third-rate productions about the end of the world and releasing them in a handful of markets or in churches, the best way to meet the demands of the red states is simply to faithfully retell great stories that have a strong faith component while simultaneously ensuring that they remain of interest to those who may not consider themselves religious or even spiritual. Any audience will put up with a certain amount of religion, so long as it is part of the natural fabric of a good story.

"Walk The Line" is a faith-lite version of a faith-filled story, and if traditionalists are smart they will punish it for its unfaithfulness not with loud protests, but by giving it the treatment they so brilliantly dished out to another picture, "Saved," a film that depicted a Christian high school in a stereotypically negative fashion. That film's backers were practically begging for a boycott, which they correctly understood as the only thing likely to save their film from the trash heap of obscurity it so richly deserved to be tossed into. Instead what it got from the leadership of the faith community was the worst punishment of all: It was ignored.

"Walk The Line" is a gorgeous movie, smartly told with some outstanding acting that will likely garner Reese Witherspoon an Academy Award nomination. It'd be a great movie if it weren't so manifestly incomplete. It releases in theaters on November 18th, a great day to stay outdoors and honor Cash's true memory by instead picking up a copy of "Cash-The Autobiography" or Steve Turner's "The Man Called Cash" and one of his American Recordings CDs, lovingly produced by an unlikely hero named Rick Rubin. He's a man who may not have shared Cash's faith, but well understood that Johnny Cash could never be understood in the absence of the God who gave him the strength to rebuild his shattered life as best he could, provided an angel named June to give him a second start, and empowered him to continue making unforgettable music that gave hope to many

From World Magazine:

Perilous project

Portraying Christ in literature poses special problems. How to portray someone who is both God and Man? Some authors evoke His deity, portraying His transcendence and majesty or turning Him into a mystical inner presence. But they miss His humanity, that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Other authors evoke His humanity, portraying Him as a flesh-and-blood man, often sentimentalized. But they fall short of conveying His divinity.

But Anne Rice, in her novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf, 2005), hits the orthodox balance. She portrays Jesus as a 7-year-old child, but He is more than a child. He plays, He cries, He is dependent on His parents. But when He yearns to see snow, it snows. When His uncle is sick, the young Jesus heals him. Throughout the novel, Jesus tries to understand who He is, piecing clues together and asking questions. But, as a prophet tells Him, "The day will come when You will have to give us the answers."

The only potential problem with Mrs. Rice's novel is the project itself. She tells the story of the 7-year-old Jesus in the first person, from Christ's point of view. Entering into the mind of Christ, even when He was so young, might seem disturbingly presumptuous. So is making up episodes in His life. This project is indeed fraught with peril. But those objections are softened by the author's reverence and her care to be biblically and theologically correct. Out of Egypt can best be appreciated as the work of a skillful writer meditating on the Incarnation and the Person of Jesus Christ.

Source material for Christ's childhood is scanty, so Mrs. Rice makes use of what she has, including apocryphal books excluded from the canon of Scripture. This too is fraught with peril. But Mrs. Rice told WORLD that she herself considers the accounts to be "legends," and she uses the details while draining them of any heresy. For example, in an apocryphal gospel, the Christ child strikes a bully dead. Lots of schoolchildren would like to do that, but it feels uncharacteristic of the New Testament Jesus. In this novel, a bully hits Jesus, who feels "power go out of Me." The boy dies, like Uzzah touching the ark, but then later Jesus, sorrowing with the boy's family, raises him from the dead.

Instead of gnosticism, what we get in this novel is a richly textured imagining of historical reality. Mrs. Rice synthesizes the findings of historians, archeologists, and anthropologists to give us a vivid portrait of everyday life in Bible times—household customs, the observance of Jewish law, what it was like to worship in the Temple. Her portrayal of life in a large extended family—which does characterize tribal societies—is particularly charming. It also makes at least imaginable Mrs. Rice's Catholic conviction (shared by many of the Reformers) that Jesus' "brothers and sisters" were not Mary's children, but a product of adoptions within the kinship system.

Scripture says that Joseph and his family left Egypt when Herod died, but feared his son Archelaus and so moved to Galilee. Mrs. Rice fills in the history, recounting the horrific bloodbaths and insurrections sparked by this change of rule. She portrays the rebels not sympathetically but as plundering bandits. In this anarchy, the Romans are welcomed at first as restorers of order, though they often crucify the innocent with the guilty.

Through these tumultuous times, Jesus grows in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. We see Him being exposed to things He would later use in His ministry—lilies of the field, living water, moneychangers, weddings, crucifixions. When Jesus, now 8, finally learns that He is the Son of God, He realizes at the same time that He is "born to die." The setting for this epiphany is significant: He is in the Temple, standing in front of the altar of sacrifice.

— Gene Edward Veith

From The Daily Standard:

The Freedoms We Fight For
The unheralded Islamist assault on free speech.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

LAST MONTH, Islamic radicals threatened to kill actor and Muslim convert Omar Sharif. Sharif had recently played St. Peter in an Italian TV film and spoke highly of the role, saying that he "seemed to hear voices" during filming and that "it will be difficult for me to play other roles from now on." Although Sharif's comments seem innocuous, they prompted a death threat. According to the Adnkronos International news agency, a message on a web forum which has been used by al Qaeda in the past linked to another website that threatened Sharif's life. The website containing the threat said, "Omar Sharif has stated that he has embraced the crusader idolatry. He is a crusader who is offending Islam and Muslims and receiving applause from the Italian people. I give you this advice, brothers, you must kill him."

This incident is relatively minor in the grand scheme of the war against radical Islam, but telling. It provides another glimpse into the Islamists' single-minded fanaticism and their willingness to punish any type of ideological non-conformity.

THE THREAT AGAINST Sharif largely fell below the media's radar. Indeed, aside from a few high profile examples--such as the fatwa directed at Salman Rushdie after he published The Satanic Verses and last year's slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh--the mainstream media has given little coverage to the widespread Islamist assault against free speech.

While the public has not forgotten the Rushdie fatwa, our collective memory of the incident's seriousness has faded. In fact, a number of physical attacks connected with the fatwa occurred in the West. The Wikipedia entry on Salman Rushdie explains:

At the University of California at Berkeley, bookstores carrying [The Satanic Verses] were firebombed. . . . Muslim communities throughout the world held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned. In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed and killed in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was burnt down by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.

The van Gogh murder further extended this battle against free speech. Shortly before his death, van Gogh directed a film called Submission, which was designed to dramatize the mistreatment of women born into Muslim families. In response, Islamic radical Mohammed Bouyeri murdered van Gogh on November 2, 2004, shooting him six times before slitting van Gogh's throat with a kitchen knife and then using the knife to impale a five-page note to his chest.

While the Rushdie and van Gogh incidents are the two most prominent attacks on critics of Islam in the last two decades, they are only part of a broader trend. The note that Bouyeri gruesomely tacked to Theo van Gogh's chest also threatened Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch MP from a Somali Muslim background. By that time, however, death threats were old hat to Hirsi Ali. She has said in an interview that she was living underground just weeks before her 2003 election to the Dutch parliament because of comments she had made in a televised debate.

According to Hirsi Ali, she was provoked during that debate and ended up blurting out, "It's my religion, and my culture, and I can call it backward if I want." But the real problem, insofar as the radical Muslims who threatened Hirsi Ali were concerned, wasn't her criticism of Islam, but her admission that she had left the faith. Many Muslims believe that apostasy from Islam is punishable by death, and the threats that Hirsi Ali received drove her into hiding.

A little over two months after van Gogh's murder, Islamic extremists struck again in the Netherlands. In January 2005, the Moroccan-Dutch painter Rachid Ben Ali was forced into hiding after one of his shows featured satirical work critical of Islamic militants' violence. The combination of this and the van Gogh murder caused even the New York Times to ask, "Can angry young Muslims dictate what is and is not acceptable in the traditionally open-minded world of Dutch arts? In the last few weeks, it appears the answer has been yes."

Sadly, the paper also reported that in response to this effort to impose an agenda by brute force, "[a] few people have quietly asked if self-censorship might be acceptable to keep the social peace."

MOVING BEYOND THE NETHERLANDS, many others living in the West have been threatened for speech that allegedly offends Islam. In 2001, author Khalid Durán produced a book called Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews for the American Jewish Committee. Shortly before the book's publication, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued two press releases insulting Durán and demanding that his book be withheld until a group of CAIR-approved academics could review it "for stereotypical or inaccurate content."

Daniel Pipes reported that a number of Islamic publications followed CAIR's lead by attacking Durán's book, with the charges against the volume escalating with each retelling. Thus, Cairo's Al-Wafd condemned Durán for "spread[ing] anti-Muslim propaganda" and for his "distortions of Islamic concepts." By early June 2001, 'Abd al-Mun'im Abu Zant, a powerful Islamist leader in Jordan, declared that Durán "should be regarded as an apostate" and called for a fatwa that "religiously condones Durán's death." (CAIR, incidentally, did not condemn Abu Zant for seeking this fatwa. Instead, it brazenly criticized the American Jewish Committee for publicizing Abu Zant's remarks.)

Both the Rushdie affair and the threats against Durán show how technology has indeed made the world smaller: They are examples of Middle Eastern Muslims attempting to stifle the speech of those who live in the West. The internet has hastened such efforts. In late January, I uncovered a password-protected Arabic-language website, Barsomyat.com, that was frequented by Middle Eastern Muslims, predominantly Egyptians. The purpose of Barsomyat.com was to systematically track Christians who were active in religious debates against Muslims on the internet chat service PalTalk. Barsomyat featured pictures of these Christians (some of which were obviously obtained by hacking into the Christians' computers) along with death threats and attempts to track down the subjects' physical addresses. Even Barsomyat.com's banner showed the website's intentions toward Christians, as it pictured a sheep--obviously intended to represent Christianity--getting its throat slit.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE ISLAMIST attack on free speech is even more successful outside of the West. There are numerous examples of people in the Middle East and elsewhere being silenced or seriously threatened because of allegedly offensive speech. In 2002, for example, the governor of Nigeria's Zamfara state issued a fatwa calling for the death of journalist Isioma Daniel after she suggested that, had Prophet Muhammad been alive, he may have wanted to marry one of the beauty queens at the 2002 Miss World pageant. After Daniel's article, riots by Muslim youths left more than 100 dead and 500 injured, and the pageant's organizers were forced to move it out of Nigeria. Daniel appears to be living in hiding to this day.

Another example is Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who had a fatwa issued against her in 1993 after the publication of her novel Lajja (Shame), which depicted the persecution of Bangladesh's Hindu minority. The Hindustan Times recently reported that Nasreen "had to leave the country overnight to save her life and his been on [the] run since then."

UNFORTUNATELY, WE IN THE WEST haven't always been vigilant about standing behind speech rights. Too often, when Islamists threaten free expression, some Westerners clamor to make excuses for them. In 1997, for example, Salman Rushdie and novelist John le Carré had a high-profile feud in the letters section of the Guardian. In the course of the feud, le Carré said that Rushdie bore the responsibility for the bounty on his head because "there is no law in life or nature that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity."

Beyond the apologists, Western legal systems are often confused about the intersection of free expression and religion. Religious vilification laws, for example, are counterproductive because they signal that the slander of a religion can be punishable by law.

Standing up for free speech in the face of religious fanaticism should be automatic for anybody who understands the classical liberal principles upon which Western society was built. Unfortunately, it seems that many Westerners either fail to understand these principles, or else fail to grasp the reality of the threat. Ultimately, it is Salman Rushdie's response to John le Carré that encapsulates the consequences of not recognizing the current Islamist attack on free speech: "John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn't an absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don't defend."

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism consultant and attorney. Raphael Satter provided research assistance for this article.

Underneath velvet veneer, Williams is fierce competitor
By Skip Myslenski

Chicago Tribune

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - He looks so placid, so professorial sitting behind his desk. But looks can deceive about North Carolina coach Roy Williams.

Some years ago, when he was coaching at Kansas, his wife, Wanda, was asked, "What era would you like to live in if not the present?"

"I'm not sure about me," she replied. "But I'm sure Roy would say back in the Wild West."

"That's true," Williams said later with a smile. "Not that I would have been a gunslinger necessarily. But I would like to have been John Wayne's sidekick."

Another anecdote about Williams: During the Big 12 tournament one year, he was asked how competitive his Jayhawks would be since they had already secured an NCAA tournament bid.

"That's not going to be a problem," he said. "If I'm playing golf and you tell me that I'm going to die when I step off the 18th green, I'm still going to try to make that last putt."

A block of granite rests beneath Williams' velvet veneer, a combativeness that is as much a part of him as his genteel manner. He can be, as Wayne was in so many of his movies, a perfect gentleman when at ease. But, again like Wayne, he is transformed when challenged.

Williams and his Tar Heels meet Illinois on Tuesday night in a feature presentation of the Big Ten-ACC Challenge.

The Tar Heels lost the top seven scorers from the team that defeated the Illini in last April's national championship game.

They return just one player who scored in that game - forward David Noel, who made a free throw.

They are the first defending champions to enter the season unranked since 1988. They are starting over, down to nine scholarship players and dependent on five freshmen.

But guiding them is Williams, who in 17 seasons has never failed to take an eligible team to the NCAA tournament. Does he have any idea what will happen this season?

"None," he says.

How does that leave him feeling?

"I've never tried to operate crisis management," he says. "I've been one of those organized guys. So it's not an easy feeling. It's an unpleasant feeling.

"But it's exciting, no question about that. The unknown, some people relish the unknown, some people are frightened by the unknown. I don't think I'd classify myself as either. It's just that we don't know, and I'm looking forward to it."

He looks forward to it even as he faces a daunting reconstruction project that has forced him to assume varied roles. He must be a patient teacher, guiding his young group through fundamentals as basic as a fast break, and he must be a bulwark in the face of dire predictions.

"You've got to talk about the mental part of it," he says. "

`Hey, we're going to be OK. Don't worry. We're going to be OK.' ''

He must transform Noel and junior Reyshawn Terry, his most experienced returnees, from bit players into stars, and he must persuade his freshmen that they too can handle a new and bigger stage.

"Mentally they've got to understand, `Last year we were playing Brother Rice and now we're playing Duke, but we're going to be OK. We're strong as a team,' '' he says.

He must infuse all his Tar Heels with proper habits and, bereft of an experienced star, he must even be their security blanket.

"We don't have that presence (that Patriots quarterback Tom) Brady takes into the huddle, that Joe Montana took into the huddle," Williams says.

"Tiger Woods always knows that he's done it. These guys have never done it on the biggest stage. We have the U.S. Open when North Carolina's playing Duke, Maryland, (N.C.) State."

The Tar Heels, as defending champs and one of their sport's most storied programs, have that no matter whom they play. They opened the season by rallying to defeat Gardner-Webb, then followed that with a 57-point rout of Cleveland State and a 17-point victory over UC-Santa Barbara.

Now come the Illini, clearly their biggest test yet. But this is just the kind of crunch that stirs Williams.

Back in 1988, when he succeeded Larry Brown and took over unranked Kansas, the Jayhawks surprised everyone by ripping off 13 wins in their first 14 games. Now he is reflecting on a similar challenge.

"We're not going to be as bad as people think, and I like that part," Williams says. "I've always said the greatest place in the world to be is be the underdog when you're going to be pretty darn good."

From The New Yorker:

NO WORK AND NO PLAY

Issue of 2005-11-28

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.

Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays). But there is a place that has got considerably closer to the leisure society of the futurists’ dreams—Western Europe. The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours. Compared with Europeans, a higher percentage of American adults work, they work more hours per week, and they work more weeks per year.

One obvious result of this is that America is richer than Europe. In terms of productivity—that is, how much a worker produces in an hour—there’s little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth. In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure. Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.

So what changed? The Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward C. Prescott has pointed to sharp increases in Europe’s tax rates since 1970—higher taxes give workers less of an incentive to work extra hours. But taxes aren’t high enough to explain Europeans’ new taste for free time. A more plausible explanation was put forward recently by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote: European labor unions are far more powerful and European labor markets are far more tightly regulated than their American counterparts. In the seventies, Europe, like the U.S., was hit by high oil prices, high inflation, and slowing productivity. In response, labor unions fought for a reduced work week with no reduction in wages, and greater job protection. When it was hard to get wage increases, the unions pushed for more vacation time instead. Governments responded to political pressure by plumping for leisure, too; in France in the eighties, for instance, a succession of laws increased mandatory vacation time and limited employers’ ability to use overtime.

The difference in work habits between Europeans and Americans, in other words, isn’t a matter of European workers’ individually deciding they’d rather spend a few extra hours every week at the movies; it’s a case of collectively determined contracts and regulations. There is a good deal to be said for this approach—most Americans, after all, are happy that the forty-hour week is written into law—but it has its costs. Even if you want to work more, it’s hard to do so: try getting anything done in Paris during August. And reducing the amount of work employees do makes it more expensive to employ people, which contributes to Europe’s high unemployment rate.

The embrace of leisure affects the job situation in Europe in other ways, too. Because Americans spend more hours at the office than Europeans, they spend fewer hours on tasks in the home: things like cooking, cleaning, and child care. This is especially true of American women, who, according to a study by the economists Richard Freeman and Ronald Schettkat, spend ten fewer hours a week on household jobs than European women do. Instead of doing these jobs themselves, Americans pay other people to do them. For instance, Americans spend about the same percentage of their income stocking up on food at home as the French and the Germans do, but they spend roughly twice as much in restaurants as the French, and almost three times as much as the Germans. Not surprisingly, many more Americans than Europeans work in the restaurant business. The same is true of child care.

In the American model, then, you work more hours and use the money you make to pay for the things you can’t do because you’re working, and this creates a demand for service jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist. In Europe, those jobs don’t exist in anything like the same numbers; employment in services in Europe is fifteen per cent below what it is in the U.S. Service jobs are precisely the jobs that young people and women (two categories of Europeans who are severely underemployed) find it easiest to get, the jobs that immigrants here thrive on but that are often not available to immigrants in France. There are many explanations for the estimated forty-per-cent unemployment rate in the banlieues that have been the site of recent riots, but part of the problem is that voluntary leisure for some Europeans has helped lead to involuntary leisure for others. The less work that gets done, the less work there is to do. Helping some people get off the labor treadmill can keep many people from ever getting on the treadmill at all.

— James Surowiecki