From NewsMax.com:
Andy Garcia Tells His Cuba Story, at Last
By Peter Davidson
Andy Garcia owns two magnificent houses -- one is in Hollywood where he works, and the other is in South Florida where he grew up. But home is in Havana, Cuba, which he fled as a young boy, and Garcia says he will never go back until his native land has been freed from Fidel Castro's tyranny and repression.
"I am opposed to the regime," the 50-year-old movie star said during a recent interview with NewsMax, adding that he would have liked to return to his homeland for a visit but "in honor of all the people who have died and suffered under the [Castro] regime, I'm not able to make that leap."
Instead, Garcia has applied his considerable skills as a filmmaker to recreate the Cuba of his memory and his imagination. The result is the recently released film "The Lost City," his opus to freedom.
The movie is his directorial debut. It's also a film he co-produced and stars in. It took Garcia 16 years to bring the film to the silver screen. "I couldn't get any support; I couldn't get financing," he said. "Selling a Cuban story to Hollywood wasn't easy."
For a long time Hollywood has been sympathetic to Cuba's longtime dictator, even though Fidel Castro gets failing marks from liberal groups.
Amnesty International cites Cuba's "illegitimate curbs on freedom of expression" and its "detention of dissidents for the peaceful expression of their beliefs." Human Rights Watch in its 2006 report condemned Castro for continuing "to enforce political conformity using criminal prosecutions, long- and short-term detentions, mob harassment, police warnings, surveillance, house arrests, travel restrictions, and politically-motivated dismissals from employment. The end result is that Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law."
Cuba has also persecuted minorities like Havana's Jews (almost all were forced to flee Cuba) and gays -- in past years hundreds were thrown into forced labor camps.
But stars like Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio have made pilgrimages to Cuba, and Nicholson went so far as to gush that Cuba is "simply a paradise."
Garcia is not quick to point to politics as the key reason for his struggle to get his story onto film.
"Can politics have an influence on someone's decision?" Garcia asks. "It's possible, but I can't say for sure because that was never articulated to me."
Then, almost as an afterthought, he said: "A lot of movies are set against a political backdrop. My favorite film last year was 'Good Night and Good Luck.'"
That movie, directed and co-written by George Clooney, recounted broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow's effort to bring down Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It won rave reviews and six Oscar nominations. But "The Lost City" was a film Andy Garcia was determined to make, and it didn't matter to him how long it took.
"Not telling this story was never an option," he says. "I figured I could outlast everyone who said no, that if I didn't play [lead character] Fico I could always play the father, or just direct and not play anyone."
Finally, Crescent Drive Entertainment said yes, backing "The Lost City." The movie was filmed in an unusually quick 35 days in the Dominican Republic for $9.5 million -- a modest amount for a major production.
Garcia says his film recaptures "a time when Havana was the Paris of the Caribbean, a vibrant, elegant and cultured city threatened and subverted by violence and social injustice, then torn apart by a revolution that became misguided and, finally, betrayed."
The screenplay was written by famed Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, an exile who died in London in February 2005. It's based on his 1967 novel "Tres Triste Tigres." Co-starring Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman and Spanish beauty Ines Sastre, the film is set in the late 1950s. It tells the story of a middle-class family ripped apart by the Cuban Revolution.
The history of the Cuban Revolution is clear-cut. Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by rebel Fidel Castro in 1959. Castro appeared to many as a hero at first, but he soon became a pawn of Russia -- an alignment that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
In his fictional account of those days, Garcia plays Fico Fellove, the owner of a Havana nightclub. Two of his brothers become Castro supporters and join the revolution while Fico, who is apolitical, desperately tries to avoid taking sides -- only to see his life destroyed by Castro's repression and Che Guevara's ruthlessness.
About Guevara, Garcia says, "Che has been romanticized over the years, but there is a darker side to his story. People wear his T-shirt like pop art. They don't know who he is. He looks like a rock star, but he executed a lot of people without trial or defense."
"The Lost City" was a big hit at the Miami International Film Festival, where Garcia received a standing ovation from 1,600 moviegoers, mostly Cuban-Americans. Dozens of viewers told him, "This is my story."
It's Andy Garcia's story as well, and it's his wife's story, too. In 1982, Garcia married Marivi Lorido, a Cuban-American whose story parallels his own. They have four children -- Dominik, Daniella, Alessandra and Andres -- and a commitment to each other that has never wavered despite his status as a Hollywood leading man and his selection by Esquire as one of the 100 sexiest stars in film history.
"I left Cuba when I was 5 1/2, and I remember everything," he says. When he closes his eyes he can still smell his father's farm, and recall how the soil felt when he walked on it, and he can feel the cold terrazzo tile floors of the family's home and hear his grandmother playing her piano.
Garcia also remembers what happened after Castro took over: "Conditions became progressively worse for us. The government took our land. Money that was in the bank was taken, too. The state passed a law and parents lost their rights to their own children."
And he remembers the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 17, 1961, when 1,300 armed Cuban exiles landed in an ill-fated attempt to topple the Castro regime. He remembers the strafing of Havana, hiding under his bed, and going out the next morning to collect spent shells from the anti-aircraft batteries.
Then one day in mid-1961, his mother brought him a glass of orange juice and told him, "We're going to Miami tomorrow." He sensed right then that they weren't coming back, at least not for a while, so he paid close attention to everything that was happening around him.
The next day Andy, the youngest of the three Garcia children, his brother Rene, sister Tesse, mother and paternal grandmother headed for the Havana airport. His father remained behind.
At the airport, the family had to pass through a final glass-enclosed checkpoint before being allowed to board their flight to freedom. It was called the fishbowl, and it was where everyone who was leaving Cuba was searched by Castro's thugs, the Revolutionary Guards, and anything and everything of value was taken from them.
His 12-year-old sister was wearing bangle bracelets, but they wouldn't come off over her hand, so one of the thugs picked up a pair of clippers. "I thought he was going to cut her hand off to get the bracelets," Garcia said. Instead, the thug cut the bracelets.
When they landed in Miami, they were so empty-handed that his mother had to borrow a dime to make a call on a pay phone to relatives who had already fled Castro's Cuba. The five Garcias took up residence in a single room in a motel off Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.
One month later, Garcia's father arrived in Florida and went to work for a catering company, which he later bought. He was also in the sock business, delivering socks to retailers on consignment. Every night after dinner the Garcia family would sit at the table and sort the socks, putting them on little plastic hangars. "I was pretty good at it," Garcia says proudly.
He was pretty good at Miami Beach High School, too, where he played on the basketball team and dreamed of becoming a professional athlete. But in his senior year an illness prevented him from playing so he turned to the drama department.
After graduating from high school he enrolled at Florida International University, where he continued his drama studies. From there he went to Hollywood, landing a role as a Latino gang member on TV's "Hill Street Blues."
That was in 1981. Other prominent roles followed -- he played a cocaine kingpin in 1986's "8 Million Ways to Die," one of Eliot Ness's men in 1987's "The Untouchables," and a detective in 1990's "Internal Affairs." But his career soared after he landed a starring role in "The Godfather Part III."
Along the way he studied the techniques of master filmmakers such as Sidney Lumet and Francis Ford Coppola, who directed him in "The Godfather Part III." And he reconnected with his Cuban roots, especially with the island nation's music from the '40s and '50s, producing four albums and a documentary.
In 2000, he starred in the HBO film "For Love of Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story," about the Cuban trumpeter great whose passion, like the character Garcia plays in "The Lost City," is music but whose dream is freedom.
Says Garcia, "'The Lost City' is about many things, but it is the music that runs deep in my veins. Neither blockades nor artistic repression can contain it. It is inexorable; like water, it will always get in and out."
Meanwhile, Garcia believes that Castro's tyranny will be swept away. "It breaks my heart that Cuba is not free, but I'm optimistic that one day it will be," he says.
He's certain that day will come. "Absolutely," he says. And when it does, Andy Garcia will, at long last, be able to go home.
Friday, May 05, 2006
From NOLA.com: Monday, May 01, 2006
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
By Keith Spera
As Bruce Springsteen led his sprawling Seeger Sessions Band onto the Acura Stage on Sunday, he confessed to a hint of trepidation.
"It's our first gig," he said. "Let's hope it goes well."
Moments later, he encountered a "technical problem" with his pants. Grinning, the embarrassed Boss turned his back to the vast audience and made the necessary adjustments. "It's not just a new band," he later explained, "but a new belt."
That was his first, and final, glitch. For two hours, Springsteen and his glorious Seeger Sessions ensemble -- six horns, a banjo, accordion, pedal steel, fiddles, piano -- rendered vintage folk and protest songs stirringly alive and relevant in a tour de force performance. Like few others in popular music could, he crafted a show that spoke eloquently to the city's struggles, both welcome distraction and poignant reminder.
The opening "O Mary Don't You Weep" set the tone. Springsteen led, then the full ensemble swung in behind him. A muted trumpet, a trombone and a saloon piano all took solos. Springsteen, as usual, heaved himself into the material at hand. The gravel in his voice stamped a ragged glory on "John Henry" over banjos and accordion. "Old Dan Tucker" and "Open All Night" were each a hoot. Big horn swells lit up a gritty "Jesse James."
The best folk songs transcend time. In the old Irish anti-war ballad "Mrs. McGrath," a cannonball claims her son's "two fine legs"; it could just as easily have been an improvised explosive device.
Certain lyrics resonated more directly for locals: "There'll be better times by and by." "God gave Noah a rainbow sign, no more water, but fire next time." "The bank holds my mortgage and they want to take my house away." "The only thing we did right was the day we started to fight." And it was easy to imagine "Louisiana" swapped into the lyrics to "My Oklahoma Home," which was "blown away" in a natural disaster.
In his most overtly political statement, Springsteen recalled his visit the previous afternoon to the 9th Ward. "I saw some sights I never thought I'd see in an American city," he said. "The criminal ineptitude makes you furious." In response, he adapted Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live" with new lyrics dedicated to "President Bystander": "My old school pals had some high times there/What happened to you folks is too bad," he sang, mocking President Bush's comments in the early days after Hurricane Katrina.
The set's watershed moment, literally, was "My City of Ruins." Originally written for his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, N.J., on Sunday he dedicated it to New Orleans. To a hushed audience, Springsteen closed his eyes and began: "There's a blood red circle on the cold dark ground, and the rain is falling down/The church door's blown open, I can hear the organ's sound, but the congregation's gone . . . the boarded-up windows, the hustlers and the thieves, while my brother's down on his knees . . . now tell me how do I began again? My city of ruins. . ." And then the refrain: "Come on, rise up! Rise up!" Thousands lifted their hands to the sky. I wept, my wife wept. And we were not alone.
Just as quickly, Springsteen kicked back into good-time gear with "Buffalo Gals" and a zydeco rubboard and accordion reimagining of "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)," from his 1980 album, "The River." A tuba, improbably enough, was the final instrument onstage before the encore at a Springsteen show.
Then he presented one last gift. A hundred bands in New Orleans, Springsteen said, could play this last song better than he. But he had come across two lesser-known verses that he thought might be appropriate. With that, he unspooled "When the Saints Go Marching In," not as a boisterous, high-kicking second-line, but as an acoustic prayer, delivered in a desperate hour. Face clenched, he sought the promised land: "Now some say this world of trouble is the only world we'll ever see/But I'm waiting for that moment when the new world is revealed."
No other artist could have spoken to, and for, the city of New Orleans at this most important of Jazzfests more purposefully, more passionately and more effectively than Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Condescensional Wisdom
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last week in his 98th year, has been justly celebrated for his wit, fluency, public-spiritedness and public service, which extended from New Deal Washington to India, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Like two Harvard colleagues -- historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sen. Pat Moynihan, another ambassador to India -- Galbraith was among liberalism's leading public intellectuals, yet he was a friend and skiing partner of William F. Buckley. After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8 Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years, he said. Buckley mischievously replied: About as long as you have been an economist.
Galbraith was an adviser to presidents (John Kennedy, a former student, and Lyndon Johnson) and presidential aspirants (Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy). His book ``The Affluent Society,'' published in 1958, was a milestone on liberalism's transformation into a doctrine of condescension. And into a minority persuasion.
In the 1950s, liberals were disconsolate. Voters twice rejected the intelligentsia's pinup, Stevenson, in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, who elicited a new strain in liberalism -- disdain for average Americans. Liberals dismissed the Eisenhower administration as ``the bland leading the bland.'' They said New Dealers had been supplanted by car dealers. How to explain the electorate's dereliction of taste? Easy. The masses, in their bovine simplicity, had been manipulated, mostly by advertising, particularly on television, which by 1958 had become the masses' entertainment.
Intellectuals, that herd of independent minds, were, as usual, in lock step as they deplored ``conformity.'' Fear of that had begun when the decade did, with David Riesman's ``The Lonely Crowd'' (1950), which was followed by C. Wright Mills' ``White Collar'' (1951), Sloan Wilson's novel ``The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit'' (1955), William Whyte's ``The Organization Man'' (1956) and Vance Packard's ``The Hidden Persuaders'' (1957).
Galbraith brought to the anti-conformity chorus a special verve in depicting Americans as pathetic, passive lumps, as manipulable as clay. Americans were what modern liberalism relishes -- victims, to be treated as wards of a government run by liberals. It never seemed to occur to Galbraith and like-minded liberals that ordinary Americans might resent that depiction and might express their resentment with their votes.
Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America's ``private affluence and public squalor.'' By that he meant Americans' consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.
If advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television -- a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room -- should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan's axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
Although Galbraith coined the phrase ``conventional wisdom,'' and thought of himself as the scourge of groupthink, ``The Affluent Society'' was the distilled essence of the conventional wisdom on campuses. In the 1960s, that liberalism became a stance of disdain, describing Americans not only as Galbraith had, as vulgar, but also as sick, racist, sexist, imperialist, etc. Again, and not amazingly, voters were not amused when told that their desires -- for big cars, neighborhood schools and other things -- did not deserve respect.
But for liberals that was precisely the beauty of Galbraith's theory. If advertising could manufacture demands for whatever corporations wanted to supply, there was no need to respect markets, which bring supply and demand into equilibrium.
``The Affluent Society'' was the canonical text of modern liberalism's disparagement of the competence of the average American. This liberalism -- the belief that people are manipulable dolts who need to be protected by their liberal betters from exposure to ``too much'' advertising -- is one rationale for McCain-Feingold. That law regulating campaigns embodies the political class' belief that it knows just the right amount of permissible political speech.
Of course if advertising really could manufacture consumer wants willy-nilly, few new products would fail. But many do. ``The Affluent Society,'' postulating the awesome power of manufacturers to manufacture whatever demand they find it convenient to satisfy, was published nine months after Ford Motor Co. put all of its marketing muscle behind a new product, the Edsel.
Small wonder that a conservative wit has surmised that the wisdom of economists varies inversely with their heights. Milton Friedman, 93, is 5 feet tall.
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last week in his 98th year, has been justly celebrated for his wit, fluency, public-spiritedness and public service, which extended from New Deal Washington to India, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Like two Harvard colleagues -- historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sen. Pat Moynihan, another ambassador to India -- Galbraith was among liberalism's leading public intellectuals, yet he was a friend and skiing partner of William F. Buckley. After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8 Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years, he said. Buckley mischievously replied: About as long as you have been an economist.
Galbraith was an adviser to presidents (John Kennedy, a former student, and Lyndon Johnson) and presidential aspirants (Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy). His book ``The Affluent Society,'' published in 1958, was a milestone on liberalism's transformation into a doctrine of condescension. And into a minority persuasion.
In the 1950s, liberals were disconsolate. Voters twice rejected the intelligentsia's pinup, Stevenson, in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, who elicited a new strain in liberalism -- disdain for average Americans. Liberals dismissed the Eisenhower administration as ``the bland leading the bland.'' They said New Dealers had been supplanted by car dealers. How to explain the electorate's dereliction of taste? Easy. The masses, in their bovine simplicity, had been manipulated, mostly by advertising, particularly on television, which by 1958 had become the masses' entertainment.
Intellectuals, that herd of independent minds, were, as usual, in lock step as they deplored ``conformity.'' Fear of that had begun when the decade did, with David Riesman's ``The Lonely Crowd'' (1950), which was followed by C. Wright Mills' ``White Collar'' (1951), Sloan Wilson's novel ``The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit'' (1955), William Whyte's ``The Organization Man'' (1956) and Vance Packard's ``The Hidden Persuaders'' (1957).
Galbraith brought to the anti-conformity chorus a special verve in depicting Americans as pathetic, passive lumps, as manipulable as clay. Americans were what modern liberalism relishes -- victims, to be treated as wards of a government run by liberals. It never seemed to occur to Galbraith and like-minded liberals that ordinary Americans might resent that depiction and might express their resentment with their votes.
Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America's ``private affluence and public squalor.'' By that he meant Americans' consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.
If advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television -- a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room -- should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan's axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
Although Galbraith coined the phrase ``conventional wisdom,'' and thought of himself as the scourge of groupthink, ``The Affluent Society'' was the distilled essence of the conventional wisdom on campuses. In the 1960s, that liberalism became a stance of disdain, describing Americans not only as Galbraith had, as vulgar, but also as sick, racist, sexist, imperialist, etc. Again, and not amazingly, voters were not amused when told that their desires -- for big cars, neighborhood schools and other things -- did not deserve respect.
But for liberals that was precisely the beauty of Galbraith's theory. If advertising could manufacture demands for whatever corporations wanted to supply, there was no need to respect markets, which bring supply and demand into equilibrium.
``The Affluent Society'' was the canonical text of modern liberalism's disparagement of the competence of the average American. This liberalism -- the belief that people are manipulable dolts who need to be protected by their liberal betters from exposure to ``too much'' advertising -- is one rationale for McCain-Feingold. That law regulating campaigns embodies the political class' belief that it knows just the right amount of permissible political speech.
Of course if advertising really could manufacture consumer wants willy-nilly, few new products would fail. But many do. ``The Affluent Society,'' postulating the awesome power of manufacturers to manufacture whatever demand they find it convenient to satisfy, was published nine months after Ford Motor Co. put all of its marketing muscle behind a new product, the Edsel.
Small wonder that a conservative wit has surmised that the wisdom of economists varies inversely with their heights. Milton Friedman, 93, is 5 feet tall.
From Opinion Journal:
They Should Have Killed Him
The death penalty has a meaning, and it isn't vengeance.
By Peggy Noonan
Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:01 a.m.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)--Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: "America, you lost." He clapped his hands.
Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.
From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved--the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives--showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. "We thank the jury." "I accept the verdict of course." "We can't question their hard work." "I know they did their best." "We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial." "I don't want to second-guess the jury."
How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.
It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.
No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.
This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks. In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them. He told no one what was coming. He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward. He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.
He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.
He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.
This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs.
As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.
Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.
I have the sense that many good people in our country, normal modest folk who used to be forced to endure being patronized and instructed by the elites of all spheres--the academy and law and the media--have sort of given up and cut to the chase. They don't wait to be instructed in the higher virtues by the professional class now. They immediately incorporate and reflect the correct wisdom before they're lectured.
I'm not sure this is progress. It feels not like the higher compassion but the lower evasion. It feels dainty in a way that speaks not of gentleness but fear.
I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.
It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.
If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?
And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?
I don't want to end with an air of hopelessness, so here's some hope, offered to the bureau of prisons. I hope he doesn't get cable TV in his cell. I hope he doesn't get to use his hour a day in general population getting buff and converting prisoners to jihad. I hope he isn't allowed visitors with whom he can do impolite things like plot against our country. I hope he isn't allowed anniversary interviews. I hope his jolly colleagues don't take captives whom they threaten to kill unless Moussaoui is released.
I hope he doesn't do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I'm not hopeful about my hopes.
They Should Have Killed Him
The death penalty has a meaning, and it isn't vengeance.
By Peggy Noonan
Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:01 a.m.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)--Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: "America, you lost." He clapped his hands.
Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.
From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved--the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives--showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. "We thank the jury." "I accept the verdict of course." "We can't question their hard work." "I know they did their best." "We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial." "I don't want to second-guess the jury."
How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.
It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.
No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.
This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks. In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them. He told no one what was coming. He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward. He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.
He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.
He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.
This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs.
As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.
Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.
I have the sense that many good people in our country, normal modest folk who used to be forced to endure being patronized and instructed by the elites of all spheres--the academy and law and the media--have sort of given up and cut to the chase. They don't wait to be instructed in the higher virtues by the professional class now. They immediately incorporate and reflect the correct wisdom before they're lectured.
I'm not sure this is progress. It feels not like the higher compassion but the lower evasion. It feels dainty in a way that speaks not of gentleness but fear.
I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.
It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.
If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?
And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?
I don't want to end with an air of hopelessness, so here's some hope, offered to the bureau of prisons. I hope he doesn't get cable TV in his cell. I hope he doesn't get to use his hour a day in general population getting buff and converting prisoners to jihad. I hope he isn't allowed visitors with whom he can do impolite things like plot against our country. I hope he isn't allowed anniversary interviews. I hope his jolly colleagues don't take captives whom they threaten to kill unless Moussaoui is released.
I hope he doesn't do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I'm not hopeful about my hopes.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
From NewsMax.com:
Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia's 'The Lost City'
By Humberto Fontova
Monday, May 1, 2006
Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie "The Lost City." He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they're ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana's last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba – a grotesque and unforgivable blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price.
Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin American countries refuse to show it. The film's offenses are many and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray such things? The man obviously doesn't know his place.
And just where did Garcia get this preposterous notion of pre-Castro Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically troubled place, they ask. All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class. Where in his movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving peasants that carried Fidel and Che into Havana on its crest, they ask. Where are all those diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my professors, Dan Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the critics.
Garcia – that cinematic bomb-thrower – has seriously jolted the mainstream media's fantasies and hallucinations of pre-Castro Cuba, of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general. In consequence, the critics are unnerved and disoriented. Their annoyance and scorn are spewing forth in review after review.
Garcia blew it. If only his characters had spoken with accents like John Belushi's as a "Saturday Night Live" killer bee! If only they'd dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they'd behaved like Cheech and Chong! If only they'd mimicked the mannerisms and gait of Freddie Prinze in "Chico and the Man"! If only the women had piled a roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen Miranda in "Road to Rio"! If only the cast had looked like the little guy who handles my luggage when I visit Cancun! Or the guys who do my lawn! Everybody knows that's what Hispanics look like!
If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in salt mines like Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad, or getting lashed by a vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a living like Ratso Rizzo!
"In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly fought," sniffs Peter Reiner in The Christian Science Monitor. "'The Lost City' misses historical complexity."
Actually, what's missing is Mr. Reiner's historical knowledge. Andy Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante knew full well that "the working poor" had no role in the stage of the Cuban revolution shown in the movie. The anti-Batista rebellion was led and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba's middle and, especially, upper class. To wit: In August of 1957 Castro's rebel movement called for a "national strike" against the Batista dictatorship – and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The "national strike" was completely ignored.
Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their "liberators," reporting to work en masse.
"Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few," harrumphs Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice. "Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason – or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about."
What's "absolutely absent" is Mr. Atkinson's knowledge about the Cuba Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that "moneyed 1 percent" and especially his "peasant revolution" epitomize the cliched idiocies still parroted by the chattering classes about Cuba.
"The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips," snorts Stephen Holden in The New York Times. "Political dialogue in the film is strictly of the junior high school variety."
It's Holden's education on the Cuban Revolution that's of the "junior high school variety." Actually it's Harvard Graduate School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba are heard in Ivy League classrooms than in any rural junior high school.
"It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution," complains Rex Reed in the New York Observer.
You're better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth Society, but nonetheless I'll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by America's most prestigious academics and its most learned film critics. I'll even stay away from those "crackpots" and "hotheads" in Miami. In place of those insufferable "revanchists" and "hard-liners" I'll use a source generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types: the United Nations.
Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S."
In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933 – five years before FDR's New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn't manage this till 30 years later.
And get this, Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies: Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930s. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S.
The anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself). Here's the makeup of the "peasant revolution's" first Cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the anti-Batista fight: seven lawyers, two university professors, three university students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor and a colonel who defected from the Batista army. A notoriously "bourgeois" bunch, as Che himself might have put it.
By 1961, however, workers and campesinos (country folk) made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. And boy, would THAT rebellion make for an action-packed and gut-wrenching movie! If by some miracle it ever got made, you can bet these learned critics would pan it too. Who ever heard of poor country folk fighting against their benefactors Fidel and Che?
The New York Times' Stephen Holden also sneers at Garcia's implication that "life sure was peachy before Fidel Castro came to town and ruined everything."
In fact, Mr. Holden, before Castro "came to town," Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and Styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off hammerheads and tiger sharks.
The learned Mr. Holden is also annoyed by "buffoonish parodies of sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders." Apparently, Communist apparatchiks should be properly depicted as somewhat misguided social workers, or as slightly overzealous Howard Dean campaign staffers.
It's no "parody," Mr. Holden, that the "apparatchiks" Garcia depicts in his movie incarcerated and executed a higher percentage of their countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his apparatchiks jailed and executed in their first three years. As well complain that the guards and police in "Schindler's List," "Julia" or "The Diary of Anne Frank" come across as hackneyed caricatures. Instead let's portray them with more "complexity," as misguided idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working class from its subservience to snooty barons, who eradicated Germany's unemployment and who ended Germany's national humiliation at the hands of Europe's premier imperialist powers.
Andy Garcia shows it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a rebellion, not a revolution. Cubans expected political change, not a socioeconomic cataclysm and catastrophe. But I fully realize such distinctions are much too "complex" for a film critic to grasp. They prefer boneheaded cliches. Garcia might have followed the laudable examples of "historical complexity" and "accuracy" shown in previous movies on Cuba. Take two that these critics compare (favorably) to "The Lost City," "Havana" and "Godfather II."
In "Havana," the brilliant director Sydney Pollack casts Fulgencio Batista with blond hair and blue eyes. In fact Batista was a black. In "Godfather II," Francis Ford Coppola, to show Havana streets on New Year's Eve 1958, casts more people than marched in Los Angeles last week and depicts them in a battle scene right out of "Braveheart." In fact, Havana streets were deathly quiet that night.
I don't presume to the exalted position of a film critic. So I don't comment on the dramatic and cinematic criticisms made by these august critics. I'm not saying, or even implying, that "The Lost City" is a better movie than "Godfather II." I'm simply criticizing the critics on their criticism of the historical accuracy of "The Lost City." In these reviews we see – in all its classic splendor – the mainstream media's thundering and apparently incurable stupidity on matters Cuban.
Humberto Fontova is the author of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," described as "absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you'll never forget" by David Limbaugh. David Horowitz says: "Humberto has performed a valuable service to the cause of decency and human freedom. Every American should read this book."
Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia's 'The Lost City'
By Humberto Fontova
Monday, May 1, 2006
Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie "The Lost City." He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they're ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana's last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba – a grotesque and unforgivable blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price.
Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin American countries refuse to show it. The film's offenses are many and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray such things? The man obviously doesn't know his place.
And just where did Garcia get this preposterous notion of pre-Castro Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically troubled place, they ask. All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class. Where in his movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving peasants that carried Fidel and Che into Havana on its crest, they ask. Where are all those diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my professors, Dan Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the critics.
Garcia – that cinematic bomb-thrower – has seriously jolted the mainstream media's fantasies and hallucinations of pre-Castro Cuba, of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general. In consequence, the critics are unnerved and disoriented. Their annoyance and scorn are spewing forth in review after review.
Garcia blew it. If only his characters had spoken with accents like John Belushi's as a "Saturday Night Live" killer bee! If only they'd dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they'd behaved like Cheech and Chong! If only they'd mimicked the mannerisms and gait of Freddie Prinze in "Chico and the Man"! If only the women had piled a roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen Miranda in "Road to Rio"! If only the cast had looked like the little guy who handles my luggage when I visit Cancun! Or the guys who do my lawn! Everybody knows that's what Hispanics look like!
If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in salt mines like Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad, or getting lashed by a vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a living like Ratso Rizzo!
"In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly fought," sniffs Peter Reiner in The Christian Science Monitor. "'The Lost City' misses historical complexity."
Actually, what's missing is Mr. Reiner's historical knowledge. Andy Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante knew full well that "the working poor" had no role in the stage of the Cuban revolution shown in the movie. The anti-Batista rebellion was led and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba's middle and, especially, upper class. To wit: In August of 1957 Castro's rebel movement called for a "national strike" against the Batista dictatorship – and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The "national strike" was completely ignored.
Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their "liberators," reporting to work en masse.
"Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few," harrumphs Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice. "Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason – or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about."
What's "absolutely absent" is Mr. Atkinson's knowledge about the Cuba Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that "moneyed 1 percent" and especially his "peasant revolution" epitomize the cliched idiocies still parroted by the chattering classes about Cuba.
"The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips," snorts Stephen Holden in The New York Times. "Political dialogue in the film is strictly of the junior high school variety."
It's Holden's education on the Cuban Revolution that's of the "junior high school variety." Actually it's Harvard Graduate School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba are heard in Ivy League classrooms than in any rural junior high school.
"It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution," complains Rex Reed in the New York Observer.
You're better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth Society, but nonetheless I'll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by America's most prestigious academics and its most learned film critics. I'll even stay away from those "crackpots" and "hotheads" in Miami. In place of those insufferable "revanchists" and "hard-liners" I'll use a source generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types: the United Nations.
Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S."
In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933 – five years before FDR's New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn't manage this till 30 years later.
And get this, Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies: Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930s. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S.
The anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself). Here's the makeup of the "peasant revolution's" first Cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the anti-Batista fight: seven lawyers, two university professors, three university students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor and a colonel who defected from the Batista army. A notoriously "bourgeois" bunch, as Che himself might have put it.
By 1961, however, workers and campesinos (country folk) made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. And boy, would THAT rebellion make for an action-packed and gut-wrenching movie! If by some miracle it ever got made, you can bet these learned critics would pan it too. Who ever heard of poor country folk fighting against their benefactors Fidel and Che?
The New York Times' Stephen Holden also sneers at Garcia's implication that "life sure was peachy before Fidel Castro came to town and ruined everything."
In fact, Mr. Holden, before Castro "came to town," Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and Styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off hammerheads and tiger sharks.
The learned Mr. Holden is also annoyed by "buffoonish parodies of sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders." Apparently, Communist apparatchiks should be properly depicted as somewhat misguided social workers, or as slightly overzealous Howard Dean campaign staffers.
It's no "parody," Mr. Holden, that the "apparatchiks" Garcia depicts in his movie incarcerated and executed a higher percentage of their countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his apparatchiks jailed and executed in their first three years. As well complain that the guards and police in "Schindler's List," "Julia" or "The Diary of Anne Frank" come across as hackneyed caricatures. Instead let's portray them with more "complexity," as misguided idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working class from its subservience to snooty barons, who eradicated Germany's unemployment and who ended Germany's national humiliation at the hands of Europe's premier imperialist powers.
Andy Garcia shows it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a rebellion, not a revolution. Cubans expected political change, not a socioeconomic cataclysm and catastrophe. But I fully realize such distinctions are much too "complex" for a film critic to grasp. They prefer boneheaded cliches. Garcia might have followed the laudable examples of "historical complexity" and "accuracy" shown in previous movies on Cuba. Take two that these critics compare (favorably) to "The Lost City," "Havana" and "Godfather II."
In "Havana," the brilliant director Sydney Pollack casts Fulgencio Batista with blond hair and blue eyes. In fact Batista was a black. In "Godfather II," Francis Ford Coppola, to show Havana streets on New Year's Eve 1958, casts more people than marched in Los Angeles last week and depicts them in a battle scene right out of "Braveheart." In fact, Havana streets were deathly quiet that night.
I don't presume to the exalted position of a film critic. So I don't comment on the dramatic and cinematic criticisms made by these august critics. I'm not saying, or even implying, that "The Lost City" is a better movie than "Godfather II." I'm simply criticizing the critics on their criticism of the historical accuracy of "The Lost City." In these reviews we see – in all its classic splendor – the mainstream media's thundering and apparently incurable stupidity on matters Cuban.
Humberto Fontova is the author of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," described as "absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you'll never forget" by David Limbaugh. David Horowitz says: "Humberto has performed a valuable service to the cause of decency and human freedom. Every American should read this book."
From telegraph.co.uk:
Obituary: Jean-François Revel
(Filed: 03/05/2006)
Jean-François Revel, who died on Saturday aged 82, was almost unique among French philosophers in being a champion of economic liberalism and an outspoken critic of the anti-Americanism of European intellectuals - particularly French ones.
In his youth Revel had regarded himself as a Leftist. He wrote speeches for the young François Mitterrand and once ran as a Socialist candidate in the French parliamentary elections. But during the Cold War, when his fellow Left-wingers were promoting Marx and Mao, he emerged as a champion of the American values of freedom and democracy over totalitarian Communism and its fellow-travellers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, living first in Italy and then in France, Revel had imbibed the fashionable opinion of America as "the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs (who were innocent, we believed), of racism and the Korean War and a stranglehold on Europe itself - the 'American occupation of France', as Simone de Beauvoir and the Communists used to say." But from the late 1960s he began to be troubled by doubts as to the validity of a view which indiscriminately condemned American foreign policy as "imperialistic", while always interpreting Soviet imperialism as philanthropic.
In 1970, after the first of many visits to America, Revel published Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution, in which he predicted that the great revolution of the 20th century would turn out to be the "liberal revolution" of multi-party democracy and market economics, rather than the "Socialist revolution" of Left-wing theory. This revolution would take place not in Cuba, but in California.
On his visit to the States, Revel had been "astonished by evidence that everything Europeans were saying about the US was false"; and most of his book consisted of a heavily sarcastic point-by-point rebuttal of the knee-jerk, anti-American prejudices of the day. Europe's loss of leadership during the post-war era, in his opinion, had led to an irrational envy and resentment.
A definitive proof of the irrational origins of anti-American sentiment, he suggested, was to be found in the way in which critics often reproached the United States for some shortcoming, and then for its opposite.
During the Vietnam conflict of the 1960s, for example, French commentators developed a sudden amnesia about their country's involvement in Indo-China, and the fact that France, while embroiled in its ugly colonial war with the Viet Minh, "frequently pleaded for and sometimes obtained American help".
Without Marx or Jesus became a best-seller in France and in the United States, but won almost universally hostile reviews from European critics. Revel's Swedish publisher was unable to get a single television interview for him, despite impressive sales; in Finland he was confronted on television by two "intellectuals" - one from Romania, the other from Poland; his Greek publisher composed a preface in which he begged his compatriots' pardon for having published the book.
Refusing to be daunted, Revel returned to the charge in L'Obsession anti-americaine. Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences (2003), in which he directed his heavy sarcasm at European intellectuals who claimed that America had brought the 9/11 terrorist attacks on itself and blamed her for impoverishing the developing world through globalisation. Slogans such as "No to terrorism. No to war", Revel wrote, were "about as intelligent as 'No to illness. No to medicine'."
Rather than point fingers at America, he suggested, European politicians should look in the mirror and acknowledge their own shortcomings. America, he argued, had been forced to act almost alone to combat global terrorism because Europe had failed to act in the cause of collective security. As for "globalisation", developing countries wanted more, not less, access to rich markets.
Revel also detected a tendency of other countries to ascribe their own worst faults to the Americans in a curious "reversal of culpability". Thus, the Japanese and Germans excoriate America for "militarism"; the Mexicans attack it for "electoral corruption"; the British accuse it of "imperialism"; the Chinese accuse it of "hegemonism"; and Arab writers, post 9/11, for "abridging press freedom".
But much of Revel's anger was directed at his fellow countrymen: "We French have had little to say against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, the imams of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the bosses of China and Vietnam. We reserve our admonitions and our contempt and our attacks for Ronald Reagan and George W Bush."
Revel was born Jean-François Ricard on January 19 1924 in Marseilles, later changing his name by deed poll to Revel, his nom de plume. When he was six months old his family took him to Mozambique, where his father had an import-export business. His first language was Portuguese. He attended schools in Marseilles and Lyon, and was 16 when the Germans invaded France. He was active in the Resistance and, after the Liberation, was involved in helping to restore police services in the Rhone-Alps region.
After the war, Revel studied Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, then began his career teaching philosophy and French in Algiers, Mexico City, Florence and then Paris. In 1960 he became chief literary editor for France Observateur and later went on to work as literary editor and then editor-in-chief at the weekly L'Express, resigning in 1981 in solidarity with a colleague sacked by the journal's proprietor, James Goldsmith. Later he worked as a commentator for Le Point.
A man of wide interests and a noted gourmet, Revel wrote some 30 books, including a three-volume history of the development of Western thought; an attack on Marxist and existentialist interpretations of Proust; a history of 18th-century culture and cuisine; an attack on the political and oratorical pretensions of General de Gaulle; and a dialogue about Buddhism, co-written with his son, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk close to the Dalai Lama.
As a philosopher, Revel's most consistent theme was the meaning and possibility of political freedom, about which he became more optimistic as time wore on.
In How Democracies Perish (1984) he suggested that democracy may turn out to be "a historical accident". But in Democracy Against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse (1993), while acknowledging the anti-democratic forces within western societies, he argued that democracy had become not only indispensable, but inevitable.
Revel, who was appointed a member of the Académie Française in 1997, is survived by his second wife, the writer Claude Sarraute, and by several children.
Obituary: Jean-François Revel
(Filed: 03/05/2006)
Jean-François Revel, who died on Saturday aged 82, was almost unique among French philosophers in being a champion of economic liberalism and an outspoken critic of the anti-Americanism of European intellectuals - particularly French ones.
In his youth Revel had regarded himself as a Leftist. He wrote speeches for the young François Mitterrand and once ran as a Socialist candidate in the French parliamentary elections. But during the Cold War, when his fellow Left-wingers were promoting Marx and Mao, he emerged as a champion of the American values of freedom and democracy over totalitarian Communism and its fellow-travellers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, living first in Italy and then in France, Revel had imbibed the fashionable opinion of America as "the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs (who were innocent, we believed), of racism and the Korean War and a stranglehold on Europe itself - the 'American occupation of France', as Simone de Beauvoir and the Communists used to say." But from the late 1960s he began to be troubled by doubts as to the validity of a view which indiscriminately condemned American foreign policy as "imperialistic", while always interpreting Soviet imperialism as philanthropic.
In 1970, after the first of many visits to America, Revel published Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution, in which he predicted that the great revolution of the 20th century would turn out to be the "liberal revolution" of multi-party democracy and market economics, rather than the "Socialist revolution" of Left-wing theory. This revolution would take place not in Cuba, but in California.
On his visit to the States, Revel had been "astonished by evidence that everything Europeans were saying about the US was false"; and most of his book consisted of a heavily sarcastic point-by-point rebuttal of the knee-jerk, anti-American prejudices of the day. Europe's loss of leadership during the post-war era, in his opinion, had led to an irrational envy and resentment.
A definitive proof of the irrational origins of anti-American sentiment, he suggested, was to be found in the way in which critics often reproached the United States for some shortcoming, and then for its opposite.
During the Vietnam conflict of the 1960s, for example, French commentators developed a sudden amnesia about their country's involvement in Indo-China, and the fact that France, while embroiled in its ugly colonial war with the Viet Minh, "frequently pleaded for and sometimes obtained American help".
Without Marx or Jesus became a best-seller in France and in the United States, but won almost universally hostile reviews from European critics. Revel's Swedish publisher was unable to get a single television interview for him, despite impressive sales; in Finland he was confronted on television by two "intellectuals" - one from Romania, the other from Poland; his Greek publisher composed a preface in which he begged his compatriots' pardon for having published the book.
Refusing to be daunted, Revel returned to the charge in L'Obsession anti-americaine. Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences (2003), in which he directed his heavy sarcasm at European intellectuals who claimed that America had brought the 9/11 terrorist attacks on itself and blamed her for impoverishing the developing world through globalisation. Slogans such as "No to terrorism. No to war", Revel wrote, were "about as intelligent as 'No to illness. No to medicine'."
Rather than point fingers at America, he suggested, European politicians should look in the mirror and acknowledge their own shortcomings. America, he argued, had been forced to act almost alone to combat global terrorism because Europe had failed to act in the cause of collective security. As for "globalisation", developing countries wanted more, not less, access to rich markets.
Revel also detected a tendency of other countries to ascribe their own worst faults to the Americans in a curious "reversal of culpability". Thus, the Japanese and Germans excoriate America for "militarism"; the Mexicans attack it for "electoral corruption"; the British accuse it of "imperialism"; the Chinese accuse it of "hegemonism"; and Arab writers, post 9/11, for "abridging press freedom".
But much of Revel's anger was directed at his fellow countrymen: "We French have had little to say against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, the imams of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the bosses of China and Vietnam. We reserve our admonitions and our contempt and our attacks for Ronald Reagan and George W Bush."
Revel was born Jean-François Ricard on January 19 1924 in Marseilles, later changing his name by deed poll to Revel, his nom de plume. When he was six months old his family took him to Mozambique, where his father had an import-export business. His first language was Portuguese. He attended schools in Marseilles and Lyon, and was 16 when the Germans invaded France. He was active in the Resistance and, after the Liberation, was involved in helping to restore police services in the Rhone-Alps region.
After the war, Revel studied Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, then began his career teaching philosophy and French in Algiers, Mexico City, Florence and then Paris. In 1960 he became chief literary editor for France Observateur and later went on to work as literary editor and then editor-in-chief at the weekly L'Express, resigning in 1981 in solidarity with a colleague sacked by the journal's proprietor, James Goldsmith. Later he worked as a commentator for Le Point.
A man of wide interests and a noted gourmet, Revel wrote some 30 books, including a three-volume history of the development of Western thought; an attack on Marxist and existentialist interpretations of Proust; a history of 18th-century culture and cuisine; an attack on the political and oratorical pretensions of General de Gaulle; and a dialogue about Buddhism, co-written with his son, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk close to the Dalai Lama.
As a philosopher, Revel's most consistent theme was the meaning and possibility of political freedom, about which he became more optimistic as time wore on.
In How Democracies Perish (1984) he suggested that democracy may turn out to be "a historical accident". But in Democracy Against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse (1993), while acknowledging the anti-democratic forces within western societies, he argued that democracy had become not only indispensable, but inevitable.
Revel, who was appointed a member of the Académie Française in 1997, is survived by his second wife, the writer Claude Sarraute, and by several children.
From insidehighered.com:
Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture
By KC Johnson
In response to the scandal surrounding the men’s lacrosse team, Duke president Richard Brodhead has initiated a “conversation on campus culture.” The first installment provided little insight. To Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies, recent events showed that “we need an innovative and brave curriculum that will allow our students to engage one another in a progressive manner.” It’s worth remembering that only two years ago at Neal’s institution, a department chairman jokingly explained the faculty’s ideological imbalance by noting, “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.” It seems rather unlikely that Duke’s curriculum lacks a sufficiently “progressive” nature.
Indeed, far from needing a more “progressive” campus culture, the lacrosse scandal suggests that a considerable portion of the Duke faculty and student body need to reread the Constitution and consider the accused — regardless of their group identity — innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, if, as Duke officials have claimed, Brodhead seriously desires to use this event as a “learning opportunity,” he needs to explore why voices among the faculty urging local authorities to respect the due process rights of Duke’s students seemed so overpowered by professors exhibiting a rush to judgment.
In early April, prior to his peculiar commentary on campus culture, Professor Neal joined 87 other Duke professors in signing a public statement about the scandal. Three academic departments and 13 of the university’ss academic programs also endorsed the statement, which was placed as an advertisement in the student newspaper, The Duke Chronicle, and is currently hosted on the Web site of Duke’s African and African-American Studies program. That 88 faculty members — much less entire departments — would have signed on to such a document suggests that whatever plagues Duke’s campus culture goes beyond the lacrosse team’s conduct and the administration’s insufficient oversight of its athletic department.
Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved repulsively. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. In response, Brodhead appropriately cancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation. Yet the faculty members’ statement ignored Brodhead’s actions, and instead contributed to the feeding frenzy in the weeks before the district attorney’s decision to indict two players on the team.
The 88 signatories affirmed that they were “listening” to a select group of students troubled by sexism and racism at Duke. Yet 8 of the 11 quotes supplied from students to whom these professors had been talking, 8 contained no attribution — of any sort, even to the extent of claiming to come from anonymous Duke students. Nonetheless, according to the faculty members, “The disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides.” It’s hard to imagine that college professors could openly dismiss how the ultimate legal judgment would shape this case’s legacy. Such sentiments perhaps explain why no member of the Duke Law School faculty signed the letter.
More disturbingly, the group of 88 committed themselves to “turning up the volume.” They told campus protesters, “Thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.” These demonstrators needed no encouragement: They were already vocal, and had already judged the lacrosse players were guilty. One student group produced a “wanted” poster containing photographs of 43 of the 46 white lacrosse players. At an event outside a house rented by several lacrosse team members, organized by a visiting instructor in English Department, protesters held signs reading, “It’s Sunday morning, time to confess.” They demanded that the university force the players to testify or dismiss them from school.
The public silence of most Duke professors allowed the group of 88 to become, in essence, the voice of the faculty. In a local climate that has featured an appointed district attorney whose behavior, at the very least, has been erratic, the Duke faculty might have forcefully advocated respecting the due process rights of all concerned. After all, fair play and procedural integrity are supposed to be cardinal principles of the academy. In no way would such a position have endorsed the players’ claim to innocence: Due process exists because the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition has determined it elemental to achieving the truth. But such process-based arguments have remained in short supply from the Duke faculty. Instead, the group of 88 celebrated “turning up the volume” and proclaimed that legal findings would not deter their campaign for justice.
When faced with outside criticism — about, for example, a professor who has plagiarized or engaged in some other form of professional misconduct, or in recent high-profile controversies like those involving Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado — academics regularly condemn pressure for quick resolutions and celebrate their respect for addressing matters through time-tested procedures. Such an approach, as we have frequently heard since the 9/11 attacks, is essential to prevent a revival of McCarthyism on college campuses.
Yet for unapologetically urging expulsion on the basis of group membership and unproven allegations, few professors have more clearly demonstrated a McCarthyite spirit better than another signatory to of the faculty statement, Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies. Lamenting the “college and university blind-eying of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain,” Baker issued a public letter denouncing the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us.” To act against “violent, white, male, athletic privilege,” he urged the “immediate dismissals” of “the team itself and its players.”
Duke Provost Peter Lange correctly termed Baker’s diatribe “a form of prejudice,” the “act of prejudgment: to presume that one knows something ‘must’ have been done by or done to someone because of his or her race, religion or other characteristic.” It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.
Baker’s attacks on athletics added a fourth component to the traditional race/class/gender trinity. It’s an open secret that at many academically prestigious schools, some faculty factions desire diminishing or eliminating intercollegiate athletics, usually by claiming that athletes are lazy students, receive special treatment, or drive down the institution’s intellectual quality. In fact, with the exception of the two revenue-producing sports (men’s basketball and football), the reverse is more often true at colleges like Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, or the Ivy League institutions.
I admit to a bias on this score: My sister was a three-year starter at point guard for the Columbia University women’s basketball team. Seeing how hard she worked to remain a dean’s list student and fulfill her athletic responsibilities gave me a first-hand respect for the challenges facing varsity athletes at academically rigorous institutions. In addition to the responsibilities sustained by most students (challenging course loads, extracurricular activities, often campus jobs), athletes in non-revenue producing sports have physically demanding practice schedules, in-season road trips, and commitments to spend time with alumni or recruits. They play before small crowds, and envision no professional careers. It’s distressing to see that many in the academy share Baker’s prejudices, and view participation in college athletics as a negative.
With the most vocal elements among Duke’s faculty using the lacrosse case to forward preconceived ideological and pedagogical agendas, it has been left to undergraduates to question some of the district attorney’s unusual actions — such as conducting a photo lineup that included only players on the team, sending police to a Duke dormitory in an attempt to interrogate the players outside the presence of their lawyers, and securing indictments before searching the players’ dorm rooms, receiving results of a second DNA test, or investigating which players had documented alibis. In the words of a recent Newsweek article, the lawyer for one indicted player, Reade Seligmann, produced multiple sources of “evidence that would seem to indicate it was virtually impossible that Seligmann committed the crime.” To date, the 88 faculty members who claimed to be “listening” to Duke students have given no indication of listening to those undergraduates concerned about the local authorities’ unusual interpretation of the spirit of due process. Nor, apparently, do the faculty signatories seem to hear what The Duke Chronicle editorial termed the “several thousand others of us” students who disagreed that “Duke breeds cultures of hate, racism, sexism and other forms of backward thinking.”
The Raleigh News and Observer recently editorialized, “Duke faculty members, many of them from the ’60s and ’70s generations that pushed college administrators to ease their controlling ways, now are urging the university to require greater social as well as scholastic discipline from students. Duke professors, in fact, are offering to help draft new behavior codes for the school. With years of experience and academic success to their credit, faculty members ought to be listened to.” If the group of 88’s statement is any guide, this advice is dubious. Even so, Brodhead has named two signatories of the faculty group to the newly formed “campus culture” committee. Given their own record, it seems unlikely that their committee will explore why Duke’s campus culture featured its most outspoken faculty faction rushing to judgment rather than seeking to uphold the due process rights of their own institution’s students.
KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture
By KC Johnson
In response to the scandal surrounding the men’s lacrosse team, Duke president Richard Brodhead has initiated a “conversation on campus culture.” The first installment provided little insight. To Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies, recent events showed that “we need an innovative and brave curriculum that will allow our students to engage one another in a progressive manner.” It’s worth remembering that only two years ago at Neal’s institution, a department chairman jokingly explained the faculty’s ideological imbalance by noting, “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.” It seems rather unlikely that Duke’s curriculum lacks a sufficiently “progressive” nature.
Indeed, far from needing a more “progressive” campus culture, the lacrosse scandal suggests that a considerable portion of the Duke faculty and student body need to reread the Constitution and consider the accused — regardless of their group identity — innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, if, as Duke officials have claimed, Brodhead seriously desires to use this event as a “learning opportunity,” he needs to explore why voices among the faculty urging local authorities to respect the due process rights of Duke’s students seemed so overpowered by professors exhibiting a rush to judgment.
In early April, prior to his peculiar commentary on campus culture, Professor Neal joined 87 other Duke professors in signing a public statement about the scandal. Three academic departments and 13 of the university’ss academic programs also endorsed the statement, which was placed as an advertisement in the student newspaper, The Duke Chronicle, and is currently hosted on the Web site of Duke’s African and African-American Studies program. That 88 faculty members — much less entire departments — would have signed on to such a document suggests that whatever plagues Duke’s campus culture goes beyond the lacrosse team’s conduct and the administration’s insufficient oversight of its athletic department.
Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved repulsively. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. In response, Brodhead appropriately cancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation. Yet the faculty members’ statement ignored Brodhead’s actions, and instead contributed to the feeding frenzy in the weeks before the district attorney’s decision to indict two players on the team.
The 88 signatories affirmed that they were “listening” to a select group of students troubled by sexism and racism at Duke. Yet 8 of the 11 quotes supplied from students to whom these professors had been talking, 8 contained no attribution — of any sort, even to the extent of claiming to come from anonymous Duke students. Nonetheless, according to the faculty members, “The disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides.” It’s hard to imagine that college professors could openly dismiss how the ultimate legal judgment would shape this case’s legacy. Such sentiments perhaps explain why no member of the Duke Law School faculty signed the letter.
More disturbingly, the group of 88 committed themselves to “turning up the volume.” They told campus protesters, “Thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.” These demonstrators needed no encouragement: They were already vocal, and had already judged the lacrosse players were guilty. One student group produced a “wanted” poster containing photographs of 43 of the 46 white lacrosse players. At an event outside a house rented by several lacrosse team members, organized by a visiting instructor in English Department, protesters held signs reading, “It’s Sunday morning, time to confess.” They demanded that the university force the players to testify or dismiss them from school.
The public silence of most Duke professors allowed the group of 88 to become, in essence, the voice of the faculty. In a local climate that has featured an appointed district attorney whose behavior, at the very least, has been erratic, the Duke faculty might have forcefully advocated respecting the due process rights of all concerned. After all, fair play and procedural integrity are supposed to be cardinal principles of the academy. In no way would such a position have endorsed the players’ claim to innocence: Due process exists because the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition has determined it elemental to achieving the truth. But such process-based arguments have remained in short supply from the Duke faculty. Instead, the group of 88 celebrated “turning up the volume” and proclaimed that legal findings would not deter their campaign for justice.
When faced with outside criticism — about, for example, a professor who has plagiarized or engaged in some other form of professional misconduct, or in recent high-profile controversies like those involving Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado — academics regularly condemn pressure for quick resolutions and celebrate their respect for addressing matters through time-tested procedures. Such an approach, as we have frequently heard since the 9/11 attacks, is essential to prevent a revival of McCarthyism on college campuses.
Yet for unapologetically urging expulsion on the basis of group membership and unproven allegations, few professors have more clearly demonstrated a McCarthyite spirit better than another signatory to of the faculty statement, Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies. Lamenting the “college and university blind-eying of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain,” Baker issued a public letter denouncing the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us.” To act against “violent, white, male, athletic privilege,” he urged the “immediate dismissals” of “the team itself and its players.”
Duke Provost Peter Lange correctly termed Baker’s diatribe “a form of prejudice,” the “act of prejudgment: to presume that one knows something ‘must’ have been done by or done to someone because of his or her race, religion or other characteristic.” It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.
Baker’s attacks on athletics added a fourth component to the traditional race/class/gender trinity. It’s an open secret that at many academically prestigious schools, some faculty factions desire diminishing or eliminating intercollegiate athletics, usually by claiming that athletes are lazy students, receive special treatment, or drive down the institution’s intellectual quality. In fact, with the exception of the two revenue-producing sports (men’s basketball and football), the reverse is more often true at colleges like Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, or the Ivy League institutions.
I admit to a bias on this score: My sister was a three-year starter at point guard for the Columbia University women’s basketball team. Seeing how hard she worked to remain a dean’s list student and fulfill her athletic responsibilities gave me a first-hand respect for the challenges facing varsity athletes at academically rigorous institutions. In addition to the responsibilities sustained by most students (challenging course loads, extracurricular activities, often campus jobs), athletes in non-revenue producing sports have physically demanding practice schedules, in-season road trips, and commitments to spend time with alumni or recruits. They play before small crowds, and envision no professional careers. It’s distressing to see that many in the academy share Baker’s prejudices, and view participation in college athletics as a negative.
With the most vocal elements among Duke’s faculty using the lacrosse case to forward preconceived ideological and pedagogical agendas, it has been left to undergraduates to question some of the district attorney’s unusual actions — such as conducting a photo lineup that included only players on the team, sending police to a Duke dormitory in an attempt to interrogate the players outside the presence of their lawyers, and securing indictments before searching the players’ dorm rooms, receiving results of a second DNA test, or investigating which players had documented alibis. In the words of a recent Newsweek article, the lawyer for one indicted player, Reade Seligmann, produced multiple sources of “evidence that would seem to indicate it was virtually impossible that Seligmann committed the crime.” To date, the 88 faculty members who claimed to be “listening” to Duke students have given no indication of listening to those undergraduates concerned about the local authorities’ unusual interpretation of the spirit of due process. Nor, apparently, do the faculty signatories seem to hear what The Duke Chronicle editorial termed the “several thousand others of us” students who disagreed that “Duke breeds cultures of hate, racism, sexism and other forms of backward thinking.”
The Raleigh News and Observer recently editorialized, “Duke faculty members, many of them from the ’60s and ’70s generations that pushed college administrators to ease their controlling ways, now are urging the university to require greater social as well as scholastic discipline from students. Duke professors, in fact, are offering to help draft new behavior codes for the school. With years of experience and academic success to their credit, faculty members ought to be listened to.” If the group of 88’s statement is any guide, this advice is dubious. Even so, Brodhead has named two signatories of the faculty group to the newly formed “campus culture” committee. Given their own record, it seems unlikely that their committee will explore why Duke’s campus culture featured its most outspoken faculty faction rushing to judgment rather than seeking to uphold the due process rights of their own institution’s students.
KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Immigration Madness -- Come One, Come All, No Ticket Needed
By Tony Blankley
As I watch our country almost hopelessly divided and wandering off in all sorts of wrong directions, I think of the last verse of John Milton's "Paradise Lost," when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden:
"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
"They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."
Of course, all is not lost. Some years later, Milton wrote "Paradise Regained." But what a terrible journey of rediscovery was before Man, once he had foolishly succumbed to temptations that forced him to leave Eden and live amongst Satan and his servants in the outer world.
I know America has not been a Garden of Eden, but for a temporal land, how wonderful it has been. And how casually we are casting off its manifold blessings. And for what future.
It is almost inconceivable that an argument is taken seriously that we don't have the right to secure our borders and determine who shall enter our country. Not only has such lunacy become respectable, but our mainstream media instantly, instinctively embraces such a position. Every radio headline newscast, almost every newspaper and television report willfully refuses to distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants. Each report stamps the mark of evil on the forehead of all who would guard our borders.
Even the Republican president of the United States makes the nonest of non-sequiturs, when he justifies doing nothing to enforce the border laws by claiming that these are decent humans just looking for a chance in life.
Well, with the exception of the 29 percent of federal prisoners and similar numbers in state prisons, with the exception of those who seek our welfare, rather than a job -- the rest of the wayfarers are indeed far from their native lands for the most decent and best of intentions.
I would guess that of the world's 6 billion or so souls -- probably about 75 percent are good and decent folks who only want the best for their children and the world. It's the same all over -- England, Mexico, America, Africa, throughout the world -- about a quarter of the population are bums, the rest are pretty good.
And most of them would like to live in America. But why stop with 85 million Mexicans? For the open border crowd -- which apparently includes virtually the entire American political, media, academic and business establishment -- there is no reason to try to keep out anyone who wants to come in. (The Senate and the president have made it quite clear that they have no plans to actually secure the border. Their border security proposals are charades and calculated pretenses.)
There are still about 700 million Chinese peasants waiting impatiently for a decent job; probably about an equal number of Indians. And most of the African continent could surely live better in Phoenix than they do being butchered in genocidal wars or starving in man-induced famines.
What is the moral basis for discriminating against that part of suffering humanity unlucky enough to find itself not sharing a border with the good old U.S. of A.? Perhaps the Dubai Ports World company could start chartering ships to bring the rest of suffering humanity to our shores.
Perhaps we have a moral obligation to tax ourselves to pay to transport to America all 4 billion or so humans who would prefer to live here, rather than where cruel fate has placed them. Surely there must be a Clinton-appointed federal judge somewhere who can provide the constitutional argument for such a mandated tax.
Frankly, that last lunatic idea doesn't sound any more far-fetched than the first lunatic idea -- that we have no right to keep anyone out of the country who goes to the bother of coming here. You can't do satire in a lunatic asylum or in present-day American politics.
Apparently the American establishment has finally taken to heart the teaching of Karl Marx: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. America should house and feed and educate and provide health care and employ all the world according to our ability. And surely the people of the world will provide the need.
And why not? After all, it is just dumb luck that each of us finds ourselves in God-blessed America.
Well, if we keep going at this rate we will soon run out of luck. But apparently we will never run out of dumb.
By Tony Blankley
As I watch our country almost hopelessly divided and wandering off in all sorts of wrong directions, I think of the last verse of John Milton's "Paradise Lost," when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden:
"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
"They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."
Of course, all is not lost. Some years later, Milton wrote "Paradise Regained." But what a terrible journey of rediscovery was before Man, once he had foolishly succumbed to temptations that forced him to leave Eden and live amongst Satan and his servants in the outer world.
I know America has not been a Garden of Eden, but for a temporal land, how wonderful it has been. And how casually we are casting off its manifold blessings. And for what future.
It is almost inconceivable that an argument is taken seriously that we don't have the right to secure our borders and determine who shall enter our country. Not only has such lunacy become respectable, but our mainstream media instantly, instinctively embraces such a position. Every radio headline newscast, almost every newspaper and television report willfully refuses to distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants. Each report stamps the mark of evil on the forehead of all who would guard our borders.
Even the Republican president of the United States makes the nonest of non-sequiturs, when he justifies doing nothing to enforce the border laws by claiming that these are decent humans just looking for a chance in life.
Well, with the exception of the 29 percent of federal prisoners and similar numbers in state prisons, with the exception of those who seek our welfare, rather than a job -- the rest of the wayfarers are indeed far from their native lands for the most decent and best of intentions.
I would guess that of the world's 6 billion or so souls -- probably about 75 percent are good and decent folks who only want the best for their children and the world. It's the same all over -- England, Mexico, America, Africa, throughout the world -- about a quarter of the population are bums, the rest are pretty good.
And most of them would like to live in America. But why stop with 85 million Mexicans? For the open border crowd -- which apparently includes virtually the entire American political, media, academic and business establishment -- there is no reason to try to keep out anyone who wants to come in. (The Senate and the president have made it quite clear that they have no plans to actually secure the border. Their border security proposals are charades and calculated pretenses.)
There are still about 700 million Chinese peasants waiting impatiently for a decent job; probably about an equal number of Indians. And most of the African continent could surely live better in Phoenix than they do being butchered in genocidal wars or starving in man-induced famines.
What is the moral basis for discriminating against that part of suffering humanity unlucky enough to find itself not sharing a border with the good old U.S. of A.? Perhaps the Dubai Ports World company could start chartering ships to bring the rest of suffering humanity to our shores.
Perhaps we have a moral obligation to tax ourselves to pay to transport to America all 4 billion or so humans who would prefer to live here, rather than where cruel fate has placed them. Surely there must be a Clinton-appointed federal judge somewhere who can provide the constitutional argument for such a mandated tax.
Frankly, that last lunatic idea doesn't sound any more far-fetched than the first lunatic idea -- that we have no right to keep anyone out of the country who goes to the bother of coming here. You can't do satire in a lunatic asylum or in present-day American politics.
Apparently the American establishment has finally taken to heart the teaching of Karl Marx: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. America should house and feed and educate and provide health care and employ all the world according to our ability. And surely the people of the world will provide the need.
And why not? After all, it is just dumb luck that each of us finds ourselves in God-blessed America.
Well, if we keep going at this rate we will soon run out of luck. But apparently we will never run out of dumb.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Republicans Running on Empty
By Cal Thomas
So it has come to this: A group of Senate Republicans has proposed $100 rebates to low-income people to ease their "pain at the gas pump." They also are entertaining the possibility of higher taxes on oil industry profits, as if government does a better job of spending money than private industry. Have they forgotten the last time government imposed a "windfall profits tax" from 1980 to '88? Oil production fell (but demand grew) as "big oil" had less incentive to explore. A history of this bad idea can be found on The Tax History Project Web page www.taxhistory.org.
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial called the $100 rebate proposal "destined for the pandering hall of fame." When Democrats want to hand out checks, Republicans call it "welfare" and they claim to oppose it on principle. What should it be called when Republicans do it, hypocrisy?
GOP impotence in the midst of fuel price hikes may be the final proof that this is a party that has run out of gas. Democrats aren't any better and should they regain a congressional majority this fall, it won't be long before they again indulge in the same pandering, unethical behavior and content-free politics that has exposed Republican ineptness.
Where is any sign of real leadership? President Bush has made some personnel changes at the White House, but does he intend to say what needs to be said and do what should be done? Why is it so difficult to tell people that if they want to see gas prices go down, they should reduce consumption? Some estimates I've seen indicate that cutting consumption by as little as 3 percent could lower prices. It's called supply and demand, but too many of us have been making too many demands, not only on petroleum, but also on politicians.
Because contemporary culture is so self-focused, are Republicans afraid to tell people to do the equivalent of eating their vegetables? Republicans appear content to let people keep eating sugar by indulging them in the view that everyone is entitled to more, bigger and better in their pursuit of comfort and pleasure. Who will stand up and say, "Take control of your own lives and stop looking to Washington to solve everything"?
Republicans have forgotten why they wanted power. It was to reduce the size and cost of government and return power (and money) to individuals. Now they mimic the Democrats, focusing on their political careers and ever-expanding government.
Some Republicans think they can squeeze by this fall with scare tactics, such as reminding voters of the liberals who would gain leadership positions if they lose their current majority. Democrats are better at scaring voters than Republicans. Traditional GOP voters have been known to stay home to punish Republicans for cross-dressing as Democrats. A visionary and optimistic agenda would be a far better strategy. It also has the virtue of being more likely to succeed.
People want to vote affirmatively for their leaders. That is why the GOP's 1994 "Contract with America" was a politically brilliant document. Republicans put their intentions in writing and a majority of voters believed them enough to toss out Democrats who had been running the House for 40 years.
In this fall's election, can Republicans go to voters with a positive agenda and solid record of accomplishment? From the volatile subject of illegal immigration and lawbreakers demanding "rights" they do not have, to spending on wasteful and unnecessary projects, to a deficit and national debt that would almost shame Democrats (but doesn't shame Republicans), a majority of congressional Republicans are giving voters little reason to vote for them.
How could a party go from a visionary like Ronald Reagan who changed the world, not to mention restoring American optimism, to the tunnel vision of his illegitimate offspring who seem to care less about change than perpetuating themselves in office? They aren't even doing a good job of that as the fall election results may show, unless somebody or something quickly lights a fire under them. Never has the derogatory phrase, "Republican in name only," applied to so many who have done so little for so few.
By Cal Thomas
So it has come to this: A group of Senate Republicans has proposed $100 rebates to low-income people to ease their "pain at the gas pump." They also are entertaining the possibility of higher taxes on oil industry profits, as if government does a better job of spending money than private industry. Have they forgotten the last time government imposed a "windfall profits tax" from 1980 to '88? Oil production fell (but demand grew) as "big oil" had less incentive to explore. A history of this bad idea can be found on The Tax History Project Web page www.taxhistory.org.
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial called the $100 rebate proposal "destined for the pandering hall of fame." When Democrats want to hand out checks, Republicans call it "welfare" and they claim to oppose it on principle. What should it be called when Republicans do it, hypocrisy?
GOP impotence in the midst of fuel price hikes may be the final proof that this is a party that has run out of gas. Democrats aren't any better and should they regain a congressional majority this fall, it won't be long before they again indulge in the same pandering, unethical behavior and content-free politics that has exposed Republican ineptness.
Where is any sign of real leadership? President Bush has made some personnel changes at the White House, but does he intend to say what needs to be said and do what should be done? Why is it so difficult to tell people that if they want to see gas prices go down, they should reduce consumption? Some estimates I've seen indicate that cutting consumption by as little as 3 percent could lower prices. It's called supply and demand, but too many of us have been making too many demands, not only on petroleum, but also on politicians.
Because contemporary culture is so self-focused, are Republicans afraid to tell people to do the equivalent of eating their vegetables? Republicans appear content to let people keep eating sugar by indulging them in the view that everyone is entitled to more, bigger and better in their pursuit of comfort and pleasure. Who will stand up and say, "Take control of your own lives and stop looking to Washington to solve everything"?
Republicans have forgotten why they wanted power. It was to reduce the size and cost of government and return power (and money) to individuals. Now they mimic the Democrats, focusing on their political careers and ever-expanding government.
Some Republicans think they can squeeze by this fall with scare tactics, such as reminding voters of the liberals who would gain leadership positions if they lose their current majority. Democrats are better at scaring voters than Republicans. Traditional GOP voters have been known to stay home to punish Republicans for cross-dressing as Democrats. A visionary and optimistic agenda would be a far better strategy. It also has the virtue of being more likely to succeed.
People want to vote affirmatively for their leaders. That is why the GOP's 1994 "Contract with America" was a politically brilliant document. Republicans put their intentions in writing and a majority of voters believed them enough to toss out Democrats who had been running the House for 40 years.
In this fall's election, can Republicans go to voters with a positive agenda and solid record of accomplishment? From the volatile subject of illegal immigration and lawbreakers demanding "rights" they do not have, to spending on wasteful and unnecessary projects, to a deficit and national debt that would almost shame Democrats (but doesn't shame Republicans), a majority of congressional Republicans are giving voters little reason to vote for them.
How could a party go from a visionary like Ronald Reagan who changed the world, not to mention restoring American optimism, to the tunnel vision of his illegitimate offspring who seem to care less about change than perpetuating themselves in office? They aren't even doing a good job of that as the fall election results may show, unless somebody or something quickly lights a fire under them. Never has the derogatory phrase, "Republican in name only," applied to so many who have done so little for so few.
From Opinion Journal:
White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.
Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.
Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
From Associated Press:
Springsteen Expresses New Orleans" Pain
NEW ORLEANS (May 1) - New Jersey's favorite son was adopted by New
Orleans on Sunday, as Bruce Springsteen - through speeches and song -
vocalized the anger, frustration, pain and resilience of this
hurricane-battered city at the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Decrying what he called "criminal ineptitude" in Hurricane Katrina's
wake, Springsteen jabbed at the political powers he deemed responsible
for New Orleans' slow recovery.
Perhaps the most pointed moment came as he prepared to sing an old song
that he had rewritten lyrics to for New Orleans. Noting that he visited
the city's ninth ward, perhaps the most devastated area in the city,
Springsteen said: "I saw sights I never thought I'd see in an American
city," and added: "The criminal ineptitude makes you furious."
With that, he launched into a song titled "How Can A Poor Man Stand
Such Times and Live?" and dedicated the song to "President Bystander."
Its lyrics included the lines: "There's bodies floatin' on Canal and
the levees gone to hell ... them who's got out of town, and them who
ain't got left to drown, tell me, how can a poor man stand such times
and live?"
It was Springsteen's first appearance at the event, the biggest musical
happening since Katrina struck last summer. The rock legend, along with
Bob Dylan and the Dave Matthews Band, were among the high-profile names
who joined the city's homegrown music stars for the two weekend-long
festival, which kicked off Friday and will end next Sunday.
Other performers on Sunday included New Orleans music luminaries The
Meters and jazzman Allen Toussiant, who performed with Elvis Costello.
Toussaint's set was more buoyant than melancholy, as he celebrated with
mostly upbeat songs. During his final song, he led the audience in a
chant: "Home, home, everybody come home."
But it was Springsteen who may have provided the most poignant moments.
Springsteen eschewed the big hits he's most identified with and instead
performed classic folk and gospel songs epitomized by Pete Seeger that
are featured on Springsteen's new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions." Though they were decades old, many of the songs seemed
particularly relevant to New Orleans struggles - "Mary Don't You Weep,"
"Jacob's Ladder," and particularly "My Oklahoma Home," which depicts a
man's loss of his home and family after the devastating dust storms
there in the 1930s.
But perhaps no song was as bittersweet as "We Shall Overcome." As
Springsteen somberly performed the tune, some people embraced each
other, others dabbed their eyes. Another emotional moment came as he
dedicated one of his old tunes to New Orleans: "My City in Ruins."
Though he wrote it for his favorite town of Asbury Park, N.J., its
lyrics resonated with the crowd: "Young men on the corner, like
scattered leaves, the boarded up windows, the hustlers and thieves,
while my brother's down on his knees. My city of ruins."
By the time he sang the chorus, "Come on rise up!" the audience
spontaneously rose their hands in their air, symbolizing the pain and
the hope of the city.
Not all of Springsteen's two-hour long set was downbeat; his huge band
at times sounded like a boisterous New Orleans brass band, with its
booming horn system, while he later injected some boogie and swing with
another jazzy tune. But he ended his performance on a tender note,
sweetly singing, "When The Saints Go Marching In."
The festival picks up next weekend with Paul Simon, Irma Thomas, Keith
Urban, Jimmy Buffett, Buckwheat Zydeco and Fats Domino, who hasn't
performed in public since being evacuated from his damaged Ninth Ward
home after Katrina.
Springsteen Expresses New Orleans" Pain
NEW ORLEANS (May 1) - New Jersey's favorite son was adopted by New
Orleans on Sunday, as Bruce Springsteen - through speeches and song -
vocalized the anger, frustration, pain and resilience of this
hurricane-battered city at the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Decrying what he called "criminal ineptitude" in Hurricane Katrina's
wake, Springsteen jabbed at the political powers he deemed responsible
for New Orleans' slow recovery.
Perhaps the most pointed moment came as he prepared to sing an old song
that he had rewritten lyrics to for New Orleans. Noting that he visited
the city's ninth ward, perhaps the most devastated area in the city,
Springsteen said: "I saw sights I never thought I'd see in an American
city," and added: "The criminal ineptitude makes you furious."
With that, he launched into a song titled "How Can A Poor Man Stand
Such Times and Live?" and dedicated the song to "President Bystander."
Its lyrics included the lines: "There's bodies floatin' on Canal and
the levees gone to hell ... them who's got out of town, and them who
ain't got left to drown, tell me, how can a poor man stand such times
and live?"
It was Springsteen's first appearance at the event, the biggest musical
happening since Katrina struck last summer. The rock legend, along with
Bob Dylan and the Dave Matthews Band, were among the high-profile names
who joined the city's homegrown music stars for the two weekend-long
festival, which kicked off Friday and will end next Sunday.
Other performers on Sunday included New Orleans music luminaries The
Meters and jazzman Allen Toussiant, who performed with Elvis Costello.
Toussaint's set was more buoyant than melancholy, as he celebrated with
mostly upbeat songs. During his final song, he led the audience in a
chant: "Home, home, everybody come home."
But it was Springsteen who may have provided the most poignant moments.
Springsteen eschewed the big hits he's most identified with and instead
performed classic folk and gospel songs epitomized by Pete Seeger that
are featured on Springsteen's new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions." Though they were decades old, many of the songs seemed
particularly relevant to New Orleans struggles - "Mary Don't You Weep,"
"Jacob's Ladder," and particularly "My Oklahoma Home," which depicts a
man's loss of his home and family after the devastating dust storms
there in the 1930s.
But perhaps no song was as bittersweet as "We Shall Overcome." As
Springsteen somberly performed the tune, some people embraced each
other, others dabbed their eyes. Another emotional moment came as he
dedicated one of his old tunes to New Orleans: "My City in Ruins."
Though he wrote it for his favorite town of Asbury Park, N.J., its
lyrics resonated with the crowd: "Young men on the corner, like
scattered leaves, the boarded up windows, the hustlers and thieves,
while my brother's down on his knees. My city of ruins."
By the time he sang the chorus, "Come on rise up!" the audience
spontaneously rose their hands in their air, symbolizing the pain and
the hope of the city.
Not all of Springsteen's two-hour long set was downbeat; his huge band
at times sounded like a boisterous New Orleans brass band, with its
booming horn system, while he later injected some boogie and swing with
another jazzy tune. But he ended his performance on a tender note,
sweetly singing, "When The Saints Go Marching In."
The festival picks up next weekend with Paul Simon, Irma Thomas, Keith
Urban, Jimmy Buffett, Buckwheat Zydeco and Fats Domino, who hasn't
performed in public since being evacuated from his damaged Ninth Ward
home after Katrina.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 04/30/06:
THE CURIOUS APOCALYPSE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
BY MICHAEL RILEY
It comes down to two words, really.
Two words and the end of the world.
These two words form the moral and emotional center of Springsteen's
new album, and perhaps more poignantly, for his current concert tour on
behalf of that album. (The disc, titled "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions," consists of 13 covers of folk songs popularized by folk
singer Pete Seeger.)
Those two words are part of the chorus to the gospel song cum civil
rights anthem called "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize."
"Hold on," Springsteen sings again and again, and in doing so, he moves
his traveling chautauqua/tent-revival show into the world of
apocalyptic literature.
Most of us hear the word apocalypse and think of the visions conjured
up in the last half of the Book of Daniel and in the Revelation of
John: visions of world-ending battles, blood-soaked bodies stretching
for miles. The skies darken and redden, filled with fierce armies of
angels doing battle against monsters and dragons, while the stars fall
and the world ends. It is theology as science fiction.
But those images almost miss the point of apocalyptic literature.
Apocalyptic literature is written during times of hardship and
persecution of those who see themselves as God's people. The fantastic
and befuddling images are code, meant to keep the true message out of
the hands of the powers that be, those with the whips and chains.
And the true message is simply and inevitably this: The world seems to
be spinning out of control. Justice is a myth, and life is filled with
sin and pain misery. But God still is in charge of history, he still
loves his children and is working even now to deliver them from evil
and bring them home.
Apocalyptic literature is a tract for hard times, and the message at
the heart of it is simply: "Hold on."
And that is the message Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band are
evidently going to bring night after night on the current tour, which
will make stops in New York and New Jersey in late June.
Most apocalyptic preachers give us images of the future. Springsteen's
apocalypse is curious in that he has reached into the past, bringing
songs over a century old to bear on the world of today and tomorrow.
He opened one of the recent rehearsal shows at Asbury Park's Convention
Hall with "Mary, Don't You Weep," a song that says our tears will end
once we realize that if God has delivered Moses and his his people in
the past, he will surely do the same again for us: "This old world will
rock," he sings, and a fire is coming.
Everybody assumes that the apocalypse is a world-shattering event. But
its always the end of the world for somebody. People die every day.
Springsteen's work always has chronicled the lives and deaths of those
with hard luck or hard hearts.
He continues those stories in the appropriated folk songs in his new
work, and even as he reworks his own songs:
The steel driving John Henry drops dead from hubris or progress or a
broken heart.
Jesse James is shot in the back by a friend.
Johhny 99 still is begging to be put to death.
Much of the music belies the sadness and anger of the words of the
songs. It seems almost as if the promises of God are carried in the
driving or light arrangements of the songs.
Springsteen often links songs together in concert, forming set pieces
that carry the narrative he's telling onstage. This tour would seem to
be no exception. At the show I attended, Springsteen followed his own
"If I Should Fall Behind" (a duet with his wife Patti Scialfa,
performed as a waltz) with the Irish anti-war song "Mrs. McGrath," in
which a Mother (and widow?) faces her wounded and ruined soldier son.
Even if love lasts and brings forth new life, the juxtaposition of the
songs seems to say that the horrors of war can take it away of ruin it.
Springsteen and the band melded "Cadillac Ranch" with the chorus of
"Mystery Train," at first glance an unwieldy mixing of metaphors, or at
least a strange amalgam like the horned beasts of Revelation. But both
songs are about the destination that awaits us all when our hearts beat
no more. We get there in a fast car or an iron horse, but we get there
- and those we love are carried off as well.
But the most striking combination of songs comes when Springsteen sings
the Depression era "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" It
is a litany of injustices in the world and the unfairness of life. The
question is sadly rhetorical. But Springsteen provides an answer with
his next song, the Sunday school favorite"Jacob's Ladder," based on a
dream the Biblical patriarch had of a ladder descending from heaven and
angels traveling up and down it.
Theologically, Jacob's dream vision says something about the closeness
of heaven and earth, of God and humanity.
Jacob's ladder is a gift of grace, a gift of God. He has not forgotten
nor forsaken Jacob or us. There is a way up. Note also that reaching
God requires effort - "Every rung takes us higher," we sing.
"How can a poor man stand such times as these?" a weary world asks.
And "climbing Jacob's ladder" is the answer, which means answering
God's call, accepting his gifts and working for justice and mercy he
requires of his children.
The theme is repeated in the gospel like "My City of Ruins," which is
filled with broken lives and blasted landscapes, but ending with a call
to rise up, to pray and work.
That sense of working for the kingdom of God is muted in a lot of
modern apocalyptic blather.
But some people know that the two are connected, which is why folk
songs become gospel songs and union songs and civil rights songs.
At the close of the concert, Springsteen sang the old Dixieland
favorite "When the Saints Go Marching In," and you would expect it to
blow the roof off the place.
But no, it was a quiet, muted performance, alternating lines sung by
Springsteen and current bandmate Mark Thompson:
"Some say this world of trouble," they sing, "is the only one we
need/But I'm waiting for that morning, When the new world is revealed."
That new world is at the heart of apocalyptic literature - what
happens the day after the day the world ends? - and the answer is a
new world, a new paradise, where humanity gets it right at last and the
Lord is never far away.
"I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in," the two
men sing with yearning in their voices, and then gain strength and
power from each other as they continue to sing, and their hope becomes
palpable.
The song thus becomes a quiet prayer of sorts, a prayer asking for the
presence of God in our lives and in our land and the strength to find
him in unexpected places.
It is every prayer we ever pray, in some sense, and certainly the
prayer that ends the Book of Revelation.
"Come, Lord . . ." John writes.
"I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in," we hear,
and music is so good and fine that you get the feeling that that fine
day could right around the corner.
Michael Riley is an ordained Baptist minister.
THE CURIOUS APOCALYPSE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
BY MICHAEL RILEY
It comes down to two words, really.
Two words and the end of the world.
These two words form the moral and emotional center of Springsteen's
new album, and perhaps more poignantly, for his current concert tour on
behalf of that album. (The disc, titled "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions," consists of 13 covers of folk songs popularized by folk
singer Pete Seeger.)
Those two words are part of the chorus to the gospel song cum civil
rights anthem called "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize."
"Hold on," Springsteen sings again and again, and in doing so, he moves
his traveling chautauqua/tent-revival show into the world of
apocalyptic literature.
Most of us hear the word apocalypse and think of the visions conjured
up in the last half of the Book of Daniel and in the Revelation of
John: visions of world-ending battles, blood-soaked bodies stretching
for miles. The skies darken and redden, filled with fierce armies of
angels doing battle against monsters and dragons, while the stars fall
and the world ends. It is theology as science fiction.
But those images almost miss the point of apocalyptic literature.
Apocalyptic literature is written during times of hardship and
persecution of those who see themselves as God's people. The fantastic
and befuddling images are code, meant to keep the true message out of
the hands of the powers that be, those with the whips and chains.
And the true message is simply and inevitably this: The world seems to
be spinning out of control. Justice is a myth, and life is filled with
sin and pain misery. But God still is in charge of history, he still
loves his children and is working even now to deliver them from evil
and bring them home.
Apocalyptic literature is a tract for hard times, and the message at
the heart of it is simply: "Hold on."
And that is the message Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band are
evidently going to bring night after night on the current tour, which
will make stops in New York and New Jersey in late June.
Most apocalyptic preachers give us images of the future. Springsteen's
apocalypse is curious in that he has reached into the past, bringing
songs over a century old to bear on the world of today and tomorrow.
He opened one of the recent rehearsal shows at Asbury Park's Convention
Hall with "Mary, Don't You Weep," a song that says our tears will end
once we realize that if God has delivered Moses and his his people in
the past, he will surely do the same again for us: "This old world will
rock," he sings, and a fire is coming.
Everybody assumes that the apocalypse is a world-shattering event. But
its always the end of the world for somebody. People die every day.
Springsteen's work always has chronicled the lives and deaths of those
with hard luck or hard hearts.
He continues those stories in the appropriated folk songs in his new
work, and even as he reworks his own songs:
The steel driving John Henry drops dead from hubris or progress or a
broken heart.
Jesse James is shot in the back by a friend.
Johhny 99 still is begging to be put to death.
Much of the music belies the sadness and anger of the words of the
songs. It seems almost as if the promises of God are carried in the
driving or light arrangements of the songs.
Springsteen often links songs together in concert, forming set pieces
that carry the narrative he's telling onstage. This tour would seem to
be no exception. At the show I attended, Springsteen followed his own
"If I Should Fall Behind" (a duet with his wife Patti Scialfa,
performed as a waltz) with the Irish anti-war song "Mrs. McGrath," in
which a Mother (and widow?) faces her wounded and ruined soldier son.
Even if love lasts and brings forth new life, the juxtaposition of the
songs seems to say that the horrors of war can take it away of ruin it.
Springsteen and the band melded "Cadillac Ranch" with the chorus of
"Mystery Train," at first glance an unwieldy mixing of metaphors, or at
least a strange amalgam like the horned beasts of Revelation. But both
songs are about the destination that awaits us all when our hearts beat
no more. We get there in a fast car or an iron horse, but we get there
- and those we love are carried off as well.
But the most striking combination of songs comes when Springsteen sings
the Depression era "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" It
is a litany of injustices in the world and the unfairness of life. The
question is sadly rhetorical. But Springsteen provides an answer with
his next song, the Sunday school favorite"Jacob's Ladder," based on a
dream the Biblical patriarch had of a ladder descending from heaven and
angels traveling up and down it.
Theologically, Jacob's dream vision says something about the closeness
of heaven and earth, of God and humanity.
Jacob's ladder is a gift of grace, a gift of God. He has not forgotten
nor forsaken Jacob or us. There is a way up. Note also that reaching
God requires effort - "Every rung takes us higher," we sing.
"How can a poor man stand such times as these?" a weary world asks.
And "climbing Jacob's ladder" is the answer, which means answering
God's call, accepting his gifts and working for justice and mercy he
requires of his children.
The theme is repeated in the gospel like "My City of Ruins," which is
filled with broken lives and blasted landscapes, but ending with a call
to rise up, to pray and work.
That sense of working for the kingdom of God is muted in a lot of
modern apocalyptic blather.
But some people know that the two are connected, which is why folk
songs become gospel songs and union songs and civil rights songs.
At the close of the concert, Springsteen sang the old Dixieland
favorite "When the Saints Go Marching In," and you would expect it to
blow the roof off the place.
But no, it was a quiet, muted performance, alternating lines sung by
Springsteen and current bandmate Mark Thompson:
"Some say this world of trouble," they sing, "is the only one we
need/But I'm waiting for that morning, When the new world is revealed."
That new world is at the heart of apocalyptic literature - what
happens the day after the day the world ends? - and the answer is a
new world, a new paradise, where humanity gets it right at last and the
Lord is never far away.
"I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in," the two
men sing with yearning in their voices, and then gain strength and
power from each other as they continue to sing, and their hope becomes
palpable.
The song thus becomes a quiet prayer of sorts, a prayer asking for the
presence of God in our lives and in our land and the strength to find
him in unexpected places.
It is every prayer we ever pray, in some sense, and certainly the
prayer that ends the Book of Revelation.
"Come, Lord . . ." John writes.
"I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in," we hear,
and music is so good and fine that you get the feeling that that fine
day could right around the corner.
Michael Riley is an ordained Baptist minister.
From The Los Angeles Times:
Bruce Leads the Revival
Springsteen closes the New Orleans Jazz Fest's first weekend with an
exhilarating performance.
By Randy Lewis
April 30, 2006
NEW ORLEANS -- Sometime, somewhere, a more dramatic and exhilarating
confluence of music with moment may have existed than Bruce
Springsteen's appearance tonight at the 37th annual Jazz & Heritage
Festival here. But in nearly 40 years of concert-going, I haven't
witnessed one.
The first public presentation of material from his new album of
folk-rooted songs, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" had the
feeling of no less than the turning of a tide, for the people of New
Orleans and Louisiana, and perhaps well beyond.
It was serendipity that Springsteen happened to finish the album just
enough ahead of Jazz Fest to accept an invitation to premiere his new
Seeger Sessions band and the material for the occasion. But the way
this project uses American folk music tradition to express and
transform people's pain, loss and anger dovetailed perfectly with the
festival's role eight months after Hurricane Katrina as a salve on the
wounds of the region's residents.
The album had been out just nine days before today's show with this
remarkably spirited 18-piece ensemble consisting of banjo, acoustic
guitars, accordion, fiddles, mandolin, Dobro, steel guitar, bass, drums
and a freewheeling horn section that fit right in here in the brass
band capital of the nation. The massed forces, which included several
backup singers, exuded an enlarged sense of the communal spirit that's
long typified Springsteen shows.
The audience at the closing set of the 10-day event's first weekend
empathetically jumped in without so much as a cue on sing-along
choruses that it cemented the feeling of a community coming together
and rising above tragedy.
This, however, was above and beyond even Springsteen's high performance
standards. Moving from the rock context of the E Street Band to the
shout-out jubilation of an unfettered hootenanny, the New Jersey rocker
was transformed into a troubadour evangelist. One concert cannot even
start to undo such monumental destruction as Katrina left, but
Springsteen seemed to understand that even a moment of renewal can be a
powerful thing.
Springsteen began with the spiritual "O Mary Don't You Weep," so
infused with religious fervor it would have worked beautifully in the
festival's gospel tent as he sang, "Brothers and sisters don't you
cry/There'll be good times by and by."
Except for a few fittingly reworked numbers from his catalog, including
"Johnny 99" redone as a New Orleans street parade workout, and a spare,
deeply felt version of "My City of Ruins," the show stuck with the
"Seeger Sessions" songs, supplemented by a couple that didn't make the
final cut for the album.
One of those was "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" - a
song written in 1929 at the start of the Depression, to which
Springsteen added three of his own verses with Katrina in mind.
He spoke at one point of driving through mile upon mile of
storm-devastated New Orleans neighborhoods, and sharing citizens'
outrage at political incompetence and/or corruption that has
compromised rebuilding efforts. But rather than giving in to despair,
the songs he chose almost invariably sought - and found -
redemption through faith and the resilience of the human spirit.
Such was the restorative power Springsteen and the band channeled that
midway through their treatment of Bill and Sis Cunningham's Dust Bowl
chronicle "My Oklahoma Home," it didn't seem the least bit coincidental
that the gray storm clouds above parted to reveal the blue sky and
shining sun behind them.
After Springsteen and his plentiful cohorts left the stage, an
announcer said, "This concludes the first weekend of the resurrection
of New Orleans." And for once such a comment didn't sound the least
like hype.
Bruce Leads the Revival
Springsteen closes the New Orleans Jazz Fest's first weekend with an
exhilarating performance.
By Randy Lewis
April 30, 2006
NEW ORLEANS -- Sometime, somewhere, a more dramatic and exhilarating
confluence of music with moment may have existed than Bruce
Springsteen's appearance tonight at the 37th annual Jazz & Heritage
Festival here. But in nearly 40 years of concert-going, I haven't
witnessed one.
The first public presentation of material from his new album of
folk-rooted songs, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" had the
feeling of no less than the turning of a tide, for the people of New
Orleans and Louisiana, and perhaps well beyond.
It was serendipity that Springsteen happened to finish the album just
enough ahead of Jazz Fest to accept an invitation to premiere his new
Seeger Sessions band and the material for the occasion. But the way
this project uses American folk music tradition to express and
transform people's pain, loss and anger dovetailed perfectly with the
festival's role eight months after Hurricane Katrina as a salve on the
wounds of the region's residents.
The album had been out just nine days before today's show with this
remarkably spirited 18-piece ensemble consisting of banjo, acoustic
guitars, accordion, fiddles, mandolin, Dobro, steel guitar, bass, drums
and a freewheeling horn section that fit right in here in the brass
band capital of the nation. The massed forces, which included several
backup singers, exuded an enlarged sense of the communal spirit that's
long typified Springsteen shows.
The audience at the closing set of the 10-day event's first weekend
empathetically jumped in without so much as a cue on sing-along
choruses that it cemented the feeling of a community coming together
and rising above tragedy.
This, however, was above and beyond even Springsteen's high performance
standards. Moving from the rock context of the E Street Band to the
shout-out jubilation of an unfettered hootenanny, the New Jersey rocker
was transformed into a troubadour evangelist. One concert cannot even
start to undo such monumental destruction as Katrina left, but
Springsteen seemed to understand that even a moment of renewal can be a
powerful thing.
Springsteen began with the spiritual "O Mary Don't You Weep," so
infused with religious fervor it would have worked beautifully in the
festival's gospel tent as he sang, "Brothers and sisters don't you
cry/There'll be good times by and by."
Except for a few fittingly reworked numbers from his catalog, including
"Johnny 99" redone as a New Orleans street parade workout, and a spare,
deeply felt version of "My City of Ruins," the show stuck with the
"Seeger Sessions" songs, supplemented by a couple that didn't make the
final cut for the album.
One of those was "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" - a
song written in 1929 at the start of the Depression, to which
Springsteen added three of his own verses with Katrina in mind.
He spoke at one point of driving through mile upon mile of
storm-devastated New Orleans neighborhoods, and sharing citizens'
outrage at political incompetence and/or corruption that has
compromised rebuilding efforts. But rather than giving in to despair,
the songs he chose almost invariably sought - and found -
redemption through faith and the resilience of the human spirit.
Such was the restorative power Springsteen and the band channeled that
midway through their treatment of Bill and Sis Cunningham's Dust Bowl
chronicle "My Oklahoma Home," it didn't seem the least bit coincidental
that the gray storm clouds above parted to reveal the blue sky and
shining sun behind them.
After Springsteen and his plentiful cohorts left the stage, an
announcer said, "This concludes the first weekend of the resurrection
of New Orleans." And for once such a comment didn't sound the least
like hype.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Where's the dissent about source of quote?
BY MARK STEYN
John Kerry announced this week's John Kerry Iraq Policy of the Week the other day: "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military."
With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair?
Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, at least until May 15, when I have a windsurfing engagement off Nantucket."
Actually, no. He got it from Thomas Jefferson. "This is not the first time in American history when patriotism has been distorted to deflect criticism and mislead the nation," warned Sen. Kerry, placing his courage in the broader historical context. "No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: 'Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.' "
Close enough. According to the Jefferson Library: "There are a number of quotes that we do not find in Thomas Jefferson's correspondence or other writings; in such cases, Jefferson should not be cited as the source. Among the most common of these spurious Jefferson quotes are: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "
Did Kerry's speechwriter endeavor to point that out? "Hey, boss, diss ain't a Jefferson quote."
"Yeah, that's right. Dissent -- a Jefferson quote. Shove one in around the fifth paragraph, but snap it up, will you? I got a fitting for my new even-more-buttock-hugging yellow lycra cycling shorts in 20 minutes."
It was the Aussie pundit Tim Blair who noted the Thomas Jeffefakery. American commentators were apparently too busy cooing that "Kerry may be reflecting a new boldness on the part of liberals to come out and say what they believe and to reclaim the moral high ground on patriotism" (CBS News) to complain that KERRY LIED!! SCHOLARLY ATTRIBUTION DIED!!! Instead, KERRY MISQUOTED!! MEDIA DOTED!!!
Indeed, America's hardboiled newsmen can't get enough of the Thomas Jefferbunk. The Berkshire Eagle used it as the headline for last year's Fourth of July editorial. Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press thundered: "We need to stop slicing this country in half, and saying those who support this act or this politician are 'good' Americans, and the rest are not. Sometimes 'dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' I didn't make that up. Thomas Jefferson did."
Er, no. You made up that he made it up. But former Georgia state Rep. Mike Snow uses it, and Miranda Yaver of Berkeley wore it on a button to the big anti-war demo in Washington last year, and Ted Kennedy deployed it as the stirring finale to his anti-Bush speech:
"It is not unpatriotic to tell the truth to the American people about the war in Iraq. In this grave moment of our country, to use the words of Thomas Jefferson, 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "
The last time Sen. Kennedy went rummaging for an old quote was when he stood up at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston and announced that "here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shirt around the world." But at least several of those words are genuine, albeit not the reference to the menswear department.
As far as I can tell, it was Nadine Strosser, the ACLU's head honcho, who cooked up the Jefferson fake. At any rate, she seems to be the only one who ever deployed it pre-9/11. Since then, however, it's gone nuclear, it's everywhere, it's a bumper sticker and a T-shirt slogan and a surefire applause line for the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation. As Sen. Kennedy's brother so memorably said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what a fake quote can do for you."
What does it mean when so many senior Democrats take refuge in an obvious bit of hooey? Thomas Jefferson would never have said anything half so witless. There is no virtue in dissent per se. When John F. Kennedy said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty" -- and, believe it or not, that's a real quote, though it's hard to imagine any Massachusetts Democrat saying such a thing today -- I could have yelled out, "Hey, screw you, loser." It would have been "dissent," but it wouldn't have been patriotic, and it's certainly not a useful contribution to the debate, any more than that of the University of North Carolina students at Chapel Hill who recently scrawled on the doors of the ROTC armory "F--- OFF!" and "WE WON'T FIGHT YOUR WARS!"
But the high holiness of dissent for its own sake is now the core belief of the Democratic Party: It's not what you're for, it's what you're against. Their current denunciations of Big Oil have a crudely effective opportunism but say to them "OK, what's your energy policy?" and see what answers you get: More domestic oil? Ooh, no, we can't disturb the pristine ANWR breeding ground of the world's largest mosquito herd. More nuclear power, like the French? Ooh, no, might be another Three Mile Island. Er, OK, you're the mass transit guys; how about we go back to wood-fired steam trains? Ooh, no, we're opposed to logging, in case it causes global warming, or cooling, or both.
Dissent for its own sake is like the Democrats' energy policy: We're opposed to any kind of energy; we prefer to be mired in enervated passivity. If the right is full of armchair generals, the left is full of armchair generalities: Nothing can be done, any course is futile, everything's a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that saying so for certain is the highest form of patriotism.
It's truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent -- against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier's mom can become a household name is if she's a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools' claims to teach our children about America, "warts and all," has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else. Or as the Capital Times of Madison, Wis., concluded its ringing editorial on the subject:
"Thomas Jefferson got it right: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education."
Teaching them authentic Jefferson quotes would be a better approach.
BY MARK STEYN
John Kerry announced this week's John Kerry Iraq Policy of the Week the other day: "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military."
With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair?
Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, at least until May 15, when I have a windsurfing engagement off Nantucket."
Actually, no. He got it from Thomas Jefferson. "This is not the first time in American history when patriotism has been distorted to deflect criticism and mislead the nation," warned Sen. Kerry, placing his courage in the broader historical context. "No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: 'Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.' "
Close enough. According to the Jefferson Library: "There are a number of quotes that we do not find in Thomas Jefferson's correspondence or other writings; in such cases, Jefferson should not be cited as the source. Among the most common of these spurious Jefferson quotes are: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "
Did Kerry's speechwriter endeavor to point that out? "Hey, boss, diss ain't a Jefferson quote."
"Yeah, that's right. Dissent -- a Jefferson quote. Shove one in around the fifth paragraph, but snap it up, will you? I got a fitting for my new even-more-buttock-hugging yellow lycra cycling shorts in 20 minutes."
It was the Aussie pundit Tim Blair who noted the Thomas Jeffefakery. American commentators were apparently too busy cooing that "Kerry may be reflecting a new boldness on the part of liberals to come out and say what they believe and to reclaim the moral high ground on patriotism" (CBS News) to complain that KERRY LIED!! SCHOLARLY ATTRIBUTION DIED!!! Instead, KERRY MISQUOTED!! MEDIA DOTED!!!
Indeed, America's hardboiled newsmen can't get enough of the Thomas Jefferbunk. The Berkshire Eagle used it as the headline for last year's Fourth of July editorial. Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press thundered: "We need to stop slicing this country in half, and saying those who support this act or this politician are 'good' Americans, and the rest are not. Sometimes 'dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' I didn't make that up. Thomas Jefferson did."
Er, no. You made up that he made it up. But former Georgia state Rep. Mike Snow uses it, and Miranda Yaver of Berkeley wore it on a button to the big anti-war demo in Washington last year, and Ted Kennedy deployed it as the stirring finale to his anti-Bush speech:
"It is not unpatriotic to tell the truth to the American people about the war in Iraq. In this grave moment of our country, to use the words of Thomas Jefferson, 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "
The last time Sen. Kennedy went rummaging for an old quote was when he stood up at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston and announced that "here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shirt around the world." But at least several of those words are genuine, albeit not the reference to the menswear department.
As far as I can tell, it was Nadine Strosser, the ACLU's head honcho, who cooked up the Jefferson fake. At any rate, she seems to be the only one who ever deployed it pre-9/11. Since then, however, it's gone nuclear, it's everywhere, it's a bumper sticker and a T-shirt slogan and a surefire applause line for the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation. As Sen. Kennedy's brother so memorably said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what a fake quote can do for you."
What does it mean when so many senior Democrats take refuge in an obvious bit of hooey? Thomas Jefferson would never have said anything half so witless. There is no virtue in dissent per se. When John F. Kennedy said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty" -- and, believe it or not, that's a real quote, though it's hard to imagine any Massachusetts Democrat saying such a thing today -- I could have yelled out, "Hey, screw you, loser." It would have been "dissent," but it wouldn't have been patriotic, and it's certainly not a useful contribution to the debate, any more than that of the University of North Carolina students at Chapel Hill who recently scrawled on the doors of the ROTC armory "F--- OFF!" and "WE WON'T FIGHT YOUR WARS!"
But the high holiness of dissent for its own sake is now the core belief of the Democratic Party: It's not what you're for, it's what you're against. Their current denunciations of Big Oil have a crudely effective opportunism but say to them "OK, what's your energy policy?" and see what answers you get: More domestic oil? Ooh, no, we can't disturb the pristine ANWR breeding ground of the world's largest mosquito herd. More nuclear power, like the French? Ooh, no, might be another Three Mile Island. Er, OK, you're the mass transit guys; how about we go back to wood-fired steam trains? Ooh, no, we're opposed to logging, in case it causes global warming, or cooling, or both.
Dissent for its own sake is like the Democrats' energy policy: We're opposed to any kind of energy; we prefer to be mired in enervated passivity. If the right is full of armchair generals, the left is full of armchair generalities: Nothing can be done, any course is futile, everything's a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that saying so for certain is the highest form of patriotism.
It's truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent -- against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier's mom can become a household name is if she's a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools' claims to teach our children about America, "warts and all," has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else. Or as the Capital Times of Madison, Wis., concluded its ringing editorial on the subject:
"Thomas Jefferson got it right: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education."
Teaching them authentic Jefferson quotes would be a better approach.
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