TOLERANCE STRIKES AGAIN
by Joe Sobran
Another media typhoon: "Metro Board Member Fired for
Comment on Gays." I'm glad I don't have to unpack that
headline for Grandpa Sobran, who went to his reward in
1959, when the world was more or less normal. Today you
may lose your job for using the word "normal."
Grandpa Sobran deserves to be remembered for one
priceless remark. When my father asked him, around 1938,
why he thought there would be another war, he explained,
"You can't have two bulls in the same pasture."
That simple, pregnant comment contained a
presumption about normality that is no longer acceptable:
that bulls like cows better than they like other bulls.
In the age of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, we must allow for the
possibility that a pair of bulls may prefer an
alternative lifestyle.
So the Republican governor of Maryland fired the
guy, one Robert Smith, for saying, "Homosexual behavior,
in my view, is deviant." Feeling a need to explain this
quaint view, Smith added, "I'm a Roman Catholic."
Catholics still believe that bulls prefer cows. A dogma,
I guess.
The governor also felt a need to explain his action:
"Robert Smith's comments were highly inappropriate,
insensitive, and unacceptable. They are in direct
conflict to [sic] my administration's commitment to
inclusiveness, tolerance, and opportunity."
Such "tolerance" makes the blood run cold. Smith
made his comment on an obscure cable show, where he was
giving his own opinion ("in my view"), one unrelated to
his office. Another Metro board member, speaking as "an
openly gay elected official," said he was "deeply
offended," called for Smith's head, and got it. Such is
tolerance in the year of Our Lord 2006.
Admittedly, Smith made a poor choice of words. He
should have said, "Sodomy is a perversion."
My old friend Ann Coulter has made the remarkable
discovery that when you say obvious things that everyone
knows to be true, people listen gratefully. She realizes
that polite argument with liberals, couched in timid
euphemism, gets you exactly nowhere. Their "tolerance"
extends only to people who accept their dubious and even
absurd premises.
Yes, I'd rather not hurt people's feelings. But
there are so many people nowadays who are positively
eager to be "deeply offended" that you're a sucker if you
try to avoid offending them. We're dealing with
aggressors who pose as victims.
The current vocabulary of hypocrisy includes such
words as "gay," "lifestyle," and the ludicrous
"homophobia," which systematically deny the obvious.
We're talking about an ugly and unsanitary perversion as
well as an immoral way of living, the sadness of which
should excite our pity as well as our censure.
Why should we pretend otherwise? Only because of new
taboos -- social pressures against candor -- that are as
perverse as sodomy itself. We are to make believe that
"marriage" can mean something it has never meant before,
that the rectum is as suitable a receptacle for the male
seed as the womb, that a filthy and fruitless union is
equal in dignity to one that produces human life? And all
this with a straight face?
Oh, Lord. Victorian hypocrisy had nothing on the
liberal kind, which insists that all the generations
before us were wrong. Overnight we must repudiate what
everyone always knew and still knows. We have seen the
same obligatory amnesia with fornication and abortion;
evils have suddenly become "rights."
And this is what our children grow up being taught
in state schools and the mass media. Democratic values,
you know. Equality. Tolerance. Constitutional rights.
Raising public awareness.
But the lies, being lies, don't work too well. For
some reason, kids still love real love -- the fruitful
mutual love of men and women. They refuse to accept "gay"
as something positive; they use it as a term of abuse and
ridicule. They recognize it as a joke, no matter what
their elders try to tell them. Reality is insistent.
Humor remains, as ever, the final revenge of the normal
on the official.
The enormous official effort to normalize the
abnormal is doomed. Note the root word "norm:" G.K.
Chesterton long ago observed "the modern and morbid habit
of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal."
But normality seems to be the one thing liberalism's
inclusiveness excludes and its tolerance can't tolerate.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
From The New York Times:
Beatles in Vegas Against Long Odds
By ALLAN KOZINN
June 25, 2006
IT'S the Beatles! Live in Las Vegas! This week, and for the foreseeable future!
Well, O.K., it's not actually the Beatles performing live. After all, two of the Fab Four, John Lennon and George Harrison, are no longer among us. And although their surviving partners, both musical (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) and marital (Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), are expected to be in the audience at the Mirage on June 30, when Cirque du Soleil opens "Love," its ambitious fantasy tribute to the band, there won't be so much as a Beatle cameo or a new song.
Still, Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian acrobatic troupe, and Apple, the company the Beatles started in 1967 to oversee their creative interests, have joined forces for this $150 million production, and they are billing it as "a timeless, three-dimensional" Beatles experience that, as one of its principals describes it, will "make the audience feel as though they are actually in the theater with the band."
Promised too is a new soundtrack. Apple has given the show's two music directors — Sir George Martin, who produced the Beatles' original recordings, and his son Giles, who has worked with Elvis Costello and Kate Bush — free run of the band's session tapes. Most Beatles fans would rather the tapes were mined for previously unreleased songs and upgrades of the standard albums. But as Giles explains, "Apple's idea was that Cirque shouldn't just be performing to a CD." He adds, "It had to be something more unusual, a new way of hearing this music."
What the Martins produced was a 90-minute soundtrack in which classic Beatles songs are remixed in surround sound, sometimes combining standard versions with outtakes, and even creating mash-ups, or versions in which riffs, vocal lines, guitar solos or sitar drones from one song are interposed on another. Next month the pair will return to London to remix the music again for a soundtrack album.
What's truly odd about all his, to longtime Beatles watchers, is Apple's enthusiasm for such innovation. For much of the last 36 years, Apple — whose four directors are the band members and their heirs — has been a barricaded fortress from which volleys of lawsuits are regularly launched. Its response to requests to use Beatles recordings in theatrical productions and films has generally been a firm no. And in its zeal to protect the Beatles' name, work and trademarks, Apple has sued everyone from the producers of the late-1970's hit "Beatlemania" to Apple Computer. So what's going on here? Isn't the soundtrack to "Love" akin to what Apple so vehemently opposed in 2004, when Danger Mouse created "The Grey Album," a mash-up of Jay-Z's "Black Album" and the Beatles' "White Album"? For that matter, aren't these mash-ups exactly what Internet-based Beatles fan groups have done, often brilliantly, though necessarily flying well below Apple's radar, on underground collections like "Mutation" and the three volumes of "Tuned to a Natural E," which can be found on various download sites?
Could it be that in allowing Cirque du Soleil to base a series of fantasy tableaus on Beatles music, and in letting the Martins take such liberties with the recordings, a usually cautious company is diving headlong into the 21st century? Has it awakened to an era in which promiscuous remixing has made the notion of a "definitive text" seem quaintly academic?
On the other hand, when Apple sics its lawyers on unauthorized use of the Beatles' music, is it really protecting the integrity of the group's work and image, or is it saying "We own the Beatles name and music, and therefore only we can compromise its integrity?"
WHEN the Beatles started Apple, they described it as the antithesis of the corporate entertainment world: a haven where musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers and artists of all kinds could find support for their projects. Along with the Beatles' last four albums, the company released a magnificently eclectic catalog and a handful of films. But the open-door policy didn't last long: a parade of hucksters and freeloaders quickly drained the company's resources.
When the Beatles went supernova in 1970, Apple absorbed the immediate shock.
Sir Paul, hoping to extricate himself from the partnership, at first sued to have the company dissolved, but later reconsidered its usefulness. And for the next 19 years a tangle of lawsuits — the Beatles against one another, and the Beatles and Apple against EMI Records — were about all that Apple produced.
Those suits were settled in November 1989, and the terms were not made public. One detail leaked out, though: EMI would maintain its ownership of the recordings the Beatles made for the company between 1962 and 1970 but could not release anything without Apple's approval. At first Apple exerted this control vigorously, refusing to release anything on CD beyond the standard British albums, released in 1987.
Gradually Apple began to relent. Two popular early-1970's compilations, known as the "Red" and "Blue" albums (officially, "1962-1966" and "1966-1970") were reissued on CD in 1993. More recently Apple and EMI have collaborated on new compilations, like "1," a collection of Beatles No. 1 hits, as well as "The Capitol Versions," two boxed sets (so far) of the group's recordings in the configurations that Capitol (EMI's American arm) released in the 1960's.
Meanwhile Apple undertook archival projects, including "The Beatles at the BBC" and "The Beatles Anthology," a multimedia autobiography that included a 10-hour video, a book and six CD's of unreleased recordings. The reissue of the Beatles' cartoon film, "Yellow Submarine," in 1999, brought with it a fully reconceived soundtrack album, "Yellow Submarine Songtrack," and in 2003 Apple addressed the Beatles' mixed feelings about Phil Spector's production of the "Let It Be" album by releasing the stripped-down "Let It Be ... Naked."
But those were in-house projects. Proposals from outside continued to find their way into the dustbin at Apple's London offices, until Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's founder, discovered the secret weapon: friendship with a former Beatle, in this case George Harrison. In 2000 they began discussing a a collaboration using the Beatles' music. After Harrison died, in November 2001, Apple kept the project going. It expects "Love" to run for at least 10 years, packing 2,000 people into the theater twice a night, five nights a week, with ticket prices ranging from $69 to $150.
If the shows sell out, it would be like the Beatles filling Shea Stadium nearly 10 times a year, without having to tune up. Or even turn up.
IN the world of Beatles obsessives, the response to "Love" has been a shrug. A Las Vegas spectacular? Isn't that a little ... Fat-Period Elvis? And a soundtrack of mash-ups?
Beatles fans just want the Beatles. They want things they haven't seen or heard, and they want the music they have heard to sound better than it does on the available CD's. They want Apple to remaster the classic albums, and they want those albums in surround mixes. Some fans would like to see the recordings available for download. (In court papers filed during the company's lawsuit against Apple Computer, Neil Aspinall, the Beatles former road manager who now runs Apple's daily operations, said a remixing project was under way, and that the group's recordings wouldn't be made available online until that process was finished. He said nothing about when that might be.)
They also want Apple to release projects that have long sat on its shelf, like the revamped video of the Beatles' 1965 Shea Stadium concert, and an expanded, bonus-packed DVD of the group's last film, "Let It Be." And how about a collection of the promotional films the group made in the 1960's? Or DVD's of Beatles concerts that were televised in Paris, Munich and Tokyo? Or the CD version of the 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl concerts? Or the fabled 27-minute outtake of "Helter Skelter" and the avant-garde "Carnival of Light" collage, created for a London "happening" in 1967? For Beatles fans an extravaganza like "Love" looks like an unnecessary sideshow.
But they are in for a tremendous surprise.
A couple of weeks ago Giles Martin stopped in New York on his way to London, and invited me to hear his "Love" mixes on a five-channel surround system at Magno Studios. I was knocked out by some, but I was absolutely floored by the pristine quality and fine definition of the sound. With the compression of the original 1960's productions stripped away, voices and instruments seem real, as if they were in the room. The new mixes wrap you in the group's arrangements and let you hear long-buried interplay that illuminates the Beatles' brilliance. This is a level of detail that simply hasn't been heard outside the Abbey Road studios until now.
On "Yesterday" you can hear Paul McCartney's pick hitting the strings of his guitar and the strings snapping against the neck. The guitar solo and the orchestral strings on "Something" had similar clarity and presence, and in the surround version of "I Am the Walrus" the whole kaleidoscope of textures — including an extraordinarily crisp drum sound — made the song quirkier than ever.
The mixes of "Revolution" and "Come Together" are incomparably more powerful than the familiar versions. Mr. Starr's childlike "Octopus's Garden" gets a fantastic restructuring that begins with the string introduction to "Good Night" and then places Mr. Starr's vocal, unaccompanied, in a foggy ambience (using effects from "Yellow Submarine" and drums from "Lovely Rita") before the full band kicks into the more familiar arrangement. And a juxtaposition of the drum figure from "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the vocal line from "Within You, Without You" creates a link between those mystical songs, recorded nearly nine months apart.
The new recordings were made under the close watch of Apple. Sir Paul, Mr. Starr, Ms. Ono and Mrs. Harrison occasionally dropped in on the Martins to hear the mixes. "It was a little terrifying," said the younger Mr. Martin, who is 36, born a few months before the Beatles broke up. (His father is 80.) "When Ringo came in, the first thing he said was, 'Have you done "Octopus's Garden" yet?' Paul said he liked what he heard, but that we could go even farther out than we have, and we've gone pretty far. And we were very concerned that Yoko and Olivia feel we were treating John's and George's songs well, but they were both very pleased."
Why do these recordings sound so immensely better than the standard CD's? The Martins made the "Love" soundtrack directly from the original unmixed master tapes of the Beatles' sessions. Because of the way recordings were made in the 1960's, the Beatles' music as we know it, both on LP and CD, come from tapes that were several generations removed from those session tapes, and electronically processed to make up for the limitations of 1960's audio technology. When the Beatles' CD's were released, in 1987, these processed tapes were used for all but two of the albums. (Sir George Martin remixed "Rubber Soul" and "Help!")
At the time CD mastering was in its infancy and yielded a sound that seems harsh when compared with more recent CD's, which often rely directly on the session tapes. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Byrds and even the Monkees have seen their catalogs remastered to take these improvements into account. But not the Beatles. Their CD's, priced at top dollar and running only about 30 harsh-sounding minutes apiece, look more squalid every year.
Collectors endlessly debate what the ideal series of remastered Beatles albums would be. Until 1999 the answer seemed clear: upgraded versions of the British albums and singles in their original stereo and mono mixes (there are often notable differences in instrumentation, edits or vocal takes), along with the handful of variant mixes released in Japan, Australia, Germany and other countries.
But the release of the "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" in 1999 made some listeners reconsider. Produced by Peter Cobbin, they were updated remixes of the session tapes. The resulting version of "Nowhere Man" was telling: in the original stereo mix, the vocals are on one channel, the instruments are on the other. Mr. Cobbin spread the sweetly harmonized vocals that open the song across the stereo image, to stunning effect. Maybe, listeners began to argue, an upgraded Beatles catalog should take the flexibility of modern mixing into account.
The "Yellow Submarine" and "Beatles Anthology" DVD's added another complication. Some of the surround mixes were so revelatory that tech-savvy fans, knowing how long it takes Apple to do things, began creating their own surround mixes. Even though these amateur remixers don't have access to the session masters, their versions are often surprisingly effective.
Apple should, of course, get in there with its own surround series, now that it has dangled teasers in "Yellow Submarine," the "Beatles Anthology" and "Love."
But if the Beatles really want to be revolutionary — and counteract Apple's reputation for slowness and litigiousness — they should take a truly bold step: release the component tracks of their unmixed session tapes on DVD's, with a Creative Commons copyright license that would allow fans to create their own remixes, mash-ups and recompositions for noncommercial use.
Not that they'd be the first to move in that direction. Two years ago David Bowie offered the component tracks for songs from his "Reality" album for download on his Web site and even offered prizes — including a car — to fans who created the most original mash-ups. Wired magazine has offered unmixed tracks by several bands for similar use.
The Beatles, though, could be the first major group to open its archives freely. And if Apple was really meant to be, as Paul McCartney described it in 1968, "a kind of Western Communism," what could be a more natural expression of that ideal?
Beatles in Vegas Against Long Odds
By ALLAN KOZINN
June 25, 2006
IT'S the Beatles! Live in Las Vegas! This week, and for the foreseeable future!
Well, O.K., it's not actually the Beatles performing live. After all, two of the Fab Four, John Lennon and George Harrison, are no longer among us. And although their surviving partners, both musical (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) and marital (Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), are expected to be in the audience at the Mirage on June 30, when Cirque du Soleil opens "Love," its ambitious fantasy tribute to the band, there won't be so much as a Beatle cameo or a new song.
Still, Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian acrobatic troupe, and Apple, the company the Beatles started in 1967 to oversee their creative interests, have joined forces for this $150 million production, and they are billing it as "a timeless, three-dimensional" Beatles experience that, as one of its principals describes it, will "make the audience feel as though they are actually in the theater with the band."
Promised too is a new soundtrack. Apple has given the show's two music directors — Sir George Martin, who produced the Beatles' original recordings, and his son Giles, who has worked with Elvis Costello and Kate Bush — free run of the band's session tapes. Most Beatles fans would rather the tapes were mined for previously unreleased songs and upgrades of the standard albums. But as Giles explains, "Apple's idea was that Cirque shouldn't just be performing to a CD." He adds, "It had to be something more unusual, a new way of hearing this music."
What the Martins produced was a 90-minute soundtrack in which classic Beatles songs are remixed in surround sound, sometimes combining standard versions with outtakes, and even creating mash-ups, or versions in which riffs, vocal lines, guitar solos or sitar drones from one song are interposed on another. Next month the pair will return to London to remix the music again for a soundtrack album.
What's truly odd about all his, to longtime Beatles watchers, is Apple's enthusiasm for such innovation. For much of the last 36 years, Apple — whose four directors are the band members and their heirs — has been a barricaded fortress from which volleys of lawsuits are regularly launched. Its response to requests to use Beatles recordings in theatrical productions and films has generally been a firm no. And in its zeal to protect the Beatles' name, work and trademarks, Apple has sued everyone from the producers of the late-1970's hit "Beatlemania" to Apple Computer. So what's going on here? Isn't the soundtrack to "Love" akin to what Apple so vehemently opposed in 2004, when Danger Mouse created "The Grey Album," a mash-up of Jay-Z's "Black Album" and the Beatles' "White Album"? For that matter, aren't these mash-ups exactly what Internet-based Beatles fan groups have done, often brilliantly, though necessarily flying well below Apple's radar, on underground collections like "Mutation" and the three volumes of "Tuned to a Natural E," which can be found on various download sites?
Could it be that in allowing Cirque du Soleil to base a series of fantasy tableaus on Beatles music, and in letting the Martins take such liberties with the recordings, a usually cautious company is diving headlong into the 21st century? Has it awakened to an era in which promiscuous remixing has made the notion of a "definitive text" seem quaintly academic?
On the other hand, when Apple sics its lawyers on unauthorized use of the Beatles' music, is it really protecting the integrity of the group's work and image, or is it saying "We own the Beatles name and music, and therefore only we can compromise its integrity?"
WHEN the Beatles started Apple, they described it as the antithesis of the corporate entertainment world: a haven where musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers and artists of all kinds could find support for their projects. Along with the Beatles' last four albums, the company released a magnificently eclectic catalog and a handful of films. But the open-door policy didn't last long: a parade of hucksters and freeloaders quickly drained the company's resources.
When the Beatles went supernova in 1970, Apple absorbed the immediate shock.
Sir Paul, hoping to extricate himself from the partnership, at first sued to have the company dissolved, but later reconsidered its usefulness. And for the next 19 years a tangle of lawsuits — the Beatles against one another, and the Beatles and Apple against EMI Records — were about all that Apple produced.
Those suits were settled in November 1989, and the terms were not made public. One detail leaked out, though: EMI would maintain its ownership of the recordings the Beatles made for the company between 1962 and 1970 but could not release anything without Apple's approval. At first Apple exerted this control vigorously, refusing to release anything on CD beyond the standard British albums, released in 1987.
Gradually Apple began to relent. Two popular early-1970's compilations, known as the "Red" and "Blue" albums (officially, "1962-1966" and "1966-1970") were reissued on CD in 1993. More recently Apple and EMI have collaborated on new compilations, like "1," a collection of Beatles No. 1 hits, as well as "The Capitol Versions," two boxed sets (so far) of the group's recordings in the configurations that Capitol (EMI's American arm) released in the 1960's.
Meanwhile Apple undertook archival projects, including "The Beatles at the BBC" and "The Beatles Anthology," a multimedia autobiography that included a 10-hour video, a book and six CD's of unreleased recordings. The reissue of the Beatles' cartoon film, "Yellow Submarine," in 1999, brought with it a fully reconceived soundtrack album, "Yellow Submarine Songtrack," and in 2003 Apple addressed the Beatles' mixed feelings about Phil Spector's production of the "Let It Be" album by releasing the stripped-down "Let It Be ... Naked."
But those were in-house projects. Proposals from outside continued to find their way into the dustbin at Apple's London offices, until Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's founder, discovered the secret weapon: friendship with a former Beatle, in this case George Harrison. In 2000 they began discussing a a collaboration using the Beatles' music. After Harrison died, in November 2001, Apple kept the project going. It expects "Love" to run for at least 10 years, packing 2,000 people into the theater twice a night, five nights a week, with ticket prices ranging from $69 to $150.
If the shows sell out, it would be like the Beatles filling Shea Stadium nearly 10 times a year, without having to tune up. Or even turn up.
IN the world of Beatles obsessives, the response to "Love" has been a shrug. A Las Vegas spectacular? Isn't that a little ... Fat-Period Elvis? And a soundtrack of mash-ups?
Beatles fans just want the Beatles. They want things they haven't seen or heard, and they want the music they have heard to sound better than it does on the available CD's. They want Apple to remaster the classic albums, and they want those albums in surround mixes. Some fans would like to see the recordings available for download. (In court papers filed during the company's lawsuit against Apple Computer, Neil Aspinall, the Beatles former road manager who now runs Apple's daily operations, said a remixing project was under way, and that the group's recordings wouldn't be made available online until that process was finished. He said nothing about when that might be.)
They also want Apple to release projects that have long sat on its shelf, like the revamped video of the Beatles' 1965 Shea Stadium concert, and an expanded, bonus-packed DVD of the group's last film, "Let It Be." And how about a collection of the promotional films the group made in the 1960's? Or DVD's of Beatles concerts that were televised in Paris, Munich and Tokyo? Or the CD version of the 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl concerts? Or the fabled 27-minute outtake of "Helter Skelter" and the avant-garde "Carnival of Light" collage, created for a London "happening" in 1967? For Beatles fans an extravaganza like "Love" looks like an unnecessary sideshow.
But they are in for a tremendous surprise.
A couple of weeks ago Giles Martin stopped in New York on his way to London, and invited me to hear his "Love" mixes on a five-channel surround system at Magno Studios. I was knocked out by some, but I was absolutely floored by the pristine quality and fine definition of the sound. With the compression of the original 1960's productions stripped away, voices and instruments seem real, as if they were in the room. The new mixes wrap you in the group's arrangements and let you hear long-buried interplay that illuminates the Beatles' brilliance. This is a level of detail that simply hasn't been heard outside the Abbey Road studios until now.
On "Yesterday" you can hear Paul McCartney's pick hitting the strings of his guitar and the strings snapping against the neck. The guitar solo and the orchestral strings on "Something" had similar clarity and presence, and in the surround version of "I Am the Walrus" the whole kaleidoscope of textures — including an extraordinarily crisp drum sound — made the song quirkier than ever.
The mixes of "Revolution" and "Come Together" are incomparably more powerful than the familiar versions. Mr. Starr's childlike "Octopus's Garden" gets a fantastic restructuring that begins with the string introduction to "Good Night" and then places Mr. Starr's vocal, unaccompanied, in a foggy ambience (using effects from "Yellow Submarine" and drums from "Lovely Rita") before the full band kicks into the more familiar arrangement. And a juxtaposition of the drum figure from "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the vocal line from "Within You, Without You" creates a link between those mystical songs, recorded nearly nine months apart.
The new recordings were made under the close watch of Apple. Sir Paul, Mr. Starr, Ms. Ono and Mrs. Harrison occasionally dropped in on the Martins to hear the mixes. "It was a little terrifying," said the younger Mr. Martin, who is 36, born a few months before the Beatles broke up. (His father is 80.) "When Ringo came in, the first thing he said was, 'Have you done "Octopus's Garden" yet?' Paul said he liked what he heard, but that we could go even farther out than we have, and we've gone pretty far. And we were very concerned that Yoko and Olivia feel we were treating John's and George's songs well, but they were both very pleased."
Why do these recordings sound so immensely better than the standard CD's? The Martins made the "Love" soundtrack directly from the original unmixed master tapes of the Beatles' sessions. Because of the way recordings were made in the 1960's, the Beatles' music as we know it, both on LP and CD, come from tapes that were several generations removed from those session tapes, and electronically processed to make up for the limitations of 1960's audio technology. When the Beatles' CD's were released, in 1987, these processed tapes were used for all but two of the albums. (Sir George Martin remixed "Rubber Soul" and "Help!")
At the time CD mastering was in its infancy and yielded a sound that seems harsh when compared with more recent CD's, which often rely directly on the session tapes. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Byrds and even the Monkees have seen their catalogs remastered to take these improvements into account. But not the Beatles. Their CD's, priced at top dollar and running only about 30 harsh-sounding minutes apiece, look more squalid every year.
Collectors endlessly debate what the ideal series of remastered Beatles albums would be. Until 1999 the answer seemed clear: upgraded versions of the British albums and singles in their original stereo and mono mixes (there are often notable differences in instrumentation, edits or vocal takes), along with the handful of variant mixes released in Japan, Australia, Germany and other countries.
But the release of the "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" in 1999 made some listeners reconsider. Produced by Peter Cobbin, they were updated remixes of the session tapes. The resulting version of "Nowhere Man" was telling: in the original stereo mix, the vocals are on one channel, the instruments are on the other. Mr. Cobbin spread the sweetly harmonized vocals that open the song across the stereo image, to stunning effect. Maybe, listeners began to argue, an upgraded Beatles catalog should take the flexibility of modern mixing into account.
The "Yellow Submarine" and "Beatles Anthology" DVD's added another complication. Some of the surround mixes were so revelatory that tech-savvy fans, knowing how long it takes Apple to do things, began creating their own surround mixes. Even though these amateur remixers don't have access to the session masters, their versions are often surprisingly effective.
Apple should, of course, get in there with its own surround series, now that it has dangled teasers in "Yellow Submarine," the "Beatles Anthology" and "Love."
But if the Beatles really want to be revolutionary — and counteract Apple's reputation for slowness and litigiousness — they should take a truly bold step: release the component tracks of their unmixed session tapes on DVD's, with a Creative Commons copyright license that would allow fans to create their own remixes, mash-ups and recompositions for noncommercial use.
Not that they'd be the first to move in that direction. Two years ago David Bowie offered the component tracks for songs from his "Reality" album for download on his Web site and even offered prizes — including a car — to fans who created the most original mash-ups. Wired magazine has offered unmixed tracks by several bands for similar use.
The Beatles, though, could be the first major group to open its archives freely. And if Apple was really meant to be, as Paul McCartney described it in 1968, "a kind of Western Communism," what could be a more natural expression of that ideal?
From City Journal:
Hands Off the Net
Congress wisely resists the urge to regulate cyberspace.
By Brian C. Anderson
28 June 2006
It’s a good thing that Congress seems to recognize—for now—that regulating the Internet is an acute danger to free political speech in America. Thanks primarily to Republican efforts, both the House and (narrowly) the Senate have fought back a push to establish in law the principle of “network neutrality,” a roster of whose supporters—from Hillary Clinton, MoveOn.org, and the New York Times editorial board on the left to the Christian Coalition on the right—includes some of the nation’s leading advocates for government regulation of the media.
What ignited the controversy is the possibility that the information bits that make up Internet traffic will no longer enjoy first-come, first-serve treatment, as has generally been the case until now. Freed up by recent Supreme Court and FCC rulings, broadband firms want to manage more actively the data pulsing through their conduits—their cables, fiber optics, phone lines, or wireless connections—offering, for instance, new ultra-fast delivery for sites willing to pay extra, just as FedEx accelerates delivery of packages for a fee. They might offer as well their own additional services, such as online video or telephony, as part of the package.
These changes, critics claim, will wreck the Internet. From an open commons where surfers can access all sites on egalitarian terms, the Net will become a world of “walled gardens,” where “broadband barons” favor certain content (their own) and impede sites unwilling to pay high fees or selling competitors’ products or supporting controversial political views. To stop this, the reformers, organized in a “Save the Internet” campaign, wanted Congress to force Internet providers like Verizon not to “discriminate among different types of traffic based on the traffic’s source, destination, or content,” in the words of Net theorist David Isenberg.
In truth, however, mandated net neutrality is completely unnecessary. For the telecoms to become site-obstructing bullies would be an odd business model, explains tech guru George Gilder of the Discovery Institute. “The providers have no incentive to kick anybody out,” he says. “They want to get as much content as possible on their conduit. That’s what attracts customers.” This is why bloggers shouldn’t fear that differentiated service will prove an enemy of openness.
Competition will give providers a positive incentive to stay honest. Say Verizon wants to charge Amazon oodles to join the fast lane, and Amazon refuses. Verizon could boot Amazon off its network in retaliation. But zillions of Amazon fans would jump ship to another supplier. “The market works these things out, as it should,” advises regulatory theorist Peter Huber. But meanwhile, many Internet giants like Amazon and Google are backing neutrality, because they don’t want to pay any more for bandwidth, which—to match fast lane rivals—they’ll have to in a non-neutral regime.
Political censorship is equally improbable. Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs worries that, without enforced neutrality, “a cable company with a pro-choice board of directors could decide that it doesn’t like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities”—and silence it. “Sure, it would be legal [to block access],” retorts Tim Lee, a contributor to the libertarian Technology Liberation Front blog. “But it would also be commercial suicide, as millions of irate pro-lifers would switch to their local Baby Bell and call their Congresscritters.”
Ah, but there’s the rub, would-be regulators say. The Coalition of Broadband Users and Innovators, a group including Amazon, eBay, and other Net firms, claims that the broadband market is an entrenched cable/telephone “duopoly” that allows network owners “to infringe or encumber the relationships among their customers or between their customers and destinations on the Internet.” “There’s nowhere else for consumers to turn,” frets the Save the Internet site. Without new regulations, the broadband barons will conspire to control the Web for their own selfish ends.
Yet as Gilder observes, “the broadband market is one of the most competitive arenas in the world economy.” FCC numbers show that around nine out of ten U.S. zip codes have two or more broadband providers (and duopolies can be very competitive); 60 percent have four or more—and the rivalry for the digital “last mile” into the home or office is getting fiercer. “In some suburbs, you now have a cable supplier, maybe two, you have the telephone company, you’ve got WiMax, you have various brands of satellite, WiFi, on and on,” enthuses Gilder. Competition is a key reason, a Pew study finds, that 42 percent of Americans enjoy broadband access, up from 30 percent only a year ago. After a telecom price war drove down monthly broadband rates, middle-class and working households in particular signed up in droves.
A neutrality law would dampen this healthy competition. “Without neutrality,” Vanderbilt law prof Christopher Yoo, a leading thinker on Net regulations, informs me, “providers could compete on quality of service, giving, say, voice communications a higher priority to make Internet telephony work better, or they could boost the security features of the network, in each case targeting a smaller subset of the market, like specialty stores in a world dominated by larger, efficient stores offering one-stop shopping.” A neutrality law, forcing all traffic to be treated the same, would transform broadband into a kind of commodity. “That would favor the largest firms, those with the largest economies of scale,” elaborates Heritage Foundation telecom expert James Gattuso. Challengers—especially tiny ones—would have a hard time getting into the market.
Given today’s bandwidth scarcity—the U.S. still lags far behind South Korea and many other nations in bandwidth per capita, despite all the competition—it’s more rational to use prices to allocate the resource efficiently. “While someone sending personal e-mail may be perfectly fine with an occasional delay of a few seconds,” Gattuso says, “delay could be deadly if a hospital or health care provider was sending vital medical information.” Creating Internet “lanes”—with the fast lanes costing more—helps solve this problem.
Neutrality fans like to tout the innovation in Web services that the Internet’s first-come, first-serve approach to data has encouraged. A neutral Net would function like the electricity grid, argue University of Virginia professor Tim Wu and Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig in a joint letter to the FCC. “The electronics industry designs new and better electronics, safe in the assumption that American electricity will be provided without preference for certain brands or products.” Similarly, Web innovators will be more likely to launch the next eBay—and find investors for it—knowing that all Internet conduits are equally open to them.
But that argument mistakenly assumes that the Net’s infrastructure doesn’t need constant and ample investment to upgrade—so that it does not end up in as poor shape as the electricity grid. As Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett testified to the Senate in March, despite billions in capital spending, “our telecommunications infrastructure is woefully unprepared for widespread delivery of advanced services—especially video—over the Internet.” Verizon anticipates that the typical Web surfer, who today uses two gigs of data monthly, will use 100 times that a decade from now, as he downloads high-definition movies and TV, music, and games. “Today’s networks simply aren’t scaled for that,” Moffett reports.
Yet if government busybodies keep networks from tapping new revenue, forget about new investment. “A net neutrality measure would just put a stop to it,” Gilder predicts. As it is, Bernstein’s Moffett notes, Wall Street is getting leery of network capital outlays. Verizon’s stock limped throughout 2005, for instance, “due to the capital markets’ distaste for the expensive capital investments in [the firm’s] . . . fiber optic deployment,” he says. Uncertainty about the regulatory future is a major reason for Wall Street’s gloom. As the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Adam Theirer suggests, enforced neutrality “would essentially tell infrastructure operators and potential future operators of high-speed networks your networks are yours in name only and the larger community of Internet users—through the FCC or other regulatory bodies—will be free to set the parameters of how your infrastructure will be used in the future.” Not a business to bet on. And so, with ever more information surging through the Internet’s overburdened pipes, such infrastructure socialism would mean a big slowdown.
Net neutrality would swiftly become a bureaucratic nightmare. “Neutrality regulation might as well have been labeled the ‘Telecom Lawyer & Lobbyist Full Employment Act of 2006’ because it would generate mountains of regulation and litigation in coming years,” says Theirer. “You simply can’t put something as amorphous as ‘digital nondiscrimination’ mandates on the books and then expect that regulators won’t abuse it—and that means competing teams of lawyers, consultants, and economists will be hired to try to figure it all out. When they don’t, the lawsuits will start flying.”
There’s no guarantee that the quest for neutrality would stop with the providers, either. The educational site KinderStart has just slapped a lawsuit on Google for downgrading its page rank. Because of its prominence, the suit argues, Google has become an “essential facility,” and thus should face government review for fairness. Welcome to the newest right, says tech writer James DeLong: “search engine neutrality.” Of course, the arguments made against Google’s freedom to run its business are analogous to those Google is now making against the telecoms.
The biggest reason to be thankful Congress resisted net neutrality: the scary prospect of Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi trying to stamp out broadband traffic “discrimination.” Some of the most vocal neutrality advocates, including Save the Internet campaign organizer Free Press, relentlessly agitate for regulation of other media to fight “corporate interests” and guarantee “fairness.” The deeper agenda at work in the net neutrality debate, insufficiently noticed by most commentators, is the Left’s zeal to get a hold of the new media, which have given conservative voices powerful outlets, shattering the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets—and regulate those outlets out of existence, so we can all go back to the days when the New York Times and other elite liberal institutions set the agenda.
It’s thus not hard to imagine a network neutrality law as the first step toward a Web fairness doctrine, with government trying to micromanage traffic flows to secure “equal treatment” of opposing viewpoints (read: making sure all those noisy right-wingers get put back in their place). European Union advisory bodies have already called for such a rule, potentially forcing all opinion sites viewable in Europe—from tiny blogs to big news organizations—to post opposing opinions or face fines.
It’s not primarily the telecoms and cable companies we should worry about as threats to Internet freedom. It’s the government regulators. Should Democrats regain control of Congress, expect another drive to police the Web.
Hands Off the Net
Congress wisely resists the urge to regulate cyberspace.
By Brian C. Anderson
28 June 2006
It’s a good thing that Congress seems to recognize—for now—that regulating the Internet is an acute danger to free political speech in America. Thanks primarily to Republican efforts, both the House and (narrowly) the Senate have fought back a push to establish in law the principle of “network neutrality,” a roster of whose supporters—from Hillary Clinton, MoveOn.org, and the New York Times editorial board on the left to the Christian Coalition on the right—includes some of the nation’s leading advocates for government regulation of the media.
What ignited the controversy is the possibility that the information bits that make up Internet traffic will no longer enjoy first-come, first-serve treatment, as has generally been the case until now. Freed up by recent Supreme Court and FCC rulings, broadband firms want to manage more actively the data pulsing through their conduits—their cables, fiber optics, phone lines, or wireless connections—offering, for instance, new ultra-fast delivery for sites willing to pay extra, just as FedEx accelerates delivery of packages for a fee. They might offer as well their own additional services, such as online video or telephony, as part of the package.
These changes, critics claim, will wreck the Internet. From an open commons where surfers can access all sites on egalitarian terms, the Net will become a world of “walled gardens,” where “broadband barons” favor certain content (their own) and impede sites unwilling to pay high fees or selling competitors’ products or supporting controversial political views. To stop this, the reformers, organized in a “Save the Internet” campaign, wanted Congress to force Internet providers like Verizon not to “discriminate among different types of traffic based on the traffic’s source, destination, or content,” in the words of Net theorist David Isenberg.
In truth, however, mandated net neutrality is completely unnecessary. For the telecoms to become site-obstructing bullies would be an odd business model, explains tech guru George Gilder of the Discovery Institute. “The providers have no incentive to kick anybody out,” he says. “They want to get as much content as possible on their conduit. That’s what attracts customers.” This is why bloggers shouldn’t fear that differentiated service will prove an enemy of openness.
Competition will give providers a positive incentive to stay honest. Say Verizon wants to charge Amazon oodles to join the fast lane, and Amazon refuses. Verizon could boot Amazon off its network in retaliation. But zillions of Amazon fans would jump ship to another supplier. “The market works these things out, as it should,” advises regulatory theorist Peter Huber. But meanwhile, many Internet giants like Amazon and Google are backing neutrality, because they don’t want to pay any more for bandwidth, which—to match fast lane rivals—they’ll have to in a non-neutral regime.
Political censorship is equally improbable. Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs worries that, without enforced neutrality, “a cable company with a pro-choice board of directors could decide that it doesn’t like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities”—and silence it. “Sure, it would be legal [to block access],” retorts Tim Lee, a contributor to the libertarian Technology Liberation Front blog. “But it would also be commercial suicide, as millions of irate pro-lifers would switch to their local Baby Bell and call their Congresscritters.”
Ah, but there’s the rub, would-be regulators say. The Coalition of Broadband Users and Innovators, a group including Amazon, eBay, and other Net firms, claims that the broadband market is an entrenched cable/telephone “duopoly” that allows network owners “to infringe or encumber the relationships among their customers or between their customers and destinations on the Internet.” “There’s nowhere else for consumers to turn,” frets the Save the Internet site. Without new regulations, the broadband barons will conspire to control the Web for their own selfish ends.
Yet as Gilder observes, “the broadband market is one of the most competitive arenas in the world economy.” FCC numbers show that around nine out of ten U.S. zip codes have two or more broadband providers (and duopolies can be very competitive); 60 percent have four or more—and the rivalry for the digital “last mile” into the home or office is getting fiercer. “In some suburbs, you now have a cable supplier, maybe two, you have the telephone company, you’ve got WiMax, you have various brands of satellite, WiFi, on and on,” enthuses Gilder. Competition is a key reason, a Pew study finds, that 42 percent of Americans enjoy broadband access, up from 30 percent only a year ago. After a telecom price war drove down monthly broadband rates, middle-class and working households in particular signed up in droves.
A neutrality law would dampen this healthy competition. “Without neutrality,” Vanderbilt law prof Christopher Yoo, a leading thinker on Net regulations, informs me, “providers could compete on quality of service, giving, say, voice communications a higher priority to make Internet telephony work better, or they could boost the security features of the network, in each case targeting a smaller subset of the market, like specialty stores in a world dominated by larger, efficient stores offering one-stop shopping.” A neutrality law, forcing all traffic to be treated the same, would transform broadband into a kind of commodity. “That would favor the largest firms, those with the largest economies of scale,” elaborates Heritage Foundation telecom expert James Gattuso. Challengers—especially tiny ones—would have a hard time getting into the market.
Given today’s bandwidth scarcity—the U.S. still lags far behind South Korea and many other nations in bandwidth per capita, despite all the competition—it’s more rational to use prices to allocate the resource efficiently. “While someone sending personal e-mail may be perfectly fine with an occasional delay of a few seconds,” Gattuso says, “delay could be deadly if a hospital or health care provider was sending vital medical information.” Creating Internet “lanes”—with the fast lanes costing more—helps solve this problem.
Neutrality fans like to tout the innovation in Web services that the Internet’s first-come, first-serve approach to data has encouraged. A neutral Net would function like the electricity grid, argue University of Virginia professor Tim Wu and Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig in a joint letter to the FCC. “The electronics industry designs new and better electronics, safe in the assumption that American electricity will be provided without preference for certain brands or products.” Similarly, Web innovators will be more likely to launch the next eBay—and find investors for it—knowing that all Internet conduits are equally open to them.
But that argument mistakenly assumes that the Net’s infrastructure doesn’t need constant and ample investment to upgrade—so that it does not end up in as poor shape as the electricity grid. As Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett testified to the Senate in March, despite billions in capital spending, “our telecommunications infrastructure is woefully unprepared for widespread delivery of advanced services—especially video—over the Internet.” Verizon anticipates that the typical Web surfer, who today uses two gigs of data monthly, will use 100 times that a decade from now, as he downloads high-definition movies and TV, music, and games. “Today’s networks simply aren’t scaled for that,” Moffett reports.
Yet if government busybodies keep networks from tapping new revenue, forget about new investment. “A net neutrality measure would just put a stop to it,” Gilder predicts. As it is, Bernstein’s Moffett notes, Wall Street is getting leery of network capital outlays. Verizon’s stock limped throughout 2005, for instance, “due to the capital markets’ distaste for the expensive capital investments in [the firm’s] . . . fiber optic deployment,” he says. Uncertainty about the regulatory future is a major reason for Wall Street’s gloom. As the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Adam Theirer suggests, enforced neutrality “would essentially tell infrastructure operators and potential future operators of high-speed networks your networks are yours in name only and the larger community of Internet users—through the FCC or other regulatory bodies—will be free to set the parameters of how your infrastructure will be used in the future.” Not a business to bet on. And so, with ever more information surging through the Internet’s overburdened pipes, such infrastructure socialism would mean a big slowdown.
Net neutrality would swiftly become a bureaucratic nightmare. “Neutrality regulation might as well have been labeled the ‘Telecom Lawyer & Lobbyist Full Employment Act of 2006’ because it would generate mountains of regulation and litigation in coming years,” says Theirer. “You simply can’t put something as amorphous as ‘digital nondiscrimination’ mandates on the books and then expect that regulators won’t abuse it—and that means competing teams of lawyers, consultants, and economists will be hired to try to figure it all out. When they don’t, the lawsuits will start flying.”
There’s no guarantee that the quest for neutrality would stop with the providers, either. The educational site KinderStart has just slapped a lawsuit on Google for downgrading its page rank. Because of its prominence, the suit argues, Google has become an “essential facility,” and thus should face government review for fairness. Welcome to the newest right, says tech writer James DeLong: “search engine neutrality.” Of course, the arguments made against Google’s freedom to run its business are analogous to those Google is now making against the telecoms.
The biggest reason to be thankful Congress resisted net neutrality: the scary prospect of Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi trying to stamp out broadband traffic “discrimination.” Some of the most vocal neutrality advocates, including Save the Internet campaign organizer Free Press, relentlessly agitate for regulation of other media to fight “corporate interests” and guarantee “fairness.” The deeper agenda at work in the net neutrality debate, insufficiently noticed by most commentators, is the Left’s zeal to get a hold of the new media, which have given conservative voices powerful outlets, shattering the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets—and regulate those outlets out of existence, so we can all go back to the days when the New York Times and other elite liberal institutions set the agenda.
It’s thus not hard to imagine a network neutrality law as the first step toward a Web fairness doctrine, with government trying to micromanage traffic flows to secure “equal treatment” of opposing viewpoints (read: making sure all those noisy right-wingers get put back in their place). European Union advisory bodies have already called for such a rule, potentially forcing all opinion sites viewable in Europe—from tiny blogs to big news organizations—to post opposing opinions or face fines.
It’s not primarily the telecoms and cable companies we should worry about as threats to Internet freedom. It’s the government regulators. Should Democrats regain control of Congress, expect another drive to police the Web.
Kerry's war
By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
June 30, 2006
The comic career of Sen. Jean-Francois Kerry is picking up steam, or gas, as the case may be. This inveterate windbag is, according to the New York Times, reopening the Swift Boat controversy of 2004 that did such damage to his presidential prospects when hundreds of the Vietnam War veterans who served with him deflated his reckless boasts of military gloire. He has undertaken this quixotic mission, claiming that he can repristinate his military record despite the Swifties' evidence against it. Then the delusory senator from Massachusetts seems to think he will be a shoo-in for the presidency in 2008.
Well, I for one shall delight in reviewing the Swifties' corpus delicti once again. There are his Purple Hearts that his officers deny authorizing. There are the missing medical records needed to substantiate his decorations. There are the questions the Swifties raised about his honorable discharge, a mysterious discharge not issued until several years after he was out of the Navy and then only issued by President Jimmy Carter in the midst of his amnesty program for draft dodgers. And there is all the controversy about young Mr. Kerry's dealings with the North Vietnamese in Paris while the war was going on and he was still in the service. Doubtless there are more indelicacies to be examined. Frankly I doubt the American electorate will gain any higher opinion of a presidential candidate who in 1971 appeared before Congress to claim that American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads" and otherwise mistreated the Vietnamese.
Mr. Kerry's statement is long and lurid, and the Swifties gladly reproduced a tape of it during the 2004 election. Now these veterans are being harassed by the senator's supporters with crank calls in the night and venomous postings on the liberal Web site HuffingtonPost.com. On that celebrity-ridden site the names and personal information of more than a dozen Swift Boat veterans were posted by such "trusted" Huffington Post celebrities as "SatanLivesinUSA." Could this be Barbra Streisand's username? At any rate, this eminence wrote on June 24: "SwiftBoatVets who need some Black Ops done on them. I have some very good ideas I gleaned from 'CIA Book of Dirty Tricks.' Don't get mad, get even." Minutes later another "trusted" celebrity poster repeatedly pasted these threatening words on the page and on another Huffington Post post.
The American Spectator's indefatigable reporter, Dave Holman, found all this and reports that "Aside from one or two complaints, fellow commenters did not object to the posting of the information or the threats." Within hours the veterans were receiving threatening calls. In the early hours of June 25 one Swiftie, Van Odell, got three in four minutes, the last from a man who inquired, "I want to know why you lied about John Kerry. . . . Traitors must die. We will get you." Mr. Holman notes that the Swifties have reported these calls to law enforcement but that they had no luck in getting Huffington Post to address the harassment. The comments remained posted until Mr. Holman reached Katharine Zaleski, the site's news editor, on Tuesday afternoon at her unlisted telephone number. As I say, Mr. Holman is indefatigable.
This sort of harassment is not new to the veterans and it will probably continue. At least one other site still posts their telephone numbers. Yet, as one Swiftie told me, "These men will not be intimidated. The SwiftVets are 300 strong. They include Kerry's entire chain of command while in Vietnam, the vast majority of officers who served with him, the attending physician to his alleged wounds, and his longest-serving crew member. They have raised legitimate questions." This Swiftie concludes that the questions can be answered if Mr. Kerry allows "a release of his military record by the execution of the Form 180, permitting the media to look closely at the truth behind Kerry's fiction."
The fact that John Kerry has not allowed these records to be opened to the general media is suspicious, no? The fact that he continues to make his military record an issue is still more evidence that a delusional man can be a funny man.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His latest book is "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House."
By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
June 30, 2006
The comic career of Sen. Jean-Francois Kerry is picking up steam, or gas, as the case may be. This inveterate windbag is, according to the New York Times, reopening the Swift Boat controversy of 2004 that did such damage to his presidential prospects when hundreds of the Vietnam War veterans who served with him deflated his reckless boasts of military gloire. He has undertaken this quixotic mission, claiming that he can repristinate his military record despite the Swifties' evidence against it. Then the delusory senator from Massachusetts seems to think he will be a shoo-in for the presidency in 2008.
Well, I for one shall delight in reviewing the Swifties' corpus delicti once again. There are his Purple Hearts that his officers deny authorizing. There are the missing medical records needed to substantiate his decorations. There are the questions the Swifties raised about his honorable discharge, a mysterious discharge not issued until several years after he was out of the Navy and then only issued by President Jimmy Carter in the midst of his amnesty program for draft dodgers. And there is all the controversy about young Mr. Kerry's dealings with the North Vietnamese in Paris while the war was going on and he was still in the service. Doubtless there are more indelicacies to be examined. Frankly I doubt the American electorate will gain any higher opinion of a presidential candidate who in 1971 appeared before Congress to claim that American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads" and otherwise mistreated the Vietnamese.
Mr. Kerry's statement is long and lurid, and the Swifties gladly reproduced a tape of it during the 2004 election. Now these veterans are being harassed by the senator's supporters with crank calls in the night and venomous postings on the liberal Web site HuffingtonPost.com. On that celebrity-ridden site the names and personal information of more than a dozen Swift Boat veterans were posted by such "trusted" Huffington Post celebrities as "SatanLivesinUSA." Could this be Barbra Streisand's username? At any rate, this eminence wrote on June 24: "SwiftBoatVets who need some Black Ops done on them. I have some very good ideas I gleaned from 'CIA Book of Dirty Tricks.' Don't get mad, get even." Minutes later another "trusted" celebrity poster repeatedly pasted these threatening words on the page and on another Huffington Post post.
The American Spectator's indefatigable reporter, Dave Holman, found all this and reports that "Aside from one or two complaints, fellow commenters did not object to the posting of the information or the threats." Within hours the veterans were receiving threatening calls. In the early hours of June 25 one Swiftie, Van Odell, got three in four minutes, the last from a man who inquired, "I want to know why you lied about John Kerry. . . . Traitors must die. We will get you." Mr. Holman notes that the Swifties have reported these calls to law enforcement but that they had no luck in getting Huffington Post to address the harassment. The comments remained posted until Mr. Holman reached Katharine Zaleski, the site's news editor, on Tuesday afternoon at her unlisted telephone number. As I say, Mr. Holman is indefatigable.
This sort of harassment is not new to the veterans and it will probably continue. At least one other site still posts their telephone numbers. Yet, as one Swiftie told me, "These men will not be intimidated. The SwiftVets are 300 strong. They include Kerry's entire chain of command while in Vietnam, the vast majority of officers who served with him, the attending physician to his alleged wounds, and his longest-serving crew member. They have raised legitimate questions." This Swiftie concludes that the questions can be answered if Mr. Kerry allows "a release of his military record by the execution of the Form 180, permitting the media to look closely at the truth behind Kerry's fiction."
The fact that John Kerry has not allowed these records to be opened to the general media is suspicious, no? The fact that he continues to make his military record an issue is still more evidence that a delusional man can be a funny man.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His latest book is "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House."
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Is Defeat Now an Option?
By Patrick Buchanan
"There is an awful feeling that everything is lurching downward," the Western diplomat told The Washington Post.
"Nearly five years on, there is no rule of law. ... The Afghans know it is all a charade, and they see us as not only complicit, but actively involved. You cannot fight a terror war and build a weak state at the same time, and it was a terrible mistake to think we could." What that disconsolate diplomat is saying is that America is losing the Afghan war.
According to the Post report, President Hamid Karzai is losing the confidence of his people and our European allies. The Taliban dominates the southeast of the country at night and is fighting in the largest units it has deployed since the fall of the regime in 2001. Anti-Americanism is spreading. A fatal accident, involving a U.S. military vehicle, caused anti-American riots across the capital.
NATO forces, who are to take over from the Americans in the embattled provinces, are likely to begin taking causalities as soon as they arrive. Meanwhile, the narcotics traffickers are bolder than ever.
In Iraq, the good news -- Zarqawi's death, completion of the Cabinet -- is old news. Sen. Richard Lugar describes present conditions as grim: "Given current events in Baghdad ... quite apart from Anbar province, the violence is horrific."
Lugar was reacting to reports that the U.S. commander, Gen. George Casey, has presented a plan to the Pentagon to substantially reduce U.S. troop levels by year's end and cut U.S. combat brigades in Iraq from today's 14, to five or six by the end of 2007.
But, as there is no sign the insurgency is defeated, and daily evidence it is stronger than ever, how do we propose to draw down U.S. forces from the 127,000 there, without risking disaster?
The new Baghdad government is also proposing an amnesty to the insurgents, though not al-Qaida or the Saddamites. But if this means a free pass into politics for insurgents who have killed U.S. soldiers, America will react with rage -- and demand an even earlier withdrawal.
Neither in Afghanistan or Iraq does there seem to be either a strategic plan to defeat the enemy and build an enduring democracy, or adequate U.S. and allied forces to ensure such a victory.
The question then could not be more critical. If victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is the Bush goal, why does he not tell the nation of the sacrifices victory clearly requires -- an indefinite commitment of far more U.S. troops than we have yet sent into either conflict?
If Bush is not willing to lay it out, or to pay that price, and the Casey plan is the Bush plan, the president and the country had best brace themselves for the possibility of defeat on one or both fronts before the end of the Bush term. For that is where we are headed.
It needs to be stated coldly. The Casey plan, for a drawdown of over half of all U.S. combat brigades in Iraq in 18 months, risks an insurgent triumph, chaos and civil war, ethnic cleansing and a Baghdad that is turned into a hellish no man's land.
A decision not to ramp up U.S. military forces in Afghanistan risks defeat there, as well. For no NATO force we send can match U.S. forces in combat effectiveness, and the Taliban resistance has grown to present levels -- the most impressive in five years -- in the teeth of attacks by U.S. forces now giving way to Europeans.
A U.S. defeat in either country would result in a bloodbath for those who sided with the Americans. It happened in Vietnam and Cambodia. If we lose these wars, it will happen in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps the above is too pessimistic. But if Americans, with the finest fighting forces on earth, have not been able to defeat the Iraqi insurgency, what makes us believe Iraqis trained by Americans will succeed where we failed? And if the Taliban, after five years of U.S. air strikes and Special Forces search-and-destroy missions, are stronger than ever, who thinks that NATO units that have never seen combat can take them down? President Bush needs to face the truth, and tell us the truth.
We may be at a crossroads in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where he has three choices: Ratchet up the U.S. troop investment to stave off defeat. Endure in what appears to be another "no-win war." Cut America's losses and get out, risking strategic disaster.
The Democratic Party, having voted to begin redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq, has taken its stand: end U.S. involvement, now or soon. If Bush, too, has decided to depart, America had best prepare for the strategic consequences abroad and the political consequences at home of another lost war for the United States.
By Patrick Buchanan
"There is an awful feeling that everything is lurching downward," the Western diplomat told The Washington Post.
"Nearly five years on, there is no rule of law. ... The Afghans know it is all a charade, and they see us as not only complicit, but actively involved. You cannot fight a terror war and build a weak state at the same time, and it was a terrible mistake to think we could." What that disconsolate diplomat is saying is that America is losing the Afghan war.
According to the Post report, President Hamid Karzai is losing the confidence of his people and our European allies. The Taliban dominates the southeast of the country at night and is fighting in the largest units it has deployed since the fall of the regime in 2001. Anti-Americanism is spreading. A fatal accident, involving a U.S. military vehicle, caused anti-American riots across the capital.
NATO forces, who are to take over from the Americans in the embattled provinces, are likely to begin taking causalities as soon as they arrive. Meanwhile, the narcotics traffickers are bolder than ever.
In Iraq, the good news -- Zarqawi's death, completion of the Cabinet -- is old news. Sen. Richard Lugar describes present conditions as grim: "Given current events in Baghdad ... quite apart from Anbar province, the violence is horrific."
Lugar was reacting to reports that the U.S. commander, Gen. George Casey, has presented a plan to the Pentagon to substantially reduce U.S. troop levels by year's end and cut U.S. combat brigades in Iraq from today's 14, to five or six by the end of 2007.
But, as there is no sign the insurgency is defeated, and daily evidence it is stronger than ever, how do we propose to draw down U.S. forces from the 127,000 there, without risking disaster?
The new Baghdad government is also proposing an amnesty to the insurgents, though not al-Qaida or the Saddamites. But if this means a free pass into politics for insurgents who have killed U.S. soldiers, America will react with rage -- and demand an even earlier withdrawal.
Neither in Afghanistan or Iraq does there seem to be either a strategic plan to defeat the enemy and build an enduring democracy, or adequate U.S. and allied forces to ensure such a victory.
The question then could not be more critical. If victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is the Bush goal, why does he not tell the nation of the sacrifices victory clearly requires -- an indefinite commitment of far more U.S. troops than we have yet sent into either conflict?
If Bush is not willing to lay it out, or to pay that price, and the Casey plan is the Bush plan, the president and the country had best brace themselves for the possibility of defeat on one or both fronts before the end of the Bush term. For that is where we are headed.
It needs to be stated coldly. The Casey plan, for a drawdown of over half of all U.S. combat brigades in Iraq in 18 months, risks an insurgent triumph, chaos and civil war, ethnic cleansing and a Baghdad that is turned into a hellish no man's land.
A decision not to ramp up U.S. military forces in Afghanistan risks defeat there, as well. For no NATO force we send can match U.S. forces in combat effectiveness, and the Taliban resistance has grown to present levels -- the most impressive in five years -- in the teeth of attacks by U.S. forces now giving way to Europeans.
A U.S. defeat in either country would result in a bloodbath for those who sided with the Americans. It happened in Vietnam and Cambodia. If we lose these wars, it will happen in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps the above is too pessimistic. But if Americans, with the finest fighting forces on earth, have not been able to defeat the Iraqi insurgency, what makes us believe Iraqis trained by Americans will succeed where we failed? And if the Taliban, after five years of U.S. air strikes and Special Forces search-and-destroy missions, are stronger than ever, who thinks that NATO units that have never seen combat can take them down? President Bush needs to face the truth, and tell us the truth.
We may be at a crossroads in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where he has three choices: Ratchet up the U.S. troop investment to stave off defeat. Endure in what appears to be another "no-win war." Cut America's losses and get out, risking strategic disaster.
The Democratic Party, having voted to begin redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq, has taken its stand: end U.S. involvement, now or soon. If Bush, too, has decided to depart, America had best prepare for the strategic consequences abroad and the political consequences at home of another lost war for the United States.
Monday, June 26, 2006
From The Corner at National Review Online:
The Triumph of T.R.-ism [Jonah Goldberg]
There's some good stuff in Karl Rove's piece on TR, but this strikes me as good a moment as any to just say it: Enough with the TR worship! TR was a great man, an amazing man, an inspirational man. But he was no conservative in the sense conservatives should emulate today.
As Rove notes, TR said "I like big things." Well one of them was big government. He adored Bismarck's Prussia (as did Wilson). He subscribed to modern Darwinian racism (as did Wilson). He was a Progressive in every sense of the word and his politics are of a piece of the Progressive era, an era — contra many in today's Republican Party — conservatives should be loath to mimic.
TR worship is a switchback tactic to glorify the intellectual and political heritage of the pre-Goldwater GOP. There is honor there, to be sure. But better to cherry pick the nice patriotic bits and leave the rest of the pile in the dustbin of history. The Weekly Standard was wrong — and flagrantly so in retrospect — to put TR (and "National Greatness") back on the conservative mantle.
In the 1990s post-Cold War conservatives were wrong to speak glowingly of the Progressive era. And they are all wrong today when they try to find an escape clause from conservative skepticism toward big government by slapping the pseudo-intellectual feel-good label "progressive" to whatever it is they're looking to do.
The Triumph of T.R.-ism [Jonah Goldberg]
There's some good stuff in Karl Rove's piece on TR, but this strikes me as good a moment as any to just say it: Enough with the TR worship! TR was a great man, an amazing man, an inspirational man. But he was no conservative in the sense conservatives should emulate today.
As Rove notes, TR said "I like big things." Well one of them was big government. He adored Bismarck's Prussia (as did Wilson). He subscribed to modern Darwinian racism (as did Wilson). He was a Progressive in every sense of the word and his politics are of a piece of the Progressive era, an era — contra many in today's Republican Party — conservatives should be loath to mimic.
TR worship is a switchback tactic to glorify the intellectual and political heritage of the pre-Goldwater GOP. There is honor there, to be sure. But better to cherry pick the nice patriotic bits and leave the rest of the pile in the dustbin of history. The Weekly Standard was wrong — and flagrantly so in retrospect — to put TR (and "National Greatness") back on the conservative mantle.
In the 1990s post-Cold War conservatives were wrong to speak glowingly of the Progressive era. And they are all wrong today when they try to find an escape clause from conservative skepticism toward big government by slapping the pseudo-intellectual feel-good label "progressive" to whatever it is they're looking to do.
The New York Times at War With America
By Michael Barone
Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.
No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.
Last December, the Times ran a story revealing that the National Security Agency was conducting electronic surveillance of calls from suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas to persons in the United States. This was allegedly a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But in fact the president has, under his war powers, the right to order surveillance of our enemies abroad. And it makes no sense to hang up when those enemies call someone in the United States -- rather the contrary. If the government is going to protect us from those who wish to do us grievous harm -- and after Sept. 11 no one can doubt there are many such persons -- then it should try to track them down as thoroughly as possible.
Little wonder that President Bush called in Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and top editor Bill Keller, and asked them not to run the story. But the Times went ahead and published it anyway. Now, thanks to The New York Times, al-Qaida terrorists are aware that their phone calls can be monitored, and presumably have taken precautions.
Last Friday, the Times did it again, printing a story revealing the existence of U.S. government monitoring of financial transactions routed through the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which routes about $6 trillion a day in electronic money transfers around the world. The monitoring is conducted by the CIA and supervised by the Treasury Department. An independent auditing firm has been hired to make sure only terrorist-related transactions are targeted.
Members of Congress were briefed on the program, and it does not seem to violate any law, at least any that the Times could identify. And it has been effective. As the Times reporters admit, it helped to locate the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing in Thailand and a Brooklyn man convicted on charges of laundering a $200,000 payment to al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan.
Once again, Bush administration officials asked the Times not to publish the story. Once again, the Times went ahead anyway. "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration," Bill Keller is quoted as saying. It's interesting to note that he feels obliged to report he and his colleagues weren't smirking or cracking jokes. "We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."
This was presumably the view as well of the "nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives" who were apparently the sources for the story.
But who elected them to make these decisions? Publication of the Times' December and June stories appears to violate provisions of the broadly written, but until recently, seldom enforced provisions of the Espionage Act. Commentary's Gabriel Schoenfeld has argued that the Times can and probably should be prosecuted.
The counterargument is that it is a dangerous business for the government to prosecute the press. But it certainly is in order to prosecute government officials who have abused their trust by disclosing secrets, especially when those disclosures have reduced the government's ability to keep us safe. And pursuit of those charges would probably require reporters to disclose the names of those sources. As the Times found out in the Judith Miller case, reporters who refuse to answer such questions can go to jail.
Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical. We have a press that is at war with an administration, while our country is at war against merciless enemies. The Times is acting like an adolescent kicking the shins of its parents, hoping to make them hurt while confident of remaining safe under their roof. But how safe will we remain when our protection depends on the Times?
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
By Michael Barone
Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.
No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.
Last December, the Times ran a story revealing that the National Security Agency was conducting electronic surveillance of calls from suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas to persons in the United States. This was allegedly a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But in fact the president has, under his war powers, the right to order surveillance of our enemies abroad. And it makes no sense to hang up when those enemies call someone in the United States -- rather the contrary. If the government is going to protect us from those who wish to do us grievous harm -- and after Sept. 11 no one can doubt there are many such persons -- then it should try to track them down as thoroughly as possible.
Little wonder that President Bush called in Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and top editor Bill Keller, and asked them not to run the story. But the Times went ahead and published it anyway. Now, thanks to The New York Times, al-Qaida terrorists are aware that their phone calls can be monitored, and presumably have taken precautions.
Last Friday, the Times did it again, printing a story revealing the existence of U.S. government monitoring of financial transactions routed through the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which routes about $6 trillion a day in electronic money transfers around the world. The monitoring is conducted by the CIA and supervised by the Treasury Department. An independent auditing firm has been hired to make sure only terrorist-related transactions are targeted.
Members of Congress were briefed on the program, and it does not seem to violate any law, at least any that the Times could identify. And it has been effective. As the Times reporters admit, it helped to locate the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing in Thailand and a Brooklyn man convicted on charges of laundering a $200,000 payment to al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan.
Once again, Bush administration officials asked the Times not to publish the story. Once again, the Times went ahead anyway. "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration," Bill Keller is quoted as saying. It's interesting to note that he feels obliged to report he and his colleagues weren't smirking or cracking jokes. "We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."
This was presumably the view as well of the "nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives" who were apparently the sources for the story.
But who elected them to make these decisions? Publication of the Times' December and June stories appears to violate provisions of the broadly written, but until recently, seldom enforced provisions of the Espionage Act. Commentary's Gabriel Schoenfeld has argued that the Times can and probably should be prosecuted.
The counterargument is that it is a dangerous business for the government to prosecute the press. But it certainly is in order to prosecute government officials who have abused their trust by disclosing secrets, especially when those disclosures have reduced the government's ability to keep us safe. And pursuit of those charges would probably require reporters to disclose the names of those sources. As the Times found out in the Judith Miller case, reporters who refuse to answer such questions can go to jail.
Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical. We have a press that is at war with an administration, while our country is at war against merciless enemies. The Times is acting like an adolescent kicking the shins of its parents, hoping to make them hurt while confident of remaining safe under their roof. But how safe will we remain when our protection depends on the Times?
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Life in an Islamist US
By Jeff Jacoby
June 25, 2006
AFTER THE terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became a cliche that if we didn't do X, Y, or Z -- usually some normal peacetime activity -- then ``the terrorists will have won." For example, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences justified the decision to proceed with the 2001 Academy Awards by declaring that ``if we give in to fear, if we aren't able to do these simple and ordinary things, the terrorists have won the war."
In truth, though, most Americans have never thought about what it would mean if the terrorists really did win -- if militant Islamists were to succeed in their quest for political control of the United States. It isn't something that elites in academia, government, or the media generally like to talk about, for fear of being branded racist or ``Islamophobic." American Islamists themselves are careful not to speak too candidly about their supremacist goals.
Life in an Islamist United States would be largely unfree and intolerant, if the experience of countries where radical Muslims have achieved power -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan -- is any guide. What would that mean in American terms? That's the question a remarkable new novel sets out to answer.
``Prayers for the Assassin," Robert Ferrigno's latest thriller, is set 35 years in the future, when the United States has been transformed into the Islamic Republic of America. It is a country in which university professors can lose their jobs for being ``insufficiently Islamic," cellphone cameras are illegal, and men can only dream of ``loud music, cold beer, and coed beaches." There is still a Super Bowl, but the cheerleaders are all men. Mt. Rushmore still exists, but the presidential faces on it have been blown up.
Ferrigno has said he spent two years researching Islam, and it shows in the level of detail with which the Islamic Republic has been conceived. In one scene, for example, a cabbie tunes his radio to a popular call-in show called ``What Should I Do, Imam?" As Ferrigno's heroine listens from the back seat, a caller asks whether there are any kinds of music that one can listen to without running afoul of Muslim law.
``Good question, my daughter," the imam answers. ``The Holy Qur'an is quite clear that music is forbidden. One of the messengers of Allah said, `There will be a nation who will make music their lot, and one day, while enjoying their music and alcohol, they will awake with their faces transformed into swine.' In fact, this messenger said he was sent to destroy all music instruments. . . . Instead of music, rather listen to the Holy Qur'an." Ferrigno invented the scene, but the severe Islamist reply has been taken almost verbatim from Ask-Imam.com, the online advice site of the South African Mufti Ebrahim Desai.
In a Muslim America, Christians are second-class citizens, barred from the best jobs and housing. Others, especially Jews and homosexuals, are not tolerated at all; many flee for their lives along a new underground railroad into Canada.
Life is especially hard for women, who may not leave their homes without written permission from a male relative, and even then risk being whipped by the Black Robes -- the Sharia-enforcing religious police -- if a lock of hair slips out from beneath their head scarves, or they neglect to keep their ankles covered. Repression is at the heart of fundamentalist Islam, and Ferrigno's portrayal of that repression in American terms is a vivid reminder of what is really at stake in the war against the jihadists.
But ``Prayers for the Assassin" is no screed. If its villains are Muslims, so are its heroes; Ferrigno is quite aware that moderate and liberal Muslims have the most to fear from an Islamofascist victory.
He is also quite aware of Islam's appeal. Many converts to Islam find comfort and reassurance in its moral certainty and firm standards, and Ferrigno underscores the point. ``Don't tell me about the old days, girl, I lived through them," says one character, a top government official. ``Drugs sold on street corners. Guns everywhere. God driven out of the schools and courthouses. Births without marriage, rich and poor, so many bastards you wouldn't believe me. A country without shame. Alcohol sold in supermarkets. Babies killed in the womb, tens of millions of them. . . . We are not perfect, not by any measure, but I would not go back to those days for anything."
The war we are in is a spiritual no less than a military one, a point too many of us are apt to ignore. ``Prayers for the Assassin" -- in addition to being a great read -- is an admonition to stop ignoring it. Unless we want the terrorists to win.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
By Jeff Jacoby
June 25, 2006
AFTER THE terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became a cliche that if we didn't do X, Y, or Z -- usually some normal peacetime activity -- then ``the terrorists will have won." For example, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences justified the decision to proceed with the 2001 Academy Awards by declaring that ``if we give in to fear, if we aren't able to do these simple and ordinary things, the terrorists have won the war."
In truth, though, most Americans have never thought about what it would mean if the terrorists really did win -- if militant Islamists were to succeed in their quest for political control of the United States. It isn't something that elites in academia, government, or the media generally like to talk about, for fear of being branded racist or ``Islamophobic." American Islamists themselves are careful not to speak too candidly about their supremacist goals.
Life in an Islamist United States would be largely unfree and intolerant, if the experience of countries where radical Muslims have achieved power -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan -- is any guide. What would that mean in American terms? That's the question a remarkable new novel sets out to answer.
``Prayers for the Assassin," Robert Ferrigno's latest thriller, is set 35 years in the future, when the United States has been transformed into the Islamic Republic of America. It is a country in which university professors can lose their jobs for being ``insufficiently Islamic," cellphone cameras are illegal, and men can only dream of ``loud music, cold beer, and coed beaches." There is still a Super Bowl, but the cheerleaders are all men. Mt. Rushmore still exists, but the presidential faces on it have been blown up.
Ferrigno has said he spent two years researching Islam, and it shows in the level of detail with which the Islamic Republic has been conceived. In one scene, for example, a cabbie tunes his radio to a popular call-in show called ``What Should I Do, Imam?" As Ferrigno's heroine listens from the back seat, a caller asks whether there are any kinds of music that one can listen to without running afoul of Muslim law.
``Good question, my daughter," the imam answers. ``The Holy Qur'an is quite clear that music is forbidden. One of the messengers of Allah said, `There will be a nation who will make music their lot, and one day, while enjoying their music and alcohol, they will awake with their faces transformed into swine.' In fact, this messenger said he was sent to destroy all music instruments. . . . Instead of music, rather listen to the Holy Qur'an." Ferrigno invented the scene, but the severe Islamist reply has been taken almost verbatim from Ask-Imam.com, the online advice site of the South African Mufti Ebrahim Desai.
In a Muslim America, Christians are second-class citizens, barred from the best jobs and housing. Others, especially Jews and homosexuals, are not tolerated at all; many flee for their lives along a new underground railroad into Canada.
Life is especially hard for women, who may not leave their homes without written permission from a male relative, and even then risk being whipped by the Black Robes -- the Sharia-enforcing religious police -- if a lock of hair slips out from beneath their head scarves, or they neglect to keep their ankles covered. Repression is at the heart of fundamentalist Islam, and Ferrigno's portrayal of that repression in American terms is a vivid reminder of what is really at stake in the war against the jihadists.
But ``Prayers for the Assassin" is no screed. If its villains are Muslims, so are its heroes; Ferrigno is quite aware that moderate and liberal Muslims have the most to fear from an Islamofascist victory.
He is also quite aware of Islam's appeal. Many converts to Islam find comfort and reassurance in its moral certainty and firm standards, and Ferrigno underscores the point. ``Don't tell me about the old days, girl, I lived through them," says one character, a top government official. ``Drugs sold on street corners. Guns everywhere. God driven out of the schools and courthouses. Births without marriage, rich and poor, so many bastards you wouldn't believe me. A country without shame. Alcohol sold in supermarkets. Babies killed in the womb, tens of millions of them. . . . We are not perfect, not by any measure, but I would not go back to those days for anything."
The war we are in is a spiritual no less than a military one, a point too many of us are apt to ignore. ``Prayers for the Assassin" -- in addition to being a great read -- is an admonition to stop ignoring it. Unless we want the terrorists to win.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
Novel's Impact Hasn't 'Gone with the Wind'
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, her husband gave her a stack of blank paper and said, ``Write a book.'' Did she ever.
The novel's first title became its last words, ``Tomorrow Is Another Day,'' and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became ``Gone With the Wind.''
You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade was his ``The Grapes of Wrath.'' Published in 1939, it captured the Depression experience that many Americans had, and that many more lived in fear of. Steinbeck's novel became a great movie and by now 14 million copies of the book have been sold.
But although the $3 price of ``Gone With the Wind'' ($43.50 in today's dollars) was steep by Depression standards, it sold 178,000 copies in three weeks and 2 million by April 1938, when it ended a 21-month run on the best-seller list. By now nearly 30 million have been sold. About 250,000 are still purchased in America every year, and 100,000 elsewhere.
In 1935, there had been an early indicator of the American yearning that Mitchell's novel satisfied. That year saw the publication of the final two volumes of another durable work of Southern sympathy, Douglas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer-Prize-winning four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. What was afoot?
By the middle of the 1930s, with the Depression entering its second half-decade and showing no sign of succumbing to the New Deal's attempts to end it, Americans were rightly skeptical about the idea that happy days would soon be here again. Their world having been turned upside down, they saw a parallel between their plight and the story of the disappearance of the antebellum South. Hence their embrace of Mitchell's epic about a society pulverized to human dust that is blown about by history's leveling wind.
Parts of the novel reek of magnolia and cloying sentimentalism. But Mitchell writes sarcastic passages about the Lost Cause:
``How could anything but overwhelming victory come to a Cause as just and right as theirs? ... Of course, there were empty chairs and babies who would never see their fathers' faces and unmarked graves by lonely Virginia creeks and in the still mountains of Tennessee, but was that too great a price to pay for such a Cause?''
Scarlett certainly was no sentimentalist. When Rhett Butler, the embodiment of unapologetic realism, asks her if she ever thinks ``of anything but money,'' she replies with words that struck a chord with a nation that had heard quite enough of the song ``Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?'': ``No. ... I've found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don't ever intend to be without it again.''
In 1936, The Washington Post reviewer called the novel ``unsurpassed in the whole of American writing,'' which was a bit strong, considering what Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Wharton had produced. What could, however, accurately have been said of ``Gone With the Wind'' was that it was the most cinematic novel yet written in America. A month after it was published, $50,000 was paid for the rights to turn it into the movie that has grossed (adjusted for ticket-price inflation) a record $3.8 billion worldwide.
Like another Southern woman who wrote a novel about her region, a novel that is still in print nearly half a century later and that became a classic movie (Harper Lee, ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' published in 1960), Mitchell never wrote another. In 1949, at age 48, she was killed by a taxi driven by a drunk in Atlanta, which was already on its way to becoming the symbol of the New South.
Mitchell had been born in 1900, just 35 years after Appomattox and 23 years after Reconstruction ended. Her sensibilities were not what ours are. The novel has passages that cannot be read without cringing. (``Not trust a darky! Scarlett trusted them far more than most white people. ... They still stuck with their white folks and worked much harder than they ever worked in slave times.'') But to read such passages is to be stunned, once again, by the amazing speed with which America has changed for the better. In 1936, in Mitchell's Atlanta, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, had a son who was 7.
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, her husband gave her a stack of blank paper and said, ``Write a book.'' Did she ever.
The novel's first title became its last words, ``Tomorrow Is Another Day,'' and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became ``Gone With the Wind.''
You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade was his ``The Grapes of Wrath.'' Published in 1939, it captured the Depression experience that many Americans had, and that many more lived in fear of. Steinbeck's novel became a great movie and by now 14 million copies of the book have been sold.
But although the $3 price of ``Gone With the Wind'' ($43.50 in today's dollars) was steep by Depression standards, it sold 178,000 copies in three weeks and 2 million by April 1938, when it ended a 21-month run on the best-seller list. By now nearly 30 million have been sold. About 250,000 are still purchased in America every year, and 100,000 elsewhere.
In 1935, there had been an early indicator of the American yearning that Mitchell's novel satisfied. That year saw the publication of the final two volumes of another durable work of Southern sympathy, Douglas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer-Prize-winning four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. What was afoot?
By the middle of the 1930s, with the Depression entering its second half-decade and showing no sign of succumbing to the New Deal's attempts to end it, Americans were rightly skeptical about the idea that happy days would soon be here again. Their world having been turned upside down, they saw a parallel between their plight and the story of the disappearance of the antebellum South. Hence their embrace of Mitchell's epic about a society pulverized to human dust that is blown about by history's leveling wind.
Parts of the novel reek of magnolia and cloying sentimentalism. But Mitchell writes sarcastic passages about the Lost Cause:
``How could anything but overwhelming victory come to a Cause as just and right as theirs? ... Of course, there were empty chairs and babies who would never see their fathers' faces and unmarked graves by lonely Virginia creeks and in the still mountains of Tennessee, but was that too great a price to pay for such a Cause?''
Scarlett certainly was no sentimentalist. When Rhett Butler, the embodiment of unapologetic realism, asks her if she ever thinks ``of anything but money,'' she replies with words that struck a chord with a nation that had heard quite enough of the song ``Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?'': ``No. ... I've found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don't ever intend to be without it again.''
In 1936, The Washington Post reviewer called the novel ``unsurpassed in the whole of American writing,'' which was a bit strong, considering what Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Wharton had produced. What could, however, accurately have been said of ``Gone With the Wind'' was that it was the most cinematic novel yet written in America. A month after it was published, $50,000 was paid for the rights to turn it into the movie that has grossed (adjusted for ticket-price inflation) a record $3.8 billion worldwide.
Like another Southern woman who wrote a novel about her region, a novel that is still in print nearly half a century later and that became a classic movie (Harper Lee, ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' published in 1960), Mitchell never wrote another. In 1949, at age 48, she was killed by a taxi driven by a drunk in Atlanta, which was already on its way to becoming the symbol of the New South.
Mitchell had been born in 1900, just 35 years after Appomattox and 23 years after Reconstruction ended. Her sensibilities were not what ours are. The novel has passages that cannot be read without cringing. (``Not trust a darky! Scarlett trusted them far more than most white people. ... They still stuck with their white folks and worked much harder than they ever worked in slave times.'') But to read such passages is to be stunned, once again, by the amazing speed with which America has changed for the better. In 1936, in Mitchell's Atlanta, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, had a son who was 7.
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