The Real Jimmy Carter
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com

April 27, 2007

I have known Jimmy Carter for years. I first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a relatively unknown candidate for president, he sent me a handwritten letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime and justice. I had just published an article in The New York Times Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed interest in my ideas and asked me to come up with additional ones for his campaign. Shortly thereafter, my former student, Stuart Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard to meet with some faculty members, me among them. I immediately liked Jimmy Carter and saw him as a man of integrity and principle. I signed on to his campaign and worked very hard for his election.

When Newsweek magazine asked his campaign for the names of people on whom Carter relied for advice, my name was among those given out. I continued to work for Carter over the years, most recently I met him in Jerusalem a year ago, and we briefly discussed the Mid-East. Though I disagreed with some of his points, I continued to believe that he was making them out of a deep commitment to principle and to human rights.

Recent disclosures of Carter's extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source?

And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially, I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School, Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts.

They were staggering. I was amazed that in the twenty-first century there were still foundations that espoused these views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, a think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his son, hosted speakers who called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a "fable." (They also hosted a speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.

Jimmy Carter was, of course, aware of Harvard's decision, since it was highly publicized. Yet he kept the money. Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the funds: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." Carter's personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable anti-Semite and all-around bigot.

In reading Carter's statements, I was reminded of the bad old Harvard of the nineteen thirties, which continued to honor Nazi academics after the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler's government became clear. Harvard of the nineteen thirties was complicit in evil. I sadly concluded that Jimmy Carter of the twenty-first century has become complicit in evil.

The extent of Carter's financial support from, and even dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known. What we do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors is Carter's friend, Sheikh Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former president establish his center...[and] more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects."

Carter gladly accepted the money, though Abedi had called his bank, ostensibly the source of his funding, "the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists." BCCI isn't the only source: Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center "in 1993 alone...$7.6 million" as have other members of the Saudi Royal Family. Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheikh Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. It's worth noting that, despite the influx of Saudi money funding the Carter Center, and despite the Saudi Arabian government's myriad human rights abuses, the Carter Center's Human Rights program has no activity whatever in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis have apparently bought his silence for a steep price. The bought quality of the Center's activities becomes even more clear, however, when reviewing the Center's human rights activities in other countries: essentially no human rights activities in China or in North Korea, or in Iran, Iraq, the Sudan, or Syria, but activity regarding Israel and its alleged abuses, according to the Center's website.

The Carter Center's mission statement claims that "The Center is nonpartisan and acts as a neutral party in dispute resolution activities." How can that be, given that its coffers are full of Arab money, and that its focus is away from significant Arab abuses and on Israel's far less serious ones?

No reasonable person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter has been and remains dependent on Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia. Does this mean that Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about the Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of money? Ask Carter.

The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter, not me, who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter's own standards, it would be almost economically "suicidal" for Carter "to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."

By Carter's own standards, therefore, his views on the Middle East must be discounted. It is certainly possible that he now believes them. Money, particularly large amounts of money, has a way of persuading people to a particular position. It would not surprise me if Carter, having received so much Arab money, is now honestly committed to their cause. But his failure to disclose the extent of his financial dependence on Arab money, and the absence of any self reflection on whether the receipt of this money has unduly influenced his views, is a form of deception bordering on corruption.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported by the cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly that cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation, that cigarettes are not addicting and that the cigarette industry is really trying to persuade children not to smoke. These people are fooling themselves (or fooling us into believing that they are fooling themselves) just as Jimmy Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that he is fooling himself).

If money determines political and public views as Carter insists "Jewish money" does, Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

From City Journal:
Mexifornia, Five Years Later
The flood of illegal immigrants into California has made things worse than I foresaw.
Victor Davis Hanson
Winter 2007

In the Spring 2002 issue of City Journal, I wrote an essay about growing up in the central San Joaquin Valley and witnessing firsthand, especially over the last 20 years, the ill effects of illegal immigration (City Journal’s editors chose the title of the piece: “Do We Want Mexifornia?”). Controversy over my blunt assessment of the disaster of illegal immigration from Mexico led to an expanded memoir, Mexifornia, published the following year by Encounter Press.

Mexifornia came out during the ultimately successful campaign to recall California governor Gray Davis in autumn 2003. A popular public gripe was that the embattled governor had appeased both employers and the more radical Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on illegal immigration. And indeed Davis had signed legislation allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens that both houses of state government had passed. So it was no wonder that the book sometimes found its way into both the low and high forms of the political debate. On the Internet, a close facsimile of a California driver’s license circulated, with a picture of a Mexican bandit (the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), together with a demeaning height (5’4”), weight (“too much”), and sex (“mucho”) given. “Mexifornia” was emblazoned across the top where “California” usually is stamped on the license.

In such a polarized climate, heated debates and several radio interviews followed, often with the query, “Why did you have to write this book?” The Left saw the book’s arguments and its title—Mexifornia was originally a term of approbation used by activists buoyed by California’s changing demography—as unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The Right saw the book as long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican Party.

Fast-forward nearly five years, and the national climate has radically changed, so much so that the arguments of Mexifornia—close the borders, return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens of long residence in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture—seem tame today, if not passé. In 2002, when I wrote the original City Journal essay, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall. Today there is rumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles of fencing instead of spanning the entire 1,950-mile border.

Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of the 11 million here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, appears the keener point of contention. And the concerted effort by Chicano activists to drive from popular parlance the descriptive term “illegal alien” in favor of the politically correct, but imprecise and often misleading “undocumented worker” has largely failed. Similar efforts to demonize opponents of open borders as “anti-immigrant” or “nativist” have had only a marginal effect in stifling debate, as has the deliberate effort to blur illegal and legal immigration. The old utopian talk of a new borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading on both sides of a disappearing boundary, has given way to a reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of greater cross-border flows of goods, services—and illegal aliens and drugs.

So why has the controversy over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the right?

We return always to the question of numbers. While it is true that no one knows exactly how many are here illegally from Mexico and Latin America, both sides in the debate often accept as reasonable estimates of 11 to 12 million illegals—with an additional 500,000 to 1 million arriving per year. Given porous borders, such guesses about the number of illegal aliens in the United States are outdated almost as soon as they are published. It is plausible, then, that there may be an additional 3 to 4 million illegal aliens here who were not here when the City Journal “Mexifornia” piece appeared.

The result of such staggering numbers is that aliens now don’t just cluster in the American Southwest but frequently appear at Home Depot parking lots in the Midwest, emergency rooms in New England, and construction sites in the Carolinas, making illegal immigration an American, rather than a mere Californian or Arizonan, concern.

Indeed, we forget how numbers are at the crux of the entire debate over illegal immigration. In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million fled Mexico in little over a decade—the great majority poor, without English, job skills, a high school education, and legality—entire apartheid communities in the American Southwest began springing up.

During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.

Since Mexifornia appeared, the debate also no longer splits along liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, or even white/brown fault lines. Instead, class considerations more often divide Americans on the issue. The majority of middle-class and poor whites, Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics wish to close the borders. They see few advantages to cheap service labor, since they are not so likely to need it to mow their lawns, watch their kids, or clean their houses. Because the less well-off eat out less often, use hotels infrequently, and don’t periodically remodel their homes, the advantages to the economy of inexpensive, off-the-books illegal-alien labor again are not so apparent.

But the downside surely is apparent. Truck drivers, carpenters, janitors, and gardeners— unlike lawyers, doctors, actors, writers, and professors—correctly feel that their jobs are threatened, or at least their wages lowered, by cheaper rival workers from Oaxaca or Jalisco. And Americans who live in communities where thousands of illegal aliens have arrived en masse more likely lack the money to move when Spanish-speaking students flood the schools and gangs proliferate. Poorer Americans of all ethnic backgrounds take for granted that poverty provides no exemption from mastering English, so they wonder why the same is not true for incoming Mexican nationals. Less than a mile from my home is a former farmhouse whose new owner moved in several stationary Winnebagos, propane tanks, and outdoor cooking facilities—and apparently four or five entire families rent such facilities right outside his back door. Dozens live where a single family used to—a common sight in rural California that reifies illegal immigration in a way that books and essays do not.

The problem with all this is that our now-spurned laws were originally intended to ensure an (admittedly thin) veneer of civilization over innate chaos—roads full of drivers who have passed a minimum test to ensure that they are not a threat to others; single-family residence zoning to ensure that there are adequate sewer, garbage, and water services for all; periodic county inspections to ensure that untethered dogs are licensed and free of disease and that housing is wired and plumbed properly to prevent mayhem; and a consensus on school taxes to ensure that there are enough teachers and classrooms for such sudden spikes in student populations.

All these now-neglected or forgotten rules proved costly to the taxpayer. In my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 1950s of my youth—in which the county inspected our farm’s rural dwellings, eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard of residence for all rural residents—has been abandoned in just a few years of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of once-comprehensive statutes. The government’s attitude at all levels is to punish the dutiful citizen’s misdemeanors while ignoring the alien’s felony, on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either cannot or will not.

Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that reflects class divides—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.

These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.

The ripples of September 11—whether seen in the arrests of dozens of potential saboteurs here in America or the terrorist bombings abroad in Madrid and London—remind Americans that their present enemies can do us harm only if they can first somehow enter the United States. Again, it makes little sense to screen tourists, inspect cargo containers, and check the passenger lists of incoming flights, when our border with an untrustworthy Mexico remains porous. While it may be true that the opponents of illegal immigration have used the post–September 11 fear of terrorism to further their own agenda of closing the border with Mexico, they are absolutely correct that presently the best way for jihadist cells to cross into the United States is overland from the south.

Other foreign developments have also steered the debate ever more rightward. In the last decade, the United States has clearly seen the wages of sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism abroad. The unraveling of Yugoslavia into Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian sects followed the Hutu-Tutsi bloodbath in Rwanda. And now almost daily we hear of Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek hatred among the multiplicity of warring clans in Afghanistan and the daily mayhem among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis in Iraq. Why—when we are spending blood and treasure abroad to encourage the melting pot and national unity—would anyone wish to contribute to tribalism or foster the roots of such ethnic separatism here in the United States?

Moreover, all during the 1990s, blue-state America offered up the European Union as the proper postmodern antidote to the United States. But just as we have recoiled from the EU’s statist and undemocratic tendencies—which have resulted in popular dissatisfaction, sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, falling demography, and unsustainable entitlement commitments—so, too, have its unassimilated Muslim minorities served as another canary in the mine. The riots in France, the support for jihadism among Pakistanis in London, and the demands of Islamists in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands do not encourage Americans to let in more poor Mexican illegal immigrants with loud agendas, or to embrace the multicultural salad bowl over their own distinctive melting pot.

Then there were the April–May 2006 demonstrations here in the United States, when nearly half a million protesters took to the streets of our largest cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Previously, naive Americans had considered that their own discussions over border security and immigration were in their own hands. And while Chicano-rights organizations and employer lobbyists were often vehement in their efforts to keep the border open, illegal aliens themselves used to be mostly quiet about our internal legal debates.

In contrast, this spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing driver’s licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations—held on May Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara—only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.

Turmoil in areas of Mexico that send many illegal aliens to the United States is especially worrisome. Recently, for example, almost the entire state of Oaxaca was in near-open revolt over efforts to force the resignation of provincial governor Ulises Ruiz. There was widespread lawlessness, vigilantism, and at times the complete breakdown of order. All this feeds the growing perception that illegal aliens increasingly are arriving not merely as economic refugees but as political dissidents who don’t hesitate to take to the streets here to demand social justice, as they did back home.

More important still, Oaxaca’s troubles cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that illegal immigration is a safety valve that allows Mexico critical time to get its house in order. Perhaps the opposite is true: some of the areas, like Oaxaca, that send the most illegal aliens to the United States, still experience the greatest social tensions—in part because of the familial disruption and social chaos that results when adult males flee and depopulated communities consequently become captive to foreign remittances.

Two further issues have persuaded Americans to close the borders: the attitude of the Mexican government and the problems with first-generation native-born children of illegal aliens.

Worker remittances sent back to Mexico now earn it precious American dollars equal to the revenue from 500,000 barrels of daily exported oil. In short, Mexico cannot afford to lose its second-largest source of hard currency and will do almost anything to ensure its continuance. When Mexico City publishes comic books advising its own citizens how best to cross the Rio Grande, Americans take offense. Not only does Mexico brazenly wish to undermine American law to subsidize its own failures, but it also assumes that those who flee northward are among its least educated, departing without much ability to read beyond the comic-book level.

We are also learning not only that Mexico wants its expatriates’ cash—and its nationals lobbying for Mexican interests—once they are safely away from their motherland; we are also discovering that Mexico doesn’t have much concern about the welfare of its citizens abroad in America. The conservative estimate of $15 billion sent home comes always at the expense of low-paid Mexicans toiling here, who must live in impoverished circumstances if they are to send substantial portions of their wages home to Mexico. (And it comes as well at the expense of American taxpayers, providing health-care and food subsidies in efforts to offer a safety net to cash-strapped illegal aliens.) So it is not just that Mexico exports its own citizens, but it does so on the expectation that they are serfs of a sort, who, like the helots of old, surrender much of the earnings of their toil to their distant masters.

But even more grotesquely, in the last five years, the Mexican real-estate market has boomed on the Baja California peninsula. Once Mexico grasped that its own unspoiled coast was highly desirable for wealthy expatriate Americans as a continuation of the prized but crowded Santa Barbara–San Diego seaside corridor, it began to reform its real-estate market, making the necessary changes in property and title law, and it welcomed with open arms cash-laden subdividers looking to come south. This is sound economics, but examine the ethical message: Mexico City will send the United States millions of its own illiterate and poor whom it will neither feed nor provide with even modest housing, but at the same time it welcomes thousands of Americans with cash to build expensive seaside second homes.

Of course, the ultimate solution to the illegal immigration debacle is for Mexican society to bring itself up to the levels of affluence found in the United States by embracing market reforms of the sort we have seen in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. But rarely do Mexican supporters of such globalization, or their sympathetic counterparts in the United States, see the proliferation of a Wal-Mart or Starbucks down south in such terms. Rather, to them American consumerism and investment in Mexico suggest only an owed reciprocity of sentiment: Why should Americans get mad about Mexican illegals coming north when our own crass culture, with its blaring neon signs in English, spreads southward? In such morally equivalent arguments, it is never mentioned that Americanization occurs legally and brings capital, while Mexicanization comes about by illegal means and is driven by poverty.

At the same time, focus has turned more to the U.S.-born children of Mexican illegal immigrants, in whom illegitimacy, school dropout rates, and criminal activity have risen to such levels that no longer can we simply dismiss Mexican immigration as resembling the more problematic but eventually successful Italian model of a century ago. Then, large numbers of southern European Catholics, most without capital and education, arrived en masse from Italy and Sicily, lived in ethnic enclaves, and for decades lagged behind the majority population in educational achievement, income, and avoidance of crime—before achieving financial parity as well as full assimilation and intermarriage. Since 1990, the number of poor Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that skewed U.S. poverty rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor will not improve our poverty statistics when 1 million of the world’s poorest cross our border each year. The number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent in the last 16 years, but the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 percent. We don’t like to talk of illegitimacy, but here again the ripples of illegal immigration reach the U.S.-born generation. Half of births to Hispanic-Americans were illegitimate, 42 percent higher than the general rate of the American population. Illegitimacy is higher in general in Mexico than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, lack of English, and an absence of higher education means that the children of Mexican immigrants have illegitimacy rates even higher than those found in either Mexico or the United States.

Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern—nearly half of all Hispanics are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a school district becomes, the greater level of failure for Hispanic students. In the Los Angeles district, 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of the students are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that, of those Hispanics who do graduate, only about one in five will have completed a high school curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That partly helps to explain why at many campuses of the California State University system, almost half of the incoming class must first take remedial education. Less than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. I found that teaching Latin to first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so much as an introduction to the ancient world but as their first experience with remedial English grammar.

Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 recently reported being arrested, one in five has been jailed, and 15,000 illegal aliens are currently in the California penal system.

Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came here only to work and would quickly assume an American identity, the public’s own ad hoc and empirical observations of vast problems with crime, illiteracy, and illegitimacy have now been confirmed by hard data. Ever since the influx of illegals into our quiet valley became a flood, I have had five drivers leave the road, plow into my vineyard, and abandon their cars, without evidence of either registration or insurance. On each occasion, I have seen them simply walk or run away from the scene of thousands of dollars in damage. Similarly, an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign hit my car broadside and then fled the scene. Our farmhouse in the Central Valley has been broken into three times. We used to have an open yard; now it is walled, with steel gates on the driveway. Such anecdotes have become common currency in the American Southwest. Ridiculed by elites as evidence of prejudice, these stories, statistical studies now show, reflect hard fact.

The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four years after “Mexifornia” first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders—while the old arguments, Americans are finally concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

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From First Things:
The Auth Cartoon

By Robert T. Miller

Thursday, April 26, 2007, 9:15 AM

Last Friday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the Tony Auth cartoon below.

Apparently referring to the fact that the five Supreme Court justices who voted last week in Gonzales v. Carhart to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 are all Catholics, Mr. Auth’s point seems to be that the Catholic justices were relying on their religious convictions, not legitimate legal arguments, in reaching the conclusions they did.

I leave aside the anti-Catholic slur in Mr. Auth’s cartoon because I find more worthy of attention the way in which he attempts to make his point. Faced with a serious disagreement about a matter of public concern, Mr. Auth makes no arguments on the point in dispute. Rather, he says, in effect, that the people who disagree with his view are doing so because of an unjust desire to impose the peculiar norms of their religion on others.

Now, whenever two people disagree, each is committed to saying that the other’s view is false and that his arguments are unsound; that’s just what disagreement means, and no one should be upset at this. But Mr. Auth goes much further. He’s saying not only that his opponents are wrong and that their arguments are unsound, but also that his opponents in fact have no reasonable arguments at all. If they had reasonable arguments, even ultimately unsound ones, then Mr. Auth would have to admit that they could well disagree with him on the basis of such arguments. So Mr. Auth is making an extremely strong claim here: not only that he’s right and his opponents are wrong, but also that all reasonable people have to agree with him, and anyone who disagrees with him is, to that extent, unreasonable. Such strong claims are almost always false. In my view, on virtually any issue of public importance, any view that commands any sizeable portion of the population probably has some reasonable arguments in its favor.

On the particular matter in question here—the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003—Mr. Auth’s claim is especially implausible. All kinds of people who are non-Catholics have reasons for supporting this act. Witness the fact that the law was enacted in the main by non-Catholics, including many Democrats (it passed 64-34 in the Senate and 281-142 in the House of Representatives) and was then signed into law by a non-Catholic president.

Similarly, until the last few decades, Anglo-American law, which has historically been dominated by non-Catholics, treated abortion as a serious crime, even in early pregnancy, and consistently did so in order to protect the life of the unborn child. If you’re heard otherwise, see the monumental new history of Anglo-American abortion laws by Professor Joseph W. Dellapenna, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, a massive work spanning eight centuries and 1,200 pages, which is destined to become the magisterial treatment of the subject. Note to Mr. Auth: Prof. Dellapenna is not a Catholic; he describes himself as a lapsed Unitarian.

Furthermore, if Mr. Auth bothered to read the philosophical literature on abortion, he’d find that there are serious arguments on both sides of this issue. In particular, he might be surprised to learn that many of the most sophisticated defenders of abortion rights long ago conceded that a human fetus is a human being, not a clump of cells (it’s rather difficult to know much about embryology and conclude otherwise). Hence, most such philosophers defend abortion either by arguing that abortion is a permissible form of homicide, such as self-defense, or else by distinguishing human beings from human persons (human persons being human beings with some minimal level of mental capacity) and arguing that only human persons and not human beings generally are entitled to moral protection.

For my part, I sense in both these doctrines a reductio ad absurdum of the view they are meant to defend, and so I think the arguments fall out very largely on the pro-life side. Still, I recognize that the issues here are very complex and involve many contestable points in ethics and meta-ethics, and so I appreciate that other people, reasonably and in good faith, often come to views different from my own. Mr. Auth, probably because of his complete ignorance of the relevant arguments, is unable to say the same.

And this I find somewhat depressing. I can accept that arguments I think are right fail to carry the day in the public square. What I cannot accept—and what no one ought to accept—is that people with genuine arguments to make in the public square are dismissed as if they had none. This is just what Mr. Auth is doing: He is cutting off argument in order to advance his own view. He gets away with it, of course, because he also appeals to anti-Catholic prejudice, but once this sort of thing becomes socially acceptable in respected venues like national newspapers, the whole social function of the public square is imperiled. Militant know-nothingism, which is the psychological prerequisite to Mr. Auth’s style of argument, is an erratic force, and there is no telling where it might turn next.

Whenever writing about such hotly contested issues as abortion, I try to remember to say, as I did above, that I think people who disagree with me on such issues are good people who have reasonable arguments for their views. Mr. Auth is only a political cartoonist, and so one cannot take him very seriously, but many other defenders of abortion rights made the same point following the decision in the Gonzales case. Consequently I think that public intellectuals who favor abortion rights but who know full well the complexity of the issues at stake have a special responsibility to come to the defense of those whose good faith is being impugned and make it clear that such people have reasonable grounds for their views.

People who make their livings dealing in arguments and have faith in the power of argument to make the world a better place should see that there is a principle at stake here larger even than abortion rights. It is a matter of fundamental intellectual integrity.

Robert T. Miller is an assistant professor at the Villanova University School of Law.

A Hollywood Promoter on Both Coasts
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, April 27, 2007

Jack Valenti, 85, a onetime confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson who spent nearly four decades as Hollywood's chief Washington lobbyist and helped devise the "G" to "X" movie-rating system, died yesterday at his home in Washington of complications from a stroke in March.

As president of the Motion Picture Association of America from 1966 to 2004, Valenti represented such powerful studios as Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM, 20th Century Fox and Universal as well as several leading independent producers. Earlier, he established political connections as a Texas advertising and public relations executive that led to his strong ties to Johnson.

With an instinctive showman's flair -- notably his grandiloquent speaking style and access to movie stars -- Valenti became the dominant power broker connecting Capitol Hill and the film colony. Besides his work on the ratings system in the late 1960s, he helped open up world markets for American-made films and secured passage of copyright legislation to protect movies into the digital age, which led to the proliferation of DVDs.

He also was a major gateway to Hollywood's financial largesse during the campaign season. On any given week, Valenti met with actors, world leaders and newspaper editors and was regarded as a brilliant and aggressive wielder of his glamorous pulpit.

Harry C. McPherson Jr., also a Johnson intimate who became a Washington lobbyist, called Valenti "an extremely successful advocate of the movie industry. You'd be hard-pressed to find any lobbyist for any industry who did a more successful job than Valenti. I can't think of many times when Jack Valenti lost."

"He had a lot to work with," added McPherson, an occasional lobbying adversary of Valenti's. "When senator X would want to go to Hollywood and would want some people to attend his fundraiser at the home of [former Walt Disney chief executive] Michael Eisner or some producer or studio chief, he'd talk to Jack. Jack would set it up and very often go out there."

Lawrence Levinson, a former Washington representative for Paramount, told the New Yorker magazine in 2001: "Jack was able to use the power and glamour and mystique of Hollywood. A new president came in, and [Valenti would] put himself in the center of the process of getting movies to the president. He'd get so excited. He'd call Sid Sheinberg" -- the president of MCA/Universal -- "and say, 'Sid! The president is going to Camp David! We've got to get him "Jaws"!' "

Valenti became known to a wider audience through his appearances on Academy Award telecasts. A diminutive, sprightly man, he was easily identifiable by a well-tanned and protruding forehead covered by snow-white hair. There was also his immaculate executive attire and what one reporter long ago called a "riverboat gambler's drawl."

The Texas-born, Harvard-educated lobbyist had a strikingly baroque writing and speaking style heavily influenced by 19th-century British historian Lord Macaulay and British prime minister Winston Churchill. For instance, a movie audience was not composed of ticket buyers but "unknown but enthusiastic companions of a single night."

He was widely considered an effective promoter for Hollywood on matters including censorship, videotape technology, copyright infringement and, in recent years, video and online piracy of trademarked films.

When Hollywood filmmakers attracted controversy, he routinely defended the studios by citing the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as the cause of artistic liberty.

This was the case when Valenti, along with MPAA general counsel Louis Nizer, helped create a voluntary rating system in 1968 that changed the way the studios classified a film's suitability for general audiences. This new arrangement was important, because it kept government intrusion and citizen censors at bay while allowing the artists maximum freedom and the consumer to influence the marketplace by voting with his wallet.

By implementing this voluntary system, the MPAA eliminated a movie code dating from the early 1930s with a long list of onscreen taboos ranging from "excessive and lustful kissing" to showing mixed-race sexual relations. The films had further been subject to city and state censorship boards trying to rid offending material.

The 1968 system -- with its long-familiar ratings ranging from "G" for admittance of general audiences to "X" prohibiting those under 17 -- was credited with helping keep the U.S. film market competitive with Europe's. European filmmakers had long ventured into fare laden with adult language, nudity and other forms of explicitness that proved increasingly popular with audiences.

What helped smooth the way for Valenti's changes was that many of these bolder U.S. films were quality productions with top stars, including "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. By 1969, "Midnight Cowboy," starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, became the only X-rated picture ever to win an Academy Award for best picture.

Valenti had a role in later changes and additions to the voluntary system, including PG-13 and NC-17 ratings. Nevertheless, the ratings system continued to be criticized for how it was applied toward films that accented sex or violence.

One of the strongest critics of the MPAA's system was Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert who wrote family-oriented movie reviews for Common Sense Media. Citing examples, she told one congressional hearing a few years ago that the MPAA's system did a poor job of providing families with helpful information.

Minow said recently: "He waited for me to finish, he stood up, learned over, kissed me on the top of my head and said, 'Nell, that's why we all need your Web site, because you can give parents what we can't.' There was really no way to respond to that. I thought that's why he's the most effective lobbyist in Washington."

The grandson of Sicilian immigrants, Jack Joseph Valenti was born Sept. 5, 1921, in Houston. His father was a clerk in the Harris County Courthouse, where young Valenti often saw office-seekers shaking the hands of well-connected bureaucrats. He began political campaigning at 10 and excelled in high school debate.

At 15, he became an office boy for Houston's Humble Oil and Refining Co., which later became Exxon Mobil. He returned from World War II a decorated Army Air Forces bomber pilot and a veteran of 51 missions over Europe.

He finished an undergraduate degree in business at the University of Houston in 1946 and received a master's degree in business administration from Harvard University in 1948.

He returned to Humble and described his most notable work as the "clean bathroom" publicity campaign for the company.

In 1952 he and an old friend, Weldon Weekley, formed an advertising agency. While Weekley oversaw the office work, Valenti lured a series of oil and business executives as clients. He also began handling advertising work for congressional and gubernatorial campaigns and met Johnson, the Senate majority leader, in 1956.

At the time, Valenti had a weekly column in the Houston Post and wrote a deeply flattering account of the future president that described him as "unbending as a mountain crag, tough as a jungle fighter" and called him the "Great Persuader."

Valenti further cemented their relationship in 1962 by marrying Johnson's personal secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley. She survives him, along with three children, Courtenay Valenti and John Valenti, both of Los Angeles, and Alexandra Valenti of Austin; a sister; and two grandchildren.

In November 1963, then-Vice President Johnson asked Jack Valenti to handle press relations during President John F. Kennedy's swing through Texas.

Valenti was in the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas when Kennedy was fatally shot Nov. 22 and accompanied the newly sworn-in Johnson back to Washington that night on Air Force One. He appeared in the famous photograph showing Johnson taking the oath of office aboard the plane.

As president, Johnson brought Valenti to Washington in 1963 as his special assistant -- a vague position Valenti likened to a "roving linebacker." He was a presidential troubleshooter, speech editor and trusted deputy for confidential assignments. He was often the first non-family member to greet Johnson in the morning and the last to see him at night.

McPherson, who became Johnson's special counsel, said Valenti was "enormously valuable as an aide because he could do so much. He could talk to members of Congress, he could take a piece of leaden speechwriting by someone and turn it, maybe not into Churchillian prose, but something that had some zip to it. There was no one he felt too shy to talk to on behalf of Johnson."

Tom Johnson, a White House fellow during the Johnson administration who later held executive positions at the Los Angeles Times and CNN, said, "Lyndon Johnson had no chief of staff, but Jack was closest to it."

He said Valenti was "the primary note taker in virtually all of the most confidential meetings LBJ had with heads of state, members of Congress, governors and [National Security Council] meetings." He also was Johnson's liaison to the Catholic Church and arranged with utmost secrecy a meeting between the president and Pope Paul VI at the Vatican during a presidential world tour.

Yet Valenti was often described as Johnson's chief whipping post or "glorified valet," who loyally absorbed Johnson's foul-mouthed tantrums and such seemingly humiliating acts as Johnson using Valenti's lap as a footrest.

Despite such treatment, Valenti continued to describe Johnson in worshipful, often purple prose, as when he told a group of advertising industry leaders in 1965, "I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my president."

Afterward, Washington Post political cartoonist Herblock drew Valenti as a slave being whipped into submission. All this brought Valenti the enduring image of a sycophant, political journalist Richard Rovere once wrote.

Valenti's closeness to Johnson was a top reason Lew Wasserman, president of MCA/Universal Studios and often called the most powerful man in Hollywood, pursued Valenti in 1966 to become MPAA president. Wasserman's empire had been a frequent target of Justice Department actions, and Valenti proved a valuable contact.

The polished Valenti remained the discreet Wasserman's frontman in Washington for decades. For his work, Valenti was among the best-paid trade group chief executives in Washington.

On the job, he was tireless yet always appeared impeccably tanned and suave. He logged hundreds of thousands of miles for his causes and at times had to confront foreign cultural ministries that used trade talks to limit or lambaste American film imports. In the early 1990s, he encouraged the MPAA to donate money to European film schools as a way of improving relations.

Videos are now among the top income sources for his client companies, but Valenti was paid for years to denounce what was then new technology. He memorably told a congressional panel in 1982, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

In the early 1980s, he successfully lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to prevent the repeal of long-standing financial-syndication rules. His actions allowed the movie industry to keep reaping billions of dollars from reruns. Until the rule was changed in the mid-1990s, television continued to be shut out of owning and syndicating the entertainment programs it aired.

Wasserman had also played an important role, having spoken directly to President Ronald Reagan, whose political rise he helped orchestrate in the 1950s.

When Valenti resigned from the MPAA in 2004, he was reportedly earning $1.35 million, and National Journal magazine ranked him the seventh-highest-paid trade group chief executive in Washington. His MPAA successor was Dan Glickman, a former U.S. congressman and President Bill Clinton's agriculture secretary.

Valenti contributed opinion pieces to newspapers and magazines such as Reader's Digest and the Atlantic Monthly. Among his books were "A Very Human President" (1975), about Johnson's White House years; "Speak Up With Confidence," a guide to public speaking (1982); and "Protect and Defend" (1992), a Washington-based political novel edited by former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In 2006, he wrote a memoir, "This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood."

From Asia Times:
BOOK REVIEW

Tolkien's Christianity and the pagan tragedy
The Children of Hurin, by J R R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Reviewed by Spengler

J R R Tolkien was the most Christian of 20th-century writers, not because he produced Christian allegory and apologetics like his friend C S Lewis, but because he uniquely portrayed the tragic nature of what Christianity replaced. Thanks to the diligence of his son Christopher, who reconstructed the present volume from several manuscripts, we have before us a treasure that sheds light on the greater purpose of his The Lord of the Rings.

In The Children of Hurin, a tragedy set some 6,000 years before the tales recounted in The Lord of the Rings, we see clearly why it was that Tolkien sought to give the English-speaking peoples a new pre-Christian mythology. It is a commonplace of Tolkien scholarship that the writer, the leading Anglo-Saxon scholar of his generation, sought to restore to the English their lost mythology. In this respect the standard critical sources (for example Edmund Wainwright) mistake Tolkien's profoundly Christian motive. In place of the heroes Siegfried and Beowulf, the exemplars of German and Anglo-Saxon pagan myth, we have the accursed warrior Turin, whose pride of blood and loyalty to tribe leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the forces of evil.

Tolkien's popular Ring trilogy, I have attempted to show, sought to undermine and supplant Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle, which had offered so much inspiration for Nazism. [1] With the reconstruction of the young Tolkien's prehistory of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose: to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is the pagan's tribal identity. Tolkien saw his generation decimated, and his circle of friends exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace the cult of Christ during World War II. His life's work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West.

It is too simple to consider Tolkien's protagonist Turin as a conflation of Siegfried and Beowulf, but the defining moments in Turin's bitter life refer clearly to the older myths, with a crucial difference: the same qualities that make Siegfried and Beowulf exemplars to the pagans instead make Turin a victim of dark forces, and a menace to all who love him. Tolkien was the anti-Wagner, and Turin is the anti-Siegfried, the anti-Beowulf. Tolkien reconstructed a mythology for the English not (as Wainwright and other suggest) because he thought it might make them proud of themselves, but rather because he believed that the actual pagan mythology was not good enough to be a predecessor to Christianity.

"Alone among 20th-century novelists, J R R Tolkien concerned himself with the mortality not of individuals but of peoples. The young soldier-scholar of World War I viewed the uncertain fate of European nations through the mirror of the Dark Ages, when the life of small peoples hung by a thread," I wrote in an earlier essay. [2] Christianity demands of the Gentile that he reject his sinful flesh and be reborn into Israel; only through a new birth can the Gentile escape the death of his own body as well as the death of his hopes in the inevitable extinction of his people.

Tolkien is a writer of greater theological depth than his Oxford colleague C S Lewis, in my judgment. Lewis is a felicitous writer and a diligent apologist, but mere allegory along the lines of the Narnia series can do no more than restate Christian doctrine; it cannot really expand our experience of it. Tolkien takes us to the dark frontier of a world that is not yet Christian, and therefore is tragic, but has the capacity to become Christian. It is the world of the Dark Ages, in which barbarians first encounter the light. It is not fantasy, but rather a distillation of the spiritual history of the West. Whereas C S Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a children's masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the work of our hands and the hone of our swords must avail us.

Tolkien set The Children of Hurin in a doomed world menaced by a fallen angel of sorts, the Lucifer-like Morgoth. An alliance of mortal men and immortal Elves attacks Morgoth's stronghold but is crushed and dispersed; only a few hidden Elvish strongholds remain free. Hurin is the lord of a small land and a leader of the failed alliance against Morgoth. He is taken prisoner and his country overrun and occupied, his people reduced to slavery. His young son Turin escapes and is adopted by the Elven-king of the secret city of Gondolin. Rather than remain with the Elves and await the divine intervention of Elvish prophecy that ultimately will destroy Morgoth, Turin grows to impetuous manhood and sets out to seek revenge or death.

Morgoth has cursed Turin's family, and the curse succeeds not by force of magic, but through Turin's own stubbornness and resentment. With the occupation of his homeland and the destruction of his clan, Turin would rather perish in a futile gesture of resistance than master his own hatred. Through his agents, Morgoth entraps Turin in a web of lies that prevent him from reuniting with his family except under sordid circumstances. It is Turin's own flaws, not Morgoth's magic, that make him susceptible to these traps.

In Tolkien's mythology the Valar are gods of whom Morgoth was a renegade. It is through their aid that Morgoth's fortress of Thangorodrim one day will be thrown down. An Elvish lord attempts to convince Turin that thoughtless pursuit of warfare will not succeed: "Petty victories will prove profitless at the last ... for thus Morgoth learns where the boldest of his enemies are to be found, and gathers strength great enough to destroy them ... Only in secrecy lies hope of survival. Until the Valar come."

To this Turin rejoins: "The Valar! They have forsaken you, and they hold Men in scorn. What use to look westward across the endless Sea to a dying sunset in the West? There is but one Vala with whom we have to do, and that is Morgoth; and if in the end we cannot overcome him, at least we can hurt him and hinder him ... Though mortal Men have little life beside the span of the Elves, they would rather spend it in battle than fly or submit." His lack of faith makes him desperate, and his acts of heroic desperation have terrible consequences.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien returned to this theme of faith in a higher power rather than in one's own force of arms. It is not the valor of the small remnant of free peoples that overcomes Sauron (Morgoth's successor) but rather the improbable mission of the Ringbearer that will overcome the Darkness that threatens Middle-earth.

After the exchange cited above, Turin's arrogance causes the destruction of the Elvish stronghold of Nargothrond by the dragon Glaurung. Once again a fugitive, Turin becomes the leader of a band of woodmen. When Glaurung reappears to menace them, he sets out to kill the dragon and save his people, in precise emulation of Beowulf's single combat with the barrow-dwelling dragon. Like Beowulf, Turin slays the dragon, and like Siegfried, he is bathed in the dragon's blood when he stands upon the dying beast to gloat.

Siegfried's bath in dragon's blood, however, makes him invulnerable to weapons (except for the one spot on his back where a treacherous spear-thrust will kill him). Turin, by contrast, is immobilized by the venomous blood, long enough for a horrible event to occur; this will provoke him to kill himself with his own blade. Morgoth's vengeance is complete at the conclusion of this dark and sad tale.

What made Beowulf a great man to the anonymous Saxon bard who composed the only major Old English work of the 9th century was his willingness to defend his people against monsters. His death in single combat with the dragon might mean the destruction of his people, as the Old Woman's lament at his pyre makes clear. Turin saves his little band by destroying the dragon, but only after he has allowed the dragon to destroy a great Elven city. Gloating over his victim leads to his own destruction.

Siegfried's fearlessness before his dragon is rewarded in the form of invincibility; Turin's fearlessness is born of despair and therefore expresses self-destructiveness. It is punished by an awful chain of events that I will leave readers of the book to discover for themselves.

It is useful to contrast Tolkien's purpose to that of T S Eliot, too often held up as the exemplary Christian poet of the 20th century. Eliot sifted through the detritus of the pagan past in the cellars of Christianity. [3] As he wrote in his notes to The Waste Land (1922), "To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough" of James Frazer. Frazer attempts to show that all Christian imagery and ritual derive from pagan myth, for example, the commonplace idea of a sacrificed god. His conclusions have been rejected by later scholars, but the relevant point regarding Eliot is that he embraced the pagan antecedents of Christianity as he thought it was (even though it turned out to be something else than he thought).

Tolkien knew far more about the pagan past than Eliot; as the great philologist of his time, he produced the first readable translation of "Beowulf", as well as seminal editions of the most important Anglo-Saxon classics. He loved the material more than any man living, but unlike the dilettantish Eliot, the authority Tolkien sacrificed his love for the Anglo-Saxon sources, and chose to transform the modern memory of it by creating a variant of it more congenial to Christianity.

That is the miracle of The Children of Hurin. Not the least of Tolkien's legacy is a son with the devotion and craft to reconstruct the projects of his father's youth. We owe Christopher Tolkien a great debt of gratitude for putting this work before us. Readers who enjoyed The Lord of Rings as a work of fantasy (which it most surely is not) will find the present volume tough going, for it comes out of the world of Anglo-Saxon epic. As the editor reports, Tolkien originally cast it as poem in alliterative verse in the Anglo-Saxon fashion. But for readers who want to understand better what Tolkien was driving at, this work of the writer's youth will provide insight, as well as a few tranquil hours of respite from the noise and clutter of the world.

The Children of Hurin, by J R R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2007. ISBN 10:0618894640. Price US$26, 320 pages.

Notes
1. The 'Ring' and the remnants of the West, January 11, 2003.
2. Tolkien's Ring: When immortality is not enough, January 5, 2004.
3. See The Dead Peoples Society, February 15, 2005.

Rewriting History a Classroom at a Time

By Fred Thompson

By now, we're used to people like Iranian President Ahmadinejad denying that the holocaust ever happened, even while he and his regime promise not only the destruction of Israel but the elimination of Jews internationally.

It's bad enough hearing from a distance about the bizarre anti-Semitic theories taught by heads of state as well as schools and religious leaders. Now, according to a study funded by the British government, we find out that some schools in Great Britain have stopped teaching history that is offensive to Muslim students. The topics that have been erased from the curriculum, the study found, include both the Nazi genocide and the Crusades.

This rewriting of history through omission wasn't some government policy. It was the result of individual decisions in local schools by teachers with large populations of Muslim students. Unfortunately, many of these students have been taught by parents and mosques that the holocaust never happened and that the Crusades were an unprovoked attack on Islam by European Christians. History books that present these events in any other light, they believe, are part some giant conspiracy designed to attack their very religion.

If anybody needs to hear these facts, it is the children who are being abused by those who are teaching the same hateful lies that have helped turn the Middle East into the self-destructive and often suicidal mess it is today.

The British are, in the main, a particularly polite people, but there is a point when the desire not to offend the easily offended becomes an even bigger problem. We've already seen an English organization ban images of Piglet, the harmless character from the classic Winnie the Pooh books, because of protests by those who imagine that simply seeing a cartoon pig is a violation of their civil rights. We've even seen the banning of pins bearing St. George's cross, because it reminds some of the Crusades -- accompanied by demands that Great Britain get rid of the venerable Union Jack for the same reason.

These views, common in the Middle East, are not just an academic or intellectual challenge. We have seen homegrown British terrorists act on the same lies and conspiracy theories that are now being used to silence teachers. Ideas do have consequences and we all need to understand that the war on terror is taking place as much in the realm of ideas as it is on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

America is a free country and we do not tell people what they can believe or say. We should realize, however, that there are people in America who are also telling their children that the holocaust is a lie and that those who say otherwise are their enemies. We cannot prevent them from doing so, but we also cannot let them promote their agenda by claiming they are victimized by historical facts.

This would be a good place to quote an important British writer, George Orwell, who wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Even in America, our children are often taught a watered down, inoffensive and culturally sensitive version of events ranging from the Crusades to the battle at the Alamo.

It's time for people who believe that they have a stake in Western civilization and its traditions to get a little backbone -- even if it offends somebody.

From, of all places, National Review Online by, of all people, John Derbyshire. A brilliant appreciation of Saturday Night Fever.

Dancin’, Yeah
Prayin’ for this moment to last.

By John Derbyshire

For proponents of the theory that everything in the world exists for some good reason, disco music must present a conundrum. What higher purpose could possibly be served by this vapid, thrumping, affectless sound, dragging in its wake a subculture of narcissism, pill-popping, promiscuity both straight and gay, cheesy light shows, and the worst male clothing styles since slashed doublets and neck ruffs went out? Disco was so mockable it had barely got started before it was mocking itself — remember “Disco Duck”?

The answer to the first of those questions will readily be given by any of us Seventies survivors. Disco came into the world so that producer Robert Stigwood and director John Badham could create Saturday Night Fever, one of the dozen or so best movies of all time.

The Richness of the Movie
This year is the 30th anniversary of SNF. Filming was wrapping up just about exactly thirty years ago as I write, and the movie premiered on December 7, 1977. By way of celebration I bought a DVD of the movie — a thing I rarely do. I have been sitting here in my study watching it on my computer. (It is not a family movie, certainly not in the nothing-spared DVD version). I can report that 30 years on, it is as good as ever — a beautiful, beautiful movie, a great movie.

Most movies are garbage. We try to have a family movie night once a week, on a Friday or a Saturday, playing some rented DVD from Netflix on the family TV. Dad likes a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, and a couple of glasses of port afterwards. The family joke is to open a book on how far the movie will get before Dad falls asleep. It’s a rare movie that keeps me awake all the way through. (The Devil Wears Prada was the last one.) SNF, however, will never send me to sleep. I watched it all the way through three times before writing this, and I’ll watch it again this weekend if I get time.

My high opinion was not shared by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The 1977 Oscars were dominated by: Julia, a leftie swooner about anti-fascists in the 1930s; Annie Hall, the first of Woody Allen’s 295 movies about Woody Allen’s neuroses; and the original Star Wars. John Travolta got a Best Actor nomination for SNF, but no Oscar. So much for recognition of merit.

The first thing that struck me, watching SNF again after a lapse of years, was the richness of it. There is so much going on. How did they get it all into 118 minutes?

At its heart, the story is just boy-meets-girl. The boy, Tony Manero (John Travolta), is 19 and works in a paint store. In his leisure hours he hangs out with a little group of coevals: Double J, Joey, Bobby C, Gus. These are all working-class youngsters in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a scruffy white-ethnic district at that time, though considerably yuppified since. On Saturday nights they go to the local disco, where Tony is the star dancer. The girl, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), is also an accomplished dancer. She shows up at the disco one night, catches Tony’s eye, and the main plot line is under way.

The richness of the movie is in the other stories being told. Tony’s brother, Frank Jr., leaves the Catholic priesthood, breaking his mother’s heart. The father, Frank Sr., has been out of work for months and the family is having trouble making ends meet — a problem not helped by Frank Sr.’s incomplete acceptance of the situation. He is, for instance, angry at the idea that his wife might get a job herself. (These are second-generation Italian immigrants. The grandmother, who lives with them, speaks only Italian.)

Stephanie herself is struggling out of her working-class chrysalis, trying to give herself an intellectual, vocational, and elocutionary make-over, with mixed results. Tony’s dancing partner, Annette, is afflicted with unrequited love for Tony, and is shattered when he takes up with Stephanie. Bobby C, a hopeless loser, has a crisis of his own, which ends horribly. There is a turf war going on between Tony’s friends and local Puerto Ricans. All this in 118 minutes! Hamlet doesn’t get so much more into four hours.

A Left-Side-of-the-Bell-Curve Movie
The second thing that struck me was that this is a movie about the left-hand half of the bell curve. Of the main characters, I would surmise that only Frank Jr. has an IQ over 100. A couple of the others — Bobby C, Doreen — come across as borderline retarded. All the rest are drawn from that big slab to the left of the mean: people with IQs of 80-something or 90-something. These are normal, unreflective working people who did not get much from their formal education, don’t read books, and don’t think in abstractions, or wish to.

In an age when most movies with any dramatic content at all are made for yuppies, by yuppies, about yuppies — an age in which nobody is supposed to go to work until age 25, after that long soaking in a warm bath of Political Correctness that we call “college” — this is wonderfully refreshing. The only yuppie in SNF is Stephanie’s slimy ex-boyfriend, a walk-on part. Political correctness? Fuhgeddaboutit. You can check off the violations: Homophobia? Check. N-word? Check. Hispanophobia? Check. Male chauvinism? Check, check, check, check, check. Everybody smokes, drinks, and cusses. (Tony’s drink preference is the “7&7,” i.e., Seagram’s 7 whisky mixed with 7-Up. He smokes Marlboros. His favorite cuss word is… well, use your imagination.)

It is true that Stephanie aspires to be a yuppie, but the script provides good and sufficient hope that she will never sell all her soul. You can take the girl out of Bay Ridge, Stephanie, but you can’t take Bay Ridge out of the girl.

Thirty years on, with the white working-class fast becoming an endangered species, their services no longer required, this second-quartile aspect of SNF is quite striking. White people with IQs around 90 are deeply uninteresting to our cultural content-providers, having no colorful ethnicity nor any anguished heritage of oppression to commend them. Our political and business elites find them bothersome, and are striving to replace them with cheaper, colorfully-ethnic and anguished-heritage-loaded, immigrants. White American proles are not favorites with movie-makers.

The SNF characters even look like ordinary people — as opposed, I mean, to looking like movie stars pretending to be ordinary people. Their teeth are not very white or very straight, they have bad haircuts and get bad shaves, they smoke cigarettes and eat crummy food, they wear cheap clothes and hang crucifixes on their walls, they are not very articulate or — away from the dance floor — graceful. They mumble, stumble, misunderstand each other, and tell little white lies.

SNF brings to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s comment on Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers: “It is just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”

Furthermore, the characters look exactly as they should look, each in his role. There is no Academy Award given for Best Casting Director, or SNF’s Shirley Rich would surely deserve one. The faces are just right, just right — and memorable:

Stephanie breaking into giggles on realizing that what she has just said is pretentious psychobabble.

Tony’s warning look when Annette, whose affections he does not desire, puts her hand on his shoulder.

Annette plunging into anguish when Tony tells her he has a new dance partner.

Frank, Jr. in the disco, grasping the hopelessness of Bobby C’s situation, and his own utter inability to help, either as priest or ex-priest.

Any one of those could be framed and hung on the wall in an acting school. It’s not the least bit surprising that, Travolta aside, none of these actors advanced into Major Celebrity status. They are too good, too human. Listen to their voices. Listen to Stephanie saying “delusions of grandeur” — pitch-perfect!

SNF was John Travolta’s finest moment, too. His only moment, perhaps — if he has since made another movie that was half as good as SNF, I missed it. His speech, his movements, his mannerisms are all precisely right. The DVD has some “special features” showing Travolta rehearsing the dance sequences. It’s clear that he didn’t find them easy, and a credit to his professionalism that the end result was so polished.

(Travolta, by the way, was struck by a personal tragedy while filming the movie. He took a few days off, then came back and finished the job. If you can tell which scenes were shot before the calamity, and which after, you have sharper eyes than mine. The man is a true pro.)

The Music So Fine
And then, the music. All right, it’s disco music. Whaddya want? — it’s a disco movie.

There is, after all, something to like about the disco craze. Dancing is a fundamental human activity. It is there in anthropologist Donald E. Brown’s “list of human universals,” in between “daily routines” and “death rituals.” (Brown’s entire list is given in an appendix to Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.)

Dancing got lost somehow around 1965, though, like a great deal else. When I was at high school in the early 1960s, we all took ballroom dancing lessons as a matter of course. What were you going to do at a dance if you didn’t know, at a minimum, the foxtrot, waltz, quickstep, and cha-cha? What kind of social life could you expect to have?

Then quite suddenly it was all gone, and solipsistic twitching took over as the preferred form of dance-floor display. All structure was lost: formlessness and chaos took over. Ballroom dance steps? That’s so old.

When disco came in, it was once again, for a brief while, cool to be able actually to dance, to dance steps. Far from being a kitschy joke, disco was a brief return to civilized social values before the darkness fell for good in the 1980s.

The disco crowd in SNF consists of people you would not likely bump into at Carnegie Hall or the Guggenheim. They have esthetic impulses, though, just as much as any gallery or concert-hall patron, and those instincts are wakened by the sight of a skillful dancer doing his stuff. See how they applaud Tony! What he is doing is beautiful, and they know it. Having a 90 IQ does not mean that you are an esthetically-challenged clod. Personally, I’ll take Bay Ridge esthetic sensibilities any time over those displayed by admirers of Robert Mapplethorpe, Eve Ensler, or Karlheinz Stockhausen.

And the music is — dare I say it? — not bad.

What you doin’ on your back? (Aah.)
What you doin’ on your back? (Aah.)
You should be dancin’, yeah.
Dancin’, yeah.

Or how about:

Here I am,
Prayin’ for this moment to last,
Livin’ on the music so fine,
Borne on the wind,
Makin’ it mine….

And of course:

Feel the city breakin’ and ev’rybody shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive.

All right, it’s not Cole Porter, but then, hardly anything is. As late 20th-century pop music goes, this is pretty superior stuff. Furthermore, if you pay attention you will notice that the lyrics are loosely keyed to the movie’s plot line. Someone here really knows what he’s doing.

Confucius Takes the “R” Train
Tony Manero is what used to be called a diamond in the rough. Crude and classless (as Stephanie tells him bluntly), he is none the less a natural gentleman, with all the right instincts (as Stephanie grasps, at some less conscious level).

After losing it with his mother, Tony at once feels terrible and tries to comfort her, his voice cracking for the only time in the movie.

Having decided to break with Annette, he tells her directly, with a proper apology.

After telling Stephanie one of those little white lies, he is immediately ashamed, as a gentleman should be, and covers with the truth.

“I’m twenty.”
[Stephanie gives him a skeptical look.]
“Well, I’m nineteen at the moment, but I’ll be twenty very shortly.”

This fundamental decency comes out plainly in the scene where Mr. Fusco, Tony’s boss at the paint store, gives him a raise.

Fusco: I gave you a raise.
Tony: A what?
Fusco: A raise.
Tony: You kiddin’ me?
Fusco: Come on, look, see how much it is.
Tony: You gave me a raise? Thank you! [Extends hand to shake.] I can’t believe this!
Fusco: [Embarrassed at the not-yet-revealed smallness of the raise.] Hold on, you better look first.
Tony: I don’t gotta look, it makes no difference. You gave me a raise, that’s the important thing.
Fusco: [Somewhat shamed by Tony’s reaction.] It’s only two fifty.
Tony: So what?

Tony understands instinctively that, to what Confucius called the junzi, the superior man, honor, recognition, and right conduct mean everything, money nothing.

Most memorably, Tony’s strong sense of natural justice and fair play lifts him above his gang’s ethnic squabbling with the Puerto Ricans, prompting him to fierce anger when he and Stephanie are awarded a dance prize unfairly, out of flagrant ethnic favoritism. He walks over to the Puerto Rican couple and thrusts the prize trophy and cash envelope into their hands — “Congratulations! I’d like to give you this, and I’d like to give you that, because I think you deserve it, all right?” — then walks right out of the dance hall, fuming.

Tony’s character includes a proper component of manly tenderness, too. Driving Stephanie back from Manhattan, they have a shouting match. Stephanie, wounded by his words, breaks down and cries. Tony repents at once, and does his best to soothe and heal: “It’s all right … Don’t worry about nothin’.” His reward at last is Stephanie’s first tentative kiss, on his cheek.

Everybody is drawn to this instinctive decency. To be a natural gentleman like this is to be a natural leader. Tony controls his little clique effortlessly, directing their activities (“We ain’t droppin’ nothin’ till I say so”), trying to prompt them to his own innate standards of manliness, scolding them for their pill popping (“Can’t you guys get off on dancin’?”), instructing Annette in the rudiments of female honor: “That’s the thing a girl’s gotta decide early on. You gotta decide whether you’re gonna be a nice girl or a c***.”

With that solid moral framework to support him, Tony is acquiring wisdom rapidly. He has a long way to go, to be sure, but you don’t doubt he’ll get there. Did Bobby C kill himself? the investigating cop asks. Tony: “There’s ways of killin’ yourself without killin’ yourself.” Indeed there are, Tony — many, many ways.

At Twenty, You’re Done
Among all the other things it is about, SNF is about being twenty. It is hard to watch it at any much greater age without a painful twinge of nostalgia.

Here it all is — all the vanity, foolishness, and excitement of twenty-dom. Here is the vigor: “I feel so wild! I got all this energy!” The narcissism: “He hits my hair!” The tribal bonding: “We got ’em … Italian style!” Here is the intense awareness of in-group status rankings, and the keen importance of maintaining one’s own at the top: “Now shape up, you assholes, we’re the faces.”

Here is the urgency of being twenty, the immediacy.

Fusco: You can save a little, build a future.
Tony: F*** the future.
Fusco: No, Tony, you can’t f*** the future. The future f***s you. It catches up with you and it f***s you if you ain’t planned for it.
Tony: Look, tonight is the future, and I am planning for it. There’s this shirt I gotta buy, a beautiful shirt…

And of course there is the wonderful, terrible affliction of romantic love. Cupid’s arrow can strike at any time of life, to be sure; but it never pierces so deep, nor with such pain, as at twenty.

SNF is a romantic movie, a celebration of love. Just watch Tony’s second sighting of Stephanie, when she is in the dance studio, doing exercises at the barre. (And not to disco music, either: Her choice is Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. 9, No. 2 — a piece that is not merely romantic, but Romantic, in the precise and technical sense.)

Judith Rich Harris, in one of her books, tells of dealing with her aged mother, who suffers from severe Alzheimer’s. On one particular day, Judith tries to get her mother to focus on the fact that this day is actually her eightieth birthday. “Do you know today is your birthday, Mom?” “Is it?” “Yes. How old do you think you are?” Dimly aware that something really important is being asked of her, the mother summons up all the powers of concentration she has left. At last she says: “Twenty?”

This is exactly right. We are all twenty, even when we’re eighty. At twenty we are cooked right through, we are done. Later changes are nothing but “walking north on the deck of a southbound ship.” Your essential character is formed at twenty, and will not change.

SNF is very good on this sad fact of our essential immutability. There is no uplifting flapdoodle here about self-transformation. Bobby C praises Tony’s dancing.

Tony: You could do as good as me if you practiced.
Bobby C: Yeah? Think I’d be a good dancer?
Tony: Sure, why not? No.

Tony is right, of course. Bobby C will never be a good dancer, or a good anything. Poor Bobby!

Bobby C: If you had to make a choice between getting an abortion and having to get married to somebody, what would you do?
Stephanie: Well, who’d I have to marry?
Bobby C: You’d have to marry me.
Stephanie: I think I’d get an abortion.

At twenty, these young men are all pretty much done, and you can practically hear the doors of opportunity clanging shut around them. Not that it is impossible for them to get somewhere in life from this point on, but now it will need more courage, determination, and luck with every passing year. This is the thing that Tony grasps at the very end of the movie: “I’m an able person. I can do these things.” (Unspoken: But I better get moving.)

“I Know Everything About That Bridge”
For seekers of symbols, SNF is dominated by bridges. You could get a Ph.D. thesis out of the bridge symbols in this movie. Someone probably has.

The very first shot in SNF is of the Brooklyn Bridge. That is also the bridge Tony and Stephanie drive over when moving her furniture to Manhattan. Then there is the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, whose construction would have dominated Tony’s childhood. (He was six when it opened in 1964.)

And beyond the bridges — the city! From Bay Ridge you can see lower Manhattan — including, in SNF, the dear old Twin Towers. Manhattan shimmers there in the background of the movie — a fairytale place, near yet somehow hard of access. In Manhattan you can be free, no longer cumbered by ties of tradition, family, neighborhood.

This freedom is of course a mixed blessing. Manhattan is no place for children or old folk. What do Tony and Stephanie care? They are twenty! (See above.) Manhattan is the land of Cockaigne, where everything is possible and you don’t have to be home in time for dinner. Freedom and opportunity — Manhattan is America.

A cynical middle-aged conservative might frown at that, and point out that Manhattan, with its bossy mayor and feather-bedding unions, its 500-word parking signs and “rent control” rackets, is the least free stretch of real estate in the country.

Again, Stephanie and Tony don’t see that, and wouldn’t care about it if they could see it. Manhattan is for them the great finishing school, the place of new experiences, the place where you shuck off that chrysalis and dump it in the East River.

Any number of movies have romanticized Manhattan, of course, but none so deftly, so lightly, as SNF. Even the subway comes out well: I have never felt the same about it since watching Tony’s long solitary ride near the movie’s end.

Stephanie: “You’ve got no idea how it changes, just right over there, right across the river. Everything is different, really different. It’s just beautiful. The people are beautiful, the offices are beautiful…”

Yes, they are, Stephanie. Don’t let any cynical old farts tell you otherwise.

Borne on the Wind
SNF isn’t flawless. There is a list of continuity bloopers at the IMDB site. The lighting strikes me as somewhat erratic. Soft-focus shots look corny nowadays, outside TV commercials for geriatric medications. And what is it that Double J says at 1:49:16 on the DVD, just after Bobby C has removed himself from the gene pool?

These things aren’t important, though. SNF is not the production of some tortured genius striving for immortality through perfection. It was created by a bunch of capable professional people pooling their talents in the hope of pulling down some overtime and making a bit of money.

In this respect, SNF reminds me of the bel canto operas I love — those early 19th-century Italian operas thrown together in a hurry by journeyman composers trying to catch the public taste, with implausible librettos, recycled overtures (Rossini used the same overture for three different operas) and arias written for tenor A in city X, then hastily rewritten for tenor B in city Y, the opera house manager drumming his fingers impatiently as the composer reaches for another sheet of music paper.

Most work produced on the fly like this is ephemeral, but now and then everything comes right. The hasty scribbler, the harassed director, the struggling actor, are kissed with genius. Then all is lifted out of the common plane, into the light of beauty and glory, up into the realm of true art — borne on the wind!