Death of the West – today’s edition
UPDATE: I’m putting this update at the top of this post because it’s the most egregious example of all. Don’t let anyone you know ever apply to the University of Maryland. It’s a reeducation camp that brainwashes students into thinking they’re racists because of their skin color or bigots because of their straight sexual orientation.
Today’s evidence that we’re getting close to the flatlining of our civilization is from the eductional front. Two columns on Townhall look unflinchingly at the advanced stage of rot in the realm of higher-education policy-making and public high school curriculum, respectively. Allison Kasic tells of a Congressional hearing on the relatively scant representation of females in the sciences and how the freedom-and-truth-haters want to look past the obvious explanation in order to impose social engineering and government largesse on the situation. Michelle Malkin looks at how Needham High School in the Boston area is requiring seniors to take – are you ready for this? – yoga. Mind you, the principal who came up with this nonsense recently did away with the school’s honor roll.
UPDATE: Then there’s this little item in which the University of Maryland has asked a speaker scheduled to be a panelist in a discussion on ant-Americanism in the Middle East to step down because another panelist – an Arab – objected to the fact that the first panelist had once served in the IDF.
10.29.07
7 – 0
It was a characteristically Colts way to win – rallying from an iffy start to beat Carolina. Next week’s face-off against New England should be tumultuous.
10.27.07
This has been years in the making
One can’t help but think about Iran these days. The unilateral sanctions Condi Rice and Hank Paulsen announced the other day reinforced its status as an ongoing front-page story.
Michael Ledeen sees regime change as the only way to avoid war. He sees sanctions as barely better than IAEA footsie. He’s been on that bandwagon for years, aand he makes an effective case, but it’s awfully late in the game. A commenter under his post about it at Pajamas Media says, “Where is the Iranian resistance’s Lech Walesa?”
Caroline Glick, writing in the Jerusalem Post, looks at the broader geostrategic scenario – Syria, Hezbolla, North Korea. Turkey, for that matter.
If anyone has an impeccably thought-out way to resolve this without boom-boom of Biblical proportions, now is the time to speak up.
10.25.07
“He went for a little walk”
Happy Halloween from Bent Notes. There may be a few more of these in the runup to the night for protecting the harvest before All Saints’ Day.
10.24.07
Of breaded tenderloins and quiet guitar chords
I just got back from the hospice that is part of our regional hospital. I was visiting a lady I’ve known for – well, coming up on eighteen years. I know her through Mrs. Q, of whom she’s been a client since the 1970s. They’re fairly close in age, as are their kids.
I never knew this lady super-well, although in the past couple of years I’ve become closer to her. I knew she hoped her rebellious daughter would settle down (which she did), and I knew she was a person of intelligence and a general curiosity about life.
What I found to be the most noteworthy about her was the fact that I’d never seen anybody endure cancer so long. She was diagnosed some twenty years ago. It’s mainly been centered around her spine. She’s had numerous surgeries and treatments and has been at the brink many times. She’s always rallied and in fact has continued to travel and enjoy her vacation home with her husband through earlier this year.
A couple of years ago, I discovered she was an ardent fan of my radio show Stirring Something Up, a food-and-dining program that airs Saturday mornings on our local news-talk station. She would ask me about recipes I’d given out over the air and restaurants I’d reviewed.
This spring, she told me she wanted to take me to the Reddington Grocery, one of those nearly-extinct general-store / diner places where locals gather for coffee and to swap fishing stories or talk about farming equipment. She bragged to me on several occasions about breaded tenderloin sandwich that Joan, the big, affable lady who runs the place, offers as a Wednesday lunch special.
This lady left several messages for me. this was clearly important to her. I finally saw a clear Wednesday on my schedule and we set it up. When the day came, I forgot all about it. I’d eaten a fair amount of rich food the previous few days, so I had a light lunch about 11 AM. At about five after 1, I remembered that I was supposed to meet Peggy and her husband Bill. I gasped a few expletives, grabbed my jacket and hopped in the car. (It’s times like that that push me closer to getting a cell phone.)
You know you’re going to have to eat a tenderloin when you get there, I told myself as I sped down the highway.
Peggy and Bill were waiting in the parking lot. I was appropriately sheepish, and they were appropriately gracious. We went on in. Joan, who knows them well, immediately commenced the routine banter and gossip. Then Peggy brought forth a wrapped package and told Joan, “I have a surprise for you.” It was a monogramed apron she’d picked up at a kitchen-specialties store. Everyone in the place gathered round to make a fuss.
I’ve been back once to have the tenderloin again. Peggy has also bragged on Joan’s biscuits and gravy, which the store offers on weekend mornings. I must do that some time as well.
Peggy is awfully frail and weak this morning. Doing a lot of coughing. Her voice is pretty much a whisper. Still, she was ready to talk food and music. In fact, last evening, she’d requested to Mrs. Q that I bring my guitar out and play her some jazz, so that’s what I did. “Misty,” “Autumn Leaves,” “In A Sentimental Mood.” Peggy said she was going to call all her friends and tell them she’d been serenaded at 9:30 in the morning.
I’m not sure if she’s aware that this is the end of the line. I think she’s confused about what city and type of facility she’s in. No matter; she’s having a great day, and, as Ecclesiastes tells us, if you can be happy in your daily work and leisure, you’re pretty much on top of things.
I got to thinking about my talents – music and writing – and how grateful I am for them. They are gifts, and I am to exercise respectful stewardship over them, like one would some cool present. Then I got to thinking about how friends are like that, too. They’re gifts. We’re gifts to each other, and we are expected by the Giver to take good care of our friendships.
We can extrapolate even further and see that – well, the whole thing is a gift. It’s spread out before us by the grace of God.
For so many decades, I’ve had a one-with / wholly-identical-with-type model of God and our relationship to him. I still think there’s something very mystical about the basis of that relationship, but I’m starting to see more clearly what C.S. Lewis and his whole lineage mean by the sovereignty of God. There’s the creator, and then there’s his creation. Otherwise, there’s no relationship involved. As W.Y. Evans-Wentz said about Tibetan thought, if it’s all one, can’t we go the next step and just call it a void?
My experience tells me that this universe is fraught with too much meaning for a state of voidness to be the final word on what’s going on. Moments like the one at Peggy’s bedside this morning, giving and receiving some graceful jazz ballads and conversing about tenderloins and pan-seared yellowfin tuna, squeezing each other’s hands, are about exchange, about two of God’s creatures looking in each other’s eyes and each of them getting and giving something, something they get to keep for eternity. I also have to think that in such an exchange, something is given back to the creator. I know that God needs nothing, but there must be some way it nonetheless pleases him to see two of his children making high use of that most precious of gifts, their time together.
10.21.07
Another reason why Condi’s November summit is a dumb and bad idea
Official Palestinian security forces tried to assassinate Olmert in August.
Bobby!
The Jindal victory in Louisiana is fantastic news for several reasons:
1.) It indicates that maybe that state is ready to climb out of decades of corruption and backward thinking.
2.) It shows that there are dynamic young minds in the conservative movement with the capability of achieving poitical success.
3.) It offers hope to the conservative movement at a time when there has been much hand-wringing.
4.) It shows that conservatives win when they show exactly what they are rather than try to put on some kind of “moderate” dog-and-pony show.
You have to know that one particular fire is put out so you can deal with the others
Ralph Peters has an excellent column today about the MSM’s ignoring of the recent good news coming out of Iraq.
Think about this. One of the major theaters in the current global war is coming to a successful resolution, and no major news outlet will say so.
I feel good about the direction things are going in Iraq, but this willful blind eye on the part of our culture here at home has me concerned for the road ahead. Without an informed populace, mistaken perceptions of reality will wind up guiding our thinking – and voting. There’s still an arduous road ahead. Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming to Pakistan was met with an al-Qaeda attack that killed over 130 and injured hundreds more. Iran is headed full-steam towards a nuclear weapon. I could go on. The point is that if no one tells the American public that Iraq is getting its act together and is no longer the mess it was even earlier this year, a we-don’t-need-any-more-quagmires mindset will prevail when other fronts in this struggle still require our vigilance and keen wits.
10.17.07
The Turkey factor
There’s always some issue arising in the Mideast that needs to be handled delicately. Right now, we have a two-pronged dilemma involving Turkey. The Freedom-Haters on Capitol Hill, in their desperation to find some way to ensure U.S. defeat in Iraq, insist on using this moment to pass a resolution on the Ottoman Empire’s genocide against the Armenians 90 years ago. Of course, this would enrage our ally Turkey to the point of cutting off our supply lines to our troops in Iraq.
It doesn’t help Turkey’s case, though, to see them gearing up to go after Kurds inside Iran. W’s saying, “Dudes, don’t do it!”
The most fearsome freedom-hater of them all
This jack-booted totalitarian stands a good chance of being the next president of what has been for 230 years the world’s most successful experiment in human liberty. That comes to a screaming halt in January 2009 if decent, normal human beings don’t talk sense – conveyed with an appropriate tone of urgency – to their fellow citizens at every opportunity.
A standard has to be outside of what is being evaluated
Selwyn Duke has a very incisive essay about evil and God at The American Thinker.
Four decades for a handful of baubles
Roger L. Simon has a really good essay on the year 1968 at Pajamas Media. Among other things, he notes how much closer in time – twenty-three years – that year was to the time of World War II and the Holocaust than it is to our own time, but how powerfully that year’s ramifications reverberate down the decades to the present.
He’s eleven years older than me, and that figures into his perspective, but he basically speaks for where I was coming from in that kaleidescopic year. I thought the constant upheaval and the radicals’ talk of revolution was very cool indeed. And, of course, I spent countless hours holed up in my bedroom, listening to the soundtrack for it all: Anthem of the Sun by the Grateful Dead, Wheels of Fire by Cream, Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix, John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan, Last Time Around by the Buffalo Springfield, Super Session by Kooper, Bloomfield and Stills.
This wasn’t crap. This was the best to which rock and roll has ever risen. Each of the LPs listed above is informed, for all its momentary relevance, by a nod to heritage and a respect for roots long and deep. That the making of that music has become the stuff of legend is not surprising.
Still, reading Simon’s essay in the last week of my fifty-second year (my birthday is Sunday), I can’t shake the nagging feeling that those of us at the tail end of the baby boom were sold a big-time bill of goods. I don’t say that with the whine of a victim. In my heart of hearts, I must concede that I knew better from the thick of those countercultural times. I think it started on a musical level for me, as so much does in the unfolding of my life of the mind. When the Beatles’ double album – known to posterity as The White Album – came out at the end of that year, I had the sense that, for all the hysteria surrounding it, it was the work of a tired, jaded musical ensemble who felt compelled by its record label to put something out for the public. That we – I speak collectively, because I permitted myself to buy into it – ate it up in the name of “raw authenticity” and “unbridled impulsive creativity” says a lot about our overall gullibility and denial as the times kept getting weirder and weirder.
Speaking of the Beatles, Simon devotes a couple of paragraphs to the way his feelings about the song “Imagine” changed over the years. Once again, I have to say that, even when it came out, I found it musically plodding. I think I was vaguely in alignment with its lyrical sentiment, but it seemed sappily conveyed. But like Simon, I have come to the point where I see it as a pathetically – tragically – myopic view of what’s possible in this world.
That such a song has become the stuff of sing-alongs, not only at New Age pow-wows, but at awards ceremonies for children at City Hall (I got roped into playing it at such an event a few years back) really reinforces my point.
Toward the denoument of his essay, Simon zeroes in on our diminished ability to recognize evil. That leapt out at me, because I wrote my last Republic column on that very subject.
It’s not just our celebrity worship or sports obsession. We even immerse ourselves in worthy pursuits and realms of inquiry at the expense of squarely facing the central issue of our time. We are under threat from an evil ideology that will probably incinerate a major Western city sooner rather than later. As much as I like jazz and wine collecting, I ignore this fact at my peril.
I’m not sure I really know how to rethink my life and the whole course of what I’ve deemed worthy of my enthusiasm and fealty. I have to feel my way along. I think I should make room for some discomfort. Not so fun, but better than holding onto some worldview that would keep me ignorant until the hour of reckoning.
10.16.07
As if we needed one more reason why Condi Rice’s summit is a bad and dumb idea – today’s installment
A prayer in the form of a cartoon from the daily newspaper of Fatah – that would be the party of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
I’m beating this drum rather relentlessly lately, aren’t I? It’s because I’m so utterly astounded by the insanity of the W administration’s sudden zeal for a fast track to a two-state solution.
10.12.07
As if we needed one more reason why Condi Rice’s November summit is a dumb and bad idea
Abbas’s religious affairs advisor demands that the Western Wall be turned over to Arab control.
Sheesh, what are the Israelis supposed to do? Just acquiesce to all this stuff, show up to sign the papers and go back to what had been their country?
Far and away the coolest campaign ad so far
I haven’t signed on to any one candidate in next year’s prez race yet, but I’m mightily impressed with the clarity and resolve shown in this message.
10.11.07
Do you fear death or not and why or why not?
The main proprietor of Bookworm Room has stated frequently that she’s pretty much a non-believer. I think, though, that posts like this show that she is someone, as I characterize myself, who is feeling her way toward a solid faith.
10.10.07
Part of the grand opening
Remember my link to my Our Brown County article about Lotus Petal Cinema? I’ll be providing music before the 7:30 and 10 PM showings on Sunday night. It’s the theater’s first weekend in business.
