09.03.10
Sheriff Joe shows how you respond to totalitarian intimidation
This guy is a true hero. And Eric Holder and the Most Equal Comrade are loathsome scumbags.
08.28.10
The distant rumble of November thunder
The live stream-cast of Restoring Honor. Right now, the stage is rocking with some great gospel music. The Tweet feed on the right side of the page is mostly comprised of expressions of being thrilled at witnessing such an outpouring, but there is also a fair share of snark from lefties.
08.24.10
It never takes long for the real story on these creeps to surface
You just knew it was only a matter of time until this came out.
I think of those America-haters lined along the streets of lower Manhattan Sunday, with their placards about “racist fear.” I think of columnists like Eugene Robinson trying to make 70 percent of America look like a frenzied mob on the fringe. I think about MSM bigwigs like Katie Couric prattling about the danger to “American values.”
Well, so it turns out this Faisal is an America-hating, Hamas-loving, Sharia zealot after all.
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about the concept of disconnect. Wee see disconnect in every aspect, on every level, of American life these days. What makes for the proper attachment of the modifier “chillingly” before the adjective “surreal” in describing it is the fact that so many people with such ostensibly respectable credentials are throwing their disingenuousness – let’s be completely accurate here – their willingness to lie – in our faces. The above-mentioned arbiters of societal mood know damn well and have since this guy showed up on the radar screen that he was a radical Islamist.
And their “W’s State Department sent him on trips, too” meme doesn’t wash, either. As we’ve said many times here at BN, W and his administration were not consistent in their adherence to American principles. That’s why North Korea is still a threat. It’s why the fraud of climate change hasn’t died yet. And, of course, it’s a precipitating factor in the debt and deficit levels staring us in the face.
It’s some small comfort, I suppose, to know that when one’s hunches about some development on the national or world stage grow strong, one can be assured that facts will soon surface to back them up. The downside, though, is that countervailing lies still carry a lot of weight in these very strange times.
08.16.10
It requires drawing on one’s inner reserve of real humanity to clean one’s glasses and look squarely at the world
Two pieces appear around the Net this morning that point to a common theme. Kathleen Parker cites a study examining the differences in tuition and academic requirements between Harvard and Lamar University to ask about the real value of elite higher education. Mort Zuckerman looks at the role the dearth of skills relevant to the demands of the hiring marketplace plays in our current demoralizing ecenomic situation.
These times have given me ample opportunity to take a fresh look at a number of considerations, both on the personal level as well as an overall cultural level. I’m an arty guy by nature. My day job is freelance writing, equally divided between arts journalism, business journalism and slice-of-life features – with an occasional opinion column thrown into the mix. I also make some money playing jazz in wine bars, at farmers’ markets and at corporate events, wedding receptions and deck parties. I teach jazz history at the local community college. My occupational profile would not lead to the conclusion that I’m a conservative.
Lately, though, my interest in the very areas in which I’ve immersed myself for the last forty years has lost some steam. I hear about improvisation workshops, or new record labels starting up, or consortiums of musicians, poets, painters and such, and it excites me about as much as the phillips-head screw aisle at Menards. Between the way political correctness, adolescent emotionality, nerdy postmodernism and the need for subsidization have introduced an advanced state of rot to that broad area of human endeavor known as the arts, and the near-total absence of common sense in our society’s discourse about public policy and economics, I have lost the ability to muster excitement for those events and developments which used to occupy the entirity of my attention.
It’s not as if I’m having a road-to-Damascus epiphany that is driving me to apply to engineering school. As I say, my basic orientation as a “creative person” was established about the time Eisenhower was showing Kennedy around the Oval Office.
What I think is happening is that, along with the phenomenon of eighteen-year-olds swelling the enrollment numbers of arts-and-social-change courses and not so much those for analytical geometry, or even American colonial history, art has been so debased, its value so distorted, that it has assumed the status of convenience-store soda pop. It really boils down to the same problem as the dwindling numbers of advanced-science students: no sense that rigor is requisite to a real understanding of the subject matter. Music is now all about learning some chords and “expressing yourself,” rather than learning the major, lydian, mixolydian, harmonic minor, dorian minor, pure minor, lydian dominant, whole-tone, half-diminished and diminished scales, as well as times signatures, clefs and pitch and tone.
As I say, this gets into the realm of the personal for me. What it boils down to is this: For the first time in my life, I’m wondering if I’m a sufficiently serious person. Do I make choices with a proper respect for what is at stake? Is there an opportunity cost to opting for comfort? What indeed makes for a real man? Is it important to move the world as far as possible in the directions of one’s highest notion of the good, or are we to be given an understanding nod for getting tired and letting diversion and small personal pleasures fill more of our hours as we get older?
Such questions have always been around. It just seems that, in light of this summer’s daily relentless stream of dismal economic news, they’ve taken on a fresh relevance. We don’t move off of dead center without something being done differently, without some change in our perspective.
“Reality check” is a hackneyed buzzword, but that’s unfortunate. It’s a fine term, actually. There is after all, such a things as reality, and it ain’t always about unicorns and rainbows.
What, then, is to be done?
08.08.10
It was plain as day where we were headed thirty-five years ago
Victor Davis Hanson takes note of the palpable and rising anger in America right now, but says no one should be surprised at our current juncture. A stroll through the campus of any fancy-pants university circa 1975 and a look at the best and brightest in its pre-law and humanities programs could have told us where our culture was headed.
08.05.10
The wild west is alive and well
So federal judge Vaughn Walker decides Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
Much to unpack here, many levels of consideration:
1.) What kind of a precedent is being set by the immediate filing of a lawsuit to overturn a direct-popular-vote referendum on a particular issue, and a judge whose impartiality is subject to all kinds of questions? There may be circumstances in some future case in which such a scenario could turn out favorably for conservatives, but it still reinforces judicial activism and diminishes the power of the directly democratic voice.
2.) And speaking of questions about impartiality, how come the openly gay Judge Walker didn’t recuse himself?
3.) For all the liberal and libertarian comparisons of this to America’s struggle to eradicate racial and ethnic bigotry, it is not the same principle that is at work in this matter, not at all. For God’s sake, fifty short years ago, this whole debate would never have gotten off the ground, with any demographic group from black Americans to Jews to square old Baptists to peacenik Unitarians. We’re talking about the most basic unit of societal organization, the family. Until the dawn of our postmodern age, that has been univesally defined (save for kinky cultures in which polygamy is the norm) as one man, one woman, and any children they procreate or adopt.
4.) This will eventually go to the Supreme Court.
07.19.10
No grown-ups at crunch time
Bill Kristol has penned an editorial in the Weekly Standard that is one of those comrpehensive looks at the current political / economic / cultural landscape that I’ve been wnting to write for a while now.
He covers the various aspects of our fatally ineffective attitude twoard our current juncture: the denial – indeed, escapism, the naivete, our fear of really looking at our freedom squarely and acknowledging its implications along with its blessings. He covers the various realms in which our overarching dilemma is manifesting itself: the incomprehensibly expanding debt and deficit, the embarrassingly silly state of our media, arts and education infrastructure, and the unimpeded race of rogue states and groups toward the capability of unleashing apocalypse.
It’s a refreshing bit of plain speaking from a generally good yet occasionally annoyingly Beltway-mindset-saddled publication.
We must all speak plainly now. The various regular commenters here at BN who have drifted away over the years have each said that it was the terms coined here and what they called overblown rhetoric that soured them. So be it. BN means everything written here. The modern Democrat party is driven by an outright hatred of basic human freedom. Barack Obama is a hardcore totalitarian socialist. The United Nations and the European Union are worthless organizations. As citizens of Western nations participating in fashioning a Western culture, we have opted to let our nobility atrophy and instead indulge our residual infantilism until it has become our most prominent characteristic.
Sorry if this brings anybody’s stuff up. You see, here at BN – and, thankfully, many other outposts of concern – we smell smoke. The strong scent of it, the intensity that indicates fire right here in the house. Let those fated to fry call for a conference to address the smoke’s impact on women and minorities and the snail darter. The rest of us, our conversation is going to have a more urgent tone.
07.18.10
The snob appeal of wealth redistribution
Janet Daly at the UK Telegraph on the alliance between the truly destitute and the pointy-headed, chin-rubbing elites – the “educated class,” as David Brooks (one of their own) puts it, and how the pointy-heads have impbued this alliance with a mindset that it’s cool to regard with disdain the group in the middle – the entrepreneurs and those living without extravagance striving against increasing odds to prosper and create prosperity for society generally.
07.14.10
Just wow
Andrew Ferguson’s piece at Commentary on the death of Newsweek is stuffed full, line-by-line, word-by-word, with the kind of deep cultural insight and intuitive savvy that the aspiring culture-and-policy blogger would die for. He absolutely nails the complete disconnect between the mindset of the reporters and editors of these pointy-headed east-coast organs and the flyover-country readership that made their expense accounts possible over the last 80 years. I remember seeing each new issue of Newsweek on the back of the commode in the centrally located main bathroom in our house while I was growing up. This was the 1960s. As the decade progressed, I noticed, with glee at the time, the increasing sense of fascination – and then outright identification – the magazine had with the countercultural developments that were coming down the pike – well, weekly.
Alas, that vision of America and Western civilization never took hold like your local FM rock station – and Newsweek, and CBS News, and your Presbyterian Sunday school – said it would. Witness the daily plummet in the Most Equal Comrade’s poll numbers.
And now a great American journalistic institution is breathing its last – all because it would rather shove a phony vision down America’s throat than tell America what happened last week.
06.29.10
From fear to fire
The other day I heard my state’s governor (Mitch Daniels, Indiana) express concern that “this American experiment is at risk.” He’s certainly not the only one forthrightly expressing alarm, and that is alarming in itself – or, rather, should be. The last thing we can afford is to become inured to the growing recognition that America’s existence is in grave peril.
That’s why “So what? Public opinion fluctuates constantly on all manner of issues” is a whistling-past-the-graveyard response to the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index experiencing a ten-point drop in June. This drop covers people’s feelings about the economy’s current state as well as where it will be in six months. Fear is also behind today’s 235-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Another phenomenon that is becoming noted more frequently is left-wing disenchantment with TCM. Although they usually get the prescription wrong for where to go from here, and generally still hold to the belief that TCM has America’s best interests at heart, they are souring on his approach as fast as the rest of us now. Bob Herbert’s NYT column today is a perfect example.
The key going forward is to transmute our fear. The first step is to have genuine, gut-level faith that we can revive the United States of America. I’m not talking about stump-speech platitudes or smiley-face bromides. How this plays itself out in our real-time interactions with each other is conversations about first principles and the things of this life that are precious. Willingness to fight is key as well. If freedom, decency and common sense are precious, we must not be cowed in defending them.
Summer 2010 is only going to get hotter.
06.18.10
Good ideas get refined and bad ideas get jettisoned
Bookworm Room on the difference between the right side of the blogosphere and any other arena in which ideas are examined and argued (left side of blogosphere, academia, journalism, politics, entertainment).
06.15.10
The folly of thinking that consulting our hearts is enough
Dennis Prager says our culture is waging a war on wisdom.
06.04.10
I wish it were surprising and out of character for him to say this
It has been getting easier to think less and less about rock and roll. Like the passing of a toxic clod through one’s digestive system, rock’s impact on our culture is running its course.
I am an adjunct lecturer in rock history (as well as jazz history, which I greatly prefer to teach) at the local campus of our biggest state university, and the past couple of times I’ve taught it, I’ve noticed the increasing irony of these twenty-somethings yearning for rock’s continued relevance and of their hope that I’d indulge them in some fanzine-level adulation of their “heroes,” most of whom are now either dead or approaching the geriatric stage of life. Here we are, well into the second decade of the 21st century, a time when Cuban missile crisis-level nuclear urgency is an ongoing part of daily life, when the American economy is dying, when public policy is based on the most idiotic of fantasies, and these – I’m tempted to use the word “kids,” although in any era previous to the advent of permanent adolescence one’s first choice of characterization would be some term connoting adulthood – students still have this comic-book / eternal-present notion of who Bob Marley or John Lennon or Duane Allman are. These icons are frozen in time to these people, even the ones that are still alive. Their mental image of Jimmy Page is not with the white hair and crow’s feet he now sports, but rather with sweaty, shoulder-length black locks, leaping all over the stage during Led Zeppelin’s heyday.
And so it is that a 68-year-old Paul McCartney, still universally regarded as a Beatle, can go before a microphone at the White House and spew the most asinine, insulting, boorish dog vomit about the last president of the United States (and, as is he case whenever I employ the term “last” in this context, it’s completely deliberately; I don’t mean “previous”) and praise the empty suit socialist who, due to his lack of any leadership skills is managing to botch even his aspiration to the status of dictator.
There’s a passage in Many Years From Now, the 1996 memoir McCartney wrote with Barry Miles, in which he talks about the spring 1966 dust-up over John Lennon’s remark in an interview with journalist Maureen Cleave that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. A rash of Beatle album burnings and radio station bans of their music around the US resulted. In the book, McCartney says that what disappointed him most about this was that, while he has always admired the American spirit, he means the “high, free-thinking” American spirit exempified by Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac. Well, let’s look at how that “high, free-thinking” stuff worked out for those two particular counterculture icons. Bruce fell off the toilet with a needle full of heroin in his arm at age 40 in 1966; Kerouac was sitting at the breakfast nook in his home in a Florida retirement community that he shared with his third wife and his mother one October morning in 1969, knocking back Scotch and watching daytime television (the Galloping Gourmet) and his stomach literally blew up. He was 47. Ennobling, elevating tales of departure from this realm, yes?
I think back to the disgust with which my father and my grandparents reacted to the advent of the British invasion of American culture in 1964. I, of course, had a far different response. It looked to me like a kind of freedom I’d never heard a word about in my life. To this day, pop-culture historians remark on how A Hard Day’s Night demonstrated a scruffy playfulness that pop icons had never before exhibited, and how this refreshing paradigm shift was destined to loosen up society.
Loosen up society. That’s another way of saying “diminish its sense of seriousness.” And that it did. Those 1964 Beatles, as I said at the outset of this post about the typical student in my rock-history classes in recent semesters, were not teenagers. They were in their 20s. One was a father.
And, to return to those modern-day students, what they come into my class knowing about the chronology of the Beatles’ career, or the careers of dozens of other rock acts from the music’s days of whatever noteworthiness it’s ever had, is impressive indeed. We get a few weeks into the proceedings, and I start to see that their command of the chronology of, say, developments in Vietnam over the same period, or the US student radical movement, or Johnson’s Great Society program, is paltry by comparison.
Which, to come full-circle, gets us to McCartney’s snide remark the other evening about presidents knowing what a library is. Does this rock bassist who wrote some great songs forty-plus years ago and has been going downhill artistically ever since realize that Laura Bush is a librarian by academic training, and that the former president is widely known as an avid reader who goes through several books a month?
I still blow hot and cold on rock’s impact on our culture. My bouts of seeing it, on balance, as a negative force are more frequent, but I can’t completely give up considerations that were passionately held convictions for many decades. The spirit of rock and roll, after all, was born of the larger American spirit (as discussed, among other places in my writing, in one of the posts about Dennis Hopper that appears a few posts down). McCartney, who undoubtedly wants to perpetuate the rock ethos as Western civilization continues to unfold – or die, or whatever it’s doing – does his cause no favors by making such a high-profile demonstration of that which is most ridiculous about it.
06.02.10
Another FHer pundit tries to discredit Ali Hirsi, and winds up looking really stupid and bigoted
05.30.10
One more Dennis reflection
For my money, one of the most ennobling and well-wrought scenes in a movie in the last 30 years is the one in Hoosiers in which the team’s coach, played by Gene Hackman, purposely gets one too many technical fouls called against him in a crucial game. Shooter, the former basketball star turned town drunk who has been assisting him for a couple of weeks (and staying sober even though it has taken white-knuckle tenacity to do so), is sitting in the bench. He looks at the coach with an expression of pure panic. The coach looks back with feigned sheppishness; what he is actually conveying with his expression is a sublime belief in Shooter’s ability to rise to the moment. It’s a confirmation of friendship and courage and affirmation of another human being’s potential as eloquently expressed as any I’ve ever seen in a work of art.
And then Shooter collects himself and puts together a series of brilliant plays that win the game.
It’s about freedom
Roger Simon’s Pajamas Media essay about Dennis Hopper posits that there was a consistency to the man throughout his life and career, even after what looked like a major shift from radicalism to conservatism in the 1980s. His was a quintessentially American spirit and outlook.
One can see antecedents such as the stirring patriotic verse of the prototypical open-road-explore-the-continent’s-vast-expanse spokesman, Walt Whitman. There is, of course, the example of Jack Kerouac, whom subsequent generation remember for his love of the road-trip epiphany, but who, it must be noted, neatly folded an American flag that had been dropped to the floor at the conclusion of a Merry Prankster happening. There is Jimi Hendrix, who was proud of his service with the 101st Airborne to the end of his days and felt that his Woodstock rendition of the national anthem was as patriotic as anybody else’s version.
The river still flows, Billy.
05.29.10
Dennis Hopper, R.I.P.
Age 74. We’re going to hear terms like “Hollywood wild man” and “bad boy” ad nauseum as this gets the kind of media treatment we all know it will.
I don’t begrudge an artist some craziness and rebellion if he or she demonstrates some evolving over the course of his or her life, and if he or she is a real artist and not a hack or a fraud. Dennis Hopper was dedicated to the crafts of acting, painting and photography from an early age, and employed a discipline in pursuit of them that gave depth to his work from his earliest efforts. At the risk of sounding like I’m making excuses for chaotic lives, I know for a fact that there is a turbulence that stirs in the core of many creative personalities that is not easily tamed.
I’m even willing to cut him some slack for the fact that, even though he’d been a conservative Republican since becoming clean and sober in the mid-1980s, he found Sarah Palin problematic enough that he felt the need to vote for TCM. I rather doubt that he was pleased with developments that resulted from his candidate having been elected.
Nobody else could turn a squint into a harbinger of dark entropy like Dennis Hopper.
