08.16.10
Posted in Behavior and motivation, Culture, Economics, Education, Human nature, Spiritual implications of our life choices at 1:48 pm by Administrator
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?
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04.18.10
Posted in Arts & Culture, Culture, Education at 9:15 pm by Administrator
. . . and the theme of their convention this year is “Art and Social Justice.” This is an outgrowth of that briefing the regime’s ministry of culture had with its propagandists in the field last spring.
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02.28.10
Posted in Culture, Education, Multiculturalism and diversity at 11:22 pm by Administrator
. . . but, as an academically trained historian, when they do it with history, ICBMs come out of my ears.
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02.01.10
Posted in Culture, Education, Radicalism in high places at 1:44 pm by Administrator
Public school teachers are distributing this to students on our dime.
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12.26.09
Posted in Culture, Economics, Education, Socialism, human sexuality at 12:53 am by Administrator
The latest print-edition issue of National Review is one of those magazines physically lying around the house that needs to go into some kind of permanent file.
The cover story is actually comprised of four related articles. Taken together, under the title “The Four Horsemen of Progressivism,” they provide a very timely look at the question of how we got here that VDH explores in his own fashion in he link in the last post.
Along with the pioneers of progressivism examined in each of the articles – Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Richard T. Ely – the reader is inspired by choice references to go back and bone up on such figures as Auguste Comte and the Marquis de Condorcet.
Each of the four NR articles at one pont or another delves into biographical data, and it’s here that one can see that a lot of our current cultural forces go back a long way. Both of New Republic founder and Promise of American Life author Herbert Croly’s parents were New York journalists. The dad was into some kind of kooky movement to loosen up society to the point of being cool with premarital – and, I think, extramarital – sex, and the mom was an ardent feminist.
There is much examination of the German influence on the development of American progressivism. Several members of the first and second generations of the faculty of Johns Hopkins, for instance, studied at German universities in the mid-19th century under pioneering scholars in such new fields as sociology.
This leads me to a personal reflection. I remember one professor in particular when I was working on my master’s degree in American history in the 1980s who, while he did try to deliver his lecture content with a credibly objective tone, nonetheless, it is clear in retrospect, spoke glowingly of the above-mentioned figures, in addition to Thorstein Veblen and Charles Beard. I was being fed PC propaganda, no doubt about it. (On reflection, it does seem as if he brought a bit of dismissive tone to his mentions of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.) This teacher was keen on impressing on us what an intellectual trailblazer Germany was at that point.
The overall impression one gets from the sum total of the four articles comprising the cover story in the latest NR is that this archetype of the American progressive goes back a long way: a professed empathy with the “struggling” or “disadvantaged” classes and demographic groups, which must be juxtaposed against an actual snobbery that borders on contempt for the actual human beings in those classes. You see, Croly, Dewey et al looked down their noses at devout Christians who put personal faith above the state, people who were at home working with their hands and backs, and those who had profit among their considerations when thinking up ways to benefit humankind. They preferred the east-coast chin-rubbers, the oh-so-judicial / sensitive / culturally-up-to-the-minute types that comrised the entirity of their social and working circles.
The rest of the issue is of this caliber. Mark Steyn’s back-page column on Nuaru’s recognition of Abkhazia, as well as Theodore Dalyrimple’s look at what Conan Doyle contributed to our culture with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, are two more examples of why you ought to avail yourself of a copy.
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12.07.09
Posted in Culture, Education, human sexuality at 8:26 pm by Administrator
GLSEN, the organization founded by TCM’s “safe schools” czar, Kevin Jennings, has a list of books it recommends American schoolchildren read.
Like Mark Lloyd, Cass Sunstein, Ron Bloom, John Holdren, Carol Browner, and Kevin Jennings, this monster must be given the Van Jones treatment. Unaccountable “czars” per se are undesirable, but it has become quite clear why TCM is so keen on the concept. It’s a highly effective vehicle for implementing his mad, perverted vision of a grim, grey totalitarian world in which dignity and common sense have been utterly eradicated.
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07.04.09
Posted in Education, Eye-opening developments, Natural disasters, Politics at 3:06 pm by Administrator
Sarah Barracuda resigns as Alaska governor.
One reason it will be interesting to see what the deal is is that it sure does the opposite of bolstering GOP morale or shoring up the party’s organizational strength. Not a good time for this either, as the Freedom Haters are firing on all cylinders with their Marxist plans for energy and health care.
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Posted in Education, Energy policy, Ideology, Islam, Pakistan at 4:21 pm by Administrator
TCM has now achieved the omnipresence that the Castros enjoy in Cuba, or Big Brother in 1984. One of the regime’s media outlets, a formerly independent network called ABC, will very overtly and forcefully shill for TCM’s Marxist health care plan on June 24.
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06.10.09
Posted in Culture war heroes, Education, Food, Ideology, Law dhimmitude, Pakistan, U.S. Constitution, War at 4:08 pm by Administrator
They want to regulate pay in private businesses.
They want to tell you how fuel-efficient your car must be.
They want to require you to have health insurance.
They want judges who “empathize” with certain demographic groups.
They want more “diversity” in the local programming of radio enterprises.
Now, they want to tell you what to eat and make sure you exercise.
Read the whole thing if you’re in need of a good hurl. It’s full of the stock phrases, bureacratic doo-doo and touchy-feely “guidance” (a euphemism for the feigned pity / actual contempt that is a hallmark of the left) that is taking over American life: nutritional counseling (because we pathetic rubes have no business choosing foods we like and, in any event, since we can’t hit our own asses with a yardstick, don’t know how to fashion a healthy diet), bike paths (you can kiss the day of local municipalities deciding whether they want stuff like that good-bye), and grocery stores in “underserved areas” (which are those places where people can’t get it together enough to hop in a car or on a bus to get to a store, much less start a store to serve the damn area).
Taxes on alcohol and sugar.
I’ll tell you this. Any goose-stepper who comes between me and my hot wings dripping with ranch dressing and my Woodford Reserve manhattan is asking for the barrel of an AK-47 up his nose.
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Posted in Auto industry, Culture war heroes, Education, Law dhimmitude at 1:38 pm by Administrator
The Federal Reserve and the SEC – with plenty of input from Treasury Secretary Geithner (and you can be sure TCM) – is going to issue “overarching guidelines” to “Wall Street and beyond” for executive pay. The “overarching” part is to let you know that this is above and beyond such measures being applied specifically to TARP-fund recipients.
The first level on which to roar opposition to this arrogation of totalitarian power is the moral one. This is wrong. Never mind for the moment the theoretical and prgamatic reasons why it won’t work. We’ll get to those momentarily. For now, let us be clear that this is wrong. We’re talking about privately owned organizations. What they pay anybody on their staffs, from CEOs to floor-sweepers, is the business of the owners. No one else. If this gets obscured, or becomes subject to ridicule, we are in trouble beyond anything we’ve ever seen.
Now, let us proceed to why it won’t work. For one thing, you’ll drive away the nation’s best talent. Who wants to work somewhere where you know your pay will be capped? People will quit studying fields such as finance and management, trying to find those ever-fewer areas of human endeavor still beyond the reach of the totalitarian state. You’ll then see other countries get a clue and de-regulate their investment and banking sectors and become leaders while e become back-benchers (and become even more in hoc, as we are now to China).
The main point, though, is that this is about as egregious an affront to human liberty as we’ve seen so far out of this regime, and that’s saying something.
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05.25.09
Posted in Congress, Contact, Diplomacy - ineffective and effective, Education, North Korea, Pakistan at 2:46 pm by Administrator
You’re not surprised, are you? North Korea has conducted another underground nuclear test, this one with a Hiroshima-sized impact.
This is what happens in a world so devoid of resolve that even the basic survival instinct is badly eroded.
Will TCM, the IAEA and the UN Security Council please shut up about sanctions and further isolation? Will the world’s pundits please shut up about “why they did it” and internal power struggles and pointy-headed little scenarios about what happens from here?
Our enemies smell blood, period. It’s to be expected when six-party talks are still treated as a viable option, when Leon Panetta of the CIA goes to Israel to sternly warn that nation not to take out Iran’s nuke program, when TCM accepts a book of West-hatred from Hugo Chavez, when the MSM can’t bring itself to put the obvious main point of a story about New York jihadist plotters of synagogue bombings – their religion – until paragraph number ten.
They smell blood in far-flung corners of the world, such as the international waters of the Gulf of Aden, into which Iranian warships have moved.
This has never been about posturing or swagger or copping an attitude or jockeying for political gain. When the great heralds of our age, such as Dick Cheney and John Bolton, speak plainly about danger and history and human nature and what we must not do and what we may have to do, they are not concerned with the “brand” of the party they happen to belong to. They are not concerned with cronyism-level interests. They certainly aren’t consumed with the utopian countercultural vision of the Freedom-Haters who currently hold our fate in their hands.
The longer you wait to face evil, the greater the chances are that you will have to face ever-more severe discomfort in the defense of what you value. How much pain are we interested in taking on?
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05.11.09
Posted in Culture war heroes, Education, Ideology, Law dhimmitude at 3:38 pm by Administrator
Four times the deficit record set last year by mush-head W and the Freedom-Hating Congress.
Now, The Chicago Marxist-Leninist is right on track in his plan to bring the country most of us have always called The United States of America to its knees.
This highly dangerous tyrant-in-progress orders his cabinet to find $100 million in budget cuts and his swooning minions hail him as a beacon of fiscal restraint. He basically hands the Chrysler Corporation over to the UAW and leaves its secured creditors – bondholders who are entitled according to the basic precepts of contract law to getting paid first in a bankruptcy – holding the bag. He pushes green jobs training, alternative-fuel cars and wind turbines when everybody who’s not an idiot knows none of those things will pay their own way in our great-great-grandchildren’s lifetimes.
This, my friends, is the logical conclusion of The Aquarian Vision. We have elected our first Rock and Roll President.
Save the planet. Peace and love. Tofu and sprouts. Arugula from Whole Foods. Buff arms and sleeveless dresses.
Meet the new boss.
The Freedom-Hater-on-Steroids regime is counting on us to have skulls so full of bong smoke, public-school education, celebrity worship and secular relativism that we’re perfectly happy to acknowledge we’ve become utter fools.
Will we oblige it?
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04.27.09
Posted in Education, Islam at 9:04 pm by Administrator
There are a few reasons I haven’t chimed in on this development.
For starters, it’s a new and mutating strain of virus. Not even the best experts on the case can tell us whether the spread will be massive or something that winds up being a public-health blip. The CDC is hoping its best guess at an applicable vaccine will keep it from reaching plague-like proportions.
I think we’ll need to see some patterns emerge from its spread to get a handle on how to respond. Who knows, it may be largely confined to certain demographics or population centers, the way HIV/ AIDS panned out.
I’ve frequently said that natural-misfortune news items, such as plane crashes, hurricanes and disease spreads only hold my interest for so long. Clearly, one’s heart goes out to those who lose loved ones or their treasured belongings in such situations, but there is no ideological charge to these stories. An accident, an atmospheric disturbance or a microbe brings heartache to a large number of people, and that’s pretty much it. Real news of lasting import, it seems to me, consists of those ever-unfolding developments in the great historical struggle between freedom, refinement, vision and joy on the one hand, and tyranny, degradation, nihilism and grimness on the other. When a headline beckons me to investigate the first paragraph of a news story, I’m looking for how my side and the other side figure into it.
To be sure, there are those who love to try to politicize natural-disaster stories. The race-baiters and poverty pimps wasted no time in spinning Katrina, for instance. I’m seeing some on my side start to succumb to the tempation to do that here. To be sure, it would be good if TCM had a HHS Secretary, a Surgeon General and a CDC head in place, and he might have been well-advised to skip that golf outing, but that hardly rises to an outrage (the way his economic and foreign-policy initiatives do).
This is just a development that bears watching for now.
Even if, in three weeks, we’re all quarantined in our homes and boys with carts are in the streets shouting “bring out your dead” a la mid-seventeenth-century London, the timeless principles that will need to be extolled and defended when afterward health returns will still be the real ongoing story.
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04.20.09
Posted in Basketball, Diplomacy - ineffective and effective, Education, Politics at 7:14 pm by Administrator
Legal Insurrection has some, including the timing of it, who did it, how much the leaker knows about the identity of this person who is possibly an Israeli agent, but then again maybe not. LI concludes that it smells a lot like someone wanting to influence American public opinion about the very possible upcoming Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The LI post also has a roundup of links to leftie sites having a field day with this, particularly the W / Alberto Gonzales angle.
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