03.04.10
I always thought this was a despicable movie, too
Bookworm says she lost respect for people who said they liked the 1990 movie “Pretty Woman.” She uses that as the lead-in to an examination of some statistics about prostitution.
02.16.10
Multiple layers of cultural rot in sixty seconds
Dennis Prager on the Super Bowl Doritos ad.
01.26.10
Glad someone said this
By way of a refutation of Charles Johnson’s (Little Green Footballs) ten reasons for parting with the right, Dennis Prager demonstrates the basic decency and intellectual integrity of mainstream conservatism.
01.19.10
The state apparatus wants inside your head
TCM’s EEOC nominee is on record as positing that society should not tolerate anyone’s beliefs that interfere with a homosexual’s equality. We should presume she reserves the right to define all the terms in her assertion, such as “beliefs” and “equality.”
Sometimes the most uncomfortable messages are the ones we need to consider most carefully
. . . such as Dennis Prager’s Townhall column today on whether society is still producing actual men.
01.17.10
Incentives matter
Jennifer Robach Morse does a great job of disspelling the libertarian argument that expanding the definition of marriage to include same-gender couples wouldn’t affect society and culture much.
01.05.10
Who meant what?
The Anchoress on Brit Hume on Tiger Woods and by inference Buddhism. She also offers a roundup of other perspectives, ranging from Buddhist to Christian to secular.
What is the relationship between forgiveness and peace of mind?
12.26.09
Look to this quartet for a lot of the nonsense we’re having to refute now
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.
12.07.09
The war’s education front
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.
10.19.09
Rather universally regarded with great reverence
The Anchoress reflects on some particular aspects of intimacy and why we ought to keep them sacred.
10.06.09
Giving a pass to zoo animals with artistic talent
Two great Townhall columns today – one by Cal Thomas and one by Bill Murchison - sum up everything I’d have to say about the Polanski and Letterman matters and what they have to say about the relationship between the arts-and-entertainment world and the erosion – as in chunks of the cliff falling into the ocean – of Western civilization.
06.25.09
The Sanford matter
The guy can put on a heart-wrenching presser, can’t he? It was brimming with the requisite deep respect for the initial good intentions of his mistress to repair her own marriage, oozing with remorse for the spouse, sons, staff and state he let down, drenched in on-the-knees humble yearning to find a way back to spiritual health.
My favorite kind of movie is the noir-era morality play. Double Indemnity, A Place in the Sun, High Noon, Casablanca. They hinge on a moment in which a moral choice is set before someone with unmistakable clarity.
A lot of life is boring or exciting or stressful or interesting or funny or gratifying or whatever, but once in a while, it is uncompromisingly demanding. There are points along the vector at which we are called to make choices that tell God everything He needs to know about the quality of our souls. It’s not a matter of the “deep,” “complicated,” “untamed” nature we express as humans. The heart having its reasons and all that. that’s using the poetic stuff as a smokescreen for unvarnished spiritual failure.
What should Sanford do? He ought to resign as governor, completely remove himself from the public arena, and focus on the supremely uncomfortable work of repairing his role in his family.
At this point, a certain kind of BN reader will no doubt be interested in seeing if I have anything to say about Newt Gingrich, for whom I have expressed admiration on many levels. For the record, I think his failings in this regard disqualify him from seeking the presidency or other high public office ever again. I am curious as to how he and his daughter Jackie Cushman, with whom he recently wrote a book on the basic principles for a happy life, have forged a close relationship, given Newt’s tawdry treatment of her mother. Anybody out there know the inside scoop on this one?
I am also willing to believe that Newt’s conversion to Catholicism is his sincere desire to learn how to face his Lord squarely in all his shame and sinfulness and seek real forgiveness.
It’s also important to state that the behavior of a Sanford or a Gingrich in no way has anything to do with the principles they assert and defend in the realm of public-policy and cultural polemics. Free-market economics, a foreign policy that accounts for enemies, and, yes, the championing of Judeo-Christian values, are good and immutable whether espoused by saints or scoundrels.
When it comes to putting those principles into law or executive policy, though, we must insist on that being done by people who hold themselves to a higher standard than adulters with good minds and intentions.
02.11.09
Cheeseburgers? Yuck! Casual hook-ups? Ho-hum
Great think piece in Policy Review by Mary Eberstadt, “Is Food the New Sex?”
11.20.08
A perfect case study in wrong
eharmonycom settles a lawsuit by agreeing to post homosexual profiles.
So much for free markets, respect for individuals’ moral codes, the definition of family that served humankind quite well for 10.000 years and still serves all other species well, and sanity generally.
You have to ask yourself why the person bringing the lawsuit didn’t take the entrepreneurial route and set up a matchmaking site for those who see things his way.
Freedom is dying before our eyes without so much as a whimper.
08.19.08
Faith, rights, the marketplace, the victim card, and people with funny ways about ‘em, sexually speaking
Quite by coincidence, today’s blogosphere offerings bring us two items on the same theme. Mike S. Adams at Townhall tells the tale of the young woman who, only after being referred by a Christian counselor with religious porblems with the young woman’s lesbianism to a counselor who had no such problems and did a fine job according to the young woman, decided to sic the leviathan state on the Christian counselor. Bookworm gives us an account of a similar situation involving a San Diego fertility clinic.
Bookworm does an admirably effective job of spelling out the distinction between situations in which market choices prevail and those in which monopolyy conditions set the parameters.
And for heaven’s sake, you didn’t croak because you had to drive to another office for your fertility test, okay?
05.20.08
Opening Pandora’s Box in California
When looking for moral clarity, you can’t do better than Dennis Prager. Today, he lays out the scope of magnitude of the California Supreme Court’s recent decision on gay “marriage.”
02.24.08
“Political, not empirical”
The always-brilliant Heather MacDonald looks at the manufactured rape crisis on American campuses.
She makes a point toward the end of her piece that is well worth examining: The same leftist mindset that wants to entrench the V-Day / take-back-the-night / Vagina-Monologues / crisis counseling center set of assumptions is the very same mindset that also holds pornography symposia and condom classes and publishes campus sex magazines.
11.25.07
That unmistakable Dennis Prager way of putting things
How’s this for thought-provoking? “The Torah’s prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible.”
This lengthy article, in a Catholic journal, interestingly enough, is full of great insights. Here’s one: Judaism was the first religion to have a creation story that wasn’t sexual.
