Postmodernism, The Civil War, and Palestinians. Huh?

Since the 1980s, Benedict Anderson's postmodern view of nationalism has pretty much taken over academia. He defines it as an 'imagined community' which is sovereign and limited. While I think its crazy to posit nations as wholly imagined, his introduction of the concept was valuable. Imagined community IS central to nationhood, and to an extent sets it apart from dynastic and other types of societies which reigned before nation-states. This approach better accounts for the fluidity of national identity, and its ability to rise and fall with surprising rapidity (for more, see Great Britain.)

The consensus among historians seems to be that no one should do Civil War history until Ken Burns is 20 years in his grave. It's just too popularized for real historians or something. However, the subject seems ripe for re-evaluation on postmodern lines. If we accept Anderson's theories, as most do, then it wasn't a Civil War at all. The Confederacy meets every aspect of postmodern nationhood -- it was an imagined community, it considered itself sovereign, it considered itself limited to a specific group of people. It also boasted all the elements of a State. The Civil War, in these terms, wasn't a war between the states, but a war between States.

This concept also has implications in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Pro-Israel types (of which I am one) often point out that there was no Palestinian nation prior to the founding of Israel. By this they mean there was no ancient, primordial people who called themselves Palestinians. This seems to be true. But does it matter? If they had no national identity before, the last several decades have certainly created one. The Palestinians are a genuine, if insane, imagined community. It really seems they should be treated with all the respect we show other genuine-but-insane nations.

A Geneva Convention for the War Between the Sexes?

Lionel Tiger has a very good piece in today's OpinionJournal -- "How about a little fair play in the battle of the sexes?" He covers some of the same themes I did here.

He covers a lot of inequities which would be well-known 'social justice issues' if only the aggrieved parties weren't gonadally-challenged. Some of the gross inequalities include:

1. EDUCATION: A "publicly financed educational system is at least 20% better at producing successful female students than male, yet hardly anyone sees this as remarkable gender discrimination. While there is a vigorous national program to equalize male and female rates of success in science and math, there is not a shred of equivalent attention to the far more central practical impact of the sharp deficit males face in reading and writing."

2. HEALTH: "When it comes to health status, the disparity in favor of women is enhanced by such patterns as seven times as much federal expenditure on breast cancer as on the prostate variety."

3. SUICIDE: "And no one is provoked into action because vaunted male patriarchs commit suicide between four and 10 times as frequently as oppressed and brainwashed women."

4. DIVORCE: ". . .mothers gain custody in 66% of uncontested cases and 75% of contested ones. Less than a quarter of parents are awarded joint custody."

Worse is the presupposition in the legal and educational system that men are inherently in the wrong, what Tiger calls 'Male Original Sin.'

Given our changing mores, I think it might definitely be time to get past our Romantic dichotomy of female virtue and male depravity. Girls are getting meaner these days -- while 43% of boys had a fistfight in 2001, a full 24% of girls did as well. And while the image of men as inherently violent sexual predators has great commerce in some quarters, 40% of all teachers accused of sex with students are female.

Our cultural institutions need to begin looking at people according to the content of their character, not the letters of their chromosomes.

Artists you should Know: Francisco Muñoz

Here are two of my favorite works by Argentinian artist Francisco Muñoz. Most of his paintings are done en plein air, winning him the prestigious Altman Prize for Landscape from NAFA in 2003. He's recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well. Definitely one to watch. I personally don't like his landscapes, preferring his more personal works:

Variations on an Eggplant, 1997

Los Orígenes, No. 14, 2004

There's further commentary on Muñoz in the comments section, be sure not to miss it.

Update -- Since hardly anyone believes in poor Francisco, this seems to say more about my philistinous qualities than it does about contemporary art. . . My first impression when the fridge magnets arrived was that they were 'art' reproductions. Heh!

Frenchman suing to enter women's golf tourney -- Cool!

I laughed when I read this -- it would be a Frenchman wanting to play women's golf.

At the same time though, I think it's brilliant. A double standard has existed for ages now wherein any specifically male space is impermissible and becomes instant lawsuit bait for feminist activists. The existence of a male-only club or organization is assumed to be anti-woman. The fact that it might have nothing to do with women at all, and instead just be that guys wanted to hang out doesn't get considered.

Compare that with the endless, tedious discussion of women's relationships, women's 'space', women's circles, ad nauseum by feminists. While male exclusivity is inherently bad, there is something noble and spiritual about women hanging out with one another.

Consider, for example, the frenzied activism to integrate VMI and the Citadel. Then watch the same feminists have fainting spells over proposals to integrate all-female colleges. Observe the sobbing over Augusta, yet women-only health clubs proliferate.

Women are now seeking admission into men's professional sports. I invite them in. And it's only fair for them to do the same with their own sports.

Considering the ease with which men would dominate these, guys would be crazy not to embrace this gender-bending egalitarianism. I wonder how these feminists would enjoy seeing the sensible shoe on the other foot.

The Christmas Wars

I've seen a few pundits dismissing the Christmas vs. Holiday fight as a manufactured issue. Their reasoning seems to be that this is all just Bubba bait -- a way to stir up Red Staters by making them feel threatened. A bit like Libs with Alito -- there's no serious threat to Roe vs. Wade if one looks at the court balance, but it's good for fundraising.

I don't think it's Bubba bait. Instead, I think the frog has simply woken up in mid-boil and decided to jump. Creeping secularism has been eroding even the most mild free expression of religion in the public square for some time now. The only way to stop this gradual process is to call it for what it is and then push back. Christians have as much right as anyone to help define what sort of culture we're to have. More so, in that they constitute a huge majority of the population.

I'm glad to see us putting financial and social pressure on corporations that want to secularize the public square. Socially liberal companies have a right to pursue whatever agenda they want. We have an equal right to spank them for it. That's democracy in action, baby.

Bennifer, PC and Slavic Terror

Political Correctness likes to masquerade as a move to treat all people with dignity and courtesy. That's actually just good manners. PC goes further, demanding that we ignore uncomfortable truths. And the more these truths hurt us, the more insistent the demand that we lie to ourselves.

Alias is a perfect example. It was quite normal to show Arab terrorists before 9/11. True Lies, for example. Now that Arabs have incinerated thousands of us, it's suddenly verboten to actually show them doing it. Alias is a show which centers around terrorism. Yet 96% of the 'terrorists' are Slavic.

Does a little light never go off in the viewers' heads? Do none of them ever ask themselves the last time a Hungarian hijacked a plane? Can they remember the last Polish jihadist they met?

And so we end up with farces such as airport security giving the same scrutiny to Norwegian grandmothers as Palestinian youths. Wrong ideas have real life consequences.

Jesse Jackson -- America's own Yasser Arafat ?

One often hears the relationship of the Democratic Party and the black community compared to a plantation. This has some merit. But the problem is much deeper than party affiliation. The heart of the problem is in its relationship to American society as a whole. I think we can find some (limited)parallels in the Palestinian relationship with Israel.

Yasser Arafat made his millions and kept his power by fostering hatred between the Palestinians and Israel. In a horrifying irony, the Palestinians were and are led by the very people who have the least interest in lasting harmony.

Black Americans face a similar situation. The present crop of Civil Rights leaders make their daily bread stirring up mistrust among the people they claim to want to help. Rather than encouraging integration into the larger society, they perpetuate separatism and fear which serves only to marginalize the black community. This marginalization in turn feeds the cycle of disadvantagement.

Frankly speaking, mainstream society is where the jobs are. By allowing people like Arafat or Jackson to speak for and ostensibly represent them, blacks and Palestinians have contributed greatly to their own social hardships.

The situation in America is much better than that in Palestine, of course. Americans as a whole have a true commitment to equality of opportunity. Public racism has been almost entirely eliminated in recent decades, excepting the occasional N-word from a Democratic senator or racist caricatures of people like Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele and Condi Rice.

The irony is that the organization most hated by African-Americans according to opinion polls is the one group with any fresh ideas for improving things. Republicans are the ones who have stayed true to the vision of a colorblind, integrated meritocracy. Republicans are the ones with fresh thinking about charter schools, school choice, continued welfare reform and opportunity zones.

However, all of these will be of limited utility so long as the black community is led by those most vested in continued racial strife.

Public Schools and the Assembly Line

My father-in-law put the imagery of Pink Floyd's The Wall into my head today. He spontaneously monologued a bit about public schools; it was good. He basically said:

"People say public schools are bad, but that isn't true. They're very good at what they were designed for -- to create people who could work in factories. They teach you to arrive at a bell, go to lunch at a bell and leave at a bell. You learn to sit at a desk and do the same work everyone else is. These things don't really have anything to do with education.

People don't realize that these things aren't inborn. In the old days, people regulated their lives by the schedules of agriculture. It took public schools to teach people to show up to the factory on time."

You can see where TulipGirl gets her brains from. What he said made a lot of sense to me. Our public schools aren't bad -- just obsolete.

Cowboys take up AK47s to combat drug runners on Mexican frontier

First of all, this is why I love America. We have cowboys. With AK-47s.

Secondly, can we please build the flipping fence now? "Cowboys take up AK47s to combat drug runners on Mexican frontier" is a great premise for a modern-day Spaghetti Western, but it's no way to run a border.

The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History

Heritage Foundation has a lecture posted on Russell Kirk and American history. Kirk was one of my defining influences growing up, so it's always nice to see a tribute to the old fella. It's my great regret never having visited him at the gatherings he held at his home in Mecosta, MI. It would have been something of a pilgrimage.

A good starting point for exploring Kirkian thought is The Roots of American Order, one of the early attempts to trace both the origins of American culture and a conservative pedigree within it.

"Historical consciousness gave him a broad, capacious vision, which always insisted that the civilization we enjoy has deep living roots. Those roots of American order extend back in time not only to 18th- century Philadelphia, but further back, to London, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Virtually everything he wrote testified to his intense awareness of the immanence, inescapability, and indispensability of the past, and not only the past of the previous generation or two, but the distant past. . ."

"What struck many readers as mannered or affected diction in Kirk was actually something quite different. It was evidence of his strong conviction that words, like people, are living things, bearing living pasts deserving of recognition and respect. That was typical of him. He had the ability to make even the dullest things gleam with the luster of historical imagination. . .

In particular, Kirk lamented the deification of progress, the cult of absolute equality, the advance of the Leviathan state, the licentiousness of the autonomous self, the transvaluation of values, and other such modern abstractions that have transformed and eroded the American republic."

This is yummy.

Johnny Depp is leaving France. It's too violent for him.

Savor the delicious irony for a few minutes. This is the guy who left America with fanfare a couple of years ago, telling a German magazine:

"America is dumb, it’s like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you," he said. "My daughter is four, my boy is one. I’d like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."

Where will he go now? France has always been the Mecca for America-hating celebs.

Well, given all the support they've given radical Islam by undercutting our war in Iraq, perhaps they could just start going to Mecca.

McCarthyism, Heresy and Intelligent Design

This is not a post about Intelligent Design. I have read not more than a paragraph about the subject. Ever. Science is a terrible bore. I do believe that the highly intelligent God of the Bible designed both the heavens and the earth. As to the scientific merits of the theory known as Intelligent Design, however, I am quite agnostic.

Just to get that out of the way.

Now, does it seem to anyone else that the decibel level of attacks on ID people is getting just a bit shrill? I can't remember this level of hysteria about anything since the Republicans cut the school lunch program by increasing spending on it by 8 instead of 12 percent.

Do you know what the ID people are being treated like? Heretics. Only heretics can inspire the sort of venom I see directed at the ID crowd. The scientific community, and those who take their cues from it, are reacting exactly like a religion which senses an internal threat.

It's ironic that the academic community, which prides itself on open inquiry, seems to have declared a specific line of inquiry beyond the pale. This from the people who brought you Masters and Johnson and cloned sheep. My understanding is that academicians with even ID sympathies are being persecuted.

Again, I have no idea if the IDers are right or not. But it would be a rare thing for an ideally totally bereft of power to elicit such a McCarthyist counter-reaction. It makes me wonder if maybe they're on to something.

UPDATE: Jared Bridges at True Pravda is blogging on the scientists as a priestly caste.

Dutch Moonbats on the Wing

Last week, we were mourning the impending death of Europe. Today, our expat pal Liberal Media drew my attention to a story from Holland. It's a reminder that sometimes cultures, like people, sink so far into dementia that they can no longer survive on their own.

Death threat for killer of Domino-toppling sparrow

"At least seven organisations have become involved in the saga surrounding the sparrow shot dead on Monday.

The little bird's crime was to knock over 23,000 of the 4.3 dominoes laid out for an attempt to break the domino toppling record . . . Animal rights group Dierenbescherming and the provincial authority have both appointed officials to investigate the shooting dead of the bird with an air gun. . . Meanwhile, the man who fired the fatal shot has been threatened with death.

Posted by Discoshaman at 12:21 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Multiculturalism: Does it Work?

The rioting in France has put the cult of multiculturalism back in the spotlight. You have two population groups in France both seeking to maintain their own language and cultural identity and now conflicting with one another.

This led me to think -- Where has multiculturalism ever worked? I mean genuine multiculturalism, two or more distinct linguistic and cultural groups living together in one nation state. The nightmare of Bosnia-Serbia-Kosovo? The Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda? The Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq? The Basques in Spain? The Québécois? Aceh in Indonesia? The Flemish and the French in Belgium? The Tatars and Ukrainians? The blacks and Arabs in Sudan? Where?

Multiculturalism has a longer record of failure than Bob Shrum. Can we point to any real successes, and are there lessons to be learned from them?

This seems to be a fair and relevant question for Americans to ask these days. For the first time in our history, the overwhelming majority of our immigration is coming from a single, different linguistic and cultural source.

We are heading toward exactly the sort of hybrid nationality we see in some of the above-named countries. As I've said before, it is a vast sociological experiment which is being performed completely contrary to the wishes of the American people as expressed in opinion surveys.

The 'Religion of Peace': reality trumps theology

There are about 70 million Reformed or Presbyterian Christians in the world. Imagine for a moment that a small percentage of us decided to organize a globe-encompassing terrorist network that slaughtered innocents from Bali to London. Then ask yourself these questions:

1. Would the vast, vast majority of us be issuing mealy-mouthed non-denunciations of the terrorists while portraying ourselves as the real societal victims? Would a huge percentage of us sympathize with the terrorists? How long would it be until the great majority of us repudiated and excommunicated the terrorists and began turning them in?

2. Would the media and government be falling over themselves to placate our feelings and make sure we didn't feel discriminated against? Or would the expectation be that we have some responsibility in this, and should clean up our own house?

It's a ridiculous song and dance when we try to blame only the terrorists for the terror problem. The problem is with Islam as it currently stands. Before anyone starts quoting religion of peace drek from the Koran, I'm not speaking of Islam theologically, but culturally.

There is something fundamentally diseased about a body of believers that can sustain terrorists in every country where that religion has a presence.

The unpopular truth is this: The terrorists wouldn't last a day without the tolerance, sustenance and shelter of "mainstream" Muslims.

100 Wonders of the World

Rebecca Writes links to the Top 100 Wonders of the World. It's discouraging to see how much of the world you -haven't- yet seen. I'm 30 this year, so I need to get busy. . . I've got these crossed off the list:

1. Pyramids of Egypt at Giza 2. Grand Canyon 3. Karnak Temple 4. Acropolis/Parthenon 5. Nile River Cruise 6. Egyptian Museum 7. Valley of the Kings 8. Louvre Museum 9. Versailles 10. Carlsbad Caverns 11. Prague Old Town 12. Delphi 13. Sahara Desert 14. NY Skyline 15. Eiffel Tower 16. Niagra Falls 17. Suez Canal 18. San Francisco 19. Yosemite Nat'l Park

Humane Conservatism, Cont.

I just wrote on the one-party system in American Academia. There is very genuine discrimination against the conservative movement there. But it won't do us any good to complain about it. But the conservative movement needs to do the same thing the Left did -- work hard, think rigorously, and get PhDs. No one handed the universities to them; they captured them fairly.

Some of my thinking on this goes back to our earlier thread on Humane Conservatism. We've become a conservative movement of think tanks rather than universities. Policy papers rather than Great Books. It's not that think tanks are bad, it's that they're ephemeral. The conservative movement needs to be influencing the literature and philosophy departments, not just the evening news cycle.

The rise of academic standards at Christian universities is a positive sign. But in the overall picture, the conservative movement seem to be losing ground if anything. The heart of America is conservative. For too long we've allowed the head to be liberal, with unfortunate consequences.

Keywords: Conservatism, conservative movement

With open minds like these, who needs Orwell?

Deb Saunders writes today on Mob Rule in Academia.

The responses by liberals to recent remarks by Ward Churchill and Larry Summers is instructive. Churchill compared 9/11 victims to Nazi war criminals. Summers made some debatable-yet-reasonable remarks about women, Bell Curves and Academia. Yet whose blood is the academic community thirsting for?

Much of the liberal talk about open minds and free inquiry is nothing more than empty self-congratulations. From which side is the movement to criminalize vaguely-defined "hate speech"? Who thought up campus speech codes? Who uses epithets like "bigot, sexist or homophobe" to cow honest debate?

Many liberals seem to see "tolerance" as a privilege, not a right. You forfeit this privilege if you transgress against their sacred cows, as Larry Summers has learned.

Universities should be centers of free inquiry and thought. My experience was just the opposite. Liberal "diversity" seems to be all about genitalia and genetics. Sadly, the idea that true diversity is one of plurality of thought or opinion is often lost.

Speaking of the lack of diversity on campus, check out this report I found by the American Enterprise. They ran surveys of party affiliation on major US campuses.

Why History People are Naturally Superior. . .

. . .to other social science types.

We have our own muse -- Clio.

Self-defeating Socialists

People who say that socialism can't work are simply wrong. It CAN. As long as its applied on the level of a tribe, family, convent or cultic community.

The Weekly Standard has a good article about the Eurabianization of Sweden -- their percentage of foreign-born residents is now equivalent to the USA's at its highest point. Socialist economics made the country into a welfare magnet. Surprisingly enough, the Muslims don't share the same liberal values as the Swedes.

But that's old news. What I found interesting was this quote by Mauricio Rojas, a Swedish politician:

"High levels of taxation require that the people taxed be a community," he says. "And this has for a long time been a tribal society. . . . A good tribe! Very peaceful and nice! But a tribe."

There are two nuggets here:

1. The folly of many who believe that economics that "work" in a nation of 9 million relatively homogenous people will be equally efficient in a massively diverse one of 280 million.

2. Socialistic economics only work even fitfully when there's a very strong shared sense of community and purpose. It's ironic that the very people who most want socialistic policies in the States are also those most aggressively pushing multiculturalism -- a dogma which destroys any national sense of community and unity.

Art and the Christian Ghetto

Note-This is a post from 2003 that Evangelical Outpost linked today. I thought it would be good for both my regulars and the newcomers to be able to interact on this thread. Be sure also to check out his ongoing links to Evangelical artists.

Original Post:

Inkling had some good things to say on a recent thread. We were discussing Christianity and the recovery of the arts. He's taught drama in school for ten years now, and has seen several of his students go on to big-name schools. Here's some of what he had to say:

" I'm not so sure they benefit that much from the post-secondary training they receive. And yet these are the places they have to go to advance their careers. . . Having experienced the Theatre and the arts culture at the University level and seeing the cultural environment chew up and spit out so many kids I would advise parents to be very careful about encouraging their kids to major in The arts unless they are well grounded."

I think this is very good advice. I've watched several "Christian" friends go off the deep end after leaving for art school. One girl, who was an enormous influence on me as a young Christian and whom I looked to as a dynamic believer, has gone completely into the world. When we told her that we'd become missionaries her response was, "Well, I hope you aren't a judgmental Christian." She'd completely internalized the values and beliefs of the Miami arts scene.

The art schools are the gatekeepers, as Inkling pointed out. And they're a hostile place for believers. Yet, they're only hostile because we've ceded this realm to unbelievers. Something of a vicious circle, isn't it? I think Inkling's advice that only grounded Christians should make the foray seems wisest.

As for the Church at large, here are a few modest proposals:

1. Stop funneling anyone with an artistic bent into either the praise band or the church dance team, and expecting this to be a sufficient outlet for them

2. Take Thomas Kinkade to the outskirts of Monterey and stone him.

3. Pray that non-liturgical Christians will learn to write readable prose (excluding our Jared, of course.) Statistically, they're the future of Evangelicalism, for better or worse.

4. Learn to distinguish art from kitsch. Stop visiting the merchandise section of the Family Christian Store altogether.

5. Lose the parasitism. Much of what passes for culture in the Christian ghetto is intensely derivative. I'm slack-jawed with amazement that we haven't yet had a baptized Harry Potter-esque series as an "answer" to Rowling. Our "answer" to the world seems generally to be that of a dumbed-down form of aping.

6. Abandon our Gnostic-like denigration of creation, beauty and art, and our visceral suspicion of believers with an artistic calling who don't exclusively paint crosses or write tractarian novels.

7. Accept the lock-out and form our own alternatives? The conservatives, facing the lock that the Libs had on media and the universities, simply constructed their own counter-establishment over a 40 year period. Do Christians need to do the same with the arts? It seems like we're already in-process. How would you rate the progress so far?

Socialized Medicine and the Euthanization of Fun

Today I don't want to talk about the economics of Socialized Medicine, but its implications in an American social context.

There's one inflexible rule in American politics -- whatever the government subsidizes, it regulates (excepting, of course, NEA grants for pee-soaked images of Mother Theresa.)

When Uncle Sam is paying for your health, he's going to want a BIG say in what you're doing with it. What you eat, what you drive, the degree of extremity in your extreme sports. . . All of that becomes his bailiwick.

It's no different than I am with my children -- I'm the one paying the doctor bills, so I'm going to tell them what not to do. The Nanny State is a misnomer. Such governments aren't maternal, they're paternalistic.

We already have an inordinate number of private-citizen health fascists in America -- dreary, joyless consumers of tofu and obscure nutritional supplements whose only pleasure is in nagging others. Imagine life once government bean counters are added into the mix.

I have seen the future, and it looks like West Palm Beach

Check out Stanley Kurtz's new piece for Policy Review -- Demographics and the Culture War. It's more exciting than it sounds.

With something to intrigue or annoy just about anyone, Kurtz takes a peek at our possible future. Turn everything the ZPGers were saying in the 70's about Population Explosion on its head, and you have the article. Kurtz makes a case for a dangerous population decline, and backs it up with stats. Then he explores the economic, cultural and political ramifications of it all.

Plus you get weird bits like this: "The United Nations estimates that by 2050, 42 percent of all people in Italy and Japan will be aged 60 or older."

I'm looking into a shuttleboard franchise.

Business -- Conditional Ally

The broad-stroke view of politics posits that conservatives are the pro-business faction. To an extent, it's true. Particularly in the fight against collectivization and Communism, we had a common cause.

One day we can look at things historically and see how new this alliance really is, but not today. Instead let's focus on the now. What should conservatism's relationship be with business?

Like the title says, I think we need a conditional alliance. There are plenty of areas where we have agreement -- reducing the size of government, protecting America's interests abroad, and so on. But a blanket pro-Business stance is naive.

The market enables us to live, but it can't tell us how to live. We need to bring our values to the market, not derive them from it. Especially as conservatives.

The market is creatively destructive. That's often necessary. But what happens when something historically precious is going to be destroyed? In such situations the liberals are often actually the ones being genuinely conservative.

The same could be said for the environment. While opposing the religion that environmentalism has become, conservatives should all be conservationists. Too often though, we fall into a reflexively pro-business stance.

Immigration is another good example. While the Wall Street Journal loves having millions of low-skilled workers cross the border to work for peanuts, conservatives should at least be asking what this influx means on a cultural and social level.

The area where we'll eventually see the biggest split is in the area of bioethics. As the technology advances, business will be drawn inexporably by potential profits. They'll lobby hard to have limits on cloning and genetic experimentation lifted. Not all of this will be bad. But it will inevitably take them into areas where conservatives cannot follow, and instead have to resist. Do we have the will to do so?

There are so many other areas where real conservatism and business part ways. One that drives me craziest is the commodification of sports. I love America's pasttimes, and I hate that corporations have co-opted every aspect of them -- from stadium names to putting Spider-Man webs on major league bases to advertise movies.

Conservatives understand that some things are priceless. Business thinks just the opposite -- everything has its price.

Racial Miscommunication

If there was ever a healthy interracial dialogue in America, there isn't one now. In place of a realistic appraisal and discussion of race relations, we've substituted a crude morality play of perpetual victim and villain.

The script is a simple one -- accusations and invective from half of the cast, ritualized introspection and self-denunciation from the other. Uncomfortable realities are avoided by both sides in favor of safe pieties. Double standards are rife. The result is simulaneously condescending and unjust.

Who suffers most from this?

Certainly not middle-class whites in their well-policed suburbs. As with so many things, it's the socially and economically vulnerable who suffer, particularly the third of the black community mired in the underclass. We can't realistically address minority poverty and social decay so long as "endemic racism" is the only permitted primary cause. Scapegoating others may be comforting, but it doesn't accomplish much else.

Racial reconciliation is so very necessary. No one who cares about social justice can see the marginalization of black America and not want to do something about it. However, will real reconciliation come unless everyone can approach the table as equals, without fear of being verbally battered into shamed silence?

Montagues and Capulets, Boys and Girls

In Romeo and Juliette, there isn't really anything in the text to distinguish the two rival families in their feud. But I've always inclined toward the Montagues, because they're Romeo's House. During the intermission at Romeo and Juliette, I asked TulipGirl whom she favored when she read the story.

"The Capulets." Why? "It's Juliette's family."

So we got to talking about gender identification and loyalty. All things being equal, are men and women tribal about their gender? Which faction do you identify with when you read the story, and why?

Marrying into the Matriarchy

The picture of Yulia below captures the quintessence of the Ukrainian woman -- beautiful, but clenching a fist.

During the Revolution, a Ukrainian friend made this comment about the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko dynamic: "It's typical Ukrainian family. Of course the woman is the strong one."

Externally, Ukrainian women are the most aggressively feminine on the planet -- they make Parisian women seem dowdy. When Western guys come across ads for "Russian Brides", all they see are the pictures. The fact that this is an entirely different culture is lost, because the girls LOOK like the ones at home (albeit thinner and better-dressed.) Cross-cultural marriages can be great, but they're rarely easy.

Before anyone answers one of those ads, they should think through the implications of marrying into a generally matriarchal culture. Read the fine print, and you'll see that many of these marriage contracts require a trip to obedience school.

Opera and Life's Beautiful Things

The Duchess and I did an opera-and-sushi date tonight -- Roméo et Juliette followed by a stop at the Okeon. Let's face it, nothing spells romance like dead Veronans and freshwater eel.

I think Gounod's score is a little heavy-handed, but the cast was excellent. Lyudmilla Semenenko was a great Stephano.

During the second act it struck me how much opera depends on society's consensus that it's "high culture." Stripped of this, there would be something ridiculous about the whole thing. Take away its prestige, the loveliness of the voices, and the grandeur of the theatre and you're left with slightly overweight grown-ups in costume enacting a tenuous plot with overacting direct from the William Shatner School.

Opera, like so many of the beautiful things in life, is impractical, unhip, and dismissed as elitist. The same could be said for formal dress, customs, local traditions and especially manners. They've always relied on a cultural consensus that said, "These things are impractical and time-consuming, but they have value in themselves."

These are the things that make civil society civil. As we urbanize and atomize, they're anything but out of date -- they're vital. They're the antidote to the coarsening and ugliness of daily life.

And the winner. . .

. . .for most ironic quasi-oxymoron is:

the problem with Massachusetts (just one?)

The Duchess and I spent the first five months of our married life in the Berkshires of western Mass. It was our first cross-cultural experience. We failed.

The time there did give us a peek at an entirely different mentality toward life. Everything is "wicked bad", it takes about 15 years to make friends with someone, and cheerfulness is considered a sign of mental defectiveness.

With that, I'll link you to an American Spectator piece on Why Massachusetts Doesn't Grow -- it's the only state in the Union with a declining population. With such bubbly personalities, it's hard to imagine why.

Tucked away in the article is this fun thumbnail of 19th Century American history: "'Warehouses lead to whorehouses, whorehouses to a police force, a police force to courthouses.' Voilа, civilization."

Urban Tribes and their Mechanized Caravans

The Guardian reviews an intriguing new book today -- Urban Tribes.

"They have been to university, they have confidence and money, but they are uninterested in what comes next in the conventional middle-class life: a structured career, marriage, children. Instead, Watters's subjects form groups with like-minded peers, and spend the decades between early adulthood and middle age going out together, bonding and gossiping with their new extended family. . . "

At first blush, the concept could be a contrived rationale to sell a book. But then I thought back to my own social life, and realized that every one of my circles of friends have fit the description -- apolitically liberal, neo-Pagan or secular in religion, and "earning money by freelance means, and drinking a great number of leisurely coffees." I was the token married-with-children guy in the bunch.

While I love my friends, tribal life was a cheery, aimless one -- days filled with role-playing games, computers, road trips and parties. Jobs were viewed not as a career, but as a means of survival. Intellects were put to more interesting uses than work -- like learning Japanese to watch anime in the original language. It's a mayfly sort of existence, flitting about and spawning with no concept of a future.

TS Eliot spoke of those who were "destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans."

I think they've encamped.

A night at the opera

TulipGirl and I caught La Bohème tonight, our first opera of the season. The sets were good and the orchestra was great. Unfortunately, the usual Mimi was out of town and a weak understudy filled in -- perhaps the company hired an actual consumption victim. That would score some serious vérité points.

This is a mildly unsettling Mick Jagger-inspired self-portrait of TulipGirl and me.

During the death of Mimi, TulipGirl leaned over and said, "Mimi and Musetta are the archetypical virgin and whore." You have to love a girl who'll whisper that to you in the dark.

The name of the brunette Musetta escapes me, but she's getting known in Western Europe. We'll lose her eventually.

Roger and Diane McMurrin -- he's the conductor of the Kiev Symphony Orchestra and one of the founders of the first Presbyterian church in Kiev after the fall of Communism (there are now four.)

The parochial Left?

In the whole Red-Blue State meme, the Reds are the provincials and the blues cosmopolitan. The Blues are exposed to a world of ideas and diversity while the Reds suffer from intellectual insularity.

But these days, maybe provincialism isn't a province only of the provinces.

Think about it. A thinking conservative is educated in an NEA-run school, then goes off to a university where the most positive thing he might hear about conservatism is its quaintness. Throughout his life he's immersed in a pop culture tat's generally a product of the Blue world. He reads liberally-oriented journals of opinion, and gets his news primarily from organizations with a preponderance of liberals (however objective they may strive to be.) By adulthood, he's well acquainted with liberalism from first-sources.

An urban liberal, on the other hand, has no such "advantages." Unless he actively seeks it out, it's possible to go a lifetime with little interaction with intellectual conservatism, or even Red-state culture. (Insert obligatory Pauline Kael "Nixon" quote here.) Which is why, for example, the NYT writes about Evangelicals like an alien race.

In a perverse way, this is of advantage to conservatism. An intelligent conservative in America has had his beliefs tested by fire. And he knows the opposing system intimately, rather than having it translated to him through an echo chamber.

NOTE: There are many, many exceptions to this on the Left. No faction holds intellectual honesty and curiousity as an exclusive preserve, and plenty of liberals have taken the time to study conservatism.

Land of the Free, Home of the Slightly Off-Kilter

The Orange Revolution made me realize that I'd become a sort of 3rd-Culture person -- neither fish-nor-fowl when it comes to national identity. I never plan to live long-term in America again, but I still have a great love for her. Distance has lent objectivity to my view, though.

Every day I hear stereotypes about America from people who have never been there -- both Ukrainians and European expats. Some of their shallower critiques have merit. Americans are fat.

Going deeper though, you see they have no clue what makes America a fascinating country. To hear them, Americans are gray, mass produced beings whose idea of the good life is sitcoms and fast food.

What's missing is the vibrancy of life, the colorfulness of the American people. Not so much in a "We Are the World" multicultural quilt sort of way, but in the unique, sometimes crazy people the country produces. You really never know who you're going to meet in a place like America.

The Lone Wacko provides a great example -- the Ferret man, the Libertarian candidate for Lt. Gov in California's last gubernatorial race. Check out his running mate, the "existential druid".

America may be a little crazy, but it's never dull.

bowties and the lies we tell ourselves

It seems to me that deep in his bosom, nearly every person nurses a secret belief that he's especially favored by the universe, exempt from things that are universals for other people. It's a survival skill -- an assertion of the will in the face of six million teeming humans.

Examples are legion -- Smoking kills people, but not me. Forget the past, Bob Shrum is just what my campaign needs. Yes, puns are the lowest form of humor, but my pun really is funny. . .

The bowtie is the standout example. Has anyone since TS Eliot been hip in one? No. But what cocktail party is complete without someone in a blazer-n-bowtie combo, preferably with polka dots? Neither this cravat nor the polka itself has been cool in fifty years, but the individual has a conviction that there is something inside him that adds a dashing note to the sad little twist of cloth.

Bowties are proof that hope really does spring eternal.

the Atlantic and the atheists

According to the YouGov poll, only 44% of Britons believe in God. Even giving some extra margin for error in that this was an online poll, this is another toll of the bell for the West. It seems to me that no society can exist with a hollow center for any length of time. If you remove the crèche from the public square, something else will eventually take its place.

This statistic is fascinating on another level as well. Compared to the 44% in Britain, about 96% of Americans tell Gallup they believe in God, and have done so consistently since 1944. Even when we define God as an "all-powerful, all-good Being who controls the world", 69% of Americans agree.

Metaphysics underlie a nation's politics, culture, and theoretically, their ethics. Of European nations, Britain is the closest culturally to our own. With such a divergence over something as fundamental as the existence of God, the widening of the Atlantic rift is understandable.

Unavoidable Africa

The popular conscience would like to forget Africa. For the past fifteen years, authoritarianism, disease and poverty have lost battle after battle in Latin America, Eastern Europe and even Afganistan. But if anything, Africa has sunk only deeper into corruption and epidemic. South Africa is now the rape, murder and AIDS capital of the universe. Such suffering makes a mockery of bright, humanistic assumptions about man's nature.

It is a humanitarian challenge that Christianity cannot ignore. Yet the causes are so vast and culturally ingrained that any aid we might offer can seem pitiful in comparison. Our friend Gideon Strauss gives this bleak prognosis: "Ever so slowly – as at the outer fringes of the Roman Empire from the fifth century to the twelfth century – Christianity seems to be working itself into the soil of African culture. The Christian transformation of African culture seems likely to be a 500-year project."

Read more about his fight against Apartheid and his work with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee at The New Pantagruel. His recollections are frank and moving.

Behold the (Mad) Man

"I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite."

I'm re-reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, and this passage really struck me today. It's as if, in an episode of syphilitic madness, he had a vision of the modern Literature department. Or the Jenny Jones Show.

Okay, The Incredibles lived up to the name.

More importantly, it challenged one of the key tenets of the Hollywood faith -- the worship of equality. Excellence was held up as something positive -- but not in any creepy Who is John Galt? sort of way. But rather in a positive manner that flies in the face of liberalism's belief that the pursuit of excellence is somehow elitist, racist, or insensitive.

Since at least Reconstruction, the central organizing principle of our nation has shifted progressively from liberty to equality. We'll ultimately lose the gay "marriage" fight, because the tide of egalitarianism is relentless. Everyone must be equal, which means identical, and any differences are prima facie discriminatory.

So how incredible it was to watch a movie where the supervillain dreams of a world "where everyone is special" and therefore "no one is special."

The Moral Side of Capitalism

I just started Baldacchino's Economics and the Moral Order, and it's set me to thinking. We're in the middle of what seems to be a realignment in the American political scene, with R's retaking majoritarian status for the first time since the Depression. However, the Dems still hold one huge advantage over us (well, two, counting the New York Times) -- they still cling tenaciously to the economic moral high ground. The national consensus seems to have become, "Liberal economics are dumb, but they sure are caring."

We need to better articulate the moral basis of capitalism. I love this quote from the book:

"People do not live by cheaper vacuum cleaners alone. . . an ethical system without at least a potential for serving man's ethical nature contains the seeds for its own destruction."

As conservatives, we need to do a better job expressing the moral worth of freedom, not just its utility. And as Christians, we need to both strengthen and infuse the free market system with the proper virtues. Because if it really is simply a game of skill and chance with no values higher than self-interest, à la Hayek, then it doesn't deserve to survive. It seems to me that an inefficient yet idealistic Socialism would be preferable to an absolutely amoral Capitalism.

Just as with any human freedoms, economic freedom derives its quality and value from the virtues of the people.

EW's Top Cult Films of All Time

I've bolded the ones I've been subjected to:

1 This Is Spinal Tap
2 The Rocky Horror Picture Show
3 Freaks
4 Harold And Maude
5 Pink Flamingos
6 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
7 Repo Man
8 Scarface <