January 27, 2007

SOROS ON AMERICA

        George Soros is living proof that money doesn't care who makes it. While endorsing Barack Obama for President in '08, he added his inimitable take on U.S. "mistakes in Iraq":
"Mr. Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history, and contrasted that reluctance to Germany’s rejection of its Nazi-era past.

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process...”
        Which American "Nazi" officials should be put on trial first, Mr. Soros?

January 21, 2007

HOW TO PERPETUATE RACIAL STEREOTYPES WHILE PRETENDING TO CONDEMN THEM

The Horsefeathers award for racial stereotyping goes to Selena Roberts of the New York Times.

        The New York Times sports pages have long been infected by the same p.c. leftism as their editorial pages. The football playoffs provide an opportunity for extended socio-political pontificating. In NYTimes sports world: Black=caring=warm=soulful=flexible=creative=human=PROGRESSIVE. White=rigid=authoritarian=unemotional=robotic=DICTATORIAL. Selena Roberts produces a classic example of how to condemn racial stereotyping while actively perpetuating it.
        In an article on football coaches, Bill Belichik, the outstanding coach of the New England Patriots whose main defect seems to be his skin color--white--is contrasted with the "soulful", utterly adorable, black coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy. Dungy gains Ms. Roberts's worshipful accolades: he, unlike the robotic, dictatorial Belichik and other white coaches like Bill Parcells, Eric Mangini and Tom Coughlin, "values relationships over victory. As many know, he, (Lovie) Smith and another past Dungy hire, Herman Edwards, all recently dined together in an Indianapolis restaurant when their teams made the playoffs. Smith and Dungy remain. If Smith’s Bears end the Saints’ feel-good journey, if Dungy’s Colts finally crack the Patriots playoff code, it will be the first time a black coach, much less two, advanced to the Super Bowl..."
        Apparently by virtue of his skin color, Tony Dungy, like his fellow black coaches, and unlike his white counterparts, cares for his players as people. Should he and Chicago's coach Lovie Smith win, then Ms. Roberts instructs us, "...It shouldn’t have to be a big deal, but there would be no diminishing the social significance of Dungy’s and Smith’s potentially coaching in the largest television event of the year... And as it is in so many cases, a societal shift has to be seen to be absorbed, be viewed to be felt. In one Super Sunday, a league forever led by an ant trail of white coaches (our comment: yuck!) could finally find a comfortable seat aboard the Soul Train." Hooray!
        Does this possibility make Ms. Roberts happy? Not entirely, for "...Somewhere today, a voice from a TV booth will celebrate Smith and Dungy for their motivational skills but not their mental acuity, leaving the thinking-man’s adjectives for Belichick or the Saints’ Sean Payton..." Aargh! Ah yes, for the mind reading Ms. Roberts, racial stereotypes never die, they're just projected onto other people. Unfortunately her own article is shot through with racial stereotyping of whites as 'ice people'. She portrays white coaches from Bill Parcells to Belichik to Eric Mangini as cold, robotic, uninterested in people and mentally rigid. They haven't gotten on board the soul train. By contrast black coaches care, they're flexible, they're more creative- but they don't receive the deserved recognition for their emotional intelligence, no doubt because of white control of the 'narrative'. Instead, "...rigid systems are celebrated more than a football coach’s mental ability to fit plays around players. Belichick will easily discard past stars for interchangeable parts to plug into his design. Dungy is more fluid in his math, able to adjust a team’s persona as well as its scheme..." Besides, Parcells and all his other white disciples are "bullies".
        Thank goodness for the New York Times; without it we might think America had made progress towards overcoming discrimination. Instead we stand reminded that whites are cold, robotic, uncaring exploiters of blacks and that success by blacks occurs because they possess the empathic intelligence lacking in their white counterparts. Thanks Selena, we needed that!

January 12, 2007

SAMUEL JOHNSON: HUMOR AND HUMAN NATURE

        Staring down at the reader of Horsefeathers is a portrait of Samuel Johnson along with the Marx Brothers. We are among the legion of admirers of the great man. Juxtaposing his portrait to one of the Marx brothers indicates how much we appreciate Johnson's humor. His friend, Hester Thrale said: "No man loved laughing any better, and his vein of humor was rich and apparently inexhaustible." Our favorite modern biography of Johnson, by W. Jackson Bate has a chapter (27) called Humor and Wit. Like Groucho, Johnson possessed both verbal wit- ("A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on its hinder legs. It's not done well; but you're surprized to find it done at all." On who was the better poet, Christopher Smart or Samuel Derrick: "There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.")-and physical humor: Boswell describes being called to Johnson's bedside "and to my astonishment he took off Lady MacDonald leaning forward with a hand on each cheek and her mouth open--quite insipidity on a monument grinning at sense and spirit. To see a beauty represented by Mr. Johnson was excessively high. I told him it was a masterpiece and that he must have studied it much. "Ay," said he."

        There was much, much more to Johnson than his humor, and a new essay by Theodore Dalrymple, highlights Johnson's multifaceted character and his introspective acuity. Yet by omitting the centrality of humor in Johnson's life, Dalrymple misses the key character trait that helped Johnson confront the darker aspects of human nature. We would argue that humor was the lens through which Johnson's realistically conservative view of human nature was filtered and made bearable. Johnson didn't need to escape into utopian fantasies, as did his contemporary, Rousseau, and all of Rousseau's totalitarian descendants. Instead he could laugh at human nature, deploying humor, often against himself. Johnson's conservatism has little in common with the conservatism of contemporary politicians who, as much as liberals, believe government can transform the human condition- just for slightly less expenditure of money. Contemporary politicians of all parties who believe that everyone welcomes freedom and democracy would do well to read Johnson. It would help rein in their foolish ambitions. Horsefeathers believes no literary work written in the years since Johnson's age surpasses The Vanity of Human Wishes in its understanding of human nature. Through all his personal difficulties, Johnson's humor was the leavening that allowed him to compress into a couplet the dark insight "How small of all that human hearts endure/that part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

        It is worth reading (see below) all of Dalrymple's article; then move on to W. Jackson Bate who gives us information about Johnson's youth that is absent from Boswell. Dalrymple clearly loves Johnson, the man, and writes accurately that "...Johnson was a man of the Enlightenment. He had a great interest in the experimental sciences, for example, and placed a high value on reason. But he was also acutely aware of the limits of the Enlightenment. He could hold irreconcilable dilemmas in his mind without giving way to nihilism or irrationalism. He was profoundly anti-Romantic: his Life of Savage ends with an implicit denunciation of the Romantic notion that the possession of talent excuses a man from the demands of the moral life or social existence:

"This relation [the biography] will not be wholly without its use if . . . those who, in confidence of superior capacities or attainments, disregard the common maxims of life, shall be reminded that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible...'

No one could accuse Johnson of being a mindless conformist; it is doubtful whether a more individual individual has ever existed; but he was always prepared to place that limit on his own appetites that, in the opinion of his acquaintance, Edmund Burke, qualified a man for freedom.

In his censure of disregard for the common maxims of life, Johnson displays his deep though flexible conservatism, a conservatism not of the mulish kind opposed to all possible change (Johnson invariably praises advances in knowledge and industry, for example), but of the kind that believes that most men, instead of reasoning from first principles on all occasions, need the aid of the accumulated wisdom of custom, precept, and prejudice most of the time if they are to live a moral life in reasonable harmony and happiness with one another. Johnson criticizes Dean Swift, in his brief biography of him, for his willful and self-conscious eccentricity. “Singularity,” he says, “as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule; he, therefore, who indulges in peculiar traits, is worse than others, if he be not better.” Note that Johnson does not deny the possibility of betterment, nor does he believe that the best path has always been found already. But he denies that deviation from the common path, for reasons of vanity, is a virtue; on the contrary, it is a vice. We might have had fewer social problems today if this view had had more currency..."
        Even if we had just as many 'social problems' we'd have had far more laughs.
        See the rest of Dalrymple's essay here.

January 09, 2007

PBS Takes on Anti-Semitism

Guest blogger Rita Kramer weighs in on public television and our Paper of Record

Monday night’s program on “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence,” broadcast by PBS, was strikingly effective in depicting the history of the world’s longest-running prejudice, its sources, forms, and uses in different cultures at different times.

Judy Woodruff’s calm and soothing voice introduced cartoons and drawings too lurid for words to do justice to them, making them even more effective than if they had been accompanied by a more passionate narrator. And in the end the program can be said to have done a good enough job of introducing to those not in the know the extent of Jew-hatred throughout the modern Muslim world.

Supporters and defenders of Israel and the Jewish people will find various shortcomings in the presentation. Frequent references are made to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with only passing reference to how Israel came to occupy the land in question, to the wars waged against the tiny country by its many Arab neighbors, the conquest of the West Bank and Golan Heights in those wars, and the necessity to provide for the security of Israelis by keeping an implacable enemy from using them as convenient posts from which to launch rockets and worse. One could come away with the impression that “occupation” in this case was similar to Hitler’s unprovoked occupation of countries for conquest.

Similarly, there is no mention of how Arabs came to be called “Palestinians,” a term which used to refer to the Jews settling in their one-time homeland, reinvented by the Arabs themselves in the cause of claiming they had been dispossessed by the Jews from their own lands and ancestral homes. There is, of course, no such thing as a Palestinian people with its own history and culture apart from their brothers and sisters in what came to be delineated as Jordan in the game of invent-a-country played by the Western powers in the 20th century. And many of those Arabs living in Palestine until they fled because they were told to by their leaders or because of fear of what might happen to them or because they were forced out had only been there for a generation or two, attracted by the Israeli presence that had famously “made the desert bloom.” Irrigating the land to make growing crops possible was only one thing the Jews brought with them—there was medical care, jobs for the unskilled, and educational opportunities.

Not surprisingly, Rashid Khalidi, holder of the anonymously-endowed chair of Arab Studies at Columbia University’s troubled Department of Middle Eastern Studies and a fervent critic of Israel, downplays anti-Semitism as a distraction, a “useful” way for Jews to turn the world’s attention from what is really the core issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the occupation of “the territory of other people” and its concomitant oppression and dispossession.

And Tony Judt, the New York Review of Books’s in-house scolder of Israel, stated reassuringly that there was no state-sponsored anti-Semitism at this time. He has somehow missed recent speeches by such heads of state as Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf.

There were sincere protestations by Arab journalists and students that the unending stream of depictions on Arab television of hideous Jewish plotters of world domination and killers of Arab children, the depiction of Jews in textbooks as apes and pigs, is not anti-Semitism. They have nothing against Jews, they say, only against Israel. Martin Luther King answered them in a speech he made at Harvard shortly before he died: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.”

Still, PBS also brought us the comments of Bernard Lewis and Natan Sharansky among others who brought another perspective to the issue at hand. And for that we must be grateful. Everyone with a point of view on the issue of the increase in anti-Semitism today will find something to criticize in this program, but many who haven’t given it much thought or who have held unexamined opinions, may be enlightened by the evidence of printed and filmed hate propaganda being spread all over the Muslim world by satellite and on the internet.

In the end there’s little to object to and much to be grateful for in public television’s treatment of anti-Semitism, lifting the veil hiding some pretty ugly stuff.

What is objectionable is the review of the program that appeared in the New York Times on Monday morning before the public had a chance to view it.[Click HERE] With typical Times reviewer snottiness, after summarizing the “history lesson,” Alessandra Stanley turns to the comments of the eminent Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis. She finds it relevant to include information “the film does not mention” —ready?—“that Mr. [sic] Lewis is one of the leading scholars that Vice President Dick Cheney consulted to formulate the administration’s rationale for topping Saddam Hussein.” What relevance does this fact have to the issue at hand, anti-Semitism? It can only be intended, since the Times considers the war and those who planned it something close to evil, to discredit Professor Lewis’ remarks. And she reminds us that the Arab media “paint the war as a sinister conspiracy cooked up by Israel and its supporters in Washington,” finding it worth noting therefore that “the documentary makes very little mention of the American occupation of Iraq.” Huh? Why should it, since anti-Semitism isn’t exactly a burning issue in Iraq right now. Perhaps to turn our attention to the role Jews (or the neocons, or the Israel lobby) played in planning the war? The Times will stop at nothing to discredit anyone associated with the Bush administration.

Having put Professor Lewis in his place and not having chosen to quote anything of substance said by defenders of the Israeli position, who does the Times critic give pride of place to as the last of the talking heads to be quoted before she wraps the story up—who but Professor Khalidi. The last words you will hear by any of the experts who appear on the program are his: “I think that the brouhaha about it is a systematic attempt to draw attention away from the roots of the conflict. There has been an oppressive occupation going on for 40 years, a people has been dispossessed.”

It’s a well worn Times trick—you interview people from various sides of a question but at the end you leave the reader with the one you want to impress on him. After that the narrator’s gentle summary is barely even heard.

This from a critic who can only describe a hate-inducing TV drama depicting Jewish villainy and Jewish crimes as “cockeyed.” How’s that for trivializing something both extremely ugly and clearly dangerous?

Why does one feel that the Grey Lady looks down her patrician nose at the Jews, just as she did sixty years ago when news of the Holocaust was buried in her inside pages?

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