March 29, 2008

GEERT WILDERS VS THE BARBARIANS

In the heart of effete and cowardly Western civilization, a man who refuses to submit:

February 19, 2008

BUSH IS TO BLAME

Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers
By PATRICIA COHEN
The suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004.

January 11, 2008

More On The Mitfords

From Rita Kramer: Not My Mitfords

December 11, 2007

ANNALS OF PERVERSION

Father killed daughter for not wearing hijab, her friends say
(See American Thinker)

Hattip to Yale Kramer

December 09, 2007

LUST TO KILL

Jihadism, Liberalism and Perversion.

December 02, 2007

OH THOSE MITFORD GIRLS!

Guest blogger, Rita Kramer, discusses the Mitford sisters.

        Please—enough with the Mitfords already! A whole industry has existed for years publishing breathless, admiring books about the delightful, charming, witty Mitford sisters, growing up in between-the-wars England and the Continent, writing books for us and letters to each other, the latest collection of which are reviewed in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Yes, they were clever, those girls, one of whom (Jessica) became a Communist (but lived out her life in the capitalist California sunshine), another (Unity) a fanatic Nazi with such a fevered love for Adolf Hitler that she shot herself in the head when England declared war on Germany. (She lived, but even more brain-damaged than before.) And there’s Diana, the one who left her husband to join British Fascist leader Oswald Mosely in his attempts to rouse the British public in support of Hitler and of good old English-style anti-Semitism. She followed him to jail and defended his positions to her dying day. Yet there is a segment of the reading public that just can’t get enough of the Mitford sisters. Celebrities in their day, they remain so down to the present, due to what the Times’ Caryn James calls “their irresistible appeal.”

        Sorry, but these were horrible people, the Mitfords and their set. Morally blind, to the point of obscenity. The Times reviewer thinks the Mitford archness amusing —OK, no harm in that, just a matter of taste. But these people were friends—friends!—of Hitler. Like other reviewers before her, the Times’ reviewer treats their pro-Nazi positions with a touch of disapproval, almost as though they had voted Republican. They never went back on those views or disclaimed them, even after we all knew about Auschwitz. (Of course Der Fuhrer didn’t really know the details, as Goering said at Nuremburg, and that was the Mosleys’ position.) The most important thing the much-praised author Nancy Mitford ever wrote was a letter denouncing her Fascist sister Diana for what she was--a kind of upper-class British Eva Braun. What a repulsive bunch, what a depressing cache of letters.

October 11, 2007

NOSTALGIA OF THE WORDSMITH INTELLECTUALS

"...With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things...

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know..."
-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Copybook" is the British for Notebook; a "Copybook heading" was a proverb or other essential truth that a teacher assigned to his class to write an essay on. The "Gods of the Market" do not refer to the Free Market (there was still little government intervention in Kipling's time), but to fashionable utopian wisdom.

When I was a medical student, assigned to the surgical ward, I had an elderly Russian émigré patient, who underwent major abdominal surgery, followed by multiple bleeding episodes requiring more operations. He remained in the hospital a very long time, during which we spent many hours together. He told me tales of Mother Russia, its people and his own hair-raising saga of survival. Since my own ancestors came from Russia, one step ahead of the pogroms, I was naturally interested in his stories. To a young student living comfortably in America, these were real life, harrowing tales of narrow escapes from fanatical and blood thirsty revolutionaries bent on exterminating the old aristocracy, into which he’d been born. I’d read about such people in Joseph Conrad novels, but to meet an actual living, breathing one was fascinating. Among other things, he was unusually tolerant of physical pain and suffering, regarding this latest threat to his physical survival with equanimity; his attitude seemed to be “I have survived worse.” He had. He deeply loved and appreciated America. When I asked him what he thought was the appeal of revolutionary Communism, he smiled as if he had given the question much thought, then replied: “nostalgia”. I have never forgotten that answer, though at the time I forgot to ask “nostalgia for what?”. Now I think I know.

Many have wondered why the socialist dream is impossible to slay, despite its failures in the real world. Communism itself seemed to die ignominiously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it survives now in an idealized form, seen almost daily in the NYTimes obituary pages fulsomely describing the death of local old Stalinists. Nostalgia. It lingers on their editorial pages which yearn for an imposible to attain egalitarian state run by liberal empaths, ensuring that everyone with a grievance gets an affirmative action program. More nostalgia.

Stalin’s songbird, Pete Seeger at age 88, has finally acknowledged that he should have condemned the Gulags, not celebrated Uncle Joe all those years while millions were murdered, but nevertheless he remains faithful to the dream of socialism. Throughout the world, socialist movements survive on a dream, the promise of egalitarian care for everyone from cradle to grave, perhaps postponing death itself by making longevity a government guaranteed ‘right’. A secular Garden of Eden to the tune track of Pete Seeger. Nostalgia.

The engine driving the utopian dream is indeed, fueled by nostalgia, and at the wheel are the wordsmith intellectuals. From philosophers like Rousseau, to Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, and Herbert Marcuse, intellectuals continue to yearn for a world of perfection—as defined, naturally, by wordsmith themselves. In the sphere of imaginative writing, novels and plays, from H.G. Wells to Norman Mailer, from Arthur Miller to Harold Pinter, these spinners of fantasies cater to the universal human longing for utopia, a prelapsarian time of bliss. They share contempt for the world of capitalist democracy, and scorn for the workers who make it run. Men of letters are of course the preeminent arbiters of the good and true in their own, self-created ideal world.

Among the many left liberal writers, H.G. Wells is an interesting example of wordsmith utopianism, a utopianism which was challenged by George Orwell. Wells, when not writing futuristic utopian fiction, was a socialist who minimized the horrors of the Russian Revolution and then topped that stupidity by trivializing the dangers posed by Hitler. Orwell possessed an understanding of human nature that Wells lacked, and composed dystopias that have outlasted Wells’s utopias. In 1940, Wells was still apologizing for the Soviets and minimizing Hitler’s threat. Orwell's words could apply as accurately today to the entire crowd of “creative” artists, in the literary, academic and media world. Just substitute Saddam for Stalin and Ahmadinejad for Hitler and see how little has changed---except unfortunately we have no Churchill:

“…There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accused Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good... Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration…”
--George Orwell, Wells, Hitler And The World State
Orwell added that Wells “…has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life…”

Our wordsmith utopians disavow their own aggression. They feel, they care, they empathize, they are concerned about the children. They understand other cultures and wouldn’t think of using force to defend ours. They’d deploy overvalued, magically invested words to resolve all conflicts. Their own sense of identity is sentimental. They weep, they deeply sympathize, they admire themselves for being virtuous. When utopian tyrants—Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro-- behave murderously, it is rationalized as a temporary measure in pursuit of noble goals. Anyway, utopia requires scapegoats to blame for its failure to materialize. Just as Wells trivialized Hitler and Stalin’s violence, so do contemporary leftists minimize jihadi violence and blame Israel.

In closeup encounters with human nature, as a psychoanalyst, I have observed the universality of utopian longings, and their intensity. For example, all patients say they wish to change, yet all are quite resistant to real change. What they mean by ‘change’ is often an unrealistic fantasy, of permanent happiness, free of all inner conflict, something like the old Henny Youngman joke wherein a man with a broken arm goes to his doctor asking if he’ll be able to play the violin when it heals. The doctor answers, ‘certainly’ to which the patient replies ‘that’s great Doc, I never could play before.’ Internal conflict can never be resolved this side of the grave; it's part of being alive. Behavior can definitely be modified—without any internal change at all. Give me an electric cattle prod and I’ll modify your behavior quickly. Internal change, shifting the way a person handles conflicts, is slow, difficult and limited. It requires an honesty many find hard to achieve. It’s always easier to assign blame—to fate, one’s parents, bad luck, etc. As Eric Hoffer once said, “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”

It is pretty apparent that most verbal creativity comes from depths of unhappiness. Most contemporary artists are aggrieved at a society that fails to appreciate them sufficiently, but the grievance goes deeper. Ernest Hemingway, when asked what it took to be a novelist said: “First, have an unhappy childhood.” Writers, when they’ve been exposed to psychotherapeutic treatment often worry that they’ll lose their creativity. Correctly so, because their literary productions are often attempts at self-healing, and if they actually solve their problems, the need to write about themselves, in fictional disguise tends to fade away. The novelist Somerset Maugham wrote a great novel, a thinly disguised history of his own miserable enslavement to women in Of Human Bondage. The self therapeutic effort, the attempt to make sense of his irrational misery is palpable. Maugham’s novel depicted the self imposed misery some men find seeking perfection, a lost world of narcissism in which all needs were instantly met by a loving maternal woman. Again, the yearning for lost perfection. Nostalgia.

The world of words is a marvelous one; a novelist can reject what’s painful in this world and create an alternative world, peopled with his own creations. This often seems amazing to the rest of us, and authors tend to think of themselves as possessing uniquely magical creative skills. They don’t. They have a specific skill with words, limited like any other, no more remarkable than the creative skill of a businessman, athlete, scientist or salesman, in fact of each of us, as we try to solve the problems of everyday life, draws on our creativity to do so. Writers do frequently possess a deeper sense of grievance and entitlement than the rest of us. Rarely do they possess common sense or wisdom beyond their particular skill, especially because as children they were made to feel superior by virtue of their skill with words. We overvalue the writer’s creativity primarily because writers tell us how profoundly important and gifted they are and leave the written records that highlight their own historical importance.

Writers often have difficulties with reality, usually with its most basic aspects. Reality doesn’t value any of us as much as we valued ourselves as young children, and this is especially painful to wordsmiths. Most of us utilize creativity in verbal and non-verbal ways to solve the problems and conflicts of everyday life, but we don’t give ourselves the title of ‘artist’. It is frustrating to the grandiosity and narcissism of the infant to discover there are differences—of strength, intelligence, power and fortune. Perhaps the most difficult blow to a young person’s self centeredness is the realization that other people exist and that there are differences between the sexes and the generations. To future wordsmiths this is especially painful so they set about creating verbal pictures of worlds where such differences don’t exist. Some like the Marquis de Sade transgress the incest taboo and the boundaries between the generations. Some write novels in which men and women change sex. Many create worlds in which superior verbal wit prevails, or nonaggressive goodness triumphs.

Non-fiction wordsmiths develop ideologies which emphasize the unfairness of Capitalist democracies wherein differences of sex, intelligence, talent and looks are acknowledged and welcomed. The Freudo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse attacked the institution of the family as the transmitter of oppressive capitalist morality with its emphasis on competition and striving for success. Most importantly, the unhappy wordsmiths of childhood think it unfair that they don’t reap the rewards of the active doers, the ones who grapple with differences and derive pleasure from them. Most feel undervalued in the real world, as measured against their own self-assessment.

To return to my patient and that unasked question. I think I have the answer now. Utopians are nostalgic not for anything real, but for a fantasy, a garden of Eden in which painful differences of talent, looks, fortune, do not exist, an egalitarian paradise where sexual and aggressive conflicts don't exist and all problems are solvable with words. As long as human beings feel injured by their very condition, their own mortality, their own vulnerability, as long as reality includes blows to one’s sense of childhood grandiosity and entitlement, the fantasy of socialist paradise will persist.

We can easily understand now, why there is such an alliance between leftists and Islamists. Both are in the grip of nostalgia for a world that never really existed. Both yearn for a fantasied perfect world they were forced out of long ago. Left-liberal wordsmith intellectuals, having been good little boys and girls, are terrified and fascinated by aggression and ready to submit when the head choppers come calling. They secretly admire their willingness to blow up the world to bring about utopia. Why the alliance between leftists and Islamists? Like good little masochists, the left utopians are prepared to submit to the unconstrained sadism of the Islamists. Each group has severe difficulties coping with the basic facts of reality, that there are two sexes. Liberals seek to contain the threat by denying the differences; Islamists try to contain the same threat by controlling and enslaving women. In truth, both groups seek to overcome their fear of sexual difference by returning to a mythic time, a womb-like fantasy, before differentiation existed. This is why they can't tolerate differing views on any important issues. Difference itself is an unacceptable part of the real world. Both Muslims and leftists are harshly intolerant of differing views, clearly because such views deeply threaten their belief systems.

While wordsmith intellectuals control much of the media, universities, entertainment industry, they are outnumbered by adults dealing with the real world. They can do much damage, for as Churchill once said: “The worst difficulties from which we suffer...come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage earners, they come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.”

Fortunately there are vast numbers of citizens, living outside of Hollywood and the Upper West Side of Manhattan who are not intimidated by their supposed intellectual betters. I personally believe that, like my Russian emigre patient, the 'wage earners' deeply and patriotically love this country and will resist the siren call of utopia.

September 21, 2007

A QUESTION FOR LEE BOLLINGER

AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?
--Genesis 4:9
Apparently not, if you're the President of Wahabbi (Columbia) University
        Suppose you knew that someone wanted to kill you, your spouse, your children and all of your relatives, and that he was stockpiling weapons to do so. Suppose he had gunned down two of your children and was developing weapons that would eliminate you and your descendants forever. Would you invite him to your house to debate his views? Would you ask your surviving children to listen attentively and respectfully. Lee Bollinger would. He is an example of the cowardice of wordsmith intellectuals who would rather talk than fight. Meanwhile, the young men and women who are fighting Ahmadinejad on his behalf are unwelcome at the Madrassa on Morningside Heights.

August 18, 2007

COURAGE AND COWARDICE: THE CASE OF WORDSMITH INTELLECTUALS

“...there must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words…I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace..” (our emphasis)
---Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad

        When Horsefeathers served as a Navy psychiatrist during the Vietnam war, one of his weekly duties was interviewing and assessing potential draftees who were seeking to avoid service by claiming mental illness. Many of these were recent Ivy League graduates, students of the humanities, who were active protesters of what they insisted was an immoral war. They thought of themselves as idealists. Yet they were not principled conscientious objectors. Instead, they were glib, had read up on symptoms of psychosis, and could feign the manifest behavior of any disqualifying syndrome—including homosexuality. Their efforts to dissemble were usually rather obvious. They were predicated on the arrogant assumption that they were smarter than any military psychiatrist. Once it was pointed out to them that if they avoided the draft, someone else, less educated and less favored by fortune would go in their place, they quickly revealed their true motivation: fear. I realized I was observing cowardice masquerading as idealism. These young men would do anything to avoid the risk of fighting and dying for their country. I then would return to my hospital responsibilities, working with wounded vets. These were not glib wordsmiths. It took real effort to get them to talk about their experiences. They didn’t think of their courage in battle as anything special. When they did talk about it, they often worried that they’d let down their comrades. The contrast with would be draft evaders was striking. There was absolutely none of the self preoccupation of the Ivy Leaguers. Instead these were men who had done deeds, fought battles, rescued other wounded platoon members, risked their lives. They readily acknowledged having been afraid, and many paid a high emotional price. They felt fear, but unlike our Ivy Leaguers, the force that propelled them was courage, not cowardice.
        Over many years of clinical observation, Horsefeathers has repeatedly confirmed the truth of Wordsworth's observation that "the child is father of the man". So who were these wordsmith cowards as children? In his great essay Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, Robert Nozick pointed out that wordsmith intellectuals—writers, journalists, liberal arts professors, film makers, television pundits—had frequently been children who achieved success in school, based on their verbal skills. They were rewarded with elite status within the school system. As adults, however, they were not similarly rewarded. Capitalism rarely gives its greatest rewards to the verbally skilled. Nozick tried to sort out the puzzle, and concluded that it is our educational system, where, as he put it: “…To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards. The wider market society, however, teaches a different lesson. The greatest rewards do not automatically go to the verbally brightest. Verbal skills are not most highly valued... Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?...The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. “ As Eric Hoffer succinctly put it: "Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words."
        Nozick also observed that there is a childhood forerunner to Capitalism—the world of the playground. There, verbal intellect is far less important than action. On the playground aggression is as important as intellect. Being able to utilize aggression in the service of solving problems produces leaders not designated by authority figures, but by one’s peers. Physical courage is valued highly. Cowards are mocked and shunned as "scaredy cats". Willingness to fight for oneself, without appealing to authority becomes a measure of status. It also provides real world lessons in human nature.
        Horsefeathers recalls trading blows to gain sufficient respect to be included in pick up schoolyard games. He recalls a classmate, an Irish Catholic boy, admired for his basketball skills, joining his fight against the anti-semites and insisting that anyone who could sink jump shots from 25 feet out could play on his team, even if he was a Jew. It took a few bloodied noses but the matter was finally settled. Gerry Paulson was our schoolyard Patton. In that freewheeling world of the schoolyard, the good little girls, and physically timid boys who craved teacher’s praise were at a disadvantage. The schoolroom was their utopia, where physical aggression was banned and all problems had a verbal solution. Girls are usually more verbally adept in the early childhood years and gain surplus praise from teachers. In addition, such children, including boys who crave teacher's approval, receive moral approbation for being “good” while aggression is, “bad”. Hence the future wordsmith intellectual grows up feeling smarter, morally superior, a caring idealist.
        These self flattering views carry over to adulthood, and shape the future wordsmith intellectuals’ political views. If words can resolve all conflicts, then wordsmiths are exceedingly important. If conflicts within and between human beings can be “resolved” with words, then who better to play the role of saviour than the wordsmith intellectual? After all, didn't those days spent at Model UN meetings work out well?
        In fact, one of the central features of utopian politics, explaining its appeal to intellectuals, is the promise that conflict can be abolished and human nature fundamentally changed. Whether Communism, Nazism or Islamism, the aim is a unified, submissive, happy mankind led by an elite in possession of the truth, just like Miss Murphy when she taught 6th grade. Aggression will then vanish when egalitarian paradise prevails. Since that happy day never arrives, scapegoats are needed to explain the failure of utopia. Usually it’s the Jews, but it can be other ‘infidels’ as well. Thus the wordsmith intellectual can rationalize mass murder by a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot or Ahmadinejad, vicariously discharging his own repressed violent aggression, while still holding fast to an idealized self image.
        Nozick’s explanation for wordsmith intellectuals’ opposition to Capitalism is an important first order explanation, but it doesn’t go deeply enough into the psychology of intellectuals. Capitalism embraces competition and competition requires utilization of aggression. Profound fear of aggression and the concomitant dislike of action to solve problems, constitutes the underlying reason for the loathing of capitalism. The schoolroom is a model for intellectual utopia. Utopia is, above all, a conflict free zone wherein no one is aggrieved. Whatever social problems exist can be talked out. Intellectuals and their verbal skills can show the way to harmony and peace. Having avoided aggression at an early age, these wordsmiths never learned Patton’s lessons in courage. Cowardice is therefore the reaction that comes most readily in situations of danger.
        As a psychoanalyst Horsefeathers belongs to a wordsmith profession, thus has a closeup view of its practitioners. They are overwhelmingly left in their politics and tend to think words are the answer to all serious problems. Their faith in the power of words to ‘resolve conflict’ is almost absolute. When psychoanalysis came to America it shed its European pessimism about human nature in adapting to New world optimism. Therapy changed its goals from Freud’s limited aim of converting misery into ordinary human unhappiness. It decided, in the cant phrase that rules to this day, that mental “conflict can be resolved”, i.e. done away with, and blissful happiness can then prevail. This became the task of individual psychotherapy—to resolve intrapsychic conflict, and then was extended to include group social conflicts. We are drowning in a therapeutic culture, saturated by a fantasy version of human nature in stark contradiction to the original psychoanalytic view, a view much closer to the stoics, and St. Augustine, than to Deepak Chopra. Unfortunately for the adherents of the therapeutic culture, conflict can never be ‘resolved’,and they are doomed to disappointment. Never mind, there will be another self help guru next week. The human mind, however, is in conflict as long as it is alive. Conflict between wishes, fears, moral prohibitions, and demands of reality never go away. The ways of handling conflict can change, with very hard and prolonged work, but that is a far more modest and realistic goal than the utopian one of transforming human nature implicit in the notion that mental conflict can be resolved. Changing entire societies is even more difficult. Contemporary psychotherapists, like other wordsmith intellectuals endorse a Rousseau-ian ideal of human nature: innocent children are victimized by their parents, who are unwitting transmitters of Capitalism's oppressive values to their offspring.
        Many fine and noble efforts have been made to awaken the Western world to the mortal threat posed to its moral foundations and its very existence by militant Islam. The openly declared intentions of the enemies of Western civilization, accompanied by their daily deeds of mayhem would seem to be enough to awaken us. Testimony by its former adherents, like the brave Ayaan Hirsi Ali should sound an alarm that would wake the deepest sleeper. Yet many in the Western world remain in a sound, politically correct, post-modern sleep. Why is this? When evidence is ignored, when savagery is blamed on provocation by its victims, when a Jew hating death cult is described as a religion of peace, when media and governing elites see little difference between the firemen and the fire, there must be non-rational forces at play. Horsefeathers suggests that rational discussion doesn’t always work because fear is great, terror has worked on many, and amongst the wordsmith elite, for reasons we have elucidated, cowardice is the usual response.
        Fear is, of course a universal response to danger. How a person handles fear varies widely, depending on early development. George Patton, in his famous D-Day speech said; “.. every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.”
        Fortunately, wordsmith intellectuals are not the majority of Americans. If you took the New York Times, our Ivy League faculties and the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis as representative of the country, you would conclude we are a nation of castrati. We think that they are nevertheless the minority, their screeching volubility notwithstanding. I find it comforting, when the caterwauling of the left becomes deafening, to think of them as "the insects of the hour", in Edmund Burke's phrase. He wrote: "Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."
        Rarely does one find a Churchill or a Patton, men of action who also are wordsmiths. It is unlikely that one will appear again, so we will have to get through this war in defense of civilization by setting an example of courage and hoping that a few of the wordsmith intellectuals will be shamed into silence. After all, as Patton remarked: "...Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American..."

July 07, 2007

THE RELIGION OF DANGEROUS FOOLS: ENVIRONMENTALISM

        Christopher Hitchens's diatribe vs. religion revealed more about its author than about the subject. (see below for Dr. Kramer's review of God Is Not Great). Hitchens was a left utopian for many years. Having lately abandoned that Godless religion, he has made a religion out of Godlessness, and substituted a shallow scientism as the one true faith. We predict the next stop in his odyssey will be environmentalism, After all, environmentalism claims to be scientific, just as old leftists believed in 'scientific socialism'. Hitchens, like Gore, has probably never spent time in a laboratory, and never learned the basics of the scientific method. Hitchens at least has learned to think critically,in the manner of skilled debater. Gore has cultivated the skills of a politician--grandiosity and deceifulness, along with monumental personal hypocrisy. His preachings are daily contradicted by his profligate energy lifestyle. Obviously, wordsmith skills don't exempt anyone from the vicissitudes of human nature with its capacity for self delusion and hypocrisy.
        While Western societies may be turning away from traditional religions, with church and synagogue attendance in steep decline, we can see the outlines of an emerging feel-good faith--environmentalism. Today's leading, self-described 'preacher' is Al Gore. He is a man, by upbringing, so self flattering as to believe he is in a position to hector us about our sinful environmental ways, and to warn us of the terrible fate awaiting the damned who fail to heed him. Implicit in Gore's ravings is a foolishly utopian fantasy that human beings can achieve omnipotent control over nature and live happily ever after. His utterly vacuous misunderstanding of the nature of science makes us grateful that he wasn't around when the phlogiston theory of combustion was the 'consensus' scientific view. Surely he would have railed against Lavoisier for being a demented critic who refused to accept what was clear to all.
        Bjorn Lomborg is a critic of religious environmentalism, who has attempted to use reason and logic, for which he has been demonized because all utopian fantasies require a scapegoat for their own failures. On the occasion of today's earth day concerts he raises the matter of priorities. The money spent in pursuit of the goals set by the Kyoto protocols is money not spent on other things. What is the relative benefit of such choices? This seems a fair question, if one were dealing with rational matters, rather than wishful fantasies. Lomborg writes: "...When we look at the evidence, we discover again and again that the best solutions to the world's biggest challenges aren't the ones we hear about the most. We could save many more lives during extreme weather events, for example, by insisting on hurricane-resistant building standards than we would by committing to Live Earth's target of a 90 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. This would be easier, much less costly, and ultimately do far more good. Indeed, the Copenhagen Consensus experts discovered that for every dollar invested in Kyoto-style battling climate change, we could do up to 120 times more good with in numerous other areas..."
Read the rest here.

May 25, 2007

MEMORIAL DAY: LEST WE FORGET

May 05, 2007

JEWISH GENIUS? WHERE HAS IT GONE?

        Recently Commentary Magazine published a fact filled sociological piece by Charles Murray, telling readers about Jewish genius and seeking to explain the origins of their intellectual superiority. Such flattering essays are bound to invite an identification, by even the least intelligent Jew, with the greats of Jewish history. It stirs ethnic pride. We're all related to Einstein, aren't we, and to all those great scientists who keep winning disproportionate numbers of Nobel prizes? If only we'd paid a little more attention to advanced calculus, no doubt we too could have captured the Prize.
        The trouble is, for those of us who care to look around, it's exceedingly hard to find evidence of this vaunted Jewish intelligence outside of a research laboratory. In fact, it is Horsefeathers' admittedly subjective impression that the collective Jewish IQ worldwide is declining at a rate of approximately 1 point per year. Apart from the mind boggling ineptitude of Israel's governing class, there is the idiotic widespread political utopianism indicating an appalling stupidity about the lessons of history. Of what consequence all those Nobel prizes if Jews are too stupid to recognize an existential threat staring them in the face? Wasn't one holocaust enough for Jews to grasp the simple fact that enemies wishing to destroy them mean what they say and need to be confronted? And what of American Jewry? How much evidence of intelligence is to be found in their lock step support for the party of Jimmy Carter, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, John Conyers, and George Soros? Do they not understand that part of the dogma of contemporary Liberalism is anti-Zionism, the delegitimization of Israel? Apparently they don't possess that kind of common sense intelligence.
        A particularly shocking example of the decline of Jewish genius is the transformation of Columbia University into the Morningside Madrassa. Since the post World War II years, Columbia has been educating many young New York Jews, often children of immigrants. Having grown up in the Bronx, in a mostly Irish, Italian neighborhood, I arrived at Columbia and quickly discovered a quality of mind I hadn't known previously. My smartest classmates were a group of brilliant Jews from high schools in Brooklyn, like Tilden, Erasmus Hall, Brooklyn Tech, and Midwood. Having finally opened its doors to Jews, many came from Brooklyn. Columbia entered an age of greatness that truly induced pride in its graduates. No wonder Jewish graduates were eager to send their children to their alma mater. Who could have foreseen the coming transformation of Columbia into what it has become, a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda? Who knew that one of Lionel Trilling's proteges, Edward Said would open the way for Western hating 'activist' scholars? And yet, now that it is obvious, why is there so little protest from the alumni? Why do Jewish parents continue to fork out upwards of $40,000/year to such an institution? The latest outrage is reported on by Candace de Russy who describes one of Barnard's leading PoMo scholars, Nadia El-Haj, a cultural anthropologist now up for tenure. And what is the thrust of El Haj's work? It seeks to undermine the historical connection of Jews to the Land of Israel, by "deconstructing" the work of archaelogists who have unearthed evidence of the historic presence of Jews on the land, long before Islam existed. For El-Haj, there is no such thing as scientific truth, only "narratives" in service to political or economic interests. The Israeli 'narrative' is designed to sustain brutal imperialist oppression of Muslims. See the entire article here.
        What Jews need now is not flattery about their vaunted intelligence but a reminder of their self destructive stupidity. Sometimes, when survival is at stake intellect needs to be devoted to the arts of war, including the war of ideas.

April 25, 2007

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE THERAPEUTIC CULTURE: THIRTY-THREE DEAD

Many years ago—before the sixties, when activist reformers discovered the notion that mentally ill patients were an oppressed people, like Negroes (as Blacks preferred to be called then), women, and homosexuals (as Gay men were identified then), and decided that they must be set free from their sadistic doctors and nurses (deinstitutionalized) in order to become independent (homeless)—I was a resident physician studying psychiatry at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.

As first-year residents, I and my colleagues spent many long and interesting hours in the admitting office seeing hundreds of men and women like Mr. Cho, the psychotic killer at Virginia Tech, to determine whether they were an imminent danger to themselves or others. The admitting office was the point of triage in the hospital. Because the hospital was designed to hold 350 patients and our usual daily census was about 700, the critical clinical decision to be made in that office was whether the patient needed to be admitted for further study and treatment.

On a summer Saturday night the two or three residents on duty there might see a hundred or more patients between ten p.m. and one a.m., so we didn’t have much time to waste.
Almost every patient was brought in by a pair of policemen, and on a hot weekend night there were as many as forty or fifty policemen milling about in the waiting room. One of the things I discovered quickly was that it wasn’t easy to get sent to our admitting office. In a tough and apathetic city like New York you really had to behave in an extreme or bizarre manner to get a New York city cop, who, they like to say, has seen everything, to escort a patient to the Bellevue admitting office. And I found out that their clinical judgment was pretty sharp. It was rare that a patient escorted by a policeman was not admitted.

Usually I’d see the patient alone and perform what is called the Mental Status Examination, which assesses all of the patient’s mental functioning. Usually, the exam revealed quickly that the patient’s everyday judgment was so impaired—was so out of touch with reality—that he was a candidate for admission.

But there were occasions when it was difficult to tell the degree of impaired reality testing and this required a report of the patient’s recent behavior. And since the only sources available were the patient and the policeman who brought him I would have to call in the policeman. Sometimes the cop would not know anything but sketchy and unreliable information. At other times he would wearily pull out his black leather notebook and start to report extensive descriptions of the patient’s behavior, which the patient was reluctant to share but would more or less acknowledge when he was confronted.

The patients who were most reluctant to share their thoughts with me and who were most evasive about the details of their everyday life were patients like Cho—seriously paranoid: they knew that their thinking was weird or bizarre and they didn’t want others to know. But their evasiveness gave them away and usually I would admit such individuals. At first, when I was new to the work, I felt that I was on shaky ground and worried about such admissions. But after a number of them I discovered that the patterns of mental functioning are extremely reliable, and that if a patient behaves evasively and is uncommunicative about himself, there is usually a good reason. After admitting such cases I would follow up by speaking to their families and their friends—if they had any— and inevitably found that there was evidence of much psychotic behavior during the recent and distant past.

Common sense is one of the rarest of commodities these days. And it has been made rarer by the gradual transformation of our society, in the past half century, into a “therapeutic culture.” There does not seem to be right or wrong anymore, no good or bad behavior, no problems that cannot be cured, no complications that cannot be solved, no flaws that cannot be removed, and no flawed people who cannot be made perfect. Freud cannot be blamed for all of this; after all, he warned that all that psychoanalysis could do at best was to change neurotic misery into everyday unhappiness. It was those social reformers who came after him, in the twenties and thirties, who took his ideas and ran with them, too far, too fast, and with too much arrogance. Philosophers like John Dewey, progressive educators, the Child Guidance Movement, and social work schools.

Unfortunately, the dynamics of the therapeutic culture were at work at Virginia Tech during the last couple of years and have contributed to the deaths of thirty-three people. Benedict Carey, a New York Times writer, describes these dynamics: “Seung-Hui Cho seemed indifferent to every small act of human kindness, any effort to connect. According to classmates of Mr. Cho…one student made several attempts to speak to him, even after reading his frightening writings. Mr. Cho’s suitemates, and some teachers, too, made an effort to engage him. And there were undoubtedly others. Maybe they signaled their openness with a slight nod, a friendly widening of the eyes. Those acts of genuine decency failed to prevent Mr. Cho’s rampage on Monday.” Why? The unintended consequences of the therapeutic culture.

The three basic values of the therapeutic culture are tolerance of aberrant behavior, a non-judgmental attitude, and a sense of understanding for the suffering patient. This is what Cho was being offered by the community at Virginia Tech. Their response goes against the commonest of common sense and only served to protect Cho’s illness from being acknowledged, diagnosed and treated. It only enabled him only to continue his psychotic existence and get worse.
During his last two years at Virginia Tech there is no doubt that he was severely, psychotically ill. What is the evidence?

First and foremost he isolated himself socially almost completely. He had no friends at all and permitted little or no communication with anyone. This in itself is characteristic of psychosis. The individual doesn’t realize how bizarre such behavior appears to others. But when he does communicate his thinking is also strange and dominated by unrealistic ideas. In his junior year, Mr. Cho told his then-roommates that he had a girlfriend named Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer space and traveled by spaceship.

In that same year his roommates mostly ignored him because he was so withdrawn. If he said something, it was weird. During Thanksgiving break, Mr. Cho called his roommate to report that he was vacationing in North Carolina with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

In class, he sat hunched behind sunglasses with a baseball cap yanked tight over his head. Sometimes he introduced himself as “Question Mark,” saying it was the persona of a man who lived on Mars and journeyed to Jupiter.

In a poetry class in his junior year, women said he would snap pictures of them with his cellphone beneath his desk. Several stopped coming to class.

English teachers were disturbed by his angry writings and oddness. According to the New York Times, “Lucinda Roy, then head of the English Department at Virginia Tech, began to tutor him privately. She, too, was unnerved. She brought him to the attention of the counseling service and the campus police because she thought he was so miserable he might kill himself.”

Even his classmates sensed his underlying psychosis. One of them said that after he finished reading one of Cho’s weird plays one night, he turned to his roommate and said, “This is the kind of guy who is going to walk into a classroom and start shooting people.”

Late in 2005 he became fixated on several real female students. Two of them complained to the police that he was calling them, showing up at their rooms and bombarding them with instant messages. After the second complaint against him in December 2005, the police came by and told him to stop.

A few hours after they left, the New York Times reports, “…he sent an instant message to one of his roommates suggesting he might as well kill himself.”

All of this added up to an individual who was significantly out of touch with reality. Like most psychotic people he was a quiet “loner” who avoided social relations, afraid of other people finding out how fantastic his thoughts were. The point is that he should have been under psychiatric care and close observation at least from December of 2005. That he was not is partly the result of the dominant attitude at Virgina Tech and most other schools—the therapeutic culture’s requirement that bizarrely behaving students be “tolerated,” handled with kid gloves, and that the offending behavior be treated as though it does not exist—pretending that there is no elephant in the room. Unfortunately, the laws enacted since the seventies protect this state of things. A school may not suspend or expel a student with mental illness who is or becomes psychotic—more absence of common sense. And further, the school may not share any information about the student and his aberrant behavior with anyone, even if such information might be helpful in the patient’s treatment.

This is what happened in Cho’s case. After he threatened suicide the campus police were called, and Mr. Cho was sent to an off-campus mental health facility. After a counselor recommended involuntary commitment, a judge signed an order deeming him a danger and he was sent for evaluation to Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford, Va. A doctor there wrote a cursory report: “Oriented X4. Affect is flat. Mood is depressed. He denies suicidal ideation. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor who wrote that Cho had normal judgment and insight—insight in this case meaning the capacity to understand how sick he was—was either quite inexperienced or incompetent if he could not see what so many of Cho’s classmates and teachers could see. In any case if the examining psychiatrist had been informed that Cho had been behaving in ways that suggested that his reality testing and judgment were impaired, he might have required that the patient spend a couple of weeks being observed on an inpatient unit. While there the degree of his psychopathology would have been ascertained and realistic treatment plans might have been formulated.

But the system failed Cho and the University. And although the judge ordered him to undergo outpatient treatment, as far as we know he never even tried and thirty-three people died.
The forces that can be unleashed in severe mental illness—psychosis—are very powerful. And of course it is a mistake to focus on Cho’s guns. As his videos show he could have killed with a hammer, or a hunting knife, and he could have become a serial killer with these. The gun was only more effective and dramatic. Psychotic killers can use anything as a weapon. A distraught mother can kill her five children by drowning them in a river or the bathtub. Or he could have become a “Unabomber” like Theodore Kaczynski, another psychotic loner whose final score was 3 killed and 23 mutilated.

The most important thing is to see aberrant behavior realistically as a sign of a possible psychosis and deal with it realistically—not tolerate it as an aspect of the individual’s “creativity”or politely ascribe it to simple shyness, in accord with the attitudes of the therapeutic culture.

The attitudes and techniques of the therapeutic culture—non-judgmental toward behavior (moral neutrality), empathic, understanding—have only one useful and proper place—a treatment venue: a consulting room or hospital. There is no place for these in schools or in any other life situations. Their use outside of clinical situations can only result in a perversion of normal guidelines for social behavior, confusion for teachers and students, and ultimately resentment and mischief.

These attitudes and the clinical techniques based on them emerged out of the practice of psychoanalysis in the early part of the century to deal with clinical problems unique to analysis but with no other application outside of analytic therapy. This came to be misunderstood by those who fell under the influence of psychoanalysis either as patients or students in schools of education and social work. Aping their analysts or teachers, they came to believe that these attitudes were in and of themselves therapeutic. And over the years these misunderstandings have gained ground and replaced reality—and common sense—as the guiding principles of education and social work.

It would be highly desirable to change the laws that stress the “civil rights” of the mentally ill in schools and that encourage the view that the privacy of the mentally ill individual trumps his health and well-being to laws that support early recognition of severe mental illness so that he may be helped to treatment and management of his psychosis in a timely way, and prevented from doing serious harm to the innocent.

April 14, 2007

COURAGE AND COWARDICE: THE CASE OF DON IMUS

        While the pundits and politicians continue a second week of thumbsucking, self-flattering moralising, Horsefeathers awards its Samuel Johnson prize for intellectual courage to Jason Whitlock.

        The Sound of Silence prize for cowardice must be shared by many of Imus's liberal friends, including John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Harold Ford, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert and others. Next time the Jihadis come at us, you don't want them in the foxhole next to you.

April 12, 2007

THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM: IMUS AND SHARPTON

        Horsefeathers' combined 80+ years of clinical observation make us aware of how difficult, how really difficult it is to believe in the actual reality of other people, that they have their own unique individuality and don’t exist only in relation to oneself and one’s own needs. Childhood narcissism takes years to overcome. It’s quite a blow to realize that the world exists and has existed comfortably for quite a while without you in it. Most of us find some benefit in relinquishing that childhood stance, even if only partially. Doing so, however can lead to a respect for other individuals, their needs and rights and to actual, real relationships. Some cannot; for them Liberalism is the perfect ideology.
        Horsefeathers remembers when Liberalism was a philosophy that protected freedom of thought, defended individual rights and stood for the uniqueness of each individual. Contemporary Liberalism, however, views the individual not in his or her uniqueness, but rather as a member of a group---race, class, ethnicity, religion. The absurd hypocrisies in the Imus flap make sense if the man is regarded as representative of a particular group-- white, patriarchal, racist, males. Who cares if the actual man has done more for young black children, their health and well being than Al Sharpton has ever done? Who cares that he’s raised large sums of money for autism research, that he and his wife personally run a ranch for kids with cancer where they can have fun and find some relief from their disease? Who cares if he raised money for medical care for war wounded? Who cares if he apologized for offending the Rutgers women?
        Personally, Horsefeathers switched Imus off a few years ago when he began acting like a mouthpiece for the Democratic party, calling Dick Cheney a murderer and constantly bashing the President in a time of war. It was all permeated by condescension, and it wasn’t funny. When his producer Bernard McGuirk weighed in with repeated assertions that the neo-Con Jews had taken us to war for the benefit of Israel, Horsefeathers permanently switched to his i-Pod. Yet the current spectacle of Al Sharpton as judge and jury, the same Al Sharpton who is responsible for actual deaths of people at the hands of his Jew hating followers, is too rich. When did he and Jesse Jackson get themselves anointed arbiters of racial justice? Was it after Jackson’s multiple anti-semitic remarks, like his description of New York as ‘hymietown’? We’re not shedding any tears for Imus, who has, in our opinion done far too much groveling before these race baiting shakedown artists. One apology to the Rutgers girls would have been enough. Especially irksome is Imus’s attempts to insist that he’s a good liberal, not a crazy right winger. Strange, the most blatant racists are liberals who view everything under the aspect of black victimhood and white racism.
        Meanwhile, as Imus falls all over himself apologizing over and over for his insulting words, who will apologize to the Duke Lacrosse players for the far worse trauma they endured than the Rutgers’ basketball players? Will Jackson and Sharpton apologize for endorsing the lying accusations of a black woman? Will Selena Roberts, the New York Times sports writer, cum sociologist, apologize for hurling around charges of racism, sexism, and white privilege, while suggesting that actual innocence would not purge the deep sickness of white racism made manifest by the Duke scandal? And how about the courageous Duke administration and faculty, who eagerly leapt—not to the defense of their own customers, the students—but to the defense of a lying accuser who proclaimed her black female victimhood? Will they apologize to the lacrosse coach they eagerly dumped overboard? Will the craven, politically correct President of Duke resign? Don’t hold your breath, because, you see, Liberals are not interested in the lives of actual real individuals—the young student athletes and their families, nor even the real life of the accuser. Instead these politically correct race hustlers and self-flatterers choose to lump individual human beings into pre-formed templates. They employ a “narrative” in place of factual truth, thanks to their ‘education’ as good PoMos. The narrative is about Amerika, a country poisoned by racism, sexism and capitalism. As the evidence against the lacrosse team emerged and collapsed in all its flimsiness, Roberts deplored the temptation to view the athletes as innocent; they were, after all, part of a larger system, college sports, sexist values, white racism, capitalism, etc. so even if the evidence supported the athletes’ story, that mattered less than that they were part of a racist, sexist culture. The accuser was also not seen as an individual, but rather a member of a victim class. That worked for Tawana Brawley and we expect the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson to continue working the strategy even after the case has been dismissed. Watch to see the various Liberal politicians condemn Don Imus while empathizing with the poor black woman who tried to destroy the lives of ‘white men of privilege’. Liberalism means never having to admit you're wrong because you're heart is with the oppressed.

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