January 5 , 2005
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from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" by Susanna Clarke
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Posted at 04:00 EST
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"...everybody knows there is a world of difference between country servants and London servants. It is not a matter of duties exactly. Servants must cook and clean and fetch and carry in Northamptonshire just as in London. No, the distinction lies more in the manner in which those duties are carried out. Say a country squire in Northamptonshire visits his neighbor. The visit over, the footman fetches the squire's greatcoat and helps the squire on with it. While he is doing so it is only natural for the footman to inquire respectfully after the squire's wife. The squire is not in the least offended and responds with some inquiries of his own. Perhaps the squire has heard that the footman's grandmother fell over and hurt herself while cutting cabbages in her garden and he wishes to know if she is recovered. The squire and the footman inhabit a very small world and have known each other from childhood. But in London this will never do. A London footman must not address his master's guests. He must look as if he did not know there were such things as grandmothers and cabbages in the world." |
December 25 , 2004
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Luke 2, 1-20
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Posted at 03:00 EST
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"And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child. So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: 'Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!' So it was, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, that the shepherds said to one another, 'Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.' And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger. Now when they had seen Him, they made widely
known the saying which was told them concerning this Child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them." |
December 13 , 2004
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from "In Defense of the Worship of Babies by GK Chesterton
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Posted at 06:00 EST
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The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. . .
The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
. . . If we could see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. . . We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found - [the one] on which we were born. But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. . . [and] that attitude towards children is right. It is our attitude towards grown up people that is wrong. . .
Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect; [we reverence, love, fear and forgive them.] We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. . . If we treated all grown-up persons with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat [the limitations of an infant, accepting their blunders, delighted at all their faltering attempts, marveling at their small accomplishments], we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. . .
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel oursleves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to been through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small. . . we feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that [God] might feel. . .
But [it is] the humorous look of children [that] is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the cosmos together. . . [They] give us the most perfect hint of the humor that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.
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December 5 , 2004
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from Culling from Among the Mediocre in Hollywood by VD Hanson
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Posted at 01:30 EST
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Well, I thought it was simply terrible. The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed were the central issues of his life. Did he really believe in a unity of mankind, and were his mass mixed marriages, Persian dress, and kowtowing cynical, sincere, or delusions of megalomania? We see nothing of the siege of Tyre, Gaza, much less Thebes or even the burning of Persepolis. Other than the talking head Ptolemy, none of his generals have much of a character. There is nothing really in detail about the page purging other than a single reference; Stone, I would have thought, could have had a field day with Alexander’s introduction of both crucifixion and decimation.
The Gedrosian desert gets a few seconds. And what was the elephant scene in the jungle? Was that supposed to be dirty fighting in India, or the battle at the Hydaspes—which in fact was a brilliant Macedonian victory? The elephants were visually good, but without context or significance. So since Stone omitted the controversial and key issues of Alexander’s career, what do we get instead for at least over two thirds of the movie? Mostly sit-com drama, with gay and bi- subplots, in various bedrooms and banquet halls. Olympias was something out of a teen-aged vampire movie, not the sophisticated and conniving royal we read about in the sources. It is the old Dallas or Falcon Crest glossy pulp in Macedonian drag. Stone’s Alexander is a pouty, wimpy bore; the real figure, whatever your thoughts on him, was a killer and a fearful man of action. Gladiator’s Maximus was a far more engaging and forceful character—and that was a far better film as well.
There is also irony here. If we remember the embarrassing Troy, we are beginning to see, that all for all the protestations of artistic excellence and craftsmanship, Hollywood has become mostly a place of mediocrity, talentless actors and writers who spout off about politics in lieu of having any real accomplishment in their own field. I’ve heard so many inane things mouthed by Stone that I would like someone at last to address this question—why would supposedly smart insiders turn over $160 million to someone of such meager talent to make such an embarrassing film? Alexander the Great is third-rate Cecil B. Demille in drag.
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November 5 , 2004
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from Interpreting the Returns of Election of '04 by Bruce Thornton
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Posted at 05:00 EST
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Now that, as Hank Williams might put it, it's all over but the Democrats' crying, what are some preliminary conclusions we can draw from this election?
The most obvious is that the Democrats are increasingly out of touch with the majority of Americans. Sure, over 50 million Americans voted for Kerry, but that was to be expected given the combination of a nasty guerilla war in Iraq and the irrational hatred of George Bush stoked by the lingering resentment over the 2000 election and the antics of partisan clowns like Michael Moore and Dan Rather. If not for those factors, this election would've been a repeat of '72, '80, '84, and '88, other elections in which Republicans shellacked programmatic liberal Democrats.
Indeed, what is mystifying is that despite those previous debacles, and despite Bill Clinton's success at running as a moderate Republican, the Democrats once more put forward a Northeastern pacifist liberal, this time a rank opportunist who had jump-started his political career by slandering his fellow soldiers while they were still under fire in Vietnam, consorted in Paris with the enemy while still in uniform, and then spent 19 years in the Senate playing Costello to Teddy Kennedy's Abbot. The Democrats' penchant for picking losers reminds me of that fable about the frog that gives a scorpion a ride across a river. Halfway through the scorpion bites the frog, and then says as both drown, "It's my nature."
Once again the Democrats have loaded on their backs a poisonous candidate whose political nature is toxic to most Americans. The problem with the liberal elite and those who share their sensibility is that deep down they don't trust the average person. Liberals believe they alone possess some higher knowledge and superior insight lacking among all those church-going throwbacks with their quaint moral values and traditional ideals like patriotism, family, hard work and self-reliance. Instead, the elite believe, with all the fervor of the fundamentalist, that all those ideals are mere illusions (see Marx, Darwin, and Freud) and that government social technicians are better equipped to run things than the average Joe with his baggage of racism, sexism, homophobia, and addiction to fast-food, talk-radio and trashy television.
So when such a candidate and his minions talk to the people, despite donning populist garb--one particularly threadbare when it's worn by a Beacon Hill billionaire with five mansions--they can't help coming off as condescending and patronizing. And say what you will about the masses and their presumed oafish lack of subtlety, they do know when they're being talked down to. And they don't like it.
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October 31 , 2004
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How to Lose an Election by Victor Davis Hanson Pt. 4
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Posted at 02:00 EST
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Sixth, at first it seemed neat to welcome in the billions of George Soros and the hype of a Michael Moore. But not now. MoveOn.org is also beginning to grate. Even its slickest commercials come across as crass, and lacking in the populist themes of the graying and grimacing Swift-boat veterans' testimonies. Soros is an unhappy and often cruel character, and he reminds the voting public that all Kerry's cries about Halliburton and Enron fall flat when he is being subsidized with the millions made from international money speculation, which has caused such mayhem in financial markets. After all, nearly ruining the banks and pensions funds in England to make a billion dollars is not a very populist or even kind thing to do. At least Halliburton, unlike Soros and his gang of speculators, creates something real, and its employees risk their lives to build infrastructure for those desperately in need of it.
Nor was it wise to piggyback on Michael Moore's transient infamy, whose buffoonery is even more tiresome than Soros's machinations. He cannot finish a simple sentence without a barely audible grunt, obscenity, or "ya know" — even while he caricatures George Bush's diction as inelegant. His movies are increasingly discredited as crude propaganda, his books simple big-print screaming, full of factual errors and teenager logic. Moore also talks of populism, but gouges college students for $30,000 a rant — recently offering nothing more than foul language and aimless rambling, before kicking out C-Span cameras in worry that they might have captured his embarrassing nonperformance for millions of viewers. That he has figured prominently in the campaigns of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, was highlighted at the Democratic convention, and jets around for Kerry are all embarrassments — not support that any sane operative would wish. Everyone Michael Moore has ever endorsed has lost, and he should have been avoided like the kiss of political death he is. His supporters find him useful but only mildly amusing, while his detractors are vehement in their dislike and impart guilt by association to any who come within his toxic orbit. That his lecture fees, lifestyle, and gratuitous slurs are at odds with the old Democratic image of a Happy Warrior only accents the mistake of welcoming him into the fold.
So there you have it. Despite uncertain news here and abroad, the perception that Kerry won the debates, a skilled — and extremely vicious — campaign team, and the hefty subsidies of time and money from the arts, universities, media, and Hollywood, Kerry still cannot quite close the stubborn remaining gap of two to three points. How can he, when it was a mistake to nominate him in the first place, and a further mistake to add Edwards to the ticket? A Gephardt/Lieberman combination, or something reflecting such middle-of-the-road practicality and seriousness — scolding the president from the responsible right on tactical lapses in postwar Iraq — would never have gotten through the extremist primary and embarrassing Deanomania, but it might well have won the general election.
When this is all over, and George Bush is reelected — Republicans then controlling all branches of federal government, and most of the state legislatures and governorships — then, and only then, will Democrats grasp the march of folly in 2004, and either return to their roots or perish from increasing irrelevance. Meanwhile, George Bush, oblivious to the hysteria, will finish and win this war.
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October 30 , 2004
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How to Lose an Election by Victor Davis Hanson Pt. 3
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Posted at 01:30 EST
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Fourth, Kerry's hypocrisy is finally catching up to him. He talks of raising taxes on those who make over $200,000, but he should start with Teresa, who paid a rate far lower than most blue-collar families. A "man of the people" — and Kerry has cultivated such an unlikely image — simply doesn't windsurf off Nantucket during a war, or snarl at federal bodyguards while skiing at Sun Valley, or peddle around on fancy racing bikes clad in Spandex. Few believe his calls for sacrifice and frugality when he owns a $500,000 powerboat, and could have saved thousands of gallons of precious fuel by symbolically shutting down one of his many estates or parking the Gulf Stream in the hangar and flying first-class. The suspicions about the new Democratic party of multimillionaires such as Terry McAuliffe, George Soros, and Ted Kennedy are only enhanced when it nominates a billionaire to head the ticket.
Fifth, Teresa Heinz Kerry started off as something of a novelty. Then she was praised as being refreshingly candid. But now? I wager that even handlers are more likely to grimace when she lectures, since she has the apparent ability to lose the election in a single moment. She tosses around slurs such as "shove it" and "scumbag" promiscuously, makes accusations of "un-Americanism," and yet, unlike the spouses of Edwards, Bush, or Cheney, finds it difficult to exude even forced public affection for her second husband. Again, fairly or unfairly, her appearances almost reaffirm, rather than cast aside, the public's doubt that if Kerry was not a U.S. Senator and she not a billionaire, neither would have married each other — all a world away from the preferable American Gothic tandem of George and Laura. So despite her elegance, intelligence, wealth, and verve, Teresa Heinz Kerry throughout the campaign has proven to be a walking time bomb.
Mimicking Marie Antoinette, Ms. Heinz Kerry advises the hurricane refugees to go naked, asks who cares about Arizona, tosses out conspiracy theories about wars for oil and October surprises, and assures us that she counsels her husband on "everything" well outside women's issues — precisely what most of us suspected and thus feared. Add in her advice to "vote often," her praise in wartime for dissidents as the true patriots, and her earlier promises to tap her fortune if the campaign got rough and we are left with the image not of a kindhearted philanthropist (which she probably really is), but a headstrong, do-it-my-way heiress, using a deceased Republican's fortune to subsidize trendy Democratic causes while retaining the lifestyle of the true corporate capitalist. No wonder she will not release her full tax records. And when she sneered that Laura Bush's past librarianship was not really a job, she had not a clue that most Americans would consider toiling in the public schools a far more difficult — and more rewarding — task than being a hostess to a billionaire, with plenty of time to brush-up on boutique causes and gripes. All that might sound harsh and terribly one-sided, but it is the image that she, not the media, created with the American voters, and it too contributes to the public's uneasiness with Kerry.
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October 29 , 2004
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How to Lose an Election by Victor Davis Hanson Pt. 2
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Posted at 02:00 EST
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At least six reasons come to mind that have little to do with issues or substance, but everything to do with style, character, and judgment. First, he comes across, perhaps unfairly so, as an unfriendly sort. He seems to confirm to flyover America that the Ivy League East Coast is a cold place of holier-than-thou privileged reformers who live one life but advocate another. Kerry is a pleasant man, but he nevertheless presents himself as a ponderous aristocrat. His oratory, for all his undeniable mastery of facts and classical rhetorical tropes, is too often humorless, condescending, and pedantic. His photo opportunities that showcase hunting vests or windsurfing look forced, and they lack the natural ease of George Bush on the stump, twanging with his sleeves rolled up. Thus while Kerry does well in debates, he in some sense does not do well, since Americans feel he is either their smug professor or cranky grandfather, peeved that he had to descend from Olympus to impart knowledge to the less gifted. Somehow most would rather be wrong with Bush than right with Kerry.
Second, Democrats should have learned after the Dukakis implosion not to nominate a Massachusetts ultra-liberal. Past voting records, affinity with a wildly unpopular Ted Kennedy, and blinkered assumptions that the Harvard-Boston nexus is synonymous with America marginalize such candidates — as we are now seeing with Kerry, who ineptly fights off the liberal tag, tries to adopt populist mannerisms, and only with difficulty curbs his references to the world of New England high culture. JFK barely pulled it off, but then he was a widely celebrated and nearly disabled war hero, had a stylishly coy wife, and projected a certain vigor that captivated friend and foe alike.
Third, most of us don't like lawyers all that much, at least in the abstract when we are not in need of wills or defense counsel, or being sued. Yet the Democrats nominated two to lead their ticket. Lawyers' capital is their verbiage, but in wartime talk pales before action; and when a John Edwards hits the campaign trail, his glibness sounds mellifluous for the first minute, aggravating by the second, and unctuous, if not nauseating, the third. A friend remarked to me that he normally loves to listen to Carolina accents, but that Edwards has nearly cured him of that taste. The senator knows very little about medicine other than how to sue doctors, so when he promises mobility to quadriplegics we sense it is yet another of his canned courtroom performances designed to fool gullible juries. Next time nominate a businesswoman, general, or actor — anybody but two multimillionaire barristers. Quite simply, the Democrats forgot that their candidates must convince voters, not juries, and that good vocabularies and speaking cadences don't equate to consistent, commonsense toughness in the face of terrorists.
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October 28 , 2004
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How to Lose an Election by Victor Davis Hanson Pt. 1
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Posted at 01:00 EST
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There is a good chance that no matter what Kerry says or does in the final two weeks of this election — barring some major catastrophe in Iraq, a presidential gaffe, or massive voting irregularity — he will lose. And he may well take much of the Democrats' remaining control of government down with him. After all, Putin wants Bush, while Arafat prefers Kerry — and that is all we need to know. But besides the obvious concerns of national security and Kerry's own failure in any honest fashion to offer a coherent and principled alternative course of action to defeat the terrorists, there are more subtle, insidious factors at play that will, I think, preclude his election.
I thought John Kerry clearly won the first debate, lost the second, and did worse in the third. Most Americans, however, apparently disagreed, since many polls showed that respondents thought Kerry won all three. We hear of mayhem daily in Iraq; news on the economic front is mixed; and an entire host of surrogates has defamed George Bush in a manner not seen in decades during a political campaign. Why, then, does Kerry gain little traction, trail in most polls, and perhaps even start to slip further? After all, he is a hard campaigner, has a razor-sharp memory, speaks well, looks statesmanlike at times, raises lots of money, and has a mobilized base working hard for his election.
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October 25 , 2004
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from Lost in Place by Mark Salzman
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Posted at 10:00 EST
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When I was thirteen years old I saw my first kung fu movie, and before it ended I decided that the life of a wandering Zen monk was the life for me. I announced my willingness to leave East Ridge Junior High School immediately and give up all material things, but my parents did not share my enthusiasm. They made it clear that I was not to become a wandering Zen monk until I had finished high school. In the meantime I could practice kung fu and meditate down in the basement. So I immersed myself in the study of Chinese boxing and philosophy with the kind of dedication that is possible only when you don't yet have to make a living, when you are too young to drive, and when you don't have a girlfriend.
First I turned our basement into what I thought a Buddhist temple should look like. I shoved all of the junk to one side, marked off boundaries with candles and set up a shrine on a coffee table. I outfitted the shrine with objects from a cookware shop, the only store in town that carried Oriental gifts: a bamboo placemat, a package of chopsticks, a sake cup, which I turned into an incense burner, and a plastic Chinese kitchen deity with the character for "tasty" painted on his stomach.
Back in those pre-smoke alarm days I was able to burn as much incense as I wanted, and as far as I was concerned a kung fu temple wasn't a kung fu temple if you could see more than five feet in front of you. Sadly, the only place in Ridgefield, Connecticut where one could buy incense was a store called Ye Olde Head Shop, which specialized in black-light posters and rolling papers, and their incense display didn't feature traditional Asian scents like sandalwood or frankincense. Ye Olde Head Shop carried Apricot, Watermelon, Passion Fruit and something called Black Love, which came packaged in a long cardboard pouch illustrated with the silhouette of a naked man and woman, both with huge Afro haircuts, having sex. I did not dare ask the brooding hippie behind the counter for a pack of Black Love or even the more temperate sounding Passion Fruit, so I stuck with the sexually neutral varieties, which did remind one of apricot and watermelon when you sniffed the box but as soon as you lit the cones smelled like burning cardboard.
There were other details. I needed an outfit for my training sessions, but the kung fu uniforms advertised in the martial arts magazines were too expensive. I settled on dyeing my green pajamas black, but the dye did not fix properly and my uniform came out an olive-purple. Tying it with my father's red bathrobe sash, I looked like an eggplant wrapped for Christmas...
...I ordered something called a Surprise Bald Head Wig from the back of a comic book. If, as advertised, it was good enough to surprise one's friends, I figured it would be good enough for my basement training sessions...My little brother, Erich, two years younger than I am, happened to wander into the bathroom ... and declared that I looked more like Ebenezer Scrooge than "any of those bald guys on TV..."
In the end I scrunched the extra hair up into a ball and stuffed it under the back of the wig. When I looked in the mirror I saw a determined young acolyte prepared to go through anything to achieve physical and spiritual mastery, but my parents, catching glimpses of me when I had to run upstairs to the bathroom, saw something else. The lumpy powdered head, the purple pajamas and the clouds of smoke that appeared behind me whenever I opened the basement door convinced them that I was headed for a career as a finger-cymbal player in airport lobbies. |
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