THE NEATHERWORLD

Mark Steyn on Britain and Europe
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
http://www.marksteyn.com

HAPPY WARRIOR
from the Novemer 23 issue of National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com

“Would it not be easier,” wrote Bertolt Brecht after the East German uprising in 1953, “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

The thought has occurred to several governments over the years, and I don’t mean the dictatorships. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, wrote a piece for the London Evening Standard the other day and, considering he’s one of those quintessentially slippery New Labour spinmeisters, it was disarmingly insouciant in its straightforwardness. When Labour came to power in 1997, the number of work permits issued each year quadrupled and immigration exploded. Mr Neather revealed that there was “a driving political purpose” behind this: “Mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.” From Labour’s point of view, it would have the additional benefit of helping put the Conservatives out of sync with the times: As Mr Neather writes, “The policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” If the justification for US immigration is that we need foreigners to do “the jobs that Americans won’t do”, in the United Kingdom they need them to do the jobs that no-one in their right mind would hire a working-class Brit for: The imported workers would be engaged in fields that “certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley,” sneers Mr Neather. “Fascist au pair, anyone?”

The BNP is the British National Party, and yes, it is, broadly, fascist. But it barely existed until New Labour’s plan to “make the UK truly multicultural” got under way, and it certainly never had such a purchase on England’s white working class that the one major European power that never succumbed to ‘tween-wars fascism this year elected two BNP members to the European Parliament.

That’s the problem with dissolving the people and electing another: You’d have to be a genius to pull off such a transformation without any unintended consequences. If Blair’s game was to import cool new Labour voters and make the dead white males of the Tory Party look even more squaresville, he also wound up imposing huge and potentially fatal stresses on Britain’s fraying societal structure.


Anjem Choudary

Take the recent observations of Anjem Choudary, Principal Lecturer of the London School of Shariah: “There is a spark that has ignited and its flame has become unstoppable,” he declared. “We find ourselves in the year 2009, waiting for Rome to fall, waiting for the White House to fall and indeed waiting for Buckingham Palace to fall.” Mr Choudary is a subject of the Crown but does not think of himself as such. His organization has demanded the Queen convert to Islam, wear a burka, and “stop playing God”. His website, Islam4UK, has many detailed illustrations of British landmarks after the introduction of Sharia: Buckingham Palace would be renamed “Buckingham Masjid” (or mosque) and have a dome fitted on top with speakers to call the faithful to prayer. It would be used as an Islamic court to issue punishments under Sharia, and also as a detention center for “prisoners of war”.

As it happens, Anjem Choudary is not an immigrant: He is British born and bred. But he is a testament to the “true multiculturalism” that New Labour prized so highly. For all but a few guilt-ridden middle-class liberals, “multiculturalism” is a nullity and those within its vapid bounds will seek their identity elsewhere. In a Britain with high Muslim immigration, high Muslim birth rates and high Muslim conversion rates, that means the host community winds up assimilating with the newcomers. In Surrey, the town of Sutton has just introduced female-only swimming sessions in the municipal pool for Muslim women. They’ll put blinds on the windows so no infidel men can see in, and the male lifeguards will be reassigned to other shifts. Might fall afoul of church-state separation in the US, but hey, what’s the big deal?

But why stop there? Azad Ali, the new advisor to the Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent, more or less, of the US Attorneys), is a supporter of Abdullah Azzam, a key influence on Osama bin Laden, and a man who quotes approvingly such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation.” Mr Ali’s appointment is part of the curious British strategy of “defusing” Islamic radicals by putting them all on the government payroll.

Even if one takes the view that arresting fellows for treason is awfully vulgar and a touch heavy-handed, it’s hard to see quite what benefit such chaps are to the United Kingdom. You can’t even say they contribute to “diversity” since such views are becoming distressingly ubiquitous. At a certain level, the idea of the muezzin issuing his call from Buckingham Palace is risible. But, after the Fall of Constantinople, it happened to what was then the largest Christian cathedral in the world. Is it really so fanciful to imagine the same thing happening in a country undergoing artificially induced, unprecedented demographic transformation?

The transparent ambition of an Anjem Choudary is less deluded than the blithe arrogance of an Andrew Neather. Combine them and toss in the likes of the British National Party, and you have the certainty of profound social convulsions in the years ahead. There'll always be an England? Ninety years ago, Bernard Shaw set his play Heartbreak House on the eve of the Great War among a British ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?”

Radney Foster explores faith, doubt on ‘Revival’

Published by Peter Cooper on September 15, 2009 in Features.
http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/

Radney Foster’s new album started when he was a college freshman, taking a required comparative religions class.

“They made you read this guy Paul Tillich, and the deserts west of Del Rio are not anywhere near as dry as Paul Tillich,” said Foster, 50. “But I had to read it, so I read it. And there was a section in there where he wrote about how doubt is an integral part of faith, and if you don’t have doubt, you can’t have faith. That was directly opposed to what I’d heard growing up in a small town, and so it really hit me when I read that. I thought, ‘Oh, then I guess I’m OK.’ ”

Foster’s latest work, Revival, is an exploration of the nature of faith, doubt, forgiveness and redemption, and it comes in the wake of some major changes for the artist. One song, “I Know You Can Hear Me,” is about the death of his father, while the title track is filled with a sense of hope and healing that Foster says is due to the return of his 17-year-old son Julien, who moved with his mother to France when she remarried.

“When Julien left, I became a real good fly fisherman,” Foster said. “He’d come back for spring break or for Christmas, and then after we put him back on the plane I’d go fish by myself. That was my day to go yell at God. There was a lot of anger, but I realized that I had to find a way to get rid of that, because it’ll destroy you. There’s a song on this album called ‘Forgiveness’ that I really wrote for Julien’s mama, because we both had to figure out how to forgive each other. With hate and anger you can’t be an effective parent.”

It’s a good time for Foster

Julien is now living with his father in Nashville, playing guitar and attending college, and Foster cannot tick off these and other facts without grinning. It’s a good time to be Radney Foster. He’s as busy and productive with writing, recording and touring as he was in the 1980s, when he first came to popular notice as half of hit country duo Foster & Lloyd, and he is regularly cited as a prime influence by artists such as Keith Urban and Darius Rucker. He’s also cited as a forerunner of the Americana movement, and he’ll perform this week as part of the Americana Music Association’s conference.

“I was a part of that thing that happened in the 1980s and early 1990s, with people like Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, the O’Kanes and others, when there was some really neat stuff coming out,” he said, laughing at Earle’s description of that Music City time as country music’s “Great Credibility Scare.” “I guess maybe all that was the birth of what they now call ‘Americana,’ and we just didn’t know it at the time.”

Foster & Lloyd disbanded after three studio albums, and Foster signed a solo deal with Arista Records that found him notching country hits such as “Nobody Wins” and “Just Call Me Lonesome.” He also recorded an album called See What You Want To See, which didn’t burn up the country charts but which found him writing with directness about a difficult time in his life. The album is a favorite of Urban’s, and the country star recorded a hit version of See What You Want To See’s “Raining On Sunday.”

“See What You Want To See was born out of huge transitions,” Foster said. “My son left and went to France, and I was a newlywed. My first year of marriage, we went through a custody trial. It was a roller-coaster ride. The best records I’ve made have been about big transitions. Great art comes from tribulations, and great love comes from that, too. That doesn’t mean the other records aren’t good ones, but they aren’t as visceral as See What You Want To See, or Revival."

Revival was released on Sept. 1 via Foster’s own Devil’s River Records, and Foster is well aware that starting a record company at a time of commercial upheaval in the music industry brings on a Tillich-approved combination of faith and doubt. But he and his band, the Confessions, have a healthy touring schedule lined up for the fall, early reviews of the album have been quite positive and a documentary about the making of the album is earning attention as well.

All in all, things seem fine, especially on long days at home, when he can spend the late afternoon cooking dinner for the family and listening to some favorite new music: Julien’s songwriting demos.

IF YOU GO

The Americana Music Festival & Conference runs Wed., Sept. 16 through Sat., Sept. 19; see http://www.americanamusic.org/ for participating venues.

Wed., Sept. 16: Radney Foster shares a free, in-store performance at Grimey’s New & Preloved Music (1604 Eighth Ave. S.), kicking off at 6 p.m.
Thurs., Sept. 17: Foster will introduce the screening of the documentary film, Behind the Confessions: Radney Foster’s Revival, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (222 Fifth Ave. S.).

The screening runs noon to 2 p.m., and admission is $19.99, $17.99 for ages 60 and older, military and students with valid ID, $11.99 ages 6–17, free ages 5-younger and museum members, free to Americana Music Association Festival and Conference registrants with badges (information on badges/registration is available via http://www.americanamusic.org/).

Fri., Sept. 18: Foster plays the Mercy Lounge (1 Cannery Row) as part of the 2009 Americana Music Festival & Conference alongside Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers, Will Hoge, JD Souther and Scott Miller & the Commonwealth. The showcase is set to start at 8 p.m., Foster is scheduled for 10 p.m. Admission comes with Americana Music Festival wristband ($45, available via www.americanamusic.org).

Today's Tune: Radney Foster: A Little Revival

(Click on title to play video)

Advent Is Coming

High Spirits

By Jonathan Aitken from the November 2009 issue
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Later this month we start Advent, a spiritual season rich in visual and musical images. Its contemporary manifestations include pop-up calendars, corporate carol services, school Nativity plays, and endless renditions of "Joy to the World" or "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." Along with tinsel, pictures of Santa with his reindeer, and early shopping for presents, these superficialities bring to mind Garrison Keillor's line: "A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together."

But there is an alternative to the boisterous countdown of the weeks leading up to Christmas, and it's called Advent. The older and deeper symbols of this season include readings from Isaiah and performances of Handel's Messiah and of the earliest Advent composition known as the Great O's or originally Antiphonae Majores. These were poetic chants written in the seventh century for the early church's pre-Christmas liturgy. Each begins with a vocative "O" connecting ancient Hebrew invocations for the first coming of the expected Savior of Israel with petitions for his return in the second coming.

Today's Christian worshippers are familiar with the Great O's as incorporated into the hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." Each of the seven antiphones covers the longings expressed for both advents, as for example in:

And open wide our heavenly home
O Come, Thou key of David, come

These words are one of many indications that this is a season of haunting themes, mysteries, prophecies, and poetry. In these next few weeks we are called to prepare for the arrival, the adventus of God, who enters history in the person of Jesus Christ. It is both an individual and a collective preparation, for he comes in our own experience of him and is yet to come in the fulfilment of all things.

Collectively Advent is full of powerful symbolism. As a young cathedral choirboy I recall being overwhelmed by Wesley's hymn "Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending" and even more by singing the treble part of the Messiah's opening chorus, "And the Glory, the Glory of the Lord Shall Be Revealed."

Revelation is an essential ingredient of Advent at whose heart is a deep yearning of the soul, waiting for the response of the God who comes. That sense of longing is shared by many, of all faiths and of none. For there is in humanity a general sense of fracture coupled with a yearning for a time when hurts will be healed, wrongs will be righted, when peace will replace violence and war. Most of the time we paper over the cracks of such feelings and get along with our lives quite cheerfully. But from time to time that sense of fracture becomes very real as we discover inexplicably bleak winters of the spirit. We feel powerless, unable to change the situation or change our own heart. God can seem far away and inaccessible. At such moments we long for God to reveal himself. If only he would come to us. In the words of Woody Allen: "If only God would give me some clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank."

In the absence of the miraculous creation of a large numbered account in a Swiss bank (plus the second miracle of it being a bank that has not been pressured by the IRS into disclosing the identities of its customers), what should those of us hoping for a sign do in Advent -- the season of waiting?

One of the lessons of Advent is that God does respond to those who wait on him in hope. However, it can be a response that comes neither on our terms nor suited to our timetables. The Gospel reading for Advent Sunday reminds us of this forcefully:

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake -- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. (Mark 13:33-37)

A possible alternative to keeping awake is to be woken up in Advent. In my own life this has happened more than once. Those choirboy experiences of beautiful Advent music were one such instance. Although this column began with some gentle mockery of corporate carol services and school Nativity plays, I have occasionally felt holiness calling from beneath the outer carapace of corniness. Advent can be the season of divine rustlings and whisperings even amidst the secular trappings of a commercialized Christmas. And as the old saying goes: "If you don't listen to God's whispers, one day you will have to listen to God's shouts."

I am a member of a church in London, St. Matthew's Westminster, whose vicar, Philip Chester, has a special vocation and scholarship for the spirituality of Advent. In the last few years he regularly wakes me up with stimulating sermons and readings that are the equivalent of Advent whispers. Last year he recommended two fine Advent books: Stephen Cottrell's Do Nothing: Christmas Is Coming and Maria Boulding's The Coming of God. Both authors encourage their readers to do less and ponder more during Advent. This pattern of patient reflection follows the example of the Virgin Mary, who after the Annunciation "pondered these things in her heart."

Another part of the original Advent pattern is the play on light and darkness. These contrasting forces are emphasized by the Anglican collect for Advent, read daily in the weeks before Christmas. It opens with the majestic words:

Almighty God give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which Thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility.

Humility is the key to our Advent preparations for the one who is coming. By penitently clearing away the debris of our lives and by prayerfully waiting in hope we can fulfill Isaiah's call "to make straight in the desert a highway for our God."


Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator's "High Spirits" columnist, is most recently author of John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (Crossway Books). His biographies include Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (Doubleday) and Nixon: A Life, now available in a new paperback edition (Regnery).

So Sioux Me

By Mark Hyman on 11.23.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org

A North Dakota judge will hear arguments next month in a case of political correctness that has embroiled the state university for a number of years.

In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced a complete ban on hosting post-season competition by 18 colleges that were using Indian mascots, logos or nicknames. The ban was to become effective in February 2006.

The NCAA made an assumption, jumped to a conclusion and adopted the politically correct viewpoint that using Indian heritage in such a manner was "hostile and abusive." The problem, it appears, is that no one bothered to check with the assumed aggrieved parties to determine if they were truly offended. Since the original announcement, the NCAA's political correctness offensive encountered the stiff defense of several universities and common sense.

The college sports governing body backed off its strident and absolute demand after learning that some Native American groups endorsed use of their tribal names by their adoptive schools. The NCAA relented and gave the go-ahead for Florida State, the University of Utah and Central Michigan University to continue using Seminole, Ute, and Chippewa, respectively, without the risk of facing the post-season ban.

Sensitivity toward the use of Native American symbols goes back a few decades. In the early 1970s, Stanford University and Dartmouth College jettisoned the nickname "Indians." Stanford chose as its replacement mascot the innocuous color, Cardinal. Dartmouth went so far as to select a dark shade of green formally known as PMS 349 and frequently referred to as Dartmouth Green as its official school color to complement its nickname of the Big Green.

As an aside, the legitimacy of the Ivy League school's color could be called into question. Would crayon-maker Crayola give a legal release to Dartmouth to poach Forest Green and claim the color as its own?

After more than 35 years, the Big Green nickname remains wildly unpopular and the college's student body has instead given unofficial approval to an animated beer keg as the school mascot. Now here is a healthy alternative to a school's politically incorrect use of a Native American mascot -- glorification of alcohol.

What is not yet known is how the NCAA will measure Native American approval or displeasure of a school's use of a generic nickname such as Indian, Redman or Brave in contrast to a more specific tribal name such as Seminole. Bradley University and the University of North Carolina-Pembroke both use the nickname "Brave" yet Bradley is on the NCAA banned list and UNC-Pembroke got a free pass. San Diego State was given NCAA okay for that school's use of Aztec for still unexplained reasons. Perhaps it is because Aztec represents not just an Indian tribe but is instead an entire civilization.

The NCAA signaled moral outrage at the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux nickname. Yet the association has remained silent on the fact that the school is (as are both the states of North and South Dakota) named after the Dakota tribe.

The NCAA's battle with UND has been raging for more than four years. Criticizing the Fighting Sioux nickname as racist, offensive and derogatory have been groups such as the school's faculty Senate and the state Board of Higher Education. They are seemingly undeterred by one significant group that wants the university to retain the nickname and logo. That is the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe, the nearby tribe from whom the school nickname is derived. The most absurd aspect of this politically correct ruckus is that non-native Americans are lecturing Native Americans on what should offend them. A hearing on the matter is scheduled in a county courtroom in early December.

Then there is the case of South Dakota's Huron College. The school was purchased in 2001 by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and was renamed Si Tanka University, another American Indian name. The school closed its doors in early 2005 due to financial difficulties. Rumors have been rampant that the school may eventually be sold to a group anxious to reopen the college under its former name, Huron, which is another tribal name. Where to draw the line? Let's see: Native American school name -- good; Native American school nickname -- bad.

The imbroglio over Indian names is not limited to college sports. A recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have finally closed the door on a 17-year-old lawsuit against the National Football League's Washington Redskins for that team's logo. It was a New Mexico man who originally claimed the Redskins mascot and logo "is damaging to Native American peoples." However, according to Playboy magazine, 90 percent of Native Americans who were polled responded they were not offended by the Redskins mascot. Is disapproval by a single individual sufficient to terminate the use of a Native American symbol or does majority rule? More importantly, one could argue it has been this year's lackluster play and dismal won-loss record by the Redskins that is more damaging to its fan base than any nickname the team could use.

Perhaps a more comprehensive poll could be taken of American Indian attitudes and views on the use of Indian names. The NCAA could commission the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute to complete the task although an apparent conflict of interest exists since the school is named after a Connecticut area tribe.

It is entirely possible that before long we will hear from other interested parties who will protest the use of school mascots and nicknames they find offensive. Will the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protest the use of Wildcats at the University of Kentucky? How do Satan worshippers feel about the Duke University Blue Devils? It may not be surprising if the National Education Association were to announce its opposition to Virginia Military Institute's misspelling of "cadets" as Keydets. Finally, could descendants of the sixth century B.C. Peloponnesians criticize Michigan State's use of Spartan?

Perhaps it is time for the PC police to take a long, deep breath and relax before contemplating any further action. Maybe all parties could sit down and calmly discuss the matter during a lunchtime meeting. I suggest a menu of German bologna and Swiss cheese on Jewish rye, with a helping of Amish sauerkraut, a slice of kosher pickle, a Greek salad with Italian dressing on the side, followed by a Danish pastry for dessert with a hot cup of Colombian coffee. After all, everyone should be reasonable about this and avoid using any racial, ethnic or national origin in a manner that any single person might decide is offensive and derogatory.


Mark Hyman is a commentator appearing nationally on the television stations of Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.

Springsteen’s glorious goodbye—or is it?

Concert Review: Bruce Springsteen and the EStreet Band

Sunday night in HSBC Arena

By Jeff Miers
THE BUFFALO NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC
http://www.buffalonews.com
Updated: November 23, 2009, 10:07 AM

The anticipation leading up to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s Sunday night concert in HSBC Arena built over the months preceding the event, and became palpable over the course of the past 10 days, following the last sale of the last ticket for the show. By midday on Sunday, the city was Springsteen’s. There were folks hanging around looking for tickets, people hoping for a good spot in the pit based on the lottery wristband policy, and folks who’d just plain blown off the Bills game to come downtown early and tailgate.

Springsteen and Co. always draw, and draw big. But this time was different. First of all, Buffalo was the final stop on the “Working On A Dream” tour, and final shows on Springsteen tours are always killer. But the hint has lingered in the air, turned into a fait accompli in the minds of some fans, and a nagging tug of doubt in the minds of others — could this be the final E Street Band gig ever? Would Clarence Clemons’ health issues become too much for the “Big Man” to endure next time around? Had this magnificent band run its course?

Springsteen and the band weren’t offering any defining clues. In fact, this gig was so fiery, so passionate, so frankly youthful in its energy, its relentless pace, and its unfailingly evident belief in the power of rock ’n’ roll as an agent of transformation, that it seemed like the first gig by a new band than it did the final one from a crew of veterans.

In keeping with that idea, Springsteen opened with a brand new tune, the defiant “Wrecking Ball,” a song that could’ve been written for Buffalo — it’s a tune that stares economic dissolution in the eye and dares it to take its best shot.

From there, it took no time for the place to erupt, as Springsteen and band dug into the timeless “The River” for a pair of barnburners in the form of “The Ties That Bind” and “Hungry Heart.” Springsteen was in fine voice, his power undiminished by the passage of time, apparently. The title song from “Working On A Dream” followed, and its Roy Orbison-like cadences offered a more powerful attack on stage than in the song’s recorded form.

Springsteen then introduced his first album, the earthy, funky “Greetings From Asbury Park, N. J.,” which the band performed in its entirety, completing the cycle begun at the beginning of the fall leg of the “Working On A Dream” tour, which found the band playing every album from its inception through 1984’s “Born in the USA.”

“Greetings” was never really a full-on E Street Band album, mostly because the record failed to capture the band’s live sound, favoring instead a bohemian post-Dylan folk style that never really suited Springsteen. The songs, though, are magnificent, and the manner in which the band performed them on Sunday, can now take their place alongside the man (and the band’s) best work.

“Blinded by the Light” suggested the boardwalk funk that would flourish on the group’s second album, “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle,” and handily outshone its studio version. “Growin’ Up” has shown up often in live sets over the years, and was stunning here.

But it was the rarely performed pieces like the dark, brooding “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel” that offered the biggest surprises. These songs simply grew wings in their new arrangements. And of course, “For You” — a street poet’s take on the Romantic tradition in literature — simply reached its fingers into the chest and squeezed the heart for four minutes or so.

“Lost In the Flood” is Springsteen’s first proper epic, and it was played with bountiful fire on Sunday, particularly by the rhythm section of drummer Max Weinberg and bassist Garry Tallent.

“Greetings” completed, the band launched into a set that, in itself, probably would’ve justified the price of admission for most in the full house. “Waitin’ On A Sunny Day” led nicely into a poignant “Promised Land,” and then Springsteen mentioned longtime co-conspirator Steven Van Zandt, who happened to be celebrating his birthday.

Springsteen, following the presentation of cake and candles, introduced “Steve’s favorite song,” the “River” outtake “Restless Nights,” which was played beautifully and lent additional power by the harmony vocals of Van Zandt and singers Curtis King and Cindy Mizelle. Van Zandt also was treated to one of “Working On A Dream’s” most infectious tunes, the Byrds-like beauty “Surprise Surprise.”

The “request” section of the gig followed, and Springsteen— who’d spent much of the evening either reaching into the audience or diving headlong into it — gathered the signs begging for specific tunes from the crowd, while the band jammed its way through Booker T and the MG’s “Green Onions.”

A pair of holiday tunes — “Merry Christmas, Baby” and “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”—were greeted tumultuously, as was the “Tunnel of Love”-era tour favorite “Boom Boom,” a cover of the John Lee Hooker tune.

The band just did not seem to want to stop, for reasons that were abundantly obvious — if this was indeed it, then one of the most passionate and powerful groups in history is saying goodbye. I don’t know, though. These guys seem to be just getting warmed up. I think they just might be back.

Regardless, Sunday’s show was absolutely sublime. It was everything a great rock ’n’ roll show should be — intense, joyous, deeply musical, irreverent, sensual, romantic, incredibly fun. No band does it better.

jmiers@buffnews.com

SET LIST:
Wrecking Ball (with trumpeter Curt Ramm)
The Ties That Bind
Hungry Heart
Working on a Dream
Blinded By the Light
Growin' Up
Mary Queen of Arkansas
Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?
Lost in the Flood
The Angel
For You
Spirit in the Night
It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Restless Nights
Surprise, Surprise
Green Onions
Merry Christmas Baby (with Curt Ramm)
Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (with Curt Ramm)
(I Don't Want to) Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes
Boom Boom
My Love Will Not Let You Down
Long Walk Home
The Rising
Born to Run
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (with Curt Ramm)
* * *
I'll Work For Your Love
Thunder Road
American Land (with Curt Ramm)
Dancing in the Dark
Rosalita (with Curt Ramm)
Higher and Higher (with Willie Nile and Curt Ramm)
Rockin' All Over the World

Winding down E Street: The last stop for the Boss and his band?

By Jeff Miers
The Buffalo News Pop Music Critic
http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/
November 19, 2009

On May 23, 1978, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band opened their "Darkness on the Edge of Town" tour with a torrid performance in Shea's Performing Arts Center. When the same band hits the stage tonight at HSBC Arena, Springsteen and the legendary E Street Band will be wrapping up a nearly two-year tour behind the "Working on a Dream" album.

Tonight's show in Buffalo is rumored — and widely believed — to be the final performance by the E Street Band as we have known it since those days of "Darkness on the Edge of Town." Both band members Clarence Clemons and Nils Lofgren in recent days have been noncommittal when questioned about the future of the band, but many longtime Springsteen followers are wondering.

"I really believe this is the swan song for the E Street Band as we have come to know it for the last 40 years," says author and Springsteen scholar Lawrence Kirsch, whose recent "The Light in Darkness" collects fan remembrances and photographs for a startling reminiscence on the 1978 "Darkness on the Edge of Town" tour. "The Buffalo concert should be an event — not just another tour-ending concert — but one that documents one of the greatest live performers of our time."

The 1978 Shea's show has become the stuff of legend, and can be seen as the launching point for what would be an almost uninterrupted succession of E Street Band tours over the next 30 years.

It's not surprising that Springsteen — a bus driver's son from New Jersey for whom rock 'n' roll meant first an escape from a grim, blue-collar reality, and later, a means of forging a new community through the music's populist tenets — has chosen Buffalo to frame what has to be considered one of the most inspired creative tenures by any single band.

Even if the choice was one based more on circumstance than volition, it's tempting to believe that there are no accidents when it comes to The Boss.

Buffalo is a city where Springsteen's stirring narratives, songs based on the struggles of working people to find some sort of transcendence amid stark, often daunting circumstances, resound with the clarity of a church bell on a crisp, cool morning.

The signs pointing to tonight's tour-ending performance being the E Street Band's last are myriad and difficult to ignore. Rumors began circulating some six months back, fed by speculation on fan-based message boards.

The death of founding member and keyboardist Danny Federici in April 2008; the recent health issues of saxophonist and Springsteen's onstage foil Clemons; hip-replacement surgeries for guitarist Lofgren; the fact that Springsteen himself turned 60 in September, though his in-concert energy level appears to be undiminished; the not-so-subtle hints dropped throughout the latter days of the tour by Little Steven Van Zandt that fans should see the band while they still can — all suggested that the future of the group was, at best, uncertain once the "Working on a Dream" tour ended.

Earlier this week, however, Backstreets.com dropped the big one when it announced that Springsteen and Co. would be performing its first album, "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.," in its entirety at the Buffalo show. This means, in effect, that the band in its fall tour has played every single one of its releases through 1984's mega-platinum "Born in the USA."

It's hard to view this as anything other than an attempt at closure.

Is the end near?

Within the E Street Band, lips are decidedly sealed regarding any retirements, though a little cursory reading-between-the-lines lends credence to Kirsch's conviction. In his recently published memoir "Big Man," Clemons makes it plain that the band has been closer to the end than the beginning for some time now. Clemons recently told the Associated Press that retirement "is something I think about. "I'll be 70 years old in a couple of years. I don't know how much energy I'll have left. That energy, I want to spend with my family."

No Clemons means no E Street Band. The camaraderie between Springsteen and Clemons, 67, has always been a major factor in the intimate connection between band and audience during the marathon shows the truest fans receive as more spiritual ritual than entertainment. The deep bond between the two has always been abundantly evident, and Clemons said the relationship has always been informed by "the passion of love and respect and trust."

Clemons — who reportedly has had serious knee trouble, has undergone several hip-replacement surgeries, suffers from sleep apnea, and is currently in need of back surgery — has been less of a factor as a saxophonist over the past decade, but his presence during the band's shows is integral to the sense of community that, without fail, those shows parlay.

'Anxious to get ... home'

Guitarist Lofgren, himself recovering from surgery replacing both hips, refuses to dwell on any negative possibilities regarding the future of E Street.

"Every time a tour ends, there's a chance it could be the last one," the guitarist told The News last week in a phone interview. "We are all anxious to get back home, to catch up on other projects — and that includes Bruce, too, who has teenaged kids and a family life that is his primary concern.

"But there's no way to say for sure that this is the end. The band has never been better than it has been on this tour. We certainly have plenty more to say, musically, and Bruce is far from out of ideas as a songwriter."

Lofgren, who commenced his musical life fronting Grin, and was working with Neil Young by the time he was in his late teens, is the "new guy" on E Street. He joined the band when Van Zandt left following the recording of "Born in the USA," and has been a formidable presence on every tour since. Simultaneously, he has always managed to keep busy during E Street downtime.

Lofgren is now running a subscription-based, online music school through www.nilslofgren.com, one that he plans to devote increased attention to in the coming months. Last year, he released "The Loner: Nils Sings Neil," a gorgeous collection of acoustic guitar- and piano-based interpretations of his old friend and former boss' songs.

As both singer and guitarist, Lofgren is rightly held to be cream-of-the-crop, and certainly, there will be no shortage of work for him with or without the E Street Band. Still, he hopes the band will continue.

"Whenever he calls, I'll be there, I'll answer," says Lofgren of Springsteen.

Facing the future

For Springsteen megafans who have been following their man for any significant portion of time, imagining a life without new music and concert tours from the E Street Band is a seriously depressing notion. Outsiders and casual fans might find this a bit strange — it's only a rock 'n' roll singer and his band, after all. What's the big deal?

"If you gotta ask, you'll never know" seems like the only pertinent response. But author Kirsch has a more tolerant response.

"At first, it's hard to believe that one performer could possibly have touched this many people this deeply — lifted them from depression, kept them from suicide, helped them through divorce or the death of a parent, or worse, a child," Kirsch says, based on recountings in his book. "But many stories reveal just how much Springsteen's music and his almost superhuman presence on the concert stage have penetrated people's lives and, in as much as it is possible for music to do so, made them whole. In fact, there's a running theme of these reminiscences, one that is sure to warm any Bruce fan's heart: That you are not crazy.

"Not crazy for seeing dozens or even hundreds of concerts; not crazy for feeling that Springsteen's songs and lyrics have actually helped carry you through some of life's toughest moments; not crazy to think that this man whom you've never met has and continues to fill some kind of void in your life."

If tonight's concert does indeed end up being the final bow for the E Street Band, then man, they've had one hell of a run. There will indeed be a void in the musical landscape, for the group is one of the last of its era — an era when rock 'n' roll was a populist form, one that spoke directly to a community of informed listeners and imparted a commitment to something greater than the moment. It has been something you had to see to believe, something that needed to be deeply felt to be clearly seen. And at its best, there was nothing better.

It ain't over yet, though. Tonight's show is already a tightly packed powder keg of emotion. And hey, it's Little Steven's birthday.

Sounds like a good excuse for a party.


jmiers@buffnews.com

The still strong voice of a vanishing Britain

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
Tuesday, 17th November 2009

I have not had a moment until now to post up a comment on Robin Shepherd’s new book about the relationship between Israel and Europe, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). It is a remarkable book by an author with a remarkable history.

Until a short while ago Shepherd, now Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, was a senior fellow at The Royal Institute of International Affairs -- commonly known as Chatham House -- in charge of its European programme. After two years he left in bitter circumstances, claiming he had been forced out principally because of his publicly expressed support for Israel – a version of events that Chatham House contests.


"Sir Galahad" By George Frederic Watts, 1862 Oil on canvas 75 1/2 x 42 1/8 inches (191.77 x 107 cm) Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachussetts, US

The fact remains, however, that his attitude towards Israel is one that is indeed unsayable within Britain’s foreign policy establishment, because it does not take an Arabist position but starts from the premise that Israel was not born in sin but is a legitimately constituted country legitimately entitled to defend itself against attack – and that the entirely illegitimate and unwarranted attacks upon it emanate not merely from the Arab and Muslim world but from the British and European intelligentsia, which in some ways are potentially just as lethal.

His book is therefore remarkable because it is a work by a member of that foreign policy intelligentsia which actually tells the truth about Israel and the Middle East conflict, and the often disgusting European attitude towards it which is unique in its mendacity and virulence. As he says, the terms and images with which Israel is associated in Europe – ‘shitty’, ‘Nazi’, ‘racist’, ‘apartheid’, ‘ethnic cleanser’, ‘occupier’, ‘war criminal’, ‘violator of international law’, ‘user of disproportionate force’ and so on -- are used about no other state, let alone one that is fully signed up to democracy and human rights for all its citizens, Arab as well as Jew, and are unique in their intensity and relentlessness. And as he says, the difference between the European demonisers of Israel and the likes of Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and David Duke in the US is that the European demonisers have a substantive presence right within the mainstream.

Shepherd wades through this filth and shows how it rests upon egregious falsehoods and twisted thinking. He observes correctly that

‘No-one of any degree of seriousness could claim that liberal-democratic Israel’s human rights record is worse than North Korea’s, China’s or Sudan’s and that it deserves the level of censure it attracts. There is not even the slightest shred of intellectual justification for charges that Israel is like Nazi Germany of apartheid South Africa.’

But of course, people of purported seriousness do subject it to just such censure and make precisely such charges.

He points out that this virulent and unique prejudice against Israel goes across the political spectrum from left to right. He observes that America is not immune from the contagion, and analyses the pathology of Mearsheimer /Walt and their support in the American academy. He cites the 2004 letter from 52 retired British diplomats, which expressed horror at the support for Israel of Bush and Blair, as evidence of the perverse and alarming tendency of such diplomats to sign up to narratives of hatred and deceit, tyranny and dictatorship. Offering a way out of the usual ‘anti-Israel attitudes are not the same as antisemitism’ conundrum, he suggests persuasively that the argument is all but irrelevant because the anti-Israel attitudes on display are bigotry, pure and simple, and all such bigotry is unacceptable. And asking why such perversity is consuming Europe, he suggests that a key reason is the loss of European self-belief. He writes:

‘The sickness here is civilisational. It reflects and draws upon the worst and the weakest in western political culture: its lack of self-belief, its ideological pathologies, its historical traumas, its relativism, its tendency to appease. It has rekindled an old problem which has sometimes appeared in traditional garb but more usually in a fully modernised, neo-antisemitic form in denigrating the most important Jewish project of our time.’

As a result of his experiences, Shepherd now writes a blog principally devoted to commenting upon the frenzy of bigotry against Israel and the Jews in British intellectual life. Shepherd is that increasingly rare phenomenon, a British intellectual of moral integrity. His principled and courageous stance on this, the greatest moral test of our age, reminds us of a Britain that is still there but alas fast disappearing -- a Britain that embodied decency and fairness and intelligence and a quiet but unyielding determination to stand up for right against wrong and face down the bullies and the bigots. Shepherd’s book is a must-read for all who want to understand this troubled continent of Europe and its British satellite (and cultural leader), and just how and why it is failing the civilisation test once again.

Boycott Burqa Barbie

By Phyllis Chesler
http://pajamasmedia.com/
21 November 2009

What will they think of next? A be-headed doll?

That’s right. I am talking about the new Burqa Barbie doll which is now on display in Florence, Italy, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Barbie doll. As my colleague over at weaselzippers wonders: Will clean-cut Ken now come (pun intended, ‘tis mine) with four burqa’ed Barbie doll wives?

Ah, I am such a Grinch. After all, the Burqa Barbie is being auctioned off for the Save the Children charity.

Save the Children? Surely, you must be jesting. I would like to save the children from this as well as from every other Barbie doll. (Yes, I know Barbie has diversified and now comes in every color and profession). But naked, even Doctor Barbie is still a pagan goddess or fertility figure but one with absolutely no relationship to female biology or reality.

Barbies are always anatomically impossible: their feet are pre-shaped for high heels, their breasts are high, firm, and perky—like Playboy dolls or surgically enhanced Hollywood stars. Bikini Barbie.

These dolls were so retro—or so I always thought. Well, shut my mouth, those were the good old days of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Now, Barbie is swathed, shrouded, in a burqa; now, she is even more hopelessly retro.

A woman, a girl, in a chador, chadari, burqa, cannot see that well. You cannot hear what she is saying. She cannot hear you. A woman in a burqa can’t run, or even walk that well. She stumbles. Inside, she has to balance a baby, a shopping bag, maybe a pair of glasses perched on her nose, slipping. If it’s hot, she is sweltering. If it’s sunny, she is still deprived of sunlight and Vitamin D. The burqa violates a woman’s human rights. It poses a danger to a woman’s health, both mental and medical.

The bikini and the burqa: What ever happened to women’s freedom?

I’ll tell you. While the bikini (especially as a symbol of pornography, prostitution, and promiscuity) was nevah (I say this with my best Barbra Streisand Brooklyn accent) a symbol of freedom, the western secular state never forced any woman to wear one; nor did her family. And, if a woman refused to wear a bikini, no one flogged, stoned, or honor murdered her. These things are happening to girls and women today all over the Islamic/Islamist world. They are happening in the West as well when young Muslim girls refuse to wear a modest headscarf.

A wonderful Muslim feminist hero just stayed with me for a week. She is a lawyer and an author, her name is Seyran Ates, she is a Turkish-German and lives in Berlin. Like Algerian-American professor, Marnia Lazreg, whose book about the Islamic Veil I’ve previously discussed, Ates absolutely opposes the veil in any form. She will not wear a headscarf. Ates is a religious Muslim woman.

Mattel: take Burqa Barbie off the market.

Parents: Boycott it.

Calling all Charities: Save the children from it.

Turning KSM into O.J.

By MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
2009-11-20 11:27:30

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama "doesn't know how to be president." It was a low but effective crack, and I didn't pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the past week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don't just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan – though that in itself is deeply weird:
After the world superbower's previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi king, one assumed there'd be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don't bow to foreign monarchs. Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic – or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

"Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent."

Tear down that wall ...so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, "Er, Mr. President, that's really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you"? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn't about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who, at a critical moment in history, decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They're no big deal, they're never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it's their day, not yours. It's not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it.

Is it the only template in the White House speechwriters' computer? "Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur /Napoleon's retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you."

Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: "OK, we know you're gay. Now try being funny." I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: OK, we know you're black. Now try being president. But a few days later, Obama dropped in on U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea for the latest episode of The Barack Obama Show (With Full Supporting Chorus). "You guys make a pretty good photo op," he told them.

Hmm. Do I detect a belated rationale for the Afghan campaign?

Probably not. The above are mostly offenses against good taste, but they are, cumulatively, revealing. And they help explain why, whenever the president's not talking about himself, he sounds like he's wandered vaguely off-message. The other day, for example, he told Fox News that "if we keep on adding to the debt ... people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession."

That's a great line – but not from a guy who plans to "keep on adding to the debt" as a conscious strategy. This is the president who made "trillion" the new default unit of federal budgeting, and whose irresponsibility is prompting key players around the world to consider seriously whether it's time to ditch the dollar's role as global reserve currency. But Obama's much-vaunted "bipartisanship," to which so many "moderate" conservatives were partial a year ago, seems to have dwindled down to an impressive ability to take one side of an issue in his rhetoric and another in his actions.

Which brings us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. He'd been brought before a military commission, and last December indicated he was ready to plead guilty and itching for the express lane to the 72 virgins.

But that wasn't good enough for Obama, who, in essence, declined to accept KSM's confession and decided to put him on trial in a New York courthouse. Why? To show "the world" – i.e., European op-ed pages and faculty lounges – that America would fight terror in a way "consistent with our values," and apparently that means turning KSM into O.J. and loosing his dream team on the civilian justice system. But, having buttered up Le Monde and the BBC and many of his own Lefties by announcing that Mohammed would get a fair trial, Obama then assured NBC that he'd be convicted and was gonna fry.

So it's like a fair trial consistent with "our values," except for the one about presumption of innocence? If the head of state declaring you guilty and demanding the death penalty doesn't taint the jury pool, it's hard to see what would. The KSM circus is not, technically, a "show trial": He could well be acquitted. But, even if he is, he's unlikely to be strolling out a free man like Frank Sinatra beating the rap in "Robin And The Seven Hoods" and standing on the courthouse steps to sing "My Kind Of Town (Manhattan Is)" – although I wouldn't entirely rule it out: In a world in which the self-confessed perpetrator of the bloodiest act of war on the American mainland in two centuries is entitled to a civilian trial, all things are possible. The other day, Attorney General Eric Holder promised us that it would be "the trial of the century" – and he said it like it's a good thing.
Why would you do that?

So how's it playing with its intended audience? Alas, the world moves on. Not being George W. Bush may be enough to impress the 2009 Nobush Peace Prize committee in Oslo, but it's old news everywhere else. America's enemies have figured out that the Superbower is their best opportunity since their Seventies, and for America's friends the short version of the hopeychangey era to date is last week's cover story at the London Spectator showing an empty suit in the Oval Office over the headline "The Worst Kind Of Ally."

Hang on, wasn't that title retired with Bush? Well, no. Apparently, he routinely called up prime ministers hither and yon and kept them in the picture and up to speed. Obama doesn't have time for any of that: When he stiffed Poland on missile defense, he got Hillary to phone it in. The Poles, bless 'em, declined to take her call. In Delhi, meanwhile, they're horrified by Obama's performance in China. America's enemies smell weakness, and our allies feel only the vacuum of U.S. leadership. About himself, the president speaks loudly. For America, he carries a small twig.

©MARK STEYN

Film Reviews: 'The Twilight Saga: New Moon'

'New Moon' over bite

By KYLE SMITH
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
Posted: 1:00 AM, November 19, 2009

Twilight,” which was about a girl and a vampire who don’t hook up, is totally different from “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” which is about a girl, a vampire and a werewolf who don’t hook up. And it’s not at all like the next sequel, in which a girl, a vampire, a werewolf and a mummy fail to find romance, nor the one after that, in which the girl gets unfriended by all of the above plus the Invisible Man and King Kong — yet finds her heart aflutter when she befriends the Bride of Frankenstein.

“New Moon” is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where’s the excitement? Where’s the action? Bella (Kristen Stewart) and vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) stare longingly past each other (Pattinson, who keeps entering in hilarious slo-mo, is so intent on smoldering at the camera that he seems to forget there’s another person around) and swap excruciating love-chat: “You can’t (long pause) protect me (longer pause) from everything.”

Bad dialogue, like bad news, doesn’t get better with age. This movie moves like the line at the post office. “Twilight” — that culture phenomenon that resembles “Star Wars” much as the prime minister of Belgium resembles the president of the United States (respective box office ranks of these two films in their respective decades: 71, 1) pushes its leads apart with thin contrivances that set up predictable last-minute rescues.

This time, Edward walks out on Bella for half the film because one of his family members almost jumps her when she cuts her finger. So Edward can best protect her by . . . leaving? Even though he knows she is being stalked by a rival clan of vampires? Not to mention a rival guy, buff Jake (Taylor Lautner), who, when angry, turns into a werewolf. They don’t kiss because if he ever got angry in her presence, he might maul her. So she’s stuck in thwart mode with him, too.

Director Chris Weitz proves that “The Golden Compass” was no fluke: He really is a non-master of action. His CGI werewolves, who look like they were designed by the animatronics crew at Disney’s Country Bear Jamboree, go at it in about three semi-OK bouts. These are by far the best scenes in the movie, but they cut off suddenly after a minute or two (you can almost hear the producer yelling, “That’s it for our budget, sorry”), as does a vigorous but pointless chase involving Bella’s redheaded vampire nemesis, Victoria.

The supposed climax, in which Edward goes to Italy to duel with a trio of Louis XVI-style vampire dandies, leads merely to a desultory bit of flinging around. Nor does an attempt to get all goth-y with a mention of hell succeed. The only real shudder-inducing moment comes not from a monster but from Bella’s dad: “You’re going to Jacksonville.” Noooooo!

Kyle.Smith@nypost.com


The Twilight Saga: New Moon

BY ROGER EBERT / November 18, 2009
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/

The characters in this movie should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan. Never have teenagers been in greater need of a jump-start. Granted some of them are more than 100 years old, but still: their charisma is by Madame Tussaud.

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" takes the tepid achievement of "Twilight" (2008), guts it, and leaves it for undead. You know you're in trouble with a sequel when the word of mouth advises you to see the first movie twice instead. Obviously the characters all have. Long opening stretches of this film make utterly no sense unless you walk in knowing the first film, and hopefully both Stephanie Meyer novels, by heart. Edward and Bella spend murky moments glowering at each other and thinking, So, here we are again.


Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart: How white the skin, how red the lips.

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is still living at home with her divorced dad (Billy Burke), a cop whose disciplinary policy involves declaring her grounded for the rest of her life and then disappearing so she can jump from cliffs, haunt menacing forests, and fly to Italy so the movie can evoke the sad final death scene from--why, hold on, it's Romeo and Juliet! The very play Edward was reciting narcissistically and contemptuously in an opening scene.

Yes, Edward (Robert Pattinson) is back in school, repeating the 12th grade for the 84th time. Bella sees him in the school parking lot, walking toward her in slow-motion, wearing one of those Edwardian Beatles jackets with a velvet collar, pregnant with his beauty. How white his skin, how red his lips. The decay of middle age may transform him into the Joker.

Edward and the other members of the Cullen vampire clan stand around a lot with glowering skulks. Long pauses interrupt longer ones. Listen up, lads! You may be immortal, but we've got a train to catch.

Edward leaves, because Bella was not meant to be with him. Although he's a vegetarian vampire, when she gets a paper cut at her birthday party one of his pals leaps on her like a shark on a tuna fish.

In his absence she's befriended by Jake (Taylor Lautner), that nice American Indian boy. "You've gotten all buff!" she tells him. Yeah, real buff, and soon he's never wearing a shirt and standing outside in the winter rain as if he were--why, nothing more than a wild animal. They don't need coats like ours, remember, because God gave them theirs.

Those not among that five percent of the movie's target audience that doesn't already know this will (spoiler) be surprised that Jake is a werewolf.

Bella: So…you're a werewolf?
Jake: Last time I checked.
Bella: "Can't you find a way to...just stop?
Jake (patiently): "It's not a lifestyle choice, Bella."

Jake is influenced, or controlled, or something, by Sam, another member of the tribe. He's like the alpha wolf. Sam and his three friends are mostly seen in long shot, shirtless in the rain, hanging around the edges of the clearing as if hoping to dash in and pick off some fresh meat.

Bella writes long letters to her absent vampire friend Alice (Ashley Greene), in which she does nothing to explain why she is helplessly attracted to these sinister, humorless and vain men. It can't be the sex. As I've already explained in my review of the first film, The Twilight Saga is an extended metaphor for teen chastity, in which the punishment for being deflowered I will leave to your imagination.

The movie includes beauteous fields filled with potted flowers apparently buried hours before by the grounds crew, and nobody not clued in on the plot. Since they know it all and we know all, sitting through this experience is like driving a tractor in low gear though a sullen sea of Brylcreem.


Just Bite Her Already

Tired of dashingly handsome vampires? Then skip The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

By Thomas S. Hibbs
http://www.nationalreview.com/
20 November 2009

If Elvis and Christopher Walken had a son, he would look like Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the dreamy-eyed vampire in Chris Weitz’s film The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The much-anticipated film is a sequel to the hugely popular Twilight, based on the best-selling series of books by Stephenie Meyer, who has found a teeny-bopper formula for repackaging the classic Wagnerian theme of love-death. If the screeches from the audience during the screening I attended are any indication, then this film will, like its predecessor, satisfy the romantic longings of its target audience: twelve-year-old girls. For that group, the endless focus on star-crossed lovers hurts so good; for the rest us, it just hurts.

As you may know, at the center of the plot is Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a high-school student who has moved from Phoenix, where she lived with her mother, to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, to live with her father, a cop who devotes some of his time to tracking the mysterious source of brutal slayings. Bella, a withdrawn, brooding teen, draws the attention of the aloof Edward, who has previously shown no interest in any girl. Eventually, he reveals that he is a vampire, but not in a bad way. With his vampire family, he feeds only on animal blood, which he compares to tofu: It provides nourishment but never really satisfies. Danger thus lurks in every meeting between Bella and Edward. He might be tempted to feed on her, as might other members of his family; even if those temptations can be suppressed, there is the risk of Bella’s being caught up in the battle between the Cullen family and a group of much less principled vampires.

Twilight is the ultimate female teen romantic fantasy, about the awkward female outsider who finds a complex, deep, dark male outsider, the one all the other girls wish they had. In this case, standard teen romance becomes a kind of teen gnosticism, since here the brooding James Dean happens to have preternatural powers and is clued in to the secrets of the universe.

The filmmakers are clever enough to know that the real draw here is the seeming impossibility of the love between the two characters. In New Moon, Bella and Edward just happen to be studying Romeo and Juliet in class. The story is all about longing unrealized, never about what Shelley called “love’s sad satiety.” It is also about being addicted to the danger itself. As Edward says in one of many instances of clichéd dialogue: “You’re like my own personal brand of heroin.”

The dreadful dialogue is matched by poor filmmaking technique. The Pacific Northwest setting, with its gloomy weather and its heavily wooded landscapes, suits the plot perfectly. But the rest of the filmmaking is utterly uncreative. The film tediously repeats slow-motion shots, zoom shots, and encircling shots. There is also that cheesy glitter vampires sport when they are seen in the sun. Large werewolves appear on the scene via the crudest CGI in recent memory, and Edward communicates with Bella in a hologram reminiscent of Princess Leia’s appearance to Obi-Wan. Then there are the profound silences, as Bella and Edward, with eyes averted, bear the excruciating pain of a love that cannot be.

In New Moon, Edward decides to end the relationship permanently after a paper cut on Bella’s finger during her birthday party at the Cullen home has nearly tragic consequences. Unable to rid the world of the threat of paper, the Cullen family leaves town. Without Edward, Bella becomes despondent and self-destructive. Seeking risky pursuits — both because, whenever she is in danger, Edward makes one of his holographic appearances to admonish her, and because the girl simply loves danger — she begins motorbike riding with her Native American childhood friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Whereas Edward was cold to the touch, Jacob is unusually hot. Edward is pale; Jacob, dark-skinned. But both are gorgeous and both harbor secrets. Repeating Edward’s pick-up line, Jacob tells Bella, “Go away. . . . I’m not good.” The girl has a thing for attracting handsome monsters, and she loves every minute of the pain.

In Edward’s absence, Bella actively cultivates pain because it is a “reminder.” One of her friends worries that she is suicidal, but she is not so much in love with easeful death as she is in love with the thrill of the constant risk of death — especially of a dramatic death. As she puts it in her opening voiceover in the first film, “I never really thought about death. . . . Dying for someone else would not be a bad way to go.”

One of the attractions of romanticism is that it counters the reductionist tendencies of the modern world. Romanticism reacts against the elimination of mystery from human life and the reduction of human sexuality to a mere appetite and of love to a contractual arrangement. As Roger Scruton argues (Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde), romanticism is a remedy for what ails the modern world — a “morbidly unheroic world,” dominated by “cost-benefit calculation,” which tempts us to regard our own existence as a “cosmic mistake.” The remedy is to “live as if a heroic love were possible, and as if we could renounce life for the sake of it.” Bella is in the grip of precisely such a vision. But we have serious reason to wonder how admirable her vision (or Scruton’s, for that matter) is. Her love-death passion is an escape from the banality of ordinary life: boring high-school classes with dull kids and a humdrum family life. The best thing about her father, Bella says, is that “he doesn’t hover.”

There is an attempt in New Moon to invest Bella’s dilemmas with some sort of moral, perhaps even metaphysical, significance, but the discussion of the soul she would lose in joining the undead is specious and vacuous. The film made me nostalgic for the days of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a TV series that extracted much greater humor from high-school existence and treated the loss of one’s soul with moral gravity and dramatic sensitivity. By contrast, Bella worries that if she doesn’t join the undead, she will grow old and become unattractive to the eternally dashing Edward. One shudders at the prospect of an eternity spent pondering self-indulgent romance masquerading as heroic self-sacrifice. Halfway through New Moon some viewers will likely have had enough. Those of us in this non-target audience have an urgent piece of advice for Edward: Just bite her already.

— Thomas S. Hibbs, an NRO contributor, is the author of Shows about Nothing.

Major Hasan’s Islamist Life

By Daniel Pipes
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
20 November 2009

As the Pentagon and Senate launch what one analyst dubs “dueling Fort Hood investigations,” will they confront the hard truth of the Islamic angle?

Despite encouraging references to “violent Islamists” by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, there is reason to worry about a whitewash of the massacre that took place on Nov. 5; that is just so much easier than facing the implications of a hostile ideology nearly exclusive to Muslims.

Indeed, initial responses from the U.S. Army, law enforcement, politicians, and journalists broadly agreed that Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murderous rampage had nothing to do with Islam. Barack Obama declared “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing” and Evan Thomas of Newsweek dismissed Hasan as “a nut case.”

But evidence keeps accumulating that confirms Hasan’s Islamist outlook, his jihadi temperament, and his bitter hatred of kafirs (infidels). I reviewed the initial facts about his record in an article that appeared on Nov. 9 but much more information subsequently appeared; here follows a summary. The evidence divides into three parts, starting with Hasan’s stint at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center:

* He delivered an hour-long formal medical presentation to his supervisors and some 25 mental health staff members in June 2007, the culminating exercise of his residency program at Walter Reed. What was supposed to be on a medical topic of his choosing instead turned into a 50-slide PowerPoint talk on “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military” that offered such commentary as “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims” and the “Department of Defense should allow Muslims [sic] Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.” One person present at the presentation recalls how, by the time of its conclusion, “The senior doctors looked really upset.”

* Hasan informed at least one patient at Walter Reed that “Islam can save your soul.”

* So apparent were Hasan’s Islamist proclivities, reports National Public Radio, that key psychiatry authorities at Walter Reed met to discuss if he was psychotic. One official told colleagues of his worries “that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide,” recalling Sergeant Hasan Akbar’s 2003 rampage.

Then followed Hasan’s record at Ft. Hood:

* His supervisor, Captain Naomi Surman, recalled his telling her that as an infidel she who would be “ripped to shreds” and “burn in hell.” Another person reports his declaring that infidels should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

* In his psychiatric counseling sessions with soldiers returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, Hasan heard information he considered tantamount to war crimes. As late as Nov. 2, three days before his murderous spree, he tried to convince at least two of his superior officers, Surman and Colonel Anthony Febbo, about the need legally to prosecute the soldiers.

* Hasan routinely signed his e-mails with “Praise Be to Allah.”

* He listed his first name as Abduwalli, rather than Nidal, in the e-mail address in his official Army personnel record. ‘Abd al-Wali is an Arabic name meaning “Slave of the Patron,” where Patron is one of God’s 99 names. It is not clear why Hasan did this, but Abduwalli could have been a nom de guerre, this being a common practice among Palestinians (Yasir Arafat even had two them – Yasir Arafat and Abu Ammar).

The title page of Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint demonstration for a medical lecture in June 2007, indicates how little interest he took in medicine and how much in the perceived contradiction between being a Muslim and an American soldier.

Finally, Hasan’s extracurricular activities revealed his outlook:

* He designed green and white personal business cards that made no mention of his military affiliation. Instead, they included his name, then “Behavior Heatlh [sic] Mental Health and Life Skills,” a Maryland mobile phone number, an AOL e-mail address, and “SoA (SWT).” SoA is the jihadi abbreviation for Soldier of Allah and SWT stands for Subhanahu wa-Ta‘ala, or “Glory to Him, the Exalted.”

* Hasan contacted jihadi web sites via multiple e-mail addresses and screen names.

* He traded 18 e-mails between Dec. 2008 and June 2009 with Anwar al-Awlaki, Al-Qaeda recruiter, inspiration for at least two other North American terror plots, and fugitive from U.S. justice. Awlaki had been Hasan’s spiritual leader at two mosques, Masjid Al-Ribat Al-Islami in San Diego and the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center outside Washington, D.C., and he acknowledges becoming Hasan’s confidant. Awlaki speculates that he may have influenced Hasan’s evolution and praises Hasan for the massacre, calling him a “hero” who “did the right thing” by killing U.S. soldiers before they could attack Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* In those e-mails, Hasan asked Awlaki when jihad is appropriate and about killing innocents in a suicide attack. “I can’t wait to join you” in the afterlife for discussions over non-alcoholic wine, Hasan wrote him. One Yemeni analyst calls Hasan “almost a member of Al-Qaeda.”

* “My strength is my financial capabilities,” Hasan boasted to Awlaki, and he donated $20,000 to $30,000 a year to Islamic “charities” outside the United States, some of it going to Pakistan.

* That Hasan, of Palestinian extraction, wore Pakistani clothing on the morning of his rampage points to his jihadi mentality.

* Hasan had “more unexplained connections to people being tracked by the FBI,” other than Awlaki, including some in Europe. One official characterized these as “Islamic extremists if not necessarily al Qaeda.”

* Duane Reasoner Jr., the 18-year-old Muslim convert whom Hasan mentored in Islam, calls himself a “extremist, fundamentalist, mujhadeen, Muslim” who outspokenly supports Awlaki, Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, Omar Abdur Rahman (the blind sheikh) and Adam Gadahn (Al-Qaeda’s top American figure).

These symptoms in the aggregate leave little doubt about Hasan’s jihadi mentality. But will the investigations allow themselves to see his motivation? Doing so means changing it from a war on “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters” to a war on radical Islam. Are Americans ready for that?

Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Travesty in New York

We are giving KSM a farcical show trial.

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 20, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the “propaganda of the deed.” And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 — not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life — and KSM, a second act: 9/11, The Director’s Cut, narration by KSM.

Sept. 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable — a civilian trial in the media capital of the world — from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, in which the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York — what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury, and spectators into fresh victims? — it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That’s precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. “Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum,” wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, “letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered.”

Finally, there’s the moral logic. It’s not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, to a military tribunal.

By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his November 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.

What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war which the U.S. itself has engaged in countless times?

By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?

Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadi is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform — everything but your own blog.

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.

Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.

Holder himself told the Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be “the trial of the century.” The last such was the trial of O. J. Simpson.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2009, The Washington Post Writers Group

Saints at a Cultural Crossroads

Art Review 'The Origins of El Greco'

By HOLLAND COTTER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
November 20, 2009

At monasteries on Mount Athos in northern Greece, you wake in the night to the sound of Greek Orthodox monks chanting Byzantine prayers. It’s an unforgettable sound, distant and unearthly, but also inside you, like a buzz in the blood.


Collection of Ecclesiastical Art, Saint Catherine of the Sinaites, Heraklion, Crete

The Origins of El Greco Christ Pantokrator, from the 14th century, is among the religious works in this show at the Onassis Cultural Center

The painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco, almost certainly heard it growing up far to the south on the island of Crete. You can hear it today when you visit “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” a lustrous exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in Midtown Manhattan.

With its extraordinary ensemble of almost 50 religious images, most of them painted on Crete — seven by El Greco and some of the rest by artists whose names are not known — the show is essentially a dual-purpose visual essay. On the one hand it roughs out the texture of a specific, cosmopolitan, East-meets-West island culture. On the other it tells the story of a great artist who emerged from that culture, lived outside it and lastingly belonged to it.

At the time of El Greco’s birth, in 1541, Crete had been a preserve of Byzantine tradition for a hundred years, since the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and a colonial possession of Venice for more than three centuries. Most of the population was Greek Orthodox, but economic power was in the hands of a Roman Catholic minority. Local artists necessarily catered to both, turning out Byzantine-style icons for one, late Gothic devotional paintings for the other and, increasingly, synthesizing the two modes.

The show opens with an example of Byzantine art in something like a pure form: a large 14th-century image (unsigned, as many of these paintings are) of Christ Pantokrator, or All Powerful, modeled after an older icon preserved in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. It’s a classic of its kind, an egg tempera painting on a wood panel of a bust-length male figure, dressed in royal purple, against a gilded ground.

The figure is half-abstract. The bearded face, set on a brawny neck, is a dainty oval topped by a turban of pulled-back hair. The nose is thin, a long droplet of flesh; the mouth, with its coral-pink lips, is minute, unsuited for eating or speaking. The eyes — large, shadowed and radiating fine stress lines — are the central feature. They look impassively at or past us, as we look into them. In the context of a church or monastery, a two-way connection between icon and worshiper is assumed.


"Virgin Hodegetria" from the Holy Monastery of Saint Panteleemon in Fodele, Crete.

Photo: Collection of Ecclesiastical

No doubt for some viewers, the much-reproduced Pantokrator image more or less defines icons as a genre: conservative and limited in variety. But the show, organized by Anastasia Drandaki, curator of the Byzantine collection at the Benaki Museum in Athens, demonstrates otherwise.

The Virgin, for example, appears in several guises: as a nursing mother, as the mourner of an adult child, as a corpse shrouded in ultramarine and about to be beamed up to heaven. Saints come in many picturesque forms and types. In a sparkling little panel, two spun-gold soldier-saints, wearing chain-mail miniskirts, do their martial thing: one skewers a dragon, the other pins the emperor Julian the Apostate like a bug to the ground.

A depiction of the death of St. Sabas is set in a craggy landscape dotted with hermits’ caves and painted in a Tuscan, or maybe Persian, palette of pink, orange and bread-crust brown. Aged and infirm monks — one riding a lion, another hunched in a litter, a third crawling on the ground — approach the saint’s prone body. Their faces are painstakingly detailed; his is gone entirely, worn away by the kisses of worshipers over the centuries.

By the time this picture was done in the second half of the 15th century, painting in Crete had moved far beyond categories like Byzantine and Gothic. Artists had absorbed Renaissance naturalism and were pushing toward Mannerism, inventing, stealing and collaging motifs as they went. In a “Pieta,” on loan from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the figures of Jesus, Mary and St. John are straight-up Giovanni Bellini plunked down on a plain gold ground. Is the painting Cretan or Venetian? Your call.

In Crete, an art-star system, long in place in Italy, came into vogue. Many early pictures went unsigned, but as painting grew more cross-culturally idiosyncratic, names appeared. Artists like Angelos, Andreas Pavias and Nikoloas Tzafouris enjoyed considerable celebrity, as did the home-grown Mannerist Georgios Klontzas, whose fantastically seething miniaturist cosmologies are among the show’s highlights. By 1584, Michael Damaskenos, who was a big deal in Venice, had returned to Crete to be a big deal there, perfecting a Byzantine-Renaissance synthesis that sold like hot cakes and spawned countless imitators.

Where was Domenikos Theotokopoulos in all of this? He was in the cosmopolitan thick of things. Until around 1567, when he was in his mid-20s, he stayed in Crete and thrived. Not much of his output from that period survives, but a few things do, and they are fascinating documents of an ambitious career on the move.

"The Baptism of Christ," by El Greco, circa 1570, at "The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete"

Photo: Municipality of Heraklion, Crete


A small, beat-up “Dormition of the Virgin,” which some scholars take to be his earliest known work, is standard-issue Byzantine, with foreign intrusions. Italianate angels parachute into the scene; a fancy gold candlestick with figures of female nudes sits indecorously front and center in what is, after all, a funeral.

The painting dates to sometime before 1567, when El Greco left — permanently, it turned out — for Venice. He may have spent time with Titian there. He certainly looked hard at the master’s painting and at Tintoretto’s, and then at Michelangelo’s and Parmigianino’s when he got to Rome in 1570. Bits of all of them stew around in a murky painting of the “Adoration of the Shepherds” that most likely belongs to the Roman stay.

He moved on to Spain with great hopes: King Philip II was a big fan. But then, for some reason, he wasn’t. What happened? Most likely the artist’s peculiar style — Mannerist extravagance laced with island-art gumbo — didn’t fly after all at court, where suavity usually tends to be rewarded. So he ended up working for churches, the institutions that had hired him in the first place in Crete. And the icon painter in him gradually resurfaced.

We see it in the very last painting in the show, a 1603 oil study for a “Coronation of the Virgin” commissioned by the Hospital of Charity in the town of Illescas. The composition has an iconlike symmetry. The figures, in their expressive abstraction, are as much Byzantine as Mannerist. And the picture scintillates with light, illusionistically painted rather than reflected from gold. Even cherubs tumbling around like kittens can distract from the picture’s nuclear focus: this is an image meant to promote, as music can, time-suspending, space-vivifying contemplation.

Exactly this psycho-sensual dynamic lies at the heart of how icons, as spiritual utensils, function. I wish the exhibition made something of this; had taken, as its third theme, the reality of these objects, not just as historical artifacts illustrating the progress of a culture or a famous career, but also as living and interactive energy sources, designed to embody and radiate charisma.

But that’s a major subject. It needs a full-dress show of its own. Maybe some day we’ll get it. In the meantime this one has some of the most enwrapping and enrapturing art in town, framed by alert scholarship, a lambent environment (the installation design is by Daniel Kershaw), and a score of Byzantine music, arranged and performed by the Greek ensemble En Chordais, that will soak into your system and stay there. Miraculously, admission to all of this is free.

“The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete” remains at the Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Avenue, near 52nd Street, through Feb. 27; (212) 486-4448, onassisusa.org.

Multimedia
Slide Show
Icon Painting and Crete

AT THE END OF THE DAY, DIVERSITY HAS JUMPED THE SHARK, HORRIFICALLY

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
November 18, 2009

It cannot be said often enough that the chief of staff of the United States Army, Gen. George Casey, responded to a massacre of 13 Americans in which the suspect is a Muslim by saying: "Our diversity ... is a strength."

As long as the general has brought it up: Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations.

Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also look at the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare -- I mean the beautiful mosaics -- in Third World hellholes like Afghanistan, Rwanda and South Central, L.A.

"Diversity" is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: "Cancer is a strength!" "Pollution is our greatest asset!"

By contrast, the canard "diversity is a strength" has now replaced "at the end of the day," "skin in the game," "blood and treasure," "jumped the shark," "boots on the ground," "horrific" (whatever happened to the perfectly good word "horrible"?), "not so much," "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," and "that went well," as America's most irritating cliche.

We should start making up other nonsense mantras along the lines of "diversity is a strength" and mindlessly repeating them until they catch on, too.

Next time you're at a cocktail party, just start saying, "Chocolate pudding is dramatic irony" from time to time. Eventually other people will start saying it, without anyone bothering to consider whether it makes sense. Then we'll do another one: "Nicolas Cage is a two-cycle engine."

Before you know it, liberals will react to news of a mass murder by muttering, "Well, you know what they say: Nicolas Cage is a two-cycle engine," while everyone nods in agreement.

Except mere nonsense makes more sense than "diversity is a strength."

If Gen. Casey's wildly inappropriate use of this lunatic cliche in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre doesn't kill it, nothing will.

Among the worst aspects of America's "diversity" is that liberals' reaction to a heterogeneous population is to create a pecking order based on alleged victimhood -- as described in electrifying detail in my book,Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America.


In modern America, the guilty are sanctified, while the innocent never stop paying -- including with their lives, as they did at Fort Hood last week. Points are awarded to aspiring victims for angry self-righteousness, acts of violence and general unpleasantness.

But liberals celebrate diversity only in the case of superficial characteristics like race, gender, sexual preference and country of origin. They reject diversity when we need it, such as in "diversity" of legal forums.

After conferring with everyone at Zabar's, Obama decided that if a standard civilian trial is good enough for Martha Stewart, then it's good enough for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is coming to New York!

Mohammed's military tribunal was already under way when Obama came into office, stopped the proceedings and, eight months later, announced that Mohammed would be tried in a federal court in New York.

In a liberal's reckoning, diversity is good when we have both Muslim jihadists and patriotic Americans serving in the U.S. military. But diversity is bad when Martha Stewart and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are subjected to different legal tribunals to adjudicate their transgressions.

Terrorists tried in civilian courts will be entitled to the whole panoply of legal protections accorded Stewart or any American charged with a crime, such as the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the right to exclude evidence obtained in violation of Miranda rights, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront one's accusers, the right to a change of venue, the right to examine the evidence against you, and the right to subpoena witnesses and evidence in one's defense.

Members of Congress have it in their power to put an end to this lunacy right now. If they don't, they are as complicit in Mohammed's civilian trial as the president. Article I, Section 8, and Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution give Congress the power to establish the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts and to create exceptions to that jurisdiction.

Congress could pass a statute limiting federal court jurisdiction to individuals not subject to trial before a military tribunal. Any legislator who votes "nay" on such a bill will be voting to give foreign terrorists the same legal rights as U.S. citizens -- and more legal rights than members of the U.S. military are entitled to.

In the case of legal proceedings, diversity actually is a strength.

COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER

Coach lets it fly

BY WILL BLYTHE - Correspondent
The Raleigh News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
8 November 2009

Coaches' memoirs are usually a sorry lot, rife with the sorts of nostrums and treacle and pithy life lessons one endures in the campaign biographies of politicians and the masterworks of celebrities.

The problem is that as autobiographers, coaches tend to play it safe. To put their propriety into basketball terms, they get a lead and resort to the sort of stall ball once famous in these parts. Piety prevails. Homilies are spun. Backsides are kissed. The chair-thrower, the jacket-stomper, the profanity-spewer are nowhere in sight.

The modern coach represents himself as a leader in the vein of General Electric's Jack Welch or Berkshire-Hathaway's Warren Buffett, successful memoirists themselves. His vast knowledge of human nature and mastery of motivational tactics simply can't be confined to a gym. His book is marketed to white-collar Joes who are supposed to apply the wisdom of a genius in help-side defense to the game of corporate ascent. To that, this reader says: as an experiment, try stomping on your jacket at work one day or cursing your boss as if he were a ref, and see how many office "victories" you win.

The first thing, therefore, that needs to be said about North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams' memoir "Hard Work" is that it isn't like that. Yes, there is some coach-speak in it but rather than a portrait as manicured as Rick Pitino's shiny little nails, readers actually - refreshingly - get a close look at a man unwilling or unable to groom his image, a fellow perhaps unashamed of who he really is. Which is to say a "plodder," as Williams puts it, from the North Carolina mountains who grew up poor in a broken family headed by his adored mother, Lallage. He was a feisty but mediocre athlete (and not much of a square dancer, either) who knew early he was destined to be a coach.

The book's structure feels a little gerrymandered, and is not so much a fast march toward an inevitable ending as an afternoon spent driving around town doing errands, a common deficiency of narratives built of taped conversations and hastily wrapped in the face of terrifying deadlines. But Tim Crothers, Williams' co-writer, has done an excellent job of eliciting new material from the coach and embodying these revelations in a salty Carolinian voice, equal parts swagger and humility. This is no small accomplishment.

We already knew that Roy Williams didn't particularly care for his father Babe's roaming ways, but until this book, we had no idea that as a 14-year-old, the future coach pulled his dad off his mother during a fight, knocked him to the floor and thrust a bottle under his chin. He told his father: "Get out of here or I'll bust this over your head. I'll kill you." When decades later, a wary reconciliation occurs between father and son, it is far more impressive, given the violence here.

We knew that Williams could on occasion be a little ornery, but we had no idea about how ornery. Home to Asheville from college, he found himself stuck in the passing lane behind a slow car. Eventually, he pulled up alongside to see a woman driving and a man asleep in the passenger seat. He yelled, "Lady, either drive faster or pull that old piece of [expletive] ...." The passenger woke up and Williams saw that it was his Uncle Gordon. The driver was his Aunt Bertha.

We knew he was competitive, but we didn't realize that he'd actually race his assistant coach, Steve Robinson, to see who could put their keys in the office door lock first. "Gotcha!" Williams, triumphant, said. Robinson didn't even know they were competing. "It's always a competition," Williams told him.

And of course, if we follow this sort of thing, we knew that Williams, then coaching at Kansas, went nose-to-nose with Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski in 2000 during the second round of the NCAA tournament. "I'll tell you what you can do," he told Krzyzewski, before telling him a lot of other things you can't print in a newspaper.

After the UNC team that would eventually win the NCAA championship in 2005 unexpectedly lost its season opener to Santa Clara, Williams forbade the Tar Heels from hitting the beaches of Maui. We knew he was mad, but we didn't know quite how mad. "They had made me mad and so I was going to make them mad. I was going to get even," he writes. "I was going to run them until half the team puked. I was vicious and they responded."

I was vicious and they responded!

This coaching lore may not be the most corporate of mantras, but Roy Williams seems like the kind of guy who'd rather hit the boards than the boardrooms. "Hard Work" is a successful coach's memoir not because it provides a blueprint for success but because it reveals the humiliations and insecurities that have stoked Williams' competitive fire and made him a basketball coach. May he always feel free to sling that jacket.

Will Blythe's memoir, "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever," examines the UNC-Duke basketball rivalry from a Carolina fan's perspective.

Roy Williams will sign copies of his book "Hard Work: My Life On and Off the Court" at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, and 7:30 p.m. Friday at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham. Tickets for the signing lines will be issued with the purchase of each book.

Bruce Springsteen shares power, presence and 'Born To Run' with Sommet crowd

Concert Review: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at the Sommet Center, Nashville TN

by Peter Cooperon
The Nashville Tennessean
http://www.tennessean.com
November 19, 2009

Bruce Springsteen has still got it, and it seems to mean more now than ever.

The guy is 60 now, and he doesn’t have to work for the applause anymore. Nostalgia is the cheapest pathway to emotion, and Springsteen’s songs are interwoven into the fabric of so many American lives that he could do a by-the-numbers, greatest hits set each night and thousands would cheer.

At the Sommet Center on Wednesday, Springsteen and his E Street Band instead delivered a sweaty three-hour workout that featured 13 different songs than they offered at last year's Nashville show, and seven different songs than they’d played four nights ago in Milwaukee.

Of the songs on this year’s 18-song Greatest Hits album, Springsteen’s Sommet night did not feature “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m On Fire,” “Glory Days,” “Fire” and three others. On an evening in which he and the band performed breakthrough album Born To Run in order and in its entirety, Springsteen still managed to balance the smiling shock of recognition with spontaneity and invention.

That doesn’t mean Springsteen was going for esoterica. It meant he and the E Streeters sought, and achieved, presence and emotion. Oh, and volume as well.

“So you’re scared, and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” Springsteen sang in “Thunder Road.” He’s not young anymore at all, and “Thunder Road” turned 25 years old nine years ago, and yet he and the band delivered the song with all of the throb and romance and desperation present in its long-ago recording.

The evening began with some of Springsteen’s darker, more difficult material: “Wrecking Ball,” “Seeds,” “Trapped” and “Something in the Night” demanded attention that would be rewarded with a sing-along of “Hungry Heart,” a song that offered saxophone man Clarence Clemons his first of many spotlight solos of the show. Last year, Clemons spent much of the concert sitting down. He’s apparently recovering nicely from hip and knee replacement surgery, as he stood for the entire three-hour concert on Wednesday.

Born To Run included more Clemons solos, most memorably on the the title track and on the epic “Jungleland.” For the Born To Run material, the band stuck fairly close to the original plot, though never to the point of rote replication.

After Born To Run, Springsteen began taking “requests” in the form of posters from fans that had song titles printed on them (the posters, not the fans). “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” “Santa Claus is Coming To Town,” “Two Hearts” and “Darlington County” were requested, and then Springsteen began crafting the show’s end without help from posters or shouted requests, save for a casual pass at the requested Johnny Cash hit “Ring of Fire.”

Late-show highlights included a slinky “Darlington County” that nodded to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and an impassioned “Badlands” that found bass man Garry W. Tallent’s fingers racing while he stood stock-still and rock-solid enough to appear as if no combination of strong winds and linebackers could derail him from his rock ’n’ roll purpose.

The show closed in encore, with “Dancing in the Dark,” “Rosalita” and a thrilling take on Jackie Wilson’s "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher."

There has always been a Peter Pan-esque, “Do you believe?” question involved in a Springsteen show. Wednesday’s show was a call to believe that, in this shuffling, iPod age, it’s relevant to deliver an album’s songs in original order. And it was a rollicking insistence that music is not a soundtrack or a backdrop, that music is in fact the heartbeat of the whole deal.

“Wendy, let me in, I want to be your friend/ I want to guard your dreams and visions,” Springsteen sang then and sings now, in the most Peter Pan line of them all. Dreams and visions aren’t often well-guarded, but they can be illuminated. Sixty years into this world, Bruce Springsteen refuses to turn off the light.

Setlist:
Wrecking Ball
Seeds
Trapped
Something in the Night
Hungry Heart
Working on a Dream
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (with Curt Ramm)
Night
Backstreets
Born to Run
She's the One
Meeting Across the River (with Curt Ramm)
Jungleland
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
Santa Claus is Comin' to Town
Two Hearts
Darlington County
You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Badlands
* * *
Ring of Fire
No Surrender
Bobby Jean
American Land (with Curt Ramm)
Dancing in the Dark
Rosalita (with Curt Ramm)
Higher and Higher (with Curt Ramm)

Cobbling Together a Crisis

Even as the swine-flu epidemic has peaked.

By Michael Fumento
http://www.nationalreview.com/
19 November 2009

‘Swine flu has killed 540 kids, sickened 22 million Americans,” screams USA Today’s page-one headline, with a sub-head proclaiming, “CDC: Cases, Deaths are Unprecedented.” “Swine flu cases in the U.S. are rising at the fastest pace for influenza in four decades,” breathlessly declares the lede of a Bloomberg News article. Another article’s title refers to a “national swine flu spike.”

Scary stuff — but it’s phony. It’s actually a desperate effort to distract from an alarmist media world’s greatest nightmare: that the epidemic has peaked.

The latest hype is based on the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 22 million Americans have been infected with H1N1 swine flu from the outbreak’s early-April beginning through October 17. (Though the word “sickened” hardly applies, since about a third of cases are wholly asymptomatic.) Of those, the agency says 4,000 have died.

Put in perspective, through a comparison with garden-variety seasonal flu, these figures aren’t at all alarming; and the CDC’s report indeed provides seasonal-flu data. But perspective is the alarmists’ enemy. So, instead, reporters simply cut, rearranged, and pasted press-conference statements from unofficial swine-flu “czarina” Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Thus Schuchat’s reference to “unprecedented” had nothing to do with absolute numbers of infections or deaths, but referred just to the time of year at which they were occurring. That’s because swine flu spreads more easily at warmer temperatures. Normally, flu doesn’t get into stride until early January and then peaks in mid-February. The figures themselves are far from “unprecedented.” The CDC estimates 5 to 20 percent of the population (15 to 60 million people) gets the flu in a typical year, with almost all cases occurring from January through April. That’s as many as 15 million a month, compared to 22 million spread over half a year.

What’s truly unprecedented about this swine flu is its incredible mildness. The CDC estimates seasonal flu annually kills 36,000 Americans, again spread over four months. That compares to 4,000 swine-flu deaths in the current cycle. The seasonal-flu death rate therefore ranges from 0.06 percent to 0.24 percent, while the CDC estimate puts it at only 0.0182 percent for swine flu. So seasonal flu is three to twelve times deadlier per case.

The media also used Schuchat to invoke the horrific Spanish flu of 1918-19, in which about 675,000 Americans died out of a much smaller U.S. population. CNN.com paraphrased Schuchat, saying: “The prevalence of flu cases is higher than at any time since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.” Utterly false. Her only reference to the calamity was “what we’re seeing with this H1N1 virus is nowhere near the severity of the 1918 pandemic.” Apparently something got lost in the translation.

And just as swine flu arrived early, so too must it peak earlier. Indeed, it already has — as data readily available on the CDC FluView website and elsewhere, and just as readily ignored, show. The accompanying graph from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a sharp decline in both new deaths and hospitalizations.

Even more telling, though, is that the bottom has fallen out of new infections. Test samples doctors have submitted to CDC-monitored surveillance laboratories went from 26,000 two weeks ago to 21,000 last week to just 13,000 at present. Further, progressively fewer of those samples have actually shown flu. Overall, the number of positive samples has plunged over 60 percent in just two weeks.

But could these indicators start to shoot up again? Not likely. According to Farr’s law, named after 19th-century epidemiologist John Farr, infectious disease patterns follow a bell curve. As the disease first plucks low-hanging fruit, infections rise rapidly, but as fruit gets harder to reach the rate of increase slows – until, finally, infections start falling off either to zero or to a low “endemic” level.

Back in 1989, I wrote that Farr’s law indicated that U.S. AIDS cases had already peaked. For my troubles I was called — to use the mildest of the epithets — a nutcase. Somehow, we were told, AIDS was going to go on infecting and infecting, killing and killing. There were predictions of more dead Americans than there were people in the U.S. population. These projections obviously simply ignored Farr’s law – and also flunked the common-sense test. And Farr’s law applies in the current case, too. Since Australia is in the southern hemisphere, its flu season has ended. Almost all cases were swine flu and there was no vaccine. And Australia’s epidemic curve indicates that, yes, once swine flu cases started going down they kept dropping.

No, the bell wasn’t symmetrical, and we shouldn’t expect it to be here in the U.S. either. Expect a long “tail” extending to the end of normal flu season in April. In other words, the fact that infections have peaked doesn’t mean we’ve necessarily seen half of them yet.

And that should actually prove to be good news. Consider that even without a vaccine, Australia along with New Zealand reported significantly fewer flu deaths than in normal years. Why? As I mentioned above, the newly released CDC estimate of infections and deaths in the U.S. indicates that seasonal flu is anywhere from three to twelve times deadlier than swine flu. Other data, including data from New York City, also indicate that swine flu is far milder. Yet swine flu spreads more easily, essentially outcompeting seasonal flu. In doing so, it’s essentially acting as a vaccine against its far deadlier cousin. (The father of vaccinations, Edward Jenner, observed something similar: Cowpox protected dairy workers from the often-deadly and horribly disfiguring smallpox.)

Swine flu, therefore, prevents more flu deaths than it causes. Unfortunately, the U.S. “hysteria curve,” as indicated by emergency-room visits by people worried they have the flu (and worried enough to seek medical attention) is still at a higher level than for any other flu season in the 21st century. You can probably credit, in part, Obama’s October 23 “national emergency” declaration. Nothing like an official pronouncement to send people with slight fevers — real or imagined — into fever pitch. Perhaps the administration can argue that extra work hours put in by exhausted health-care personnel, and by a sensationalist media hyping the story, are stimulating the economy.

— Michael Fumento is director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in science and health issues, and author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics.

Excused Horrors

by Walter Williams
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
19 November 2009

Last Tuesday, I had the pleasurable task of being Master of Ceremonies for the Atlas Economic Research Foundation dinner in Washington, D.C., that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Founded in 1981, the Atlas Foundation assists the formation of free market think tanks around the world to spread the ideas of personal liberty, private property rights and limited government. So far, they have been successful in at least 70 countries. Attending the two-day celebration were think-tank representatives from many of these countries, including those from Croatia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, South Korea, Russia and Brazil.

Alan Kors, University of Pennsylvania history professor, gave the evening’s keynote address. What he revealed about the dereliction and character weakness of academics, intellectuals, media elites and politicians is by no means complimentary, but worse than that, dangerous. Professor Kors said that over the years, he has frequently asked students how many deaths were caused by Joseph Stalin and Mao Tsetung and their successors. Routinely, they gave numbers in the thousands. Kors says that’s equivalent to saying the Nazis are responsible for the deaths of just a few hundred Jews. But here’s the record: Nazis were responsible for the deaths of 20 million of their own people and those in nations they conquered. Between 1917 and 1983, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.

Professor Kors asks why are the horrors of Nazism so well known and widely condemned, but not those of socialism and communism? For decades after World War II, people have hunted down and sought punishment for Nazi murderers. How much hunting down and seeking punishment for Stalinist and Maoist murderers? In Europe, especially Germany, hoisting the swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag is a crime.

It’s acceptable to hoist and march under a flag emblazoned with the former USSR’s hammer and sickle. Even in the U.S., it’s acceptable to praise mass murderers, as Anita Dunn, President Obama’s communications director, did in a commencement address for St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral where she said Mao Tsetung was one of her heroes. Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite or politicians, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Academics, media elites and leftist politicians both in the U.S. and Europe protested the actions and military buildup of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the breakup of the Soviet Union. Recall the leftist hissy fit when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire and predicted that communism would wind up on the trash heap of history.

Professor Alan Kors did not say this but the reason why the world’s leftists give the world’s most horrible murderers a pass is because they sympathize with their socioeconomic goals, which include government ownership and/or control over the means of production. In the U.S., the call is for government control, through regulations, as opposed to ownership. Unfortunately, it matters little whether there is a Democratically or Republican-controlled Congress and White House; the march toward greater government control continues. It just happens at a quicker pace with Democrats in charge.

You say, “Come on, Williams, there will never be the kind of socialist oppression seen elsewhere here!” You might be right because Americans have become very compliant with unconstitutional and immoral congressional edicts. But what do you think would happen if some Americans began to rise up and heed Thomas Jefferson’s admonition “Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” and decided to disobey unconstitutional congressional edicts?

Breast Cancer Follies

The Right Prescription

By Robert M. Goldberg on 11.18.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org

Think Congress is regretting having allocated over a billion dollars to let the government generate studies to tell us what medical tests and procedures should be covered under Obamacare?

In the wake of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation to tell women in their forties to take a hike on mammograms, and to suggest that other screening technologies aren't worth the money, I bet it won't be long before that budget and the agency that has it and also controls the information the Task Force uses to make such wise decisions, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, are the subjects of congressional hearings.

The breast cancer recommendations come in a 30-page review of 10 studies that even the authors admit cannot be generalized to individual forms of breast cancer and different groups of patients .

But there's more. The Task Force on Monday also issued a second recommendation that has received no media coverage -- on screening for heart disease. Because heart disease kills more women than breast cancer, that decision could be even more dangerous for women because it is based on -- or biased towards -- old, even outdated methods for determining risk for a serious illness.

The Task Force rejected the use of a test for heart inflammation called C-reactive protein (CRP) as a reliable predictor of risk of heart disease. Instead, it said doctors should stick to a rule of thumb called the Framingham Risk Evaluation (FRE).

The FRE uses the number of fatal and nonfatal heart attacks suffered by workers in Framingham, Massachusetts, within a ten-year period, and it is based on a summary estimate of major risk factors for coronary heart disease, such as age, blood pressure, blood cholesterol levels and smoking.

How did the Task Force conclude CRP testing is worthless? The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality told them so based on "the evidence."

But AHRQ ignored three recent studies demonstrating the importance of CRP. A 2005 study from Johns Hopkins and funded by the National Institutes of Health found that the FRE fails to identify approximately one-third of women likely to develop coronary heart disease. Many women deemed "low risk" by the geniuses at AHRQ had had coronary atherosclerosis, which even the Task Force will admit predicts heart attacks.

Second, it ignored the JUPITER ("Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: An Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin") study. That experiment tested whether giving healthy people with low LDL cholesterol levels but high hs-CRP levels would reduce death from heart attacks. It did. Or more to the point, it showed that screening CRP along with cholesterol tests can cut the incidence of heart disease by 40 percent in high risk individuals with statins and reduce death from heart disease by 20 percent.

Third, the Task Force, in a rush to save a buck for Obamacare, skated past the most recent findings from JUPITER that apply particularly to women. Forty percent of JUPITER's participants were women 60 and over with low cholesterol and no history of heart disease but were tested and found to have high levels of inflammation. It turns out that women are more likely to benefit from testing and treatment than men: the incidence of heart disease of any form was cut by 46 percent in women over 60 compared to 42 percent in men over 50.

But that's not the Task Force recommendation. Instead, the Task Force, relying on a review of studies and research that ignored these important findings and stopped looking in 2002, just when the understanding of CRP as a predictor was in its infancy, came to a pre-ordained conclusion that conveniently fits the party line that so-called evidence-based medicine can actually reduce the cost of care even as government creates a new health care entitlement.

The one-size fits all recommendation for breast cancer screening ignored the fact that breast cancer is not just one disease, but many related illnesses with different pathways and signatures. Worse, it acknowledged the wide variation that makes individualized risk assessment essential but went on to claim it wasn't worth the effort. And it failed to estimate the impact of telling women to simply go away. It took years to build up screening rates to where new drugs could have an impact on mortality. Now all that could be undone.

Similarly, the failure to take into account advances in testing and treatment, insights that will save the lives of thousands of women, is hard to explain, let alone justify. Dr. Diane Petitti, vice chair of the Task Force, maintains: "we have to say what we see based on the science and the data."

But if you only see what you are shown, then what you see or say isn't really science. It's politics. And if you think these two decisions were controversial, just wait. With billions to spend and a high profile, the AHRQ and its Preventive Services Task Force will turn prevention into just another word for saying "no" to medical innovation.


Robert M. Goldberg is vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and founder of Hands Off My Health, a grass roots health care empowerment network.

It’s No Way to Fight a War on Terror

This won’t be a show trial, but it will be a trial for show.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 18, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

I get where President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are coming from. They think that if we change our way of life, the terrorists will have won.

In principle, I agree. If upholding our values makes fighting the War on Terror harder, then it should be harder.

That’s why I don’t care much that it will cost more money to try suspected terrorists in the Big Apple than it would in the state-of-the-art facility at Guantanamo Bay. Similarly, while the security concerns stemming from a trial in New York are real, I think we can handle them. And, again, just because something is harder or more dangerous, that doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t do it. That’s the whole point behind “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” Some things just aren’t for sale.

Nonetheless, I think the decision to send Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his buddies to a civilian trial is a travesty.

Ultimately, the disagreement is one of first principles. If we are at war, then the rules of war apply. The fact that this is a war unlike others we’ve fought should not mean that it isn’t a war at all.

Don’t tell that to Obama. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t see the threat as an unconventional war but as a conventional law-enforcement problem. The attorney general insists that 9/11 is a matter for civilian courts. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says attacks such as 9/11 should be thought of as “man-caused disasters.” Her top priority after the Fort Hood shootings was to bring Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to justice — a fine answer for a law-enforcement official, but not from someone charged with protecting the homeland. The War on Terror itself has morphed into “overseas contingency operations.”

Just as telling, Obama insists that the decision to move Mohammed to civilian court was entirely Holder’s. This is deceptive nonsense. Even if technically true, the choice to let Holder make the decision was the real decision. The commander in chief opted to hand off jurisdiction over enemy combatants to the cops. He can’t duck that responsibility by saying it wasn’t his call.

But there’s a more immediate problem. This won’t be a show trial, strictly speaking. But it will be a trial for show.

Prominent defenders of the decision insist that this trial is at least partly to benefit America’s image around the world. That’s a laudable goal — and another example of why this is not a mere law-enforcement issue. But I’m dubious that will be the result.

Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.) defended the administration Sunday on Fox News, echoing suggestions from the White House that even if the accused are acquitted on a technicality, they won’t be released. They would go back to the legal purgatory known as “preventive detention.” That is the right policy; these are dangerous men, after all. But it is an affront to civilian jurisprudence. Under military law, preventive detention is a well-established norm. Under civilian law, it’s an affront.

Throw into the equation that these men weren’t read their rights, were interrogated in a manner that is illegal in civilian courts, are being tried with little if any possibility of an impartial jury — and the fact that Holder all but insists they’ll be convicted — and it all adds up to a farce.

Moreover, the administration has not abolished military tribunals. Holder is sending the al-Qaeda suspects in the attack on the destroyer Cole to one. Hence, enemies who attack us abroad are treated like enemy combatants with fewer rights, while terrorists who managed to kill civilians here at home are treated like American citizens. That is perverse.

If history is a guide, this trial will unavoidably come at a cost in terms of leaked intelligence and propaganda victories for our enemies.

Obama’s defenders don’t believe it. “Does anyone think,” asks Joshua Micah Marshall, a prominent liberal blogger, that the “Nuremberg trials . . . advanced (the defendants’) causes?” Obama himself invoked the Nuremberg trials during the presidential campaign. “Part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities,” he explained, “we still gave them a day in court, and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law.”

Such arguments are revealing on at least two counts. First, the Nuremberg trials were military tribunals — it was understood that the Nazis were not mere criminals.

Second, they took place after we had won the war against Nazi Germany. We could afford such a spectacle because the Nazi cause was dead.

Meanwhile, the War on Terror lives. Just don’t tell that to Barack Obama.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Is America a Serious Nation?

by Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.humanevents.com/
11/17/2009

Are we at war -- or not?

For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?

Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies -- that he may not be guilty.


And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.

Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.

We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?

Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, a naval base on U.S. soil, when America was at peace, and killed as many Americans as the Sept. 11 hijackers, was not brought here for trial. He was an enemy combatant under the Geneva Conventions and treated as such.

When Maj. Andre, the British spy and collaborator of Benedict Arnold, was captured, he got a military tribunal, after which he was hanged. When Gen. Andrew Jackson captured two British subjects in Spanish Florida aiding renegade Indians, Jackson had both tried and hanged on the spot.

Enemy soldiers who commit atrocities are not sent to the United States for trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers who commit atrocities are shot when caught.

When and where did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acquire his right to a trial by a jury of his peers in a U.S. court?

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, alleged collaborators like Mary Surratt were tried before a military tribunal and hanged at Ft. McNair. When eight German saboteurs were caught in 1942 after being put ashore by U-boat, they were tried in secret before a military commission and executed, with the approval of the Supreme Court. What makes KSM special?

Is the Obama administration aware of what it is risking by not turning KSM over to a military tribunal in Guantanamo?

How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?

Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but that his family would be killed and he would be water-boarded if he refused to talk?

And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?

There have been reports that in the trials of those convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, sources and methods were compromised, weakening our security for the second attack on Sept. 11.

If the trial is held in lower Manhattan, how much security will be needed to protect against a car bomber who wants the world to see a mighty blow struck against the Great Satan? And if, as some suggest, the trial should be held on Governor's Island, would that not make the United States look like a nation under siege?

What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?

In America, trials often become games, where the prosecution, though it has truth on its side, loses because it inadvertently breaks one of the rules.

The Obamaites had best pray that does not happen, for they may be betting his presidency on the outcome of the game about to begin.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

The Art of Karen Laub-Novak

Deirdre M. Lawler
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/11/the-art-of-karen-laub-novak
Nov 12, 2009

Last week I was introduced to the work of the late Karen Laub-Novak (1938–2009), on exhibit at the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. Only vaguely familiar with her and her work, I was curious to see how her art relates to the deeper questions of life and faith, and to see a collection from a successful, contemporary Catholic artist.

The Angel (Duino Elegies)

Laub-Novak’s works in oil, bright and imposing, dominate the exhibit. The overwhelming theme among these works, which are all focused on human forms, is of struggle; the body is the locus of tension and decision. Laub-Novak’s figures are, on the one hand, carefully studied and anatomically examined; she depicts them as flesh and bones, occasionally with an almost x-ray quality. She seems to revel in muscle mass, the tension of individual sinews wrapping around and connecting the body. On the other hand, as people they are left undefined: almost anti-gravitational at times, they are positioned without grounding and presented without context; their extremities trail off or are truncated; their faces are obscured. Nevertheless, by omitting definition in the figures, Laub-Novak seems to invite the viewer to consider what forces or ideas these figures are battling. While she stresses the physical and yet leaves it incomplete, she introduces the metaphysical and highlights the fragility of the distinction between the two in the human experience. Some of her choices in color and composition are too harsh for my taste, but I was struck by Laub-Novak’s ability to convey one single moment like a cross-section of motion. Reflecting on this juxtaposition, I was reminded of Eliot’s image of “the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.”

One striking piece in a spectrum of whites, reds, and blacks called “Confusion” focuses on a proportional male figure, standing in profile. His body is almost lost in a conglomeration; blending iterations of himself which pull him in different directions and combine with him to form an abstract shape. A faint outline of a secondary facial profile indicates the motion of the figure turning his head down and to his left, away from the viewer. Whether he is turning aside from a goal, redirecting his thoughts, or hanging his head under oppression is left undetermined.

One oil painting stands apart from its group and indeed from the entire exhibit: a portrait entitled “Fr. Richard Novak, CSC In Orvieto, Italy.” Fr. Novak stands in the foreground of an Orvieto street with the cathedral in view behind him, facing the viewer with a genuinely happy expression. The close-up view of the priest and angular perspective on the street lends a snapshot-like quality to the painting; even without the hint of the name in the title, I would have guessed that the artist was familiar with her subject. Fr. Novak’s peaceful and unassuming presence gives the painting a lighter and perhaps less serious tone than her other work; yet some foreboding background color and one intriguing detail (the priest’s crucifix hangs askew from his neck, half-hidden in his cassock) ensure that the viewer is not left without food for thought.

Coming upon Laub-Novak’s lithograph series on T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” I was excited to find explicit evidence of Eliot’s influence on her after her oils had already brought the poet to mind. Like the oils, these prints illustrate states of the soul and the emotions through bold imagery of the body. In this medium, however, Laub-Novak searches further along the lines of human weakness, where many of her oils depict strength. “At the Turning of the Stairs,” a mysterious reflection on part III of the poem, relates most to Laub-Novak’s other works compositionally. I preferred “Redeem the Time,” however, a work with more classic composition than many of her other pieces, taking up part IV with Eliot’s image of the “jeweled unicorns” and a subtle approach to the “silent sister veiled in white and blue.”

The remainder of the exhibit consists mostly of the “Duino Elegies” and an Apocalypse Series, both sets of lithographs. The style of the apocalyptic pieces is more open and dynamic, eliciting the confusion and drama of the event. The “Elegies” have a more precise and measured character, and are darker and more unsettling.


Karen Laub-Novak with a commissioned work, a 12-foot bronze sculpture of agronomist Norman E. Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But I was struck most of all by a solitary watercolor which, half-hidden in the entrance to the main exhibit, could easily be overlooked. This piece, “The Original Big Apple,” presents a unique perspective on the scandal of Eden; the fallen couple is depicted standing within the core of the apple, which hangs from a tree around which the serpent, large and dominating, is wrapped. Despite what appears to be inferior technique and presentation—the paint as well as the ink in the piece are almost carelessly applied, the paper is buckled, and pencil sketches are evident—the thoughtfulness combined with delicacy in this work are distinct from and in some ways preferable to the more ambitious style of the others.

That Karen Laub-Novak was a woman of faith is evident through her work. Even if her biblically themed paintings and lithographs are not indication enough, a few samples of her work in bronze, Church commissions, are certainly expressions of a religious spirit. I understand that she did not consider her work religious art per se, and I would second her there—the questions she addresses, she addresses from the human perspective. They are more an invitation to introspection than a directive toward the divine. Nevertheless, it is clear that all the pieces drive at the deeper questions of our existence, and that they originate from an artist who believed the answers will be deeper yet.

Deirdre M. Lawler, formerly an art teacher, studies philosophy and theology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Related Links
http://laub-novakart.com/index.html

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/10/karen-novak-1938-2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303509.html?wprss=rss_metro/obituaries

Bringing al-Qaeda to New York

By the Editors
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 14, 2009 7:00 AM

Candidate Barack Obama urged a return to pre-9/11 counterterrorism-by-courts. President Obama’s Justice Department overflows with lawyers who spent the last eight years representing America’s enemies. Thus, Friday’s announcement that top al-Qaeda terrorists will be brought to New York City for a civilian trial is no surprise. That doesn’t make it any less inexcusable.

The treatment of jihadist terror as a mere law-enforcement issue, fit for civilian courts, was among the worst of the national-security derelictions of the Nineties. While the champions of this approach stress that prosecutors scored a 100 percent conviction rate, they conveniently omit mention of the paltry number of cases (less than three dozen, mostly against low-level terrorists, over an eight-year period, despite numerous attacks), as well as the rigorous due-process burdens that made prosecution of many terrorists impossible, the daunting disclosure and witness-confrontation rules that required government to disclose mountains of intelligence, the gargantuan expense of “hardening” courthouses and prisons to protect juries and judges, and the terrorists’ exploitation of legal privileges to plot additional attacks and escape attempts.

A picture posted on the website www.muslm.net allegedly shows Al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and four suspected co-plotters will be tried in a civilian court blocks from where Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center, the US government has announced.
(AFP/HO/File)

In placing the nation on a war footing after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration invoked the laws of war to detain terrorists as enemy combatants and to try those who had committed provable war crimes by military commission — measures that were endorsed by Congress despite being challenged in the courts by some of the lawyers now working in Obama’s Justice Department. This military-commission system provided due-process protections that were unprecedented for wartime enemies, including the right to appellate review in the civilian courts. But they protected national-defense information from disclosure.

This commission system is tailor-made for the 9/11 plotters, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suicide-hijacking mastermind who is brazen in taking credit for that and numerous other attacks against the United States. In fact, last December, KSM and his four co-defendants indicated to the military judge that they wanted to plead guilty and move on to execution. But then the Obama administration swept into power and undertook to repudiate many of Bush’s counterterrorism practices, declaring its intention to close Gitmo within a year and forcing a moratorium on military commissions so the process could be “studied.” Friday’s announcement that KSM and the other 9/11 plotters will be sent to federal court in New York for a civilian trial is the most significant step to date in Obama’s determination to turn back the clock to the time when government believed subpoenas rather than Marines were the answer to jihadist murder and mayhem.

It is difficult to quantify how dangerously foolish this course is. As they demonstrated in offering to plead guilty while bragging about their atrocities, KSM and his cohorts don’t want a trial so much as they want a soapbox to press their grievances against the United States and the West. With no real defense to the charges, they will endeavor to put America on trial, pressing the court for expansive discovery of government intelligence files. Having gratuitously exposed classified information on interrogation tactics and other sensitive matters in order to pander to Obama’s base, the Justice Department will be in a poor position to argue against broad disclosure, even if it were so inclined. As the court orders more and more revelations, potential intelligence sources and foreign spy services will develop even graver doubts about our capacity to keep secrets. They will reduce their intelligence cooperation accordingly, and the nation will be dramatically more vulnerable.

Moreover, the transfer of the worst al-Qaeda prisoners into the U.S. will grease the skids for many, if not most, of the remaining 200-plus Gitmo terrorists to be moved here. This will be the worst of all possible outcomes. These are trained terrorists who have been detained under the laws of war, but most of whom cannot be tried because the intelligence on them cannot be used in court. We are still holding them because they are deadly dangerous and because no other country is willing to take them off our hands. Once inside the United States, they will indisputably be within the jurisdiction of the federal courts — which are staffed by judges predisposed against wartime detention without trial. As long as the terrorists were at Gitmo, those judges were reluctant to order them released into the U.S. — a transfer that would violate federal law. If the terrorists are already here, though, judges will not be as gun-shy. Inevitably, some will be freed to live and plot among us.

The Obama Left delusionally argues that running these risks will make us safer. The international community will see how enlightened we are, the fable goes. The hostility of America’s enemies will melt away. They’ll lay down their bombs and stop attacking us. As observed by former attorney general Michael Mukasey — who presided over terrorism cases as a federal judge — “We did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.”

A jihadist hiding in plain sight

How many deaths are acceptable for the sake of diversity?

By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
November 13, 2009 12:26 PM

Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again – not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a U.S.-bound Air France flight. The "Shoebomber" attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn't have to be "alert" to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He'd spent most of the past half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying "JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK." But we (that's to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Maj. Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Maj. Hasan's "research interests," so there was no need to worry. That's America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two "joint terrorism task forces" stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.

On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Maj. Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: "SOA." As in "Soldier of Allah" – which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then-Capt. Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered "how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents." So he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood, Texas.

And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.

Well, like they say, it's easy to be wise after the event. I'm not so sure. These days, it's easier to be even more stupid after the event. "Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida," mused MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "That's not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?" Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is, we're not prepared to draw a line even after he's gone ahead and committed mass murder. "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said Gen. Casey, the Army's chief of staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here." A "greater tragedy" than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the "tragedy" must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish "Troubles", "an acceptable level of violence." Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we'll find out.

"Diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing "Muslim" garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn't until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that's to say, a "Punjabi suit," as they call it in Britain, or the "shalwar kameez," to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about "diversity" across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan's outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine "multiculturalist": That's to say, he's attuned to often very subtle "diversities" between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, "Aw, look. He's wearing ... well, something exotic and colorful, let's not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant."

The brain-addled "diversity" of Gen. Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel that the author's not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you're openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your e-mails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long-established "research interests." If you're psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there's no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn't count unless you're found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this past week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a "tragedy" but a national scandal, already fading from view.

©MARK STEYN