Exclusive: John Lennon, the lost interviews

By Ray Connolly
From The Sunday Times
September 6, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/

John Lennon did many brilliant things in his life, but arguably one of his most inspired acts was his deliberate destruction of the Beatles in 1969 — just 40 years ago this month. It didn’t seem that way then, not to tens of millions of devastated Beatles fans around the world, and not to Paul McCartney, who, feeling abandoned, went off to his farm in Scotland and into a deep depression.

But if Lennon, who’d started the group that evolved into the Beatles, hadn’t murdered his creation at that moment, if the band had somehow struggled on through their rows into the 1970s,

I doubt that you’d be reading this article today.

By killing the Beatles before they could disappoint us, as they inevitably would have done when music fashions changed and the band’s later albums didn’t quite live up to the ones we still love, Lennon froze them for ever at their peak.


John Lennon illustration by Erika Simmons

At the time of their break-up in 1969, I was an interviewer on London’s Evening Standard with the special task of covering rock music. Today, journalists are kept at arm’s length from stars by legions of publicists, but it was different then, for me anyway. Only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate the astonishing access to the Beatles

I had, from 1967, that Sgt Pepper high water of their careers, until 1972, when their dissolution was making its way through the High Court.

So I was at the Abbey Road studios in October 1968 to hear Yoko Ono be happily indiscreet about her affairs during her first two marriages, before ending the evening being given a personal concert by McCartney at the piano as he worked on a new song called "Let It Be" — while from down the corridor I could hear John Lennon and the producer George Martin mixing "Cry Baby Cry" for the White Album.

Almost every conversation I had during those final febrile Beatle days ended up in my new little Sony recorder, where intimacies and opinions were caught on cassettes, and then stored away, forgotten and uncatalogued in an old Pickfords packing case. And it’s those tapes, unplayed in decades (if ever, in some cases), that I recently unearthed — recordings that in some cases challenge views of the Lennon-McCartney relationship that have been held for 40 years.

Not all the interviews have survived. Cassettes were expensive then, and I’m mortified to admit that I have one on which the names McCartney, Jagger and Hendrix have each been successively crossed out as the interviews were recorded over. Nor was everything that was recorded published. Much was off the record. Time heals. Now it doesn’t matter that I write some of it here.

By 1969 there were rumours of strife in the Beatles camp, but on the surface it still seemed jolly enough. Then, while I was hanging around their Apple headquarters in Mayfair one day in September, I realised something was seriously wrong. There was a Beatles meeting in the boardroom that suddenly ended in a row, followed by much running up and down the stairs. But nobody was saying what it was about.

A few weeks later I got a call from John telling me he’d just sent his MBE back to the Queen. He was in a giddy mood,

I reflected, as I typed out my story. But he was also acting so separately from the other Beatles that two days later I wrote a piece headlined "The Day the Beatles Died".

At the time I was half-afraid I’d overstated my case, because to the outside world they were still very much alive. But no sooner was the article published than a white rose wrapped in Cellophane was delivered to my desk with the message "To Ray with love from John and Yoko".

From then on, when it came to covering Beatles affairs, my tape recorder and I would have the best possible source. And, just before Christmas that year, I would listen in astonishment (and some despair) as John, who’d flown me out to join him and Yoko in Toronto, gleefully let me in on the secret of how he’d destroyed the band.

"At the meeting Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do, so in the end

I just said, ‘I think you’re daft. I want a divorce.’"

He hadn’t planned to say that, but once spoken, and although news of the split wasn’t going to be announced until the Let It Be album came out the following May, the words were never withdrawn.

Of course, there are McCartney interviews on tape, too. While John was busy pulling the walls of the Beatles temple down around him, Paul eventually recovered from the setback enough to make his first solo album, McCartney. Usually astute with publicity, at this point he slipped up, putting out an ambiguous press statement along with his record in April 1970 that was interpreted as saying that he’d broken up the band. Headlines of blame ran around the world. "How could he?" distressed fans wanted to know. "It was all a misunderstanding," he told me a few days later. "I thought, ‘Christ, what have I done now?’ and my stomach started churning up.

I never intended the statement to mean ‘Paul McCartney quits Beatles’."

It was ironic. The Beatle who had most wanted the group to stay together, the biggest Beatles fan of all, was being blamed for its dissolution.

"Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada?" John demanded when he realised that Paul had accidentally got the dubious honour of ending the world’s favourite group. As he’d started it, he thought he should be the one to end it. "You asked me not to," I said. He was scornful. "You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me," he snapped.

What strikes me most, though, listening again to the tapes, is how prescient John was, how closely his ear was tuned to the changing mood of the times. As once he’d instinctively known which songs to write and what pithy comments would grab a headline, somehow, while in the middle of the whirlpool that was the Beatles, he’d seen the end approaching.

"The whole thing died in my mind long before all the rumpus started," he said in 1971 when I was spending a few days with him and Yoko in New York. "We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public, and we were in love with them in just the same way. But basically we were four individuals who eventually recovered our own individualities after being submerged in a myth.

"I know a lot of people were upset when we finished, but every circus has to come to an end. The Beatles were a monument that had to be either changed or scrapped. As it happens, it was scrapped. The Beatles were supposed to be this and supposed to be that, but really all we were was a band that got very big.

"Actually, our best days were before we got that big, when we used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always Elvis’s "Baby Let’s Play House". We’d make it last about 10 minutes, singing the same verse over and over.

I pinched one of the lines from it later to put in one of my own songs called "Run for Your Life" — something about ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man’.

"Mick Jagger said we weren’t a good band as performers. But he never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. We were the best bloody band there was. I know all the early rock songs much better than most of those I’ve written myself."

July 1968

This photograph was taken by the photographer Tom Murray of the Beatles whilst recording the Sgt Pepper album. They are part of a new exhibition The Beatles’ 11 Million Dollar Picture Show, at the Saint Giles Street Gallery in Norwich, opening on Thursday 10th September. www.sggallery.com

Tom Murray

During most of that time, however, John was in iconoclastic mode. It was as though, having made his decision, he couldn’t smash his Beatle persona quickly, or outrageously, enough. He didn’t want to be "one of four gods on the stage", he told me, so instead he invited the world’s press to his honeymoon bedside for a week "in aid of world peace". Then, not minding that he was being widely ridiculed, not to mention chastised by his formidable Aunt Mimi for "making an exhibition of himself", he appeared naked with Yoko on an album of electronic music called Two Virgins, before really chasing controversy with a series of erotic lithographs featuring Yoko, and sometimes himself too.

"Why do you draw so much cunnilingus?" I asked him during the trip to Canada, as I passed the lithographs for him to sign. "Because I like it," the one-time moptop grinned merrily. London’s Metropolitan Police would later close down his exhibition in a West End gallery. They didn’t like it.

At the time, Yoko was much publicly blamed for the Beatles’ demise, and she certainly might have played her part more tactfully. But she was only one of several catalysts. And John, as I’ve been hearing again on my tapes, was absolutely besotted by her, this sexy, mysterious artist who matched the zany dottiness in him.

"It was Yoko that changed me," he teases her during one conversation in 1970. "She forced me to become avant-garde and take me clothes off when all I wanted to do was become Tom Jones. And now look at me! Did you know avant-garde is French for bullshit?" Then, referring to how she’d begun to join him on stage, he goes on: "We’ve only got to play four bars and she grabs the microphone and she’s off? Aggghhh! Take her anywhere and she does her number for you." In the background, Yoko giggles. She was his pal.

The John Lennon I recorded was a very funny man who liked to paint himself ironically as the indignant butt of his own stories. "Did you see that Time magazine is saying that George is a philosopher?" he asked me one day. "And there’s an article in The Times, that I’ve actually thought about sending to Pseuds Corner [in Private Eye] — anonymously, of course — saying how Paul is this great musician. One a philosopher, another a great musician. Where does that leave me?"

"The nutter?" I hear myself suggest.

"Yes. I’m the nutter. F*** ’em all."

Today he would have been a star as a stand-up comedian with a line in self-mockery. And, having returned from a session of primal therapy in California in 1970, he was more loquacious than ever. He could have done a whole act on the subject of what made people like him want to become famous. "There you are up on the stage like an Aunt Sally waiting to have things thrown at you. It’s like always putting yourself on trial to see if you’re good enough for Mummy and Daddy. You know, ‘Now will you love me if I stand on my head and fart and play guitar and dance and blow balloons and get an MBE and sing "She Loves You" — now will you love me?’" It was a typical Lennon rant, but he was smiling all the time.

On another occasion, talking about his song "Not a Second Time" from the Beatles’ second LP, in a conversation devoted to his music, he says: "That was the one where that f***ing idiot Thomas Mann (he meant William Mann, the Times music critic) talked about the aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler’s "Song of the Earth". They were just chords like any other chords. It was the first intellectual bullshit written about us." Then the knowing pause. "Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about you."

Later, saying how a favourite of his songs, "You Can’t Do That", was his attempt at being Wilson Pickett, he becomes mock-anguished when admitting it was "a flip side because "Can’t Buy Me Love" [Paul’s song] was so f***ing good".

He was competitive with Paul, yes, and, when relations between the two were really bad, vituperative, as evidenced in a line in a song about his former partner on his Imagine album: "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears."

Paul had to have been hurt, and a few months later in New York even John would admit slightly ruefully: "I suppose it was a bit hard on him?" But, as he would so often say, "They were just the words that came out of my mouth at the time."

In truth, he always knew how good Paul was, without necessarily liking everything he did.

"I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner," he would boast of his talent-spotting abilities. "One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. That’s not bad, is it?" Indeed, I recall a writer from an underground magazine being snide about Paul’s song "Let It Be", presumably assuming John would agree. He didn’t.

"Paul and me were the Beatles," he would emphasise to me privately. "We wrote the songs." And on the subject of his debt to the young McCartney, he was actually generous. "I didn’t write much material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent on guitar.

Paul taught me quite a lot of guitar, really."

Those who see John as the towering greatest of the great should reflect on that: John Lennon quietly, happily admitting how much he owed to Paul McCartney. And while he could be flattering about some of Paul’s songs — he liked "For No One" particularly ("that was one of his good ones. All his semi-classical ones are best, actually") — he was disarmingly dismissive about several of his own. " 'I Am the Walrus' didn’t mean anything," he says, consigning to the pointless bin the work of a generation of Beatles anoraks who’d tried to interpret its lyrics, while he always hated "Yes It Is", didn’t think he sang "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" very well ("I was so nervous I couldn’t sing, but I like the lyrics"), and admits that he and Paul would give the lousy songs they wrote to George and Ringo to sing.


John Lennon and Paul McCartney

But "It’s Only Love" from the Help! album was the one that earned his greatest ire. "It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote. Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then I was so ashamed of the lyrics, I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really wished I’d never written," he says. Then, after another comic pause: "Well, you can say that about quite a few." And the ones he liked? " 'Across the Universe' was one of my favourites. I gave it at first to the World Wildlife Fund, but they didn’t do much with it, and then we put it on the Let It Be album. It missed it as a record but maybe the lyrics will survive. And "Strawberry Fields Forever" meant a lot. "Come Together" is another favourite. It started off as a slogan song for Timothy Leary’s wife, but I never got around to finishing it. Everyone takes it as meaning ‘come together in peace’, but there’s the other meaning too!" Actually, he was proud of quite a few — "In My Life", "I’m a Loser", "Girl?"

"When I was in therapy I was asked to go through a book of all the songs I’d written, line by line. I just couldn’t believe I’d written so many."

Interestingly, and it’s something I’ve only realised listening again to the tapes, no matter how much John publicly criticised Paul, in none of my interviews with Paul did he ever criticise John. Quite the contrary. "On Abbey Road I would like to have sung harmony with John, like we used to. And I think he would have liked me to. But I was too embarrassed to ask him."

I always wished I’d been involved in the Beatles’ early happier days, but my role was to cover the final act of their career, and to observe the fallout, mostly, though not totally, with John. There were some bizarre and revealing moments during those days. Visiting a Native American village in upstate New York the day after his

30th birthday, he showed that even he, in his enthusiasm, could get it wrong. "When I used to see cowboys-and-Indians films when I was a kid in Liverpool, I was always on the side of the Indians," he told the assembled group, not realising how patronising he sounded.

I’m sure when he said he wanted a divorce from the Beatles he never imagined how complicated, or expensive for all of them, it would be. But by October 1971, when he was living in New York, he was beginning to get a good idea. Asking me to be a go-between, he gave me a message to take to Paul suggesting that perhaps the two of them could solve at least one of their differences without either Allen Klein, his manager, or Lee Eastman, Paul’s manager and also Linda McCartney’s father, becoming involved. Back in London I delivered the message, but in the end it was inevitably lawyers who sorted out their problems.

Listening to the tapes, and hearing John’s singsong voice again after all these years, has led to some poignant memories. But what has stayed with me most from all the interviews is the vitality of the man, and that straight-faced, British, tongue-in-cheek delivery he had. A very generous person, he would say: "I can’t think about money. It rains in and rains out.

"I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am." John on his education made me laugh: "If I’d had a better education, I wouldn’t have been me. When I was at grammar school I thought I’d go to university, but I didn’t get any GCEs. Then I went to art school and thought I’d go to the Slade and become a wonder. But I never fitted in. I was always a freak, I was never lovable. I was always Lennon!"

Then there’s John, as forthright as ever when I suggested he might like to write a musical. "No. No musicals. I loathe musicals. I never did have a plan for doing one. My cousin made me sit through some f***ing musical twice. I just hate them. They bore me stiff. I think they’re just horrible. Even Hair. And they’re always lousy music." What he would have made of Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas show Love, an interpretation of the Beatles’ records, would have been interesting to know.

John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad. I couldn’t get any f***ing peace."

And finally there’s John in 1970 being ominously prophetic. "I’m not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don’t want to die at 40."

He was 40 and two months when he was murdered by a mad fan in New York in 1980.

I was due to interview him for The Sunday Times the following day

Dick Butkus

Most feared defender, greatest LB are only a few of legend's titles

BY NEIL HAYES
nhayes@suntimes.com
Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/index.html
December 16, 2008

He wore No. 51 for the Bears, but nobody ever needed a number to identify him on the field. He had a primal, predatory gait, and he closed on opposing ball carriers like a runaway locomotive. No one was better at finishing a tackle. He would slam a running back to the ground or engulf him with his bulk, making the smaller player disappear behind his wide shoulders as if he had been swallowed whole by a man NFL Films once described as ''Moby Dick in a goldfish bowl.''

Mostly, Dick Butkus' career was defined by high-impact collisions. When he hit somebody, you could almost hear twisting metal and shattering glass.

''Football is what I am,'' he once said. ''I love the hitting.''

Butkus may have been the most feared defender in NFL history and perhaps the greatest linebacker of all-time. The South Side native, who was voted the second-greatest athlete in Chicago history by a Sun-Times panel, also was versatile enough to have excelled at any of the three linebacker spots, any position along the offensive and defensive lines as well as fullback and perhaps even tight end, ranking him among best all-around players who ever lived. In 1970, a panel of NFL coaches chose the future College and Pro Football Hall of Famer as the one player they'd choose to build a franchise around.

In the end, he's mostly remembered for the fury with which he played and the devastation it created.

''I always say, to play professional football, you have to have a neanderthal gene,'' longtime Bears linebacker Doug Buffone once told ESPN. ''Dick had two.''

Butkus was the youngest of eight children who grew up in Roseland, not far from Gately Stadium. Maybe it was because his older brothers all played football -- Ron Butkus played professionally before tearing up his knee -- that he became obsessed with being a pro football player. At a young age, he dedicated himself to achieving his goal. When he was 12, he attached straps to a broken-down motor scooter and pulled friends through the park to strengthen his legs. When he got older, he pushed an old car up and down a dead-end street to pack on more muscle. Even when he played other sports, football was on his mind.

''I used to play catcher in Little League so I could have collisions at home plate,'' Butkus once said. ''I'd run up the line as they came in and knock 'em down before they could slide. Their mothers would boo me.''

He developed into the prototypical linebacker at Vocational High School, where he made 70 percent of his team's tackles, was its leading scorer and kicked. He was the first junior named Sun-Times Player of the Year. He was an All-American after his senior year and might've gone to Notre Dame had the university allowed married students to enroll. As a high school senior, Butkus already was contemplating marriage to his sweetheart, Helen, who remains his bride to this day.

At Illinois, he became a two-time unanimous All-American and led the Illini to a No. 3 ranking and a 17-7 victory over Washington in the 1964 Rose Bowl. Butkus was named Player of the Year by the Football Coaches' Association and finished third in Heisman voting.

''Before he's through,'' ex-Illinois coach Pete Elliott predicted, ''he'll be the greatest linebacker anybody ever saw.''

Butkus was named Rookie of the Year and All-Pro after being a first-round selection of the Bears. He would terrorize opponents for nine seasons before his knee gave out. Former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, then working for Baltimore, remembers walking into a training room littered with injured players after one Bears-Colts game. The Baltimore trainer shrugged and offered a one-word explanation: ''Butkus.''

Those same Colts were on their way to the airport after another bruising game against the Bears when the team bus was rear-ended at a stoplight. ''There's Butkus again,'' one of the players said.

''I don't need cheap shots,'' Butkus once told the Sun-Times.

He was named All-NFL seven times and went to the Pro Bowl after each of his first eight seasons. He recovered a then-NFL record 27 fumbles and intercepted 22 passes, giving him an amazing 49 takeaways during a career that produced individual greatness but only two winning seasons.

''I've been away from the game for 30 years, and people still talk about me and recognize me,'' said Butkus, who now campaigns against steroid use.

''I don't know what I did to deserve that. A lot of people have played the game, a lot of great ones. I must have made some kind of impression. It's amazing that people remember.''

Your family is being watched 24-7

What’s next in surveillance-happy Britain? Cameras in private homes? Actually, yes.

by Mark Steyn on Thursday, September 3, 2009 3:20pm
http://www2.macleans.ca/

To passing tourists, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the U.S.S.R. CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies. Last year, when David Davis resigned from the shadow cabinet because of the remarkably bipartisan insouciance about the “erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” he said there was “a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens.” The British, according to another well-retailed line, are apparently the most video-monitored people in the world other than the North Koreans. In an aside in his new novel The Defector, the American author Daniel Silva lays out the background:

“ ‘So how are the British so certain about what happened?’

“ ‘Their little electronic helpers were watching.’

“Navot was referring to CCTV, the ubiquitous network of 10,000 closed-circuit television cameras that gave London’s Metropolitan Police the ability to monitor activity, criminal or otherwise, on virtually every street in the British capital. A recent government study had concluded that the system had failed in its primary objective: deterring crime and apprehending criminals. Only three per cent of street robberies were solved using CCTV technology, and crime rates in London were soaring.

Embarrassed police officials explained away the failure by pointing out that the criminals had accounted for the cameras by adjusting their tactics, such as wearing masks and hats to conceal their identities. Apparently, no one in charge had considered that possibility before spending hundreds of millions of pounds and invading the public’s privacy on an unprecedented scale. The subjects of the United Kingdom, birthplace of Western democracy, now resided in an Orwellian world where their every movement was watched over by the eyes of the state.”

All true, except for the “10,000” cameras, which is certainly an underestimate. By some calculations, they’re now approaching five million (public and private) across the country. On this side of the Atlantic, closed-circuit television is mostly confined to banks and a select few other locations, and they still look like cameras. Not on the streets of London, where ever smaller boxes mounted ever more discreetly to the clutter of curbside signage betray no clue as to their purpose. Not that the authorities are embarrassed by them. Au contraire, notices advertising that you’re in their reassuring presence are almost as frequent as the cameras. Strolling down Piccadilly the other day, I lost count of the number of signs emblazoned “WESTMINSTER CCTV: KEEPING OUR STREETS SAFE,” complete with a cute little CCTV logo that they paid some marketing firm to hire some graphic artist to come up with. Any day now the government will surely unveil some lovable anthropomorphized cartoon figure—Carlton Camera or some such—who’ll appear in public service announcements saying he’s just popped up to keep an eye on you.

But perhaps I overestimate the modern security state’s need to soft-soap its purposes. A couple of years back, London Transport unveiled a poster called “SECURE BENEATH THE WATCHFUL EYES” showing the iconic red double-decker bus making its way across a Thames bridge protected by a sky filled with giant all-seeing eyes. “CCTV & Metropolitan Police on buses,” explained the caption, “are just two ways we’re making your journey home more secure.” The draftsmanship was beautiful, the image a strange conflation of classic London Underground poster art and ’tween-wars Continental Fascist propaganda. You would have thought that anyone who had . . . well, not read but was just dimly aware of the vague gist of Orwell’s 1984 could not possibly have approved such a campaign. But London Transport did, and Londoners more or less accepted it.

If you’re a novelist, it’s impossible to write a story set in Britain without taking CCTV into account. In his new book The Ghosts of Belfast, Stuart Neville writes of his protagonist:

“The truth was he’d slept very little the previous night. It took him an hour and a half to work his way through the streets, avoiding CCTV cameras on his way home.”

Easier said than done. Daniel Silva captures the scale of the enterprise:

“ ‘Were you able to trace the car’s movements with CCTV?’

“ ‘It turned left into Edgware Road, then made a right at St. John’s Wood Road. Eventually, it entered an underground parking garage in Primrose Hill, where it remained for 57 minutes . . . After leaving the garage, it headed northeast to Brentwood, a suburb just outside the M25. At which point, it slipped out of CCTV range and disappeared from sight.’ ”

Did you tell your wife you were kept late at the office but you were in fact parked outside your mistress’s flat at 27b Lucknow Gardens? There’s an electronic record of that somewhere in a government database. Maybe that’s nothing to worry about, maybe no one will ever have cause to dig it out. But it’s in there.

So now the country with the most CCTV cameras in the “civilized” world also has the most hooded youths. On a dismal ride back up to London on a CCTV-fitted train through the Oxfordshire countryside the other Sunday afternoon, I was joined, in an otherwise empty carriage, by three persons in large feature-concealing hooded sweatshirts. In an idle moment while the train was stalled outside a tunnel, I found myself reflecting that, even after an hour in their company, I’d have a job picking them out of a police lineup.

“Er, well, he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, officer.”

“Did the shadow on his upper chest indicate any other features, such as the length of his nose, or an unusually hirsute mole?”

“It might have, but I couldn’t tell, as the sweatshirt was black.”

“Hmm. A black sweatshirt. Well, that narrows it down a bit.”

Happily, the lads graciously declined to stab me. Not all hooded youths are criminal, but the larger percentage who aren’t favour the garb in part because it flips the finger at the surveillance state. It is, thus, a CCTV-generated fashion statement, and now so widespread that, in the twilight of his premiership, with his usual control-freak instincts, Tony Blair mused on the possibility of banning hooded sweatshirts in order to prevent “anti-social behaviour” and restore “respect on our streets.”

But “respect” is a two-way street. And on Britain’s two-way streets, where the government cameras whir 24-7, the security state signals its contempt for the citizen. And, needless to say, if the Big Blairite Brother had banned “hoodies,” British youth could easily have adopted the burka as the uniform of alienated youth, and Her Majesty’s government wouldn’t have done a thing about it. Mr. Blair’s one-time deputy, an Old Labour bruiser called John Prescott, was once approached at a motorway caff by a gang of hooded yoofs anxious to beat him up and (in a touch of artistic symmetry) videotape the encounter: in a sense, they were proposing to demonstrate their “respect” for CCTV Britain by shooting their own CCTV footage.

So CCTV isn’t simply a new “technique,” as, say, fingerprinting once was. It makes a larger statement about what’s happened to a land that was once, as Daniel Silva acknowledges, the crucible of liberty. Henry Porter’s new novel The Dying Light is set mainly in an English market town in Shropshire that feels as claustrophobic as Communist East Germany, a land in which rural coppers badger you for such amorphous offences as “failing to account for your intentions in a designated area.” Returning to her native sod from a job in New York, the heroine can’t help noticing that there’s “more surveillance than I thought possible in a free country,” and yet the citizenry are quiescent. The Prime Minister is struck by Oliver Cromwell’s choice of job description, “Great Lord Protector”: “That is exactly what you feel leading the country: an acute desire to protect the people”—for the best of motives.

Earlier this year, Greater Manchester Police introduced “Smart Cars”—little bubble vehicles equipped with rotating cameras on 12-foot poles poking through their roofs. As the BBC reported, “Anyone seen driving while distracted—eating at the wheel, playing with the radio or applying makeup for instance—is filmed by the cameras.” Shortly thereafter, they get a letter and a fine.

Henry Porter’s political thriller nudges that on just a wee bit: unmanned four-camera mini-drones sail the skies, tracking the wayward “citizen” even in the remotest thickets of the country. What next? CCTV in private homes? Ah, but we’re already there. This month the “Secretary of State for Children” (another Orwellian touch) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.”

Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he might have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.

Long and Winding Road, Newly Repaved

By ALLAN KOZINN

The New York Times
September 6, 2009

THE newly remastered CDs of the Beatles’ original albums and singles, which EMI and Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, are releasing on Wednesday, have less of a gee-whiz factor than The Beatles: Rock Band, which hits stores on the same day. But for those of us for whom the music is paramount — and who will forever refer to Rock Band as “the toy” — the game is a plastic tail wagging a cartoonish dog. And though the compact disc, as a format, may be on its deathbed, these remastered CDs are really the main event.

The complete catalog, in mono and stereo, has been given a careful digital upgrade. These are straightforward transfers of the albums as they were released in Britain, rather than the American versions, which were reconfigured by Capitol Records (to the Beatles’ chagrin). Do not look for bonus tracks: the only extras are making-of documentaries on each of the stereo discs. And although the stereo and mono mixes could have fit together on single CDs, in most cases EMI is selling them separately.

The up side: In most cases this music has dimension and detail that it never had before, and the new packaging reflects each album’s musical and cultural importance. Over all, the new discs sound substantially better than the Beatles’ original CDs, which EMI issued in 1987. The most striking and consistent improvements are a heftier, rounded, three-dimensional bass sound, and drums that now sound like drums, rather than something in the distance being hit. But because each album has its own sonic character, due partly to developments in recording technology during the Beatles’ career, and partly to the growing complexity of their work, some discs are improved more radically than others, and some are hardly improved at all.

Probably the most revelatory of the new transfers is the stereo White Album. From the opening jet engine effects on “Back in the U.S.S.R” to the final orchestral chord on “Good Night,” this album now leaps from the speakers. Gentler songs like “Julia” and “I Will” have a lovely transparency, and hard rockers like “Yer Blues” and “Helter Skelter” — as well as John Lennon’s quirky vision of dystopia, “Revolution 9” — have a power and fullness unheard until now.

“Abbey Road” also benefits considerably. The clearer instrumental profiles serve this rich-textured album beautifully: “Sun King” and “Here Comes the Sun” are unusually supple; the vocal on “You Never Give Me Your Money” no longer has a shrill edge, and Lennon’s proto-Minimalist “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” has never sounded more mesmerizing. Nor has the group’s valedictory jam in “The End.”

And if you are cherry-picking among these reissues, the two-CD singles compilation “Past Masters” should be near the top of your list. The stereo mixes of these songs are often less hard hitting than the mono singles were, but the remastered versions, with their enriched bass, palpable drum sound and improved sense of vocal presence, no longer sound anemic. You find yourself discovering textural details (the percussion overlay in “She’s a Woman” is one such surprise) that show how imaginative the Beatles’ arrangements are.

It’s about time. In 1987 the elation of finally getting the group’s classic recordings on CD, four years after the format was introduced, quickly gave way to disappointment with the discs’ sound quality and presentation. Like many early CDs, several (though not all) of the Beatles’ discs had a harsh upper range. And except for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was put in a deluxe package with liner essays and archival photos, the 1987 CDs came with minimal, slapdash artwork.

Collectors who had long prized both the mono and stereo mixes of the group’s albums, which have different attractions (and sometimes different vocal takes and instrumental details), and had hoped that EMI would find a way to release both mixes on CD, were upset that the 1987 series offered the first four albums only in mono and the rest only in stereo. In one sense all of the group’s music had made the transfer; in another, about half the catalog was missing.

In a way it still is: the stereo recordings are available either individually for $18.98; $24.98 for double albums, or boxed (as “The Beatles”) for $259.98. But the mono albums can be had only in a 13-disc boxed set, “The Beatles in Mono,” for $298.98, which covers up to the White Album (the last album the group mixed in mono) and includes a mono version of the “Past Masters” singles compilation that includes previously unissued mono mixes of “Across the Universe” and songs from the “Yellow Submarine” soundtrack.

The Beatles and their producer, George Martin, considered the mono mixes definitive, and you don’t have to be a Beatles completist to see why. “She’s Leaving Home,” which drags sappily on the stereo “Sgt. Pepper,” is faster on the mono album, which also has a decidedly more psychedelic sounding “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a punchier “Good Morning, Good Morning” and a sizzling reprise of the title song. “Magical Mystery Tour” is far more solid and detailed in mono, and the White Album is packed with details you don’t hear in the stereo mix. But by making them available only in a collectors’ box, EMI has made it impossible for many listeners to sample one or two.

To produce the new CDs, EMI returned to the mono and stereo masters prepared for the group’s vinyl releases in the 1960s, which the label says have remained in pristine condition. These are the same tapes EMI used in 1987, but analog-to-digital technology has improved considerably since then, making it possible to get a much more fine-grained, high-resolution digital transfer. And where the 1987 transfers were done quickly, the new set was assembled over four years, with different teams working on the mono and stereo recordings.

As in 1987 there are two exceptions to the “’60s masters only” rule: the stereo “Help!” and “Rubber Soul” discs use the remixes that Mr. Martin made for the 1987 CDs. It may seem inconsistent to present these remixes as the de facto standards, given that Allan Rouse, who oversaw the project, has said that the goal was to produce a series of CDs that sound as close as possible to the ’60s master tapes.

But Mr. Martin’s updates largely match the placements and balances of the originals, and because they were made from the multitrack session tapes, instruments and vocals sound strikingly fresher than in the 1965 versions (which are included in the mono box). Perhaps not surprisingly, given their digital origins, the new “Help!” and “Rubber Soul” CDs, though slightly louder than their 1987 counterparts — as all the new discs are — are identical in matters of timbre and definition. The group’s experimental “Revolver” and “Magical Mystery Tour,” and its back-to-basics “Let It Be,” if not as lapel-grabbing as the upgrades of the White Album and “Abbey Road,” nevertheless benefit from the more distinct instrumental and vocal profiles of the new transfers.

“Sgt. Pepper,” oddly, is a mixed bag. Instrumental textures are crisper and cleaner, and the bass is firmer. And songs like “Getting Better” have shed the piercing treble sound that afflicted the 1987 version. Yet several songs — “Fixing a Hole” and “She’s Leaving Home,” among them — now sound flatter, or less dynamically fluid, than they did on either the 1987 CD or a good British LP.

Among the early albums I have always loved the wide stereo separation of “Please Please Me” and “With the Beatles” — despite its vigorous condemnation by Mr. Martin (which is why they have not been available on CD) — because it lets you hear exactly what’s happening in both the instrumental and vocal arrangements. Those albums sound superb, as do the better-balanced “Hard Day’s Night” and “Beatles for Sale.”

Few listeners are likely to replace their CDs for the sake of new cover art, but it is a distinct attraction. The stereo discs come in three-panel (four for the “White Album”) laminated sleeves, with booklets that include the original liner notes and lyrics (if they came with the LP), contemporaneous photos and new essays about what the Beatles were up to when they made the album at hand and (more cursorily) how the recordings were produced. The discs are pressed on reproductions of the various Parlophone, Capitol and Apple labels on which the albums first appeared.

The video documentaries, embedded as computer-playable QuickTime files on the stereo CDs, draw largely on interviews recorded for “The Beatles Anthology” (1995) and offer a few surprises. With the exception of Mr. McCartney, for example, the group had an almost perversely dismissive attitude toward “Sgt. Pepper.” Ringo Starr says he preferred the group dynamic on the White Album (even though he quit in frustration during the sessions) and “Let It Be” (when the band was at its most fractious). The stereo box also includes a DVD compilation of these video clips.

The mono discs lack the documentaries (and the DVD) and are packaged as copies of the original albums. The covers are accurate down to the quaint way EMI LP jackets were assembled in the ’60s (with glued-down cardboard flaps on the back). Extras like the White Album poster and portraits, and the “Sgt. Pepper” cutouts, are included too, as is a 44-page book of historical notes and pictures.

In the 22 years since the release of the original, mediocre CDs, just about all of the Beatles’ great contemporaries — the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan among them — have had their catalogs upgraded as technology has changed. Beatles fans have been begging EMI to do the same, and although the wait has been long, the new transfers are so good that this thrice-familiar music sounds fresher than ever.

Now EMI should consider moving the catalog to a truly high-definition format, like Blu-ray DVD, adding newly remixed Surround versions like those on “The Beatles Anthology.” With the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first hit coming in 2012, there isn’t much time to waste.

Pledging allegiance to our beloved Obama

The starry-eyed Hopeychangey Generation growing bored with Obama. Now he's targeting the kindergarten constituency.

By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, September 4, 2009

On Friday, I had the rare honor of appearing in the pages of The New York Times, apropos President Obama's plans to beam himself into every schoolhouse in the land in the peculiar belief that Generation iPod will find this an enthralling technical novelty. As Times reporters James C McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote:

"Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on theRush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader."

Oh, dear! "A Canadian author": Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don't know what's crueler, the "Canadian" or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that's one way of putting it. Here's what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim:

"Obviously we're not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale."

Close enough for Times work.

But, if the Times wants to play this game, bring it on. The Omnipresent Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of Third World basket-case dumps: the conflation of the man and the state is explicit, and ubiquitous. In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few weeks after the regime's fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily taking down the huge portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall, I visited an elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly empty picture frames piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them. The education system's standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids called Hassan and Amal – a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane – proudly holding up their portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of an Iraqi education:

"O come, Hassan," says Amal. "Let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, 'Our beloved Saddam.'"

"I come, Amal," says Hassan. "I come in a hurry to chant, 'O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.'"

Pathetic, right?

On Friday, Aug. 28, the principal of Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah – in the name of "education" – showed her young charges the "Obama Pledge" video released at the time of the inauguration, in which Ashton Kutcher and various other big-time celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize, "pledge to be a servant to our president and to all mankind because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek."

Altogether now! Let us chant for mankind and use our pens to write, "O beloved Obama, our courageous president, we are all servants defending the hope for you and marching to change."

And, unlike Saddam's Iraq, we don't have the mitigating condition of being a one-man psycho state invented by the British Colonial Office after lunch on a wet afternoon in 1922.

Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a "servant" to the head of state, would reply, "Get lost, creep." And, if they still taught history in American schools, he'd add, "Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776."

To accompany President Obama's classroom speech this week, the White House and America's "educators" drafted some accompanying study materials. Children would be invited to write letters to themselves saying what they could do to "help the president."

My suggestion: "Not tell people what I really think about his lousy health care plan."

Well, after the unwelcome media attention, that exercise was hastily dropped.

For the rest of us, the president does not yet require a written test from grown-ups after his speeches, but it's surely only a matter of time. The New York Times managed to miss my point: Far from "accusing" the president of "trying to create a cult of personality," I spent much of my airtime on Rush's show last week "accusing" the president of doing an amazing job of finishing off his own cult of personality in record time. Obama's given 111 speeches, interviews and press conferences in which he's talked about health care, and the more he opens his mouth the more the American people recoil from his "reforms." Now he's giving a 112th – to a joint session of Congress – and this one, we're assured, will finally do the trick. That brand new Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals the deal but America's Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign in the end.

The president has made the mistake of believing his own publicity – or, at any rate, his own mainstream media coverage, which is pretty much the same thing. They told him he was the greatest orator since Socrates, but, alas, even Socrates would have difficulty playing six sets a night every Open Mike Night at the Soaring Rhetoric Lounge out on Route 127. Even Ashton Kutcher's charms would wane by the 112th speech.

"Mr Obama," wrote Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, "has grown boring." Amazing, but true. He's a crashing bore, and he's become one in nothing flat. His approval ratings have slumped – not just among Republicans, not just among independents, not just among seniors, who are after all first in line for the death panels. But they've fallen among young people – the starry-eyed members of the Hopeychangey Generation who stared into the mesmerizing giant "O" of his logo and saw the new Otopia. According to the latest Zogby poll, Obama's hold on the young is a wash: 41 per cent approve, 41 per cent disapprove. Zogby defines "young" as under 30, so maybe the kindergartners corralled into his audience this week will still be on side, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The President's strategy on Jan. 20 was to hurl all the vast transformative spaghetti at the wall – stimulus, auto nationalization, cap'n'trade, health care – and make it stick through the sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the American people aren't finding it quite so charismatic, and they're beginning to spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan hopeychangey rhetoric and the budget-busting, prosperity-throttling, future-beggaring big government policies.

No wonder the poor chap's running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America's schoolchildren is to suggest what you'd like him to do in his next speech. Here's mine: Call in sick, sir. You'll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president's speech.

But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid, I dare you: "That's all, folks!"

Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words in order:

1) Try

2) Something

3) Else

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Roxy Music - My Only Love (Live)

(Click on title to play video)

Gehrig’s Final Hit: A Single on a Cold April Day in the Bronx

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
September 4, 2009

His body betraying him for reasons he could not understand, Lou Gehrig came to bat at Yankee Stadium in the fourth inning against the Washington Senators on April 29, 1939.

He had only three hits in the young season.

But he had 2,720 in his magnificent career and was playing in his 2,129th consecutive game.

His power was almost gone. A degenerative neurological disease that would be named for him was decimating his body. Gehrig was 35, only weeks from turning 36.


Associated Press

Lou Gehrig on May 2, 1939, the day Gehrig benched himself and ended his consecutive games played streak at 2,130.

Derek Jeter, another 35-year-old Yankee captain, has a different and much happier story. He is having one of his best seasons, batting .330, with 17 home runs, more than his total in any of the last three seasons.

And with 2,713 hits, he is close to passing Gehrig as the Yankees’ career hits leader.

In 2009, Jeter can look forward to several more seasons and, if he stays healthy, to 3,000 or more hits. He is signed through next season and has said he might still be playing at shortstop when he’s 41.

As Gehrig came to the plate at the end of April 1939, he had just over two years to live.

His hitless game on April 24 prompted Arthur Daley of The New York Times to say that Gehrig’s batting average “has reached an alarming state of anemia.”

Even the next day, with two hits against the Philadelphia Athletics and his only run batted in of the season, Gehrig could not celebrate a respite from the indignity of failure. When a fly ball fell in for a hit (the left fielder was playing him to pull), Gehrig could not make it to second for what would have most likely been a double if he had been healthy. He rounded first base, but could neither return to first nor reach second.

He did not even wait to be tagged. “He just lowered his head and jogged slowly back to the Yankee dugout,” Jonathan Eig wrote in his book “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig.” The Times reported it differently, saying he was tagged out in a “reckless attempt” to stretch a single into a double.

Yet that day Gehrig felt optimistic enough that his ailment was temporary that he ordered three new bats from Hillerich & Bradsby, Eig wrote. They weighed 33 ounces, lighter than those he used in 1938.

April 29 was a Saturday, with 11,473 fans watching the Yankees play the Senators on a chilly, cloudy afternoon. The Yankees’ Lefty Gomez was pitching against the Senators’ Ken Chase.

Gehrig was fifth in the Yankees’ lineup, behind Frank Crosetti, Red Rolfe, Jake Powell and Joe DiMaggio.

In his fourth season, DiMaggio was now the team’s superstar, not Gehrig, whose .295 batting average in 1938 represented a worrisome fall from his .351 average in 1937. In 1938, DiMaggio hit .324 with 32 home runs and 140 R.B.I. In 1939, he was on his way to hitting .381, his career best.

In the second inning, Gehrig walked against Chase, a left-hander.

Before fans could will Gehrig another hit, they were distracted by a more immediate concern: DiMaggio was hurt. As he ran to catch up with a hard line drive hit by Bobby Estalella, his right leg got stuck in the mud, tearing muscles just above his right ankle. He writhed on the grass for eight minutes, The Times reported. He limped off the field and was later quoted as saying, “I heard something snap in my leg” and “I felt something crack.”

An inning later, Gehrig singled, but few, if any, could imagine it would be his 2,721st and last hit.

There was no announcement, no acknowledgment, no tip of the cap, no curtain call.

Bill Dickey came up next and singled. Gehrig stopped at second but advanced no farther.

The next day, Gehrig came to bat four times with men on base and did not get a hit. After the game, “there was a buzz of disgruntlement in the Yankee clubhouse,” Ray Robinson wrote in “Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time,” a 1990 biography. Some of his teammates doubted that they could win with Gehrig hitting .143.

With the Yankees heading to Detroit, The New York Mirror wrote, “Captain Lou Gehrig isn’t hitting and may be demoted from his present slot.” The New York Sun suggested that Gehrig’s “benching seems imminent.”

Gehrig, not Manager Joe McCarthy, took the initiative. On May 2, Gehrig benched himself, and he would never return. “Maybe a rest will do me some good,” he said. “Maybe it won’t. Who knows? Who can tell? I’m just hoping.”

Multimedia
Graphic
Gehrig’s Last Hit

Why Parents Don't Trust the Educator-in-Chief and His Comrades

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.vdare.com/
September 03, 2009

They think we're crazy. "They" are the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can't fathom the backlash against the president's nationwide speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday. "We" are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America's classrooms.
Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to "service" for "change." Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise "to be a servant to our president." Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges "to be of service to Barack Obama."

The campaign commercial crescendos with the stars and starlets asking their audience: "What's your pledge?"

This same "Do Something" ethos infected the U.S. Department of Education teachers guides accompanying the announcement of Obama's speech—until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to "help the president." Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country—circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts.

O's bureaucrats can whitewash offending language from the Sept. 8 speech-related documents, but they can't remove the taint of left-wing radicalism that informs Obama and his education mentors. A spokesman maintained that the speech is "about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate." But the historical subtext is far less innocent.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers' pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program's first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky—a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called "small schools movement" to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of "inequity, war and violence."

A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The "change" agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama—and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.

Ayers preached his education-as-"social justice" agenda to his "comrades" at the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, three years ago:

"This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President (Hugo) Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I've come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane."

Ayers continued:

"I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I've thought of myself as a teacher, but I've also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: You can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you've been, whatever you've done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: We must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!"

This is why informed parents do not trust the Educator-in-Chief and his "comrades." You can take Obama from the radicals in Chicago. But you can't take the Chicago radicalism out of Obama.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

- Michelle Malkin [email her] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin is also author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild and the just-released Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies.

Obama, the Mortal

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Friday, September 4, 2009

What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?

The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chávista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?

But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama's behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama's reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob -- misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest -- from drug companies to auto unions to doctors -- in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

"Get out of the way" and "don't do a lot of talking," the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the "mess" from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.

Things got worse still. With answers so slippery and implausible and, well, fishy, he began jeopardizing the most fundamental asset of any new president -- trust. You can't say that the system is totally broken and in need of radical reconstruction, but nothing will change for you; that Medicare is bankrupting the country, but $500 billion in cuts will have no effect on care; that you will expand coverage while reducing deficits -- and not inspire incredulity and mistrust.
When ordinary citizens understand they are being played for fools, they bristle.

After a disastrous summer -- mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing -- Obama is in trouble.

Let's be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He's not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.

But what has occurred -- irreversibly -- is this: He's become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He's regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.

For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another prime-time speech.

But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises -- mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

A Dangerous Delusion

We go to war to defend our interests, not to encourage democracy.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 04, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

Right after 9/11, Pres. George W. Bush made a succinct demand of the Taliban: Hand over Osama bin Laden and his cohorts or face horrific consequences. The demand, the president emphasized, was non-negotiable. The Taliban refused, insisting that the U.S. produce evidence against al-Qaeda. Because Islamists — not just terrorists but all Islamists — believe the United States is the enemy of Islam, the Taliban also floated the possibility of rendering bin Laden to a third country. No deal, Bush replied. As promised, the consequences were swift and severe. Yet, two weeks into the first bombing raids, the president offered the Taliban a “second chance.” Mullah Omar declined to take it. The invasion proceeded and the rest is history.

It’s now a long, confused history. The distance we’ve traveled from the clarity of the first days is manifest in the Right’s ongoing intramural skirmish over the eminent George Will’s latest column.

Will has called for a steep reduction of our 60,000-strong military force (out of a total of about 100,000 coalition troops) in Afghanistan. That country, he argues, is an incorrigible mess where we’re engaged more in social work than in combat. Instead, Will would have our forces retreat to offshore bases from which, “using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units,” American efforts could be concentrated on Afghanistan’s “porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.” This suggestion comes just as other conservatives are backing a Pentagon proposal to add about 40,000 troops. They seek a counterinsurgency surge for Afghanistan, similar to the one they claim worked so well in Iraq three years ago.

There’s no question that the surge in Iraq resulted in the rout of al-Qaeda. For that reason, it has to be counted as a net success. It would have been a strategic disaster to retreat while al-Qaeda was present and fortifying itself.


Kandahar City, Afghanistan

But then there was the rest of the surge rationale: the claim that we needed to secure the Iraqi population so a stable government, one that would be a reliable ally against terror, could emerge. The same argument now is being made about Afghanistan. Have you taken a look at Iraq lately? We went there to topple Saddam; we stayed to build an Islamic “democracy,” and the result is an Iranian satellite. The new Iraq is a sharia state that wants us gone, has denied us basing rights for future military operations, has pressured a weak American president into releasing Iran-backed terrorists, has rolled out the red carpet for Hezbollah, allows Iranian spies to operate freely (causing the recent ouster of the intelligence minister, who was an American ally), tolerates the persecution of religious minorities, and whose soon-to-take-power ruling coalition vows “not to establish relations with the Zionist entity” — a vow that would simply continue longstanding Iraqi policy, as Diana West points out. If that’s success, what does failure look like?

Democracy-project naysayers (I’ve long been one) reluctantly supported the surge in Iraq because our nation could not allow al-Qaeda a victory there. By contrast, as Rich Lowry mentions in passing at The Corner, “al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan.” Rich’s observation came in the course of chiding Will’s advocacy of “counterterrorist strikes from a distance.” But if al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan, why do we still need 60,000 troops there, let alone 40,000 more? We don’t invade other hostile countries where al-Qaeda is actually present (see, e.g., Iran, Kenya, Yemen, Somalia), and the likelihood of al-Qaeda’s return is not enough to keep us in other countries where we’re not wanted (e.g., Iraq). That is, we’re already banking on our capacity to conduct counterterrorist strikes from a distance.

The reason for going to war in Afghanistan was that al-Qaeda was there. The Bush administration was content to live with the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. They are a tyrannical lot, but Islam doctrinally and culturally lends itself to tyranny. The Taliban’s brutalization of the Afghan people was not our military concern. That was a problem for the State Department to take up with our “allies” — like Pakistan, which created the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia, which helped Pakistan sustain it. Our military issue with the Taliban was bin Laden. Had the Taliban agreed to our terms, there would have been no invasion of Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding al-Qaeda’s departure, the idea now seems to be that we should substantially escalate our military involvement in Afghanistan to replicate the experiment that supposedly worked so well in Iraq. It’s the age of Obama, so our commanders are talking not about combat but about a stimulus package to fight the “culture of poverty.” As military officials described it to the New York Times, “the overriding goal of American and NATO forces would not be so much to kill Taliban insurgents as to make ordinary Afghans feel secure, and thus isolate the insurgents. That means using force less and focusing on economic development and good governance.” This is consistent with the delusional belief that terrorism is caused by poverty, corruption, resentment, Guantanamo Bay, enhanced interrogation tactics, Israel — in short, anything other than an ideology rooted in Islamic scripture. But before we all laugh George Will out of the room, we might remember that the Taliban was not our reason for invading. We would not have gone to war to save Afghanistan from the Taliban — which is to say, to save Afghanistan from itself.


THE WAR AND THE DREAM

At Contentions, Pete Wehner offers a withering critique of Will’s column. Pete reminds us that, not so long ago, Will predicted that the Muslim world would be overrun by “a ripple effect, a happy domino effect . . . of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies.” But now, in a dizzying turnabout, Will ridicules the very premise of the democracy project: the conceit — to quote Will quoting Tony Blair — that “ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit.” Typical of Pete, it is a very effective smack-down. And it would be a show-stopper — except that the pertinent issue is not Will’s inconstancy. The question is: Was Will wrong then or is Will wrong now?

And that’s where Pete and the rest of the surge-minded lose me. George Will is not being faithless about the war. To the extent there was national agreement about its objectives, the war was about routing al-Qaeda, driving it out of its safe haven, and killing or capturing its main players. Those objectives have been substantially accomplished, and, while we’ve failed to round up bin Laden, Zawahiri, and some others, they are not in Afghanistan.

What Will is being faithless about is the democratic vision. Democracy enthusiasts have always conflated the war and the dream, but the two are and will always be separate. The American people overwhelmingly supported, and still support, a vigorous war — not an experiment, but a war — against the enemies who threaten us: Islamist terrorists and the regimes that abet them. Americans do not support, have no patience for, and would never go to war over the thankless enterprise of transforming the Islamic world.

Mind you, I’m no dove. I daresay I’m as much or more of a hawk than the nation-building side of the house. I’ve bit my tongue for a long time, and it kills me to write this, because I’ve never bought the nonsense about how you can support the troops but not support the mission. And if someone can convince me we need 40,000 or 400,000 or 4 million more troops in Afghanistan to destroy enemies who would otherwise attack the United States, count me in. But I think Rich, Pete, and others I admire — Bill Kristol, Fred Kagan, and Jen Rubin, for example — go too far in their condemnation of Will. Americans have a right to wonder what on earth we’re doing. The war against Islamist terror is global and, even in the region where we are fighting, has always involved more than Iraq and Afghanistan. There are hostile regimes (particularly in Iran) that we have left in place, unscathed, and growing stronger. For all the brave “you’re with us or you’re against us” talk after 9/11, we never walked that walk. Americans would have supported such a war, which was — and is — patently in the national interest. There is no political will for it now because, without first defeating the enemy, we tried to reprise the Marshall Plan in a place where it won’t work.

On that score, one of the more baffling things I’ve read recently was from Powerline’s John Hinderaker, whom I also admire. John was questioning former vice president Dick Cheney’s apparent admission (in a Fox News interview) that he had favored attacking Iran, which President Bush declined to do. John counters that “at the time, it seemed to me that we had our hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military conflict with Iran was not a serious possibility.” But we had military conflict with Iran whether we wanted it or not — they were orchestrating terror attacks and killing Americans. And what we had our hands full with in Iraq and Afghanistan was nation-building. Quite apart from the inherent futility of trying to democratize fundamentalist Muslim countries, our efforts in those two places were doomed if we failed to address Iran’s promotion of terrorism and its intolerable nuclear threat. What has happened to Iraq has happened because we lacked the will to deal with Iran. We left unaccomplished the mission that was vital to our national interests while laboring exhaustively to create Islamic democracies that are either hostile or useless to us. And now, while we are still idling on Iran, the plan is to double-down against the Taliban?

There has been a fascinating point of alignment since 9/11 between the anti-war Left and the democracy hawks. Both sides have failed to identify the enemy: Islamists. The hard Left resists because it doesn’t see Islamism as an enemy at all. The Islamists, like the Left, regard the United States as the problem in the world.

Democracy hawks are another matter. Their boundless faith in democracy blinds them to the severity of the Islamist challenge. For them, dwelling on Islam is counterproductive: If Islam is understood as a huge liability, Americans will rebel against the prohibitive costs, in lives and money, of democracy-building. So the democracy-hawk approach is either not to mention Islam at all or to absurdly portray it as a “moderating” influence that will help build stable democracies. They shame doubters into silence by decrying “Islamophobia” and “cultural condescension” — mortal sins these days. On some level, the democracy hawks may grasp that the threat here involves more than terrorism. But they’ve convinced themselves that if we could just get rid of the terrorists, the rest of the Muslims who abhor us would be brought around by democracy’s light.

It’s a fantasy, and we’re betting our lives on it. So let me try to spell out the folly of the democracy project’s fundamental assumptions.

ISLAMISM

We like to think Islamism represents only a fringe of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. But that’s because we confound Islamists and terrorists. The terrorists — those who commit and materially support violent attacks — are a fringe (bigger than we’d like to think, but still a tiny minority). By contrast, Islamists may be a majority, and, if they’re not, they constitute a very substantial minority.

Islamism is not terrorism. To be sure, Islamism includes terrorism in its arsenal. Still, there is major disagreement among Islamists about when violence should be used and how effective it is. In any event, we must fight the tendency to meld these concepts. Terrorism is a tactic that divides Muslims. Islamism is a belief system that unites tens of millions of Muslims. Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, estimates what he calls the “radicalized” portion of the umma at about 15 percent. I think he’s low-balling it, but even if he’s right, that would be about 200 million people.

So what is Islamism? It is the belief that Islam is not merely a religious creed but a comprehensive guide to human existence, conformity to which is obligatory, that governs all matters political, social, cultural, and religious, from cradle to grave (and, of course, beyond). The neologism “Islamist” was minted over three-quarters of a century ago by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. To this day, the credo of the Brotherhood is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood claims, preposterously, to have renounced terrorism. It maintains, more credibly, that it is the Muslim Nation, as in a mass movement representing what Muslims, broadly, believe.

The Brotherhood’s Islam is called Salafism. Developed in the 19th century, Salafism calls for a return to the unalloyed Islam of the 7th-century founders. It is to be “unalloyed” in the sense that it should be stripped of modernizing influences — particularly Western influences. This is to be achieved by implementing sharia, the divine law designed to govern all aspects of life.

Implementing sharia is the aim of jihad. Because our government does not want to be seen as Islamophobic, we are discouraged from noting the palpable nexus between Islamic scripture and Islamist terror. Thus we’re conditioned to think of jihad, a creature of Islamic scripture, as a form of madness — as if terrorists blew up buildings for no better reason than to blow up buildings. But jihad is a central tenet of Islam. It is the obligation to struggle in the path of Allah — to impose God’s law everywhere on earth. Jihad can be savage, but it is not irrational.

Jihad is correctly understood as a military duty, but it need not be violent. That does not mean, as Islam’s Western apologists claim, that jihad is some wishy-washy internal struggle to become a better person. To the contrary, just as war is politics by other means, violent force is one of several jihadist tactics by which the Muslim Nation seeks to install sharia. If non-Muslims are willing to accommodate sharia in their political, legal, and financial systems, combat is not required. Surrenders are happily accepted.

But jihad undeniably includes the duty to drive infidel armies out of Muslim countries by force — even infidels who see themselves as benign, progressive, good Samaritans rather than occupiers. In 2004, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the “nonviolent” Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to fight the Americans in Iraq. He was zealously supported by the faculty at al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most authoritative voice of Islamic jurisprudence in the Arab world. A few months later, Alberto Fernandez, then the State Department’s top spokesman in the region, gushed that Qaradawi was an “intelligent and thoughtful voice from the region . . . an important figure that deserves our attention.” It was an idiotic thing to say, but it was said in recognition of the grim reality that Qaradawi is not a fringe figure. His influence is vast. Understand this: It is not just terrorists but millions of Muslims who believe Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan should be killed even if they believe they are risking their lives so that Muslims can have a better life.

Why should Islamism matter to us? Because, besides being the ideology that catalyzes jihadist terrorism and threatens our freedoms in sundry other ways, Islamism rejects the premises of Western democracy. Islamists believe that sharia is the perfect, non-negotiable blueprint for law and life, prescribed by Allah Himself. Therefore, Islamists reject the notion of free people at liberty to govern themselves, to legislate in contradiction to God’s law. They reject freedom of conscience: Islam must be the state religion, and apostasy from Islam is a capital crime. They deny the principle of equality under the law between men and women, and between Muslims and non-Muslims. They abjure any semblance of Western sexual liberty: gay sex, adultery, and fornication are brutally punished. They countenance slavery. They encourage polygamy. I could go on, but you get the idea.

This is all horrifying to us, but that is because we are a different civilization. Tony Blair was wrong, as Will has realized in more recent times. Individual liberty and democracy are not “universal values of the human spirit.” And our democracy-building enthusiasts are wrong, and unintentionally insulting to Muslims, when they intimate that the Islamic world will fall in love with our values once they taste a little freedom.

President Bush decried the “cultural condescension” of us democracy doubters. But the shoe of arrogance is on the other foot. Those of us who’ve studied Islam have never doubted its “aptitude for democracy” (to borrow Will’s phrase). The issue has never been one of aptitude; it is about principled beliefs. Fundamentalist strains of Islam, including Salafism, have been developed by extraordinary minds. It is not that these Muslims fail to comprehend our principles; they reject them. They have an entirely different conception of the good life. They believe freedom is not individual liberty but individual submission to Allah’s law. Their very conception of freedom is the opposite of ours. When we talk to them about “freedom,” we are ships passing in the night.

That doesn’t make the Islamists backward. They are convinced that Western liberalism and the Judeo-Christian veneration of reason in faith are corrupting influences that rationalize deviations from Allah’s law and His natural order. They believe, instead, in a pre-ordered, totalitarian system in which the individual surrenders his freedom for the good of the umma — and in which sowing discord (i.e., engaging in what we think of as free speech) is a grave sin, on the order of apostasy. They are wrong in this. Our civilization is superior to theirs, which is why we have flourished and they have faltered. But being wrong doesn’t make them crazy. They don’t want what we’re selling, and they have their reasons.

DEMOCRACY BEGINS AT HOME

Most of our uninformed national conversation about Islam since 9/11 has been about the degree of Muslim support for terrorism. If you’re going to embark on a quest to remake the Middle East, that’s the wrong question. We should be asking: What is the degree of Muslim support for Islamism? The answer to that question is: immense.

Islamism is the official creed of Saudi Arabia, which, as noted above, is risibly portrayed as a U.S. ally against terrorism. The Saudis have lavishly supported and collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1950s, enabling the Brothers to spread Islamism globally, including in America and Europe. Islamism, moreover, is the dominant ideology in the Arab world and in much of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. It is strengthening in northern and eastern Africa. Despite decades of suppression, it is resurgent in Turkey. Even in Indonesia, where Islamism is not preponderant, it is a growing force.

The fact that Islamists disagree with their terrorist factions on tactics obscures the reality that they heartily agree with the terrorists’ contempt for the West. Most of the places that are sources of Islamist terror do not want Western democracy. They want sharia.

We can’t change that about them, and it cheapens us when we try. The State Department’s new “democratic” constitutions for Afghanistan and Iraq are a disgrace: establishing Islam as the state religion and elevating sharia as fundamental law. That is not exporting our values; it is appeasing Islamism. It is putting on display our lack of will to fight for our principles, which only emboldens our enemies. Recall, for example, the spectacle of the Christian prosecuted for apostasy a couple of years back by the post-Taliban, U.S.-backed Afghan government. He had to be whisked out of the country because it’s not safe for an ex-Muslim religious convert in the new Afghanistan. It’s not safe for non-Muslims, period. We’re not building a democratic culture.

Further, even if we could clear the hurdle that Islamists don’t want Western democracy, there remains the problem that a Muslim country’s becoming a democracy would not make us safer from Islamist terrorists. It is illogical and counter-historical to suppose otherwise. The 9/11 attacks were extensively planned, over long periods of time, in, among other places, Berlin, Madrid, San Diego, Florida, Oklahoma, and Connecticut. Clearly, thriving democracy in those places provided no security. The doctrine that democracy is preferable because democracies don’t make war on one another applies only if your threat matrix consists of hostile nation-states. A transnational terror network with no territory to defend and no normal economic system lacks the incentives a democracy has to avoid war. And, far from discouraging terrorists, democratic liberties work to their advantage.

We can’t stop Muslim countries from being Islamist. That is their choice. It should be no concern of ours who rules them as long as they do not threaten American interests. When they inevitably do threaten us, or allow their territories to be launch pads for terrorists, we should smash them. But the price of defending our nation cannot be spending years — at a cost of precious lives and hundreds of billions of dollars — in a vain attempt to give people who despise us a way of life they don’t want.

Meanwhile, we must accept that Islamism is our enemy and has targeted our constitutional system for destruction by slow strangulation via sharia. Instead of worrying about democracy in Afghanistan, we need to worry about democracy in America. The surge we need is at home: to roll back Islamism’s infiltration of our schools, our financial system, our law, and our government. In addition to not being universal, the “values of the human spirit” are not immortal. If we don’t defend them in the West, they will die.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).