Demagoguery 101

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
May 13, 2011

“I’m going to do my part to lead a constructive and civil debate on these issues.”

— Barack Obama, speech on immigration, El Paso, May 10


Constructive and civil debate — like the one Obama initiated just four weeks ago on deficit reduction? The speech in which he accused the Republicans of abandoning families of autistic and Down syndrome kids? The debate in which Obama’s secretary of health and human services said that the Republican Medicare plan would make old folks “die sooner”?

In this same spirit of comity and mutual respect, Obama’s most recent invitation to civil discourse — on immigration — came just 11 minutes after he accused opponents of moving the goal posts on border enforcement. “Maybe they’ll need a moat,” he said sarcastically. “Maybe they want alligators in the moat.”

Nice touch. Looks like the Tucson truce — no demonization, no cross-hairs metaphors — is officially over. After all, the Republicans want to kill off the elderly, throw the disabled in the snow and watch alligators lunch on illegal immigrants.

The El Paso speech is notable not for breaking any new ground on immigration but for perfectly illustrating Obama’s political style: the professorial, almost therapeutic, invitation to civil discourse, wrapped around the basest of rhetorical devices — charges of malice compounded with accusations of bad faith. “They’ll never be satisfied,” said Obama about border control. “And I understand that. That’s politics.”

How understanding. The other side plays “politics,” Obama acts in the public interest. Their eyes are on poll numbers, political power, the next election; Obama’s rest fixedly on the little children.

This impugning of motives is an Obama constant. “They” play politics with deficit reduction, with government shutdowns, with health care. And now immigration. It is ironic that such a charge should be made in a speech that is nothing but politics. There is zero chance of any immigration legislation passing Congress in the next two years. El Paso was simply an attempt to gin up the Hispanic vote as part of an openly political two-city, three-event campaign swing in preparation for 2012.

Accordingly, the El Paso speech featured two other staples: the breathtaking invention and the statistical sleight of hand.

“The [border] fence is now basically complete,” asserted the president. Complete? There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fencing along the Mexican border. The border is 1,954 miles long. That’s 18 percent. And only one-tenth of that 18 percent is the double and triple fencing that has proved so remarkably effective in, for example, the Yuma sector. Another 299 miles — 15 percent — are vehicle barriers that pedestrians can walk right through.

Obama then boasted that on his watch 31 percent more drugs have been seized, 64 percent more weapons — proof of how he has secured the border. And for more proof: Apprehension of illegal immigrants is down 40 percent. Down? Indeed, says Obama, this means that fewer people are trying to cross the border.

Interesting logic. Seizures of drugs and guns go up — proof of effective border control. Seizures of people go down — yet more proof of effective border control. Up or down, it matters not. Whatever the numbers, Obama vindicates himself.

You can believe this flimflam or you can believe the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. The GAO reported in February that less than half the border is under “operational control” of the government. Which undermines the entire premise of Obama’s charge that, because the border is effectively secure, “Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement” didn’t really mean it.

I count myself among those who really do mean it. I have little doubt that most Americans would be quite willing to regularize and legalize the current millions of illegal immigrants if they were convinced that this was the last such cohort, as evidenced by, say, a GAO finding that the border is under full operational control and certification to the same effect by the governors of the four southern border states.

Americans are a generous people. Upon receipt of objective and reliable evidence that the border is secure — not Obama’s infinitely manipulable interdiction statistics — the question would be settled and the immigrants legalized.

Why doesn’t Obama put such a provision in comprehensive immigration legislation? Because for Obama, immigration reform is not about legislation, it’s about reelection. If I may quote the president: I understand that. That’s politics.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

The Dark Night of Islam

The revolutionary events shaking the Islamic world will not change an intolerant and obscurantist culture

By Michael Knox Beran
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 10, 2011 4:00 A.M.

The last six months have proved a climacteric in the history of Islam. An astonished world has witnessed the deposition of rulers in Egypt and Tunisia, revolts in Syria and Libya, the intensification in Iran of a struggle between President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the United States’ imposition on Osama bin Laden of a wild but under the circumstances salutary justice.

Yet however tumultuous the events may be, Islam seems unlikely to undergo the reformation its most generous hearts and intelligent minds desire. The revolutions in the Arab states more nearly resemble the abortive ones of 1848 than the successful ones of 1989: Only the identity of the ruling cabals is likely to change. Osama is dead, but his cult and myth live on. He has already been enrolled by many Muslims in the register of their martyrs, while others piously approach his house in Abbottabad as they would a reliquary shrine.

In Iran the conflict between the messianic president and the apocalyptic ayatollah has been phrased, not in the language of liberty and the just limitation of power, but in a cryptic idiom concerned with the invocation of djins (genies or demons) and the proper method of computing the coming of the Mahdi, the redeemer of Islam, who, it is foretold, will raise a Black Standard, have a natural mascara around his eyes, and establish the new caliphate.

A small number of Islamic intellectuals, many of them educated in the West, have during the last few decades attempted to open the Islamic mind and reconcile the teachings of the prophet with individual liberty, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, and wide and accurate learning. They have sought to disprove the pessimistic conclusion of Charles Doughty, who after living for some time among the Arabs complained, in Travels in Arabia Deserta, that “the Moslem religion ever makes numbness and death in some part of the human understanding.”

These humane Islamic intellectuals — I met a few of them some years ago in Fez and Rabat — have been faithful to the spirit of Dr. Aziz in Forster’s A Passage to India. Aziz has an open mind; “for so young a man he had read largely; the themes he preferred were the decay of Islam and the brevity of love.” But however promising this humane Islam might be, it remains the dream of a few isolated philosophers whose idiom and orientation are largely Western, and who have no idea how to appeal to the sensibilities of ordinary Muslims.

The Islamic intellectual who seeks the regeneration of his faith finds promise in the mystic saints and learned faylasûfs (philosophers) of Islam’s golden age. But Islam today is very different from what it was in its springtime. A few years ago a U.N. report noted that “Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years.” Greece alone translates “five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from English to Arabic.”

The light of Averroes and Avicenna, of Rûmî and Junayd of Baghdad, long ago waxed dim, and when one today visits a country where Islam is the religion as by law established, it is difficult to escape the feeling that a darkness has come over the faith. Not the creative darkness that begets illumination but an oppressive darkness under cover of which millions of people live without freedom, opportunity, or the useful employment that offers a way out of squalor and sloth.

A rich spiritual life, it is true, might be an adequate or indeed a more than adequate compensation for the want of material felicity, and he is unwise who would dismiss the spiritual recompense of Islam. Coleridge, Mill said, “considered the long or extensive prevalence of any opinion as a presumption that it was not altogether a fallacy. . . . The long duration of a belief, he thought, is at least proof positive of an adaption in it to some portion or other of the human mind; and if, digging down to the root, we do not find, as is generally the case, some truth, we shall find some natural want or requirement of human nature which the doctrine in question is fitted to satisfy . . .”

Islam, to have flourished as it has, must put down deep roots in the soul. But in the present darkness even the spiritual virtues of Islam are blighted. Whatever is divine and true in its orthodoxy has been obscured by a vengeful and intolerant fanaticism. A wise soul might prefer a high, pure spiritual culture to what Emerson called the “vulgar aims,” the “erudition of sensation,” the “civility of trifles, of money and expense,” characteristic of a wholly materialist culture, as the West’s is perhaps coming to be; but the spiritual culture of Islam, in its most visible forms, seems no longer to be pure. On the contrary, it appears gloomy and bigoted — a machinery of intolerance and obscurantism manipulated by mob-masters and demagogues who, though they masquerade as holy men, derive power and profit from the malignant passions they excite.

Because the Islamic mind, in its present benightedness, is so largely a closed one, the Islamic state can only be barren and corrupt. A constructive renovation of the Islamic regimes, if it is to take place at all, can take place only after more light has been let into the intellectual part of the Islamic mind. But what prospect is there of this? What Islamic leader today is preaching sweetness and light? From India to China, non-Islamic Asians, many of whom grew up under the most oppressive authority, are opening their eyes. But the Islamic peoples, for the most part, vegetate in darkness.

As epochal as the events that have shaken Islamic civilization in the last six months seem to have been, they have not let in the sun and can bring forth little fruit. New tyrants will replace old tyrants; living terrorists will replace dead terrorists. The darkness will remain, and will not be dispelled until a new and different sort of leader emerges, to show his people a better way.

— Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author, most recently, of Pathology of the Elites.

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Film Review - 'Thor': A Minor Marvel

By Richard Corliss
http://www.time.com/
Wednesday, May 04, 2011

If it's the first weekend in May, it must be Marvel superhero time. Spider-Man and its two sequels, plus both Iron Man movies and the Wolverine prequel, have all kick-started the summer movie season in burly style. Now it's Thor's turn. The Norse god — first Marvelized in a 1962 comic book — introduces what is conceived as a zillion-part movie series about the Avengers team of Marvel stalwarts. Captain America, impersonated by Chris Evans, gets his own starring chapter in July; another Avenger, the James Bondian Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), comes next year.

Like its namesake, Thor is big, blond-bland, handsomely put together and a little musclebound. Played by an Aussie Adonis named Chris Hemsworth, whose looks and demeanor suggest a young, airbrushed Nick Nolte, Thor sports a permanent scowl — perhaps because, in the alternate universe of the movie business, he had his, oh, thunder stolen by the carjackers of Fast Five, which jumped the traditional opening date of the Hollywood blockbuster season by a week and proved a popular smash. So this weekend Thor faces two daunting challenges: to vanquish his enemies in mythological Norway and modern-day New Mexico, and to top Fast Five's $86.2-million box-office haul.

Early on, that seems an impossible task, given the heavy weather of the first part of the film. Set in the mists of ancient Asgard — the home of Thor, his brother Loki (Tim Hiddleston) and their regal dad Odin (Anthony Hopkins) — these scenes are as starchy and stentorian as the cloudland sequences in superhero films of old. Great actors (Marlon Brando as Jor-El in the 1978 Superman, Laurence Olivier as Zeus in the 1981 Clash of the Titans) tend to go fruity when slumming as fantasy-film deities, and Hopkins nearly surrenders to that campy impulse. The drama flirts so flagrantly with self-parody that one half-expects the actors to burst into their own Mel Brooks lampoon, with Hopkins spritzing, "I just disowned my son and heir, and, boy, is he Thor."

Given that Thor is a gigantic surfer-god, and Loki slim and black-clad, the film's platoon of writers (eight are credited) might have gone the familiar Marvel route of turning the malcontent into a troubled hero, a la Peter Parker. But they stick to the Aryan tradition of blond as beautiful and dark as malevolent. The early sequences are also clotted with confounding backstory dialogue — like Thor's "Have you forgotten all we've done together?" — that will have non-Marvelettes thinking they've wandered into the middle of another movie. Let's see: a cold land, frosty mytho-creatures, icy art direction, a woozily pompous atmosphere — could this be an unwished-for sequel to The Last Airbender?

Then you recall that the director is Kenneth Branagh, the actor-director who a quarter-century ago was called the next Olivier — a prophesy that became an albatross. Like Lord Larry, he starred in and directed films of Henry V and Hamlet, but he lacked Olivier's divine fire; he was more a clever manager than a matinee idol. Between Shakespeares (he also brought Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labors Lost and As You Like It to the screen), Branagh directed a morose version of Frankenstein in which he played the scientist to Robert De Niro's Creature, and a remake of the murder thriller Sleuth, which after much judicious consideration I can call the worst movie of the current millennium. What could he bring to a Marvel comic movie that Spider-Man's Sam Raimi or Iron Man's Jon Favreau couldn't?

Turns out Branagh has a deft touch after all; he just waits for the modern scenes to reveal it. Evicted from Asgard, Thor lands in the New Mexico desert, getting promptly creamed by astrophysicist and reckless driver Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, in her sixth film released in six months) and tased by her comic sidekick Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings). A displaced superhero stranded on Earth, where his special gifts are initially inappropriate, Thor acquires some of the clumsy charm of Jeff Bridges' interstellar traveler in Starman. The heroic bluster that seemed stilted in Asgard plays as engaging comedy when Thor is confined in a hospital and demands, "How dare you attack the son of Odin!" Clearly, the dude has muscle-management issues. As Jane advises him: "Don't smash things."

An action movie is obliged to smash things, just as an action hero has to face outsize adversaries. So Thor contains its share of fights, which are well-staged if video-gamey, and a climactic showdown with a lantern-headed iron giant sent to Earth by Loki. But the central pleasures are in the smaller scenes. The picture finds the right light tone when puny humans, as if in a carnival strength game, attempt to pull Thor's hammer from the rock where it's embedded — the Arthurian sword in the stone, transported to the American Southwest. And Branagh brings a tactful warmth to the budding relationship of Thor and Jane. Of the power he learns to harness in his new terrestrial home, he tells her, "Your ancestors called it magic, but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same." At its best moments, Thor weaves a spot of magic from the complex science of $150-million fantasy-film technology.

Marvel completists will welcome the return of S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), who popped up in the Iron Man films. And Thor wouldn't be an official part of the Avengers canon without a visit from Jackson's Nick Fury, already the most advance-promo'd character in movie history: He doesn't get his own self-named film until summer 2012, but he showed up in both Iron Man films and will materialize again in this July's Captain America. I believe Fury was also spotted last weekend at the royal wedding and the White House Correspondents dinner, and he may have been part of the Seal Team Six that took down bin Laden. But we'll have to wait for the movie version to be sure.

The true god of the project is Stan Lee, who went to work at Marvel (then known as Timely Publications) an astounding 72 years ago, filling inkwells for the artists and soon graduating to writer, editor and chief mythmaker. He and his artists dreamed up Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Fury and the rest of the Avengers team in the space of one year, 1962. Looking spry for 88, Lee has a one-line cameo in the latest film to spring from his lightning-bolt brain. "Did it work?" he asks about I-forget-what. The answer: After a rough start, and when it comes down to Earth, Thor works pretty well.

Today's Tune: The Gaslight Anthem - Great Expectations

Bamboozled: Two Recent Biographies Shed New Light on Liberal Icons

Why are we startled to learn the real truth about Gandhi and Malcolm X? Because journalists are remarkably adept at seeing only what they want to see when a liberal dreamboat comes floating along on a river of lies.

By John Boot
http://pajamasmedia.com/
May 8, 2011


Did you hear that ripping sound? Two liberal icons known by their silly stage names — Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X — have just been torn down from their sanctified perches thanks to a pair of massively researched but finally damning new biographies.

Both men, it turns out, were at pains to take on phony identities. Each hid his homosexuality, each was racist, each took pains to manufacture favorable coverage, each was driven by petty hatreds instead of shining ideals — each of these supposedly principled figures was an out-and-out phony.

Perhaps the most delicious irony of this myth-busting is that writers with impeccable liberal credentials are the ones who are doing the exposing — and implicitly rebuking the generations of journalists who actively participated in the distortion and exaggeration.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by the Columbia scholar Manning Marable, who died just as the book was being sent to stores, shows us a “profoundly flawed individual,” Princeton professor of African-American studies Melissa Harris-Parry told NPR, which called the book “an abrupt departure from ‘heroic’ and ‘perfected’ visions of the African-American minister that were set in motion by The Autobiography of Malcolm X and perpetuated in American popular culture.”

That “autobiography,” as David Remnick makes clear in a review in The New Yorker[1], consisted in large part of Malcolm Little making up tall tales about his life while being egged on by the sensationalist writer Alex Haley, whose later book Roots would also turn out to be mostly fictitious (and partly plagiarized). Haley, says Marable, wanted to write “a potboiler that would sell,” facts be damned.

Essential to the Malcolm X legend is the “autobiography’s” story that his father was murdered by being laid on railroad tracks by white supremacists. But Malcolm himself said in a 1963 speech that the death was an accident. Haley and Malcolm exaggerated the latter’s youthful criminal behavior to make the later redemption myth more salient. They also painted the young Malcolm as uninterested in politics until his famous prison conversion to the nutty preachings of the Nation of Islam, but in fact Malcolm’s father was a Marcus Garvey devotee who raised his son in the same school of black separatism.

Marable also casts a skeptical eye on the idea that his subject was a loving husband. Malcolm felt forced to marry Betty Sanders for the sake of appearance and the marriage went bad almost immediately. “The main source of our trouble was based on SEX,” Malcolm said in a letter:

She placed a great deal more stress upon it than I was physically capable of doing. . . . One day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction. From then on, try as I may, I began to become very cool toward her.

As for the ultimate source of this tension, Marable reports that Malcolm was probably talking about himself when he told a story about an imaginary friend named “Rudy” who, while serving as a butler to a rich man in Boston, willingly became a male prostitute who would “undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.”

Malcolm X, a hate-spewing charlatan (“Jews run the country,” he said, while women were “tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh” and a plane crash that killed lots of white people was “a very beautiful thing” because “We call on our God — he gets rid of 120 of them”), was always difficult to take seriously, and few fans are likely to remain after reading Marable’s book.

Mohandas Gandhi also successfully hid his homosexuality — his biographer Joseph Lelyveld, former editor of The New York Times, writes in his admiring new book Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India that the Indian leader dumped his wife to have an affair with a German bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach. “How completely you have taken possession of my body,” he wrote to Kallenbach. Gandhi even said that Vaseline was “a constant reminder” of his boyfriend.

If Gandhi was not a rabid anti-Semite like Malcolm, his beliefs in regard to Jews are nonetheless reprehensible. He addressed Hitler as “my friend” in a letter and urged that the Jews pursue nonviolent resistance to the Nazis. He also advised the Jews of Palestine to “rely on the goodwill of the Arabs” and wait for a Jewish state “till Arab opinion is ripe for it.”

Gandhi was equally misguided when it came to his own co-religionists, telling fellow Hindus in conflict with Muslims, “I do not mind if each and every one of the 500 families in your area is done to death” as long as they stuck to the idea of passive resistance. He wrote in racist terms about the blacks of South Africa and said the British Empire was an “exact parallel” to the Third Reich.

Why are we startled to learn the real truth about Gandhi and Malcolm? Because journalists are remarkably adept at seeing only what they want to see when a liberal dreamboat comes floating along on a river of lies. We don’t even know exactly what Gandhi told reporters. Lelyveld writes that Gandhi demanded — and journalists granted! — the right to go back over his interview transcripts and edit them heavily. Fittingly enough, a state in India has banned the book. And don’t hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to remake Malcolm X or Gandhi along factual lines.

John Boot is the pen name of a conservative writer operating under deep cover in the liberal media.

Link:

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/04/25/110425crbo_books_remnick

The 'Say Hey Kid' turns 80

By Howard Bryant
http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/
Friday, May 6, 2011

The words reverberate, vibrating noisily like a quarter sitting atop a spinning washing machine, rattling and demanding acceptance from those who wince at how quickly time goes, how easily it takes things away. Even the famous nickname -- the "Say Hey Kid" -- stands stubborn, unbelieving of a single sentence that holds and hangs for everyone who identified through him a life full of possibility instead of memory: Willie Mays is 80.

Age and time eat away at the body of a baseball player most cruelly: The sharp eyes of a hitter, perhaps Mays' greatest possession, are now almost blind. Yesterday's lithe frame -- 5-foot-10, 185 pounds, sinewy and lean -- is gone, and an old man, hunched and bespectacled, is physically all that's left. For most, even the great ones, time always erodes the monument. The people who molded it are gone, fewer and fewer people still around who saw it built -- home runs and stolen bases, electric moments and the emulated batting stance, the tapping of the glove just before the catch. Old numbers are replaced by new ones. People forget.

None of this applies much to Mays, for there is the power of imagination and deed, and then there is Mays' power -- vibrant and illuminant, 38 years after he played his last game, where the name itself represents without further explanation an era, a standard that remains. "It's still like Moses parting the Red Sea when he walks around the park," says one San Francisco Giants season-ticket holder.

Mays was the first athlete to spawn the practice of flattering imitation. The No. 24 might be the most enduring jersey number in sports, all tracing back to him. Babe Ruth retired in 1935, yet there was no generation of players who chose the No. 3. There was Mays and his 24, then everyone after who wanted to be him. Reggie Jackson wore 24 in college at Arizona State, Rickey Henderson to Barry Bonds to Ken Griffey Jr. on the top shelf, scores of lesser talents but equal reverence wearing the jersey, breathing his air, kneeling at the altar of the original.

So many of the explanations exist of the Mays phenomenon, of why he endures so many years later, and they seem to fall short in their comprehension. There always will be the big numbers that still seem big today -- 660 home runs, 2,062 runs, 3,283 hits, 1,903 RBIs -- but the numbers don't quite do it. Albert Pujols puts up numbers. So did Frank Robinson.

The great New York writer Pete Hamill lionized Mays last year in The New York Times by talking about Mays in misty, nostalgic terms, that Mays played the game for joy when baseball was a joy. It's dangerous territory, generations allowing the mind to play tricks on it. Perhaps for the kids of New York who left school and drifted deep into imagination of sandlot heroics, Mays provided them wonder and discovery: a human, living comic book. In comparison to today, when drugs temper accolades to replace enthusiasm for on-the-field heroics with a detective's skepticism, perhaps Mays seemed pure, just as Joe DiMaggio did. And maybe now, because of the speed of life and the roads that have been traveled and all that America knows that it wish it did not, the iconic life will never be quite so iconic again.

Mays, however, did not play baseball during an uncomplicated time. In a changing America, Mays was the first African-American superstar in every sense of the word. Boxer Joe Louis might have been considered an American hero, but he was a star in a shadowy sport, and his greatest triumph -- the knocking out of Max Schmeling with Hitler at the height of power -- did not come against an American but a German.

Jackie Robinson was respected -- for being first, for persevering, for being a tough, excellent ballplayer -- but he was never beloved, not like Mays.

Although black in a time of legal segregation, Mays did not allow his play to suffer such burden. He played with a certain joy that translated into love -- love of his talent, love of his game, love of his demeanor -- that eased for the white fans the tension of simmering 1950s race relations, tension that could not be erased when considering Robinson. Robinson wanted to know your politics before you cheered for him. Robinson never made the distinction between on the field and off. That made him complicated, respected and, in some corners, hated. Mays depoliticized turning a triple into a long, lonely out.

Mays provided the joy, and that was what made him famous. It hurt often when the pieces of his public persona could not hide his mercurial true self, how complicated his life truly was, how his own complexities were never taken seriously, how he attempted to navigate the same vexing social issues frustrating Robinson and Aaron without receiving respect for his feelings.

He would pay a personal price while receiving a public benefit that would not serve him as the years continued. Robinson criticized him for not using his public power to be prominent in the civil rights movement. As he challenged baseball's reserve clause to free players and ultimately make them wildly rich, Curt Flood singled out two star players as especially resistant: Carl Yastrzemski and Willie Mays. Mays lived in simmering silence that he was never recognized for supporting the movement until he authorized a biography in 2010. He wanted to be seen as three-dimensional, but to the public, he had to make it happy. The world was fine with that, even if Mays was not.

What made Mays the signature player of his time originally, then of all time, was the sheer incandescence of what he could do on a baseball diamond and how he could do it. Dutch has a word for it: uitstraling, pronounced "out-strah-ling." The closest English equivalent is "charisma," but charisma doesn't quite do uitstraling justice. In Mays' case, charisma seems an insufficient description.

"Willie did everything big," Henry Aaron said. "I remember we were at an All-Star Game playing cards one year. It was all of us -- Frank [Robinson], [Roberto] Clemente, [Bob] Gibson, me -- and when Willie walked in, he just took the room over. He was the center. I don't even know if he knew he was doing it, but that was just Willie. He couldn't be one of the guys because he was Willie. He was Willie Mays."

It isn't just talent. Bonds had talent. Griffey had talent. So did Aaron and Ty Cobb, Hank Greenberg and Ted Williams. They said DiMaggio was one of the original five-tool players, too, but although DiMaggio played with grace, he moved with the brooding quest for respect of the immigrant. DiMaggio played with every hair in place, uniform pressed. His aura transformed whatever silent discomforts he possessed into a quiet elegance, trying to prove that he not only belonged on the baseball diamond but also looked the part, either at the dinner table or of an American leading man.

Mays bore deep into the American imagination, touching the kids who wanted to run fast and score and do it with a kind of flair -- like running so fast that your hat flies off. He resonated with the ones who wanted to hit the ball high and far, the ones who wanted to catch everything hit their way and the ones who wanted to charge a ball in the outfield, see the baserunner round second and gun him out with a perfect throw to third base.

They took place from the beginning, the big achievements with flair. During the barnstorming trip in the mid-1950s, when the Willie Mays All-Stars toured the country and went 32-0, each night Mays did something that would travel by word of mouth. He hit .477 in the minors at Minneapolis, then won the pennant his rookie year. He hit 50-plus home runs in a season twice. He robbed Vic Wertz, for posterity, in the '54 World Series. He tormented individual teams for years, like in 1961, when 22 of his 40 home runs came against Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

"With Willie, people remember 'The Catch,' but it was something different," Joe Torre said, trying to explain why Mays always has shined so bright. Torre, from Brooklyn, was a Giants fan as a kid. "Willie had the showman's flair without being a show-off. That is difficult to do, especially in a game that policed itself like ours did. What it was, was this: It was the volume of things he did. Willie Mays made a play you'd never seen every night."

From the day Mays returned from the military in 1954, the narrative of Babe Ruth's home run record belonged to him. It was his. He was the best. End of story. It was his in 1962 and 1965, the year he won his second NL MVP award and his last great season, the last year he would score 100 runs and the second to last he would drive in as many. Even in 1969, the hold that Mays had on the public made people believe. Cameras might lie after all, but mathematics do not, and by the end of the decade it was clear that even the great Mays would not complete the journey to surpass Ruth.

Yet even at the end, when individual skills fade with age while the game remains ever so harder and demanding, Mays' mortality enhanced his humanity, evidenced by a 1971 Roger Angell profile in The New Yorker, which marveled at the Great Man's last charge:

"Candlestick's classic pastime -- and the best entertainment in baseball this year -- is watching Willie Mays. Now just turned forty, and beginning this twenty-first year in the majors, he is hitting better than he has hit at any time in the past six or seven seasons, and playing the game with enormous visible pleasure. Veteran curators in the press box like to expound upon various Maysian specialties -- the defensive gem, the basket catch, the looped throw, the hitched swing, and so forth. My favorite is his base-running. He may have lost a half-second, but I doubt whether Willie Davis or Ralph Garr or any of the other new flashes can beat Mays from first to third, or can accelerate just as he does, with his whole body suddenly seeming to sink lower when, taking his turn at first and intently following the distant ball and outfielder, he suddenly sees his chance. Watching him this year, seeing him drift across a base and then sink in to full speed, I noticed all at once how much resembles a marvelous skier in midturn down some steep pitch of fast powder. Nobody like him."

"The game," Reds manager Dusty Baker said, "is going to get all of us." Even Willie Mays. No throne worth having is easily abdicated. Mays had set the standard of play, of leadership, of the responsibility the white baseball establishment would allow a black player to have in those days and how much money black players earned. But Mays' time was ending. At the start of the 1972 season, Aaron for the first time passed Mays in salary, $200,000 per year to Mays' $165,000. In May, Aaron passed Mays in home runs at 648 and never looked back. Months earlier, Baker's prophecy applied. The Giants had just lost to Pittsburgh in the National League Championship Series, and Mays, like Ruth, exemplified the marquee -- vitality in victory, mortality in defeat. The latter, in a baseball sense, occurred during the playoffs, and Angell was there for that, too:

"A missing name in this account, it may be noticed, is that of Willie Mays. He played in all four games and did not exactly or entirely fail: two doubles, one homer, a stolen base, four hits. But these totals do not suggest the true level of his contribution, and by this, for once, I mean that he was less of a player than the statistics suggest -- much older player, who looked every year and every month of his forty years, a player gone quite gray-faced with exhaustion and pain and the pressures of leadership. Willie had seen all his splendid early-season triumphs worn away to bare competence; in the late going, he had managed but four hits in forty at-bats, had gone a whole month without a homer, and had been striking out almost half the time. He apologized to his fans at the end of the regular season. During the playoffs, after I had seen Mays taking call third strikes or trying to bunt his way aboard or slicing a weak little pop hit on a fast ball he could no longer get around on, I began -- for the first time in my life, and with enormous sadness -- not to want him to come up to the plate. I dreaded it, in fact, and I was embarrassed and ashamed of myself. But I still feel the same way, and I think it should be said: Hang them up, Willie, please. Retire."

Half a lifetime later, at the Fairmont Hotel in the Nob Hill neighborhood in San Francisco, the 40-year-old ballplayer is now 80, and a birthday party is being thrown for Mays. The name is still the standard, a living scouting report for baseball perfection, the scout's dream, the elusive five-tool player. The party is private, as is the guest list, which the Giants say contains 200 people.

Later in the day, the Colorado Rockies will come to town to a sold-out stadium. The Giants will be handing out birthday hats and mini-replicas of the towering Mays statue that stands in front of AT&T Park. There will be cake and legends and cheering. It is Willie Mays night, which, given a little bit of thought, sounds redundant. It's been Willie Mays night for 60 years.


Howard Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He is the author of "The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron," "Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston" and "Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball" He can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/hbryant42 or reached at Howard.Bryant@espn.com.

Related:

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/10260/ten-reasons-willie-mays-is-greatest-ever





Say Hey to 80

By Quin Hillyer on 5.6.11 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

There was something about that baseball card. For one thing, the 587 under the "HR" column, far and above the corresponding number on any other player's card, absolutely wowed a five-year-old who thought that home runs were the primary measure of a player's greatness. For another thing, there was that incredibly broad and engaging smile on the photograph. Finally, there was, as I remember it, some sort of "fun fact" about how this player was particularly known for going out of his way to be nice to children.

Somewhere around that time came the greatest catch I ever saw. No, it wasn't "The Catch," the famous Polo Grounds snag of the ball blasted by Cleveland's Vic Wertz; that one came ten years before I was born. This catch was even better. My memory might embellish the reality a little, but it went something like this: A drive to right-center in Candlestick Park. Two incredibly fast outfielders at full sprint in pursuit. Bobby Bonds, from right field, arrived at the ball and the fence at the exact same time. So did my player, streaking over from center. He arrived at the same place at the same time. Two players, at full sprint, hit each other and the fence simultaneously. Both players fell in disheveled, oddly angled heaps. One of them may even have been temporarily knocked unconscious. Then came the dawning realization: Nobody seemed to know where the ball was.

Then, from the centerfielder, still in a heap on the ground, the gloved hand raised up, like that arm in the promo for the movie Deliverance. The glove opened. The world could see: The ball was snugly inside. The batter was out. Willie Mays' glove once more had become the place, as an opposing team's executive once said, "where triples go to die."

I was hooked on Willie Mays for life. And the more I learned about him, the more I liked. I found out that the stories of his manifold kindnesses to kids were true. I saw him act as a peacemaker in the 1973 League Championship Series when Mets fans were throwing objects at Cincinnati's Pete Rose. I read about how he had run to the aid of opponent Johnny Roseboro, rather than joining in the brawl, when his teammate Juan Marichal beat Roseboro on the head with a bat. I heard how he had taken time to take a troubled, athletic gang member named O.J. Simpson around San Francisco one day, by Simpson's own testimony turning the youth's life around. (Okay, okay, I didn't know in 1973 that O.J. would revert to form two decades later.)

Everything about Mays seemed admirable. And, of course, his record as a ballplayer, even as he faded into mediocrity on the field by the time I was nine years old, remained absolutely nonpareil.

Today (as indicated by the headline), the Say Hey Kid turns 80 years young. I happen to be reading, thoroughly enjoying, and marveling at, Mays' official biography by James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend. What I am finding is that it was all true: Just about all the heroic qualities that my younger, innocent self had ascribed to Mays turn out to be qualities Mays usually exhibited. He was an ever better player than can be imagined -- and a good and kind and generous man.

His remarkable career statistics, especially the 660 home runs when all was said and done, actually understate his brilliance. He lost nearly two full seasons to military service; the year he returned, he hit 41 home runs. Give him just 30 in each of the two previous years and he would have passed Babe Ruth before Henry Aaron did. But wait: There's more. He played almost his entire career in two of the worst home parks ever for home run hitters. New York's Polo Grounds did have an incredibly short left-field foul line, conducive to homers, but Mays' power was to the "alleys" -- and the Polo Grounds' right- and left-center alleys were cavernous. No park today has fences remotely as deep. Then there was San Francisco's Candlestick Park, plagued by winds that particularly beat back drives to left field, which is exactly where the right-handed Mays pounded the ball. Author Hirsch reports that today's sophisticated statisticians estimate that Candlestick alone cost Mays between 80 and 160 home runs during the course of his career (Mays himself estimates it was around 120). Put Mays in Milwaukee's park or Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium, and he might have approached 800 career homers, even without recouping his two military seasons.

And that was during some of the tougher years for hitters in Major League history. Throughout much of the 1960s, pitchers had a statistical advantage, especially in Mays' National League. Those were the years when Sandy Koufax was tallying ERAs of 2.54, 1.88, 1.74, 2.04 and 1.73, while Bob Gibson (a few seasons later) was posting ERAs of 2.44, 2.98, 1.12 and 2.18.

Mays led his league in hitting once (and second three times), walks once, on-base percentage twice (including at age 40!), stolen bases four times, home runs four times, triples three times, runs twice, slugging five times (and second-place twice). Ten different times he led the league in the stats-nerds' new favorite category: wins above replacement player. He won Gold Gloves for the first 12 consecutive seasons the award was given (and surely would have won in the three previous years if the award had existed). His 7,095 career putouts easily lead all outfielders in history. And, by all accounts, he made more visually spectacular plays, with his glove and with his arm and with his base-running, than can easily be fathomed. Scoring from first base on singles, repeatedly. Advancing from first to third on ground-outs, repeatedly. Scoring from second base on sacrifice flies. And always doing so with a showman's flair.

"I'm not sure what the hell charisma is," said slugger Ted Kluszewski, "but I get the feeling it's Willie Mays." Or, as the actress Tallulah Bankhead said in 1962, "There have been only two geniuses in the world: Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare."

It's quite possible, however, that not even The Bard's poetry could have done justice to the Say Hey Kid.

- Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom.

Willie Mays, the greatest all-around baseball player to live, turns 80, and he's worth remembering

By Mike Lupica
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Sunday, May 8th 2011, 4:00 AM

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - MAY 06: Willie Mays speaks at a ceremony for his 80th birthday before the San Francisco Giants against the Colorado Rockies at AT&T Park on May 6, 2011 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Willie Mays, the greatest all-around baseball player who ever lived, turned 80 on Friday. It is a big landmark birthday, worth celebrating, for a player who did everything you could on a ballfield, and did it all at 5-11 and 180 pounds.

This is a time in sports when the past matters less and less, when the present is all that matters, in real time, when you think that the only relevant history in modern sports is being written as if it is a tweet on Twitter, in 140 characters or less.

There was a time when we thought of journalism as history in a hurry. Now it is a few keystrokes and the send button. You see it in the young, who don't want to hear about Michael Jordan anymore, the greatest basketball player ever, because his best was in the '90s, so he is not right there for them the way Kobe and LeBron and Kevin Durant are.

So even at a time when there aren't nearly enough baseball stars, nearly enough people you want to watch these days, all those who never saw Willie Mays don't want to hear about an old Giant - a baseball giant in every sense of the word - who played his last game nearly 40 years ago.

All this time after he played his last game, you feel obligated to tell people about Willie Mays.

Once the only proper way to describe the combination of talent and star power in sports, the elusive combination that the late great Boston columnist George Frazier used to describe as "duende," was to say it this way: That guy has some Willie Mays in him, the same way you used to say that this singer or that had some Elvis in him.

Only one guy got to be Elvis. And only one ballplayer in this world got to be Willie Mays, who hit 660 home runs and Lord knows how many he would have hit if he hadn't had to play so much of his prime in the wind and cold of Candlestick Park, where summer always felt like winter, not to mention giving up nearly two years of his career to the military.

He hit them at 5-11 and 180 and that was about the same size that Hank Aaron was as he hit enough home runs to pass Babe Ruth and become the de facto home run king of baseball. Barry Bonds, Willie Mays' godson, later passed Aaron, but did it with help from a needle. Maybe now Bonds wishes he had done it differently, the way his godfather did, and the other true greats of the past.

It is funny how Bonds, who just got convicted of a felony for obstruction of justice on grand jury testimony about his use of baseball drugs, is linked forever to both Aaron and Mays. The great Henry Aaron, more than ever, is the conscience of baseball. Willie Howard Mays, 80 on Friday, the Say Hey Kid, is still its soul.

I didn't see him in person until he was past 40. Only saw him on television as a kid in all the years when he was still something to see, hitting home runs through the wind of Candlestick Point and making his basket catches and having his cap fly off and running the bases. There was no satellite television in those days. You couldn't watch Willie Mays even late at night if you wanted to. You had to wait for the Game of the Week. When he did make it to one of those Saturday afternoons, it was like a baseball holiday.

So was the 1962 World Series, when his Giants nearly beat the Yankees, when Willie Mays stayed on third base in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 as Willie McCovey lined one to Bobby Richardson at second base. So that great moment was nearly 50 years ago on Mays.

So he didn't win a World Series after 1954, when he made the most famous catch in Series history, off Vic Wertz at the Polo Grounds, ran that ball down in deep center, what even now feels like a mile from home plate, then stopped and turned on a dime and threw the ball back toward the infield. And he wouldn't win a World Series in '73 with the Mets, when he stumbled around in the outfield after coming home to New York, and the Mets lost in seven to the Oakland A's.

That was why it was such a fine thing to see him celebrate last year's World Series Giants the way he did, and be celebrated along with them. He ended up with a World Series ring and now has that to go along with the statue of him outside the Giants' fancy ballpark in downtown San Francisco.

Of course the real monuments to Willie Mays are the memories burned into the heart and imagination of anybody who ever saw him play baseball the way he did, for as long as he did. He was as big as there ever was, and unlike modern players, his body never got bigger as he went.

Happy Birthday to Willie Mays. If you ever saw him play, you know: He was the one who was history in a hurry.


Photo: Michael Macor / The San Francisco Chronicle

Even the Willie Mays statue at AT&T Park was made part of the celebration for the legendary Giants' 80th birthday party.

Today's Tune: Rosanne Cash - Sea of Heartbreak (Live)

Show the Proof, Mr. President

Americans don’t want to ‘spike the ball.’ They want to show they crossed the goal line.

By Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
http://www.peggynoonan.com/
May 5, 2011

If it weren’t Osama bin Laden we just killed, he’d be giving interviews in the hills right now taunting the great Satan that once again lied. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Let’s start with credit where it’s due. The U.S. Navy SEALs did it and deserve our profound thanks and deep admiration.

It was President Obama who told CIA chief Leon Panetta: Get this guy. When presidents insist, the guy tends to get got. It was Mr. Obama who made the decision not to bomb the house with predators or B2s, because that way we wouldn’t have known if we’d got Osama. It was Mr. Obama who decided to do it the hard way, the way that would allow us to know we’d succeeded. It was Mr. Obama who’d have taken the blame if the operation had gone wrong, and things like this are tricky and often go wrong because they have a thousand moving parts and almost every part has to move right. And it’s not as if the president was operating from a position of political strength. It was Mr. Obama who, having made the decision, apparently didn’t micromanage. He did his job and let the military do theirs.

It was Mr. Obama who decided—rightly—to stiff Pakistan, not to tell them of the operation but to allow them to be exposed and humiliated in front of the world. Which they richly deserve. They accept our aid and hide our enemies. Every day they frighten the world with their chronic instability, their Wild West ways, their infiltrated military, their nuclear weapons. At a certain point you have to say “Enough.” Mr. Obama said it very nicely. And by the way, that silence you hear from the U.N. on charges of violating Pakistan’s sovereignty? That’s the silence of the civilized world thinking, “Good. They had it coming.”

It was well and brilliantly done. It reminded the world that American might can be wielded with American competence. It highlighted the brilliance of the U.S. military when it is given clear goals and full resources.

And it had to be done, for us and the world.

Osama’s importance is that he was the leader of al Qaeda, but his mystique resided in the fact that he attacked America and got away with it. He killed nearly 3,000 people in a brutal assault and lived to tell the tale. He launched a war and taunted us from the hills. He was invincible, the “strong horse.” This gave him charisma, which he used to rouse and recruit the young, the ignorant and the unstable.

That’s over now. He has been answered. The U.S. action said, “You didn’t get away with it. You are not invincible. You are dead. Followers, please note.”

Is the world safer with bin Laden dead? Who knows. But it is better.

*****

However, and with our president there is always a however, he has spent almost every moment since his Sunday night speech displaying both a tin ear and a chronic tendency to misunderstand his own country. His refusal to release more evidence that Osama is dead is allowing a great story to dissolve into a mystery. He is letting a triumph turn into a conspiracy theory.

Here is the fact of the age: People believe nothing. They think everything is spin and lies. The minute a government says A is true, half the people on Earth know A is a lie. And when people believe nothing, as we know, they will believe anything. We faked the moon landing, there was a second gunman in Dallas, the World Trade Center was blown up in a U.S.-Zionist conspiracy, Hitler grew old in Argentina.

There will always be people who believe conspiracy theories, and with the Internet there will be more. They are impervious to evidence. But people who care about the truth need to be armed with evidence to refute them.

Mr. Obama misunderstands all this. He tells Steve Croft Sunday on Sixty Minutes that showing photos of the dead Osama would be to “spike the football.” “We don’t trot this stuff out as trophies.” Trophies? Who does he think we are?

It’s not about pride, it’s about proof. “We got him, shot him and immediately threw him in the sea” is not enough. The U.S. government should release all the evidence it has that does not compromise security. Pictures of Osama are said to be gruesome. Then get the least gruesome one and put it out. Release the DNA evidence, incriminating information found in the house, and pictures of the raid. If there was a passport under the mattress, make it public. And let the SEALs tell their story. Allow them, if they are willing and eager, to go on “Nightline,” “Frontline” and “60 Minutes.” If they cannot be identified or don’t wish to be, put a blue dot over their faces, filter their voices, and don’t use their names.

All of this should be put in one big package and released to the world. In this way you give the nation and the world data, and a lot to talk about. That talk will crowd out and diminish conspiracy theories and deather denialism.

Americans don’t want to spike the ball. They just want to show they crossed the goal line.

Two closing thoughts. One has to do with the reaction of young men to the news of Osama’s death. I saw it last Sunday night with a wordless but emotional high-five from a boy with whom I’d lived through 9/11. After midnight his friend, with whom we’d shared those days, came over for hugs all around. On the TV there were the celebrations that broke out in New York and Washington, and the young Marine smoking a stogie in front of the White House. There were the cheering young men of West Point, and the young people of many universities, including Yale, among whom was a veteran of the Australian forces in Afghanistan. The next night he looked like one happy, hung-over soldier.

Young men, mostly, fought the wars and are fighting them. Young men took to the streets Sunday night. It was their night. They’d seen their country do something brilliant and brave and right, and it was as if they were visiting for a moment the America their parents had told them about. They were 10 or 15 when it all began, on 9/11. Now the guy who did it sleeps with the fishes.

And so they cheered: “USA! USA!” It was good to hear that again. It was especially good to hear it from them.

Finally, people talk about “closure,” but there’s no such thing as closure. You absorb life, including its blows, and move on. If you’re lucky or work hard, adversity makes you better, stronger, deeper. You’ll never not mourn, because you’re human and that’s the way we’re built. But there are moments when something happens—you take a turn, or a new understanding happens. There are times when you realize a certain point in the arc of mourning has been reached. There are times when justice happens.

Such a time was brought to us this week by U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6. They made a whole country feel young again.

Hooyah, baby. Hooyah.

Benedict XVI: In No One's Shadow

By Samuel Gregg on 5.6.11 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

It was inevitable. In the lead-up to John Paul II's beatification, a number of publications decided it was time to opine about the direction of Benedict XVI's pontificate. The Economist, for example, portrayed a pontificate adrift, "accident-prone," and with a "less than stellar record" compared to Benedict's dynamic predecessor (who, incidentally, didn't meet with the Economist's approval either).[1]

It need hardly been said that, like most British publications, the Economist's own record when it comes to informed commentary on Catholicism and religion more generally is itself less than stellar. And the problems remain the same as they have always been: an unwillingness to do the hard work of trying to understand a religion on its own terms, and a stubborn insistence upon shoving theological positions into secular political categories.

Have mistakes occurred under Benedict's watch? Yes. Some sub-optimal appointments? Of course. That would be true of any leader of such a massive organization.

But the real difficulty with so much commentary on this papacy is the sheer narrowness of the perspective brought to the subject. If observers were willing to broaden their horizons, they might notice just how big are the stakes being pursued by Benedict. This pope's program, they may discover, goes beyond mere institutional politics. He's pursuing a civilizational agenda.

And that program begins with the Catholic Church itself. Even its harshest critics find it difficult to deny Catholicism's decisive influence on Western civilization's development. It follows that a faltering in the Church's confidence about its purpose has implications for the wider culture.

That's one reason Benedict has been so proactive in rescuing Catholic liturgy from the banality into which it collapsed throughout much of the world (especially the English-speaking world) after Vatican II. Benedict's objective here is not a reactionary "return to the past." Rather, it's about underscoring the need for liturgy to accurately reflect what the Church has always believed -- lex orandi, lex credendi -- rather than the predilections of an aging progressivist generation that reduced prayer to endless self-affirmation.

This attention to liturgy is, I suspect, one reason why another aspect of Benedict's pontificate -- his outreach to the Orthodox Christian churches -- has been remarkably successful. As anyone who's attended Orthodox services knows, the Orthodox truly understand liturgy. Certainly Benedict's path here was paved by Vatican II, Paul VI, and John Paul II. Yet few doubt that Catholic-Orthodox relations have taken off since 2005.

That doesn't mean the relationship is uncomplicated by unhappy historical memories, secular political influences, and important theological differences. Yet it's striking how positively Orthodox churches have responded to the German pope's overtures. They've also become increasingly vocal in echoing Benedict's concerns about Western culture's present trajectory.

But above all, Benedict has -- from his pontificate's very beginning -- gone to the heart of the rot within the West, a disease which may be described as pathologies of faith and reason.

In this regard, Benedict's famous 2006 Regensburg address[2] may go down as one of the 21st century's most important speeches, comparable to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Address[3] in terms of its accuracy in identifying some of the West's inner demons.

Most people think about the Regensburg lecture in terms of some Muslims' reaction to Benedict's citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor. That, however, is to miss Regensburg's essence. It was really about the West.

Christianity, Benedict argued at Regensburg, integrated Biblical faith, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby creating the "foundation of what can rightly be called Europe." This suggests that any weakening of this integration of faith and reason would mean the West would start losing its distinctive identity. In short, a West without a Christianity that integrates faith and reason is no longer the West.

Today, Benedict added, we see what happens when faith and reason are torn asunder. Reason is reduced to scientism and ideologies of progress, thereby rending reasoned discussion of anything beyond the empirical impossible. Faith dissolves into sentimental humanitarianism, an equally inadequate basis for rational reflection. Neither of these emaciated facsimiles of their originals can provide any coherent response to the great questions pondered by every human being: "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" "Where am I going?"

So what's the way back? To Benedict's mind, it involves affirming that what he recently called creative reason lies at the origin of everything.

As Benedict explained one week before he beatified his predecessor: "We are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis."

It's almost impossible to count the positions Benedict is politely assailing here. On the one hand, he's taking on philosophical materialists and emotivists (i.e., most contemporary scholars). But it's also a critique of those who diminish God to either a Divine Watchmaker or a being of Pure Will.

Of course none of this fits into sound-bites. "Pope Attacks Pathologies of Faith and Reason!" is unlikely to be a newspaper headline anytime soon. That, however, doesn't nullify the accuracy of Benedict's analysis. It just makes communicating it difficult in a world of diminished attention-spans and inclined to believe it has nothing to learn from history.

So while the Economist and others might gossip about the competence of various Vatican officials, they are, to their own detriment, largely missing the main game. Quietly but firmly Benedict is making his own distinct contribution to the battle of ideas upon which the fate of civilizations hang. His critics' inability to engage his thought doesn't just illustrate their ignorance. It also betrays a profound lack of imagination.


- Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, and Wilhelm Röpke's Political Economy.


Links:

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/18618461

[2] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html

[3] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

Our Pakistani Allies

They knew they could get away with harboring bin Laden.

By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 7, 2011

As my old friends at The Spectator in London pointed out on Monday morning, I scooped the entire planet in breaking the news of Osama bin Laden’s death: “Osama bin Laden is dead, says Mark Steyn.” This was in The Spectator’s edition of June 29, 2002, which turned out to be a wee bit premature. I jumped the gun, much like Osama’s missus in Abbottabad, but by nine years.

Nor, to be honest, was a teensy-weensy near-decade discrepancy in the date the only problem with my scoop. Much of that Spectator piece was preoccupied with the usual assumptions about Public Enemy No. 1 — caves, dialysis, remote wild Pakistani tribal lands where Western intelligence hasn’t a hope of penetrating unless you turn a cousin of the village headman, etc. All these assumptions prevailed until a few days ago, when it emerged that Osama, three wives, and 13 children had been living in town in a purpose-built pad round the corner from the Pakistani military academy for over half a decade. Brunch every Sunday with a couple of generals at his usual corner table at the Abbottabad Hilton? Eggs Benedict, hold the ham?

The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well — elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery — indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

If this were a movie, the crowds cheering “USA! USA!” outside the White House would be right: The bad guy is dead! We win! The End. But the big picture is bigger than Hollywood convention. In the great sweeping narrative, the death of Osama bin Laden is barely a ripple, while the courtesies afforded to him by the Pakistani establishment tell us something profound about the superpower’s weakness and inability to shift the storyline. Bin Laden famously said that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they naturally prefer the strong horse. Putting a bullet through his eye is a good way of letting him know which role he’s consigned to. But the strong horse/weak horse routine is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On September 12, 2001, General Musharraf was in a meeting “when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later.” The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf’s I’m-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he’d been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if they didn’t get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it.

A decade later, we’re back to September 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they’ve got the superpower all figured out — that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet, but it doesn’t really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching Dancing With The Stars when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it’s time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way.

In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas Friedman, the in-house thinker at the New York Times, offered this bit of cartoon analysis:“For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones — and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.”

But they didn’t, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their way out.

When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader, the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later — and, indeed, the locals fought for king and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi’s skull winding up as Lord Kitchener’s novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.

Not a lot of that today. It’s hard to imagine Osama’s noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year’s White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America’s “educators” teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.

That’s why Pakistani bigshots harbored America’s mortal enemy and knew they could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a lot of those about, funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to Dearborn, Mich. They’ve walked their petrodollars round the Western world buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university Middle Eastern Studies departments. By comparison with his compatriots, Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote, “Junior’s just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son — a criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama, who took his dad’s fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the ground.”

A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan “winning hearts and minds” and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they’ve spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the U.N., the EU, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in the “Facebook revolutions” of “the Arab spring,” the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden’s goal — the submission of the Western world to Islam — but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.

Today's Tune: Jimmy LaFave - Rain Falling Down

NEXT TIME, USE FEDEX

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
May 4, 2011

The CIA stepped up the search for Osama bin Laden last week after becoming as sick of royal wedding coverage as the rest of us.

American intelligence operations located Osama by following his trusted couriers, whose names were given up by al-Qaida members during harsh interrogations at CIA black sites under President Bush.

Yes, the same interrogations endlessly denounced by the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman), the mainstream media, and an especially indignant Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

The most-wanted terrorist in the world was living in a moldy, million-dollar mansion in a gated community just outside of Islamabad. It took the CIA five years to figure out the four-digit code to get in.

One important missed clue was that Osama was living at 72 Virgins Way. He might still be alive today if only he hadn't borrowed his neighbor's shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and never returned it.

Our mighty Navy SEALs not only put a bullet through Osama's head, but carried off his computers, disks and hard drives. So far, all they've revealed is that Osama had multiple Netflix rentals of "Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Love Actually."

Can you imagine what's on Osama's hard drives? I mean besides the goat pornography. Pants are wetting throughout Pakistan's military establishment.

The New York Times reports that the raid that killed Osama is being bitterly denounced on Pakistani TV as a breach of that country's sovereignty. Osama, our dear allies say, was not a terrorist, nor has al-Qaida ever been unfriendly to Pakistan -- unlike the United States, which they call "an enemy of Pakistan and Muslims."

(Also, bin Laden's entire video crew is in line at the Islamabad unemployment office today. Thanks, Barack.)

The one Islamic country that openly cheered our taking out bin Laden is Iraq. According to reports from inside the country, TV stations are treating the raid as a great victory for Iraq -- the final battle in a war that was mostly fought by Iraqis on Iraqi soil. They view bin Laden's killing as their own personal triumph in the war against Islamic terrorism.

Similarly, when there was an explosion of violence throughout the Muslim world in response to some Danish cartoons in 2006, guess which Islamic nation was nothing but placid contentment? Again: our plucky Iraq. (Having U.S. Marines in your midst apparently has some sort of calming influence.)

It's great that we got bin Laden, but if the last Democratic administration had been doing its job, there would have been no Osama bin Laden and no 9/11 attack to begin with.

Democratic presidents are always too busy feverishly redistributing wealth at home to devote serious attention to our national interests abroad.

Obama gets to reap the rewards of Bush-era terrorism policies -- policies that he, his fellow Democrats and Jane Mayer hysterically denounced at the time -- while Reagan and Bush had to deal with the consequences of Carter's Iranian policy and Clinton's bin Laden policy.

According to Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA for many years, President Clinton was given eight to 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden but refused to act, despite bin Laden's having publicly declared war on the United States and launched various terrorist attacks against us, murdering hundreds of Americans.

(If only one of those opportunities had presented itself on the day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, instead of Clinton's bombing Iraq, he might have postponed his problems at home by finally taking out bin Laden.)

Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, never once met with Clinton in a one-on-one meeting. This is in contrast to Monica Lewinsky, who got about a dozen face-to-face -- or face-to-something -- meetings with the president.

That's why Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, was caught stealing documents from the National Archives during the 9/11 commission hearings. That's also why Clinton blew a gasket and forced ABC to cancel the DVD release of the docudrama "The Path to 9/11" -- based on the commission's report.

Bush had to deal with the ticking time bomb of Osama bin Laden left by Bill Clinton.

All presidents have had to deal with the ticking time bomb set by Carter's passive acceptance of the Iranian revolution in 1979, giving Islamic lunacy its first nation-sponsor.

What ticking time bombs are being set around the globe by our current Democratic president?

Following the Democratic playbook, Obama's overall approach to national security is to pointlessly fling our influence and military around the globe -- in Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan -- with no evident national security purpose.

Thanks to our feckless president, most of the Middle East is rapidly degenerating into a terrorist fever-swamp.

The Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as a power broker in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya. Meanwhile, the "democracy" movement in Syria seems likely to end with President Bashar al-Assad gaining a tighter grip on power, after he's killed enough of his own people to remind them why he's their president.

All of these countries are becoming worse than they were before. (On the plus side, Obama is set to announce the SEALs have just found Joe Biden.)

But George Bush's legacy -- Iraq – will be standing there, all on its own, the one point of light in a sea of Islamic darkness. And the media will coo about how reassuring it is that we now have a "thoughtful" president in the White House, instead of a cowboy.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

The Beatification of John Paul II

What the Church is lifting up as a model in John Paul is a life of radical Christian discipleship.

By George Weigel
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 4, 2011 4:00 A.M.

An aerial view is seen of St. Peter's square in Vatican May 1, 2011. Pope John Paul II moves a step closer to sainthood on Sunday when his successor beatifies him before an expected crowd of several thousand people.(Reuters)

Rome — Two hours before the Mass of beatification for Pope John Paul II began on May 1, I looked up from our NBC platform near the Castel Sant’Angelo and saw a solid mass of humanity stretching in every direction: all the way up the length of the Via della Conciliazione to St. Peter’s; across the Tiber bridges and along the Lungotevere; around Hadrian’s tomb; spilling out past the Piazza Risorgimento. And the thought occurred: “There are a million people here who not only think this beatification wasn’t a ‘rush job’; they think it couldn’t have happened fast enough.” The voice of the Church’s people, which had been acclaiming John Paul’s heroic virtue since those cries of Santo subito! erupted at the end of his funeral Mass on April 8, 2005, was the voice of truth in all of this; those tiny, carping noises from the likes of Maureen Dowd, Hans Küng, and Richard McBrien had resonance only because they bounced around for a few days inside the world-media echo chamber.

The global Catholic family had gathered around John Paul II once again, as it had six years and 23 days before. Then, the task was to send him to his reward. Now, in a certain way, the task was to welcome him back and thank God for the gifts that had come to the world through his prayers for us at the Throne of Grace.

A QUESTION OF IMAGES

Four and a half weeks before Rome (in its semi-chaotic way) welcomed 1.5 million pilgrims determined to share in the largest beatification ceremony in history, I visited the Postulator of John Paul II’s cause, Msgr. Slawomir Oder, in his small office at the Vicariate of Rome, next door to the Basilica of St. John Lateran. Monsingor Oder, a Polish canon lawyer, had become a friend of mine over the past several years, and we were going to lunch together. After catching up a bit, he said he wanted to ask my opinion of something and showed me three photos. One of them would be selected as the pattern for the tapestry portrait of Blessed John Paul II that would be unveiled on the loggia of St. Peter’s just after Pope Benedict XVI pronounced the words of beatification. “Which would you choose?” Msgr. Oder asked.

I thought two of the pictures, from the pope’s last years, were inappropriate, being neither good photography nor very compelling. But the third, taken in 1989 by the Polish photographer Grzegorz Gałązka, was perfect: The pope had that characteristic slightly impish twinkle in his eye; his white zucchetto was a bit off-center, in a typical expression of his utter indifference to ecclesiastical finery; he showed some of the wear and tear of what was, at that point, an eleven-year-old pontificate that had changed the world and the Church decisively, but the ravages of Parkinson’s disease were still a few years in the future. It was him as I certainly wanted to remember him. So I said to Msgr. Oder, “I think this one.”

Oder smiled and said, “Good. That’s the one I’ve been pushing for, too,” evidently against some resistance from other quarters.

And that was indeed the image that was unveiled from the loggia where John Paul II had presented himself urbi et orbi, to the city and the world, on the night of his election, October 16, 1978. I don’t know whether my “vote” had any effect — it almost certainly didn’t — but the thunderous response from the hundreds of thousands who could see the tapestry suggested that this was what they, too, would have chosen: John Paul II at the top of his game, vibrantly alive, a wonderful human being who gave others courage because his courage came from the far side of Calvary. And I thought of the comment of the late André Frossard, a French writer who, having converted to Catholicism from the fashionable agnosticism of his class, had become a friend and interlocutor of John Paul II. Shortly after John Paul’s election, Frossard wired back to the Paris newspaper for which he was writing, “This isn’t a pope from Poland; this is a pope from Galilee.”

VATICAN CITY, VATICAN - MAY 01: Pope Benedict XVI attends the John Paul II Beatification Ceremony as a Swiss guard stands below the tapestry featuring the portrait of beatified John Paul II on May 1, 2011 in Vatican City, Vatican. The ceremony marking the beatification and the last stages of the process to elevate Pope John Paul II to sainthood was led by his successor Pope Benedict XI and attended by tens of thousands of pilgrims alongside heads of state and dignitaries.(Getty Images)

A TALE OF TWO WOMEN

The unveiling of the portrait — which seemed to bring John Paul back to us, somehow — was one emotional apogee of the three-hour beatification ceremony. The other came immediately afterward, when two women brought a relic of the new beatus, a vial of his blood in a silver reliquary, up to Pope Benedict for him to venerate. One was Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a French nun from a pro-life order that serves women and newborns in crisis pregnancy and maternity situations; her inexplicable cure from Parkinson’s disease had been accepted by the Church, after review by a panel of doctors, as the miracle that confirmed John Paul II’s heroic virtue. The other was Sister Tobiana Sobodka, who had worked in John Paul’s household since his days as archbishop of Cracow.

I don’t know Sister Marie, who had to be talked into becoming a public person after her cure, and who made a moving appearance before 200,000 young people at a prayer vigil at the Circus Maximus the night before the beatification. But I’ve known Sister Tobiana for 15 years, and there could have been no more appropriate choice as a bearer of a relic of John Paul II. In addition to working in his household and in the inner papal office for his entire pontificate, Sister Tobiana, a trained medical professional, was a kind of auxiliary doctor for the pope. And when he died, it was she who cradled his head in her hands. If hers was indeed the last face John Paul saw this side of the Kingdom, it was a face he knew well, the face of a woman of virtue who displayed many of the same remarkable pastoral skills as the man she had served so long and faithfully. When I saw Sister Tobiana last July, her first concern was for my daughter, who had lost her husband five months before, and for my grandson. That conversation was curiously reminiscent of my last dinner with John Paul in mid-December 2005, when, six weeks after my father’s death, the first question from the pope, who was himself in very tough shape, was “How is your mother doing?”

Those who pray seriously for others, it seems, have very powerful memories.

PUTTING DOWN MARKERS

From the point of view of ideas, the high point of the beatification ceremony was Pope Benedict XVI’s homily, which was both pointed and personal, reflecting Joseph Ratzinger’s keenly felt debt to the example of John Paul II. Benedict lifted up John Paul’s role in combatting, “like a titan,” the falsehoods of Communism and the warped notion of human progress they embodied. He offered a gentle (and deserved) correction to both the “progressives” and the ultra-traditionalists who had objected to John Paul’s beatification, reminding everyone that the new beatus was a true son of the Second Vatican Council, of which his pontificate had given an authoritative interpretation. And he highlighted the characteristic of John Paul that inspired so much good in the Church and the world: his ability to instill hope in people who had lost hope, or who were losing their grip on hope.

Benedict also described, beautifully, just what the Church was lifting up as a model to be emulated, which was a life of radical Christian discipleship precisely calibrated (by Providence, John Paul would have said) to give the world the evangelical charge it needed at a specific moment in history: “By his witness of faith, love, and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the Gospel. In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, for the truth is the guarantee of liberty.”

THE GREAT

Seventeen years ago, I may have been the first scribe to put the phrase “John Paul the Great” into print, in an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times marking the publication of John Paul’s most personal book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. That title is not formally bestowed on popes by the Catholic Church; it simply becomes habitual over time, as with Pope St. Leo the Great and Pope St. Gregory the Great. Should that happen to John Paul II, it will not be because he saw off Communism, although there was delicious irony in the fact that his beatification took place on May Day, when Italy’s tatterdemalion Communists and their leftist comrades still wave the red flag. And it will not be because he had a luminous personality that was made for the age of mass communications. It will be because he was a great channel of grace, conviction, and courage for others.

Very few human beings will ever have bestowed upon them the extraordinary range of gifts that John Paul II exhibited: intellectual gifts, literary gifts, linguistic gifts, pastoral gifts; the gift of seeing around corners and through walls to discern possibilities where others only saw blockages. Those gifts, however, will not be why the Church of the 22nd century may well speak of Pope St. John Paul the Great. If that happens, it will be because he was a radically converted Christian disciple who lived out his life in service to the truths of the Gospel that had seized his heart and mind when he was a young man in Nazi-occupied Poland: truths he believed essential to human flourishing in the 21st century and third millennium — and far beyond.

— George Weigel is the William E. Simon distinguished senior fellow of Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His two-volume biography of Blessed John Paul II includes Witness to Hope (1999) and The End and the Beginning (2010).


[The Reuters caption under the photo at the top of the page stated that the beatification ceremony was performed before an expected crowd of "several thousand". In response, I thought I would post the stunning photo at right. - jtf]

In this photo released by Italian Police faithful crowd St. Peter's Square and Via della Conciliazione at the Vatican, Sunday, May 1, 2011. Pope Benedict XVI beatified Pope John Paul II before 1.5 million faithful in St. Peter's Square and surrounding streets Sunday, moving the beloved former pontiff one step closer to possible sainthood in one of the largest turnouts ever for a Vatican Mass.(AP)