Don Feder
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 10, 2005
For decades now, our bad neighbor to the south has aided and abetted its impoverished citizens in their efforts to enter the United States illegally – a process that pays handsome dividends to Mexico, but results in massive trauma and social upheaval for the gringos.
The latest attack on our sovereignty is a 32-page color comic book published by Mexico’s foreign ministry and designed as a self-help manual for illegal aliens.
The publication (which should be titled "Juan and Miguel Join Mexico’s National Synchronized Swimming Team") contains helpful advice on crossing the Rio Grande (wear light clothing), traversing the desert (carry salt tablets as well as water) and preventing repatriation once the illegal arrives in the U.S. (avoid bar brawls, domestic disturbances, drunk driving, and other behavior likely to attract the attention of authorities).
"This guide is intended to give you some practical advice that could be of use if you have made the difficult decision to seek new work opportunities outside your country," the handbook explains. (Emphasis added.) More than 1.5 million copies have already been distributed, inside a popular cowboy comic book – indicative of the level of literacy in Old Mexico.
To cries of outrage on this side of the border, the Mexican government responds that it isn’t encouraging illegal immigration (Why, they wouldn’t dream of it!) but is merely trying to protect its itinerant citizens.
"Last year, over 300 Mexicans died in their attempt to enter the United States (illegally-DF) in search of a job, and the government has the obligation to avoid that," says Geronimo Gutierrez, undersecretary of North American Affairs for Mexico’s foreign ministry.
Well, if Gutierrez and the government of Vincente Fox (who calls border-jumpers "heroes") is really interested in preventing the deaths of Juan and Miguel, it has only to describe, in graphic detail, what it’s like to die of dehydration in the desert – illustrated with appropriate photographs – instead of facilitating their criminality.
Or, it could tell its citizens how to apply for a visa. (Wouldn’t that be a novelty: Mexicans who enter the U.S. legally.) Instead, it encourages its citizens to break our laws and undermine our national identity.
Even the friends of a porous border understand that the move is a PR disaster.
A January 5th editorial in the pro-immigration Arizona Republic observes that the comic book will make it harder for the Bush administration and its congressional allies – in this case, including Edward Kennedy – to sell another amnesty or a "guest-worker" program to the American people.
"Mexico’s booklet on how to sneak into the United States…raises serious doubts about whether Mexico will ever help curb illegal migration – even if the United States creates a legal mechanism for large numbers of workers to obtain temporary work visas," the editorial warns.
Let any lingering doubts be dispelled! Short to stationing troops on the border to provide cover fire for infiltrators, the Mexican government will do everything in its power to facilitate illegal immigration.
The heirs of Montezuma and Cortez have a continent to gain and nothing to lose.
Once in the U.S., the "migrant" goes from wages of $5 per day, to $60 a day for manual labor.
Mexico gets to export its surplus population. And the nation receives $15 billion annually in remittances. This exceeds its combined income from tourism and foreign investments, and is second only to oil exports as a source of national wealth.
Mexicans here constitute a growing constituency for whatever Mexico City wants from Washington -- due to the latest fashion in political pandering: courting the Hispanic vote – and a fifth column which could eventually wrest California, Texas and the Southwest away from America (La Reconquista).
And there’s never a penalty. After wiping the spittle from our face, we continue to shower benefits (like NAFTA) on those who mock our laws and undermine our sovereignty, Mexico City’s modern-day Pancho Villas.
Within days of his re-election, the president dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to Mexico to re-start talks on the size and scope of the latest proposed amnesty (which, of course, isn’t being called an amnesty) and guest-worker program.
Illegal immigration doesn’t work quite as well for the importing nation as it does for the exporters, despite the pleading of Fortune 500 Republicans about the "jobs Americans won’t take." In reality, illegal immigration artificially depresses the wages of certain jobs, making them unattractive to Americans.
Cheap immigrant labor is really quite dear. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, illegal aliens cost the state of California $10.5 billion annually, or almost $1,200 per year for every native-born family.
Included in that cost is $7.7 billion to educate the children of illegal aliens (who now constitute 15 percent of the state’s K-12 enrollment), $1.4 billion for health care for illegals and their families and the same amount to incarcerate alien lawbreakers.
In 1980, fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens were held in our state or federal prisons. That number grew to more than 68,000 in 1999. In Orange County, California alone, there are 275 street gangs, with 17,000 members – 98 percent Mexican or Asian. Not only do our uninvited guests get to rob, rape, murder, and deal drugs, but we get to pay for the incarceration of those who are caught.
Restaurants, landscapers, contractors and meatpacking plants get labor at below-market prices.
The taxpayer gets the bill. As Milton Friedman admonishes us, there is no such thing as a free lunch, especially when it comes to immigration.
But that’s not the worst of it.
Besides crime, poverty and increased social costs, those who make the difficult decision to seek new work opportunities in the Golden Pinata – 300,000 a year, net – bring with them language fragmentation, alienation, and a loss of national identity.
The number of Spanish-speakers in the U.S. is doubling every decade. We now have bilingual education, bilingual ballots, and bilingual tests for drivers’ licenses.
Almost anywhere in the country, when you pull up to a drive-through ATM, you’re given the option of proceeding in English or Spanish. Airport signs in both languages are common. (Can bilingual street signs be far behind?) Language-pandering has become a growth industry. Government, education and business all do their part to promote language ghetto-ization – to make it easy for Spanish-speakers to avoid learning English, and still make a living, get an education, raise a family and enjoy the rights of citizenship here.
In 1999, the town of El Cenizo, Texas, (south of Laredo) declared Spanish its official language and put out the welcome mat for illegal aliens, promising to protect them from the INS.
Mexico’s total population is around 100 million. There are now 25.5 million post-1963 Mexican immigrants and their descendants in the United States. They constitute a nation within a nation: two-thirds the population of our largest state, belligerent and growing.
Mexico has 54 consular offices in the United States, more than one for each state. They serve as support units for the alien invasion and brazenly interfere in American politics, from lobbying against official English measures (a few years ago, the consul general in Atlanta called the reform "racist"; this from the representative of a nation whose Congress is whiter than the Newport Yacht Club) to campaigning for new amnesties.
To encourage Mexican nationals here to maintain their old identity and still influence our politics, Mexico has adopted a dual citizenship law.
There’s hardly a public school in California that doesn’t have a Cinquo De Mayo essay contest. (Students in the state’s school system know more about a holiday celebrating one of Mexico’s rare military victories than the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.) The birthday of labor agitator Cesar Chavez (March 31st) is a California state holiday.
The militant, separatist Chicano Student Movement of Atzlan (MEChA) has chapters at college and high school campuses across California and the Southwest. Its symbol is an eagle clutching a machete in one claw and a stick of dynamite in the other. It’s motto: "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada." (For the Race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.) It is radical, racist, anti-Semitic, and works toward regional secession and the expulsion of non-Chicanos from the future nation of Atzlan. How do you say "Nazi" in Spanish?
Antonio Villaraigosa the former Speaker of the California State Assembly who came close to being elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2001, and is running again this year, headed the UCLA chapter of MEChA in his college days. As a candidate in 2001, Villaraigosa not only refused to disassociate himself from this brown fascist ideology, but said he was proud of the group.
California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is another MEChA alumnus (Fresno State). As a candidate for governor in last year’s recall election, Bustamante supported then-Governor Gray Davis’ bill for driver’s licenses for illegal aliens and wanted to give illegals in-state tuition at California colleges and universities. When it comes to public benefits, Bustamante said no distinction should be made between those here legally and illegally.
In a 1997 speech to the National Council of La Raza, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said he "proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important – a very important – part of this." In case you missed it, the Mexican government is saying its sovereignty extends to wherever Mexicans reside.
Speaking in Nogales, in 2001, Mexican President Fox hailed illegal alien in these words: "We want to salute these heroes, these kids leaving their homes, their communities, leaving with tears in their eyes, saying goodbye to their families, to set out on a difficult, sometimes painful search for a job, an opportunity they can’t find at home." Americans, too, have tears in their eyes when they survey the devastation Fox’s brave opportunity-seekers have wrought.
Back in 1982, when the deluge was still a trickle, the Mexican newspaper Excelsior commented, "The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot."
Speaking at a symposium on the 150th anniversary of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago (which ended the Mexican-American War and transferred California and the Southwest to the United States), Jose Angel Pescador Osuna – then Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles – remarked, "Even though I am saying this part serious and part joking, I think we are practicing la Reconquista in California." No kidding!
Here are a few more choice quotes from Reconquistadors: "Remember, 187 (the proposition denying public benefits to illegal aliens) was the last gasp of white power in California" (Art Torres, chairman of the Democratic Party in California), "California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave" (Mario Obledo, California Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Jerry Brown, awarded the Presidential Freedom Medal by Bill Clinton), "We are politicizing every single one of these new citizens that are becoming citizens of this country….I gotta tell you that a lot of people are saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and vote, because I want to pay them back.’" Have you guessed who "they" are, and how these new voters intend to pay us back, gringo?
David Kennedy, who is the Donald J. McLauchlan Professor of American History at Stanford University. warns, "The possibility looms that in the next generation or so, we will see a kind of Chicano Quebec take shape in the American Southwest."
Antonio Navarro, a professor at the University of California at Riverside and prominent Chicano activist, exults, "If in the next 50 years our people are subordinated, powerless, exploited and impoverished, then I will say to you that there are all kinds of possibilities for movements to develop like the ones that we’ve witnessed in the last few years all over the world, from Yugoslavia to Chechnya." Would that include open guerrilla warfare and Chicano suicide bombers?
Are you scared yet? Do you now understand that Mexico’s comic book/handbook for illegals is one more salvo in its undeclared war on America? (Call it the Mexican-American War, Round 2.)
All of which is not to say that Mexican-Americans (not those who call themselves Chicanos, but Americans of Mexican ancestry) can’t be good citizens. There are Mexican-Americans whose families have been here for generations. More than 30 percent of Mexican-American voters in California supported Proposition 187. Mexican-Americans have bled for our flag and died defending our borders.
Still, immigration from Mexico poses a special problem. Roughly one million better-job-seekers cross the rivers and deserts along the 2,000-mile Mexican-American border each year.
Between January 4 and October 1 of last year, the number of infiltrators apprehended jumped 13 percent (to 194,576). "This is clearly tied in with President Bush’s call after his re-election to revive the guest-worker program," observes T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, representing 10,000 Border Patrol agents. "Migrants are rushing over the border to take advantage of that."
Build it, and they will come.
From Washington to Sacramento, we’re building it – with amnesties, welfare benefits, drivers licenses for illegals, lax immigration enforcement and language pandering). And they are coming – a hungry, ravaging, grudge-bearing alien horde. If it continues, and our national house is still standing a few decades hence, it will be a miracle.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Stephen Goldstein: A Death in the University
Stephen Goldstein
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 10, 2005
Recently, I read about a young man, Ahmad Al-Qloushi, a 17-year-old Kuwaiti citizen who came to this country a mere four months ago. Today he is a student majoring in Political Science at Foothill College, a small California community college in the Silicon Valley area of California.
What has happened to Al-Qloushi at Foothill is a symptom of a disease that has infected college campuses across America for the past thirty years and has become cancerous over time. I have seen this cancer destroy several lives, and, as a pastor, have officiated at the funerals of two conservative students who committed suicide because of this disease. Out of deference to the families, I will keep the anonymity of these innocents, but I want to share one their stories as a cautionary tale.
This was a young woman whom I will call Jane. Her father is in the ministry. She had been raised in a loving home; nurtured in the “admonition of the Lord,” and sent out as “a sheep” into a wolves pack, also known as a “school of higher learning.” Ironically, under the guise of political correctness, these schools pride themselves on being “sensitive” and “welcoming” to minorities who are different. But this compassion does not extend to political enemies.
Instead of being nurtured, this young Christian was savagely attacked, instead of being educated, she was harassed and ridiculed and made to feel less than human because she dared to identify against the evils she saw in the society in which she lived. She spoke out against abortion, declaring it murder; she was asked if she ate meat, when she replied yes, she was verbally assaulted and called a murderer. When she returned to her dorm, she found a dead mouse, a string around its neck, pinned to her door.
She was sexually harassed as well. When she declared that she was a virgin and was proud of it, she found used condoms had been thrown all over her dorm room, the dried semen sticking to her clothing in her closet, all over her dresser and mirror. Someone had written a message across her mirror in red paint that she needed to get her “cherry popped.” She called home; her parents called the school and they were assured the matter would be looked into and the students that were responsible would be punished. Not only was no one held accountable, but her academic advisor told her she needed to “grow up.” Several of her professors openly mocked her in class for her pro-life, pro-Christian stance.
Jane’s grades began to slip. She went from Dean’s honor roll her first year to academic probation. The verbal taunting and abuse continued until a day came when she didn’t show up for any of her classes, nor for her part-time job at the campus bookstore. One of her few friends on campus went to her room to check on her. When there was no response to her knock, she went to the student advisor for the dorm who got the master key and opened the door. They found Jane dead, in her hands a mock fetus with a pair of scissors in its head.
Perhaps other “mitigating factors” led her to the decision. Sadly, we will never know. I was shown the note she left behind, “What is the point in believing in what I think is right when everyone else in school tells me I am wrong? How can I go on and be successful when all of my professors tell me that God hates me because of what I believe?”
I wept without shame for this child -- lost to an intolerance that goes almost without notice in our liberal culture.
Perhaps her story will cause others to think again.
Stephen Goldstein is a born again Jewish Believer in Messiah. He is a writer, a Bible teacher, ordained pastor, and evangelist. He performs one act, one scene plays as tools of evangelism. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife of 27 years. Mr. Goldstein can be reached at sgoldstein99@comcast.net
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 10, 2005
Recently, I read about a young man, Ahmad Al-Qloushi, a 17-year-old Kuwaiti citizen who came to this country a mere four months ago. Today he is a student majoring in Political Science at Foothill College, a small California community college in the Silicon Valley area of California.
What has happened to Al-Qloushi at Foothill is a symptom of a disease that has infected college campuses across America for the past thirty years and has become cancerous over time. I have seen this cancer destroy several lives, and, as a pastor, have officiated at the funerals of two conservative students who committed suicide because of this disease. Out of deference to the families, I will keep the anonymity of these innocents, but I want to share one their stories as a cautionary tale.
This was a young woman whom I will call Jane. Her father is in the ministry. She had been raised in a loving home; nurtured in the “admonition of the Lord,” and sent out as “a sheep” into a wolves pack, also known as a “school of higher learning.” Ironically, under the guise of political correctness, these schools pride themselves on being “sensitive” and “welcoming” to minorities who are different. But this compassion does not extend to political enemies.
Instead of being nurtured, this young Christian was savagely attacked, instead of being educated, she was harassed and ridiculed and made to feel less than human because she dared to identify against the evils she saw in the society in which she lived. She spoke out against abortion, declaring it murder; she was asked if she ate meat, when she replied yes, she was verbally assaulted and called a murderer. When she returned to her dorm, she found a dead mouse, a string around its neck, pinned to her door.
She was sexually harassed as well. When she declared that she was a virgin and was proud of it, she found used condoms had been thrown all over her dorm room, the dried semen sticking to her clothing in her closet, all over her dresser and mirror. Someone had written a message across her mirror in red paint that she needed to get her “cherry popped.” She called home; her parents called the school and they were assured the matter would be looked into and the students that were responsible would be punished. Not only was no one held accountable, but her academic advisor told her she needed to “grow up.” Several of her professors openly mocked her in class for her pro-life, pro-Christian stance.
Jane’s grades began to slip. She went from Dean’s honor roll her first year to academic probation. The verbal taunting and abuse continued until a day came when she didn’t show up for any of her classes, nor for her part-time job at the campus bookstore. One of her few friends on campus went to her room to check on her. When there was no response to her knock, she went to the student advisor for the dorm who got the master key and opened the door. They found Jane dead, in her hands a mock fetus with a pair of scissors in its head.
Perhaps other “mitigating factors” led her to the decision. Sadly, we will never know. I was shown the note she left behind, “What is the point in believing in what I think is right when everyone else in school tells me I am wrong? How can I go on and be successful when all of my professors tell me that God hates me because of what I believe?”
I wept without shame for this child -- lost to an intolerance that goes almost without notice in our liberal culture.
Perhaps her story will cause others to think again.
Stephen Goldstein is a born again Jewish Believer in Messiah. He is a writer, a Bible teacher, ordained pastor, and evangelist. He performs one act, one scene plays as tools of evangelism. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife of 27 years. Mr. Goldstein can be reached at sgoldstein99@comcast.net
The Fresno Bee: Dirty Dancing Leads Principal To Cancel School Proms
Lemoore (CA) school decides to fight dirty (dancing)
By Tim Bragg / The Fresno Bee
(Updated Monday, January 10, 2005, 5:45 AM)
LEMOORE — Dirty dancing by some Lemoore Union High School students has led the principal to cancel all school dances until students stop bumping and grinding.
Principal Jim Bennett blames an upsurge in the number of students freaking — a form of sexually suggestive dancing popular in nightclubs that involves grinding the hips and pelvic area — for his decision to cancel the rest of this year's school dances, including the Sadie Hawkins dance in February and the junior and senior proms in the spring.
Bennett said that at the winter formal dance last month, he warned students several times over the public address system to either quit the dirty dancing or face the possibility of cancellation of all of the dances.
He said the students made their choice when they continued freak dancing despite his warnings. He left open the possibility of rescheduling the dances but said it will be up to students to modify their behavior.
"It's really up to the kids at this point. They have to take some responsibility," Bennett said. But some students and parents say it's not fair to punish all students, including those who were not doing anything wrong. They say the number of students dancing out of bounds was small.
"All it would take is kicking out someone from the dance," said Kayde Naylon, an 18-year-old Lemoore High senior who is on the organizing committee for the Sadie Hawkins dance. "I've never seen anyone get kicked out of dance for that."
The Sadie Hawkins dance is a fund-raiser for the school's Future Farmers of America. Naylon said it usually raises about $1,500 to help send FFA students to conventions and competitions.
Naylon and the other dance organizers are working with Bennett to come up with a series of regulations they hope will allow the Sadie Hawkins dance to go on.
Ideas include having the students sign a form when they purchase their tickets indicating they understand they'll be kicked out if they engage in any inappropriate dancing.
Naylon and others hope similar regulations also could lead to the reinstatement of other dances, especially the prom.
"Some students save up all year to buy a dress or rent a tuxedo and buy flowers for the prom," said student body president Zohra Lakhani, a 17-year-old senior. "To crush everyone's dreams … it's not fair."
Bennett said trying to enforce a ban on freak dancing is difficult because school officials cannot monitor everyone: "Then you have the parents calling up and saying, 'Hey, my kid wasn't the only one doing it. Why are you punishing him?'"
As evidence of his conviction to cancel the dances until changes are made, Bennett pointed to his decision to cancel the popular "night rally" celebrations before the homecoming football game after they got out of hand.
The principal said the school has not held a night rally in four years.
One problem with the dances, Bennett said, is a lack of parental chaperones to keep an eye on students during the dances.
"I'm not required to hold school dances," Bennett said. "If they want to get parent chaperones or teacher chaperones or security to help, it's up to them."
Administrators at other local school districts say that while they're dealing with the issue of students freak dancing, they've never threatened to cancel all student dances.
"With most students, they usually stop it when we ask them, 'Would you like me to call your mother or father and tell them how you're dancing?'" said John Leal, assistant principal at Roosevelt High School in Fresno.
He said administrators closely monitor the dances and try to alternate between fast and slow songs to cut down on freaking.
Other school officials say part of the problem is that freaking is the common form of dancing in nightclubs that appeal to young people, and it's regularly shown on television.
"I think the kids are getting mixed messages," said Nick Miller, a teacher at Redwood High School in Visalia who serves as the student activities director.
Students are not the only ones smarting over the dance cancellation in Lemoore.
Business owners say the move could be costly if the prom is among the canceled dances. And some wonder what the fuss is all about.
"When my generation was young, our parents said rock 'n' roll would rot our minds," said Titta Champ, owner of Special Touch Tuxedo Rentals and Wedding Chapel in Hanford. "They said doing things like the Twist was bad. Sure, some of us turned out bad, but for the most part, I think we're OK. I think most of these kids are OK."
The reporter can be reached at tbragg@fresnobee.com or (559) 622-2417.
By Tim Bragg / The Fresno Bee
(Updated Monday, January 10, 2005, 5:45 AM)
LEMOORE — Dirty dancing by some Lemoore Union High School students has led the principal to cancel all school dances until students stop bumping and grinding.
Principal Jim Bennett blames an upsurge in the number of students freaking — a form of sexually suggestive dancing popular in nightclubs that involves grinding the hips and pelvic area — for his decision to cancel the rest of this year's school dances, including the Sadie Hawkins dance in February and the junior and senior proms in the spring.
Bennett said that at the winter formal dance last month, he warned students several times over the public address system to either quit the dirty dancing or face the possibility of cancellation of all of the dances.
He said the students made their choice when they continued freak dancing despite his warnings. He left open the possibility of rescheduling the dances but said it will be up to students to modify their behavior.
"It's really up to the kids at this point. They have to take some responsibility," Bennett said. But some students and parents say it's not fair to punish all students, including those who were not doing anything wrong. They say the number of students dancing out of bounds was small.
"All it would take is kicking out someone from the dance," said Kayde Naylon, an 18-year-old Lemoore High senior who is on the organizing committee for the Sadie Hawkins dance. "I've never seen anyone get kicked out of dance for that."
The Sadie Hawkins dance is a fund-raiser for the school's Future Farmers of America. Naylon said it usually raises about $1,500 to help send FFA students to conventions and competitions.
Naylon and the other dance organizers are working with Bennett to come up with a series of regulations they hope will allow the Sadie Hawkins dance to go on.
Ideas include having the students sign a form when they purchase their tickets indicating they understand they'll be kicked out if they engage in any inappropriate dancing.
Naylon and others hope similar regulations also could lead to the reinstatement of other dances, especially the prom.
"Some students save up all year to buy a dress or rent a tuxedo and buy flowers for the prom," said student body president Zohra Lakhani, a 17-year-old senior. "To crush everyone's dreams … it's not fair."
Bennett said trying to enforce a ban on freak dancing is difficult because school officials cannot monitor everyone: "Then you have the parents calling up and saying, 'Hey, my kid wasn't the only one doing it. Why are you punishing him?'"
As evidence of his conviction to cancel the dances until changes are made, Bennett pointed to his decision to cancel the popular "night rally" celebrations before the homecoming football game after they got out of hand.
The principal said the school has not held a night rally in four years.
One problem with the dances, Bennett said, is a lack of parental chaperones to keep an eye on students during the dances.
"I'm not required to hold school dances," Bennett said. "If they want to get parent chaperones or teacher chaperones or security to help, it's up to them."
Administrators at other local school districts say that while they're dealing with the issue of students freak dancing, they've never threatened to cancel all student dances.
"With most students, they usually stop it when we ask them, 'Would you like me to call your mother or father and tell them how you're dancing?'" said John Leal, assistant principal at Roosevelt High School in Fresno.
He said administrators closely monitor the dances and try to alternate between fast and slow songs to cut down on freaking.
Other school officials say part of the problem is that freaking is the common form of dancing in nightclubs that appeal to young people, and it's regularly shown on television.
"I think the kids are getting mixed messages," said Nick Miller, a teacher at Redwood High School in Visalia who serves as the student activities director.
Students are not the only ones smarting over the dance cancellation in Lemoore.
Business owners say the move could be costly if the prom is among the canceled dances. And some wonder what the fuss is all about.
"When my generation was young, our parents said rock 'n' roll would rot our minds," said Titta Champ, owner of Special Touch Tuxedo Rentals and Wedding Chapel in Hanford. "They said doing things like the Twist was bad. Sure, some of us turned out bad, but for the most part, I think we're OK. I think most of these kids are OK."
The reporter can be reached at tbragg@fresnobee.com or (559) 622-2417.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Bob Smizik: Excitement Guaranteed, Steelers Wins Aren't
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Buckle up, Pittsburgh, the occasionally exasperating but mostly exhilarating four-month ride you've been on with the Steelers is about to get better. The regular season is behind us, the playoffs in front of us. In the games ahead, the curves will be sharper, the straightaways more thrilling, the drama more intense and the outcome more important.
That's the good part about the playoffs. The bad part is this: The ride could be bumpy.
Understandably, there's an almost unanimity of opinion across the country that the Steelers, who are 15-1 with a 14-game winning streak, have the best team in the American Football Conference and, as such, are the favorite to advance to the Super Bowl. All that means is the Steelers have the best chance of reaching the Super Bowl -- not the only chance.
Beginning Saturday, when their likely opponent will be the New York Jets and, should they win, eight days later when their probable opponent will be New England or Indianapolis, the Steelers will be playing against the other elite teams of the AFC. Those teams want to go to the Super Bowl as badly as the Steelers do. Their fans believe in them as fervently as Steelers fans do in their team.
The Jets have Chad Pennington, who missed a few games because of injury but had nearly the same numbers as Ben Roethlisberger; Curtis Martin, a Pitt and Allderdice High School product, who led the NFL in rushing with almost 1,700 yards. The Colts have Peyton Manning, on the track to becoming an all-time great, at quarterback; Edgerrin James, the No. 3 rusher in the AFC; and Marvin Harrison, who caught more balls for more yards than Hines Ward. The Patriots have won two of the past three Super Bowls and have Tom Brady, the man who started at quarterback in both those games; and Corey Dillon, the No. 2 rusher in the AFC.
None of those teams has the defensive excellence of the Steelers, but all are capable of getting to and winning the Super Bowl. In other words, all are capable of beating the Steelers.
Should that happen -- should the Steelers falter -- what will be the reaction of this community? That response will tell us a lot about ourselves.
Past playoff losses by Steelers teams that were favored have resulted in widespread massive disappointment, which was appropriate, and the unleashing of bitter criticism, which was most inappropriate.
Hear this, folks. Regardless of what happens Saturday -- even if the Steelers lose in a shutout -- this season has been nothing but an absolute joy. No one should consider it anything but a monumental success. The thrills the Steelers have given this town, this region and their passionate fans across the country cannot be taken away or be undone by even the most ignominious of defeats.
Unfortunately, too many people, who take this stuff way too seriously, will react with the most unsuitable behavior. They will act as if they'd lost their first born instead of a football game.
In all certainty, Bill Cowher will take the brunt of the criticism. Regardless of the script of a defeat, Cowher will be charged with being outcoached.
That was the case when the favored Steelers lost to New England in the AFC title game after the 2001 season. Cowher was tortured by bitter fans after that defeat, although the Patriots' margin of victory was a result of two Steelers offensive linemen -- Marvel Smith and Rich Tylski -- being unable to block their man on a field-goal attempt. They failed at something that usually has a 99 percent rate of success, and the kick was blocked and returned for a touchdown that produced the margin of victory.
That was Cowher's fault?
If the Steelers lose in this postseason -- even if its in the Super Bowl -- frustrated fans will lash out at Cowher, completely forgetting his immense contributions. If he did nothing more than keeping this team together in the face of a seemingly insurmountable and never-ending rash of injuries, he should be coach of the year. But his contributions go beyond that.
By all we've seen this season, the Steelers should win the AFC playoffs and advance to and win the Super Bowl.
But sports don't work that way. Upsets happen all the time. If that's what happens to the Steelers, the first and only thing fans of the team should say is, "Thanks for the memories."
(Bob Smizik can be reached at bsmizik@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1468.)
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Buckle up, Pittsburgh, the occasionally exasperating but mostly exhilarating four-month ride you've been on with the Steelers is about to get better. The regular season is behind us, the playoffs in front of us. In the games ahead, the curves will be sharper, the straightaways more thrilling, the drama more intense and the outcome more important.
That's the good part about the playoffs. The bad part is this: The ride could be bumpy.
Understandably, there's an almost unanimity of opinion across the country that the Steelers, who are 15-1 with a 14-game winning streak, have the best team in the American Football Conference and, as such, are the favorite to advance to the Super Bowl. All that means is the Steelers have the best chance of reaching the Super Bowl -- not the only chance.
Beginning Saturday, when their likely opponent will be the New York Jets and, should they win, eight days later when their probable opponent will be New England or Indianapolis, the Steelers will be playing against the other elite teams of the AFC. Those teams want to go to the Super Bowl as badly as the Steelers do. Their fans believe in them as fervently as Steelers fans do in their team.
The Jets have Chad Pennington, who missed a few games because of injury but had nearly the same numbers as Ben Roethlisberger; Curtis Martin, a Pitt and Allderdice High School product, who led the NFL in rushing with almost 1,700 yards. The Colts have Peyton Manning, on the track to becoming an all-time great, at quarterback; Edgerrin James, the No. 3 rusher in the AFC; and Marvin Harrison, who caught more balls for more yards than Hines Ward. The Patriots have won two of the past three Super Bowls and have Tom Brady, the man who started at quarterback in both those games; and Corey Dillon, the No. 2 rusher in the AFC.
None of those teams has the defensive excellence of the Steelers, but all are capable of getting to and winning the Super Bowl. In other words, all are capable of beating the Steelers.
Should that happen -- should the Steelers falter -- what will be the reaction of this community? That response will tell us a lot about ourselves.
Past playoff losses by Steelers teams that were favored have resulted in widespread massive disappointment, which was appropriate, and the unleashing of bitter criticism, which was most inappropriate.
Hear this, folks. Regardless of what happens Saturday -- even if the Steelers lose in a shutout -- this season has been nothing but an absolute joy. No one should consider it anything but a monumental success. The thrills the Steelers have given this town, this region and their passionate fans across the country cannot be taken away or be undone by even the most ignominious of defeats.
Unfortunately, too many people, who take this stuff way too seriously, will react with the most unsuitable behavior. They will act as if they'd lost their first born instead of a football game.
In all certainty, Bill Cowher will take the brunt of the criticism. Regardless of the script of a defeat, Cowher will be charged with being outcoached.
That was the case when the favored Steelers lost to New England in the AFC title game after the 2001 season. Cowher was tortured by bitter fans after that defeat, although the Patriots' margin of victory was a result of two Steelers offensive linemen -- Marvel Smith and Rich Tylski -- being unable to block their man on a field-goal attempt. They failed at something that usually has a 99 percent rate of success, and the kick was blocked and returned for a touchdown that produced the margin of victory.
That was Cowher's fault?
If the Steelers lose in this postseason -- even if its in the Super Bowl -- frustrated fans will lash out at Cowher, completely forgetting his immense contributions. If he did nothing more than keeping this team together in the face of a seemingly insurmountable and never-ending rash of injuries, he should be coach of the year. But his contributions go beyond that.
By all we've seen this season, the Steelers should win the AFC playoffs and advance to and win the Super Bowl.
But sports don't work that way. Upsets happen all the time. If that's what happens to the Steelers, the first and only thing fans of the team should say is, "Thanks for the memories."
(Bob Smizik can be reached at bsmizik@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1468.)
Friday, January 07, 2005
Elaine Donnelly: The Army's Gender War
http://www.nationalreview.com
January 07, 2005, 7:50 a.m.
The Army’s Gender War
A new policy is unfair to both men and women soldiers.
By Elaine Donnelly
I recently heard from a female soldier who feels betrayed by the Army. Calm but justifiably angry, the soldier said she is being assigned to a forward-support company that will "collocate" with the Army's new, modular infantry/armor land combat battalions. This is a serious change in policy, unfair to men and women soldiers alike.
Under current regulations, women cannot be forced to serve in smaller direct ground-combat units such as infantry or armor battalions, or in companies that collocate with them. If the Defense Department wants to change these rules, law requires that the secretary must notify Congress no less than 30 legislative days in advance, when both houses are in session. Despite the "collocation rule" and the congressional notification law, the Army is unilaterally assigning women to previously all-male forward-support companies in its new "unit of action" land combat teams, which are key to the Army's "transformation" to a lighter, faster force.
In letters signed by underlings, the Army claims compliance because the units in question will belong to gender-mixed brigade-support units operating elsewhere. This is only an administrative sleight of hand, which a May 10 Army briefing admitted could be seen as "subterfuge." Pentagon planners rearranged blocks on organizational charts, but in practice the forward-support companies in question will still be collocated with and organic to the Army's new combined infantry/armor maneuver battalions 100 percent of the time.
What's worse, Army officials have tried to mislead Congress about their intent. During a November 3, 2004, briefing for congressional staffers, Pentagon officials denied any violation or change in rules exempting female soldiers from assignments in land-combat-collocated units. A different briefing conducted inside the Pentagon on November 29 stated that the preferred "way ahead" is to "rewrite/eliminate the Army collocation policy."
When the Washington Times reported the duplicity on December 13, Army Staff Director Lt. Gen. James Campbell immediately issued a widely distributed memo warning about "Information Security" and the loss of "positive control of pre-decisional briefing materials, decision memorandums, and otherwise generally sensitive information." President Bush and the Congress should ask, Why is this matter so sensitive?
Some military decisions must remain confidential, but this is not one of them. The 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., has been quietly training women for the new land-combat forward-support companies, while arrogantly claiming that the notification law does not apply. "Lessons learned" from the division's impending redeployment to Iraq will be declared a "success," but if (when) anything goes wrong, officials will blame the collocation rule that they intend to eliminate. Either scenario will betray the trust of soldiers and undermine the Army's own best interests.
Some officials have made the unsupported claim that female soldiers will have to make up for shortages in male combat soldiers for the Army's new land-combat teams. To the extent the problem exists, gender-based recruiting quotas are to blame.
Instead of dropping the gender quotas, the same officials are pursuing an illicit course of action that will erode the effectiveness of all land-combat troops, and eventually apply to special-operations forces and the Marine Corps. The Army has also defied logic in retaining co-ed basic training, acknowledged in 2002 to be "not efficient" in transforming civilians into disciplined soldiers. Revised "warrior training" programs sound impressive, but gender-normed standards emasculate the concept by assuring "success" for average female trainees. Soldiers know that there is no gender-norming on the battlefield.
The nation is proud of our women in uniform, but that is no excuse for forcing unprepared female soldiers, many of whom are mothers, to face the physical demands of violent close combat and a higher risk of capture than exists today. In the Army's own surveys over a decade, 85 to 90 percent of enlisted women said they strongly oppose such policies. Their opinions matter no more than those of male soldiers, who will have to bear new "female force protection" burdens that could complicate dangerous missions.
Combat commanders will have to cope with significant personnel losses, distractions, and social turmoil that will be more intense in the heat of war. Predictable problems include far higher rates of medical leave and evacuations, primarily due to pregnancy, which Army officials refuse to reveal or discuss. Making the mix even more volatile will be sexual attractions, personal misconduct, and accusations of same.
Forget feminist legends about Amazon warriors and push-button wars. The modern land-combat soldier carries weapons and high-tech equipment weighing 50 to 100 pounds, with body armor alone weighing 25 pounds. Such burdens would be disproportionately heavy for average female soldiers, who are certainly brave but shorter and lighter, with smaller hearts and bones, 25 to30 percent less aerobic capacity for endurance, and 40 to 50 percent less upper-body strength.
Politically correct group-thinkers and Clinton-promoted generals in the Pentagon apparently have forgotten certain realities affirmed by overwhelming evidence: In direct ground combat, women do not have an "equal opportunity" to survive, or to help fellow soldiers survive. No one's injured son should have to die on the streets of a future Fallujah because the only soldier near enough to carry him to safety was a five-foot-two 110-pound woman.
The concerned soldier who contacted me recognized that the Army is about to conduct an unannounced, extremely dangerous live-fire social experiment under wartime conditions. With deployments imminent, what can be done?
President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must intervene to enforce the notification law and encourage the recruitment of young men. In long-overdue congressional hearings, members should require Pentagon officials to document alleged shortages of males, and explain why female soldiers should have to pay the price for the Army's bureaucratic errors. Congressmen worried about the sexual abuse of military women should be consistent in expressing concern about the elevated risk of combat violence at the hands of the enemy.
Today's changing battlefield makes it even more important to retain personnel policies that recognize combat realities that have not changed. The collocation rule should be strengthened, not weakened, and applied consistently in all units that collocate with direct ground-combat forces. At times we have no choice but to send young men into land combat, but we do have a choice when it comes to sending our women there.
— Elaine Donnelly is president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that specializes in military personnel issues.
January 07, 2005, 7:50 a.m.
The Army’s Gender War
A new policy is unfair to both men and women soldiers.
By Elaine Donnelly
I recently heard from a female soldier who feels betrayed by the Army. Calm but justifiably angry, the soldier said she is being assigned to a forward-support company that will "collocate" with the Army's new, modular infantry/armor land combat battalions. This is a serious change in policy, unfair to men and women soldiers alike.
Under current regulations, women cannot be forced to serve in smaller direct ground-combat units such as infantry or armor battalions, or in companies that collocate with them. If the Defense Department wants to change these rules, law requires that the secretary must notify Congress no less than 30 legislative days in advance, when both houses are in session. Despite the "collocation rule" and the congressional notification law, the Army is unilaterally assigning women to previously all-male forward-support companies in its new "unit of action" land combat teams, which are key to the Army's "transformation" to a lighter, faster force.
In letters signed by underlings, the Army claims compliance because the units in question will belong to gender-mixed brigade-support units operating elsewhere. This is only an administrative sleight of hand, which a May 10 Army briefing admitted could be seen as "subterfuge." Pentagon planners rearranged blocks on organizational charts, but in practice the forward-support companies in question will still be collocated with and organic to the Army's new combined infantry/armor maneuver battalions 100 percent of the time.
What's worse, Army officials have tried to mislead Congress about their intent. During a November 3, 2004, briefing for congressional staffers, Pentagon officials denied any violation or change in rules exempting female soldiers from assignments in land-combat-collocated units. A different briefing conducted inside the Pentagon on November 29 stated that the preferred "way ahead" is to "rewrite/eliminate the Army collocation policy."
When the Washington Times reported the duplicity on December 13, Army Staff Director Lt. Gen. James Campbell immediately issued a widely distributed memo warning about "Information Security" and the loss of "positive control of pre-decisional briefing materials, decision memorandums, and otherwise generally sensitive information." President Bush and the Congress should ask, Why is this matter so sensitive?
Some military decisions must remain confidential, but this is not one of them. The 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., has been quietly training women for the new land-combat forward-support companies, while arrogantly claiming that the notification law does not apply. "Lessons learned" from the division's impending redeployment to Iraq will be declared a "success," but if (when) anything goes wrong, officials will blame the collocation rule that they intend to eliminate. Either scenario will betray the trust of soldiers and undermine the Army's own best interests.
Some officials have made the unsupported claim that female soldiers will have to make up for shortages in male combat soldiers for the Army's new land-combat teams. To the extent the problem exists, gender-based recruiting quotas are to blame.
Instead of dropping the gender quotas, the same officials are pursuing an illicit course of action that will erode the effectiveness of all land-combat troops, and eventually apply to special-operations forces and the Marine Corps. The Army has also defied logic in retaining co-ed basic training, acknowledged in 2002 to be "not efficient" in transforming civilians into disciplined soldiers. Revised "warrior training" programs sound impressive, but gender-normed standards emasculate the concept by assuring "success" for average female trainees. Soldiers know that there is no gender-norming on the battlefield.
The nation is proud of our women in uniform, but that is no excuse for forcing unprepared female soldiers, many of whom are mothers, to face the physical demands of violent close combat and a higher risk of capture than exists today. In the Army's own surveys over a decade, 85 to 90 percent of enlisted women said they strongly oppose such policies. Their opinions matter no more than those of male soldiers, who will have to bear new "female force protection" burdens that could complicate dangerous missions.
Combat commanders will have to cope with significant personnel losses, distractions, and social turmoil that will be more intense in the heat of war. Predictable problems include far higher rates of medical leave and evacuations, primarily due to pregnancy, which Army officials refuse to reveal or discuss. Making the mix even more volatile will be sexual attractions, personal misconduct, and accusations of same.
Forget feminist legends about Amazon warriors and push-button wars. The modern land-combat soldier carries weapons and high-tech equipment weighing 50 to 100 pounds, with body armor alone weighing 25 pounds. Such burdens would be disproportionately heavy for average female soldiers, who are certainly brave but shorter and lighter, with smaller hearts and bones, 25 to30 percent less aerobic capacity for endurance, and 40 to 50 percent less upper-body strength.
Politically correct group-thinkers and Clinton-promoted generals in the Pentagon apparently have forgotten certain realities affirmed by overwhelming evidence: In direct ground combat, women do not have an "equal opportunity" to survive, or to help fellow soldiers survive. No one's injured son should have to die on the streets of a future Fallujah because the only soldier near enough to carry him to safety was a five-foot-two 110-pound woman.
The concerned soldier who contacted me recognized that the Army is about to conduct an unannounced, extremely dangerous live-fire social experiment under wartime conditions. With deployments imminent, what can be done?
President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must intervene to enforce the notification law and encourage the recruitment of young men. In long-overdue congressional hearings, members should require Pentagon officials to document alleged shortages of males, and explain why female soldiers should have to pay the price for the Army's bureaucratic errors. Congressmen worried about the sexual abuse of military women should be consistent in expressing concern about the elevated risk of combat violence at the hands of the enemy.
Today's changing battlefield makes it even more important to retain personnel policies that recognize combat realities that have not changed. The collocation rule should be strengthened, not weakened, and applied consistently in all units that collocate with direct ground-combat forces. At times we have no choice but to send young men into land combat, but we do have a choice when it comes to sending our women there.
— Elaine Donnelly is president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that specializes in military personnel issues.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Book Review: Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
Southern CrossFreaks and other Christians in Flannery O'Connor's stories.
by Maria Andraca Carano
The Weekly Standard
01/03/2005, Volume 010, Issue 16
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
by Ralph C. Wood
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 208 pp., $22
The waspish grandfather of Hazel Motes, an old evangelical preacher "with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger," broadcasts to listeners willing and unwilling the startling news that to redeem a single "stone soul," Jesus was willing to die "ten million deaths."
That preacher's creator was Flannery O'Connor, the author from Milledgeville, Georgia, who died in 1964 at age thirty-nine--an incalculable loss to American literature. Who in the forty years since has been willing to aim fiction at the deepest metaphysical foundations of human existence? Who, for that matter, still believes fiction can aim at metaphysical foundations? O'Connor disdained to write about anything less crucial, less important than such subjects as the presence of Christ revealed in history and present in the sacraments--all through the life and death, love and hate, grandeur and pettiness of American southerners in all their peculiarity.
Perhaps that's why O'Connor has not faded away but remains a perpetual puzzle for contemporary readers of literature. The highbrow world since the early 1960s has overwhelmingly rejected the possibility of literature driven by the religious faith they believe entirely repressive and destructive. And yet, there stands Flannery O'Connor in their way: a stumbling block, an unavoidable contradiction.
Last year, in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie outlined Flannery O'Connor's life and works in the context of her pilgrimage of faith among such influential Catholic contemporaries as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy.
This year, in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Baylor University professor Ralph C. Wood examines O'Connor's writings both to reveal that her southern background illuminated her unique vision and to expose to present-day Christians her cautionary admonitions against a flaccid practical atheism.
Not a traditional biography, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is a collection of essays aligning Flannery O'Connor's work with the fundamentalist Protestant Christians of the South and explaining the cultural, social, and political dynamic that formed the catapult for her writing.
O'Connor's fiction is filled with rustics, freaks, and prophets, the likes of which--Wood insists--really did populate the deep South she knew. What O'Connor saw is that these strange characters were seeking the truth behind eternity, reckless of the personal cost. As she once declared, "It seems to me . . . that all good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing."
Wood focuses on two major themes to connect O'Connor's literature to southern fundamentalist Protestantism. First, he examines the decline of traditional religious belief in and fear of an omnipotent Lord in favor of what he calls today's "civil religion," which dominates American culture save for that pocket of traditionalist believers who come from the South. Second, he scrutinizes O'Connor's application of southern speech and manners to create a world in which the themes she found worthy, indeed compelling, could be developed.
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South examines the death of true atheism and the concomitant rise of practical atheism, typified by the character of Mrs. May in the story "Greenleaf," who had "a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true." O'Connor respected atheists such as H.L. Mencken, because they addressed the issue of God seriously enough to argue against His existence. She would affirm that she was "a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist but like someone else would be an atheist." She despised a culture espousing a "civil religion" whose commandments mandate that all religious beliefs have equal weight and that spiritual values derive from democratic principles. Or, as her character Hazel Motes sums up the American gospel: "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified by Jesus."
As befits a professor at one of the nation's premier Baptist universities, Ralph Wood looks in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South to align the Catholic O'Connor with the evangelical impulse--in other words, to use her southernness to claim her for the English department of Baylor rather than the English department of Notre Dame.
Is this possible? Well, maybe. As O'Connor wrote, "It is an embarrassment to our fundamentalist neighbors to realize that they are doctrinally nearer to their traditional enemy, the Church of Rome, than they are to modern Protestantism." Indeed, she added, "the Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
O'Connor believed that the American South constituted a region "haunted" by Christ--and thus, in however distorted a way, was able to avoid the nihilism of the modern age. If the disintegration of morals and religious beliefs into the chaos of nihilism constituted "the very air that we breathe," still, devotion to a system of manners might yield something beyond mere social convention or psychological delusions. Southern manners formed an important buttress for religious values, and so Flannery O'Connor praised the elaborate sense of manners prevalent in southern culture as being "the next best thing to Christian charity."
And yet, she knew the limits of manners as well. The narrow-minded cynics in her stories typically imagine they are exempt from southern manners, because they fail to live Christian beliefs. Meanwhile, her prophets and freaks fail to be mannerly because the religious quest at stake must be revealed in violent action.
This much is true of Wood's goal in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:
O'Connor's characters could not be other than Southern fundamentalists. They speak with a simplicity of language and boldness of imagery retained only in the rural areas of the South. This vivid simplicity shines in the language of O'Connor's preachers. In "The River," Bevel Summers exhorts his listeners to baptism: "Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain't but one River and that's the River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood." In The Violent Bear It Away, Lucette Carmody intones, "Divine love cuts like the cold wind and the will of God is plain as the winter"--and shouts "The Word of God is a burning Word to burn you clean, burns man and child, man and child the same, you people!"
The southerner, O'Connor once quipped, greatly feared that he might have been formed in the image and likeness of God. She wanted her work to sound "like the Old Testament would sound if it were being written today." Laconically noting that "subject matter has more to do with region than religion, at least in fiction," she thought that universalism--a vision of the metaphysical roots of reality--was possible only by taking advantage of a narrow parochialism:
Her characters had to travel their salvation journey within the Deep South. Her prophets, like the reluctant Francis Marion Tarwater, may run from "the stink of the Cross," but the Cross will not let them go.
Wood rightly notes the link between Flannery O'Connor's literary freaks and the freakishness of southern fundamentalism. Protestant theologians and atheists alike have found it difficult to "grant cultural standing to fundamentalism," belittling Southern fundamentalists as "primitive agriculturalists . . . inclined to magic." O'Connor found this intense adherence to traditional beliefs a sincere calling and a just ordering of priorities.
AND YET, while it is undeniable that O'Connor empathized with southern fundamentalists in her stories, she nonetheless saw them as potential or unconscious Catholics--and not herself as a secret fundamentalist. Southern Protestantism is a religious place, she wrote, whose "outward forms are farthest from the Catholic and most revealing of a need that only the [Catholic] Church can fill." Her very need to write derived from her Catholicism. Wood mentions O'Connor's observance of traditional Catholic religious practices, including daily Mass and prayers. He also characterizes part of her message as "holding hard to the sacraments that evangelical Protestants are prone to neglect."
But contrast the passage where Paul Elie in The Life You Save May Be Your Own stresses O'Connor's treatment of the Eucharist ("the doctrine of the Body of Christ explained the pain in her bones") with Wood's focus instead on her dramatic depictions of the sacrament of baptism. Baptism represents a political proclamation of allegiance with Christ. It also constitutes a crucial sacrament for Protestants. For Catholics, however, baptism is a sacrament of initiation that is fulfilled in the Eucharist.
Indeed, O'Connor wrote, "the Eucharist is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable." Her admiration for fundamentalism was based in part on her pleasure "with the amount of Catholicism that fundamentalist Protestants have been able to retain."
One place that the religious reading in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is especially helpful, however, is in explicating the violence of O'Connor's stories. ("While a lot of folks get killed in [my] work," she once explained, "nobody gets hurt.") Wood argues that the characters' earthly physical sufferings, which include deaths by drowning, gunshot, and goring, lead to spiritual happy endings, because the characters experience the revelation of Divine love.
As she noted to her cloistered correspondents, the monks and nuns with whom she kept in
contact, a Catholic joins the convent and is "heard from no more," whereas a Protestant believer enjoys no such haven and thus "must go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on [his] head." The fierce truths voiced by O'Connor's fundamentalists could hardly be spoken by a typical Catholic mystic.
For O'Connor, the violence acted out in her stories had a redemptive purpose; violence was required to make the religious point: "For the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." Who, in the forty years since her death, has used fiction to shout as loudly as she dared?
Maria Andraca Carano lives in Houston with her husband and three daughters.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
AP- Big Ben Named NFL's Top Rookie on Offense
Associated Press Posted: 1 day ago
Ben Roethlisberger did what John Unitas, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Brett Favre and every other NFL quarterback never managed by winning The Associated Press Offensive Rookie of the Year award.
The first quarterback to win the honor since its inception in 1957, Roethlisberger did so unanimously, the second straight rookie to get all the votes. The Pittsburgh Steelers' young star received all 48 votes Wednesday from a nationwide panel of writers and broadcasters who cover pro football.
Ben Roethlisberger took over as the Steelers' starting QB on Sept 19 and took every snap before injuring rib cartilage on Dec. 26.
Last year, Arizona wide receiver Anquan Boldin also swept the panel.
But Boldin didn't go unbeaten in 13 starts, as Roethlisberger did in leading the Steelers to a franchise-best 15-1 record, which led the NFL this season. Neither, of course, has any other rookie QB.
"I think it is just a comfort level every week, learning and practicing, getting on the same page as these guys," Roethlisberger said. "I think that has really helped by being out there in practice and working with these guys, the receivers, the linemen, the running backs, and just getting familiar with each other has really helped our success and our progress."
Roethlisberger's progress was aided by having a superb running game featuring Jerome Bettis and Duce Staley, operating behind perhaps the league's best offensive line. Pittsburgh ranked second in rushing.
And the Steelers' defense was the league's best, allowing the fewest points and yards.
That meant Roethlisberger didn't need to win many games with his arm.
Yet when he did, he brought back the AFC North champions with late drives to beat Jacksonville and the New York Giants. His composure, competitiveness and intelligent handling of the offense were keys to those wins — and several others in which he didn't require such heroics.
"I did not really know what to expect," said Roethlisberger, the 11th choice in the first round of the draft — and the third overall quarterback taken behind Eli Manning and Phillip Rivers, neither of whom had much of an impact.
"I thought coming in, knowing about Tommy (Maddox) as the starter, that I was going to come in and just try to learn this offense and try to learn to be a backup, whatever coach was going to ask of me," Roethlisberger said. "Obviously, things changed."
They changed when Maddox injured his right elbow in Game 2 at Baltimore, the Steelers' only loss. There were loud doubts about Pittsburgh's chances of prospering with a rookie quarterback, including some from Roethlisberger's teammates.
He silenced those doubters very quickly.
"We've got mostly the same guys, it's Ben that has made a big difference," linebacker Joey Porter said. "Everybody else has been here. Duce and Ben are the biggest two additions we had. Nobody knew he could play at this level this early."
Roethlisberger finished fifth in passer rating at 98.1. He completed 196 of 295 passes — yes, only 99 incompletions — for 2,621 yards, with 17 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. His best work came in the middle of the schedule and he wasn't quite as dynamic in December. But he kept winning, even as he was given more responsibility in the offense.
"I think we will surely evolve and add more plays and do more things as an offense," he said, "and I can kind of become more diversified as we continue on this quest this year and in coming years."
Roethlisberger, whose sensational rookie season could earn him $2.6 million in bonuses, is the fourth Steelers player to win the award, joining receivers Louis Lipps (1984) and Jimmy Orr (1958) and running back Franco Harris (1972).
Thomas Sowell: A Wave of Criticism
Thomas Sowell (archive)
January 6, 2005
The catastrophic tsunami wave that has devastated so much of southern Asia has even killed more than a hundred people on the east coast of Africa, more than 4,000 miles away. Two questions: First, what country has done the most to help the victims of this natural disaster?
Second, what country has been criticized most for not doing enough?
The answer to both questions is the United States of America.
Even the $350 million officially announced as American aid to help the tsunami victims does not count the cost of sending American military planes and naval ships, including an aircraft carrier with a crew of thousands, to aid in the rescues and provide medical treatment.
As with many other natural disasters, aid pouring into the stricken areas tends to pile up at transit points -- ports or airfields, for example -- while the victims suffer and die elsewhere.
American aid has been particularly important in this regard because it includes not only the supplies of food, water, and medicine which are arriving in the region from various countries around the world, but the logistical support to get those supplies to the people needing them, as fast as possible under the chaotic conditions in the aftermath of widespread destruction.
It is American planes and helicopters that are doing much of the heavy lifting, rushing food and medical supplies to people and rushing stricken people to medical treatment centers.
What, then is the criticism?
The first blast came from the United Nations, where one of their high officials implied that the United States is stingy in the aid it is providing. No matter what we do, it is always possible to do more. But "more" is not the standard to which any other country is held.
Ironically, the charge of stinginess comes at a time when a study cited in Philanthropy magazine shows that Americans donate not only more money to philanthropic causes than any other people, they devote a higher percentage of their income and contribute far more of their time as volunteers to a whole spectrum of humanitarian causes.
But, no matter what we do, "more" is the demand -- and the criticism -- that can always be made. We are not compared to other people. We are compared to an ideal that human beings have never met.
No consistent principle is involved in these criticisms, just attitudes. These include not only the attitudes of those foreigners envious or resentful of American success and power, but also the attitudes of those among the American intelligentsia who automatically echo foreign criticisms of the United States.
Decades ago, Eric Hoffer wrote: "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." Reasons may be cited but the flimsiness of many of those reasons betrays the fact that what is really involved are attitudes.
A recent example is a denunciation of the United States as a "land of penny pinchers" by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Why? Because, aside from highly publicized tragedies like the tsunami, "we're tightwads who turn away as people die in greater numbers" around the world from things like malaria and AIDS.
Foreign governments are more generous with their taxpayers' money than the American government is, both domestically and internationally. But real generosity is shown by those who voluntarily give their own hard cash -- and Americans do that more than anybody else.
Incidentally, in all of Mr. Kristof's waxing indignant about the ravages of malaria, there is not one word about the banning of DDT, which has led immediately to a resurgence of malaria that has taken lives by the millions, as a result of propaganda campaigns against DDT by environmental busybodies.
Apparently it is not the principle of saving lives lost to malaria that is crucial, but the opportunity to score points against the United States. Green extremists get a pass. So do bungling and corrupt foreigners, including the United Nations.
©2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Contact Thomas Sowell Read Sowell's biography
January 6, 2005
The catastrophic tsunami wave that has devastated so much of southern Asia has even killed more than a hundred people on the east coast of Africa, more than 4,000 miles away. Two questions: First, what country has done the most to help the victims of this natural disaster?
Second, what country has been criticized most for not doing enough?
The answer to both questions is the United States of America.
Even the $350 million officially announced as American aid to help the tsunami victims does not count the cost of sending American military planes and naval ships, including an aircraft carrier with a crew of thousands, to aid in the rescues and provide medical treatment.
As with many other natural disasters, aid pouring into the stricken areas tends to pile up at transit points -- ports or airfields, for example -- while the victims suffer and die elsewhere.
American aid has been particularly important in this regard because it includes not only the supplies of food, water, and medicine which are arriving in the region from various countries around the world, but the logistical support to get those supplies to the people needing them, as fast as possible under the chaotic conditions in the aftermath of widespread destruction.
It is American planes and helicopters that are doing much of the heavy lifting, rushing food and medical supplies to people and rushing stricken people to medical treatment centers.
What, then is the criticism?
The first blast came from the United Nations, where one of their high officials implied that the United States is stingy in the aid it is providing. No matter what we do, it is always possible to do more. But "more" is not the standard to which any other country is held.
Ironically, the charge of stinginess comes at a time when a study cited in Philanthropy magazine shows that Americans donate not only more money to philanthropic causes than any other people, they devote a higher percentage of their income and contribute far more of their time as volunteers to a whole spectrum of humanitarian causes.
But, no matter what we do, "more" is the demand -- and the criticism -- that can always be made. We are not compared to other people. We are compared to an ideal that human beings have never met.
No consistent principle is involved in these criticisms, just attitudes. These include not only the attitudes of those foreigners envious or resentful of American success and power, but also the attitudes of those among the American intelligentsia who automatically echo foreign criticisms of the United States.
Decades ago, Eric Hoffer wrote: "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." Reasons may be cited but the flimsiness of many of those reasons betrays the fact that what is really involved are attitudes.
A recent example is a denunciation of the United States as a "land of penny pinchers" by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Why? Because, aside from highly publicized tragedies like the tsunami, "we're tightwads who turn away as people die in greater numbers" around the world from things like malaria and AIDS.
Foreign governments are more generous with their taxpayers' money than the American government is, both domestically and internationally. But real generosity is shown by those who voluntarily give their own hard cash -- and Americans do that more than anybody else.
Incidentally, in all of Mr. Kristof's waxing indignant about the ravages of malaria, there is not one word about the banning of DDT, which has led immediately to a resurgence of malaria that has taken lives by the millions, as a result of propaganda campaigns against DDT by environmental busybodies.
Apparently it is not the principle of saving lives lost to malaria that is crucial, but the opportunity to score points against the United States. Green extremists get a pass. So do bungling and corrupt foreigners, including the United Nations.
©2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Contact Thomas Sowell Read Sowell's biography
Daniel Pipes: Hollywood Discovers Radical Islam
By Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 6, 2005
The war on terror has not been the subject of a single American feature film nor, so far as I know, is there one in the works. But television is proving a bit braver and things should get interesting on Sunday, Jan. 9, when Fox begins a new season of its action show, called 24.
Why the absence of movies on the current war? Jack Valenti, then-head of the Motion Picture Association of America, once replied with questions of his own:
Who would you have as the enemy if you made a picture about terrorism? You’d probably have Muslims, would you not? If you did, I think there would be backlash from the decent, hard-working, law-abiding Muslim community in this country.
That’s what some call a pre-emptive cringe. Others call it dhimmitude.
In any case, the most recent big-budget movie to deal with terrorism was 2002’s Sum of All Fears (“27,000 Nuclear Weapons. One Is Missing”), based on a Tom Clancy novel of the same name. The novel had Arab terrorists setting off a nuclear device at football’s Super Bowl but the movie, under pressure from Islamist organizations, features neo-Nazi terrorists. (“I hope you will be reassured,” Director Phil Alden Robinson wrote in early 2001 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination.”)
In an review of recent movies, Jonathan V. Last finds that, “If anything, the PC pressure has been upped since the war on terror began.” The first break in the silence came in mid-2004, when The Grid, a TNT mini-series, took on radical Islam. Last termed it “the bravest, most-daring piece of entertainment in years,” precisely because Tracey Alexander and Brian Eastman, its executive producers, did not whitewash all forms of Islam.
An excerpt from The Grid’s second episode, concerning a Lebanese national named Fuqara, arrested as he tries to flee the United States after trying to murder an FBI agent, gives its flavor. Fuqara is interrogated by Agent Canary while his attorney tries to stop the proceedings:
Agent Canary: Mr. Fuqara, who ordered you to commit the assassination?
Fuqara: (Mutters in Arabic.)
Fuqara’s Attorney (to Agent Canary): Can we have a moment outside? (The two exit the room.) Don’t you dare threaten him with a rend writ.
Agent Canary: He has information about planned attacks here that could threaten thousands of American lives.
Fuqara’s Attorney: And that gives you the right to summarily dismiss Mr. Fuqara’s rights? Hey, why stop there? Deport all the Muslims in America to win your war!
Agent Canary: I might suggest some rights stop at mass murder.
Fuqara’s Attorney: They don’t. And until there is an amendment to the constitution to that effect, I will protect Mr. Fuqara’s rights.
A second break will come in a few days, when the Fox Channel’s 24 shows four episodes depicting an Muslim family as coming to the United States solely to implement attacks against Americans. To do so, they masquerade as just folk. Here is how Jim Finkle of Broadcasting & Cable describes them: “One of the villains is a Walkman-toting, bubble-gum-chewing teenager who fights with his conservative Dad about dating an American girl and talking on the phone.”
But this is a disguise.
The young man also helps his parents mastermind a plot to kill large numbers of Americans that begins with an attack on a train. Over the breakfast table, the father tells his son: “What we will accomplish today will change the world. We are fortunate that that our family has been chosen to do this.” “Yes, father,” his son replies.
The terrorists manage to take the secretary of defense as a hostage; and the movie climaxes with the secretary shown on a gruesome Internet video like those coming out of Iraq, then tried for “war crimes against humanity.”
Predictably, 24 has the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s lead Islamist outfit, in a tizzy. CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed complains that “They are taking everyday American Muslim families and making them suspects. They’re making it seem like families are co-conspirators in this terrorist plot.”
Melanie McFarland, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s television critic, has no patience for such whining: “this is 24, OK? Anyone who watches it knows the show borrows aspects of real nightmares to drive its plots, paying little attention to political correctness.”
But there is another reason to stick with the plot as it is. Nearly every terrorist suspect in the West is said to be a regular guy or a wonderful gal, as I have previously shown. The adjectives applied to Sajid Mohammed Badat, a Briton, are typical: “a walking angel,” “the bright star of our mosque,” “a friendly, warm, fun-loving character,” “a friendly, sociable, normal young lad, who had lots of friends and did not hold extreme views in any way.” Despite those raves, he has been indicted for helping shoe-bomber Richard C Reid to blow up an airliner and will face trial on conspiracy charges (he was found with parts for more shoe bombs like those Reid used).
Just last week, the Seattle Times reported on a Saudi now being deported from the United States:
To his co-workers at the University of Washington School of Nursing, Majid al-Massari was a happy guy who bounced down the halls and seemed like a "big teddy bear." What his friends didn't know about the burly, bearded 34-year-old computer-security specialist was that he had helped set up a Web site for a group linked to al-Qaida, quoted Osama bin Laden in his own Internet postings, lashed out against American policies on his father's London-based radio show and had landed in the sights of U.S. terrorism investigators.
This sort of surprise happens with such consistency that I am tempted to generalize: On arrest, every single Islamist in the West is initially hailed as a delightful person, and never as a hate-filled brooding loner.
So, hooray for Fox for portraying reality; and may it not cave to the Islamists.
Daniel Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 6, 2005
The war on terror has not been the subject of a single American feature film nor, so far as I know, is there one in the works. But television is proving a bit braver and things should get interesting on Sunday, Jan. 9, when Fox begins a new season of its action show, called 24.
Why the absence of movies on the current war? Jack Valenti, then-head of the Motion Picture Association of America, once replied with questions of his own:
Who would you have as the enemy if you made a picture about terrorism? You’d probably have Muslims, would you not? If you did, I think there would be backlash from the decent, hard-working, law-abiding Muslim community in this country.
That’s what some call a pre-emptive cringe. Others call it dhimmitude.
In any case, the most recent big-budget movie to deal with terrorism was 2002’s Sum of All Fears (“27,000 Nuclear Weapons. One Is Missing”), based on a Tom Clancy novel of the same name. The novel had Arab terrorists setting off a nuclear device at football’s Super Bowl but the movie, under pressure from Islamist organizations, features neo-Nazi terrorists. (“I hope you will be reassured,” Director Phil Alden Robinson wrote in early 2001 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination.”)
In an review of recent movies, Jonathan V. Last finds that, “If anything, the PC pressure has been upped since the war on terror began.” The first break in the silence came in mid-2004, when The Grid, a TNT mini-series, took on radical Islam. Last termed it “the bravest, most-daring piece of entertainment in years,” precisely because Tracey Alexander and Brian Eastman, its executive producers, did not whitewash all forms of Islam.
An excerpt from The Grid’s second episode, concerning a Lebanese national named Fuqara, arrested as he tries to flee the United States after trying to murder an FBI agent, gives its flavor. Fuqara is interrogated by Agent Canary while his attorney tries to stop the proceedings:
Agent Canary: Mr. Fuqara, who ordered you to commit the assassination?
Fuqara: (Mutters in Arabic.)
Fuqara’s Attorney (to Agent Canary): Can we have a moment outside? (The two exit the room.) Don’t you dare threaten him with a rend writ.
Agent Canary: He has information about planned attacks here that could threaten thousands of American lives.
Fuqara’s Attorney: And that gives you the right to summarily dismiss Mr. Fuqara’s rights? Hey, why stop there? Deport all the Muslims in America to win your war!
Agent Canary: I might suggest some rights stop at mass murder.
Fuqara’s Attorney: They don’t. And until there is an amendment to the constitution to that effect, I will protect Mr. Fuqara’s rights.
A second break will come in a few days, when the Fox Channel’s 24 shows four episodes depicting an Muslim family as coming to the United States solely to implement attacks against Americans. To do so, they masquerade as just folk. Here is how Jim Finkle of Broadcasting & Cable describes them: “One of the villains is a Walkman-toting, bubble-gum-chewing teenager who fights with his conservative Dad about dating an American girl and talking on the phone.”
But this is a disguise.
The young man also helps his parents mastermind a plot to kill large numbers of Americans that begins with an attack on a train. Over the breakfast table, the father tells his son: “What we will accomplish today will change the world. We are fortunate that that our family has been chosen to do this.” “Yes, father,” his son replies.
The terrorists manage to take the secretary of defense as a hostage; and the movie climaxes with the secretary shown on a gruesome Internet video like those coming out of Iraq, then tried for “war crimes against humanity.”
Predictably, 24 has the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s lead Islamist outfit, in a tizzy. CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed complains that “They are taking everyday American Muslim families and making them suspects. They’re making it seem like families are co-conspirators in this terrorist plot.”
Melanie McFarland, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s television critic, has no patience for such whining: “this is 24, OK? Anyone who watches it knows the show borrows aspects of real nightmares to drive its plots, paying little attention to political correctness.”
But there is another reason to stick with the plot as it is. Nearly every terrorist suspect in the West is said to be a regular guy or a wonderful gal, as I have previously shown. The adjectives applied to Sajid Mohammed Badat, a Briton, are typical: “a walking angel,” “the bright star of our mosque,” “a friendly, warm, fun-loving character,” “a friendly, sociable, normal young lad, who had lots of friends and did not hold extreme views in any way.” Despite those raves, he has been indicted for helping shoe-bomber Richard C Reid to blow up an airliner and will face trial on conspiracy charges (he was found with parts for more shoe bombs like those Reid used).
Just last week, the Seattle Times reported on a Saudi now being deported from the United States:
To his co-workers at the University of Washington School of Nursing, Majid al-Massari was a happy guy who bounced down the halls and seemed like a "big teddy bear." What his friends didn't know about the burly, bearded 34-year-old computer-security specialist was that he had helped set up a Web site for a group linked to al-Qaida, quoted Osama bin Laden in his own Internet postings, lashed out against American policies on his father's London-based radio show and had landed in the sights of U.S. terrorism investigators.
This sort of surprise happens with such consistency that I am tempted to generalize: On arrest, every single Islamist in the West is initially hailed as a delightful person, and never as a hate-filled brooding loner.
So, hooray for Fox for portraying reality; and may it not cave to the Islamists.
Daniel Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Billings Gazette: People and Grizzly Bears Find Ways to Coexist
A journey far from over: People and bears must find ways to coexist
By MIKE STARKOf
The Billings Gazette Staff
Theresa Lineberger can still remember the young male grizzly that crawled onto her family's deck, perched itself on the railing and munched on all of the crab apples he could swipe from a nearby tree.
"I nailed him with a full can of (pepper) spray," said Lineberger, an emergency room nurse who lives on a ranch near Wapiti, Wyo., with her husband, Ron. "I don't dislike (bears), but when I'm home, where I'm supposed to feel safe, I don't want to have encounters."
Bears, black and grizzly, are common at the Linebergers' place. One summer and fall, 11 had to be trapped and relocated.
Like many who live in the heart of grizzly country, the Linebergers are tolerant of bears and, increasingly, are making efforts to live peaceably with them. At their ranch 20 miles west of Cody, they have put up an electric fence, take down bird feeders during the summer and try to keep apples and other bear attractants out of reach.
A yearly field trip has even been organized to have the students from the Wapiti school pick apples off the ground at their property and take them to the school to make applesauce.
The efforts help keep the family safe and reduce the risk that grizzlies have to be trapped.
"What we're trying to do is keep bears from getting into trouble and give them an opportunity to keep living," said Lineberger, who also co-wrote a grant that paid for a bear-proof fence at the school playground.
Grizzlies have become a way of life for residents along the North Fork of the Shoshone River. The improvements by people like the Linebergers will help reduce the risk of conflicts between people and bears - but won't eliminate them.
"You can still be doing everything right and something bad could happen," Lineberger said. "It's not anybody's fault. They're just not tame animals."
As the grizzly population around Yellowstone National Park and elsewhere continues to expand, more bears and people are going to be bumping into each other.
The trick is finding ways to coexist. In some cases, that means replacing regular garbage cans with bear-proof Dumpsters, placing electric fencing around beehives or knowing more about how to behave in the backcountry. In other cases, that could mean allowing some of the most troublesome bears to be trapped or killed and, in certain situations, retiring federal grazing allotments where grizzlies are common.
"Wherever there's people and grizzly bears, there will always be some level of conflict," said Kim Barber, a bear biologist with the Shoshone National Forest. "But bears are here to stay and people are here to stay. There's got to be some common ground."
CHANGING ATTITUDES
Finding that "common ground" may sound simple, but it also has required a psychological shift in how people view grizzlies. As settlers moved into the West, the intimidating grizzly was largely seen as a blood-thirsty beast capable of ruining livestock operations and worse. Surviving meant keeping the bear at bay.
"The old attitude was, if it got in the way, we got rid of it," Barber said.
These days, some people still fear the grizzly - it is, after all, the biggest meat-eating predator in North America - but are also more tolerant.
That's what's needed as grizzlies expand out of recovery areas like the one near Yellowstone National Park and look to gain a foothold in other areas in Montana, Idaho and Washington state, according to bear experts.
"Any of these small populations, such as the Cascades or the Cabinet-Yaak, until they're the size of the Yellowstone (population) they're in serious jeopardy," said University of Calgary professor emeritus Stephen Herrero, author of the classic book "Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance." "So they are totally dependent on working things out with humans."
For years, federal agencies have pushed an aggressive public education program, using brochures, classes and roadside signs to talk not only about the potential danger of bears but, more importantly, how best to live with them.
Most of the time, that means leaving bears alone, especially those living in remote areas away from people. But in cases where bears are using the same land as people, a scenario that's becoming more common as the population grows, something extra is needed.
SUCCESS ON THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN FRONT
Mike Madel was hired by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in 1986 to help ranchers cope with an increasing number of grizzlies on the Rocky Mountain Front that were wandering out of the wilderness and onto private land.
"It was probably the most controversial area relative to grizzlies because they were down low where people didn't expect them," Madel said.
In places like Choteau and Dupuyer, Madel found ranchers frustrated that bears were coming onto their property and killing sheep and cows.
In particular, bears congregated at the "bone yards" that popped up each spring after cows died during calving season. The cow carcasses had become a consistent source of protein for hungry bears emerging from hibernation.
Ranchers, Madel and others began redistributing the carcasses to more remote spots that still allowed bears to get the meat but reduced the number of conflicts with people.
That step alone has reduced problems with grizzlies by about 80 percent in May and June, Madel estimated.
Government agents have also worked with ranchers to cordon off livestock pastures and bee operations - often using solar-powered fencing. Noisemakers, dogs, traps, garbage-proof bins and other measures have also helped, Madel said.
Nothing, though, has been more effective than educating the public and trying to find solutions that work for each landowner, he said. Madel regularly works with about 150 ranchers and spends nearly half his time talking with them one on one.
"It's fair to say attitudes toward the grizzly bears have come a long way," Madel said. "Most ranchers are willing to coexist with grizzlies. It's their land, and they see more grizzlies than most people ever do."
EDUCATION
In Wyoming, Mark Bruscino has seen a change in attitude, too.
"There are people that aren't particularly fond of grizzly bears but they're doing what they can to get along with them," said Bruscino, a Cody-based bear management officer for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Bruscino deals with about 20 "nuisance bears" each year, many of them along the north fork of the Shoshone River. In most cases, the bears are trapped and relocated to a wilderness area. Bears that return and cause chronic problems are usually killed.
As more and more people move into bear habitat, and as the number of bears increases, there are more frequent conflicts at ranches, subdivisions and campgrounds.
"If you think back 20 years ago, bears were relegated to the park and surrounding wilderness areas. The conflicts were mostly in backcountry settings," he said. "Now … there's a whole different set of conflicts."
There are still occasional reports of people feeding bears or accidentally leaving food out, but Bruscino said local residents have taken to heart years of education efforts about dealing with grizzlies.
"I tell you, in Cody if you talk to a local or go to a school and ask 'what do you do when you encounter a bear,' they know what to do," Bruscino said.
As grizzlies expand south and east, more problems can be expected and people will have to adapt. Not everyone, though, is happy about it. Several county commissions have voiced their displeasure about the possibility of grizzlies showing up, and some have opposed food storage orders by Shoshone National Forest.
Removing the Yellowstone grizzly from the endangered species list may give state officials more latitude in dealing with the bears, but it won't alleviate the need to diligently find ways for grizzlies and people to live together.
"There are still a few good areas where bears can make a living and not run into problems," said Barber, the Shoshone forest bear biologist.
But elsewhere, expanding populations will bring bears and people face to face and keep people like Bruscino very busy, Barber said.
"They're doing a good job, but their job is only going to be more difficult," he said.
[See the rest of last year's series "Grizzlies in the West" from the Billings (MT) Gazette below:]
YELLOWSTONE GRIZZLIES PHOTO GALLERY
TIPS FOR LIVING AND RECREATING IN GRIZZLY BEAR COUNTRY
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BLACK BEAR AND A GRIZZLY
Lodge owners have several bear stories
Prevention is key in bear management
Humans employing containers that are bear-proof
A journey far from over: People and bears must find ways to coexist
The skills to survive: Grizzlies has shown it can adapt to almost any environmental condition
New highway crossings target wildlife safety
Bitterroots may be crucial to grizzly recovery
Back from the brink: Federal government to propose the removal of Yellowstone grizzlies from endangered species protections
Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.
By MIKE STARKOf
The Billings Gazette Staff
Theresa Lineberger can still remember the young male grizzly that crawled onto her family's deck, perched itself on the railing and munched on all of the crab apples he could swipe from a nearby tree.
"I nailed him with a full can of (pepper) spray," said Lineberger, an emergency room nurse who lives on a ranch near Wapiti, Wyo., with her husband, Ron. "I don't dislike (bears), but when I'm home, where I'm supposed to feel safe, I don't want to have encounters."
Bears, black and grizzly, are common at the Linebergers' place. One summer and fall, 11 had to be trapped and relocated.
Like many who live in the heart of grizzly country, the Linebergers are tolerant of bears and, increasingly, are making efforts to live peaceably with them. At their ranch 20 miles west of Cody, they have put up an electric fence, take down bird feeders during the summer and try to keep apples and other bear attractants out of reach.
A yearly field trip has even been organized to have the students from the Wapiti school pick apples off the ground at their property and take them to the school to make applesauce.
The efforts help keep the family safe and reduce the risk that grizzlies have to be trapped.
"What we're trying to do is keep bears from getting into trouble and give them an opportunity to keep living," said Lineberger, who also co-wrote a grant that paid for a bear-proof fence at the school playground.
Grizzlies have become a way of life for residents along the North Fork of the Shoshone River. The improvements by people like the Linebergers will help reduce the risk of conflicts between people and bears - but won't eliminate them.
"You can still be doing everything right and something bad could happen," Lineberger said. "It's not anybody's fault. They're just not tame animals."
As the grizzly population around Yellowstone National Park and elsewhere continues to expand, more bears and people are going to be bumping into each other.
The trick is finding ways to coexist. In some cases, that means replacing regular garbage cans with bear-proof Dumpsters, placing electric fencing around beehives or knowing more about how to behave in the backcountry. In other cases, that could mean allowing some of the most troublesome bears to be trapped or killed and, in certain situations, retiring federal grazing allotments where grizzlies are common.
"Wherever there's people and grizzly bears, there will always be some level of conflict," said Kim Barber, a bear biologist with the Shoshone National Forest. "But bears are here to stay and people are here to stay. There's got to be some common ground."
CHANGING ATTITUDES
Finding that "common ground" may sound simple, but it also has required a psychological shift in how people view grizzlies. As settlers moved into the West, the intimidating grizzly was largely seen as a blood-thirsty beast capable of ruining livestock operations and worse. Surviving meant keeping the bear at bay.
"The old attitude was, if it got in the way, we got rid of it," Barber said.
These days, some people still fear the grizzly - it is, after all, the biggest meat-eating predator in North America - but are also more tolerant.
That's what's needed as grizzlies expand out of recovery areas like the one near Yellowstone National Park and look to gain a foothold in other areas in Montana, Idaho and Washington state, according to bear experts.
"Any of these small populations, such as the Cascades or the Cabinet-Yaak, until they're the size of the Yellowstone (population) they're in serious jeopardy," said University of Calgary professor emeritus Stephen Herrero, author of the classic book "Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance." "So they are totally dependent on working things out with humans."
For years, federal agencies have pushed an aggressive public education program, using brochures, classes and roadside signs to talk not only about the potential danger of bears but, more importantly, how best to live with them.
Most of the time, that means leaving bears alone, especially those living in remote areas away from people. But in cases where bears are using the same land as people, a scenario that's becoming more common as the population grows, something extra is needed.
SUCCESS ON THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN FRONT
Mike Madel was hired by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in 1986 to help ranchers cope with an increasing number of grizzlies on the Rocky Mountain Front that were wandering out of the wilderness and onto private land.
"It was probably the most controversial area relative to grizzlies because they were down low where people didn't expect them," Madel said.
In places like Choteau and Dupuyer, Madel found ranchers frustrated that bears were coming onto their property and killing sheep and cows.
In particular, bears congregated at the "bone yards" that popped up each spring after cows died during calving season. The cow carcasses had become a consistent source of protein for hungry bears emerging from hibernation.
Ranchers, Madel and others began redistributing the carcasses to more remote spots that still allowed bears to get the meat but reduced the number of conflicts with people.
That step alone has reduced problems with grizzlies by about 80 percent in May and June, Madel estimated.
Government agents have also worked with ranchers to cordon off livestock pastures and bee operations - often using solar-powered fencing. Noisemakers, dogs, traps, garbage-proof bins and other measures have also helped, Madel said.
Nothing, though, has been more effective than educating the public and trying to find solutions that work for each landowner, he said. Madel regularly works with about 150 ranchers and spends nearly half his time talking with them one on one.
"It's fair to say attitudes toward the grizzly bears have come a long way," Madel said. "Most ranchers are willing to coexist with grizzlies. It's their land, and they see more grizzlies than most people ever do."
EDUCATION
In Wyoming, Mark Bruscino has seen a change in attitude, too.
"There are people that aren't particularly fond of grizzly bears but they're doing what they can to get along with them," said Bruscino, a Cody-based bear management officer for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Bruscino deals with about 20 "nuisance bears" each year, many of them along the north fork of the Shoshone River. In most cases, the bears are trapped and relocated to a wilderness area. Bears that return and cause chronic problems are usually killed.
As more and more people move into bear habitat, and as the number of bears increases, there are more frequent conflicts at ranches, subdivisions and campgrounds.
"If you think back 20 years ago, bears were relegated to the park and surrounding wilderness areas. The conflicts were mostly in backcountry settings," he said. "Now … there's a whole different set of conflicts."
There are still occasional reports of people feeding bears or accidentally leaving food out, but Bruscino said local residents have taken to heart years of education efforts about dealing with grizzlies.
"I tell you, in Cody if you talk to a local or go to a school and ask 'what do you do when you encounter a bear,' they know what to do," Bruscino said.
As grizzlies expand south and east, more problems can be expected and people will have to adapt. Not everyone, though, is happy about it. Several county commissions have voiced their displeasure about the possibility of grizzlies showing up, and some have opposed food storage orders by Shoshone National Forest.
Removing the Yellowstone grizzly from the endangered species list may give state officials more latitude in dealing with the bears, but it won't alleviate the need to diligently find ways for grizzlies and people to live together.
"There are still a few good areas where bears can make a living and not run into problems," said Barber, the Shoshone forest bear biologist.
But elsewhere, expanding populations will bring bears and people face to face and keep people like Bruscino very busy, Barber said.
"They're doing a good job, but their job is only going to be more difficult," he said.
[See the rest of last year's series "Grizzlies in the West" from the Billings (MT) Gazette below:]
YELLOWSTONE GRIZZLIES PHOTO GALLERY
TIPS FOR LIVING AND RECREATING IN GRIZZLY BEAR COUNTRY
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BLACK BEAR AND A GRIZZLY
Lodge owners have several bear stories
Prevention is key in bear management
Humans employing containers that are bear-proof
A journey far from over: People and bears must find ways to coexist
The skills to survive: Grizzlies has shown it can adapt to almost any environmental condition
New highway crossings target wildlife safety
Bitterroots may be crucial to grizzly recovery
Back from the brink: Federal government to propose the removal of Yellowstone grizzlies from endangered species protections
Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.
Michelle Malkin: A Salute to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln
January 04, 2005
By Michelle Malkin
Greetings, America-haters. Do you think you could stop raving against our “war criminals” and “killing machines”—and you, Teddy Kennedy, could you stop panting over those Abu Ghraib photos—for a moment and join me in praise for our military’s compassion and innovation?
At the drop of a hat, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group sped from Hong Kong to help survivors of tsunami disaster in southern Asia.
How is the unmatched speed, range, and overall mobility of the American super carrier possible?
Twin nuclear reactors.
Believe it or not, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln has been banned from docking at certain politically correct ports because of its reactors. For the moment, global environuts have stopped attacking the aircraft carrier over the nuke issue. But you can count on the eco-Luddites returning to their hysterical protests as soon as all the aid has been delivered.
Too much of the world, and too many here at home, take the amazing capabilities of ships like the Abraham Lincoln for granted. The carrier’s 1,092-foot flight deck outperforms some of the best commercial airports, launching and recovering up to 90 aircraft on hundreds of flights every day, according to the Navy. Eight steam turbine generators produce enough electrical power to serve a small city. The ship carries approximately 3 million gallons of fuel, and can stock food and supplies for 90 days.
Oh, and those much-maligned nuclear reactors help turn seawater into more than 400,000 gallons of fresh water daily—clean, safe water desperately needed by survivors. Sailors aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln have reportedly even stopped taking showers to make every last drop of fresh water available to tsunami survivors for drinking.
One of the most touching series of photos available at the Navy’s website features Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Joshua Savoy and Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Davy Nugent preparing loaves of bread in the aircraft carrier’s bakery for tsunami victims. The bakery produces between 600-800 loaves a day.
Here are two fine, young American sailors—representative of thousands of Americans in uniform like them—lending their skills to help the suffering.
Where are the politicians who will wave Spc. Joshua Savoy and Spc. Davy Nugent’s pictures before the TV cameras? Who will make them household names?
Aboard the carrier, every last crew member—from medical personnel to engineers to bakers—is pitching in to help with the relief effort. The crew of about 6,000 has deployed at least 10 of its 17 helicopters to deliver them to tsunami victims on the coast. Surgical teams from the carrier have set up triage sites on Sultan Iskandar Muda Air Force Base in Banda Aceh, and are working with teams from Carrier Air Wing Two and the International Organization for Migration.
I would be remiss in not mentioning the rest of the strike group and their leaders: the San Diego-based cruiser USS Shiloh (CG 67), commanded by Capt. Joe Harrissm and the destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65), commanded by Cmdr. Don Hornbeck; the Everett, Wash.-based destroyer USS Shoup (DDG 86), led by Cmdr. Alexander T. Casimes; the Pearl Harbor-based attack submarine USS Louisville (SSN 724), under the command of Cmdr. David Kirk; the Bremerton, Wa.-based fast combat support ship USS Rainier (AOE 7); Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 2; Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 151; Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 137; and Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 82.
You should also know that the members of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group are no strangers to humanitarian missions. In October 1993, Abraham Lincoln took off from the Arabian Gulf (where it was supporting the United Nations-sanctioned enforcement of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq) for Somalia. The carrier flew patrols over Mogadishu and surrounding areas for four months, backing U.N. ground troops during Operation Continue Hope.
How’s that for “stingy?”
I wish I had room to print the name of every sailor, pilot, rescue swimmer, technician, and engineer who serves in this strike group—and on every other American ship, plane, and helicopter on its way to help the tsunami victims.
You deserve to be seen and known and thanked and remembered. You make America proud.
At the U.N., saluting our troops is called jingoism. Where I’m from, it’s called gratitude.
Michelle Malkin [email her] is 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.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
The articles on VDARE.com are brought to you by The Center for American Unity. We are supported by generous donations from our readers. Contributions are tax deductible and appreciated. Contribute...
By Michelle Malkin
Greetings, America-haters. Do you think you could stop raving against our “war criminals” and “killing machines”—and you, Teddy Kennedy, could you stop panting over those Abu Ghraib photos—for a moment and join me in praise for our military’s compassion and innovation?
At the drop of a hat, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group sped from Hong Kong to help survivors of tsunami disaster in southern Asia.
How is the unmatched speed, range, and overall mobility of the American super carrier possible?
Twin nuclear reactors.
Believe it or not, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln has been banned from docking at certain politically correct ports because of its reactors. For the moment, global environuts have stopped attacking the aircraft carrier over the nuke issue. But you can count on the eco-Luddites returning to their hysterical protests as soon as all the aid has been delivered.
Too much of the world, and too many here at home, take the amazing capabilities of ships like the Abraham Lincoln for granted. The carrier’s 1,092-foot flight deck outperforms some of the best commercial airports, launching and recovering up to 90 aircraft on hundreds of flights every day, according to the Navy. Eight steam turbine generators produce enough electrical power to serve a small city. The ship carries approximately 3 million gallons of fuel, and can stock food and supplies for 90 days.
Oh, and those much-maligned nuclear reactors help turn seawater into more than 400,000 gallons of fresh water daily—clean, safe water desperately needed by survivors. Sailors aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln have reportedly even stopped taking showers to make every last drop of fresh water available to tsunami survivors for drinking.
One of the most touching series of photos available at the Navy’s website features Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Joshua Savoy and Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Davy Nugent preparing loaves of bread in the aircraft carrier’s bakery for tsunami victims. The bakery produces between 600-800 loaves a day.
Here are two fine, young American sailors—representative of thousands of Americans in uniform like them—lending their skills to help the suffering.
Where are the politicians who will wave Spc. Joshua Savoy and Spc. Davy Nugent’s pictures before the TV cameras? Who will make them household names?
Aboard the carrier, every last crew member—from medical personnel to engineers to bakers—is pitching in to help with the relief effort. The crew of about 6,000 has deployed at least 10 of its 17 helicopters to deliver them to tsunami victims on the coast. Surgical teams from the carrier have set up triage sites on Sultan Iskandar Muda Air Force Base in Banda Aceh, and are working with teams from Carrier Air Wing Two and the International Organization for Migration.
I would be remiss in not mentioning the rest of the strike group and their leaders: the San Diego-based cruiser USS Shiloh (CG 67), commanded by Capt. Joe Harrissm and the destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65), commanded by Cmdr. Don Hornbeck; the Everett, Wash.-based destroyer USS Shoup (DDG 86), led by Cmdr. Alexander T. Casimes; the Pearl Harbor-based attack submarine USS Louisville (SSN 724), under the command of Cmdr. David Kirk; the Bremerton, Wa.-based fast combat support ship USS Rainier (AOE 7); Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 2; Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 151; Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 137; and Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 82.
You should also know that the members of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group are no strangers to humanitarian missions. In October 1993, Abraham Lincoln took off from the Arabian Gulf (where it was supporting the United Nations-sanctioned enforcement of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq) for Somalia. The carrier flew patrols over Mogadishu and surrounding areas for four months, backing U.N. ground troops during Operation Continue Hope.
How’s that for “stingy?”
I wish I had room to print the name of every sailor, pilot, rescue swimmer, technician, and engineer who serves in this strike group—and on every other American ship, plane, and helicopter on its way to help the tsunami victims.
You deserve to be seen and known and thanked and remembered. You make America proud.
At the U.N., saluting our troops is called jingoism. Where I’m from, it’s called gratitude.
Michelle Malkin [email her] is 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.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
The articles on VDARE.com are brought to you by The Center for American Unity. We are supported by generous donations from our readers. Contributions are tax deductible and appreciated. Contribute...
Robert Spencer: Northeastern's Professor of Jihad
By Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 5, 2005
Northeastern University professor Shahid Alam has aroused controversy this week by likening the 9/11 killers to the Founding Fathers. After recounting some details of the establishment of “a sovereign but slave-holding republic, the United States of America,” Alam declared: “On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers too demonstrated their willingness to die – and to kill – for their dream. They died so that their people might live, free and in dignity.”
Alam’s words were published widely on the Internet. When challenged by an email, Alam replied with an anti-Semitic sneer: “Why is it that the only hateful mail I have received is signed by Levitt, Hoch or Freedman?”
Then Alam published a follow-up piece in Counterpunch, “The Waves of Hate: Testing Free Speech in America.” In it, he portrayed himself as a heroically misunderstood figure, testing the limits of free speech in Amerikkka while “hate websites” (he named my jihad news and commentary site, http://www.jihadwatch.org/, and the popular Little Green Footballs, among others) pestered him with “orchestrated attacks--many of them death threats...”
As for “orchestrated attacks,” Professor Alam would have a hard time finding a conductor, much less an orchestra, with any connection to Jihad Watch. Nor is he the first Muslim to accuse someone who quoted him of “hate” simply for the act of reporting what he actually said.
Of course, in his second piece Alam pointed out that he had drawn distinctions between the colonists and the jihadists: “the parallels are not exact. The colonists did not deliberately target civilians; the nineteen hijackers did.” But of course then came the qualifiers: “In their war of independence, the Americans may not have targeted civilians, but they did commit atrocities, and they did inflict collateral damage on civilians.” And of course there was that little matter of the American Indians.
Alam seemed surprised that people would take exception to his analogy: “I have since been wondering why my suggestion that al-Qaeda--like the American colonists before them--was leading an Islamic insurgency has provoked such a storm of vicious attacks.”
After retailing some of the differences, he complains: “But this cannot obscure the fact that both were insurgencies, even though al-Qaeda for now uses different methods. I might add, more abhorrent methods. But this is not the first time that insurgents have used such methods. The Zionists did so against the British and more massively against the Palestinians; several of them went on to lead Israel. So did the Irish, the Algerians and South Africans. Nelson Mandela, once jailed as a terrorist, is now the greatest world statesman.”
But of course, none of that, despite Alam’s showy bewilderment, made his comparison contemptible. What did, in case anyone missed it, was his utter lack of a moral compass. Of course, Alam, being a good Saidist, would probably dismiss as “Orientalist” any suggestion that the jihadist imperative is morally flawed, or, if he imbibes the fashionable relativism of the academy, would deny that it can be judged at all.
But in the real world we know how to distinguish Jesus from Hitler, and the Sharia from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Alam’s assumption that an Al-Qaeda victory would bring freedom and unity to the Islamic world assumes a society that consigns women and non-Muslims to all manner of misery, and puts a straitjacket on free inquiry, freedom of conscience, and the human soul.
Al-Qaeda and the rest see the implementation of Sharia as the goal of their striving, which in itself places them on the other side of the moral divide from the men who fought and died to secure “liberty and justice for all,” however imperfectly these principles were applied after their victory. Yes, Professor, Al-Qaeda is fighting for freedom as they see it. So were the Nazis, striving to free Germany from the so-called “Jewish threat” and the encirclement of hostile powers. But someone who wrote in 1938 about the Nazis’ returning dignity to the German people would have deserved the condemnation of free men, just as Shahid Alam deserves that condemnation now.
Should he be hounded and threatened? Of course not. I would like to see a return of moral sensibility to the academy, so that his case would be examined just as Nazi sympathizers were scrutinized in the 1930s. But in the meantime, let him talk. The more he does, the more I hope he will help awaken Americans to what we have allowed to happen to American universities, and what we are up against in general.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 5, 2005
Northeastern University professor Shahid Alam has aroused controversy this week by likening the 9/11 killers to the Founding Fathers. After recounting some details of the establishment of “a sovereign but slave-holding republic, the United States of America,” Alam declared: “On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers too demonstrated their willingness to die – and to kill – for their dream. They died so that their people might live, free and in dignity.”
Alam’s words were published widely on the Internet. When challenged by an email, Alam replied with an anti-Semitic sneer: “Why is it that the only hateful mail I have received is signed by Levitt, Hoch or Freedman?”
Then Alam published a follow-up piece in Counterpunch, “The Waves of Hate: Testing Free Speech in America.” In it, he portrayed himself as a heroically misunderstood figure, testing the limits of free speech in Amerikkka while “hate websites” (he named my jihad news and commentary site, http://www.jihadwatch.org/, and the popular Little Green Footballs, among others) pestered him with “orchestrated attacks--many of them death threats...”
As for “orchestrated attacks,” Professor Alam would have a hard time finding a conductor, much less an orchestra, with any connection to Jihad Watch. Nor is he the first Muslim to accuse someone who quoted him of “hate” simply for the act of reporting what he actually said.
Of course, in his second piece Alam pointed out that he had drawn distinctions between the colonists and the jihadists: “the parallels are not exact. The colonists did not deliberately target civilians; the nineteen hijackers did.” But of course then came the qualifiers: “In their war of independence, the Americans may not have targeted civilians, but they did commit atrocities, and they did inflict collateral damage on civilians.” And of course there was that little matter of the American Indians.
Alam seemed surprised that people would take exception to his analogy: “I have since been wondering why my suggestion that al-Qaeda--like the American colonists before them--was leading an Islamic insurgency has provoked such a storm of vicious attacks.”
After retailing some of the differences, he complains: “But this cannot obscure the fact that both were insurgencies, even though al-Qaeda for now uses different methods. I might add, more abhorrent methods. But this is not the first time that insurgents have used such methods. The Zionists did so against the British and more massively against the Palestinians; several of them went on to lead Israel. So did the Irish, the Algerians and South Africans. Nelson Mandela, once jailed as a terrorist, is now the greatest world statesman.”
But of course, none of that, despite Alam’s showy bewilderment, made his comparison contemptible. What did, in case anyone missed it, was his utter lack of a moral compass. Of course, Alam, being a good Saidist, would probably dismiss as “Orientalist” any suggestion that the jihadist imperative is morally flawed, or, if he imbibes the fashionable relativism of the academy, would deny that it can be judged at all.
But in the real world we know how to distinguish Jesus from Hitler, and the Sharia from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Alam’s assumption that an Al-Qaeda victory would bring freedom and unity to the Islamic world assumes a society that consigns women and non-Muslims to all manner of misery, and puts a straitjacket on free inquiry, freedom of conscience, and the human soul.
Al-Qaeda and the rest see the implementation of Sharia as the goal of their striving, which in itself places them on the other side of the moral divide from the men who fought and died to secure “liberty and justice for all,” however imperfectly these principles were applied after their victory. Yes, Professor, Al-Qaeda is fighting for freedom as they see it. So were the Nazis, striving to free Germany from the so-called “Jewish threat” and the encirclement of hostile powers. But someone who wrote in 1938 about the Nazis’ returning dignity to the German people would have deserved the condemnation of free men, just as Shahid Alam deserves that condemnation now.
Should he be hounded and threatened? Of course not. I would like to see a return of moral sensibility to the academy, so that his case would be examined just as Nazi sympathizers were scrutinized in the 1930s. But in the meantime, let him talk. The more he does, the more I hope he will help awaken Americans to what we have allowed to happen to American universities, and what we are up against in general.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
John Herreid: Distorted Reality- Communism and the Movies
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com
Kids walk to and from the university near my workplace every day. Usually they dress casually, with t-shirts and jeans. Shirts express everything from devotion to a particular brand of beer to religious affiliation, but the face that is seen most often is that of Communist revolutionary Che Guevara. Fascism is reviled worldwide, but the equally evil system of Communism isn’t seen as a threat, even after a century of violence, death, and religious persecution.
Why is this?
The answer, at least in the United States, is partly because of Hollywood. Stars and directors have flocked to have their pictures taken with dictator Fidel Castro (Oscar-winners Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Steven Spielberg among them.)
A recent example: Robert Redford, the popular actor who starred in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is the producer of the new movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, which purports to be a factual tale of a young Che and a friend trekking across South America in the 1950’s. Inspired by the suffering he sees, the saintly Che becomes a revolutionary. The massacres and murders that he ordered as a military leader are never mentioned, or the religious persecution that followed in his wake.
But it wasn’t always this way. During that supposedly dark age known as the 1950’s, Communists within the movie business were exposed and blacklisted. Zealous patriots like Ronald Reagan testified of the perceived threat of Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
Times change though, and by the time the 1960’s rolled around, the once blacklisted writers and directors were back in the saddle. One of the most powerful and acclaimed movies of that era was Spartacus. Directed by Stanley Kubrick and written for the screen by Dalton Trumbo (a formerly blacklisted screenwriter) it showed used an underlying message of class struggle that came straight from the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
Motion pictures shape how people see issues—even intelligent viewers can be swayed by a deftly portrayed plot, which is why dictators like Adolf Hitler sought the help of talented filmmakers to get his message across.
In the current climate of Hollywood, it would be just as hard to make an anti-Communist film that would be accepted by critics as it would have been to make a mainstream pro-Communist film in 1954. For example, the 1980’s John Milius’ film Red Dawn, showing a fictional invasion of America by Russian and South American Communists, was denounced by critics as “fascist.”
It is ironic that an industry that is celebrated for creativity and freedom of thought is caught up in such a lock-step when it comes to political statement. After Steven Spielberg visited Cuba recently, the only Hollywood criticism he got came from actor Robert Duvall. Duvall acknowledged that he would probably be blacklisted from Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studios for speaking out on the issue, but felt that someone had to say something: "Spielberg went down there recently and said, 'The best seven hours I ever spent was actually with Fidel Castro.' Now, what I want to ask him [is] 'Would you consider building a little annex on the Holocaust museum, or at least across the street, to honor the dead Cubans that Castro killed?”
For the most part, it’s only outside the Hollywood system that criticism is allowed. The most thoughtful assessment of Communism in movies of the past year was The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian film about a dying professor who rethinks his radical view on religion, politics and family. At one point he recalls congratulating a Chinese woman on Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”, not realizing that the woman had lost her family and nearly died herself during the violence and terror that accompanied the phenomenon. The independent film presents an honesty that is too frank for most in Hollywood today.
From a Christian point of view, Communism has always been a failure. It has always gone hand-in-hand with suppression and persecution of religious belief, and has produced some of the most violent anti-Catholic propaganda the world has seen.
The renowned Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn discussed the essence of socialist Communism in an interview with biographer Joseph Pearce.
"In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."
So, just as we must be careful that we do not allow ourselves to be enraptured by the idealization of violence and sexual immorality that is shown on movie screens, we also have to be cautious of how we allow our political outlook to be influenced by the message of films. What may seem innocuous to many because of a lack of obvious immoral content may be poisonous in its ideology.
And that is the sort of influence that leads idealistic young people to glorify persecution and murder through a t-shirt they wear, not seeing that the message is a seductive poison.
Kids walk to and from the university near my workplace every day. Usually they dress casually, with t-shirts and jeans. Shirts express everything from devotion to a particular brand of beer to religious affiliation, but the face that is seen most often is that of Communist revolutionary Che Guevara. Fascism is reviled worldwide, but the equally evil system of Communism isn’t seen as a threat, even after a century of violence, death, and religious persecution.
Why is this?
The answer, at least in the United States, is partly because of Hollywood. Stars and directors have flocked to have their pictures taken with dictator Fidel Castro (Oscar-winners Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Steven Spielberg among them.)
A recent example: Robert Redford, the popular actor who starred in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is the producer of the new movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, which purports to be a factual tale of a young Che and a friend trekking across South America in the 1950’s. Inspired by the suffering he sees, the saintly Che becomes a revolutionary. The massacres and murders that he ordered as a military leader are never mentioned, or the religious persecution that followed in his wake.
But it wasn’t always this way. During that supposedly dark age known as the 1950’s, Communists within the movie business were exposed and blacklisted. Zealous patriots like Ronald Reagan testified of the perceived threat of Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
Times change though, and by the time the 1960’s rolled around, the once blacklisted writers and directors were back in the saddle. One of the most powerful and acclaimed movies of that era was Spartacus. Directed by Stanley Kubrick and written for the screen by Dalton Trumbo (a formerly blacklisted screenwriter) it showed used an underlying message of class struggle that came straight from the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
Motion pictures shape how people see issues—even intelligent viewers can be swayed by a deftly portrayed plot, which is why dictators like Adolf Hitler sought the help of talented filmmakers to get his message across.
In the current climate of Hollywood, it would be just as hard to make an anti-Communist film that would be accepted by critics as it would have been to make a mainstream pro-Communist film in 1954. For example, the 1980’s John Milius’ film Red Dawn, showing a fictional invasion of America by Russian and South American Communists, was denounced by critics as “fascist.”
It is ironic that an industry that is celebrated for creativity and freedom of thought is caught up in such a lock-step when it comes to political statement. After Steven Spielberg visited Cuba recently, the only Hollywood criticism he got came from actor Robert Duvall. Duvall acknowledged that he would probably be blacklisted from Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studios for speaking out on the issue, but felt that someone had to say something: "Spielberg went down there recently and said, 'The best seven hours I ever spent was actually with Fidel Castro.' Now, what I want to ask him [is] 'Would you consider building a little annex on the Holocaust museum, or at least across the street, to honor the dead Cubans that Castro killed?”
For the most part, it’s only outside the Hollywood system that criticism is allowed. The most thoughtful assessment of Communism in movies of the past year was The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian film about a dying professor who rethinks his radical view on religion, politics and family. At one point he recalls congratulating a Chinese woman on Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”, not realizing that the woman had lost her family and nearly died herself during the violence and terror that accompanied the phenomenon. The independent film presents an honesty that is too frank for most in Hollywood today.
From a Christian point of view, Communism has always been a failure. It has always gone hand-in-hand with suppression and persecution of religious belief, and has produced some of the most violent anti-Catholic propaganda the world has seen.
The renowned Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn discussed the essence of socialist Communism in an interview with biographer Joseph Pearce.
"In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."
So, just as we must be careful that we do not allow ourselves to be enraptured by the idealization of violence and sexual immorality that is shown on movie screens, we also have to be cautious of how we allow our political outlook to be influenced by the message of films. What may seem innocuous to many because of a lack of obvious immoral content may be poisonous in its ideology.
And that is the sort of influence that leads idealistic young people to glorify persecution and murder through a t-shirt they wear, not seeing that the message is a seductive poison.
Dennis Prager: Better Answers- The Case for Judeo-Christian Values, Part I
By Dennis Prager
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 4, 2005
With this first column of 2005, I inaugurate a periodic series of columns devoted to explaining and making the case for what are called Judeo-Christian values.
There is an epic battle taking place in the world over what value system humanity will embrace. There are essentially three competitors: European secularism, American Judeo-Christianity and Islam. I have described this battle in previous columns.
Now, it is time to make the case for Judeo-Christian, specifically biblical, values. I believe they are the finest set of values to guide the lives of both individuals and societies. Unfortunately, they are rarely rationally explained -- even among Jewish and Christian believers, let alone to nonbelievers and members of other faiths.
So this is the beginning of an admittedly ambitious project. Vast numbers of people are profoundly disoriented as to what is good and what is bad. Just to give one example: Take the moral confusion over the comparative worth of human and animal life.
The majority of American students I have asked since 1970 whether they would save their dog or a stranger have voted against the stranger.
A Tucson, Ariz., woman in late 2004 sent firefighters into her burning home telling them that her three babies were inside. The babies for whom the firemen risked their lives were the woman's three cats.
The best-known animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), funded by the best educated in our society, has launched an international campaign titled "Holocaust on your plate," which equates the barbecuing of millions of chickens with the cremating of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. To PETA and its supporters, there is no difference between chicken life and human life.
Only a very morally confused age could produce so many people who do not recognize the immeasurable distance between human and animal worth. We live in that age.
We do in large measure because values based on God and the Bible have been replaced by secular values. The result was predicted by the British thinker G.K. Chesterton at the turn of the 20th century: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."
Yes, the moral record of Christian Europe is a mixed one -- especially vis-Ã -vis its one continuous religious minority -- Jews. And one has to be quite naive to believe that belief in God and the Bible guarantees moral clarity, let alone moral behavior.
But Chesterton was right. The collapse of Christianity in Europe led to the horrors of Nazism and Communism. And to the moral confusions of the present -- such as the moral equation of the free United States with the totalitarian Soviet Union, or of life-loving Israel with its death-loving enemies.
The oft-cited charge that religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is a widely believed lie. Secular successors to Christianity have slaughtered and enslaved more people than all religions in history (though significant elements within a non-Judeo-Christian religion, Islam, slaughter and enslave today, and if not stopped in Sudan and elsewhere could match Nazism or Communism).
In fact, it was a secular Jew, the great German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who understood that despite its anti-Semitism and other moral failings, Christianity in Europe prevented the wholesale slaughter of human beings that became routine with Christianity's demise. In 1834, 99 years before Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, Heine warned:
"A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem harmless and carefree. Christianity restrained the martial ardor for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman [the cross] is shattered, savagery will rise again. . . . "
What is needed today is a rationally and morally persuasive case for embracing the values that come from the Bible. This case must be more compelling than the one made for anti-biblical values that is presented throughout the Western world's secular educational institutions and media (news media, film and television).
That is what I intend to do. Events in the news will compel columns on those events, but I do not believe that anything I can do with my life can match the importance of making the case for guiding one's life and one's society by the values of the Bible. As a Jew, by "biblical" I am referring to the Old Testament, but this should pose no problem to Christian readers, since this is the first part of their Bible as well. Indeed, as the greatest Jewish thinker, Maimonides, pointed out over 800 years ago, it is primarily Christians who have spread knowledge of the Jews' Bible to the human race.
I not only welcome responses, I value them -- equally from those who agree and those who disagree. I may be contacted through my Web site http://www.dennisprager.com/.
Stay tuned.
Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His Web site is http://www.dennisprager.com/. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, columnist and author of four books, including Think a Second Time (HarperCollins), containing 44 of his essays.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 4, 2005
With this first column of 2005, I inaugurate a periodic series of columns devoted to explaining and making the case for what are called Judeo-Christian values.
There is an epic battle taking place in the world over what value system humanity will embrace. There are essentially three competitors: European secularism, American Judeo-Christianity and Islam. I have described this battle in previous columns.
Now, it is time to make the case for Judeo-Christian, specifically biblical, values. I believe they are the finest set of values to guide the lives of both individuals and societies. Unfortunately, they are rarely rationally explained -- even among Jewish and Christian believers, let alone to nonbelievers and members of other faiths.
So this is the beginning of an admittedly ambitious project. Vast numbers of people are profoundly disoriented as to what is good and what is bad. Just to give one example: Take the moral confusion over the comparative worth of human and animal life.
The majority of American students I have asked since 1970 whether they would save their dog or a stranger have voted against the stranger.
A Tucson, Ariz., woman in late 2004 sent firefighters into her burning home telling them that her three babies were inside. The babies for whom the firemen risked their lives were the woman's three cats.
The best-known animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), funded by the best educated in our society, has launched an international campaign titled "Holocaust on your plate," which equates the barbecuing of millions of chickens with the cremating of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. To PETA and its supporters, there is no difference between chicken life and human life.
Only a very morally confused age could produce so many people who do not recognize the immeasurable distance between human and animal worth. We live in that age.
We do in large measure because values based on God and the Bible have been replaced by secular values. The result was predicted by the British thinker G.K. Chesterton at the turn of the 20th century: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."
Yes, the moral record of Christian Europe is a mixed one -- especially vis-Ã -vis its one continuous religious minority -- Jews. And one has to be quite naive to believe that belief in God and the Bible guarantees moral clarity, let alone moral behavior.
But Chesterton was right. The collapse of Christianity in Europe led to the horrors of Nazism and Communism. And to the moral confusions of the present -- such as the moral equation of the free United States with the totalitarian Soviet Union, or of life-loving Israel with its death-loving enemies.
The oft-cited charge that religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is a widely believed lie. Secular successors to Christianity have slaughtered and enslaved more people than all religions in history (though significant elements within a non-Judeo-Christian religion, Islam, slaughter and enslave today, and if not stopped in Sudan and elsewhere could match Nazism or Communism).
In fact, it was a secular Jew, the great German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who understood that despite its anti-Semitism and other moral failings, Christianity in Europe prevented the wholesale slaughter of human beings that became routine with Christianity's demise. In 1834, 99 years before Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, Heine warned:
"A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem harmless and carefree. Christianity restrained the martial ardor for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman [the cross] is shattered, savagery will rise again. . . . "
What is needed today is a rationally and morally persuasive case for embracing the values that come from the Bible. This case must be more compelling than the one made for anti-biblical values that is presented throughout the Western world's secular educational institutions and media (news media, film and television).
That is what I intend to do. Events in the news will compel columns on those events, but I do not believe that anything I can do with my life can match the importance of making the case for guiding one's life and one's society by the values of the Bible. As a Jew, by "biblical" I am referring to the Old Testament, but this should pose no problem to Christian readers, since this is the first part of their Bible as well. Indeed, as the greatest Jewish thinker, Maimonides, pointed out over 800 years ago, it is primarily Christians who have spread knowledge of the Jews' Bible to the human race.
I not only welcome responses, I value them -- equally from those who agree and those who disagree. I may be contacted through my Web site http://www.dennisprager.com/.
Stay tuned.
Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His Web site is http://www.dennisprager.com/. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, columnist and author of four books, including Think a Second Time (HarperCollins), containing 44 of his essays.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Orthodoxy Today- Masculinity and the Priesthood
Here's a link to an article on Maculinity and the Priesthood from OrthodoxyToday.org...it's a very fine piece but a bit too lengthy to put the entire text here...have at it.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/PencePriesthood.shtml
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/PencePriesthood.shtml
John Leo: Revealing Wesleyan
John Leo (archive)
January 3, 2005
http://www.townhall.com
In the fall of 2000, I promised my daughter the freshman that I wouldn’t write about Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.) until she graduated. As a result, you readers learned nothing from me about the naked dorm, the transgender dorm, the queer prom, the pornography-for-credit course, the obscene sidewalk chalking, the campus club named crudely for a woman’s private part, or the appearance on campus of a traveling anti-Semitic roadshow, loosely described as a pro-Palestinian conference.
Instead of hot news items like these, you usually just hear that Wesleyan is very “diverse.” Newsweek once hailed the school as the “hottest” diversity campus in America, apparently using the word diversity in its normal campus meaning of “no diversity at all.” A one-liner about the campus is that “Wesleyan is so diverse that you can meet people here from almost every neighborhood in Manhattan.” And the students tend to have opinions from every known corner of MoveOn.org.
After the 2000 election, my daughter told me that 80 percent of the students had voted for Al Gore. “Bush got only 20 percent of the vote?” I asked. “No, Dad,” she explained, “the 20 percent was for Nader.” Visiting speakers who challenge any aspect of campus orthodoxy are as rare as woolly mammoths. However, columnist Nat Hentoff, whose son had gone to Wesleyan, showed up in 2002 and criticized the lack of intellectual diversity and free speech.
At a Manhattan holiday party last week, hosted by a friend with Wesleyan ties, I overheard my daughter explaining that no real debate takes place on campus. This was a major frustration, since she is feisty and brilliant and loves to argue ideas. She is politically liberal but wonders how Democrats of her generation will be able to speak convincingly to the middle of the political spectrum when so many of them shun the complexity of arguments and simply spout the party line.
Two years ago the Argus, the student newspaper, ran a survey and found that 32 percent of the students feel “uncomfortable speaking their opinion.” Orthodoxy plays a role, of course, but so does an exaggerated fear of giving offense. Identity politics is so strong that criticizing other students’ ideas can seem like a faux pas, if not a challenge to their core identity. Better to keep your head down and stick to standard opinions.
The naked dorm and the porn course were both examples of Wesleyan’s determination to accommodate as much sexual confusion as possible. The porn course, which had some students filming S&M scenarios, ended when the teacher died. The popularity of the naked dorm, which featured nude wine and cheese parties, seems to have faded. “I just sometimes feel the need to be nude,” a Wesleyan male told the New York Times in 2000. “If I feel the need to take off my pants, I take my pants off.” The obscene chalkings, which included colorful references to the sexual practices of professors, are now forbidden, possibly because they were upsetting donors and enraging some faculty.
But the Wesleyan campaign to stamp out diversity continues, this time in a move against fraternities. The university is pressuring its frats to accept women as members or pay a stiff financial price. The antifraternity campaign is standard on the politically correct campus these days, usually with an announced aim of reining in a boozy, sexist, right-wing culture. But this is Wesleyan, which has no right-wing culture and no sexist, out-of-control frats. The Argus has quoted gays and women saying mild and kind things about the Wesleyan frats, some of which are receptive to gays and set rooms aside for female residents. Much of the opposition to the frats seems to depend on the gross national image of fraternities, not the essentially harmless frats at Wesleyan. The administration and radical feminists oppose the frats for violating the campus nondiscrimination rule by not allowing women as members. However, they don’t bother to apply the same objection to Womanist House (a residence for females) or Malcolm X House, which caters to blacks.
I should add that I think my daughter got a decent education at Wesleyan. You can do this if you are strong-minded, independent, and willing to pick your courses very carefully. But admission to the university should come with a warning label: If you are fainthearted, go somewhere else.
©2004 Universal Press Syndicate
Contact John Leo Read Leo's biography
January 3, 2005
http://www.townhall.com
In the fall of 2000, I promised my daughter the freshman that I wouldn’t write about Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.) until she graduated. As a result, you readers learned nothing from me about the naked dorm, the transgender dorm, the queer prom, the pornography-for-credit course, the obscene sidewalk chalking, the campus club named crudely for a woman’s private part, or the appearance on campus of a traveling anti-Semitic roadshow, loosely described as a pro-Palestinian conference.
Instead of hot news items like these, you usually just hear that Wesleyan is very “diverse.” Newsweek once hailed the school as the “hottest” diversity campus in America, apparently using the word diversity in its normal campus meaning of “no diversity at all.” A one-liner about the campus is that “Wesleyan is so diverse that you can meet people here from almost every neighborhood in Manhattan.” And the students tend to have opinions from every known corner of MoveOn.org.
After the 2000 election, my daughter told me that 80 percent of the students had voted for Al Gore. “Bush got only 20 percent of the vote?” I asked. “No, Dad,” she explained, “the 20 percent was for Nader.” Visiting speakers who challenge any aspect of campus orthodoxy are as rare as woolly mammoths. However, columnist Nat Hentoff, whose son had gone to Wesleyan, showed up in 2002 and criticized the lack of intellectual diversity and free speech.
At a Manhattan holiday party last week, hosted by a friend with Wesleyan ties, I overheard my daughter explaining that no real debate takes place on campus. This was a major frustration, since she is feisty and brilliant and loves to argue ideas. She is politically liberal but wonders how Democrats of her generation will be able to speak convincingly to the middle of the political spectrum when so many of them shun the complexity of arguments and simply spout the party line.
Two years ago the Argus, the student newspaper, ran a survey and found that 32 percent of the students feel “uncomfortable speaking their opinion.” Orthodoxy plays a role, of course, but so does an exaggerated fear of giving offense. Identity politics is so strong that criticizing other students’ ideas can seem like a faux pas, if not a challenge to their core identity. Better to keep your head down and stick to standard opinions.
The naked dorm and the porn course were both examples of Wesleyan’s determination to accommodate as much sexual confusion as possible. The porn course, which had some students filming S&M scenarios, ended when the teacher died. The popularity of the naked dorm, which featured nude wine and cheese parties, seems to have faded. “I just sometimes feel the need to be nude,” a Wesleyan male told the New York Times in 2000. “If I feel the need to take off my pants, I take my pants off.” The obscene chalkings, which included colorful references to the sexual practices of professors, are now forbidden, possibly because they were upsetting donors and enraging some faculty.
But the Wesleyan campaign to stamp out diversity continues, this time in a move against fraternities. The university is pressuring its frats to accept women as members or pay a stiff financial price. The antifraternity campaign is standard on the politically correct campus these days, usually with an announced aim of reining in a boozy, sexist, right-wing culture. But this is Wesleyan, which has no right-wing culture and no sexist, out-of-control frats. The Argus has quoted gays and women saying mild and kind things about the Wesleyan frats, some of which are receptive to gays and set rooms aside for female residents. Much of the opposition to the frats seems to depend on the gross national image of fraternities, not the essentially harmless frats at Wesleyan. The administration and radical feminists oppose the frats for violating the campus nondiscrimination rule by not allowing women as members. However, they don’t bother to apply the same objection to Womanist House (a residence for females) or Malcolm X House, which caters to blacks.
I should add that I think my daughter got a decent education at Wesleyan. You can do this if you are strong-minded, independent, and willing to pick your courses very carefully. But admission to the university should come with a warning label: If you are fainthearted, go somewhere else.
©2004 Universal Press Syndicate
Contact John Leo Read Leo's biography
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)