'Magic' provokes thought

Bruce Springsteen's new album reflects on current events

By Stuart Poulter
The Santa Clara
SCU's weekly undergraduate newspaper since 1922

Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: Scene
Originally published: 10/18/07 at 1:09 AM PST
Last update: 10/18/07 at 1:07 AM PST

When New Jersey's prodigal rock and roll son, Bruce Springsteen, stated in an interview that "the best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with," he must have had an album like his newly released work, "Magic," in mind.

With the Oct. 2 release of "Magic," Springsteen and the E Street Band answer both critics and fans with various types of songwriting that Springsteen has made his own since his debut in 1972.

While many would consider Springsteen a product of a past generation, his music has continually found resonance today among younger audiences brought up on his music by their parents.

As students, we often look to music that can inspire and is visionary in scope. Springsteen's music, from his down-and-out Jersey shore beginnings to his post-9/11 musical explorations of modern America, allows for such a visionary process to continue and has made his audiences understand themselves, and their world, that much better.

Beginning with his invigorating but thought-provoking single, "Radio Nowhere," Springsteen paints for us a picture of America lost within the image of itself, looking for a common belief and truth to hold onto amid the chaos of our present world.

The third song on the album, "Livin' in the Future," harkens back to the Springsteen of the "Born to Run" era, with Clarence Clemons blaring away on his saxophone and Stevie Van Zandt's rhythmic guitar playing. Together, they provide the edgy, Jersey sound that made "The Boss" and the E Street Band a staple of the rock scene in the late 1970s.



Springsteen at Madison Square Garden (10/17/07)

The political undertones of such songs as "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Devil's Arcade" provide an '80s flashback to Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." by depicting disparate, forgotten people struggling to come to grips with the unforgiving world they find themselves in.

His message is applicable to current events -- from the political unreliability of our leaders, to the tainted international image of America to the more frequent lack of appreciation shown toward U.S. soldiers.

While relatively blatant in his message about all things social, political and romantic, such as the experience of the Iraq War and the loss of a common belief in the America he had grown up in, Springsteen reaches out to all Americans "searching for a world with some soul." Within the words of "Magic," we find Springsteen calling out to all Americans to question, to reach for a common ideal bigger than ourselves and to regain the unique energy that has allowed us to survive and prosper.

When a question of his patriotism came up upon the release of "Magic," Springsteen responded in a "60 Minutes" interview by saying: "Silence is unpatriotic ... I still see America as a beacon of hope and possibility ... I'm interested in the country we live in and the country we'll leave to our kids."

In the end, Bruce Springsteen's music is about making you feel something, whether good or bad, acting upon the emotions of the times, and falling back upon the human element of the American Dream.

"Magic" showcases Springsteen's innate ability to make Americans think about ourselves in a way we never knew possible.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are currently on tour in the U.S. through November.

They will be performing at the Oracle Arena in Oakland on Thursday, Oct. 25, and Friday, Oct. 26, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available through www.ticketmaster.com.

Grade: A-

Contact Stuart Poulter at spoulter@scu.edu.

BRUCE REGAINS 'MAGIC' TOUCH AT GARDEN

New York Post
October 18, 2007 -- WHILE the Bruce Springsteen tour featuring his recent CD "Magic" has been anything but, the Boss and his E Street sidekicks found their mojo last night at Madison Square Garden.

Compared to the spotty concert last week on home turf at the Meadowlands, peppered with technical bugs and derailed by a lackluster audience, the Garden gig was a total triumph for E Street - together with the Boss for their first full-scale tour in five years.

At the Garden, the band was all confidence; the concert flow was powerful and steady; and everyone from Bruce on down was determined to make a great show.

They did.

As he has at most of the stops on the tour, Springsteen checked the Garden's vital signs at the start of the show with the screamed-out question: "Is there anybody alive out there? Is there anybody alive?"

On cue, the sold-out house roared. and the band launched into "Radio Nowhere" the power rocker off of "Magic."

That opening number was a near-perfect introduction to what followed during the 21/2-hour performance. All the elements of a classic Springsteen were in place, from the muscular musical interaction between band and man, to the Boss' gut-busting vocals, during which he clamped his eyes shut and contorted his mug.

As "Radio" raged, drummer Max Weinberg was a machine who tracked Springsteen's moves so precisely that each of the Boss' steps landed on a beat. Guitar ace Steven Van Zandt showed he's more than just a pretty TV mobster, with some very flashy six-string fretwork.



He also sang well, even as he suffered the spray when he and Bruce shared a lone microphone center stage.

Then there was the Big Man - Clarence Clemons - who did a Gabriel-sax solo that brought the house down.

And that was just the first song.

The rest of the set was as good or better, from "The Ties That Bind" to "Adam Raised a Cain" to one of the best versions of "Promised Land" that's ever battered the Garden.

The set also mixed in a load of new "Magic" material, some of it familiar enough to conjure a sense of déjà vu. That happened when the band played the very political "Livin' in the Future," which, in concert, sounded remarkably close to the Bruce classic "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out."

When Bruce and company are hitting on all cylinders, as they did last night, few acts in music can come close to matching their ability to rock an arena. It was as if 58-year-old Springsteen was trying to prove all night that he and his pals can still stay tightly wound for an entire concert - just like when they were kids.

dan.aquilante@nypost.com



SET LIST

Radio Nowhere
The Ties That Bind
Lonesome Day
Gypsy Biker
Magic
Reason to Believe
Adam Raised a Cain
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
The Promised Land
Brilliant Disguise
Backstreets
Darlington County
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Girls in Their Summer Clothes
Thundercrack
Born to Run
Dancing in the Dark
American Land

Jeff Jacoby: Big Brother at School

Boston Globe
October 17, 2007

"FREEDOM of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty . . . must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever," the party's national platform declared. "We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government."

That ringing endorsement of parental supremacy in education was adopted by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1892, which just goes to show what was possible before the Democratic Party was taken hostage by the teachers unions. (Wondrous to relate, the platform also warned that "the tendency to centralize all power at the federal capital has become a menace," blasted barriers to free trade as "robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few," and pledged "relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure.")

Today, on education as on so much else, the Democrats sing from a different hymnal. When the party's presidential candidates debated at Dartmouth College recently, they were asked about a controversial incident in Lexington, Mass., where a second-grade teacher, to the dismay of several parents, had read her young students a story celebrating same-sex marriage. Were the candidates "comfortable" with that?

"Yes, absolutely," former senator John Edwards promptly replied. "I want my children . . . to be exposed to all the information . . . even in second grade . . . because I don't want to impose my view. Nobody made me God. I don't get to decide on behalf of my family or my children. . . . I don't get to impose on them what it is that I believe is right." None of the other candidates disagreed, even though most of them say they oppose same-sex marriage.

Thus in a little over 100 years, the Democratic Party - and much of the Republican Party - has been transformed from a champion of "parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" to a party whose leaders believe that parents "don't get to impose" their views and values on what their kids are taught in school. Do American parents see anything wrong with that? Apparently not: The majority of them dutifully enroll their children in government-operated schools, where the only views and values permitted are the ones prescribed by the state.

But controversies like the one in Lexington are reminders that Big Brother's ideas about what and how children should be taught are not always those of mom and dad.

Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others are devout believers. Some place great emphasis on math and science; others stress history and foreign languages. Americans hold disparate opinions on everything from the truth of the Bible to the meaning of the First Amendment, from the usefulness of rote memorization to the significance of music and art. With parents so often in loud disagreement, why should children be locked into a one-size-fits-all, government-knows-best model of education?

Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation's entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Yet the government's control of 90 percent of the nation's schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned.

But we should be concerned. Not just because the quality of government schooling is so often poor or its costs so high. Not just because public schools are constantly roiled by political storms. Not just because schools backed by the power of the state are not accountable to parents and can ride roughshod over their concerns. And not just because the public-school monopoly, like most monopolies, resists change, innovation, and excellence.

All of that is true, but a more fundamental truth is this: In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children's minds and character. As we wouldn't trust the state to feed our kids, or to clothe them, or to get them to bed on time, neither should we trust the state to teach them.

What 19th-century Democrats understood, 21st-century Americans need to relearn: Education is too important to be left to the government.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Thomas Sowell: Crime and Rhetoric

October 17, 2007
http://www.realclearpolitics.com

Oakland, California, continues to suffer the high crime rate, and especially the high murder rate, which has long afflicted that city. Judging by a recent speech by its current mayor, long-time leftist Ron Dellums, it can look forward to a future all too much like its past.

Why is Oakland so crime-ridden? According to Mayor Dellums, "we have closed our eyes to the injustices and inequities, and now we are reaping the wild winds of that disregard for a whole range of people."

This is the "root causes of crime" rhetoric of the 1960s, still going strong on the left today, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary that have accumulated in the decades since then.

That is what makes Oakland's problem more than just Oakland's problem -- or even America's problem. The same kind of thinking prevails on the left in other countries, producing the same kinds of dire results.

As British writer Peter Hitchens put it: "England is rapidly becoming a place where the good are afraid of the bad and the bad are not afraid of anything."

He also said, "The sheer concrete-headed stupidity of most political statements about crime defies belief." Both statements would apply as much in Oakland as they do in London -- and in many other places in between.

A newspaper account of Oakland mayor Ron Dellums' speech said that he was "clearly comfortable with what he was conveying and speaking without notes."

Why should he be uncomfortable or need notes to be repeating the same politically correct notions that the entire left -- here and overseas -- has been repeating like a mantra for nearly half a century? Would you need notes to recite the alphabet?

The idea that "injustices and inequities" explain crime goes back more than two centuries. You can find it in William Godwin's 1793 book, "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice" in England and even earlier in a number of writers in France.

It is the hallmark of the left around the world.

While such ideas have been around for centuries, they did not become the dominant ideas among those making legal and political policy until the second half of the 20th century -- more specifically, the 1960s in the United States.

What was crime like in 1960, before these ideas took over in our courts and in the legislative and executive branches of government?

As of 1960, the murder rate had been going down for decades -- among blacks and whites alike -- and was just under half of what it had been back in 1934.

Were there no "injustices and inequities" in 1960 and in the prior decades? No one who is old enough to remember those times could believe that.

It was precisely the rise to power in the 1960s (in the courts as well as in politics) of those who believed that "injustices and inequities" were the causes of crime which marked a de-emphasis on law enforcement and imprisonment -- and marked one of the most dramatic increases in crime in our history.

Having declined for decades on end, the murder rate suddenly doubled between 1961 and 1974. The rate at which citizens became victims of violent crimes in general tripled.

Such trends began at different times in different countries but the patterns remained very similar. As the rates of imprisonment declined, crime rates soared -- whether in England, Australia, New Zealand or the United States.

After a whole generation of crime victims were sacrificed on the altar to the theories of the left, a political backlash produced higher rates of imprisonment -- and lower rates of crime -- in all these countries in the late 20th century.

We are still not back to where we were in 1960, as regards either the level of crime or the downward trend in murder rates. The notions of the left are still going strong in the media, in academia, and in politics.

The left is still comfortable talking about "injustices and inequities" -- even without notes -- and certainly without confronting the vast amount of evidence that they are wrong.

Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Film Review: "Eastern Promises"

Making good on 'Promises'

David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen team up to give us a violent, thrilling look at the Russian mob.

By Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Last update: September 20, 2007 – 5:17 PM



Viggo Mortensen and Armin Mueller-Stahl in Focus Features' Eastern Promises - 2007

The relentlessly intelligent, stunningly violent "Eastern Promises" unfolds in London neighborhoods controlled by Russian crime families trafficking in drugs, sex and murder. It's an illicit subculture of hard, silent men like Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a stoical driver and fixer whose prison tattoos reflect a brutal criminal career. The film is suitably devious, surrendering its secrets gradually, like Russian nesting dolls whose exteriors, pulled apart, reveal different figures inside.

Shifting identities have been a central theme in David Cronenberg's films, and here, re-teamed with his star from 2005's "A History of Violence," he explores the idea in the context of a sophisticated, intriguing mob thriller. His latest offering evokes the emotional themes, and power, of "The Godfather."

Naomi Watts plays Anna, a nurse who enters this subterranean world when a 14-year-old Russian girl she is attending dies in childbirth. Concerned that the unidentified girl's newborn will go into foster care unless relatives can be found, Anna takes the young woman's diary to her own uncle, a Russian émigré, for translation. One look at the book is enough for him to warn her to mind her own business.



Anna persists, tracing the girl to a cozy old-world restaurant whose grandfatherly owner Semyon (Armin Muller-Stahl) hosts banquets of czarist lavishness. Semyon sends her away with promises of help, and on her way she crosses paths with the mysterious, coldblooded Nikolai and his boss, Semyon's volatile playboy son Kirill (Vincent Cassell).

The relationship between the men is complex. Nikolai keeps a watchful, protective eye on Kirill, a hotheaded but weak eastern European synthesis of Fredo and Sonny Corleone. Kirill simultaneously admires and resents his babysitter. He overgenerously insists that Nikolai sample the wares when they visit whorehouses, and demands to watch while he does. Nikolai, ambitious to rise in the mafia, impassively complies. The men's fraught rapport is further complicated because Semyon scarcely disguises his preference for the capable ex-con over his own prodigal son.

As Anna's inquiries come uncomfortably close to the family, Nikolai is assigned to dissuade her. Mortensen's performance is so masterfully subtle and Cronenberg's direction so canny that it's impossible to guess whether he'll add her to the collection of corpses he has already dropped in the Thames.



Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts in Focus Features' Eastern Promises - 2007

There's not a false moment in Steve Knight's exquisitely plotted script, which gives Watts much more than the usual stand-around-and-look-worried woman's role. The film is taut with the threat of violence, and when it erupts, it's hand-to-hand, intimate, inelegant and unflinchingly savage. In a scene that redefines screen fights the way "Bullitt" and "The French Connection" rewrote the rules for car chases, two knife-wielding goons enter a sauna to attack Nikolai, who although naked is far from defenseless. The show-stopping struggle will leave viewers feeling excited and shocked.

Cronenberg's fascination with the fragility of flesh and bone has spawned some indelible images, from the exploding heads of "Scanners" to the mangled bodies of car accident victims in "Crash," but this grimly realistic crime story raises the bar higher still. It's a mouthful of blood with a vodka chaser.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186

Film Review: "Eastern Promises"

Mortensen is driving force in Cronenberg film
By Ty Burr

Boston Globe
Published: 09/14/2007


In "Eastern Promises," David Cronenberg's hellacious new Russian mob movie, Viggo Mortensen finally comes of age as an actor and a movie star.

He plays Nikolai Luzhin, an underling in London's Vory V Zakone criminal organization and a man whose only asset would seem to be that he's best friends with the boss's son. That's only on paper, though. Although he has impressive skills in corpse disposal, Nikolai works as a driver, and when pressed he'll say that's all he is. In a sense he's right: Calm, alert, and frighteningly efficient, he's the figure who drives the plot and the fates of the film's other characters. He's the sudden death you don't see coming until it's too late.

Mortensen plays this role as if he had different blood chemistry than the rest of us. Nikolai remains eerily still until he's moved to act; then he glides forth with reptilian grace. Yet something still glows at the bottom of those half-lidded eyes - enough to suggest the cobra has a soul.

Enough, too, to attract Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), even when her instincts tell her to run the other way. British-born but of Russian descent, Anna is a midwife working at a North London hospital one night when a 14-year-old girl in heavy labor (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) is admitted. The girl dies, leaving behind an infant daughter and a diary written in Cyrillic, which Anna can't read.

A postcard in the diary will lead her to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl, the father in "Shine"), an aging and elegant restaurateur who doubles as the ruthless head of the Vory mob. This is also where Anna meets Semyon's excitable son and heir to the empire, Kirill (the French actor Vincent Cassel), as well as Nikolai, initially a sinister figure on the sidelines.



At the mention of the girl's diary, the kingpin's ears prick up and Mueller-Stahl's calculated foxiness comes into play. Of course, he's willing to translate it for Anna, and wouldn't it help to know where she lives? No dummy, she soon senses she's standing at the threshold of a very dangerous universe.

"Eastern Promises" is a genre movie, then - a gangland drama - and it doesn't break free into a larger contemplation of morals and metaphysics the way Cronenberg's last film, "A History of Violence," did. Still, it shows the Canadian filmmaker working at a whole new level of confidence in what must be the fourth or fifth phase of a long career. Rather like Nikolai himself, "Promises" is alluring but heavy with imminent threat.

This being a Cronenberg film (with a sharp script by Steve Knight), there's a scene of appalling violence early on. It's a palate cleanser of sorts and a reminder that civilization is a thin skin over our animal nature. Indeed, animal nature is everywhere in "Eastern Promises," from the periodic eruptions of bloody mayhem to the revealed fate of the dead girl, a teenager from Ukraine lured to London by promises of a new life (thus the title) that ended in slavery.

Cronenberg has always been a director whose screen violence actually hurts, and in this film he extends the pain to include man's inhumanity to women. The world of the Vory V Zakone is macho and sealed off, a hidden order of prison tattoos and sexual bravado. Kirill is probably gay under endless layers of denial, and Cassel nicely shows the character whipsawing between a desperate crush on his friend and a rich boy's insolence. The actor knows he's playing the movie's Fredo Corleone, but he gives Kirill some of the sweaty, dangerous energy of an early Warner Bros. gangster, too.

Mortensen's Nikolai, by contrast, could come out of a Jean-Pierre Melville movie of the 1960s - one of those French Zen crime sagas like "Le Samourai," where silence is sexy and lethal. Unreadable behind his wraparound shades, Nikolai slicks his hair back in a devil-horned quiff and just waits. It's a performance of almost unbearable tension, erotically and otherwise. As Anna slowly realizes the full depravity of the situation and her own peril, Nikolai has the chance to become her knight. The attraction is there, but it wars with duty and self-preservation.

The storm finally breaks in a fight sequence, set in a Russian steam bath, that's an instant movie classic. It pits the naked Nikolai against two knife-wielding Chechens who aren't about to play fair, and, staged for maximum audience reaction, the scene's outrageous, punishing, gory, exploitative, absurdist, and thrilling beyond all measure. A woman I was sitting near - a die-hard Viggo fan - kept turning from the screen with shrieks of dismay then turning back for a peek at the star's kibbles and bits.

As the film's bruised innocent, Watts is very good, but "Eastern Promises" isn't about her so much as it's about the lengths men will go to plunder or protect. (That also covers Anna's Uncle Stepan, a bitter Russian émigré played by the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski.) Cronenberg and screenwriter Knight see brutality as the normal state of affairs, and fighting brutality as a mission that often works best in secret. The battle never ends, which perhaps explains why the movie's final scenes feel oddly abrupt and unsatisfying.

It's hard to leave Nikolai, though, burning a hole in the screen. Mortensen has played a king of Middle-earth and, for Cronenberg, a man with two lives. This is the first time, though, his performance seemed so much bigger than the film surrounding it. That he manages the feat with so few wasted gestures puts him in line with the greats.

Concert Review: Bruce Springsteen in Toronto

http://www.eyeweekly.com/daily/?p=1063
October 16th, 2007
Paul Isaacs
Comments [0]
Toronto Eye Weekly

“Bruce, take me now!” yelled a portly fortysomething guy in lumberjack shirt a few metres away from me, in the moments before “Born To Run.” Or maybe I’m lying — perhaps it was me who yelled it. As a self-confessed Bruce Springsteen obsessive, it’s hard for me to write objectively about a Springsteen/E Street Band live show. But in a year that’s already brought us lifetime-top-ten performances from Daft Punk and Prince, last night’s set at the Air Canada Centre was still something special. Maybe I’m just a lame Springsteen nerd — OK, I’m definitely a lame Springsteen nerd — but with a backup band as crack as E Street, a head-spinningly massive back catalogue of classics, and one of the most charismatic front men in show business, how could it fail to be?

There might have been no surprises at the ACC like Arcade Fire’s guest appearance in Ottawa on Sunday, but on the other hand, thank Christ for that. (What would you rather hear at a Springsteen concert: “Keep the Car Running” or “Incident on 57th Street“? Right.) Instead we got a straight set of favourites (”Candy’s Room”), obscurities (”Thundercrack“) and some decent cuts from Magic. New single “Radio Nowhere,” “Night” and “Lonesome Day” made for a passable opening trio, but the band really started kicking about half an hour in, with a bluesy take on Nebraska’s “Reason to Believe,” outrageously vamped-up to resemble AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie.”

Watching Bruce camp it up royally with a distorted microphone, sounding like nothing less than Jon Spencer’s fucked-up uncle, was a prime example of the classic Springsteen goof-off. What tends to get lost in the reports on Springsteen’s alleged influence on modern hipster bands is just what a fun performer he is. Age may have forced Bruce to cut down on the throat-killing between-song preacher patter, and jumping on the piano is now pretty much out of the question, but there’s still a simple joyousness to his live shows that none of his imitators (save perhaps The Hold Steady) have come even close to reproducing. The earnest troubadour aspect of The Boss’s persona — the aspect currently being imitated to death by Arcade Fire, The Killers, The National et al — is just one part of his act. But for every austere “Nebraska” there’s got be a rave-up like “Sherry Darling,” and for every plodding “Devils and Dust” there’s a glitzy pop bauble like “I’m Going Down.” (I don’t know about you, but I’d like Win Butler a whole lot more if he occasionally tried back-flipping on a trampoline.)

And then there’s the band. If Magic finds the E Street Band on unusually restrained form – with producer Brendan O’ Brien cutting back on Roy Bittan’s trademark high-end piano trills – then last night saw them back at their rollicking best, with Miami Steve and Springsteen’s homoerotic shared-microphone interplay kitsched-up to the max, and the wondrous enigma that is Clarence “Big Man” Clemons busting out one classic sax solo after another (although his playing did at one point remind of something else entirely.) Capping off the set with a bruising “Badlands” and an idiotically transcendent take on “The Rising,” Springsteen returned to encore with “Dancing in the Dark” and “Born to Run,” both performed with the house lights up on full — ideal for watching 20,000 audience members simultaneously go apeshit while singing to “strap your hands across my engines.”

If I were honest, I’d say that some of the Magic cuts could use a bit more oomph: “Livin’ in the Future” (already an obvious fan favourite) still needs a little practice, and “Long Walk Home” a little more bite. “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” on the other hand, sounded a lot more lively, with a much more committed vocal than on the staid recorded version. Still, it would be churlish to complain: The Boss is still The Boss, righteous, tacky and righteously tacky as ever.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: The Clinton Crime Family

October 16, 2007 12:00 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com

Bergler steals HRC 2008 credibility.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton did their online Sopranos spoof the night after the HBO show’s finale, they may have been trying to tell us something more than we realized at the time. The Clintons, sans the New Jersey accent, subtly yet unmistakably, were announcing: “We and our posse are back. Burglars and all.”

In fairness to the Clintons, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger is just one burglar. But when we’re talking national-security information, surely one is all you need to question a candidate’s credibility.

Berger, you may recall, was Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser. He is also the star of The Case of the Stuffed Socks. Now Hillary Clinton wants to sock it to you: He is a Clinton campaign foreign-policy adviser. The Democratic presidential candidate is treating Berger like a respectable foreign-policy expert — exactly, in other words, what he ceased to be when he acted like a common criminal with exceptional classified clearance at the National Archives in 2003.

While preparing the former President Clinton for his 9/11 Commission testimony (as well as preparing his own), the former national-security adviser stole top-secret national-defense documents from the National Archives, stuffing them in a briefcase and in his clothing. (Yes, his pants and socks. And yes, that sounds ridiculous. It was and is. Archives staff thought so too, which is why they investigated the former senior Clinton administration official.) He destroyed documents. He hid others — some at a nearby construction site. He would later lie, claiming it was all a mistake, blaming the removal and destruction on “sloppiness” — “an honest mistake,” he said, with former-presidential backing.

That the Hillary Clinton campaign would even take Berger’s phone calls at this point, never mind hold him close as an adviser, is an outrage. Moreover, it’s a bright red screeching siren signaling a huge judgment problem on Senator Clinton’s part.

Berger, for the record, wasn’t stealing old lunch menus for his scrapbook. While we don’t know everything he took (and in some cases destroyed), we know he did take drafts of what people familiar with it have described as a scathing “after-action report” done after the intelligence community failed to foil the millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, instead leaving it to an awake Customs agent to save the day. The report was a brutal internal review of our state of unreadiness—our vulnerability to domestic terrorism. A House Government Reform Committee investigation revealed that Berger had unsupervised access to uninventoried original documents on terrorism for which there were no duplicates.

So perhaps Mrs. Clinton is holding Berger close as a “thank you”: Thanks for making sure that some hard-hitting internal analysis of the Bill Clinton administration’s poor counterterrorism performance won’t become breaking news at some inconvenient moment on the way back to the White House. Or — as much as I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but one is left asking questions since the Clintons aren’t offering answers — maybe it’s because Berger simply knows too much, the kind of information that could hurt an aspiring President Clinton running on executive experience. That’s surely another reason to keep him on board.

Perhaps candidate Clinton feels the need to prove that she is up for a challenge. How, after all, can Hillary Clinton continue using the Democrats’ top talking point, i.e., the claim that they are the antidote to a “culture of corruption” in Washington? If Sandy Berger’s top-secret rampage isn’t corrupt, I don’t know what corrupt is.

However you view it, the facts are that the Berger case is weird, troubling, and mishandled. It’s been mishandled by the Clintonistas, who haven’t had an open-door policy on the classified after-action report. Berger hasn’t been in a rush to set the record straight, giving up his law license rather than let the D.C. bar do a thorough investigation. It’s been mishandled by the Bush administration: The Justice Department let Berger plea bargain, admitting guilt to a misdemeanor handling of classified information, slapping him with a $50,000 fine. No jail for Berger the Burglar.

Now, of course, the last time we left a Clinton administration, they had redefined the word “is,” so perhaps the Democrats’ First Family may be able to pull a disappearing act on an obvious case of criminal activity. Hillary may be able to get away with it. But for serious people, in serious times, it should disqualify her for the presidency.

© 2007, Newspaper Enterprise Assn

Jonah Goldberg: Why Be Pro-Life?

Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
October 16, 2007


I don't know if life begins at conception. I don't really know what "life" means. Consciousness? Possessing a soul? Well, if consciousness defines the issue, then life surely does not begin at conception. Not even the most adamant pro-lifer claims otherwise.

As for souls, I believe we have them, but I don't know how they work. Indeed, ensoulment -- the process by which God puts a soul in our bodies -- is a controversial topic among religious scholars, people who know a lot more about such things than I do. And I'm not sure any of them are right anyway.

If "life" simply means that fetuses are something more than inanimate objects, I'm with you. But that hardly seals the deal for me on the issue of abortion. After all, the world is filled with organisms that do not deserve any special consideration, let alone a claim on a human being's life or liberty.

In short, while I have great sympathy for "culture of life" arguments, if you tallied most of the above views on abortion, they'd appear to add up to my being pro-choice. And yet, when I get right down to it, I'm not. Why?

I've been trying to find my own answer to that question as the GOP comes to grips with the fact that its presidential front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, is pro-choice. I confess: A fully satisfactory answer eludes me, but I have enough of one to stay pro-life.

Part of my reasoning is politically pragmatic. Grover Norquist, the right-wing activist, once told my National Review colleague, David Freddoso, in an interview that anyone who can go to black-tie dinners and face the haranguing of rich donors for his pro-life stance has the backbone to support tax cuts too.

That's a crude way of putting it, but I know what he means. Being pro-life is so unfashionable, so uncool, I tend to trust politicians who are willing to hold the line.

This, in turn, points to why I have special contempt for antiabortion politicians who switch sides. Jesse Jackson used to call abortion "genocide." Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Dennis Kucinich and other pro-choicers all once championed the unborn. Did each of them revisit the moral, philosophical, scientific and theological issues involved and, after careful study, suddenly decide that abortion doesn't kill "babies" after all but, rather, merely evacuates "uterine contents"? I doubt it.

I could be wrong, obviously. But the fact that their conversions echoed the march of the Democratic Party and, for the most part, dovetailed with their own presidential ambitions suggests to me that they were willing to sanction the taking of what they had once believed to be innocent lives merely for political gain. That is disgusting.

Flip-flopping the other way (as George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney and others did) may be no less cynical. To pro-choice voters, it's surely deeply offensive to watch someone sacrifice the individual liberty of women for political expediency. But, morally, it just doesn't seem as bad to me.

Every day, the government restricts what you can do with your body, from the drugs you can take to the surgeries you can subject yourself to. In other words, the line of personal autonomy is often blurry and narrow. The line between life and death is supposed to be bright and wide. Once a politician takes a stand that a certain population -- be they fetuses, Jews, blacks or anybody else -- has the right to life, their motive for changing their minds should be a lot better than fear of losing support from NARAL and the New York Times.

And that gets me to my more philosophical or principled reason for being pro-life: I just don't know. I confess that I lack passion about debates over RU-486, Plan B and other measures that terminate a pregnancy in the first few hours or days after conception, because that's when I'm least sure that a life is at stake. But when it comes to, say, partial-birth abortion, I am adamantly pro-life. I don't know if a fertilized egg has rights. But I am convinced that a baby minutes, days or weeks before full term is, simply, a baby. And despite what you constantly hear, Roe vs. Wade doesn't recognize that fact.

In death penalty cases, "reasonable doubt" goes to the accused because unless we're certain, we must not risk an innocent's life. This logic goes out the window when it comes to abortion, unless you are 100% sure that babies only become human beings after the umbilical cord is cut. I don't see how you can be that sure, which is why I'm pro-life -- not because I'm certain, but because I'm not.

Mark Steyn: Doom if Saint Al loses carbs

The Australian
October 15, 2007

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors.

For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus."

I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15cm and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.

And nobody minds. His Honour was examining the vice-president's acclaimed crockumentary because the British Government, in its wisdom, has decided to force-feed it to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. It would be nice to think it would have to be preceded by a warning that any resemblance between this film and any actual planet living or dead is entirely coincidental, but it seems more likely that the Nobel Peace imprimatur will completely insulate the picture from even the most modest quibbles.

A schoolkid in Ontario was complaining the other day that, whatever subject you do, you have to sit through Gore's movie: It turns up in biology class, in geography, in physics, in history, in English.

Whatever you're studying, it's all you need to know. It fulfils the same role in the schoolhouses of the guilt-ridden developed world that the Koran does in Pakistani madrassas. Gore's rise is as remorseless as those sea levels. I assumed Gore's clammy embrace would do for the environmental movement what his belated endorsement had done for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential candidacy: kill it stone dead. But governor Dean was constrained by actual humdrum prosaic vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire. The ecochondriacs, by contrast, seem happiest when they're most unmoored from reality.

That's where Gore comes in. No matter how you raise the stakes ("It might take another 30 Kyotos", says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. "We are," warns Gore, "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe".



Wow. It's not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. You wouldn't happen to have the stats on that, would you? Universal "balance of energy" graphs for 1940 and 1873? Gore is the logical reductio of what the popular Australian blogger Tim Blair calls global warm-mongering: Worst-case scenario, with all the zeroes you want on the end, and then a few more for holes in the ozone layer as yet undreamt of. Anyone can, as the environmentalists advise, think globally and act locally, but only Gore thinks cosmically and acts not at all.

One can forgive youthful indiscretions, like his 1988 presidential candidacy, when he became the first and only politician in US history to hire a herd of cows for the launch of his campaign, positioning them attractively around him for the photo op at the supposed Gore "family farm". The contribution to global warming from increased methane from bovine flatulence in the Gore neighbourhood was no doubt "offset" by reduced flatulent emissions from whichever farm he'd hired the cows from: it was, in that sense, a "carbon-neutral" event.

But since then there's been a pronounced pattern of behaviour. In 2000, it was revealed that his tenant, Tracy Mayberry, has asked her distinguished landlord to fix the plumbing. The toilet overflowed and the tank was held together by bread bag ties. This was after Gore had inflicted federal toilet regulations on the rest of the country in the interest of water conservancy, yet he let his own tenant's lavatory overflow for months on end. Americans have to make do with cisterns that hold less than a supersized cup at McDonald's, but Environmental Boy had a Niagara-sized torrent running through his tenants' bathroom and down the stairs 24 hours a day. After Channel 5 in Nashville ran a story, he eventually called Tracy and invited himself to dinner so they could get to know each other. But Mayberry, a Democrat, told the vice-president he could "kiss my ass", which given the state of sanitation on the property was probably not a wise idea.

An isolated incident? Well, the average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000kWh.

221,000kWh? What's he doing in there? As his spokesperson explained it, his high energy usage derives from his brave calls for low energy usage. He's burning up all that electricity by sending out faxes every couple of minutes urging you wastrels to use less electricity. Insofar as he's made any contribution to global peace, it's in persuading large swaths of a narcissistic Western world to busy itself with non-solutions to pseudo-crises to such a distracting degree that al-Qa'ida may wind up imposing the global caliphate without having to fire a shot.

As for the climate, you could take every dollar spent on "global warming" and blow it on internet porn, and the Earth's climate in 2050 will be pretty much what it would be anyway. Meanwhile, Gore is now being urged to jump into the presidential race and save Democrats from the allegedly too-hawkish Hillary Clinton. I doubt he will.

But you'll know he's considering it if he starts slimming down faster than the Antarctic shelf. When Al Gore starts getting carb-neutral, we're really in trouble.

Mark Steyn is author of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

Srdja Trifkovic: The Really Bad Dogs of War

MPRI training Bosnian soldiers (Reuters)

The Really Bad Dogs of War
by Srdja Trifkovic

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/

October 10, 2007

Focusing on Blackwater while neglecting MPRI is like investigating Ivan Demjanjuk for years on end, but allowing Adolf Eichmann to live peacefully in Buenos Aires.

Up to 17 Iraqis were killed on September 16 by mercenaries working for the security company Blackwater USA, in what Iraqi and some U.S. officials say was unprovoked murder. Earlier this week two Armenian Christian women were killed by Unity Resources Group hired guns. A devastating report by the House Oversight Committee accused Blackwater of acting like murderous cowboys, but the firm still operates with impunity—unaccountable under either U.S. or Iraqi law. Yet while exposing the misdeeds of “security contractors” is necessary and long overdue, it is curious that the media have neglected the work of a far more sinister mercenary outfit, one that has caused thousand-fold more death and suffering over the years.

Since time immemorial kings and governments have hired militarily skilled men and groups to do their fighting and provide security services. In the two decades since the Iran-Contra scandal, however, a few major “international security firms” and “private military contractors” have come into being to satisfy a particular requirement of the U.S. government: to provide military training, logistics, arms, equipment and advice to foreign clients whenever it is desirable for Washington to be able to plausibly deny direct American involvement. The most important among them has been MPRI. The firm has claimed “more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon,” including Gen. Carl E. Vuono, the former Army chief of staff; Gen. Crosbie E. Saint, the former commander of the US Army in Europe; and Gen. Ron Griffith, the former Army vice chief of staff. There are also dozens of retired top-ranked generals and thousands of former military personnel, including elite special forces, on the firm’s books.

MPRI is to Blackwater what a general is to a sergeant. It is less interested in the heat of combat than—in its own words—in “training, equipping, force design and management, professional development, concepts and doctrine, organizational and operational requirements, simulation and wargaming operations, humanitarian assistance, quick reaction military contractual support, and democracy transition assistance programs.”

When the 1991 UN arms embargo prevented the Clinton Administration from helping Croats and Bosnian Muslims directly, MPRI was engaged to do all that the U.S. government preferred not to do openly. In 1994 it referred MPRI to Croatia’s visiting defense minister Gojko Susak, who duly contracted the company to train and equip its forces. According to U.S. Army War College Quarterly, with the explicit consent of the U.S. State and Defense Departments the firm undertook to modernize and retrain the Croatian army, including the general staff. In the summer of 1995, thanks to such assistance, the formerly inept Croatian army mounted Operation Storm,

using typical American combined-arms tactics, including integrated air, artillery, and infantry movements, as well as maneuver warfare targeted against Serbian command, control, and communication systems. French and British officials accused MPRI of helping to plan the Croatian invasion, an allegation denied by the company. Correctly or not, MPRI received credit for a major success.

This “major success” was the bloodiest episode of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. The operation drove a quarter-million Serb civilians from their homes, with MPRI-trained Croat soldiers summarily executing the stragglers and indiscriminately shelling refugees. All along, according to the former head of Croatian counterintelligence, Markica Redic, “the Pentagon had complete supervision during the Storm action.”

Miro Tudjman, son of the late president and former head of Croatia’s foreign intelligence, says that during Operation Storm all Croatian electronic intelligence “went online in real time to the National Security Agency in Washington.” Several Croat officers—including MPRI graduates—have been brought to trial for war crimes since that time, but no MPRI employee has ever been charged.

“These new mercenaries work for the Defense and State Department and Congress looks the other way,” the late Colonel David Hackworth, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, commented on MPRI’s role in the Balkan wars. “The American taxpayer is paying for our own mercenary army, which violates what our founding fathers said.”

MPRI was also granted a major contract to train and equip the Bosnian Muslim forces. It was financed by a number of Islamic countries. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia deposited money in the United States Treasury, which MPRI drew against. The Bosnian Muslims received over $100 million in surplus military equipment from the US government “Equip and Train Program,” but MPRI contractors did everything else, from planning long-term strategy to conducting war games and training locals in the use of American weaponry. According to Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, “It was a brilliant move in that the U.S. government got someone else to pay for what we wanted from a policy standpoint.”

The next MPRI assignment was to train and equip a shadowy guerrilla group accused by the State Department of being a terrorist organization. The military men knew that the Drug Enforcement Administration suspected the guerrillas of smuggling high-grade Afghan heroin into North America and Western Europe, and police agencies across Europe had been alerted to the links among the rebels and the various mafias:

Was this the setting for a Tom Clancy novel? Or was it a flashback to one of the numerous secret meetings attended by the likes of Richard Secord and Oliver North during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s? Actually, it was neither. It was a real life and present-day strategy session at MPRI (formerly known as Military Professional Resources, Inc.). Its client: the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

MPRI was subsequently caught off-guard when Bosnia’s Muslim army arranged for millions of dollars worth of arms to be secretly transferred from Bosnian caches to KLA guerrillas in Kosovo and Serbian Muslims in the province of Sandzak. As a result of the arms transfers, the State Department temporarily suspended MPRI’s “train and equip” program—but not for long: soon thereafter the KLA itself became itself a valued client. Col. Hackworth was the first prominent commentator to reveal that MPRI was using former U.S. military personnel to train KLA forces at secret bases inside Albania. Some of the military leadership of the KLA—including Kosovo’s current “prime minister” Agim Ceku, a war criminal par excellence—included veterans of MPRI-planned Operations Storm.

The fruits of MPRI’s work became apparent in the aftermath of NATO bombing. Just like in the Krajina, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed, thousands were murdered, their homes looted or burned, their cemeteries vandalized, their churches dynamited.

And finally, in 2001, MPRI enjoyed the rare feat of working for both sides both sides of a Balkan conflict. It was contracted by the government of Macedonia—as part of a U.S. military aid package—“to deter armed aggression and defend Macedonian territory.” It was also helping the local KLA offshoot known as the NLA carry out armed aggression against Macedonian territory. In late June of that year, the Macedonian army undertook a major assault against KLA positions in the village of Aracinovo near Skopje. In a NATO sponsored operation—supposedly to help the Macedonian Army—U.S. troops were sent in to “evacuate” and “disarm” the terrorists. The soldiers “saved” 500 terrorists together with their weaponry, took them to another village, gave them their U.S.-made weapons back, and set them free. But sources in the U.S. Army in Kosovo revealed that the mysterious “evacuation” had the real objective of rescuing and concealing the identity of 17 Americans, MPRI instructors, who were among the withdrawing rebels.

Compared to MPRI, Blackwater are thuggish amateurs; but don’t expect any House Oversight Committee reports or New York Times exposés.

Srdja Trifkovic :: Oct.10.2007 :: News & Views :: 18 Comments »

Jon Landau: Inside the 'Magic'

The Q&A

Entertainment Weekly
October 15, 2007

The one-time music critic has been in Bruce Springsteen's camp for more than 30 years. With the Boss's new album at No. 1, Jon Landau tells us about his balancing act over the years as manager and producer

By Chris Willman

Jon Landau once wrote probably the most famous statement ever made by any rock critic, when in 1974 he said, in a long defunct publication called the Real Paper, ''I saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.'' But Landau wasn't content to watch that future play out without his direct participation. He did his part to make that pronouncement a self-fulfilling prophecy by getting out of the journalism business and back into the production and managerial side. From 1975's Born to Run through the Human Touch/Lucky Town double-hitter in 1991, Landau co-produced all of Springsteen's albums, and he continues to this day as his manager.

Springsteen's acclaimed new album, Magic, has generated more instantaneous fan enthusiasm than anything he's done since 1987's Tunnel of Love. As part of our series on the men behind Magic, EW spoke with Landau to get his take on how Springsteen pulled off this particular hat trick.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: People always wondered why Bruce didn't use the E Street Band for an entire album between 1984 and 2002. I always imagined that there was a feeling he didn't want to indulge in nostalgia, that he felt it was time to put away childish things, as it were. It feels like that dilemma was solved on this album, somehow.

JON LANDAU: Well, I think that takes you a little bit into the relationship that has developed between [producer] Brendan O'Brien and Bruce. And I think that on the Rising album, which was the first time they worked together, they were just getting used to each other's style. This time they were just totally ready for the kind of interaction that they have. One of the things about this album that I personally find different is that this really is the most guitar-dominated record that I believe Bruce has ever made. The guitars, the number of them, the range of them, are the dominant sound most of the time. And with our two great keyboardists, a lot of times in the past, the keyboard sound was a little more dominant. And I think some of the force and power of the record is related to that development.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Legendarily, a lot of stuff that Bruce writes gets left on the cutting room floor, because an album gets streamlined and things don't fit. This is his shortest album since Lucky Town — and it's a full half-hour shorter than The Rising — so I would imagine that was even more the case here.

JON LANDAU: That is a good point. One of the things Bruce did do that we talked about is he kept this record very tight and focused. The actual length of the album is not exhaustive. What I encouraged from my corner was just a certain playability. And the record moves like a rocket from beginning to end, and that's a great feeling. It's obvious from the record that the artist was aiming for a certain level of concision and tightness and focus, and maintaining the flow going from one song to another; the sequence is very meticulous. But it's not a case where there's a zillion outtakes or things of that nature. There's very little.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: One thing I didn't think I'd hear on one of his records again was the whole Phil Spector/Beach Boys influence.

JON LANDAU: ''Girls in Their Summer Clothes''? That's a masterpiece. When I heard some of it in its more finished form, I was as surprised as anybody. [(Laughs)] I think the occasional use of strings that Brendan brings into it enlarges some of the pieces and really does help to drive it into that sphere. I don't know that anybody was setting out to remind people of anything that specific. Whereas on the album Born to Run, Bruce had Phil [Spector] very much in his mind, along with some other influences that were guiding his hand. Bruce, if he hadn't done what he has done, [could've] had a whole other potential career as a — oh my God! — rock critic. There's nobody I know of who listens to more current and old stuff. Bruce is just a person who's thrilled with music.

ENTERAINMENT WEEKLY: This album walks an interesting line between the personal and political. But if you say ''political,'' people get scared.

JON LANDAU: My favorite song on the album is ''Long Walk Home,'' where he sings, ''that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone.'' And that's followed by the reference to ''what we'll do and what we won't.'' And I think at that point, the listener knows what he's talking about, without him getting hyper-literal.

So I think there is a commentary and an expression about things. But I think it's always part of a bigger thought. It's not an end in itself. And I don't think Bruce is engaged in writing political music as it's commonly understood. Now, with the Seeger Sessions band, he recorded an old-fashioned political song, ''Bring 'Em Home,'' Pete [Seeger]'s own song. He did add quite a bit of his own lyrics to it. And he was also doing a great early '30s song, ''How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live.'' So in the context of doing a tour that focused on other people's writing, he picked up some very direct types of things. But in his own writing, I've never known him to be fundamentally [political]. The political implications of the songs are just that: they're implications that come out of a larger vision.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you miss being in producer's chair, since you haven't done that since the early '90s?

JON LANDAU: No. I started out as a ''legendary rock critic.'' My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late '60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor. I took a hiatus from that, and then got back into the production thing when Bruce and I met up. And after we did Born to Run, I continued to work as a freelance producer, trying to build my skills and reputation; I made The Pretender with Jackson [Browne]. But after that, from Darkness on, basically because somewhere in that process I added the hat of being a manager, I was pretty much just taken up with working with Bruce.

By the time we got to the '90s, after all the thousands and thousands of hours we had spent sitting side by side in the studio, I felt whatever it was I had to offer, I had done. Whatever I know and whatever talents I have, Bruce had absorbed them. So my presence wasn't required. So in the '90s, I stopped producing and sort of expanded our management work. We did quite a bit with Natalie Merchant and Train, and had a wonderful time with Shania Twain for six years or so. That was great fun, because from a management point of view, we got to do a lot of things that one doesn't do with Bruce, because they're not appropriate for Bruce.

But at the same time, I was sort of looking for who could be a fresh influence in the studio for Bruce. Now that I was out of the equation, for a while he continued with our great production partner, Chuck Plotkin. But at a certain point, it seemed like there was a need to shake things up. It was actually our pal Donnie Ienner [former head of Columbia Records] who said the guy to look into was Brendan O'Brien. I sort of investigated Brendan a little bit and became convinced that that was potentially a great idea. And eventually Bruce decided to explore the idea of having a fresh producer.... That took a while for him to absorb. But once the two of them sat down, they formed a relationship very quickly. Bruce himself is a great record producer. It's just that producing entirely on your own has some of the shortcomings of a lawyer doing his own case. And Brendan brings in this state-of-the-art skill set. The second or third night he was recording with Brendan, Bruce called me. He's kidding around and he says ''Jon, this is fantastic. This is just better than I could have expected.'' So I said, ''Well, what's his method?'' He said, ''His technique is very simple. Let me explain to you how he does it. First you go in and play, right? Then you come in and listen to the playback, and it sounds phenomenal. That's his method.'' (laughs)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: From a managerial standpoint, there must be so many new challenges with the way the business is changing. I'm sure every manager thinks he handles his client in a unique way. But Bruce is so sacred to people, so even more care than usual might be put into not wanting him to do the wrong thing. Yet you do face all these new challenges where record companies want you to do even more. in terms of the web, and with retailers, and so on. Are you doing anything different now than you've done before?

JON LANDAU: You know, we try to acknowledge the changes, when we can fit them in. For example, giving away ''Radio Nowhere'' for a week on iTunes, we didn't have any issues with it, and it seemed like a positive way to create awareness and excitement. On the Sessions tour, we broadcast a different song each night, live, from every U.S. show on AOL. So we have been working in our own way in that area for a while now. The fundamentals of managing Bruce involve three major things, and making sure the conditions that pertain to each are 100% correct: One is writing great songs, two is making the best album he can make, and three, doing the best show he can do. Everything else is a lesser issue. That's the way it was when I met him in 1974, that's the way it is in 2007, and that's the way it's gonna be for as long as we're doing this. And then, with the Internet and [learning] how to use television, which is something we make a lot more use of than we used to, those are extensions. But what I've found is, if you accomplish those three core things, then everything else follows.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You came up with the most famous line of any rock critic of all time. Did you ever imagine that decades later that line would have entered into the lexicon to such a degree?

JON LANDAU: No, I really didn't. I'd like to be well known for some things in addition to having said that, but that seems to stand out, from 1974. I guess if Bruce's career had been a big flop, my quote about him would have been forgotten by now.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do people still spoof you with that? Do family members call you in for dinner and say ''I have seen dinner future, and its name is beef stroganoff''?

JON LANDAU: (laughs) Well, you know where the quote comes from. It's from Lincoln Steffens, the journalist who went to Russia at the revolution and said, ''I have seen the future and it works.'' Now, he was wrong, but I was right.

Springsteen pulls out the young guns to set stage on fire

Boss joined by indie-rock darlings

Lynn Saxberg
The Ottawa Citizen

Monday, October 15, 2007



Bruce Springsteen performs with the E Street Band Tuesday night, Oct. 9, 2007 at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J.

Glancing at all the empty seats in the upper reaches of Scotiabank Place last night, one's first reaction might have been that Bruce Springsteen isn't quite as hot as he was a few years ago. But then he pulled a surprise that no one was expecting: two members of Arcade Fire joined Springsteen and the E Street Band to play two songs, one of his and one of theirs.

Arcade Fire's husband-and-wife creative core, Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, joined the Boss at the beginning of his extended encore, first playing Springsteen's Thundercrack and then Arcade Fire's Keep The Car Running.

It was a nice touch for a concert that had been a bit underwhelming thus far. Too bad there wasn't some advance warning -- more people might have shown up.

Not that it was a poor turnout. With 15,000 in the house, it was a big show for Ottawa, though well short of a sellout. In 2003, the last time Springsteen brought the E Street Band to town, they filled the stadium to its capacity of 18,000.

Of course, the 2003 performance was Springsteen's first appearance in the nation's capital in a couple of decades, and it's an understatement to say there was pent-up demand. A generation of fans had grown up without seeing the Boss in their home town, and the casual fans came out in droves to witness the power of Springsteen and his E Street Band.

This time, the sense of urgency was lacking, at least in terms of demand for tickets. Springsteen's solo tour also passed through town a couple of years ago, so last night marked the third time in four years for a Boss sighting. And it's not like it's a retirement tour -- the way things are going for the Jersey native, who turned 58 last month, it looks like he'll be working for a long time yet. The ticket price was nothing to sneeze at, either -- really, who wants to pay $130 or thereabouts to sit in the nosebleed section?

Not even the promise of some great new songs was enough to fill the place, possibly because the album, Magic, is still too new to have had a big impact, despite the multimedia marketing blitz. The disc came out Oct. 2, and between the network TV appearances, radio play and online saturation, it's been impossible to overlook the phenomenon that is the Boss.

But let's not get bogged down in the attendance numbers. The important thing last night was that the one and only Bruce Springsteen was on stage doing what he does best with the folks who matter most in his musical life, the E Street Band (which includes Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa). Most of the time, it was a blast for everyone who was there, on stage and in the crowd. Even those who shelled out their hard-earned bucks to sit behind the stage and watch the musicians' bums appeared to have a good time.

"Is anybody alive out there?" the Boss bellowed when he took the stage, just 20 minutes behind schedule. The line was from Radio Nowhere, the rocking first single from Magic and a rollicking concert-opener. The roar from the crowd told him that yes, there were plenty of warm bodies in the house and they were ready for whatever he had to throw at them. Another roar erupted for Clarence Clemons when he stepped into the spotlight to unfurl a saxophone solo.

That's one cool thing about the E Street Band -- their faces are almost as recognizable as the craggy mug of their leader.

Next to Clemons, the crowd favourites also included guitarists Nils Logfren and Stevie Van Zandt, the Sopranos mobster, drummer Max Weinberg of late-night talk-show fame, and red-haired Mrs. Springsteen on guitar and back-up vocals. Singer-violinist Soozie Tyrell also had her share of admirers. The lineup is rounded out by bassist Gary Tallent and keyboardists Danny Federici and Roy Bittan.

Dressed in black biker boots, black Levi's and a black shirt, his hair swept back, Springsteen easily slipped into his role as a hero of the common people.

In Lonesome Day, when he threw his hands in the air, his body language made it clear the crowd was to follow him, including the folks behind the stage.

A couple of slowish new songs played early in the concert proved to be among the most powerful of the night. Gypsy Biker, one of the anti-war songs from Magic, took on a fierce dimension as Van Zandt and Springsteen indulged in duelling guitar solos, while the new album's title track was stark in its simplicity, built around Springsteen on acoustic guitar.

In the convoluted introduction to Magic, the song, the Boss spoke about how we're living in times when the truth seems like lying and lying seems true. "This ain't really about magic," he said, "It's really about tricks."

As expected, Springsteen and his crew played hard and kept it real. The lighting was tasteful, with lots of blues and greens, and the bare stage was open on all sides so the rear- and side-view audiences could see.

But by stretching the set out with slower-paced songs and new material, there was a delay in delivering that glorious feeling you're supposed to get at a Springsteen show.

It took the shock of the Arcade Fire appearance -- and then a triumphant version of Born To Run -- for it to finally come.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

Setlist:
Radio Nowhere
The Ties That Bind
Lonesome Day
Gypsy Biker
Magic
Reason to Believe
Adam Raised a Cain
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
The Promised Land
Tougher Than the Rest
Backstreets
Darlington County
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Girls in Their Summer Clothes
State Trooper
Keep the Car Running
Born to Run
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Springsteen's Tortured Logic

by Monica Crowley

http://www.humanevents.com

Posted: 10/10/2007

Watching Bruce Springsteen on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, I was catapulted back to 1984. That was the year his song “Born in the U.S.A.” (from the album of the same name) became not just a monster hit, but an anthem of sorts for America. An America proud of its patriotic resurgence under President Reagan. An America no longer defined by Carteresque policies of weakness and accommodation but by strength, principle, and trust…with verification.

Springsteen, however, believed his song had been hijacked by Americans newly proud of their country. He made a point of saying publicly that the song was written NOT as a patriotic tune but rather to question America’s use of power and to draw attention to the injustices and inequities he saw.

He’s got a new album now, and unlike Born in the U.S.A., it leaves no ambiguity about his message. On "60 Minutes," Springsteen said:

“I think we’ve seen things happen over the past six years that I don’t think anybody ever thought they’d see in the United States. When people think of the United States’ identity, they don’t think of torture. They don’t think of illegal wiretapping. They don’t think of voter suppression. They don’t think of no habeas corpus, no right to lawyers….There’s been a whole series of things that…I never thought I’d see in America.”

Did he ever think he’d see Islamic terror on the scale of September 11? In America? That question, of course, was not asked of Springsteen.

As you’d expect from "60 Minutes", his allegations remained unchallenged. So let’s set the record straight point by point.

1. “Torture.” American policy prohibits the use of torture. After September 11, it became clear that we were dealing with a different kind of enemy: religiously-driven enemy combatants who wore no country’s uniform and who deliberately targeted unsuspecting civilians. It also became clear that captured terrorists were outside the parameters of the guidelines for traditional POWs, and that the range and intensity of what we could do to extract information from them was similarly vague.

Last year, Senator John McCain tried to clarify what could be done by authoring legislation that limited interrogation methods to what was already authorized in the Army Field Manual. It also made murky the existing law on torture by failing to define its own broad terms, such as “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Instead of clarifying what was allowed, the McCain amendment fogged it up.

Last week, some (now not so) secret memos on interrogation techniques were leaked -- of course -- to the New York Times. There was discussion of certain methods, including exposure to cold temperatures and simulated drowning. Again, because what is permissible remains unclear, the president reiterated that the U.S. does not torture, although aggressive techniques have generated actionable intelligence from which American lives have been saved.

Further, former president Bill Clinton and the leading Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, have said they support a presidential exemption for emergency interrogation authorizations.

So, Springsteen, although some aggressive methods may be used, the U.S. does not engage in torture. And not a single terrorist suspect has argued successfully and offered proof that he has been tortured. (And with all of the lawyers and the International Committee of the Red Cross available to them, if they were being tortured, you’d hear about it.)

2. “Illegal wiretapping.” The president kept up a precedent set by other presidents in wiretapping possible foreign enemies communicating into the U.S. When questions arose (after yet more leaked stories), he took it to Congress -- which had been overseeing it all along -- and got its parameters clarified. There have been no cases -- and no evidence -- to suggest an abuse of the wiretapping policy, which even many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates say they would continue.

3. “Voter suppression.” This was Springsteen’s not-so-subtle suggestion that Bush’s election and re-election were illegitimate. In 2000 and 2004 (like every presidential election before them), there were anecdotal reports of some spotty voting irregularities, but there has been no evidence of widespread, orchestrated fraud or suppression. Although if Springsteen wants to talk about real voter fraud, may I suggest a discussion of the 1960 election in Chicago, Texas, and West Virginia.

4. “No habeas corpus -- no right to lawyers.” Here Springsteen was referring to the terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. First, I was there last year. I saw some of the hundreds of lawyers representing them pro bono. Second, those accused terrorists are in the military tribunal process, complete with a final option to appeal to a U.S. civilian court, unprecedented for the U.S. to grant to any enemy in wartime.

These enemy combatants, having exhausted all tribunal and appeals reviews, can take their cases to a federal appeals court, and ultimately to the Supreme Court. They have the very essence of habeas corpus, and are taking full advantage of the legal paths made available to them. These are all “rights” we’ve chosen to give them, as there is a strong constitutional argument that because they are not American citizens but enemy combatants, they are not entitled to any rights.

Nobody is telling Springsteen to zip it or not to criticize his government or dissent if he disagrees with policy. He is an iconic rock star with a big platform and a big microphone. With that should come the responsibility to get the facts straight before he blasts his government during wartime. But we should know better than to confuse rock stars with responsible people.

Monica Crowley, Ph.D., is a nationally syndicated radio host and television commentator. She has also written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Post. www.monicamemo.com

Mark Steyn: Time for the U.S. to get comfortable with ideology

Friday, October 12, 2007

Orange County Register

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was this:

"Here we are today, more than six years after 9/11. Does anyone believe a new 'Long Telegram' has yet been written? And accepted throughout the senior levels of the government?"

Answer: No.

Because, if it had, you'd hear it echoed in public – just as the Long Telegram provided the underpinning of the Truman Doctrine a year later. Kennan himself had differences with Truman and successive presidents over what he regarded as their misinterpretation, but, granted all that, most of what turned up over the next 40 years – the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, Soviet subversion in Africa and Europe, Grenada and Afghanistan – is consistent with the conflict as laid out by one relatively minor State Department functionary decades earlier.

Why can't we do that today?

Well, one reason is we're not really comfortable with ideology, either ours or anybody else's. Insofar as we have an ideology it's a belief in the virtues of "multiculturalism," "tolerance," "celebrate diversity" – a bumper-sticker ideology that is, in effect, an anti-ideology which explicitly rejects the very idea of drawing distinctions between your beliefs and anybody else's.

Less sentimental chaps may (at least privately) regard the above as bunk, and prefer to place their faith in economics and technology. In Britain in the 1960s, the political class declared that the country "needed" mass immigration. When the less-enlightened lower orders in northern England fretted that they would lose their towns to the "Pakis", they were dismissed as paranoid racists. The experts were right in a narrow, economic sense: The immigrants became mill workers and bus drivers. But the paranoid racists were right, too: The mills closed anyway, and mosques sprouted in their place; and Oldham and Dewesbury adopted the arranged cousin-marriage traditions of Mirpur in Pakistan; and Yorkshire can now boast among its native sons the July 7th London Tube bombers. The experts thought economics trumped all; the knuckle-dragging masses had a more basic unease, convinced that it's culture that's determinative.

To take another example, on CNN the other night Anderson Cooper was worrying about the homicide rate in Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love is the murder capital of the nation, and CNN had dispatched a reporter to interview the grieving mother of a young black boy killed while riding his bicycle in the street. Apparently, a couple of cars had got backed up behind him, and an impatient passenger in one of them pulled out a gun and shot the kid. Anderson Cooper then went to commercials and, when he returned, introduced a report on how easy it is to buy guns in Philadelphia and how local politicians are reluctant to do anything about it. This is, again, an argument only the expert class could make. In the 1990s, the number of guns in America went up by 40 million, but the murder rate fell dramatically. If firearms availability were the determining factor, Vermont and Switzerland would have high murder rates. Yet in Montpelier or Geneva the solution to a boy carelessly bicycling in front of you down a city street when you're in a hurry is not to grab your gun and blow him away. It's the culture, not the technology.

Very few members of the transnational jet set want to hear this. They're convinced that economic and technological factors shape the world all but exclusively, and that the sexy buzz words – "globalization", "networking" – cure all ills. You may recall the famous Golden Arches thesis promulgated by The New York Times' Thomas Friedman – that countries with McDonald's franchises don't go to war with each other. Tell it to the Serbs. When the Iron Curtain fell, Yugoslavia was, economically, the best-positioned of the recovering Communist states. But, given the choice between expanding the already booming vacation resorts of the Dalmatian coast for their eager Anglo-German tourist clientele or reducing Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo to rubble over ethno-linguistic differences no outsider can even discern ("Serbo-Croat"?), Yugoslavia opted for the latter.

As I wrote in my book, the most successful example of globalization is not Starbucks or McDonald's but Wahhabism, an obscure backwater variant of Islam practiced by a few Bedouin deadbeats that Saudi oil wealth has now exported to every corner of the Earth – to Waziristan, Indonesia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Toronto, Portland, Dearborn and Falls Church. You can live on the other side of the planet and, when Starbucks opens up in town, you might acquire a taste for a decaf latte, but that's it. Otherwise, life goes on. By contrast, when the Saudi-funded preachers hung out their shingles on every Main Street in the West, they radicalized a significant chunk of young European Muslims. They transformed not just their beverage habits, but the way they look at the societies in which they live.

So many of the administration's present problems derive from squeamishness about ideological confrontation that any effective Long Telegram would have to address. When President Bush declared a "war on terror," cynics understood that he had no particular interest in the IRA or the Tamil Tigers, but that he was constrained from identifying the real enemy in any meaningful sense: In the fall of 2001, a war on Islamic this or Islamic that would have caused too many problems with Gen. Musharraf and the House of Saud and other chaps he wanted to keep on side. But it's one reason, for example, why the Democrats, as soon as it suited them, had no difficulty detaching the Iraq front from the broader war. If it's a "war on terror" against terrorist organizations, well, Saddam is a head of state and Iraq is a sovereign nation: the 1946 Long Telegram was long enough to embrace events in Ethiopia and Grenada 30 years later, but the "war on terror" template doesn't comfortably extend to Iraq. Nor to the remorseless Wahhabist subversion of Europe. Nor to the Palestinian Authority, where Condi Rice is currently presiding over the latest reprise of the usual "peace process" clichés designed to persuade Israel to make concessions to a populace, which largely believes everything the al-Qaida guys do. The state-funded (which means European- and U.S.-taxpayer funded) Palestinian newspaper published a cartoon this September celebrating 9/11 as a great victory.

Perhaps we need more investment in jobs. Or maybe guns are too easily available in Gaza. Or, if guns aren't, self-detonating school kids certainly are. This is the ultimate asymmetric warfare: we're trying to beat back ideology with complacent Western assumptions. Not a good bet.