http://www.orthodoxytoday.org
At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the last few stages of Jesus' journey to the cross are realised. The Church marks where Christ was nailed to the cross, where He died and finally where His body was laid in the tomb. This is where Jesus laid for three days and is the very place where He was resurrected. As such it is the most precious site in the world for Christians to visit today. I have been coming to the Holy Tomb for the last twenty-four years but in the last eleven years I have been living full time in the small village of Taybeh, the only all Christian village left in Palestine twenty minutes outside Jerusalem.
Our Christian community is a small dwindling one, but it seeks solidarity with Christians from all over the world to come and venerate this holy site where the Lord experienced His passion, His crucifixion and His holy resurrection. It should be a spiritual journey of a lifetime that every believer should hope to undertake.
There are many reasons why a Christian would want to venerate this holy place, essentially it can be an experience of deepening ones faith and glorifying God in the very spot of His Holy Resurrection. One might ask though, how is this possible and what role does it play today -- The dwindling Christian community might ask itself the same question -- what role do we play? For the tomb seems like a contradiction -- it is empty, yet it is life giving. Our community is small, but has within its reach sites of such significance.
The significance of the Tomb being referred to as the "Life-Giving Tomb," is that Christians seek a life with Christ which is not of this world but of God's Heavenly Kingdom, our Promised Land is Paradise. If we choose a life with Christ and place Him first in our lives then earthly and material things seem less important. Life with Christ becomes a focus for the individual and more important to pursue. These Christian values and beliefs can help to promote non violent resolutions to the conflict and violence all around us. Thus, we come and venerate this holy site seeking forgiveness of sins and seeking life with Christ for eternity.
Christians learn from the Creation story in Genesis that man was created in the image of God and lived in communion with God, until he broke that communion and was expelled from the Garden and became subject to death. So, the question becomes, "How do we return to communion with God? How can we get back to that place where we can talk to and walk with God? Many feel that there's a void within, a void that can only be filled by communion with our Creator. It is the Life-Giving Tomb that reminds us that the barrier between God and man was removed by Christ's resurrection. When one walks the footsteps of the Lord, this is the message that reaches the soul. That all darkness can be overcome by God's love and God is here for us.
If ever one needed an indication of how relevant and powerful this message is, one need look no further than Holy Saturday, when many from the Christian community in Jerusalem gather to witness the greatest of all miracles--the Miracle of the Holy Fire. The Miracle of the Holy Fire is the celebration of Christ's resurrection, when the flame miraculously appears, literally, from within the marble stone tomb. This is the uncreated light of God not God Himself. It is received by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch as it has been done every year, on the same day, in the same manner, at the same time, at the same holy place of Christ's Life-Giving Tomb. Sometimes it can be a gathering of chaos with the soldiers, the police, the large crowds, the noise, the drums of the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts anxiously waiting to receive the light outside the Holy Sepulchre.
During peaceful times, representatives of many churches from all over the Holy Land come to receive the Holy Fire and carry it back in small lanterns to their particular churches for the Midnight Resurrection Service. Even now, many local people go to great extremes to get the proper permits in order to partake in this centuries old celebration that reflects our Christian heritage and deep roots in Palestine.
All lights, candles and vigil lamps are put out at the start of this ceremony. The Holy Fire is physically apparent as a blue mist, a moving cloud in the air and the words "Christ is Risen" are chanted in many languages as the light is quickly distributed to everyone present.
The light that proceeds from the core of the stone that covers Christ's Life-Giving Tomb has been celebrated as one of the oldest unbroken Christian ceremonies that exist in the world today. Some people find it hard to comprehend what happens, just as people find it hard to comprehend the eternal love and presence of God. It therefore takes faith to believe in the significance of the Holy Tomb. Christians appreciate that they have a holy place that is the remembrance of Christ coming to earth to reconcile us to God and God to us. The very spot where victory was shown over death by Christ's resurrection.
This is the miracle that allows us to know that Christ is in our midst. This is the miracle that allows us to feel that Christ is truly among us. This miracle is another way that God communicates to us as a community our role to the world today. As we remember when we chant in our Midnight Resurrection Service: "Come ye and receive light from the unwaning Light, and glorify Christ, Who a rose from the dead." When you glorify Christ you begin to hear the gospel message and practice it.
The ceremony of the Holy Fire is one of the most magnificent celebrations in the Holy Land that has been overshadowed because of the violence and turmoil that this region has experienced. Living the cycle of death every day has made it even more important for Christians to celebrate Christ in Our Midst and place all of our hope in the Saviour. Many years of killing, back and forth, people here have surely been living in the darkness of all evil. It would therefore seem even more important than ever to see Christ as the true light and to be inspired towards peaceful ways to coexist. As it is written in the Gospel of John, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not" (John 1:5).
As a small Christian community in the Holy Land we have a duty to share this message with the entire international community. To give hope to people that might be suffering from darkness in other corners of the world. At the Orthodox Easter service we sing:
You arose, O Christ, and yet the tomb remained sealed,as at Your birth the Virgin's womb remained unharmed;and You have opened for us the gates of paradise.
During the ceremony, Orthodox Christians remember that Christ is the One Who has smashed the gates of Hades and opened the gates of Paradise, and gone before us! Seeing the Life-Giving Tomb of Christ is another reminder of our final destiny. As a small Christian community we want to witness and reflect Christ's eternal love. We pray for peace and hope Jerusalem can be an open city of all faiths so Christian pilgrims from all over the world can come and be inspired and spiritually uplifted by the true Light of Christ and share the richness of the Christian roots that exist in the Holy Land.
The Myrrhbearing Women who came to the Holy Tomb over two thousand years ago may have wondered who was going to roll away the stone. Later on, they may have even wondered whether it was Jesus or the angel who did it. Either way, it doesn't matter. The stone wasn't rolled away so Christ could get out. Rather, the stone symbolizes death and the barrier that existed since the original sin between man and God. Through our annual recollection of Christ's passion and holy resurrection, Orthodox Christians are physically reminded that once again that this barrier between God and man is removed, now and forever!
For us, the stone symbolizes the boundary between the living and the dead, between those who are dead in sin, which are separated from God, and those who are alive in Christ and growing in union with Him. This is the message the Life-Giving Tomb has for the world today.
St. Peter says, in his first Epistle, that God has called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.
Also, St. John wrote:
"Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, 'I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life (Jn. 8:12)."
The significance of Christ's Life-Giving Tomb is a reminder of this call to be in the image and likeness of our creator. To fill our souls with God's love since God is love. To fill our hearts with God's grace thus fostering understanding and compassion. To answer the call to be in the image and likeness of God means, more than anything else, that we must love with a perfect love.
The tomb also reminds us that Christians are called not merely to love God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength; and their neighbour as themselves. These are the chief commandments of the Old Testament. But we Christians are called to hear the Lord of the New Testament and to fulfil His commands found in Matthew 5:
"Love your enemies; Do good to those who hate you; Bless those who curse you; Pray for those who abuse you; Turn the other check to those who strike you."
In Luke 16:15 we read that Jesus said:
"Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved"
We witness the truth and receive the Holy Fire every Holy Saturday so that all who are not blessed to live in the land of Christ's Holy Resurrection can believe that Christ is the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (John 1:9).
In this Holy Lenten Season, the Life-Giving Tomb of Christ can serve as a reminder that no matter what we have done, how badly we may have suffered or what deep pain we may have experienced, we too have a chance for a new life with Christ, an everlasting life. It shows that no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, we have a purpose and that through commemorating Christ's holy resurrection, we too can rise up with a pure heart, a cleansed soul and a new life in God.
This article was recorded for the BBC Radio Annual Lenten Talks at the site of Christ's Holy Tomb in Jerusalem.
Maria C. Khoury was born in the US, but moved to Taybeh (biblical Ephraim) after marrying David Khoury, an Orthodox Christian Palestinian.
Maria Khoury is author of Witness in the Holy Land and the children's book, "Christina's True Heroes" about seven women saints.
Contact Maria Khoury at Saint-george-taybeh@saintgeorgetaybeh.org
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
David Brooks: Virtues and Victims
DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
Published: April 9, 2006
All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
If you wander through the thicket of commentary that already surrounds the Duke lacrosse scandal, the first thing you notice is how sociological it is. In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes.
"This whole sordid party scene played out at the prestigious university is deeply disturbing on a number of levels, including those involving gender, race and the notion of athletic entitlement and privilege," a USA Today columnist wrote.
"The collisions are epic: black and white, town and gown, rich and poor, privilege and plain, jocks and scholars," a CBS analyst observed.
The key word in the coverage has been "entitlement." In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.
The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players "license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."
It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.
Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.
If you were looking at this scandal through that language, you would look at the e-mail message one of the players sent on the night in question. This is the one in which a young man joked about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.
You would say that the person who felt free to send this message to his buddies had crashed through several moral guardrails. You would surmise that his character had been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and that he'd entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.
You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?
The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.
Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.
But in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe tried to steer readers back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul. Wolfe's heroine is a modern girl searching for honor in a world where the social rules have dissolved, and who commits "moral suicide" because she is unprepared for what she faces.
Many critics reacted furiously to these parts of Wolfe's book. And we are where we are.
The New York Times
Published: April 9, 2006
All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
If you wander through the thicket of commentary that already surrounds the Duke lacrosse scandal, the first thing you notice is how sociological it is. In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes.
"This whole sordid party scene played out at the prestigious university is deeply disturbing on a number of levels, including those involving gender, race and the notion of athletic entitlement and privilege," a USA Today columnist wrote.
"The collisions are epic: black and white, town and gown, rich and poor, privilege and plain, jocks and scholars," a CBS analyst observed.
The key word in the coverage has been "entitlement." In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.
The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players "license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."
It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.
Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.
If you were looking at this scandal through that language, you would look at the e-mail message one of the players sent on the night in question. This is the one in which a young man joked about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.
You would say that the person who felt free to send this message to his buddies had crashed through several moral guardrails. You would surmise that his character had been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and that he'd entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.
You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?
The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.
Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.
But in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe tried to steer readers back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul. Wolfe's heroine is a modern girl searching for honor in a world where the social rules have dissolved, and who commits "moral suicide" because she is unprepared for what she faces.
Many critics reacted furiously to these parts of Wolfe's book. And we are where we are.
Srdja Trifkovic: Islam as the Agent of Revolutionary Change
Friday, April 07, 2006
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
The following is from an interview with Srdja Trifkovic broadcast on April 7, 2006, on The Right Balance (abbreviated transcript)
The show’s presenter Greg Allen first asked Dr. Trifkovic to draw a distinction between Islamic terrorism and other varieties of the same problem: What makes Jihadist terrorism different?
TRIFKOVIC: All other forms of terrorism use it as an instrument in pursuit of some wider objective. The Bolsheviks were blowing up banks in 1905 and assassinating political leaders, and their purpose was to undermine the structure of the system so that when the revolutionary moment comes, as it did in 1917, you go a stage further. With ETA in Spain, the IRA, Sendero Luminoso, Tamil Tigers, or the Sighs in India, you have terrorist outrages but they are not an integral part of the mindset, the world outlook of the given group. With Islam, terrorism is not only an instrument, a tool, it is also the core of policy itself. Terrorist violence is not only divinely sanctioned, it is divinely ordained. We don’t have time for the details, but suffice to say that the condoning and overt advocacy of violence both in the primary texts of Islam, such as the Kuran and the Hadith, the traditions and sayings of the “prophet,” and in more than 13 centuries of Islam’s historic practice, make that record pretty straightforward. For people to still debate the allegedly peaceful nature of Islam, its “true character,” is plainly absurd. The truth is out there and those who want to deny it are the same ones who, 50 years ago, would have been the apologists for Uncle Joe, or 30 years ago would have claimed that the bold experiment of Chairman Mao was paving the way for the future . . .
The mindset of appeasement, even after Munich 1938, is at work. It’s not only that those who had claimed that Mein Kampf was a pacifist tract, or that Uncle Joe’s Moscow trials were an exercise in impeccable legality, are now acting as the apologists for Islam. They are actively importing the jihadist fifth column! It is the particular emphasis of my book that we need an absolute moratorium on the immigration of Muslims into both Western Europe and North America, coupled with the denial of citizenship to all practicing Muslims, the denial of security clearances, and the policy of systematic deportation of all jihadists activists. Once we realize that jihad is a political mindset and that jihadist activities—which are inherently discriminatory against women, against Jews, against so-called infidels—are a political, subversive and radically seditious activity with a revolutionary objective, i.e. turning the World of War into the World of Faith, Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam, then we’ll realize that the First Amendment no longer applies. To all intents and purposes Islam ought to be regarded as a violent political ideology rather than just a religious cult.
The next question concerned the curious tendency of the Left to overlook, ignore, or even deny Islam’s mistreatment of women, homosexuals, and other protected minorities:
The explanation is fairly simple, and we see the same syndrome all over the place. For instance in Scandinavia you have literally a rape epidemic, perpetrated by Muslim immigrants against Swedish, Norwegian and Danish women. And yet, very active, very well organized and financed feminist movements in those countries are keeping quiet—both about the epidemic itself, and about the identity of its perpetrators.
The reason is that the Left sees Islam as a de facto ally—as Marxists would say, an “objective ally”—in the destruction of the vestiges of the traditional society based upon Christianity and its moral code, and traditional cultural patterns. So what they are doing is using Islam as the battering ram and as a would-be fellow-traveler, in their grand anti-Christian, Christophobic design. They hope that once they create their brave, new multiculturalist Utopia, Islam can be tamed, that soft porn and state education will convert the Muslims’ offspring to the general multiculturalist melange.
We know they’re wrong because we know that second and third-generation Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, particularly in France and Britain, are far more radical and far more Islamic-minded than their parents and grandparents. The explanation is very simple: the tepid, non-descript multiculturalist pap that is being offered by the dominant elites cannot inspire these young men and women. They need something that gives meaning to their lives, and so they fall back upon the religion of their forefathers—and once they do that, they cannot do otherwise but turn against the multiculturalist host-society. So the Leftists are making a colossal miscalculation. Far from being the clients of their future global welfare state, the Muslims—in the Western world in particular—will be the agents of revolutionary change not only against the remnants of Christianity today, but also against the secularist, multicultural Utopia of tomorrow.
Greg Allen’s next question concerned the difference between Islam’s basic tenets and the teaching of other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity: do we all worship the same God, as some claim?
One of the clichés that are endlessly repeated by those who seek to conceal the true nature of Islam is that Muslims “believe in the same God” as Christians and Jews. This is a severe distortion of the truth. What Muslims believe is that they know the true nature of God that Judaism and Christianity tell lies about, and have a distorted picture. The fact that Muslims share a Levantine monotheism of sorts with Judaism and Christianity only makes them more, not less antagonistic to us… The concept of an utterly transcendent Allah that cannot be “known” and doesn’t “reach out” to man or man to him. There is no “contact” with God that is essential to the Judaic and Christian tradition. In fact, the forlorn call, repeated five times a day from every minaret in the world, sounds more like the cry of an abandoned child for an absentee father.
At the practical level, the notion that Muslims award Christians and Jews some level of respect as “the people of the book” is also greatly distorted. In practice it only means that for as long as they accept the status of second-class citizens, and pay the poll tax with “the hand of humility,” their security will be guaranteed—but not their equality of rights.
At the theological level, the fundamental difference is the absence of love. It needs to be understood that Islam’s denial of the Trinity creates a completely different world outlook. “Allah begets not,” i.e. he is no Father, and “is not begotten,” i.e. he is no Son, and no one is like him, i.e. no Holy Spirit. The utterly . . . not only “monotheistic” but monistic image of the world under an unreachable, unknowable god, creates the kind of spiritual uniformity that ultimately results in both cultural and social-economic wasteland that is the Muslim world today. [ . . . ]
What is known as Islam’s “golden age” happened largely in spite of Islam, rather than thanks to it. Connecting the brief blossoming of arts and sciences in Baghdad and Cordoba with the “benevolent” influence of Islam is the same as saying that the high level of scholarship on Pushkin or Tolstoy in Moscow in the 1950s was the result of Stalinism and dialectical materialism, or that the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwaengler was as good as it was in the late 1930s thanks to Nazism. But the true causes of squalor and corruption in the Muslim world are indeed moral and cultural, rather than economic. After that brief period of flowering its had very little to offer to the world, either in the sphere of ideas or in the sphere of material production—even though it had that unique geographic position at the crossroads of civilizations . . . The problem cannot be resolved by seeking to import Western technology and Western know-how, while retaining the old mindset. We’ve already seen it with the Ottoman Turkey in the 19th century. They’d brought in Western engineers and military officers, and doctors, to train their Muslim students, but the latter never managed to produce more than what was imparted to them.
The problem remains insoluble to this day. The Christian world’s discipline, cohesion, ingenuity and prosperity are rooted in certain aspects of the Western psyche that cannot be easily transplanted. It has a lot to do with the notion of delayed gratification as opposed to instant gratification and sensuality that is the hallmark of the Muslim world.
/Islam print permanent link writebacks (22)
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
The following is from an interview with Srdja Trifkovic broadcast on April 7, 2006, on The Right Balance (abbreviated transcript)
The show’s presenter Greg Allen first asked Dr. Trifkovic to draw a distinction between Islamic terrorism and other varieties of the same problem: What makes Jihadist terrorism different?
TRIFKOVIC: All other forms of terrorism use it as an instrument in pursuit of some wider objective. The Bolsheviks were blowing up banks in 1905 and assassinating political leaders, and their purpose was to undermine the structure of the system so that when the revolutionary moment comes, as it did in 1917, you go a stage further. With ETA in Spain, the IRA, Sendero Luminoso, Tamil Tigers, or the Sighs in India, you have terrorist outrages but they are not an integral part of the mindset, the world outlook of the given group. With Islam, terrorism is not only an instrument, a tool, it is also the core of policy itself. Terrorist violence is not only divinely sanctioned, it is divinely ordained. We don’t have time for the details, but suffice to say that the condoning and overt advocacy of violence both in the primary texts of Islam, such as the Kuran and the Hadith, the traditions and sayings of the “prophet,” and in more than 13 centuries of Islam’s historic practice, make that record pretty straightforward. For people to still debate the allegedly peaceful nature of Islam, its “true character,” is plainly absurd. The truth is out there and those who want to deny it are the same ones who, 50 years ago, would have been the apologists for Uncle Joe, or 30 years ago would have claimed that the bold experiment of Chairman Mao was paving the way for the future . . .
The mindset of appeasement, even after Munich 1938, is at work. It’s not only that those who had claimed that Mein Kampf was a pacifist tract, or that Uncle Joe’s Moscow trials were an exercise in impeccable legality, are now acting as the apologists for Islam. They are actively importing the jihadist fifth column! It is the particular emphasis of my book that we need an absolute moratorium on the immigration of Muslims into both Western Europe and North America, coupled with the denial of citizenship to all practicing Muslims, the denial of security clearances, and the policy of systematic deportation of all jihadists activists. Once we realize that jihad is a political mindset and that jihadist activities—which are inherently discriminatory against women, against Jews, against so-called infidels—are a political, subversive and radically seditious activity with a revolutionary objective, i.e. turning the World of War into the World of Faith, Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam, then we’ll realize that the First Amendment no longer applies. To all intents and purposes Islam ought to be regarded as a violent political ideology rather than just a religious cult.
The next question concerned the curious tendency of the Left to overlook, ignore, or even deny Islam’s mistreatment of women, homosexuals, and other protected minorities:
The explanation is fairly simple, and we see the same syndrome all over the place. For instance in Scandinavia you have literally a rape epidemic, perpetrated by Muslim immigrants against Swedish, Norwegian and Danish women. And yet, very active, very well organized and financed feminist movements in those countries are keeping quiet—both about the epidemic itself, and about the identity of its perpetrators.
The reason is that the Left sees Islam as a de facto ally—as Marxists would say, an “objective ally”—in the destruction of the vestiges of the traditional society based upon Christianity and its moral code, and traditional cultural patterns. So what they are doing is using Islam as the battering ram and as a would-be fellow-traveler, in their grand anti-Christian, Christophobic design. They hope that once they create their brave, new multiculturalist Utopia, Islam can be tamed, that soft porn and state education will convert the Muslims’ offspring to the general multiculturalist melange.
We know they’re wrong because we know that second and third-generation Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, particularly in France and Britain, are far more radical and far more Islamic-minded than their parents and grandparents. The explanation is very simple: the tepid, non-descript multiculturalist pap that is being offered by the dominant elites cannot inspire these young men and women. They need something that gives meaning to their lives, and so they fall back upon the religion of their forefathers—and once they do that, they cannot do otherwise but turn against the multiculturalist host-society. So the Leftists are making a colossal miscalculation. Far from being the clients of their future global welfare state, the Muslims—in the Western world in particular—will be the agents of revolutionary change not only against the remnants of Christianity today, but also against the secularist, multicultural Utopia of tomorrow.
Greg Allen’s next question concerned the difference between Islam’s basic tenets and the teaching of other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity: do we all worship the same God, as some claim?
One of the clichés that are endlessly repeated by those who seek to conceal the true nature of Islam is that Muslims “believe in the same God” as Christians and Jews. This is a severe distortion of the truth. What Muslims believe is that they know the true nature of God that Judaism and Christianity tell lies about, and have a distorted picture. The fact that Muslims share a Levantine monotheism of sorts with Judaism and Christianity only makes them more, not less antagonistic to us… The concept of an utterly transcendent Allah that cannot be “known” and doesn’t “reach out” to man or man to him. There is no “contact” with God that is essential to the Judaic and Christian tradition. In fact, the forlorn call, repeated five times a day from every minaret in the world, sounds more like the cry of an abandoned child for an absentee father.
At the practical level, the notion that Muslims award Christians and Jews some level of respect as “the people of the book” is also greatly distorted. In practice it only means that for as long as they accept the status of second-class citizens, and pay the poll tax with “the hand of humility,” their security will be guaranteed—but not their equality of rights.
At the theological level, the fundamental difference is the absence of love. It needs to be understood that Islam’s denial of the Trinity creates a completely different world outlook. “Allah begets not,” i.e. he is no Father, and “is not begotten,” i.e. he is no Son, and no one is like him, i.e. no Holy Spirit. The utterly . . . not only “monotheistic” but monistic image of the world under an unreachable, unknowable god, creates the kind of spiritual uniformity that ultimately results in both cultural and social-economic wasteland that is the Muslim world today. [ . . . ]
What is known as Islam’s “golden age” happened largely in spite of Islam, rather than thanks to it. Connecting the brief blossoming of arts and sciences in Baghdad and Cordoba with the “benevolent” influence of Islam is the same as saying that the high level of scholarship on Pushkin or Tolstoy in Moscow in the 1950s was the result of Stalinism and dialectical materialism, or that the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwaengler was as good as it was in the late 1930s thanks to Nazism. But the true causes of squalor and corruption in the Muslim world are indeed moral and cultural, rather than economic. After that brief period of flowering its had very little to offer to the world, either in the sphere of ideas or in the sphere of material production—even though it had that unique geographic position at the crossroads of civilizations . . . The problem cannot be resolved by seeking to import Western technology and Western know-how, while retaining the old mindset. We’ve already seen it with the Ottoman Turkey in the 19th century. They’d brought in Western engineers and military officers, and doctors, to train their Muslim students, but the latter never managed to produce more than what was imparted to them.
The problem remains insoluble to this day. The Christian world’s discipline, cohesion, ingenuity and prosperity are rooted in certain aspects of the Western psyche that cannot be easily transplanted. It has a lot to do with the notion of delayed gratification as opposed to instant gratification and sensuality that is the hallmark of the Muslim world.
/Islam print permanent link writebacks (22)
David Forsmark: The Munich Puzzle
David Forsmark
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
April 11, 2006
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response
By Aaron J. Klein Random House, $24.95, 256pp.
In a sensational new book, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response, Aaron J. Klein, Time Magazine military and intelligence affairs correspondent, mines newly declassified documents and over 50 interviews with high ranking Israeli intelligence, military, and political figures to finally tell us what really happened at the 1972 Munich Olympics—and after.
Striking Back is authoritative and definitive—if by necessity somewhat incomplete. It will be many years before all the details are revealed, but Klein manages enough to tell a gripping story, and give a good overview of one of perhaps the 20th century’s highest profile terrorist act, and its aftermath.
Because they could operate abroad without fear, Palestinian terrorists became bold and audacious by 1972, culminating with the atrocity in the Munich. In response, Israel’s military and intelligence special units conducted a series of assassinations. These were set up by spies, planned by top-level officers and carried out by highly trained commandos.
Striking Back blows away the central conceit of Stephen Spielberg’s implausible film Munich and Vengeance, the single-sourced book by George Jonas on which the movie is based. Namely, that the Mossad -- recognized as one of the world’s most effective and skilled intelligence agencies in 1972 -- sent a team of guilt-ridden, kvetching amateurs into the field to hunt down terrorists, and relied on a French crime family out of a bad Robert Ludlum novel for information.
The reasons for the assassinations of PLO members involved in terrorism went far beyond mere vengeance, Klein writes. It was the only way to disrupt terrorist networks. In most Western European countries, terrorism against Israeli targets drew no real punishment. Participants could expect maximum sentences of 3 or 4 years -- if the police or security forces bothered to catch someone.
It wasn't just the heinous Munich Massacre that motivated the Israelis to put together their counterattack, which became known as Ceasarea. Equally disgusting was the Germans' incompetent and cowardly response to it during the initial standoff and afterward. Klein details how the first priority of the Germans and the Olympic Committee was to get the hostages off campus so the games could go on. Worse, Germany had no military or police counterterrorist unit; in the end, the federal police handled the situation worse than any small town police force in the United States could have done in its worst nightmare.
Munich galvanized the government and security forces of Israel in much the same way that 9/11 did in the United States, including finger pointing by the opposition party (though the report, unlike the 9/11 commission's document, was classified until recently and is summarized in Striking Back's appendix ).
And there was plenty reason for finger pointing. First, Klein reveals, the head of the Israeli Olympic delegation was scorned for protesting that the accommodations were the least secure in the complex. Second, he details the way in which different Israeli intelligence and security agencies did not communicate with one another, much like U.S. agencies before 9/11.
For Ceasarea, there were three assassination teams for logistics, surveillance, and assassination, each with about a dozen members. “The logistics squad drove the cars, spoke the local language, and was in charge of communications… The surveillance team, frequently the largest, had many female members (who often acted as parts of ‘couples’). Their job was to blend into their surroundings…The final component of each group were the assassins. They were combatants who trained in pairs… generally well-prepared young men from top flight army units.”
The assassins employed various methods from pistols to car bombs, from bombs in beds, to in one case, a full blown military commando operation launched from the sea.
What they did NOT do—memo to Academy Awards nominating committee-- was sit outside KBG safe houses all day in their cars, waiting for the target to show up, then jump out and start shooting.
Klein takes a skeptical view of Ceasarea’s claims of success, weighing their plusses and minuses dispassionately. He points out the early targets were chosen not because of their importance or their connection to the massacre but because they were "soft" targets that were easy to reach. He discusses whether some of the more peripheral Palestinian radicals were worthy of full-blown assassination missions, although he doesn’t feel bad for any of them. (If you’re going to run around advocating the murder of the innocent and assist anyone who actually carries out an attack, you become fair game.)
Klein also discusses at some length the botched mission in Lillehammer, Norway, where a waiter was misidentified as Ali Hassan Salamah, one of the prize Black September targets, and killed by mistake. Several Israeli agents were arrested and convicted in Norwegian courts. The sloppiness of the mission showed that the Israelis had grown complacent and arrogant about their successes. After that, of course, the politicians pulled back farther than necessary, and the Mossad began refining both its target list and opting for less spectacular assassinations.
Not only does Klein name names when it comes to several of the missions supposedly run by the assassin called "Avner" in Speilberg’s film, but he notes that the most important hit -- the interagency strike on Beirut that took out several important terrorists in a place where they felt safe -- was led by Ehud Barak, a future Israeli prime minister.
And while Spielberg and radical screenwriter Tony Kushner say in Munich that terrorism increased as a result of the hit teams. Klein proves that the opposite is the case. In fact, most of the highly visible terrorist acts that happened after the launch of Ceasarea had been planned months earlier. By the time a year passed, the disruption in the PLO networks due to the loss of key players and a shift to defensive mode led to an undeniable lull in Palestinian terrorism. Within a few years, terrorist acts against Israelis abroad had all but ceased.
So much for “the cycle of violence.”
After reading this book it is hard not to conclude that Speilberg and Kushner drew all the wrong lessons for all the wrong reasons. Terrorism cannot be treated as a law enforcement problem. War is messy and imprecise, and that cannot be used as an argument against waging it. It’s not whether specific missions are successful or the target is important, but whether the effort itself bears dividends.
When the film Munich falsely says every act of terrorism that happened after the assassinations was in answer to the Israeli response, it is an argument that is forced onto the story to make a case against George W. Bush’s war on terror—especially in Iraq. It’s impossible to imagine the professionals we meet in Striking Back sitting at the dinner table and dithering over whether their targets are guilty enough to hit—that’s the soft privilege of American liberals safe in their Hollywood mansions.
With his concise, exciting and informative book, Aaron Klein strikes back against a cause celebre fraud against Israeli (and American) counter terrorism. It should settle the argument, but it won’t. After all, evidence matters little to the people still maintain Sacco and Venzetti were framed, Stalin opposed Hitler out of principle, and the Israelis botched their revenge against those who murdered their athletes and then beat themselves up to boot.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
April 11, 2006
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response
By Aaron J. Klein Random House, $24.95, 256pp.
In a sensational new book, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response, Aaron J. Klein, Time Magazine military and intelligence affairs correspondent, mines newly declassified documents and over 50 interviews with high ranking Israeli intelligence, military, and political figures to finally tell us what really happened at the 1972 Munich Olympics—and after.
Striking Back is authoritative and definitive—if by necessity somewhat incomplete. It will be many years before all the details are revealed, but Klein manages enough to tell a gripping story, and give a good overview of one of perhaps the 20th century’s highest profile terrorist act, and its aftermath.
Because they could operate abroad without fear, Palestinian terrorists became bold and audacious by 1972, culminating with the atrocity in the Munich. In response, Israel’s military and intelligence special units conducted a series of assassinations. These were set up by spies, planned by top-level officers and carried out by highly trained commandos.
Striking Back blows away the central conceit of Stephen Spielberg’s implausible film Munich and Vengeance, the single-sourced book by George Jonas on which the movie is based. Namely, that the Mossad -- recognized as one of the world’s most effective and skilled intelligence agencies in 1972 -- sent a team of guilt-ridden, kvetching amateurs into the field to hunt down terrorists, and relied on a French crime family out of a bad Robert Ludlum novel for information.
The reasons for the assassinations of PLO members involved in terrorism went far beyond mere vengeance, Klein writes. It was the only way to disrupt terrorist networks. In most Western European countries, terrorism against Israeli targets drew no real punishment. Participants could expect maximum sentences of 3 or 4 years -- if the police or security forces bothered to catch someone.
It wasn't just the heinous Munich Massacre that motivated the Israelis to put together their counterattack, which became known as Ceasarea. Equally disgusting was the Germans' incompetent and cowardly response to it during the initial standoff and afterward. Klein details how the first priority of the Germans and the Olympic Committee was to get the hostages off campus so the games could go on. Worse, Germany had no military or police counterterrorist unit; in the end, the federal police handled the situation worse than any small town police force in the United States could have done in its worst nightmare.
Munich galvanized the government and security forces of Israel in much the same way that 9/11 did in the United States, including finger pointing by the opposition party (though the report, unlike the 9/11 commission's document, was classified until recently and is summarized in Striking Back's appendix ).
And there was plenty reason for finger pointing. First, Klein reveals, the head of the Israeli Olympic delegation was scorned for protesting that the accommodations were the least secure in the complex. Second, he details the way in which different Israeli intelligence and security agencies did not communicate with one another, much like U.S. agencies before 9/11.
For Ceasarea, there were three assassination teams for logistics, surveillance, and assassination, each with about a dozen members. “The logistics squad drove the cars, spoke the local language, and was in charge of communications… The surveillance team, frequently the largest, had many female members (who often acted as parts of ‘couples’). Their job was to blend into their surroundings…The final component of each group were the assassins. They were combatants who trained in pairs… generally well-prepared young men from top flight army units.”
The assassins employed various methods from pistols to car bombs, from bombs in beds, to in one case, a full blown military commando operation launched from the sea.
What they did NOT do—memo to Academy Awards nominating committee-- was sit outside KBG safe houses all day in their cars, waiting for the target to show up, then jump out and start shooting.
Klein takes a skeptical view of Ceasarea’s claims of success, weighing their plusses and minuses dispassionately. He points out the early targets were chosen not because of their importance or their connection to the massacre but because they were "soft" targets that were easy to reach. He discusses whether some of the more peripheral Palestinian radicals were worthy of full-blown assassination missions, although he doesn’t feel bad for any of them. (If you’re going to run around advocating the murder of the innocent and assist anyone who actually carries out an attack, you become fair game.)
Klein also discusses at some length the botched mission in Lillehammer, Norway, where a waiter was misidentified as Ali Hassan Salamah, one of the prize Black September targets, and killed by mistake. Several Israeli agents were arrested and convicted in Norwegian courts. The sloppiness of the mission showed that the Israelis had grown complacent and arrogant about their successes. After that, of course, the politicians pulled back farther than necessary, and the Mossad began refining both its target list and opting for less spectacular assassinations.
Not only does Klein name names when it comes to several of the missions supposedly run by the assassin called "Avner" in Speilberg’s film, but he notes that the most important hit -- the interagency strike on Beirut that took out several important terrorists in a place where they felt safe -- was led by Ehud Barak, a future Israeli prime minister.
And while Spielberg and radical screenwriter Tony Kushner say in Munich that terrorism increased as a result of the hit teams. Klein proves that the opposite is the case. In fact, most of the highly visible terrorist acts that happened after the launch of Ceasarea had been planned months earlier. By the time a year passed, the disruption in the PLO networks due to the loss of key players and a shift to defensive mode led to an undeniable lull in Palestinian terrorism. Within a few years, terrorist acts against Israelis abroad had all but ceased.
So much for “the cycle of violence.”
After reading this book it is hard not to conclude that Speilberg and Kushner drew all the wrong lessons for all the wrong reasons. Terrorism cannot be treated as a law enforcement problem. War is messy and imprecise, and that cannot be used as an argument against waging it. It’s not whether specific missions are successful or the target is important, but whether the effort itself bears dividends.
When the film Munich falsely says every act of terrorism that happened after the assassinations was in answer to the Israeli response, it is an argument that is forced onto the story to make a case against George W. Bush’s war on terror—especially in Iraq. It’s impossible to imagine the professionals we meet in Striking Back sitting at the dinner table and dithering over whether their targets are guilty enough to hit—that’s the soft privilege of American liberals safe in their Hollywood mansions.
With his concise, exciting and informative book, Aaron Klein strikes back against a cause celebre fraud against Israeli (and American) counter terrorism. It should settle the argument, but it won’t. After all, evidence matters little to the people still maintain Sacco and Venzetti were framed, Stalin opposed Hitler out of principle, and the Israelis botched their revenge against those who murdered their athletes and then beat themselves up to boot.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Robert Ferrigno: The Making of 'Prayers for the Assassin'
http://www.prayersfortheassassin.com
If I had never ditched church, stolen the family car and gone to the bowling alley with Carla Johnson, I might not have written Prayers for the Assassin. I was sixteen at the time, attending a fundamentalist southern Presbyterian church under great duress. Carla wasthe hottest girl in the congregation, the wild-eyed daughter of a church elder. We spent a couple hours at the bowling alley where we listened to loud music and rubbed thighs while playing pinball, the trifecta of sin in those more innocent times. That was the end of my formal church attendance.
While I left church, the church didn't leave me. As Simone de Beauvoir, a French atheist put it, "you can abolish water, but you can't abolish thirst." Amen to that. I've been writing crime thrillers for the last fifteen years, and for some time I had given thought to writing a crime novel about a man who lost his faith, and suffered the loss badly, a cop more interested in justice than legalisms and failing at both.
9-11 changed these plans. I live on the West Coast but get up early. I was watching the news when the second airplane hit the World Trade Center, and knew the world was changed forever. In the weeks that followed, I realized that my hero who had lost his faith would be a Muslim warrior.
The premise of Prayers for the Assassin is that the USA loses the war on terror and becomes an Islamic republic. I make it clear that the USA was never defeated militarily, but bled white by a conflict without end, weakened internally by dissent, economic malaise, and a consumer culture hostile to people's thirst for meaning in their lives. A lot of people have asked me if I think such a thing could really happen. As always, the answer can be found in The Godfather.
There's a great scene in Godfather II, where Michael Corleone goes to Havana to deliver twelve million dollars to the Batista government to set up some casinos. On the drive from the airport to the presidential palace, Michael sees a young rebel blow himself up with a grenade, taking out the military police attempting to arrest him. While his partner, Hyman Roth dismisses the chances of Castro's rebels being successful, Michael is discomforted, noting that the soldiers are paid to fight, but the rebels are dying for what they believe in. I think this is the key to the world of Prayers for the Assassin.
We live in an innovative, sectarian nation, which values personal freedom and creativity, but it also leaves us shortsighted and vulnerable, demanding quick fixes and steady progress. In a generation-long war, technology will not matter as much as the absolute belief in the rightness of one's cause and the willingness to die for those beliefs. The ongoing and deadly hostility between the Sunni and the Shiite branches of Islam stems from the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in a battle over 1300 years ago. Can you remember who won the World Series two years ago? Which culture do you think is better equipped spiritually to fight a fifty-year war?
In contrast to the moral certainty of Islam, we have the flabby pieties of our own leaders. George Bush talked about angels watching over the U.S. after 9-11, and then suggested that we all go shopping, lest the terrorists win. John Kerry's Catholicism was high on his resume when he ran for president, but he was unapologetic about his thirty-year record of voting against any limits on abortion, in clear violation of the most basic tenets of his Catholic faith. Now try to imagine an Islamic politician stumping with a ham sandwich in his hand, or suggesting that shopping is the best defense, and ask yourself what kind of leader would you trust to lead you through dark and perilous times? Moral ambiguity and cultural relativism are luxuries when the ground shakes beneath your feet.
Try this on for size. On October 23, 2001, six weeks after 9-11, David Weston, president of ABC News, told an audience at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, that he didn't have an opinion as to whether the Pentagon was a legitimate target. "As a journalist I feel strongly that's something that I should not be taking a position on. I'm supposed to figure out what is and what is not, not what ought to be." Weston's sense of objectivity mirrors a statement former CBS News anchor made during a PBS discussion some years ago. Rather said that if he was attached to a Viet Cong patrol in his capacity as a newsman, and the Viet Cong were about to ambush American soldiers, he would not warn the Americans. Good night and good luck, Dan.
I sometimes think that people who can't imagine American's converting to Islam are deaf to the serenity and comfort of a deep religious faith. In my research, I discovered many aspects of Islam that I found appealing, particularly the sense of worldwide community. One of my favorite parts of the book is when the hero, Rakkim, is walking through the streets of Seattle at dawn and hears the call to prayer.
Rakkim stood there in the pink glow of daybreak, trembling with the sound, the perfect resonance. One heart. One soul. One God. He hadn't prayed in three years, but he found himself mouthing the words of the muezzin as people hurried past him toward the mosque, businessmen in three-piece suits, teenagers in jeans, women leading children by the hand, urging them on so as not to be late. Congregational prayers were said to be twenty-seven times better than individual prayers, and greater blessings were given to those who were first inside. In a few minutes the faithful would be on their knees, facing toward the Ka'aba in Mecca, a perfectly synchronized wave of submission, selfless and infinite, rolling through eternity. Rakkim watched them rush to mosque and he envied them their devotion.
I spent over two years researching the book, everything from theology and geopolitics to small unit battle tactics and the proper position of the hands and feet during Muslim devotions. As a former reporter, I utilized facts to bolster the story, from dietary proscriptions, to the second-class status of Christians under Islamic law, to the nature of the main antagonist in the book. This character, known as the Wise Old One, is in fact a figure from Islamic lore, the Mahdi, a descendent of Muhammad, who will someday unite all Muslims at their time of greatest crisis, and go on to conquer the world. I took great pains to internalize my research so as not to get in the way of telling a good story. My intention was always to tell a tale, to write a novel filled with love and violence and betrayal, a thriller set in the future that makes you forget it's not happening right now. If you read the first page and are not eager to turn to the next, then I've failed.
About Excerpt Making of
Friday, April 07, 2006
Jon Heder gets off the bench
'Napoleon' has put him in comedy's big leagues
Updated 4/7/2006 12:43 AM
By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
Jon Heder stands on a sunny sidewalk outside a Los Angeles novelty shop, staring through his own reflection in the store window with an expression that is partly amused and partly mortified.
The star of the 2004 cult comedy Napoleon Dynamite has heard of this chain of gag stores called Aahs, but he has never been to one before. On the other side of the glass, a mannequin in a rubber, empty-eyed Napoleon mask gapes back at him, wearing a T-shirt, hat and slippers emblazoned with the movie's famous phrase "Vote For Pedro."
All around the dummy are trinkets and dolls with that face — you know the one. In fact, as he surveys the merchandise, Heder is making it now: eyes at half-staff, his full lips hanging open limply until they spring back to life and say: "That is a creepy mask."
[PRESTON HIGH REUNION: What's become of the Napoleon Dynamite cast?]
Like many fans of Napoleon Dynamite, Heder is glad to see a part of himself in the character without really wanting to be him. With The Benchwarmers, opening Friday, Heder (it rhymes with "leader") will try to break away from the character that launched his career. This Adam Sandler-produced movie is about three grown losers who take on Little Leaguers at baseball. Heder plays a paperboy whose skull is thicker than his crash helmet.
Heder enjoys his pop-culture niche. He points to the window display to the left of the Napoleon tchotchkes: a heap of toys and clothing from Tim Burton's animated The Nightmare Before Christmas, and on the other side, collectibles from The Simpsons.
"You know what's cool, though?" Heder says, breaking into a grin. "We're right next to my favorite movie of all time. We're there between The Simpsons and Nightmare. That's a dream come true."
Three movies to come
Heder is 28 now, and it has been two years since Napoleon premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and over the course of the summer became one of the biggest sleeper hits in movie history.
Made for $400,000, the movie earned $45 million at the box office, became a DVD hit, collected assorted MTV and Teen Choice awards and draped kids across the country in a fresh batch of ironic T-shirts.
For the uninitiated, Napoleon Dynamite is about a hopeless Idaho teen who campaigns to elect his monotone pal, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), class president. He feuds with the family llama, slap-fights with his miniature older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), and tries to escape from it all by wiring himself into a "time machine" purchased by his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), which only paralyzes him with an electrical shock.
Heder has done several other movies, most awaiting release. Last fall, he was the spaced-out psychic in the Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy Just Like Heaven.
Other Heder films coming soon:
• In the computer-animated Monster House (July 21), he voices a chubby pizza-delivery guy who tells neighborhood kids the secrets of a haunted mansion.
• In School for Scoundrels (Sept. 29), he's a meek meter-reader who takes a confidence-building class from Billy Bob Thornton, only to find himself competing with his teacher for the same woman.
•Blades of Glory, now shooting and due in 2007, has Heder as the rival of a disgraced Olympic skater (Will Ferrell). They team up for one more shot at gold.
Gold is one thing he didn't get a lot of from Napoleon. As he looks over the toys, T-shirts, action figures, lip balm, wigs and other items at the Aahs store, Heder says he didn't get rich off the movie.
Napoleon was made by director Jared Hess, Heder's classmate at Utah's Brigham Young University. Heder starred mainly as a favor and was paid $1,000.
"Technically, that's what I was paid," he says, though Fox Searchlight gave him an unspecified bonus when the movie became a hit.
"Anything after (the original $1,000), which wasn't much, was Fox saying 'Oh, you put a lot of work in for us through promotions, so basically here's a gift check,' " Heder says. "It wasn't that much. But it was the most I'd ever seen, so I'm not complaining. I could never complain because it was a boost. I didn't have a career. This started it."
In Aahs, a television plays the film continuously, and a man and his two children stand transfixed. When the father tries to move them along, one little girl protests: "Let's see what Napoleon says!"
Heder whispers: "It'd be great to just lean down and say, 'Kids, buy my stuff!' "
But he doesn't. Now, Heder looks so different from Napoleon, maybe they wouldn't believe him anyway.
No bones about it
Movie stardom is an unlikely arc for a Mormon kid from Oregon, who started studying film to become an animator, not a leading man. Napoleon Dynamite is no pin-up material, with his throaty Beavis and Butt-Head voice and donkey-sized choppers, but Heder is far more handsome, though more Tom Hanks than Tom Cruise.
He and his wife, Kirsten, have been married for three years, and he spent two years in Japan on the traditional proselytizing mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He's a twin from a family of six children, though he doesn't have any kids yet.
Napoleon has led to a first-look production deal at Universal Pictures for Heder, his twin, Dan, and their older brother, Doug, who will craft movies for Jon while producing their own animated features.
Gil Kenan, the director of the upcoming Monster House, says Heder's subtle facial expressions and unlikely limberness add a dangerous intensity to his performances.
"I broke his foot in the first take of the first scene," the director says. Heder also recently fractured his ankle working with Ferrell on Blades of Glory and wears a brace.
Kenan compares him to Monty Python's John Cleese: "As soon as you let him move his limbs, he's a big guy, but it feels like he doesn't have any bones. And it turns out he doesn't — in his feet."
But there's more to his success than slapstick. Heder and Hess (who directs Jack Black in the upcoming wrestling comedy Nacho Libre) presented a slice of life in Napoleon that is unique to rural Mormon culture in states like Utah and Idaho.
"I think that (Mormons) definitely see some correlation between the Napoleon character coming up with creative alternatives to swear words" like "Gosh!" "Dang!" and "Frickin' idiot!" Hess says. "In Mormon households, that's what kids have to do."
Robert Kirby, a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, has seen Napoleon many times and has some lines of dialogue as his cellphone ringtones. He says Heder provides Mormons with a cultural caricature they can embrace.
"If you weren't (Napoleon), you at least knew him, these hicks who thought they were really with-it but were about two years behind the times," says Kirby, a Mormon humorist who has written the books Sunday of the Living Dead and Wake Me for the Resurrection. "(Heder) promises real hope for the way Mormons are regarded in film. What we're looking for is our own stereotype. And without doing it in an overt or in-your-face way, he brings the Mormon character to the screen."
Heder says that because of his religious beliefs he won't take roles that have cursing, excessive sexuality or violence. In Benchwarmers, he says he tried to make his role more kid-friendly, though there are still plenty of gross-out gags.
Laughing, not preaching
He makes it clear that he's a comedian, not a preacher. "It's tough now, because am I like an ambassador (for Mormonism) now? I was representing the church on my mission, and now I'm representing the church again in some ways," Heder says. "Sometimes I downplay it. 'I'm a Mormon. This is what Mormons do.' — That's not my thing. I want to get up there and tell entertaining stories but that are also to a certain extent clean."
Walking this Saturday morning around Westwood near the UCLA campus, Heder remains unrecognized. At the nearby Bruin theater, he was mobbed by fans nearly a year ago when he and his brothers attended one of the first public showings of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. He says he should have known better. "Bad idea," he says now. "It was like geek central. Everybody was coming up, left and right, bugging me for autographs, pictures, cellphone messages, cellphone pictures. It was out of control."
But inside Aahs, surrounded by merchandise and admirers glued to the movie, he is tickled to be undercover. Still ...
As Heder stands in line to purchase a Napoleon MP3 cover, Napoleon lunchbox and Napoleon flip-flops, he watches the family seen earlier watching the movie leave the store. He laments, "I should have said something."
Or, as his alter ego would say: Dang it!
Posted 4/6/2006 9:50 PM
Updated 4/7/2006 12:43 AM
By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
Jon Heder stands on a sunny sidewalk outside a Los Angeles novelty shop, staring through his own reflection in the store window with an expression that is partly amused and partly mortified.
The star of the 2004 cult comedy Napoleon Dynamite has heard of this chain of gag stores called Aahs, but he has never been to one before. On the other side of the glass, a mannequin in a rubber, empty-eyed Napoleon mask gapes back at him, wearing a T-shirt, hat and slippers emblazoned with the movie's famous phrase "Vote For Pedro."
All around the dummy are trinkets and dolls with that face — you know the one. In fact, as he surveys the merchandise, Heder is making it now: eyes at half-staff, his full lips hanging open limply until they spring back to life and say: "That is a creepy mask."
[PRESTON HIGH REUNION: What's become of the Napoleon Dynamite cast?]
Like many fans of Napoleon Dynamite, Heder is glad to see a part of himself in the character without really wanting to be him. With The Benchwarmers, opening Friday, Heder (it rhymes with "leader") will try to break away from the character that launched his career. This Adam Sandler-produced movie is about three grown losers who take on Little Leaguers at baseball. Heder plays a paperboy whose skull is thicker than his crash helmet.
Heder enjoys his pop-culture niche. He points to the window display to the left of the Napoleon tchotchkes: a heap of toys and clothing from Tim Burton's animated The Nightmare Before Christmas, and on the other side, collectibles from The Simpsons.
"You know what's cool, though?" Heder says, breaking into a grin. "We're right next to my favorite movie of all time. We're there between The Simpsons and Nightmare. That's a dream come true."
Three movies to come
Heder is 28 now, and it has been two years since Napoleon premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and over the course of the summer became one of the biggest sleeper hits in movie history.
Made for $400,000, the movie earned $45 million at the box office, became a DVD hit, collected assorted MTV and Teen Choice awards and draped kids across the country in a fresh batch of ironic T-shirts.
For the uninitiated, Napoleon Dynamite is about a hopeless Idaho teen who campaigns to elect his monotone pal, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), class president. He feuds with the family llama, slap-fights with his miniature older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), and tries to escape from it all by wiring himself into a "time machine" purchased by his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), which only paralyzes him with an electrical shock.
Heder has done several other movies, most awaiting release. Last fall, he was the spaced-out psychic in the Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy Just Like Heaven.
Other Heder films coming soon:
• In the computer-animated Monster House (July 21), he voices a chubby pizza-delivery guy who tells neighborhood kids the secrets of a haunted mansion.
• In School for Scoundrels (Sept. 29), he's a meek meter-reader who takes a confidence-building class from Billy Bob Thornton, only to find himself competing with his teacher for the same woman.
•Blades of Glory, now shooting and due in 2007, has Heder as the rival of a disgraced Olympic skater (Will Ferrell). They team up for one more shot at gold.
Gold is one thing he didn't get a lot of from Napoleon. As he looks over the toys, T-shirts, action figures, lip balm, wigs and other items at the Aahs store, Heder says he didn't get rich off the movie.
Napoleon was made by director Jared Hess, Heder's classmate at Utah's Brigham Young University. Heder starred mainly as a favor and was paid $1,000.
"Technically, that's what I was paid," he says, though Fox Searchlight gave him an unspecified bonus when the movie became a hit.
"Anything after (the original $1,000), which wasn't much, was Fox saying 'Oh, you put a lot of work in for us through promotions, so basically here's a gift check,' " Heder says. "It wasn't that much. But it was the most I'd ever seen, so I'm not complaining. I could never complain because it was a boost. I didn't have a career. This started it."
In Aahs, a television plays the film continuously, and a man and his two children stand transfixed. When the father tries to move them along, one little girl protests: "Let's see what Napoleon says!"
Heder whispers: "It'd be great to just lean down and say, 'Kids, buy my stuff!' "
But he doesn't. Now, Heder looks so different from Napoleon, maybe they wouldn't believe him anyway.
No bones about it
Movie stardom is an unlikely arc for a Mormon kid from Oregon, who started studying film to become an animator, not a leading man. Napoleon Dynamite is no pin-up material, with his throaty Beavis and Butt-Head voice and donkey-sized choppers, but Heder is far more handsome, though more Tom Hanks than Tom Cruise.
He and his wife, Kirsten, have been married for three years, and he spent two years in Japan on the traditional proselytizing mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He's a twin from a family of six children, though he doesn't have any kids yet.
Napoleon has led to a first-look production deal at Universal Pictures for Heder, his twin, Dan, and their older brother, Doug, who will craft movies for Jon while producing their own animated features.
Gil Kenan, the director of the upcoming Monster House, says Heder's subtle facial expressions and unlikely limberness add a dangerous intensity to his performances.
"I broke his foot in the first take of the first scene," the director says. Heder also recently fractured his ankle working with Ferrell on Blades of Glory and wears a brace.
Kenan compares him to Monty Python's John Cleese: "As soon as you let him move his limbs, he's a big guy, but it feels like he doesn't have any bones. And it turns out he doesn't — in his feet."
But there's more to his success than slapstick. Heder and Hess (who directs Jack Black in the upcoming wrestling comedy Nacho Libre) presented a slice of life in Napoleon that is unique to rural Mormon culture in states like Utah and Idaho.
"I think that (Mormons) definitely see some correlation between the Napoleon character coming up with creative alternatives to swear words" like "Gosh!" "Dang!" and "Frickin' idiot!" Hess says. "In Mormon households, that's what kids have to do."
Robert Kirby, a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, has seen Napoleon many times and has some lines of dialogue as his cellphone ringtones. He says Heder provides Mormons with a cultural caricature they can embrace.
"If you weren't (Napoleon), you at least knew him, these hicks who thought they were really with-it but were about two years behind the times," says Kirby, a Mormon humorist who has written the books Sunday of the Living Dead and Wake Me for the Resurrection. "(Heder) promises real hope for the way Mormons are regarded in film. What we're looking for is our own stereotype. And without doing it in an overt or in-your-face way, he brings the Mormon character to the screen."
Heder says that because of his religious beliefs he won't take roles that have cursing, excessive sexuality or violence. In Benchwarmers, he says he tried to make his role more kid-friendly, though there are still plenty of gross-out gags.
Laughing, not preaching
He makes it clear that he's a comedian, not a preacher. "It's tough now, because am I like an ambassador (for Mormonism) now? I was representing the church on my mission, and now I'm representing the church again in some ways," Heder says. "Sometimes I downplay it. 'I'm a Mormon. This is what Mormons do.' — That's not my thing. I want to get up there and tell entertaining stories but that are also to a certain extent clean."
Walking this Saturday morning around Westwood near the UCLA campus, Heder remains unrecognized. At the nearby Bruin theater, he was mobbed by fans nearly a year ago when he and his brothers attended one of the first public showings of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. He says he should have known better. "Bad idea," he says now. "It was like geek central. Everybody was coming up, left and right, bugging me for autographs, pictures, cellphone messages, cellphone pictures. It was out of control."
But inside Aahs, surrounded by merchandise and admirers glued to the movie, he is tickled to be undercover. Still ...
As Heder stands in line to purchase a Napoleon MP3 cover, Napoleon lunchbox and Napoleon flip-flops, he watches the family seen earlier watching the movie leave the store. He laments, "I should have said something."
Or, as his alter ego would say: Dang it!
Posted 4/6/2006 9:50 PM
Victor Davis Hanson: Congresswoman McKinney & The Admiral
April 07, 2006
Victor Davis Hanson
Georgia Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney's recent run-in with a security official at the nation's Capitol reminded me of an earlier dust-up.
On New Year's Eve 2002, while I was a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the superintendent - the distinguished three-star Vice Adm. Richard J. Naughton - tried to enter the academy without wearing the photo ID required of all military and civilian personnel.
Naturally expecting that the young Marine sentry on duty would recognize his all-important superintendent, Naughton boldly tried to pass. But instead, the Marine asked him to produce identification. Angry words and some sort of altercation ensued between the admiral and the enlisted man.
Later, Naughton claimed he couldn't "remember" whether he had "touched" the guard, but he did concede he "might" have done so.
After a lengthy, ultimately damming investigation, Naughton resigned - first from his post as academy superintendent and then subsequently from the Navy altogether. During the investigation, some skeptics at Annapolis had doubted whether Naughton would pay any price. But his exalted rank, along with his race and gender, won no exemption.
I mention the Naughton case to illustrate that such mix-ups at government checkpoints are not unusual - and that eventually public pressure catches up with aristocratic arrogance and even the powerful are held to account.
Cynthia McKinney recently had her own Naughton moment when she tried to enter the Capitol.
Like the admiral, she took umbrage when confronted by a guard who didn't recognize her and was merely trying to do his job of protecting a government facility. She, too, found herself in some sort of physical altercation with a lowly subordinate. But that's where the comparisons end.
All the facts are not yet known, and McKinney is an elected official not subject to military accountability. But her reaction to this similar incident tells us a great deal about the pathologies of our current culture.
After witnesses related that McKinney was asked to stop three times - and replied with some sort of shove - she went public at a press conference. There she resorted to the now all too familiar fallback positions unavailable to Naughton. Surrounded by celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, McKinney said, "This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female, black congresswoman."
Note how she covered all the bases to preempt a possible indictment, putting the onus on the aggrieved. Plus, in our star-struck culture, we equate celebrity with gravitas. And so we are supposed to believe that an otherwise clueless Calypso singer or action-hero actor lend credence to McKinney's wild charges.
McKinney not only played the race and celebrity cards, but the feminist one as well - as if the dutiful policemen had kept his job this long by allowing unrecognized white male elected officials to enter checkpoints without showing identification.
And if race and gender were not enough, McKinney evoked the standard sexual harassment code words "inappropriate touching" - as if a randy guard were trying to grope the defenseless congresswoman.
McKinney realizes that claims of victimization are the keys to conning our system - and that the more accusations of racism, sexism and harassment the better for turning the cowardly aggressor into the heroically aggrieved.
Some of the official response so far has been depressing. The leading Democrat in the House, California's Nancy Pelosi, initially dryly dismissed the incident with, "I would not make a big deal of this."
Fine, except this same congresswoman recently referred to Vice President Dick Cheney's handling of his hunting accident as a "manifestation of the arrogance of the White House. They don't come clean with the American people. They think they are above the law and above accountability to the American people."
Note Pelosi's words "arrogance" and "above the law." Is deliberately slugging a federal security official at a Capitol checkpoint less arrogant or illegal than how Cheney behaved after accidentally peppering a friend during a private hunt?
So, what can we learn from the McKinney moment?
Slandering someone as racist and sexist is now supposed to do for Democrats what the old wealth and power purportedly did for Republicans - give them an unfair advantage and allow them to evade the rules.
Progressives once gained credence because they insisted merit should outweigh class, money and connections. These days they are losing credibility when they insist race and gender should trump merit and facts.
America has learned to apply the rules to a Vice Adm. Richard J. Naughton; now it must also insist on them for Rep. Cynthia McKinney.
Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Mexifornia. A State of Becoming (Encounter 2003).
(C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Victor Davis Hanson
Georgia Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney's recent run-in with a security official at the nation's Capitol reminded me of an earlier dust-up.
On New Year's Eve 2002, while I was a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the superintendent - the distinguished three-star Vice Adm. Richard J. Naughton - tried to enter the academy without wearing the photo ID required of all military and civilian personnel.
Naturally expecting that the young Marine sentry on duty would recognize his all-important superintendent, Naughton boldly tried to pass. But instead, the Marine asked him to produce identification. Angry words and some sort of altercation ensued between the admiral and the enlisted man.
Later, Naughton claimed he couldn't "remember" whether he had "touched" the guard, but he did concede he "might" have done so.
After a lengthy, ultimately damming investigation, Naughton resigned - first from his post as academy superintendent and then subsequently from the Navy altogether. During the investigation, some skeptics at Annapolis had doubted whether Naughton would pay any price. But his exalted rank, along with his race and gender, won no exemption.
I mention the Naughton case to illustrate that such mix-ups at government checkpoints are not unusual - and that eventually public pressure catches up with aristocratic arrogance and even the powerful are held to account.
Cynthia McKinney recently had her own Naughton moment when she tried to enter the Capitol.
Like the admiral, she took umbrage when confronted by a guard who didn't recognize her and was merely trying to do his job of protecting a government facility. She, too, found herself in some sort of physical altercation with a lowly subordinate. But that's where the comparisons end.
All the facts are not yet known, and McKinney is an elected official not subject to military accountability. But her reaction to this similar incident tells us a great deal about the pathologies of our current culture.
After witnesses related that McKinney was asked to stop three times - and replied with some sort of shove - she went public at a press conference. There she resorted to the now all too familiar fallback positions unavailable to Naughton. Surrounded by celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, McKinney said, "This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female, black congresswoman."
Note how she covered all the bases to preempt a possible indictment, putting the onus on the aggrieved. Plus, in our star-struck culture, we equate celebrity with gravitas. And so we are supposed to believe that an otherwise clueless Calypso singer or action-hero actor lend credence to McKinney's wild charges.
McKinney not only played the race and celebrity cards, but the feminist one as well - as if the dutiful policemen had kept his job this long by allowing unrecognized white male elected officials to enter checkpoints without showing identification.
And if race and gender were not enough, McKinney evoked the standard sexual harassment code words "inappropriate touching" - as if a randy guard were trying to grope the defenseless congresswoman.
McKinney realizes that claims of victimization are the keys to conning our system - and that the more accusations of racism, sexism and harassment the better for turning the cowardly aggressor into the heroically aggrieved.
Some of the official response so far has been depressing. The leading Democrat in the House, California's Nancy Pelosi, initially dryly dismissed the incident with, "I would not make a big deal of this."
Fine, except this same congresswoman recently referred to Vice President Dick Cheney's handling of his hunting accident as a "manifestation of the arrogance of the White House. They don't come clean with the American people. They think they are above the law and above accountability to the American people."
Note Pelosi's words "arrogance" and "above the law." Is deliberately slugging a federal security official at a Capitol checkpoint less arrogant or illegal than how Cheney behaved after accidentally peppering a friend during a private hunt?
So, what can we learn from the McKinney moment?
Slandering someone as racist and sexist is now supposed to do for Democrats what the old wealth and power purportedly did for Republicans - give them an unfair advantage and allow them to evade the rules.
Progressives once gained credence because they insisted merit should outweigh class, money and connections. These days they are losing credibility when they insist race and gender should trump merit and facts.
America has learned to apply the rules to a Vice Adm. Richard J. Naughton; now it must also insist on them for Rep. Cynthia McKinney.
Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Mexifornia. A State of Becoming (Encounter 2003).
(C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Won't You Please Help Me? The Life and Death of the Beatles
April 06, 2006, 6:25 a.m.
By Timothy M. Thibodeau
http://www.nationalreview.com
In his epic saga of the four lads from Liverpool, The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz delivers a jarring reappraisal of the supposed glory days of the band that spearheaded the British Invasion. The Beatles's earliest performances in the grimy clubs of Liverpool; their brutal drug and alcohol fueled gigs in Germany; the bedlam of Beatlemania; and the petty dismemberment of the most successful pop ensemble to that date are meticulously chronicled with unflinching candor. Whether intentional or not, Spitz has succeeded in deconstructing the official, blissful Beatles myth that was propagated by Paul, George, and Ringo in their meandering television pseudo-documentary, The Beatles Anthology (1995).
After hearing an upbeat interview with Spitz on Laura Ingraham's radio show, I expected his book to indulge us with a joyful celebration of Beatlemania. Instead, the heroic Mop Top myth quickly disintegrates into an often dark and tragic morality play that begins with the dysfunctional family life of an angry teenager named John Lennon, whose eventual stardom led him to declare that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. The irony, of course, is that one is hard pressed to find a more apt illustration of Jesus' saying "What would it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" than the John Lennon of Spitz's biography. (As it turned out, Lennon's fame also quite literally cost him his life when a deranged fan murdered him).
A Sad Man
Beatles fans know that the band's founder was a restless and unconventional soul, that Lennon had a biting wit and predictably offered huge doses of sarcastic buffoonery to his audiences. Spitz highlights many of these colorful displays: torrents of profanity at German audiences; Nazi salutes from the balconies of hotels; and John's famous, much-rehearsed quip in which he invited the British royalty to "rattle their jewelry" during a Royal Command Performance.
Spitz deftly takes us beyond these antics to lay bare a tortured soul that found no comfort in fame, no respite from his inner demons. While avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of armchair psychologist, Spitz documents the traumas of young Lennon's life that weighed him down with an often-debilitating melancholia. His father abandoned him when he was five; his mother was killed in a car accident when he was 18; he flunked out of art college; his best friend and idol, Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist for the Hamburg version of the Beatles, died of a brain aneurysm.
The grown-up Lennon found little solace in his musical art; instead, this despondent artist acted out his pain in increasingly frequent verbal and physical confrontations with his closest friends and associates. When the Beatles finally bid good riddance to the deplorable conditions of their early gigs and began to live like royalty, Lennon's alcoholism, drug abuse, and self-destructive tendencies became even more pronounced (many readers will understandably be stunned by the magnitude of his chronic drug dependency). The people who loved him the most — Cynthia, his long-suffering wife, whom he treated with humiliating contempt; and Brian Epstein, the Beatles' gay manager with whom John reportedly had a sexual encounter in Spain — were vilified, mocked, and abused. Lennon was also a miserable father who subjected his young son Julian to the same emotional deprivations that he had endured as a child.
How the Other Half Lived
The other half of the fabled Lennon and McCartney song-writing team seems to have been more immune to the vicissitudes of his life. While it is true that Paul came from a more stable home environment, he too suffered the trauma of a lost parent; his mother died of cancer when he was a teen. Yet Paul seemed to carry little emotional baggage into adulthood, or if he did, he was remarkably adept at concealing it. The Paul that emerges in Spitz's account is an exceptionally intelligent young man; a brilliant and disciplined musician who was brimming with self-importance; the consummate entertainer and showman who thrived on being in the public eye.
Like the other Beatles, Paul was often overwhelmed with the virtual imprisonment that accompanied stardom. But unlike John, Paul enjoyed being a Beatle, and when the joy ride came to an end, he didn't demolish his legacy with the same sort of vituperation and public lunacy as his partner. Spitz forces us to conclude that Lennon's hostility towards the Beatles after their break-up was largely the result of his deep personal animosity towards Paul. Always jealous and suspicious of Paul, even when they were at their collaborative peak, Lennon bitterly resented the fact that after Brian Epstein's untimely death, John's band became Paul's band. But given Lennon's drug addiction, mental instability, artistic incoherence, and puerile behavior, it is hard to imagine any other scenario.
Paul introduced the Beatles's lead guitarist, George Harrison, to the band. A solid musician who always stood in the long shadow of Lennon and McCartney, George seems to have been much closer to John in his cynicism about Beatlemania and the legions of shrieking girls who drowned out their performances. While he feasted on endless orgies of babes, booze, and drugs with the other Beatles, George looked to the East for spiritual enlightenment, convincing the other band members to embark on an ill-fated trip to study with the Maharishi. Despite the disappointment with his initial foray into Eastern spirituality, Harrison seems to have continued his introspective quest through his close association with Indian musicians,
Ringo Starr (born, Richard Starkey) became a Beatle when John, Paul, and George decided that their strikingly handsome and popular drummer, Pete Best, was an impediment to their success. Their manager unceremoniously fired Best; he was stunned that they weren't man enough to deliver the news to his face, and he broke down in tears at the ruthlessness of this act of treachery. Ringo had no qualms about leaving his band and taking Best's place. Most observers agreed that he was a talented musician who worked his own kind of ugly-duckling charm with the band members and audiences alike.
Disbanding the Band
The demise of the Beatles, recounted with mind-numbing detail in the closing chapters of the book, seems less surprising and more inevitable in Spitz's reconstruction. In fact, given the perpetual conflict, chronic drug abuse, and chaos that engulfed the band, we can only wonder how they endured for so long. The Beatles were great songwriters and performers but had no aptitude for the business end of Beatlemania. As Spitz notes, they were the victims of a number of bungled business deals and scams that resulted from the shortcomings of their all-too-distracted manager, Brian Epstein. His grooming of the Beatles when he "discovered" them in the Cavern Club paved the way for unimaginable success. But Epstein's bumbling through the terra incognita of celebrity of such magnitude was compromised by his own inner turmoil. A life-long homosexual (when such behavior was both scandalous and illegal), Epstein, like Lennon, fell into a downward, inward spiral just as the Beatles phenomenon had hit a dramatic crescendo. His own self-destructive and hedonistic behavior, which paralleled Lennon's, culminated in death by a drug overdose at the age of 32. If only he had found the equivalent of a Yoko Ono to pull him back from the abyss.
The Beatles never recovered from their manager's death. As Lennon later declared, when Brian died, "I knew we'd had it." Their brilliant producer, George Martin, continued to work his magic in the studio with the band members (his magnificent production of Abbey Road is perhaps his greatest achievement), but he invested little emotional or spiritual capital in his personal relationship with them. He clearly admired them as musicians but not as people. In aggressively attempting to fill the gaping hole left by the loss of Brian, Paul only generated more strife among the band members. Critics panned his disastrous television project, Magical Mystery Tour, and another of his ill-fated schemes, the movie Let it Be, unwittingly became an embarrassing archive of the band's demise. Even Paul admitted, years later, that he had crafted the "Beatles' break-up on film."
The disbanding of John, Paul, George, and Ringo comes as a relief by the time we finish Spitz's narrative. He unblinkingly catalogues the drug-induced absurdity of their new commercial enterprises. The anarchy and corruption of their own record label, Apple — with its host of con artists, groupies, and gold-diggers (Spitz counts Yoko Ono among them), who fleeced the Beatles for untold sums of money — makes for painful reading. It is hard to imagine that the band would have been capable of even of a modicum of artistic achievement in such a Dionysian setting. The angry young man from Liverpool who founded the Beatles had "gained the world," but in the process was quite literally losing his mind, not to mention his personal fortune. It really had come time for the lads to go their separate ways and to Let it Be.
— Timothy M. Thibodeau is professor of history at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.
By Timothy M. Thibodeau
http://www.nationalreview.com
In his epic saga of the four lads from Liverpool, The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz delivers a jarring reappraisal of the supposed glory days of the band that spearheaded the British Invasion. The Beatles's earliest performances in the grimy clubs of Liverpool; their brutal drug and alcohol fueled gigs in Germany; the bedlam of Beatlemania; and the petty dismemberment of the most successful pop ensemble to that date are meticulously chronicled with unflinching candor. Whether intentional or not, Spitz has succeeded in deconstructing the official, blissful Beatles myth that was propagated by Paul, George, and Ringo in their meandering television pseudo-documentary, The Beatles Anthology (1995).
After hearing an upbeat interview with Spitz on Laura Ingraham's radio show, I expected his book to indulge us with a joyful celebration of Beatlemania. Instead, the heroic Mop Top myth quickly disintegrates into an often dark and tragic morality play that begins with the dysfunctional family life of an angry teenager named John Lennon, whose eventual stardom led him to declare that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. The irony, of course, is that one is hard pressed to find a more apt illustration of Jesus' saying "What would it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" than the John Lennon of Spitz's biography. (As it turned out, Lennon's fame also quite literally cost him his life when a deranged fan murdered him).
A Sad Man
Beatles fans know that the band's founder was a restless and unconventional soul, that Lennon had a biting wit and predictably offered huge doses of sarcastic buffoonery to his audiences. Spitz highlights many of these colorful displays: torrents of profanity at German audiences; Nazi salutes from the balconies of hotels; and John's famous, much-rehearsed quip in which he invited the British royalty to "rattle their jewelry" during a Royal Command Performance.
Spitz deftly takes us beyond these antics to lay bare a tortured soul that found no comfort in fame, no respite from his inner demons. While avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of armchair psychologist, Spitz documents the traumas of young Lennon's life that weighed him down with an often-debilitating melancholia. His father abandoned him when he was five; his mother was killed in a car accident when he was 18; he flunked out of art college; his best friend and idol, Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist for the Hamburg version of the Beatles, died of a brain aneurysm.
The grown-up Lennon found little solace in his musical art; instead, this despondent artist acted out his pain in increasingly frequent verbal and physical confrontations with his closest friends and associates. When the Beatles finally bid good riddance to the deplorable conditions of their early gigs and began to live like royalty, Lennon's alcoholism, drug abuse, and self-destructive tendencies became even more pronounced (many readers will understandably be stunned by the magnitude of his chronic drug dependency). The people who loved him the most — Cynthia, his long-suffering wife, whom he treated with humiliating contempt; and Brian Epstein, the Beatles' gay manager with whom John reportedly had a sexual encounter in Spain — were vilified, mocked, and abused. Lennon was also a miserable father who subjected his young son Julian to the same emotional deprivations that he had endured as a child.
How the Other Half Lived
The other half of the fabled Lennon and McCartney song-writing team seems to have been more immune to the vicissitudes of his life. While it is true that Paul came from a more stable home environment, he too suffered the trauma of a lost parent; his mother died of cancer when he was a teen. Yet Paul seemed to carry little emotional baggage into adulthood, or if he did, he was remarkably adept at concealing it. The Paul that emerges in Spitz's account is an exceptionally intelligent young man; a brilliant and disciplined musician who was brimming with self-importance; the consummate entertainer and showman who thrived on being in the public eye.
Like the other Beatles, Paul was often overwhelmed with the virtual imprisonment that accompanied stardom. But unlike John, Paul enjoyed being a Beatle, and when the joy ride came to an end, he didn't demolish his legacy with the same sort of vituperation and public lunacy as his partner. Spitz forces us to conclude that Lennon's hostility towards the Beatles after their break-up was largely the result of his deep personal animosity towards Paul. Always jealous and suspicious of Paul, even when they were at their collaborative peak, Lennon bitterly resented the fact that after Brian Epstein's untimely death, John's band became Paul's band. But given Lennon's drug addiction, mental instability, artistic incoherence, and puerile behavior, it is hard to imagine any other scenario.
Paul introduced the Beatles's lead guitarist, George Harrison, to the band. A solid musician who always stood in the long shadow of Lennon and McCartney, George seems to have been much closer to John in his cynicism about Beatlemania and the legions of shrieking girls who drowned out their performances. While he feasted on endless orgies of babes, booze, and drugs with the other Beatles, George looked to the East for spiritual enlightenment, convincing the other band members to embark on an ill-fated trip to study with the Maharishi. Despite the disappointment with his initial foray into Eastern spirituality, Harrison seems to have continued his introspective quest through his close association with Indian musicians,
Ringo Starr (born, Richard Starkey) became a Beatle when John, Paul, and George decided that their strikingly handsome and popular drummer, Pete Best, was an impediment to their success. Their manager unceremoniously fired Best; he was stunned that they weren't man enough to deliver the news to his face, and he broke down in tears at the ruthlessness of this act of treachery. Ringo had no qualms about leaving his band and taking Best's place. Most observers agreed that he was a talented musician who worked his own kind of ugly-duckling charm with the band members and audiences alike.
Disbanding the Band
The demise of the Beatles, recounted with mind-numbing detail in the closing chapters of the book, seems less surprising and more inevitable in Spitz's reconstruction. In fact, given the perpetual conflict, chronic drug abuse, and chaos that engulfed the band, we can only wonder how they endured for so long. The Beatles were great songwriters and performers but had no aptitude for the business end of Beatlemania. As Spitz notes, they were the victims of a number of bungled business deals and scams that resulted from the shortcomings of their all-too-distracted manager, Brian Epstein. His grooming of the Beatles when he "discovered" them in the Cavern Club paved the way for unimaginable success. But Epstein's bumbling through the terra incognita of celebrity of such magnitude was compromised by his own inner turmoil. A life-long homosexual (when such behavior was both scandalous and illegal), Epstein, like Lennon, fell into a downward, inward spiral just as the Beatles phenomenon had hit a dramatic crescendo. His own self-destructive and hedonistic behavior, which paralleled Lennon's, culminated in death by a drug overdose at the age of 32. If only he had found the equivalent of a Yoko Ono to pull him back from the abyss.
The Beatles never recovered from their manager's death. As Lennon later declared, when Brian died, "I knew we'd had it." Their brilliant producer, George Martin, continued to work his magic in the studio with the band members (his magnificent production of Abbey Road is perhaps his greatest achievement), but he invested little emotional or spiritual capital in his personal relationship with them. He clearly admired them as musicians but not as people. In aggressively attempting to fill the gaping hole left by the loss of Brian, Paul only generated more strife among the band members. Critics panned his disastrous television project, Magical Mystery Tour, and another of his ill-fated schemes, the movie Let it Be, unwittingly became an embarrassing archive of the band's demise. Even Paul admitted, years later, that he had crafted the "Beatles' break-up on film."
The disbanding of John, Paul, George, and Ringo comes as a relief by the time we finish Spitz's narrative. He unblinkingly catalogues the drug-induced absurdity of their new commercial enterprises. The anarchy and corruption of their own record label, Apple — with its host of con artists, groupies, and gold-diggers (Spitz counts Yoko Ono among them), who fleeced the Beatles for untold sums of money — makes for painful reading. It is hard to imagine that the band would have been capable of even of a modicum of artistic achievement in such a Dionysian setting. The angry young man from Liverpool who founded the Beatles had "gained the world," but in the process was quite literally losing his mind, not to mention his personal fortune. It really had come time for the lads to go their separate ways and to Let it Be.
— Timothy M. Thibodeau is professor of history at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.
As Bonds Nears Baseball's Apex, a Sinking Feeling
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 6, 2006; A01
SAN FRANCISCO, April 5 -- Superimposed over the left field fence at AT&T Park are images of Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and the words, "A Giant Among Legends."
Bonds's career home run total, 708, is displayed prominently in right-center, just above those of Aaron (755), Ruth (714) and a legend he has already passed, Willie Mays (660), who happens to be Bonds's godfather.
For more than a decade, the Giants have been financially and emotionally dependent on their mercurial slugger. Now, with Bonds the focus of a Major League Baseball investigation into steroid use, the dysfunctional relationship has come to epitomize an entire era in baseball, one that brought the sport unprecedented riches but ultimately embarrassment and unease.
"This is not a good situation," said Chicago Cubs Manager Dusty Baker, who managed the Giants from 1993 to 2002. "It's not a good situation for anybody, you know? I feel bad for everybody."
For those still in Bonds's orbit -- team officials, players, sponsors and his coterie of assistants -- dealing with Bonds has become a series of uncomfortable trade-offs. The lucrative benefits are offset by the player's demanding personality and mounting evidence that his greatest achievements were tainted by performance-enhancing drugs.
Giants owner Peter A. Magowan said his club intends to cooperate "to the fullest extent that we can" with baseball's investigation. Magowan said he and other club employees would provide information to investigators if asked. At the same time, Magowan said, the Giants, who will play their home opener against the Atlanta Braves on Thursday afternoon, are preparing to celebrate Bonds's 715th home run, which would move him past Ruth into second place on the all-time list.
"We think and our fans think it's quite an achievement and should be recognized as such," Magowan said in an interview this week. "We will recognize it."
Bonds has earned it, Magowan said. Since the Giants signed Bonds as a free agent left fielder in 1992, the franchise value has increased from $100 million to an estimated $381 million. Attendance, which averaged 19,272 in 1992, averaged 40,000 in the first five seasons at AT&T Park until dipping slightly last season, when Bonds was hurt for most of the year. The stadium is essentially sustained by Bonds's popularity. Built with private funds, the ballpark requires annual mortgage payments in excess of $20 million, putting intense pressure on the Giants to keep it filled.
"Signing Barry Bonds helped turn San Francisco into a baseball town," Magowan said. "This is a city where the 49ers won five Super Bowls. And now this city has drawn 19.5 million people" to see the Giants "over the past six years."
Asked if that record would be tainted if Bonds is found to have used steroids, Magowan said: "I'm not gonna talk about steroids. There will be a time when I hope I can talk about them, but that time has not come yet."
Fears of a Faustian Bargain
The Giants are not the only ones grappling with their relationship with the left fielder. The slugger is 47 homers shy of Aaron's record, perhaps the most hallowed in American sport. But Bank of America, which has sponsored the team for 30 years and has nine ATM machines inside AT&T Park, has announced it will not sponsor a home run chase because of "questions about the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in the game," said Joe Goode, a bank spokesman, not specifically mentioning Bonds.
Meantime, ESPN, which last year paid approximately $2.4 billion for the rights to broadcast baseball over eight years, has struggled internally with its decision to purchase "Bonds on Bonds," a reality series. In an emotional March 27 meeting, ESPN reporters questioned whether the network had sacrificed its integrity to air a series in which Bonds preapproves the content.
The growing uneasiness surrounding Bonds mirrors the larger question that increasingly haunts baseball: whether the sport's renaissance in the late 1990s was essentially predicated on a lie.
The renaissance began when Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs dueled to break Roger Maris's 37-year-old single-season home run record in 1998. McGwire set the new record with 70. Bonds topped that by belting 73 homers three seasons later. From 1998 to 2004, major league attendance and home run totals soared concurrently. Baseball's annual revenue rose as well, from $2.3 billion in 1998 to $4.7 billion last year, and nine teams built largely publicly financed stadiums at a cost of $3.4 billion.
McGwire, an iconic figure after the 1998 season, has disappeared from public view after a humiliating appearance before a Congressional subcommittee in March 2005. Sosa, his skills diminished and hounded by steroid rumors, is out of baseball.
Steroids help build muscle and speed recovery but have been banned by most professional sports leagues because they also are known to cause undesirable side effects, create an uneven playing field and are illegal without a prescription.
Bonds's current predicament -- chasing Ruth and Aaron while under investigation for using drugs to help him hit home runs -- at times borders on the surreal.
On the morning of March 30, Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig announced that George J. Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader and part owner of the Boston Red Sox, would head baseball's investigation. As the basis for the investigation, Selig cited "Game of Shadows," a new book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters -- one of whom is the brother of this reporter -- that details Bonds's alleged steroid use in numbing detail.
That afternoon, at the corner of Third and King streets in San Francisco, a Borders bookstore had dozens of copies of the book stacked inside the front door. Across the street, Bonds, who has denied knowingly taking steroids, sat inside the Giants clubhouse, relaxing before an exhibition game while two of his personal trainers stared blankly at the television, where an ESPN analyst was pondering their boss's possible fate.
About 20 feet away from Bonds, shortstop Omar Vizquel offered support for his teammate while, at the same time, acknowledging doubts. "Obviously, Barry is a target because of the home run chase," Vizquel said. "Who doesn't want to talk about the home run chase and the record and is he or is he not" going to break it? "It's major league history. This is going down for the books forever. And I would love to [see] that moment on the field. How excited I would be to see Barry Bonds hit his 755th home run in front of 45,000 people. That's going to be unbelievable."
Asked if he would feel as excited if the investigation reveals that Bonds used steroids, Vizquel replied: "Probably not. If the whole thing comes out to be positive and it's out in the open, I don't know if it would have the same, what's the word? I don't know, it wouldn't feel as exciting."
Uncomfortable Trade-Offs
It is almost impossible to calculate how much Bonds has meant to the Giants. At the time the club acquired him, former owner Bob Lurie had tried to move the team to Tampa Bay. Rebuffed by his fellow National League owners, Lurie sold the Giants to Magowan, a former chief executive of Safeway. Magowan, in his first move, signed Bonds, then a free agent who began his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, to a six-year, $43.2 million contract.
"That signing of Barry Bonds put into effect a chain of events that, number one, kept the Giants in San Francisco and over the next 13 years gave us the third best won-lost record in baseball," Magowan said. "It put the best player in the game in a Giants uniform and has helped us draw more fans in the last six years than any team in baseball except the New York Yankees. None of that would have been possible, I don't think, without Mr. Bonds."
By 2000, the Giants had moved into their new state-of-the-art stadium, then known as Pacific Bell Park. Bonds was the Giants' main draw; the ballpark, constructed so that long homers to right field would land in San Francisco Bay for "Splash Hits," was essentially built with him in mind.
But the team's reliance on Bonds came with a trade-off: The left fielder began to exercise his new power. He staked out a wing of four lockers in the Giants' clubhouse, replete with a leather recliner on which he napped before games. The area was soon peopled by Bonds's personal trainers, in violation of a league policy that limited clubhouse access to players, club employees, immediate family and others authorized to do business, including members of the media.
One of those trainers was Bonds's weight coach, Greg Anderson, who was later indicted in a federal probe of a San Francisco area nutritional supplements company known as the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or BALCO. Anderson later pleaded guilty to distributing steroids and was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement.
The Giants' response to Anderson's indictment in 2004 shows how the team has bent over backwards to accommodate Bonds.
In the wake of the BALCO scandal, MLB moved to enforce limits on clubhouse access. The Giants circumvented the policy by putting Bonds's personal trainers on the team payroll. They included Bonds's speed and flexibility coach, Harvey Shields. Bonds later testified before a federal grand jury on the BALCO case that like him, Shields ingested a clear substance that both believed was flaxseed oil, the Chronicle reported. Prosecutors said it was an undetectable steroid. To replace Anderson, the team hired another strength coach, Greg "Sweets" Oliver, who is frequently seen carrying Bonds's bats.
Shields and Oliver are part of an entourage that also includes a videographer, a chiropractor and a batting practice pitcher. Members of the entourage also work with other Giants players but their movements are controlled largely by Bonds.
Giants officials acknowledge that Bonds gets special treatment but said he has earned it as the cornerstone of the franchise. Asked how the club determined where to draw the line, General Manager Brian Sabean said: "You draw the line by what happens on the baseball field. In his case, at least my opinion, he has the effect of the great college basketball player. That's unheard of in baseball, where one guy can make five. When he's on the field in a Giants uniform, it can elevate everybody's game."
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report from Washington.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 6, 2006; A01
SAN FRANCISCO, April 5 -- Superimposed over the left field fence at AT&T Park are images of Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and the words, "A Giant Among Legends."
Bonds's career home run total, 708, is displayed prominently in right-center, just above those of Aaron (755), Ruth (714) and a legend he has already passed, Willie Mays (660), who happens to be Bonds's godfather.
For more than a decade, the Giants have been financially and emotionally dependent on their mercurial slugger. Now, with Bonds the focus of a Major League Baseball investigation into steroid use, the dysfunctional relationship has come to epitomize an entire era in baseball, one that brought the sport unprecedented riches but ultimately embarrassment and unease.
"This is not a good situation," said Chicago Cubs Manager Dusty Baker, who managed the Giants from 1993 to 2002. "It's not a good situation for anybody, you know? I feel bad for everybody."
For those still in Bonds's orbit -- team officials, players, sponsors and his coterie of assistants -- dealing with Bonds has become a series of uncomfortable trade-offs. The lucrative benefits are offset by the player's demanding personality and mounting evidence that his greatest achievements were tainted by performance-enhancing drugs.
Giants owner Peter A. Magowan said his club intends to cooperate "to the fullest extent that we can" with baseball's investigation. Magowan said he and other club employees would provide information to investigators if asked. At the same time, Magowan said, the Giants, who will play their home opener against the Atlanta Braves on Thursday afternoon, are preparing to celebrate Bonds's 715th home run, which would move him past Ruth into second place on the all-time list.
"We think and our fans think it's quite an achievement and should be recognized as such," Magowan said in an interview this week. "We will recognize it."
Bonds has earned it, Magowan said. Since the Giants signed Bonds as a free agent left fielder in 1992, the franchise value has increased from $100 million to an estimated $381 million. Attendance, which averaged 19,272 in 1992, averaged 40,000 in the first five seasons at AT&T Park until dipping slightly last season, when Bonds was hurt for most of the year. The stadium is essentially sustained by Bonds's popularity. Built with private funds, the ballpark requires annual mortgage payments in excess of $20 million, putting intense pressure on the Giants to keep it filled.
"Signing Barry Bonds helped turn San Francisco into a baseball town," Magowan said. "This is a city where the 49ers won five Super Bowls. And now this city has drawn 19.5 million people" to see the Giants "over the past six years."
Asked if that record would be tainted if Bonds is found to have used steroids, Magowan said: "I'm not gonna talk about steroids. There will be a time when I hope I can talk about them, but that time has not come yet."
Fears of a Faustian Bargain
The Giants are not the only ones grappling with their relationship with the left fielder. The slugger is 47 homers shy of Aaron's record, perhaps the most hallowed in American sport. But Bank of America, which has sponsored the team for 30 years and has nine ATM machines inside AT&T Park, has announced it will not sponsor a home run chase because of "questions about the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in the game," said Joe Goode, a bank spokesman, not specifically mentioning Bonds.
Meantime, ESPN, which last year paid approximately $2.4 billion for the rights to broadcast baseball over eight years, has struggled internally with its decision to purchase "Bonds on Bonds," a reality series. In an emotional March 27 meeting, ESPN reporters questioned whether the network had sacrificed its integrity to air a series in which Bonds preapproves the content.
The growing uneasiness surrounding Bonds mirrors the larger question that increasingly haunts baseball: whether the sport's renaissance in the late 1990s was essentially predicated on a lie.
The renaissance began when Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs dueled to break Roger Maris's 37-year-old single-season home run record in 1998. McGwire set the new record with 70. Bonds topped that by belting 73 homers three seasons later. From 1998 to 2004, major league attendance and home run totals soared concurrently. Baseball's annual revenue rose as well, from $2.3 billion in 1998 to $4.7 billion last year, and nine teams built largely publicly financed stadiums at a cost of $3.4 billion.
McGwire, an iconic figure after the 1998 season, has disappeared from public view after a humiliating appearance before a Congressional subcommittee in March 2005. Sosa, his skills diminished and hounded by steroid rumors, is out of baseball.
Steroids help build muscle and speed recovery but have been banned by most professional sports leagues because they also are known to cause undesirable side effects, create an uneven playing field and are illegal without a prescription.
Bonds's current predicament -- chasing Ruth and Aaron while under investigation for using drugs to help him hit home runs -- at times borders on the surreal.
On the morning of March 30, Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig announced that George J. Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader and part owner of the Boston Red Sox, would head baseball's investigation. As the basis for the investigation, Selig cited "Game of Shadows," a new book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters -- one of whom is the brother of this reporter -- that details Bonds's alleged steroid use in numbing detail.
That afternoon, at the corner of Third and King streets in San Francisco, a Borders bookstore had dozens of copies of the book stacked inside the front door. Across the street, Bonds, who has denied knowingly taking steroids, sat inside the Giants clubhouse, relaxing before an exhibition game while two of his personal trainers stared blankly at the television, where an ESPN analyst was pondering their boss's possible fate.
About 20 feet away from Bonds, shortstop Omar Vizquel offered support for his teammate while, at the same time, acknowledging doubts. "Obviously, Barry is a target because of the home run chase," Vizquel said. "Who doesn't want to talk about the home run chase and the record and is he or is he not" going to break it? "It's major league history. This is going down for the books forever. And I would love to [see] that moment on the field. How excited I would be to see Barry Bonds hit his 755th home run in front of 45,000 people. That's going to be unbelievable."
Asked if he would feel as excited if the investigation reveals that Bonds used steroids, Vizquel replied: "Probably not. If the whole thing comes out to be positive and it's out in the open, I don't know if it would have the same, what's the word? I don't know, it wouldn't feel as exciting."
Uncomfortable Trade-Offs
It is almost impossible to calculate how much Bonds has meant to the Giants. At the time the club acquired him, former owner Bob Lurie had tried to move the team to Tampa Bay. Rebuffed by his fellow National League owners, Lurie sold the Giants to Magowan, a former chief executive of Safeway. Magowan, in his first move, signed Bonds, then a free agent who began his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, to a six-year, $43.2 million contract.
"That signing of Barry Bonds put into effect a chain of events that, number one, kept the Giants in San Francisco and over the next 13 years gave us the third best won-lost record in baseball," Magowan said. "It put the best player in the game in a Giants uniform and has helped us draw more fans in the last six years than any team in baseball except the New York Yankees. None of that would have been possible, I don't think, without Mr. Bonds."
By 2000, the Giants had moved into their new state-of-the-art stadium, then known as Pacific Bell Park. Bonds was the Giants' main draw; the ballpark, constructed so that long homers to right field would land in San Francisco Bay for "Splash Hits," was essentially built with him in mind.
But the team's reliance on Bonds came with a trade-off: The left fielder began to exercise his new power. He staked out a wing of four lockers in the Giants' clubhouse, replete with a leather recliner on which he napped before games. The area was soon peopled by Bonds's personal trainers, in violation of a league policy that limited clubhouse access to players, club employees, immediate family and others authorized to do business, including members of the media.
One of those trainers was Bonds's weight coach, Greg Anderson, who was later indicted in a federal probe of a San Francisco area nutritional supplements company known as the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or BALCO. Anderson later pleaded guilty to distributing steroids and was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement.
The Giants' response to Anderson's indictment in 2004 shows how the team has bent over backwards to accommodate Bonds.
In the wake of the BALCO scandal, MLB moved to enforce limits on clubhouse access. The Giants circumvented the policy by putting Bonds's personal trainers on the team payroll. They included Bonds's speed and flexibility coach, Harvey Shields. Bonds later testified before a federal grand jury on the BALCO case that like him, Shields ingested a clear substance that both believed was flaxseed oil, the Chronicle reported. Prosecutors said it was an undetectable steroid. To replace Anderson, the team hired another strength coach, Greg "Sweets" Oliver, who is frequently seen carrying Bonds's bats.
Shields and Oliver are part of an entourage that also includes a videographer, a chiropractor and a batting practice pitcher. Members of the entourage also work with other Giants players but their movements are controlled largely by Bonds.
Giants officials acknowledge that Bonds gets special treatment but said he has earned it as the cornerstone of the franchise. Asked how the club determined where to draw the line, General Manager Brian Sabean said: "You draw the line by what happens on the baseball field. In his case, at least my opinion, he has the effect of the great college basketball player. That's unheard of in baseball, where one guy can make five. When he's on the field in a Giants uniform, it can elevate everybody's game."
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report from Washington.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Michelle Malkin: The Party of Police-Haters
April 05, 2006
Michelle Malkin
There's only one thing more damning than the recent caterwauling of cop-bashing Rep. Cynthia McKinney and her race-mongering mob:
The stone-cold silence of Beltway Democrats.
While McKinney and her ilk sling wild charges of racism and conspiracy at the police, national Dems have yet to utter one clear word in defense of the men and women who protect their privileged backsides day in and day out in Washington.
But, hey, don't question their patriotism.
McKinney, who is black, is having the mother of all Beltway snit fits because, she claims, a white Capitol Hill police officer "inappropriately touched" her last week. After asking her several times to stop when she traipsed around a security checkpoint without proper identification, according to police accounts, the officer reportedly touched McKinney's arm or shoulder. In response, she struck the officer.
You know, Rep. McKinney, as a fellow "woman of color," I have been pulled aside by government security agents numerous times for secondary screening at airports over the last few years. I've had my bra straps snapped, my thighs pawed, and my torso wanded. I've had my cell phone tested for bomb residue, my laptop inspected, and my handbags manhandled.
My response was not to go postal or do a Naomi Campbell on the gropers. My response was to ask why they aren't doing more security profiling.
McKinney is spitting venom about "double standards" of justice. But if I had done what McKinney did to the police officer just doing his job, I would be marking time in the slammer. Caught in an imperial act of lawlessness, McKinney is now conducting her own victim Olympics to deflect blame and responsibility:
Lawyer James W. Myart Jr. called McKinney "a victim of the excessive use of force by law enforcement officials because of how she looks and the color of her skin. Ms. McKinney is just a victim of being in Congress while black." Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, admittedly ignorant of what McKinney did on Capitol Hill, were on hand to add their tribal "uh-huhs" and "amens" to the blanket condemnations of white police officers.
On Monday, an entire contingent of black leaders in Atlanta inveighed against law enforcement officers and lent McKinney their unconditional political support at a meeting of the Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta in the Community Church of God. (Hello, church-and-state separatists?) "Racial profiling is a well-thought-out and planned attack on black political leaders," fumed state Rep. Roberta Abdul-Salaam. "It's going from the gold dome down to the White House. It's happening and it's wrong."
Another instigated the crowd: "We know what time it is, and that's why the most progressive of us are standing here. Because we know that if you can come and get Cynthia today, you'll come and get us tomorrow." Yet another McKinney supporter rattled his tinfoil and asserted: "I believe this incident with Cynthia McKinney is a setup . . . I say the politicizing of this event was planned and staged! They decided to set this brave sister up!"
McKinney later appeared on CNN to insinuate that the entire Capitol Hill police department had "problems inside with the treatment of -- or the respect for diversity -- let me say." She adamantly refuses to apologize for her treatment of the officer she hit.
Two Capitol Hill cops died in the line of fire in 1998 defending politicians and government workers from an intruding gunman who waltzed passed a checkpoint in the same manner McKinney did. The Democrats' refusal to condemn the McKinney mob's smear campaign against the Capitol Hill police sinks to a new level of political cowardice. And stupidity. Republicans have already announced plans to introduce a bill defending the 1,700-member Capitol Hill police force -- reinforcing the Donkey Party's haplessness on public safety and national security issues.
Contempt for law enforcement is a hallmark of the party of Ted Kennedy, Al Sharpton, Chuck Schumer, Jesse Jackson and the Clintons. New Yorkers won't forget the shameful attack on members of the Albany Police Department honor guard, who were cursed at and spat on by participants in the state Democratic Party convention in 2000. It's all of a piece. To quote a certain now-quiet Democrat senator from New York pandering to her black constituents:
"And you know what I am talkin' about."
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Michelle Malkin
There's only one thing more damning than the recent caterwauling of cop-bashing Rep. Cynthia McKinney and her race-mongering mob:
The stone-cold silence of Beltway Democrats.
While McKinney and her ilk sling wild charges of racism and conspiracy at the police, national Dems have yet to utter one clear word in defense of the men and women who protect their privileged backsides day in and day out in Washington.
But, hey, don't question their patriotism.
McKinney, who is black, is having the mother of all Beltway snit fits because, she claims, a white Capitol Hill police officer "inappropriately touched" her last week. After asking her several times to stop when she traipsed around a security checkpoint without proper identification, according to police accounts, the officer reportedly touched McKinney's arm or shoulder. In response, she struck the officer.
You know, Rep. McKinney, as a fellow "woman of color," I have been pulled aside by government security agents numerous times for secondary screening at airports over the last few years. I've had my bra straps snapped, my thighs pawed, and my torso wanded. I've had my cell phone tested for bomb residue, my laptop inspected, and my handbags manhandled.
My response was not to go postal or do a Naomi Campbell on the gropers. My response was to ask why they aren't doing more security profiling.
McKinney is spitting venom about "double standards" of justice. But if I had done what McKinney did to the police officer just doing his job, I would be marking time in the slammer. Caught in an imperial act of lawlessness, McKinney is now conducting her own victim Olympics to deflect blame and responsibility:
Lawyer James W. Myart Jr. called McKinney "a victim of the excessive use of force by law enforcement officials because of how she looks and the color of her skin. Ms. McKinney is just a victim of being in Congress while black." Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, admittedly ignorant of what McKinney did on Capitol Hill, were on hand to add their tribal "uh-huhs" and "amens" to the blanket condemnations of white police officers.
On Monday, an entire contingent of black leaders in Atlanta inveighed against law enforcement officers and lent McKinney their unconditional political support at a meeting of the Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta in the Community Church of God. (Hello, church-and-state separatists?) "Racial profiling is a well-thought-out and planned attack on black political leaders," fumed state Rep. Roberta Abdul-Salaam. "It's going from the gold dome down to the White House. It's happening and it's wrong."
Another instigated the crowd: "We know what time it is, and that's why the most progressive of us are standing here. Because we know that if you can come and get Cynthia today, you'll come and get us tomorrow." Yet another McKinney supporter rattled his tinfoil and asserted: "I believe this incident with Cynthia McKinney is a setup . . . I say the politicizing of this event was planned and staged! They decided to set this brave sister up!"
McKinney later appeared on CNN to insinuate that the entire Capitol Hill police department had "problems inside with the treatment of -- or the respect for diversity -- let me say." She adamantly refuses to apologize for her treatment of the officer she hit.
Two Capitol Hill cops died in the line of fire in 1998 defending politicians and government workers from an intruding gunman who waltzed passed a checkpoint in the same manner McKinney did. The Democrats' refusal to condemn the McKinney mob's smear campaign against the Capitol Hill police sinks to a new level of political cowardice. And stupidity. Republicans have already announced plans to introduce a bill defending the 1,700-member Capitol Hill police force -- reinforcing the Donkey Party's haplessness on public safety and national security issues.
Contempt for law enforcement is a hallmark of the party of Ted Kennedy, Al Sharpton, Chuck Schumer, Jesse Jackson and the Clintons. New Yorkers won't forget the shameful attack on members of the Albany Police Department honor guard, who were cursed at and spat on by participants in the state Democratic Party convention in 2000. It's all of a piece. To quote a certain now-quiet Democrat senator from New York pandering to her black constituents:
"And you know what I am talkin' about."
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
The Joy of Conservatism: An Interview with Roger Scruton
by Maxwell Goss with Roger Scruton
http://www.newpantagruel.com
Roger Scruton is a philosopher, essayist, foxhunter, farmer, publisher, composer, and man of letters, as well as a contributor to Right Reason, the weblog for philosophical conservativsm. He is also Britain’s leading conservative intellectual and The Meaning of Conservatism, which he wrote in 1980, is arguably the most important statement of the traditionalist conservative outlook since Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953). One sign of the book’s success is the hostility it provoked on the left; the journal Radical Philosophy, for instance, described it as “clearly too ghastly to be taken seriously.”
Roger’s recent books include, among many others, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (2002), News from Somewhere: On Settling (2005), and the autobiographical Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005). Roger tells me he has “a strong attachment, recently acquired, to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Hazel River.” He and his wife Sophie recently bought a house in Virginia, and divide their time between rural America and rural England.
Roger graciously agreed to an interview on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Meaning of Conservatism, now in its third edition. We discussed a range of subjects including the reaction to the book from left and right, the possibilities and limitations of free markets, the U.S. Constitution, the nature of philosophy, the social function of religion, the prospects for conservatism under Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and the joylessness of liberalism.
Max Goss:What prompted you to write The Meaning of Conservatism?
Roger Scruton:I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy–or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist. At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of ‘resentment politics,’ other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them. It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left–whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition–would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.
MG:What about the reaction among conservatives? I’m thinking in particular of your criticism of certain capitalist arguments. While noting the conservative affinity for private property, you say these arguments “present us with a vision of politics that is desultory indeed, as though the sole aim of social existence were the accumulation of wealth and the sole concern of politics the discovery of the most effective means to it.” Did your lack of enthusiasm for free markets win you a warm reception with members of the Conservative Party?
Scruton:So far as I know The Meaning of Conservatism elicited no response whatsoever from the Conservative Party or those connected with it. There was, at the time, a small circle of intellectual conservatives at the London School of Economics–a legacy from the days when Oakeshott and Popper both taught there–and another at Cambridge. Neither of them seemed to notice the book. The Conservative Party was very much in the grip of the free market ideology relayed by the Institute for Economic Affairs. The view of the IEA at the time was that I, and the Salisbury Review which I founded, should be avoided, as exhibiting dangerous tendencies towards extremism, fascism etc., or alternatively as being part of a sophisticated KGB operation to split the Conservative Party. Later, however, the IEA’s Social Affairs Unit, under the leadership of Digby Anderson, developed in a direction that I felt closer to, and broke away from the IEA.
MG:What deleterious consequences result from the “free market ideology” you mention? Are there particular economic arrangements that conservatives ought to prefer?
Scruton:The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. [Friedrich] Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of ‘spontaneous order’, as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality. The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.) Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.
MG:Shifting gears, an important theme in your book is that the notion of a social contract, “a recent and now seemingly irrepressible political idea,” cannot ground political life as we experience it. Can you say a little about the contrasting idea of the “transcendent bonds” that you say give rise to our social obligations?
Scruton:My point was simply to emphasize that the most important obligations governing our lives as social and political beings–including those to family, country and state–are non-contractual and precede the capacity for rational choice. By referring to them as ‘transcendent’ I meant to emphasize that they transcend any capacity to rationalise them in contractual or negotiable terms. They have an absolute and immovable character that we must acknowledge if we are to understand our social and political condition. The refusal of people on the left to make this acknowledgement stems from their inability to accept external authority in any form, and from their deep down belief that all power is usurpation, unless wielded by themselves.
MG:Does your emphasis on authority give any substance to the claim, so often found on the lips of liberals, that conservatism is repressive and dictatorial?
Scruton:To describe an obligation as transcendent in my sense is not to endow it with some kind of oppressive force. On the contrary, it is to recognize the spontaneous disposition of people to acknowledge obligations that they never contracted. There are other words that might be used in this context: gratitude, piety, obedience–all of them virtues, and all of them naturally offered to the thing we love. What I try to make clear in my writings is that, while the left-liberal view of politics is founded in antagonism towards existing things and resentment at power in the hands of others, conservatism is founded in the love of existing things, imperfections included, and a willing acceptance of authority, provided it is not blatantly illegitimate. Hence there is nothing oppressive in the conservative attitude to authority. It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority–teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.
MG:The authority of the hunt master also comes to mind; an interesting study might be “the foxhunt as mediating institution.” Are there freedoms or other goods that could not exist without the benign forms of local authority you identify?
Scruton:The example of the hunt master is a good one, since it shows both the spontaneity of authority and the willingness of people to accept it, when they see how intricately it is connected to their own well-being and to the well-being of their community. To put the point in the arid terms of game theory: authority is a spontaneous solution to problems of coordination, and may be the only solution available. In all matters when discussion, voting and bargaining would delay the decision beyond the point when it must be made, the artifact of authority is the rational solution to problems of collective choice. This is obviously so in the military, but the principle extends through all society. And once authority is in place it becomes part of the culture: there grows around it that sense of security and of being at home in the world that we knew in childhood, and which now radiates from the people, offices and institutions to which we turn for answers. Without authority the mass of people have only questions, and it is not possible to live with a diet of unanswered questions.
MG:Is this why religion is important? Is a shared religion required for the forms of spontaneous authority you mention?
RS:Of course religion offers the certainties that people need–if it didn’t do that at least, it would have no congregation. But the social function of religion can be fulfilled whether its content is true or false, and whether it is compatible or not with modernity. Not every religion is tolerant of the unbeliever, and it is a remarkable fact about our own religious tradition that it allows not only apostasy but overt atheism–emphasizing that we bear witness through forgiveness and not through usurping a right of punishment that belongs only to God. In short it is a religious tradition that presents certainty in the midst of doubt, and allows the two to compete freely for our affections.
MG:In your book you criticize “the attempt to remake the nation through statute, and to substitute statute wherever possible for common law.” In the U.S., however, conservatives tend to be suspicious of what they term “the rule of judges,” and pin their hopes largely on a judiciary that hews as closely as possible to the letter of the law. Is there a tension here?
Scruton:American conservatives have rightly complained against the power of judges under the American constitution. For the Supreme Court has been able to use its authority as constitutional arbiter to expropriate the law-making powers of the Legislature. The doctrine of the division of powers is like the doctrine of the Trinity: it enshrines a mystery, and nobody really knows how to keep the three powers separate but united. There is a constant danger that they will collapse into one, as they have done under the rule of liberal judges in the Supreme Court. The British experience is related but different. In our case the collapse has gone the other way, with the legislature displacing and canceling the work of the courts. This is because we have a single chamber Parliament (the House of Lords now counting for nothing) and an unwritten constitution that places no real brakes on the abuse of legislative power (witness the recent Hunting Act). The conservative view, as I see it, is to advocate balance, which means respect offered by each organ of government to the others, and a refusal to arrogate powers when there is any doubt concerning the right to do so. I would also point out that the common law–a great gift of history that both our countries still possess–is both intrinsically conservative, and better able to resolve social conflicts than the schemes of politicians.
MG:You are often described as a “paleoconservative,” a term that Russell Kirk, who was described the same way, eschewed. Do you accept this designation?
Scruton:I am not hostile to American neo-conservatism, which seems to me to show a commendable desire to think things through and to develop an active alternative to liberalism in both national and international politics. But I suppose I am more of a paleo than a neo-conservative, since I believe that the conservative position is rooted in cultural rather than economic factors, and that the single-minded pursuit of competitive markets is just as much a threat to social order as the single-minded pursuit of equality.
MG:What do you make of the critique of industrial society presented by the Southern Agrarians, or by contemporary agrarians such as Wendell Berry?
Scruton:Things have moved on since the Southern Agrarians, who were able to enjoy the last twilight glow from a way of life which now barely glimmers in the ashes. Of course people like Wendelll Berry will awaken a strong feeling of loss, and a longing for homecoming, in many Americans. But the real conservative is the one who wishes to recuperate the lasting sense of life and its value, even in circumstances that seem unpropitious–such as those that prevail in a modern city. Industrial society was rightly criticised from both the right and the left; but industrial society has all but disappeared. The future lies with the self-employed, and it is for them to form the new communities, on the model of the old.
MG:The sort of conservatism you espouse is not easily expressed in slogans, nor do the arguments for it seem as easily mastered as those advanced in behalf of more populist varieties. What hope, if any, does your vision of conservatism have for gaining ascendancy?
Scruton:Of course it is not easy to put my kind of conservatism into slogans. That is a defect in slogans, and not in my conservatism. You cannot put Hayek’s theory of the common law, Kant’s theory of republican government, or Hegel’s theory of civil society into slogans. But they are true, for all that. A philosophy is nothing if it does not aim at truth. (That is why Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze are not philosophers.) To aim also to persuade is commendable, and for this reason it is necessary for a political thinker to learn how to write. Marx solved this problem, unfortunately, but then so did Burke. Good writing affects the minds of the literary elite, and ideas in the minds of that elite will eventually filter down, to the point where some slick but ignorant journalist will find the slogans that correspond, at his level of mental life, to those distantly and vaguely perceivable notions. This is in part what Plato had in mind, when he advocated the noble lie. Not “noble” but elegant; not a “lie” but journalism.
MG:If you could persuade the governments of Prime Minister Blair or President Bush to take onboard one of the lessons of your book, what would it be?
Scruton:My advice to Mr. Blair would be to stop pretending to be President and recognize instead that he is just a minister of the Crown. The burden of my argument in The Meaning of Conservatism is that proven institutions are more precious than the people who occupy them, and that those who exercise authority ought also to obey it. Mr. Blair has shown no disposition to recognize that his authority has been conferred on him by institutions that he is duty-bound to respect. His frivolous attitude to constitution, procedure and the dignities of office has done something to undermine not just his own authority, but the authority of government as such. My advice to President Bush would be to look at the ways in which the power of the state might be needed in order to support the autonomous associations and ‘little platoons of American civil society. There are two evils in particular which need to be addressed: the litigation explosion, which has vastly increased the risk of small businesses, and also sown discord among neighbours; and the disaster of the inner cities, which have suffered from the worst effects of American zoning laws and laissez-faire aesthetics, with the result that the middle class has fled from the city centres, causing social decay at the heart, and an unsustainable growth in transportation and suburban infrastructure all around. I believe that federal policies could be initiated that would address both these evils, without increasing the role of the state in the conduct of litigation or in the planning of city streets.
MG:Thanks very much for making time for this interview, Dr. Scruton. Any parting thoughts for our readers?
Scruton:I think conservatives should study the ideas and arguments that prevail on the left. There is always something to learn from these arguments, if only which way the wind of resentment is now blowing. And lifting your eyes from this joyless stuff, you will thank God that you are a conservative.
The Meaning of Conservatism belongs on the shelf of every thoughtful conservative; click here to view it on Amazon. A complete listing of Roger Scruton’s books and much else can be found on his website. Dozens of his articles are linked on the internet bibliography compiled by Christopher S. Morrissey.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel
http://www.newpantagruel.com
Roger Scruton is a philosopher, essayist, foxhunter, farmer, publisher, composer, and man of letters, as well as a contributor to Right Reason, the weblog for philosophical conservativsm. He is also Britain’s leading conservative intellectual and The Meaning of Conservatism, which he wrote in 1980, is arguably the most important statement of the traditionalist conservative outlook since Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953). One sign of the book’s success is the hostility it provoked on the left; the journal Radical Philosophy, for instance, described it as “clearly too ghastly to be taken seriously.”
Roger’s recent books include, among many others, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (2002), News from Somewhere: On Settling (2005), and the autobiographical Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005). Roger tells me he has “a strong attachment, recently acquired, to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Hazel River.” He and his wife Sophie recently bought a house in Virginia, and divide their time between rural America and rural England.
Roger graciously agreed to an interview on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Meaning of Conservatism, now in its third edition. We discussed a range of subjects including the reaction to the book from left and right, the possibilities and limitations of free markets, the U.S. Constitution, the nature of philosophy, the social function of religion, the prospects for conservatism under Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and the joylessness of liberalism.
Max Goss:What prompted you to write The Meaning of Conservatism?
Roger Scruton:I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy–or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist. At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of ‘resentment politics,’ other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them. It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left–whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition–would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.
MG:What about the reaction among conservatives? I’m thinking in particular of your criticism of certain capitalist arguments. While noting the conservative affinity for private property, you say these arguments “present us with a vision of politics that is desultory indeed, as though the sole aim of social existence were the accumulation of wealth and the sole concern of politics the discovery of the most effective means to it.” Did your lack of enthusiasm for free markets win you a warm reception with members of the Conservative Party?
Scruton:So far as I know The Meaning of Conservatism elicited no response whatsoever from the Conservative Party or those connected with it. There was, at the time, a small circle of intellectual conservatives at the London School of Economics–a legacy from the days when Oakeshott and Popper both taught there–and another at Cambridge. Neither of them seemed to notice the book. The Conservative Party was very much in the grip of the free market ideology relayed by the Institute for Economic Affairs. The view of the IEA at the time was that I, and the Salisbury Review which I founded, should be avoided, as exhibiting dangerous tendencies towards extremism, fascism etc., or alternatively as being part of a sophisticated KGB operation to split the Conservative Party. Later, however, the IEA’s Social Affairs Unit, under the leadership of Digby Anderson, developed in a direction that I felt closer to, and broke away from the IEA.
MG:What deleterious consequences result from the “free market ideology” you mention? Are there particular economic arrangements that conservatives ought to prefer?
Scruton:The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. [Friedrich] Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of ‘spontaneous order’, as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality. The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.) Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.
MG:Shifting gears, an important theme in your book is that the notion of a social contract, “a recent and now seemingly irrepressible political idea,” cannot ground political life as we experience it. Can you say a little about the contrasting idea of the “transcendent bonds” that you say give rise to our social obligations?
Scruton:My point was simply to emphasize that the most important obligations governing our lives as social and political beings–including those to family, country and state–are non-contractual and precede the capacity for rational choice. By referring to them as ‘transcendent’ I meant to emphasize that they transcend any capacity to rationalise them in contractual or negotiable terms. They have an absolute and immovable character that we must acknowledge if we are to understand our social and political condition. The refusal of people on the left to make this acknowledgement stems from their inability to accept external authority in any form, and from their deep down belief that all power is usurpation, unless wielded by themselves.
MG:Does your emphasis on authority give any substance to the claim, so often found on the lips of liberals, that conservatism is repressive and dictatorial?
Scruton:To describe an obligation as transcendent in my sense is not to endow it with some kind of oppressive force. On the contrary, it is to recognize the spontaneous disposition of people to acknowledge obligations that they never contracted. There are other words that might be used in this context: gratitude, piety, obedience–all of them virtues, and all of them naturally offered to the thing we love. What I try to make clear in my writings is that, while the left-liberal view of politics is founded in antagonism towards existing things and resentment at power in the hands of others, conservatism is founded in the love of existing things, imperfections included, and a willing acceptance of authority, provided it is not blatantly illegitimate. Hence there is nothing oppressive in the conservative attitude to authority. It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority–teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.
MG:The authority of the hunt master also comes to mind; an interesting study might be “the foxhunt as mediating institution.” Are there freedoms or other goods that could not exist without the benign forms of local authority you identify?
Scruton:The example of the hunt master is a good one, since it shows both the spontaneity of authority and the willingness of people to accept it, when they see how intricately it is connected to their own well-being and to the well-being of their community. To put the point in the arid terms of game theory: authority is a spontaneous solution to problems of coordination, and may be the only solution available. In all matters when discussion, voting and bargaining would delay the decision beyond the point when it must be made, the artifact of authority is the rational solution to problems of collective choice. This is obviously so in the military, but the principle extends through all society. And once authority is in place it becomes part of the culture: there grows around it that sense of security and of being at home in the world that we knew in childhood, and which now radiates from the people, offices and institutions to which we turn for answers. Without authority the mass of people have only questions, and it is not possible to live with a diet of unanswered questions.
MG:Is this why religion is important? Is a shared religion required for the forms of spontaneous authority you mention?
RS:Of course religion offers the certainties that people need–if it didn’t do that at least, it would have no congregation. But the social function of religion can be fulfilled whether its content is true or false, and whether it is compatible or not with modernity. Not every religion is tolerant of the unbeliever, and it is a remarkable fact about our own religious tradition that it allows not only apostasy but overt atheism–emphasizing that we bear witness through forgiveness and not through usurping a right of punishment that belongs only to God. In short it is a religious tradition that presents certainty in the midst of doubt, and allows the two to compete freely for our affections.
MG:In your book you criticize “the attempt to remake the nation through statute, and to substitute statute wherever possible for common law.” In the U.S., however, conservatives tend to be suspicious of what they term “the rule of judges,” and pin their hopes largely on a judiciary that hews as closely as possible to the letter of the law. Is there a tension here?
Scruton:American conservatives have rightly complained against the power of judges under the American constitution. For the Supreme Court has been able to use its authority as constitutional arbiter to expropriate the law-making powers of the Legislature. The doctrine of the division of powers is like the doctrine of the Trinity: it enshrines a mystery, and nobody really knows how to keep the three powers separate but united. There is a constant danger that they will collapse into one, as they have done under the rule of liberal judges in the Supreme Court. The British experience is related but different. In our case the collapse has gone the other way, with the legislature displacing and canceling the work of the courts. This is because we have a single chamber Parliament (the House of Lords now counting for nothing) and an unwritten constitution that places no real brakes on the abuse of legislative power (witness the recent Hunting Act). The conservative view, as I see it, is to advocate balance, which means respect offered by each organ of government to the others, and a refusal to arrogate powers when there is any doubt concerning the right to do so. I would also point out that the common law–a great gift of history that both our countries still possess–is both intrinsically conservative, and better able to resolve social conflicts than the schemes of politicians.
MG:You are often described as a “paleoconservative,” a term that Russell Kirk, who was described the same way, eschewed. Do you accept this designation?
Scruton:I am not hostile to American neo-conservatism, which seems to me to show a commendable desire to think things through and to develop an active alternative to liberalism in both national and international politics. But I suppose I am more of a paleo than a neo-conservative, since I believe that the conservative position is rooted in cultural rather than economic factors, and that the single-minded pursuit of competitive markets is just as much a threat to social order as the single-minded pursuit of equality.
MG:What do you make of the critique of industrial society presented by the Southern Agrarians, or by contemporary agrarians such as Wendell Berry?
Scruton:Things have moved on since the Southern Agrarians, who were able to enjoy the last twilight glow from a way of life which now barely glimmers in the ashes. Of course people like Wendelll Berry will awaken a strong feeling of loss, and a longing for homecoming, in many Americans. But the real conservative is the one who wishes to recuperate the lasting sense of life and its value, even in circumstances that seem unpropitious–such as those that prevail in a modern city. Industrial society was rightly criticised from both the right and the left; but industrial society has all but disappeared. The future lies with the self-employed, and it is for them to form the new communities, on the model of the old.
MG:The sort of conservatism you espouse is not easily expressed in slogans, nor do the arguments for it seem as easily mastered as those advanced in behalf of more populist varieties. What hope, if any, does your vision of conservatism have for gaining ascendancy?
Scruton:Of course it is not easy to put my kind of conservatism into slogans. That is a defect in slogans, and not in my conservatism. You cannot put Hayek’s theory of the common law, Kant’s theory of republican government, or Hegel’s theory of civil society into slogans. But they are true, for all that. A philosophy is nothing if it does not aim at truth. (That is why Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze are not philosophers.) To aim also to persuade is commendable, and for this reason it is necessary for a political thinker to learn how to write. Marx solved this problem, unfortunately, but then so did Burke. Good writing affects the minds of the literary elite, and ideas in the minds of that elite will eventually filter down, to the point where some slick but ignorant journalist will find the slogans that correspond, at his level of mental life, to those distantly and vaguely perceivable notions. This is in part what Plato had in mind, when he advocated the noble lie. Not “noble” but elegant; not a “lie” but journalism.
MG:If you could persuade the governments of Prime Minister Blair or President Bush to take onboard one of the lessons of your book, what would it be?
Scruton:My advice to Mr. Blair would be to stop pretending to be President and recognize instead that he is just a minister of the Crown. The burden of my argument in The Meaning of Conservatism is that proven institutions are more precious than the people who occupy them, and that those who exercise authority ought also to obey it. Mr. Blair has shown no disposition to recognize that his authority has been conferred on him by institutions that he is duty-bound to respect. His frivolous attitude to constitution, procedure and the dignities of office has done something to undermine not just his own authority, but the authority of government as such. My advice to President Bush would be to look at the ways in which the power of the state might be needed in order to support the autonomous associations and ‘little platoons of American civil society. There are two evils in particular which need to be addressed: the litigation explosion, which has vastly increased the risk of small businesses, and also sown discord among neighbours; and the disaster of the inner cities, which have suffered from the worst effects of American zoning laws and laissez-faire aesthetics, with the result that the middle class has fled from the city centres, causing social decay at the heart, and an unsustainable growth in transportation and suburban infrastructure all around. I believe that federal policies could be initiated that would address both these evils, without increasing the role of the state in the conduct of litigation or in the planning of city streets.
MG:Thanks very much for making time for this interview, Dr. Scruton. Any parting thoughts for our readers?
Scruton:I think conservatives should study the ideas and arguments that prevail on the left. There is always something to learn from these arguments, if only which way the wind of resentment is now blowing. And lifting your eyes from this joyless stuff, you will thank God that you are a conservative.
The Meaning of Conservatism belongs on the shelf of every thoughtful conservative; click here to view it on Amazon. A complete listing of Roger Scruton’s books and much else can be found on his website. Dozens of his articles are linked on the internet bibliography compiled by Christopher S. Morrissey.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel
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