A Defining Moment

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
Thursday, 22nd January 2009


So the inevitable has now come about in the teetering civilisation of Europe, and it has happened first in the Netherlands. One of the supposedly most liberal societies on the planet wants to criminalise someone for telling the truth. The BBC reports that Dutch Freedom Party MP Geert Wilders is to be put on trial

‘...for for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs’...In March 2008, Mr Wilders posted a film about the Koran on the internet, prompting angry protests across the Muslim World. The opening scenes of Fitna - a Koranic term sometimes translated as ‘strife’ - show a copy of the holy book followed by footage of the bomb attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, London in July 2005 and Madrid in March 2004.

Pictures appearing to show Muslim demonstrators holding up placards saying ‘God bless Hitler’ and ‘Freedom go to hell’ also feature. The film ends with the statement: ‘Stop Islamisation. Defend our freedom.’


Geert Wilders

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said at the time that the film wrongly equated Islam with violence and served ‘no purpose other than to offend’. A year earlier, Mr Wilders described the Koran as a ‘fascist book’ and called for it to be banned in ‘the same way we ban Mein Kampf’, in a letter published in the De Volkskrant newspaper.

This is what I wrote about Fitna last March:

It shows very clearly the precise nature of what the civilised world is up against, a war of religion with striking similarities to Nazi ideology and murderous mass hysteria.

It was, however, very careful not to call for the Koran or Islam to be banned. Instead it confined itself to calling for Muslims to reform their faith by removing the bad bits of the Koran, and for an end to the Islamising of Europe. To that extent it was not extreme at all, and indeed reformist Muslims themselves say much the same thing.

On the other hand, it did not make any acknowledgement of those Muslims around the world who do not subscribe to the application of their religion as represented in the film, and who live pacific and unthreatening lives in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. It was nevertheless accurate in its depiction of the religion and therefore could not be considered insulting. As a result, reaction from the Muslim world has so far been muted (although that may change). As the Financial Times reported:

Omar Bakri, the Libyan-based radical Muslim cleric who is barred from Britain, did not think the film was very offensive. ‘On the contrary, if we leave out the first images and the sound of the page being torn, it could be a film by the [Islamist] Mujahideen,’ he said.

Ever since Fitna appeared, Wilders has had to live under police protection. But far from defending him and western civilisation from the totalitarian threat to life and liberty arising from the attempt to suppress discussion of radical Islamism and the religion upon which it draws, the Dutch have now decided to suppress it themselves.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, in The River War published in 1899, Winston Churchill wrote this:

How dreadful are the curses which Islam lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property‹either as a child, a wife, or a concubine must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Islam is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science -the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.


Amin Al Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Adolf Hitler meet in 1941

During the 1930s and World War Two, the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine – from whom, incidentally, Hamas are directly descended – were the allies of Hitler. Heinrich Himmler observed:

Muslims responded to the call of Muslim leaders and joined our side because of their hatred of our joint Jewish-English-Bolshevik enemies, and because of their belief and respect for, above all -- our Fuehrer.

And Churchill wrote in turn:

In truth though, just as the British stoicism recalls the same from 65 years ago, so too, there is a deep and instructive similarity between the Nazis and the Islamic-fascist forces that attacked then and attack today. The fact of the matter is that even more important than invoking the famous British ‘stiff upper lip,’ to fight this current war to victory requires understanding and accepting the similarities between the Nazis and the Arab-Islamic terrorist armies.

If Churchill were to have said these things today, he too would surely have been prosecuted, at least in the Netherlands, for inciting hatred and discrimination just for fighting for freedom against enslavement -- on behalf of life and liberty-loving Muslims as well as everyone else.

This is a defining moment for Europe. It is when people have to decide what side they are on. All those ‘human rights’ supporters who tell us endlessly that we can only defend our society against terror if we remain true to its values now must decide whether they are going to defend Geert Wilders against the attempt to criminalise him for exercising his freedom to speak in defence of life, liberty and western liberalism -- or whether they are going to run up the white flag in the face of Islamist totalitarianism enforced by its already enslaved western dupes.



Click on link below to view Fitna:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020472.php

Speech Therapy

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 21, 2009; A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/


Wondering if his publisher liked the manuscript of "Les Misérables," Victor Hugo sent a terse note: "?" His publisher replied as tersely: "!" That was the nation's response to Barack Obama's inaugural address, even though -- or perhaps because -- one of his themes, delicately implied, was that Americans do not just have a problem, they are a problem.

"The time has come," he said pointedly, "to set aside childish things." Things, presumably, such as the pandemic indiscipline that has produced a nation of households as overleveraged as is the government from which the householders insistently demand more goods and services than they are willing to pay for. "We remain," the president said, "a young nation." Which, even if true, would be no excuse for childishness. And it is not true. The United States is older, as a national polity, than Germany or Italy, among many others.

Obama's first words -- "I stand here today humbled by the task before us" -- echoed the first paragraph of the first inaugural address. George Washington, although elected unanimously by the electoral college, confessed "anxieties" and adopted the tone of a servant "called" to crushing duties:

"The magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies."

The presidency that awed Washington -- or so he said -- was soft wax on which he could leave any impress he wanted. But because of his unchallengeable preeminence, and because many Americans considered executive power a standing temptation to monarchical abuses, Washington, who could have been akin to a king, was almost histrionically humble.

The first president was head of one branch, not yet the dominant one, of a federal government housed in a few buildings on the southern tip of mostly agricultural or forested Manhattan. In 1801, Jefferson in his address said that "the sum of good government" is not very much -- to be "wise and frugal," to "restrain men from injuring one another," to "leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits" and to "not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." The federal government had decamped to a Potomac River village, which, although unprepossessing, was commensurate with the federal government's modest competencies.

Now, however, the ubiquitous federal government struggles with tasks, from managing the economy to inspiriting the citizenry, that were not considered government tasks until long after 1789. Today, when many Americans seem to want in the presidency a semi-royal presence of the sort that Washington eschewed, inaugural addresses ring with regal confidence.
Obama's preternatural confidence is intended to be infectious. His presidency begins as an exercise in psychotherapy for a nation suffering a crisis of confidence. But neither the nation nor the government that accurately represents it is constructed for consensus. And he will be unable to fault his office for his frustrations because, more than any predecessor except the first, the 44th president enters office with the scope of its powers barely circumscribed by law, and even less by public opinion.

Obama's unprecedented power derives from the astonishing events of the past four months that have made indistinct the line between public and private sectors. Neither the public as currently alarmed, nor Congress as currently constituted, nor the Constitution as currently construed is an impediment to hitherto unimagined executive discretion in allocating vast portions of the nation's wealth.

He acquires power just as the retreat of the state has been abruptly reversed. The retreat began 30 years ago this May, when Margaret Thatcher became Britain's prime minister; it accelerated 20 months later when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated; it acquired an exclamation point a year after that, when adverse market forces compelled French President François Mitterrand to abandon socialism in a nation receptive to it.

Obama, whose trumpet never sounds retreat, overstated the scale of our difficulties with his comparison of them with those the nation faced in the almost extinguishing winter of 1776-77. Still, the lyrics of cultural traditionalism with which he ended -- the apostle of "change we can believe in" urging the nation to believe in "old" values -- reinforced his theme of responsibility, summoning the nation up from childishness.

georgewill@washpost.com

Today's Tune: Chuck Berry - Brown Eyed Handsome Man

(Click on title to play video)

Gordon Brown brings Britain to the edge of bankruptcy

Iain Martin says the Prime Minister hasn't 'saved the world' and now faces disgrace in the history books

By Iain Martin
London Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 8:41AM GMT 21 Jan 2009


When will the Gordon Brown nightmare end? Photo: Jane Mingay


They don't know what they're doing, do they? With every step taken by the Government as it tries frantically to prop up the British banking system, this central truth becomes ever more obvious.

Yesterday marked a new low for all involved, even by the standards of this crisis. Britons woke to news of the enormity of the fresh horrors in store. Despite all the sophistry and outdated boom-era terminology from experts, I think a far greater number of people than is imagined grasp at root what is happening here.

The country stands on the precipice. We are at risk of utter humiliation, of London becoming a Reykjavik on Thames and Britain going under. Thanks to the arrogance, hubristic strutting and serial incompetence of the Government and a group of bankers, the possibility of national bankruptcy is not unrealistic.

The political impact will be seismic; anger will rage. The haunted looks on the faces of those in supporting roles, such as the Chancellor, suggest they have worked out that a tragedy is unfolding here. Gordon Brown is engaged no longer in a standard battle for re-election; instead he is fighting to avoid going down in history disgraced completely.

This catastrophe happened on his watch, no matter how much he now opportunistically beats up on bankers. He turned on the fountain of cheap money and encouraged the country to swim in it. House prices rose, debt went through the roof and the illusion won elections. Throughout, Brown boasted of the beauty of his regulatory structure, when those in charge of it were failing to ask the most basic questions of financial institutions. The same bankers Brown now claims to be angry with, he once wooed, travelling to the City to give speeches praising their "financial innovation".

Does the Prime Minister realise the likely implications when the country joins the dots? He has never been wild on shouldering blame, so I doubt it. But Brown is a historian. He should know that when a nation has put all its chips on red and the ball lands on black, the person who made the call is responsible. Neville Chamberlain discovered this in May 1940 with the German invasion of France.

We're some way from a similar event. But do not underestimate the gravity of the emergency and potential for disgrace.

The Government's bail-out of the banks in October with £37 billion of taxpayers' money was supposed to have "saved the world", according to the PM, but now it is clear that it has not even saved the banks. Our money kept the show on the road for only three months.

As the Liberal Democrats' Treasury spokesman Vince Cable asks: where has the £37 billion gone? The answer, as Cable knows, is that it has disappeared down the plug hole.

It is finally dawning on the Government that the liabilities of the British banks grew to be so vast in the boom years that they now eclipse the entire economy. Unfortunately, the Treasury is pledged to honour those liabilities because it has guaranteed not to let a British bank go down. RBS has liabilities of £1.8 trillion, three times annual UK government spending, against assets of £1.9 trillion. But after the events of the past year, I wager most taxpayers will believe the true picture is worse.

Meanwhile, the assets are falling in value. This matters, because post-nationalisation these liabilities are now yours and
mine.

And they come piled on top of the rocketing national debt, charitably put at £630 billion, or 43 per cent of GDP. The true figure is much higher because the Government has used off-balance sheet accounting to hide commitments such as PFI projects.

Add to that record consumer indebtedness and Britain becomes extremely vulnerable. The markets have worked this out ahead of the politicians, as usual, and are wondering what to do next. If they decide our nation is a basket case, they will make it so.

The PM and the Chancellor , both looking a year older every day, tell us that for their next trick they will buy more bank shares, create a giant insurance scheme for bad debt, pledge to honour liabilities without limit, cross their fingers and hope it all works. The phrase "bottomless pit" springs to mind for a reason: that is what they have designed.

In this gloom, the Prime Minister has but one slender hope: that somehow, by force of personality, the new President Obama engineers a rapid American recovery restoring global confidence, energising the markets and making us all forget this bad dream.

Obama is talented but he is not a magician. Instead, Gordon Brown's nightmare, in which we are all trapped, is going to get much worse.

Climate Confusion

By Steven Milloy
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Wednesday, January 21, 2009


As a new president takes office and elevates global warming alarmism to official federal policy, much of America is experiencing record low temperatures. While the deep freeze amounts to little more than irony, Americans should nevertheless take what could well be a last opportunity to reconsider the cliff off which Barack Obama, Al Gore and the rest of the global warming industry want us to jump.

No doubt many experiencing the bitter cold this January have muttered under their breath that we could actually use some global warming about now. But the ongoing cold spell no more debunks global warming alarmism than Hurricane Katrina proved it was real. Weather, a short-term phenomenon, is simply not evidence of climate change, a long-term phenomenon. Weather is not the only natural phenomenon that is often misused as evidence of manmade climate change.

We’ve all read and heard about shrinking polar ice, receding mountain glaciers, endangered polar bears and a variety of other environmental phenomena that supposedly reflect the allegedly harmful effects of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Alarmists have tried to induce the public to think that simply because the Arctic ice cap has shrunk on our watch, for example, then industrialized man must have caused it. The reason they do this is because they have been unable to prove their fundamental contention in the global warming debate - that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases drive global climate - despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars on climate research over the last 25 years.

Here are three indisputable scientific facts about climate that are sufficient on their own to throttle any claims of manmade global warming. First, we know from studies of Antarctic ice that, over the last 650,000 years or so, warmer temperatures have preceded increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by hundreds, if not thousands of years. The ice studies indicate that the carbon-dioxide-causes-global warming theory is precisely backwards.
Second, during the 20th century, there is simply no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature. Not only did most of the century’s temperature rise occur before most of the century’s manmade greenhouse gas emissions, but during 1940-1975 global temperatures actually declined while atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide emission levels steadily increased.

Finally, the ultimate test of a scientific theory is whether it has predictive value. We used Newton’s laws of physics, for example, to land men on the moon. Unfortunately, there are no climate models that predict trends and changes in global climate with any degree of accuracy. Think about the recent failures with hurricane season predictions or even the risk of relying on what your local weatherman predicts for tomorrow’s weather - and you’ll start to get an idea of how far away science is from predicting global climate 10, 50 and 100 years from now.

Although none of this is rocket science or a state secret, our government is nevertheless on the verge of saddling our society with draconian energy-use and rationing laws that will harm our economy and reduce our standard of living. How did we find ourselves in this position?

You may be surprised to learn that it’s not only or even mostly due to the persuasiveness and persistence of environmental activists. After all, how many people really believe Al Gore and Greenpeace? Ironically, we’re in crushing jaws of global warming regulation thanks to big business and other rent-seekers, including Gore, who hope to profit from new laws.

Leading the lobbying charge on Capitol Hill is the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a big business-environmental activist group coalition that is urging Congress to enact a so-called cap-and-trade bill. Under such legislation, Congress would issue permits to emit greenhouse gases (also called “carbon credits”) to electric utility companies and other major emitters. The permits represent more than mere regulation since they have monetary value and are tradable among emitters. An electric utility, say, that emits more greenhouse gases than it has permits for, would be forced to purchase additional permits from another utility that had excess permits. Under cap-and-trade, Congress would issue more than one trillion dollars worth of permits over the programs first ten years - so there’s a lot of money at stake. Who’s set to profit from all this?

Manufacturing companies and USCAP members like Alcoa, Dow Chemical and Dupont want Congress to award them free carbon credits for actions they’ve taken since 1992 to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. - like moving manufacturing operations to other countries. They’ve not reduced their emissions so much as they’ve displaced them.

Other USCAP members include electric utilities like Exelon, Florida Power & Light, and NRG Energy. They use emission-free nuclear power to generate much of their electricity and anticipate having extra carbon credits that they can sell at high prices to major greenhouse gas emitters like coal burning utilities. Wall Street is also a big proponent of cap-and-trade in anticipation of investing in and facilitating the trading of carbon credits. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns part of the Chicago Climate Exchange and European Climate Exchange where carbon credits would be traded.

Many would-be climate profiteers don’t care so much about cap-and-trade per se as they do any legislation that would mandate America’s switch to new and more expensive forms of energy production and energy efficiency. USCAP member General Electric, for example, wants to sell wind turbines, pricey equipment for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired utilities and high-priced but more energy-efficient industrial and consumer products. Al Gore is a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins which, as described in a New York Times Magazine cover story hopes to make billions of dollars of profits off global warming legislation.

Regular Americans who are not part of some global warming special interest group will be paying the price for all this. Expect the price of electricity and gasoline to skyrocket, as well as the prices of goods and services that are produced with energy. Remember the 2007-2008 spike in food prices caused by higher gasoline prices as well as the ethanol mandate? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Much more than mere money is at stake. The global warming mob wants to tell you where to live, what to drive, how many children you can have, what you can eat - all in the name of reducing your carbon footprint. Energy efficiency can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing when it’s forced down your throat, costs you more money than it saves and robs you of your freedoms and dignity.

Action to reduce the dreaded “global” warming, of course, needs to be coordinated on a global basis, hence the need, climate alarmists intimate, for global government. “We are one” was a theme of Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities - disturbingly similar to the Communist Chinese theme for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “One World, One Dream.” While such rhetoric may sound inspiring, the reality is that it is little more than a euphemism for central planning and, ultimately, “the road to serfdom” as economist Friedrich Hayek might say.

America’s strength lies not in its one-ness, but in its diversity of beliefs and efforts. And it will take all our strength in the coming years to combat global warming alarmism and to keep America from falling into the totalitarian green abyss.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of the forthcoming book, “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.”

A Minority View

By Walter E. Williams
http://www.townhall.com/
January 21, 2009

President Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. during the inauguration ceremony in Washington, January 20, 2009. Michelle Obama holds the Bible used President Abraham Lincoln used at his Inauguration in 1861. Daughters Malia (C) and Sasha, second from right, look on with former President George W. Bush, Laura Bush, former President Bill Clinton, upper right.(Reuters)


President Obama was sworn into office placing his hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. That is the last Bible I would use to be sworn into office. You say, "Why? Didn't Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation free your ancestors?" It all depends where they were living. Let's examine the document's text to see why.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which reads, "That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free …" The key phrase is "in rebellion against the United States" because slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion.

The Proclamation is specific about the states where slaves were freed, to wit: "Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued."

Slaves in the excepted Louisiana parishes were not freed because those parishes were not in rebellion. Neither were slaves in West Virginia. By the way, West Virginia's June 1863 admission as a state, formerly a part of Virginia, was a clear violation of the Constitution's Article IV, Section 3, that reads in part "but no new States shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." But what the heck, Lincoln had much of the Constitution under siege by then.

The hypocrisy of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. His Secretary of State William Seward said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." The New York World wrote, "He has proclaimed emancipation only where he has notoriously no power to execute it. The exemption of the accessible parts of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia renders the proclamation not merely futile, but ridiculous." The London Spectator mocked, "The principle (of the Proclamation) is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States." Lincoln admitted in a letter to his Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that his proclamation had no legal justification. Lincoln's motivation for proclamation was the war was going badly for the Union and there was the possibility that England and other European powers, who had recently abolished slavery, might give the Confederacy economic and political aid, but would not do so if the war was seen as a war against slavery. An excellent reference for this period is The Real Lincoln by Loyola College of Maryland's economics Professor Thomas DiLorenzo.

President Obama can be forgiven for celebrating the hypocrisy of Abraham Lincoln because the victors of wars write their history and glorify the winners. The recognition that slavery is a despicable institution does not require hero worship of a president who made the largest contribution to the unraveling of our Constitution. After all when it is settled by brute force that states cannot secede, as they thought they had the right to in 1787, then the federal government can ride roughshod over states and their people's right -- in a word make meaningless the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.


- Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

Political Speeches

President Obama has demonstrated the rhetorical skills to use the bully pulpit, whether for good or ill.

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.tsowell.com
January 21, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

If making speeches is one of the tests of a president of the United States, then Barack Obama has passed his first test with flying colors. He has understood the varied constituencies, and the various hopes and fears he had to address. He said the kinds of things that all these constituencies wanted to hear.

As a speech, it was the best inaugural address since Ronald Reagan. This is not to judge the substantive merits or demerits of what he said. Anyone who judges any political speech by its substance—much less by what actions follow—is likely to be disappointed.

However, a political speech is more than just a theatrical performance of the moment. The ability to make a speech that connects with a wide range of people can be a political power in itself.

That power enabled Ronald Reagan to put through legislation that created “the Reagan revolution,” even though his party never controlled both houses of Congress while he was in the White House.

Nobody wanted the Gipper to go on the air and say that he was one of those in Congress who was obstructing the president’s program. In addition to the powers that automatically come with the office, the president has what Theodore Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit” from which to shape public opinion.

That bully pulpit was nowhere used more powerfully than by TR’s cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the famous “first hundred days” of FDR’s administration, so much far-reaching legislation was rushed through Congress that it is doubtful if most Congressmen ever read it all, much less had time to think about it.

President Obama now has that bully pulpit and has shown that he has the rhetorical skills to use it, whether for good or ill. The unprecedented throng that filled the vast reaches of the Washington Mall and lined the parade route from the capitol to the White House shows that he has the people behind him as he assumes office.

Secret service agents may have been concerned (or appalled) when the Obamas got out of their limousine and started walking in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. But anyone who might have tried to harm them would probably have been torn limb from limb by the crowd before anyone could have gotten there to arrest him.

It was an auspicious beginning. But presidencies are not measured by their beginnings. A long list could be made of presidents who came to the White House with high hopes and left with bitter disappointments.

Inevitably, much is being made of the fact that Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States.

He is indeed the first “African American” president, unlike the millions of other black Americans whose ancestors were here longer than millions of white Americans. By the time that there was a United States of America, most black Americans had never seen Africa and neither had their grandparents.

There is no group less eligible to be called hyphenated Americans. Nevertheless, Barack Obama is one of them—symbolically, at least—and race is part of the symbolism of this moment.

Those who doubted that a black man could be elected to the highest office in the land no longer have a leg to stand on. That can be a force for good, when young blacks can no longer be told that there is no point in their trying to get ahead in this society because “the man” is going to stop them.

In another sense, the Obama presidency may not be nearly as big a change in the country as some might think. Colin Powell could probably have been elected eight years ago. But you don’t know it can happen until it happens.

No doubt the race-hustling industry will continue, and no doubt their chief victims will be blacks, especially young blacks, who buy the paralyzing picture of victimhood and the counterproductive resentments which sap energies that could be better used to improve their own lives.

Now that we have the first black president of the United States, maybe we can move ahead to the time when we can forget about “the first” whatever to do what. There is too much serious work to do to spend more time on that.


— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Seduced by the Saint

By Janet Albrechtsen
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/
January 21, 2009

You know that something is amiss with rational judgment when economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen describes events surrounding Barack Obama’s arrival as US President as “turning an exceptional human being into almost the kind of godhead that he has become”.

Sober analysts must be standing aside, wondering about the role of emotion in politics and its implications for critical scrutiny of Obama’s presidency. But many other observers have metaphorically cast aside their crutches and accepted that Obama has made them whole again.

To be sure, none of this is new. During Obama’s campaign, Hollywood types swooned at the sight of a good-looking, left-wing, articulate man of colour. And the media was equally seduced.

Back in September, The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, suffering that sinking feeling of four years ago when the Democrats lost, warned the US that the world would not tolerate a vote against Obama. “If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us, and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.”

Mind you, it would be mean-spirited to complain about Freedland and the rest of the left-liberal media rejoicing in the inauguration today.

President Obama entered the history books our children will read. His presidency bookends an era that began with segregation between blacks and whites and ended when he became the 44th American president and the first black man in the White House. No one can take that away from him. Nor can anyone doubt his charisma or political skills.

However, the inauguration is just a moment in history. While Obama’s toastmaster skills are exceptional, his performance as President is an entirely different and more uncertain matter. Yet if the liberal media’s performance to date is any guide, predetermined judgments in favour of Obama will infect coverage of his presidency.

Now, a distinction must be made here between opinion writers and news reporters. Commentators and opinion writers are expected, indeed usually required, to present a point of view, to make judgments. (Thus Phillip Adams is entitled to get orgasmic when he types the word Obama, just as Andrew Bolt may call for pain relief at the thought of Saint Barack.) That is their role in a functioning media.

But when opinion leaks into news coverage and straight analysis, as so often happens, something altogether more dangerous is happening. The media forfeits their place as the fourth estate when they forget their primary duty to report the facts so the average reader, as well the commentariat, can form their own judgments.

Regrettably, much of the mainstream media in the Western world have abandoned this trusted role. They want to be players, not mere observers. Intellectual scepticism, which should sit at the heart of good political analysis, is too often a rarity in an increasingly liberal (in the American sense of that word) media.

During the George W. Bush years, cynicism accompanied much of the media’s reporting of his presidency. During Obama’s term, that cynicism appears almost certain to give way to a predictable pattern of fawning support. Those in the media who were devoted to dishing out criticism of Bush on so many scores for just being Bush will award Obama a free ride from criticism for just being Obama. The not-so-secret deal is that he’s handsome, he’s articulate, he’s left wing and he’s black. So what’s there to criticise?

From my present vantage point in Canada, The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson gave it away when he declared at the weekend in a leading news piece that “a bond has formed between Barack Obama and Americans unlike any we have seen between a new president and the people”.

It seems churlish to ask for evidence of that proposition, and none was given. The media can feel the vibe and that is enough for them. In fact, the real bond is between Obama and the media.

At least Ibbitson paid lip service to the dangers of disappointment. The enormous expectations about Obama are such that it is inevitable some people will discover he is only mortal. But will the media make this discovery any time soon? Or will they extend to Obama a honeymoon that sidelines their own critical analysis of his administration?

Take Obama’s train trip from Philadelphia to Washington, tracking the route Abraham Lincoln took in 1861. Imagine the media’s reaction had Bush mimicked Lincoln in 2000. Back then the media delighted in reporting the protesters along Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2009, the media are lapping up the Obama drama, writing about their tearful reactions, already inclined to see Obama as Lincolnesque in stature. Sure they are both from Illinois. But analysis? None.

Indeed, for Odrama to present himself in this way as Lincoln’s heir hints at the sort of hubris that usually sets in only towards the end of a presidency. To do so at a time in his career when he still has no executive track record of any kind and precious few achievements as a legislator suggests a vast presumptuousness.

But this has gone largely unremarked. For much of the media, the cocktail of colour, left-wing politics and grand rhetoric is enough to secure him immortal presidential greatness, whether or not he achieves anything.

This is deeply disturbing given the hefty issues that will require Obama’s attention. Think climate change, the global financial mess, Iraq, the Middle East. How Obama handles each of these issues should define his presidency, not his stirring personal history, his charisma or his rhetoric.

Sadly, it looks as if Obama may get a free pass on tough media scrutiny largely because so many journalists share his politics, just as Kevin Rudd escapes the sort of media scrutiny that followed John Howard. For instance, where was the outrage about the Australian Human Rights Commission’s report last week that children are still being held indefinitely in our detention centres? Where are those socially concerned Australians chaining themselves to Villawood? Or was it always just a weapon to attack Howard? And where is the media’s indictment of Rudd given they so often condemned Howard for being cruel and callous?

But there is likely to be a deeper, though related, reason for the bias. Progressive politics is essentially an emotional, rather than rational, pursuit. Its foundations rest on altruistic, even utopian, beliefs about the perfectibility of man and society. For progressives, hope triumphs over experience.

That causes leftist politicians to place a large premium on myth-making, rhetoric and romance. And leftist journalists swallow it whole. Results matter much less to both of them. That’s one reason, for example, that Gough Whitlam is still a demigod to the ALP and to its media adherents.

In a tough world, however, we will need more from Obama and from his press gallery. What will matter is whether Obama does a good job, not whether he’s black, good looking and speaks well.

Studying Obama's Rhetoric

[Michael Novak]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/

The change from President Obama's campaign rhetoric to his presidential rhetoric is striking. The change was, in fact, so abrupt that the vast crowd seemed largely puzzled by it, and applause was neither frequent nor greatly animated—even though the pilgrims on the cold two-mile Mall seemed ready to burst out with emotion.

The presidential Inaugural was quite conservative in its vision of "revolution," in the distinctly American way. For us, from the beginning, revolution has always meant re-volution, from the Latin for "turn back to one's beginnings" as a wheel turns around from top to bottom and back to the top again. The reason Americans do this is that they love this nation's first principles, the origin of its idealism and its energy. As the motto on the Seal of the United States says, "Annuit Coeptis," that is, "Providence smiled on our beginnings or, better, on the principles in which we were conceived."

President Obama's rhetoric about these first principles had the ring of a political conservative—its emphasis upon founding principles, tradition, patriotism, courage, honesty, and responsibility. His rhetoric was not nearly so much Big-Government oriented as his campaign speech had been. He praised the market as having no peer in its ability to favor the creation of new wealth and the expansion of liberty. He seemed to set both government and the market as co-equals. The principle he chose for giving priority, case by case, to one dynamism or the other was "what works."

His turn of thought and phrase here was, it seemed to me, a good deal more Burkean than most of today's liberals know how to feel and speak. He did not show quite the fear of the self-aggrandizement of government that conservatives have traditionally invoked, in order to encourage vigilance. But he was far more cautious than utopian liberals about how well the government can actually function.

The address itself was far more pedestrian than I had expected, far less given to stirring utopian flights than his campaign speeches generally were. It was often given to easy clichés—about shadows, storms, and onward marches despite the odds. There were a few quite eloquent passages as the Address approached its conclusion, passages summoning witnesses from the past to stir contemporary hearts with love for first principles and for personal responsibility.

I suspect that the address did more to reassure conservatives than to excite liberals; and that those farther left might have felt the stirrings of anxiety about it.

Rhetorically, at least, between election day on the first Tuesday of November and his swearing in on the third Tuesday of January, Obama has made quite a turn in the direction of realism, and away from his earlier soaring utopianism.

On these points, there may be a churning interior struggle in his own heart.

01/20 05:32 PM

A Classless Society [Jay Nordlinger]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/

When I read that the crowd today booed President Bush — and then saw a video of it — I thought of a quip my friend Eddie made, not long ago: “When the Left asks for a classless society, now I know what they mean.”

01/20 05:29 PM

Tardy and Preliminary Thoughts on the Speech

[Jonah Goldberg]

I had to leave the computer right after the address and I only have a few minutes before my plane leaves for DC.I thought the address was delivered beautifully, but here Obama suffers from expectations, since we already knew he can deliver a speech well.

I thought it was good that he wants to claim the founders for his cause and his party. It may infuriate conservatives – and rightly so in some cases – that an acolyte of the “living constitution” claims the endorsement of the founders, but we’re a stronger and better country when both parties seek to buy-in to the wisdom of the founders and the greatness of the nation. It was also nice that he had some good words for markets. And I thought his remarks on foreign policy were helpful all in all. If he’s serious about wanting to focus on effective rather than big government, that would be a good thing. But I suspect that this is a rhetorical gimmick to defend bigger government. Well have to see. As John says below, I await the list of government programs he seeks to cut.

I agree with most of the folks here that it wasn’t as well-written as I expected. There were some awfully clunky clichés in there. For example, here’s the second paragraph:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

Gathering clouds and raging storms? Really? How did that survive the first draft? Oh, and shouldn’t that be forebears not forbearers? A forbearer is someone who refrains from something.

Also, if you’re going to use clichéd language you should at least make it track logically. According to this imagery, times of peace and times of prosperity have not coincided, unless of course rising tides can be still at the same time.

This actually illustrates the larger problem with the speech. Too many of themes contradicted each other. On the one hand, he wants to be optimistic, but the speech was at times frightfully gloomy. He desperately wants to convey a sense that this is a new era, where we shed tired dogmas like a caterpillar sheds a cocoon. This requires him to categorize the pre-Obama era in tendentious and uncharitable ways (some of which have been detailed below). That, in turn, rubs against the grain of his alleged era of bipartisanship.

One last point, for now. There was also a great deal of nonsense in there. Ramesh already mentioned the bit about harnessing the sun and whatnot to power our factories (why not distill energy from our strategic unicorn manure stockpile). But the line that grated on me most came from the bit about service and sacrifice. He said:

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

No, “they” didn’t. Slaves certainly didn’t endure the lash of the of the whip out of a sense of service and sacrifice for us. That is one of the reasons slavery is so evil; it isn't voluntary. Suffice it to say that if that line had come out of a different man’s mouth it would not be nearly so well-received. Nor did those immigrants make their sacrifices for “us.” They made them for themselves, for their own pursuit of happiness, for their families.

This is not to say we do not benefit from the sweat of their brows and the shedding of their blood, but Obama’s rhetorical ambition seems broader than that insight. He wants to forge a new sense of collective identity. There are aspects of that effort that are admirable or defensible, to be sure. Don't we conservatives lament a lost sense of citizenship and the erosion of a common culture? But too often he comes across as wanting to take that collective vision and drape it over individualism and enterprise like a wet blanket. The pursuit of individual prosperity is not selfish and the effort to defend it is neither a tired dogma nor a childish thing. I often get the sense that President Obama doesn't see it that way, never more so than today.

01/20 07:09 PM

Meet the new boss

It's Bruce Springsteen in utterly candid mode, discussing how Bush ruined America, and how he coped with recent tragedies of his own. But with a new president, the singer has a fresh optimism - hell, he even loves his local supermarket now.

Interview by Mark Hagen
The Observer, Sunday 18 January 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/


Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band in concert, Oslo, Norway. Photograph: Allover Norway/Rex Features

It's a cold winter's day, and I'm driving through snowy fields on my way to meet Bruce Springsteen. Towards the end of the 18th century, a Scottish emigré came to this part of northern New Jersey in search of a new world. He bought land, built a house for his family and settled down to the life of a farmer. The ducks and chickens are still here, but the current owner lives a very different life.

Bruce Springsteen and I struck up a friendship 10 years ago when I came to this same farm to make a film for the BBC. It's a warm, familiar place, the wood and slate of the kitchen giving way to a small recording studio and a front room decorated with photographs of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Band; the room, in fact, where Springsteen made 2006's The Seeger Sessions album, the musicians setting up around the sofas and on the stairs. In the parlour some of the photographs for Devils & Dust were taken in 2005 and just out the back is the swimming pool from which he emerged, dripping, in the dread of night for the video of "A Night With the Jersey Devil", a spectral blues number based on a sample of Gene Vincent's 1958 single "Baby Blue" and given away as a web-based Hallowe'en surprise last year.

I've been back regularly, sometimes to revisit old ground, sometimes to talk about new projects, but always to drink beer, swap musical discoveries and speculate on life's great mysteries, like how exactly Elvis got his hair to do that quiff thing. Today I'm here as Springsteen prepares to release his 16th studio album, Working on a Dream, a collection of intimate songs about long-term relationships, meditations on the effects of time that come wrapped in lush, layered arrangements rooted in the 1960s of the Beach Boys, the Turtles and the Byrds.

Springsteen has seldom shied away from big themes - think back to 1975 and the way a worried post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America responded to Born to Run's romantic vision of escape, or how the small-town dramas of 1984's Born in the USA found resonance as the Reagan era deepened the divide between have and have not. In recent years that has continued to be the case; he famously began to make 2002's The Rising in the wake of 9/11 after a passing stranger wound down his car window and told the singer: "We need you now." Magic, released two years ago, was in large part a railing against the Bush era, and in November last year, Barack Obama came to see him play live and confessed to his wife that he was only running for president because he couldn't be Bruce Springsteen. He has often referred to his work as a long conversation with his audience, and it's the ability to keep that exchange going - and it is most definitely a two-way thing - that has kept him relevant, timely and firmly in place alongside Dylan, Presley and Johnny Cash on the Mount Rushmore of American popular music.

With that in mind, plus the fact that he plays at the Super Bowl - that most American of events - on 1 February, the week after its release, it's something of a surprise that Working on a Dream isn't a state of the nation address, but something more personal, and a departure from his usual sound. Springsteen himself recognises this when he says: "You'll hear pieces of it in all my other records, but if you have all my other records, you don't have this - it takes it to some different place."

The Springsteen who greets me with a warm hug is in typical form, however, laughing wheezily as he recalls the time he saw the New York Dolls at Max's Kansas City in 1972, stranded in Manhattan after missing his last bus home. He asks me what I'm listening to at the moment, and carefully notes down the names of Kate Rusby and Girls Aloud for further investigation. Svelte in a black shirt over a black skull and crossbones T-shirt, he's never been the world's most eager interviewee, but he goes about it with a good grace, refining and honing his answers as meticulously as one suspects he writes his songs. Which isn't to say that he's guarded or in any way circumspect, nor does he steer clear of politics. In fact, the next couple of hours reveal a man prepared to open up about his life and work to a quite remarkable degree.

Mark Hagen: Working on a Dream starts with "Outlaw Pete", which is a very American story: a fable about a character who can't escape his past.

Bruce Springsteen: "The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad. It will come and it will devour you, it will remove you from the present. It will steal your future and this happens every day.

"We've lived through a nightmare like that in the past eight years here. We had a historically blind administration who didn't take consideration of the past; thousands and thousands of people died, lives were ruined and terrible, terrible things occurred because, there was no sense of history, no sense that the past is living and real.

"So the song is about this happening to this character. He moves ahead. He tries to make the right moves. He awakes from a vision of his death, and realises: life is finite. Time is with me always. And I'm frightened. And he rides west where he settles down. But the past comes back in the form of this bounty hunter, whose mind is also quickened and burdened by the need to get his man. And these possessed creatures meet along the shores of this river where the bounty hunter of course is killed, and his last words are: 'We can't undo the things we've done.'

"In other words, your past is your past. You carry it with you always. These are your sins. You carry them with you always. You better learn how to live with them, learn the story that they're telling you. Because they're whispering your future in your ear, and if you don't listen, it will be contaminated by the toxicity of your past."

MH: So do you think that kind of nightmare is going to change? That to an extent America has now taken account of that?

BS: "Yes, because, you know... the whole place practically has come crashing down. [laughs] Yes, there is severe accounting being taken of it right now. We're going through something that we haven't gone through in my life. Foreign policy, domestic policy - driven to its breaking point. Everything got broken.

"And the philosophy that was at the base of the last administration has ruined many, many people's lives. The deregulation, the idea of the unfettered, free market, the blind foreign policy. This was a very radical group of people who pushed things in a very radical direction, had great success at moving things in that direction, and we are suffering the consequences."

MH: And are you optimistic?
BS: "It's like this. You go out. You spend 35 years, singing your songs about a place. And you see that place in things that people are doing in their communities from city to city on a local basis. But you don't see it on a national level. Matter of fact, you see the opposite. You see the country drifting further from democratic values, drifting further from any fair sense of economic justice.

"So you work under the assumption that you have some small thing that you can do about it. You proceed under the assumption that you can have some limited impact in the marketplace of ideas about the kind of place you live in, its values and the things that make it special to you. But you don't see it. And then something happens that you didn't think you might see in your lifetime, which is that that country actually shows its face one night, on election night."

A man whose political beliefs had generally been implied rather than stated, Springsteen finally broke cover with his public support for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. This time he came out for Obama early, declaring him "head and shoulders above the rest" in April 2008. In October he headlined a fundraiser alongside Billy Joel and John Legend, then hit the road to play four rallies; the last of these, in Cleveland, Ohio on 2 November, saw him debuting the title track of Working on a Dream before bringing his entire family out on stage to stand alongside Obama's wife and daughters.

MH: You said you had to be "peeled off the wall" after Kerry lost; what was this year like?

BS: "Well, it was an exhilaration I've never seen after an election. And it was rooted, I think, in a recognition that this country, that so often seems buried beneath missteps and mistakes, had suddenly shown its real face."

MH: And what about Obama himself?

BS: "Obama's a unique figure in history. The fundamental American-ness of his story and the fact that he represents for many, many people an image and a view of the country that felt like it was so long missing in action.

"His election was an incredible moment for someone who seemed to carry, both seriously, and... not, not lightly but without great burden, enormous parts of American history with him. Enormous and painful parts.

"Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous. And for the country to recognise that was a wonderful moment. This place we've been talking about, singing about... it's alive. It isn't dead. It exists.

"That dynamic in my life has been a big part of staying alive. Staying present. Not fucking it up too bad at any given time. But it's a day-to-day experience. There's always tomorrow and, hopefully, you can use the word 'hopefully' now. You can live here, and use the word 'hopefully'. So that's pretty nice."

With the election won, it would seem that other things are on Springsteen's mind. Now approaching 60, his personal world is changing too. Much of that has been constant: he's lived in this same part of Jersey for most of his life. His professional career has predominantly been spent with the same group of musicians, the E Street Band, and this in a world where the Beatles barely lasted a decade. He's been with wife Patti Scialfa - herself a member of the band - for 20 years, and they have three teenage children.

Now those children are growing up and leaving home, with eldest son Evan just starting college, and in the past 18 months he's had to endure the deaths of two close friends: personal assistant Terry Magovern and then, in April, E Street keyboardist Danny Federici, who had played with Springsteen for more than 40 years. Little surprise, then, that when talking about the themes of this new album he quotes Martin Scorsese - "The artist's job is to make people care about your obsessions and see them and experience them as their own" - although some of those obsessions come from unlikely sources.

MH: There's a song on this album - "Queen of the Supermarket" - about a guy who has a terrible crush on a check-out girl. Where on earth did that spring from?

BS: "They opened up this big, beautiful supermarket near where we lived. Patti and I would go down, and I remember walking through the aisles - I hadn't been in one in a while - and I thought his place is spectacular. This place is... it's a fantasy land! And then I started to get into it. I started looking around and hmmm - the subtext in here is so heavy! It's like, 'Do people really want to shop in this store or do they just want to screw on the floor?'" [laughs]

MH: Sometimes it's about buying groceries, you know...

BS: "But maybe... [laughs] maybe there's this other thing going on. In the States they're sort of shameless, the bounty in them is overflowing. So the sexual subtext in the supermarket; well, perhaps, it's just twisted me."

MH: It must be really hard to go shopping with you.

BS: "I'm telling you, it's there! So I came home, said: 'Wow, the supermarket is fantastic, it's my new favourite place. And I'm going to write a song about it!' If there's a supermarket and all these things are there, well, there has to be a queen. And if you go there, of course there is. There's millions of them, so it's kind of a song about finding beauty where it's ignored or where it's passed by."

MH: And does Patti still take you shopping?

BS: "Yeah, she does [laughs]. Says, 'Hey - what's this one about?'"

MH: I wouldn't tell her if I were you... you've got to keep some mystery.

BS: "It's funny - all those great old records always seem to trail off into mystery. You always wonder, 'What was the room like that these guys made that record in? Where they made those Sun records, what did it feel like?' They're surrounded with so much mystery. These days a lot of the mystery has been drained from popular music, but it still comes forth."

He first became enthralled by that mystery in the small town of Freehold in Jersey's Monmouth County where he grew up the son of a bus driver and a legal secretary. By all accounts blindsided by Elvis, and an awkward youth who could only make sense of his world through music, he chuckles when he mentions he's recently been listening to tapes of his first band the Castiles and his face lights up at the memory:

BS: "All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful. You would just say, 'I like it. No, Dad, I like this,' or it's great, or it's fun, or it's exciting me. And those records, some of them sustained their beauty. If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they're beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance. So you're trying to write elegantly also. I was interested in that kind of a creative pull, and that's not the stream that runs on top through your farm, it's the stream where it disappears underground."

MH: "Kingdom of Days" has the best line on the record - "I don't see the summer as it wanes, just the subtle change of light upon your face."

BS: "It's a line about time and I'm old enough to worry about that a little bit. Not too much but a little bit [laughs]. And at certain moments time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren't here any more. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older those very fearsome markers... in the presence of love - they lose some of their power."

MH: That's true...

BS: "But it also deals with the deterioration of your physical body. It drifts away, it's just a part of your life. But beauty remains. It's about two people and you visit that place in each other's face. Not just the past and today, but you visit the tomorrows in that person's face now. And everybody knows what that holds."

MH: And recently that's the thing that you've had to deal with that you haven't really had to deal with before, which is the death of people your age that have been close to you...

BS: "It's in most great rock music, you know. Because the impact of so many great records, immediately tells you, 'Oh, there's something else, my friend!' The desperate presentness of so much great rock music, the life force in it, it's a ranting against the other thing.

"The mythology is always mixed. The skulls, crossbones, death's head. It's ever-present. I hear death in all those early Elvis records, in all those early, spooky blues records. And in records made by young kids - it's in "Thunder Road". A sense of time and the passage of time, the passage of innocence. It cuts through all popular music but in this record, it comes more to the surface."

MH: Well, "The Last Carnival" is obviously for, if not about, Danny Federici...

BS: "It started out as a way of making sense of his passing. He was a part of that sound of the boardwalk the band grew up with and that's something that's going to be missing now."

MH: Does writing something like that help you process it yourself?

BS: "Maybe. I don't know. You know, uh... on one hand it's just a song."

MH: It's never just a song, Bruce...

BS: "You know, he's the first guy we ever lost. The thing I've been proudest about for a long time was that unlike many other bands, our band members, they lived. They lived and that was something that was a group effort; it was something that we did together. The surviving part. People did watch the other person. And it was a testament to the life force that I think was at the core of our music - that nobody gave up on you. And that lasted a long time. People got pulled out of a lot of holes. And I would include myself, in different ways over many, many different years."

If nothing else, time tells us that a lot of rock stars struggle with the ageing process. One of the tragedies of Presley's life was that he was the first of those stars and back then the job didn't come with a road map. Thirty-six years after he released his first album, it's obvious that Springsteen does have a map, one he drew himself and studied carefully. He has a clear vision of the future, saying: "All I'm trying to do now is get music to my audience that is relevant to the times we're living in and to the times in their lives," and in difficult times his thoughts are on what endures.

MH: That sense of survival - or maybe not - is also in the title song you wrote for the film The Wrestler, where your friend Mickey Rourke plays a man who's washed up, whose career is ending. How do you write something like that?

BS: "It's the old job of putting yourself in somebody else's shoes, while you've got a foot in your own shoe. And that's how it works. I'm grounding this song in something I've experienced myself, that I believe I can write about.

"Everybody understands damage by the time they're 12 years old. Most of what you write comes from that point in time, and before. Your life narrative, the inner geography that you are going to have to make your way through is quite firmly set pretty early on.

"And that was a song about damage, about what it does to somebody with the inability to get in to normal life. The inability to stand the things that nurture you. Because much of our life is spent running. We're running, we're on the run; one of my specialities.

"You can find your identity in the damage that's been done to you. Very, very dangerous. You find your identity in your wounds, in your scars, in the places where you've been beat up and you turn them into a medal. We all wear the things we've survived with some honour, but the real honour is in also transcending them.

"Everybody has experience with those things, but if you live in them, it's a very dangerous life, and it's going to be a very hard and unsatisfying one. And that's a daily choice. In my own life I've built a lot, but... I don't kid myself."

MH: Do you still feel like that 12-year-old?

BS: "Of course. There is no part of yourself that you leave behind; it can't be done. You can't remove any part of yourself, you can only manage the different parts of yourself. There's a car, it's filled with people. The 12-year-old kid's in the back. So's the 22-year-old. So is the 40-year-old. So is the 50-year-old guy that's done pretty well, so's the 40-year-old guy that likes to screw up. So's the 30-year-old guy that wants to get his hands on his wheel and put the pedal to the metal, and drive you into a tree.

"That's never going to change. Nobody's leaving. Nobody's getting thrown out by the roadside. The doors are shut, locked and sealed, until you go into your box. But who's driving makes a really big difference about where the car is going. And if the wrong guy's at the wheel, it's crash time. You want the latest model of yourself at the wheel, the part of you that's sussed some of this out and can drive you someplace where you want to go.

"The artists people are interested in have something eating at them. Those are the guys they're interested in. Elvis. What was eating at that guy? Why did he have to sing like that and move like that? Jerry Lee Lewis, what was eating at him, what was eating at Hank Williams? Johnny Lydon. Something was.

"So the idea is: how do you manage that thing that's eating at you, without letting it eat you? 'Cause that's what it wants to do. The thing that's eating at you, wants to eat you. And so your life is... how do you keep that from happening? That's a pretty interesting story too, and that's what a lot of my records are about, maybe all of them. So now, you know - my records and the music and everything are me attempting to keep from being eaten." He laughs. "As best as I can."

An extract from Springsteen's speech from the stage on 2 Nov 2008

"I spent most of my life as a musician measuring the distance between the American dream and American reality. For many... the distance between that dream and their reality has never been greater or more painful. I believe Senator Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and work. I believe he understands in his heart the cost of that distance in blood and suffering in the lives of everyday Americans. I believe as president he would work to bring that dream back to life.

"So I don't know about you, but I want my country back, I want my dream back. Now is the time to stand together with Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the millions of Americans that are hungry for a new day, roll up our sleeves and come on up for the rising."

• Mark Hagen's Springsteen On Songwriting is on Radio 2, Saturday 24 January at 7pm. Working on a Dream is released by SonyBMG on 26

Unlike media, Obama knows he's no wizard

By John Kass
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
January 20, 2009

WASHINGTON — Venturing out among the gentle Hopium Eaters here without an antidote is quite risky, what with journalists from every state about to eagerly witness Tuesday's historic inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama and bathe in symbolic waters.

For protection, I slipped some de Tocqueville in my pocket, the wise Frenchman warning about 170 years ago that "the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public's money."

But then I realized that if spotted, I'd be denounced, perhaps with howling and finger-pointing in the fashion of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." So to get into the proper, journalist-eyes-glazed-over mood, I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times titled "Magic and Realism."

"But this 47-year-old man of mixed race, whose very name—O-Ba-Ma—has the three-syllable universality of a child's lullaby, has always had something of the providential about him, a global figure who looks more like the guy at the local bodega than the guys on dollar bills. That's the magic."

That's the magic?

I can't imagine Obama reading that and not retching, wondering what to do with so many adoring scribes, so dogmatically secular, yet eager to be led by political holy men, or sorcerers.

Is Tuesday's inauguration special? Of course. The son of an African immigrant will become president of a country where, just a few years ago, people with black skin were denied basic civil rights. That can't ever be understated, or truly understood, by white America.

But Obama is too smart to believe in sorcery, even as the scribes of the left (and even the right) gather about him, offering advice, preening for attention, inviting him to dinners where they touch the hem of his garment without invitation.

Unlike some who raise expectations to manic heights, Obama has an extremely clear head. He's a rational man. He's not on Hopium. He's from Chicago.

So is Dr. Timuel Black, 90 and of vital mind, the son of sharecroppers, a Chicago educator, civil rights activist and historian who like many is here in Washington to witness our new history.

"Certainly the symbolism of the inauguration is important," Black said. "Just think of all the mothers who'll sit with their sons and point to Barack Obama and say, 'This is what you can aspire to.' So you can't dismiss the symbolism. It is vitally important, and it speaks to pride, accomplishment and overcoming centuries of pain. I think of all the families here, and those watching at home, filling with pride at this unbelievable day."

But a teacher never stops teaching, and Dr. Black offered me a lesson the day before Obama took the oath of office.

"I remember when I was a little boy, and my grandmother, who was born in 1847, was with me. And I'd be doing something, perhaps even some mischief, talking to her, and she'd say something I never forgot."

What did she tell you?

"She'd say, 'I can't hear what you're saying because what you're doing is talking so loud.' "

Perfect.

"Yeah," Black said, "and I don't think she ever read Aristotle. But it's not only what we say, it's what we do that counts, and what we do speaks louder than our words. Magic has nothing to do with it. That's Obama's challenge, and our own."

Unlike some of the emotional media geysers, Tim Black is full of hope, but he isn't on Hopium. He's not guilty, and he's grounded.

Unfortunately, other analysts aren't, and their involuntary yearning and gushing tells me they may have memorized an old song by Uriah Heep in the early 1970s, when there was something else in the air besides Hopium.

He was the wizard of a thousand kings/And I chance to meet him one night wandering/He told me tales and he drank my wine/ Me and my magic man kind of feeling fine/He had a cloak of gold and eyes of fire/And as he spoke out of a deep desire/ To free the world of its fear and pain/And help the people to feel free again.

So much of this week's over-the-top coverage seems born of that Uriah Heep song. And I would remind those who yearn for magic to stash the bongs and grab some coffee. Obama is no sorcerer. He is a man.

And he realizes that after Tuesday's rhetoric and symbolism, it will be his actions, not words, that shape his future, and ours.

jskass@tribune.com

Letter to Obama Supporters

by Mona Charen
http://www.townhall.com/
January 20, 2009

I did not vote for the man who today becomes the 44th president of the United States, and in fact, advocated for his opponent. But I am not immune to the happiness of those who did support him, particularly African-Americans, and -- to slice it a little thinner -- particularly older African-Americas who actually lived through the contempt and cruelty of Jim Crow America. I do not for minute deny the symbolic greatness of the moment, and despite my wariness of President Obama's policies, it makes me happy to see so many of my fellow Americans in a celebratory, patriotic mood. (If the shoe were on the other foot, however, I doubt that they would reciprocate these sentiments.)

That much having been said, it would be salutary in the midst of all this effervescence to reflect that many of the difficulties faced by the United States are not -- the left's animadversions notwithstanding -- the fault of George W. Bush. It is, for example, nearly universally agreed that America's supposed unpopularity in the world will be erased by the simple fact of Barack Obama raising his right hand and swearing to uphold the Constitution.

Well, the Obama ascendancy may make the U.S. more popular in Europe -- though our unpopularity there has been overstated. The most influential nations in Europe elected or re-elected Bush allies during his two terms in office, including Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Tony Blair in Great Britain, Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France. In other hemispheres, Canada elected Stephen Harper, and Australia (hats off please for one of our most stalwart allies) re-elected John Howard.

Still, let's concede that for many Europeans, George W. Bush's style was off-putting. The Texas swagger that many of us (though not all to be sure) regard as an amusing regionalism, they found obnoxious. The same cannot be said for our enemies. It wasn't a matter of Bush's style, or his accent or his political party.

Let's not delude ourselves, America's enemies remain our enemies. They were not George W. Bush's personal hate club (that distinction belongs to others, like the BBC and The New York Times).

Consider that all the good will in the world doesn't cut any ice with Hizbollah, one of Iran's terrorist proxies currently controlling a swath of Lebanon. Just last month, former President Jimmy Carter traveled to Lebanon hoping to meet with the leaders of Hizbollah. Carter sought this meeting despite Hizbollah's long record of murder and terror (including the deaths of 243 United States Marines). They gave him the back of their hand. Carter was disappointed.

In the final days of the transition, Obama gave an interview to Univision in which he mentioned that Hugo Chavez's Venezuela "has been a force that has interrupted progress in the region." He also mentioned that Chavez, a Castro acolyte, has been funding the FARC in Colombia, the revolutionary insurgency that has engaged in a terror campaign including murder and kidnapping. "We need to be firm," said President Obama, "when we see this news that Venezuela is exporting terrorist activities or supporting malicious entities like the FARC. This creates problems that are not acceptable."

Well, Chavez was not happy. "No one should say that I threw the first stone at Obama. He threw it at me " In 2006, Chavez made world headlines by saying of President Bush during an appearance at the United Nations, "The devil came here yesterday. And it smells of sulfur still today." Last week, responding to President Obama, Chavez said "I hope I am wrong, but I believe Obama brings the same stench, to not say another word."

What inflamed Chavez? It wasn't the cowboy boots or the Texas twang or the "go it alone" arrogance of George W. Bush. It was the truth. Was it an accident that Obama took such a firm line against Chavez, or was he ensuring that he will never be obliged to live up to his unfortunate campaign promise to meet personally with America's enemies?

As for Hizbollah, Iran, Hamas, al-Qaida, even, to a degree Russia, they have their own reasons to be hostile to us and to our interests. The new occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. won't make a particle of difference to their implacable enmity or menace.


- Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist, political analyst and author of Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help .

Bruce Springsteen, Working on a Dream – review

Springsteen has swapped anger for romance on his 24th album.

By Neil McCormick
The Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 9:40AM GMT 19 Jan 2009


Don't accuse the Boss of going soft: Bruce Springsteen Photo: GETTY

Bruce Springsteen

Working On A Dream

(Columbia)


Springsteen 24th studio album follows 2007's Magic, a record underscored by fear, disgust and shame at the direction of his country under Bush. But now, as he plays to inaugurate a new president, the weight seems to have been lifted. The most political thing about Working On A Dream is that it is not political at all.

The Boss is in love, and doesn't care who knows it.

On "Queen of the Supermarket", Bruce Springsteen drives a shopping cart rather than a Cadillac, swooning over a check out girl with the wry tenderness of a Midwestern Morrissey. The E Street Band fill the supermarket aisles with a lush update of Roy Orbison-style operatic rock 'n roll.

At times the sentiments come close to Tin Pan Alley cheesiness. In "Kingdom of Days" he rhymes "I love you", "I do", and "blue", while also drawing attention to the moon and sun. Yet Springsteen is too substantial a songwriter to fall into cliché. The dark heart of love is glimpsed in the desperate epic "Life Itself", while even the simplest songs contain hard won wisdom.

On rare occasions when he strays from amour it is to celebrate hearty male friendship. The album's opener, "Outlaw Pete" is a sprawling folk saga, comic and touching, with a wild arrangement that hearkens back to the kind of music Springsteen made in the early 70s, before he really started to define himself.

The epic qualities of the E Street Band's sound is easily pastiched (indeed, others have built entire careers on it, from Bon Jovi to the Hold Steady) but Springsteen is moving forward by looking backwards. He has clearly been listening to '5th Dimension' era Byrds, The Beach Boys, West Coast Psychedelia and even pre-rock big band ballads. The arrangements are as likely to include swoonsome strings and choral singing as Clarence Clemons' trademark ripe sax.

This, I suspect, is Springsteen's idea of a pop album. But don't accuse the Boss of going soft. If anyone can make romance sound like manly business, Bruce can.