Seeing as they each impact key pillars of what today passes for liberalism, there seems to be more than a few connections between the recent ACORN stings by Giles, O’Keefe and Breitbart, and the recent hacking of the emails of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or “Global WarmingGate”, as Charlie Martin dubs it elsewhere at Pajamas. Not the least is that they each sent the legacy media into full gatekeeper mode, hoping to prevent exciting, important news of current events from ever reaching their readers. Or perhaps, like the scandal last year involving John Edwards, sitting on the stories for so long, while making claims that they have to endlessly research them to verify their authenticity — Keep rockin’! — that when the legacy media decides to go “public” with news that everyone already knows, they can dramatically dilute the ultimate impact of these stories.
In September, we noted the L.A. Times’ hypocrisy when they wrote, “O’Keefe’s hidden-camera methods are distasteful, and the extent to which his videos were edited is unknown” — as opposed to the hidden camera videos run almost every week by their fellow liberal brethren on 60 Minutes since the show debuted on CBS over 40 years ago.
And as a nice sequel of sorts to our previous post on leftwing cognitive dissonance, Orrin Judd spots this staggering moment of hypocrisy from the New York Times’ Andrew C. Revkin of their “Dot Earth” blog on Friday:
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
And they don’t contain any obvious state military secrets as well, unlike say the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War or more recently, the secrets of War on Terror, or any of a number of other leaked documents the Times has cheerfully rushed to print.
Back in 2006, when his paper disclosed the previously confidential details of the SWIFT program, which was designed to trace terrorists’ financial assets, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said on CBS’s Face the Nation, “one man’s breach of security is another man’s public relations.” Of course, much like the rest of the media circling the wagons with ACORN, it’s not at all surprising that the Times circles the wagons when it’s necessary to save the public face of their fellow liberals.
Incidentally, Tom Maguire explains the perfect way to square the circle:
If Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe are done tormenting ACORN maybe they can figure out how to pose as underaged climate researchers…
Heh, indeed.™
Related: “LA Times Changes Its Mind: Science Doesn’t Matter On Climate Bill.”
Update: At the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb adds, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published”:
If I could, I would only publish emails and documents that were never meant to see the light of day — though, unlike the New York Times, I draw the line at jeopardizing the lives of American troops rather than jeopardizing the contrived “consensus” on global warming.
And of course, the Times has those priorities exactly reversed. But then, for the Gray Lady, small government Republicans are “Stalinists”, but actual totalitarian governments are worthy of emulation and respect.
Update: On Twitter, “Justkarl” asks, “You don’t suppose the real reason Revkin won’t publish the CRU e-mails is that he’s implicated in them?”, adding, “Revkin CRU e-mail. Likely here too.”
Related: For those who would like to “Wear The Decline”, T-shirts are now available in the lobby!
Update (11/23/09): And speaking of bringing things full circle, the commenters below note that the Times had few ethical concerns when they linked to the hacked emails of Sarah Palin last fall during the presidential election.
Update: Welcome readers from:
And others. Please check out the rest of the blog — chances are that there’s more here you’ll enjoy as well.
At the Corner, John J. Pitney Jr. does the job that AP used to do, before they transferred all of their staff over to research Sarah Palin’s book, and fact checks a slightly hyperbolic claim by the president:
“As America’s first Pacific president,” said President Obama in Tokyo, “I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”
It is true that the president was born in Hawaii (sorry, birthers), lived from ages six to ten in Indonesia, and attended a Honolulu prep school. But he is not our first Pacific president. Richard Nixon was born in California in 1913, and spent much more of his life in the Pacific region than the current president has. Moreover, while Barack Obama made his career in Chicago and Springfield, Ronald Reagan made his in Los Angeles and Sacramento.
And the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.
Meanwhile, as far as what Obama is doing for today’s children, Big Hollywood presents: “The ‘Fourth Graders For Obama’ YouTube Channel.”
Related: And speaking of the Pacific Theater of World War II, as John Hinderaker of Power Line tweets, “Was Truman right to end WWII? Obama can’t say.”
Related: From the Anchoress: “I feel like Brandon deWilde…”
In the mid-1970s, liberals were outraged over Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word
for deflating the pretensions of one of the left’s then-most sacred institutions: modern art. Traditional painting and sculpture were based on two millenia of aesthetic assumptions, meaning that anyone could instantly understand the art they were looking at. Modern art eventually jettisoned traditional aesthetics to turn itself into a sort of insular game where the theory behind the art was far more important than the actual work of art itself. (Hence the title of Wolfe’s book.)
Or as Wolfe himself wrote in The Painted Word:
And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a “receiver” that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just “the artist”, in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode–and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.
In the Washington Times, Sonny Bunch reviews (Untitled), which sounds like the indy motion picture equivalent of Wolfe’s book — and only 35 years later!
“(Untitled)” isn’t a conservative film in any narrowly doctrinaire sense of the word. It isn’t a Randian broadside against “the looters” trying to implement socialized medicine. It isn’t a rousing war epic in the vein of “300″ or “The Longest Day.” It isn’t a terrible parody film that takes cheap shots against easy targets such as Michael Moore.
Instead, “(Untitled)” goes after postmodernism — specifically, postmodern art.
Brothers Adrian and Josh Jacobs (Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey, respectively) are artists of different temperaments. Adrian’s a sound artist whose musical arrangements include bucket-kicking and vinyl-squeaking; Josh is more successful, a painter whose compositions are less challenging than his brother’s cacophonous noise but far more popular.
Josh’s popularity with corporate types doesn’t win him what he desires, however: a showing in the avant-garde art gallery owned by Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton). Madeleine has been content to sell his art — it keeps her afloat financially, in fact — but she refuses to show his work because it will diminish her credibility with the artiste set.
Instead, she shows art that can only be described as hideous. One exhibited artist is Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), whose work resembles a taxidermist’s office by way of Derrida: Animals are stuffed and put into odd positions and splashed with makeup as a “comment” on society.
Another show consists of little more than items from a home placed onto a wall. A thumb tack (”Pushpin Stuck Into Wall”), for example, or a flickering lightbulb. In the world of New York’s hipster pomo set, this is what passes for art.
As Josh becomes more and more frustrated by Madeleine’s sensibilities, he finally blows his stack, yelling out, “When did beauty become so… ugly?”
“(Untitled)” is by no means a defense of banality in art, and Josh’s art is nothing if not banal — his painted canvases of soothing colors dotted with the occasional sphere line the hallways of corporate meeting rooms and hospitals. Instead, “(Untitled)” searches for the midpoint between banality and absurdity, doing so in a way that is likely to please lovers of both modern and classical art.
Again, this isn’t a fire-breathing conservative tract. It’s far more subtle than that. But it is a celebration of art and, in large part, a rejection of the turn the artistic avant-garde has taken over the last few decades.
It’s a relatively brave rejection at that: Those who argue that Hollywood is uniformly too timid to attack its own sacred cows would do well to recognize it. We shall see if they do.
Well, count me in — Bunch certainly makes it sound like a picture well worth checking out, unlike most of the post-1960s art at MOMA.
Harvard discovers the hyperlink:
The Stalinist (sorry — couldn’t resist, Frank) Vast Right Wing Conspiracy sets out to capture the high ground of cyberspace! Don Surber dubs it, “The Axis of Instapundit”:
Oh no!
A blogger at Harvard has discovered that blogs link to one another:
At the moment I will not address the merits of the criticisms, but focus instead on the interesting diffusion process that followed from the initial criticism from Coburn. Each day it was picked up by another few blogs. A quote from John Stossel provides a sense of the tone of the postings: “This summer’s town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether.” Initially, I would infer, the first few blogs must have been on some distribution list from Coburn’s office (i.e., they weren’t just watching his website) because there were quotations from materials from Coburn that were not on his website. Thereafter you could see how different blogs picked up on the story, typically quoting or copying from another blog. So what one sees is a signal propagation process through the blogs. And as the signal propagates it evolves. Thus, for example, Stossel quotes from the Heritage blog, but then adds his distinct emphasis. The link and copying structure reflects the attention each blogger is paying to other blogs, however one would guess that each blog has a different but overlapping audience.
So the lesson here is that bloggers communicate with other people, including fellow bloggers.
Eureka!
This has to be the ultimate example of “I need a study to tell me this?” Though as Don writes:
Actually, it is quite flattering. I just love how a blogger in Poca, West Virginia, with a few thousand hits a day is placed on par with Sean Hannity, who reaches 10 million listeners. There is something very American — and very strange — about that.
Don adds, “Heaven help us if Harvard ever discovers Twitter.”
Heh. Maybe we can give them a head-start if they’re following blogs linking to their breakthrough study.
Michael Ledeen looks back at the multifaceted opinions of of 1970s Italian newspapers and compares it to America’s media today:
Like the Italians in the seventies, we have accepted bias as a fact of life, and while both “sides” complain about the “other side’s” politicization of the news, hardly anyone complains about the process itself. Indeed, most energy and money are directed at monopolizing the “information flow,” shutting up or shutting down the other side (the recent White House jihad against Fox News being the most recent case in point–the attempted exclusion of Fox people from the White House pool is a textbook example), and seizing upon any excuse to vilify anyone who is taken to be wrongheaded. But it’s only part of a much bigger transformation. On the one hand, Soros pours money into web sites, on the other, Murdoch expands his media empire. Some of these enterprises make some money, but for the most part they are losers. Profit is certainly not the point. It’s all about politics, just as in Italy thirty-forty years ago.
I don’t see any short-term “solution” to this state of affairs. It might be nice to have a generally reliable source, but most politicized consumers would probably find it boring, which means losing money. The only hope is to change the culture, which means, above all, changing the universities. Our elite students are mostly products of super-politicized colleges and universities. They’ve been trained by professors who not only do not conceal their politics, but often impose their ideology on the students. A few years ago there was a poll of Ivy League professors in the humanities and social scientists, which produced a tiny handful of conservatives in a sea of liberals and leftists. Not even a pretense of “balance.” Unless that changes, there is no chance of producing a new generation of reporters.
I think that’s exactly right — if you want to change the content of America’s media, it starts with changing the content taught in America’s elite universities, and reversing the Long March of the 1960s.
Austin Bay asks, “What Kind of Action in the World Justifies a Nobel Peace Prize?”
Obama’s Nobel is the result of the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” a phrase encapsulating the route ’60s hard left political radicals took to gain control of universities, media, religious organizations, arts and literary associations, and businesses in order to break the chains of “bourgeois” hegemony and bring about “true revolution.” If this sounds neo- or semi- or vaguely Marxist, well, indeed it is — secular utopians dedicated to creating paradise on earth once the politically correct people are in control.
The “long marchers” belong to the permanent grievance clan that insistently claims its members are repressed and oppressed by (fill in the blank) capitalist, traditionalist, colonialist, sexist, Western or (when they are really on a roll) “Amerikan” values.
Now it’s 2009, they’ve marched, sagged in the belly and jowls, and Obama’s Nobel is a clue they’ve created a self-rewarding circle of cronies, giving attaboys and prizes to their pals. The joke is on everyone except the classicists –geniuses like Sophocles, Shakespeare and Faulkner — who understand the permanent grip of human flaws, especially self-aggrandizing power.
What kind of action in the world justifies a Nobel Peace Prize? Averting nuclear war between India and Pakistan ought to earn one, and a good case can be made that George W. Bush’s administration did just that in 2002.
An Islamo-fascist terror attack on India’s parliament in New Delhi ignited the confrontation. The administration’s intricate diplomacy helped defuse that Armageddon (and it may have done so again following the terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008). However, long marchers don’t give Nobels to Republican presidents because Republicans are (fill in the blank) capitalist, traditionalist, et cetera.
Jonah Goldberg adds:
The Nobel Peace Prize has renewed prestige in my book. No, not because Barack Obama won it for accomplishments to be determined later. It’s got new luster because Shirin Ebadi has, at great personal risk, effectively come out for regime change in her native Iran.
Ebadi, who won the Peace Prize six years ago (under the old rules whereby recipients were expected to do something to earn the prize before receiving it), is Iran’s premier human-rights lawyer. In an interview with the editors of the Washington Post, Ebadi “suggested that the nature of Iran’s regime is more crucial to U.S. security than any specific deals on nuclear energy.”
Her point is precisely the same point made by so-called neoconservatives for years. The problem with Iran is its regime; its nuclear program is merely a symptom of that problem.
Via Steve Green, who’ll be holding down the fort at Blog World this weekend, while I’ll be here.
Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters spots a Stanford University’s global warming alarmist whose career has covered all the bases:
Stanford University’s noted global warming alarmist and Al Gore advisor Stephen Schneider appeared in a 1978 television program warning Americans of a coming Ice Age.
For those that have forgotten, “In Search of…” was a televised documentary series from 1976 to 1982 that was normally narrated by Leonard Nimoy.
In the May 1978 episode “The Coming Ice Age,” Nimoy presented to viewers facts about the previous Ice Age, and discussed how the bitterly cold winters of 1976 and 1977 might be a harbinger of a new one: “Climate experts believe the next one is on its way. According to recent evidence, it could come sooner than anyone had expected.”
One climate expert cited was Stephen Schneider, a climatologist working for the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time who was asked to address some of the possible solutions being discussed to stop the coming Ice Age such as using nuclear energy to loosen the polar icecaps (video [at Newsbusters], relevant section at 6:04, h/t Minnesotans for Global Warming via Bob Ferguson):
DR. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Can we do these things? Yes. But will they make things better? I’m not sure. We can’t predict with any certainty what’s happening to our own climatic future. How can we come along and intervene then in that ignorance? You could melt the icecaps. What would that do to the coastal cities? The cure could be worse than the disease. Would that be better or worse than the risk of an ice age?
Imagine that. In 1978, one of today’s leading global warming alarmists not only appeared in a television program warning the world of a coming Ice Age, but he also said: “We can’t predict with any certainty what’s happening to our own climatic future. How can we come along and intervene then in that ignorance?”
Now, thirty years later, Schneider is INDEED predicting what’s happening to our climatic future by using models, and advocates government intervention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming.
Yet, thirty years ago when he was concerned about a new Ice Age, he worried that the proposed cure could be worse than the disease.
Meanwhile, Deciever.com spots a different kind of enviro-hypocrisy, from Hollywood’s Harrison Ford:
Ford doesn’t say much about his commitment to environmental causes, but Hello! points out that he’s doing promotional work for the Team Earth project, which encourages people to live a more sustainable lifestyle. In that same interview, Ford admits to owning more motorcycles that he can count on both hands and Hello! mentions that Ford, a pilot, has five airplanes and a helicopter and owns three residences. Now how is owning six aircraft and three homes compatible with being conscious of your environmental impact?
Well, it’s perfectly compatible with what Roger L. Simon has dubbed the Hollywood “mini-me” syndrome. And elsewhere in the world of show business, even as award-winning filmmaker Al Gore turns another documentarian’s microphone off, a lack of viewers threatens to reduce his TV’s channel’s carbon footprint. But it’s important to have no impact, man, right?
Related: “Al Gore’s First (and Probably Last) Q&A.”
The Washington Post and the Politico do their best to carry water for the Obama administration on the issue of “civility” — those crazy fringe tea partiers and conservatives, versus the calm, elite Obama administrators. Regarding the former, Michelle Malkin is the subject of the former, for daring to ask the questions about an inconvenient topic the Post would rather not cover:
The Sunday edition of the Washington Post featured a massive, front-page article by Ann Gerhart decrying the “incivility” of conservatives. “The nation’s political discourse seems sour, angry, even dangerous,” Gerhart frets.
The introduction of the article spotlighted an e-mail from yours truly to Obama-philic author and Jamestown Project member Charisse Carney-Nunes.
Does the e-mail contain incivil rhetoric, profanity, or threats?
No.
My message contained….questions:
Which Michelle relays in her rebuttal/correction to the Post’s strange article, which contains this classic bit of dissembling. Michelle reprints a photo in the article of Carney-Nunes, whose caption notes the now viral “mmm-mmm-mmm” video was was “erroneously linked” to.
Here’s how erroneously, Michelle writes:
There was nothing “erroneous” about the link. The video was uploaded on the YouTube channel of Carney-Nunes.
Which the Post doesn’t argue with. Rather, according to the Post…
Carney-Nunes said an associate of hers videotaped the children’s performance and later uploaded it, along with video and photos from other of her readings, to Carney-Nunes’s YouTube account.
Oops! The upload button just went off!
Meanwhile, Politico helpfully dissembles for the Obama administration’s very visible lack of public civility:
President Barack Obama called rap star Kanye West “a jackass.” Vice President Joe Biden told a senator to “Gimme a f—-ing break!” Economic adviser Christina Romer declared that Americans had yet to have their “holy s—-” moment over the economy.
Those who pay attention to political rhetoric say an unusual amount of profanity has emanated from this White House – even without counting famously colorful White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. But before this statement becomes fodder for yet another partisan debate (with conservatives saying Obama is disgracing the presidency, and liberals that the media are once again being unfair), they quickly add that Team Obama is no crasser than administrations past. It’s just that they are being quoted more accurately.
Uh-huh. One possible alternate meta-explanation here.
(Elsewhere Robert Stacy McCain channels Mssrs. Bialystok and Bloom.)
It’s fascinating watching how a society at large and its overculture interact. James Lileks once described the latter as:
That twitchy, cheery, idiot blare produced by a stratum of coastal types who think the rest of America truly gives a shite whether Lindsay Lohan lost her Blackbird at a party last week, and who actually know who Anna Wintour looks like.
As for the former, England’s has certainly undergone a remarkable transformation in the years since World War II. The other day, David Foster of the Chicago Boyz econoblog quoted a wonderful passage from George Orwell, written in 1940, which highlighted, in just three paragraphs, the pluses and minuses of British culture in the early days of World War II:
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillarboxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches in to the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantlepiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillarboxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.
That dovetails remarkably well with an article written last year by the great Theodore Dalrymple — who has the clarity of Orwell, along with the blessing/curse of actually living in the era that’s been so worked-over by a half century of the socialism that the pre-1984 Orwell so desired:
When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldn’t; and neither, frankly, could I.
It wasn’t simply that she had been robbed twice during her last five years, having never been the victim of a crime before—experiences that, at so advanced an age, would surely change anyone’s opinion of one’s fellow citizens. Few things are more despicable, after all, or more indicative of moral nihilism, than a willingness to prey upon the old and frail. No, even before she was robbed she had noticed that a transvaluation of all values seemed to have taken place in her adopted land. The human qualities that people valued and inculcated when she arrived had become mocked, despised, and repudiated by the time she died. The past really was a foreign country; and they did do things differently there.
What, exactly, were the qualities that my mother had so admired? Above all, there was the people’s manner. The British seemed to her self-contained, self-controlled, law-abiding yet tolerant of others no matter how eccentric, and with a deeply ironic view of life that encouraged them to laugh at themselves and to appreciate their own unimportance in the scheme of things. If Horace Walpole was right—that the world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel—the English were the most thoughtful people in the world. They were polite and considerate, not pushy or boastful; the self-confident took care not to humiliate the shy or timid; and even the most accomplished was aware that his achievements were a drop in the ocean of possibility, and might have been much greater if he had tried harder or been more talented.
For the first 15 to 20 years after World War II, a middlebrow culture flourished in the media in both England and America. Regarding the latter nation’s post-war media overculture, Terry Teachout wrote in 2003:
Just as city dwellers can’t understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows–but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.
The catch was that the middlebrow culture on which I was raised was a common culture, based on the existence of widely shared values, and it is now splintered beyond hope of repair. Under the middlebrow regime, ordinary Americans were exposed to a wide range of cultural options from which they could pick and choose at will. They still do so, but without the preliminary exposure to the unfamiliar that once made their choices potentially more adventurous. The rise of digital information technology, with its unique capacity for niche marketing, has replaced such demographically broad-based instruments of middlebrow self-education as The Ed Sullivan Show with a new regime of seemingly infinite cultural choice. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each “narrowcasting” to a separate sliver of the viewing public, just as today’s corporations market new products not to the American people as a whole but to carefully balanced combinations of “lifestyle clusters” whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or BMWs to Dodge pickups.
The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for sophisticates. The problem is that it offers nothing for everybody. By maximizing and facilitating cultural choice, information-age capitalism fused with identity politics to bring about the disintegration of the common middlebrow culture of my youth. Let’s return for a moment to those unlettered folks who don’t know who painted the “Mona Lisa.” I assume, since you’re reading this, that you’re distressed by this unmistakable symptom of the widespread cultural illiteracy with which what Winston Churchill liked to call “the English-speaking peoples” are currently afflicted. But it so happens that a great many American intellectuals, most of them academics, would respond to your distress with a question: so what? To them, the very idea of “high art” is anathema, a murderous act of cultural imperialism. They don’t think Leonardo da Vinci should be “privileged” (to use one of their favorite pieces of jargon) over the local neighborhood graffiti artist. And as preposterous as this notion may seem to you, it is all but taken for granted among a frighteningly large swath of the postmodern American intelligentsia.
Which brings us right back to the problem of cultural illiteracy. How can we do anything about it if we can’t even agree on the fact that it is a problem–or about what basic cultural facts ordinary people should be expected to know? The answer is simple: we can’t.
What’s really sad is that most people under the age of 35 or so don’t remember and can’t imagine a time when there were magazines that “everybody” read and TV shows that “everybody” watched, much less that those magazines and shows went out of their way to introduce their audiences to high art of various kinds. Those days, of course, are gone for good, and it won’t help to mourn their passing. I’m not one to curse the darkness–that’s one of the reasons why I started this blog. Even so, that doesn’t stop me from feeling pangs of nostalgia for our lost middlebrow culture. It wasn’t perfect, and sometimes it wasn’t even very good, but it beat hell out of nothing.
And shows about nothing are pretty much all England has left. Somewhere between the 1970s and the 1990s, the culture that so intrigued Dalrymple’s immigrant mother and George Orwell evaporated — slowly killed off by “Start From Zero” elites who saw little in its place worth keeping. Mark Steyn takes the pulse of British culture in his latest Maclean’s piece:
Earlier this week, David Cameron, the British Conservative Party leader and probable next prime minister, was “cleared” of “breaching” “the broadcasting code” by the country’s TV and radio regulatory authority, Ofcom. Back in July, Mr. Cameron had been appearing on the morning show at Absolute Radio, a national rock station, and had, apropos the political class in general, observed that “the public are rightly, I think, pissed off.” To a question about why he was not using Twitter, the Tory leader replied, “Too many twits might make a twat.”“That seemed to go okay,” reckoned Cameron as he left the studio. “Apart from the language,” responded his press secretary, Gabby Bertin.
“Oh, yeah, ‘pissed,’ sorry about that.”
“No, it was the ‘twat,’ ” said Ms. Bertin.
“That’s not a swear word,” insisted the heir to Thatcher, Churchill, Lord Salisbury and Disraeli. My dictionary says:
“noun [origin unknown] (1656): VULVA—usually considered vulgar.”
On the other hand, an Ofcom report from 2005, Language And Sexual Imagery In Broadcasting: A Contextual Investigation, is more ambivalent, concluding only that “twat” is “very polarizing . . . offensive especially to British Asian females and some women from other groups, but many especially men think it is an everyday word.”
Nevertheless, Ofcom felt obliged to spend two months investigating David Cameron, prompting lefties to advance the theory that the Tory honcho deliberately said “piss” and “twat” on the radio in order to appear “cool” and not your usual uptight conservative like . . . um, well, names no longer spring easily to mind in the British Tory party. But imagine Mitt Romney going on the radio and saying “muthafucker” to look cool, or Stephen Harper revealing he has nipple piercings.
If it wasn’t a focus-group-generated coolness op, Mr. Cameron might reasonably wonder why in the United Kingdom of 2009 his on-air effusions should merit a two-month investigation. I am a wee sensitive soul and so, when in Britain, try to avoid turning on the TV. A couple of years ago, I forgot myself and switched on to find in progress a game show in which the male contestants were required to remove the female contestants’ brassieres without using their hands. This was on the BBC. Which is funded by a poll tax: if you own a television set in the United Kingdom, you are obliged to pay a licence fee of £142.50—or about 250 bucks Canadian—which goes to fund the BBC. This is necessary, so it is claimed, to prevent the airwaves being clogged with hideous down-market trash of the kind that infects American telly by enabling the BBC to produce quality programming the market would not support. Like televised bra-removal competitions. Although, if that’s not commercially viable, it’s no wonder capitalism is dead.
Anyway, speaking of “everyday words,” and indeed of vulvas, last year I forgot myself again and switched on for my annual 15 minutes of BBC quality programming. This time I caught an episode of Mock the Week. This is one of those shows in which comedians say funny things about the news. If you’re thinking, “Ah, you mean like Air Farce or 22 Minutes?”—not exactly. If you’re faintly irked by those shows’ cozy relationship with the political establishment they’re meant to be afflicting and the party leaders showing what good sports they are by appearing in toothless sketches, that doesn’t seem to be a problem at Mock the Week. The host, Dara Ó Briain, asked the panel to suggest things Her Majesty the Queen would be unlikely to say during her Christmas message.
The show’s star, Frankie Boyle, replied: “I’m now so old my pussy is haunted.”
What larks!
In the London Times, Jeremy Clarkson sounds like he would agree with Steyn, concluding, “Cleverness is no more. This is a dumb Britain”:
Today my encyclopedic knowledge of everything Python is seen as a bit sad. Former fans point out that Cleese has lost it, that Jones is married to an eight-year-old and that Spamalot was a travesty. Worse. Liking Python apparently marks me out as a “public-school toff”.
There’s a very good reason for this. Nowadays people wear their stupidity like a badge of honour. Knowing how to play chess will get your head kicked off. Reading a book with no pictures in it will cause there to be no friend requests on your Facebook page. Little Britain is funny because people vomit a lot. Monty Python is not because they delight in all manifestations of the terpsichorean muse.
When you go on a chat show, it is important you tell the audience straight away that you were brought up in a cardboard box and that your dad would thrash you to sleep every night. If you want to get on and to be popular you have to demonstrate that you know nothing. It’s why Stephen Fry makes so many bottom jokes.
And then you have my colleague James May, who says that, occasionally on Top Gear, he would like to present a germane and thought-provoking piece on engineering. But I won’t let him unless his trousers fall down at some point. I’m ashamed to say that’s true.
It’s also true that today no one ever gets rich by overestimating the intelligence of their audience. Today you make a show assuming the viewers know how to breathe and that’s about it. It’s therefore an inescapable fact that in 2009 Monty Python would not be commissioned.
Indeed — pioneering blogger Steven Den Beste wrote about that topic in 2002:
The series couldn’t be made now. It is very politically incorrect; it’s full of racial slurs and stereotypes; it uses a lot of foul language and it even has nudity (and I don’t just mean the nude organist). In “The Attila the Hun show” Idle dresses up in blackface and does a 40’s American minstrel part as the butler for the Hun family. One of the things which was nice about Python was that it was dangerous. They accepted no limits; they’d cross any line; but not for shock effect, just because what was on the other side was funny.
It seems to me that the only reason that Python can still be shown is that it’s considered a classic; it gets a “by”, it’s grandfathered. Even the politically-correct liberals enjoy Python. (Maybe there’s hope for them.) In particular, all the fag-baiting that the show does: no-one would ever do anything like that now. (”Precision flouncing about” by a squad of soldiers? Yeesh.) I wonder whether gays now look at that and cringe, or if they’re as amused by it as the rest of us? (The fact that Chapman was gay makes it all particularly surreal.)
If Python were first run now on a major American network, it would result in a flood of protest letters from the very first episode, and would have been cancelled after six (if it even got that far). Which may well be the reason why I haven’t watched a regular show on any of the major networks for more than fifteen years.
In a way, the timing of Monty Python Flying Circus makes it pivot point of sorts in the liberal overculture. Their show debuted in 1969, after the mid-’60s era of Swinging London, and as the Beatles were melting down and ultimately breaking up as a musical group. But the Pythons’ TV series ran in an era that was pre-multiculturalism and pre-Political Correctness. The Pythons may have been nihilists (“Life’s a piece of s***, when you think of it”, Eric Idle memorably sung in The Life of Brian), but they took Western Civilization and its intellectual history seriously enough to mock it.
That’s a far cry from their successors on the far left, who belong to the “Black Armband School of History”, as Australian historian Geoff Blainey memorably put it.
(Which is why teaching the significance of the event celebrated on the second Monday in October in the US is invariably such a hit in her classrooms.)
Linking to a must-read piece by Tea Party anthem writer Lloyd Marcus at the American Thinker titled “Stop Allowing The Left To Set The Rules”, Mark Steyn writes, “Mr Marcus’ column reminded me of a larger point: Don’t take your opponents at face value; listen to what they’re really saying”:
What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek’s “Mad Man” cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have “civility” drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper’s scrotal “teabagging” slur and characterized as “racists” and “terrorists” what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?
They’re telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into “mad men”. Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now.
Sad to say, many who should know better go along with it. Our old comrade David Frum wrote a piece called “Whose Side Is Glenn Beck On?” Well, in the space of a week Beck claimed the scalps of Van Jones, Acorn and that Yosi Sergant guy at the NEA, none of whom should ever have been anywhere near the corridors of power but who’d still be there if it weren’t for Beck. So whoever’s side he is on, it seems pretty clear he’s not on the Obama Administration’s. Hence, Media Matters’ sudden obsession with such pressing concerns as Glenn’s mom’s three decade-old suicide.
The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That’s the better guide to what they’re really worried about.
Meanwhile, in a related item, Virginia Postrel links to a video interview with a radical subversive whose writings are being censored on at least one campus:
Dave Barry.
No, really!
Since the start of this blog way back in 2002, we’ve been watching a curious trend being pushed by far left academicians for a return to separate but equal education.
We’ve already looked at segregated college dormitories, and separate but equal graduations. What’s next on the list? Mark J. Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan, quotes on his blog from a piece in the Arizona Republic, which notes “The Tucson School board is calling for a two-tiered form of student discipline. One for Black and Hispanic students; one for everyone else”:
With the goal of creating a “restorative school culture and climate” that conveys a “sense of belonging to all students,” the board is insisting that its schools reduce its suspensions and expulsions of minority students to the point that the data reflect “no ethnic/racial disparities.”
From the section of the 52-page plan titled “Restorative School Culture and Climate”: “School data that show disparities in suspension/expulsion rates will be examined in detail for root causes. Special attention will be dedicated to data regarding African-American and Hispanic students.”
The board approved creating an “Equity Team” that will oversee the plan to ensure “a commitment to social justice for all students.” The happy-face edu-speak notwithstanding, what the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) board of governors has approved this summer is a race-based system of discipline.
Offenses by students will be judged, and penalties meted out, depending on the student’s hue. TUSD principals are being asked to set two standards of behavior for their students. Some behavior will be met with strict penalties; some will not. It all depends on the color of the student’s skin. It is an invitation to chaos.
As Michael Graham noted in late 2002, when he was promoting his remarkably prescient book, Redneck Nation:
In 1948, Strom Thurmond was a politician obsessed with race. The modern American liberal is obsessed with race. Strom Thurmond thought schools and courts should treat citizens differently based on their skin color. Liberal supporters of, among other things, race-based admissions policies and hate-crime laws agree. Strom promoted the “multicultural” view that institutions like Jim Crow and segregation might appear irrational or unjust to outside agitators, but they were a perfect fit with southern culture.
* * *
Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I know live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because “race matters.” I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say “black people learn differently from white people.”
And of course, it was only last year that a certain prominent spiritual leader was telling his audience in a nationally-televised speech precisely that last point:
He was trafficking in stereotypes, though to a p.c. theme to which few could object. But soon, Wright’s speech turned more serious. More subtly separatist. More Afro-centric.
He claimed these differences were genetic (imagine Charles Murray trying to pull this off!). European-Americans have a “left-brain cognitive, object-oriented learning style. Logical and analytical,” explained Wright, whereas blacks “learn not from an object, but from a subject. They are right-brain, subject-oriented in their learning style. That means creative and intuitive. The two worlds have different ways of learning.”
The logical conclusion of Wright’s words was that whites and blacks should be schooled separately, but he did not expand on the point. What was important is that whites and blacks inhabit different spheres — two worlds, in fact. And now we were at the nut of Wright’s message.
As Graham noted in 2002, “Gee, I haven’t heard that since I was 12 — from a klan member!”
