Mark Steyn, satirist

February 28, 2008 By 8 Comments

Mark Steyn, the Canadian conservative, brings together insightful punditry and devastating humor. That is to say, he is a true satirist. For a sample of what a good writer he is, consider his description in a piece on fall of the house of Clintonof Bill Clinton’s famous televised walk to the stage to receive his party’s nomination:

Bill Clinton understood a crude rule of show business — that, if you behave like a star, there are plenty of people who’ll treat you like one. The apotheosis of this theory was his interminable ambulatory entrance down mile after mile of corridor at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Slick Willie finally out-Elvised Elvis — or, more accurately, out-Smarted the opening sequence of Get Smart. Apparently, no-one had thought to tell him to try to get within four miles of the stage before the introductory video ended. He was, by my calculations, outside the men’s room on Corridor G27, Sub-Basement Level 6 of the Staples Center. As he began the long, long, lo-oo-oo-oong televised walk to the podium the crowd watching the monitors cheered — and, 20 minutes later, after he’d strolled down the first three or four windowless tunnels of attractive luminous drywall, hung a left by the water cooler, taken the emergency stairs, cut across the stationery closet, moved smoothly through the boiler room and had still only reached the Coke machine on Sous-Mezzanine Level 4 and there was at least a mile and a half between him and the stage, and the Democratic activists out in the hall were beginning to figure they could get dinner and a movie and still be back in time for the last third of his walk-on, they were nevertheless still cheering. In effect, President Clinton dared them not to cheer. Tom Jones wouldn’t have risked it. Engelbert Humperdinck would have balked. But, after eight years of talking the talk, Bill walked the walk. In the hall, the delegates’ hands were raw, bleeding stumps, but the Slicker knew that if he started his entrance in Idaho those Dems would cheer him every step of the way.

But Steyn has turned his satire on Muslims, and so he is being dragged before Canada’s human rights courts. Read this account of his case and mourn the way Western civilization, in the name of its own invention of multi-culturalism, is repudiating its liberties, persecuting its defenders, and committing cultural suicide.

Filed Under: Humor, Islam, Literature, Politics 8 Comments

A dog whistle for kids

February 28, 2008 By 24 Comments

Shopkeepers in England, annoyed by adolescents loitering around their stores, are installing a new device called the Mosquito. It emits an ultra-high pitched annoying noise—”eeeeeeeeek”–that people over 25 cannot hear. It drives away the kids while adults, with their deteriorating hearing, remain unphased. Read this: Merchants in Britain Give Young Loiterers an Earful.

Yes, some people in England are claiming that the device constitutes age discrimination. Still, young people have had their own version of the Mosquito for some time that drives away adults. It’s called rap music.

But still, isn’t the Mosquito a great invention? Don’t you just want one? I can imagine many other uses. I wonder if Mosquito technology could be applied to all boom-boxes and car stereos, once the windows are opened, so that only young people could listen to their music despite their good-hearted impulse to share it with the rest of us.

Filed Under: Music, technology 24 Comments

The Death of William F. Buckley

February 28, 2008 By 6 Comments

William F. Buckley, the influential conservative writer, intellectual, and raconteur, is dead at 82.

Go to National Review Online, which he founded, for a wide array of tributes.

Filed Under: Politics 6 Comments

Flexidoxy

February 27, 2008 By 14 Comments

Naming something is the first step to dealing with it. Thanks to Terry Mattingly for teaching me a new word: Flexidoxy.

Every Saturday, journalist David Brooks and his family can choose between three services at their synagogue in Washington, D.C.

Rabbis lead a mainstream, almost Protestant, rite in the sanctuary. Then there is an informal “Havurah (fellowship)” service led by lay people, including a 45-minute talk-back session. The erudite leaders often pause to explain why the Torah’s more judgmental and dogmatic passages don’t mean what they seem to mean.

Finally, throngs of young adults pack the wonderfully named “Traditional Egalitarian” service, which features longer Torah readings, a rigorous approach to liturgy and what Brooks called a “somewhat therapeutic” seminar blending spirituality and daily life.

“It can get pretty New Age-y,” said Brooks, at his Weekly Standard office. “It’s as if you’re in an Orthodox shul and then Oprah Winfrey comes on.”

It was a rabbi in Montana who gave Brooks the perfect word — “Flexidoxy” — to describe this faith. This is what happens when Americans try to baptize their souls in freedom and tradition, radical individualism and orthodoxy, all at the same time. One scholar found a Methodist pastor’s daughter who calls herself a “Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.”

Filed Under: Church 14 Comments

Obama vs. Guns

February 27, 2008 By 38 Comments

Barack Obama has a lot of things going for him, but once his positions get scrutinized, he may have trouble getting the votes of the masses. For example, he has an unusually extreme, even for liberals, Anti-Gun Stance.

A discussion about guns has broken out in the comments, but I’d like to raise some questions. How could anyone–let alone a former professor of Constitutional Law like Obama– think the 2nd Amendment is just to protect the gun-owning rights of hunters and skeet shooters?

Did the founders think “militias” were groups of guys who went out on hunting trips? Or a club devoted to SKEET SHOOTING? Doesn’t the reference in the 2nd Amendment to a “militia” suggest that an armed populace is to be a safeguard against enemies foreign and domestic? While the 2nd Amendment certainly protects hunters and skeet shooters, isn’t its major purpose to give citizens the right to use weapons to defend themselves?

Filed Under: America, Politics 38 Comments

Youth without a culture

February 27, 2008 By 24 Comments

Young people today know hardly anything about history, literature, or Western culture. We knew that, but study proves it. Among the findings,

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

I’m positive my students here at Patrick Henry College know all this stuff. What amuses me is the way they often draw a blank at pop cultural references. Ask them about Britney Spears, High School Musical, and similar staples of the adolescent universe, and you often just get a blank stare. They WILL, however, tell you all about Homer, Dostoevsky, and deToqueville.

Filed Under: Culture, Education 24 Comments

The possibility of an appearance

February 27, 2008 By 8 Comments

Michael Kinsley has written a hilarious take on the New York Times story about John McCain: McCain and the Times: The Real Questions. A sample:

Many readers of last week’s New York Times article about McCain, including me, read that article as suggesting that Sen. McCain may have had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. The Times, however, has made clear that its story was not about an affair with a lobbyist. Its story was about the possibility that eight years ago, aides to McCain had held meetings with McCain to warn him about the appearance that he might be having an affair with the lobbyist.

This is obviously a much more important question. To be absolutely clear: the Times itself was not suggesting that there had been an affair, or even that there had been the appearance of an affair. The Times was reporting that there was a time eight years ago when some people felt there might be the appearance of an affair, although others, apparently including Sen. McCain himself, apparently felt that there was no such appearance.

Similarly, I am not accusing the New York Times of screwing up again by publishing an insufficiently sourced article then defending itself with a preposterous assertion that it wasn’t trying to imply what it obviously was trying to imply. I am merely reporting that some people worry that other people might be concerned that the New York Times has created the appearance of screwing up once again.

What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion — about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever — that McCain was having an affair.

The piece goes on and on, creating level after level of possibilities of appearances.

Filed Under: Humor, Politics 8 Comments

Protestant numbers slide

February 26, 2008 By 86 Comments

Protestants are just about to slip down into minority status, according to this report. “Whereas nearly two thirds of Americans identified themselves as Protestant as recently as the 1980s, only 51 percent identify as Protestant today, the study found.” (For a more in-depth discussion of the survey results, read this.)

The major reason is not a surge in the number of Catholics. That church body is losing members faster than any other, except that large numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, most of whom are Catholics, are keeping the numbers up to pretty much what they have been. The biggest factor is the rise of the fastest-growing religious category: the “unaffiliated,” which now numbers 16%. Evidently, people who once went to churches are abandoning them.

I myself am glad Protestants will soon be another minority group. That will allow Protestants to seize the moral high ground, claim victimhood, get respect, silence critics with shame, and allow for the claiming of a whole bunch of new rights.

But seriously, folks. . .The poll also shows a great deal of people changing from one church or one religion to another.

This graph summarizes the data, including showing the losses from childhood to adulthood in each group. What conclusions can you draw from this information?

Religious affiliation data

Filed Under: America, Church 86 Comments

Soft Jihad

February 26, 2008 By 48 Comments

Roger Kimball notes that Muslims are waging a traditional jihad, but are finding much greater success with a soft jihad:

That’s the new mantra, you know: “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t give away piggy banks (to say nothing of other “pig related items”) “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t draw cartoons of Mohammad “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t publish articles pointing out the demographic disparity between the Muslims of Canada and Europe and other parts of the population “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t even publish books saying critical things about “Saudis and terrorists” “for fear of offending Muslims.”

It’s all part of the campaign of soft jihad. Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance. Soft jihad is patient. It can add and multiply as well as Mark Steyn can (and here). It, too, sees the demographic writing on the wall and is content to wait a few years to occupy the West’s real estate—it’s so much easier, when you come right down to it, than blowing the stuff up and then finding yourself with a massive clean-up and rebuilding bill. Just sit tight and watch the infidels tie themselves into knots making excuses for you while, elsewhere in their lives, they embrace barrenness as an “environmentally friendly” alternative to Genesis 1:28.

Filed Under: Islam 48 Comments

More Clinton tactics

February 26, 2008 By 38 Comments

Hillary Clinton’s people are circulating a picture of Barack Obama, on a trip to Kenya, wearing African dress, including a turban. (Even though he is wearing a polo and khakis underneath.) The insinuation is that he is a Muslim. That, or she is trying to summon up some kind of weird racist reaction. But Matt Drudge usefully assembles some other pictures of politicians wearing native clothing, including Mrs. Clinton dressed like a Muslim! See this story and the photos below.

Mrs. Clinton has not only dropped all restraint in slamming Mr. Obama, she has adopted John Edward’s class warfare rhetoric in an effort to rally the proletariat to her side. It worked SO WELL for Mr. Edwards.

Doesn’t she see that the more she does this kind of vicious, angry stuff the less voters like her?
Barack Obama going native
Hillary Clinton going native

Filed Under: Politics 38 Comments