"Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got To Go!" at the Kennedy Center

Kennedy Center Deborah Rutter speaks to donors at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater last week.

When Jesse Jackson led a chanting mob of students determined to end the Western Civ requirement in 1988 at Stanford University--which Stanford subsequently abolished--many otherwise reasonable Americans mistakenly thought such lunacy might be limited to prestigious American universities, therefore not affect them, once they were off-campus and out of range of those Roger Kimball dubbed "Tenured Radicals".

They could be forgiven for believing that their cultural betters were committed to defending civilization. For example, the Kennedy Center in Washington features inspirational quotes from JFK himself, carved in stone on the River Terrace, such as:

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci, the age of Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare, and the new frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a new frontier for American art. 

However, a recent donor presentation by Deborah Rutter, new president of the Kennedy Center, suggests that Sixties-generation style cultural vandalism did not stop at the university faculty lounge, rather has metastasized into the dominant paradigm at the leading performing arts institution in the Capital. Rutter is one of the most successful arts administrators in the country, having served as president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony. Yet there was little great music heard from the stage of the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater at the presentation this writer (and donor) attended.

For example, while listing conventional concert fare, plugging so-called "thought leaders" like David Brooks and Bill Irwin, ballet troupes and an upcoming Irish festival, as well as lauding contemporary composers and Wagner operas in passing, Rutter's talk highlighted a temporary Skateboard park constructed at the cultural complex, entitled "Finding a Line," sponsored by the Converse sneaker company.

From her PowerPoint, it looked much like what anyone might see (or try to avoid) any day of the week in playgrounds, plazas, parks and parking lots across America--not Phidias, not Leonardo, and certainly not Shakespeare. Not JFK, either, to judge from another carved inscription on the walls:

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.

It seemed that rather than raising standards and commanding respect for American civilization, the main takeaway from the first hour (this reporter had to leave before President Rutter could explain an  ugly multi-million dollar expansion project) was that dystopian and dispiriting imperatives for "access" and "equity" have replaced any commitment to artistic excellence, creativity or inspiration.

To illustrate this  bureaucratic decline and fall of civilization, President Rutter apparently contacted out a portion of her talk to Mario Rossero, the complex's "Education" VP, formerly Chicago Public Schools Chief of Core Curriculum.

While Rossero's "Super-Mario" cartoons and folksy demeanor might work at a National Education Association convention, they were a slap in the face to anyone seeking uplift through the arts. What can one say about his PowerPoint slides? Amazingly, he showed complete contempt for the English language, by redefining "Quality," like Alice's Red Queen, to mean whatever he wanted it to mean. 

Rossero announced, without citing a single source, that "Quality" meant "Access + Equity." This was very surprising to at least this correspondent, who had done his Ph.D. dissertation on "Quality," yet never run across that formula anywhere. 

Needless to say, Rossero's definition doesn't sound much like John F. Kennedy. 

Likewise, it does not match the that in any English-language dictionary with which I am acquainted. To cite just one example, the online Oxford Dictionaries defines "Quality" as: 

NOUN (plural qualities)

The standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind;

The degree of excellence of something: an improvement in product quality; the hospital ranks in the top tier in quality of care;

General excellence of standard or level: a masterpiece for connoisseurs of quality;

[AS MODIFIER] a wide choice of quality beers...(etc.)

There were also some very sad-looking photos of National Symphony Orchestra musicians in nightclubs and high school auditoria. When I was growing up in New York City, students went to Philharmonic Hall to hear Leonard Bernstein conduct in the inspiring surroundings of Lincoln Center. 

Somehow, in the presentation, it appeared that things were moving backwards. Why go to a shabby high school auditorium...couldn't students come to the Kennedy Center instead? There's a free shuttle bus to the Metro at Foggy Bottom. 

Perhaps Mr. Rossero had been sampling some quality craft beers while putting his talk together, but in any case. the chief educational officer of the nation's foremost cultural institution demonstrated to an audience of donors that he literally did not know the meaning of the word "Quality."

This defective definition, which would earn an "F" in any respectable English class, was presented as the basis of the Kennedy Center's educational "outreach" to schools and the community. A sad day for "Quality," and a sad day for the Kennedy Center.

Apparently, Kennedy Center donors like the Carlyle Group's David M. Rubinstein, who gave $50 million towards Rutter's $125 million expansion project, aren't embarrassed that their money goes to parade ignorance, perhaps illiteracy, among their beneficiaries.

If one truly wants to promote "Quality," skateboards and "petting zoos" won't do the trick.  For President Kennedy's vision to be fulfilled, the Kennedy Center must return to its original mandate to raise standards of artistic accomplishment in order to restore an America which commands respect around the world for its civilization.

Sir Vidia's Pale Shadow: Paul Theroux in the Deep South

Paul Theroux speaking at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, DC on September 30th.

Last Wednesday Paul Theroux came to Washington, DC  to sell his new book, Deep South, but ended up talking about his relationship with Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul during a question-and-answer session at Politics and Prose bookstore.

For Sir Vidia S. Naipaul had published his own memoir of a tour of America's Southern states in 1989. A Turn in the South documented his road trip to Atlanta, Charleston, Tallahassee, Tuskeegee, Nashville, Chapel Hill as well as a visit to Eudora Welty and the birthplace of Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi. At the time,  Historian C. Vann Woodward reviewed Naipaul's Southern travelogue favorably in The New York Times.

If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, Theroux's book is an homage to his one-time mentor. "One-time" because in 1998, Paul Theroux wrote Sir Vidia's Shadow,  which portrayed his putative friend as a monstrous racist who called Arabs and Africans derogatory names. Theroux was quoted in a British newspaper condemning him as a tyrant: "I mainly saw his sadness, his tantrums, his envy, his meanness, his greed and his uncontrollable anger." The Daily Mail added this stinger in 2009: "He got his millions, a knighthood and the Nobel Prize, but the karmic twist is that no one gives a toss about his books."

Apparently, however, Theroux himself gave a toss.

His memoir was so bitter that the New York Times review concluded: "What we have here is a man who claims to be recalling a friendship when obviously he's seeking revenge." In the intervening decade and a half, Naipaul and Theroux managed to patch up their literary feud, culminating in a public ceremony of reconciliation at the Jaipur Literary Festival this past January, where Theroux embraced a weeping Naipaul, now confined to a wheelchair due to Parkinson's Disease.  

When I had heard Naipaul speak at Sixth & I Synagogue a while back, he appeared as an ex-Colonial who had bettered his betters--a civilized, witty, and curmudgeonly  man-of-the-world. He spoke the Queen's English with Churchillian clarity. Naipaul was blunt, outspoken, cantankerous, and provocative--taking on Political Correctness and Islamic Fundamentalism in defense of Western Civilization. A bit ridiculously Victorian, but delightful in his eccentricity.

On the other hand, when not dissenting from Naipaul, Theroux appeared as a Filene's Basement version of Henry James.  But, instead of offering insights into the human condition wrapped under dense prose, he uttered unremarkable platitudes designed to flatter the liberal sensibility of the NPR crowd. 

He had never been to the South before writing this book, he said, although he had traveled all over the world. But he had wanted to support the Civil Rights Movement, which is why he went to Africa with the Peace Corps. He said he was sorry that he had lost touch with a Medford High School friend who had gone to work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. So now, some 50 years after Selma, the latter-day Freedom Rider decided to visit small towns in the South to document the suffering of African-Americans in places like Allendale, South Carolina. Some of his concerns were still more dated, such as his interest in the case of Emmett Till. It was as if Theroux's world view had been frozen, Rip van Winkle-like, in the 1960s...

And, "surprise, surprise" as Gomer Pyle used to say, Theroux discovered the natives were friendly. He was invited to share meals, to a Black church, and a Rosenwald School,  as well as gun shows...where the natives were even friendlier, he noticed, because everyone was armed.

Theroux likewise observed that roads were good, he go anywhere, could drive in circles if he liked, that his car was like a magic carpet that would take him anywhere he wanted to go (unlike railway journeys abroad), and he could receive NPR stations in his radio well below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Like Walker Evans, whom he claimed to admire, he had a political agenda. Theroux intended to document poverty and devastation in the wake of textile plants gone to China. He said he found it in abandoned roadside attractions and factories along US 301. His conclusion: the US needs to spend more international development money at home. Not surprisingly, the USAID and State Department staffers in the audience appreciated his comparison of South Carolina to Zimbabwe. According to Theroux Arkansas was full of racists and Christians, and the Clintons refused to help Black farmers. The crowd was standing-room-only.

Of course, to differentiate Theroux's work--which appeared to recycle Southern cliches not revised since he first heard them in 1965--the Yankee scribbler was at pains to declare his book was completely different from the earlier landmark volume by Naipaul. 

He noted that Naipaul went to big cities, while he avoided the metropolis in favor of small towns. He pointed out that Naipaul had a driver, didn't even know how to drive, but Theroux drove his own car. Naipaul didn't bother to visit Black churches, but Theroux sought them out. Etc. In other words, Theroux was better traveler than Naipaul--just as George Bernard Shaw claimed he was a better writer than Shakespeare.

Concluding that he felt "at home" in the South, the actual resident of Cape Cod and Hawaii, in his best Yankee Brahmin intonation, suggested that the Politics and Prose audience might even--gasp--want to drive to see the South for themselves. Not only was it perfectly safe, it was only a few hours away! 

Imagine that...who knew Washington was so close to Virginia? 

From Theroux's presentation, it became clear that his narrative was one of cleansing Puritan redemption--like Abolitionists of old, his claim to moral superiority would enable him to uplift the oppressed in the South who were poor, childlike, and dependent upon the kindness of strangers, especially Yankee carpetbaggers with development schemes to reconstruct the region in their own imaginations.

In the end, the complaint seemed to be that while Naipaul only saw the South that really existed, Theroux saw the South through the horn-rimmed lenses of New York's Upper West Side, Cambridge and New Haven, perhaps even the view from London, England. It was not just picturesque locale for tourism, but rather poor, backwards, and in need of guidance from the Elect, such as himself.

As Theroux's preposterous accent ebbed and flowed, as he name-dropped schoolmate Mike Bloomberg, as he derided graduates of Andover and Exeter and Groton he knew as as "dim" though "rich,"  it became clear that the power of Ivy Leaguers like Theroux is a con game, dependent upon browbeating listeners into submission using a club of moral superiority and a hammer of assumed greater intellect.

"I'm smart, and you're dumb," appeared to be his bottom line.

In assuming that public pose, Paul Theroux revealed himself to be the palest shadow of V.S. Naipaul, indeed.

"Share the Road"...and Die.

On Saturday, September 19th, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy adviser Jacob Thomas "Jake" Brewer was killed in Howard County, Maryland when he lost control of his bicycle, crossed a double yellow line into oncoming traffic, and collided with a car during the 160-mile "Ride to Conquer Cancer"  benefitting Johns Hopkins, Sibley and Suburban Hospitals. 

Brewer's death might have been less noted, had the late 34-year old Obama aide not been husband to Fox News celebrity Mary Katharine Ham. Noticed it certainly was, by a host of Washington insiders including President Obama, who issued an official statement saying he was "heartbroken at the tragic loss of one of my advisors."

The death of any young person is indeed tragic, but the White House statement and most news coverage failed to emphasize that Brewer had died in a charity cycling event in which bicycles had irresponsibly been routed onto highways filled with cars. 

Thus, Brewer had become yet another victim of a "Share the Road" transportation ideology apparently based upon the premises of the civil rights movement, which in an absurd attempt at vehicular integration inevitably puts cyclists and vehicles on a collision course, only making such tragedies ever more likely to recur.

Brewer's death was avoidable. In the 20th Century, transportation engineers figured out the principles used to separate bicycles from automobile traffic, based upon the reasonable premise that the two different types of vehicles had incompatible characteristics. 

Cars and trucks are heavy, drive fast, and take up a lot of space. Bicycles are slower, lighter, and take up less room. The optimal solution, obviously, is to segregate bicyclists from drivers. Separate bikes lanes are a first step, completely isolated bicycle paths even more desirable. Under no circumstances should bicycles "share the road" with cars, trucks, and buses.

The most advanced bicycle networks have been built in Holland, a country that has established the world's most successful form of cycling apartheid...after realizing in the 1950s that unless cars were separated from bicycles, as the chief inspector of Dutch traffic police declared in 1967, "Cycling is tantamount to attempting suicide." 

By 1973, according to the Boston Globe, over 3,000 pedestrians and cyclists were being killed annually in Dutch traffic accidents. 

"STOP THE CHILD MURDER," read signs held up by protesters who poured into the streets. On one of Amsterdam's most congested thoroughfares, hundreds laid down in the street next to their bicycles.

And so bicycle apartheid was established. Streets were closed to cars, and new "cycle tracks" established across the country. Holland even installed traffic lights at intersections, just for bicycles, and required cyclists to come to a complete stop.

As the Boston Globe reported: Rule number one of Dutch cycling: If you want regular people to ride bikes, you've got to separate them from the cars.

Despite the success of the Dutch experience, however, a countervailing "Share the Road" policy, which perversely places bicyclists in harm's way, now appears to be firmly in place in the United States. 

The most visible evidence of this ideological shift may be found is the appearance of so-called "sharrows" painted on city streets across the country. The nickname is short for "Shared Lane Markings," which according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials: 

Shared Lane Markings (SLMs), or “sharrows,” are road markings used to indicate a shared lane environment for bicycles and automobiles. Among other benefits shared lane markings reinforce the legitimacy of bicycle traffic on the street,  recommend proper bicyclist positioning, and may be configured to offer directional and wayfinding guidance. The shared lane marking is not a facility type, it is a pavement marking with a variety of uses to support a complete bikeway network. 

Transportation officials sing the praises of "sharrows," to integrate bicycles with vehicular traffic, on their website. However, these officials irresponsibly champion a policy of shared lanes, without sufficient attention to reports of increased pedestrian and bicycle fatalities and injuries, as cyclists are forced into closer proximity to speeding traffic.

For example, a recently published medical research letter, Bicycle Trauma Injuries and Hospital Admissions in the United States, 1998-2013, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on September 1, 2015, described a 28% increase in injuries and 120% increase in hospitalizations among bicyclists from 1998 to 2013, including a 60% in head injuries and 20% increase in body injuries, including genito-urinary injuries. The impact was most severe among those over 45.

Likewise, Dr. John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra concluded that American cyclists are three times as likely to be killed per mile as Dutch riders, and twice as likely to be killed as German bicyclists, in research published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003.

According to the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, 743 bicyclists were killed in 2013, and 48,000 were injured. Meanwhile, a  review of pedestrian-cyclist accidents in New York State from 2007-2010 by Hunter College professors Peter Tuckel and William Milczarski revealed that bicycles were hitting more pedestrians than previously reported:

Earlier research, based on a sample of hospitals nationwide, estimated that there were approximately 1,000 pedestrians hit by a cyclist each year in the United States who needed to obtain medical treatment at a hospital. This present study, based on every hospital in New York State, has found that in New York State alone, there were approximately 1000 pedestrians struck by cyclists each year necessitating medical treatment at a hospital. 

So, not only is bicycling in traffic clearly unsafe for riders, it is also demonstrably unsafe for pedestrians. Although Ralph Nader has not issued an Unsafe At Any Speed: Bicycle Edition, you don't need to be a traffic engineer to realize that any bicycle at all is far less safe than a 1964 Chevrolet Corsair.

Given the terrible toll of suffering and death "sharing the road" policies inflict upon cyclists and pedestrians alike (not to mention the trauma suffered by drivers who hit cyclists), why have counterproductive strategies like "sharrows" spread across the United States?

The answer may have been provided at a recent seminar I attended, where a cycling activist with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics described his world-view.

He was, he told us, educated at a school for the "transnational global elite" and as a cyclist felt himself to be a member of an "imagined community" which distinguished itself from the "other" community--those who drive cars. His community of cyclists was "green," but automobiles were destroying the planet. His cycles were so much better than cars, that he felt good about organizing groups of bicycle riders to travel in groups, blocking entire lanes on heavily traveled roads in order to slow down traffic, using laws that treat bicycles equally to cars. 

In fact, he came to realize that mere equality for bicycles was not enough, rather he sought to transform existing motor vehicle law to secure additional privileges for bicycles--such as not stopping at red lights. 

In effect, his goal was to reinforce "bicycle privilege."

This kind of logic is premised upon a religious conception of the "Elect" and the "Damned" going back to John Winthrop and the Puritans in Boston. Bicycling is "green" and a sign of Grace. Driving is not "green" and a sign of Damnation.

Additionally, the cycling advocate pointed out that fewer than 1% of commutes are done by bicycle--which means that the "elite" cyclists are by definition more "elite" than the 1% who have $1 million. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that committed bicyclists are overweight, disabled, or aged--you must be very fit to ride a bike to work every day.

Therefore, a community of cyclists is by definition exclusionary as well as elitist: able-ist, ageist, and size-ist, among other things. Transnational globalism is the least of the problems that bicyclists have. 

The 2013 music video by Sons Science in the YouTube box below gives a hint of the sense of entitlement contemporary cycling advocates hold:


Unfortunately, the world-view of cycling advocates is seriously flawed, because people don't divide neatly into "communities" of cyclists v. drivers. We are all both.

People are able to both ride bicycles and drive cars--you can't haul a lot of stuff on a bicycle, and you might not enjoy the fresh air as much in an air-conditioned SUV. When it pours, it's nice to have a car or bus to take. When it snows, All-Wheel-Drive comes in handy. Which is why there are bike racks on cars, trucks, and buses.

Needless to say, the streets of Mao's China, once filled with bicycles, now host traffic jams of BMWs, Mercedes, Audis and Volkswagens (Chinese like German engineering as much as everyone else). The future cycling advocates claim to envision is actually the past the Third World wishes to escape.

Unless American cycling advocates are determined to make  "Share the Road" a "right-to-die" issue, it is time to abandon a dangerous ideology that puts the lives of cyclists and pedestrians at risk. Instead of "Share the Road," American transportation engineers and legislators need to enact stricter "Where to Ride" laws governing the conduct of bicyclists, separating them from vehicular traffic to the maximum extent possible until America is able implement the Dutch model of vehicular apartheid. 

Otherwise, the streets of America are doomed to become killing fields in a new kind holy war between cyclists and automobiles--a war no one could possibly win. And that would mean, tragically: One, Two, Three--many more Jake Brewers.

Len Downie Has Seen The Future Of Journalism--And It Is NPR...

Former Washington Post Executive Editor (and current Editor-at-Large) Len Downie spoke about his personal history, as well as the future of journalism at Washington, DC's Tenley-Friendship Public Library on September 10th.

It could have been stirring to hear from a news legend. However, while still a vigorous 73, the former Metro desk editor--who supervised Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage--appeared downbeat and dispirited. His wife and two children were in the audience, giving the occasion as well something of the elegiac feel of a memorial service: The News--May She Rest in Peace.

He said he was concerned with the rise of the internet as a competitor to newspapers, and made an allusion to the departure of Washington Post staffers to Politico. Yet Downie's praise of NPR as a future model for newspaper publishers was chilling, since NPR is a government-subsidized propaganda network protected from audience and market forces. NPR is a model for corruption and cronyism that should be anathema to any principled reporter, editor or publisher. That NPR's incestuous "circle-jerk" coverage is apparently held in high esteem by the editor of what was once a far superior competitor is a sad commentary on the state of journalism in the United States of America today.

To quote Glenn Garvin:

And now we've come to the real secret of NPR news: Bad journalism is not just an occupational hazard, the occasional and inevitable accident that occurs in every news organization. Bad journalism happens on the quarter hour at NPR. Bad journalism is, often, policy at NPR. 

How shall we count the ways? 

The dull scripts, so formulaic that even the reporters privately make fun of them. Last year, when NPR was running a long, long, long series of stories on local people shunted aside by development in Latin America, several reporters formed a pool. Recalls one: "We bet on how long each story would go before it cued a strumming guitar, followed by a grandfather mourning his lost son, then singing long-forgotten revolutionary songs."

It was not always thus.

Downie recounted his Horatio Alger career path: from editor of the Wilbur Wright Junior High School newspaper, to helming The Ohio State University newspaper, then rising from intern to Metro Editor of the Washington Post, to Watergate, Buckingham Palace (he covered the wedding of Princess Diana to Prince Charles),  Monica Lewinsky (Drudge forced him to run it) and insider negotiations with President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and CIA Director Porter Goss over his paper's coverage of secret American prisons (they agreed the Post would run the story without naming countries that agreed to host black sites), to a post-Post career as author, professor, novelist, and foundation-funded journalistic sage.

Yet in retrospect, Downie's future world of journalism seemed a bleak one indeed, far from the fun and frolic of Ben Hecht's Front Page or even the romantically crusading reporters of All The President's Men played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (John Devlin played "Metro Editor"--i.e., Downie). Of course, the author of The News About The News: American Journalism in Peril and The Reconstruction of American Journalism was never known as a Pollyanna, but this requiem for a heavyweight session was downright depressing to sit through, as gloomy as the graph below:




This doomsday feeling was especially apparent in the Question and Answer session.

Predictable questions about Iraq war controversies drew predictable apologies (although Downie did somehow mention that Senators  Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the head of the CIA and all major world leaders believed Saddam Hussein had WMD, as well as Saddam Hussein himself declaring that he possessed WMD, prior to the start of the Iraq war).

Then, when asked to name five major news sources he admired, he could only come up with three: The Washington Post, the New York Times, and NPR. Not a very exciting media landscape, as the Post's paid print circulation has dropped by half, from a high of 800,000 to 400,000 in 2015, and the Times showed a similar slide.

Queried why the Post didn't do more local reporting under Jeff Bezos' ownership, the former Metro boss offered statistics on increased numbers of reporters, yet concluded that the Post would never be able to match reporting by "The Current" (a free local weekly throwaway), because of his company's emphasis on "analysis," national and international news. Considering that Downie just finished telling the audience that Watergate grew out of a local news story, and that Post scoops by local reporters (Woodward & Bernstein) under Downie led to the resignation of a President of the United States, the implication was dismal.

Likewise, when someone who looked like a grizzled ex-newsman asked about the fate of the "beat" system, commenting that he didn't recognize bylines of Post reporters anymore, Downie responded that nowadays young reporters are too busy making videos, writing blogs and sending tweets to cover beats the way that they did in the old days. Which could explain why there are so few scoops in the Post nowadays...the reporters are tweeting, or perhaps twerking.

In the end, Downie avoided mention of the real reason for the decline of newspapers--they no longer do their job. Instead of reporting news, hiring reporters who deliver scoops to, in the words of Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne), "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," they have undergone a perverse transformation into sandboxes for lunatic academic fads and fashions, that bully their readership with crackpot political propaganda, laying off Pulitzer prizewinners to replace them with younger and cheaper "writers" of "narratives" who appear to know nothing, learn nothing, and add nothing to the party line they clip and paste from internet listservs. They just can't break a story that sells papers.

One example of this phenomenon was Downie's words of praise for the work of Ezra Klein, whose "JournoList" group of 400 reporters co-ordinating news stories by email was shut down after The Daily Caller exposed  messages urging journalists to kill reporting on Rev. Jeremiah Wright's relationship with then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The future of news has been a concern of Downie's past written work. Yet, in praising Klein, Downie had exposed precisely the problem with American journalism today--it's not journalism, it's not reporting, it's not muckraking--it's "JournoList."  Klein wasn't a reporter, he was a propagandist.

Downie's  talk confirmed that newspapers have lost their audience not because of a lack of advertising, circulation, or technology; rather because they have surrendered their mission, lost integrity, abandoned subscribers and betrayed advertisers. American journalists no longer "speak truth to power," in the words of the Quaker saying. Rather, more often than not, they speak lies to the powerless.

That is the only real problem facing American journalism today--they don't do their job.

In the words of Mark Steyn, whose epic freedom of the press court trial, Mann v. Steyn, is taking place in a Washington, DC courtroom--curiously without significant Post editorial support or news coverage (although the Washington Post Company joined other media outlets in an amicus curiae  brief,  on Steyn's behalf):

There is nothing worth reading in American newspapers and they entirely deserve to go out of business. An old editor of mine in Fleet Street liked to emphasize the importance of what she called a "f**k-me headline". In the United States, if a story does not fit their ideological needs, the media prefer a sedate-me headline. From The New York Times:
Suspect in Virginia Shooting of News Team Commits Suicide. Not quite passive and enervated enough for you? Try The Boston Globe: Suspected gunman in Virginia TV killings dies at hospital.

Etc.

Contra Downie, the solution for the problems facing the news media does not lie in more of the same, supported by NPR-style government and foundation funding.

It is this simple: just report the news.

Life Imitates Art: "The March" (BBC-TV, 1990)

Media coverage of the current "migrant crisis" in Europe is eerily reminiscent of The March, a 1990 BBC-TV docudrama directed by David Wheatley, written by William Nicholson, and starring Juliet Stevenson. The film aired on BBC One, Britain's main channel, during what they called "One World Week," and was reportedly broadcast in 20 countries simultaneously to draw attention to the dangers of global warming, as it was then called, and the North-South Divide.

The TV plot is simple and straightforward, based upon Ghandi's 1930 "Salt March" to protest British colonial rule in India. It recalls as well as Jean Raspail's dystopian 1973 French novel about an Indian invasion of the French Riviera, The Camp of the Saints. In The March, 250,000 African migrants march from the Sudan to Europe to demand entry to their Promised Land.

At the time of production, the BBC filmmakers denied any connection to their French precursor, as well they might. For while the plot is similar, the attitude is not.

Raspail's novel is thematically xenophobic, racist, and nationalistic, a Custer's Last Stand type of depiction of French Civilization under assault from barbarian masses--presumably influenced by the traumatic episodes of May 1968.

On the other hand, this BBC 1990 docudrama was clearly made to promote increased spending on  international aid, with the ultimate goal of a "world without borders."

In "The March," the mob of 250,000 migrants from Africa, led by "Isa el-Mahdi" (Malick Bowens) are the heroes of the story, for demanding that rich Europeans share their wealth with the people of the Third World.

The message of the Mahdi is calculated to tug at the guilty heartstrings of progressive Europeans: "We are poor because you are rich."

Unlike Raspail, who portrayed Europe engulfed and destroyed by a wave of impoverished humanity, Wheatley and Nicholson made their protagonist an Irish EU commissioner of international development, Clare Fitzgerald (Juliet Stevenson), who helps the marchers to reach the Gibraltar shores (or perhaps beaches in Spain) from Algeria, on live TV, to teach Imperialists a lesson. With deference to another Irish celebrity, Oscar Wilde, it seems Samantha Power was played on TV by Juliet Stevenson in 1990, before there was a Samantha Power.

Clare Fitzgerald concludes the movie by declaring that Europe may not yet ready to admit all the people of the Third World, but someday, perhaps, they will be.

That day appears to have come. Given the reporting on recent events in Europe, The March seems truly prophetic, providing insight into the mentality of the governing European elite...for now in 2015, European Commissioners--depicted critically in the The March as resistant to sharing their wealth with the Third World--appear to have come down categorically against Raspail's Eurocentric attitude in his 1973 Camp of the Saints.

Instead, by admitting hundreds of thousands of marching migrants, they are making their stand on the side of Nicholson, Wheatley and the BBC in 1990.

Please Stand By...

Well, I may not be as tanned, rested or ready as hoped a year ago, so I'm taking a summer vacation...look forward to coming back online after Labor Day.

Going Fishing...

Dear Readers,

I'm about to take a new position on May 22nd, and so will be going offline for the next year.

I do hope to be back online after it wraps up on May 23rd, 2015…tanned, rested, and ready.

In the meantime, thank you for reading this blog, and all the best to all our readers over the coming 12 months.

Sincerely,
Laurence Jarvik

NYPL Saved From Vandals!

http://observer.com/2014/05/nypl-dumps-much-maligned-42nd-street-renovation-plan/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/arts/design/public-library-abandons-plan-to-revamp-42nd-street-building.html?_r=0

The NY Times reports:

"Mr. de Blasio had expressed skepticism about the library’s renovation plan during the mayoral campaign and recently met with Mr. Marx to discuss his views on the project.

"This shift is something of a defeat for the library, which had long defended its plan against a roster of prominent scholars and authors who said the introduction of the circulating library in the research building would diminish its capacities as a center for scholarship.

"The library had heralded the renovation as part of a significant new chapter in the library’s effort to rethink its physical plant in preparation for a digital future in which public access to computers would become as important as books.

"Several factors contributed to the library’s decision: a study that showed the cost of renovating the 42d Street building to be more than expected (the project had originally been estimated at about $300 million); a change in city government; and input from the public, several trustees said. (Four lawsuits have been filed against the project.)

"Scholars and others objected to the plan in part because it required the books in the stacks to be moved to New Jersey — which could cause delays in retrieving them — and many questioned the cost as vague and wasteful. Under the new plan, all of the books will remain on site; the library has found a way to free up additional space in its storage area under Bryant Park."

Down the Memory Hole by Peter Van Buren

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren


...However, blocking and redirecting technologies, which are bound to grow more sophisticated, will undoubtedly be the least of it in the future. Google is already taking things to the next level in the service of a cause that just about anyone would applaud. They are implementing picture-detection technology to identify child abuse photographs whenever they appear on their systems, as well as testing technology that would remove illegal videos. Google’s actions against child porn may be well intentioned indeed, but the technology being developed in the service of such anti-child-porn actions should chill us all. Imagine if, back in 1971, the Pentagon Papers, the first glimpse most Americans had of the lies behind the Vietnam War, had been deletable. Who believes that the Nixon White House wouldn’t have disappeared those documents and that history wouldn’t have taken a different, far grimmer course?Or consider an example that’s already with us. In 2009, many Kindle owners discovered that Amazon had reached into their devices overnight and remotely deleted copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 (no irony intended). The company explained that the books, mistakenly “published” on its machines, were actually bootlegged copies of the novels. Similarly, in 2012, Amazon erased the contents of a customer’s Kindle without warning, claiming her account was “directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies.” Using the same technology, Amazon now has the ability to replace books on your device with “updated” versions, the content altered. Whether you are notified or not is up to Amazon.
In addition to your Kindle, remote control over your other devices is already a reality. Much of the software on your computer communicates in the background with its home servers, and so is open to “updates” that can alter content. The NSA uses malware — malicious software remotely implanted into a computer — to change the way the machine works. The Stuxnet code that likely damaged 1,000 centrifuges the Iranians were using to enrich uranium is one example of how this sort of thing can operate.
These days, every iPhone checks back with headquarters to announce what apps you’ve purchased; in the tiny print of a disclaimer routinely clicked through, Apple reserves the right to disappear any app for any reason. In 2004, TiVo sued Dish Network for giving customers set-top boxes that TiVo said infringed on its software patents. Though the case was settled in return for a large payout, as an initial remedy, the judge ordered Dish to electronically disable the 192,000 devices it had already installed in people’s homes. In the future, there will be ever more ways to invade and control computers, alter or disappear what you’re reading, and shunt you to sites weren’t looking for.
Snowden’s revelations of what the NSA does to gather information and control technology, which have riveted the planet since June, are only part of the equation. How the government will enhance its surveillance and control powers in the future is a story still to be told. Imagine coupling tools to hide, alter, or delete content with smear campaigns to discredit or dissuade whistleblowers, and the power potentially available to both governments and corporations becomes clearer.
The ability to move beyond altering content into altering how people act is obviously on governmental and corporate agendas as well. The NSA has already gathered blackmail data from the digital porn viewing habits of “radical” Muslims. The NSA sought to wiretap a Congressman without a warrant. The ability to collect information on Federal judges, government leaders, and presidential candidates makes J. Edgar Hoover’s 1950s blackmail schemes as quaint as the bobby socks and poodle skirts of that era. The wonders of the Internet regularly stun us. The dystopian, Orwellian possibilities of the Internet have, until recently, not caught our attention in the same way. They should.
Read This Now, Before It’s DeletedThe future for whistleblowers is grim. At a time not so far distant, when just about everything is digital, when much of the world’s Internet traffic flows directly through the United States or allied countries, or through the infrastructure of American companies abroad, when search engines can find just about anything online in fractions of a second, when the Patriot Act and secret rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court make Google and similar tech giants tools of the national security state (assuming organizations like the NSA don’t simply take over the search business directly), and when the sophisticated technology can either block, alter, or delete digital material at the push of a button, the memory hole is no longer fiction.
Leaked revelations will be as pointless as dusty old books in some attic if no one knows about them. Go ahead and publish whatever you want. The First Amendment allows you to do that. But what’s the point if no one will be able to read it? You might more profitably stand on a street corner and shout at passers by. In at least one easy-enough-to-imagine future, a set of Snowden-like revelations will be blocked or deleted as fast as anyone can (re)post them.
The ever-developing technology of search, turned 180 degrees, will be able to disappear things in a major way. The Internet is a vast place, but not infinite.  It is increasingly being centralized in the hands of a few companies under the control of a few governments, with the U.S. sitting on the major transit routes across the Internet’s backbone.
About now you should feel a chill. We’re watching, in real time, as 1984 turns from a futuristic fantasy long past into an instructional manual. There will be no need to kill a future Edward Snowden. He will already be dead.
- See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/#sthash.6TyabClo.dpuf

Daniel Greenfield: The Blair Doctrine | FrontPage Magazine

The Blair Doctrine | FrontPage Magazine

In his speech, Blair argues that reactionary Islamic rule is the problem, rather than mere tyranny. It’s a shift that invalidates the entire political Islam movement behind the Arab Spring. And for all the many ways that he covers his tracks, subdividing Islam from Islamism, he does hold a nearly firm line on Islamic rule. That is a rarity in a world order which had come to embrace political Islam as the future.

And yet Blair’s speech isn’t really that revolutionary. It’s a reaction to current events such as the degeneration of Erdogan’s Turkey, once used by Western diplomats as a model of Muslim democracy, into a brutal tyranny whose abuses the world is no longer able to ignore, the collapse of the Arab Spring and the failure of elections to bring peace to the religious conflicts in the Muslim world.

The establishment parties and pundits have had little to say about it. The Obama-Romney foreign policy debate has been largely mirrored across the ocean in Europe. Widely hated by his own party, Blair has little to lose by offering a shift that seems very mild, while explaining the failures of the past 15 years in terms of a new paradigm. It’s much more graceful than Cameron’s episodes of unconvincingly bellicose rhetoric, to say nothing of his opposite number, and yet for all its shortcomings, it’s also very promising.

If religious freedom replaces democracy as the metric by which we judge Muslim countries, if we put as much effort into protecting the rights of minorities as we did into promoting elections, we will finally be on the right track. And even if we accomplish little, the metric effectively blocks the political ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various front groups.

And that is no small thing.

The Blair Doctrine, while paying ample lip service to the peaceful nature of Islam, would block the rise of Islamic political parties. It would make pluralism into the new democracy and “religious extremism” into the new tyranny. It would be far less interested in majority rule elections and far more cognizant of protecting the diversity of political and religious expression.

It would apply the very metrics that the modern left insists on applying to the West, but refuses to apply to the Third World, to the Muslim world.

Republicans could do worse than put copies of the speech into the hands of presidential candidates still mumbling confused nonsense about the region. Blair offers much of the same rhetoric, but with a clear focus on the lack of religious freedom. If Romney had been operating from the Blair Doctrine, he might have been able to put forward a polished and reasonable worldview in the debate.

There are plenty of things wrong with Blair’s speech. He believes the Saudis are reformers, that the Palestinian Arabs want peace and that the issue isn’t Islam as a religion. But he is also surprisingly honest about Egypt, Syria and Libya; and about the links between Islamic power and violence.

And the Blair Doctrine’s shift from democracy to religious freedom could fundamentally change our relationship with the Muslim world.

Tony Blair's Clash of Civilizations Speech

http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/why-the-middle-east-matters-keynote-speech-by-tony-blair/

Money quote:

...Finally, we have to elevate the issue of religious extremism to the top of the agenda. All over the world the challenge of defeating this ideology requires active and sustained engagement. Consider this absurdity: that we spend billions of $ on security arrangements and on defence to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defence relationships. Some of those countries of course wish to escape from the grip of this ideology. But often it is hard for them to do so within their own political constraints. They need to have this issue out in the open where it then becomes harder for the promotion of this ideology to happen underneath the radar. In other words they need us to make this a core part of the international dialogue in order to force the necessary change within their own societies. This struggle between what we may call the open-minded and the closed-minded is at the heart of whether the 21^st C turns in the direction of peaceful co-existence or conflict between people of different cultures.

If we do not act, then we will start to see reactions against radical Islam which will then foster extremism within other faiths. Indeed we see some evidence of this already directed against Muslims in Asia particularly.

When we consider the defining challenges of our time, surely this one should be up there along with the challenge of the environment or economic instability. Add up the deaths around the world now – and even leave out the theatre of the Middle East – and the toll on human life is deplorable. In Nigeria recently and Pakistan alone thousands are now dying in religiously inspired conflict. And quite apart from the actual loss of life, there is the loss of life opportunities for parts of the population mired in backward thinking and reactionary attitudes especially towards girls.

On this issue also, there is a complete identity of interest between East and West. China and Russia have exactly the same desire to defeat this ideology as do the USA and Europe. Here is a subject upon which all the principal nations of the G20 could come together, could agree to act, and could find common ground to common benefit. An international programme to eradicate religious intolerance and prejudice from school systems and informal education systems and from organisations in civic society would have a huge galvanising effect in making unacceptable what is currently ignored or tolerated.

So there is an agenda here in part about the Middle East and its importance; and in part about seeing what is happening there in the context of its impact on the wider world.

This is why I work on the Middle East Peace Process; why I began my Foundation to promote inter-faith dialogue. Why I will do all I can to help governments confronting these issues.

Consider for a moment since 9/11 how our world has changed, how in a myriad of different ways from the security measures we now take for granted to the arenas of conflict that have now continued over a span of years, there is a price being paid in money, life and opportunity for millions. This is not a conventional war. It isn't a struggle between super powers or over territory. But it is real. It is fearsome in its impact. It is growing in its reach. It is a battle about belief and about modernity. It is important because the world through technology and globalisation is pushing us together across boundaries of faith and culture. Unaddressed, the likelihood of conflict increases. Engagement does not always mean military involvement. Commitment does not mean going it alone. But it does mean stirring ourselves. It does mean seeing the struggle for what it is. It does mean taking a side and sticking with it.

Terrence O. Moore: Indiana's Schlocky Common Core Standards

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/04/21/losing-our-stories-losing-the-regime/

The loss of great literature in the schools and its replacement with something that is manifestly not great—and is meant in fact to put an end to the very idea of greatness—is no academic matter. As Plato taught us long ago, whoever controls the stories, what today we call “the narrative,” of any society, will inevitably control the society. If we give up our stories, we lose our surest means of teaching young people what is truly good and true and beautiful; we lose the best way of teaching them how to be human. Should we give that up because self-appointed educational experts apparently don’t know how to talk about a great book when it is put in front of them?
Call me old-fashioned, but it seems to me that if you were having a statewide discussion about education you would have to talk about books. Moreover, if the subject you were discussing was what used to be called English (now known by the horrendous acronym ELA), the debate would be over Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe and other worthy storytellers and poets whose stories should fill our imaginations and whose words should be etched in our hearts. You would have to offer some indication, some hint, as to what great books are about: love, hope, despair, heroism, victory, in short, human life.
Such a conversation has certainly not taken place over the last few weeks in Indiana, as “Technical Teams” and “Evaluation Teams” have rushed to copy and paste and slightly re-word the Common Core in order to produce the Hoosier state’s “new” college- and career-ready standards. Far from having a conversation about real learning, the only thing the educational establishment in charge of this charade has talked about is “the process” of coming up with new standards.
It has produced a document that would guide schools in the teaching of English yet omits the likes of Shakespeare or Austen or Poe. The reason is that those responsible for re-crafting English standards in Indiana do not really care about great literature; nor do they show much concern for the English language. They certainly have not recognized that the primary innovation of the Common Core English Standards has been to take great literature out of English classes and to replace it with a combination of largely forgettable and often biased “informational texts” and depressing post-modern schlock that no child should ever read.
So they haven’t fixed anything. The school children of Indiana remain vulnerable to the mind-numbing, soul-shrinking, imagination-stifling, story-killing mandates of the Common Core.

April Fool's! (not)

http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/03/31/state-department-spends-400000-of-your-money-on-sculpture/

 Peter Van Buren reports on WeMeantWell.com:

 Your Department of State spent $400,000 of taxpayer money on a piece of sculpture called “Camel Contemplating Needle” for the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The sculpture weighs 500 pounds. The written justification for not putting the project out for competitive bidding includes a cut ‘n paste from Wikipedia about the artist. The State Department says that the sculpture meets the “values of a predominantly Muslim country.” The price paid, $400,000 of your money, included crating of the sculpture. The photo above is the actual $400,000 sculpture. These are the people in charge. That is all.

- See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/03/31/state-department-spends-400000-of-your-money-on-sculpture/#sthash.PRsRf24J.dpuf

Frank Furedi on Ukraine

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-infantile-diplomacy-behind-demonising-russia/14824
Anyone who follows the Western media could be excused for thinking Russia is a rampant, aggressive and expansionist power just waiting for a chance to reconquer its neighbouring state of Ukraine. The reality is that despite the occasional nationalistic posturing of President Putin, Russia has turned into a classical defensive status-quo power. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced a diminishing of its power and influence. It has struggled to keep a grip in the Caucasus and faces a radicalised Islamic movement that is far more formidable than any of the forces that directly challenge Western societies. And on its Western front, Russia feels threatened by political and cultural pressure from Europe. In such circumstances, it is understandable that many in the Russian elite feel as though the very fabric of their nation is fraying.
The main accomplishment of Western, specifically EU diplomacy in Ukraine, has been to force Russia further on the defensive. Russia’s intervention in Crimea is at least in part a reaction to what it perceives as systematic foreign interference in Ukraine. What did the EU expect would happen when it invited Ukraine to join its sphere of influence? As Professor Stephen Cohen noted, this dangerous conflict was ignited ‘by the EU’s reckless ultimatum in November that the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country choose between Europe and Russia’. The West claims that we have moved beyond the bad old days of the twentieth century, when global powers sought to consolidate and dominate spheres of influence. And yet, since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a systematic attempt to move the Western sphere of influence closer and closer to the borders of Russia. The line that divided East and West has shifted from the middle of Berlin towards the Russian border. Putin may sometimes come across as insecure to the point of paranoia. But a Russian today would not have to be paranoid to think his nation is being encircled and slowly undermined by forces hostile to its existence. Western diplomats who fail to grasp Russia’s concerns are actually the ones who have lost touch with geopolitical reality.
The EU and the US act as if they bear no responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine and in Western-Russian relations. Possibly the West has deluded itself about global affairs to such an extent that it is oblivious to its own complicity in the current crisis. Such delusions mean that the normal rules that inform international relations have given way to shallow posturing and empty moralising, always with an eye to making an impact with the media. This corrosion of Western diplomacy represents a real danger to global stability. It also undermines the moral authority of democracy. At a certain point, the politics of double standards in foreign affairs will demean democratic ideals so much that even the integrity of democratic institutions at home will come to be undermined

Club Orlov on Ukraine

In this intercepted phone call (http://youtu.be/6RxSzSWbcxo) Yulia Tymoshenko, a likely Ukrainian presidential candidate (but there will be no elections*) talks about using nuclear weapons on the eight million Russian citizens who live in Ukraine. Good thing these "Ukrainians" don't have any nuclear weapons, but they do have plentiful baseball bats and AK47s looted from armories in the west of the country. Listening to the tone of her voice (these Ukrainian nationalists are speaking together in pretty good Russian, by the way; they are both urbane and Ukrainian is a village dialect) I almost feel sorry for her. Except that she is talking about murdering people like me (my father was born in Kiev, so I have the right to a Ukrainian citizenship). Ahem, President Putin, do you have a moment? [* And the reason there will be no election is that if the election were held today, the people in power would get maybe 5% of the popular vote.] In his novel The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov, writing of the events of 1918 in Ukraine, characterized Ukrainian politics as a “pathetic operetta.” We appear to be at just that point yet again.

JIM HENSON: THE BIOGRAPHY, by Brian Jay Jones

JIM HENSON: THE BIOGRAPHY by Brian Jay Jones (NY: Ballantine, 2013).
Reviewed by Laurence Jarvik

There's a new Kermit movie at theaters nationwide these days--MUPPETS MOST WANTED.

What better time could there be to read JIM HENSON: THE BIOGRAPHY, by Brian Jay Jones (http://brianjayjones.com/book)?

After all, during his lifetime, Kermit was performed by Jim Henson,himself. And the author knows more about Jim Henson and the Muppets than anyone outside the Henson family.  This volume represents years of research and interviews. It is extremely valuable as cultural history and American history--but what's more, as television history...and because of the importance of Sesame Street to the development of PBS, Washington history as well.

In this work, Jones demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, that without Jim Henson, there would not have been a Sesame Street phenomenon. Henson not only did the Muppets, he also made the short educational films like "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10..." and "3". Everything exciting, innovative and memorable about that program can be credited to Henson. The live-action was just a bunch of Captain Kangaroo producers and directors doing their live kid-show stuff, which CBS did better with Bob Keeshan and Mr. Green Jeans.

And Jones reveals that Henson was a genius businessman as well as a genius muppet performer...he was a hit here in DC on WTOP and WRC as a teenager, and made money all his life from TV commercials--Kermit and Cookie Monster and others came from commercial TV...Jimmy Dean and Wilkins Coffee and Big Bird has his origins in the La Choy Dragon.

In other words so-called non-commercial PBS was airing a Jim Henson commercial aimed at kids all along. Not surprisingly, Jim Henson retained his rights to merchandise based on Muppet characters sold by non-commercial PBS. And in the end, Henson sold his empire to Disney (CTW bought back their muppets from a German company in a complicated post-mortem deal Jones explains pretty well). Everybody was making money all along...

It is all documented in the book which has scoop after scoop after scoop.He literally knows where the bodies are buried--and the Muppets had a body count with a number of sudden deaths, including an unsolved murder mystery...not to mention Henson's premature demise at age 53.

All of which is to say, Jones' story is a pleasure to read. He is a gifted writer, and the fast-paced biography reads like a novel. I could not put it down. The author has written a book that I would have liked to write..

Because Jim Henson is also Washington story. His father worked for the Department of Agriculturel. He began the Muppets on Washington television with Sam & Friends and Wilkins Coffee. He went to the University of Maryland. He lived in Hyattsville. And the Muppets made Sesame Street, which made PBS...

One of the insights in this book is that the success of Henson's Fraggle Rock helped launch HBO. It was the first original series made for Cable. And of course The Muppet Show was a hit in syndication, thanks to Britain's Lord Grade and President Nixon's syndication rules.

In any case, I can't recommend Brian Jay Jones' book highly enough. You can buy the book right now from Amazon, here: