Raplog

Pages or Screens

2012-01-15T13:48:00.003-08:00

See my article published in Education Matters, the newsletter of the Association of American Educators, here. Scroll down to page 5 of the PDF file to "Pages or Screens."

Review of Stephen Greenblatt's SWERVE

2011-12-25T09:00:00.001-08:00

See my latest review at Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Watch this video

2011-11-27T07:59:00.003-08:00

Please watch and forward this video link. It is a remarkable example of the possibility of turning from evil to good.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the man once known as "the Green Prince," son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef and author of the book Son of Hamas, spoke on October 23, 2011, from the podium of the Deutscher Israel Kongress.

Review of Paul Johnson's Socrates

2011-11-27T07:56:00.001-08:00

Check out my online review of Socrates by Paul Johnson here.

The Tempest at the Old Globe

2011-07-21T13:15:00.002-07:00

If you are in or near San Diego this summer, I urge you to see Shakespeare’s Tempest in the production directed by Adrian Noble, now in repertory at the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre of the Old Globe in Balboa Park. It is the most magically moving Tempest I have seen, perhaps ever.

Combining exquisite clarity of language and acting with tastefully strange original music, compelling stage effects, and a generous trust in the audience’s capacity to grasp what is intended, the production becomes a beautiful and translucent medium of Shakespeare’s complex and profound meanings. In the face of so moving a production, the flaws—one incompetent and one miscast (or misdirected) actor, one misinterpretation, and some bits of staging—shrink into insignificance.

Miles Anderson as Prospero was truly impressive, mostly because of his superb mastery of Shakespeare’s language and the supple variety of his speech. Ben Diskant’s Ariel and Jonno Roberts’ Caliban were forceful, clear, and moving. Diskant is also a fine singer and musician and a competent dancer. Roberts’ intensity and mastery of variations of tone rendered almost negligible his occasional tendency to introduce distracting pauses in his speech, apparent too in his portrayal of Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing (also in repertory at the Old Globe). Charles Janasz, as usual, gives a flawless performance as Gonzalo. Adrian Sparks as Stephano and John Cariani as Trinculo could hardly have been better. Donald Carrier (Alonzo), Michael Stewart Allen (Sebastian), and Anthony Cochrane (Antonio) were clear and effective in every way, and Grayson DeJesus superbly and movingly delivered Francisco’s most important speech about Ferdinand’s survival.

Would that Ferdinand had lived up to Francisco’s image of him. But alas, the two serious flaws in the production were the acting of the young lovers. Kevin Alan Daniels (who also plays Claudio in Much Ado) has not managed to transcend the amateur actor’s temptation to get in the way of Shakespeare’s speech with false pauses for petty dramatic effect, improper stresses on pronouns, and cutesy gestures, all of which obstruct or distract from the meaning of his words. In general he played Ferdinand as a likeable kind of nincompoop instead of as a royal prince overwhelmed by magic and love.

Opposite him, Winslow Corbett was an equal disappointment as Miranda. In place of a young virgin to be wondered at for her beauty, modesty, superior education, and compassion, Corbett’s Miranda sounded like what Shakespeare elsewhere calls a “self-willed harlotry.” She delivers her first lines not in compassionate concern for the victims of the shipwreck but in the voice of an angry virago screaming at her hitherto virtuous father. In the rest of the play she speaks in the voice of a fishwife. I don’t know whether feminism has entered into the interpretation of her character or whether Adrian Noble means anger to run in the family or whether Ms. Corbett herself simply cannot imagine what a modest young maiden ought to sound like, but her enactment of Miranda robbed the production of a measure of its loveliness. It was a therefore a double relief when the lovers’ kisses stopped their mouths.

There were minor bits of distraction in the staging: Ariel’s stilts stole focus from a portion of the Stephano-Trinculo comedy, and Ferdinand’s stage business from an exchange between Prospero and Miranda. But the only significant objection I had was that Prospero was portrayed as in general more angry than the play warrants. Though the text supports moments of righteous anger toward Caliban and Antonio, the fact remains that unlike Sycorax, who was a goetist—a black-magic-wielding witch—Prospero is a theurgist, a white magician, whose magical powers can have been developed only through his virtuous mastery of himself. He is not in general a vengeful and angry man who comes to a turning point in his life and thereafter achieves virtue. He is rather a virtuous man who at one point—namely in Act IV, Scene i—experiences a temptation to angry vengeance, of which the immediate aftermath and sign of his temporary weakness is his moment of bleak melancholy expressed in perhaps the most famous speech in the play:

The cloud-capped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temple, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

What makes me say that the hint of despair here is a momentary aberration and not the summary wisdom of Prospero’s life? He says so:

Sir, I am vexed.

Bear with my weakness: my old brain is troubled.

Be not disturbed with my infirmity. . . .

A turn or two I’ll walk

To still my beating mind.

In the words I have italicized we see not a lifelong characteristic but the momentary distemperature of a usually composed and virtuous man laboring under the pressure of an imminent attack (for the second time) on his life. His rising to the ultimate virtue of forgiveness in the next scene is not therefore the transformation of a flawed character but the fulfillment of a virtuous one.

That said, none of my objections were enough to disturb the magical beauty and moving power of the play in this production. Gonzalo’s utopian dream of a purely good natural world, which cannot by the law of reality come to pass, gives way to his prayer in response to the revelation of a world redeemed from its flaws:

Look down, you gods,

And on this couple drop a blesséd crown!

For it is you that have chalked forth the way

Which brought us hither. . . .

Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue

Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice

Beyond a common joy, and set it down

With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage

Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,

And Ferdinand her brother found a wife

Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom

In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves

When no man was his own.

By the time of Prospero’s epilogue, the entire audience was swept up into the transcendent harmony of the ending—vengeance redeemed by virtue, bondage by freedom, lust by love, nature by grace, and suffering by joy.

See it if you can.

An Essay on Shem, a film by Caroline Roboh

2011-07-17T13:35:00.002-07:00

[Spoiler Alert: See the film before reading beyond the first paragraph of this review.]

Caroline Roboh’s film Shem participates in neither the cliché rituals of Hollywood nor the inconclusive, abstract detachment of French cinema. Hence it has been misunderstood by critics who fault it for the apparent incompleteness of its plot. In fact Shem yields its riches with a subtler mode of aesthetic interpretation, and this we can find in the fourfold method of interpretation that traditional scholars apply to Jewish and Christian sacred texts and that Dante builds in to his Divine Comedy. The four levels in this method of interpretation are pshat (simpleness)—the literal meaning, remez (hint)—the allegorical meaning, drash (homily)—the moral meaning, and sod (secret)—the mystical meaning. Understood in these four ways, Shem will be seen to offer a deeply touching, haunting, and healing image of man’s journey toward the meaning of life.

Pshat— the literal level:

The main character, Daniel, is not particularly likeable at the start but exudes a youthful vitality irresistible to others and to us. (He is played by the attractive Ash Newman in a performance that is fresh, subtle, various, committed, and forceful.) Despairing of his life of hedonism and self-absorption, Daniel responds to his grandmother’s challenge to find the grave of her father, a righteous rabbi who, after sending his daughter to England, died in Europe in 1939. Daniel follows clues on a journey from city to city in Western and then Eastern Europe, at last experiencing defeat in his quest. Reunited with his grandmother (played by Hadassah Hungar Diamant), he is told that she has learned in a dream that her father had in fact died in a Nazi extermination camp. The grave Daniel has been seeking never existed.

Remez—the allegorical level:

Hints that there is more than literal significance to the quest for a physical grave include several recurring visual and verbal motifs.

1. Awakening: The film begins with Daniel symbolically opening his eyes from sleep, and we see him being awakened several more times during the film. These images hint that Daniel’s hedonism, poly-sexuality, temper, rudeness, and arrogance are a form of sleep from which he is being awakened in the course of his journey to achieve the “one important thing” he has been given to do. He thinks it is to find his great-grandfather’s grave. He—and we—awaken to the realization that his true mission is something else.

2. Names: The title of the film means “name” in Hebrew. In each city, when asked his name, Daniel gives a false one. In the museum in Paris, he gives the ancient British name Alfred (after Dreyfus, he says). In Berlin he calls himself Henry, also a non-Jewish name, though we see him secretly typing his real name on a museum computer. When he enters the synagogue in Prague, he calls himself David, the first time he has used a Jewish pseudonym, and one which begins with the same letter as his real name. This is followed by the transforming experience of seeing, on the walls of the otherwise empty synagogue, the names of the Jewish dead killed by the Nazis. In Belgrade Daniel says his name is Paul, and the name’s association with Christianity is explicitly discussed. Finally in Sofia, to the man who will tell him the truth about what his great-grandfather actually did in life, Daniel gives his real name. Symbolically, Daniel is both avoiding and seeking himself. Having learned the truth about his great-grandfather (whose name, Theodor Weiss, means “Gift-of-God White”), Daniel finally becomes himself.

3. Hiding: In addition to the sleep imagery and the false names, Daniel engages in other forms of disguise, hiding, and avoidance, often related to his eyes. At different times he dresses in drag (with tears from his right eye drawn onto his face), is blindfolded, wears sunglasses in nightclubs, buys dope, pretends to poke himself in the eye with a pool cue, becomes blind drunk. (We see him with a real tear after he leaves the first person in his life who refuses to be seduced by him despite his beginning to fall in love with her.). Another form of hiding is sexual license: “I can have sex with anyone I want whenever I want,” he says, and he does.

4. Cities: The journey—to Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, and Rome—traces Theodor Weiss through the European capital cities whose Jews disappeared into the Nazi attempt at annihilation, leaving only names and artifacts behind. In each city (until Sofia) the search turns up nothing but a slim reason to go to the next city. In all these places, the Jewish synagogues, museums, and libraries are often just closing and usually nearly empty. Former Jewish buildings and neighborhoods are populated by non-Jews. All the cities bespeak the destruction of European Jewry, the few living Jews constituting a tiny remnant.

5. Yarmulke: At every synagogue Daniel visits looking for information, the man in charge puts a yarmulke (skullcap) on Daniel’s head before he admits him to the building. Symbolically the hand of a Jew draws Daniel into participation in his own history. Daniel acquiesces in increasing respect for the places in which Jews have worshipped God and for the Jews expunged from them.

6. Words: Daniel is exposed to one repository after another of words and names—printed in books, written on papers, embossed on walls, carved on gravestones, called up on computer screens, and inscribed on “synagogue scrolls.” With no access to the written word that, as he will discover, his great-grandfather spent his life trying to preserve, Daniel learns the truth from living people. Early on, Daniel refuses to say the Shma (the Hebrew words of the central Jewish confession of faith in God’s unity) at the request of his grandmother. Later Zara, the young Jewish woman in Berlin who evokes Daniel’s incipient love by refusing to sleep with him, persuades him to repeat those words after her by rote, and he does.

7. Dead ends: People from whom Daniel hopes for information have died, recommended repositories of information have changed functions, records are absent, rooms are empty, clues yield no fruit, even physical alleys are blocked. Every lead seems to lead to a dead end.

8. Contemplation of death: After a night of debauchery in Prague, Daniel is taken next morning to the forest of Kuks Castle by a young man interested in Baroque art. Daniel brags about his “Baroque” affair with a mother and her son “at the same time,” whereupon the young man takes him to a group of sculptures called Betlém (Bethlehem), carved by Baroque sculptor Matthias Bernard Braun (1662–1738) in the natural sandstone rocks of the forest. The young man says that what really mattered to Braun was not his sculptures of vice and virtue at the castle nearby, but his meditation on death in sculptures doomed to disappear back into nature. “This is the true spirit of Baroque,” he says, “—man and religion bound together by the glorified representation of death.”

He takes Daniel to the Braun sculpture of Juan Garinus the Hermit. (Tempted by the devil to kill a maiden, Garinus gave himself the penance of living like a beast, crawling on the ground, never looking up at the heavens, until eventually he was forgiven. The sculpture pictures him crawling out of his cave, pursued by hounds. [See http://www.richtera.cz/betlemari/english/newfor/08_en.html.]) There Daniel reclines upon the sculpture and masturbates in his pants as the young man photographs him. Images of him pleasuring himself are intercut with images of religion and death—Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” (a hilarious juxtaposition), a crucified Christ, cupids, death’s heads. Daniel says, quietly and seductively to the camera, “Now that’s what I call Baroque.”

Several scenes later, sitting by the Danube in Budapest as the lights on the nearby bridge come on at dusk, Daniel is invited to converse with a young man walking a dog. He declines. The young man clarifies that he does not want a sexual liaison but rather company in his contemplation of death. Daniel declines.

In these two scenes sexual license and death are identified. In the first Daniel succumbs; in the second he does not. It is between these two scenes that the film presents Daniel’s spiritual turning points.

Drash—the moral level:

These are Daniel’s turning points: In awe he recognizes his responsibility to the dead; in humility he participates in a festive Jewish religious ceremony; in fear and despair he calls for help; in penitence he is rewarded with a divine promise and encouragement.

The first takes place in Prague after the Kuks Forest scene and after Daniel has been directed, as part of his apparently fruitless Kafkaesque search, to the grave of Franz Kafka. He comes to a Prague synagogue, which now contains nothing but the names of “all the Czech Jews who perished” in the Nazi Holocaust. Failing to find the name of Theodor Weiss here too, he is nevertheless moved. In his mind, he says to the dead, “I’m not a monument; I’m alive; I owe it to you to be alive.” Then, “every road I travel has your graves beneath it.” Here Daniel begins to transcend his quest for a grave and to intuit that the history of the dead is connected with his own. The central theme of the film is suggested: The dead cannot be found unless they live in the living.

But what does it mean to be living? In the next scene Daniel is invited to spend the Sabbath with the synagogue official. At the latter’s home Daniel experiences a traditional Sabbath in which the hostess blesses the Sabbath candles and the host blesses the bread and the wine. He does not know the ritual, but for the first time Daniel participates in a Jewish ritual by modestly uttering the word “amen.” He has begun to accept who he is.

In Budapest Daniel is chased in panic to a physical dead end, a locked gate. He chooses not turn back but to go up—several flights up the staircase of an abandoned tenement—until he comes to an empty apartment with empty rooms and there is nowhere left to go, an apparently final dead end. “Help,” he says, quietly, as if to God.

We next see him climbing over a wall into a cemetery, where he finds the name Theodor Weiss on a memorial stone. But this Weiss died in the 19^th century—not the man whose grave he seeks. Another dead end. In frustration, Daniel falls into despair, whereupon an angel in the form of an old man with white hair suddenly appears (played by Hungarian-Jewish film director István Szabó).

“I’m sorry,” says Daniel.

“Can I help you?” asks the angel.

“It’s my fault,” says Daniel. “For once in my life I had something important to do, and I failed. I’m a failure. Basically a fake. I’m never going to find his grave.”

“You will find what you’re looking for,” says the angel.

“It’s impossible,” says Daniel. “I’m sorry. I’m such a stupid fool.”

“You are not,” says the angel. And then, three times with kindness, “Continue your way.”

Then the angel is suddenly gone, and Daniel continues his way.

In these turning points, we find that the moral journey of the film is from death to life—from the living death that is deluded, hedonistic self-regard to the death-conquering life that is human connection. The final breakthrough is prepared for by what Daniel learns in the synagogue of Sofia.

Sod—the mystical level:

One motif not mentioned above takes the form of an apparently unresolved sub-plot. Through the film we become aware that Daniel is being secretly observed (Paris to Berlin), cared for and reported on (Prague), saved from death (Budapest), again followed (Belgrade), and finally solicited for information (Sofia to Rome) by a group of spies directed by a Christian prelate called only Monsignor. On the train from Sofia to Rome, we discover that the prelate’s followers believe Theodor Weiss to have been seeking or hiding the “stones from the Temple,” which they believe to have great monetary value. This is perhaps a reference to the Urim and Tumim, stones or jewels sewn into the breastplate of the High Priest of the Temple at Jerusalem through which prophetic knowledge was conveyed. In any case, all that we see of the Monsignor is a jeweled ring. The Monsignor’s representative suggests that Daniel is being manipulated by others (those who have helped him, given him clues, shown him kindness), that Daniel knows what his great-grandfather was “really” doing, and that he should come to them when he is ready to admit as much and “when you have decided to be a wealthy man.”

Because this sub-plot leads to no just deserts or villainous triumph for the spies, some critics have accused the film of bad editing in leaving this business “unfinished.” In fact, the sub-plot is all it needs to be: a precisely structured externalization of all the temptations that try to deflect Daniel from his spiritual journey. The spies of the Monsignor, like Daniel’s hedonism and the preoccupation with death, are a representation of the yetzer ha-ra, the evil impulse, which according to Jewish mystical thought is implanted in every human being as an inner drive whose worldly temptations it is man’s mission to resist or channel. The evil impulse is necessary to life—because of it we are moved to eat, to reproduce, to build a house. But one whose yetzer ha-tov (the good impulse) does not chasten and prevail over his yetzer ha-ra lives a life of material self-indulgence and spiritual emptiness.

Specifically, the stone-seekers tempt Daniel to believe that his great-grandfather was not a righteous rabbi at all but a hedonist like Daniel, who secretly sought the “stones from the Temple” for the sake of his own wealth and power. They promise worldly wealth in exchange for Daniel’s agreement to interpret the life of Theodor Weiss in their worldly terms. This is Daniel’s final temptation by the yetzer ha-ra.

By this point in his journey, however, Daniel has discovered the truth. What Daniel learned from an eyewitness in the Sofia synagogue is that Theodor Weiss had gone from city to city in Europe in order to warn Jews to hide the “synagogue scrolls” from the Nazis so that “the next generation can study the Torah.” Daniel has found not a grave but a life—in fact, a life lived for others and for God. Rejecting the materialist interpretation of Weiss’s life, Daniel remains faithful to its spiritual meaning, reporting the truth to his grandmother, whom he meets again in Rome.

Daniel’s feeling of defeat at not finding the grave is challenged at the end by the news that the grave never existed. Was the journey a waste? Or has Daniel found something far more valuable? Rejecting the temptation of worldly wealth, Daniel makes of his quest something akin to what Theodor Weiss made of his life. Daniel has chosen solidarity with his great-grandfather, hence participation in the past, present, and future of his people. In doing so, he has risen out of the death that is sensual self-absorption and self-delusion and into living human relationship. Thus he has completed his mission, though the real mission is not what he thought it was. As the mission of Theodor Weiss was to fight the Nazi intention by striving to preserve the Torah “for future generations,” Daniel’s real mission has been to subdue the yetzer ha-ra and to preserve his own Jewish self through meaningful human relations. Hence the film becomes a vision of the survival of Judaism in living Jews despite the destruction of European Jewry and alienation in its remnants.

The film’s final mystical significance is this: Daniel is not only a young Jew alienated from his people, religion, and history. He is also an embodiment of modern man in the grip of physical pleasure, emotional impulse, and intellectual confusion, cut off from both past and future by ignorance of the spiritual context of life and of its challenge to combat rather than embrace death. Daniel’s journey is a journey to wholeness, to the meaningful integration of body, heart, and mind in relation to a world of the spirit redeemed from death and despair by small acts of kindness, generosity, and sacrifice, to which, in spite of himself, his spirit is drawn by its own truest hunger.

This is why the film is in places non-realistic, almost dream-like and mystical. Like the purpose of Daniel’s quest, the purpose of the film is not what we at first think. It shows us the death that is worldliness in order to lead us to insight about the life that lies in human spiritual connectedness in the present and through time.

The film ends with the grandmother sitting in a public square on a suitcase. She is about to leave this world in which there is no final destination but only the suitcases we sit on temporarily on our journey. It reminded me of the following tale:

A Jew with an important question traveled to consult a famous holy rabbi for an answer. When he entered the rabbi’s room, he saw no furniture but a table, a chair, and books. Surprised that so great a rabbi would live in so sparse a room, he asked “Where is all your furniture?”

The rabbi replied, “Where is yours?”

“Mine?” said the Jew; “but I’m just a traveler; I’m just passing through.”

“So am I,” said the rabbi.

Before she leaves, his grandmother shares a drink of soda with Daniel, whom she loves and who loves her. Her toast is l’chaim—to life.

2011-07-06T11:32:00.004-07:00

I am posting this forwarded letter and the attached article because they seem crucial--yet one more example of how important the next election will be.

Obama Administration Embraces the Muslim Brotherhood

Meanwhile, our petition demanding reinstatement of Captain Fields passes 33,000 signers. Have you signed yet?

Two seemingly unrelated actions are in fact very related: The Obama administrating embracing the Muslim Brotherhood (see Frank Gaffney’s column below) and the demotion and suspension of Tulsa police Captain Paul Fields.

In both instances, the Muslim Brotherhood is at the heart of the issue. The Islamic center in Tulsa that held the “Law Enforcement Appreciation Day” is tied to Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

In both instances, government officials have made decisions to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama Administration decision is more obvious, but when the Tulsa police chief suspended Captain Fields the net effect was to send a loud and clear message of appeasement to the Muslim Brotherhood’s front organizations.

It’s bad enough that Captain Fields was ordered to attend an Islamic proselytizing event. What makes it all the more damning is that the Islamic Center is actively tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

We are fewer than 7,000 signers from our goal of 40,000 for the Captain Fields petition. If you have not yet done so, please sign the petition today and forward it to everyone you know. With your help we can reach our goal this week!

Soon we will announce the next action item for our campaign on behalf of Captain Fields.

The Tipping Point: Embracing the Muslim Brotherhood

F R A N K J. G A F F N E Y, J R.

The Obama administration chose the eve of the holiday marking our Nation's birth to acknowledge publicly behavior in which it has long been stealthily engaged to the United States' extreme detriment: Its officials now admit that they are embracing the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic). That would be the same international Islamist organization that has the destruction of the United States, Israel and all other parts of the Free World as its explicit objective.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to downplay the momentousness of this major policy shift by portraying it during a stopover in Budapest as follows: "The Obama administration is continuing the approach of limited contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood that have existed on and off for about five or six years." In fact, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out in a characteristically brilliant, and scathing, dissection of this announcement, Team Obama's official, open legitimation of the Brotherhood marks a dramatic break from the U.S. government's historical refusal to deal formally with the Ikhwan.

To understand why the Obama administration's embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood is so ominous, consider three insights into the organization's nature and ambitions:

First, here's the MB's creed: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." (Source: Husain Haqqani and Hillel Fradkin, "Islamist Parties: Going Back to the Origins.")

Second, here's the Ikwhan's mission in America:

"A kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, sabotaging its miserable house with their [i.e., Americans'] hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." (Source: Muslim Brotherhood's "Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goals of the Group," entered into evidence by the Department of Justice in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-finance trial. Archived at the NEFA Foundation.)

Third, here are excerpts from the Muslim Brotherhood's "phased plan" for accomplishing that mission:

Phase One: Discreet and secret establishment of leadership.
Phase Two: Phase of gradual appearance on the public scene and exercising and utilizing various public activities. It greatly succeeded in implementing this stage. It also succeeded in achieving a great deal of its important goals, such as infiltrating various sectors of the Government.
Phase Three: Escalation phase, prior to conflict and confrontation with the rulers, through utilizing mass media. Currently in progress.
Phase Four: Open public confrontation with the Government through exercising the political pressure approach. It is aggressively implementing the above-mentioned approach. Training on the use of weapons domestically and overseas in anticipation of zero-hour. It has noticeable activities in this regard.
Phase Five: Seizing power to establish their Islamic Nation under which all parties and Islamic groups are united. (Source: Undated Muslim Brotherhood Paper entitled, "Phases of the World Underground Movement Plan." Archived at Shariah: The Threat to America.)

In short, the Muslim Brotherhood is deadly serious about waging what it calls "civilization jihad" against the United States and other freedom-loving nations in order to secure their submission to the Islamic totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine called shariah. The MB's goal in this country is to replace our Constitution with theirs, namely the Koran. And they regard this task as one commanded by none other than Allah. (For more details on the nature, ambitions and modus operandi of the Ikhwan, see the Team B II Report, Shariah: The Threat to America). To this end, as Andy McCarthy notes in the aforementioned essay, the MB's senior official, Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi, has effectively declared war on the United States.

Were there any doubt that legitimacy is what the Ikhwan is taking away from this gambit, consider this assessment from an expert in Islamic groups, Ammar Ali Hassan, cited by Associated Press: "...The Brotherhood will likely try to float ‘conditions' or ‘reservations' on any dialogue to avoid a perception that it is allowing the U.S. to meddle in Egypt's internal affairs. But in the end, the talks will give a boost to the group, he said, by easing worries some in the Brotherhood and the public have of a backlash if the Brotherhood becomes the dominant player in Egypt. ‘Now the Muslim Brotherhood will not have to worry [about] moving forward toward taking over power,' Hassan said." Unfortunately, the U.S. government's dangerous outreach to the Ikhwan is not confined to Egypt but is systematically practiced inside the United States, as well. For example:

Muslim-American organizations identified in court by the U.S. government - and, in many cases, by the Muslim Brotherhood itself - as MB fronts are routinely cultivated by federal, state and local officials. Representatives of homeland security, Pentagon, intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently meet with and attend functions sponsored by such groups.
MB-associated individuals are sent as our country's "goodwill ambassadors" to foreign Muslim nations and communities. MB-favored initiatives to insinuate shariah into the United States - notably, the Ground Zero Mosque and shariah-compliant finance, conscientious objector status for Muslim servicemen and stifling of free speech in accordance with shariah "blasphemy" laws - are endorsed and/or enabled by official institutions.
A blind eye is turned to the presence across the country of shariah-adherent mosques that incubate jihadism. A peer-reviewed study published last month in Middle East Quarterly determined that 81% of a random sample of 100 mosques exhibited such qualities - constituting an infrastructure for recruitment, indoctrination and training consistent with the Brotherhood's phased plan.
Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, individuals with family and other ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have actually given senior government positions. The most recent of these to come to light is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin (who also happens to be former Rep. Anthony Weiner's wife).

It seems a safe bet that, as Team Obama legitimates Muslim Brotherhood organizations and groups overseas, it will feel ever less constrained about further empowering their counterparts in the United States. If so, the MB will come to exercise even greater influence over what our government does and does not do about the threat posed by shariah, both abroad and here.

The absolutely predictable effect will be to undermine U.S. interests and allies in the Middle East and further catalyze the Brotherhood's campaign to insinuate shariah in the United States and, ultimately, to supplant the Constitution with Islamic law. Consequently, the Obama administration's efforts to "engage" the Muslim Brotherhood are not just reckless. They are wholly incompatible with the President's oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" and the similar commitment made by his subordinates.

These officials' now-open embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a geo-strategic tipping point, one that must catalyze an urgent national debate on this question: Does such conduct violate their oath of office by endangering the Constitution they have undertaken to uphold?

At a minimum, such a debate would afford a much-needed opportunity to examine alternatives to the administration's present course - as well as the real risks associated with that its intensifying pursuit. For instance, one of the most astute American authorities on the Middle East in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, Dr. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a posting at The American blog yesterday:

"Rather than embrace the Brotherhood, the Obama administration should be seeking to ensure that the group cannot dominate Egypt. Most analysts agree that the Muslim Brotherhood is by far the best organized group in Egypt, but that it only enjoys perhaps 25 or 30 percent support. The secular opposition remains weak and fractured. If the Obama administration wishes to remain engaged in Egypt's future and shape the best possible outcome for both U.S. national security and the Egyptian people, it should be pushing for electoral reform to change Egypt's dysfunctional system to a proportional representation model in which the secular majority can form a coalition to check a Muslim Brotherhood minority for which true democracy is anathema."

The same goes for the enemy within. Instead of relying upon - let alone hiring - Muslim Brotherhood operatives and associates, the United States government should be shutting down their fronts, shariah-adherent, jihad-incubating "community centers" and insidious influence operations in America. By recognizing these enterprises for what they are, namely vehicles for fulfilling the seditious goals of the MB's civilization jihad, they can and must be treated as prosecutable subversive enterprises, not protected religious ones under the U.S. Constitution.

Let the debate begin.

This article can be found here:
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18757.xml

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ACT for America
P.O. Box 12765
Pensacola, FL 32591
www.actforamerica.org

Remove my "Smart Meter"!

2011-07-03T09:38:00.007-07:00

The following is the text of a letter I am sending today:

June 30, 2011

Jesse J. Knight, Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
San Diego Gas and Electric
P.O. Box 129831
San Diego, CA 92112-9831

and

Neal E. Schmale, President and Chief Operating Officer
Sempra Energy
101 Ash Street
San Diego, California 92101

Dear Sirs:

After expressing to SDG&E my wish not to have a “smart meter” installed in my home, I returned from vacation to find that a “smart meter” had been installed while I was away. I have called SDG&E and spoken to a supervisor, who asserted that SDG&E provides no opt-out option. I have called the CPUC, which says the same thing.

Therefore I am writing to you to request that you find a way to remove the “smart meter” at my home and replace it with a meter of the previous kind.

My reasons for requesting the removal of the “smart meter” at my home are three:

1. There is increasing evidence that excess Radio Frequency radiation causes health problems in human beings, and there is no evidence that the “smart meter” limits quantities and pulse frequencies to safe levels, particularly in conditions in which the insides of houses form somewhat reflective environments.

2. The ability of SDG&E to identify with wave functions the usage patterns of electricity in my home and therefore the activities in which I may be engaged, with the potential to sell such information against my will for marketing purposes, constitutes an unreasonable search of precisely the kind against which I have the right to be secure according to the United States Constitution, Amendment IV.

3. The Federal law under which the State of California has instructed the various utility companies in the state to provide “smart meter” options does not require any citizen to have such a meter, mandating only that utilities offer such an option. Hence the pretense that a customer of SDG&E has no right to opt out of the use of “smart meters” if he or she wishes to continue contracting for electricity falsifies both the letter and the spirit of the federal legislation.

For these reasons, I ask that you

a) cause my “smart meter” to be removed immediately and replaced with the previous type of meter, and

b) make generally available to all customers of SDG&E an opt-out provision for the refusal of “smart meter” installation.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

P.S. I would appreciate a reply at your earliest convenience. Please do not simply inform me of the arguments for the safety and usefulness of “smart meters.” I have already seen them and find them nugatory.

cc:

California Public Utilities Commission
505 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, California 94102

Jim Holman, Publisher
San Diego Reader
P.O. Box 85803
San Diego, CA 92186

Edward R. Moss, Publisher
San Diego Union Tribune
350 Camino de la Reina
San Diego, CA 92108

Center for Electrosmog Prevention
P.O. Box 655
La Mesa, California 91944-0655

Utility Consumers’ Action Network
3100 5^th Avenue, Suite B
San Diego, California 92103-9656

-->

David Mamet's Political Conversion

2011-06-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

Following (knowingly or not) in the footsteps of David Horowitz, whose Left Illusions is a must read for any liberal not yet brain-dead, the playwright David Mamet, in an essay in the Village Voice in 2008, described his awakening to common political sense, and to the nonsense of continuing to believe the leftist ideology of “political correctness” in which (like many of us) he had grown up.

You can read that article here:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/

Now Mamet has written a book of essays called The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, in which he looks at familiar realities with newly clear-seeing eyes. I look forward to reading it and will share my thoughts when I have done so.

Read about the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Knowledge-Dismantling-American-Culture/dp/1595230769

2011-04-09T22:01:00.002-07:00

Last of this series of forwards, an article on why my students can't read, from

New York Times, November 21, 2010

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

By MATT RICHTEL

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

2011-04-09T21:53:00.001-07:00

You must hear this Muslim student speaking at the U.N. among far unwiser heads than his.

Bravo Denis MacEoin at Edinburgh

2011-04-09T21:51:00.002-07:00

Denis MacEoin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, addresses The Committee
Edinburgh University Student Association

The Committee
Edinburgh University Student Association

May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain's great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University. Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field.

I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those member of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I'm not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I'm speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a "Nazi" state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled things in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country's 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha'is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world centre; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, the Baha'is (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren't your members boycotting Iran?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews = something no blacks could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.

In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it's better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak. I do not object to well documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it's clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens. Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world's freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Baha'is.... Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott.

I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument. They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930s (which, sadly, there was not), don't you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it? Of course he would, and he would not have stopped there. Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense. I have given you some of the evidence. It's up to you to find out more.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin

Disgraceful Goldstone

2011-04-09T21:46:00.001-07:00

Richard Goldstone’s legacy

By Avi Bell

03/04/2011

At a recent debate on a panel with the South African judge, I started feeling sorry for him.

Last Monday, I debated with Richard Goldstone about the controversial Goldstone Report at Stanford Law School. Three days later, Justice Goldstone finally admitted, in The Washington Post, that, contrary to the report’s assertions, Israel did not intentionally target civilians. A Palestinian outfit called the International Middle East Media Center carried a story this weekend lamenting that two “racist Zionists” at the debate – Peter Berkowitz and I – were responsible for convincing Goldstone of the error of his ways. Sadly, this is, at best, only partly true.

The debate at Stanford was not designed for enlightenment. Besides the moderator, there were five of us debating under a format that let Goldstone avoid responding directly. The debate had too many participants, too large a topic and too crimped a format to allow a serious probing of the report’s defects. The International Law Society, which organized the debate, tipped its hand by inviting an organization called “Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel” to cosponsor the event.

Even with the friendly format, Richard Goldstone cannot have enjoyed the criticism. As I watched him sitting through the debate stone-faced, his wife sitting next to him, and as I thought back on his lengthy resumé, I recognized the enormous tragedy of a man, once lauded as a champion of human rights, becoming a shill for a terrorist organization.

Goldstone had been proud to take credit for his work in prosecuting war criminals before such institutions as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. And now he had to listen to his professional colleagues demonstrate how the Goldstone Report distorted international law and, as The Washington Post editorialized, made a “mockery of impartiality, with its judgment of facts.”

When the Goldstone Report was first published in 2009, with a brew of blood libels and legal fallacies that exceeded even the usual anti-Israel vitriol produced by the UN Human Rights Council, Goldstone went on a PR offensive. He took to the airwaves to try to sell the idea that the report, which conspicuously and repeatedly denied or whitewashed nearly all of Hamas’s crimes, was accurate in accusing Israelis and Israel’s leadership of the most monstrous crimes and motives. Even then, Goldstone’s going was not easy. The Economist, generally cold to Israel, condemned the report as “deeply flawed,” and a “thimbleful of poison.” A barrelful is more like it.

Now Goldstone has produced less than a thimbleful of contrition. He still refuses to acknowledge the cocktail of lies and distortions that comprise the Goldstone Report. Goldstone has refused to disavow the report’s attempt to eliminate laws against terrorism from the international legal codex, and its refusal to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization. He has not renounced the preposterous characterization of Gaza as territory under Israeli occupation, or the report’s shocking claim that Israel’s limited economic sanctions against the Hamas government are an unlawful form of collective punishment. He continues to remain silent on the report labeling all Israelis liars to stamp Hamas’s anti-Israel libels with the imprimatur of truth. He has not yet expressed remorse about the report’s gratuitous inclusion of anti-Jewish slurs, such as its endorsement of the bigoted claim that Israeli Jews are dehumanized and paranoid.

Goldstone said during the debate that no one has disputed the report’s factual allegations. But this is demonstrably false and Goldstone knew it, because he was looking right at me when I reminded him of this fact during the debate. He did not repeat the claim in The Washington Post.

At Stanford and afterward in The Washington Post, Goldstone took credit for prompting and helping internal Israeli investigations, and claimed that the report’s main demand was for further investigation, but this is a lie.

None of the report’s nine demands directed at Israel included a call to investigate. Instead, after falsely accusing Israel of crimes, the report scandalously slandered its entire legal system and called for the “international community” to prosecute Israelis while economically punishing the Jewish state.

Israel’s investigations started before the Goldstone Report, just as they do after every major IDF combat operation. Being professional and thorough, Israeli investigators gathered all the relevant evidence, and continued for as long as it took to arrive at answers that would hold up in court. Unsurprisingly, the investigators could not corroborate even one of the Goldstone Report’s accusations as printed.

The Palestinians, by contrast, never have and never will impose any criminal price upon Palestinians for crimes against humanity victimizing Jews; indeed, both the Fatah-led and Hamas-led Palestinian governments still name public buildings after terrorists. No one has investigated Hamas’s use of civilian shields, its commandeering of hospitals and ambulances, or many of its other war crimes.

Goldstone excused the report’s harsh pronouncements of Israeli guilt on the grounds that his mission did not have contrary evidence. But this is both false and irrelevant. The mission had plenty of contrary evidence, including photographs and testimony, which it willfully disregarded. Where evidence was lacking, the responsible course was to admit that the mission did not know what had happened. Instead, the report repeatedly and unjustifiably presumed Israel guilty and Hamas innocent.

Goldstone's belated and partial acknowledgement of error has not undone the report’s damage. The reputation of the UN Human Rights Council is at a nadir. Legal scholars have observed that if the Goldstone Report’s perverted legal standards become those of international law, international law will no longer have any relevance to modern warfare.

Hamas enjoys newfound legitimacy as it pursues its express goals of destroying the Jewish state, waging eternal war on the Jewish people, and subjecting its own citizens to its puritanical and xenophobic interpretation of Islamic law. The UN continues to falsely claim, like the Goldstone Report, that international law requires Israel to assist Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Israelis, meanwhile, are harassed around the world by opponents of the Jewish state hiding behind the report’s distorted version of international law; last week, President Shimon Peres was threatened with arrest in Switzerland by activists claiming that the Goldstone Report “proves” his guilt.

It is a legacy to be ashamed of. And it is now Richard Goldstone’s.

The writer is a professor at Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Law and the University of San Diego School of Law. He participated in a debate on “The Goldstone Report and the Application of International Law to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.”

Anti-Semitic Thuggery at Univ of CA

2011-04-09T21:42:00.002-07:00

AMERICAN THINKER

April 05, 2011

The University of California's Anti-Semitism Problem Deepens

By Leila Beckwit

America's most renowned public university system is sinking deeper into a scandal over its treatment of anti-Semitism and even terror groups.

The Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) at the University of California Irvine (UCI) is a fig leaf, a token gesture, used by the UC administration to cover up the shame of the existence of anti-Semitism at UCI and the administration's lack of resolve in identifying, condemning, and combatting it. But now the cover is blown. A letter, dated 10/08/2009, obtained recently under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals the moral confusion of the OTI ideology and its staff. The letter indicates that the OTI is part of the problem of anti-Semitism at UCI and not the esteemed solution as proclaimed by the UCI administration.

Chancellor Michael V. Drake has been silent for years as his campus has been the scene of physical and verbal harassment of Jewish students, inversion of Holocaust imagery, in which Jews are the new Nazis, sponsorship of public speakers who accuse Jews of not being able to exist equally with other human beings, as well as accusations that Jews deliberately kill non-Jewish children for nefarious purposes. He was even silent when more than 60 UCI faculty issued a public statement, May 2010, stating that they "are deeply disturbed about activities on campus that foment hatred against Jews and Israelis. Some community members, students, and faculty indeed feel intimidated and at times even unsafe."

Instead of addressing the problem, Mark Yudof, President of the University of California, and Chancellor Drake have promoted the Olive Tree Initiative(OTI) at UCI as a sterling example of their efforts to combat bigotry. President Yudof in May 2010 gave the first-ever President's Award for Outstanding Leadership to the OTI student leaders, and Chancellor Drake awarded its founders as "Living Our Values." Moreover, on March 24, 2010, when asked to speak at a special meeting of the Regents of the University of California called specifically in response to an outbreak of bigotry at various University of California campuses, including UCI where the Muslim Student Union had disrupted an invited lecture from Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Chancellor Drake touted the OTI as evidence that students on his campus "live and practice tolerance."

The Olive Tree Initiative, begun by a group of UCI students of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds, has as its mission to promote dialogue and discussion about the Israeli Arab conflict. The OTI is now an official part of the UCI Center for Citizen Peace-building and International Studies Program with salaried faculty, director, and staff. Three trips by students to Israel and the West Bank have been organized as part of the program, as well as more than 70 lectures off and on campus. There are efforts on other UC campuses to replicate the program.

Yet, the moral bankruptcy of the OTI as a solution for anti-Semitism in academia is revealed by the letter. Addressed to Michael V. Drake, Chancellor of UCI, written by the Jewish Federation of Orange County, the letter divulges that UCI faculty and staff under OTI auspices, during the second trip to Israel in the fall of 2009, secretly arranged for students to meet with Hamas leader Aziz Duwaik. Hamas is virulently anti-Semitic; it is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.; its charter calls for the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and the murder of Jews (article 7). It is responsible for suicide terror attacks that murder Israeli civilians, and the firing of thousands of missiles into Israeli territory.

Combatting bigotry and promoting peace-building by meeting with Hamas is Orwellian. Would the University of California take students to meet and dialogue with the head of the Ku Klux Klan as a way to combat murderous racism? It would not.

Even the OTI faculty and staff realized that something was amiss in their plan. As exposed by the letter, Daniel Brunstetter, the faculty advisor, and Daniel Wehrenfennig , Ph.D candidate, who were the organizers on the ground, told students to conceal the fact of the meeting in order to thwart Israeli authorities, the Jewish Federation of Orange County, the chief funding organization, and the UCI administration itself.

How high up did their cover-up go? Once he was notified by the Jewish Federation of Orange County in October, 2009, it clearly included Chancellor Drake. He made no public statement about the event, nor any public condemnation of Brunstetter or Wehrenfennig. Brunstetter is still Assistant Professor of Political Science. Wehrenfennig now directs OTI as well as a new undergraduate certificate program in conflict analysis and resolution. Rather than rebuke or punishment, Chancellor Drake colluded in awarding Wehrefennig a precious staff position.

Equally reprehensible, given that Chancellor Drake knew in the fall of 2009 about the infamous incident and its cover up, he glowingly advertised it six months later as the way in which he was combating anti-Semitism and protecting Jewish students on his campus.

Did the cover-up go further than Chancellor Drake? Is it possible that President Yudof was informed, but 6 months later, he gave a first-ever commendation to OTI, implicating himself in the cover-up? Or is it possible that Chancellor Drake did not notify President Yudof that UCI had involved students with a U.S. designated terrorist group, an incident that would at best deeply embarrass UC? Now that President Yudof has been apprised, what actions is he taking in regard to Chancellor Drake and the OTI?

After years of trying to get the University of California administration to take action, Jews have had to turn to federal law to combat anti-Semitism at UC. Jessica Felber, in a suit against President Yudof and the Regents of UC, charges that as a student at UC Berkeley she was physically assaulted by a member of the student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, an assault for which UC officials are partly responsible for ignoring the mounting evidence of anti-Jewish animus at their campus. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, has filed a Title VI complaint against UC Santa Cruz, presently being investigated by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. The complaint charges that "professors, academic departments and residential colleges at UC Santa Cruz promote and encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish views and behavior" creating a hostile environment for Jewish students. Although the OCR previously denied a complaint of the Zionist Organization of America against UCI, claiming that Jews were not a protected group under Title VI, that position is now changed. Jewish students, under federal law, must now receive the same civil rights protection in higher education as do other protected ethnic groups.

The legal suit and Title VI complaints charge that the University of California administration discriminates against Jewish students by allowing a hostile, anti-Semitic environment. President Yudof and Chancellor Drake can no longer hide under a fig leaf. That fig leaf, itself tainted, does not provide cover for such an abuse of decency and of the law.

Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus, UCLA.

Why California Is Broke

2011-04-09T21:36:00.002-07:00

The first of a few forwarded odds and ends you should see.

These are our current California State Agencies ..........................

California Academic Performance Index (API) * California Access for Infants and Mothers * California Acupuncture Board * California Administrative Office of the Courts * California Adoptions Branch * California African American Museum * California Agricultural Export Program * California Agricultural Labor Relations Board * California Agricultural Statistics Service * California Air Resources Board (CARB) * California Allocation Board * California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority * California Animal Health and Food Safety Services * California Anti-Terrorism Information Center * California Apprenticeship Council * California Arbitration Certification Program * California Architects Board * California Area VI Developmental Disabilities Board * California Arts Council * California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus * California Assembly Democratic Caucus * California Assembly Republican Caucus * California Athletic Commission * California Attorney General * California Bay Conservation and Development Commission * California Bay-Delta Authority * California Bay-Delta Office * California Biodiversity Council * California Board for Geologists and Geophysicists * California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors * California Board of Accountancy * California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology * California Board of Behavioral Sciences * California Board of Chiropractic Examiners * California Board of Equalization (BOE) * California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection * California Board of Guide Dogs for the Blind * California Board of Occupational Therapy * California Board of Optometry * California Board of Pharmacy * California Board of Podiatric Medicine * California Board of Prison Terms * California Board of Psychology * California Board of Registered Nursing * California Board of Trustees * California Board of Vocational Nursing and Psychiatric Technicians * California Braille and Talking Book Library * California Building Standards Commission * California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education * California Bureau of Automotive Repair * California Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair * California Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation * California Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine * California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services * California Bureau of State Audits * California Business Agency * California Business Investment Services (CalBIS) * California Business Permit Information (CalGOLD) * California Business Portal * California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency * California Cal Grants * California CalJOBS * California Cal-Learn Program * California CalVet Home Loan Program * California Career Resource Network * California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau * California Center for Analytical Chemistry * California Center for Distributed Learning * California Center for Teaching Careers (Teach California) * California Chancellors Office * California Charter Schools * California Children and Families Commission * California Children and Family Services Division * California Citizens Compensation Commission * California Civil Rights Bureau * California Coastal Commission * California Coastal Conservancy * California Code of Regulations * California Collaborative Projects with UC Davis * California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth * California Commission on Aging * California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers Compensation * California Commission on Judicial Performance * California Commission on State Mandates * California Commission on Status of Women * California Commission on Teacher Credentialing * California Commission on the Status of Women * California Committee on Dental Auxiliaries * California Community Colleges Chancellors Office, Junior Colleges * California Community Colleges Chancellors Office * California Complaint Mediation Program * California Conservation Corps * California Constitution Revision Commission * California Consumer Hotline * California Consumer Information Center * California Consumer Information * California Consumer Services Division * California Consumers and Families Agency * California Contractors State License Board * California Corrections Standards Authority * California Council for the Humanities * California Council on Criminal Justice * California Council on Developmental Disabilities * California Court Reporters Board * California Courts of Appeal * California Crime and Violence Prevention Center * California Criminal Justice Statistics Center * California Criminalist Institute Forensic Library * California CSGnet Network Management * California Cultural and Historical Endowment * California Cultural Resources Division * California Curriculum and Instructional Leadership Branch * California Data Exchange Center * California Data Management Division * California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission * California Delta Protection Commission * California Democratic Caucus * California Demographic Research Unit * California Dental Auxiliaries * California Department of Aging * California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs * California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board * California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control * California Department of Boating and Waterways (Cal Boating) * California Department of Child Support Services (CDCSS) * California Department of Community Services and Development * California Department of Conservation * California Department of Consumer Affairs * California Department of Corporations * California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation * California Department of Developmental Services * California Department of Education * California Department of Fair Employment and Housing * California Department of Finance * California Department of Financial Institutions * California Department of Fish and Game * California Department of Food and Agriculture * California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) * California Department of General Services * California Department of General Services, Office of State Publishing * California Department of Health Care Services * California Department of Housing and Community Development * California Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) * California Department of Insurance * California Department of Justice Firearms Division * California Department of Justice Opinion Unit * California Department of Justice, Consumer Information, Public Inquiry Unit * California Department of Justice * California Department of Managed Health Care * California Department of Mental Health * California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) * California Department of Personnel Administration * California Department of Pesticide Regulation * California Department of Public Health * California Department of Real Estate * California Department of Rehabilitation * California Department of Social Services Adoptions Branch * California Department of Social Services * California Department of Technology Services Training Center (DTSTC) * California Department of Technology Services (DTS) * California Department of Toxic Substances Control * California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) * California Department of Veterans Affairs (CalVets) * California Department of Water Resources * California Departmento de Vehiculos Motorizados * California Digital Library * California Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Certification Program * California Division of Apprenticeship Standards * California Division of Codes and Standards * California Division of Communicable Disease Control * California Division of Engineering * California Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control * California Division of Gambling Control * California Division of Housing Policy Development * California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement * California Division of Labor Statistics and Research * California Division of Land and Right of Way * California Division of Land Resource Protection * California Division of Law Enforcement General Library * California Division of Measurement Standards * California Division of Mines and Geology * California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) * California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources * California Division of Planning and Local Assistance * California Division of Recycling * California Division of Safety of Dams * California Division of the State Architect * California Division of Tourism * California Division of Workers Compensation Medical Unit * California Division of Workers Compensation * California Economic Assistance, Business and Community Resources * California Economic Strategy Panel * California Education and Training Agency * California Education Audit Appeals Panel * California Educational Facilities Authority * California Elections Division * California Electricity Oversight Board * California Emergency Management Agency * California Emergency Medical Services Authority * California Employment Development Department (EDD) * California Employment Information State Jobs * California Employment Training Panel * California Energy Commission * California Environment and Natural Resources Agency * California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) * California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) * California Executive Office * California Export Laboratory Services * California Exposition and State Fair (Cal Expo) * California Fair Political Practices Commission * California Fairs and Expositions Division * California Film Commission * California Fire and Resource Assessment Program * California Firearms Division * California Fiscal Services * California Fish and Game Commission * California Fisheries Program Branch * California Floodplain Management * California Foster Youth Help * California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) * California Fraud Division * California Gambling Control Commission * California Geographic Information Systems Council (GIS) * California Geological Survey * California Government Claims and Victim Compensation Board * California Governors Committee for Employment of Disabled Persons * California Governors Mentoring Partnership * California Governors Office of Emergency Services * California Governors Office of Homeland Security * California Governors Office of Planning and Research * California Governors Office * California Grant and Enterprise Zone Programs HCD Loan * California Health and Human Services Agency * California Health and Safety Agency * California Healthy Families Program * California Hearing Aid Dispensers Bureau * California High-Speed Rail Authority * California Highway Patrol (CHP) * California History and Culture Agency * California Horse Racing Board * California Housing Finance Agency * California Indoor Air Quality Program * California Industrial Development Financing Advisory Commission * California Industrial Welfare Commission * California InFoPeople * California Information Center for the Environment * California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (I-Bank) * California Inspection Services * California Institute for County Government * California Institute for Education Reform * California Integrated Waste Management Board * California Interagency Ecological Program * California Job Service * California Junta Estatal de Personal * California Labor and Employment Agency * California Labor and Workforce Development Agency * California Labor Market Information Division * California Land Use Planning Information Network (LUPIN) * California Lands Commission * California Landscape Architects Technical Committee * California Latino Legislative Caucus * California Law Enforcement Branch * California Law Enforcement General Library * California Law Revision Commission * California Legislative Analyst's Office * California Legislative Black Caucus * California Legislative Counsel * California Legislative Division * California Legislative Information * California Legislative Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Caucus * California Legislature Internet Caucus * California Library De velopment Services * California License and Revenue Branch * California Major Risk Medical Insurance Program * California Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board * California Maritime Academy * California Marketing Services * California Measurement Standards * California Medical Assistance Commission * California Medical Care Services * California Military Department * California Mining and Geology Board * California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts * California Museum Resource Center * California National Guard * California Native American Heritage Commission * California Natural Community Conservation Planning Program * California New Motor Vehicle Board * California Nursing Home Administrator Program * California Occupational Safety and Health Appeals Board * California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board * California Ocean Resources Management Program * California Office of Administrative Hearings * California Office of Administrative Law * California Office of AIDS * California Office of Binational Border Health * California Office of Child Abuse Prevention * California Office of Deaf Access * California Office of Emergency Services (OES) * California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment * California Office of Fiscal Services * California Office of Fleet Administration * California Office of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Implementation (CalOHI) * California Office of Historic Preservation * California Office of Homeland Security * California Office of Human Resources * California Office of Legal Services * California Office of Legislation * California Office of Lieutenant Governor * California Office of Military and Aerospace Support * California Office of Mine Reclamation * California Office of Natural Resource Education * California Office of Privacy Protection * California Office of Public School Construction * California Office of Real Estate Appraisers * California Office of Risk and Insurance Management * California Office of Services to the Blind * California Office of Spill Prevention and Response * California Office of State Publishing (OSP) * California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development * California Office of Systems Integration * California Office of the Inspector General * California Office of the Ombudsman * California Office of the Patient Advocate * California Office of the President * California Office of the Secretary for Education * California Office of the State Fire Marshal * California Office of the State Public Defender * California Office of Traffic Safety * California Office of Vital Records * California Online Directory * California Operations Control Office * California Opinion Unit * California Outreach and Technical Assistance Network (OTAN) * California Park and Recreation Commission * California Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) * California Performance Review (CPR) * California Permit Information for Business (CalGOLD) * California Physical Therapy Board * California Physician Assistant Committee * California Plant Health and Pest Prevention Services * California Policy and Evaluation Division * California Political Reform Division * California Pollution Control Financing Authority * California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo * California Postsecondary Education Commission * California Prevention Services * California Primary Care and Family Health * California Prison Industry Authority * California Procurement Division * California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) * California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) * California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) * California Real Estate Services Division * California Refugee Programs Branch * California Regional Water Quality Control Boards * California Registered Veterinary Technician Committee * California Registrar of Charitable Trusts * California Republican Caucus * California Research and Development Division * California Research Bureau * California Resources Agency * California Respiratory Care Board * California Rivers Assessment * California Rural Health Policy Council * California Safe Schools * California San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission * California San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy * California San Joaquin River Conservancy * California School to Career * California Science Center * California Scripps Institution of Oceanography * California Secretary of State Business Portal * California Secretary of State * California Seismic Safety Commission * California Self Insurance Plans (SIP) * California Senate Office of Research * California Small Business and Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Certification Program * California Small Business Development Center Program * California Smart Growth Caucus * California Smog Check Information Center * California Spatial Information Library * California Special Education Division * California Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Board * California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) * California Standards and Assessment Division * California State Administrative Manual (SAM) * California State Allocation Board * California State and Consumer Services Agency * California State Architect * California State Archives * California State Assembly * California State Association of Counties (CSAC) * California State Board of Education * California State Board of Food and Agriculture *California Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) * California State Children's Trust Fund * California State Compensation Insurance Fund * California State Contracts Register Program * California State Contracts Register * California State Controller * California State Council on Developmental Disabilities (SCDD) * California State Disability Insurance (SDI) * California State Fair (Cal Expo) * California State Jobs Employment Information * California State Lands Commission * California State Legislative Portal * California State Legislature * California State Library Catalog * California State Library Services Bureau * California State Library * California State Lottery * California State Mediation and Conciliation Service * California State Mining and Geology Board * California State Park and Recreation Commission * California State Parks * California State Personnel Board * California State Polytechnic University, Pomona * California State Railroad Museum * California State Science Fair * California State Senate * California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) * California State Summer School for the Arts * California State Superintendent of Public Instruction * California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) * California State Treasurer * California State University Center for Distributed Learning * California State University, Bakersfield * California State University, Channel Islands * California State University, Chico * California State University, Dominguez Hills * California State University, East Bay * California State University, Fresno * California State University, Fullerton * California State University, Long Beach * California State University, Los Angeles * California State University, Monterey Bay * California State University, Northridge * California State University, Sacramento * California State University, San Bernardino * California State University, San Marcos * California State University, Stanislaus * California State University (CSU) * California State Water Project Analysis Office * California State Water Project * California State Water Resources Control Board * California Structural Pest Control Board * California Student Aid Commission * California Superintendent of Public Instruction * California Superior Courts * California Tahoe Conservancy * California Task Force on Culturally and Linguistically Competent Physicians and Dentists * California Tax Information Center * California Technology and Administration Branch Finance * California Telecommunications Division * California Telephone Medical Advice Services (TAMS) * California Transportation Commission * California Travel and Transportation Agency * California Unclaimed Property Program * California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board * California Unemployment Insurance Program * California Uniform Construction Cost Accounting Commission * California Veterans Board * California Veterans Memorial * California Veterinary Medical Board and Registered Veterinary Technician Examining Committee * California Veterinary Medical Board * California Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board * California Volunteers * California Voter Registration * California Water Commission * California Water Environment Association (COWPEA) * California Water Resources Control Board * California Welfare to Work Division * California Wetlands Information System * California Wildlife and Habitat Data Analysis Branch * California Wildlife Conservation Board * California Wildlife Programs Branch * California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) * California Workers Compensation Appeals Board * California Workforce and Labor Development Agency * California Workforce Investment Board * California Youth Authority (CYA) * Central Valley Flood Protection Board * Center for California Studies * Colorado River Board of California * Counting California * Dental Board of California * Health Insurance Plan of California (PacAdvantage) * Humboldt State University * Jobs with the State of California * Judicial Council of California * Learn California * Library of California * Lieutenant Governors Commission for One California * Little Hoover Commission (on California State Government Organization and Economy) * Medical Board of California * Medi-Cal * Osteopathic Medical Board of California * Physical Therapy Board of California * Regents of the University of California * San Diego State University * San Francisco State University * San Jose State University * Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy * State Bar of California * Supreme Court of California * Teach California * University of California * University of California, Berkeley * University of California, Davis * University of California, Hastings College of the Law * University of California, Irvine * University of California, Los Angeles * University of California, Merced * University of California, Riverside * University of California, San Diego * University of California, San Francisco * University of California, Santa Barbara * University of California, Santa Cruz * Veterans Home of California

"We have all seen the TV ads which say that the only places we can cut are Police and Fire....Are you kidding me ?

"Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, this list has to shock you. Over the years, our politicians have created this enormous pork barrel of agencies that employ over 350,000 people directly, and countless more via contracts with the State. All of these people get salaries, medical coverage and pensions at our expense. Take a good, close look at this list. Is this really what you want your tax dollars to fund?"

Reading vs. Technology

2011-02-06T22:00:00.004-08:00

I have linked here an important article about the decline in the ability to read complex texts among entering college freshmen. It is one of the best diagnoses I have read of what I am seeing in my classroom every day. Read it especially if you have children in school or soon to be in school. It is by Prof. Mark Mauerlein at Emory University and is titled "Too dumb for Complex Texts?"

A Letter to My Colleagues on the N-Word in Twain

2011-01-05T22:24:00.001-08:00

We all agree, I hope, that Huckleberry Finn should not be sanitized, bowdlerized, or prettified. Otherwise we would be being dishonest to our students. But more, it would be salutary to study the history of the n-word itself and the various ways in which it is used in the book.

When I was a young boy, my immigrant grandmother, trying her best to speak English, would use the phrase "the colored people," the n-word having already been forbidden in polite society, at least in Southern California. In grade school I learned that her phrase was inappropriate; one should say "Negroes." By the time I was in college, "Negroes" was thought of as totally inappropriate and condescending, and we were expected to use the term "Blacks." (This was the period of "Black Power.") Before I had finished graduate school, "Blacks" was passé and we were supposed to return to a variation of my grandmother's diction by saying "People of Color," which phrase became problematic when the number of colors that term included had to increase with the addition of Asians (then still referred to as Oriental), Latinos (then called Hispanics ), and Native Americans (then called American Indians). In about the middle of my teaching career, the proper term became "African-Americans," which, unless I'm lagging, is still the accepted term, though apparently I don't offend anyone when I occasionally revert to the term "Blacks" or I'd have heard about it before now.

As I look back, I cannot be sure in each case whether these changes in terminology were initiated by African-Americans or by the white (Caucasian?) liberal left, but I do know that I experienced more enforcement of proper usage by people of the latter persuasion then by those whom I knew who were African-American.

The point of this memoir is to illustrate that to all of us now (regardless of race) even the n-word means things that are—at least in some ways—different from what it meant to Mark Twain and especially to Huckleberry Finn. We must not only teach the book as written, but teach it historically, attending to the variations of meaning in the n-word as it is used in various points in the novel, neither absolving 19th-century America of its race prejudices nor screening ourselves from Twain's nuances because of 21st-century verbal prejudice of our own.

The irony of being so prejudiced against his use of a now discredited word that we cannot see what Twain was up to as a novelist is akin to allowing Huck's use of that word to blind us to the moral heroism in his saying "Well, then, I'll go to hell" and tearing up the note he had written to betray Jim. Sin lies not in the word but in the will. To expurgate Huckleberry Finn as if Mark Twain himself were what we would now call a racist because he faithfully recorded typical American speech would be to fall to a degree of blind prejudice totally inappropriate to a school of our supposedly enlightened quality. (Not that I think anyone here is suggesting such a thing.)

We should teach The Merchant of Venice responsibly without making Shylock a Martian instead of a Jew and teach Huck Finn responsibly without cleansing it of words we don't like.

(It is interesting that those who loudest cry "censorship!" when people object to the government's funding of art involving crosses in urine are of the same political stripe as those who loudest call for banning Mark Twain from schools. This is partly a function of our society's replacement of logic—the second art of the trivium, the other two being grammar and rhetoric—with political correctness as the fundamental content of education. As a result, the latter can pretend to absolute moral authority without ever having to answer to the demands of the former.)

"Left on Down"

2010-12-14T21:20:00.002-08:00

Thanks to the Drudge Report, we have this inevitable news from Switzerland. I say “inevitable” because it represents but one more step in the long march from traditional values toward a future devoted to—well, to what? Let’s see where we end up if we plot the course laid out by certain promoters of social and legal “progress” in recent years.

By “progress” I don’t mean legitimate improvements in the justice system or wiser practical balancing of the sometimes opposed values of liberty and equality. I am referring, rather, to the Oregon and Netherlands laws permitting assisted suicide and euthanasia, respectively; to the push for gay marriage; to the argument that any woman has a “right” to choose to have an abortion; to the promotion of sex-change surgeries; to the attempt to assert the “rights” of animals (as opposed to the responsibilities of human beings); to the defense of lucrative traffic in addictive drugs, pornography, and in sex slaves; to the justification of homosexual pedophilia among certain fringe groups; to the state-wide proposal in California to legalize marijuana; to the refusal of Homeland Security, against all practical reason, to countenance so-called “profiling” while justifying what in any non-government operation would be considered sexual harassment. You may wish to add examples of your own.

All these movements, backed by passionate groups of devotees, are predicated upon the valid principles of individual liberty and equality under the law. They reason thus: If all men are created with equal rights, as they interpret the words, “who is to say” that women can’t choose to abort, that two men can’t choose to marry, that any man or woman can’t be the gender he or she would like to be, that an underage child can’t sexually love an older person, that a white great-grandmother or Asian infant should be immune to the kind of body search more properly directed at swarthy middle-eastern Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 40? Why not die when you feel like it or marry your sister if you wish? The problem is that the backers admit no limits imposed by the same authority by which we claim our rights to liberty and equality, namely “nature and nature’s God.”

The only traditional reason not to do any of these things is civilized tradition itself, rooted in ancient wisdom, religious faith, the practice of neighbors and nations for millennia. The legalization of incest, whether Switzerland passes the bill this time around or not, is but one more in the long list of rebellions against all tradition in the name of the freedom to make the world correspond to any desire we may conceive instead of having to correspond ourselves to once universally acknowledged rules of human behavior.

But my assertion of the validity of those traditional values need not be repeated. Anyone interested in the fundamental arguments for them may read C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, so often referred to on this weblog. Today I want to ask instead toward what world the supporters of these various progressive advances imagine they are moving us. How do they picture us living if they should have their way?

I realize that not all those who embrace one item in the list above will necessarily embrace all, or even any, of the others. I also realize that the devil is in the details. But promoters of all of the above changes have in common the similar intellectual stance that nothing may justly hinder anyone from living out his or her heart’s desire. Well, let’s say government did get completely out of the way. Where would we be? What would be the practical effects of the success of these movements?

At a certain point in the decline of ancient Rome, if things didn’t quite go your way—say you had a rebellious child or lost an election or couldn’t pay a debt—you’d get into a warm bath and slit your wrists. Any child of either gender not under fairly careful protection might be subject to sexual abuse by any passing epicure. All the trees of Italy were burned to make hot running water in Rome. Caligula could marry his horse. Is ancient Rome in collapse to provide the picture of our own ideal future?

Suppose all incest taboos were renounced as antediluvian superstition. We might not suffer a flood of mental and physical impairments or supernatural punishments. Wouldn’t something nonetheless be lost? To the ancients, Oedipus was that man to whom the worst thing that could possibly happen to a man happened—killing one’s father and marrying one’s mother. If our enlightened northwest were to go the way of Switzerland, how many thousands would blaze a new Oregon Trail in order to clear a senile old man out of the path to a trophy mother? If only Oedipus, like us, hadn’t had the gods in his way, bugging him for doing what came naturally! Who are non-Oregonians to say that Oedipus didn’t deserve a happy life too?

Imagine a child growing up in a world in which he knows that one day his parents will ask him to kill them as he will be expected to ask his own future children to kill him to get him off their impatient hands; a world in which married couples may be any mix of genders or transgenders and of any blood relation; a world in which a boy is taught no sexual responsibility because women can have free abortions any time and children are available for his future sexual needs as he is available at present to those of his elders; a world in which animals may not, but people may, perhaps must, be eaten; a world in which there are no Jewish ethicists, no Catholic confessionals, no Protestant Bible-thumpers curtailing our freedoms and ruining our fun; a world in which no vestigial notions of higher divine authority or higher human calling will be permitted to stand in the way of the satisfaction of any material desire, practical or sensual.

Do the promoters of these perverse ideas of progress really believe that man is naturally good? That without the constraint of law and custom mankind will not fall to barbarism? That the abandonment of all traditional virtues will involve no loss of happiness, contentment, or meaning for the individual in society? Do they actually think that the goods of civilization won from nature in years past are so permanent and secure that all restrictions of individual desire can be safely dismantled? If they do, they must be utterly ignorant of human history, or utterly mad—or both.

We cannot have it both ways. Either we are moral beings, created in a context of neutral nature to aspire to meaning and happiness consistent with goodness by constraining our illicit impulses for the sake of ourselves and our posterity, or we are mere bundles of desire whose mission is to indulge in every pleasure that strikes our fancy until such time as nature itself prevents us, at which point we are free to end our desperate and ultimately meaningless lives before others end them for us. As Charles Embree puts it, “It’s either right back up or left on down.”

If you agree with me that we are moral beings, answerable for our choices to the power that made us, we had better start drawing some non-negotiable lines—at incest if no closer.

The Dematerialization of School

2010-11-26T10:06:00.001-08:00

Recently my colleagues and I were sent the following links to the newest wave of the future—online college courses—as recorded in the pages of the newspaper of record for the Manhattan culturati once known as the New York Times and now more appropriately yclept the Senile Gray Lady.¹ Here they are for your re-education:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05college.html?_r=1&ref=education

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/world/europe/01iht-educLede01.html?ref=education

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05ttcredits.html?ref=education

Because some administrators seem to be toying with the idea of imitating this movement at our high school, I would like to say why I think that—except for those too physically disabled to attend live classes—online schooling is a terrible idea.

Years ago my teacher Mary Holmes observed that the world was becoming increasingly dematerialized, more and more human experiences becoming virtual ones. We punched thermostat buttons instead of piling logs in hearths or stoves; we squeezed paint tubes and clicked ball-points instead of grinding colors and ink; we spoke into devices instead of face to face; we went to movies, watched TV, and listened to tapes instead of attending live theater and concerts. To no one’s surprise the process has continued, so that we may now have a vast music collection the size of a credit card, to say nothing of the credit card itself, and find worlds of information on a computer the size of an old ink pad. Without experiencing the sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell of any natural thing, we can order online our food, clothing, furniture, cars, houses, pets, and bedmates.

It is ironic that in the age of so much concern over the extinction of animal and plant species and the supposedly man-made decay of the condition of earth, air, and water, we are so passionately devoted to living with less and less actual participation in nature, including our own nature. Mary said that anyone who lives without animals and angels—must we now add plants?—lives an impoverished life. Perhaps it is a result of our becoming so completely abstracted from our natural lives that we imagine we are but glorified machines, complex interlocking biochemical computer networks rather than Donne’s “subtle knot”² of nature and spirit.

Though Mary warned against trusting anyone whose voice could not be heard without the aid of sound amplification, a principle all the more applicable when all we can see of the person is an image on a screen, she would not have said the process of dematerialization was simply bad; much practical advantage has been gained by it. Google Earth technology reduces collateral damage in warfare and gets us to someone else’s church on time. But much is also lost. Let us set aside for the moment the particular losses in my field: the annual reduction in the length of sentences that my sophomore students can understand, and their increasing conviction that grammar and paragraphs that they cannot comprehend instantly they cannot comprehend at all. Considering the efficiency and convenience gained, what is the general educational downside of dematerialization?

The downside is the attempt to reduce the experience of self in the world to bits of information. Despite our prejudices and our abstractions, we are not in fact merely glorified computing machines. We remain natural beings, compounds of soul and body alive in a natural world, requiring meaning to be happy and harmonic psycho-physical experience to find meaning. And, as many believe about other inorganic behaviors (pollution of air, adulteration of food, steroid-enhanced athletics), it is not nice—or safe—to fool with Mother Nature. Just as the picture on the Wheaties box is not breakfast and cyber sex is not love, so the aggregation of online information is not education.

Education involves not merely the transfer of bits of information but the experience of relation—between a learner and a teacher who himself or herself embodies a relation between person and subject, person and skill, life and art, body and mind—in short, the relation between human being and world, including other human beings.

In the 16^th century, Montaigne wrote the following:

Those who would divide our two principle parts, and isolate one from the other, are in the wrong. On the contrary, we must reunite them and bring them together. We must command the soul not to draw aside and hold herself apart, not to scorn and abandon the body—which she can only do by some false pretence—but to ally herself with it, help, control, advise, and correct it, and bring it back when it goes astray; in short, marry it and become its partner, so that their actions may not appear diverse and opposed, but harmonious and uniform. . . .

The Peripatetic school [i.e., Aristotle and his followers], of all sects the best adapted to society, assigns to wisdom this sole task, to provide for and procure the common welfare of these two associated halves. And it points out how by paying insufficient attention to the existence of this bond, other schools have taken sides, some for the body and some for the soul, with equal error on both sides; and that they have lost sight of their subject, which is man, and of their guide, which they generally admit to be nature.³

A live teacher engaged with students in conveying a discipline is the embodiment of the fruitfulness of a harmonious natural marriage between body and soul. The dematerialization of learning threatens the fruits with abortion.

What stands to be lost in the online classroom is quality—not merely in the vague sense of a “high quality education,” but in the sense of the very particular quality of an experience, the kind of quality that is irresistibly experienced when in the presence of one who has it or who can convey it—as we experience not only the fact but the feel of a great basketball player’s three-point shot or the uniqueness of soul in a Rembrandt face—the kind of quality that cannot be reduced to bits of information, no matter how powerful the hard drive.

The other day when a student asked what “skulking in corners” means, I moved over to the corner of the classroom and skulked. Present to the experience, even if they thought I was a nut, my students realized what I was doing, in part by their empathic response to my demeanor before and after the illustration as well as during it. What would it look like on a screen? Would it read? Would the feeling come across? Perhaps the idea of skulking would. But would viewers sense the teacher’s willingness to look like a fool for their sakes? Could they experience the potentially illuminating revelation of the complex relation between word and world?

I don’t mean inordinately to glorify my own teaching or the significance of such an action. I do and say a hundred things a day that are forgettable and are mercifully forgotten. Yet there is a connection between teacher and students in a classroom that cannot be conveyed on a screen. Metaphors for that relation—ambiance, tone, interactive tension, chemistry, electric charge—try to say what there are no words to say. As with the taste of a food—just try to tell someone who doesn’t already know it what the taste of milk is, or of a green pepper—the attempt to convey in words the student’s experience of being in a classroom is hopeless, as is the attempt to characterize the teacher’s experience of the quality of the particular grouping of students that constitutes a class. Yet those experiences are real, and they matter.

My point is that only live experience can yield true knowledge of such qualities, and only one with that knowledge can be the judge of whether a virtual classroom has succeeded in conveying what is valuable in the experience (let alone that such knowledge is often not known to have been gained until many years later). Students treated to online versions of any class will believe they are getting all that matters. But they cannot know whether it is so. Only by experiencing both the unmediated event and the online version could they make a just comparison, and the last time I checked, human beings (as opposed to their disembodied images) still cannot be in two places at once.

If we go down the route of online schooling, we will never know what we have lost, just as, at this very moment, almost none of my students have any idea what it takes to grow a carrot, milk a cow, or shear a sheep, or to cut grass with a scythe, or to wait until the library opens to find a fact in a book. I am not here opposing the valuable conveniences of supermarket, power mower, and Wikipedia. I am trying to express the inexpressible richness of the life that is lost when we substitute virtual experience for real. We divorce our bodies from our minds, as Montaigne warns us not to do, and take disembodied mental experience for authentic natural life. We praise convincing 3-D images in the movies when we’ve never jumped a fence to escape a threatening dog.

When I read poetry aloud, and get my students to recite it, I am trying to do something like magic, to give them the awareness of how in a great poem meaning is incarnated in form. This kind of knowledge can be taught only as a combination of speech and kinesthetic experience. Students need to feel the air vibrations coming from my speaking of the words, not from an electronic speaker reproducing that gesture. And they need to see and feel the visceral awkwardness of other living people when they speak the words badly, and the aha! that fills the room when they speak them well. There can be no such interchange of the living experience of poetry in an online classroom. And the same goes for chemistry experiments and history lessons and math problems solved on a blackboard. Can the particular quality of the movement of a history teacher’s finger on the board from the miracle of 1776 to the disaster of 1789 reach through cyber-space with its true weight and meaning and with the corresponding scintillation of her voice?

All who have ever paid to hear a live concert of their favorite band will agree that there can be no substitute for presence, which ever and always has the potential to burst, as my friend Charles Embree’s Judge Bat Savannah would say, into a Moment of POW, which stands for Presence of WOW, which stands for Wonder of Wonder.

Mary Holmes taught an absolute principle of art: “The greater the work of art, the worse the reproduction.” I think the same applies to the art of teaching. Little may be lost in putting online a class given by an uninspired teacher droning boring facts in a spiritless way to a class of rote learners with no higher aspirations than a grade on a test, though even then I would argue that there is some potential for the students’ boredom to compel the teacher to think twice about what he or she is doing. But when the teacher has any hope to engage, or the students the potential for excitement, or the content any significance at all, the loss in trying to go online—as in any artificial reproduction of the incarnation of meaning in form—will be both literally and figuratively immeasurable.

___________________________

1. cf., “Pop Goes the Times” in The New Criterion, November 2010.

2. “The Ecstasy,” l. 64.

3. Essays, Book II, Ch. 17: “On Presumption,” tr. J.M. Cohen (Penguin, 1958).

Grammar Lesson

2010-11-22T20:30:00.004-08:00

Today, during a review of grammar, a student asked me why he had to learn grammar. I gave a several-part answer, including that his knowing grammar would make it easier for me to teach him to write better and that it is an essential element in education because grammar is the structure of thought. He thought for a moment and then said the sentence below. I wrote it on the board, and identified its grammatical parts. Looking at it together a few minutes later, we both decided the sentence as written and analyzed on the board was a marvelous poetic image of itself. Since I rarely achieve such a perfect unity of form and content, I asked his permission to share it with readers of my blog. So, for all who value grammar and all who do not, here it is:

Technicals: S stands for subject, V for verb, prep for preposition, O.P. for the object of the preposition, and the lines indicate that the prepositional phrase modifies the verb.

And I rest my case.