RUTHFULLY YOURS

The scariest great poem in the English language was written by a young genius of limitless potential who turned into an opium addict, was besotted by German metaphysical philosophy, and was plagued by ill health and a loveless marriage. Though he considered himself a slothful failure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge left us a portfolio of astounding poems that includes not only “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but “Kubla Khan” (which he characteristically denigrated as a mere “fragment”). He also produced a prose masterpiece (“Biographia Literaria”), invented the conversation poem (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”), and was present at the creation of a major literary movement.
One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem. ENLARGE
One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem. Photo: Art Resource

With William Wordsworth, Coleridge was co-author of “Lyrical Ballads” (1798), the book that launched the Romantic revolution in English poetry. The first and longest poem in the book—one of only four by Coleridge (his collaborator had 20)—is the immortal “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions. Because of its vast readership, Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.

Styling himself an “investigative historian,” O’Reilly purports to have discovered amazing facts that have escaped the notice of real historians. The book’s intimated hypothesis is that the trauma of the March 1981 assassination attempt somehow triggered in Reagan a mental decline, perhaps accelerating the Alzheimer’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 13 years later. The book says Reagan was often addled to the point of incompetence, causing senior advisers to contemplate using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Well.

Reagan was shot on the 70th day of his presidency. In the next 2,853 days he produced an economic boom and the Cold War’s endgame. Among O’Reilly’s “explanations” for Reagan’s supposed combination of creativity and befuddlement are: He was brave; “on his bad days, he couldn’t work” but on good days “he was brilliant”; Nancy Reagan was in charge; it was “almost miraculous.”

When Reagan’s unsatisfactory chief of staff Don Regan was replaced by Howard Baker, a Baker aide wrote a memo that included slanderous assessments of the president from some disgruntled Regan staffers. This memo, later regretted by its author, became, O’Reilly says, the “centerpiece” of his book. On this flimsy reed he leans the fiction (refuted by minute-by-minutes records in the Reagan Library) that, in O’Reilly’s words, “a lot of days” Reagan never left the White House’s second floor where he watched “soap operas all day long.”

The thought that most frequently pops into my head when I read diatribes by militant atheists is “Why won’t you read a book?”

Of course, put thus, the thought is implausible. The militant atheists who get interviewed in newspapers presumably have read books. Christopher Hitchens had certainly read a lot of books. But there are good books and there are bad books, and then there are necessary books. And, clearly, they haven’t read any of the books that should, in a cultured society, be presumed necessary for participation in public debate.

Take the theoretical physicist and public speaker Lawrence Krauss. Krauss is, in a way, a perfect example, because he doesn’t even pretend to be a philosopher — unlike, say, Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins. Krauss recently received the 2015 Humanist of the Year award and delivered himself of a speech attacking religion; before that, he wrote a piece for The New Yorker that went viral, calling on scientists to attack religion.

Krauss’s belief — and it is a belief — is that religion and science are competing ways of explaining the world. Religion is based on dogma, and science is based on doubt, and those two are, at the end of the day, incompatible. One must win. I’ll let you guess which side Krauss is on.

Britain should divorce the EU with extreme prejudice and reclaim its sovereignty in full. Then it might have a brighter future.

There are a number of ways to divorce oneself from an unwanted spouse.

The Muslim way is for a man to say three times to the wife, “I divorce thee.” Or words to that effect.

The Jewish way is for the man to write it out. According to the Torah, divorce is accomplished simply by writing a bill of divorce, handing it to the wife, and sending her away.

There were three films of the same title, A Bill of Divorcement, in 1922, in 1932, and 1940, dealing with the problems of a woman whose husband was declared incurably insane and institutionalized. She obtains a divorce from him, with the understanding that she will never see him again and is free to remarry. In all three films it doesn’t work out well for all the concerned parties.

Britain is about to embark on a bill of divorcement of sorts from the European Union, in which a referendum on EU membership will be held. The EU lately has embarked on a political and economic course that is utterly insane, if not suicidal, especially in regards to the massive immigrant invasion of the Continent. The referendum couldn’t have been better timed. Even though Britain is not a part of the Shengen borderless system on the Continent system, many Britons could not have but noticed the continued efforts of especially Muslims trying to enter Britain for its benefits. Presumably they’re better than Germany’s, but I wouldn’t know. They try to enter Britain by truck-and-train-hopping and rushing en masse into the Chunnel and have set up a tent-and-shack slum in Calais near the entrance to the tunnel to Dover. It’s probably less sanitary than the Normans’ camp before they invaded Britain in 1066.

Dr. Catherine Chatterley on Anti-Zionism: The New Face of Anti-Semitism
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Thursday, December 3, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (EST)
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Sift through the Tom Wolfe papers and you get a picture of a writer who, from Sixties hippies to Eighties “masters of the universe”, has been a correspondent on the frontline of American society, reporting on its changes, its absurdities and its hypocrisies — and in doing so, helping a country make sense of itself.

In December 1969, Tom Wolfe received an invitation to the Park Avenue apartment of Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia. They were holding a party for guests “to meet and hear from leaders of the Black Panther Party and lawyers for the New York Panther 21”.

Wolfe was 38 and becoming famous as the Man in the White Suit. He had published a bestselling and ground-breaking book about the hippie movement, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), as well as two collections of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and The Pump House Gang (1968). With his wit, his powers of observation, his application of the novelist’s tools to non-fiction writing, and an unmistakable style, he turned himself in a few short years from a just another newspaper reporter into a journalistic sensation. And it was after this metamorphosis, at the end of 1969, that Wolfe found himself on the guest list for the Bernsteins’ glittering fundraiser.
The “Panther 21” were facing trial for conspiracy to blow up department stores, a police station and the Bronx Botanical Gardens and they need money to post bail and pay for lawyers. But Tom Wolfe left his chequebook at home and instead packed his notebook.

The result of his reporting that night was an article published several months later in New York magazine. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” is an evisceration of the Bernsteins and other socialites who had taken to hobnobbing with the leaders of radical movements. It is the trivial concerns of those at the gathering and the shallow motivations for their involvement that Wolfe satirised so savagely:

The Iran nuclear deal agreed in Vienna on July 14, 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will be the focus of furious debate for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s term in office and beyond. The White House and other proponents will argue its merits and proclaim it to be a “good deal” in the best interests of the United States and our allies and friends. They will also warn that the only alternative to the Vienna deal is war. Opponents will claim that if the deal goes into effect as it is currently structured, it will prove to be a catastrophic mistake and will make the Middle East and the world at large a far more dangerous place. They will argue that the alternative to this deal is a better deal.

Perhaps the underlying reason for this glaring disparity can be found in a phrase that often afflicts strategic thinkers and political decision-makers: We don’t believe the world we see; we see the world we believe. As the great liberal philosopher Karl Popper argued, the always-difficult search for truth is guided in part by “the gradual discovery of our prejudices.[1]

The Obama Administration has avoided such a voyage of discovery, signing a nuclear deal based on a belief system and a series of assumptions that, in the President’s own words, provide “a historic chance to pursue a safer and more secure world.” Hence, the fundamental question is this: “Does the President’s conclusion match up to the world as it is, or is the conclusion based on series of profoundly false assumptions?”

Have you noticed that men in frocks and women with whiskers are making the news all over the place? Well one thing you probably won’t read in all the adulatory coverage of Caitlyn Jenner’s “bravery” is that the US hospital which pioneered sex-change surgery now refuses to perform it
Among the issues guaranteed to draw a volcanic eruption from the politically correct is the free and open discussion than transgenderism. Indeed, to talk these days about transgenderism other than lavish and unqualified praise for those who abandon the gender of their births is to invite the label of mean-minded bigot.

Caitlyn Jenner’s apotheosis from suffering patriarch of the Kardashian clan to the newly inaugurated Queen of the trans movement marks a fresh high-water mark for trans-mania. At the start of April this year, Caitlyn was a father, former Olympian and sordid reality TV star. Now, just over eight months later, Caitlyn has been crowned ‘Woman of the Year.’ Should you want to offer anything other than gushing adulation for Caitlyn’s putative heroism, expect to be exiled from polite society.

This is why it was so amusing when last week Germaine Greer, normally a stalwart of the left, bluntly confront the First Commandment of transgenderism: Thous shalt not deny that gender is ‘fluid.’

Here’s what she said:

Just because you lop off your d— it doesn’t make you a woman… a man who get his d*** chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat, but that won’t turn me into a f***ing cocker spaniel.

“In the end, one can say this: Snyder’s obfuscating and half-baked “discoveries” about the Holocaust do further harm to a field of study already disfigured by the work of emissaries of one school or another, not to mention outright deniers. His book will not be the last such venture in misguided interpretation—the varieties are unlimited—but it will lengthen the time needed to repair the damage.”

No author of books on Eastern Europe during the period of World War II and the Holocaust has been more widely reviewed and discussed in recent years than Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. In Bloodlands (2010), Snyder presented what might be termed a Polish-Ukrainian version of the Holocaust, highlighting the brutality of Nazi rule over the countries of Eastern Europe—the “bloodlands” between Germany and Soviet Russia—and the horrific toll in lives, especially Polish lives, taken by the two battling powers.

Now, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder deals mostly with the mass murder of Jews, ascribing greater responsibility than have other historians to the early work of the Nazi SS killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) operating in occupied Eastern Europe, but also memorializing those who helped to save Jewish lives in Poland after the 1939 invasion and partition of that country by the twin forces of Nazi Germany and the USSR. Indeed, the book, which is based to a considerable extent on the stories of individual survivors, centers like the previous one mainly on Poland, and to a lesser extent on the three Baltic states. There is little here on the fate of Jewish communities in other European countries, most of whom were transported to their deaths in Poland. Nor, despite its subtitle—“The Holocaust as History and Warning”—is Black Earth properly seen as another history of the Holocaust. It is instead a new interpretation, and one with some startling arguments to advance.

“Mr. Obama will do none of this. Instead he will send out Messrs. Kerry and Blinken to assert that U.S. retreat is really success, that Russian advances are really defeat, and that five years of war will soon yield to peace because Mr. Obama believes against all Syrian evidence that the arc of history bends his way.”

So the U.S. government that was surprised by Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Crimea, surprised by his invasion of eastern Ukraine, surprised by his plan to sell S-300 missiles to Iran, and surprised by his intervention in Syria now thinks the Russian strongman will sue for peace in Syria on U.S. terms and oust Bashar Assad.

“Russia’s intervention is a powerful example of the law of unintended consequences,” said Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a security conference in Bahrain this weekend. “It will have two primary effects. First, it will increase Russia’s leverage over Assad. But second, it will increase the conflict’s leverage over Russia. And that in turn creates a compelling incentive for Russia to work for, not against, a political transition.”

Secretary of State John Kerry’s right-hand man even used a Vietnam War-era word to describe Mr. Putin’s supposed predicament: “The quagmire will spread and deepen, drawing Russia further in.”