RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is an abbreviated book review of historian Jacques Barzun’s seminal 1959 critique of American culture, The House of Intellect*. However, I shall begin instead by citing one of my favorite movie scenes, from Lewis Gilbert’s 1983 film, “Educating Rita,” for it will help to amplify one of Barzun’s many concerns.

Rita, a “lower class,” ambitious hairdresser (presumably of playwright Willy Russell’s Liverpool), feeling that she is suffocating in her station and wants a “better song to sing,” enrolls in Britain’s Open University to satisfy a hunger to broaden her mind and horizons. She is assigned a literature professor, Frank Bryant, who has lost his zest for life and for his subject, and is drinking himself down the drain. Rita is asked to answer in essay form the question of how best to stage Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt. She turns in a paper in which she says, simply, “Do it on the radio.” (Watch the scene here, between minutes 5:55 and 8:44.)

Bryant mildly upbraids her for her unintentional “flip” brevity, which, while it conveys the right answer, doesn’t begin to explain why and so wouldn’t be good enough for her to pass an exam. Rita replies that she wanted to “encapsulate” her answer in one line. But she repairs to a desk in Bryant’s office to write out her explanation, which she initially didn’t think needed elaboration or explication. Her rewrite reveals to Bryant that she has read up on Ibsen and is deadly earnest about her ambition. She writes:

In attempting to resolve the staging difficulties of a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, I would present it on the radio, because, as Ibsen himself said, he wrote it as a play for voices, never intending it to go on in a theater. If they had had the radio in his day, that is where he would have done it.

This explanation pleases Bryant. He smiles and nods to Rita in acknowledgement.

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), originally a French citizen, was a prolific historian and cultural critic who came to the U.S. in 1919 to join his father who was on a diplomatic mission and became a U.S. citizen in 1933. I discovered Barzun and his House of Intellect in an antiquarian bookshop in Palo Alto. What I enjoyed most about Barzun in that book and in his later works was the breadth of his knowledge and his way of approaching his subjects.

Barzun died in 2012 at the age of 104 years. He witnessed much of the 20th century and a preview of the 21st, which must have dismayed him. The London Telegraph began its October 26th, 2012 obituary of him:

The sheer scope of his knowledge was extraordinary. Barzun’s eye roamed over the full spectrum of Western music, art, literature and philosophy. A champion of the liberal arts tradition in higher education, he deplored what he called the “gangrene of specialism”.

Barzun’s intellectual ancestors were Gibbon, Burkhardt and Macaulay. The work of history, he declared, should include “the range and wildness of individuality, the pivotal force of trifles, the manifestations of greatness, the failure of unquestioned talent”.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/12/rita-discovers-house-of-intellect.html

The traditional purpose of the university — the teaching of the knowledge of the past — was, he insisted, increasingly under threat; and in a speech in the United States in 1963 he warned that “the best colleges today are being invaded, not to say dispossessed, by the advance agents of the professions, by men who want to seize upon the young recruit … and train him in a ‘tangible skill’.”

Obama’s Powers or Lawlessness? — on The Glazov Gang
A troubling look at an administration’s relationship with the Constitution.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamas-powers-or-lawlessness-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/israel-and-the-moral-midgets-of-american-academe/print/

province of the academic Lilliput called the American Studies Association has voted to boycott Israeli academics because of “the Israeli occupation of Palestine” and “the systematic discrimination against Palestinians.” The well-earned criticism of this vote is probably the most attention this organization has ever received outside the parochial precincts of the American university, where “conferences” of like-mindedness pedants regularly gather together to read papers to each other and ritualistically affirm their fossilized political and intellectual orthodoxy. Indeed, what this vote tells us about the corruption of American higher education is more worthy of comment than its impact on Israel’s intellectual life, considering that “American Studies” is a political rather than a scholarly enterprise unlikely to concern genuine Israeli scholars. Martin Kramer’s response gets it just about right: “Boycott me, please.”

The first thing revealed by this vote is the massive ignorance of history, including current events, that permeates American universities. Most obvious is the rote repetition of the phrase “Israeli occupation of Palestine.” This phrase is historically meaningless. There is no occupation in legal terms, because there has never existed a country to be occupied. The territory under question last existed formally as a province of the Ottoman Empire, which has long settled into the dustbin of history because it miscalculated badly and allied with the Central Powers in World War I. The legal disposition, through a U.N. resolution, of this territory by the mandatory powers that replaced the Ottomans after World War I was rejected and violently contested by the Arab nations that attacked Israel in 1948.

Until 1967, this territory was controlled by Jordan, whose annexation of it was never recognized internationally. It came under control of Israel as a result of the defensive Six Day War. Without that event, it is likely that despite international disapproval, the territory would have in time become part of Jordan according to the ancient wisdom that possession is nine-tenths of the law. After all, who boycotts China over its absorption of Tibet? If after their victory in 1967 Israel had behaved as most states do in such circumstances, she would have annexed the territory that by the legitimacy of history is part of Israel, and that was fairly won on the battlefield. And again following the usual practice of most states, Israel then would have expelled all the Arabs. This historically has been the common practice that no one other than the losers complained about after other wars. One and a half million Greeks, for example, were booted out of Muslim Turkey in 1923, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for nearly 3 thousand years, while half a million Muslims, descendants of invaders or Christians converted under the shadow of the sword, were sent to Turkey. Or consider the 12 million Germans kicked out of Eastern Europe after World War II. That’s what happens when a people start a war and lose.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/boycotting-the-israel-boycotters/print/ Eighty years ago, the Nazis dispatched thousands of SA thugs to enforce their boycott of Jewish businesses. Stars of David were painted on windows. Leaflets listing the crimes of the Jews were handed out. Cameras were set up outside stores to photograph anyone violating the Nazi BDS campaign. Like modern BDS campaigns, it went […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joe-kaufman/baby-food-jihad/
Meet the halal certification group whose board member calls Jews corrupt apes and swine.

Baby formula is vital to an infant’s health, as it contains the nutrients necessary for proper physical and mental development. Some baby food, though, while being healthy for babies, is associated with terrorism and bigotry.

For Orthodox Jews and others, the baby formula that their children consume needs to conform to kosher dietary laws, meaning that the food excludes ingredients that would render it religiously inedible. A hechsher or kashruth symbol is placed on a number of products to let those concerned know that they are okay to eat. The most prominent hechsher found on U.S. baby food is the “U” with an “O” around it, the symbol of the group Orthodox Union.

Recently, the Muslim community has gotten into the act, creating a market for Islamic halal (permissible) food, as they too have restrictions regarding food consumption – halal being the Muslim equivalent of kosher. This, though, seems to be more about something other than religious duty, as Jewish dietary laws are more stringent than Muslim ones, rendering kosher food perfectly acceptable to Muslims and halal food entirely unnecessary.

One reason for the existence of halal deals with money. The margin of profit can be great when it comes to the food industry, especially baby food. The other reason seems to be political motivation. Placing Muslim symbols on products is a convenient way to push Islamist culture into non-Muslim American households.

Swedish parliament removes Baroque artist’s bare breasted painting for offending feminists and Muslims

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4481/swedish_parliament_removes_baroque_artist_s_bare_breasted_painting_for_offending_feminists_and_muslims

A nude painting named Juno, which was painted by baroque artist G E Schröder and has hung in the dining room of the Swedish Parliament for 30 years has been taken down for fear of offending the sensitivities of feminists and Muslim visitors, Swedish newspaper, The Local reported on Thursday.

Explaining the ban on the baroque breasts, a source from the parliament said: “You have to think of the foreign guests, especially those from Muslim countries.”

The deputy speaker of Sweden’s parliament, Susanne Eberstein, also a prominent Social Democrat, added:

“I think it is more a feminist issue. It’s tiresome (looking at) a bare-breasted woman when I sit at public dinners with foreign guests. I think it feels a little hard to sit there with men who look at us women.”

One humourist in Britain wondered why Swedish lawmakers could not have emulated the famous English comic Mr. Bean (who once posed in a movie as an art critic) and get someone to paint a bra on top of the offending mammaries in order to preserve modesty and thus prevent offence.

In Sweden, the move is being lambasted as political correctness gone mad. It is not clear whether the Swedish Parliament will now stop taking women, and guests from Muslim countries to art museums.

Sweden is known for a conflictual relationship with issues of tolerance. The country recently attracted international attention for allowing a convicted paedophile man in his 60s to adopt a young child.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/12/22/nelson-mandela-the-true-story/ Nelson Mandela will stay in history on two accounts. He will be remembered for acceding to his country’s presidency after more than thirty years in jail, including 27 years uninterrupted imprisonment in Robben Island, Pollsmoor, and other places. It happens quite often, of course, that rebels, dissidents, or political prisoners turn into heads of […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304367204579270431939767244?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop The president’s panel found no official malfeasance but recommends overhauling surveillance programs anyway. Grope through the Styrofoam pellets of rhetoric that surround the 46 recommendations in the report issued last week by the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, and you will discover that the authors “have not uncovered any official efforts […]

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie has issued the following statement on the proposed boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education:

“Indiana University joins other leading research universities in condemning in the strongest possible terms the boycott of institutions of higher education in Israel as proposed by the American Studies Association and other organizations. Boycotts such as these have a profound chilling effect on academic freedom, and universities must be clear and unequivocal in rejecting them. Indiana University strongly endorses the recent statement on this matter by the Association of American Universities

http://IndianaUniversity.pr-optout.com/Tracking.aspx?Data=HHL%3d8032%3b7-%3eLCE17-9%2f%3c8-GLCE17.6&RE=IN&RI=746473&Preview=False&DistributionActionID=23528&Action=Follow+Link and the long-standing position in this area of the American Association of University Professors.

“Indiana University values its academic relationships with colleagues and institutions around the world, including many important ones with institutions in Israel, and will not allow political considerations such as those behind this ill-conceived boycott to weaken those relationships or undermine the principle of academic freedom in this way. IU stands firmly against proposals that would attempt to limit or restrict those important institutional relationships or this fundamental principle.

“Indiana University will contact the ASA immediately to withdraw as an institutional member. We urge the leadership of the ASA and other associations supporting the boycott to rescind this dangerous and ill-conceived action as a matter of urgency.”

http://spectator.org/print/57242 History admonishes us that the law has to be maintained like a carefully tended garden. Even when a law has undergone a thorough modernization less than ten years ago, when it deals with critical national security issues directly affected by technology — as does the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in regard to terrorism — […]