RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have a vivid memory of putting on my mother’s high heels and covering my head with the veiled hat she wore on special occasions. All decked out, I made my way up The Boulevard in New Haven to our neighbor’s home about four houses away.

And on that sojourn, I have an equally vivid memory of a man sitting on his porch and stopping me in my tracks with his comments. “Well well well, Missy, don’t we look pretty! And where would you be going today looking so beautiful?”

It was a single moment in time, but in that instant, I knew that it felt very good to be noticed and called attractive.

Where was leftist lawyer Gloria Allred all those years ago to represent me and accuse Mr. Porch Guy of sexual suggestiveness, intimidation, even harassment?

She was nowhere because even as a little girl I knew the following:

I dressed up fancily precisely so people would notice.
I enjoyed the fact that people––in this case, Mr. Porch Guy––noticed.
I continued all my life––and to this day––to attend to my appearance because the feedback (from both women and men) is so affirmative and so sweet.

Of course, that puts me in the same category as the multimillions of people around the world who spend multibillions of dollars on cosmetics and clothing and hair and nail care for exactly the same reason––to appear attractive and by doing so to inspire people to smile at them, accept them, hire them, promote them, flirt with them, or approach them with romantic interest.

It’s called human nature. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. And it’s been going on since the Garden of Eden when I’m sure Eve squeezed berry juice on their cheeks and lips and Adam bedecked himself with that famous fig leaf.

“Sxandals” are everywhere with dominoes falling among legislators and celebrities. Remember this “sexcapade” by two Democrat Senators in 1985 while they served in the Senate:

Daniel Greenfield reminded us:http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/264466/heres-how-ted-kennedy-sexually-assaulted-waitress-daniel-greenfield

Ted Kennedy was United States Senator from Massachusetts for over forty years from 1962 until his death in 2009. Christopher John Dodd served as a United States Senator from Connecticut for a thirty-year period from 1981 to 2011

1985-

“It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.

As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room.”

When considering moderation in politics, we must differentiate between outcomes and process – ideologies versus behavior. The French political philosopher Montesquieu claimed humans naturally migrate toward the center – that policies are best that accommodate the greatest number. On the other hand, Adam Smith, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, suggested it is moderation in social interactions, regardless of political opinions, which allow people to relate to and understand one another.

Most Americans believe in a mixture of government and personal independence – an equilibrium allowing the country to prosper, while preserving the obligations society demands. Politics is the search for that balance, but it is a Sisyphean struggle that never satisfies everyone. Polarization is today’s political nemesis. Mainstream media argues that extremism, especially from the right, has made people yearn for moderation. As well, blame is laid on social media that gives expression to myriad views and inspires populist politicians to take advantage of the resulting (seemingly) broken system. Blame is also attributed to media outlets like C-SPAN, venues for posturing politicians playing to their ideological bases.

Those desirous for moderation in politics often hark back to the 1950s, a period seen as relatively quiet – a time of normalcy, to borrow a word from the 1920s. But that era of uniformity, in the long history of our country, was atypical. The number of newspapers had declined, and was still falling. Talk radio did not exist. Television was in its infancy, with only three network television stations, each with fifteen-minute or half-hour news segments. There was little difference between John Chancellor of NBC, Walter Cronkite of CBS and John Daly of ABC. There were no forums for alternative views. We were trapped in a monolith, with little option but to conform. But that is not as it always was. Pamphleteers and writers of broadsheets, in the early years of our republic, provided thousands of people the opportunity to vent individual opinions, much like bloggers today.

How is it that the people who want to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee because it evokes the painful legacy of slavery give Larry David a pass on his crude riffs on the Holocaust? Here is an article that states it well:
Larry David Goes One Cringe Too Far BY Thane Rosenbaumhttp://jewishjournal.com/opinion/227019/larry-david-goes-one-cringe-too-far/

With his appearance on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, Larry David, the undisputed king of cringe-comedy, may have finally crossed a line. It is a symbolic line, admittedly, one that artists draw for themselves both morally and aesthetically. But it is a line nonetheless.

Of course, it’s not a line David would ever hesitate crossing again. He’s taken that same devilish step many times in the past—all for laughs.His monologue on SNL, however, doubled down on a theme that properly deserves to be forever buried and left alone. That’s what we do with the dead, especially the victims of mass murder. A certain amount of piety is expected, and one never dreams of desecration with such nightmarish events.
David pivoted from the recently disclosed sexual predations of certain men in the entertainment industry, making the unpleasant association that many of them happened to be Jews, to his own unseemly wolfish behavior. Apparently, so indiscrete are his sexual urges that he can imagine checking out Jewish women in a concentration camp. In fact, he gave a national audience a glimpse of David hypothetically approaching an attractive woman with death in her immediate future, and testing out pick-up lines.

Appalling, but perhaps not surprising. David has been flirting with the Holocaust for many years. And he keeps coming back, not taking no for an answer, a nebbish with a libido for bad taste. Except the Holocaust is not a love interest. It is an unsightly atrocity, incapable of attraction of any kind, and on any human scale.

This is the same man who conceived a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry was making out with a girl during a screening of Schindler’s List. And another in which a disagreeable fast-food proprietor was renamed “The Soup Nazi.” An episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm riffed on the Reality TV show, The Survivor, in which a winning contestant squared off at a dinner party with an actual survivor of a death camp, comparing their relative suffering. In still yet another, a man with numbers tattooed on his forearm turns out not to be a Holocaust survivor, but rather just someone who temporarily inks his lotto ticket number each week so as not to forget.

This column is from and about Australia but applicable to all the nations of the Anglosphere -America, Canada and England…….rsk

Even the most cursory inspection reveals the integrity of institutions and mores is coming apart. From a failing yet ever more costly education system to defence policies crafted to achieve electoral advantage, rather than national security, the strands of what once held us together are rupturing.

A wire rope is made to support a load under tension and composed of many woven steel strands. But wire ropes sometimes break, the best policy being to conduct regular examinations and, just in case, never to place any part of your body near the rope in case it fails. When the first strand goes the load and strain on the remaining wires intensifies until, most likely sooner than later, the next-weakest wire fails, and so on. There is nothing that can be done to stop the deterioration or, eventually, the catastrophic failure that sees the severed rope become a whip-lashing peril to all unlucky enough to be nearby at the time. Many a tilt-truck driver has been grievously injured when his winch rope’s unnoticed deterioration became suddenly and catastrophically apparent.

You’ve probably guessed that I’m invoking a metaphor about society. In Australia right now even the most cursory inspection reveals strands whose integrity is either partially or wholly gone. Let me identify some of these strands; I am sure readers can add their own.

Discipline: Today, discipline appears to be absent or marginal in many areas: the schoolroom, the home, public behaviour, even our parliament. Don’t like a former prime minister? Well head-butt him because, well, why not! Arguing your case requires thought and effort and logic. It’s so much easier (and far more satisfying) to make your case with a forehead to the nose. Yes, you might end up in court, but it will be to the cheers of your Twitter admirers and urgers.

Respect: This seems to be regarded as one of yesterday’s virtues, as we see in almost all areas of public and private life: customer service, attitude to the elderly, simple gestures such as opening a door, road rage. Or think of it this way: you are Australia’s greatest tennis player but hold unfashionable views about re-defining the word “marriage”. Expect your center court achievements to count for nothing as activists push to remove your name from the stadium built to honour your sporting achievements. Why extend respect when a public burning is so much more fun?

Education: Where does one start? In no particular order: lack of emphasis on the three Rs; the inclusion in the syllabus — indeed, elevation – of lifestyle advocacy. Even as Australia slips ever further down the international rankings, the amount poured into “education” grows, yet teacher unions and bureaucrats insist it is still not enough. And it gets worse at the tertiary level. Universities now focus on generating revenue rather than promoting academic excellence. To be fair, this is all they can do, as the schools system delivers every year a fresh crop of minds either half-formed or so polluted by approved doctrine that the critical thought once seen as the essence of university life is beyond them. Ever wonder about the popularity of gay studies, womens studies and all the other make-it-up-as-you-go-along “studies”? The explanation is simple: useless courses are the perfect vehicles to keep the fees flowing and bums on lecture room seats. That a degree in, say, feminist film studies is unlikely to enhance job prospects is never mentioned.

Law and order: In Victoria almost one billion dollars every year is shaken out of motorists who travel just a whisker over the speed limit — respectable citizens for the most part whose only crime is to have money in the bank the government thinks should be better used underwriting its education system (see above) and other follies. Meanwhile teen gangs rampage through the late-night suburbs and police warn that any homeowner who defends home, life and property against push-in invaders risks being charged with vigilantism. Nevertheless, sporting goods stores sell out of baseball bats.

Some words stir the soul when I think of those who served and serve in defense of our nation.

President Ronald Reagan on Veterans Day November 11, 1985 at Arlington Cemetery

“It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country, in defense of us, in wars far away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray haired. But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives — the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”

President Franklin Roosevelt in a letter to the families of fallen soldiers:

” He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live and grow and increase its blessings. Freedom lives and through it he lives in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.”

Hannah Senesh, World War 2 hero and martyr and poet who was imprisoned and tortured but did not reveal the secrets of her mission to save Hungarian Jews. She was tried and executed. From her poem “Blessed is the Match”:

“Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.”

God Bless our Veterans….rsk

It is hard to think that in spite of incontrovertible evidence of the horrors of a century of Communism, there are still those who insist that Communism is a noble ideology that was hijacked by the world’s tyrants.

The great English-American historian and poet Robert Conquest who died in 2015 wrote two magnificent books on Soviet history and barbarity.

The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

Upon his death, The Wall Street Journal’s deadline was:
Robert Conquest, Seminal Historian of Soviet Misrule, Dies at 98

The Economist added: “What the West, and the Soviet Union’s victims, owe to Robert Conquest- His greatest work was chronicling chapters of the Soviet nightmare which had been cloaked first in secrecy and then in shame.”

P.S. They don’t read that in colleges…the watch fawning movies about Che Guevara instead.

Three years and many beheadings after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate, Americans are rejoicing in its demise. “With the liberation of ISIS’s capital and the vast majority of its territory,” President Trump said in a statement, “the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight.”

But does the fall of Raqqa really mean the fall of Islamic State? One needs merely a sharp object—or as we saw last week, a rented truck—and a nearby group of “infidels” to be an ISIS soldier.

After the Oct. 31 New York attack, Mr. Trump tweeted: “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” But ISIS’ most important battlefield is not in the Levant; it is online, in hearts and minds. ISIS’ power comes from ideas, not territory.

The threat is from within as well as without. Sayfullo Saipov, the Uber driver who allegedly murdered eight in ISIS’ name, had been living an unremarkable life in the U.S. for seven years. Thousands of young Muslims have left Europe and the U.S. for Syria and Iraq to answer Mr. Baghdadi’s call. Seduced via social media, young men and women, some of them converts, are also taking up arms in the West, or leaving their homes in Chicago, London and Paris, to live, and perhaps die, for a cause.

The Obama administration argued that young people join ISIS because of poor economic prospects. “We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in 2015. “We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.” That’s myopic. Physicians, computer scientists and star high-school students have been radicalized, too. People are motivated by meaning more than money.

While Western states do (or used to) provide good social services, economic opportunity and consumer goods, they are increasingly indifferent to questions of meaning—to principles worth living, and perhaps dying, for. In the U.S. we are proud of our freedom—but freedom to do and care for what? For a small but not negligible number of young people, answering a call to build a caliphate, allegedly based on the dictums of a holy book, will seem a more genuine choice than ambition or consumerism.

Mr. Trump should know this. His campaign was a kind of call for meaning. Whatever the merits of Mr. Trump’s positions, he framed his views on trade, immigration and foreign policy in terms of America’s national identity: “Make America Great Again.” Hillary Clinton emphasized technical solutions. Can anyone remember her slogans, her rallying cries? There was “breaking down barriers” and “fighting for us” and “I’m with her.” None stuck. She ended on “stronger together.” Together with what or whom?

You know the old saw “ignorance is bliss.” When it comes to the history of the Middle East I prefer the blissfully ignorant to the “scholars” who teach fake history parroting the biased fiction that passes for Middle East studies to gullible students.

Take the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) that feeds faculty to the departments of Middle East history in most American Universities.

“The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a private, non-profit learned society that brings together scholars, educators and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world.” This is their claim, which sounds innocent enough.

In fact, students will “learn” that Jews usurped ancient Arab lands, colonized them, instituted harsh repression and liquidated basic rights in their illegal occupation. They will be taught that Arab wars and terrorism were a reaction to Jewish invasion of Arab lands. They will unlearn, if they ever knew, anything about the Jews’ historic ties to Palestine, the Balfour Declaration or the deception that deeded 80% of Palestine to the Hashemites who had absolutely no historic ties to the area.

The current president of MESA, Beth Baron, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of City University (CUNY), is an outspoken supporter of the morally lopsided Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. She has published dozens of letters to the Israeli government condemning its actions and defending terrorists. She refers to the Israel Defense Forces as the “Israeli Occupation Authorities.” In August 2017 CUNY gave her a thirty thousand dollar raise and named her a “Distinguished Scholar.” Imagine what she teaches her students.

Judith Tucker, a professor of History at Georgetown University, is the President-elect of MESA, and (no surprise) a leader in the BDS movement. Back in 2014 she co-authored a resolution that defended scholarly associations’ right to endorse and participate in BDS. In January of 2016, Tucker sponsored a resolution titled “Protecting the Right to Education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” that was presented at the annual American Historical Association (AHA) convention. While that fortunately failed to pass, at the convention Tucker chaired a “Roundtable on Violations of Academic Freedom in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Lisa Hajjar, a professor of “Law and Society” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a member of the board of MESA whose term expires this month. As the late and greatly lamented Professor Steven Plaut wrote in Frontpage in June 2005: “Lisa Hajjar has made an entire academic career out of bashing the United States and Israel for their supposed use of ‘torture’ against Arabs. She spouts off these baseless accusations from her academic home at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she teaches in its ‘Law and Society’ program. In fact she has no credentials at all in law. (She also teaches “Middle East Studies” at UCSB, with even fewer qualifications in that field.) Instead she holds a PhD in sociology from American University. The one in Washington, not Cairo.“

At Columbia University, past president of MESA Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. He is fiercely anti-Israel and in his latest screed bemoaned: “Israel advocates will ‘infest’ the Trump administration and impose a new ‘vision’ of the Middle East disproportionately favoring the Israeli government….. they have a vision whereby the occupied territories aren’t occupied, they have a vision whereby there is no such thing as the Palestinians, they have a vision whereby international law doesn’t exist, they have a vision whereby the United States can unilaterally cancel a decision in the United Nations.” His entire department of fake history shares his views.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a “play in which nothing happens, twice,” in Vivian Mercier’s bon mot. Less known to English-speaking audiences is another work in which nothing happens twice, namely Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, The Exterminating Angel. The great Spanish auteur attacked the subject as surrealist social farce rather than as Existentialist absurdity, as with Beckett. Buñuel’s nihilism makes no pretense at portraying the human condition in general. It is as distinctively Spanish as Gilbert and Sullivan are distinctively British, which explains why Spanish theater troupes do not perform HMS Pinafore and American audiences largely ignored The Exterminating Angel. As a narrative of cultural suicide, though, it has no peer in postwar art.

Buñuel was a lifelong Communist and concluded his film with a revolutionary statement. But he brought to the screen a profoundly biblical sensibility, most of all in the matter of retribution. The film’s title may be a reference to the 19th-century Spanish Society of the Exterminating Angel, a death squad that hunted Spanish liberals. But it is more immediately a citation of I Chronicles 21:15, “And God sent an angel unto Jerusalem to destroy it” after King David ordered a census in contravention of biblical law. The subject of the film is divine vengeance against a corrupt elite that is incapable of extricating itself from its torpor.

The British composer Thomas Adès, the son of Syrian-Jewish immigrants to the United Kingdom, debuted an operatic adaption of Buñuel’s Angel at the Salzburg Festival last year. The Metropolitan Opera features it prominently in its fall season. With a few telling exceptions, Adès and his librettist, Tom Cairns, stick close to Buñuel’s screenplay. Their endeavor raises a question: How do you write music about nothing? The question is not as silly as it sounds. Adès solves it by injecting extraneous material into the comedy, which supports the music but disturbs the joke.

Adès has no limitations as a composer, by which I mean that he has a sure grip on the whole battery of compositional styles and musical devices. He can do with a score whatever he thinks best, and his use of tonal devices, as well as atonal gestures and sound effects, is canny and deliberate. The question is whether he has provided Buñuel’s comedy with the music it requires. The film has no score at all; the only music is performed by one of the characters in the course of the action.

In the film, guests arrive for dinner at a Mexico City mansion (on “Providence Street”), and find that they cannot leave the living room. The servants have had a strange compulsion to flee. There is no explanation for their paralysis of will. They do not understand it themselves. Days go by, and the aristocratic company begins to stink and starve. They obtain water by breaking open a pipe in the wall and food by butchering a pet lamb. A crowd gathers outside but cannot enter, either. The entrapped guests descend by turns into madness and violence, until one of them observes that they have returned by random motion to the precise positions they occupied just before the spell descended on them. They repeat verbatim the party banter that preceded their imprisonment, and the survivors stumble out of their hell.

The host promises to sponsor a solemn mass if the group escapes, but the partygoers’ Christianity cracks and peels under stress. One lady in the party, who carries chicken feet in her purse, applies practical Kabbalah without success; it is not clear whether she is meant to be a covert Jew or just dotty. Chicken feet pertain to voodoo, not Kabbalah. A Freemason in the group shouts “Adonai!” a masonic call for help, but no one appears.

Repetition, it turns out, is not the counter-spell, but a nasty divine joke. Buñuel warns us that something is awry by repeating the entrance of the guests into the mansion. The master of the house offers a toast to the prima donna of the opera they have just heard. He starts to repeat the scene, but this time the partygoers ignore him, as Buñuel winks to the audience.

After stumbling out of the house, the partygoers appear shortly afterward for a Mass of thanks-giving, but this time no one is able to leave the church. The priests halt at the exit and the parishioners mill about unable to pass the threshold. In case we were unclear about what Buñuel had in mind, the last scene shows machine guns firing at an uprising outside the church, and a herd of sheep entering the church. The relevant repetition was not the reenactment of the banal events that preceded the guests’ entrapment, but rather the repetition of the entrapment itself, this time in the church. Nothing has happened twice. These are people who are doomed to repeat themselves. That is why they are trapped.