RUTHFULLY YOURS

The last First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, delivered some palaver this past Wednesday explaining why some women voted for Donald Trump, thus adding to the myriad explanations of “what happened.”

Her words:

“As far as I’m concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice. To me, that doesn’t say as much about Hillary . . . and everyone is trying to wonder, well what does this mean about Hillary? No, no, no, what does this mean about us as women? That we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, that guy [scoffs], he’s better for me. His voice is more true to me. Well, to me that just says, you don’t like your voice. You like the thing you’re told to like. The voice you’re told to like…..We have been socialized to sort of sit there and be quiet. We think 12 times before we open our mouths, we argue with ourselves in our head, and we think, before I can speak up, it has to be perfect. While the guy is like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s not thinking about perfect, right, or anything, he’s just like, “I’m used to hearing my voice.” That’s what happens to a lot of people.”

First of all, her grammar is like off…..it should be “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against her own voice. But, like, never mind, how dare she demean women who think for themselves, vote for their principles, and speak out in their own strong voice?

She delivered more like blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Pure, unadulterated patronizing folderol. rsk

Mainstream reviews of Donald Trump’s recent Warsaw speech laid bare the modern Left’s modus operandi in attempting to criminalise any opinion that gainsays identity politics and political correctness. Conflating “the West” with “the white national right” is nothing less than perverse

President Trump’s Warsaw speech, delivered on July 6 in Krasinski Square, scene of Poland’s 1944 uprising against Nazi occupation, was—depending on your political point of view—either a cry of freedom or duplicity of the greatest magnitude:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilisation in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

The Churchillian urgency of the Warsaw Speech was, for many, not at all misplaced. Western civilisation is indeed in peril because it happens to be confronting a global jihad, and whether we have the will or even the lucidity to meet the challenge remains an open question. For the naysayers, on the other hand, the primary danger facing the West was the speaker of these words.

Jamelle Bouie, writing for Slate magazine, was one of the many pundits on the Left who viewed President Trump’s vigorous defence of Western civilisation, the passage above especially, as an allusion “to ideas and ideologies with wide currency on the white nationalist right”. Similarly, Jonathan Capehart, in the Washington Post, detected “white-nationalist dog whistles” in an appeal to “preserve our civilisation”. Not to be outdone, Sarah Wildman, in Vox magazine, considered Donald Trump’s performance to be straight out of the so-called alt-right’s playbook: that is to say, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and so on. Peter Beinart, in the Atlantic, clarified the situation for anyone who might have thought Trump’s words about freedom and civilisation sounded like John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan defending the West in times past: “The West is a racial and religious term.”

Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day Left’s modus operandi for criminalising any opinion that gainsays their identity politics and ideology of political correctness. Conflating “the West” with “the white national right” marginalises conservative or traditionalist thinking of every kind. It is also, we might note, perverse. Western civilisation, as Roger Scruton explained in The Uses of Pessimism, is not about race or any other form of tribalism but about individual self-determination. The West has the led the way in creating a workable social arrangement “that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent—an order not of submission but of settlement”. Vaclav Havel’s eassay “The Power of the Powerless”, as encapsulated by M.A. Casey in the July-August edition of Quadrant, is an instructive example of the freedomist Western impulse challenging, in this case, the “post-totalitarianism” (or soft totalitarianism) of late communism in Eastern Europe: “life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organisation, in short towards the fulfilment of its own freedom”.

The Western ethos, by this account, is neither racial nor religious per se but, ultimately, a project of individual autonomy and liberty. Our post-tribal sense of individual uniqueness, choice and conscience has its roots in long-standing Christian principles. Even the Age of Science, notwithstanding the New Atheists, was not a rebellion against Christian culture but, as writers such as David Bentley Hart have argued, a product of it. Participation in a Western society is open to people of all races and all religions, with the caveat that they embrace a civilisational code that demands not submission but settlement—freedom, in other words.

The NFL’s run of terrible press is over — when President Trump attacked the league Friday night in Alabama, 99.99 percent of the alt-left media reflexively fell into line in defense of a sport they were denouncing as barbaric as late as Friday afternoon.

You know that torrent of negative news the fellow travelers has been spewing out about pro football — the epidemics of CTE and spousal abuse, the league’s plummeting TV ratings, the half-empty stadiums in California, the $6 tickets going begging, etc., etc.?

Now that Trump has slammed the NFL, it is once again … America’s Pastime!

All it took was 90 or so seconds of the president fantasizing aloud about an NFL owner — like his buddy Bob Kraft, maybe, or his ambassador to the Court of St. James, Woody Johnson — reacting to the latest pampered prima donna to take a knee during the national anthem.

“Get that son of a bitch off the field right now!” the president imagined one of his fellow billionaires bellowing. “Out! He’s fired! He’s fired!”

Which would be the owner’s right, obviously. And surely a huge percentage of what used to be the NFL fan base is fed up with the endless PC posturing, both on the field and in the ESPN studios and on the sports pages.

The NFL’s appeal has faded, but not just among the deplor­ables. There’s a reason they are called “soccer moms,” after all. They wouldn’t dream of letting Junior put on shoulder pads. A football field is the furthest thing from a snowflake’s safe space.

But now the lemmings of the left feel compelled to defend something they loathed a mere 48 hours ago, because if Trump likes something, it must be bad. And vice versa.

It’s amazing how quickly the 45th president can rehabilitate the image of any loathed institution or individual, just by jumping on the pile. If only he could apply this magical touch to, say, repealing Obama­care, or building the wall.

We’ve been told that the ritual of football players kneeling when the national anthem is played signifies their protest of police brutality towards black life. But the American flag has much broader significance than that, specifically its presence draping the coffins of fallen soldiers and veterans. Today’s military numbers more than 1.3 million Americans, 17% of whom are black men and women who have volunteered to serve. What message is being sent to those Americans as well as all other ethnicities who voluntarily put their lives on the line in the ultimate act of patriotism for this country.

By supporting the actions of those players who choose to exercise a freedom that would have them thrown into jail in many other parts of the globe, we become complicit in dissing the families of fallen heroes in other uniforms as well. So soon after the anniversary of 9/11, have we forgotten the sacrifice of first responders – the numbers of policemen and firemen who gave their lives then or subsequently due to prolonged exposure to smoke and chemicals and were similarly buried beneath our flag as the symbol of their sacrifice to the people of this nation. Many of those heroes were black as well.

America has been a land of unequaled opportunity and rewards for its football players. Its failures need to be addressed but if you refuse to honor the flag that stands for so many of its important freedoms, perhaps you should also refuse to partake of its bounty. Rather than take the knee-jerk route of one empty gesture of a few minutes duration, why don’t football players set up a charity to help black youth avoid the pitfalls of gangs, drugs and failure to get an education. If each kneeling player became a Big Brother to a child at risk, think of the publicity value and how many other athletes might be spurred on to join that mission. Black Self-Help, specifically aimed at pro-active projects would certainly surpass the “protests” of Black Lives Matter that often turn into scene of looting, violence and random destruction. Here’s an opportunity for Colin Kaepernick, a bi-racial man who was given up for adoption to a white family, who worships god and kisses the tattoos of His sayings, to do some of God’s work, to get off his knee, stand tall and help to lift his less fortunate brothers and sisters to a better future in a better America.

Anti-Semitism originated during biblical times when Jesus Christ, the most famous Jew in the world, left traditional Judaism to create a new religion. Christ’s first century Jewish following was eventually expelled from the synagogues and Christianity established an identity separate from Rabbinic Judaism. Followers of Christ were called Christians and the original Jewish population was divided.

The Old Testament remained with the Jews and the New Testament belonged to the Christians. Jesus was a Nazarene and lived most of his life in the town of Nazareth in the province of the Galilee. Israel’s history has been a continuous struggle for national sovereignty. Israel was invaded and occupied by Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, Greeks, and Romans but also enjoyed periods of sovereign self-rule under Hebrew Kings. At the time of Jesus the Romans occupied Israel.

During the time of Jesus Judaism was divided into four main groups. The Zealots were revolutionaries who chose a military option to free themselves from the Romans. The Sadducees were wealthy pragmatists who tried to negotiate and compromise with the Romans. The Pharisees chose spiritual purity and strict adherence to the Torah. The Essenes withdrew from the struggle by committing themselves to monastic life waiting for God to save them.

Jesus brought a form of non-violent resistance that resonated among the people and empowered them. During the time of Jesus politics and religion were deeply intertwined so his influential teachings and growing popularity were a threat to Rome and to traditional Judaism. Jesus was sentenced to death by Romans on the charge of political treason for claiming to be “King of the Jews.” The Roman occupiers of Israel considered Jesus to be a political threat and the Jewish leaders considered him to be a religious threat. Both were responsible for his crucifixion yet the Gospel narratives only blame the Jews – it was the beginning of institutionalized anti-semitism for political purposes.

Early Christianity in the Roman empire was considered a sub-sect of Judaism. In 64 AD Emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome and the scapegoating, persecution, and killing of Christians continued until Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and proclaimed the Edict of Milan in 313 AD which insured benevolent treatment for Christians within the Roman Empire. Some consider the Edict of Milan a political pact between Romans and Christians to stabilize the country’s growing instability. Monotheistic Christianity was incompatible with the traditional polytheistic “pagan” Roman religion but Christianity prevailed and became the official religion of Rome in 380 AD under Emperor Theodosius I. The persecution of Christian and non-Christian heretics followed.

Government sanctioned anti-semitism has been used for political purpose since Theodosius I. It is an extremely effective political tactic that deflects attention away from the government’s own failures and focuses attention on the blamed target. Wikipedia lists some examples: The Rhineland massacres preceding the First Crusade in 1096, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290, the Massacre of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres in Ukraine from 1648-1657, various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire from 1821-1906, the Dreyfus affair in France, the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, official Soviet anti-Jewish policies, and Arab and Muslim involvement in the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.

As Jews observe the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we enter a period not of celebration—notwithstanding the former being known as the “Jewish New Year”—but of profound reflection. Best known as a period of prayer and repentance, it is also, and explicitly, a period of remembrance: Yom Kippur is one of only four times each year when Jews recite the Yizkor prayer, primarily for deceased parents. It concludes, more broadly, with “Av Harachamim,” the eleventh-century prayer first written after crusaders destroyed German-Jewish communities.

We will recite it this year at a time when remembrance has become complicated—especially as it involves public memorials. It is in that context that a personal story of remembrance comes to mind, for suggesting what may currently seem counterintuitive: that there is much that we miss when a historic site has no monument.

My own encounter with such a site came on a trip to Germany that my wife and I took three years ago. It was a trip inspired by a long-ago conversation with my wife’s elderly cousin Roselle Weitzenkorn, who fled Northern Saxony in 1937. When we spoke with her in the mid-1970s in her Philadelphia apartment, she was still thoroughly German in many ways—and not just in her Kissingerian accent. She was a fan of the Bismarckian social-welfare state and looked down on what she viewed as the benighted United States. Her family, composed of small shopkeepers and cattle traders not far from Hamlin, was well assimilated to German life. Indeed, a member of her own family was named on the village Great War monument for his service to the Kaiser. But once the Nazis took power, Jewish children, such as Roselle’s niece Ilsa, were separated from Christians on the school playground. Soon after, the Hitler youth massed outside Ilsa’s father’s business one evening, threatening him for having traded with Gentiles. If that was not enough to convince them to flee Germany, there was, as Roselle put it, the night “I saw Hitler speak.”

She’d provided a clue as to where she heard him by noting that she’d lived in “Emmerthal on der Weser”—the river in northern Germany. We began to look into events in that rural, agricultural part of the country with the help of German friends whom we had met in graduate school. They arranged for us to meet a Hamlin-based author and guide, Bernhardt Gelderblom, the son of a Nazi soldier who has taken it as his mission to restore desecrated Jewish cemeteries, such as those in which my wife’s family members were buried.

Gelderblom told us that, yes, just outside the municipal limits of Emmerthal—within a short walking distance—was Bückeberg Mountain. This was not just somewhere Hitler spoke; it was a place of chilling Nazi spectacle. There, in the autumns from 1934 to 1937, it was the site of Das Reichserntedankfest, the so-called Nazi harvest festival. In October, 1937, more than 1 million Germans gathered on the mountainside overlooking the river to witness military maneuvers and much more. They massed there in the countryside for a show culminating with Hitler himself striding up the Führerweg (Führer’s way) to a harvest monument. Women were said to have begged for Hitler to touch their children and to serve as their godfather. At a festival altar, he addressed the throng. “The starting point for National Socialism’s views, positions, and decisions lies neither in the individual nor in humanity,” Hitler said. “It consciously places the Volk at the center of its entire way of thinking. For it, this Volk is a phenomenon conditioned by blood in which it perceives the God-given building block of human society.”

Yet when we visited, there was not only no monument to Hitler—of course—but also no historic marker of any kind. No plaque, no explanation—nothing to indicate what had once happened there. Without our guide, we would never have noticed that there remained but one telling remnant: a still-visible path, the Führerweg, where a parade of troops and notables—and Hitler himself—had marched. Otherwise, this was a rural hillside with nothing to distinguish it.

The kiddies are now back at school and both public and private schools will operate under new gender guidelines. Forget grammar and declensions and tenses and hanging participles. Education has went!

Now it is “non-binary” — masculine or feminine — pronouns for students who are gender-nonconforming or who do not prescribe to the gender binary. They may prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘they,’ ‘ze,, xe, hir, hirs and zirs’ or other pronouns.”

And, as the term begins the students have to fill out a form about what their “pronoun identification” is their preference.

Now here is my question:

Why do people want to use gender-neutral pronouns anyway? What’s wrong with gendered pronouns?

Here is a response: (http://motto.time.com/4327915/gender-neutral-pronouns/)

“It’s not that there is something wrong with gendered pronouns; it’s just that the pronouns “he” and “she” come with a certain set of expectations about how someone should express their identity and relate to the world. For many people, gender normativity can get in the way of self-expression—so the words “he” or “she” can feel limiting. “Some people have a gender identity that is non-binary, and conventional pronouns have the effect of assigning them a binary identity,” says Adams.”

Hir does explaint it don’t ze? rsk

In 1946, on September 26, world Jewry gathered for a sad and dispirited New Year numbed by the Holocaust when one third of the world’s Jews had been murdered. For displaced Jews living in harsh detention and refugee camps throughout Europe the gates to Palestine remained shut by Great Britain, but from the ashes, the Zionist spark was rekindled. The rest is history. In 1948 the state of Israel was liberated. In spite of wars and reversals the Jewish homeland prevailed.

Tonight, the eve of the Jewish New Year 5778, is a holiday of wonder and awe and thanksgiving and good and plentiful food and wine. We live and thrive in a great nation and Israel is an amazing source of pride for its accomplishments, its state of the art scientific and technological institutes, and its outsize contributions to the welfare of the entire world.

May the new year bring all of us the blessings of peace, health, a fruitful life…..and good times. rsk

In yesterday’s New York Times “Style” section Hillary Clinton was interviewed about her book and why she lost.

Her lament: ” This has to be called out for what it is: a cultural, political, economic game that’s being played to keep women in their place”

This from the lady that really kept women in “their place” by calling all her husband’s bimbo eruptions “nuts and sluts” and who played a political and economic game by lying, profiteering, and peddling uranium and other favors to adversaries.

I have not posted anything lately, because Hurricane Irma was imminent and on my mind, and then I was without power and the Internet for days. Yes, I live somewhere in Florida, in a region of the state that was relentlessly baptized by an outer band of the storm, rich in rain and howling winds.

Now that I’m back in business, and able to catch up on the news, I see that a new hurricane is imminent, that is, the storm of censorship and the enforcement of politically correct thought, speech, and writing. It promises to wreck destruction not just on Florida, but on the whole of Western civilization. The storm has been collecting strength for decades as it approaches the mainland of Freedom of Speech.

When to date the origins of the storm? Let’s say in 1995, with the publication of a fussy, snarky book, addressed mostly to academics. I quote from the article I wrote about it, “The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism.”

A small, innocuous-looking book appeared in bookstores recently, published under the auspices of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), an organization which claims to be devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research. Its title is Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is little more than 100 pages long, weighs less than a pound, yet its contents are more potent than the Oklahoma City bomb. Its ingredients are politically correct jargon, multiculturalism, and the phenomenon of what may be called “grammatical egalitarianism.”

It is important to note at the start that the Association boasts a membership of 114 institutions, mostly university presses, but includes such diverse organizations as the National Academy Press, the National Gallery of Art, the Modern Language Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Its membership includes all major American and Canadian universities, plus Oxford University Press and presses in Tokyo, South America, and Scandinavia. This is an organization with significant cultural clout.

Guidelines promotes and encourages “grammatical egalitarianism,” which in practice serves to stifle the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research.

Presciently, Guidelines, in 1995, covered virtually every issue now at large in 2017, including feminism, “social justice,” and race. Feelings have replaced language as a mode of expression.

Guidelines includes the disclaimer, “there is no such thing as a truly bias-free language” and stresses that the advice it offers is only “that of white, North American (specifically U.S.), feminist publishing professionals.” The Task Force, which is composed of 21 university press editors (two of them men), recommends euphemistic proxies for all of the terms on its “hit list.” [Brackets mine]

This is true. There is no such thing as a truly bias-free language, but Marilyn Schwartz and her team resisted that truism anyway. A truly bias-free language would be no language at all, except for grunts, gesticulations, and facial expressions. But even those would not be free of bias. Looking through an atomic microscope, without a bias-loaded language, how would a scientist otherwise say that an atom’s valence of electrons is abnormal? How would one say that “this is a very good (or bad) painting”? How would one say, “I love you.”? I leave it to your biasedimagination. Because language is governed by values – that is, by “bias” – such as objective truth, it enables precise communication. Without bias, language, communication, and the formation of concepts would be impossible to men.