RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s one of the oddest films ever to come out of Hollywood, an extended exercise in the gently bizarre that has been on near-permanent rotation in my DVD player, so much so that my wife now suspects an unhealthy obsession with a gawky, mega-awkward teen.
For the serious tourist, it is disappointing to pass through a major historic site without being aware of it. I had that experience in Idaho four years ago. My host merely slowed the Dodge Charger through Preston (pop 5000), with its farm-machinery sheds and neat homes with nary a front or side fence – unlike Aussie home-owners who barricade their blocks. I asked, “Why no fences?” and he said, “Because we own guns”.

We’d come 27 miles north from Logan, Utah, to lunch on fried shrimp, twice-baked potatoes and honey-buttered scones at the Deer Cliff Inn, which sits by the Cub River canyon. Opposite is a cliff with an 80deg slope. The Shoshone, until virtually wiped out in the Bear River Massacre nearby (1863), used to stampede deer herds over the cliff, heedless of environmental impacts.

Last week my host, a Perth classmate who went native in Utah, emailed me and mentioned that he’d not given me a “Napoleon Dynamite” tour of landmarks in Preston, the setting for the film of 2004. I hadn’t seen the flick but the very next day I was in an op shop to buy toys, and there on an otherwise empty shelf was the DVD, price $2. It could not have been coincidence.

I have since watched it three times and according to my spouse, have developed an unhealthy obsession with mega-awkward teen Napoleon, his weedy brother, Kip (32), Kip’s unlikely black lover LaFawnduh and Tina the family’s llama.

The houses, farms and especially Preston High School are now sacred sites for Napoleon Dynamite tragics, attracting pilgrims from as far afield as Korea and New Zealand. Even Tina has her cult, though cynics claim the original llama has passed and visitors are patting a look-alike.

The cult film cost a paltry $US400,000 to make during 23 days shooting. That included a $US1000 salary for the star, Jon Heder. It made $US 40million at the box-office, although it’s so off-beat that none of Hollywood marketers’ algorithms could cope with it. Writer-director Jared Hess himself went to Preston High. He parceled all the weirdness of his adolescent world into the film. The plot is typical revenge-of-the-nerds, but the underwhelming characters are quirky bordering on surreal. There is no profanity, no sex, and no grossness. The Mormon ambience is obvious only to initiates. Preston also happens to be the second-most Republican-voting town (93%) in the US.

Much of the sly comedy can slip by un-noticed. You will also learn new meanings of boondoggle (in Idaho, plaited nylon keyring add-ons) and Tater-Tots (dice-sized cubes of potato, hash-brown style). The politically-correct class claim the film mocks the disabled and Mexicans. Napoleon Dynamite, as his name doesn’t suggest, is a 16-year-old carrot-topped misfit. His jaw sags, his eyes stay half-shut and he can barely manage a sentence. He pals up with a sluggish exchange student, Pedro from Juarez, with even less vocabulary and animation. One exchange goes:

Napoleon: How long did you take to grow that moustache?
Pedro: A couple of days.

The film is set in 2004 but abounds in 1980s anachronisms such as VCR players. For some reason Napoleon has no parents but is looked after by his grannie, Carlinda, who has trysts with boyfriends on quad-bike outings. Napoleon’s brother, Kip, is a 5ft, live-at-home weakling who is still getting his teeth straightened. Kip says, “Napoleon, don’t be jealous ’cause I’ve been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know that I’m training to become a cage fighter.”

Help, I’m a Prisoner in a Brain Lab

Alan Mittleman’s new study of Jewish philosophy ‘boils Bible stories and brain science into the message that there’s something holy in everything and everyone’—but can reason and faith coexist?

Most educated people hold radically incompatible views about humankind and nature. They believe that the brain is a mechanism governed by the laws of physics, and that not long from now brain scientists will give a complete account of human consciousness. They also believe that machines will be able to think and that everyone will have meaningful conversations with robots, not just the nerds who ask rude questions of Siri. They believe, in short, that we are the objects of deterministic physical systems akin to machines themselves, but that we can design our identities to suit our whim, down to and including our gender.

The majority of educated people embrace mutually exclusive schools of thought: a vulgar sort of 19th-century determinism on one hand, and the existentialism of Camus and Sartre on the other. It does not occur to them that their views about the mind and the human person are illogical because they do not care about logical consistency, either. Not only do they believe that everyone has their own truth, they believe everyone has a collection of different truths to be applied when convenient.

This state of affairs poses a special sort of problem for the philosopher who wants to present Jewish concepts to a broad audience—which is to say, a mainly secular one. One cannot argue from authority, for the secular audience admits of none, and one cannot argue for logical consistency, because most people do not know what it is, and would abhor it if they did.

Nonetheless, almost everyone has some kind feeling for the sacred, although few associate this feeling to a personal God. That is the soft target at which Alan Mittleman aims in his book Human Nature & Jewish Thought: Judaism’s Case for Why Persons Matter. Mittleman, a professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, boils Bible stories and brain science into the message that there’s something holy in everything and everyone. He writes: “The sacred is not an ontological add-on to the natural world. It is the capacity of that world, as it has emerged in human beings, to turn toward, to attend to, what is highest,” whatever or whomever that might be.

***

The notion that the sacred is immanent is a popular view nowadays, but it is not a particularly Jewish one. To be sure, it was put forward by the 17th-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza, who pops up frequently in Mittleman’s account. Spinoza was expelled by his congregation and severed his ties to the Jewish world; the question of whether he should be regarded as Jewish is poignant and difficult. Mittleman avoids the difficulty altogether. Here and at other key points in his argument Mittleman seems averse to conflict. He presents controversial assertions in sharp conflict with traditional Jewish thinking as if they were self-evident and then changes the subject without bothering to defend it.

Wake Up America should be the rallying cry for everyone who wants the United States to be great again, considering it has gone adrift over the last seven years from what the Founding Fathers intended. It is also the name of “The Five” co-host Eric Bolling’s book. After interviewing him American Thinker decided to take points he made and compare it to world events.

The qualities Bolling writes about are grit, manliness, individualism, merit, profit and providence, dominion over our environment, thrift, and above all pride in our country. Bolling speaks of his background, raised in a struggling blue-collar family in Chicago, where he learned from his parents that hard work and firm values will enable someone to get ahead in life. Those values drove him as a young baseball player to being drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, then success as a New York Mercantile Exchange trader, and now his daily role on Fox News Channel.

The book begins with a dedication to President Obama, “If it weren’t for your announced goal of ‘fundamentally transforming the United States of America,’ I wouldn’t have been to exceedingly motivated to write this book to stop you and your liberal pals from achieving that goal. America will survive your agenda.”

He explained, “I did the dedication because this upcoming election is extremely important. It is the last shot we have for at least eight years, maybe longer. We need to push back against President Obama’s stated goal of not making America exceptional on the world stage. The President has done everything in his power to achieve the goal of undermining American exceptionalism.”

An example is President Obama’s executive order that makes the central point of U.S. policy the limiting of civilian casualties in war zones. He spoke of having between 64 and 116 civilian casualties occurring in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. No one wants any civilians to be hurt or killed, but this president appears to put those in war zones ahead of other civilians. Just look at the numbers of innocents killed outise of any “war zone”: 129 in Paris, 32 in Brussels, 14 in San Bernardino, 49 in Orlando, 41 in Istanbul, and 20 in Bangladesh. Bolling is correct that Americans need to wake up and elect a president who is willing to destroy the terrorist threat, no matter the consequences, because in the end more of those in war zones will also be saved. In its own military campaigns, America often saves the few only to watch the many die horrific deaths at the hands of the Jihadists.

How many people have been frustrated with political correctness? Bolling shows his exasperation calling it “defeatist crap… a huge number of Americans think trying to make everyone equal is the right thing to do. For example, a school board’s decision in North Carolina to stop naming valedictorians over the ‘unhealthy competition’ is an example of liberalism run amok. What they are saying, ‘it is not ok to work hard and succeed.’ It is a ‘everyone gets a trophy culture.’ We need to emphasize winning, being in first place or the Asian countries like China will eat us for lunch. The top ten countries in math, science, and reading are the Asian countries. We’re becoming a nation of wussies. Let’s stop America’s slide into the liberal abyss. People are fed up with political correctness and are tired of being told what to say, how to say it, and who to say it to.”

At a conference in New York last year, the historian Jonathan Sarna spoke on the subject of his book Lincoln and the Jews. The full interview, conducted by Meir Soloveichik, is included in the just-released volume, What America Owes the Jews, What Jews Owe America. We present an excerpt of their conversation here:http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/07/we-have-not-yet-appointed-a-hebrew/

Meir Soloveichik: Let me start with the obvious question. More books are written every year on Abraham Lincoln than on almost any other figure in history. But is it so clear that Lincoln was the most important person in American history—more important than say, George Washington? Widening the lens, was he more important for the course of world history than such figures as Napoleon, or Alexander the Great, or Winston Churchill? Why the almost unique fascination with Lincoln in general, and why from a Jewish perspective in particular?

Jonathan Sarna: It’s a fine question. Take the case of Washington and Napoleon. We’re familiar with this story: the story of the great general who becomes a great political leader. It goes back to Joshua. But Lincoln’s story is different: he’s a figure who came out of nowhere, who was probably illiterate in his young life, who later went on to lose several elections—and who only then became what he became. That story is deeply inspiring—in a wholly different way.

But as for who most changed the world, one would be hard-pressed to name anyone who changed the American world, and not just the American world, more than did Lincoln. And here I can cite the testimony of a European Jew. In an essay reflecting on his own childhood, the great scholar Solomon Schechter recalls hearing about Lincoln in Romania as a child—and what a wondrous thing it was to him that a person who came from nothing and nowhere could climb so high and achieve so much.

Nor, for Schechter, did all this have anything to do with the Jews or with the story of Lincoln and the Jews. His essay shows no knowledge of that side of things. But it does touchingly bear on why people all over the world were and remain so impressed with Lincoln, the simple person from a simple background who emerges as president of his country and radically transforms it for the better.

Meir Soloveichik: I wonder whether there isn’t something Jewish about precisely that point. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points to the story of Moses in the Bible as a kind of literary antitype. Many ancient tales of heroes feature the child of a god or a king who is raised by a peasant and in time discovers his true identity and true destiny. By contrast, Moses is the child of slaves, is raised in the king’s palace, rebels, and becomes a great leader. Could this quality be what attracts Jews in particular to the Lincoln story?

Jonathan Sarna: Yes, in a way. More specifically, I think that many Jews also saw in Lincoln a fellow outsider: one who became, as they aspired to become, a kind of ultimate insider. That, too, is a Jewish story. And Jews saw in Lincoln something else as well: aspects of the archetypal righteous prophet.

Meir Soloveichik: That brings us to the matter of Lincoln’s relations with actual Jews. Born in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln moves to Illinois, works as a lawyer, gets involved in politics—and meets Jews. Eventually, as you say in your book, he will become the first president actually to have Jewish friends.

Thanks to its socialist writers, this one brings to mind the famous quotation: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

Exalted literary icon Mary McCarthy had a years-long feud with literary avatar and non-capitalist Lillian Hellman. Said McCarthy of Hellman’s oeuvre: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

While Captain Fantastic is not wholly meretricious, it is filled with so many pretentious assumptions and memes that McCarthy could have had a field day.

Viggo Mortensen, for instance, usually a sexy, serious portrayer of classic males in some distress, future or past, in one genre or another, plays the strict, affect-deprived father of six lively children. Early in the film, their mother, stricken with bipolar or some other mental disorder, dies, a suicide.

The father is living the Walden Pond life, homeschooling his active troupe of kids in the woods, raising them with what used to be a classical education in science, philosophy, medicine (sort of), literature, and languages. Esperanto is apparently one of the latter, a tongue for some reason taboo on one of the family’s rides on the rickety converted school bus they ride when they need groceries or city contact.

But though the sprach is all Trotskist (as opposed to the verboten Trotskyite) sloganeering, and the father wears a faded T-shirt reading Jesse Jackson 1969 or something, and he is too young to have even worn such a T when Jackson rode the racialist bandwagon, the kids do not – contrary to what they sprout and the father hectors anyone who asks – wear homespun, but store bought’n clothes, trendy if dowdy city folks’ notions of what hicks in the woods might wear. They don’t know what Nikes or Adidas are, but they make stealing food from grocery emporia a fun regular event, after staging faux heart attacks. Though they make a thing of organic food, and Mortensen rejects a greasy spoon diner because “they don’t serve any real food here, kids, so let’s go,” the truth is, minutes later, he’s celebrating the odious Noam Chomsky’s birthday (instead of Christmas) with a sprinkle-covered store-made cake and – here’s the thing – Redi-Whip, which is completely artificial and damaging, one figures, to the chromosomes of all concerned. He spritzes it joyously into his mouth, as if it were nectar of the gods. Fake, fake, fake.

Ever the prisoner of PC rectitude, President Obama wrongly fears that opposing — or evening naming — global jihadism as the enemy of civilisation is a declaration of war against Islam. By this reticence he has flung petrol on the Islamist fires.

Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War
by Sebastian Gorka
Regnery, 2016, 256 pages, US$27.99
_______________________________

President Obama almost always deports himself in public with poise and dignity. His “New Beginning” speech, delivered at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, was no exception. The address was full of generous sentiment and seeming humility. At one point a member of the audience cried out: “Barack Obama, we love you!” A round of applause greeted the US president’s gracious “Thank you.” President Obama’s 2009 charm offensive throughout the Middle East promised to undo the mistakes of President George W. Bush, and yet his tenure in office has only exacerbated matters. Sebastian Gorka’s Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War goes some of the way to explaining Barack Obama’s failure and a potential way forward for his successor.

At the very heart of President Obama’s misapprehension has been his hubris, the Cairo venture being a case in point. Though Obama acknowledged scientific and other contributions of the Islamic world to the dawn of Europe’s Renaissance, he appeared incapable of comprehending that for many in his audience that day, including high-level members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (which has since been outlawed), the Renaissance and all that subsequently ensued—we might call it secular-powered modernity or individual self-determination—are deeply problematic. Nevertheless, Barack Obama blithely based his foretelling of a united world on the principles of European-style humanism and the particular experience of the United States: E pluribus unum or Out of many, one.

Islamic revivalists, as Sebastian Gorka argues, have a very different interpretation of E pluribus unum. To decode the spirit and ambition of the global jihadist movement, insists Gorka, whose father was a political prisoner in the Hungarian People’s Republic, we should not only employ the term “totalitarian” to delineate our Westophobic enemy but also revisit the origins of the Cold War and the writings of George Kennan and Paul Nitze. We must begin, as Paul Nitze did, with Sun Tsu’s cardinal rule of war—Know both yourself and the enemy if you want to win.

Gorka quotes a key early passage from Nitze’s NSC-68 to define a liberal democracy: “In essence, the fundamental purpose is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” The global jihadist movement, in contradistinction, abhors the idea of individual freedom; to the extent an apologist speaks of choice they invariably mean the “freedom” to submit to religious authority and the “freedom” that results from submission. It is totally at odds with liberty.

The Obama administration contends that Islamic terrorism—or should we say extremist violence—is “the result of poverty, unemployment and lack of political enfranchisement”. Religion, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of Islam, does not contribute to terrorism but is a safeguard against it, or so the PC narrative goes. Here we have an explanation for Barack Obama’s forbearing relationship with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, naivety about the Arab Spring, support for Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, intervention in Libya and Yemen, appeasement with Tehran, denial about the motives of domestic terrorists and, of course, why Team Obama insisted on front row seats for the Muslim Brotherhood dignitaries attending the 2009 Cairo University address.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, said that U.S. sanctions would have no impact on the organization, as it already obtains complete financial and weaponry assistance from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

After the flimsy and uncompleted nuclear agreement, the Obama Administration immediately began transferring billions of dollars to Iran’s Central Bank. One of the payments included $1.7 billion transferred in January 2016. $1.4 billion of this sum came from American taxpayers.

Thanks to President Obama and the continuing lifting of sanctions, the money that Iran is receiving from the U.S., from international trade, and from increased oil sales is most likely being directed toward Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s major beneficiaries, which keep attempting to scuttle U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region.

Nearly 34 years after its inception, Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite militant group, has publicly admitted that it is fully receiving its money and arms from the Iranian government.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, ridiculed the recent U.S. sanctions targeting Hezbollah. His speech was broadcast by the Al-Manar, the Shiite party’s TV station, which isfunded by the Iranian government. Nasrallah said that the U.S. sanctions would have no impact on the organization, as his group already obtains complete financial and weaponry assistance from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Shiite leader pointed out that “We do not have any business projects or investments via banks…” He added that Hezbollah’s survival depends on Iran: “We are open about the fact that Hezbollah’s budget, its income, its expenses, everything it eats and drinks, its weapons and rockets, come from the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said, and pressed the notion that his group “will not be affected” by any type of sanctions.

Nasrallah’s recent speech was also part of a ceremony that marked 40 days after the death of a high level Hezbollah commander, Mustafah Bedreddine, in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Nasrallah has recently vowed to increase Hezbollah’s military presence in Syria, and assist Bashar Al Assad’s forces, although Hezbollah has suffered significant losses in the latest fighting in Aleppo, Syria.

Men need to “be better.”

—Michelle Obama in conversation with Oprah.

Western civilization is clearly coming part at the seams. There are so many destructive elements at work, they are almost impossible to list. But one of the most destructive of these elements, incited by a punitive feminist ideology, is the relentless campaign to delegitimize the very idea of manhood. And the most effective way to do that is to impugn male sexuality.

We are told constantly that we live in a virtual rape culture, a culture in which rape is widespread and condoned, victims are blamed, and rapists receive little or no punishment. There are rape cultures in the world. If one wants to see one in action, all one need do is look at the Muslim world or at Muslim enclaves and populations that have burrowed into Western nations, where atrocities and scandals continue to multiply. In the Western world, by contrast, rape and other forms of sexual misconduct—even mere allegations of sexual misconduct—are universally condemned and harshly punished.

No matter. Islamic culture gets a free pass while Western culture is said to be ravaged by gynophobia under the reign of male supremacism. In the new sexual paradigm that has clamped succubus-like upon the culture, the heterosexual male mainstream is under attack for the crime of harboring a normal sexual drive, which must be ruthlessly expunged in an offensive characterized by media propaganda, legislative bias and institutional practices. Respectable-seeming websites promote the total reform of masculinity using terms such as “mascupathy” to define masculine traits such as aggression and competitiveness as forms of disease needing to be cured. Western men are being progressively demasculanized, a deficiency which results, as Andrew Klavan argues, in “tremulous feminists who hysterically fear rape culture on college campuses where it is not, and Western leaders who don’t dare to see the rape culture inherent in invading Islam, where it is.”

What the Feminization of the West Has Wrought

The signs of anti-male bias are everywhere we look. The university, for example, has become a veritable minefield for male students, who may at any time be hauled before an administrative tribunal and their careers put in jeopardy for sexual misconduct, however trivial or ambiguous. A recent memo from my wife’s university mandates a statement against “sexual violence” in all course syllabi—mind you, nothing against harassing and lying about one’s professor for a better grade, shutting down conservative, Zionist, pro-Life or anti-feminist speakers, perpetrating racist hoaxes, denouncing the teaching of good English and male authors as forms of “microagression,” or any of the other violations of civil conduct that we have witnessed on university campuses recently. The only sexist harassment that takes place regularly in academia is feminist harassment of male students and staff—but that is considered not intimidation but enlightened practice.

A portrait of an iconic movie director and the recovery of an autistic child provide the subject matter for two excellent documentary films just released.

De Palma Directors: Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow

Life, AnimatedDirector: Roger Ross Williams

A fascinating and by no means entirely hagiographic week of recording the master filmmaker — he wore the same shirt throughout shooting, for continuity’s sake — of the some-say misogynistic but suspense-drenched filmmaker.

Speaking directly to the camera, the genial, occasionally self-mocking De Palma discusses his methodology, why he chooses certain tracking angles, why specific actors are caught from various heights and distances, and in general gives a chewy, nutritious take on his trademark process, a privileged behind-the-scenes look at an avatar of a certain generation of great lensers, up there with Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg ,and our other faves.

De P delights in talking about the young De Niro and Pacino, whom he discovered in his own early filmmaking and school. De Palma unabashedly honors Hitchcock in camera setups, plotting, framing, suspense sequences and so forth. Provocative, tantalizing excerpts of his many iconic and still virulent films include Sisters, Obsession, loosely inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Dressed to Kill, and the taut G-man drama, Untouchables, high-school nightmare Carrie, nose-candy Scarface, and illegal eagle skeeves, Carlito’s Way.

There is much adult content, violence and sudden gore, which cut into the overall enjoyment, as did scenes involving women not being treated all that chivalrously. De Palma’s recollections and powerful opinions about his film, and others’ filmmaking, are worth the discomfort. No one is forcing anyone to see those films that handle women as props for bloodletting and screams.

As a doc, it ranks up there with the recent “Brando on Brando” — almost must-viewing for aficionados of the genre.