RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United States expelled two Russian officials on June 17 in response to an attack by a Russian policeman on an American diplomat earlier in the month, the State Department said Friday.

“On June 17, we expelled two Russian officials from the United States in response to this attack,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. He would not provide any further detail.

Kirby said a Russian guard attacked an American diplomat outside of the U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow on June 6. He described the attack as “unprovoked and it endangered the safety of our employee.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry said the diplomat was a CIA agent who hit the guard in the face.

“Instead of the CIA employee, who was in disguise, as we understand, it could have been anyone –a terrorist, an extremist, a suicide bomber,” said Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.

Kirby responded to Moscow’s accusation by telling reporters, “The Russian claim that the policeman was protecting the embassy from an unidentified individual is simply untrue.”

The State Department has said that Russia has harassed U.S. diplomats in the past, a claim the Kremlin denies.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have been especially strained since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

Anyone who has experienced what America’s ghettos are actually like will know that popular depictions of cops as racist oppressors are distortions and caricatures. These myths and the statistics that belie them are worth exploring in some detail.
Are black people in the United States disproportionately subject to excessive force, including killings, by the police? American liberals certainly think so, and have repeatedly used the slogan, “Black lives matter.” On October 22 last year President Barack Obama said:

I think the reason the organisers use the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not because they are suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting is that there is a specific problem that is happening in the African American community that is not happening in other communities … The African American community is not just making this up.

But he also added, with greater wisdom, that those who make this claim should “back it up with data, not anecdote”.

Support for this contention has been fanned by two recent incidents in the United States in which unarmed black men were allegedly killed at the hands of the local police. Both incidents led to demonstrations and violence throughout America and to enormous media publicity around the world. The first occurred in Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St Louis), on August 9, 2014, when eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. The second took place on April 12, 2015, in west Baltimore, Maryland, where a twenty-five-year-old black man, Freddy Gray, was arrested for possessing an illegal switchblade; while being transported to the local police station, he fell into a coma in the back of a police van and died. Both incidents and their consequences were widely reported in the Australian media, generally as open-and-shut examples of police brutality and racism, with little or nothing in the way of balance or nuance.

Anyone who has studied these events, or who has real experience of what the black slum areas of America’s cities are actually like, will know that the popular depictions of these events are distortions and caricatures. They are worth exploring in some detail, as are the realities of race and crime in the United States which lie behind them.

Ferguson, Missouri, a largely depressed suburb of St Louis, has a population of 21,000. In 1970 it was 99 per cent white; today it is 67 per cent black. In 1900 St Louis was the fourth-largest city in America, but its population has declined from 857,000 in 1950 to only 317,000 today, and it is now fifty-eighth.

Shortly before he was shot dead, and accompanied by a friend, Michael Brown robbed a local convenience store, grabbing and repeatedly threatening the store clerk. He then stole several packages of cigarillos (often used to wrap marijuana). Officer Darren Wilson had received word of the robbery and attempted to arrest the two men. Brown was six feet four inches (1.93 metres) tall and weighed 210 pounds (95 kilos). He was indeed unarmed, but was actively engaged in rectifying this deficiency, attempting to grab Wilson’s gun through the window of his police car (his DNA was found on the gun and inside the police car). The two robbers fled, with Wilson in pursuit. Brown stopped, turned towards Wilson and moved towards him. Wilson then shot him twelve times, the last shot being fatal.

A Grand Jury, appointed in the wake of the killing and subsequent rioting, deliberated for twenty-five days and completely exonerated Wilson. Many eyewitnesses, most of them local blacks, fully backed up Wilson’s account of the shooting. Nevertheless, almost immediately after the killing, hundreds of protesters gathered to throw bottles at the police, followed by the widespread looting of local shops and violent clashes with the police. These attracted worldwide publicity. Amnesty International sent a thirteen-strong contingent of human rights activists to monitor the local scene. (Amnesty is the body which has issued more reports critical of human rights violations in South Korea than in North Korea.) At the behest of the Obama administration, forty FBI agents were sent to interview potential witnesses; in addition, Obama’s Attorney-General sent his own set of lawyers to investigate further. Again, these investigations completely exonerated Wilson.

“Riefenstahl is now grotesquely overrated — despite or perhaps because of her notoriety. The influence of her personality, art and ideas is ubiquitous, from directors such as Herzog to photographers such as Mapplethorpe. When Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s most revered film critic, pronounced Olympia and Triumph of the Will “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman”, criticism of Riefenstahl became uncritical. And when John Galliano declared his love for Hitler, aesthetics trumped politics. Among fascists and fashionistas alike, Leni Riefenstahl remains the high priestess of Nazi chic.”

Leni Riefenstahl, revered by critics as the greatest of all female film directors, made her name by celebrating the triumph of the willy. No male film director has championed masculinity in such a crude, even obscene form. For the 12 years that it actually lasted, Hitler’s thousand-year Reich was a thoroughly masculine, if sadomasochistic, sexual fantasy. In Triumph of the Will, Olympia and other propaganda films, Riefenstahl depicted it as such, while enriching herself as its obedient servant, enjoying lavish budgets that her Anglo-American counterparts such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles could only envy.

That is why the new Hollywood biopic Race — about Jesse Owens, the African American star of the 1936 Olympic Games — gets Riefenstahl so very wrong. She is played by Carice van Houten as a pragmatic, highly professional filmmaker trying to do a good job for the athletes, including black ones such as Owens, in the teeth of violent opposition from the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. It is true that Goebbels made one disparaging diary reference to Riefenstahl during the Olympics as “a hysterical woman”. But if the filmmakers had bothered to study the Goebbels Diaries in greater depth, they would know that such squabbles paled into insignificance compared to Riefenstahl’s heroic mythologising of Hitler on film — the Führer’s favourite art form. “She is the only one of the stars who really understands us,” Goebbels wrote.

Riefenstahl’s Nazi eroticism was mordantly evoked 40 years ago by the late Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism”, one of her best essays: “Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the feminised masses, as rape. The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy. The leader makes the crowd come.” What Riefenstahl depicted was politics as pornography. Sontag glimpsed something which today we recognise from the Islamist propaganda of Isis: “Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorises death.”

Sontag was right: Riefenstahl exemplified everything that was wrong with the aestheticising of politics in the 20th century — a century that coincided almost exactly with her lifespan. But when this ferociously self-mythologising and litigious centenarian made her final exit in 2003, the gushing tributes seemingly vindicated her decision to live in denial. For 12 years she was Hitler’s propagandist; for the next 60 she was her own. More than 50 successful lawsuits testify to her determination to suppress any suggestion that she knew exactly what and whom she was justifying. Since her death, a growing army of apologists have defended her as a genius of cinematography.

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.