Belliveau Blog

Author Jeannette Belliveau:

Belliveau Blog Presentations Contact
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Her books:

An Amateur's Guide to the Planet

Romance on the Road
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Belliveau's discount travel links
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Now reading:
Ace of Spades
by David Matthews
Harrowing but compelling look at growing up mixed race in Baltimore.
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Now watching:
The Office - Season Three
Subtle brilliance from the leads and the minor characters -- Angela, Phyllis, Kevin, Oscar, Toby and Ryan -- only increase the hilarity exponentially. .........................
Now listening to:
Complete Studio Recordings
Led Zeppelin
Incredibly, Zep now have an entire station to themselves (Channel 59) at XM Radio.

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November 3, 2010

Excellent look at how to create strong passwords

If you want a good look at how to create stronger passwords, take a look here, at How to Come Up with a Super Strong Password. It talks about how to create a password you can remember but no person or machine can easily crack. This has become more important as email accounts get hacked by password-guessing bots.

• posted by jbelliveau at 8:30 AM in Culture
• permanent link

July 30, 2009

Top 10 favorite moments in the JK wedding entrance dance

Yes I am compulsively watching and rewatching the pure boogie-ing joy of Jill and Kevin's wedding dance on YouTube. (And I am not alone, my sister confesses to having downloaded it to her iPod for happiness interlude purposes.)

Here are my Top 10 favorite moments:

10. "Kevin's Mock Escape"
He appears to pretend to be trying to running  from the altar but the bridal party is marching very determiningly, blocking the aisle.
















9. "Cool Guy Does Royal Wave"

If you can't dance, do the Queen of England's little wave. You're still supporting the concept.
















8. "The Underrated Dancer"

This guy is visually blocked much of the time by the chubby bald-headed guy who kind of does the Funky Chicken, but he acquits himself well when not blocked in the frame.
















7. "Handstand Guy"

One of three or four moments where the crowd ROARS its approval!
















6. "Twirl of Support"

When the party reaches the altar, they slowly mime nearly falling as the lyrics chant "I won't you fall, let you fall, let you fall," and the final three bridesmaids in the frame (are they professional dancers) twirl beautifully. Here we see the barely scripted genius of this entire dance, the song and the moment, as somehow an apparently amateur videographer catches so many lovely ephemera. And as with "Kevin's Mock Escape," the friends are supporting the couple and suggesting that a marriage is sanctioned and held up by the larger community.
 















5a. "Chubby Red-Tie Guy"

He'll never be a professional dancer but he moves with assurance and aplomb and even a certain style behind the lead dancer ("Pogo Guy" ... see Fave Moment No. 2) with the wildly swinging knees and jumps and you gotta love him anyway as a supportive friend. (Looks like I've actually got 11 favorite moments so there will be two No. 5s).
















5. "Somersault and Necktie Straightening"

Kevin does a surprise somersault (whoo!) and then STRAIGHTENS HIS NECKTIE! We are in the presence of greatness ... the whole group is having too much fun to be nervous and inspiration certainly graced the groom for this little gesture.
















4. "Girls Vogue"

How fabulous is this!! Are these professional dancers? The most happening part of the video for me and the crowd knows they are in for a difference. Every woman who loves to dance would love to have this moment in the limelight. I can totally see my high school buds Deborah and Patti in this role.
















3. "Couple Strolls Together to Altar"































2. "Initial Moment of Shock"

The first notes of Chris Brown's "Forever" squeak out, no one is sure what is going down, and then Pogo Guy stars boogieing ... What ?!































1. "The Bride's Appearance"

You can see why Kevin is marrying Jill in these expressions!  Boogie on forever.

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:32 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
• permanent link

December 8, 2007

Stephen Hunter captures Baltimore ... and sex tourism, and more

OK!  Here is an older post -- and much revised and I hope improved post -- from just before my blog got broken back around July 25, when my Web host moved from California to Ohio and my shopping cart also got wrecked in the process. I've finally got the wonderful Richard Kersey at SlickRicky.com to get me up and running again, with this entry lost however. Now I will figure out this newfangled Movable Type 4.0. To resume ...

I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop.

"Troy" ...

(Director Wolfgang) Petersen is an old pro. His is a narrative sensibility, and he's capable of keeping the story moving and subplots straight. He's got an eye for beauty too, though mainly of the male kind. He so loves the image of the helmeted, husky warrior boys, bulgy of bicep, lean of loin, aglow of sweat, eyes feral and fierce in the slits of their art-deco steel pots, that he hits it over and over and over. Many a gay man will consider this the ultimate date movie.

"Apocalypto" ...

One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative.
The results are not pretty.

You see it all over the Third World, anywhere poverty and beauty converge under balmy skies, and the liquor is sweet and hits hard. A Westerner, north of 45, with fallen arches, hair, belly and spirit, clearly no longer sexually competitive in the meat markets of the big city, shows up, hunting an arrangement.

The arrangement will be with a younger, suppler body, owned by a younger, duller, more beautiful person. The two will share not an hour of anonymous sex, a la the streetwalker and her beau, but something tangentially more dignified: a kind of ersatz relationship, with life narratives exchanged, laughs and drinks sampled to lubricate the awkwardness, day trips to the mountains or the monuments to eat up the afternoon hours, and then discreet nights of sweat and bliss. Finally, certain monies will be quietly exchanged, "gifts," not payments, addresses passed between the two for the letters that will never get written, the photos that will never be sent, and ... that's it.

Hello, Monday morning, back in the office. Hmm, you look so refreshed. Have a good time down south? That glow in your face? You must have gotten good weather. Meanwhile, you are thinking, Good Lord, I didn't even notice the weather.

Weyman Swagger: He's actually a photo editor on my old paper, The Sun, and a grizzled old truck-driver looking man, without college education and a little rough and hilly in his ways. He's also a brilliant natural editor, who has helped me immeasureably; he knows things the pros in NY don't and my books are much the better for his ideas. I don't always use them but they are usually so provocative that they jigger me into something that works. He's also a very smart perceptive line reader, who's got a sense of voice and timing and colloquialism bar none. It's a privilege to have him help me.  

• posted by jbelliveau at 6:09 PM in Culture
• permanent link

December 11, 2006

Ordering pizza with a biometric card

Hat tip to my brother, Jim, for this incredible link on what it will be like to order pizza in 2010 if we all have biometric ID cards.

• posted by jbelliveau at 6:33 PM in Culture
• permanent link

May 11, 2006

Gay marriage vs. religious liberty

What an eye-opening column by marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher -- Banned in Boston: The coming conflict between same-sex marriage and religious liberty.

In a nutshell, Catholic Charities of Boston placed children for adoption. A small number of these children were placed with gay couples.

The Catholic Church told Catholic Charities such placements were against church policy. When Catholic Charities complied, refusing to place any more children with gay couples, the state of Massachusetts blocked it from engaging in adoptions at all.

What has happened is that gay activitists have persuaded the courts (and to some extent public opinion) that their cause is a civil rights issue (an equivalence that maddens a significant number of African Americans who flatly reject this comparison), for which no religious or conscience exemptions could be made. From the article:

From there, it was only a short step to the headline "State Putting Church Out of Adoption Business," which ran over an opinion piece in the Boston Globe by John Garvey, dean of Boston College Law School. It's worth underscoring that Catholic Charities' problem with the state didn't hinge on its receipt of public money. Ron Madnick, president of the Massachusetts chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, agreed with Garvey's assessment: "Even if Catholic Charities ceased receiving tax support and gave up its role as a state contractor, it still could not refuse to place children with same-sex couples."

This March, then, unexpectedly, a mere two years after the introduction of gay marriage in America, a number of latent concerns about the impact of this innovation on religious freedom ceased to be theoretical. How could Adam and Steve's marriage possibly hurt anyone else? When religious-right leaders prophesy negative consequences from gay marriage, they are often seen as overwrought. The First Amendment, we are told, will protect religious groups from persecution for their views about marriage.

Gallagher asked numerous legal scholars, including Anthony Picarello, president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, what this all means. How serious are the coming conflicts over religious liberty stemming from gay marriage? "The impact will be severe and pervasive," Picarello says flatly.

These experts' comments make clear that it is not only gay marriage, but also the set of ideas that leads to gay marriage--the insistence on one specific vision of gay rights--that has placed church and state on a collision course. Once sexual orientation is conceptualized as a protected status on a par with race, traditional religions that condemn homosexual conduct will face increasing legal pressures regardless of what courts and Congress do about marriage itself.

Nevertheless, marriage is a particularly potent legal "bright line." Support for marriage is firmly established in our legal tradition and in our public policy. After it became apparent that no religious exemption would be available for Catholic Charities in Massachusetts, the church looked hard for legal avenues to continue helping kids without violating Catholic principles. If the stumbling block had been Catholic Charities' unwillingness to place children with single people--or with gay singles--marriage might have provided a legal "safe harbor": Catholic Charities might have been able to specialize in placing children with married couples and thus avoid collision with state laws banning orientation discrimination. After Goodridge, however, "marriage" includes gay marriage, so no such haven would have been available in Massachusetts.

Precisely because support for marriage is public policy, once marriage includes gay couples, groups who oppose gay marriage are likely to be judged in violation of public policy, triggering a host of negative consequences, including the loss of tax-exempt status. Because marriage is not a private act, but a protected public status, the legalization of gay marriage sends a strong signal that orientation is now on a par with race in the nondiscrimination game. And when we get gay marriage because courts have declared it a constitutional right, the signal is stronger still.

The method and the mechanism for achieving protected status may be different for orientation and for race. Even the Massachusetts supreme court, for example, declined to rule explicitly that orientation is a protected class, subject to strict scrutiny. But in Massachusetts, the end result may be similar. If state courts declare gay marriage a constitutional right, they are likely to see support for gay marriage as state public policy.

The article quotes some leading legal minds on the extent to which placing gays on the same level as minorities will impact activities sponsored by religious groups, from adoptions to schools (can they expel lesbian students?), homeless shelters, marriage counseling and retreats.

It even remains cloudy whether free speech -- the freedom to argue against gay marriage -- would be freely permitted.

Even a lesbian legal scholar at Georgetown University has some pause about where we are heading. Chai Feldblum, raised an Orthodox Jew, notes:

She pauses over cases like the one at Tufts University, one of many current legal battles in which a Christian group is fighting for the right to limit its leaders to people who subscribe to its particular vision of Christianity.

She's uncertain about Catholic Charities of Boston, too: "I do not know the details of that case," she told me. "I do believe a state should be permitted to withhold tax exempt status, as in the Bob Jones case, from a group that is clearly contrary to the state's policy. But to go further and say to a group that it is not permitted to engage in a particular type of work, such as adoptions, unless it also does adoptions for gay couples, that's a heavier hand from the state."

Indeed. Do read Gallagher's full article to see an amazingly wide range of legal views on the implications of gay marriage as a civil rights issue.

I'll also highly recommend reading Gallagher's excellent book The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially which takes on feminist notions that marriage is only good for men.

Other blogs commenting on "Banned in Boston:"

• Bettnet.com (note a lively set of comments after the blog entry).
• Rod Dreher: Why I Can't Help Voting GOP.
• And National Review's the Corner, where Stanley Kurtz foresees that "same-sex marriage will be used as a tool, not only to silence opposition, but to unstring religion itself as a force in American life." He summarizes:

  Scholars on the left and right agree that the gay marriage movement has raised the specter of a massive and protracted battle over religious liberty. In states that adopt same-sex marriage, religious liberty is clearly going to lose. The source of the problem is the flawed analogy between the battle for same-sex marriage and the sixties movement for civil rights. Gay marriage proponents argue that sexual orientation is like race, and that opponents of same-sex marriage are therefore like bigots who oppose interracial marriage. Once same-sex marriage becomes law, that understanding will be controlling.

Update: A month after I first wrote this, the New York Times examines this issue today, see link here: Will Same-Sex Marriage Collide With Religious Liberty?, by Peter Steinfels (June 10, 2006).

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:51 AM in Culture
• comments (1)
• permanent link

April 24, 2006

My daily diary of hearing F bombs

You never know exactly when it's coming ... only that it is coming.

At some point in every day, you will be subjected to a completely gratuitous dropping of the F bomb.

Or if you live in Baltimore, let's be more accurate: You may be subjected to near-continual dropping of F bombs.

Last night, I walked our older sheltie, Beau, and got ready to bring him up the front steps. I stopped to chat with two of the neighbors. Neighbor 1 told me about his girlfriend, his future job in New York, his own dog, and minor problems with other dogs who are walked off leash. These little stories required at least three glaringly inappropriate uses of "f-ing" as an adjective.

Note to Neighbor 1: I nearly flinched each time you used the word -- it felt like being hit in the ear. My mind struggled to come up with a proper way to make this known. Should I have noted brightly, "F Bomb"? Or ask him, "When did the memo come out saying that word was appropriate around women? I must have missed that."

If there is a such a secret memo, is this more fiery blowback, another unintended consequence, of feminism? Is it the case that now that some women (especially girl gangbangers) think they can swear like sailors, men (especially sons) no longer have a clue about how to behave?

Anyway, when Neighbor 1 said he was moving in four months, I took the easy way out: Wimping out. It won't be a problem for long if he's moving soon and I avoid him in the meantime. Later I learned that Neighbor 2 (male) was equally offended by the language, and similarly reasoned that Neighbor 1 is moving soon.

That just leaves thousands of other Baltimoreans who still sling the word around. Professionals, gangbangers passing by on the street, construction workers, athletes, and many in between. Note to everybody: You're not cool, you're not shocking anyone, you're just tone-deaf and making almost every corner of our city coarse.

Maybe I need to print out the chart above and carry it around Baltimore, the City that F-Carpetbombs Everyone's Ears, to show to people. Guess what -- two-thirds of the public is offended by your language.

Walking around our neighborhood, I often also hear the M-F Superbomb. From a distance, it sounds like, "m'h fhuh, that m'h fhuh m'h fhuh." Muffled but menacing, the individual syllables of the word aren't crystal clear, but the hostility and anger are. It sounds really ugly -- maybe the ugliest sound humans can make.

The graphic above was published with an article entited, Poll: Americans See, Hear More Profanity. When I read the article, it reminded me that I have thought about keeping a diary of the appalling language that I hear everyday. If compressed, it would read something like this. All examples are real:

• 8 a.m. Walk dogs. Overhear, "m'h FH, that m'h FH m'h FR," from pair of gangstas. Cross the light at Ann and Lombard and hear F bombs in stereo! One from two guys on scaffolding doing their work, the other from three men strolling by, one saying, "I'm not going down f-ing Broadway."
• 9 a.m. Go to Light Street Cycles. Gen-X repair crew pumps out loud rap with high F-bomb quotient. They apparently assume that every single customer wanting to buy or repair a bike or get supplies enjoys smutty language.
• 10 a.m. Guys getting on Light Rail at Camden Yards drop a few F-bombs. "C'mon guys," I implore, shaking my head. They respond, "We're not talking to you." "You're in a public place!" I point out. Their body language -- quieter, calmer, subdued -- acknowledges that on some level, they know they should clean it up.
• Noon. I have a hair appointment at the home of my hairdresser. Her daughter's friend, John, high school age, Fs this and Fs that. John and the daughter leave the kitchen, where my haircut and color are taking place. "What do you think of them?" my hairdresser asks. As she washes my hair in the sink, I reply, "Using the F word is inappropriate around women. It just is. And he won't know that if he's allowed to use bad language in the house." She's quiet, neither agrees or disagrees.
• 3 p.m. Go to Du Burns Arena to watch Lamont's soccer team play. A tall player, mid-20s, in athletic gear, waits in stands for his game to begin. He pulls cell phone out of his gym bag and engages in loud conversation that includes the word M-F. As he passes me to take the steps down to start his game, I quietly say, "Some language." He snaps back immediately an attempt at something clever. The metacommunication, or message behind the message, is, This is a men's space. If you don't like it, you can leave.

  "Guess no one ever told you to watch your language around women," I say evenly.

• 5 p.m. Next, to Tyson's bar in Canton, which sponsors Lamont's team, the Slackers. A guy with a red Abe Lincoln beard F-bombs merrily at the NCAA basketball game on the TV screen. He may be a regular, and I've never been here before. No leverage to get him to watch his mouth around ladies. I shrug this one off. If I had the graphic above, maybe I could hand it to him.

• 7 p.m. Off to catch the latest play at Center Stage, Radio Golf. From the stage, the actors emit F bombs, S words and I believe the M-F word.

  I just don't understand the need for this language anymore. Playwright August Wilson must have thought he was lending street cred to his script. It's nearly 40 years after the Sixties -- I thought we were long past using language for shock value? No one in the audience seems to blink at the words.

Hail to my mom, who just turned 80 with a bangup birthday celebration, for knowing what good behavior -- heck, with knowing what a little class -- consists of, and instilling this knowledge in her children, without concessions to being faux-hip. It really isn't as cool as people think it is to throw around bad language once past the junior-high rebellion stage.

To me, bad language -- especially that of the jock at Du Burns arena -- is (or should be) a rather serious matter against women. Males (but not men, or gentlemen) sometimes use bad language to mark an area as off-limits to women -- as a hostile move.

Maybe what's really going on is that there is no concept anymore of what being a gentleman entails.

I confess my own failings in the matter. I am not perfect in abstaining from the F bomb. It is something that escapes the mouth when, say, a hammer hits my thumb, or I am playing goalie in soccer and a shot goes by, into the net. Even then, I try to keep swearing at a murmur, not for the ears of others.

This quote from the article linked above also sees the F-word as something only for moments of extreme frustration:

And Donnell Neal of Madison Lake, Minn., notes how she'll hear the F-word used as a mere form of emphasis, as in: "That person scared the f--- out of me!" Neal, 26, who works with disabled adults, says she swears only in moments of extreme frustration, "like if someone cuts me off when I'm driving, or if I'm carrying something and someone shuts the door in my face." Even then, she says, she'll likely use "milder cuss words" -- and never at work.

Some young folks have bought into the canard that the F word, and the C word (which I truly detest), is "just a word." At Tyson's bar, Slacker pal George goaded me to say "c" word. "It's just a word," he said, his Gen-X pseudo-reasoning as predictable as the sun coming up in the East.

I thought, "George, I'm not restraining myself because I'm inhibited. I'm restraining myself because it's a matter of having a little class and decorum."

And I'm restraining myself because, as a writer, I know the power of words. Almost no word is "just a word." All have meanings. It's precisely because of their power that they need to be saved for the right times. I'd say vulgarity may be forgivable if you are hitting your thumb with a hammer. If there's no hammer in sight, save it -- I'm tired of the hammering on my ears.

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:25 AM in The Neighborhood
• permanent link

April 18, 2006

My husband the rock star

Anyone look familiar in this picture?

The guy front and center is Lamont Weston Harvey dressed as a rock star. In his words:

Hey, I'm a rock star!

The people from the Live! section were doing a cover shoot on
"cover bands" and they needed an extra body to make a 4-piece band.
I just happened to be wearing a Pantera concert shirt under my
layers.

I initially grabbed the Paul Stanley mask but when the drum sticks
were passed out I saw it as an opportunity to show off my tatoo and
flex a bit.

- - Rock ON! Wes

Hey babe you look like you LOVED helping out on this!

• posted by jbelliveau at 2:19 PM in Culture
• permanent link

April 13, 2006

The heroes of Flight 93

With rapt attention, we watched the Discovery Channel special, "The Flight That Fought Back," last September.

"If you'd be on that plane ...," Lamont said, speculating on my famous temper.

"... it would have crashed in Cleveland," I finished his thought.

After a moment, I continued. "No way I would have waited until Pennsylvania and plotted with others," pantomiming grabbing my ever-present Swiss Army knife (Flight 93, obviously, was pre-airport screening) and bum-rushing the hijackers reflexively, as soon as they made themselves known.

"RAARRRRRRRRRR!" Yes, women, at least some of us, fantasize about being heroes or warriors, giving a battle yell and charging the bullies. If you're going to go down, take your enemies with you, right?

That sentiment still stands. But in reality, the fearful details of the flight, revealed yesterday, would have scared the breath out of me. Thus the courage of the passengers becomes even more apparent.

Most of the details in the A+E re-enactment were born out by the playing of the cockpit tape yesterday at the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui.

What comes from the tapes is a better sense of the heroism of the passengers. Having courage required:

• dealing with the impending doom of an airplane heading for a crash, which must be utter Hell.
• knowing that other human beings (bringing a new wrinkle to cruelty), and not mechanical failure, doomed them.
• and knowing that they had little hope for themselves -- two of their number lay with their throats slit -- but could at best only avoid further deaths on the ground.

How did they act with such surety, in a situation far past that of Hell, subjecting them to some unfathomable level of fear and pure terror?

Somehow the passengers deliberated, got information from friends on the ground watching the World Trade Center burn, planned, made final calls home, acted and succeeded -- as maniacs in the cockpit screamed "Allah is great" nine times and turned the plane upside down.

The thought that any human could imagine that the use of an airplane for homicide honors the greatness of Allah is beyond chilling.

It's interesting to note Moussaoui's nonchalance in these two accounts below. Zacharias, you are moving into John Wayne Gacy territory with your casual attitude toward exterminating others, but maybe that's exactly how you can manage to be so evil.

Striking details from yesterday's court trial in Alexandria, Va. (from the New York Times, Final Struggles on 9/11 Plane Fill Courtroom, by Neil A. Lewis):

• There are also the sounds of what may have been the killing of a flight attendant as the hijackers took control: a woman in the cockpit moaning, "Please, please, don't hurt me." Her voice soon appears again for the last time as she is heard to say, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die" followed by one of the hijackers saying in Arabic: "Everything is fine. I finished."
  
• Mr. Moussaoui has mostly evinced an air of indifference during the trial.
  
• Violence in the cabin had told the passengers that something was different than an ordinary hijacking. In evidence presented Tuesday, jurors heard the phone call of Marion Britton, a passenger, to a friend on the ground. "Don't worry," the friend consoled. "They'll probably take you to another country."

  Ms. Britton replied, "Two passengers have had their throats cut."

From the Washington Post, At Trial, Flight 93 Myth Finally Becomes Reality:

• It began with a muted series of thumps from a sharp knife or maybe clenched fists. The sounds were muffled but unmistakable, one body blow after another, ending with a squishy thud.

  "No, no, no, no, no. No," came the high-pitched voice of a crew member or flight attendant being subdued. " . . . Please, please don't hurt me," the person said later. " . . . I don't want to die."
  

• A foreign-accented voice, increasingly agitated, screamed: "Down. Down. Down!" as the whacking sound continued. Then there was silence. "That's it. Go back," a hijacker said calmly. "Everything is fine. I finished."
  
• "Let's get them!" one passenger yelled as dishes crashed to the floor. "In the cockpit. If we don't we'll die," screamed another amid more thumping and crashing and breaking of glass.
  
• In the end, as the passengers were either in the cockpit or moments from entering it, the hijackers turned the plane upside down -- and crashed it.

  "Allah is the greatest!" one screamed nine times as the plane went down. The recording then went dead. The courtroom was silent.
  

• More than 35 survivors and family members testified in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, including Lorne Lyles, whose wife, CeeCee, was a flight attendant on Flight 93 (see photo of family, right). He brought several jurors to the brink of tears with his testimony yesterday about his wife's two calls from the plane.

  The first time the phone rang, Lyles, a Fort Myers, Fla., police officer who had worked the overnight shift, rolled over and went back to sleep. He did speak to his wife briefly when she called again. But only a week later did he hear the message she had left on his voice mail.

  "Hi, baby," CeeCee Lyles said in the call, a tape of which was played in court yesterday. "Baby, you have to listen to me very carefully. I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. . . . I'm trying to be calm."

  Saying she knew that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, Lyles tried to keep her composure, but her voice broke as she ended the call. "I hope to be able to see your face again, baby," she said. "I love you, baby."

  Lyles said he has been in and out of counseling for the past five years. "I'm just now being able to appreciate a full night's sleep," he testified. "They say closure, but there's never any closure. It takes a piece of you."
  

• Moussaoui looked bored, as he did when the cockpit voice recorder was played. Jurors leaned forward in their seats.
  
• Passengers, who had made cellphone calls and learned of the earlier trade center attack, then rushed the cockpit. "They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside," a hijacker said.

  "Shall we finish it off?" one hijacker asked.

  "No, not yet," responded another. "When they all come, we finish it off."

  Within seconds, there was bedlam -- the sounds of a violent, almost animalistic struggle. People yelled and objects crashed, which Sept. 11 commissioners say was probably the passengers hurling objects at the cockpit door or ramming it with a beverage cart.

  "Down, down. Pull it down, pull it down," a hijacker said just before his colleague praised Allah and crashed the plane.

  In the background, a single voice could be heard screaming "No!"

Zacharias, what goes on in that mind of you and your friends, to do what you did to CeeCee Lyles and 39 others?

• posted by jbelliveau at 1:45 PM in Culture
• permanent link

February 9, 2006

Missionaries, Brazil's tribes and 'cultural contagion'

An article in the Washington Post today, Evangelical Missionaries Move Into Amazon Villages, looks at wrangling between anthropologists, Indian officials and missionaries over who essentially "owns" members of remote Brazilian tribes.

From the article:

But [the missionaries] often lack the permission of Brazil's government, which is now trying to regain control of the activity. Many anthropologists fear the missionaries will harm indigenous people by weakening native culture and religion and by exposing them to new germs and illnesses.

... But critics say a weak Brazilian state has left the 215 known tribes vulnerable to the outreach efforts of evangelicals, however well-intentioned they may be. They fear oral history, origin myths and native religions will be lost.

"The Surui no longer worship shamans because missionaries told them it was bad. That's a terrible, immense cultural loss," said Ivaneide Cardozo, a board member at Kaninde, a nonreligious group in Rondonia state.

Christian groups say the government is acting irresponsibly and that its policies prevent it from intervening even in life-or-death situations involving tribespeople. In an effort to protect indigenous culture, many government officials do not want to introduce outside influences in tribal villages including food and medicine.

"This relativist stance violates the human rights of Indian children all over Brazil," said Braulia Ribeiro, who heads the Brazilian chapter of the international missionary group Youth With A Mission ... .

This is a very complex topic. It's funny to me to see in this article the usual proprietary interest anthropologists take in indigenous peoples -- they often resent both missionaries and backpackers who "invade" their turf, even though the anthropologists themselves also bring change through contact with remote people, no matter how careful they are.

In my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, I looked at missionaries who visited the remote upcountry of Borneo. I'll quote a passage from Chapter 3.

Language, transmitted today by a world pop and computer culture dominated by English, ultimately exerts a much bigger influence than religion on a cultures such as that of [Borneo's] Dayaks.

Lesson : Language may be a more irreversible re-director of thought patterns than the discarding of animism for Christian beliefs.

For example, Afro-Brazilians, despite adopting Portuguese and nominally Catholicism, fused tribal gods to saints to create the religion called candomblé. They use the Yoruba language for ceremonies to the present day, and thus preserve an important aspect of African culture.

Professor Jerome Rousseau of McGill University put it this way in an e-mail to the author:

"The main threat to local cultures, in Borneo as in Canada, France, the United States, or what have you, is probably television. It, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. [And] the the most significant re-director of thought patterns is the socio-economic changes of a society, e.g., moving from subsistence to commodity production, moving from the country to the city and changing educational patterns and media of communication."

Change wrought by missionaries, logging and emigration had already come to the Dayaks. Perhaps it had weakened their art, perhaps it had created a need for kerosene and 90-minute air transport to the coast that people had previously managed to cope without. Possibly this was bad. But as [medical anthropologist Sjaak] van der Geest pointed out, if one accepts change as a normal part of life, “it will be agreed that the prevention of change is indeed ‘change’ in another more complex sense of the term.”

The modern world was bound to reach the remote Apau Kayan, in the same way that Chinese bead traders, Javanese transmigrasi and people who enjoyed Redmond O’Hanlon’s book have also turned up.

Lesson: Explorers, adventurer travelers, anthropologists and missionaries alike bring change no matter how much lip service they pay to cultural preservation.

Van der Geest wrote of anthropologists and missionaries (he could have included travelers as well) that "their mere presence is in itself a formidable factor of change. The culture which missionaries and anthropologists carry with them is 'contagious.' "

Exactly! All contact with the outside world is contagious -- and inevitable. While one understands the beauty and mystery of premodern people and the value of probing their beliefs, it is ultimately patronizing to exclude them from the lives we choose for ourselves, free of superstition and with top-notch nutrition, health care, choices and ultimately ease.

• posted by jbelliveau at 8:52 AM in Culture
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December 1, 2005

Please don't use Evite!

I just received a party invitation from a soccer teammate via eVite. That is the surest way to ruin a friendship!

Evite makes it clear from their Web site that they will harvest the emails of recipients of an Evite for spam purposes, see here:

Evite works with third-party advertising companies, sponsors and other companies with whom we do business ("Business Partners") to place advertising on our site and in email communications sent to our registered users and to recipients of invitations, Reminders, and other communications related to the Evite service. Information about your visit to this site, such as number of times you have viewed an ad, may be used to serve advertising to you on this site.

I had the unhappy task of sending this e-mail to my soccer teammate:

I must ask that you not put my e-mail address on any Web site. THis is my own company's e-mail address and it is costly and dangerous for it to be spammed. I don't have some big IT department to handle this problem.

Basically, everyone you invited via the evite is now vulnerable to getting spammed!!

It's not like this is the first time this has happened. I received months of "free movie tickets" offers from Yahoo after another teammate entered my e-mail address on a Web site. She also entered my email address on some stupid site showing a dancing monkey. It took two requests to get the idea to her, don't place my e-mail on any Web site!

A fellow blogger notes:

I understand why people like to use Evite. I'm sure it's very convenient for providing party information, directions, and a guest list all in one place. In spite of this, I think the problems with it far outweigh the benefits. These problems mainly revolve around whether or not it's ok to give out the personal information of your friends to a third party, especially one with a privacy policy as questionable as Evite's, or their parent company, Ticketmaster.

In other words, when you use Evite, you are "opting-in" all of your friends to potentially be sold and spammed. You agreed to their terms when you used their service, but the people on your invitation list did not, yet they will potentially receive spam all the same. In fact, this is likely one of the reasons for Evite's existence; by now they've got a huge database of confirmed-good e-mail addresses just waiting to be sold to those third-party advertisers.

Basically, here's a rule of thumb: Never provide any e-mail but your own to any Web site. It's that simple.

Ask yourself, why is this Web site offering me a free service and asking for e-mail addresses in return? Your answer should be, quite possibly to harvest e-mails for spam. Please respect the privacy of your friends, family and soccer teammates!

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:16 AM in Culture
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July 5, 2005

Would you want an HIV-positive nurse?

The topic of HIV-positive nurses came up in conversation the other day.

The current class of nurses at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, I was told, has one gay, male, seroconverted student in its ranks.

My immediate question: Is this student planning to nurse HIV-negative patients? Because I, for one, certainly hope not -- for a good number of reasons, he might be better off serving HIV-positive patients.

In fact, given the numbers of HIV-positive intravenous drug users in Baltimore -- including some that apparently deliberately stick doctors with needles -- you could make a case that HIV-positive nurses could carve out a little specialty niche treating HIV-positive patients.

A true story:

Accidents in health care happen all the time. One of our housemates, a medical doctor from Britain, while working at Johns Hopkins Hospital was deliberately stuck with a needle by an HIV-positive drug addict in a rage. Our badly shaken doctor friend had to immediately receive an anti-viral cocktail of drugs.

The best assumption in a profession such as nursing that involves intimate contact is that Murphy's law will prevail.

My sailing party was told, for example, by the Johns Hopkins international clinic before our trip to Thailand not to get so much as a manicure on the beach because of the risk of being nicked by infected clippers. (See An Amateur's Guide to the Planet p. 140.)

What if an HIV-positive nurse has a nick from shaving, scratches it, and then fiddles with an intravenous line?

What of hundreds of other similar scenarios?

Further, the issue of nosocomial diseases -- ailments caught while in the hospital -- is a growing one. In "Data Show Scourge of Hospital Infections," the Washington Post reported July 13:

Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has estimated that as many as 2 million infections are acquired in hospitals each year, resulting in 90,000 deaths, said Denise Cardo, director of the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

Add HIV as a long-shot problem to this the list.

It's sad to read the position of the American Nurses Association, which views the matter as one of "protecting the workforce" rather than avoiding unneeded risks to patients:

PROTECTING THE WORKFORCE

Workplace issues of HIV-Positive Nurses

The number of nurses with HIV in the United States or globally is not known. There is also little scientific evidence regarding health care workers transmitting HIV to their patients during care. What is known, however, is that the use of highly active, antiretroviral therapy has dramatically improved the health of HIV-positive persons, which has led to HIV being viewed as a chronic condition and not a terminal disease. Although this shift in prognosis is good news, it has created new workplace concerns, including HIV-positive nurses fearing the loss of their jobs due to employer discrimination and/or patient concerns.

We have the usual dipsy-doodle "modern" thinking leading to advocacy of HIV-positive nurses. First, there is the notion that stigma = bad. The reluctance of patients to be treated by someone with a chronic infectious disease comes from an unwillingness to face even a small risk of contracting a disorder that requires an intensive drug regimen and safe-sex practices for life. Is this so unreasonable? It seems to me patients have a reasonable right to decline treatment by health professionals with HIV.

There is the further modern notion that everyone needs to be "self actualized," as described in the now-discredited heirarchy of human needs by Maslow. (See a wonderful debunking of Maslow in One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance by Christina Hoff Sommers.)

So it is now ostensibly more important for a nurse to "do her thing" (or "do his thing" in the case of male nurses) than for a patient to be protected against preventable risks.

See as an example an "Ask the Experts" email to an outfit called "The Body: The Complete HIV / AIDS Resource:"

Q: I am a HIV postitive nurse. What kind of work can I do now? Should I not work in the hospital setting or be restricted from other areas of nursing? Nursing was my calling and I am torn between ethics and confidentiality.

A: Response from Ms. Breuer

Who told you that nurses with HIV couldn't work as nurses? It isn't true!

First, check with your own employer's policy on bloodborne pathogens and disclosure. Unless you are performing blind invasive procedures, you may not face restrictions.

Then take yourself quickly to the Web site of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, ANAC, and learn from their extensive experience with HIV+ nurses. You have LOTS of options within nursing: www.anacnet.org

Nurses are quite often exceptionally kind people who want to make the world a better place. I say that knowing a fair number of nurses as housemates. No doubt this explains this kindliness to those who are sick.

However, the first obligation of a medical professional is to care for patients, and to do no harm! Especially to those who already face risks of getting sicker in the hospital (due to the phenomenon of nosocomial, or hospital-contracted, infection; a related term is iatrogenic, which means illness caused by medical action).

One also must note a certain anti-intellectualism to remarks such as that by the American Nurses Association above, that "The number of nurses with HIV in the United States or globally is not known. There is also little scientific evidence regarding health care workers transmitting HIV to their patients during care."

Well, a search of the medical literature might just tell us the reality of such a scenario. In just a few minutes, you can learn the following from Google:

Apparently there may have been six cases of transmissions by health-care provider to patients in the United States (involving the notorious dentist in Florida) and one case in France (an infected orthopaedic surgeon).

It just seems obvious that one's risk of contracting HIV declines as one assiduously avoiding contact with members of high-risk groups.

And it seems as though involuntary contact with HIV-positive health-care providers is about to become another potential vector.

My area of expertise, such as it is, involves the HIV risks of casual travel sex by female travelers (to be explored in my forthcoming book, Romance on the Road. I can readily crank out a 20-citation bibliography of warnings in respected medical journals for women to avoid sexual contact with strangers during their travels, and if passion strikes, to use a condom bought from a Western manufacturer, and to roll it on themselves.

Question for the medical profession:

Are there two kinds of HIV out there?

One that is menacing and lurking in clever seducers in foreign countries, the other, benign and safely encapsulated in that caring man (or woman) in the nurse's scrubs attending to my health care?

Hospitals (and nursing schools) should put the concerns of the patient, not the nurse, first. But that is not the way it is now. The hospital, not you the patient, decides if an HIV-positive nurse is to be in an operating theatre or not. Check out these complicated guidelines in Scotland on what sorts of assignments HIV-positive nurses can receive.

Wouldn't it be simpler to have HIV-negative nurses work with HIV-negative patients? I will grant the following points: That in many places (such as right here in Baltimore), the risk of a health professional getting HIV from a patient, in circumstances such as occured with our housemate who was a resident, is greater than the risk of a patient getting HIV from a health professional.

Still, it seems the right of the patient to make an informed choice. At least one HIV-positive nurse doesn't see it that way, as Operating Theatre Online (scroll down to "HIV-positive NHS worker fights for right to privacy") described of a worker in Britain's National Health Service:

An HIV-positive worker in the NHS is fighting a landmark legal action that could prevent those he has treated knowing that they could have been in contact with the virus. The worker is reportedly claiming that his right to privacy should supersede the rights of patients he has treated to know of his condition. If his claim is upheld in law, the case could have "serious implications" for the way in which the NHS handles such cases. The worker won an injunction on Saturday (17/11/01) to prevent a newspaper publishing his name or the branch of medicine he works in, although the newspaper said he worked in a field that involved the routine wearing of rubber gloves to prevent the transmission of infection. (From The Guardian 19/11/01; p.8)

Well, there you have it: A medical worker's right to privacy supercedes the risk to the patient, at least in one medical worker's mind.

Ideally, nursing schools should address the question of what chronic, communicable diseases are acceptable in students they accept, hospitals should try to make sure only 100 percent healthy nurses treat patients, and patients should have a right to know a hospital's policy toward HIV-positive staff, especially for invasive procedures.

If the demographic of nursing schools is going to increasingly include gay men, or other risk populations, as seems to be anecdotally the case, this question of policy will attain increasing importance.

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:02 AM in Culture
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July 4, 2005

Africa, poverty and Live8

I enjoyed watching parts of the Live8 concert on MTV, especially the generally superior lineup from London. Seeing Pink Floyd looking way older than even the Rolling Stones -- that's David Gilmour and Roger Waters, above, but playing brilliantly, was a highlight.

Madonna, who strikes me as a very confused person straining to achieve predictable sacrilegiousness in her videos, did well to perform holding the hand of a beautiful Ethiopian woman, Birhan Woldu, below, who had been on the brink of starvation as a 3-year-old and now attends college, due to efforts to combat the effects of famine.

In Philadelphia, Linkin Park teamed with Jay-Z, and like many of the other artists, seemed to put their all in the performance.

Their call to eliminate poverty in Africa, and prevent 30,000 deaths a day from its effect, is a worthy, noble and necessary one. Let's just hope the musicians and concert organizers fail in their attempt to get the G8 to increase aid to the continent. MTV interviewed plenty of 20-something, dreamy kids who said essentially how jazzed they were that by watching U2 play for free, world poverty would end.

Here's what I envision when Bob Geldof, Bono and others call for debt relief in Africa: More money for the kleptocrats who already steal most of the so-called Western aid.

More aid = more Mercedes tooling around Lusaka, Kampala, Windhoek and other capitals.

For a brilliant article on what Africa, and most of the developing world, really needs -- a crackdown on corruption, private property rights, the rule of law -- see this terrific article, Live8: a triumph for sentiment, not for results, by Allister Heath, in the BusinessOnline:

The history of Africa since the 1960s is the history of groups of elites seeking the political kingdom with the primary purpose of enriching themselves, Mbeki says. To rectify this situation, he believes that Africa's poorest people must be empowered through the institutions of the free society: property rights and markets: It is necessary that peasants who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa become the real owners of their primary asset: land. To enable such ownership, freehold must be introduced and the so-called communal land tenure system, which is really state ownership of land, ought to be abolished.

Heath notes that "Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest average customs delays in the world; Estonia requires one day for customs clearance versus 30 days on average for Ethiopia."

Some additional excellent reading on this topic:

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, by David Landes. Could something as simple as cultural attitudes toward thrift, honesty and persistance, as well as a systematic approach to science, explain the gulf in rich and poor nations that grew after the Industrial Revolution?

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown, by Paul Theroux.

Theroux returned to Africa after serving in the 1960s in Malawi to find backsliding everywhere. He lambastes the professional anti-poverty workers in their gleaming, air-conditioned Land Rovers playing CDs on state-of-the-art sound systems. He returns to the school where he taught to find it decrepit and his former house in disrepair. Where are the Africans stepping forward to teach their own children, to build, to repair, he wonders, as he concludes that many aid efforts are futile, doomed until Africans themselves decide it is time to have good government, good schools and decent housing.

The solution to Africa's poverty must come from Africans, Heath also concludes:

There is an urgent need for Africans to boost their inter-regional trade, partly to reduce their dependency on commodity exports to the West. Ask an African business person what needs to be done and chances are that very high on their list will be facilitating internal African trade by sweeping away bureaucracy and taxes. The facts speak for themselves: it costs the same to clear a 20-foot container through the ports of Abidjan or Dakar as it does to ship it all the way to a north European port.

... The West can help by tearing up its trade barriers and scrapping its deadly export subsidies; but not by handing out cash. If only those demonstrating in Edinburgh this weekend were to accept this, they would actually be helping to make poverty history. Instead, despite their good intentions, they may inadvertently be helping to prolong Africas misery.

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:10 AM in Culture
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June 27, 2005

Families and schizophrenia

The Washington Post has a must-read article today, Social Network's Healing Power Is Borne Out in Poorer Nations, on how poor countries often do a better job than rich ones with patients with mental illness.

Why? Parents, husbands, wives, children work together to monitor a mentally ill person's behavior, adjusting their drugs, quietly arranging make-work jobs and keeping them part of a social milieu.

This immediately struck a huge chord with me -- it is a central theme of my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet. The West's nuclear family, it seems, is quite good at freeing its members for individual achievement. The extended family, by contrast, serves as a far better safety net for the frail and vulnerable. It's a pattern that was obvious to me in my world travels, from Ireland to Africa, in so many places where the village idiot and the town drunk are considered harmless and are humored by all as they wander, unhospitalized, over country roads and into shops.

This article, by Shankar Vedantam, also jibes with a fascinating book by Martin Seligman entitled Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, which holds that far higher proportions of Western populations suffer from depression today than a century ago, when more people belonged to extended families, churches and community organizations -- all bulwarks against the difficulty of negotiating the modern world.

Bravo to Vedantam for spotlighting our overly technical reliance on the modern religions -- psychiatry, counseling and miracle drugs -- and showing how family healing and love are crucial too.

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:10 AM in Culture
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March 27, 2005

Terry Schiavo and ethics

I will humbly say I may well be wrong about this, but it seems to me from the video clips shown on cable news that Terri Schiavo smiles when she sees her mother.
One detects the light of a simple happiness in that reaction, not some random reflex.

In 2003 when Terri's feeding tube was first removed, and I read about the case, it did not seem such a big deal. If she was in a state like that of Karen Ann Quinlan -- who lay curled on her side in the fetal position for a decade after a drinking-and-Valium binge -- it seemed kindest to let her go.

Then when I saw the video clips of Terri's face on TV -- in marked contrast to just reading about the case -- I was appalled and incredulous that someone would want to remove her feeding tube.

She wasn't a vegetable at all, but someone brain damaged. The spark of personhood seemed obviously apparent to anyone who cared to watch.

Could anyone be serious that she was a vegetable on life support? I saw in Terri a real person, albeit disabled. Having covered the Special Olympics once as a newspaper reporter, it was obvious that Down's children had much to teach about devotion and joy, and I had nothing but admiration for parents who loved their limited children. A sophisticated ability to communicate verbally did not a person make, nor a life.

If her blood relatives possessed the Christlike, unjudgmental love for Terri even with her severe limitations, and the patience to care for her, we should be applauding their heroism.

One begins to think one is hallucinating such an interpretation of Terri's videos, given the culture of death that leads much of the country to oppose government intervention in this case, but others see her the same way. As Wesley J. Smith wrote on National Review Online:

Videotapes of Terri clearly show her responding to requests. For example, a closed-eyed Terri is asked to open her eyes by a doctor. Her eyes flutter and she does as he requests. She is asked in another video to follow a balloon with her eyes, and she does. In a heartbreaking video, Terri's mother kisses her on the cheek and Terri smiles and responds, clearly happy that her mom is with her.

Can anyone explain to me why Judge George Greer found Michael Schiavo's arguments to kill his former wife (he now has a new family) compelling? Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times of March 27, 2005, seems as baffled as the rest of us:

This is not a criminal, not a murderer, not a person whose life should be in the gift of the state. So I find it repulsive, and indeed decadent, to have her continued existence framed in terms of ''plaintiffs'' and ''petitions'' and ''en banc review'' and ''de novo'' and all the other legalese. Mrs. Schiavo has been in her present condition for 15 years. Whoever she once was, this is who she is now -- and, after a decade and a half, there is no compelling reason to kill her. Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo -- something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of -- would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough. It would be one thing had a doctor decided to reach for the morphine and ''put her out of her misery'' after a week in her diminished state; after 15 years, for the courts to treat her like a Death Row killer who's exhausted her appeals is simply vile. ...

Michael Schiavo is living in a common-law relationship with another woman, by whom he has fathered children. I make no judgment on that. Who of us can say how we would react in his circumstances? Maybe I'd pull my hat down over my face and slink off to the cathouse on the other side of town once a week. Maybe I'd embark on a discreet companionship with a lonely widow. But if I take on a new wife (in all but name) and make a new family, I would think it not unreasonable to forfeit any right of life or death over my previous wife.

Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He's forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: She is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously? The legal deference to Mr. Schiavo's position, to his rights overriding her parents', is at odds with reality.

Many observers find interesting, as did Peggy Noonan in "In Love with Death: the bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people," the vehemence of proponents of starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo.

Part of this is displaced, visceral and inexplicable loathing for the president, Republicans or conservatism in general.

Part of it is elitist views that might be expressed as "the unexamined life is not worth living," as expanded into a view that "a life constrained by severe disability is not worth living." In other words, sophisticates in particular project their own fears of being severely disabled, and no longer worthwhile to a spouse, on to a Terri Schiavo. They do not see the smile for her mother, they see only the immobile body unable to perform many of its prior functions.

They are, in the words of Joe Ford, "bigots:"

Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots. A close examination of the facts of the Schiavo case reveals not a case of difficult decisions but a basic test of this country’s decency.

Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability. One insidious form of this bias is to distinguish cognitively disabled persons from persons whose disabilities are “just” physical. Cognitively disabled people are shown a manifest lack of respect in daily life, as well. This has gotten so perturbing to me that when I fly, I try to wear my Harvard t-shirt so I can “pass” as a person without cognitive disability. (I have severe cerebral palsy, the result of being deprived of oxygen at birth. While some people with cerebral palsy do have cognitive disability, my articulation difference and atypical muscle tone are automatically associated with cognitive disability in the minds of some people.)

Much of the vehemence against Terri Shiavo is liberals exploiting her as a proxy for the abortion issue, as Thomas Sowell notes:

Terri Schiavo is being killed because she is inconvenient to her husband and because she is inconvenient to those who do not want the idea of the sanctity of life to be strengthened and become an impediment to abortion. Nor do they want the supremacy of judges to be challenged, when judges are the liberals' last refuge.

This explains the mainstream media's refusal to publicize Schiavo's nurses who concur with her family that she is a human presence who smiles at familiar visitors and caregivers, or who tell of her "husband's" reference to her as bitch.

One of Terri's nurses, Trudy Capone, related many conversations where Michael Schiavo admitted (I paraphrase the quote from memory) that he did not know Terri's wishes on being kept living: "I don't know what do to, we never talked about this" (source: interview with Capone on Greta Van Susteren's MSNBC show, Good Friday, 2005).

Hundreds of thousands watch this show and know the entire underpinning of Michael Schiavo's case to starve Terri is without merit. But Judge George Greer refuses to weigh such evidence, available since at least 2001 via an affidavit.

And finally, as regards unseemly glee in the undoing of this disabled woman, there is a sort of emotional retardation, an autism if you will, that ignores the spark of happiness in Terri's eyes in the videos, a tone-deafness among some (not all) men toward reading faces of those who trust others for their care. We women may be hardwired to read faces of dependents correctly and find the person within. That is the only explanation I can find for the cruelty and heartlessness on sites such as Fark.com, partly dominated by information technology types, who were nothing short of elated at the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of Terri's appeal.

Numerous commentators have sensed the intelligentsia's squeamishness at becoming disabled, being an inconvenience to others, or "unproductive." John Leo notes:

Among bioethicists, [Leon] Kass [a moderate conservative who heads the president's committee on bioethics] says, "there is a kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [and] a very real danger that what constitutes meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured." Under pressure from bioethicists, norms have been collapsing. Fifteen years ago, as author Wesley Smith writes in his 2002 book The Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, legally assisted suicide was unthinkable. So was harvesting the organs of terminally ill patients, which is done today and approved by bioethicists.

Orson Scott Card describes being at a party of literati in the New Republic:

It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book.

“Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed.

They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars.

I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not been invited to such gatherings since.

It’s so easy to decide that someone else’s life is not worth living. Lacking something that we regard as essential, we cannot fathom how they get through a day.

The nattering of intellectuals about the valuelessness of the “unexamined life” might be taken as hyperbole, if it weren’t for the fact that it is precisely our intellectual elite that has decided to set itself up as champions of the right to murder people “for their own good.”

... For instance, we now live in a country where you can kill your wife, as long as she’s tragically brain-damaged, lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak.

She does open her eyes, though. And she can track objects that move across her field of vision. She isn’t in a coma.

She even has people who want to take care of her. Her parents, her siblings.

And pay no attention to the “experts” who say that these apparent signs of intelligent life aren’t real. We once had an “expert” make the same sort of declaration about our son Charlie, after a mere half hour of observation, completely discounting the experience of Charlie’s parents and other caretakers who knew perfectly well that he really communicated with us.

The expert’s assumption was that anything seen through the eyes of people who loved Charlie was to be discounted completely. Ironically, though, it is precisely the people whose attention is concentrated by love who are best equipped to judge whether communication is happening — since it is happening with them.

The people who love Terri Schiavo apparently do not include her husband, who seems awfully impatient to get rid of her.

And under our bizarre laws, he has the only vote, and her parents and brothers and sisters are completely disregarded.

What is the husband’s case for killing her?

It couldn’t possibly be because he wants to be able to marry the woman he’s living with now. After all, to accomplish that he need only divorce the brain-damaged woman in a hospital bed.

Oh, but wait. If he divorces her, then he won’t get as much of that million-dollar settlement that’s paying for her care right now. Only if she dies will he get any of that.

No, his motive is completely noble and unselfish. He wants to shut off her feeding tube because she “wouldn’t have wanted to live like this.”

Hmmmm. Convenient that she can’t speak, isn’t it?

The incredible thing — to me, at least, and yet I have to believe it, don’t I — is that he was able to find a judge who would give him the right to kill this woman.

Despite the fact that she has loved ones who are desperate to keep her alive and take responsibility for her care. Despite the fact that the husband’s motives are suspect at best. Somehow, judges in Florida keep finding a “right to kill” hidden somewhere in the law.

Well, we have a precedent for that, don’t we. When it comes to legalized killing, our judges are way ahead of our legislatures ...

Once you plunge out onto that slippery slope of allowing the killing of another human organism for no better reason than personal convenience, it’s so hard to find a handhold to let you climb back up.

The intellectual may imagine that he or she may be far more threatened by a state of minimal consciousness than the more typical person -- Schiavo was an insurance-claims clerk. But let's consider the extraordinary book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death.

After a massive stroke, former Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote this book by blinking his left eye, to indicate one letter and then another, and having his blinks transcribed into a manuscript. In his book, Bauby described his imagination's rich journeys to sensual places. As one perceptive reviewer noted:

Public opinion surveys reveal an interesting contrast in modern opinions on the "right to die." Contrary to the accepted wisdom, the so-called right is favored by those who are young and healthy, but opposed by those who are old and sick. The very premise which underlies such a right is the belief that the quality of life experienced by the aged and the ill is so inadequate that they would willingly choose death instead. In fact, the evidence suggests that--despite the anecdotal horror stories with which all of us are familiar--people generally cling to life even in the face of suffering which seems unendurable to the well.

Harriet McBryde Johnson, above, a deeply impressive, wheelchair-bound woman whom I caught on TV last week, eloquently defends Congress's intervention in "Not Dead at All," noting:

In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.

Pat Buchanan noted with a sorrowful, dignified "quiet outrage" on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on Friday that you would be prosecuted in this country for denying water and food to a cat. Where is the upwelling of national outrage for dehydrating a brain-damaged woman? I do challenge all the heartless ones out there overjoyed by the setback to Terri Schiavo, delighted that this may bump down the president's poll numbers, to start right now not drinking a drop of any liquid for nine days before you wish such a fate on any living being.

Desert explorer William Langwiesche described thirst as the most terrible of deaths in Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert -- on pages 149-51, he describes a Belgian family lost in the Sahara in Algeria. They drank in rough order radiator fluid, gasoline, their own urine and finally each other's blood, as thirst maddened them. Their son begged for death, and they killed him. The husband begged for death, and the wife broke his neck with a rock.

We would treat anyone this way? Condemn them to die of thirst, in a hospice where they should be made comfortable? How does Judge Greer or Michael Schiavo or his lawyer George J. Felos live with their decisions?

Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon in the Weekly Standard urge us not to make too much of the opinion polls that purport to show opposition to Congress's (failed) intervention in the Schiavo case:

It is no anomaly that roughly half of the Democratic congressmen who returned to Washington to vote on the pro-Terri Schiavo emergency legislation in March voted Yes instead of No. And it is no anomaly that it's impossible to find a Democratic leader acting as if he takes at face value the ABC and CBS polls that purport to show strong national approval of Michael Schiavo and the array of federal and state judges who effectively gave him their blessing.

For President Bush and the social conservatives who comprise the central rampart of his base, the courts' naked assertion of judicial supremacy in deciding the fate of Terri Schiavo represents an important moment. This is because the premise of the Democratic filibuster of the president's conservative judicial nominees is that the Roe v. Wade decision must never again be called into question.

The judicial confirmation debate will now unavoidably be about whether democratic decision-making on abortion should continue to be prohibited by our courts and (effectively) by the American legal profession. From the beginning, those who believed Roe would corrupt the rule of law feared that state sanction of private killing would put all public order and all private restraint in doubt. The fate of Terri Schiavo makes clear that those fears were utterly on target.

A very active and appalled proportion of this nation is more than ever perplexed by our judiciary.

This may not show up now in the polls but expect time to bring greater and greater questioning of how Judge George Greer managed to order the starvation of a disabled woman in a nation supposedly devoted to liberty and justice. What sort of horror must a mother such as Mary Schindler endure as to have a court order deny her daughter even the comfort of ice chips on the tongue or the administration of Holy Communion?

A doctor, Steven Collins, experienced in caring for cancer patients asks these valid questions that an ethical person must consider. While I do not agree that Terri cannot communicate with those around her (a huge proportion of communication is nonverbal), let's give the doctor a hearing:

Should medical intervention (i.e. a feeding tube surgically placed through her skin into her stomach) be continued to indefinitely prolong the life of this woman, who is totally helpless and paralyzed and likely nearly blind, who cannot swallow and enjoy any food, who cannot communicate with the loved ones around her and likely cannot even understand what they have to say to her, who is incapable of rational thought, who may be in intermittent and perhaps severe pain and yet cannot get relief from this pain because she cannot communicate her distress to others, and who has been in this state for the past 15 years with no hope for recovery? What would I want for myself in this situation? What would I want for my children in this situation? What is the most decent and humane and compassionate approach to take?

In the case of Terri Schiavo in my mind the above issues are the only relevant questions -- questions that unfortunately I fail to see being addressed by the politicians, the religious sector, and the media pundits and columnists who have offered their varied opinions.

In "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo," Eric Cohen notes:

A true adherence to procedural liberalism -- respecting a person's clear wishes when they can be discovered, erring on the side of life when they cannot -- would have led to a much better outcome in this case. It would have led the court to preserve Terri Schiavo's life and deny Michael Schiavo's request to let her die. But as we have learned, the descent from procedural liberalism's respect for a person's wishes to ideological liberalism's lack of respect for incapacitated persons is relatively swift. Treating autonomy as an absolute makes a person's dignity turn entirely on his or her capacity to act autonomously. It leads to the view that only those with the ability to express their will possess any dignity at all--everyone else is "life unworthy of life."

This is what ideological liberalism now seems to believe--whether in regard to early human embryos, or late-stage dementia patients, or fetuses with Down syndrome. And in the end, the Schiavo case is just one more act in modern liberalism's betrayal of the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for. Instead of sympathizing with Terri Schiavo--a disabled woman, abandoned by her husband, seen by many as a burden on society--modern liberalism now sympathizes with Michael Schiavo, a healthy man seeking freedom from the burden of his disabled wife and self-fulfillment in the arms of another. And while one would think that divorce was the obvious solution, this was more than Michael Schiavo apparently could bear, since it would require a definitive act of betrayal instead of a supposed demonstration of loyalty to Terri's wishes.

We can pray for Judge Greer to see the light, or Michael Schiavo to grant his "wife" life, but this matter is now in God's hands, for Man has decided somehow that a simple feeding tube is somehow an extraordinary measure to keep this 41-year-old woman alive.

I cannot help but fear, having seen the videos and read affidavits by her sister, Suzanne Vitadamo, and attorney, Barbara Weller, that Terri wants water and sustenance and life right now, that she has tried to communicate her family this to the best of her remaining ability, and cruelness has triumphed over compassion in those black-robed gods who could temper her fate.

• posted by jbelliveau at 4:14 PM in Culture
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February 24, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson, why?

Stories that begin, "One time I got so wasted, that I ...," followed by a tedious litany of vomiting, passing out, having dry heaves, being pulled over by the cops, fondled by an ex-boyfriend, or loaded limply into a wheelchair by airport security, make me cringe.

Uck. How not hilarious, or remotely interesting, for those past the age of 18. Around the dinner table or the bar railing, one feels the pressure to chortle or at least smile indulgently. For myself, I begin to understand why Carrie Nation carried a hatchet and smashed up saloons. Carrie wanted to put an end to the imbibing of liquor, or what may be worse, banal stories beginning, "I was so drunk that ... ."

Hunter S. Thompson, who took his own life and whose body was found Sunday, unintentionally milked this vein in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Look, he suggested to us, look at suburban America in their tacky clothes gambling at the slots in Lost Wages, oh how monstrous it appears ...

Suburbanites, monstrous ... to a journalist and a 300-lb. Samoan lawyer whacked out on designer drugs, obscure psychotropics and liquor? As Aretha Franklin would say, who's zoomin' who?

I had looked forward to Fear and Loathing when it first came out (in 1972), having religiously read Thompson's political reporting for Rolling Stone, as well as Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967). Later I enjoyed Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

Yet ... back in the late 1960 and early 1970s, I was already long sick of the stoners in my high school animalistically grubbing around on the floor at psychedelic concerts, grabbing a stepped-on gum wrapper and staring fiercely at it, nose touching the paper, for the answers to the questions of the universe. Though relatively high functioning compared to the stoners, Thompson still operated in the grip of faux insight.

Fearing that Thompson's writing would fare badly in current daylight, I reluctantly (what I force myself to do for my blog ...) cracked open an excerpt of Hell's Angels in my yellowing, crumbling copy of The New Journalism.

This exercise confirmed my suspicion that the good Kentucky doctor would not wear the years well. His first-person reporting and participatory style were cutting edge at the time ("oooh! a reporter buys beer with the greasy-haired Frisco chapter, and Sonny Barger threatens to rape Thompson's wife if they don't like his article").

But Thompson never pulled even with contemporary Tom Wolfe, who simply possessed better reporting skills, insight and a discipline that masked his inner devils. Even the great Wolfe's Thompson reminiscence (here) inadvertently portrays Thompson as a supremely uninteresting attention whore.

One might be tempted to say the Emperor of gonzo journalism wears no clothes. Thompson certainly was an awful lecturer, as I can attest after seeing him at the University of Maryland in 1987, when he rambled incoherently but drew big laughs from we dazzled faithful for ... sticking his wobbly microphone in a roll of toilet paper.

And by 1995, his talent seemed to have fully departed. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, whose office was near my desk, gave me her comp copy of Better Than Sex (Gonzo Papers, Vol 4), handing it over as if it were a used prophylatic. The title and the cover displeased her. It was the actual content of the interior pages, just a grab bag of what seemed to be memos, scraps, lists and drafts, that was my problem. Off Thompson's last book went to eBay, where I thought it would attract no interest, but a bidder duly appeared.

Peggy Noonan does a good job on why Thompson's reputation is a tad overblown, and concludes:

In time Thompson's swashbuckling came to seem joyless, aggressive and half dead. What he thought fed his gift (drugs, alcohol) killed it. He must have been very scared to get tanked like that to write. The empty page, the blank screen, is scary. But so is a mortgage. So is the stillness of a courtroom before you make the closing argument. And so is a broken leg that needs fixing fast. We all have jobs. You take a bad turn when you start to think your next work must be marked by genius because you are a genius. Thompson's death is an occasion not for inspiration or celebration but compassion. Not pity, but a sense of universal idiocy, and sympathy.

Austin Ruse, writing for National Review, pulls no punches:

Hunter Thompson shot himself in the head sometime on Saturday and a few things are certain. He was either stoned or hung over, and his work will be forgotten.

Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about.

Ruse accurately notes Thompson's appeal to "a tiny sliver of demography, say ages 45 to 55", who "recall his comic-outlaw persona, which many of us found quite appealing in those days." And that is why the Emperor indeed had at least some clothes, for we really loved reading his political coverage back in the day, and he was (at the time, but not now) the perfect ferocious observer of, say, a year such as 1968.

Over at Fark.com, many found Thompson's decision to shoot himself inexplicable. One poster wrote:

As much as I enjoyed his work, I can't imagine why anyone would smoke a .45 over a hip replacement.

But then again, no one really knows if the guys was depressed or otherwise mentally tweaked, especially after 6 decades of heavy bourbon intake.

I've worked with several folks that visited him at Woody Creek (Owl Farm) and while they were merely casual friends, they did say he had huge mood crashes on occassion that lasted days at a clip. My bet's on clinical depression, but what do I know.

From haldrogen bomb:

It's amusing to see you guys fight amongst yourself to see who can best defend a drug-addled, past-his-prime author from some comments on an internet message board. Get over yourselves. HST was a talented writer, but he was also a major jackass. It's too bad he died, but I'm not going to waste time and emotional capital mourning a rich bastard who took his own life. And as far as gonzo goes, you could do a lot better reading the New Journalism of Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe ... .

I deliberately titled this blog "Hunter S. Thompson, why?" because it seems inexplicable that the doctor would commit suicide and also to hint that his writing may become close to irrelevant in the future. He was a writer that I enjoyed during a turbulent time in our history, a time that in retrospect seems more of a disaster than a renaissance.

Thompson did his part to glorify the outlaws and the druggies. Tom Wolfe, who sought to explain and never seemed in awe of the same renegades, holds up much better.

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:43 PM in Culture
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June 11, 2004

Farewell, Ronald Reagan

Last night, for hours I watched the mourners visiting the late president's casket in the Capitol Rotunda. Isn't C-Span wonderful? No voice-over, just the quiet dignity of the changing of the military honor guard, the mothers shepherding well-dressed children in the line, soldiers offering salutes, Lech Walesa kneeling in private prayer. I found the procession hypnotic and watched it past midnight, riveting despite a lack of anything resembling traditional entertainment values. Just wanted to make sure that Mr. Reagan had company, in person from more than 100,000 people, and electronically from stay-at-homes like myself.

What stood out for me were the thousands of mourners clearly in their mid-20s to mid-30s, some fighting tears. Reagan had a set of values and beliefs that Americans born three generations later have fervently adopted.

It's a remarkable generational transference. When I watch specials on Reagan, such as MSNBC's Headliners and Legends bio, I am struck by the profound innocence on the face of Ron as a young lifeguard and actor. He kept his hair in that antiquated but poignant wavy style hearkening back to Dick Tracy cartoons -- one my little brothers wore as late as the early 1960s.

You would think, no way would anyone under age 90 find Reagan so cool. And nothing is more important to some Baby Boomers than being hip. But Reagan is cool as can be to Boomers and even, apparently, much of Generations X and Y.

To me, Reagan was infinitely hipper than Jimmy Carter -- Reagan wanted our country strong and the world free. He was cutting-edge hip despite that innocent, bygone-era face with the Irish twinkle to the eyes (like my mom's) and modified pompadour and gentle smile, which even now wows young Americans tired of endless sleaze from Madonna and rappers and others who just don't comprehend how much nice and decent this country can be.

I had originally feared (believe it or not) that at the viewings in liberal California and liberal Washington, D.C., that almost no one would come. I know from working at the Washington Post the overwhelming antipathy toward Reagan and conservatives in general among D.C. journalists and residents in general.

Judging from interviews with people waiting in line near the Mall in Washington, Americans from the Midwest, Virginia, and other places, including Northeasterners like myself in the minority of our communities as conservatives, made a yeoman's effort to give the former president a proper, respectful and well-attended sendoff.

Typical of journalist's low-grade but evident hostility are comments such as this from Washington Post associate editor Bob Kaiser, in his online chat, reminding us that AIDS "became an epidemic when [Reagan] was president." Huh? Was it Reagan, or Dionysian gays, who encouraged promiscuous rough-stuff in the bath houses? When will the absurd lack of responsibility for behaviors that spread vile germs (not just HIV and STDs, but amoebas and all sorts of things) stop? From the unintentionally revealing Kaiser:

My gay brother Charles Kaiser, himself a very good writer, wants us all to remember that Reagan really did almost nothing about AIDS, which, sadly, became an epidemic when he was president. Charles is right. But Reagan was far from alone in neglecting this crisis when it first emerged. Indeed, I think it's a measure of how America has changed in 20 years that we look back now at the beginning of the epidemic with some dismay at the way our government and leaders handled it.

Typical of Washington, D.C. and Maryland liberalism is this question posted to Kaiser from Jessup, Md.:

Why isn't the press covering that the legacy of Ronald Reagan's civil rights policies was to divide the nation along racial lines? The lines to see his casket were almost all white, and except for Colin Powell it was hard to see any person of color at this "state funeral." Its a travesty to applaud this type of legacy, and an embarrassment for the nation.

Robert G. Kaiser: Referred to this earlier. Thanks for the comment. I too was struck by the crowd in the Cathedral.

Oh, well. Here we have two errors. One, the lines weren't all white, unless one choses to ignore steady numbers of black and Asian mourners, including some ostentatiously proud black servicemen who stood at full height and snapped off powerful salutes.

Two, there is a postmodern assumption that America's white majority cannot be doing anything right unless masses of minority groups lend their stamp of approval. We may have to live with the fact that U.S. minorities, barring what seems to be a "talented tenth" who happily have wandered off the victimology plantation, were not too happy with a president who preached liberty over equality of results, knowing that the latter is both impossible and even if possible would require totalitarian state apparati to achieve.

I haven't ever been able to live surrounded by the American majority that elected Reagan and that quietly paid their respects at his library in Simi Valley and at the Capitol. I've always been marooned in the world of journalists and liberals, in the U.K., Washington and Baltimore. (As Reagan lived surrounded by Hollywood liberals.)

When I worked in suburban London in the early 1980s, on the copy desk of a health magazine, I had a boss named Martin, from the North of England. Like most journalists in the U.K., he was a committed leftist, and loved to mock the president he called "Ronnie Ray-Gun."

Martin viewed the Soviet Union as some sort of benign experiment in collective ownership, and the United States as belligerent, aggressive, irredeemable racist, etc. etc. Nothing Martin said (he had never visited the U.S.) jibed with my extensive life and travels in my home country. Whenever he trotted out his aspersions on the president and displayed warmth toward the Soviets, I tried to point out that if the world is a jungle, you have to be prepared to defend yourself, that the Eastern bloc shot defectors in the back, that the Western way of life was under attack and needed a vigorous defense.

It's two decades later, and I hope that Martin holds a fuller understanding of the way communism had indeed landed on the ash help of history.

Bravo to his compatriot, Prince Charles, who made great effort to remember and honor a fallen American at the National Cathedral today, and to Lady Thatcher for her grand appreciation of the nation that produced Reagan:

Nothing was more typical of Ronald Reagan than that large-hearted magnanimity - and nothing was more American.

Therein lies perhaps the final explanation of his achievements. Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them. He and they loved America and what it stands for - freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.

As an actor in Hollywood's golden age, he helped to make the American dream live for millions all over the globe. His own life was a fulfilment of that dream. He never succumbed to the embarrassment some people feel about an honest expression of love of country.

He was able to say 'God Bless America' with equal fervour in public and in private. And so he was able to call confidently upon his fellow-countrymen to make sacrifices for America - and to make sacrifices for those who looked to America for hope and rescue.

With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today the world - in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself - the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer "God Bless America".

(Incidentally, the vicar who presided at my first wedding at St. Alban's, the tiny church adjacent to the National Cathedral, the Rev. Theodore "Ted" Eastman, performed some of the readings at the funeral.)

• posted by jbelliveau at 6:49 PM in Culture
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June 7, 2004

Ronald Reagan, converter of liberals

On the passing of this great former president, may I add that Reagan spoke of why he became a "former Democrat" in his 1964 address in support of Republican nominee Barry Goldwater:

As a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration. Back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his party was taking the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. And he walked away from his party, and he never returned to the day he died, because to this day, the leadership of that party has been taking that party, that honorable party, down the road in the image of the labor socialist party of England.

Sixteen years later, I shocked myself when as a lifelong Democrat whose Boston Irish Catholic aunt had worked for JFK, I pulled the lever for a conservative for president. Like Reagan, I felt the Democratic Party had headed into the realm of fringe politics, while Reagan stood for freedom from tyranny. The suffering of the common person in the Soviet bloc made an impression on me.

On that day in 1980, at the age of 26, I found myself almost trembling in a voting booth in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had first voted eight years earlier, for George McGovern ... talk about liberal and anti-war (but remember, I was only 18 at the time of McGovern's candidacy). By the age of 26, I had traveled to Britain and Continental Europe several times and been negatively impressed with how left-wing policies led to high unemployment, depressed salaries, strikes by groups of workers (nurses, railway and airport workers, newspaper printers) aimed at maximum disruption , economic malaise and accommodation with the Soviet Union. My life experiences led me to a conservative conversion, as Reagan himself experienced.

At the time of my first of two votes for Reagan, I had some residual inclinations towards feminism and environmentalism, but I could not hold myself a hostage to the Democrats when I fully agreed with Reagan on limited government, freedom, tax cutting and a strong national defense.

Now at the age of 50, I have spent more than half my life as a Reagan Democrat. When I voted for Reagan, it was with some anxiety -- would the sky fall in? Over time, Reagan exceeded every possible expectation, along with Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher liberating millions in Europe and bringing prosperity to many.

How many thousands and millions of Americans in their 20s and 30s during the 1980s also were swayed by Reagan? Did he create the neo-conservatives (ex-liberals) who so creatively seek solutions to poverty, terrorism and other issues of today? Did he move a plurality of the United States rightward? Did he strip the romantic patina off Marx, Lenin, Guevara and all the other chi-chi campus darlings, cutting through the fog with plain talk?

I believe the answer to all these questions is yes. Reagan got me and a whole lot of other former Vietnam protestors thinking twice about all the nonsense we picked up in the 1960s. Once you start looking at socialism closely, you get plenty nervous about liberalism's similar emphasis on government solutions to problems, and then voila -- you find yourself a Reagan Democrat and eventually, a conservative, believing in God, human rights derived from the Lord, and government as a tool of national defense rather than social engineering.

What was most interesting to me listening to talk radio yesterday (Michael Graham on WMAL-AM in Washington, D.C.) was how many immigrants from the former Soviet Bloc calling to offer their heartfelt remembrances. You can fool the sociology professors at the University of Maryland and the journalists I've worked with in Britain and the U.S. East Coast and a whole lot of other people about life in the fool's paradise of socialism, but not a Latvian or Czech or Russian. Everyone journalist I ever worked with rolled their eyes at Reagan's "evil empire" on the ash heap of history remark, but prisoners in the Soviet gulag took heart -- Natan Sharansky in the Jerusalem Post via The Corner on National Review Online:

In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

Goodbye to a great patriot and a true freedom fighter of the 20th century.

• posted by jbelliveau at 12:25 PM in Culture
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May 19, 2004

Maryland and multiculturalism

My most recent blogs have looked at media coverage of the remarks on immigration and assimilation by Maryland's current Gov. Robert Ehrlich and former Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

Eight days after I noted the reckless inability of liberal critics to distinguish between the words multiethnic and multicultural, we finally have a catch-up op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, The 'multicultural' lie by H. George Hahn:

Rushing to dilute the curriculum further with "multicultural" course requirements, colleges across the country, like many of those outraged by Mr. Ehrlich's and Mr. Schaefer's remarks, fail to understand that American culture is English. Seeing America as a diverse nation, they conclude that diversity is its most important truth. And then, seeing diversity as multiethnic, they conclude that America is multicultural.

It is not, of course, for a culture means far more than eating ethnic foods, celebrating ethnic holidays, singing in ethnic bands and donning ethnic costumes to dance at ethnic festivals. Are not the most important cultural truths about America crystallized in its Western heritage as transmitted by the English experience?

That experience is sixfold, as Russell Kirk says in his book, America's British Culture: first and crucially, the English language; a history evolving from Britain; a legal system based on English common law; political ideas and structures patterned on the British model; a literary heritage that's British to the core; and social ideals rooted in Britain.

Of course, I broadly agree with Hahn's point that the United States is multiethnic but not multicultural.

But I think his article oversimplifies matters.

As someone who has lived in England, grew up in Maryland (part of the Crescent of New Africa, as discussed in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet), and traveled much of the world, one of the points stressed in An Amateur's Guide to the Planet is how ancestral memories play roles even after many generations in several of the world's diasporas, including Greater China, Greater Indonesia and Greater Africa.

Cultural survivals brought to the New World by Africans (generosity, forgiveness and a belief in redemption, see p. 97), the Irish (a reverence for books, reading and academic excellence, see p. 54), Germans (a love of recreation and weekends) and the Chinese (mercantile talent), among many others, make the United States hugely different from Britain.

In fact, older editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica argue that Irish (not English) immigration to the United States provided the momentum that made our nation English- rather than German-speaking. So although English is our national language, our American identity is something to my mind a grander achievement, for it merrily rejected many negative aspects of Britain and in fact Europe, and added good bits of string from wherever in the world they could be found.

The differences between the United States and Britain make for huge and unanticipated culture shock for tourists and expatriates alike, and the comparative ease of the tourist in, say, Ireland or the Netherlands demonstrates the more relaxed aspects of American culture compared to Britain's.

American culture is a work in progress, and will no doubt continue its inexorable sifting of additional worthy elements of Hispanic and South and Southeast Asian cultures brought by the newest immigrants. However, U.S.'s newest arrivals may have to learn that the United States, much as it rejected King George III's Upper Class Twit arrogance, will also have little patience for wholescale attempts to force an abandonment of its common language and its principles. American culture has always been free to change organically, but its precious idealistic core needs to be defended. As Hahn notes:

Though some multiculturalists would actually exchange courses in Shakespeare for ones in healing chants, few would replace automobiles with rickshaws or computers with signaling drums. And none would visit a witch doctor for coronary care, countenance female infanticide or clitorectomies, cast themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, applaud bloody coups and despots, be tolerant of cruel and unusual punishment, laudatory about theocracies and open-minded about slavery.

Yet many multiculturalists teach, in the cause of liberal open-mindedness, as if they would grant cultures still practicing such customs a moral equity with - if not superiority to - Western ways. And having themselves studied Western civilization not so long ago in college, they would deny that privilege to their own students. Their ethical compass spins wildly.

The American compass points steadily to the classical West, via England. Our national culture believes in equality before the law, due process, civil rights, freedom to speak, to worship, to keep arms and defend ourselves, to own property, to vote, to move about freely.

P.S. Here's a funny line from Michelle Malkin on Schaefer's and Ehrlich's remarks: "Befuddled professors and reporters view the controversy as some kind of calculated political maneuver by Ehrlich, instead of a rare outbreak of common sense." As I noted earlier, The Sun published an article, "Ehrlich has no apology as immigrants protest" that portrayed the discussion of a matter crucial to the future identity of the United States as some sort of political grab by the governor toward the whiter suburban counties.

• posted by jbelliveau at 12:49 PM in Culture
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May 12, 2004

The beheading of Nick Berg

Admiral Yamamoto warned his Japanese colleagues against attacking Pearl Harbor. Hollywood has him saying in two movies, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

With similar prescience, Yamamoto could have warned Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi against putting the video of his preening enjoyment of the butchering of Pa. resident Nick Berg on the Internet.

For Zarqawi has blundered terribly with his merry display of barbarism. Pearl Harbor girded the U.S. for war. Nick Berg's beheading reveals Islam's extremists as savages. With clearer eyes, the West can see what it is up against in the Middle East.

I cannot recall ever sobbing at any photos in career as a journalist spanning four decades (starting with my high school paper) until seeing the few stills of Nick Berg's exceptionally cruel slaughter on the Drudge Report today.

On Fark.com yesterday, posters made it clear that watching the full video was an exercise that might shake the viewer for hours, days or longer:

Everyone taking comfort in a quick painless death afforded a beheading need[s] to take a gander at the video. He screams. Beheaded people don't have time to scream. His head was sawed off from the adams apple back to the spine.

More from the same thread:

Perhaps NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS will air the video of the American getting his head sawed off with a large knife (he is heard screaming and gurgling in the video) before they show the new photos of the "horrible" atrocities a few of our guys committed.

That way Americans will know what "real" abuse/torture is.

And finally:

Something that struck me almost as much as the brutality of seeing a human head separated from a live human being and the resulting screams of pain and death were the reactions of the Islamists doing the cutting all the while groaning allah akbar in an almost sexual manner. It had an almost orgasmic quality. I've noticed it before in the Islamist recruiting videos. It isn't the screaming passion of the battle field that all soldiers exhibit, this is something totally different. It is a deep joy an almost sexual release they get when they cut throats, torture and otherwise engage in cold blooded murder. They truly and deeply enjoy it. It appears to be a quasi-sexual experience that is ingrained in their religion and cultural psyche.

In the popular vernacular - They get off on it. Religiously and sexually.

I'm sure we can peacefully co-exist with people like that. I'm sure if we are just nice to people like that they will leave us alone.

Callers into the Ron Smith show on WBAL here in Baltimore similarly had said the screams of the victim were close to unbearable.

As an inveterate newshound, I had thought to take a look, but ran into technical problems using my dial-up connection. Perhaps its just as well.

So here for others in a similar boat -- prevented from watching the video by a technical problems or squeamishness -- a description follows.

Rush Limbaugh devoted an uninterrupted stretch of nine minutes on the radio today to a description of what occurs on the video. He said he watched Nick Berg sitting with his hands around his knees, naming his family members. "Five hooded cowards" stood behind the young man, Rush said, "and I hated 'em. I hated these bastards, 'cause I knew what was coming:"

I brought to the witnessing of this video [knowledge of the prison photos at Abu Ghraib] and I was just enraged.

I was angry that this was a Jewish man.

I couldn't tell if he knew what was coming.

There was a sudden lunge for the neck of Nick Berg ...

And I ... I've seen the [Daniel] Pearl [decapitation] video too ... but this is not like that if you've seen this.

This took multiple swipes, 'cause this is not a sharp knife.

I was mesmerized, I admit I couldn't turn away from it, but I couldn't watch it ... I'm already angry as hell (because) of the moral equivalencies going on. ...

I wanted to personally go in and level those guys [to rescue Nick Berg]. I felt a flood of powerlessness.

This was not a beheading. This was ... um ... folks, cattle have it better. This was not even a slaughter. This was slow, this instrument, saw, whatever it was, was not sharp. The screams that emanated with each stroke of this instrument were just shocking because you know that Mr. Berg felt everything happening to him
and he looked surprised.

It was a combination of numbing and heart palpitations at the same time. And then these cowards at the conclusion of it display their work, I thought I saw a couple smiles thru the mouth holes of the mask.

And I at that instant I wanted to call George Bush and level the place. Turn it 20,000 degrees and let's start over. You're not dealing with human beings, you're dealing with human debris ... they don't deserve to live.

• posted by jbelliveau at 2:39 PM in Culture
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May 11, 2004

Multiculturalism is 'bunk'

Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich is more correct than he knows when he states (from the Baltimore Sun):

Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, that some folks are teaching in our college campuses and other places, you run into a problem. There is no such thing as a multicultural society that can sustain itself, in my view, and I think history teaches us this lesson.

Much of the kneejerk criticism of the governor's statement (and Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's defense of speaking English) comes from fuzzy-thinking people who don't understand the simple difference between the words multiethnic (good) and multicultural (bad).

Our multiethnicity is a national strength.

Multiculturalism, however, holds that Americans need share nothing greater than physical proximity -- not language, not shared ideals, not the cultural agreement that makes for a social contract, only competing grievances.

I addressed this topic in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, which in a chapter on Greece looks at the matter of national greatness and decline. How does a nation like the United States, which resembles in its multiethnic makeup the Roman Empire, achieve and maintain its status as a World Power?

In a nutshell: The United States needs to insist on assimilation, including that its immigrants speak English. Ehrlich has a sense of history and a leader's willingness not to bow to today's fad of catering to advocacy groups that insist on splintering a great people into little identity-riddled factions.

From An Amateur's Guide (pages 164-65):

Rome’s approach to minorities: sharing power and insisting on cultural assimilation

The length of time a Great Power gets to stay at the top may hinge upon how much it ensures that its diverse population shares a stake in national success.

My husband, artist and historian Lamont W. Harvey, notes that Great Powers such as the United States, China or the former Soviet Union cover large areas and comprise more than one ethnic group. (The exception is comparatively homogeneous Japan.)

Thus Great Powers need a policy to prevent instability among differing peoples. History reveals some widely divergent approaches taken by Great Powers toward minorities (defined in the sociological sense, as persons subjected to different treatment, rather than groups smaller in numbers).

In the Greek colonies and British Empire, for example, no one could hope to join the ruling classes except by birth. The Greeks in their cities and colonies simply considered themselves innately superior to barbarians outside and saw no purpose in trying to civilize their neighbors. Thus virtually all citizens of Athens came only from married Athenian parents.

The Romans looked at things quite differently. Non-Romans during the imperial era could exercise power, particularly in their home provinces. For Rome’s subject peoples, who came to cherish the peace established under Roman rule, to become a Roman citizen was a high honor.

Stephen Neill, in Colonialism and Christian Missions, wrote that

Citizens in Spain who had never once seen the eternal city became more Roman than the Romans, and spoke and wrote the Latin tongue with an almost classical elegance. Rome seemed identical with the civilization and stability of the world.

Rome only permitted those who adopted its language and culture to become citizens. It tolerated but did not celebrate diversity, even as it absorbed elements of other cultures (especially Greece’s).

Rome allowed its subjects to continue to speak Celtic, Aramaic, Libyan and other languages. But officials, soldiers, traders and schoolchildren learned Latin, which became the official language of the Mediterranean. As John Matthews wrote in “Roman Life and Society: Distances and Diversity” (in The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World:

It was precisely the achievement of the Roman Empire to have assimilated in one political and administrative system the immense diversities of the Mediterranean, and much of the northern European, worlds.

Like modern U.S. conservatives, Rome also came to emphasize public safety and family values. People in the empire had to obey the law and allow free passage on the Roman roads. And Augustus Caesar introduced numerous social reforms designed to strengthen the family and the integrity of marriage. (Though his own family failed disastrously in this regard, as I, Claudius, the BBC television series based on Robert Graves’s book I, Claudius amply demonstrated.)

• posted by jbelliveau at 1:26 PM in Culture
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May 7, 2004

Speaking English at McDonald's

Maryland Comptroller William Donald Schaefer sounded off on Tuesday about McDonald's cashiers who cannot speak English.

Out in Averageville, U.S.A. (most precincts of the region not part of Mediaville), everyone recognizes this as an absurd disregard for what once used to be the pride of the U.S. economy, customer service. See some typical reactions at this Baltimore Sun forum, including HOORAY FOR SCHAEFER and
No Habla English at Mcdonalds, as well as an article reporting, "Reactions to Schaefer's 'English' comment is mostly favorable."

For some reason, we have moved as a society from having the hallmark of every society since the beginning of time -- namely, a language of our own, in this case, English:

• to encouraging bilingualism,
  
• to tolerating pockets of inner cities where most residents don't speak English,
  
• to having major employers and a government that hire workers who can't speak English for jobs interacting with the public,
  
• and finally, for liberal apologists to see no problem whatsoever in people serving customers but lacking the customers' language.

One can eagerly anticipate the ultimate logic of direction McDonald's is taking us -- that communication plays no role in, well, communication -- including air traffic controllers or brain surgeons or editors at Miriam-Webster's dictionary who can't comprehend English.

As a world traveler, I wrote of many of my communication struggles in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, and Amateur accidentally became an intercultural communication textbook.

As any true traveler knows, a hallmark of respect for any place you are visiting is to try to learn basic words. I have on my bookshelf phrasebooks from my travels, including for one (or more) for Italian, Greek, French, Indonesian, Chinese, Spanish, Hawaiian, Arabic, Portuguese and Swahili -- even an American English-British English phrasebook.

My friend Sylvia just asked to borrow the Italian phrasebook for her upcoming seven days in Portofino. While Sylvia makes the requisite effort of the true traveler, for a one-week trip, can it be that we have immigrants who expect to live and work and sell to English-speaking customers in this country without learning our language?

I shake my head at Michael Olesker's reflex assertion, coming from the separate kingdom of Mediaville, that any criticism of an immigrant, no matter how justified, qualifies as bigotry:

Because what [Schaefer's] new outburst does is send a signal. It signals that small, dark place in the heart of bigots that it's all right to put down one group at the expense of another. That it's all right to call one group American and one group Not Quite American. And that it's all right to deny the very heart of the national experience, if it suits your mood of the moment.

No Mr. Olesker, Schaefer's view does not fly "in the face of the American way."

The tourist who wants to shout English in beatific ignorance at foreigners is a clod. The immigrant who wants to deal with English speakers in beatific ignorance is a clod, too.

The non-English speaker at McDonald's, for some reason, has decided to ignore the requirements of commerce since the mists of history.

Immigrants show disrespect by not learning even the basic vocabulary to buy and sell a simple set of goods, something the folks with their beads and pottery and ropes and chickens and salt in every port along the Mediterranean and East Africa-to-China trade routes mastered from the beginnings of human transport.

My next book, Romance on the Road, describes gigolos worldwide, such as those in Jamaica and Thailand, who niftily learn enough English, Japanese, German or whatever it takes to make money off tourist women.

In China, there are 250 million speakers of English as their second language, many self-taught from tapes. It's not difficult. It's certainly not impossible. And the Chinese learn quite acceptable English without being surrounded, as an immigrant is, with broadcast and print media and native speakers.

Here's what a conscientious traveler does: Learn enough of the local language to show respect and appreciation of the culture. If possible, learn enough to communicate well. Even if you grew up with English or another Romance language, and are struggling to learn Arabic, Thai or Chinese, which don't even use Romanized alphabet.

Here's what a conscientious immigrant does: Learn the host country's language, period.

It can be done.

• posted by jbelliveau at 3:47 PM in Culture
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May 6, 2004

More on Abu Ghraib

The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation. Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can't. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I've never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.

But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo--she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.

Peggy Noonan, welcome to today's Brave New World. Where nothing is scarier or tougher than a city girl, or a girl fight, or an enraged feminist. Ask any school administrator, or soccer referee, or university administrator. Or Iraqi prisoner.

Noonan's recollection of decency in the American public, including its women, is both touching and heartbreakingly dated. A coarsening culture can, yes, lower its women as much as its men. Masculinity found its revival in the implosion of the World Trade Center on strong, altruistic firemen chugging up stairs to rescue the weak.

What pivotal moment will bring back femininity? What will bring back the matriarch and her the moral authority, the woman neither coarse nor timid, who instead of posing like a goofball by naked Muslim men, says this is perverse and wrong, and needs to stop?

As I noted yesterday (see below), the big water-cooler (and talk radio) buzz is over the Iraqi prison photo showing West Va. Spc. Lynndie England. We would all like to learn more about Lynndie England. There is a story here, a big one that is resonating.

Donna M. Hughes, writing on National Review Online, indirectly echoes my point yesterday about the sexual tension and domination and politics underlying the activities at the Iraq prison, as well as Peggy Noonan's observation of our coarse culture:

Why are we shocked by these images from Abu Ghraib, but when the victims are women (or gay men) the images are called pornography or "adult entertainment"? Why can we easily see the violations of human beings in one set of images, but miss it in others? What if the Iraqi men had been forced to smile, could we be convinced that there was a newly formed "publishing and film production" company in Baghdad instead of sexual abuse and humiliation being perpetrated?

President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have condemned the acts and the abuse of the Iraqis. They said that these acts do not represent American values. I want to believe that is true. Yet, I see the common themes and methods used by other types of perpetrators on different victims. These similar images are what the young American soldiers from the Internet generation have grown up with and learned to call "adult entertainment." Did they become desensitized to the harm of doing such things to people by seeing multiple images of similar abuse to women? Did they learn how to violate someone by being a voyeur to abuse, and in Abu Ghraib they had the chance to become perpetrators — and pornographers? Did they fully comprehend the harm they were doing?

• posted by jbelliveau at 12:07 PM in Culture
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April 28, 2004

Incredible shrinking Kerry

Kerry is a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate.

So writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post.

This flap over whether presumptive Democrat nominee John Kerry threw his Vietnam medals (or ribbons), or someone else's medals or ribbons over a fence in a 1971 protest, is devastating to a candidate already with a reputation as a flip-flopper. This country simply isn't going to select a candidate who doesn't know whether to brand himself as a war hero or radical pacifist in times that require a leader for a battle against radical Islam and terror that may last generations.

Even the left-wing Village Voice has bailed on Kerry: "John Kerry Must Go," writes a columnist there.

I wrote on March 15, in a blog entitled John Kerry, fog machine, that Kerry reminded me of failed Maryland Dem candidate for governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who generated not one iota of excitement within her own party.

My earlier blog appeared six weeks ago. Now an avalanche of criticism from within his own party threatens Kerry.

Somewhere, Hillary Rodham Clinton is smiling.

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:22 AM in Culture
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April 24, 2004

Let's ban ass pants!

A small sign that one member of our mass culture, down in Louisiana, possesses a shred of common sense and decency:

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - People who wear low-slung pants that expose skin or "intimate clothing" would face a fine of up to $500 and possible jail time under a bill filed by a Jefferson Parish lawmaker.

State Rep. Derrick Shepherd said he filed the bill because he was tired of catching glimpses of boxer shorts and G-strings over the lowered belt lines of young adults.

Of course if you read the article a little ways down, you will learn from the usual source (ACLU) all the legal reasons that the greater society must be forced to continue to view teen underwear.

For years, young men have flaunted this style, said to come out of prison, where belts are confiscated. It's an obvious attempt to disrespect basic social notions of how to appear in public. When I was a young teen, just wearing jeans ("dungarees" as my uncle called them) to school was close to shocking.

Today's more nihilistic bunch is running out of ideas, and thus pushing the fashion envelop past informality, past indecency, and into the realm of the surreal, wearing pants that require being pulled up, but not too much, so that the wearer can walk (barely) and offend at the same time.

Some time ago, when I belonged to Baltimore's expensive Downtown Athletic Club, a guy on the basketball court wore his shorts below crack level so as to expose his boxers. Bad enough that such a coarse fashion statement assault our eyes on the streets, but in a health club? I complained to the front desk. "The only man whose underwear I have the slightly interest in seeing is that of my husband, if that," I said. The DAC staff made murmurs of understanding, but I doubt they did much about it.

More power to Rep. Shepherd. It's about time somebody stood up and declared to the watching world,

"We DON'T want to see your underwear in public!"

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:31 AM in Culture
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April 11, 2004

A pair of successful small films

Two new DVDs caught my eye this weekend. The first, Lost in Translation, had me not knowing exactly what to expect. Others seem to find it either a wonderful look at disorientation overseas or a film in which close to nothing happens.

Both camps seem to be correct. We have plenty of imagery of lonely young wife Scarlett Johansson and aging star Bill Murray hanging out doing not very much at a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Even on such a micro stage, however, strange things happen in their separate rooms: beeps and buzzers and faxes emit noises incomprehensible to a Westerner, and curtains open themselves, apparently in response to sunrise.

Anyone who has ever been to Japan will no doubt find Lost in Translation intriguing. Japan is indeed where Western stars go to reap huge sums for liquor commercials. Channel surfing reveals cultural oddities, brilliantly captured in a bit with Murray appearing on "Matthew's Big Hit TV," a show with a screaming host with dyed-blond hair in a neon candy-striped suit.

One can scarcely imagine a corollary situation, say, of a non-English-speaking guest on Jay Leno appearing with the obligatory wrapped present in hand and translator at his side. The DVD contains a gem, an extended version of Murray's appearance with Matthew as seen through the principal camera on the set.

I mostly admired the film's reluctance to have the two principals fall into the sack at the first hints of marital loneliness. They share a deeper sort of intimacy, watching TV together on a hotel bed without having sex, or even touching each other, except for a brief resting of Murray's hand on Johansson's foot.

I say mostly because the ending hints that Stateside, they will embark on an affair, and it's clear they can barely hold a conversation even in Japan, where they have plenty of motivation to band together in an alien place. As I wrote in the Burma chapter of An Amateur's Guide to the Planet :

Lesson Number 3: English speakers form groups for mutual support when attempting to navigate in a little-visited foreign land.

The other DVD we watched was American Splendor, about the life of Cleveland comic book author Harvey Pekar. Kudos to its blend of actors, their real-life models and animation!

The film gets funnier as it goes along, and Pekar meets Robert Crumb, a nerdy co-worker, his future wife, David Letterman and his eventual daughter! The nerdy co-worker seems almost too much to believe, until we see his inspiration, expounding on the different flavors of jellybeans on the set.

A big hoorah for this look at how a guy with a boring job as a file clerk at a VA hospital found an outlet for his creative muse.

• posted by jbelliveau at 1:40 PM in Culture
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March 17, 2004

Currying favor with foreigners

John Kerry seems to think it is a good thing to assert that foreign leaders want him to replace President Bush.

Which foreign leaders, Colin Powell asks (without receiving an answer). Wait, let us guess -- the Euroweenies! As led by France and Germany.

Well, Kerry's not saying, probably because this is either an Al Gore moment of sheer imagination on his part (in other words, it never happened), or the answer might be, the French and Germans.

This country learned from the time of its revolution to turn its back on Western European decadence and anti-democratic tendencies so as to make its own way. It is quite puerile for Kerry to curry favor with people now, as before, whose elites are openly at war with American values and simultaneously deeply envious of our strengths. Meanwhile, more ambitious rank-and-file Europeans, disgusted with their nanny states, are desperate like people the world over to live and work here. A million people a year (!) vote with their feet to emigrate to the United States.

Let me share one conclusion I drew from living in Europe for more than three years and traveling there over the course of 20 years: Nothing America does will ever, ever please them.

I've had French strangers excoriate me for Carter's failed hostage rescue mission in Iran. Brits furious that Reagan was siting cruise missiles at Greenham Common. Greeks upset about something with NATO. You could have Europe go right ahead and just elect the U.S. president, and the crescendo would continue unabated, because the criticism is kneejerk, cuts across party lines, and is immune to logic or reality.

My three years in Britain, I worked as a journalist, mainly with anti-Americans from the U.K. and other Commonwealth nations. We had some spirited debates. What struck me was while the educated elites had it in for the United States, the receptionists at the front of the office would ask how to get their kids a visa -- what could be a clearer testament to which is the land of opportunity?

Let John Kerry go run for president of Europe. Let Americans decide for themselves who has their best interests at heart.

• posted by jbelliveau at 12:44 PM in Culture
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Travel writer as ambassador? Not.

You've heard of the Ugly American? Welcome to the latest incarnation of ourselves abroad: The Anti-American American.

John Kerry's absurd belief that it's good to win the approval of anti-American elites reminds me of a topic I've been meaning to address for some time now, that of the leftish American traveler disparaging her homeland to foreigners -- people who have highly positive impressions of our nation!

There's an irritating example in a Bay Area travel writer's book, Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa. Tanya Shaffer travels in Africa, doing her best to tear down the country that gave her the historically unprecedented freedom and wherewithal to be a woman journeying halfway around the globe:

Traveling in Africa brought my Americanness acutely into focus. Everyone I met had such strong ideas about the U.S. that I found myself adjusting my descriptions to counter each individual's perceptions. Since most Ghanaians imagined a promised land, I was quick to paint for them a troubled nation, rife with injustice [emphasis added]. For the Europeans who believed all Americans were fervid imperailists, gung ho to impose our brand of corporate capitalism on the world, I hastened to explain that the American people aren't the government -- that there is, in fact, a vibrant counterculture within the U.S that rejects our role as a global bully. [emphasis added] (pp. 182-83)

This is the voice of a politically correct, incredibly privileged American who deigns to right the misperceptions of Ghanaians who dared voice the mistake of thinking the United States sounds pretty darn good. Oh, please. This drips with the condescension of the "right-thinking" postmodernist for whom everything Western is bad, who can't wait to share the news with those backwards West Africans who retain the common sense to correct assess, for themselves, the opportunities for themselves and their families in the West vs. the Third World.

Isn't a tad arrogant to lecture people perfectly capable of coming to their own conclusions? Being an Anti-American American requires swallowing whole a vision of matters wholly confined to U.S. campuses, Sweden, Greece, Britain, and certain elites in Continental Europe and fringe Canada. Anyone who is open to a wide swath of information -- including Ghanaians with cousins who drive taxis in Chicago -- has a far more balanced and positive view of the United States than those living in the Echo Chamber of Envy.

The "global bully" remark also begs for an explanation. Let's see, who have we bullied ... the Taliban? Saddam Hussein? Kosovars?

Most people around the world are quite proud of the land that nurtured them. Whatever they can justiably brag about, from historic high points to the local soccer team, will be happily proclaimed. National or at least ethnic pride is close to a universal trait, in my experience.

The left-wing Westerner, and especially the anti-American American, must be a pitiable, confused creature to anyone from anywhere from Bolivia to Thailand. She has so much to be grateful for, they must think. I just don't understand. That is the land that raised her. Is she confused, or ungrateful?

I give a talk called "Becoming the Beautiful American" loaded with examples of hip, culturally sensitive Americans who far outshine European travelers in empathy and good behavior abroad. I also discuss the Beautiful American (p. 237) in my chapter on Brazil in An Amateur's Guide to the Planet.

At the same time, I stress that Americans should be proud to say who they are overseas. Leftists who put the Canadian flag on their backpacks thinking to fool foreign critics are as lame as it gets. Be who you are. All you do is confuse the heck out of foreigners dying to move here by hiding your nationality, or heaping criticism.

By all means, give a balanced view of your homeland. Hollywood depicts us as a nation of the outrageously rich (Dallas and Dynasty had huge worldwide impact) and also as a place of mean streets ridden with criminals.

Everywhere I've traveled, people have been obsessively curious about what is not on display in Hollywood's products, that is, routine suburban life: our grocery stores, houses, cars and jobs. Conversing with foreign people about daily routine, and honoring the U.S. genuine founding vision as a place of opportunity, are the hallmarks of the Beautiful American.

• posted by jbelliveau at 12:34 PM in Culture
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Thank you, Spain ...

... for rolling over and playing dead after your train attacks. Now you too have a "Black Hawk Down," a public demonstration that you lack the will of your terrorist enemy.

Islamic terrorists must be feeling pretty happy about now. Every attack they mount succeeds beyond their wildest dreams. Osama wanted hijacked airplanes to crash into the World Trade Center; he is shown in a videotape giddy that the towers, to his surprise, fully collapsed, and fairly quickly. The train bombing in Madrid easily toppled Spain's ruling party and will likely lead to withdrawal of its troops in Iraq.

Mainly, however, you have just radically increased the U.S. risk of a major terrorist attack before our November election and at no real net gain in your own security (see this column by Mark Steyn). George Will believes, however, that such an event would be less likely to have its intended effect of ousting President Bush.

Europe is constitutionally incapable of learning anything, is it. Let's appease Hitler, let's appease the terrorists in our midst, and the problem will just go away. If you blow up a bunch of our innocents, well, we must have had it coming for daring to displease a terror master.

Here's a gem from a Washington Post editorial: "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists," European Commission President Romano Prodi said yesterday.

As David Frum writes:

People are not always strong. Sometimes they indulge false hopes that by lying low, truckling, appeasing, they can avoid danger and strife. Sometimes they convince themselves that if only they give the Cyclops what he wants, they will be eaten last. And this is what seems to have happened in Spain.

• posted by jbelliveau at 12:27 PM in Culture
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March 15, 2004

John Kerry, fog machine

Wryly amusing column by David Brooks on the presumptive Democratic nominee:

The 1990's were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.

Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The gulf war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. "There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong" in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, "There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing."

A prediction: Kerry's lack of both achievement and popularity in the U.S. Senate make him a national version of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland's failed nominee for governor that Democrats simply could not get excited about. We'll see if enough Pavlovian anti-Bush fervor will truly transfer to the fog machine.

• posted by jbelliveau at 10:44 AM in Culture
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Gay marriage

See article at OpinionJournal.com on "Save Marriage? It's Too Late: The Pill made same-sex nuptials inevitable:"

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated.

In my opinion, the Pill is only half the equation: The other is assisted fertility, which allows everyone with money, from Michael Jackson to lesbian couples, to become a parent, without the slightest commitment to being in a genuine relationship with a member of the opposite sex.

• posted by jbelliveau at 10:41 AM in Culture
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March 13, 2004

Weight watching

Can you guess how many Hershey's Kisses are in "one serving" according to the nutritional information on the package?

ONE!

What a crock.

I am trying to lose weight before soccer season starts and it took a lot of willpower to hold myself to "four" "servings" yesterday when Lamont left me a small packet of Hershey Kisses. Usually "20" servings would feel about right.

Now it looks like the FDA will crack down on this nonsense. See this useful article in the Washington Post (it also tells you how to calculate your body mass index, which I never knew before):

The agency also sent letters to food manufacturers warning that it planned to be more aggressive about policing how labels count the number of servings in a package. Some labels are inaccurate or mislead people into overeating by dividing packages into unrealistically small serving sizes, officials said.

There is a suggestion in the article that restaurants begin to provide nutritional information, which I would love to have, even though on the other hand, this sounds bureaucratic and anti-"The Joy of Eating." I guess if we weren't a nation of fatties this wouldn't be necessary.

Your thoughts?

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:43 AM in Culture
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Takoma Park's resident spy

A resident of the People's Republic of Takoma Park, Maryland's crunch granola town just outside Washington, D.C. and a "nuclear-free zone," has been arrested on charges of spying for Iraq. Susan P. Lindauer describes herself as an "anti-war activist." The manager of the local food co-op in Takoma Park, with unintended comedy, notes in a Baltimore Sun article, "I'm surprised that [she] could be from around here."

If not Takoma Park ... where?

Reminds me of the time last year I arrived early to meet a friend at an organic cafe in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood and noted a "No Bombing Iraq" sticker on the front door. "So, you're pro-Saddam?" I pleasantly asked the waiter who seated me. "What?" she said. "Your bumper sticker," I nodded toward the door. "It's not as simple as that," she said in consternation.

"It's not?" I asked.

Don't everyone be so shocked, shocked when fringe liberals give concrete comfort to sworn enemies of this country.

Lindauer's black Mazda apparently sports a "War Is Not the Answer" bumper sticker. An identically worded banner often appears outside the Quaker's building on North Charles Street in Baltimore. It made me realize as I drove by that to the contrary, war is the ultimate answer to tyranny.

As P.J. O'Rourke noted in a book title, Give War a Chance.

Let me suggest some new bumper stickers for Lindauer:

"Treason Is Not the Answer"
"Feminists for Tyranny"
"Activists for Dictators' Sons' Rape Squads"

Oh, speaking of nutty feminists, did anyone see the hilarious Arrested Development last Sunday (Fox, 9:30 p.m., offbeat comedy) where the smitten son, George Michael, makes a poster for his "ethics" teacher who "loves" Saddam Hussein?!

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:36 AM in Culture
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March 11, 2004

Evil stalks

The entire premise of the question in this Washington Post headline, Victims' Relatives Still Ask, Why -- Snipers' Motives Remain Unresolved is based on the secular humanist belief in man as essentially good and perfectable.

Reading further, we learn:

During the trials of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, Larry Meyers often attended the proceedings, a poignant figure on a wooden courtroom bench trying to learn something about the men who killed his youngest brother, Dean.

He is still in the dark. Dozens of witnesses, hundreds of pieces of evidence and two sentencings later, he cannot comprehend what drove two drifters to become coldblooded snipers.

"I will never understand the total depravity of mind that causes something like this to occur," Meyers said this week as he left the Prince William County courtroom where Muhammad was sentenced to death. "I can never walk in those shoes and understand."

My heart goes out to Larry Meyers, in his quiet loyalty to his slain brother, but there is a good reason the snipers' crimes elude rational comprehension.

Religious believers know that man is flawed and struggling on his way to a relationship with God. There is good and evil in the world, and Muhammad and Malvo are evil made plain. One can readily envision the same Satan as strolls with a Mona Lisa smile on Golgotha in Mel Gibson's Passion as present in the sniper's blue Caprice as they mowed down innocents in Maryland, Virginia and D.C. [As A. Larry Ross notes today, The Passion is really a war movie, pitting good against evil.]

I recall a conversation in my kitchen with a housemate with a housemate holding a Ph.D. in psychology. I had just read a gripping biography of John Wayne Gacy (Tim Cahill's Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer). As with the sniper victims' families, the author ultimately could find no complete explanation for Gacy's murders -- achieved with careful calculation that suggested a sane mind -- without concluding that he may have simply demonstrated the real presence of evil. I asked my housemate about this explanation and she was utterly dismissive -- "It's not important."

So much for the ability of psychology to grapple with society's most dangerous individuals.

One can look forever for "motives" for the inexplicable monsters of history, and come up empty, if one holds that there is no higher presence in the world than that of humankind.

• posted by jbelliveau at 10:27 AM in Culture
• comments (2)
• permanent link

March 10, 2004

Martha Stewart, martyr

If you don't exactly know what to make of the Martha Stewart case, trying reading this interesting article by John O'Sullivan, who explains that she wasn't even charged with insider trading:

She was charged instead with obstructing justice during the FBI investigation into whether or not she had committed the crime. She had falsely claimed to FBI investigators that she had instructed her broker to sell the ImClone stock when it fell below a certain price.

Now, you can lie quite legally to private persons or to the state police (though it is highly inadvisable, as well as immoral, to do so). Lying is a crime either when the liar is under oath or when he is talking to federal investigators. And though Stewart had not committed the crime, she had lied about not committing it. If the law were not an ass, she would have been charged with obstructing injustice.

And, in today's breezy, anything-goes climate, Sullivan asks, "Was there any sign of the leniency generally shown first offenders? Quite the contrary: The prosecutors alleged that for her even to maintain she was innocent was itself a crime. "

Maybe this isn't exactly a case of a butterfly broken on a wheel, but it sure smells of big bad prosecutors with too much time on their hands.

• posted by jbelliveau at 1:41 PM in Culture
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March 9, 2004

Spalding Gray, R.I.P.

The noted monologuist has dropped off the twig, in dramatic fashion, his body found in New York's East River.

His Swimming to Cambodia enthralled me, with his observations of Thailand's pro-pleasure culture, and his daringly minimalist presentation ... sitting at a desk speaking. Geographers will love the fact, however, that he performed the monologue with a map on stage. I had lost track of his post-Swimming oeuvre, see books here and DVDs here.

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:51 AM in Culture
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Don't miss Jodie Allen

One of Washington's smartest women -- and therefore, one of Washington's finest minds -- is Jodie Allen, who understands and thinks about the big picture. She had an interesting piece, Maybe We Could All Deliver Pizza, in the Washington Post Outlook section on outsourcing jobs to foreign companies. Money graf:

So, short of crass protectionism, what remedies might we pursue? ...

... the White House is right that tort reform could reduce incentives for lawsuit-ridden employers to flee. Even more potent: detaching health care coverage from payrolls -- a move, [Kerry pollster Doug] Usher notes, that would also reduce worker anxiety about job loss.

Do look for health care at some perhaps distant point in the future to be untracked from employers and paid directly by individuals. Watch job creation explode at that point -- and huge pressure to cut health care costs from people who will shop around the way they do for groceries.

A discussion of Allen's article appears here.

• posted by jbelliveau at 9:39 AM in Culture
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March 7, 2004

Huntington and Mexican immigration

Also see the latest Foreign Policy wherein Huntington asks whether we really want Mexican immigration in such numbers that we lose the founding principles of the United States. Money graf:

[Lionel] Sosa identifies several Hispanic traits (very different from Anglo-Protestant ones) that "hold us Latinos back": mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in “education and hard work” as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to “buy into America.” Profound cultural differences clearly separate Mexicans and Americans, and the high level of immigration from Mexico sustains and reinforces the prevalence of Mexican values among Mexican Americans.

• posted by jbelliveau at 11:06 AM in Culture
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March 4, 2004

The ever-wise Peggy Noonan

From today's OpinionJournal:

"Mr. Kerry seems to me not a man of deep belief but of a certain amount of sentiment and calculation. One has the sense he is a liberal Democrat because of the time and place in which he was born, that he inhaled a worldview as opposed to struggling through to one."

What a marvelous turn of phrase! My entire first book describes a worldview achieved by walking on the ground of foreign lands as a route to learning. Worldviews achieved through struggling along seem so much more articulated than those received from "inhalation."

A quiz: Anyone remember the book that popularized the term "worldview" ? Post a comment if you do!

• posted by jbelliveau at 10:06 AM in Culture
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March 3, 2004

“The Passion of Christ”

Enjoyed seeing Gibson's film last Friday with my friend Janet Cook’s church group. I found it faithful to my vision of the Passion formed by reading my parent’s copy of The Day Christ Died by Jim Bishop many, many decades ago. Bishop’s book according to my musty recollections was fairly explicit about the actual details of the misery of dying on a cross.

The scourging was the part of the film that was perhaps the most inhumane of all. Gibson finds a style closer to Fellini than that of any American filmmaker to depict the hideousness of Jesus’s flaying alive -- a touch of the impossible, the unreal, a call to a buried awareness that such bullying could part of human nature.

I wondered as Christ staggered to Golgotha whether modern crucifixions would deter the crime rate. Certainly scourging looked like it would give pause to any post-Renaissance mind, even the knucklehead population of our drug-dealing street corner here in Upper Fells Point, Baltimore.

Here’s Richard Cohen’s take on the Passion, terming it “fascistic,” buttressing this observation with rather inpenetrable logic. He does acknowledge not being a typical viewer. One wonders about the futility of this column, an atypical viewer professing incomprehension, which could be summed up by the headline “member of the Mandarin class takes platform to demonstrate Mandarinness.”

• posted by jbelliveau at 2:24 PM in Culture
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