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Monthly Archives: June 2004

POP CULTURE REPORT–JUNE, 2004

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Your faithful correspondent takes a look at the current scene…

The Movies

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third of the popular series, boasts a new director—Alfonso Cuarón—and a whole new dark attitude. A bad wizard has escaped from prison, and is out to get our Harry (Daniel Radcliffe)! The pic has exciting moments, but contains limited story, and is too long at 2 hours 21 minutes. It also relies way too much on CGI, perhaps to make up for the watering-down of what little plot exists in the book. Many who have read the book wonder how non-readers could follow the action, inasmuch as key details were inexplicably left out. (It’s not too hard.) Yet, helmer Cuarón and screenwriter Steve Kloves still have time for three separate stupid incidents of bad boy turned sissy Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) harassing Harry, Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson), only to be scared off when met with the slightest resistance.

Most of the acting is poor, with the notable exceptions of Gary Oldman as maybe-villain Sirius Black and David Thewlis as Professor Lupin (think of the French word for “wolf”). If you look quickly, you do get to see none other than Julie Christie pull a short-short cameo as landlady Madame Rosmerta.

Riddled with plot holes big enough for the proverbial Mack truck, and burdened with an unsatisfying denouement, its box office success proves that if you have a franchise and CGI, you don’t need anything else.

Fans of the late, great Roald Dahl will see his influence on the opening sequence covering Harry’s terrible home life. Imagine what Dahl could have done with this Potter thing…

As to the execrable Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 preaching to the choir of anti-Bush Lefties, what can we say? That the guy’s common man persona is a complete fake, that he exploits the grief of a “former” patriotic mom, whose son dies in combat in Iraq, that he engages in over-the-top conspiracy theories that can’t stand up to even the barest analysis?

Suffice to say that the success of this fat, ugly, obnoxious, sneering no-talent could only be possible in a media world dominated by venal, amoral individuals who at once fancy themselves the elite, but when you strip away the facade, emerge as the trash they really are.

Bush Haters and Clinton Lovers

Slick Willie is back in the limelight this summer with his new book. Would you believe that people camped out overnight to be among the first to purchase it?

Have you ever wondered why the Left seems to love the guy, even though he is no liberal? Consider that Clinton prominently upheld the death penalty in a case involving a retarded perp, and that two of his most touted (and there were precious few of them anyway) accomplishments in eight long years were welfare reform and balancing the budget. These are hardly the trappings of a foaming-at-the-mouth Leftist. So, exactly what’s going on here?

The answer, dear readers, is as easy to articulate as it may be difficult to accept. Remember those “venal, amoral individuals” mentioned above? Well, this country is chock full of them, and they’re not just in media. They’re in politics, education, industry, health care, religion, and living across the street from you. They didn’t realize that sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll was only supposed to be a passing phase of youth. They bought into it as a permanent lifestyle.

So, when Clinton was exposed as lecherous creep, who brought oral sex to the oval office, they loved it. One of their own as president. True, other chief executives fooled around, but FDR and Eisenhower were discreet about it, and JFK was boffing Marilyn Monroe, for Pete’s sake. True to form, he lied about the Lewinsky affair, but so would they!

Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he does operate on a somewhat better defined moral compass than his predecessor. Imagine, someone (almost) talking about objective good and evil. They can’t have that, since the existence of objective good and evil inexorably leads to the existence of God.

This simply would not wash with all the atheists and functional atheists, more numerous than you may care to believe. You might recall that Clinton even tested this once by deliberately misquoting the Bible. One of the beatitudes states

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. (Matthew 5:9)

Clinton rendered it, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will inherit the Earth,” using the tagline from “Blessed are the meek…” As he must have anticipated, not a single commentator noted this error, and many praised him for making the scriptural reference. This was absolutely not a mistake, but was a deliberate ploy, especially for a man whose entire life is scripted. Do you really think that in the preparation of the speech that contained the misquote, that a biblical reference would not have been checked?

Clinton and his groupies would have been better served to read on to verse 10…

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

FIRST, THEY CAME FOR THE TRUTH

Posted on by Posted in History, Politics

Most of us, in this PC age, are familiar with the following sentiments or some variant, supposedly written by prominent German Protestant theologian and pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) about the Nazis.

First they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Finally, they came for me and there was no one left to speak out.

Two things always bothered me about this passage. The first, of course, is that there are so many varieties of this “quote.” Sundry versions include Catholics, homosexuals, socialists, and Social Democrats, while the US Holocaust Museum itself omits the communists. The most historically accurate statement would have it in the order communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Jews. Moreover, “they” never came for Catholics or Protestants per se. Rather, they went after many Christian religious figures who spoke out against the Nazis.

Secondly, there is a complete lack of emotional focus, and the conclusion or punch line is at best facile, if not downright dishonest. He starts off confessing that he did not speak out when he should have, perhaps implying a collective guilt of all Germans. Indeed, Niemöller was a principal author of the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis (“Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”). The problem is that many people DID speak out against the Nazis—although it accomplished little, and even some, like Pope Pius XII, who did more than speak out, and actually helped Jews and others escape death, are now routinely pilloried in the Leftist press, even though Pius was praised after World War II by Golda Meir, and contemporary Jewish leaders.

Moreover, when the Gestapo finally came for Martin Niemöller in 1937, his life was spared because George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and others spoke up for him. In fact, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels urged Adolf Hitler to have Niemöller executed, but party ideologist, and probably the purest Nazi of them all, Alfred Rosenberg, hardly a humanitarian, argued against the idea as he believed it would provide an opportunity for people like Bishop Bell to attack the German government. Hitler agreed, and Niemöller spent the rest of the war in Dachau.

It must be noted that Niemöller was a fervent supporter of Hitler, and even volunteered to serve in the German Army in 1939. He got himself put into the infamous concentration camp merely for opposing Hitler’s control of the churches in Germany, and had never opposed Nazi racial theories. Far from it: In 1931 Niemöller made speeches arguing that Germany needed a Führer, and in his sermons he espoused Hitler’s views on race and nationality. This all came out in a mea culpa press conference he gave in Naples in June of 1945. Widespread public outcry prevented him from entering England after the war, his mission of reconciliation notwithstanding.

It was at this point that he became a committed socialist and peace-freak, campaigning against the formation of NATO, condemning Harry Truman as second only to Hitler as a mass murderer, praising Ho Chi Minh, and winning the coveted Lenin Peace Prize in 1967.

Some time after he died in 1984, the poem First They Came For The Communists began to circulate in all of its many forms, and nearly always with attribution to Niemöller. But there is serious doubt whether he wrote it at all, since it is not mentioned by either of his biographers [Dietmar Schmidt (1959) and James Bentley (1984)], and the anecdote most often cited to prove its origin cannot possibly be true.

In this fantasy, he is asked, in 1946, by some students how the Holocaust could have happened, and he answers with the poem. The source, though, is his second wife Sybil von Sell, whom he did not marry until 1971, who was a young child when this allegedly occurred, and could have no personal knowledge of the incident. Rather, she enjoyed the celebrity and was only too happy to feed the myth, offering no explanation of how such pearls of wisdom could have been kept from the public for 38 long years.

A more realistic assessment is that the poem was written by an anonymous Leftist, perhaps a friend of Niemöller’s, who knew that its turgid and vague sentiment would disappear unless credited to a well-known, if ultimately fraudulent “hero.”

Just one more deception brought to you by the usual suspects. What a surprise.

ON GOVERNMENTS, ANARCHY, AND MORALITY

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In a thoughtful 3500-word piece from December, 2002, entitled The Reluctant Anarchist, Joe Sobran describes his conversion from libertarian-conservative to philosophical anarchist. Sobran, regarded by most establishment conservatives as too Catholic, too blunt, and too anti-semitic for prime time, is at least reliable for bringing up topics that hardly ever appear elsewhere. And, for that reason alone, his columns often make for interesting reading.

He is surely correct when he notes that

“[n]o constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution meant, steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power.”

This, of course, refers to Lincoln’s war, and the notion, defended by force, that the so-called free association of states somehow precluded any of those same free states from seceding. Apparently, it still “pains” him to admit that, for all practical purposes, the U.S. Constitution is a “dead letter.” At least he admits it! What about everyone else? From Lincoln’s dictatorial usurpation of power to FDR’s massive expansion of the Federal Leviathan, to our more modern phenomenon of the Leftist courts misapplying the Constitution to establish an atheistic and libertine oligarchy, where is the outcry?

The outcry, such as it is, is still to be found mostly on the Internet and talk radio. But even if all the elite media suddenly became conservative, turning this mess around would still be very much in doubt. Blame it all on partisan politics.

Ultimately, there is no political reward for remaking the country. Rather, there is reward only in winning elections. But even this simple paradigm must now be tempered with political correctness, it would seem. Surely Karl Rove knows that had George W. Bush received a scant 3% more of the White vote in 2000, he would have won an electoral landslide. However, spending less time on the unattainable minority vote was simply not in the game plan, and he very nearly lost.

The closeness of the election demonstrated quite clearly, to anyone not in serious denial, that the constituencies of both major parties are tenuous, relying on appeals to emotion and little else. The Democrats can count on the mindless tribal votes of minorities who never knew that the Dems were the racist party before 1964, the Jews who continue to support the Dems because their grandfather liked FDR, the pro-abortion zealots, the homosexual lobby, and the anti-Christian crowd.

Meanwhile, even though the Republicans don’t stand for anything, they can count on the nominal conservatives who must oppose the Dem agenda, those with some religion and vestiges of patriotism, and the dreamers among us who believe that heading for all-out socialism at 55 miles per hour is preferable to the same destination at a higher speed.

Just don’t expect leadership. Read, if you care to, the recent 117-page mind-bogglingly outrageous decision by US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Planned Parenthood v. Ashcroft, that upheld barbaric partial birth abortion, even as it has been overwhelmingly condemned by people of all political stripe. There are many items to mock in this incredibly poorly written decision, but this excerpt from page 36 will give you a taste, wherein the Fed’s experts—all renowned physicians arguing against the procedure—are effectively disqualified.

“Accordingly, this court found that the government

WHOM TO BLAME?

Posted on by Posted in Current Events, Politics, Religion

In just the past few months, we have witnessed the redefinition of marriage; the removal of a ten commandments monument from a state courthouse; judicial affirmation of partial birth abortion; and here in Los Angeles, the effacing of an obscure cross from the official seal of LA County.

Many of us are scratching our heads and asking how it is that America, replete with thousands of churches, synagogues, and religious schools could have turned, outwardly at least, into little more than an atheistic cesspool with a pious gloss. To answer this comprehensively, of course, would consume multiple Ph.D. theses, and could fill several long books. Still, I will toss out a few ideas in this essay.

First of all, if it makes you feel any better, most of the rest of the world is even worse off. Take whatever comfort you can, for example, in looking at Europe, formerly known as Christendom, where morals are lower, virtue goes unrecognized, and a nihilism seemingly worse than what existed in Germany during the Weimar Republic has taken firm root. But, for the majority of Americans, anything outside of our borders is of limited interest, unless we want to vacation there. Cold comfort, anyway, to be living in a higher rent district of Hell.

Some, such as Thomas DiLorenzo blame most of the decline on the dictatorial secularist welfare/warfare state, neoconservatives, and especially in DiLorenzo’s case, on Abraham Lincoln. Far be it from me to ever defend Lincoln, but even if I agree with Robert E. Lee’s observation that the destruction of states’ rights and the transformation of the American government into one consolidated empire was sure to render it despotic at home and aggressive abroad, it does not follow that this monolithic federal government was going to promote an atheistic, pagan agenda. In fact, it did not really begin to do so until the 1960s, one hundred long years after Lincoln’s miserable presidency.

Radio talk show host Neal Boortz blames it on “…how truly stupid the American people are.” In the linked article, he cites numerous examples, and who am I to disagree? This may not sound PC, but what good does it do for you to be an informed voter, if one of Boortz’s fools, taken in by media hype [you do know, don’t you, that more Americans get their news from Entertainment Tonight than from any other single news source] has a vote equal to yours? Related factors here are a destroyed public education system, public complacency [don’t be judgmental] and culture rot, all rapaciously exploited by the evil Left.

As a conservative Catholic, I would have to lay some blame at the hierarchs of my own Church. Perhaps there really were some good intentions behind Vatican II. The novus ordo Mass is doubtless more accessible, and not only because it is celebrated in the vernacular. Revising the liturgical calendar was also an improvement. Nevertheless, after reading many Vatican II documents, it is difficult to avoid concluding that they were purposely written to confuse, rather than enlighten. The many references to the pivotal importance of one’s conscience, without elaborating on the necessity of properly forming that conscience, was far too in keeping with the times, and led countless souls astray while it undermined Church authority.

And it certainly didn’t help the popular image of the Church’s moral teaching authority when the sexual harassment crisis emerged in the late 1990’s. The infiltration of the chancery by the Lavender Mafia had been an open secret for at least 30 years, and precious little was done about it. Even now, the disparity between moral leaders like Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, and shameless weak liberals such as our own Cardinal Roger Mahony, supposedly presiding over the same church in merely different regions, evokes the Founder’s words (Matthew 18:6-7)…

“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!”

Ultimately, in a free country, the people get the kind of government and culture they want, and they are thus responsible, even if they are ignorant, since many, if not most, choose to be that way. But this does not mitigate one iota the dereliction of duty of those in charge. It was the freewheeling folkie/Leftie Richard Fariña, who died young, and before the 60’s got out of hand, that sang about the “prey of a foul command.” How right he was.