Dear Weekend Jolter,
God forbid that thee, me, or anyone in range of North Korea’s popguns gets nuked by one of Rocket Man’s projectiles, whether aimed or stray. But even if the haircut-criminalizing, basketball-rule reinventing sociopath actually hands over all the fuses, does that require pretending that this sadist is a misunderstood frat boy who’d have been an Eagle Scout if only daddy had hugged him more? Is he really worthy of being anyone’s “friend,” Satan aside?
Another question: Could Pudgy, Pops, and Grandpa be history’s most twisted hereditary trio? The author of this missive votes yes. The current chief Commie inherited North Korean’s gulag system from Kims Il-sung and Jong-il and has kept the antique running in perfect condition. And yet he is . . . “very honorable.” And seven times 13 equals 28.
Yours Truly files this on Wednesday (places to go, people to see, airports to loiter). Who knows what grand headlines will appear between now and when your eyes get joltified. Still, Mardi Gras is upon us, which means that Lent is as well. This correspondent and his stained soul have much to atone for and many meals not to eat for atonement’s sake. As we get fitted for our ashes, let’s at least enjoy this week’s edition. May it prove worth your sweet while.
But First, Let Me Ask: Are You Getting Enough Vitamin Sea?
Which is our way of saying, please do check out www.nrcruise.com and consider joining us this August for NR’s glorious Canada/New England cruise.
And then Let Me Encourage You . . .
. . . to sign up for the NR Institute’s 2019 Ideas Summit (it’s taking place March 28-29 at the Mandarin Oriental in Washington, D.C., — and only a handful of the hotel’s discounted group-rate rooms for Summiteers are left). Seriously, we have a couple of big-name confirmed-speaker announcements coming up next week. But this week we added to the already terrific speaker roster Congressman Dan Crenshaw, Senator Marco Rubio, White House “Office of American Innovation” chief Brooke Rollins, and our old colleague Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.
And at the Thursday night, at the Whittaker Chambers Award dinner, we’ll be honoring Mark Janus — yep, of Janus v. AFSCME — for being a profile in courage.
So sign up now. And book that last hotel room now (chop chop: our discount “deal” expires on Monday, March 4!). Register and find complete information here.
Editorials
1. And so it now seems that Democratic presidential wannabes will — until the next wacky idea — anchor the party’s primaries on the demand for slavery reparations. As our editorial says, “It’s an unserious proposal, but we’ll do its authors the courtesy of offering a serious answer anyway.” From the ensuing intellectual drubbing:
Paying reparations for slavery is a terrible idea because there is no one to pay reparations and no one to pay them to. There are not any slave-owners left among us and haven’t been for some time. There aren’t any liberated slaves, either. Slavery was a terrible crime and, like all such enormities, it was carried out by real people who inflicted unconscionable suffering on real people — specific people, individuals.
Our progressive friends like to talk about their high regard for “diversity,” but they are blind to the real thing: Neither the white population of the United States nor the black one is homogenous; relatively few living white Americans are the heirs, however distant, of slave owners, and a significant and growing population of black Americans has no link to antebellum slavery at all. Some of them, like Barack Obama, are the offspring of more recent African immigrants; others are immigrants from the Caribbean and elsewhere who may have family links to slavery but not to American slavery. The question of what it means to be an “African American” grows more complex by the day.
Such considerations are significant if we are to avoid sinking into the morass of willful racism as a public-policy criterion, insisting upon collective racial culpability and collective racial entitlement. These ideas are alien to the fundamental American creed of individual rights and individual liberties — indeed, we have been at our very worst on racial issues when we as a nation have failed to live up to those ideals, as unfortunately has been the case all too often in our history.
2. A new Trump Administration rule, which will ban the use of federal “Title X” family-planning funds “to perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning,” will put a hurt on Planned Parenthood’s treasury. Which makes us smile. From the editorial:
Planned Parenthood wants to be considered a benevolent health-care provider rather than the nation’s largest abortion business, and it wants the cachet of the federal government’s treating it as a valued and non-controversial partner. Hence the frequent, though long-debunked, claim that abortion makes up a mere 3 percent of the organization’s activities. Planned Parenthood’s own annual report tells the real tale: Last fiscal year alone, its facilities performed upwards of 332,000 abortion procedures, well over one-third the estimated abortions in the entire country. Its new president, Leana Wen, was more candid last month when she said that “protecting and expanding access to abortion” is the group’s “core mission.”
So Planned Parenthood and its allies are fighting the new rule for both philosophical and practical reasons. It disagrees with the administration — and with longstanding American law — about whether abortion should be considered a legitimate method of family planning deserving federal funding. And the organization is unwilling to keep its Title X funding by financially and physically separating its abortion business from its other operations. Abortion is its bottom line, not a rounding error.
3. The best possible outcome of the talks that never should have happened in the first place . . . happened, when President Trump walked away from — rather than getting rolled by — the despicable Rocket Man. From our editorial:
Worse, Trump couldn’t help but make boosterish comments about the Supreme Leader, who enslaves and immiserates his people. In Hanoi, he even professed to take seriously Kim Jong-un’s denial that he had anything to do with Otto Warmbier’s murder, as if rogue security services are kidnapping and torturing Americans on their own initiative in the most tightly controlled society on Earth.
All signs were that the North Koreans were heading to a diplomatic win, getting sanctions relief — as well as a U.S. liaison office in Pyongyang and a formal end to the Korean War — in exchange for steps to dismantle its Yongbyon enrichment facility. This is a version of the sucker’s deal that the U.S. has fallen for time and again with the North. Pyongyang’s play is to pocket any economic relief and diplomatic recognition, and then cheat on its commitments. Indeed, President Trump revealed that we are aware of a second, heretofore unknown enrichment facility.
For whatever reason, though, the North Koreans pushed Trump on sanctions relief further than he was willing to go, and the president left the table.
Lent Approaches, So to Prepare for Fasting, this Week We’ll Offer Only 12 Selections from NRO . . . But Be Assured, They Are Plenty Meaty!
1. You’ll enjoy the excellent follow-up to Dan McLaughlin’s reflections of the presidency — and “proud” record — of Ulysses Grant. From the Part Two analysis:
Taking the reins of a war-weary nation at the tail end of a turbulent period in international affairs, Grant’s chief concern was to still the waters. As general of the Army, he had pushed for an invasion of Mexico to dislodge the French and chase out ex-Confederate adventurers such as Jubal Early whom he suspected of further hostile intentions. Then–secretary of state William H. Seward, however, counseled patience, and three events in 1867 vindicated him: The French-backed regime in Mexico fell, Seward completed the Alaska purchase, and the British established the unified Dominion of Canada (in part a response to the realization in 1861 that Canada was unprepared to fend off a feared American invasion). By the time Grant took office, North America was quiet.
The great foreign-policy success of Grant’s tenure was the peaceable resolution of the CSS Alabama claims. America demanded damages from Great Britain, still the world’s most powerful empire, over “neutral” British provision of a warship to the Confederacy. Grant and his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, managed an international arbitration that gave a substantial monetary award to the United States, reduced tensions with Britain so successfully as to set the two nations on the path to a long-term alliance, and established a new model for the resolution of international disputes. The Alabama precedent was so respected internationally that Grant was later asked to mediate a dispute between China and Japan.
Grant failed at his other major foreign-policy goal, the American annexation of Santo Domingo, the territory that would become the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s island neighbor, which had failed in its first try as an independent state and gone through a period of renewed Spanish control, was receptive to an American purchase, but tenacious opposition in the Senate shot down Grant’s plan. Where antebellum efforts to annex Latin American territory aimed at plowing new fields for human bondage, Grant had other purposes for seeking to annex the Dominican, which he envisioned as an American state: exploiting its natural resources, providing a domestic haven for African Americans fleeing southern repression, and building a naval base to control the approaches to a future Central American canal. (As it happened, it would be a generation before the canal would be built, but the Suez Canal had opened in 1869 and a canal across Panama or Nicaragua was already eagerly anticipated.)
RELATED: Here’s Part One of Dan’s Grant analysis.
2. Rich Lowry’s new column sacks Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots’ owner, who was busted in a Florida sex-parlor sting that shines a spotlight on the lucrative sex-trafficking trade that enslaves thousands of trapped women. From his piece:
The women were lured from China with promises of legitimate work and then trapped in a life of sexual slavery. They were working to pay off debts incurred traveling to the United States. Some of them had their passports confiscated. There was no choice and no escape from a nightmarish existence that makes a mockery of the glamorous image of prostitution in much of the popular culture and belies the term “sex worker.”
Sex with up to a thousand men a year. No change of clothes. Sleep on massage tables. Food from hot plates at the back of the parlor. Moved around from one parlor to the next as pawns of the traffickers.
And this is a major business. According to the anti-trafficking group Polaris, the country’s 9,000 illicit massage parlors make $2.5 billion a year.
They are such a lucrative industry only because the Robert Krafts of the world are patrons. He is a billionaire, famous and the owner of one of the most successful franchises in sports. He presumably has access to women, indeed dates an actress and dancer nearly 40 years younger than he is. He doesn’t have to go to a strip-mall massage parlor for sex.
3. Jim Geraghty nails the phony who is the junior senator from Vermont (by way of Brooklyn and Moscow): Bernie Sanders will attack billionaires but not socialist thugs who starve the people of Venezuela. From his Morning Jolt:
There’s an amazing inversion in Sanders’s worldview, as some of the villains he denounced most frequently were the Central Intelligence Agency, private hospitals, banks, and of course, “millionaires and billionaires,” no matter how they made their money.
Maduro’s stepsons allegedly plotted to skim $200 million from the state-owned oil company, and there are other claims of an attempt to embezzle $1.2 billion. Hugo Chavez’s daughter is believed to be the richest woman in Venezuela, with a personal fortune of more than $4 billion hidden in bank accounts in Europe. (Finally, Bernie Sanders found some “millionaires and billionaires” that he likes.)
Bernie Sanders is a sucker, who will always give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who claims to be a socialist. Most of us, at an early age, recognize that people who claim to act on behalf of others can be selfish. Plenty of people who say they love humanity turn out to treat individual human beings terribly. Plenty of leaders who claimed to fight for freedom turned out to be lusting after power and ruthless in getting it and keeping it. You have to be careful who you trust with authority, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. And you have no obligation to defend someone you once saw as an ally once they start abusing their power and demonstrating cruelty and brutality.
4. More Bernie: The Kid from Brooklyn (no, not Danny Kaye) headed north to establish his particular Burlington brand of foreign policy, which involved much dictator up-cozying. Michael Brendan Dougherty reviews the record of the Commie-lovin’ ex-mayor. From his piece:
In his decades-long career in politics, Bernie Sanders was never more active as a foreign-policy figure than when he was the mayor of Burlington, Vt. He owned it. “Burlington had a foreign policy,” he wrote in his 1997 book, Outsider in the White House. From his mayoral perch he fired off missives to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, demanding better treatment of IRA prisoners held in Northern Ireland. He tried to establish direct relations with the incoming Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, hoping to establish a radio channel that would broadcast the revolution to Vermont. The mayor met with Daniel Ortega to convey that many Americans rejected the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Ortega, in the many years since, has looted his country, installed hideous light fixtures along the major roads to please his wife, suborned much of the Catholic Church to his rule, and blown past his own constitution’s term limits. The country is sliding into unrest, as the aid that used to come in from the Netherlands and Luxembourg has dried up.
As mayor, Sanders cemented a sister-city relationship between Burlington and the Russian city of Yaroslavl (he and his wife spent their honeymoon in the Soviet Union). Sanders was diplomatic during his trip. After a presentation on central planning, Sanders told his Soviet peers that health care and housing were better in the United States, though they cost much more back in America. When he came home, Sanders praised Soviet train stations and “palaces of culture.” His wife was even more effusive, almost describing the theory of New Soviet Man, when she described a cultural life that wasn’t cleaved off from work, as a mere hobby, but fully integrated into an ideal of community service. Burlington’s foreign policy, as it was then, was driven by idealism (some of it misguided), lots of easy talk about imperialism, and dislike of “Ronald Ray-gun.”
5. George Weigel believes Cardinal Pell, scourge of the miscreants who turned the Vatican Bank into their plaything, was railroaded in his trial in Australia. Not every accusation of a Church “prince” rings true, especially when the reasons for a set-up are galore. Read the analysis here.
6. Kevin Williamson looks at Elizabeth Warren and sees Election’s Tracy Flick, determined and insincere. From his article:
Senator Warren is a seeker after celebrity. She never had much of a legal career (she wrote wills and the like from home) and instead sought the pseudo-celebrity of academia, which offers many attractions: gentle workloads, security, a measure of prestige, and — not least — a stage. Academic life can be very rewarding — Senator Warren and her professor husband earn nearly $1 million a year between them — but that wasn’t enough. Warren became an author of dopey self-help books and an occasional cable-news guest, instructing Lou Dobbs on the tribulations of the middle class. She found a bigger audience in activism, and a bigger one still after securing a very safe seat in the Senate representing Massachusetts, from which comfortable perch she pretends to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted — she’s very comfortable with some of the comfortable, including the big corporate law firms that sponsor her campaigns — as she seeks, ever hungrily, after larger venues.
What she believes is . . . contingent. She was, not too long ago, a full-throated advocate of school choice, writing: “With fully funded vouchers, parents of all income levels could send their children — and the accompanying financial support — to the schools of their choice.” That kind of heresy does not get you nominated by a party run by public-sector-union bosses, and so she has evolved on that and other issues. She reminds me of the womanizing football player in Infinite Jest who approaches his potential conquests with cheerful honesty: “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.”
7. Dennis Prager opines about the many stunned leftist spectators who wish deeply for this: that the attack on Jusse Smollett had really happened. From his column:
There is no doubt that most Americans on the left, including black Americans, are distraught over the fact that Smollett faked the “racist” attack on him. Apparently leftists, Democratic leaders, and, most depressingly, many of his fellow blacks wish Smollett had been attacked by white racist homophobes.
Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.), a white leftist, tweeted, “I hope this was not something that Mr. Smollett did to himself, or created.”
Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart told MSNBC there has been “an atmosphere of menace and hate” since Donald Trump was elected president, which made “people want to believe” Smollett’s story. Exactly. Capehart, a black leftist, wanted to believe that racists yelling “This is MAGA country” beat up blacks.
Another black leftist who writes hate columns for the Washington Post, Nana Efua Mumford, wrote: “I wanted to believe Smollett. I really did.” Again, exactly. Mumford wanted to believe that racists yelling “This is MAGA country” beat up blacks.
8. Congressman Jeff Duncan warns that non-citizen voting is the next big cause for the Left, and urges conservatives to take up the fight. From his article’s wrap-up:
Finally, there’s the mutual-benefit argument, which suggests that if aliens are allowed to vote, then they can make common cause with other marginalized groups in our society, and come together for the mutual improvement of our country. This is a classic example of how identity politics erases individuals. Who is to say that a single male alien from Honduras has the same interests as, for example, a female high-school principal who is an American citizen in a low-income community? It is just as likely that they have competing interests. The Honduran might be a construction worker, and therefore might benefit from reduced taxes on the construction industry, while the principal might benefit from increased spending on education. The history of immigration and assimilation is littered with these types of examples.
Part of the reason that none of the stated arguments put forward by leftists hold up to logic is that, even when advancing the radical policy of noncitizen voting, they can’t state their true view: that drawing a distinction between citizens and noncitizens of the United States is immoral. It’s the same principle that leads them to oppose both securing the border with a wall and enacting effective immigration enforcement measures. But, in the same way that a strong border is what protects the citizens of the United States from drug trafficking and terrorism, a strong border between who is and is not a voting member of our Republic based on citizenship protects and upholds the legitimacy of our institutions. Opposing the radical position on noncitizen voting is certainly a worthy effort for conservatives.
9. New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: John Fund writes that Zimbabwe’s new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is as bad as his predecessor, the vile Robert Mugabe. Fund explains that he is helping turn the resource-happy country into Africa’s version of Venezuela. From his article:
Ordinary Zimbabweans have every reason to fear not only the military but every part of their government. Last week the government ended the practice of pegging the value of Zimbabwe’s dollar to that of the U.S. dollar, a 2009 reform that had finally ended the nation’s hyperinflation. Fears of a new round of hyperinflation has helped reduce food reserves such that the nation’s grain-millers’ association says there is now only a week’s worth of wheat in reserve. Zimbabwe now produces less than half of its annual wheat consumption, even while having some of the most fertile farmland and one of the most temperate climates in the world.
During my visit to Zimbabwe, every local I spoke with was wary of being quoted on the record regarding their real feelings about the government. “Everyone keeps their head down for fear it will be chopped off,” said “Captain Jack,” the nickname that one of my drivers from the airport uses in dealing with visitors. “No one has any confidence these people will ever leave power.”
When I asked an employee at my hotel if he had heard of the situation in Venezuela, he just laughed. “Oh, yes, we know about them. We would only remind them that their Hugo Chávez came to power 20 years ago. Our versions came to power nearly 40 years ago.”
While blacks I spoke with were proud that they had won independence from white rule in 1980, they were embarrassed that the country has been so mismanaged since then. “Zimbabwe has all the ingredients to be a successful state — good land, minerals, hard workers, modern farming techniques, proximity to markets in South Africa,” says Rejoice Ngwenya, head of a Zimbabwean free-market think tank. “We don’t have a government that builds on that.”
10. Victor Davis Hanson says Candidate / President Trump’s blunt attacks on China now appear to be the once-horrified establishment’s position. It’s an amazing 180. From the piece:
In Silicon Valley, the good old news of making trillions of dollars over the last 30 years in outsourcing assemblage to China, opening up a huge new Chinese consumer market, and entering joint partnerships has insidiously been eclipsed by the growing reality that our techie masters of the universe were instead deluded Dr. Frankensteins who had helped to birth an unstoppable monster.
Technology was stolen, either by espionage inside the U.S. or by formalized theft as the cost of doing business inside China. Copyrights and patents did not bother China. The scale of environmental damage inside China did not diminish, but accelerated and was manifested abroad. There was no sense of symmetry; in dealing with China, the idea of commercial reciprocity, shared environmental protocols, generalized notions of international commerce — all that simply did not exist. And the reason it did not exist wasn’t sloppiness or insensitivity; it did not exist by design, owing to the Chinese’s arrogance that they were the rising sun and the U.S. was in its twilight — with a few exceptions granted to some of the Western elite who were getting rich largely by accommodating the Chinese warping of trade and technological theft.
Financially challenged colleges and universities had come to rely on full-tuition-paying Chinese students. When stories spread that some Chinese students were acting as organs of the Chinese Communist Party, actively engaging in espionage, or illiberally bullying any critics of China, colleges either ignored such news or regarded its bearers as racists and xenophobes.
11. And then there was the fifth and final part of Neal Freeman’s excellent series, a personal spiritual journey, if you will, about a man in a sincere search of faith, not apparitions; a go at the New Testament; a wondering about the answer to the refrain: Is that all there is? From his essay:
I picked up a Bible given to me in the middle of the last century by Grandmother Freeman. I should report that it is in embarrassingly pristine condition. In a single sitting, and relishing every verse for its King James diction, I read the four Gospels. (Biblical scholar alert! Avert your eyes from what follows. We have disturbing reports of an amateur thrashing about on your turf.) John, who seems to be the heartthrob of doctoral students with his propensity for complexity-verging-on-opacity, did not do it for me. William Blake may have been thinking about John when he wrote: “Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.” I have nothing against John, personally or pastorally, but I have only one lifetime to spend on this project. Nor did Mark or Luke make the tumblers fall into place on my particular combination lock. Both of them are duly chiliastic, but they tend to veer off into clubhouse chatter in what amounts to a Members-Only lounge. I have been elevated from the waiting list, praise the Lord, but I’m still no more than a provisional member of His club.
But Matthew! The much underrated Matthew! To my untrained eye, he must be reckoned either a) the apostle with prophetic powers greater even than the God whose earthly life he chronicles; or b) the world’s most reliable stenographer. The latter seems far more likely, with Matthew cast as the wire-service reporter who, after swearing off color and hype, locks in the timeline and then nails the quotes. Take the sermon of all sermons, which launches in Chapter Five. Matthew records the Beatitudes with what appears to be absolute fidelity to somebody’s original text. We not only have the perfectly sculpted “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth,” but we have the soaring, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” Ask yourself: Did Matthew jot down rough notes at deadline, making up stuff like a cable news guy with five minutes to air? Did Matthew get a sketchy translation from some descendant of a shepherd who claimed to wander by the Mount that day? Or did Matthew transcribe faithfully the timeless Word of God in all its shimmering beauty?
12. The beginning of this article by Alexandra DeSanctis may be the saddest paragraph National Review has ever published:
A moral catastrophe unfolded on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Monday. Forty-four Democratic senators voted against legislation that would have required doctors to give the same care to infants who survive abortion procedures that they would give to any other infant.
Lights. Cameras. Pundits!
1. Kyle Smith thinks Spike Lee is a heinie (I was going to write “ass” but this is a family email) for how he acted at the Oscars when his film got denied the Best Picture honor. This is how the piece ends:
Who throws a hissy fit because he wins only one Oscar? I and many others share Lee’s dim view of Green Book, but his outburst was childish, ungentlemanly, unacceptable, and completely ridiculous. No doubt many an Oscar non-winner has tossed an ashtray over the mantelpiece back home after the show. No doubt many have lashed out at managers or assistants on the phone. But to carry on a public meltdown in the middle of the winner’s acceptance speech is outlandish. Lee should apologize, but if he doesn’t, he should never be invited back to the ceremony again, much less be nominated again.
Will that happen? Of course not. Such is the masochism of Hollywood progressives — thank you, Sir, may I have another! — that if anything, Lee’s crybaby act pretty much guarantees he’ll win an Oscar if he ever again makes a film that is a hair better than mediocre. Given that most of Lee’s films are so terrible (Bamboozled, Red Hook Summer, Oldboy, Miracle at St. Anna) that they disappear without a trace, it may be difficult for the Academy to pretend Lee deserves to be honored. But right now all those Beverly Hills bolshies are thinking: Go, Spike, go! Stick it to the Man! Now, Carlos, bring the Mercedes around.
2. More Oscars: Armond White decries their racialization. From his piece:
Filmgoers who maintain their starry-eyed innocence about journalism, the Oscars, and the politics of the movies cannot sense how socially backward and culturally deceiving the racialization of the Academy Awards has become.
A few examples: The very showy acting prizes (which journalists call “the major awards”) went to performers, Mahershala Ali and Regina King, who were repeatedly defined by their racial identity.
What went unmentioned was that each played racially and socially stereotyped roles: It is Ali’s second win for playing a gay man (his first was for Moonlight), and King won for portraying yet another of the Academy’s most favored clichés, the mammy.
When former Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs purged the Academy’s elder members a few years back and instituted quotas to include more ethnic-identified voters regardless of industry status and experience, she set the stage for so many recent race-based Oscar nominations and wins. What looks like social progress was merely rigged electioneering. a politicization of the arts. Through improper journalistic acceptance — and extension — of this practice, film culture is turned into self-congratulatory propaganda.
3. Even More Oscars: No glamour, no pizzazz, so B-listy! Kyle thought last Sunday’s affair was a stinker. From his take:
For the first time ever, all of the acting Oscars went to character actors, four people the average American would not recognize if they were waiting in line ahead of you at the DMV. Sorry, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but your bid to regain a high place in American culture is failing. No one tunes in to the Oscars to get swept away by a Mahershala Ali win, or Olivia Colman, or Rami Malek, or Regina King. All four are talented performers, but the Oscars have always been keen to balance meritocracy with star worship. Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock are not great actresses, but they won their Oscars for Erin Brockovich and The Blind Side because it was their turn, and it was their turn because each of them had charmed us oncreen for many years. If the Oscars forsake glamour and magic — if they lose interest in that mystical quality that movie stars have but mere actors do not — they risk becoming the Independent Spirit Awards. Which are broadcast to an audience of tens on IFC.
When Bradley Cooper suavely escorted Lady Gaga to the stage to sing their duet “Shallow,” from A Star Is Born, then unexpectedly picked up the mic stand and went to sit down next to her at the piano, it was the only time all evening that produced a shiver of movie magic. These two are intriguing, they’re stars, and they multiplied each other’s radiance by sitting close together, casting each other a sidelong look that said, “I’d like to rip your clothes off after the show.” What Cooper and Gaga delivered is what we crave from Hollywood, but it was the only jolt of feeling we got the entire evening. It was the only time there was enough star wattage to power up a small flashlight.
4. My dear colleague Mary Spencer has come to the defense not so much of Woody Allen, but of his art. Do debatable accusations make Annie Hall trash all of a sudden? From the piece:
Although most people are far from perfect, that does not prohibit one from doing and making worthwhile art in the course of a life.
Maya Angelou famously said that as a child she thought “Shakespeare must be a black girl” because his works affected her in a unique and profound way. Her words also highlight the fact that sometimes we place too much importance on who the artist is instead of what he or she produces. Shakespeare’s works didn’t speak less to Maya’s heart, and not because he was a white, British man born in the 1500s. In a similar blind assessment of art on its own merits, if someone awful makes something beautiful, we can still recognize it as beautiful.
The allegations against Allen differ from those against Alfred Hitchcock, for example, whose jealousy and perversion made the process of filming unpleasant. Nobody has accused Allen of emotionally or sexually abusing anyone on set. Yet we are now meant to feel guilty about watching Allen’s movies, while there is a significantly fainter stigma and less public criticism that detracts from Hitchcock and his work.
It makes sense to reject or dismiss art that itself is borne of unpleasant or hurtful circumstances created by the artist, because then it is the art itself that is in question — people should not physically or psychologically suffer unduly for the sake of some director’s presumed genius. But as for a movie that was made under fine conditions, to protest it because of unrelated claims against the director misplaces the blame, to the detriment of justice.
5. Kyle watches the new two-part, four-hour HBO documentary on Michael Jackson, Neverland. Maybe only senators who support infanticide would not be nauseated by the story of the Pop Singer / Serial Pedophile. From the end of his review:
Years after their time with Jackson, both Safechuck and Robson married and had children, and becoming fathers triggered more revulsion at what had happened to them. The final 45 minutes or so of the documentary delve into their depression and torment as well as that of their mothers, each of whom searches her soul at excruciating length. What can it be like to know that you abetted the long-term despoliation of your own son? Safechuck says Jackson abused him for four years; Robson says his nightmare lasted seven years. Both mothers own up to what they did, and neither will ever be able to live with herself again. Says Stephanie, “I danced when I heard that he died.” She thought, “Oh thank God, he can’t hurt any more children.”
Throughout the film, everyone involved marvels at his or her own acquiescence to the acts of a monster. No one heard any alarm bells going off. No one saw any red flags. Both boys and their mothers were fully in the singer’s thrall. Jackson’s fame was central to why he got away with so much. Leaving Neverland is a harsh reminder that supposed role models who ought to be held to the highest of standards can use that notoriety as a way of blinding people to the obvious, odious truth.
6. Armond takes in the cautionary thriller, Neil Jordan’s Greta. From the review:
Is Greta scary? Does it work? Those questions can also be asked of socialism advocates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, who practice political versions of the same deception that Greta deploys on Frances.
This isn’t the top of Jordan’s oeuvre, but sometimes movies gain fascination for the way they absorb and reflect the day’s social currents, including our media-inspired anxiety. That’s what’s so striking about the IMAX scene where Frances instinctively reacts to the artificial replacement for real-life experience. Jordan is aware of how movies and myths operate as a substitute for memory. His horror film offers a metaphor for the Old World failures that naïve millennials dangerously mistake for progressive political alternatives.
7. Kyle finds Apollo 11, director Todd Douglas Miller’s new IMAX documentary, to be “breathtaking.” From the review:
The level of danger Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong faced is dizzying even 50 years later. Oh, three hours before launch, there turns out to be a leak in the rocket? No worries, it’s merely liquid hydrogen. Men were still tightening bolts as the three astronauts were boarding the ship. What is going through your mind if you’re one of this trio? “Uh, fellas, I can’t make it this time, I have a headache . . . I think I left the oven on . . . I don’t want to miss All My Children . . . for the love of God, am I really strapping myself into a 360-foot stick of dynamite?”
It’s gobsmacking how Miller manages to flay the nerves when recounting a historical event, but when dumped into the middle of it all, you’re keenly aware that from this vantage point no one knows how this mission will turn out. Looked at up close, the degree of difficulty of every aspect of the voyage is phenomenal. Using animated diagrams and readouts plus film shot aboard the rocket, together with glimpses of controllers in Houston, the director breaks the mission down into discrete segments, any one of which seems like arrogance even to attempt.
The Six
1. In the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports on the escalation of Maduro’s brutality in Venezuela, where the tide is turning against the thug and his Cuban backers. From her piece:
Before Hugo Chávez, democratic Venezuela suffered corruption and misrule but seldom tyranny. That changed when Chávez imported castroismo. Since 2002, thousands of peacefully protesting Venezuelans have been victims of chavista snipers, National Guard beatings and executions and attacks by brownshirts riding motorcycles. Opposition members have been dragged off to dungeons, tortured and convicted by kangaroo courts.
Most recently there has been a targeted crackdown by the Venezuelan special forces in poor neighborhoods that have turned against the regime. On Sunday independent Venezuelan media reported that Mr. Maduro is liberating common criminals from jails with instructions to attack democracy advocates.
As the smoke cleared Sunday, Mr. Maduro and his Cuban handlers still had the upper hand. Yet something big has changed. With so many regime atrocities now recorded and circulated on social media and the privation triggering a mass exodus, Venezuelan suffering under Havana control is no longer ignored.
2. In The American Conservative, Robert W. Merry finds the idea of a socialist like Bernie Sanders being elected President in 2020 is not so far-fetched. From his piece:
If Trump’s presidency is the product of referendum politics, then it also is a product of the country’s willingness to try new things when the political class screws up. Hardly anyone thought Trump could be elected because few analysts sufficiently took into account the degree of ennui and anxiety in the land. But to many Americans, that ennui and anxiety rendered thinkable the prospect of a Trump presidency, whereas in normal times his boorishness and repellent traits would have made him entirely unthinkable as a president.
The campaign of 1980 was also waged in unsettled times, with raging inflation mixed with economic stagnation, sky-high interest rates, and fears of Soviet expansionism. Yet the conventional wisdom was that incumbent Jimmy Carter would likely win reelection because challenger Ronald Reagan was just too erratic, too extreme in his conservative views, and too much of a lightweight. But Reagan won big, not because the electorate suddenly turned conservative in its collective political outlook, but because the incumbent had squandered his claim to the job and because unsettled times called for trying new things, meaning a new president.
3. Very interesting survey data on socialism by our pal Scott Rasmussen from the week prior. From his analysis:
Sixty percent (60%) of voters nationwide believe that Socialism represents a threat to America’s founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance. A ScottRasmussen.com survey found that 53% also see populism as a threat to those ideals. Thirty-eight percent (38%) say that’s true of capitalism and 29% see free markets as a threat to those values.
For a small minority of the population, threatening America’s values is part of the appeal of Socialism. Thirteen percent (13%) of all voters have both a favorable opinion of Socialism and see it as a threat to American values.
The survey also found that just 28% of voters see Socialism as primarily an economic ideology. Seventy-two percent (72%) see it as more concerned with other societal issues. The numbers are the same for Populism. However, voters overwhelmingly view capitalism and free markets as primarily an economic ideology (see question wording and crosstab results).
These differing perspectives help explain what some see as a strange disconnect in perceptions of Socialism today. Among American voters who have a favorable opinion of that ideology, 82% also favor free markets. However, it should be noted that most (61%) who like free markets do not like Socialism.
4. Sins of the Fathers, or, How Jesuitical: The College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany reports that Georgetown University is considering imposing an annual fee on all students to fund reparations. From her story:
Georgetown University students will soon vote on whether they want to tax themselves to benefit the descendants of slaves sold by the university in the 1830s.
Its student government recently authorized a campus-wide student referendum on whether to establish a fund for the families of the 272 men, women and children sold by Georgetown in 1838.
If approved, the semesterly fee would begin to be collected in the fall of 2020 and start at $27.20 per student “in honor of the 272 people sold by Georgetown,” states the student government resolution approving the referendum, a copy of which was obtained Wednesday by The College Fix.
“The proceeds of the GU272 Reconciliation Contributions will be allocated for charitable purposes directly benefiting the descendants of the GU272 and other persons once enslaved by the Maryland Jesuits — with special consideration given to causes and proposals directly benefiting those descendants still residing in proud and underprivileged communities,” the resolution stated.
5. These are my people (half of me anyway) and now that they have thrown themselves into the arms of unfettered abortion, they move on to legal Jew Hate. At Gatestone Institute, Peter Baum blasts the new Irish law that sticks it to Israel. From his piece:
Parliamentarians in the Republic of Ireland are displaying an unprecedented level of hostility towards Israel, unparalleled by that of any other member state of the European Union — inviting the question about Ireland’s long, distasteful history of anti-Semitism, which clearly predates the frequently used pretext of hating the State of Israel.
The “Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018” — supported by the Republican and Nationalist political parties of Fianna Fáil, Sinn Fein and Independents — would ban the import of goods from Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines (the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights). The Irish legislation not only coincides ironically with the U.S. Senate passage of a motion to prevent anti-Israel boycotts, but also constitutes a breach of European trade law.
More disturbing is the combination of ignorance and anti-Semitism displayed by the purveyors of the bill, and evident in their view of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute cause as well as conflicts around the world.
6. At the Foundation for Economic Education (a.k.a FEE) Donald J. Boudreaux makes the case for Frédéric Bastiat having an even standing in the pantheon of economic theorists. From his article:
And so we return to Bastiat. He’s one of history’s most brilliant tellers of economic stories. This fact, I’m convinced, justifies calling Bastiat a great economic theorist.
Consider Bastiat’s famous 1843 “Petition of the Manufacturers of Candles.” In this short essay, Bastiat radiantly conveyed economists’ understanding that artificially contrived scarcities make the general population worse off even if they increase the wealth of a small handful of individuals. Who other than the most benighted protectionist can read Bastiat’s satirical portrayal of sunlight as an unfairly low-priced import and not go, “Aha! Of course inexpensive imports that ‘flood’ into a country no more impoverish that country than does the light sent to us free by the sun!”
Another example is Bastiat’s even-shorter essay “A Negative Railway.” Here Bastiat revealed the flaw in the argument of a gentleman who insisted that if a railroad connecting Paris to Bayonne were forced to have a stop at Bordeaux, the wealth of the French people would be enhanced. The hapless target of Bastiat’s brilliance based his conclusion on the correct observation that forcing trains to stop at Bordeaux would increase the incomes of porters, restaurateurs, and some other people in Bordeaux.
BONUS: Stephen Moore reveals “The Four States of the Apocalypse.”
“I Want to Report a Murder”
“Who was murdered?”
“I was.” If you’ve never seen the great 1950 film noir – D.O.A. – starring Edmond O’Brien, you gotta.
Baseballery
Some 58 men have ended their MLB career by smacking a home run in what turned out to be their final at bat. To many, the most famous of these is Ted Williams’ 521st and final dinger, a solo shot off Orioles reliever Jack Fisher (also infamous for leading the NL in losses in 1965 and 1967) on September 28, 1960, at Fenway Park (the Sox won in the bottom of the 9th).
But maybe the best of the lot belongs to Reds utility infielder Ramon Santiago, in his 13th and final season, who came to bat at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park in the bottom of the 10th on the afternoon of September 27, 2014. On the mound for the Pittsburgh Pirates was reliever Bobby LaFromboise, who inherited loaded bases. And then, with two outs, on a 1-0 pitch, Santiago emptied them. His walk-off grand slam won the game for the Reds, 10-6. What a way to say “adios!” Speaking of which . . .
A Dios
Such a world, hellbent on blood sacrifices, carried out on babies (cowards!), while crowds cheer as governors sign madness into law and legislators commend infanticide. God, what gives?! Remember, man, thou art dust: Time for penance, if not for yourself than for those who through the mercy of the Ancient of Days will benefit from your mortifications. Have a wonderful week.
God’s blessing on you and yours,
Jack Fowler
Abuses, accusations false and true, mockery, insults, jabs, blather, and all else (including subscription complaints and any variations of grandmother’s recipe for pizza rustica) can be sent to jfowler@nationalreview.com, who may or may not answer depending on the intensity of the nervous breakdown initiated by your remarks.