THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
“Political correctness”
is not an annoying fad. It is a deadly serious means of
preventing public discussion of things that those in power
do not want discussed (for example, race, affirmative
action, illegal immigration).
—Fred
Reed
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.16 p.m., 13 April 2005►
GRACE NOTES
Free Jacko! That Michael Jackson has a depraved
interest in prepubescent boys is not in dispute. This is
not a crime, however, and this is not what he has been
charged with—but it
is what he being tried for. The prosecution has been
permitted to blacken his name by introducing gossip as
testimony: all the tittletattle that he groped Macaulay
Culkin, et al. Mac says Jacko didn't
molest him but no matter. Nor should it matter what Mac
says, because the person Michael Jackson has been charged
with molesting is not called Macaulay Culkin. Even before
the judge allowed this flagrant
misjustice I doubted that Jackson would get
a fair trial. Now I'm certain he won't. If Jackson is
convicted, then his previous convictions would be relevant
to his sentencing, but of course Jackson has no previous
convictions. Except in the media, but American celebrity
trials have nothing to do with justice. They're popularity
contests. Yes, we must all agree that Scott Peterson is a
bad man, and he probably killed his wife, but the
prosecution presented no evidence to prove it. No matter,
and Peterson is now on Death
Row. Robert Blake isn't; the difference
being that we must all agree Lacey Peterson was a
blameless woman, while Blake's unfortunate
ex-wife was a miserable bitch who probably
got what she deserved. My advice to Jacko: take advantage
of Marlon
Brando's offer while you still can.
If Jackson is convicted, he won't end up on Death Row,
but he will probably end up dead sooner than Scott
Peterson, one way or another. A great many people believe
that this would be just, but is it amusing?
Is forcible sodomy amusing? I have never thought so, but I
would appear to be in the minority here. The last time I
watched Saturday Night Live, David
Spade hosted, and the show featured two
sidesplitting skits about prison
rape. A great many Americans, perhaps a
majority, would seem to believe that prisoners get what
they deserve. After reading the description of prison life
in Tom Wolfe's A
Man in Full, I was sick with anger, but
I suppose this marks me as a "liberal." I wonder
if "law and order" Americans understand they are
only a couple of NSF cheques away from savage degradation
themselves.
Kelly Jane Torrance recommends
that we read Julian Sanchez's oh-so-brave broadside
against "political correctness" in the arts. I
should have known better, but I read it anyway. Therein I
was informed that "Mozart's Die
Zauberflöte" (actually, the libretto
is by Emanuel Schikaneder, but never mind) "contain[s]
racist elements" and "heavy-handed sexism."
This was pretty disturbing, but the good news is that
"Artists in past centuries were not necessarily as
enlightened as well-educated arts patrons circa
2005." Whew! Yeah, well, as they say, if you think
ignorance is expensive, try sanctimony.
Gene Healy recommends
that we read Clark Stooksbury's post
on the "infantilization of the American Right,"
and I was glad I did. Younger readers, familiar only with
the pungent pronunciamentos from Jonah Goldberg's couch,
may find this impossible to believe, but it was not all
that long ago that the American Right was a high-IQ
enterprise. But who needs Mozart when you have Gene
Roddenberry?
Terry Mattingly, the "anti-Borg" (all hail St
Gene!) at GetReligion, worries
that "the Vatican just doesn't get the blogo------."
So that's the problem! Mattingly is impressed by George
Weigel's contention
that Rome was caught short by the clerical abuse scandals
because "the Vatican is simply not, to this day, a
part of the Internet culture. There are a few people who
take the trouble to go online every morning or
evening." I could point out that the heavy lifting on
the abuse scandals was not done by the "blogo------"
but by the dreaded "MSM," by newspapers such as
the Boston
Globe, but that would constitute a sin
against the Holy Digital Ghost.
At 76, Ted Byfield is presumably closer to death than
me, but who knows? As Peter Blegvad sings, "You could
choke on your chewing gum." In his latest Calgary
Sun column,
Byfield examines the question of what constitutes a good
death. He recommends Nicholas Monsarrat's novel The
Cruel Sea in this regard. "The
ship has been torpedoed off Iceland in mid-winter. Many
men have died trapped inside her. A few jump into the
near-freezing sea, where they bob about in the dark,
perishing one by one. 'Some men died badly,' writes
Monsarrat, 'and some men died well.'" Thanks for the
tip, Ted. Should I ever find myself fighting the Battle of
the Atlantic, I'll keep it in mind. He continues, "To
Monsarrat, dying was not something that happens to you.
It's something you do, a task, your last job. You can do
it right, or you can mess it up. This explains those
curious observations in so many death notices. So-and-so
died 'after a valiant battle with cancer.' What are
So-and-so's survivors trying to tell us? They're saying
that So-and-so did it right. To use Monsarrat's term, he
'died well.'" So "dying well" means
maintaining the discipline expected of British naval
ratings, does it? Far be it from me to instruct the
founder of the Christian Millennial History Project on
theology, but it was always my assumption that "dying
well" refers not to the disposition of the body but
rather to the disposition of the soul.
"Valiant battle with cancer" is one of those
phrases like "devout Catholic": ubiquitous and
meaningless. Ever hear of a "craven submission to
cancer"? No, you don't, because the primary duty of
the dying is now not to God but rather to their relations.
Thrashing about in pain and terror is not only bad form,
it's a major buzz kill. Get this coward more morphine,
stat!
Determined to put the "ass" in
"class," Byfield favours us with a choice
account of the Pope's final agony. "John Paul II
certainly did it well. With his last iota of strength, he
crawled to the window, blessed the sea of humanity
assembled outside, then returned to his bed and shortly
checked out. It was a class act." Yes,
"class" is exactly the word that comes to mind
after one has just characterized the Pope's demise as
having "checked out."
In typically droll fashion, Mark E. Smith of the Fall describes
the buzz kill that resulted after he refused to suck up to
the hip young gunslingers of the New Musical Express:
This
sets Smith off on a rant about New Dads and their
biographers, Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons. He remembers
being summoned to the NME by Parsons and Julie
Burchill and promised a front page. "They were like:
‘The Clash have sold out—The Fall are the great new
communist band.’
"They
asked about my influences and I told them I loved Johnny
Cash. ‘You’ve just blown your cover,’ they said.
‘Too bad,’ I said, ‘he means a lot to people where I
come from.’ Then the other day I’m reading how much
Parsons misses the same Johnny Cash. Fookin’
revisionist!"
Revision
is the soul of style. A few years before Smith's
confrontation with the cultural commissariat, I was a
serious student of hipness myself. I would have denied to
the death I'd owned and loved Cash's San
Quentin and Folsom
sets, as well as albums by Sergio
Mendes, Burt
Bacharach and Glen
Campbell. Of course that was long
before Cash was taken up by Rick
Rubin, before bossa nova became
swell again, before Bacharach was anointed the Godfather
of Lounge, before Jimmy
Webb was anointed the Shelley of the
American Midwest. Everything naff is hip again.
I find Cash's American Recordings somewhat
hit-or-miss affairs. I like his version of "Hurt,"
but not in preference to Trent
Reznor's, while I find his version of "One"
preferable to U2's. Everyone raves about his cover
of "The
Man Who Couldn't Cry," but it's not a
patch on the original by Loudon Wainwright III, who was
and is scandalously underrated.
The blogger who calls himself "Edward T Bear"
took my Zhu
Jiang riff and composed
a witty set of variations on it. And William Stewart
writes, "Ah, but isn't Tuborg designated as being 'By
Appointment to the Royal Danish Court,' hence making it
the Official Beer of the Kingdom of Denmark?" I had
suspected something of this sort would be forthcoming, and
I stand to be corrected, but Tuborg's designation is not
so much an imprimatur as a nihil obstat, if
you catch my drift.
On the stereo, Peter Blegvad, Downtime,
"Crumb de la Crumb":
In
cemeteries of cement
it says on every monument:
"Consider How Your Time Is Spent
'Cos Soon Your Time Is Done."
The planet's condemned,
from sultan to skid row bum—
From the crème de la crème
to the crumb de la crumb.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.24 a.m., 12 April 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
I don't know about you, but
it is not apathy that will keep me from the polling
station on May 5. It is disappointment, disgust,
revulsion, loathing and anger. People go on about the
right to vote and how precious it is. Well, there are
times and places where the right not to vote is just as
important.
If the powerful present us
with a choice that is no choice, the only honest thing to
do is to stay away.
Both the big parties are, as
it happens, close to collapse.
Their members have died or
deserted. Their organisations are hollow, their leaders
Dalek generals yelling for obedience and amazingly getting
it.
The Liberal Democrats retain
credit only because they are virgins clamouring to be let
inside the brothel.
We all deserve better. This
is my manifesto, that this should be the last time we are
insulted in this way. I could carve a better party than
Labour or the Tories out of a banana. Once this fraudulent
poll is over, let us build new parties that speak for us
and not for them.
—Peter Hitchens, London Mail on Sunday, 10 April
2005
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.17 a.m., 12 April 2005►
BELLOWING
When you can't argue the facts, argue the received
wisdom. Jonathan
Yardley on Saul Bellow:
The Adventures of Augie
March is just about the last attempt at what every
American with literary aspirations not so long ago wanted
to write: the Great American Novel.
Perhaps that's why so many American novels are
unendurable. Why not try writing a good novel instead, and
let others decide later whether it is "great"?
And perhaps Yardley should lay off the hyperbole.
"Every American with literary aspirations"?
"Last attempt"? Really, now. But let's hear
Yardley's attempt to explain why Augie March is
great:
Its famous opening sentence
declares that there is a new voice in the land—"I
am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber
city—and go at things as I have taught myself,
free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first
to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock,
sometimes a not so innocent"—and that voice asserts
itself on every one of the more than 500 pages that
follow.
Five hundred pages of that pompous, self-satisfied
voice asserting itself? What an ordeal. Is Chicago
particularly somber? Since when? And how does one make
one's record by knocking? Or determine the characteristics
of "innocent" and "not so innocent"
knocking? This is piss poor writing. One wonders why
anyone would seek to emulate it. Well, Bellow sold a lot
of books, won the Nobel Prize and was a hit with the
ladies. Perhaps that's enough.
Speaking of waste matter, the London Times,
formerly a serious newspaper, asked John Podhoretz to
contribute his own remembrance
of the Great American Novelist. Podhoretz studied under
Bellow (and Allan Bloom) at the University of Chicago, and
the following passage demonstrates that he learned a great
deal, at least about prose, from the old windbag.
Bellow and Bloom, who had
both been students there, inhaled books and ideas the way
the rest of us breathe air.
Throughout his 56-year
career, Bellow sought to elevate the heart above the head,
feelings above thoughts, love of man above love of
reading. But his books come most alive when they reflect
and examine Bellow’s one true love, Western culture.
If ideas are in the air, as it were, why would Bellow
have needed to "inhale" books as well? How could
Bellow have extolled romance over ratiocination,
"love of man above love of reading," if his
"one true love" was "Western culture"?
How does a novel "reflect" Western culture,
anyway? Or, better still, "reflect" and
"examine"? So far, so maladroit. But what makes
this paragraph so delightfully bathetic is its inane
specificity. A "56-year career": so much more
glorious than a mere 55-year career would have been.
What Poddy Jr. has sought to elevate in his too-long
career is love of ideology. Bellow may have been "the
most distinguished American writer of the second half of
the 20th century," but was he one of us? "Was
Bellow a neoconservative?" The answer? "Not
really." Unlike the Pod People, who "became
full-throated American patriots and defenders of
capitalism, [Yay!] Bellow retained an aesthetic distaste
for American excess." [Boo!] Why it is not possible
to be both an "American patriot" and a
"defender of capitalism," while retaining a
distaste for "American excess" is a question
Podhoretz doesn't answer. Perhaps he considers it
self-evident that neoconservatism demands American excess
be worshipped. Which leaves little room for God.
According to Podhoretz, it was only in old age that
Bellow accepted the Almighty, in his inimitable
"free-style" way of course.
Saul Bellow was finally able,
as Mr Sammler says in the book’s last line, to fulfil
the terms of his contract with God—“the terms which,
in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As
all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know,
God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."
No, honestly, I don't. That pompous, self-satisfied
voice intoning rubbish again. According to Amazon.com, Mr
Sammler's Planet weighs 1,200 pounds,
so that voice asserts itself for many more than 500 pages
that precede the end of this Great American novel. But
perhaps it only feels that long.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.25 a.m., 11 April 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
When I was a schoolteacher,
the set book for one class was Herzog by Saul
Bellow, who has just died. I found it unreadable. I tried
another of his masterpieces, Henderson the Rain King,
and that, too, defeated me. I am a voracious reader but
Bellow strikes me as verbose, boring and self-obsessed. I
have never got to the end of one of his stories.
I recently agreed to preside
at a lecture by James Wood at the Royal Society of
Literature on the subject of Bellow and I discovered that
many of the young people there shared my feelings.
However, there were a few woolly, greyheads in the
audience nodding devoutly as Wood tried to find parallels
between Bellow and, of all things, the Bible.
Many of our best-known
contemporary writers, including Martin Amis and Ian
McEwan, appear to worship Bellow, but their
boring tributes serve only to remind me that Bellow was
the most overrated writer of his generation.
—A.N. Wilson, London Evening Standard, 8 April
2005
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.14 a.m., 11 April 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The better a novel is, in
literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel
succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film
succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so
many bad novels can become good movies, like Jaws
or The Godfather.
—Alexander
Payne
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.45 p.m., 8 April 2005►
RIP JOHN PAUL II
May the Lord receive Pope John Paul II into His Kingdom
and embrace him.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.48 p.m., 2 April 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Life is not a problem to be
solved; it is a purpose to be fulfilled.
—Joseph Conrad
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.24 p.m., 1 April 2005►
