Spock and the Return to Paradise

In a scene from the 1991 movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a character asks the Vulcan science officer Spock about a painting on the wall of his living quarters. “It’s a depiction from ancient Earth mythology,” he explains, “‘The Expulsion from Paradise.’” Why does he keep it? “As a reminder to me,” Spock replies, “that all things end.”

Recently the life of Leonard Nimoy, the 83-year-old actor behind the pop culture icon Spock, came to an end. Nimoy, who did indeed live long and prosper, was a film director, poet, singer, photographer, and of course, actor; but it is the pointy-eared, Vulcan apotheosis of logic with whom he will forever be associated. Fans who grew up with the original Star Trek television series, as I did, or who came to know him through the show’s movie franchise, all felt the loss of one of the familiar touchstones of our youth.

“The Expulsion from Paradise,” or “Adam et Eve chassés du Paradis,” may hang on a Star Fleet officer’s wall in the distant future, but it currently resides in a museum in Nice. It is a beautiful image by painter Marc Chagall, the prolific French Jew whose work is shot through with joyful mysticism and Biblical imagery. The half-century-old painting is a dreamlike vision of the first man and woman being banished from the Garden of Eden. For Spock, this image of the end of the original paradise serves as amemento mori, a humbling reminder of the transience of all things, including us.

Coming to terms with the inevitability of our own death is, as philosopher Roger Scruton says, the most difficult trial human beings face. The end will come no matter how—or even whether—we choose to face it; our only freedom lies in finding serenity about it beforehand, says Scruton. Spock seems to have dealt with it by cultivating a certain detachment about death, which the Chagall helped him keep foremost in mind.

Whether or not Leonard Nimoy managed a similarly detached calm about his mortality, I don’t know. Like Chagall, Nimoy was powerfully influenced by Judaism (the famous split-fingered Vulcan salute, for example, derives from his Jewish origins). Like Spock, Nimoy’s rational and mystical sides wrestled. Although the title of volume one of his autobiography—I Am Not Spock—mistakenly led people to believe that he resented being associated with the Star Trek character, he actually had a deep identification with Spock, and he attempted to correct the misunderstanding surrounding the first book with volume two entitled, I Am Spock. So the dialogue quoted above may be as much a reflection of Nimoy’s attitude as of Spock’s.

But do all things come to an end, as Spock said? Perhaps it is truer to say that all thingschange. Death is a change, not an end—or as Scruton puts it, death is a return, a “transcendental homecoming” to the paradise to which we long to return.

Leonard Nimoy died at home. I hope that he departed on his transcendental homecoming with the same peace and equanimity with which his character contemplated the Chagall on his wall.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 3/9/15)

Tsarnaev’s Lawyers Will Paint Him as Victim

Nearly two years after three people were murdered and over 260 injured by a pair of pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line, the accused Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will go on trial for his life. His guilt is not in question but his attorneys will try to depict the (then) 19-year-old as the victim of his older brother Tamerlan’s influence.

Tsarnaev faces 30 charges in the bombings and the assassination days later of a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seventeen of the charges carry the possibility of the death penalty. His older brother Tamerlan died in a shootout with the police.

The Boston Herald reports that, in a sideshow bid for sympathy from the jury, Tsarnaev’s legal team plans to tow into court the entire 24-foot boat in which the fugitive was captured, so that the jury can appreciate the “context” of that April night in 2013. His attorneys want them to picture their poor client fearing for his life inside its blood-stained, bullet-riddled hull as the target of an intense manhunt. “You can imagine Mr. Tsarnaev lying in the boat as one might lie in a crypt,” said defense attorney William Fick.

What the jurors should imagine is Tsarnaev’s victims lying in crypts while their surviving family members grieve. “The bomb tore large chunks of flesh out of [8-year-old] Martin Richard,” said the prosecutor in his opening statement today, and the boy bled to death on the sidewalk as his mother looked on helplessly. Martin’s 7-year-old sister lost her leg. His father has significant hearing loss (many of the victims have perforated eardrums), and his mother lost vision in one eye. A close friend of the family stated that “the loss of Martin for the Richards is heartbreaking, and it leaves scars that will absolutely never heal. It tears their heart out, and nothing is ever going to make it right.”

Perhaps the jurors should imagine what that’s like instead of taking pity on the 19-year-old jihadist who planted one of the bombs mere feet away from the Richards family, and then, as the prosecutor told the jury today, stayed to watch the carnage, then calmly bought milk at a nearby Whole Foods, went back to school, and played video games.

Or perhaps the jurors could consider 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, who was also killed in the bombing. A friend who lost her leg that day tearfully testified today that she remembers being hoisted into the air and thrown back by the bomb blast. When she looked down at her leg, “my bones were literally laying next to me on the sidewalk.” Her friend Krystle “very slowly said that her legs hurt,” and the two held hands. “Shortly after that, her hand went limp in mine, and she never spoke again.”

Perhaps the jurors could reserve a little sympathy too for Krystle’s mother and father, who clung to hope for 15 hours that their daughter might be saved in surgery, only to discover that that patient was not Krystle, who had already died. “A parent should never have to bury a child because the hardest thing any parent has to go through is to lose a child,” said the father. “I don’t care if it’s newborn, 6 years, 30 years or 40 years. It’s very difficult.”

The jurors might also consider 23-year-old grad student Linzi Lu, whose life was also cut short by the Tsarnaev brothers. Her family still struggles with the grief. “Even little things can bring it all back,” her aunt said. “It’s been very hard, very emotional.”

MIT police officer Sean Collier, 27, was ambushed and shot in cold blood for his gun a few days later by the Tsarnaevs. “Sean was taken from us in a moment of extreme evil,” said a friend, “but that instant has never defined how we remember him on this campus.” 

Here is a list of the severe injuries suffered by the 264 wounded in the blasts, whose lives also will never be the same. Sixteen people lost limbs and at least 3 more lost multiple limbs. And yet Tsarnaev’s defense team wants the jurors to take pity on the poor fugitive who helped wreak that havoc.

Defense attorney David Bruck said the team intends to show that the younger brother’s motive “may well have been the defendant’s domination by, love for, adoration of, submissiveness to… his older brother.” Hopefully the jury understands that children often adore their older siblings but stop short of setting off bombs full of ball bearings and carpenter’s nails at crowded events in a bid for their love and attention. Also, the younger Tsarnaev was not a child. He was 19, and if you’re old enough to do the crime, you’re old enough to do the time.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Weinreb of the prosecution noted that the defense team’s boat sideshow is a naked plea for sympathy and a suggestion that law enforcement went after the poor boy with unnecessary force: “It’s fair to say what the defense really wants is for the jury to see a boat riddled with bullets,” he said.

But the prosecution would like the jurors to see the boat as well, or at least the jihadist messages Tsarnaev scrawled inside the boat in his own blood: “Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.” “We Muslims are one body. You kill one of us, you hurt us all.” Not to mention the references to Allah and martyrdom.

As the trial’s opening statements got underway today, Weinreb described Tsarnaev as “a soldier in a holy war against Americans” who was radicalized over a two-year period and believed that the U.S. was an enemy of Muslims. “He also believed that by winning that victory, he had taken a step toward reaching paradise. That was his motive for committing these crimes.”

In her opening statement today, defense attorney Judy Clarke said that her team will not “sidestep” her client’s responsibility, but they plan to portray Tamerlan as the mastermind. She showed the jury a younger photo of Dzhokhar and claimed that she will show how he went “from this to this.”

“The evidence will not establish and we will not argue that Tamerlan put a gun to Dzhokhar's head or that he forced him to join in the plan,” she said, “but you will hear evidence about the kind of influence that this older brother had.”

Clarke has saved a number of high-profile clients from the death penalty, including Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and Gabrielle Giffords shooter Jared Loughner. But perhaps this time the jury will recognize her client’s evil for what it is, and do the right thing.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 3/5/15)

Sharyl Attkisson, author of 'Stonewalled'

I'll be introducing former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel this Thursday March 12th. She will be speaking about her book Stonewalled and the Obama administration's obstruction and intimidation of journalists.

See more about this David Horowitz Freedom Center event here.

‘Cheers’ Actor: Bring Back Shop Class to Teach Self-Reliance

There was a time, before college became accessible to all and the computer revolution transformed our economy, when all American schoolboys were required to take shop class (the girls took home ec). But today, “shop class is dead,” declares Forbes, “and so are the potential tradespeople that would be born out of that early exposure to a tool or machine.” One celebrity understands how far-reaching is the impact of that loss, and he has undertaken to revive shop class and the spirit of self-reliance that it fostered.

Actor John Ratzenberger may not be a household name, but as Cliff Claven, the trivia buff mailman and Norm’s bar buddy on the long-running Cheers, he was a still-familiar face on one of the most-loved sitcoms in television history. That was just one role in Ratzenberger’s very lengthy acting résumé that more recently includes voiceover work in literally every Pixar animated film to date (Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, the Toy Story franchise, etc.).

In the real world, Ratzenberger is now behind an initiative to bring back shop class to middle schools and high schools across America. The aim is to re-instill the fading virtue of self-reliance to young students who have grown up at ease with the latest high-tech games and gadgets, but who are utterly helpless when faced with a common problem like a leaky pipe or electrical short.

On the Fox News Channel’s Your World last weekend, host Neil Cavuto introduced John Ratzenberger as a man who wants to get America “back to making things and not just buying things.” The actor told Cavuto that America was “built by people who knew how to use tools. That’s what brought us to the dance.” But “this is the first generation in the history of the world that has been raised not knowing how to use tools. So we’re in jeopardy.”

When Cavuto asked what was the use these days of taking shop, Ratzenberger replied that “It makes you a more well-rounded human being, more capable and self-reliant if you can fix your own screen door.” That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to make a career out of working with your hands, he adds, but the basic skills you develop in shop class are indispensable in our daily lives.

(As an aside, I was reminded of the dinner party scene in an episode of Mad Men in which 1960s ad man Don Draper strips off his dress shirt to deal with a spraying leak in the kitchen faucet. “Look, it’s Superman,” says one of the admiring wives. While fellow exec Pete is still digging around in the toolbox, Don reaches under the sink and fixes the leak, to the applause of all present. That scene perfectly reflects the manual competence and self-reliance that the man’s man Don acquired during a hard-luck youth, and that distinguish him from his less handy, more upper-crust colleagues.)

If you do choose to pursue a trade, Ratzenberger continued, “there’s a lot of jobs in manufacturing right now, a lot of jobs in construction, and there’s nobody to fill ‘em because we neglected to teach our children how to use tools and we’ve denigrated the image of manufacturing.”

Part of the problem is an increasing emphasis in recent decades on college and “knowledge jobs” over apprenticeship and manual labor. Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe – another celebrity who understands the value of skilled labor – once testified before the Senate Commerce Committee that “in a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a ‘good job’ into something that no longer looks like work.” And the result is an America that less and less resembles the self-reliant country that built itself into the world’s preeminent superpower.

To address this, Ratzenberger personally donated one million dollars to his project called the National Educational Initiative. The NEI promotes the joys of working with your hands to students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity for hands-on experience, so to speak, making or repairing things. It recently kicked off in Georgia, and Ratzenberger hopes to take it state by state across the entire country.

The NEI is part of Ratzenberger’s Foundation for America, which “exists to educate and prepare American workers, manufacturers, educators, innovators and leaders for an American manufacturing renaissance.” Its goal is to help “put more Americans to work, produce more American-made products, spark innovation, grow the economy and re-establish America’s rightful place as the greatest producer of intellect, products and people the world has ever known.” Reinstating shop classes in our schools lays the groundwork for that.

In the compelling Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford writes about the dignity and satisfaction of manual work that actually produces something of worth, as opposed to an information economy job shuffling papers in a cubicle: “A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world.” At a time when many Americans are yearning for meaningful work but are beginning to question the necessity of a college education, John Ratzenberger’s campaign could help regenerate respect for the honest labor of skilled tradespeople, and reinvigorate this nation’s do-it-yourself spirit of old.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 3/3/15) 

A Comedy of Terror

Last weekend Saturday Night Live presented a skit that mocked terrorists – no, not Tea Partiers, the usual butt of Hollywood’s jokes and DHS surveillance, but ISIS itself. The bit got mixed reactions – some found it in offensively bad taste, some appreciated the dark humor. This raises a serious question about comedy: is it ever acceptable to joke about terrorism?

In the sketch, the comedy show spoofed a sentimental Toyota commercial in which a father drops his daughter off at the airport to join the U.S. Army. In SNL’s version, however, the daughter is joining up with a band of, shall we say, less noble fighters.

“You be careful, okay?” says the dad to his teen daughter, just before she climbs aboard a pickup loaded with ISIS militants bearing their black flag and weapons. “Take care of her,” the tearful father tells one of the bearded terrorists. “Death to America,” he replies, and the pickup races off with terrorist guns blazing and tongues ululating. A voiceover concludes: “ISIS. We’ll take it from here, Dad.”

Many viewers expressed their dismay and outrage on social media. What was SNL thinking? How can anyone find a sketch about ISIS funny, particularly when there actually are instances of young Western women traveling to Iraq and Syria to join the bloodthirsty organization?

Terrorism is probably the gravest and most horrific of topics one could choose in which to look for laughs; there’s not an iota of humor to be found in the ruins of the World Trade Center, or the massacres in Mumbai or London or Madrid or Ft. Hood or Beslan or Kenya or Tel Aviv or Paris or anyplace else where murderous Muslim fundamentalists have struck. There is nothing amusing about the reality of ISIS barbarians enslaving women captives, burying children alive, beheading Christians… the list of horrors goes on.

On the other hand, one of our most potent cultural weapons against such fundamentalists (as well as the radical left) is humor – not by playing atrocities for laughs, but by attacking evil in the form of satire and ridicule. Totalitarians cannot bear being mocked; it discredits and emasculates them. Writers through the ages have successfully employed satire and farce to enable their otherwise helpless audiences to confront the ugly realities of power, politics, and war. Handled correctly, comedy can open up an accessible, empowering perspective on this grimmest of contemporary topics.

The problem lies in finding the target’s most vulnerable spot and striking with just the right balance of wit and incisive social commentary. As the saying goes, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” And comedy about terrorism is an even trickier endeavor.

It's been tried before. In 2004 a pair of screenwriters collaborated on a sitcom pilot called The Cell, about a sleeper cell of inept Muslim terrorists sent to America to blend in with the culture and ultimately blow up a power plant. The comic twist is, the jihadists are unable to resist the lure of American capitalist abundance and pop culture – Domino’s pizzas, big-screen TVs, talk shows and bowling leagues – and they have to conceal their unwillingness to carry out violent jihad from a ruthless superior who shows up to check on their progress.

The execution of the script was less inspired than the concept, but it was a good start at ridiculing the ideology behind the terrorism. The screenwriting team wrote it for themselves with absolutely no expectation that any studio would run with it – and indeed, though it was an underground hit with executives throughout Hollywood, none would touch it.

A less successful, but nonetheless produced example: a few years ago a British comedy film Four Lions portrayed a young Muslim Londoner and his ragtag group of fellow jihadists bumbling their way through an attempted terrorist attack: multiple suicide bombings during the heavily attended London Marathon. Sound hilarious? No, and it wasn’t. There were a few theoretically funny moments, such as when the group’s rattletrap car breaks down and they blame it on faulty spark plugs that were part of “a Jewish plot to control global traffic.”

But it was hard to laugh at their complaints about uppity women and un-Islamic music when there are real-world fundamentalists stoning women and bombing CD shops. It was hard to laugh at the loony accusation about Jewish car parts when the Muslim world is rife with just that sort of irrational Jew-hating conspiracy theory, and Jews are killed for it. It was impossible to find it funny when one of the terrorists talked about targeting Jews and “slags” – British slang for sluts, by which he means uncovered women who go to dance clubs – when one remembers the two car bombs, loaded with nails for extra carnage, parked outside a popular London nightclub in 2007, intended to go off on “Ladies Night” to kill as many “slags” as possible. It was impossible to separate the movie’s jokes from their disturbing real-world context.

And therein lay the problem with SNL’s skit: the humor wasn’t sharp enough to overcome the real-world context, and ISIS wasn’t even ridiculed; if anything, the joke was on the American father, representing Western cluelessness, who turned his daughter over to the monsters.

H.A. Goodman at the Huffington Post disagreed, posting an article with the hyperbolic title “‘SNL’s’ Skit Did More to Defeat ISIS Than Any Bombing Campaign. Satire Destroys Extremist Ideology.” Well, he got that half-right: a bombing campaign that atomizes a significant number of Islamic fanatics does go a long way toward reducing the threat, but satire is a withering weapon too.

Unfortunately, the SNL piece wasn’t on the same level as Charlie Hebdo’s slashing ridicule of Islam’s sacred cows like its prophet Muhammad. SNL didn’t make ISIS look bad, much less take on the ideology that inspires ISIS – they wouldn’t dare, lest they end up on the business end of death threats like the ones previously aimed at the creative team behind South Park, or the team at Charlie Hebdo, or more recently, at Twitter founder Jack Dorsey for cracking down on the accounts of ISIS supporters.

Yes, a bombing campaign isn’t enough. Our fight with the savages of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists must also be waged on the cultural battlefield, to diminish the reputations they work so hard to bolster through deftly produced recruiting videos. But in the comedy arena, it’s going to take a lot more effective work than one toothless SNL skit to win the propaganda war.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 3/3/15)

Jezebel Reporter Reluctantly Apologizes for Scott Walker Accusation

The left realizes that the fearless Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is becoming a serious threat as the right’s potential presidential candidate. So, true to their politics of personal destruction, the leftist media has united in a full-on pre-emptive assault to take Walker down. That included a blatant lie about the governor’s effort to conceal the reporting of campus rapes.

Last Friday Jezebel, a politics-and-pop-culture website replete with vicious and foulmouthed radical feminists, posted an attack on Walker written by “senior reporter” Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Vargas-Cooper is no novice to pop culture journalism, though she apparently doesn’t feel bound by any Old School journalistic standards of factuality and objectivity (and why should she? The mainstream media long ago decided that the aim of journalists should be, not fair and balanced reportage, but social justice activism). The daughter of leftist journalist Marc Cooper, her writing has been featured in all the usual media outlets from The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly to HuffPost and Salon.

Her short article, straightforwardly titled “Scott Walker Wants Colleges to Stop Reporting Sexual Assaults,” claimed that his proposed state budget “has a non-fiscal bombshell tucked in between its insane pages”:

Under Walker's budget, universities would no longer have to report the number of sexual assaults that take place on a campus to the Department of Justice. Under Walker's plan, university employees who witness a sexual assault would no longer have to report it.

There are no policy recommendations in Walker's budget how or what would replace these reporting mechanisms. The Governor simply instructs that they should be deleted.

Vargas-Cooper went on in a weak attempt to belittle Walker as “a small-time guy who is having a big-time moment by playing the conservative werewolf, a role Chris Christie and Jeb Bush are so far unwilling to play in their presidential bids.” She sneered at him as bearing the “CONSERVATIVE STRONG MAN card” – which is precisely the reason the left fears him so much: they recognize that Walker isn’t a soft RINO who can be counted on to roll over for them once he is in office, like the current Republican leadership.

Jezebel’s perpetually hate-spewing readership swallowed this false accusation whole and, in the comments section, responded predictably with head-exploding outrage, casual obscenities, and animated graphics called gifs in lieu of literate thought (“I can only express myself via gif” wrote one female commenter, which is no doubt true of her and much of the rest of Jezebel’s readers).

However, to paraphrase Vargas-Cooper herself, there was a non-factual bombshell missing from her article’s insane paragraphs: Walker neither wanted nor instructed the state university system to stop reporting sexual assaults. As noted by USA Today, it was the University of Wisconsin itself that asked Walker to delete a requirement that all 26 campuses report sex assault allegations to the state every year, because it already submits similar information to the federal government as well as posting that information on its website. USA Today also reported that Walker’s spokesperson confirmed that “protecting victims of domestic violence and sexual assault remains a top priority for the governor.”

But the left never apologizes and never plays defense (take heed, conservatives). So rather than Vargas-Cooper acknowledging the damning revelation about Walker and posting a retraction, she initially let the libelous headline stand and merely added an “UPDATE.” The original piece too remained unchanged, but at the bottom, Jezebel vaguely clarified that Walker was not at fault. Since the headline still reads as if Walker is waging a war on women, this is the newspaper equivalent of burying a retraction on page 17.

As reported at Newsbusters, The Daily Beast initially ran with the smear, as did blogger Ana Marie Cox, who later took down her tweet about Walker being “terrified of campus rape stats getting out.” The Feministing website declared that “With a swipe of the ‘delete’ key,” Walker “has eliminated efforts to combat campus rape from the state budget.” The progressive mouthpiece Rawstory repeated the false charge as well. Madison’s local progressive paper Capitol Times slyly wrote, “Does Scott Walker want colleges to stop reporting sexual assaults? It's not that simple.” Yes it is – the answer is no, but Jezebel and its cohorts in the media would rather not be bothered to acknowledge that because it’s more useful to spread the hateful lie that Walker is pro-rape.

Called out on Twitter about her hit piece, Vargas-Cooper dug in her heels with this begrudging bit of belligerence: “Ran an update on the Walker piece. Find another thing to be outraged about sweet, sweet Walkerites.” When Twitterites took her to task for this juvenile, bullying unprofessionalism, she doubled down: “Also, I'm not gonna apologize for reporting what was in the budget. Because that was in the budget. Ask your gov. to apologize for bad optix.” Right, it was in the budget – never mind that she lied about the entire context surrounding it and refused to apologize for it. The damage was already done, so for her it was “Mission Accomplished.”

But in light of the USA Today story, and after intense browbeating on social media, where conservatives actually have a voice, Jezebel finally issued another “update” – not described as a retraction – in which they announced that “We reported this piece without full context, and while this piece conveys factual information, omission of that context for that information presents an unfair and misleading picture. We regret the error and apologize.” The original headline smearing Walker still stands, however.

In the wake of that reluctant apology, the Daily Beast came out with a full-blown retraction blaming Jezebel but hinting that there were still problems with the sexual assault reporting requirement in Walker’s budget. At least they changed the headline to “Walker Unfairly Attacked on College Rape - ORIGINAL STORY RETRACTED.”

Finally, Vargas-Cooper herself broke down and admitted fault in a series of Twitter messages: “I realize now that it would have been worth a follow up phone call to Walker's office… So, you guys, Walker folk and media pundits alike, I screwed up… I know I said I wasn't going to say sorry but I hope you won't fault me for changing my mind.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of progressive journalism, where angry radicals in the guise of journalists don’t even bother pretending to care about the truth until they’re taken to task for it on social media. All that matters to the left is the total destruction of the target – in this instance, the Conservative Strong Man that progressives fear the most.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 3/2/15)

Information is Not Wisdom

What a scholar one might be if one knew well only five or six books. – Gustave Flaubert

Hardcore lovers of traditional books complain that ebooks aren’t as aesthetically satisfying, that a book’s digital rendering can’t match the sensory appeal of its physical counterpart. But there may be another reason to prefer the real thing: Kindles, Nooks, and other ebook delivery systems may actually be degrading our appreciation of books and the wisdom they contain.

Elisabeth Cervantes at the Intercollegiate Review wrote recently about “What Kindle Readers Should Take From Plato.” She notes that some college and high school classes are now allowing students to use Nooks or Kindles rather than be burdened by piles of real books to carry all over campus. Besides being more efficient, e-readers supposedly help the classroom keep pace with the march of technology and give students greater technological proficiency.

She quotes historian David A. Bell about how the internet and convenient technology are changing our relationship to reading. Bell warns of the danger, for example, of the seemingly innocuous “text searching” function – using your e-reader to locate a word or passage in a book:

Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge, searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.

Readers who simply pull what they think is necessary from a book and ignore the rest, writes Ms. Cervantes, will “never know the importance of context, or of seeing the parts in relation to an entire body of thought.”

Is this a valid complaint, or just typical sky-is-falling rhetoric about technology and the written word? There has always been resistance to new technologies that change the way we share words and ideas, from today’s smartphone texting all the way back to the printing press and before. Ms. Cervantes quotes the philosopher Plato, for example, who states in the Phaedrus that even writing itself “will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.” The result of relying on the written word, Plato feared, was that it would impart to students only the appearance of wisdom: “They will imagine that they have come to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.”

Perhaps this is what the internet and e-readers are doing to us. The technology puts virtually unlimited information at our fingertips almost instantly, convincing us that we are all potential polymaths, but in truth we are fooling ourselves about how thoroughly we understand any one thing. The novelist Flaubert made a similar point when he commented that one is more educated by knowing a handful of books deeply and well than by having a cursory familiarity with many. Search-driven reading discourages us from immersing ourselves deeply into books, and encourages us to divorce ourselves from the context that is crucial to our comprehension of them.

Information is not knowledge, as the historian Bell said, but more importantly, it is not wisdom, which is what the best books impart to us. The late culture critic Theodore Roszak – once a professor of mine – wrote a book in the mid-‘80s called The Cult of Information. In it he noted that the personal computer revolution of the time was bestowing a value upon the word “information” that it didn’t deserve. Simply processing information, which is what computers excel at, is the lowest order of thinking; wisdom grows out of ideas, which may have nothing to do with information. “All men are created equal,” for example, is a world-changing idea that contains absolutely no “information,” said Roszak. Similarly, search-driven reading is the lowest order of reading; it dredges up information but no wisdom.

The internet and ebooks aren’t going away, nor should they. We must simply be conscious of the ways in which our own technology manipulates and flatters us as readers and thinkers. We must have the humility to know how little we know and the patience to read for wisdom. “The most important thing,” concludes Ms. Cervantes, “is to accept the wholeness of a book, and to pass that love for the complete work on to students, family, and friends.”

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 2/27/15)

Campus Press Circles the Wagons Around SJP

Last Sunday, students on the campuses of UCLA, UC Irvine, Drake University, the University of Virginia, DePaul, and UMass Amherst encountered anonymously planted posters depicting the nationwide campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as being complicit in Jew-hatred and Arab terror. It was an eye-opening act of guerrilla activism against an organization that should be officially labeled a hate group.

One of the two types of posters depicts a photograph what appear to be a pair of masked, armed Arab militants looming over a kneeling man with a bag over his head – presumably a hapless informant or Israeli sympathizer. The text reads, “Students for Justice in Palestine” with the hashtag “#JewHaters” at the bottom. The same text appears on the other poster, a photo of a half-naked corpse being dragged along behind a motorcycle, an obvious reference to this instance of Hamas dragging the body of a suspected Israeli sympathizer through the streets of Gaza City.

College students require trigger warnings now for anything that could conceivably disturb their tender psyches, so this surprise, graphic exposure of SJP’s darker side no doubt unsettled many. JStreet President William Baker at the University of Virginia said he was “shocked” and found the posters “disturbing.” “When I saw it I was kind of shocked,” said one UCLA student. “It’s like hate speech, directed toward this one specific group.”

Naturally, the SJP itself has declared that the posters constitute hate speech: “They rely on Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes to paint Palestinians as terrorists,” reads the group’s statement, “and to misrepresent Students for Justice in Palestine as anti-Semitic.” In his own statement about the controversy, David Horowitz, who calls SJP the spearhead of anti-Israel aggression against Israel on American campuses, described this response as “fictional” and “typical SJP deception.”

Accusations of hate speech, of course, are the kneejerk reaction of the left and its Islamic partners in what Horowitz calls their unholy alliance to any opinion with which they disagree. This anti-rational, go-to tactic for shutting down opposition was very effective for many years, but it is becoming increasingly shrill, desperate, and impotent in the face of truth – and the truth in this instance is that SJP is a thinly veiled hate group that actively campaigns for the demonization and destruction of the Jewish state via economic divestment and even terrorism, through its support for the terrorist governments of the West Bank and Gaza.

Charges of racism and the mythical Islamophobia are a similar tactic. Evan Scribner, treasurer for the SJP chapter at UMass, said that the posters have Islamophobic and racist undertones and make SJP members feel unsafe on campus. “We don’t like the implications that anybody who cares about Palestine or anybody who is a Muslim or a Palestinian or an Arab is a terrorist or is violent,” he said. Of course that wasn’t the implication of the posters, but the fact is, if you truly care about “Palestinian” Arabs and don’t want to be associated with violent terrorism, don’t support the violent terrorists of Hamas.

For a full account of the many examples of SJP’s Israel-hating radicalism, check out the group’s profile here on the Freedom Center’s Discover the Network website. It relates the origins, development, funding sources and connections, and activities of SJP including the campus staging of Israeli Apartheid Week designed to portray Israelis as genocidal oppressors. That annual campaign includes students simulating the rape or killing of pregnant Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers, the establishment of mock checkpoints where the SJP harasses passing students, the placement of fake eviction notices on the dormitory doors of Jewish students, the display of “Apartheid” walls bearing images and text accusing Israeli Jews of genocide, and the harassment of Jewish students.

The Discover the Network profile further notes that support for terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades has been common at SJP chapters across the United States, and that some chapters hold annual commemorations for the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And yet the response of campus newspapers to the posters so far has been, not to investigate these actions and connections, but to circle the wagons around Students for Justice in Palestine. The University of Virginia paper’s response to the controversy was typical: it described SJP as “an organization advocating for human rights” and quoted SJP President Yahiya Saad as asserting that it is a humanitarian organization – no mention whatsoever of SJP’s radical activism, proving that serious journalism is dead and that SJP wields considerable nationwide influence on our nation’s campuses.

As for the timing of the posters’ appearance, Vice President of SPJP Luma Abunimer said that “in the last few days, we made an event on Facebook, Israeli Apartheid Week,” and that the use of the word “apartheid” can elicit strong feelings from pro-Israeli groups. Really? Perhaps that’s because smearing Israel, the only country in the Middle East that extends full rights to Arabs and Jews alike, as the equivalent of the defunct, racist South African regime is a disgusting lie.

Saad said that a possible response to the posters could be hanging posters adorned with the phrase “#loveheals.” Love heals. Tell that to the Arab and Jewish victims and survivors of terrorist attacks against the “oppressor” Israel, including 4-year-old Adele Biton, who finally succumbed to the brain-damaging wounds she received in an Arab rock-hurling incident at the age of two.

Caught off guard by the posters, SJP and their defenders at campus newspapers leapt to portray the group as eager to initiate “constructive dialogue” on the issue – in other words, they see this as an opportunity for further obfuscation about SJP’s real aims and means. The posters themselves actually constitute the most constructive dialogue, in that the blunt simplicity of the images cuts through SJP’s layers of deception and gets to the heart of the matter, which is that the true oppressor of Israeli Arabs and Jews alike is not Israel, but Arab terrorist entities and their supporters among campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/25/15)

Giuliani Speaks Truth to Power

At a Republican dinner event last week, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke the bold truth, something to which the progressive media and politicians of all stripes are unaccustomed, and the media pushback was swift and harsh. “I do not believe that the president loves America,” said Giuliani, something that has been obvious to many of us ever since Barack Obama hit the campaign trail prior to his first election. But this kind of blunt speech about the leftist Messiah simply isn’t tolerated, and so the media pounced.

Giuliani was expressing his frustration that Obama doesn’t praise America like even other Democrat presidents like Kennedy and Clinton have done; instead, he constantly criticizes, constantly apologizes. Giuliani blamed this partly on Obama’s unusual upbringing, echoing Dinesh D’Souza’s view of Obama as a man suffused with anti-colonialist animus.

Leftists commonly disdain patriotism as right-wing jingoism until they have their own love of country questioned by the right. They immediately lashed out to paint the 71-year-old Giuliani as a pathetic, racist nut. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest expressed pity for him: “It’s sad to see when somebody who has attained a certain stature and even admiration tarnishes that legacy so thoroughly.” CNN political commentator Errol Louis called Giuliani’s remarks “ugly, thoughtless, and divisive.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson declared the former mayor’s attitude “racist” and “kind of unhinged.” “If Giuliani’s Obama Smear Wasn’t Racist,” read Jonathan Chait’s headline in New York Magazine, “What Was it?” Giuliani is a “deranged” race-baiter, wrote the angry lunatics at Salon.com.

Even a surprisingly combative Megyn Kelly at Fox News took Giuliani to task for the remark and asked him if he planned to apologize, but he felt that his opinion was “perfectly reasonable” and worth repeating: “If we look at [Obama’s] rhetoric, he has not displayed the kind of love of America... the exceptionalism that other American presidents have displayed. That he has gone abroad and criticized us over and over again, apologized for us. Every time he does it embarrasses me.”

“This is an American president I’ve never seen before,” Giuliani concluded. None of us has seen a president like this before, because Giuliani is correct: Obama is of a different order from previous presidents. He is not merely an awful Democrat president like Jimmy Carter; he is the culmination of the radical left’s movement to dismantle America as we know it and rebuild it according to their vision of a social justice utopia. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said of Giuliani’s remarks that it’s fine to disagree with Obama, “but let’s agree on one thing: he loves this country.” But does he?

In a different interview, Giuliani pointed out that Obama has been deeply influenced by three notably anti-American mentors: communist Frank Marshall Davis, radical strategist Saul Alinsky, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “[Obama] was educated by people who were critics of the U.S.,” said Giuliani, putting it mildly. “And he has not been able to overcome those influences.” Obama has not overcome them because he hasn’t tried; he has embraced those influences. Could it be said of those men that they loved America?

You can love this country and still want it to be better than it is. Patriots can agree that there are many ways we could improve upon its greatness – but the fundamental transformation that Barack Obama has always promised is not an improvement; it is a radical re-envisioning. It requires ditching America’s core qualities and starting from scratch – a page one rewrite, as we say in the screenwriting biz. That’s not loving your country – it’s loving the idea of replacing it with a different one.

Obama doesn’t celebrate American exceptionalism. He proclaimed early on that he intended to recreate this nation into something that, to paraphrase his wife, he can be proud of for the first time in his life. Everything he has done since his first election demonstrates his dissatisfaction with – or even a contempt for – the traditional America that patriots know and love.

He has done everything in his power to knock this country off its superpower pedestal. He alienates America’s allies and empowers its enemies, including poisoning our relationship with Israel and bringing the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House. He has opened the floodgates of our borders. He has no respect for the Constitution or its constraints on his power. He is overloading the economy. He is the most divisive American president in living memory, if not in history, and that includes the despised George W. Bush. Are these the actions and policies and character of a man who loves this country?

Rudy Giuliani said he won’t recant unless he hears the president praise American exceptionalism and admit that Islamic fundamentalism is our enemy. I think we all know what the likelihood of that is. Nonetheless, “somebody has to raise these issues with the president,” Giuliani said. “Somebody has to have the courage to stand up.” Indeed, but few politicians or hopefuls on the right have that courage. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz called on Republican leaders to repudiate Giuliani’s statement, suggesting that bigotry was behind it, and indeed, prominent figures on the right were lukewarm at best in their defense of the former mayor. Governor Bobby Jindal more or less stood with him, but Governor Scott Walker refused to comment on Obama’s feelings for the country. Senator Marco Rubio said he has no doubt that Obama loves America, “but I just think his policies are bad for our nation.”

Obama’s policies are bad for our nation, precisely because he doesn’t love the United States, at least not in its current form.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/24/15)

Oliver Sacks, Mortality and Gratitude

Last week in the New York Times, bestselling author Oliver Sacks wrote that he has mere months to live. At 81 and in otherwise robust health, Sacks learned that a cancer which he thought had been eradicated when first diagnosed nine years ago is back with a vengeance and now cannot be halted.

The New York Times has called Sacks “a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine.” An accomplished neurologist and professor, he is the author of numerous bestselling books including fascinating collections of case studies of people suffering from neurological disorders. His book Awakenings was adapted into an Oscar-nominated 1990 film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat spawned pop culture offshoots from a chamber opera to plays to movie characters to an indie pop album.

Sacks hasn’t slacked off with advancing age. In the last 15 years alone he has published five books and completed an upcoming autobiography, as well as several other books he claims are nearly completed. He has no intention of letting his death sentence slow him down, either: “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he wrote. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

That’s an inspirational reminder. It is human nature to ignore the fearsome inevitability of our own death unless something like the diagnosis of a terminal disease forces us to contemplate it. And yet it is this very awareness of our mortality that prompts us to strive to live more fully. As the saying goes, nothing quite focuses one’s attention like the prospect of being hanged in the morning.

Sacks is no exception. He wrote that, since his prognosis,

I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight…

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

It must be a challenge under such circumstances to respond with anything but panic, regret, denial, anger, some other form of resistance, or a combination thereof. Sacks, on the other hand, confesses to some trepidation about dying but says that his “predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”

Sacks has lived a longer and fuller life than many, and he has the added benefit (or perhaps curse) of advance notice of the approximate time remaining to him. Sacks finds this to be cause for gratitude, too. Most of us do not know the hour when our turn will come. We could outlive Sacks or die today. That is, or should be, a sobering uncertainty, and by and large we have no control over the outcome.

But what we can control, and Oliver Sacks serves as an inspiring example, is how we spend each moment given to us. There is no time for anything inessential, as he put it, for any of us, whether or not we have yet received our terminal diagnosis. What we do with however much time we are given is what will enable us to face the end of it without panic, regret, and all those other forms of resistance. How we live is what will enable us to cultivate a sense of gratitude for what Sacks calls the “enormous privilege and adventure” of the gift of life.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 2/23/15)