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)

Fighting Terrorism with Social Justice

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf became the target of much ridicule last week when she inanely suggested that we can combat Islamic terrorism through job creation. But the concept makes perfect sense to an administration that considers the solution to every issue, including “violent extremism,” to be “social justice.”

You will no doubt recall that Harf, while on MSNBC’s Hardball hosted by the befuddled Chris Matthews, claimed that we cannot beat ISIS simply by killing them; we also have “to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups,” citing a “lack of opportunity for jobs” as an example. She suggested that the U.S. should work with other countries to “help improve their governance” and “help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.”

In subsequent TV interviews, Ms. Harf doubled down on her original comments and explained that she was speaking about a broader strategy that her critics were too dense to grasp:  “Look, it might be too nuanced an argument for some, like I’ve seen over the past 24 hours some of the commentary out there, but it’s really the smart way that Democrats, Republicans, military commanders, our partners in the Arab world think we need to combat this.”The notion that poverty causes Islamic terrorism has been discredited so often and for so long that I won’t bother elaborating on it again here (but if you insist, here is a recent debunking of that theory atNational Review, and here is one atFrontPage Magazine). On its face, it is a patently ridiculous suggestion. People don’t choose to move to the Middle East and cut throats, enslave women, immolate people in cages, crucify them, and bury children alive because they are struggling to make ends meet or because their job applications aren’t getting them callbacks. They do it because they are fervent believers in a medieval warrior ideology that feeds their bloodlust and justifies it.

As much as progressives like to believe that they’re so much more intellectual than the right, nuance is not the issue. The issue is that Barack Obama’s administration refuses to acknowledge the real root motivation of ISIS and its “affiliates,” as the President calls them: Islamic supremacism. The issue is that our own administration is in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood. The issue is that our own President has facilitated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East, has facilitated Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, and has alienated our ally Israel while refusing to acknowledge the rising tide of Islamic anti-Semitism in Europe. We have an administration that pretends to be dealing with terrorism by holding a farce of a summit on “countering violent extremism.” (To give you some idea of how ineffective and morally skewed this summit is, our hapless Vice President and sexual harassment poster boy Joe Biden was there warning about groups who potentially could carry out violence “in the name of the Bible” – an outrageous accusation which greatly pleased the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a Brotherhood legacy group.)

Harf continued: “If we can help countries work at the root causes of this – what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?” The answer to her question is “jihad.” What drives “kids” to pick up AK-47s and knives and anything else they can use to butcher infidels is jihad. The answer to Islamic hatred of Jews, America, and the West in general is jihad. ISIS offers a bold vision of itself as the stronger horse in our clash of civilizations, and that is what compels these “kids” to leave home and join the growing number of jihadists challenging the decadent West. But I suppose that isn’t a nuanced enough explanation for Ms. Harf or a State Department that denies that the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam.

In Obama’s remarks at the counter-extremism summit, he acknowledged that poverty alone does not cause a person to become a terrorist, and that there are terrorists from very wealthy backgrounds. And yet he went on to say that “resentment festers” when millions of people who are impoverished “have no hope for the future,” when “corruption inflicts daily humiliation” upon them, “when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns.” In other words, our own President is suggesting that the Islamic enemies of the West have legitimate “grievances” and if only we address those, the terrorists will turn their swords into plowshares and we can coexist, just like all those Prius bumper stickers urge.

For this administration, all issues can and must be solved through social justice activism. The term “root causes,” which the left raises frequently, is progressive-speak for “grievances.” In the case of Islamic “violent extremism,” that means helping young Muslim males feel less “hopeless” and “resentful” and “humiliated” by improving their economic conditions.

Islamic terrorists don’t have legitimate grievances. What they have is a savage hatred of infidels and the manmade laws of the Western world. But in Obama’s mind, we in the West must look at the blame and inadequacy within ourselves: “If we are going to prevent people from being susceptible to the false promises of extremism,” he stated, “the international community has to offer something better.”

But the United States does offer something better. Israel and Europe and Australia offer something better. The entire Western world offers something vastly better than life under sharia law: freedom, prosperity, modernity, peace. And yet it is our way of life that these “violent extremists” are waging war against. They don’t have a void in their lives that can be filled by the promise of “something better”; they already have something they believe is better – Islam – and they are literally hellbent on imposing that belief system worldwide.

Besides, as former SEAL Rob O’Neill told Fox News, the members of ISIS already have jobs: “They get paid to cut off heads – to crucify children, to sell slaves and to cut off heads and I don’t think that a change in career path is what’s going to stop them.” But that argument isn’t nuanced enough for Ms. Harf.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/22/15)

Save Send Delete

Back in November I was contacted by a writer and professor in New Jersey named Danusha V. Goska, a former leftist who had begun posting powerful and personal articles about her political transformation. I interviewed her here, and subsequently she became a contributor to FrontPage Mag. She also happens to be the author of the novel Save Send Delete, which I recently read.

As powerful and as personal as her articles, Save Send Delete chronicles the intellectual love affair-by-email of Mira – a poor, Catholic professor – and Rand, an atheist author and celebrity. The tale is simultaneously a philosophical debate, an exploration of faith, and a passionate romance.

In my interview with Dr. Goska, she had explained that her novel was essentially her own true story, albeit with the names changed to protect the identity of the man who was once the object of her affection:

Several years back I was wrestling with the big, hard questions: Is there a God? Why is there suffering? I saw an atheist on TV and I sent him an email. To my great surprise, he wrote back. We corresponded for a year, debating the existence of God, and we fell in love.

Her novel grew out of that tempestuous intellectual affair between a confirmed atheist and a questing believer. But that intellectual bout is not as black-and-white as that might seem. “Save Send Delete isn’t a left-wing book or a right-wing book,” Dr. Goska told me. “It’s about confronting God and love and trying to dig down as deeply as possible for worthy, livable truth.”

The book opens with Mira emailing an outraged rant to Lord Randolph Court-Wright, a prominent philosopher, after she sees him interviewed by Bill Moyers on TV. She bluntly challenges his intellectual arrogance, calling him “as dogmatic in your atheism as a Monty Python parody of a pope.” To her shock and mortification, the celebrated philosopher responds graciously; Mira even suspects that it must be the work of a grad student reading Rand’s emails. And thus begins their conversation.

Mira is Christian because “Catholicism assured me that I had a place as good as any rich kid’s in the kingdom of Heaven… Inside a Catholic Church, I never doubted my worth. There was no reason.” Burdened at one point in her life with physical challenges, her faith gave Mira meaning to her suffering. “I approached every feature of my suffering: loneliness, pain, paralysis, despair, terror, rage, waste, poverty, as an obstacle on a course I was running for my own spiritual growth in the eyes of God – and nobody else. That choice was what made all the difference.”

Other than the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mira tells Rand, she knows of “no other narrative tradition where common, often peasant, women from two, and three, and four thousand years back, take on individual life and importance that outlasts the renown of kings.” On the other hand, she writes,

I don’t believe in a God who, the moment you cast your lot in with him, or read that bestseller about the power of positive thoughts, makes you happy, pretty, and rich. I do believe that there is a supernatural entity who can make you feel 100% better instantaneously, and his name is Satan.”

As for Buddhism, Mira tells Rand that, “like Merton, I’m grateful to embrace Buddhism’s gifts, like meditation, that don’t contradict my own beliefs.” But ultimately, “we humans are hot-blooded creatures, and Buddhism is as cold as empty space, and it demands that we be, as well, and we cannot.”

On the subject of Islam, Mira tells Rand that she didn’t learn about jihad from a book; she received a blunt education about it from a childhood Muslim friend named Narin, who told Mira calmly as they walked home from school together one sunny day “that when the time for jihad came, she’d kill me if I did not submit”:

The unchanging command that Muslim men must commit jihad and establish universal dominance is unique to Islam. No other world faith mandates the nonnegotiable, continuous and all-pervasive denigration of women and girls that has proven central to Islam… Islam allows no criticism, and, therefore, no growth, no change.

One of the reasons she revels in her correspondence with Rand is that, thanks to the “mind-crippling toxin” of politically correct education, she gets no intellectual stimulation from her functionally illiterate students or even from other professors: “It’s your feeeelings that matter most,” she says, scorning their vapid mindset. “There Are No Wrong Answers. Let’s all sit in a circle and make a communal collage expressing our anger at our enemy – rich, white, heterosexual, Christian, American men.”

In the process of their back-and-forth, Mira quickly finds herself becoming seduced; she confides to a friend that “it’s as if he knows what words I most crave to hear and is speaking them, one after another, in some order designed to move me to the maximum.” But the growing intimacy is not of a simple sexual nature: “He and I are not tearing off our clothing to reveal our nakedness, but, rather, we are revealing something far more intimate – our souls.” In doing so, she finds they are not so much opposites attracting as complementary halves:

He’s a glacier. I’m a blowtorch. His hyperrationality and stunted emotional life provide scaffolding. For once in my life I can lean back. There is finally a methodical, cold and rational yang out there equal and opposite to my arithmetically retarded, ever-exploring yin.

Mira’s world view is a reflection of Dr. Goska’s own, of course; they both categorically reject the deadly relativism of what Goska calls “capital A” Atheists who dismiss all religion as evil. Such relativism “has long been the thinking of mass murderers from the French Terror to the Khmer Rouge,” she stated in the interview.

Save Send Delete presents a compelling challenge to that absolutist mentality. It is a passionate, intellectually wide-ranging novel that wrestles with “the big, hard questions” and makes the case, as Dr. Goska put it, “not only for faith, but for civilization.”

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/19/15) 

Sizing Up Sports Illustrated’s First Plus Size Model

The 2015 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is here, and hype is buzzing around its historic inclusion of a so-called “plus size” model. But is that really a positive step forward for women?

SI’s swimsuit edition, a juggernaut which has earned a billion dollars for SI’s parent company Time, Inc., has been around for over 50 years. Its annual appearance sparks controversy. Its detractors rightly ask what itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie yellow polka dot bikinis have to do with the wide world of sports. They complain that, like Victoria’s Secret, SI is promoting an unrealistic body ideal for women. They argue that the titillating cover makes the swimsuit edition barely distinguishable from the Playboyjust a few magazines away at the newsstand.

On the latest one, for example, model Hannah Davis wears little more than a come-hither look; there is so much exposed flesh south of her belly button that the magazine very nearly qualifies as Gynecology Illustrated. It’s fair to say, as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation does, that the photo “normalizes genital display” and “borders obscenity.”

But this year SI seems to be throwing its critics a curve, so to speak, by featuring the first plus size model ever to appear in the swimsuit edition: Australian Robyn Lawley.

The term “plus-size” bears so little relation to reality as to be meaningless, and should be scrapped. In the fashion biz, it refers to models who are size 8 and up—but the average American woman is about a size 14. As Laura Beck puts it at Cosmopolitan: “At size 8, the plus-size models are considerably smaller than the average American women, and if that isn’t indicative of how delusional we are about what the majority of woman’s bodies look like, I don’t know what is.”

The 6’2” Robyn Lawley (a U.S. size 12) is no Kate Moss but she’s hardly overweight. “It’s ludicrous to call me plus size,” she wrote on Facebook. “I just consider myself a model because I’m trying to help women in general accept their bodies,” she has saidelsewhere.

It was a struggle for the Amazonian Lawley not only to be accepted in an industry that treats women her size like lepers, but even to accept her own body. “When I started my career 10 years ago, I had to painfully go to castings and people would look at you and say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’” After years of extreme dieting, being sent home from casting sessions for not fitting the clothes, and hating her own body, Lawley found a modeling agent who told her, “‘You don’t need to lose any weight. You just need to be you. You’re perfect just as you are.’ You have no idea how happy and amazing that was to hear as a teenage girl. ACCEPTANCE.”

This revelation, and her perseverance, paid off with an extraordinary career and a string of awards and notable “firsts”: first plus-size model to be shot forAustralian Vogue and GQ Australia; first Australian plus-size model on the cover ofAustralia Cosmopolitan; and first plus-size model to appear in a Ralph Lauren campaign, among others.

Nevertheless, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is, as she puts it, “a milestone”—not just for her but for the magazine’s inclusion of her and, in a Swimsuits for All ad, another plus size model. The ad depicts a bikinied Ashley Graham, whose size 16 curves so captivate a passing male admirer that he either trips or hurls himself into a nearby pool.

Thanks in no small part to the much-publicized SI appearances, Lawley, Graham, and other models burdened by the “plus size” label are becoming increasingly visible fashion role models for women who want to be considered sexy but who don’t measure up to the waifish images that usually populate magazines and advertisements.

Yes, the swimsuit issue blatantly panders to Sports Illustrated’s largely male readership, and the cover’s pushing-of-the-sexual-envelope is problematic. But with Lawley and Graham, at least SI appears to be making a concession to the growing calls for size diversity in modeling, and using its rather significant influence to begin to broaden our perspective on the feminine ideal and on what is sexy. It may be the beginning of the end for the limiting label “plus size.” That may not sound like a giant leap for womankind, but it’s a step in the right direction.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 2/17/15)