The Mulatto Mafia “ May he poop on my knee? “ First Lady of rudeness “
The law’s delay “ The GOP’s B-list meets “ The National Association
for the Advancement of Billionaire People “ Cumberbatch grovels “
Bottoms up “ Package goes in slot “ In defense of Andrew
Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the village from picturesque into postcard-beautiful. I am lying in bed listening to a Mozart version of “Ave Maria,” with a heavenly soprano almost bringing tears to my eyes with the loveliness of it. This is the civilization of our ancestors, one that gave us Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven and built cathedrals all over the most wondrous continent in the world—and it is now being replaced by a higher one, in which distinctions of ethnicity and religion will no longer be tolerated.
The human race has a limitless capacity for self-improvement, and it shows where architecture, the arts, and music are concerned, not to mention literature. You might think me jaundiced, but the Parthenon’s perfection is less impressive than the Trump Tower’s glitz, and Cellini’s Narcissus raises fewer eyebrows than Hirst’s Shark. And what about the “Ode to Joy”? Can one really compare it to the rap that blasts 24 hours a day among those who are with-it? Nah, of course not; anyone who disagrees must be getting old.
Just as “Ave Maria” was coming to an end, I opened the papers and felt proud to see Prince Charles and David Cameron kissing Saudi ass, to be followed by Obama couple of days later. Oswald Spengler came to mind. What did he know that we don’t? Three thousand years of civilization took an upward swing when TV was invented, and taking drugs became de rigueur, and popping pills and pop music became one and the same. Those ancient Greeks were bores, and I’m not referring to myself but Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, not to mention Aristophanes. So were the wops—the Titians and Tiepolos—and the frogs. The latter built a few churches that now lie empty. Give me Norman Foster any day.
And give me Frantz Fanon above all dead white males, like Goethe and his ilk. Like a certain Harold MacMillan, who told his flock it never had it so good back in 1959, I say to you now we’re in the money. All we have to do is forget our prejudices, allow more Africans and Muslims in, especially uneducated poor ones, and turn against Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Presto, we will have proved the doomsayers wrong once and for all.
This is Simon Cowell time, as well as Wendi Murdoch. Sodom and Gomorrah is a myth, so stick to Simon and Wendi. Better yet, to the Kardashians. Watch as many reality shows as you can, and try to emulate the accents and the topics they discuss. Ditto for sci-fi and zombie movies. Encourage modern professional athletes to be more violent—nerds like Jesse Owens and Stanley Matthews should have their names removed from memory. Oscar Wilde died in disgrace, and no wonder. He dared say this: “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.” Which means things were getting better even back then.
And this brings me to beauty and an article in Vanity Fair about Dudley House in London’s Park Lane. It was written by a man I know and like, Jim Reginato, with pictures by Jonathan Becker, another friend. The house has been purchased and redone by a 33-year-old Qatari by the name of Al-Thani, who, according to the article, is now a leading member of English society, frolicking with its golden youth, and his circle includes the Queen. I told you at the start that things were improving. Even the dear old Queen now hangs out with people whose ancestors coupled with camels and produced the Thani dynasty.
Yesterday, a massive brawl broke out at a St. Louis City Hall meeting that was called to investigate police behavior. A senator who works with the police unions stood up to defend the police and was quickly shouted down with: “You white supremacist motherfucker. Get the fuck out of here.” Then the entire place burst into a gigantic fight between blacks and whites.
I blame the media. They created this tension.
The media love hate crimes because they seem to explain everything that’s wrong with America and put the blame on someone who can handle it: white people. Unfortunately, there aren”t enough hate crimes against blacks to go around, and journalists are forced to invent them. What they don”t realize is that the biggest hate crime hoax is the press itself.
By creating an imaginary reality where blacks are constantly under siege, they are all but daring them to attack and murder whites. The media have created the racial tension they were going for, only they got everything backwards. In an attempt to create a fictional world where whites hate blacks, they accidentally created a real one where blacks hate whites.
Last week, Fredrick Young was sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of two white teenagers, Jourdan Bobbish and Jacob Kudla. After yawning throughout the trial, he turned to the victims” families and said: “I”d like to say sorry to the families of Aiyanna Jones, Michael Brown, [and] Eric Garner … for not being able to get justice for their loved ones who was murdered in cold blood.”
He punctuated this hair-whitening audacity by putting his hands in the air and repeating the wildly popular hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.”
One of the boys” mothers said she will pray for forgiveness. Good luck with that, God.
But this case doesn”t get the media going the way certain others do, because it doesn”t fit their narrative: that cops and vigilantes are going out left and right to mow blacks down. This is a dangerous lie to tell because it encourages revenge killings. These murders are pointless hate crimes.
Fatal NYPD shootings have in fact been dropping for decades, but a black Muslim named Ismaaiyl Brinsley ate up the anti-American media narrative and decided to assassinate two NYPD cops. His logic went, as he put it, “They take 1 of ours. Let’s take 2 of theirs.”
This story was so explosive it had to make the news, but few know of Zemir Begic, who was bludgeoned to death with hammers for being white and outside, while trying to prevent his street from being looted. Begic looks as caucasian as every Gino on the Jersey Shore, but he’s originally from Bosnia, so the cops referred to him as an immigrant and refused to call the attack a hate crime against whites.
Last August, Iraq war vet Ralph Weems was beaten to within an inch of his life because he’s the same race as the cop who shot Mike Brown. The black mob who followed him from one restaurant to another to carry out the attack showed no mercy and kicked him repeatedly in the head after he was down.
The Department of Justice is reluctant to call this a hate crime even though the attack was prefaced with Weems being told that the area he was in was “not safe for white people” because of what happened to Mike Brown. Weems is still suffering from traumatic brain injuries. As his father recently put it, “He’s not coming home anytime soon.”
There were dozens of attacks like this recently and the media have tamped them all down. Remember the black gunman in St. Louis who was targeting elderly couples and telling them, “This is for Michael Brown”? Me neither.
All these attacks bear a striking resemblance to the ones we saw after Trayvon Martin was killed”and the new cases keep changing the context of the old ones. The more this happens, the less the brutal beating of Matthew Owens looks like a freak occurrence.
There were dozens of attacks in the name of Trayvon, and outside of the actual perps, the media also have to take some blame. It was NBC who lied and said Zimmerman told 911, “He looks like he’s up to no good, he looks black.” This fake story didn”t just ruin Zimmerman’s life, it created racial tension in this country that will last for decades.
In the pretend America they constructed, cops and white vigilantes randomly shoot black kids because they”re bored. In the real America, as Taleeb Starkes points out, Christopher Lane and Pat Mahaney are two white guys who were attacked (Lane was killed) by bored black teenagers. Where’s the parade? Why were Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom kidnapped, sodomized, tortured, and lit on fire?
Young blacks committing this kind of senseless violence is a real pattern. Cops and vigilantes shooting innocent kids is not.
The common refrain used to deny this reality is that the above cases involve criminals who get arrested, while killer cops avoid prosecution because of “institutionalized racism.” But in truth, cops are under so much scrutiny from the race baiters that one study found they are more hesitant to pull the trigger on armed black suspects than on whites. The “racist” stop & frisk program actually wound up stopping a disproportionately high number of whites.
Let this be a lesson for anyone trying to find something remotely redeeming in politics.
President Obama’s recent State of the Union address began like many speeches: with an anecdotal story. In recounting the hardships of mother Rebekah Erler, Obama gave the nation a narrative of how government can help a normal middle-class family. Erler had gone through what many ordinary parents faced after the 2008 financial crisis: loss of a housing industry-dependent job and the rising day-to-day costs of raising a family. She was invited to the SOTU, and as she sat next to the First Lady, her story begged for empathy. Camera shots of her grateful visage complemented the orator-in-chief.
It was nice except for one crucial detail: Erler is a former field organizer for the Democrats. This wasn”t the touching story of an average American sharing her trials with the country; it was a political stunt used to help the party of government dependency.
The Republican response to the otherwise tepid lecture showed the same promise at first. Delivered by Iowa’s newly-minted Senator Joni Ernst, the onetime pig-castrator regaled listeners with an engrossing story about growing up on a farm and working fast food in high school. She even admitted to wearing bread bags around her only pair of good shoes on rainy days. Unfortunately the hokey story didn”t last; the narrative soon collapsed into standard, red-meat talking points. Republican tropes about jobs and economic growth overwhelmed Ernst’s speech and drained it of its original, rustic flavor.
It was a shame. But playing it safe is typical for politicians. The question is: why was Ernst’s brief story so compelling? When polled by PolitiFact, many Iowans admitted to strapping bread bags around their shoes to protect them from bad weather. So Ernst’s anecdote had more than a grain of truth to it. But facts aside, there was something wholesome, even vivid, about the description of her childhood. It demanded attention.
What is it about stories that grab our moral imagination? Any metaphysical philosopher will tell you that stories can teach virtue and courage. Narratives also provide a shared sense of humanity that can stretch across peoples and times”a chain that connects us to the ordeals of the past, and shows how man deals with hurdles in everyday life.
But in our progressive age, reason is no longer proof enough for anything. There must be empirical evidence. If anything is to have value, it must be shown to have utility. And science has to be used to back up your claim, lest it be seen as fundamentalist raving.
Luckily, a 2010 study confirmed what we already know: that stories have the gift of changing worldviews. Aeon Magazine described Princeton psychologist Uri Hasson’s research: he had a graduate student tell a story, which he recorded while scanning her brain activity with an fMRI; then he replayed the story to 11 volunteer listeners and scanned their brains as well. The results were predictable: as stories were read, parts of the brain involved in moral reasoning, empathy, and theory of mind lit up in both the reader and listeners. A similar study at the University of Southern California uncovered the same results; as participants listened to harrowing stories, their emotions fell in line with the narrative ups and downs.
But these discoveries aren”t new; when it comes to humanistic affairs, science is always lagging behind. Much of our wisdom about love, justice, and bravery is intuitive”a law written into our species. Stories are a device for freeing a talent we already possess.
Here’s a brilliant idea for an anthology: collect essays about the changing face of war and war technology, then alternate them with short stories and novel excerpts from the cutting edge of military-focused sci-fi and fantasy.
Riding the Red Horse, edited by fantasy star Vox Day and Army Ranger vet Tom Kratman for Castalia House, is a tailor-made compromise for those time-pressed souls who find the consumption of unalloyed fiction to be too useless a practice in which to indulge. It’s also a treat for sci-fi readers who retain an interest in the world around them”and the two groups” overlap is large enough to make it a very good idea indeed.
Every tale or essay is fronted by an editor’s introduction, placed conveniently before each piece rather than in some tedious index or intro; they perk up the reader’s ears for the key factual and speculative themes of the collection.
Essays are fully half the mix, with the fiction serving as not only pleasure reading but as exercises in imagining how the technological and population changes the essayists describe might play out in the future. The tone is set early on by William S. Lind’s discussion of the four generations of modern war strategy, in “Understanding 4th Generation War.”
Lind’s unsettling conclusion is that the U.S. military is stuck in the second-generation mindset used by the French in World War I, while our adversaries”particularly those who aren”t based in a state, i.e. the jihad”have moved on to an updated version of pre-nation-state warfare, where neither the battlefield nor the combatants are clearly defined. Lind writes:
We have no magic solutions to offer, only some thoughts. We recognized from the outset that the whole task might be hopeless; state militaries might not be able to come to grips with Fourth Generation enemies no matter what they do. …
“Wherever people go, conflict seems to follow, and one always prefers to be on the winning side”so we might as well be ready for the physics problems we”ll encounter if the conflicts move into outer space.”The fact that no state military has recently succeeded in defeating a nonstate enemy reminds us that Clio, the patron goddess of history, has a sense of humor; she teaches us that not all problems have solutions.
His essay is preceded by a dramatic fictional illustration of the unpredictability of the near future of war, albeit a state-based one: Eric S. Raymond’s “Sucker Punch,” a near-future military tale in which an American attempt to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is rendered both impossible and unnecessary by the gruesome new weapons both sides have in store for each other.
The American pilots” disorientation is so stark as to be almost darkly humorous:
“Hey. What are those flashes from the tin cans?”
Blazer: “Cool off. We’re stealthed, and radar’s clear. They”ve got nothing in the air that can hit us at angels twenty.”
Blazer’s plane disintegrated less than three seconds later.
Later in the book, editor Kratman’s own, titular essay balances Lind’s doomsaying with a primer on the timeless principles of war that reminds us there’s nothing new under the sun. The essays range from Ken Burnside’s brilliant “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF””a love-slap in which the author details precisely how most sci-fi, even that of legends like Heinlein, brushes off the inconveniences of physical reality”to James F. Dunnigan’s insightful recent history of Chinese military aggression.
Spoiler: Dunnigan mentions collective revenge fantasies, although the instability of North Korea isn”t helping anyone. But whatever the current ideology, nations don”t ever seem able to budge the riverbed of their own history; Dunningan writes:
To thoughtful Chinese their current government is simply another imperial dynasty pretending to be something new and different. But it’s the same old collection of wealthy, corrupt, and inept aristocrats doing whatever it takes to hang onto their wealth and power.
Here as elsewhere in the collection, various honest observations are held together by a sense of fatalism: just like Chinese dynasties, war may change its face, but it doesn”t seem to be going anywhere. Wherever people go, conflict seems to follow, and one always prefers to be on the winning side”so we might as well be ready for the physics problems we”ll encounter if the conflicts move into outer space.
Such fatalism extends to Harry Kitchener’s demystification of spy fiction, “The Limits of Intelligence: Why It’s Nowhere Near as Important as the Spooks Would Have You Think.” Kitchener explains that a mountain of data doesn”t necessarily mean we know what’s going to hit us:
(T)he average modern nation has intelligence coming out of its ears…. And therein lies the rub…. Assuming that the old truism that “90 percent of everything is dreck” applies … you can do word searches, or even quite complex Bayesian natural language analysis, on large volumes of intercept data, but one runs the risk of pulling out too many false positives, which is not particularly helpful, or worse, discarding the one genuinely relevant thing.
Thus we”re stuck with plain old humans in the loop.
Just like the United States” mighty (but strategically backward) military heft, any feeling of security engendered by letting the NSA be as invasive as they please is illusory. Kitchener’s essay reflects back at the short story immediately preceding it””Tell It to the Dead,” one of Vox Day’s contributions, with Steve Rzasa, in which a lieutenant’s overconfident in-combat decision causes a security breach that lets a cyborg screw up the Earthers” communication and trigger a friendly-fire meltdown.
It’s widely assumed, both by liberals and conservatives, that the fields of arts and entertainment innately induce egalitarian political leanings. Much of the prestige of the left, in fact, derives from the notion that it’s only natural for creative people to favor equality above all else.
Granted, there are a handful of obvious public exceptions, typically ornery senior tough guys, such as Republican Clint Eastwood. His American Sniper, with its monumental star turn by Bradley Cooper, is now on track to being the biggest movie released in 2014. This would make American Sniper the first movie for grown-ups to lead a year’s box office tally since 1998, when Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was tops.
Out-of-the-closet anomalies like American Sniper drive the liberal press crazy with fear that they are losing control of the media.
One possibility is that artists and entertainers are less monolithically on the left than you might think, but are kept in line in public by stifling peer pressure.
For example, by now Spielberg ought to have earned himself a fair amount of deference from his fellow liberal Democrats for being a credit to his political persuasion. But even he doesn”t seem able to admit that his upbringing in the red state of Arizona saddled him with a lifelong love for guns.
Here’s the only known photograph on the web of Spielberg shooting a gun.
You”ll notice it’s an extraoardinarily expensive one. Like a British duke in 1913, Spielberg has assembled one of the world’s finest shotgun collections. He commemorates each movie he makes by buying himself a six-figure shotgun, then having an Italian master craftsman spend a year suitably engraving it. It’s an elegant hobby, but one that Spielberg can”t talk about. Perhaps it would raise doubts about his work: Are his best movies really as homogeneously liberal as they are supposed to be?
A more subversive theory is that art is inherently anti-egalitarian, that the entertainment industry thrives by elevating individuals to levels of mass adoration that Belshazzar of Babylon would have found excessive. In turn, the entertainment industry adopts a bogus ideology of promoting equality to cover up its essential tendency toward Caesarism.
For example, this combination of exhortation and megalomania has been apparent for 99 of the 100 years that Hollywood has been making epic films.
Early March will mark the 100th anniversary of the original box office smash, D.W. Griffith’s denunciation of the rape culture of the Reconstruction Era, The Birth of a Nation. Stung by criticism from the NAACP, Griffith released in 1916 a more politically correct and even more ambitious blockbuster, Intolerance. It retold four stories of bigotry and oppression, from ancient Babylon down to the present day.
I”m sure that everybody has taken Griffith’s sermon against intolerance deeply to heart, but, honestly, the only thing anybody remembers from the movie is the Babylonian set that Griffith spent his Birth of a Nation profits constructing.
To give tourists snacking at the food court at the Hollywood & Highland Center shopping mall (which hosts the Academy Awards annually at its Dolby Theatre) a fittingly cinematic experience, the developer rebuilt some of Intolerance‘s elephant god monuments. These things are almost as big as that Chinese statue of Martin Luther King, Jr.“which itself looks like the kind of cross between Ozymandias, Chairman Mao, and Mike Tyson that we”re not supposed to notice is an aesthetic blot on the National Mall in Washington.
But certainly, we rapidly outgrew such excess, right?
I”m not so sure.
During the Great Depression, Frank Capra directed movies about plucky little guys standing up to the big shots. But when casting his plucky little guys, Capra tended to pick James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, or Cary Grant. And when Capra wrote his autobiography, he called it The Name above the Title.
Consider the most academically acclaimed movie of all time, Citizen Kane. I”ve read countless explanations of how it’s an important warning about the menace posed to democracy by William Randolph Hearst. But, come on, everybody really loves Orson Welles” big man act. Welles, as he liked to explain, was a “king actor.” He had to be the highest-ranking figure in a scene or audiences would wonder why he wasn”t in charge.
Intellectuals have done much to egg on genius worship. For example, Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s tended to be made by large organizations using careful division of labor. But the young French critics at Cahiers du cinéma, rebelling against the dominance of Communist intellectuals in Paris, explained that if you looked at American films just right, you”d know that the director was the true auteur and thus Hollywood studio movies are monuments to individualism.
Their auteur theory was de Gaullism avant la lettre: enlightened autocracy validated by occasional popular approval. When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, he had his culture minister, André Malraux, find him some young artists who weren”t Communists to subsidize to make France look good. The French New Wave critics-turned-directors were de Gaulle’s chief beneficiaries.
But of our work, the work of our order and in particular the work of this monastery, a part”indeed, the substance”is study, and the preservation of knowledge. Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself … There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.
In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the blind zealot Jorge of Burgos believes with a fevered intensity that knowledge has reached its limit. There is no need to seek new knowledge, as everything that can be known is already known. Recapitulation is all that is left for mankind.
Which obviously brings us to Alfred Hitchcock. Okay, no, it’s not an obvious progression at all, but I”ll explain. There’s been a great deal of fuss this week over the upcoming HBO premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s “lost” and “newly discovered” Holocaust film, which has been “restored” by filmmaking genius Brett Ratner (I don”t throw the term genius around lightly, but the man gave us Horrible Bosses and Rush Hour 2). The “lost narration” has been recorded by Helena Bonham Carter.
In fact, that Hitchcock film was as “lost” as a Kim Kardashian sex tape. The “newly discovered” Alfred Hitchcock Holocaust film premiering on HBO January 26 as Night Will Fall is also the “newly discovered” Alfred Hitchcock Holocaust film that premiered on PBS in 1985 as Memory of the Camps. That one was “restored” by producer Michael Sullivan (who gave us the TV series Growing Pains and the cinema classic Ninja Assassins), with the “lost narration” recorded by British actor Trevor Howard.
Forty years ago, Allied troops invaded Germany and liberated Nazi death camps. They found unspeakable horrors which still haunt the world’s conscience. FRONTLINE presents a 1945 film made by British and American film crews who were with the troops liberating the camps. The film was directed in part by Alfred Hitchcock and was broadcast for the first time in its entirety on FRONTLINE. “PBS, 1985
A documentary about the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps directed by Alfred Hitchcock is to be shown in complete form for the first time in 70 years. The movie, Hitchcock’s only factual work, is made up of film taken by army cameramen as the allies liberated the camps in 1945. The work, with a script by Richard Crossman, who later became a Labour cabinet minister, has lain uncompleted in the archives since the government prevented it from being shown in 1945. “The Sunday Times, 2015
“An unseen 1945 documentary about Belsen is finally to be screened,” heralded the Guardian on Thursday. Unseen indeed, unless you count the 1985 PBS premiere, the panel discussion that followed, the countless repeats, and the fact that PBS has it available to purchase from its website or watch online.
But yes, if you overlook all of that, it’s “unseen.”
Welcome to the world of Holocaust scammers. I know that world well, as, for a period of time after 1997, I was one. And I was an innovator of the “lost Holocaust film” meme.
The Daily Beast calls the “lost” Hitchcock film “the greatest documentary never made.” The Toronto Star called my “lost” Holocaust film Nuremberg “one of the most historic films never seen.” News hacks, like career sitcom writers, love nothing more than to recycle dialogue. In 1996, I discovered the 1948 documentary film Nuremberg. And by “discovered,” I mean that via a series of faxes, I helped Raye Farr of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum identify the catalog number of Nuremberg in the National Archives.
And to think, poor fools like Howard Carter had to crawl through dirt for their historical discoveries.
Having fled Holocaust revisionism due to the bounty put on my head by the Jewish Defense League, and badly in need of money, I immediately began marketing Nuremberg as the great “lost” Holocaust film. Back in the late 40s, the film had been a pet project of FDR New Deal shill Pare Lorentz, and soon-to-be big-time TV producer Stuart Schulberg (The Today Show). Farr and I had indeed located it in the National Archives, but it was far from a “discovery.” It had been shown in theaters in Europe in the 40s, and on TV in the U.S. in the 60s.
But it had been out of circulation for a while, so it was ripe for being billed as a new discovery. And the media uncritically ate it up. I released it in 1997 (it’s a public domain film, but I spent about $2,000 to have the print cleaned up so I could copyright it in that form). After speaking with Lorentz’s widow, I learned of a few edits he wished he”d made. Ah-ha! Director’s cut! I rereleased the film in 2007. The screening at the Garden State Film Festival was heralded as a festival highlight by the New York Times (March 30, 2008). Nuremberg won best feature-length documentary.
Much to my amusement, Stuart Schulberg’s daughter Sandra was working the same angle, and was pissed as hell that I beat her to it. Her “discovered” version of Nuremberg didn”t have its first-time-ever premiere until 2010. And then again in 2011, because … Holocaust!
Menstruation is having a moment.
I don”t mean the fleshly, goopy one that vexes roughly half the human race. Periods, while remaining annoyingly corporeal, are once again oozing into the conceptual realm too, thanks to a new wave of feminist writers and artists.
Why, yes, this IS more of that “raising awareness“ (about something everyone’s already quite aware of) hoo-ha.
So: Rose George at the Guardian (where else?) wrote last week:
My period may hurt, but not as much as not talking about menstruation does.
Her cri de sein was prompted by British tennis champ Heather Watson, who”d demurely pinned her recent Australian Open shellacking on “girl things.”
Why, you”d think Mary Richardson had just slashed the Rokeby Venus. George tells us she “cheered” Watson’s stigma-shattering alibi, “cheered” again when other women athletes stuck up for her”and then “winced in sympathy” (naturally) at the very thought of “female tennis players who have their periods during Wimbledon, when they must wear white and are allowed one toilet break per set. That’s awful.”
“But when it comes to the cost of menstrual taboo,” she somberly informs us, “there is far worse.”
George knows whereof she speaks, you see, because not three years ago, she “travelled across India with a sanitation carnival.” As you do.
I detected a faint whiff of Mead’s Samoans at this juncture, imagining local ladies trying not to smirk as they told Lady Bountiful what she wanted to hear”that they “had known nothing about periods””just so they could scoop up an armful of the “free sanitary napkins on offer.”
Of course, women like George disapprove of “primitive” practices like the menstrual hut and the mikveh, but others kind of like the idea of getting a little retreat/spa day on the regular.
“Sometimes a quiet space away from men is exactly what you want for a couple days out of the month,” muses Amber Frost at too-cool-for-you website Dangerous Minds.
That said, Frost’s not totally sold on artist Elizabeth Tolson’s new “Fertility Dress,” a conceptual art thingie that supposedly turns blue when the wearer is ovulating, red during menstruation, and”eww”yellow “to indicate hygiene [sic].”
Tolson’s “work” is an “Atwoodian” satire on the fascist patriarchy or whatever, but Frost simply finds the “dress” appealing in a “Go Away” welcome mat fashion.
Yeah, it’s a stupid idea, but at least this “art” seems to be an advance over the “I paint with my menstrual blood!” school called the “Menstrala” movement.
(Kudos to this female photographer for trying to inject a modicum of wit and technical prowess into this sort of thing, and for teaching me that in France, instead of saying “My Aunt Flo is visiting,” the euphemism of choice is “les Anglais ont débarqué“ (“the English have disembarked.”)
The trouble is, menopausal me is old enough to remember all this “stigma smashing” nonsense, not just the second time around (during feminism’s third wave), but the first.
Exhibit A: Gloria Steinem’s widely anthologized Ms. Magazine column circa 1978, “If Men Could Menstruate.”
(Incidentally: because the honorific “Ms,” at least in its late 20th century iteration, is a neologism rather than an abbreviation of an existing word, it was never supposed to include that … period.)
(And somewhat incredibly, the third word in Steinem’s first sentence is “India.” What is it with these peripatetic white broads and their third world period safaris?)
Anyhow, most readers fondly recall her then-timely jokes about John Wayne and Robert Blake doing maxi pad commercials in her Bizarro World alt-universe. It’s satire in the “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” vein that characterized second wave feminist humor. (Yes, it exists. While the other girls treasured their copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves, I wore out Pulling Our Own Strings.)
I”m sure that Canada was settled by tough people, but what the hell happened?
Being fond of neither Canada nor Canadians, I jump at any chance to malign and defame that fundamentally useless patch of ice that’s perched jealously to the north of this great land that true, red-blooded, steak-eating Americans call the US of A. It’s quite clear to anyone with a brain that Canadians speak ill of Americans due to their deep-rooted feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and national humiliation at the hands of their much more popular and powerful big brother to the south. It’s beyond fun to mock Canadians, and it’s comically easy to send them into a defensive fury.
Sure, OK, there are a few good things about Canada”namely, clean air, beautiful scenery, and Stompin” Tom Connors“but this is all drowned out by a PC culture that’s so extreme it borders on the psychedelic.
Today’s saga of Canadian PC that’s so severe it’s trippin” balls comes from the famously tolerant town of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Dalhousie University in Halifax is nearly 200 years old. It was founded in 1818 by George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie, a man whose official portrait leaves no doubt that he is an arrogant white patriarchal type who”d probably be puking from the grave if he knew what had become of his namesake.
The school has found itself embroiled in two recent scandals that really wouldn”t even be news stories if we lived in a world that was 49% sane”one involving “misogynistic” comments on Facebook by male dentistry students, and another revolving around a female teacher’s suggestion that white males should be discriminated against during classroom discussions.
A Facebook group called “Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen” and composed of fourth-year male students at Dalhousie’s dentistry school apparently contained thousands of posts, but as is usually the case with this sort of thing, it only took a handful of objectionable comments to get the bonfires of outrage burning in the hearts and sphincters of social justice warriors both on campus and online.
In an analysis of this silly-ass dentistry/misogyny scandal, Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail summarizes the offensive comments that have grievously chafed the loins of female activists and their testosterone-sapped male enablers:
On their Facebook page, some of them joked about using chloroform on women. Someone asked the members to vote on which female student they”d rather have “hate” sex with. In one post, someone jokes that a penis is “the tool used to wean and convert lesbians and virgins into useful, productive members of society.” Another responds, “And by productive I”m assuming you mean it inspires them to become chefs, housekeepers, babysitters, etc.”
Pardon me for thinking that sounds kind of funny”and, more importantly, harmless.
Naturally, the predictable squadrons of chipmunks are chattering about “rape culture” and “institutionalized misogyny” and how this is a teachable moment that will help teach us once and for all that male dental students are nothing more than rapists in training.
As a result of the outcry, 13 male dental students were suspended from clinical activities early in January, but this was not sufficient for the crybabies who are leading the outcry. They want them expelled and possibly even ritually castrated in front of the entire student body.
The whistleblowing dental student who snitched on his Facebook buddies to get the whole scandal rolling is one Ryan Millet, who himself is one of the 13 suspended students. Millet may forfeit his education and dental career for the sin of clicking “Like” on one group photo that “shows a woman sitting on the steps of a public building with a sign tucked under her folded legs that reads: Public entrance.”
But everyone draws a line somewhere, and regarding the poll where group members were asked to vote on which of two real-life female classmates they”d like to “hate-fuck,” Millet claims “It was a targeted, hateful, sexualized, violent attack. That was what upset a lot of us.”
So Millet got upset and then told other people to get upset, at which point they all got upset together. I don”t know about you, but it’s hard for me to get upset about that.
Consequent to the hubbub about the woman-hating dental students, a female professor speaking on a panel at Dalhousie exploited the situation to urge the implementation of a new classroom practice that would require teachers to call on females and minorities before calling on white males to speak, even if the white males” hands were raised first.
The proponent of this new rule is a stout lass named Judy Haiven, who sort of looks like an older Harold Lloyd in drag. Haiven claims she already has enforced a velvet-glove-cast-in-iron-fisted “women speak first“ policy in her classes.
The Week’s Snappiest, Scrappiest, and Crappiest Headlines
SHOVING ALL THAT GAY STUFF IN OUR FACES AND DOWN OUR THROATS
Two gay icons from the 1970s faced a heated gay backlash last week for making comments that hurt gays” feelings and made gays feel ashamed of being gay.
Billy Crystal first gained fame portraying Jodie Dallas, one of network TV’s first openly gay characters, in the late-70s sitcom Soap. But last week he inflamed the homos” tender nerve endings by taking verbal potshots about explicit gay sex on modern TV. When asked about gay storylines, Crystal told a reporter:
Sometimes I think, “Ah that’s too much for me.”…Sometimes, it’s just pushing it a little too far for my taste and I”m not going to reveal to you which ones they are….I hope people don”t abuse it and shove it in our face…to the point where it feels like an everyday kind of thing.
These comments were too much for the gay community, which started having gay conniptions over it. They were going to make sure that not only would Billy Crystal have the gay lifestyle shoved in his face, they would also ram it down his throat and quite possibly up his tuchis.
Crystal quickly apologized, limply trying to reason that his comments applied to all kinds of explicit sex on TV, not just the gay kind, although technically he had been responding to a question about the gay kind in the first place.
From coast to coast and at several hotspots overseas, the gay world has worshiped Barbra Streisand and her big honker since the 1960s. That is why the gay world is now shocked, appalled, aghast, and revolted to hear that she once used the “F” word. (That would be “faggot.”) Video from the 1980s has recently emerged of the big-nosed fag-hag singer as a dominatrix who’s whipping Harrison Ford before exclaiming “I feel like a faggot!”
“It’s incredibly shocking and heartbreaking for Streisand’s legends of gay fans,” wrote one of Streisand’s legions of shocked and heartbroken gay fans, misspelling “legions” in the process.
But Streisand has a secret weapon that she can wield like a lightsaber against all accusations of homophobia: her gay son Jason, who proves that his mom isn”t a homophobe because, like, her son’s gay.
In last Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Barack Obama used the words “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender””the first time any of these words have ever been used in a State of the Union address.
France, that bastion of free speech (so long as it doesn”t diverge one millimeter from Cultural Marxist orthodoxy), has convicted three Twitter users for using “homophobic” hashtags such as #Lesgaysdoiventdisparaîtrecar (“Gays must disappear because…”) and #brûlonslesgayssurdu (“Let’s burn the gays on…”) The accused homophobes all received small fines for inciting violence against the faygelehs.
A Green Party candidate in England has been smeared as “transphobic” for daring to question whether men who suddenly claim they”re women don”t indeed magically transform into women. Aspiring Member of Parliament Rupert Read had written:
Imagine that some people regard themselves within themselves as disabled, as missing a limb. Are disabled people obliged to regard those people as already part of the disabled community? I would suggest: obviously not…. Does feeling psychologically as if you are a woman and making certain changes to your body as a consequence make you a woman? Is it enough, in order to BE a woman, to psychically identify as one? To this second question, we must surely answer: no.
In North Carolina, a female politician found herself in hot water for calling a man a “man” because the man in question thinks he’s a woman. Then she apologized publicly for “using an incorrect gender pronoun,” even though the pronoun in question was biologically accurate.
In England, a guy who still looks like a guy but who claims he’s a chick has caused a mild dust storm of controversy because he wasn”t allowed to use the women’s loo where he worked.
Although we disagree on many political points, we here at Taki’s Mag”as well as all of our friends and partners in the Taki’s Mag community”can all agree that the homosexual and trans-testicle communities were acting extremely uppity last week.
THE MAGIC YARMULKE
Citing a disturbing, alarming, concerning, and”what the hell, even terrifying”uptick of anti-Semitism in Europe, an Israeli barber named Shalom Koresh is designing yarmulkes made of human hair that visually blend into the wearer’s scalp almost like religious camouflage, thereby averting any physical attacks that might befall them should angry mobs of anti-Semites espy them walking innocently down the streets. Koresh is marketing his hairy yarmulke as the “Magic Kippa” and brags to potential consumers that not only can it be dyed and washed like regular yarmulkes”it can also be brushed.
Israel National News describes Gilad Atzmon as “An anti-Semitic Israeli jazz player who describes himself as an “ex-Jew”,” which immediately makes him at least somewhat interesting. The burly saxophonist has been quoted as saying that “it is always Jewish bad behavior that brings disaster upon Jews.” Due to such comments, a concert venue in Nottingham, England recently canceled an upcoming performance by the ex-Jewish anti-Semite.
