ALEX writes in response to the post on modern art:

José Ortega y Gasset in his essay, “The Dehumanization of Art,” alleges that the essential function of modern art is to partition the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. Modern art, he says, is not so much contingently unpopular, as deliberately anti-popular. It acts “like a social solvent which separates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of men”. It’s intended to have that effect. (more…)

SARAH NELSON writes:

As an avid reader of your blog, I thought you would be interested in an article from the Huffington Post. As a full-time wife and mother who sees her husband’s income confiscated and redistributed a little more each year, this angers me. I also believe this is only the beginning. The state will continue to use the tax code not only to enforce the purchase of products such as health insurance, but to “socially engineer” (reward/ punish) family structures. (more…)

THIS MAGNIFICENT painting by Lord Frederick Leighton, titled Mother and Child and dated 1865, is probably unfamiliar to you. You have seen Monet’s water lilies, Picasso’s Guernica and Warhol’s soup can many times, but not this interesting scene, with its very human interaction, complex beauty and idealized femininity. (Please click on the image and see it in more detail.) The period from 1850 to 1910 saw one of the greatest outpourings of artistic masterpieces in Western history. But many of these masterpieces have been systematically relegated to obscurity, the artists charged with sentimentality and the cold embrace of technique over emotion.

We have been cheated of many great works by modernism’s revolutionary campaign.

The Art Renewal Center, an organization started by millionaire Fred Ross, is dedicated to restoring appreciation for traditional humanist art, especially the works of this neglected period. I highly recommend the center’s essay “The Great 20th Century Art Scam.” It states:

For over 90 years, there has been a concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names, and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th Century. Fueled by a cooperative press, the ruling powers have held the global art establishment in an iron grip. Equally, there was a successful effort to remove from our institutions of higher learning all the methods, techniques and knowledge of how to train skilled artists. Five centuries of critical data was nearly thrown into the trash. It is incredible how close Modernist theory, backed by an enormous network of powerful and influential art dealers, came to acquiring complete control over thousands of museums, university art departments and journalistic art criticism. We at the Art Renewal Center have fully and fairly analyzed their theories and have found them wanting in every respect, devoid of substance and built on a labyrinth of easily disproved fallacies, suppositions and hypotheses.

The essay is worth reading in its entirety and there are many other excellent pieces at the Center’s site.

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ALEX A. writes from England:

Thanks for posting George Cole’s superb painting, Harvest Rest. Landscapes similar to the one depicted in this painting can still be seen in some counties of England. But the timeless and untroubled composure suggested by the three field workers eating their simple meal amidst the corn, beneath a beautiful tree and under a benign sky, has disappeared without trace. (more…)

  I will extol thee, my God, O king; And I will bless thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless thee; And I will praise thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised; And his greatness is unsearchable.        (Ps 145: 1-3)

STEPHANIE writes:

I am currently on the hunt for apron patterns and came across this heart-warming page. It made me smile and I think it would be appreciated by many of your readers.

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JR writes:

You said in your post about the Atlanta cheating scandal: 

At the heart of this scandal is the failure to recognize that blacks should not be held to impossible standards. It is not right. Black education should be different from white education. It is not compassionate to deny racial differences. (more…)

  IN THE discussion of the latest prominent news story about a mother who forgot her child not once but twice in her parked car and has been charged with his death, Josh F. writes: I am in the process of raising a fourth two-year-old. The idea that one could forget a two-year-old in the car seems impossible. A child this age will almost certainly either be requiring constant attention or will have fallen asleep alerting one to this occasionally alleviating event. Exactly. These deaths are inconceivable. These events are mind-blowing. Even if they are rare, they are the extreme manifestation of something very common: a callous detachment from the young. Liberalism has endlessly encouraged and celebrated this state of detachment in mothers. The fact that it has also encouraged parents to spoil and indulge their children, to shower them with gifts and gadgets, does not negate its murderous indifference. Indulgence and neglect are part of the same cultural phenomenon. The child alone in his car seat, strapped in, crying in bewilderment, slowly dying from hyperthermia while his parent files papers or answers phones a few yards away, is the inevitable consequence of a radical estrangement between the generations and the withering away of the institution that protects the vulnerable: the traditional family.

LAURENCE B. writes:

One angle that needs to be investigated with the recent Atlanta cheating scandal is the issue of parental awareness. It seems very unlikely to me that even parents of illiterate children wouldn’t notice or question the otherwise inexplicable success of their otherwise underachieving children. (more…)

ALAN writes:

A reader wrote [What the Civil Rights Act Did for Blacks, Tuesday, July 5, 2011 ] about the effects of “The Great Society” do-gooder schemes like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 
 
Many people seem disillusioned by the realization that such do-gooder schemes did not benefit blacks all that much over the past forty years.  Of course they didn’t.  They were not intended to benefit blacks.  They were intended to benefit the Marxist, Communist, Socialist and other anti-American planners and agitators who engineered “The Great Society” and the “Civil Rights Movement.”  
 
How many of your readers know that a book entitled The Great Society was published in 1914 by a proponent of Fabian Socialism?  Or that the Fabian Socialists have been planning for more than a hundred years to make the United States into a Socialist nation?
 
To believe that the “Civil Rights Movement” was about Rights is like believing that the ACLU is a group of American patriots.  The truth is quite different:  The ACLU was founded by people whose long-range goal was to make America into a Communist nation.  “Civil liberties” was just the pretext.  The “Civil Rights Movement” was about Power and Revolution.  In both cases, most Americans – black and white alike – bought what the Socialists were selling. (more…)

WRITING in The American Thinker, Joel Levine examines “the coming indifference of American medicine.” The medical profession, he argues, has been transformed from a field imbued with heroic self-sacrifice to one characterized by a clock-punching mentality. The result is worse patient care.  As has been discussed here before, a major cause of this transformation, only obliquely referred to by Levine, is the large-scale entry of women into the profession. Today’s physician, Levine writes, virtually “advertises [his] fragility.” But why? Levine won’t come right out and say it. The entire culture has  changed because the doctor is more likely a woman.

Levine writes:

Thirty years ago, the training and practice of medicine was deeply rooted in “inherited” values as much as craft. Physicians were in a noble discipline recast into paladins protecting society, even a bit of its soul, against an implacable adversary. Training was both arduous and flawed (inflated egos and autocratic mice that roared) but with a central purpose. (more…)

A WASHINGTON, D.C.-area mother left her child alone in a minivan while she went to work in January and only remembered she had forgot to drop him off at day care when the day care center called to ask where he was. (more…)

 King Lear in New York - Steve Kogan - I HAD A strange and disconcerting night at the theater this spring, when my wife and I saw Derek Jacobi in the title role of Shakespeare's King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On our subway ride back home, my feelings ran so high that we began to quarrel over their intensity, and it was only after we apologized to each either in the morning that I was able to express exactly why my emotions had been roiled. What follows grew out of what I said to her and what I later discovered when I read a review of the production in the New York Times. In my last two years of college, I took a one-year course on Shakespeare and a senior semester on Lear, which we read scene by scene and line by line. There was a time in my life when I went to the theater to see whatever works of his and his fellow dramatists were being performed in the city, and I developed a way of turning even mediocre acting to advantage by supplying my own imaginary performance as I let the familiar words sink in. When the acting was good, my absorption was complete. I also came of age when New York's museums were as quiet as a library, which is to say when libraries themselves were shelters for quiet study and reflection. Times have changed,…

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 is a new book by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher based on interviews with 89 men and women who married in the first half of the twentieth century. Bel Mooney writes about it in The Daily Mail:

From our perspective, the people telling their stories (many of whom must have died since) led repressed lives. Again and again old women recall their lack of knowledge about the sexual act, and their nervousness on the wedding night. (more…)

I WAS unfamiliar with the “My Fellow American” campaign until today. A spokeswoman named Elizabeth Potter politely urged me to ask my readers to take the pledge. Here it is:

Muslims are our fellow Americans. They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. I pledge to spread this message, and affirm our country’s principles of liberty and justice for all. (more…)

A FORUM in The New York Times entitled “How Can We Get Men to Do More at Home?” is a classic illustration of the feminist program to remake human nature through state control and brainwashing. Participants in the discussion come right out and say that people must change their thinking. Equality is good even if people do not want it. Government should even “force” men to change.

“Mentalities generally change much more slowly than legal codifications and institutional policies,” Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, says. Communists repeated the same line until the very fall of the Berlin Wall. What can Ute tell us about life in her home?  Why would you listen to Ute more than, say, your great grandmother, who never welcomed the emasculation of her husband and would have been horrified to see him make a pie? Who knows more about men? (more…)

APPEARING AT the “Capitol Fourth” concert on the Mall in Washington, D.C. yesterday, the pop singer Josh Groban sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” a paean to ennui and alienation. To the crowd gathered on the mall, and the millions who watched at home, it was perhaps enough that the melody was about their nation. This is an Americanism so automatic and unreflective, so perversely narcissistic, it does not even care when America is viewed as empty and meaningless – as long as it is the center of attention. Here are the lyrics, which describe a British couple traveling across America:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America (more…)

GREG JINKERSON writes:

Regarding the thread about black culture under modern liberalism, I agree wholeheartedly that the Great Society scheme, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amounted to a huge step in the wrong direction for blacks politically. (more…)