ROBIN JENNIFER writes:

When gazing upon your photo of Caroline Norton and her extraordinarily revealing facial expression, I could not help but share this tale with you, knowing that you will appreciate the fruit of Caroline Norton’s existence.

I recently had the misfortune of witnessing the following situation between Woman A. (I’ll call her Jane), and Woman B. (I’ll refer to her as Mary). (more…)

A MANHATTAN mother has filed a lawsuit against her daughter’s $19,000-a-year nursery school, charging that it failed to prepare her daughter for the entrance test necessary for admission to top private schools. According to the suit, as reported by The New York Times, “The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom.”

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MARI writes:

I read with interest your post on a group who would like to protect Western civilization and its Christian heritage and influence. I am not Caucasian, but I am a Christian. Will there be a place for
those like myself who love the Lord and regard Western Civilization highly, in this society of Caucasians? I hope I have not offended you. I have always thought that I would like a place in such a society. To assure you, I am not a liberal intending on starting trouble. I have always wanted to be a part of a society which regards highly the Lord, His ways, the Constitution of the U.S.A. to name a few things. I grew up in a Muslim country and lived there for almost 18 years. And there is no place like the U.S. This is where I call home. I think multiculturalism can only work if it is based on conservative Christian principles. Otherwise, it degenerates into trouble.

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  CAROLINE NORTON was the mother of modern divorce in England. She actively campaigned for liberalizing divorce laws in the early Victorian era in an effort to leave her husband and retain custody of her children. She succeeded in lobbying for the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, which made it possible for mothers to procure custody of young children. She was also influential in passage of a later law transferring adjudication of marital dissolution from ecclesiastical to civil court. I find this photograph of her intriguing.  Her entire expression seems to say, "Eat my shoes!" However, Norton was opposed in some senses to the modern liberal view of marriage. "The natural position of woman is inferiority to man. Amen! That is a thing of God's appointing, not of man's devising. I believe it sincerely, as part of my religion. I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality," she wrote in The Times in 1838.

  SURELY, no president in history has spent as much time in school classrooms as President Obama, pictured here visiting a Virginia high school last week with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. At least once a week, or so it seems, Obama pops into a public school somewhere in America. The Great Unifier believes education is the great unifier. And for many Americans, both conservative and liberal, it is. Public education is the one issue surrounded with a halo of incontestability. How could anyone begrudge more funds or more energy or more ideas devoted to our schoolchildren? How could anyone not like a man who takes the time to be with children and who wants to boost our global competitiveness? The school is the natural playground of the liberal politician. It is the place he is most at home because there he feels secure in his good intentions. Education reform is the path to political holiness.

SUPRIYO writes:

I discovered your blog quite sometime ago and have come to really admire what you have to say.

I am a 30-year-old man living in one of the bigger cities in India. I sit and watch in despair as I see many of the ills which seem to affect your society (irreversibly?) gradually come to haunt ours.

Mindless popular culture delights in taking the worst the West has to offer (e.g. I am talking reality shows, the vulgarization of newspapers), increasing divorce rates (divorce was unheard of a generation ago), adolescents engaging in promiscuous behaviour, you name it ! Something of our ancient culture still exists though but we stand as it were on the brink.

You may be surprised that even though we may be so culturally different, many of the values that you hold so dearly are exactly what we seek and idealize too. They are indeed the “common good.”

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AT THE ridiculous and revolting Women in the World Summit in New York City this weekend, Hillary Clinton told Middle Eastern reformers that they must give women more political power. The Secretary of State is utterly at home telling other peoples how to order their lives. Global Oprah-ization is her objective. Women “deserve to be able to run for office, to serve as leaders and legislators, even president,” she said.

The chic summit was a cross between the Academy Awards and a global Take Back the Night rally. (more…)

  THE COURAGE and desperation of the Japanese in face of the horrific tsunami is demonstrated by this story of a 60-year-old man found floating on the roof of his house ten miles out at sea. He had fled the wave, but then returned to his house to recover valuables. He and his wife were both swept away and she is still missing.

The recent item at The Thinking Housewife about the “heroic” movie house in East St. Louis provoked me into remembering the many heroic films that Hollywood produced in the decades before World War II that thrilled the audiences who attended those glorious cinemas.  The movies used to belong to a healthy popular culture, which began to erode after the heady victory of 1945 and which disappeared apace in the tumult of the late 1960s.  Contemporary popular culture tends to be sexually and violently gross, morally relativistic, and intellectually so degraded that its mindlessness beggars description.  Recently, when I had the opportunity to teach a course on the history of American popular culture, I asked my students to watch a number of pre-1950 movies of the type that drew people out of their homes by the millions in the 1930s and 40s.  One of them was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn. 

Ascriptions like “the greatest film ever” are dubious, but in the case of The Adventures of Robin Hood, what would usually be hyperbole seems justified.  (Sample the original theatrical trailer.)  If, as I argued to my students, the European directors employed by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s saw in film a continuation of grand opera on the Wagnerian model – a type of unified total artwork involving all the subordinate arts from costume- and scene-design through dramatic dialogue to musical accompaniment – then one would be hard pressed to find a more exemplary instance than the Flynn-Curtiz Robin Hood.  The critic René Girard has argued that all effective narrative turns on moral conversion and that reading is itself a type of conversion experience.  So it is also in film.  One of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’ superbly directed medieval epic is that the story turns on a moment when two paths of moral conversion intersect one another and intertwine.  Robin must let love temper his passion for justice and Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland) must give up her Norman superciliousness to become reconciled to the English virtues embodied by Robin. (more…)

IN ITS latest issue celebrating global pop feminism, Newsweek includes Rebecca Lolosoli, of Kenya, as one of the 150 “women who shake the world.” Lolosoli has established a “matriarchal utopia,” a womyn-only village called Umoja. To add to the perfection of this Arcadia, many of these women were raped by British soldiers. That’s what we are told by the investigatively hard-nosed Newsweek, and expected to believe without any proof. “Sons are welcome—as long as they are willing to follow the village’s rules and do not try to dominate the women.” The village supposedly offers women protection, as if any women can seriously protect themselves without the help of men.

The women of Umoja must be only too happy to indulge the fantasies of Western feminists and the bottomless credulity of American women. In a ludicrous example of fusion feminism, which is commercial to the core, the village manufactures artisan bead necklaces sold by fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg. Buy one, and you too can be part of global matriarchy and channel the strength of the Umoja women as you drop your children off at day care or are on your way to work as a low-level government functionary. Umoja! Primitive is cool. It sure beats the soulless, deadening, day-to-day reality of Western androgyny. 

Eliza Griswold reports:

Lolosoli, a mother of five, is now the first woman among her people, the Samburu of Kenya, to ask for—and receive—a divorce.

Two months ago, when the verdict was announced, her husband burst into tears in the courtroom.

“I will get hold of you again,” he threatened.

Lolosoli will be part of this weekend’s Women in the World Summit in New York City. The event is sponsored by Founding Partner HP, American Express, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Reuters, the Virtue Foundation, Vital Voices Global Partnership, Women for Women International and the United Nations.

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HERE’S THE latest from The Australian on efforts by the Australian government under Prime Minister Julia Gillard to force companies to hire and promote women: (more…)

WHEN I chose this Soviet poster honoring International Women’s Day yesterday, I was perplexed by the picture. What is happening to the woman on the left? What is all that stuff? Now, I realize, thanks to a reader, that she is buried under her kitchen. This is a symbol of household slavery. The woman is literally crushed by her samovar and mop.

Lucy Zubova writes:

I don’t know if you translated it but the Russian wording reads: “8th March Insurrection Day of the Female Workers against Kitchen Slavery.” All I can say is, Ha ha ha ha. I don’t care how many billboards or pictures of Dyadya Lenin were placed around the former USSR. My own Russian husband has told me something of the life those “equal” Soviet women enjoyed. (more…)

  If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word. O my people, what have I done unto thee. Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence Not on the sea or on the islands, not On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land, For those who walk in darkness Both in the day time and in the night time The right time and the right place are not here No place of grace for those who avoid the face No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice                                                   From "Ash-Wednesday" by T. S. Eliot

JOSIAH writes:

Patriarchy is assumed by many to mean rule by men. Feminists make this assumption, and anti-feminists tend to make this mistaken assumption too. Patriarchy is not rule by men, but rule by patriarchs (from the Latin root pater) or family men. In the past, most men were patriarchs so patriarch and man were interchangeable. This is the reason we have made the mistaken assumption that patriachy is rule by men.  (more…)