IN THIS World War II recruiting poster for the U.S. Marines, the soldier is unmistakably a woman. She is manly, with her tie and clipboard; she appears to be play-acting, dressed in a male costume, but there is a softness to her face and her hair is loose. Her mission is purely administrative and the dreamy look in her eyes suggests love for a Marine, not for war. Compare that to the recent recruiting poster below it. There the woman bears no trace of femininity; one cannot imagine her ever falling in love. She stands above men, in command, a ferocious female fighting machine. She is taut and angry, a human embodiment of artillery. Her outstretched arm resembles a gun and her mouth seems to spew invisible smoke.  The men look up to her in adoration.

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The Camp Kitchen, Ivan Sukhanov

STEVE KOGAN writes: 

There are times when a political hit job in the news can consume me to distraction. Either I find a way to work it out of my system or live with it until it disappears, although some never truly go away. I know an academically accomplished woman whose insults and smears are so barbed that people who were on the receiving end years ago can still feel the sting when they think of her. 

 The other day I experienced a reawakening of two such smears that have stuck in my craw for the longest time, the first being Dick Durbin’s remark on the Senate floor on June 14, 2005, in which he likened “what Americans had done” at Guantanamo to totalitarian regimes. His reference to Nazis was bad enough, but “Soviets in their Gulags” hit me hard. 

The second sliming was Tina Fey’s ridicule of Sarah Palin on NBC’s Saturday Night Live (“I can see Russia from my house”), which was peddled by the left with such avidity that it not only became an emblem of Palin’s supposedly diminished mental faculties but also made people believe that the words were actually hers. In effect, Tina Fey became Sarah Palin, while Dick Durbin was allowed to remain himself after he performed an exercise in damage control that sounded like remorse but was nothing of the kind (“I am sorry if anything I said,” and a “heartfelt apology” to those who “may believe that my remarks crossed the line”).  Read More »

IN 1979, James Webb, the future Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Senator, wrote in Washingtonian Magazine:

There is a place for women in our military, but not in combat. And their presence at institutions dedicated to the preparation of men for combat command is poisoning that preparation. By attempting to sexually sterilize the Naval Academy environment in the name of equality, this country has sterilized the whole process of combat leadership training, and our military forces are doomed to suffer the consequences. Read More »

BRUCE writes:

That is a wonderful essay from Jim Kalb on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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Journey into the Whirlwind
Within the Whirlwind
By Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg

The Thinking Housewife Book Club

Years ago, I picked up the books of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg and was so astonished by the clarity of her memories and by both the Stoicism and feeling with which she described unimaginable suffering, cruelty and bureaucratic absurdity, that I vowed to actively remember her forever, as if she was a relative or a good friend lost in a plane crash.  That’s why I return, and I imagine others return, to these books every so often and remember her remembering, vicariously reliving that time when Ginzburg was in solitary confinement in the Yaroslavl prison, the days when she traveled the Sea of Okhotsk in the stench-filled hold of a slave ship and that moment when she encountered berries in the snow while felling trees in the subarctic Siberian taiga:

It was already May when, as I was crouching close to the ground in order to cut the branches off a felled larch tree, I noticed in the thawed patch near the stump that miracle of nature – a sprig with five or six berries on it, of a red so deep that they looked almost black, and so tender that it broke one’s heart to look at them. As with all over-ripe beauties, they could be destroyed by the slightest touch, however careful. If you tried to pick them., they burst in your fingers; but you could lie on the ground and suck them off the branch with your dried, chapped lips, crushing each ojne separately against your palate and savoring its flavor. The taste was indescribable, like that of an old wine – and not to be compared with ordinary cranberries: its sweetness and heady flavor were those of victory over suffering and winter. (Journey into the Whirlwind,  Transl. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward)

Soviet Communism lies in the dustbin of history, but for all that has been said and written,  its full reality has not permeated the consciousness of many Westerners. The extremity of their suffering calls us to know at least some of the victims of Soviet Communism up close. Yet the inhabitants of the dark underworld of Soviet concentration camps, the zeks and deportees, the exiles and prisoners, still have not gained the attention they are due. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is world famous, but other accomplished memoirists have never achieved the ranks of Anne Frank, Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel. The warmth once extended to Stalin and, to Communism in general, perhaps lives on in the muted horror over their legacy. Lingering bad conscience, the close affinity of Communist ideals of equality and social justice to the objectives of modern liberalism, must explain why someone like Ginzburg is rarely read in American high schools or universities.  Here is an author meant for the student pondering the lessons of the twentieth century. And, regardless of its lessons, here is a story as gripping as the best works of the imagination.   Read More »

THIS EXPLANATION by Russell Kirk of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s former influence on American intellectual life is so funny and true that when I first read it I burst out laughing (in a very restrained and housewifely way). I have always found reading Ralph Waldo Emerson to be like riding a roller coaster. When the trip is over, you are exactly where you began except your hair is messed up. Here is Kirk:

When, as in some of the Transcendentalists and their Unitarian progenitors, the transplanted Germanic idealism which inspired their system seemed to sustain a kind of conservatism, this was by accident, not from the logic of things. Hegel himself was a conservative only from chance and expediency. The whole melioristic, individualistic tendency of their philosophy was destructive of conservative values. Reliance upon private judgment and personal emotion, contempt for prescription and the experience of the species, a social morality alternately and bewilderingly egocentric or all-embracing (the contradiction so frequently encountered in Rousseau) – these qualities of Emerson’s thought gratified a popular American craving which ever since has fed upon Emersonian “Self-Reliance” and “Experience” and “Nature” and his other individualistic manifestoes. Read More »

YOU’VE heard many fantastic liberal theories as to why members of the underclass are not responsible for their own actions and why government largesse must be increased, but here is one that takes the cake. Nicholas Kristof argues that early childhood intervention may be too late to “break the cycle of poverty.” The prenatal environment determines later success. The obese were exposed to doughnuts in the womb and criminals may have had mothers with worries.

This is a whole new frontier for socialist effort. Kristof does not say what the cure for these prenatal disasters may be other than cleaning up the environment. But imagine what this might cost with national health care. Head Start will seem cheap by comparison. Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The lore of alien visitation and the flying saucers is one of my hobbies. It occurs to me that the aliens might already be wise to Mrs. Othman. In the UFO lore, the “contactees” are never people of office or elevated station; they’re always backwoods people, dirt farmers, highway hamburger stand owners, slightly maladjusted teenagers and the like. The one exception that comes to mind is ex-President Jimmy Carter, who reported a close encounter, but without “contact.” Of course, Carter was also the only serving president to be the victim of a rabbit attack. It is difficult to interpret these things with certainty. If I were an alien visiting the earth in the late 1970s, I would probably have knocked on Billy Carter’s door. I have the intuition that Billy was a better greeter than his brother Jimmy. Considering his ears, Ross Perot probably was an alien. Obama is an alien of a different kind. Once or twice in a faculty meeting (a college teacher, I work in the most ferociously, homogeneously left-liberal institution of them all), I have gotten the distinct impression that I am an alien.

Klaatu barad nikto

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IMAGINE traveling millions of miles to a new planet and the first person you meet is a U.N. bureaucrat. Imagine your disillusionment when Mrs. Othman sits you down for a PowerPoint presentation or hands you a massive folder crammed with brochures, maps and coupons.

Aliens should be greeted by a small child of around four or five. He will know what to say.

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BIRTH CONTROL pills have already been linked in some studies to breast cancer and lower male fertility. New evidence suggests they may alter the brain structure of women too. According to Scientific American,  a study reported in the journal Brain Research “found that birth control pills have structural effects on regions of the brain that govern higher-order cognitive activities, suggesting that a woman on birth control pills may literally not be herself — or is herself, on steroids.” The brains of women on the pill show smaller amounts of the “gray matter” that affects learning and memory. 

The human endocrine system is remarkably complex and delicate. The full effects of a “steroid hormone cocktail” on this sensitive infrastructure may take many years to come to light. But there is already significant evidence that synthetic hormones damage the body and, when secreted into public water supplies, the environment. Here is a major public health issue seldom reported in the mainstream press.

Whether these effects on the physical structure of the brain are confirmed or not, artificial birth control unquestionably alters the psyche of women and tinkers with awareness. The birth control pill changes a woman’s mental outlook. Femininity is openness, a form of attentiveness which artificial contraception destroys.

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Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton

KATHERYN GALLANT writes:

Your post “Marriage Continues Its Downward Slide” has an interesting echo in current events in Britain. The new leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is 40 years old and the father of a 15-month-old son, but is not married to the child’s mother, a barrister named Justine Thornton, who is expecting another child in November. Mr. Miliband is not a practicing Christian (he was brought up in a secular Jewish home: his father was a noted Marxist scholar) and considers himself an atheist (see the Wikipedia entry on him), and seems to consider “getting around to marriage” with his long-time partner perfectly all right. When “asked whether the state should promote marriage, [Miliband] admitted that given that he had not married, he could hardly tell other people to do so.”  Read More »

A. writes:

Here is a statue of Pancho Villa, a known murderer and rapist. I know of stories about him riding into town and the people would have to hide their little girls in holes in the ground, covered with boards and dirt to protect them from rape, kidnapping and killing. He stands in the middle of Tucson, Arizona at the main entrance to downtown. Read More »

The Cowboy, Frederic Remington

STATUES are living ghosts. They exist among us, frozen bronze and stone, silent and alive. This is the natural medium for heroes, the glorification of the individual and the sealing in stone of a spiritual narrative. No other art form depicts the important figures of the past in the same concrete, larger-than-life way. It is no wonder that the heroic statue is offensive to the contemporary sensibility, particularly the sensibility of the artist trained to be perpetually aggrieved and professionally stunned by the imperfections of warriors, political leaders, explorers and kings. Liberalism’s distrust of Western heritage and its suspicion of heroes is not conducive to affection for the bronze horseman or the marble saint. There must be some way to remove them from their pedestals, figuratively if not actually. The Metropolitan Museum put its paintings in storage during World War II to protect them. It would be too much to do the same here. But it would be nice if we could do something for these expressive artifacts in our parks and public squares. Perhaps the best  we could do is collect them all in some safe warehouse until we are permitted to love our ancestors again. 

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 SEBASTIEN WRITES:

For three years years now the Chateau de Versailles has been disfigured by temporary exhibitions of state-promoted contemporary art. This year the culprit is the Japanese manga ‘artist’ Takashi Murakami whose plastic sculptures have ruined the Versailles experience for hundreds of thousands of tourists from all the over the world. Some of the most angry tourists are the Japanese. The French Embasssy in Paris has been inundatedby phone calls from Japanese citizens apologising for the trouble caused by the artworks. Over 12,000 people have signed two petitions protesting the Murakami exhibit and demonstrations have been held at the gates of the 17th century chateau. As a result, the director of the Palace of Versailles has agreed to hold no more art exhibits in the chateau’s royal apartments,  a decision that has angered the contemporary art community. 

Murakami said in a press statement, “I am the Cheshire Cat who greets Alice in Wonderland with his devilish grin, and chatters on as she wanders around the chateau.” The leader of a group formed in protest has called him “a parasite that feeds on an existing work of art.” 

The financial interest at stake in these public arts displays is not insignificant. Read More »

THIS IS the Queen Victoria statue near Hyde Park in Sydney, Australia. The Queen’s get-up is part of a public art project that “celebrates the power of creativity in unexpected spaces.” Public art is another term for public desecration. Is that a dish brush (or toilet bowl brush) in Victoria’s hand?

The children who see this statue will probably never forget it. They will forever regard the Queen as a buffoon.

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COLLEGES, which are always seeking new marketing schemes now that they aggressively pursue a business model, almost universally advertise their study abroad programs. For $50,000, or whatever the going rate for tuition, parents send their college students to a foreign country for a year. Why should a young person party in his native country when he can live hard on an international scale?  Read More »

TRADITIONALISTS working for a turnabout in Western culture are often asked this question. What guarantee is there that civilization will be restored? Doesn’t it appear we are fighting a losing battle and, if so, why not hunker down and prepare for the worst?

Lawrence Auster gives an excellent answer here: Read More »

THE NUMBER of married adults has fallen to its lowest level since the government began keeping records more than 100 years ago. According to Census Bureau data in today’s New York Times, 52 percent of the population over 18 years is now married, as opposed to 57 percent ten years ago. That’s a drop of five percent in just a decade. For the first time in recorded history, the number of never-married young adults, between 25 and 34, exceeds those married.

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