LYDIA SHERMAN reflects on a visit by a friend from South Africa who is amazed by the honesty and trust common in this country. In some areas, people leave their doors unlocked. Porch furniture is never stolen. Farmers leave cans of money by tables of produce and trust that buyers will leave what they owe.

IF YOU are stubbornly bourgeois, you may enjoy the links to recordings of some of the most sumptuously melodic classical compositions of mid-nineteenth century Europe in this entry. If you take the time to listen to these recordings, I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Thomas F. Bertonneau has added some great examples to the list.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

Bruch’s D-Minor Violin Concerto, his Scottish Fantasy, Raff’s C-Minor Piano Concerto, and Lalo’s Norwegian Fantasyhave in common, with each other and with much of mid-nineteenth century “classical” composition, a basis in folk music.  Bruch, Raff, and Lalo, representatively for Romantic composers, strove to write singable melody; they often did this by mining the treasury of actual folksong, in a way that is obvious in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Lalo’s Norwegian Fantasy,but rather less obvious (but no less the case) in the purely abstract scores.  The snobbism of twentieth century academicism declared peremptorily that such immediate appeal to ordinary and recognizable emotion was “inauthentic.”  (See Theodore W. Adorno.) (more…)

  VIEW the very funny David Zucker video spoofing Sen. Barbara Boxer at RightChange.com  here.

MAX BRUCH, the mid-nineteenth century German composer and pianist, completed the first draft of his Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor Op. 26 in 1866. The violinist Joseph Joachim made suggestions for revisions and premiered the piece in Bremen in 1868. It was an instant success, eventually eclipsing all of Bruch’s other compositions. Violins seemed to “play the piece by themselves,” said the somewhat irritated composer.

They still do. This is one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for the instrument. It will never die.

Sadly, Bruch took a one-time payment. If he had agreed to royalties, his estate would have received payments for the concerto until 1990, according to his biographer. Instead, his daughter Margarethe, who passionately promoted her father’s work after his death, died in poverty.

If you have never heard this sublime work for violin, I highy recommend the 1962 recording by Jascha Heifetz and the New Symphony Orchestra of London. The first movement, which my older son played to a standing ovation at his school three years ago and which I had the pleasure of hearing him practice for many hours, is breathtaking. You can hear the second movement here and the dramatic finale here.

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  THE NORTHEASTERN hardwood forests of America are spectacular always, but never more than at this time of year. When the trees reach their autumnal climax, the forest is in flame. Embers of leaf burn at our feet. We live inside a massive hearth, torched by tree. The deciduous tree speaks of illuminated manuscript and gilded hallways, of morning and mourning. The tree smolders for two weeks before it is fully extinguished. The whole speaks to us, as Robert Frost said, "as if it were leaf to leaf." A poet of New England is a poet of leaves. He said there is no reason we have to go because they have to go.

IF YOU have any doubt that modern society is suffering from a profound disintegration in literacy and mental coherence, I invite you to read this excerpt from The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance and Democracy’s Future by the famous Harvard psychologist and madwoman Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards. The book was published by Cambridge University Press and was presumably edited. If I weren’t already acquainted with the science and code words of victimology, I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what the authors are saying. The audience for this book has a Pavlovian response to words like “patriarchy”and “women.” All the other words are filler.

Liberalism destroys the mind. It creates fissures in cerebral tissue that widen with time.

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  [T]he best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.  ... [W]hile the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda.                                 ---   G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

NOTICE THE blasé, non-committal way the Mayo Clinic discusses the link between breast cancer and birth control pills at its website:

The effect of birth control pills on breast cancer risk isn’t quite clear. However, some studies do show a link between pill use and breast cancer. Key factors seem to be how many years you take the pill and how recently you last used the pill. In one study, use of birth control pills led to a higher risk of premenopausal breast cancer in women who took the pill for four or more years before having a baby. Other evidence suggests that 10 or more years after you stop taking the pill, your breast cancer risk returns to the same level as if you had never taken birth control pills. (more…)

ROGER writes:

What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man.

Just to show that a group of people at a crisis doesn’t always act like a vicious mob, years ago I chanced by a crowd that had just formed where a jumper was spotted up on a building. You read how in these circumstances, everyone is chanting “Jump! Jump!” Well I assure you, we were all hollering at him to stop, reconsider, get back in, etc. One woman was yelling that Jesus loved him (I’m a Jew, but I applaud the sentiment). Particularly impressive was the man near me who (at the top of his voice, so he could only get out a few words at a time) bellowed, “YOU’RE TAKING…A PERMANENT…SOLUTION TO… A TEMPORARY…PROBLEM!!” I looked at him and said, “Damn, you’re good!” He replied, “Throw it all up there and hope something sticks.” After a few minutes the police arrived, and chased us away so the experts could handle things. Eventually the poor fellow was talked down. Anyway, I don’t see how we did any harm. It couldn’t have hurt for him to know that we were rooting for him. (more…)

HOLLY WRITES:

If I may be so bold, I am curious about Christianity with regards to your traditionalist views. Do you espouse Christianity because it is the moral and ethical framework that our culture’s traditions were based on, and because an embracing of it is most likely to bring traditionalism back? Or do you truly believe in the very specific details of the faith — i.e. that Jesus was actually, physically, born of a literal virgin, physically died and was resurrected, etc.?

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  HERE is a heart-warming story about a man who has managed to coax would-be suicides off the sandstone cliffs of Sydney, Australia. If this man had been hired to do what he does, which is simply invite those about to jump into his home for tea, it would never have worked. Charity cannot be legislated.

THE ONGOING effort to encourage children and adolescents to see themselves as homosexual, a campaign that seeks the destruction of innocence, will result in more bullying of children not less. That is a prediction based on common sense. When children are encouraged to flaunt homosexual attractions, they are more likely to arouse hostile responses.

Jeanette Victoria writes:

I’m not a deep thinker but it is my impression that the rise in anti-homosexual bullying is a direct result of the pro-homosexual “anti-bullying” campaign in the public schools. We now have childern as young as 12 (or maybe younger) coming out as homosexuals. Who knows what their dysfunction may have been but what with the pro-homosexual propaganda in the public schools children as young as five years old now self-identify as “gay.” (more…)

THIS AD appears in the latest issue of Fortune. The slogan is “Women as half of all workers changes everything.” That’s true. It does change everything, including the hearts and minds of women. The women in the foreground of this ad appear aroused. They appear to be on the verge of an erotic apocalypse, as if they will gaze from the pinnacles of power with moans of ecstasy. Notice how the morning sun rises in the background. They carry severed heads in their handbags.

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JILL F. writes:

Twenty-five years ago I was expecting my first baby and was a preschool teacher in a childcare center. One of my charges was a quiet, introverted little boy, much like I was as a child. During our parent/teacher “conferences” little Bryce’s parents confided in me that they were thinking of keeping him home for two days of the week and only sending him to preschool for three days…and they were so worried that doing this would mean that he would miss out on “enrichment.” I remember feeling so glad that, somehow with my college degree and absolutely no experience in being a parent, I was in a position of authority and that these parents took me seriously enough to listen to me. I told them to keep him home and bake cookies with him and read to him. (more…)

THE iPHONE, with its many applications designed specifically for young children, is wildly popular among toddlers, even to the point of addiction. According to this piece in the New York Times, some parents believe the phone’s games make young children smarter. There also seems to be genuine concern. Hilary Stout writes:

But Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist in Vail, Colo. said: “Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat.’ You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none.” (more…)

KRISTOR writes:

Lawrence Auster’s memories of childhood play brought back a flood of similar memories: playing war with sticks for rifles; practicing for hours to perfect my vocal imitations of machine gun fire; elaborate mining operations modeled on the side of a dirt hump, using toy trucks and construction machines; throwing my knife millions of times at a tree, trying to learn how it was done. But the absolute acme of all my play took place when I was about 11. My father’s side of the family had bought a bunch of land in the Vermont woods, for a family retreat. We all vacationed there for many years together: about 15 cousins and 6 parents, usually joined by my grandparents. We boys used to spend hours pretending to be Indians in the woods, skulking about as quietly as we possibly could and ambushing each other. I made myself a loincloth once, and tried to peel bark off birch trees in useful quantities (it’s pretty tricky). Once the whole troupe set out on a hike to a waterfall deep in the woods. (more…)

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes in response to previous posts, which can be found here, here and here, on the subject of childhood play:

My main toy in my childhood was a set of toy rubber soldiers. There were maybe 50 or 60 soldiers, contained in a round metal tin, enough for entire battles. There was one soldier in the set who unlike the others was not in a fixed position holding a gun, but was standing in a dynamic position, looking like he could be running, or leaping, or climbing, so he became the main character and hero of my various battle pieces. Sometimes he would serve as a Batman-like hero. I would make a paper plane with a string suspended below it, and attach the toy soldier to it, and he would fly with this paper airplane from his headquarters out to battle criminals. 

Another main toy was a set of bricks, with which a friend and I constructed various edifices, particularly an Egyptian tomb. We would designate the toy soldier a pharaoh, whom we named Ralph, and hide him in the tomb, and then we would become archaeologists and dig him out.  (more…)