THE ILLUSTRATOR Daniel Mitsui has a fascinating piece (see July 14th entry) on recent trends in Legos, the plastic building toys popular among boys. Lego stopped basing its miniature figures on characters and narratives  from medieval history and legend, choosing branded fantasies instead. Mitsui writes:

I began to lose interest in these toys around the time of the first troubling developments. The weird and thankfully short-lived Wolfpack Renegades theme was a harbinger of worse to come; this was the first introduction of characters with no basis in medieval history or literature. Dragon Masters followed, with a wizard named Majisto. (more…)

STUART writes:

Regarding your recent post on feminism and plumbers, I’ve always liked this American promotional poster for plumbers from the 1930s. A bit over the top maybe, but there’s a lot of truth in it. 

My family were farmers but I trained as a plumber as a young man and am still licensed. It took six years to become fully qualified, which included training in gas-fitting, roofing and drainage. I’m 45 now and work as a project manager/estimator for a large Australian based engineering/property maintenance company. 

Maybe I’m influenced by my background, but I’ve always felt plumbers (and many other trades) are undervalued for the work they do. So much of this dirty, difficult and at times dangerous work goes unnoticed by many. And of course our cities and towns would soon fail without the essential maintenance of infrastructure, utilities and services of all kinds.  (more…)

JOHN LOCKHARD writes:

My thanks to you and Thomas Bertonneau for introducing me to Françoise Hardy.

There’s a detail which I found very beautiful. French is more flexible with articles and possessive pronouns than English. In the first two verses, she sings “et les yeux dans les yeux, et la main dans la main.” Literally translated, “and the eyes in the eyes, and the hand in the hand,” or, in more natural English, “eyes locked, hand in hand.” French uses definite articles where English doesn’t. (more…)

LAST MONTH, in an interview with the ever-incisive Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem noted, while offering a philosophical overview of contemporary society and world history, that there are relatively few women plumbers. This insight struck me like a lightening bolt. It showed that Ms. Steinem continues to be a penetrating thinker. Now, I have never met a single woman who wanted to become a plumber, let alone a woman who wanted to become a plumber but was prevented from fulfilling her dreams, but Ms. Steinem is probably very plugged in to the feminine plumbing subculture. Almost everything that is humanly possible exists in this world and I don’t doubt there are one or two frustrated women who have unclogged drains since early childhood and have longed, to no avail, to commit themselves to the lonely, back-breaking labor of the plumber’s life.

I am here to tell you that it is not just plumbing that remains a closed field to women.

Look at this New York Post photo of the crew that just completed a new subway tunnel in New York City. Does something seem amiss? You are right. There are no women in this picture. Where was Ms. Steinem when this photo was taken? Her presence was needed. Ladies, oppression is real. It is real and ongoing. From the bowels of the earth, men are ruling the world.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU, who teaches literature at SUNY Oswego in New York state, has sent the syllabus to his Western Heritage course in response to recent discussion here about college literary studies. The syllabus includes compelling remarks on the moral dimension of literary studies:

The study of literature is the single most important and life-changing element in an undergraduate’s four years of matriculation towards his or her baccalaureate.  The study of literature is not only a discipline; it is the discipline.  Understanding difficult, extended texts requires patience and perseverance, a putting aside of distractions, and a determination to suspend all hasty or childish judgments.  Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish writer of the Nineteenth Century, once said of life that while one perforce lives it forwards, one only ever understands it backwards.  So it is with studies, most especially with literary studies: we perforce read forwards, but only ever understand once we have finished reading, “backwards,” as it were.  Moral commitment remains indispensable to the endeavor …

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  THE PLACES I most liked to play as a little girl were scenes of enclosure and domestic adventurism: the playroom furnished with dolls and a tiny mock kitchen, the living room where my friend and I staged balls, the pavements where we played skip-rope and hopscotch, the shaded streets where we rode our bikes. Here at Tradition in Action is a fascinating piece on modernist playground equipment and its hostility to girlish play. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira writes: The feminine soul is a fountainhead of grace, delicacy and sensibility, which enriches the moral and social life of humanity with spiritual values that man does not give it. The equilibrium of the mankind demands women with a rich mental structure displaying all the gifts proper to their sex, just as it demands men with profoundly virile souls. It would be absurd to educate a generation of boys in the most effeminate way possible. No less absurd would it be to educate a generation of girls with the intention of making them as masculine as possible.   

THE PRESENCE of large numbers of women in governing positions degrades politics, not because women are incapable or stupid but because women are womanly. Here is a perfect example. Czech female parliamentarians have posed for a racy calendar. The purpose of the calendar is to create a refreshing, anti-authoritarian image. Wouldn’t you rather have your life controlled by beautiful women, than men in suits? The Telegraph reports:

“We want to draw attention to the fact that we have women in politics,” said MP Lenka Andrysova, who appears in one shot in a thigh-high dress kneeling on a shelf.

They want to draw attention to more than that. John of Powerline reacts with flippant indifference: “Czechs seem to be having a little more fun in their political lives than we are.” Paul disagrees:

My conclusion is that this calendar confirms the decline of Western Civilization, assuming the Czech Republic is part of that Civilization.

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  IT'S RARE to come across good news in the gossip press, unless you find items about two beautiful narcissists getting married uplifting. But the news that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are engaged is an exception. Here's a man and woman who were settled into a lifetime of public animosity. Instead they have chosen to be parents for their child. America doesn't need to hear Bristol's lectures on the joys of single motherhood. It does need to see young people in their early twenties embrace marriage and parenthood.

A READER who asked for suggestions for his college literature course writes:

What a treat to return to the Internet after several days away to find your thoughtful and lengthy response to my admittedly difficult request! Thank you very much for taking the time to respond – you’ve introduced me to some new writers and refreshed my memory on some others. I haven’t read Meredith or Gissing; I’ll look into those. I have read Sarah Orne Jewett in the past but forgot about her – great idea. I had also forgotten about Blixen/Isak Dinesen; I was just thinking I might try to put together a connected story/film lesson or two using her story Babette’s Feast and the excellent film version. I like the idea of starting with some of the ancient Greeks and especially A.’s idea of Antigone and the natural law. Teaching The Book of Job as literature is also an intriguing idea. (more…)

I WAS reading a blog the other day in which a young woman stated that she loves Lady Gaga. The pop star, she said, makes her “feel alive.”  This is to be expected as the fans of Lady Gaga are half alive. Here is an apt quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man:

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

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RENÉE writes:

When I was twelve years old, my orchestra conductor told us that when she was young, women were not allowed in professional orchestras because they would have to be replaced with they got pregnant and it seemed more practical to just hire men. To me that seemed very sensible, though my opinion was something I knew not to share.

Throughout my life I have had many moments like that, knowing that the prevailing wisdom was wrong about matters of discrimination against women, but not feeling secure to voice my opinions because of fear, and, more importantly, not knowing how to frame my opinions in a manner that would even satisfy me. For, though I sensed that it seemed justifiable to discriminate against women, I still felt on some level that it was not fair. And the desire for fairness is what I was taught was the basis for any perspective on matters of gender. (more…)

LAST DECEMBER, Lady Gaga performed for Queen Elizabeth at the annual Royal Variety Performance in Blackpool.  Please don’t write to me and say that lots of trashy perfomers have appeared before the Queen. I don’t care if Satan himself tapdanced on a piano for the monarch. The point is, the Queen of England and the Queen of Nihilism should not be in the same room together, let alone shaking each other’s hands. If the Queen of England were responsible to her people she would not have shaken hands with Gaga or clapped at her performance. She would have appeared in a national address on television and asked all parents to ban Gaga from their homes. Instead, the Queen has done what leaders throughout the Western World have done. She has stood by, a mere spectator at the desecration of innocence and the tortured spiritual death of the West.

Reader N. writes:

There is a hidden significance to any performance for the Queen of England, although it isn’t as important as a few centuries ago. Ever since Henry VIII the English monarch has been the head of the Church of England. Yes, the Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of that church, but the monarch is the titular head. (more…)

JESSE POWELL writes:

I see that bringing to attention the harmful pornographic imagery Lady Gaga has produced in her music videos and public persona has started a vigorous and much needed discussion of the harms that pornography, which is titillation of the senses without regard to the moral content of the message and the imagery, does to our culture. 

It’s important to emphasize here how clueless most people are as to the harms and dangers that Lady Gaga represents, and how the press has treated Lady Gaga with deference, approval and affection. Youngfogey has made comments about how it is at least redeeming that Lady Gaga is showing the dead-end of sexual liberation. Evan talked about the need to expose teenagers to cultural icons such as Lady Gaga so that they will be prepared to deal with the “real world” once they are no longer under the supervision of their parents. When Youngfogey and Evan made their comments, they were operating under the assumption and common understanding that the messages that Lady Gaga sends in her videos are actually bad, that they represent either the failings of and false promise of sexual liberation or they represent a danger that children need inoculation against through limited exposure combined with moral teaching as to why the messages embodied in Lady Gaga are bad. 

The wider culture, the response of the average person who imbibes of the cultural environment around them, does not have this fundamental understanding that what Lady Gaga represents is bad or morally dangerous at all. Now true, there is a feeling that Lady Gaga is often “naughty” and occasionally someone will describe the imagery she uses as “disturbing” but overall the cultural response to Lady Gaga is positive, affirming, and without a sense that what she is doing is wrong.  (more…)

IN THE previous entry about Gaga, a reader says that shielding children and adolescents from pop stars may be to their detriment. I have heard this argument before. His point was that young people are later exposed to temptations that they are entirely unprepared for and thus give in to them. But, of course, limiting your child’s intake of toxic vulgarity is not the same as placing him in a locked cell. A child only needs to walk into the local CVS pharmacy and listen to what’s on the audio system to get a warning that sexual depravity exists. 

See the comments in that entry by James P., who writes:

 I want to raise my children to have the moral and intellectual strength to regard popular culture with the boredom, contempt, and disgust that it deserves. Exposure to television — even “educational” television — weakens them, and of course, exposure to evil, however banal and commonplace, corrodes their souls and undermines their character development. One need only meet the coarse, ignorant, and self-indulgent children who are typical products of popular culture and the public school system to understand this properly.

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  TODAY'S pop performers lower the bar so far that aesthetic simplicity and understatement seem primitive. In fact, they are the end products of high civilization. This lovely version from the sixties by the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy of "Tous les Garçons et les Filles," is the sort of thing crowded out by Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. Loveliness, the smiles of a summer night, feminine purity, these have become so quaint and unreal that some even argue that parents are not preparing the young for life if they don't expose them to the bleakest of alternatives. The video was sent by Thomas F. Bertonneau, who writes "there is no gyrating, no electronic processing of the voice, very little cosmetic makeup -- simply a beautiful feminine voice singing a song about every young person's dreadful worry that everyone except he or she has someone to love."

SEE THE excellent contribution by Scott M. in the previous entry to various reflections on Lady Gaga and the diabolic imagination. He writes:

We can speak of the ageless “powers and principalities” that have been seeking to destroy human souls since time immemorial, but we would be telling only half the story if we did not identify groups in the human community that have been determined and impassioned agents of real malevolence, and whose depredations have not only been tolerated but internalized by their victims. (more…)