The education special issue of National Review is in part available for reading online. The first article is a discussion by Victor Davis Hanson on why universities (he concerns himself with the US but the arguments are at least as applicable to Canada) are so radically left. His conclusion, that one generation of radical professors has poisoned the atmosphere on campus but that the damage will be limited to their tenure, is optimistic. I don't share his optimism.
First of all, he argues that the anti-Vietnam War students grew up to become professors and brought their politics with them. This is largely correct. The larger point, though, is that students in general were not particularly anti-Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact young men under 25 were the second highest supporters of the war (after men 26-35), and it is this cohort who became junior faculty in the early 1980s and are running the show today. (For more discussion of this see David Frum's How We Got Here.) So the ascension of radical liberals of that generation didn't represent the university conceding to some massive wave of demographics, it represented the concentration of a small part of the student population into academia.
Second, Hanson is right that today students are much less liberal than their professors. His conclusion that these more-balanced students will in the years to come bring more balance to the faculty, though, doesn't follow. The real question isn't "what are the politics of today's undergrads," after all, since the great majority of undergrads don't set foot on campus again after they graduate. More relevant are the political leanings of graduate students, since it is from this much smaller pool that future professors are drawn, and any look at graduate student societies active in Canada today will indicate that they are not particularly politically diverse. (McGill's Graduate Student Society has a special Queer Student representative, since presumably the needs and interests of homosexuals diverge so radically from those of heterosexuals.) It is also a mistake to assume that intellectual diversity amongst students will have an inevitable "trickle-up" effect on faculty composition; as long as leftists can influence admissions, funding and hiring decisions, which they certainly do, they will favour their ideological offspring over all other candidates and maintain the link between radical left politics (at this point to the left of Moscow and arguably Beijing) and the professorial classes.
Perhaps Hanson's optimism is more justified in the US. When the best universities have tuition that is higher than a respectable income in Canadian dollars, and when universities are as dependent as the major American schools are upon alumni and corporate donations, there is a degree of accountability that is largely lacking from Canadian universities, with their tremendous degree of government funding. More students go away from home for university in the USA than in Canada, too, which means that choices are greater; outside of Ontario high school graduates are strongly influenced by geographic proximity, and perhaps this leads to issues such as intellectual integrity and politics being left out of the decision making process. It is very hard to see any reason for believing that Canadian universities will change in the near future.
Yasser Arafat appears to have diverted over a billion dollars to a bank account he personally controls.
The never-boring Rabbi Boteach has some interesting thoughts on why homosexuality seems to so many people to be so much less threatening than in the past.
"Conceptual artist" Damien Hirst unveiled his first solo exhibition for eight years yesterday and the London Telegraph was there:
In a bloody show that would sit as easily in the Natural History Museum as at his fashionable gallery in London's East End, Hirst has used flayed cows' heads to represent Christ's Apostles. More severed bovine heads, in Hirst's trademark formaldehyde-filled rectangular tanks, represent the four Evangelists. In an act of symbolism supposed to represent the martyrdoms and bloody history of the Christian church, these heads have kitchen knives, scissors and shards of glass and mirror violently embedded in them.
Elsewhere, Hirst has made two montages using the wings of hundreds of butterflies, and 13 gruesome, slightly smelly black canvases each made up of thousands of dead flies, called the Cancer Chronicles. If you don't look too closely, they more closely resemble thousands of burnt Rice Krispies.
Will Hirst's followers be concerned that after eight years the artist is stuck churning out dessicated animals?
Possibly, said Karen Wright, editor of the magazine Modern Painters yesterday. "His [religious] comments and symbolism is so obvious. Taking on religion requires a lightness of touch in the 21st century and I don't see it."
Sometimes a headline says so much, so well, that there is no need to read further. Here is one example:
Santa arriving too early, claim baby-oil-wielding terrorists.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that city high school students will be offered
tickets to sporting events and coupons for Walgreens drug stores to get them to show up for class more often.
Some kids likened the idea to bribes, but Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan said he was merely trying to "incent improvement.''
"Marc Quinn is best known for Self (1991), a model of his head made from nine pints of his frozen blood, now on show at the Saatchi Gallery in County Hall, London. More recently, Quinn created a model of his four-day old son’s head, made from his girlfriend’s liquidised placenta."
-- Guardian Magazine
If, as the philosopher Heraclitus would have it, character is destiny, what does one make of the character of the late Pallop Thachao of Thailand? Consider his fate, dear reader, and ponder the inscrutability of karma. This is the tale the deceased's relatives told reporters this summer in Bangkok:
"We were driving past a tollbooth last night when Pallop said he needed to relieve himself, so we pulled over at the side of the highway, and let him out. He stood beneath an electricity pole and began to urinate, when all at once there was a flash of light, and we instantly feared the worst. We searched for him in the darkness, but all we found were ashes. Mysteriously, his artificial leg was still standing upright, all by itself, with the foot welded to the ground and smoke coming out of the top. We were all sick on the spot.”
Later, Police Captain Narongchat Sajjathai explained how Pallop Thachao had met his death. “There was a heavy rainstorm last night, and ground water had collected around the pole. An exposed cable was in contact with the water, and the stream of urine must have completed an electrical circuit. He might have survived, but his prosthetic leg was a strong conductor of electricity, and that proved fatal. Tragic though this incident is, it highlights the folly of urinating near electrical equipment, especially during the rainy season.”
“We will not press charges against the electricity company", said the relatives, "because we consider this to have been his destiny."
From a British Shakespeare Association conference programme, "Shakespeare and the Ethics of Cultural Exchange":
The aim of this seminar is to promote the elaboration of a new ethical reading of Shakespeare, one which is allied not to a post-Aristotelian ethics of character as self-consciousness but rather to phenomenological conceptions of ethos as a Subjective making room, an opening (which may be effected by a real or symbolic violence) to the diverse modes of alterity that are encountered in the processes of social and cultural exchange. We suggest that it is timely to reconfigure a Shakespearian ethos as a set of cultural and relational openings which accord value, not to singular subjective modes of knowledge, but rather to a set of dramatic acts and relationships.
We hope to look specifically at processes of exchange in the plays and poems - whether these involve signs, things, or persons (as in disguise or cross-dressing) - which serve as distinctive markers of cultural difference. We will consider the extent to which such exchanges may be represented as marking the limits of a certain social and cultural security, experienced as the painfulness of not knowing. And we will ask if such exchanges may consequently point obliquely towards an obscure dimension of (aesthetic?) law or meaningfulness that operates in excess of the sphere of socio-historical cohesiveness.
From a New York Times article on the policies of Democratic hopeful Wesley ClarK:
On the plane, General Clark also said he might support changing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy governing the presence of gay men and lesbians in the military.
"I'd like to see the military relook the policy," he said. "I didn't say change it — I said relook it."
The National Post website has a great editorial on the subject by Robert Fulford. A further note to those who think Canadian culture is someone intrinsically better than American culture: only in Canada do we have a government run tv network that pays huge amounts of money to create unwatchable shows. While the network system in the US surely creates more than its share of dreck, there are the odd gems; as cable becomes increasingly financially viable the quality of programming available only increases. And just think, it's all accomplished without massive coerced public subsidy! How truly unCanadian.
The latest issue of the New Yorker has a long and in some ways interesting profile of Mel Gibson and The Passion. The most interesting parts are the interviews with and comments of Gibson himself; his words have so far gotten much less attention in this matter than have the opinions of people only tangentially associated with the project. Much of the article, though, concerns the question of whether or not The Passion will be bigoted, hateful, and so on and so forth.
This is the anniversary of the worst atrocity ever committed on North American soil, committed by Moslems. Last week saw the 101st bombing carried out by Moslems in Israel, and took the number of Jewish dead past 800 in the past three years. A Moslem bomber killed Australians at a resort in Bali. Indian Moslem rioters killed Hindus in India. In central Africa Moslems continue their violent persecution of Christians, especially Anglicans. Closer to home the RCMP has found frightening numbers of Moslem would-be-terrorists living in Canada. Our government is not only quiet about this but seems quite nonchalant about the horrific treatment of Canadians in Saudi Arabia, the ideological source of much of the above violence.
In this climate, in a time in which a significant part of the world has openly declared war on Western civilization, many public intellectuals are at long last questioning the relationship between murder, hatred and religion. And the target of their inquiry is traditional Catholicism. The West has indeed lost its mind.
Here is a Salon article that seems to look favourably on "safe injection" programmes in Vancouver. I find myself quite ambivalent about this whole concept. While anything that reduces new infections of HIV and hepatitis is good for our country in general, both in terms of confining the disease and reducing the burden on our health care system, there are a lot of problems with this approach. First of all, by reducing the cost of heroin use and addiction (which this inevitably does, by making it safer, easier and less stigmatized) such initiatives will increase the number of users. Second, and without meaning to sound too callous, I wonder what responsibility the government has to prevent sane adults from the logical consequences of their freely made decisions. (Yes, yes, one can question whether addicts are sane, or acting with free will, but the great majority of drug users were of sound mind when they first decided to use a highly addictive drug. The ensuing dependency and its related problems are hardly unforeseeable consequences.) Especially in a country in which detox and rehab treatments are paid for by the government for everyone, is it really appropriate to use tax revenues to make it easier for people to stay addicted? While the centre discussed in the Salon article isn't government run, BC and Vancouver are actively preparing to start running official "maintenance" programmes. And would most people not prefer that this money go toward the treatment of babies born to addicts, or to victims of crimes caused by drugs, or to reducing waiting lists for life-saving treatments for non-elective diseases?
A potboiler thriller published in the US a few years ago had as its main character a rogue FBI agent who, after publishing warnings in major newspapers, laced the nation's drug supply with poisons. Rumour has it among several writers' groups that in the second draft, the agent had also to plot to assassinate several politicians, because far too many readers had trouble figuring out who exactly was the villain. This approach is certainly too proactive an attack on addiction for my taste; nonetheless, doing more to reduce the social, fiscal and medical costs of addiction seems at best counterproductive.
Pat Martin's appalling remarks about religious opponent of "gay marriage" have prompted neither an apology nor significant national attention. Mr. Martin's only further contribution to the dialogue has been to express his dismay that religious Christians are not more concerned about the dismal child poverty and drug abuse statistics for his inner Winnipeg riding. This is disingenuous on at least two counts.
First, of the many charities active in that area that seek to bring food to the hungry, help to the ill and despondent, and a future to children, the vast majority (in fact every one of which I am aware) is run and staffed by religious people, the great majority of them volunteers. I look forward to the day when we have children's camps run by committed atheists and food banks run by gay pride organizations, but do not think it will come soon.
Second, by refusing to see the link between "gay marriage" and child poverty and drug abuse, Martin is being either deliberately and maliciously obtuse or remarkably naive. Since the vast majority of socialists of my acquaintance are painfully well-intentioned, I'm happy to assume the latter for the time being. Nonetheless it boggles the mind how one can advocate the abandonment of sexual restraint and then be surprised by the vast increase in neglected and unwanted children. Similarly, a society that preaches that adults may do anything they please with their bodies should expect that this will make it easier for a number of them to ingest addictive and harmful substances. The insistence that personal morality regain a position of importance in everyday life would have many benefits, not least the reestablishment of an expectation that people will provide for their offspring, and that vices such as addiction and its attendant problems be considered deviant, not diseases or coping strategies. There are few parts of the country that would improve more sharply under such changes than Canada's inner cities.
From The Corner:
From the Alameda Times-Star:
FEDERICO de Jesus owes Victor David Hanson an apology.
De Jesus, a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Cal., falsely accused Hanson, the distinguished author of the just-published book "Mexifornia" (Encounter, 2003), of racism and xenophobia at a recent Capitol Hill briefing.
During his introduction, Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece, was aptly described as "a classicist." De Jesus somehow interpreted that to mean that the author had a white "classist" bias against immigrants. Pelosi's aide, who somehow earned a diploma without being able to make a distinction between a classicist and a classist, got ugly with Hanson and stormed out of the briefing in protest.
Winnipeg MP Pat Martin (sorry, no link until tomorrow) has gone on the record as saying that those who oppose "gay marriage" for religious reasons are "bastards" and "assholes." He goes on to say that his god (name unspecified, but Sven Robinson must be in the running) wants everybody to love each other, or some such pablum. Is there any group besides religious Christians who could be abused in this manner by a sitting MP without dire political consequences for the bigot in question?