George Orwell is alleged to have said that some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them. Let Dexter add a corollary to that. There are some ideas that are so insidious and socially destructive that only a lawyer could propose them.
Today's example comes from Oregon where a Portland attorney is arguing that 19th-century American slave-owning should allow his client a free pass for murdering his son. It seems that the evils inflicted on African-Americans in the distant past produces a "post-traumatic slave syndrome" among twenty-first century blacks which leads them to violent acts. Apparently Mr Isaac Cortez Bynum was such a victim of this syndrome that he was moved to leave 70 whip marks on the body of his 2-year-old son and then to break his ribs and neck.
Unsurprisingly the straight-faced lawyer proposing this theory is relying on the work of an intellectual, or at least someone who plays one at the Portland State University Graduate School of Social Work. Joy DeGruy-Leary, an assistant professor at that august institution, claims that because African Americans as a class never got a chance to heal from their servitude and "today still face racism, oppression and societal inequality", they suffer from multigenerational trauma.
Dr DeGruy-Leary reportedly has been working on this theory for 20 years but still has found no publisher for her research. As a public service, Dexter offers her this space to demonstrate the truth of her assertions.
A new report claims that too many students are dropping out of universities and that more effort should be spent on retention. The professional hand-wringers who wrote the report found that "students' perceptions of academic control, the level of pride and hope they felt about the academic performance, as well as negative emotions, significantly influenced academic achievement." It is a pity that they did not interview Dexter who has more than a little experience in this field and some thoughts that run contrary to those of these researchers.
In all of the universities that Dexter has laboured in, trying gamely to maintain the standards of the civilization that bred him, there are veritable industries dedicated to student support -- counselling offices, student advocates, remedial programs, peer counsellors, food banks, free condom dispensers, psychiatric services, chaplains, disability centres, harassment investigators, employment assistance, English-language classes, etc., etc., etc. There are programs to ease first-year students into university life, people to show them how computers work, free computers and printers for them to use, free access to the Internet, tours of the library, help desks, free bus service to the parking lots, faculty advisers, aboriginal student centres and foreign student centres. Astonishingly, there is not a single outlet dedicated to the propagation of diligence among students or a sense of responsibility to the society that is heavily subsidizing their education.
Universties could solve their retention problem and instantly elevate teaching standards by the simple adoption of a rigorous standardized entrance exam. Such an exam would eliminate the one-third of first-year students who are unqualified for higher education at the university level. No more would professors have to dumb down lectures, endlessly repeat simple instructions about assignments and mark the plagiarized drivel that the bottom-feeders produce in lieu of hard work. Lectures would be livelier and more intelligent; crowded class-rooms and over-booked facilites would be a thing of the past. High schools would be forced to admit their systemic failure to produce a literate and numerate graduating class and standards would perforce rise in the secondary system. Families would not waste tens of thousands of dollars on the aborted university careers of mouth-breathers and knuckle-draggers and these young worthies would instead be directed into training for the plumbing, hair-styling and automotive trades where they would make fortunes over-charging their better-educated neighbours.
Who could oppose such an elegant solution? Teachers' unions who fear high standards, devotees of "inclusiveness", university administrators who realize their budgets depend on inflating enrollment figures and the student-support industry that cries out for more resources.
I have a long list of people I will not abide moral lessons from. Swedes, for example, and the Swiss -- nations who maintained a lucrative neutrality while Nazi Germany attempted to drag Europe back into Teutonic barbarism. The United Church of Canada. The United Nations. Barbara Streisand, Tim Robbins, Michael Moore and Madonna. Today's example of insufferable carping comes from the Russians.
As the 60th anniversary of D-Day draws nigh, some fans of Russian military prowess have chosen to revive the old "Second Front Now!" controversy. Readers will remember that during World War II, left-wingers in Britain, the US and Canada pressured their governments to speedily invade western Europe to relieve pressure on our beleaguered allies in the USSR. After the war the brutal but highly successful Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov complained that the Allies had deliberately delayed their offensive so that the Germans and Russians would annihilate each other more thoroughly. Now comes another veteran of the eastern front, Marshal Dmitry Yazov, to announce that: "It would be wrong to say that the Allies weren't helping us, but it would be equally incorrect to say they were helping us very actively. They only opened the second front less than a year before the victory."
Forgive me if I shed no tears for bleeding Mother Russia but there are some other pertinent facts that should be taken into account:
1. There would have been no need for a European-wide war against fascist Germany if Stalin and Hitler had not conspired in 1939. The secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of that year allowed Germany a free hand to invade Poland in return for Russia being allowed to swallow up the Baltic republics and annex eastern Poland.
2. Under instructions from Stalin western European communists impeded the war against Hitler from 1939 to 1941. One important reason for the rapid fall of France in the spring of 1940 was French communist sabotage and defeatism.
3. Shortly after Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Russia, British possessions in Asia were attacked by Japan forcing the Allies into a second front in the Far East. Hundreds of thousands of British, Indian, Canadian and Australian troops were killed or captured and hundreds of thousands more were battling the Japanese in China, Burma and the Pacific.
4. Despite calls for a "Second Front", there was plenty of fighting in the west against the Germans and Italians. In 1942 a failed raid on Dieppe by Canadian forces suggested that an amphibious landing against a defended port was a bad idea but there were considerable victories in North Africa where the Rommel's Afrika Korps was shattered. In 1943 the Allies invaded Italy and knocked Mussolini out of the war. Tens of thousands of Allied airmen took part in the bombing of Nazi-held Europe; tens of thousands of sailors struggled to reinforce Britain, run supplies to northern Russian ports and defeat the U-boat threat in the Atlantic.
In short, long before D-Day there were plenty of other fronts on which western allies were dying to save Russia from the fate it had brought on itself.
If one were to write a history of the past hundred years, one of the most consistent themes would be the oppposition of the English-speaking world to tyranny. (Another would be the utter discrediting of the Enlightenment project but we will save that for a future blog.)
From 1914-18 the Anglosphere fought and defeated the imperial designs of the Ottomans, the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs. In 1918-19 we tried, and failed, to prop up a nascent Russian democracy in the face of a Bolshevik revolution. From 1939 to 1945 the enemy was European fascism and in 1941-45 racist Japanese imperialism decided to take a run at us too; both were crushed at enormous expense in resources and lives. From 1945 to 1989 a war, both cold and hot, was waged against the worst enemy yet, Marxism-Leninism in its various forms. At a gigantic cost, on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, in thousands of covert and proxy skirmishes in Asia, Africa and South America, across a barbed wire curtain down the middle of Europe, in magazines, books, academic conferences and bankers' offices, a struggle for the soul of the planet was waged and won.
In these wars allies came and went: sometimes the Turks, say, or the Italians were enemies, sometimes they were neutral, sometimes they were helpful. One moment the Russians were arch foes, in the next they were bosom friends, and a moment later, they resumed their hostility. Some countries, like Sweden, always discovered they were morally superior to the struggle and muck.
It is also interesting to consider how some nations, over the course of the century, have lost their stomach for the fight. New Zealand, which left its dead at Gallipoli and Monte Cassino, now flies the flag of neutrality. Canada, which always fought with one hand (Quebec) tied behind its back, has become increasingly missish and ineffective. Of the French, whose stands on the Marne and at Verdun were once the stuff of legends, no more need be said.
Now an old enemy of civilization, militant Islam, has awoken again. Starting with the triumph of the ayatollahs in Iran, and continuing through the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, slave war in the Sudan, the despotism of the Taleban, bombings of American embassies, ships and cities, and countless acts of terror against Asian and African Christians and Muslim dissidents, Islamists have used violence to expand the boundaries of the faith.
Who will stand against this attempt to revive the caliphate and bring 8th-century sensibilities about stoning, dismemberment and dhimmitude to the 21st century? The Great Satan wasn't given much chance to negotiate with the Sons of the Prophet so America reluctantly found itself on the front line. Britain, Italy, Poland and Australia bravely stepped forth. Canada, as has become usual, played the high-school tease -- willing to go to second base with the Afghani mission but coyly unwilling to go all the way to Iraq. The cynical sabotage by France, Germany and Russia has been noted in the Book of Life and will be repaid in the Last Days (or sooner if I become king).
What is so disheartening in May 2004 is that we seem to have entered an Age of Iron, a sad decline from the Age of Gold. Even in countries whose governments have taken up the task of repelling the barbarians from the gate, a majority of voters and media outlets oppose the fight. The continuous nagging losses, the seeming ingratitude of the Iraqi people and the disgraceful behaviour of the military police have discredited the war and overshadowed the real successes on the ground. But even if there were few local successes, even if the cost in lives was many times greater, this would not be a fight to shrink from. The genius of the Bush Doctrine is twofold: to take the Islamist threat seriously in a way no American government had, and to take the battle into enemy territory. The best way to defeat Isamic terror is not to impair civil liberties in the U.S. and mount guard on every shopping centre, reservoir, power line and bus depot but to implant a democratic alternative in the madhouse of the Middle East. The effect of such an attempt has already produced fruit in Libya and will also have troubled the sleep of the dictators in Iraq and Syria. This is not a time for the American voters to reject Bush nor for allies to go wobbly.
Canada is apparently a valid target of the jihadists of the Religion of Peace. There is a valuable lesson here: you can insult Americans, natter about root causes, and piss on Israel until the cows come home, but until you yourself are a practicing Wahhabist Moslem, Islamists will still hate you. Since presumably not even the Liberals will go that far to curry favour, can we please join the right side of this war?
A man who has suffered greatly at the hands of those who tampered with nature has ended his own suffering. David Reimer, whose chromosomes indicated that he was male, was forced by doctors and their errors to live his early life as a girl. He refused to do so in adulthood, and for a time seemed to have found some happiness, but in the end apparently not enough to make life bearable. The doctors (and his parents) may well have had nothing but his best interests at heart, but this sad story is yet more evidence that sex is not arbitrary, irrelevant, or imaginary, and that those who imagine they need "gender reassignment" are best understood from the perspective of mental illness, not that of Queer/Gay/Lesbian/Transgender/Two-Spirited Studies.
Also while channel-surfing last night, I caught a bit of Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet. It was quite an experience. I'd never seen it, out of the (mistaken) impression that it was yet another "reimagining" of the play which has since Grade 8 left me numb. As it turns out the language was (in the parts I saw) entirely that of the original, but the setting was a 1990s gang war in a large American city with a beach. (I'm guessing LA.) All in all it was marvellous. The meaning was if anything more clear to the modern viewer, and the change in setting didn't obscure the greater themes at all. I have in the past sneered at this sort of playing around with staging, and didn't at all enjoy a performance of Bizet's Carmen set in Franco's Spain, for example. But with R&J it worked very well. Shakespeare's extremely sparse notes on costumes and sets also means that there is less violence done to the original script than would be necessary when adapting other works. I still feel comfortable drawing the line, though, at the version of Henry V performed in London in 2003 in which Henry was transformed into George W. Bush and the English somehow became the villains.
As someone whose only (and limited) creative talents are in the realm of the written word, rather than music, painting, or dance, perhaps I invest too much meaning in the language of the play. I'd far rather see a Shakespearean play artfully performed in modern dress, with the language left untouched, than see a dramatic version of Lambs' Tales, for instance. In Shakespeare's greatest works the literal context is almost irrelevant, and the dynamic between the main characters, and their internal struggles, are so powerful as to be applicable to many different eras. It is the language itself that conveys these themes, not the costuming or the decade in which it is set. The language may at first be difficult for people accustomed to Friends-level dialogue (in which "how YOU doin'?" is about as nuanced as it gets) and sound bites, but the inability of early 21st century demotic speech to convey deep emotion makes the original language the only possible way in which to transmit authentically the meaning of the work.
Perhaps the only other instance in which I feel so strongly about language, and the preferability of less transparent but more authentic wording, is in the Bible. The Bible is also perhaps the only source more rich than Shakespeare in terms of the heritage of English idiom today. Translating Shakespearean or King James English into today's colloquial language therefore not only damages the meaning, but it also severs the ties between literary English of the 20th century (and earlier) and its earlier incarnations. Imagine, then, my horror upon discovering a translation of the Bible into English called "The Message." Here is the King James version of one of the most powerful parts of the Bible, the response of God to the challenge of Job:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man;
for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest?
or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened?
or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
This is language that resonates through centuries of literature, poetry and eloquent speech. Among those who are familiar with this passage, a whole new level of discussion is possible, in which words and phrases possess a depth of meaning that greatly exceeds their denotation. Now consider The Message's interpretation:
And now, finally, GOD answered Job from the eye of a violent storm.
He said: "Why do you confuse the issue?
Why do you talk without knowing what you're talking about?
Pull yourself together, Job!
Up on your feet! Stand tall!
I have some questions for you,
and I want some straight answers.
Where were you when I created the earth?
Tell me, since you know so much!
Who decided on its size? Certainly you'll know that!
Who came up with the blueprints and measurements?
How was its foundation poured,
and who set the cornerstone,
While the morning stars sang in chorus
and all the angels shouted praise?"
A more pedestrian rendering is hard to imagine. Here are the two versions of possibly my favourite verse, Ruth 1:16. KJV: "And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God." The Message: "But Ruth said, "Don't force me to leave you; don't make me go home. Where you go, I go; and where you live, I'll live. Your people are my people, your God is my god." The editors of the latter version have successfully turned a silk purse into a sow's ear, or, as they would no doubt put it, turned a bitchin' wallet into a piece of pig.
There are no doubt arguments to be made in favour of rendering any important document into readily comprehensible material, as was recently done with the courts in Ontario, for example. I also realise that, in a country in which high school graduates sue if they're expected to demonstrate basic literacy, very very few people will learn Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin to a level sufficient to give them an ability to study the original texts and then decide for themselves upon the most accurate or apt translation. But there must be a line drawn somewhere. For myself, if it is ever proven than God said, verbatim, "Pull yourself together, Job! Up on your feet!" I shall cheerfully throw in my lot with the Scientologists.
Last night, on a very high channel, the Royal Canadian Air Farce was on. After watching for a few minutes it became clear that it was a rerun (the Prime Minister being clumsily lampooned was Chretien) but it also became clear that I had no idea how old it was. Subsequent sketches made it clear that it dated to the months preceding the Presidential election of 2000, but the astonishing thing is that the requisite Canadian content was indistinguishable from any other episode of the four years on either side.
The jokes about Dubya's stupidity, the Middle East, and Tony Blair were all clearly dated, and even if the general tropes were the same the particulars were sufficiently different to evoke the rough season in which the episode was filmed. But the Canadian jokes were almost entirely applicable to any period under Chretien's reign, and, if you substituted Martin, to today. Air Canada? Bankrupt, incompetent, on the brink of collapse without more taxpayer's money. The Liberals? Corrupt, openly robbing the taxpayer and laughing about it. The politicians right of the Liberals (alright, I admit, their name changes help to date the show too)? Some good ideas, but too disorganized ever to gain power, and besides, isn't it a bit unCanadian to be conservative? The script never changes.
This is deeply depressing. But at least, perhaps, we can cut the CBC's funding, and they can just rerun all their programming on a 6 week rotation. It would take years for anybody to notice.
Cynthia Ozick, a writer with whose politics I seldom agree, has written a tremendous essay on modern Jew-hatred (a term I prefer to the sterile and euphemistic antisemitism). It's almost, but not quite, enough to make me wish Edward Said were alive to read it.
One definition of political corruption is the unwillingness to distinguish between the public interest and those of your own party or pocket. The corruption that has soaked deep into the marrow of the Liberal party is on display this week in Winnipeg. There the flamboyant mayor Glen Murray is being courted to run as a Grit candidate in the next federal election. A suitably safe seat must be found for him, but where? All eyes turn to the Charleswood-St James constituency currently held by undistinguished backbencher John Harvard.
Harvard is said to be willing to step down for Murray but only for a price. He is alleged to want a patronage appointment but is afraid that if the Liberals lose the election they will not be in a position to pay him off -- therefore the pork must be delivered immediately. What of the lieutenant-governorship, some party functionary cries. It is merely our province's highest honour, the vice-regent of our dread sovereign and the cornerstone of our democracy -- the perfect plum for an aging hack looking for a quick escape from a seat will likely go Conservative next time around.
This shabby bargain may not come off. Murray is desperate for a Martin cabinet post but he is canny enough to realize that this may not be the time nor the riding to attempt the jump to Ottawa. In a perfect world Harvey would be promised the job, Murray would resign the mayoralty to run federally and both drones would be unemployed in late June when the Liberals lose the election. A girl can dream, can't she?
The New Yorker exposes Bush's plan to invade France to eliminate their Snails of Mass Destruction. In an unrelated piece of news, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin is informed of the plan to invade Norway.
A useful reminder that we should always be happy as civilization crumbles.