Tuesday, 27 October 2009 by bbbeard.

From Lincoln to Carter to Caesar. Spengler would be proud.

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Monday, 26 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

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Thursday, 8 October 2009 by bbbeard.

First, a cautionary tale. Some time ago I read a critique of multiculturalism, the central parable of which went as follows: it seems that there was once a classics professor, tasked with teaching a sophomore course in Plato’s Apology. As the professor explains:

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato’s Apology, his account of Socrates’ trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates’ origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

The professor is Mary Lefkowitz, of Wellesley College. The student is fortunate to remain nameless. But I recall this story from time to time, because it is a reminder that even very intelligent people can be enticed, perhaps by cultish isolation, into a worldview that is not only counterfactual, but antisocial in its effect.

Now, the truth is that for a long time I have been privy to a set of facts regarding the period known as “the Red Scare”. I use the word “privy” advisedly, because these facts are readily available to anyone willing to look into the matter — but these facts are nonetheless not only widely disbelieved, but sharply discouraged by the larger culture. For instance, I am painfully aware that people are profoundly uncomfortable with any voicing of the fact that, in the 1930’s and ’40’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of agents operating in many areas of American culture and government, ranging from Hollywood to the Executive Office of the President. I have friends who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Alger Hiss was framed. I know there are many people who continue to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, unpersuaded even by the recent confession of Morton Sobell. And of course, to the extent that they think of it at all, most people are content to fall back on the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Blacklist was our equivalent of Stalin’s Gulag, and that the Red Scare was based on a false premise.

And so I am left with the same feeling that Professor Lefkowitz’s student must have had: why does no one mention this? Are they all deluded? Or am I? But all my investigations lead to the same conclusion. The more I learn about the extent of Soviet infiltration, the more it is apparent that the indictment is true. Alger Hiss was a spy. Rosenberg and Sobell were traitors. Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. Elia Kazan told the truth. I.F. Stone was a paid agent of Stalin. And the more I learn, the less the official reaction makes sense. Why did half of Hollywood’s elite sit on their hands when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award? How can Ivy Meeropol make a film about her grandparents (the Rosenbergs) that remains resolutely ambiguous about their guilt? And why do people treat these facts about Communism — and the Left’s defense of it — as disconnected from the flow of American history?

So I am led to ask the question that Orwell left implicit in the climax of 1984: can facts be defeated by simple fiat of the guardians of the culture?  Winston Smith is finally stripped of all his humanity and forced to accept O’Brien’s demand that 2+2=5 (as the Wikipedia author remarks, “a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact”). As the previous blog post remarks, we live in an age in which — in accordance with the ascendant ideology — the facts of the past are dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to the problems of the present. Is this the fate of those who oppose the cult of personality, to suffer the ‘jackboot stamping on a human face, forever’?

Or is this just another Black Socrates moment?

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Tuesday, 6 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Michelle Malkin has tweaked the other Michelle about her remembrance of things past — specifically, about her memories of sitting in her daddy’s lap while watching Carl Lewis at the Olympics. The fact that Michelle O was 20 years old when Lewis first ran in the Olympics makes her remark a trifle unsettling. Well, okay, in fairness, MO started her sentence by referring to Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, earlier competitors, but the sentence doesn’t parse in any way that is flattering either to her or to her dad. Maybe Barack was borrowing the teleprompter. And fair’s fair, W was pilloried for less creepy assaults on his mother tongue. As it were.

In any case, it put me in mind of our President’s strange detachment from facts about the past. There have been gross errors in interpretation, as when he expressed a belief that leaders like FDR and Kennedy showed the path of virtue by negotiating with our enemies. Well, Kennedy did at least have a summit with Khrushchev, although the summit itself has been described as “disastrous”. But FDR never met with any Axis leader; nor was Joseph Stalin considered an enemy to the United States during FDR’s lifetime. But there have also been peculiar personal exaggerations, as when Obama claimed his parents met because of the (1965) march on Selma — which happened four years after BHO was born. And he has engaged in unnecessary mangling of family history, too, as when he claimed his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz. Auschwitz, Buchenwald — so sue me!

My personal favorite is when he credited Muslims with inventing the magnetic compass, an assertion that no doubt came as a surprise to our Chinese friends. This claim came in his Cairo speech, in which he more egregiously (and erroneously) claimed that John Adams wrote “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” Those words appear in the English version of the text of the Treaty of Tripoli, and are attributed to Joel Barlow, not John Adams. Of course, the fact that Obama even thought it was a good idea to bring up the Treaty of Tripoli in an entreaty to the Muslim world is baffling. The Pasha of Tripoli abrogated the Treaty in 1801 when Jefferson refused to pay, initiating a chain of events that are memorialized in the Marines’ Hymn.

Most recently, he visited the United Nations and claimed “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside.” Again, this is a very odd statement from a self-proclaimed “student of history”. One imagines the German and Japanese Ambassadors exchanging puzzled glances over this claim, thinking their translators had malfunctioned.

I fear that we are led by a man whose “study” of history has been seriously distorted by the Marxists he sought out on the Columbia campus, by the race-baiter in the pews of whose church he sat for twenty years, by the political allies he made in Chicago, and by the friends he has chosen to man his administration and to help draft legislation.

In Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler urged his readers to understand the times in which they live, in order that they might participate in history and not merely stand outside as spectators. Obama seems to have intuited that, at this moment of world history, the Leader has no need for Comprehension, for Understanding of What Is, for Appreciation of What Has Gone Before, the Leader only has a need to have a vision of What the World Could Be. His dwindling but still-numerous followers seem to agree.

And that is a cause for apprehension.

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