So much apocalyptic news nowadays. Will Israel bomb Iran’s nuclear sites? Will Obama’s healthcare act crush conscientious objectors? Will the Eurozone collapse? These are global or national apocalypses, of course, but they remind me of a personal encounter.
Some time ago, as I walked to work in a leafy suburb of Sydney, I often crossed paths with Geoff. He was English and had been a teacher of something or other. In retirement, he looked like the dishevelled younger brother of Neville Chamberlain, with a grey moustache hiding his upper lip, a frayed and funereal black suit and wispy grey hair combed back and matted down over his pate. On the back of his head there was an enormous wen, as big as an egg. He was unmistakable.
We greeted each other now and then on the footpath, discussing the weather mostly, nothing remotely personal. One day, to my surprise, he accosted me in a lather of distress.
“Michael,” he said. “Never in my whole life have I been so insulted.”
“Ah, is that so?” I responded cautiously.
“I was just in the dry cleaning shop,” said Geoff in a fury, “and the young woman there was dressed all in black.”
“Ah,” I said. I recalled the lass – she was probably a university student working part-time.
“She looked quite charming in black and I said, my dear, I am deeply grateful and I would like to invite you to dine with me. No one else has ever acknowledged that I am the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.”
“Ah-ha,” I said. Geoff’s real identity was news to me and no doubt to the young lady as well. It may not have inclined her to accept Geoff’s invitation.
“And do you know what she said to me? Do you know how she responded to my kindness? She told me to…” and here Geoff uttered an expression which sounded even more incongruous on his lips than on the young lady’s.
“Ah, Geoff,” I said. “I really am quite busy. I’ll have to run.” And that was nearly the last I saw of him, although one of my friends was on a train when Geoff spied a woman in a red dress. “Behold the Scarlet Woman,” he shouted. “Behold the great whore of Babylon.” There was a certain lack of tact about this which probably impeded further discussion of this interesting theological point.
I suppose that the lesson is that excessively apocalyptic language can shut down communication. It is advice which we have always tried to follow at MercatorNet.
Anyhow, enough of the personal stuff. So far this week we have posted three articles. Zac Alstin discusses a new book by Alain de Botton under what may be the best headline we have ever had in MercatorNet: “God is dead. Can I have his stuff?” (His headline, by the way, not ours.) Ronan Wright reviews Carnage, a new film by Roman Polanski about parental pride. And a distinguished new contributor, Angelo Codevilla, detects a shift from rule of law to rule by decree in the controversy over the health care act.
What a busy week! So much happening and people popping out of the woodwork with articles and ideas. It’s wonderful and a bit dizzying at the same time. The blogs look after themselves thanks to Sheila, Marcus and Shannon, Katie, Jennifer and the Reading Matters team but pretty well everything else goes through the brain and computer of Michael Cook or myself before it gets published. Golly, we could do with some more staff on this site, and money to pay them -- a thought for when you are revising your will. Or sooner.
Michael has dashed off to another commitment this afternoon but not before posting a brief but moving comment on the winner of the 2011 World Press Photo.
From the Muslim subjects of the photograph to a Muslim British Baroness: unlikely as it sounds, there is such a person. Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, born and bred in Britain, is co-chairman of the British Conservative Party and the first female Muslim to serve as a minister in a UK cabinet. Even more surprisingly, she spoke at a conference at the Vatican this week saying “Europe needs to become more confident in its Christianity”! Do read what she has to say; it’s very encouraging.
In other articles at this end of the week: Thomas Patrick Burke, a libertarian born in Brisbane and living near Philadelphia (but very sane for all that) tackles the idea that the government should get right out of marriage. William West looks at research on the effects of regular date nights among couples, and Mary Rice Hasson is indignant at a new development on university campuses.
We are always grateful for tips, especially if they involve humour. Washington resident Matthew Mehan, who is keeping a close eye on the Obama “contraceptive mandate”, found this video in which there’s a great line about the president’s definition of when life begins. You probably won’t want to watch the whole thing so just go to the 4 minute mark…
As I took the train after work today, it was charming to see all those young women cradling bouquets of long-stem red roses from their sweethearts. However, I’ve got to be honest and confess that there is no day in the year that hones out my killjoy instinct more keenly.
In elementary school, this was a day of dread. I could never make sense of the annual ritual of cutting hearts out of coloured paper, sticking them down with liberal lashings of non-toxic paste, sprinkling them with glitter, and composing gooey messages. Not for one or two friends, but for everyone in my class, plus everyone at home. It was real drudgery.
Besides it doesn’t seem to do a lot of good. So many millions of Valentine’s Day cards and so little genuine, lifelong romance, as new contributor Shirene Urry points out in her feature on love among college students and Carolyn Moynihan suggests in her article on on-line dating.
Anyhow, I must be wrong. On this one I get outvoted year after year. The US National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will spend US$17.6 billion today on Valentine’s Day gifts – more than the GDP of Afghanistan. This figure includes $630 million on Valentine’s Day gifts to pets, something that never actually entered my head as a child. That is, by the way, more than the GDP of East Timor.
It does seem a bit excessive, doesn’t it? If we donated half of the pets’ share of gifts, we could build a splendid hospital for poverty-stricken East Timor.
Our lead story examines some hollow statistics used by the Obama Administration to bolster its push to force contraceptive coverage onto all health insurers, including conscientious objectors.
Another new contributor, Thomas Clark, discusses the ethics of parking – why should people who can afford a Prius get priority parking? And Rebekah Hebbert examines a tragic “honour killing” in Canada.
If you are not American and spend most of your time absorbed in the things that the majority of ordinary people do, such as holding down a job and caring for your family, you may not have noticed how the mercury is rising in the US human dignity barometer. In the five or six years since I began paying close attention to the United States I don’t think the pressure has ever been higher.
I don’t mean the roller-coaster of the Republican primaries, which are almost a sideshow right now to what used to be called the culture wars but now seem more like civilisational wars: the mammoth struggles going on over marriage and human fertility. Dr Jennifer Roback Morse, who is right in the thick of the action and whose instincts about this I mightily respect, describes the infamous White House “contraceptive mandate”, for example, as not only an attack on freedom of conscience but the establishment of a new state religion. (And remember, there is no old state religion in the US.) Read her powerful piece on our front page and see if you don’t agree.
Even if this attempt falls over it won't be the last one. What’s just as important as the current political struggle for human dignity is passing on the attendant values and virtues to the younger generation. This is the challenge Tom Lickona outlines in the conclusion of his review of a book about young adults and their tenuous grasp on moral principles. Mary Santangelo suggests that parental nagging, judiciously applied, can help. Rebekah Hebbert, from within the young adult camp, defies the gender equity brigade and finds that “Lego cupcakes totally rock”. That’s the spirit!
War, particularly as conducted nowadays, is a thorny moral issue. Jacob Shively, a PhD candidate in political science and a new contributor, examines the US campaign against al Qaeda in Pakistan and throws some light on the justice (or otherwise) of the cause.
We await your comments on these issues, whether heavy or lightweight. But just to end on a nice note I recommend the video we currently have up on the front page. The Military Wives Choir (sent by Mary Cooney - thanks) is another perspective on war, and very moving.
Today, February 7, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. England is full of Dickens festivals and debates in the newspapers over whether 11-year-olds should be required to read his novels. His most recent biographer, Claire Tomalin, says that he is “amazingly relevant” – but feels that he is too demanding for schoolchildren. "Today's children have very short attention-spans because they are being reared on dreadful TV programmes. They are not being educated for long attention-spans."
Is this the problem? For the past decade schoolchildren have been devouring volumes of Harry Potter, books which swelled to incredible lengths. As far as I can see, Charles Dickens was probably the single most important literary influence upon the series, with its immense gallery of grotesque characters, lively language and convoluted plots.
Exuberance is the first of Dickens’ great virtues, an Olympian quality shared by few other writers in English. He created characters with the cheerful prodigality of a drunken sailor. A Dickensian sentence is bursting with joy at the wrestle with language. He is credited with scores upon scores of new words, like flummox, rampage, butter-fingers, tousled, sawbones, casualty ward, footlights, dustbin, fingerless, squashed, seediness, Scrooge, Gradgrind, tousled and tintack.
The second is his anger. Most of his books are seething over the injustice dealt out to innocents by petty tyrants and the implacable law. He was unafraid to take sides, to be committed, to dream of a kind and juster world.
In fact, you cannot read Dickens – whether you are weeping or laughing or seething with indignation -- and fail to feel that being alive is an exhilarating vocation to slay the giants of injustice. There is no lack of giants today: abortion, euthanasia, the scandal of starvation in a world of consumerist waste, overflowing prisons, the drugs trade… Would that today we had novelists who combined Dickens’ vitality with his righteous anger.
So far this week we have published four articles. Jennifer Roback Morse reviews a stunning book about the consequences of China’s one-child policy; Frances Kelly asks whether language is being hijacked in the same-sex marriage debate; Joanna Bogle salutes Queen Elizabeth on the 60th anniversary of her coronation; and Jim Cole detects hostility to religion in the Obama Administration’s recent decisions.
While I was waiting for a fairy godmother to come and do this newsletter I read an article in the local paper (yes, a real newspaper) about Facebook’s US$100 billion public float, the basis of which I do not quite understand, even though I am one of the 800 million users who made it possible. The figure is quite astonishing for a Kiwi -- I mean, the value of our whole economy is only about $135 billion. Perhaps the government could do an IPO and raise the funds to make us top of the South Sea Island Paradise market…
What caught my attention more than all the facts and figures, though, was a sidebar with the five core values that Mark Zuckerberg has set out for investors:
Focus on impact -- by always solving the most important problems. The difficulty I see with this is knowing which are the most important problems. For example, in my article today about a Harvard Business School report, I find that business leaders seem to be unaware of the most fundamental problem of the US economy.
“Move fast and break things” -- If you never break anything you are not moving, ergo learning, fast enough. Personally, I find I break things by moving too slowly. If you listen carefully you may hear the sound of my New Year’s resolution to send this newsletter out before Kiwi and Aussie workers leave their desks on Friday shattering.
Be bold -- Building great things means taking risks. This I agree with completely; publishing your opinions to the world is along those lines.
Be open -- “A more open world is a better world because people with more information make better decisions,” says Zuckerberg. Hmmm. Disagree. Quality rather than quantity is what counts in information as in all areas of life, “and the wisdom to know the difference”. FB tests that wisdom to the limit; indeed, someone has suggested that TMI would have been a more fitting stock ticker symbol than the FB the company chose.
Build social value -- Facebook expects everyone to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do. Agreed, one hundred per cent. A high ideal but very much in sync with MercatorNet’s aims. We may have a slightly different idea of “value” but then, that is what the business of communication is all about.
I am sure you will find added value in Tom Lickona’s second article on emerging adulthood, and George Friedman’s interesting analysis of Germany’s role in the eurozone crisis. Among the blogs I have to say that Sheila Liaugminas is going gangbusters on the American political scene. Quite fascinating.
In my ceaseless search for distractions from Real Work, I moderate comments obsessively, surf for article ideas and post items on the MercatorNet Facebook page. These are demanding and time-consuming tasks, but somebody’s got to do the heavy lifting around here. Otherwise Real Work could fill up the whole day.
I confess that I had always avoided Twitter. Coming to grips with its appeal sounded more like Real Work than a genuine distraction. But after a dinner table conversation with @Blazes92 the other day the penny dropped. I had never actually met anyone who used MercatorNet’s Twitter feed (even though there are nearly 1000 followers – feel free to join them!). But he showed me how brilliantly useful it can be to keep up to date. Thanks @Blazes92!
This led me to visit MercatorNet’s Twitter page and I discovered that people have actually been messaging @MercatorNet. The good news is that this is seriously distracting, but the bad news is that tweets from Twitterers like To@IdaFlo, @Grimkjell, @dennygirltwo and @OLVKAmsterdam have been ignored. My apologies. Now you know the score.
Twitter is mostly a smartphone and tablet phenomenon. Up to now, it has been a bit painful to read MercatorNet on a smartphone. So I have the pleasure to announce that we have launched a mobile version of MercatorNet. Please check it out – m.mercatornet.com.
It’s straightforward and easy to navigate. If you have ideas about how to improve it, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks very much, Debasish Mondal, of Encyclomedia, for pushing this through.
So far this week, we have posted three articles. Peter Saunders writes from the UK about the nature of homosexuality. Francis Phillips reviews a history of World War II. And Margaret Somerville argues that the controversy over gendercide shows that abortion is not just a matter of choice.
Round about this time last year I announced a New Year resolution to see more movies as they came out. Well, I did, although it’s not hard to move up from zero. Looking at Michael Cook’s list of the best films of 2011, however, I find I haven’t seen one of them. Never mind; at least I have a better idea of what to spend my time and money on. Of course, the list is by no means the last word on the subject. As Michael says: You can never get complete agreement on lists of movies. In this annual feature, we try to select films which are worthwhile, entertaining and reasonably family-friendly. If you would like to nominate others, please make a comment.
From movies to morality. Young adults in Occupy Wall Street camps might be railing against greedy capitalists, but the moral constitution of youth is also under the microscope. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith has written up a study of emerging adulthood (18- to 23-year-olds) focusing on its “dark side”, and the picture certainly doesn’t look good. We asked Professor Thomas Lickona, an educator who has vast experience in the field of moral development and character, to review what seems an important book and you can read the first part of his article on the front page. The rest will be published in subsequent weeks, and it is important to follow the series through since the picture might be better than first drawn.
By the way, take a look at the blog posts by Katie Hinderer on Tiger Print and Marcus Roberts on Demography (wonderful time-lapse video to view there) about the huge annual pro-life march in Washington on Monday -- with hundreds of thousands of young people.
If there’s one place where we would all fervently hope to find moral integrity it is on the bridge (or whatever they call it these days) of a ship carrying 4000 souls. But we cannot make its captain a mere scapegoat for the Costa Concordia disaster, Constance Kong decides in her article. Moral consistency is also highly desirable in the command of such important organisations as the United Nations. From that point of view Vincenzina Santoro challenges us to write to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. As for US policy towards Iran -- I’ll leave that horribly complex issue to George Friedman.
Shackled once again to the keyboard. Fingertips callused. Holidays now a distant memory. However, over the weekend I did manage to escape to Hobart and scored a bargain at my favourite second-hand bookshop. Just $1 for a nearly mint copy of N'Heures Souris Rames!
I will battle to persuade most of you that this was a bargain rather than an indulgence by an egghead with scrambled brains. The technical term for the contents of this precious volume is homophonic verse – the same sounds make sense in two languages. Thus, N'Heures Souris Rames (French) = Nursery Rhymes (English, about 30 of them). “Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie / Kissed the girls and made them cry” = “Georgie Port-régie, peu digne en paille / Qui se dégeule sans mais. Dame craille”. Ha ha, quite hilarious. Of course, the French suffers a bit and elaborate footnotes are required. Nonetheless, in both languages the words make sense, even if they are most meaningful in English.
Hang in there. There is a point to this carry-on. We have run several articles in MercatorNet over the past few weeks on same-sex marriage. After moderating hostile comments from critics of natural marriage, I have come to feel that we are speaking, so to speak, homophonically: the words of our articles make sense in English, but some people are reading them in a different language. There’s almost no communication going on.
I feel at a loss when commenters post comments like: “good and evil? Get over it.” Or “what so special about being natural?” Or “the purpose of sex isn’t about having babies anymore. What about IVF?” Or “you have your morality and I have mine.” To my mind, these suggest not just two different views of the same problem, but two different universes of logic. It’s important to deal directly with the issue of same-sex marriage – and a host of other issues which put human dignity at risk – but until we have reached agreement on fundamental issues of logic and meaning, we will be talking homophonically.
Anyhow, so far this week, we have posted three articles. Bryce J. Christensen decries a loss of freedom of speech in debates over same-sex marriage. James S. Cole explains a unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court which defended religious freedom. And Izzy Kalman has some advice for President Obama about anti-bullying strategies.
(Just thought I’d give the old greeting an airing.) During the week I went to see The Iron Lady, thinking I might write a review for MercatorNet. In the end there did not seem to be much to say. It’s always fun watching Meryl Streep impersonate historical figures, real or stock, whether the mother superior of a 1960s convent, cookery supremo Julia Child or, as in the current instance, Margaret Thatcher. (Although you can never quite forget that it is MS being awfully clever, this time she is brilliantly aided by make-up artist Marese Langan.)
Still, I had rather hoped to learn a little more about Mrs T (or MT as her husband Denis affectionately calls her in the film), to get a look behind the political clichés about her grocer’s-daughter love of hard work and thrift, her belief in purging the body politic (“The medicine will be harsh…”), and the jingoism that led her to go to war with Argentina over some bleak islands at the bottom of the inhabited world. But, after an hour and three-quarters of hallucinations and flashbacks, I found myself complaining, “Is that all?” If there was more to the Western world’s first female head of state in her heyday you are not going to learn it from this movie.
Nevertheless, I can’t leave the subject of Margaret Thatcher without repeating a joke that largely sums up the mother-knows-best way she is portrayed in the film: The cabinet goes to dinner at a swish restaurant. The maitre d' asks Mrs Thatcher what she would like. A steak, she says. Thick. Rare. And the vegetables, madame? They'll have whatever I have, says the PM.
We do have a film review this week -- Ronan Wright finds War Horse good in parts. Also on the media trail, Philip Elias wonders exactly what the 24-hour shutdown of Wikipedia was meant to prove.
With the world economy still front and centre of the global stage, we reproduce a paper by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, examining the moral roots of the current crisis, while David Peterson takes another look at a controversial economic proposal from some Catholic scholars. Looking at the US debt, Vincenzina Santoro asks why conscience-smitten millionaires don’t put their money there their mouth is. George Friedman keeps an eye on the Middle East and oil supplies.
Finally we have two articles on aspects of sexual politics. Susan Moore writes about the complementarity of the sexes and, in an article reproduced in partnership with Public Discourse, Angela Franks reviews a life of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger which glosses over her ideological commitment to eugenics.
A lot of reading there! Next week we will be back to two newsletters and a more normal routine, though some of us are still in partial holiday mode Down Under.
A good solution or a quick fix?
22 Feb 2012
Should women suffering from anorexia take pills to suppress hunger? Should women suffering from fertility take pills to suppress babies?
From law to decree
21 Feb 2012
Obama's health care act shows that decrees issued by government bureaucrats have displaced the rule of law.
Carnage
20 Feb 2012
Roman Polanki's latest film mercilessly skewers the superficial values of America's snobbish elite.
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