Culture
Clips - May
2, 2006
Totalitarian Chic
In January 2005, Britain's Prince
Harry attended a birthday party dressed as a Nazi. When the London
Sun published a picture of the prince in his German desert uniform
and swastika armband, it triggered widespread outrage and disgust.
In scathing editorials, Harry was condemned as an ignorant and
insensitive clod; months later, he was still apologizing for his
tasteless costume. "It was a very stupid thing to do,"
he said in September. "I've learnt my lesson."
For a more recent example of totalitarian fashion, consider Tim
Vincent, the New York correspondent for NBC's entertainment newsmagazine,
"Access Hollywood." Twice in the last few weeks, Vincent
has introduced stories about upcoming movies while sporting an
open jacket over a bright red T-shirt —
on which, clearly outlined in gold, was a large red star and a
hammer-and-sickle: the international emblems of totalitarian communism.
And what was the public reaction to seeing those icons
of cruelty and death turned into the latest yuppie style? Furor?
Moral outrage? Blistering editorials?
None of the above.
Nazi regalia may be strictly taboo, but communist emblems have
never been trendier. Enter "hammer and sickle" into
a shopping search engine, and up pop dozens of products adorned
with the Marxist brand — T-shirts
and ski caps, bracelet charms and keychains, posters of Lenin
and "Soviet Kremlin Stainless Steel Flasks."
Jeff Jacoby
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/jeffjacoby/
2006/05/01/195627.html
--
Public Schools vs. Parents’ Values
Earlier this month, Lieutenant Governor
Kerry Healey, the only Republican in the [Massachusetts] governor's
race, explained in an interview why she and her husband picked
a private school for their son and daughter. "I want my kids
to be in an environment where they can talk about values,"
she said — talk about values,
that is, "in a way that you can’t always do in a public school
setting."
It's hard to see anything objectionable in Healey's words, but
they triggered a broadside from Attorney General Thomas Reilly,
a Democrat and the only gubernatorial candidate whose children
all attended public schools.
Healey is "completely out of touch with the lives of regular
people," he snapped.
"Somehow the perception is that
the kids in public schools are not learning the values that they
should be learning.... Public schools reinforced the values of
our home.... It was a wonderful experience."
Those quotes appeared in The Boston Globe on April 17. Now consider
a story that appeared three days later.
The…incident, also at the Estabrook
School, was triggered when a second-grade teacher presented to
her class a storybook celebration of homosexual romance and marriage.
There is nothing subtle about "King & King," the
book that Heather Kramer read to her young students. It tells
the story of Prince Bertie, whose mother the queen nags him to
get married ("When I was your age, I’d been married twice
already," she says), and parades before him a bevy of princesses
to choose from. But Bertie, who says he’s "never cared much
for princesses," rejects them all. Then "Princess Madeleine
and her brother, Prince Lee," show up, and Bertie falls in
love at first sight — with the
brother. Soon, the princes are married. "The wedding was
very special," reads the text. "The queen even shed
a tear or two." Bertie and Lee are elevated from princes
to kings, and the last page shows them exchanging a passionate
kiss.
Jeff Jacoby
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/jeffjacoby/
2006/04/28/195371.html
--
The Two-faced Networks
A war has begun. The four largest
broadcast television networks and 800 of their affiliates are
taking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to federal
court. For the public, the claim is that the FCC's latest fine
of CBS is unconstitutional and does not apply a clear and consistent
standard on matters of decency.
It's true that the FCC has not always
come to agreement on fines with perfect consistency. But for anyone
following the decency debate, this network argument is drop-to-your-knees
funny. The broadcasters, saying the regulators have an inconsistent
standard on decency? The broadcasters rate their programs for
parents using differing standards for each network, often for
each show, with holes in the parental protections so broad you
could drive a fleet of Hummers through it. And they think the
FCC is inconsistent?
But that's not what this network
lawsuit is about. The real network viewpoint came through in the
Frank Ahrens report in the Washington Post: The hope that this
lawsuit "could become the test case awaited by broadcasters
who seek to challenge the government's ability to police the airwaves,
the broadcasters acknowledge privately."
There's a powerful underlying message
in that "acknowledging privately" phrase. The networks
are fighting a two-faced war. To parents and the general public,
they talk of social responsibility, and spend hundreds of millions
of dollars talking up their V-chip, and how they aid parents to
navigate the channels. But in court filings, and in the councils
of power, the networks are unmasked for what they are: people
who believe in no limits, no standards, no scruples. It's an industry
that is just a profitable assembly line of garbage, and wants
the "right" to offend many millions of families, using
the public airwaves owned by those families to do so.
Brent Bozell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/brentbozell/
2006/04/28/195438.html
--
Seeking Truth at Movies
Almost everything our fathers taught
us about Christ is false," says one of the characters in
"The Da Vinci Code," the best-selling novel by Dan Brown.
It's not clear whether this line will appear in the movie, which
reaches theaters in three weeks, but some version of it probably
will make the final cut. Although nobody expects Christians to
riot over "The Da Vinci Code" the way Muslims did over
those Mohammad cartoons, some clergymen already have announced
their disapproval. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
used his Easter sermon to criticize Mr. Brown's book for making
the true story of Christianity seem "automatically suspect."
In an advertisement in the New York Times, the Catholic League
compared "The Da Vinci Code" to the anti-Semitic "Protocols
of the Elders of Zion."
It turns out, however, that many
Christian leaders are choosing a completely different approach
to the movie. They certainly aren't embracing "The Da Vinci
Code" and its conspiracy theories about the supposed marriage
of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the phony divinity of Christ and
so on. Yet many view the film as providing an unconventional occasion
—"teachable moment,"
as they say--to spread their faith. "It's a marvelous opportunity
to be positive," said Josh McDowell of Campus Crusade for
Christ in the Orlando Sentinel. "If you look carefully, truth
will always stand."
The movie's tagline happens to be
"seek the truth" —
a phrase that feels like an invitation to explore and think rather
than a demand to watch and submit. It distantly echoes Acts 17:11,
which urges people to read Scripture so that they may determine
its validity. Sony Pictures, the studio behind the film, obviously
hopes that millions of Christian truth-seekers will feel inspired
to buy tickets. There's no guarantee that they will: In 1988,
when Christians protested "The Last Temptation of Christ"
for its depictions of Jesus as lustful and confused, Mr. McDowell's
organization tried to buy the film prints so that they could be
destroyed.
John J. Miller
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008303
