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August 4, 2008 - July 28, 2008

Monday, July 09, 2007

THE GODS. It's not news by now that the worldwide Live Earth concerts were a bust. It's not all that surprising either. Global Warming has to be the dullest crisis ever, championed by the dullest demagogue ever. The closest I came to watching it was sitting through the first half of a rerun of the South Park Manbearpig episode last night. When I chanced this morning to hear an audio clip of Al Gore's pledge speech (seven points!) at one of the concerts, he sounded exactly like the fruity illiterate Stan and Kyle were trying to avoid.

What's really odd is that I think the South Park boys were actually on to something with Manbearpig. The obvious absurdity masks a subtler but nevertheless quite real absurdity. And mask is the right word. The mask of Global Warming is science, but the underlying passion that's driving it is paganism. Manbearpig is a classic pagan god, two parts animal, one part human, adding up to an archaic godhead. And Global Warming is really an outgrowth of a pagan yearning. How else is it that this cobbled-together -- and remotely consequential -- theory has become part of a cluster of 'progressive' causes that most notably include gay rights, hard-line feminist rejection of 'the patriarchy' (excepting Islam, of course), anti-Christian campaigns that are disingenuously positioned as expressions of secularism and humanism, extreme sexual libertarianism, an obsessive focus on health and nutrition as if they were morality, and an irrational Luddite condemnation of all things technological (excepting cell phones, the internet, and MP3 players)?

Would the scientists who think their rationalism is saving the planet from mankind's baser instincts be happy to know that their most ardent followers are the same people who wear crystals, read auras, channel ancient eastern spirits, dance Wiccan spells naked under the full moon, and perform imaginary Druid ceremonies at Stonehenge during the solstices? Or that some of their most vocal fellow travellers are defying the imperatives of evolution by engaging in non-reproductive sexual activities which have been scientifically proven (more than Global Warming, anyway) to reduce their chances of survival by 30 to 60 percent?

What's going on here isn't an enlightened transformation of medieval superstition (Christianity) into rational planetary consciousness (green progressivism). It's an act of reversion to pre-conscious paganism -- a violent divorce of theology from morality, a sundering whose ultimate purpose is 180 degrees antithetical to science. Why? Because the opposite of science is magic, which is based on the notion that purely symbolic actions can have an impact on matter at a distance, without physical contact or logical cause and effect. What's the difference? The cultures of antiquity (including the increasingly self-righteous native peoples of North, Central, and South America) employed human sacrifice as an act of magic, a brutal and bloody transaction that had to be repeated every time Gaia or Quetzalcoatl seemed to be punishing the earth. Christians elevated sacrifice to a divine concept, one that was performed once, to perfection, and so needed never to be performed again except in symbolic form. Because its purpose was not to slake the appetites of a vicious nature god like the sun or the storm, but to imbue the human spirit with an internal sense of right and wrong and transcendant truth.

It was Christianity's focus on mind and spirit that liberated science from the shackles the originating Greeks had constrained it with. The idea of a relationship with the divine that was not based on transactions but an aspiration to know the beauty of creation inspired every scientist from Newton to Einstein. Now we are reduced, once again, to the level of mere animals. Good is what makes us feel good -- sexual gratification, prolonged physical health, the comfort of rituals that make no demand on minds that have grown weary of complexity. For their excessive demands on our minds, the gods of complexity must be destroyed, utterly, by the most potent and ancient of magic. All their mores must be trampled. All their virtues must be mocked. Everything must be turned on its head. Rich must become poor. Evil must become good. Man must become woman, woman must become man, commandments must be broken, and the rituals we perform must be magical, not spiritual.

So they accept the ridiculous magical notion that a concert can change climate -- provided that we say and do all the right things along the way, regardless of the facts. It's the performance that matters, not anything like a chain of cause and effect as scientists might understand it.

What's actually amazing about all this is not the conduct of the crazies, but the ambivalent reactions of the people you don't expect to be crazy. That's where you see the real power of magic and paganism and the irrational generally. I won't be forgiven for this (but who cares?), and besides it was Camille Paglia in our time who has made the strongest case for the theory that men invented rationality as a defense against the native paganism of women, which is another way of saying that if you want to see the cracks in the edifice of rationality, look first to the women.

I've previously commented here on the peculiar response of the famous Ann Althouse to Al Gore's idiot Global Warming movie. Today, we have her equally ambivalent response to the Live Earth concerts. Yes, she knows the whole exercise was silly. But:


Everyone likes Madonna now? No. Sorry. Not everyone does. Some of us think Madonna is as much of a woman as Al Gore is of a man, and we're not comfortable with either of them. And the idea that time somehow alchemizes old vice into present-day respectability is uniquely female -- and definitively amoral. Men who once thought Madonna physically attractive but whorish haven't changed their perception of anything but her attractiveness. Once a whore, always a whore. It's only from the women that you hear the excuses and qualifications -- but she's been so successful, for so long, and she keeps reinventing her.... what? Her whorishness.

To most men I know she's reached the worst stage of whorishness -- she's reached the stage of kidding herself that a bunch of superficial makeup -- a British accent, authoring children's books, playing the grande dame expatriate from her native Queens -- will somehow undo the nights she spent cruising Manhattan in her limo picking up gigolos for wanton sex. That's an act of magic that makes sense to a large number of women, but not to men. To men, you are what you do. To women, you are what you can convince other women you are.

And if Madonna is somehow slowly transmogrifying -- like other English women -- into a man, women are also strangely comforted, it seems, by the fact that so many men, Al Gore included, are gradually morphing into the sitzenpissers of Germany. To the pagan mind, which resides deep in the minds of many, this is the ultimate victory against rationalism, a milestone in the return to the prehistorical times that are supposed to have been matriarchal, when the Eleusinian Mysteries prevailed, and men were subservient to women throughout the course of a single, endlessly repeated year in which no history occurred, no writing disrupted the cycle of the moon, no manufactured art competed with naked breasts, and the earth was a merciless mother who still managed to screw every man, woman, and child like a satyr.

Deep down, though, that's what most women still want. The Return. Scroll through Ms. Althouse's site, with special emphasis on her photography, and then look at this. Then take a look at this and this, and tell me how much faith you have in women to rescue western civilization with their more highly evolved values.

Richard Dawkins actually thinks he's winning. You can take it from me, he's losing the house, the barn, and the car.


UPDATE.  A new controversy. And more yuck.


But we all love her now, right? Right.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

IRA.21.1-33. En route to a July 4th event yesterday, I happened to be listening to WIP/AM in Philadelphia and was treated to a kind of epiphany by talk host Howard Eskin. I'll tell you all about it, but first some background.

We've had all this blabber lately about the Fairness Doctrine, which gives liberals a chance to show off just how little they actually know about talk radio and its most influential conservative personalities. Since they can't bring themselves to listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Ingraham et al, they make up their impressions of the shows out of whole cloth and never learn their mistake because all their liberal friends who also don't listen have exactly the same unsubstantiated impressions. That's why they keep saying the same things over and over again -- conservative talkers are fact-free propagandists, servile to Republican politicians, vicious to political opponents and callers who disagree, and sustained on the air by hopelessly uninformed idiots. Never mind that right-wing talkers have displayed an independence from the party line you'll look for in vain on Air America, which bores its few listeners to death with a changeless diet of Bush bashing and rote recitals of Dem talking points.

In recent years conservative talkers have attacked their party and their president for profligate spending, the Harriet Miers nomination, the Dubai ports deal, and almost nonstop on immigration. And their policy arguments are hardly fact free. Indeed, even the dumbest of the syndicated conservatives, Sean Hannity, helped sway the senate vote on the late immigration bill by humiliating Ohio Republican George Voinovich in an on-air debate that exposed the senator's disgraceful ignorance of the content of the bill and its projected costs, as well as his paranoid view of the conservative base.

It's true that Hannity may be among the sharper tongued of the most popular talkers, but he also has two regular features that illustrate the principal misconceptions liberals have about the medium. Hannity has a hate-line, a permanent voicemail system on which the liberals who despise him can record their hostility in whatever terms they prefer. Obscenities are bleeped, but the comments are otherwise unedited and used as a bumper going to and from commercials. Their abuse is far uglier and more personal than any Hannity deals out to callers. Hannity also has a weekly segment in which he sends one of his producers onto the streets of Manhattan to ask the residents of that overwhelmingly Democratic city questions like, "Who is the Vice-President of the United States?" and "How many senators are there in the U.S. Congress?" He often asks them about their party affiliation, too. The far-and-away most common answer to questions like the first two is "I don't know," and the usual answer to the third is "Democrat." The segment is only entertaining to Hannity's listeners because they do know quite a bit about politics and politicians. Otherwise, it would be about as soporific as watching endless reruns of the exact same episode of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" It gets dull anyway because after a while you know they don't know anything about the government or the Constitution and then they'll boast about having voted for Kerry.

The dirty secret that explains the popularity of conservative talk radio and the utter failure of liberal talk radio is that except for their high-profile elitists in academia, the mainstream media, and the public sector (10 percent of the base? 5 percent?), Democrats are much much more ignorant and uneducated than conservatives.

Which brings us to Howard Eskin. He hosts the number-one rated local talk radio show in Philadelphia, another overwhelmingly Democrat city. But WIP isn't talk radio of the Limbaugh-Hannity sort. It's sports talk. All sports all the time. Or it's supposed to be. The listeners are the people -- mostly, but not all, men -- who pay attention to nothing in public affairs but the fortunes of the Eagles, the Phillies, the Sixers, and the Flyers. To them it doesn't matter if Texas is burning, California is breaking apart along the San Andreas fault, and another European capital is counting bodies after the latest riot or terrorist attack; they are really steamed about the pitiful performance last night by the Phillies bullpen. And Howard Eskin is their favorite. Why? Most of the other WIP hosts are reasonably friendly and polite to callers. Eskin is merciless. He tells them they're stupid, he interrupts them, he interrogates them to expose further ignorance, he makes fun of their lame strategies and diagnoses, and he hangs up on them in mid-sentence, all while sounding continuously bored to death with his job and the teams it's his responsibility to cover. And they love him for it.

Eskin's only real expertise is in-depth knowledge of Philadelphia's teams and their histories. This he gets from being a born Philadelphian (nobody can mangle the pronunciation of the letter "P" -- as in 'WIP' -- like a Philly native). He also has learned the mysterious feature of talk radio Phil Hendrie has exploited to become a cult phenomenon. The people who call in to a radio show are a tiny subset of those who listen, and the callers will keep calling and keep being as stupid as you dare them to be. Eskin's bread-and-butter fans would never call him because his whole shtick is torturing callers for the entertainment of those who listen for the easy pleasure of feeling smart; i.e., smarter than the tireless victims who don't ever get the joke. Unlike Hendrie's application of this principle, which is creative, funny, and sometimes inspired, Eskin's exploitation of dim bulbs is akin to masturbation. His whole act is designed to solicit calls only from the dumbest rocks in the box, and putting them down strokes his own insecure ego on a continuous basis.

The real genius of Hendrie, who makes up his own on-air guests and argues with callers as both host and guest, is that he makes no secret of what he's doing. He talks about his systematic deceptions on his show, sometimes at length, and he's even been known to perform the whole charade in front of a large audience. But the callers keep calling, outraged anew every day by the shocking positions taken by Hendrie's fictitious interviewees. Eskin is no genius and he never lets anyone in on the joke. Why? Because his non-calling listeners don't entirely get the joke either, that is, the part of it that's also laughing at them. Like Eskin, they're feeling smart because they're smarter than the inexhaustible parade of self-selecting numbskull victims. Unlike Eskin, they don't realize that he has just as much contempt for the listeners who don't have the guts to call. In his own mind, he's a smart guy because he's smarter than all of them. Could there be any shorter yardstick of intellect?

And so, you see, Eskin really is bored to death almost all the time. He talks about sports because it's his job, but even the idea of a radio audience that is obsessively concerned with sports and nothing else repels him. Groucho Marx once said he'd refuse to belong to any club that would have him as a member. That's Eskin's plight, too. Which explains why, every so often, he can't stop himself from doing what he did yesterday -- use his air time on WIP SportsTalk to rant about politics.

Eskin permitting himself to talk politics is a mistake. A HUGE mistake. He decided we would all benefit from hearing his views on Bush's commutation of the Libby sentence. As he rolled through his spiel, I realized I was finally hearing a pure example of what liberals claim conservative talk radio is -- fact-free propaganda delivered with maximum rhetorical abuse and so little relation to any foundation of learning, facts, or actual ideas that it becomes an oxymoron -- dead air that is nevertheless annoyingly unsilent.  He kept referring to the commutation as a pardon, which it isn't. He raged repetitiously about the "appearance of corruption," without referencing a single definable act of corruption. He repeated ad nauseam his personal demand that George W. Bush should be impeached. "Impeached and removed." Impeached for what? Exercising a presidential prerogative that is clearly delineated in the Constitution? Removed how? By radio outrage? If he chooses to, the President of the United States is legally entitled to grant a full pardon to a child-raping serial killer and we can disapprove all we want, but he can't be impeached for it. At no point did he mention the Constitution, the mechanics of the impeachment process itself (indictment in the House, trial in the Senate, two-thirds majority required for conviction), any specific charges that might constitute an impeachable offense, or the inconvenient conflict-of-interest liberals have on the questions of perjury and pardons in the context of recent history, as laid out in a New Jersey newspaper editorial Eskin undoubtedly didn't, and wouldn't, read:


Read the whole thing, because it also includes fair criticism of Republican defenders of the commutation, although it should be noted that conservatives in particular are hardly unanimous in backing the president's decision. Some, indeed, despise it. They're against a president condoning lying under oath. Just as they were nine years ago. Go figure.

Of course, Howard Eskin would be exempt from this admonition if he had ever criticized Bill Clinton's perjuries and pardons in the same terms that he attacked George W. Bush, whom he declared, without a single factual citation of any kind, to be "the worst President in the history of the United States." Do you think he ever handed it out to Clinton like that? You be the judge.


What was funny as hell about the rant was that my internal prediction about it came immediately true. The first caller after his eight-or-ten minute solo tirade wanted to talk about the Phillies. Eskin brushed him off quickly and resumed his rant, waiting long minutes before the call board showed him a caller who wanted to talk politics.

The second caller agreed with Eskin about the "pardon." He cited what he'd heard from other people he knew who believed "in that right-wing stuff," because even they were saying Bush was incompetent. This inspired Eskin to shout that Bush was "incompetent, an idiot, the worst president in the history of the United States." Again.

That's when my better half reached out and changed the channel on the radio. "That's enough," she said. And she was right, as usual. So I can't prove to you that subsequent callers kept trying to reintroduce the one true topic, sports, and the despicable machinations of Phillies owners and Sixers management, etc ("Yeah, Bush is a big dumb a**hole, but do you think there's any chance the Sixers could get Iverson back?...), but I have an educated guess that Eskin didn't have a great deal more to add to his political analysis. For example, I found this gem -- from a lefty, no less, in May of this year -- in no time flat:


We come full circle. The author of this blog item is obviously one of the 5 or 10 percent of the Democrat base which works so hard to maintain the image that lefties are smarter, better informed, and better educated than Rush Limbaugh's ditto-heads. The emotion on display is embarrassment. What's missing is any honest insight about what it means. My own belief is that in Howard Eskin and his sports ditto-heads we can get a glimpse of the real Democrat base, people who pay no attention whatever to politics until some local or categorical issue (health care, ethnic entitlements, the economy) induce them to go to the polls on voting day. They vote for Democrats because Democrats promise them the most and are ever so much better at demonizing the evil rich Republicans. In fact, they're so ignorant that they don't even know how often their preferred political party is working against their own interests in day-to-day politics. (Where is Jesse Jackson to declare his outrage that illegal aliens who work for less than minimum wage are directly increasing the already sky-high 9.7 percent unemployment rate of African-American males? He's greenmailing corporations. Where is NOW to protest the same catastrophic effect on unskilled single mothers? They're promoting lesbian marriages on TV. Where is organized labor to denounce precisely the same impact on union membership and bargaining clout? They're working out how to funnel more money under the table to Dem candidates. Phooey.)

There are lots and lots of these people, Democrats by pitiful, traditional default, but they don't want to listen to political talk radio at all. Ever. When you don't even know the names of your own congressman and U.S. senators, how can you possibly care about specific provisions of a bill or policy being chewed to death by procedural maneuvers in the Congress? Howard Eskin is, in this instance, simply a first among equals (that's primus inter paribus for you elitist lefties), the figurehead spokesman for a bunch of know-nothing, do-nothing idiots who think they are smart because if you asked them, what do you suppose they would tell you?

Liberal talk radio already exists, and it's enormously popular. It consists of NPR for the privileged few and Sports Talk for the immense dumb majority. If you're a lib and you want to experience the paradise of equal time for your side, just work your way along the AM dial till you hear the name of the major league baseball team nearest you. (You can look your team up on the internet if you don't know who it is). You'll be home then. And they probably have their own ignorant, ill-tempered, arrogant clone of Howard Eskin. Enjoy.

Thanks, Howard. It all makes sense now.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

HISTORY. In my home county today, there will be only one parade and one fireworks display. That's pitiful. Hopefully, an aroused citizenry will fill in the gap with uproarious and illegally loud celebrations of their own. Unless our huge government has so eaten out their substance that they no longer remember why this day is still worth celebrating.

Let's hope not.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

Monday, July 02, 2007

NOT LONG AGO. Back in May, I reported that an unlikely pair of turkeys had taken up residence in the yard and were guarding a nest filled with eggs.


The eggs are still there. The turkeys, sadly, have gone and with them any chance the chicks could hatch. Just knowing what sits at the base of the old willow tree has made this whole vista melancholy to look upon.


We don't know why they left. Turkeys don't offer many explanations. But nature is a funny old girl. When she causes some bit of magic to evaporate, she often compensates by waving her wand somewhere else. Maybe that's why we were suddenly inspired to acquire two new birdfeeders, one for goldfinches and one for hummingbirds. They've been in business for a couple of weeks now and the results have been spectacular.

From the beginning the garden was a magnet for songbirds, and not just the sparrows that always seemed to take over at other places I've lived. Instead there's been a rich and lovely diversity of seasonal visitors and full-time residents. The martin house is stuffed with martins. The wrens are so much at home they even make periodic appearances at the feeders. We have two pair of cardinals, one of the males so gorgeously red that he seems to glow like a light. There's a blue jay, but he's too outnumbered to be a bully. Once we saw a cedar waxwing, and once a bluebird. More regularly, we see teams of red-winged blackbirds, mourning doves, chickadees, and their upside-down friends the nuthatch and titmouse. Also, woodpeckers. Thanks to the willow and its hollowed-out limbs (perfect for hammering beaks), the corn bricks hanging outside the bay window are so constantly visited by husband-and-wife pairs of red-breasted and downy woodpeckers that the squirrels can barely steal enough corn to survive. In years past, it seemed like a privilege just to catch a glimpse of a red-breasted woodpecker, but one of ours has actually become a mild pest. When the corn is gone, he lights on the roof and registers his disapproval with a machine gun tattoo on the rain gutter.


We thought they were the most voracious of the birds, but that's before we hung the goldfinch feeder. In all my life I've never seen more than two or three goldfinches in a year, and generally they're just passing through with that strangely graceful dip-dipping flight path. If they light to feed it's for just a moment, and then they're off, a vanishing flash of sun yellow and black. But they like this new feeder. They like it a lot. By the end of the second day, we were seeing as many as six goldfinches feeding at a time, always in married pairs. Apparently, the dull yellow female doesn't trust her husband to be out of her sight, and moments after he lands somewhere, she lands next to him. When two males perch side by side, you can imagine but not prove that they're complaining to each other about this.

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