The Arts and Culture

More on the academic culture of the left

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Kevin MacDonald wrote this week in his blog, “Kevin Lamb’s TOO review of William Tucker’s book on Raymond Cattell is a microcosm of how far the academic world has sunk.”

Don’t I know it! Frankly, even if I had a good shot at getting a decent academic job at an American university, I don’t think I would take it, for the same reason MacDonald wrote about in a previous blog: “My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left.”

The hostility toward White men and Western culture that I noticed got very strong about 1995 is just too much for me. Absolutely everything I’ve observed since only confirms it’s gotten worse — much worse.

For instance, the leading journal in my field recently eulogized a former President of the American Studies Association: “When Emory became an assistant professor at Princeton in 1972, he joined an overwhelmingly White and male academy, one steeped in privileges of tradition and exclusion.” That’s White folks for you. It’s all about exclusion and privilege.

One wonders if he approved of the rate and degree of change during his watch.

The same journal also has a long essay by one Jodi Kim (I assume she’s Korean American) about (White) Americans adopting Asian babies. Representative sentence: “It is also a highly racialized and gendered process implicated in the United States’ imperialist, capitalist modernity and indeed its foundational or constitutive projects of racial formation and ‘nation building’ both domestically and internationally.” Please go back to Korea if you hate your adopted country so much.

Or this: “The films make visible how the conditions of possibility of transracial adoption surface at the disturbing nexus of the successive forced migrations engineered by US and Western capitalist modernity, cold war imperialism in Asia, the White heteronormative bourgeois nuclear family ideal, and the long-standing imperialist desire to ‘save’ the world.”  Tranraical adoption is part of Western imperialism engineered by evil “heteronormative” (!) White people trying to “save” the world?  Okay, let’s send all the non-White children back to their Asian homeland.

And this all comes within the first two pages.

Interesting footnote from the essay: “Since 1954, over 200,000 children have been adopted from South Korea, including 150,000 sent to the US and the remainder to Europe.”

Recently, China has become the main source for such adoptions. Why? As a footnote tells us: “Almost all transnationally adopted Chinese babies are abandoned girls.” Golly, who’s the bad guy in this tale, the Whites who adopted them or the non-Whites who abandoned thousands of babies?

I’m not surprised by such writing, though, since it is so routine in the humanities in America. Over a decade ago, for example, I read social scientist Derek Freeman’s account of debunking Margaret Mead’s Franz Boas-inspired book. The title of Freeman’s account is The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Here’s a telling story about the sad state of social “science” these days.

In an earlier book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Freeman ignited a firestorm in the world of anthropology by challenging, in one professor’s words, “the Mother-Goddess of American Anthropology.” From the publication of that book in 1983, Freeman “was subjected to a highly emotional and, at times, flagrantly ad hominem campaign that reached its apogee in Chicago during the Eighty Second Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, when . . . there was a special session (to which [he] was not invited) devoted to the evaluation of [his] book.” Descriptions of the meeting from those who attended ranged from “a sort of grotesque feeding frenzy” to “I felt I was in a room with 200 people ready to lynch you.”

Whatever happened to dispassionate search for truth and the advancement of science?

Another excellent point MacDonald makes concerns both the brother- and sisterhood of victims, and its hierarchy with Jews at the top:

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

Zoom in on another tribute in our field’s journal to a fallen multiculturalist, a person who can best be described as the patron saint of American studies. I really don’t think you readers need this pointed out, but the author hates the idea that America has any White identity at all. She is writing in tribute to a fellow Chicana, “internationally recognized cultural theorist, creative writer, and independent scholar Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa.”

Remember, this is the leading journal in the field. That means that publishing there is the route to tenure and recognition. The route to tenure is to wallow in one’s victimhood, and in the victimhood stakes, this woman is thrice blessed — female, non-White, and lesbian: the diversity trifecta all in one person.

I quote at length only to give you a feel for what is going on in the academy these days:

I was introduced to your borderlands theory at the same time that I left the El Paso/Juárez border, never realizing how your work would impact my own scholarship in a field that I, at first, found as White as a midwestern winter. 

On May 21, 1980, almost exactly twenty-four years before your death, you wrote “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in which you visualized other women of color engaged in the radical act of writing and theorizing about our own lives, contemplating our raced/sexed/gendered/ classed realities and histories, and reclaiming our right to write. “Forget the room of one’s own,” you wrote, “write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking.” . . . 

First, I should admit: I knew nothing about either you or the field until 1985, when I began my Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Iowa. Once there, I was dazed by cold and culture shock. From what I gleaned in my classes, “doing” American studies meant reading White male historians, White male literary critics, and great White male literature, trying to find the immanent “American” mind and character—a concept so riddled with problematic assumptions about what “American” meant that I was ready to pack up my bags and run for home. 

I can’t tell you the intellectual malaise I wallowed in that first semester, feeling for the first time in my life like a cultural alien in a White wilderness. Little did I know I was in the throes of what you called the nepantla state, “that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another . . . to be disoriented in space is to experience bouts of disassociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups.” Little did I realize I was experiencing my first rite of passage as an academic border crosser. 

And then, you came to town. I couldn’t believe it, a tejana fronteriza dyke like me, speaking the same three tongues I speak. Lenguas de fuego, you named them, tongues of fire—the queer tongue, the decolonial tejana tongue, and the forked tongue of the border. You were finishing up with Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (a doctoral dissertation, if I ever saw one) and were trying out some of your theories—La Facultad, the Shadow Beast, the Coatlicue State, Mestiza Consciousness—on a multicultural college audience in Iowa City. Even among all those maricones and tortilleras (who knew I would find such queer Latinidad in Iowa?) your lecture settled over us like cosmic dust from another planet. The Whites in the room, even the liberal ones wearing Guatemalan shirts under their parkas, shifted uncomfortably in their seats; the more honest ones stared at you as though you’d just dropped a crop circle in their cornfield. 

I saw how the queers, the rape survivors, and the people of color responded with recognition to your idea about a certain faculty of mind that people who live in the margins develop early in life, a “survival tactic,” you called it, that teaches us to become aware of the racist, the rapist, or the homophobe in the room before that person even approaches. The African American and Latina professors, whatever their sexuality, saw themselves reflected in that beastly mirror of self-doubt and self-hate that you explained was a consequence of internalized racism and sexism. As a border dweller myself, I completely identified with your discussion on linguistic terrorism and the way those of us who are bred in the borderlands develop an ability to negotiate two languages and two cultures as a way of protecting ourselves against cultural schizophrenia. 

But when you got to the part about how identity must be fluid like the river, how we must shed our skins by entering into the Coatlicue state of death and renewal, the immersion into crisis when an old self dies and a new self awakens with a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity and a talent for seeing through “serpent and eagle eyes”—you lost us. More accurately, you plunged us into that nepantla state.

Now ask yourself if the writer of the above — or the intended audience — can ever gain freedom from the constraints MacDonald identified. To wit: “In the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change.”

Since I’m skewering the academy in which I’ve spent so many years, let me also allude to Christopher Donovan’s current TOO article “A Window on the Warping of Whites: The Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine.”

To be honest, I share the same experience about my alma mater that he writes about Swarthmore. My school is a good second-tier private institution, one with a historically White ethnic/religious background that continues to this day. Yet it tries to go more upscale by aping the same trends Donovan highlights. In every issue they try to cram more photos of blacks and articles about Jews into the publication than I find even remotely warranted.

Yes, Donovan gets it exactly right: “What’s so amazing . . . is the totality of intellectual takeover.”

Again, this is not new. As a thirtysomething in 1992, I returned from six years of working abroad and did an unpaid internship at the leading pro-American manufacturing think tank in D.C. The other nine or so interns were college kids who just wanted to play softball with other interns during the hot Washington summer. Few of them even knew what the think tank dealt with.

When they found out about the pro-American slant of the think tank (a car maker—since gone bankrupt—was the biggest funder), they nearly rebelled.

They came from Cornell, Harvard, Bates . . . and Swarthmore.

So I think I’ll remain aloof from the American academy and earn my bread elsewhere. I don’t want to work somewhere where I’m always unfairly attacked because I was born a White male. Plus I don’t want to be around people teaching or educated at places like Swarthmore—or any other “good” university.

Needless to say, I send not a penny to any of the three universities from which I gained degrees. I’ll let others fund those glossy photos of high-achieving African Americans and “socially active” Jews.

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Ted Sallis: Taking a Initial Look at the American Third Position Party

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Ted Sallis: The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a new political party that purports to represent the interests of the white American majority.  As such, it is a refreshing change from the standard Republicrat/Democan one-party system and gives hope that, finally, the political system can be used to further our specific group interests. 

These are early days and one cannot make any definitive conclusions about A3P at this point.  However, some progress has been made, and the party has put forth some initial positions on major issues, so it is worthwhile to examine these. Readers are urged to look at A3P’s program and policies.  I have no major disagreement with their stance on crime, economy, education, etc.  Instead, I would like to take a closer look at two of their major policy initiatives. Emphasis added to all quotes. 

The following summarizes the party’s key positions on immigration:

 To safeguard our identity and culture, and to maintain the very existence of our nation, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration. Recognizing our people’s right to safety, and respecting the sanctity of the rule of law, we will immediately deport all criminal and illegal aliens. We believe, too, that American citizenship should be exclusive and meaningful. As such, the American Third Position will end the practice of automatic birthright-citizenship for children of illegal aliens. To restore, with civility, the identity and culture of our homeland, we will provide incentives for recent, legal immigrants to return to their respective lands. 

This is good – stopping the influx, deportation of illegals, and an end to the concept of “anything goes” birthright citizenship.  Even more impressively, the possibility of repatriation of “recent, legal immigrants” is brought up – the only instance of an American political party raising the “R” issue.  I would like even more – a more comprehensive repatriation program for example, but this is a good start. Also: 

Immigration affects our culture. It affects the way we feel, act, and operate within a community. It affects whether or not we can have actual communities at all. It affects our welfare and livelihood in ways that are immeasurable, aside from the efforts we go to in protecting against it. Immigration erodes our culture and sense of identity. In cities where many cultures meet, there is an atmosphere of hostility. Neighborhoods become atomized, and a true community is never established. 

True and good, but it’s not only culture. Not surprisingly, I would like to have seen a more explicitly Salterian mention of the actual physical, demographic, biological effects of immigration.  They add: 

While we accept that ethnic minorities are, and will always be, part of America, we want our will to be observed and exercised as it should be, and as it should have been. We have a right to sovereignty and to exercise our will as a people. We want an America that is recognizable to us, one that we can feel comfortable in. We believe that this desire is not unique to our nation or our own people, and we believe that all people’s have a right to sovereignty. Accordingly, we will stop all immigration into America, except in special cases. To help restore our national identity, we will offer generous grants to recent immigrants who have a desire to return to their countries of origin. While this can be easily repositioned by a media who is hostile to our people or to a political establishment who relies on recent immigrants for votes, we only mean to create a system of mutual benefit, where the wills of both parties are observed and respected, as they should be. Wherever a recent immigrant has a need to get back home but is without the resources to do as much, we will lend a helping hand. 

I don’t know about the first set of phrases, but I understand that this party needs to navigate within the streams of the politically possible – for now – and that a too radical program at first may be difficult.  A contrasting argument would be that it’s a mistake to start off too moderate.  An initial moderate stance may “lock in” this moderation and prevent future shifts toward more radical positions since, having attracted a mass of more moderate supporters at the beginning, the party would be loathe to lose that support by shifting towards more radical solutions to the pressing problems of race, culture, and nation.  Truth be told, I’m more supportive of the latter mindset – that it is better to lay your cards on the table at the beginning and build in depth with more revolutionary support.  Of course, the assumption here is that the A3P leadership and I actually agree on these more radical ideals.  It may be that our vision is not congruent, and that the party program is what it is because that’s what the party leaders want it to be.  And, of course, A3P leadership has the right to formulate their own party’s positions as they see fit.  I merely make suggestions and offer some contrary views.

The A3P also has an excellent position on space exploration.

This is important; I am a very strong supporter of space exploration (both manned and unmanned).  This is part of Western Man’s Faustian soul, will yield important information and discoveries, and, hopefully, eventually lead to Western Man’s expansion into, and colonization of, space (assuming of course we are not first Third Worldized out of existence).  That the A3P has included space exploration as a key part of their program is therefore encouraging and demonstrates a willingness to look at long-term objectives, and also the ability to look beyond the standard “right-wing fare” (immigration, economy, crime, etc.). 

One point though is that they should go beyond space exploration and put together a broader position on overall science and Technology.  In other words they should also: encourage the development of alternative and novel sources of energy, promote advances in biomedical research (which should include not only basic research and that aimed at disease therapeutics, but also research on race and eugenics), stimulate development of advanced computing, and encourage continued and expanded research into the fabric of the universe and of reality itself (e.g., astronomy and, especially, both theoretical and applied advanced physics, cosmology, etc).  Further, Americans need to be in the lead of what can be called “global disaster abatement” – research aimed at investigating and, if possible, preventing asteroid strikes, super volcano eruptions, pandemics, environmental degradation, etc.  While some of the latter may seem like “science fiction,” that is more a function of our limited knowledge and imagination than it is to any real limitation of the possibilities. 

The A3P can also state an interest in Western cultural artifacts – an interest in opposing the current “Winter” of our High Culture, and its sewer-like degraded atmosphere, with a contrasting encouragement of Western cultural rebirth and the creation of a civilization that can make us, our ancestors, and our posterity proud.

In summary, there is some more work to be done and I hope that a bit of constructive criticism will be appreciated.  However, all in all, A3P seems at this point to be a very positive development, and I wish them well.

A major concern is that the landscape of “movement” history is littered with the scattered remnants of past projects that, initially, looked promising and generated enthusiasm, but quickly petered out due to lack of progress and direction, infighting, the action of infiltrators and agent provocateurs, diminished interest of activists with short attention spans, and the ability of the establishment to use a variety of methods to thwart nationalist progress.  We can hope that things will be different this time.

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Avatar: Anti-White or Anti-American?

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As Joe Webb’s review makes clear, Avatar is an anti-White movie. Today’s LA Times article by Patrick Goldstein (“Avatar: Why do conservatives hate the most popular movie in years?”) shows that the movie has been panned by conservatives. But of course no mainstream conservative could actually label the movie “anti-White.” That’s simply not an aproved part of the lexicon because mainstream conservatives must be completely blind to race. Conflicts must be phrased in terms of American citizenship or conservative values, but not as Whites versus non-Whites, even when (as in Avatar and in the real world)  racial conflict is staring them in the face. Instead, it’s “anti-American.”

Big Hollywood’s John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film essayists, blasted the film, calling it “a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a single plot turn, large or small, surprises…. Think of ‘Avatar’ as ‘Death Wish’ for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you freakin’ hate the bad guys (America) you’re able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all.”

John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard’s film critic, called the film “blitheringly stupid; indeed, it’s among the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen.” He goes on to say: “You’re going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie’s politics — about how it’s a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq…. The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism — kind of. The thing is, one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take ‘Avatar’ — with its … hatred of the military and American institutions and the notion that to be human is just way uncool — at all seriously as a political document. It’s more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have become by now.”

As the article makes clear, conservative viewers have flocked to the movie because of the spectacle, not the politics. Goldstein points out that Avatar reflects long held Hollywood values, emphasizing opposition to religion and the military as well as pro-environmentalism. But of course he does not mention Hollywood’s anti-White values as documented by Edmund Connelly: Reel bad WASPs; Reel bad whites — values that reflect the strong Jewish influence in Hollywood.

Cameron is not Jewish. I don’t  know where his leftist attitudes come from, but there’s no question that they sell well at the box office. He may well have figured that non-Whites would love to see bad White guys defeated by non-Whites. (James Cameron’s movie has already grossed over $1 billion, 2/3 of it from foreign countries.) And of course Whites don’t mind seeing themselves defeated as long as they have fun doing it. After all, most Whites are used to seeing themselves as the bad guy (see links to Connnelly above) and have internalized that attitude. It’s money in the bank.

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Charles Dodgson’s "Get Smart! and Birth of a Nation: Lessons for White Cultural Emancipation"

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I hope people get a chance to read Charles Dodgson’s latest TOO article. The critical take-home point is the power of the media in shaping attitudes. The Birth of a Nation of 1915 was a powerful call to White racial awareness and defense. Right now, there is a huge amount of anger among Whites in America, but it will probably be channeled within politically acceptable boundaries —boundaries in which White racial consciousness and the need for racial defense will remain beyond the pale of acceptable political discourse. Hence the  energetic attempts at containment by organizations like the ADL and the $PLC aimed at completely cleansing the mainstream media of anything remotely likely to legitimize White racial consciousness and defense (even Glenn Beck).  As Dodgson notes, “White Americans will continue to lose the culture war — and their freedom and identity — until they retake the commanding heights of mass entertainment and guard that position with the same determination with which their forebears defended the nation’s physical borders.”

Heidi Beirich: Political Repression — The End that Justifies the Means

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In her book Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, Ellen Schrecker describes the intellectual climate that prevailed in the 1950s as a result of the anticommunist surge led by Joseph McCarthy. The communist, racial egalitarian, laborite far-left had collapsed from intense scrutiny. So-called “activists” (academics, writers, government employees, lawyers, union organizers, directors, screen writers) lost jobs, blacklisting prevailed, and a generation of hardcore Marxists scurried like cockroaches from this intense exposure. Schrecker admits that the anticommunist claims were fundamentally accurate. What she objects to is the repression that occurred as a result of the tactics used to clamp down on communist subversion.

Schrecker writes,

If nothing else, McCarthyism destroyed the left.  … It wiped out the communist movement — the heart of the vibrant left-labor Popular Front that had stimulated so much social and political change in the 1930s and 1940s. Though the party itself survived, all the political organizations, labor unions, cultural groups that constituted the main institutional and ideological infrastructure of the American left simply disappeared. An entire generation of political activists had been jerked off the stage of history.

The role reversal could not be more blatantly transparent in today’s political climate.

The $PLC’s Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok are busy applying this history lesson to the political right. This YouTube footage shows Beirich agonizing about the threat of far-right “domestic terrorism” in a MediaMatters.org–sponsored forum on “Mainstreaming Extremism.” It could just as easily have been a symposium titled: “Marginalizing the Right: From Extremists to Domestic Terrorists.”

In essence she links public opposition to the Obama administration (Glenn Beck’s rhetoric, Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and others) as fostering a “rise” in violent acts even though only a handful of violent incidents were actually mentioned (the forum occurred before Major Hasan took the lives of 13 and injured 30 at Fort Hood although Beirich has said little to nothing about the ideological or political motives of the alleged military psychiatrist-turned mass murderer). If you dissect her message, it is clear she wants to shut down speech that she and her employer disapprove of and label as a “toxic environment” any effective opposition to the egalitarian-activist left.

It’s not a surprise that the ADL is also a major player in this drive to cleanse the mainstream media of “extremism” with the same list of enemies (Beck, Dobbs, Limbaugh, Buchanan) and the same tactics as the $PLC.  As Kevin MacDonald noted in “The ADL: Managing White Rage,” “Particularly important is to keep any vestige of “extremism” out of the mainstream media, particularly anything that would legitimate White anger and concerns about the future.”

The real “toxic environment” is the political climate that Beirich, Potok and explicitly Jewish activist organizations like the ADL  have cultivated in formulating, among other things, a contemporary “blacklist” of individuals (academics, writers, editors, and commentators) and aggressively marginalizing their adversaries to the realm of the repressed; not to mention pressuring university administrators to punish scholars for their work in a collegiate environment that has been traditionally insulated from political pressures that stifle scholarship and free expression.

The ultimate goal of Beirich and other diehard leftists is to suppress the political right; strengthening political correctness into a force of political repression interchangeable with the anticommunist tactics of the 1950s. The real targets of Beirich’s wrath are not lone gunmen such as James von Brunn, but popular conservative commentators (Buchanan, Beck, Dobbs, and Limbaugh), which she blames for producing a “toxic environment” and greasing the skids for another Tim McVeigh-Oklahoma City bombing.

Schrecker makes an important admission in her book that activists on the right should realize:

The overall legacy of the liberals’ failure to stand up against the anticommunist crusade was to let the nation’s political culture veer to the right. Movements and ideas that had once been acceptable were now beyond the pale. Though Communists and their allies were the direct victims, the mainstream liberals and former New Dealers within the Democratic Party were the indirect ones.

Beirich and other far-left activists understand this lesson (which all-too-often seems lost on right-wing activists): A marginalized, politically ineffective right will steer the nation’s political culture further leftward.

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Lasha Darkmoon: Why Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize and Hitler Didn’t

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Lasha Darkmoon: Asked why the Peace prize had been awarded to President Barack Obama, Nobel committee head Thorbjorn Jagland said: “It was because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve.” 

Obviously such a comment would make sense if we knew what Obama was trying to achieve. Even assuming that the President were trying to achieve something noble and uplifting for mankind  — an assumption it would be rash to make — why give a man a peace prize if all he does is make war?  

Mr Jagland then added somewhat enigmatically: “It is a clear signal that we want to advocate the same as he has done.” 

How strange. What has Obama done exactly? I mean, what has he done that the Nobel committee are so enthused about that they wish to advocate it? Get more American soldiers killed in foreign parts? Increase the number of amputees in the armed forces? Order more torture?  Kill more Muslims? Expand old wars and start new ones? 

Mr Jagland does not explain. 

Perhaps there’s something in the air hanging over those Norwegian fjords that does something to the brainsof Nobel Committee members. In 1973 they gave the Peace Prize to one of the world’s most shameless warmongers: Dr Henry Kissinger. Taking note of his war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the committee decided that here was a man who clearly needed to be commemorated for his unflinching efforts in pursuit of peace. A few years later, in 1994, they handed the peace prize to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres at a time when the Israelis and Palestinians were, as ever, fighting like cats and dogs. 

The Nobel Peace Prize committee have obviously been influenced by the Orwellian mantra “War is Peace!” Anyone who starts a war, it seems,  automatically becomes a candidate for the Peace Prize. 

*   *   *   *   * 

When Obama collected his prize on December 10, you could almost sense his embarrassment. It’s as if he knew that satire had died yet again. He had the modesty to admit he had no idea why he’d been given this prize. He even pointed out that there were millions of worthier recipients. After all, he had just ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and had refused to consider a ban on land mines. Not exactly a peacenik. 

His spokesman Robert Gibbs, putting in a good word for this boss of his who had broken all his election promises, noted apologetically: “The president understands that he doesn’t belong in the same discussion as Mandela and Mother Teresa.” 

The understatement of the year. 

*   *   *   *   * 

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a man in Malaysia who asked me if I knew why Obama had been nominated for the Peace Prize. “Isn’t it strange?” he asked. I felt I owed him an explanation, since he was under the impression I was some kind of authority on world peace. So this is what I wrote back to him: 

Yes, it is indeed very strange, seeing that Obama has done nothing to deserve the Peace Prize apart from give a speech in Cairo which hinted at a solution to the long-standing Arab-Israeli problem. I can’t see how anyone can get a pat on the back for telling Israel to stop settlement activity when the Israelis ignore him anyway. Nor can he be given a peace prize for continuing the carnage in Iraq, expanding it in Afghanistan, and starting a new war in Pakistan which has already created over a million refugees. So the answer has to be this: having received the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama will now find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to start a war with Iran. 

The Norwegians may well have maneuvered Obama into a corner. How can a man who has just received the accolade of the world’s most prestigious peace prize give the order to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran in defiance of international law? The people who are crying for Iranian blood in America right now are the known neoconservative warmongers. How can Peace Prize Obama give ear to such warmongers? It won’t be easy. Nor will it be easy, if Israel launches an attack on Iran, to join Israel in pulverizing a helpless and innocent civilian population. Obama’s name would be mud.

Conclusion: give a man a peace prize when you want to stop him starting a new war.

*   *   *   *   *

We shall have to see what happens next. Iran will be the litmus test. If Obama gives the order for an attack on Tehran, our worst suspicions will be confirmed. We shall then have to seriously ask why the Peace Prize wasn’t awarded posthumously to Adolf Hitler.

It’s amusing to note in this context that kookie Jewish-American lesbian litterateuse Gertrude Stein said in 1938: “I think Hitler ought to have the Nobel Peace Prize!”  And she did her best to persuade the Nobel Committee to honor the Nazi leader in this way.  

My Aunt Agatha thinks the reason Obama got the Peace Prize and Hitler didn’t has something to do with Hitler’s mustache. As far as the Norwegians were concerned, that dreadful mustache was a big no-no.  Obama, she says, labored under no such disadvantage.     

She could have a point.

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Nora Ephron makes an obvious choice

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I finally got around to watching Julie & Julia, directed by Nora Ephron who also wrote the screenplay. She is Jewish and a typical Hollywood liberal. She donated to Al Franken and Obama. Here’s an example of her prose (titled “White Men” from the liberal (and very mainstream) website Huffington Post, written just before the Pennsylvania primary in 2008:

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)

White men are nothing more than haters. Not even Bill Kristol is liberal enough for her.

Julie & Julia is basically about two women becoming famous cooks 50 years apart. But Ephron can’t resist an opportunity for a little propagandizing. The movie has a brief cameo appearance of Julia’s father, John McWilliams. The following is from a biography of Child:

Pasadena, where she was born in 1912, was a handsome city, known for its wealth and civic accomplishments; John McWilliams was a living symbol of the city’s prosperity. A Princeton graduate and devout Republican, he managed the Western landholdings and investments amassed by his own father and later became vice president of J. G. Boswell, one of California’s major landowners and developers. His personal and professional mission was to keep California booming, and he put a great deal of time into Pasadena community life. Julia was raised to admire his discipline and public spirit, which she did, but he also nurtured a set of rabidly right-wing convictions that she would come to abhor. The two of them split sharply during the 1950s, when John McWilliams became a strong supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy whom Julia found despicable. Her father was also outspoken about his contempt for Jews, artists, intellectuals, and foreigners; and for most of her adult life Julia viewed him with enormous dismay, though she managed to keep loving him.

In fact, McWilliams’ anti-Jewish views were well enough known that he was mentioned, along with well-known figures such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Methodist preacher Wesley Swift, as anti-Jewish supporters of McCarthy in Aviva Weingarten’s Jewish Organizations’ Response to Communism and Senator McCarthy (see my review here).

In Julie & Julia, McWilliams is presented as a cranky supporter of McCarthy who dislikes Julia’s husband Paul, a political liberal who had lived in Paris as a poet and artist — everything that McWilliams detested. In the movie, Paul is working as a librarian in the Foreign Service when he is called to Washington where he is grilled about possible communist associations and on his sexual orientation. Julia states that she knows many people who have been persecuted by McCarthy even though they have done nothing wrong. Paul returns to France dispirited by his experience.

The movie seems to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of McWilliams — a portrayal tailor made to hammer home one of Hollywood’s favority moral lessons about the evil 1950s.

However, Ephron could have taken another tack altogether. Although Julia renounced her father’s views on McCarthy, her views on homosexuality would certainly exclude her from the culture of the mainstream media today.

Homophobia was a socially acceptable form of bigotry in midcentury America, and Julia and Paul participated without shame for many years. She often used the term pedal or pedalo — French slang for a homosexual — draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden’s, using the same pedalo I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not pedals!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homovipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of pedals—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I’m tired of them, talented though they are.”

So Ephron had a choice if she wanted to bring up politically volatile issues. She could have played up the angle of Julia’s father as a cranky right-wing supporter of Sen. McCarthy, or she could have played up the angle of the Childs as homophobes.

But this was a feel-good movie, so it was a no-brainer. For Ephron, part of the feel-good message is to portray Julia’s character as an enlightened liberal, just like herself — and at the same time get in yet another dig at the retrogrades who supported McCarthy while avoiding any mention of McWilliams’ civic contributions or Julia’s homophobia.

Despite the fact that McCarthy was basically right about the people he hauled before his committee (see M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies), the cause of anti-McCarthyism remains a rallying cry for the Nora Ephrons of the world — at least partly because, as Weingarten shows, so many of them were Jews.

My only surprise is that we weren’t treated to a caricature of McWilliams’s anti-Jewish attitudes.

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