“For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions—and power”

There is nothing more indicative of the sickness of the West than the ludicrous ‘peace movement’. So it’s always very very refreshing when a serious liberal like Bruce Bawer takes it on.

From now on when I get into an argument with one of these lovers of humanity I’m just going to send them to Mr. BB.

Very near the top on my list of good liberal journalists truths the Progressive Broadcasting System’s Jim Lehrer. The man is a veritable paragon of decency and fairness. It is impossible that he could ever reduce himself to the sort of petty contrivances of the uberbiased Bill Moyers. And you know he has to be an extraordinarily grounded and sane individual because he has just published his seventeenth novel!

I am a staunch defender of the NewsHour–it’s simply the best audio-visual daily forum for discussion of current events. Lehrer & Co. balance the ‘debate’ marvelously. I only very occasionally spot a progressive framing issue.

But alas, in the end the bias comes through. I speak of the NewsHour essayists who frequently appear at the end of the broadcast to perform their tele-essays on matters socio-politcal-cultural and cultural-historical-pastoral.

They are to a person liberals: Anne Taylor Fleming. Roger Rosenblatt. Clarence Page. Richard Rodriguez. Responsible, moderate, likeable liberals, yes, but liberals for all that. I almost invariable quarrel with liberal assumptions embedded in their presentations.

So how could my ‘paragon of decency and fairness’ allow such a monopoly of opinion? The easy answer is that the essay is clearly set up to be non-partisan. And who better to deliver a non or bi-partisan essay than a card-carrying liberal? But I can’t believe that my esteemed Mr. Lehrer could really think or believe such a thing. Unless unconsciously.

It must be that the biases which so irritate me are not even noticeable to the liberals—including the essayists themselves and the great Mr. Lehrer—who edit and produce, etc. This single point was the cornerstone argument of Bernard Goldberg’s controversial tract .

I think I am going to have to write Mr. Lehrer a fan letter, slipping in my view of the essay matter.

Isn’t it incredible that we allow money grubbing ‘movers and shakers’ to capture children’s minds…filling them with desire? Selling to children through the means of mass propaganda has to be one of the sicker aspects of our commercial society.

As with previous years, it appears that TatteredMan will not be voting in the upcoming election: No one is worth voting for; but if any of our demagogues decides to make advertising to children an issue I would be at campaign headquarters first thing in the morning. Sweeping floors or peeling potatoes…whatever.

Sontag’s cancer riff is not the right analogy: In this edifying discourse whitey is a pernicious plague; excepting, as always, the elite whitey who has—contra leftist historicism—transcended his or her whiteyness enough to diagnose the disease and is therefore driven to defeat it. Hey, it beats self-hating…

And by the way—before we get too excited—it’s a mistake to believe, as certain conservatives seem to, that our universities are churning out these true-believers in massive numbers (well, perhaps in Canada & Europe!) . They are merely getting to certain bright young minds with a passion for justice, politics, etc. Those motivated to ‘make a difference’—in other words an important segment of our future leaders.

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

Lest we surfeit with cathartic joy let’s balance things out…meet some more parents.

And now to this interview Terry Gross did with two Philadelphia teachers who in separate incidents were seriously injured by students.

By now you should be ready to beat the parents–and for that we shall visit our neighbors in Japan for some multi-cultural tips. I offer this selection from Michael Zielenziger’s disturbing yet fascinating book:

Attacking a parent has become one of the most common forms of domestic violence in Japan…the consensus among psychiatrists seems to be that at least half of all hikikomori treat their parents with some sort of violence. Beating them with an aluminum baseball bat is common; some children just use their fists (43).

Here’s a radio interview with Mr. Zielenziger if you wish to hear more about this sad state of affairs.

Fast Forward; or, keeping it real: Here’s a lively article from Founding Crunchy Con Rod Dreher invoking McLuhan, The Queen, and our little terror problem.

I recently saw her splendid lecture-performance at the UberCorrect ALA on the Progressive Broadcasting System. She ended her show with a treat: an enthusiastic recitation from Roald Dahl’s Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Very Well.

The perhaps potentially slightly embarrassing thing is that her talk dealt very much with the Rushdie affair. Is she aware that Roald Dahl was one of Rushdie’s severest critics at the time of the Fatwa? [see this article for a brief on the Rushdie affair as well as Dahl's view among others] Does it matter? Would she care?

I shall send her a note. It can’t hurt!

And while we’re all grinning this would be a good time to re-visit Jane Smiley’s understanding of the difference between liberals and conservatives (please don’t torture yourself by listening to the entire show: the particular invidiousness begins around 44:OO).

So for Ms. Rehm a liberal is simply someone who, having no particular ideological bent, listens to all the facts before trying to make the best decision.

And according to Ms. Smiley you are a liberal to the extent that you care about right and wrong–even though it hurts your cause since conservatives, concerned above all else with group loyalty, are able to exploit liberals lack of consensus (she apparently was ass-isted in this view by her reading of David Hackett Fischer– surely proof that if a donkey looks into a book…).

But is this the kind of nuanced and shades- of-gray understanding that our esteemed liberals boast of? Of course it is! And that’s why there’s going to be kulturkampf for the forseeable future.

Anti-theist superstars Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins see plenty of action but also encounter a surprising amount of resistance. Note: Session 8 begins with a very robust exchange between Harris and the anthropologist Scott Atan. I mention this because Harris is not listed in the line-up.

Throughout the talks there occurs the occasional jab at republicans and or the Bush Administration. Though not always invidious, most speakers evince clear sympathies with the political left. At the end of the day I wonder if most of these great scientists do not reserve more animus for the political right than the simply religious.

But perhaps I over-rate their capacity for discernment in the real world. They often don’t see very well without their micro and telescopes.