Conservative Donnybrook

You have to love an artist with a sense of irony.

A friend of mine has written a book that deals with educational reform. I have just finished reading it and recommend the book. I wrote the following review on Amazon:

I am not a teacher, a student contemplating teaching as a career, or even a parent. I do not play one on television. Nonetheless, I found Mr. Kaufman’s book, Reclamation: Saving our schools starts from within, to be a compelling read. Indeed, I read the book in one sitting. Furthermore, I believe that teachers, students who are contemplating a career in teaching and parents will all find this book to be, at moments, an eye-opening exposé of the plight of our public schools, and also a prescription for reclaiming them.

Teachers who read this book will fall into one of two camps. The majority of them will be infuriated at having their worldview challenged. Those teachers are likely to vilify Kaufman for his positions, chalking it up to political bias, as his fellow teachers in Los Angeles did after he and a coworker wrote an op-ed piece promoting a merit pay proposal. However, there will be others who have spent time in the trenches and who have seen the biases, laziness, and self-centeredness of a large proportion of their fellow teachers and wish for something better – if not for them professionally, at least for the children who are a third, fourth or even fifth priority. Those teachers, even if they do not ultimately agree with Kaufman’s prescriptions, will recognize a kindred sense of moral outrage and will appreciate Kaufman’s attempt to steer a new course for public education.

Unfortunately, many students may be put off by Mr. Kaufman’s bleak portrayal of the culture in public schools where teachers are more concerned with padding their already bloated paychecks, with escaping responsibility, and with running out the clock before they can retire to a fat pension than they are with educating young men and women. There is an element of Kaufman’s narrative that may work to discourage potential young teachers from entering the profession. If so, that would be tragic, although Kaufman’s experience led him to make the same decision. Nonetheless, teachers-to-be owe it to themselves to read this account and to enter into their chosen profession with their eyes open.

Parents should consider sending their children to private school or homeschooling their children. But first, they should read this book.

Kaufman provides a two-chapter introduction, which probably should have been combined into a single chapter, explaining why he wrote this book and what he hopes to achieve from its publication.

Kaufman then goes about his work by establishing the problems inherent in the current public school culture. Lazy teachers, who are granted tenure after two short years, live in a world divorced from reality, but nonetheless believe that they are mistreated, underpaid, micromanaged, and unappreciated – none of which are true, at least after they achieve tenure. Kaufman shares an anecdote, which would be surprising to any but the most cynical, about one of his coworker’s reactions to the above-mentioned op-ed piece promoting merit pay. His coworker sent him an email agreeing that his reasoning was correct and that she largely agreed with him, but would nonetheless support the union, which strongly opposed merit pay.

Kaufman then convincingly shows the perfidy and moral bankruptcy of the teachers unions. He concludes that if any reform to the public schools is possible, teachers must reject the unions whose policies are positively harmful to students. Indeed one union head’s statement reveals the danger posed by unions to the welfare of children and their education when American Federation of Teachers president, Albert Shanker, said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, then I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Tragically, in light of that attitude, the vast majority of teachers vote the union line.

Competition, which the teachers unions strongly oppose and fear above anything else, Kaufman proclaims, is the great hope for American public education. Vouchers and charter schools, programs that give parents choices and force accountability on schools and teachers, are the path to reform of public schools.

Kaufman chronicles the hardly surprising liberal bias that inhabits American schoolrooms. From pointless field trips to shameful revision of American history and from eco-brainwashing of our children to outright anti-Americanism, the full pathology of the worst of the Leftist agenda is on display in our children’s classrooms. Moreover, any voice of moderation is shouted down, vilified and made into a pariah, all abetted by the administration of these schools.

Kaufman has a true gift for the use of anecdotes to illustrate his point. It is through the retelling of these stories that Kaufman is at his strongest. The book is sprinkled throughout with articles that he either wrote or co-wrote on the topics discussed in this book. While the writing is excellent, there are spots where a stronger editorial hand might have been beneficial to keep Kaufman’s narrative a bit more focused (for example, he spends a fair amount of time cataloging the evils of the anti-Semitic terrorist group, ANSWER, of which the teachers union is a supporter and perhaps loses focus on the main thesis). Overall, this is an excellent book with provocative content. Kaufman’s voice should be welcomed into any discussion of education reform and his thoughts deserve to be read widely.

I encourage everyone to buy a copy, or better yet, to buy three to give as gifts.

This morning I was talking to my beautiful wife while Pandora played in the background and a song began to play that I mentioned was probably the Coolest Song Ever Recorded. She immediately challenged my assertion. It seems that living in my household is a donnybrook all its own. The song that was playing was Frank Sinatra’s version of Mack the Knife. My second offering was also a song by a member of the Rat Pack (seriously, was there ever a group of people who embodied the essence of cool like the Rat Pack?). My second choice was Dean Martin’s Ain’t That a Kick in the Head. Of course, she instantly repudiated that choice as well. Notably however, she declined to offer her own choice for Coolest Song Ever Recorded.

So I appeal to a wider audience. What is the Coolest Song Ever Recorded? I’ve offered my top two nominations. I like Frank’s version of Mack the Knife, but I think that almost any version automatically bumps its singer three notches on the coolness meter. Now is your turn to nominate your favorite for the title of Coolest Song Ever Recorded.

I encourage everyone to visit an important new blog called Comics in my Pants.

Its author pulls of the seemingly impossible task of making newspaper comics funny by adding “in my pants” to the final panels. You’ll LOL!

Today I have added a new webzine called The Catholic Thing to our blogroll. The Catholic Thing is being launched (actually it was launched in early June – I am behind in finding it and spreading the word) by Dr. Robert Royal in association with Dr. Michael Novak and Dr. Ralph McInerny. Some of you may remember Dr. McInerny for his now-sadly-defunct magazine Catholic Dossier: Issues in the Round. By far, Catholic Dossier was my favorite Catholic magazine of any I’ve ever read.  Some of the other regular columnists are: Hadley Arkes, Michael Uhlmann, Mary Eberstadt, George Marlin, Bill Saunders, Brad Minor and Austin Ruse. With any luck, and with our prayers, Dr. Royal’s new enterprise will capture some of the spirit of that publication. So far, the results are promising.

Hulsman and Mitchell wrote an excellent article for National Interest wherein they draw parallels between characters in The Godfather and American politics. I think their take on Tom, the consigliere, and Sonny are right on the money. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that there is a MIchael Corleone candidate. I think the parallels most closely align as follows: Hillary Clinton was represented by Tom Hagen; George W. Bush/John McCain was represented by Sonny Corleone; and Barack Obama was represented by Virgil Sollozzo (he seems to be bringing the family a good business opportunity, but in reality he seeks to transfer the power of the Corleones to other families).

This afternoon my wife and I went to see Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As one reviewer pointed out, one’s opinion of the film is almost guaranteed to be determined by one’s stance on the Evolutionism v. Intelligent Design “debate.”

The point of the film is not whether ID is superior to Evolutionism, but rather that the mere suggestion that ID might provide some explanation as to the origins of life is strictly verboten in academic and scientific circles. Stein introduces his viewers to several scientists who have been drummed out of their positions because they had the audacity to mention Intelligent Design in their research.

One proponent of evolutionism, William Provine, an avowed atheist science historian at Cornell University, objected to the teaching of intelligent design in part on the basis that it’s “BOOOORING. I can’t think of any topic that is more BOOOORING!” Of course, when asked about the origins of life, Provine posited that aliens might have seeded life on this planet, deftly pushing back the question one generation (How did the seed scattering aliens come to exist, Professor Provine?).

Perhaps no single point shows that Stein was not attempting to advocate for the Intelligent Design position than the fact that Stein did not interview Michael Behe, a microbiologist whose book Darwin’s Black Box I found to provide much evidentiary support for intelligent design. Behe’s argument proceeded by examining the simplest of life forms, a single celled creature, and examined it at the microbiological level. At that level there are mechanisms (Behe uses a flagella as one example) that are incredibly complex structurally and functionally such that they could not have evolved happenstance. He coined the term “irreducible complexity”: Take away any of the structure’s complexity and it would cease to function and therefore would not confer an advantage which would be selected for. Indeed, extra baggage which provided no function would put the organism at a disadvantage, which Darwin predicted would ultimately cause its extinction. Critics of Behe have noted that some of the proteins that make up some of these structures that Behe used as examples occur in other contexts within the cell, however, that still fails to account for their combination into a specific structure which is much more complex than the joining of a few proteins randomly.

Continue Reading »

Can we assume that other eminently high-minded persons will soon be submitting GOP applications?

Playwright David Mamet explains why he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal.”

Martin Amis jettisons his liberal naivete and looks unflinchingly at Islamic terror.

Thomas Bertonneau puts on his hazmat suit and diffuses the miasma of Atlas Shrugged in a new essay on First Principles, ISI’s Web Journal.  

Particularly excoriated is Rand’s ”naïve attitude towards history and philosophy[,] that at times can only be described as sophomoric.”

I know, it is shameful that I have only just now read Witness. Whittaker Chambers’ autobiography is required reading for anyone who would call himself conservative. Thankfully, unlike most required reading, this is interesting, provocative and, considering it was written in 1952 about the Communist threat, timely. Even though it would seem that the threat of Communist expansion, especially in the form of Soviet Communism, seems to have passed, the underlying premise of this book is the question, “God or Man?” It is in answering that question that one is drawn to Communism, its brother Fascism, or any number of totalitarian forms of government hatched from the laboratory of the Enlightenment deification of Man that were spawned out of the French Revolution.

On the opening page of his autobiography he writes:

I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed, or that has happened to me since, has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast. But nothing has changed my determination to act as if I were wrong – if only because, in the last instance, men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.

Then in 1938, with the clearest understanding of the consequences, we freely made the choice which history is slowly bringing all men to see is the only possible choice – the decision to die, if necessary, rather than to live under Communism. Continue Reading »

The Hobbit is going to be made into a movie–two movies, actually–by Peter Jackson. Why they need two movies to tell the story, I don’t know. Hopefully Ian Holm and Ian McKellen will reprise their roles as Bilbo and Gandalf.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat is underwhelmed. He also points to the fact that one of the movies will be based on The Hobbit, the other will be a kind of bridge between The Hobbit and LOTR. This strikes me as a terrible idea. As Douthat notes, there probably isn’t enough of a movie plot there among Tolkien’s notes and appendices and such for this extra prequel, and so presumably screenwriters will have to make some additions to the “Tolkien universe.” What is this, Star Wars? Hopefully the Tolkien estate will be vigilant enough that things don’t get too out of hand.

So here’s some of the finest picking you’re liable to see. Here’s Part II.

Here’s Phil Keaggy. So talented you’ll pee yourself.

Enjoy.

The most many people will ever see or hear of the Pope’s message on World Peace Day is the headlines in newspapers and tabloids declaring that the Pope is not a strong believer in human-made climate change.  But the Pope says so much more. 

His Holiness agrees that family should be regarded “as the first natural society.”  That mankind must do more to ensure tranquility and peace within the family structure.  Based on healthy families, the world civilization will grow and the world will learn “the language of peace.”  Moral law must be followed.  Nations must be allowed to flourish in freedom and without bowing to nations whom wish to subjugate and control them.  The Pontiff rightly and profoundly states, “In many situations the weak must bow not to the demands of justice, but to the naked power of those stronger than themselves. It bears repeating: power must always be disciplined by law, and this applies also to relations between sovereign States.”Non-proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons is also highlighted by His Holiness.  Dissemination of weapons of war and sabotage must be stopped.  It is the responsibility of the developed nations to lead in this regard.  Civil wars in Africa, constant war in the middle east and an increasing global arms race all work to “cast dark shadows on [the world's] future.”

The Holy Father does call for more dialogue on the environment and climate change.  The environment, the Pope says, is an asset for use of the whole human race, not simply one generation.  Yet the primacy of human life must not be denigrated and reduced in importance to that of the environment.  Following science is imperative; blindly following ideologues is dangerous and will bear no fruit.  We have been blessed with yet another fantastic message from His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI.  I encourage everyone to read his message in full.

Slate has put up a good essay/slide show about Charles Schulz and Peanuts, inspred by a new biography that explores Schulz’s troubled life. The essay nicely captures the strip’s often grim tone as it grappled with themes of failure and depression.

The Peanuts merchandising machine and the treacle of A Charlie Brown Christmas allow Peanuts to be remembered as something sweeter, kinder, and more lovable than it truly was. The cognitive dissonance represented by the mass-merchandising success of this prickly, often despairing, sour, and snide work might have been worth more thought in a book of this scope than Michaelis gives it.

Many also forget how excellent the strip was. This is due to the sickly-sweetness of Peanuts merchandise but also because Peanuts peaked in the ’60s and ’70s, and by the late ’80s to the end of the strip Schulz’s powers were in decline.

I have just come across an interview with columnist and blogginghead James Pinkerton on Lawrence Auster’s blog regarding Pinkerton’s The American Conservative cover story The Once & Future Christendom, in which he elucidates his “Shire Strategy” for the defense of Western civilization.

The AmConMag piece and interview both appeared in September, so this is a terribly un-timely blog post. So sue me!

In the exchange with Auster, Pinkerton expands on the thinking behind his AmConMag article:

What really impelled me to write this piece was the vision of the Muslims dynamiting the Vatican, as I read about 30 plus years ago in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints–and I’ve had plenty of occasion to think to myself that Raspail was not wrong about where current trends are headed. I am Protestant, not Catholic, but still. And once I thought about that, and prayed on that, it became clear to me that if the Muslims overran Europe, Christendom would never recover–at least not here on earth. To use a Tolkien analogy that I don’t think made it into the final draft, it would be as if all Christians were wounded by the Blade of Morgul. Frodo was so wounded, and never recovered–the books end happily, but that can’t really be said for Frodo himself. By contrast, if it’s merely the atheists and secularists who overrun Europe, then the Continent can be won back, or at least preserved, allowing the Remnant to exist, and Europe to find its way, hopefully, eventually, without being conquered from without.

Read the whole thing! And for those of you on Facebook, Pinkerton has begun a group called “Council of the West” as a followup to his AmConMag piece, and also two other Facebook groups–”Sovereignty Caucus” and “American Sovereignty Caucus” (why the need for both, I don’t know)–along with their respective blogs.

I agree with awb’s comment.  In most suburbs, for whatever reason, the architecture of most parishes isn’t particularly eye-catching.  As for the music, well, sometimes you take what you can get.

This is why I’ve been trying to make it into the city regularly.  Mass at St. Thomas Church on 5th Avenue offers what is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing and cathartic experiences available.

Next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is one of America’s “architectural gems,” the brainchild of Bertrand Goodhue and Ralph Adams Cram.

The architecture alone, however, is not why the pews fill so quickly.  St. Thomas is renowned for its choir school, a boarding institution that houses boys from third through eigth grade.  Here, the wonderful young voices that fill the gotchic masterpiece fine tune their craft.

Michael Linton, writing for First Things, recently had a wonderful piece on the parish, referring to it as “the most beautiful in all of Christendom.”  To anyone visiting the New York area, St. Thomas offers a splendid opportunity to soak in one of the premiere masses in the country.

Make sure to listen to some of the free music that St. Thomas provides online, especially if you don’t foresee yourself wandering Manhattan anytime soon.

I am happy to see that C.S. Lewis’ classic The Screwtape Letters is in pre-production!  The book was fantastic, I eagerly await the movie.

Rumor also has it that The Great Divorce is also under consideration for production.

In an effort to familiarize myself with the heritage of our Conservative Donnybrook, I have just watched the movie “Red River,” from which the banner image at the top of this page featuring John Wayne slugging Montgomery Clift comes. I wasn’t disappointed. Cowboys, gunfights, the Frontier, Indians, an epic cattle drive complete with stampede, the railroad, lost love, wagon trains, the Duke… It doesn’t get any better.

I also recently screened another film classic: “Tommy Boy” starring the late, great Chris Farley. It occurs to me that there is an identifiable sub-genre of comedy: where the plot involves the protagonists on some sort of automobile journey, throughout which their car gets progressively mangled and destroyed.

E.G. the following: Tommy Boy; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; National Lampoon’s Vacation; The Blues Brothers. But there must be more. Suggestions?

Here, Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria University has an insightful essay on George Bush’s invocation of Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle, the quixotic but destructive antagonist of The Quiet American.

Graham Greene never much cared for the label of “Catholic novelist,” instead preferring the more ambivalent ”novelist who happened to be Catholic.” Despite Greene’s insistence on only a subconscious Catholic influence, a majority of his canon – from Brighton Rock to The End of the Affair – deals with the ambiguities of faith that fed his own psychomachia: good vs. evil, carnal vs. spiritual, religious vs. modern. For Greene, the sinner and the saint were inextricably bound; neither could exist without the other’s presence. In a sense Greene was the anti-Waugh. Whereas Waugh was quite at home with his faith, Greene struggled with his faith throughout most of his adult life, personifying the ongoing process of conversion that is essential to a true understanding of Catholicism.

The Quiet American was Greene’s most overtly political novel. Here, he displaces his religious leitmotifs in the political arena. The narrator of the story, Fowler, is a cynical English journalist whose objectivity underscores the romanticism of the American Pyle, a covert agent hellbent on ousting the communist government that controlled 1950’s Vietnam. In order to accomplish this task, he oversees a series of false flag bombings that will be blamed on the communists. The end result will be the installation of an equally corrupt military junta, one evil replacing another. Continue Reading »

In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, a time traveller fast forwards to discover that the human race has devolved into two species.  The downtrodden working classes have become human spiders, or Morlocks, who toil underground maintaining the machinery that keep the communist Eloi docile and plentiful, as they are the staple of the cannibalistic Morlocks’ diet.  Both species are routinized with very little, if any, intelligence.

Now, accoring to this article in the Daily Mail, a top scientist claims the human race will split into two: “an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures.”  The cause of this bifurcation?  Sexual selection, of course.  However, as long as we have this on hand, I find this claim to be very suspect.  Then again, some have said this great divide in humanity is already underway (intelligent ruling elite on left).