Archive for the ‘Americana’ Category

Trademarks and Hasidism

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 20, 2007

If you think that is an interesting post title, you will certainly find this interesting.

Posted in Americana, Faith and Works, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »

I don’t get paid to say this: The Atlantic and me

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 20, 2007

There is something about a magazine that blogs are not about to put out of business. Slate, of course, achieves that something; it is, after all, a magazine that happens only to be online. Blogs can be great (can’t they?) and they can have long — sometimes really long — and very good articles, but they are not usually journalism.

Years ago I stumbled into an internship at Student Lawyer magazine at the American Bar Association Press in Chicago. I later became a contributing editor there, which was where I really began my writing career (let’s just say). Talking to the sparkling editrices there at the time, Liz Poppens and Sarah Hoban, they asked me what sort of magazines I read. I told them: The [old] American Spectator, the National Review, The New Republic…. they asked, how about some general interest magazines? Don’t you get the Atlantic or Harper’s? I admitted I didn’t, so then I did.

Harper’s I could not take. The famous Harper’s Index, to me, epitomized how easy it is to lie with statistics. And in general the magazine was insufferably liberal. But the Atlantic, it turned out, was a godsend. Yes, by and large its outlook is more liberal than mine, but — the writing! It was and is fantastic. So, too, is the breadth of topics intelligently covered there. You should read it. Here’s what I got just on the ride home yesterday (yeah, I read fast):

How American interrogators in Iraq, stripped of even remotely coercive techniques after Abu Ghraib — but with the spectre of Abu Ghraib hovering in the minds of their prisoners — “cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle“
About the growth of a weird suicide cult in Japan, where bored and listless young adults — in a society one Japanese says has never had to face “adulthood” — meet on the Internet to find mutually satisfactory times and places to kill themselves together
Virginia Postrel’s consistently excellent writing on fashion — writing so good (and this is the test) that I read it even though I don’t care much about women’s fashion
The sensitive, multifaceted thoughts (read to the end before you react — the whole article is available for free) of a middle-aged feminist on abortion in our time
A topic I won’t touch but John Burgess will
And, of course, HITCHENS.

You can’t consider yourself a person who lives the life of the mind, no matter how weensily, and depend on blogs to feed your brain. So I read the Atlantic, and to less of an extent I read Slate, regularly for my secular learning. (I still get The National Review, read the book reviews and short pieces and then stack it up three or four deep before I throw it away. I gave up on TNR a long time ago, while The American Spectator just plain gave up.)

You should find your quality slick-paper magazines, too — not just because you will learn things, but because you will be exposed to points of view that differ from yours and yet, unlike what is generally found on blogs (or partisan rags such as The Nation), you will read them expressed in a manner that will not insult your intelligence. This is a good thing to know how to do if you are ever to have a conversation with someone, and the writers at The Atlantic do it exceedingly well.

And that is my only prescription, by the way, for the Internet social dysfunction I complained about here. Of course there will be no systemic resolution. There are some blogs where name-calling, vulgarity, and basically a gang-up mentality will always reign, and their proprietors are happy with that. That’s fine; they have their fun, and we may join in at our risk, and, as John points out here, there is often wisdom in the bedlam. Others seek to be intelligent and reasoned voices of intellection, reflection and expression. If you prefer the latter type, or if you, as I do, seek to write one of that type, you must read real journalism, with all its faults, regularly.

Posted in Americana, Ars Longa, Medialites | 2 Comments »

Checkered background checking

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 19, 2007

Did you wonder about this minor detail: That Seung-Hui Cho was pretty much worked up by “mental health professionals” and yet got an instant green light on his federal “background check” before buying the guns he used to commit 30 murders? I’m sure you did. Here’s how:

A court-ordered mental health evaluation of Virginia Tech mass-murderer Seung-Hui Cho in December 2005 found him “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization” and “an imminent danger to self and others.” But that never showed up in computer records when he went to buy his gun.

“We ran a state police background check,” said Roanoke Firearms store owner John Markell, whose store sold Cho a Glock 19 handgun. “It came back clean.”

Federal law is fairly clear. According to the “Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act” that became law in 1993, anyone who “[h]as been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution” is prohibiting from purchasing a firearm.

The definition of a “mental defective” includes anyone whom “a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority” has determined to be “a danger to himself or other” because of “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”

Cho might seem to qualify as a “mental defective” by that definition, but FBI spokesman Steve Fischer said it’s up to each state to determine who qualifies a “mental defective.” And Virginia chooses to draw its lines in a way that didn’t include Cho, even though he was found “mentally ill” and “a danger to self and others.”

That sounds kind of like some bad line drawing. Very, very bad.

This has very little to do with gun control and everything to do with the very delicate interlocking relationships between civil liberties, mental health, medicine, government, finance — and the people who wear the hats with all those names on them.

Still, if you have a standard, regardless of what words are used to label it, that is the mental-health criterion for whether someone is allowed to buy a gun, and some government agency, somewhere, makes a finding that a given person is “mentally ill” and “a danger to self and others,” it’s just negligent not to recognize that this criterion has been met — and to apply it.

And gun control advocates, here’s where you chime in and say: This is just another example of what happens when we depend on government to protect us (new link) whether on guns or anything else. “Don’t worry,” says the state. “One thing we can promise you is no nuts are going to buy guns legally any more.”

“Don’t worry” is what children, husbands and the government say when you should “Worry.”

UPDATE: Krauthammer deals with some of the issues (via Insty).

Posted in Americana, Lex scripta | 11 Comments »

Decent discourse in a virtual society

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 19, 2007

God forbid even a not-so-moderate political blogger suggests a limitation, a question, a caveat to a valued principle of the ideological charter on the Internet. He’s not just wrong — he’s an idiot, a complete dummy, or worse, and of course in instant time. I wonder if we can do anything about this, besides choosing to maintain standards on our own blogs. Here I edit out vulgar language and try to steer discussion — when there is any; this is not a well-established blog, after all — to a focus on the issues, not the adjectives, if I can. That takes time, work and patience. And of course some people are going to hate you no matter what you do.

Now, I enjoyed, and was not surprised by, the “finding” several weeks ago suggesting that left-wing blogs are — not a little, but a lot — more vulgar than those on my side of the aisle. But as Jonah Goldberg points out, our house could, not surprisingly, be a lot cleaner:

Standing up to political correctness has become an unlimited warrant to be rude for its own sake. And if you catch flak for it, you can just say you were defending free thought. Ann Coulter, for example, justifies her cruder barbs and insults on the grounds that she’s pushing back against the liberal thought police. Sometimes she’s even right. . . . I’m all in favor of acid wit and barbed satire. But too many partisans on both sides sound like Beavis and Butt-Head, tittering over trivia. . . .

The reality is that much of political correctness — the successful part — is a necessary attempt to redefine good manners in a sexually and racially integrated society. Good manners are simply those things you do to demonstrate respect to others and contribute to social decorum. Aren’t conservatives the natural defenders of proper manners?

I’ll say, but perhaps both Goldberg and I are those offensive things, cultural conservatives, whereas the dominant ~~right-wing~~ non-liberal ethic in the Internet tends to be libertarian. I posit that as part of the problem, along with Internet anonymity.

That, and the fact that I am always right, and you other ninnies just can’t stand this.

UPDATE: Radioactive Liberty has this all figured out, thank God.

Posted in Americana, Blogophilia, O Mores! | 20 Comments »

Meeting across the river

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 19, 2007

Drop off at North Bergen

There’s a special world commuting across the river from Midtown Manhattan ’round midnight. I know it pretty well. I’d like to blame that fact on lawyering, but time management is not a forte of mine. And I do a little blogging, see, which does not help.

Usually slogging your way across the dense waist of the island is so hopeless that you can hardly tell what kind of distance you’re traversing getting from, say, Third Avenue and 53rd — where I work now — to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and 42nd. It is a kind of “tell me when it’s over” experience.

This late at night I avoid the subway, not because it’s dangerous, but because the trains are so few and far between and the rats along the tracks of the E line at Lexington Avenue a little too frolicsome for my delicate sensibilities. So I took a cab, and it seemed as if, despite the relative lull in traffic — there are still always garbage trucks, vans unloading, construction sites, so it hasn’t ever been a straight shot across the City since probably the Civil War — I was in the darned thing for ten minutes and I only looked up to see my old office at Fifth Avenue. In other words, that’s where I would have started out five years ago.

Third Avenue and Fifth Avenue are not nearly as close as they sound, as any New Yorker knows; in between are not the largely imaginary Fourth Avenue but the three avenues of the Holy Trinity — Lexington, Madison and the double-barreled grandiosity of Park . Even at midnight I felt each block. At Fifth I looked out my window at the vagrants sleeping on the steps and under boxes at a church that has been the subject of litigation over the inalienable right to sleep in the street; at Sixth — what they call the Avenue of the Americas, in order to separate out tourists from locals — the constant traffic around the Hilton, the dregs of some testimonial dinner emptying onto the street; at Seventh you can begin to feel the vibration of Times Square, and then a left onto Seventh and down Broadway, into the belly of the neon beast, where night is day and 50-foot-tall underwear is always appropriate.

But seven dollars and a tip later, I was at the Port Authority, which is in the midst of a campaign to convince its countless numbed denizens seeking a nothing more than a seat on the bus or a fast way to the subways below the terminal — admittedly, like Times Square just outside, eons more pleasant and safe than when it was a festering crackhouse during the glory of the Koch Administration — is really a tony shopping mall you might like to shop or dine in rather than a bus station. No one is buying.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Americana | 2 Comments »

Some did fight back

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 17, 2007

We can talk about the guns, but also there are hearts. Mrs. Likelihood sends along the following:

Fatally shot as he protects students – NY Daily News:

Virginia Tech University Prof. Liviu Librescu, described as a family man who once did research for NASA, sacrificed his life to save his students in the shooting rampage yesterday.”When he heard the gunfire, he blocked the entrance and got shot through the door,” his daughter-in-law Ayala Schmulevich said.

“He realized he had to save the students,” she said. “That was the kind of man he was.” …

Alec Calhoun, 20, said the last thing he saw before he jumped from the window was Librescu, blocking the door against the madman in the hallway.

He died trying to protect the students.

Librescu taught aerospace and ocean engineering but focused much of his time on research.

He leaves a wife and two sons. His family is planning to bury him in Israel.

He was, in fact, Israeli. And:

Ryan Clark was shot as he went to investigate a disturbance in the dorm where he was the resident student adviser, witnesses said.

Who knows what other shining moments will yet emerge from this horror.

UPDATE: Instapundit collects more. And here is a unique link (fedora tip to Jeff Ballabon) that is heavy on the Yiddish-English jargon but worth looking at even if you don’t understand every word.

Posted in Americana | 5 Comments »

Everything looks like a nail

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007

When you’re a carpenter, of course. And when you’re a Second Amendment enthusiast — the real kind, not the mildly interested in the topic kind such as I am — every nightmare shooting is proof of how bad gun regulation is. But a smart guy like Instapundit?:

These things do seem to take place in locations where it’s not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that’s the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset.

. . . . And reader John Lucas, who works with a Virginia law firm, emails that Va. Tech is a “gun-free zone.” Well, for those who follow the law. There was an effort to change that but it failed: “A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly.” That’s unfortunate.

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn! College students are not cowboys or sharpshooters! What are you thinking? College students barely wear clothes and you want them packing heat and picking off crazed mass murderers? And professors? Give me a break!

I like the concept of “concealed carry” for streets… bars…. places where adults can get in trouble. (I’ve never touched a gun but I’m told they’re useful.) The empirical support for it as a policy is solid. But let’s not get ridiculous — implementing it here almost certainly would not have saved anyone today.*

Gun control doesn’t kill people. People kill people.

—

*Last clause added for clarity. I am not arguing for gun control. I am arguing against fantasy.

Posted in Americana, Lex scripta | 37 Comments »

Johnny Hart Dead at 76

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 15, 2007

Johnny Hart, the creator BC and The Wizard of Id, has passed away. Creators’ Syndicate did a little tribute (hat tip to Batesline).

Hart was notable for a couple of reasons.

His comic strips were not brilliant, though they were pretty good. But he had two of them running in a lot of papers — an extraordinary achievement.
He was instrumental in changing the way comic strip artists and authors benefited from their own work: “Because of his commitment, syndicates no longer insist on ownership when they sign new cartoonists. He had revolutionized an entire industry, and empowered cartoonists to take control of their work and demand the freedoms they enjoy in their contracts today.”
He wore his Christian faith on his sleeve. Today’s cartoonists are almost all blatantly political, but with the passing of Charles Schulz and Johnny Hart, expressly religious topics aren’t likely to find their way back into comics. Sometimes he stepped on toes — Jewish ones (oversensitive ones, in my opinion) and Muslim ones (perhaps not so oversensitive, actually, based on this story — scroll down), but it was remarkable that he got away as much as he did.

It’s just comics, but I once wanted to draw and write comics and as a child I drew and dabbled quite a bit; one of my high school and college friends grew up to do just that (of course he blogs too), and I envy him a little. I’ll miss Johnny Hart a little, too.

Posted in Americana, Ars Longa | 6 Comments »

Politics of the Imus fallout

Posted by Ron Coleman on April 13, 2007

Good analysis from Classical Values, via Insty. Imus does still have the Holocaust denial vote, though — of course I refer to Patrick Buchanan, formerly relevant public figure who was dug up by Imus as a token “conservative” opponent of the Iraq war and who kvetches (I doubt he would appreciate the word), “The hypocrisy here was too thick to cut with a chainsaw.” Well, he’s not wrong about that, as he is about much else; but I do want briefly to address the hypocrisy point.

The fulcrum of the hypocrisy argument does not center properly on the “well, rappers say it too” argument. It is not the same when Imus, McGuirk or another pasty-face says it in a public context. I believe, and I have said before that “it’s different for blacks.” Thus while it’s a problem that rappers and other black “urban” characters use the language that Imus did on a daily basis or more, it’s a black problem.

In this time and place, Don Imus is dead when he makes himself a black problem — and while I think it’s foolish to ignore the overall content of a man’s editorial presentation, which you have to do in order to conclude that Imus is truly a racist (he’s not in any meaningful way), Imus went up to the line as part of his job and stepped over it. He gambled and, this time, he lost.

It’s not the same when those words are used on the streets of black America — it’s a different issue, a different gamble, different stakes.

UPDATE: Obama disagrees with me. Or does he?

If it’s not good for Don Imus, I don’t know why it’s good for us. If we don’t like other people to degrade us, why are we degrading ourselves?” Obama asked.

Yes, they’re both wrong — it’s not good for “us” either. But degrading oneself is not the same as degrading someone else.

MORE: Interesting angle on The Reverand Al and rap lyrics.

Posted in Americana, Medialites | 17 Comments »