One of my favorite “Christmas movies” is not on any “best Christmas movies” list that I know of. It’s a quirky little indie movie called Metropolitan, and it’s about a bunch of upper-class , mixed-up kids from Manhattan who’ve come home from college for their Christmas break. They go to debutante parties every night, and afterward, sit around with cocktails, talking for hours about sociological theories and the meaning of life.

Believe it or not, it’s hilarious. But there are some pretty serious themes in it for anyone who cares to find them. Metropolitan is a sort of modern version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, much as Clueless is a modern take on Emma. Jane Austen is even explicitly mentioned at several key points in the movie — my favorite being this little snippet:

guy:  “Nearly everything Jane Austen wrote seems ridiculous from today’s perspective.”

girl:  “Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective, would look even worse?”

Touché!  If Jane Austen could travel through time and plop down in Times Square, I daresay she’d be appalled. And I don’t just mean by the sexual lewdness, and the commercial garishness, but also by the general rudeness of people to each other — from people blasting up their car stereos so loud that it inflicts physical pain on people nearby, to the ubiquitous refrain of “whatever,” uttered snidely to dismiss another person without having to formulate a real reply.

I’ve often speculated about the huge popularity of all things Austen in the past fifteen years or so. What can modern Americans possibly find to relate to in Austen’s tales of the turn-of-the-19th-century landed English gentry?

Well, for starters, “common courtesy” — which is not so common anymore.  In our crude, brash, vulgar culture, Jane Austen’s world is a soothing balm to frazzled sensibilities.  The Golden Rule has not changed, and never will:  Treat others the way you would like to be treated. For all our cynical posturings, every one of us, deep down, would like to be treated with civility and respect. The oft-scorned traditions of chivalry and Emily Post etiquette were really just adaptations of the Golden Rule designed to train us to behave in accordance with that rule even when we don’t feel like it.

What strikes me whenever I read Jane Austen or watch one of the film adaptations is how considerate of other people her heroines are. Even the relatively abrasive Emma earnestly tries to do right by the people around her. To her neurotic, “high-maintenance” father, who would drive most people to distraction, she is unfailingly gracious and kind.

In Austen’s society, even people who secretly despise each other are polite and don’t make a scene. Our generation tends to dismiss that as “hypocrisy” — but maybe it’s just a matter of having the decency and good sense to not make life any more difficult than it already is.

It’s been many years since I’ve heard psychologist Dr. Laura Schlesinger on the radio, and I don’t remember anything she said except one thing, because she repeated it often. People would call in — especially in the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays — worried about how they were going to deal with some difficult person during the anticipated family gatherings — a domineering in-law, perhaps, or an obnoxious cousin, an estranged sibling, an ex-spouse.  She would always tell them:  “You don’t have to like them. You only have to be polite.”

Whenever I read Austen, I learn much from her heroines’ unfailing solicitousness toward others, their tolerance of those they find personally irritating, their good manners even when under stress. Human beings tend to revert to old habits when they’re stressed, so these characters’ training in civility must run very deep. A wise man said, “We can’t make people be good — but we can make that kind of society where it is easier for people to be good.” Austen’s era know this instinctively — and trained its young accordingly.

I also notice that Austen’s protagonists have very rich interior lives.  But a rich interior life — by which I mean a deep self-knowledge, and the keen perceptiveness about others that that can bring –  may only be possible in an environment that affords enough quietness to literally hear oneself think.

Finally, the biggest difference between Austen’s society and our own may be the behavior of men toward women, and vice versa. Don’t get me wrong; I would never want to go back to a time when women had no career opportunities to speak of and no freedom to travel alone, were discriminated against in countless ways, and were often treated like children. No, what I’m speaking of is civility. If you’ve read Austen (or watched the film adaptations), you know what I mean. Whatever their follies, the people of Austen’s time at least had enough sense to acknowledge what so many moderns have forgotten:  Men and women are different.  And that’s not something to wring one’s hands about, but to celebrate. A society that ignores or denies such a huge, basic fact is going to be a society with a lot of dysfunction. You end up with divorce and abortion and people numbing the pain with every imaginable drug.

Perversely, “progressives” either actively promote the dysfunction, or misguidedly advocate things that will make it worse. “Political correctness,” for instance, far from inspiring people to behave more decently toward each other, only exacerbates social friction and resentment — which people then vent by being rude toward others!

“Progressives” often think conservatism means wanting to “go back” in time. But they are the ones who keep wanting to go back — to ideas, such as Marxism, that have long since been shown by real-world experience to be out of touch with reality and hence, inevitably, catastrophic. Conservatives try to respect, not deny, timeless truths about human nature. The motivating principle for most conservatives I know — and very clearly for Allen West — is the dignity of the human individual.

Conservatives don’t treat each other respectfully because some agent of the political-correctness thought police is standing over us, threatening us with a lawsuit or a fine if we don’t.

One of my favorite “Christmas movies” is not on any “best Christmas movies” list that I know of. It’s a quirky little indie movie called Metropolitan, and it’s about a bunch of upper-class , mixed-up kids from Manhattan who’ve come home from college for their Christmas break. They go to debutante parties every night, and afterward, sit around with cocktails, talking for hours about sociological theories and the meaning of life.

Believe it or not, it’s hilarious. But there are some pretty serious themes in it for anyone who cares to find them. Metropolitan is a sort of modern version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, much as Clueless is a modern take on Emma. Jane Austen is even explicitly mentioned at several key points in the movie — my favorite being this little snippet:

guy:  “Nearly everything Jane Austen wrote seems ridiculous from today’s perspective.”

girl:  “Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective, would look even worse?”

Touché!  If Jane Austen could travel through time and plop down in Times Square, I daresay she’d be appalled. And I don’t just mean by the sexual lewdness, and the commercial garishness, but also by the general rudeness of people to each other — from people blasting up their car stereos so loud that it inflicts physical pain on people nearby, to the ubiquitous refrain of “whatever,” uttered snidely to dismiss another person without having to formulate a real reply.

I’ve often speculated about the huge popularity of all things Austen in the past fifteen years or so. What can modern Americans possibly find to relate to in Austen’s tales of the turn-of-the-19th-century landed English gentry?

Well, for starters, “common courtesy” — which is not so common anymore.  In our crude, brash, vulgar culture, Jane Austen’s world is a soothing balm to frazzled sensibilities.  The Golden Rule has not changed, and never will:  Treat others the way you would like to be treated. For all our cynical posturings, every one of us, deep down, would like to be treated with civility and respect. The oft-scorned traditions of chivalry and Emily Post etiquette were really just adaptations of the Golden Rule designed to train us to behave in accordance with that rule even when we don’t feel like it.

What strikes me whenever I read Jane Austen or watch one of the film adaptations is how considerate of other people her heroines are. Even the relatively abrasive Emma earnestly tries to do right by the people around her. To her neurotic, “high-maintenance” father, who would drive most people to distraction, she is unfailingly gracious and kind.

In Austen’s society, even people who secretly despise each other are polite and don’t make a scene. Our generation tends to dismiss that as “hypocrisy” — but maybe it’s just a matter of having the decency and good sense to not make life any more difficult than it already is.

It’s been many years since I’ve heard psychologist Dr. Laura Schlesinger on the radio, and I don’t remember anything she said except one thing, because she repeated it often. People would call in — especially in the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays — worried about how they were going to deal with some difficult person during the anticipated family gatherings — a domineering in-law, perhaps, or an obnoxious cousin, an estranged sibling, an ex-spouse.  She would always tell them:  “You don’t have to like them. You only have to be polite.”

Whenever I read Austen, I learn much from her heroines’ unfailing solicitousness toward others, their tolerance of those they find personally irritating, their good manners even when under stress. Human beings tend to revert to old habits when they’re stressed, so these characters’ training in civility must run very deep. A wise man said, “We can’t make people be good — but we can make that kind of society where it is easier for people to be good.” Austen’s era know this instinctively — and trained its young accordingly.

I also notice that Austen’s protagonists have very rich interior lives.  But a rich interior life — by which I mean a deep self-knowledge, and the keen perceptiveness about others that that can bring –  may only be possible in an environment that affords enough quietness to literally hear oneself think.

Finally, the biggest difference between Austen’s society and our own may be the behavior of men toward women, and vice versa. Don’t get me wrong; I would never want to go back to a time when women had no career opportunities to speak of and no freedom to travel alone, were discriminated against in countless ways, and were often treated like children. No, what I’m speaking of is civility. If you’ve read Austen (or watched the film adaptations), you know what I mean. Whatever their follies, the people of Austen’s time at least had enough sense to acknowledge what so many moderns have forgotten:  Men and women are different.  And that’s not something to wring one’s hands about, but to celebrate. A society that ignores or denies such a huge, basic fact is going to be a society with a lot of dysfunction. You end up with divorce and abortion and people numbing the pain with every imaginable drug.

Perversely, “progressives” either actively promote the dysfunction, or misguidedly advocate things that will make it worse. “Political correctness,” for instance, far from inspiring people to behave more decently toward each other, only exacerbates social friction and resentment — which people then vent by being rude toward others!

“Progressives” often think conservatism means wanting to “go back” in time. But they are the ones who keep wanting to go back — to ideas, such as Marxism, that have long since been shown by real-world experience to be out of touch with reality and hence, inevitably, catastrophic. Conservatives try to respect, not deny, timeless truths about human nature. The motivating principle for most conservatives I know is the dignity of the human individual.

Conservatives don’t treat each other respectfully because some agent of the political-correctness thought police is standing over us, threatening us with a lawsuit or a fine if we don’t. We treat each other respectfully because that’s the Golden Rule — and, knowing we are each made in the image of God, we do our best to live by it.

…we’d cry. Or go crazy.

It started with Iran’s arrest of fourteen squirrels accused of being Western spies. Yes, you read that right: squirrels. (I always knew those little critters were smarter than they look!)

And then there were the two Israeli pigeons that were caught doing surveillance on the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. (If these birds “sang,” would that make them “stool pigeons”? Especially if they managed — as I dearly hope they did — to leave some stool samples on the mullahs’ heads!)

And who knew that antelope could be used as spies? (That was in Lebanon.) Well, if anyone could figure out how to do it, it’d be those crafty Jews, wouldn’t it!

Now, Egypt is getting in on the act, accusing Israel of orchestrating recent shark attacks on the shores of the Red Sea (to cut into Egypt’s income from tourism, don’t ya know).

But surely the worst thing those evil Zionist Masters of the World have done is to set wild boars loose in the fields of Samaria to eat up the crops of the poor Palestinian farmers. Ah, you ask, but wouldn’t the boars — they are wild, after all — also invade the nearby Israeli croplands? Ummm… er… well, I don’t know, but… those evil genius Jews have got it figured out! They probably implanted some kind of computer chips inside the pigs’ brains!

Sheesh. I always thought American Ostrich Syndrome (put your head in the sand and pretend there are no bad guys in the world, and we should all just join hands in a circle, buy the world a Coke and teach the world to sing — Kumbaya, preferably) was the most delusional thing out there.

But hey, I’ll take American naïveté any day, over the fevered paranoia that puts bushy-tailed rodents under arrest. (“Help, Bullwinkle, help!”)

Americans often have a hard time seeing anyone as an enemy, even when someone’s got a gun to their head. But those who’ve been brainwashed by Muhammad’s cult tend to see enemies behind every tree… or up in the trees!

Folks, it’s a zoo out there.

And that’s no joke.

Cross-posted at West to the West Wing 2012.

Read More →

There have been some very lively discussions here at RedState about the ongoing family feud in the Republican party between “fiscal” and “social” conservatives.  As important as this fiscal-versus-social discussion is, however, aren’t we forgetting something?

Recall that Ronald Reagan is remembered as a brilliant politician because he was able to unite the three — not two, but three — strands of conservatism, namely, fiscal, social and national security/defense. Reagan called it a “three-legged stool” — because a three-legged stool cannot stand if even one of the three legs is missing.

Isn’t it a little strange — not to mention, dangerous — for that third leg to be neglected when we are, after all, at war, with “hot” fronts currently in two different countries?

You will not find Victor Davis Hanson neglecting it.  In his recent piece, “In Defense of Defense,” Hanson makes the case that, as we go about the very necessary task of drastically reducing government spending, the defense budget should have some degree of immunity.

The United States has an alarming record of courting danger when it has slashed defense, or even merely been perceived abroad to be pruning its military. In the 1930s the Germans and Japanese did not take the United States seriously as a deterrent power, and understandably so: It was not until 1943 — after tens of thousands of American deaths — that the United States finally deployed planes, armor, and ships that were of rough parity in numbers and quality with those of its Axis enemies.

After World War II ended, America demobilized and returned to its parsimonious military ways. The result: By August 1950 an outnumbered and outclassed American army in South Korea was confined to the tiny Pusan perimeter. For the first six months of hard fighting in Korea, the military’s obsolete tanks, anti-tank weapons, and planes proved no match for Soviet-supplied T-34 tanks and MiG-15 jets.

Three decades later, in April 1980, post-Vietnam budget cuts were the subtext of the humiliating failed mission (Operation Eagle Claw) to rescue the Iranian-held hostages. And the post–Cold War defense cuts of the 1990s may have made it far more difficult to pursue terrorists or fight in Iraq and Afghanistan in the new millennium….

It is almost a given that anytime the post-war United States cuts its military or tires of its global deterrent role, it will soon rue the effort and pay for its laxity with blood and treasure.

Hanson’s argument immediately got my attention, because I remembered that Lt. Col. Allen West — who is, like Hanson, a brilliant military historian — had said recently that everything should be “on the table” for budget cuts — even defense.  As West’s landmark speech about Afghanistan made clear, however, we are wasting a lot of money — and American lives — with our dunderheaded non-strategy in Afghanistan.  We could fight leaner if we would fight smarter.

Not long ago, I read a disturbing novel, a thriller:  John Lescroart’s Betrayal.  The title had multiple meanings in the book, but one of the main ones was the nefarious behavior — including huge-scale embezzlement — of one of the many private contractors working with the U.S. military in Iraq.  Granted, it was only a work of fiction; and granted, Lescroart — though one of my favorite writers — may tend toward the liberal side of politics.  Still, he was describing things that really do happen.  As long as there have been private defense contractors, there have been waste and fraud.  How Allen West, if elected President, will attack this problem remains to be seen — but I’m sure that he saw some things in Iraq that will give him some pretty clear ideas of how and where our mammoth defense budget might be tightened up.

Meanwhile, conservatives should read Hanson’s piece.  The fiscal-versus-social conservatism debate will be moot if we lose in Afghanistan, and give radical Islamists around the world a morale boost that will drastically increase their numbers and their boldness.

hat tip:  Big Peace

Cross-post

Well, 3 minutes, 24 seconds, to be exact.

Here’s how it works:

No matter how many times you may have seen it already, go ahead and watch this clip again, because we’re going to do a little comparison afterward.

Here’s what many people may not know when they watch this video (I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know until just yesterday!):

That man at the far end of the panel who gives that embarrasingly pathetic response is none other than…

Richard Myers.  General Richard Myers.  The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers!

Umm… does that give us a clue as to how far Islam has succeeded in intimidating even our military leaders?

And what does it tell you when the next man over from Myers, the great Andrew McCarthy — who’s one of the best anti-Islam warriors we’ve got — on this occasion just cops out by making a joke?  “I’d say, take the fifth!”

Contrast those men with Allen West, whose response begins at the 1:40 mark.

Now here’s the 3-minute challenge: 
I challenge everyone who loves this country to watch this three-minute video and then tell me honestly that you don’t yearn to have this man as your next President.

Start passing it around, folks. Email it to your friends, post it on Facebook — just get it circulating.

Ask everyone you know to take the 3-minute challenge.