Topic 1 (of 2) Duplicity on Democracy. Dubya held a news conference today in which he told Americans to be patient with Iraqi democracy. Apparently he did not mention that his beloved Israel has undone democracy in Palestine by arresting 40 members of the elected government there! The Israelis who so indignantly launched a war against both Palestine and Lebanon over the kidnapping of 3 Israeli soldiers have now seized 40 Palestinian government officials, apparently in a plan (plot) to exchange them for the Israeli soldiers who were in turn kidnapped to hold for exchange for Arab prisoners! So, kidnapping people for a prisoner exchange is perfectly alrite if Israel does it, but horribly evil, a casus belli (cause for war!) if Arabs do it. And democracy — the Bush Administration's simple-minded cure to all the problems of the Mideast — can be undone anytime you don't like the results. What an interesting foreign policy the Republican Right (sorry; that should be "The Republican Wrong") has given us!
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Naturally, the Democrats too are absolutely silent about this criminal antidemocratic behavior by Israel. Israel, you see, can do no wrong. When anyone does exactly the same things as Israel, those people can be denounced for crimes against democracy, crimes against humanity, etc., but never Israelis. They are the Teflon People. No criticism may ever issue against any Israeli for any action taken in "defense" of Israel, no matter how detestable it might be.
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(2) Land of the Free(k). I made the mistake of watching Comedy Central's "roast" of William Shatner last nite. It was a truly appalling parade of deviancy, filled with vile language and disgusting, explicit sexual references, often to a vicious and violent deformation of homosexuality that departs from the mutual and affectionate equality of two men into a power trip in which one party abuses the other. What has happened to this country?
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Everywhere you look, even in small towns, you see degeneracy pervading the popular culture. Tattoos cover large parts of the body and piercings poke thru the skin in bizarre locations in young people influenced by the deviants of popular music, the MTV generations who have been seduced into self-mutilation as some kind of perverse "self-expression". Decades after society recognized that drugs were producing catastrophic consequences for millions of individuals and ravaging entire swaths of cities and even suburbs, Jay Leno and other 'comedians' keep making drug 'jokes'. "Celebrities" treat marriage as a doormat outside a revolving door — but gay men are blamed for subverting marriage for wanting the permanency that heterosexual marriage seems to have abandoned. TV talk shows are filled with DNA tests to try to establish the paternity of children conceived out of wedlock — and in some cases, testing of 6 and 7 different men still can't find the father!
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Joseph C. Phillips, who played "Denise"'s husband "Martin" in the Cosby show and is now a social commentator as well as actor, observes on Black America Web:

In 1965, Patrick Moynihan issued his now famous report entitled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Forty years ago, the Moynihan report was distressed by an illegitimacy rate in the black community of 22 percent. The current illegitimacy rate among whites is 24 percent. It is 44 percent among Hispanics. In 1965, the percentage of unwed mothers nationally was eight percent. That figure now stands at 34 percent.

So we have gone from being alarmed about a 22 percent illegitimacy rate among blacks in 1965 to being blasé about a 24 percent illegitimacy rate among whites. Rightwing Republicans blame gay men for the failure of heterosexual marriage and the appalling lack of stable relationships in which to raise children, and insist that the reason marriage must be reserved to straight people is because it is basically about children. Tell that to all the children of multiple divorce and their confused, 'blended' families, all the "daddies" who have come into their lives, then left.
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Phillips goes on:

From Bill Cosby and his call-outs to conservative and liberal pundits across the country, all behave as if declining marriage rates and soaring illegitimacy rates only exist in the black community.

While it is true that some of these challenges predominate in the black community, they are by no means exclusive to the black community.

The decline of two parent households and the social costs that accompany it is an issue that transcends race and economics. It is an American problem.

Conspicuously absent from his commentary is a figure for black illegitimacy (see below).
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Alas, Phillips identifies the wrong culprit:

The current crisis in marriage is an outgrowth of the American cultural revolution of the late 1960’s. Many of the social changes of the time clearly made America better. However, in the midst of these social changes, we discarded old school notions of marriage and family and embraced new school notions of self-actualization. Americans embraced the idea that life is first and foremost about fulfilling the self. It is a vision at odds with the idea of two becoming one. Marriage is the process of sacrificing what is best for the “me” in service to what most benefits the “we.”

It often happens that people fix on the wrong culprit. For instance, a lot of commentators blamed slavery for the destruction of the black family, claiming that white slaveowners sold children away from their parents and that established a pattern of weak family relationships. The reality, however, is that the black family, both nuclear and extended, was very strong until the mid-20th Century, long after slavery had vanished in every trace, and largely in urban settings in the North, where there never was slavery. Walter E. Williams, a black writer,* observes:

The black illegitimacy rate is close to 70 percent. Less than 40 percent of black children live in two-parent families. This produces devastating socioeconomic consequences, but is it caused by racial discrimination? Or, might it be a legacy of slavery? In the early 1900s, black illegitimacy was a tiny fraction of today's rate. Roughly 75 percent, and in New York City 85 percent, of black children lived in two-parent households. The fact of lower illegitimacy and more intact families, at a time when blacks were much closer to slavery and faced greater discrimination, suggests that today's unprecedented illegitimacy and weak family structure have nothing to do with discrimination and slavery. It's explained better by promiscuity and irresponsibility, and as such it's not a civil-rights problem.

And it did not come to us from the Sixties. I came to adulthood in the Sixties, and know full well what the Sixties did and did not do to the popular culture. It did not destroy marriage, but did tend to put it off and substitute living together until people were sure they wanted to be together long-term. No, the range of grotesque, antisocial behaviors I have pointed out above, at least as regards the majority community, is much more the result of the influence of television, film, video games, and, most especially, MTV and its peers, which have raised the deviants among us to the point where their deviancy is not just no longer regarded as deviant but to the status of role models!
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Music, once rare in human society, is now omnipresent. From TV to radio in the home to radio in the car to CDs in the home and then everywhere, on portable CD players, to music on computers first at home, and then on mp3 players carried everywhere, the deviant 'norms' of the bizarre individuals who produce an astoundingly large portion of today's music has been catastrophic to young people. Aside from the devastating shortening of the attention span produced by intercut images that race thru the brain at a rate of two and three a second, for hour after hour, and a scatterbrained approach to life produced by constant interruptions from IMs and text messages and cellphone calls everywhere they go, the images that they are soaked in are monstrous.
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Bill Cosby, as "Dr. Huxtable" in one episode of his famed show, denounced a video his kids were watching as "a nitemare set to music". Precisely so. Combine these horrifying images with antisocial lyrics that pound themselves into young people's consciousness over the course of hours a day, and you get an entire generation of deviants confused about everything.
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Let me give one example of a nitemare set to music. Perhaps 10 years ago there was a music video — think about that: music video — in which a female vampire lured dozens of young men to their death and placed the bodies in body bags that hung from the ceiling of a warehouse. ♫ That's entertainment! ♪
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Why do we permit such mad, violent, antisocial deviance to fill the minds of our youth? The First Amendment doesn't cover visual images or music, but only speech and the press. Music videos are not extensions of speech or the press but of the graphic and performing arts, which the Framers of the Constitution knew about but chose not to protect. Dance is not protected; nonspeech sound is not protected; violent images that normalize mass murder, rape, etc., are not protected by the Constitution. We need to fite back against the madness that threatens to engulf us and destroy us as a civilization. No wonder we have so great a tolerance for violence in our foreign policy: violence has become the ubiquitous, inescapable wallpaper of our lives.
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Joseph Phillips is right about this much:

We can support marriage through public policies like tax credits and housing subventions. Certainly these are helpful. But substantive political change must be preceded by cultural changes, and cultural change begins with words. Changing ideas about marriage and family demands a passionate and vocal advocacy. We must take every opportunity to bear witness to the world the way in which sacrifice, problem-solving and enduring tough times only to reach for each other again, have enriched our lives. Those on the other side of the debate do not shy away from advocating their position, and they are not armed as we are with truth and mountains of research.

Except that "the other side" does not debate: they indoctrinate thru images and music. If they put into explicit words the messages they are propagandizing by sound and lite, even stupid kids could see the madness: violence is normal; violence is good; using and abusing others is normal and admirable; if you're going to use others, expect and joyfully accept being used and abused yourself; debase yourself, deform yourself, mutilate your body with permanent markings and painful piercings; love hurts, so never love; hurt others before they can hurt you; break off relationships before the other person does; and on, and on.
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As for the "humor" of "roasts", where did this inhuman ugliness come from? Again, from entertainment deviants.

The Friars Club has held celebrity roasts in private since the 1920s. Only recently has the public been invited to see them. Dean Martin hosted a series of roasts on television during the 1960s and 1970s as part of The Dean Martin Show. The humor at these broadcast tributes was far tamer than the sometimes extremely vulgar and explicit language of the private, non-televised ones.

Decent society has always recognized that there is something about show business that attracts and indulges deviancy. In 'the olden days', men played women's roles in stage plays because theater companies were regarded as unfit places for women. Society was right. Barbara Streisand was denied an apartment in a pricey New York coop building in part because she was in show business, in part because of concern that her fans would invade the building, congregate outside, or otherwise make life unpleasant for the (respectable) tenants.
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Entertainers are not like the rest of us, which they show plainly in their hair styles, tattoos, piercings, tomcat sexual behavior, etc. Until fairly recent times, society had marginalized these entertainers, and other people set the standards for behavior, from parents and educators to clergymen to political leaders and writers. But the arrival of the multiplicity of entertainment media has brought hundreds of these deviants into the home and computer, and onto portable devices. This country has developed a fascination with "celebrities" that has created them into a type of royalty to admire and emulate. Alas, many celebrities are utterly unworthy of any kind of admiration or emulation, but are inhuman scum with the morals of vermin.
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At least the Friars Club roasts were held behind closed doors, and decent people knew to stay away from the raunchy proceedings. The Dean Martin roasts, which popularized the form, were carefully censored to exclude the worst remarks. But Comedy Central's roasts are censored only at times, and only so narrowly that one can all too easily guess what the bleeped words must be. Comedy Central's late-nite "Secret Stash" feature broadcasts every ugly word.
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There comes a point where society needs to recognize aloud that public life is not just being coarsened by the language and sexual imagery that fills film and cable, but that fundamental harm is being done to people who immerse themselves too deeply and for too many hours in the deviant trash that pours from media — and do something to rein it in.
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* "Dr. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:16 PM