You probably saw it in the news the other day: Hugo Chávez called José María Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, a fascist. And Aznar, of course, is the opposite of a fascist: He is a decentralizer, a deregulator, a free-marketeer, a democrat a liberal (classical liberal). When Chávez called Aznar a fascist, he may have been projecting or do the shrinks call it transference? I always forget.
We have discussed this in Impromptus many times before: the labeling of anti-collectivist democrats as fascists. The perversion of the word “fascist” is all but complete. Like every other Reagan conservative, I have been called a fascist many times. Usually happens before breakfast; sometimes the defamers wait till lunch.
And, of course, when people say “fascist,” all they mean is, “I sense you are right of center, and I hate you.” They don’t really mean “fascist”; they have no idea what the word means. One result is, when a real fascist appears, there’s no word left for him which is a pity, if not a tragedy.
When a modern college-educated American calls someone a fascist, I assume that the person who has been attacked in this way is some sort of Jeffersonian in other words, an anti-fascist. Like José María Aznar. Aznar actually believes that liberal democracy should be defended against Islamists who wish to kill or subjugate us. Hence, he is a “fascist.”
Earlier this week, I was telling John Derbyshire that I had lately been denounced by some ignoramuses as a fascist. And his response was priceless: “How original.” I wish you could have heard him say it. His manner insouciance, fatigue, light contempt made the remark even more priceless.
A reader sent me a
link, showing how NPR handled George W. Bush’s award of a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Oscar Biscet, the Cuban political prisoner. In a way, I wish I had never received the link.
The NPR person tells us that “the dissident’s views are . . . closely aligned with the Bush administration’s position”; that “Biscet’s opposition to abortion, which is practiced widely in Cuba, makes him a hero to the pro-life movement”; that the prisoner “also agrees with the Bush administration that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba should be maintained until there’s major democratic change on the island.” And so on.
At least the guy admits that Biscet is “a genuine political prisoner jailed for his defiant opposition to Fidel Castro’s regime.”
Nonetheless, this NPR report or commentary or whatever it is is incredibly grudging about this honor for Biscet, and even irritated about it. The reader who sent me the link said he found the report “nauseating.” That is exactly the word. Dr. Biscet has been tortured in a totalitarian dungeon and what our government radio does is sniff.
Please tell me, once more, why the United States, founded as a liberal republic, has government radio? And if we have to have it does it have to be like this?
One of the biggest problems with Middle East Studies in the U.S. has been the Middle East Studies Association MESA. I grew up under MESA-ites, was educated by them (or miseducated). Longtime readers may remember my accounts of misspent days in a Middle Eastern Studies department. MESA, as a whole, is dedicated to a left-wing, illiberal, Islamist-excusing position. Martin Kramer wrote an entire
book about this.
At any rate, two excellent and independent thinkers Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have formed a new association: the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. (You can read about it
here.) The purpose of ASMEA is to break the monopoly of MESA to provide an alternative. But we all know that monopolies do not like alternatives. In fact, they fear and loathe them, and often try to crush them.
Here’s to the prosperity of ASMEA, and to everything else that Lewis and Ajami do. They are two of the most valuable men we have.
In a
column last week, I wrote of John Bolton’s new
book, and said I found poignant the manner of his going off to college. He lived in Baltimore, went up to Yale. His father a city firefighter could not get the day off to take him there. John took a Trailways bus.
Why do I bring this up again? Because a sensitive and knowledgeable reader sent me a relevant picture by Norman Rockwell:
here. It’s called
Breaking Home Ties. If you were educated as I was, you were told that Rockwell is trite and laughable. Instead, he is talented, insightful, and wise.
I would like to hail two of the best pieces of journalism I have read in all of 2007. The first is by Mark Steyn, and appears in the current
New Criterion: It figures in the magazine’s symposium on Allan Bloom’s
Closing of the American Mind, whose 20th anniversary is being celebrated. Mark writes about music: the effects of rock and roll on all of us. Back in the late ’80s, a lot of people thought the worst chapter in Bloom’s book indeed, the only bad one was its chapter on popular music. Some of us thought it, not only the most important, but the best one.
If I started quoting that which is wise and delectable about Steyn’s piece, I would wind up typing out the whole thing. Let me confine myself to a couple of sentences:
Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music.
Needless to say I hope needless to say the whole symposium is worth reading, and so, for that matter, is the whole magazine. The editor, Roger Kimball, is another contributor to the Bloom symposium. And he is magisterial, as always.
The other piece I wanted to spotlight is by the aforementioned John Derbyshire, who
wrote satirically about the upcoming Beijing Olympics. He suggested a number of demonstration sports, for example organ extraction:
A test of speed and skill in wielding surgical instruments. A succession of convicted criminals, or members of obstreperous religious sects, are strapped to operating tables and their organs are removed without anesthetic, to be sold to intermediaries for transplant into wealthy foreigners. Points are awarded based on the total market value of the removed organs.
That the International Olympic Committee is holding the Games in a police state is a bitter shame. How do you deal with this, if you have a conscience? You can cry against it, and should. And you can also resort to wicked fun, or gallows humor which Derbyshire has done brilliantly. Frankly, his little web job is one of the most striking pieces of journalism I can remember reading.
One of the things Steyn says in his New Criterion piece is that, if you don’t know classical music, you can’t enjoy jokes and such about classical music. This may be obvious, but is no less true for that. Mark talks about Looney Tunes: When a character was in a cave, the soundtrack would give us The Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal’s Cave (Mendelssohn). How many people would get that joke now? (Realistically, how many people got the joke then?)
I thought of this when a dear friend sent me this link, showing Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye, jiving it up. They sing about dozens of composers, sounding their names, punning them “Put Liszt on that list!”
And before I leave the subject of Danny Kaye and other artists: You may want to see Beverly Sills in action with him here. Frankly, I believe that Sills had the greater comic gift (to go with all her others).
Take a little more music, in the form of reviews from the New York Sun: For the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, under Gustavo Dudamel, with Emanuel Ax, piano soloist, go here. And for the New York Philharmonic, under Xian Zhang, with Vadim Repin, violin soloist, go here.
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