On the Death of Christendom

From Michel Houellebecq’s Submission:

[Rediger] called it tragic that their irrational hostility to Islam should blind them to the obvious:  on every question that really mattered, the nativists and the Muslims were in perfect agreement.  When it came to rejecting atheism and humanism, or the necessary submission of women, or the return of patriarchy, they were fighting exactly the same fight.  And today this fight, to establish a new organic phase of civilization, could no longer be waged in the name of Christianity.  Islam, its sister faith, was newer, simpler, and more true . . . which is why Islam had taken up the torch.  Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives, the Church had lost its ability to oppose moral decadence, to renounce homosexual marriage, abortion rights, and women in the workplace.  The facts were plain:  Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more that fifth-century Rome could have done.  This wave of new immigrants, with their traditional culture – of natural hierarchies, the submission of women, and respect for elders – offered a historic opportunity for the moral and familial rearmament of Europe.  These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent.  Some were Christian; but there was no denying that the vast majority were Muslim.

He, Rediger, was the first to admit the greatness of medieval Christendom, whose artistic achievements would live forever in human memory; but little by little it had given way, it had ben forced to compromise with rationalism, it had renounced its temporal powers, and so had sealed its own doom – and why?  In the end, it was a mystery; God had ordained it so.

Is This Movie Pro-Castro?

On the recommendation of Ace-of-Spades (IIRC), I saw the movie Before Night Falls about the gay Cuban dissident Reinaldo Arenas and based on his autobiography of the same name. Arenas was imprisoned by the Castro regime for a couple of years in the '70s, fled to America during the Mariel boatlift in 1980, and, dying of AIDS, committed suicide in New York in 1990.

Arenas was a poet and novelist. Although Arenas was ostensibly imprisoned for publishing outside of Cuba without a permit, the movie portrays, apparently accurately, the source of his antagonism towards the regime as being its policies discouraging homosexuality. Arenas doesn't seem to have had much of a problem with dictatorship as such, only to his own persecution by it.

But in the movie, the Cuban campaign against homosexuals wasn't especially brutal as persecutions go. For instance, Arenas' first arrest was in response to an accusation of molestation. This was false, but nonetheless properly a crime. Homosexuals were subject to roundups, but not massacres; on the contrary, the homosexuals being arrested didn't even look especially intimidated. Cuban prisons were cramped, ugly places, as Third-world prisons tend to be, but neither Arenas nor any other prisoner is shown being tortured.

What was portrayed graphically was the homosexual activity. In this respect, the atmosphere of the movie reminded me of nothing so much as Midnight Cowboy, whose gross sexual content initially earned an MPAA "X" rating. From what I recall of its retrospectives, Midnight Cowboy set out to portray the grizzly brutality and misery of that kind of life, and succeeded brilliantly; the filmmakers acknowleged that the film could never made under today's orthodoxies.

But, what was the intention behind Before Night Falls? I don't know. I don't think I'm alone among straight men in being viscerally put-off by depictions of male homosexual activity, but its entirely possible that the filmmakers counted on straight audiences being conditioned (or intimidated) into bearing this with approval. But it's also possible that the movie set out, in the guise of a pro-gay polemic, to subtly imply that, yeah, this kind of behavior needed some discouragement. For the record, I'm against Castro's particular methods of discouragement . .. unless the alternative is what we actually have now: dissidents from homosexuality suffering our own persecution.

So Few Democrats

I have a strong recollection of the Democrat primary candidates of 2008.  It was the first presidential election in which I voted, though why the Democrats would stand out in my memory, I have no idea.

But since 1992, it seems like the Democrat field has never been as crowded.  Of the three elections since then in which the Democrats haven’t run an incumbent, the number of candidates with non-trivial delegate counts  or vote totals have been:

2000:  2 (Gore, Bradley)

2004:  4 (Kerry, Edwards, Dean, and Clark (barely))

2008:  2 (Obama and Hillary)

The Republicans, in contrast, run more candidates:

1996:  5 (Dole, Buchanan, Forbes, Alexander, and Keyes

2000:  3 (Bush McCain, Keyes))

2008:  4 (McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Paul)

2012:  4 (Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul)

Which brings us to 2016.  The Democrats have two declared candidates (Clinton and Sanders), one undeclared candidate (O’Malley), and one rumored to be testing the waters (Biden).  Meanwhile, the Republicans have some 15 candidates serious enough to participate in one of the Fox debates.

Granted, Clinton’s candidacy makes 2016 something of an outlier even in the context of the trend I’m describing:  she has the Wall Street money, the Democrat core is generally happy with her and the party’s brand of cultural Marxism, and other politicians seem afraid of her.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Biden even considering a challenge but for the scandal of her ongoing criminality.

Likewise, Trump has exaggerated something of the opposite effect on the Republican side.  As any number of commentators have pointed out, there is deep dissatisfaction among the Republican base with what the party has become, and while Trump has successfully appealed to that dissatisfaction, a lot of his rivals are counting on his candidacy to collapse under the weight of his own . . . Trumpishness.

But the trend was already established, and I don’t fully understand why this should be so.  Is there anything structural about the nominating procedures that encourage competition on the Republican side while discouraging it on the Democrat side?  Or is it just a function of the Clinton syndicate?

So, Female Adultery is Okay Now?

Although I never actually watched the movie, I have the impression that the release of the movie Bridges of Madison County was attended with some controversy, and it required strenuous efforts on the part of the intelligentsia to assure us how empowering (or something) adultery was for women.  But I strain to recall having seen or heard about subsequent movies whose female protagonist cheated on her husband and that the movie celebrated this.  The movies I can think of – Unfaithful, Chloe – with unfaithful wives uniformly carried the message that adultery was, you know, bad; those two in particular carried the message that it was dangerous, much in the way Fatal Attraction presented the dangers of male adultery.

Has the zeitgeist shifted more decisively in favor of adulterous wives?  It may be coincidence, but I happened to have caught two movies in the last couple of months that celebrated adulterous heroines:  This Is Where I Leave You, with Tina Fey cheating on her workaholic husband with the high school boyfriend she broke up with when he was brain damaged in a car accident; and The Best of Me, with Michelle Monaghan cheating on her workaholic husband with the high school boyfriend she broke up with when he went to prison.  I note that in neither movie was the wife intending to divorce her husband (although both movies make the eventual outcome ambiguous).  She just wanted a little extra-marital action.

Neither of these movies are very good.  TIWILY presents its progressive family as the cliché I identified back in this post, and it strains unsuccessfully to reconcile its approval of Fey’s adultery with Justin Bateman’s character being the victim of his wife’s adultery.  TBoM, meanwhile, avails itself of almost every movie cliché every invented, and it’s kind of distracting when you can see the plot lines coming a mile away.  But the point is that the movie presented this kind of behavior as okay if it makes women happy.*

Neither of these movies generated even the least bit of controversy that I heard about, and this strikes me as something new.  Mrs. Φ said she is surprised that I’m surprised at the moral degeneration of popular culture.  But I see enough of it to know when it ratchets downward.

* Popular culture – or at any rate its purveyors – doesn’t seem to extend this indulgence to men.  I can’t even think of a recent movie celebrating the adultery of a married man.  Relatedly, I have the vague impression that media opinion was really on the fence about the Ashley Madison hack until Gizmodo revealed that virtually all of its distaff accounts were zombies. Ashley Madison was only cool when it was “empowering” women; now that it’s a hangout for desperate men, it suffers the obloquy of being a late-nite punchline.

Wrong Hermeneutic

Leon Wolf (via Ace) writes:

As a conservative . . .

Really? I've never even heard this guy's name before, but let's see what he has to say:

. . . who has advocated for criminal justice reform, I have a lot of admiration for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been remarkably effective at raising awareness of the myriad ways that black Americans are treated differently — or, put more bluntly, treated worse — by law enforcement.

So, already we're off the rails. I say this as a conservative who has himself been critical of the police: their methods are characterized by excess aggression, poor accountability, and insufficient regard for the Constitutional rights of American citizens. But I have no sympathy at all for criticisms centered around "disparate impact" analysis, and for two very good reasons: (1) it's factually wrong; and (2) it doesn't contribute to my well-being.

As the experience of, most prominently, Martin O'Malley at the Nut-Roots convention demonstrate, the #BlackLivesMatter movement isn't motivated by the desire to improve police behavior in a disinterested way. It is motivated by the desire to socially and politically validate black racial grievance, and his claims to conservatism notwithstanding, Wolf buys into this motivation.* His analysis may be more sophisticated than the crude slogan -- "Po-po b' raciss'!" of the street, but his column is about the structural racism of "Big Government". Nowhere does this "conservative" mention the easily observed and incontrovertible reality of disproportionate black criminality and anti-social behavior. I don't have a firm fixed opinion about whether "loosies" should be sold legally by street peddlers in NYC, whether parking and traffic laws are in all cases constructive or the fines for their offenses onerous, or whether the drug laws and their associated sentences are socially optimum. Indeed, I can understand the arguments on both sides of these questions. But I am sure, by common experience, that blacks run afoul of these laws in the numbers they do, not by some conscious or unconscious discrimination on the part of the police or in the structure of the law, but rather by the inability or unwillingness on the part of black Americans to observe the standards of behavior expected by their fellow citizens.

Believing otherwise is unlikely to end well. We already see what disparate impact analysis did in the Wells Fargo lending prosecution: Wells Fargo allowed its loan officers to charge not-smart borrowers above-market interest rates, but the government didn't bring a case on behalf of not-smart borrowers. It brought the case only on behalf of not-smart black borrowers, and only the black borrowers received redress in the eventual settlement. The white not-smart borrowers? The government sent them away empty-handed.

I'm not interested in these kinds of settlements. I'm not interested in a world where the police continue the violate with impunity our rights under the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, where we have no right of self-defense against those violations, where the legal system itself refuses to vindicate those rights, and where vindication, even when possible, is lengthy, expensive and uncertain . . . BUT where the police structure their violations such that blacks and whites are victimized in equal proportion to their percentages of the population. Because THAT is the likely outcome of admiration for #BlackLivesMatter.

* Wolf links to a Ken Cuccinelli column that considers the effects of drug sentencing reform, mostly in Texas. The column is too vague for me to understand what trade-offs might have been involved, but to be fair to Wolf, it's apparently an example of the kind of changes he has in mind.

Ruling the Ranks

From the Arizona Republic:

Media heads rule ranks of best-paid CEOs

The article contains the names of 13 individual CEOs:

• David Zaslav
  

• Leslie Moonves
  

• Bob Iger
  

• Jeffrey Bewkes
  

• Brian L. Roberts
  

• Si & Donald Newhouse
  

• Sumner Redstone
  

• Philippe Dauman
  

• Marissa Mayer
  

• Leonard Schleifer
  

• Marc Benioff
  

• John Malone
  

• Jeff Leiden
  

I wonder if there is anything else in common among the best paid CEOs other than media?

Mad Men Finale

A few thoughts:

• I liked the ending, though not until the next morning when, while recouting the details to Mrs. Phi, I finally caught the connection between Don's meditative Cheshire cat-grin and the Coke commercial. Until then, Don's retreat with Stepanie into a hippie commune and his crisis of conscience didn't make any sense, from his tear-stained phone call with Peggy to his apparent moment of empathy with a proto- cubicle drone. "I took another man's name . . . and made nothing of it." No, he made "Don Draper" into the most sought-after creative name on Madison Avenue; finding the limits to the happiness and meaning that accompany his fame is not the same thing. And as for the drone's lament at being invisible, replaceable, expendable: Don was the opposite of those things from the beginning, drawing the envy of every man he met and the loins of every woman. Yes, he alienated all his personal relationships by failing to control his zipper, but again, that's not the same thing.* But who cares? It was all an artifice to put Don in a place to Ommm his way into advertising history.
  

• I'm happy for Pete and Trudy. I was so afraid last episode that their reconciliation would fall apart just to spite those of us rooting for it. But apparently his million dollar signing bonus and Lear jet finally succeeded in providing him with the status he craved. That doesn't make him a good person, but it does make him relatable: I've always said that the little weasel was the one character whose motivations I really identified with. Pete should have been the one to hug cube-drone-man.
  

• Joan's character arc was absurd. She began the series as the ultimate alpha female who deployed her icy sexuality to keep the men around her awed and at bay; she ended it mewling about the EEOC and Betty Friedan. She began it openly scornful of Peggy's career ambitions, preferring to serve as Roger's mistress; she ended it trading in her rich and retired lover for . . . gambling her cashed-out partnership on starting a production company?**
  

• Given creator Matthew Weiner's well-documented ethnic animosities, it's probably for the best that he didn't consider Christianity to be interesting enough for any treatment beyond the occasional drive-by shooting. But the rise of Evangelical Christianity in the 60s and 70s has been a more significant and enduring manifestation of the counterculture than the "hippies" ever were. It's too bad that the show lacked the perspicacity to give this a fair treatment.
  

* Also something about not recognizing that people around him loved him, which may have been what Don was actually empathizing with. This is marginally more credible, but only just, since I don't really think this was the source of Don's problem.

** The only more absurd character was Harry Crane, whose misfortune was to be the dumping ground for every contrivance the writer's need to dig themselves out of a hole. He began as, by the standards of Sterling Cooper, a straight arrow; he ended by first hitting on and then half-assed blackmailing Megan Draper.