An Acknowledgement of Evil

President Barack Obama made an eloquent appeal in Tucson yesterday for civility and communal healing following the horrific shooting in that city last Saturday. One of the more interesting things he said was the following:

” Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world and terrible things happen that defy human understanding”

It is notable that this is actually the second time, to my knowledge, that Obama during his presidency  has used the word evil.  The first was in the delivery of his Nobel acceptance speech in December, 2009.   There he said:

‘” I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

At the time I saw it as a signal of his recognition of certain realities in life and his willingness to identify the existence of absolute moral standards.  Unfortunately the subsequent twelve months did little to buttress that belief.

His comments in Tuscon, which underscored an apparent belief that Jared Lee Loughner’s actions were the result of a manifest evil which had gripped the young man – and not only a consequence of mental illness, political extremism or social alienation, is evidence ( if thin) of  a  moral maturity that has noticeably lacking in this President.  Too many in his own party and on the left are willing to see gray areas where the evidence suggests stark black and white distinctions.  This is of course most relevant to the seething hatred poised against the United States from Islam and the Arabic world.  We should never ignore that the evil which drove 19 young men to fly planes into the Twin Towers 10 years ago is of the same character which made Jared  Loughner pull the trigger over and over again in Tucson on Saturday afternoon.

Lets hope this president indeed continues to face the world as it is and grasp that, as he states in his own words, ” evil really does exist in the world”  and that he, of all people, cannot stand idle in the face of it.

Jenny McCarthy Gets Her Comeuppance

For nearly 14 years, many parents in the Western world have been wringing their hands about what to do about vaccinations – a formality taken for granted over the past half century.   Measles, mumps, chicken pox and small pox- killers of children in past centuries, were nearly wiped out in the latter half of the 20th Century by the advent of preventative vaccinations which injected antibodies  that impeded the spread of the diseases.

That was until an unfortunate article appeared in the U.K’s premiere medical journal The Lancet in July 1998.  A study then published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield concluded that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine—a mainstay of public-health disease prevention efforts around the world—was linked to autism and gastrointestinal disorders in young children.

The study led to a highly charged campaign, led by such celebrities as former Playboy centerfold and television personality Jenny McCarthy, that called for the end of vaccinations.   At the same time, a parallel campaign was led by medical researchers who claimed that the original study had been based on a fraudulent and inaccurate data.

The Lancet finally withdrew the article in January of last year after concluding that “several elements” of the paper were incorrect. But the journal didn’t describe any of the discrepancies as fraud. A British regulator stripped Dr. Wakefield of his medical license last May, citing “serious professional misconduct” in the way he handled the research.

An article, published  a few days ago by journalist Brian Deer, found that important details of the cases of each of 12 children reported in the original study either misrepresented or altered the actual experiences of the children, the journal said. “In no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal,” the editorial said. It called the study “an elaborate fraud.”

The damage done by the original article and the irresponsible advocacy of people like Jenny McCarthy and the organization Talk About Curing Autism is incalculable.   Hundreds of thousands of children in the West are now exposed to diseases that were already but wiped out by the mid 1960s. Much like the scare over DDT, fraudulently declared toxic to human beings by Rachel Carson in the mid- 1960s ( despite practically having wiped out malaria), the scare over vaccinations has proved again how politics has crept into science and how political correctness  has been used to assault the truth.

Jenny McCarthy and her supporters steadfastly cling to their version of the truth.   But her pseudo-science now deserves out right condemnation and a public backlash against her irresponsible advocacy and that of her claque  should be exposed as the posturing of a know nothing celebrity completely out of her depth.

Daily Blurb #4

The Death of Alireza Palhlavi

The death of 44-year-old Alireza Pahlavi, the former Shah of Iran’s youngest son at his home in Boston yesterday, is another sharp reminder of how elusive a return to normalcy continues to be for Iran today.  Although the younger Pahlavi was not involved in the Iranian emigre opposition in the United States and had played a very minor role in his older brother’s campaign to restore the Iranian Peacock Throne, his death symbolizes the frustration so many emigres have experienced over the past three decades as they have watched their country’s descent into fascism.

Perhaps even more significant, the suicide has opened a window on the splintered and severely divided ex-patriate Iranian community in the United States.   Pahlavi’s brother, Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s oldest son and the pretender to the Peacock throne, is not taken seriously by many – although with his name and prestige he could be supported as a likely leader of a future  Iranian constitutional democracy.  Now with over 25 Iranian opposition groups in existence, bereft of  a central leader or focus, the Iranian opposition, which if  united could marital substantial financial and diplomatic resources for democracy advocates within the forlorn Iranian Green Movement, is instead a rather useless weapon with which to assault the Iranian regime.   Alireza may have played no significant role in any of this.  But his name alone bore weight.  The sad ebbing of Iranian hopes parallels  the tragedy of this young man’s own passing.

Mark Twain’s Problem with the ” N”  word.

The New York Times offers a sensible editorial this morning on the suggestions of how to clean up Mark Twain’s language in his classics The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  The editorial is a response to the announced release of a combined volume of the two classics in which the word ” nigger” is replaced by ” slave’”  and “Injun”  converted to “Indian.”

The editorial astutely argues that:  “What makes Huckleberry Finn so important in American literature isn’t just the story, it’s the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language. Substituting the word “slave” makes it sound as though all the offense lies in the “n-word” and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Worse, it suggests that understanding the truth of the past corrupts modern readers, when, in fact, this new edition is busy corrupting the past.”

I couldn’t agree more.  It is ludicrous to project modern sensibilities on to works of art dating from more than a century ago.   It reminds me of my participation in a book group that I was leading in the early 90s.   The book we had chosen for a particular  month was The Picture of Dorian Gray, the sole novel  by Oscar Wilde.  A young woman who had participated in the group for a few months called me to explain that she could not attend that month’s reading because Wilde’s message was so anti-feminist.  I asked  her whether she would refuse to read Scott’s Ivanhoe because it promoted imperialism or why she had failed to object to the choice of Nabokov’s  Lolita since it deals with pedophilia.

The novels and art of previous generations reflects the temper and temperament of their times.  We can’t change the past; we can only observe and understand it.  By editing  the masterpieces of our literary forbears  so as to make them comply with  our own politically correct notions, we run the risk of denuding them of all authenticity. With so little of it in our own world, we should steer well clear of that kind of tampering.

The Fourth Turning

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Howe, co-author of  The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with History. You can listen to the  full one hour interview here.    Howe wrote his book in 1997 in attempt to understand where the United States stands in the cycles of history.   He  and his co-author, William Strauss conclude that this country is fast approaching a crisis, or a fourth turning, replicating other eras in human history in which a civilization passes through a process of education, awakening  and corrosion before encountering  a frightening denouement.   Previous American cycles had ended in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II.  The book was remarkably prescient in predicting our financial meltdown of September, 2008 and gave a good indication that we are in for rough waters ahead.

But Howe (and  his book for that matter) was surprisingly optimistic about the American future=, stating that if this fourth turning conforms with previous turnings in the nation’s history, then a winnowing out of destructive moral, cultural and social ills will be forthcoming to be followed by a reversion to fundamental American ideals and values

For those who hang their heads in despair at the rampage of political correctness  in our society and its domination by alien ideals, this is an impressive and joyful read.  I highly recommend it.

The Halloween Wasteland

Whenever I write about Halloween I get into very hot water.   My kids, my friends, my readers , my editors – all voice astonishment that I should feel disgust for such a quintessentially American event.     They regularly pass  off my distaste as evidence of my foreign roots, insisting that no one who grew up in this country could possibly feel the same way.

But I can’t help myself.   As I witness the lawns of my neighbors’ houses being ploughed up and planted with fake headstones;  skeletal remains  poking out of flower beds and clover  rings and cobwebs festooning trees and hedges,  I get a sense that all is not well in the American psyche.  Since some begin populating their front lawns with these necromantic accessories as early as September, this is an unease that resides with me for many weeks and sometimes even months.

One of the reasons for my despair is is that I fail to see the same slavish penchant for detail being lavished on Christmas, Easter, Channukah or almost any other religious event.  The same houses that sport the cobwebs of October can barely bring themselves to hang up the mistletoe of December.  While I am well aware of the demise of traditional religious practices, I  do have to wonder how the fascination with death and the dead has taken  the place of the celebration of life.

Our television and movie culture isn’t helping matters much.   This week sees the first episode of the new AMC series  The Walking Dead which premieres appropriately on Halloween night.  It follows the travails of Rick Grimes who wakes up in a hospital bed only to find the world over run by zombies. His survival in this nightmarish landscape is dependent on the maintenance of his own moral framework – apparently not such  an easy task.   This week will also see the release of the Mexican film maker Guillermo Del Toro’s  phantasmagorical new novel.  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times’ Pat Morrison, Del Toro explains how in his native Mexico the Day of the Dead,  a time in the Catholic calendar reserved for paying respect to dead relatives and dead saints, has transformed into a day in which the dead are mocked and treated with contempt:

“Sadly, in Mexico, the All Saints’ Day aspect of it has faded into straight Halloween. I miss being able to show my daughters what it is to pay your respects to a grave and bring food and drink and spend the day in the cemetery.”

Del Toro points out something important here.  Halloween began as All Saints Day – a day of reverence – and then over the course of a century transformed into something far more macabre and outlandish.   Becoming first a children’s spectacle, it has transformed again over the past 20 years into an adults’ affair which supports an entire bacchanalian industry in costuming and accessories.

I was reminded of this by a friend in his mid 50s who explained to me that when he was a young boy ghosts, ghouls , witches, skeletons, obscene behavior and death worship were not part of Halloween playfulness.   The Halloween of his youth was the Halloween of the Peanuts strips – grinning jack o’ lanterns, corn candy, neighbors eager to stave off the threat of  a trick  and only a few houses begirdled with anything like Halloween cobwebs.

In the transition between that youth and today, something vital has been lost and something terrible gained.  A creeping nihilism has seeped into the American suburban consciousness where, unseen, it has torn to shreds any idea of reverence and moderation.  If you asked any adult today what Halloween is about and why we do it, they would,  in all likelihood, answer that its not about anything.  It is done because it is fun.

But that in itself is the problem.  In this day, when there are myriad other ways in which to have fun,  why involve yourself and your children in something that is so clearly centered  on death?  It is not a question most parents , if they are thoughtful, would be comfortable answering.  Because it would require an admission that they see nothing wrong with the death-centered messages being subliminally given to children and the contempt this suggests.

But it is a fine line between the jaundiced kind of death mockery we see today and celebration of the occult.  And from there, the field is wide open to the  practice of witchcraft and the pursuit of a host of other pagan rites that challenge the very foundations of our civilization.

No one who celebrates Halloween today considers him or herself  as contributing to anything but happiness and community joy.  They have little understanding of the absolute moral wasteland that yawns open to accept the performance of the Halloween ritual.  I can only hope that others, even if not foreign born, will begin to realize where this “innocent prankish” little festival is taking us and why it is vital to apply the brakes to its continued spread.

The (Not So) Wonderful Life of Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis never thought he would not be famous. Almost from the day he was born, he became the center of attention, drawing praise from family, friends and neighbors alike for his dusky good looks. As he grew into adulthood and won the attention and affections of older women, he began to recognize his powers over the opposite sex and did all he could to exploit it. Arriving in Hollywood in the late 1940s, his winning personality and good fortune in meeting the right people, opened more opportunities for him as he cut a swathe through ingenues and starlets of the movie industry, leaving, in his own words, “no skirt unmoved.”

Curtis, though, was not just a pretty boy and did possess considerable talents as an actor. When he finally began to produce good films,such The Defiant Ones (1958) and Some Like It Hot (1959), he seemed poised to transform from playboy into serious actor with an Oscar win inevitable. He married upcoming actress Janet Leigh and the magazine industry touted the two as America’s sweetheart couple.

Unknown to most of his admirers in these years, Curtis was neither the faithful husband, nor doting father his publicity machine portrayed him to be. In fact in the 1950s , by his own reckoning, he bedded every A-list actress in the country, the lurid details of which are recounted in his memoir, American Prince.

Perhaps his notoriety engendered some ill feeling from cuckholded producers, for by the mid 1960s the good roles had dried up and Curtis was soon being regarded as something of a has been. He divorced Leigh after a highly publicized affair with Natalie Wood and other actresses

As he aged, Curtis lost the public’s attention. He married five more times, and produced five children, most of whom he rarely saw. He fell into alcoholism and drug addiction and almost died from a cirrhosis of the liver in 1995. His relationships with his many children evaporated, and one of them even died from a heroin overdose in 1993.

Yet his 2009 memoir American Prince does not dwell of any of these problems and the great unhappiness he brought to others’ lives. In that book Curtis instead spent 500 pages regaling his readers with details of his sexual conquests and evening scores with long dead producers, directors and fellow actors. A thread of bitterness runs through this autobiography as Curtis, who many would believe lived one of the most charmed existences in America, reveals his intense insecurity and essential shallowness.

And so Tony Curtis, at the end of his life, missed an important opportunity. He failed to share any recognition that celebrity and fame can be soul crushing steam rollers that offer little lasting happiness if the opportunities they profer to help others are never taken up. Curtis might have summarized at the end of American Prince ” Yes I was a red hot lover, but so what? What lasting happiness did it bring me and those near and dear to me? In my self absorption, had I done anything to improve the lives of others? “

That kind of introspection was seemingly beyond Tony Curtis. He died at his home in Henderson, Nevada on Friday at the age of 85, remaining a study in American narcissism. That is too bad. He might have taken a leaf from fellow actor Paul Newman’s book, whose tireless assistance of the needy was often performed anonymously. He seemed to know, as Curtis did not, that only giving and not taking brings ultimate happiness on this earth.

Should All Laws Based on Morality Now Be Considered Unconstitutional?

Judge Vaughn Walker, Chief Judge of the United States District Court of Northern California may not have realized it, but on Monday he made history.

The decision to invalidate Proposition 8, a measure approved by California voters in November, 2008 to ban gay marriage and affirm the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, didn’t come as much as a decisive blow against traditional marriage, as it was an assault on democratic government itself.

In responding to constitutional arguments of the plaintiffs, the judge denied that there was a rational basis for proponents  of Proposition 8′s claim that it would promote more marriage, less divorce, procreation and social stability.

” Permitting same sex couples to marry will not affect the number of opposite -sex couples, who marry, divorce, co-habit, have children outside of marriage or otherwise affect the stability of opposite sex marriage.”   he stated in his opinion.

More ominously he attacked the very basis of biological differences between the sexes:

“The ban on gay marriage exists as  an artifact of time, when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and marriage.   That time has passed.  Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage.  Marriage under law is a union of equals. “

It was the final sentence that was so significant.  Issues of morality did not play into Judge Walker’s decision.  Law, Walker seems to be saying, is not informed by morality, but by what is rational and of utility in modern society.

Walker’s position, in line with general secular views in our society, is that because there is no such thing as a generally accepted moral values, moral arguments have no place in a court of law.

But it is a travesty to declare the United States constitution only a rational document.   It is most certainly also a moral document, informed by the deep Christian values of the men who wrote it and guided by their vision of a society built on Judeo-Christian principles.

The founding fathers would almost certainly not have considered the extension of constitutional protections to a minority when its moral conduct vitiated against generally accepted public views of that conduct.  To argue otherwise is to indulge in a revisionism that is intellectually dishonest and historically inaccurate.

The defendants in the  Perry vs Schwarznegger, were therefore at a distinct disadvantage when presenting their case.   Debarred as they were from presenting moral arguments, they failed to present the scenarios which are likely to unfold in the event that Proposition 8 is eventually  invalidated.

Some of these include:

• That public schools in the future would be required, at the risk of penalty, to present students with the efficacy and viability of a variety of alternative lifestyles from homosexual to transgender to pederast.
• That private institutions and associations such as synagogues, churches, boy scouts  and private clubs will come under increasing pressure to conform to legal standards for the acceptance of minority rights – and be forced to change their own rules and principles or else risk both legal sanction and law suits.
• That denying the legitimacy of a gay lifestyle will soon come to be seen on the same level as antisemitism.
• That the very foundation of our own civilization – the bond between a man and a woman-  is now under assault since the gay community has far less interest in obtaining marriage licenses ( the vast majority of homosexuals have absolutely no interest in marriage) as they do in obtaining the stamp of legitimacy for their lifestyles and conduct.

It seems passe these days to declare that the viability of a modern democracy depends on a a generally accepted moral outlook. Yet it is nonsense to argue that strict adherence to the legal framework elucidated by the constitution alone  is enough to hold our polity together.   It must be informed by morality.

In November, 2008 the people of California, by a clear majority, voiced their opinion that morality was a significant element in the construction of  American democracy.

It will inevitably fall to our judges in the highest court of the land to now determine if they were right.  Lets hope that they show a little more prudence and insight into the workings of democratic government – and an understanding of the American people -  than was demonstrated by Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco this week.

The Milk of Human Kindness

Shavuoth is a mysterious Jewish festival.  Being neither an exact anniversary nor conforming to the harvest cycle in the land of Israel, it seems to exist outside of time, an exception  to the chronological flow of the Jewish seasons.  Just as puzzling is the custom of eating dairy products on the festival.  Ascribed by many to the inhibitions of the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai, over the laws of kashruth, there are myriad reasons explaining the consumption of dairy products on this Festival, although none are entirely convincing.

Perhaps each of us  needs to build our own understanding.  For the Davis family in Melbourne, Australia, dairy products were an inseparable part of life – they were the family business.  Not only was I born on the family’s dairy farm on the outskirts of town, but my grandfather David, who had purchased the farm twenty years earlier,developed it into a thriving milt delivery business.

Succeeding him, my father dramatically expanded this business by adding yogurt.   Keren Dairies, taken from the Hebrew words for ” ray of light” became a symbol of pride for the small Jewish community of Melbourne.   It proved that Jewish immigrants, raised inthe cloistered villages of Eastern Europe, could defy prejudice and ridicule and by rising to an Australian challenge,  become successful men of the land in their own right.

My grandfather was a quiet, circumspect man who rarely spoke of his past.   But occasionally he would share a story that gave me a glimpse into his early struggles.

One of those stories I have never forgotten.

In the early 1930s he would rise before dawn to deliver milk in a horse drawn dray to customers in the inner suburbs.  He would rattle his canister filled cart from door to door, ladeling milk into pails and bottles.

On this daily journey he would often come across an obstreperous man who would grandfather while  lie in wait for him.  The man would regularly hurl a stone or shoe at my grandfather while jeering at him with antisemitic slurs.  He would sometimes go so far to place heavy objects on the road to prevent his passage.

The abuse continued intermittently four years. But one day it stopped and the man disappeared. My grandfather asked some of the man’s neighbors what had happened to him.  They explained that he had suffered a stroke and could no longer leave the house. Inquiring further he discovered that his tormentor was close to destitution and had no relatives.  From that day forward my grandfather would leave him milk everyday. He did not cease the practices until the man died.

I was astonished when I first heard this story.   When I asked my grandfather why he did this, he answered simply, ” He was probably thirsty and I was carrying milk,.”

I remembered my grandfather’s actions a few years ago when I saw a photograph posted in a edition of the Ma’ariv newspaper . It showed an IDF soldier providing water to one of five handcuffed terrorists, captured on their way to executing a bombing in Israel.  Among the five members of the terrorist squad, two were carrying explosive belts.  A further 17 kilograms of TNT was found inthe trunk of their car.

Similar reports reveal the way in which the IDF provided food for the trapped terrorists and their hostages inside the besieged Church of the Nativity in 2002.  There are remarkable accounts of Israeli medics treating surviving terrorists, rushing them, often inthe same ambulances as their victims, to Israeli medical facilities in order to save their lives.

Many decades and thousands of miles separate my grandfather and the IDF soldiers.  Yet they are bound by the enduring legacy of Jewish tradition and the respect for the sanctity of life.  It is taught to us in the Book of Exodus   “when your enemy’s donkey falls down, you must help to raise him up.”

The promise of holiness, delivered to the Jewish people at the time of the giving of the Torah on the festival of Shavuoth, is embedded int his simple teaching. It defines our concept of humanity.

It is one of the supreme ironies of my life that my grandfather died on the first day of Shavuoth.  It was also fitting that his great grandson, born 27 years later, would be named Matan David, the gift of David, linking the boy to his forbear and to the climatic event of Jewish history – the giving of the Torah.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy he can absorb is that even in the face of adversity, the milk of human kindness must still be delivered.

News as Entertainment

If you want an idea of how network news has completely transformed over the past ten years from the sober conveyance  of information to a place for larks and comedy, look no further than the ad that came wrapped around the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, April 22.

The ad displays all eight members of the KTLA 5 Morning News team ( four women and four men) posing with their arms outstretched and apparently singing  words  ‘Find Me A Comic.’ appear.   Here are the lines that then follow:

“The KTLA 5 Morning  News, in association with the John Lovitz Comedy Club at Universal City Walk, is searching for the next great Stand- Up Comedian.  Go To KTLA .com/Comic for details.  Upload your best  two minute routine and you could be on your way to a booking in Los Angeles or Las Vegas.”

It concludes with the words  “KTLA5 Morning News -   News, Weather and OUTRAGEOUS FUN!”  (my emphasis added) .

If you think that sinks to a new level of imbecility, then you might want to flip over the news sheet.  For there you can read what looks like a page ripped from a ninth grade  year book with all eight members of the team individually profiled.  One by one they have jotted down their biographical details, in order  to give you important insight  into their sparkling personalities:

Here’s Michaela Periera:

Greatest Achievement: Not losing my mind in this town or in this business. Biggest Dislike:  Judgment and negativity; Favorite Journey: Home

Jessica Holmes goes one better:

Greatest Love: Hmmm… still waiting…on that answer; Greatest extravagance: food…I would spend a paycheck on a good meal; Greatest Fear: Being stuck in an elevator. Swarm of bees.”

And we surely are better off for gleaning this information from Sam Rubin:

“Favorite Journey:  Amalfi Coast, Italy; My Most Treasured Possession: My Kindle;  Most Marked Characteristic: Its my own hair.”

Well, its a certainly a relief Sam, to know that you have your own hair.

This sophomoric posturing wouldn’t be so offensive if KTLA5  didn’t command a sizable morning audience that relies upon its newscasters for reliable information.  According to Nielsen, the station  has the second largest market share for morning news  in Southern California and  ranks  as 12th in the nation.

There is no great revelation in declaring that the division between news and entertainment has disappeared.   Turn on almost any news program from MSNBC to Fox News and it becomes clear:  newscasters are presented as celebrities in their own right whose images are carefully groomed;  the news is tailored to capture sensation, often at the expense of veracity and proportion;  and aimless banter between newscasters is given almost as much emphasis as the news itself.

So on any given day, we  can view newscasters deliver, in mordant tones, news of the death of hundreds in an earthquake or flood, only to follow it a few minutes later with some lighthearted banter about home cooking or the hosts’ latest travel plans.

The repugnant narcissism of the whole enterprise, should make almost anyone with a sense of propriety and reverence for traditional news service to turn off their televisions and never return.   That, of course, will not  happen.  Most of us will still tune into televised news in order to be brought up to date as quickly as possible on events unfolding in our local environment.   No one can say they  regret having a television on September 11, 2001 and learning, instantly, of the events unfolding in New York City on that day.  The television is a vital source of information and communication and at one time, was regarded as a great blessing to our society and civilization.

There is almost no question that that perspective on the medium has changed and for many of us  it is difficult to turn on a news broadcast without a sense of being used or manipulated.

Perhaps then, in the light of KTLA’s  search for new comedic talent, it  might pay us then to be aware that those providing us with the information we often need to make daily choices or decisions in our lives, are nothing more than paid actors, enjoying their celebrity at our expense and all in the name of outrageous fun.

Lady Gaga’s Shock Value

My eleven-year-old son has taken to singing the strangest of  songs around the house lately.

“I want your ugly,  I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free
I want your love
Love-love-love
I want your love.“

Brand me a troglodyte, but I must be the only parent on the planet who did not know that those are the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s disturbing number one hit Bad Romance.  Since I don’t listen to FM radio, I have not been privy to the pleasures of receiving Gaga’s not-so-subliminal  sado-masochistic messages or reveling in her neo-feminist mystique.

My son is a bright, happy child who attends a modern orthodox Jewish junior high school, where religious instruction and studies take pride of place with secular studies.  The modern orthodox credo is that religion and modernity are compatible and that secular pursuits and religious observance can be balanced in a way that gives young modern Orthodox Jews the potential to succeed in life without losing their moral or religious bearings.

Yet the insidiousness of  modern secular music, with its messages weighted with innuendo, misogyny, violence and moral transgression, is not so easily thwarted.  It takes me back to my own school days and discovering that Lou Reed’s  Walk On the Wild Side, a song we all innocently hummed along to back then, was focused on the adventures of  a transsexual.  At the same time I was informed that a few years earlier, the Kinks’ Lola, a song I had loved, had traversed the same territory.  The 70s involved a slippery descent of popular music into the realm of outright seaminess with recording artists offering us simulated orgasms, paeans to androgyny and the invocation of satanic prayers. Despite years of exposure to the music, I never ceased to be disturbed by its slide into decadence.

It was hard to believe that much worse was to come.

While trading on fetishist fantasies and sado-masochistic impulses has been a long time avocation of pop queens such as Madonna and  Christina Arguilera together with goth rockers such as Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper, Lady Gaga has taken outrage to a new level.  Her songs and videos don’t just celebrate sexual deviance, they actively encourage bondage, rape and torture, laced with the understanding that this is what a woman  truly wants.

In the music video that accompanies Bad Romance, Gaga is seen dancing provocatively before a group of gangsters, imploring them for “their revenge” and posturing that “she doesn’t want to be their friend.”  The video ends with a shot of Gaga on an ash covered bed, with the charred remains of what one supposes was her lover.   Gaga is  smoking nonchalantly, while her brassiere emits the final bursts of flame that have apparently just incinerated the victim.

Is it Gaga then who has the final “revenge?”   It doesn’t seem to matter all that much.  The point made is that sexual dominance is the order of the day and that sex, rather than a form of emotional connection between a man and woman is nothing more than a dangerous power play with the  focus being on who will dominate whom.

Perhaps it is evidence of  a prudish spirit, but I am as concerned with the influences that populate my childrens’ imaginations as I am with their scholastic achievements.  I have tried to wean them off mindless 21st century television with DVDs of mindless 60s television (You’ll  have to admit that Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island -  for all their vacuousness – are at least blessed with sexual restraint and minimal violence).  Yet at some point, I have  realized that, short of placing mufflers on their ears and blindfolds on their eyes, not much can be done to prevent their exposure to images that young children should never hear nor witness.

Part of our problem may be that  studies reveal that children rarely pay attention to lyrics  from a song on the radio but do pay attention when that song is accompanied by a video where they can see the lyric’s messages acted out.   In this study from 2003 it is stated that:

” Videos with many violent images have been shown to increase aggressive
attitudes, including antagonism toward women and acceptability of violence
both for themselves and in others (Greeson & Williams, 1986; Hansen &
Hansen, 1990b; Johnson, Jackson, & Gatto, 1995; Peterson & Pfost, 1989).
In a study of seventh and tenth graders, those who viewed 30 minutes of
music videos with high concentrations of sex, violence, and antiestablishment
themes showed higher approval of premarital sex than did similar participants
who viewed 30 minutes of videos randomly taped off of the air.”

So while the marriage of video and audio recordings has been a boon for artists such as Madonna and Lady Gaga, it has been disastrous for  parents seeking to protect their children from such influences.

What remains is the determination of parents to defy the prevailing zeitgeist – to give their children a moral education that focuses on modesty, temperance and a deep respect for individual privacy.   Although I have never thought about it before, that is the way my brothers, sister and I were raised – which almost certainly accounts for my shock, at the same age my son is now, upon hearing Lou Reed’s seminal song.

It would seem to me that inspiring in our children that same sense of shock, couched as it is in value judgments and a clearly articulated moral world view, is at least as important to their future as their absorption of  history, mathematics and science at school.

The Holocaust and The Truth About Genocide

How could it happen in Europe?

If history was a panorama dome, it might be  possible to observe a vista of the  Holocaust’s  European antecedents.    We would then be witness to Islam’s armies sweeping across Middle Eastern deserts and North Africa, slaughtering Jews wherever they found them ; the Crusaders leaving behind them rivers of Jewish blood flowing in the gutters of villages in the  Rhineland and France;   the Jews of York  being  massacred  in Clifford’s Tower; the Inquisitors of  Spain and their auto de fé slashing a scar across the face of that country that has never truly healed;   Chmielnicki’s Cossacks of 17th Century Russia, galloping across the foothills of the Ukraine, raping, pillaging and murdering Jews  unchallenged; the pogroms of  Tsar Alexander III in the early 1880s , the first modern instances of  state sanctioned murder and despoliation of Jews;  the Kishniev massacre of 1905,  a final  stake into the heart of Old Russia.

Unabated and unabashed Jew killing became a European specialty and so it is often claimed by modern historians that Adolf Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews was  merely a culmination of centuries of such slaughter.  But that theory has always rankled with me.    The Holocaust stands alone in  history as a high water mark, not just of Jewish slaughter but also of human degradation.  The two had to combine to produce something as truly brutal and barbaric as the mechanized slaughter of Jews.  The unending question, the one that never truly ceases to pound  in my brain is  -  how was it possible for the German people to have perpetrated such a horrifying program of inhumanity with barely a ripple  of conscience?

The most immediate answer to that question is that for those who executed their orders, as well as those whose silence made them complicit in the Holocaust’s perpetration, it was not inhumanity at all.  Rather, it was a service to mankind.

The very idea that one could facilitate the creation of a better world by the elimination of the less worthy elements in it, was a function not simply of German antisemitism but of a modern nihilism and entropy that had been metastasizing in Western civilization for a century.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest (and the Social Darwinism which emerged from it); Einstein’s theory of relativity which suggested that there were other dimensions to the universe and that time and space were not a continuum ; Freud’s probing of the subconscious, exposing man’s basic impulses as fundamentally barbaric;  the rampant growth of  political ideologies which found the cause of man’s unhappiness rooted  in capitalism, wealth and greed;  Nietzsche’ s insistence that God was dead –  all nurtured  the growing acceptance that life had little purpose beyond immediate gratification of one’s senses.  It ultimately lead to an erosion of religious faith and the notion that moral strictures and codes were essentially human constructs designed as instruments of power rather than as  a path to purpose, meaning and civilized conduct.

The eugenics movement of the early 2oth Century became the most fitting scientific analog to this collapsing sense of humanity.   The notion that humans can and should be selectively bred to improve the species began in 1865 with Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who believed that heredity governed  talent and character, just as it does eye color and facial features.  He coined the term  ” eugenics ” in 1883,  deriving it from the Greek “good in birth”    In  the early 20th Century eugenics was a serious intellectual and political movement with courses offered in 350 American universities and endorsed in over 90% of high school biology text books.   In 1920, two esteemed German academics Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche published Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life ( Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens)  in which they argued that some humans had greater moral worth than others.  Here they suggested that physicians ought to be allowed to kill people deemed unworthy of life including the “terminally ill and mortally wounded; ” incurable idiots” and the”unconscious”   This was all  fifteen years before the Nazis instituted their own euthanasia programs.

And if you believe that eugenics was just a  European intellectual past time, think again.  In my June, 2009 piece California Roots of the Eugenics Movement, I describe how the Golden State became the leading sterilizer in the nation, putting to the knife to over 60,000 citizens deemed unworthy of reproduction, before a moratorium was called  on the practice in the early 1960s.  Eugenics enthusiasts were numbered among some of the West’s most  famous political and intellectual leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and these included  Sir Winston Churchill, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt.

It is any wonder then that the Germans felt at considerable ease committing (in 1904), the first genocide of the century in South West Africa – all but wiping out the Herero natives there?   Or that the Turks, eleven years later, could mercilessly drive one million  Armenians from their ancestral homes and force them on a death march which resulted in the disappearance of 90 per cent of the population?  Or that Josef Stalin in the 1930s could allow five million Ukrainians to slowly perish from starvation?   And that all these events occurred years before the advent of the Second World War?  These perpetrators had been schooled for years  in the idea of the Üntermensch – that there were lesser beings who populated the planet and whose existence stood in the way of human progress.

Perhaps this should give us pause then to remember that genocide never begins with guns, machetes and knives, but with ideas.  The Nazis only built on the concepts that, by the time they came to power, had been percolating through Western intellectual life for more than 60 years.

In our own day, we can’t forget that there are bio-ethicists and philosophers such as Princeton University’s Peter Singer who argue quite seriously that infants, as human beings absent cognition, have no right to life  at all – at least no more than baby chimpanzees.

Years ago I remember a celebrated Australian journalist writing that whenever he contemplated the Holocaust, his biggest nightmare was not that he could have been a concentration camp victim, but that he could have been one of the guards.

This is a reminder to those of us who are regularly exposed to the noxious arguments of supporters of assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion and  mercy killing and who daily see the reality of animal life raised to the sanctity of human life, that there might indeed be modern day forms of  “permission to destroy life unworthy of life.”   Perhaps it can make us all realize that the horrors of the Holocaust began with the dehumanization of those incapable of either defending or speaking for themselves, decades  before the blueprint of the first gas chamber was set to paper.

How could it happen in Europe?  The real question – and an ongoing one – is how could it have happened in the human soul?