Jesus Christ Superstar and Free Speech

I attended the Lyric Opera’s performance of Jesus Christ Superstar this weekend.   This rock opera, along with Tommy, are two of my favorites (I plan to attend Roger Daltrey’s performance of Tommy later this summer).   The music score to Jesus Christ Superstar is one of the first albums I ever purchased (Black Sabbath’s Paranoid was one of my other earliest purchases, which may go a long way toward explaining my theological discord).   As a boy, I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar over and over again and a booklet with the lyrics came with the album so I knew all the lyrics.  The rock opera was an innovative, modern way to present that ancient story.   Jesus Christ Superstar was filled with emotion and conveyed the complexities of Christ’s life, the division of the earthly and the divine, the humanity of Jesus and the threat that He posed to the Roman authorities.  The music and the lyrics were masterful and the music had a great beat, reflecting the golden age of rock of the late 60’s and early 70’s.   I also attended a strict Catholic grammar school, and I still have memories of the nuns fussing about it, calling the rock opera “blasphemous,” especially criticizing it for ending with the death of Jesus and completely omitting the resurrection (fair point, I think).   Yet, although the Christian story was incomplete and took a few liberties, it brought the gospel to life for many of us. 

Following Jesus Christ Superstar (turned into a movie in 1973, which was well done), Monty Python did an irreverent parody and satire of Christianity- The Life of Brian in 1979.   The Life of Brian has been heralded as one of the greatest comedies of all times and while it was by definition, blasphemous, and was shunned by the BBC and some local towns in the UK, the film was ingenious and uproariously funny.  Its edginess and Monty Python silliness can still elicit guffaws with Christ and the two thieves singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” as they hang on the cross and the reference to “Biggus Dickus” by Pontius Pilate.   Despite its outlandishness, there were no riots, no violence, no mass protests opposing the film.  No one died as a result.    More recently, The Book of Mormon, first staged in 2011, took a direct, playful swipe at a particular sect of Christians, the Mormons.  It also was widely acclaimed and I saw it a few years ago with my son.   Rather than howling about how offensive the film was, the Mormons simply rolled with it, and even took out ads in the playbills that read, “You saw the musical, now read the book.”

The only time I remember artists getting Christians riled up was the work “Piss Christ,” funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which depicted a crucifix in urine.  That work did provoke the ire of many Christians, but the irritation was mostly over whether the government should pay for this.  The only real threats were directed at cutting off government funding.  

Seeing Jesus Christ Superstar and reflecting on some of the other artistic portrayals of Christianity made me pause and ask some questions about Islam, and ultimately whether Islam is compatible with the West.   But merely asking that question triggers a hysterical accusatory response of “Islamophobia,” a synthetic word designed to cut off discussion and debate.  Given the experience of Europe, it is a question that should be asked. 

I will also not pretend to be a religious scholar, and I acknowledge that my theological depth of knowledge of my own faith—Catholicism is only ankle deep and I do not pretend to know a great deal about Islam and its belief system.  But I do observe things, and have enough knowledge to at least raise questions.   And whether or not Islam is fundamentally compatible with the West is a question that needs to be answered and needs to be subject to debate and grounded in reality.  I also understand that Islam is complex and has sects and gradations and just like Catholicism, there are adherents that are strict about their faith and some that are, like me, looser and prefer a more a la carte menu. 

But I have some reservations about Islam’s ultimate compatibility with the West, and those reservations rest on three components.  First, is that unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam does not appear to recognize a difference between church and state.   For a great number of Muslims, they are intertwined.  And the two nation states where Islamists have seized the controls of government—Iran and Turkey—those societies and economies have suffered greatly.   Secondly, is the difference between the founders.  Christ was a messenger of peace- love thy neighbor as thyself is a basic precept of Christianity.  Muhammed, in contrast, was a warlord, and was interested in conquest.  The founder’s themes are hard to ignore.  The third aspect, and one the only one that I will address here, is Islam’s aversion to free speech.

The initial provocation from Islam regarding free speech came in 1989 from Ayotollah Khomeini, who put a fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, forcing Rushdie into hiding for years.  Dutch film make Theo van Gogh was gruesomely murdered in 2004 after producing his film “Submission.”    In 2008, a Danish newspaper was forced to apologize after setting off riots when it published a cartoon depicting Muhammed with a bomb in his turban.   Borders book chain (since defunct) self-censored and pulled copies of magazines and newspapers carrying the cartoon out of concern for the safety of their customers.   In 2015 the offices of Charlie Hebdo were attacked in France resulting in the murder of 11 people and the attackers injured 12 more.

Islam has largely been behind hate speech laws and other institutional curtailment of free speech.  Britain has stepped up enforcement of its hate speech laws, and British police monitor social media to ensure that posts offensive to Muslims are dealt with.  Canada recently passed C-16 which contains language which restricts language that reflects “Islamophobia,” that Jordan Peterson has spoken out against.   There has been a push at the U.N. to curtail “blasphemy,” and even in the U.S., President Obama warned that “the future must not belong to those that slander the prophet of Islam.” 

Recently, the College of the Holy Cross announced that it was going to shelve its mascot—the crusader because Muslims found it offensive.  Can you think of an Islamic institution or organization that changed its symbol or logo because it was offensive to Christians or Jews?

As a sometimes rebellious Catholic, I am free to criticize the Church and the Pope—which I vociferously have on many occasions.    I am free to reject and question doctrine.   I am free to poke fun at my own faith and its practices (I thoroughly enjoyed Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?), and some of its traditions.   I can mock the Catholic Church and even other faiths without threat of violence to me (today, for instance, the Vatican expressed concern over tweeting nuns—really??).  Assume I had a 11 year old boy and assume my local church was sponsoring a weeklong religious retreat for young boys chaperoned only by 10 Catholic priests.  Given the sex abuse scandals, no one in the world would call me Catho-phobic because I expressed reservations about permitting my son to attend unaccompanied.  No one would say, “Gee, it’s only a minority of priests that do that sort of thing.  Why are you worried?” Do the same standards not apply to Islam?

Free speech in the West is our most vital freedom.   In the West, generally, and in America especially, we curtail it only under the narrowest of circumstances, although it is being eroded in Europe and on college campuses in the U.S.   In the nearly 50 years since the initial production of Jesus Christ Superstar and other satires and parodies of Christianity in the West, there has not been a single death or violent incident arising out of them. 

But after seeing Jesus Christ Superstar, it occurred to me that one test as to whether Islam is compatible with the West would be to produce a good natured musical parody of Islam and Muhammed, complete with dancing girls and shortie burkas.    I ask a simple question of whether you would bring your family to opening night?   Would there even be an opening night?  Could you have an opening night, or any other night for that matter without hardened security?  

We should not be afraid to ask those important and complicated questions and not permit others to stop us from asking them.  America is a welcoming and tolerant nation.  But there are two provisos.  First, if your religious creed bumps up against OUR sacred document (the Bill of Rights), yours must yield.  And second, we are a free and open society.   You should be expected to adapt to our social norms and not expect us to adapt to yours.

Jordan Peterson

A fundamental issue plaguing conservatism/libertarianism over the past decade has been almost a complete absence of intellectual heft behind it.  Milton Friedman passed away in 2006 and William F. Buckley departed in 2008.   With the loss of those two giants, conservatism lost its intellectual moorings and no one has emerged to replace them, none that could combine intellectual rigor with an ability to communicate ideas on a mass level.   Friedman wrote his book, Free to Choose and PBS carried the television series with the same name.   Buckley had his writings and Firing Line, also carried on PBS.  Both were witty, charming and could disassemble liberal arguments with aplomb and without personal enmity.   Personal attacks were so rare that they were noteworthy.  Buckley only lost his temper once, with Gore Vidal, documented in the film Best of Enemies.  Otherwise, Buckley and Friedman most often dislodged ideological opponents with reason and witty barbs.

I had brief hopes that Tucker Carlson could be that person, and he does have his moments.   He often picks the right issues, and is generally well-prepared.  But having to perform nightly and perform for ratings doesn’t lend itself to that kind of depth that is required to be a true public intellectual.  Carlson hasn’t published, which is a critical aspect of establishing intellectual bona fides.  He also has too many puffball guests—far left wing whackadoodle idealogues that are too easy to obliterate.  His segments sometimes have the feel of hunting at the zoo.  Buckley and Friedman used PBS as a main platform for their message—an entirely different ballgame.  Still, Carlson has not yet shown that he has the stature to attract and persuade much more than the Fox loyalists.

But an unlikely professor has shown up on the scene and may be one that has the potential to fill the void.  Jordan Peterson, an unlikely figure from the University of Toronto, has suddenly garnered the attention of millions, and he has been especially popular among young people.  His book, 12 Rules for Life has sold over a million copies and the popularity of his YouTube videos and podcasts has blossomed.

Of course, he has drawn the ire of the Left, especially since he voiced opposition to Canadian measures against “offensive speech.”  He has been attacked by the Left as Alt-Right.  The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had an article on Peterson entitled, “What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?”  

I was attracted to his message after I saw a YouTube video last year in which he discussed the pathology of post-modernism.   Hisis destruction (metaphorically) of reporter Cathy Newman which rendered her speechless convinced me that Peterson is somebody that we should take seriously.   I began to listen to his podcasts and read his book.  His appearance in Chicago was perfectly timed, so I bought a ticket to see and hear him in person.

As I waited in line (which was as long as the one I waited in for the Allman Brothers a few years ago), I noticed that the crowd was younger, primarily late 20’s to early 30’s.   I happened to strike up a conversation with the two young guys in front of me, both of whom had copies of Peterson’s book in hand.  They had just graduated from medical school and were on to their residency.  “You don’t understand,” one of them said, “Universities have become indoctrination centers.”   That set the stage for Dr. Peterson.

Peterson began his two and a half hour talk with a discussion of stories, talking about “getting our story straight,”  and of universal themes that bind a culture together.  He leaned heavily on Carl Jung, Friederich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in his thinking.    He emphasizes that we are a largely Judeo-Christian culture and a good portion of his talk revolved around the symbolism in Genesis, the Abrahamic stories as well as the importance of “picking up your cross and carrying it up the hill.”  He talked about how universal these stories are and that the Harry Potter books really pick up on biblical themes.   He talked about other symbols that appear in stories—dragons, for instance and the story of Hansel and Gretel and Snow White.  All of these stories have universal themes to them. For Peterson, the Hero Myth is paramount and that we want to live a life of truth, and to strengthen ourselves to be able to take on the dragon—the things we are loathe to face.  He believes that Western civilization’s gift to the world has been to value the individual and that we cannot fix the social order until we fix ourselves (which the modern university often gets backwards).  We need to adopt a stance of ready engagement in the world and categorically reject victimhood. 

He talked about the right being concerned with a hierarchical system that produces winners and losers.  He rejects the notion that hierarchical organizations are a consequence of the capitalist patriarchy, and illustrates that with his description of lobster society in the first chapter of his book.  Hierarchical organizations of our society is hard wired into our being.  The left, he said, is much more concerned with government taking care of the losers.  Peterson is sympathetic to the Left’s desire  to do so--you don’t want to crush these people and you want them to get up and try again.   But he eschews the excesses of the Left and he gets animated when he talks about the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Maduro.   He talked about his anger with the intellectual left complicity in Mao, Stalin, Khymer Rouge, and the millions of deaths and millions more lives shattered—and they have never apologized for it.  

Peterson is most passionate when he is arguing against tribalism and for free speech.  He gets animated, his volume raises and he speaks in categorical terms.   With respect to tribalism.  You. Don’t. Want. To. Go.  There.  Ever.   Bad things happen to societies when they revert to tribalism.  It is clear that he worries about that a lot (as does Victor Davis Hanson).   He regards The Gulag Archipelago as the most important work of the 20^th century as it exposed the lies of the Soviet system.

He would certainly have gotten on well with Buckley and Friedman, but his focus is entirely different.  Friedman was a Nobel prize winning economist, and his message was primarily about the human as an economic actor, making choices that are best for him or her.  Buckley spoke a great deal about politics and the individual’s relationship to the state.  Peterson’s approach is primarily from the psychological and philosophical perspective.  He only spoke about economics in the broadest terms.  He did not even mention the names of Trudeau, Trump or Clinton.  He is concerned with the culture wars, free speech and “social justice.”   He is Canadian, which necessarily implies that he has no skin in the game of U.S. politics.   But as I thought about this, perhaps it is in the culture wars,   where the courageous intellectual firepower is needed as more politicians engage in identity politics, and our universities clamp down on free speech.   Friedman and Buckley largely won the war in economics in a sustainable way.   Even Obama’s signature program, Obamacare, was based on a Heritage Foundation plan.  Flawed as Obamacare was, it was not socialized medicine but a failed attempt at creating a “market.”   It didn’t even contain a public option.   And Obama didn’t raise individual tax rates anywhere near the levels that existed under Roosevelt, Kennedy or Eisenhower (Obama did raise taxes in other ways, however).  But where the battle between right and left is fiercest and where the left has made a great deal of headway is in the media and academics and on social matters, and that is where Peterson comes in.

Peterson is not a garden variety self-help guru.   He blends philosophy and psychology in a powerful way and in a way in which people can understand it.  He is an antidote to the pathology and irrationality of post-modernism.  And he is very, very smart.

It was with irony that I saw Peterson speak during the same week the New York Times ran an article celebrating Karl Marx’s birthday and the town in which Marx was born put up a statue commemorating him.  At the same time, American university students are circulating petitions to take down statues of Thomas Jefferson.

Can Peterson provide the intellectual backbone that conservatism has been missing all these years and sustain it?   I sure hope so.   The West badly needs a convincing voice to remind itself that its culture is worth preserving, that individualism, not tribal grievances should guide us, and that attempts to constraint “offensive speech” must be constrained.   No one since Buckley and Friedman has been able to provide the intellectual platform and articulate traditional Western liberalism and free markets need to be defended.  Until Jordan’s arrival, conservatism has been adrift with most American Republican politicians becoming “swamp denizens” instead (which is why Donald Trump was able to seize the nomination in 2016).   That Peterson does not seek political power and cannot because he is Canadian adds to his credibility.

Jordan Peterson is a person worth watching.  I encourage you to listen to his podcasts and YouTube videos and judge for yourself.  He may, if fact, be the right person at the right time, emphasizing the right things.  His popularity among young people gives me hope that he is the kind of intellectual force that will compete for the minds of our youth with a university system that has gone off the rails.

The New Barbarism

Last spring, I wrote a blog post entitled “Our Children” following the Manchester bombing in which 22 girls were killed and 59 injured in a terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Great Britain.   I asserted that a civilization that cannot or will not protect its children (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/05/our-children.html) is likely doomed.   A year ago, those children were a victim of Islamic terror.

But a new menace has claimed the life of a British child.  I awoke Sunday morning to the news that little Alfie Evans had died, a victim of not only a degenerative brain disease, but a barbaric, cold and bureaucratic national health care system in Great Britain.  Ironically, the cover of The Economist magazine shown above depicts a child’s hand gripping an adult’s hand with the cover story Within Reach:  Universal health care, worldwide.   But this week, the child’s hand lost its grip, in a maddening and awful way.

The bureaucrats at the National Health Service in Great Britain decided that baby Alfie was terminal, and cut off life support to this little, adorable 23 month old baby, setting off a worldwide firestorm.   With all the empathy of a tow truck operator in Lincoln Park in Chicago, the authorities decided not only was in in the best interest of the child to be denied life support but that his parents would be denied permission to remove him from Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool.  The authorities denied his parents permission to remove him even when the Vatican offered to fly him to Italy to receive treatment there.   Worse, the local police posted a message on Twitter, saying that they were surveilling posts about Alfie and threatened action.   Alder Hey had become Hotel California—you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.  And as Ross Douthat pointed out, the Alfie Evans case has powerful implications for end of life treatment as the West ages.

The callousness with which the parents of this child were treated, the inhumaness of it all was reminiscent of the Gulag.   The West fought Soviet encroachment for half a century.  Now we have become a society that itself uses government force to prevent its citizens from leaving and then monitors their communications. 

The MSM mocked Sarah Palin and her reference to “death panels” mercilessly.  But the death panels are now here—maybe not in the U.S. just yet---but we’re seeing a preview of the cold brutality of universal health care.   The whole episode was unnerving to watch unfold.  The callousness with which the parents were treated.  The implied threat to the parents to not permit them to take their baby home unless there was a “sea change” in their attitude.   The stripping away of parental rights by the state at the worst moment for a parent.   Whether or not the “experts” were correct in their assessment is almost irrelevant.  The state inflicted emotional torment on these people in a fashion George Orwell predicted in 1984.  Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard now stand as testaments to Sarah Palin’s warning.

And in the same week as the drama unfolded in the U.K., Planned Parenthood sued the state of Indiana to block the state from implementing a law that would require annual state inspections of abortion clinics and require them to report on complications from those procedures.  The crux of Planned Parenthood’s claim is that it puts an “undue burden” on the clinic, interfering with the Constitutional right to an abortion established under Roe. 

Planned Parenthood has come under pressure since they were caught on camera negotiating the price of fetus parts.  Then at a conference, abortionists from Planned Parenthood were surreptitiously filmed laughing and joking about the procedure—how heads were cracked, spinal cords were snapped and an eyeball rolled on her lap.   Only Edgar Allen Poe could have come up with details as gruesome.   While a judge ordered these tapes sealed, the damage had been done and the public became aware of exactly what goes on in these places and how desensitized some of these abortionists had become. 

Then came the whopper—Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist that evolved into a serial killer.   Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist was sentenced to life in prison after it was discovered that, he had operated a clinic in which he killed life babies by snipping their necks with a scissors.  Several jurors had to undergo counseling after seeing and hearing the evidence.  If Gosnell had happened in any other circumstances, there would be hearings, protests and a raft of regulatory measures.    But somehow abortion clinics are exempt from this, and this macabre event has largely been forgotten already.

Beauty salons get inspected.  Your local sandwich shop gets inspected.  Construction projects get inspected.  The U-Haul truck I just rented is required to undergo a federal inspection regimen.  Try developing some property with a bit of marsh on it and deal with your local EPA administrator.  The CFPB has unleashed thousands of pages of regulation and reporting requirements on how mortgage loans and car loans can be made.  But require an abortion clinic to undergo an inspection and report complications that occur in these young women---that’s an undue burden.  Hands off.  Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, the Gosnell case says that these places need regulatory supervision like every other organization involved in health and safety.

As Cecile Richards ends her term with accolades raining down on her on social media, we have to ask ourselves what kind of culture celebrates a person that snuffed out three times as many lives as Auschwitz and with as much efficiency?  Three and a half million abortions were performed under her tenure at Planned Parenthood.  The cheapening of life and the coarseness of the view of many on the left was highlighted by comedienne (?) Michelle Wolf’s “jokes” about abortion at the White House correspondents dinner, “ Don’t knock it until you try it.  And when you do try it, really knock it, you know, you gotta get that baby out of there. “ A real knee slapper.

Finally, Maine Republicans introduced a bill to criminalize female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice somewhat common among Muslim immigrants.   Somali refugees have settled in towns like Lewiston.  FGM is a barbaric practice designed to deprive women of sexual pleasure and a throwback to the middle ages.   It has no place in this country and should be fought at every turn.  But Democrats and the A.C.L.U. teamed up to defeat the measure, claiming, among other things, that it is illegal under federal law, that it would inhibit girls that have had the procedure from seeking medical attention, that it unfairly singles out a single group of people (Muslims).  The Republican measure would have criminalized FGM at the state level and also made it a crime to send a girl overseas to have the procedure done.

If FGM is part of your culture, you need to leave that at home.   Maine Republicans were correct to make the strongest statement possible that the medieval practice of FGM cannot gain a foothold here.  While exact numbers are not known, two doctors in Detroit have already been prosecuted for it and it is a large problem in Great Britain:

               “Despite being illegal for three decades, and despite more than 130,000 women in Britain having suffered this barbaric treatment, there have still been no successful prosecutions for the crime.  If Western Europe finds it so difficult even to confront something as straightforward as FGM, it seems unlikely it will ever be able to defend some of its subtler values in the years ahead.”

-        --Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe.

That the A.C.L.U. teamed up with Maine Democrats to fight this bill is simply appalling.  As much as anything, the bill sent a message that this practice will not be tolerated here, ever.   But again,  the A.C.L.U. would rather pander to a sector of Islamism than protect children.   

In all of these instances- Alfie Evans, the resistance of Planned Parenthood to “commonsense regulation,” the Left’s fight against criminalizing FGM, we are seeing a new barbarity, a cheapening of life, putting the state and liberal doctrine, including the barbaric practices of FGM, ahead of actually protecting children and family bonds.   It does not bode well for our society.

Oh, the Sanctimony

The world is awash is sanctimony right now.  In the 80’s, almost all of the sanctimony came from the right, particularly from evangelical Christian Republicans.  Their sanctimony, led by folks like Jerry Falwell, freaked liberals out.  A mere 13 years ago, Kevin Phillips wrote American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21^st Century.   Fast forward to today, only the peril of borrowed money remains.  Radical evangelicalism and dependence on foreign energy have mostly faded into the background.  Today’s self-righteousness comes mostly from the left.

The current icon of individual sanctimony is Jim Comey, former head of the F.B.I.  He is full bore into his book promotion/bash Trump tour that is mostly rationalizing and justifying the handling of his investigation of Hillary Clinton and alternatively smearing Trump directly or through innuendo (“I can’t say whether prostitutes peed on a mattress in front of Trump.  It might have happened.”).  

The entire tiresome tour is an attempt to vault himself onto a higher moral plane, and, indeed, the title of his book—A Higher Loyalty—hits you over the head with the purpose of his publicity tour (which the MSM is more than happy to oblige).  Along with his book tour, Comey has announced that he intends to teach ethics and leadership to further cement himself as a self-appointed authority in the subject.  But let’s take a step back and take a true measure of his authority.  How did the F.B.I. has actually perform under his leadership?  Putting aside his contempt for Donald Trump for a moment, how did the agency do and how did the people under him perform when it mattered?   Is the agency more esteemed, more respected, more effective today because of his leadership?

The answer is pretty obvious. 

Law enforcement generally has a dual mandate: (1) Protect us, and (2) Play it straight.   Comey’s F.B.I. failed miserably on both fronts.  Its actions with respect to the Pulse nightclub shooting was noteworthy because the shooter’s father was an F.B.I. informant, the shooter, Omar Mateen, was known to the F.B.I., and they permitted his wife to leave the country after the shooting occurred (although she was subsequently acquitted of being an accessory).  None of this smells quite right.  Similarly, at Parkland High School, Nikolas Cruz was known to the F.B.I., was waiving red flags and self-identifying as a school shooter on social media.  The agency admitted that it “failed to follow protocol,” in responding to the threat represented by Cruz.  The Las Vegas shooting was yet another fumble by the F.B.I. and months later, we still have no clarity on the incident.  Inexplicably, the F.B.I. left the shooter’s house unguarded the night after the incident and it was broken into with the thieves possibly removing evidence relevant to the deadliest mass murder in U.S. history.  The F.B.I. did not acquit itself well in any of these high profile cases.

The McCabe fiasco has now deteriorated into a cat fight among Comey, McCabe and Loretta Lynch, with each one accusing the other of being untruthful.   And McCabe is now suing Donald Trump for defamation.  Of course, you still have the mess with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the anti-Trump lovers who left an entire trail of unbecoming emails that destroyed any notion that they were playing it straight.

No matter what your views of Trump and no matter how this plays out, the head of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world should not be picking sides in a political fight.  Last week, Comey (whose entire family marched in the Women’s March) came out and said he wasn’t a Republican anymore, a revelation about as surprising as Barry Manilow’s announcement last year that he was gay.  Who could have guessed?

Comey’s shameless self-promotion now make it difficult to distinguish him from Stormy Daniels.  And if you consider the performance of the agency he led and its people in the areas that count—stopping bad guys and playing it straight—Comey’s better option would be to lay low and box up the sanctimony. 

On the corporate side, preachy Starbucks also did a pratfall last week.   Starbucks has held itself out as a progressive paragon in the corporate world, and you now routinely get a little social justice with your latte.   It took a stand on immigration, defiantly announcing that it would hire illegal aliens (prompting a social media outcry –what about veterans).    CEO Howard Schultz jumped into race relations a few years ago with its RaceTogether initiative (in response to the narrative around Michael Brown) and actively encouraged its employees to talk to its customers about race.   The company has piously incorporated all of the social justice/sustainability talking points  into its corporate mission.   The company that fastidiously tailors your coffee drink and wouldn’t dream of putting artificial sweetener in it without your permission routinely serves up a dose of virtue signaling whether or not you have asked for it.  Sometimes you just want a cup o’ jo.

So it’s hard not to smirk a little to see Starbucks get hoisted on its own petard.   Last week when two young African Americans were asked to leave a store and then arrested when they would not, the heads at the executive offices of the virtuous Seattle based company nearly exploded.  Howard Schultz was immediately on the news accusing his manager of at least “unconscious bias,” and terminated her even though it appears that she followed company policy with respect to loitering patrons that don’t buy coffee.

And on top of this, a leader of the women’s march is trying to organize a boycott of Starbucks due to a partnership with a Jewish group.  When it rains social justice, it pours.

In response, Starbucks is closing ALL of its stores for a day for mandatory training.   Think about that for a second.  It is 2018 and a major national restaurant chain is shutting down to teach its people how to treat African Americans.  Excuse me, but I thought our society had settled this out about half  a century ago.

Not that I am a little sympathetic to Starbucks’s plight.  With 8,200 locations in the U.S., it was inevitable that some newsworthy incident somewhere someday would crop up.  Somebody somewhere would find something icky in their drink.   Some Starbucks manager would be caught selling drugs out of the back.   Some supplier would be found breaking the law.  But Starbucks got caught in the crosshairs of the very issue it was impliedly lecturing us all about.

To be sure, Starbucks has a difficult line to walk.   As a place that is known as a business meeting and hangout place, it’s difficult judgment call to know when to weed out “free riders” that are simply loitering without buying coffee.   Public libraries have an analogous problem with unkempt, smelly homeless people that nearly take up residence and by their presence dissuade other patrons from coming in.  The trick is to enforce policies uniformly across stores and especially ensure that rules aren’t enforced differently ever based on race.  Ever.  One the other hand, you don’t want to get played either by people that demand special treatment or exempt from policies BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK.  Of course, as of today, protesters are griping that Starbucks isn’t going far enough—it will never be enough once you start playing the corporate identity politics game.

The company that moralizes, preaches, and is so inclusive that it has banished any hint of Christmas from its holiday cups has to take a time out to train its people on how to treat blacks.  Not Chick-Fil-A.  Not Hobby Lobby.  Not even Cracker Barrel or any of the other companies that progressives are contemptuous of.   The virtuous Starbucks is now being devoured by black activists and the Women’s March. 

One of the most openly socially self- congratulating progressive companies is tangled up in how it treats black customers and the former head of the top law enforcement agency in the world who is teaching ethics is himself being investigated.

Sanctimony often bites back.

At the Movies

If you are tired of the news cycle and this never ending winter.  If you have had it with Syria, Michael Cohen, Paul Ryan’s retirement, Stormy Daniels, James Comey sanctimony and living with the anxiety that we could wake up and find we are engaged in WWIII, you might try a little escape and there are a few noteworthy films are in theaters at the moment that are very much worth seeing.   I highly recommend A Quiet Place and Chappaquiddick, along with The Death of Stalin (with some reservations).   Obviously, Chappaquiddick doesn’t quite take you away from the political overload but it is nonetheless a good reminder of what Deep State looked like before it metastasized into its present form.  While spring baseball and golf are being held in abeyance by this awful spring weather, fortunately there are some good films to drag you away from current events.

A QUIET PLACE

I have been hungry for a new and interesting sci-fi film for some time.  Terminator and Alien are classics but those franchises have run out of gas, with Alien Covenant falling to new depths in this series that should have ended in 1986 with Aliens.  Likewise, Star Wars and Star Trek have also petered out, in my view and I even snoozed a bit during the last Star Trek film.  The remakes of Bladerunner and Planet of the Apes were mediocre.  Interstellar didn’t wow me, and neither did Arrival.  Frankly, Annihilation should have been annihilated. 

But A Quiet Place is a cut above.   It represents a fresh concept, and doesn’t try to overwhelm you with special effects.   A Quiet Place follows a post-apocalyptic family redoubting in a farm house in upstate New York.   Disconnected from whatever remains of civilization, the countryside is populated  by predatory creatures that have superlative hearing and use it to hunt down their human prey.   A snap of a twig could alert them to your presence and have them descend upon you.  The family has figured out how to survive by using sign language, nods and gestures, but the the extreme quiet and isolation of the family keep stress levels high.  The awful cliché ridden, stilted dialogue that sinks most sci-fi movies is completely absent by design in this film.  In fact, the actress that stands out is young (14 or 15) deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, who already gets my nod as best supporting actress.  The film is able to keep a high level of tension throughout.

To be sure, there are a few minor weaknesses.   The creatures borrow heavily from Alien and Predator and are kind of a hybrid of the two.  There is one short scene that appears to be plagiarized from Jurassic Park.  But overall, the acting is quite good, and its novel approach—making you aware of subtle sounds and noises—is refreshing, especially in an industry that most often tries to overload us with special effects.  I only recommend that you see this film on a sparsely attended Sunday or Monday night so that you won’t be distracted by people munching on popcorn and sipping on soda.

A Quiet Place is the best sci-fi/horror movie of the last couple of decades.  Even its title is unusual and subdued for a film of its genre, giving no clue as to what the film is about.  I have often held that sci-fi horror movies are often allegorical and reflect the fear and anxiety that pervades society at the time.  The Godzilla films in Japan and the B movies in the U.S. of the 50’s (Them, Attack of the Giant Spiders) echoed the fear of nuclear war.   Terminator reflected the fear that robots would annihilate humanity and, of course, the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey of 50 years ago was ahead of its time, predicting the hazards of AI (“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that”).  A Quiet Place melds our independent frontier past with a post-apocalyptic dystopian future—our lives have become an endless stream of cacophony inputs, bombarding us from sun up to sun down.  Our phones beep and buzz at us.  Films blare at us.  Urban life assaults our auditory systems every day.  A Quiet Place flips it.   The family is forced to be perfectly still, turn off all techno things that beep, ring, or chime or face immediate death.   A Quiet Place may earn a spot as one of the best sci-fi films of the decade.

CHAPPAQUIDDICK

Chappaquiddick is also noteworthy for not being overacted.  Jason Clark was excellent as young Ted Kennedy.  It was a role that would have been easy to overdo, and while Clark looks remarkably like Kennedy, he did not overreach with the Boston accent.   As we all know by now, Chappaquiddick recounts that fateful evening when Ted Kennedy left a party with Mary Jo Kopechne, then 28.  The exact details of what happened that night remain murky, and were intended to remain so.  Kennedy (who likely was drinking) drove off of a bridge and flipped the car and while he escaped, Mary Jo remained trapped inside.   Kennedy waited a full 10 hours to report the accident, claiming he was suffering from physical and emotional shock.  But Joe Gargan and Paul Markham didn’t report it either, and left the matter to Kennedy to report, even though they returned to try to get Mary Jo out of the car after Kennedy walked back to the cabin where the family had been partying with a group of female staffers.  

Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended sentence.  The DA, who tried to reopen the case was stymied when Mary Jo’s parents denied him the ability to exhume her body and perform an autopsy.   The diver that retrieved her body reported that there was an air bubble in the car that would have permitted her to live for up to three hours.  Kopechne likely would have lived if Kennedy had responded quickly.   The accident and the delay in reporting prompted charges of a cover up, and even during the Watergate investigation, comments such as, “At least no one drowned at Watergate.”

As we all know, Kennedy went on to become know as the Lion of the Senate, and was a chief architect of our hyper divisive politics, derailing the nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court (despite the fact that Bork was highly qualified and had no skeletons in his closet)—a tactic that became known as Borking).   He led the charge against Clarence Thomas and was a supporter of chain migration.   While he never got to be president (he lost a primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980, which may have cost Carter the election to Reagan, so perhaps we should be grateful).

Chappaquiddick does for the  Kennedy family what Spotlight did for the Boston Archdiocese.   Those films show us the measures that will be taken to protect the inner circle of powerful institutions, even when those institutions commit heinous acts.   The organization and those around it will close ranks, and so will the press, unless it has individuals courageous enough to risk their careers as they did at the Boston Globe with the Boston Archdiocese sex abuse scandal.   We can see the same forces at work today with Peter Strzok, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, and Jim Comey as they whitewash Hillary Clinton’s email and money laundering scandals.   Chappaquiddick, like Spotlight, highlights just how a person can be sheltered from accountability for horrendous behavior if you have enough friends in the right places.  I ordinarily reject the concept of “white privilege” in its entirety, but the Kennedy clan breathes substance into the term.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

I vacillated greatly on recommending this film.   The Death of Stalin is a farce around the death of Joseph Stalin and the subsequent power struggle in the Soviet Union.  The film has a lot going for it.  Its Monty Pythonesque silliness and one-liners are sometimes very good.   It is laden with some excellent acting talent.   Steve Buscemi does a masterful job as Nikita Khrushchev.   Jason Isaacs turns in a solid performance as Georgy Zhukov.  And Monty Python veteran Michael Palin kills it with his portrayal of Vyacheslav Molotov.  As a fan of dark comedy, there were times that this film was uproariously funny.  The writing and acting talent combined to make this film—like A Quiet Place—a truly interesting and different work.   But it is difficult to make a farce involving the Stalin terror work.   I remember some controversy around the T.V. show Hogan’s Heroes at the time.  It was a little too close to the end of WWII and the brutality of Nazi POW camps for comfort (1965).  I felt a bit the same about The Death of Stalin.  As someone that grew up with Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians that escaped the Stalin terror, I have at least second-hand knowledge of the repressiveness of the Soviet regime.   A dark comedy about the Holocaust would certainly draw criticism in the press and the Stalin’s Soviet Union was not far behind Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the scale and scope of its terror, and if you go by body count, it exceeded it.   Still, it is a film worth seeing if you have a hankering for off-beat dark comedy.

ITZHAK

I saved perhaps the best for last.  A few years ago, I began to be drawn to the documentary film genre.   If it is well done, a documentary film can provide an insight into a person or a situation in a way that even a well written and well documented book cannot.  And on my blog, I have reviewed several outstanding documentaries such as Jane (Jane Goodall), Austerlitz, and Finding Vivian Maier.   The 2011 and 2012 Oscar winners, Undefeated and Searching for Sugar Man were two outstanding and moving films.

Music lovers especially will love Itzhak, a refreshingly complete and fulfilling documentary on this gift to humanity – Itzhak Perlman.  I am at a disadvantage because I am musically illiterate, but Itzhak is a moving portrayal of this extraordinarily gifted musician.  Like his scientific counterpart, Stephen Hawking, Perlman had to overcome a crippling disability (polio) to become one of the finest violinists of our lifetime.   Harkening from modest beginnings, Itzhak struggled against his affliction, transcended his very modest beginnings and overbearing teachers to become a master of his realm.  And unlike so many top performers in so many fields, Perlman did not fall prey to drug or alcohol abuse, philandering, or idiosyncratic quirks that would make him unlikeable.  Indeed, he stayed married to the same woman during the course of his life.  His slight cantankerousness is in line with almost every aging man on the planet.

This wonderful film brings together snippets from his youth and middle age, with his national launch at age 13 on the Ed Sullivan Show.  It neatly weaves in his day to day existence, overcoming snow and ice in his electric wheelchair and the impediments to such mundane tasks as boarding an airplane or going to the bathroom.  This film is at its best when it shows this extraordinary man in ordinary moments.  He is at his best in the film in candid moments with his wife, drinking wine with friend Alan Alda and sprinkling Jewish humor throughout.

This is a man that LIVES.  His passion for all things—his music, people, and the sensory pleasures of life—above all music, but also baseball, food and wine.

An important part of the film is his relationship with his wife, Toby, who is also a classically trained musician.  Part of the film’s charm is exploring Toby’s big personality and her importance to his success.  The strength and durability of their long and mutually respectful marriage is something to be admired.

Of course, the film would not be complete without a full complement of snippets of his performances, but the filmmakers are careful not to overdo things and provide us instead with shortened samples.  Appropriately, the most moving and most complete is his performance of the theme from Schindler’s List, a score which is nearly impossible not to come away from misty eyed.

I recommend any one of these fine films, and hope you see all of them, but if you want to have your faith in humanity restored and only have time to see one, see Itzhak.   This man, his music, his marriage, his life is one to be admired.

All Zucked Up

The Man Who Would Be King will be testifying before Congress this week.  Mark Zuckerberg’s digital empire seems to have scraped an iceberg and is taking on water.   The Cambridge Analytica fiasco has ripped open a wide gash in Facebook’s business model and exposed fundamental flaws inherent in it.

Thus far, the Facebook team looks quite amateurish in its response.   Zuckerberg sent representatives to Europe to meet with European regulators instead of traveling in person.  His prepared comments yesterday were platitudinous and were capped off with his outlandish claim that “advertisers and developers will never take priority as long as I’m running Facebook,” which prompted knee slapping comments all around social media yesterday.  Likewise, Sheryl Sandberg’s apology tour has been full of platitudes, claims of making innocent adolescent mistakes, and attempts to elevate Facebook above it the fray.  “We were way too idealistic,” Sandberg spouted, as if Facebook’s aspirations to achieve a higher purpose was sufficient to wash away their sins.   She further asserted that the company was in compliance with all FTC regulations, which may not be true—Facebook may face FTC fines in the billions.  Zuckerberg, in concert with Sandberg keeps repeating lofty, grandiose statements of purpose for his company that are sounding flatter every day.  In fact, they are beginning to echo of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes’s claims of, “We’re here to change the world.”   As if that were enough to insulate Zuckerberg and Facebook.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Zuckerberg will not be Chairman of Facebook by this time next year and that Facebook, while it will still exist, will be a great deal less relevant than it is today.  Facebook faces multiple material issues that go to the heart of its existence. 

• ·        Facebook’s business model is broken.  I have to admit that I was wrong about Facebook in my blog post a couple of years ago.   I wrote that Facebook met an inherent human need—to connect with people, and that is was essentially free.   While it does permit us to easily connect with friends and family, the price may turn out to be unacceptably high for many people—a total forfeiture of your privacy.  For us Android users, the cost to privacy was very high indeed.  Facebook apparently has scraped text messages and call data from phones.

• ·        Facebook’s failure to curtail fake news has implications for our democracy.  While the integrity of all of media has broken down into hyperpartisan advocates, rather than news reporting, Facebook’s platform has been most egregious.  And one of the biggest problems is that Facebook itself has allowed itself to become hyperpartisan.   It allowed Russian agents to propagate disinformation.   But it also likely permitted the Clinton campaign to harvest data from millions.

• ·     Facebook’s political bias is now beyond the pale.   There have been suspicions that Facebook suppresses conservative viewpoints but now it is out in the open.  Just a few days before Zuckerberg’s testimony, Facebook banished Diamond and Silk, two conservative pro-Trump black women as being “dangerous to the community.”  Diamond and Silk are no more dangerous to the community than Jimmy Kimmel.   And at the same time, Facebook permits Antifa and its members to post.   Facebook’s bias is at the front end of this battle as Twitter has also shadowbanned people and otherwise banned or suppressed politically conservative commentators.

Zuckerberg said that his company is more like a government than a company.  The problem for Zuckerberg is that nobody elected him and this country has a long history of pushing back on the power and reach of government.   But I have to hand it to Zuckerberg, the young, brash lad got me to rethink my position on an issue.   As a small government advocate, my default position is to let markets alone to sort out behavior.   I have reacted negatively to every push by the government to regulate the internet.

The behavior of Facebook and the rest of Big Tech has caused me to reconsider.  Perhaps we do need a Digital Protection Agency.  We have had an Environmental Protection Agency to make sure corporate America acts responsibly when it comes to the environment.  The CFPB issues thousands of pages of regulations on terms and conditions of mortgages and other consumer lending.  But social media trading on our personal data has almost no rules.  I need to think through some of the contours of regulation, especially since it would come so close to touching freedom of speech issues, but I at least am now willing to consider some level of regulatory scheme.

I have written this all before hearing Zuckerberg’s testimony but I do not suspect his testimony to change my views much.

One thing I know for sure.  Alexa will not be taking up residence in my home anytime soon.

What the He___?

The mainstream media along with more prestigious publications such as Foreign Affairs have lambasted Donald Trump for upsetting the “world order,” pulling out of TPP, threatening to pull out of NAFTA, and calling into question military alliances such as NATO.   Respected “experts” such as Adam Posen have attacked the Trumpian “America First” doctrine in trade relations (see The Post-American World Economy; April 1 Foreign Affairs) and Richard Haass has been critical of Trump in foreign policy.   They argue that, while not perfect, these relationships have, on balance, served us well and have strengthened us economically and have kept us more secure.  Trump has threatened to disrupt the “world order.”

But not to be outdone,  Pope Francis,  apparently and without warning that the issue was even under consideration, abolished Hell during Holy Week.  Now the Vatican and other archdiocese are scurrying around, claiming that it is not true, that Pope Francis was misquoted in an interview, and that the official Vatican position is that Hell does, in fact, exist.   But the fact that other Catholic authorities had to make clarifying remarks about the existence of Hell, tells us something.  Either Francis was careless or imprecise in his remarks, was injudicious in who he will grant an interview with, or was materially misquoted.  None of these possible explanations for this episode is good and the episode lit up social media for a day or two.  If true, Francis’s position may represent a major concession to Jean-Paul Satre (“Hell is other people.”).

The hubbub over this is…..well….positively Trumpian and echoes of Trump’s comment about “shithole countries” last month.   It's almost karma that Pope Francis would step into a very Trump-like controversy.   Francis apparently made the reference to Hell in an interview with Eugenio Scalfari, a friend of the pontiff not always known for his fastidiousness.  But the Vatican claimed that Scalfari’s comments were a “reconstruction” but has not yet issued a direct denial.   But what gives the story some legs is that Francis has made some surprising moves—most recently he advocated a revision to the wording of the Lord’s Prayer.  Who would have thought that the Lord’s Prayer needed editing?

We heard about Stormy Daniels for weeks in the mainstream media, but the controversy over Hell seems to me to be vastly more important.   Hell is a basic concept in Christianity.  Its existence has lurked in the background and in some measure may have guided the behavior of Catholics for a couple of millenia.

If the Pope, who is infallible on matters of faith, simply erased Hell, I’m not sure how I feel about that.  In one sense it is a relief, because according the Catholic doctrine, there are a myriad of sins that may qualify you for that horrible place and eternity is a very long time.  It would be easy to trip over the rules (like missing Mass on Sunday) without going to confession and end up in eternal torment.  On the other hand, eliminating Hell would leave open a lot of questions.  Where, then, does Satan reside?   What about souls that really do belong there, like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Jeffrey Dahmer?   Going forward, would eliminating Hell change behavior of people?   If Hell did not exist, doesn’t that bring us closer to atheists, who believe that your soul simply ceases to exist when you die?   Do we purge Dante from library shelves like we have been tearing down statues of Confederate generals? 

It’s hard to imagine two world leaders with such divergent views.  Unlike Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, who together faced down the Soviet Union, Trump and Francis appear to be on the opposite ends of on a range of substantive and important issues: immigration, climate change, borders, the role of capitalism in modern society. 

Still, these two leaders have more in common than you might think.  Both Trump and Francis are disrupters.   They represent discontinuities and are attempting to make changes in their respective organizations that have an entrenched establishment fighting hard to resist that change.   Both, for instance,  are attempting to deal with an emerging China in their own way while Francis appears to be seeking some sort of an accommodation with the Chinese regime.  Trump appears to be taking a somewhat more confrontational approach to Chinese economic and military power.  But both realize that a relationship with China needs to be managed.    Both Trump and the pontiff have also taken a bolder stance in matters of foreign affairs.  Francis has not hesitated to leap into political matters.   Trump has also moved aggressively on several fronts:  Making a visionary speech in the Middle East last summer, recognizing Israel’s capital as Jerusalem, agreeing to meet with Kim Jung-Un, and taking concrete action against Chinese trade practices and intellectual property theft and coercion.  

I look forward to reading Ross Douthat’s new book, To Change the Church:  Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.    Regardless of Douthat’s assessment, I believe that Francis has more in common with Trump than either would admit.   Neither man is a caretaker leader.  Both have a higher toleration for risk taking than their immediate predecessors, and the organizations that they lead will look much different at the end of their tenure as a result.  Both are out to reshuffle the existing order and are willing to buck the establishment.

Pope Francis apparent challenge to the existence of Hell and Trump tweeting out to Kim Jung-Un, “Why would Kim Jung-Un call me “old” when I would NEVER call him “short and fat?”  Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend- and maybe someday that will happen!”  and then agreeing to meet with him without conditions tells you that both men are committed to a break with the past. Neither is a guardian of the status quo.  Like them or not, they are the new disrupters.