Culture Clips - May 2, 2006
Totalitarian Chic
In January 2005, Britain's Prince Harry
attended a birthday party dressed as a Nazi. When the London Sun published
a picture of the prince in his German desert uniform and swastika armband,
it triggered widespread outrage and disgust. In scathing editorials,
Harry was condemned as an ignorant and insensitive clod; months later,
he was still apologizing for his tasteless costume. "It was a very
stupid thing to do," he said in September. "I've learnt my
lesson."
For a more recent example of totalitarian fashion, consider Tim Vincent,
the New York correspondent for NBC's entertainment newsmagazine, "Access
Hollywood." Twice in the last few weeks, Vincent has introduced
stories about upcoming movies while sporting an open jacket over a bright
red T-shirt — on which, clearly outlined
in gold, was a large red star and a hammer-and-sickle: the international
emblems of totalitarian communism.
And what was the public reaction to seeing those icons of cruelty
and death turned into the latest yuppie style? Furor? Moral outrage?
Blistering editorials?
None of the above.
Nazi regalia may be strictly taboo, but communist emblems have never
been trendier. Enter "hammer and sickle" into a shopping search
engine, and up pop dozens of products adorned with the Marxist brand
— T-shirts and ski caps, bracelet charms
and keychains, posters of Lenin and "Soviet Kremlin Stainless Steel
Flasks."
Jeff Jacoby
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/jeffjacoby/
2006/05/01/195627.html
--
Earlier this month, Lieutenant Governor
Kerry Healey, the only Republican in the [Massachusetts] governor's
race, explained in an interview why she and her husband picked a private
school for their son and daughter. "I want my kids to be in an
environment where they can talk about values," she said —
talk about values, that is, "in a way that you can’t always do
in a public school setting."
It's hard to see anything objectionable in Healey's words, but they
triggered a broadside from Attorney General Thomas Reilly, a Democrat
and the only gubernatorial candidate whose children all attended public
schools.
Healey is "completely out of touch with the lives of regular people,"
he snapped.
"Somehow the perception is that the
kids in public schools are not learning the values that they should
be learning.... Public schools reinforced the values of our home....
It was a wonderful experience."
Those quotes appeared in The Boston Globe on April 17. Now consider
a story that appeared three days later.
The…incident, also at the Estabrook School,
was triggered when a second-grade teacher presented to her class a storybook
celebration of homosexual romance and marriage.
There is nothing subtle about "King & King," the book
that Heather Kramer read to her young students. It tells the story of
Prince Bertie, whose mother the queen nags him to get married ("When
I was your age, I’d been married twice already," she says), and
parades before him a bevy of princesses to choose from. But Bertie,
who says he’s "never cared much for princesses," rejects them
all. Then "Princess Madeleine and her brother, Prince Lee,"
show up, and Bertie falls in love at first sight —
with the brother. Soon, the princes are married. "The wedding was
very special," reads the text. "The queen even shed a tear
or two." Bertie and Lee are elevated from princes to kings, and
the last page shows them exchanging a passionate kiss.
Jeff Jacoby
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/jeffjacoby/
2006/04/28/195371.html
--
A war has begun. The four largest broadcast television networks and 800 of their affiliates are taking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to federal court. For the public, the claim is that the FCC's latest fine of CBS is unconstitutional and does not apply a clear and consistent standard on matters of decency.
It's true that the FCC has not always come to agreement on fines with perfect consistency. But for anyone following the decency debate, this network argument is drop-to-your-knees funny. The broadcasters, saying the regulators have an inconsistent standard on decency? The broadcasters rate their programs for parents using differing standards for each network, often for each show, with holes in the parental protections so broad you could drive a fleet of Hummers through it. And they think the FCC is inconsistent?
But that's not what this network lawsuit is about. The real network viewpoint came through in the Frank Ahrens report in the Washington Post: The hope that this lawsuit "could become the test case awaited by broadcasters who seek to challenge the government's ability to police the airwaves, the broadcasters acknowledge privately."
There's a powerful underlying message in that "acknowledging privately" phrase. The networks are fighting a two-faced war. To parents and the general public, they talk of social responsibility, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars talking up their V-chip, and how they aid parents to navigate the channels. But in court filings, and in the councils of power, the networks are unmasked for what they are: people who believe in no limits, no standards, no scruples. It's an industry that is just a profitable assembly line of garbage, and wants the "right" to offend many millions of families, using the public airwaves owned by those families to do so.
Brent Bozell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/brentbozell/
2006/04/28/195438.html
--
Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," says one of the characters in "The Da Vinci Code," the best-selling novel by Dan Brown. It's not clear whether this line will appear in the movie, which reaches theaters in three weeks, but some version of it probably will make the final cut. Although nobody expects Christians to riot over "The Da Vinci Code" the way Muslims did over those Mohammad cartoons, some clergymen already have announced their disapproval. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Easter sermon to criticize Mr. Brown's book for making the true story of Christianity seem "automatically suspect." In an advertisement in the New York Times, the Catholic League compared "The Da Vinci Code" to the anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
It turns out, however, that many Christian leaders are choosing a completely different approach to the movie. They certainly aren't embracing "The Da Vinci Code" and its conspiracy theories about the supposed marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the phony divinity of Christ and so on. Yet many view the film as providing an unconventional occasion —"teachable moment," as they say--to spread their faith. "It's a marvelous opportunity to be positive," said Josh McDowell of Campus Crusade for Christ in the Orlando Sentinel. "If you look carefully, truth will always stand."
The movie's tagline happens to be "seek the truth" — a phrase that feels like an invitation to explore and think rather than a demand to watch and submit. It distantly echoes Acts 17:11, which urges people to read Scripture so that they may determine its validity. Sony Pictures, the studio behind the film, obviously hopes that millions of Christian truth-seekers will feel inspired to buy tickets. There's no guarantee that they will: In 1988, when Christians protested "The Last Temptation of Christ" for its depictions of Jesus as lustful and confused, Mr. McDowell's organization tried to buy the film prints so that they could be destroyed.
John J. Miller
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008303
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