"The fact of the matter is that we can no more choose our culture and its languages than we can our parents. A trendy academic recently urged his peers to make a careful selection among what he called our ‘cultural baggage.’ We should not deceive ourselves, however. If our … [Read more...]
French Fries and Diet Coke
Just got a card in the mail that breathlessly announced to me that a bunch of Bill Sali's campaign war chest, not to mention that of Robert Vasquez, comes from "out of state special interests." Whoa. That's bad, we are supposed to think. Then the thought comes, who was kind … [Read more...]
They Feel Good All Over
"Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct has freely used and abused the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. This is part of what makes it so seductive. How gratifying to know that one is automatically on the … [Read more...]
No Such Thing As Art In General
"Art is a discipline rooted in a specific culture." [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), p. 24] … [Read more...]
Free the Goldfish!
"Creativity is possible only as the final stage in a long, rigorous absorption of the teachings and discoveries of the past. The last thing we need for the future of our country or of our young people is one more lunatic smashing goldfish bowls in order to free the goldfish" [E. … [Read more...]
Intellectual Carnage
"There is perhaps no more dramatic index of the disaster that has befallen liberal arts education in this country than the contempt in which the new academic orthodoxy holds this constellation of ideas about the nature and goals of higher education. It would be difficult to … [Read more...]
Doublethink
"Perhaps Marcuse's ability to reconcile liberty and dictatorship has come of age, and Orwell's characterization of such thinking as 'doublethink' does not bring the flash of recognition that it once did" (The Shadow University, p. 96). … [Read more...]
Deconstructing Nehushtan
"There is another sense in which we can ‘burn incense’ to a work of art. We can overmystify it, ascribing to it supernatural or religious functions The passage on the destruction of the serpent image says that ‘it was called Nehushtan.’ The Hebrew is rather ambiguous here, but … [Read more...]
Sounds Like Some People I Know
"Many codes explicitly encourage charging a student with sexual harassment even if his intent is innocent . . . The City University of New York warns that 'sexual harassment is not defined by intentions, but by impact on the subject.' As Herbert London, a dean and a professor of … [Read more...]
How Art Should Be Didactic
"Artistic images can appeal powerfully to the emotions, kindling pity at human suffering or outrage at evil. Art that is ostentatiously didactic, having no other merit than that of the lesson it teaches, generally fails both as art and as teaching. This is often because it starts … [Read more...]
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