SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
April 2004
Volume 11, Number 4 -- "The Passion" Furor
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Gibson and the New Taboos
-> The Moving Picture (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> The Real World War II
-> Crying "Wolf!" at the Lamb
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
Gibson and the New Taboos
(page 1)
When Mel Gibson's PASSION OF THE CHRIST was finally
released on Ash Wednesday, the reviewers went to work.
Most of them avoided the too-predictable charge of
"anti-Semitism" and chose to find other excuses for
disapproving it. The most common rap was "excessive
violence."
Well, yes. It's a film about what might even be
*called* excessive violence. Gibson himself announced
that long ago.
The word "crucifixion" has long been immediately
associated, in the West (formerly known as Christendom),
with *the* Crucifixion. It stands for a single remote
event that has been softened and stylized by iconography,
while the countless other crucifixions of antiquity have
been forgotten.
The first hearers and readers of the Gospels didn't
need a movie to tell them what a crucifixion was. They
knew it as a familiar and horrible form of punishment.
They understood concretely what it meant to say that
Jesus had been crucified; no elaboration was necessary.
For us, distance has removed both familiarity and the
sense of horror.
It's been Gibson's inspiration to realize that film
is the first art form to make it possible to restore that
horror. No previous artistic representation of Christ's
suffering has more than suggested it. Painting,
sculpture, drama, and music have symbolized it and
explored its significance, sometimes movingly, but even
previous movies based on the Gospels have never conveyed
its actuality very vividly.
This is exactly what Gibson decided to attempt. He
chose to abandon the conventional decorum of Christian
art and imagine the Crucifixion anew as a real
crucifixion, with all its blood, agony, and humiliation.
He seems to have succeeded. The film presents the
Stations of the Cross with stunning realism.
Is it excessive? Here's an irony. Not so long ago, a
film this violent would have been banned. But standards
have changed, and the same film reviewers who condemn THE
PASSION OF THE CHRIST for its gore have long welcomed and
applauded the "candor" of other directors who savor
unflinching mayhem, from Peckinpaugh to Scorsese to
Tarantino, holding squeamishness up to scorn.
The old taboos have fallen. Gibson has merely taken
advantage of this fact for religious -- evangelical --
purposes. But in doing so, he has broken the new taboos,
shocking critics who fancied themselves shockproof. They
never dreamed that the "new candor" would be put to such
reactionary uses.
Christ, we are taught, told his apostles to announce
the Good News. He apparently didn't direct them to engage
in apologetics or debate philosophy. The Good News would
speak for itself, and no great education was necessary
for its proclamation or recognition. If their audience
was receptive, good. If not, they were to shake the dust
from their feet and move on.
Gibson has used the modern medium of film to tell
the central part of the simple Gospel story, filling in
such details as may help a modern audience to see it in
its immediacy. If some viewers choose to raise
sophisticated objections to it, well, that's their loss.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is indeed an ordeal to watch,
but the thing that makes it bearable is that it is still,
in the end, good news.
The Moving Picture
(page 2)
I never thought the phrase "worse than Bush" would
pass my lips, except perhaps as wild hyperbole (like
"hotter than hell"). But something tells me John Kerry
merits it. A nominal Catholic, he's an unreserved
pro-abortion, pro-sodomy liberal Democrat, cold as a fish
in his secularism, as comfortable with the Total State as
a snake on a warm rock. Not that I'm any more reconciled
to Bush. If I were forced into a voting booth at gunpoint
and ordered to cast my ballot for Kerry or Bush, I'd pull
a Jack Benny.
* * *
By the way, who is Willie Horton supporting this
year? I'll never forget his wonderful 1988 endorsement:
"Naturally, I'm for Dukakis." That must rank high among
history's unsolicited testimonials. It was the adverb
that made it exquisite.
* * *
I yield to nobody in my derision of homosexual
mock-marriages, but I hope that in this year's
presidential campaign the Republicans will find other
things to talk about. *Must* the Democrats hand them this
issue?
* * *
We are now hearing, from David Brooks and others,
that "neoconservative" is a hostile code-word for "Jew."
Vicious nonsense. Irving Kristol, "the godfather of
neoconservatism," and many others have embraced the label
proudly. But the Iraq war they craved has given them such
unwelcome exposure that, as Michael Lind has observed in
THE NATION, they are now reduced to "denying their own
existence." Milovan Djilas once remarked: "The Party Line
is that there is no Party Line." For the neocons now, the
Party Line is that there is no Party.
* * *
While we're enjoying the postwar recriminations,
let's not forget that the neocons' pseudo-patriotic war
propaganda was subsidized in large part by three
foreign-born press tycoons: Conrad Black, Rupert Murdoch,
and Mortimer Zuckerman. These guys deserve a lot more
credit than they're getting.
* * *
If it hadn't been for the Jewish protests, the
"offensive" line in Mel Gibson's PASSION OF THE CHRIST --
"His blood be on us and on our children" -- would have
passed pretty much unnoticed. Now *everyone* has heard
it. Abe Foxman has given it more attention than it
received in the Middle Ages.
* * *
"Wherever they go [in Afghanistan]," laments Tom
Brokaw, "the [U.S.] soldiers are at risk of being
attacked." Ain't it the truth, though. Next time, let's
make war on a friendlier country.
* * *
Credit where credit is due, I say again. Whenever I
hear a Shostakovich symphony, I reflect that perhaps
Stalin hasn't been given his due as a music critic. The
sometimes excessive severity of his judgments, in my
view, doesn't detract from their essential soundness.
* * *
Why do we put presidents' portraits on our money? In
fairness, George Washington should be removed from the
single and replaced by a picture of the current chairman
of the Federal Reserve, who, after all, determines its
value. Surely Washington wouldn't want credit for that.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
The New York Yankees have signed Alex Rodriguez, the
acknowledged greatest all-around player in baseball, much
to the chagrin of the Boston Red Sox, who'd failed to get
him a few weeks earlier. Let's knock off all this talk of
the great Yankee-Red Sox "rivalry," when nobody can
recall the last time the Red Sox won. You might as well
talk about the great rivalry between Sonny Liston and
Floyd Patterson.
* * *
After more than two decades, the aging upstart
WASHINGTON TIMES remains an amateurish alternative to the
WASHINGTON POST. Worse yet, its daily three-page
commentary section, rigidly right-wing (well, Republican
and neocon, really), achieves consistent monotony; the
POST, for all its liberalism, offers more real variety,
and far better writing, on its single op-ed page. And the
TIMES is still losing millions of dollars annually.
The Real World War II
(pages 3-5)
The Iraq war has given rise to a new wave of
nostalgia for World War II, with its "moral clarity" and
the "Greatest Generation," as Tom Brokaw's best-selling
book calls it. All sense of the tragedy and sheer
ugliness of that war seems to have been replaced by a
sentimental haze. Our boys were heroes, warmly if
anxiously supported by the folks at home; Franklin
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill provided inspired and
visionary leadership for what Churchill called "the Great
Democracies."
Paul Fussell, a fine literary critic who is also a
combat veteran, remembers it all differently. His 1989
book WARTIME demolishes the happy image of "the Good War"
(the title of yet another book by the ancient
proletarian, Studs Turkel). To call Fussell's book a
classic would give the wrong impression. There is nothing
stately or musty about it. It's vigorously colloquial,
and the best description of it may be to say it's
refreshing. Every page rings true. The reader feels he is
meeting the real daily experience of the war for the
first time. The Iraq war has made Fussell's account all
the more recognizable.
Like most wars, World War II began in optimism. It
would be won quickly, thanks to American know-how and
long-distance "precision bombing," which, the experts
assured, would reduce the need for ground combat. As the
enemy proved -- surprise! -- stubborn, strategy and
tactics intensified (that is, became cruder and more
brutal), culminating in massive bombing of cities and,
finally, the atomic bomb. But not before some of the most
terrific infantry battles of all time.
At home, American civilians had little conception of
the real war. Journalism and Hollywood gave only heavily
censored accounts and images, showing almost none of the
grotesque mutilations that were routine on the
battlefield. In the movies, nearly all wounds were mere
flesh wounds; young boys didn't get their faces shot off.
Nothing to put the home folks off their popcorn. Then as
now, enthusiasm for the war was generally roughly
proportionate to one's distance from the front.
The troops were bitterly aware that civilians knew
little, and therefore cared little, about what they were
actually going through. Their bitterness, Fussell argues,
helps explain the extreme obscenity of their daily
conversation; polite language was inadequate to express
their feelings about the war. Soldiers and sailors have
never been noted for refinement, but in this case
vulgarity not only intensified dramatically but spilled
over into postwar civilian culture as well. American
mores, it's now commonplace to note, were permanently
changed by World War II. (Violent drunkenness was also
unusually common among the troops.)
The Greatest Generation was, after all, composed of
boys -- gullible, uncomprehending boys, who entered the
war trusting their government, but who soon wised up
considerably, as Fussell shows. Yet for all the cynicism
they acquired, few of them to this day have grasped the
true enormity of the war or its total impact on American
life. They saw the worst horrors of the modern state at
first hand without quite drawing the appropriate lesson;
civilians, sheltered from those horrors, learned even
less. Fussell himself never tries to sum up the Meaning
of It All; he is content to notice telling details, in
both military and civilian life.
Supporting the "war effort" was imperative. Ordinary
people at home were expected to endure, without
complaint, government-imposed hardships like rationing
and its attendant ubiquitous bureaucracy. Patriotism
required no less. In reality, it was tyranny, using war
as its excuse. The traditional everyday freedoms of
American life vanished. People were even cautioned
against speaking too freely ("Loose lips sink ships")
lest an unguarded word betray vital secrets to some
lurking agent of the foe. Yet the war was officially
portrayed as a fight for the freedoms the *enemy* was
intent on destroying! Most Americans submitted willingly.
Leading intellectuals suppressed their doubts and
pressured their peers to do likewise. Even the caustic
H.L. Mencken felt obliged to write pap; the cornball
optimism of Carl Sandburg was upheld as the model for
literary men. Edmund Wilson was one of the few who
protested the pseudo-patriotic atmosphere of conformity
that suffocated American cultural and intellectual life
during the entire war. (In England, Evelyn Waugh clearly
saw the fraudulence of the war from the start, but spoke
his mind only in oblique satire.) Respectable literature
became unbearably high-minded with patriotic pieties.
Skepticism went underground.
It came back in postwar literature, though. Fussell
notes that many of the novels that appeared after the war
were surprisingly focused not on the official enemy or
the proclaimed purposes of the war, but on the
humiliating "chickenshit" that ordinary soldiers and
sailors had endured at the hands of their own officers.
Even during the war many felt more hostility from (and
toward) their officers than the Japanese or Germans.
"There are two wars here," one soldier remarked. "I
joined the army to fight fascism, only to find the army
full of fascists." John Keegan wrote of the "culture
shock" 12 million young Americans suffered when exposed
"to a system of subordination and autocracy entirely
alien to American values." This is all vividly portrayed
in the hit 1953 movie FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, where two
main characters are virtually destroyed by their own
petty and cynical officers even before the war begins.
The film's huge popularity, dwarfing that of most movies
centered on combat, suggests that it reflected the shared
memories of the "Greatest Generation."
In both civilian and military life, wild rumors were
rife, showing how little ordinary people trusted official
sources of information. Yet that same distrust of
government begot credulity, almost superstition, toward
anonymous reports, however implausible. When it came to
getting facts, it was every man for himself. Such was the
condition of public discourse, in contrast to the
reassuring mythology of World War II. The general
assumption was that the government was either lying or
withholding vital truths.
Fussell reserves for his final, climactic chapter
his description of what combat was really like. He takes
his title from Walt Whitman: "The real war will never get
in the books." Whitman was talking about the Civil War,
but it applies to all wars: you had to be there. Fussell
was there. The sheer awful noise of artillery caused many
soldiers to lose control of their bowels and bladders.
They quickly saw the infinite possibilities of being
dismembered or mutilated. Their feet slipped in others'
intestines; they saw direct hits reduce their comrades to
pink mists; miscellaneous body parts littered the field;
the smell was nauseating. Many went raving mad. Some lost
their sanity in the first few minutes, but the strongest
would lose it after a few months of steady combat;
officially, this was euphemized as "battle fatigue." (The
official euphemism is one of Fussell's specialties.)
Another discreet wartime skeptic was George Orwell,
and Fussell is not the first to suggest that the
nightmare dystopia of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was inspired
not only by Stalin's Soviet Union (which Orwell never
visited) but also by Churchill's England, where the "war
effort" also exerted its strong tendency to crush and
erase individuality. "Morale" for the nation meant
anonymity for the person. "Democracy" meant, in practice,
tyrannous bureaucracy. War ceased to be a series of
events on remote battlefields; it was much more than
that. It was an entire way of life, including a state of
mind -- a willingness to submit without question to
arbitrary authority, to offer even one's inner life, mind
and soul, to the State.
Fussell never says so, but his book richly
illustrates how socialism operates -- and fails, and
promotes tyranny. Until his early death, Orwell insisted
that he remained a socialist, but his imagination outran
his intellect and compelled him to show socialism's
actual operation. In his day there was little intelligent
criticism of socialism -- Hayek's ROAD TO SERFDOM was
about the only popular critique available -- and it was
still pardonable to believe that central planning might
realize its proclaimed goals. But Orwell was
instinctively skeptical of utopianism and well aware of
its abuse. He could conceive (because he had seen them)
men who professed to share his own beliefs while using
them for purely cynical reasons of power.
Orwell had reviewed Hayek's book in 1944,
disagreeing with it while frankly admitting the dangers
of collectivism. Possibly he later came to appreciate
Hayek's argument more fully, just as he came to
appreciate the thought of James Burnham years after he'd
attacked Burnham in print. Many have speculated on
whether Orwell would have abandoned socialism if he'd
lived longer; and though the question can't be answered,
it's pretty clear that he was becoming seriously
disillusioned with the Left as he aged. But he seemed
unable to imagine a humane alternative.
Orwell's stubborn verbal adherence to socialism
might have changed, but it hardly matters. NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR, like any good myth, speaks for itself, and
even the author can't claim the last word on its meaning.
"Trust the tale, not the teller" will always be good
advice.
Other regimes are judged by their records; but
socialism eternally demands to be judged by its promises.
By now, unfortunately, socialism has its own grim record,
and can only be peddled under other labels. Every time
the "dream" turns out to be a nightmare, we are asked to
believe it has been "betrayed"; but this excuse has been
worn out. Where has socialism ever kept its promises?
Even if such a thing were barely possible, its dangers
would still be all too probable to warrant the risk of
adopting it.
Even during the Cold War, the historian John Lukacs
noted that the most accurate term for the prevalent form
of government, in both the "free" and "communist" worlds,
was "national socialism." That is still true enough.
Political power remains centralized and bureaucratized in
nearly every country on earth. (Nearly? Where are the
exceptions?) It has been said that if fascism ever comes
to America, it will come in the guise of fighting
fascism; and so it did, as John Flynn observed during
Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.
"Fascism" has long since become an all-purpose
epithet of opprobrium, a vague synonym for tyranny, no
longer standing for a specific kind of state; as witness
the recent coinage "Islamofascism," widely adopted by
neoconservatives and nearly as indiscriminate as
"terrorism." Nearly all supporters of the Iraq war
idealize World War II and want to see the "war on terror"
as a new version of the war against fascism, with Bush
cast as Roosevelt and the patriotism of dissenters held
suspect.
It's a pretty poor fit. Though the 9/11 attacks were
probably as great a shock as Pearl Harbor, Bush, thank
heaven, is no Roosevelt. He was caught unawares
(conspiracy theories to the contrary gravely misjudge his
intelligence) and hadn't laid the groundwork for total
war. He didn't dare demand great sacrifices of the
country, let alone try to reintroduce conscription and
rationing. He did impose obnoxious security measures, but
even these fell far short of Roosevelt's curtailments of
everyday freedoms.
Conservative enthusiasts for the Iraq war actually
seemed to hark back less to World War II (which few of
them actually remembered) than to the Sixties, with their
campus Kulturkampf over everything from war to drugs.
They recalled World War II chiefly in remote icons, but
their love-it-or-leave-it patriotism echoed the
Vietnam-era annoyance with anti-war protest. And even
this sort of "patriotism" was more assertive in the
Israel-first neocons than in conventional conservatives.
At first the neocons smeared opponents of the Iraq war as
"anti-American," but they inevitably reverted to the more
emotionally frank charge of "anti-Semitism."
But the country, happily, had changed. During World
War II and the Korean War it was possible to suppress
"isolationist" objections with slurs of disloyalty, but
during Vietnam this no longer worked. Protest and
military failure kept Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon on
the defensive in a way Roosevelt never had been. False
optimism about the Vietnam war, much derided, was
impossible to sustain. And by then Americans took
prosperity so much for granted that austerity measures
were unthinkable.
The carnage of Vietnam, as well as the end of the
draft, also made it unthinkable for the United States to
fight another prolonged ground war. At first Americans
feared that the 1991 Gulf War would become another
Vietnam, and the quick victory, thanks to overwhelming
air power, came as a huge relief. Seeing that the
American public would tolerate quick, easy wars like his
father's, George W. Bush replicated his father's war,
adding only "regime change" and occupation. But even the
occupation now threatens his incumbency, despite its
relatively low American casualty rate. The war seems
increasingly pointless, especially since it has turned
out that Bush was bluffing about the Iraqi "threat."
The basic truth is that war no longer impinges on
daily life in America. But the government does so in
myriad other ways, and total Federal spending is higher
than during World War II itself. Federal bureaucracy is
also as intrusive now as it was then, judging by the
number of forms Americans are required to fill out, the
petty regulations they are compelled to obey, and the
taxes they are forced to pay.
With all due respect to the Greatest Generation, was
World War II a fight for freedom at all? Or was it
really, under that guise, part of a vast campaign, along
with the New Deal, to bring bureaucracy -- "chickenshit"
-- into every corner of American life? As between power
and freedom, there is no doubt which Roosevelt preferred.
His legacy, faithfully preserved by his successors, is
national socialism.
Crying "Wolf!" at the Lamb
(page 6)
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks around
the emphasized words.}}
In its first week of release, THE PASSION OF THE
CHRIST was far and away the top box-office success in the
country, pulling in nine times as much money as its
nearest competitor. But so far, it has utterly failed to
fulfill one prophecy: that it would "incite violence
against Jews."
Jewish groups and critics have confidently forecast
anti-Jewish mayhem for more than a year. So why hasn't it
come to pass? The sheer number of unmaimed Jews in
America today threatens to leave Abe Foxman with a lot of
egg on his face.
Come to think of it, why have Jews made no
preparation for this long, hot Lenten season? They
haven't been arming themselves, taking shelter, fleeing
Christendom, or even asking for any police protection.
After decades of warning the world against Christian
fanatics, from the Catholic Church to fundamentalist
Protestants, they have been remarkably complacent about
the new danger. Why, you'd almost think they didn't
believe their own warnings!
In fact, they didn't. We have been witnessing a new
kind of smear: defamation by prediction. From coast to
coast, millions of Christians have peacefully bought
tickets and watched the film in reverence without so much
as bloodying a single Jewish nose. Exactly as everyone,
including Jews, knew they would.
Yes, it's possible to lie about the future -- just
as it's possible to lie about the past. We've also heard,
ad nauseam, that "countless" Jews have been persecuted,
even murdered, because of the film's predecessors, the
Passion plays of the Middle Ages. Few details have been
forthcoming, but we must suppose that flyers were handed
out to medieval playgoers: "There will be a brief pogrom
after the performance. Please bring your own clubs and
staves."
Come to think of it, why aren't these persistent
lies about Christians ever called "hoary canards"? It's
only because they pass uncontradicted that they are
repeated. If Christians were the violent bigots they are
accused of being, Jews wouldn't dare to say such things.
The truth is the opposite: Christians have been culpably
passive against Jewish versions of "blood libel," which
routinely calumniate them, their ancestors, and by
implication Christ himself.
One of the most stubborn Jewish canards in this
discussion is that the Second Vatican Council, which
Gibson rejects, "reversed" the teaching that all Jews,
including today's, bear the guilt of Christ's death. But
the Church never reverses Catholic doctrine, and
Catholics who learned their stuff before Vatican II know
that this particular item was never part of it -- as
Gibson himself has said. (Oddly enough, the Talmud
proudly claims that the Jews killed Christ as a sorcerer;
so far only David Klinghoffer, writing in the LOS ANGELES
TIMES, has been frank enough to acknowledge this.)
Another canard that has resurfaced in this debate is
that the Spanish Inquisition monstrously persecuted Jews.
In fact, that inquisition targeted heretics, not Jews; in
its three centuries, it executed a fraction of the number
killed by the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Beirut in
a week in 1982 ... but why go on? Useful lies live on,
while hard facts perish.
Once again, the Tribe has cried "Wolf!" at the Lamb.
The threat is always Christianity -- or, more precisely,
Jesus Christ. He started it all, didn't he?
{{ The Jewish slander artists may thank themselves
for making the words "His blood be on us and on our
children" nearly as familiar as John 3:16. If we soon see
bumper stickers reading simply "Matthew 27:25," the
credit will belong to Foxman. }}
Not that the pacific behavior of Christians will
change anything. Like astrologers, their detractors won't
be deterred by any number of false, and falsified,
predictions. Charges of anti-Semitism are eternally
unfalsifiable -- even, it now seems, those that are
flatly refuted by events. Nor may we look forward to
apologies for this smear-in-advance.
Jewish reviewers, trying to be more clever than
Foxman, have generally avoided the blatant charge of
anti-Semitism; but they've accused Mel Gibson of "sadism"
and/or "pornography" so regularly that he should be
eligible for a fat grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts. The insinuation that the film is of
psychosexual interest (one reviewer calls Gibson
"perverted") seems to be irresistible to this crowd;
under severe emotional stress, Jewish intellectuals
regress to the primal Freudian cliche, always sure that
they're being profoundly original.
Of course such thoughts don't even occur to innocent
Christian viewers, who see the movie for the reverent
work it is. Maybe an avowed sadist will come forth to
assure us, "Hey, I really dug that flick!"
One way or another, it's clear, Gibson must be
discredited. The NEW YORK TIMES, among other sources,
reports that many of Hollywood's Jewish moguls mean to do
his career a bit of no good. Surprise! As if he hadn't
expected that, after having had to finance the project of
his life out of his own pocket. To his eternal credit, he
was willing to pay the price of provoking the
2000-year-old hatred that is still going strong.
NUGGETS
COALITION OF THE WINKING: Writing in THE NEW YORKER,
Seymour Hersh, the most resourceful reporter I know of,
says the Bush administration is so intent on capturing
Osama bin Laden (who would be a prize trophy at election
time) that, in gratitude for access to Pakistan's remote
regions where he's believed to be hiding, it's
overlooking the Pakistani government's sales of nuclear
weapons materials on the global black market. So Bush's
war on terrorism may result in portable nukes falling
into the hands of terrorists -- making the 9/11 attacks
look like a bit of teenage vandalism by comparison.
(page 5)
SUGGESTION: Shouldn't same-sex marriage be called
"sodomatrimony"? (page 5)
NOTA BENE: Kerry is actually well to the left of Howard
Dean. So why is he deemed more "electable"? I can only
suppose it's because the media are willing to play down
his record. Never mind that his most right-wing supporter
is Ted Kennedy. (page 8)
OUCH! Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League has
accused Bill Buckley of anti-Semitism. This is Bill's
reward for all that crawling? Well, as they say, the old
lesson of Munich: Appeasement doesn't work. (page 11)
REFLECTIONS ON RECENT HISTORY: Let's face it. This was a
better world when the Italians ran the Catholic Church
and the Mafia. (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
MAUREEN ON MEL: Maureen Dowd is the ever-so-hip columnist
of the NEW YORK TIMES -- so hip, in fact, that you have
to read the POST and DAILY NEWS to keep up with her
up-to-the-minute allusions. She's also the successor to
Anna Quindlen's Catholic Girl seat on the paper's op-ed
page, whose duties include sneering at Catholics who take
their faith seriously. Trying to do her job, she recently
wrote that Mel Gibson has "found the ultimate 12-step
program: the Stations of the Cross." Of course her
numbers were a little off, but who's counting?
ROOTS: Like Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark before
him, John Kerry has learned he had Jewish ancestors. He
handled it well, with an adroit remark about losing
relatives in the Holocaust. Not everyone shows such
poise, which suggests a need for a new self-help book: A
GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED: WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU FIND OUT
YOU'RE JEWISH. My own plan for such a contingency is to
announce that I'm not an anti-Semite after all, but a
self-hating Jew.
QUERY: Unprincipled liberals are furious with Ralph Nader
because they fear he may ensure the reelection of
George W. Bush. Come to think of it, shouldn't principled
conservatives be just as angry?
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Faulty Intelligence (February 10, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040210.shtml
* The Grim Secularist (February 17, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040217.shtml
* Gibson and His Enemies (February 19, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040219.shtml
* Gibson and His Psyche (February 24, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040224.shtml
* Gibson's "Excessive Violence" (February 26, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040226.shtml
* Gibson's Goal (March 2, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040302.shtml
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