Columnist.
This is not the happiest Thanksgiving holiday. So many out of work, so many others afraid they're next, and the recession is not receding as swiftly as we were told it would. Yet all these worries pale against the collective remembrance of the fearful hardships endured by the first immigrants to these shores. They spread the first feast of gratitude in the New World. They laid the foundation for the generations who followed to enjoy life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness (and turkey).
Ann McElhinney's low-budget documentary refuting the global warming hype and hysteria arrives in Washington just in time to break Al Gore's crystal ball. "Not Evil Just Wrong," the feature-length film she made with her husband Phelim McAleer, coolly reveals how Al's disguise of hot fanaticism as cold fact arrives as the Senate begins to gear up for debate on "climate change" legislation. "We know you can't teach religion in school," McElhinney says. "But there is a religion being enforced, a green religion." Her film illustrates just how schoolchildren have been indoctrinated with fear, loathing and foreboding, as Al's film attempts to recruit them as tiny prophets of doom. Her camera shows children in Northern Ireland describing how the sea level rises when the ice caps melt and polar bears drown.
Not so long ago, rape was a capital offense, right up there with murder. When death was not decreed, convicted rapists could count on a long prison sentence. No one took rape lightly. The crime was an absolute evil, the moral equivalent of neither shoplifting nor stealing a kiss. Our sex-saturated society -- where children are exposed to titillation they cannot fully understand and often are regarded as more knowledgeable than they really are -- has changed all that. Children are pressured to affect an air of sexual sophistication, leading to a young adult attitude of devil-may-care hedonism.
Austin, age 13, is touching and familiar. With his helmet of short brown hair, biggish ears and sensitive eyes, he's typical of a tender age almost on the cusp of manhood. So little time behind him, so much time ahead of him. If he were Jewish, he might be preparing for his bar mitzvah, thanking his parents for giving him life, expressing his hopes to live up to the respect they place in him. Tender age notwithstanding, Austin has another agenda. He's on the cover of The New York Times Magazine last Sunday, telling the world what he earlier told his parents and his classmates. He's gay. Not cheerful, happy and carefree in the original meaning of that word, but as how the untender times have redefined the word.
Autumn in Washington is often cruel. The heat and the humidity have lifted, and Congress returns more or less refreshed from summer vacation, but the pressure cooker continues to cook politics. Conversations about health care legislation and the economy continue to get top billing on the Hill and elsewhere, but Barack Obama is playing football with foreign policy. It's the season of the gridiron, after all. The president threw a long pass over the heads of the lads from the Czech Republic and Poland, and Vladimir Putin, Moscow's very defensive back, intercepted easily. He naturally looks forward to more such floaters. "I do anticipate that this correct and brave decision will be followed by others." The president's announcement that the United States would not deploy long-range missile defenses in Eastern Europe after all was astonishing because George W. Bush had negotiated so patiently with the Czechs and Poles, who took considerable risks in cooperating with Washington. The astonishment and anger in the West was not necessarily duplicated in Eastern Europe, accustomed as the Europeans in the East are to a role as pawns. Saving face is not necessarily a skill practiced only in the Orient.
The attack on America on Sept. 11 set off alarms everywhere. We were shocked to discover that few Foreign Service officers were fluent in Arabic or Farsi, the dominant languages of the Middle East. We didn't know much about Islam. Children grew up on the engrossing and romantic "Tales of the Arabian Nights," but few parents thought much about the implications of women portrayed in veils and harems, as the property of men. College students grooved on "The Rubaiyat" by Omar Khayyam, the medieval Persian poet and philosopher, whose poetry was tailored to Western sensibility by the 19th century English translator Edward FitzGerald in "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread -- and Thou." There's a small park on Embassy Row in Washington dedicated to the poem. The popular culture glibly entertained us with tales of flying carpets and genies popping out of magic bottles, and serious study of Islamic history and culture was grossly neglected.
Conservatives and other parents won their point. President Obama dropped his lesson plan for the schoolchildren of America. He didn't ask what they can do for him, as he first intended to do, but what they can do for themselves and country. "We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect, so you can help solve our most difficult problems," he said. "If you don't do that -- if you quit on school -- you're not only quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country." Nobody can argue with that. The furor that preceded the speech was rage against the "cult of personality," and the White House did a good job of changing the subject to misrepresent what the furor was about. But as the Bard would say, "All's well that ends well."
All but hidden in the fulsome eulogies for Ted Kennedy lurk a few serious ideas worthy of more than romancing history or waxing sentimental over a death in a famous family. These ideas are about the very nature of liberalism and conservatism, the connections between personal virtue and public morality, and how emotion shapes ideology. The passing of "the last liberal lion" comes amidst a national debate over health care "reform" that grows fiercer by the day. President Obama, who has tried to stand above the messy details of whatever emerges from Congress -- tacking first left, then right, then left again -- is about to tack this time into the fray. But there's scant room left above the fray. Two books, one a reissue of a minor classic, illustrate how and why. The president, like the rest of us, could usefully make room on his bedside table for both of them.
This is everybody's bummer of a season, particularly these rough weeks for Barack Obama. You could call this a summer of discontent, but there's nothing poetic about it. The president warns that the economy will only get considerably worse before it gets better. "The long-term deficit outlook remains daunting," the White House said Tuesday. Unemployment is expected to surpass 10 percent soon, the deficit to swell to $1.5 trillion, and the gross domestic product to shrink by 2.8 percent this year. We may get an early frost, too.
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. -- Colonial Williamsburg is proud of its tradesmen. You can see the carpenters walking out of the history books and down the cobblestone streets, ready to talk to visitors about how they hammered Williamsburg together, log by log, shingle by shingle, as if still in the 18th century. These tradesmen built new homes, smokehouses, dairies, barns. They built additions and repaired old structures. Some were skilled carpenters and bricklayers, others were just learning, but together they raised rafters and roof beams, set door frames, laid floors with timber cut from nearby trees.
The shorter days of late summer ushers in the melancholy prospect of autumn, the thoughts of returning to school, work and reality. Such anticipation makes the last moments at the beach, lake or campsite especially precious. The kids can stay up late because they can sleep 'til noon. They come and go on whim, tracking sand or mud, but dirty footprints are easily washed away with seawater. We put off thinking about the devil in the details waiting in the mundane world of everyday life. For now, conversation can be imbued with deeper insights taken at a slower pace.
When my mother was in her late 80s, I took her to a lawyer's office one sunny day to sign her "living will." We read over the questions and her answers, and she signed on the dotted line. She was pleased with the decisions that she had made weeks before.
