Chris Abraham » evils

Thank You Fresh Air Fund Holiday Bloggers!

Chris Abraham — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:46:30 +0000

In December, we at Abraham Harrison helped the Fresh Air Fund reach out to bloggers and folks online in order to remind the online Fresh Air Fund friends and family that they both need donations during this time of year as well as needing families to host children for the summer. Since the holidays, over ninety bloggers have responded to Fresh Air Fund’s call to action with the placement of banners, with tweets, and with blog posts. We are much obliged to you, Fresh Air Fund bloggers! (via Marketing Conversation)

Menehune and the Nightmarchers

Chris Abraham — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:30:07 +0000

This morning I was listening to Tapestry from the CBC and they were talking about the Netherworlds, including stuff about Anne Rice. What interested me was a segment on elves and faeries. The segment focused on how folks from Iceland and Newfoundland truly believe in elves and faeries. It made me think about growing up in Hawaii and how everybody I knew believed in both the menehunes and the nightmarchers.

In fact, we really believed in menehunes and many of us residents saw examples of the sort of endless, ancient, black lava rock walls that cut the verdant countryside. The fish ponds of almost super-human proportions. Even viaducts that carry water And, even more, we were always wary about running around in the wilderness at night. The menehune were pranksters. They are sometimes called “little people” — the same word they use in Ireland — because they’re supposed to be small, strong, mischievous, and only come out at night. They, too, are supposed to by mystical, minor deities, and also capable of reproducing with people, resulting in very blessed children.

The nightmarchers are different. There is no doubt that these are ghosts who don’t really know they’re dead, per se. They’re still making marches through the forest, and heaven forbid if you build your new home in the path of their marches. Many people have head them and some have seen their flaming torches.

In fact, my dad, Bob Abraham, who spent many years digging deep into Hawaiian culture as a photographer, told me that he heard the nightmarchers one night. In fact, my dad had stories of many experiences with ghosts and spirits in Hawaii Nei.

Here are two good resources I have discovered about them both:

Hawaiian Legends – Nightmarchers, Menehune, and the Tiki Gods

By: Celeste “Sally” Cheeseman, Century 21 Liberty Homes, Mililani, HI 96789 (Localism.com Featured Article)
HAWAIIAN Spirits and Superstitions covered only a sliver of our Spirits and Superstions in Hawaii. Remember I mentioned that we had our home blessed because our home was in the path of the warriors marching? We will now embark on one Hawaiian legend, ….The Nightmarchers.
The Nightmarchers are the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian high ranking warriors. They say that they come forth during the night from their burial sites to march where they battled or march on to other sacred areas. It is said that if you live near their path of marching you will see their torches or hear the chanting, the marching and/or the drums beating faintly. Place ti plants or leaves around your house to keep away evil spirits and the “nightmarchers” to avoid the area as well. The most famous of these “marching” paths of the Nightmarcher’s is along the Pali where Kamehameha fought the last battle.
In Hawaii, the Menehune, are “little people” that stand two feet high. Similar to pixi’s or trolls the Menehune roam the deep forests at night. They are very strong and are master builders and said to accomplish many projects over night! There are many stories how they came to be in Hawaii. One version is that they were the first settlers in Hawaii that came from the descendants of the Marquesas Islanders and resided here between the years of 0-350 A.D. Supposedly, the “bigger people” from Tahiti came and the Menehune ran off into the caves in mountains and only came out at night for food.
My mother was born and raised on Kauai with her 7 sisters and 1 brother. Later on, one of my Auntie’s married and moved to Waimea Kauai. When my cousin and I were 10 and 11 our mom’s would let us go to Kauai to visit my Aunt and Uncle for the summer. She lived right on Menehune Road and at the end of the road was the “Menehune Ditch”. The high chief of Waimea, “Ola” received aid from the Menehune to divert water from the Waimea River to their taro patches and supposedly made this ancient acqueduct overnight!
Anyway, my cousin claimed she must be a Menehune as well because she was very short and tried to go in the passageway in the Menehune Ditch in the mountain……I ran away afraid that something might happen! (The opening is in the picture to the right)

Menehune by Hugh D. Mailly on Encyclopedia Mythica

The folklore of many nations around the world include stories of magical little people. The most famous of course, are the leprechauns of Ireland. In Hawaii, it is the mischievous Menehune who are said to haunt the deep forests or the mountains of Pu’ukapele (“Hills of Pele”). They come out mostly at night to play tricks on people, or to serve them if they feel that way inclined.
The mythology of the Menehune is as old as the beginnings of Polynesian history. Some say that the great god Maui himself, was one of the tiny creatures. When the first Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, they found dams, fish-ponds, and even Heiaus (temples), all presumably built by the Menehune who were already there, living in caves.
The creatures are said to be about two feet high, although some have been seen as small as six inches, capable of fitting in the palm of someone’s hand. They are always naked, but the long straight hair that falls to their knees keeps them warm and discreet. Apparently no two of them are the same, and they can be so moody as to be malicious and dangerous one day, and simply harmless the next. But they are always tricky, and therefore should be avoided, unless a special favor is absolutely needed of them.
In the old times, some Hawaiians married Menehune girls, who were said to be quite fair, but needed to be shown how to make a fire and eat cooked food, because their own diet consisted only of starchy raw vegetables. The services of Menehune expert builders and craftsmen can be requested. This is especially so, if you can trace your family tree back to one of them. They then act like benevolent godparents. Many a major project, such as the preparation of a wedding feast, has been completed in a single night by the super strong little gods, while all humans slept.
Menehune are afraid of owls. On the island of Kauai, the Menehune sometimes sneak in among the people there and pull too many tricks. That is when the owl god of Paupueo (owl hill) summons all the owls of Kauai to chase the Menehune back into the forest.
The little ones are fond of dancing, and singing, and of sports, such as shooting arrows. Sometimes they use magic arrows, to pierce the heart of angry persons, and make them feel love instead. They also truly enjoy diving off cliffs into the surf. If you hear splashes in the night at Kaanapali, it is possibly a Menehune diving off Black Rock! But you would have to move impossibly quick to ever see one.

Earned Media for SEO and Profit

Chris Abraham — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:27:43 +0000

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra
[...]
[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)
[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:
More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect
[...]

Yahoo Founder, CEO, Jerry Yang Steps Down

Chris Abraham — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:35:05 +0000

This news is from the hasn’t this already happened before department? Also, from the I can’t believe it took this long department. Via the Washington Post.

Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang will step down, the company announced last night, as the once-highflying Internet portal struggles to steady itself in the turbulent environment for Web media.

Yahoo! should be one of the coolest brands on the block. With Flickr and del.icio.us, Yahoo really should be #2 — and it could be #1 if it would stop with the self-loathing — and it is not. Why? Because Yahoo isn’t nearly shameless enough to survive in the 2008 Internet. It is no longer the world of wizened Unix gurus who would easily define what is and isn’t couth on the Internet. Yahoo! is stuck in the days when it was uncool to splash your own brand on the brands you own (so is AOL); Yahoo! is stuck in the Internet of the 90s, an Internet wherein being good enough was good enough.

If Yahoo! was trying not to become gauche or become an ugly American in the Europe of the Internet, then it was successful! Yahoo! has become irrelevant. At least people hate Microsoft & AOL. Hell, I have nothing at all to say about Yahoo! except I adore del.icio.us and Flickr. How could the owner of two of the Internet’s coolest properties never be able to harnest the gravity of these two major celestial bodies and slingshot themselves into #1?

Maybe there is too much modesty, not enough braggadocio, in the halls of Yahoo! Maybe if you look closely, Yahoo! is the company that does no harm and does no evil. Maybe the company who’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” is actually pretty shameless and far from modest. Maybe on the modern Internet (and in modern business) it is more important to say you’re doing good, being good, and being modest than it is to actually be modest.

Yahoo!, Yahoo!, Yahoo! please try your darnedest to spend more time sharing yourself with the world and less time being the best of the good citizens. Google is absolutely shameless when it comes to all the good work they’re doing. They are not keeping their religion to themselves, they’re not praying quietly to themselves in a bare cell, away from prying eyes! Google is on the soapbox! Google is bragging! Google is sharing the Holy Spirit with the world!

If you keep on slipping those alms into the alms box of Internet Good Works by dark of night you will actually become irrelevant. Nobody is against you but nobody is for you, either. Nobody cares.

What’s worse, I don’t think enough people even really think much about Flickr and del.icio.us being Yahoo! properties.

Yes, you make folks become Yahoo! members, but that’s not enough. In DC and Virginia, everyone has a Safeway card but nobody like to shop at Safeway — it’s only because Safeway makes it super-easy to become a member. There is no brand loyalty, there is no passion behind the brand (OK, OK, Safeway Select pasta sauce is awesome — it is like Safeway’s Flickr), even if everyone has a Safeway scan card on their key ring.

Anyway, Yahoo!, I am so sorry for the rant. Oh, also, why is it that all of my geeky friends in the Zope and Python world all want to work for Google and not for Yahoo!? How come all of my PHP and MySQL friends ache to work for Google and not for Yahoo! How pissed you must be to suffer that Google drank your milkshake. They took you toys! You, Yahoo!, where supposed to be that success story! I mean, you were the first search engine, after all! You were the first directory, right?

Well, it is time to get off your pity pot, kick Jerry to the curb, and again become the Yahoo! I have known you since 1994 and have loved you (although I have not used your email address since Gmail came out, sorry) and I really want you to get you some smarts. Give me a call at +1 (202) 352-5051 or +49 (0)151 52579077 — I would be more than happy to try to help you turn this ship around!

Viel Glück

Pithy Philosophical Quotes on Democracy

Chris Abraham — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:37:30 +0000

“Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.” Friedrich Nietzsche #
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonl … #
“Only the educated are free.” Epictetus #
“When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.” Eug … #
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.” Edvard Teller #
“A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.” Napoleon Bonaparte #
“Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.” Napoleon Bonaparte #
“Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even f … #
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” Thomas Jefferson #
”You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.” James Thurber #
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, … #
“If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the s … #
”Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without l … #
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure … #
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Mar … #
“Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.” John Simon #
“Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.” Sen … #
“Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” George Bernard … #
“In democracy everyone has the right to be represented, even the jerks.” Chris Patten #
“When the government fears the people, that is LIBERTY. When people fear the government, that is TYRANNY.” Author Unknown #
“It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.” Marcus Tullius Cicero #
“Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.” Charles Caleb Cotton #
“Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” African proverb #
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Ma … #
“Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.” John Stuart Mill #
“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” Laurens van der Post #
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker #
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” Saul Bellow #
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle #
“Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.” Thomas A. Edison #
“Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as ‘sentimental’, ‘impractical’, or ‘womanish’, etc., by those whose fun, profit or … #
“To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them a … #
“Democracies don’t prepare well for things that have never happened before.” Richard A. Clarke, former White House counter- terrorism chief. #
“Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and … #
“Good government could never be a substitute for government by the people themselves.” Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, British Prime Minister #
“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.” Bill Vaughan #
“Only the educated are free.” Epictetus #
“I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. #
“It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.” John Mayard Keynes #
“Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.” Clement Atlee #

Sarah Palin is New Feminism According to Camille Paglia

Chris Abraham — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:01:32 +0000

I would have never guessed that Camille Paglia would be in awe of Sara Palin or perceive her as follows, “Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.” Whoa. (Via Salon.com)

Fresh blood for the vampire
Rip tide! Is the Obama campaign shooting out to sea like a paper boat?
It’s heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain — that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won’t die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces.
Oh, the sadomasochistic tedium of McCain’s imprisonment in Hanoi being told over and over and over again at the Republican convention. Do McCain’s credentials for the White House really consist only of that horrific ordeal? Americans owe every heroic, wounded veteran an incalculable debt of gratitude, but how do McCain’s sufferings in a tiny, squalid cell 40 years ago logically translate into presidential aptitude in the 21st century? Cast him a statue or slap his name on a ship, and let’s turn the damned page.We need a new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision — which is why I support Barack Obama and have contributed to his campaign. My baby-boom generation — typified by the narcissistic Clintons — peaked in the 1960s and is seriously past it. But McCain, born before Pearl Harbor, is even older than we are! Why would anyone believe that he holds the key to the future? And why would anyone swallow that preening passel of high-flown rhetoric about “country above all” coming from a seething, short-fused character whose rampant egotism, zigzagging principles, and currying of the gullible press were the distinguishing marks of his senatorial career?
Having said that, I must admit that McCain is currently eating Obama’s lunch. McCain’s weirdly disconnected persona (beady glowers flashing to frozen grins and back again) has started to look more testosterone-rich than Obama’s easy, lanky, reflective candor. What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren’s public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California? That shambles of a performance — where a surprisingly unprepared Obama met the inevitable question about abortion with shockingly curt glibness — began his alarming slide.
As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes — be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.
The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick — there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly — though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into “Star Wars” — a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.
After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation — a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.
As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women’s studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me — and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).
Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.
Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.
One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones — nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they’re sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along — poor dears!
It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin’s boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
Here’s another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto’s Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:
Abigail Becker Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830
A tall, handsome woman “who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all,” she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper’s cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.
But what of Palin’s pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God’s plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We’ll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don’t believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.
The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
Let’s take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women’s movement — leading to feminists’ McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women — an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.
On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?
What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.
The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.
If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society’s acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.
It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism — one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.
But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.
Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Cook the Whale Eat the Whale

Chris Abraham — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:59:38 +0000

Well, I give up. So many people think I am an evil whale-killer that I will stop fighting. What do you think I am after you read Don’t Save the Whales? Should I be “harpooned and flayed alive?” Well, for those of you who think I kill whales, here are my favorite whale recipes:

Whale Recipe One:

3/4 to 1 kilo whale meat (or beef/horse)
50 g butter, tallow or lard
2-3 onions
Salt and pepper
Laurel leaf (optional)
600-700 ml water
Sauce colouring (caramel)
50 g flour
200 ml milk
Clean the meat: some say it’s enough to slice off about a centimetre off each side of the piece, others recommend soaking in milk overnight. This is only to ensure there will be no oily taste to the meat, but if it has been properly handled in the first place, it will not taste oily. Cut into steaks and beat with a meat mallet.
Slice the onions. Heat the cooking fat in a frying pan, brown the meat on all sides and put in a cooking pot, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Brown the onions in a frying pan and add half to the pot with the meat, along with the laurel leaf, if using. Set half the onions aside. Pour water into the frying pan and deglaze. Pour over the meat and cook for 15 to 30 minutes or until the meat is tender. Arrange the steaks on a serving dish and arrange the browned onions that were set aside on top.
Make a paste with the milk and flour and use it to thicken the cooking liquid left in the pot. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with cooked potatoes and vegetables arranged around the meat and sprinkle parsley or cress over the dish. Serve gravy on the side.

Whale Recipe Two:

3/4 kg whale meat, beef or horse
250 g onions
75 g margarine or butter
2 tbs tomato purée
200 ml water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp paprika
Melt the margarine in a frying pan, slice the onion and brown it. Remove from pan and set aside. Cut the meat into slices, brown in the pan and put in a cooking pot or stew pan with the onions. Boil the water, stir in the tomato purée, salt and paprika and pour over the meat. Cook slowly for 14 to 30 minutes, or until the meat is tender. Serve with potatoes.

Whale Recipe Three:

3/4 kilo whale, beef or horse
50 g margarine
3-4 onions
2-3 tbs water
Salt, pepper, garlic powder
Cut the meat into very thin slices (1/2 cm thick or so). Brown quickly in a dry pan (no oil). Remove meat and melt the margarine and brown the sliced onions in it. Remove from the pan, add the water and cook the meat slices in the water for 2-3 minutes. Flavour with salt and spices. Serve with potatoes and a salad.

Sour Pickled Whale Blubber – Súr Hvalrengi

Chunks of whale blubber are washed under cold running water and cooked until firm, then removed from the cooking liquid, cooled and kept in cold water for 1-2 days, cut into smaller pieces and dropped into strong whey. Ready for eating in 4-6 weeks.

Whale Steak:

4 slices of whalemeat @ 150 – 180 g
Salt and pepper, preferably freshly ground
4 onion rings
2 dessert spoonfulls of finely diced green or red peppers
1 dessert spoonful of finely diced parsley
1 dessert spoonful of finely diced gherkins
Carve the meat into slices of about 1.5 to 2 cm thick, beat them with your hands and press them into shape. Preheat the frying pan and melt some butter in it. Brown the butter before adding the meat. Fry the steaks on both sides. Whale meat should be fried for about 4-5 minutes on each side. The steaks taste best when they are medium rare, but they should be warmed right through and not eaten raw. Serve the steaks on a plate, place an onion ring on each of them and fill it with peppers, parsley and gherkins. Potato scollops taste good together with the steaks. Serve with a bowl of good, crisp lettuce and salad.

Joint of Whale Meat Steeped in Red Wine Marinade:

1 1/4 kilos of whale meat
3 dl red wine
1 dl vegetable oil
3 ground cloves
1/2 teaspoonful of coarsly ground pepper
2 teaspoonfuls of salt
The Marinade – 3/4 litres of juices from the meat Thickening (milk and flour) 4 dessert spoonfuls of sour cream (20% rømme) Sugar colouring Salt
It may be a good idea to bind the joint to help it keep in good shape. Place it in a small oven dish and pour the marinade over. Leave the joint there until the next day, turning it at regular intervals. Remove the joint from the dish, dry it well and rub it with salt. Cook the joint until it turns a pleasant brown colour all over, turn down the heat and add water to reach 2-3 cm up the side of the joint, approx. 3/4 litre. Let the joint simmer for about 20 minutes, turn it over and leave it for another 20 minutes. Measure enough of the juices to make enough marinade, about 3/4 litre. Add the thickening to the marinade, and then the sour cream to taste. Serve with boiled beans or other vegetables, and potatoes – boiled or fried in the pan.

How to Cook a Whale Found Dead

An old Kwakuitl recipe, as narrated in the Kwakuitl language by Elie Hunt and translated into English by her husband, George Hunt, circa 1908.
Courtesy of http://www.hallman.org/~bruce/
Most importantly, you cannot eat it all by yourself! So the first step is to call for a party and invite all your friends, relatives, and local dignitaries.
A special occasion, like the finding of a whale, calls for the use of ceremonial names. Though a hunter, a man, has found the whale, preparing food is women’s work, and therefore the daughter of the hunter has the rights to prepare the whale. She is given the ceremonial name, Place-of-cutting-Blubber. Note that it is the daughter who has the rights, not the wife(s), due to the family rights in a matrilineal society.
Once everybody is ready, you bring tools, and the hunter who found the whale leads everybody in their canoes to the spot where he found it. The father of the hunter has the honor of speaking for the daughter of the hunter to “make a toast” for the occasion. It is customary to first declare how wonderful the whale is, being full of delicious blubber, etc.. Then you should give the choicest piece (the dorsal fin) to the ranking dignitary, who is typically the chief of the village.
Everybody else gets an equal size piece of the whale according to the order of their rank. The first piece starts at the whale neck, and they work from the top down and from the head to the tail. Generally the pieces are cut about a fathom (6 feet) in width. After the ceremonial pieces are given out, the women go to work to gather the remaining fat from the whale. The last step is cut off a piece of the tale of the whale.
When this is done, the pieces are loaded in the canoes, and everybody goes home to do the remainder of the preparation. The hunks of blubber are split into strips four fingers thick (two inches). These pieces are then cut into half inch strips.
A kettle of water is set to boil on the beach, and the strips are boiled to render the oil. The oil is ladled off and stored in watertight storage boxes. Whale oil is best stored in the corner of your house.
Then, you take cedar bark, and split it into long strips. Poke holes in the middle of the boiled pieces of whale blubber, and thread them onto the long strips of bark. When finish these strings of blubber are now called “tied-in-the-middle”.
Dry these strips in the smoky rafters of your house for at least a month. When you want to eat some “tied-in-the-middle” take it down from the rafters, and boil it in a kettle until tender. This takes a lot of boiling. Be sure to eat it hot, because when it is cold, it is really tough. If you boil more than you can eat, you can dry it again, and reheat it later. This dish is called “eating boiled blubber tied in the middle”, a real treat!

Whale Pie

20    oz    Whale meat
One bay leaf
1         Stalk celery
6         Peppercorns
1    tb    Salt
1/2    c    Butter
1/2    c    Flour
1    c    Light cream
1/8    ts    Pepper
1/4    ts    Salt
One 1 pound can pearl onions
1         4 ounce can sliced mushrooms
1    pk    Frozen peas
2    cn    Pimentos, sliced 1
Box pastry mix
Whale meat (minke whale) is unfortunately no longer easy available, but it can still be obtained in some countries.
Whale meat is a very strong tasting, but marinades may be used to help tenderise and add flavour, such as red wine, oil, juniper berries, port, spices, bay leaf and peppercorns.
Normally I use whale meat for steaks or for barbecue, but this is a new recipes, which turned up to be a great success:
Cut the wale meat up, and place in a large kettle and cover with water ( or use crock pot). Add bay leaf, celery, peppercorns and 1 tablespoon salt. Bring to boil, cover and cook over low heat for 2 hours or until the meat is tender.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, add flour and stir until blended. Add light cream, pepper and salt. Cook stirring, until thickened.
Arrange whale meat pieces, onions, mushrooms, peas and pimentos in 2 quart casserole. Add sauce to within 1 inch of top.
Prepare the pastry mix. Cut pastry circle 1/2 inch larger than casserole and place over the whale-mixture, turning edge of pastry under and pressing to casserole with fork or spoon.
Bake in preheated 450 degree oven 15 min. or until crust is golden brown.
Serves 4 to 6.

Whale-Qaeda

Chris Abraham — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:39:31 +0000

I wrote an article called Don’t Save the Whales and the results have been unanimously negative, hostile — even murderous. I call these 14-year-olds who consider me worthy of being harpooned, flayed, and killed, the Whale-Qaeda! Don’t you love that?

Sydney wrote:
KILL THE CHRIS!! KILL THE CHRIS!! cMON EVERYBODY, DONT SAVE THE CHRIS ABRAHAMS!!! considering he doesnt care about anything but himself. hes gonna ruin the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!
Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 1:42 pm #
jenn wrote:
i think you are a fucked up person considering you dont care about anything but your self i hope a whale beaches it self on you
Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 6:46 pm #
Tony wrote:
I hope you burn in hell Whales r Awsome, they rule. Fuck u
Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 7:55 am #
angie wrote:
What the fuck is wrong with you, you selfish asshole!!! if you where getting harpooned to the point of near extinction-i think you would want to be saved…then again what whould the Japs need 2 do ‘research’ on a self centred-ass like yourself. whales have done NOTHING to this world besides making it alittle bit more beautiful. Dude, what have they done too you…do you feel unapriciated? being a member of a race of fucking BILLIONS!! Get a life you sick, redarded cocksucker!!! hope you randomaly get harpooned one day and dragged aboard a big fucking ship-whilst your skin is being riped off…hope you like hate-mail, motherfucker!! your gonna get lots. WHALES RULE. PEACE OUT xxx
Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 7:51 am #
Jordan wrote:
You truley are the most selfish uneducated vile and pathetic little man ive ever seen in my whole life. You know that 90 percent of these people that are standing up for whales and such, do not have children, or any sort of obligation at home, and do you not think that your family would be happy for you, that you’re doing something that you love? Well you truley are a fool. You say we should spend less time fighting for the whales… You are spending an equal ammount of time trying to stop us.. So take some of your own advise… Shut up, go back to school and stay in your dark cave with your beloved children… who I assume will grow up to be as little hearted, foolish, evil, vile and cruel. If you didn’t catch that you might want to get a dictonary… Do you know what a library is? Most likely not. Bloody idiot. Have fun loosing this war.
Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 7:21 am #
Victoria wrote:
SHUT THE HECK UP! DON’T BE SUCH AN IDIOT! WHALES ARE ALMOST GONE! EXTINCTED! NADA! AND ALL YOU CAN DO TO HELP IS TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO KILL WHALES!? HAVE YOU GOT NO HEART!? IF YOU DO YOUR SO COLD HEARTED! WHAT THE HECK IS YOUR PROBLEM!!!!!!!!!!
Y’KNOW I MAY ONLY BE A PRE-TEEN, BUT EVERYONE CAN MAKE A CHANGE IN THE WORLD! EVEN KIDS TOO. SO SHUT UP COLD HEART!
Monday, February 25, 2008 at 10:30 pm #
bambam2cute4you@yaho wrote:
Dude you really need to get a real hobby other than dissin’ the whales they are apart of the ecosystem and what goes around comes around so i hope that you get stolen by some japenese whalers that will take your guts and feed them to their hungery offspring!!! Plus I think that you dont even know how many ways us humans hurt animals every day so some of us are trying to help them!
Monday, February 11, 2008 at 7:18 pm #
sea_angel27 wrote:
i think u should think again about not saving these amazing creatures they have lived here way before we did, that does NOT mean kill them. whales and dolphins, especially orcas are said to be as smart as humans maybe smarter, think of how they feel if one of their family members got killed!ur probably just a sick old man that sits all day thinking of these things. so… save the whales and all of gods creatures their not doing any harm to us! SELFISH PEOPLE LIKE U ARE!!!!!
Friday, February 8, 2008 at 1:22 pm #
Evelyn wrote:
hope u die!
fuck u
Monday, February 4, 2008 at 4:23 pm #
Tyler Boller Whale wrote:
U are so selfish yes whales are important at the moment cause Japan is kkilling the for supposably reacher but how do u reacher a dead whale or any other animal in their natural habitat i agree with the other viewers on this web cause u are a heartless besterd and diserv to die .Other indanger animals need help too yes and we should help them but right now the whales need more help we are starting a club to save the whale we are collecting 5000 pennies to see how many whales will die for japan cause they said that is how many they are going to kill and the money we make is going to LOta a whale in Florida with the worlds smallest tank so they can make her a bigger tank.So u need to shut up and i hope ur family lives and u die y faggot. SAVE THE WORLD AND ITS LIVING CREATURE cuase we need living creatures to serive so we can live on cause they help our plants when they die and when they use the bathroom and we need them to eat vbut only certain ones .SAVE A COW EAT MORE CHICKEN> and u need to help us save the whales and i bet u are a bitter old man all alone trying to get attion because u are lonly and missible but that doesn’t mean that u should try to stop us cause we the children of the world are ur future one day we may find away to save the world
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 3:39 pm #
chelsiea lhamon wrote:
i think you should research whales while they are alive and whale shouldn’t be dead they should live how would you like it if you was alive and some one killed you and ate you ?
thats my point i dont think you do.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 3:26 pm #
VivyRome wrote:
You Rude Obnoxious idiot! How dare you put your CRUDE opinoins out there like that? I’m from D.C too and you’re lying my mother worked on the whale project with Green Peace and I’m fine.As is my wonderful family.Prejudice is wrong, you are discriminating against people who are trying to keep our economy and WORLD alive and intact. If you want to see it go up in flames, be my FUGLY (Fucking ugly)guest It’s a flippin’ free country you moron. Let it live. We need to save the world, and not exclude any creature. Yes children and are important, but SO ARE ALL ANIMALS! And, also, I agree with Amy: YOU, you heartless prat, deserve to be hunted by whale hunters!
Sunday, January 6, 2008 at 4:39 am #
nema wrote:
hello? is there a heart in your body? there are millons of humans on the earth, yes care about them but don’t not care about the animals and whales!! your website is sick and twisted, i’de rather see a kid die than a orca or a bottle nose dolphin!
Friday, January 4, 2008 at 12:53 am #

Zardoz is the Most Interesting Movie You’ve Never Heard Of

Chris Abraham — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:06:03 +0000

Before I start, check out Sean Connery’s costume (left). Zardoz is the most important movie nobody (I know) has seen. Forget that there is a lot of nakedness and topless women; or, that you get to see a super-buff, 1974-era, Sean Connery running around for more than two hours in a pair of underwear; this is an important movie or utopia gone terribly distopian.

Zardoz is written and played out like a Broadway musical, with lithe dancer-actors, it is presented like a play. This is not a sophisticated movie but it will surely make you think. I would say that Zardoz is both brilliant and campy; insightful and kitchy, and brutal and actually very good at dealing with the concept of balance: in order to grow as men and as a society, one cannot — must not — merely separate physically from poverty, ignorance, sickness, and death; but, rather, integrate, integrate, integrate — or perish. Bravo! See it.

The quote that is most popular from the movie comes from the first scene. God Zardoz says,

“The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill!”

“In this cult favorite from John Boorman (Beyond Rangoon), 23rd century society is split into two castes — the overly civilized Eternals and the barely civilized Brutals — one of which is constantly controlling the other. The Brutals worship a huge stone figure known as Zardoz. When Zed (Sean Connery) begins to question the authenticity of this god, the film is able to offer some pointed commentary on class structure and religion.” Via Zardoz/60020833?trkid=14″>Netflix

“Zardoz BY ROGER EBERT / January 1, 1974

John Boorman’s ZARDOZ is a genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators. It’s set in an Ireland of 2293 that looks exactly like the Ireland of today, until you get inside the Vortex. And then suddenly everything is shimmering gowns and futuristic throne rooms and beautiful young people who glide around at an endless debutante ball.

These are the Immortals. They will never die. They cannot. Every time they try to, their bodies are relentlessly restored by the all-knowing mystical computer mind that runs the Vortex. There’s a catch, though: They can’t die but they can grow old, and for infractions, they’re sentenced to age a few years. If they don’t watch themselves, they might wind up as Immortal Seniles.

Outside the Vortex, a barbaric civilization survives. Slaves till the land and gather the crops, ruled over by sadistic masters who sometimes gallop around killing off the surplus population. One of the barbarians is Zed, played by Sean Connery as a cross between Tarzan and Prince Valiant. But one day, Zed (like Lord Greystoke, come to think of it) finds a child’s alphabet book. He teaches himself to read and then fanatically devours the contents of whole libraries (like Thomas Wolfe, come to think of it). Eventually he comes upon The Wizard of Oz and, in a moment of blinding insight, sees through the whole joke of his world’s social structure.
Zed has himself smuggled aboard the giant floating head of Zardoz, which rules hinterlands, and finds himself inside the Vortex. Here he is an object of great interest, because the Immortals, you see, having lost the ability to die have also lost the drive to procreate and are doomed to an eternity of detumescence. Zed labors with no such difficulty.

The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful DELIVERANCE. Boorman seems fascinated by stories which are disconnected from the ordinary realist assumptions of most movies; his LEO THE LAST (1970) gave us Marcello Mastroianni as the last of the big-time decadents, living in a mansion at the end of a deserted street in an eerie London.

Boorman puts a lot of heavy concepts into ZARDOZ, but seems uncertain whether he takes them seriously himself. There are sight gags (the attempt to turn on Connery with futuristic pornography provides the best) , there are group seances that seem lifted bodily from pajama parties, there is no end of special visual effects (every optical printer in England must have been busy for weeks), and at the end there’s a combination shoot-out and mercy-killing spree that is at once ridiculous, depraved and low camp.

Sean Connery wanders through all of this with a slightly bemused expression on his face. He begins as a barbarian given to distrust and childish impulses, but after he gathers all knowledge to himself (the movie is full of phrases like “gathers all knowledge to himself”), he turns into a sort of body-building Einstein who sees into the center of the Vortex, deciphers the wisdom of the crystal, stimulates the Apathetics (that’s another social class I forgot to mention), makes love with a good-looking Immortal dame (she regains the knack) and finally turns into a fossil while the sound track milks Beethoven’s 7th for all it’s worth.

I remember standing in the rain once outside a theater that was playing LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Now there was a movie so complex and personal no one claimed to be able to understand itÑno, not even Time magazine. The people coming out from the previous show were shaking their heads and admitting that they, too, didn’t have a clue. And then it was our turn to go in and be mystified.

Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it. In the movie’s own terms, this much can be said for sure: It may not make you an Apathetic, but it will certainly age you by two hours.”

“Zardoz Review by Scott Weinberg

If your idea of perfect science fiction consists of space battles and droids, you’re probably best advised to steer clear of John Boorman’s ultra-trippy cult classic Zardoz. If, however, you can enjoy an ironic and entertaining fantasy mind-bender, then this one might be right up your alley. While overlooked by general audiences, Zardoz is one of the most feverishly adored cult movies ever. And while the movie certainly looks outdated and even silly at times, the deeply intelligent and thought-provoking issues under the surface challenge and entertain audiences.

The year is 2293 and most of humanity has devolved into mindless ‘Brutals.’ Their god Zardoz visits these savages periodically, instructing them to hunt down and kill any human ‘Breeders’ they come across. This is because “the penis is evil,” and humanity deserves to be wiped out. Zardoz appears to his violent followers as a giant flying stone head that spits out rifles and ammo, along with his murderous decrees. Zed (Sean Connery), one of the Brutals, stows away aboard the massive stone head, which takes him to ‘the Vortex.’ The denizens of the Vortex are a race of genetically superior, immortal beings that treat one another pretty rotten and long for death. When Zed climbs out of that giant head and starts poking around, things get really screwy.

Zardoz is packed to the gills with high-minded concepts. Take the ‘apathetics.’ These are immortals who have become so bored and disassociated during their eternal lives, that they are breathing, blank zombies. Another faction of the immortals is the ‘Renegades,’ who have become irretrievably insane. These elderly creatures are dumped off in an out-of-the-way building and forgotten. Zardoz is a movie with a lot to say about the ills of society.

Since it was made in 1973, it’s no surprise that Zardoz looks dated and even downright absurd. There are more than a few costumes and set designs that may have you rolling your eyes in disbelief, but it’s important to watch a movie like this with a sense of maturity. It may be difficult to take seriously dialogue like “The penis is evil,” but a willing (and preferably enthusiastic) suspension of disbelief is essential. Yes, that’s Connery as Zed, running around in what looks like a giant red diaper… and yes, there is a scene in which Zed is forced to achieve an erection while dozens of fascinated immortals stare on. But with the plethora of challenging and satisfying ideas being tossed around in Zardoz, it’s a tough movie to dislike.

It’s a testament to writer/director John Boorman that this movie ever saw the light of day. Zardoz was obviously a labour of love for him, and to this day Connery still lists this movie as one of his favourites. If you’re a fan of science fiction in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner, I would recommend Zardoz. While not as ‘polished’ as those other films, it deserves a place in anyone’s sci-fi collection.”

Plot Summary

* Genres: Fantasy, Sci-Fi
* Tagline: Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death
* Plot Outline In the far future, a savage trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity’s achievements.
* Plot Synopsis: In the distant future Earth is divided into two camps, the barely civilized group and the overly civilized one with mental powers. A plague is attacking the second group after which it’s members cease to have any interest in life and become nearly catatonic. When Sean Connery one of the barbarians, crosses over, the tenuous balance in their world is threatened.
* Plot Keywords: Blindness, Bizarre, Book, Mutant Human, Crystal Ball, Head, Harvest, Mutation, Flying Head, Ring, Reverse Footage, Horseback Riding

- Actors: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Sally Anne Newton, See more
- Directors: John Boorman
- Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
- Language: English, French
- Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Number of discs: 1
- Rating R
- Studio: 20th Century Fox
- DVD Release Date: March 27, 2001
- Run Time: 106 minutes
- Average Customer Review: based on 113 reviews. (Write a review.)
- DVD Features:

* Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
* Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 3.0), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
* Commentary by director John Boorman
* Still photo gallery
* Concept Art and Pressbook Galleries

- From IMDb: Quotes & Trivia
- ASIN: B000059HAE
- Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,570 in DVD (See Top Sellers in DVD)

Nominations

* BAFTA Awards: BAFTA Film Award for Best Cinematography
* Hugo Awards: Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation

Trivia

* The scene where Zed (
* DIRCAMEO:(
* To help keep the movie cost down,
* Zed’s revolver is a Webley in 455 caliber.
* The exterior shots at the very opening of the movie were taken right next to director
* To make the shots of the stone head move into the mouth accurately, the camera was placed at the mouth and tracked backwards, and the film reversed in the lab.
*
* The government initially refused to allow the production team to import the guns for the movie into Ireland because of terrorist attacks occurring at the time.
* Radio spots (available on the DVD) were narrated by
* According to John Boorman, Sean Connery found it incredibly difficult to get work when he abandoned the James Bond role a second time after Diamonds are Forever. Thus, Boorman was able to hire Connery very cheaply for this project.

Goofs

* When mortality comes to the vortex, several “dead” characters can be seen moving.
* When the exterminators on horseback are killing the brutals, tire tracks can be seen on the wet beach sand.
* Early in the film, when the weapons are spewed out of the floating head’s mouth, a crewmember’s arm can be seen throwing them.
* About three minutes into the movie, when the floating head is in the clouds, part of a car can be seen in the top right corner of the screen.
* In the scene where Zed discovers the floating book, you can clearly see the strings suspending it in midair.

Movie Connections

* Remade as: Planet B: Mask Under Mask
* References: Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey
* Referenced in: Excalibur, Dark City, The Big Tease, Wonder Boys, Empire of Dreams: The Story of the ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy
* Featured in: To the Galaxy and Beyond with Mark Hamill, The Fly Papers: The Buzz on Hollywood’s Scariest Insect

Quotes

* Arthur: It was I! I bred you! I led you!
Zed: And I have looked into the face of the force which put the idea in your head. You are bred and led yourself.
* Friend: We’ve all been used…
Arthur Frayn: …and reused…
Friend: …and abused…
Arthur Frayn: …and amused!
* Zardoz: The gun is good.
Exterminators: The gun is good.
Zardoz: The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!
* Zed: Stay behind my aura!
* Consuella: The brutal is now in fourth hour of unconscious sleep. It’s astonishing that Homo Sapiens spends so much time in this vulnerable condition, at the mercy of its enemies.
* Zed: I want the truth.
May: You must give the truth, if you wish to receive it.
Zed: I’m ready.
May: It’ll burn you!
Zed: Then burn me.
* The Tabernacle: Caution: You are approaching the periphery shield of Vortex Four. Caution: You are approaching the periphery shield of Vortex Four.
* Zardoz: Zardoz is pleased.
* The Tabernacle: Vote, please. Vote, please.
* The Tabernacle: I cannot give information which may threaten my own security.
* [watching his memory-scan video of hunting down Brutals] Zed: I love to see them running. I love the moments of their deaths – when I am one with Zardoz.
* [first lines]
Arthur Frayn: I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived 300 years, and long to die. But death is no longer possible, I am immortal. I present now my story – full of mystery and intrigue. Rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep within a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may! Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale I am a fake god by occupation, and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in showbusiness too?
* [to Zed] Consuella: I have hunted you so long, I have become you.
* George Saden: I think what I think. I hate you all. I hate you all. I hate you all. Including me…
* [about to Liberate Consuela] Zed: All that I am is gone.
* [Zed breaks the heart of the crystal] The Tabernacle: You have destroyed us. You are alone.
* Consuella: Penile erection was one of the many unsolved evolutionary mysteries surrounding sexuality. Every society had an elaborate subculture devoted to erotic stimulation. But nobody could quite determine how this…
[Consuella points to a diagram of a male penis and scrotum]
Consuella: becomes this.
[Consuella points to a diagram of an erect penis and scrotum]
Consuella: Of course, we all know the physical process involved, but not the link between stimulus and response. There seems to be a correlation with violence, with fear. Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more or less aware of our intensive researches into this subject. Sexuality declined probably because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve. And we are no longer victims of this violent, convulsive act which so debased women and betrayed men. This brutal
[Sean Connery]
Consuella: , like other primates living unselfconscious lives, is capable of spontaneous and reflexive erection. As part of May’s studies of this creature, we’re trying to find, once again, the link between erotic stimulation and erection. This experiment will measure autoerotic stimulation of the cortex, leading to erection.
* The Tabernacle: Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated. As Eternals achieved total consciousness, sleep became obsolete and Second Level meditation took its place.
* Zed: What is it you want?
Friend: Sweet death. Oblivion.
Zed: For yourself, or for the whole Vortex?
Friend: For Everybody. An end to the human race. It has plagued this pretty planet for far too long.
Zed: You stink of despair. Fight back! Fight for death, if that’s what you want.
Friend: I thought at first you were the one to help. But it’s hopeless. All my powers have gone.
* May: Friend, I cannot sanction this violence and destruction.
Friend: It’s too late, May. There’s no going back.
May: Don’t destroy the Vortex! Let us renew it. A better breed could prosper here. Given time…
Friend: Time? Wasn’t eternity enough?
Zed: This place is against life. It must die.
May: I have my followers. Inseminate us all, and we’ll teach you all we know. Give you all we have. Perhaps you can break the Tabernacle. Or be broken.
Friend: An end to eternity.
May: A higher form.
Zed: Revenge.
* [to Consuela] Zed: Can you unknow what you know of me?”

Zardoz from Wikipedia

Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction film directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery in one of his first post-James Bond roles. The film contains a mix of mythology, a bizarre, sprawling plot filled with twists and incongruities, and wide-ranging satirical and allegorical stabs. Filmed on a small budget of US$1 million, Zardoz‘s mixture of cerebral, philosophical sci-fi was in complete contrast to Boorman’s previous film, the brutal thriller Deliverance. The film was shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth. An attempt to market the film to the post-2001: A Space Odyssey audience was unsuccessful, although the film has since developed a cult following.

Plot

In a future post-apocalypse Earth (2293), the human population is divided into the immortal “Eternals” and mortal “Brutals”. The Brutals live in a dark-ages wasteland. The Eternals, who live apart in various “Vortices” (singular “Vortex”), hidden bastions of civilization, lead a luxurious but aimless existence. The contrast between the two groups is stark. In general, calamity after calamity has reduced life on much of the Earth to dire subsistence levels. The distant Eternals are unknown to most people. The only contact between the groups is through a religious warrior class called the “Exterminators”, who kill and terrorize other Brutals at the orders of a huge flying stone head called Zardoz. The stone head supplies them with weapons and ideology in exchange for the food they collect.

Zed (Connery), an Exterminator, hides aboard Zardoz during one trip, “killing” its Eternal operator-creator, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy). Arriving in the Vortex as a stowaway, Zed meets two Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman). They possess psychic powers, and make Zed a prisoner of the community of decadent effetes in order to study him. Zed is put to work as a physical laborer under the direction of subversive troublemaker called Friend (John Alderton).

Over time Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by an AI called the Tabernacle. Through their vastly extended lifespan the Eternals have grown bored, corrupt, and impotent. They spend days stewarding the vast knowledge of humanity while doing little themselves besides participating in bizarre rituals and mass meditations navel gazing. As they never die and the passage of time is largely meaningless as a result, violating the complex set of social rules, and thereby going “Renegade”, results in artificial aging. An Eternal thus aged will remain as the feeble elderly for the rest of time. More recently some have fallen into catatonia through an odd mental illness, forming a new social strata the Eternals call the “Apathetics”.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Zed is not quite the “brutal” the Eternals believe him to be. He very quickly divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, and starts to play an increasingly proactive role among the Eternals. The backstory develops to reveal that Zed was aware of the true nature of Zardoz, having been led to an old book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; the origin of the name Zardoz (Wizard of Oz). After revealing that Frayn had led him to the book and taught him to read, the story is completed; Zed is the ultimate creation of Frayn’s long-running experiment in creative eugenics, using the Exterminator class to control the Brutals with the aim of breeding a superman to save humanity from its dead-end status quo. He had led Zed to understand the nature of Zardoz, hoping he would use it to infiltrate the Vortex.

The Eternals discover the deceit and “age” Friend, while attempting to control Zed. But Zed is actually superior in intelligence to the eternals, and is eventually able to withstand their psychic powers. He destroys the Tabernacle, after which the Vortex is invaded by other Exterminators who bring death to the majority of Eternals, typically with their blessing, given the novelty of the events. A few Eternals escape to make a new life outside the Vortex among the Brutals, carrying the knowledge of civilization. The allegorical ending shows Zed and Consuella producing a child, growing old and dying naturally, whilst the sound of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony swells in the soundtrack.
Spoilers end here.

History

Zardoz is is notable for being the first time a search engine (or a precursor) is shown in a film, retrieving visual images from a database, years before the personal computer was invented. Arthur Frayne is shown instructing the computer to search for specific images of Cars in the way that we associate with search engines, except with voice recognition software .

Production

In the DVD commentary Boorman repeatedly complains about the low budget of the film. Nevertheless he attempted to fill it with a sort of concept art. The Exterminators hunt down the Brutals while wearing large red paper mache facemasks, loincloths and matching bandoliers. The Brutals are instead dressed almost universally in sport coats and jeans, except for young women, who are dressed in “caveman” garb. If this were not enough, in one scene Zed escapes from the Eternals by dressing in a wedding gown. The head of Zardoz, arguably the most important set in terms of plot development, is clearly made of painted paper mache. Most of the sets in the Vortex are equally low quality, variously consisting of large inflated plastic sheets, “olde English” villages, or pastel decorated sets – the Tabernacle is simply a room filled with mirrors.

Reception

In 2004 the magazine Total Film described Connery’s costume (consisting of a ponytail wig, leather knee boots, and a loincloth which bears a strong resemblance to a giant orange nappy or diaper) as the number 1 “dumbest decision in movie history”.

References in popular culture

This article contains a trivia section.
Content in this section should be integrated into other appropriate areas of the article or removed, and the trivia section removed.

* The DC Comics character Vartox is a near-carbon copy of Zed. He has an exact replica of Zed’s clothing, brown hair, and receding hairline. The character’s name is even close to sounding like the “Vortex” of the film.
* The video game Time Bandit, which has several science fiction references, mentions the “spirits of Zardoz“.[citation needed]
* The video for “Dreams” by the rock band TV on the Radio features a huge stone head like the one in “Zardoz” that disintegrates at the video’s end.
* The webcomic Questionable Content referred to Zardoz multiple times in comic number 830].
* Saul was dressed as Zed in an episode of Saul of the Mole Men, “Fun King Johnny”, when he was on trial by combat.

Quotes

If the content can be changed to be more encyclopedic rather than just a list of quotes, please do so and remove this message. Otherwise, you can help by formatting it per the Wikiquote guidelines in preparation for the duplication.

* Zardoz: The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill! [Zardoz proceeds to vomit a torrent of rifles and ammunition for his followers to use.]

Listen to Your Own Declaration of Independence

Chris Abraham — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 14:07:22 +0000

Listen to the entire Declaration of Independence read by all the stars of NPR this AM. Via NPR.

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton

Martin Marty is a Gift to America and My Favorite Theologian

Chris Abraham — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 10:40:28 +0000

I got to spend some time hanging out with Martin Marty at Renaissance Weekend a couple years ago. All I knew about him was gleaned from lunches, dinners, and panels together. During last night’s run, my friend Marty Marty started speaking into my iPod earbuds in the form of an interview on Speaking of Faith, America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty Download MP3, Listen, Podcast, and uncut interview with Martin Marty (1:38). God bless Martin Marty and thank you, Krista Tippett.

Transcript of America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty
Billboard:
Krista Tippett, host: I’m Krista Tippett, today a conversation about religion in America, with one of the great public theologians of our time, Martin Marty. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are now the stuff of daily headlines: the rise of religious fundamentalism across the world, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the vigor of evangelical Christianity in American life. Marty offers historical and personal perspective.
Mr. Martin Marty: I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts, and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both.
Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty on America’s changing religious landscape. This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are the stuff of daily headlines and partisan rhetoric: the vigor of evangelical Christianity in politics, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world. Today we’ll probe the historical perspective of this leading scholar of religion. We’ll discuss what’s really new in religion as a force in American culture, politics, and daily life.
From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”
Martin Marty has been called the foremost interpreter of religion in America today. The National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are just a few of the honors he has amassed. He’s served on U.S. presidential commissions and directed a visionary research project on religious fundamentalism. The University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for 35 years, has created the Martin Marty Center to continue his work on public religion.
But for all his celebrity and scholarship, Martin Marty draws crucial insight from his own personal grounding in the mainstream religious life of American culture. He began his working life not as a scholar but as a pastor. He was born into a Lutheran family in 1928, in the Nebraska of Dust Bowl and Depression, where his father was a teacher and a church organist.
Mr. Marty: We were a churched family, of course, it was my father’s profession, and I’ve reminisced with some folks about how I got babysat next to the organ bench and had to sit through long funerals as a child, and somehow it didn’t turn me off from it all. I have a brother and a sister, and the three of us were well-schooled in literature and music and art, and also a very close basic sense of the faith of ordinary people, and I’ve tried to keep some sense of that in my lifework.
Ms. Tippett: Much of Martin Marty’s investigation into American religious life has centered on the dominant majority religion at the heart of our culture, the many denominations of mainline Protestant Christianity. But in our time, surveys show that majority is disappearing even as many Americans perceive the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity to be growing. In his 2004 book, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, Marty describes the centuries from 1607 to 1955 as an era in American history in which “Protestants ran the show.” That began to change and take on new dimensions in the 1960s, an era vivid in the American popular imagination for political movements and the Vietnam War. For Martin Marty, it was also a decade of astonishing religious turning points whose significance went unnoticed. I asked him to walk me through the religious watersheds of the 1960s that began to erode the dominance of mainline Protestantism.
Mr. Marty: The biggest single event that hit this country happened in Rome, and that’s the Second Vatican Council. That is, Protestantism always knew what it was because it knew what Catholicism was, and it was over against that. Suddenly, Catholicism is friendly. It moves out into the public sector. The GI Bill puts Catholic young people into universities. They soon became the most educated group in the country, and Protestants were thrown off balance by that.
Secondly, it’s the beginning of the surge of evangelicalism within Protestantism, which — in those days, I imagine a lot of the Protestant leaders kind of sneered at Billy Graham and looked down their nose at tent revivals and so on and didn’t pay much attention to see how it was coming. And suddenly in the ’60s, I visited Berkeley, you had the Jesus People, little girls getting baptized in their bikinis, and change of worship from a certain kind of formality. The rock bands were coming in. And another huge infusion was an awareness of the religions of the East. You might keep going to your Presbyterian church, but you start doing yoga and you start doing Buddhist disciplines, etc. And you didn’t stop being Presbyterian, but you were of a different sort. You didn’t take it all for granted.
Ms. Tippett: I also think that something we’ve lost a memory of is how much tension there was between Catholics and Protestants, right, in this country, between different kinds of Christians, in a way that is absolutely unimaginable now. And I mean, personally for you, was that shift surprising?
Mr. Marty: I, in 1956, was invited to join the staff of The Christian Century, which was the towering Protestant voice. Today it still is, if not towering, a strong voice, but it’s ecumenical. It has a lot of Catholic writers; it has a lot of evangelical writers. But at that time, it was Protestant, and it was anti-Catholic. In 1950, on the cover of The Christian Century, there was an article, “Pluralism, A National Menace.” Pluralism was they’re worried about Catholicism. When I joined the staff five years later, pluralism was the best game in town. My first visits to campus, you always had one priest, one minister, one rabbi; that was called pluralism back then. But through that all, the Protestant still was in a privileged position. It simply was a kind of a reflex: ‘We’re the largest. We’re the ones who left our stamp on America’s literature, its poetry, its statecraft, etc.’
I’m going to say something in case I’m sounding critical.
Ms. Tippett: You can sound critical if you’d like to.
Mr. Marty: I’d be happy to be critical, but I don’t want to be distorting what I want to be. And that is to say, for all of that reflexive sense of establishment, I think I’m being a neutral, value-free historian when I say I don’t know any time in human history that somebody that powerful yielded that gracefully. In the previous century, Protestantism was often used — white Protestantism — to enslave, and it was used to justify the reservating of the Indians. But in the 20th century, Protestants have sort of said, ‘All right, you’re making your case. We’ll make room for you.’ They weren’t doing that much before the mid-’50s, but from then on in, they have done it even at the expense to their own identity.
Ms. Tippett: And I’m sure you’ve read these statistics that are now coming out, that perhaps today or tomorrow or six months from now, there will no longer be a Protestant majority in this country. And it depends on how people measure these things but, still, it seems significant when what is replacing the number of people who say that they’re Protestant are more people who say that they have no religion at all. In fact, it’s very high among people who were born in 1980 or later. And then there’s a category that’s doubled, of people who call themselves just Christian, right, who don’t identify with a specific tradition. How do you explain these statistics?
Mr. Marty: First of all, I think that Protestantism and Catholicism have very common fates here. They both have had trouble holding their younger generation. In some respects, the Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of the northern part of the United States share a lot with Canada, which is far less involved with church, or Western Europe, which is far, far less involved. Incidentally, that little section, I call it the spiritual ice belt: Western Europe, the British Isles, Canada and the northern U.S. We are really exceptions in the world, and we are really having a hard time catching up with understanding the rest of the world.
Protestantism is not in trouble around the world. I am a Lutheran, and we’ve had 300 years to get about eight million people. In 15 years from now, the African Lutheran churches will have added as many people as it took us 300 years to get. And that’s true of many other Protestantisms and Pentecostalisms. Every day there are 23,000 new Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, and half of them would be called Protestant, if often in the Pentecostal version. So around the world, it’s not a losing force. No longer, however, does it make the reference it once did to Western Europe and its daughter, the United States.
What will that mean for the United States? I don’t think we’re going to wake up some day and see total change. There’s a strange thing that hundreds of years after the vital life of a religion is past, there’s still a strong influence. We’re still living off some of the Greek religious influences. We’re living off a lot of medieval Catholicism. Our very universities are inventions of that. Our hospitals are inventions of that. So in a sense, meanings, ideas — in this case, ideas of liberty, freedom — that came very often from Protestants will live on even if not everybody goes to church. Still, the churches have been the places where these stories get renewed regularly.
Ms. Tippett: OK. I mean, I just wonder, personally, is this something that troubles you?
Mr. Marty: I don’t think I wake up in the morning having great worries about that. You can tell from what I’ve said I have a global view of humanity and of religion, and it moves around a lot. In the 1930s a great Catholic, Hilaire Belloc, said, “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.” Well, that was true then. Now the cathedrals are empty, but their granddaughters are full in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I certainly think that some things borne by the Protestant message would be a great loss. One of its gifts to America was its sense that we’re scripted. It’s a scriptural faith, it’s a Christ-centered faith, but it doesn’t mean that all virtue and all morality goes with you. And I think that’s been a nice irritating voice in classic Protestantism, which is, no matter how far along you’d come, God was holding you to a higher standard.
Ms. Tippett: Religious historian and author Martin Marty. One of the most popular of his over 50 books is Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in American. He is considered by some to be a bridge between the devotional and scholarly worlds of liberal mainline Protestantism and evangelical Christianity.
Ms. Tippett: Let’s talk about evangelical Christianity, which at the same time that there are some statistics of people becoming less religious, there’s certainly a sense that religion in some ways is more of a force now. I mean, I think there would be people who would take your phrase, “When Protestants ran the show,” and say that a certain kind of Christianity is becoming almost a controlling force or, you know, we have an evangelical Christian in the White House. I mean, how are you observing what’s happening now, with your broad view of things and of history?
Mr. Marty: I think those of us who write this kind of history are a little puzzled by the naiveté of the — well, people in journalism, in the media, in the general public, who think all this just got invented in the last four years and couple months. It has very deep roots. I trace it not to the ’20s. Nobody cared about the religion of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. And Roosevelt was a mainline Protestant, Episcopalian, and he could draw upon these themes very much. Harry Truman was a salty Baptist. Truman and Carter and Clinton, the three Baptist presidents of the century, know the Bible best. They can just recite reams of it at any moment. Eisenhower started having Billy Graham come by. When we say “evangelical” today, it’s almost a long shadow originally of Graham. Today, evangelicalism is multi-headed. It’s all over the place. You can’t really generalize about it much anymore, but in its purer form, it came up in that way.
And, yes, in ’64, they really galvanized around Barry Goldwater and the kind of conservatism. And they didn’t get very far because he didn’t get very far, but they got angry about being dismissed and so on. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter ran, he’s the first one who would say, ‘I’m born again,’ first one to say, ‘I had a personal experience with Jesus,’ but they soon dropped him because they didn’t like him politically. Ronald Reagan was not born again, but he was friendly to them. But you could see this long trend coming.
Robert Handy, one of our major historians, once wrote a little book on The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935, because the mainline churches were already beginning to lose some of their membership, their status. They were depressed. But Joel Carpenter, another historian, has since pointed out, through it all the fundamentalists who’d been disgraced in the 1920s started organizing. They bought radio stations. They started Bible colleges. They had magazines. And they were building a world inside the world. And suddenly along come people like Billy Graham and presidents who favor it, and you have a very different kind of pattern, so that by the time — I would say by the time of Ronald Reagan, it became so vivid that the normal clergy in the White House would be evangelists, usually, until recently, of a rather moderate sort.
Ms. Tippett: It also seems to me, though, that a mistake is made in media in lumping together — as you said, evangelicalism is a — there’s a multiplicity of evangelicalism, and evangelicalism has a very different history and theology in some cases from Pentecostals and certainly from fundamentalists, although there is some overlap. How would you explain the distinctions?
Mr. Marty: All right. To the sociologists, the slightly more than one-fourth of America that would be called evangelical includes fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and conservative Protestant denominations. And they really have tremendous differences except when they converge on highly focal and, let’s say, useful political points: gay marriage or something of that sort. But for the most part, they’re much more diverse.
Until around the turn of the last century, all Protestants were called evangelicals; all evangelicals were called Protestant. During the century, though, you started having the liberal churches accenting more the Biblical story applied to social life, economic life, cultural life, whereas those who were evangelical started dealing with private life, personal life. That still goes down in our own time.
Ms. Tippett: Why did that happen? How did that happen?
Mr. Marty: Well, I think the Protestants who ran the show had the sense that you can pass a law and get rid of slavery, you can join secular people to get antitrust laws, you could have child labor laws. All the while then, the revivalists, Billy Graham’s ancestors — the greatest being Dwight Moody, a Chicago evangelist — looked out at the world and saw it in trouble, and he said, ‘The world is a flood, and God gave me a lifeboat and said, “Moody, rescue all you can.”‘ And I think they concentrated on heaven, on saving souls. And then on moral issues, they chose those over which an individual could have control: You shouldn’t gamble. You shouldn’t swear. You shouldn’t drink.
Now what’s so interesting today is, what have come to be called social issues in recent campaigns are not social, they’re personal enlarged. In other words, the evangelicals and the fundamentalists and the Catholic conservatives concentrate on what goes on in the bedroom, and they don’t talk much the way classic Protestants did about should the government be involved with poverty, with waging peace, all of those kinds of things. It’s been their genius to organize that in our own time so they have great political power. The Republican Party in particular has seen that that can be amassed and help get votes for things outside of the bedroom.
Ms. Tippett: Although there certainly are Catholics and evangelicals who are mobilized around poverty and those more classic kinds of social justice issues.
Mr. Marty: Oh, my, yes. Catholics are very much upfront. And some of the strongest social involvements of today are among evangelical Protestants. But that kind of Catholic and that kind of evangelical and that kind of Protestant are themselves in a kind of a loose coalition today. Not as powerful as the personal morality people, but there’s a lot of power there. A lot of witness goes on.
Ms. Tippett: Religious scholar and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today we’re exploring Martin Marty’s historical and personal perspective on the changing religious dynamics in American culture. For a half-century, he has studied the effect of increasing pluralism on American Christianity. He’s also been a visionary scholar of religious fundamentalist movements around the world.
Ms. Tippett: I want to talk about the Fundamentalism Project that you did but, I mean, before we actually talk about fundamentalism, I’d like to note something that I thought was very interesting. I was reading your address that you gave at the conclusion of that project to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You titled it, “Too Bad We’re So Relevant: The Fundamentalism Project Projected.”
I’ll just read this quote: “The Fundamentalism Project scholars have found that fundamentalists tend to turn intimate and private issues into public affairs. Concern for the zones of life closest to the self — world view, identity, sexuality, gender differentiation, family, education, communication — tend to take priority over macroeconomic concerns.”
So my question to you is, is there something at the origins of fundamentalism that is also moving our culture as a whole right now?
Mr. Marty: OK. One quick word about fundamentalism. The fundamentalism we studied, to which you’re referring, is not your friendly neighborhood fundamentalist down the block. Our assignment was to study the militancies. When we started this, a historian friend said, ‘When you’re studying American fundamentalism, Marty, remember there are no machine guns in the basement of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.’ We were really studying a different kind of thing there, and yet there are certain things everybody had in common.
In the roots of fundamentalism in our culture, it started, of course, anti-evolution, anti-biblical criticism, and then it started taking a moral cast. But its moral cast, again, was the things that you should take control of. Virtue, advice were their big terms, not social justice and social change. Take what is a virtuous person; pass laws to promote that virtue. And I certainly am leaving a wrong impression if I’m suggesting that bedroom and clinical issues don’t have social consequences. They have huge social consequences. If divorce becomes more easy and grows and families disintegrate and children don’t have models in the parental world and they’re not educable, it’s a huge difference in the culture. So they don’t have a monopoly on it either in its invention or its present carrying out, but I think more of them restrict their energies to that and, again, it’s a very politically popular thing to do.
Ms. Tippett: But here’s my question: This description that you gave of fundamentalism, that people turn to intimate and private issues and that these take priority over macroeconomic concerns, could actually, I think, describe maybe a majority of Americans this year. So what I’m wondering is if there’s something that you see that gives rise to that tendency within fundamentalism that is actually alive in our culture as a whole right now.
Mr. Marty: I think two things are going on. On one level, around the world people are having trouble with their identity, their belief — whom do I trust, who trusts me? And so a phrase we used in The Fundamentalism Project, around the world, there is a massive, convulsive ingathering of peoples into their separatenesses and over-againstnesses, to protect their pride and power and place from others who are doing the same thing. Now, look at American life. We don’t do it the way they do it in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. We don’t veil women or anything like that, but we’re clustering more tightly. ‘We’re the virtuous, and they’re the vicious. We’re the good, they’re the evil.’
Ms. Tippett: I guess I’m still wondering how you understand the human and spiritual–maybe not theological, but the spiritual roots of this focus that seems to have become so definitive in our public life, on private issues of morality as the issues of morality.
Mr. Marty: I think that all through Christian history, anything related to sexuality was troubling and exciting. Clerical celibacy for 1700 years in Catholicism shows this, how much of an upheaval was caused when Martin Luther got married and when the Protestant clergy married. Every change in sexual mores is troubling because that’s so close to the roots of creation and transmission of life. Now what’s happened in our own time, I argue, every church body from the Mennonites to the evangelicals to the Roman Catholic Church are torn up over two words: sex and authority. By sex, I mean everything in the biological cycle, from in vitro fertilization or stem cell research, abortion, birth control, cohabitation outside of marriage. All these things are troubling all the churches, some of them sweeping…
Ms. Tippett: And dividing people in them.
Mr. Marty: Oh, yes. Some people sweep these things under the rug or close their eyes to it or whatever. But I think it’s very hard to get to the root of your part of the question as to why this longtime concern for personal morality, sexual morality, suddenly became so politically powerful. On one level, let’s be honest, it’s very exploitable. Everything else I’ve talked about — caring for peace, caring for justice, caring for feeding — these are all relative things. How much foreign aid budget you’re going to put into it, how much energy you’re going to put into it. With abortion, you either have an abortion or you don’t. You either perform gay right marriage or not. So it can be a big matter of identity and boundary, and I think that’s very popular in a time when people lose their identity and their boundary. I always say that the laws on gay rights and the practices toward them will be changed when every tenth evangelical minister’s daughter comes out. That is, when it gets close to you, you see these differently.
Ms. Tippett: So liberal — let’s say, Democrats and even liberal religious people who also have been struggling to find a voice in this last period will often hearken back to the days when it was the social justice issues that mobilized people and that had political force. Did those issues somehow achieve that force in the ’60s because they became more personal for people and, I mean, could you imagine that happening again?
Mr. Marty: Oh, I think so. The personalization of civil rights, you suddenly had a face: Martin Luther King. You suddenly had causes: the four little Birmingham girls who were bombed. These are very, very vivid things so that the president of the United States had to get on television one night, and after you’d seen the pictures of the dogs attacking children and police attempts to put down blacks in the South, suddenly it did become personal.
I should also say in fairness — I’m really trying to be as accurate as I can — these involvements of white Protestants in peace movements and civil rights movements that was never massive. That was often leadership. Some people would call them generals without armies. And there’s where I think we historians have kept saying a lot of evangelicals were up close, they were getting their hands dirty. The Salvation Army, for example, is an evangelical movement, one of the oldest. So we don’t have any absolute lines here at all. I just think that the sudden choice to organize on the virtue-vice line, the ‘we’re entirely right and they’re entirely wrong’ line, was very exploitable in politics, and in many, many states that has come to prevail as the main political agency. Nobody would have dreamed of that 20 years ago.
Ms. Tippett: Historian and author Martin Marty. This is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, more of his reflections on the nature of fundamentalism, separation of church and state, and the future of religion in America.
Mr. Marty: I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody.
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I’m Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I’m Krista Tippett, today exploring America’s contemporary religious landscape with Martin Marty.
Martin Marty is a celebrated historian and interpreter of American religious life. This hour he’s been reflecting on the religious dynamics of contemporary America from his perspective of half a century of scholarship. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the present, he’s been involved in many large-scale analyses of American Protestantism in particular, including its cultural influence and its pluralistic impulses.
And from 1987 to 1993, well before religious fundamentalism had become a feature of daily news headlines, Marty directed a global fundamentalism project that was commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That project studied militant religious fundamentalist cultures around the world, and resulted in a five-volume publication. I asked Martin Marty what he learned that surprised him and what shapes his reaction to fundamentalism now.
Mr. Marty: The first thing we learned was that it is religious. That is, we didn’t let the psychologists in the first couple of years. This was a six-year study. We wanted to make sure that we caught the religious dimension and were convinced of that. And therefore fundamentalists, by and large, saw us as being fair. Our main instrument was the tape recorder. We sent out a couple hundred scholars around the world and they would ask, ‘Why are you this?’ and ‘Why do you raise your family that way?’ We studied it in 23 religions, by the way, Jains and Sikhs and everybody; it wasn’t just Christians and Muslims and Jews.
What else did we learn? Number one, fundamentalism is not the old-time religion. Fundamentalism is a very modern packaging. That is, it’s born when there’s an assault on values that you have and are uncertain about. There has to be a threat to you as a group identity or to you as an individual. So the most important word in fundamentalism is you react. Very few fundamentalists are concerned about things that traditionalists and regular conservatives and orthodox are. You can’t get a phone booth full of an argument on the most important Christian doctrines like the divine trinity and the two natures of Christ and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. They care about evolution. They care about being left behind as the world ends. But there’s a very selective agenda. The whole left-behind theology is not the old-time religion. It was invented in the 1840s, which is really the modern world.
Ms. Tippett: For someone like you.
Mr. Marty: That’s right. I move glacially, not with a hurricane. And many other features were modern. Everywhere we studied them, they were better at the use of mass media than modernists were.
Ms. Tippett: Now, that’s interesting.
Mr. Marty: Yes. I once spoke in a church in — I think it was Dallas, and the pulpit looked like a 747 panel. A red light would go on, a baby’s crying in nursery 23C, and another blue light and that means a Jaguar’s lights were left on in parking lot D, and I could raise the temperature and the volume and everything else. And the minister in his sermon later on blasted technology, which he was using. In other words, he blasted the energy put into it, I suppose you’d say.
Well, I can go to a liberal Methodist church and I’m pretty sure the microphone won’t work. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution was done through tape recordings from France. Al-Qaeda is very much at home with the Internet.
Ms. Tippett: Very savvy, yeah.
Mr. Marty: Mass media helped produce fundamentalism because — first stage was born in the early radio; the second stage, Billy Graham, early television; the third stage now, Internet. What do you do? It comes at you with full force. You might try laws against obscenity and pornography. You might try to boycott Disney World. That doesn’t do much. You’re better off starting your own television networks. ‘Mass media are what messed up the intimacy of my family life; I’ll turn it right back upon itself.’
Ms. Tippett: So as late as on September 11th, 2001, the word “fundamentalism” became a part of our public vocabulary. And I’m curious, as you watched that happen and have watched all the discussion since then, having spent this good block of time studying fundamentalism a decade earlier, what have you found to be missing in our analysis of fundamentalism recently?
Mr. Marty: I think, unfortunately, the word is used to clump everybody together. The overuse of the word “fundamentalism” — I should be claiming a patent on it because we did those five big fat books on it. But one of the themes of those five books was there are an awful lot of things out there and there’s a lot of internal diversity. We would remind people — for example, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s had 450,000 members in Indiana, in the North, and every meeting had a Protestant minister, it had a cross, it had the open Bible, it had prayer, and the rest of Protestantism and the rest of Christianity would say, ‘That’s not a bit representative of the one billion of us out there.’ So I think when al-Qaeda came on the scene that was our first message: Show the diversities. Make it easier for moderates to be moderate. Don’t demonize the enemy. Do all that you can to show their varieties and to make it easy for them to be diverse.
Ms. Tippett: Esteemed religious historian and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”
Ms. Tippett: You’ve lived a good long time as a public theologian and a religious thinker, and you quote a lot of great thinkers in all your works. I wonder, if I asked you who you think of as the most formative and influential religious figures in American life in the 20th century, who would you want to describe?
Mr. Marty: Among the well-known people, I would have to say the two Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, who towered at Union Seminary and Yale when Protestantism was strong. They both were strong for the prophetic principle. They weren’t good at leading you into worship, though they did write prayers. But they were up close. They were in the thick of things.
Reinhold was a “cold warrior.” He was a consultant in the Truman era to the Dean Achesons and then the John Foster Dulleses. He’s there. But his interpretation of human nature — on one level, there was a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, but he once said, ‘You’ll never understand me if you don’t know that I believe in Christ crucified.’ He always went back to his roots in the gospel, but they also appreciated his analysis of human nature was so realistic, and his interpretation of history and the place nations played.
Ms. Tippett: Here’s a favorite quotation of the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with which Martin Marty ended an address at the White House in 1998.
Reader: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
Ms. Tippett: From Reinhold Niebuhr.
My guest, Martin Marty, is describing some of the most interesting and influential religious forces in his lifetime.
Mr. Marty: I certainly would have to put Billy Graham in the front rank. And I may not have always been in the same camp, we’ve exchanged a few nice letters and have never had a sour word in 30, 40 years, but there’s no doubt about it that I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both. But he’s not a mean. And I think you’d have to say that’s just been an enormous influence on many people.
Paul Tillich, of German import, was highly influential theologically. But I really think that people whose names you’ll never know were influential.
Ms. Tippett: Right. And who are some of those that are important to you?
Mr. Marty: Well, a custodian at a high school I went to. You’d come there in the morning and, as busy as he might be pushing a broom, he read your face better than the counselors did as to what your trouble was.
I personally have a lot of interest in the arts and I have hung out with people who are in music. Recently I was at the dedication of a new organ in honor of Paul Manz, a great, great organist who brought back something as corny-sounding as hymn singing into the great cathedrals. He and I have been on a couple of CDs together. I assure anybody listening that I don’t sing, I narrate. But certainly Paul Manz would be in my front rank of people who shaped me.
A theologian named Joe Sittler, not among the best-known theologians in America, blind in the last years of his life, nearly deaf, had a way with words and a way of discernment and a good-humored understanding of ethics that made the world richer for me.
Reader: A reading from Joseph Sittler in the 1986 book Gravity and Grace:
“St. Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions, makes a great and beautiful statement: ‘Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’ Back of that statement lies a proposition which says that the human is created for transcendence … that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities.
“We are formed for God. …Faith is a longing. Humankind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle or manage.
“…This restlessness may make us want to throw in the towel — or to pull up our socks. You can either be creatively restless, as before the unknowable, or you can simply collapse into futility. One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness, and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.”
Theologian Joseph Sittler, from the book Gravity and Grace.
Ms. Tippett: You often mention a Dutch philosopher.
Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: How do you say his name?
Mr. Marty: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who was a Swiss-German Jew and Christian. He’s one of those geniuses that you can quote 20 pages of and then the 21st page is so nutty you’re not sure you can use it. But I’ll give a quick illustration of what I get from him. For example, he says — and this is extremely important in my life. He says you can write the history of learning in the western world in three Latin phrases.
The first is, in Latin, Credo ut intelligum — “I believe in order that I may understand.” It’s the birth of the universities in Europe, Bologna, Paris, Oxford. You believe to apprehend the universe; truth is divinely revealed and can be appropriated. And that’s the charter that believers should never be afraid of learning.
Secondly, modern learning, without which we couldn’t do, is Descartes. René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.” Modern university is born on skepticism and doubt and inquiry and criticism, and you want that. I don’t want a med school in which they’re just taking things on faith. I want them to be extremely critical. But he said, ‘That, too, gets sterile.’ And so he says, in the 20th century, that we also have to learn that truth has a social character. I’m learning from this conversation with you. We learn from conversing with someone else, we learn from the meaning of “I” and “thou.”
And his third motto was Respondeo etsi mutabor — “I respond although I will be changed.” I’m not changed when I argue with somebody because I know an answer and I got to defeat them. I’m always changed in a conversation because they’re going to surprise me. It’s kind of a game, it’s kind of play. And I think that that’s the kind of learning we need more in the churches, in theology, in politics, and in personal life.
Ms. Tippett: You’ve done a lot of projecting in your life. I mean, I found one book written in 1971 where you were projecting the church in that century, and there was projecting in The Fundamentalism Project. I wonder what you have been wrong about, as you look back, and also I wonder, as you look forward, where you are finding your hope and nurture.
Mr. Marty: Well, looking ahead, it’s a very foolish thing for a historian to do because we have nothing to say until something’s happened. I mean, our specialty is the past. But when you’re involved in the worlds in which I’m involved, you do hang out with the people who do projecting and you go along with them. My biggest misses were I didn’t foresee three huge things: One, the explosion of evangelicalisms; number two, the highly individualized spirituality of which you spoke earlier, the people who are on a spiritual search but they’re doing it at the coffee shop, at the mega bookstore, or they’re doing it in a little chanting group, and they’re not doing it in the churches. That’s certainly a force I hadn’t foreseen. And then I think the vitality that has come with the new pluralism, and that’s because I did a lot of writing before 1965 when the immigration laws changed.
Ms. Tippett: That’s another one of those points in the ’60s that you say how important that was for our religious life, that we never talk about as a turning point in the ’60s.
Mr. Marty: Well, it’s huge. It was the year of the Selma March. It was the year of the engagement in Vietnam. It was the year of all the LBJ Great Society legislation, and Congress made a little change in the immigration laws, after 41 years. And it was just in time for all the boat people. It’s just in time for people from Africa to come direct, and so on. And it was just a huge change…
Ms. Tippett: Because it gave rise to a pluralism and a multiculturalism in a new way.
Mr. Marty: Yes. It makes new demands on hospitality, etc. Lewiston, Maine, suddenly has people from Somalia. I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. And when you go to a hospital today, your doctor’s probably Pakistani and your nurse is Filipino, and your clinician is Jewish, etc. That’s our future. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody, but it does mean that your interpreting is being done on a larger scale.
And, again, the two biggest of those — and I guess you could say I probably didn’t foresee that either, since we’re talking about what I didn’t foresee — is that half of everything we’re talking about today is done by women. And that was not true in the ’50s. When I was writing the third volume of my three-volume work on American religion, I said to my class, half of whom were women, ‘Help me out. I need women who are big in religion in the ’50s. I can’t have an index of all men.’ And they couldn’t find hardly anybody. And then one of them said, ‘I’ll bet they were seething.’ And I said, ‘OK, Julie, you’re going to right a history of seething women of the ’50s,’ and she found interesting stuff. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Catherine Marshall, all these people whose husbands are up front, and they’re seething. They’re all ready to change along the way. So I didn’t foresee how sudden and total that is.
It’s hard to think your way back to when very few women added work outside the home if they had children at home. And I think the…
Ms. Tippett: That’s a piece of pluralism we don’t really think about, in terms of how people are active in our public life. Women are more of a force in that way.
Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: Religious historian Martin Marty. We’re exploring how his historical and personal insights shed light on the religious dynamics of contemporary America.
Ms. Tippett: I think that there is a real sense among many people in our time that the whole relationship between church and state–as we define that, it’s not really just church and state anymore, right, it’s mosque, synagogue, church, and state, and many other variations of religious expression, but that that is shifting profoundly. But I wonder, with your perspective as a historian, you know, how new, how profound is this shift and how do you view this?
Mr. Marty: On one level, the image of the wall of separation never worked. We did never have a wall. For example, tax exemption of churches probably pays more to the churches in America than being established governmental churches in Europe ever did. I like James Madison’s word, there’s a “line of distinction,” a line of separation between religion and civil authorities.
I think of it more, too, as zones. Most people know when you’ve really overstepped. Most people don’t want religion utterly in a box. When the astronauts looked at the Earth on Christmas Eve, they read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” I think Madalyn Murray O’Hair and one or two other people protested, but most people thought, ‘That’s great.’ And when you have the space shuttle disasters, the president gets up and is at his most eloquent invoking religious language. Well, if you read real separation of religion and the state, you wouldn’t do that.
It gets more complex in some other areas. There is much more eroding of that line than there had been. I think, though, again, many of us who are nervous about crossing the line are also interested in religion in public life. I’m all for the teaching about religion in public schools. I think you should know that Martin Luther King was a black Baptist and what that did for him. You should know why the Puritans came. You should know why your Hindu neighbor does something different. But a lot of people want to convert that and say, ‘But we should teach the majority religion as the truth about life, and we should worship in that tradition.’ And that’s where we get nervous, and yet there’s a strong popular appeal. ‘If only we had prayer amendments. If only we had stipulated prayer.’ And here’s where a Protestant of the old school or a real Protestant would say, ‘Watch out. Give religion privilege and it gets corrupt. And look at Europe if you want a sample of that.’ So in my view, religion has its place all over the public sphere as long as it is persuasive and voluntary. And the minute it gets to be coerced and privileged and assumed, somebody’s going to run it at the expense of others or it’ll get fat and corrupt.
Ms. Tippett: Where do you look for nourishment and hope? Where do you look around and say, ‘This is exciting. I’m happy for my grandchildren to be living in this time’?
Mr. Marty: The most important thing in my world, when I mention public life I don’t mean only politics. A lot of people equate the two. Politics is one branch of it. Public life is town meeting, it’s the mall, it’s the supermarket, it’s the college, it’s all those things. And I’m greatly cheered by artists, by musicians, by people who live out their vocation. It’s almost a hobby for me to pursue people who just never get their name in print and do heroic things.
I’m cheered by — I never know how to speak without proper nouns. I like a group called Opportunity International, which is one of a number of microeconomic ventures around the world that lends money, put 140,000 people around the world to permanent work last year. Now, they’re religiously motivated people and they give me tremendous hope, as do the people on the other end, 92 percent of whom pay their loans back in two years, which inspires me. That kind of thing.
In the city where I live, Chicago, there are all kinds of groups that provide leadership in the inner city without condescension, without imposing on them. There are others that train people. In one of these groups, the Christian Industrial League, trains people, mainly Mexican men, to start their landscaping companies and women to start their homemaking companies — not just to do the work, but to start companies. And they plant the flowers that we see in the city of Chicago. Come see them.
And family is very important. I draw nurture from the family. We love friends. I can’t say enough — I once wrote a book about friendship. In a cold, brutal world, you can’t do much better for somebody else than to stimulate friendship. And the model there again is God. As distant as God’s supposed to be, God also condescends and is our 3:00-in-the-morning friend. So I’m nurtured by all those kinds of things.
Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Martin Marty Center has been founded there to promote public religion endeavors. He’s the author of more than 50 books, including, recently, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, When Faiths Collide, and the Penguin Lives volume on Martin Luther.
Contact us at speakingoffaith.org and read listeners’ reflections on this conversation. Also, sign up for the free Speaking of Faith podcast. You’ll never have to miss another program again. Listen on demand, when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org.
The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Jody Abramson and editor Ken Hom. Our Web producer is Trent Gilliss, with assistance from Jennifer Krause. Kate Moos is the managing producer of Speaking of Faith, the executive editor is Bill Buzenberg, and I’m Krista Tippett.

Regina Spektor is Tori Plus Ani Plus Joni Plus Björk Plus Nora Plus Wow

Chris Abraham — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 09:57:34 +0000

I must admit that my first exposure to Regina Spektor was in Regina Spektor’s Boundless Talent on CBS Sunday Morning this AM. I must also admit that my first reaction was visual and visceral: Regina Spektor is a monumentally beautiful and compelling young woman. Although I lost the first five minutes of the segment to Regina Spektor’s beauty, I lost the remaining minutes to Regina Spektor’s story of being a Russian immigrant, her talent as a classically-trained pianist, her experience as an anti-folk singer-songwriter, her modestly as just a tough girl from the Bronx, her whimsy as just a girl, and her playfulness as a wordsmith. I am mesmerized and besotted. Give Regina Spektor a look and listen and I guarantee that you, too, will be besotted, compelled, and mesmerized, be you man or woman, gay or straight.

Regina Spektor entry on Wikipedia

Regina Spektor (born February 18, 1980) is a Soviet-born American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered on New York City’s East Village.

Early life
Spektor was born in Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union to a musical family. Her father, a photographer, was also an amateur violinist, and her mother was a music professor in a Russian conservatoire; she now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.

Spektor studied classical piano from the age of six, and was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika when Jewish citizens were permitted to emigrate. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving Russia, but they finally decided to emigrate, for religious and political reasons.

Travelling first to Austria and then Italy, the family settled in the Bronx, New York, and eventually moved to Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last three years of her high school career. Spektor has stated that she was originally interested only in classical music, but later became interested in hip hop, rock, and punk.

Beginnings as a songwriter
In New York, Spektor gained a firm grounding in classical music from her piano teacher, Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music. Spektor studied with Vargas—whom Spektor’s father had met through violinist Samuel Marder, Vargas’s husband—until she was 17.

Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in songwriting during a visit to Israel with the Nesiya Institute in her teenage years. Attracting attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking, she realized she had an aptitude for songwriting. Following this trip, she was first exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which gave her the idea that she could create her own songs. She began writing her first a cappella songs around age 16, and wrote her first songs for voice and piano when she was nearly 18.

Spektor completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in Purchase, New York within three years, graduating with honors in 2001. She worked briefly at a butterfly farm in Luck, Wisconsin. She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village’s Sidewalk Cafe. During this period, she sold her self-produced CDs 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002) at such performances.

Style
Spektor’s songs rely on a mixture of styles and techniques, often starting with a piano riff but ending with moans, nonsense words, warblings, and other noises. Spektor has said that she has created 700 songs, but that she rarely writes any of them down. Spektor’s songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Her songs show influences from folk, Jewish, Russian, hip hop, jazz, and classical music. Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.

Spektor possesses a broad vocal range and uses the full extent of it. She also explores a variety of different and somewhat unorthodox vocal techniques, such as verses composed entirely of buzzing noises made with the lips, beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, or the use of a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano or chair. Part of her style also results from the exaggeration of certain aspects of vocalization, most notably the glottal stop, which is prominent the single “Fidelity”. She also uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she has said is due to her love of New York and its culture.

Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song. Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. Spektor’s music is further set apart from mainstream folk music by its frequent literary references, such as to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in “Poor Little Rich Boy”, The Little Prince in “Baobabs”, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in “Paris”, Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in “Pound of Flesh”, Boris Pasternak in “Après Moi”, and Oedipus the King in “Oedipus”. Recurring themes and topics in Spektor’s lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Christian references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases have been known to recur in different songs by Spektor, such as references to gravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the name “Mary Ann.”

In Spektor’s early albums, many of her tracks had a very dry vocal production, with very little reverb or delay added. However, Spektor’s more recent albums, particularly Begin to Hope, have put more emphasis into song production and have relied more on traditional pop and rock instruments.

Performances
Since roughly January 2005, Spektor has performed on a bright red Baldwin baby grand piano. She opened for The Strokes in 2003, on her first North American tour. Subsequently, she appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien twice, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno twice, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Last Call with Carson Daly twice. She has toured the United States and Europe. Although she generally only performs original material, she performed her first covers in 2005, of songs by Leonard Cohen and Madonna for the 2nd Annual Jewish Music & Heritage Festival at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

While with The Strokes on their 2003–2004 Room on Fire tour, Spektor performed “Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men” alongside the band.

In 2006, Spektor embarked on a successful headlining tour of the United States and Europe, selling out numerous clubs and theaters.

Media coverage
Beginning in 2005, Spektor’s music has been used in various television programs and commercials. In late 2005 “Us” (from Soviet Kitsch) was used in a commercial as part of the What Do You Want To Watch? series for the United Kingdom’s Sky Television. The advert features a clip from a documentary on skateboarder Danny Way. In the summer of 2006, a clip from “Us” was used for the teaser website for Microsoft’s Zune project at ComingZune.com, as well as for a promotional campaign for MtvU. “Somedays” was used in a 2005 episode of CSI: NY and “Samson” was used in a 2006 episode of the same series. “On the Radio” was used in an episode of ABC’s popular Grey’s Anatomy. “Field Below” was used in a 2006 episode titled “The Last Word” of CBS’s Criminal Minds. “Fidelity” was also used in a recent episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” titled “Sometimes a Fantasy”, in an episode of Veronica Mars titled “Friday Night Sleights”, and in an episode of “Brothers & Sisters” titled “Sexual Politics”. “Better” is currently being used in a commercial for XM Satellite Radio. Spektor also sang the title song “Little Boxes” of Showtime’s television series Weeds in the 2006 episode “Mile Deep and a Foot Wide” and her “Ghost of Corporate Future” was used both at the beginning and end of the episode.

Regina Spektor gained much media attention in 2006 when her video for “Fidelity” was viewed over 200,000 times in two days on the YouTube website. On SIRIUS Radio’s Left of Center channel, her single “Fidelity” was voted by listeners as the #1 song of 2006.

In Australia particularly, Spektor’s music has rapidly gained popularity in mainstream culture primarily due to Begin To Hope being played on the nation-wide radio station Triple J, where it eventually became a feature album. Prior to Begin To Hope, Regina Spektor had only a small following in Australia in comparison to the US and Europe.

Discography
Most of Spektor’s early albums have been released exclusively in the United States. Her compilation, Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories, has been released worldwide.

Albums
2001 – 11:11 (Regina Spektor)
2002 – Songs (Regina Spektor)
2004 – Soviet Kitsch (Sire/London/Rhino)
2005 – Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories (Transgressive)
2006 – Begin to Hope (Sire) US sales 160,720

Singles and EPs
2003 – Reptilia b/w Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men by The Strokes (Rough Trade)
2004 – Your Honor / The Flowers (Shoplifter)
2005 – Live at Bull Moose EP (Sire)
2005 – Carbon Monoxide (Transgressive)
2006 – Us (Transgressive)
2006 – On the Radio (Sire) UK #60
2006 – Fidelity (Sire) US #84*

Compilations
2006 – Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories (Transgressive)

REGINA SPEKTOR
Begin To Hope (SIRE)

A mere five years ago, Regina Spektor was hypnotizing small crowds at hole-in-the-wall venues on New York ‘s Lower East Side . After playing hundreds of shows in and around NYC, Spektor became the talk of the burgeoning music scene. Though she was selling many copies of CDs she had recorded and produced with friends ( 11:11 and Songs), it was her next album, “Soviet Kitsch,??? that would become her calling card. Originally released as a CDR and handed out at shows, Spektor signed with Sire Records who re-released “Soviet Kitsch??? in 2003. While touring nationally and abroad in support of “Soviet Kitsch,??? Spektor began as an opening act but by year’s end was the main attraction. Going from 200-capacity venues to selling out 1,300 capacity-venues like New York ‘s Irving Plaza and London ‘s Shephard Bush Empire, this Russian-born chanteuse’s songs have gone from being burned in her bedroom to receiving a worldwide fanfare. Though in love with playing shows to her rapidly growing audience, Spektor had written hundreds of songs since “Soviet Kitsch??? and was eager to get back into the studio.

Abandoning her usual method of production and opting for a new experience, Spektor holed herself up at New York Noise Studios in NYC’s Meatpacking District with seasoned producer David Kahne (Paul McCartney). Spending two months during the summer of 2005 working on her fourth release (this new album is also considered her major label debut), Spektor had the opportunity to experiment “until a little Frankenstein was born.” Taking two months to record was a huge amount of time by Spektor’s standards, since she had recorded her “Songs??? record in 1 day and “Soviet Kitsch??? in 10. “To work like this had been a dream of mine, but I thought it would be years before it happened. I definitely tried to put every aspect of myself into it. We played with wires and sounds, set the lab on fire a bunch of times, laughed and started again.???

“Before I even started I knew I was going to experiment with things I’ve only thought about, like beats and drums,” explains Spektor, a multi-instrumentalist. “I really wanted to play with electronic instruments and bigger arrangements. Still, on this record, there are some songs where it’s really sparse. You don’t want to arrange just for the sake of arranging. I had to be careful so the music wouldn’t be more fun to make than to listen to.”

Judging from the final product, we’d say mission accomplished. On “Begin To Hope??? Spektor took the lyrical vignettes and sparse instrumentation she crafted for “Soviet Kitsch??? and pushed herself more in every direction—both lyrically and musically. From the staccato strings plucking the opening chords to the album’s first song, “Fidelity,??? to the blues-infused homage to Billie Holiday “Lady,??? Spektor isn’t able to pinpoint the exact inspiration behind her musical musings.

“You don’t ever know the true lineage of your songs,??? reveals Spektor. “Maybe I’m becoming less of a narrator and more of a character these days. I was always used to observing and writing third-person narrative stories about things I was seeing. Then, as time went on, I started placing myself in these scenes, more like an actor.???

“I don’t fully understand the fascination of people wanting to know the ‘real’ you after listening to your songs” says Spektor, who is still extremely careful when it comes to sharing her personal life with the public. “I understand the fascination of people to want to know you,??? admits Spektor but “ People always want to know which part of the song really happened, they want to know some sort of a “Truth.” For some reason they can see the same actor acting in 17 different movies, using 17 different hair colors, using fake props, changing their voice, changing their accent, being evil or being the victim, and they are okay with that. They understand that it’s just a movie, they understand that it’s an art. But with music they forget. Music, somehow, is life.”

Always willing to damn convention for the sake of creativity, Spektor is one of those rare talents who manage to outrun the trends and force the rest of the world to keep up. “The more I experience in this world, the more questions I seem to have about where this life is leading,??? reveals Spektor . Begin To Hope might still mark the beginning of her career, but Regina Spektor has been carving out her place in music history since she sang her first note.

Propaganda During War by Adolf Hitler

Chris Abraham — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 09:21:05 +0000

Well, I never knew what an astute intellectual Adolf Hilter was because I just assumed he was a monster. Surely a monster, a madman, a devil, and also an evil genius,

“All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed . . .”

“. . . Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach. When there is question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.”

Whenever I work for PR, I am reminded to keep the language in the message at a 7th grade level.

The entire chapter, VI, War Propganda, is posted below. Very current and very important in understanding the current war’s propaganda strategy and campaign.

Mein Kampf Chapter VI, War Propaganda, by Adolf Hitler
In watching the course of political events I was always struck by the active part which propaganda played in them. I saw that it was an instrument, which the Marxist Socialists knew how to handle in a masterly way and how to put it to practical uses. Thus I soon came to realize that the right use of propaganda was an art in itself and that this art was practically unknown to our bourgeois parties. The Christian-Socialist Party alone, especially in Lueger’s time, showed a certain efficiency in the employment of this instrument and owed much of their success to it.
It was during the War, however, that we had the best chance of estimating the tremendous results which could be obtained by a propagandist system properly carried out. Here again, unfortunately, everything was left to the other side, the work done on our side being worse than insignificant. It was the total failure of the whole German system of information – a failure which was perfectly obvious to every soldier – that urged me to consider the problem of propaganda in a comprehensive way. I had ample opportunity to learn a practical lesson in this matter; for unfortunately it was only too well taught us by the enemy. The lack on our side was exploited by the enemy in such an efficient manner that one could say it showed itself as a real work of genius. In that propaganda carried on by the enemy I found admirable sources of instruction. The lesson to be learned from this had unfortunately no attraction for the geniuses on our own side. They were simply above all such things, too clever to accept any teaching. Anyhow they did not honestly wish to learn anything.
Had we any propaganda at all? Alas, I can reply only in the negative. All that was undertaken in this direction was so utterly inadequate and misconceived from the very beginning that not only did it prove useless but at times harmful. In substance it was insufficient. Psychologically it was all wrong. Anybody who had carefully investigated the German propaganda must have formed that judgment of it. Our people did not seem to be clear even about the primary question itself: Whether propaganda is a means or an end?
Propaganda is a means and must, therefore, be judged in relation to the end it is intended to serve. It must be organized in such a way as to be capable of attaining its objective. And, as it is quite clear that the importance of the objective may vary from the standpoint of general necessity, the essential internal character of the propaganda must vary accordingly. The cause for which we fought during the War was the noblest and highest that man could strive for. We were fighting for the freedom and independence of our country, for the security of our future welfare and the honour of the nation. Despite all views to the contrary, this honour does actually exist, or rather it will have to exist; for a nation without honour will sooner or later lose its freedom and independence. This is in accordance with the ruling of a higher justice, for a generation of poltroons is not entitled to freedom. He who would be a slave cannot have honour; for such honour would soon become an object of general scorn.
Germany was waging war for its very existence. The purpose of its war propaganda should have been to strengthen the fighting spirit in that struggle and help it to victory.
But when nations are fighting for their existence on this earth, when the question of ‘to be or not to be’ has to be answered, then all humane and æsthetic considerations must be set aside; for these ideals do not exist of themselves somewhere in the air but are the product of man’s creative imagination and disappear when he disappears. Nature knows nothing of them. Moreover, they are characteristic of only a small number of nations, or rather of races, and their value depends on the measure in which they spring from the racial feeling of the latter. Humane and æsthetic ideals will disappear from the inhabited earth when those races disappear which are the creators and standard-bearers of them.
All such ideals are only of secondary importance when a nation is struggling for its existence. They must be prevented from entering into the struggle the moment they threaten to weaken the stamina of the nation that is waging war. That is always the only visible effect whereby their place in the struggle is to be judged.
In regard to the part played by humane feeling, Moltke stated that in time of war the essential thing is to get a decision as quickly as possible and that the most ruthless methods of fighting are at the same time the most humane. When people attempt to answer this reasoning by highfalutin talk about æsthetics, etc., only one answer can be given. It is that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation for its existence must not be subordinated to any æsthetic considerations. The yoke of slavery is and always will remain the most unpleasant experience that mankind can endure. Do the Schwabing 12) decadents look upon Germany’s lot to-day as ‘aesthetic’? Of course, one doesn’t discuss such a question with the Jews, because they are the modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God’s image in His creation.
Since these ideas of what is beautiful and humane have no place in warfare, they are not to be used as standards of war propaganda.
During the War, propaganda was a means to an end. And this end was the struggle for existence of the German nation. Propaganda, therefore, should have been regarded from the standpoint of its utility for that purpose. The most cruel weapons were then the most humane, provided they helped towards a speedier decision; and only those methods were good and beautiful which helped towards securing the dignity and freedom of the nation. Such was the only possible attitude to adopt towards war propaganda in the life-or-death struggle.
If those in what are called positions of authority had realized this there would have been no uncertainty about the form and employment of war propaganda as a weapon; for it is nothing but a weapon, and indeed a most terrifying weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it.
The second question of decisive importance is this: To whom should propaganda be made to appeal? To the educated intellectual classes? Or to the less intellectual?
Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. For the intellectual classes, or what are called the intellectual classes to-day, propaganda is not suited, but only scientific exposition. Propaganda has as little to do with science as an advertisement poster has to do with art, as far as concerns the form in which it presents its message. The art of the advertisement poster consists in the ability of the designer to attract the attention of the crowd through the form and colours he chooses. The advertisement poster announcing an exhibition of art has no other aim than to convince the public of the importance of the exhibition. The better it does that, the better is the art of the poster as such. Being meant accordingly to impress upon the public the meaning of the exposition, the poster can never take the place of the artistic objects displayed in the exposition hall. They are something entirely different. Therefore. those who wish to study the artistic display must study something that is quite different from the poster; indeed for that purpose a mere wandering through the exhibition galleries is of no use. The student of art must carefully and thoroughly study each exhibit in order slowly to form a judicious opinion about it.
The situation is the same in regard to what we understand by the word, propaganda. The purpose of propaganda is not the personal instruction of the individual, but rather to attract public attention to certain things, the importance of which can be brought home to the masses only by this means.
Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential. But as this art is not an end in itself and because its purpose must be exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form such an opinion on grounds of objective study – because that is not the purpose of propaganda, it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers.
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach. When there is question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.
The more modest the scientific tenor of this propaganda and the more it is addressed exclusively to public sentiment, the more decisive will be its success. This is the best test of the value of a propaganda, and not the approbation of a small group of intellectuals or artistic people.
The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. That this is not understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity or mental inertia.
Once we have understood how necessary it is to concentrate the persuasive forces of propaganda on the broad masses of the people, the following lessons result therefrom:
That it is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a manifold system of scientific instruction.
The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way. Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.
It was, for example, a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the enemy as the Austrian and German comic papers made a chief point of doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one; for, when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite a different impression. Therefore, the mistake had disastrous results. Once the German soldier realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information which had been given him. Therefore, instead of strengthening and stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary effect. Finally he lost heart.
On the other hand, British and American war propaganda was psychologically efficient. By picturing the Germans to their own people as Barbarians and Huns, they were preparing their soldiers for the horrors of war and safeguarding them against illusions. The most terrific weapons which those soldiers encountered in the field merely confirmed the information that they had already received and their belief in the truth of the assertions made by their respective governments was accordingly reinforced. Thus their rage and hatred against the infamous foe was increased. The terrible havoc caused by the German weapons of war was only another illustration of the Hunnish brutality of those barbarians; whereas on the side of the Entente no time was left the soldiers to meditate on the similar havoc which their own weapons were capable of. Thus the British soldier was never allowed to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue. Unfortunately the opposite was the case with the Germans, who finally wound up by rejecting everything from home as pure swindle and humbug. This result was made possible because at home they thought that the work of propaganda could be entrusted to the first ass that came along, braying of his own special talents, and they had no conception of the fact that propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found.
Thus the German war propaganda afforded us an incomparable example of how the work of ‘enlightenment’ should not be done and how such an example was the result of an entire failure to take any psychological considerations whatsoever into account.
From the enemy, however, a fund of valuable knowledge could be gained by those who kept their eyes open, whose powers of perception had not yet become sclerotic, and who during four-and-a-half years had to experience the perpetual flood of enemy propaganda.
The worst of all was that our people did not understand the very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with. In this regard so many errors were committed, even from the very beginning of the war, that it was justifiable to doubt whether so much folly could be attributed solely to the stupidity of people in higher quarters.
What, for example, should we say of a poster which purported to advertise some new brand of soap by insisting on the excellent qualities of the competitive brands? We should naturally shake our heads. And it ought to be just the same in a similar kind of political advertisement. The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.
It was a fundamental mistake to discuss the question of who was responsible for the outbreak of the war and declare that the sole responsibility could not be attributed to Germany. The sole responsibility should have been laid on the shoulders of the enemy, without any discussion whatsoever.
And what was the consequence of these half-measures? The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. As soon as our own propaganda made the slightest suggestion that the enemy had a certain amount of justice on his side, then we laid down the basis on which the justice of our own cause could be questioned. The masses are not in a position to discern where the enemy’s fault ends and where our own begins. In such a case they become hesitant and distrustful, especially when the enemy does not make the same mistake but heaps all the blame on his adversary. Could there be any clearer proof of this than the fact that finally our own people believed what was said by the enemy’s propaganda, which was uniform and consistent in its assertions, rather than what our own propaganda said? And that, of course, was increased by the mania for objectivity which addicts our people. Everybody began to be careful about doing an injustice to the enemy, even at the cost of seriously injuring, and even ruining his own people and State.
Naturally the masses were not conscious of the fact that those in authority had failed to study the subject from this angle.
The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Its notions are never partly this and partly that. English propaganda especially understood this in a marvellous way and put what they understood into practice. They allowed no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.
Proof of how brilliantly they understood that the feeling of the masses is something primitive was shown in their policy of publishing tales of horror and outrages which fitted in with the real horrors of the time, thereby cleverly and ruthlessly preparing the ground for moral solidarity at the front, even in times of great defeats. Further, the way in which they pilloried the German enemy as solely responsible for the war – which was a brutal and absolute falsehood – and the way in which they proclaimed his guilt was excellently calculated to reach the masses, realizing that these are always extremist in their feelings. And thus it was that this atrocious lie was positively believed.
The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda is well illustrated by the fact that after four-and-a-half years, not only was the enemy still carrying on his propagandist work, but it was already undermining the stamina of our people at home.
That our propaganda did not achieve similar results is not to be wondered at, because it had the germs of inefficiency lodged in its very being by reason of its ambiguity. And because of the very nature of its content one could not expect it to make the necessary impression on the masses. Only our feckless ‘statesmen’ could have imagined that on pacifists slops of such a kind the enthusiasm could be nourished which is necessary to enkindle that spirit which leads men to die for their country.
And so this product of ours was not only worthless but detrimental.
No matter what an amount of talent employed in the organization of propaganda, it will have no result if due account is not taken of these fundamental principles. Propaganda must be limited to a few simple themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important condition of success.
Particularly in the field of propaganda, placid æsthetes and blase intellectuals should never be allowed to take the lead. The former would readily transform the impressive character of real propaganda into something suitable only for literary tea parties. As to the second class of people, one must always beware of this pest; for, in consequence of their insensibility to normal impressions, they are constantly seeking new excitements.
Such people grow sick and tired of everything. They always long for change and will always be incapable of putting themselves in the position of picturing the wants of their less callous fellow-creatures in their immediate neighbourhood, let alone trying to understand them. The blase intellectuals are always the first to criticize propaganda, or rather its message, because this appears to them to be outmoded and trivial. They are always looking for something new, always yearning for change; and thus they become the mortal enemies of every effort that may be made to influence the masses in an effective way. The moment the organization and message of a propagandist movement begins to be orientated according to their tastes it becomes incoherent and scattered.
It is not the purpose of propaganda to create a series of alterations in sentiment with a view to pleasing these blase gentry. Its chief function is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.
Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. In this way alone can propaganda be consistent and dynamic in its effects.
Only by following these general lines and sticking to them steadfastly, with uniform and concise emphasis, can final success be reached. Then one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a persistent policy secures.
The success of any advertisement, whether of a business or political nature, depends on the consistency and perseverance with which it is employed.
In this respect also the propaganda organized by our enemies set us an excellent example. It confined itself to a few themes, which were meant exclusively for mass consumption, and it repeated these themes with untiring perseverance. Once these fundamental themes and the manner of placing them before the world were recognized as effective, they adhered to them without the slightest alteration for the whole duration of the War. At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.
But in England they came to understand something further: namely, that the possibility of success in the use of this spiritual weapon consists in the mass employment of it, and that when employed in this way it brings full returns for the large expenses incurred.
In England propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, whereas with us it represented the last hope of a livelihood for our unemployed politicians and a snug job for shirkers of the modest hero type.
Taken all in all, its results were negative.

Have You Missed Past Articles?

Chris Abraham — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 21:41:17 +0000

I Am Whatever is Exactly Not a Cat Person

Chris Abraham — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 19:11:40 +0000

If you own cats I won’t visit your house, I won’t date you, I won’t come over, I won’t marry you, I won’t even stand next to you if I can help it. I certainly won’t sleep with you. Okay, there are people like Stephanie Soper who I will visit even though she has cats, but that’s very rare.

If you want to break up with me, buy a cat.

I have contempt and hatred for cat people. Nothing personal.

My best friend, Mark, is a cat person, and I have contempt and hatred for him. And he will surely be the best man at my wedding and if he buys a cat (proving, finally, that he is in fact Evil and also a spinster — because only lonely and insane spinsters own cats, right) I will never cast a shadow on his front door. Or even in the late evening.

Its not just the allergy — and allergy based on a constant spitting on oneself — but its also the offensive indolence and insolence that I see as soundtrack to a cat’s life.

They are the familiars of all that is Evil. I am surprised that the Salem witch trials didn’t include lots and lots of drowning of cats (although I think it has a lot to do with how difficult it is to get a bloody pussy into any body of water — and all the scratching and so forth — the Puritans, when all is said and done, were a bunch of poofs anyway).

Okay, now that I have that off my chest, I have to admit that that picture has given me hives and I have turned the color of a radish and can scarcely breathe.

On Chivalry and Courtly Love

Chris Abraham — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:41:07 +0000

My friend Jee suggested I read up on Courtly Love, which comes to us from medieval Europe.

I put it off and put it off and in a spare cycle I went ahead and Googled it. I wonder if Jee realizes that there is a distinct difference between a renaissance festival and Renassance Weekend?

I thought I would share a little bit of what I found out thanks to Sir James Marshall.

The Ten Commandments of the Code of Chivalry From Chivalry by Leon Gautier

Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches, and shalt observe all its directions.
Thou shalt defend the Church.
Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
Thou shalt love the country in the which thou wast born.
Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
Thou shalt make war against the Infidel without cessation, and without mercy.
Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
Thou shalt never lie, and shall remain faithful to thy pledged word.
Thou shalt be generous, and give largess to everyone.
Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.

The Code of Chivalry From the Rifts: England Supplement

Live to serve King and Country.
Live to defend Crown and Country and all it holds dear.
Live one’s life so that it is worthy of respect and honor.
Live for freedom, justice and all that is good.
Never attack an unarmed foe.
Never use a weapon on an opponent not equal to the attack.
Never attack from behind.
Avoid lying to your fellow man.
Avoid cheating.
Avoid torture.
Obey the law of king, country, and chivalry.
Administer justice.
Protect the innocent.
Exhibit self control.
Show respect to authority.
Respect women.
Exhibit Courage in word and deed.
Defend the weak and innocent.
Destroy evil in all of its monstrous forms.
Crush the monsters that steal our land and rob our people.
Fight with honor.
Avenge the wronged.
Never abandon a friend, ally, or noble cause.
Fight for the ideals of king, country, and chivalry.
Die with valor.
Always keep one’s word of honor.
Always maintain one’s principles.
Never betray a confidence or comrade.
Avoid deception.
Respect life and freedom.
Die with honor.
Exhibit manners.
Be polite and attentive.
Be respectful of host, women, and honor.
Loyalty to country, King, honor, freedom, and the code of chivalry.
Loyalty to one’s friends and those who lay their trust in thee.

The Twelve Chief Courtly Rules in Love From The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus

Thou shalt avoid avarice like the deadly pestilence and shalt embrace its opposite.
Thou shalt keep thyself chaste for the sake of her whom thou lovest.
Thou shalt not knowingly strive to break up a correct love affair that someone else is engaged in.
Thou shalt not chose for thy love anyone whom a natural sense of shame forbids thee to marry.
Be mindful completely to avoid falsehood.
Thou shalt not have many who know of thy love affair.
Being obedient in all things to the commands of ladies, thou shalt ever strive to ally thyself to the service of Love.
In giving and receiving love’s solaces let modesty be ever present.
Thou shalt speak no evil.
Thou shalt not be a revealer of love affairs.
Thou shalt be in all things polite and courteous.
In practising the solaces of love thou shalt not exceed the desires of thy lover.

The Art of Courtly Love From The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus

Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.
He who is not jealous cannot love.
No one can be bound by a double love.
It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing.
That which a lover takes against the will of his beloved has no relish.
Boys do not love until they reach the age of maturity.
When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor.
No one should be deprived of love without the very best of reasons.
No one can love unless he is propelled by the persuasion of love.
Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.
It is not proper to love any woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry.
A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved.
When made public love rarely endures.
The easy attainment of love makes it of little value: difficulty of attainment makes it prized.
Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates.
A new love puts an old one to flight.
Good character alone makes any man worthy of love.
If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.
A man in love is always apprehensive.
Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love.
Jealousy increases when one suspects his beloved.
He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little.
Every act of a lover ends in the thought of his beloved.
A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.
Love can deny nothing to love.
A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved.
A slight presumption causes a lover to suspect his beloved.
A man who is vexed by too much passion usually does not love.
A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved.
Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women.