Holiday Greetings from Hitler

Hipster Hitler knows the reason for the season - dancing!

Annals of Poor Taste

In Minnesota, a woman who had been grief-stricken over the death of her son from a heroin overdose tried to burn down her house, kill her husband, and kill herself, in especially gruesome fashion.

The diagnosis from Power Line, a conservative blog?  It's because she's a Democrat.  The money quote:

This sad anecdote from my neighborhood illustrates a commonplace of sociology: scratch a conservative and you will almost always find a happy person; scratch a liberal and you are likely to encounter a seething cauldron of disappointment and rage.

Ugh.  How grotesque.

HT: Sullivan.

Next Up on the Gay Agenda

Joe Biden made news the other day when he said that gay marriage was an "inevitability."  Then, in a (somewhat fawning) interview with The Advocate, Obama said that he is "wrestling" with the issue of gay marriage (he was for it before he was against it before he was "wrestling").

Translation: "Okay, gays, I ended DADT.  I also ended the HIV travel ban, extended partner benefits for federal employees, and extended hospital visitation rights.  I've done my part for term one.  Help me get a second term - and while you're at it, help me reclaim the House as well - and we'll see what we can do on DOMA and ENDA."

Personally, I see ENDA - a federal ban on employment discrimination against gays - as the bigger priority.  But even if we can only get one of the two accomplished over the next six years, it's a fair deal.

Incidentally - what will be Obama's stance on DOMA when he finishes his "wrestling" and comes to his senses?  Will it be merely repeal?  That should be enough to require all states to recognize gay marriages from other states, if my understanding of the Full Faith and Credit Clause is correct.  But might Obama push for a federal law requiring all states to recognize gay marriage?

I would guess that such a law would arguably be constitutional, under the enormously broad ambit of the Commerce Clause.  But the reach of that clause has been whittled down over the past decade or so - and rightly so, I believe; whether it would support a federal law on this matter is more questionable today than it would have been not too long ago.  The more decisive question, I think, is whether a second-term Obama administration would be willing to expend the political capital necessary to pass a measure that would assuredly meet with outraged opposition.  My guess on that would be no.

But no matter; repeal alone - if it would, as I suspect, require Utah to recognize gay marriages from Massachusetts - would be enough.

Onward and upward!

Rahm Way Out in Front

Good.

Merry Christmas, Antonio!

Gotta Say it Was a Good Day

It's a bit after the fact, I know, but there's a lot to be said about December 15.

Catholicism and Human Dignity

A Jesuit priest urges his fellow Catholics to celebrate the repeal of DADT, since it "says nothing about gay marriage (nor would it have been approved by lawmakers if it had), since it does not contradict church teaching on that matter, and since it takes a strong stance against 'unjust discrimination' against gays and lesbians, as the Catechism encourages[.]"

Very welcome words.  While the author is absolutely right about the spirit and the letter of the Catechism, he is distressingly at odds with the thinking of the Church grandées.  While the Catechism says that gays "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity," the Church itself shows little of any of this to gays.

Indeed, the Church's recent decision that gays - and even those who "support homosexual culture" without themselves being gay - should not be permitted to become priests is the ecclesiastical equivalent of DADT.  Actually, it's worse the DADT, and more akin to the outright ban that DADT replaced.  Aside from the unequivocal ban, the Church's proclamation states that, "if a candidate practices homosexuality, or presents deep-seated homosexual tendencies, his spiritual director as well as his confessor have the duty to dissuade him in conscience from proceeding towards ordination."

Critics "have long objected that gay seminarians might feel they have no choice but to lie about their sexual orientation," and there can be no doubt that the consequence of the Church's hostile approach is to force devout gay Catholics who wish to join the priesthood to face an Inquisition if they pursue that dream.  Shrugging off the blame for the witchhunt they themselves create, the Church's lawgivers state, with sublime callousness, that "[i]t would be gravely dishonest for a candidate to hide his own homosexuality[.]"

More roadblocks, more unseemly inquiry, more humiliation, more degradation.  Do ask, do tell - and then reject.

Anglican Church - woo me.

A Very Judy Christmas

Here's Judy, singing a melancholy holiday number on Johnny Carson's show.  Her voice is already going, but the feeling is all there.


I know someone who wouldn't even give me the courtesy of waiting until after the Holidays.  It's a painful feeling.

HT: Sullivan.

It's Pleasant to Parler

John McWhorter of The New Republic gives short shrift to the value of learning French (or German or Italian or most other European languages, for that matter).  From a purely Benthamite perspective, of course, he is right: greater practical value can be had by learning Chinese, or Spanish, or Arabic, or arguably even Portuguese.

Then again....  I take a look at my list of languages on Facebook - French, German, and Dutch.  Hardly a practical assembly, I grant you.  But because I speak French, at least, I have had the inestimable joy of reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Balzac in the original.  I actually got to use my slender ability in German when I worked for a law firm in Philadelphia, and I enjoy being able to know what, exactly, Wagner's characters are bellowing at each other.

As for Dutch - well, when I go to Amsterdam, I always get smiles of surprise and genuine gratitude when I demonstrate that, hey, at least I bothered to learn some of your language.  And Dutch, while not pretty, is fascinating for an English-speaker; much as was once said about Latin, I studied Dutch and learned more about my own language.

Furthermore, learning other European languages can better connect us to our shared Western cultural heritage - in literature, yes, but also in many other intellectual and cultural endeavors.  China, of course, has a resplendent cultural heritage - but it's not ours, and the heritage of Italian is really much closer to us than the heritage of China, notwithstanding the former's present geopolitical irrelevance.  Reading Machiavelli in the original is going to provide more direct benefits to us, as Westerners, than reading Sun Tzu in the original.

Studying European languages teaches us about Europe, about the West, about the languages of the West - about ourselves.  This isn't chauvinism, or at least, it doesn't have to be - rather, it is merely venturing into new fields that, nevertheless, share our cultural substratum.  We can put down roots more quickly there.

Most fundamentally, studying foreign languages develops a person's intellectual capacities.  The choice of language - and the cultural doors opened by that choice - has consequences for the way and extent to which those capacities can be developed.  Cross-cultural communication is an important goal of language study, but it isn't the only one.  There are reasons other than strict, direct utility for learning a language.

Did I mention I also speak a few words of Irish?

Progress

DADT is now a dead letter.  On to the next battle:

Finally!

I need never blog about DADT again - except in a historical context.  But in the meantime, we can take a good hearty laugh at the temper tantrums being thrown by those who opposed repeal:

"We will no longer be able to bail out these other emasculated armies [i.e., our allies] because ours will now be feminized and neutered beyond repair, and there is no one left to bail us out."  Bryan Fischer, American Family Association.

"The American military [...] has now been hijacked and turned into a tool for imposing on the country a radical social agenda."  Tony Perkins, Family Research Council.

"If the lame-duck Congress succeeds in ‘gaying down’ our military this weekend, it will take a disastrous leap toward 'mainstreaming' deviant, sinful homosexual conduct – not just in the military but in larger society — thus further propelling America’s moral downward spiral."  Peter LaBarbera, Americans for Truth about Homosexuality.

"There'll be high-fives all over the liberal bastions of America. [...] But there'll be additional sacrifice."  John McCain, Douchebag.

Hahaha!  Pass the popcorn!

The Plight of Bradley Manning

What do you call placing someone who has only been charged with a crime (not even convicted) in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, without a pillow or a blanket, for six straight months?  Torture.

Incidentally, where was this form of torture invented?  Philadelphia.

In other cruelty-related news, former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens has an interesting review of a book on the death penalty in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

Sigh

I loved my time in Italy.  But, like Julia Louie Dreyfus, far too many of my nights ended with me wearing an outsized ten-gallon and getting pecked by a fake ostrich.  Ma c'è una bella vita...!

Yay for Meth Heads!

Move over, Sassy Gay Friend - there's a new gay parody we're okay with.  It's Stefon, from SNL, and he has been providing viewers with family-friendly venues in NYC all year.  See his three skits here, here, and here - in reverse order.

Philadelphia: an Indictment

Bad, improbable combinations abound: ancient yet ignorant; centrally located yet parochial; old-moneyed yet threadbare; pedigreed yet insecure; historically important yet presently insignificant; well-schooled yet idiotic; well-nursed yet insalubrious. And they throw batteries at Santa! 

In Philly you'll find the worst of all worlds....

The Daily What Continues to Provide Grist for My Perverted Mill

To wit.

My Nephews' Handiwork

The picture below is of me and my nephews (eight and five years of age), on the subway last night.  My sister and my mother were sitting nearby.  We all went downtown, to Daley Plaza, to see the annual Christkindlmarkt, which was staffed almost exclusively by Germans.  I had a grand time showing off my skills in Deutsch.  I said "vielen Dank" to the woman who sold us some hot chocolate; the littlest one repeated it perfectly and asked what it meant.  (Thanks very much.)  Perhaps he has a faculty for languages!

Ireland Needs Billions

Sigh.

Degenerate Art Unearthed

No one can claim, with honesty, that postwar Germany has tried to bury its ignoble record from the Nazi era.  To the contrary, Germans have been assiduous in acknowledging and atoning for their country's misdeeds during the '30s and '40s.  Only recently have they decided (appropriately) that the time is ripe to move on, separated as they are from Hitler by two generations.  But there is still no impulse to bury the past.

Nevertheless, the ground still yields buried secrets from that time.  Recently, while working on a new subway station in Berlin, workers unearthed some sculptures that had been featured in the Nazis' notorious "degenerate art" exhibit.  They had been housed in the home of one Erhard Öwerdieck, and were entombed beneath the rubble of that home when it became a casualty of airstrikes on Berlin.  The full story, from The New York Times, is here.  The sculptures are now on display in the Neues Museum, Berlin's museum of archaeological antiquities.  (This, itself, is a subtle plea by Germans for the right to move on.)

First minor quibble: "How they ended up underground near City Hall is still a mystery; it seems to involve an Oskar Schindler-like hero."  At first, I balked - Schindler saved people, not sculptures - but read on, as it seems that Öwerdieck actually was Schindleresque.

Second minor quibble - the final two paragraphs:

Farther down the block the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s Hitler exhibition, today’s version of a “Degenerate” show, means to warn viewers about succumbing to what present German law declares morally reprehensible. How could any decent German have ever been taken in? the show asks.

That happens to be the question the Nazis’ “Degenerate” show posed about modern art. Many more Germans visited that exhibition than the concurrent one of approved German art. Maybe Oewerdieck was among those who went to the modern show and saw these sculptures in it. In any case, today’s Germany has salvaged them and has organized this display. Redemption sometimes comes late and in small measures. 

Late?  Small measures?  This is rather too begrudging.  One would think the Germans had done nothing to atone between the end of the War and now.

Hipsters Are the Shock Troops of Gentrification.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

UPDATE: Speaking of hipsters....