Cold Comfort Farm is one of my favorite movies of all time because it shows how simply and naturally people can escape the grip of a totalitarian tyrant — in this case, Aunt Ada Doom, of Starkadder Farm. The short version: connect people with their dreams and their ability to achieve them.
I’ll be developing this theme. But in the meantime, here is a clip that starts at the end of the turning point scene where the first character to free himself announces he’s leaving. It includes the ever-delightful Eileen Atkins chewing the scenery when the second character to free himself leaves and the wonderful line, “I’d take her, too, but she’s gloomy!”
Do watch the entire movie again and again until you understand the mechanics of how enslaved, dominated and manipulated people become able to free themselves.
My father got me hooked on the work of Eric Hoffer when I was in high school in the late 1960’s, starting with his most famous book, The True Believer. And I came upon the work of Jamie Glazov thanks to the kind invitation of David Swindle, associate editor of FrontPage magazine and assistant managing editor of NewsReal Blog. David asked me if I wanted to comment on his post in support of Phyllis Chesler and Jamie Glazov, which he wrote after Naomi Wolf threw a blogospheric fit over the punksmacking that Dr. Chesler administered unto her on Aug. 31, “The Burqa: the Ultimate Feminist Choice?,” which did not take and had to be repeated on Sept. 2, “Wolf Demands an Apology, Chesler Won’t Back Down,” AND on Sept. 3, “Chesler-Wolf-Glazov: Round Three.” I was one of the first bloggers to jump into the fray in support of Dr. Chesler with my post, “Phyllis Chesler punksmacks Naomi Wolf — couldn’t happen to a nicer girl,” and Jamie Glazov was not far behind with his post, “Why Naomi Wolf loves the burqa.” (In addition, my dear friend Little Miss Attila had pointed remarks for Wolf here and here.)
Since “Jamie” can be either a male or female name, I wanted to find a photo and the Wikipedia biography of Jamie Glazov before responding to David’s generous invitation. What a wonderful revelation to find him! If you truly want to understand the psychological foundation of totalitarian movements, read Eric Hoffer’s books, starting with The True Believer. (In contrast, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is more like a taxonomy of totalitarianism: he tracks who, what and where, but not much why, and the work of Eric Hoffer, which ought to have been his North Star, is not a cloud on his horizon let alone a star in his sky — the magnitude of the omission is stupefying.) After listening to the videos below, I have the sense that Dr. Glazov is a true intellectual heir of Eric Hoffer in his understanding of the Left, especially with his explanation of how the fall of Communism created a vacuum for the Left that they are now filling with their embrace of Islam. I have been mystified about that — I think he explains it perfectly.
As I listened to him I realized that I bring to conservatism tools that have a proven ability to support the individual’s ability to realize his or her full potential and simultaneously reduce indicators of negativity throughout a population without imposing any precepts or behaviors on everyone in it. And I felt really, truly called to start writing more about it. Well, it was nice being thought of as rational and sane while it lasted. Sigh. But I’ll tell you this for sure — it’s definitely not crazier than the belief that you can kill hate by shooting it or appease your way to peace.
I highly recommend listening to Dr. Glazov in the following two videos from May 2009:
One of the commenters on my post “Phyllis Chesler punksmacks Naomi Wolf — couldn’t happen to a nicer girl” alluded to Helen Reddy’s song, “I am woman,” and I had the thought that my younger readers might not recognize the allusion so I went looking for the song on YouTube.
What a powerful experience it was to hear and see Ms. Reddy sing this galvanizing anthem of the women’s liberation movement! The song debuted in October 1972 shortly after I turned 19 when I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and about eight months after I had come out as a lesbian. Believe you me, it was a time when it didn’t just appear that the world was against women, it really was. Why, back then, if a woman aspired to become governor of a state, or PRESIDENT!, people would say she ought to stay home and take care of her husband and children! Well! We answered back that we were determined to have it all — education, career, spouse and family! So we needed Helen Reddy’s song, and when we sang it, we put our hearts into it and it made our souls soar and gave us the ambition, courage and faith in our own ability to achieve our goals. It is in every way a magical song.
I can’t resist noting that I predicted on Aug. 24 that Obama was tanking and that Obama’s minions see to it that a big lie about Gov. Sarah Palin usually follows within about 48 to 72 hours any bad news about Obama that is dominating the news shows. Well, the lie was postponed since Ted Kennedy died and coverage about his life and funeral filled the news shows through Sunday, taking the heat off of Obama, despite his excruciating eulogy at Kennedy’s funeral on Saturday.
However, Obama’s poll numbers continued to drop like a rock AND make news, so the Obama Prevarication Predictor clock reset on Monday. And lo! An essay supposedly written by Levi Johnson, father of Bristol Palin’s baby, was published today, 72 hours-ish later, suitably filled with lies about Gov. Palin in an effort to distract the media with their favorite cut of red meat.
However, darn the luck, it’s not working this time. Over at The Other McCain, dear Stacy, father of six children, including a teenage daughter, writes, “… if that third-rate teenage hockey goon did to my daughter what he did to Sarah Palin’s daughter, he wouldn’t be available for media interviews, unless Vanity Fair covers seances . . . .” Hot Air points out that even MSNBC thinks Levi is lying about Gov. Palin, while Conservatives4Palin provides the fisking and Ace has great color commentary on the plausibility of Levi’s claims: “Sarah Palin Would Often Offhandedly Confirm the Left’s Worst Suspicions About Her to Me, the Self-Declared Redneck Sticking it to Her Daughter.”
I hate to think of what Obama will resort to when lies about Gov. Palin really, really stop working to shift attention from his inadequacies, failures and treacheries to friend and foe.
My Obama Prevarication Predictor says that whenever a consensus develops opposing anything Obama favors, within 72 hours of the consensus developing he will announce he either no longer wants the thing OR that he is the personification of reason and compromise over the thing — whatever “the thing” du jour is. Currently it is the public option in Obamacare, the impenetrable and mischievous and ever-changing collection of proposals to nationalize the healthcare industry without really helping the people it purports to help.
I just noticed Healthcare Horserace is quoting Politico and announcing that Obama is willing to drop the public option. DON’T YOU BELIEVE IT. Obama uses announcements like this to get his opposition* to believe they’ve won so that they will leave the field of battle and stop paying attention. Then he does whatever he wants, usually within about 72 hours, and usually the opposite of what he said he would do. So NOW is the time to pay even MORE attention to what Obama and the Democrats are doing when it comes to the public option.
Defcon 2, people. I mean it. Defcon 2 on the public option.
*He does this to his purported friends and allies, too, so they won’t be paying attention when he’s cheating them. That was his strategy when he signed an order for the environment in July that the greenies wanted and hours later agreed to clear-cutting in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
H/T: Memeorandum has a round-up on the story, which I didn’t see until after writing this post.
Update, 9/2/09: Sometime after the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky retired, I saw an interview where he explained one of the secrets of his genius at playing hockey: the game was not random to him — he perceived AND remembered patterns in the movement of the puck and the responses of all the players. The result was that he knew where the puck would be five or six moves ahead of time, so he would have plenty of time to skate to the place he expected the puck to be and decide which path through the other teams’ defense was the most expeditious one to scoring a goal.
(I just Googled to check the spelling of Gretzky’s name and found that this quote of his is justifiably famous and alternately given as: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been,” and “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”)
My point is that Obama has used the tricks in his playbook of deceit and treachery so many times now and with such contempt for the intelligence and will of his opponents that he seems completely unaware that he has become predictable. Meanwhile, the Right is becoming Wayne Gretzky, able to predict his actions five or six moves in advance and skating to that spot to be ready to take the puck.
And how apt that my analogy comes from the game of hockey, because our best player on the Right is a hockey mom in Wasilla, Alaska — you can tell which one she is in that pack of pit bulls by her lipstick — who is able to see through Obama’s game plan and take the puck away from him armed only with her Facebook page and we few, we happy few, we bandofbloggers.
I regard with horror the naivete and foolishness of feminists and lesbians and gays regarding the menace of Islam because they are the first ones who will lose their liberty and/or lives when Muslims move into a neighborhood. This is not prejudice toward Muslims — they are commanded to kill unbelievers. Women and gays are low-hanging fruit, as it were.
Naomi Wolf is one of this breed of feminist fools. She recently toured Morocco, Jordan and Egypt — where over 95 percent of women have had some sort of genital mutilation — and then published some claptrap about how sexually liberating the chador is and how she can really relate because she went shopping wearing a shalwar kameez, aka Punjabi suit.
Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish woman, who, in her foolish youth, married a Muslim man, moved to his country, was effectively imprisoned by him and managed to escape, has a much more authoritative view of Islam, Muslim sexuality, the burqa, the chador and the hijab. She punksmacks Naomi Wolf here.
However, if you are not familiar with the differences between the shalwar kameez, the chador and the burqa, let me supply some illustrations for Dr. Chesler’s lecture.
The shalwar kameez, or Punjabi suit, is comfortable and flattering to all ages and figures, and available in an array of designs, all sorts of fabrics and price ranges, and a rainbow of colors:
Shalwar kameez or Punjabi suit
Now a chador:
Chador -- from an online supplier (veil not included, one size fits most).
Now a burqa:
Person, probably a woman, wearing a burqa.
Two of these things are not like the other, Naomi. Two of these things are not like the other. Not even a little.
Update, 9/2/09: Dear Little Miss Attila has linked this post and provides her own thoughtful discussion on dressing modestly here.
Update, 9/2/09: Dr. Chesler has a follow-up piece at Pajamas Media today, “Wolf Demands an Apology, Chesler Won’t Back Down” because — what’s a nice way of saying this? — Ms. Wolf can’t use a Web browser well enough to know that when Dr. Chesler linked her piece, it was Wolf herself who persuaded Dr. Chesler’s readers who CAN use Web browsers and DID read it in its entirety that she is a fool AND that she has no practical grasp of what women’s rights are, and no appreciation for the concepts of liberty and freedom, either.
So Ms. Wolf, the place to stand to demand your apology is right in front of a mirror.
And Dr. Chesler — please count this newly conservative lesbian as someone who has your back when you are fighting for equality for women everywhere and sounding the alarm about the menace of Islam.
Update, 9/3/09: Little Miss Attila kindly linked this post here on Sept. 1 and today the unmitigated, clueless GALL of Naomi Wolf’s demand that Dr. Chesler apologize to her has inspired her to provide Wolf with another punksmacking. Kids, these days.
Update, 9/3/09: The following is my favorite comment from the comments following Dr. Chesler’s posts at Pajamas Media schooling Naomi Wolf on the atrocities Muslim women suffer under Islam:
(Author: RSE; I corrected one typo.)
Honestly, the single sentence in Wolf’s original story, “I do not mean to dismiss the many women leaders in the Muslim world who regard veiling as a means of controlling women,” is the only place her piece even obliquely states, in Wolf’s words, that “Muslim women face terrible oppressions.”
I was fascinated by another sentence in in Wolf’s piece. In her paragraph beginning, “Ideological battles are often waged with women’s bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception,” Wolf writes, “When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for female genital mutilation, forced wearing of the burka, refusal to educate women and girls, forced arranged child marriage, daughter- and wife-beating, and honor killings.” Ooops, sorry, that’s not what she wrote. Wolf wrote, “When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women.” If ever there were an epitaph for Western academic feminism, that is it.
One of my commenters from Australia quoted Helen Reddy’s song, “I am woman,” and it occurred to me that most younger readers here might not recognize the allusion, so I went hunting on YouTube for it. I just watched it and I’m sitting here with tears running down my cheeks. It deserves its own post.
If Obama has any sense at all, for the rest of his life he will resent the humiliation of having followed genuinely eloquent and inspiring men as the final eulogist at Sen. Ted Kennedy’s funeral service on Saturday, August 29, in Boston at The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. If his handlers have any sense, the opportunity to compare Obama’s tedious speaking style to, well, practically anyone else, will not happen again.
The speakers who preceded Obama were Ted Kennedy, Jr., and his brother, Patrick Kennedy. Ted, Jr., spoke more easily, but Patrick soon hit his stride, and their eulogies were by turns funny, passionate, heart-warming and touching, and if you saw them and they did not bring a smile to your face and a tear to your eye, then you are made of stone (or devoted to the memory of Mary Jo Kopechne).
In contrast, while Obama’s speech very obviously reached for great emotions and evocative images in the life of Ted Kennedy, Obama is a soulless man who can only truly feel a few emotions, none of them wholesome. So he fell short every time. He used his best frowns and scornful sneers, which until recently have made people think he has magical powers, but only really brightened up when he could work himself into the narrative. However, his egomania during a speech that was supposed to be extolling the life of another person betrayed the weird cluelessness so characteristic of Obama — it is one of the telltale signs of his sociopathy, since it reveals how utterly lacking he is in the ability to feel empathy. So he was too clueless to know the right emotions to fake. This made Obama’s eulogy an excruciating 15 minutes of posturing and tedium.
I have absolutely no idea how anyone thinks Obama is a stirring speaker.
All three eulogies are available for embedding from Fox News, so I am presenting them here for comparison. You don’t have to listen to them in their entirety — a minute or two of each one will prove my point. But I bet that if you start listening either to Ted, Jr., or to Patrick, you will be spellbound in moments and listen to their entire eulogy, or at least, more than you intended. And I also bet that it will require an act of will to force yourself to listen to more than a minute or two of Obama, due to his limited range of emotions and the overall fakery, superciliousness, narcissism and posturing.
Here are the videos of Ted, Jr., Patrick and Obama, in the order they gave their eulogies in Massachusetts on Saturday, August 29 — first Ted, Jr.:
Charles Krauthammer’s Aug. 28 column declares Obamacare 1.0 (its current form) dead and makes sensible proposals for a universal healthcare bill he dubs Obamacare 2.0 that he believes could get passed. Why, it even leaves out tort reform. However, the column takes a mordant turn at the end when Dr. Krauthammer notes that such a program would result in the dreaded healthcare rationing and death panels sooner, rather than later. So I do not believe he really supports the alternative he proposes.
However, I must take Dr. Krauthammer to task for failing to note the themes that unite all of Obama’s signature proposals: first, their stated purpose and their real purpose are never the same; and second, the real purpose is nefarious: destroying capitalism, destroying democracy, establishing socialism, destroying our military, destroying the security of our borders, paying off supporters, destroying Israel and so on.
The purpose of Obamacare is NOT to establish universal healthcare. The purpose of Obamacare is to transform the U.S. from a capitalist economy to a socialist society. Obamacare will establish socialism by forcing high rates of taxation, destroying initiative by denying people the majority of the fruits of their labors and forcing government intrusion into every aspect of people’s lives.
Obama will only support an Obamacare bill that will establish socialism. He will tell any lie and play every dirty trick to make that happen. Nothing else will do. Dr. Krauthammer, if you do not understand that these are the new rules of the game under Obama, you should stop giving advice until you do. This doesn’t mean you should leave the room, as you so crazily suggested Gov. Palin do before you co-opted her objections to the death panels and peddled them as your own. Just stop talking until you’ve observed the patient enough to understand his pathology. THEN I expect you will have some very trenchant observations indeed.
Those wonderful young gay men at HillBuzz have taken note of the Left venting its rage on Whole Foods because the company’s owner wrote an op-ed opposing Obamacare. This is how Democrats find out that all Democrats are equal, but some Democrats are more equal than others. Silly man! Thinking that when the Left says it wants a discussion about something that you’re allowed to give your opinion instead of saluting and toeing the party line.
Since the Left is busy boycotting Whole Foods, the dear men at HillBuzz realized it is high time to support the store by shopping there. However, they worried about being able to afford the prices and asked their readers for tips. Bonanza! Go and read for yourself — those Whole Foods-savvy HillBuzz readers will save you time and money!
For the offending op-ed and Little Miss Attila’s take, go here. And donate as much as you can — she’s not a kidder about things like getting by on white rice and soybean sauce right now. And, yes, since you mention it, I donated as much as I could — it’s prosperous to give with the intention and belief that the gift will be multiplied both for you and the receiver.
As a teenager in the 1960’s I read the term “female circumcision” and I was very puzzled because male circumcision is cutting off the foreskin, but there is no corollary to the foreskin in female genitalia to remove.
Later I found out that “female circumcision” is a mostly Muslim and mostly African custom of cutting off all of the external female genitalia — the clitoris, and the labia minora and labia majora — and leaving scars that just barely allow for urination, menstruation, sex and childbearing. Opponents of the practice have been successful in re-naming the practice “female genital mutilation” to alert the unwitting that a LOT more is taken from women than men by this type of “circumcision.”
Therefore it is an outrage to compare male circumcision to female genital mutilation by claiming that male circumcision is “male genital mutilation.” To be truly comparable and deserving of the phrase “male genital mutilation,” the entire penis would have to be chopped off. Without anesthesia. Or a really sharp knife — since this is often done with a shard of glass to the young pre-teen girls in cultures where this is practiced.
One of the guys in the bassoon section of the D.C. Different Drummers is a surgical nurse and told us at a party after one of our marches that he had assisted in a surgery on a woman who was an immigrant who had been genitally mutilated. He said her private parts looked like a Barbie doll’s crotch — all smooth, no labia, no clitoris.
So if there are male bloggers who wish to push the fiction that female genital mutilation and male circumcision are comparable, I am willing to discuss the matter over the sharpest shard of glass I can find.
Oh, and while parity requires only the removal of the penis, I recall now that lesbians are smeared generally as castrating bitches and that it is my nature to be thorough and always go the extra mile ….
P.S.
This subject came up when I was checking citations for a comment I was writing and I found Stacy McCain’s post, “Hanna Rosin has guest-blogged her last.” Stacy writes:
“Male genital mutilation!” scream the connoisseurs of uncut, preservationists of the precious prepuce.
Get over it, people. Only porn freaks and gay men — having ample opportunity to comparison shop, as it were — obsess so fanatically over the difference….
The advantages in terms of hygiene are well-known, and tend to be especially appreciated by mothers who have a difficult enough time getting boys to bath, much less to wash their winkies with health-conscious care. And it is certainly my impression — based on comments whenever the subject is raised — that women generally prefer what we might call the kosher pickle.
P.P.S.
While the silicon and acrylic dildos fabricated and favored by my homegrrls come in both realistic and non-realistic shapes, the last time I checked, although that hasn’t been for awhile, the realistic ones all were circumcised. Hmmmm …. I wonder what Becky would say. Or Little Miss Attila, who has looked at life from both sides now.
