When, a semester or two ago, my department chair asked me to teach the local version of the nowadays-pervasive “popular culture” course, I consented with some mild misgivings and, as I like to do, took a mostly historical approach to course-content. I have no investment in contemporary popular culture, the wretchedness of it striking me as consummate. My students, for their part, being morbidly, continuously immersed in contemporary popular culture, require no one, really, to acquaint them with it. At least they require no one to tutor them in it directly, since it regrettably is their ubiquitous and hortatory guide and cue-giver for all facets of life. But one might apprise them about the insipidity of existing mass-entertainment indirectly by putting it in contrast with the popular entertainments of the past, including the classic films that most of them have never seen and, more importantly, would never seek out on their own. One film that I showed to students was the Errol Flynn vehicle The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz. Another one, not so well known as Robin Hood, was the Roger Livesey/Wendy Hiller vehicle I Know Where I’m Going (1945), directed by Michael Powell (1905-1990).

In respect of The Adventures of Robin Hood, I have remarked in an article [here], for MediaHope, how one of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’s superbly mounted medieval epic is that, at its heart, the film tells a moving conversion story – actually a pair of them, Marian’s and Robin’s, that the screenwriters skillfully intertwine. In the same article I reiterated critic René Girard’s argument that all effective narrative turns on plausible conversion and that reading itself is a type of conversion experience. If Girard’s point were valid for written narrative then why would it not likewise be so for film? Like Curtiz’s Robin Hood, Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going tells a conversion story, brilliantly, and uses it to make a profound filmic critique of the crassness that pervades modern life. I should add that in neither instance is it a case of religious conversion but rather of something subtler.

There are conspiracy theories that hold that Europe’s political establishment is deliberately attempting to replace the continent’s population by an entirely different one. Though conspiracy theories are rarely true, Europe’s political establishment is making it extremely hard for the sceptics to refute them. Take, for instance, the recent Belgian amnesty for illegal aliens.

Last July, the government of Belgium announced a collective amnesty for illegal aliens. It is Belgium’s second general amnesty in barely a decade. When the previous one was approved by the Belgian Parliament in 1999, the government promised Parliament that it would be the final one and that henceforward people who entered the country illegally would be sent back. Nevertheless, there has been no crack-down on illegal immigration in the past ten years and hardly any illegal aliens have been sent back.

George Handlery about the week that was. Searching for antidotes against the insolent disobedience of the restless masses. Pacify Islam: export secular atheism. Just discovered: Muslims are not responsible for the last two world wars. The devaluation of racism through over incantation. About the extent of Soviet infiltration.

1. The insurrection of the masses. Only one politically advanced industrialized society practices on a regular basis and within short intervals institutionalized direct democracy. Some evidence suggests that it is a better system than its missing global practice would suggest. The widespread representative system puts decisions in the hands of a political class. The insider crowd’s orientation and ability to sense issues that concern its people can be limited. When its ideology’s assumptions and reality diverge, it can even run contrary to what formal politics’ outsiders desire.

Chapter 2: Barko = Fundamental Transformation 

  

2 + 3 = 5.038²⁰

There was a time, before every car had a bumper sticker that read, “Even my llama voted for Obama,” when Americans preferred to affirm in this manner some essential and incontrovertible truth, like “S**t happens.” Swayed by their ruling elites and boob tube to take out reverse mortgage loans to buy swamp vacations condos and 3-ton SUVs with all the desert options for driving to MacDonald’s, they lost their mind. Their political and opinion-making leaders, all graduates of elite universities, all counseled by PhD’s from even more elite universities -- they too had forgotten the simple truths one used to learn in kindergarten.

 

Since I am a certified sci-fi geek and most science fiction movies are quite bad this habit unfortunately forces me to watch a large number of bad movies. It’s one of my little perversions. I have just watched the most expensive B-movie ever made, the US$ 237 million Avatar by director James Cameron, famous for having produced films such as The Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens and Titanic. Briefly summed up I would say that while it is visually spectacular, as is everything Mr. Cameron makes, Avatar has to be one of the most anti-Western and especially anti-white Hollywood movies I have seen in a long time.

Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party has a branch for younger members – "Jeunes Populaires". These young persons are "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed", trendy as today's news, oh-so-optimistic, and terminally adolescent (like Sarkozy himself?). A video has been posted at their website that gives an excellent idea of what they are about, but it also shows the ministers of Sarkozy's government as well as UMP party leaders engaging in a ludicrous political pep rally that can be qualified as an embarrassment at best, and voluntary prostitution at worst, without any fear of exaggeration. To watch key figures in the government behave like this should make us laugh, but in fact, it is nauseating, and if you really look at the underpinnings, terrifying. Especially on examining the words to the lip-synched ditty they jubilantly "sing" in our faces:

George Handlery about the week that was. Cultural success and the dynamism of the West. Free ideas against stolid dogmatism. The dogmas of security and the uncertainties of freedom. The nature of the challenge determines the proper response to it. The worth of the dollar. Obama’s dilemma: How much surrender is volatile support worth? Welfare competes with earned salaries.

1. Not infrequently, one encounters observations whose essence is that, if subjected to Islam’s rule here, we would be returning to the Middle Ages. With respect to the average person’s knowledge, the argument might be effective. Nevertheless, even if it is good PR, crucial errors are embedded in the concept. These errors denigrate the middle ages while understating the consequences of Muslim conquest.

It used to be a joke among Swedes of self-deprecating ability – one dating from the time when Dag Hammarskjöld was President of the United Nations – that the most obvious trait of the representative Stockholm bureaucrat or university professor when abroad was his “portable conscience.”

There are few books published these days that are worth a second look, but The Suicide of Reason by Lee Harris is one of the exceptions. Many observers currently sense – correctly in my view – that something is fundamentally wrong with the Western world, but they differ substantially in their analysis of the cause(s) of this. The First and Second World Wars were horrible, and most thinking people agree that something went wrong with the Western Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, which unlike the Chinese Cultural Revolution became institutionalized. But does that mean that everything was fine in the 1950s?

In a recent referendum, a majority of the Swiss approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in their country. Now activist European European judges may tell Switzerland to lift the ban. The Swiss, however, might not be impressed.