What happened, England?

I wrote in the previous post that someone at the Academy Awards should protest the prosecution of Dutch politician and filmmaker Geert Wilders in the name of artistic freedom of speech.

Now Mr. Wilders, who was invited by a member of the House of Lords to screen Fitna, has been detained at Heathrow Airport after being banned from entering England.

(Question: Are Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned from England as well? Or are dictators exempt from such measures?)

The British government claims that the presence of Mr. Wilders would constitute a threat to the security of the country. But who is more of a threat to Britain: a Dutch parliamentarian or the head of the Church of England advocating sharia law?

This is yet another indicator that the British have gone insane. It distresses me greatly to say this, since I love England and its history and culture. I love its literature, its architecture, and, until recently, the stiff-upper-lipness of its people. I love the impossible collection of great men it has produced in a steady stream for hundreds of years. I love its wit and its accent. And though I am forever fortunate and grateful that America won its independence, I harbor only affinity toward the nation we broke away from, whose traditions we inherited.

But as I watch the reaction of the current British goverment to the Islamic extremism that seeks to be the future British government, I fear for our distant cousin across the pond.

Something for the Academy Awards to consider

In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered on the street in Amsterdam by a Muslim extremist for making a movie critical of the subjugation of women in the Islamic world. His death made headlines worldwide, and he was considered a martyr for free speech. Yet at the Academy Awards the following year Mr. Van Gogh’s name was never mentioned, not even in the video that commemorated those in the film community who had recently died. In a ceremony known for its political commentary, it was as though the most notorious and barbaric assault on the freedom of artistic expression in a generation had never happened.

Hollywood will likely look the other way once more. One of Mr. Van Gogh’s compatriots, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, faces criminal prosecution in his country for insulting Islam. In March, Mr. Wilders released via the Internet a short film called Fitna, in which he compares Islam to Nazism and urges Muslims in the West to tear the Koran in half. The film was just one in a series of salvos against Islam by Mr. Wilders, long a politically incorrect pest to the European establishment, and it raised the possibility of another death on Dutch soil due to a provocative movie. Though he is still alive – he lives under 24/7 armed protection – the complaints against him grew into enough of a crescendo to compel the government to prosecute one of its own for offensive statements.

Had Mr. Wilders been prosecuted for making a film critical of the Catholic Church or Judaism, he’d be praised throughout Hollywood and Europe as an artiste. Stars might patrol the red carpet with white lapel pins representing the politician’s trademark bleached hair in a show of solidarity, the way some have worn orange ribbons in support of the terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. There would be protests against preemptive censorship – many of Fitna’s critics wanted it banned before it had been released – and against the fascism of the Dutch government for punishing someone for having a dissenting point of view. (Dissent, remember, is the highest form of patriotism.) And there would be the likelihood that the world will hear Geert Wilders’s name at least once during the Academy Awards on February 22.

But attacking Islam and Muslims is the big no-no of Hollywood and the global entertainment community, especially if the attackers are pasty-white, fair-haired heterosexual men of European ancestry. Whether it is out of leftist ideology, fear of being labeled Islamophobic, or fear of Islamist terror itself, most filmmakers have chosen either to ignore the topic of radical Islam or to treat those who confront it as the bad guys. No matter that Mr. Van Gogh, who was shot several times and nearly decapitated in public in broad daylight, became a martyr for the movies – he was too blonde and his movies went after the wrong people. The same goes for Mr. Wilders. It is yet to be seen how the prosecution against him turns out, but if Hollywood were writing the script he’d be guilty as hell.

Scenes from a dojo

Segment of transcript of my karate class:

Instructor: Now I’m going to teach you how to do a rising block. Put your arm above your face like this.

Me: Okay.

Instructor: A little higher. Good. Keep those fingers in a fist. Now, before you switch and block with your other arm, you’re going to release the fist in the arm that’s already blocking and straighten your fingers, like this.

Me: Why do I straighten my fingers?

Instructor: Because after you block your opponent’s punch, you can grab his arm — try to hit me….

Me: Okay….

Instructor: You can grab his arm like this —

Me: Oh.

Instructor:  — and twist it.

Me: GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

[Thud.]

Instructor: Any questions?

Me: No, I think I got it.

Women and Weddings

My sister is getting married in August. I have found out these past couple weeks that planning a wedding has much in common with plotting a murder: both require an eye for detail, a cunning mind, and a dash of insanity, and ultimately provide the same amount of satisfaction for the planner.

Sunshine Patriots

I see that the video where Hollywood celebrities are pledging to support Obama is getting lots of talk. Funny how they get all patriotic once their guy gets in office. Where the hell was their patriotism for the past eight years?

In other news, a relative who lives in Seattle gave me the details on that big snow storm last month, and I told him that the best cure for the gray-weather blues is a sun lamp and a Girls Gone Wild video. It wasn’t until later when I realized what a brilliant idea that is.

How it goes down, Part II

Gracelessness Under Fire

The other day I was watching via YouTube the trailer to the 1949 movie The Bribe, the one with Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and Vincent Price.

Oh, you’ve never heard of it, either?

I’m usually pretty good at keeping track of which stars appear in which films, so imagine my surprise when I find three of the biggest stars in cinematic history together in a film I never knew existed, in a genre I used to follow diligently: film noir. But I suppose in those days you could slip a B-film with three well-known faces into theaters and it would slip by unnoticed by audiences, or at least by future generations, because the studios had movie-star talent to spare. That’s one of the reasons why I miss the studio system: It gave the world some damn interesting people to look at for two hours every weekend.

We have some terrific actors today, but very few of them can provoke the awe of a Gardner or a Price. Some come close, but are ultimately doomed by the unclassiness that the studios back then guarded against. For instance, I believe Thandie Newton to be one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen, but the roles she picks are so devoid of glamour that the masses will never compare her with Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn.

Things like class, style, grace, and glamour have to be carefully crafted, otherwise they give way to less admirable, or at least more boring, qualities. And what are most movie stars today if not boring?

Slaying the beasts

I listened to Dennis Prager interview Thomas Sowell on the radio this morning. Sowell announced he was writing a book on intellectuals.  When asked how his book would differ from Paul Johnson’s earlier work Intellectuals, one of most scathing and merciless indictments of some of the most celebrated people of all time, Sowell responded:

“Mine won’t be as charitable.”

Looking forward to it already.

In a just world, Prager, Sowell, and Johnson would be lionized in universities and throughout our culture, whereas Marx and Rousseau would be held not as men who made valiant attempts at improving our civilization, but as sick individuals whose ideas caught fire with people who should have known better.

When talent is discovered

Bush and History

It’s seven days until the presidency of George W. Bush, the man who terrified us all for eight years by achieving the remarkable feat of being both an evil genius and a drooling idiot, is over. No doubt there will be many smiles across the country when that happens. And then, when Barack Obama is sworn in, we can once again be proud to be Americans.

I don’t want to burst the happiness bubble that will surround universities and Hollywood conference rooms on that day, but there is just one problem for those who think Bush was a blight on America: History may judge him differently.

The name George Bush is as synonymous with Iraq as Al Gore is with global warming. And if the situation in the Middle East continues to improve — if Iraq has an America-friendly democracy ten or fifteen or twenty years from now — Bush’s reputation will rise, just as Ronald Reagan’s reputation has risen significantly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Granted, Iraq’s stability is a big “if,” but not impossible. Several years ago, the situation there seemed hopeless and pointless; now, it’s looking more and more like a success story.

Whereas the former Vice President’s assertion that “the debate is over” regarding global warming is looking more and more foolish.

What’s more, the measures taken by Bush have kept his country safe since 9/11. To paraphrase the T-shirts, Bush might not have been your President, but he was your protector.

It is possible, though no doubt blood-chilling, that future generations will grasp this. If so, odds are they will view Bush favorably and believe he got a massive bad rap in his time, while his nemesis, the right honorable Al Gore, will be spoken of as an American Don Quixote chasing after windmills made from carbon emissions.

ADDED: Few say, well, anything better than Mark Steyn, and the perpetual thorn in the side of the Western intelligentsia has his own take on Bush’s legacy.