Category Archives: English

Breaking: Inadvertently, BHO Inferred Something True

Barack Obama, Christianity, English, Islam

Inadvertently, Barack Hussein Obama suggested a correct inference today. I didn’t say he spoke the truth (other than “the” and “a”); that would be too much to ask. Listen:

The first Crusade was proclaimed almost 1000 years ago; the inquisition a little after that. Indirectly—and in his attempt to draw “moral equivalency between the brutality of ISIS and Christianity”—Barack Obama situated the ISIS phenomenon in the Middle Ages.

From a man whose relationship with truth is at best tentative—that’s the best one can hope for. So what did President Pinocchio say at the National Prayer Breakfast?

Unless [LEST] we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was [WERE???] justified in the name of Christ.

It’s “LEST we get on our high, etc. …”

LEST you doubt that the man’s grammar even with teleprompter—the Millennials write this drivel—is as bad as all that, here’s the tape, sound included.

Obama’s easily as stupid as W. Bush, except that the media cover for him.

Adding Fire Power To The Literary Canon

English, Human Accomplishment, Literature, The West

With respect to the column “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon,” my good editor at Quarterly Review rightly griped that I should have added more titles fit for the precocious child reader.

Leslie’s favorites are Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Seconded. And boy, did I adore Molière, “one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.”

Add Don Quixote by Cervantes, Kafka, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling. The Hebrew Bible is a very racy, great read. I’m no expert on the New Testament.

Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon

Economy, Education, English, Literature, Objectivism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture

“Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND. The WND version has been scrubbed of the “salacious sex scene,” excerpted below, which happens to be required reading in some kids’ English class:

The fraught relationship between state and society carries over into classroom and town hall. Something of a commonplace in police state USA is the scene in which a citizen is arrested for speaking his mind to a public official, pedagogue or politician.

Our story begins with a dad, William Baer, a lawyer, I believe, who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” For speaking out of turn at a school board meeting, Baer was cuffed and carted out of a forum of educrats and obedient parents, herded together at the Gilford high school. An arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct followed—Baer, after all, had exceeded the talk time allotted to him.

“It was basically, you make a statement, say what you want and sit down,” the dad told a local television station. “‘Sit down and shut up’ … [is] not how you interact with adults.”

In the background to the online YouTube clip of the event one can hear the dulcet voice of a female emcee, delighting in the petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.

Mr. Baer was protesting a novel which was required reading in his 14-year-old daughter’s English class: “Nineteen Minutes” by home girl Jodi Picoult. (One of Australia’s finest writers, also the copy editor of this writer’s last book, relates that every time he gets on a train or a bus, there seems to be some female or three reading a Jodi P. “masterpiece.”)

Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Picoult’s novel is the rotten writing throughout:

“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ”
… She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
… (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.
“Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”

The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political. Inculcating kids early on with these cumbersome, constricted constructs serves to stunt young minds. The young reader is intellectually disemboweled, as he is steered into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines. …

… Without the literary canon, young minds are doomed to become as dim and sclerotic as those of the educators who assign them the piss-poor reading material aforementioned

… Read the rest. “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND.

Monica’s Back. In time for Halloween.

English, Gender, Hillary Clinton, History, Ilana Mercer, Pop-Culture

Talk about a throwback culture. The bullying lobby has made whining a national pastime. This group has some cheek calling out Monica Lewinsky for setting back their cause. What cause? Thou Shalt Not Offend? Here are some bully headlines from Drudge:

BULLY GROUP TO LEWINSKY: TAKE YOUR STAINED DRESS HOME!
‘She’s setting us back years’…
‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about’…

Nothing could make this scribe listen to what Monica has to say today. However, here’s the column written in March of 1999 for Canada’s North Shore News. It probably appeared in the Calgary Herald as well, but I cannot quite recall. It seems a lifetime away. Have I been in the trenches that long? The insights are still good, the writing overwrought (being brutally self-critical is the first rule of writing).

After watching Monica Lewinsky’s TV debut, I realized who in all this was the real hero. The man who stood bravely between the public and this caricature of a woman is no other than finger-in-the-dyke, Kenneth Starr. It is the independent counsel we must thank for delaying the unleashing of the histrionic Monica.

Menaces like Monica are a product of the times, as is the TV-pimp, Bawbawa Walters. These sorry prototypes are carefully nurtured by the education system. Girls are raised to believe that “like” they deserve everything “and stuff.” That empowerment means they can abandon reason and realistic self-appraisal because they are “totally great.” Feelings rule. Venting and pouting are the only ways of being, and if a guy doesn’t return your calls, President or “whatever,” he’s a jerk. Above all, your sexuality, the true meaning of which evades these shallow sisters, is your shrine second only to your self-esteem.

Monica, of course, blames her woes on a “low self-esteem.” What else? Her demeanor, however, was anything but demure. Her admirers chose “self-possessed” to describe her brazen countenance, although “arrogant” is more apt. If anything, this girl suffers inflated self-importance with a dose of grandeur. Monica threw tantrums when the president of the United States shied away from blowing his sax over the phone for her. And the “pres.,” says Monica, should have broadcast their “relationship” to the world had he any decency. From where Monica is perched, the president’s men had no right to come between her and her lover. This is a woman whose chunky self-esteem is a match only to her keister.

Next, Monica says “sorry.” Fully 66 percent of those polled thought Monica’s apology to the First Wife and daughter was a sincere one. What the public now accepts as an apology is another sick sign of the times. Monica said she was contrite yet proceeded to peel-off layer by layer every scab that ever formed over the sorry affair. This exercise in expiation she carried out in view of millions of people. Apologies have, indeed, become nothing but Oprah-moments, where victims and perpetrators collaborate, under the media’s gaze, to belittle the meaning of loss and injustice.

The reactions in the media to Monica are a useful litmus test for the quality of commentary in the press. The Canadian National Post came tops, consistently assigning wry descriptions to the “bubble head.” Second was the New York Times, referring to the interview as “… a giddy Cosmo version of self-realization, a tale told in the psychosexual language of magazine covers that urge their readers to own their sexuality.”

The Globe and Mail, and the Vancouver Sun vied for a position on the lowest of rungs. Gaseously effervescent was the Globe and Mail’s John Allemang’s string of superlatives: “all-consumingly sensuous, frank, lucid, articulate, focused,” blah, blah, blah. Even her voice, “High, gentle and firm,” gave this man the hots. The Vancouver Sun upped the ante by dignifying Monica’s book with a review.

The reviewer called the book “delicious,” and offered a sample of Andrew Morton’s lumpen prose, showcasing these linguistic vacuities: Monica is analytical, sharp, brilliant, with a photographic memory … ad nauseum. Morton, who told Princess Diana’s “story,” is popping up under every rock with details about the genesis of Monica’s “pain,” which all lead to no other than Torry Spelling’s birthday party snubs. Spelling has a lot more to atone for than a bunch of dreadful films.

Monica’s heft is no longer upon us, although others will step forward to fill the only impression she ever left on the cultural stage, to paraphrase Sir William Shwenck Gillbert’s witticism. When they do, be mindful that girls like Monica don’t get betrayed; they simply star (no pun intended) in their own destructive passion plays. Monica shared her stain-filled affair with anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. And Monica selected her cast, including the sneering Linda Tripp and “Bomber Bill.”