Music impresario Don Kirshner, dead at 76, may not be remembered best for catapulting Kansas to stardom in the 1970s, nor for launching the career of the Monkees and launching the animated chart-toppers The Archies in the 1960s. Those accomplishments – even to the most die-hard, discriminating popular music critics – should be enough for us to mourn his passing today.
By Daniel P. Crandall You just finished another long day in the office. The project is ahead of schedule and under budget. Your boss calls you into his office before you leave for the night. Your heart skips a beat as you wonder if unemployment looms behind his doors. Once you walk in, he looks you in the eye and gives you a hearty congratulations; you’ve received glowing accolades from customers that will lead to future projects, and you are to be honored by your peers at an upcoming convention. This is the feedback laborers in the corporate fields crave. Nothing drives productivity like compliments and rewards for a job well done. Every rational person recognizes the power awards and positive reviews have in reinforcing behavior and producing the products we enjoy. So why, when it comes to popular culture, do most conservatives do little but shovel burning coals on writers, artists, filmmakers, and others laboring in the cultural influence professions? There is an old adage that you can tell what someone values when you open her checkbook. Conservative organizations, for years, told purveyors of pop culture that political activism is far more valuable a commodity than artistic endeavors. Look
Conservative leaders got together and decided, “What we need to do now is pretty much what we’ve been doing since 1955.” These leaders seem to have declared that what happens in Washington DC will be their raison d’être for another 60+ years. The US Marines have an unofficial motto when facing dire circumstances, “Improvise, adapt and overcome.” If only the conservative movement would take this saying to heart. The Mount Vernon Statement is a document by conservative leaders to “recommit to the ideas of the American Founding.” It is a well-intentioned assertion that what we need is “a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” With all due respect to the smart folks who put this document together, haven’t conservatives been articulating these “priceless principles” since William F. Buckley Jr. created National Review in 1955 and Young Americans for Freedom put out the “Sharon Statement” in 1960? What, exactly, will change if they continue down this path for another six decades? The problem with the Mount Vernon Statement is not the reform it seeks. The document’s authors are spot on when they write, “The change
By now you’ve probably heard that Britt Hume had the temerity, the unmitigated gall, made the unpardonable social faux pas to suggest that Tiger Words turn to Christianity to find “forgiveness and redemption.” How could he do such a thing? Doesn’t he know that the Christian faith belongs where it should always have been, in the closet? Quiet, minding its own business? Of course this is only controversial to our precious, leftist media elites. I’m sure even some of those same elites that come down on the opposite side of the political/cultural spectrum were even a bit uncomfortable with Hume’s remarks. It is amazing that in less than half a century Christianity came from being the dominant faith of Western civilization, to being “controversial.” How did this happen? The seeds of this rejection are partly the nature of the faith itself. Throughout the gospels, Jesus predicts he and his followers’ persecution, and so do the writers of the epistles. Paul in 1 Corinthians says it well, “e preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” But culturally speaking, this utter lack of respect for the faith that created Western civilization came about because people of
Two Italian courts reduced a convicted criminal’s sentence because they decreed that his genes predisposed him to murder. The decision is based not on science but on a hardline adherence to a philosophy called determinism, S. T. Karnick writes.
Government broadcaster PBS is running a new, five-part series on a subject naturally interesting in our time: American Experience: The 1930s. Episodes are available for online viewing here. The program is just what one would expect from PBS: earnest, well-researched, skillfully presented, and eager to lick the boots of government while criticizing individual freedom for everything wrong in the world, S. T. Karnick writes.
The animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was unexpectedly successful last weekend as U.S. movie audiences continued to seek out more positive stories, S. T. Karnick writes.
Dismayed by what conservative church members see as a loss of understanding of a central Christian doctrine, the concept of sin, the Catholic Church has been reviving the practice of indulgences. The church’s controversial return to a doctrine that fell out of favor in recent years has important social and cultural consequences that will by no means be limited to the Catholic Church but will in fact affect us all.
Prosperity is the result of a cultural choice: whether to build and nourish a culture of personal responsibility, or one of forced submission to a willful aristocracy.
With real conspiracies taking real lives around the world, this summer’s X-Files movie just didn’t capture the public imagination.
Arguments over censorship tend to concentrate on it as a national issue, when there’s really little to argue about there: according to the Constitution, the national government can’t regulate anything but obscenity and should be very limited in its activities in doing so. Where the real action is and should be is on the state and local level. Political columnist Mona Charen makes the case for one state’s effort to curb child pornography.
I am by no means an unalloyed admirer of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who seems rather too much of a trimmer, in my view, and whose self-description as a "modern compassionate conservative" is a remarkably tin-eared characterization and confirms the impression that he is dedicated more to gaining power than to pressing any classical-liberal or modern-conservative principles. Particularly off-putting are his support for the UK’s inept National Health Service, legal recognition of homosexual "marriage," the fictional concern over catastrophic manmade global warming, unlimited immigration, nation-building in foreign countries, and his excessive willingness to allow the EU to run roughshod over British sovereignty.
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