Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries is a melancholy farce inspired by the author's life, a memoir darkly tinged with folly recalled in abrasive detail under the shadow of advancing years.
Gray is an English playwright and author of several other books, although he writes as though he has outlived himself. My only previous encounter with his output was the film Butley, which starred Alan Bates and which he adapted from his own stage comedy. Both play and film were popular in the 1970s, but their writer is possibly correct that they have been occluded in recent years. He implies that his other plays, produced for the English stage, have been less than roaring successes; I don't know if that's true or just part of the self-critical mood he adopted, or which adopted him, for The Smoking Diaries.
As this journal of consciousness and (in Malcolm Muggeridge's phrase) "chronicle of wasted time" opens, Gray has just turned 65. Having given over drinking because its pleasures had lured him into alcoholism, he clings lovingly to his remaining vice, smoking. His physical condition is not likely to be an inspiration to others. At the time of writing, his close friend the playwright Harold Pinter has just been diagnosed with cancer. (Pinter is still with us, and received a Nobel this year.) The restaurant, Chez Moi, where Gray and his wife Victoria and Pinter and his wife, Antonia Fraser, have enjoyed one another's company for ages, is about to close down. Gray is starting to have trouble remembering useful things and finding it easy to remember painful events.
No wonder his mood resembles an English weather report.
The Smoking Diaries is written in a kind of diary format, so seemingly casual that some entries stop in the middle of a sentence. Thoughts break off from his intended subjects and he follows them as they drift away. His stream of consciousness repeatedly overflows its banks, sending rivulets into hidden sinkholes.
From many writers, this format could be pretentious, but decades of playwriting craft have taught Gray to bring the audience along through every byway. Minor events in his present dredge up flashbacks, some half a century old, and they become progressively more haunting as the pages are turned. But Gray asks no indulgence; as he muddles along, he makes sure that the language stays tuned up. He's a master at self-mockery delivered with panache, and he can turn a phrase that goes straight to your funnybone … on its way to your heart.
How much of The Smoking Diaries is revelation and how much is an assumed attitude is impossible for an outsider to say — maybe he doesn't know himself as he unfolds his tale of comic decline. But it's the nature of art to pull apart the raw material of life, reshaping actual experiences through imagination, fashioning them into a higher untruth. Gray has given us a work of eloquent despair that wears the masks of both comedy and tragedy — no small accomplishment for a writer of plays to remember, as the curtain slowly descends.
UPDATE 1/16/09: Harold Pinter, of course, passed on a few weeks ago. I haven't heard anything further about Simon Gray.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
Talk of the Town
Visiting New York City is something like taking a mind-altering drug whose provenance is unknown and you can count on a trip to Heaven, Hell, or both. For me, it's usually both.
My visit earlier this week was on what is called, in a peculiar expression, "family business" — in this case, my mother's surgery. She was well enough on the following day that I was able to leave her at home in Queens and travel to Manhattan, primarily to visit the Met (see the previous entry).
New York, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. No, stop me, at least after a few paragraphs of venting.
The subway system is simply horrible. Efficient on some level, I guess, but an experience of such unremitting grime, noise, and congestion that I don't know how any sensitive person can endure it regularly. And the new Metro cards that have replaced tokens are a nuisance and sometimes worse; mine refused to open the turnstile but deducted more money each time I swiped it until my credit was zero. Complaining to the agent in his zoo-cage-like enclosure brought no recompense. It was like dealing with a talking statue.
I tire easily, too, of the all-but-incomprehensible English and dozens of foreign tongues spoken by so many immigrants (call me xenophobic if you want; I'm not, so I don't care) and the gruffness of the native New Yorkers. Now I am well aware that what auslanders think is rudeness by New Yorkers is usually not intended as such. New Yorkers assume you are very busy making money and a name for yourself, and that you want them to get straight to the point. All right, but I still prefer a little graciousness.
And how about those bus ads from an organization called something like "StayClose.com"? They feature celebrities with gay siblings — Cyndi Lauper and her sister, and a gentleman I didn't recognize and his brother were on one — and urge you to be supportive if you are straight and your sibling is gay, or vice versa. If somebody has a lesbian sister and is perfectly comfortable with it, I say that's fine. On the other hand, if said person is not comfortable with it, that's fine by me too. But it's none of my business, or StayClose.com's, or anybody's but the people concerned. This organization is one more group of busybodies dedicated to the proposition that ordinary people are too stupid or retrograde to work out family issues by themselves, so these "experts" have to educate them about what to feel.
Not to make too soft a point of it, the New York environment bums me out.
It can also take my breath away, in a good sense. Because, despite the oppressive crowds and noise, the streetcorner madmen lecturing to the sky and the absurdly costumed fashion victims, somehow an enthralling and even civilized residue remains.
You walk up Madison Avenue in the 80s and every other shop window is a wonderland of individual flair, a treat for anyone used to mall chain-store window displays. You admire the detailing of townhouses, Renaissance revival, Beaux Arts, Gothic revival, French provincial, and wonder that such magnificence still exists in our gritty, pinched era.
Step into the Metropolitan Museum, fork over a mere $15 — yes, I consider that a lot of money too, but still — examples from virtually the entire history of human artistic creation are there before you: take your pick. And I don't think you have to be an art historian or specialist to realize that these are not table sweepings. They are mostly of remarkable quality, and some are among the finest works ever realized in the world of time and space.
Even in the city of restaurants competing to see who can come up with the most outlandish decor and dishes, it is still possible to dine in a pleasant atmosphere, with polished service and imaginative but not crazy cooking, among customers who can talk in a normal conversational tone without bellowing at one another as so many oafs do in public dining rooms these days. It's risky to recommend anyplace on the basis of one visit, but since I have no reputation to lose I'll go ahead and suggest you check out Caffe Grazie on 84th Street between Fifth and Madison if you happen to be in the area.
New York isn't my kind of place, but maybe that is an advantage, because my visits are infrequent enough that its moments of magic catch me unprepared and leave me grateful.
My visit earlier this week was on what is called, in a peculiar expression, "family business" — in this case, my mother's surgery. She was well enough on the following day that I was able to leave her at home in Queens and travel to Manhattan, primarily to visit the Met (see the previous entry).
New York, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. No, stop me, at least after a few paragraphs of venting.
The subway system is simply horrible. Efficient on some level, I guess, but an experience of such unremitting grime, noise, and congestion that I don't know how any sensitive person can endure it regularly. And the new Metro cards that have replaced tokens are a nuisance and sometimes worse; mine refused to open the turnstile but deducted more money each time I swiped it until my credit was zero. Complaining to the agent in his zoo-cage-like enclosure brought no recompense. It was like dealing with a talking statue.
I tire easily, too, of the all-but-incomprehensible English and dozens of foreign tongues spoken by so many immigrants (call me xenophobic if you want; I'm not, so I don't care) and the gruffness of the native New Yorkers. Now I am well aware that what auslanders think is rudeness by New Yorkers is usually not intended as such. New Yorkers assume you are very busy making money and a name for yourself, and that you want them to get straight to the point. All right, but I still prefer a little graciousness.
And how about those bus ads from an organization called something like "StayClose.com"? They feature celebrities with gay siblings — Cyndi Lauper and her sister, and a gentleman I didn't recognize and his brother were on one — and urge you to be supportive if you are straight and your sibling is gay, or vice versa. If somebody has a lesbian sister and is perfectly comfortable with it, I say that's fine. On the other hand, if said person is not comfortable with it, that's fine by me too. But it's none of my business, or StayClose.com's, or anybody's but the people concerned. This organization is one more group of busybodies dedicated to the proposition that ordinary people are too stupid or retrograde to work out family issues by themselves, so these "experts" have to educate them about what to feel.
Not to make too soft a point of it, the New York environment bums me out.
It can also take my breath away, in a good sense. Because, despite the oppressive crowds and noise, the streetcorner madmen lecturing to the sky and the absurdly costumed fashion victims, somehow an enthralling and even civilized residue remains.
You walk up Madison Avenue in the 80s and every other shop window is a wonderland of individual flair, a treat for anyone used to mall chain-store window displays. You admire the detailing of townhouses, Renaissance revival, Beaux Arts, Gothic revival, French provincial, and wonder that such magnificence still exists in our gritty, pinched era.
Step into the Metropolitan Museum, fork over a mere $15 — yes, I consider that a lot of money too, but still — examples from virtually the entire history of human artistic creation are there before you: take your pick. And I don't think you have to be an art historian or specialist to realize that these are not table sweepings. They are mostly of remarkable quality, and some are among the finest works ever realized in the world of time and space.
Even in the city of restaurants competing to see who can come up with the most outlandish decor and dishes, it is still possible to dine in a pleasant atmosphere, with polished service and imaginative but not crazy cooking, among customers who can talk in a normal conversational tone without bellowing at one another as so many oafs do in public dining rooms these days. It's risky to recommend anyplace on the basis of one visit, but since I have no reputation to lose I'll go ahead and suggest you check out Caffe Grazie on 84th Street between Fifth and Madison if you happen to be in the area.
New York isn't my kind of place, but maybe that is an advantage, because my visits are infrequent enough that its moments of magic catch me unprepared and leave me grateful.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
"Photography and the Occult" at the Met
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has an enterprising and unusual special exhbition. "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult" contains two rooms displaying photographs of allegedly paranormal phenomena, among them apparitions of the dead, "vital forces," physical manifestations such as levitation and ectoplasm, and photo images created by thought. Most of the pictures date from the so-called golden age of spiritualism, roughly 1850 to 1930.
"Approaching the material from a historical perspective, the exhibition presents the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity," the show's explanatory text says. And for the most part, the curator has kept that commitment. Nevertheless, notes next to the photos of a few of the "spirit manifestations" have a tinge of incredulity, which in those cases is quite justified. But using "Henri Robin and a Specter" as the show's iconic image, reproduced in a poster, is a little misleading. The photo's "specter" looks like a Hallowe'en costume, and the curatorial note acknowledges that Robin was an illusionist who never claimed to be anything else; he was simply demonstrating the "phantasmogorical" entertainment he devised to cash in on the spiritualist vogue.
Most of the "spirit photographs" consist of either a medium or a "sitter" (the medium's client), the translucent form of the departed above or to the side. We smile, knowing all about double exposures. In the late 19th century, though, photography was a specialized craft and few non-photographers had any concept of how the pictures were developed, so we can forgive the naive acceptance that such forgeries met with at the time.
But if we can understand why ordinary people tended to take these concoctions for reality, what are we to make of educated and presumably sophisticated students of psychical phenomena such as Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
On view is a photo by Schrenck-Notzing showing a naked medium, "Eva C.," peeking from behind a curtain, while a few feet from her is a supposed ghost. Schrenck-Notzing, according to the annotation, commented on the marvel of the medium's being without a stitch in which she could have concealed any apparatus for faking the ghost, which was captured in the same shot. It might have been marvelous, all right, if the revenant from the beyond did not look so utterly like a cardboard cutout, with features resembling those a child might have drawn. How could anyone, let alone a scientist, have fallen for this? I offer one possibility. Unlike the "ghost," the partially visible disrobed Eva C. is definitely three-dimensional -- and rather shapely into the bargain. Perhaps Schrenck-Notzing was distracted from concentrating too closely on the disembodied spirit by the embodied one.
Now we come to the embarrassing case of Conan Doyle and the famous "Cottingley fairy" photographs, two of which also figure in this exhibition. The creator of Sherlock Holmes developed, as is well known, a keen interest in the paranormal. He wrote quite a few books defending and explaining spiritualism. I've read a couple of them, and they struck me as reasonable in tone, neither dogmatic nor suggesting that the author had gone dotty in his later years. So there's no easy way to account for his being taken in by photographs of "fairies" who inhabited a garden in the village of Cottingley, and who were discovered there by two young ladies. The most, and the least, you can say about these fairies is that they were fashion conscious enough to dress very much in the mode of their time (circa 1920).
This is probably one instance where critics of psychical research are right when they say that an investigator fell prey to his own "will to believe" in the object of his research.
I left the exhibition with no doubt that most of its photographs of alleged paranormal manifestations were fakes, either cynically doctored to exploit people grieving over lost relatives or just for a hoot.
Why most rather than all?
Writing in the July 2005 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, David Fontana remarks (in a book review, not in connection with the Met's show) that "photographs of materialisations always appear 'stagey' and rarely serve as hard evidence for paranomality ... ." True. But one reason such photos look "stagey" might be that we don't normally see materializations of non-material entities, so they are bound to look unreal when captured by the camera. In pictures (typically rather repellant) of ectoplasm being extruded from a medium, the ectoplasm may resemble cotton strands or cloth; but again, we don't know what ectoplasm, if such a thing exists, looks like. We shouldn't assume too quickly that what appears dubious must be phony.
So it is barely possible that even a few of the shots on view at the Met are what they purport to be, and they look dodgy because our minds don't know how to process what they have never experienced. That is of course only speculation on my part, and not offered as evidence.
But a few of the pictures in the exhibit do have some apparent claim to legitimacy. And, interestingly, they are among the most recent, taken long after the original "tricks of the trade" had been exposed (or double exposed).
A man named Colin Evans is shown in a photo taken in 1938, amid an auditorium full of people. The photo was taken using infrared light in a completely darkened room. Evans has risen into the air -- levitating, as D.D. Home, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and St. Teresa of Avila are said to have done. No means of aerial support are visible. And the audience members, including those right next to him, are looking not at Evans but at the seat he occupied when the lights went out. Supposing he had somehow leaped from a sitting position into the air,where he is shown to be almost vertical, it is hard to imagine that even in a darkened room no one would have heard or sensed it. And to have faked the whole scene would have required the cooperation of dozens of people, which a charlatan photographer could scarcely have expected would stay a secret for long.
For serios evidence -- excuse me, I mean serious evidence -- you should also consider a number of "thoughtographs" produced in experiments in the 1960s. Ted Serios, a boozehound and ne'er-do-well from the American midwest, appeared to have a singular talent: the ability to transfer his own visualized images to Polaroid film. Several examples are shown at the Met. The Serios phenomena, like practically everything else in the history of psychical research, are controversial, endlessly "debunked" and defended.
Whatever you want to make of the Serios "thoughtographs" or any other exhibits in "Photography and the Occult," they do not approach scientifically acceptable proof for post-mortem survival, energy fields, mediumship, or such. That, however, is not grounds for dismissing the paranormal.
In his book The Paranormal, Stan Gooch writes:
"Approaching the material from a historical perspective, the exhibition presents the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity," the show's explanatory text says. And for the most part, the curator has kept that commitment. Nevertheless, notes next to the photos of a few of the "spirit manifestations" have a tinge of incredulity, which in those cases is quite justified. But using "Henri Robin and a Specter" as the show's iconic image, reproduced in a poster, is a little misleading. The photo's "specter" looks like a Hallowe'en costume, and the curatorial note acknowledges that Robin was an illusionist who never claimed to be anything else; he was simply demonstrating the "phantasmogorical" entertainment he devised to cash in on the spiritualist vogue.
Most of the "spirit photographs" consist of either a medium or a "sitter" (the medium's client), the translucent form of the departed above or to the side. We smile, knowing all about double exposures. In the late 19th century, though, photography was a specialized craft and few non-photographers had any concept of how the pictures were developed, so we can forgive the naive acceptance that such forgeries met with at the time.
But if we can understand why ordinary people tended to take these concoctions for reality, what are we to make of educated and presumably sophisticated students of psychical phenomena such as Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
On view is a photo by Schrenck-Notzing showing a naked medium, "Eva C.," peeking from behind a curtain, while a few feet from her is a supposed ghost. Schrenck-Notzing, according to the annotation, commented on the marvel of the medium's being without a stitch in which she could have concealed any apparatus for faking the ghost, which was captured in the same shot. It might have been marvelous, all right, if the revenant from the beyond did not look so utterly like a cardboard cutout, with features resembling those a child might have drawn. How could anyone, let alone a scientist, have fallen for this? I offer one possibility. Unlike the "ghost," the partially visible disrobed Eva C. is definitely three-dimensional -- and rather shapely into the bargain. Perhaps Schrenck-Notzing was distracted from concentrating too closely on the disembodied spirit by the embodied one.
Now we come to the embarrassing case of Conan Doyle and the famous "Cottingley fairy" photographs, two of which also figure in this exhibition. The creator of Sherlock Holmes developed, as is well known, a keen interest in the paranormal. He wrote quite a few books defending and explaining spiritualism. I've read a couple of them, and they struck me as reasonable in tone, neither dogmatic nor suggesting that the author had gone dotty in his later years. So there's no easy way to account for his being taken in by photographs of "fairies" who inhabited a garden in the village of Cottingley, and who were discovered there by two young ladies. The most, and the least, you can say about these fairies is that they were fashion conscious enough to dress very much in the mode of their time (circa 1920).
This is probably one instance where critics of psychical research are right when they say that an investigator fell prey to his own "will to believe" in the object of his research.
I left the exhibition with no doubt that most of its photographs of alleged paranormal manifestations were fakes, either cynically doctored to exploit people grieving over lost relatives or just for a hoot.
Why most rather than all?
Writing in the July 2005 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, David Fontana remarks (in a book review, not in connection with the Met's show) that "photographs of materialisations always appear 'stagey' and rarely serve as hard evidence for paranomality ... ." True. But one reason such photos look "stagey" might be that we don't normally see materializations of non-material entities, so they are bound to look unreal when captured by the camera. In pictures (typically rather repellant) of ectoplasm being extruded from a medium, the ectoplasm may resemble cotton strands or cloth; but again, we don't know what ectoplasm, if such a thing exists, looks like. We shouldn't assume too quickly that what appears dubious must be phony.
So it is barely possible that even a few of the shots on view at the Met are what they purport to be, and they look dodgy because our minds don't know how to process what they have never experienced. That is of course only speculation on my part, and not offered as evidence.
But a few of the pictures in the exhibit do have some apparent claim to legitimacy. And, interestingly, they are among the most recent, taken long after the original "tricks of the trade" had been exposed (or double exposed).
A man named Colin Evans is shown in a photo taken in 1938, amid an auditorium full of people. The photo was taken using infrared light in a completely darkened room. Evans has risen into the air -- levitating, as D.D. Home, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and St. Teresa of Avila are said to have done. No means of aerial support are visible. And the audience members, including those right next to him, are looking not at Evans but at the seat he occupied when the lights went out. Supposing he had somehow leaped from a sitting position into the air,where he is shown to be almost vertical, it is hard to imagine that even in a darkened room no one would have heard or sensed it. And to have faked the whole scene would have required the cooperation of dozens of people, which a charlatan photographer could scarcely have expected would stay a secret for long.
For serios evidence -- excuse me, I mean serious evidence -- you should also consider a number of "thoughtographs" produced in experiments in the 1960s. Ted Serios, a boozehound and ne'er-do-well from the American midwest, appeared to have a singular talent: the ability to transfer his own visualized images to Polaroid film. Several examples are shown at the Met. The Serios phenomena, like practically everything else in the history of psychical research, are controversial, endlessly "debunked" and defended.
Whatever you want to make of the Serios "thoughtographs" or any other exhibits in "Photography and the Occult," they do not approach scientifically acceptable proof for post-mortem survival, energy fields, mediumship, or such. That, however, is not grounds for dismissing the paranormal.
In his book The Paranormal, Stan Gooch writes:
... It is not the case that the alternative universe is mysterious in itself. It is mysterious only to us. For our nervous system is poorly equipped to understand the paranormal. ...Although I question many of the conclusions in Gooch's book (and think that last quoted sentence is probably an overstatement), I do believe he is basically on the right track here. When we look for physical proof of a non-physical reality, or one whose "matter" exists in a more subtle realm than what we normally perceive, it's like trying to catch water in a butterfly net.
The alternative universe -- I should really say universes -- of the paranormal do have their own laws and their own coherent existence. It is the case, however, that these in no way resemble those of the objective universe. They simply bear no relation to the rules of every day. This, in brief, is why the application of science and the scientific method to the paranormal not only produces no results, but rather literally causes the phenomena to disappear.
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944)
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944)
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Intermission
I'll be away from home base for several days and expect to do no posting until at least Friday, November 11. Meanwhile, if you haven't already, check out the sites on the sidebar to the right. A number of good books also exist. I'll tell you about one of them when I resume.
Until then, then. Thanks for stopping by.
Until then, then. Thanks for stopping by.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Dumb pleases
DumbJon, who posts at House of Dumb, could easily be an understudy for Mark Steyn and should be better known than he appears to be.
Jon's beat is British (mostly) politics and how the mainstream media cover them. That hardly sets him apart from the crowd, but his style is both venomous and witty (one without the other won't do). He's among the best I've encountered in blogdom for holding the mirror up to the preening, self-congratulatory moralizing of professional conscience dispensers and apologists for wicked behavior by the Oppressed Group of the Week.
Here he is on the U.K.'s equivalent of the ACLU:
Now if only there were more Brits like DumbJon and fewer scoundrels frozen in their tracks by fear of offending certified victim groups, the U.K. might have a future other than cringing dhimmitude.
Jon's beat is British (mostly) politics and how the mainstream media cover them. That hardly sets him apart from the crowd, but his style is both venomous and witty (one without the other won't do). He's among the best I've encountered in blogdom for holding the mirror up to the preening, self-congratulatory moralizing of professional conscience dispensers and apologists for wicked behavior by the Oppressed Group of the Week.
Here he is on the U.K.'s equivalent of the ACLU:
The Left’s opposition to anti-terrorist legislation isn’t based on any particular principle, except the principle of throwing their hand in with anyone who hates Britain. This is the sheer nihilism of the modern Left. Everything they ever believed has been proven to be nonsense, so now they don’t actually believe anything more concrete than vague fantasies of the Golden Age that will follow when they're no longer oppressed by the system, man. They’re a bunch of angry losers endlessly shrieking out their hatred for the civilization that seems to get along fine without following their asinine ideology. No wonder they get on so well with the Islamopaths.On the ever-listing-to-port BBC's coverage of the violence between Muslim Asians and blacks in Birmingham:
Speaking personally, I loved the BBC’s coverage of the Birmingham riots. Plenty of folks may not know any better than to swallow the BBC's line about events in Iraq or Israel but the cat is well and truly out of the bag as far as Birmingham goes, and no amount of Beeboids interviewing each other about these totally inexplicable disturbances between unknown groups of people will put it back in again.He can be more serious and socially conscious, though, as when he urges his countrymen to drink themelves to death for Britain.
Perhaps sensing a sudden run on their credibility, the BBC has launched a counter-offensive to try and rescue themselves from public ridicule. To sum up their line: we lied because we’re so honest, or as the BBC puts it:
'Journalists at the BBC want to report fact, they want to be accurate. They don't want to be in a position where they report every rumour that springs from the rumour mill.'
Hey, anyone got an up to date body count for the New Orleans flood ?
Even if we assume that BBC policy has suddenly changed since they were reporting 10 000 floating dead in the French Quarter, we’re talking about information that was being reported by virtually every other MSM outlet and which has not been seriously questioned by anybody: just how does the BBC define ‘rumours’ ?
Now if only there were more Brits like DumbJon and fewer scoundrels frozen in their tracks by fear of offending certified victim groups, the U.K. might have a future other than cringing dhimmitude.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
The list
Here is a list of acts of wanton violence perpetrated by Muslims in a single year, 2004.
I know, I know — these were carried out by "extremists," supposedly a tiny minority among all the "moderate" Muslims. It's true, by definition: as soon as a moderate Muslim heeds the call to annihilate a few infidels, he becomes an extremist, so no taint of the act attaches to all those moderates.
Scroll down the list, please, reading each item. I know it's long, but I don't think you'll be bored. Shocked, probably, but not bored.
Then come back here and tell me Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia should be inviting Muslims to come and settle so they can be part of the beautiful multi-cultural mosaic. If, that is, you can go through the whole list and the words don't die on your tongue.
I know, I know — these were carried out by "extremists," supposedly a tiny minority among all the "moderate" Muslims. It's true, by definition: as soon as a moderate Muslim heeds the call to annihilate a few infidels, he becomes an extremist, so no taint of the act attaches to all those moderates.
Scroll down the list, please, reading each item. I know it's long, but I don't think you'll be bored. Shocked, probably, but not bored.
Then come back here and tell me Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia should be inviting Muslims to come and settle so they can be part of the beautiful multi-cultural mosaic. If, that is, you can go through the whole list and the words don't die on your tongue.
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