Still wrong

 

The British commentariat is doing the post-mortems. You will not be surprised that they are irrelevant, politically correct exercises by mopes wearing Deep Thinker costumes. No, I'm not talking about leftists who blame the thuggery on too few government-funded youth clubs. I mean the whingers in the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, who imagine themselves fierce, out-front crusaders for traditional values. See here, here, and here. And if you want still more, here.

Don't feel like wasting several minutes of your lifetime on piffle? Good on you. I'll summarize. They're angry at the rioting class. They want the yoofs punished -- punished, do you hear? Lock 'em up or make 'em join the army (as if the army wants thousands of illiterate, shiftless welfare-coddled dummies to throw into battle).

These brave journos are taking a stand -- against gangs! Against battery and burglary! "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his ink with me shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition; and gentlemen in England now-a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that writ with us in the Daily Mail."

Okay, chaps, we get it. You don't like yobs. The welfare state has gone a little too far. Wow, have you ever crawled out on a limb. Hope you don't get the sack from the papers you write for.

Funny old thing, though, truth-tellers-to-the-world. I notice you don't say one single word about the  race replacement of the British population. Not a peep about the shattering of a way of life and the ethnic tribalization of your crowded little island thanks to your tin-whistle politicians and their globalist masters. Never mind human biodiversity, the only kind of diversity the establishments of the Western world don't cheer for -- don't even acknowledge; you're too cowardly to mention immigration or race.

Thank goodness the ignorant masses have you to explain it all to them. Congratulations for being too smart to listen to what they might explain to you.

Wrong. Wrong. And wrong.

Now that, for the moment, vandalism fever has subsided in the U.K., what has its political class learned? Just ask Prime Minister David Cameron. From The Telegraph:

David Cameron has promised to "restore a sense of morality" to Britain after this week's riots, announcing stronger police powers to ensure that offenders are caught and made to pay for their crimes."

David, David. Riot and looting are immoral, but they are not caused by the loss of "a sense of morality." People don't lose their morality like forgetting their car keys. The loss is itself a symptom of prior causes.

There are many factors, but they form a kind of constellation. How deep do you want to drill? 

Let's start with the loss of belief in God or any kind of transcendence among most white Britons. Old churches are empty or converted into restaurants. Other than among Muslims -- perhaps some Hindus? -- spirituality is "out." Life has no meaning except (depending on one's social and financial situation) booze, sex, and "fun," or economics. What's the point of conforming to norms of decent behavior associated with a God who's gone to ground?

Nothing to live for, nothing to respect. Music turns to loud, monotonous noise, art to the search for greater levels of the grotesque. Drink is not the curse, but the pastime, of the workless class. Why not? The state will give you your dole money regardless.

We could go on in this vein, but never mind. Prime Minister, you have been raised in a centralized political culture with an insanely exaggerated idea of what political diktats can accomplish, even imagining that you can "restore morality" by passing a few more laws. Or maybe you know what tosh you're speaking, and it's a bid to hitch a ride on the public sentiment of the moment.

Turning the deeper causes of the riots, Mr Cameron said that family breakdown and poor parenting had played significant role.

“In too many cases, the parents of these children – if they are still around – don’t care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing,” he said.“The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.”

What action? According to what I read, my impression is that social workers in Britain are a law unto themselves, a bureaucratic police force, judge, and jury who can separate children from their parents for almost trivial reasons, but have a strange blind spot when it comes to horrendous actual child abuse.

Anyway, bad parenting is a politically safe target. Who's going to take a stand for rotten parenting?

Mr Cameron also announced new police powers to deal with disturbances, including greater discretion to order people to remove masks and other face coverings.

Greater discretion? Does a Bobby currently have to get a court order to tell a yob to remove his mask or hood?

Ministers are also reviewing dispersal powers. That could lead to police being given a “wider power of curfew,” he said.

Sorry, but that's different from having someone remove a mask. No one needs to stroll through a shopping mall wearing a mask (except some Muslim women, and you can bet no copper is going to ask them to bare their faces). A curfew is something else again. It limits an individual's ability to go where he wants to. Sure, there are situations when curfews are useful, or necessary, as a temporary measure. But they should be imposed by civil authority, not by police for their convenience.

A cross-Whitehall project on gang culture will report in October, drawing on the success of police forces in Glasgow and Boston in tackling gang culture.  

Is any study group, committee, or politician going to acknowledge that the mass importation of Third World people from tribal cultures plays a significant role in the disaster zone that modern Britain has become? That population replacement has been a cynical power play by the globalist Establishment to destroy a traditional, coherent society in the cause of enhanced control? That a polyglot, balkanized country is no country at all?

Of course not. There are things officials and academics mustn't say, even though they're obvious. So much easier to decry moral decay and parental neglect. Throw in a few more police powers to calm everybody down. Until the next time a materialistic culture that knows no Good, only goods, does what such cultures do.

The fires of darkness

I'm a little sorry for the facetious tone of yesterday's posting. That was before hell broke out in numerous locations around London and elsewhere last night. My intention yesterday was to make some kind of serious point through jesting. Today jokes about England's crisis die before they arise.

Well, what kind of serious point is to be made about this eruption of madness? It's hard to say. Certainly Britain's failed program of forced multiculturalism is involved, and many looters are black; but the photographs show white faces among the mob too. Anarchy? The word was coined in the 19th century, but the anarchists of that day had political goals, however crackpot. Today's lawlessness seems more like an end in itself, a pure negation of civilized norms.

An American visiting Britain can be surprised by how evident the social class distinctions are, even in this age of ideological egalitarianism. The strata are clearly visible in manners and audible in people's speech. Since the industrial revolution, the U.K. has had a working class with its own identity, and often at odds with the commercial class and the vestigial aristocracy. 

For a while it seemed as though the inequality was waning, with the extension of the vote in the 19th century Reform Acts and, especially, with the new power of the trade unions. The two worst periods of modern British history -- the world wars -- saw the putting aside, although not the elimination, of class antagonism.

What happened then? I think socialism changed Britain. Ever since an avowedly socialist government was elected after the last war, the country has been gradually shifting to the Left, although with periods of reaction that brought more American-style capitalism but didn't change the long-term trend toward the welfare state and centralization of power in Whitehall.

By the late 1970s a new class -- a no-class class, so to speak -- had come into being. It was beneath the working class, a nonworking class. It had absolutely no identification with (and hardly any knowledge of) British history or traditions. It was emptiness, squalor, the dole queue. "Punk," the music and the lifestyle, was part of its visible portion. The invisible part took place in dismal, graffiti-covered council flats, storage bins for the economically useless whose business was drugging, drinking, and breeding, with the cost billed to the state.

The Blitz, 2011

That was bad enough. And then, primarily after the Labour government took power in the '90s, was added mass Third World immigration. Most of what was left of the old civility crumbled as waves of colonization about which the people had never been consulted added another dimension to social division and dysfunction.

I have enjoyed my visits to England, with its fascinating remnants of a long history. I once had an English girlfriend, from Croydon in Surrey, where the mobs burned buildings last night. (I went with her to visit her family members in Croydon. That part of the London area wasn't exactly Knightsbridge, but it was middle class -- her brother worked at Lloyd's -- and I wouldn't have dreamed it would one day be the setting for Hieronymus Bosch-like scenes.)

I have no doubt there continue to be decent people throughout the country, many of whom feel pushed aside by a globalist government set on dividing and conquering the indigenes through Muslim immigration.

But I have sensed, especially in recent visits, something decayed and pathological in the vibes. While hardly alone, the U.K. is way out front in pushing everything that is "edgy," "transgressive," and repulsive. Beyond the glare of show business and the neon strip lighting of stores, a darkness of the soul seems to fill space, underfoot, around the corner. Just out of sight. Until now.

Sonata for loot and violince

I say. Bad form, chaps. This won't do. 

We English, despite our proverbial calm demeanour that got us through the Blitz and all that, aren't without feelings, what? One of your lads seems to have waved a gun in a friendly greeting to the police -- a rough lot, don't you know, egg-and-chips types -- perhaps squeezed off a vibrant round or two, and after some sort of jumble-up was left with his exit ticket collected.

Rum business, that.

Of course I understand that your lot has certain ways of working out grief that are different from ours. Wouldn't dream of trying to impose our value system, much of which goes back to the days when we were trading slaves and hanging pickpockets, on you who've brought so much colour and diversity into our hideously white society. Just a flea in your ear, what: your grieving process is likely to be misinterpreted by right-wing extremists.

Take this ignorant observation by the, er, Telegraph. (Naturally The Guardian is more understanding.)

As youths weighed down with bags and shoes stream out of a ransacked branch of JD Sports in Tottenham Hale retail park, the woman calmly inspects a new pair of white trainers. She even bends down to try one on. 

Ah, youth! Wasted on the young, they say. Not you lot, I'm glad to see. Some day, years from now, you'll look at those shoes and remember this day of mourning and shopping without all that petty bourgeois bit about paying.

 

Education is the key to sorting things out, who can deny it? Those lads who nicked the big screen TV, I'm sure they'll be regular watchers of the evening news and the annual BBC adaptations of Jane Austen.

Love that junk sculpture of the no. 82 London Transport bus. Work your feelings out in creativity! Always admired that about you multi cultures, your exuberance in the face of tragedy. So much better than our long-faced, ashes-to-ashes Church of England rituals.

Just one more thought. Keep it real, as you say in your wonderfully colourful brand of English. Work it out in your own neighbourhoods, I beg you. Here in Kensington, we have all these types who might not understand your ways and would get the wrong end of the stick. Hate to see you getting the other end, what?

Let us now praise Stanley Kauffmann

It is almost as if designed. The last film of Claude Chabrol, who died in September, is such an apt example of his major gifts that it is almost as if he had planned a farewell. Inspector Bellamy ... is another of his mysteries in which the director seems at least as interested in the characters as he is in the mystery.

Chabrol said he wanted to pay homage to Georges Simenon, whose hundred-plus novels about Inspector Maigret are only a segment of his breathtaking output. ... A further impulse was the fact that Gérard Depardieu would be in the film -- his first with Chabrol -- and the director saw the present-day Depardieu as the epitome of the middle-aged Maigret: possibly a bit heavier, a bit slower, suggesting more understanding of criminals and greater hatred of crime.

That's from Stanley Kauffmann's review of Inspector Bellamy in The New Republic. Kauffmann has written about films at The New Republic for as long as I can remember; since, I think, the 1960s. He's the last of an old breed, writers who made a literary form out of movie criticism, just as others have done for book criticism. There was James Agee; there was Dwight Macdonald; Pauline Kael; and John Simon, who has retired from regular reviewing.

I usually disagree with the opinions in The New Republic, but from a literary standpoint it's way ahead of other political magazines with back-of-the-book arts coverage. And Kauffmann has earned his tenure. The average moviegoer has never heard of him, and probably most people who claim to take "the art of the cinema" seriously are only vaguely aware of him. (For one thing, he shames pseudo-sophisticates by his refusal to trade in academic jargon.) But his discussions of  films are almost unfailingly rewarding, regardless of whether you see, or have any interest in seeing, the film. I think he's the best movie critic now working, and always has been one of the best.

Respect for a film reviewer is not primarily a question of whether you agree with that reviewer's judgments. Pauline Kael wrote striking and original prose, although in my view she was often writing about a derivative movie in her mind rather than what was on the screen. John Simon has always been worth reading for his erudition and wit, but was a little harsh on anything less than a masterpiece, and given to gushing over the output of directors including Ingmar Bergman and Lina Wertmuller that varied in quality. As for Kauffmann, I probably trust his opinions as much as anyone's; but it's his perceptions and style that fit him out as distinguished.

Along the way, we can savor the clever little inventions by Chabrol to move his story along. For just one instance, Bellamy arrives at a woman's house and sees a watering can lying on the terrace floor. This leads to a blunt discovery. The whole sequence takes perhaps five seconds, but we can see that Chabrol searched beforehand for a means of revealing the fact without cliché.

He's a shrewd observer of the various arts that go into making a film, from cinematography to musical score to set design to editing to -- of course -- the director's overall vision. But he seems most in his element when he writes about acting. (He's also reviewed stage productions in New York, where the acting is what matters above all.)

The ordinary workaday movie reviewer for a newspaper or magazine commenting on a performance falls back on a handful of ready-made ideas: the actor was "miscast"; the two leads "lacked chemistry"; &c. Kauffmann is beyond that kind of piffle. He finds words that most of us couldn't about what makes a performance work, or not, or how.

One benefit that a really big film star provides is the assurance of embrace before we even see his or her new film. Depardieu himself knows that he doesn't have to begin, as most actors must, by winning the audience: that was done long ago. He can just enter and get right down to business, without implicit or explicit fanfare. What a warm dividend this kind of encounter is on the time we have invested in Depardieu.*

One of the toughest jobs for the movie reviewer is giving the reader a reasonable idea of what the film is about -- a certain minimum of description is unavoidable -- without giving a plot summary or being excessively detailed. That part gave me trouble when I was in the film reviewing racket. Kauffmann makes it seem easy, even though he doesn't have a lot of space to work in (he'll write about two or three movies in, I'd guess, no more than 1500 words). He has a facility for choice observations that say more in a sentence or two than most reviewers could in a dozen, even assuming they had equal insight:

Nothing Personal could not be more of a contrast to the Chabrol. It is a first film; it has a simple narrative with only two characters, though minor ones flit through occasionally; and we never learn their backgrounds or even their names. Finally, although every moment is realistic, the story is a fantasy -- it couldn't happen. Except that we see it happening.

How could anyone go to movies and write about them bi-weekly for over 40 years? Movie reviewing did my head in after a year or so in each of my stints. Of course, he gets to choose which movies he wants to see, and in New York has more and better options than most places. You'd think, nonetheless, it would become a deadly grind. But Stanley Kauffmann just sails on, with no apparent lack of enthusiasm and no decline of his consummate skill. I hope I'll still be reading his latest work years from now.

* I haven't seen Inspector Bellamy, but I thought of Kauffmann's words when I recently watched Depardieu in 36 Quai des Orfèvres, an absorbing if brutal crime movie. (The title is absurdly translated as 36th Precinct; Quai des Orfèvres is the location of Paris's police headquarters on the Ile de la Cité -- the name comes from the Middle Ages, when the quai was where workers in gold (or) did their trade. As for "Precinct," I think New York is the only city in the English-speaking world that uses the term for its police districts.)

Anyway, in the first shot where Depardieu appears, he dominates the scene -- and he hardly does a thing, just lights a cigarette. It's possible, as Kauffmann suggests, that we're primed to react to Depardieu and he can afford to underplay the moment. Still, not having seen him in a movie for some time, I was struck continually by how unobtrusively "right" his every expression and tone of voice was. I don't think I've appreciated his acting technique because it's never obvious. He just slips into a character like a perfectly fitting glove.

The political, pro-illegal clergy

We're here from God, to stop
immigration law enforcement.

I was dumbfounded to read this in an article from the Birmingham News, linked by Lucianne.com:

Leaders of the Episcopal, Methodist and Roman Catholic churches in Alabama filed a federal lawsuit this morning to stop enforcement of the state's new immigration law, which they say could strike at the core of their ability to worship.

Say again?

A law against illegal immigration could cripple the ability of Episcopalians, Methodists, and Catholics to worship? 

I thought that worship was something you could do any time and anywhere, but particularly in church.

Reading further clarified matters, sort of. First, the so-called journalist who wrote the story is sub-literate. The antecedent of "their" is not the church leaders; the pronoun has no antecedent in the paragraph. What it's trying to say is that these divines "have reason to fear that administering of religious sacraments, which are central to the Christian faith, to known undocumented persons may be criminalized under this law." So they're suing to stop enforcement of the will of the electorate.

Needless to say, there's nothing in the law to stop clergymen giving sacraments to illegals or forcing them to demand an ID before performing religious functions.

According to the linked story, "On June 9, Gov. Robert Bentley signed into law the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. That collection of new laws includes allowing local police to detain people suspected of being in the United States illegally, requiring public schools to inquire into immigration status of students, making it a crime for an illegal immigrant to seek work, and making it a crime to knowingly transport or harbor an illegal immigrant." 

Their Holinesses' claim is an absurd "slippery slope" argument. If words mean nothing, as Their Holinesses seem to believe, then anything can lead to anything. 

So the Right Reverends Larry, Moe, and Curly believe that national borders are un-Christian; that Alabama has no right to prevent colonies of lawbreakers on permanent holiday in the state, supported by taxpayers; that in order to "welcome all people to the altar" the welcomed must be allowed to stay in the country illegally. (I attended a mass at a cathedral in France; what an opportunity I missed! I should have gone to the authorities and argued that that entitled me to settle in Paris permanently should I wish to.)

The odds are that the ordinary people who make up the congregations of these churches are overwhelmingly in favor of the Alabama law. Do Larry, Moe, and Curly care? Of course not. Their alleged compassion is all for the illegals their church members are expected to support and compete with in the job market.

If fake spiritual leaders are going to indulge in political posturing, we can't start taxing church property fast enough.