The way it is

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “kaba” offers a nice summary of our present situation:

We have a president who neither knows or understands anything about the country he is supposedly leading. Despite what his birth certificate might say he is an alien in any meaningful sense of the word.

We have a Congress, both houses and both parties, who worry more about the next election than the next generation. They refuse to lead and won’t get out of the way so others might.

We have an American public who think that federal spending should be cut. Except, of course, for that particular program or programs from which they personally benefit.

There is plenty of blame to go around. And our heirs will rightfully curse us one day for allowing this to happen.

Climategate II

The New Neo Posted on by

Is this one of those cases where the sequel will be better than the original?

Or will it just go down the rabbit hole? The NY Times is doing its best to assure that, with an article whose thrust is to pooh-pooh the new emails’ significance. Its first sentence is typical of the MSM coverage of Climategate I, as well, “The anonymous hacker who…”

Anonymous”? Yes. But “hacker”? We don’t know; most of the speculation I’ve seen has always been that the release of the Climategate emails was an inside job.

A moral dilemma

The New Neo Posted on by

Barry Peterson is a man facing a dilemma (the video can’t be embedded, so you’ll have to watch it at this link). His beloved wife Jan has early onset Alzheimer’s, and she now lives in an institution where he visits her—with his new girlfriend.

Before you judge him too harshly, please watch it. My mind says he promised “till death do us part” and that he is a traitor to those vows. But my heart cannot condemn him. There is no good answer to this human tragedy.

Jan Chorlton Peterson was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 55, only five years ago. Before that, she was a journalist and television news personality (as is her husband). From the clips of them as a couple you can see how much in love they were, and from the old videos you can tell she was an exceptionally beautiful, sunny, and charming woman.

Funny thing, she still is, although her memory is terrible and she doesn’t even know that Peterson is her husband when he comes to visit her, despite the fact that she seems to know he’s someone she loves (in the clip this segment begins at 5:00). Like Clive Wearing (whom I wrote about here), her personality, her “Jan-ness,” still seems intact despite the huge deficits—for now.

But that’s quite different from being able to share the life she and her husband used to live. He’s lonely, and now he’s found someone to fill the gap. He says Jan would want this, and I suppose he knows her best, although I wonder.

If Peterson were a conventionally religious man it would be simpler although not necessarily easier: what he’s doing is wrong, and he would know that, although it wouldn’t necessarily keep him from doing it. Perhaps he’d divorce her so he wouldn’t be committing adultery, but somehow that seems wrong, too.

As I said, there’s no good answer to this human tragedy.

I wish, though, that he was more like Jimmy Hales, featured in the following video. But not everyone is able to be so noble and so selfless. Of course, this couple is much older; that helps, too, although it’s never never easy. But as Hales, says, it’s a labor of love. Truer words were never spoken.

Notice, also, how towards the end of the video, Jimmy speaks of prayer; he seems to be a religious man. And note how the newscasters watching the story get all choked up.

Another day, another debate

The New Neo Posted on by

Will you be watching tonight?

I have debate fatigue, myself. I’ve become convinced that the main function of these debates is to collect the largest possible assortment of gaffes with which to (a) destroy each front runner in turn; and then (b) create sound bites against the eventual nominee. It may only be political junkies watching now, but the MSM and later the campaign ads can use all this material as fodder for negativity.

On the other hand, best to find out now who can survive the onslaught and who can’t. If you can’t stand the heat—get lost!

DWTS: keeping up with Rob Kardashian

The New Neo Posted on by

No, of course I don’t watch the Kardashian reality show or follow much about them. But I do follow the mindless entertainment of “Dancing With the Stars,” and the Kardashian known as Rob has impressed me with his progress as a ballroom dancer, and the heaps of fun he seems to be having out there.

So mock me; what do I care? Last night I had fun, too, watching Rob in the finals. He was a surprising first-place finisher with the judges, and this free-style was one of the reasons. If you think it’s easy for a non-dancer to take a woman and spin around this fast, holding her horizontally behind his head (starting at 1:24), you’ve got another think coming (not to mention the bravery his partner showed by choreographing the move in the first place):

Just to show you the sort of progress he’s made in ten weeks, here’s Kardashian’s first performance on DWTS, a Viennese waltz. He already had the grin, but his awkward, stiff dance skills left an awful lot to be desired, and his partner wisely kept the choreography very simple:

[NOTE: This seems to be my day for writing about 24-year-old male scions of well-known celebrity families. Rob, like Ronan Farrow, is 24.]

[ADDENDUM: Looking again at the clip of Rob’s first performance, I’m struck by the fact that there’s one ability he had from the first (besides the grin): a natural and attentive connection and eye contact with his partner. That’s important in any sort of couples dancing, and it’s hard to teach and harder to achieve unless it’s a given, as it is with Rob.]

Ronan Farrow, 24-year-old son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, is one lucky guy

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do I say he’s lucky? Well, he could have inherited father Woody’s looks, but instead he strongly takes after mother Farrow.

In addition, his original first name was Satchel, but when his parents parted ways, that was dropped in favor of second name Ronan, an improvement (what is it with these celebrities and their penchant for giving their kids strange monikers?)

But his achievements are only partly luck (having a good brain); they’re mostly a combination of luck plus a lot of hard work: he’s a prodigy who graduated from college at 15 and Yale Law School at 21 and has done quite a bit in the short years since, and has just been named a Rhodes Scholar. Yes, he seems to be politically liberal (no surprise there), but his work has been mainly in the field of human rights in the third world and especially the plight of children in Africa.

So, who does Ronan take after? Neither parent was much of a scholar, although he’s clearly following in his mother’s footsteps in his interest in Africa and children. But it’s father Allen who was a prodigy of sorts, although not the same sort as Ronan. Did you know (I didn’t) that Woody Allen was already a professional joke writer, making more money than his own parents combined, when he was still in high school? And that by the age of 19, a college dropout, he was writing scripts for such well-known TV personalities as Ed Sullivan Show and Sid Caesar, who paid him the princely salary (this was in 1954, remember) of $1500 a week?

Ronan even seems to possess the moral compass that his father lacks. Here’s the son on the subject of the union of his father with Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow’s adopted daughter and Ronan’s half-sister:

He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent… I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children.”

Despite Ronan’s lifelong access to money and fame, it could not have been easy when his parents split up when he was five years old and fought a highly visible and bitter custody battle over him. I say “when his parents split up,” because they never divorced—because they had never married, although they’d had a relationship for twelve years, and one biological and two adopted children. I wouldn’t have placed much money then on the chances of Satchel/Ronan turning out this well.

Keep buying at Amazon through neo-neocon!

The New Neo Posted on by

I warned you you’d see this again.

It’s almost Thanksgiving. And that means that Christmas, Chanukah, and whatever other holiday might suit your fancy are all coming up much sooner than you think.

This post is to encourage you to feel their hot breaths on your neck and solve all your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.

And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money! What could be more wonderful?

This announcement will appear at my blog again a few times between now and Christmas, as a gentle yet mercenary reminder. And notice that Black Friday deals have already begun at Amazon, even prior to Thanksgiving and the actual Black Friday.

What’s more, you can get free shipping with a free trial of Amazon Prime for a month. Why not time it for the holidays?

Growing political intransigence

The New Neo Posted on by

The two mainstream political parties in America have grown more bitter and more extreme.

Oh, I know there have been even more divisive times in American history. After all, I hear tell there was a Civil War a while back. But in my lifetime at least, the parties have morphed from two groups with somewhat differing opinions who seemed to be able to work together at times to two groups who cannot do so any more.

Case in point: the not-so-super-committee and the debt crisis. There is a crisis, no party has total control, therefore some sort of compromise is required, and we don’t have one.

This is the way it’s been for some time.

I bet quite a few of you are saying “Good! To tyrants I will give no quarter!” And indeed, there’s something to be said for a federal government that must move slowly and ponderously. But sometimes government needs to act, and then paralysis and intransigence is not good, and the ability to “come, let us reason together” would be helpful.

What’s going on? I’m not sure, but to the best of my recollection it was some time during the mid-90s that things became more polarized. The impeachment of Clinton did not help, nor did the rabid nature of the opposition to President Bush in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War. The internet may be part of it, escalating matters.

Another factor is that, as Congressional districts have been re-drawn to make them safer for one party or another, candidates have not been required to appeal to the middle, and the makeup of Congress has become more extreme on each side. I also read somewhere (can’t find the source right now; sorry) that the growth of airplane commuting has meant that fewer members of Congress regularly live and socialize in Washington DC, and therefore they don’t get to know each other better and can remain sworn enemies.

But part of it is that the public is angrier and less tolerant of compromise and more demanding of perfection. I’ve seen this even within each party. In fact, Jonathan Chait—a man with whom I don’t usually agree—wrote about this yesterday in relation to liberal Democrats’ anger at Obama. But I see a similar thing operating among Republicans; just switch the parties (and eliminate the example of Obama) in the following quote, and it would serve pretty well for the other side (except for the “dancing-in-the-streets-delirious” part; that’s not a Republican tendency):

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president””indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious””but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president””either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

It seems as though nearly everybody has morphed into Peter Finch’s character in “Network.” He used to seem extreme, but now he’s run-of-the-mill:

Graphic illustration of why the rise of photography…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has coincided with a rise in the rate of depression.

The ravages of time didn’t used to be so well-documented.

Then again—there’s a genre of YouTube videos that feature the morphing of photos of the same person over a long period of time, showing the aging process with its attendant sags, bags, folds, and blotches. But watching a bunch of them, my strongest impression was one of continuity rather than change. The person—eyes, expression, essence, je ne sais quoi—remains.

And if you start out beautiful/handsome to begin with, sometimes you end up pretty beautiful/handsome a lot of years later. Here’s a married couple morphing:

From “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

If I Loved You

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve become a teeny bit obsessed with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel,” while indulging in one of my favorite procrastination habits—watching YouTube videos.

Now, the musical “Carousel” was stupid in a lot of ways, especially the movie version. I tend to detest movie musicals anyway, and “Carousel” contains some special abominations. For instance, it added a prologue, set in some unspecified after-death location—was it heaven? purgatory?—that foreshadowed the fact that main protagonist Billy Bigelow died during the course of the story, so that his death, which had been such a shock in the stage play, comes as no surprise at all.

And then there was how Billy died. Instead of yelling out Julie’s name and committing suicide because he knew how he’d messed up, he falls on his knife by accident (I can’t find exact documentation for all of this, but that’s it if memory serves me). Dumb change, typical of the 50s.

And that wasn’t all that was changed. Some of the lyrics were cleaned up, as though they weren’t clean enough already. For example, in the incredibly moving “Soliloquy” (one of the few songs ever written about becoming a father), the word “virgin” (in the line “a skinny-lipped virgin with blood like water”) is changed to “lady.” Ugh.

The movie’s sound stage and lip-syching don’t help, either. Where does the following scene take place? It looks like some weird combo of the Washington DC mall at cherry blossom time, a Florida swamp, and a lake. Not coastal Maine, where it’s supposed to be set (and where some of the film was beautifully filmed).

But—and but and but and but—the excellent John Raitt of the stage version became the transcendentally-voiced and even handsomer and sexier Gordon MacRae in the movie, and the stage’s Jan Clayton (yes, she of later “Lassie” TV fame) became the more beautiful and sonorous-toned Shirley Jones (TV and “The Partridge Family” being in her very distant future, as well). MacRae and Jones conveyed more sorrow in their voices, even from the beginning.

MacRae is simply spectacular here. I’ve watched many YouTube renditions of this song, old and new, pro and amateur, and I’ve not seen one to compare. MacRae wasn’t the greatest with the spoken word. His acting is servicable and nothing special. But when he sings, not only does his voice pour like honey, but singing releases something within him that allows him to act wonderfully, too. In the role of Billy Bigelow—and especially when singing this particular song. “If I Loved You,” the theme of which is hidden longing and love that can’t be expressed—his slight problem with emotion in speaking and his facility with emotion when singing are a perfect fit (just hear what he does with the word “longing”):

The musical contains a reprise of the song, occurring after Billy has screwed everything up and died. He gets a chance to come back to earth for a day and visit the wife he left behind and the daughter he wanted to love but never met. He mucks it up again for a while, and then—well, here’s MacRae as Billy (or Billy’s ghost, or Billy’s spirit or shade), trying to tell his wife how much he really did love her. Note how well he expresses the profound regret of a man who knows now what he didn’t know then:

And here, to be fair, is John Raitt in “If I Loved You.” He’s no slouch, either; what a beautiful voice! He’s really really really good. But as good as Raitt is, to me MacRae remains superior in every way. This is the entire song, a more complete version than the one I cued up in the movie; well worth watching the whole thing. But Raitt’s part starts around 6:11:

Pigs fly, and the WaPo writes the article I thought they wouldn’t write about Newt Gingrich’s divorce

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not perfect. But Paul Farhi offers a relatively fair narration of the events in question—you know, the ones I’ve been writing about (here and here) concerning the rumors that have been spreading for many years to the effect that Newt Gingrich blindsided his first wife by serving her with divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery.

Does Farhi read neo-neocon? I very much doubt it, although I suppose it’s not outside the realm of remote possibility. But at least he’s tackling something few in the MSM have gone near, and he indicts the press along the way:

The story has been trumpeted by Gingrich’s political opponents, endlessly recycled by the news media and repeated even by would-be allies, including social conservatives, who have long had doubts about the thrice-married former House speaker. As candidate Gingrich has risen to the top of some polls in the past few weeks, the story has inevitably surfaced again. Variations have turned up on MSNBC and in National Journal, various columns and blogs and two British newspapers in just the past week.

Farhi’s story covers much the same ground (although his is more expanded) as I did in yesterday’s post on the subject. He also manages to answer a question I asked yesterday (although he does not cite his source, so I’m still not sure whether the information is correct) as to whether Gingrich’s wife had a history of cancer prior to the surgery in question, which was for a benign tumor. Farhi says that she did.

There are three big problems I see with the piece, although two of them are not Farhi’s fault. The first is that it’s on the “lifestyle” pages. That means it probably won’t get much traction, although the WaPo can point to it as an example of their fairness. The second is that even if it were on the front pages I doubt it would change the fact that much of the MSM and media on the left will continue to milk the original misleading story dry, because it is so useful, and that at any rate the damage has already been done and the meme has had a long life of its own and is part of the background of what so many people think they know about Gingrich.

The third is that Farhi neglects to quote Gingrich’s story about what happened that day. This is subtly misleading [emphasis mine]:

Over the years, Gingrich himself has declined to comment on the story’s details, although when asked about his divorces and extramarital relationships, Gingrich has usually relied on some variation of the comment he made to the New York Times earlier this year: ”˜’There are things in my life I’m not proud of, and there are things in my life I’m very proud of.’’

Yet while the thrust of the story about his first divorce is not in dispute ”” Gingrich’s first wife, Jackie Battley, has said previously that the couple discussed their divorce while she was in the hospital in 1980 ”” other aspects of it appear to have been distorted through constant retelling…

Accounts of what happened next vary in detail, but primary sources agree on a central point: Gingrich wanted to talk divorce with his hospitalized wife.

But Gingrich has commented on it and denied that version, which makes it “in dispute”:

In the Mother Jones story [written in 1984 and where the tale originated], one-time Gingrich press secretary Lee Howell is quoted as saying that while Mrs. Gingrich was in the hospital, “Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.”

Gingrich said the account was not true.

So the genesis of the story was one of those “former staffer tells all” things. Not surprising.

Gingrich goes on to explain:

“What did happen in the hospital room is something that any couple who has gone though this can totally identify with,” Gingrich said.

“She was recovering and I actually went by with the girls (Jackie and her sister, Kathy Gingrich Lubbers) to see her and be with her, and I was trying to be helpful. And we got into an argument, which I think people who have gone through divorces can probably identify with.”

He said that in retrospect, going to the hospital that day, let alone arguing, was “stupid.”

Divorcing couples don’t even need an excuse to argue; they do it very naturally.

So, why did the WaPo decide to come out with this correction now? Is it, as commenter “Occam’s Beard” suggested, because “they think Newt is done, and so there’s no harm in lifting the leftist curse on him”?

Perhaps. Or perhaps, somewhat paradoxically, they’re trying to temporarily promote the Gingrich candidacy because they think he’d be easier to beat than Romney. Oh, who can fathom the Byzantine workings of the MSM?

Or maybe, just maybe (could it be?) somebody out there actually wanted to do some decent reporting?