Today in 1961, this was the first country song to sell more than $1 million:
The number one single today in 1962:
The number one single today in 1970 (which sounded like it had been recorded using 1770 technology):
The number one album today in 1975 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
Imagine having tickets to this concert at the National Guard Armory in Amory, Miss., today in 1955: Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley:
Today in 1957, while Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old second cousin (while he was still married — three taboos in one!), Al Priddy, a DJ on KEX in Portland, was fired for playing Presley’s version of “White Christmas,” on the ground that “it’s not in the spirit we associate with Christmas.”
The start of this week brought the excellent news of Wisconsin’s going to the Holiday Bowl in nearly-always-sunny San Diego to play Southern California.
That was followed by this not-excellent news, reported by the Badger Herald:
The University of Wisconsin marching band will have a not so happy holidays after 90 freshmen and several band directors are being denied the trip due to spending cuts.
Earlier this week the UW Athletic Department announced they would only fund travel expenses for 225 band members out of the nearly 325 member band, John Lucas, UW spokesperson said in a statement. This means the other members will not travel to San Diego when UW plays University of Southern California in the Holiday Bowl Dec. 30.
The Athletic Department has supported the band and provided millions of dollars for them to travel to major athletic events, Lucas said. Some of these events include bowl games, NCAA tournaments and the Alabama game in Dallas earlier this fall.
“[UW] is also committed to fiscal responsibility,” Lucas said. “That philosophy dictates that bowl travel parties, including the band, will vary in size depending on the bowl game and the level of travel expenses for individual destinations.”
Though the Athletic Department determined the number of members they would fund, it was left to the band directors to determine which members would be included in that 225 group, he said.
The band directors decided freshmen and several band directors would not be able to make the trip, Wendy Margolis, UW band administrative coordinator, said.
“You can tell everybody has been very distressed about it,” Margolis said.
Dani Wetter, freshman and band member, said she knew it was serious Tuesday when UW marching band director, Mike Leckrone turned off his microphone during practice.
“As soon as he said there wasn’t enough space on the chartered flight for freshmen and not enough funding to charter another, I felt my heart sink in my chest,” she said.
Wetter said upperclassmen band members were moved to fill in the holes freshman left in the show. Many of them, Wetter said, also felt disappointed after hearing the news and comforted the freshmen.
Marching band directors have since been in communication with the Athletic Department to ensure this does not happen again in the future, Margolis said.
Though the band directors have been communicating with the Athletic Department about the trip, changes are unlikely.
Everyone appreciates the efforts and long tradition the UW band has established, Lucas said.
“We appreciate the band’s presence at athletic events and look forward to a great trip to San Diego,” Lucas said.
The UW Athletics Department did not respond to request for comment.
To say that band alumni are irate would be a huge understatement. That includes the band members who went to no bowl games because the football team was so bad for so long. (The Badgers played in no bowl games between the 1963 and 1980 seasons and between the 1984 and 1993 seasons. I went to one bowl, the 1984 Hall of Fame Bowl.)
It’s strange that the bowl organizers would think this is OK. The bowl organizers are banking on thousands of Badger fans to come to the game. The band has been a big reason why UW has gotten some bowl games despite the football team’s less-than-sterling record. (Including the aforementioned Hall of Fame Bowl.) Certainly the parents of the freshmen band members aren’t likely to go to the game now.
It also seems to be poor financial planning to not have covered the likely cost of the entire band for a bowl game. UW had to have known that, with the new Big T1e4n tie-in to the Holiday Bowl, that a trip to San Diego might have been possible. As it is since UW didn’t get to the Big T1e4n football title game (unlike last year), that should have left some travel money available. Yes, the Band went to the Alabama game in Jerry World, but the Athletic Department knew about that game well in advance. One wonderes what would have happened had, as some predicted before the season, UW gotten to the Rose Bowl.
The only mitigating factor here is that, given the fact the football team has been going to bowl games for nearly 20 consecutive years, the chances of this year’s freshmen going to a bowl game in the future are pretty good. But nothing is guaranteed, particularly given that next year’s UW schedule is considerably more difficult than this year’s.
The bigger insult here is to UW Marching Band director Mike Leckrone, who surely deserves better than having to take part of his band to a bowl game. (Southern Cal will surely have its entire band there, although its trip just requires several buses down Interstate 5.) For that matter, it’s not guaranteed Leckrone will necessarily be back, because he’s been the band director since 1969 and nothing is forever.
Mitch Henck adds:
Athletic Director Barry Alvarez, who must have signed off on this decision, apparently has forgotten the number of people who came to his games when his team was bad, before the 1994 Rose Bowl.
For instance, 1991, when the Badgers finished 5–6 and went to no bowl. This is from the last game of that season, when Badger fans knew going into this game there would be no bowl trip, yet 38,620 showed up to watch.
It’s also the height of arrogance to decline public comment, on which Alvarez also surely signed off.
On Thursday I announced a two-overtime girls basketball game. It is the third overtime game I’ve announced this year, and the second two-overtime game I’ve announced since the season started a month ago.
Add the overtime college football game I announced in September, and since the 2015-16 seasons began in August, I have announced four overtime games totaling six overtime periods. (Or, as I call them, borrowing from the late Braves announcer Skip Caray “free (insert sport name here).”) I announced a playoff game with the boys counterpart of one of last night’s participants back in March. That game went to overtime too.
I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise in one sense, because the first football game I ever announced went to overtime. (Cuba City 28, Lancaster 27, 1988.) I recall at least two basketball games that year going to overtime as well.
Before that, I was in the band for the most famous UW basketball overtime game, the triple-overtime loss to Indiana in 1987:
There was no college football overtime in those days, but I attended nine UW hockey games that went to overtime. Wisconsin won all nine. The most harrowing was probably the last one, in 1988, when North Dakota scored the game-winning goal only to have it waved off because the stick was above the waist of the boy named Sioux. Moments later, the Badgers scored on a drop-pass and a long shot.
The first overtime I remember was on Christmas Day 1971, when whatever I wanted to watch was preempted by the longest NFL game in history:
There are two different kinds of overtimes — the overtimes that include the words “sudden death” (NFL, hockey before the shootout) and those that don’t (basketball, although you can win on an overtime buzzer-beater).
Though I don’t remember this, the Packers’ first playoff game after my birth was an overtime game:
I was, however, at the Packers’ next overtime playoff game, 39 years later:
Hockey playoff overtimes, particularly NHL playoff series-ending overtimes or NCAA playoff overtimes, define sudden death:
The 1974 NBA Finals featured a thrilling double-overtime game between the Bucks and the Boston Celtics …
… the overtimes of which I didn’t get to see because my mean parents made me go to bed at the end of regulation. (The benefit of that was nonexistent since Dad kept running into the bedroom to update us on the overtimes.)
Baseball can have either version. Three friends and I contributed to the ear-splitting din at Miller Park in 2008:
That came 25 years after the first extra-inning baseball game I ever saw — Brewers 2, Orioles 1 on an 11th-inning home run by Rick Manning. One of my newspaper awards is for a game story about a 12-inning sectional semifinal baseball game. It wasn’t because of my flowery writing; the award was for my covering all the things that happened in the game. (Including one sequence where a baserunner stole second, went to third on the bad throw to second base, then was thrown out at the plate, then was thrown out of the game for spiking his batting helmet.)
One overtime game I covered should be called the Bad Sausage Bowl, the Madison La Follette-Madison West game of 1987 whose overtime I missed because the pizza I ate that day made a return appearance, forcing me to listen to the public address announcement of the overtime while puking from the top row of Warner Park.
The happier version came two decades later, a playoff football game between Ripon and Chilton made possible only because of a Hail Mary pass:
In the overtime, Chilton got a touchdown but missed the extra point. Ripon got a touchdown and kicked the extra point.
The appeal of an overtime game is obvious. You have the drama of someone prepared to go all out 60 minutes, or nine innings, only to have that not be enough. (That’s particularly dramatic in basketball, where high school and college players foul out on their fifth foul even if it occurs in overtime.) Scores and other statistics are outsized, particularly in college football, which awards one possession per team per overtime period. The high of winning is even higher for an overtime win, and the low of losing is even lower for an overtime loss.
There’s also the surreality of being somewhere later than you’re supposed to be, but the game’s still going on. After the Mets and Braves played deep into the night after Independence Day 1985 …
… Caray said it was the first time he had ever come home at 5 a.m. for a legitimate reason.
Postseason overtime games become instant classics. The first NFL overtime game is still considered the greatest NFL game of all time:
1975 World Series, Game 6:
Duke vs. Kentucky, 1992:
Some are even known by only one word: Matteau!
The number one album today in 1961 was Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” …
… while the number one single was a request:
Today in 1968, filming began for the Rolling Stones movie “Rock and Roll Circus,” featuring, in addition to the group, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Who, Eric Clapton and Jethro Tull, plus clowns and acrobats.
The film was released in 1996. (That is not a typo.)
I’ve pointed out that while Donald Trump claims to be a Republican today, he has not acted like a Republican until he decided to run for president. (Unless you think that Republicans favor abortion rights, single-payer health care and donating to the Bill Clinton presidential and Hillary Clinton U.S. Senate campaigns.)
Trump really is a member of the Donald Trump Party, to which he may return after giving up his run for the Republican nomination, if CNN is correct.
Truth be told, Trump even today is supporting Democrats, as Noah Rothman shows:
The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis and our own Jonathan Tobin were just some of the commenters on the right who noted the most lamentable casualty of Trump’s irresponsible call to block all Muslims from entering the country, beyond of course comity and decency, was a disastrous moment for Barack Obama’s presidency. Before the press became universally incensed over and obsessed with Trump’s latest ridiculous proposal, reporters were investigating how the worst radical Islamist terrorist attack on American soil since September 11 happened. Gone are the condemnations of Barack Obama’s ill-timed claim that ISIS was “contained” just hours before the Paris attacks. Gone are the recriminations of his prime-time self-indictment, in which he insisted Americans stay the course of his failed war. When the president warned the country not to engage in a backlash against Muslim Americans, Republicans were perplexed as to where exactly the evidence for this forthcoming backlash was until Donald Trump manufactured some.
This is far from an isolated event; it’s a pattern. First, a Democrat becomes embroiled in a controversy or an external event reflects negatively on the party. Donald Trump then makes an outrageous comment calculated for maximum political impact. Like clockwork, the press abandons their critical examination of Democratic policies, and Republicans are back at each other’s throats. This is a measurable phenomenon. In just the last six months, there are almost too many examples to count.
On June 29, Fox News revealed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president had exchanged information on the night of the deadly Benghazi attack, a revelation that indicated the president was possibly coordinating the nation’s response to that terrorist event as it was ongoing. The details of that exchange were withheld from the press, but not on the grounds that they were classified in nature. Less than 36 hours after this revelation, however, the trail the press was following went cold after they became sidetracked by Donald Trump’s contention that Illegal immigrants from Mexico are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.”
The fallout from Hillary Clinton’s early July interview on CNN, the first national television interview of her campaign, was still settling on July 12 when CNN’s John King declared her contention that she had never received a subpoena for her emails from congressional investigators “just simply not true.” Who knows how far the condemnation might have gone, because the following day Trump asserted that he would have preferred it if the United States invaded Mexico instead of Iraq in 2003.
The Center for Medical Progress made a splash on July 14 when the first of a series of undercover videos featuring controversial and potentially illegal practices at Planned Parenthoods. That controversy exploded on July 15, when conservatives noticed a conspicuous lack of interest in the sting video from major media outlets. But even conservatives had moved on by July 18, when the Planned Parenthood controversy took a backseat to the latest tendentious Trump comments: His insistence that Senator John McCain was no war hero because he allowed himself to be captured by the Viet Cong after being shot down over Hanoi.
On August 14, Hillary Clinton’s rolling email controversy began boiling once again when an investigation into her emails discovered they contained what was surely classified information, including satellite imagery and confirmation of an unacknowledged program of drone-executed assassinations inside Pakistan. It wasn’t 48 hours before the nation moved on, however, when the Trump campaign released a white paper calling for the elimination of the provision in the Constitution extending birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants born on American soil.
“What, like with a cloth?” an unconvincing Hillary Clinton asked reporters when they inquired if she had tried to wipe information from her server before surrendering it to the FBI. That was on August 18, but that comment was quickly forgotten when Trump averred later that night that, as president, he would direct the courts to “find out whether or not anchor babies are actually citizens.” “I don’t think they have American citizenship,” he added, igniting the outrage cycle anew.
The federal government reluctantly admitted on September 23 that the Office of Personnel Management hack, allegedly executed by Chinese intelligence agents, was so severe that tens of millions of Americans may have had their personal information compromised. That same day, Trump decided to reignite his ongoing feud with the Fox News Channel and anchor Megyn Kelly, announcing that he was boycotting the network.
In a major blow to the Obama administration, Russia began an overt intervention into the Syrian civil war early on the morning of September 30. The news was briefly dominated by the scale of the threat posed by Russian forces operating in the same theater as NATO assets, but it was muted by Trump’s determination to spark a domestic debate over the refugees streaming out of that country on October 1. Trump, who had previously said the U.S. had a duty to accept Syrian refugees because “it’s a living hell in Syria,” now contended that America could not accept any refugees at all. What’s more, those we’ve already accepted must be deported.
The nation refocused its attention on the slow-motion train wreck that is ObamaCare on October 15, when the Congressional Budget Office revealed that new enrollments would come in well below projections. This threat to the stability of Barack Obama’s signature achievement was buried in an avalanche of Trumpian furor, now directed toward George W. Bush who he noted did not keep the country safe on September 11. “Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was the president,” Trump said.
American eyes turned toward Hillary Clinton on October 22, as she prepared for a marathon testimony over her role in the Benghazi attacks before a Congressional panel. Those eyes were, however, briefly redirected back toward Trump on that afternoon when he insisted that his reduced standing in polls of Iowa Republicans was the result of genetically-modified corn rendering Iowans idiots. Like theimage of Nazi soldiers overlaid on an American flag, Trump later insisted that this blooper was the work of an intern.
Hillary Clinton suffered a brief moment of scrutiny in the press when she was criticized for not correcting an audience member who gleefully joked about throttling the life out of Carly Fiorina. Clinton laughed at the dark joke, and Trump would have been justified in piling on Clinton. After all, he was also criticized for not correcting a town hall participant who called Obama a secret Muslim. Just over 24 hours after this gaffe exploded in the press, however, Trump changed the subject again. This time, linking what he determined were the eerie similarities between the violent pathology to which Ben Carson admitted having as a youth and the same mental deficiencies that afflict a child molester.
Three days after the Paris terror attack, Barack Obama delivered a remarkably callous assessment of the terror threat by calling the slaughter of over 130 civilians a “setback.” That same day, Trump opted to flog his idée fixe when he insisted that Syrian refugees represent a “Trojan horse,” and may be part of a larger “plot” to attack the United States from within.
Americans were still reeling from the Paris attacks when Democrats on the debate stage committed a number of gaffes. Those included the candidates’ universal determination not to say the phrase “radical Islam” when referring to the war on radical Islam and Bernie Sanders’ bizarre claim that climate change represents a more immediate threat to American national security than terrorism. Hillary Clinton did herself no favors when she insisted that the donations she received from Wall Street executives was her way of coping with the 9/11 attacks. The press was still coming to terms with this bizarre assertion on November 19, when Trump insisted that he would “absolutely” create a database designed to track all Americans who practiced the Muslim faith. Political reporters moved on; Clinton was saved.
This makes Mona Charen reasonably observe:
It’s not clear whether he set out intentionally to elect Hillary Clinton, but there is little question that he could not be fulfilling the role of Republican bogeyman to greater effect.
As Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin noted, during a week in which the disastrous fecklessness of President Obama and his party in the face of terrorism ought to have been Topic A, we are all talking about Trump instead. Brilliant. Tobin’s point actually applies to the entire presidential contest. By rights, it should be about the Democrats’ unraveling. From Obamacare to terrorism, from the economy to climate change, and from guns to free speech, progressive policies have proven deeply disappointing when not downright obtuse and dangerous. Clinton promises more of the same while trailing an oil slick of corruption in her wake. And yet swinging into the frame, week in and week out, the orange-maned billionaire bogeyman dominates the discussion.
Hell yes, Republicans are anti-Hispanic bigots, Trump (a lifelong Democrat) is supposed to confirm. Just look at the way he talked about Mexican “rapists” and vowed to build a wall that Mexico will fund.
Hell yes, Republicans want to fight a war on women. Did you hear what Trump said about Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina?
Hell yes, Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-handicapped, anti-Jewish, and anti-Muslim. Line ‘em up and Trump will offend. Not cleverly, mind you, but crudely. Donald Trump is fond of saying that our political leaders are stupid, constantly outmaneuvered at the bargaining table by shrewder Chinese, Mexicans, and Japanese. No one can accuse him of stupidity, provided his goal is to elect Hillary Clinton.
This week, while we were still burying our dead from San Bernardino, every Republican — instead of explaining why President Obama’s refusal to fight the war on terror has led to this moment — instead had to condemn Donald Trump’s mindless proposal to keep every single Muslim out of the United States until further notice. Again, he’s the perfect bogeyman.
It’s not just that what he says demands condemnation. It’s that it seems to give credence to the Democrats’ narrative. One of the false notes in President Obama’s Sunday-evening speech was his resort to one of his favorite libels about the American people he purports to lead. He scolded the country for its Islamophobia. “It is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently.”
That’s not the trouble here. America is an incredibly welcoming nation and has opened its arms to Muslims along with people from every part of the globe. Far from targeting American Muslims for discrimination, the U.S. has been a haven. Though liberals like to conjure it to slander the U.S., anti-Muslim discrimination and violence have been minimal in the U.S., even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (The most common targets of religious bigotry in America? Jews.)
On the other hand, it’s only common sense to proceed with caution about admitting thousands of refugees and immigrants from the part of the world that is currently aflame with Islamic extremism. That caution, not to be confused with discrimination (there is no constitutional right to come to America), was endorsed just three weeks ago by a large majority in Congress (including 47 Democrats). It isn’t anti-Muslim to seek to exclude Muslim extremists. Leave it to Trump to lob a stink bomb that putrefies everything.
Above all, the great favor that Trump does for Obama and for Hillary Clinton is to focus on personalities instead of philosophy. Trump, of course, has nothing to offer except personality (even if its charm eludes me). But his emphasis on “getting the best people” is exactly wrong. That’s the progressive idea — that the best people know better how to run your life than you do. That’s what we’ve had under President Obama. Obama is a failure not because he’s stupid, or stubborn, or inexperienced. He’s a failure because he believes in failed ideas.
Hillary Clinton believes in all the same myths and shibboleths. After two terms of decline and decay, voters are ready for a different approach, unless someone crashes the Republican party. Can it be pure accident that Donald Trump is playing the role to perfection?
How does a man who entered the White House vowing to restore science to its proper place tell us that gun control is the answer to terrorism?
After all, California already has strict gun control, as does France, which just had its second terrorist massacre this year. Not to mention that the one time when terrorists with assault rifles and body armor were foiled, it was because an off-duty traffic cop in Garland, Texas, was carrying a gun—and used it to shoot the two heavily armed Islamists before they could kill anyone.
Or that “common sense gun control” would have done nothing to stop Richard Reid (the unsuccessful shoe-bomber); the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston (pressure cookers) or the 9/11 hijackers (box-cutters). Maybe the president should be demanding common sense pressure-cooker control.
Yet while the critiques of the president’s antigun pitch are correct, they are also beside the point. Because liberal calls for gun control aren’t about keeping guns from bad guys. It’s what you talk about so you don’t have to talk about the reality of Islamist terror. And focusing on the weaponry is part of a liberal argument that dates to the Cold War, when calls for arms control were likewise used to avoid addressing the ugly reality of communism.
Understand this, and you understand why Senate Democrats reacted to San Bernardino by putting forth antigun legislation. Why the New York Times ran a gun control editorial on its front page, and the Daily News used its own cover to feature the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre underneath San Bernardino killer Syed Farook—labeling them both terrorists. And why President Obama used Sunday night’s address to whine about those resisting his call for gun measures that would not have stopped any of the shooters.
Put simply, today’s liberalism cannot deal with the reality of evil. So liberals inveigh against the instruments the evil use rather than the evil that motivates them.
Not that there aren’t measures society can embrace to keep the innocent from being shot and killed. The best example may be New York City from 2002-13, during Ray Kelly’s last stint as police commissioner, when the NYPD was bringing the murder rate to record lows through America’s most effective gun-control program: stop-and-frisk.
This was gun control for bad guys, under the theory that when you take guns away from bad people—or at least make them afraid to carry guns on the street—you reduce shootings. But it was savaged by liberals. Because they don’t want just the bad guys’ guns. They want yours.
So they demonize guns while fighting approaches that try to identify threats, whether from mentally ill individuals such as Adam Lanza, who went on a murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, or terrorists such as Syed Farook and his wife,Tashfeen Malik. Surely the key to distinguishing between the millions of law-abiding Muslims and those who mean us harm is intelligence.
Nevertheless, the urge to blame the weapon has deep liberal roots. It was particularly pronounced in the latter years of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan was president.
Even as Reagan was applying the pressure that would ultimately bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989—from arming the Afghan resistance to supporting Poland’s Solidarity movement to rebuilding America’s defenses—liberals derided him as a warmonger. Two things especially irked them: He’d called the U.S.S.R. the Evil Empire, and he was skeptical about arms control for the sake of arms control.
So when the Gipper walked away from the 1986 Reykjavik summit because Mikhail Gorbachev insisted his price for a nukes deal was the end of missile defense, Reagan was derided as a dunce. But his decision proved one of his finest moments: Scarcely a year later the Soviets caved and Mr. Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Bad regimes are like bad guys in this respect. They’ll take a deal they know has no teeth. But they will accept a genuine arms reduction only when the good guys put them in a position where they have little or no choice.
This helps explain why, for example, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi turned over his entire nuclear program to George W. Bush—and why the Iranians happily agreed to a deal with President Obama that puts them on the path to a bomb.
Meanwhile, we’ve just endured what may be the first successful ISIS-inspired attack on the homeland. And like her former boss, Hillary Clinton is demanding the government “take action now” on guns.
Back and forth it goes. Instead of debating the antiterror policy of the past seven years—the wisdom of ending the National Security Agency’s metadata program, whether ISIS can be knocked out without any ground troops, how the lack of nerve on Syria fed this mess, or whether Islamist terror can be defeated so long as our leaders refuse to call it by its rightful name—we’re all arguing over gun control.
Then again, if you were Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton, isn’t this the debate you’d prefer?
Today in 1959, the four members of the Platters, who had been arrested in Cincinnati Aug. 10 on drug and prostitution charges, were acquitted.
Still, unlike perhaps today, the acquittal didn’t undo the damage the charges caused to the group’s career.
U2’s Bono is an interesting guy in the music world.
He’s not a conservative, but he admits that capitalism helps poor people improve their lives better than government (or what serves for government in the Third World).
So his comments reported by the Independent Journal about ISIS are worth considering:
In recent weeks, many different strategies for defeating ISIS have been proposed. Russia and France (among others) have engaged in airstrikes. President Obama has suggested more “gun control.”
U2’s Bono and the Edge? “Music.”
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Bono and the Edge sat down to discuss their dedication to returning to Paris as a venue, despite the fact that a rock concert was so recently the target of a horrific attack.
Zakaria mentioned the Paris resident who, following the attack at the Bataclan, dragged a piano out into the streets and began to play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He asked if Bono felt that music was a proper response to terrorism. Bono explained:
“That’s poetry in music, and humor…
All fascists are afraid of humor. That’s why Hitler outlawed the dadaists, the surrealists. Violence is their language.”
He then addressed the philosophical side of the issue:
“Think about the idea of outlawing music. A child sings before it can speak. It’s the very essence of our humanity.”
And he added a few words of caution for Americans:
“If you only take Christian refugees… this is not the American idea. I’m always reminding people that America is not just a country – it’s an idea.
If they change the nature of the United States and the way people think and the pluralism and inclusiveness, then they win.”
The Edge added his perspective as well:
“Everything that we hold dear seemed to be the target.
And France, the birthplace of the enlightenment movement, which gave birth to America. It’s like the place where the modern Western world was born.”
And he added the historical significance:
“There have only been a few movements that have targeted music specifically. The Taliban banned music, and during Mao’s cultural revolution some music was banned.
We think of music as the sound of freedom. We think that rock and roll has a part to play.
Defiance. Resistance, as it were.”
U2, after canceling a performance immediately following the attacks on the Bataclan and surrounding areas, returns to Paris for back to back concerts December 6th and 7th. They are determined to be a part of that “spirit of defiance,” said Bono:
“[ISIS] is not trying to take lives. They’re trying to take away our way of life.
They’re a death cult. We are a life cult.”
And ticket sales indicate that Paris is ready to embrace U2 and the music Bono referred to as “defiant joy” – all but 300 seats were sold to the rescheduled shows in a city still reeling from the effects of a terror attack.
Even if you don’t agree with all of their analysis, most of it is correct. Certainly if humor includes ridicule, humor is a useful weapon against ISIS. Whether or not they are legitimate, every video that shows a terrorist blowing up himself by accident deserves to go viral. (As observed by someone decades ago, comedy is tragedy that happens to someone else.)
No war is ever won merely by bombs and soldiers. World War II, for instance, required not just the military defeat of Germany and Japan, but, in Japan’s case, the elimination of the militaristic facets of their culture, and in Germany’s case the elimination of the Nazi culture. That takes decades in some cases. The last thing that pushed the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries into the dustbin of history was the fall of the Berlin Wall, pushed there by young East Germans wanting to live in the more prosperous and more free West.
Donald Trump has been wrongly advocating for the elimination of Muslim immigration. (The fact that Jimmy Carter stopped Iranian immigration during the Iran hostage crisis proves only that two wrongs don’t make successful strategy.) Were Trump serious about the cultural war between radical Islam and our culture, he would have gone to Paris (unlike the other presidential candidates, he certainly can afford the trip) for the U2 concerts and demonstrated to the world that he’s not afraid of radical Islam.
Wars are not won by hiding in your bunker and fencing yourself off.
Until recently, Princeton University’s devotion to Woodrow Wilson was so pervasive and worshipful that visitors to campus might easily have mistaken the modernist parthenon housing the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for a literal temple.
If nothing else, the black students demanding that my alma mater strip the segregationist president’s name from its public-policy school and Wilson College residential complex have accomplished one amazing thing. They’ve forced Princeton to acknowledge that its 13th president, and the nation’s 28th, was not the most nearly perfect human ever to inhabit New Jersey.
As the university continues to debate the protesters’ demands, a new work of intellectual history coincidentally published by Princeton University Press and written by a Princeton faculty member offers a compelling — though implicit — case that Wilson’s name is ideally suited for the public-policy school but deeply ironic for the residential college.
Along the way, “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration.
The book isn’t about Wilson per se. It’s about the progressive intellectual movement in which he played a major role as scholar, university administrator, and politician. Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. “It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,” writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.
The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.
Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroadregulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and “cephalic index,” or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics — and supposed natural inferiority — of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants. (Present-day progressives somehow didn’t highlight this heritage when they were defending “the Wisconsin Idea” against the depredations of Republican Governor Scott Walker.)
“The ‘race suicide’ of the American or colonial stock should be regarded as the most fundamental of our social problems,” the Wisconsin economist John R. Commons wrote in 1920. His colleague Edward A. Ross, who popularized the terms “social control” and “race suicide,” called interest in eugenics “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race.”
In the early 20th century, most progressives viewed as cutting-edge science what today looks like simple bigotry. “Eugenics and race science were not pseudosciences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Leonard emphasizes. “They were sciences,” supported by research laboratories and scholarly journals and promoted by professors at the country’s most prestigious universities.
While some socialists and conservatives also embraced them, Leonard argues, eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: “Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.” Equally important, “biological ideas,” Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers “a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform — its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.” They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.
Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. “Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,” Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.
Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature — a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: “race suicide.” Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations. …
Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the “Negro question.” They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants. MIT president Francis Amasa Walkercalled for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe,” whom he described in Darwinian language as “representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”
So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as “the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation” — equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration
The irony is that Wisconsin — specifically Ripon — is where the first U.S. political party that advocated equal treatment for blacks and whites was born. The Republican Party included progressives such as Fighting Bob La Follette, but most progressives ran off to form the Progressive Party (as opposed to Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party), then after the Progressive Party (or Parties) collapsed became Democrats.
That historical whitewashing, so to speak, continues in this state. The Fighting Bob site claims …
Most of La Follette’s contemporaries remained convinced that people of color were inherently unequal to whites, and defended their stance with arguments based in both biology and social, religious, and political tradition.
La Follette rejected discrimination for any reason. Despite the nation’s embrace of Jim Crow, La Follette told Howard University Law School’s African American graduating class of 1886, “We are one people…our lives run side by side, our ashes rest in the same soil.” He railed against separatism: “It is snobbish stupidity, it is supreme folly, to talk of non-contact, or exclusion.”
La Follette attributed the source of the trouble to the discrimination by the majority rather than in the alleged inferiority of their targets. In 1889, he lectured white racists from the floor of the U.S. Congress: “There is nothing threatening or portentous in the Negro problem today, excepting as you make it so. The difficulty does not lie with him, but with you instead, in the blind prejudice and stubborn antagonism, ever opposed to his development politically and socially as a citizen.”
… while not mentioning what Christian Schneider does:
You are also supposed to forget the black marks of Progressivism: the virulently racist eugenics of La Follette’s handpicked president of the University of Wisconsin, Charles Van Hise, who once said, “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race and of its future, is the new patriot.” You have to forget that Progressives played a part in foisting Prohibition on the nation, an unforeseen effect of which was people either blinding or killing themselves by drinking substitute alcohol made of chemicals such as paint thinner.
And you will never, ever get fans of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, to admit Sanger’s racist beliefs and support, to quote her, “how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 