Confucius: "morals and art will deteriorate"

“If language is not correct . . . . . . morals and art will deteriorate":

Many years ago I went through an art exhibition at a glitzy mall in Newport Beach. I remember two of the art exhibits. One was a model wearing one of those iconic French Maid outfits - the short black, form-fitting dress with the little white apron and cap. But the model (perhaps the artist) was a rather tall man who also wore black tights, some really ugly black and white gym shoes and a gas mask. The other memorable exhibit featured wall hangings which exploited the various textures and colors of lint removed from clothes dryers.

I think there was some sort of environmental message intended by both of these art pieces, but I'm not sure what it was.

There are at this moment in history a lot of "artists" on the Left delivering political messages through "art". Relatively few on the Right, most of them
satirists pointing out rhetorical or other excesses on the Left. Moe Lane compares Australian Green protesters (dignified by American standards) to performance art. I can imagine myself in the audience. He says
about the second photo in this post:

". . . it looks for all the world like a snapshot of a particularly boring and pretentious piece of performance art. You know the kind that I’m talking about; one featuring three or four people moving about and talking aimlessly while atonal, yet annoying, stringed instruments play in the background. You’re there because your S.O.’s friend is involved with the production, and you have been promised that the party afterward will not be dull - so you spend the time trying to decipher the program, which reads like it was translated from German to English via Academic Marxist, with a quick stopover at Martian. You suspect that it has gained in the translation; meanwhile, up on the stage someone has just waved a broomstick at a man wearing a cow suit, which apparently has something to do with the Falkland Islands War.

It is about that time that you grimly conclude that the party afterward will be dull."

Hyperbole on the part of Australian Greens has reduced the tendency of the general population to pay attention to the Global Warming Issue. Particularly since the Australian contribution to greenhouse gasses is so tiny compared to, say, China's growing emissions. But the Greens still have the attention of the news media - just like in America. This may be one reason why political "performance art" gets more and more extreme while serious, fact-based discussions of issues go unnoticed.

The Day After the Anniversary

It was good to see Senator Obama and Senator McCain together, taking time out from politics on the anniversary of that day. We all remember where we were when we heard the first confusing news. Let's not start mis-remembering 9/11.

Jim Geraghty talks about the little comment that made him choke up. Here are remembrances by Michelle Catalano and Jazz Shaw .

Richard Fernandez, an Australian, remembers 9/11 in a somewhat cryptic post. He's one of the first generation of philosophical/political bloggers, many of whom took pen names or, more accurately, "blog names". It took some doing to find out who these bloggers were. The idea was to focus on the topcs under discussion rather than on the people presenting their thoughts. Some of these bloggers took famous names from antiquity - Cicero, Marcus Fabius, etc. Others took mysterious names like XLRQ. Richard's blog name was "Wretchard the Cat", later shortened to "Wretchard". His background is Filipino, and he sometimes blogs about the slums of Manila (unbelievably poor, compared to our slums), sometimes about Australia or other countries but often about the USA. When he moved Belmont Club to Pajamas Media (a confederation of bloggers), he started blogging under his own name.

This post elicits thoughtful or touching comments by some of the interesting people who regularly conversed with each other in Wretchard's "comments" section at the old Belmont Club, plus the usual couple of cranks.

Growing up in the Age of MTV

Yesterday, I heard part of this discussion between Dennis Prager and a physician/author worried about the psychological and other effects of casual sex on young people. She believes that it adversely affects their ability to form a lasting commitment to a partner and a family due to changes in brain chemistry. Thankfully, the young people she described were quite different from the ones we watched at the Stake dance Saturday.

One of the points Dennis made was how quickly the educational system was destroying Judeo-Christian values in America. It takes a strong counter-balance to the popular culture and the educational system for young people to hang onto those values. He described his favorite moral question to students: whether they would save a drowning human or their drowning beloved pet. A 16 year-old caller described a class discussion in which her classmates casually accepted Nazi-like ideas concerning killing the infirm (expressed by another student) as just another point of view. Tolerance of various points of view has become a higher good in many people's minds than basic agreement on principles such as as not murdering imperfect people.

Worthwhile listening, even if you don't agree with everything you hear.

Related: Feminine modesty: Between Bare and Burqa. Many young women have no idea of the effect that skimpy clothing has on male observers. On the other hand, completely obscuring your femininity with clothing can be dehumanizing.

Update: Dennis' latest written argument in favor of Judeo-Christian values. I usually find Dennis more interesting on the radio that on a page, as I think he often outlines only the barest skeleton of his principles when he writes. When he discusses the same principles on the radio, it's easier to see how they apply in people's lives. I would be interested in other's reactions to this piece.

Introduction to Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager, the talk-show host and lecturer, is an original. He has helped me clarify my thinking a lot over the years.

When he was young, some in his family thought he was retarded because he would sit for hours twirling the tail of the family's pet dog while staring at a lake. He decided in high school that, in his case, youth would not be "wasted on the young". He skipped high school classes, getting into a lot of trouble. Instead of going to class, he visited all the interesting adult in New York City whom he could manage to visit. He also taught himself to conduct symphony orchestras, learned foreign languages and read serious political journals. He almost flunked out of high school, but got good grades in Community College. He took a graduate degree in the Soviet system of government at Columbia, where he says that his faith in God was confirmed by observing the irrationality of some of the positions of the non-religious professors there.

He has visited more countries than any 20 people I know. He is Jewish, and after the first airline highjackings (before highjackers started steering planes into buildings) he started an outreach called the "Center for Ethical Monotheism", promoting an ethical basis of understanding between Christians, Jews and Muslims (I might not have the name quite right).

I listened to him when I lived in Southern California. In addition to his regular broadcast, he did a show on Sunday night called "Religion on the Line" where clergy from different faiths discussed theological and other issues. It was fascinating, sometimes emotional, and the clergy got along with each other very well. There has been nothing like it since.

When I first started listening to Dennis, he called himself a "passionate moderate" - someone interested in balancing important principles which were inherently in conflict. As our political system moved further to the left, he started to identify himself as a "conservative" or as a "classical liberal" - terms he thought of as practically synonymous at that point in history. He continues to identify with conservatives and classical liberals today. He made a difficult (for him) change in party affiliation from Democratic to Republican several ago.

Dennis decided a few years ago that he needed to take his show national, and KABC in Los Angeles cut him lose. He still talks about a wide range of issues, both personal ("micro") and cultural or political ("macro"). If I'm not interested by a particular topic, I just wait for the next one.

Today, in his first hour he presented persuasive encouragement for people to balance trivial entertainment time with time spent in "elevating" pursuits - reading good books, listening to elevating music, studying scripture or other wisdom literature, etc. He reminded us that this used to be something that people regularly thought about. Times have changed. Now most of us are totally oriented toward entertainment in our free time.

Dennis is more tolerant of "expressing our lower natures" in harmless ways than are some religious people. But he still talked about feeling the need to take a bath after watching a particular MTV program.

His second hour was an interview with the (mostly) conservative columnists George Will , who defined the difference between liberals and conservatives in a simple way. Will related a memory about Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They don't make Democratic senators like him anymore. Prager and Will discussed audio books, the great advantages for Democrats in this year's election, and two very important reasons why conservatives should vote for McCain even if they don't like him much.

Audio of his programs is available here or (commercial free) at Pragertopia here. In the Central Valley, we can listen to him on KTIP 1450 AM from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. - his third hour is not broadcast.