Of all the sins of leftism — its assault on our Constitution, its undermining of our inalienable rights, its hobbling of the economy — none is quite so wicked as its virtual enslavement of the black underclass. It was increases in welfare and the institutionalization of leftist attitudes that, beginning around 1964, brought a century of improvements in black life to a crashing halt. In this 2007 City Journal article, my brilliant friend Myron Magnet explained how it happened:

Though welfare was part of the answer, the real explanation was larger. It was cultural, not economic. Begun by the elites, vast changes reshaped mainstream attitudes in the 1960s. Sex became fine outside marriage, and illegitimacy lost its stigma. Drugs were cool; social authority and tradition weren’t. America was deemed a racist, unjust society that victimized and impoverished blacks, who could rarely better their condition and who therefore deserved generous welfare benefits as reparations for past and present oppression. If blacks committed crime, the system that drove them to it, out of poverty or as an act of protest, was at fault: we shouldn’t blame the victim, as the saying went—meaning the poor criminal, not his prey. Since people shape their actions according to the ideas and beliefs they hold, when these new attitudes reached the inner cities, what could result but an epidemic of social dysfunction?

This leftist witchcraft transformed the once-great gains of the Civil Rights movement into a virtually inescapable structure of government hand-outs and dependency, establishing the Democratic Party as masters of a new plantation with black front men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton playing the role of go-betweens and overseers. Unlike the original forms of slavery which the Democratic Party defended and upheld for so long, this program of dependency introduced a new wrinkle: it enticed blacks into facilitating and supporting their own subjection. Over 90 percent of blacks vote for the party that has locked them in the slums of Detroit, New Orleans, and Chicago. Some 96 percent of blacks voted for Barack Obama, during whose presidency black unemployment and poverty have skyrocketed, especially among the young.

In order to prevent any liberating message of moral and economic self-sufficiency from reaching their captive black constituency, leftists have waged a scurrilous 50-year campaign to brand conservative whites racist. To do that, of course, the term had to be redefined. Racism once meant a belief that some races were inferior to others. It now refers to any misspoken word or gesture or slightly untoward attitude that might be used to silence a conservative or at least prevent dependent blacks from listening to him. Just watch the ugly, twisted, dishonest, and corrupt attempts by the network news media and others to paint the Tea Party movement as racist per se. Why do that to innocent Americans whose agenda has nothing to do with race at all? Because — if the Democrat Party’s economically enslaved black base ever listened to the Tea Party message, it might come to its senses, break its shackles, and head for freedom.

The Woman in Black

I believe it was Big Hollywood’s John Nolte — the Hulk of the culture wars (lovable until angered) — who first pointed out that Hollywood could revitalize its failing self by learning some lessons from the National Football League. I mentioned his column in a blog here and recently taped a discussion on the topic with my PJTV pal Bill Whittle.

But while I acknowledge that everything Nolte says is true because otherwise he might turn into an enormous green giant and crush me, I also think there are certain ways in which Hollywood simply can’t compete with the NFL – and shouldn’t. Art is art and sports are sports, in other words. For me, this was driven home last week like a stake through a vampire’s heart when I compared the Super Bowl (LXVCDL whatever) with the movie The Woman in Black.

Careful students of this blog will know what a crazed fan of ghost stories I am and Woman in Black is one of my favorites. (I’m also a big fan of The Woman in White so clearly when it comes to women’s fashions, I’m easy to please.)  I first saw WIB as a two-handed play in London (one of the longest running plays in the West End, I believe). I was riveted and terrified. At the intermission, I stood up. The lady behind me had her foot on the back of my seat and when it folded up on her toes, she let out a loud scream. I was already so tense that they had to bring in a cherry picker to pry my head out of the ceiling plaster.

I wasn’t all that thrilled with the Susan Hill novel the play was based on, but I loved the 1989 Granada Television adaptation. The new film, however, starring Daniel Radcliffe, is just awful. All the subtlety gone, the characters uninteresting. One big startle after another with a prettified ending that was gag inducing. My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that none of this was the fault of the creative team, but that the various suits involved worried that modern audiences wouldn’t tolerate subtlety and tragic implications and so forced the movie makers’ hands. Again, just a guess, but that’s what it smelled like to me.

And here’s the thing — financially, the strategy was right:  it worked.  The film came in a close second at the weekend box office, earning around 20-million dollars, and got decent enough reviews (64% critical, 69% popular on Rotten Tomatoes). It seems to have been a hit – a single maybe, but a hit nonetheless.

The Super Bowl also worked — big time — scoring the biggest audience of any US telecast ever, garnering somewhere around 111 million viewers.

But here, once again, is the thing. The Super Bowl worked because it was good:  a thrilling back-and-forth rematch between the juggernaut Patriots and upstart Giants, and the conclusion to a season of delights and excitement.  The Woman in Black worked because it pandered to teens and had a good advertising campaign. The Super Bowl will be remembered by sports fans for a long time. The Woman in Black will be forgotten before I even finish writing…  what was I talking about?

And the truth is, all sports events that work work because they’re good and are also good because they work. Experts may say, oh, no one truly appreciated this great game or that, or such and such a player wasn’t fully recognized because he played in a small market instead of a big one, but basically every one knows a really great game or player when they see one and if they can see one, they will.

With art, it just ain’t so. If you had been alive during the greatest season of English poetry—alive with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley and Byron—even if you were a literate, intelligent person, you might only have been aware of Byron. Blake labored in utter obscurity, Keats died before anyone really knew he was there, Shelley pretty much likewise, Coleridge wasted a lot of time on opium, and Wordsworth lived through a lifetime of the worst reviews any great writer has ever had before getting a small portion of the love he deserved.

Some people will tell you that quality in art is all a matter of taste but they’re wrong. Shakespeare is better than Ian Fleming, whether audiences think so or not. And yet the recognition of greatness in art is capricious. Some great art is for intellectuals and goes over the head of the common man, some great art is for the common man and is dismissed by intellectuals out of snobbery, some great art is lost to view by chance or personal foibles (crazy Van Gogh only ever managed to sell one painting in his lifetime, kooky Kafka left most of his work unfinished and unpublished), and some great art comes out before its time and critics and audiences alike just simply don’t get it for years and years. Conversely, a lot of art that becomes hugely famous and well-reviewed just stinks. In fact, going back in history, many of the most famous and appreciated artists working in any given generation are terrible and soon justly forgotten. They managed to amuse the people or mesmerize the critics, but they weren’t really any good.

Leftism, political correctness, foreign markets and bad business are removing Hollywood movies from the mainstream of American culture they once dominated. Imitating the NFL’s respect for its audience would be a good place for movies to start to find a way back. But American movies were also once great art. And the journey back to that greatness is far more complicated than throwing a football.

Never mind Santorum’s stunning upsets in the midwest.  Don’t even mind the Giants win at the Super Bowl. The real victory today that the Mainstream Media doesn’t want you to think about:  Baby Jonah’s triumph over all in the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter. Doubtless boosted by a flood of voters from this blog, the Doritos ad Sling Baby won the poll for most beloved Super Bowl commercial.  Justin Folk – the mastermind behind the visuals on PJTV’s Klavan on the Culture – worked on the ad’s SFX. He also worked on the star of the commercial, his son, Baby Jonah, who appeared as a reasonable facsimile of himself. Justin will share in a cash prize, and I’ll be hitting him up for a loan.

Pundits will be talking about the ramifications of this amazing victory for years, but one thing is certain. Klavan on the Culture voters have it within their gnarled and palsied hands to make the difference in any election anywhere any time. Let us then, with our hearts high and our eyes on the future, begin to collect as much money in political bribes as is humanly possible.  Why should Democrats have all the fun?

I have no doubt it was readers of this blog whose Chicago-Democrat-style multiple voting helped send the “Sling Baby” Doritios ad to the Super Bowl. You’ll recall the folks who worked on the Sling Baby ad included two Folks — namely Justin Folk, who did some of the SFX and his son Jonah folk, who played the role of the baby magnificently. Hard to believe the kid’s thirty, I know.

Though he doesn’t like to admit it for fear of arrest, Justin was also the brilliant and prize-winning visuals fellow who did the backgrounds of my Klavan on the Culture videos at PJTV.

Anyway, I think there’s still time to drop in at the USA Today Ad Meter site and give the ad five stars. If Sling Baby ends up the most popular Super Bowl ad, the team gets a cash prize a portion of which will help keep Baby Jonah in the chips until his father can think of something else to do.

You did it once; please do it again. Go to the site and give five stars to Doritos’ “Sling Baby.”

The Obama administration is insisting that church-affiliated employers pay for birth control in their health care plans. This especially violates the Catholic Church’s doctrine prohibiting the use of contraception. As such, it’s an act of tyranny — an insidious attempt to bring down one of the load-bearing walls of liberty.

The idea that churches stand to a great degree apart from the power of the state has its beginning — in my reading of history — in an incident that involved Pontius Pilate before he entered the Gospel stories. Appointed the Roman governor of Judaea in 26 AD, Pilate set up (according to the account of the historian Josephus) a set of Roman standards in the city of Jerusalem. The Romans were famously tolerant about the religions of the people they conquered. They didn’t care if you worshipped your gods — as long as you also worshipped their gods. To ask this was to ask no more than loyalty to Rome, whose gods and government were as one.

This was good conqueror policy and worked well — except in Judaea. The Jews had only one God and he was a jealous one. They felt the Roman display constituted idolatry and a violation of God’s law. They protested to Pilate. Pilate enticed the rabble rousers into the great stadium at Caesarea, then surrounded them with soldiers, swords drawn: Either accept the Roman symbols in the Holy City or die. The Jews, as one, flung themselves on the ground and extended their necks: better to die than to break God’s law.

Pontius Pilate, meet the Jews. With his emperor furious at the mess he’d made, Pilate was forced to back down and remove the symbols.

About 45 years later, the Jews tried to secure their religious freedom through violent revolt. The Romans crushed them, sacked Jerusalem, and destroyed the Jewish temple. But God’s irony never sleeps. By destroying its Jewish centers, the Roman conquest of Palestine accelerated the spread of a Jewish cult throughout the Roman world — a cult that would eventually transform Rome into its instrument.

According to theologians like N.T. Wright, the founder of this cult, Jesus of Nazareth, had been trying to warn zealous Jews off the disastrous path that led to the revolt. He preached a more patient and pacific but nonetheless unyielding religiosity, pointing to a way that involved neither religious surrender nor political violence: Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar; give God what belongs to God. It may have been the best political advice anyone ever gave anyone, and was wholly in keeping with the actions of the men who bared their necks at the stadium in Caesarea.

Throughout the so-called Dark and Middle ages, as Christianity helped shape Rome’s savage conquerors into the nations of Europe, church and state battled over how to actualize Jesus’s doctrine. In clash after clash, crisis after crisis, kings and popes vied over which was the ultimate arbiter of what power where. Did these clashes involve perfect people versus evil people? Pristine institutions versus corrupt ones? Don’t be ridiculous. They involved only men, sinful, self-interested, and violent. But out of their clashes, there evolved an idea that was better than the mere mortals who shaped it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I read the list of this year’s Oscar nominations and thought at once, “The movies are over.”

This is not to say that the movies are bad. Not to say that the people making them are untalented. Not to say that some films don’t make money. It’s simply to point out that the form is sinking into social irrelevance.

Every art form has peaks and valleys of relevance. Shakespeare could say of stage actors that they were “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” whose portrayals could destroy a reputation. Percy Bysshe Shelley could declare with a straight face that poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” James Joyce could have a budding intellectual novelist proclaim — with youthful grandiosity but not without legitimacy—that he was setting out on his career, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Which stage actor — which poet — which intellectual novelist — could say such things today and be taken seriously by anyone but his doting mother?

So too, there was a generation of movie makers—several generations—who brought the dreams of the world to life. Neal Gabler in Empire of Their Own talked about how movies once “colonized the American imagination,” and in the same vein Geoffrey O’Brien called film The Phantom Empire because it captured — in more senses than one — the way people thought and felt about their country and the world. But the list of nine Oscar nominees shows how far the art form has receded from its imperial moment. As John Nolte at Big Hollywood pointed out, only one of the nine nominees — The Help — was a major hit, and the films of the year that were major hits — Rise of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class — weren’t Oscar-worthy. In other words, Hollywood is less and less capable of making important pictures of high quality that the general public wants to see.

In a wonderful post earlier this year, Nolte offered his advice for how to bring the movies back to full vigor: give us real movie stars, stop insulting America and Americans, emulate the NFL’s respect for its audience, etc. But I wonder if Doctor John might be writing a prescription for a patient who has already died.

Unfortunately, that said, I don’t have much to report on the cultural front this week for various reasons. I’ll try to write my Monday column about the Oscar nominations. Which leaves only politics for now …  and politics this week has been just plain depressing.

By now it seems reasonable to assume that every single sentient being in America if not the universe has listened to this week’s Ricochet podcast or at least has fast-forwarded through to my parts. Thus you’ll have heard me challenge GOP political consultant Mike Murphy on his support for Mitt Romney, who is either running for president or selling cigars out in front of the drugstore, I’m never sure which. Murphy, a witty and intelligent guy with a lot of wonky information at his fingertips, seemed to me the very incarnation of the much-talked-about Republican establishment. As such, he says a lot of sensible things — and also seems completely unaware that a libertarian revolution is brewing in this country, that it gave the Republicans the only relevance they have left by returning them to power in the House in 2010, and that if GOP centrist types like him succeed in putting up a Bushian only-sort-of-conservative like Romney and then lose to Obama, the consequences for them may include treatment last seen during the Inquisition.

Like Murphy, like just about everyone who thinks, I’m not convinced that Gingrich is a viable alternative to Romney either.  I’m not even convinced he’s the more conservative of the two. (I don’t think Santorum is that conservative either, by the way. Aside from the social values stuff, which won’t matter a damn if the country goes bankrupt, he seems to have backed a lot of W’s big spending.) When I turn to the best pundits, I find Ann Coulter making a brilliant case against Gingrich and for Romney, and Thomas Sowell making a brilliant case against Romney and for Gingrich. From this, I deduce that Coulter and Sowell are brilliant people capable of making brilliant cases. In fact, if I’m ever arrested for stalking some beautiful intelligent blonde conservative pundit, I may hire Coulter to defend me…  although on consideration, I can think of several reasons why that might not work.

I knew I’d be doing a Ricochet podcast this (Wednesday) morning on the State of the Union, so I watched the entire speech straight through.  By the end of it, I was offering to betray our military’s field positions, change my religion and sign a statement demanding the U.S. get out of Viet Nam if they would just make it stop. What a cynical and disingenuous blowhard this president is! The speech seemed to me a complete fantasy, existing as it did in a world in which our country was NOT currently borrowing more money than it produces and in which “paying your fair share,” meant having your money taken away from you to fund things you don’t want and the government has no right to buy. GOP Governor Mitch Daniels’ response was like having water splashed in my face, waking me from a dream. Listen, I know he’s short and boring, but Daniels not only would have made a better candidate than Mitt or Newt, he’s a better executive than either Mitt or Barack could ever be. And here’s another thing: the social conservatives who beat up on Daniels because he said we needed to call a truce on their issues in order to bring people together to deal with the debt? They were wrong and he was right. Let me be more exact: they were a hundred per cent wrong and he was a hundred per cent right. They should make a pilgrimage to his state house on their knees, like the old women who climb the Sacred Steps in Rome, in order to apologize and beg him to reconsider getting into the race. You don’t like abortion? Who do you think your best president would be? Obama, Mitt or Daniels? Right, me too. Go stand in the corner.

You can hear me wax incredibly eloquent on these and other topics together with people who actually know what they’re talking about like Peter Robinson, Rob Long, James Lileks and Mike Murphy on the Ricochet podcast for 1/25.

"The tide of war is receding," he lied.

The Taliban is pissed off at getting pissed on. After four U.S. Marines apparently urinated on the faces of their dead enemies in Afghanistan—and after the event was captured on video and spread on YouTube—the Taliban condemned the action as “inhuman.” And listen, if anyone knows inhuman it’s the Taliban.

The Obama administration made a great show of condemning the Marines’ actions. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the pissing “utterly deplorable,” and promised an investigation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.”

In angry response, commentators and politicians on the right puffed up and got their macho on. “Shut your mouth. War is hell,” said the wonderful congressman and war hero Allen West wonderfully. The adorable pundit Dana Loesch added adorably, “I’d drop trou and do it too.”

But let’s face it, it is an infraction: the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids such shenanigans. The Corps must maintain decorum with its corpses. (For Obama supporters: that’s a joke, because corps and corpse are pronounced differently.)

Most organizations have a time-honored way of dealing with this sort of thing. In this case, some high-ranking superior officer ought to call the piss-men onto his hopefully plastic-covered carpet and say something to the effect of: “I rebuke thee! Go thou forth and urinate upon thine enemy no more.” After which, there would be a brief period of embarrassed feet-shuffling, a brisk and coordinated “Yes, sir!”and then off the chastised men would go to kill and piss on more Taliban, only without the video guy this time.

But the Obama administration can’t afford to behave with that sort of decency and common sense. They have to over-react—they have no choice.  They are desperate to appease these Islamist murderers in order to hold together an attempt to negotiate a phony settlement with them. Only then can they pull our troops out of the country with some display of make-believe honor before the wild slaughter there starts again.