Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day

In your fine green ware I will walk with you tonight
In your raven hair I will find the Summer night
Upon far flung soil I will run you through my head
In my daily toil all the promises are said

For I know the weary can rise again
I know it all from the words you send
I will go, I will go, I will leave the firelight
I will go, I will go, for it’s now the time is right

Chorus:
I will sing a young man’s song
That you would sing on Remembrance Day
I will be the sacrifice
And bells will ring on Remembrance Day

I must leave this land and the hunger that is here
But the place I stand is the one I love so dear
Like a flower in some forest that the world will never see
I will stand so proud for I know what we can be

For I know the weary can rise again
I know it all from the words you send
I will go, I will go, I will leave the firelight
I will go, I will go, for it’s now the time is right

Chorus

This day I will remember you
This way I will always return
This day I will remember you
This way I will always return

Chorus out

Words and music: Stuart Adamson
From the album
The Seer

Over the Hills and Far Away

Here’s forty shillings on the drum
For those who volunteer to come,
To ‘list and fight the foe today
Over the hills and far away

Chorus:
O’er the hills and o’er the main
Through Flanders, Portugal and Spain
King George commands and we obey
Over the hills and far away

When duty calls me I must go
To stand and face another foe
But part of me will always stray
Over the hills and far away

Chorus

If I should fall to rise no more
As many comrades did before
Then ask the pipes and drums to play
Over the hills and far away

Chorus

Then fall in lads behind the drum
With colours blazing like the sun
Along the road to come what may
Over the hills and far away

Chorus out

Words:  John Tams / Music: traditional English folk song
From the album Over the Hills and Far Away:  The Music of Sharpe

 

Photo:  Tombe du Soldat inconnu, 2007 Leafsfan67.  Public domain.

Straight Outta Compton and the language of lament

I’m not sure why so many people in Hollywood were surprised when Straight Outta Compton took over the box office this past August.  Interest in the movie was running high, from what I saw, and it’s not as if there was much competition in the theaters by that point.  For that matter, though there were some big hits this year, there wasn’t all that much worth watching for most of the summer.  What’s more, SOC was released by Universal, which was well into its “all your box office are belong to us” routine.  According to the Grantland article linked above,

Universal has already put together a box office year for the ages, and Straight Outta Compton notches the studio’s sixth no. 1 opener of the year. With Straight Outta Compton, Universal could release nothing else this year but a two-hour video of the staff taking selfies and it would still break Warner Bros.’ $2.1 billion record for domestic box office. By the way, that’s a record set in December 2009, which Universal will break in August.

Finally, while the main reason projections for the movie were low was that “it had no stars,” that wasn’t really true.  I understand why people would say that (since the only actor in the movie with any reputation to speak of was Paul Giamatti, and he’s not exactly your classic leading man), but it missed the point.  The stars of the movie were the characters in the story; it wasn’t the name value of the actors but their ability to bring the characters to life that mattered (as is the case most of the time).  N.W.A has been defunct for a long time, but Dr. Dre and Ice Cube still have more pull than most movie stars.  As long as they were behind it and the movie told the story in a compelling way, it had all the star power it needed.  Having Ice Cube’s son playing him only reinforced that.

While it was mildly amusing watching the commentary and analysis of SOC‘s success, I was more interested in how little controversy there was.  I’ve never been a rap fan, but N.W.A was a mammoth cultural presence in my high-school years.  I remember the fury they caused, and I remember articles over the years asserting that gangsta rap was celebrating and even inciting violence against the police.  I don’t know if those articles were correct or not, but I was surprised that when N.W.A came back in some sense with this movie, I didn’t see the opposition come roaring back along with it.  Apart from a personal essay by Dee Barnes, who was brutally assaulted by Dr. Dre in 1991, the dominant cultural response seemed to be nostalgia.

This is unfortunate, because N.W.A shouldn’t be uncritically celebrated.Read more

How’s that “changing Washington” thing working?

Judging by Gov. Christie’s experience in New Jersey, not so well. As you may have heard, the state’s Race to the Top application was disqualified, costing the state some $400 million, “because some clerk in Trenton turned in the wrong Excel spreadsheet”; out of a thousand-plus-page application, one page was incorrectly submitted, so the U.S. Department of Education threw out the whole thing. As you can probably imagine, the governor was not at all happy.

Was the administration being petty, seizing an excuse to deny funding to a political opponent? Maybe; and then again, maybe not. After all, one should never ascribe to malice what can be explained perfectly well by incompetence. Either way, though, this is exactly the sort of thing that Barack Obama promised us his administration would not be about. I don’t blame him for not keeping his promise to change Washington—it was beyond human capability; but I don’t think it speaks well of him that he made it, or of so many others that they actually believed it. And if preventing these sorts of occurrences is too much to ask, one would think they could at least show some sort of commitment to setting them right. (Unless, just maybe, they actually are playing petty politics.)

It should be noted that the DoE did have one rejoinder to Gov. Christie: they released a video proving that NJ state education commissioner Bret Schundler had not in fact verbally given them the correct information. When the governor found out that his education commissioner had lied to him, he fired Schundler after all.

Would Browncoats still have been brown in the ’80s?

This went by a while ago, but I decided I couldn’t resist posting it; as it happens, I love the real title sequence for Firefly, but this ’80s-style version from the folks at i09 is a lot of fun, too; and while they only get two cheers as a result of leaving out Simon (and no, I don’t buy the excuse), they get most of the third one back for the way they fixed that.

It’s a shame Fox mishandled the show so badly; but I haven’t given up hope. You can knock a Browncoat down . . . but keeping one down is quite another matter.

This is purely delightful

I don’t know if they were inspired by the Sound of Music stunt last year at Antwerp’s Central Station, but a couple months ago, the Opera Company of Philadelphia performed “Brindisi” from Verdi’s La Traviata in the Reading Terminal Market, during their Italian Festival. Just watch, this is too good for words:

Criminalizing evangelism?

You’ve probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here’s the video they took (though I’m not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

If you want to see a Muslim response to this, Allahpundit posted one, along with the above video; having watched it, I’d have to say he’s being exceedingly generous in calling that attempt at a response “singularly lame,” since it’s a collection of repeated assertions supported by non sequiturs and a brief video clip of dubious provenance and import.

I have to say, I have two reactions to this. On the one hand, from a constitutional point of view, I find this very troubling; while I certainly don’t support the “separation of church and state” read as government-mandated secularism, I’m also no believer in theocratic government—and in particular, the idea of agents of government aiding and abetting the de facto imposition of shari’a law in an American community is deeply problematic. Muslims are as welcome in America as anyone else—and they have to play by the rules, same as anyone else, that’s the deal. Our history has well established that “separate but equal” isn’t, that different rules for different groups is wrong, no matter the reason; Muslims have no more right to be insulated from the discord, dissent, and disagreement of a democratic society than anyone else. If they’re going to argue that their faith demands otherwise—well, in that case, we have a problem.

Considered as a case of Christian witness, though, I find this video very troubling in a different way. Though the professed purpose of the folks who made it is to share the gospel with Muslims, nothing about their actions actually seems to support that purpose aside from their copies of the Gospel of John. Rather, their actions in this case seem designed to test the Dearborn police; I’m not sure it’s necessarily fair to say they were trying to provoke a confrontation, but it certainly looks like they were trying to see if they would get one, and indeed that they were expecting to. From their comments during the video, and especially from the final section complaining about all the intersections where they aren’t allowed to hand out copies of the Gospel, it sure sounds like their real concern is not bearing gospel witness to Muslims, but the infringement on their constitutional rights.

Which I don’t deny, either as a real issue or as a fair complaint; as I say, I think there’s reason for real concern here. If in fact we’re starting to see Muslim communities in this country effectively seceding from the larger political and social structure, as many European countries have seen, that’s bad news. But it does make the whole thing more than a little disingenuous, in my judgment. It makes this supposed attempt at evangelism look like, not a true expression of Christian discipleship and witness, but a calculated attempt to use Christian practices to make a political statement—and that, as someone has said, is a kettle of fish of a different color.

The truth is that the life of Christian discipleship isn’t based on rights; as I’ve said elsewhere, in the Bible, “right” isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective. Christian doctrine certainly provided and provides the foundation and root for the political concept of human rights, and in its political implications, it requires us to stand up and defend the rights of others; but our contemporary insistence on standing on our own rights and insisting on our own rights against others is nowhere to be found in Scripture, and especially not in the example of Jesus. I can’t presume to judge the hearts of David Wood and the folks with him in that video, but from what I can see of his judgment, it’s pretty poor, and it looks to me like their priorities are out of whack.

In my judgment, what the folks in that video are actually advocating and bearing witness to is not the gospel, regardless of the texts they were holding; they showed none of the humility or willingness to meekly accept suffering for the gospel which Paul holds up as essential in Philippians 2, and most of what they had to say was about themselves. Rather, they were to all intents and purposes serving as advocates and defenders of a particular political and cultural position. In that role, it appears to me they succeeded, judging by the e-mails and blog posts I’ve seen. As evangelists . . . well, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform (just read the book of Jonah), and I’m not going to say what his Holy Spirit can and can’t use—but the whole affair seems a lot more likely to turn the hearts of Muslims against Christianity than toward Christ. And shouldn’t that really be the bottom line?

Gov. Straight Talk is at it again

I hope he’s not even thinking of jumping into the coming presidential campaign; New Jersey needs him too badly, and he really needs to have a successful first term and win re-election before he has enough reason to be thinking about a run for the White House. But if he keeps this up, with a little luck, he could definitely make that run and win. For now, it’s just really good to have someone on the national political scene willing to tell people the home truths they don’t want to have to hear; there are very, very few of those, and especially few who do it as well as Gov. Christie.

Can he yodel?

I’ve been thinking about the President’s Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:

That wasn’t surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was.  Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he’s less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his “Top of the Ticket” blog:

The first two-thirds of the president’s remarks read just fine . . .

But watching the president and hearing him was a little creepy; that early portion of the address was robotic, lacked real energy, enthusiasm. And worst of all specifics. He was virtually detail-less. . . .

Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I’m going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS’ Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning—1,200 fleeting seconds—to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster.

Then, he’s got an important lunch with Joe “I Witnessed the World Cup’s First Tie” Biden. . . .

President Obama has said he doesn’t sense an appetite to address something as large as the illegal immigrant issue this year. But suddenly—watch the left hand over here because he wants you to not focus on how long it’s taken him to take charge of the spill—he thinks there’s a compelling need to spend a motorcade full of moola that the federal government doesn’t have in order to change the country’s energy habits.

And we’ve gotta start that right now because of an underwater leaking pipe 40 miles off Louisiana that we haven’t plugged and don’t really understand how it broke in the first place. So let’s do the electric car thing and build more windmills now.

And if, by chance, the nation’s politicians end up fighting over an energy plan during the next five months until the voting, maybe the politically damaging healthcare regrets and hidden costs will drown in all the words like so many thousands of seabirds in all the gulf’s still-surging oil.

Of course, no one reasonable expects the President to know how to fix the blowout. Gov. Palin isn’t criticizing him for that, because she doesn’t know how to fix it either. The problem is, we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation that nobody knows how to fix. Which means, you have to mitigate the problem, and it’s there that people do have ideas and that executive leadership is needed from the White House to enable the people who have the ideas and the equipment and the experience to go to work to fix what can be fixed—and it’s there that Barack Obama and his administration are not only falling down on the job, but in fact are being actively counterproductive; significant, experienced help was offered—and rejected.

I realize that most Americans don’t take the Dutch all that seriously (those of us who grew up around their American descendants don’t make that mistake, however), but as James Joyner pointed out,

As to the fact that the Netherlands government has a plan for this and we don’t, I’m not terribly surprised. It’s a small, maritime and riverine country surrounded with oil drilling.

What’s more, the offer came through official channels, via the Netherlands’ consul general in Houston, which means it should have been treated far more seriously and respectfully, and not just for environmental reasons:

You’d sure think taking advantage of an ally’s offer of assistance would have made sense, not only in terms of the spill itself but for building better relations with Europe. Given the scale of our economies, it’s rare that the Netherlands can bail us out. Why not let them when the opportunity arises?

Why not let them? Well, if you’re thinking like a Chicago Democrat, it makes perfect sense:

What about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn’t and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren’t really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It’s the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

What’s more important than getting the mess cleaned up? Making sure that if there’s any spending to be done, it’s your supporters who get the money. And, of course, making sure that whatever else happens, all federal laws and regulations are strictly enforced—don’t want to set any precedents for deregulation, now, do we?

Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf’s surface. Can’t do that until we see if they’ve got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: “The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport.”

Taken all in all, it’s no wonder that the best thing the President can find to do about this disaster is . . . blame Congress. To be sure, he was trying to blame just Republicans; but you might have thought he would have realized a) that all such comments would do is make voters more hostile to Congress in general, and thus more likely to vote against their current federal representatives, and b) that his own party currently controls Congress, and thus would be more likely to be hurt by the effects of his comments.

Were I a Democrat, I don’t think I’d be at all pleased with the way the President has shown in this situation. Since I’m not, I’ll just say that more and more, he’s reminding me of this guy: