In case you haven't seen it already, Will Warren has new gems at Unremitting Verse, including a hilarious piscine send-up of My Funny Valentine.
Looks like the Indepedent Women's Forum is fighting back against the gender feminist take-over of Saint Valentine's on campus, with an ad urging women to Take Back the Date! and showing a dejected cupid outside of the Vagina Monologues. This is the second ad á la Horowitz that the IWF has offered up to campus newspapers. This one fared better; it was accepted immediately by many Ivy-league schools, and only Penn State expressed concern it "might be too inflammatory" and ³might upset some groups on campus.² But when faced with the prospect of bad press coverage, they finally decided to run it.
Meanwhile, Valentine's Day is hated, not just by radical feminists, but by extremists of many kinds. In India, militant Hindus vehemently protested Valentine's Day, burning greeting cards in the street. And our friends the Saudis have officially banned Valentine's Day this year, declaring it to be a "worthless holiday." I guess its feminist uses as a means to fight against patriarchal oppression are lost on them. Still, there is an underground market for Valentines-- amor vincent omnia.
Just in time for the big day comes news that expensive dark chocolate is good for you. Not only does it contain disease-fighting antioxidants, but its fat is monounsaturated, like olive oil. The current thought is that such fats are necessary for good health (in moderation) because they lower levels of bad cholesterol. Pass me the bonbons!
Speaking of Ms. Ensler, I saw the Vagina Monologues performed about a year ago, and found it to be, well, quite difficult to describe adequately. It was kind of like a pudenda pep-rally, where that-of-which-one-ought-to-be-ashamed was very loudly celebrated. (Imagine yourself in a theatre filled with well-dressed women of all ages, though tending towards the mature, chanting proudly, "Cunt! Cunt!") The mostly feminine crowd was rather enthused, to say the least. Parts of the play are funny and sad, but I have to agree with Erik Tarloff that is basically a piece of feminist agitprop without much literary merit. Not that literary merit is often to be discovered in the contemporary theatre, but the play is amazingly over-rated, mainly by people who love it before they even see it. It has a single positive male character and many male rapists. It also depicts a female molester of a thirteen-year-old girl in glowing terms, with her victim later describing the act as "a good rape." Interestingly enough, this character ends up as a bag lady, but the audience must draw conclusions on its own.
Last I checked, this was still America, of course, and Ms. Ensler has every right to espouse whatever sexist views she wishes. I do take issue with her co-option of Valentine's Day for radical feminism, though. I love Valentine's, which to me represents so many of the lovely things in life: champagne, a new dress, dinner on the town, roses, chocolate, and, but, of course, l'amour. Can it be that the "V-Day" enthusiasts have had a few, shall we say, uneventful Valentine's Days and so they now would rather just sit around and moan about their oppression instead? That's a cruel stereotype of feminists, but their anti-romance stance really invites it. You have to wonder if Ensler and her coven actively brainstorm ways to give the impression that they are man-hating harpies. I guess I would be satisfied, if they will just please promise to give Valentine's Day back in 2005, once the lion lays down with the ewe. Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic now.
Terrific piece by Rich Lowry on the distortions and hypocrisy of the campaign-finance muckrakers:
All this really amounts to what campaign-finance reformers call "mud slinging." That's why I can't understand why McCainiacs and other campaign-finance reformers say they want to raise the level of public discourse, when they so relentlessly run it down by imputing corrupt motives to everyone in Washington.
The Times had a profile over the weekend of the mind-boggling Eve Ensler, anti-war activist and prize-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, who has recently decided that violence towards women should be eliminated by 2005. Why not 2004, I wonder? I mean, the sooner the better, right? Perhaps she felt that that shooting for 2004 would be, well, too unrealistic. No sense in attempting the impossible, I guess. Actually, I have no idea what she can be thinking.
Personally, I abhor the idea of violence done to any person, male or female, who is not a terrorist of some sort. And it seems that in this country, at least, rape and domestic violence are decreasing. But human nature is not going to change anytime soon, and humans will continue to do evil and violent things to one another in 2005 and for millennia to come. Even if we eliminated men, which would no doubt be a ghastly and violent ordeal, there would still be domestic violence among lesbians. Woman-on-woman violence is a real problem. Why? Because women are human beings capable of bizarre jealousy and insane rage, just like men. In fact, studies have shown that women tend to be just as violent to their partners as men. What makes male-on-female violence more deadly is the size differential.
The race between Tony Sanchez and former Attorney General Dan Morales for the Democratic nomination is getting interesting. One issue has been affirmative action, which Morales opposes. Sanchez has accused Morales of having taken advantage of preferences himself, while trying to prevent others from following him. Now Morales has fired back that race cannot be the sole issue that is considered:
I guess one of the things that makes this point most clearly . . . in my visits and conversations with voters is that the policy which Mr. Sanchez pursues would result in a situation where his children, the children of a billionaire, would receive an automatic preference above the children of a police officer or a laborer or public school teacher in Gilmer, Texas, or Longview, Texas, who happens to be Anglo.
This is a point that needs to be made more often, though I don't know how well it will sit with "the base."
Bjorn Lomborg has a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of the Scientific American hitpiece against him on his website. It's funny that they didn't even give him a chance to respond to their attacks and even demanded that he remove their quotes from his response.
First, they weren't giving the money to any victims and threatened to spend some of it on a new phone system. Now they're passing it out wily-nilly and regardless of need.
Is he a Marine first and a Somali warlord second, or the other way around? Hussein Farrah Aidid was a LA suburbanite and Marine reservists before his father's death. Now he carries on the familiy business in exile in Ethiopia. Does he retain any loyalty to America? His former Marine chums think so, but time will tell.