One of my favorite pieces of music. An exquisite and moving song about a love gone awry due to bad timing. Beautiful melody, lyrics, and music capped by Mark Knopfler's mumbled croaking voice which suits the song. Bracketed by a perfect piano intro and Knopfler's sparse but evocative endpiece, finger-picked on his steel guitar.
This 2006 live performance is far superior to the studio version recorded in 1981. The video says it is Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris but that is incorrect. It is from a tour the two of them did together, but only Knopfler appears on this.
You and me, babe, how about it?
A lovestruck Romeo sang the streets a serenade Laying everybody low with a love song that he made Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade Says something like, "You and me, babe, how about it?"
Juliet says, "Hey, it's Romeo, you nearly gave me a heart attack" He's underneath the window, she's singing, "Hey, la, my boyfriend's back You shouldn't come around here singing up at people like that Anyway, what you gonna do about it?"
"Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start And I bet, and you exploded into my heart And I forget, I forget the movie song When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?"
Come up on different streets, they both were streets of shame Both dirty, both mean, yes, and the dream was just the same And I dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?
When you can fall for chains of silver you can fall for chains of gold You can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah Now you just say "Oh, Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him"
"Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry You said 'I love you like the stars above, I'll love you 'til I die' There's a place for us, you know the movie song When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?"
I can't do the talks like they talk on the TV And I can't do a love song like the way it's meant to be I can't do everything but I'll do anything for you I can't do anything except be in love with you
And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be All I do is keep the beat, the bad company All I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme Julie, I'd do the stars with you any time
"Juliet, when we made love you used to cry You said 'I love you like the stars above, I'll love you 'til I die' There's a place for us you know the movie song When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?"
And a lovestruck Romeo, he sang the streets a serenade Laying everybody low with a love song that he made Find a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade He says something like, "You and me, babe, how about it?"
While we usually think of 1453 as the date of the final demise of Rome with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, it was on this date in 1475 the last remnant of the Roman world was extinguished. Strangely enough it was on the Crimean Peninsula on the north side of the Black Sea.
Starting in the Sixth Century BC, Greek settlements were established on the south side of the Crimea. The Roman Republic came into contact with the Greek city-states in the First Century BC, and from that time until the mid-4th Century AD, Rome either occupied or treated the Crimean cities as allies. After a two century interruption when nomadic warriors from the steppes overran the peninsula, the Byzantines reestablished Roman authority in the late Sixth Century AD. Over the next six centuries the Eastern Roman Empire indirectly or directly, as a province, ruled the area.
When the Fourth Crusade was diverted from the Holy Land and instead captured Constantinople in 1204, the Byzantine remnants splintered in three; the Empire of Nicea on the eastern shore of the Sea of Marmara, which recaptured Constantinople in 1261, the Despotate of Epirus in northern Greece, and the Empire of Trebizond, on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea. Trebizond extended its rule to the Crimea.
(Empire of Trebizond at its maximum extent)
During the 14th and early 15th centuries the Eastern Roman Empire with its capital of Constantinople was steadily squeezed by the rising power of the Ottomans until finally, in 1453, Constantinople fell. By 1461 the last surviving parts of the Empire, located in Greece, had also fallen. That same year, Trebizond also surrendered to the Ottomans. All that was left of the Roman world was the tiny principality of Theodoro on the Crimea, adjacent to the Crimean colonies of Genoa.
The principality was also known as Gothia, because of the presence of a large Hellenized Gothic population. Wikipedia describes the principality as, "a mixture of Greeks, Crimean Goths, Alans, Circassians, Bulgars, Cumans, Kipchaks, and other ethnic groups, most of whom were adherents to Orthodox Christianity and Hellenized. The principality's official language was Greek." It goes on to tell us:
Various cultural influences can be traced in Gothia: its
architecture and Christian wall paintings were essentially Byzantine,
although some of its fortresses also display a local as well as Genoese
character. Inscribed marble slabs found in the region were decorated
with a mixture of Byzantine, Italian, and Tatar decorative elements.
In 1475, the Ottomans decided it was time to put an end to the principality and reduced the territory, capturing its capitol, Theodoro (modern Mangup) on December 5.
1,145 years after the founding of Constantinople, Rome was no more.
On November 10, Bari Weiss delivered the Barbara K Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society. Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, formerly worked at the New York Times until being driven out for dissenting from some tenets of the Equity Faith. Most of her views remain those of a traditional progressive and I can't imagine that at the start of 2020 she would ever have thought she'd be giving this lecture to this audience.
Some excerpts, beginning with her recitation of academic reaction to the Hamas attacks in which she correctly identifies the underlying cause as more than just traditional antisemitism.
What could possibly explain this?
The easy answer is that the human beings who
were slaughtered on October 7 were Jews. And that antisemitism is the
world’s oldest hatred. And that in every generation someone rises up to
kill us. “They tried to wipe us out, they failed, let’s eat” as the old
Jewish joke goes.
But that is not the whole answer. Because the proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom.
When antisemitism moves from the shameful
fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about
Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or
the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that
the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.
It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one
that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11,
educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of
civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.
It was twenty years ago when I began to
encounter the ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters.
It was twenty years ago, when I was a college student, that I started
writing about a nameless, then-niche worldview that seemed to contradict
everything I had been taught since I was a child.
At first, things like postmodernism and
postcolonialism and postnationalism seemed like wordplay and
intellectual games—little puzzles to see how you could “deconstruct”
just about anything. What I came to see over time was that it wasn’t
going to remain an academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less
than the deconstruction of our civilization from within.
Over the past two decades, I saw this inverted worldview swallow all of
the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with
the universities. Then it moved beyond the quad to cultural
institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well
as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. It’s taken root
at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and our
elementary schools.
It seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.
It replaces basic ideas of good and evil
with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It
replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with
identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The
rule of law with the fury of the mob.
People were to be given authority in this
new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments,
or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the
disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical
ideologues.
If you want to understand how it could be
that the editor of the Harvard Law Review could physically intimidate a
Jewish student or how a public defender in Manhattan recently spent her
evening tearing down posters of kidnapped children, it is because they
believe it is just.
Their moral calculus is as crude as you can
imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and
“colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of
color, so they are good. No, it doesn’t matter that most Israelis are
“people of color.”
That baby? He is a colonizer first and a
baby second. That woman raped to death? Shame it had to come to that,
but she is a white oppressor.
In recognizing allies, I’ll be an example. I am a gay woman who is
moderately pro-choice. I know there are some in this room who do not
believe my marriage should have been legal.
I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my
allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile,
external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies
are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good.
That human beings—not cultures—are created equal and that saying so is
essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values
are worth fighting for—and that is the priority of the day.
Time to defend our values—the values that
have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history
of the world—without hesitation or apology.
The leftist intellectual Sidney Hook, who
broke with the Communists, and called his memoir Out of Step, used to
implore those around him to “always answer an accusation or a charge” to
not let falsehood stand unchallenged.
We have let far too much go unchallenged. Too many lies have spread in the face of inaction as a result of fear or politesse.
No more.
Do not bite your tongue. Do not tremble. Do
not go along with little lies. Speak up. Break the wall of lies. Let
nothing go unchallenged.
Our enemies’ failure is not assured and
there is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry. We are the last line of
defense. Our civilization depends on us.
There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails.
So let’s get up. Get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of—and for—our lives.
Yesterday the Louis D Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans For Fairness In Education (and its individual members, including two Berkeley Law School professors) filed a lawsuit in Federal Court against the University of California Berkeley, Berkeley Law School, and the Regents of the University of California. The complaint alleges the defendants are in violations of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and asks the Court to issue injunctions requiring the University to enforce its own policies regarding discrimination and to end the hostile environment towards Jews on the Berkeley campus.
I can't opine on the legal merits but there are three aspects that caught my eye:
First is the nature of the allegations, many of which have been previously reported:
In spite of the recognition of anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, no fewer than 23 Berkeley Law student organizations have enacted policies to discriminate against and exclude Jewish students, faculty, and scholars. For example: • To be a member of Women of Berkeley Law, the Queer Caucus at Berkeley, or the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Jewish students must accede to the groups’ support of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to dismantle the modern State of Israel; • In order to volunteer to provide pro bono legal services through a number of Berkeley Law Legal Services organizations, Jewish students must undergo a “Palestine 101” training program that emphasizes the illegitimacy of the State of Israel; • And to speak to any of these student organizations, invited speakers must first repudiate Zionism under a bylaw that prohibits speakers who hold Zionist views (the “Exclusionary Bylaw”). In fact, the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice, goes one step further, prohibiting Zionists not only from speaking to its members but from publishing in its pages.
Second, the plaintiffs seek to use the University's own policies regarding discrimination by student organizations. Interestingly, policies like this have been used at several academic institutions by leftists against Christian student religious groups, to force them to admit non-Christians to membership.
Third, and more significantly, is that the student organizations at the heart of the complaint because of their actions are not defendants in the lawsuit. An argument they would surely raise if they were defendants (and they might seek to intervene as amici) is that the complaint improperly conflates Zionism with Judaism. Rhetorically, they will ask if they would be forced to admit or engage with white supremacists and, if not, why should they be forced to do this with Zionists who are just another type of supremacist? And here's where things get tricky with definitions. Remember that white people, including Jews, are, by definition, white supremacists. One doesn't have to be George Wallace, Bull Connor, or David Duke to be a racist or white supremacist if you are white. Unless you are actively antiracist you are a racist. To be antiracist you must do the equivalent of what Jewish students are being asked at Berkeley - support the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement which calls for the dismantling of Israel. As with Jews, these organizations will not engage with whites unless they are antiracist and support all the precepts of DEI; nuance and distinguishing between good and bad arguments and assertions is not allowed and if you persist you will be cast into the darkness.
It will be interesting to see how the arguments go around equating Jews with Zionism. You can read the argument by the plaintiffs in the complaint. We are already seeing how the defendants may respond with the pathetic Law School Dean, Erwin Chermerinsky who just two weeks ago wrote of his recent experiences with antisemitism at the Law School:
Two weeks ago, at a town hall, a
student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school
would be “to get rid of the Zionists.” I have heard several times that I
have been called “part of a Zionist conspiracy,” which echoes of
antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.
Chermerinsky also denounced the very actions taken by the student organizations referenced in the complaint. But now he tells us the complaint, "paints a picture of the law school that is stunningly inaccurate". For more on the Dean read Equality Or Equity: Which Side Are You On?
As a practical matter, that the anti-Zionism positions are an effective ban on most Jewish students participating in the organizations and creating a hostile law school environment is clear; what the legal implications are less so.
Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, what is happening at Berkeley Law School is not much different from what is occurring at many American law schools at which traditions of equal protection under the law, due process, and individual constitutional protections are being subordinated to the new creed of DEI. A generation of lawyers is being trained to regard the constitution as racist trash, and instructed on how to effectively dismantle it.
Last week the Jewish Insider carried an article about a bipartisan group of Congressional lawmakers calling for additional funding to combat antisemitism. Here are the key components:
The letter specifically calls for funding in excess of the
administration’s $360 million request for the Nonprofit Security Grant
Program, which funds security improvements at religious institutions,
and in excess of its $178 million request for the Department of
Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which helps enforce protections for
Jewish students on campus.
The lawmakers also offered support for funding for K-12 Holocaust and
antisemitism education programs, Department of Justice hate crimes
grants and the offices of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat
Antisemitism and the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues at the
Department of State.
Comments on the specifics and then on the problem with the overall approach:
I support security improvements at religious institutions, but how, and to whom, will those funds be controlled and distributed?
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is a disgrace and should be defunded. It is fully captured by DEI and will give the minimum lip service to antisemitism needed to keep Congress off its back.
Before more funding for K-12 Holocaust and antisemitism education programs, shouldn't we first do a review of what's apparently gone wrong with decades of Holocaust education in our schools? Throwing more money to support something that has failed is not a solution.
The real issue is that this particular coalition will never recognize the underlying problem - DEI in all its guises. Antisemitism is integral to the ideology of DEI, but because DEI is also an assault on whiteness it is untouchable for many politicians. Until that is recognized any monies thrown towards the educational establishment and the federal bureaucrats supporting it will be wasted or, even worse, used to support DEI (never underestimate the wiliness of bureaucrats).(1) This proposal is the type of thinking that Otter in Animal House called "a really futile and stupid gesture".
(1) I continue to be surprised at the lack of curiosity by the elite institutions and large municipalities where we've seen the worst eruptions of support for Hamas about what might have prompted this or, as old-fashioned liberal Michael Schermer recently wrote, "Why are the BLM supporters, climate extremists, academic feminists, and trans activists so quick to side with Hamas? Why are those who champion women’s reproductive rights so quick to align themselves with a Hamas-controlled Gaza where women lack the right to drive, let alone get an abortion?"
I've written of this 1994 Paul Newman film before, set at Thanksgiving in a declining small town in upstate New York. My friend Titus Techera, who did an American Cinema Foundation podcast on the movie, has now published a piece in the Washington Free Beacon. Some excerpts which capture the essence of the film:
Thanksgiving is a very American holiday, a family holiday, but people
don’t go to church much these days, so it’s not exactly about faith.
It’s easier to see Thanksgiving clearly if you look at a character like
Sully, who seems to have nothing for which to give thanks, being a
loser. That’s what Nobody’s Fool is all about. Sully gets a
second chance, to grow old by becoming a grandfather and a father and
putting aside his suffering. All his anger turns to comedy, and he even
learns to laugh at himself a little. His small success is also America’s
success; it’s somehow about learning to deal with disappointment.
Newman makes the quaintness as well as the suffering of North Bath
come to life. What starts as a caricature of Tocqueville’s New England
township turns into a community, where people help each other, if
grudgingly, and gather for ceremonies like a funeral, though some of
them have to be let out of jail for the occasion. The bitterness of
losing jobs and hope for the future is sweetened by the families and
friendships we see tested and proved in the story. And Sully turns out
to be almost a leader, not just a malcontent.
