Join the club

Movie buffs may enjoy this piece by Ken Russel.

"Known as the CURRICULUM"

Diane Ravitch explains the problem with "No child left behind:" neither money nor formal accountability nor federal mandates can produce good education.

Compassionate nihilism

Melanie Phillips does not exactly hit the right tone, but she is right that the figure in recently history that most resembles Obama is Tony Blair. Personally attractive, moderate in economic matters, hawkish in foreign policy, but ultimately the enabler of a disastrous progressivist ideology and a believer in the redemptive power of the state. She is also right in pointing out that Blair's (and, probably, Obama's) sentimental-technocratic progressivism reflects most of all a gaping cultural vacuum. Ultimately, politics must rely on some notion of what it means being a human being, and on some body of shared knowledge about how to live in society and educate young people. Otherwise, without any roots in the past, what is left is the editorial page of the New York Times: sentimental mush and moronic babbling about equality. In this vacuum, individual politicians can be personally intelligent and well-meaning, but (bad) ideas have their own power and produce their own effects.

Reality check

Shelby Steele on the Obama election and race.

To be filed under "What's Ahead?"

President-elect Obama is known to have taken a keen interest in education. So whom might he pick for Secretary of Education? Here are some possibilities.

Class divide

Christopher Caldwell makes an interesting summary of the presidential campaign.

Thinking straight

Maggie Gallagher explains the obvious. The fact it is not obvious is quite a bad sign regarding our collective capacity for rational judgement.

Fueled by imagination

Fouad Ajami is concerned about crowds. It is true that a crowd can be the most lonely place, and that lonely and alienated people provide the best material for politicians in search of a crowd.

Culturally divided

Howard Fineman is rightly astonished that the electoral race is not over. Indeed, given the mood of the country Obama should be 30 points ahead. The fact that he is not points to to something interesting: US elections are about conflicting ideologies (as opposed to conflicting interests) much more than they used to be. Many people don't vote for a political program, they vote based on cultural identification. And many people simply cannot identify culturally with Obama.

Disenfranchised

John Allen on US Catholics and the presidential elections.

Fantasy world

All the news coverage of sex addiction is of some interest for two related reasons: 1) it undermines one of most nefarious and pervasive ideologies that shape our culture, the theory of sexual liberation originally elaborated by Wilhelm Reich (Freudo-Marxism), 2) because just raising the question of "reality" awakens, implicitly but inevitably, a religious question.

Fingers crossed

Michael Gerson offers a typically balanced assessment of what would decide the success or failure of an Obama presidency in domestic policy. As for foreign policy, let us just hope that Sen. Biden is wrong.

Memento mori

Christopher Hitchens reviews Brideshead Revisited.

Enough

It is appalling that an intelligent Catholic layman like E.J. Dionne accepts as a the normal state of affairs that US catholics should be divided "conservative" and "progressive" groups. It is a sad truth that US Catholics think of themselves according to such external political categories. But do they realize this a symptom of complete cultural failure on their part? If you let the secular culture set the terms of the debate to the point that you end up dividing the Church exactly along the same political lines as the rest of society, that means you have not done your homework in developing an original Catholic political culture. It is a shame, really.

Rugby, the meaning of life?

What kind of parent would bring his/her paralyzed son to Switzerland?