The Scrapbook had been looking forward to the commencement exercises at Catholic University on May 14, mostly because of the donnybrook that was expected to erupt over the choice of commencement speaker: GOP House speaker John Boehner.
A few days before the ceremonies at the Washington campus, over 80 academics (about 30 of them from Catholic) had distributed an open letter to Boehner declaring that his “voting record”—that is, his support for drastic budget cuts and a revamping of Medicare and Medicaid—was “among the worst in Congress” in terms of abiding by the Catholic church’s “most ancient moral teachings” that require the powerful to “preference the needs of the poor.” A major protest was expected, a sort of opposite number to the anti-abortion protests at Notre Dame when President Obama, a stalwart supporter of unrestricted abortion, spoke at the commencement exercises there in 2009.
Alas, the excitement was not to be. Although the National Catholic Reporter, the liberal Catholic daily, the Washington Post, and other media outlets had hyped the faculty letter for days, there were few signs of dissension. Indeed, Boehner’s speech was pointedly apolitical: mostly sentimental reminiscences of growing up as one of the 12 children of an Ohio tavern owner and playing high school football under Gerry Faust, who later coached for Notre Dame and the University of Akron, all punctuated by expected Boehner tears and unexpected quotations from Ernest Hemingway, Frank McCourt, and Genesis.
“When it’s all said and done, we are but mere mortals doing God’s work here on Earth,” Boehner concluded. “Put a better way—no, put the best way—remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The newly minted bachelor’s degree recipients gave him a standing ovation.
To be sure, The Scrapbook spotted one neon orange “Where’s the compassion?” sign, and the Washington Post interviewed a graduate with a neon green sign pinned to her chest that read, “Where’s the compassion, Mr. Boehner?” Like many of the professor-signatories of the letter to Boehner, she was in social work, a field whose graduates might have the most to lose if the House succeeds in cutting the number of federally subsidized “social work professionals” administering innumerable programs of public assistance.
The refreshing thing was that so few Catholic University undergraduates were buying the effort either to politicize their graduation or to turn Catholic social teaching into an arm of liberal-progressive policy. As for having the speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency, deliver their commencement address, they were clearly thrilled.
For Your Consideration
The killing of Osama bin Laden was such a fine achievement that there is probably enough credit to be spread far and wide. But Nikki Finke of the website Deadline Hollywood recently noted that America’s screenwriters deserve some recognition for doing their part in the war on terror. Finke cited a post-Abbottabad NPR interview with Lawrence Wright—author of works ranging from the serious-minded book The Looming Tower to the Bruce Willis popcorn flop The Siege.
In the sit-down with Terry Gross, Wright said,
[I]n 2006, the CIA came to me to write a scenario, in their words, about what would we do if we got bin Laden because this has been a subject of concern within the intelligence community. What if we did get him? How would we treat him? Where would we take him? Would it be better to take him alive or dead? And because I had written this movie, The Siege, and Hollywood had done a somewhat better job of connecting the dots about terrorism and the threat to America than the intelligence community. The CIA was reaching out to screenwriters, such as I had done, and I said, “Well, you know, I’m a reporter. I can’t go writing screenplays for the CIA. But I’ll tell you in the form of an op-ed for the New York Times what I think if we were able to catch bin Laden.”
Finke then added her own two cents:
Wright’s remarks also recall that October 2001 meeting between a group of two dozen Hollywood writers and directors asked to brainstorm with Pentagon advisers and officials over a three-day period about what could happen next following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Clearly that dialogue between the U.S. government and Hollywood continued long after.
Yup. Thanks to CIA interrogators, Navy SEALs, and Hollywood for a job well done.
FOIA For Me, But Not For Thee
We’ve been reading a particularly fatuous article in the May issue of Perspectives on History, the journal of the American Historical Association, titled “The Imperative of Public Participation.” The AHA’s president (Princeton professor Anthony Grafton) and executive director (Jim Grossman of the University of Chicago) self-indulgently write that “we historians ought to take seriously our role as mediators between the past and the present.” How seriously? By denying perfectly legal and reasonable requests for public information, for starters.
Last March the AHA’s incoming president, Wisconsin professor William Cronon, mediated between past and present by starting a blog attacking the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and criticizing Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s positions on public employees’ unions. Shortly afterward, the Wisconsin GOP issued an open records request for emails Cronon may have written from his university account pertaining to -anti-Walker rallies organized by state labor groups. There was the possibility that Cronon was violating the university’s policy by using public resources “to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum.”
That ringing in your ears is from all the cries of “McCarthyism!” that predictably ensued. Cronon became the lefty cause célèbre of the day. The usual suspects—James Fallows, Joshua Micah Marshall, Paul Krugman, John Judis—rallied to his defense. Never mind that, as long as university email accounts are covered under public records law, anyone has the right to file a request for Cronon’s emails at any time for any reason. For the academic and journalistic establishment, the Republican stunt was a classic example of political “intimidation.” No emails have been released. But Cronon does seem to have taken a hiatus from blogging—his last update was April 1.
The worst part of this dreary affair has been the flood of self-righteous, soppy op-eds like the Perspectives on History essay. “Saving the world is hard,” Grafton and Grossman write. “Even saving your own corner of the world is hard.” Gag us now. And while you’re at it, try explaining how denying open records requests furthers the cause of “open” debate.
[img nocaption float="center" width="480" height="640" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]2690[/img]
The Enemies List Expands
Last week the White House made waves by excluding the Boston Herald from the press pool when the president made a fundraising trip to Beantown, supposedly because the administration was angered by the paper’s allegedly insufficient coverage of the president’s trip.
Has any other recent president had so little respect for the press and the First Amendment as Barack Obama? During the 2008 campaign, amidst the Tony Rezko trial, Obama held a press conference to explain why a man eventually convicted of several counts of politically connected fraud and bribery gave him generous help buying a million-dollar home. The press erupted when he tried to walk off the stage prematurely. Obama’s response: “Come on now, I just answered, like, eight questions.”
Later in the campaign, the future president’s team set up a “truth squad” in Missouri made up of high-profile prosecutors and, incredibly, a sheriff supposedly to squelch any unfair rumors about Obama.
As president, he tried unsuccessfully to exclude Fox News from a press pool; he went a nearly unprecedented 308 days without a press conference; and he drastically limited the media at the signing of the Freedom of the Press Act.
But last year’s oil spill might have been the coup de grâce. The New Orleans Times-Picayune was prohibited from flying a plane over the spill to take photos. Florida senator Bill Nelson was denied permission to take a boat out to the spill with reporters and examine the catastrophe affecting his state. A CBS crew was also threatened with arrest on a public beach.
It’s obvious that the president has no respect for the Fourth Estate. So why do so many media outlets continue to fawn over him?
Music to Our Ears
The Second Spring: Words into Music, Music into Words is so original and sophisticated a project that it would strike us as entirely overambitious had it been undertaken by anyone but our own Joseph Bottum, the boundlessly creative editor of our Books & Arts pages from 1997 to 2005. A South Dakotan with a Ph.D. in philosophy, he is a writer of prose and verse of exceptional range. No wonder it occurred to him to enliven several original tunes and nearly two dozen recycled ones spanning seven centuries with lyrics of his own.
Some ballads, a lullaby, a pop song, patriotic songs, a country-western tune, a bouncy jig about all the sounds his house makes when he can’t sleep, a nostalgic air recalling being read to by his father—these are works whose variety is perhaps best captured in the contrast between two of the Christmas carols.
The first, partly inspired by an unusual 16th-century Christmas poem called “The Burning Babe” and set to the tune of an 1835 Southern hymn, emphasizes the human depravity that is the backdrop to Bethlehem: The heart of hatred has singed the child: / the scorching sneer at a stranger. / But he replies with a love gone wild: / the Torch of God in a manger.
Then there is “Joy Will Keep Us,” a carol set to an original melody by -Michael Linton. This is classic, ecstatic Christmas made fresh: Dreamers seek the source of dreaming. / Wise men search for wisdom’s throne. / Christ has shown the cause of meaning: / truth itself at last made known. / Nature’s wounds and weakness healed— / the grace of light in dark revealed.
And for anyone not hopelessly drunk on rhyme and music by page 131 of this volume, an appendix reprints Bottum’s controversial essay in the Atlantic, “The Soundtracking of America,” out of which this project grew. The Scrapbook is nothing short of dazzled.
Headline Heaven
It was quite a week for the pun and double-entendre crowd. Between Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on sexual assault charges and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that he fathered a love child, the headlines have been coming at us hard and fast.
But The Scrapbook is especially enamored of the New York Post. With regard to the Schwarzenegger affair, the paper proclaimed: “ ‘Conan’ the destroyer of his wife and kids’ lives,” “Hasta la vista baby!” and “ ‘Sperminator’ Won’t Be Back.”
Meanwhile, the Post has nicknamed Strauss-Kahn “Dirty Dom” and thrown up headlines like “French Diss,” “What Gaul! IMF Big’s Hissy Fit,” and “Frog Legs It!”
We salute the paper for its valiant effort—perhaps its finest work since it ran the Ike Turner obituary that read, “Ike, 76, beats Tina to death.”