In the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the sleeper hit of the year, the mother of the bride-to-be explains why she loves America, because they don't tell you what to eat, where to live or where to go to school. Compared to the Greek village of her youthserially occupied by Nazis, communist partisans and local but ineffective irregularsAmerica is paradise. And the film is an unexpected hit because it depicts the accurate story of the old-fashioned melting pot reality of immigration in stark contrast to the current politically correct policy in which new arrivals are instructed to maintain their own languages and customs in public commerce because, well, we don't think much of ourselves anymore. After 35 years of incessant New Left propaganda that sees America as an imperialist and cruel tyranny created by white males in the 18th century who practiced slavery, oppressed women, grew the evil weed tobacco, and wiped out the Indians, good old American self-esteem is vanishing. Greek Wedding goes against the perceived doctrinal grain by depicting the way it is (or should be) for immigrant Americans and the hell with the policy wonks, multicultural activists and post-modern professors who are embarrassed by America.
But the film is an underground hit, not a mainstream and accepted view and cannot reverse by itself Americas free-fall into self-doubt. We are in this downward spiral because our intellectual community and our authoritarian mass media have fallen for the idea that institutions, not people, are the agency for dictating the terms of our lives. Of these institutions, government grabs the lions share of the tyranny, but big business, universities, the teacher unions, big banks, credit card cartels, credit reporting agencies, internet control agencies (add your choice here) are weighing down on our privacy and self-respect. We are being told what to eat, where to live and where to go to school. The weight of the state and its compatriot institutions are making it hard to breathe.
Over in Russia, where breathing was regulated for 70 long years under state enforced socialism, the volunteer human rights group Memorial has uncovered a mass grave where they believe 30,000 bodies will be found, victims of one of Stalins minor purges during the late 1930s. They have a long way to go to locate all the victims as it is now agreed by even the pro-Soviet Left that 20 million souls were murdered, executed or sent to gulags to die from torture and the elements in the Bolshevik era from 1917 until Stalins death in 1953.
Yet, until the total meltdown of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, many Western intellectuals and political activists defended and admired the USSR and believed its propaganda while ignoring the grisly facts right before their noses. Even today, if you interviewed the tenured professors at the top liberal arts campuses you would discover that Marxism, the deadly doctrine that spawned the most murderous regime in human history, is not only alive and well but espoused in classrooms as the most desirable of political systems. The Soviets, they say, just didn't do it right.
This flummery has been going on in intellectual, literary and media circles in the West since the 1930s when the Russians arranged tours of the Soviet Union for writers and activists. As late as 1986, one of my writers at the old Spectator went over as a guest of Izvestia, the magazine edition of the official Pravda propaganda apparatus in Moscow. He came back and wrote the same distorted depiction of a happy collectivist state on the verge of a workers paradise as did Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others in 1935. This nave madness has tainted the intelligentsia of the West, leading to the conclusion that all of our alleged great writers need to be re-taught in the light of the distortions now revealedthat they were victims or knowing accomplices in the propaganda that kept the Soviet Union alive and well and willing and able to murder millions of their own innocent citizens. In the West, although we havent resorted to political executions and prison camps, the influence of these defenders of Soviet socialism over the years has created a national policy mind-set that makes the freedom felt by the Greek mother in the film a sham.
Koba the Dread
Just in time, British novelist and member in good standing of the Western intellectual establishment Martin Amis, son of another revered UK writer and thinker Kingsley Amis, has had enough and has written a potent attack on his fellow traveling literary political colleagues, most especially Christopher Hitchens, the unkempt and self-proclaimed Trotskyist Brit who peddles his wares in New York City and on US and UK TV talk shows. Amis, following in the courageous footsteps of writer Robert Conquest (who excoriated the Soviet Union in print as early as the 1970s but was not a member of the intellectual fellow-traveling society), lays it out in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (TalkMiramaxBooks). Koba was Stalins nickname as a kid, but the book is about Stalin the adult tyrant, and is a must-read for those who want to get to the bottom of how we in the US are allowing our privacy to be confiscated by Soviet-style omnipotent and inaccessible government, educational, media and business bureaucracies that trivialize the sanctity of the individual.
Amis depicts the reality of life in the Soviet State that eerily fits our society in 2002 and would make the Greek mother cry. For example, apropos of the current encroachment of the state in our everyday lives: Stalin (according to one of his henchmen) owned the physical spaces of Russia. But he wanted the mental spaces too. He wanted to fan out into every mind. Remind you of speech codes and the curtailment of free expression enforced today? Do you have the feeling in America that youd better watch what you say? Do you find that you are just a number in the interlocking vastness of the state?
Or this from Soviet-era essayist Vasily Grossman: He could feel quite tangibly the difference in weight between the fragile human body and the colossus of the State. He could feel the States bright eyes gazing into his face; any moment now the State would crash down on him; there would be a crack, a squealand he would be gone.
We should heed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns words about the Russians under the Soviet Union and apply it now: We didn't love freedom enoughWe purely and simply deserved everything that came after.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
One example of the surreal world created by race politics, white liberal guilt and the abandonment of factual discourse in America happened in Wilmington where Stephanie Bell, a white teacher at Williams Elementary School, used the word niggardly in class only to find herself sent off to the gulag by her principal who took the side of an irate black mother whose child objected to the use of the word. Neither the mother nor the student nor apparently the principal knew that the word is not a racial slur. Yet the teacher was ordered by the North Carolina Association of Educators union not to make a fuss over her punishment, which included a written apology to the mother, sensitivity training, and agreeing not use the word again in class. Stalin relied on downward selection to get his way and would approve of the punishment. The more the state discredits and denigrates intelligent people, the better the opportunity to create a world of mediocrity in which the ignorant prevail as pawns of the state. Stephanie Bell is a modern political prisoner, but a political prisoner nonetheless.
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Jim Leutze is retiring in two years after a truly distinguished career. Now head of the fast-rising UNC-Wilmington, Leutze previously was president of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia after being turned down for the Chancellors job at Chapel Hill where he was chairman of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense, the new sensitized name for ROTC on liberal arts campuses. Leutze, whose classes were always full, refused to ignore the facts in teaching history and went against the grain of the post-modern professorate who see history as a long series of slights against the non-white world. Later, he was the choice to become president of the UNC system but lost out to Molly Broad, a last-minute choice by the Board of Governors after capitulating to pressure from female Board members who insisted that a woman get the jobwhether qualified or not. Jim Leutze, who refused to lower his standards to accommodate the prevailing multicultural wind, is one of the last sane voices in North Carolina academe. He will be missed.
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The New Republic, the Washington-based Bible for Democrats, visited US Senate nominee Erskine Bowles in the hustings before the primary and came away unsure if he can beat Liddy Dole since he maintains that he is not a politician. However, Bowles is looking more and more like one every day. If he can present himself as a moderate to conservative Democrat, a once-proud tradition in this state, and promise not to be another whipping boy for Tom Daschles one-vote politburo in the Senate, he can win. Bowles worked both sides of he aisle to clean up the corrupt Small Business Administration and later, as chief of state to Bill Clinton, used bipartisan diplomacy to balance the federal budgetboth sensible yet perceived to be conservative achievements. If he ignores these achievements while communicating with voters, hell be labeled one of Daschles boys and Liddy wins. This is, after all, Jesses seat.