Artistic martyrdom

Anthony Daniels admires the works of Frida Kahlo, but wonders whether her current popularity is a reaction to her work or whether she had been exalted for her victimhood and her politics.

And yet there is something unhealthy, of equal intensity, about the disproportionate adulation that Frida Kahlo has received over the last two or three decades. I think that what has happened is that people with no objective right to do so have equated her suffering with their own, and have appropriated her work as a symbolic representation of their own minor dissatisfactions and frustrations, victimhood being the present equivalent of beatitude.

They say, “I too have known a faithless or a worthless man; I too have suffered from persistent headaches, dymenorrhoea, or sciatica; therefore, Frida Kahlo has understood me, and I have understood Frida Kahlo. After all, I have suffered just like her. Moreover, like me, she was a moral person, which is to say that she had all the right attitudes; she was on the side of the oppressed, at least those who were not in the Gulag; she loved indigenes as a matter of principle; and she took part in the holy work of dissolving boundaries, the boundaries between sexes (or rather, genders) and between cultures.”

Goings on across the pond

You may have heard that the Bishops of the Church of England would like all British Christians to apologize for the war in Iraq. The Rev. Peter Mullen, the Rector of St Michael's, won't be among their number.

What do the bishops know about politics and war anyhow? There is the story of Stanley Baldwin faced with a miners' strike and a threatened intervention by the bishops in his day. Baldwin said, "I'll let the bishops mediate between the government and the strikers if they'll let the National Union of Mineworkers revise the Athanasian Creed".

But the bishops have never let doubts as to their actual competence in any matter impede them from poking their crooks into matters a mile away from their proper expertise. Bishops and Synods in the Church of England have pronounced on every issue from glue sniffing to the hydrogen bomb these last twenty-five years. They want us to believe that they are lending us the divine perspective on matters too intransigent for professional political or military remedies. Thus they declare on the rightness or wrongness of all wars, they enter the minutiae of every aspect of social policy from the future of the inner cities to the operation of the coffee market.

And don't look for the Church of Scotland to join in either. The Rev. David Lacy, the Church of Scotland's moderator, says extremist Muslim clerics should leave the country.

"If we are their enemies they should have nothing to do with us, but they don't. They speak out against us from within and get heart operations and care on our system. And we are happy to do that for them, to have rights and care, but we expect them to love us in return and accept our right to be who we are."

Lacy also criticised civil liberties campaigners, whom he accused of stressing rights while underplaying the need for individual responsibility.

He added that those who believed it was Christian to "turn the other cheek" to such extremism were misunderstanding the Gospel message and claimed that believers had a duty to "confront evil".

Via Marcus.

Metrosexuals: Not dead yet

Simon Doonan, attending fashion week, is alarmed by the trend.

After dining, I returned to the fray for John Bartlett’s show. Taking inventory of the unguent-packed goodie bag alongside Cargo magazine editor in chief Ariel Foxman, I became privy to some shocking insights into the exploding world of men’s products. “Our focus groups show that men, straight men, are now totally fascinated by grooming and skin-care unguents,” said the good-looking, young Mr. Foxman, adding: “Even more than electronics.” The depressing idea that heterosexual men were now obsessing about the merits of Clarins “fatigue fighter” instead of doing what they’re supposed to do—watching videotapes of Paris Hilton, drinking beer, being lap-danced upon and punching each other—precipitated another huge mood swing.

Don't break out the champagne just yet

North Korea begins backtracking on nuclear deal.

SEOUL -- North Korea said today that it would not dismantle its nuclear-weapons program until the United States first provides an atomic energy reactor, casting doubt on its commitment to a breakthrough agreement reached at international arms talks.

The North's Foreign Ministry made the surprise demand a day after it had agreed at six-nation talks in Beijing to give up its arms efforts.

...

The administration of President Bush has opposed anything resembling a 1994 U.S.-North Korea agreement, which promised the North two light-water reactors for power. That project stalled amid the current crisis that broke out in late 2002 over the North's resumed nuclear-weapons program.

Ah yes, 1994. The year Jimmy Carter appointed himself to speak on behalf of the Clinton administration and "settle" the North Korean problem once and for all. We're still paying for that one.

Concentration camp good training for life as a POW

Tibor Rubin, a Hungarian Jew who was rescued by American troops from the Mauthausen concentration camp during World War II, will receive the Medal of Honor on Sept. 23 for his service in the Korean War.

When he was at the Chinese prisoners’ camp known as “Death Valley,” Rubin said he would pray in Hebrew for the U.S. soldiers — about 40 each day — who died in the freezing weather. He also took care of soldiers suffering from dysentery or pneumonia.

Rubin, who goes by the name Ted, called concentration camp good “basic training” for being a POW and applied lifesaving lessons he learned there. For example, Rubin said he would retrieve maggots from the prisoners’ latrine and apply them to the infected wounds of his comrades to remove gangrene.

Fellow POW Sgt. Leo Cormier said Rubin gave a lot of GIs the courage to live.

“I once saw him spend the whole night picking lice off a guy who didn’t have the strength to lift his head,” Cormier told the Army. “What man would do that? ... But Ted did things for his fellow men that made him a hero in my book.”

As a POW, Rubin turned down repeated offers from the Chinese to be returned to his native Hungary.

“I told them I couldn’t go back because I was in the U.S. Army and I wouldn’t leave my American brothers because they needed me here,” Rubin said.

Simon Wiesenthal dead at 96

The man who dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals died in his sleep in his home in Vienna.

Wiesenthal spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and remembering the Jewish experience as a lesson for humanity. Through his work, he said, some 1,100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice.

''When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it,'' he once said.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Wiesenthal ''brought justice to those who had escaped justice.''

''He acted on behalf of 6 million people who could no longer defend themselves,'' ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. ''The state of Israel, the Jewish people and all those who oppose racism recognized Simon Wiesenthal's unique contribution to making our planet a better place.''

Calls of remorse poured into Wiesenthal's office in Vienna, where one of his longtime assistants, Trudi Mergili, struggled to deal with her grief.

''It was expected,'' she said. ''But it is still so hard.''

Wiesenthal was first sent to a concentration camp in 1941, outside Lviv, Ukraine, according to the Wiesenthal Center Web site. In October 1943, he escaped from the Ostbahn camp just before the Germans began killing all the inmates. He was recaptured in June 1944 and sent back to Janwska, but escaped death as his SS guards retreated westward with their prisoners from the Soviet Red Army.

Wiesenthal's quest began after the Americans liberated the Mauthausen death camp in Austria where Wiesenthal was a prisoner in May 1945. It was his fifth death camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned, and he weighed just 99 pounds when he was freed. He said he quickly realized ''there is no freedom without justice,'' and decided to dedicate ''a few years'' to that mission.

Uptick in violence not a quagmire

Ken Wheaton:

As we move toward October, look for the violence in Iraq to get worse. We'll see more bombings of civilian targets and this will play into the "quagmire" script. What's actually happening, though, is we're entering the "death throes" phase that many mocked earlier this year.

Shi'ite pilgrims marching to Karbala will present a prime target to Iraqi insurgents, says Wretchard.

Apart from its symbolic significance to the Shi'ites, the pilgrimage to Karbala must constitute a prime target in a month full of prime targets for the insurgency. In a period when Iraq is preparing to hold a plebiscite on its constitution and the insurgents seek revenge for Tal-Afar, the pilgrimage is like a cherry sitting on whipped-cream topped fudge. Not only that, but as Bill Roggio points out, there is a whole slew of offensive activity against insurgents in Anbar, Haditha and Qaim and even Samarra and Ramadi. The enemy must react. Some sources have warned of a Great Ramadan Offensive aimed at getting back at the Coalition for all the knocks the invincible (are you listening George Galloway?) insurgency has received.

...

The next two weeks are a clear test of the insurgency's strength. But apart from the massacre of unemployed construction workers and unarmed civilians, the insurgents who "are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars" are having a surprisingly poor showing.

Miscellany

Not just Bush: History of high level bathroom breaks.

Gnocchi and a bikini: Perfect together.

Idiom meets idiots: Overheard in New York.

Flame warriors: Rogue's gallery of trolls. Via Ace.

Zionist condoms: Interesting slogans.

The strange case of Conan Doyle

Exhumation seeks to prove that the Sherlock Holmes creator was a murderer. And a plagiarist.

A suicide bomber who lived

From the Religious Policeman:

He's now going to appear on TV, supposedly to discourage others. However, for those who are reassured by the fact that suicide bombing is not a hereditary profession, take heed of the fact that Saudi Arabia's unfulfilled womenfolk are fuelling one of the largest birthrates in the world, and there are plenty more where Ahmad came from.

Not a question you'll hear bandied about often

"Is Gwyneth Paltrow a genius?" Graduate students in Math review Proof.

Eliminating Islamic extremism in the UK

Will not be an easy task. In "Britain's Pedagogy of Hate," Jonah Avriel Cohen points to the poisonous hate literature being distributed in and around Britain's institutions of higher learning, 30 of which were cited as being home to extremist or terror groups.

Cathy Young discusses the committee that wants to eliminate Holocaust Memorial Day because Muslims find it offensive.

Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."

But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other ''genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians.

RINOs sighted

At Evolution. Check it out.

Semicolonics

American writers distrust the semicolon; the Brits, on the other hand, defend the puncuation mark for the "restful and easy" pauses it brings to prose. I'm in the pro-semicolon camp myself; I'm an Anglophile, after all. Anyway, my besetting sin is the dash--one of my professors in college told me my use of the dash was too extravagent despite the fact that he was generally in favor of the extravagent use of dashes--so what do I know?

Via A&L Daily.

NORKs to give up nukes

Seems the six-party talks were a good idea after all. Though Dan Darling predicts Bush will get no credit.

If this in fact pans out, people who have previously argued that the North Korean diplomacy was a complete failure will now start arguing that this would have happened anyway regardless of what the US did.

The perfect blog post

The Platonian ideal, I should think. It features horses, Madonna, sex with horses, sex with Madonna and The Sopranos.

Hitchens v. Galloway: Postmortems

Hitch won on points, says Andrew Anthony, who notes that after the Grapple in the Big Apple, the line for copies of Hitchens' book was twice as long as the Galloway line.

Hitchens, for his part, says he's not done with Galloway yet.

The experience of spending some hours on a public platform with George Galloway is disappointingly similar to the experience of watching him on al Jazeera, or on Syrian state television. One learns exactly nothing that one did not already know.

When addressing audiences in the Middle East, his metaphors of martyrdom and rape, and his celebration of the "resistance" forces are a little more florid, perhaps, but I shall have to concede that even in New York he has the nerve to tell an audience that the atrocities of September 2001 were essentially the fault of the United States itself. That was not his finest moment - and nor was it by any means his lowest one - but I began to see again his essential appeal, which is an utter indifference to embarrassment.

Elegy for the slip

I was just watching a trailer for Butterfield 8 on Turner Classic Movies. A great deal of time was given over to scenes of Elizabeth Taylor swanning around in her slip, something I recall she also did a lot of in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as well. And what a slip! Molded to the body like a glove, it emphasizes the smallness of the waist and the fullness of ths hips and breasts without revealing more than a hint of cleavage.

In the movies of old, a woman in a slip was available: A gangster's moll might loll about in her slip. A slip signified desire: Anna Magnani lusted after Burt Lancaster in a slip in The Rose Tattoo. In fact, foreign actresses in general wore slips: Simone Signoret, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren all wore slips.

You don't see the full slip anymore these days--either in the store or in movies. There are camis, teddies, bustiers, thongs and tap pants, but a woman onscreen wearing any of these never packs the punch of Liz in her slip. Probably because it's not unusual to see women on the street wearing much less.

'PC drivel' or art?

I vote for the former. I particularly like the Dalrymple quote in Sissy Willis' post:

With admirable courage, Ms. Lapper has overcome her disability to become an artist with, alas, all the tedious conformism of her professional tribe: It goes almost without saying that she is a single mother sporting ironmongery in her nose. Her own art, according to a eulogistic Web site, "questions notions of physical normality in a society that considers her deformed because she was born without arms." The eulogizer, however, does not spot the irony here -- that Lapper has shrewdly (and, in the circumstances, understandably) commodified her armlessness, turning it to an advantage. If people truly considered her condition either normal or beautiful, it would be disastrous for her career . . .

What I find particularly ironic is the placement of the armless woman in Trafalgar Square, which pays homage to a man who was missing an arm and blind in one eye. Surely a triumph for the disabled?

Of course, Nelson probably didn't think of himself as disabled in the modern sense of being part of a protected class. Nor would he be likely to dwell on the "beauty" of his disability.

Were a statue of Nelson be erected today, how much emphasis would be put on the armless socket and blind eye?

Yes

Is the UN unsalvageable?

A United Nations that cannot even rationally define the universal problem of terrorism, or exclude Libya and Cuba from sitting in judgment of human rights, is a fatally flawed UN.

... [T]he UN remains largely at the mercy of nations for whom aggression is a relative term and a legitimate diplomatic tool, one that in fact they will gladly continue deploying at the UN itself, as they have in the past. It would actually be counterproductive to push for a more effective UN, so long as it remains, on fundamental matters of peace and security, pointed in the wrong direction.

The UN is the last utopian institution of the 20th Century. It sounded good at the time, now not so much.