Tendentious

That noted metaphysician Maureen Dowd, to the warm applause of the Left, has informed us that the "moral authority" of Cindy Sheehan is "absolute." To give the exact quote:

the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.

Even under the circumstances, it's still absurd to see the kind of people who normally laugh at the concept of "morality" as a foolish Christian prejudice suddenly embrace it. But I digress. The larger point is that Dowd is, simply, a moron. To quote one of the comments to a post at Sgt. Stryker:

Suppose my beloved teenage daughter is raped and murdered by black criminals. I go to city hall waving a sign that reads “Death To All Black Savages”. I demand that the mayor come out and confess to deliberately fomenting a crime wave to drive down property values, so his Jewish cronies can buy up the city cheap.

How different am I from Cindy Sheehan? Does my grief validate my racist and paranoid beliefs? Should I get ‘respectful’ coverage from the media? Should my association with white-supremacy and anti-semitic groups be covered up?

When Cindy Sheehan says horrific, deeply offensive things like "America is not worth dying for," she's doing exactly the same thing as the hypothetical racist mother in the above comment. Grief is not a blank check to say or do whatever you want without criticism.

So the city of San Francisco has rejected the basing of the battleship Iowa for the usual predictable political reasons.

"If I was going to commit any kind of money in recognition of war, then it should be toward peace, given what our war is in Iraq right now," Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said.

It's kind of ironic, and darkly funny, that the city of San Francisco is so self-righteous and so (to use Diane Feinstein's word) petty about "war." Especially when you consider that, in absolute numbers, the AIDS virus that was spread--peacefully, of course--in San Francisco bathhouses has already killed more people than the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq put together. And hot on the heels of World War I.

Michael Fumento has pointed out how the city's refusal to close the bathhouses, in spite of massive evidence of an ongoing public health disaster, facilitated the spread of the epidemic. "It wasn't until 1987 [1987!] that the last bathhouse closed its doors."

The appalling, purely political failure to close the bathhouses gave an enormous boost to the disease in its earliest years. And at the time, the city abused and vilified the late Randy Shilts for speaking that fact out loud:

In the mid-1980s, his stories suggesting that gay bathhouses in San Francisco were breeding grounds for AIDS made him a pariah, unable to walk through the city's Castro District without being jeered or spat upon.

San Francisco: The conscience of the nation.

HBO is still showing their awful original movie The Girl in the Cafe. It's about a young woman who singlehandedly shames the G8 summit into throwing enormous amounts of money at Africa in order to "save the children," and it's a kind of summit of awfulness. Its awfulness is that special, lofty kind of awful known only to those familiar with the magnificently awful work of its author Richard Curtis, the British writer-director whose previous film, Love Actually, was awful in an almost hypnotic way. The Girl in the Cafe isn't nearly as ambitious, because it has a different purpose; it sacrifices Curtis's trademark aesthetic awfulness in the service of political awfulness.

The film was made to coincide with an actual real-live G8 summit in early July 2005. The ever-helpful CNN even produced a documentary on the G8 summit that featured segments of the film to help "explain" the "issues" to confused viewers.

TGITC presents us with characters who have no personalities at all except to serve as megaphones for the writer's political viewpoints, which are, as survivors of viewing Love Actually could tell you, leftist and anti-American; the effect is something like an Ayn Rand novel, only with all the dialogue spoken by toddlers. The adversaries are the thick-headed Americans and the Euro politicians who need to curry favor with them.

The stupid obstuse Americans speak in their stupid flat American accents singlemindedly about such abstractions as "economic growth" and "free trade"...demanding that aid to Africa "work" as if the mere act of throwing money wouldn't suffice.

In fairness, Curtis's script doesn't caricature the American point of view: The arguments out of the Americans' mouths are those that any person with a grasp of economics greater than that of a five-year old might use. But because Curtis--like socialism itself--is trying to appeal to the five-year old in all of us, the Americans, the only grown-ups in the film, must play the heavies. (Recall the scene in Love Actually whose primary political complaint was that Tony Blair had been "bullied from pillar to post" by those Mean, Mean Americans. They pick on kids who are smaller than them! It's not fair!) It's somehow significant that the previous role of female lead Kelly MacDonald was...Peter Pan in Finding Neverland.

The dialogue is designed to appeal to the simplest sort of understanding that human beings can possibly have while retaining the ability to feed themselves with a fork.
"There are cows in Scotland that are subsidized to the tune of L12,000 a year." And my favorite, "You should have more pictures in these papers so you can see what you're talking about." Me, I'm hoping for future G8 summits narrated by cartoon animals.

While Curtis may have little or no faith in Western politicians and their commitment to the poor, he retains a messianic faith in the UN Millennium Goals, which promise to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger" in the world. Period. Provided, of course, that the Goals are "fully funded," which is the crux of TGITC: There can't be any half-measures when it comes to starving children, dammit. Just shut up and give 'em all your money--to be administered by the hard-working public servants of the UN, of course--or else you're a thug.

Now, it would be cruel of me--indeed, thuggish--to point out that, so far this millennium at least, the most suffering, starving, deprived children in the world are in North Korea, a country completely unmentioned or untouched by the Millennium Goals. Or that millions of children are in imminent danger of starvation in Zimbabwe only because that country is run by a vicious monster who deliberately ruined his country's agriculture for political reasons. But public criticism of North Korea and Zimbabwe is too...how shall I say...American, so we'll have none of that.

The best review of the politics of The Girl in the Cafe is from an actual African, President Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme of Cameroon, in a slightly different context (the recent Live 8 concerts). Surprisingly, President Tonme doesn't agree with the Curtis toddlers. He sounds, more surprisingly still, like one of the grown-ups:

Neither debt relief nor huge amounts of food aid nor an invasion of experts will change anything. Those will merely prop up the continent's dictators. It's up to each nation to liberate itself and to help itself. When there is a problem in the United States, in Britain, in France, the citizens vote to change their leaders. And those times when it wasn't possible to freely vote to change those leaders, the people revolted.

In Africa, our leaders have led us into misery, and we need to rid ourselves of these cancers. We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for political revolution. Instead, they mourned a corpse while forgetting to denounce the murderer.