Category: Commentary

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Raquel Welch is right (and notes on Limbaugh/Fluke)

The Cinch Review

Raquel Welch

Raquel Welch always gives an amusing interview. At 71 years-old, she’s not only a working actress in amazing and beautiful shape, but is prone to dishing commonsense with a great pithy and sassy style. In an interview with—of all things—the magazine Men’s Health, Welch fires bullets on the cultural decline being brought on by rampant sexual explicitness. Commenting first on the music business, she says:

It used to be about a great song, great lyrics and a great voice. And now everybody is more concerned with being cutting edge and pushing the envelope. You have to be funkier, you have to be more audacious and more provocative than anybody else. When there’s somebody like Adele, it seems revolutionary because she’s not out there in a g-string and pasties. You forget that all music, all art, isn’t about T&A and girls spreading their legs for the camera.

Observing society more generally, she goes on:

I think we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we’re all sex addicts, literally. We have equated happiness in life with as many orgasms as you can possibly pack in, regardless of where it is that you deposit your love interest.

[…]

It’s just dehumanizing. And I have to honestly say, I think this era of porn is at least partially responsible for it. Where is the anticipation and the personalization? It’s all pre-fab now. You have these images coming at you unannounced and unsolicited. It just gets to be so plastic and phony to me. Maybe men respond to that. But is it really better than an experience with a real life girl that he cares about? It’s an exploitation of the poor male’s libidos. Poor babies, they can’t control themselves.

These are something of a continuation of observations she made in writing a couple of years ago. She’s on the money, and if the world were organized correctly, she would be head of Sociology at Princeton or somewhere like that. Continue reading “Raquel Welch is right (and notes on Limbaugh/Fluke)”

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Man at Last Seeks God [Particles]

The Cinch Review

Man at Last Seeks God ParticlesI was just reading the latest about what’s being discovered by the use of gigantic particle accelerators around the world, like the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi Accelerator and the CERN in Switzerland. It is said that “tantalizing hints” of the theorized Higgs boson particle, otherwise known as the “God particle,” have been seen. The Higgs boson, if it exists, isn’t very much; it’s merely the particle that enables other particles to have mass. Without mass, things would be much the same, I suppose, except considerably lighter. Obesity would hardly be an issue at all and public schools in America could focus more on reading, writing and arithmetic versus tinkering with what children are eating. Continue reading “Man at Last Seeks God [Particles]”

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The Counterproductive Elevation of Bullying

The Cinch Review

There’s been a vast amount of talk in the media lately about bullying. In reality the talk about it has been growing for years, but currently there’s a confluence of events, what with the trial of that New Jersey college student for webcamming his gay roommate having sex (which some have said drove that roommate to suicide), and the school shooting in Ohio by an apparently bullied “outcast,” and then a new documentary aimed at teenagers about bullying called “Bully.”

Idly reading a story on how 150,000 people have signed a petition trying to get that film’s “R” rating lowered, so that younger kids can watch it, I saw this quote from the director: “Suicide is the ultimate consequence of bullying, so yes, we did know early on that we wanted to tell the stories of parents whose children had committed suicide due to bullying.”

Is suicide truly a consequence of bullying? It seems to be the overwhelming conventional wisdom in all of the coverage of these stories. Bullying, it’s assumed, either causes people to commit suicide, or to steal a gun and shoot up the school. This is also what impressionable kids are effectively being told in all of these stories. But I would suggest that bullying does not in fact cause people to kill themselves or others. It is rather an extreme and extremely unhealthy response to being bullied that causes someone to take his or her own life or to commit a mass shooting. Continue reading “The Counterproductive Elevation of Bullying”

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Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

The Cinch Review

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

In many Christian churches this morning, the first reading would have been from Second Kings, chapter two, where the prophet Elijah is taken by God while his assistant and successor Elisha (who had repeatedly refused to leave him) looks on. They are walking by the river Jordan when it happens.

And as they still went on and talked, behold, chariots of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it and he cried, “My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” And he saw him no more.

That image of chariots of fire coming for Elijah inspired the widely-beloved spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is credited to Wallis Willis, a Choctaw freedman who is believed to have composed it sometime circa 1860. Continue reading “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”

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Youcef Nadarkhani: A Christian pastor sentenced to death in Iran

The Cinch Review

Youcef Nadarkhani, an Iranian and a Christian pastor, was sentenced to death after being convicted of apostasy from Islam in November of 2010. Since then, international pressure and attention has kept him alive.

Amnesty International has taken up his case. Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said:

It is shocking that the Iranian authorities would even consider killing a man simply for exercising his right to choose a religion other than Islam.

(Later he was overheard expressing shock on learning that slot machines had been discovered in Las Vegas.) Continue reading “Youcef Nadarkhani: A Christian pastor sentenced to death in Iran”

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In memory of Whitney Houston, please party on

The Cinch Review

I’ve been trying to suppress the reflex to write anything on the death of Whitney Houston, but one’s stomach can only take so much before the need to expel becomes overwhelming.

It has become tiresome in the extreme to repeatedly witness the whole sordid pattern of a celebrity going from unbelievable levels of success to becoming drug-addled and universally mocked, and then very predictably dying of his or her bad habits and finally having his or her corpse raised up like a trophy by the same ravenous entertainment industry that had both built and consumed him or her in a new wild orgy of profit, schlock and revolting cynicism.

Hours after Whitney Houston’s pathetic and lonely death in a bathtub, Sony music mogul Clive Davis went to the stage of a pre-Grammy party, and, with her corpse in the process of rotting upstairs while surrounded by police investigators, he said this to the overpaid self-important revelers:

“She graced this stage with her regal presence so many times. Whitney would have wanted the music to go on and her family asked us to carry on.”

Continue reading “In memory of Whitney Houston, please party on”

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Parade in St. Louis for Iraq War veterans

The Cinch Review

Good for the people of St. Louis, Missouri, for throwing the first major parade welcoming home veterans of the war in Iraq. I sincerely hope we see this being repeated around the country. (Including and especially in New York City, by the way. I really don’t understand why Mayor Bloomberg claims he needs permission from the Pentagon to have a parade on Broadway. This is something that the people want to do. It is inappropriate—at the very least—to allow generals in Washington to overrule it.) Continue reading “Parade in St. Louis for Iraq War veterans”

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The scandal and tragedy of over-medicated kids

The Cinch Review

A psychologist named L. Alan Sroufe who was there in the beginning when conditions like “A.D.D.” were first characterized as problems, and who believed treatment with drugs like Ritalin was correct and helpful, pens an interesting column in the NY Times: Ritalin Gone Wrong: Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long Term. Read it and weep. Continue reading “The scandal and tragedy of over-medicated kids”

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Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes

The Cinch Review

Bono (of U2) recorded the Jimmie Rodgers song “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes” for a Jimmie Rodgers tribute albumthat was put out on Egyptian Records in 1996. If you happen to look for it on YouTube currently, you’ll see multiple instances where it’s been uploaded, but most of the people uploading and commenting on it seem to be under the impression that the song is actually a Bono or U2 original.

You can listen to the embedded version above (though you might want to avoid looking at the slideshow of images associated with it by this particular uploader). A lot of the YouTubers believe it’s one of Bono’s greatest songs, or even the greatest. It’s not that surprising they assume it’s an original, because Bono’s rendition is certainly far away from any blue yodeling connotations; his characteristically big, breathy vocal floats atop a bed of piano and rising strings. However, that the version works very well is beyond question. In fact, I think it’s total dynamite, and likely the most striking contribution to that album (which is itself very good). Continue reading “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes”

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Tomorrow’s World: The Home Computer

The Cinch Review

There was a long-running TV show on the BBC in Britain called “Tomorrow’s World,” which looked at budding new inventions and technologies and predicted how they would change the way people lived. The YouTube clip below is from a 1967 episode and focuses on an early form of a home computer. It’s quite amusing, naturally, with hindsight; it resembles a Flintstones version of a modern appliance. (How do you download a bit-torrent on that thing?) But I was struck in another way by the final words of the narrator in the segment: Continue reading “Tomorrow’s World: The Home Computer”

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Have yourself a merry little Christmas card

The Cinch Review

A holy and merry Christmas to all who will be celebrating, and a very happy Chanukah to those observing that festival.

The small group of close relatives, friends and world leaders on my snail-mail-Christmas-card list received a custom made card this year featuring the photograph of our dog Billie below, and the Bible verses beneath it.

Dog at Christmas

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the LORD has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.”

Job, Chapter 12, verses 7 through 10 (English Standard Version).

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New York ban on church use of space in schools upheld

The Cinch Review

For some years now, a number of religious congregations in New York City that were short of worship space have taken advantage of unoccupied public school buildings, and paid a fee to use such space for their services. Other community groups and organizations do similar things. A win-win, you would think. However, the City of New York has long been suing to prevent churches—and only the churches, mind you—from utilizing public school space in this way. Something to do, I guess, with the terrible danger to innocent kids of merely knowing that the space they’re sitting in might have been occupied the evening before by a person who professes belief in God. Continue reading “New York ban on church use of space in schools upheld”

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A note on OWS numbers in New York City

The Cinch Review

This morning’s much anticipated and ballyhooed “Occupy Wall Street” march in the financial district, and attempt to shut down the New York Stock Exchange, attracted anywhere from a few hundred to somewhere between one and two thousand participants, according to the media.

In this city of New York, you can gather a crowd like that if you stand on the corner giving away free samples of some new protein bar. I mean, really. Considering the non-stop publicity and promotion of this event taking place (for free) in all outlets of the mainstream media, the level of participation is nothing short of dismal. This is not the 99%. It is more like the 0.000001%. In addition, as is well known, many of those in the hardcore membership of this OWS “movement” in New York are in fact from out of town. Take them away and you have a complete non-event. It’s a non-event anyway: the whole escapade of the past two months has been created by and remains dependent upon the wildly disproportionate attention of the media, in pursuit of a political narrative that suits their own preferences. (And we must not forget who in the political world supported it from the beginning.) Continue reading “A note on OWS numbers in New York City”

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The Bloomberg versus the Giuliani way on Occupy Wall Street

The Cinch Review

In the early hours of this morning, the New York City Policy Department cleared Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan of hundreds of protesters, some of whom had been camping there since the “Occupy Wall Street” movement began two months ago. They were followed by an army of New York City Sanitation Department workers who moved in to remove tents, tarps and other accoutrements of the occupation, and to thoroughly disinfect the public plaza.

The decision to do this at this juncture came as a surprise, not least because Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vacillated for the past two months over how to address the problems created by the encampment; though he had largely seemed on the side of allowing the situation to continue until it might naturally peter out (with winter coming and all). Continue reading “The Bloomberg versus the Giuliani way on Occupy Wall Street”

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The danger of the media’s non-stop Herman Cain show

The Cinch Review

It’s difficult to tell exactly who’s out to get Herman Cain, although this cockamamie series of allegations does not have the look of a random phenomenon. In a way, I don’t have a dog in the fight, since (as explained in some detail previously) I’ve basically put him aside in terms of who I might support for the GOP presidential nomination, for reasons of substance that have nothing to do with the current brouhaha. Continue reading “The danger of the media’s non-stop Herman Cain show”

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Drifting Too Far From the Shore

The Cinch Review

It’s one of the most moving for me of what I like to think of as the sacred songs from the hills. It tugs at something deep within. It was written by Charles E. Moody in the 1920s. Famous versions exist by Hank Williams and Emmylou Harris. No less than Bob Dylan has credited his hearing of a version of this song while a child with altering him on some indefinable but vital level. Continue reading “Drifting Too Far From the Shore”

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Guilty of murder in Philadelphia

The Cinch Review

In the case centered around atrocities which took place for many years in the abortion clinic of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, two of his former employees today pleaded guilty to murder. One woman, Adrienne Moton, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder for picking up an infant that had been born alive and snipping the baby’s neck and spine with a scissors. The other woman, Sherry West, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder for administering a fatal overdose of anesthesia and painkiller medication to a woman who had come to the clinic for “treatment.” The infant who was killed was not named; the name of the adult victim was Karnamaya Mongar, who had arrived in the United States from Nepal only four months earlier. Continue reading “Guilty of murder in Philadelphia”

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Occupy Wall Street: getting cooler, but not in the way they’d like

The Cinch Review

At Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan this morning, the New York City Fire Department moved in and removed generators and gasoline from the small encampment of protesters which has been hunkering in that location for about five weeks. Naturally enough, the tiny public plaza was never intended for the kinds of activities taking place, and fire codes were being violated all over the place in the name of heating and cooking. Until now, a blind eye had been turned to it. It is an interesting time to now turn an unblind eye towards it, one must say, with temperatures having just plummeted in the New York City area, and with actual snow being predicted for tomorrow night. Continue reading “Occupy Wall Street: getting cooler, but not in the way they’d like”

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Jerry Lee Lewis: Last Man Flying

From a performance in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1981, the YouTube clip below features Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins performing “I’ll Fly Away.”

Carl Perkins died in 1998. Johnny Cash in 2003. Elvis Presley, the fourth member of the famed “million dollar quartet,” passed away back in 1977. That’s the genesis of the title of a recent Jerry Lee Lewis album, namely Last Man Standing. As one of those latter-day albums of aging-stars-singing-duets-with-younger-stars goes, it’s not so bad at all. Continue reading “Jerry Lee Lewis: Last Man Flying”