Posted on 07/05/2012 10:06:44 AM PDT by Sherman Logan
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice." It's an old line, and perhaps an obsolescent one. I can't recall the last time I heard anyone use it. Americans don't seem to want to get to Carnegie Hall, not if American Idol is auditioning round the block. And practice is one of those things, like math, the education system seems to have ceded to the Asians. These days, China not only makes most of the pianos, but plays them. ...
The stories a society tells itself are not unimportant. Today, we have superhero movies but no westerns with beleaguered loners trying to live up to moral codes against the odds, and few films with amateur adventurers who find themselves caught up in something and forced to see it through because they understand that honor requires it. Perhaps this is because the ever more unreal computer effects require ever more unreal characters. Meanwhile, the supposedly unreal musical is as dead as the western, in part because it requires real human talent and, like Carnegie Hall, practice. The old-timey actors came with specialized skills: James Cagney and Bob Hope were both great dancers — and, as my old pal Sammy Cahn liked to say, that's not even what they do. By comparison, what can Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio do? I notice a big dance solo seems to be about the only effect you can't fake in CGI: If you can't do it, you can't do it, and the computers can't help you.
... Is a culture that communicates complacency and inertia likely to raise a generation of non-super heroes willing to make the sacrifices to, say, roll back our multi-trillion-dollar debt or reform Medicare? At Carnegie Hall and beyond, we are way out of practice.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Very sad, IMO.
Recommend reading entire article. As always with Stein, it's a winner.
Depends on who is having the kids. Liberals don't want to be bothered, so that leaves it to conservatives to have, and rear, kids with the virtues we admire. Yeah, some of our kids will be enticed by the 'no responsibilities' attitudes, for a while, but I believe most will return to the right side, eventually.
It will also make a difference if we conservatives start thinking stragetically, and getting ourselves into positions of influence in the arts and the media. We've ceded those to liberals for FAR too long.
That's good. Very good.
I remember thinking at the time that the lyrics of this song were appalling.
Nobody I talked to could see anything out of whack, which itself I thought pretty appalling.
Love of oneself is the greatest possible love? How unutterably shallow and meaningless.
The Bible says we should not think more of ourselves than necessary, but here we have an apparent societal consensus that thinking well of ourselves is the highest ambition.
Actually, the relevant factor between having and not having kids is not so much liberal vs. conservative.
It’s rich vs. poor. As you go down the socio-economic ladder the birth rate climbs, as you go up it drops. The most successful people in our society, and around the world for that matter, hardly have any children at all.
This contrasts with most of history, where successful men in general had many more children, and more who lived to reproduce, than less successful men. Many of them bastards, of course, but DNA doesn’t care about marriage licenses.
To the extent there is any hereditable factor involved in the complex of traits that make for success in today’s world, this is a recipe for eventual Darwinian disaster.
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