Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

Drier-Email –

What are they afraid of?

We pay the bills. We want our children to receive comprehensive, legitimate educations as advertised by the schools we choose; educations in which multiple viewpoints of issues are honestly presented, empirically considered, and respected by professors. We do not want our schools to act as political parties and centers for ideological indoctrination.

But, the Cry Wolf Project is in violation of joint policies adopted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU). From the Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure:

As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

From the Statement on Professional Ethics:

Professors, guided by a deep conviction of the worth and dignity of the advancement of knowledge, recognize the special responsibilities placed upon them. Their primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it. To this end professors devote their energies to developing and improving their scholarly competence. They accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge. They practice intellectual honesty.

In soliciting the creation of political propaganda through their schools and the facilitating organizations that receive public funding, CWP scholars abandon their ethical principles.

Nationwide university regulations, education codes and tax law strictly prohibit the unauthorized use of school resources for partisan political purposes. There are formal complaint procedures that can and should be initiated immediately against the Cry Wolf Project.

The project’s Request for Proposals was sent from Professor Dreier’s Occidental email address, and presumably communicated to and from the other schools’ servers. This creates the impression that Occidental, UCSB, Harvard, Yale, et al. endorse the plan by which Dreier & Co. intend to carry out the project. How prevalent is it that our tuition and tax dollars fund similar activities?

The Zinn Education Project is a notorious example. Its ‘guerilla-warrior’-in-chief, the late professor Howard Zinn, publicly instructed participants to violate education codes as he channeled Saul Alinsky:

Don’t obey the rules. You have to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the establishment in which you try not to be fired. You have to depart from the curriculum… outside the lines that are set for us by the school administration, or the politicians.

With the high cost of tuition, people must practice due diligence in choosing schools. Universities not only promise an excellent education, but also the practice of good, legitimate intellectual values and principles we want to instill in our students’ young minds so that they can be successful, productive citizens in our American civil society.

The actions of the Cry Wolf committee and the schools associated with its participants should cause parents and taxpayers to reassess their very dear investments in these institutions.

President Obama, touted as one who “embodies diversity,” attended three CWP schools: Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard, where he was recalled as being an “even-handed leader.”

I got into politics at Occidental. I made a conscious decision to become involved in public policy.

That decision would lead him to Columbia University and his first exposure to community organizing, “I really wanted to see New York and become more involved in politics.”

Obama of course later enjoyed his own teaching stint as a University of Chicago law lecturer; the same university’s alumni association once awarded CWP coordinator Peter Dreier a distinguished Public Service Award.

In his Hampton College commencement address last month, President Obama stated:

[So that] all those checks you or your parents wrote to Hampton will pay off… now that your minds have been opened, it’s up to you to keep them that way. It will be up to you to open minds that remain closed that you meet along the way. That, after all, is the elemental test of any democracy: whether people with differing points of view can learn from each other, and work with each other, and find a way forward together.

Mr. President, as an even-handed leader who embodies diversity, do you believe the Cry Wolf Project meets your elemental test of democracy? Or is it “just words? Just speeches?”

“Intellect loses its virtue when it ceases to seek truth and turns to the pursuit of political ends.” – Robert H. Bork

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten.

And yet here we are, ninety years later, using this newest of game-changing technologies — the Internet — to spend over a month talking about one of these old movies. If you’ve followed along, you’ve learned much about the people that made it, the thoughts that fueled their artistic decisions, the innovative techniques that brought it to life on screen, and the rapturous reaction of American audiences everywhere to its fell beauty, bewitching exoticism, and achingly tragic love story.

Real art endures.

Consider, then, the following analysis, pulled from one of the thousands of books of modern academic criticism published at our universities each year (for the morbidly curious, this one is titled Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, and was written by Gina Marchetti, a professor specializing in Asian cinema). Broken Blossoms, this scholarly tome informs us, is “a tale of sexual perversity” delineating not D. W. Griffith’s poetic soul but his “own well-documented penchant for young girls as objects of erotic desire.” The movie is not — as contemporary audiences once judged it — a tender, heartbreaking story of innocent love in a brutal world, but one of “rape, incest, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, necrophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, and prostitution as well as miscegenation.”

In short, this aged little film (one that had audiences openly weeping in their seats, and critics rhapsodizing about “Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and fragrantly poetic. . .”) is judged to be pornography. “Bible-Belt pornography,” to be exact:

Given the very thinly disguised sexual deviations depicted in the film, approaching Broken Blossoms as a pornographic text seems appropriate. Like pornography, Broken Blossoms uses spectacle to arouse the sexual interest of the spectator, while narrative structure permits, controls, and legitimizes this arousal by symbolically punishing the principals (and through them the viewer who identifies with them) for their erotic excesses. However, spectacle wins out, and the evocation of an atmosphere, an image, a feeling that stimulates the erotic involvement of the male viewer takes precedence over the moral imperatives of the plot.

Stimulates the erotic involvement of the male viewer? Actually, the truth is the exact opposite: Broken Blossoms was what we call in modern parlance a “chick flick.” It was mothers and wives and daughters who stood in line to see it again and again, driving its box office grosses into the stratosphere. Editor Robert Parrish, the same man who helped John Ford edit The Battle of Midway during World War II, remembers being dragged to Broken Blossoms by his mother as a child. As he tells it in his memoir Growing Up In Hollywood:

As we crossed Broad Street and turned into Talbotton Road, I could see the lights flashing BROKEN B OSSOMS on the Royal. The L was not functioning, and for the first five years after that I thought we had seen Broken Bossoms that afternoon. . . .

We took our seats, and as the lights went down, a man and a pipe organ came up out of the floor in front of the screen. He was banging away at the keys and kicking his feet and I thought his name was Wurlitzer because that’s what it said on the organ. . . .

Mr. Wurlitzer’s music rose to a crescendo as the coming attractions ended and Broken Blossoms started. My mother’s eyes began to fill as soon as Lillian Gish’s name appeared. . . her watery eyes were glued to the screen. Nothing sad had happened yet, but she knew what was coming up and she wasn’t going to be caught unprepared. . . .

By now, the famous emotional scene in the closet was on and my mother was really enjoying herself. The tears were flowing freely. . . I looked around. Most of the other people were women. They were all crying.

Over-educated and hyper-politicized academics the world over would have us believe that the reactions of these long dead women were the result of cultural brainwashing, accomplished through relentless oppression levied via racism, sexism, and any other -ism, -phobia, or -philia that can be dreamt up. Thousands of nigh-unreadable books make such arguments every year. The pages are formatted into near gibberish according to the dictates of the pompous, pretentious, and monolithically leftist Modern Language Association. The contents are absurdly footnoted against myriad other academic treatises in an endless, incestuous merry-go-round. And the whole works is funded by heaping piles of your tax dollars, funneled like mobster-loot into the lavish coffers of once-great universities. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being assigned such books, and they are relentlessly pressured into accepting their batty premises.

Thus it happens that, when presented with two people on a movie screen expressing honest love, our children are soberly informed that it is really (to pull again from the above-mentioned volume) “implicit sexual abuse,” a “rape fantasy,” and an expression of “white, patriarchal power.” Note the rhetorical sleights of hand. The critic can’t reasonably damn Broken Blossoms for bonafide sexual abuse, because none exists in the film — so she falls back on implicit. The critic can’t cry rape, because no rape occurs anywhere in the film — so she tries to claim that somewhere in the story lurks a rape fantasy. And, of course, what book of modern academic criticism would be complete without suggesting that Battling Burrows, the villain of the film, isn’t just an abusive ogre who happens to be both white and a father, he’s abusive because he’s both white and a father.

Putting ivory-tower ravings aside for the moment, let us ask the $64,000 question: what message did D. W. Griffith intend for his film, if any? I looked long and hard for a clue to this riddle, and finally found the answer in an old 1919 file clipping from a long-forgotten magazine interview. Which magazine, alas, remains a mystery, but the article’s title is “Just Marionettes,” and the byline credits one Louise Williams, who describes attending the New York premiere of the film. “Incense floated out from the stage,” she writes, “while the notes of a balalaika orchestra threaded a plaintive melody back and forth through the fabric that was being woven in the mind of the audience. Far back in a corner of one of the upper boxes sat D. W. Griffith, hat drawn down over his eyes, chin sunk deep in his overcoat collar, watching unobtrusively to see how New York would take Broken Blossoms, the result of his latest straying from the beaten paths of picture making, and the first picture of his repertoire series.”

Afterwards she cornered Griffith, and goes on to relate the following:

“We didn’t have any idea that this picture would take hold in the way it has,” Griffith remarked with the most unassuming frankness as we stood, discussing the picture after the showing was over. “It was originally intended to be just a regular picture, so far as presentation was concerned. But something impelled me — the story, in the first place. I believed in it. Personally, I think that Thomas Burke is about the only writer doing anything original nowadays, and his “Chink and the Child,” from which we made the picture, has a big message, which ought to do much toward internationalizing human sympathy. Of course, we broke all the rules when we did this story: it has a yellow man for a hero, instead of a white one; it’s a tragedy throughout; there are no quick, snappy bits; the story moves very slowly. But I believe that it shows convincingly that we’re wrong when we labor under the delusion that Americans are superior to those they call “foreigners.” No nation can do that — just as no nation can afford to think that it represents all the beauty and heroism and ideals in the world.”

OK, let’s recap:

Filmmakers and viewers of 1919: human sympathy, tragedy, anti-prejudice, beauty, poetry, heroism, ideals.

Modern critics and academics: rape, incest, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, necrophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, prostitution, miscegenation, and “white, patriarchal power.”

The next time you hear someone write with a straight face that, say, the horsewhip wielded so horrifically by Battling Burrows in Broken Blossoms is a phallic symbol just because actor Donald Crisp holds it “at penis height,” or that when his abused daughter drops to the floor and desperately wipes the dust off his shoes it represents not abject fear but fellatio, keep in mind that these theories say far more about the critic than the work being criticized. If you’ve read enough in the field, you don’t have to be any kind of prude to conclude that academia is home to some real sick puppies. There’s nothing too crazy for them to say, nothing too perverted (not just in a sexual sense, but also in a logical, rational one) to slather on any beloved book, film, song, painting or poem you care to name. These people are nothing less than cultural terrorists who will happily blow your entire culture sky-high just to watch it burn if you let them.

Good criticism is earthy, carrying with it the grit of the soil of a culture, and thus the tang of truth. It doesn’t rely on jargon, it doesn’t try to achieve a sheen of authenticity with footnotes and MLA format, and it is easily understandable by anyone with a passing interest in the subject at hand. You know you’ve encountered good criticism when it leaves you feeling expanded and healthy, afire both with a respect for art and with a pride for your culture. Worthwhile essays deepen and broaden their subjects in one’s mind — in a very real sense, they make the original work better. Forever after, the thoughts of the essayist will be there in your head, reminding you of how that particular work of art succeeded in putting you in touch with some untrammeled height of emotion or depth of virtue.

In the original theater program for Broken Blossoms there is a quote from Confucius, one that hints that D. W. Griffith understood all this as well as anybody: “I care little who makes a nation’s laws if I have the making of its ballads.” Conservatives would be wise to heed those ancient words of wisdom. Culture matters, and if we let the other side pervert and mock the great art of the past with impunity, then we’re not worth a damn, and we’ll all get the debased, degraded culture we deserve. The tears wept by our great-grandmothers during this silent ballad still echo down to us, if we care to listen, with a music powerful enough to drown out the deranged howling of all the cultural terrorists combined.

This concludes our look at D. W. Griffith’s sumptuous, “unspoken” love story, Broken Blossoms. Come back next week for an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There are plenty of ways to view Broken Blossoms — free on YouTube, streamed via Netflix’s on-demand service, or even projected on-screen during the occasional museum or revival-house retrospective. If it’s a DVD you want, visit the Silent Era website and read their detailed analysis of all the various versions floating around out there. They recommend the edition released by Kino International (a company that advertises itself as providing “The Best in World Cinema”).

Whenever you watch a silent movie, you’ll want to worry about two items: the music and the film speed. My opinion is that, for modern viewers, these films go down a lot better when played absolutely silent, with the accompanying music track muted. Almost all of the music on silent movie DVDs is of the crappy keyboard variety, with repetitive themes that fail to live up to the often splendorous visuals. When watched in silence, the long-buried original pace of the film becomes discernible. Before you know it, shot-lengths that used to feel strange and edits that used to feel jarring begin to flow and make sense.

As for speed, our modern eyes can forgive things moving in slow-motion far easier than when they are sped-up in Benny Hill fashion. I therefore recommend that you adjust the speed setting on your DVD player so that the film plays just a bit slower than normal. That will give all movements a far more realistic edge, and I think you’ll find that the images become much more dramatic as a result.

Broken Blossoms is only around ninety minutes long, so I do hope you give it a whirl. There are many joys to be had in silent film, and culturally literate conservatives need to familiarize themselves with the best of them.

But I’m not surprised.

Think about it for a second. Since when has socialism ever been accurately portrayed in American pop culture or academia? I’ve never seen it covered in “Facts of Life,” and I’ve watched every episode. And Rage Against the Machine, one of the most successful leftwing buckets of noise on the planet, never really explained how they spent their millions. Although I’m guessing it’s not just on Rogaine and trucker hats.

Fact is, because socialism is a lie, people have to keep pushing the lie. When someone says, “Hey, my brother is a socialist,” they never follow it with, “you know, that ideology based on envy that’s responsible for the deaths of millions.” No instead it’s, “He sells Che shirts out of hemp, when he isn’t recycling sex toys for the homeless. God he’s so caring.”

Fact is, socialism is the easiest thing you can romanticize, because it’s a big fat exaggeration of “sharing.” As kids, we were always told to share, because sharing is good. If you had twenty Playboys under your bed, surely you could hand one off to Billy, who has none. Socialism has always piggybacked on this notion: that it’s just not right for you to have so much, when others have so little. Never mind that you’ve earned what you’ve got, while the others sit around watching Judge Judy in their underpants (sorry Bill). Socialism is government forcing you to share your stuff with jerks.

So the only way to teach American adults that socialism is evil, is to get them when they’re young. The next time your son mows the lawn, instead of paying him directly – tell him you’re going to “spread it around,” to quote our President. Yep, even though you did all the work, Tommy, there are kids down the block who deserve that money just as much.

Now, if your kid finds this idea appealing, you have full permission to send him to Venezuela. He can mow for Hugo!

And if you disagree with me, you probably masturbate to Noam Chomsky.

Tonight we’ve got: 

Ann Coulter!

Tucker Carlson!

comedian Tom Shillue!

fun fun fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!

Note:  No, I do not actually think that George W. Bush was a war criminal. Even though I was undercover, I felt dirty just wearing the shirt.

Count me among those who find a U.S. President delivering a speech to students–especially one encouraging them towards academic responsibility and excellence as a means to productive adult citizenship–among the more innocuous, and potentially beneficial activities of the Office.

Appreciating yesterday’s early release of President Obama’s speech and having now read it in context, I would heartily maintain that opinion, were it not for the ED’s controversial lesson plan.

FYI:

Part I, Sec. 1905 of the ED’s General Provisions: ELEMENTARY & SECONDARY EDUCATION states:

PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL MANDATES, DIRECTION, OR CONTROL:

Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic achievement standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of instruction.

That raises some questions:

Is what the White House and ED submitted to teachers merely a suggestion for a lesson plan, or is it considered a mandated part of the curriculum?

If it is mandated at the school level, will districts potentially lose any NCLB funding if the lesson plan is not completed?

If not, can schools still mandate students to participate in the lesson plan?

If so, at what cost–in both classroom hours and subsequent elimination of otherwise state-mandated curriculum–will be the result of the ED’s lesson plan?

Is the lesson plan in any way controversial? (A rhetorical question.)

If a district unilaterally deems it uncontroversial, will the district automatically be exempting itself from any laws requiring equal time for varying viewpoints?

Are Districts legally and/or ethically required to establish and enforce standardized criteria on how teachers shall base their decision to show the speech and implement the lesson plan?

Will written consent be required from parents prior to any future screenings of the president’s address and/or participation in the lesson plan?

If teachers do show the speech and use the lesson plan, how will the teachers present them in a consistent, district-wide manner?

Obviously, controversy stems from the message, not the messenger.

Ideological and political partisanship and “cult of personality” persuasions aside, once duly elected, who the President is is not controversial in and of itself.  Nevertheless, what a President says may indeed be controversial, especially when addressed to a captive audience of ideologically and politically naïve youths.

The trouble with all this arose because the materials in the ED’s lesson plan are an integral part of the president’s message, and the fact that it has already been necessarily revised (post-dissemination) proves it was in fact controversial.

That the ED and its recipient, undoubting education professionals do not seem to appreciate this distinction (and parents’ natural concerns) perhaps illustrates how the quest for intellectual conformity in public education–not to mention this particular predetermination to accept a federal government lesson plan–exemplifies a pervasive and discriminatory injustice that runs contrary to all pretense to freedom of conscience, speech and thought in modern academia.

Debates are fairly presented when opposing views are inherently present in the debate.

Therefore, congratulations and thanks, Mr. President.  Your speech and its ED lesson plan have inspired ‘schoochildren’ [sic] and our body politic to further, fairly and openly address controversial subject matters and debate them in the arena of ideas.

Or, as Jonah Goldberg once profoundly wrote:

“Unity Is Overrated: What’s so bad about partisanship?”

But, if there is one thing that is certainly uncontroversial in the president’s speech today, it is his close to our Nation’s students: “God bless you, and God bless America.”

May God bless you Mr. President.

With Barack Obama, many Americans had hoped to get a post-racial president. With Mr. Obama’s pick of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David H. Souter on the Supreme Court, it looks less and less like they got one.

President Obama – a man we still hardly know – clearly subscribes to the notion that we should judge each other not just on the content of our character, but also by the color of our skin.

We’ve had warning signs before. Remember the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.?

As for the outrage du jour, the call for Sotomayor to apologize for making a racist comment in a 2001 speech is silly. She said what she meant, and she meant what she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

No white nominee could get away with that statement’s corollary in which a wise white man comes to better conclusions that a Latina. Nor should he.

A non-apology apology – which seems to be all the price she is going to pay – is pointless.

The White House simply says Judge Sotomayor used “poor” word choice. But that excuse applies to any number of public figures who have had their careers derailed for similar language blunders. This double standard needs to go on public trial.

In today’s left-of-center culture, the “white male” – “the victim,” as it were – understands that what Judge Sotomayor said is the accepted liberal way of thinking. Identity politics (also known as political correctness, multiculturalism and cultural Marxism) is the foundation of the political left. It is the first, middle and last lesson taught today in Academia. It is the mainstream media’s rulebook.

It is why Sotomayor and Obama are praiseworthy, and why Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez and Miguel Estrada are unacceptable members of their respective tribes. It is the onerous double standard that ensures that the left wins every argument over race. And that is far too useful a weapon for the president and his Democratic Party to give up.

You can read the column in full here.