Canadian Conservatives

Progressive Wannabes

Preston Manning's "The New Canada"

Melanie Phillips writes a commentary on British Conservatives, which I think is fully applicable to Canadian Conservatives:

The British Conservatives think that, to regain power, they have to show they have broken with cultural conservatism and go instead with the way society has changed — gay rights, green politics, anti-racism. What they have failed to grasp is that such change has turned values such as right and wrong, good and bad on their heads and has produced a sentimentalised, cruel, oppressive and perverse society — one where burglars go scot-free but householders are prosecuted for putting the wrong kind of garbage in the trash can, and where people are too frightened to protest at the erosion of British, Christian, or Western values because of the opprobrium that will follow.

The Conservatives don’t realize that by embracing such "change" they are endorsing a kind of enslavement. They don’t realize that the first duty of a conservative is to conserve that which is precious and protect it against attack. The result is that millions feel betrayed and abandoned by the absence of conservatism, and yet more still think the Conservative party is just a bunch of opportunists who don’t have any principles. Why vote for the progressive wannabes, after all, when you can have the real thing?

This is a rather long quote, but I think it is insightful and appropriate. Ever since Harper's government took the helm, this is precisely the erosion of conservatism that we have seen here. And just like Phillips says, "why vote for the progressive wannabes when you can have the real thing?" Record numbers of Canadians who stayed at home rather than vote for these wannabes should have been a wake up call for Harper.

I wonder how a man who used to work with Preston Manning and the Reform Party of Canada becomes the progressive wannabe that he is now? Partly I think it is to do with opportunism, like Phillips says. But also it is that I think Harper has embraced these policies so thoroughly, and in fact believes in them so fully, that he is no longer any type of conservative.

One anecdote I remember well. When Harper was explaining why he is was supporting the government's apology (and redress) for the Chinese Head Tax, he talked about a Chinese acquaintance his wife had. How this Chinese man became a friend of her family's, which now included him. How this man was a hard-working, loyal and good friend of the family. And how this man's family suffered because of this head tax.

Such emotionalism and personal reasons do not make for good policy and political decisions. The head tax was a governmental decision to protect the Canada of the past. Harper made the whole thing into a guilt trip which the nation had to overcome. How liberal is that?

The Angst Within

Homosexuals as the epitome of narcissists

Portia de Rossi "married" to Ellen in 2008, dating Ellen in 2005, pre-Ellen (closeted) days in 2003

Here she is (left) while still married to a man, Mel Metcalf in 1997.
She still has a strange look.

Above are some photos of Portia de Rossi, Ellen Degeneres' "wife", and how she looked before she was dating Ellen, and during two episodes of her life with Ellen.

Her " Ellen" photos show an unresolved angst in her demeanor. But what is even more surprising is how strange she looks in her pre-Ellen photos. In the 2003 photo, she looks as though she is beckoning the devil to just come and get her. Cocky, and with a nice smile, but there is something about her eyes which is off-putting.

In the one when she was married to a man (which some biographies of hers say she did to get a green card), she still has an androgynous, uncomfortable, unfeminine look about her, although she is still a very "feminine" lesbian, compared to Ellen, at least.

Most of these "celebrity" lesbians, have strange, rebellious childhoods. I don't know if that translates to "ordinary" lesbians, although I don't see why not. For example Portia changed her very plain (to her) Anglo-Australian name Amanda Lee Rogers to the more exotic Portia de Rossi when she was fifteen. Later on, she also developed an eating disorder. She now claims that was all due to her lack of identity, and not knowing that she was really a lesbian. I don't buy that. She just sounds stubborn and self-centered. Eating disorders are about control and manipulation, anyway. The only outlet these stubborn girls have to "rebel", by turning their family life upside down, and getting attention.

That is why I think all this lesbianism business (and homosexuality in general) is to do with a narcissistic personality bent.

New Post and Side Column Links

At "Our Changing Landscape"

I have put two new posts at "Our Changing Landscape: Putting a Stop to the Islamization of the West."

One is how stealthily and cleverly Muslim groups are "borrowing" our beloved logos for their own purposes, in this case using the logos from the "Little House on the Prairie" for the almost identical "Little Mosque on the Prairie."

Secondly, on the side (and more permanent column) I link to Lawrence Auster's articles on the "rollback, isolate, and contain" strategy he has developed for dealing with Muslim presence in the West.

Nadya Suleman, The Inadvertent Cybele

Nadya Suleman started her adult life with a modicum of normality. She was an only child and was married at twenty-one for eight years. But her marriage was fraught with miscarriages and fertility problems, and ended in childless divorce. She worked for a number of years in a psychiatric ward, only to leave with back injuries after a patient riot, receiving a worker’s compensation award of around $165,000. She has earned a bachelor’s degree in child counselling, and still plans to go on for her masters in counselling.

She says that she had always wanted siblings growing up, and felt that having children of her own would satiate that emptiness she felt as an only child. She eventually saved enough money, about $100,00, to have her fourteen children through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Her octuplets, born on January 26, 2009, catapulted her into the public’s eye.

Technology and the compliance of doctors assisted Nadya in her decision to have children. She used IVF to overcome her past reproductive problems. She found a willing donor to fertilize her eggs, and she went to an anonymous fertility clinic which didn’t ask too many questions, and which performed the quasi-dangerous procedure of implanting her last remaining six embryos that resulted in the unprecedented eight births (with two sets of twins).

Nadya, dubbed the Octo-mom, has been receiving constant negative reaction from the media throughout the news of her ocutplets. Newspaper op-eds, pundits and bloggers decried what they called her selfish, narcissistic behavior, some calling her evil and even crazy. The news in general portrayed her as a disorganized, unemployed, child-obsessesed woman who is scamming the government. Some of this information is incorrect, since for many years she lived off her $165,000 worker’s compensation and student loans (which she rationalizes she will pay back). The welfare she receives was just in food stamps and disability checks for three of her children. She has also lived with her mother and has the help of both her parents.

Still, since the outbreak of her octuplet news, enough people have quietly supported her to provide the necessary provisions for her expanded family. It is still not clear how much she receives for her various public appearances on television and her stories in tabloid magazines. Some calculate it to be in the hundreds of thousands. But whether it is raw fascination or some kind of empathetic curiosity, there is no doubt that she has garnered the public’s interest.

Nadia has a profound confidence that the most natural, the most normal, thing a woman could do is to have her own children. She just wanted lots of them. In her own honest way, she had things properly planned out. All the children would be from the same donor (father), and she would avoid “killing” any of her embryos, hence her insistence on having them all implanted during her final IVF. She admits that she made up the name for the babies’ donor father from the Bible, calling him David Solomon, two personalities who themselves are joined together in family. She even tried to change her own last name to Solomon, presumably to legitimize her actions and give her children a united mother and father, albeit in her fertile imagination.

Her social environment provided her with the means to fulfill her plan and she simply convinced many people, including her parents, the IVF doctor, the sperm donor (apparently there are two donors, although one never had the chance to fertilize her eggs), and a crew of hospital staff to follow her lead.

So what is it that repulsed people, or at least those writers and TV hosts who continue to denigrate her? It certainly is not the illegitimacy of her children. After all, the unplanned infants of teen mothers and single, career women who use anonymous donors, and even of movie stars, are acceptable. Her lack of funds was not at issue with her first six as she has indicated that much of her worker’s compensation provided for several years of upkeep. And as people are belatedly presented with her explanations, they realize that she only expected one or two from her final IVF . Still, writers and commentators just wouldn’t give her any slack. Where did Nadya go wrong?

Close reading of many articles, whose writers start off by voicing their concern for the funds required to raise the children, or who are irate over the slack the government would have to take, shows one thing in common: Fourteen! is the exclamation point. Some (deep in their articles) have referred to the babies as “litter” or “freakish”. One writer described Nadya as a Third World Muslim Jihadist set to out-breed the American population, even though Nadya has indicated that she is a Christian and was born in America. A female writer talks about Nadya as “the maternal equivalent of a cat collector” with an “out-of-control female body”. And an op-ed columnist has called her behaviour “motherhood psycho kind of thing”.

Sarah Palin and her five, and the Duggar family with its eighteen, have received similar, although less vitriolic, reactions. Even ordinary families with more than four children (why is that the cut-off point?) have to deal with the derision of family and friends for having more than the expected two or three children.

Movie stars like Angelina Jolie, who has only three of her own, and Mia Farrow who has four, have more than doubled their children by salvaging babies from third world countries or providing homes for disabled children. Their fans find this expansion through “rescuing” (rather than birthing) a worthy and admirable behavior.

Nadya’s fourteen are all hers, with photos of her enlarged belly carrying all eight fetuses to prove it. If she had culminated with the seven or eight she expected after her last IVF, there would have still been room for criticism, but not nearly as much as what she gets with her fourteen.

Modern people are disturbed by large numbers of children and by unabashed displays of motherhood. And Nadya is not at all shy about hers, something which we don’t see with Jolie and Farrow. Nadya has a voluptuously generous post-natal body, unlike the scrawny and gaunt Jolie whom many incorrectly say she tries to resemble. She is constantly hugging and kissing any one of her six children in abundant motherly love. She sings individualized songs to the eight that are still in hospital. Her quick mind is constantly thinking of her offspring, often coming up with unconventional ways to provide for them. And Nadya says things like, “I believe you expand your love…I’m trying to make myself bigger” for her fourteen children.

Nadya is a modest regeneration of Cybele, the Great Mother (of the gods and men), the Magna Mater, the fertility goddess, whose story is full of the powers and secrets of womanhood. Cybele is flanked by lions and worshiped by castrated men, and reigned over ancient cities. She has a strange resonance with the insouciant Nadya, whose breeziness camouflages a will of steel. Jolie tried to win this role, but her strange, detached demeanor and her lanky body makes her an unlikely candidate.

The avant-garde filmmaker Man Ray even made a surrealist film on Cybele with his L'Étoile de Mer, where he simultaneously showed his fear of castration by her vagina dentata (toothed vagina) and his great admiration of her being: “Si Belle! Cybèle?”. André Breton, founder of the surrealist movement, has uncanny references to the modern-day Nadya in his novel Nadja, whom he depicts as some mad woman, which is how the media (incorrectly) has been portraying our current Nadya. He even sites a film The Grip of the Octopus in Nadja which film critic P. Adams Sitney says refers to the vagina dentata of Man Ray’s fears, the cloying, grasping tentacles pulling unsuspecting men towards the all-engulfing female.

The world of art and myth often collide to embellish and elucidate our strange daily lives.

Nadya’s men did indeed symbolically castrate themselves for her by providing their seeds for her progeny without the sexual act. One has even publicly presented himself as her emasculated benefactor, risking all humiliation to show his adulation, saying that he is the donor and father of her fourteen children (although according to Nadya, he is not). What real man publicly announces that he is a sperm donor?

Still, other mothers, like Angelina Jolie, the sperm-donor conceiving working women, and the five-time-mother Sarah Palin, are behaving in “Cybele-lite” fashion, although it is clear that for them motherhood does not take precedence, unlike the home-bound Nadya. Their men, whether it is those anonymous sperm-donors, trailing partners like Jolie’s Brad Pitt, or even Sarah Palin’s accommodating husband Todd Palin, are forced to dance to their tune, like Cybele’s emasculated men. Todd, despite his macho snowmobile treks, is forced to live around his wife’s political career and act as a babysitter when she’s not around, and Pitt is a partner in the adoption crime fulfilling the occasional donor-giving qualities built into the contract.

In a twist of media attention, which surprisingly didn’t happen sooner, Nadya, our reluctant Cybele, was asked if she would star in a pornographic film, where she would have eight different partners in eight different scenes. The gripping octopus from André Breton’s novel was coming to life – a crude interpretation of her powerful fecundity (eight babies from eight tentacles?) as the Great Mother into some kind of erotica. Nadya coyly didn’t refuse this offer at the beginning, perhaps sensing the subliminal and mythic nature of the whole situation. And a million dollars is a lot to contemplate.

Ordinary people, not distracted by indignant TV hosts and priggish newspaper columnists, do understand the iconic nature of Nadya the Octo-mom. One should read the tabloids, not the New York Times, to gauge Nadya’s popularity. Nadya the Octo-mom, mother of fourteen and Magna Mater, is a force of nature. She even had the intrusive and opportunist Dr. Phil, the TV mega-host and mega-man himself, momentarily ineffectual (a pattern here?) when he beseeched to his audience to support his accusations that “she has done wrong.” Nadya finally said “yes”, she did wrong, but not without telling us first a thousand reasons why she did right. She nonetheless got Dr. Phil on her side, securing his on-TV declaration that he will do all he can to help her children.

Nadya’s dealings with the labyrinthal, heathen, modern world has given her more than she bargained for. Now, it’s time to bring some propriety to her family. Throwing all myth and poetry aside, she should persuade, in her talented way, the Biblically named father of her children David Solomon to do the right thing by marrying her in a proper church manner, perhaps at the one she was filmed attending with her children. She might even convince the public that it’s fine to have more than two or three children – God provides in mysterious ways, as is happening to her. For all her mythic possibilities, I suspect all Nadya wanted was a house full of children with the right man to take care of her and them.

What's On My Youtube?

Brahms Cradle Song



Over at the classical music.

Postponed deliveries

And fathers as birth assistants

The astute and persistent Chris Wallace of Fox New asked Obama's campaign manager David Plouff whether he was planning to be at his child's birth on election day, if that happens to be the day of the delivery. Plouff says: "Absolutely." Wallace goes on to say: "Boy, there are a lot of people in the Beltway are going to question your priorities, David."

There was a time when such a question wasn't even entertained. No father would relinquish an important (public) engagement to sit at his wife's hospital bed to help deliver his child.

Of course, this is the other side of the coin where women now (enter Sarah Palin) will prolong delivery (by what miracle, I wonder) to make scheduled speeches as full-time careerists.

If women can act like men, why not men act like women? In the mean time, who exactly is running the country?

The Monsters

Of Art and Science

Max Ernst, The Fireside Angel, 1937

This past summer, I was in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada's summer show "The Making of the New Man", where works from important artists of the turn of the 20th century such as Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and many others, were exhibited showing their version of "The New Man."

What was intriguing about these visions was that they were almost all of them deformed in some way or other. Max Ernst, in his meticulous paintings, perhaps articulated this best. His "new man" was an amalgam of parts, some imaginatively created by Ernst himself, others he appropriated from animals or other familiar sources. But in the end, his "new man" was a monster.

In an article entitled "Listening to Frankenstein", The Center for Vision and Values' Andrew J. Harvey writes about the monster that Mary Shelley's main character, Victor Frankenstein, creates. This creature was never given a name, but we know him as "Frankenstein."

Harvey describes Victor's mindset as that of the modern scientist, and especially today's research scientist, where the pursuit of pure knowledge without its ethical or moral implications can land us with many Frankensteins.

Since this is an art blog, I will just briefly focus on art. Max Ernst's monsters were also created in the pursuit of pure art, where the artist becomes the creator and uses his inner imagination to design his own unique world. Just as the scientist can use his knowledge to make his world - three-legged chicken, tomatoes from green beans - so can the artist create his own by just using his palette and his imagination.

Modern artists who searched into the depths of their imagination, and who believed that they have it within them to make new and great creations, found either an emptiness, as Rothko realized. Or, they found monsters and inhuman concoctions, just as Max Ernst demonstrated. The idea that artists can create something out of nothing - by simply using their imagination - is a modern phenomenon. Previous generations used nature, the Bible and myths and stories to create their paintings to much better success.

There is no "new man", as the scientist Victor found out. But modern artists are slow to catch on, even though Mary Shelley wrote Victor's experiment as a novel rather than as a scientific document.