[Rhodes22-list] test

Fri Oct 6 12:20:49 EDT 2006

Bill,

Let me be the one to break the silence.  Today is an absolutely beautiful
day in Tennessee, a perfect day for sailing.  The sun is shining, the wind
is blowing, and the temps are in the 70's, but alas, I'm playing Mr. Mom.
Since when did Fall Break start?  I don't remember that one as a kid.

Here is something from the morning's reading that summarizes my thoughts
quite well (from the WSJ) about this whole Foley mess.  Why should anything
shock anyone anymore?

I feel so sorry for those Amish parents.  A long time ago when I was into
raising Haflingers (an Austrian draft pony) I met a lot of Amish at the
national shows.  Good People!

Brad

---------------------

Return to the Article<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/tides_of_confusion_have_washed.html>

October 06, 2006 Is This Mark Foley Thing Really Happening?*By* *Daniel
Henninger*<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/daniel_henninger/>

<http://www.opinionjournal.com/>Is this Mark Foley thing really happening?

I woke up early the other morning after a bad dream about Muslims routinely
blowing up and torturing other innocent Muslims. You know the world has
turned upside down when your dreams spill over with real problems and your
working hours are filled with the most fantastic stories.

It's hard to believe that the Foley/instant message/congressional-page/GOP
meltdown story has run for a week. Other than the slaughter in Amish
country, is anyone aware of anything else of note in the world that happened
the past seven days? Dive deep enough beneath the Foley flotsam and you
discover reports that North Korea may be preparing to conduct an underground
nuclear test. China and South Korea are at this hour trying to forestall the
Hermit Kingdom's nuke test and no doubt could use an expression of support
and outrage from the American political establishment. Sorry, they're busy
reading Congressman Foley's 1995 email traffic.

We see also where Europe's envoy to Iran, Javier Solana, threw in the towel
after "endless hours" of talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
who on Wednesday told a crowd screaming "Death to America" that sanctions
wouldn't stop Iran from enriching uranium. Whatever. The big news in
Washington yesterday morning was that the House Ethics Committee sat down
"behind closed doors" to think about Mark Foley.

We know when we're beaten. Bowing to the gods of the news cycle, let us
undertake the great questions of the moment. Where does post-modern American
ethics place Mark Foley's homosexuality on a scale of 1 to 10--a 1 being
just another gay guy and a 10 being a compulsive, predatory sex offender?
What might fall in between seems to have confused Denny Hastert, two
newspapers, one TV network and the FBI. In the event, Mr. Hastert, as the
point man, is being driven from office for having failed, in hindsight, to
recognize the obvious.

On this score, Mr. Hastert has our sympathy. There is much in American life
that doesn't seem "obvious" anymore. Call it the transgendering of reality.

This compulsion to ambiguity is the reason that both the politicians and the
reporters writing about the Foley affair have been describing what the
congressman did as "inappropriate." Inappropriate is the word you use when
describing behavior that falls on the scale between 3 to 7. Mark Foley seems
to be the kind of guy who runs up a high phone bill calling 1-800-SEX-GUYS.
That might have qualified as a 10 some 50 years, but not anymore. Former
Congressman Gerry Studds had sex in 1973 with a House page. He said it was
consensual. Even now, this is a 10. In Florida, doing a 10 probably earns
you a johnboat trip to the swamps. But in Mr. Studds's Massachusetts
district, it earned him five more trips to Congress.

Mark Foley is on his way to oblivion after his 15 minutes of infamy. As luck
would have it, the originator of the increasingly true prediction that in
the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, Andy Warhol, was the
subject of an excellent American Masters documentary a few weeks ago. It was
impossible to watch this unsparingly honest account of Warhol's career and
the era spawned from the 1960s onward without thinking about the culture we
inhabit today.

Andy Warhol didn't create the culture we have today. He was merely among the
first to recognize that the magic carpets were arriving, and always a fast
learner, he knew how to ride them. Whatever older, earthly restraints on
personal behavior existed, they were falling away fast back then. You could
get away with things. So you did. And did. And did.

As a result, we live now in an era awash in cultural confusions. The tides
bring in weird phenomena, like the Mark Foley story, leave them on the beach
overnight, then drag them back out to sea before there's time to make much
sense of what we saw. As often as not, we don't even try. The Web and
digital technology have ramped up the cultural velocity to warp speed.
MySpace, YouTube--the once-bright line between the private and public
spheres has evaporated.

This has had an effect on the way we think, or don't. Clarity--thinking
clearly--is harder than ever to achieve, because clarity assumes a degree of
general social agreement about things. For instance, time was that most
people would agree that putting a crucifix in urine and calling it art
doesn't qualify as anything but bad thinking. But no, we had to have a big
argument over that. At the end of her current stage act, Madonna makes
herself the central figure in a crucifixion scene. No problem. Most
reviewers simply describe it, and move on.

Challenge over the past 40 years became a more powerful social value than
clarity. One of the byproducts of challenge is that you don't have to think
very much--about the point or the consequences. Just do it. The act of
challenge is its own justification. And one of the byproducts of constant
challenge is aggressive confusion. Another seer of the Sixties, Bob Dylan,
saw what was happening by 1967: "There's too much confusion here, I can't
get no relief." Denny Hastert, meet the joker.

Looking back again at Ric Burns's Warhol documentary, it is hard not to see
in retrospect the inexorable dominance over time of the cultural
frivolousness that emerged in those years. Politics is especially
vulnerable. A political culture--the politicians and their attendant
media--that would allow itself to set aside everything else to spend a week
with the Mark Foley "scandal" is frivolous. They look like dupes.

So the Foley comet hurtles forward, no doubt into the weekend, like some
black star sucking all of Washington's loose debris into its vortex. Within
hours of convening yesterday, the Ethics Committee issued nearly four dozen
subpoenas. An 866-number "tipline" has been opened to solicit--if one may
use that word--more page complaints about Mr. Foley or . . .

By midafternoon yesterday, a rumor emerged that in fact Mark Foley had been
pranked by the House pages. It is the first plausible thing I've heard in
seven days. Four weeks from the election, I have an idea: Let's fire the
Members and replace them with the pages. We could do worse. We are.
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial
page.
*Page Printed from:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/tides_of_confusion_have_washed.html
* at October 06, 2006 - 11:11:24 AM CDT

On 10/6/06, Bill Effros <bill at effros.com> wrote:
>
> Hank,
>
> Its been awfully quiet.  Hard to believe on this list.
>
> Bill Effros
>
> Hank wrote:
> > If you are testing the address, then you passed.  However, if you put in
> > content, then you didn't.  Unless you've decided to run for political
> > office
> > and this was a fact sheet of of you party's platform and actual
> > accomplishments (Rep or Dem) then I guess you filled up the page! ;>)
> >
> > On 10/6/06, Bill Effros <bill at effros.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> __________________________________________________
> >> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help? www.rhodes22.org/list
> >>
> > __________________________________________________
> > Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help? www.rhodes22.org/list
> >
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help? www.rhodes22.org/list
>