HOW'S THAT EGALITIE WORKING OUT?:

Hardly seems like it would still be necessary, but always fun to compare Leftist delusions, Europeans urged to celebrate and remember (Max Frankel, NOVEMBER 23, 2005, International Herald Tribune)

Buck up, Europe. Though lacking a coherent ideology, a genuine political unity and a significant military, you have stumbled upon a way of life that is preferable even to America's. Indeed, if you continue to let your sinful past retain its "admonitory meaning" - and learn to share your blessings with impoverished immigrants - you will have found not only moral purpose but also a way to teach the 21st century how to avoid the horrors of the 20th.

So says Tony Judt in describing his massive new work, "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945." When asked at a forum at the Open Society Institute in New York on Monday to encapsulate his densely packed 831-page story (voluminous notes and bibliography still to come on the Internet and an eventual paperback), he acknowledged his high but hesitant hopes for Europe and a festering, subtle disillusionment with America. His tale points to a Europe that has learned the value of trying to provide for the common welfare, health and happiness of most of its citizens - a Europe that, with him, sees an America overburdened by military missions and shamed by doctrinal individualism, unfair social policies and often violent tendencies.

...with the brutal reality of the anti-culture Leftism has created:
Entr'acte: If only French leaders listened to pop culture (Alan Riding, NOVEMBER 23, 2005, International Herald Tribune)

So life often imitates art. Yet with the recent uprisings in some French immigrant neighborhoods, this cliché came with a new twist: art in the form of movies and rap music has long been warning that French-born Arab and black youths felt increasingly alienated from French society, that their banlieues were ripe for explosion.

Certainly, anyone who saw Mathieu Kassovitz's film, "La Haine," or "Hate," a decade ago had no reason to be surprised by this fall's violence. At the time, Kassovitz's portrayal of a seething immigrant Paris suburb, even his choice of the word "hate" for his title, seemed shocking, even exaggerated. Today, the movie could almost pass as a documentary. [...]

Even in the mid-1990s, though, "Hate" was hardly an isolated protest. Rather, it spawned a genre known as "banlieue movies" that explored the problems of children of Arab and African immigrants and effectively announced the birth of a new "lost generation." Some films, like Coline Serreau's "Chaos," also focused on young Arab women trying to escape male-run households. Their messages were uniformly disturbing.

Why did these movies not ring alarm bells? Clearly, screen fiction has a distancing effect on spectators: it is "only" telling a story. Yet even television documentaries and news reports can have much the same effect. For most middle-class French, nightly car burnings and police clashes with stone-throwing youths have been taking place on their television screens, not in their neighborhoods.

Where fiction has an advantage in portraying reality is in giving individual faces to well-documented social and economic problems. "Banlieue movies" have also proved more effective in analyzing the cause and effect of these problems than the newspapers and politicians who, of late, have rushed out quick answers as if responding to a natural disaster.
Public thinks STIs are 'trivial' diseases (The Guardian, November 24, 2005)

Cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the UK rose sharply again last year because many people wrongly consider they are trivial diseases and have unprotected sex, health experts warned today.

There were around 700,000 new diagnoses of STIs in 2004 - a rise of more than 60% since 1995, according to the Health Protection Agency (HPA), which monitors infectious diseases.

The HPA found the biggest rises in infection rates over 2003-04 were seen in cases of chlamydia, syphilis and genital warts.

The Passion of Merkel (Marc Young, 11/22/05, Der Spiegel)

Unfortunately, what Merkel most needs to pursue these bold measures is her greatest weakness: her political presence. Merkel got her professional start as a reserved and calculating scientist and she has never fully managed to shed that image. Unlike her congenial predecessor Gerhard Schröder, she finds it difficult to connect to people.

Media savvy and charismatic Schröder called snap elections last spring because of his inability to convince members of his own coalition to follow his course of difficult economic reforms. Unless Merkel's new position allows her to grow beyond her natural tendency to be reserved and cautious, the new chancellor may find it hard to keep her unlikely coalition focused and effective.

Merkel's transformation will have to come swiftly. The response to her proposed program of tax hikes and spending cuts has been muted, to say the least. And unless she can convince her fellow Germans that such sacrifices will lead the country to better days, there is the real danger the steps the government is considering could do as much harm as good.

Anyone who has spent time in Germany recently is aware the country is deeply mired in a crisis of confidence. Germans are almost pathologically pessimistic about their future prospects....

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 23, 2005 11:21 AM