Category: The Dish

Move over, American Idol. At least, I think he went to Africa.

It really shouldn’t exist – but it does.

"Gay people who are raised in a religious environment, a conservative religious environment are basically told, "You’re not good enough / you don’t belong here / you need to change / you need to be something else." And so, in a lot of our lives, we end up leaving the church and hating God or hating Religion or hating the whole nine yards. But an inherently spiritual person doesn’t really lose the core of their being. So it’s going to come out somewhere.

I think that what we discovered is that it comes out of Theatre, because Theatre and Church are essentially the same thing. They are story-telling, they are inspirational, and they are true. Theatre brings an even higher truth sometimes. Church basically repeats the same old story over and over again. I often wonder if that’s not one of the reasons so many Gay people wind up getting into Theatre. We’re always told that the reasons are because we’re used to hiding and wearing masks and being somebody else. But I think there’s something more profound," – Steve Schalchlin, San Francisco Sentinel.

A reader writes:

Did I miss something? Did I skip right over the parts where Gerecht proposes something more effective than Obama? If someone is trying to figure out a suitable response to an ugly situation, and another someone shreds, at length, those responses, he’d best have something better to propose or shut up.

At some point, some brave soul will come forward and just flat out tell the US that this is the way it is, the way it will be for decades. Women have checked over their shoulders for eons, to be sure the enemy is not approaching. Now the entire free world must adopt that behavior.  We will never be without the threat of terrorism and death in our lifetimes.

We can either cower in fear, or live and be cautious and observant. Waiting for someone to make us "safe" is fruitless.

Or further adventures up Karl Rove’s lower colon, by Fred Barnes.

An Iraqi boy looks through a broken windshield of a damaged car, following an alleged early joint Iraqi and US forces raid on the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 12 August 2007. Five American soldiers have been killed in fighting around Baghdad, including four in one attack, the US military said today, as Iraqis mourned an assassinated provincial governor and police chief. By Wissam Al-Okaili/AFP/Getty Images.

Reuel Marc Gerecht tackles Obama:

To the senator’s credit, he sees that Iraq and al Qaeda do not define Muslims and Islam. What he does not seem to grasp – and the Bush administration is no better – is that America is the cutting edge of a modernity that has convulsed Islam as a faith and a civilization. This collision will likely become more violent, not less, as Muslims more completely enter the ethical free fall that comes as modernity pulverizes the world of our ancestors. Barack Obama’s newly devised "Mobile Development Teams," which will bring together "personnel from the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID … to turn the tide against extremism" are unlikely to make America more attractive to devout Muslims who know that America is the leading force in destroying the world that they love. The senator can leave Iraq, shut down Guantánamo, apologize for Abu Ghraib, and build "secular" schools all over Pakistan, and he will not change this fact. This is the deep well from which al Qaeda draws.

I think Gerecht is right here. But what exactly is the alternative? Permanently occupying a Muslim country with US troops is clearly not a way to reconcile Islam with modernity either. Doubling down in Iraq compounds this problem. It shows no signs of alleviating it. Perhaps our greatest delusion is believing we can do anything much about the internal convulsions of Islam in grappling with modernity. The forces behind this are far deeper and greater than any foreign policy initiative from the distant US can reverse or channel. We may just have to endure, with prudential defenses of nascent democratic life in Afghanistan and Kurdistan, and make sure we do not violate our own constitutional freedoms in the meantime. Or we can hope that the nascent Muslim civil war brings the world of Islam to its senses. Either way, it’s going to be a long and grueling struggle.

Has popular music gone from rewarding the long careers of perfectionist strivers to embracing the unvarnished genius of youth? David Galenson thinks so:

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative life cycles of songwriters. Golden Era songwriters were generally at their best during their 30s and 40s, whereas since the mid-’60s popular songwriters have consistently done their best work during their 20s. The revolution in popular music occurred at a time when young innovators were making similar transformations in other arts: Jean-Luc Godard and his fellow New Wave directors created a conceptual revolution in film in the early ’60s, just as Andy Warhol and other Pop artists made painting a conceptual activity.

Sager does it – not once but twice.

A new study finds they side with members of their own race in making calls.