Culture Watch

Is Country Music Inherently Conservative?

by Peter La Chapelle

At its annual awards show last week, the Country Music Association honored the 2007 inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Considering the association's track record of focusing on album sales and downplaying the genre's frequent political controversies, it perhaps came as no surprise that the CMA's anonymous industry-dominated selection committee this year honored largely apolitical performers Mel Tillis and Vince Gill and broadcaster Ralph Emery. And yet, prominent figures in Ameri

Review of "My Name is Rachel Corrie"

by Mary Ann Fay

The controversial play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, closed the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, to sold-out houses on the final weekend of the festival. Produced for the first time in London at the Royal Court Theater in April 2005, the play has met obstacles and provoked heated debates in the U.S. when theater companies have attempted to mount productions of the play, and its inclusion in the CATF was no exception. The p

The Myth of Rachel Corrie

by Ronald Radosh

This letter was sent in June to Ed Herendeen, the founder and artistic director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in protest of the production of "My Name is Rachel Corrie" (reviewed on HNN this week). Dear Mr. Herendeen:            I moved to this area [Shepherdstown, West Virginia] one year ago, largely beca

Was CNN's "God's Warriors" Fair?

by Timothy R. Furnish

On August 21-23, 2007, CNN ran a series entitled “God’s Warriors,” hosted by Christiane Amanpour. The two-hour segments dealt, in nightly order, with Jews (and Israelis), Muslims and Christians. I watched all three, but since my areas of expertise are Islamic and Christian history (as well as being a Christian myself), my commentary will not encompass the first night.

Sicko: Michael Moore and Freedom from Fear and Want

by Ron Briley

In a January 6, 1941 State of the Union address to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt spelled out American war aims as the nation entered the Second World War. The address is often referred to as the “Four Freedoms” speech, for Roosevelt asserted that everyone in the world ought to enjoy freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In these last two categories of want and fear, the President was expanding the traditional natu

Books: Review of William Saletan's Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (University of California Press)

by Stanley I. Kutler

The Thirty Years' War raged in Europe from 1618 to 1648, largely the consequence of religious conflicts between Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 brought temporary peace, but it proved fragile, and conflict continued on the European continent for another 150 years. One thinks of such a protracted conflict as belonging to another time, not ours. But the abortion wars are our Thirty Years' War, rooted in the same religious and moral claims that fuel

Books: Alexander DeConde’s Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control

by Robert Spitzer

The issue of gun control has been with America for many decades. Most would date the modern gun control controversy to the 1960s, when assassinations and civil disorder promoted enactment of the first modern gun control law, the Gun Control Act of 1968. From that point forward, pressures to enact stronger gun laws escalated, as did resistance to these efforts. The powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) spearheaded the resistance. Yet, the story of gun control in America predates the 1

Invasion USA (1952): It Can Happen Here

by Ron Briley

Americans have long celebrated their opposition to tyranny, dating back to the American Revolution and clarion call of “no taxation without representation.” Many citizens take pride in the second amendment to the Constitution, believing that individual possession of firearms will prevent foreign invasion and the imposition of dictatorship in the United States. More sophisticated considerations of how fascism might come to America, such as It Can’t Happen Here by Si

Norman Rockwell: How Innocent Was He?

by Richard Halpern

In early October, The Boston Globe ran a piece about my recently-published book on Norman Rockwell. That book argues (among other things, but this was apparently the sole point of interest) that Rockwell’s work has a sexual dimension, often of a harmlessly perverse kind. The response of the paper’s readers was volcanic. Some of the postings on the website’s discussion board were so violent (most notably by someone writing under the worrisome nom de plume &

The Uneasy Relationship Between Money and Morals in Book Publishing

by Richard L. Cravatts

In 1948, one year after the death of legendary Charles Scribner's Sons editor Maxwell Perkins—editor of Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and Wolfe—the annual Books in Print index listed 85,000 titles from only 357 book publishers. The small scale of the book trade at that time meant that book publishers continued their tradition of being gatekeepers of our culture and knowledge; publishing, it was thought, was a calling for those for whom commerce was a secondary consideration. Di

Is the New World War II Monument Fascist?

by Daniel Honan

"For a great building project I would, like Faust, have sold my soul." --Albert Speer Responsible critics and historians are naturally reluctant to throw around a term like"fascist" when describing a contemporary work of art. However, a growing number are openly using that term to describe the World War II Memorial slated to be built on the National Mall in Washington. Using that term"is not a moral judgment," expla

The Most Dramatic Moment in Major League Baseball History

by George Beres

As the years pass, an Oregon octogenarian grows more secure in his place as a key figure in the most dramatic moment in Major League baseball history. Forest Grove's Larry Jansen was winning pitcher in the "game of the 20th century," when the Giants came from behind in the bottom of the ninth inning to win a playoff series against the Dodgers and get into the World Series against the New York Yankees. How long ago was that for the boy born in little Verboor

The Vietnam War and Modern Memory

by Ron Briley

A 2005 documentary film still seeking wider theatrical release demonstrates the continuing relevance of how we remember the Vietnam War. Sir! Nor Sir! by filmmaker David Zeiger chronicles the resistance within the military of soldiers who became convinced that the course of action taken by the United States in Vietnam was morally wrong. These soldiers of conscience published underground newspapers, frequented coffee shops where the military was subject to criticism and satire, questi

The Da Vinci Code: A Fun Bunch of Hooey

by Cathy Schultz

Leave it to Tom Hanks to put The Da Vinci Code into perspective. Interviewed for London's Evening Standard, the star of the upcoming blockbuster insists the furor over the film is misplaced. "It's a damn good story and a lot of fun," he asserted, adding that no one should take the film too seriously. It's loaded, he said, "with all sorts of hooey."He's

Flight 93 ... No Flight of Fantasy

by Timothy R. Furnish

In the last several weeks the Big Three of the Islamic world’s sizable jihadist wing–Usama bin Ladin, his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri and his epigone Mus`ab al-Zarqawi–all fulminated about the need for continuing jihad against “Crusaders” (and Zionists, and Hindus). How appropriate, then, that “United 93" opened at the same time, reminding us that it’s ZZ and their Top that are the real threats to the world–not George Bush. If you

Review of "The Boy in the Bubble"

by Barron H. Lerner

After watching the latest American Experience documentary on PBS on Monday, April 10, 2006, you may never laugh again at the Seinfeld episode that spoofed the life of the “Bubble Boy.” After all, the real-life story of David Vetter asked the painful question: “Is this boy better off dead?” Not surprisingly, there were no easy answers. Vetter was born in 1971 with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID), a disease of boys in which the body’s immune system

Caspar Weinberger's In the Arena

by Edwin Black

In the Arena [Regnery], Casper Weinberger's plain prose memoir generally devoid of emotion recounts the 20th century as it intersected the events of his life.In the very first chapter, Weinberger bluntly lays to rest the assumption that he was raised Jewish, recounting that both his father and grandfather were indifferent to any religion dating back to a synagogue quarrel in Bohemia three generations earlier. Weinberger was instead influenced by his mother's interest

Jarhead Nation

by Jerry Lembcke

Commenting on films nominated for this year’s Academy Awards on his February 5, 2006 show, Chris Matthews noted that films are important for what they say about the times in which they are made. For example, Good Night and Good Luck, he said, is about the current Bush Administration’s attempts to suppress the truth of governmental malfeasance, even though the film is set in the McCarthyite climate of the 1950s. Munich, he observed, speaks to our on-going anxiety ab

Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima

by David McNeill

Early in 2005, as Japan was gearing up for a summer of painful World War II anniversaries, Shindo Yoshitaka received an unusual phone call. Hollywood superstar Clint Eastwood was planning to visit Tokyo in April and would very much like to meet the Japanese Diet member to discuss a project he was working on. Was he available? “Of course I said yes,” Councilor Shindo recalled. The project was a movie about Iwo Jima, a speck of volcanic rock in the Pacific Ocean about 700 miles sou

Terence Malick’s The New World: A Creation Myth for a Lost World

by Ron Briley

Historians often cringe when the term “new world” is used for the contact between Europeans and Native Americans. The employment of this language assumes a European perspective; as if indigenous peoples were not already living in the Western Hemisphere. Director Terence Malick’s The New World, however, attempts to tell the story of contact from both a European and Native American point of view. Malick’s film gets a head start on the 400th anniversary of the Ja