They Were the World, They Were the Children 

Ranking the vocal solo parts in "We Are the World" in celebration of the terrific new documentary The Greatest Night in Pop:

01. Stevie Wonder Absolutely kills it. Stevie's solo sans Springsteen (on whom see way below...) from 5:07–5:20 is the only transcendently awesome part of this song. The doc's fascinating anecdote about how Stevie also served as Fellow-Genius-Whisperer when Bob Dylan was awkwardly out of his element further enhances the importance of his contribution here.

02. Diana Ross The prettiest solo (with just a bit of MJ backing), and her pointing hand gesture at 1:43 is sweetly endearing, particularly after hearing in the doc about how much the experience meant to her. (Also: look closely behind Ross as she sings, and you'll see Tina Turner knelt down seemingly trying to find something in her purse and for a second glancing up at the camera, lol!) 

03. Willie Nelson So much plaintive minor-key beauty packed into nine seconds, and that slight wince at 2:05 really sells it. 

04. Paul Simon Likewise condenses what he does best (as a singer) into less than 10 seconds. 

05. Michael Jackson It's hard to know where to rank his vocal contribution here. In a larger sense, this is unmistakably a MJ song, especially in hindsight, as both lyrically and melodically this sounds quite close to his signature ballads from Dangerous onward. His solo part is fine. It fits well, and is maybe most admirable for its relative restraint. Obviously he could've totally outshone everyone else, give or take Stevie Wonder, but he didn't, which ultimately made the(/his, essentially) song better on measure.

06. Tina Turner Also remarkably restrained; she sounds so good down in that subtle low range. 

07. Cyndi Lauper The opposite, yet in its way approximately as good, Cyndi sings the absolute hell out of "Let's realize THAT A CHANGE CAN ONLY COME". Apparently she got the nod over Madonna, and her eight seconds of solo time leave no doubt that she was the more expressive, and superior, singer. The doc's anecdote about her noisy jewelry was hilarious. 

08. Dionne Warwick Nicely sung and transitions well to Willie Nelson's part while contrasting with it. 

09. Ray Charles and 10. Bob Dylan Both of these slightly expanded cameo slots are instantly recognizable and distinctive, but also feel a touch out of place in the flow of the song.

11. Lionel Richie Sets the table for what follows –- and what exists largely due to his Herculean labour, MJ's effortless brilliance, and Quincy Jones' ability to make something super rushed and inherently messy sound cohesive and fairly polished. 

12. Al Jarreau I now like Jarreau's (tiny) part 80% more after learning from the doc that he was chugging wine all night, and it was basically a race against time to record him getting through his five-second bit before he could no longer form words. Legendary stuff! 

13. James Ingram Hmm... [googles 'James Ingram']...Oh! He sang Fievel's part on "Somewhere Out There" from An American Tail, one of the best animated-movie songs of all-time (later re-purposed in one of the best Community sequences!). To be sure, Ingram's bit here isn't Fievel-level great, but it's totally solid.

14. Huey Lewis Apparently filled in for M-I-A Prince (who insisted on recording a guitar solo in a separate room, and when Richie said it wasn't feasible Prince hung up the phone and never showed at the studio, which is exquisitely on-brand!), and did so pretty serviceably. For posterity's sake, I think it's for the best that we have that excellent Prince story but Lewis' solo –– notwithstanding the glaring fact that the greatness gap between HL and PRN is of Grand Canyon-like dimensions! 

15. Kenny Rogers Now getting into just-OK territory. (As a 90s kid, what remains my first mental association for Kenny Rogers isn't musical, but rather the Seinfeld episode involving 'his' fried chicken and neon restaurant sign.)

16. Kim Carnes Poor Kim Carnes had to follow right after Cyndi Lauper blasted off into the stratosphere, a fact that Lauper acknowledged (while also admitting that she didn't actually like the song itself!) on Andy Cohen's show. Watch closely at 3:01 and you'll see that Carnes is only truly solo when singing "when we," though that is exactly two words more than Sheila E. (per the doc, included in the choir specifically to entice Prince, which didn't work), Harry Belafonte, Smokey Robinson, Waylon Jennings, John Oates, and any Jackson not named 'Michael' get to deliver solo. 

17. Daryl Hall, 18. Kenny Loggins, and 19. Billy Joel  Mehsville, USA. I would've rather seen what Dan Aykroyd (for whatever reason included as part of the larger group for the big chorus parts) could do with a solo spot. Would he have done a Blues Brothers thing? Or just sang as...Dan Aykroyd? This is low-key one of the great pop-culture what-if's! And the deeply unlikely answer to the trivia question "Who is the only person who both sang on 'We Are the World' and acted in a Terence Davies movie?" 

20. Steve Perry Exactly as much Steve Perry singing as I can comfortably tolerate. 

21. Bruce Springsteen The artistic merit of "We Are the World" lies in the way most of its solo parts encapsulate the quintessence of each singer's particular vocal style/persona, pared down to amuse-bouche-like portions, while somehow mostly still fitting together to form (again, due in large part to the wizardry of Quincy Jones) a long song that hangs together pretty well all things considered. The Boss (who is my favourite among all the artists involved; only Paul Simon and, with more ambivalence, MJ come close) is the only singer here who fatally crosses the line into full-on self-parody, which is really a shame because he can be a very nuanced singer when he wants to, and could've supplied a performance that better fit the song while still "sounding like Bruce Springsteen" – i.e., more Nebraska, less Born in the USA. He had just finished touring in support of the latter album, and was apparently deeply exhausted from that. I wish he had channeled that feeling of exhaustion (think: "Highway Patrolman," "Atlantic City") rather than summoning up a rather cartoonish Bruce Springsteen impression.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

                        The great, apparently ageless Rob Sheffield ranked all (243!) Taylor Swift songs, which I really wish I could somehow get paid to do. Alas, as a quirky amateur pursuit, I haven't the time to spare. 

And yet...in deep-diving Vault tracks and concomitantly rethinking/revising this earlier, off-the-top-of-my-head top ten (now itself lightly tweaked), I (*ahem*) 'accidentally' expanded it to fifty seventy-five (!).

I also arrived at the conclusion that no one since John Lennon –– going back to his early Beatles true co-writes –– has done so much with the ebullient-love-song/bitter-break-up-song/regretful-lingering-heartbreak-song spectrum. Prince was a bona fide master of the first two song types, but more often than not his stabs at the third came off as rather perfunctory ("When U Were Mine," his greatest-ever track, in my view, falls somewhere between types two and three), at least as performed by him. "Sinéad's Version" proved he could write heartbreak brilliantly, but always seemed too...human-adjacent to really get it across himself. (Of course Prince totally tops Lennon, Swift, and everybody else when it comes to the unabashed sex song, an idiom in which only Liz Phair, Madonna, and maybe, at her freakiest, Björk come close – no pun intended.) 

Anyway, I digress. At this moment I think these are the best Swift songs, though her ever-expanding Version of the Great American Songbook is such that another weekend workload-soundtracking deep dive could shake it up, especially the lower third or so of these fifty, which, admittedly, I simply may have played more recently than others omitted here that are approximately as good. Her top twenty-five stacks up well against anyone's: Prince, Beatles/Lennon, yes, Moz even!

Put on "I Almost Do" right now. To my tastes, it's her finest deep cut ("Right Where You Left Me" isn't even a deep cut – it's a subsequent bonus track!) and proof positive that she's one of the most preternaturally gifted and eloquent songwriters we've had. And listening to it at, like, 3:45 am, I'm thinking, "Whoa, I can really relate to this song!" But then at 3:47 it occurs to me that almost everyone can really relate to this song –– it's highly specific yet universal, which is her sweet spot and her genius. She catches (sad, wistful, sleepless) lightning in a bottle, and answers for us in the affirmative to the "Is This Anything" test regarding stuff we feel but mostly fail to articulate most of the time. 

[updated with Tortured Poets Department/Anthology tracks and expanded to 75]

01. "Right Where You Left Me"
02. "Tim McGraw"

03. "Our Song" 

04. "I Almost Do"  
05. "All Too Well" (10-Minute Version)

06. "Dear John"

07. "Sparks Fly"   

08. "Delicate"

09. "Fifteen"

10. "Peter" 

11. "Call It What You Want"

12. "New Year's Day" 

13. "Ours" 

14. "A Place in This World"

15. "I Know Places"

16. "The 1" (The Long Pond Studio Sessions version)

17. "Fearless" (Live from Clear Channel Stripped 2008 version)

18. "Lover" 

19. "Clara Bow"

20. "The Bolter" 

21. "Willow" 

22. "The Best Day" 

23. "Teardrops on My Guitar"

24. "Cardigan" 

25. "Back to December"

26. "Should've Said No" 

27. "Cruel Summer" 

28. "Speak Now" 

29. "You Belong with Me" 

30. "Love Story" 

31. "Enchanted" 

32. "Haunted" 

33. "You're on Your Own, Kid"

34. "So Long, London"

35. "Style" 

36. "Never Grow Up" 

37. "I Knew You Were Trouble" 
38. "Gorgeous"  

39. "22"

40. "Blank Space"

41. "The Very First Night" 
42. "Labyrinth"

43. "Long Live" 

44. "Wildest Dreams" 

45. "Last Kiss"

46. "White Horse" 
47. "Mean"  

48.  "State of Grace" (acoustic version)  

49. "I Hate It Here"  

50. "How Did It End?" 

51. "Don't Blame Me"

52. "I Did Something Bad" 

53.  "Cassandra" 

54. "I Bet You Think About Me"

55. "Champagne Problems" 

56. "I'm Only Me When I'm with You" 

57. "New Romantics" 

58. "Karma" 

59. "Now That We Don't Talk" 

60. "Getaway Car"

61. "Ready for It?"

62. "Hey Stephen" 

63. "Maroon"

64. "Mine" 

65. "The Story of Us"

66. "Soon You'll Get Better"

67. "The Tortured Poets Department"

68. "Down Bad" 

69. "You're Losing Me" 

70. "Is It Over Now?"

71. "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"

72. "But Daddy I Love Him"

73. "Picture to Burn" 

74. "Lavender Haze" 

75. "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" 

I Want the One I Can't Have

 One More List for Good Measure: Top 20 Paul Simon or Simon & Garfunkel Songs

Not the most balanced list, admittedly, as I'm deeply partial to Graceland and, to a lesser extent, the self-titled solo debut. 

01. "The Boy in the Bubble" (go to 52:17 here!) 
02. "Duncan"
03. "Bleecker Street"
04. "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" 
05. "I Know What I Know"
06. "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" (go to 26:00 here!) 
07. "Graceland"

08. "The Sound of Silence" (remixed version) 
09. "Run That Body Down"
10. "The Only Living Boy in New York" 
11. "Bridge Over Troubled Water"

12. "Gumboots" 
13. "Under African Skies" 

14. "Peace Like a River"
15. "The Sounds of Silence" (original version) 
16. "Mrs. Robinson"

17. "Seven Psalms"
18. "You Can Call Me Al"
19. "Everything Put Together Falls Apart"
20. "Still Crazy After All These Years" 

 Performances, 2023

01. Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers 

02. Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
03. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, You Hurt My Feelings 
04. Joaquin Phoenix, Napoleon
05. Vanessa Kirby, Napoleon 
06. Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings 
07. Paula Beer, Afire 
08. Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall
09. Sandra Hüller, The Zone of Interest
10. Zach Galifianakis, The Beanie Bubble
11. Jay Baruchel, Blackberry 
12. Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon
13. Helen Mirren, Golda 
14. Léonie Dahan-Lamort, Bitten
15. Emma Stone, Poor Things 
16. Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon 
17. Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers 
18. Greta Lee, Past Lives
19. Joel Edgerton, Master Gardener 
20. Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 
21. Natalie Portman, May December
22. Julianne Moore, May December 
23. Léa Drucker, Last Summer 
24. Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things 

25. Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction 
26. Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers 
27. Rupert Everett, Napoleon 
28. Franz Rogowski, Passages
29. Glen Howerton, Blackberry 
30. Ji-Min Park, Return to Seoul 
31. Tobias Menzies, You Hurt My Feelings 
32. Sunny Sandler, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah 
33. Idina Menzel, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah 
34. John Magaro, Past Lives
35. Teo Yoo, Past Lives 
36. Paolo Pierobon, Kidnapped 
37. Paul Dano, Dumb Money 
38. Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers 
39. Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla 
40. Michelle Williams, Showing Up 
41. Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers 
42. Christian Friedel, The Zone of Interest 
43. Ryan Gosling, Barbie 
44. Hugh Grant, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves 
45. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 
46. Willem Dafoe, Poor Things 
47. Ben Kingsley, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar 
48. Bradley Cooper, Maestro 
49. Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer 
50. Sydney Sweeney, Anyone But You 

Films, 2023

01. The Zone of Interest (Glazer)

02. Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese) 

03. Past Lives (Song) 

04. Napoleon (Scott) 

05. The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki) 

06. Bitten (de Saint-Blanquat) 

07. Afire (Petzold) 

08. I'm Just Here for the Riot (Jayme/Youngman) 

09. A Cooler Climate (Ivory/Gardner) 

10. All of Us Strangers (Haigh) 

11. Return to Seoul (Chou) 

12. You Hurt My Feelings (Holofcener) 

13. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (Cohen) 

14. Poor Things (Lanthimos) 

15. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Wrench) 

16. Satan Wants You (Adams/Horlor) 

17. The Luckiest Guy in the World (James) 

18. Kidnapped (Bellocchio)

19. No Hard Feelings (Stupnitsky) 

20. Les filles du Roi (Payette) 

21. Blackberry (Johnson)

22. Master Gardener (Schrader) 

23. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Mangold) 

24. Anatomy of a Fall (Triet) 

25. Our Body (Simon)

26. Nimona (Bruno/Quane) 

27. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Dos Santos/Powers/Thompson) 

28. Last Summer (Breillat) 

29. Priscilla (Coppola) 

30. Barbie (Gerwig) 

31. Showing Up (Reichardt) 

32. The Holdovers (Payne) 

33. Snow in Midsummer (Chong) 

34. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (Fell) 

35. Dumb Money (Gillespie) 

36. American Fiction (Jefferson) 

37. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (W. Anderson) 

38. Bama Rush (Fleit) 

39. Destination NBA: A G League Odyssey (Hughes/Robinson) 

40. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Rowe) 

41. May December (Haynes) 

42. The Killer (Fincher) 

43. Monster (Koreeda)

44. Maestro (Cooper) 

45. Talk to Me (Philippou/Philippou) 

46. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves (Daley/Goldstein) 

47. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Horvath/Jelenic) 

48. Elemental (Sohn) 

49. Golda (Natiiv)

50. The Beanie Bubble (Gore/Kulash) 

Requiem for a Raptor

The 2019 playoff run was a golden and uncommonly fortuitous time for the Toronto Raptors and their fans, yet, we should remember, replicating that magic was not immediately out of the question. It wasn't a fluke. It was an historically great team! 

Three factors led to the quietly tragic, too-soon demise of that perfectly assembled squad: Kawhi to L.A., of course (but that alone wasn't fatal); the Covid hiatus and Orlando bubble (although it's easy to forget now, the post-Kawhi 2019/20 Raptors were playing really good basketball prior to the pandemic turning everything to shit); and subsequently the terrible, lifeless Tampa period (truly a lost season, and proof that "We the North" wasn't just a branding coup). 

From that awesome championship team, the ascendant Spicy P was my favourite player and has remained my favourite Raptor since, as he's developed into a top 15-, at times arguably top 10-level superstar. But the team has since failed again and again to build around his superlative strengths, instead somewhat bafflingly loading up on redundant player-types who bring more or less the same skillsets and similar areas of weakness. In reality, the utopian experiment of "positionless basketball," total switchability, and wingspan for miles meant a team of mostly 6'9–6'11 guys who were high-ceiling athletes but (at best) hot-and-cold shooters, none of them a true center, plus two undersized point guards who were also streaky shooters, especially from three-point range, in a league now defined by high-volume distance shooting and the resurgence of dominant, very-hard-to-guard centers like Jokic and Embiid. 

With all due respect to Chris Boucher (who I like a lot and hope retires a Raptor some day!), this is clearly the sad end of an era, and this one really hurts the most, particularly because Siakam, by all accounts, wanted to stay in Toronto, not depart for the sunnier climes and more glamorous environs of L.A. or Miami. I wish O.G. well, but he seemed to want out; and, due to an ill-timed emergency appendectomy, his association with the championship run will always be kind of tangential. Obviously, losing Kawhi after just one (amazing) season was devastating in its way, though not sentimentally. Lowry to Miami was a bummer, but made sense for him. Fred bet on himself and got eye-poppingly paid by Houston; good for him! Firing Nick Nurse wasn't a prudent move, but it may well have been more a matter of saving face as things turned rather acrimonious. Only the trade of all-around great dude Norman Powell to Portland hit nearly as hard. And still, Powell – while wonderful and wholly superior to Gary Trent Jr. – is not an all-world talent on the level of Siakam. 

I am long-term cautiously optimistic for the Barnes–Barrett–Quickley era, and hope the Raptors draft wisely with these picks coming their way. And, to be frank, this current season has, on the whole, sucked. (Thank goodness for the surprisingly excellent Canucks, or else I'd be far more sports-depressed this winter!) But right now, I'm mostly just sad to see the team I support lose a player as dynamic and inspiring and exceptionally entertaining to watch as Pascal Siakam, for whom I wish nothing but success in Indiana and wherever he decides to sign after that. Real Ones Knows he was the most Fun of Guys. 

I never put white towels on the floor anymore

She's not actually fine. 

Holes in my confidence / Holes in the knees of my jeans

The Voice of Reason 

Noa Tishby is doing serious hero work in these super dark (and grotesquely dumb) times. 

(So, please buy her book – it's terrific and important!) 

Albums & Singles, 2023

01. Olivia Rodrigo, Guts 

02. PJ Harvey, I Inside the Old Year Dying

03. Black Belt Eagle Scout, The Land, The Water, The Sky

04. Boygenius, The Record

05. Paul Simon, Seven Psalms

06. Blondshell [s/t] 

07. Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want to Turn into You

08. Mitski, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

09. Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loveliest Time

10. Nili Hadida, Love Life Death Despair and Anohni, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross [tie] 

01. Caroline Polachek, "Dang"

02. Lana Del Rey, "A&W" 

03. Bizarrap and Shakira, "Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53" 

04. Olivia Rodrigo, "Vampire" 

05. Olivia Rodrigo, "Get Him Back"

06. Tate McRae, "Greedy" 

07. Tate McRae, "Exes" 

08. SZA*, "Kill Bill"

09. Kylie Minogue, "Padam Padam" 

10. Jessie Ware, "Begin Again"

*note: SOS was on my 2022 list. 

You know, the greatest films of all time were never made

The "Extended Version" of the Eras Tour film (for Taylor Swift is nothing if not the savvy master of collect-'em-all "versions" of any and everything) benefits both from the (re-)inclusion of "The Archer," "Long Live," and "Wildest Dreams" (where is "Cardigan," though??!) and also from one's ability on VOD to fast-forward past "The Man," "The Last Great American Dynasty," and "Bad Blood," their considerable, respective aural cringe levels cranked intolerably to 11 with cornball Broadway musical-style staging. 

But definitely not past the between-songs banter, which – however generically standard across concerts it may well be – shows why the first artist in any medium to be named TIME's "Person of the Year" for their art (i.e., Bono's philanthropy aside) is somehow still more than "just" one of the most prolific, accomplished, and talented singer-songwriters of her generation. She is also the most charismatic and deeply likeable Very Famous Person on the planet, in a cultural moment when overexposure via warts-and-all social media has yielded unflattering if not off-putting "versions" of many if not most Very Famous People. 

Anyone who still scoffs at the flaky tastes of the masses should listen closely to (or watch, as the Eras show centrepiece) all ten breathless minutes of the extended "All Too Well" and marvel at how a subtle literary genius of limitless sensitivities has willed herself into being the biggest one-person global brand this side of Elon Musk. If he represents something close to the worst of our age, Swift represents the best – 2023 from the glass-half-full view. And, goddamn, she just turned 34!

Places in the Heart

"'Context': It's a new spell that makes everything that's wrong right!" 

Much sharper and funnier than SNL's take on this appalling crisis in moral conscience. 

(And Michael Rapaport is my new favourite wizard.)  

Just in time for a long, dark, wet winter, I made the ultimate sad songs playlist. 

(It is named in honour of the meteorological phenomenon that is happening here right now.) 

In these insane times, the normally awful National Review – of all places to turn for sanity and basic human decency! – may have here boiled down the matter at hand to its essential moral core and put it best, most expressively and sharply. 

*****

When describing the various players, commentators have set them against a series of ideological axes: Left and Right, Zionist and anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, the Settlers and the Displaced, and so forth. If I may be so bold, I would like to propose that these categories are wholly inadequate to the task before us and that, instead, we ought to be dividing the observers into just two camps. Into the first, we can place the normal human beings. Into the second, we can place the unreconstructed crackpots who have lost their godforsaken minds.

It is simply not within the normal bounds of human behavior to look at what has happened in Israel and to filter one’s instinctive moral reaction through whatever goofy, specious, ugly ideology one might have picked up in an overpriced seminar hall when aged 19. In their proper place, terms such as “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and “occupation” can be descriptively useful; as a response to the news that a bunch of armed savages have just massacred a thousand innocent people in cold blood, they are utterly, disastrously, spectacularly irrelevant. I daresay that, in certain faculty lounges and newsrooms, the latest iteration of the Unified Oppressed/Oppressor Matrix goes down a treat. To everyone else, it appears psychotic. Well-adjusted people do not read about surprise attacks that involve the machine-gunning of concertgoers, the live-streaming of executions, the beheading of babies, the raping and desecration of women, and the immolation of corpses and respond by musing about how intersectional the dead might have been. Well-adjusted people do not learn of the largest single instance of antisemitic butchery since the Holocaust and write open letters that “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence” against it, that describe the atrocities as an example of “inevitable” “resistance” that “made history,” or that cast Hamas as a quotidian political entity that is engaged in a “process of decolonization.” Well-adjusted people do not see the reams of harrowing footage that has been published and assume aloud that the most likely explanation is that the Israeli government staged a false-flag in order to protect its embattled prime minister. Such thoughts would never occur to them. George Orwell once said that “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” That there is anything much to debate about the egregious crimes that were committed in Israel over the weekend is among those “some ideas.” There is not.

Indeed, I shall go one further here and propose that it is not simply abhorrent to subordinate one’s elementary sense of horror to a set of esoteric abstractions; it is the prerequisite to barbarism. From time to time, students of history wonder how the great tyrannies of the past could have impelled so many ostensibly rational people to treat others with such brazen contempt. This question, I’m afraid, has a mundane answer: Those tyrannies persuaded their accomplices to do terrible things by insisting that the people to whom the terrible things were being done were lesser in some meaningful way. I have no doubt that many of those who are making excuses for Hamas are convinced that their dispassionate analysis is the product of an exquisite understanding of the world that the less credentialed conspicuously lack. I also have no doubt that they are wrong, for, in reality, such reactions are the grotesque product of a brainwashing process that has swapped the rudimentary building blocks of civilization for a set of monstrous self-justifications. It may be terribly bourgeois to believe that it is presumptively wrong to slaughter or rape or set fire to civilians, but, if we are to enjoy any semblance of stability in the world, it is also imperative. As sophisticated as we might fancy ourselves to have become, there will always be a place for the sort of pedestrian Manichaean dualism that rejects cruelty irrespective of its target. That the vast majority of human beings continue to believe this is not a problem within our society; it is our society. Sometimes, there really is just Good and Evil. On Saturday, when the Western world saw both, most of us were able to determine which was which. The remainder were not.

Freaks. 

*****

Right. Freaks, indeed – "brainwashed," "psychotic" "freaks."  Severe rhetoric but all of it apt and fully warranted in this case. Coming from the goddamn National Review – but 'broken clocks,' etc. 

 

This more Canada-specifc piece is also very strong, echoing and reinforcing points made in the Vancouver Sun op-ed linked to below. 

[Edit – addendum: And now this from the New York Times, echoing in only slightly less polemical language the important points made in the National Review piece quoted above: 

On Thursday, Students for Justice in Palestine, a network of pro-Palestinian campus groups, is holding Day of Resistance demonstrations across the United States and Canada. A planning document the group posted online refers to all of Israel as a “settler colony” and says, “Settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” 

Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality. Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret. 

We also shouldn’t underestimate the role of antisemitism in warping people’s moral sentiments. I’m reminded of the German New Left militants of the 1960s and ’70s. Though they were radicalized by abomination of the Nazism of their parents’ generation, some, in a grotesque irony, ended up committing anti-Jewish terrorism themselves.]

 From the Arch of Titus to the Brandenburg Gate

                                                  A Day That Will Live in Infamy

I was supposed to fly to Israel (a place I've been fascinated by and longed to visit for as long as I can remember, a feeling that only deepened as I worked toward a career as a professional historian specializing in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages) today for an academic conference in Jerusalem. Suitcase packed, credit card issuers notified, arrangements made for the classes I'm teaching, a day-trip bus tour of the West Bank booked and plans with a close friend for after the conference. Instead, I stayed up most of the night toggling among live updates on news websites and refreshing airline flight status pages, and now I'm spending an unseasonably warm and sunny autumn Saturday, disappointed but safely on the ground in serene and peaceful Vancouver, glued to CNN, watching in horror and disgust a shocking tragedy play out grimly in real time, worried sick for good friends in Israel, where a serious and significant war – perhaps the worst there in a half-century – now seems sadly inevitable. All my thoughts today are with good, reasonable, and peace-seeking Israelis (Jewish, Arab, or otherwise) and Palestinians; hoping against hope that cooler heads prevail and conditions for peace and calm present themselves in very short order. 

[Edit – addendum: This op-ed piece is squarely, precisely on the mark when it comes to some of the most morally repugnant and utterly hypocritical tendencies of the lunatic fringes of the Western far Left. Essential reading as ostensibly credentialed representatives of said lunatic fringes come out of the woodwork to justify unambiguously and unapologetically Nazi-inspired exterminationist terrorist groups by means of naïve and ill-informed Vive la révolution! romantic rhetoric, the pseudo-historical logic of Lebensraum and Blut und Boden, and/or Both Sides false equivalencies that sound an awful lot like post-Charlottesville Trump, afraid of alienating the "side" that thinks Hitler was very much on the right track. How come these "progressives" call everyone Nazis as a catch-all pejorative except the groups who explicitly declare that they want to kill all the Jews?] 

Completely aside from this terrible news but compounding the all-around awfulness of October 7, 2023, one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of my all-time favourites, Terence Davies, has died, gone from us at the very height of his powers as a singular cinematic artist, maker of some of the most beautiful and truly humane movies we have. And the last thing we need right now is a further depletion of beauty and humanity from this world. Sic transit gloria mundi.