Manu Chao-- King of the Bongo

Pink Floyd-- Wish You Were Here

Sia-- Stop Trying

Al Green

David Byrne-- Psycho Killer

Serious About Happiness

My column this week in Jewish Journal:

It’s not every day that Orthodox Jews gather in a synagogue to learn about happiness. But on a recent Sunday morning at Young Israel of Century City, a standing-room-only crowd came for precisely that. The event was the seventh annual Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture, and the speaker was author, radio host and happiness guru Dennis Prager.

The very idea of a serious lecture on happiness felt weird, and Prager sensed it. After all, synagogue sermons usually deal with sober topics like ethics, compassion, truth and justice. Personal happiness? That feels more like a selfish fetish of the secular world. The Torah world is supposed to operate on a more noble and altruistic plane.

Well, that is the misconception Prager came to correct.

Prager’s thesis — which he expounds on in a book (“Happiness Is a Serious Problem”) and a weekly “Happiness Hour” on his radio show — is that happiness isn’t a selfish act at all, but might be, in fact, the ultimate mitzvah.

To dramatize his point, Prager used the religious language of altruism. If the Torah commands us to look beyond ourselves and consider the welfare of others, what better way than to act happy around others and elevate their own happiness? It’s a worthy sacrifice, Prager explained, not to allow one’s negative feelings to bring others down.

His subject touched a sensitive nerve. He was talking to Jews who pride themselves on following all of God’s mitzvot, and yet, acting happy to make others happy hardly seemed like an obvious mitzvah; certainly not as natural or obvious as lighting the Shabbat candles or donating to charity.

Prager’s thesis came to life when he talked about his “war on the moody” — people who put their feelings first, even at the expense of bringing others down. Judaism isn’t about putting feelings first, he said. It’s about actions, and actions that bring happiness to the world are supremely moral.

Prager explained how he stumbled onto his happiness philosophy. Many years ago, Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz invited him to speak to students at UCLA and suggested “something light, like happiness.” When Prager responded that “happiness is a serious problem,” Schwartz said he loved that title, and Prager crafted a talk that became one of his most popular.

He’s been on a happiness mission ever since.

His mission isn’t to promote the suppression of negative feelings — that’s not realistic — but to make people aware of the power of a happy disposition to change the world around us and make it a better place.

His lecture hit home with me, since one of my pet peeves is moody or disengaged people who think they’re being “authentic” when they inflict their moody vibes on those around them, especially in a festive setting. Of course, at the other extreme, I also don’t enjoy people who try too hard to act happy. Faux happiness makes me feel guilty that they’re faking it on my behalf. Maybe, then,

Prager’s lecture should come with this caveat: If you have to act happy when you’re not feeling it, make sure only the happiness shows, not the acting.

Eventually, Prager says, the more you act happy, the less you’ll have to fake it.

This whole notion of happiness was on my mind last week when I went to an event at the Backdoor Art Gallery, a little space located off an alleyway behind Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

The gallery is run by my friend Bob Oré, a French-Moroccan Jew who is one of the premier producers of French cultural events in town. Last year, when he brought the popular comedian Gad Elmaleh to Los Angeles, several hundred French-speaking Jews packed a local theater. Oré is the kind of guy who can get a hundred fashionable people to show up at a party on an afternoon’s notice.

At his event last week, you felt you were in a little nightclub in St. Germain, with a French poet singing love songs to a summer night crowd seeking a little moonlight bliss.

The singer was Pol-Serge Kakon, a painter and troubadour in his late 50s with long silver hair and a thin mustache who looked like he could have been married to Edith Piaf. I couldn’t believe I was in Los Angeles.

As Kakon was singing to his adoring crowd, I thought about Prager’s lecture on happiness. For all I knew, Pol-Serge could have had a real crummy day or been consumed by the sadness of a failed romance. But if that was the case, we saw none of it. All we saw was a singer exhaling happiness onto the people around him. It wasn’t a showy kind of happiness, but an intimate sort that comes from being lost in the pleasure of the moment.

Kakon had the power to make us happy, and he used it.

Maybe Prager wants us to be a little like that French troubadour — to elevate those around us by simply exhaling happiness.

To Prager, this simple act is so important that he calls it a moral obligation. If that’s still not enough to motivate you, well, just remember that happy people get invited to the best parties.

Third Eye Blind-- How's It Going To Be

Crosby, Stills and Nash-- Just a Song Before I Go

"It Takes a Spillage" by Mark Steyn

I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

Barack Obama was supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably, consistently mediocre. His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of last year’s boy band. At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the president. For a bewildered Obama, it must have felt like his Ceausescu balcony moment. Had they caught up with him in the White House parking lot, they’d have put him up against the wall and clubbed him to a pulp with Matthews’s no longer tingling leg.

For the first time I felt a wee bit sorry for the poor fellow. What had he done to so enrage his full supporting chorus? In the Washington Post, the reaction of longtime Obammysoxer Eugene Robinson was headlined “Obama Disappoints From The Beginning Of His Speech.”

So what? He always “disappoints.” What would have been startling would have been if he hadn’t “disappointed.” His eve-of-election rally for Martha Coakley “disappointed” the Massachusetts electorate so much they gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. His speech for Chicago’s Olympic bid “disappointed” the Oslo committee so much they gave the games to Pyongyang, or Ouagadougou, or any city offering to build a stadium with electrical outlets incompatible with Obama’s prompter. Be honest, guys, his inaugural address “disappointed,” too, didn’t it? Oh, in those days you still did your best to make the case for it. “He carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate,” wrote Stanley Fish in the New York Times. “There is a technical term for this kind of writing — parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.’”

Gotcha. To a fool, His Majesty’s new clothes appear absolutely invisible. But, to a wise man, the placing of buttons and pockets without indicating the relation of co-ordination is a fascinating exercise in parataxical couture.

And so Obama bounded out to knock ’em dead with another chorus of “I’ll be down to get you in a parataxis, honey,” only to find himself pelted with dead fish rather than Stanley Fish. The Times’s Maureen Dowd deplored his “bloodless quality” and “emotional detachment.” This is the same Maureen Dowd who in 2009 hailed the new presidency with a column titled “Spock At The Bridge” — and she meant it as a compliment. Back then, this administration was supposed to be the new technocracy — cool, calm, and credentialed chaps who would sit down, use their mighty intellects to provide a rigorous, post-partisan, forensic analysis of the problem, and then break for their Vanity Fair photo shoot.

What was it all the smart set said about Bush? Lazy and uncurious? Had Obama or his speechwriters chanced upon last week’s fishwrap, they might have noticed that I described the president as “the very model of a modern major generalist,” and they might have considered whether it might not be time to try something new. For example, he could have demonstrated, as he and his energy secretary (whoops, Nobel Prize–winning energy secretary) have so signally failed to do, an understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why it’s hard to stop. Instead, lazy and uncurious, this is what the Technocratic Mastermind offered: “Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

“As a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology.”

Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize–winning Head of Meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge of mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti oleaginato at Starbucks.

The boring technocrat stuff out of the way, he then did his usual shtick. In the race speech, invited to address specific points about his pastor’s two-decade pattern of ugly anti-American rhetoric and his opportunist peddling of paranoid conspiracies to his gullible congregants about AIDS being invented by the U.S. government to wipe them out, Obama preferred to talk about race in general — you know, blacks, whites, that sort of thing; lot of it about. The media loved it. This time round, invited to address specific points about an unstoppable spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama retreated to more generalities — the environment, land, air, that sort of thing; lot of it about. “President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to push a new energy bill through Congress,” observed Jay Leno. “How about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?”

When he did get specific, he sounded faintly surreal. “As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows.” Energy-efficient windows? That’s a great line — if Obama’s auditioning to play himself on Saturday Night Live parodies.

And hang on, isn’t this the same guy who was promising to start “kicking ass” just a few days ago? You may find yourself recalling the moment in the film In and Out when Kevin Kline is trying to master the How to Be Manly audiotape and accidentally says, “What an interesting window treatment.”

But, as Rahm Emmanuel shrewdly noted, never let a crisis go to waste, not when you can get a new window treatment out of it.

My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill — Gulf War 3! — and in this epic conflict the speechgiver-in-chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:

“I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago,

I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico . . .”

Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?

Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?

“It Takes a Spillage.”

Teddy Pendergrass

Uriah Heep-- Lady in Black

Arlo Guthrie

Blinded by Multiculturalism

HONOR AND SHAME by Mark Steyn in National Review

When you look at all the formulaic sludge that wins the Pulitzer Prize for Most Unread Multipart Series, it is striking that not one of the major newspapers has done an investigative series on the proliferation of "honor killings", not in Yemen or Waziristan but in the heart of the western world. Instead, as Phyllis Chesler writes:

The mainstream media rarely covers them. More often, local media does, but even local media does so walking-on-eggshells, careful to quote from at least one apologist and one know-nothing. Usually, the (hardcopy) mainstream media covers such events weeks later, only briefly, or as a way to “spin” any possible prejudice against the perpetrators involved. Sometimes they are mentioned, but only in passing. Rarely do follow-ups appear. Usually, a wire service piece is used, and no original reporting is done. Sometimes, the newspaper’s blog might refer to a piece which first appeared in another newspaper which, in turn, has mentioned the subject only in passing.

I've noted this phenomenon many times: See, for example, here at NR, "Noor Ignored", "Watery Graves", "The Stranglehold of Political Correctness", and "Headless Body in Legless Story". But nothing changes. Multiculturalism trumps feminism, and so the media accept a two-tier sisterhood in which Muslim girls are run over, stabbed, strangled, drowned and decapitated for wanting to live like the women they read about in The New York Times and The Washington Post. No matter how novel or arresting the details of a story are, the PC blinkers go on immediately. As Miss Chesler adds:

In 2009, the gruesome beheading of Aasiya Z. Hassan was covered only five days later by the New York Times—and then mainly to explain that Islam had nothing to do with it and that anyone who believes to the contrary is misguided or prejudiced.

The media's attitude to "honor killings" is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it's also part of the reason why America's newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.

Message from former Prime Minister of Spain

IF ISRAEL GOES DOWN, WE ALL GO DOWN

Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region

By José María Aznar

For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel. In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean, it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion.

In an ideal world, the assault by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara would not have ended up with nine dead and a score wounded. In an ideal world, the soldiers would have been peacefully welcomed on to the ship. In an ideal world, no state, let alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey, would have sponsored and organised a flotilla whose sole purpose was to create an impossible situation for Israel: making it choose between giving up its security policy and the naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.

In our dealings with Israel, we must blow away the red mists of anger that too often cloud our judgment. A reasonable and balanced approach should encapsulate the following realities: first, the state of Israel was created by a decision of the UN. Its legitimacy, therefore, should not be in question. Israel is a nation with deeply rooted democratic institutions. It is a dynamic and open society that has repeatedly excelled in culture, science and technology.

Second, owing to its roots, history, and values, Israel is a fully fledged Western nation. Indeed, it is a normal Western nation, but one confronted by abnormal circumstances.

Uniquely in the West, it is the only democracy whose very existence has been questioned since its inception. In the first instance, it was attacked by its neighbours using the conventional weapons of war. Then it faced terrorism culminating in wave after wave of suicide attacks. Now, at the behest of radical Islamists and their sympathisers, it faces a campaign of delegitimisation through international law and diplomacy.

Sixty-two years after its creation, Israel is still fighting for its very survival. Punished with missiles raining from north and south, threatened with destruction by an Iran aiming to acquire nuclear weapons and pressed upon by friend and foe, Israel, it seems, is never to have a moment’s peace.

For years, the focus of Western attention has understandably been on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Israel is in danger today and the whole region is slipping towards a worryingly problematic future, it is not due to the lack of understanding between the parties on how to solve this conflict. The parameters of any prospective peace agreement are clear, however difficult it may seem for the two sides to make the final push for a settlement.

The real threats to regional stability, however, are to be found in the rise of a radical Islamism which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfilment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony. Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large.

The core of the problem lies in the ambiguous and often erroneous manner in which too many Western countries are now reacting to this situation. It is easy to blame Israel for all the evils in the Middle East. Some even act and talk as if a new understanding with the Muslim world could be achieved if only we were prepared to sacrifice the Jewish state on the altar. This would be folly.

Israel is our first line of defence in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos; a region vital to our energy security owing to our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil; a region that forms the front line in the fight against extremism. If Israel goes down, we all go down. To defend Israel’s right to exist in peace, within secure borders, requires a degree of moral and strategic clarity that too often seems to have disappeared in Europe. The United States shows worrying signs of heading in the same direction.

The West is going through a period of confusion over the shape of the world’s future. To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the most fanatical incarnation of their faith. To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears.

This cannot be allowed to happen. Motivated by the need to rebuild our own Western values, expressing deep concern about the wave of aggression against Israel, and mindful that Israel’s strength is our strength and Israel’s weakness is our weakness, I have decided to promote a new Friends of Israel initiative with the help of some prominent people, including David Trimble, Andrew Roberts, John Bolton, Alejandro Toledo (the former President of Peru), Marcello Pera (philosopher and former President of the Italian Senate), Fiamma Nirenstein (the Italian author and politician), the financier Robert Agostinelli and the Catholic intellectual George Weigel.

It is not our intention to defend any specific policy or any particular Israeli government. The sponsors of this initiative are certain to disagree at times with decisions taken by Jerusalem. We are democrats, and we believe in diversity.

What binds us, however, is our unyielding support for Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. For Western countries to side with those who question Israel’s legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel’s vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude.

Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.

José María Aznar was prime minister of Spain between 1996 and 2004.

No Moleste

Women in Art

Crosby, Stills and Nash

Ani Yehudi

Edwin Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes

Gari Glaysher

Beinart's Failure

The last part of my column this week in the Jewish Journal:

Yes, it’s true that many defenders of Israel — especially since the Second Intifada and the Hamas rocket attacks that followed the Gaza disengagement — don’t do much Israel-bashing. They’re too busy trying to push back against the onslaught of hypocritical and disproportionate global criticism that is poured almost daily onto the Jewish state. Maybe that’s their way of fighting for the liberal values of fairness and balance. Anyhow, if they won’t do that dirty work, who will? Beinart?

Like many Jews, these Israel defenders are reluctant to second-guess the democratic choices of their Israeli brethren, who have to live with the life-and-death consequences of their decisions. If Beinart himself is so keen on improving Israel’s democracy, instead of beating up on pro-Israel groups like AIPAC, why doesn’t he talk to those Israeli voters and try to convince them to vote for Meretz? Or better still, why doesn’t he work through any of the numerous human-rights NGOs or any other groups whose missions coincide directly with his? Not every Zionist needs to play the same instrument.

Beinart’s own instrument is to criticize Israeli democracy, criticize establishment types for not criticizing Israeli democracy, and then hope that in the end, that symphony of criticism will attract more liberal Jews to come under the Zionist tent. Good luck. Whatever power there is in criticizing Israel, it surely won’t seduce a Jew tainted by anti-Zionist propaganda to take a second look at Zionism, let alone enter the tent.

To have any chance with those alienated Jews, Beinart needs to go back to that popular ad he mentioned from the college focus groups. That ad was neither criticism nor propaganda: it was context — context that provided information to balance out the anti-Israel venom the students are routinely exposed to, while recognizing that Israel is still a messy and wonderful work in progress.

As part of that work in progress, Beinart can also point, with pride, to the many liberal Jewish groups in Israel who are using the Israeli legal system to defend the rights of Arabs and other minorities.

If all of that “context” helps alienated Jews care more about Israel, he can then introduce them to the Israel activist community so they can pick their own instrument, whether it be joining J Street, AIPAC or a human-rights NGO.

Of course, if he believes in the research he quoted, Beinart must also try to rekindle in those liberal Jews some kind of connection to their Jewish heritage.

In any event, all of these issues are multilayered and complex, and Beinart shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Issues like Jewish alienation from Israel, the evolving role and nature of the Jewish establishment, the character of Israel’s democracy and the revival of liberal Zionism in America are infinitely more textured and complicated than what Beinart reduces them to. But complexity doesn’t make for hypnotic prose. Alarmism and finger-pointing do.

By largely abandoning nuance and context in favor of dramatic impact, Beinart has made a lot of noise and put a big part of the Jewish community on the defensive. But in the process, he has ignored less divisive approaches to our common problems and discouraged a deeper understanding of complex issues.

In my mind, I consider that a failure. And I say this with the same tough love that I know he has for Israel.

Animal Collective

Nike World Cup Commercial-- Write the Future

Pipe dream-- by Animusic

"We Con The World"

Bye Bye Blackbird-- Ray Henderson