Culture Briefs

Aid and comfort

“Anti-war protests in the United States during the Vietnam War were a major source of moral support to the enemy. We know that not only from plain common sense, but from the statements of former North Vietnamese military leaders who evidently didn’t get the memo telling them not to say so. … Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, called the American peace movement ‘essential’ to the North Vietnamese victory.

“‘Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement,’ he said. ‘Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.’”

—Ann Coulter, writing on “New idea for Abortion Party: Aid the enemy,” Nov. 24 in WorldNetDaily at www.worldnetdaily.com

No Dark Ages

“The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past. … This always should have been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and all the rest of the world, for that matter. …

“Perhaps the most revealing instance involves the ‘story’ that in order to gain backing for his great voyage west, Columbus had to struggle against ignorant and superstitious churchmen who were certain that the earth was flat.

“Truth was that all educated Europeans, including bishops and cardinals, knew the earth was round. What produced church opposition to the Columbus voyage was that Columbus believed the circumference of the earth was only about one-fifth of its actual distance. Thus, the church scholars who opposed him did so because they knew that he and his sailors were bound to perish at sea. And they would have done so had the Western Hemisphere not been there to replenish their food and water.”

—Rodney Stark, author of “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,” interviewed by Marvin Olasky in the Dec. 3 issue of World

Celebrity fixation

“That messy Hollywood breakups are the stuff of American obsession is not news. But we have notoriously short attention spans. Even the tawdriest of Hollywood imbroglios hold us rapt for a month or two, tops. Remember Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez? Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow? [Gwyneth] Paltrow and [Brad] Pitt? … Remember how we got bored with all those stories and moved on?

“If this year is any indication, we do not have the capacity for boredom when it comes to Jennifer Aniston and her tale of betrayal, loneliness and redemption. …

“The 36-year-old former sitcom star … never got this much attention when she was actually on television every week, or even when she was married to a bronzed god of cinema. …

“What is most remarkable about the Year of Jen is that she has become a celebrity pioneer for a new age, the only star so deft at maneuvering the twists of her own tale that she has wrested control of it from the insatiable celebrity press.”

—Rebecca Traister, writing on “Our Jennifer fixation,” Saturday in Salon at www.salon.com

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