Seeking truth
“Trading largely in messy interpersonal relations, Maury [Povich] likes to present himself as a seeker of truth. … Povich’s real specialty, the gimmick around which almost every other broadcast revolves, is the paternity test. The formula never varies. A woman … comes onstage and declares, either angrily or tearfully, that she knows a given man fathered her child. After a couple of minutes of this drama, the accused male walks out … and just as vigorously denies that he is the father. The denial routinely involves the guy pointing toward a large picture of the kid in question … and emphasizing how dramatically the child’s features differ from his own. He’ll often cast aspersions on the mother’s character, too. …
“At this point, Maury says something along the lines of, ’Well, let’s find out.’ Ripping open a large manila envelope, he withdraws a sheet of paper and solemnly pronounces, ’When it comes to 2-year-old Jadiem, Corey, you are the father,’ or, just as often, ’When it comes to 10-month-old Treasure, Earnell, you are not the father.’ …
“[W]hat we are witnessing here are flesh-and-blood examples of underclass pathology. The supply of accusers and accused seems inexhaustible. …
“The one word almost never heard on ’Maury’ is ’marriage’ — the practice of which offers the best hope of refuge for these desperate women and their fatherless children.”
—Harry Stein, writing on “Daytime TV Gets Judgmental,” in the spring issue of City Journal
Culture of magic
“As a Christian critic of Harry Potter, it would be easy to point to the obvious occult allusions in these books as well as the movies. … The whole occult tradition, beginning in the pagan mystery religions, through the underground movements in the Middle Ages and into the modern new age movement, has at its heart this belief in man’s ability to become a god, to exercise godlike powers over the physical world. It is the promise of the serpent to know good and evil, to have power over the forces of nature. …
“In Harry Potter, this occult tradition of attempting to manipulate the physical world is made to seem perfectly normal, and it is masked in the culture of magical thinking which permeates our society. …
“The legions of Harry Potter admirers have no idea how deeply entrenched in the occult paradigm the books really are.”
—The Rev. Michael Hallford, writing on “Harry Potter and the Culture of Magical Thinking,” in the March issue of Romiosini
’Terrifying fantasy’
“Communism, it is now generally acknowledged, was a human calamity of a kind and on a scale never previously known. As a matter of ideology, all means were justified in pursuit of Communist ends, and this granted a license for criminality devoid of moral restraints. …
“This was the work of a very few men, and principal among them was Josef Stalin. Murderous autocrats are nothing new in history, but from the mid-’20s until his death in 1953, Stalin aimed for much more: the complete reordering of his own country, and the mobilization of the Communist movement against all who stood in his way internationally. Through a combination of unchecked power and personal strength of will, he was able to twist reality in pursuit of an inhuman and terrifying fantasy about mankind. …
“What made Stalin and his courtiers monsters was their common belief that good comes from doing evil.”
—David Pryce-Jones, writing on “Crimes of the Century,” in Monday’s issue of National Review
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