RUTHFULLY YOURS

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Captain, Cool Hand Luke, 1967

In terms of understanding Islam, that would include a failure, or an outright refusal, to grasp and integrate the truth about Islam and its movers and shakers by especially those charged with the responsibility of fighting the “War on Terror” and securing the safety of this country. Given such a “war,” it is incumbent upon the government, the military, and intelligence assessment agencies to “know the enemy.” As things stand now, in their eyes Islam is not an enemy, but an “innocent” bystander upon which is heaped the “calumny” of associating it with terrorism.

“Islamophobia” in Americans is more the enemy than is the fearful enemy. Within that purgatory of purposeless analytical bean-counting and sand-sifting is a startling and craven ignorance of the actual enemy, enforced by post-modern, left-wing politically correct thought and speech while the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation stymie any meaningful investigation and intelligence analysis by determining definitions and “red lines.”

And to paraphrase the Captain in Cool Hand Luke – the Captain, while a villain, is certainly a quotable character – “Some men you just can’t reach.” The men who can’t be reached have already submitted to Islam, and accepted the “war” on Islam’s terms, and they are in our government. And they are not only losing the war, but aiding in the enemy’s advance.

A single column review of Stephen Coughlin’s vitally important Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, would not do justice to the book. I can only highlight some of the important, interlinked and salient information presented by Coughlin. Therefore this review will run to two or more columns. Coughlin’s book is literally vital, as vital as the blood that courses through our veins. Catastrophic Failure brings to light everything we should know about Islam and its advocates’ determined campaign to conquer the West, and especially America, and impose Sharia law on the world – and everything our government has consistently refused to know or evaded to a degree that amounts to criminal negligence.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro is, like the London square drawn on its cover, tumultuous, dark and teeming with life. In the cover art, unruly crowds throng the streets, prodded and chased by authorities struggling to maintain order. In the foreground, a horse drags a traitor bound to a wicker sled toward the focus of the public’s attention: a gallows, where a man is being hung. Nearby, another man is being quartered; an executioner throws his leg, severed at the thigh, into a fire pit for cremation.

I dwell on the book’s cover art for two reasons. First, because The Year of Lear is unusually well-illustrated from start to finish, from the jacket—with gold foil details and ye olde printing press lettering—to the glossy insert with portraits of the book’s major players. (It is one of those rare books that is worth the surcharge to buy in hardcover.) Second, I mention the cover art because it distills the book down to one poignant, violent image.

This is no mean feat. The Year of Lear, for its seemingly limited scope, is an epic. Shapiro, a Columbia professor and governor at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has written a book brimming with detail about 17th century England, if not necessarily about Shakespeare.

David Evanier’s Woody: The Biography is an engaging account of Woody Allen’s life and works. It’s not a biography in a traditional sense, like Marion Meade’s 2000 The Unruly Life of Woody Allen or Eric Lax’s 1991 Woody Allen, the only biography for which Allen fully cooperated. Nor is it like the many books, most recently Richard Schickel’s 2003 Woody Allen: A Life in Film, which focus on Allen’s movies. What Evanier has done is marry the two approaches, weaving between Allen’s life and his creative output, which makes sense given that Allen is so enmeshed in his films. Evanier notes that Allen is “the only comedian in Hollywood history to insert the same unchanging comic persona into every genre of his filmmaking: comedy, satire, melodrama—and yet work himself effectively into the plot.”

Of Allen’s early life we learn he was a peculiar, if talented child. Peculiar, for instance, in his reaction to learning about death when he was five. He apparently never recovered from the shock. Evanier notes the scene in Annie Hall where the mother takes her son (obviously meant to be a young Allen) to the doctor because he has become depressed. The reason—he has learned that the universe is expanding. “Someday it will break apart,” the boy says, “and that will be the end of everything.”

Only some aspects of Woody’s on-screen persona are true of the real-life Allen. Yes, he was funny, hypochondrial, introverted, shy with girls—“a nerdy type of person,” a childhood friend says. But, like Allen’s other biographers, Evanier emphasizes that in crucial respects Woody is unlike the character he plays. Lax calls him “a business tycoon.” Evanier says: “Allen is not a schlemiel, a nebbish, a sad sack, or a Kafkaesque character.” Unheard of in Hollywood, he has total artistic control of his films. Even his appearance belies the movie image. Evanier quotes Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, who saw Allen on the street: “I was struck by how utterly different his posture was from his image: strong, stiff, upright.”

Precious were the recriminations after the first Democratic presidential debate. Putative nominee Hillary Clinton, amid what is more a coronation than a contest, had proudly boasted of making the Republicans her “enemy.”

“How despicable,” GOP graybeards gasped. After all, this is just politics, not war. At the end of the day, we’re all fellow patriots, all in this together: not “red states and blue states,” as that notorious bipartisan, Barack Obama, framed it in the 2004 convention speech that put him on the map, but “one people . . . all of us defending the United States of America.”

Dinesh D’Souza begs to differ. He would tell you that Hillary hit the nail on the head, and that we’d better get a grip on that or we will lose the country that we love.

D’Souza has come about this realization the hard way, as he explains in his remarkable new book, Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party. For his “experience with criminal gangs,” to which he alludes in the book’s subtitle, the prolific conservative author and filmmaker has the president to thank. The book, part memoir, part polemic, part prescription, and part Kafka, opens with an account — frightening because it is so verifiably true — of one of the grossest abuses of power by this lawless administration: the prosecution of D’Souza for a campaign-finance offense.