London Calling Freaks, lunatics, and Labour MPs.

by Greg Gutfeld 10/02/2006, Volume 012, Issue 03
London The British are funny people, and the funniest thing about them is how seriously they take being British.
The Brits still see themselves as somewhat valuable to civilization: a sophisticated bastion of intelligence and wit, home of those programs recycled on Masterpiece Theater, Dame Judi Dench reciting passages from Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jeremy Paxman sneering at anything that isn't actually Jeremy Paxman. The fact that most Brits think they sound smart somehow allows them to judge Americans, their bastard offspring, as idiots. And racist.
"It's good to see an American show with a black hero," observes the Observer's Andrew Anthony, upon observing the show Sleeper Cell--without apparently observing the last three decades of American television. But we can forgive him, for he lives in a land where Yanks are seen as rank, racist, and selfish--un-British qualities exemplified in thought and deed by George W., the dumbest man alive since Ronald Reagan, another knucklehead somehow responsible for upending the cruelest ideological machine known to man.
But come spend some time in England, and you realize that England's reputation for high culture is, in their own words, crap. England may pretend to be the posh hotel, but once inside, you find it to be nothing more than a bilious brothel teeming with pop-star pervs, park-bench fiddlers, and frantic finger-sniffers. And that's just on my block.
England is a country as delusional as a 35-year-old stripper--everyone in the room but her sees that her powers of attraction have faded. Her life is a loose coalition of press-on nails, fake tan, hair extensions, and implants, all held together by the duct tape of delusion. Which is not at all unlike Lea, a star of my favorite U.K. show, Big Brother.
I love Lea because I used to draw her when I was 12. Lea is shaped like a puberty-stricken boy's feeble sketch of a desirable female: A large clump of blonde hair, big curves, bulbous lips, massive breasts. Proportionally--it's the only thing a hormone could draw. But Lea is nothing special. For if I described her as a bimbo with implants, regular Big Brother viewers would need more specifics. Because, on the top-rated U.K. reality show, implants are as common as pimples at Pizza Hut.
I start with Lea--a divorced, leathery sex performer with a teenage daughter--not because of the appeal of the "oilys," the nickname for two slippery and massive artificially enhanced missiles, but because both are individually bigger than her head. A latecomer to the porn industry, Lea's harrowing hardcore movie has already made the email rounds (to repulse, not to titillate). It wasn't pretty, even by the fourth viewing. Lea came on BB, she said, to simultaneously flaunt her giant breasts, and to prove she is more than a woman who flaunts her giant breasts. On the floor of the BB house, you could see her hair, falling out. In clumps.
I loved Lea, but I loved all the characters. I am a hopeless addict, infatuated with a program that caters to the British need for ridiculing anyone who attempts to rise above their station with the hope of becoming famous. These "housemates" exemplify the new British entertainer: grotesque but often likable failures, willing to do almost anything to get their name in print. My favorites so far: The family comic linked to a horrible sex crime; a manic-depressive gay cruiser; a crotch-fondling date rapist; a self-pronounced "sexual terrorist" currently serving time as a Canadian waiter; two sickly she-males (one Scottish); a high-priced female escort; an aging housewife/dancer from the Robert Palmer video "Addicted to Love"; and the Rt. Hon. George Galloway, MP.
And then there's the lady who did that thing with the bottle. (More later.) Big Brother is wildly successful in the U.K. Like Dallas during the who-shot-JR period, but without Mary Crosby. BB's enjoyable hysteria is fatigue-resistant, knocking major stories off the front of the tabloids as it effortlessly builds toward a frenzied finale when an audience comprising 60 percent of the entire British viewing public tunes in. Banner-waving crowds turn up, jeering and cheering. I watched it twice--in case I missed anything. I also voted to evict housemates every single week (at roughly 50 pence a pop). And yes, I am still married. The series is so popular that it has spawned three companion shows, including Big Brother's Little Brother, Big Brother's Big Brain, and Big Brother's Big Mouth. I record and watch them all, even on beautiful days, which are rare in London. I can no longer fit into my trousers.
As for the American version of Big Brother, there can be no comparison. The U.S. version is crass, formulaic, and dull. The U.K. version is crass, inventive, and smart. Its story lines are as ingenious as those for a scripted show, and the producers treat the characters with the same disdain and affection as viewers do, toying with them the way a cat does a crippled baby bird. Housemates veer from jittery excitement to abject misery (based on assigned tasks) and Big Brother is everywhere, characterized by an emotionless voice--sometimes male, sometimes female, and once or twice Welsh.
By banning books, television, and cell phones, the cast members are forced to deal with each other, creating a magnetic mini-hell that is both riveting and tedious, if that's possible. Because the noncelebrity version lasts three months, it self-selects for volunteers who have three months to spare. Meaning the unemployed and incompetent. I laugh at their uselessness; but then again, I watch every episode (90 plus) as well as the live, overnight feed. And yes, I don't bathe much anymore.
I first became hooked on BB during its sixth series, which featured a group of housemates so perverse and obsessive I felt like I was back in Los Angeles. This crew included a leggy transvestite named Kemal, an obsessive gay stalker, a psycho nurse, a gay black Tory, and something called Kinga, a fat blonde monstrosity. Celebrity Big Brother 4 followed, featuring an awesome selection of troubled, egocentric, and mildly insane C-listers, all verging on breakdown. The housemates included an aging television presenter named Michael Barrymore, who had run off to New Zealand after a man was found dead in his swimming pool. On the show, Barrymore wept like a child, but possessing the soul of a true entertainer, still attempted to rouse housemates by performing a dance number dressed as Hitler. It wasn't half bad.
The cast also included Pete Burns, the former singer of Dead or Alive (known for the addictive but aggravating "You Spin Me Round") who stole the show as an increasingly spiteful she-male, an alien destroyed and then rebuilt by cosmetic surgeons. Dressed in little more than a piece of fabric and heels, with a face full of collagen injections and implants, Burns appeared like a sci-fi hooker from another galaxy--one you'd never visit sober. He bragged that his favorite coat was made of gorilla skin, prompting the police to storm the house to confiscate the jacket. It turned out it was not gorilla at all but Colobus monkey! Animal rights activists hated him, which made him even more endearing.
There was also Dennis Rodman. An unknown in London, his newfound obscurity forced him to act out, scaring housemates by soliciting sex from them at every opportunity. Rodman injected lurid overtones into every conversation, and in a press conference following the end of BB, told a reporter that he would be up "in his ass." And George Galloway, the left-wing politician and Respect party member of Parliament, who still laments the loss of the Soviet Union. George thought that joining BB would help gain him a "younger audience."
Instead it destroyed his career. And for that BB deserves its greatest praise. In one stellar episode, housemates had to place themselves in order of fame from most famous to least famous. George put himself near the top, explaining that over a billion Muslims know him, so technically he's more famous than everyone. Later, he pretended to be a cat, prowling on all floors, lapping up make-believe milk from the willing hands of faded stage star Rula Lenska. He also danced like a robot in red spandex. At his eviction, when host Davina McCall revealed the staggering amount of horrible press headlines he received, George looked like he was going to cry. I hate the guy, but even I felt bad for him.
And now, sadly, the most recent BB (7) series has ended, the winner of the show being Tourette's Syndrome sufferer Pete Bennett. He beat out Nikki, the anorexic former escort, a gay waiter named Richard, and an 18-year-old Welsh lifeguard. Among the other housemates waiting to greet him at the end were Shahbaz, a psychopath who admits to being arrested for cruising in parks for anonymous sex. Shahbaz was forced off the show after experiencing as close to a mental breakdown you can have without swallowing your tongue. Who wasn't there? Sezer, for legal reasons. A housemate evicted early on, he's already been under investigation for rape.
I, like everyone else, really liked Pete Bennett. And his appearance on the show revealed an interesting truth: Whenever anyone with a disability goes on a reality TV show, there are initial complaints that they are being exploited. These pass only when everyone realizes (quickly) that the disability in question isn't that funny: If no one is laughing, it's not exploitation. But once you realize that the exposure of the disability is seen as "raising awareness," you can laugh all you want, and imitate the verbal tics and twitches, which was happening all over Britain, due to Pete's manic outbursts and grimaces. Oh yeah, he also exposed himself in the pool. But I think we've had enough.
Not everyone watches Big Brother, of course. You do get your share of pseudo-intellectuals who make a point of telling you they never watch it--much like their same counterparts in America who say they never watch TV in general, as if they've been spending all that saved time knocking out cures for cancer or inventing a flying toaster.
But I don't watch BB to make myself feel smarter. I watch it to remind myself that I'm not British. And not being British means I don't need a TV show to express my disdain for idiots. BB gives Britain--a country paralyzed by multiculturalism--the chance to stare at the freaks and judge them, laugh at them, berate them. Contrast this with the real lives of Brits: Living in a culture that must tolerate chavs, criminals, lager louts, benefit fraudsters, hooligans, and Islamic nut-bags, often at their own peril. This is a country that allows mullahs to preach the demise of their own country, all in the name of tolerance.
Still, the good news is that Celebrity Big Brother 5 is practically upon us. I predict the cast will include Boy George, the guitarist from Status Quo, Cindy Sheehan, Siamese Twins, and a four-pound bag of brine shrimp. I put my money on the shrimp.
Greg Gutfeld is a writer in London.
© Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Nihilism
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This article is about the philosophical position. For the Russian political and revolutionary movement, see Nihilist movement.
Some information in this article or section has not been verified and may not be reliable.Please check for any inaccuracies, and modify and cite sources as needed.
Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that the world, and especially human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following: there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator, a "true morality" is unknown, and secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has no truth, and no action is known to be preferable to any other.[1]
Nihilism is often more a charge leveled against a particular idea, movement, or group, than it is an actual philosophical position to which someone overtly subscribes. Movements such as Dadaism as well as Futurism[2] and deconstructionism,[3] among others, have been described by commentators as "nihilist" at various times in various contexts. Often this means or is meant to imply that the beliefs of the accuser are more substantial or truthful, whereas the beliefs of the accused are nihilistic, and thereby comparatively amount to nothing.
Nihilism is also a characteristic that has been ascribed to time periods: for example, Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch,[4] and some Christian theologians and figures of authority have asserted that modernity[3] and postmodernity[5] represent the rejection of God, and therefore are nihilistic.
Prominent philosophers who have written on the subject of nihilism include Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche described Christianity as a nihilistic religion because it evaded the challenge of finding meaning in earthly life, creating instead a spiritual projection where mortality and suffering were removed instead of transcended. He believed nihilism resulted from the "death of God", and insisted that it was something to be overcome, by returning meaning to a monistic reality. (He sought instead a "pragmatic idealism," in contrast to the prominent influence of Schopenhauer's "cosmic idealism.") Heidegger argued that the term "nihilism has a very specific meaning. What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is being; and hence, it is nihilistic,"[6] and that nihilism rested on the reduction of Being to "mere value."[citation needed]
Contents[hide]
1 Etymology
2 Nihilism in Philosophy
2.1 Nihilism in Ethics and Morality
2.2 Postmodernism and the Breakdown of Knowledge
2.2.1 Lyotard and Meta-narratives
2.3 Nihilism and Nietzsche
2.4 Nihilism, Self-consistency, and Paradox
3 Nihilism in Art
3.1 Dadaism
3.2 Nihilism in Literature
4 See also
5 External links
6 References
7 Further reading
8 Books on Nihilism
//
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Etymology
The term comes from the Latin nihil, meaning "nothing". The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1817 as its earliest use in English, and Alain Rey's Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (rev. ed. 1995) gives 1787 as the first use of the word in French, noting that nihiliste was used in 1761, though in a religious sense of 'heretic' that is now obsolete. Rey also argues that the Russian equivalent nighilizm (нигилизм) that appeared in 1829 was an impulse to the penetration of the term into modern language.
The Latin indefinite pronoun nihili ('nothing') is a reduced form of nihilum, a term that derives from ne-hilom, an emphatic form of the negation ne by means of hilum, meaning 'the slightest amount' and of uncertain origin. [citation needed]
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Nihilism in Philosophy
Certainty series
Nihilism
Agnosticism
Uncertainty
Probability
Estimation
Belief
Justified true belief
Certainty
Determinism
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Though the term nihilism was first popularized by Ivan Turgenev (see below), it was first introduced into philosophical discourse by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), who used the term to characterize rationalism, and in particular Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy in order to carry out a reductio ad absurdum according to which all rationalism (philosophy as criticism) reduces to nihilism, and thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation. (See also fideism.)
Friedrich Nietzsche's later work displays a preoccupation with nihilism. Book One of the posthumous collection The Will to Power (a highly selective arrangement of jottings from various notebooks and from an incomplete project begun by Nietzsche himself, then posthumously edited and released by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche) is entitled "European Nihilism" which he calls "the problem of the nineteenth century." [citation needed] Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. He hints that nihilism can become a false belief, when it leads individuals to discard any hope of meaning in the world and thus to invent some compensatory alternate measure of significance.
Though some deride it as nihilistic, postmodernism can be contrasted with the above formulation of nihilism in that the most common type of nihilism tends toward defeatism or fatalism, while postmodern philosophers tend to find strength and reason for celebration in the varied and unique human relationships it explores.[citation needed] Nihilism can also readily be compared to skepticism as both reject claims to knowledge and truth, though skepticism does not necessarily come to any conclusions about the reality of moral concepts nor does it deal so intimately with questions about the meaning of an existence without knowable truth.[citation needed]
In a very different vein than just given, contemporary analytic philosophers have been engaged in a very active discussion over the past few years about what is called mereological nihilism. This is the position that objects with parts do not exist, and only basic building blocks without parts exist (e.g., electrons, quarks), and thus the world we see and experience full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception. Jeffrey Grupp of Purdue University [7], argues for a doctrine of mereological nihilism, maintaining that there are no objects whatsoever which have parts. Grupp argues that nihilism is the standard position of many ancient atomists, such as Democritus of ancient Greece, Dharmakirti of ancient India, that it is the position held by Kant in his transcendental idealism, and that it is the position actually found in quantum observational physics.[8] The other contemporary mereological nihilists are not atomists, such as the mereological nihilists Trenton Merricks of the University of Virginia, and Peter van Inwagen of Notre Dame.
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Nihilism in Ethics and Morality
Main article: Moral nihilism
In the world of ethics, nihilist or nihilistic is often used as a derogatory term referring to a complete rejection of all systems of authority, morality, and social custom, or one who purportedly makes such a rejection. Either through the rejection of previously accepted bases of belief or through extreme relativism or skepticism, the nihilist is construed as one who believes that none of these claims to power are valid. Nihilism not only dismisses received moral values, but rejects 'morality' outright, viewing it as baseless.
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Postmodernism and the Breakdown of Knowledge
Postmodern thought is colored by the perception of a degeneration of systems of epistemology and ethics into extreme relativism, especially evident in the writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. These philosophers tend to deny the very grounds on which Western cultures have based their 'truths': absolute knowledge and meaning, the accumulation of positive knowledge, historical progress, and the ideals of humanism and the Enlightenment. Though it is often described as a fundamentally nihilist philosophy, before entering a brief discussion on postmodern thought it is important to note that nihilism itself is open to postmodern criticism: nihilism is a claim to a universal truth, exactly what postmodernism rejects.
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Lyotard and Meta-narratives
Lyotard argues that, rather than relying on an objective truth or method to prove their claims, philosophers legitimize their truths by reference to a story about the world which is inseparable from the age and system the stories belong to. Lyotard calls them meta-narratives. He then goes on to define the postmodern condition as one characterized by a rejection both of these meta-narratives and of the process of legitimization by meta-narratives.
"In lieu of meta-narratives we have created new language-games in order to legitimize our claims which rely on changing relationships and mutable truths, none of which is privileged over the other to speak to ultimate truth." It is this unstable concept of truth and meaning that leads one close to nihilism, though in the same move that plunges toward meaninglessness, Lyotard suspends his philosophy just above its surface.
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Nihilism and Nietzsche
'To the clean are all things clean' — thus say the people. I, however, say unto you: To the swine all things become swinish! Therefore preach the visionaries and bowed-heads (whose hearts are also bowed down): 'The world itself is a filthy monster.' For these are all unclean spirits; especially those, however, who have no peace or rest, unless they see the world FROM THE BACKSIDE — the backworldsmen! TO THOSE do I say it to the face, although it sound unpleasantly: the world resembleth man, in that it hath a backside, — SO MUCH is true! There is in the world much filth: SO MUCH is true! But the world itself is not therefore a filthy monster!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche defined the term as any philosophy that, rejecting the real world around us and physical existence along with it, results in an apathy toward life and a poisoning of the human soul — and opposed it vehemently. He describes it as "the will to nothingness" or, more specifically:
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos—at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 585, Walter Kaufmann
In this sense it is the philosophical equivalent to the Russian political movement mentioned above: the irrational leap beyond skepticism — the desire to destroy meaning, knowledge, and value. To him, it was irrational because the human soul thrives on value. Nihilism, then, was in a sense like suicide and mass murder all at once. He saw this philosophy as present in Christianity (which he describes as slave morality), Buddhism, morality, asceticism and any excessively skeptical philosophy.
Nietzsche is referred to as a nihilist in part because he famously announced "God is dead!" What he meant by this oft-repeated statement has been the subject of much heated debate, because Nietzsche simply declared this position in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra without actually arguing for it. Some argue that Nietzsche meant not that God has died in a literal sense, or even necessarily that God doesn't exist, but that we don't believe in God anymore, that even those of us who profess faith in God don't really believe. God is dead, then, in the sense that his existence is now irrelevant to the bulk of humanity. "And we," he says in The Gay Science, "have killed him."
Alternately, some have interpreted Nietzsche's comment to be a statement of faith that the world has no rational order. Nietzsche also believed that, even though Christian morality is nihilistic, without God humanity is left with no epistemological or moral base from which we can derive absolute beliefs. Thus, even though nihilism has been a threat in the past, through Christianity, Platonism, and various political movements that aim toward a distant utopian future, and any other philosophy that devalues human life and the world around us (and any philosophy that devalues the world around us by privileging some other or future world necessarily devalues human life), Nietzsche tells us it is also a threat for humanity's future. This warning can also be taken as a polemic against 19th and 20th century scientism.
Nietzsche advocated a remedy for nihilism's destructive effects and a hope for humanity's future in the form of the Übermensch, a position especially apparent in his works Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Antichrist. The Übermensch is an exercise of action and life: one must give value to their existence by behaving as if one's very existence were a work of art. Nietzsche believed that the Übermensch "exercise" would be a necessity for human survival in the post-religious era.
Another part of Nietzsche's remedy for nihilism is a revaluation of morals — he hoped that we are able to discard the old morality of equality and servitude and adopt a new code, turning Judeo-Christian morality on its head. Excess, carelessness, callousness, and sin, then, are not the damning acts of a person with no regard for his salvation, nor that which plummets a society toward decadence and decline, but the signifier of a soul already withering and the sign that a society is in decline. The only true sin to Nietzsche is that which is against a human nature aimed at the expression and venting of one's power over oneself. Virtue, likewise, is not to act according to what has been commanded, but to contribute to all that betters a human soul.
Nietzsche attempts to reintroduce what he calls a master morality, which values personal excellence over forced compassion and creative acts of will over the herd instinct, a moral outlook he attributes to the ancient Greeks. The Christian moral ideals developed in opposition to this master morality, he says, as the reversal of the value system of the elite social class due to the oppressed class' resentment of their Roman masters. Nietzsche, however, did not believe that humans should adopt master morality as the be-all-end-all code of behavior - he believed that the revaluation of morals would correct the inconsistencies in both master and slave morality - but simply that master morality was preferable to slave morality, although this is debatable. Walter Kaufmann, for one, disagrees that Nietzsche actually preferred master morality to slave morality. He certainly gives slave morality a much harder time, but this is partly because he believes that slave morality is modern society's more imminent danger. The Antichrist had been meant as the first book in a four-book series, "Toward a Re-Evaluation of All Morals", which might have made his views more explicit, but Nietzsche did not survive to write the later three books.
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Nihilism, Self-consistency, and Paradox
Nihilism is often described as a belief in the nonexistence of truth. In its more extreme forms, such a belief is difficult to justify, because it contains a variation on the liar paradox: if it is true that truth does not exist, the statement "truth does not exist" is itself a truth, therefore showing itself to be inconsistent. A formally identical criticism has been leveled against relativism and the verifiability theory of meaning of logical positivism.
A more sophisticated interpretation of the claim might be that while truth may exist, it is inaccessible in practice, but this leaves open the problem of how the nihilist has accessed it. It may be a reasonable reply that the nihilist has not accessed truth directly, but has come to the conclusion, based on past experience, that truth is ultimately unattainable within the confines of human circumstance. Thus, since nihilists believe they have learned that truth cannot be attained in this life, they look upon the activities of those rigorously seeking truth as futile. However, this interpretation is open to the same criticism as above, since, barring mystical revelation, the only way the "truth" of nihilism can have been learned is from within the confines of human experience. An attempt at reconciliation may be made in the following way:
To logically deduce that one cannot realise objective (certain) truth as opposed to subjective (assumed) truth, one requires logic. Logic is an artefact of the human mind, which is a finite, subjective apparatus of observation and "experience". Thus, from within the confines of "human experience", it is possible to be convinced (by logical and therefore subjective means) that it is not possible to realise objective truth. The nihilist, then, cannot profess to know something objectively and without bias, but he can submit that he is subjectively convinced that he will never be certain in his knowledge of anything. Therefore, nihilism is a type of cosmic agnosticism ( 'agnostic' meaning 'without knowledge' ) in which the nihilist merely admits that he can never be certain of anything, not for lack of evidence, but for the fallibility inherent to consciousness.
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Nihilism in Art
There have been various movements in art, such as surrealism and cubism, which have been criticized for touching on nihilism, and others like Dada which have embraced it openly. More generally, modern art has been criticized as nihilistic due to its often non-representative nature, as happened with the Nazi party's Degenerate art exhibit.
Nihilistic themes can be found in literature and music as well. This is especially true of contemporary music and literature, where the uncertainty following what some perceive as the demise of modernism is explored in detail.
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Dadaism
The term Dada was first used during World War I, an event that precipitated the movement, which lasted from approximately 1916 to 1923. The Dada Movement began in the old town of Zürich, Switzerland known as the "Niederdorf" or "Niederdörfli," which is now sporadically inhabited by dadaist squatters. The Dadaists claimed that Dada was not an art movement, but an anti-art movement, sometimes using found objects in a manner similar to found poetry and labeling them art, thus undermining ideas of what art is and what it can be. The "anti-art" drive is thought of to have stemmed from a post-war emptiness that lacked passion or meaning in life. Sometimes Dadaists paid attention to aesthetic guidelines only so they could be avoided, attempting to render their works devoid of meaning and aesthetic value. This tendency toward devaluation of art has led many to claim that Dada was essentially a nihilist movement; a destruction without creation. War and destruction had washed away peoples' mindset of creation and aesthetic.
Because they attempted to undermine the way art was viewed in the 20th century, the dadaists chose to name their movement after a baby phrase to show the way their anti-art was shaking everything up. Several myths regarding the invention of the name "Dada" exist, including that it was a form of mockery against Tzara, who is widely viewed as the father of the movement (in Russian "da, da" is "yes, yes", a name that still offers no indication of the art that bears it). (http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=tzara">Tristan Tzara (see Samuel Rosenstock), Jewish poet (born in Romania; moved to France) who was one of the co-founders of the Dada movement (1896-1963).
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Nihilism in Literature
Although the word nihilism is of recent historical vintage, the attitude it represents is not, as is seen in a famous passage near the end of Shakespeare's Macbeth — though Macbeth is not speaking of universal collapse or expansion but the brute and more immediate fact of human death:
Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more; it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
— William Shakespeare , Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5
In nineteenth-century culture, nihilism was given wide currency by the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) to describe the views of an emerging radical Russian intelligentsia. These consisted primarily of upper-class students who had grown disillusioned with the slow pace of reformism. The primary spokesman for this new philosophy was D. I. Pisarev (1840-1868) who articulated a program of Revolutionary Utilitarianism and advocated violence as a tool for social change. Pisarev was cast as Bazarov in Fathers and Sons much to his own delight; he proudly embraced his new status as a fictionalized hero and villain. [citation needed]
After its popularization in the character of Bazarov, the word quickly became a catch-all term of derision for younger, more radical generations, and continues in this vein to modern times. [citation needed] It is often used to indicate a group or philosophy the speaker intends to characterize as having no moral sensibility, no belief in truth, beauty, love, or whatever else the speaker and his presumed audience values, and no regard for the current social conventions.
In Germinal (1885), by Émile Zola, the nihilist character Souvarine dramatizes the danger of nihilism when, in a climactic scene, he sabotages a coal mine and causes a catastrophic accident, then slips away. Souvarine's lack of belief, frequently expressed, is a foil to the optimistic socialism that fuels the coal miners' revolt. [citation needed]
In Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov embraces a nihilist sort of utilitarianism. Dostoevsky ultimately points out the emptiness of nihilism with the epilogue of the novel. [citation needed] In fact, many of Dostoevsky's novels dealt with nihilism. Another major example of nihilism is found in The Possessed (or The Devils), in which Kirilov sees no solution to nihilism but suicide and ultimately kills himself. The main protagonist, Stavrogin, finally sees Kirilov's dilemma and follows suit at the end of the book with his own elaborate suicide. [citation needed]
The works of Albert Camus can be read as a sustained engagement with nihilism. [citation needed] Camus was highly influenced by the works and thoughts of Dostoevsky, even writing his own play based on Dostoevsky's novel, "The Devils". [citation needed]Yukio Mishima is another example of engagement with nihilism. [citation needed]Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote several novels of a strongly nihilist bent, most notably Journey to the End of the Night. [citation needed]
The works of Samuel Beckett, especially the play Waiting for Godot, exhibit elements of nihilism. This play has subsequently been made into a cinematic film which visually deals with the more pessimistic and cynical aspects of nihilism. [citation needed]
In contemporary literature, themes of nihilism can also be found in many of Kurt Vonnegut's books. [citation needed] Robert Stone, additionally, is a contemporary American novelist who has often thematized nihilism in his work. In A Flag for Sunrise (1981), for example, the anthropologist Holliwell is a protagonist struggling against his own nihilistic tendencies. [citation needed] Another American author who is commonly believed to deal with themes of nihilism is Chuck Palahniuk. In his 1996 novel Fight Club, for example, the ultimate goal of the book's 'project mayhem' is the destruction of modern civilization in order to rebuild humanity. [citation needed] Palahniuk, however, claims that he does not deliberately focus on the subject. [citation needed] Nathan Tyree's Novel, Mr. Overby is Falling, is another current example of nihilism in literature. In that book the main character longs for the destruction of all society, so that the world can be cleansed of evil. [citation needed] Nihilism is also a common theme in the worldview and writings of horror author Thomas Ligotti, as well as Bret Easton Ellis[9][10].
[edit]

Excerpt from the Pope's lecture

Tom Smith
Here is an extended excerpt from the Pope's address at the University of Regensburg, entitled"Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization", that is supposed to be so offensive.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) of part of the dialogue carried on -- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara -- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.
It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran.
In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point -- itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself -- which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason," I found interesting and which can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation ("diálesis" -- controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.
Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably ("syn logo") is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...."
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?
And that's it. That's what all the kerfuffle is about. The Pope can apologize if he wants to, but I certainly don't think he has anything to apologize for. I suppose he could explain that when he quotes a dialog between a 14th century Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian, he does not therefore endorse the views of either interlocuture. He might even quote something in order ask, as he does, what are we to make of this? Obviously, the Pope was just putting in context the question the emperor was posing, and that has been posed for a long time, since 1391 anyway -- whether forced religious conversions are religiously justified.
12:50 PM Permalink

Body&soul
Faking it? The tyranny of the female orgasm
Yes, yes — well, no. Germaine Greer, who’s in a film about vibrators, cuts the Big O down to size
Female orgasms wander through the news media like the Loch Ness monster, glimpsed now and then, but never quite surfacing. Now we have two more sightings, thanks to the latest book by Fay Weldon and a new film about the Rabbit vibrator. In What Makes Women Happy? Weldon recommends that a good woman should fake her orgasms “and then leap out of bed and pour him champagne, telling him: ‘You are so clever’. ”
Meanwhile, the new film, Rabbit Fever (in which I make a cameo appearance), launches next week, purporting to tell the story of the sex toy’s rise and its tendency to create orgasm addicts. What is it about the female orgasm nowadays? The O-word itself is horrid and its meaning is confused; the root is the Greek word for tumescence or engorgement, not for the spasm that invariably accompanies ejaculation in the male, of which something similar can be produced in the female, but less reliably and with rather more effort. Candles and carrots used to be credited with more potency in triggering female orgasm than the male member but the march of technology has produced a purpose-made pleasure-tool, namely the vibrator, of which the market leader is the Rabbit.
For a mere £30, any woman can acquire a “good-sized Rabbit vibrator with an extra: the beads can move up and down for pure pleasure whilst the rabbit is teasing your cl*t”, according to the advert. The rabbit is a two-eared projection on the upper side of the shaft of the instrument. And there’s more: “The shaft has a number of pleasure beads and the touch control allows you to choose between vibrate, pulse, escalate or multi-speed”, all accompanied by the kind of droning buzz you associate with a cordless hedge-clipper. You can get silent Rabbits, but they cost more and they’re more of the squirmy type. Eventually men will have penile inserts that give them a similar range of extras, vibrating eggs in the penis head, jelly spikes, rotating beads. But a man takes more looking after than a Rabbit and today’s women don’t have the time.
In modern consumer society the name of the game is instant gratification and the paradigm of all pleasure is solitary. Sole users guarantee the widest volume of sales of any appliances, hence the iPod and the Rabbit.
Apparently Fay Weldon did not watch Sex and the City, which is what launched the Rabbit into every boudoir in the Western world. Women no longer expect men to supply orgasms, if they ever did. It’s only the men who expect to supply orgasms; their penis gives them so much pleasure that they can’t imagine it not doing the same for their sexual partner.
Most of us do fake orgasm, often, but we could do without Weldon betraying our little secret. In every porn video the whores are whimpering, snorting and panting from the git-go, at the merest touch in vaguely the right area from a even the rubberiest of male organs. Faking it is de rigueur. Most women do it because given their workload they need to get the sex over with in the nicest way and get some sleep. It’s called “keeping everyone (but yourself) happy”. That principle is a chief mechanism in women’s oppression and I am saddened but not surprised to hear Weldon upholding it.
If you’re Paris Hilton — hugely rich, entirely self-willed and don’t give a damn whether the people around you are happy or not — you can skip the whole performance. In a porn video made by some hustler when Hilton was only 18, he crouches head-down between her thighs, snuffling like a trufflehound, while she lies back, staring expressionlessly at the ceiling.
The sequence lasts about 20 minutes. I almost expected her to ask the famous question from Deep Throat: “Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?” But she remains mute and motionless throughout. She could be asleep. Attagirl.
The rest of us wouldn’t dare to be so disobliging. We moan and groan to make our man feel good, much as a man will tell his date that she’s the prettiest girl in the room. It’s just good manners.
And as for telling him how clever he is after sex and pouring him a rewarding glass of champagne, it’s hard to do that if he’s flat on his back snoring.
Most of us are too insecure to be upfront about our failure to respond. Weldon is wrong: men are not expected to supply women’s orgasms. These days women are expected to produce orgasms on demand. Regardless of age or fitness or the tedium of the relationship, we’re all supposed to be hot, up for it, in all circumstances, at all times. The insertion of the penis is tantamount to lighting the blue touchpaper. If we don’t go off like a fire-cracker, it’s not the man’s fault but ours. The most potent cause of so much faking it is fear of appearing frigid, of being a “dud bash”.
Mid-20th-century marriage manuals encouraged men to be patient, to stimulate their partners in a host of different ways, and to delay their own gratification as long as possible. The woman was to be the violin; the man the virtuoso. With a man who knew what he was doing, a woman could experience multiple orgasms, remaining in an orgastic state for many minutes. Alas, the multiple orgasm has proved even more elusive than the mutual orgasm.
Sexualities have many forms of expression and those forms are continually changing. From 1927, when Wilhelm Reich first published The Function of the Orgasm, orgasms have been represented as essential to mental health. In the beginning these weren’t just any orgasms; the essential orgasms were those that eliminated tensions, leaving the individual in a state of equilibrium, self-regulating and therefore capable of freedom.
Oppressive political systems, it was claimed, induced mindless servility and impotence by censoring free sexual expression. Unfulfilled subjects sublimated their frustrations in militarism, racism and genocide. If Hitler had had the right orgasms the Holocaust would never have happened. “Right sex” was a purifying ritual; masturbation was discouraged.
For women, the right orgasm was vaginal; orgasms deriving from stimulation of the clitoris were thought to be superficial, inferior, typical of the narcissistic immature personality. Better understanding of female anatomy brought the awareness that there were few nerve ends in the vagina, despite the myth of the G-spot. Proper study of the ramifications of the clitoris revealed that it was not so much a localised button as the outcropping head of a deep neural network involving the whole pelvis, including the vagina. The truth was out: women did not need men’s help to reach orgasm. Indeed, men could get in the way. The more they fiddled and twiddled, the more in the way they were.
Fay Weldon is probably right to say that sex without orgasm can be perfectly pleasurable, but making love is even more deeply satisfying than simply having sex, with the female orgasm as an optional extra.
Weldon is certainly right to say that there is no point in a woman demanding an orgasm from her man. If an orgasm is what she wants, rather than intimacy, there’s always the Rabbit.
What Makes Women Happy? (Fourth Estate, £12.99) is available from Times Books First at £11.99 (p&p free).
Rabbit Fever is in cinemas from September 22

Books of The Times
With Pluck and Luck, Surviving a Fascist Nightmare
By WILLIAM GRIMES
At the beginning of 1939, a young Frenchwoman named Mireille Journet made a decision. She would accompany her lover, a German artist and fervent anti-Nazi, to his hometown, Stuttgart, so that he could put his mother’s affairs in order.
Six months. That was the agreement. Then history intervened. For the duration of the war, the couple, who married in a Nazi civil ceremony, lived an existence that lurched wildly between the absurd and the horrific. Mireille Journet, now Marokvia and in her late 90’s, captures it movingly in her precise, beautifully written memoir, a strange tale of two bohemians caught up in a totalitarian nightmare.
Ms. Marokvia was a country girl with an appetite for adventure. As a student at the Sorbonne, she fell for a dashing artist she took to be a Russian, but soon discovered was a German of Slovak descent. In the Paris of the 1930’s, they lived the way artists were supposed to, taking their aperitifs at the Dôme and racing off on mad quests. In one characteristic episode, the man Ms. Marokvia calls Abel (Artur in real life) crosses into Spain to buy horses for a riding vacation and ends up imprisoned in a Spanish jail. There, fed two sardines a day, he waits his turn to be shot as a Russian spy. A well-timed telegram from the German consul frees him at the 11th hour.
Ms. Marokvia, also blessed with pluck and luck, makes a perceptive, wry witness to events in Germany, where she led a threatened but charmed life. On the face of it, two anti-Nazis, one of them French, and the other incapable of keeping his opinions to himself, would seem to stand little chance of survival in Hitler’s Germany. But Abel, with an artist’s gift for making connections in the right circles, always managed to squeak through. His wife, quick to learn German, played her cards shrewdly, too, steering clear of trouble and patiently observing with a perceptive but not unsympathetic eye. Unlike her husband, Ms. Marokvia could find it in her heart to like Germany and Germans, the decent ones.
Circumstances, and her husband’s postings abroad to do military illustrations in Ukraine, Italy, Finland and Yugoslavia, sent Ms. Marokvia all over Germany. She saw it in triumph and despair. She lived in big cities like Stuttgart and Berlin. She encountered humble Germans in Sankt Peter, a fishing village on the North Sea, where she labored as a weaver, and in Bergheim, a village in the Black Forest near the Swiss border, where she rented a reputedly haunted house and raised a goat.
In Bergheim, a peasant neighbor, eager to converse with an educated woman, springs a question that has been troubling him for years. This obsession the Nazis seem to have with the Jews. What is that all about?
Ms. Marokvia observes. Abel seethes. She finds Berlin attractive, and Berliners, too. “They seemed to have a dry wit I could enjoy,” she writes. Abel scowls. “Pretentious and overbearing,” he tells her.
When they catch sight of Hermann Göring coming out of a government building, Ms. Marokvia, fascinated, leans forward for a closer look. “His cheeks were plump, rosy and smooth,” she writes. “He wore makeup, I swear.” Abel broods. “For days, weeks, he was obsessed by having been close enough to the ‘sinister clown’ to kill him,” Ms. Marokvia writes.
On one occasion, providing one of the most satisfying moments in the book, Abel loses all sense of reality and confronts a Nazi official at a dinner party given by Abel’s boss, the head of an advertising agency, in a suburb of Stuttgart. After the official begins railing against the Jews, Abel approaches him and says: “You, I want to tell you something. You are an idiot, and your Adolf also.” Then he administers a slap in the face. “After that,” Ms. Marokvia writes, “what we called animal fear sat by our side.”
Nothing came of the incident. The official was on the way down and embroiled in party infighting. Abel also managed to avoid combat duty late in the war. Sent to basic training, he threw himself on the ground during a field exercise. Every war needs dead people, he told his perplexed sergeant, who turned his attention to more promising material and sent his hopeless, overage recruit home.
Ms. Marokvia, in her own small way, resisted. Early in the war she refused an offer by the Gestapo to return to France as an informer. Later, when she was hired by a publisher to translate mystery novels into French, she put her own spin on orders from above.
“I did adaptation for French taste, as required, turning tall, blond, handsome Aryans into short, darker non-Aryans,” she writes. “Some types even got wavy hair and fleshy noses.” More seriously, she helped some escaped Polish prisoners find their way to the Swiss border from her village in the Black Forest.
Here and there, some Germans also resisted, or at least tried to get at the truth. The village priest in Bergheim pointedly omits the required Nazi formulas from his sermons. Others furtively listen to the BBC. In Sankt Peter, a shop owner employs a Jewish weaver and hides her.
“There are so many of us,” Ms. Marokvia once tells her husband, who corrects her sharply. “No, there are not,” he responds. “We just attract each other and lose perspective.” True.
Almost unbelievably, Ms. Marokvia considers staying in Germany after the war. Her husband has other ideas. But Paris, they find, is not the same Paris they knew. Some former friends denounce them. Knowing only a few words of English, they set sail for the United States and a new life.
Ms. Marokvia kept wartime journals and diaries. In 1944 she burned them, alerted that the Gestapo was on the way to her door in Bergheim. “This slice of life, 50 years in the past, is a tragicomic mural on the walls of a cave,” she writes. “My memory, like a flashlight, its batteries half spent, conjures stray images out of the darkness.”
The batteries may be weakening, but the images are vivid, the lives truly extraordinary. Ms. Marokvia, who wrote about her childhood in “Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o’-the Wisp,” is at work on a third volume of her memoirs. At a steady pace, she could finish it by her 100th birthday.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

September 6, 2006
The Greening of Downtown Atlanta
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA, Sept. 5 — Snaking through this city named after a railroad is a ring of mostly unused track, a kind of citywide gutter that for decades has divided neighborhoods and attracted only kudzu and trash. But lately parcels of land on either side of this forgotten alley have skyrocketed in value.
That is because the city and a host of nonprofit groups have begun what urban planners say is a singularly ambitious municipal undertaking, transforming the railroad right-of-way into a 22-mile loop for hikers and bikers; a mass transit route; and a green corridor that strings together many of the city’s parks and serves as a framework for new ones.
In a city choked by its dependence on cars, the Beltline, as it is called, will provide a sanctuary, weaving its way over and under city streets, between decrepit loading docks and behind leafy backyards. It will link with the city’s existing transit lines, but unlike many projects in the Atlanta area it is not aimed primarily at commuters or suburbanites. Within a two- to four-mile radius from downtown, the corridor links the city’s old, historic neighborhoods, skirting attractions like the Carter Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.
“This will change the character of life in Atlanta 25 years from now,” said Alexander Garvin, the urban planner who was a crucial figure in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and New York’s bid for the Olympics, and who did a study of potential park enhancements along the Beltline. Already the city has spent $40 million to acquire one of the parcels of land he identified: a stunning 137-acre quarry that will be, when additional land is added, the city’s largest park.
The $2.8 billion Beltline began life humbly, as a thesis project for Ryan Gravel, a graduate student in architecture and urban planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. That was seven years ago.
But it has taken on a life of its own, exhibiting a rare power to capture the imagination of diverse interest groups, from cyclists to powerful developers, and to flatten opposition. It overcomes the traditional competition between trails and transit, for example, by combining the two.
“It’s very important that cities and communities go for a big vision,” Peter Calthorpe, an urban planner based in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview. “Cities need these bold moves and elements to make them exciting places to live. It’s exactly the kind of thing that will differentiate a city from the suburbs. Suburbs are the sum of a lot of little ideas.”
In 2001 Mr. Gravel, sensing a window of opportunity, began circulating the Beltline proposal. At the time city leaders were beginning to talk about how to expand the focus of transportation planning from the time-honored problem of moving commuters to include projects that would serve in-town Atlanta residents. Huge development projects like Atlantic Station, a dense new neighborhood on the site of a former steel mill near downtown, were on the horizon. New construction — condos, rentals, “loftominiums” — was untrammeled.
A City Councilwoman, Cathy Woolard, who became the council’s president in 2002, seized on the Beltline idea, which has also been pitched as an economic development engine that will create 30,000 jobs and 28,000 housing units, along with restaurants, shops and cultural sites. But perhaps more to the point, the Beltline provides a tool to organize and control development around a public amenity.
“The neighborhoods just loved it instantly,” said Mr. Gravel, now the senior project manager for the Beltline team at the city’s Bureau of Planning. “It’s a pretty exciting city to be in when you can live in a house with a yard a couple of blocks from a much larger building with shopping and access to transit.”
Yet the many feasibility studies that have been done read like a litany of impossibilities. The loop, consisting of four different rail lines, does not link up smoothly. Different sections of the right-of-way are owned by different entities. Federal money for transit projects is scarce. Some parts of the track are still in use; at one point, near the historic Oakland Cemetery, there is a major transfer yard where containers are moved from trains to trucks.
Last October Mayor Shirley Franklin urged community leaders to take a “leap of faith.” She has a history of such exhortations: more recently, she persuaded businesses and wealthy donors to spend $32 million to save the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers from auction and keep them in the city.
“Here’s our dilemma,” she said in October, according to a news report at the time. “Despite the sense of unreadiness, the opportunity to create the Beltline will slip away if we don’t act now.”
She was right: the timing of the Beltline is so perfect as to be almost late. Atlanta the city, as opposed to Atlanta the metropolitan blob, is growing in population for the first time in decades, and growing fast. In the next decade it is expected to increase to nearly 650,000 residents from just under 500,000. More Atlantans now live in multifamily buildings than in single-family homes.
That shift increases the importance of public space. And Atlanta lags far behind other major cities in land devoted to parks; it has 3.8 percent, compared with 18.9 percent in New York, 10 percent in Los Angeles and 8 percent in Chicago.
In some ways the Beltline has been its own enemy. The proposal has increased property values along the route, making parkland acquisition more expensive. The Trust for Public Land, which tries to help slow-moving governments in just these circumstances, is itself scrambling to buy the lots identified in Mr. Garvin’s report. It has spent $22 million so far on land it intends eventually to sell to the city.
A developer, Wayne Mason, has already bought the northeast quadrant of the Beltline, saying he intends to donate the right-of-way to the city. But the two sides have argued over issues like just how wide that right-of way needs to be. Another developer, Charles Brewer, who has expressed opposition to the transit component of the Beltline, has left only a two-lane street where the Beltline was projected to run; the Trust for Public Land bought the property behind his to accommodate a detour.
The city grasps the need to act quickly. Last year Ms. Franklin and the Beltline’s advocates won the fight to approve a special tax district that will funnel money into the project. The first tangible results, to be completed in the next five years, will be two sections of trail; the transit component will be the costliest and take the longest.
“Never in my professional life,” Mr. Garvin said, “did I come up with a set of proposals and find that a year later they’d been adopted by the local government and that 18 months later they were buying property.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

FLASHBACK MURDER MYSTERY

Judith Ann Roberts: Taking a crack at a Miami cold caseIn 1954, a 6-year-old girl was slain in Miami. The murder of little Judith Ann remains unsolved.BY LUISA YANEZ

yanez@MiamiHerald.com

An intruder breaks into a Miami home late at night and kidnaps a 6-year-old girl from her bed. Within hours, her body is dumped on a desolate road in Coconut Grove. She had been beaten, strangled and sexually molested.
The 1954 murder of Judith Ann Roberts, just a month before her seventh birthday, was Miami's first media-soaked, high-profile murder of a child.
Call it South Florida's version of today's JonBenet Ramsey murder mystery.
The abduction and slaying of a little girl visiting her grandparents rocked small-town Miami, where folks until then thought nothing of leaving their doors unlocked at night. Across the country, headlines trumpeted news of a sex maniac on the prowl in sunny Miami.
More than half a century later, the unsolved murder case has been reopened by a band of detectives with the Miami Police Department's Cold Case Squad, which is tracking down old leads for suspects.
They aren't talking, but the lead investigator in the original case, Irving Whitman, now 85, spent three days last year telling a Cold Case detective all he knew.
Whitman, who lives in Palmetto Bay, still keeps copies of investigative material from the case in his home office. He declined to show them to a reporter, guarding their secrets. ''The case is still open,'' the former detective explained.
FOUND BODY
Whitman was among those who found Judith Ann's body under mangroves on a road leading to Biscayne Bay. It's now the north side of Kennedy Park, along busy Bayshore Drive.
''She was nude, her body beaten and wrapped in her own little girl nightgown,'' Whitman recalled. ``A tree branch had been used to sexually assault her, but that was a ruse. The killer wanted to make it look like a sexual crime, but it wasn't.''
In recent weeks, due to the stir in the JonBenet case, Judith Ann has been heavy on Whitman's mind.
``I still visit the site where we found her every year. This thing, it stays with you. It's the biggest case I worked, no doubt, and it's unsolved.''
Efforts to reach the surviving Roberts family members -- only Judith Ann's mother and sister are alive -- were unsuccessful.
Judith Ann's parents buried their child in Miami before returning home to Baltimore. The little girl would have turned 59 on Aug. 9.
The story of her death began on the evening of July 6, 1954. Judith Ann and her family -- dad James, his second wife Shirley and Judith Ann's 3-year-old sister, Betty -- were on vacation in Miami.
James, an attorney, union organizer and unsuccessful Maryland legislative candidate, had driven them all down from Baltimore for a two-week vacation with his in-laws, Harold and Dora Rosenberg.
The Rosenbergs lived in a modest duplex at 1234 SW 13th Ave., which today straddles Shenandoah and Little Havana.
RECUPERATING
The day before she died, Judith Ann frolicked at the Venetian Pool with her sister and grandparents. The girl had undergone several operations to remove a tumor from her throat and now seemed robust and healthy, her family told police.
They had come home that afternoon and made dinner. It was Tuesday and the girls watched Danger, a popular murder mystery drama on CBS.
By 11 p.m., everyone was in bed. Judith Ann lay down on the living room couch, by the front door, under a front window. Her sister was in the rear, sleeping near the back door. The adults were in bedrooms. The doors were left unlocked for James Roberts, the girls' father, who was out for the evening.
About 1 a.m., Dora Rosenberg, the girl's grandmother, was awakened by the sound of a car speeding away; she went into the living room. Judith Ann was gone. Frantically, she woke her husband and daughter.
Soon, they realized the Rosenbergs' car, a green 1952 Oldsmobile with a gray top, was gone. They also found Harold Rosenberg's pants by the front door. His back pockets, where he kept his car keys, were inside out.
The girl's mother called police.
Detective Whitman, on the midnight shift, remembers the call that would stay with him to this day.
FBI CALLED
With Judith Ann listed as a missing person and thinking she had been kidnapped for ransom, Whitman called the FBI. About 5 a.m., the first break came. A Miami patrol officer found the Rosenbergs' car off Kirk Street in the Grove.
Police officers and firefighters rushed to the scene, but it wasn't until almost daybreak when Whitman and others looked under a thicket in the wooded field and found the girl's body.
It was a gruesome scene. A handkerchief had been placed over her face. She had been struck in the mouth, a blow so severe the medical examiner said it jarred her teeth loose.
Her thighs and genitals showed bruising from the branch. The cause of death: strangulation.
News of the horrific murder spread fast.
''It was bizarre. It became a total circus. . . . I got calls from around the world,'' Whitman recalled. ``Everybody had a theory.''
200 QUESTIONED
Nearly 200 men, known sex offenders, were rounded up and interrogated. The police department was overwhelmed with tips from a hysterical public. Politicians, state law enforcement officials, even then-acting Gov. Charley Johns got involved.
Judith Ann's father's union activities in Miami -- he had tried to push communists out -- were first thought to be the motive for a revenge killing, but that was shot down. So was the theory that a stranger or burglar had murdered the girl. Detectives concluded the killer must have known the family's routine. And troubling new questions began to pop up.
How did the killer know which car would start with the keys taken from the grandfather's pocket? And why did the intruder ignore Judith Ann's little sister Betty, sleeping by the unlocked rear door, where the killer had likely entered? And why didn't Judith Ann scream?
Police started looking closer to home.
''All members of the family are under suspicion,'' announced a frustrated then-Dade State Attorney George Brautigan. ``This is a heinous crime. It had to be committed by someone who had knowledge of the house.''
First targeted was the girl's father. The night his daughter was abducted, he had been bar hopping with a female client.
Was that to provide an alibi?
Rumors flew he needed cash and staged his daughter's kidnapping to extort money from his in-laws. Except, the plot went awry.
FATHER ARRESTED
Two months after his daughter's death, Judith Ann's father was arrested. He insisted on his innocence. By December, charges were dropped when a key witness was found to be lying.
Next to come under scrutiny was the girl's grandfather, a retired garment district merchant from New York.
Police knew the car seat of the Rosenberg's Oldsmobile was pushed up, indication that whoever drove it last was very short. Harold Rosenberg was under five feet. Maybe the grandfather had tried to molest the girl and she had cried out, the new theory went, but that, too, fizzled. Rosenberg charged that police made him a prime suspect because he had complained bitterly about the lack of leads in the case.
''We had a lot of supposition and conjuncture, but we could never get a case tight enough against anyone to take it to a jury,'' Whitman said.
Not everyone believes Judith Ann knew her killer.
Warren G. Holmes, then a Miami police detective sergeant in charge of the lie detector bureau, said the pushed-up seat in the Oldsmobile points to a young suspect. Holmes' pick is a 16-year-old questioned but released in the hours after the murder.
`TOTALLY CONVINCED'
''I'm totally convinced he is the killer,'' said Holmes, 79, of Miami, who knew the teen while working as a beat cop along downtown Miami's red-light district. ``I think he saw the little girl through the window and had to have her.''
Holmes said the teen, who was living behind a drugstore near the Rosenbergs' home, admitted he peered into the Rosenbergs' window.
In 1964, a decade after the murder, Holmes said the teen's wife called police to say her husband told her during a violent argument that he had killed Judith Ann Roberts.
''I gave her a lie-detector test and she passed it,'' Holmes said. But when he gave the test to the man, he registered no emotion to questions, including whether he had killed Judith Ann. ``It's as if he had ice water in his veins.''
Holmes hopes new publicity about the old Judith Ann murder case encourages someone who knows something to come forward. But he's sticking to his theory.
''I know who did it,'' Holmes said. That teen would now be 70.
Whitman, however, maintains Judith Ann and her killer were not strangers.
Whitman said he shared his theory with the Cold Case detectives: ``They didn't say if they agreed with me or not.''
Just in case, Whitman has kept three details about the murder a secret, things only the killer would know. They could be crucial facts because little physical evidence is left of the murder scene.
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