On the coming persecution (iii)

From Francis Poulenc's famous opera Dialogues of the Carmelites:

Sister Constance: "Are there no men left to come to the aid of the country?"

Mother Superior: "When priests are lacking, martyrs are superabundant."

The new CCCP

From Title 28, United States Code, Section 455, sections (a) and (b):

(a) Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
(b) He shall also disqualify himself in the following circumstances:
   (1) Where he has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party, or personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding;
   (2) Where in private practice he served as lawyer in the matter in controversy, or a lawyer with whom he previously practiced law served during such association as a lawyer concerning the matter, or the judge or such lawyer has been a material witness concerning it;
   (3) Where he has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy;
   (4) He knows that he, individually or as a fiduciary, or his spouse or minor child residing in his household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding;
   (5) He or his spouse, or a person within the third degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person:
     (i) Is a party to the proceeding, or an officer, director, or trustee of a party;
     (ii) Is acting as a lawyer in the proceeding;
     (iii) Is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding;
     (iv) Is to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.

By rule, sections (a) and (b) automatically disqualified Ginsberg and Kagan.  But at seven justices, a fair hearing would have been made.

The NFL prohibited a game official from working games where his son (now retired) participated.  On the same, note, an umpire would not be allowed to officiate his child's games.  And a parent's business partner isn't allowed to officiate that child's games either.  NASCAR barred Jeff Gordon from serving on the rookie panel in 2002 (a custom that the reigning champion serves on the rookie panel) because he had an interest in a rookie contender.  A similar rule would be in play of a Hendrick Motorsports Holden driver, or Kevin Harvick, wins the championship because Chase Elliott is a Hendrick driver (and Mr. Harvick has been an Xfinity teammate to Mr. Elliott on Dale Earnhardt Jr's team).

All of those situations are similar to the said regulations regarding judges that demanded a judicial disqualification of Sotomayor and Ginsberg.  Both judges publicly demanded marriage redefinition, one as the President's attorney (Solicitor General) and one publicly presided over a few illegal weddings.  That is grounds for disqualification.  The case redefining marriage should be overturned on this technicality.

But it never matters to the Left's arrogance.  They overturned thirty states and pushed urban values of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and college towns on the rest of America.  The Founding Fathers knew the dangers of allowing large states to have total control over smaller states, resulting in the Great Compromise on the legislative front, overturned on the state level in 1964.  Note the South's protests against taxation by Calhoun and others that led to attempts at nullification, and the Civil War (which is now the target of a deconfederatisation push similar to 1946 Germany in the wake of Mother Emanuel, which was caused by a rogue nihilist).  Anthony Kennedy was a "Plan C" judge that Ronald Reagan did not nominate as much as Joseph Biden, Ted Kennedy, and Robert Byrd made the selection, since Senate leaders on the Judiciary Committee and the Majority Leader handily shot down President Reagan's choice for the seat, Robert Bork, with the most lopsided defeat in history.   A second judge withdrew over what we call today a violation of WADA standards, effectively giving the choice to liberal leaders.  The Obama, Biden, and Clinton judges together caused this mess that we are paying today with the loss of our freedoms and replacement of it by the new one of Sexual Freedom.

Antonin Scalia proved best stating, "The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."  When majorities of over 60% nationally, and 75% in many states (Mississippi over 86%) are crushed by the judicial dictatorship overturning their Constitutions to push the outcome the Left demands, we have a totalitarian regime.

This is the Outcome-Based Education issue of the 1990's again.  Remember the controversy over "invented spelling"?  Whatever you feel is right is the only thing that counts.  And this was "invented lawmaking" -- whatever you feel is right again is the only thing that matters.  No standards matter.

We are headed to a dictatorship of a humanist theocracy with the judges.   Mao's Cultural Revolution is rapidly approaching.  With the deconfederatisation movement at full steam, we are headed to the abolition of all Confederate figures and history (including the CSS Hunley that preceded the German U-boats by 50 years, along with the CSS Virginia vs USS Monitor battles, which revolutionised war globally as the first ironclad ship battle), Memorial Day (celebration Union War dead in 1867) and even the Calgary Flames (named for the burning of its original city in the war), and its replacement by sexual deviancy hero Harvey Milk, with his birthday becoming a federal holiday to celebrate what a majority opposes -- that's a dictatorship.  We're also headed to persecution of Christians.

Christians taking a stand doesn't matter to them.  Liberals want a de facto dictatorship, and sexual freedom allows it to create a new caste system where Christians are the untouchables, and an apartheid system that separates deviants, atheists, and elites supporting them into a "privileged" class and Christians, along with those that hold a Biblical worldview, as the "punished" class.  This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.  Welcome to the new CCCP.

Wish I'd written that

Lileks, watching workmen install traffic counters on his street:

"I wanted to say 'why don’t you just ask me? I’ll tell you. And I’ll tell you something else: dang kids drive too fast. They get out of school and streak down here like it’s devil-take-the-hindmost.' And then they’d say 'well, this is our job, and it’s more exact than asking you, and I think the devil could take any of them, possessing supernatural abilities as he does. It’s possible the devil would take the first-most, because that person would be more surprised and despair.'

'I see your point. And you have to wonder why the devil would do such low-level work, like chasing people.'

'Well, throughout history - at least in Western literature - he engages on a personal level with people to make them sign over their souls, so it’s obvious he’s a hands-on type. Perhaps he just enjoys his work.'

'Never thought of it like that. Then again, we always assume that the guy doing the transacting is The Devil capital D, not a lesser devil who’s handling the grunt work. Think of it - who’s running hell when the Devil is swanning around with contracts in hand, trying to get souls one at a time?'

'Hell probably runs itself, inasmuch as it runs at all. Well, we have to get going.'

Wish I had said something, but I just waved: hello, municipal employees putting rubber-coated wires in the street."

- James Lileks

On the coming persecution (II)

There is," said an Italian philosopher, "nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation and the road is strewn with many dangers.

[M]any of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.

[…] It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. […]

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change. […] I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

[There is] the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged -- will ultimately judge himself -- on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort."

- Robert F. Kennedy, 1966

On the coming persecution (I)

Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.  The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideals hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.”

- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

So the Dega Pack grows

The "Talladega Pack" we call the 2016 Presidential nomination chase continues to build new draft lines. And this time, we've learned the next man to file an entry for this Chase. And for those who know a well-known television franchise owned by RTL Group, this piece should give a hint to who has entered the Chase for the Presidency.

Nihilism and the AME church shootings

The Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church (AME, NOT an Anglican church!) in downtown Charleston was devastated by a shooting where a South Carolina state legislator who is the minister at the church was among nine people killed in a shooting in the middle of a prayer meeting.

The blame game, as you might expect, has sadly begun.  Emile DeFilice, a farmer who runs a popular farmers market and is a former Commissioner of Agriculture candidate, placed the blame on the Cross of St. Andrew flag that the Confederacy used in war, probably based on the suspect's race, posting on the farmers' market page to take down the Battle Flag -- all on the basis the shooter was of one race and the church was of another.  He was followed hours later by one of the Left's top agitators.  The President, as part of his propaganda to push for an elimination of guns, decided to advance his mantra of eliminating the Second Amendment the way he has been working the First Amendment to death.  Another state legislator blamed the shooting on Fox News Channel, a popular

Unfortunately, this is not about race or weapons.  This instead is regarding the worldview of the shooter, considering the recent history of younger shooters involved in mass murders, most of whom are nihilists.  Nietzsche's nihilism, advanced by humanist teachings in school that have a 1960's "God is Dead" attitude, a lack of respect for anyone except themselves.  We've seen that with postmortem comments by those who knew the assailants in many incidents.  As John Carr in Orthodoxy Today wrote in the wake of the Aurora, CO theatre shootings, "Let us consider the facts that are forgotten in this restricted conversation: we have killed off all of our cultural heroes, accenting the flaws of those who have gone before us instead of emphasizing their strengths and virtues and the ideals toward which they strove; we have questioned into extinction the traditional understanding that some truths, particularly in the moral sphere, are absolute and absolutely binding upon all of us; and we have exalted everything that is base, barbaric, evil and insane, expecting that somehow our culture will continue to thrive on this noxious, unwholesome food." (Carr)

Touchstone magaine in 2000 had this to say after the Harris and Klebold shooting in an article, "The Children of Columbine."  The assailant was five at the time of the incident.

The evidence is clear in all of the research:  A hatred of God and a hatred of the sanctity of human life that the Left have designated over the years has much to do with the crisis in youth today.  Both helped develop another monster attack where this time, a church was hit.  Our Summer Chorus is singing Mendelssohn's "Hear My Prayer" next week, and I am thoroughly enjoying the practice sessions.  Enjoy this as we remember those who died in a senseless attack that has the evidence of the godless coming fast, and the wicked oppressing us.

Hear my prayer, O God, incline Thine ear!
Thyself from my petition do not hide.
Take heed to me! Hear how in prayer I mourn to Thee,
Without Thee all is dark, I have no guide.
The enemy shouteth, the godless come fast!
Iniquity, hatred, upon me they cast!
The wicked oppress me, Ah where shall I fly?
Perplexed and bewildered, O God, hear my cry!
My heart is sorely pained within my breast,
my soul with deathly terror is oppressed,
trembling and fearfulness upon me fall,
with horror overwhelmed, Lord, hear me call!

O for the wings, for the wings of a dove!
Far away, far away would I rove!
In the wilderness build me a nest,
and remain there for ever at rest.


WORK CITED
John Carr, "Nihilism at the Core of the Colorado Shooting," Orthodoxy Today, August 9, 2012. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/view/nihilism-at-the-core-of-the-colorado-shooting

My favorite team does it again!

Sentimentalism by any other name...

Very interesting article up today at First Things, and if you accept the premise of Dominic Bouck's article, it seems to explain a lot.

Bouck's contention is that intuitional philosophy, often referred to as emotivism or sentimentalism, has become the dominant philosophy in American culture today.  Put simply, we don't think about things anymore, we feel them.  According to Bouck, this leads people toward what appear to be contrary positions, such as an opposition to abortion and support for gay marriage.

It works this way:

As a consequence of this more emotive approach, a growing number of Americans have decided abortion is not the best option, especially as the pregnancy progresses. Abortion rates have fallen 12 percent since 2010 according to a recent survey, and 49 percent of Americans think abortion is morally wrong, much higher than on other life-issues. Technological progress has helped people to see what—or more accurately—who it is that is being aborted. The closer something appears to be like me, the intuition seems to say, the more I think it should be protected.

So how does this tie into gay marriage?  Easy:

They can show two nice-looking, kind people expressing love for one another and ask, “How could that be wrong?” The argument implicitly goes, “You love someone, don’t you? How could you deny that love to a fellow human being.” In effect, the argument is similar to the one in Juno, essentially saying, “We all have fingernails.” What seemed right in the first instance, either being pro-abortion or thinking there should only be male–female marriages, shifts for literally no “reason,” but instead a feeling, a new intuition.

Sentimentalism is a good way of putting this; at the TV blog, I've referred to it as the Oprahfication of America.  Although not the same thing, sentimentalism can be closely linked to sentimentality, which often produces the same problem.  Sentimentality should not be confused with nostalgia, which is what I'm inclined to - sentimentality is much more flowers and coronets, while nostalgia is a yearning to go back to a specific time or way of life.  That's not to say that the two can't intersect - they often do.  But sentimentality is always going to be based on emotion, on feelings, whereas nostalgia, as I've tried to show, can actually lead to an intellectual examination of, for instance, how things got the way they did.

Bouck writes that by falling into sentimentalism, we've given up on using reason, preferring feeling to logic.  Again, this doesn't have to be an either/or proposition.  How many times have we seen the heroic detective depend on a gut feeling to solve a case?  But the gut feeling that he has is often based on experience, on a logical analysis of past crimes and patterns, and combining that with a feel for the frailties of humanity that often run contrary to logic.  Were he to depend on that gut feeling all the time, he would probably soon find his emotions soon running away with him, scurrying erratically from one theory to another with no discernible pattern, and likely no discernible results.

In the same way, we look at Mr. Spock in Star Trek.  He operated exclusively on logic, which often made him unable to anticipate the illogical way in which a human could react.  It was in such situations that Captain Kirk, with his mix of experience and intuition, was able to step in and save the day.  True, it was necessary to keep the focus on Kirk as the star of the show, or else it would have become known as The Mr. Spock Hour, but one can often see Spock trying to develop that ability to include the human factor in his thought process, in order to arrive at a solution that was not only "logical," but correct.

We are not machines, which is why we have emotions.  We are not animals*, which is why we have the ability to reason.  One of the great majesties of God is that he chose to give us both emotion and reason, along with the good sense to know how to combine them.  As we rapidly lose that ability, we also lose the ability to integrate what was commonly-held truths into our thought process; nowadays, if those come into conflict with our feelings, we simply discard them.

*Yes, I know that technically we are, but you know what I mean.

So whatever you want to call it, its continuing dominance of our cultural philosophy is anything but good.  Of course something like this doesn't just appear overnight; it can be many years before something like this takes root and grows within a culture.  I wonder, though - might we be able to trace this back to the beginning of Oprah Winfrey's influence in pop culture?  If so, then one would have to think that she bears a rather large burden for what America has become - and not a good one, at that.  It's not an exaggeration for me to say that I would not want to carry that burden come Judgement Day.  Just a gut feeling, you know.

You'd only expect a BBQ War for a Hockey Championship in the South

There was the case of a bet between mayors in the NHL's Western Conference when the mayor of Calgary sang the megahit from Frozen, "Let It Go," in the city chambers as part of a lost bet with Anaheim's mayor, complete with a classic Ducks jersey.


There's also the bet where Deval Patrick had to send Martin O'Malley lobster after a Ravens defeat of the Patriots, and also when Prime Minister Harper won President Obama's Yuengling.

But now this.  The Ultimate Southern War has come to hockey.  The mayor of North Charleston (South Carolina Stingrays) is placing a bet wit the mayor of Allen (Americans) in the ECHL Kelly Cup Final.  The prize is nothing short of what Myron Mixon, Tuffy Stone, and Moe Cason could appreciate.  A fourth Stingrays Kelly Cup would mean a cow, while a third consecutive Americans title (two CHL Ray Miron President's Cup and now ECHL Kelly Cup after the merger) would mean five hogs.  Each represents their own style of barbecue -- whole hog (such as Sweatman's in Holly Hill) and brisket (a popular barbecue form in Texas).

So it isn't just hockey.  It's a battle for barbecue bragging rights.  And you would only expect that in the South.  Go figure.

Wish I'd written that...

Lionel] Messi is an alien that dedicates himself to playing with humans. The only hope is that this Saturday he will be from earth, like the rest of us.”

- Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, on the eve of the UEFA Champions League final between Messi's Barcelona and Juventus on Saturday.  Buffon should not count on it.

Throwback Thursday: Saving opera from itself

VIVA LA MAMMA - YES, THAT'S REALLY THE TITLE - BY GAETANO DONIZETTI, 2015.  LOOKING LIKE NOTHING HE IMAGINED.

Thought it was time to write about something other than the morbid subject matter we've been getting from Mitchell lately, so here's a link to a provocative Heather MacDonald piece on the cultural debasement of opera, or as she puts the question, "Can the Met stand firm against the trashy productions of trendy nihilists?"

The "Met" in question is the Metropolitan Opera, of course. And like it or not, that is the gold standard for opera in this country, and in much of the world. With such an exaulted position comes responsibilities, and expectations. And the question MacDonald asks, indeed the one all music lovers should be asking, is whether the Met, under second-year general manager Peter Gelb, will withstand the invasion of Regietheater, or "Director's Theater," that is becoming ever more prevalent in opera today.

This is not a new topic for us at this blog; we've discussed many times the seemingly insatiable urge some producers and directors have to put their own unique stamp on an established piece of art. Many (if not most) times this takes the form of political ideology that is being superimposed over the composer's original vision. Take these examples MacDonald cites:

The Spoleto Festival USA, for example, has presented the usual masturbating Don Giovanni; a recent Rossini Cenerentola (Cinderella) in Philadelphia featured a motorcycle and large TV screens projecting the characters’ supposed thoughts; City Opera mounted a Traviata in the 1990s that ended in an AIDS ward.

There's more, of course, as MacDonald details. What they all have in common though is this desire to send a message, to impose something on the audience whether they like it or not. Most times in a free market, the audience can send a message by coming disguised as empty seats. But, as MacDonald notes, "even when audiences stay away in droves—and 'sometimes in those productions you could shoot ducks in the auditorium and not hit anyone,' says [American baritone Sherrill] Milnes—the managerial commitment to Regietheater usually remains firm.'

This is not to say that all artists, or even most of them, go along with this rubbish. MacDonald cites comments from German soprano Diana Damrau on her performance in the Bavarian State Opera's Rigoletto, set (I kid you not) on the Planet of the Apes:

“I fulfilled my contract,” she says scornfully. “This was superficial rubbish. You try to prepare yourself for a production, you read secondary literature and mythology. Here, we had to watch Star Wars movies and different versions of The Planet of the Apes. . . . This was just . . . noise.”

There are others who fight against this trend, but as Pinchas Steinberg, chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony and former principal guest conductor of the Vienna State Opera, says, "You need courage to oppose it. . .People start to say: ‘You can’t work with this guy, he creates problems.’?” (Which, I wonder, may have something to do with those formers in Steinberg's titles.)

MacDonald's article goes into great detail to explain the forces and dynamics at work in this takeover of classic art, but I feel the need to provide one more long excerpt that says much not only about opera and art, but our own culture in general:

The defining characteristic of the sixties generation and its cultural progeny is solipsism. Convinced of their superior moral understanding, and commanding wealth never before available to average teenagers and young adults, the baby boomers decided that the world revolved around them. They forged an adolescent aesthetic—one that held that the wisdom of the past could not possibly live up to their own insights—and have never outgrown it. In an opera house, that outlook requires that works of the past be twisted to mirror our far more interesting selves back to ourselves. Michael Gielen, the most influential proponent of Regietheater and head of the Frankfurt Opera in the late seventies and eighties, declared that “what Handel wanted” in his operas was irrelevant; more important was “what interests us . . . what we want.”

And so here we are. By all means, check out MacDonald's article in full. In addition, check on our roundtable discussion of art and politics, which begins here. MacDonald has some scornful words for Peter Sellars, a favorite of the Minnesota Opera (which explains a lot), and by clicking here you can see some of what we've had to say on that subject. And Judith talked about the another production from the Berlin Opera which raised a few hackles , Mozart's Idemeneo, here.

Lest we end on such a pessimistic note however, MacDonald does point out encouraging signs at the end of her article. Gelb's groundbreaking innovations, such as broadcasting Madam Butterfly in Times Square, have brought energy to opera. The Met's opera moviecasts have proven a smash. By the end of the past season, the Met's remaining productions were all sold out. And as for the audience, as MacDonald notes, "young and middle-aged adults already appear to make up a surprisingly high percentage of patrons. They are coming to see not a twisted rewriting of the great works, but the thing itself, drawn to what opera promises: sublime musical beauty and human drama." The question she asks, and we ask, is what the future holds for the Met. To paraphrase a long-ago campaign motto of a forgotten presidential candidate, it takes courage - does the Met have it?

Originally published July 31, 2007

The FIFA scandal: deja vu all over again

In considering the ongoing FIFA scandal, one can be forgiven for feeling they'd seen this all before, maybe on an episode of The Untouchables, where the incorruptible Eliot Ness helps bring down the mob, although Sepp Blatter makes for a most charmless Al Capone.  Or it could have been the evening news, with Blatter cast as an Eastern bloc strongman brought down by the people's revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall; you can almost see his statue being pulled off its pedestal, an outstretched arm breaking off and shattering as the statue comes crashing down.  Whatever the analogy, it all seems awfully familiar.  I mean, the level of corruption makes you think of a college sports scandal.

Which is why I have trouble believing FIFA will be able to stall the election of a new president until the end of the year; once the people have it in mind to revolt, liberalized policies are usually a case of too little, too late. As the tumult grows, with confirmations that Blatter is the focus of an FBI probe that includes charges of bribery in the awarding of World Cup tournaments dating back to 2010, the calls for reform can only grow louder.  If Blatter should be indicted this summer or early fall, with the United States demanding his extradition (and perhaps calling for him to be held without bond as a flight risk), it would make it very difficult for him to continue running his empire from the county jail.

It's certainly possible that FIFA is an organization that defies reform, where the corruption runs so deep a divining rod wouldn't be able to uncover it all.  If that's the case, the only possible solution would be to blow it up and start all over, to let the United Nations take care of selling the game to developing countries (put it under UNICEF; after all, soccer's good for kids, isn't it?), while a new organization could be formed to manage the basics of the game: the rules, the governance of international competitions, and most of all the administration of the World Cup and the granting of media and advertising contracts.*  It's true that this last point is what led to most of the bribery in the first place, but without the ability to dispense patronage to smaller countries under the guise of "growing the game," it would be that much harder for anyone to build up the likes of the power base Blatter had.

*There's also this option.

Whatever the case, it is true that sports hasn't seen anything like this since the heyday of boxing, when the International Boxing Club spread its octopus-like tentacles throughout the sport and the mob controlled everything and everyone.  Because make no mistake about it: FIFA is modern-day organized crime, a group of corrupt officials running the world's most popular sport as if they were cheap hoods in expensive double-breasted suits, smoking Cuban cigars while sitting around a table that looks suspiciously like a map of the world.

This has been an extraordinary couple of weeks for people who've followed the story.  With the sordid headlines dominating newspapers and cable news networks like the latest political scandal (at least nobody's thought to call it FIFA-gate.  Yet.), soccer hasn't gotten this kind of attention in the United States since the last World Cup.  In fact, I'm not sure it's ever had this kind of exposure.  And for every new story that breaks, every new charge that comes complete with the opening theme to The FBI accompanied by images of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. waiting to pounce on another crooked vice president in charge of graft, the remaining officials of soccer's governing bodies are left to hope in the truth of P.T. Barnum's old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity.