The nature of the so-called “religious question” is much the same today as it was in the Kennedy days. Essentially, when a member of a less-mainstream religion is running for the presidency, voters wonder to what degree his religion will affect his leadership decisions, particularly with regards to how powerful this would make his specific church, politically. With Kennedy, many protestant Americans feared that the executive power would become usurped by the Papacy, and with Romney the fear was that he might use the executive branch to make decisions that would strictly benefit the Mormon church and mindset. This is particularly important with the Romney’s campaign for the Republican nomination, due to the fact that, in recent years, the religious factions of the political right have been a major aspect of the Republican constituency, and these groups are particularly sensitive to issues of this nature. As one heckler at a February question and answer session said, “I want my testimony to read that I voted for a man who stands for the Lord Jesus Christ… and you, sir… you’re a pretender. You do not know the Lord.” (Romney, “Romney Takes On”) Obviously, then, this “religious issue” is a contentious one.

Even though, at first glance, Romney’s speech seems to be a direct parallel to the Kennedy speech, if you dissect the content itself you see that these two presidential hopefuls handled the issue in vastly different ways. Kennedy’s 1960 speech addresses the question of how much intersection there should be between his religious life and his role as the leader of the country, and his answer is concise and consistent. As he puts it, “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.” At it’s heart, the speech is one that underscores the importance of their being a separation between church and state, even at the highest levels of government, and that, regardless of religious imperative, an acting President must, “devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the Presidency.” Romney’s speech, on the other hand, has a much more mixed message to send. Where Kennedy spends a good deal of his time extolling the virtues of the separation of church and state, Romney’s speech spends more time underscoring the virtues of religion, using such language as “We are a nation ‘Under God,’ and in God we do indeed trust,” especially in the political sphere, a tactic that seems to directly counter that of Kennedy. In fact, at one point in the speech he even makes a jab at those who would seek to separate church and state in the style of Kennedy. As Romney says in his speech, “Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of Secularism. They are wrong.” Interesting, then, that in a speech so intended to do parallel the success of the JFK speech, Romney would use the same phrase “private affair” in a context that almost seems to indict Kennedy’s viewpoint. Even worse, there are several mixed messages throughout the speech itself. It seems to make motions toward the separation of church and state, even invoking Kennedy himself, mentioning “another candidate from Massachusetts [who] explained that he was an American running for President, not a Catholic running for president,” even when he turns around and finds it important to the exigence of his speech to give an answer to the question “What do I believe about Jesus Christ?” He even goes so far as to quote the bible directly and explain that his “faith is grounded on these truths […] and these convictions will indeed inform my presidency,” which is an odd choice of focus for a man trying to convince his audience that he will “serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest.”

The timing of the Kennedy and Romney speeches were also vastly different, in the scope of the overall campaign. Kennedy didn’t give his speech on the “religious question” until after he had secured the nomination for presidency, while Romney held his speech well before any of the state primaries had even begun. Could this be why the speech was largely ineffective? It would seem that the indefinite nature of the Romney campaign, coupled with the lack of an overwhelming pressure to address the issue, may have meant that the kairotic moment that he was trying to grab by giving this speech simply wasn’t there. In the case of the Kennedy speech the candidates were decided, and the party had the choice to either support him or further divide the party, whereas with Romney there were several other potential candidates that people could support, rather than dealing with a potentially contentious issue, such as the role that Mormonism might play in such a persons candidacy for being President. This, combined with the plainly mixed message that Romney’s speech makes, makes for an overall statement that was confusing and ill timed, with such ideological contradictions as stating that “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” in one passage, while talking about radical Islamists as employing “conversion by conquest” and “the coercion of minds,” in the next.

All things considered, the most problematic aspect of Romney’s speech was the fact that there really was no call for it, at the time that he gave it. This, in and of itself, sends a message that’s contrary to the one he was presumably trying to send. A good counter-example was how Senator Obama handled the issue of race in his campaign. In order to win the nomination, Obama had to be able to enlist supporters from all races, just as Romney needed to express that he would be a President with more interests at heart than that of the Mormon church. In order to do this, Obama avoided, at all costs, talking significantly about race, so that no-one could claim that he was using his race as a political tool, and it was only when the controversy over the statements of his former paster surfaced when he made a decisive and thought-out statement. It was this pressure to speak on the topic which underscored the point that he was not trying to use his race to his political advantage, and was trying to represent all people, not just people who are grouped into the same demographic as him. This was the same sort of pressure that, in 1960, the “religious issue” was placing on Kennedy, and it was also the same pressure that was was suspiciously lacking when Romney gave his own speech on religion. The problem, in the political climate, is that when a candidate attempts to manufacture a kairotic moment from a potentially, but not currently, contentious issue, it is usually viewed as being purely a political machination, and thus garners much less interest in the public sphere. It can even be seen as being a temperamental ploy to get attention.

In the end, Romney’s campaign was brought to a hasty close by the former governor. It’s impossible to say exactly what caused him to withdraw his bid for Presidential candidacy, but it would be a fair assessment to say that his speech on religion with its terribly timed attempts at manufacturing kairos certainly didn’t encourage particularly savvy party members to feel confident in the viability of his campaign. While it is unlikely that this speech and this speech alone was the cause of the failure of his campaign and it’s precipitous withdrawal, it is certain that it is this sort of overtly forced rhetoric and lack of political planning that usually precludes people from winning such a high-profile position as President.

Kennedy, John F. Religion Speech. Greater Houston Ministerial Association . 12 Sept. 1960. 9 May 2008 .

Romney, Willard “Mitt”. Religion Speech. George Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX. 6 Dec. 2007. 9 May 2008 .

- - -. Romney Takes on Religion Heckler. 2007. 9 May 2008 .

The popular view of atheism is rife with imagery that compares it to Nazism, Communism, and a plethora of other enemy figures in American history. Countless accusations of this sort have been leveled, accusing atheism of being an inherent source of evil and suffering, as proven by the atrocities committed by certain twentieth-century totalitarian governments that had rulers who were characterized as being atheist, whether correctly or incorrectly, most notably Hitler and Stalin. In fact, this association is so strongly made that the conservative collaborative encyclopedia Conservapedia’s “Militant Atheism” article has more information about the connections between atheism and communism than it does on all other parts of the definition combined (“Militant Atheism”). The promotion of connection, however, is hardly limited to the faceless mass of the internet. In the Current Events column on Forbes.com Paul Johnson writes that “More people were killed by totalitarian states (all atheistic) in the 20th century than in all previous periods of history.” (Johnson) In one brief parenthetical statement, Johnson is laying millions of deaths at the feet of all disbelievers, leaving it to be considered obvious that the atheistic tendencies of the totalitarian governments in question were, in fact, the cause of these atrocities. But where does this connection originate? While perceived atheism is a common thread between these two examples, commonality is not sufficient to create this powerful of an accusation. It would be just as baseless as saying that the cause of the atrocities were the two rulers’ common propensity for growing mustaches. Indeed, these claims point to things that are much more implicit in the American zeitgeist than a simple common attribute.

One of the themes that is most widely used to characterize the perceived forces of atheism is that of a hostile force, typically dripping with warlike rhetoric, some of which even goes so far as to name the conflict outright. This view is that disbelievers are actively pursuing the destruction of religion, usually the specific religion of the speaker, usually using tools provided via the scientific community. As was published in the Apologetics Press, “In fact, a large majority of scientists now believe that God does not exist. These scientists feel that they should militantly spread their ideas of atheism and evolution as far and wide as possible. They abhor the idea of a supernatural Creator and believe it should be eradicated from human consciousness.” (Lyons) This language drips with the same absolutism that is common to demagogic literature, since the atheistic evolutionists described here do not merely disbelieve, they abhor the very concept to the point where they wish to eradicate all mention of it. This charged and absolutist language not only robs the target of any human sensibility, it directly frames atheists as being a force locked in a perpetual battle against that which the audience presumably believes to be the ultimate good. This impression, that the amassed forces of atheism are making a concerted effort to destroy religious belief, is echoed throughout countless journals, editorials, articles and essays, and could even be considered a commonplace for a good number of people. Almost always, the rhetoric of war or combat is used to refer to this phenomenon, as exemplified by the following quip from Doug Hagin of RenewAmerica: “Now, emboldened by his victory on the pledge, he is back to broaden his campaign of religious genocide[…]” (Hagin) The conflict has even been given a name, by radio and television pundit Bill O’Reilly, who characterizes the “war” in his book entitled Culture Warrior.

“[…]I have chosen to jump into the fray and become a warrior in the vicious culture war that is currently under way in the United States of America. And war is exactly the right term. On one side of the battlefield are the armies of the traditionalists like me, people who believe the United States was well founded and has done enormous good for the world. On the other side are the committed forces of the secular-progressive movement that want to change America dramatically[...]” (O’Reilly)

Laced with accusation, O’Reilly makes the implicit claim that those who are secular, a label which is largely synonymous with atheistic in popular culture, are not only actively hostile to their country, but they are also engaged in an offense against those who identify as traditionalists. The culture war and conflicts with the secular progressives, wittily shortened to “SPs” at times, has since become a common theme in O’Reilly’s regular political analysis programs.

The second major theme to the popular qualities attached to the label of atheism is that of inhumanity, specifically the quality of being inherently devoid of any moralistic structure or motive. This view, again, is an absolutist take on the nature of disbelief, hinging on the principle that if someone feels that their moral code is based in some way on their religion, people without a religion are therefore without any sense of morality. This is an opinion that’s been voiced frequently through American history. As Ronald Regan said, of the separation of church and state, “The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” It would be simple to just dismiss this as a view from a prior era in American history, but rather than become less common, this claim has become more and more widely used by American politicians. Indeed, Joseph Lieberman stated that the American people should not “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” in an interview in 2001. More recently, and perhaps most bitingly, former Attorney General John Ashcroft made a parenthetical slight at not just atheists, but anyone not of the three Abrahamic religions, when he said, “Civilized people — Muslims, Christians, and Jews — all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” This claim, that those who disbelieve are somehow less moral or civilized by mere virtue of their disbelief, has become so implicit, though, that many of these quotes pass largely unnoticed, their meaning either ignored or accepted implicitly. It is somewhat ironic, then, that this is the very same view of one of those very individuals who have been accused of committing terrible acts in the name of atheism. As he said, in a 1933 speech, “A general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion myst be derived from faith…. We need believing people.” (Hitler)

These popular stereotypical views of the nature of disbelief combine to give a much more pervasive and subtle character to the American zeitgeist. Regardless of whether or not you might directly accept the claims of hostility or inhumanity, the pervasiveness of these views cause society at large to hold an implicit distrust toward those who identify as irreligious, a component to the stereotype that is as common as it is unaddressed. In a 2006 study conducted by the University of Minnesota, a survey of more than 2,000 households put atheists as the least trusted minority in America, below Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals, and other racial and cultural minorities (Aquino). This opinion, while not one that is commonly mentioned in the mainstream of public discourse, is nonetheless present, usually in subtly divisive ways, such as in Republican presidential candidate hopeful Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech. The speech was largely viewed by pundits and analysts alike as being largely harmless and conciliatory, aimed at attempting to assuage concerns that people might have with his Mormon beliefs. However, in the text of the speech, he makes such statements as “Freedom requires religion, and religion requires freedom,” and “Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone.” (Romney) These statements which seem largely pithy and inconsequential, take it as assumed, conversely, that those who are irreligious are inherent enemies to freedom. He even states that “Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me,” which parenthetically defines those who believe in religious freedom in such a way that excludes the irreligious. This mistrust runs so deep, in fact, that it has even found it’s way into the very letter of the law, in some ways. The Constitution of the State of Texas, for example has the following provision:

“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.” (Texas)

It is in this divisive realm of mistrust that demagogic seeds can most easily take root, due to the importance of having a common enemy against which the demagogue can crystalize his movement. Lacking an force to fight against that is as absolute and unwavering in it evil as it is in its threatening nature, a movement based on fear and raw emotion is bound to fall apart before it is able to truly take shape. Even at the cost of an accurate understanding of the enemy, this is key. As Hitler himself points out in Mein Kampf, “It would have been correct to load every bit of the blame on the shoulders of the enemy, even if this had nor really corresponded to the true facts […] As soon as our own propaganda admits to so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid.” (182-183) Typically, this polarizing enemy is derived from the exploitation extant stereotypes as they exist in the public consciousness, as in Hitler’s exploitation of latent anti-Semitism in postwar Germany. These stereotypes are typically based on one key dividing factor that is fundamental enough to the audience’s identity that it allows for an easily created in-group/out-group mentality. In the current sociological state of the United States of America, the common stereotype of atheists and other irreligious individuals as being intrinsically inhuman and hostile could very possibly be used as a catalyst for a demagogic movement. The movement would not only benefit from the pre-existing stereotypes of the irreligious, but due to the success of science in the modern age, and the view that atheists are, in fact, in control of “Big Science,” a demagogic rhetor would also be able to use this to frame atheists as being arrogant and successful intellectual elites, a category that countless generations have been successfully rallied against.

The ease with which the implicit mistrust surrounding the label of atheist could be co-opted for demagogic gain is most clearly shown in the success of the second so-called Red Scare, and most specifically the acts of Joseph McCarthy, who was able to get enough implicit support for his actions that he was able to go on a multi-year witch-hunt for both Communists and those he felt would be susceptible to Communist tactics. As Noam Chomsky would say, more than fifty years later, “In the early 1950s in the US, there was what was called McCarthyism, and the only reason it succeeded was that there was no resistance to it.” How then, was there no strong public opposition to this sort of fear mongering, and how was it that communism, an economic and governmental concept, was so easily and succinctly used as a devil term in America for so long? As McCarthy himself put it, in his now famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity, […] and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down.”

Aquino, Jeannine. “Survey: U.S. Trust Lowest For Atheists.” The Minnesota Daily 24 Mar. 2006. 20 Mar. 2008 .

Ashcroft, John. National Religious Broadcasters Convention. 19 Feb. 2002. The Avalon Project. Yale. 1 Apr. 2008 .

Chomsky, Noam. “Chom’pin at the Bit.” Interview with Mark Thomas. Schnews 28 Dec. 2002. 1 Apr. 2008 .

Comfort, Ray. “Expelled Review.” Weblog entry. 28 Mar. 2008. Comfort Food. 1 Apr. 2008 .

Hagin, Doug. “Atheist Fanatics–Stalin Would Be Proud!” Editorial. Renew America 15 Nov. 2005. 20 Mar. 2008 .

Hitler, Adolf. Nazi-Vatican Concordat. 26 Apr. 1933.

- -. Mein Kampf. 1943. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1971.

Johnson, Paul. “Militant Atheism and God.” Forbes 8 Oct. 2007. 20 Mar. 2008 .

Lieberman, Joseph. Notre Dame University. 24 Oct. 2000.

Lyons, Eric, and Kyle Butt. “Reason & Revelation.” Apologetics Press 27 Jan. 2007. 20 Mar. 2008 .

McCarthy, Joseph. Wheeling, West Virginia. 9 Feb. 1950. History Matters. George Mason University. 1 Apr. 2008 .

“Militant Atheism.” Conservapedia. 16 Mar. 2008. 20 Mar. 2008 .

O’Reilly, Bill. “Centcom.” Preface. Culture Warrior. By O’Reilly. N.p.: Broadway, 2007.

Reagan, Ronald. Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast. Dallas. 23 Aug. 1984.

Romney, Willard Mitt. “Faith in America.” George Bush Presidential Library. 6 Dec. 2007. Rpt. in Commitment 2008. The Boston Channel. 20 Mar. 2008 .

Texas. “Article 1 - Bill of Rights, Section 4 - Religious Tests.” The Texas Constitution. Texas Legislature Online. 20 Mar. 2008 .

Mr. Horowitz makes two main claims throughout the bulk of his rhetoric. Firstly, he believes that many of university-level academic disciplines have, over time, been subverted and fundamentally transformed into platforms for ideological indoctrination. Then, to support this conspiracy of dangerous leftist educators, he makes the claim that there is an institutional policy of excluding conservative viewpoints completely by refusing to hire conservative professors. In his article entitled General Introduction to the "Indoctrination Studies" Section he even goes so far to claim that “[Liberals have] put in place the largest and most effective blacklist in the history of the country.”

These are provocative claims indeed, and in many ways it’s a shame that, while he is perpetually invoking scientific inquiry, pluralistic education, and the disinterested search of truth, the man evidently knows little about any of those principles.

The most blindingly problematic aspect to his argument is that, while he cites study after study, and pulls quotes from countless student anecdotes, he never actually provides any definitive evidence that there is any actual indoctrination going on – at least in the way he means the word.

There are two primary accepted definitions for the word “indoctrination,” as evidenced by the entry in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The first meaning of “indoctrination” is “to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments”, while the second – the sort that Horowitz is presumably trying to expose – is “to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle.” If, by using the word “indoctrination” in the first sense, then he would be absolutely correct, and there wouldn’t be a controversy. As for the second, we can look high and we can look low, but we can find no actual evidence given in any of Horowitz’ writings that would definitively prove, using the principles of disinterested inquiry, that actual indoctrination of the sort he is describing is actually going on.

He gives evidence of the unmitigated expression of opinion and even of attempts to persuade , but he has yet to produce any evidence of any trend among higher education students to accept, without critical analysis or question, everything that is presented to them. In fact, most of his anecdotal evidence makes a much better case for a lack of tactful consideration on the teacher’s part, telling tales of offended and emotionally distraught students.

However, offense is hardly indoctrination.

One might think that this might be bad enough, and that all education must be completely inoffensive and impartial, but if radical thought and controversy is sterilized from higher education, how would students ever learn how to hold their own opinions in the face of opposition? Not only does Horowitz assume that students are obsequiously malleable, the environment which he proposes actually encourages blind faith in anything that is presented as being authoritative. After all, if bias is ostensibly not allowed, what reason would students have to try to stand up to the common doctrine?

Of the statistics Horowitz seems to enjoy citing, a particularly high concentration of liberal professors as compared to those of a more conservative leaning seems to be of his favorites. This, he claims, is proof of a “blacklist,” and a widespread institutional bias against the hiring of conservative professors. It’s fairly conspicuous, however, that he never produces any actual evidence of procedural wrongdoing in hiring practices at any of the universities that he has supposedly investigated, much less proof of systemic political corruption. The best information he can present is a trend for certain disciplines to have higher percentages of liberal professors as compared to conservative ones. Unfortunately, anyone who’s taken an entry-level statistics class knows that it is incorrect to say that a correlation between two things inherently shows a causal relationship.

To give a somewhat more exaggerated example, there is also a statistically clear correlation between the rise in global temperatures, and the steady decrease of instances of naval piracy, but it would be ludicrous to say that global warming is caused by the global decline of pirates.

A bit more seriously, however, Horowitz’ claim of a national hiring conspiracy would have to present more evidence than a simple statistical bias. Such a bias could easily be caused by naturally occurring sociological phenomena, such as a tendency for people of certain political views to hold different priorities regarding issues of human interest, which could affect the field someone may go into. If one political faction believed that keeping the national and global economy stable was fundamentally important, that would cause a greater number of them to enter the fields of business and economics, whereas a political faction that placed greater emphasis on social work or education would see greater representations in schools and jobs suited to that mentality. Not to say that any of these rules are hard and fast, but such things could more than account for the sorts of trends that Horowitz is seeing.

If only he knew enough about critical analysis and statistical logic to realize that causal relationships must be proven, not simply assumed.

Throughout his campaign, Horowitz is perpetually attempting to needle liberal educators and administrators, saying things like “How can any self-respecting liberal countenance academic programs in which there is only one side presented to the most controversial issues of the day?” in attempts to seem as though he is righteous and universal in his pursuit of academic freedom, and pluralist education, and to attempt to discredit those academics who would disagree with him. After all, what honest man would be against academic freedom, and the pluralistic pursuit of truth?

One name comes to mind – Horowitz.

As much as Mr. Horowitz fashions himself to be an old-fashioned muckraker journalist, exposing a dangerous trend in modern academia, he never makes a single attempt at non-partisanship. The anecdotes that he uses is almost always a case of perceived attack on an explicitly conservative opinion by the “radical left”. If Mr. Horowitz is so staunch a defender of academic freedom, how is it that he isn’t also lobbying for Marxism to be taught in modern capitalist-centric business schools? Third-party opinion is also conspicuously absent in any of his arguments.

It would seem that whenever Horowitz examines something, it can easily be grouped into two categories, conservative and liberal. Funny how all of human opinion throughout history so neatly follows the socio-political “black-and-white” of the current political factions of our specific country’s government.

Or, perhaps, it might just be simply that Horowitz realizes that if he uses the much more accurate labels of “Things I Agree With” and “Things I Don’t Agree With”, he would sell a great deal fewer books.

So much for unbiased observation and his much-lauded principle of disinterested inquiry.

As for Horowitz’ own effect on the educational landscape, the solution he seems to be asking for is dangerously close to mass institutional censorship.

Any sort of institutional restriction on the scope or content of academic discourse holds within it the potential for corruption, and, ironically, poses the threat of a loss of academic pluralism, not necessarily because professors aren’t presenting more than one viewpoint, but because they would be presenting institutionally approved viewpoints, in bureaucratically defined measure. Horowitz definitely feels that there is a systemic conspiracy to squelch conservative viewpoints in higher education, so it’s odd that he is, at the same time, calling for more institutional control of curriculum.

In fact, if these radical instructors are actually trying to teach unconventional opinion to their students, then by definition they are acting either against the prevailing doctrine, either of their society or of their field. If this is the case, then they are of the very educators that most closely follow Horowitz’ stated ideal; these are the instructors who are most faithfully working to bring balance to an inherently biased world, and provide counter-arguments for pervasive common doctrines.

However, rather than defending these attempts at truly diverse and pluralistic education, Horowitz insists that the teaching of any doctrine other than that with which he agrees should be minimized. He doesn’t even make the pretense of being universally “pluralistic” in his efforts, using examples and anecdotes taken exclusively from politically conservative fronts, no matter how much emphasis he may place on “disinterested inquiry”.

Using faulty logic and politically loaded rhetoric he has created a scandal that he makes no attempt to definitively prove. To be honest, he seems wholly uninterested in pursuing any form of scientifically valid form of inquiry to actually find the truth.

Disinterested inquiry indeed.

Time to get out your thinking caps and see if you can find the hole in this argument (it’s about 2:08 in):

"And the reason for that, even though people point to the Israelis, and point to the Brits, and point to other people as having homosexuals serve, is that most Americans, most kids who [...] go out and serve in the military, [...] most of them are conservatives. And they have conservative values. And they have Judeo-Christian values. And to force those people to work in a small tight unit with someone who is openly homosexual [...] is, I think, a disservice to them and I agree [...] that it would be bad for unit cohesion."

So, apparently, the reason why we’re so different from Britain (which has an established national church, which just happens to be a Christian denomination) and Israel (gee, wonder what religion they might be) is that we’ve got… you’ve guessed it.  Judeo-Christian values.  Do these people even bother looking up what these words mean anymore?

From the article:

“The idea that gender structures society is an ideological claim, not a program for scholarly investigation. This claim is the organizing principle of gender feminism, a radical sect of the broader movement. Not surprisingly, the reading lists for courses in the department are almost exclusively drawn from radical feminist texts.”

Gender impacts society? Radical thinking indeed.

Platforms Tested

• Firefox v2.0.0.3 on OSX 10.4.9
• Safari v2.0.4 OSX on 10.4.9
• Firefox v2.0.0.3 on Windows XP Pro SP2
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730 on Windows XP Pro SP2

Cross Platform Support

The install for Silverlight is just as easy as Micrsoft claims. A fairly small MSI installer for people using Windows, and a similarly sized DMG for OSX, containing a standard installer package.

Unfortunately, for this release at least, it seems like that is where the the support for the Mac OSX platform ends. I was completely unable to get any of the pages included in the Feb2007 Silverlight Sample Pack to run on either the OSX version of Firefox, or Safari. They both seem to load the flat background color, and completely fail to run the rest of the code. The plugin is correctly installed, in both cases, and is recognized by the browsers.

For Microsoft’s sake, I hope this is an issue they fix fairly quickly, or they will have a hard time selling this as a cross platform Solution.

Media Experience: SleekVideoPlayer

The sleek video player represents perhaps the biggest single area of the market that Microsoft is trying to break into with Silverlight: the online video playback arena. The interface is simplistic, as one would expect from a developer sample, and the playback quality is comparable to, if not slightly better than, that of theYouTube or Google Video players, and I have to note that the seek functionality is much much more granular than either of those systems, which is something I’ve been wanting to see happen for a while now.

Perhaps most excitingly, there is a plugin-based system to allow the user to play the video in fullscreen when it is double-clicked, without having to work around the limitations of existing platforms by simply opening a larger copy of the video in a new, less cluttered window. However, the excitation of this feature was short-lived, as I realized that playing the video in this mode slows down the speed of playback, causing the video to lag fairly significantly behind the audio track.

Then we arrive at the audio track itself, which seems to suffer from some sort of software issue that makes it quite loud and distorted-sounding, which, needless to say came as a somewhat unplesant jolt on first loading the sample player.

At first I thought that this might be due to some sort of conflict between the Silverlight platform and my soundcard drivers, or something to that effect, but later, when I tried out the GrandPiano demo, I found that while some of the keys (the natural notes, for those of you who know your way around a sheet of music) suffered from the same distortion, other keys (the accidentals) seemed to play back correctly.

Certainly something that needs to be worked out.

Web Effects: PageTurn

If you’ve seen one animated-page-turning website, you’ve seen them all, and this is no exception. In this demo Silverlight looks, and behaves, just like it’s Adobe counterpart. Even the responsiveness of the animated flipping page and the speed it draws at make me feel just as annoyed at this particular interface idea as I would be on one of the all-too-many websites out there that use the page-flipping paradigm.

Strangely enough, though, while I haven’t been able to reproduce the error since, while I was running this demo in the Windows XP copy of Firefox, the browser gave me an error message saying that it had detected a stalled script. Another compatability issue, perhaps?

Lightweight Gaming: Sprawl

The only game in the bundle, this simple little demo is evidently meant to show off Silverlight’s interactivity, and along those lines it’s very reminiscent of some of the earlier flash games. It doesn’t seem to raise the bar any, but it doesn’t fall all that short either. All in all almost exactly the same experience I would expect to get from the same game made in Flash.

Almost exactly, but not quite. It would seem this too has Firefox issues, and never gets past the initial loading screen.

Security Concerns

While I was poking around at the examples, I found two things that lead me to believe that there may be problems down the road for this product, by way of security issues.

First, while I was testing a few of the demo sites, I noticed that the browser was, for some reason, contacting and retrieving information from downloads.microsoft.com. While I’m not sure what exactly it was doing, there seem to be two likely answers.

Either it’s downloading content for the site, or it’s downloading something that the plugin needs. If it’s the first part, then that means we can’t base very many observations about the code in the samples, because the local sites are evidently not complete. The second, and I think more likely, scenario is that it’s downloading something the plugin needs to run the content, be it an audio codec or some other kind of dependancy.

This is worrisome, though, because this transaction was made without any notice or action to the user at all, and if it’s downloading and executing code this behavior could represent a serious security risk. A man-in-the-middle attack, for example, could spoof the downloads.microsoft.com server, for example.

The second hint that suggests there might be a potential security risk to this platform is that, when you look at the sample code, the comments inside make reference to ActiveX controls.

new agHost(”wpfeControl1Host”, // hostElementID (HTML element to put WPF/E
“wpfeControl1″, // ID of the WPF/E ActiveX control we create
“600″, // Width
“225″, // Height
“white”, // Background color
null, // SourceElement (name of script tag containing xaml)
“plugin.xaml”, // Source file
“true”, // IsWindowless
“30″, // MaxFrameRate
“ErrorHandler” // OnError handler
);

While I haven’t researched the inner workings to the Silverlight platform yet, if it is indeed ActiveX-based, then that means the plugin introduces ActiveX to browsers that explicitly didn’t support the technology for security reasons. I’m not sure how great the risk here would be, but ActiveX doesn’t exactly have a clean track record.

Executive Summary

Wait for the next few releases before devoting any real time or effort into developing for this platform unless you have a massive overabundance of both. Also, keep an eye out for the first wave of security vulnerabilities as this platform starts becoming a bigger target.

The new platform has been dubbed Silverlight, and is claimed to be the all-singing all-dancing second coming of online media. Why is this such an important upgrade over current technologies, you might ask? The answer is probably put best by Microsoft’s own press release.

“Silverlight customers will also enjoy compatibility with the broad ecosystem of Windows Media-enabled tools and solutions, and the proven scalability and reliability of the Emmy Award-winning Windows Media technologies. At the discretion of content providers, Silverlight will also deliver digital rights management support built on the recently announced Microsoft PlayReady™ content access technology — with feature parity on Windows and Mac.”

Translation: Current technologies work too well with unrestricted and non-Microsoft formats, so we’ve made our own platform from scratch, based on entirely in-house technologies that will all need to be licensed. Yay DRM!

Not to be outdone, Adobe promptly unveiled their own new technology, which includes, among other things, you guessed it… Digital Rights Management. Ladies and gentlemen, the gloves are off.

So what format will come out on top? Personally I think Adobe has a severe territorial advantage on this one, as they own the core technology that virtually all online video playback revolves around currently, especially when you compare an upgrade to Flash with the prospect of replacing it entirely in favor of a new and largely unproven platform, to say nothing of Microsoft’s history with these sorts of technologies. (Can anyone say Windows Metafile?)

A few companies have signed onto the Microsoft bandwagon already, however, including, most notably, Netflix, who undoubtedly sees this as a possible way of smoothing out the rougher edges on their “Watch Now” streaming system, but in the end, I seriously doubt this will even make a dent into Flash’s marketshare.

Honestly, what I’d like to see coming out of Microsoft are some true innovations. The Office 2k7 interface was definitely a good start, but their attempts at making first an iPod killer and now a Flash killer honestly just make them look like they’re coming up a day late and a dollar short.

Get it now.