Pinochet and Chile

Interesting article in Foreign Policy-- well, it's a review, really-- on the legacy of Augusto Pinochet, former dictator of Chile. Dumb soldier, brilliant neo-liberal reformer? Discuss.

Good grief, the Doc is back with a vengeance after his illness...I can smell the vituperation from across the Atlantic.

When Manor House ran over here it was called Edwardian Country House, which I guess says something about the difference in American and English societies, as well as in their historical context, to be sure. They had many more applicants for each of the servant's jobs than they did for the aristocrat's positions. That says something, I take it, about the current class-conciousness in Britain; reverse class snobbery is in, big time.

Now, Doc, you have to put together those talking points I was begging for. Talking points for winning the argument with limp-minded Southerners who back a postmodern sort of, you know, secession; because then people can do, like, their own thing. OK?

And at some point I am going to have to explain why I have more time for reenactors than you do...but not much more.

To the Manor Born

Since one of my compatriots mentioned Frontier House, I should mention that I watched Manor House last night. Manor House is the latest installment in public television's foray into that combination of "living history" and reality tv, where (much like 1900 House and Frontier House) one family plays the gentry family in a 1906 English country house and an assortment of others play their servants. For three months. Their motivations are essentially the same. It seems as though every last one of them wants to "see what it was like" for their grandparents, although this is truly fool's gold. My approach to these "players" is essentially that of Civil War re-enacters: "You can dress up, run around a field, and shoot blanks all day long. You'll never be able to understand or see like an 1862 soldier." Dress up does not equal worldview.

The limited nature of "dress-up history" is what makes their reaction to manor house life/immersion so jarring and, I must say, amusing. Indeed, far from sensing the improvement in social life since those dastardly hierarchical Edwardian days, I found these players the spoiled brats of triumphant liberalism. How many of them whined about missing their family, their boyfriends, etc.? How many refused to do their jobs, refused to take orders, refused "to be spoken to in that tone of voice?" How many of the manor family felt guilty about having anyone serve them? Rather than impressing me with how difficult manor life must have been, I came away utterly convinced that Edwardian social order liberated participants by limiting their choices, and hence limiting their preposessions, desires, and pride. These players have apparently just left a self-esteem course at the local community college, "every man a king" and always to be spoken to in a kind and respectful manner.

My favorite quote was when the scullery maid broke down for the cameras and said (I paraphrase but this is close): "I am not spoiled, but my mother cooks and cleans for me, and I am used to going out to the pub every night with my friends, and here all I do is clean and people order me about." No, of course you are not spoiled, my dear girl. Sniffle. She left after two days.

What was it Chesterton said of reason? “A madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Speaking of Chesterton, I just finished teaching a class on the man himself, impressing upon a decidedly skeptical class the influence and importance of GKC. We read aloud his two essays "Cheese" and "On Archaeology."

The first delightfully sings the praises of bread and cheese ("nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it") and wonders why the ancient poets did not write odes to cheese, especially since it rhymes so well with "breeze" and "seas." He recalls traveling to four English inns and sampling the cheeses native to those regions, and then to "a large and elaborate restaurant" where they gave him cheese cut up into bite-size bits ("contemptibly small pieces") and biscuits. Oh the horror! He had left behind the "true poetic civilisation" of "universal and varied" customs, and entered the "universal and rigid" hell of bad civilisation (biscuits and bad cheese). "I asked [the waiter] if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong."

The second sought to deflate the popular misconception that archaeologists and historians are old, dusty, dull, unhappy people, an endeavor I heartily support. While I may be a curmudgeon, I am relatively young, well-kept, moderately entertaining, and quite happy. "I do not know why it should be that a man who studies mummies must himself be a mummy." From this liberation of historians from bad press, he continued on to make some insightful comments on the nature of time and history. Chesterton forcefully argues against the notion that the past is dead, because "the past has moved on living lines; but we can only conceive the future as moving on dead lines -- that is, mechanical lines." The future is merely mathematics and scientific probabilities and statistical analysis, a cold rational place of guessing in round numbers. The past -- a place of "vulgar fractions" -- is "the things left over, the things that do not fit, the things sprawling and struggling." Futurists think the future is x, but in reality they believe that x = 0, or zero, says Chesterton. Think about it. A zero is "round and harmonious and symmetrical, and has a fine inevitable curve; but it is also hollow and blank -- a face without features." Because it cannot account for messy, nasty details of free will that bring features to the face, the future is a dead, enslaved land, pressing on toward necessary but vague destinations.

But history is "full of those free actions and frustrated prophecies. The future can only consist of things expected; it is only the past that consists of things unexpected. Therefore history, and even archaeology, is intrinsically surprising; because it is the study of a story of surprises." What greater advertisement for the study of history can we have than this? What greater warning can there be for those who wish to walk alone on the terribly straight path of the sciences, or who plan utopias far off in the future when humans act as they should? "We may guess some of the fulfillments of a later generation; but we cannot share in any of its surprises. We may know a little about the heritage of our grandchildren, but nothing about their windfalls or their wilder adventures. If we want windfalls and wild adventures, we must consider the ways of our grandfathers and not our grandchildren. If we want the wildest emotions of novelty and astonishment, we can only find them in mouldering stones and fading tapestries, in the museum of antiquities or the place of tombs."

Prithee, make every undergraduate read this essay.

Germany, Oh Germany

Some interesting stuff in the Wilson Quarterly on Germany, none of it connected to the war...well, not the most recent one, at least. I say that because one of the articles is on Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's director, marking her 100th birthday.

This brings up a fascinating review in the magazine Forward on the aesthetic drive behind Hitler and the Nazi Party. It contains, appositely enough, an analysis of the beginning frames of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and argues that they are an aesthetic reshaping of a Messianic message.

Interesting stuff.

Rationality and the GULAG

Anne Applebaum's new history of the Soviet Gulag has been getting a lot of favorable attention. Today's opinionjournal.com has yet another glowing review mixed together with some interesting ponderings by reviewer Stephen Sestanovich. For my money the most interesting bit is his reflection on the perennial question: why did they do it?

Anyone tackling the enormity of the Gulag comes up against this question, and Ms. Applebaum canvasses the explanations, from the ambitions of Lenin and Stalin to the boredom of camp guards ("fourth-class people, the very dregs," one of their commanding officers called them). Many readers are likely to be surprised by how much attention she pays to the economic logic behind the camp system, but she does so for good reason. As an institution the Gulag reflected the Bolshevik drive to remake the human personality by remaking the world of work: hence the term "corrective labor." To achieve this aim, Soviet leaders were ready to enforce their own ideas, however bizarre, of what constituted a "rational use" of the manpower at their disposal.

Coercion and "rationality" went together: hence the euphemistic term "command economy." Did Moscow want to tap the natural resources of the Russian far north? The Gulag could help. As the commander of one of the largest northern mining camps explained: "If we had sent civilians [instead of prisoners], we would first have had to build houses for them to live in."

Killing them wasn't the goal, as it was for Hitler. Remaking them into the New Soviet Man was. Brutality, scientifically applied, could liberate those who did not want to be liberated.

Sometimes, it seems to me, genocide is easier to understand; if, admittedly, less "rational".

Why Historians Can't Give People What They Want

Hey, what's that, you say? Isn't history the top-selling nonfiction genre, and isn't it outselling most of the fiction genres as well? Well, yes, so they say. But it depends what you call history, doesn't it? What people really want from historians is what we can't give them. I offer, as Exhibit A, the following snippet from the excellent blog run by Nate Bierma at Books and Culture.

We crave sensible, scientific explanations for social phenomena. This Washington Post column contains two cause-and-effect scenarios that are farther off the beaten path. A recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that certain failing schools in Virginia boosted the sugar and calorie counts on their lunch menu during standardized testing periods. What's more, the gluttonous gambit seemed to work, bumping test scores up by 6 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, Wall Street seems prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression related to lack of sunlight during the winter months. A paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that stock bargains are most prevalent in fall and winter, when winter blues leave moody stockholders more likely to dump high-risk stocks at low prices. Prices rise and bargains are harder to find in the spring, when people cheer up, the paper says.

How neat, how tidy. Historians are not about that. The deeper we dig, the more untidy things are. And sometimes we find tidiness, or at the least hidden order, amongst seemign disorder. Our work seems random and pointless, and it often is; it is the journey of curiosity that is best understood as hyperlinking, going from one point to the other amidst a sea of information, and then turning to look back and see how we got this far, and whether the journey is worth duplicating, or if it explains anything else to anyone else. People aren't very interested in that. That is why Jared Diamond's books are considered history. They have a Theory of Everything, and that is what people think historians should be giving them; after all, isn't that what scientists do?

When people look to those sort of answers from historians, we should have the guts to tell them to go ask their questions of God instead of us. And quite frankly even His answers (cf. Job, Book of) are not as tidy as cafeteria surveys.

Oh, Bro-o-o-ther!

But perhaps that's too weak a word for the following.

According to this morning's Daily Telegraph, in yet another story derived from Iraqi intelligence files, the French government assisted "Iraqi and Arab brothers" to crash a human rights conference on Iraq being held in Paris on April 14, 2000. This human rights conference was being held in a hotel, a hotel named the "Hotel La Concorde Lafayette".

Further comment should be superfluous. But what the heck, let's vituperate! The irony here is so vicious that it gives me whiplash to read this article. And it shows, I think, a way forward.

We obviously cannot move all of our war-dead back to the United States. For one thing, I want the French to have to look a their graves on a regular basis. But there is one American veteran and general who we could bring back: Joseph Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. Someone should seek the consent of his family, such as remains, to move the Marquis' remains to Mount Vernon, where they can be interred by the side of the man he regarded as his father. It would be a fitting tribute to both men in time for the 225th anniversary of Yorktown. It could even be regarded as a expression of hope and trust for Franco-American relations. But, as far as I am concerned, it would be getting one of our own back.

Hitchens on Muggeridge

Not only is The Weekly Standard the bastion of warmongering neoconservatism- and that's a good thing, too!- it has got to have one of the more interesting books and arts reviews. The New Republic is an academic journal by any other name when it comes to the arts, and if you want to read that sort of thing then you had best stick with The Times Literary Supplement. "Fresh, witty and irreverent" aren't words that spring to mind about the worthy TNR's deep pondering.

But the Standard gives us such pleasures as, in their most recent issue, Christopher Hitchens reviewing a reprint of Gregory Wolfe's biography of Malcolm Muggeridge. It turns out to be the perfect editorial choice. Hitchens is notorious for a lot of things, mostly now on the Left as it happens, but certainly one of his most audacious literary assaults was against Mother Theresa. And it was Muggeridge who made Mother Theresa an international celebrity with his film Something Beautiful for God.

Yet, strangely enough, the review is a wonderful read. Hitchens has written recently and reverentially about Orwell. But in so many ways he has always struck me as a Muggeridge rather than an Orwell. Both men share a sort of performer's zest which, I think, Orwell lacked. I cannot imagine Orwell performing on BBC or C-SPAN, with the zest and hamminess (and I mean that as a compliment) of Muggeridge and Hitchens.

Surprisingly enough, Hitchens never belittles Muggeridge's religion. Indeed, he gives a rather sound and even sympathetic account of Mugeridge's lifelong flight towards God. That is just one of the delights to be found in the review. Read it.

Murderous Malaria

Another disease with which "colonists" on Colonial House won't have to cope is malaria. Unfortunately, many people in the rest of the world aren't so lucky.

Malaria kills 1-2 million people a year, the majority of whom are pregnant women and children under the age of five. To put it in more comprehendible terms, every thirty seconds a child dies from malaria. In one year malaria kills more people in Africa than AIDS has in the past fifteen.

Malaria takes its toll upon the living as well. Ninety percent of all malaria cases occur in Africa, and Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard argues that the burden of malaria has greatly contributed to the poverty of Africa. Even when controlling for determinants such as human capital, life expectancy, and geography, countries with a high rate of P. falciparum malaria infection have annual economic growth rates 1.3% lower than those of non-malarious countries. Over the long term the effect of malaria is that the per capita gross national product (GNP) of highly malarious countries is reduced by more than half compared to the GNP in non-malarious countries. Malaria causes this reduction in a variety of ways. It impacts the cognitive development of children, which can decrease their ability to function as productive members of society; the fear of infection and a compromised workforce drives away economic investment; and the treatment of the disease cuts into what little money families have been able to save.

Today, as well as being ANZAC Day, the 50th anniversary of the determination of the structure of DNA, and The Feast of St. Mark, is Africa Malaria Day. Many of the articles in the news today that discuss the problem of malaria mention the need for drugs, vaccines, and bed nets.

These are all good and lovely things that I absolutely support, but they are all future solutions. The Plasmodium parasite has developed resistance to the drugs currently available to treat the disease, especially the drugs that people in Africa can afford. There have been great strides lately in vaccine development for malaria and in understanding the astonishingly complex structure of Plasmodium, but I've been hearing that the vaccine for malaria is "5 years away!" since 1985. Bed nets have been around for years, but yet only 3-4% of the population in malarial areas use bed nets. You can hop up and down and scream "Education!" all you want, 3-4% is not a promising statistic.

What you won't read about in most of these articles is the current best hope of saving people from malaria. Why? Because the current best hope is extremely politically incorrect. It is the insecticide DDT. Yes, that DDT.

It turns out that DDT is effective, not just because it kills mosquitoes. DDT also has repellant and irritant properties so even if mosquitoes become resistant to its insecticidal properties, DDT still protects people from malaria. (See this cool Flash program for a demonstration of how DDT works) Applicators spray a small amount of DDT on the walls and under the eaves of a house. The repellant property keeps mosquitoes from entering the treated house. The irritant property forces even resistant mosquitoes to leave a treated house. For those mosquitoes that lack resistance, DDT remains a lethal pesticide. Also the persistence of DDT, which drives enviros gaga, causes DDT to be a effective for a much longer time than other pesticides, an important consideration when treating houses in remote areas. Additionally DDT costs half as much as the next cheapest pesticide. In short if countries hope to control malaria and in doing so break the cycle of death and poverty that plagues them, they need to use DDT.

If DDT is cheap and effective, why don't malarious countries use it? Well my little anti-globalization comrades, here is an actual example of Western imperialism for you. Western countries, including the US, won't fund spraying programs. (USAID won't even fund spraying programs that don't use DDT.) Some countries, Mozambique for example, have even claimed that if they used DDT, Western countries wouldn't give them any aid at all. These financial considerations forced the countries to switch to other pesticides that were both more expensive and less effective than DDT.

South Africa switched to using pyrethroids in its malarious areas in 1996. However, within 5 years the mosquitoes developed resistance to these pesticides, and malaria rates rocketed in South Africa from 5,991 in 1995 to 61,934 in 2000. Luckily for South Africans, South Africa is in a relatively good financial state. It told the West it wasn’t going to place Western political correctness over the lives of its people and in 2000, South Africa decided it could no longer endure the havoc that malaria was wreaking on the population and switched back to using DDT. By 2002, the number of malaria cases plummeted to 14,474.

And bed nets are the big hope?

As for those tiny children who died in the grip of cerebral malaria:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

But shouldn't they have had a chance at life?

Webbed History

Just to bring to your attention some interesting new history stuff on the web.

Well, www.common-place.org is not really new; it's been around for a couple of years. It is a nicely done web-zine that seeks to bridge the gap between the popular and the academic. That it generally fails in this is because the people that run it seem to be the sort of types who actually use raceclassgender as a single word. They just aren't populist enough or snobbish enough to figure out how to make the masses eat their spinach. This leads to such winners as a handwringing article that laments the fact that millions are being spent on Frontier House and not one more cent on Sturbridge Village, Plimouth Plantation, or Colonial Williamsburg. No sense, of course, that the upcoming Colonial House could be one of the best commercials for living history since Williamsburg opened. Though, mind you, I am figuring it will be a long wait until we see Plantation House.

Another good site is the new Historacle history blog from The Historical Society. A nice idea- but they don't seem to be updating the content. Stay tuned for more.

SCHADENFREUDE, or, 'Tis Pity He's a Whore

Well, no it's not really, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow. I refer to Gorgeous George, Mr. Galloway, MP for Kelvin, Leftist Agitator, Member of Parliament and Saddam Financed Thug...or so it would appear from the files that first the Daily Telegraph and now the Christian Science Monitor have been publishing.

The arrest of Tariq Aziz yesterday gave me a special thrill in re Galloway. Aziz, according to the CSM, was one of a committe of four that handled Galloway's financial needs; new wives, Havanas, and villas in Portugal don't come for free, you know. So imagine the beauty of having Tariq Aziz as a witness in the libel trial of Galloway v. Daily Telegraph. I can hardly wait.

And here the entire time I in my innocence thought George, who has publicly pined for the old Soviet Union as a necessary check on US agression, was doing it for beliefs, for ideology. But he's just another expensive ideological trollop. You almost feel sorry for Saddam, to have to rely on such people.

On second thought, I'd rather not.

Bygone England

The Telegraph brings us a story of a bygone England, in which timid mousy English girls turn out to be masterspies, before eventually becoming heads of an Oxford college and crafty parliamentarians in the House of Lords.

This is, I am afraid, an England that was; only the Torygraph would run such a profile, and only Americans would like it so much.

Another Historical Inaccuracy

Clive James, Anglo-Australian bien-pensant and man about town, committed an error in the Times Literary Supplement of April 4, 2003 that I have often heard over on this side of the pond. He mentioned in passing, I guess to show off his erudition, that "When the Founding Fathers were addressing the question of a national language, German and Hebrew were both considered."

All together now: This Ain't True. Why this is such a popular myth over here is, to be sure, slightly more interesting. But let's just settle on all realizing that it never happened.

Ah, you doubt me? Be so good as to consult Willi Adams, The German-Americans: An Ethnic Experience (Indianapolis, 1993), especially Chapter VII, "German or English?".

Seeing the Navy

Went down to Portsmouth yesterday from Oxford, City of the Dreaming Spires. I wanted to see an old friend who had travelled over from the States; and I also wanted to see the Royal Navy.

And by golly, did I ever. For anyone who gobbled up the wonderful novels of Horatio Hornblower as an adolescent, and then moved on in their 20's to Patrick O'Brian's massive Aubrey-Maturin series, it was an intoxicating time. I mean, last night I had fish and chips on The Hard! Aye, lad, these eyes have seen The Hard, where many an old seadog first set foot on English soil after years at sea; and me mate and I had pints of bitter in a pub christened the Captain Anson, so we did, to mention the namesake of one the great circumnavigators-- and he took the Manila galleon to boot, stap me with a marlinspike if he did not.

The Historic Dockyards are where a lot of great stuff is located. It is where the flagship of Lord Nelson, the Victory, is kept. Of the Victory I will say that it is both smaller and larger than I imagined. Perhaps it's "smallness" was because there was a Royal Navy aircraft carrier tied up on the other side of the quay. Its size was particularly evident once you got below decks; cramped, little head-space, but immense spaces spreading fore and aft.

In a strange way, the Mary Rose was even more interesting. This is a ship of Henry VIII's fleet that went down in freakish circumstances in Portsmouth Harbour, and was raised again in 1982. It is now undergoing preservation treatment for an eventual full-scale exhibit. Next door is a museum with the many artifacts found in its hull. In many ways it is more interesting than the Victory because there is such a wonderful slice of 17th century life preserved in the Mary Rose's wreckage, everything from longbows to men's purses to surgeon's supplies to horn spoons.

The rest of Portsmouth seems like Baltimore before the Inner Harbor, and without the wonderful "How ya' doin', hun?" attitude of the natives. In fact the natives of Portsmouth seem to posess some emotional black-hole that makes them the anti-Baltimoreans. So that's not much of an endorsement, to be sure-- but the Historic Dockyard makes it all worth while. As does the sea, and the views of the Isle of Wight...but I'll stop there. It is a sign of the remarkable and frightening way that all of English (British, even) life tilts towards London that Portsmouth hasn't been taken over by high-tech companies and artists' lofts and things.

In any event I have now seen the Air & Space Museum of the Sea, and more than that. It was a moment in which I saw the physical reality of what has long been a theatre of my imagination.

A few oddballs:

A student of mine steered me toward two websites he thought I'd appreciate. Since I don't have video capacity on my office computer (It's a Studebaker, I think), I haven't had a chance to see much of these sites yet. The photo gallery in "protest warrior" is hysterical. Check them out: brain-terminal and protest warrior.

And is it me, or does this look like a story out of the Onion:

"Baghdad's self-proclaimed rulers said Wednesday they will use Iraqi government funds to pay all state employees their salaries this month -- with a 1,000-percent raise -- and took credit for progress in getting power, water and hospitals back up and running.

They also claimed the U.S. Army recognizes their authority, meets with them daily and even drove them from Kuwait to Baghdad in American military vehicles. The United States said it doesn't even know who they are."

I may try this myself. Just announce that I am in charge, claim credit for achievements, fire some people, spend some money, see what happens.

And as for the secession drivel, give me a day to recharge. Too much correcting and too little sleep has me a bit tired. Secessionists with "the better argument" indeed.

Secession

Well, I want to have a good rant and rave here, but I feel too tired to begin, because I have been here so many times before.

Yesterday I was sitting on a sun-soaked manor house lawn in Hampshire, drinking tea, and listening to a guy from New Jersey agree with a buddy of mine who hails from Texas that the secessionists in the Civil War had the better argument. It was a surreal moment, to be sure. They listened with scorn to my protestations to the contrary which were, I confess, feeble.

Why? Well, for one thing, I struggled with a student of mine all last term who had been reading neo-Confederate, ah, nonsense, and I am tired from constant battle against people for whom evidence is a speedbump rather than a signpost. Moreover, speaking as a historian of Colonial America/American Revolution/Post-fetal American Republic, I realize now that everyone in that period could really care less about the question, and if they did, they were revolted by the idea. The more letters I read from officers in the American Revolution, the more I realize that saying "Secession" to them was like saying "Democratic Republic" to Osama bin Laden.

Anyway, I am weary of all this. Take it away, Dr. Curmudgeon.

I'm sorry I missed the Easter Day posting action, but as Easter is a season...

Campus Eye

After finishing teaching the other day, I went to the campus bookstore for a snack. There, talking with a friend and looking puzzled, was a student complaining that this store sold nothing but junk food. A true observation, as it is full of various chips, cookies, and candies. Butting into her conversation, I said, "Well, there are some natural food bars here. They are pretty healthy," pointing to the apple, blueberry, and strawberry variety. She turned, stone-faced and frowning, and said, "They contain milk." That was it for her. She shuffled off with her vitamin water to the register.

Now judging a book by its cover -- based on her raggy appearance and petchouli oil odor, she was quite clearly of the hippie genus -- I do not think she was lactose intolerant but a vegan. And a deadly earnest one at that, who obviously thought I was insufficiently informed on the extent of bovine suffering, and hence a demonic member of the faculty. The encounter reminded me of my undergraduate days, when my roommate's mother came to visit and marched into the kitchen while I was making dinner. Observing me cooking hamburger for a batch of chili, she coolly asked, "So, you are a flesh eater?" I refused to give her the reaction she wanted by simply chuckling and saying "yes."

Again, it was the earnestness I found remarkable in both cases, that cold seriousness of purpose that went looking for earthly suffering and its perpetrators. That purpose was not to save my immortal soul (perhaps armed for the uphill fight with 2000 years of Christian history, literature, and philosophy) but a mortal cow (instead armed with the shocking information that humans do indeed eat animals for food and have since the dawn of time). A shock that transformed itself into self-righteousness when made aware that most disagree and do not mind eating a steak. The greater the lack of "awareness" (translation: those who are as upset and committed as I am), the greater the outspoken indignation.

Robert Bartley wrote a dead-on op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal about Bush and God. The issue has annoyed me a bit more lately, as one of my fellow professors has tacked up an article critical of Bush and his "born-again" Christian worldview on the History Department board. As such it doubles for official department policy. Quite ridiculous.

Here, here.

"They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn."

G. K. Chesterton

Happy Easter!

"The Cross is the abyss of wonders, the centre of desires, the school of virtues, the house of wisdom, the throne of love, the theatre of joys, and the place of sorrows; It is the root of happiness, and the gate of Heaven."

Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)


"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep."

St. Paul

OH BRO-O-THER!!!

Peggy Noonan tells a nice little story about Ethel Merman attending a Broadway musical featuring someone trying to fill ol' Ethel's shoes, and hit the high notes- which this wannabe manifestly could not do. At some point in the program, after one particularly lousy rendition of a Merman standard, the orchestra audience- and probably most of the balconies- was treated to a unmistakeable voice saying, "Oh, bro-o-ther!" Ethel, it would seem, was not amused.

Today's "Oh, Bro-o-ther" Moment is brought to you by The New York Times, who pays R.W. Apple to write mush-mouthed equivocations like the following: "The war in Iraq was neither as painful as its opponents predicted nor as painless as its proponents suggested."

Oh, Bro-o-ther!

Caiaphas the High Priest is a harder question, with even fewer biblical mentions than Pilate. But what can we say about him?

In many ways, Caiaphas and Pilate were alike, in that Caiaphas was at least partially motivated from concern over public order. He says in Matthew, while plotting to arrest Jesus, that they must be careful when they do it, "or there may be a riot among the people." A riot would bring pressure upon Caiaphas from the Romans and threaten the power and prestige of the established religion. Public disorder threatened Caiaphas as much as Pilate. His calculation (in John 11) that one man must die to preserve the integrity of the nation was eminently practical, answering the concern that Jesus' activities would turn the Romans against the established religion. His protestations and dramatic tunic-ripping when accusing Jesus of blasphemy seem contrived, a pretense to protect the existing social order. When Caiaphas and the crowd met Pilate (in Luke 23), they charged that Jesus was "subverting our nation" and "stirring up people all over Judea" What better way to interest Pilate?

That said, what motivated Pilate, "the threat of Tiberius Caesar's displeasure?" If you mean that a rebellion or breakdown in social order would hurt his reputation in Rome and mark him as a failure as administrator, then yes. (1.) He was faced with a public riot. The Gospel of Matthew says clearly, "So when Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but rather that a riot was about to break out, he took water and washed his hands in the presence of the crowd, saying, I am not guilty of nor responsible for this righteous Man's blood; see to it yourselves." In the Gospel of Luke, Pilate is faced with "loud shouts" from an insistent crowd, and prudently "decided to grant their demand." In the Gospel of Mark, the "chief priests stirred up the crowd" to shout louder and louder, until finally Pilate granted their wish. Instead of Pilate believing Jesus stirred up riots (which he doesn't), we have the irony of Caiaphas and company stirring up their own riots to convince Pilate.

(2.)Pilate risked an open breach with the high priest and the entire Jewish community. All the Gospels not only place a loud and unruly crowd outside the palace, but the "chief priests, with the elders, [and] the teachers of law" escorting Jesus as well. Pilate wants to avoid the whole situation ("Take Him yourselves and judge and sentence and punish Him according to your [own] law," he says in John) but they won't let him -- they want a death sentence and only Roman authorities can do this. How will Roman authority and its relationship to Caiaphas be effected if he denies their plea?

(3.) Despite thinking the whole Jesus trial a charade built on envy, Pilate is virtually blackmailed by the Jewish leadership and crowds: "Upon this, Pilate wanted (sought, was anxious) to release Him, but the Jews kept shrieking, If you release this Man, you are no friend of Caesar! Anybody who makes himself [out to be] a king sets himself up against Caesar [is a rebel against the emperor]!" One gets the sense they were not only questioning his patriotism but threatening to inform Rome of his weakness. Crucify Jesus or we'll tell Rome you coddle anti-Roman rebels.

So, I think Stephen may have a point, in an impish, irreverent way. Caiaphas was defending an old and established religion at relative peace with Roman authority from a rising populist threat that promised to destroy both; what kind of religious and political authority will we have then? Who knows? Pilate's job was to maintain and promote the Roman Empire in Judea. With the Jesus crisis, he was faced with a Jewish riot, a possible breach between the province's established religion and Roman authority, and blackmail. What were practical men supposed to do?

Pilate? Hah! That's too easy a question. If you want a hard one, what about Caiaphas the High Priest?

After all, it's common sense what he says: "It is expedient that one man die for the sake of the country." Here was a blasphemer who was going to get the Jews in trouble yet again, but this time with the inexorable Roman legions. Much better to get him out of the way. Much better to nip this problem in the bud.

The catch for Pilate is, of course, what Stephen himself says: "if an in so far as he believed, in good faith and on reasonable grounds, that what he did was necessary for the preservation of the peace of Palestine..." It is evident even from the limited textual evidence that Pilate did not believe that. What swayed him was the threat of Tiberius Caesar's displeasure. It was for that reason, it seems clear, that he executed the Nazarene.

Was Pilate right?

Since you neglected to react to my Humanities question, I will provoke you in other ways.

This week I am teaching James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, one of my favorite texts of political and social commentary, in my Modern European Intellectual History class. Since this is Easter Week, what do you think of Stephens' shocking remark contra John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:

"Was Pilate right in crucifying Jesus? I reply, Pilate's paramount duty was to preserve the peace in Palestine, to form the best judgment he could as to the means required for that purpose, and to act upon it when it was formed. Therefore, if and in so far as he believed, in good faith and on reasonable grounds, that what he did was necessary for the preservation of the peace of Palestine, he was right ... Pilate's duty was to maintain peace and order in Judea and to uphold Roman power. It is surely impossible to contend seriously that it was his duty, or that it could be the duty of anyone in his position, to recognize in the person brought to his judgement seat, I do not say God Incarnate, but the teacher and preacher of a higher form of morals and a more enduring form of social order than that of which he was himself the representative. To a man in Pilate's position the morals and social order which he represents are for all practical purposes final and absolute standards. If, in order to evade the obvious inference from this, it is said that Pilate ought to have respected the principle of religious liberty as propounded by Mr. Mill, the answer is that if he had done so he would have run the risk of setting the whole province in a blaze."

He further states in a footnote that the rightness or wrongness of the persecution depends upon "the comparative merits of the religion which is persecuted and the social order which persecutes. Whether Pilate was right in thinking that what took place in Judea threatened social order directly or indirectly we cannot tell, but it was his business by all means to protect social order."

So there you are. Reminds me of that scene in "Life of Brian" when the People's Front of Judea (or is it the Popular People's Front?) recite a long list of productive things that imperial rule has given the province, and then ask, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" "The aqueduct?" "Shut up!"

The Left Bank of Paris also gave us Pol Pot. Let's not forget him, or the quarter of the population of Cambodia that he did away with. And there were plenty of Vietnamese torturers who were educated there as well.

What was in the water of the Seine in those years?

From the today's Manchester Union Leader (NH):

"BY NOW EVERYONE has seen the image of the American flag wrapped around the head of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last week. The story of that flag’s journey across the globe is one of the greatest tales of the war. As The Union Leader reported on Saturday, the flag was given to Marine Lt. Tim McLaughlin, 25-year-old son of former New Hampshire Attorney General Philip McLaughlin, for his service helping rescue victims at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. McLaughlin, of Laconia, brought the flag with him from the Pentagon to Iraq.

Last Wednesday as McLaughlin’s tank, among the first to enter Baghdad, approached that statue, a British war protester screamed at McLaughlin, “Yankee bastard . . . go home!” He returned her kindness with a few choice words of his own, then pulled out the flag and gave it to a comrade, who carried it to the top of the statue and, in that now famous scene, wrapped it around the big bronze head of Saddam.

The tale functions as a powerful allegory, with Lt. McLaughlin representing American resolve and the poor protester representing European irrelevance in world affairs.

Allegory or no, it’s a great story of one American patriot’s determination to make the world a better place, preserve the memory of those who died on Sept. 11, and make his country proud. Lt. McLaughlin, America is proud of you and all of your comrades. You’ve done a fine job, and we are all grateful. "

Media Research Center is doing a lovely compare and contrast job on the Hollywood Left, especially Janeane Garolafo: http://www.mediaresearch.org/mrcspotlight/war/welcome.asp

Kathleen Parker's article on the "yes but-ters" makes for satisfying reading: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-edpparker13041303apr13,0,6043276.column

One more reason to dislike the French, from an MSNBC article on Syria:

"If in fact Syria is turning a blind eye to Iraqi officials crossing the border, this represents a shift in Syrian-Iraqi relations. The two countries have been at odds for decades, at times almost to the point of military confrontation, usually over Syrian restrictions on the flow of the Euphrates River. The major dispute between Baghdad and Damascus has its roots in the founding of the Baath Party, or the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party. The party was born in Damascus, Syria, in the 1940s, the brainchild of two French-trained Syrian teachers, Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah Al-Din Bitar."

So the left bank gave us Marcuse, Foucault, Derrida, AND the Baath Party. A-ha!

I spent much of yesterday afternoon in a meeting to decide the college sophomore humanities core curriculum where I teach. The votes were close at every turn, but here is what we decided. You be the judge.

Last year, we taught Michelangelo, Calvin, Elizabeth I, Hobbes, Jefferson, and Beethoven in the first semester, followed by Sand, Darwin, Freud, Picasso, Ellington, and Pope John XXIII in the second. This has been altered for the next two years (curriculum changes are only made every two years) to Michelangelo, Luther, Galileo, Elizabeth I, Jefferson, Beethoven and Darwin, Carnegie, Freud, Picasso, Ellington, Camus. So, out with Calvin, Hobbes, Sand, and Pope John, and in with Luther, Galileo, Carnegie, and Camus.

Several of the votes were quite close. Calvin put up a good fight and I voted to retain him, but after a round of speeches his support bled away and we are all Lutherans now. Hobbes was killed (yours truly among the defeated Hobbesians), while both George Sand (who my students thankfully hated) and poor Pope John were blasted out by acclamation. There was also a spirited debate about Elizabeth I versus Shakespeare, with one set of professors saying any "great books" core must include Will and the other set saying without Elizabeth we would have no women in the core and hence no opportunity to teach gender. Despite the pleas of many that ideas are more important than gender, Elizabeth held on.

The great second semester debate was which three among Tolstoy, Carnegie, Freud, and Ellington to keep. Ellington was retained with no opposition (here, here) and Freud by a healthy margin. In the end, it came down to the Russian novelist and the Scots-Pittsburgh steel magnate. An appeal by a business professor that we ought to be studying people "who build things" along with writers, artists, and musicians carried enough votes, and Carngie snuck in. I secretly wondered why Camus was included, and would have like Tolstoy instead, but several profs afterwards insisted to me that the students loved him. We shall see, but two weeks on French existentialism as the last unit of the core at a Catholic school seemed odd.

In response to the Doc's Concorde observation, I offer two words: Stanley Steamer.

This was a fiendishly clever product of New England genius. It was a steam-powered automobile with two cylinders and so much torque that the Stanley twins, who designed and produced these cars, didn't bother to put a transmission on the sucker. Was it fast? Oh, yes, it was. In 1906, just eight years after the Stanley's had started to design cars, one of their steamers was clocked at 127.66 miles per hour on Daytona Beach in the first car do be designed for aereodynamic efficiency with wind tunnel tests. The next year they had reached 150 miles per hour.

There were just a couple of problems. One was that it took about fifteen minutes to heat the steam in a Stanley's boiler to the required temperature for operation. The other was that it was priced at about $600, twice the cost of a year's wages for a working man. Thus, the internal-combustion engine, while not as fast or efficient as the Steamer, won the economic race after the invention of the self-starter. A less efficient technology had trumped a more interesting technology, one that was capable of greater speeds- but not capable of operational efficiency.

That's where the Concorde failed. The only reason it is still flying is because it was flown so little. Fast, sure. But an operational nightmare. It is really an engineering disaster taken as a system; I'm sure it's wonderful to fly, and I would be there at the gate tomorrow if I could afford it. But to service? Can you imagine how much the parts cost?

This is a part of a historic pattern, btw. The most innovative technology will be pushed aside if a cheaper, more dependable alternative can be found. Haydon Christensen has talked about this in relation to business history, but of course it is an observation of the history of technology as much as it is of business.

Speaking of technology, did you notice that the Concorde is being phased out by October? According to British Airways and Air France, it is too expensive, premium travel is lagging, and many are afraid after the crash of a Concorde in 2000.

But think about how odd this is. A transportation innovation that boasted getting passengers to their destinations in record time is being abandoned for slower transport. So much is made about the fast pace of society, the growing speed of communications and travel, and the appetite for more. Yet, the fastest travel on earth is being scrapped. Imagine trains being "phased out" because people preferred buggies, or telephones because people preferred the US Mail.

GOODBYE LEONARDO

If there is one figure who is the most over-rated in history, it is Leonardo da Vinci.

Sure, sure, a nice painter. (Not, mind you, that he got a lot done.) But not, as Jacques Barzun has pointed out, a Renaissance man. He seems to have been completely uninterested in literature, classical or Italian. Michelangelo wrote poetry, very good poetry; Leonardo didn't bother. Michelangelo was fascinated by theological and philosophical questions; Leonardo never noticed them

The only reason we still care about him is because of our interest in a person who is a visual artist and vaguely interested in technology. That flatters our view of this as an age uniquely interested in technology, and baptizes Leonardo as One of Us. Which is, of course, why we most often find historical figures interesting; they seem like us.

And quite frankly, can there be a better day to have a delightful cocktail than today? Mix up a Manhattan or Martini, settle back in front of the TV, and watch the exorcism of the totalitarian demons live.

Maybe a glass of champagne to follow...but better save that for the occupation of Tikrit.

I am, myself, quite a fan of the Manhattan. But I sympathize with Dr. Curmudgeon's aversion to the sweet Manhattan. This is usually the cause of bourbon, too much sweet vermouth, and an overdose of maraschino cherry syrup.
What's this, you say? Are you recommending rye instead of bourbon?
Not necessarily. I am in favor of bourbon anytime, anywhere, and anyplace. But it is nice to increase the consumption of rye, a much maligned spirit which never recovered from Prohibtion. Do what you can to preserve an important part of local culture, and a linchpin of Hamiltonian democracy.
So you can keep the bourbon, though rye is good if not great. Forget the Canadian blend. What you want to do is mix equal parts dry and sweet vermouth, the total mixture to form no more than an eighth of the beverage. That, shaken with crushed ice and rye (or bourbon) is a drink!

Indeed, cocktails are "near and dear" to the Doctor & Co., although I hesitate to jump on board the Manhattan-bound train. I've always found it a bit on the sweet side for my tastes. Classic Martinis are the trick, and classic does not mean vodka; shame on you, James Bond. To do this correctly, several things are important:

1. Use good gin, not outrageously expensive and ostentatious gin. Bombay Sapphire at $18, stored in your freezer, will work lovely. I, for one, do not trust people who prefer vodka over gin.
2. Don't make it too dry. It is, after all, a cocktail, a mixed drink. Try it with a dab more dry vermouth, around a 4/1 or 3/1 ratio gin/vermouth. To order them bone dry, dripping-spraying-waving the vermouth over the glass, is silly. I make them "wet" (or sweet, if you must) so I can taste both liquors.
3. I also do not buy the "if you shake it, you bruise the gin" line. Shake away and mix it up.
4. Garnish with two olives on a toothpick. As Johnny Carson wisely said, "Happiness is finding two olives in your martini when you are hungry."
5. Avoid any other garnishes and tricks to cloud the drink -- apples, chocolate, etc.

Drink and repeat -- a wise aunt always tells me, "Tee martoonis, please."

Speaking of Carrie Nation, the Washington Post food section has an article on a topic near and dear too our hearts, cocktails! As part of this article they also have a side piece on Trends, and it is here that we find the giddy biscuit. I quote:
"Classics are back: The manhattan, a rye whiskey drink created in the 1890s, and the sidecar, a brandy drink popular in the 1920s, are both finding new fans across the country. "
I suppose I should rejoice that some people someone in this country are finally acquiring good taste, but it creates a dilemma for your correspondent. A long time drinker of the Manhattan (although I prefer the bourbon variety rather than the original rye), I refuse to be labelled as "trendy." Thus, it appears that I must find another cocktail on which to rely. I am accepting all sensible suggestions so long as they do not involve vodka. Your truly does not drink vodka, because in these United States vodka drinkers are tastebud lacking wimps. You differ? Consider this snippet from the trends piece:
"Gin: Fighting an uphill battle. Sales have been flat except for the popular super premium brands (more than $25 a bottle). Vodka drinkers say they don't like the juniper flavor in gin. Gin makers are fighting back with softer, more mellow blends, like Tanqueray Ten and Plymouth"
One feels for the gin makers of course and acknowledges that they must bend to market forces, but really the nation that depends on people unable to appreciate the taste of juniper to set the course of history is in trouble.
But possibly in less trouble than the nation that drinks this:
"Blue heaven: The cool blue mixer with the young, hip-hop crowd is Hpnotiq -- a fruity-flavored, vodka-spiked Cognac that's a glowing shade of aquamarine blue. Blue Fin in New York mixes it with lemon vodka and white cranberry juice, garnished with a gummy fish. At Topaz in Washington, it's served topped with Champagne. At Dream nightclub, try The Incredible Hulk -- Hpnotiq and Hennessy."
Perhaps then the Manhattan trend is only to be encouraged. Manhattans all around!

What compels three Catholic nuns to break into a missle silo, begin beating on it with hammers, and smearing crosses on the silo with their own blood? Were they having a Carrie Nation moment, contra missles rather than saloons? Are they the new Barker gang (the ringleader nun looks rather like a fearsome Ma Barker)? Any which way, these sisters are-a-goin-da-klink.

Laughter is not only the best medicine, it is also the best deterrent. "Forget your troubles and just get happy..."

And for those of us who spent many years living in Washington DC and frequented Colonel Brooks Tavern, this is simply horrifying.

I will pull back on the reins and give you the point about the Gospel and salvation. My annoyance was directed at a narrow reading of Scripture, that seemed devoid of context, history, or political realities. As to Hooker and Luther shaking hands, I can't say. The Tudor Hooker sought to defend the emerging British Anglican Establishment from the rougher edges of Continental Protestantism (Anabaptism in particular, Purtianism in general), doing so (in part) by means of history. That was my gist. I detected all scriptura and no traditio with my fair parish priest.

As for the fast rules, it will almost certainly have to be Spam for vegetarians, as the marsh is low on muskrats. Besides, muskrats are too tasty to waste on the unappreciative.

No. It demonstrates the problems of asserting one's social agenda before God's salvation agenda.

For Lutherans, sola scriptura holds that the scriptures alone indicate the way to salvation. Thus, scriptures are the authority by which church doctrine and authority are to be judged. It does not say that scriptures prescribe all aspects of living a Christian life.

Although I am not versed in Hooker, I am inclined to think from the bits you have posted and what little I know that there would not be too much, if any, disagreement between Luther and Hooker. There is a great deal of disagreement between the Lutheran position and the Calvinist position, which is where I believe your ire is directed.

Thus, disappointing though it is, I don't think there's too much disagreement between us. My point was sola scriptura keeps one focused on "the healing voice of Christianity charity", which is to say the salvation found in our Lord Jesus Christ. If the priests who have you blood a-roiling were actually practicing sola scriptura, they would be preaching not on how the Gospel applies to social issues, but how the Gospel applies to salvation.

About 10-11 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I stopped going to the campus Catholic Church because of ... well, a number of things, but that would take many messages. Instead, I began attending the local church nearby, while friends of a similar mind as myself remained at the campus Mass. The Gospel that day dealt with wealth and worldly goods. My pastor said, "This does not mean to give away all your things..." On campus, the college pastor told his student parishioners to give away their things, like stereos and televisions. Needless to say, my friends began joining me in the other parish and never attended campus services again.

Doesn't this illustrate the danger of sola scriptura? Both the danger of multiple interpretation (and private judgement) and no application of Christian history and traditions?

"[W]hat was used in the Apostles' times, the scripture fully declareth not, so that making their times the rule and canon of Church polity, ye make a rule which being not possible to be fully known, is as impossible to be kept ... it is the error of the common multitude to consider only what hath been of old, and, if the same were well, to see whether still it continue; if not, to condemn that presently which is, and never to search upon what ground or consideration the change might grow." Richard Hooker

It is not 33AD. We have both Testaments and 2000 years of Christianity to use as our guide. Those who say, "St. Paul said we must do x, therefore let us endeavor to do x," work with only one-half the story and set themselves up for error. Perhaps it is the historian in me, but I believe in the power and majesty of time and what it tells us.

This isn't relativism unhinged from timelessness, far from it. It seeks to combine scripture with the powerful evidence of history to reach firmer conclusions. My priest suggested I kiss my enemies because Scripture said so, it is right in itself, and my example will inspire them to kiss me back. I'd prefer not, first because it suggests all my enemies are alike (which they are not), second because it demands I forget how my enemies have acted in the past (which I won't until they show a willingness to repent), and third because it applies a rigid abstraction to all human activity (which is dangerous and noncontextual).

Scripture uninformed by history is theory uninformed by practice. Scriptura et traditio. I'll stick with Hooker.

I also must differ with Dr. C. in the matter of Lenten abstinence. No steak for vegetarians. Let them eat spam. Unless, of course, they are from Hawaii.

As a member of the church that proudly proclaims "sola gratia, sola fides, sola scriptura", I must point out that the sermon my Pastor gave yesterday focused on...the gospel (John 12: 20-32) and the revelation of Christ's glory on the cross now that his hour has come. On Friday I attended a marvellous vespers service that featured the performance of Bach's St. Johns Passion. Bach, another adherent to "sola gratia, sola fides, sola scriptura", emphasizes throughout this work the paradox that Christ had to be bound for us to be freed, and the Pastor there gave a fine sermon on this. All this sola scriptura action and yet not once have I had the experience that the good Doctor passionately and vividly describes. Thus I must differ from his opinion that sola scriptura is to blame. I would say rather that a lack of adherence to sola scriptura is to blame. The proper application of sola scriptura, you see, leads to a focus not on this world, but the next.

Politics and the Pulpit

As the priest told the 9am Mass of the inefficacy of violence and the necessity of creating peace schools rather than war colleges and military academies – “Haven’t you heard of ‘peace studies’ and other such ninny programs?” I raged in my head – I began to roll my eyes and squirm in my seat. My wife, in tune to my body language, knew I was annoyed and patted my knee, as if to say “now, now.”

But it seemed so out-of-place, so naïve, so devoid of any historical understanding or context, and, chief of all, so totally inappropriate to the pulpit. “No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity,” Burke wrote in the Reflections, of pro-Revolution ministers. “Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.” My priest indeed had “quit his proper character” to adopt that of the prognosticator, taking Biblical passages from Jeremiah and St. Paul and opining on modern political realities. Donning this new responsibility, the priest became a preacher, in the worst sense of that word, informing the congregation how they ought to think about politics if they were real Christians. One had the feeling of being “read out” of the Church unless you realized the pacifistic foundations of modern Catholicism.

Yet it was not only the confusion of duties that annoyed me. A rigid doctrinaire application of biblical morality to daily life, devoid of circumstance or context strikes me as totally irrelevant without reflections on the actual condition of man, the current political climate, and 2000 years of Christian history. The great Anglican scholar Richard Hooker made that observation 500 years ago, facing down British Calvinists bent on subjecting England to a reign of “sola scriptura,” faith by the literal Word alone, history and circumstance be damned. Indeed, my priest seemed dangerously close to slipping into a Calvinist Catholicism, a Roman “sola scriptura,” if you will. Men are a diabolical combination of good and evil, giving that character to their world, and must be dealt with based on who and where they are. Moral institutions and systems that cease to recognize this flux of unpredictable individuality, to see men acting in time, are brittle from their stiffness. They see theoretical men, not actual men.

Further, they run the danger of becoming irrelevant. The perceptive nineteenth century legal scholar James Fitzjames Stephen warned, “As a matter of historical fact, no really considerable body of men is, or ever has been, or ever has professed to be Christian in the sense of taking the philanthropic passages of the four Gospels as the sole, exclusive, and complete guide of their lives. If they did, they would in sober earnest turn the world upside down … Nothing can be more monstrous than a sweeping condemnation of mankind for not conforming their conduct to an ideal which they do not really acknowledge.” Stephen was not carving out an anti-Christian argument, but sought to make Christianity relevant by dealing with men as they are, rather than as many would like them to be. Pacifism and peace suit situations where pacifism and peace can be expected to work; when not, they are a destructive waste of life, time, and treasure. Only vigilance, patriotism, and service can preserve the peace and liberty we have carved out of this world.

In the end, the priest stepped back, as if sensing the discomfort of his flock, and said “but this is not an anti-war speech.” The silly disclaimer left me unconvinced and frowning, tapping my fingers on the pew. Save my soul, Father, “restore all things in Christ” and leave the rest alone.

A Lenten Aside

As a Roman Catholic, I have to give up meat on Fridays. What do Catholic vegetarians give up? Nothing? I say, MAKE Catholic vegetarians eat meat on Fridays. I give something up; they should sacrifice too. Each of us sharing a little bit of Christ's suffering. Me missing a steak, them gagging while eating my steak. Beef. It's what's for dinner.

ALL ALONE

Wonderful article- well, wonderful if you enjoy a healthy dollop of schadefreude on your morning coffee- in the New York Times this morning. It's all about how greying faculty are dismayed that the students of today don't seem upset about the war in Iraq. Apparently these students are too concerned by September 11th or something like that.

Imagine that.

The picture with the article is, if not worth a 1,000 words, at least worth 941. It's pretty amazing to see 60's hipsters looking older than your own parents. Might take me a little while to recover from the shock. Heh.

Welcome to the world of the totalitarian demons.

There will never be a better time to get a visceral understanding of what it is like to live in the constant fear and loathing that the police state induces in its subjects. Reading a report in The Guardian today by James Meek, who was somewhere north of Azizya, I was struck by the constant use of "him" to refer to Saddam; there is never any need to explain who "he" or "him" is. One Iraqi is quoted as saying that "he" might use chemical weapons. Another one says "I am afraid nothing will happen to my friend, and we will be slaughtered." This is euphemistic, but it is not sarcastic; some spy of the regime cannot be absolutely certain that this resident of Azizya is actually talking about Saddam.

And it's catching; "His" enemies feel his presence, now. Lt. Col. Strotman, USMC, is also quoted as referring to "him". No need to figure out that he's not referring to George W. Bush.

This, my protesting academic compatriots, is what a real Fascist regime is like. This is what 1938 Moscow was like. "He" ultimately controls everyone. Not directly, of course, but by those who in Ian Kershaw's words "desire to 'work towards the Fuehrer'." "He" doesn't have to do anything, other than execute a few from time to time pour encourager les autres. The daily battle that subjects of such a regime face- those who wish to battle- is to keep alive some part of their soul that is free from His dominion.

Read the following words in the interior of your hearts, and ponder your protest. "We are not angry with the Americans. For 35 years the Ba'athists have been killing us, suffocating us. Even if the Americans killed me the sacrifice would be worth it."

What about this don't you understand? Can't you imagine what it takes to make someone say such awful words?

I suppose orthodox Anglospherists would object to the inclusion of, say, Bolivia and Nicaragua into the concept, but I am not so sure. If we take as our definition that given by James C. Bennett, Goldwater's "Atlantic Civilization" seems a nice fit with Anglospheric thought. Here is what Bennett said:

"The Anglosphere, as a network civilization without a corresponding political form, has necessarily imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa and India constitute the Anglosphere's frontiers."

Certainly this is broad enough in principle to emcompass Goldwater's vision? This "network civilization" (akin to Goldwater's American pillared "Atlantic civilization") is united by a web of political, economic, historical, religious, and linguistic realities, "galvanizing and guiding emergent nations everywhere" to use Goldwater's phrase.

It is one thing to be a prophet or a seer, it is another to be prescient and envision the future from current trends. I claim the latter for Barry.

Leaving aside the validity of the Anglosphere concept, let alone its practicality (as a resident of England and constant observer of the political scene here, to say that I have my doubts is a wee understatement) ? leaving all that aside? that is a pretty impressive statement that Goldwater made.

It is a statement that only a guy from a traditionally Jewish family turned Episcopalian and settled in Arizona could make. I mean, those were the days when being Episcopalian meant being an Anglophile, even more so than it does today. And with his Anglophilia, old Barry mixes in the sense of Latin American connections that thoughtful residents of the American southwest recognize as givens. The Anglosphere as Goldwater portrays it is, oddly enough, connected to the Hispanosphere, with the United States as the bridge between the two.

I don't think this is something Anglospherists or, for that matter, idee-fixe immigration consevatives would would really appreciate. Can you see John O'Sullivan or Peter Brimelow standing up and saluting this section of Goldwater's speech?

Nope, did';t think so.

Myself, I am trying to work "shock and awe" into daily conversation. I figure that phrase is the "mother of all battles" of the Second Gulf War.

"Rapid and Decisive Manuver" is also nice, maybe even better than "shock and awe". Too bad it faded after early and continual usage, because it flows beautifully off the tongue. Moreover it is pretty easy to use in conversation, ie, "Well, if it's OK with you, let's make a Rapid and Decisive Manuver into that pub across the street."

Failing that, I will have to keep saying something like, "Well, five minutes to the 11.00 lecture; time to shock and awe the undergraduates."

Goldwater an Anglospherist?

For several years now, I have used the video of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech as a prop to teach 1960s conservative Republican protest politics to my college students. Each year, I am more impressed with the language and vision within that speech, far beyond the controversial “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice ... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” line.

Yesterday, while watching it yet again, I was struck with Goldwater’s prescience on what he called “the flowering of an Atlantic civilization.” Much of what he forecasted has come to pass, the recent fracas with France notwithstanding, and resembles what many are today calling the “Anglosphere.” Here is what he said:

“I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow. I believe that the communism which boasts it will bury us will, instead, give way to the forces of freedom. And I can see in the distant and yet recognizable future the outlines of a world worthy our dedication, our every risk, our every effort, our every sacrifice along the way. Yes, a world that will redeem the suffering of those who will be liberated from tyranny. I can see and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world. This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.

It's a truly inspiring goal for all free men to set for themselves during the latter half of the twentieth century. I can also see - and all free men must thrill to - the events of this Atlantic civilization joined by its great ocean highway to the United States. What a destiny, what a destiny can be ours to stand as a great central pillar linking Europe, the Americans and the venerable and vital peoples and cultures of the Pacific. I can see a day when all the Americas, North and South, will be linked in a mighty system, a system in which the errors and misunderstandings of the past will be submerged one by one in a rising tide of prosperity and interdependence. We know that the misunderstandings of centuries are not to be wiped away in a day or wiped away in an hour. But we pledge - we pledge that human sympathy - what our neighbors to the South call that attitude of "simpatico" - no less than enlightened self'-interest will be our guide.”

He may have been swept up in the idealistic tide when predicting that national “misunderstandings” would be drowned in “a rising tide of prosperity and interdependence,” but he was not far off. Europe and Asia are freer today, they are linked much closer to the Americas (politically and economically), and central political and philosophical tenets beyond “human sympathy” and “enlightened self-interest” unite the regions – representative constitutional governments, English as a necessary language, respect for the individual, and the cultivation of creative talents. In fact, the Iraq War has drawn those Eastern European countries under Soviet domination in 1964 firmly into the Anglo-American orbit.

Goldwater’s Anglospheric “mighty system” has come to pass. For more information on the idea of an Anglosphere, see:

http://www.pattern.com/bennettj-anglosphereprimer.html

Have you notice that if you say "shock and awe" fast, several times, it begins to sound like an Indian tribe?

Is anyone else getting tired of hearing the following, meant to be the clincher of a deep-thinking argument?

Deep Thinker (with a weary sniff): "Well, you can't expect the Iraqis' to establish a Jeffersonian Democracy."

Let's leave aside what they really mean by that. Who cares; though, mind you, I doubt if pressed they would opt for red-knuckled Thugocracy, or gold-plated Kleptocracy.

The important thing, for Dr. Curmudgeon & Co., is to have the right historical analogy to slam back across the conversational net. So the next time someone says that to me, I am going to say, ?Yes, I quite agree with you. I see no need for an agrarian utopia with neoclassical architecture, a hierarchical educational system, strict international neutrality and a separation of church and state? desirable as those might be. I prefer a Hamiltonian democracy in which international trade is established, Iraq places itself firmly within the sole hyperpower?s sphere of influence, pays off its outstanding debts and encourages the growth of industry with the understanding that it cannot live forever on its oil fields.?

I invite you to try that response as well.

Well, it is raining/snowing/icing at the moment, and I have to teach Marx, Hegel, and Nietzsche today. How appropriate I have to explain about crabby Germans on a grey day like this.