The Closer

Kerry mentions Vietnam. Big surprise. The plans mentioned, but not alas the summit. I'm becoming quite fond of the summit. God bless America a nice touch.

Bush nice with fighting terrorists around the world so we don't fight them here. "Trasformation power of liberty", nice line. the speechwriters return in the closing.

Verdict
Kerry won the debate, but it won't hurt Bush. It won't in fact change anything, It was a good debate though.

The Russia Question.

Smart of Kerry to go back to North Korea and the multilateral talks and argue China has an interest. Bush wandering off in a wee dree on points.

Points to Kerry. The nuclear proliferation point is a good one, especially containing the Russian materials, except that he lost it on the bunker busting bombs. I think we rather need bunker busting bomb.

Bush flounders badly in response, but then find his groove. Such as it is. I do like though how he keeps bringing up Libya.

The bilateral talks angle is an interesting one. Bit reversed. Who's yer internationalist, noo?

Oh my the personal touch. Gag-o-rama to both of them. Kerry's smart though with the quite graceful compliment to Laura especially when Bush paid none to Teresa.

Ah the Dafur question. Well of course they're both going to say it's genocide. No brainer that one Interesting. Kerry has been pressing for "action through the African Union", yet he derides using Iraqis in Iraq. How does this fit?

Both would commit troops though to back the African Union...they had better get ready.

Alas, the Prez appears to be floundering a bit after his excellent point re "the global tests".

O mercy, the climate change treaty. SENATOR Kerry conveniently ignores that the Senate rejected consideration of the Kyoto treaty as currently written 98-0. I do not believe Senator Kerry was one of the missing 2.

A petty poin perhaps, but then so silly to bring the topic up.

I have now added "summit" and "I have a plan" to the debate drinking game. The Craggamore is going to take a beating tonight.

Judging dispassionately, Kerry is a better debater than Bush, no surprise there because debating isn't Bush's thing. But ye gods, the summit! It SO petit bureaucratic: have a meeting, and all will be better! The tiny soul and imagination of the man, all summed up in his "summit".

Excellent

I'm halfway through a glass of Craggamore just on Kerry's Vietnam references alone.

And we're only a half hour in.

I like some of the clever nicknames people are suggesting for the Washington baseball team.

Courtesy of WTOP radio:

Gridlocks
[CLASSIFIED] (with names blacked out on uniform)
Blue Sox
Red, White & Blue Sox
Filibusters
Frankenfish
Explos (as in Exploding Manhole Covers)
Ex-Expos
Angel-O's
Pandas
Cicadas (because like the Wizards, they'll make the playoffs every 17 years)
D.C. Diamonds
Beltway Bandits

Go Nats!

Although the price tag looks to be a bit steep for Washington DC, the fair capitol now has baseball back for the first time in 33 years. Will they be the Senators? I hope so, but apparently the Texas Rangers (who left DC in 1971 to become that franchise) still own the name. Why not field a team of big, fat, slow home run hitters and call them the Washington Monuments?

I just love stories like this: book returned to the Inverness Library 100 years overdue and with a five thousand pound fine. It was found in a South African book sale. Oh, the tales that book could tell of the trip it made!

Our dear friend Mr. Soames has been deep into wardrobe discussions of late, and we approve heartily. Our thin wallet oftentimes prevents following through on his advisings, but we try. And where does he find such good links? How about this magazine, called The Chap, which blazes a fiery trail for the cause of good dressing:

Society is withering, like the fruit on some diseased vine. We have become the playthings of corporations intent on converting our world into a gargantuan shopping precinct. Pleasantness and civility are being discarded as the worthless ephemera of a bygone age - an age when men doffed their hats at the ladies, and small children could be counted upon to mind one's Jack Russell while one took a mild and bitter in the local hostelry.

Instead, we live in a world where children are huge, inelegant hooded creatures lurking on street corners; the local hostelry has been taken over by a chain and serves chemically-laced lager which aggravates the nervous system. Needless to say, the Jack Russell is no longer there upon one's return.

The Chap proposes to take a stand against this culture of vulgarity. By turning ancient rituals of courtesy and dress into revolutionary acts, the immaculately attired Anarcho-Dandyist can use the razor-sharp crease in his trousers to press home his advantage. Once presented with the dazzling sight of rakishly angled trilbies, gleaming brogues and exquisitely mixed dry martinis, hoi polloi's long-cherished nylon sportswear and strawberry milkshakes will suddenly lose their appeal.

Good stuff, but don't make my martini too dry. I want to taste that vermouth behind the crispness of the gin. Might I also suggest joining the Country Gentlemen's Association, and shopping for your waistcoat at Horse Country Saddlery. We must look sharp while walking the corgis, mustn't we?

Academic Style

Myself, I am currently looking I was dragged through a hedge backwards by a rope. So I should really not be saying this: the article on academics and dress expressed what I saw at the last American Historical Association.

It also expressed much of what I felt as an undergraduate. Professors seemed damned unwilling to speak to a class, and they expressed this in part by looking like unkempt hobos. Who can say which came first, the unwillingness or the esthetique hoboesque. But the two did often co-exist. What a refreshing thing it was to have a professor who wore a gown during his lectures. He had been savaged by campus radicals for this practice in the '60's. In the '80's, us neotraditionalist undergrads found it an indication that he thought lecturing to us was an Event; and we treated it accordingly.

While I applaud the Doc on his neo-Schlesingerian apparel, myself I look forward to dressing in something a bit towards the formal side, yet in colors and patterns not to be found in a law office. As much as I like a nice tweed, I am afraid that it is a little too sterotypical. Unless it comes in a suit, or with a leather waistcoat, of course.

Ahem.

While that article was quite on target for most academics, I'd like to take this opportunity to exempt myself from the ill-dressed collegiate club. As we speak (and this is no different from normal), I am wearing a pressed white Oxford shirt with Brooks Brothers red-patterned bow tie, pressed brown pants, brown Bass leather shoes (sufficiently buffed), and a dark green/brown wool-tweedish Canadian sports coat. And just to make sure I do not err in my color selections, I always check with my wife first. She has a rather good eye.

I do not say this to brag or gloat, although I could, but to suggest instead that in some dark corners of higher ed, some of us aim to dress as George Saintsbury not as the checkout boy as Sainsbury's. Remember, I went to undergrad in Vermont, so I know what what fashion-challenged professors look like. Burlington is their lair.

And, yes, I do advocate the recovery of academic robes as classroom wear, not to cover-up but to distinguish. (I sigh wistfully every time I see Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands) The last thing colleges need is to become more casual. Any more casual and campuses will become nudist colonies. To be casual on campus today is to be orthodox; to be rather more formal and "put-together" is quite radical. A bowtie can cause a riot.

Now, where's my pipe?

Tin Fiddles

In his marvelous book, The Supper of the Lamb , Robert Farrar Capon has a riff on "the Tin Fiddle." Capon uses the term to refer to equipment foisted upon the non professional public that a professional cook would never accept. (He's particualrly bitter about bread knives.) In our family, "tin fiddle" has come to mean cooking gadgets that complicate a cook's life (and clutter the cupboards) rather than simplify it. I love gadgets, but some things are just ridiculous. Reading the latest Williams-Sonoma, after wading through the 10 different items I need to be able to cook an egg, I came across the tin fiddle to beat all tin fiddles: the scone pan. Like stout Cortez, I was silent, albeit in a kitchen in Virginia, dumbfounded by this apparation. It is so pointless. Rolling out scone dough and slashing it into triangles with a knife is easy, the work of a minute. Stuffing the fiddling little compartments of the scone pan with dough would take 4 times as long. What's the reason for this waste of metal?

Ah the sartorial splendor of the academic class! How I laughed when I read this. It reminded me of one of my favorite professors. Admittedly he was a scientist, and they're even more eccentric in matters of dress than the humanities faculty, but he refused to wear pants that cost more than $10 and shirts that cost more than $1. And he wore Birkenstocks year around. Still it was apparently an improvement over his grad school apparel.

Just this past Sunday I found myself weighing yet again into the fray, frothing at the mouth, and waving my "Sherman's March to Sea" T-shirt. What fray was that? Ah yes the Civil War. Yes it was finished almost 150 years ago, but get two even weakly Southern individuals together and suddenly the South rises again. My Yankee self can take a half hour of this talk being uttered in my dining room, but then the gorge rises, which always shocks Southerners because on this topic they usually have very limited imaginations. (They also say the most absurd things. "If you wore that shirt in South Carolina, you would get your ass kicked," said one. "Well you wouldn't because you're a lady (said with extreme doubt that was) but if you were a guy, you'd get your ass kicked." It never occurred to them that I wouldn't wear it in the South because I am a lady and don't believe in rubbing victory in the face of the defeated, the "ass kicking" has already been administered as it were.)

But occassionally there are surprises, which is why I am looking forward to reading the biography of Ulysses S. Grant written by Josiah Bunting III, the former superintendent of ( as well as an alum of) the Virginia Military Institute, the keeper of the Stonewall Jackson flame. Apparently Bunting thinks well of Grant. It's a good thing he's retired and apparently living in Rhode Island.

Meanwhile a Greek professor is suited up for a fray as well. Just an earlier one.

One of several interesting CBS news releases today: "Bill Burkett, in a weekend interview with CBS News Anchor and Correspondent Dan Rather, has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents used in the Sept. 8 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY report on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source. Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point." This one came via the good men and women over at the Corner.

Is it me, or is this taking on a Watergate-esque tinge? Dirty tricks, fake documents, strange connections, media complicity, "pajamahadeen" investigations, etc. If the bloggers had been around in 1972, Nixon would have resigned by Christmas.

Whoa, Doc

I hereby declare a ban of at least 24 hours of any more postings on the English and the hunt ban. England jails people who shoot burglars for goodness sake, and that raised barely an eyebrow compared to the din over banning the chasing a red fuzzy creature across other people's property, trampling their corn and not giving a damn, and I daresay that half of these save the hunt people were all for banning guns too so the yobs wouldn't have them. No I've decided I can't really work myself up about the hunt ban in Britain.

As for me I'm off to read that glorious paen to American individual freedom: "The Armed Citizen." At least here 80 year old widows can exercise the ancient common law right of self defense within one's curtilage (much less one's household) without being put in the chokey. (And exercise it they do by golly. Judging from the reports, those 80 year old widows are crack shots.)

Still to any Britons who do want to hunt with dogs and are groovy with individual liberties and have made the wrenching decision to shake the dust of the UK from their feet and go elsewhere, may I be so bold as to recommend the pleasures of the Commonwealth of Virginia? For those who look good in pinks, I am given to understand that the Hunt in Middleburg is quite good. For the more adventurous bear hunting is a popular sport in the Southwest. Indeed rumor has it that should Roger Scruton quit the UK over the hunting issue, he will, as have many Englishmen before him, settle in Virginia. I certainly hope so as we have a plethora of squirrels and deer for which the Texas defense (they needed killin') should certainly be invoked.

Big Steyn also had a simply wonderful, laugh-out-loud, "gee I wish I had written that" Telegraph column on Tuesday about plans to put closed-circuit tv in British country lanes to nab fox hunting violators. No joke. Some of the choice cuts:

For all the talk of vibrant "multi-culturalism", Blair's Britain is strikingly unicultural - diversity of race, gender and orientation, but a ruthless homogeneity of metropolitan modishness imposed by a highly centralised politico-media culture. America is a federal state and thus local majorities prevail: in New Hampshire, we like hunting; in the gay environs of Fire Island, the thrill of the chase lies elsewhere. Each, as I said, to his own.

In Britain, Soho's views on hunting should be no more relevant than Somerset's opinion of gay leather bars. But they are. And those Left-wing columnists who go on about the "climate of fear" in Bush's America ought to remember that, even in their wildest power-crazed dreams, Bush and John Ashcroft will never be able to issue a national ban on centuries-old traditions merely because they offend metropolitan taste. Nor, unlike the modern British state, are they able to keep the populace under 24-hour video surveillance, whether you're at the railway station, in the shopping centre, or strolling down a leafy country lane.

We are watching you! Hello, hello! A riding crop! And what were you doing with that?

The inability of Conservatives to defend hunting sums up the problems of British conservatism. At the time of the first Countryside March, Joanna Trollope said that the essential ingredients of village life are "church, pub, farms, cottages, a small school and a Big House". That's swell if you're the one in the Big House, but presenting rural Britain as a haven of deference and social order cripples its political viability. In Britain, this is an undeferential age - see Digby Anderson on oiks et al. Rural America is about individual liberty - where even the brokest of broke losers with no teeth can still have a few acres, a rusting trailer, a hunting licence and a "Survivors Will Be Prosecuted" sign at the foot of his drive.

As long as British conservatism recoils from individual liberty and clings to Joanna Trollope Big-House social order, it will be unable to offer a viable modern defence of that which it wishes to conserve.

Sad, but good political sense. You'll have a hard time rallying the great unwashed with calls to save the lifestyle of the big country house. You'll have a much better time of it saying let people hunt if they choose.

Is this a battle or a soccer match? BBC headline: "Bannockburn battle to rage again: Scotland's greatest win over England is to be re-enacted and watched by up to 15,000 people on Saturday." Nope, just a reenactment of the Battle of Bannockburn, a "win" for Scotland in 1314.

And a great Telegraph editorial on yesterday's hunting vote and Commons circus, and how Blair's New Labour will use the heavy-handed Parliament Act to bypass any opposition in the Lords: Keeping aside the Government's real motives in banning hunting, there is something instructive about its willingness to use the Parliament Act. Asquith's Liberal government resorted to this extreme parliamentary measure in 1911 to allow Lloyd George's radical Budgets to bypass Conservative opposition in the House of Lords. Those Budgets laid the foundation of the welfare state.

In those days, radical campaigning politicians sought to introduce old-age pensions. Today, Tony Blair's Government deploys the Parliament Act in defence of a few score foxes per hunting season. How Lloyd George and his ideological heirs in the Labour Party must be laughing at the dismal automatons crowding the government benches today.

They pose as modernisers, while indulging their activists back home by tossing them an Old Labour bone; they take time from a crowded parliamentary session, with public services still unreformed and unimproved, to throw up a giant, self-indulgent distraction from the work they were elected to do.

And on this day in 1620, the ship Mayflower, brimming with righteous unhappy Calvinists, left Plymouth, England bound for parts unknown, somewhere off in the east. Does this count as irony? The spot where they spent their last night in England is now a large distillery, the HQ of the Plymouth Gin Company. Excellent for GTs and Martinis, I might add. Here are the "Mayflower Steps."

Snooping around, I see Jeremy Irons has been with the pro-hunting Alliance for a bit, saying quite intelligently in 1999: [The countryside] is in modern parlance a balanced ecosystem, and our presence here today is like being a signal; a signal not to meddle for politically correct reasons with that balance. A signal that the voice of rural England will be heard. A signal to leave our countryside alone.

Quite well put, as opposed to ninnies like Paul McCartney who have little to add but sentimental drivel like: There can be no rational reason for this practice to continue, and only when it is banned will we be able to emerge from the dark ages into the light of a new century. Not too cliched, eh?

Other pro-hunting/pro-Countryside Alliance actors and actresses include the aforementioned Anthony Andrews, Robert Hardy (Siegfried of All Creatures Great and Small fame -- one of my all time favorites), Simon Williams (of Upstairs, Downstairs ... noticing a pattern here?), Marsha Fitzalan, and the writer Sir John Mortimer.

Good catch! Shame on me, I looked right over this. Clearly Brideshead was a transformative experience. Add to this, Edward Fox:

Fox has a reputation of his dapper and well-spoken, almost Edwardian, on-screen persona translating into real-life.

He admits he still wears the suits he donned for Edward and Mrs Simpson, even though he knows it makes him seem fusty.

But he is proud of the fact that he has never worn jeans, adding: "I won't wear shell suits either."

Mr. Soames will no doubt approve.

My dear Dr. C, did you not see that Sebastian Flyte, i.e. Anthony Andrews, is already in the Countryside trenches?

Good to see that Charles Ryder, er Jeremy Irons, supports the Countryside Alliance in maintaining fox hunting and the rural life. I am sure the Marchmains are also firmly behind them as well, and Lady Julia will mention the fuss at the next Conservative Ladies Meeting.

A new look -- still tinkering and adjusting.

A Welsh Anglican vicar is being investigated by the local police because (get this) his church bells are too loud and some have complained. File this under "givemeabreak":

However, the vicar said that he was "really annoyed" when he learnt about the investigation.

"I resent being treated in the same way as someone playing their hi-fi at two o'clock in the morning," he said.

"The whole thing is a nonsense - the clock has been in the church for 60 years and it is part of the town's heritage.

"For every complaint that the council has had, I have had half a dozen people telling me what nonsense it all is."

"I just hope that the council will have a degree of common sense about this," he added.

Kids roaring their uber-bass stereos is individual freedom in action; churches ringing their bells is an annoyance. Wake me up when it is over.

Here's when you know you have a problem: you show up for your drunk driving hearing ... drunk:

"You don't show up drunk for a preliminary hearing, especially when it's a drunk-driving case," [Judge Dean] Patton said. "I asked him what he was thinking and he said, 'You told me I could drink at home.'"

And how about this for conclusive on the Dan Rather-Fake Bush memos scandal. Little Green Footballs has clearly nailed it.

Happy Birthday James Fenimore Cooper. His American Democrat is a treat, and a bargain too.

Happy Birthday William Howard Taft, President and Justice. The safe vote in 1912.

Requiem in pace Electric Review, a smart "High Tory" blog of politics, literature, and culture. We'll keep the link so the ER's archives are available, but how sad. Where will the ER's High Tory writers go now? Find a place, please.

And a nice bit from Anthony Daniels over at the Social Affairs Unit (thanks to Enoch Soames for the heads-up) about the excesses of self-expression. My mind immediately went back to James Fitzjames Stephen and his jeremiad against Mill:

The odd manner in which Mr. Mill worships mere variety, and confounds the proposition that variety is good with the proposition that goodness is various, is well illustrated by the lines which follow this passage:-- "Exceptional individuals ... should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass" --in order that there may be enough of them to "point out the way." Eccentricity is much required in these days. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded, and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportioned to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric makes the chief danger of the time.

If this advice were followed, we should have as many little oddities in manner and behaviour as we have people who wish to pass for men of genius. Eccentricity is far more often a mark of weakness than a mark of strength. Weakness wishes, as a rule, to attract attention by trifling distinctions, and strength wishes to avoid it. Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people.

Here, here. Difference for difference sake stinks of desperation, a call to "pay attention to me."

Imagine there's no heaven

Apparently Anglican priests are quite good at it , better even than Madonna. (Rather daring of him though to believe in the Incarnation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The opening paragraph of this Spectator piece shows why Mark Steyn is the best in the business now, but the trenchant analysis of the article shows why he'll stay that way for a long time.

Well, Well, Well

And then there come those moments in the political theater called a Presidential Election Year that go beyond farce into the netherworld of possible insanity. Into the netherworld boldly goes John Kerry's Department of Wellness as even Kerry supporter Mickey Kaus recognizes. Really if Kerry hadn't announced it himself, I would have dismissed this Department of Wellness as a ploy by the geniuses who bring us "the People's Cube" .

Yes, it's HI-LARIOUS. But as Jonah Goldberg notes in The Corner , the name, the Department of Wellness, rings with an Orwellian tone. And so it does, but I find an even more ominous literary parallel. Start with a Department of Wellness and the Brave New World is not far behind.

Does this sound a bit extreme even from Cassandra, The Style Editor? Perhaps, but consider. The World Health Organization in its Constitution defines health as " state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." In which case your Style Editor would like to point out that she may have been healthy for all of 5 years out of her 33, but WHO might think that assessment optimistic. However, your average Victorian novelist would describe me as "bursting with rude health."

From WHO this well-being gobbledygook means nothing. There's so much disease and infirmity in the world that WHO can't even cope with that much less worry about our mental and social well-beings. (Although as it is, WHO spends far too much time worrying about health problems in the developed world.) In the developed world where we don't have diseases like malaria (How could I resist?) slaughtering our children and driving down the GDP, however, this definition becomes extremely problematic, and there is no doubt in my mind that the Dept. of Wellness would embrace WHO's definition. After all, it's international.

Thisdefinition leads to a bioethical swamp through which we will pick our way in later postings, but not now because I am feeling unwell.

Ho-hum, [sigh], and "yawn," Dalrymple dissects boredom in the latest Spectator with the expected lovely result. This underlying, or existential, boredom — and the desire to overcome it by whatever means — is a major cause of the epidemic of self-destructive, as well as antisocial, behaviour that has swept the Western world in the past few decades, Britain above all. In matters of self-destruction, in fact, we are in the vanguard. If gold medals had been awarded at the Olympics for senseless, self-destructive egotism, we’d have swept the board, gold, silver and bronze.

The sensible royalist Enoch Soames expresses horror at poorly dressed, swinging Republicans at the NYC Convention last week: Oh, I would like to meet their tailor...If they had one. I am not sure that one should deliver the reins of a nation's government into hands that are incapable of tying a proper knot. Please people, a tie requires a dimple, and the collar forms an inverted "V", it should not be that difficult to discover the center...Not left or right but center. As in “line it up with the buttons you hideous ass” center, are there no mirrors in your house? You might scoff at a king, but one thing is certain, you would never be embarrassed by his knot.

Being a bowtie devotee, I never have to worry over such barbarities.

NR Online has pooled the thoughts of many literary, academic, and political heavies on which are the best/most-important non-fiction books of the 20th century. Several observations on the selections:

Here, here on C.S. Lewis (add the Screwtape Letters), Michael Oakeshott, Joseph Schumpeter (to the horror of libertarians, to the joy of traditionalists), and G. K. Chesterton.

Here, here on Tom Wolfe, but honorable mention to his From Bauhaus to Our House.

Camus? Important, yes, but great? Something to be honored or admired? Not sure on that.

Hofstader's Age of Reform is the century's greatest American history book? Debatable. Where is Louis Hartz? Perry Miller?

Irving Babbitt's Democracy and Leadership is the safe choice, but I've always liked Literature and the American College better.

Lippmann's Public Philosophy perhaps?

I nearly fell over when I saw Pobedonostsev's Reflections -- certainly a fascinating and useful thinker, a major stick-in-the-eye for 20th century liberal democracy, but one of the greatest books of the century? The theorist of Russian czarism?

Roll Jordon Roll deserves mention for its impact if not for its interpretation. As my mentor once said, "Only Genovese could make collard greens and skunk sound so good." Methinks those planters were a bit more capitalist than the Godfather believes. Just how did they get so rich?

Freeman's Lee is great ... as a work of literature.

I prefer Von Mises' Human Action to his Bureaucracy. But I am a glutton for punishment.

Note to the Style Editor: they put Carson's Silent Spring on the list. How do you feel about that?

McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is good, but look to Roy Nichols' Disruption of American Democracy instead.

Might I add to the list Robert Remini's three volume Andrew Jackson biography, to say nothing of his massive bios of Webster and Clay? He is certainly one of the most prominent historians of the past 50 years. And how about David Donald's Lincoln?

Interesting that Leo Strauss and Eric Voeglin never appeared.