My fellow Golden Age of Detective Mysteries afficionado Mike Tooney has written an excellent review and summary of The Dead Sleep Lightly, a terrific collection of radio mystery scripts by the great detective story writer John Dickson Carr. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime," the murder that seems as if it cannot have been committed by a human being, and his narratives usually had a appeallingly creepy atmosphere and strong intimations of the preternatural.
The Dead Sleep Lightly is out of print, but copies are available in used bookstores and through online search engines. It is well worth seeking out.
With Mike's kind permission, I am reprinting his review here for your enjoyment and edification:
Radio: Until the advent of television, it was the most pervasive form of home entertainment available. Unlike TV, radio allowed--one could say forced--listeners to employ their imagination to its utmost, to supply imagery in their own private "theater of the mind." Radio could make a superstar of a ventriloquist' s dummy; it could permit listeners to create a convincing image of a comedian's old automobile, a vehicle that only existed as a vocalization; and radio could even give a boy genius an opportunity to scare the bejabbers out of America with a play about invaders from Mars.
The heyday of radio drama was in the 1930s and -40s; by a wonderful coincidence that was also the heyday of John Dickson Carr--and, needless to say, Carr was in the thick of it. In THE DEAD SLEEP LIGHTLY (1983), Douglas G. Greene has selected nine representative scripts that highlight Carr's abiding interests in the eerie and the mysterious.
For him, radio--rather than film--was the perfect medium of self-expression; film's faithful reproduction of reality was, for Carr, its principal limitation. If mystery thrives in the unseen and real terror has no objective substance, then it was in the "theater of the mind" that John Dickson Carr's talent for enthralling and baffling the listener would naturally flourish.
The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983)
John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) Edited and with an Introduction by Douglas G. Greene (born 1944) Doubleday Crime Club, Hardcover Collection of Radio Mystery Scripts: 9 Plays 184 pages
Contents: Introduction: "John Dickson Carr and the Radio Mystery" (11 pages):
"The Golden Age of the detective novel and the Golden Age of radio drama came together in the late 1930s and the early 1940s....perhaps the key year was 1939: that was when John Dickson Carr...wrote his first radio drama." (page 1)
"...Carr was able to combine comedy and spookiness in a way that...might be Wodehouseian or occultist, but was at base a Carrian synthesis. Only one of his comic plays is included in this volume; most of the others are neo-Gothic in mood." (page 2)
"Carr's use of atmosphere is key to his combination of rational detection with seemingly supernatural events. He uses setting and mood to make the reader [and listener] expect the supernatural and thus misdirect him from the clues that eventually lead to a rational solution." (page 3)
"To create mood by suggestion, to lead his audience into the menace of outer darkness--these are Carr's qualities both as a novelist and as a radio dramatist." (page 4)
With respect to his motion picture script writing experiences, "Carr's judgment [was] that filmmakers are 'madder than a crate-load of coots...'" (page 4)
"Carr enjoyed writing for the radio. He had no difficulty inventing plots, and he looked on his scripts as a welcome relaxation from writing novels." (page 8)
"Television was coming to dominate the American media, and Carr refused to write for video broadcasts; perhaps he recalled his unhappy experiences with film scripts." (page 9)
"Carr not only knew how far his audience's imagination could range; he counted on it. Some of the plays in this book depend on the listener fooling himself through his own imagination. " (page 10)
"...we have printed the scripts" [except for "some editorial decisions" that "we have had to make"] "exactly as broadcast, even including indications of knife-chords and other effects." (page 11)
1. Preface to "The Black Minute" (1 page)
Play: "The Black Minute" (1940)
Setting: London, 1940.
"So this is the ogre's den!" (page 15)
"I am reborn. Elsie talks to me." "Elsie?" "My wife. She died four years ago." (page 19)
"That, my friend, is not part of his head. That's the handle of the knife. He's been stabbed through the throat." (page 25)
Comment: Dr. Gideon Fell solves a case of murder during a seance in a locked and completely darkened room.
"A little dirt. A little blood. A little span of life composed of the two. I've nothing much to lose there." (page 31)
2. Preface to "The Devil's Saint" (1 page)
Play: "The Devil's Saint" (1943)
Setting: Paris and Touraine, 1927.
"Because everybody who sleeps in that room...dies. " (page 41)
"We are a very old family, my friend. Old, and perhaps accursed." (page 45)
"Then it WAS murder?" "Of course it was murder. Murder so cunningly contrived that the police never saw through it." (page 49)
Comment: An impetuous young man bets he can spend the night in a haunted room in a castle. If he wins, he can wed; if he loses, will he be--dead?
"Can a room kill? . . .[Carr] wrote two novels, a short story, and two radio-plays, each solving the problem of the murderous room in a different way." (page 35)
3. Preface to "The Dragon in the Pool" (1 page)
Play: "The Dragon in the Pool" (1944)
Setting: An English country house, early 1940s.
"My father, of course, didn't die in the swimming pool. But that pool is the answer to the whole mystery." (pages 55-56)
"I accounted to the police for every second of my time. I've got an alibi as big as a house." (page 58)
"He's been stabbed through the chest with a big wide-bladed knife." (page 65)
"I don't want to suggest you're stark, staring mad, but are you talking about an invisible knife?" (page 68)
Comment: Sometimes your worst enemy can be yourself, even if your intentions are good, a fact Andrew Prentice doesn't live long enough to appreciate; in this play, a victim turns into a sleuth and then into a victimizer-- quite an evolution for a character.
4. Preface to "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1 page)
Play: "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1943)
Setting: London, 1933
"There's a lunatic downstairs, sir." "....What sort of a lunatic is he?" (page 74)
"I lost my head and bolted out of that house as though the devil were after me. Maybe he was." (page 84)
"I can't go to the police; I can't go to you; where CAN I go?" "If I were less polite, sir, I should tell you." (page 85)
"The man's in danger, but you DON'T want the police?" (page 87)
"And this, apparently, is the famous library. This is the place where bogies walk and a telephone talks of its own accord." (page 91)
"He killed her. . . . Oh, not cleanly. Not with a knife or a bullet or poison. All he did was break her heart and leave her to starve." (page 94)
Comment: A man is convinced he's being haunted; Gideon Fell unveils the ghost and uncovers hidden motives.
"'The Dead Sleep Lightly' remains one of John Dickson Carr's most memorable accomplishments. With its shuddery atmosphere, its seemingly inexplicable events, and its rational conclusion, it is Carr at his finest." (page 71)
5. Preface to "Death Has Four Faces" (1 page)
Play: "Death Has Four Faces" (1944)
Setting: La Bandelette, France, 1930s.
"I know these young English. Each year they come here, and they lose what you call the shirt." (page 101)
"But don't try any funny business, old man." "Meaning what?" "There's a nice sharp knife--got that?--a nice sharp knife waiting for people who try funny business." (page 105)
"You say this knife was not used as a dagger in the hand of an assassin?" "Yes, I do." "But at the same time it was not thrown?" "Right." "It follows, then, that I seek an invisible murderer?" (pages 109-110)
Comment: A young Englishman "lose[s] what you call the shirt" at the roulette table and comes close to losing his head on the guillotine when he's charged with an impossible murder.
"Carr rarely transferred his novels or short stories bodily to the radio....'Death Has Four Faces' is a re-telling of his too-little- known story 'The Silver Curtain'." (page 97)
6. Preface to "Vampire Tower" (1 page)
Play: "Vampire Tower" (1944)
Setting: Kent, 1930s.
"Damme, my girl, how do you do it? Are you a demon in disguise, or what?" (page 117)
"All I did was touch the trigger by accident. (Innocently) I-I do hope I haven't hit anything." (page 121)
"Here's a human soul....[e]xisting only to gloat when it draws life from fellow creatures. It's a modern version, the true version, of the old vampire legend." (page 123)
Comment: A young man attempts to catch a killer--but catches something else entirely.
"'Just how far does any man trust his wife, or his fiancee either for that matter?'. . . . Carr never posed the question more effectively than in 'Vampire Tower,' with its contrast between the hearty normality of an English fete and the tale of a tortured soul." (page 113)
7. Preface to "The Devil's Manuscript" (1 page)
Play: "The Devil's Manuscript" (1944)
Setting: Weyford, an English seaside town, 1934.
"How did it happen, you ask? Can a manuscript, a mere story, strike the life out of a man's body?" (page 133)
"I'm absolutely crackers about you! Don't you know that?" "No. I don't." "WELL, I AM!" (page 134)
Comment: Never accept a challenge offered by a writer of ghost stories; the last line of the play is a killer.
"When John Dickson Carr chose a story by another author to adapt for the radio, he usually revised the original so much that it became his own work. . . . For this book, we have chosen 'The Devil's Manuscript,' based (with many changes) on [Ambrose] Bierce's 'The Suitable Surroundings' ." (page 131)
8. Preface to "White Tiger Passage" (1 page)
Play: "White Tiger Passage" (1955)
Setting: Brighton, 1954.
"To my shame and sorrow, madam, I AM Willie Whiskers." (page 150)
"Attend to me, my friend. This person is not normal. He is mad, and he have a madman's logic." (page 152)
"He'd been first stabbed in the back, and then . . . well, disembowelled. " (page 154)
"This knife I have here is a very interesting knife. I have only to press the button...(sharp click)...and a double-edged blade springs out." (page 162)
Comment: Andy Hardy and Nancy Drew versus the Slasher of the Boulevards: "Only a handful of [Carr's] radio scripts . . . feature hilarious coincidences worthy of P.G. Wodehouse, combined with subtle clues worthy of John Dickson Carr. The best of these is 'White Tiger Passage'..." (page 146)
9. Preface to "The Villa of the Damned" (1 page)
Play: "The Villa of the Damned" (1955)
Setting: Rome and Naples at the time of Mussolini.
"No, I've never met her. But I've read a good deal about her family history. Daggers, poison, and treachery for more than five hundred years." (pages 168-169)
"Where did you get this sudden obsession about ghosts?" (page 170)
"Mortui te salutamus!" "'Mortui'?" "'We WHO HAVE ALREADY DIED salute you!'" (page 174)
Comment: A beautiful woman wants to revive a dead lover--dead for three hundred years.
"The impossible situation in 'The Villa of the Damned' may be the most daring of all. It is surely incredible that an entire suburb-- and perhaps an entire century--can vanish like smoke...." (page 165)
Short Biographical Sketch of John Dickson Carr (1 page)
Occasional AmSpec contributor S.T. Karnick has a piece at TCS Daily arguing for withdrawal from Iraq shortly after the troop surge shows results. Whatever the merits of this position, his framing of it is more than a little peculiar. Karnick claims he's laying out the classical liberal view of foreign policy. "Nation-building is simply not a proper function for government, according to classical liberal thinking," he writes. That statement would seem to write John Stuart Mill, a defender of the British Empire, out of classical liberalism. If the author of On Liberty isn't a liberal, no one is.
Mill's views on the Empire were different from those of some of his liberal contemporaries, by the way. There simply isn't any single set of narrow principles that define the "correct" classical liberal foreign policy (or modern liberal or conservative foreign policy, for that matter).
S.T. Karnick asked me to post this reply to John Tabin's post regarding Karnick's understanding of Mill and liberalism:
Although his book On Liberty was indeed highly influential in forming the modern understanding of classical Whig liberalism, Mill frequently supported policies antithetical to it, because he believed in utilitarianism over natural rights. The following famous words from On Liberty—
"... the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or to forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise."
—are all too easily cast aside by the ultilitarian thought in the sentence that immediately followed:
"To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else." (On Liberty, ch. 1.)
This is a loophole through which one can drive an entire army. One could surely "calculate" that a free Iraq would "produce evil to someone else," and hence we may be justified in compelling it to become a modern, liberal, democratic state. But even if we set aside the fact that it is manifestly impossible to accomplish this task, it is clearly a contradiction of the first four sentences of Mill's statement. Mill's willingness to set such limits on liberty is, in fact, precisely what begins the movement away from classical liberalism to the odious modern kind.
The two interesting points this discussion brings up are, one, that Mill, certainly a great figure in the understanding of classical liberalism, did not always hew to classical liberal principles, as in his willingness to allow for the possible incorporation of socialism on utilitarian grounds, and two, the fact that Mill's utilitarianism did indeed leave a philosophical loophole in liberalism that led the way to a modern-liberal fondness for "positive liberty," the premise that people are not truly free unless the circumstances of their lives promote their ability to reach their full potential, whatever that may be.
To be sure, Mill tried not to go very far down that road himself, but his utilitarianism did open the door for the undermining of classical liberalism. Bad premises typically lead to bad conclusions, and utilitarianism has some highly intractable flaws, as is probably true of any foundational philosophy.
Mill was a great thinker, of course, and he was wrestling with problems that no one has ever fully solved nor probably ever will. That he was not fully consistent in his views on liberty should not surprise us nor reduce our opinion of his great stature as a political and social philosopher.
As to what happened to liberalism after Mill, well, sometimes even the nicest people have naughty children.
Does Classical Liberalism Work in Foreign Affairs?
A commenter suggests that classical liberal principles are an impractical guide to international issues. Susan Behrend writes,
You are forgetting one thing - leaving a chaotic Afghanistan to the Taliban led directly to the 9/11 attacks. When the Soviets left, the world community just left the Afghans to sort it all out. They didn't do a very good job of it. . . . We can't leave Iraq to descend into becoming a failed state, unable to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing training camps. It is too easy for them to acquire weapons and transport them to our shores. THe problem with the pure ideology of classical liberalism is that its very purity makes it impractical in the real world. . . . What you say may be consistent with Locke et al, but it may not be consistent with keeping this country safe from harm
I agree that this is a dangerous world (of course!) and that our decisions must be based on realities. However, without principles and standards we have no way of judging reality and choosing what is the best course of action. As I have noted in my postings on this matter, there will always be empirical questions of fact to debate, and only then may we wisely apply our principles. I am glad that Susan brought up the emprical questions she raises.
However, I think that it is simply wrong to suggest that our government had a right, much less a responsibility, to project force into Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in order to prevent an attack on New York City nearly fifteen years later. We could hardly have drawn such a conclusion at the time or even in the years leading up to 9/11. Of course, Susan surely means the Afghanistan situation as an analogy to the present time, but the point remains: we have no way of predicting such remote threats and hence no sensible and effective way of countering them.
There is one thing we do know, however, and it is this: if we had operated on classical liberal principles during the mid to late 1990s, we would have answered the attacks on the United States—USS Cole, Somalia, etc.—forcefully, and that might indeed have prevented 9/11 from happening.
Using remote possibilities as premises for military action around the world is precisely what gets a nation in trouble. Responding firmly and effectively to real or imminent offenses is what keeps a nation out of trouble.
Today marks the centenary of the birth of the greatest movie star of all time, John Wayne.
Wayne was a huge presence in the motion picture industry, and also a superb actor whose skills were consistently underrated by the critics.
Turner Classic Movies featured Wayne during the month of May, showing many of his movies. But there should be much more attention toward his great career and recognition of the images he brought to American life and culture. The strong, stolid, but usually easy-going and often humorous hero he created is an American archetype, and although he had plenty of models on which to base it, he made it his own. He produced his own films for many years, ensuring that he could tell the stories he wanted to tell in the way he wanted them told.
Wayne was of the right politically, but in the great twentieth century tradition of American classical liberalism. He was a Reagan-style Republican, stronglt opposed to both communism and to big government in general. His characters were almost always on the side of the good, were often a little personally troubled but fought through the adversities, and struggled hard not only to do the right thing but to make their part of the world a little better.
That is a legacy to be proud of, and John Wayne has rightly been seen as an American hero himself. His reputation took quite a few knocks as the devaluation of all values hit American culture and society with increasing strength over the past few decades, but only fools and swime deny his greatness and the truth and goodness of what he stood for.
Here are some of my favorite John Wayne films, which you may find of interest in looking back over his great and well-spent life:
Rio Bravo—Definitely one of my favorite films of all time.
Hatari!—another great Duke film directed by Howard Hawks; Wayne leads a team of hunters in Africa who catch wild animals for zoos. Great fun, impressive action scenes, and very thought-provoking in observing the various characters' relationships and personal problems. It's a pity they don't make them this way today. A must-see. Actually, a must-own.
Stagecoach—a classic Western, directed by John Ford. A disparate group of people are thrown together in a crisis, and the Duke leads them out. It spawned dozens of imitators over the ensuing decades.
Tall in the Saddle—the Duke's character fights political corruption in the old West, while female ranch owner Ella Raines is a strong and effective character.
The Big Trail—an early classic Western of the sound era, directed by Raoul Walsh.
The Telegraph Trail—a quickly paced Western from 1933, with some surprisingly interesting insights into economics and politics. Wayne thwarts a greedy businessman who is attempting to stop technological progress (the telegraph) in order to protect his position.
The Searchers—critics greatly respect this Western for its thoughtfulness and complexity, and Wayne's characterization of the emotionally disturbed protagonist, Ethan Edwards ,is central to the film's success.
The Alamo and The Green Berets—Wayne had nothing but respect for America's fighting men, and he stuck his neck out to defend their honor when it began to be increasingly questioned during the 1960s and '70s. These two films are both excellent portrayals of men in combat and are highly moving at times. Wayne directed them himself, which suggests how important they were to him. Each of the two films has some uncomfortably sincere and direct moments which snide, smug people can deride as hokey, but anyone with any sense of decency and honor can appreciate the real beauties of these films.
The Hellfighters—Wayne portrays a character based on Red Adair, who led a team that made their living in the highly dangerous occupation of putting out oil-rig fires. Although directed by Andrew V. MacLaglen, the film takes the Howard Hawksian approach of using the dangers to reveal the personal character of the various individuals involved.
Donavan's Reef—with one of Wayne's warmest, most appealing performances and a great example of his skill at comedy, this John Ford comedy tangles with some serious issues and wins.
The Quiet Man—raucous comedy, heartfelt, drama, a beautiful setting, one of the greatest fight scenes of all time; directed by John Ford.
Bush Moving Toward Classical Liberal Position on Iraq?
President Bush echoed two thoughts from my "Classical Liberal Analysis of the Iraq War" (available in three parts, here, here, and here) yesterday in his press conference.
One was that the idea of the surge is to get the situation in Iraq stable enough so that we can leave:
I want to remind you as to why I sent more troops in. It was to help stabilize the capital. You're asking me how much longer; we have yet to even get all our troops in place. General David Petraeus laid out a plan for the Congress, he talked about a strategy all aiming—all aimed at helping this Iraqi government secure its capital so that they can do the—some of the political work necessary, the hard work necessary to reconcile. . . .
[I]t's going to require taking control of the capital. And the best way to do that was to follow the recommendations of General Petraeus. As I have constantly made clear, the recommendations of Baker-Hamilton appeal to me, and that is to be embedded and to train and to guard the territorial integrity of the country, and to have Special Forces to chase down al Qaeda. But I didn't think we could get there unless we increased the troop levels to secure the capital. I was fearful that violence would spiral out of control in Iraq, and that this experience of trying to help this democracy would—couldn't succeed.
Clearly he's at least toying with the idea of the surge is to get things stable enough so that we can get out. Unfortunately, he appears also to be rhetorically reserving the option to keep a skeleton crew of U.S troops there for the indefinite future. This would be extremely ill-advised, in my view, as the troops would simply become hostages in an unstable foreign country. However, Bush appears at least to be strongly acknowledging the notion that the idea of a surge is to enable the great majority of U.S. troops to get out. That's a good start.
Point two is when Bush said of Iraq, "It's a sovereign nation." That is explicitly point 1 of the classical liberal position I've outlined in my analysis. It also reinforces the notion that Bush is truly looking for an exit strategy (at long last) and that the surge is his attempt at achieving the soonest reasonably graceful withdrawal possible:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. You say you want nothing short of victory, that leaving Iraq would be catastrophic; you once again mentioned al Qaeda. Does that mean that you are willing to leave American troops there, no matter what the Iraqi government does? I know this is a question we've asked before, but you can begin it with a "yes" or "no."
THE PRESIDENT: We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It's their government's choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.
Where Bush fell short, once again, from a classical liberal perspective, was in his claim that fighting in Iraq is a good way to prosecute the war on terror, which I noted in my analysis is entirely unconvincing.
Failure in Iraq will cause generations to suffer, in my judgment. Al Qaeda will be emboldened. They will say, yes, once again, we've driven the great soft America out of a part of the region. It will cause them to be able to recruit more. It will give them safe haven. They are a direct threat to the United States. . . .
It's better to fight them there than here. And this concept about, well, maybe let's just kind of just leave them alone and maybe they'll be all right is naive. These people attacked us before we were in Iraq. They viciously attacked us before we were in Iraq, and they've been attacking ever since. They are a threat to your children, David, and whoever is in that Oval Office better understand it and take measures necessary to protect the American people.
On the question of whether it's better to fight "them" here or in Iraq, Bush's assumption that these are the only two alternatives seems to me highly dubious indeed. We should fight them wherever they are, provided only that there is a real, credible threat to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. And the connection between that and Iraq strikes me as very tenuous indeed.
Regardless of whether Bush follows through on the implication that he's preparing as graceful and quick an exit as possible, certainly the terms I mentioned in my analysis have begun to enter the debate. Of course I believe that that's a very good thing, as a classical liberal perspective provides wise guidelines for actions both domestic and foreign.
Do producers and TV networks have an obligation to their viewers?
Producers and networks are increasingly using long-term plotlines in order to keep viewers returning week after week. In shows such as 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, and the like, a long-term, overarching plot line keeps moving the narrative forward as each episode resolves lesser elements of the story.
It's a great way to keep viewers interested in a show, and when done well, it gives a program the narrative drive of a Victorian novel by Wilkie Collins or Anthony Trollope.
But what happens when such a show gets canceled? Should viewers who have invested multiple hours in a program just be left hanging?
That has been the case in the past, with cancellations of programs such as Point Pleasant and Miracles, and it appears that we're never going to find out who killed Boston medical examiner Jordan Cavanaugh's mother in Crossing Jordan, which NBC cancelled at the end of this just-concluded season.
CBS, however, has decided to reward its viewers' investment in the prgram Jericho, which the network cancelled last week after one full season. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Since [the cancellation announcement], passionate "Jericho" fans have organized and bombarded the network with letters and e-mails that state feelings, such as, "This show has touched us like no other before" and "CBS has cast aside a gem in Jericho." An online petition, http://www.jericholives.com, already has 60,000 signatures. . . .
[CBS President of Entertainment Nina] Tassler was so moved by the response that she posted a letter to the fans on http://www.cbs.com, her spokesman, Chris Ender, said. . . .
In the letter, Tassler told the fans that she also loved the show: "We truly appreciate the commitment you made to the series and we are humbled by your disappointment. In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure to the compelling drama that was the 'Jericho' story."
CBS executives will meet this week to discuss how the network can let the fans know how the "Jericho" story would have ended.
It's interesting to see Tassler explicitly acknowledge and apprecaite the viewers' commitment to the series, and recognize that it is both the right thing and a good public relations move for the network to oblige them by providing a sense of closure.
That's the right move, and let's hope that other networks follow suit.
As frequent visitors Pascal and Mike both note in comments on my "Theocracy Slur" item, it is clear that the old terms Left and Right do not apply in the post-Cold War world but that there are nonetheless still two very different mindsets operating in the West.
One could see these two minds as representing ends of a continuum, with most people somewhere near the middle of one side or the other (sort of a dual bell curve, with one bell on each side of the neutral or zero mark), but clearly there is a great difference between the mentality that embraces abortion and the one that abhors it; the one that presses for schemes of world government and the one that supports national sovereignty and individual and community autonomy; the one that believes national citizenship should ideally be granted to anyone who wants it and the one that believes in working for national cultural unity; the one that stresses government income redistribution by force and the one that regards private property as sacrosanct, and so on.
In fact, statism and (classical liberalism) can easily be seen as the outcomes of these two mentalities, not the fundamental source of the major conflicts within the West over the past few decades.
It is tempting to think that one side tends to think in terms of what is best for society and the other what is best for the individual. That is the way most people characterized the two sides during the century past: individualism and collectivism.
This goes back to the Enlightenment-era differences between the British/Scottish/American concern for individual rights and the Continental belief in the primacy of the General Will.
But this distinction doesn't wash today, nor did it do so during the past century. The same mind that favors economic redistribution, an obviously collectivist orientation, also favors the freeing of mentally unstable persons, a definitely individualist approach. And the same mind that presses for free markets often approves of community authority over how much public indecency to allow.
It it still not quite clear, then, exactly what constitutes the two separate minds.
Or is it?
Perhaps the difference between the two ends of the continuum is perfectly evident, but neither side wishes to admit it.
As I wrote in my article for the Fall 2006 issue of Orbis magazine, there appear to have been two main streams of thought throughout the history of Western civilization.
One stream comes from Greece and Rome, and the other from Calvary. The Western world, sometimes known as Christendom, has always vacillated between the two, with one stream sometimes sweeping history in its direction, and sometimes the other being predominant. Western history is in fact the record of the intellectual turbulence created and sustained by these two currents. To understand where we are today, we have to understand the nature of these two streams and where each would lead us.
I believe that we are at another point in history in which we may well be in transition between dominance by one of the two streams, as during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. Such periods are times of great intellectual and cultural tumult, and we are certainly experiencing a highl level of such turbulence these days. Hence, a further investigation of the nature of these two streams and their current manifestations is in order, and I shall provide it in coming installments on this site.
One of the most powerful weapons of the left today has quietly taken hold and moved into the mainstream culture without the right realizing what has been happening:
The Theocracy Slur.
This is the notion that American Christians want to replace our current form of government with a theocracy that will openly oppress non-Christians and impose the Ten Commandments and other bizarre (as they see it), sectarian opinions through law on a highly unwilling populace.
It is a perfectly absurd notion, given the vast distance our society would have to travel to get anywhere near such a condition, and the amount of anti-Christian policy that has been implemented by the nation’s courts and legislatures over the past half-century. Nonetheless, it is a common claim today, despite its entirely fantastic nature. It codifies and extends the Left's customary characterization of the Religious Right as an alien, un-American force.
Jon Sanders of the John Locke Foundation recently noted a typical example of the Theocracy Slur, one aimed at indoctrinating high school students in the dangers of Christian belief:
Burlington Township High School in New Jersey . . . last month held a mock hostage-taking and school shooting training scenario. As the Burlington County Timesreported, the perpetrators in this scenario were “members of a right-wing fundamentalist group called the ‘New Crusaders’ who don't believe in separation of church and state” and who “went to the school seeking justice because the daughter of one had been expelled for praying before class.”
Such grotesque and outlandish beliefs about American Christians are standard issue today among the left. Consider, for example, the following books released in the past couple of years: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the Twenty-First Century, by Kevin Phillips; Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right,by Mel White; The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris; An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, by Michael Northcott; TheFundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America, edited by Kimberly Blake; and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, by Chris Hedges. Get the idea?
That’s just a sampling of many such titles, and the ideas in them are repeated continuously in articles, editorials, and op-eds and on TV and radio. Harris, for example, in a March 15, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “God’s Dupes,” hysterically claimed that every Christian, without exception, “inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism.” Harris argues as follows:
Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists—men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals—who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally—deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.
Harris’s conclusion: “it is time we broke this spell en masse.” A less tolerant attitude is hardly imaginable, and one can clearly see that Harris is simply projecting his own hatred onto others, imagining that Christians must despise him as much as he loathes them. And naturally, if one assumes that all Christians, inadvertently or otherwise, are protecting a vanguard of theocrats who would turn the United States into a Christian version of Taliban Afghanistan—after all, Calvin’s Geneva was actually a pretty good place—then they are a mortal danger to society and must be suppressed at all costs.
Hence the Theocracy Slur is central to leftist politics today. Harris makes the argument thoroughly explicit, but he is only articulating what the American atheist left increasingly and openly believes: that all Christians, without exception, are complicit in an ongoing attempt at a religious coup d’etat of the United States.
This belief, moreover, makes it impossible for Christians ever to win any trust from the atheist left, even by agreeing with them on particular issues, as some evangelicals are trying to do by adopting the left’s position on global warming, for example. For if all Christians are inherently furthering a Christian Taliban takeover, then Christianity is a dire problem and must be stamped out, for the nation’s protection.
As a result, concessions to the left only enable it to win greater support on those particular issues and do nothing to ameliorate the atheist left’s intense fear and hatred of Christianity.
In addition, the Theocracy Slur explains why the contemporary left expresses little to no concern about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Satanism: the numbers of believers in those religions in the United States are so small that the left sees no imminent danger from them. Christians, on the other hand, are numerous and potentially powerful.
The ultimate consequence of the current use of the media to enforce an identity politics position on personal expression is clear: to establish that people’s statements should be evaluated on their expected consequences, and that the expected consequences of Christianity are the enslavement of the American people to religious fanatics who wish torture and death on all unbelievers. The only solution to such a problem is to unleash dreadful assaults on those who dare to press Christian claims in public.
This is the impulse behind homosexual activists’ physical invasions of churches, spitting the Eucharist on the floor, and other such overtly bigoted and fanatical anti-religious behavior. It is also what is behind the attempts to criminalize criticism of homosexuality, even or especially when made from church pulpits.
The process is simple: claim that an idea or proposition with which you disagree endangers the physical safety of some group of people, and then declare that for their protection such statements simply cannot be made. Then use all possible means to stop them: media attacks, character assassination, lawsuits, physical intimidation, and, whenever possible, legislation and the use of government force.
It can happen here, to revive Sinclair Lewis’s claim about fascism, and it is clear that these attacks must only increase unless and until American Christians stand up on their hind legs and fight back with equal force.
Such a counterattack will bring even greater fury from the atheist left, there can be no doubt, but it is the only alternative to the increasing erosion of Christianity as a viable force in American society. That, after all, is the enemy’s real goal.
A Strong Defense of Jerry Falwell—And an Appreciation of Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter's thoughts on the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, from her most recent column, are impressive. She is unbounded in her admiration for the man, saying, " Let me be the first to say: I ALWAYS agreed with the Rev. Falwell."
Her comments provide a powerful tonic against the toxins spread by the press both during Falwell's life and in the wake of his death. Here is an excerpt:
No man in the last century better illustrated Jesus' warning that "All men will hate you because of me" than the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who left this world on Tuesday. Separately, no man better illustrates my warning that it doesn't pay to be nice to liberals
Falwell was a perfected Christian. He exuded Christian love for all men, hating sin while loving sinners. This is as opposed to liberals, who just love sinners. Like Christ ministering to prostitutes, Falwell regularly left the safe confines of his church to show up in such benighted venues as CNN.
He was such a good Christian that back when we used to be on TV together during Clinton's impeachment, I sometimes wanted to say to him, "Step aside, reverend -- let the mean girl handle this one." (Why, that guy probably prayed for Clinton!)
For putting Christ above everything -- even the opportunity to make a humiliating joke about Clinton -- Falwell is known as "controversial." Nothing is ever as "controversial" as yammering about Scripture as if, you know, it's the word of God or something.
Coulter is right. Among people in power in this nation, there is a powerful desire to suppress real knowledge of Christianity and in particular its centrality to all that is good in our society and in fact to all of Western civilization throughout history. That is a fact and should be a truism. The media's specious and contemptible use of the Rev. Mr. Falwell as a punching bag over the years is direct and irrefutable proof that most people in positions of power in this society despise and reject the very things that have made this such a great, powerful, and unusually virtuous nation.
Coulter herself is widely hated among American smarty-pants types, perhaps even more than the Rev. Mr. Falwell was, and that is saying a lot. What people despise about her is that she is a powerful and uncompromising defender of Christianity.
Her rhetoric is often intermperate, and indeed sometimes unjustifiably so, but what she stands for is thoroughly good and right.
The press love "suffering Christ" Christians who embrace everyone who hates them and who rush to adopt the values and ideas of the enemies of the faith. They intensely hate Martin Luther-style Christians whose fervor for their beliefs do not allow for smarmy compromises with the minions of the devil.
It is time for those who believe in a culture that values freedom, truth, and other Christian virtues to stand up and say so, as Ann Coulter does.
Now here's a production that combines beauty and sense: a choir singing about the ideas of the great economist Milton Friedman, introduced by the man himself. See it here.
The far-left polemicist Alexander Cockburn, longtime columnist for The Nation, has been openly skeptical toward the dangerous-anthropogenic global warming theory that has increasingly animated the entire left during the past decade. In a recent column in The Nation, he skewers the global warming alarmists as superstitious, unreasoning, supercilious chiliasts.
There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.
Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.
And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That’s the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it’s at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn’t even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere’s CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels. . . .
As [meteorologist Martin] Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor “is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun. ... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane.” And water is exactly that component of the Earth’s heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.
It’s a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties, like the medieval warming period’s higher-than-today temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local European affair.
We’re warmer now because today’s world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth’s elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth’s tilt. . . . In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth’s orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there’s 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. “The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” Hertzberg concludes. “It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse.” In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.
Those are the facts, but given that they conflict with the religion of the global warming alarmists, it is unlikely that the left will listen to Cockburn on this. On the contrary, based on past experience they're much more likely to break out the thumbscrews and iron maiden.
Leftists Spew Hatred Toward Dead Man—A Call for Action
The explosion of hatred toward the late Rev. Jerry Falwell on the left is truly appalling. It is documented in excruciating terms in this article on the Newsbusters site.
I'll provide just one representative sample of this revolting manifestation of the blatant evilness of the modern left, as reported in the Newsbusters article:
John Edward's former campaign blogger Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:
The gates of hell swing open and Satan welcomes his beloved son
No word yet on whether or not that position is shared by John and Elizabeth Edwards campaign, or how Edward's staff will spin this into a fundraising opportunity.
Can you imagine the firestorm of denunciation if people on the right said things like this?
Remember what happened to Tim Hardaway and Don Imus for far milder comments?
I call upon Time magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN, the New Republic, and all other left-of-center major newspapers, magazines, and media outlets to report on this and repudiate it, just as they would if the right said these things about someone on the left.
In a comment on our entry on Hollywood censorship of smoking, Lars Walker points out that "from an actor's point of view--a cigarette gives you something to do with your hands." He's quite right, and there's more interesting cultural material to mine from this subject.
To wit . . .
The common belief is that cigarette smoking in movies became the norm when talkies started and actors didn't know what do with themselves during long conversations that were necessitated by static cameras lodged in enormous, soundproof booths. There's some plausibility in that, but if you watch silent films you'll see that there's plenty of cigarette smoking in them as well. Cigarette smoking increased rapidly after World War I, and largely because of the invention of the safety match, which is much easier to use than a taper!
In short, the movies had nothing to do with it.
My theory is that smoking has always been popular in the movies because the rising, curling, and ever-changing image of smoke coming from a cigarette makes boring conversation shots look much more interesting. It would be a pity to take that away from people just to prevent a few hundred thousand agonizing deaths from cancer each year.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a televison evangelist and moral activist, died today at the age of 73.
Falwell was, of course, one of the great bugaboos of the Left for the past three decades, and he earned that distinction largely by having non-atheist and non-latitudinarian principles and sticking to them.
Falwell had failed to install the theocracy that leftists had long insisted he was intent on creating in the United States.
Although I disagree with some of his theological positions and many of his political statements, I acknowledge that Jerry Falwell tried to work correctly within the American system to effect positive change.
He founded an institution, Liberty University, that may well hae a greater and more lasting influence on American society than any of his political activities did.
Falwell's political activities were thoroughly justifiable on the basis of American history and our constitutional order, in great contrast to those of most other prominent political activists of our time, who wish to force their wandering desires and phony panics on us by dint of pure government power.
Far from trying to impose a theocracy, Falwell tried to work through the electoral process honestly to restore to the American people the opportunity to decide the important moral issues of our time. Despite his occasional rhetorical excesses, Jerry Falwell appears to have been an honorable man.
AP reports that Falwell enjoyed a good day at the university in his last hours: "The day before he died, Falwell 'had been up on the mountain by the logo, and students were up there picnicking, and he had had a happy exchange with those students,' [Liberty University executive vice president Ron] Godwin said. Tuesday morning, he said, Falwell was talking about plans for the future." That sounds like a fine way to leave this vale.
The Motion Picture Assoociation of America has announced that portrayals of smoking will be considered in rating movies, along with depictions of sexuality and violence. Glamorization of smoking will bring on a more restrictive rating, and tobacco use will be added to the increasingly elaborate descriptions of movie content the industry's rating system is incorporating.
Given that nobody is allowed to smoke anywhere in the previously free United States, simple realism would seem to require filmmakers to stop showing people smoking. Of course, reality hasn't been an interest for Hollywood for several decades.
Witness, for example, Hollywood's support for global warming myths and leftist politics.
Of course the real reason smoking is so common in Hollywood movies is that it is so common in Hollywood. I'd very much like to see statistics on this, but it's clear that Hollywood people smoke more than the rest of us for two reasons.
One, smoking does help an individual keep their weight down, though it is hardly a panacea in that regard, and
Two, smoking is more common among the lower classes than among the upper.
F. A. Hayek and the Essentials of Classical Liberalism
My essay on the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek in the April 20 print edition of National Review (not available online) considers the essentials of classical liberalism—and finds that a crucial element of classical liberalism is the moral philosophy developed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and dervived from Christian principles.
What distinguishes classical liberalism—and modern Reaganite conservatism—from libertarianism is exactly this concern for preserving and strengthening the moral structures that make freedom possible.
Click here to read on....
Repairing the Right
By S. T. Karnick
Review of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, edited by Edward Feser (New York: Cambridge University Press), 342 pages, $29.99 pb, ISBN 0521615011
The 6.4 trillion dollar question in American politics today is whether the great coalition of the Right—the Reagan alliance between libertarians and traditionalist conservatives—can be put back together. It is tempting to see the Nobel Prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek (1899-1992) as a potential key figure in establishing a solid philosophical foundation for such a happy remarriage. Hayek wrote secular arguments for traditionalist policies and philosophy, and based them solidly on worldly evidence.
As Edward Feser observes in his Introduction to the thoroughly informative and stimulating Cambridge Companion to Hayek which he edited, “it is typical of New Right thinking to try to combine an emphasis on free markets, limited government, and individual liberty with the encouragement of personal moral restraint and respect for tradition and religion. Hayek’s body of thought weaves these themes together systematically, regarding as it does both the deliverances of market competition and those of tradition as the byproducts of similar selection mechanisms.”
That should be enough, one might think, but it isn’t, as the book ultimately makes clear. Subsequent chapters trace the evolution of Hayek’s subject matter from his early days as an economist to his political, philosophic, and scientific writings of later years. Underneath the variety of subjects he tackled, Hayek’s thinking retained a firm foundation. As Feser notes, “A characteristically New Right combination of classical liberal economics and Burkean conservative social theory seems to have been his settled position, and by the end of his life, the label ‘Burkean Whig’ was the one he indicated best characterized his politics.”
Contributor Robert Skidelsky points out that Hayek was no libertarian—he argued, for example, that the state should provide a social safety net. As contributor Andrew Gamble notes, “The issue he always maintained was not whether planning should be done or not, but whether it should be done centrally or divided among many individuals.” His preference, of course, was for the latter.
The book offers good insights into Hayek’s debates with British economist John Maynard Keynes. The two had more in common than is commonly thought. Skidelsky notes that Keynes identified the intellectual foundations of Western civilization as “the Christian Ethic, the Scientific Spirit and the Rule of Law,” and he cordially welcomed Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, calling it “a grand book” in which he found himself “in deeply moved agreement,” though he did have some criticisms, maintaining (of course) that macroeconomic government intervention could be done well, which Hayek dogmatically denied.
Skidelsky notes that Keynes really wanted the same thing as Hayek: to defend Western, liberal values. Their big difference was over the amount of state intervention required for that good work. Moreover, as more than one contributor to the book observes, Hayek never really did say exactly where to draw the line between excessive laissez-faire and overly intrusive government. He was completely victorious, however, in his criticism of socialism, beginning in the late 1930s. His argument was simple and devastating: “he argued that socialist planning could not accomplish the ends it set out for itself,” contributor Bruce Caldwell notes.
A market economy, Hayek noted, incorporates an unimaginably large number of personal decisions based on an even greater number of individual preferences, and does so with amazing accuracy through the price mechanism. And even if it were possible for any group of people or machines to do the computations necessary to replace the price mechanism, the knowledge they would need—the individual preferences—does not exist outside the local context and thus cannot be accessed by planners, as contributor Peter J. Boettke notes.
Hayek truly can be said to have changed the world with his publication of The Road to Serfdom in 1944, just when it seemed that the movement toward collectivism was inevitable and inexorable. Contributor Anthony O’Hear praises the book’s “combative spirit” and notes, “Hayek asserts that socialism means slavery and that even in the democratic west we are steadily moving in the direction of socialism.”
The good news Hayek found was that central planning wasn’t necessary anyway. As contributor Eric Mack points out, “A great deal of Hayek’s message is simply that a well-ordered society exhibiting rational coordination among its members need not be a designed and commanded order. Freedom and the choices of free individuals can also be the source of rational coordination.” In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek sketched out a political approach intended to preserve such a liberal social order.
A central tenet is that legitimate government actions are those that adhere to the principle of equality before the law. Favoring individuals or groups would thus be forbidden. This makes individual liberty a critical element of the equation. In addition, Hayek says, the government itself should be bound by the rule of law. Even within these strictures, he concedes, not all that is permissible will be wise, but the principles would definitely sweep away the kind of destructive economic planning that was common at the time.
This effort was really an attempt to posit classical liberalism as the alternative to modern statism. As contributor Chanduran Kukathas notes, The Constitution of Liberty opens with the words, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations.” The political system that Hayek proposed, as Kukathas describes it, was an order “governed by abstract rules of just conduct.” Abstract rules, contributor Roger Scruton notes, govern conduct without specifying the end to be achieved by them. An order based on abstract rules and individual liberty is able to accommodate a healthy pluralism and avert tribalism, two important goals for Hayek after World War II.
The opposite danger, however, is the great curse of the modern West. A liberal social order “is possible . . . only if there is widespread agreement on some values,” Kukathas notes. Hayek places his trust in the organic growth of socially beneficial customs and traditions. But traditions break down all the time, Scruton observes, and “if these good things decay, then there is no way, according to Hayek, that legislation can replace them. For they arise spontaneously or not at all.” Government cannot reverse the decay, and the foundations of the liberal social order and market economy continue to erode.
What keeps a society together, Scruton observes, are bonds of “history, territory, language, and allegiance. . . . Only when this sense of membership is in place are people disposed to submit to a common rule of law and willing to place contractual obligations to strangers above tribal and family ties.” Excessive emphasis on the free and sovereign individual frays these bonds, Scruton observes, and the modern, heavily interventionist state undermines these traditions further. As a result, Scruton notes, “spontaneous order . . . is a rare achievement” in human history.
This is where conservatism is essential to the maintenance of a liberal social order, Scruton says, for one of conservatism’s goals is “to give a coherent and humane account of the kind of pre-political membership that will sustain free institutions and a rule of law.” This essential loyalty cannot “be costlessly replaced by relations of a purely contractual kind.” Therefore, Scruton concludes, “liberalism is possible only under a conservative government.”
Although Hayek has the right end in view, his means are insufficient to get us there. In the end, Hayek’s thinking is an important and even necessary element of the modern right—but not a sufficient one. Where Hayek leaves off, other defenders of moral traditions and social bonds must step forward.
Although the movies of the past few decades have often treated motherhood rather cynically, there have been some exemplary mothers in Hollywood films, especially during the 1930s and ’40s.
Some fine examples are the self-sacrificing Apple Annie (May Robson) in Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day, the courageous and indomitable Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson) in the William Wyler film of the same name, the sweet-natured and infinitely supportive Emily Hardy (Fay Holden) in MGM’s underappreciated Andy Hardy series, and the intrepid, widowed businesswoman and homemaker Lillian Gilbreth (Myrna Loy) in Belles on Their Toes.
Most impressive of all, however, is Vinnie Day, played superbly by Irene Dunne in the 1947 classic Life with Father. Seemingly submissive and even a bit ditzy, she’s the glue that holds both the film and the family together in spite of irascible husband Clare’s fulminations and demanding ways. Vinnie uses persuasion, quiet strength, and sly manipulation to make things right, and she is unfailingly patient and decent.
She also looks out for her family’s spiritual welfare, and when she finds out that Clare has never been baptized, she is appalled and gets to work on making sure that they will one day be united in Heaven. A house with a mother like Vinnie is the closest to Heaven most of us can hope to get in this life.
The New York Times reports that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani is going to clarify his position on abortion:
After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.
I certainly will not support him, and I think this dooms his chances of getting the Republican presidential nomination.
At least, however, this finally shows some integrity, which was always Rudy's greatest selling point. Some will perhaps turn their support to him for this reason.
But many, many, many more will stay away permanently.
Look at it the other way: imagine that a Democratic candidate for president stated his or her steadfast opposition to legalized abortion and called for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Such a candidate could get support but could not possibly win the nomination.
The great majority of single-issue voters regarding abortion are pro-life. That means Rudy's position is a net loser even among the general population, and definitely a big loser among Republicans.
All of this suggests that Rudy is hoping to gin up enough support among Republicans, and among Democrats crossing over to vote in Republican primaries, so as to show sufficient support so that he can run as a third-party candidate next year.
As Broadcasting and Cable reports, "violence did not even make the list of top programming complaints to the commission, which did include complaints about indecency/profanity and obscenity, as well as in two catch-all categories for general criticisms."
As I noted in my earlier piece on the FCC mentioned above, the public is much more concerned about indecency on television than violence in the medium.
The B&C story continues:
In its quarterly complaint report released Wednesday, the FCC did not break out the number of complaints for violence--FCC spokesman Clyde Ensslin was unable to provide a breakout of violence complaints at press time. But that absence means there were not enough complaints to make the list of top radio and TV programming complaints, the lowest number of which was 1,106 for a category simply labeled "general criticism."
One argument is that the FCC doesn't have the ability to regulate violence, which could discourage complaints from being lodged. But, also according to the FCC, over a third of the TV shows that had indecency complaints filed against them for the first half of 2006 were cable programs, which the commission doesn't regulate either.
Interestingly, the number of complaints about obscenity, indecency, and profanity fell, according to the B&C story:
Meanwhile, consumer complaints to the FCC about obscenity, indecency and profanity, dropped precipitously from the third to the fourth quarters of 2006, though it was still the top category in number of complaints to the commission.
For the fourth quarter of 2006, 30,962 indecency/profanity or obscenity complaints were lodged, compared to 162,170 the previous quarter. Almost all the fourth-quarter complaints came in October (29,821), with only 835 complaints in November and 306 in December. The totals can include duplicate complaints sent to different parts of the agency, so the totals may even be smaller than that.
Whether that indicates that TV has cleaned up a bit during that quarter or viewers have simply tired of complaining is unclear.
What is perfectly clear, however, is that the FCC should get off of its crusade against violent programming and tend to cases of obscenity and indecency, which are plentiful enough and are under its appropriate constitutional purview.
Columnist Greg Couch agrees that nobody is to blame for St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock's death by automobile accident but Josh Hancock. Couch writes,
Josh Hancock, a St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, is dead. He drank, drove and died. Presumably, the drinking started after a game in the clubhouse. So the push is on to ban clubhouse beer, a tradition. Teams are making a statement about Hancock's death to find reasons and solutions. It's a nice gesture.
But here's the thing: Clubhouse beer didn't kill him.
Josh Hancock killed himself. He chose to drink, chose to drive. And he died.
I've railed against the locker-room culture plenty of times. It's hurtful and hateful. But culture holds hands with personal responsibility.
And personal responsibility comes first. It's true that Hancock's decision was comfortable because of the culture he works in. So it's important to analyze that culture.
But in this case, people are so uncomfortable criticizing a dead man that they've decided to focus on the culture as if Hancock were the victim.
He was, I guess, but it was a self-induced crime.
As Couch points out, the locker-room culture of today's athletes—like the culture as a whole—is often vulgar, narcissistic, and openly exploitative.
But if it is so, I would add, it is because our culture does not sufficiently teach and enforce the value of personal responsibility for our actions. If athletes and others knew that they would have to pay for their misdeeds with something more than an openly insincere apology—say, by losing their lucrative position for a significant period of time—they would be more likely to behave properly, or at least not to misbehave egregiously on a regular basis.
Hancock is not a victim of anybody or anything. He made his own choices, and his drunken driving could easily have killed others. He was a menace to himself and others.
As Couch notes,
Yes, the culture is there. But La Russa spoke to him, someone tried to get him to take a cab. And he made his own decisions. . . .
We all have to look out for each other. But one man was responsible for himself, old enough, at 29, to know the dangers of drinking and driving.
He made his own calls, followed his own path.
They led to a tow truck [into which he crashed his car in a fatal accident].
Taking beer out of baseball clubhouses is a phony response. It is simply another pretense that circustances, not people's decisions, are responsible for the harm caused by people's actions. What is even more absurd about such bans is that clubhouse beer had nothing to do with causing Hancock's death, which occurred nearly seven hours and a couple of tavern visits later.
That means, of course, that the bans are symbolic—and what they symbolize is entirely wrong, as noted above. The premise is in fact the real problem: undermining people's sense of personal responsibility doesn't protect them from "mistakes" that "circumstances" somehow force them to blunder into; it exposes them to self-destruction through indulgence of their own passions.
Identifying players who have alcohol problems and requiring them to get help in kicking the habit if they want to play in the big leagues would be a much more direct and actually effective solution. Big, powerful corporations like Major League Baseballe should not allow their employees to become public menaces.
In this regard, the National Football League's decision to suspend Pacman Jones for a year for a variety of offenses against morals, manners, and human decency is a good step in the right direction. The move came in the wake of prolonged criticism of the vile behavior of many NFL players, and was clearly a response to negative publicity.
That, however, is not a knock against what the NFL did but a very positive thing. That the NFL received negative publicity for the wanton misbehavior of its players is good, and that it responded with some sanctions that send a strong message to those players, are both just right.
The key thing to watch will be whether the NFL will continue to monitor its employees' behavior and impose sanctions that show it stands for decency, self-control, morality, and manners.
It will be equally interesting to see whether other sports leagues and other prominent institutions follow suit. Don't hold your breath.
ION Network to Be Sold—Potential Cultural Asset Wasted
One of the most woefully underutilized cultural assets of the past few years has been the ION Network. Originally called PaxTV, ION consists of sixty broadcast TV stations reaching ninety million households and all or nearly all the major markets.
It's a pity, because the market area the network was trying to fill is a big one, and it remains largely untapped.
The venture was begun as an alternative to the sleaziness and irresponsibility of most network programming (and please note that I mean that as a factual description, not a judgment, although it certainly implies one). However, the owner was burdened by a heavy debt load and failed to put enough money into original programming. Hence the network's offerings consisted largely of nightly reruns of what the owners considered to be the least offensive of then-recent network programs—Touched by an Angel, Dr. Quinn—Medicine Woman, Seventh Heaven, The Father Dowling Mysteries, Diagnosis: Murder, and the like. The few original programs the network came up with did all right but never posed any kind of a challenge to the major networks.
The network's founder, Lowell "Bud" Paxson, arranged increasing investments from NBC, a competing network that could not legally own a majority share of Pax TV but saw great protential for cross-promotion of NBC products. This was rather ironic in that NBC was arguably the most urban-oriented, corrosively "hip" of all the major TV networks while the Pax Network was obviously aimed at religious suburbanites.
Over time, the NBC tail increasingly wagged the Pax, then ION, dog, and now NBC stands poised to buy out the network through a corporate catspaw, the Citadel Investment Group. This appears to be a blatant attempt to skirt the law, but it may just manage to pass legal muster. At least NBC hopes so.
Many ION investors are not so sure, and they are furious over the deal, arguing that other offers on the table would be better and that the network's NBC-dominated board is selling out the stockholders on a deal that benefits NBC but not the ION investors for whom the board is supposed to be working. As today's New York Postreports,
Since January, NBC has been locked in a nasty battle with a large group of irate investors who argue that Ion's board has spurned better offers, including one from EchoStar Communications, in favor of the NBC/Citadel offer.
The shareholders, including hedge fund Gradient Partners and insurance company AIG, submitted their own offers but were rejected by the board. Under the NBC/Citadel deal, Citadel will pay $100 million for a majority stake in Ion while NBC maintains a minority stake. . . .
"We are exploring our legal rights and we believe the board acted improperly," said David Friedman, an attorney who represents the disgruntled investors.
The pity of it all is that there is a vast market of people who are dissatisfied with the major TV networks. They are served well by various offerings on cable/satellite channels, but having a single home for their programming would certainly appeal to the large number of religious Americans and should have a strong, ready-made, relatively affluent audience. If successsful, it would hold the other network's feet to the fire and give them cause to contemplate similar programming efforts.
Telander basically blames La Russa and, secondarily, the St. Louis Cardinals' owners, for Cardinal pitcher Josh Hancock's death by automible accident a week ago.
Telander couldn't be more wrong, and his well-meaning moralism will in fact do much harm and no good.
Writing about the death of St. Louis Cardinals'baseball player Josh Hancock just over a week ago in an automobile crash, Telander attempts to put the situation in perspective by noting that the team's manager, Tony La Russa, had been arrested for drunken driving two months ago. (He had fallen asleep at the wheel while waiting at a stoplight, and his blood alcohol content was found to be a shade over the legal limit.)
When he had his fatal collision, Hancock was very drunk (blood alcohol content twice the legal level), speeding, talking on his cellphone, and in possession of marijuana. Clearly, this was madly reckless behavior, and however much sympathy one might feel for Hancock and his family and friends, it is impossible for a rational person not to see that he dared death and came up short.
Telander, however, sees La Russa and the team as being at fault for setting up a culture of alcohol and bravado in the St. Louis Cardinals clubhouse. He argues this even though less than three days before the accident La Russa had a "serious heart-to-heart" conversation with Hancock about the immense dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. Telander writes:
'Maybe I could do a better job in my conversations,'' La Russa said of his talk with Hancock, ''but I pulled out all the stops....''
The trouble is that in baseball, as in other young men's sports, culture speaks louder than words.
You're a tough young guy, you go pedal to the metal, you're full of spit and vinegar, and, by God, you can kick anybody's ass, throw a 100-mile-an-hour speedball, and you're never gonna die.
It's called testosterone.
It's why guys take steroids. It's caveman.
Then you see your hip, famous manager out drinking, and you see the team cooler filled with beer, and you know your club is owned by the very people—Busch—who sell more beer in this country than anyone, and you can't stop yourself from going out and acting like a risk-taker from hell.
I believe that Telander's point of view is the real problem here.
Tony La Russa is personally responsible for any excessive drinking he may have ever done, and Hancock is personally responsible for his own.
La Russa is absolutely not responsible for Hancock’s drinking, even if he did set a “bad example.” We see bad examples all the time, and those of us who have the wisdom that comes with humility—which is available to all of us, even children—choose to learn the right lessons from these negative examples.
We don’t emulate anything we don’t want to emulate. It’s just as in hypnosis: outside of the use of real force, no one can really make you do anything you don’t really want to do. To blame La Russa for Hancock’s drinking, or even to attribute him as a cause in a chain of events, is dead wrong.
Such thinking is what really leads to trouble for the weak-willed or selfish among us, as it allows us to think that anything bad that happens to us is not ultimately our fault. It is true that it does rain on the just, but when the unjust knowingly walk out into a tornado, they and we have no right to blame anyone else but them.
Josh Hancock had a choice every day of his life, and he tragically chose to go down the road that led to an untimely death. Dozens upon dozens of other players passed through the St. Louis Cardinals clubhouse and chose a slightly or greatly different direction.
To blame Tony La Russa for Josh Hancock’s death, which is precisely what Telander's column does, is not only wrong but thorougly damaging to the very people he wants to help. Undermining peoples’ sense of personal responsibility will not make them more responsible. It will only embolden them to greater irresponsibility.
The other Josh Hancocks of the world need to know that they are entirely responsible for their actions, so that they will avoid what is bad and enjoy what is good.
The culture of alcohol and bravado in sports clubhouses certainly has its faults, but the truly dangerous mindset is our national culture that tends to deny personal moral responsibility.
Our friend Mike has sent us a comment that presents an amusing set of terms by which to understand contemporary politics and political analyses. It's good for a laugh, so I append it here, with gratitude to Mike for sending it.
Mike writes:
On a lighter note: Since this is the beginning of the latest political season, it might be instructive if we keep everything in perspective and respond in proportion to the provocation. To that end, here are some "measures" by which to judge the candidates and their pronouncements (from Willard R. Espy's AN ALMANAC OF WORDS AT PLAY, 1975, page 130, attributed to Joe Ecclesine):
Our friend Hunter Baker of RedState.com gave us an amusing and insightful response in a comment on my second post on Rudy Giuliani and abortion today, which I don't want you to miss. Here it is:
I think the conservative electorate is going to go through the same process I did with Rudy. Observe:
1. I like him. He worked miracles in NY! 2. Listen to him campaigning for Republicans, even GWB. What a team player! 3. This is a guy who knows how to fight a liberal press and win! 4. He said what? 5. He said what? 6. He said WHAT to WHOM? 7. Find me another candidate.
I've been through the cycle. Many of Rudy's current supporters are just hitting step 4.
He has said something else that makes all this less okay. I've seen a statement where he says it would be "OK" if a "strict constructionist" were to leave Roe in place.
Leaving aside the problem that it is impossible to put strict constructionist and leaving Roe in place in the same sentence without cognitive dissonance, I do not view this to be a positive development.
Rudy is out for me right now.
The idea that Rudy would seek out Supreme Court nominees who are "strict constructionists" who support keeping Roe v. Wade in places strikes me as extremely weaselly and not one that projects integrity and philosophical consistency. If we add that factor to our chart of Rudy's abortion logic, his position looks even more convoluted and devious:
I am personally very strongly opposed to abortion.
I enthusiastically support the Supreme Court's 1972 decision to remove voters' rights to decide whether to allow abortions in their respective states or otherwise to regulate the practice in any effective way.
As President, I would appoint "strict constructionist" judges, which most people think are the type who will probably overturn Roe v. Wade.
It will be "OK" with me if they do that.
But not all strict constructionist judges want to overturn Roe v. Wade, at least by my definition of the term.
So you have no way of knowing which way my nominees would move the U.S. Supreme Court on abortion.
Trust me to do the right thing—remember how decisive and valiant I looked after 9/11.
Hunter Baker is a classic social conservative, and his opinion on these subjects carries a lot of weight with me. My doubt about Rudy's ability to woo social conservative Republicans (something of a redundancy, perhaps?)—already expressed several times on this site and reiterated this morning—just increased a notch or two.
Rudy G. Offers Half an Abortion Loaf . . . Will It Be Enough?
In contrast to the other worthies at last night's Simi Valley, California, debate among candidates for the Republican party's presidential nomination, Rudy Guiliani expressed very muted support for the idea of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its 1972 Roe v. Wade decision that made it impossible for states to regulate abortion.
Most of the candidates present expressed great enthusiasm for a reversal, with Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback characterizing the prospect as a "glorious day of human liberty and freedom."
"It would be OK to repeal," said Giuliani, New York's former mayor, contending with his record of support for abortion rights as he courts conservative Republicans.
"I think the court has to make that decision and then the country can deal with it. We're a federalist system of government and states can make their own decisions," said Giuliani, who leads Republicans in the polls.
Although not at all in tune with social conservatives' intense dislike of Roe, Guiliani's answer did manage to square the circle of his professed personal opposition to it and prior firm support of the courts' keeping it legal by restricting the states from all but the most ineffectual legislation about it.
Guiliani's statement that he wouldn't have a problem with a reversal of Roe if the Supreme Court decided to do that, coming on the heels of his previous promises (promises! promises!) that he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges, is a definite movement away from his former enthusiastic support for the court-ordered legality of abortion (as opposed to letting the voters decide, which Roe ended).
Most observers consider strict constructionist judges to be the type that might vote to overturn Roe, even though it is not a strict-construction issue. Hence, in practical terms Rudy seems to be saying the following:
I am personally very strongly opposed to abortion.
I enthusiastically support the Supreme Court's 1972 decision to remove voters' rights to decide whether to allow abortions in their respective states or otherwise to regulate the practice in any effective way.
I will appoint judges who will probably overturn Roe v. Wade.
It will be "OK" with me if they do that.
If that sounds convoluted . . . well, I suspect a lot of Republicans are going to be "OK" with it.
It certainly makes Guiliani stand out from the rest of the group, and middle-of-the-roaders could see his lonely position as rather courageous. But they're not the ones who typically flock to the polls during the primaries, especially in Republican strongholds in the South and West.
The question is, will Rudy's Alice in Wonderland logic on abortion enable another candidate, one firmer on this issue, to separate himself from the pack and make Rudy's position on this look weak-kneed, thereby destroying Rudy's strongest quality as a candidate, his strength in confronting crises?
The Democrats have done a good job of making themselves sound like Republicans in their newly proposed "Innovation Agenda."
Unfortunately, they've also taken up the Republicans' recent fondness for big government and used the language to dress up their own adoration for telling all of us how to go about our lives. They've created a set of proposals for gargantuan government. Read it here if you have a strong stomach.
It all shows just what a culture of dependency the United States has become. . . .
As if the expansion of government interference in Americans’ lives under President George W. Bush weren’t enough already, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats propose an “Innovation Agenda” that will extend the reach and tighten the grip of government’s tendrils much further.
It should be called the Intrusion Agenda, because that’s really what it is.
Pelosi and the Democrats propose to intrude the national government into individual, local community, and state decisions about who teaches what in our schools at every level. They would destroy the higher education student loan market through price caps. They want to entice farmers to divert production away from food, making it more costly, in order to produce extravagantly expensive biofuels that won’t appreciably reduce our use of fossil fuels or do anything about global warming. They would strangle our nation’s amazingly productive and innovative research and development infrastructure by putting the federal government in charge. They intend to have bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. decide what fuels we should produce and how we use them. They want to put the federal government in charge of the Internet and wireless communications by replacing innovative market solutions with intrusive government mandates. And they want to push the federal government into the decision-making processes of our nation’s small businesses, our greatest job-creators.
And that’s just the parts they’re willing to tell us about. Pelosi and the Democrats are making the most misguided aspects of the Bush agenda the model for a huge further expansion of government power over our lives.
The Democrats’ plan is no innovation, it is even more of the big-government meddling we have suffered under for decades. We don’t need an Intrusion Agenda—we need, as Ronald Reagan said, to “get the government off the backs of the people.”
A society without values will accept anything. Enthusiastically.
One result of such a lack of shared values is identify politics and its insane consequences. Hence it shouldn't surprise us that an estimated 150,000 Chicagoans marched in support of crime , criminality, and criminals yesterday.
Galvanized by a federal raid in Little Village last week, 150,000 flag-waving protesters headed for Grant Park on Tuesday, demanding an end to raids and deportations and seeking amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.
Draped in American flags and chanting in many languages, members of immigrant support organizations, labor unions, gay and lesbian rights groups and socialist organizations marched in support of legalization for the estimated 12 million undocumented people -- approximately 400,000 in Chicago -- living in the United States today.
The term undocumented people, by the way, refers to criminals.
Love is hate, peace is war, crime is goodness.
Such perverted thinking is not a vision, it is an anti-vision It is what the philosopher and theologian Francis Schaeffer called the "Escape from Reason" that characterized the evolution of Western thought in the twentieth century.
Without a vision, the people perish.
People are trying to march us closer to the cliff each day. This is one of those instances.
A Classical Liberal View of the Proposed Iraq "Surge"
Having gone on record as arguing that the classical liberal position suggests that it is high time that the United States extricate its military troops from Iraq (here and here), the question then beomes, How?
One way could be the troop surge that President Bush proposes.
In principle, the proposed surge could fit a classical liberal approach, at least as a response to the situation at this particular time. If the point of a surge is to get out while leaving Iraq in the best shape possible—while recognizing that it is not going to be much like Utah any time soon—a surge could indeed be a classical liberal response to our current situation.
The danger, of course, is that the Bush administration will use the surge to push back the enemy, then remain to "keep the peace," and then watch helplessly as our enemies rearm and resume their counterattacks in a few weeks or months.
Surging, pacifying, and leaving, however, could be a reasonable classical liberal response to the present circumstances.
The goal, after all, is to defend the U.S. population from attack. We have been safe from such attack since 9/11, and the Iraq War may have a good deal to do with that, though I find the evidence far from convincing.
In any case, it is clear that our heavy presence in Iraq spreads our military very thin and hinders us from pursuing other imminent terrorist threats elsewhere.
Noting that polls of Islamic populations show that a large minority of them around the world approve of the notion of terrorist attacks against the United States, Tony Blankley, writing in today's Washington Times, observes that we simply do not have a plan for combatting the global nature of this threat:
[M]ost importantly, we have not had -- even remotely -- a national debate on what policies are best judged to reduce radical sentiment in the Muslim world, while also protecting us from potentially imminent terrorist attacks. Rather, we are still having a jolly old time deciding who among us to skin for our past mistakes.
Here, I think, the classical liberal position becomes immensely valuable. In a classical liberal formulation, the role of the government in this arena is to protect the American people from attack. It seems likely that attacks against us are in the planning and set-up stages around the world, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that countering such threats requires the potential for quick U.S. military action to destroy the actual threat and allow a swift return home to prepare for the next problem.
That is the way of things in a world of diversified threats, and the classical liberal approach provides a sound guideline regarding when and how to intervene in response to actual or imminent attacks.
There will always, of course, be empirical questions regarding what is and is not a real threat, but the point of a principle is to give us a way to figure out what to do once we have information. The classical liberal position provides that.
In the current instance, I think that classical liberals should be willing to discuss whether a surge is the best way of getting out of the mess that the United States got into by ignoring these principles. We should keep in mind, however, that the goal of a surge is to get out, not to get in even deeper.
As is usually the case in these situations, a few of the investors will make big profits, but most will lose money. The FT reports:
The $1.65bn sale of YouTube to Google last year, along with an expected wave of advertising tied to online video, have prompted a stampede that some Silicon Valley financiers are already comparing to the dotcom bubble, though at this stage at least it remains on a far smaller scale.
Video has become the hottest corner of a broader financing boom tied to so-called "Web 2.0" internet companies. The amount of US venture capital flowing into video-related start-ups of all types jumped by 95 per cent last year to $682m, according to figures compiled by Dow Jones/Venture One. . . .
Some 30 start-ups have already raised venture capital money to create consumer video sites, according to Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, whose investments include video site Veoh Networks.
Most are in their early stages and have raised only an average of $10m each, but eventual investments in these companies as they try to expand are set to top $1bn, he estimated.
In addition, the article reports, numerous proposals for additional startups are pouring in. Dagres predicts that most investors in this will eventually lose money, but that they should be safe this year.
Some investors are taking the seemingly less risky approach of backing companies that create the software and other necessaries to run these sites:
Part of this involves software, networking and other "infrastructure" companies deemed less risky than websites trying to attract a consumer audience.
But of course, when their customers go belly-up, most of these won't have any revenue stream, either.
I knew of a few people, as we all do, who invested in the Google/Yahoo!/etc. boom a few years back and got out just days before the bubble burst. They made a fortune, and their money—and that of the big losers—made the current Web possible.
But that's little comfort if you lost your fortune on it.
The moral is just as it always has been in the investment world:
My fellow Golden Age of Detective Mysteries afficionado Mike Tooney has written an excellent review and summary of The Dead Sleep Lightly, a terrific collection of radio mystery scripts by the great detective story writer John Dickson Carr. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime," the murder that seems as if it cannot have been committed by a human being, and his narratives usually had a appeallingly creepy atmosphere and strong intimations of the preternatural.
Radio: Until the advent of television, it was the most pervasive form of home entertainment available. Unlike TV, radio allowed--one could say forced--listeners to employ their imagination to its utmost, to supply imagery in their own private "theater of the mind." Radio could make a superstar of a ventriloquist' s dummy; it could permit listeners to create a convincing image of a comedian's old automobile, a vehicle that only existed as a vocalization; and radio could even give a boy genius an opportunity to scare the bejabbers out of America with a play about invaders from Mars.
Short answer: Not always and in every way.
Today marks the centenary of the birth of the greatest movie star of all time, 
Do producers and TV networks have an obligation to their viewers?
One of the most powerful weapons of the left today has quietly taken hold and moved into the mainstream culture without the right realizing what has been happening:
Ann Coulter's thoughts on the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, from her most recent column, are impressive. She is unbounded in her admiration for the man, saying, " Let me be the first to say: I ALWAYS agreed with the Rev. Falwell."
The far-left polemicist Alexander Cockburn, longtime columnist for The Nation, has been openly skeptical toward the dangerous-anthropogenic global warming theory that has increasingly animated the entire left during the past decade. In 
In a comment on 
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a televison evangelist and moral activist, died today at the age of 73.
My essay on the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek in the April 20 print edition of National Review (not available online) considers the essentials of classical liberalism—and finds that a crucial element of classical liberalism is the moral philosophy developed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and dervived from Christian principles.
In honor of Mother's Day, here is 
One of the most woefully underutilized cultural assets of the past few years has been the ION Network. Originally called PaxTV, ION consists of sixty broadcast TV stations reaching ninety million households and all or nearly all the major markets.
In a comment on 
The Democrats have done a good job of making themselves sound like Republicans in their newly proposed "
A society without values will accept anything. Enthusiastically.
