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 o,
I'm not going to blog forever. It's just a phase I'm going through.
Bear with me, please, till I've got it out of my system. (I'm assuming
I have formed the verb correctly here: "blog, v.i. —
to yoke together random thoughts on unconnected topics and present
them as a newspaper, magazine, or webzine column.")
 On
the phone with my sister in England. She tells me that a mutual
friend has bought a house in France, and adds: "A lot of people
here are doing that, now." Stirred to indignation with thoughts
of Agincourt, Crécy, Blenheim, Waterloo, and my father muttering
They let us down in the War, you know, I asked her why so
many English people wanted to live in France. She: "Because
the French still know who they are. We don't, not any more."
Poor old England!
I
can claim one tenuous link with the Beatle George Harrison, who
died last week: Like him, I am a Lancastrian. "Derbyshire"
and "Harrison" are both Lancashire surnames from far back.
My father's family moved to Shropshire when Dad was an infant and
he was raised a Shropshire lad, but he had been born in Westhoughton,
five miles east of Wigan, which is the ancestral hearth-place of
the Derbyshire clan, and was the hometown of both of his parents.
The essayist and historian Paul Johnson, whom I quote a lot because
I find him very quotable, is another Lancastrian, born in Preston
I think, and in many ways a typical representative of the species,
with all the points (as they say at dog shows) very well displayed.
Peter Brimelow, author of Alien Nation, co-proprietor of
the VDARE website,
and formerly an NR editor, is another Lancastrian.
All
the Beatles were technically Lancastrian, of course, since Liverpool
is a city in Lancashire. (Note: At the high tide of bureaucratic
managerialism in England, in the 1970s, the old county system was
reorganized, and Liverpool is now in an administrative area named
"Merseyside." However, no sane English person — certainly
no true conservative — pays any attention to these arbitrary
and artificial new regional designations.) Liverpudlians, however,
are for the most part only geographically Lancastrian. Like any
great port city — New York, Shanghai, Marseilles — Liverpool
has a culture, and even a dialect, of its own, separate from its
immediate hinterland. It seemed to me, though, that George was more
Lancastrian than Liverpudlian: introvert rather than extrovert,
witty rather than cheeky, action more than talk.
Until the Industrial
Revolution came up, Lancashire was a backwater place, poor and neglected,
vegetating in obscurity under the control of a few powerful families
who had mostly mastered the art of being left alone by the Crown.
The Reformation largely passed by the county without stopping. Nobody
much cared whether these uncouth folk were Protestant or Catholic,
with the result that many of them — whole towns and villages
— just stayed Catholic, down to the present day. My dad's mother,
whose surname was Daniels, was one of these "recusant"
Catholics, though Dad's own father was staunchly Church of England.
There is in
fact a strong strain of mysticism in the Lancashire character, much
encouraged by the landscape. The Pendle witches, a great 17th-century
cause célèbre, came from the Forest of Pendle,
over Burnley way. North Lancashire is dominated by the Trough of
Bowland, a huge expanse of wild, empty moors (called "fells"
in the north of England) broken up with pleasant wooded valleys
— one of the great unknown beauties of England, and a terrific
place to be a hermit, if you feel like taking twenty years off for
some serious meditation. South of the Trough, in the middle of nowhere
down by Clitheroe, is Stonyhurst, a forbidding pile of gloomy square
stone containing a boys' boarding school run by Jesuits. Paul Johnson
went to Stonyhurst. So did Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock
Holmes; though Doyle's lineage was Irish Catholic, not recusant.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins taught there, as did J. R. R. Tolkien,
the hobbit man — the school has a Tolkien Library.
That odd streak
of mysticism aside, we Lancastrians are a lean, hardy, frugal people,
short of speech but long of memory, with a ready wit (practically
all English comedians come from Lancashire) and a grim stolid courage
in battle. We treasure and honor our own, and I salute the memory
of George Harrison: a kind, humorous, thoughtful, watchful man,
a man of words few but true — a worthy addition to the honor
roll of the Red Rose.
Erratum.
In my
Christmas book selections for NRO Weekend I passed the remark
that India's population will surpass China's by the end of this
decade. I should have said "around mid-century": The 1999
numbers are, in billions, 1.25 for China and 1.00 for India. The
2015 numbers, according to a cute little statistical handbook The
Economist just sent me, will be 1.41 and 1.23, which gives a
cross-over point sometime in February 2057 on a linear extrapolation.
Sorry about that — I quoted hearsay without checking. Who could
imagine that a journalist would ever do such a thing!
I
read too much, way too much. One of the things we do at NR
— the print NR — is sit around a large table every
second Monday and trade ideas for the one-paragraph snippets that
appear at the front of the magazine under the heading "The
Week." (Efforts to persuade the editors to change this heading
to the much more logical "The Fortnight" have so far fallen
on stony ground. Apparently some dismayingly large proportion of
Americans don't know what "fortnight" means.) Well, at
the last one of these conferences I put forward a piece I had read
in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Harvard's acquisition
of the "postcolonialist" theorist Homi Bhabha. Professor
Bhabha would make a good paragraph, I said, and started to explain
who he was. A colleague gently interrupted to remind me that back
in the October 15th issue of NR we had run a 2,000-word piece
by Roger Kimball on the egregious Bhabha. The distressing thing
was that I had read Roger's article at the time, enjoyed it, ...
and then forgotten all about it.
It wasn't the
first time this has happened. I'm in conversation with someone,
on some topic. He says: "Did you see what so-and-so wrote about
this in The Standard?" No, I say, I didn't. He gives
me a précis. I think: "That sounds fascinating,"
go off to the library and look up the piece... and halfway through
realize that I did read it after all.
The root problem
here is that there is just too damn much good writing now for a
human mind — at any rate, a middle-aged, non-super-retentive
mind — to hold. I feel that, as part of my professional duties,
I have to read it all, with the result that half of it slops over
the edge of the tub and is wasted. I spend the first hour of every
working morning trawling through news and opinion sites on the web.
Then there are the subscriptions that come in through my mailbox.
On returning from six weeks abroad in early August, I found awaiting
me (you can sing this to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas"):
6 copies
each of The Economist, The New Yorker, and Science
News
5 copies each of The Spectator and The New Republic
4 copies of Human Events
3 copies each of National Review and The Weekly Standard
2 copies each of Chronicles and PC World
1 copy each of American Mathematical Monthly, China
Journal, American Renaissance, my local diocesan newsletter,
the NRA magazine, New York Review of Books, Notices
of the American Mathematical Society, First Things,
Literary Review, and The American Spectator.
(Yes, I know,
the list doesn't make sense. NR is fortnightly; The Weekly
Standard is, duh, weekly; how come I had the same numbers of
both waiting for me? Beats me, I just report the facts, which I
wrote down at the time with the idea of doing a column on information
overload. Perhaps the guys down at the post office sorting room
were backed up in their reading.)
When we lived
in Manhattan, my wife had a friend who worked as a "personal
shopper." That is, she had clients — rich socialite women
with full schedules — who wanted to buy clothes, jewelry, and
whatever else rich socialite women buy, efficiently, rather
than just browsing all the stores. Rosie's friend would help them
do this. What I need is a "personal reader"!
The first time
I lived in mainland China, in the academic year 1982-3, I had just
one magazine subscription coming in to my address in the remote
Manchurian town where I lived. It was the London Spectator.
How I looked forward to its weekly arrival! How I devoured its contents,
like a thirsty man in a desert! How desperately I missed it if it
was a day late! How doggedly I fought my way through the crossword
(one of the tougher ones)! I can still remember whole articles.
Now: What was in that Spectator issue that arrived yesterday?
Er.... And when was the last time I did a Spectator crossword?
Um...
Although,
as a matter of fact, there was one piece in the current (so
far as airmail subscribers are concerned) Spectator that
got my attention. Regular Spectator contributor (and occasional
NR contributor) Paul Johnson — yes, the Lancastrian
Paul Johnson — chose this issue, the one dated November 24th,
to write a column about singing: the pleasures of it, how people
don't do it much any more but ought to... Now, I myself did a column
on exactly this topic, even making some of the same points, for
the
Thanksgiving NRO Weekend. I wrote that piece on Friday, November
16th, and e-mailed it to the noble webmaster on the 17th. It appeared
in public — that is, on the web — on the afternoon of
Wednesday the 21st. I happen to know the Spectator's production
cycle: Paul Johnson's piece would have had to be in final form by
at very latest the afternoon of Tuesday the 20th, and would have
shown up on London newsstands on Thursday the 22nd. There is thus
no possibility of plagiarism by either of us. This is a pure case
of "great minds think alike"... Or possibly evidence of
an ocean-spanning Lancastrian super-mind, into whose rich and mysterious
workings we individual Lancastrians are mere windows.
One
more China comment. When I assert, as I frequently do, that you
can't have a modern economy under a dictatorship, a trickle of emails
comes in saying: "What about South Korea? What about Taiwan?"
What about
them? Taiwan: I was working in the credit department of a big Wall
Street investment bank in the late 1980s. One day some very smart
young men came along with a scheme for us to underwrite some commercial
paper issues for Taiwan companies, a thing we had never done. (They
wanted us to get into the Taiwan equity markets, too, but I forget
the precise details.) We set our credit analysts to work looking
at the fundamentals — ownership, earnings, management, legal
enforcement, accounting practices — and after we'd read their
reports, said: "Thanks, but no, thanks." You might
think that Taiwan in the late stages of the Chiang-family dictatorship
was a modern economy, but my bank sure as heck didn't think so,
and making judgments of this sort was their business. South
Korea: The 1997 crisis revealed very clearly that South Korea had,
up to that point, been running a Soviet-style command economy, with
all the CEOs of all major enterprises more or less government appointees.
The result was that, after they had sucked all the blood out of
their own banking system, they could not get any foreign bank to
lend to them, and had to call in the IMF. Sorry, but that's not
a modern economy.
Now, there
is no doubt that a country can make great economic progress under
a dictatorship. Hitler showed that, for heaven's sake. So,
for that matter, did Stalin and his successors — Russians (well,
urban Russians) were much better off in 1980 than they were in 1930.
So was the Soviet economy a modern economy in 1980? Of course not.
Seven percent
annual economic growth doesn't mean you have a modern economy. It
just means (in China's case) that you are starting from an extremely
low base. A modern economy needs a firm rule of law, honest administration,
honest justice, openness to foreign competition, well regulated
securities trading, and a host of other things that China has
not got, and won't have until they get rid of those damn communists.
There
has been, it seems to me, surprisingly little really first-class
reporting from New York's "Ground Zero." Where are the
products of all those schools of journalism that now infest the
academic scene? Perhaps the magnitude of that horror is too much
to be encompassed by journalists trained to sniff out the latest
bogus health scare, political sex scandal, "racist" /
"sexist" / "homophobic" outrage, or other inconsequential
pseudo-news of the age that ended on September 11th.
Where really
good reporting has come out, it has often been from unexpected
and seriously un-famous quarters. There is an example in the current
(December 2001) issue of Father Richard John Neuhaus's monthly First
Things: a piece simply titled "Ground Zero: A Journal,"
by a writer completely unknown to me, name of Vincent Druding, bylined
as "a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in New York City,"
whatever that means. Whatever it means, Druding's beautiful and
moving record of his Ground Zero experiences is one I feel sure
I shall not be forgetting anytime soon.
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