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Wars are almost always fought for mixed motives. But understanding the nature of the Civil War is essential in judging its rightness, which in turn controls the question of how the contestants should be remembered. According to David W. Blight's Race and Reunion, post-Civil War America saw three attempts to explain the catastrophe. Emancipationists remembered the war as, in Lincoln's words, "a new birth of freedom." Reconciliationists remembered the valor of the combatants. White supremacists hoped that the South would rise again in rolling back Reconstruction. "The challenge" for American memory, according to Mackubin Thomas Owens in a review of Blight for The Claremont Review, "is to link emancipation with reconciliation." Noble words. What happened instead, in the late 19th century, was an alliance of reconciliation and white supremacy, which held that both sides were brave, and both sides were equally right.
During the lengthy research process, capital is tied up for 12 to 15 years, and about 80 percent of the drugs that are experimented with fail to develop. To keep the research system going, there has to be a big payoff with one of the rare successful new drugs to compensate for the huge risks to capital, and to cover the costs of research on the drugs that never make it to market. But the public doesn't appreciate the risks that confront the pharmaceutical industry, in part because they view drugs as fundamentally different from other consumer products. They want to pay less for the current terrific products that so benefit their lives, but fail to appreciate what they could lose if those regulations went into effect. There are over 400 new anti-cancer drugs being researched; scores of others are being studied in the hope of treating Alzheimer's and diabetes. Which of these does the public want to see canceled for lack of research funds?
The major ideologists of revolutionary Islamism and Ba'athism consciously adopted the tactics and organizational ideas of fascist and Communist movements, and their defeat will require the same multi-dimensional approach as the efforts that led to the vanquishing of Communism and fascism. Those ideologies were defeated by a combination of approaches — military, political, economic, and cultural. Effective opposition to European totalitarianism involved speaking directly to the populations living in closed societies, using international radio broadcasting and other measures. Central to this effort was significant material and moral support to democratic voices — in recent years, through such instruments as the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. A solid commitment to market economics was also crucial to success. An understanding of the need for a similarly comprehensive and integrated approach is beginning to emerge within the administration and in Congress; it needs to spread to our natural allies in the rest of the democratic world.
No baseball is played in Britain, and it is all but impossible to buy a baseball here, but sales of baseball bats are extremely strong, as weapons against one's neighbors. Whenever a young man tells me that he has suffered a head injury such as a fractured skull, I ask, "Baseball bat?" to which the answer, nine times out of ten, is yes. Likewise, machetes are sold in large numbers, though sugar cane does not generally grow in our slums. Machete wounds, by contrast, are commonplace. In some areas, the majority of children as young as seven and eight carry knives, and are ready to use them. No sensible adult would dare any longer to challenge the misbehavior on buses and elsewhere of children older than seven or eight: As a nation, we are now scared of our own children. This is because they are well aware of their own legal impunity, and are ready to take advantage of it.
In early December, Angelo Petrone, the interim public-schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., sent a memo out instructing teachers to remove all Christmas and Hanukkah-specific decorations from their classrooms. Teachers had to disassemble bulletin boards festooned with children's artwork. Parents — not one of whom had complained about the holiday decorations — were outraged. Petrone quickly backtracked, saying (unpersuasively) he had only meant for them to "have sensitivity to the diversity in the district," and to use "common sense." Petrone demands the metaphysically impossible: You cannot be "sensitive" and "diverse" as contemporary America understands these terms, and simultaneously use common sense. Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which is party to the crèche lawsuit in New York, has a knack for identifying the contradictions. He points out, for example, the contrast in public schools between tolerance for sexual explicitness and intolerance for the Christian faith: "You can't have Baby Jesus, but you can have a condom on a cucumber?"
The main problem for Indians on reservations isn't that land was stolen from their ancestors a few generations ago, but that the federal government owns or controls most of the land they live on now. This means that Indians have a hard time securing bank loans, because they can't do something other Americans take for granted: put up land as collateral. To complicate matters even further, longstanding federal law encourages tribal governments to charter corporations and run their own businesses — in essence, to set up a command-and-control economy of tribally owned and operated enterprises, rather than creating a pro-business environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish. At Pine Ridge, the tribe at various times has tried to run a moccasin factory, a meat-processing plant, and a fishhook-snelling operation, among other projects. All have flopped, as government-run ventures are wont to do. At bottom, reservations such as Pine Ridge are socialist enclaves in the heart of a capitalist country.
It is a distinctive Christian achievement to propose secular government as a religious duty, and religious toleration as an avenue to God. The Enlightenment conception of the citizen, as joined in a free social contract with his neighbors under a tolerant and secular rule of law, derives directly from the Christian legacy. This contrasts radically with the vision set before us in the Koran, according to which sovereignty rests with God and his Prophet, and legal order is founded in divine command. True law is holy law, whose precepts derive from the four sources of Islamic legal thought: the Koran, the Sunna (customs authorized by the Prophet), qiyas ("analogy"), and ijma' ("consensus"). These are the sources to which the classical jurists referred when giving judgment, and they none of them acknowledge any law-making institution of merely human provenance. They are the means for discerning God's will, and so attaining the posture of submission (the literal meaning of islam).
They lined up, looking very clean and handsome and holy, Jim and John at the back, Timothy and Janet on either side of Pam at the piano, and the middle echelon sensibly and unquarrelsomely distributed in the middle according to heights. Just like the von Trapp family, I thought to myself happily. Pam turned and gave them all a long and, I hoped, extremely stern look, before she turned back to play the opening measures. "Silent night, holy night," nine young voices chanted softly, and I noticed Jennifer and Betsey beginning to break up in twinkles and dimples. "All is calm, all is bright," they went on, John's recorder piping low and clear. Buckley and Alison clapped their hands briefly over their mouths. "Round John Virgin, Mother and Child," the chorus swelled sweetly, and I rapped hard on the piano. "Just who," I asked, in my most restrained voice, "is Round John Virgin?"
The Quality of Mercy
— Richard John Neuhaus Judging the Court
— Richard A. Epstein City Desk: A City Christmas — Richard Brookhiser on a melancholy season in Manhattan
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