So like all middlebrow, displaced Catholic Americans I have a selective nostalgia for the (mostly Italian) ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, where I’ve never really spent any time. Although I’m aware enough of their various flaws, I can’t spend enough time with Tony Soprano, Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen, and even Frankie Valli. So I dissent from the teaching of Carl’s College of Musical Knowledge by affirming the majestic greatness of the sound of the E Street Band, and I agree with Louis C.K. on the Pascalian depths of “Jungleland.”

I certainly enjoyed the play Jersey Boys, not at all for the story of Frankie and the Four Seasons’ lives, but for the the great live performances of the highest form of greaser music. I thought the film, directed by Clint Eastwood, would be better, because we would get to see a lot more Jersey. There’s some, but not nearly enough. Christopher Walken does do a very memorable–but somewhat un-Jerseyish–job playing a mob boss. The life and times of Frankie Valli are just sort of sad. He, unlike Bruce, can really sing, but he, again unlike the Boss, never really got control of his artistic situation. Potentially the most interesting character in the film is the gay-guy producer, the genius who developed the sound, but we really don’t learn much about his “creative process.” The musical performances in the film are good, but it’s too easy to get the sound down on screen for that to be all that impressive. People were dancing in the aisles where I saw the play (the Fabulous Fox in Atlanta), but not in the theater.

So one reason I haven’t said anything about films so far on this site is that I haven’t any really good ones lately. There is quite the ethnic Catholic big-city Irish thing going on on the shows to be found on the various premium channels, and I’ve used a good part of my summer vacation so far enthusiastically catching up. Please watch Boss, Ray Donovan, and Shameless for endlessly entertaining and repulsive displays of highly dysfunctional versions of the Irish gifts of gab, sociopathic alcoholism, residual Catholicism, and family values. Maybe Irish Catholics should be outraged by these offensive caricatures, but in each case plenty of eloquence and even nobility shine through. Each show is, in its way, so pro-life that sin and love are insistently irreducibly real. Each of these Irish shows is far superior to House of Cards, which gives us nothing more than the Machiavellian cleverness of infinite betrayals in the service of maximum possible control. But there’s no character worth caring about, no real politics, and little real appreciation of nobility or decency. In the obvious way and more, H of C is not pro-life. It’s not that H of C doesn’t mean to be critical of the destructive sterility of the single-minded devotion of the Underwoods to “public service”; it’s just that no decent alternative is presented that we’re allowed to believe in. More later on the Irish of Boston, Chicago, and L.A.

Back to Jersey. Carl’s posts below might be described as the highest version of Fordhamism to emerge so far. Not so long ago, the graduate program in political science at Fordham in the Bronx (adjacent to the Little Italy immortalized in the explicitly Machiavellian and partly anti-Machiavellian film A Bronx Tale) was blessed by an extraordinary number of great teachers in political philosophy. A couple of them were Straussians all aboard with the large commercial republicanism of The Federalist. But there was a dissident: Carey McWilliams. Carl has done well in talking up Carey’s singular achievement, but I thought I’d say a bit more.

First off, Carey was a Jersey boy. Well, he didn’t grow up in Jersey. But he taught for decades at Rutgers and was involved in the politics of his local community in Flemington (the hometown of the E Street Band’s Danny Federici). He was also an elder in his Presbyterian church, a genuine Calvinist who understood the first and most important American founders to have been the Puritans. There, of course, he was following the lead of Tocqueville. Tutored by mainstream Straussians, too often what we remember about Tocqueville’s account of our Puritanical founders is that they had ridiculously tyrannical laws that violated the rights of conscience. But Tocqueville also said that the Puritans were animated by the Biblical idea of equality, tried, with great success, to make it the foundation of political community, and are the source of all the public-spirited versions of our great liberal and democratic institutions. It’s from the Puritans that we get the idea that both work and liberal education are for everyone, and that each of us is a created being with a soul, or not merely a middle-class being with rights and interests. What the Americans learned from the Puritans is the interdependence of the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty; neither can be thought about properly in isolation from the other. It’s from the Puritans, Carey reminded us, that we get our love of equal persons under God. Democracy is not merely a means to personal liberty; it is a kind of virtuous devotion to serving goods we share in common, a devotion which accords each of us personal significance. That devotion is a kind of liberty, insofar as it is freely chosen by citizens. Carey pitted what the Puritans gave us against our creeping libertarianism, a techno-creep (meaning reducing politics to Machiavellian techno-machinations) that began with The Federalist.

Carey was not your usual Jersey Boy. He was, in fact, an Orangeman and so somewhat anti-Catholic. He once told me that if we were in Ireland, he’d have to kill me (probably joking). He was once the discussant on a panel at which I gave a paper on Flannery O’Connor. His comment was he was sure it was good, but he wasn’t about to read O’Connor and find out for sure. He was almost as big a man as Clarence Clemons. He was easily the best entertainer in political science. He always spoke off the cuff and with perfect mastery of detail. He knew everything about American political thought, from the canonical authors through all of American literature (well, not Percy and O’Connor) to virtually everything that’s ever appeared on American TV.

Carey was all for the Democratic Party, unions, the Great Society, civil rights, and the Vietnam war. His most unfashionable moment, maybe, was in explaining the many ways Lyndon Johnson was our last great president. Yet he was also loud and proud in explaining why he was a “fellow traveler” with the Straussians in defending the dignity of American political thought and opposing those who dissed our greatest authors and statesmen with stupid political correctness. He was postmodern and conservative where it counts most.

Carey once came to my Berry College. He gave a brilliantly incisive and witty talk attacking the utter triviality of President Clinton from the left. The Berry faculty in attendance were thrilled that I finally invited a speaker who knew what he was talking about. He ended his talk by saying, with dramatic pauses, that the first principle of the revitalized Democratic Party should be respect for the sanctity of life. The faculty were astonished, and not in a good way. But of course a really egalitarian Democrat–an heir of the idealistic Puritans–would be pro-life.

After the talk, we had a party in an upstairs bar in downtown Rome, GA. I think the statute of limitations is up, and so I can admit it got out of control and many people–including Berry students–came who were not invited. I’m not saying any Berry students actually drank alcoholic beverages. In fact, I don’t think they did. But they did line up with the gift of whiskey to get to talk to Carey. He told them all kinds of wonderful stories and flattered them shamelessly and made them promises (all of which he would have kept had they insisted) for hours. The liquor bill was astonishing, and I had no fund to pay for it. Fortunately, the bar was about to go out of business, and the bar tender told me not to worry about it. (Paul Seaton–a distinguished Fordhamite–was there and can confirm my story. He might not want to remember that the bill included his nine White Russians.)

Carey had to fly out first thing the next morning. He got up at six and had a good breakfast at the Landmark Diner as if he had turned in early and sober.