. . . I heard her pray the night Chicago died . . .
Dear WJ Reader,
Daddy wasn’t a cop (he sold life insurance). And the fact is, our brood of ten kids lived (stacked in a fleet of bunk beds) on the north side of The Bronx. Still, this fantasy edition of WJ kicks off by going back one half-century, to the Democratic Convention in Chicago, back in the USA, back in the bad old days, when chaos was rampant in the streets as Windy City cops battled anti-war rioters. And inside the convention hall, where raucous prevailed, speakers castigated the city’s Mayor from the podium.
The time and place remain important: In plain sight, this is where the Democrat Left honed its skills and made clear the lengths to which it would go to intimidate and rule. I’ll pull it out of the usual order and recommend to you Arthur Herman’s piece, The Night the Democratic Party Died. From it:
After killing off the traditional liberal Democratic party they despised, they would go on to take over the corpse and make it the host of America’s radical Left, from Jerry Brown to Bernie Sanders — with George McGovern, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama as their front men.
The friends who joined in the kill were the mainstream media. . . . Starting that night the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC and CBS News would become the enablers of America’s radical Left, even at its most violent — and in the process cut themselves off from the millions of ordinary working Americans who had made the Democratic party their political home.
There’s more below. Before we get there, let’s put on the 45 RPM and recall Paper Lace singing about another famously bad night in Illinois. Glory be!
But Let’s First Harangue You About . . .
NRPLUS. Notice I have had Phil the Galley Slave put it in bold! Why? Because: extra attention from your eyeballs. Now let me reinforce a point: If you don’t get NRPLUS, you are subscribing, for free, to what is essentially NRMINUS. (Make that bold, Phil, but no red). Minus the opportunity to read NRO sans ads. Minus the opportunity to comment on articles. Minus invites to special NR events (like the Fowler Leaf-Raking Extravaganza in Milford, CT this October 32nd — remember to bring your work gloves, calamine lotion, and Bengay). Do yourself a big favor, a plus-sized favor, if you will: become an NRPLUS member today. It only costs 59 bucks, which is a small price to pay to stay completely and (informing my pal Waren that a new word is approaching) unharrassedly informed.
OK, let’s get on with the show.
Editorials
1. We reflect on the passing away of John McCain. From the editorial:
Perhaps his finest moment in the Senate was his lonely advocacy for the surge in Iraq at a low point of the war. It was classic McCain, who didn’t hesitate to take up an unpopular cause, and who propelled it with his passionate commitment and his credibility on military matters.
That said, we had many differences with him over the years. His signature domestic cause, campaign-finance legislation, was of dubious constitutionality and even more doubtful wisdom — it helped kneecap the party committees. In his insurgent 2000 bid for the Republican nomination, he road-tested a TR-inspired progressive Republicanism friendly to government regulation (although he remained in most respects a conventional Reaganite). After he lost to Bush that year in an honest fight — although the media portrayed Bush’s key victory in South Carolina as underhanded and racially charged — he entered a period of bitter estrangement from his own party.
2. Florida’s Democrats want to put a socialist, nominee Andrew Gillum, Tallahassee’s mayor, in the governor’s mansion. NR says this will be a disaster for the Sunshine State. From the beginning of the editorial:
In a gubernatorial town hall held three weeks ago, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum was asked if he considered himself a “democratic socialist.” He demurred. But Gillum, now the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida, is campaigning as a member of the Sanders–Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party: He wants to abolish ICE, raise the minimum wage to $15, pass single-payer health care, and increase taxes across the board. With its laissez-faire economic policies and its general respect for personal liberty, Florida has long been considered one of the freest states in the union. And the Democrats want to put a socialist in the governor’s mansion.
Since emerging as a surprise contender for the nomination, Gillum has received fawning coverage from the national press. The fawning will only intensify after his victory over two well-funded candidates to capture the Democratic nomination and make a bid to be the first African-American governor of the state (Republican congressman Ron DeSantis will be the other candidate, after routing his opponent Tuesday night). Gillum clearly has a base of support, and has earned the backing of left-wing billionaire donors. He is an energetic campaigner whose political savvy should not be underrated. But he would be a disaster as governor of Florida.
Seventeen Enjoyable Wisdom Pearls that Require No Labor to Read this Labor Day Weekend
1. Rich Lowry recalls those nasty few days in Chicago and what the ruckus has meant for us, half a century later. From his new column:
It’s hard to think of a direct action that more directly backfired than the Chicago protests. But the passage of several decades tends to alter judgments. So it is that, 50 years later, the Spirit of 1968 is in the ascendancy on the left and in the Democratic party, which is moving toward a more open embrace of democratic socialism than perhaps could have been imagined by the protesters during those fevered summer nights in 1968.
Chicago was a war within the Democratic party; there’s a reason the protesters didn’t show up at the Republican convention in Miami earlier that summer. Mayor Daley, and especially his cops, hated the demonstrators and showed it with the appallingly free use of their billy clubs. Now, much of the Democratic party — certainly its rising figures — wants to cater to and capture the energy of the activists of the Left rather than resist them.
2. Talk Socialist, Act Capitalist: Kat Timpf reflects on how the words and the actions of adored lefty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are never twain-meeting. From her report:
Now, this is not the first time that something like this has happened. As Investor’s Business Daily notes, Ocasio-Cortez seemed to make an argument against herself again last week when she expressed her sadness over the closing of a restaurant where she used to work. In her post about the good times that she’d had there, she failed to mention that the reason it was closing was because it could not comply with New York City’s soon-to-be-implemented $15 per hour minimum wage. Perhaps unknowingly, she had expressed regret over something that had been caused by the very sort of policy she supports.
3. Louis Farrakhan is toxic, but that hasn’t kept the Congressional Black Caucus from being comfortably associated and footsie-playing with the National of Islam boss. Jeryl Bier reports about this and more in an excellent article, from which this highlight is selected:
Another CBC member who has remained close to Farrakhan is Representative Danny Davis (D., Ill.). Ten years after Farrakhan met with the CBC about the Millions More Movement, he organized and in October 2015 was the keynote speaker at the Justice or Else rally, which marked the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Davis attended and spoke to the crowd, saying, “I want to commend and congratulate minister Louis Farrakhan for his visionary leadership.” Davis assured the gathering that “we will march on with the understanding that today is our day, tomorrow is our day, and we will march with the vision and with the leadership of minister Louis Farrakhan.” (An interesting footnote from that rally: Davis was introduced by Leonard Muhammed, the Nation of Islam’s chief of staff, and was followed by none other than the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s estranged pastor, and by Linda Sarsour, a Muslim activist who herself often faces charges of anti-Semitism. One of the emcees for the Justice or Else rally was Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory, who stands by Farrakhan to this day.)
Despite these numerous, publicly accessible articles and videos, the associations between the Congressional Black Caucus and Louis Farrakhan have been largely ignored over the years by the media, even the conservative press. From the warm greetings and fond remembrances from both Farrakhan and CBC members captured in these stories and videos, it seems likely that many more private get-togethers took place over the years. Though some CBC members have publicly condemned Farrakhan after my Wall Street Journal op-eds, others have remained mum or even renewed their support. Only one CBC member’s office has responded to my requests for comment, and that was simply to report that the congressman would have no response.
4. The big brain of Reihan Salam produces thoughtful analysis and interpretation of polling about how new arrivals affect policy positions (and maybe even voting-bloc preferences) of existing immigrant communities. It’s very interesting stuff, so read up.
5. Holy Mother Church One: Michael Brendan Dougherty reacts to The Predator (Cardinal McCarrick), the Diplomat (explosive memo-writer Archbishop Carlo Viganò), and the Pope (who’s all of a sudden doing a Mum’s Da Woid routine). From his piece:
The key questions that reporters need to address: What records, if any, are there of sanctions placed on Cardinal McCarrick’s life and ministry under Benedict? Can Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re recall them? Perhaps most important, will Cardinal Marc Ouellet confirm whether he communicated the details of these sanctions to Viganò in 2011? Certainly journalists sympathetic to McCarrick reported at the time that he had been “put out to pasture” under Benedict, and then under Francis was “back in the mix and busier than ever.” If there were no sanctions placed on him other than removing him from the seminary in 2009 or 2010, then the rest of the claims in the Viganò letter may begin to fall apart quickly. Can Archbishop Viganò or the nunciature provide dated copies of the memos he sent? The documentary evidence for Viganò’s report is crucial.
But one thing is most crucial of all: candor among the bishops and cardinals of the Catholic Church. Ever since Cardinal Timothy Dolan alerted the public about a credible accusation of pederasty against McCarrick, letting loose a flood of stories about the “open secret” of his sexual harassment of seminarians, lay faithful have been demanding that bishops tell the public “what you knew and when you knew it.” The answers cannot wait until the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in November. They cannot wait until bishops war-game how their disclosures will play out within the Catholic Church’s ongoing political and theological civil war. Just tell us what you knew, like Archbishop Viganò, and let reporters try to verify it.
6. Holy Mother Church Two: Does a bear you-know-what in the woods? Is the Pope . . . Catholic? John O’Sullivan considers men in collars and the depth of their faith and vocation. From his essay:
So what did the bishops and priests who failed either at chastity or at justice or at both believe? Let me suggest three possible answers.
The first answer is: nothing much. They gradually lost their faith as they went through life and woke up one day to find that they were agnostics who had a decent living in the Church and no prospect in middle age of getting a job of equal worth and satisfaction. It’s an easy thing to do in a post-Christian society. No doubt their loss of faith was a problem for them, but in a very human way they managed to keep postponing a decision on what to do about it. Maybe they even enjoyed their job, which they defined as a special kind of social worker helping others or, at a more senior level, a special kind of bureaucrat who could use the Church to advance good causes of a secular kind. Of course, agnostics in clerical garb would find it hard to keep the rules on chastity as age and loneliness wore them down. And if they no longer took the priesthood’s disciplines (or the authority sustaining them) seriously, even if they remained personally chaste, they would find it hard to impose those rules on others. Their loyalty would gradually shift from the Christian faith to the Church as an institution, and their first response to scandal would be to conceal the vice to protect the institution.
7. Holy Mother Church Three: John Hillen walks out to the mound and signals for a relief pitcher. He argues that when it comes to Church governance, it’s time to empower the laity. From his analysis:
The healthiest political and corporate institutions have checks and balances, and some degree of independent oversight or overseers. The Catholic Church does not (at least from a temporal authority). The highly trained (in philosophy and theology) and specialized clergy are terrifically prepared to administer the sacraments to the faithful, but they also must administer the Church — its finances, workforce, politics, and all else. The latter set of issues requires a very different set of skills and experiences from those that are necessary in teaching, pastoral, or missionary work or in conducting liturgy and administering sacraments. Especially at the senior levels.
But the senior leadership of the Church — the leadership at every level, really — is exclusively clergy. Chosen by . . . clergy. The Church is aided by advisory bodies of lay leaders at almost every level. I serve on several — from the level of my little parish right on up to a program in the Vatican. But, even so, the lay leaders are members of advisory boards only. As such, they are not in a position to know and help with some of the more sensitive legal, personnel, and behavioral issues in the institution in a way that fiduciary-board members would. We give advice, we write checks, we form great relationships with our clerical partners . . . but at the end of the day we are waving at the car as it drives away — and praying for its safe journey.
8. Holy Mother Church Four: David French explains why the health of Roman Catholicism is not unimportant to American Evangelical churches. From his piece:
Third, reputational harm to the church can sweep far and wide — well beyond the guilty parties themselves. No one should presume that in an increasingly secular world our fellow citizens can so easily discern the good guys and the bad guys. I remember well moving from the Bible Belt to Boston in 1991, and being stunned to discover that my classmates painted the church with a very broad brush. In my youth and naïveté I had largely pointed and laughed at the televangelist scandals of the 1980s, only to discover that I was one of “them” until proven otherwise, a gullible congregant in a church of con men.
9. Holy Mother Church Five: Washington’s Cardinal Wuerl and his obtuseness are explained by Alexandra DeSanctis. From her report:
If, as the archdiocese continues to aver, Church officials are dedicated to honest communication with Catholics and outside observers alike, why the total silence? Because to answer these questions or provide anything other than PR blather would call into question Wuerl’s assurances that he has always been beyond reproach.
In other words, telling the truth would cost one man too much. Wuerl would like us to believe he is merely disinterested and uninvolved in what happens on his watch. In fact, he has been lying to keep faithful Catholics in the dark and asking his staff to cover his tracks with obfuscations. So much for “professional transparency.”
10. Kevin Williamson reads The Economist and finds naivety and maybe even stupidity about our peculiar — and peace-ensuring — system of self-government on this side of The Pond. From his essay:
Over the summer, The Economist did two things of interest: One, it began a series exploring the great thinkers of liberalism — liberalism in the “broad classical sense, rather than the narrow American left-of-centre one” — with a suggested-reading list including important liberal thinkers from members of the Surname-Only Club (Mill, Hobbes, Spinoza, Tocqueville, Locke, Montesquieu, Paine, Smith) to a few who may not have been on your undergraduate syllabus, such as Frédéric Bastiat, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, and Mary Wollstonecraft. (No, friends, Frédéric Bastiat is not on very many undergraduate syllabi, even though he should be. Not everybody goes to Hillsdale, King’s, or Grove City.) This is a genuine public service, one of the many things that makes The Economist an invaluable voice in public affairs.
The other interesting thing The Economist did was publish an uncharacteristically stupid essay about the “built-in bias” of the American electoral system. “In no other two-party system does the party that receives the most votes routinely find itself out of power,” the newspaper said. That’s true enough. There isn’t another two-party democratic republic very much like the United States, and that is intentional. One of the important reasons for that is the fact that Jefferson et al. were up on The Economist’s reading list well before James Wilson (the Scottish one, who also appears on the reading list, not the American Founding Father) got around to launching The Economist. Perhaps the essayist here should peruse the works of some of those great liberal thinkers. A good place to start would be in The Economist, which intelligently included an essay on the father of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, which bears the title “Against the Tyranny of the Majority.”
As it turns out, there is a relationship between these two items of journalistic curiosity.
11. How to describe the idea of a post-Trump world? Victor Davis Hanson takes a crack at what impeachers might wrought (if you will pardon the tense). From his piece:
The Trump base will see a Trump removal as a Deep State/elite-bluestocking effort to nullify an election. With long memories, they will be far less likely to vote Republican at the national level. We should remember that conservatives have maligned Trump voters as much as has the Left, from “crazies” to what Eliot Cohen recently referred to as a “peasant revolt.”
What got Trump elected was not just his populist/nationalist agenda but a canny appraisal of the Electoral College. So far in the two years of Republican-party civil war, few Never Trumpers have offered anything like the following: “We do not need the crude Trump and his crackpot heresies, or his pathetic peasant rallies, but instead can return to Republican orthodoxy and thereby win the states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.”
Few seem to ponder that the Trump election was not so much a vote for a raconteur who frequented with the likes of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, but rather for someone who was notthe Republican party, at least as embodied in the last few years in the national elections. Few have argued that had Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich won the Republican nomination, his agenda and Marquess of Queensbury rules of decorum would have won over the swing voters in the above key states. That is not an endorsement of either Trump’s heterodox views or his personal comportment; it is just a statement of fact.
12. Dennis Prager explains the Left in three easy lessons. One: Fear the naïve and the bored. Two: Chooches like Andrew Cuomo can’t help but show their sincere contempt for America. Three: You get Saul Alinsky when you ditch God.
13. I’ll Be a Monkey’s Uncle: In The Corner Rich Lowry attacks in turn the “idiotic” attacks on FL GOP gubernatorial nominee Ron DeSantis.
14. Monkey See, Monkey Do: Charlie Cooke seconds El Jefe’s outrage, and decries a disgraceful press. From his Corner post:
In pursuit of both, an enormous number of self-described “journalists” deliberately tied DeSantis’s use of “monkey this up” — which came attached to some praise for Gillum coupled with a warning that Gillum’s socialism would muck up Florida’s excellent economy — to the fact that Gillum is black, the obvious implication being that DeSantis believes that electing a black man as governor of Florida would “monkey this up” (whatever that means). But that is not what DeSantis said. It is not what DeSantis meant. And it is not what anyone really thinks he meant, either. It is a lie of the sort that is to be expected from explicitly political players, but not from those who believe they are Woodward and Bernstein in a firefighter’s hat. (Given his interest in “context collapse,” I’m sure that Ezra Klein is penning a defense of DeSantis for Voxas I type.)
15. More from the Barrel of Monkeys: Jay Nordlinger recalls the chimp-influenced defenestration of Howard Cosell. From his Corner post:
In light of Monkeygate, down in Florida, I’ve been thinking of Howard Cosell — who in 1983 was covering a Cowboys–Redskins game. “That little monkey gets loose, doesn’t he?” He was referring to the Redskins’ Alvin Garrett, a pass receiver of diminutive stature, certainly for the NFL (5 foot 7). As Garrett is black, a furor ensued.
Cosell protested his innocence. First, there was his record on civil rights (sterling). But second, he often used “little monkey” to refer to small, fast people. He used the term about his own grandchildren.
RELATED: Timing being everything, of coincidental note is that this Sunday night, at 8 PM Eastern time, Turner Classic Movies will be showing the possibly racist Cary Grant / Ginger Rogers / Marilyn Monroe comedy, Monkey Business. (Which is not to be confused with any documentary on Gary Hart.)
16. Armond White reviews Support the Girls. Insightful as heck, as usual. From his piece:
It is the Obama Effect that explains the shallow acclaim for Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls. Regina Hall plays the film’s protagonist, Lisa, the middle-aged black female manager of a Hooters-like Texas bar called Double Whammies. She goes along with the establishment’s matter-of-fact sexism as well as the white owner’s casual policy of not having more than one black female on waitress duty at a time. Lisa’s not an activist; she understands how racism operates, and so it doesn’t faze her. She has work to do and a life to live — which means she understands America. This premise proves that Hall and Bujalski both understand America in a particular way — a double whammy that remedies the Obama Effect.
Hall and Bujalski collaborate on the most credible portrait of a black American woman’s travail in any film this millennium. The Texas setting is different from the Williamsburg hipster locale of Bujalski’s early Mumblecore films (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) and the Lisa character differs from Hall’s widely admired comic turns in the Scary Movies series. A filmmaker dedicated to subcultural specifics and an actress striving for her career identity have found artistic common ground. They bypass the social stereotypes of the Obama Effect through this story’s Southern ethnic mix that big-city Northern media folk just don’t understand: Lisa mentors her team of young-lady waitresses, shares confidences with them, the same way she humors her good-old-boy customers and the white cops she depends upon to keep order.
17. David Nammo offers three cheers for the not-impartial, increasingly lefty American Bar Association getting sidelined over the Kavanaugh SCOTUS confirmation process. From his analysis:
No one seems to expect liberal judicial nominees to come to the bench without life experience or opinions. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg worked for the ACLU. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was an advocate for immigrants. Justice Thurgood Marshall was an NAACP champion. We ask our judges — liberal or conservative — to set aside their personal opinions to consider each case based on the law. In a pluralistic society, many views are accommodated, since we are stronger together than we are separately.
But given the bias against faith and pro-life concerns, it’s clear that the ABA stamps all résumés of attorneys found “guilty” of faith as unqualified. No longer should the ABA’s analysis be consulted when considering people for the bench. It has a right to its point of view, but not the right to prevent others from participating in our democracy. Unfortunately, this bias will be on full display over the next month as the ABA and its political friends in Congress take weeks to criticize Judge Kavanaugh, play to their base, and raise money for 2018 and 2020.
Podcastapalooza
1. Rob Long joins the intrepid host of The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg for some GLoP-flavored (gluten- and Podhoretz-free) discussion. Catch it here.
2. In this episode of The Editors, Rich, Reihan, Charlie, and Michael remember John McCain, discuss possible outcomes of an ongoing NAFTA negotiation with Mexico, and consider controversies in the recent Florida primary. Rich also asks Michael for more details and clarification on the unfolding scandal in the Catholic Church. Say three Hail Marys and listen here.
3. Given the PC-engineered stoppage of the forthcoming Broadway revival of West Side Story, Mr. Nordlinger can’t help but make the new episode of Jaywalking focus on such at the get-go, before delighting us with a rich stew of other treats. Eat if you can, but I suggest listening instead, right here.
4. James Robbins, author of Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past, joins John J. Miller on the new episode of The Bookmonger, which awaits your ears here.
5. We’ve got two new episodes of Ordered Libertyawaiting you. The newest finds Alexandra and David taking on the New York Timesfor after a report which says conservative Catholics “pounce” to . . . take advantage of the sex scandal and to take on Pope Francis. Catch that here. And in the prior episode, our Dynamic Duo explain how the “Catholic Catastrophe is a Christian Catastrophe.” Listen here.
6. On the new episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Charlie and Kevin discuss whether Florida needs a socialist governor. Get back into the Woof Blimey groove here.
7. Constitutionally Speaking, now playing on NRO, this week finds co-hosts Luke and Jay giving a briefing on the Bill of Rights. Refuse to short-change your intelligence, here.
8. On Reality Check with Jeanne Allen, our host is joined by Chris Whittle to discuss “reimagining education” and “the first global school.” This very cool discussion can be heard here.
9. On the new episode of The McCarthy Report, Andy and Rich focus on three personalities with deep ties to Trump and the Russia allegations: Bruce Ohr, Michael Cohen, and Don McGahn. Podcast is in session, here.
The Six
1. At ConservativeHome.com, our mate Dan Hannan dissects identity politics. The MEP shares some anecdotes and we pick up here (using Britishy spellings):
What is most striking about these stories is the unquenchable indignation of the affronted. It becomes impossible to avoid giving offence, because the offended keep changing the rules. It is obligatory to demand a black Bond, yet simultaneously unconscionable to applaud a white Maria. Gender is an invented social construct, but we must recognise self-designated gender identities. Racial discrimination is always wrong, except when quotas are wanted.
The wokest of the woke can find themselves tripping up. Consider, for example, the explosion earlier this month when The Nation, a Leftist American magazine, published a poem written from the point of view of a homeless black woman. When it turned out that the author was a white man, he had to issue a grovelling apology, while the editors involved rushed out the kind of self-accusatory statements that were heard at Stalin’s show-trials. Why? Because the poem was written in black American vernacular – apparently quite authentically.
2. Skidmore College professor Flagg Taylor graces Law & Libertywith an essay on Anne Applebaum’s “Holomodor” book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. It’s never too late to set the record straight. From the essay:
While the story of the Holodomor deserves telling and retelling, historical awareness of the terrors of 1932-33 was nearly effaced in the ensuing decades. The Soviet Union was quite adept at whitewashing these events and finding willing agents in the West to propagate lies on its behalf. Academic political scientists and historians, those supposedly well-equipped for measured analysis, have not always proven themselves to be reliable interpreters of the Holodomor. As the French philosopher and historian Alain Besançon put it, “It is characteristic of the twentieth century that its history was not only horrible in terms of human massacres, but that historical awareness . . . has had particular difficulty finding a true orientation.”
The British social scientists Sydney and Beatrice Webb visited the Soviet Union during the famine. Still they returned more convinced than ever that the Soviet system was a model for all to emulate. Here is their considered judgment, rendered in 1937, on “dekulakization” (the forced removal and deportation or murder of the supposedly wealthier peasants) during the collectivization campaign: “Candid students of the circumstances may not unwarrantably come to the conclusion that . . . the Soviet Government could hardly have acted otherwise than it did.”
3. Ain’t no fear here. At First Things, Todd Flanders contends retribution, sin, and damnation are quite real and merit theological attention. From his piece:
The Church in America has, for the most part, almost exclusively emphasized doctrines of grace, forgiveness, love, and this-world social justice, as though there is little or no eschatological dimension to reality. To the extent that eschatology is preached or taught in schools it tends to be heaven alone (except for Hitler and maybe the likes of Trump). It is commonly good news all the time, to the point where the Good News of Jesus can seem a bit arbitrary, as though the Incarnate Christ found no particularly bad news about man to respond to on earth.
For me and many fellow converts in the past quarter century, the “good news all the time” approach has been especially puzzling. I came to see Christ in the Catholic Church as the sure source of healing, forgiveness, growth, and transformation. The way of sanctification in the Church — by grace and mercy and love — I saw not only as possible, but compellingly attractive. For many, there comes a moment of recognition that we are unrighteous, in radical need of a savior and redeemer as well as a brother and friend. Thus the Good News that is the gospel. Thus the evangelical power of the Church.
4. Steven Pinker has a new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, that’s getting lots of attention. Jeffrey Folks gives it some for The University Bookman. From his review:
It is difficult to dismiss Pinker’s writing since it displays extraordinary rhetorical skill, but the word that comes to mind so often in reading his work is “superficial.” Enlightenment Now is the product of high intelligence and exceptional diligence, but it seems tone deaf to the enduring facts of human nature and the human condition, and, I would add, to the growing realization among populations everywhere that progressivism has not resulted in greater human happiness but rather in enslavement.
Indeed, having read Enlightenment Now and other works by Pinker, I am left with a chilling fear of what progressivism might do were its adherents to gain complete control. The world that Enlightenment Now envisages, that same world imagined in the past by Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, Benito Mussolini, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, LBJ, and Obama, is one of state control, intellectual repression, and regimentation. It is not the route to happiness but to a death-in-life unlike anything the world has seen, even in that ancient Babylonian past in which, as the author points out, an hour of candle light (by sesame seed oil) cost 50 hours of human labor. Better to sit in the dark than to live in thrall of those “experts” so highly recommended in Enlightenment Now.
5. It’s been a year since “the events at Charlottesville,” as the great Mark Helprin calls them in a reflection for Claremont Review of Books. From his piece:
So, in Charlottesville many serious injuries and three deaths (two police in a helicopter crash; one peaceful demonstrator slain by a white supremacist who drove his car into her and dozens of others) came not from the tips of the two spears but from innocents. The national press ignored both the role of Antifa in joining battle and the city authorities in instigating it. They deliberately misapplied President Trump’s comment that there were good people on both sides, to the confrontation rather than to the issue of monument removal. And Trump, being Trump, did not manage or bother to correct them.
As innocent as Charlottesville may be of exaggerated charges, being part of America it suffers nonetheless what James Madison characterized as “[i]mbecility in the government; discord among the provinces; foreign influence and indignities; a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities from war.” The now fashionable abandonment of civility, turning like an augur deeper and deeper into the country’s heart, appeared here 20 years ago when the “conservation chairman” of the Virginia Sierra Club wrote, “Officials who support the road should be mercilessly abused, shamed, ridiculed, and otherwise made to suffer pain.” Charlottesville’s mayor at the time of last year’s confrontation, Mike Signer, was recently quoted as referring to “the so-called freedom of speech.”
6. At The New Criterion, James Piereson reviews the body counts and wonders why socialism isn’t a hate crime. Read his piece here.
BONUS: William H. Young recounts in Minding the Campus his recent trip to Madison’s homestead, Montpelier. In the face-off between slaveholder and Constitution father, guess which aspect of the fourth president prevails in the site’s exhibits? From the piece:
When I last visited Montpelier, the ancestral home of James Madison and his wife Dolley in northwestern Virginia, about twenty years ago, the principal exhibit focused on the ideals and ideas of the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the contributions made to them by the man called the Father of the Constitution. To my surprise and dismay upon a return visit to Montpelier in May 2018, that exhibit had disappeared and had been replaced by one that tells the story of James Madison as a slaveholder, how slavery was rooted and protected in the Constitution, and how that legacy is manifested in America today.
The new Montpelier exhibit adds to the transmogrification of the public presentation of American history at our museums and historic sites, which the academic left (and their affiliated progressive and postmodern multicultural elites) has achieved. The ideologically refitted narrative presents the oppression of marginalized groups and injustice as the principal story of American history — replacing the understanding of our founding ideals and ideas, the applications of our governing principles, and the positive achievements of our nation’s past.
Buy this Book!
My pal Matthew Hennessey has authored a new book getting deserved attention and acclaim, Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials. That was the Amazon link, so buy your copy thataway. After all, you could do with some insight into a matter of major societal concern. Now, if you want a taste of what Matt is getting at, I recommend his 2017City Journal essay (it shares a title with that of the book):
Millennials’ high opinion of themselves doesn’t extend to the country they share with older generations. Markedly less patriotic than boomers and GenXers, they see nothing particularly special about being American and recoil at the notion of American exceptionalism. A 2016 Gallup poll found that socialism was more popular than capitalism among those under 30. Nearly 70 percent of millennial survey respondents said that they’d be comfortable voting for a socialist candidate. During the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, 80 percent of voters under 30 voted for Bernie Sanders in the crucial early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. In 2012, millennials put Democrat Barack Obama over the top in a tight race against Republican Mitt Romney.
Perhaps most troubling, millennials have displayed an indifference to the bedrock American principle of free speech. A 2015 Pew Research Center study found that 40 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 felt that the federal government ought to censor potentially offensive statements about minority groups. “Roughly two-thirds of college students say colleges should be allowed to establish policies that restrict slurs and other language that is intentionally offensive to certain groups (69%), as well as the wearing of costumes that stereotype certain racial or ethnic groups (63%),” according to a 2016 Gallup survey. Nearly half of respondents said that they thought that there could be some “legitimate reasons” to prevent the press from covering campus protests.
These attitudes set millennials apart from Generation X and the baby boomers, but it’s Generation X that will feel their impact. The advertising world has already begun to turn away from marketing to middle-aged Xers and cater instead to millennials and their unprecedented purchasing power. Even the military is scrambling to adapt to the needs of its youngest recruits. The army is considering prolonging the amount of time that drill sergeants spend with new soldiers during basic training. “The problem that we do have is that right now the generation we have coming in is not as disciplined as we would like them to be,” said an army spokesman. “So we have to provide them with discipline over a longer period of time.”
Buy this Cabin!
On the National Review 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise. You’ll find complete information at www.nrcruise.com.
Baseballery
The days dwindle down to a precious few, September . . .
The game is marked by many things, but of its more dramatic moments are the collapses in the season’s last month, when first-place certain-pennant winners . . . crash like a falling piano. One of the more-forgotten collapses was that of the 1934 New York Giants, led by player/manager Bill Terry, crossword-puzzle answer Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell, and ace Hal Schumacher (all but Hal Hall of Famers). Things looked sorta rosy on Thursday, September 6th, and they were: The Giants stood seven games ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals, and nine ahead of the Chicago Cubs. But then things got bad and stayed that way for Terry’s Men: In the season’s final days, the Giants played 8-13 baseball, including losing the last five games, five extra-inning games, and dropping three out of four to the Cardinals in an important Polo Grounds homestand.
The flashy Cards showed why they were called the Gashouse Gang: Led by player/manager Frankie Frisch(the “Fordham Flash”) and fellow future Hall-of-Famers Ducky Medwick and Dizzy Dean, they went on a 17-5 tear (Dizzy and brother Daffy Dean took 11 of those victories, and registered no defeats), sweeping a four-game season-ending series at home against the Cincinnati Reds to clinch the pennant. The Cards finished the season 95-58, two games up over the Giants. In the World Seasons, they prevailed over the Detroit Tigers in seven games, with Mrs. Dean’s boys each snagging two victories.
September Song
. . . and these few precious days . . .
The beautiful tune was written by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson for the 1938 Broadway musical, Knickerbocker Holiday. The classic “original” version of September Song was sung by Walter Huston — best known for his performances in Yankee Doodle Dandy (as George M. Cohan’s dad, Jerry) and in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (as Howard, the old goat prospector, for which Huston won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar). Listen here to him croak it out. Some other worthwhile takes on the classic: Frank Sinatra crooning it in 1965, an exquisite rendition by Ella Fitzgerald, a remarkable tag team of the Boston Pops and Wynston Marsalis backing up Sarah Vaughn.
But wait, there’s more: If you like Sammy Davis Jr. (and I do) then stop your waiting game here, The Ravens’ version sounds like a mash-up of the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, and the Old Schnozzola, Mr. James Durante, did September Song nasally justice in this version.
Labor Day
Or, let’s be honest, non-labor day. But so what: May I recommend Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Message on the Observance of Labor Day? Sweet, simple, essential, American:
A rising economy and greater opportunity give us confidence, but our work is far from finished. Too many of our fellow Americans are still out of work or down on their luck. We must not and will not rest until everyone who wants a job has found one, until all Americans can reach as high as their vision and talents take them. We must and we will make certain that the American dream remains a springtime of hope for all our people. Meaningful work, not welfare, is every American’s hope, and we have a continuing responsibility to make those hopes a lasting reality.
By the way, here’s an interesting 2011 piece from The Atlantic on how The Gipper was a great SAG union president.
I Coulda Been a Contenda . . .
Are we disappointed that TCM this weekend isn’t airing the most-appropriate film for Labor Day, On the Waterfront? Hell yeah! But before you get your one-way ticket to Palookaville punched, watch this clip of the film’s classic scene.
Related: A few years back my pal Tim Peterson wrote this excellent profile of Father John Corridan, the real-life tough Jesuit who was portrayed by Karl Malden in the film.
A Dios
Lord, see my goods, my possessions; in my boat you find, no power, no wealth. Will you accept then, my nets and labor? I hope so.
God’s Blessings on you and all those for whom you seek His Graces,
Jack Fowler
I await you taunts, your brickbats, your elation at finding typos, your glee in my factual errors, at jfowler@nationalreview.com.