Dear Weekend Jolters,
This turkey — the one you are reading — was cooked on Monday (affording WJ editorial galley slave Phil the freedom of actual time off). We put it in the fridge right away so you wouldn’t catch any salmonella, and now it awaits you and your fierce appetite. The food baby of Thursday having passed, you find yourself beyond peckish, so . . . why not warm up the gravy and have yourself a hearty hot-turkey sandwich today while you read selections from the NRO Holiday Cornucopia — Vintage Edition — assembled below.
Vintage? Yeah, we are serving you tasty leftovers from NR’s abundant archives. You’re going to need a bigger plate.
(As for the turkey in the image, no question he was begging for the ax rather than let that brat with a clearly bogus American flag ride him for another second.)
Editorials
1. There’s something of Marvin K. Mooney that lends itself to Theresa May (looney!) and her awful Brexit negotiating with the EU. We urge the British PM: Will you please go now?! From the end of our big, meaty editorial:
Crises of this kind follow no known rules. Governments usually get their way, but when party loyalties are stretched to breaking point and constitutional conventions strain under pressure, governments sometimes lose and are sometimes broken altogether. At present, it looks as if May is likely to lose the parliamentary vote on the deal but likely to survive a leadership challenge. If she loses the leadership, she’s out altogether — there’s no coming back from that. If she holds on as leader but loses the vote on the deal because of Tory dissent, she’s almost certainly out then also. A leader who spends two full years not getting Brexit done will find her support evaporating. Her allies let it be known that in the event of such a parliamentary defeat, she would call an election on a manifesto that included her deal with Europe.
That is surely a fantasy. It would run up against at least two formidable obstacles. The first is that the Conservative party below the cabinet level is a Leaver party — as opinion polls and election statistics both show clearly. She would be leading a bitterly divided party into an election on an issue on which her natural voters are against her. That would be the culmination of her original error on Brexit — which has been to allow herself to be maneuvered by a faction of Remainer ministers, civil servants, and establishment worthies into a Brexit strategy at odds with the great majority of her own party. It would almost certainly lead to electoral. The second obstacle is her claim that the EU–U.K. deal she has embraced achieves the Brexit referendum result. It’s a completely absurd claim, as everyone can see, and she would lack the rhetorical ability to put across a much better case. As in the last election, she would be reduced to helpless silence.
There is no good end to this crisis under May’s leadership or on the basis of this dangerous and undemocratic deal. The Tories should find the courage and commonsense to choose a new leader who would then have the authority to forge a new policy to achieve a real Brexit. At present they are sleepwalking into vassalage.
Ancient of Days
For your enjoyment, an eclectic collection of seven pieces written by some big freaking deals. Men of Old, there are reruns, and then there are reruns worth rerunning. (Of course, there is ReRun, but we’re not talking about people.)
1. From 1962, Frank Meyer’s famous NR essay, “The Twisted Tree of Liberty,” a smackdown of the “‘pure libertarian’ sector of right-wing opinion.” From the essay:
Before the challenge of modern collectivism, hostile alike to transcendent truth and to individual freedom, traditionalist and libertarian have found common cause and tend more and more to work together on the practical political level. But further, the common source in the ethos of Western civilization from which flow both the traditionalist and the libertarian currents, has made possible a continuing discussion which is creating the fusion that is contemporary American conservatism. That fused position recognizes at one and the same time the transcendent goal of human existence and the primacy of the freedom of the person in the political order. Indeed, it maintains that the only possible ultimate vindication of the freedom of the individual person rests upon a belief in his overriding value as a person, a value based upon transcendent considerations. And it maintains that the duty of men is to seek virtue; but it insists that men cannot in actuality do so unless they are free from the constraint of the physical coercion of an unlimited state. For the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil.
Therefore, the conservative — who understands also that power in this world will always exist and cannot be wished out of existence — stands for division of power, in order that those who hold it may balance each other and the concentration of overweening power be foreclosed. He stands for the limitation of the power of the state, division of power within the state, a free economy, and prescriptive protection of the rights of individual persons and groups of individual persons against the state. But he does not see the state as an absolute evil; he regards it as a necessary institution, so long as it is restricted to its natural functions: the preservation of domestic peace and order, the administration of justice, and defense against foreign enemies.
In the political sphere the conservative consensus presently emerging in the United States regards freedom as an end; but, although it is an end at the political level, it is a means — as is the whole political structure — to the higher ends of the human person. Without reference to those ends, it is meaningless. While that conservative consensus regards the untrammeled state as the greatest of political evils, it does not regard the state itself as evil so long as it is limited to its proper functions, so long as the force it wields is effectively limited by a constitutional understanding of the bounds beyond which that force may not intrude upon the sacred sphere of the individual person, and so long as that understanding is enforced by division and balance of powers.
2. Several months later, in “Freedom or Virtue?” the great L. Brent Bozell responded to that essay, and the overall Meyer effort to advance “fusionism.” From the beginning of LBB’s rejoinder:
Frank Meyer has labored earnestly in recent years to promote and justify modern American conservatism as a “fusion” of the libertarian and traditionalist points of view. His “Twisted Tree,” though it read out of the movement that curious breed of anti-anti-Communist recently spawned by nihilistic libertarianism was essentially a restatement of the thesis that a symbiosis of the two schools, if the contribution of each is properly understood, is not only possible but necessary. Meyer has been by no means alone in trying to keep order in conservatism’s divided house. While he was perhaps the first to identify the contenders generically, and to name the terms for peaceful coexistence, he has been ably seconded by others, notably Stanton Evans, who has made Professor Morton Auerbach’s allegations of right-wing schizophrenia (“Do-It-Yourself Conservatism?” NR. Jan. 30) his special concern. Still others, less persuaded than Meyer and Evans of the theoretical cogency of fusionist apologetics, have helped, too — by bearing their misgivings in silence for the sake of conservative unity.
Now I venture no prediction about the political fate of the Meyer-Evans effort — either as to its ability to hold the conservative movement together, or, more to the point, as to whether it will succeed in midwifing the movement to power. After all, the Liberal collapse is creating a power vacuum into which almost anything might move. I do question, however, whether the libertarian-traditionalist amalgam, as the fusionists defame it is worth bringing to power. For I doubt whether a movement dominated by libertarianism can be responsive to the root causes of Western disintegration. And we should not make any mistake about this. A movement that can accommodate libertarianism’s axiom is dominated by it: if freedom is the “first principle” in politics, virtue is, at best, the second one; and the programmatic aspects of the movement that affirms that hierarchy will be determined accordingly.
3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a withering 1982 essay for NR about “The Soft Voice of America.” The entire shebang is a worthwhile read, but there are particularly prescient passages in this remarkable essay, such as this:
The fatal historical mistake of liberalism is to see no enemy on the left, to consider that the enemy is always on the right. It is the same mistake which destroyed Russian liberalism in 1917, when the liberals overlooked the real danger, which was from Lenin. The same error — the mistake of Russian liberalism — is being repeated on a worldwide scale today.
And worst of all is China. China in the Eighties is like the Soviet Union in the Thirties; it is in need of everything. It seeks aid from America. If the U.S. provides it with technology and then with weapons, China may, for a while, serve as a safeguard against the Soviet Union, although even that is problematical. But if the U.S. arms China, China may take over the second half of the earth — that second half which includes America.
Never forget that Mao’s government murdered millions — even more, probably, in proportion to the population than Stalin did. China is even more closed to foreigners than the Soviet Union. The West knows even less about it. When, thirty years from now, you read the Chinese Gulag Archipelago, you will be amazed: “Oh, what a pity, and we didn’t know!” But you must know! You must know in time, and not when it is too late.
No matter what the Chinese rulers may say when they are looking for favors from the U.S., no Communist government ever cares about the rights, the development of its people. Communist governments are like cancerous tumors: they grow wildly and have two aims only: first, to strengthen their power, and second, to expand their boundaries. Those are the aims of the Chinese government, as they are those of the Soviet government.
4. Michael Novak has written many brilliant pieces for NR over the years. As “Christmas” began to come under attack from the Left, he responded (in 2004) to the outrages with this powerful defense of the power of the Nativity. From his essay:
In any case, knowing that this really is a wonderful life, in which implausible dreams can come true, I have been dreaming that one Christmas soon some atheist will start a movement of “Atheists for Christmas.” The purpose would not be to declare that such atheists are Christians. Rather, they or others similarly placed are in a position to state, without partisanship, the positive contributions that Christmas dramatizes for the understanding of freedom and virtue in our time.
It is not just that without Christmas the year would be much drearier. It is rather that Christmas is in fact centered upon the mystery of liberty. During one Christmas or another, each of us is going to have to make a decision: “Who is this baby in the manger?” The consequences for our own lives that follow upon that question are tremendous. Yet the child appears before our eyes, not in the glory of his terrible swift sword, but in helplessness and need–not as overpowering, but as altogether unthreatening. The decision thus depends upon the free conscience of the observer, upon his inalienable liberty.
For that reason, too, Christmas also instructs us to recognize all around ourselves many persons of good will. Even when their answers to that question differ from ours, we owe their inalienable dignity our respect and honor. Freedom, then, and also charity, forbearance, and tolerance — and not merely tolerance, as George Washington confided to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, but mutual respect — are all implicit in the scene at the crib.
5. In 1965, President Johnson was pressing US corporations to show “voluntary restraint” in making investments overseas. The implication was . . . greed. Milton Friedman found LBJ’s idea preposterous. Subversive to the cause of freedom, even. From his essay:
Perhaps by now we can see why systems of voluntary restraint are seldom successful unless there lurks somewhere in the background, the coercive power of the state, either explicitly as when there are laws and penalties, or implicitly as when Washington brandishes the tax stick and the threat of anti-trust prosecution (steel, 1962) or when Washington offers the tax carrot (railroads, 1964). People are being asked to act against their self-interest. Even if we assume that most of them accept the “social responsibility,” the case is not won. A few, less “responsible” or more sophisticated, will reap fine profits from the opportunities made available to those who wish to flout, or who know how to refute, the doctrine of “social responsibility.” Their fine profits will rankle in the hearts of the “socially responsible” who are expected to continue to sacrifice their own interest for a social purpose that is obviously not being met.
For the sake of the argument, however, let us assume that everyone, without exception, wishes to act in accordance with his “social responsibility.” We still must face the problem: How can he know what behavior is “socially responsible”?
Consider the seemingly simple case of the foreign loan. Is it socially desirable to cut out all foreign loans completely? That cure would be worse than the disease. Then some foreign loans should and some should not be granted. How is our banker to know which is which? He knows tolerably well which loan will be best for the bank, but how is he to know which will be best for the balance of payments?
The president, or a presidential committee, can fix a target. It might be a 20 percent cut in foreign loans. Twenty percent of what? If it’s 20 percent of loans requested, then requests for loans will go up, and the payments problem, remains untouched. If it’s 20 percent of some earlier amount of loans, then the formula is the typical backward-looking device that crops up, sooner or later, in every governmental program that is said to be progressive.
Even then we are not out of the woods. Which 20 percent? Shall each bank decide for itself? If so, each bank cuts off the least profitable borrowers. Borrowers then compete with each other for the privilege of getting a loan, and the interest rate on foreign loans (assuming perfect voluntary compliance) goes up. The voluntary exercise of “social responsibility” has become a governmentally approved cartel to raise the price to foreign borrowers — which helps to explain why leading New York bankers were among those who developed the program and why so many banks heavily involved in foreign lending have been so favorably disposed towards it.
6. Bill Buckley visited Lourdes in 1993, not looking for miracles, but as a pilgrim who found his God omnipresent, his faith divinely nourished. From his essay:
Pilgrims who travel to Lourdes make up their own schedules, in cooperation with the Administrative Office there. The routine of our group began one afternoon with Mass at the upper Basilica, one of the many churches. An odd sense of tranquility settled on us. I can’t offhand remember when last, other than at sea, I felt so little concern for timetables. On Friday there was a “Morning of Recollection” and the anointing of the sick at another chapel (St. Joseph’s). There are three hospitals — more properly, hospices — all of them administered by volunteers. Few of us were sick, but we were reminded that from the day of birth, we are on our deathbeds. In the afternoon. Mass at the Salle Notre Dame, and in the evening a candlelight procession in front of the Rosary Basilica. It is not easy to imagine 20,000 candles shaping a cross. The ensuing four days included a daily Mass in different churches; easy access to confessions, heard in six languages, throughout the day; the Stations of the Cross, twice life-sized bronze statuary, rising up a steep hillside, invoking the travail of Calvary. The schedule left several hours every day during which one could do as one chose (there are historical sites, including the birthplace of Bernadette, and the great, massive fort built during the Middle Ages), and one tends to choose to walk about, and to take keen pleasure in casual encounters.
The sense of the visit is rapidly communicated. There are thousands of gurneys (voitures, they are referred to) for the malades, the all-inclusive French word for the sick — again, propelled exclusively by volunteers. Perhaps every malade harbors the hope that he (or she) will be cured, but it is not reasonably expected; yet somehow it seems irrelevant as larger perspectives take hold. It is a part of the common faith that prayer can effect anything (“Remember, most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided”), but incantatory hyperbole is simply a ritualized form of docility. The sick who travel to Lourdes are there, yes, because of the undeniability of recorded miracles, but that isn’t what brings as many as fifty thousand people a day to Lourdes, the great majority of them healthy. The reason so many people come, many of them on their second or tenth visit, is that what is effected is a sense of reconciliation, if not well-being. Hardly miraculous, unless one chooses to use the word as most appropriate for that buoyancy experienced on viewing the great processions, sharing with almost 30,000 people an underground Mass, being lowered for three bracing seconds into one of the baths; suddenly noting the ambient serenity. These are Christians feeling impulses of their faith, and intimations of the lady in white.
They are in Lourdes because of this palpability of the emanations that gave birth to the shrine. The spiritual tonic is felt. If it were otherwise, the pilgrims would diminish in number, would, by now, have disappeared, as at Delphos, which one visits as a museum, not a shrine. What it is that fetches them is I think quite simply stated, namely a reinforced conviction that the Lord God loves His creatures, healthy or infirm; that they — we — must understand the nature of love, which is salvific in its powers; and that although we are free to attempt to divine God’s purpose, we will never succeed in doing so. The reason is that we cannot know (the manifest contradictions are too disturbing) what is the purpose behind particular phenomena and therefore must make do with only the grandest plan of God, which treats with eternal salvation. To keep the faith: To do this (the grammar of assent) requires the discipline of submission, some assurance that those who are stricken can, even so, be happy; and that the greatest tonic of all is divine love, which is nourished by human love, even as human love is nourished by divine love.
7. From NR in 1961: Evelyn Waugh reviews Gary Wills’ Chesterton: Man and Mask. From the review:
These criticisms made, one can turn to Mr. Wills’s virtues. He is a young man without the dandyism proper to his years, but he is also free of adolescent prurience. The title Man and Mask raised apprehensions of an attempt at exposure. It has become commonly accepted nowadays that any man’s idiosyncrasies of appearance or manner are a disguise deliberately adopted to conceal some fear or vice. Persona is one of the cant terms of modem criticism, and modern critics regard it as their function, to strip their subject of its protective mask. They should take notice of Max Beerbohm’s Happy Hypocrite. The mask, the style, is the man.
Mr. Wills to his great credit shows no inclination to expose Chesterton. There are questions which do titillate curiosity: What, if any, were his homosexual adventures at the Slade? To what extent, if at all, was he ever in danger of becoming a serious drunkard? The obesity which he bore like a panache must have been morbid. The physical health of an artist, like his financial means, is something which a critic may reasonably consider an influence on his work. How much was Chesterton, how much Belloc, really driven by financial need to the over-production which oppressed them both? How much was it the product of a nervous restlessness and sloth? For profusion can be slothful. It requires more effort to do a small thing really well than do many things carelessly. Mr. Wills, with commendable restraint, denies himself the investigation of these problems. He concerns himself very little with the events and circumstances of Chesterton’s life. He has contented himself with a study of his written work and has been assiduous in pursuing it in all its huge ephemeral bulk.
Are There Worthwhile Early-Week NRO Pieces to Read? Magic 8-Ball Says “It Is Decidedly So.”
1. Andy McCarthy is very critical of the Trump Administration’s new criminal-justice effort, “FIRST STEP,” and its implication of political libel. From the end of his piece:
Again, it is all well and good to argue that the 100:1 disparity in treatment of the different forms of cocaine was bad policy, and that later legislation, which reduced it to about 18:1, is more sensible. President Trump would have garnered the bipartisan applause he craves by arguing that the original disparity was overkill, and that FIRST STEP would improve on the subsequent downward adjustment by applying it retroactively (giving more incarcerated defendants the benefit of it). But it is libel against the people who enacted and enforced the laws to suggest that they intentionally harmed the African-American community.
If anything, the motivation behind those laws was to protect African-American communities from determined criminals. It remains to be seen whether those communities will be as safe once, thanks to the FIRST STEP bill, many of those criminals are more rapidly set free.
BONUS: From Groundhog Day, Ned Ryerson warns about that first step.
2. Kathryn Lopez has assembled a powerful symposium on “Adopting Life.” Read it here. And here is one contribution, from Branden Polk:
Our nation has a duty to care for our children — it comes with being an American. It comes with being a human. Not one of us has been released from our moral duty to love, emotionally and in practice, those that are beaten, abandoned, and abused, even though many of us feel that we should be “called” to foster or adopt a child. We often treat this as a special assignment or mission for the most generous and kind among us. But in reality, we all have a role to play in either supporting, fostering, or adopting children in care. Together, Americans can ensure that our nation’s future is grafted into families, that the most vulnerable among us feel worthy of connection, no matter their age or background.
The current foster-care and adoption circumstances are dire. I do not believe that a socially and morally conscientious society can afford to ignore this problem, and yet so many children remain in care. If I could immediately do one thing to help compel more engagement, I would make sure that all families on the fence about fostering or adopting were guaranteed robust social and spiritual supports, which would surely increase their retention and increase the recruitment of other families. Additionally, I would elevate the voices of youth in foster care more frequently through film, music, and media. Those most impacted by this crisis can provided valuable clarity on how to deliver effective supports.
For children in care, the days drag on, and perhaps their hopes wain. The system is overloaded. Maybe it’s not hard for them to imagine aging out of foster care without a forever family. My hope for adoption policy is that decision makers will see this as a true crisis and an issue of conscience, putting aside all political differences in order to create nonpartisan solutions that free all of our hands to be altruistic helpers. Even so, if the politicians continue to have a hard time regulating, my hope is that our faith-based and community-based organizations will take up arms, setting aside our differences, on behalf of children and older youth who need and deserve amazing families.
3. Kyle Smith went to the local cinema, watched Creed II, and found that Mr. Stallone has created another satisfying boxing flick. From the review:
The sequel to 2015’s Creed, a spinoff from the six Rocky Balboa films, finds the late Apollo Creed’s son Adonis “Donny” Creed (a superb Michael B. Jordan) on the verge of capturing the heavyweight championship while he tries to work up the nerve to propose to his girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson). Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) angrily trains for a chance to fight Creed for the title. In the 1985 Cold War proxy Rocky IV, Viktor’s father Ivan (Dolph Lundgren) killed Adonis’s father Apollo before being defeated by Rocky.
Yes, Sylvester Stallone is back and gives another warm, finely tuned performance. Stallone has played the character in at least one Rocky film each decade going back to the Ford administration, and this 42-year, eight-film run is without parallel in movie history. How he has made the Philly fighter endure is a subject for another day, but Stallone deserves more respect than he has gotten as both a writer and an actor. (He co-wrote this entry with Juel Taylor, from a story by himself, Sascha Penn, and Cheo Hodari Coker.)
4. Duck Season / Wabbit Season: Hunters are urging hunters to ixnay with the ophytray pictures and bragging, because, well, the cool kids don’t like them. Hunters Need Not Apply. Kevin Williamson explains. From his piece:
We live in an antiseptic world, and there is no cure for that quite like gutting a Texas feral hog or roasting a pheasant you shot yourself. And there probably is no single activity that measures the width of the cultural chasm between coastal, urban, progressive America and interior, rural, traditional America. Hunting means guns and blood and non-ironically worn camouflage pants — often worn by the church-going, heterosexual white men who give the willies to the likes of Joan Walsh, author of What’s the Matter with White People?
(About that: Walsh hails from Wisconsin, one of the whitest states in the Union, where she attended school in an almost exclusively white suburb just north of Milwaukee, America’s most segregated city — none of which seems to have tamped down her squishy progressive sanctimony. Joan Walsh is what’s the matter with white people.)
Rural white guys are out of fashion just now. It’s hard to blame hunters for being concerned about the optics — not the kind made by Leupold, but the kind the politicians are always going on about. It’s easy to caricature hunters as bloody-minded Elmer Fudds, and there are those who want to drive them underground. Perhaps one day they’ll be forced to obliquely refer to one another as “Friends of Elmer” the way members of Alcoholics Anonymous call themselves “Friends of Bill” and gay men used to call themselves “Friends of Dorothy.” That lawsuit was after all successful and, for the moment, brown-bear hunting remains restricted to Alaska, with its abundant population of Ursus arctos.
BONUS: Elmer, Buggs, and Daffy do their thing.
5. Part 4 of the John Yoo / James Phillips series on setting a course for constitutional restoration. Here, the pair looks at gun rights. From the essay:
But just as we argued earlier with privacy, the true constitutional source for a right to bear arms comes through the 14th Amendment’s privileges and immunities clause. The radical Republicans believed that one of slavery’s great sins was its deprivation of the basic natural rights of blacks: to think and speak for themselves, to keep the fruits of their labors, to participate in political life as full citizens, and to defend their lives and property, just as any other human being could. In drafting the privileges and immunities clause, Reconstruction congressmen argued that it would override the South’s laws that had prohibited blacks from bearing arms and defending themselves. Rather than give in to the liberal enterprise of inventing rights from whole cloth, the new Roberts Court could more faithfully ground the right to bear arms by honoring the understandings of the Republicans who freed the slaves and fought to enshrine their equal rights in the Constitution.
Once it has reestablished its Second Amendment jurisprudence, the Roberts Court can then look forward to the task of elevating the right to bear arms to the same level as the others in the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, like unsupervised students when the teacher has left the classroom, the lower courts have largely done as they please. Normally, the Court will instruct lower courts as to a test to apply to determine whether a constitutional right has been infringed. A frequent test is one with tiers of scrutiny, with more or less scrutiny depending on the degree of infringement and the counterbalancing government interest.
But the Court has failed to announce any such test with the Second Amendment. The lower courts have struggled to come up with their own, which they have borrowed from “intermediate scrutiny” cases in other areas. Government action, here the regulation of gun ownership or use, is upheld if it furthers an important government interest and does so via means substantially related to that interest. Lower courts, for example, have upheld ten-day waiting periods before a firearm purchase, bans on semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity magazines, bans on openly carrying a firearm in public, and bans on carrying a concealed gun in public. Compared with cases on free speech, religion, and privacy, these courts have lowered the hurdle that the government must clear. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has merely looked the other way.
6. Son of Masterpiece: A new “wedding cake” case has percolated in Oregon, where Aaron and Melissa Klein are under attack from the state for their refusal to customize a cake for a same-sex wedding. Jeremy Dis and Mike Berry of First Liberty Institute tell the tale. From their piece:
Today, in their zeal to press a popular political agenda, aggressive though well-meaning government officials can do great damage to the Bill of Rights. Popular opinion may not be on the side of people like our clients, Aaron and Melissa Klein, but the Constitution protects their right to differ.
Aaron and Melissa Klein sold only custom wedding cakes. When they declined to customize a cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony — a simple yet highly symbolic act — the State of Oregon punished their speech, or rather, their polite refusal to speak. In imposing a $135,000 penalty, the state sought to compel them to speak a message the government approved or go out of business.
The Kleins’ situation bears a similarity to Jack Phillips’s in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Although in that decision the Court made clear that state officials may not be hostile to the religious beliefs of its citizens, it left unanswered the more critical question: whether the government can compel citizens to create a message, popular or not, contrary to their religious beliefs.
7. Jibran Khan is shedding super tears for the late Stan Lee, creator of “the most memorable characters since Shakespeare.” You will . . . marvel . . . at this analysis. From Jibran’s piece:
Spider-Man, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, the Hulk, the X-Men, and so many other characters continued to keep their fans’ attention as these readers grew from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. This was no accident. From the formative period, these characters, who shared a universe, evolved and had life-changing experiences. Lee often spoke of the letters he would receive from readers, addressed to the characters. (Iron Man in particular got a lot of letters from girls worried that he wasn’t taking care of himself.)
Stan was Marvel’s editor in chief, and he was responsible for scripting pretty much all of its major titles. (A bracing thought!) He spearheaded the “Marvel Method,” which both kept things efficient for him as editor and allowed the creativity of all parties to make itself known. He would give the artist a plot (some, like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, would sometimes come up with the plots themselves), the artist would then draw and lay out the whole comic, and then Stan would write the dialogue and exposition in his signature style. The method was showcased in bonus material in the comics themselves, complete with self-deprecating dialogue from Stan.
Today, many people are prone to downplaying Stan’s role, but frankly the sheer volume and consistency of his characters make it clear that there was a common factor. The artists absolutely share credit for coming up with the characters and stories; the likes of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, Bill Everett, John Romita Sr., and many others from the “Marvel Age” brought something new, and they would continue to produce amazing work even apart from Stan Lee or Marvel. But Stan worked with all of them, and he was the one who established the norm of crediting comic artists front-and-center.
By Grabthar’s Hammer . . .
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A Dios
Let’s not forget in our haze of pie and stuffing and cranberry sauce that there are those who hunger and thirst, those homeless by fortune or fire, those forgotten, those alone with their despairs and sorrows. Give thanks by comforting where you can, feeding where you can, visiting where you can. It never fails: You’ll feel better about yourself.
God’s profound blessings and graces on you and yours,
Jack Fowler
He can run but he cannot hide from missives sent to jfowler@nationalreview.com.