Dear Weekend Jolters,
You had no idea of my side gig as a model for Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons?
It’s not considered a Thanksgiving movie, but the tremendous Ernie Pyle-tribute flick, The Story of G.I. Joe (you can watch the entire thing at that link) — starring Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum (“Bobber” to my daughter Mary) in his only Oscar-nominated performance — makes much ado about the soldiers, slogging in the mud beneath Monte Cassino, being denied a turkey dinner with the trimmings. And then getting it. OK, there is Christmas music in the background, so maybe it’s not Thanksgiving-specific. So just take this as an excuse and opportunity to catch a classic film.
Now, more on the Big Hairy Ape below, but growing up in NYC, Thanksgiving Day meant the broadcast (on WOR and WPIX) of the original King Kong, and Laurel and Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers. How these movies have come to symbolize the Great Day would confound the hell out of Captain Myles Standish had he lived another three centuries.
And confound George Washington, who as President had this to say in our country’s first proclamation for “a day of public thanks-giving and prayer”:
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
Now it has come to the time when you will, as GW says, encrease your wisdom by learning more about what National Review Online has published this week past. On with the Jolt!
Editorials
1. When the consent of the governed’s fate is controlled by the politically motivated and incompetent, democracy has got itself a big problem. Hence our call for Brenda Snipes, Broward County’s law-disregarding, outcome-torturing elections supervisor, to get the boot. From our editorial:
It should be clear by now that Broward County has a systemic problem with its management of elections. (Guess which county was at the heart of the 2000 Florida recount?) 2018 is the 18th year in a row in which its elections commission has been headed up by an arrogant bungler (in the best case), and yet voters in the county keep reelecting those bunglers every two years. On present evidence, if Brenda Snipes is to be removed from her role, it will once again be because the governor cries “Enough.” When Ron DeSantis takes office in January, he should fire Snipes. And when he has done that, he should insist that Broward County take a good, hard look in the mirror, the better to ask how long it wishes to remain a den of blustery incompetence, or worse.
Stuff These Ten Smart NRO Pieces in Your Intellectual Gobbler
1. Hey Ladieeeees! If you vote Republican you are brainwashed. Unsisterly. Traitors. Racist. Y’all should be ashamed. Didja know that? Carrie Lukas smacks back at the Lefties-Before-Sisters crowd. From her piece:
Waiting for back-to-school night to begin, while exchanging names and pleasantries with parents of my daughters’ new classmates, I would never have brought up politics, and I carefully neutered descriptions of my employment to avoid revealing any ideological leanings. Yet the woman next to me felt no similar limitations and quickly offered a profanity-laced opinion of the president. A few laughed agreeably, offering their own digs not just about Trump, but about conservatives more broadly. I simply disengaged.
I suspect many right-of-center women have had similar experiences. This is a problem, not just because it silences people, but because increasingly women on the left seem to have no actual contact with women outside of their own ideological bubbles. They can’t fathom why, other than racism and sexism, some women reach different conclusions about politics and policy issues.
2. Did mommy tell you a good-night story about how social media was going to be all about equality and free speech and . . . but mommy’s story turned out to be a nightmare. Fred Bauer tells how the world of Twitter, Facebook, and all else is now the province of elites and mobs and demagogues. No puppy-dog tales! From his scary article:
In recent months, that pretension to universality has become less and less plausible. In part in response to the ongoing populist disruption, social-media companies have taken a much more aggressive approach in de-platforming users. That such community standards are not equally enforced across the ideological spectrum only increases the quasi-editorial power of these platforms. The power of these community standards can be seen in the fact that a fair amount of political energy is expended on battles over who can even have a voice on the platforms in the first place. The flamewars that used to happen on discussion boards and blogs across the Internet have now been funneled to a few places, which gives the moderators of such locations increasing power. Now the purported digital public square increasingly resembles a first-grade classroom, echoing with shrill volleys of “I’m telling!” (That some media corporations have led various efforts to de-platform rogue media outlets is another sign of how the currently entrenched power elite can use the digital landscape to protect its own power.)
Of course, social-media scalp-hunting does not confine itself to de-platforming; it often involves targeting people IRL. Because much of the media class spends an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and because this class is particularly attuned to peer-group signaling, it has become a major battleground for those who control (or seek to control) the commanding heights of culture. To follow media Twitter is to see a real-time negotiation of the bounds of public debate, which will be later reinforced by news coverage, cultural criticism, editorials, and so forth.
3. Ben Shapiro isn’t doing somersaults over the recent elections. He finds the results troubling for Republicans and conservatives and sees the policy prescriptions of some conservatives (Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Oren Cass) to be lacking and worthy of criticism. If you want intra-movement debate, look no further. From his piece:
These thinkers argue in favor of a certain political pragmatism: Cut regulations here, increase regulations there; push wage subsidies here, remove minimum-wage laws there. All of this does raise one fundamental question, however: Is government intervention truly likely to lead to the revitalization of family and community? Do families and communities rebuild themselves on the basis of economic policy, or must the preconditions for economic thriving be in place first? When those preconditions are undermined, does prosperity naturally fade away?
These questions go to the heart of our politics and raise another serious question: Can political conservatism survive the growth of government-led intervention designed to shore up fundamental institutions? When it comes to government intervention, what’s the limiting principle? If we believe government can rebuild the labor market according to Cass’s prescriptions, or rebuild families according to Douthat’s and Salam’s, where is the line drawn? Tucker Carlson recently suggested on my show that he’d ban automatic driving because of the danger of job loss among blue-collar workers, for example. Would that be a bridge too far? If so, why?
4. God and Man at Where? Graham Hillard makes the case for Christian colleges. From his piece:
With respect to my torch-bearing colleagues, however, I’d like to propose a different path. Like a sick child, like a treasured possession left too long to rust, the American university system is too dear to abandon. If anything, we should be sending more students to college — opening up further avenues of funding, both public and private, even as we pursue policies that might lower tuition or challenge the progressive domination of our campuses. Colleges will have to change, to be sure, but in the meantime conservatives would be wise not only to celebrate but to actively advance the interests of those institutions that are educating students properly right now.
Would it be self-interested of me to suggest that Christian universities have moved to the head of that class?
That I can ask such a question straight-facedly might surprise readers for whom the phrase “Christian college” evokes images of color-coded sidewalks (lest the sexes mingle) or steely Puritans dangling sinners over the mouth of hell. While it is true that students at Christian schools are likely to hear the gospel (a religious institution that didn’t at least try to proselytize would be highly suspect), it’s just as accurate to point out that many Christian universities have assembled what conservatives say they want: an intellectually diverse faculty with whom students may freely debate the ideas that have informed modern human existence.
5. It’s National Adoption Month. Kathryn Jean Lopez has an excellent interview with Malka Groden about the experience of a Jewish family trying to adopt a child. From the Q & A:
Lopez: Is there a specifically Jewish vision or approach do these things? Or should there be more of one?
Groden: There really hasn’t been much of an approach or vision in the Jewish community. Orthodox Jewish families have many biological children and simply don’t have the bandwidth to adopt or foster, so it hasn’t been part of our culture unless it’s emergency services within our own communities. There is an incredible social services organization called OHEL in New York. Among its many services, it provides foster care options for Jewish children in New York and New Jersey, ensuring that Jewish children are placed in Jewish homes.
That’s been one of my challenges when I speak about adoption in the Jewish community. I am constantly asked about Jewish children, because we have an ethic of taking care of our own first. That just isn’t the landscape of adoption today. There aren’t many Jewish children waiting for homes.
I want everyone to adopt, but I have altered my strategy within our community. I’ve started speaking more about my own journey to adoption. We put together a small women’s event in Crown Heights, showing a film by the Archibald Project, and I shared my story from infertility to adoption. My talk was a mix of my personal story, general adoption awareness, and answering questions. In December, we’ll be hosting a similar event in Los Angeles. I plan to hold an info session with my adoption agency in my home in the spring of next year.
RELATED: Groden’s powerful NRO piece from January is inspired reading.
MORE RELATED: KLO, Groden, and Naomi Schaefer Riley will headline a discussion on the urgent need for foster-care reform on Tuesday, November 20, in NYC at the offices of the Tikvah Fund. The time will be 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.). For more information, and to sign up, visit here.
6. George Nash, the authority on Herbert Hoover, finds one silver lining to World War One: global humanitarian aid. From his piece:
But there is another legacy of the Great War that we must also mention, for out of it something positive came. At its center was an American who in 1928 was elected president of the United States: Herbert Hoover. In the summer of 1914, Hoover had been a highly successful American mining engineer living in London when the war broke out. In the first weeks of the fighting on the Continent, an invading German army overran the small, neutral nation of Belgium, in a dash for France. Dependent on imported food for most of its consumption, yet trapped between a hostile occupier and a British naval blockage of its German enemy, the civilian population of Belgium faced mass starvation unless food supplies could somehow be obtained from the outside world.
With the approval of the American ambassador to Great Britain and the acquiescence of the warring British and German governments, Hoover — a private citizen of a neutral country at that point — established in October 1914 a benevolent organization called the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) to purchase, transport, and deliver food through the blockade to the beleaguered Belgian populace. Initially, no one anticipated that this humanitarian mission would last more than a few months. But as the clash of giant armies degenerated into a gruesome stalemate on the Western Front, Hoover’s emergency relief undertaking for Belgium turned into an elaborate enterprise without precedent in human history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from the threat of starvation amid enemy occupation in the middle of a war.
For the rest of the war, Hoover and his fellow volunteers in the CRB (mostly Americans) succeeded — despite tremendous obstacles — in supplying the food that kept more than 7 million Belgian civilians alive, as well as more than 2 million French civilians subsisting in German-occupied French territory just behind the front lines. It is an amazing story, told with great verve by Jeffrey B. Miller in his new book WWI Crusaders. In the course of these exertions, Hoover, working without pay, became an international hero, the embodiment of a new force in global politics: American benevolence in the form of humanitarian aid programs.
When the United States entered the world war in 1917, Hoover returned from Europe to America to head a new wartime agency, the U. S. Food Administration. But he continued to lead the Belgian-relief effort from afar. And when the Great War ended in November 1918, President Wilson quickly dispatched him back to Europe to take charge of food distribution to a continent exhausted by war and threatened by hunger and disease. While Wilson and Allied leaders labored to draft a peace treaty in Paris, Hoover, as director-general for relief and head of the American Relief Administration, orchestrated the distribution of food to millions of desperate people in more than 20 nations. In Poland alone, the ARA, at its peak of operations, supplied food for the daily feeding of 1.3 million children.
7. The Sunshine State’s Monkeyshine Stakes: So here is how Kevin Williamson’s piece on Brenda Snipes’ vote-counting / creating hijinx begins:
Conspiracy theories are bad for civic life.
So are conspiracies.
I wonder if there is one mentally normal adult walking these fruited plains — even the most craven, abject, brain-dead partisan Democrat — who believes that what has been going on in Broward County, Fla., is anything other than a brazen attempt to reverse the Republican victories in the state’s Senate, gubernatorial, and (not to be overlooked) agriculture commissioner’s races. I cannot imagine that there is, but it is really quite something to see partisan Democrats — the same people who pretend to believe that the 2016 presidential election was invalid because Boris and Natasha posted something on Facebook — watch not only utterly contented but with joy in their hearts as the rolling crime wave that is Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes and her coconspirators try to actually steal an election or three.
Boxes of ballots magically showing up in the trunks of rental cars in the Fort Lauderdale airport — cars last rented by Democratic operatives? What is this, a Coen Brothers movie? At least Saddam Hussein had the good taste to be amusing when he was stuffing the ballot boxes.
8. Donald Trump is not . . . populist enough. Rich Lowry argues for more substance and less POTUS style. From his new column:
He showed an instinctual sense that he needed a genuine middle-class agenda. He talked of a fantastical, imminent middle-class tax cut. And he insisted that Republicans would do a better job dealing with the problem of pre-existing conditions than Democrats, without offering any supporting policy.
In the absence of any populist substance, Trump was thrown back on the caravan, and more caravan, and his usual mediagenic provocations. This pushed both his supporters and opponents to the polls, and — with the exception of some key red-state Senate races — more of the latter than the former.
Going into 2020, he needs a populism that is less stylistic and more substantive, and one that has crossover appeal to Trump’s working-class voters and suburbanites.
It’s easy to see a rough outline. One focus should be work. Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute has written a new book, The Once and Future Worker, that is a guide to new conservative thinking on how to support a healthy labor market. The Trump team should crib from it freely.
9. Speaking of Cass, we run an excerpt of his book, making the case for wage subsidies. From the excerpt:
Subsidizing wages is a particularly well-tailored response to the challenges that globalization presents for American workers. First, the wage subsidy is the appropriate mechanism for redistributing gains from the economy’s “winners” to its “losers.” It comes closest to doing this directly, by taking tax revenue drawn from higher earners and inserting it directly into the paychecks of lower earners. As a result, it demands the least of government and introduces the fewest opportunities for inefficiency and distortion. Perhaps most important, it ties the redistribution to productive employment rather than to its absence.
Second, the wage subsidy offsets subsidies given to foreign producers and moves the cost to employers for domestic workers closer to parity with what firms pay foreign workers living in sharply different social and economic contexts. The benefit is largest for industries where the work is most labor-intensive and relies on the lowest-cost labor — in other words, the industries under greatest pressure from globalization. But it does this through a neutral structure, not through politicians choosing when to intervene.
Third, the wage subsidy helps to sustain communities that lose their tradeable sector. A community lacking the ability to export (even to the rest of the nation) must rely on government transfer payments to fund the resources it requires from the outside world — the community is literally exporting need. The existing American safety net conditions those transfers on very low incomes — often, no work at all — and channels them primarily toward consumption of health-care services. With a wage subsidy, work, rather than unemployment, draws government support, and that support can flow to a fuller range of productive activities in the community. In this model, a services economy can still thrive disconnected from a tradeable sector — not an ideal arrangement but one far better than today’s.
10. In Pakistan, blasphemy laws are means of oppressing Christians. The recent case (gaining much international attention) of Asia Bibi — a Catholic who was declared innocent of the charge, but who has received no offers of asylum from any Western country — is tackled by Nina Shea. From her piece:
Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge. But her escape seems stalled. The West’s response so far of passive hand-wringing while Bibi faces mortal danger indicates more than poor planning; it shows a failure to fully comprehend the deeply radicalizing effects of the blasphemy taboo within the world’s second-largest Muslim nation — and the inroads it has made in the West.
Western leaders have consistently expressed concern for Bibi during her nearly decade-long ordeal. Human-rights advocates, such as the indefatigable Lord David Alton, who just last month met personally in Pakistan with the chief justice, have vigorously championed Bibi in the British parliament. Yet when the moment of truth arrived, London quickly decided it would not give her asylum owing to security concerns. The U.K. has its own radical Islamist leaders within its million-strong Pakistani community to worry about, including Anjem Choudary, paroled last month following a terror-law conviction. Lord Alton called the British decision “craven.”
In Paris, the city hall had an enlarged photo of Bibi by its front entrance when I last visited several years ago, and France has long been discussed as a place of asylum for her. But deadly Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo’s editors for blasphemy, and most recently against French Jews, make asylum there unthinkable. Last week Italy and Canada revealed their engagement in “sensitive” multilateral talks on Bibi’s case, but so far neither has offered an actual legal grant of asylum. Also last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for Canada’s turning away the MS St. Louis and its 907 desperate Jewish passengers seeking refuge from German Nazis 79 years ago. Hopefully, he will apply the St. Louis lesson to throw a lifeline to Bibi.
BONUS: Jonah Goldberg’s tribute to the late Stan Lee.
BONUS BONUS: Jay Nordlinger shares various reflections on the last supper, non-divine.
Become an NRI Fellow, Whydoncha?
If you’re interested in this remarkably enjoyable National Review Institute program, then you’re in luck: NRI is seeking applicants for its Spring 2019 Regional Fellowship Programs in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Who/what/when/where/why, you ask? Fair enough: The ideal applicant will be a mid-career professional (aged roughly 30–50), with an interest, but not professional experience, in policy or journalism. Past Fellows have represented diverse industries and professions ranging from oil and gas, finance, real estate, medicine, sporting industries, law enforcement, education, nonprofits, and the arts. The program takes place over eight moderated dinner discussions (always at a classy joint). The 2019 class will run from January through May. Each session is moderated, and there is a curriculum. Moderators include popular writers at National Review and leading academics at local universities. The rewards of participating are plentiful and last a lifetime. The deadline to apply is December 15. To do that, and to find more information about the Regional Fellows Program, click here. And if you don’t live in one of the three program cities, but know folks who do (maybe there is a kid in Philly, a grandkid in Brooklyn, a niece or nephew in Georgetown) and who might be NRI fellow material, please share this with them.
The New Issue of Your Favorite Magazine Is Off the Presses, Hot and Piping. Here’s a Sampler that Would Make Whitman Envious.
1. The cover essay by Kevin Williamson profiles the West Texas “energy miracle,” and some of the challenges it faces before it can become completely miraculous. From the piece:
There is a great deal of highly specialized short-term work in the oil business, with crews traveling from place to place as needed. One of the results of this is that Midland has a kind of upside-down hotel market, in which weeknight rentals are about 2.5 times the weekend rate. Investors and bankers with a lot of history in the cyclical (sometimes viciously cyclical) oil business are hesitant to put a lot of money into construction of apartment buildings and lower-cost developments, so houses out here tend to be built one at a time. There are vacant and underused buildings downtown that are ripe for residential conversion, but the high up-front costs (asbestos abatement is a factor in many old buildings) have discouraged the sort of developers who might have jumped feet first into another booming market. The geologists and engineers and pipeline builders are confident that they can find the oil, but they sometimes have a hard time finding the workers.
“One of our issues is work-force growth,” Robertson says. He is a lawyer by profession, but he has spent many years in and around the oil business and takes a clear-eyed view of its ups and downs. “We have a product and a price that responds to supply and demand, and that’s the reality. Things can change.” One of the problems the industry faces during booms is that people act like they will never end. “How do you take a kid who is in high school, who maybe comes from a one-parent family where that parent is making $90,000 a year driving a truck, and convince him that that’s not what he should do after high school — or even during high school? How do you convince him to stay on and continue with his education? We need engineers, we need geologists, we need these highly technical jobs. You might make $70,000 . . . this year. But you’ll make so much more if you pursue your education.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean a four-year degree. The oil business has a little bit of a gap in the middle of the education curve: They know where to get low-skilled labor, and they know where to get engineers and guys with Ph.D.s. But there’s a bluecollar sweet spot in between for skilled tradesmen, from welders to pipefitters. Among other initiatives, the local school system has set up something called the “Petroleum Academy,” which supports the educational development of both college-bound students and those interested in oil-field jobs that require some further education but something short of a bachelor’s degree in engineering. And once those workers are in oil-field jobs, there is real value to continuing education oriented toward professional development rather than toward an academic degree. The invisible hand of the local labor market is pretty e
2. For the past few years, Jay Nordlinger has been on the Venezuela’s-Going-to-He!! Beat. In this issue he profiles the exiled mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma. From the piece:
He served in the legislature of Venezuela and, in 1999, founded a party: the Fearless People’s Alliance. (The name comes from Venezuela’s national anthem, “Gloria al bravo pueblo,” which sings of the fearlessness of the people.)
It was in 2008 that he was elected mayor of Caracas. That was almost a decade into Hugo Chávez’s regime. Chávez had come to power under the “camouflage” of democracy, says Ledezma. He was elected democratically and then set about dismantling the country’s democracy. He was not without talent, needless to say: great and dark talent.
He had “the magic of seduction,” says Ledezma. “He played the role of a poor man exploited by the gringos, by the Americans, giving speeches that were full of self-pity and promising that the state would be more paternalistic than ever.” We are a rich country, Chávez would say, so why should anyone ever want for anything? (Soon, they would be wanting for everything.)
Mayor Ledezma was one of the most prominent opponents of Chávez and chavismo in the country. In a headline last year, Britain’s Guardian described him as a “hardline” opposition leader. What does “hardline” mean, exactly? Ledezma is certainly opposed, firmly, to the tyranny that has stalked and battered Venezuela.
3. Madeleine Kearns keeps us posted on the “TRANS” dogmatists and how their insanities have caused a backlash amongst feminists. From her piece:
While in America trans rights are the latest battle in the left–right culture war, in Britain they have sparked a bitter left-on-left conflict, and the most valiant opponents of trans militants have been not conservatives but a cohort of liberal women — or, as their detractors call them, “TERFs”: trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
Between July and October of this year, Britain’s Conservative party considered whether to reform the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) so that any person could change his legal gender simply by filling out a form. The existing provisions of the GRA require that a person provide medical proof of gender dysphoria and live for at least two years as a member of his preferred gender. (The law does not require surgical transitions, as laws in some U.S. states do.) Trans activists maintain that the requirements are too demanding.
But if any man can become a woman without so much as shaving his beard, where does that leave natal females? Earlier this year, a sex offender named Karen White was incarcerated in a British women’s prison, where “she” raped fellow inmates. And how did this “woman” rape other women? The prosecution explained: “Her penis was erect and sticking out of the top of her trousers.”
4. Andrew Stuttaford looks at Angela Merkel and sees . . . Leonid Brezhnev. Yikes! From his essay:
No, no, Merkel is not a Communist. Nor does she order the invasion of other countries; she merely bullies them. She may have participated in the overthrow of Italy’s unruly and unacceptably euroskeptic Silvio Berlusconi, but no tanks were deployed, just “suggestions” made menacing by Italian fears of what the bond-market vigilantes might do.
Look deeper, however, and unsettling similarities come into view. That Brezhnev was no democrat is hardly a surprise. That Merkel, the bien-pensant “leader of the free world,” has repeatedly demonstrated her disdain for democratic propriety is, by contrast, disappointing. Perhaps it is a legacy of her East German upbringing, but, whatever the cause, it has poisoned both the politics of the country she leads and those of the EU, the misbegotten union that Germany dominates with a mixture of passive aggression, money, and size.
In the early 2000s, Brussels, compelled as always by the imperative of “ever closer union,” midwifed an ambitious draft constitution only to see it felled by French and Dutch referendums. When voters get a direct say on deeper European integration, they have a way of saying no.
That should have been the end of the matter, but Merkel used Germany’s tenure of the EU’s rotating presidency (it’s complicated) to cobble together the Lisbon Treaty, a sly pact that reproduced the spurned constitution in every material respect but was structured in such a way that pesky referendums could be dodged everywhere other than reliably awkward Ireland. No matter: The Irish rejected the treaty in one referendum but, engulfed by the financial crisis, were cajoled into changing their minds.
The Six
1. Robert Royal, writing in The Catholic Thing, analyzes the Vatican’s strong-arming of America’s bishops, calling on them to delay taking any action in response to the abuse crisis until March 2019. Something stinks, and it ain’t incense. From the piece:
If you talk with people in and around the Vatican, they tend to think America an aberration (conveniently forgetting similar trouble in Chile, Honduras, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Italy itself, the Vatican itself, and other countries). They say that our bishops have let this thing get blown out of proportion by mishandling it.
At one point Cardinal Maradiaga, the pope’s right-hand man in the Council of Cardinals (himself mixed up in sexual and financial scandals in Honduras) attributed the 2002 revelations in America to Jewish and Masonic influences in the American press that, he claimed, are seeking to destroy the Church. He apologized later – but that’s clearly what he, and no doubt others at the very highest levels of the Vatican, really think.
You can talk yourself blue in the face trying to explain to them the widespread, justified anger among the laity, and large numbers of priests and bishops as well. So far, the way Rome has been dealing with that news — as it has dealt with Archbishop Viganò’s claims — is not to deal with it at all. That leads people — even many faithful Catholics — to suspect — rightly or not — that there’s something fishy here that some very powerful people are trying to keep from coming to light.
You can try to blame this all on the slowness of Vatican bureaucracy, resentments among members the hierarchy, dislike of the pope, the influence of Satan himself. But the simple fact is that people don’t want more talk, meetings, commissions. They want action. And truth.
Instead, what they see is that, even when our American bishops want to take some tentative first steps to deal with a difficult and urgent problem involving not only the protection of innocents but the moral credibility of the Church, Rome says: No, wait.
2. In The American Conservative, Casey Chalk writes about history’s greatest Khan man. Genghis. Chalk believes the Mongol general has much to teach us about American politics. From the article:
There are other gems of wisdom to be had from Genghis Khan. He accepted a high degree of provincialism within his empire, reflecting an ancient form of subsidiarity. Weatherford notes: “He allowed groups to follow traditional law in their area, so long as it did not conflict with the Great Law, which functioned as a supreme law or a common law over everyone.” This reflects another important task for national leaders, who must seek to honor, and even encourage, local governments and economies, rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.
He was an environmentalist, codifying “existing ideals by forbidding the hunting of animals between March and October during the breeding time.” This ensured the preservation and sustainability of the Mongol’s native lands and way of life. He recognized the importance of religion in the public square, offering tax exemptions to religious leaders and their property and excusing them from all types of public service. He eventually extended this to other essential professions like public servants, undertakers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and scholars. Of course, in our current moment, some of these professions are already well compensated for their work, but others, like teachers, could benefit from such a tax exemption.
There’s no doubt that Genghis Khan was a brutal man with a bloody legacy. Yet joined to that violence was a shrewd political understanding that enabled him to create one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. He eschewed the traditional tribal respect for the elites in favor of the common man, he pursued policies that brought disparate peoples under a common banner, and he often avoided a scorched earth policy in favor of mercy to his enemies. Indeed, as long as enemy cities immediately surrendered to the Mongols, the inhabitants saw little change in their way of life.
3. On his Twitter feed, Japanese historian Nick Kapur presents a series of illustrations by Utagawa Yoshitora from an 1861 book (authored by Kanagaki Robun) that attempts to be a history of the United States (George Washington punching a tiger!). This is too fun to pass up.
4. In Claremont Review of Books, David Goldman takes on Woodrow Wilson, the “Great Resenter,” via a review of Patricia O’Toole’s biography, The Moralist. From the review:
The constitution in Wilson’s reading had become a relic of a bygone era. He proposed to jettison this putatively archaic document in favor of a government less burdened by checks and balances. His first major publication in political theory, an 1879 essay titled “Cabinet Government in the United States,” preferred what he called the British Cabinet system to America’s separation of powers. What he advocated, of course, had nothing to do with the actual British Constitution, in which the monarchy restricts the capacity of a passing parliamentary majority to undertake drastic and permanent change. Wilson had proposed a sort of quasi-parliamentary dictatorship, with no appeal to natural or unchanging rights. Later he revised his views, resting his hopes on a strong executive Leader to direct the government and people into the future. Unfortunately, O’Toole barely mentions Wilson’s copious writing about political theory. Instead she writes that cabinet government appealed to him because he loved debating and oratory. In place of substance, the reader has a surfeit of personal detail about a rather vain, priggish, self-absorbed man whose favorite diversion was playing solitaire.
The same utilitarian criteria that Wilson applied to the Constitution guided his judgment about capitalism and socialism. He abandoned the personal God of his clerical antecedents in favor of the Social Gospel, to which he was introduced at Princeton by Richard T. Ely, a close friend and ally of movement founder Walter Rauschenbusch. As economists Clifford Thies and Gary Pecquet have observed, “Wilson believed that the difference between socialism and democracy was a matter of means rather than ends.”
5. Texas A&M prof James Rogers, at Law & Liberty, shares interesting observations about what Americans miss when reading the Declaration of Independence. From his article:
Modern readers of the Declaration often jump too quickly to unalienable rights as rights that cannot be taken away by governments. That is true, of course, but moving to the conclusion too rapidly means readers often give short shrift to two precedent claims in the Declaration’s argument. First, the Declaration’s inalienable rights as pre-political rights. As such they not only limit government, they also justify government. As the line reads, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” Government exists first to protect these inalienable rights. Rights to life, liberty and happiness’s pursuit can be imperiled by too little government as by too much government. Indeed, a central claim in the Declaration’s list of indictments asserted Great Britain provided too little government to the American colonies.
A second precedent claim regards the inalienability of rights. This, to be sure, means government can’t take away these rights. But the bite of “inalienability” is not that it prohibits others from taking these rights away from us, it bites in that it prohibits us from giving away those rights.
6. Michaela Todd, a member (vice president even) of the student government at Emporia State University, used the phrase “illegal alien” on Facebook, which prompted triggered snowflakes to demand her impeachment, according to The College Fix, which now also reports that said weenies have called off the impeachment, citing, as weenies do, “safety and well-being” fears, but the big factor for the backdown is they would be hit with a First Amendment lawsuit. One yearns for the days when one could exclaim in response to this madness – these people deserve to be horsewhipped!
Light. Cameras. Punditry.
1. Seems Armond White can’t resist an anniversary . . . so he considers what were 1968’s best films and sees how well they hold up, a half-century later. From his piece:
The movies of 1968 revived the medium’s past advances in genre, narrative structure, and social relevance. It was the beginning of a cinematic ferment that would explode during the 1970s, but 1968 movies complemented the political upheaval of the Vietnam years, women’s liberation, urban unrest, and the draft — subjects that would come back to haunt the millennium. Today, 1968’s memorable films accuse us, asking, “What have we learned?”
2001: A Space Odyssey. It wasn’t the best film that year, but its legend has overwhelmed its competition. Nothing less than an epic comedy on mankind’s folly from the Stone Age to the stoned age, it used the decade’s space exploration to laugh at American hubris. Now, First Man frowns at American exceptionalism, turning executive producer (and Kubrick devotee) Steven Spielberg’s former optimistic amazement into grim, anti-American, anti-optimistic cynicism. Aspiration is zapped. No wonder it flopped.
Weekend. Jean-Luc Godard’s adversarial prophecy of revolution and “the end of cinema” proved all too prescient, but it remains a thrill to watch. This cavalcade of human folly uncovers still-recognizable social compulsions from sex to materialism, climaxing in an extended single-shot traffic jam that summarizes the modern condition. Still, it’s the best film of 1968.
2. Ye Olde Oscar Buzz is buzzing about Green Book, which Kyle Smith finds to be a lousy retread of Driving Miss Daisy. From the review:
Widely regarded as one of the more embarrassing Best Picture choices in Academy Awards history, Driving Miss Daisy has been reconfigured for 2018 tastes: Green Book is a leading contender to win Best Picture next winter despite being even more trite, didactic, corny, and obvious than its 1989 isotope. Co-written and directed in oleaginous style by Peter Farrelly (yes, the Dumb and Dumber auteur), the movie combines Hallmark Channel-style humor with a homily about racial tolerance carefully designed to appeal to awards-show voters, to whom no message movie can be too blunt as long as it is sending one of the five or so messages of which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never tires (boo racism, yay showbiz).
3. Meanwhile Kyle heads to the Great White Way to see the play about the Big Monkey. He does not go ape for King Kong. The musical! From his review:
Actually, he’s 2,000 pounds, and 20 feet tall, and he’s the only reason to see the show: He — it — is an arthritic puppet manipulated by clearly visible and undisguised heavy wires that allow him to lumber around a bit, change expressions marginally, and occasionally rise straight up, out of sight, to await the next laughably non-scary appearance. The monster bellows like Alec Baldwin when someone steals his parking spot and moves with the kind of alacrity associated with Abraham Lincoln in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.
When a giant anaconda comes to menace Kong on Skull Island, the two machine-marionettes move so slowly that it’s like watching a septuagenarian donnybrook, possibly over lox in Boca Raton. If one had clobbered the other over the head with a copy of AARP Magazine, it would have been scarier than what actually happens onstage. The anaconda has a chance to swallow, or at least squeeze to death, the struggling Depression-era actress Ann Darrow (Pitts) — who has been tricked into coming here from New York to film the world’s first nonfiction monster movie — but all the serpent does is lasciviously lick her backside. This scary monster is more like a super creep.
4. Back to Green Book: Armond too sees race self-congratulations in this sorta Son of Driving Miss Daisy. From the beginning of his review:
Green Book isn’t a comedy, but it should have been. This road movie about the temperamental tug-of-war between an Italian nightclub bouncer and a black jazz pianist merely repeats Neil Simon’s Odd Couple formula. But because it is also a post-Obama buddy movie, the men’s racial difference looms large — in fact, it haunts their on-the-road adventures in which the white man chauffeurs the black man through the horrors of America’s Deep South during the early 1960s. Green Book is so heavy with seriousness that any humor about the essential qualities the men share — or that complement their unlikely friendship — is lost. This misjudgment fails to reverse the lachrymose gimmick of Driving Miss Daisy. It’s as if we’ve gone backwards since the American mainstream hid national tensions behind that film’s namby-pamby panacea.
Baseballery
A few weeks back my dear old pal from high school, Mark Nelson, fan of our journal and its founder, was in the Big Apple and visited NR HQ (he got to sit in the Buckley chair, which you too can do if you pay a call!), and the conversation turned quickly to baseball and this section at the depths of the WJ. It prompted him to write me (in part):
As we were leaving, I mentioned Dave Frishberg’s Van Lingle Mungo. I stumbled on the work of Mr. Frishberg when I was driving around Poughkeepsie a few days after returning from my first trip overseas in 1985. . . Frishberg has an immense thirst for all things baseball, especially baseball history. He wrote a musical about the 1919 White Sox Scandal. I heard him perform selections from it in the most appropriate of places: Cooperstown, NY. He had been invited to perform at a local high school. To induce him to make the trip from his home in Oregon, he was offered a private tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame. One of my favorites from that concert was his performance of Sports Page. He also wrote Dodger Blue in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Dodgers’ move west. Many New Yorkers would not consider that something worthy of celebration.
About the colorful Mungo, one of the best NL right-handers pitching in the early 1930s, what might his career numbers have been but for the booze?
A Dios
Remember that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. So pace yourself. And give thanks to God for all the blessings which have been bestowed upon you.
God bless you and yours,
Jack Fowler
This side of a turkey coma, responsive to missives sent him at jfowler@nationalreview.com.
PS.: Mackerels of holiness, yes, you can still get a cabin on the National Review 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise. Visit www.nrcruise.com and book that sucker!