Dear Weekend Jolters,
Smokes of Holiness, the Chinese Communist Party has translated that once-forbidden book, The Bible, and in doing so has taken more liberties than the crew of an aircraft carrier that’s been at sea for a year.
Cameron Hilditch reports on the Monstrosity of All Re-Writes. We’re confident that you will most definitely not confuse it with the King James version of the Word of God.
In the new Commie edition, of which we know little, we do know this of a famous parable: Jesus himself casts the first stone to clobber the adulteress:
The CCP “translation” reproduces the story more or less word for word — up until the point at which Jesus is left alone with the woman whom the Pharisees had dragged before him. Events then take an altogether bizarre and diabolical turn:
When the crowd disappeared, Jesus stoned the sinner to death saying, “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.”
You read that right: In this telling, Jesus gets rid of the crowd so he can have the pleasure of bashing the woman’s skull in himself.
Needless to say, this alteration is blasphemous and offensive to Christians, but we would do well to understand why the CCP has decided to make it. The story of Jesus and the adulteress is clearly impermissible to the Party in its original form. Though everything up until Jesus is left alone with the woman can be assimilated, their final exchange is disqualified, replaced by something not just tolerable but useful to the CCP. Such points of divergence between the CCP Bible and its source material tell us a lot about what the Politburo sees as the irreconcilable differences between Western and Chinese civilization.
Imagine what He does with the money changers at the Temple — Xi’s flunkies at the Ministry of Truth have probably slipped the Lord an Uzi and some flash grenades. Loaves and fishes? Who’s taking bets that, in Mao fashion, the crowd is allowed to starve. The Wedding Feast at Wuhan?
The ChiCom Bible. Now, nothing is unfathomable. Other than Your Humble Correspondent rooting for the Red Sox. It’s been a wild week and is getting wilder, and speaking of getting, let’s be getting on to the Jolt.
Editorials
1. Biden refuses to unpack his position on SCOTUS-packing. We say the voters have a right to know. From the editorial:
We suspect that if Donald Trump were proposing to amend the 1869 Judiciary Act in order to install a set of friendlier judges on the nation’s highest court, the problem with the idea would be evident to almost everyone. But one does not have play “imagine if” in order to grasp just how appalling a notion this is. Up until now, it has been tried only once in American history, by a newly reelected Franklin D. Roosevelt. Despite Roosevelt’s party controlling 74 of the 96 seats in the Senate and 334 of the 435 seats in the House, it failed. The Chairman of the House Rules Committee called it “the most terrible threat to constitutional government that has arisen in the entire history of the country.” This “measure,” wrote the 1937 Senate Judiciary Committee, “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”
From Joe Biden, a simple “no” would suffice.
Why does Biden not offer that answer up? After all, if he were to reject the idea, there would be no “issue” to discuss.
2. Amy Coney Barrett is an exceptional SCOTUS nominee. From the editorial:
The Barrett-specific arguments against confirmation are, if anything, weaker. When Barrett was up for her current appellate judgeship in 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein attempted, notoriously, to portray her as a religious extremist who could not be trusted to apply the law without bias. At that time Barrett said, “I see no conflict between having a sincerely held faith and duties as a judge. I would never impose my own personal convictions upon the law.” As a law student more than 20 years ago, she co-authored an article arguing that a judge who opposes the death penalty on religious grounds might have to recuse himself in certain cases. Note, however, that even in that theoretical case, her view was that the judge should not try to force the law to comply with the dictates of her faith. And she has not seen any need to recuse herself from death-penalty (or abortion or immigration) cases.
Some progressives are trying to portray Barrett’s views on the force of precedent as radical, but this effort depends on willful misreadings of her work. Justice Clarence Thomas has made a strong case that the Supreme Court is too stubborn in sticking with mistaken precedents. Judge Barrett has not said that she agrees with him, that she thinks the Court has it right, or that her view lies somewhere in between. Moreover, this complaint rings hollow coming from progressives who want the Court to overturn its precedents on free speech, religious liberty, and the right to bear arms.
3. Republican trust-us claims on Obamacare reform don’t quite cut it. From the editorial:
Republicans now have three basic choices in answering the question of how they would help people with pre-existing conditions if they replaced Obamacare or courts invalidated it. The first would be to promise that they would reenact Obamacare’s stringent regulation and provide subsidies for those who need it to afford the high premiums it necessitates — essentially re-creating a lot of Obamacare. The second would be to promise to enact continuous-coverage protections of the type they proposed in 2017. And the third would be to do nothing, telling people with pre-existing conditions that they are on their own (even though the paucity of cheap, renewable catastrophic policies is largely the result of government policies).
Our preference would be the second option. The Trump administration, unable to decide among these options, is instead, effectively, promising to choose among them at some future date when the courts have struck down Obamacare or Republicans have unified control in Washington. That refusal to choose lets the Democrats hang the third position around Republican necks while also doing nothing to dislodge Obamacare. It also lets Democrats say that Republicans are dodging the question instead of leveling with the voters. Which is, unfortunately, true.
Gloryoski! Another Bundle of Brilliant Articles to Fire Up the Ol’ Conservative Intellect
1. Like Antifa? David Harsanyi believes Joe Biden is an idea. A terrible one. From the piece:
Instead, we hear how Biden’s feckless opportunism is moderation. Biden himself likes to drop a prefabricated line contending he was the one who beat Bernie Sanders, signaling to moderates that his candidacy prevailed over extremism. Why would someone whose campaign stemmed the scourge of collectivism co-sign a 110-page Menshevik-Bolshevik Unity Pact? (I exaggerate only slightly.) Maybe when Chris Wallace is done digging into the vital right-wing militia matter, he will investigate.
In the past when candidates made outlandish promises to their base during the primary, they would move back to the center. There is no center anymore. There is only Trump. And because of the press’s abdication of basic professionalism, Biden, the empty vessel, can concurrently hold any position that suits you.
It was Trump, for example, who brought up the Green New Deal during the first debate — the massive multi-trillion-dollar attack on, yes, cars, airplanes, your food, your house, and modernity in general. Biden casually claimed that it is “not my plan,” though it says, quite unmistakably, in his “Plan for Climate Change and Environmental Justice” that the Green New Deal is the “crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” Instead of fact-checking Biden, the same Washington Post that once ran a headline that read, “Joe Biden embraces Green New Deal as he releases climate plan,” corrected Trump, asserting that, “Biden has never supported the Green New Deal.”
Rinse and repeat on fracking and “defunding the police.”
2. More Harsanyi: A reflection on the oft-mocked “But Gorsuch . . .” mindset. From the piece:
Was the Trump presidency worth it for conservatives? History will tell. Considering the accelerating radicalism of the modern Left — evident in the feverish reaction to Barrett’s nomination — the Court is clearly going to be more important than it has been in years.
Will it help Trump win in 2020? I’m no prognosticator, but politics has to be about more than always situating the party for the next win. Occasionally you’re going to have to fulfill promises. These justices fulfill the wishes of the vast majority of the Right, sans a handful of Trump-obsessed former conservatives.
Nor should it be forgotten that, if Barrett is confirmed, Mitch McConnell will have become one the most effective and consequential conservative politicians — nay, politicians, period — in American history. Call him a hypocrite if you like, but the risk of denying Obama another Constitution-corroding justice in 2016, widely seen as politically self-destructive by Washington commentators, was worth it. His constitutionally kosher position turned into three justices, who, one hopes, will abide by their stated originalist and Scalia-like disposition. Their rulings will long outlast any fleeting partisan squabble.
3. Andrew C. McCarthy explains Joe Biden’s court-packing fudgery. From the analysis:
Biden was in the Senate for 36 years. He knows how to count. Assuming that this array of Democrats is on the up and up, there is no way the Left has the votes it would need to pack the Court. So why not just oppose court-packing? Given that Democrats don’t have the numbers to make it happen, why would Biden risk the appearance that he is just a placeholder for the extreme Left — that he is remaining noncommittal to hoodwink voters into electing him, after which the true believers controlling him can push radical change?
Surely, Biden fears the wrath of the hard left. He doesn’t want to put up with what his old pal Feinstein has had to endure recently, or, even worse, end up feeling the heat that has been turned up on Democratic mayors who have strayed even an iota from the Change! line in places such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis.
But even more, Biden is worried about losing the energy of his base. It is still a tight race in the states where the election will be decided. The last thing Biden can afford is a revolt from the Bernie Bros. and AOC’s “squad.” He knows Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election in its last couple of weeks, mainly by taking the Democratic base for granted. He is not going to repeat that mistake. (And, of course, no FBI director is going to announce the reopening of a criminal investigation against him just days before voters go to the polls — so he’s got that going for him.)
4. Morgan E. Hunter makes the case for the 490 B.C. Project. From the piece:
One cannot seriously study Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra without knowing something about Roman history and Greek tragedy. One really cannot study any European or American philosopher of the past 400 years without knowing Plato and Aristotle. However, many American school districts currently employ a chronological straitjacket that confines general study of the ancient world to middle school. (Those that teach it in high school usually do in a “World History” class that devotes only two or three weeks to the classical world.) Further teaching of the classical world is pursued only in specialized Latin courses at a few, mostly private, schools. Since college-level study of the humanities requires a good understanding of the ancient world and its authors, the classical world ought to be taught in high schools. These classical foundations are just as important to the humanities as algebra or high-school chemistry are to STEM. Learning Latin or ancient Greek can remain a requirement for those who wish to major in the classics, but they shouldn’t be the only way to study the classical world.
The educational system in Britain is rather different from the U.S. In America, students are required to select a specialization (their major) for only the last two years of college. In Britain, students are admitted to college in order to “read” a particular course of study, e.g., mathematics or history. Thus college in Britain corresponds to the last two years of American colleges (and perhaps also the first year of graduate school). Consequently, the last two years of British high schools (the “sixth form”) are when students take the introductory courses that Americans typically take in their college freshman or sophomore years. These pre-college courses culminate in tests called Advanced Levels or “A-levels.” College-bound students typically take three A-level courses in subjects preparatory to the course they intend to study in college.
5. Alexander DeSanctis explains why Lefties hate SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett. From the piece:
Empowered by technology and medicine that grant them the illusion of control over their childbearing, women can dabble in sex and family life only insofar as they fit into the grander plan of climbing the ladder, reaching the corner office, and perhaps pausing once or twice along the way to get married or have a child.
This conception of gender equality has been popularized by high-powered career women such as Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg and public-policy leader Anne-Marie Slaughter. Their vision, sometimes called “lean-in feminism,” consists of benchmarks such as filling the boardrooms of every major company with an equal number of men and women.
In a 2011 commencement speech at Barnard College, Sandberg popularized her now-famous notion of “leaning in,” by which she meant prioritizing career success and workplace ambition as an antidote to the supposed fact that men run the world. “A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world,” Sandberg told the graduates.
Slaughter echoed this idea in her viral 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” arguing that “only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women.”
6. Rich Lowry and John McCormack provide the backstory on how the GOP lined up quickly behind the Barrett nomination. From the piece:
There hasn’t been any such surprise yet in the Senate. When Republicans voted to change the rule for confirming Supreme Court justices to require 51 votes in response to the 2017 Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch, McConnell “built support over many weeks, and did it in a lot of settings,” says the first Republican senator.
The RBG vacancy didn’t require any such campaign. “Over the last year, McConnell laid the foundation about what to expect if this were to occur,” says one Republican strategist. “There wasn’t an 11th-hour staff meeting. They already had a pretty good idea of where they’re going to end up.”
In September 2019, McConnell told reporters that Senate Republicans would “absolutely” fill a vacancy if it arose in 2020 — which would occur with the Senate and White House under the control of the same party, unlike the 2016 vacancy following the death of Justice Scalia. In 2016 there hadn’t been a consensus within the Republican caucus about what blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland meant. Most spoke at the time about the need for the voters to decide. A few senators explicitly said they’d hold open an election-year vacancy even if Republicans were in control of the Senate and the White House — although several simply said they were exercising their constitutional right to withhold consent. In 2016, McConnell had repeatedly emphasized the point about divided government. In 2020, there would be no deadlock for the voters to break.
7. Ellen Carmichael profiles the partisan-based, public-health-menacing attacks on COVID vaccines. From the piece:
On August 27, 2020, CDC Director Robert Redfield, M.D., announced in a letter to governors that they should be prepared for medical facilities to administer a coronavirus vaccination as early as November 1, 2020, explaining that the agency had contracted with pharmaceutical distributor McKesson Corporation to deliver upwards of hundreds of millions of doses in the fall. The letter did not indicate that federal officials had already greenlit the administration of the vaccine to the general public, nor did it say that McKesson would be allowed to subvert robust testing requirements before bringing it to market.
Outlining how the existing approval systems could create a slowdown that poses “a significant barrier to the success of this urgent public health program,” Redfield simply asked state agencies to do their part in aiding a “public health effort of significant scale” by expediting the processing of “permit applications for the new McKesson distribution facilities,” including those for “related business and building permits.” But, Redfield insisted, breaking the bureaucratic logjam would “not compromise the safety or integrity of the products being distributed.”
After the news broke of Redfield’s letter, the political Left began promoting conspiracy theories about the vaccine, arguing the president would rush an untested vaccine to market in time for the election but before it was safe to administer it. Some reporters have given credence to such baseless claims, including CNN’s Gregory Krieg, who wrote that Trump’s “coronavirus delusions risk corrupting the search for a vaccine,” while ironically asserting Trump was setting off a “vicious circle that could undermine public confidence in a vaccine that credibly meets the strict, long-held standards set by scientists and public health officials.”
8. When Kevin Williamson looks at BLM, he sees an emerging knock-off of the PLO. From the piece:
Because Democrats run the most troubled cities, they are desperate to either change the subject from the performance of the municipal agencies in Minneapolis, Louisville, San Francisco, etc., to something more general and more politically malleable, hence the vapid, empty talk about “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” It’s bullsh**, and everybody knows it’s bullsh**. Even the president of Princeton more or less admitted his bullsh** was bullsh** when the Trump administration had the uncharacteristic wit to actually call him on said bullsh** and threaten a civil-rights investigation into the school after he denounced its “systemic racism.” A vague problem vaguely related to the vaguely racist actions of vaguely identified vaguely Republican people elsewhere is a much more comfortable discussion for the powers that be in Minneapolis than the question of how Minneapolis is run, who runs it, how they run it, who benefits from that, and who pays the worst social costs. One suspects that Democrats in such cities actually prefer the riots and arson to having that uncomfortable discussion. Remember when the Minneapolis city council vowed to defund the police department? More bullsh**, as the New York Times reports. Of course they never meant a word of it — they just feel obliged to make certain noises with their faces and perform histrionic pantomime of moral seriousness.
We see this kind of thing all the time. San Francisco doesn’t need to abolish capitalism or eliminate “inequality” to alleviate its affordable-housing problem, but it does need to reform its zoning and land-use laws — something that Nancy Pelosi’s rich San Francisco friends have been fighting tooth and talon for decades. And so San Francisco pretends that San Francisco’s problems are not of San Francisco’s making, that the problem is “white privilege” or some other comfortable abstraction.
BLM could be using the Democratic Party to pursue a reform agenda; instead, the Democratic Party is using BLM to prevent the pursuit of a reform agenda. It’s always the same question: Who, whom?
9. Kyle Smith finds defund the fuzz fizz gone. From the piece:
Yet the idea was so fashionable among the radicals, columnists, and talking heads who don’t live in high-crime areas that, for a moment, even Joe Biden was momentarily beguiled by it. Asked by a left-wing activist, “Do we agree that we can redirect some of the [police] funding?” Biden replied, “Yes, absolutely.” (Biden had been musing about how “the last thing you need is an up-armored Humvee coming into a neighborhood. It’s like the military invading,” as though Americans had spent the month of June debating the wisdom of police Humvee usage. As president, Joe would handle the difficult questions by answering different, easier questions.) Yet, when Biden came to his senses he emphasized that he didn’t want to defund the police.
It’s now clear that the coast-to-coast conflagrations of the summer were not an urgent call for police reform but merely an extended temper tantrum. A serious look at police reform would begin with the question: Why do American police kill so many citizens — black, white, and other — and what can we do to reduce the violence? Few expressed any interest in that matter, though the papers decided to capitalize the adjective “black” and the Poetry Foundation and Princeton volunteered that they were white supremacists, at least until a government inquiry forced the latter institution to admit that this was meaningless posturing for woke points, not to be construed as an admission of race discrimination because that would be illegal.
“Defund the police” got rolling in Minneapolis, and that’s where it . . . stopped rolling, fell over, and got trampled by the billion-footed beast of reality. A New York Times report sadly informs us that the Mini Apple is “a case study in how idealistic calls for structural change can falter.” Because it would have been ideal for residents of black neighborhoods to wake up one morning and discover they no longer had police protection from criminals thanks to the efforts of parlor radicals.
10. Congressmen Kevin McCarthy and Michael McCaul say it’s time the U.S. got deadly serious about the ChiComs. From the piece:
House Republicans on the China Task Force have put forward policies to end America’s dependence on the PRC while protecting Americans’ safety and well-being. Our comprehensive recommendations mobilize strategic U.S. government action in six areas: ideological competition, supply chains, national security, technology, the economy and energy, and competitiveness.
Without question, we must strengthen our military, and stop both CCP theft and its influence operations here at home. We begin by giving the Department of Defense the resources it needs to modernize the force and close the capability gap in specific areas, such as research and development. We also focus on providing the Department of Justice the resources it needs to investigate and prosecute visa fraud.
Beyond strengthening our national-security capabilities, we must also fortify our position on the commanding heights of the economic battlefield. Our plan doubles research and development funding for artificial intelligence and quantum computing across the federal government over the next two years, and ensures that both international 5G standards and the fabrication of advanced semiconductor chips are led by America. But just as American companies need to understand the stakes, CCP-affiliated companies need to face consequences. That is why our plan protects homegrown innovation by imposing sanctions on PRC entities that engage in industrial spying, including hacking U.S. researchers who are developing a vaccine for COVID-19.
11. Helen Raleigh reports on Red China upping its game on attacking non-lickspittle foreign journalists. From the article:
In August, Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen of Chinese descent who worked for the state-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN), was detained by Chinese authorities. No charges were filed, and Cheng simply “disappeared.” China’s foreign ministry waited until early September to announce that she was suspected of “criminal activity endangering China’s national security.” Her family and friends still do not know her whereabouts, and it is unclear if she has any legal representation.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s announcement of Cheng’s detention came after the Australian government was forced to mount a frantic mission to extricate the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Bill Birtles and the Australian Financial Review’s (AFR) Mike Smith from the country. Both had been questioned by Chinese authorities regarding their dealings with Cheng, and both sought help from the Australian consulate. They were allowed to leave China only after a five-day diplomatic standoff. Birtles’s former boss, the ex-ABC China bureau chief Matthew Carney, recently disclosed the threats and interrogations that he and his family, including his 14-year-old daughter, had to endure from Chinese authorities back in 2018, which eventually led them to leave the country, too.
Early this month, a Los Angeles Times reporter was detained by Chinese police in Inner Mongolia while investigating the central government’s push to teach Mongolian children key curriculums in Mandarin rather than Mongolian. Many parents and students have been protesting that effort, which they view as Beijing’s latest attempt to erase their cultural identity. The Times reporter said plainclothes men “took her to a police station, where she was interrogated and separated from her belongings, despite identifying herself as an accredited journalist. She was not allowed to call the U.S. Embassy; one officer grabbed her throat with both hands and pushed her into a cell.”
12. Peter Rough compares Donald Trump’s Middle East foreign-policy successes with French bossman Emmanuel Macron, who wants to call les shots. From the article:
Unlike in the Middle East, where the Abraham Accords brought together U.S. allies under Washington’s direction, Macron envisions a European architecture more free from American influence. Thus Trump’s attempts to run his playbook in Europe — by expressing ambivalence to collective defense and initiating a troop drawdown from Germany — have given Macron an opening to pursue his own vision.
In May 2017, Macron celebrated his presidential victory with the European Union’s anthem and flanked by EU flags. Ever since, he has sought to advance a vision of so-called European strategic autonomy, which enlists German economic power in the service of French strategic leadership at the EU. Paradoxically, the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU brought relatively little heartache for Macron because it removed a powerful opponent to his vision of continental freedom.
That leaves NATO as the most serious impediment to Macron’s designs. Unsurprisingly, he alone among Europe’s leaders has regularly criticized the alliance, memorably diagnosing its “brain death” last November. Trump’s capricious and contemptuous view of Western Europe has been central to Macron’s argument, but the French leader cannot openly challenge the United States, anchor of the West, and hope to succeed. Instead, he has sought to weaken American influence by quarreling with Turkey in its place. Macron regularly trumpets Turkey’s transgressions in part to send a message to Europe: NATO is an unreliable alliance; better to build an EU alternative. In the months to come, look for tensions between France and Turkey to flare time and again.
13. Victor Davis Hanson pushes back on the attacks against Scott Atlas. From the piece:
After COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., Atlas consistently warned that government must follow science, not politics, in doing the least amount of harm to its people. He has reminded us that those under 65 rarely die from COVID-19, and that those infected who are younger than 20 usually do not show any serious symptoms.
Accordingly, Atlas has urged the states to focus more resources on the most vulnerable — those over 65, who account for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths — and allow younger Americans to reenter schools and the workforce with appropriate caution.
Atlas has also warned that the available test data on COVID-19’s infectiousness, spread, and morbidity must be handled with care, given that those who feel sick are more likely to get tested. He argues that those with some natural protection from the virus, either through antibodies from an asymptotic past infection or through T-cells, may be a far larger group than previously thought.
But most importantly, Atlas has warned that government must be careful not to endanger Americans with Draconian lockdowns that curtail needed medical examinations, procedures, and treatments.
Just as dangerous as the disease may be quarantine-related spikes in mental illness, substance abuse, child and spousal abuse, and depression from lost livelihoods. Children may be suffering irreparable harm from being locked down and kept out of school.
14. Maxford Allen explores Joe Biden’s Big Labor agenda. It would make Bernie swoon. From the analysis:
Further, Biden proposes to reinstate a legally questionable, and morally indefensible, Obama administration regulation allowing states to deduct union dues from Medicaid payments to home caregivers serving functionally disabled adults.
The Trump administration repealed the regulation in 2019, which brings in about $150 million per year for unions such as AFSCME and SEIU, though unions have filed litigation to preserve the old rule.
The heart of Biden’s policy platform for private-sector unions calls for adoption of the PRO Act, an expansive union wish-list that would end any pretense of allowing workers to make up their own minds about unions. Among other things, the law would require employers to allow their internal communications systems to be used for union organizing and force them to turn over employees’ personal information — including home addresses, cell phone numbers and personal emails — to union organizers. At the same time, the bill would restrict employers’ ability to speak with employees about the implications of unionization.
Perhaps most concerning, the PRO Act would ban right-to-work laws, which have so far been adopted by 28 states and which protect the rights of workers to choose for themselves whether to surrender part of their paychecks to unions.
15. Cody Wisniewski argues that Second Amendment supporters need to bring their guns to the knife fight. From the piece:
The entirety of the “gun control” movement is really an “arms control” movement. This movement has always focused on unpopular weapons, since banning or limiting their use was least likely to meet with legal or political resistance.
Initially, the open carriage of arms — including Bowie knives, swords, and dirks — “to the terror” of the public was prohibited. These laws had their roots in the English common-law tradition, and in our early republic. In the mid-19th century, the state of Georgia became the first to try completely banning possession of certain bladed weapons. That attempt was quickly struck down by the state supreme court. A century later, more states began implementing total bans on specific arms that politicians and the public associated with criminals.
That’s how we arrived at the knife bans many states have today, which often cover switchblades and butterfly knives. There is no question that these knives are inherently less dangerous than guns. And yet they are completely banned in a number of jurisdictions, from Hawaii to New Jersey.
Due to a lot of bad action movies, a lack of public understanding, and a media campaign surrounding juvenile delinquency, politicians were able to pass complete bans and Draconian restrictions on many different types of knives at both the state and federal levels.
Thankfully, much as modern efforts to ban or limit gun ownership have spawned a potent, organized political backlash, people and politicians are starting to come to their senses about knife bans. A number of states have already repealed their antiquated switchblade bans, as Colorado did in 2017. Other bans were successfully challenged in court. Some states have already repealed their bans on butterfly knives, and Hawaii’s ban is currently the subject of a lawsuit. We at the Mountain States Legal Foundation have filed a brief in that case, Teter v. Connors, arguing that Hawaii’s ban violates the Second Amendment and is thus unconstitutional.
16. Brian Allen bemoans the ongoing lockdown of many a college-based museum and the culture behind it. From the article:
Fighting Crimson has turned Fleeing, Frightened, Hiding Crimson. I don’t think Harvard cares that much about its undergraduates — it’s all about the faculty’s research and, to a lesser extent, its graduate students. And Harvard certainly couldn’t care less about the people living in Cambridge. Still, the Fogg is one of America’s great museums. It’s a shame it’s closed. I hope donors take note and steer their gifts to Yale, which is open for teaching and whose venerable art gallery is open to the public.
The Rhode Island Institute of Design museum is open only to RISD ID-holders. The Hood, the art museum at Dartmouth, is closed to the public, as is the very good Smith College Museum of Art. This is wrong. These three museums, like Yale, are not only the museum for students and faculty at their schools. They’re the local civic museum. The Yale University Art Gallery has always had a high public profile. I grew up near New Haven, so I know this and benefited from this.
The RISD museum is the civic museum for people in Providence. The Hood serves the Upper Valley, the hundred or so towns along the Connecticut River and inland in western New Hampshire and eastern Vermont. The Smith museum serves Northampton and dozens of towns surrounding it. Their public profile is part of the negotiated tranquility between Town and Gown. The schools, in keeping their museums closed, have jettisoned the deal, flipping the public an Ivory Tower bird along the way.
I’m not troubled by the Williams College Museum of Art’s decision to serve only students for the time being. It’s a modest place and mostly serves Williams students under any circumstances. The locals go to the Clark Art Institute or Mass MoCA. I do find it strange that students wanting access to the museum have to give the place 48 hours’ notice.
If I were paying $70,000 a year for my kid to go there, I’d expect snap-to, on-demand access. You can’t even pop into the museum! You need to have a class assignment. Why does the staff need 48 hours’ notice? “Holy moly, a student’s coming. . . . We need 48 hours to get into our germ-proof bubble.” Is that what they’re thinking? It’s another example of museums forgetting who they serve. It’s not about the staff. And, by the way, there’s no COVID-19 in rural northwestern Massachusetts.
17. We remembered John Dos Passos on the 50th Anniversary of his death by republishing his initial writing for NR — a two-part 1956 essay on his lefty youth. From the piece:
How hard it is to write truthfully. Reading over the articles I wrote that summer I keep remembering things I forgot to put in. Why did I forget to put in about the enlarged photographs of Lenin as a baby I saw in the ikon corner in the peasants’ houses instead of the Christ Child? Why did I neglect people’s hints about Stalin? There was a very pleasant actress whom I’ve called Alexandra who had worked with the Art Theater I sometimes took evening walks with in Moscow. She came of the old revolutionary intelligentsia. I shall never forget the look of hate that would come into her face when we’d pass a large photograph of Stalin in a store window. She never spoke. She would just nudge me and look. As the years went on I understood what she meant. Of course in 1928 Stalin had not shown himself yet. He was working from behind the scenes. Trotsky was in exile but there were still people around the theater in Moscow whom their friends introduced half laughingly as Trotskyites. The terror that English journalist was trying to tell me about still lurked in the shadows. It was not yet walking the streets.
And yet, I remember that for absolutely no reason I fell into a real funk for fear they wouldn’t let me leave the last few days I was in Moscow attending to the final passport formalities. Just like every other American, I’d done my best to see the good, but the last impression I came away with was fear, fear of the brutal invisible intricate machinery of the police state. No fear was ever better founded.
Warsaw in those days was no paradise of civil liberties, but I still remember how well I slept in the sleazy bed in the faded hotel I put up at in Warsaw after piling out of the Moscow train. Warsaw was Europe. My last month in Moscow I’d been scared every night.
There’s a Great Russell Kirk Shindig Looming
The Russell Kirk Center is featuring a first-ever virtual walking tour of Russell Kirk’s library –where America’s conservative mind wrote his influential books and welcomed students for nearly 40 years — during its 25th Anniversary Gala. Join Annette Kirk for a free, livestream event on October 21 at 7 p.m. ET. Historian George Nash will speak about the ongoing significance of Russell Kirk’s work and the Center’s role in continuing that legacy. The 60-minute presentation will conclude with a toast of Dr. Kirk’s own creation called “Mecosta Fruit Punch.” Please register here for a reminder notification.
The October 19, 2020 Issue Hearkens — Sample the Exceptional Fare
The new issue of National Review is out, replete with wisdom and sanity, all available to those who have NRPLUS, some available to those who have yet to exhaust their this-side-of-the-paywall freebies. We provide, as is our custom, five random pieces:
1. Dan McLaughlin’s cover essay shoots down the idea of D.C. statehood. From the essay:
Madison and the other Founders worried, as well, that the federal government’s independence of action in the national interest would be imperiled by subjecting its physical security to state and local authorities. This was not a hypothetical problem. In June 1783 a drunken mob of unpaid Continental Army soldiers surrounded the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. State and local authorities in Pennsylvania refused Alexander Hamilton’s desperate pleas to defend the Congress. Led by Hamilton and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, its members fled across the Delaware River into New Jersey and took up temporary housing in Princeton. Hamilton spent the time in New Jersey exile drafting a resolution calling for a constitutional convention. The Framers of the Constitution that was drafted at that convention (conducted in secrecy from the Philadelphia crowd) understood that a government with more permanent quarters could not so easily pack its bags.
With the events of 1783 fresh in mind, Madison warned that, without federal control of the capital, “the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity. . . . A dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government, for protection in the exercise of their duty, might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence” to the detriment of other states. In 1812, as president, Madison saw the capital burned by an invader when the Maryland militia could not protect it. His insight proved prophetic in 1861, when Maryland teetered on the verge of joining Virginia in seceding. Federal authorities needed to subdue angry mobs in Baltimore and send a young Andrew Carnegie at the head of a military and technical crew to keep the District connected by rail and telegraph to the North. The next four years of war centered heavily on the physical defense of the capital, and of the Confederate capital in Richmond.
Today, that threat is back out in the open. In June, after President Trump deployed federal authority to protect the White House and federal property against unruly mobs in Lafayette Square, Washington mayor Muriel Bowser lobbied for statehood precisely because it would expand her authority at federal expense: “I think what we saw from this president is something that we haven’t seen in our city, and that was federal troops on the ready, federal police, policing a local city, National Guard troops hauled in from all over the country. So I decided, when we saw those federal police out on D.C. streets, that we had to push back.”
2. Rong Xiaoqing finds anti-Asian educrats in northern Virginia at the center of a growing trend to squash merit-based K-12 schooling. From the piece:
But while the Asian parents were pouring their energy into these few high-profile cases against Ivy League institutions, “desegregation” became a buzzword in many local school districts, and affirmative action has trickled down from colleges to K–12. The concern among many on the left is that the top selective public high schools consist almost entirely of Asian and white students because they test well. Black and Hispanic students have difficulty competing.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan in the summer of 2018 to get rid of the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT), the sole criterion for admissions to the city’s top three public high schools. The plan has been stymied, at least for now, after tenacious resistance from Asian parents. In the same year, a new admissions policy for merit-based magnet programs for middle-schoolers in Montgomery County, Md., was put in place to reduce the emphasis on test scores. In Virginia, not long before the TJ admissions plan was announced, parents in neighboring Loudoun County filed a lawsuit against a similar plan for the Academy of Science and the Academy of Engineering and Technology that was adopted in August of this year.
And in California, Proposition 16, which if passed would allow race to be considered in public-education decisions, is on the ballot this November, a year after Asian voters in Washington State helped thwart a similar referendum.
The trend is accelerating as Black Lives Matter and the anti-racism movement gain momentum. “Everyone talked about racism. No one talked about improving the quality of education for K–8 students anymore,” said Kwok Chien, a New York parent, giving his impression of the more than a dozen meetings of various community education councils that he attended in the city this summer.
3. Madeleine Kearns finds that #MeToo feminists have killed the distinctions between seduction and coercion. From the essay:
In the same year as Greer, Kate Millett, in her seminal feminist text Sexual Politics, noted that “sex has a frequently neglected political aspect.” (The same can obviously not be said in 2020.) Millett’s work, which began as a doctoral dissertation, focused on the ways in which feminine characters were subjugated by masculine characters in the sexually explicit fictional works of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Genet. Unsurprisingly, given that the excerpts under study were mostly pornographic, she found most of the depictions of women to be objectifying and degrading. What is surprising is where feminism went next.
Twisting their ideology in all sorts of self-sabotaging knots, feminists attempted to convince themselves and other women that the answer to the sort of passivity that degradation induces is to try to own it, to do to themselves (and perhaps also to men) what is done to them by men. Camille Paglia, for instance, a leader of this school of thought, continues to insist that strip clubs, prostitution, and pornography — which benefit men, not women — all have the potential to unleash the paganistic power of “woman as goddess.” Look where it’s gotten us. If we’re not celebrating the big-bootied rapper Cardi B’s offensively unmusical video “Wet A** P***y,” in which she calls herself a “whore” and writhes around half naked, we’re cheering on Shakira’s stripperesque Super Bowl routine. The point, I think, is meant to be this: If a woman appears to have freely and enthusiastically chosen degradation, then it’s actually empowerment.
4. Craig Shirley reminds us why the 1980 presidential elections were so consequential. From the retrospective:
greatest presidents. The election of 1980 was also about war — the Cold War — and a fundamental change in national policy. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter came to rhetorical blows over everything. They were diametrically opposed on every point of policy. They agreed on nothing. They really did not like each other. Reagan thought Carter was in over his head, and Carter thought Reagan was a lightweight. During the campaign, Reagan confided to a reporter that it’s not enough for a candidate simply to want to be president: “There is more of a feeling that one should be president.”
In 1980, by any metric, the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War and the West was losing. The USSR had invaded Afghanistan one year earlier; Southeast Asia had fallen to communism; Angola had fallen to communism; Nicaragua had fallen to communism; Fidel Castro was running amok; Soviet subs were in Cuba; but all Carter cared about was his precious SALT II treaty. He said as much. The invasion of Afghanistan be damned, he wanted a signed treaty with the Soviets. Suffice it to say, the Soviets played Carter for four years like he was holding a busted flush. In the 1980 campaign, Carter said Reagan would divide the country and that “Americans might be separated, black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.” Reagan told his convention in Detroit in July, “Never before in our history have Americans been called upon to face three grave threats to our very existence, any one of which could destroy us. We face a disintegrating economy, a weakened defense, and an energy policy based on the sharing of scarcity. . . . You know, there may be a sailor at the helm of the ship of state, but the ship has no rudder.” Reagan’s longtime aide and friend Stu Spencer once told me that he thought Reagan regarded Carter as “a little sh**.” Reagan really had no use or respect for the Georgian peanut farmer.
5. We give not enough attention to James Lilek’s ever-delightful “Athwart” column, which this time fails to soft-soap. From the piece:
Showering — for that matter, basic bathing — is bad for you and unnecessary. NPR had an interview with the author of Clean: The New Science of Skin, Dr. James Hamblin. He hasn’t bathed since Obama was in office, lest soap and water disturb his personal “microbial ecosystem.”
Says the NPR piece: “Skin has long been considered to be our first line of defense against pathogens, but new studies suggest that the initial protection may come from the microbes that live on its surface.” Loofahs are like razor blades to a vein! B
e that as it may, the good doctor seems to have the usual modern motivation: knocking down all those ridiculous bourgeois notions we believe because, you know, brainwashing.
“We’ve gotten a lot better, culturally, about not judging people about all kinds of things, but when people smell or don’t use deodorant, somehow it’s okay to say, ‘You’re gross’ or ‘Stay away from me!’ and it gets a laugh,” he says. “I’m trying to push back against the sense of there being some universal standard of normalcy.”
Well, smelling like a dead goat is normal. A cultural preference for not reeking is also normal. It could be that the culture oppresses people who don’t want to bathe, or it could be that the culture encourages bathing because it makes the public sphere a less disagreeable place. Or is that somehow racist and gendered? It’s NPR, so you can guess. Here’s how the interviewer gets to the pith of the nub:
“How did your identity as a cisgendered white male influence your reporting on this subject?”
Lights. Camera. Review!
1. Armond White finds the new Netflix take on The Boys in the Band to be a concerted effort to concoct the usual liberal cultural claptrap. From the beginning of the review:
When playwright Edward Albee objected to his drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? being performed by an all-male cast, his injunction prevented the catastrophe now on view in Netflix’s The Boys in the Band. It’s a film version of a stage play in which nine men gather for a birthday party that collapses into funny-bitter clashes showing off their insecurities. As a Millennial version of the 1968 play that Mart Crowley already slyly derived from Albee, this film doubles down — four-fold — on the too-obvious idea of gay men bitching among themselves. Albee knew that would grossly politicize the exploration of human illusions in his theatrical landmark.
Ironically, Netflix’s The Boys in the Band is conceived to be a landmark like the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, using Crowley’s Albee knock-off to make superfluous, overly knowing political commentary on Millennial gay consciousness. The cast, headed by Jim Parsons as the party host Michael, Zachery Quinto as birthday honoree Harold, and Robin de Jesus as their most effeminate friend Emory, go about promoting the film by acknowledging their own experience as gay men (ethnically diverse, too). Their idea of art as psychotherapy (“I feel seen,” says Parsons) adds little to the film’s dramatic meaning but, instead, works as cultural intimidation. Netflix inflates Crowley’s subculture curio, insisting that it be given the same dominant culture reverence as Albee’s masterpiece.
This modernized Boys in the Band is yet another example of Netflix’s political program. It emphasizes the spectacle of a stigmatized group acting out its oppression to sustain the progressive social engineering practiced by Netflix and other competing streaming services. But it’s also cultural engineering from a now-privileged group of industry professionals, starting with producer Ryan Murphy, who adds this adaption to his unsavory brand: TV’s Glee, American Horror Story, Feud: Bette and Joan, American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and the miniseries Hollywood.
2. Kyle Smith thinks people will want to make a date with the new French romance film, The Salt of Tears. From the beginning of the review:
Nobody does a simple, disarming love story like the French. France’s The Salt of Tears, with its black-and-white photography and its quiet, unforced naturalism, is a charmer about how young people meet, get to know each other, and form a deep bond. It’s a lovely, enchanting little tale. For the first 20 minutes, anyway.
The Salt of Tears doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date but is coming out in France next month. Meanwhile it is a standout offering from this year’s New York Film Festival; in an unforced and unassuming way, it says a great deal more than it depicts on its surface. Philippe Garrel, the 72-year-old French writer-director who has been making films since the 1960s, has devised a romantic odyssey that has a timeless quality and yet seems fully apprised of the alarming details about how the game works today; he doesn’t use American terms like “ghosting” or “kidult,” but he doesn’t need to. Garrel wonders what contemporary dating conventions are doing to young people, particularly vulnerable women, and so should we all. Restrained and low-key as it is, The Salt of Tears gradually opens up to become a powerful moral tale on a par with the great films of Eric Rohmer, with a hint of François Truffaut.
Elsewhere in the Conservative Solar System
1. President Trump signs an executive order banning federal involvement with “Critical race theory” scape-goating. From the order:
Today, however, many people are pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual. This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.
This destructive ideology is grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world. Although presented as new and revolutionary, they resurrect the discredited notions of the nineteenth century’s apologists for slavery who, like President Lincoln’s rival Stephen A. Douglas, maintained that our government “was made on the white basis” “by white men, for the benefit of white men.” Our Founding documents rejected these racialized views of America, which were soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War. Yet they are now being repackaged and sold as cutting-edge insights. They are designed to divide us and to prevent us from uniting as one people in pursuit of one common destiny for our great country.
Unfortunately, this malign ideology is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country. Instructors and materials teaching that men and members of certain races, as well as our most venerable institutions, are inherently sexist and racist are appearing in workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the Federal Government and among Federal contractors. For example, the Department of the Treasury recently held a seminar that promoted arguments that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism,” and that instructed small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid “narratives” that Americans should “be more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.”
2. At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher spotlights the insanity — the evil — that the Left has brought to mixed-race adoption. It is mostly long quotation from an email. It deserves to be read in total, and it begins like this:
You have seen, maybe, Ibram Kendi raise questions about Jesse and Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of black children from Haiti. I did not realize how serious, and how inhuman, the movement within adoption circles is to destroy families composed of white parents and adopted kids of non-white backgrounds.
3. At The College Fix, Jeremy Hill reports on a Catholic college hiding its statue of Saint Junipero Serra. From the beginning of the piece:
A Catholic university does not appear to have any plans to return a statue of St. Junípero Serra to a public place on campus.
The University of San Diego removed the statue in July after other statues of the 18th-century California priest were vandalized. Critics accuse Serra of mistreatment of Native Americans during his time running missions in California, though religious leaders have disputed this characterization.
Now the university will not say when, if ever, it plans to publicly display the statue.
University officials told the Catholic News Agency in July that it was moved to “temporary storage” after the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ bishop published a letter criticizing the vandalism against statues of Serra. The university is not within the jurisdiction of the archdiocese.
“Faced with the possibility of vandalism, we are taking increased security precautions at the historic missions located in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” Archbishop José Gómez wrote on June 29.
4. More College Fix: Its great editor, Jennifer Kabbany, reveals the results of a poll on college students saying yea or nay to “controversial” campus speakers. From the beginning of the piece:
The vast majority of college students are opposed — in some cases by wide margins — to allowing speakers on campus who promote controversial topics, such as the idea that Black Lives Matter is a hate group or that abortion should be illegal.
That according to the results of a massive new poll of nearly 20,000 college students nationwide.
“The results were ominous for supporters of free expression on campus,” according to a report on the results released Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and RealClearEducation, which commissioned the survey.
The free speech poll asked college students a variety of hypothetical questions, including whether they would support or oppose their university allowing a speaker on campus who promotes various hot-button topics.
5. At Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh warns about the new Turkey-Iran-Qatar-Hamas Axis. From the article:
Abbas has already damaged the Palestinians’ relations with some Arab countries by condemning the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain for signing peace treaties with Israel. Abbas and his senior officials have accused both Gulf countries of “stabbing the Palestinians in the back” and betraying the Palestinian cause, Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque by signing normalization accords with Israel.
A sign of the growing rift between the Palestinians and the Arab world surfaced on September 22, when Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Malki announced that the Palestinians decided to “relinquish” their right to preside over the Council of the Arab League at its current session, in protest of the decision of the UAE and Bahrain to normalize relations with Israel. “Since the decision to rush after [normalization] was taken in Washington, it does not serve any purpose to exert any more effort to sway [the Arabs] against normalization, particularly since they are not the decision-makers, regretfully,” Malki explained.
The decision marks the beginning of a divorce process between the Palestinians and the Arab world. The Palestinian leadership has been boycotting the US administration since December 2017, when President Donald Trump announced his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Palestinians have also suspended their ties with Israel, including security coordination.
The Palestinians have, in addition, lost the support of several Arab countries because of their recurring condemnations of Arab governments and leaders who want to make peace with Israel.
Now it appears that the Palestinians are also headed toward ruining their relations with Egypt because of Abbas’s decision to make peace with Hamas and appease Iran, Turkey and Qatar.
6. At Quillette, Charlotte Allen delves into the strange case of wanna-black Jessica Krug. From the story:
Until her recent resignation Jessica Krug was an academic superstar. GWU’s history department hired her onto its tenure track as assistant professor even before she collected her PhD degree from Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. This was a feat in itself, because the academic job market for newly minted doctorate-holders in History has been depressed for decades. According to the American Historical Association, there were only about half as many full-time four-year-college teaching job openings either on or off the tenure track for history PhDs in 2012 as there were new doctoral degree-holders. The situation in the highly specialized, thinly populated sub-field of African history was slightly better but not much. But Krug nonetheless landed at GWU, a high-tuition, lavishly appointed campus in downtown Washington not far from the White House while many of her fellow PhDs in History struggled as poorly paid part-time adjunct professors hoping that full-time openings might show up down the road. And then, in 2018, GWU rewarded Krug with tenure and a promotion to associate professor — lifetime job security.
All this was on the basis of Krug’s 260-page book Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom, published in 2018, the very year she attained tenure. It was a reworking of her doctoral dissertation and, as she explains in a preface, at least one seminar paper she had written in graduate school. The publisher was the Duke University Press. The Duke Press is famous, or infamous, for its booklist of trendy but nearly unintelligible — because thick with impenetrable postmodernist jargon — academic writings on such voguish subjects as gender and post-colonial theory. One of its publications is Social Text, the deconstructionist journal that in 1996 published New York University physics professor Alan Sokal’s hoax paper claiming, among other things, that the force of gravity was a fiction constructed by power-seeking scientists. (Social Text is still going strong, with a current issue devoted to the “biopolitics of plasticity.”)
Krug’s book is no exception to the Duke Press norm of inscrutable jargon that skeptics might prefer to call pure mush. Its theme is Kisama, an arid region of present-day Angola (it’s a wildlife preserve today) that, according to Krug, was a center of “resistance” to Portuguese colonizers and slave traders over the centuries, inspiring “global iterations of the Kisama meme” as “maroons” — fugitive slaves — in the New World engaged in their own periodic “violence” against “state power.” Krug paints Kisama as a kind of anti-state collectivist utopia that sent its “widely circulating” meme of resistance on a “remarkable odyssey” across the Atlantic. Her biggest problem is that, as she admits, “neither oral nor written records” in Africa or anywhere else provide any evidence that this occurred — beyond the fact that many Latin-American slaves were of Angolan origin, some of them apparently from Kisama. Another problem is Krug’s inability or unwillingness to write chronologically straightforward history. In order to find a coherent account of what actually happened with the slave trade in 16th and 17th century Angola you need to consult Wikipedia.
7. At The Imaginative Conservative, Michael De Sapio ponders the possible destructiveness of art. From the beginning of the essay:
As conservatives we often undertake to argue for the importance and necessity of beauty. But it is common in discussions of aesthetics not to distinguish clearly between beauty and art. This can be a fatal mistake, and a strong reminder comes from the great cultural historian Jacques Barzun in The Use and Abuse of Art, a series of lectures given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Barzun, with his biting Gallic wit, brilliantly charts the shift in Western culture from art to aestheticism. Considered from one vantage point, art has replaced religion in the life of man (one of Barzun’s chapters is entitled “Art in the Vacuum of Belief”). A signal of the change was when the word “creative” was first applied to art and artists, where it never had been before. Liberated from being servile craftsmen, artists were now creators. By the twentieth century, artists were popularly regarded as gurus possessing the deepest secrets of life and second only to scientists on the social scale.
The shift occurred in the nineteenth century when Romanticists first started talking explicitly of art in quasi-religious terms. Of course, there were earlier roots to this, as the bonds between art and religion had been gradually loosened since the Middle Ages and through the humanist Renaissance. Disenchantment with the industrial age and with scientific rationalism made many 19th-century people yearn again for transcendence and mystery; but for many of the intelligentsia who could not return to orthodox religious belief, art became a natural religion-substitute. It was around that time that Romantic art was emulating qualities of the infinite, the absolute, eternal longing, and similar emotions and aspirations that are traditionally evoked by religion. The boundaries between art and religion began to be blurred, so that one could, for example, make a “pilgrimage” to Wagner’s opera house at Bayreuth as to a religious shrine.
Previously it was understood that art was not completely autonomous; there were higher values to which it was responsible. During the ages of faith, art was the handmaiden of religion, illustrating the Christian mysteries in fresco and stained glass. By contrast, the aestheticist or “art for art’s sake” movement of the Victorian era tended to see art as answerable only to aesthetic standards. Barzun describes the strategy of many aestheticist writers and artists as one of representing art as “the core reality, by which all other things were shown false and artificial.” This involved the divorce of aesthetic and moral values. Artists were a special caste who lived by a different code, one far removed from “bourgeois morality.” While ordinary people lived by moral values, artists lived by aesthetic values. Arguably, it’s a small step from this attitude to dismissing the validity of value judgments in art.
Baseballery
With accumulated rainouts, a Senior Circuit battle for third place (which team possessed it would earn a larger slice of forthcoming World Series’ receipts), and the end of the season at hand, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds — on this day, October 2nd, 100 years ago — squared off for MLB’s only triple header.
Had the Pirates — in fourth place at this late date, but with a shot at overtaking the third-place Reds — swept the triple match (all legitimate make-ups of scheduled games that had been cancelled due to rainouts), third place would be theirs. An appeal to the league for the never-before — and, never since — trio of same-day games was approved. And so it came to pass.
The drama that might have been ended sometime around 2:03 PM on that Saturday afternoon at Forbes Field, when Pirate second baseman Cotton Tierney ground into a double play to close out the Ninth. That handed Reds starter Ray Fisher his 100th (and final) career win, as Cincinnati punched out a 13-4 victory. The team’s third-place status was ensured.
But there were still — a double header? — to play. It would prove a race towards the early Fall sunset. It was now mid-afternoon, as the Pirates took a 2-0 lead into the Seventh Inning of the middle contest. It didn’t hold: a combinations of six hits, two walks, and two errors allowed the Reds to score seven runs off Bucs starter Jimmy Zinn (considered one of the greatest-ever minor league pitchers — he collected 288 wins in 22 seasons, and was still tossing in 1939 at the age of 44). The affair ended somewhere around 4:00PM, the Reds prevailing 7-3.
The triple header came to its dusky conclusion in the approaching-nightcap, the final game of the day earning the Pirates a speck of dignity: Rookie righty Johnny Morrison, in only the second appearance of his career, tossed a 6-0, six-inning shutout. Oddly, the Pirates batted in the bottom of the Sixth, and scored three runs — adding to three scored in the First — before Reds starter Buddy Napier got shortstop Pie Traynor to ground out to close out the frame. Traynor would be the last man to ever bat in triple header. Admittedly, that was not as important a distinction as his being inducted to the Hall of Fame.
Speaking of Hall of Famers, when last we wrote we mentioned the passing of Carroll Hardy, noted by baseball historians as the only man to have ever pinch-hit for Ted Williams. Not so. Reader Jerry T puts Your Humble Correspondent in his place:
In your Baseballery section you repeat an error that I have seen before. Carroll Hardy was not the first player to pinch hit for Ted Williams. I knew of at least one instance where Ted was pinch-hit for. In 1951, on June 17 in the second game of a double header [here’s the box score] , Tom Wright [his Baseball-Reference.com stats can be found here] pinch-hit for Williams. . . . Scrolling through Ron Bernier’s Replay Guides (www.baseballsimresearch.com) I could find no other time but the Hardy and Wright pinch hit appearances for Ted. I don’t know why he was pinch hit for in the 1951 game but can only surmise it may have been due to either an injury or fatigue. It was the eighth inning of the second game of a double header and the Red Sox had a 3-0 lead with no one on base.
We appreciate the correction Jerry.
A Dios
Your Humble Correspondent, picking up a new brother-in-law this weekend, has been asked to offer grace before the feedbags are strapped on at the celebratory lunch. “No speeches,” surely the Better Half will warn. OK then — a sermon! Maybe one referencing The Wedding Feast at Cana. That is, unless we’re using the new ChiCom Bible, which rumor has it speaks of the Wedding Feast at Wuhan. Insert bat-related joke here. Anyway, if you might spare a prayer for new husband and wife, it would be most appreciated.
God’s Blessings to You and to All Things Bright and Beautiful,
Jack Fowler, who awaits your broadsides, and recommends they be fired at jfowler@nationalreview.com.