The day's reading

 "... Islamists decide whether violent jihad should be launched against non-Muslims based on a cost-benefit analysis, not on any conviction that killing non-Muslims is immoral."

Shall we have the New York police department refrain from investigating Muslim terrorism because the Obama justice department says that's insensitive? Read it all.

Of Mafiosi and Mullahs - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online

I'll weigh in

"A terrible day," according to Commentary's blog. Tantamount to the arrival of the Visigoths outside Rome, circa 408 A.D., according to the always humorously snarky and depressed Mark Steyn. (They share the classical references, but Steyn is quite unlike the more intellectual, but never humorous and always depressed Victor Davis Hanson.) Both -- all -- are talking about Standard & Poor's downgrading of the United States to a less than triple A rating, for the first time ever.

I'll weigh in. I'll agree that it's not a good piece of news. But it seems to me that reading editorials for a lifetime will teach us that most pundits are wrong about most things. When I was growing up, pundits and wise men yelled and screamed about the environment, pollution, overpopulation, the rise of Brazil and Japan and yes, China, as the world's next superpower. And so on. What they never said Boo about was the rise of Islamic terror, because they didn't see it coming. And it has turned out to be the biggest problem the modern West faces.

Now they yell and scream "Downgrade," and about all the economic woe undergirding it. Agreed. But they are pundits. What is the big picture they are now missing? -- what grave threat will we all face in twenty or thirty years, that no wise man at the moment can see heading our way?

Springfield -- Lincoln's tomb

The little "Field trip! Springfield" seems to have been, in hindsight, a sort of severance package for the end of a marriage. He wanted a room with a relaxing Jacuzzi. A month later, he wanted to leave. As we say in the vernacular, who knew?

Lincoln's tomb: note the young boys' faces, present in all the sculpture groups around the monument. We still sometimes call soldiers "boys," but in the Civil War, many of them really were children, and serving in the thick of it. Lincoln's face, too, is sculpted differently here at his gravesite from the way it is made now in the many representations of him all over Springfield. In majestic nineteenth-century bronze, he is leonine, heavy-featured, fearsome, all black. In the new depictions of him -- including wax, or whatever dioramas are made of -- his face is thinner, blander, and of course happier.

And speaking of new ways of looking. I had forgotten to note that, in the Lincoln Museum in downtown Springfield, the tourist is guided through a series of floodlit dioramas showcasing lifesize wax figures of scenes from the President's life. In one, a slave couple are shown in the act of being forcibly separated and sold away from each other at a slave market in New Orleans. "This is something the young Lincoln might have seen on his first trip to New Orleans," the plaque beside it says. We are naturally invited to think how it might have affected him.

Ah, but what did happen to him on his first trip south in 1828? David Herbert Donald quotes him.

" 'One night,' as Lincoln remembered, 'they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then cut cable, weighed anchor, and left.' " (See Lincoln, p. 34.)

But that story is not to be thought of when making dioramas nowadays. Political correctness is so much more useful in them than the truth.   

Looking at this massive monument, at the entrance to an otherwise obscure nineteenth-century cemetery in an Illinois town that would have been completely obscure were it not for Lincoln's own presence here, one gets a sense of the emotions, the shock and disbelief people must have felt at provisions having to be made for President Lincoln -- Lincoln -- to be buried here within days of Union victory in the Civil War. Every place where his body rested before final interment in the great crypt is noted: below, the small house-shaped structure cut into the hill is the public vault where anyone's body could be placed temporarily. Once it happened to be used for him, in May of 1865, it seems rarely to have been used again.

Inside this quiet barred cell, there are dignified, nineteenth-century curlicues of stone and metal gracing the plain metal doors of the vaults, now forever empty. Ladies in black hoop skirts and gentlemen in stovepipe hats looked at them and were comforted, perhaps, not just in May of 1865 but in earlier seasons when mourning other dead. Last year's leaves nestle in the corners, as no doubt they do every year. Farther up the hill to the left, a mute stone marker stands where Lincoln's body was moved again (in December 1865), from the public vault to a second resting place before the real, giant's tomb was finished. Construction on that took nine years. For nine years he lay simply in the side of the hill.   

When at last the tomb was finished and dedicated, it must have been a point of great pride and honor, as the years went by, for other Springfield veterans to be buried one by one in Oak Ridge, almost at the feet of the Emancipator. Below, veterans' headstones lie in concentric circles around a monument made of (ersatz?) cannon balls, the circles rippling out, the death dates of old men falling later and later. The 1880s, 1890s, and so on into the 1900s.

Here we are looking up at the back of the tomb from behind its hill, the obelisk framed in a graceful tree. Behind us in turn, on a warm if barren-looking April morning, the rest of Oak Ridge rolls and stretches, in softly shaded, quiet wooded hills, into an oblivion of unvisited Victorian American graves. 

And then, the trip home. Why need there be so many very 21st-century-looking windmills outside Odell, Illinois?

They whirl and spin, and the trees turn green, and life goes on. It's blazing hot summer there now.

Joy

How many future historians, a hundred, two hundred years from now, will make careers out of studying President Barack Obama? I wonder if he might not turn out to be the most discussed and analyzed person in American history -- or will he, by contrast, be quickly slotted into his proper place? -- a very little man, a freak of collapsing early 21st-century American academia, pet of a whole superclass of citizens, the media, who propelled him into power by ignoring everything he was? Not that the voting public, alas, weren't dreadfully to blame.

This latest episode in his life provides us with the most delicious piece of irony and poetic justice it is possible to conceive. So he authorizes the killing of Osama bin Laden, the archfiend. Good. Congratulations. Yet the Greek-tragedy-and-hubris perfection of it seems beyond human arrangement. Of all things, what should Mr. Obama now be known for, what albatross now hangs around his neck? He who delights in his Muslim background but lacks the gravitas to really espouse any faith except the America-bashing one of his former Chicago church, he who wanted to, say, redesign NASA as a vehicle of outreach to the Muslim world and apologized for Americanness at Cairo and anyplace else that would host him, he who comes from a college world where the United States, the military and the masculine are about equally loathed, he who supported the Ground Zero mosque and wanted to try the 9/11 mastermind as a citizen with full Constitutional rights in a Manhattan courtroom -- and so on, all these noble views of course contingent upon polling data and re-election prospects -- he now has used America's most extraordinary soldiers to kill the most famous America-hating Muslim in the world. It seems he had to do it, literally. His re-election prospects could never have survived any leaked word that he had a chance to do it and passed it by. (Couldn't they?) And when it was over he had to go out and announce it to the world from the White House late on a Sunday night, just as if he were President.

I wonder if it wasn't one of the bitterest moments of his life. No, not because he "killed a fellow Muslim." I repeat, I doubt he has a real faith to speak of. But being impelled to do something because the position of the presidency is larger than himself must have been infuriating. The reason he won't get a "bump" in approval from this is not only because it's still the economy stupid, but because everyone, right or left, knows this one dramatic act is totally out of character for him. The path to it was laid down by other men in other years. Heroism, action, decision making, is the last thing he wants to be around. The order that bin Laden's body must be correctly treated according to Islamic law after being shot up -- now that is in character. And not because by it he was "burying a fellow Muslim." Rather because such a picayune, theatrical command is totally in keeping with our president's emotional background: the provincial professor accustomed to trotting out his special subject, the play-President who likes the job's little powers, the wildly inexperienced adult who wants ownership of a group project but lacks an adult sense of the grotesque. Lacks taste, simply put.

So, yes, congratulations.Good luck living it down among your friends.

Field trip! more Springfield

Springfield, Illinois must boast the worst mishmash of architectural styles of any state capital in the nation -- I would say, of any community on the planet, but I could be wrong about that. Every visitor to the city comes, of course, to see this:

This is Abraham Lincoln's home, restored, but not with too heavy a hand, the National Park Service men told us. Eighty percent of the interior is original, as is sixty percent of the exterior. It sits in a neighborhood that looks reassuringly familiar -- spacious, calm, manicured and even up-to-date. The little four-block area might be a corner of any comfortable midwestern town even today, except for the gravel "streets" and the wooden "sidewalks." I use quotation marks because all of it except for Lincoln's house, right down to those streets and sidewalks, is reconstructed. Even if you weren't told so you would probably guess it. The beautiful houses have an eerie, perfect, plastic look, and if you venture inside those that have been rendered museums, you find the rooms are all painted a dull, clean, sensible museum-gray. Tap on the marble-look mantelpieces. Fake. They ring like metal.

Above, for instance, is a house painstakingly recreated to suggest one that belonged to a Lincoln neighbor. (His is behind you and across the street to your right when you stand here.) I couldn't resist snapping a photo of the view that neither Lincoln nor the neighbor ever saw: some modern municipal buildings, and the Hilton hotel towering over the city. This is what I mean by mishmash. Had I also troubled to photograph the new Abraham Lincoln Museum and its companion Library, both great tiered circles of shining wheat-blond stone and glass amid the gray concrete parking garages and the plain brown office piles and the circa 1890s brick and multicolored storefronts downtown, not far from the weathered Greek columns of the Old State Capitol, well -- you would have seen mishmash with a vengeance.

If only it all looked as turn-of-the-twentieth-century-dignified as this.

On the right of this photo, the Greek-columned Old State Capitol, again. Site of the famed "house divided" speech, 1858.

There was one more very interesting house in Lincoln's neighborhood, this time a real one, falling to pieces with age but more alive than all the others for all that. I wonder if this is what an architectural historian might call a piece of Victorian gingerbread.

I wonder, too, if the colors of pale salmon and slate blue were the height of chic at the time. When I look at it somehow I imagine the daughter of the family, a hundred or more years ago, dressing and primping excitedly for her first grown-up party. Fond father, town brahmin complete with watch chain, mutton chop whiskers, and monocle, looking on, etc. The house has a femininity about it, right down to the violets and grasses still struggling to grow in the yard, and the ivies trailing into the deep sunken brick-lined bowl which I suppose was once a fish pond, or the basin to Mother's precious fountain. In the photo below, you are standing with the house at your back, at the bottom of "Old Aristocracy Hill" -- the sign says so -- and looking up Eighth Street toward the Lincolns' place in the distance.

The salmon-and-blue affair is surely within a hair's breadth of being condemned and torn down; bright warning official stickers on the boarded windows are already almost too weathered for passersby to be able to read "Dangerous Structure" on them. This is what happened I feel sure, one by one, to the real houses near Lincoln's corner, and this is why all the reconstructed homes around his are such perfect but eerie ghosts. They all just weathered and crumbled. This house is for sale, but would cost a fortune to revive. It lies outside the sacred precincts which the National Park Service now owns and keeps frozen in 1860, so I imagine if it were not perfectly revived -- if you bought it and did what you liked with it -- if it were simply made safe, pretty, and livable, that would be all right.

In fact I almost wish all the others up the street had not been so perfectly revived themselves. Though the window back into time which they provide is interesting, I wish living families with children were still in these homes, even at the price of historically inaccurate doorknobs or windows glowing blue with television, rather than that Lincoln's part of the town should be the so pristine, still and dead. Our park service guides lamented to us that, before the government began buying up the four block area with preservation in mind, there had been not only real people's, non-1860 homes all around but also "a Piggly-Wiggly" (tacky grocery store chain) cheek by jowl with the Lincoln shrine. Well, what if there was?  People need groceries, and Lincoln, ex-store clerk, was nothing if not sympathetic to the human comedy. By this lofty argument, however, I should not complain about the mishmash effect of Springfield's architecture taken altogether. People need parking garages, and hotels.

A final thought, prompted by the scenery on a warm spring day. Springfield gives the strange impression that it would never have remained the state capitol were it not for Abraham Lincoln's presence here. The seat of Illinois government, already four or five times removed from more rural locales before arriving here in the 1840s, would have naturally moved on again. The mishmash, the isolation and the ghostliness are un-capital-like. And then, the rolling up of sidewalks on Saturday night is another matter. 

Field trip -- the drive to Springfield

Illinois does go on for miles and miles, hours and hours. Photographs of a farm beside the highway, and another farm past it in the distance, and a third and fourth in yet further distances, still don't convey the endless expanse of land and sky. Imagine walking through here beside a creaking, slow- moving covered wagon, when all the land was prairie cut through with meandering small creeks burbling down in the grasses. They named them "Vermilion" or "Money." I think scenery like this is the reason why, the few times in my life that I've seen mountains, I have found them weirdly disturbing and almost confining. Beautiful of course, but still. Imagine never being able to see the horizon.

Then again, imagine reaching a certain point -- right here -- and deciding, this is a good place to stop. We'll live here. Or, imagine deciding, no, let's go on walking for two or three more months and settle in Nebraska ... or Utah ... or Oregon.Who knows? Maybe some people in the wagon trains were thinking, I'd like to live near mountains. Or the sea.

The change in the look of growing things was noticeable once we reached a certain point south. The spring day was unusually warm everywhere, but beyond a certain point, the meager springtime colors of our northern part of the state changed, from the grays and browns of bare trees and plowed fields, the bright tans of last year's grasses and the deep reds of the almost budding trees, to a more uniform stippling of the palest green along the treetops and in the underbrush in the woods zooming by. Had we passed, in our drive, from what the gardener knows as USDA Zone 5 to Zone 6? In Springfield -- yes! the excitements of the capital were our destination -- things had gone even further. A few flowering crabapples were in full bloom, and a magnolia across the street from Abraham Lincoln's house had already dropped most of its petals. Then there was this odd thing.

This tree graces the site of Lincoln's first law offices in downtown Springfield. On the building next to it, in the picture below, happens to be a reproduction of a flowery painting by Vachel Lindsay, who struggles to be the second-most significant figure ever to come from the town. Poor fellow, it's not his fault. What can one do, when one is a forgotten poet-artist who happens to share a bit of biographical coincidence with an incomprehensibly epochal figure? By way of thought experiment: who, for example, counts as the second most important man from Stratford-on-Avon? Answer comes there none.

Again with the commonplace book

It's incredible, and heartening, to see and read the wisdom that shows up among anonymous people thinking and commenting anywhere the freedom of the internet allows them to do so. It's not all blathering, ALL CAPS SHOUTING and "trolls." This is from a post at Pajamas Media called "The Slow Suicide of the West." And it's better than the base article. The commenter calls himself only "Kipling."

"The faith of the author in classical civilization is laudable but largely misplaced. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were eventually able to hold their civilizations together. The Greeks had their own intercene [sic] wars that eventually gutted their civilizations. The Romans pursued a vicious policy of conquest to fund their imperial coffers. For every Cicero there were countless Neros and for every Cincannatus [sic] a legion of Sullas.

"The strength of western civilization is built upon Biblical Christianity and its revelation to the world of universe of ordered liberty. The Nazis and Marxists did not just happen on the scene in the 20th century. They were the product of the philosophical quest for answers in the rejection of God that ended in the bloodbath of Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzche [sic -- he forgot the 's'] and nihilism marked the death of philosophy as he concluded that we are simply bubbles of emptiness on a sea of nothingness. With truth out the windows, the disciples of Nietzche [ditto] embraced the will to power and spread darkness across the land. No philosophy has risen to take its place and we live in a post-modern world where the individual determines truth.

"Western civilization can only restore itself when it reforms upon the foundations that made it great. These foundations include our classical ancestors but they also include the giants of Christiandom [sic -- Christendom] who developed the concepts of ordered societies that influenced our founders. Christianity gave us the dignity of man, the value of work and honest labor, and the drive to suffer and yearn as a means of spiritual growth. It gave us a belief in something larger than ourselves that was worth sacrificing and building for on a daily basis. It gave us strong homes, strong churches, and informed citizens. It gave us a sense of community and purpose that far surpassed the ancient world. It can do so again but we must go back to the ancient paths."

Is he right? Despite the [sic]s, he's thinking. Heartening. 

"So this is how liberty dies" -- by resumé

Is it "amid thunderous applause," as Padme sadly says in one of the Star Wars movies? Maybe, although poor George Lucas was more prescient than he knew. Trying to savage George Bush in that film, we may be sure the erstwhile freedom-loving director subsequently felt not the slightest distress at the thunderous applause that in a few years elected Barack Obama to office.

No, it's not necessarily the applause that marks the event. It might instead be the fact that liberty dies when one or two people, who don't care much about freedom or any other abstractions, nevertheless need to make a political career out of getting noticed for doing something. Someday, I do believe historians will look back marveling that the prime characteristic of our era was that we were all busy compiling our resumés. Think of the idiotic things we do, think of the time we are compelled to waste, because we, or someone in authority just above us who wants to be noticed and promoted, is compiling a resumé. The staff training days, the workshops, the break-out sessions, the role-playing, because the director wants to be able to boast "I implemented staff training days with break out sessions and role playing" when she writes her next grant. Think of the smarmily-acronymed drug and gang "resistance" programs delivered to bored, embarrassed students in the public schools, because the school principal wants to be able to boast likewise when he goes for his Ph.D., and the nice young police officer in charge of the program wants to be able to say he sponsored D.A.R.E.  and G.R.E.A.T. when he runs for county sheriff in fifteen years ... have you ever seen thirteen-year- olds required to dance, in front of an audience, to the song "D! -- I won't do drugs! A! -- I won't have an attitude ...."    

Then there are small-time politicians who latch on to an issue, which itself has no value except that it erodes a little bit of freedom from people's daily lives, because the issue seems to have "legs" and because they, the small time politicians, want to become big time, or at least stay employed as politicians. Have you read the excellent cover article in the latest Weekly Standard, titled "Another triumph for the greens (why your dishwasher doesn't work anymore)"? 

In sum, Jonathan V. Last's article tells us how it happened that dishwasher detergents, which used to contain about 8% phosphorus -- this is the chemical that makes the detergents clean well -- now contain 0.5% and don't clean nearly as well. And we none of us have any choice but to buy them. The companies that make Cascade, Finish, and Electrasol all agreed to remove those useful phospates from their formulas as of last summer, because three politicians in Spokane, Washington, wanted them banned. Phosphates are blamed, rightly or wrongly -- note: rightly or wrongly -- for polluting fresh water and eventually killing fish, in the Spokane river specifically. The two meatiest paragraphs in the article follow:

It was in the midst of Spokane’s phosphorus-reduction mania that two politicians got the idea to ban dishwasher detergents containing phosphates. In April 2005, one of Spokane’s state representatives, Democrat Timm Ormsby, proposed a bill requiring that any dish detergent sold or distributed in the state contain less than 0.5 percent phosphorus. At the time, Ormsby didn’t think the bill had much of a chance. “I thought we were up against a pretty steep challenge,” he says, “given that other states had tried and failed.” The bill sat stewing until, a few months later, Spokane County commissioner Todd Mielke, a Republican, proposed a phosphate-detergent ban for the county.

Mielke, who served for five years in the state legislature before becoming a corporate lobbyist, was widely respected by Washington Republicans. When he joined forces with Ormsby, support for the phosphate ban took off in the house. It passed by a vote of 78 to 19 with such strong bipartisan support that both the speaker and the minority leader voted for it. The legislative strength of the bill surprised Lisa Brown, the Democratic majority leader in the state senate, who quickly became engaged. She knew a winner when she saw one. And it didn’t hurt that she, too, hailed from Spokane. With Brown muscling it along, the bill passed in the senate just two weeks later, 41 to 7.

Did both men, and the woman, have a genuine passion for reducing phosphates in their hometown's river, or a passion for fish, or nature, or only a passion -- and more and more I believe it is the ruling human one -- for telling their fellow beings what to do? Or were they just interested in improving their resumés? The result has been not only that good dishwasher detergents were banned in Washington state, but that the detergent manufacturers "threw in the towel" and decided to make all their products 0.5% phosphorus, rather than manufacture two sets of soaps, one for sale in Washington and one for the rest of the country. They recognized that there is no fighting Gaia.

And then, consider Lisa Brown. She, too, seems to be building her resumé.

Last January the Washington state legislature took up a proposal to ban phosphates from residential lawn fertilizers. It passed in the senate, but stalled in the house. The bill, which would have required neighbors to inform on one another, was sponsored by the Democratic majority leader, Lisa Brown [emphasis added].

Perhaps it's inevitable that democratic government becomes depraved. Eventually, there is nothing for candidates to promise, and nothing for elected officials to do, except to create more and more laws. At least olden-time aristocracies devoted a good part of their year to hunting, wenching, and court intrigue, and so left Jack Sprat alone to buy the dishwasher detergent he liked. Yet, note how people in un-democratic regimes walk through fire to vote.

Erasmus declared Folly the daughter of Plutus, Riches, and has Folly describe her father as the god "according to whose pleasure war, peace, empire, counsels, judgments, assemblies, wedlocks, bargains, leagues, laws, arts, all things light or serious -- I want breath -- in short, all the public and private business of mankind is governed ... this is my father and in him I glory."  If Folly in turn marries Democracy, it seems the children of the pair turn out to be the best and the brightest who like to outlaw things, and thus meddle and destroy in their own incremental way. They end up writing a lot of resumés.

One more thought, to be filed under the heading "incremental meddling." Eventually, the phosphate-banning, fish-loving environmental mania is going to come up against the grand topic of public health. Towards the end of the Weekly Standard article Jonathan Last writes,

The anti-phosphorus lobby began by agitating against phosphates in laundry detergent. In the early 1990s they were banned, though an exception was made for dish detergents. Now phosphates are banned in dish detergents, too, though these bans make an exception for commercial dish detergents, which still contain phosphates. Surely they are next in line for improvement.

"Next in line" are commercial detergents. What this means is that in time people who want to be noticed for having gotten something done are going to decide that it's not very important whether or not restaurant (or hospital?) dishes are clean. They also don't care if Jack Sprat actually wastes more water and more electricity hand-washing or double-dishwashing his dishes, as long as he's not using what they want to boast in their resumes about having banned. Will restaurant patrons complain about dirty plates and glasses? What of the public health inspectors, visiting kitchens and store rooms and also compiling resumés?

Hospitals, I suspect, will become the battleground where environmentalism makes its stand. Being an environmentalist has to be a function of youth and health. Recycle as you like, carpool, plant a tree on Earth Day, think green thoughts, smile at nature and love Gaia as you please, -- but wait till the day when you have to enter a hospital. The things those doctors and nurses use once and then throw away will absolutely astonish you. And when it's your turn to benefit from their ministrations, you will want them to go one doing exactly that, no matter how many trees you've planted on Earth day or how many canvas bags you righteously lug to the grocery store. You will want them using and hygienically throwing away the exam gloves, the needles, the syringes, the cotton swabs, the plastic sheaths for ear scopes and thermometers, the plastic I.V. lines and drip bags, the plastic bed protectors and the hand sanitizers and the face masks and the little cups for your pills. All this is only what you see in the patient's room, where things are relatively tidy and unshocking. God knows what is used up and thrown away in operating rooms or labs, and I don't mean obvious biohazards. When it comes to our lives and our health, we don't care what goes into the landfill or flushes into the ocean. Perhaps a race memory of filth and disease is still that strong in us. In the hospital we say: keep me clean and keep me alive.

For the moment, anyway. Can the best and brightest, people like Ormsby, Mielke, and Brown, change that? Will your doctor be required to share needles for the sake of the environment? It seems impossible, but up until last July it seemed impossible that free citizens would not be permitted to buy a good dishwasher detergent. It seems impossible that we shall all be forbidden to buy lightbulbs as of 2014, but lo, the law exists. (You can stock up, if you don't mind pretending you live in the old Soviet Union whose peoples' hoarding habits we used to rather pity.) When it comes to the hospitals, then we will see what passions the religion of Gaia really compels. Or perhaps there's a greater and subtler force at work, and it's just our attachment to the incremental folly of resumé writing. Either way, I imagine the daughter of Riches somewhere in heaven, laughing, deliciously.      

"Half the charm"

"Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos with the thought of the bitter cold in the rough stable ...."

Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan, 1912

Indiana girls

"Aunt Edna and Eula Mae."

When a farm girl gets dressed up to have her picture taken ... or was she a city girl, and this her high school graduation photograph? If so, she would have been unusual. My grandmother, a city girl probably of about the same generation, always bragged about having graduated high school, which girls didn't necessarily do in the early part of the 20th century.

I like the little pearls around her neck. They represent glamor and wealth, can't possibly be real -- and aren't remotely needed. She is far lovelier than they are.

Bride? Bridesmaid? Halloween?

Ottie's postcard

Mrs. Elsie Carter of Frankfort, Indiana, received a lot of postcards from family and friends in the early 1900s. She saved most of them, it seems. The complete postmark for this one is illegible, but the others in the box are dated around 1907 or 1909.

If you read this one carefully, you'll notice that Mrs. Carter's sister, Ottie, is telling her that she is about to have the baby. It is early February.

"Well sister I got your letter I hope you will all be much better of your colds until you get this that receipt is for cake she baked it in a bread pan. it is real good for a dark cake. I thought that picture was cute Alta sent I got 11 eggs yesterday that is the highest for 3 weeks. Well I am alright this morning but I expect to be in bed in a few days so you can wonder how we are will let you know as soon as I can I hope for Good Luck. from Ottie."

Two political ads

First, the "Mourning in America" ad, which refers to the well-remembered "Morning in America" spot of Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign. Having heard something about it, I expected the new ad to be far more powerful.



It shirks facts, and it ends with a disappointing plea for our government to "care about us." Isn't that the problem?

The next ad, from benhoweblog, is many times better. It revisits history, naming the two men whom we have been trained to revere but whom we now know, thanks in my opinion largely to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, to have been primarily responsible for sending the United States off its Constitutional rails in order to satisfy an elite ideology: Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The ad also captures the fundamental point of the last two years' politics: economic misery is one problem, but the larger problem is just our elites' generations-long hostility to the Constitution. The insertion of the clip showing Barack Obama trumpeting "fundamental change!" to a screaming crowd captures, not an image of the simple days when he was a teenybopper idol, but an image of chilling and calculated evil.



Wise, too, of the makers of this ad to finish with many pictures of protesting crowds, for this reflects the other main point of the last two years' politics: popular movement, popular understanding of, and anger at, what is going on. Here are not actors portraying the sad unemployed, but the actual rallies and speeches the media would not report. Big red Xs over the portraits of Republican candidates who lost because they weren't conservative enough also capture history as it is unfolding.

Bravo, benhoweblog. Memo to the group Citizens for the Republic: a bit less timidity next time, please. 

Molly hides -- Robert, Hugh, Daniel, and Jonah do not

This is one of those stories of creeping sharia that one had hoped would always have a dateline of the UK or Sweden. Not that that's good, but those places are far away, and so when stories carry datelines like that, one can put aside, for a few moments, the fact of having to face what our ancestors knew.

Our ancestors collectively knew a lot about Islam. Evidence of their experience crops up in the oddest places, in books and documents of earlier times, in our own Marines' hymn of all things. They knew and remembered (and defeated) Muslim armies gathered outside the walls of Vienna. They knew Muslim slave raiders snatching men, women, and children off the coasts of Europe, as far north as Ireland, even in what seems to our astonished eyes the proto-modern world, the mid-17th century, by which time surely people were beginning to be rational. They knew, in Samuel Johnson's casual 18th-century phrase, all about "the Turkic contempt for women." They knew what our own ambassadors, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were told by the Muslim representative of the Barbary states (today's Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya) in London who explained why Muslims enslaved American sailors in the Mediterranean: "that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise." This last is from Adams' and Jefferson's report to the Continental Congress in 1786, and is quoted in Joshua London's Victory in Tripoli. Hence, incidentally, the young United States' fight against the Barbary pirates, and the reference to the "shores of Tripoli" in that hymn.

Our ancestors knew, in short, what we have had the luxury of forgetting for a while and would rather not be confronted with again, that Islam has a core of aggressive, triumphalist malice at its heart which brooks no compromise, but can only be admitted and defeated through the vigorous defense of Western freedom and frankly through battlefield victory where the battlefields are.

Our having to face this is a kind of double shock. Most Americans are believing people. It's a shock to imagine a religion could exist which has malice at its heart, and which is therefore so contrary to what a good God could will; and, childish as it may seem to say so, it's a shock to follow through and contemplate a loving and good God who could allow untold millions of people over centuries to be enslaved to this malice, in their national life, in their homes, in their bodies, in their minds. This is the way a large part of the world is. And its people are commanded by their holy books to export this, through intimidation and violence, to other lands. I am not speaking of the day-to-day aspects of the religion, of any religion, being malicious. What guides kind, decent conduct or enables man to offer praise, thanksgiving, and supplication to God is good. I am speaking of the core of this one religion, to which its purists may always revert:

Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam. Islam is less a personal faith than a political ideology that exists in a fundamental and permanent state of war with non-Islamic civilizations, cultures, and individuals. The Islamic holy texts outline a social, governmental, and economic system for all mankind. Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission. The misbegotten term "Islamo-fascism" is wholly redundant: Islam itself is a kind of fascism that achieves its full and proper form only when it assumes the powers of the state. ("Islam 101," Part 3, Conclusion, by Gregory Davis, a web page of Jihad Watch.)

 

So Molly Norris has gone into hiding, as obediently as if her own state had commanded her to -- which apparently, via the advice of the FBI, it has. May we peasants be permitted to know the identities of the American agents who suggested an American citizen do this? -- who admitted to an American citizen living on her own soil that she cannot be protected from the potential punishments meted out for blasphemy by a foreign and anciently violent religious and political civilization?

And why Molly? I want to know why creeping sharia picks off the small fry, while big important fish swim and thrive. Molly is -- or was -- a cartoonist living and drawing in Seattle, who made a simple and funny cartoon last spring as a free-speech response to the South Park episode that apparently did not depict Mohammed in a bear suit, but was censored by Comedy Central as if it did anyway. She drew all sorts of ordinary objects, cups of tea and pasta packages and things, each cheerily saying "I am the real likeness of Mohammed." She framed it as if it were a hortatory poster from a non-existent group, "Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor (CACAH)." Molly very insouciantly hit the nail on the head, at first, when she reasoned that if enough people draw "Mohammed," Muslim jihadists won't be able to kill them all, and death threats like those offered to the creators of South Park -- by two individual ciphers with a laptop, it turned out -- will become "unrealistic."

Fair enough Then her idea went viral. (She enjoyed an audience to begin with, which goes far toward explaining why her cartoon of April 20, 2010 got noticed at all. She worked, or used to, for the "alternative" paper Seattle Weekly.) Major newspapers and well-known bloggers reported on her. Somebody else quickly launched a Facebook page called "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," setting aside this past May 20 as the day for a free-speech and divinity-lampooning extravaganza. The page racked up guests and "Likes," and drawings poured in.

When devout Muslims who know their duty saw it, they, or some few of them, set up protest pages. Molly freaked about not wanting to offend anyone, and essentially about the catastrophic loss of her privacy, which is understandable. She also freaked about having her throat cut, most understandable since we can anticipate Muslims doing so, just as we can now anticipate them blowing themselves up in pizza parlors, beheading journalists, and flying planes into office buildings. Facebook freaked and shut down the "Everybody Draw" page. One man, an American-born imam named Anwar al-Awlaki who used to run a Virginia mosque but is himself now in hiding in Yemen, announced that Molly "should be taken as a prime target of assassination." It will help to remember that, in Islam, Mohammed is the perfect man and the model for all behavior. In small matters, this is why the devoutest men may dye their beards red and marry little girls. In large matters:

The Prophet particularly seems to have disliked the many poets who ridiculed his new religion and his claim to prophethood -- a theme evident today in the violent reactions of Muslims to any perceived mockery of Islam. In taking action against his opponents, "the ideal man" set precedents for all time as to how Muslims should deal with detractors of their religion. ("Islam 101," Jihad Watch, by Gregory Davis, section 1, c., i., The Battle of Badr.)

Five months only after publishing her art, and two months after this holy man in Yemen passed his sentence on her, "Molly," her ex-employer sadly acknowledged, "is no more." Dead? No. Buried alive. She has changed her name, moved, and gone into hiding. I daresay we cannot imagine the nightmare she is now living in, for all she knows, self-created and for the rest of her life.

Still I'm confused as to why Molly should hide. Gregory Davis, who wrote the excellent "Islam 101" summary for JihadWatch which I quote above, to my knowledge is not in hiding. Neither are any of the all-star roster of Western or adoptive-Western scholars and journalists who write and educate us today about things our ancestors knew: Robert Spencer. Hugh Fitzgerald. Daniel Pipes. Andrew McCarthy. Andrew Bostom. Bruce Bawer (who lives in Europe). Mark Steyn. Pamela Geller. Melanie Phillips. Brigitte Gabriel. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Wafa Sultan. Jonah Goldberg, who wrote as superb and simple a piece on Muslim violence as it is possible to find, just a few days ago ("A convenient excuse," National Review Online, September 17, 2010). A few heavyweights, like Europe's Ba'at Yeor and America's Ibn Warraq, do publish under pseudonyms, but even that nod to danger seems rare. We are blessed with some brave people out there -- though it's still shocking to live (again) in the world where we have to say that.  

So then why would Molly hide, when far more serious and, to jihadists, surely more offensive and targetable people do not? My guess is that it's not so much that Muslim jihadists go after the small fry, or the women. My guess is that it happens to be a jackpot if any one of them operating independently can cow, at a great distance, someone -- anyone -- who was a private citizen but achieved prominence by offending Islam in a free Western country. When people like Molly "go ghost" and "essentially wipe away their identity," it helps create a mental climate in which ordinary citizens hear of this and think that jihadist power anywhere is actually stronger, more startlingly pervasive, and yet more hidden, somehow therefore more routine, than it is.

Not that Muslim jihadist power and aggression in our world isn't already appalling enough. Daniel Pipes writes that although he's "elated" at the public's waking up to the classical triumphalist Muslim insult of the Ground Zero mosque, he had hoped that the public might have woken up a long time ago to jihadist penetration of our security services. (This is why I want to know who in the FBI advised Molly to disappear.) And, just incidentally, have you heard about the Christians arrested for distributing Christian literature outside a Muslim festival in Dearborn, and about the $10,000 reward offered by Detective Sherief Fadly for information on whoever burned a Koran in East Lansing, Michigan? Memo to the Dearborn police and to Detective Fadly: distributing Christian themed pamphlets and burning a copy of the Koran are not against American law, though of course both activities violate sharia.

It happens that the writers above, particularly Andrew McCarthy and Daniel Pipes, pursue a theme among many in their articles which may be apropos to Molly. The theme is that our victory in the war between Islam and the world -- and yes, Islam itself divides the world into the House of Islam (where all is correctly Muslim) and the House of War (polluted by sinners not yet converted, subjugated, or dead) -- depends very much on Westerners being confident and joyous in their inheritance, and aware of and determined to hold to its manifest strengths.

For many educated Westerners, this is emotionally dangerous. It means having to judge other civilizations, judge Islam, and find it very wanting. We don't like doing this, especially the younger of us who have been well trained in Western guilt and a kind of pretty-pretty-princess moral relativism for decades. Creeping sharia succeeds quickest, these men say, where just we well-meaning, gently reared, abashed Westerners have already absorbed instruction in our collective crimes, hypocrisies, vulgarities, and shortcomings, and therefore are ripe for the typical how-dare-you-judge-anyone-else scolding -- from a people whose civilization is far worse and who regard criticism of its religious core as blasphemy. Needless to say, freedom is not their friend, nor do they like its being ours.

Molly, I fear, good soul of the courageous "alternative" paper, is one of those guilt-ridden, sensitive types with no confidence or joy in her civilization. At first she showed an absolutely correct, simple gut understanding of her society's basic virtues, but then inadvertently tested them against an intractable alien claim otherwise. Never having dreamed there could be other worldviews -- though I daresay she could have spouted the correct things about "diversity" at a moment's notice -- she certainly could not react to absolute judgment with a gut level be-damned-to-you judgment of her own. It almost seems that, in her own conscience, she agreed she had to go.

What a mewling little tragedy that she should be the first American to go into hiding out of obedience to sharia. I know it's very easy to say someone else isn't brave enough in a situation that we ourselves are not living through. But did she, this comparative small fry, really get worse or more actionable threats or angrier pronouncements than those heard by Robert Spencer just for a start? His publishers restate them as negative selling point blurbs on the jackets of his books -- "Allah should pull his spine out and beat him with it every day for all eternity," and other official clerical gems. Robert, Daniel, Hugh, and all the others have been working to recapture and publicize our ancestors' knowledge of Islam for years, and are far better known than Molly. Yet in a matter of weeks, she dissociated herself from one drawing, and in a matter of months submitted to sharia in her own land, ostensibly forever. And her liberal, tolerant, speak-truth-to-power friends and colleagues did nothing in her defense. Mark Steyn puts it bluntly: "no one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you" ("Mollifying Muslims and Muslifying Mollies," Steyn Online, 20 September 2010).

Foolishly or not, I hold out hope for a nice, saccharine American ending to this saga. In three months -- not more, don't forget our collective attention span is not what it should be -- I want to see Molly on the cover of People, pensively and serenely photographed, telling her story of survival and bravery and uplift. Or maybe it would go better in Vogue. They can fit her in amid the fawning interviews with Eric Holder and Timothy Geithner, and perhaps dress her in couture, too. If they dare.

Image from Wikipedia article, "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"

For ye be villeins (another California decision)

It's the illogic of it that ought to stand out, even for those of us who have been cajoled into supporting the right of homosexuals to "marry," mostly because we want to be good-natured, and because for fifty years our civilization has accepted that no discourse can possibly be more exalted than civil rights. The illogic of the judge's decision consists in this, that at some point, gay marriage activists will have to slam the door behind them, on all the other people who will want this right too. If marriage can be expanded to include same-sex partners, a thing no human society has ever dreamed of any more than it has ever dreamed of legislating that cats shall be dogs or day shall be night, then there is no logic in closing off "marriage" to anyone. Brother and sister, adult and child, more than two partners -- who shall say any joining is incorrect? Today's activists will have to either return to the notion of human taboo in order to shut the gates, hardly a sophisticated argument (albeit enough to have trumped them), or follow through in their moral posturing, open the gates fully, and announce that all sexual behavior is good and laudable.

The first alternative would prove them self-serving hypocrites and the second, collective sociopaths. They won't want to accept either alternative. They like the here and now, and their celebration here and now proves that the point of the gay marriage drive has always been to assault common people's beliefs, and morality itself, for the sake of assault.

I don't know what the upshot will be. If I were a fiction writer I would notice the current trend of young men and women living together without marriage, and put into my books something about youth no longer sullying itself with a polluted institution. Or I'd think about a futuristic tax revolt -- about some enterprising software engineer starting work, this very moment, on a computer program that would enable retail stores to bypass the automatic collecting of state sales taxes, for example. Cheaper goods would mean a satisfied and surging customer base, that is, until the authorities noticed and came with their handcuffs and their jail sentences. Then there might be the plot line of the mass of ordinary citizens simply choosing not to file. Why willingly pay the salaries of our oppressors?

Would a fiction writer think also of sketching in some details about violence -- revolutionary violence? Is there any logical precedent, would it feel emotionally right and in keeping with characters, motivations, etc.? What if army units abroad should begin to decide that events at home, at the highest levels of leadership, are totally unacceptable?

I suppose for the maker of fiction it all depends on fictional characters and fictional motivations. The Jacquerie rose, you know, and lots of other peasants at other times and places. And who was it who made an agreement with them and then broke it, sneering, "for ye be villeins, and villeins ye shall remain"? "Whether you like it or not" is the modern translation. It was some king, I think. 

Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin


The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell

I begin to understand

I begin to understand why a landed aristocracy should have arisen over the course of centuries in Europe and particularly in England. It makes sense, if nothing else, as a way to stop the galloping growth of government. There is nothing for political candidates to do in the modern world except perpetually run for office, perpetually promising us what they'll do for us (with our money) and perpetually legislating, legislating, legislating. The time will come when there is little left to legislate except, as our next Supreme Court justice seems to think is fair, what we must eat and drink every day.

I think I would prefer living in a system where a landed aristocracy controls the reins of power, but at least goes home to its estates and does nothing but wallow in idle privilege for a large part of the year. Squire Allworthy, hunting, shooting, fishing, and wenching, and occasionally rearing foundlings, would at least be in a position to leave us all alone when Parliament was not sitting. He could ride the circuit as a justice of the peace, too, I suppose, and hear cases and ladle out right and good, and get a little more fishing and wenching done that way.

Who wants to vote for a return to dukes and earls? Do you think an American earl would understand the premise? I'll bet his countess would.

Who are the 29?

Once again, a tiny minority submit to sharia, Islamic law and its inherent triumphalism, on our behalf. Who are the 29 members of New York's "community board 1" who voted to approve plans for a 15- storey mosque practically at the site of the World Trade Center? In an interview with Rush Limbaugh yesterday, Andrew McCarthy says the mosque builders intend to have it built by the tenth anniversary of the attacks.



Image from Standbesideher.com

Do you think this man, rather nattily dressed for a nice late summer day, would approve?

Mrs. S

Sometimes it's good to write things down, however minor they are, before you forget. A friend's Facebook post tonight on an old board game from the early '70s reminded me about "Mrs. S."

This was a game I used to play when I was growing up. It required only a lightweight, good sized rubber ball, a wall, and solitude. You bounced the ball against the wall and caught it again, and each time you threw it, you recited something or performed some quick trick before catching it. The tricks got more involved as you played -- there were seven things to do -- and if you missed doing the trick or catching the ball, you started over. It was an easy game to play if you stood far from the wall, allowing yourself plenty of time to do the trick; the challenge was to stand close enough to the wall to make the ball come flying back to you at a good speed.

Everything rhymed. It went like this:

"Mrs. S.
"Clap once
-- and then you repeated something like "se-BECK--ee--oh" and spun your hands around each other in the air in front of your chest --
"Touch my knee
"Touch my toe
"Turn around
"Touch the ground
"Under we go (you stood on one leg and threw the ball from under the other, bent knee)"

I'd love to know what I was saying with "seBECKeeoh," and who Mrs. S. was, and where the game originated. In the mid-twentieth century a scholarly English couple named Iona and Peter Opie made a career out of researching and chronicling traditional childhood games and pastimes. Look for their books The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Children's Games in Street and Playground, and their first effort, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. I met them, so to speak, in two articles from the old hard back magazine Horizon (Winter 1971): Robert Cowley's "Their work is child's play" discussed the couple's research, and their own "Games (Young) People Play" analyzed the 250 individual children engaged in "some 75 pursuits" in Bruegel's painting Children's Games.

The Opies had interesting things to say about the modern child and his games. They had no patience, for one thing, with the idea that the Modern Child is swamped by electronic amusements and no longer runs and plays as children once did. (To be fair, the Opies lived and wrote before the real tidal wave of late-20th century electronic amusements washed over everybody -- or did they? What could have been a more fundamental intrusion into free time, for either adults or children, than the movies?) "It is an enormous myth that children are no longer aware of traditional amusements and are unable to entertain themselves when they are left to their own devices," they wrote in Horizon. The modern child's trouble, they believed, has come when adults muscle in on playtime, scheduling it, refereeing it, and confining it physically to asphalt playgrounds inside fences. Adult interest in certain games is precisely what atrophies them, the Opies suspected. As Cowley quoted them:

But many old favorites, such as King of the Castle, Sardines, and Leapfrog, are diminishing in popularity. "We feel it is no coincidence," the Opies write, "that the games whose decline is most pronounced are those which are best known to adults, and therefore most often promoted by them ..." Games live only as long as they have a reason to live and the Opies see nothing intrinsically sad in the gradual disappearance of any particular one. Old games die out so new ones can flourish in their place: we threaten games most when we try to preserve them.

King of the Castle was probably our own King of the Hill, which I hated -- it involved nothing more than one person pushing everyone else down. I liked Mother May I (so much more interesting than Simon Says), and of course I loved Bloody Murder, but that was so difficult to arrange. (It was basically just "It" at night.) By the time it got dark enough to really play that, people just seemed to wander home without telling anyone. Speaking of spoiled games, there's an idiotic game children play now called Slug Bug, in which the poor soul who is "It" has to close his eyes and attempt to find the other players by the sound of their footfall on the gravel or wood chips beneath a park's jungle gyms. The entire ritual is just an excuse to tease. Whenever It calls out "Slug bug," the person who has been fairly caught simply shouts "On," to claim he was actually safely on the jungle gym, and it doesn't take long before It is wandering around, eyes squeezed shut, the only one still playing while everybody else goes and has fun elsewhere. ("When children are cooped up in playgrounds, their games become more aggressive than when they play in open spaces.") Perhaps an adult invented this one -- I'm guessing a Child Development major. Then of course, there's Marco Polo, a swimming game still more ridiculous and dreary than Slug Bug. Everybody hops around in a swimming pool shouting "Marco" and "Polo" utterly at random. Nobody could have invented that, for the sake of pleasure, except some fool child.

And who was, or who invented, Mrs. S? I don't see any sixteenth century children bouncing a ball against a wall in Bruegel's painting. "Of course not," the Opies notice, too. "No bouncing of rubber balls." Of course -- no rubber.

And what of the Opies? Is their home in Liss, England, still extant, is it still the research engine/private museum it once was, does it still hold the largest collection of children's books in England? I've chosen not to look them up beyond the winter 1971 issue of Horizon; just for the moment I'd rather not find out what we tend to find out when we go digging on people -- that their work is now discredited or they were terrible parents. I'll take Peter Opie's advice to heart instead. "I've always felt," he says on page 15, "that if you really want to understand a thing, you have to own it. If you want to appreciate an eighteenth-century author, you should really read him in an eighteenth century edition and not a modern reprint ...."

All right. I own the '71 Horizon. And there, in an issue devoted to the problems of youth, Mr. and Mrs. Opie run and jump, and are the last word on fun and games.

Ch-ch-changes

As we wade in to a new future of nationalized banks and major industries, of probable socialized health care, high unemployment, endless taxes, and just generally Animal Farm-style governance -- oh yes, achievement will be punished, and some pigs will be very much more equal than others I am sure, and nothing to do about it but try to "put boulders in the road," as Rush Limbaugh says -- it occurs to me that the destruction and disappearance of old worlds is a constant in human history. Pundits being wrong about a lot of things, including the dire results of change, is also a constant, but valuable things do vanish. Noble systems break down, useful knowledge is forgotten, new rules and systems imposed, often enough through deception or crowd hysteria or violence. People and nations witness ends that would have seemed unbelievable if seen in a crystal ball. Or in their own childhoods.

I don't compare President Obama's assault on the country to, say, the cranking up of the French Revolution (which started as an upper-class tax revolt, funnily enough), or to the sweeping of hordes of Goths into the crumbling Roman empire. Or to the sweeping of Arab Muslim hordes into Zoroastrian Persia, say. ...I only just learned about this so I get bragging rights in passing it on. It produced most curious results in history. Zoroastrian Persian diplomats stationed abroad found themselves, after a climactic battle in their homeland in 642 A.D., suddenly without a country, an emperor, or a religion to represent. Forever. A thousand years of high civilization and fearsome conquest, vanished. Those berobed and sandaled diplomats, in Alexandria, in Tripoli, must have had to find other ways to survive, for there was no point even in going home.

And Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, and Goths sat on the throne of Augustus. Roman legions withdrew from Britain; civilized European men slaughtered one another by the millions in the trenches of World War I. And then the civilized empires which sent them to their deaths collapsed, too.

Dear me, such very massive and tragic examples, and all out of chronological order, too. One could be accused of a yowling and infantile panic. No, I don't quite compare the President's plans to all this, but in him we do have someone unprecedented. We have our first anti-American American president, who seems genuinely to want to restructure the country for his own personal pleasure and intellectual and especially academic satisfaction -- payback, even -- and power. It would be as if the former professor Ward Churchill was president. It would be as if any one of my old left-wing professors was president. He is them. No one would doubt that their attitude was fundamentally anti-American, even though like all good open-minded America-hating liberals, each lacked the true courage of their convictions, to pick up and go live elsewhere. I remember my professors scoffing at the deep-voiced young men in the back of the class who challenged them to go live elsewhere. They scoffed, so if you were bright and following along, you could take that as an assurance that the deep-voiced young men were stupid, bigoted -- conservative. But the professors never quite had an answer to the challenge. The truth was always that it is so much safer and more fun not to move, but to change the where.

So we have a president, inexperienced, aggressive in some things and passive-shabby in others (all those bows from the waist, poor, ill raised child) and indoctrinated in economic systems that are righteously, emotionally pleasing but impoverish everyone, who wants to change things. The nation has changed, has been changed, in other ways before now, in ways that to the private citizen constituted a private tragedy, or perhaps a cosmic one, or maybe didn't even come within his notice at all. Pick your changes, in chronological order or out of it. The opening of the West. The Civil War (did you lose a brother, a husband, a son? Five sons?). The presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who also tried and greatly succeeding in laying the foundations of Barack Obama's eternally statist, planned American economy, on the grounds that there shouldn't be unfairness. On an individual, human scale, my grandfather lost his post as Republican precinct captain when FDR won office, and that was that.

And we have all survived, though who can say what's been lost. I was struck recently by the old movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in the 1940s but set largely in pre-World War I America. The characters are show business people, who travel the country performing and who consider a steady job of two or three weeks' salary a godsend. They live in boarding houses in the meanwhile, and when they are low on money, they sit at the bottom of the communal table and are served only noodles and maple syrup until they can pay their rent. When they can pay, they are welcome to some goulash. It's fiction, but it reflects circumstances that must once have been true. They are on their own, free (gulp) in ways that we now would not tolerate. What's been lost, if anything?

What makes Obama different and more threatening from a lot of previous American movers and shakers is not only his having bigger, more ignorant, more absurdly expensive plans, and a downright vengeful Democratic Congress willing to help him implement those plans -- and these Democrats do include people like my own Senator Dick Durbin, who viciously compared American troops in Iraq to Nazis -- but his election by a voter base that may stay untroubled by the dirt clinging to him. I believe they may remain untroubled by anything he ever says or does. His church membership and his terrorist friends didn't bother them. Now his inability in economics to add two and two, or rather his cynical relish in not adding it, does not bother them either. Some pundits think his followers will wake up when they at least realize that he has his hand in their wallets, too. I'm not so sure. I fear he may be creating the Presidency as an emotional office that only he can fill. I wonder if his voter base would notice or care if he suspended elections, "because folks are struggling, and this great country needs ... ," etc., etc.

And what makes him and his swoony voter base still more threatening is that he is imposing plans that can unravel the nation as a Western power quickly, you might say a Western-proud power, unravelled following the model of a socialist and hyper-taxed Europe, poleaxed in addition by waves of non-Western immigrants who have taken Europe up on its offers of compassion, asylum, religious tolerance, jobs possibly, but free state money forever, definitely. It's a whole world of circumstances that our man's voters do not know or care about. If someone observing Europe and liking what he saw wanted to think out a formula to quickly transform the United States into its mirror, he could hardly have come upon a more pitch-perfect scenario than this. Let the nation, well meaning and deluded, exhaust itself vomiting out imaginary money on problems that are made worse by more imaginary money; let the state control all, on the grounds that only the state can fund fairness. Let our man, freely and joyously elected, be of Muslim descent with a Muslim middle name, just for sheer irony's sake and nothing else.* A few years ago Mark Steyn wrote a book called America Alone, all about the U.S. being the last non-Muslim, un-jihadi-fied bastion on the planet. How strange to think the book could now be nearly obsolete, simply as a result of election day, 2008, and the changes thereby made. America alone? Not so much. America as a jihadi state, led by President-for-life Obama? No. (Fiction is not my strong point.) America joins the world? More likely yes, but not in a good way.

Yes. Well. In the meantime, people live, as they have with luck lived through changes before. Goth and Zoroastrian, sans-culotte and Civil War widow. Yowling and infantile though it may seem, I do think this interesting situation prompts the question, what else do you do with life when things on a grand scale are not going as you'd like?

It sounds like an idiotically selfish, whiny little question. The left preens itself on its patient George W. Bush hatred, and no doubt regards everything from Obama's blessed Inauguration Day onward as mere payback, with plenty more to come. And the end, you know, has not quite come yet. Goth and Zoroastrian and Civil War widow would not even bother to scoff at me. They would be too busy living. And who knows, in a year or two our man may have so far overreached himself that pundits who now fear him, or adore him, will be astonished at the depths of impotence to which he has fallen. Expect the unexpected, not only in the White House but in life and in history too.

Meanwhile what do you do, privately, publicly, when it looks like an entire system of liberty and prosperity whose greatest vulnerability is its need to rest on a populace educated in those things, may be bumped off that foundation by an opposing ideology that mimics the system's purposes (freedom, fairness) but can't achieve them and can't admit it? What do you do? -- write your congressman? Garden? Philosophize? There's a Roman lady in Tacitus, therefore by definition living through interesting times, who spends her time "beautifying her fish ponds at Baiae." Senator Durbin writes back, after a lag of a month or two, congratulating me on agreeing with him and explaining why it's so important to stop global warming. Before he moved up in the world, Senator Obama did the same. Senator Burris hasn't gotten around to replying -- or, to be fair, was he the one whose email link didn't work?

What do you do? I've done a few new things, lately. I've skimmed over The Federalist Papers, which I never thought to do. Did you know they were short articles, originally published in a newspaper, and each designed to answer a specific complaint about the new Constitution? They are pretty digestible. I've learned to put in words, if only for my own satisfaction, why it's not true that of course one must acknowledge and support the great leftist, progressive credo that there are "two sides to every story." No, there are not. There is the truth, which you or I may not find today -- Socrates admitted he couldn't necessarily find it, today -- but which is not the same thing as humbly agreeing it can't be known, thus inhaling the left's debate-snuffing anaesthesia so they can loudly keep the field.

Even knowing that, do you then continue beautifying your fish ponds at Baiae? I believe there is a school of thought, a human tendency, to give up (or become wise) and say that in the great unfolding pageant of human folly, no matter whatsoever the grand stupid men are doing above you, the time sometimes comes when after all, what you are doing for your own happiness in your tiny corner of the universe turns out to be the loftiest thing of all. It's the only thing you do that affects -- that pleases or displeases -- you, so you may as well carry on.

A wise reaction, mature and sophisticated, deeply Old World? Or surrender? Lin Yutang wrote books throughout the mid-twentieth century, claiming that Chinese civilization for one had long since learned to avoid the blind alleys of moral righteousness, religious certainty, of, I suppose, taking on too much personal trouble over great national ch-ch-changes. He delighted in stories of famed Chinese sages retreating to the mountains to sip tea and write poetry. When they got visitors from the folly-filled world, they would leap up and run to the nearest stream to wash the filth of the News of the Day out of their ears -- and the wisest of all could tell when the water outside his hut had been polluted by the sage upstream, already washing the News of the Day out of his own ears.

Or is such behavior indeed surrender? After all, wise and chastened and sophisticated nations full of poetic sages still have not done all we've done. And -- Rush is correct -- nothing is different about us as human beings except that we have a political and economic system which allows us to do all we can or wish to do in the pursuit of happiness. It's all worked amazingly well. As the economist Thomas Sowell emphasizes (in Basic Economics for a start), "wealth saves lives," just for a start, and there's no doubt about our wealth. There is far more to the good, for more people, going on here than can be wisely and sadly represented by the image of the innocent lady tending her fish ponds, long divorced from any concern for the fools in Rome. So why loathe and desire to change our system?

Perhaps because the most intractable human folly of all is the passion for power over one's fellow men, especially the lower orders. A system which gives them power, which incidentally doesn't tell funny stories about sages' exiling themselves and leaving government to do as it likes, is totally anathema to any human spirit that wants power. "What in the world can we do with the Napoleonic -- heroic ambition or military glory?" Allan Bloom asked in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). He meant "we" who live in a "gray," "commercial" liberal democracy, we who have made a good system, but one that lacks what democratic revolutions tear down forever: the "nobility, brilliance, and taste," nurtured by a leisured aristocracy, the "depth, seriousness, and sacredness" of a state religion. Re-reading Bloom leads to the suspicion that he and Mr. Limbaugh would not get on.

Incidentally I'd hardly call President Obama Napoleonic. He only wants to remake a country to which he has contributed nothing, as per instructions from shrivelled little academic souls he respects, and he does feed on worship. Otherwise, one can't imagine him crossing the Alps, still less winning battles. But perhaps he is a sort of little Napoleon, a little answer to Bloom's wonderment at "what we're going to do" with this aspect of the human personality that can't be kept in check all the time. What are we going to do with it? Well, occasionally it seems we're going to lose our heads and elect it to the White House, not least because we're so unused to seeing the type in action that we've forgotten it exists and that it loves to tell lies, too. Perhaps future historians will say that, right about now, two hundred or so years after the American founding, intellectuals and other grand people began fully to realize that the American system, unchanged, could leave them in a desert of impotence forever. Imagine being wise and educated, imagine knowing what's best for Bodo the peasant, or Bodo the NASCAR fan, and never, ever, being able to impose it on him because he votes in the same dreary old system year after year, because he has money and more than enough to eat, and possibly a gun. You can almost hear the roar of frustration, from a large segment of humanity. What to do? The answer, historians may notice, was for the roarers to fall down in joy before a little Napoleon, and work like mad to see him re-open closed doors and reforge old chains, before Bodo fully grasped the malice bubbling in the situation.

What an extraordinary thing that Bodo's major hobby these days has turned out to be the internet, with all the opportunities for independent news-gathering, fact-checking, scathing commentary, and protest planning it affords. It would be as if Hussite and Wycliffite and Roundheads all had a thousand printing presses at once. What do you do -- what does he, Bodo, do -- with individual life when things on a grand scale aren't going as he'd like? Just as there seems to be a personality type that retreats wisely into the mountains to contemplate plum blossoms and folly, there is another that does not. There is another that, in its own way, may be just as infected with the lust for personal power, power over its own person, as is its better, its Napoleonic counterpart. The comfort of this thought might be ruined by its triteness, were it not for the fact that we can cite a powerful text in support of it. Who was it who said something like "I have never believed that one part of mankind was born to be ridden?" No, it went like this: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately." And dear me, the speaker was none other than Thomas Jefferson.

Of course, he was talking about an official priesthood. But then, of what else are we talking?

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*"Obama would fail security clearance," Daniel Pipes.org, Oct. 21, 2008.