Would you prefer a one-room school to what is offered in your community?

I certainly would. Bill Kauffman reviews a book by NYU professor Jonathan Zimmerman, Small Wonder. My understanding of one-room schoolhouses comes largely from the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and they were a mixed blessing, though amazingly successful considering their scant resources. As we vote with our feet and send our kids anywhere but the local public school, let's remember how we got where we are: consolidation in the name of progress. Kauffman writes:

'The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware schoolconsolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools.

'Progressives worshipped "efficiency," Mr. Zimmerman observes, a word that to country people "conjured up a bloodless, impersonal system that buried small-town traditions and idiosyncrasies in a maze of regulations and policies." Big was better than small, asserted the consolidators. Riding the bus to a new school over "good roads" -- the highway and automobile industries lobbied for consolidation -- was superior to walking (how old-fashioned!) to a nearby school. A system in which parents and neighbors had a say in the education of a community's children was judged incapable of keeping up with the ever-accelerating improvement of the human species.'

Because public schools as we know them were born of a belief in human progress, even meliorism, it appears that the calamities of 20th century, from the sinking of the Titanic to the Great War to the Depression to the Second World War to postmodern philosophy, nullified the premises of progressive schooling. All that is left is the progressive impulse to consolidate power.

Public schools can be reformed, but it is going to be extremely difficult because it
is virtually impossible to pry central power from any entrenched bureaucracy. What is needed is decentralization.

Most of the brilliant experts who don't teach daily but tell teachers all over each state how to do so would do well to get back into the classroom themselves. The central authorities which micromanage all but a small percentage of public school funds should be told that the local authorities are free to be brilliant or stupid. If public education cannot be reformed and made effective by local people at the local level, it cannot be reformed.

A school, if it is to nurture a culture of freedom, needs to be free. Where the schools fail, the school boards will be replaced or the citizens will vote with their feet. American public schools in structure and hierarchy resemble Soviet agriculture more than they resemble the culture and methods of a free people.

[Photos above of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.]

Foreboding of Trouble

Perhaps it is because I have been sharing with my daughter two works of art, each set at the beginning of a violent era, but I am sensing doom at the moment. I have a gloomy side, but I am sunshiny most of the time. The last time I felt more gloomy was in the fall after September 11, 2001. At that time I read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King.

This month I have been reading The Fellowship of the Ring to my daughter. Frodo and his companions have left the Shire under pursuit of the Black Riders. We just finished the part in which they leave the Prancing Pony Inn led by Strider (Aragorn) and seek to find Galdolph at Weathertop. Evil is everywhere, and men and elves are fleeing the coming troubles.

Over the weekend, I went to Birmingham and took my daughter, wife, and mother to see The Sound of Music at the beautiful and grand old Alabama Theatre. Baron George von Trapp had to face the tyranny of the National Socialists after the Anschluss in 1938. As joyful as the movie is, its joy is in contrast to the horrors about to engulf Europe.

Tonight I write with a sense of foreboding. The mad North Koreans almost caused a world war in 1950, and here they are again trying to make more trouble, even provoke a war. I am not confident in our nation's leadership, which is trying to raise taxes and trample international trade during a recession.

[Above: George Ritter von Trapp.]

219-212 in favor of a bill nobody actually read...

The House leadership had to pass this bill because they could not face their constituencies next year if they had not. They had to pass a bill, any bill. They prevailed 219-212.

That to me is good news. 219-212 without a complete reading means that it is a very sloppy bill. Because it is not "stimulus" (translate as pork barrel nobody would have voted for except in panic masking cynicism), it certainly contains some reckless policies, not just reckless spending. In the words of Will Rogers, "When Congress passes a law it's a joke, and when it tells a joke it's a law."

My hope is that the U.S. Senate butchers this bill beyond recognition, so that if it passes, no conference committee can put Humpty Dumpty together again. The House Democrats will get what they want, which is "climate change bill," and we will be spared the consequences of their foolishness.

The last time Congress raised taxes during a steep economic slide was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. The Republicans in that case could pat themselves on the back for making the rise of National Socialism in Germany that much easier.

Revisiting David and Bathsheba (II Samuel 11 and 12)

At the turn of the year, when kings go out on campaign, David sent out Joab along with his officers and the army of Israel, and they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. David, however, remained in Jerusalem. One evening David rose from his siesta and strolled about on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing, who was very beautiful. David had inquiries made about the woman and was told, "She is Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, and wife of (Joab's armor-bearer) Uriah the Hittite."

Then David sent messengers and took her. When she came to him, he had relations with her, at a time when she was just purified after her monthly period. She then returned to her house. But the woman had conceived, and sent the information to David, "I am with child."

As my Young Life Bible teacher told a roomful of teenagers one summer, the first sin is usually laziness. When David, the king of an ancient kingdom surrounded by enemies, declined to lead his own soldiers into battle that spring, he started something terrible.

I thought of David this week when it was revealed that the Governor of South Carolina, an evangelical Christian who had voted in 1998 while in the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach President Bill Clinton for perjury, had slipped away on Fathers' Day weekend to visit his mistress 7,000 miles away (same distance as Moscow) in Buenos Aires.

Gov. Sanford didn't wake up last week saying, "I think I want to ruin my life, my marriage, my career, my ambitions, my sons' lives, and all the trust people have ever given me." Like David, Gov. Sanford made a series of little decisions, which seemed relatively harmless at the time, and he ended up committing a series of mortal sins: adultery, lies, and more lies.

It took Nathan the prophet to set David straight (after David conspired to murder Bathsheba's husband), and the king repented. Even then, civil war destroyed David's family, and his own son was slain by his most loyal general. Gov. Sanford is going to be stabbed by a thousand knives for the rest of his life.


Though some people enjoy watching the mighty fall, especially when a public figure has in the past assumed a moral posture in a divisive public issue involving adultery, I feel much pity for Mark Sanford (pity being empathy uncorrupted by contempt).

We are all capable of lying to ourselves to the point of not being able to discern truth and then sinning in ways that would shock our friends. We all, when we confess our sins with contrition, know that we have been on more than a few sinful errands, even if they didn't take us as far as Buenos Aires.

We know and fear that horrible moment when someone, whether righteous as Nathan or not, says: "You are the man!"

Farrah and Michael... on the same day

I cannot say that either one influenced me, except that Farrah Fawcett, by being beautiful and attractive, confirmed that I was attracted to females, and that Michael Jackson, by being odd in every way, confirmed that life as a pop star might very well be a sick prison. Requiescat in pace.

France in 1940- Lest We Forget

There are not too many blogs that remind Americans every year of how France had the largest land army in the world in 1940 yet was beaten in six weeks by the German Wehrmacht and capitulated on June 22, 1940. This blog does for a reason. Being champion in 2008 does not mean you will be champion in 2009. Admiral John Jellicoe was criticized for not being more aggressive at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, but he responded that he was the only man who could have lost the Empire in a day. Such is true for the President of the United States, not that we think in these terms very often.

The only way to be strong is to plan according to your opponent's capabilities, not as you think he will likely attack. 9/11, as Thomas Friedman said, was a failure of imagination, not intelligence.

So today I remind the world through my little broadcast here into cyberspace that big fools lose big. Our nation is not defended by cliches about world peace, but armed vigilance.

UPDATE: The Maginot Line was a tremendous public investment, not unlike the security gates in gated communities that are not effective unless people actually know their neighbors and watch their doors. Its construction marked not only a major strategic mistake, but it memorialized military thinking frozen in the tactical holocaust of the Great War as well as the end of creativity in French culture and life. Perhaps I'll draw a negative comment, but the Maginot Line was to French military doctrine what nihilism was to French philosophy. Both are fortified prisons in which your enemies can trap you, suffocate you, starve you, and force you to surrender or die.

Iran?

I have posted on Iran several times. Here is Peggy Noonan's latest column, an excerpt:

'Should there at this point, more than a week into the story, be a formal declaration of support from the U.S. government? Certainly it's time for an indignant statement on the abuses, including killings and beatings, perpetrated by the government and against the opposition. It's never wrong to be on the side of civilization. Beyond that, what would be efficacious? It must be asked if a formal statement of support for the rebels would help them. And they'd have a better sense of it than we.

'If the American president, for reasons of prudence, does not make a public statement of the government's stand, he could certainly refer, as if it is an obvious fact because it is an obvious fact, to whom the American people are for. And that is the protesters on the street. If he were particularly striking in his comments about how Americans cannot help but love their brothers and sisters who stand for greater freedom and democracy in the world, all the better.'

My tenth Fathers' Day

The first one was the best one. I remember standing up at Mass looking at my wife and baby and asking, "Who me?"

Today we went to Mass with my father, ate breakfast, and then took a memory tour by car around Birmingham. We saw my great-grandmother's house on the Southside, my maternal grandparents' house above Highland Avenue, my paternal grandparents' house on Cliff Road, Ramsey High School, the spot now covered by UAB where my great-grandparents lived and from which my father walked to the streetcar to join the U.S. Navy in 1943, downtown where my father worked, Phillips High School, the first house I lived in, and the house in which I grew up. Dad and I told stories. My daughter has heard most of them, but one day neither of us will be around to tell them again.

As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

More historic postcards archived at the University of Alabama here.

Totalitarianism at work...

There is a tendency to give new threats different names, partly to distinguish them from the old, partly to feel as if the defeat of the Nazis and Fascists in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Communists in 1989-91 permanently vanquished distinct brands of evil. The older I get, however, the distinctions between Fascists, Communists, Jihadis, etc. appear more and more semantic. The distinctions are articulated by current factions wanting to distance themselves from evil and tie their opponents to something despised. But totalitarianism is secular tyranny in which the state replaces free choices of anything, no matter what the label.

In Iran, "the mullahs" of the Islamic Republic have ceased to be simply the dominant social, ethical, and judicial group in the country. They have built a party bent on keeping power from anyone who might threaten it, and party thugs dominant the military, police, and national security forces. Iran has become the Shiite version of Baathism, which is the Arab version of Fascism, which Benito Mussolini copied from the revolutionary-party model of Vladimir Lenin. All involve a perverted state backed by an inverted religion in which the state promises secular salvation in this life if millions of young people will love death and give themselves to the good of historic destiny. The labels change, but the methods and the false promises vary only slightly.

Michael Totten reports.

A thought from St. John Vianney...

'God is always almighty; He can at all times work miracles, and He would work them now as in the days of old were it not that faith is lacking!'

-- Saint John Vianney

Can we recognize evil?

J.R.R. Tolkien spent a lifetime painting a portrait of good and evil, heroes and monsters, light and darkness. Perhaps our modern world is too sophisticated for such, but only at its own peril. (The world "sophistication" is derived from the same Greek root as Sophist and sophistry.) Reason without moral imagination results in what C.S. Lewis called "men without chests," that is, men who have nothing (heart or soul) to prevent their brains from being controlled by their appetites.

I am reading The Fellowship of the Ring now to my daughter. Frodo and his hobbit friends are being pursued by the Ringwraiths, a.k.a. the Nazgul. These nine men possess evil rings created by Sauron. They are consumed by evil; they have no warm flesh left. They are horsebackriding forms of men covered by dark cloaks. They are lost souls. Their souls have been freeze-dried and extracted from their bodies by evil.

Sometimes I wish the evil in our world was as stark as the Nazgul, though it would be frightening if it were. We would need a steady stream of light to overcome such darkness.

I am not one to the predict the end of the world. I grew up around apocalyptic evangelicals. All I know is that the world as we know it will end one day, and that God is in charge, not I. Nonetheless, the evil afoot in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and N. Korea is startling. Humorless men dedicated to an ideology containing a perverted religion, if any at all, convinced that death is better than life and hateful of everything that is beautiful, are capable of every kind of cruelty. They are also capable of provoking a nuclear war because they believe that the Apocalypse is better that life, not because they have a beatific or heavenly vision, but because they have despaired of life.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.

Feast of Corpus Christi

'A revelation is religious doctrine viewed on its illuminated side; a mystery is the selfsame doctrine viewed on the side illuminated.'

-- John Henry Cardinal Newman

Cordiality doesn't sell...

As Peggy Noonan notes, the "base" of both parties wants strident partisanship. I'm not against partisanship. It's the ad hominem attacks that wear down public trust.

What if health insurance programs rewarded individuals for healthy living?

Most health insurance pools are collectives in which healthy people pay the costs of unhealthy people and rewards for good behavior, whether of the sick or the well, are seldom realized.

Auto insurance companies penalize the irresponsible and reward those who have good driving records. Could health insurance do the same on if the system were less politically skewed?

Yes.

Safeway's CEO explains [an excerpt from the WSJ]:

'At Safeway we believe that well-designed health-care reform, utilizing market-based solutions, can ultimately reduce our nation's health-care bill by 40%. The key to achieving these savings is health-care plans that reward healthy behavior. As a self-insured employer, Safeway designed just such a plan in 2005 and has made continuous improvements each year. The results have been remarkable. During this four-year period, we have kept our per capita health-care costs flat (that includes both the employee and the employer portion), while most American companies' costs have increased 38% over the same four years.

'Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

'As much as we would like to take credit for being a health-care innovator, Safeway has done nothing more than borrow from the well-tested automobile insurance model.'

The majority of employees apparently like it because they are rewarded for good behavior. If we are to become prosperous again, we must make it possible for entrepreneurs to insure themselves and their employees. Right now, entrepreneurs, besides taking on capital costs, must compete in health insurance markets (a major cost in the labor market) with a system rigged for governments, unionized shops, and conglomerates. The big institutions will always have an advantage, but right now, the big institutions can claim large tax deductions for health insurance, but mom & pop businesses cannot. That should change. Insteading of taxing healthcare benefits, let's just make all health-insurance premiums tax-deductible (or none at all).

Kim Strassel discusses the administration's plan to tax healthcare benefits in another column.

Hazards of anonymous blogging...

Or blogging under a pseudonym. Jonathan Adler, who formerly blogged under a pseudonym, blogs about the "outing" of Publius (an untenured law professor) by Ed Whelan:

'I also think it is important to distinguish between anonymous and pseudonymous blogging. While complete anonymity may enable someone to evade any accountability for intemperate or unwise remarks, the creation and maintenance of a pseudonym can have a disciplining effect on blogger behavior, and thus should be encouraged as an alternative to purely anonymous blogging and posting. Reputation effects and the desire to maintain readership can impose significant discipline. A pseudonym operates like a brand name, and the value of the brand is, at least in part, a function of how the pseudonymous blogger acts over time. This disciplining effect is hardly perfect, however, particularly when it comes to maintaining civility. As I believe the tone and snarkiness of many pseudonymous bloggers and commenters attests, a pseudonym can reduce a blogger’s vulnerability to personal attacks and can shield him or her from social sanctions for uncivil conduct. I believe this means that those who utilize pseudonyms should take greater responsibility for the tone and content of their own posts so their pseudonymous shield does not become a license for nastiness and snark.'

I think Adler's analysis is correct. I blog under the name of Tertium Quid, and I comment on other sites under the same name. Tertium Quid is my web persona, and I am comfortable with it. One day when I work for myself I might not worry about a pseudonym. For now, I am proud of Tertium Quid's writing and cordiality. I make fun of public and historic figures, but I don't throw grenades. If this blog becomes so well-known that allies of the people I criticize want to "out" me, e.g., friends of Mao Zedong, then perhaps it will be time to put my name on this blog (or to pack up my family and disappear).

More about the consequences of China's one-child policy...

Kenneth Anderson, libertarian and lapsed Mormon, notes:

'[I]n a world with scarcity of women - especially in a world of scarcity of females and yet a cultural preference for male births - the result would be increased treatment of women as property. More valuable property, yes, but increasingly as property precisely as the perception of its value increased....

'The intrinsic inequality is about the mateless men, deprived of the opportunity to even have a chance to marry and have families and children. I don't recall offhand the numbers, but it only takes a quite small percentage of men with three or four wives to create something approaching the imbalances of regions of China or India. It is in a certain sense an inequality far worse than mere economic inequality - although almost always deeply embedded and intertwined with it.

'The point is not that the mateless men have a right to have a wife, but instead they ought, in an egalitarian society, to have a right to be able to compete for one in the marriage market. Equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality of result. And of course it goes the other way around; a society in which large numbers of women were deprived of the ability even to seek a mate would be equally unattractive.'

The law of unintended consequences cannot be repealed, even by communists in the Middle Kingdom. A shortage of marriageable women in the world's most populous country combined with 30 million young men with little hope of settling in China with a wife and family means trouble. These Chinese men might do any of the following:
(1) Emigrate in huge numbers.
(2) Overthrow their government.
(3) Invade another country, perhaps two or three.
(4) Push for a true test-tube baby program.
(5) Crowd the monasteries in China and abroad.

Only one of these actions is good, and we can be sure that 30 million virile men in a country that is rapidly changing as I write will not be content with their lot. The scary part is that China has huge numbers of expendible men, organizational genius, and passionate nationalism.

The Crusade for Europe remembered...

Click here for the audio.

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

-- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

On this day, you could camp out at your computer or in the public library and never run out of great stories. Here is the story of a 23 year-old infantryman meeting a Normandy veteran. Perhaps you remember Red Buttons' parachute getting snagged on the steeple of a church in The Longest Day. Here is the story of Pvt. John Steele of F Company, 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

The invasion of Normandy is the glory and sacrifice of my parents' generation. It was only glorious because the Nazis were defeated. The combined American, British, Canadian, French civilian, and German casualties in the summer of 1944 were ghastly, yet they were only a fraction of the casualties on the Eastern Front, where two ideologies that hated life battled to the death. One of the great achievements of the victories on the Western Front is that we spared at least half of Europe a forty-year occupation by the also-victorious Stalinists.

Here is the D-Day as told by Thomas B. Allen in National Geographic in 2002. The photos are excellent, as should be expected from NG.

[Photos above: an unidentified landing craft, the defended terrain at Point du Hoc, and the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa, a heavy cruiser which supported the invasion with its 8-inch guns and saw plenty of action during the war.]

Today we commemorate all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Resistance, and civilians from all countries who helped defeat National Socialism.

Ronald Reagan's statue in the Rotunda

Peggy Noonan reports:

'The colors were presented. The U.S. Army chorus sang the national anthem so beautifully, with such harmonic precision and depth, that some dry eyes turned moist, including those of the crusty journalist to my right. Congressmen hear choirs sing patriotic songs all the time and grow used to it. The rest of us do not and are stirred. Tourists walk through the Rotunda and think to themselves that they'd die for the signs and symbols of this place. Lawmakers experience the Rotunda as a connecting point between House and Senate that's too often clogged by overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne. We need term limits. When the music no longer moves you, you should leave. When you cannot leave, you should be pushed.'

The piece is about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, not term limits, but I have been one of those sweaty tourists in awe of the architecture, statues, and symbols in the Capitol. I hope our legislators understand how exploited many of us feel. Our patriotism, our votes, and our willingness to pay taxes are being mismanaged and misdirected to benefit people who are not willing to lift a finger to defend this Republic or even pay taxes.

"China will be a modern country when it no longer fears the memory of June 4."

Claudia Rosett writes in today's WSJ.

'In a long career as a reporter, which has included both tanks and gunfire elsewhere, there is no story I have covered that has been more haunting, inspiring and important than that Tiananmen uprising. And there is no story that, in its plotline, has been more heartbreaking.'

Read the entire piece. 1989 was the year the Berlin Wall fell (November 9), an event I'd hoped for but did not anticipate in the near future. It was the year that millions in communist countries demanded their freedom. As great as the victories for freedom were in 1989 and the two years beyond, if you think about it, more than twice as many gambled for their freedom and lost than gambled and won.

I have seen the Berlin Wall. I looked at it as a young college grad in 1984. I saw the East German guards staring back at me. They had guns, yet they were in a cage. Never before have I been more grateful to hold a U.S. passport.

Today we remember those who gambled and lost at Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989 and what they dreamed about for those hopeful weeks proceeding the violent crackdown. A logical question follows: Do we really want to be a trillion-dollar debtor to the regime that brutally crushed everything we believe in?

Incredible Victory!

On June 4, 1942 at the Battle of Midway, three American aircraft carriers, a handful of cruisers, submarines, and escort ships, a few dozen land-based planes, and some grim Marines stood between most of the Japanese navy and dominance of the Pacific Ocean. By sunset that day, four Japanese aircraft carriers, the cream of their navy, were mortally wounded.

The story of how a few squadrons of plucky Americans defeated what had become the world's best navy is one of the greatest stories of American history. I was in the 6th grade when I read Walter Lord's Incredible Victory. I read it again and again until the exploits, sacrifices, and good and bad luck of the airmen and seamen on that fateful day became a part of my American soul. Midway was a battle for the ages. I hope I have a fraction of the guts of the defenders of that little atoll.

These stories will grab your heart. The photo above is the U.S.S. Yorktown, which was lost in the battle. Here is one of the short stories:

'Known to his USNA classmates as “The Naval Academy Peter Pan – The Little Boy Who Never Grew Up,” CDR Dixie Kiefer had brought Yorktown “to a high state of morale, efficiency, and readiness for battle.” On 4 June, Kiefer led a fire-fighting party in battling the blaze consuming the ship’s photographic lab although he had been unable to obtain a rescue breathing apparatus. Later that day, the energetic executive officer directed the abandonment of the ship, suffering severe burns to his hands helping to lower a man over the side. Later going over the side himself, his badly seared hands could not grasp the line firmly and he fell, caroming off the armor belt and suffering a compound foot and ankle fracture. Nevertheless, he helped push a life raft, laden with survivors, to a nearby destroyer. For his heroism at Midway on 4 June, Kiefer received the Navy Cross.'

The lone survivor of one torpedo-bomber squadron, Ensign George Gay, lived until 1995. I am afraid that most of his shipmates on the Hornet and veterans of that war are no longer in the land of the living. Requiescat in pace.

Me and politics in 2009

When Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964 by scaring the American people about war, perhaps nuclear war, Russell Kirk took leave of politics for the better part of a year, largely by traveling in Europe and finishing a couple of books, fiction and nonfiction. (It is absurd in retrospect that Goldwater, a warrior who loved peace, would be less safe as president than Johnson, a political animal who feared war would upset his ambitions.) Kirk saw that the country had made a major misjudgment but it would take several years before the law of unintended consequences forced the pendulum back to the right. In the meanwhile, the conservative mission is never primarily about politics but about culture. It is, simply put, more important that my daughter is reading The Lord of the Rings, and for that matter, that Tolkien is read, than whatever Congress is cooking to save incumbants and donors.

Gore Vidal once said that he had quit voting after 1964 when he voted for the "peace candidate," Lyndon Johnson. So much for elections and expectations. There has not been a Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt who did not bitterly disappoint the millennialists of our country.

Having said this, I have plenty that I might say about politics in 2009, but it seems my more important mission is to teach the Permanent Things to the one person I know is going to respond spiritedly, that is, my daughter, rather than preach to cyberspace about how the Obama administration is printing money by the trillions of dollars and giving it to the bankers, financiers, and executives who miscalculated billions of dollars of their shareholders' and bondholders' money. Walker Percy would write much better than I about 80,000 unionized automobile workers who will be building only about 80,000 green vehicles in 2010 for purchase by the only entity that would buy them, the federal government, while they engage in numerous activities of self-help and self-improvement in order to qualify for their pensions at 55, when they can retire to organic farms, burn peat for fuel, and get larger pensions if they can prove their vegetarianism. This is funnier than what actually happened to the government-run motor company in Ceausescu's Romania.

I read Real Clear Politics, Instapundit, and Pajamas Media, and the news is mostly bad. Michael Barone has a nice piece today saying that Republicans- and I would say conservatives- don't need to move to the incoherent center as they need to persuade the center to come to them. William F. Buckley, and for that matter, Kirk, would certainly agree. I'll start with history, a tale of adventure, aesthetics, and moral imagination. I'll start with my daughter and her recent ticket to Middle Earth.

A lesson learned this weekend

My daughter participated in a program for her gymnastics/dance studio at a local high school auditorium. The studio is a private business. My daughter likes her gymnastics teacher and is learning balance, tumbling, and coordination. These are good things. I am now very glad, however, that she does not take instruction in dance at the same studio.

The dance programs, at least from their choices of music and moves, are terrible. Dance can delight the eyes and move the audience to some collective sense of something beautiful, fun, meaningful, or even transcendent, but the dance numbers we saw, with a few exceptions, did none of the above. They seemed to be training in pole dancing. The younger girls were jiggling boobs that haven't grown yet. The older girls were swinging their hips and shoulders more than moving their feet. The songs were of the modern obsession with self, desire, sexual aggression, and possession. The only consolation was that the kids, including my daughter, were backstage and couldn't see much of it. I sat staring at my feet saying the Rosary.

Demeaning was the word. The older girls were demeaned. For all their efforts, they know little of the rhythms and movements that order the soul and civilization and too much of the rhythms and movements that manipulate men and intimidate women. The younger girls get to be sex objects before they know about the birds and the bees. One parent was yelling, "Shake it girl!" to her teenaged daughter.

We left at the intermission and took our girl home. We could not sleep last night because we had to talk about the program and how it was everything we don't want our daughter to see or do. If she studies dance, it will be ballet or Irish dance.


The Irish dancer traditionally holds her upper body rigid while she moves her feet, symbolic of fire and ice and the tension within the soul and among men. The dance I saw yesterday was all fire (with noxious fuels) and no ice. It was dance to lead you not to Dublin, W. Africa, Krakow, Kiev, Galicia, Greece, or the Scottish Highlands, but to Las Vegas.

[Photo above of Riverdance. Link to the Trinity Irish Dance Company, a wonderful group based in the Midwest.]

What do the Amalekites mean to the Jews?

A nice essay by Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein. Here is an excerpt:

'In rabbinic thought, Amalek was the archetype of hatred of good itself, who attacked Israel, not because of any strategic goals, but out of pure hatred and contempt. They despised the Children of Israel — whom they had never met — because they stood for an encounter with a G-d Who made demands on people of moral living. Amalek did not want to be bothered by such niceties, nor did they want anyone tugging at their conscience. It was more convenient to simply eliminate them. (The approach echoes Hitler's chilling words, saying that the rest of us cannot forgive the Jews for two things: circumcision and conscience.)'

This blog, neglected as it has been recently, was started because I felt that much of our culture has lost the beatific, aesthetic, and historical vision and moral imagination to recognize good and evil.