The St. Croix Review speaks for middle America, and brings you essays from patriotic Americans.
Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The old joke told among disgruntled faculty that teaching would be an excellent profession if it were not for students has actually become a reality. On my campus this summer, you will be more likely to run into administrators and their assistants than a student or a member of the faculty. This is not to say there will not be students registered for classes this summer, but it is to say that there will be very few faculty and students attending classes at the University of Nebraska at Kearney this summer.
Our summer school classes have gone underground: subject matters will course through a computer cable system running out of the basements of buildings, through the main frame, and on into cyberspace, from the hinterlands of central Nebraska to students in almost every state.
The new, techno-professor no longer needs a classroom, an office, a desk, or a chair from which to log-on to his class of cyberspace students, but rather the surrounds of a coffee shop in Sausalito, a sailboat on the Aegean, or simply his bedroom in Cozad, Nebraska. The professor remains faceless. A techno-teacher does not have any more personal contact with students than a television has as it babysits. He does not hear the hesitation in a voice, the perplexity at a question, or know whether a student is on time or tardy, comely or scruffy, bright-eyed or sleepy-headed, attentive or fidgety, well-prepared or on the fly.
The techno-teacher does not make eye contact with students when he looks up after reading a passage from Republic or Hamlet to ask what a student thinks about the place of justice in the soul or "Whether tis' nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . ." both of which could spontaneously erupt into a classroom discussion that lasts well beyond the allotted hour.
Being a professor has always encompassed the parental act of cultivating young minds which have arrived half-formed, full of blank spaces, misconceptions, and generalizations, and often completely ignorant of the subject being taught. Socrates thought of himself as a midwife who assisted a student in developing his thinking through a dialectical discussion focused on the examination of ideas at the very moment in which he was talking with this student. By unpacking allegories, analogies, metaphors, and similes, the teacher helps the student give birth to his own intellectual discoveries, all in hopes that this student will be able to govern his own soul in a moral and thoughtful manner.
Gilbert Highet, in The Art of Good Teaching, has Socrates in mind when writing of the rewards of being present at the birth of a student's thoughtfulness:
You do not merely insert a lot of facts, if you teach them properly. It is not like injecting 500 cc. of serum, or administering a year's dose of vitamins. You take the living mind, and mold it. It resists sometimes. It may lie passive and apparently refuse to accept any imprint. Sometimes it takes the mold too easily, and then seems to melt again and become featureless. But often it comes into firmer shape as you work, and gives you the incomparable happiness of helping to create a human being. To teach a boy the difference between truth and lies in print, to start him thinking about the meaning of poetry or patriotism, to hear him hammering back at you with the facts and arguments you have helped him to find, sharpened by himself and fitted to his own powers, gives the sort of satisfaction that an artist has when he makes a picture out of a blank canvas and chemical colorings, or a doctor when he hears a sick pulse pick up and carry the energies of new life under his hands.
In the cyber-classroom, a teacher will not hear a pulse pick up and carry the energies of new life in an active mind. He is severed from his students and is more akin to an encyclopedia dispensing factual information from a television screen than a parent looking the youth in the eye while offering a helping hand.
Undoubtedly, a computer is a research tool and an asset to those who are motivated to study. However, there is a difference between pupils and students; the former are under the tutelage or direction of someone who knows what the pupil, for his own good, ought to know and to learn; the latter has matured to the point at which his own curiosity or ambition permits him to follow his inclinations and passionately pursue knowledge that is worth knowing for his and the common good.
The current fad of removing the student from the classroom is advertised as being "convenient," for the student will no longer have to attend campus, thereby saving gas money and dorm fees; can work at his own speed, enabling him to maintain a part or full time job; can participate in the on-line campus "conversation" by reading the "postings" on the classroom "discussion board" and responding -- a minimum of three times a week -- which is supposed to duplicate the benefits of being actively engaged in a class discussion.
Being a student has never been nor should ever be convenient. It is not easy to be engaged in thoroughly reading ten pages of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as preparation for classroom discussion, to sit up straight and pay attention (three times a week for sixteen weeks), to write essay exams in one hour, and to write and rewrite papers on the virtues and vices of each of the brothers Karamazov by defending one's analysis to both teacher and classmates.
A colleague recently commented that his students asked far more questions and had lengthier online discussions than they ever did in class. As anyone who enjoys singing in the shower or dancing before a mirror could explain, it is easy to perform in the anonymity of privacy. There is safety in isolation, the refuge of a clam.
Why would a teacher ever want to be cut off from his students? Why would a parent not want to see his children?
Imagine being asked to write a letter of recommendation for a student you have never spoken with or seen, but with whom you had a web relationship by dropping into, deus ex machina, his on-line journaling's to scan the entries which satisfied the three required weekly writing assignments, or by clicking down to check out his participation in a cyber-space class discussion for which the student can log-in any time, day or night.
In all of this, an anecdote from a former student, doing his student teaching in a local high school English class, serves to show the difference between pupils and students. He was standing in the hall with the English teacher to whom he had been assigned, observing a group of juniors and seniors from the doorway as they took an on-line college English literature class. The students were riveted to their personal laptop screens which were blocked from the teacher's view. After objectively observing the students for some time and being amazed by the interest of the students in their web-based literature class, he asked the teacher what he should do. The teacher suggested he enter the class to observe the lesson being taught by the on-line university professor. So, he did, and found, to his dismay, the boys were on porn sites and the girls were shopping. He went back into the hall and told the teacher, who replied, "I know, there isn't anything I can do with them." So what was happening in the professor's mind at the other end of this course being taught from the university campus?
I spoke with another student over a cup of coffee who told me he gave his five required speeches for his on-line university Speech 100 class in one afternoon sitting before the web cam on his computer. He clicked the speeches to his teacher and received an "A" for the class. "No audience, no pressure: what a breeze." He also took an on-line biology course, with which he struggled, saying that he basically had to teach himself, and he did not do very well.
I turned from talking with him to a colleague who told me of a former faculty member who is currently teaching twenty-seven on-line English courses from seven different universities this semester. I quickly calculated four thousand dollars a class times two semesters at this load. You do the math. Practical, optimal or beneficial? And for whom?
I also have a friend who took Ethics online, satisfying class requirements by taking a multiple choice exam on Aristotle, Kant, and J. S. Mill. Easy for both her and her teacher.
Imagine separating coaches from their players, who at their convenience logged-on to a series of organized performance and conditioning drills. Then think of the music student recording a flugelhorn lesson in the privacy of his bedroom for a teacher who listens and comments at her convenience.
This summer members of our faculty will teach hundreds of students who will not set foot on campus. What a savings: no desks to straighten, boards to erase, classrooms to clean. However, while the classroom lights may be turned off, the building's air conditioning must be left on so the computerized "smart classroom" equipment will not be damaged by the heat.
In fact, we now have a new College of Education building which houses its entire faculty, who had previously been scattered throughout the campus. However, this summer the entire College of Education graduate program is offered on-line, and the campus will no longer see elementary and secondary school teachers bustling about campus. The building, though, will remain open for a few administrators, and their staff, and to ensure the equipment is air-conditioned.
The movers and shakers of distance education effervescently applaud UNK's move to a scaled-down version of the University of Phoenix -- the one university in America that has a football stadium without a campus.
The reason for our distance education enthusiasm is that it keeps our campus enrollment from declining. Given that the high school population of central Nebraska has dried up with the loss of the family farm to agri-business, the President of the University's -- and thus this campus chancellor's -- focus in higher education is a job preparation program in hopes of stopping the brain drain by building "technology to draw business to Nebraska." Last week President Miliken was advocating "entrepreneurship" to our students who should be prepared to compete in the global economy of the 21st century. Meanwhile, back at the campus, we are offering very few reasons to come to Kearney because the courses are not here. Soon, no doubt, we will be accepting credits from the likes of the University of Phoenix and students will graduate with a patchwork of courses from a variety of universities. Some entrepreneurship.
Be this as it may, meditations on the computer's force in our lives today, what it is used for, what it stands for -- the computer as weapon, as movie theater, as boom-box, as play-station, as face-book, as porn shop, as shopping mall -- might lead us right into the heart of all contemporary problems: the demise of the family, the collapse of American public education into mediocrity, the growing brutality of entertainment, the demeaning of women into sex objects, the flight from reality into artificial fantasy created for a nation of spoiled children who are in peril of losing their imaginations to a screen to which their pupils are glued like deer in the headlights of on-coming cars.
In all of this I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan, who introduced the idea "the medium is the message" and created the term "global village" [global classroom?], who saw technology as an extension of the human body, a tool to facilitate labor. An "extension" occurs when someone uses something to extend the capacity of the human body and mind in a new way. A hoe is similar to an arm and a cupped hand. Only, as an extension, it is stronger in breaking crusted soil and clods. Microscopes and telescopes are extensions of the eyes used to enlarge images of minute objects as well as magnify distant objects. This is fine; the instrument as instrument is an inanimate object without motive, will, or responsibility.
McLuhan further noted, however, that every extension of technology has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. An example of an amputation would be the loss of the art of hoeing with the development of the roto-tiller and the loss of strong legs with the takeover of the automobile. The telephone extends the voice but amputates penmanship and the art of letter writing.
As McLuhan was deeply concerned with man's willful blindness to the perils of technology, he established four laws, framed as questions, by which to examine the modern instruments of technology.
The first of these questions is "What does the technology extend?" In the case of on-line college classes, it extends the teacher into cyberspace. The second question is "What does it make obsolete?" The on-line college class makes a college campus obsolete as the library, offices for faculty, and classrooms are no longer necessary. In fact, the teachers' lectures can be recorded, thereby making the teachers obsolete. The third question is "What does it retrieve?" It supports the idea that every child in America has a natural right to an affordable higher education. The fourth question is "What does technology revert into if it is overextended?" The overextended on-line student is driven into solitude where he is fixed to a hand-held or computer screen where he has an artificial interactive relationship with his teachers and classmates. This is a place where more and more teachers desire to spend their hours as they are freed from the classroom. In effect, the student is a faceless spectator before his teachers in a virtual reality which he tunes into, or not, at his convenience.
Have we have forsaken our children? *
"A good moral character is the first essential in a man." --George Washington
Gary Scott Smith chairs the history department at Grove City College, in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and is author of Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is also a fellow for faith and the presidency with The Center for Vision & Values. This article is from V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values.
What made George Washington the most remarkable man of an extraordinary generation? He was not an intellectual giant like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison. Compared with most other Founders, he was not well-educated (he attended school for only about five years), and, unlike many of them, he disliked abstract philosophical discussions. Washington was intelligent, well-informed, and astute, but he was neither a polished writer nor a spellbinding speaker. Moreover, he was not particularly affectionate, said little in public meetings, and lacked the charisma of many of his successors. Defeating the British with his ragtag army was an impressive feat, but he was not a traditional military hero. He won no spectacular victories during the Revolutionary War. Although he is widely admired as an outstanding president, few of his policies were stupendous successes.
While praising his military and political record, many scholars contend that Washington's genius lies principally in his character. The only other American president who has been so highly extolled for his character is Abraham Lincoln. Since Washington, all presidents have been ultimately measured not by the size of their electoral victories or the success of their legislative programs, but by their moral character. His character helped sustain his troops throughout the travails of the Revolutionary War, convince delegates to the Constitutional Convention to assign significant powers to the presidency, secure the ratification of the Constitution, and enable the new republic to survive in a hostile world.
Although scholars criticize Washington's personal ethics, sexual behavior, vanity, and ownership of slaves, his moral character, especially his refusal to yield to temptation, set him apart from most others in the late 18th century. He took the standards of his age very seriously and diligently strove to be virtuous. To many, the crowning achievement of Washington's character was his simultaneous resignation in 1783 as the commander in chief of the American army and his retirement from the world of politics. Throughout the Western world, his unprecedented relinquishing of power (which he did a second time when he declined a third term as president) was widely heralded. Unlike other victorious generals, he did not expect a political or financial reward for his military exploits. Washington's character, Jefferson argued, probably prevented the American Revolution from subverting the liberty it sought to establish. The Virginian had a sterling reputation for integrity and honor, dedication to duty and his country, and remaining above the political fray.
Eulogists and early biographers imputed many virtues to Washington. They praised his wisdom, judgment, astounding courage on the battlefield, and dignity. Congress elected him the first chief executive, principally because its members trusted his moral character. Assessments of Washington applauded his military zeal and political passion on the one hand and his self-restraint and civil moderation on the other. Blending Stoic and Christian traditions, Washington's perseverance in the midst of setbacks has been extolled by eulogists.
Many admirers considered Washington's self-control the key facet of his character. He could master events because he had mastered himself. Despite being surrounded by fear, despair, indecisiveness, treason, and the threat of mutiny, he remained confident and steadfast. Eulogists also heralded his self-sacrifice, devotion to the common good, compassion, generosity, and benevolence.
As president, Washington strove to establish public confidence in the new government and to demonstrate that political leaders could act virtuously. He believed his character was much more important to the success of the republic than his policies, and he spent much of his adult life creating and preserving a reputation for integrity and uprightness. In 1788, the planter wrote to his trusted confidant Alexander Hamilton:
I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain (what I consider the most enviable of all titles) the character of an honest man.
His character helped hold the other Founders together in the midst of tremendous trials and reassured them that they could construct a workable republic. His example of self-sacrifice, discipline, and moral goodness helped elevate the status of the presidency.
Both as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and president, Washington worked to form an American character. Throughout the War for Independence, he expected both his officers and soldiers to act morally and "display the character of republicans" appropriate to "Christian Soldier[s]" who were defending their country's "dearest Rights and Liberties." Speaking to the nation's governors in 1783, Washington argued that Americans could "establish or ruin their national Character forever." As John Winthrop had done in his 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," Washington reminded his countrymen that "the eyes of the whole World" were "turned upon them." Guided by the complementary principles of revelation and reason, Americans must fulfill their civic duties because they were "actors on a most conspicuous Theatre . . . peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity." *
"The Hand of providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations. . . . The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institution may be abused by human depravity. . . . It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors." --George Washington
Jarrett Skorup is a 2009 graduate of Grove City College and former student fellow at The Center for Vision & Values. He is the research associate for online engagement for Michigan Capitol Confidential at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan. This article first appeared through the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values.
Some high-profile "climate-change" alarmists have been backtracking following recent revelations of significant errors and outright fraud involving the so-called scientific global-warming "consensus." The latest comes from Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who is now encouraging the faithful to replace "global warming" with the more ambiguous "global weirding." In addition to the crumbling scientific case, Freidman and fellow warmists are bucking the headwinds of public opinion: Pew Research found that people ranked global warming dead last among their top national priorities.
Notwithstanding the increasing levels of scientific doubt, Friedman himself is still quite convinced that "the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic," and urges policymakers to:
. . . buy some insurance -- by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit -- because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.
Of course, by "investment" Friedman actually means government spending. Yet, if the opportunities are so manifest, why wouldn't private citizens and businesses invest their own capital? Perhaps because Friedman's nostrums actually involve outdated technologies that have been tried repeatedly and found to make us the opposite of "richer and more secure."
Most notably, in the late 1970s President Jimmy Carter poured billions into wind, solar, and biodiesel, offering massive subsidies for "clean energy" and vowing that America would never import more oil than it did then.
A decade earlier, enthusiasts believed that electric cars and high-tech batteries were on the threshold of revolutionizing our transportation system. Columnist James Kilpatrick of the Detroit Free Press wrote in 1967 that:
Companies are searching for a billion-dollar breakthrough in battery design. General Dynamics is working on a zinc-air cell battery. Ford is actively interested in a sodium-sulfur cell. Gulton Industries and General Motors are tinkering with lithium. . . . All the activity is bound to pay off probably within the next five years.
More recently, the big push has been for mass transit (or "light rail") as a "new" form of transportation. But as the economist Thomas Sowell explains in his latest book, Intellectuals and Society, this is a fantasy as well:
"Light rail" has become the fashionable term used by mass transit advocates for things that are very much like what were once called trolleys or street cars, and which were once common in hundreds of American cities. Trolleys were replaced by buses in almost all those cities -- for a reason. But now the inconveniences and inefficiencies of trolleys vanish into thin air when they are presented as that new-sounding thing called "light rail," whose prospective wonders can be described in glowing terms by city planners and other advocates, secure against experience rearing its ugly head through memories or histories of the decline and fall of the trolley car.
Likewise, there's nothing new or groundbreaking in the stimulus-driven spending on mass transit, light rail, and other "new" forms of transportation. As with the new/old alternative energy fads, if an investment case could be had for public transportation, then it wouldn't be necessary for taxpayers to subsidize more than 80 percent of its operating expenses.
At some point, we may well replace coal and oil with some cheaper and easier technology, but in the meantime, oil is still much cheaper than bottled water and coal still provides half of our domestic energy. On the other hand, if one really does believe that man-made climate change is an impending disaster worthy of dismantling our economy, then it may be rational to argue for a shutdown of oil, coal, and other industries.
But don't make the case that these are profitable investments; the only direction we're progressing is backwards. *
"The people alone have an incontestable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government and to reform, alter, or totally change the same when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it." --John Adams
Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American Studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. These articles are from V & V, a web site publication of Vision and Values.
On the eve of the German offensive against France in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently asserted to some departing troops, "You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees." The German monarch was known neither for his prescience nor intellect and undoubtedly was einige Apfelstrudel short of a Dutzend, but his sentiments on this matter were not unique. Other military and political leaders were busy rummaging through their wardrobes to ensure that full dress uniforms for autumn would be available at a courier's grasp for the inevitable march through their enemy's capital; after all, last summer's garb is so-o-oo, well, last summery. The last thing a monarch needed was to be fashion-challenged at the time of triumph.
This colossal arrogance generated colossal horrors, which, a half-century later, relegated the war's participants to the status of effete sideliners -- sideliners, that is, to greater historical dramas taking place elsewhere in the world. European hubris had political consequences far beyond the fortunes of national leaders, nearly all of whom put themselves first and their countries second. At lower levels in a political or military hierarchy, arrogance generates losses that are measured in the thousands, often multiplied many times. At higher levels, the fate of nations or entire civilizations is in the balance. In short, there is a geometric progression of consequences in the politics of arrogance, and politics informs all decisions in government, the military, and society in general. The inherent resistance to criticism and blindness to reality that are characteristic of oversized egos magnify such consequences.
Sometimes nations beat the math and survive the politics of arrogance practiced by leaders who identify their personal fortunes with the destiny of their country. For instance, in the opening campaigns of the Civil War, adulation of George B. McClellan reverberated hugely inside the echo chamber of his own ego, generating a conclusion that "God had placed a great work in [his] hands," and the fate of his country rested solely with him. In fact, McClellan was an able organizer but an inept commander whose battlefield judgments were ludicrous and whose incompetence unquestionably lengthened the war. Unfazed by criticism, McClellan still ran against "the well-meaning baboon" Lincoln, who beat him soundly in the 1864 election. God, Grant, and "the original gorilla" saved the Republic to persevere, at least until another megalomaniac strode across the political platform to gain America's attention.
Few fit this description better than Woodrow Wilson, particularly since he compared himself favorably to Jesus Christ, whose major shortcoming in Wilson's view was the failure to produce a plan for peace. Wilson trumped the Ten Commandments by adding four -- the Fourteen Points -- and burned his life out leading a crusade for a cause few Americans cared about, the League of Nations. Wilson finally concluded that his countrymen were not ready for the grand project he had in mind for them. It's hard to get more arrogant than that, but at least Wilson's haughtiness produced few adverse consequences; international organizations are singularly inept at preventing war, and America's membership in the League likely would have meant little. But Wilson's politics of arrogance rendered him impervious to such considerations.
Which brings us to the present, with an administration filled with people whose self-esteem would make the Kaiser blush. America has a leader who reprises Sonny and Cher's trademark song with the words, "You've Got Me, Babe." Indeed, Mr. Obama's use of the personal pronoun suggests a new political formula to calculate arrogance -- call it the "I-Test" -- which refers to the frequency the President uses that letter in his speeches. But it's not just him; his supporters numbered millions who were swept into the "we are the change we've been waiting for" movement, and the American Left still views the current political situation the way the German leadership looked upon Europe in August 1914: now is the time to strike; we may never have an opportunity like this again.
But it is almost impossible to conceive of the United States over the next decade "beating the math" to overcome a McClellan-like ego or vitiate a Wilsonian-type moral crusade. Efforts to create a European-style social democracy likely will produce a European outcome: a debt-ridden menagerie of stagnant societies smothered under a thick cloak of bureaucratic mediocrities oozing with self-importance. The prevailing politics of "never letting a serious crisis go to waste" so far has generated national debt estimates that cannot possibly be sustained without the United States suffering in economic terms what imperial Germany did in military terms during the Great War.
The question is, can this politics of arrogance be stopped? To this, another German, Otto von Bismarck, had an answer: "God protects fools, drunks, and the United States of America." Bismarck is no longer around to give advice, which leaves America with only one alternative to combat our own politics of arrogance.
God help us.
Presidential comparisons that greeted Barack Obama's election ranged from the sublime to the transcendent. He was variously described as the second coming of John F. Kennedy, a re-embodiment of Franklin Roosevelt, and even a budding Abraham Lincoln -- a sort of Savior-in-Chief to rescue an aggrieved nation from the Dantesque tribulations of his predecessor. Mr. Obama's public pronouncements signaled his determination to abrogate George W. Bush's policies and send us all back upon paths of righteousness. And that was before the new president had even done anything.
Well, now President Obama has done quite a number of things, which bring to mind other analogies, some of which lurk beneath the worship continuum. Before Roosevelt there was Herbert Hoover, and before Lincoln there was James Buchanan, both of whom share the dishonor of being ranked among the country's worst presidents, as Nathan Miller pointed out a decade ago in a perky book entitled Star Spangled Men. About Hoover, much has been written; but it is President Buchanan who presents a really interesting case.
Miller's review suggests that presidents fail because they are clueless or spineless or both. James Buchanan was both. Among the most reviled in the heap, he exhorted Supreme Court justices to deliver what was arguably the most disastrous court decision in American history -- Dred Scott v. Sanford -- and in the process egregiously violated constitutional integrity and the separation of powers. Buchanan lambasted Congress for not passing the notoriously pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution that would have admitted Kansas as slave state into the Union. To get his way he resorted to political thuggery: promises of cash to his supporters and dismissal of officials who opposed him. All to no avail; Congress defeated the measure anyway. A later vote in "bleeding Kansas" resulted in the defeat of the Lecompton plan by a margin of about nine to one, a result that surprised him. Cluelessness.
And when southern states seceded one by one, Buchanan dithered and temporized, declaring such acts unconstitutional, but unlike Andrew Jackson before him and Abraham Lincoln after him, he did nothing. Spinelessness throughout. All this from a man who believed that defusing the time bomb over slavery would rank him at the level of George Washington, a hope that goes beyond cluelessness.
This is the danger of the Obama presidency, as Barack Obama juggles a half dozen major bills along with several foreign-policy challenges, any one of which risk failure that could damage his presidency severely, if not destroy it altogether. Since the last summer especially, Obama's executive style has been carefully documented with increasing alarm by president-watchers, even those who are sympathetic to his goals. Thus, on healthcare, Mr. Obama has insisted on reconstructing the entire industry in spite of the fact that all but a minority of Americans have insurance, and by large margins are satisfied with their coverage. Ghosts of Lecompton haunt this figure.
In foreign policy, Obama has courted dictators, spurned America's traditional allies, and curried favor with adversaries such as the Medvedev-Putin duo by caving to their objections over a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic -- apparently in hopes that appeasing the Russian bear will bear fruit in negotiations with Iran. Such spinelessness did not go unnoticed by the Iranians, who responded with missile-firing contempt. Finally, the president's vacillation over Afghanistan while carbon-footprinting his way to that other Euro-Superpower, Denmark, apparently to seek advice from Hamlet on executive decision making, hardly speaks well for his quest to find the buck that stops somewhere in the vicinity of the Oval Office. It's hard to see how old "Public Functionary Buchanan could have done worse.
The implications of these actions seem to escape President Obama, and therein lies the chief danger to his presidency. He could take a lesson from another predecessor to a favored president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Neither flashy nor eloquent, Ike actually had a life before writing about it and knew the world is not a global version of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Further, he possessed the good judgment not to inflict ambitious programs onto a population weary of war and the previous incumbent, much like Americans in 2008 who were tired of conflict and of George W. Bush. Initial reviews of Ike's terms in office were unenthusiastic; more recently, his stature has risen among mature scholars who do not equate presidential greatness with increased federal power.
The question for President Obama is less about whom he resembles among the great ones; rather, it is about which among the others will be staring him in the face when he completes his term in office: Hoover, Eisenhower, or Buchanan?
On August 25, 1914, in a spate of disorder, shots rang out from the Belgian town of Louvain, instigating its German occupiers to launch a frenzy of looting and destruction. Crazed soldiers butchered civilians, ransacked buildings, and finally burned the town to the ground, including its magnificent and irreplaceable library. The Kaiser's truculent commanders were convinced that Belgian citizens had been ordered to resist by those "above" them; that is, by a malevolent cabal of government officials, local burgomasters, and priests, all devoted to a bloodthirsty campaign of resistance. In Barbara Tuchman's words, "that people could be animated to stop the invader without an order from 'above' was inconceivable." Further:
. . . the Germans saw these orders everywhere. [General] von Kluck claimed that the Belgian government's posters warning its citizens against hostile acts were actually "incitements to the civil population to fire on the enemy."
The plain meaning of such words was irrelevant, which meant that Belgian citizens were perfidious murderers acting on their superiors' orders to kill Germans.
This is the perspective of a regime that had gone insane, one whose theory of terror in warfare had clearly put it outside the community of civilized nations. Indeed, Germany's depredations during its second effort to dominate Eurasia instigated war crimes trials against its leaders. A special irony is that during the first half of the 20th century, Germans were among the most highly educated, culturally sophisticated, and technologically advanced people on earth. Didn't matter. Kaiser Wilhelm's Empire and the Third Reich both perpetrated acts of unspeakable insanity.
The relevance of Germany's experience to contemporary politics perhaps becomes clearer with an understanding of what a regime is. A regime is a complex of institutions, personnel, and practices committed to the preservation of a ruling ideology. A regime comprises the commanding heights of a political and social system, including public and private bureaucracies, major media outlets, and the academic establishment -- all of whose members understand one another, defer to sympathizers' needs, and devote their professional lives to self-aggrandizement and ideological conquest.
Naturally, not all regimes are alike and therefore do not go insane in the same way. Has the American regime -- i.e., our governing political order -- gone insane? Some may think the matter is debatable, but I think we may be taking the first steps on the pathway to political insanity.
For instance, the way regime officials and sympathizers have treated Tea Party people is nothing short of despicable, a mere hair's breadth this side of insanity. Tea Party supporters have been characterized as racists, radicals, fascists, and traitors, none of which of course applies to them, but some of which are fair characterizations of some of those making such accusations. The liberal-progressive regime that has dominated America for the past generation or so cannot fathom a genuinely popular uprising. Regime adherents are cynically familiar with all sorts of fraudulent demonstrations, from their college days to union organizing, and can manage no better response to the Tea Partiers than to project their own race-class-gender-political identity bigotry onto their challengers. This rube-like narrowness of intellect would be amusing if it were not so mean-spirited.
Other growing manifestations of regime insanity are counterintuitive and often grotesque. For instance, would a sane regime member compare American soldiers to death-camp guards or terrorists --"Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some other mad regime"-- as did Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)? Would its minions enact policies whose inevitable trajectory is to bankrupt the country within a decade? Would a sane regime delegate authority to a government agency to regulate practically every puddle of water?
The list of questions goes on, much longer, from immigration to recent defense policy, the latter of which has been characterized by Charles Krauthammer as "incomprehensible."
And if this isn't quite at the stage of insanity, it is at least very bad policy.
The question is, what can citizens do about it? Here's where I'm concerned, because the answer is: probably not much. Unless, that is, citizens reconstruct those institutions and fill their posts with fresh recruits from the ranks of civil society. That would mean ending the tenure of incumbents throughout the regime, in government, media, and academia, which is a tall order, one whose magnitude is likely not fully understood by Tea Party enthusiasts and their supporters. But absent a thorough changing of the guard, the liberal-progressive regime's walk on the path to political insanity will continue. *
"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom." --John Adams
David J. Bean is a freelance writer living in California.
There are several fundamental economic facts that our politicians would not like the average person to know or understand. And the media, both print and electronic, either have not chosen to focus on them or are ignorant of the principals. The St. Croix Review has published many articles on this subject but the general public still seems unaware of the implications or doesn't care. The following is a very basic course in economics that will benefit everyone when they understand it. With that understanding perhaps some sanity could return to our national policies.
A nation's wealth is not the same as money. In a macro-economic sense wealth is what the nation's workers produce in terms of saleable goods and services. The total produced is expressed in dollars as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Money is a lien on the wealth that was produced. A dollar is an IOU that can be exchanged for a good or service of that value. Out of the total GDP, the federal government currently takes about 25 percent to provide for what it has spent on security, administration, healthcare, welfare, etc. Most often the government even spends more than it takes in any given year, the excess spending becoming a lien on future production. This excess spending is known as the deficit. When combined with state and local taxes the total approaches 40 percent. The government does not directly contribute to wealth production; it only consumes wealth. Of course keeping up the nation's infrastructure and many of the other government programs indirectly contribute to production, but the fact remains that the government produces no wealth; it is only a consumer of wealth. The federal, state, and local governments do not just take 40 percent off the top but use taxes that are applied to punish producers of wealth and reward non-producers.
The next basic concept is very difficult for the average person to comprehend: In the micro-economy, the day-to-day operations, the taxes used to allocate the rewards and punishments do not act as they seem on the surface. This is because businesses (and employees) do not pay taxes; they only collect them. Any viable business producing a good or service follows the equation: price + profit = price of the good or service produced. And cost = labor + material + rent + taxes. Yes, business costs to provide a good or service include the taxes assessed against that business and the people who contributed to the production of that good or service. These taxes go into the price of the good or service produced. Since the people working for that company get all their income from the company, and their taxes are paid by that income, their taxes also go into the price of the good or service produced. This trail of taxes proceeds all the way back to the very origin of the production process. Those same two equations apply to every business and all the people who had anything to do with bringing that good or service to market.
Look at the process used to bring a loaf of bread to market. Today one can pay over $4 for a loaf of good bread. The bread started out at the wheat farmer who grew the grain. He had it trucked to the mill by a trucking company. The mill company sent the flour on to the bakery and the bakery sent the finished bread on to the distributor who finally sent it to the grocery store where it could be purchased by a consumer. Every one of those businesses and the farmer had to follow the two equations above in order to stay in business. Therefore the consumer of that loaf of bread pays a one-loaf portion of all the taxes assessed against the businesses and workers that had anything to do with bringing the bread to market. These taxes are cumulative and therefore the major difference between $.25 bread and $4 bread is taxes.
Over the years the government has committed to funding on-going perpetual entitlement programs that present a constant and growing lien on the future production of wealth. The increase in spending by the government increases the amount of production (wealth) the government must take and thus results in even higher prices. This inflation depreciates the value of money used to purchase a good or service and has exactly the same effect as an additional tax. There is fundamentally no difference between a tax and inflation. They both reduce the real goods or services that money will buy.
So, think about that. In 1950 a loaf of bread cost about $.25 and today it costs $4 plus. Of course labor, material, and rent have all gone up too, but these increases are certainly also due to cumulative taxes. When you reflect that all the workers' taxes and all the business taxes are accumulated in the total government spending (federal, state, and local, about 40 percent of production), you can understand the rise in prices. The conclusion must be that the consumer of a good or service pays a portion of all the taxes assessed against all the people and businesses that had anything to do with producing that good or service. All of those taxes show up in the price of any good or service. Think too, of the implications of these facts on our current income tax laws and regulations. All these taxes are aimed at the micro-economy and what they do is punish the producers and reward the unproductive elements; in short, they redistribute the wealth earned by the producers. The current extensive income tax regulations only affect the market share or instantaneous advantage of one sector or another. They really are like rearranging the Titanic's deck chairs. Makes them sort of silly doesn't it? It seems that there should be much simpler methods of redistributing the wealth if that is a recognized objective of government.
Any reduction in prices not attributable to a reduction in taxes means true deflation of non-government's share of production. Deflation means that the future deficits cannot be paid off with depreciated dollars. This is why deflation scares the pants off politicians. *
"Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be . . ." --John Adams
Fred A. Kingery is a self-employed, private-equity investor in domestic and international financial markets from New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and a guest commentator for The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This article is from V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values.
Financial markets function to discount the future. Usually, by the time you read about something in the newspaper, financial market pricing has already "discounted" that event weeks, months, or perhaps even years before it hits the front page and becomes evident to everyone else. That's what it means to "speculate."
The whole world is beginning to seriously speculate that the Treasury is becoming a deadbeat borrower. Normally, such speculation would be expressed as a higher cost for borrowing, meaning higher interest rates on treasuries, coupled with a reluctance by lenders to offer long-term financing. If you have money to lend, why would you risk it by lending long term when you would be exposed to less risk by lending short term? The risk for lending long term to the Treasury is that there is more time for something bad to happen like inflation, a currency collapse, or even default. As Will Rogers once said, "I ain't so much worried about the return on my money as the return of my money."
So, Treasury bond market speculators have a problem. The Federal Reserve's current monetary policy is unintentionally manipulating the market's willingness to express a true perception of the growing credit deterioration of the U.S. government's balance sheet.
Specifically, lenders to the Treasury would prefer to lend short term (under one year) rather than long term (beyond five years). However, the Fed has pegged interest rates in the short end of the treasury market at near zero percent. Lenders willing to lend money short are getting no return. Beyond five years, where Fed policy influence is significantly less, the return for a lender is much better at 3.5 percent or higher.
So here is the problem: The market wants to lend short, but that desire doesn't get paid. The market is reluctant to lend long, but that reluctance is rewarded with a higher return. So, what happens when the Fed begins taking its foot off the monetary accelerator and short rates in the treasury market begin rising? The Fed will almost certainly begin raising short rates in the next six to 12 months.
Currently, about 30 percent (c. $4 trillion) of total outstanding Treasury debt matures in less than one year. About 55 percent (c. $7.5 trillion) of the total national debt matures in less than three years. If the Treasury currently matures $4 trillion of debt each year, and, in addition, runs an annual deficit of $1.4 trillion, then the total annual borrowing requirement will be $5.4 trillion. What happens if the 55 percent of the debt that matures in three years decides to migrate to a maturity of less than one year as reluctant longer-term lending gives way to preferred short-term lending, encouraged by an inevitable shift in Fed policy to raise short-term interest rates?
In that case, the total annual borrowing requirement (maturing debt plus the deficit) becomes a gigantic $8.9 trillion. Each year's maturing debt has to be "rolled" (new debt sold to replace that which is maturing) to the next year (at least), and each year's new borrowing need (the deficit) has to find buyers from the same pool of lenders. The annual maturing debt "roll," plus the annual government deficit, make up the total annual borrowing requirement for the Treasury.
How gigantic is $8.9 trillion? It's approximately the combined size of the second and third largest GDPs on the planet, Japan and China, combined. It's also approximately the sum of the GDPs of Germany, France, England, and Brazil. U.S. Treasury debt financing, which already depends on the kindness of strangers, will become even more so. And each year the world's lenders (the notorious "bond vigilantes") will get to decide if they want to finance over half of the entire maturing Treasury debt structure.
Bottom line, in the next year or two, interest expense as a percentage of federal government's receipts could easily explode to the upside and exceed 20 percent (the Congressional Budget Office's projection for the current year is 9.5 percent) as Fed policy change translates immediately into higher interest expense on what might be approximately 55 percent of the Treasury's total outstanding debt. Fed monetary policy will then become hostage to the combined annual maturing debt "roll" and deficit.
At that point, the Fed's predicament will be that it won't be able raise interest rates to stop inflation or defend the U.S. dollar for fear of what it will cost the Treasury in additional interest expense. Lenders, both foreign and domestic, would begin to speculate that the Treasury could soon be caught in a borrowing death spiral (funding both maturing debt and deficit increasingly driven higher by rising interest expense). These lenders would be very easily tempted to withdraw liquidity from the Treasury bond market (the dreaded buyers strike). That, in turn, will force the Fed to simply print the money in order to provide the required financing. The money printing would then easily translate into a serious inflation (hyperinflation) and a currency collapse.
Anyone want to "speculate" on an alternative happy ending to this story?
Realists may wish to ask a more profound question when confronted with the shocking size of America's annual debt "roll" and deficit: Where is the current leadership in Washington taking our nation? *
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." --Edward R. Murrow
Sean Varner is a former student fellow with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and a current graduate student at Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Studies in Fairfax, VA. This article is from V & V, a web site publication of Vision and Values.
President Obama signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in Prague on April 8 -- and did so to global accolades. It was the culmination of years of negotiations and a major triumph to finally achieve agreement with Moscow. Unfortunately, President Obama's signature was attached to a nave arms control treaty that threatens the strength of the U.S. nuclear umbrella that defends over 30 friends and allies. It compromises American interests while benefiting the Russians and weakening international security and stability.
On the surface, START looks like a reasonable albeit constrictive treaty. The 800 delivery-vehicle limit on bombers and missiles is about 100 below what is currently deployed. The 1,550 nuclear-warhead limit can easily be achieved by retiring some aging B-52s and changing the way they are counted. The treaty provides for telemetry exchanges (information from missile test launches), which promotes mutual trust. It also contains no overt constraints on missile defense or the ability to deploy non-nuclear systems with global reach.
A quick glance at the treaty's effects is more troubling. The 800 delivery-vehicle limit will cut valuable systems used to defend the United States and reassure its allies. Conversely, Russia only has to continue already planned decommissioning of obsolete missiles and submarines. The U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force will probably have to be reduced from 450 to 400 deployed missiles. The most survivable nuclear platforms, stealthy ballistic-missile submarines, will shrink by two submarines to remove four dozen missiles from accountability.
The bomber fleet will be limited to 18 stealth B-2s and dozens of 50-year-old B-52s. The remainder will be converted to conventional-only capabilities or simply eliminated. The future triad of missiles, submarines, and bombers will therefore be smaller, less flexible, and less capable of reassuring America's friends and allies in threatening environments.
These cuts may seem minimal, but when the missile reductions are combined with the cancellation of NASA's Constellation program, they could severely weaken the already decimated industrial base. The solid-rocket-motor industry is particularly vulnerable to collapse. An inability to sustain and replace valuable systems like ballistic missiles will have long-term negative consequences for our scientific and deterrent capability.
While the new warhead limit is 30 percent below the Moscow Treaty of 2002 limit, complicated counting rules give the Russians a whopping advantage. Each Russian bomber can carry eight warheads on cruise missiles, with the potential for more in the bomb bay. Under the New START, those 76 bombers count as only 76 warheads. Therefore, Moscow could deploy 500 or more warheads above the 1,550 limit, which would put it equal or above the Moscow Treaty limits. The United States, with its strict adherence to treaty law, will not imitate such devious accounting to ignore the 1,550 limit. Can we say the same for the Russian Federation?
The Bush administration began talks on a successor to START in its final years. The Obama administration publicly designated negotiations as the centerpiece of its "reset" with Russia and rushed negotiations in such a manner that the Russians knew exactly who wanted the treaty more. As former Bush administration official Stephen Rademaker has argued, you do not go to a car dealer and say "I absolutely positively have to have that car and I need it today, how much is it?" However, that is exactly what the president has done. In an effort to meet arbitrary deadlines, the American negotiators made multiple unnecessary concessions, most notably abandoning the missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Now Russia is objecting to any future missile-defense deployments, saying they would be cause to withdraw from the New START.
This treaty is different from past nuclear reductions in one important aspect: It is meant as a "down-payment" on President Obama's pledge for moving toward a "world without nuclear weapons," rather than to primarily improve U.S. national security. President Obama needs START to (among other things) justify his Nobel Peace Prize. He will push senators to provide their advice and consent for ratification of a bad treaty. Although many senators will want to avoid the pro-nuclear weapon label, the existence of these weapons has guaranteed American security for over 60 years.
The New START has turned out to be a golden missed opportunity. Instead of negotiating a treaty with modest reductions and extensive verification provisions, the administration opted for a bold approach. Proponents argue that the United States no longer needs the nuclear force structure it has from the Cold War. They assert that America's conventional superiority can increasingly fulfill the mission of nuclear weapons. Conventional weapons, however, do not have the same deterrent effect provided by nuclear forces. As Margaret Thatcher observed, "There are monuments to the futility of conventional deterrence in every village in Europe." Until the international security environment is severely improved, drastic reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons will not make the world more secure. Address the root causes of conflict between states, and wider nuclear reductions will be more successful and constructive. *
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." --Mark Twain
A politician has a choice to make -- the same choice that politicians have faced for decades. But the choice now involves consequences looming just over the horizon that politicians, such as Ted Kennedy, could have reasonably hoped that they would not live to see.
On the one hand the choice amounts to going further into the equivalent of credit card debt (using other peoples' money) by providing money or influence to favored people in return for votes or influence with the purpose of securing for oneself a position of power -- with no concern about deficits and debt, and therefore diminished subsequent interest in the prosperity of other peoples' children, outside, possibly, a small circle of friends.
On the other hand, to genuinely care about the welfare of the nation's children and grandchildren a politician these days must necessarily face questions of finance. Just the interest on financing the nation's debt will in the near future become a crushing burden. The promises made by generations of voluble Republicans and Democrats concerning Medicare and Social Security will soon be seen as empty.
Sooner or later many more of us in the private sector, who have to live with the inconvenience of market discipline, and who up until now have been inattentive, will awaken to the fact that government employees have better pay, benefits, and retirement arrangements, and we will be asking why this is so. It will become apparent that public sector unions and politicians have been in cahoots; one party getting out the vote, the other bringing home the bacon. In the midst of economic difficulty the private sector has been shedding jobs, but the federal government has been hiring: Why?
The brave politicians who genuinely care about the nation's future will be saying "no" to well-organized interest groups who have the ability to mount ad campaigns against them, with the certainty that opposing politicians will make every effort to portray them as mean-spirited and racist, and with the knowledge that most of the media will take sides against them.
One could almost feel sorry for the politicians who entered public service with the intention of doing good but by slow degrees and half-measures found themselves to be (perhaps because of timidity?) more and more compromising their larger constituencies' interests in favor of their own. One could almost feel sorry, except that as a group they are very clever people, and thus they bear responsibility.
The time is approaching when deceitful rhetoric is no longer sufficient to cover up impending financial calamity. *
"There is but one Straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington
We would like to thank the following people for their generous support for this journal (from 3/12/2010 . . . 5/18/2010): Michael A. Alaimo, John D. Alt, Larry G. Anderson, George E. Andrews, William D. Andrews, Ariel, Lee R. Ashmun, Gordon S. Auchincloss, A. D. Baggerley, Douglas W. Barr, David J. Bean, Bud & Carol Belz, Charles Benscheidt, Peter H. Block, Robert P. Bringer, Patrick J. Buchanan. Terry Cahill, Edward J. Cain, Dino Casalis, John B. Charlton, Laurence Christenson, Dianne C. DeBoest, Peter R. DeMarco, Francis, P. Destefano, Alice DiVittorio, John H. Downs, Don Dyslin, Irene M. Elkins, Nicholas Falco, Jane F. Gelderman, Gary D. Gillespie, Lee E. Goewey, Jim Hamilton, James E. Hartman, Thomas E. Heatley, Bernhard Heersink, Daniel V. Hickey, Nancy Holland, John A. Howard, David Ihle, Burleigh Jacobs, Robert R. Johnson, Loren R. Johnson, Warren W. Johnson, John H. Johnson, Edgar Jordan, Margaret Kearney, Robert L. Kemper, Edward B. Kiolbasa, Joseph D. Kluchinsky, Gloria Knoblauch, Charles B. Koehler, Mary S. Kohler, Thomas F. Kordonowy, Anne C. Kuhn, Alan Lee, Leonard S. Leganza, Herbert London, William H. Lupton, Paul T. Mandrodt, Howard S. Martin, Thomas J. McGreevy, Will K. McLain, Edwin Meese, Henry M. Mitchell, Walter M. Moede, Anthony W. Moro, Robert A. Moss, John M. Nickolaus, Michas M. Ohnstad, Harold K. Olson, Clark Palmer, Gary Phillips, Bernard L. Poppert, Melvin J. Ptacek, David Renkert, Shirley W. Roe, Steven B. Roorda, Katherine Ross, Herbert C. Schneider, Richard P. Schonland, John A. Schulte, Alvan I. Shane, William A. Shipley, L. Sideris, Ben T. Slade, David L. Smith, Thomas W. Smoot, Phillip Stark, Carl G. Stevenson, Lee Stoerzinger, Kenneth R. Thelen, W. G. Thompson, Paul B. Thompson, Jack E. Turner, James Walsh, Robert C. Whitten, Robert L. Wichterman Sr., Gaylord T. Willet, Robert F. Williams, Donald Wilson, Charles L. Wilson, Lee Wishing, Piers Woodriff, Chris Yunker, James P. Zaluba.
The following is a summary of the April 2010 issue of the St. Croix Review:
Barry MacDonald, in "Healthcare Reform Up in Smoke," shows how Republican Paul Ryan exposed the Democrat's double-counting gimmicks in the latest version of healthcare reform at the Blair House Summit.
In a "Letter to the Editor," Don Lee comments on whether we Americans have retained a "moral compass" in the conduct of our politics.
Herbert London, in "The Spiritual Dimensions of Nationhood," writes Americans have lost self-confidence because too many of us have come to believe our nation is not worth defending; in "Remembering Liberty," he believes that big government is rarely the solution to our problems, and that for all our difficulties, we remain the land of miracles; in "Presidential Denial," he writes that President Obama's persistent habit of blaming others for difficulties shows stubbornness and self-pity; in "Terrorism's Victory," he believes that the Nigerian Christmas-day bomber succeeded in deepening the fear involved in air travel; in "Iranian Influence in Iraq," he shows how the announced withdrawal plan has played into Iranian hands: they have the power to provoke a Sunni insurgency -- in return for a peaceful exit, the U.S. must acquiesce to Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Allan Brownfeld, in "With the Deficit Soaring, the Bipartisan Congressional Practice of Wasteful Earmarks Continues with No End in Sight," reports on the unprecedented debt piling up, and the disregard of its consequences by Congress and the President; in "Recent Acts of Violence Illustrate the Need for Repeat Criminals to Serve Their Full Sentences," he relates several recent failures of the justice system to protect the innocent; in "It Is Not 'Racism' but Far More Complex Factors Which Account for the Gap in Achievement Rates for Black Students," he writes that one primary reason black children are not learning is the absence of fathers in the home; in "The Largely Untold Story: Rescuing Jews in Mussolini's Italy," he tells the stories of unrecognized heroism.
Mark Hendrickson, in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Adam Smith's Timely and Timeless Classic," explains Smith's three cardinal social virtues: prudence, justice, and beneficence; in "Obama's Anti-jobs Policy," demonstrates why the president's programs are making things worse; in "The Student Loan Problem," he talks about the predicaments naive young people find themselves in; in "A Moment of Illumination," he casts light on the foolishness of poor-performing, mercury-filled, "green" light bulbs: we will never use all the energy that our energy-rich world contains.
Paul Kengor interviews Guido Hulsmann about the consequences of bloated spending in "Outrageous Public Debt."
James Inhofe, in "Sneak Peek Into New Senate Report on Climategate," provides an overview and selections of a Senate Report on the scientific scandal known as Climategate.
James Inhofe's Senate Office has compiled the emails that have been at the center of Climategate in "A Sampling of CRU Emails and Documents."
In "Pennsylvaia's Green Eco-Slumber," Robert Smith reveals liberal lawmakers' method: demand uneconomical and unfeasible changes, make utilities carry out the changes and take the blame, then leave office before the bill comes due.
Thomas Martin, in "Discerning Care," takes a philosopher's scalpel to arguments for including abortion funding in healthcare reform; in "Christmas" he writes of redeeming "newness."
In "H. L. Menken -- Man of Prejudices," Robert M. Thornton reveals the spark that animated an early 20th century American writer.
Jigs Gardner, in "Thomas Hardy," discusses the author's failings and strengths, and his tragedy that has no equal in English literature since Shakespeare.
Robert M. Thornton writes from Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.
I have been reading H. L. Mencken for over thirty-five years but it was only a short time ago when I realized why I enjoy him so much. Joseph Epstein wrote about encountering a man at a gathering of Mencken admirers and asking why he read him. The immediate response was "because he makes me feel good." Over the years I guess I knew that but had never articulated it. Mencken brought this off, explains Epstein:
. . . in part through comedy, in part through the energy that vibrates through his prose. In part through high intelligence joined to great common sense. [Mainly] he achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joi d vivre. Mencken took joy in life after looking at life critically and taking full measure of its darkest side, not out of any idiot optimism.
Epstein believes that the "extraordinary cleansing and vitalizing effect" Walter Lippman found in Mencken's prose sixty-five years ago is still to be found in it. He believes also that "Lippman may have been right, too, in attributing this wondrous effect to that fact that Mencken's blows "are directed by a warm and violent but an unusually healthy mind which is not divided, as most minds are, by envy and fear and ambition and anxiety."
In his essay "Rediscovering Mencken" (April 1977, Commentary), Epstein explained the influence of Mencken by quoting from an essay on Thomas Carlyle written by George Eliot in 1855:
The influence of such a writer is dynamic. He does not teach men how to use sword and musket, but he inspires their souls with courage and sends a strong will into their muscles. He does not, perhaps, enrich your stock of data, but he clears away the film from your eyes that you may search for data to some purpose. He does not, perhaps, convince you, but he strikes you, undeceives you, animates you.
H. L. Mencken, concludes Epstein "is such a writer."
Mencken also "makes me feel good" because he wrote exactly what he thought instead of watering down his ideas so as not to offend anyone. Albert Jay Nock commented sixty years ago that he admired Thomas Carlyle for "his cusseddness and his crusty readiness to say just what he thought about anybody and anything. . ." Nock was disdainful of the "awful surfeit of mush-and-water in the current writing about public affairs," which reminded him of
. . . the preacher who told his people that "unless you repent, as it were, and, as one might say, have a change of heart, you will be damned -- so to speak and, in a measure, go to hell." There was none of that sort of bilgewater in Carlyle's pronouncements.
This is equally true of Mencken, Nock wrote. He gives you the word with the bark on it. But however confident and outspoken, Mencken is refreshing because he retained a sense of his own fallibility. For instance, he replied to someone who called him a fool for something he had written "Dear Sir: You may be right. Very truly yours, H. L. Mencken."
Menken is refreshing, too, because although bombastic and unmerciful in his assaults on fanatics, phonies, fools, radicals, artistes, charlatans, quacks, world-savers and the self-righteous and pompous, he always leavened them with an unfailing sense of humor. He never became flustered, never wrote in anger. "There was no vindictiveness, no rage, no heave and sweat," wrote John Chamberlain. His deliverances were made
. . . with an air of great aplomb, as from an Olympian height, and there was always the grin and the dancing points of light in Mencken's eyes when the last sentence had been committed to paper. This Olympian attitude made him singularly easy to take . . .
Another reason why Mencken refreshes the spirit is that he never claimed his views were wholly objective, untainted by even a hint of subjectivity. He "had amazing prejudices," wrote Samuel A. Nock:
. . . but he never pretended they were anything else. Such things were part of his vast gusto, his love of living, his fascination with all that went on about him and those concerned in it. He showed as one vigorous way of living a full and happy life.
In our time, of course, prejudice is a bad word -- often a fighting word used to flail our enemies -- because for most people it means disliking persons simply because they are of a certain race, gender, class, or nationality instead of "judging" each individual by the content of his character.
Nock was using the word in its innocent sense of prejudgement and so did Richard Weaver in an essay written thirty years ago, "Life without Prejudice." There he explained the value of healthy prejudices in a society and invoked Mencken in support of his thesis. In the 1920s Mencken "wrote a brilliant series of essays on men, life, and letters" and "he gave them a title as illuminating as it was honest -- Prejudices." What he meant was that these views were "based on such part of experience as had passed under his observation." He did not apologize because some figures were praised while others were damned. Above all, there was no canting claim to "objectivity." He knew that most convictions rest upon "imperfect inductions, or samplings of evidence, and he knew that feeling is often a positive factor." One might expect that Mencken's "unfairness" would "leave him unread and without influence," but just the opposite was the case, probably because many "found in him a man whose prejudices had more of reality than the slogans and catchwords on political banners."
Rationalistic men, declared Weaver, are more intolerant than prejudiced men because they believe their judgments are reasoned conclusions and wholly objective so should never be challenged. The person, on the other hand, who admits his prejudices, the subjective nature of his conclusions, is usually "more human and humane." He understands that "a prejudice may be an unreasoned judgment . . . but an unreasoned judgment is not necessarily an illogical judgment." The man of strong prejudices is not a "political and social menace" but often a helpful citizen. The chances are greater that:
. . . he will be more creative than the man who can never come to more than a few gingerly held conclusions or who thinks that all ideas should be received with equal hospitality.
After all, wrote Weaver, "there is such a thing as being so broad you are flat."
In his splendid essay, Weaver draws upon the ideas of John Grier Hibben who some fifty years before wrote an essay entitled Defense of Prejudice. While reason may determine the tone, wrote Hibben, prejudices produce the overtones of character. The overtone gives a distinctive quality to sound and, in a similar manner:
. . . character may be regarded as having its peculiar timbre. There is a certain ring about a man's character -- it is true or false, pleasing or unpleasing, harmonious or discordant, as the case may be.
Then, firing a salvo of words that should have the enemies of prejudices hoisting the white flag or beating a hasty retreat, Hibben makes it perfectly clear why prejudice is so vital to a man's character:
We love a man on account of his prejudices; we hate him also for a like reason. Strip a man of his prejudices, and only the commonplace remains. Individuality is the projection of our prejudices. Remove the prejudices and the individual is merged again with the crowd. He is only one of many. He no longer appeals to our imagination. There is no more of interest or charm or power about him. Character without a dash of prejudice is insipid. A man without a fair amount of prejudice in his nature always lacks intensity of conviction. There may be a glow of intellectual light, but there is a conspicuous absence of fire and driving power. Theirs is often a certain judicial poise of mind which reveals itself in a tolerance that is an indication of weakness rather than strength. Such a man never lets himself go. He always sees two sides to every question, and can never commit to the one or the other. Freedom from prejudice is often indicated by a vacillation which is pitifully weak and ineffectual. *
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." --Thomas Jefferson