“Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool” is one of George Orwell’s great essays. As I reread it I am less able to accept his anti-religious bias; but I share his dislike of the dubious otherworldly “saintliness” that Tolstoy attempted to put into practice.

In the essay, Orwell addresses Tolstoy’s violent dislike of Shakespeare, noting Tolstoy’s choice of King Lear as illustrating everything that is wrong with the poet. Tolstoy finds Lear to be

stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, ‘wild ravings’, ‘mirthless jokes’, anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.

Orwell turns the tables on Tolstoy and proposes that Tolstoy dislikes the play precisely because King Lear is a figure who in strong ways resembles Tolstoy as an old man, and the play is a refutation of what Tolstoy himself tried to do – renounce all his wealth and privilege in a “huge and gratuitous act of renunciation.”

According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy. On the contrary, he was driven almost to the edge of madness by the behaviour of the people about him, who persecuted him precisely because of his ambition.

Putting aside Orwell’s assumption that doing the will of God must be in conflict with earthly pleasure, his thesis about Tolstoy, whose desire for mystic renunciation he contrasts with Shakespeare’s curiosity and interest in all facets of human life in this world, is compelling. Even more interesting is his summary of the meaning of King Lear:

Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you…but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek.

The deeper moral of the play, Orwell says, is:

‘Give away your lands if you want to, but don’t expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won’t gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.’

My own turn away from liberalism came in my teens when I began to realize, from the bold statements of people like Ayn Rand, that “selflessness” and self-renunciation can actually be a great evil. People who make themselves miserable are not helping others, but merely spreading misery and evil in the world. People who allow parasites to feed on them are encouraging the growth of parasites. Orwell saw this too. I imagine that, like Rand, his negative experiences with adults who used religious platitudes as a way to control children prevented him from seeing the possibility of Christianity as compatible with worldly enjoyment and love of humanity.

Orwell’s lesson from Lear applies to nations, too. A great nation that renounces its wealth, land, power, even the dignity and well-being of its own people in the name of world peace, universal democracy, woman’s rights, free trade, anti-racism, and other liberal abstractions will certainly meet a grievous end. And the society that replaces it, being founded on plunder and looting, is guaranteed to be greatly inferior to what it replaced. Unfortunately, the person who tries to point this out today has to endure being regarded as a raving Fool – the one who spoke the truth to King Lear. Still, much vitality and spirit remains in the nations of the West, and I’m not giving up on the possibility that they will awaken to the truth.

American society, like other Western societies, is clearly in trouble. We see not only a decline in our physical and cultural environment, but, increasingly, the emergence of actual barbarism and savagery within our borders, as events like the gang rape that took place outside a California high school show us on almost a daily basis. But what can we do? Liberals pin their hopes on progressive social reform, carried out by the government and other institutions. Libertarians, a minority, see protecting individual freedom as key. Conservatives call for a return to traditional values and social norms. I hold that the conservative position (perhaps with certain elements of the other two) offers the only hope for saving these United States. But “traditional values” are not simply principles to be followed, voluntarily, by individuals. They must be embodied in the framework of a larger society. For Westerners, at least, that larger society is the nation, and the culture and society of that nation is its civilization.

That last sentence might sound like the sort of dull truism that schoolchildren used to be taught to write in composition class, but the shocking fact is that the idea of civilization, once taken for granted, has entirely dropped out from our discourse. This is a natural consequence of the domination of the values of equality and nondiscrimination. For the idea of civilization necessarily implies the existence of its opposite, non-civilization, the primitive, savage, or barbaric. Western men today are carefully trained to avoid judging any group or society in such terms, because this implies that some groups or societies are superior to others, and that the white Westerner making such judgments might see his own group as superior. Today, to see Western culture as superior is seen not only as morally contemptible but as nearly self-evidently false as the statement “two plus two equals five.”

Thus the idea of American civilization, which once was an academic subject in itself and which formed the framework for any discussion of the history, literature, and culture of the United States, has vanished from our natural life. The defenders of that civilization withered under the sneering voices of people like Gandhi, who is supposed to have said, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, “I think it would be a good idea.”

I think that American civilization would be a very good idea and I would like us to reclaim the concept. Of course, our kindred Western nations need to do the same. We might start by fleshing out the concept of civilization a little.

My 1985 American Heritage Dictionary defines civilization as follows: “1. An advanced stage of development in the arts and sciences accompanied by corresponding social, political, and cultural complexity. 2. The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a particular epoch: the civilization of ancient Rome.” I suppose that the word is still used occasionally in the second sense, but probably not in the first, unless with a meaning so broad that it applies to all human societies that exist today. Somalis have SUVs, therefore they are civilized.

A complete set of the Encyclopedia Americana, 1951 edition, is one of the under-appreciated treasures of my parents’ home that I intend to claim for myself someday. It is, come to think of it, a product of American civilization. Interestingly, its article on “Civilization” is fully titled “CIVILIZATION, History of. Pre-Christian,” with no corresponding article on Christian civilization, which I suppose is covered under another heading. The article gives an impressively expansive enumeration of the components of civilization, focusing on Europe and the Near East. It includes things like: food-getting; agriculture; fire; mining; textile-making; architecture; art; music; clothing; cooking; government; commerce; transportation; science (beginning with astronomy); medicine; and literacy. Always amazing is how much people in very ancient times were able to accomplish in these areas.

What is common to these definitions of civilization is the linkage between material developments and spiritual elevation. This comes out in a careful reading of the Americana article. For example, the bow and arrow gave man “an entirely new dominance over his world and lifted his food-getting enterprises and himself above the level of the brute as no other invention had done up to that time.” With the invention of agriculture, man “had to stay in a place long enough to plant and to reap and this acquired a sense of ownership.” Also, “Without the use of fire, man could not have risen above the lowest depths of savagery and barbarism.” For “When he took the fire and put it on a crude stone hearth just within the hut, it meant a better home and the gathering about the hearth marks the beginning of the family circle with all that that has meant.” Textiles, building, music, and other arts are linked with spiritual elevation; for instance, “The wonderful sculpture which filled the Grecian world before and after B.C. 500 must have done much to awaken in the people a love of the beautiful and a distaste for whatever was ugly.”

Almost poignant, in an era when over half of marriages end in divorce, is the discussion of the family, which should give us pause to think:

No single fact has been more influential in the process of civilization than the rise of the family. Respect, consideration for one another, chastity, obedience, honor, sacrificing love, virtues altogether fundamental to civilization, are its direct product.

On government, the writer notes of the laws of Hammurabi and others:

These laws are attempts to compel a certain orderliness, and decency and honor in human activities and relationships. This growing custom of making a man face the wrong of his acts and inflicting a penalty therefore, compelled him to see the need of taking some thought as to the character and consequences of his deeds.

Of religion, the writer says that it “has played its part in helping and hindering and shaping civilization,” and interestingly gives as the first example an example of a Neanderthal youth buried with a food offering. I read a similar story as a boy. The writer sees a positive progression from primitive religions in which man “worships gods which are usually fearful and many, and believes that these gods cause all things to happen,” to Judaism and Christianity.

The civilizing value of the idea of a God as a God of Righteousness proclaimed by the Hebrew prophets has even yet not been fully realized, and when under Josiah social justice was made virtually a religion, religion was destined to play a greater part in lifting civilization to higher levels.

One does sense in the use of words like “social justice” an assumption that the goal of civilization is equality. One also senses a materialistic bias, with material developments seeming to lead to spiritual ones instead of vice-versa. Both tendencies are problematic. One lesson people living in the 21st century ought to have learned by now is that material and spiritual progress are not inevitably correlated, though it may have been possible to believe in 1951 that they were. Our material progress continues, at least in some areas, but our spiritual and social decline is striking. And, as with the recording of rapes on cell phones, technology can be used in service of outright savagery.

Still, the view of civilization presented in the Americana is helpful in reminding us of what we are trying to preserve – civilization as a “total package,” a society of people with a history and way of life that took eons to develop and needs to be maintained and protected. The value of civilization, indeed, the inseparability of our civilization from everything we love and are, was self-evident to all Westerners until recent times. Recapturing the idea can help us focus our efforts to save the thing.

…of a full-length posting this weekend. I hope everyone is enjoying the turning of the season – nice autumn leaves here, but the rain and wind are a little oppressive.

“When the Frost is on the Punkin”

WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,
And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,
And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it’s then the time a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,
With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

- James Whitcomb Riley

I will recommend to you without comment the following two versions of a song, one the original, the other a cover version. Really, just because it’s a great song. But if you insist on thinking politically, it’s a nice example of the way successful black-white cultural interaction used to work.

The Beatles:

Arthur Alexander:

One passage from George Orwell’s 1984 that has stuck with me for a long time is the scene where Winston Smith, suspecting that the accounts of British society prior to the totalitarian revolution may be false, decides to ask someone who was actually alive then about them. Wearing the “worker’s” overalls that mark him as a Party member, he slips into a pub which caters to the Proles, or common people. There, he encounters an old man who is unsuccessfully trying to order a pint of beer:

“And what in hell’s name is a pint?” said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

“Ark at ‘im! Calls ‘isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.”

“Never heard of ‘em,” said the barman shortly. “Liter and half liter — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.”

Winston buys the man a drink and proceeds to question him about what life was like when he was younger. The man, though, responds unsatisfyingly that the beer was better, and cheaper. Winston then presses the point:

“The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn’t even boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousands — the capitalists, they were called — who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats-”

The old man brightened suddenly.

“Top ‘ats!” he said. “Funny you should mention ‘em. The same thing come into my ‘ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain’t seen a top ‘at in years. Gorn right out, they ‘ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral.”

Winston keeps trying, citing pieces of “history” that are increasingly ludicrous and unbelievable: the “capitalists” could do what they liked with you, “ship you off to Canada like cattle,” sleep with your daughters, flog you with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The old man, though, is unable to grasp the meaning of the questions, responding instead with his fragmentary memories of the vanished objects and words. His nostalgic tone implies that things were not so bad, but he fails to directly refute any of the Party’s claims. Finally, Winston asks him simply: was life, then, better in 1925, or in 1984? The man merely replies that the ailments of old age are troublesome, but that he is glad to be free of the worries of a young man, concerning, for instance, women.

Winston’s conclusion:

Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified — when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

Even in a society with strong traditions, the bulk of memories held by a particular generation are lost when they pass away; after two generations, the loss is almost complete, or, as someone remarked on View From The Right today, “I know basically nothing about my great grandparents!” On the other hand, provided that a people satisfy the minimum requirements for maintaining their identity as a people – reproducing, inhabiting the same land, passing down their language and essential values to the next generation – then however much the culture may change, there is always the possibility of re-connecting with the past generations. It is in this way that the Chinese, only a few decades after smashing their ancient monuments and sending their intellectuals to labor camps to be purged of “feudal” thinking, can now set up Confucius Institutes (!) in places like the United States to promote their culture abroad. Unfortunately for the United States, the changing ethnic composition of our population is threatening us in ways that Communism never threatened the Chinese.

The United States is rapidly slipping into a state of collective amnesia about her past that truly rivals that of Orwell’s old man. Large numbers of people – white Americans – truly seem to believe that prior to 1965 black people could not venture out in public without running into white men who would push them into the gutter and snatch their wives away; or that women were prevented from learning to read and chained inside the home to be brutalized by their husbands.

All right, I exaggerate a little. But white America is certainly portrayed in a consistently negative light. I recently caught an episode of a TV drama, Mad Men, which illustrates perfectly the liberal view of the older America. Beneath the surface of bourgeois ideals, nice dress, and prosperity is a world of sexual predation, ruthless competition, self-satisfaction, abortions, alcohol abuse, Cold War paranoia. Even with the sound off, the shadows and shifty glances of the characters convey a society so ugly as to be hardly worth saving. And yet there are millions of Americans still living and active who belong to the very generation being portrayed. Why aren’t they criticizing this program?

I am afraid it is vain to hope that older people will come to the rescue by telling how things actually were. As long as the authoritative ideology rules, perpetuated by our “experts” and institutions, the memories of individuals will be, in Orwell’s words, no more than “rubbish heaps of details.” Even more, ideology shapes the way people understand their own memories. When we are told that something we remember as good or benign was actually evil, unless we are equipped with a mental defense of our perceptions, we will be inclined to believe what is being claimed.  This, I think, is what has probably happened with many older Americans. Many do have a strong feeling that things were better in the old days, but they are not able to articulate why this is so. Indeed, since it was their generation that initiated the breakdown of the old social order in the 1960s and 1970s, it is safe to assume that there were flaws in their ideas to begin with – just as Orwell’s old man bought in to some of the socialist rhetoric of his time. (Well, so did Orwell.) It may be too late for most of them to come to terms with this.

Still, the truth remains the truth, and it is waiting to be discovered, or perhaps, to be brought back to life. If you believe that something is not right with the direction of our society, and don’t accept the present common wisdom (read: the common un-wisdom) about how we got here and what needs to be done, you have a powerful weapon already. And, unlike Orwell’s imaginary regime, I believe the actual ruling powers are deeply immersed in stupidity and blindness. That’s not reassuring when you’re counting on them to protect you, but it may be an advantage when you’ve decided they need to go.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

- William Wordsworth

Until middle age I rarely thought about my country, preferring more exotic foreign cultures to my own and the Continental giants of Western civilization to the often more provincial, ephemeral figures that America produced. It was not until I realized the terrible peril my country was in (mainly after 9/11) that I began thinking again about what it meant to be American and about what I might do to help my country, or at the very least, to share in the experience of helping her.

This site is, in a way, about boyhood, for it was in boyhood that my “American” identity was formed, both in the flesh-and-blood connection to a people I experienced and in the stories and symbols of that nationhood. I know that the spiritual world I knew then was real, and that if we Westerners allow the spiritual, moral, and demographic decline to continue, there will be no more boys like my grandfather, my father, or me.

It has nothing to do with nostalgia. It has everything to do with the future.

When Wordsworth said that “the child is father of the man,” he was not only stating an obvious fact about the formation of our personalities; he was also calling for us to engage actively with the child in us, to draw upon the naïve genius of the child whose heart leaps up when he sees a rainbow. In our popular culture, the idea of “getting in touch with the child within us” may suggest a program of self-indulgence in which the goal seems to be to remain childish and irresponsible. But revisiting childhood can also be a source of strength, reminding us of who we basically are and sometimes shedding light on current dilemmas.

The Romantic celebration of personal liberation and social revolution was destructive (something Wordsworth realized early on), but I cannot give up Romanticism entirely. Surely there is something about the Romantic spirit, with its uniting of human love and spiritual elevation, with its belief in the world-changing power of the individual will, that we should retain even as we seek to re-impose a traditional order on our society.

Longfellow was another Romantic who at the same time understood the indispensability of social order. He, too, was constantly returning to his boyhood:

Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.
And a verse of a Lapland song
Is haunting my memory still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

* * *

There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “My Lost Youth“

I am not sure exactly what those last two lines mean, and yet, as poetry, I know they are true. Indeed, I never realized how important my “lost youth” would become to me later in life. Whether those younger than me, with even less direct knowledge of the historical America, will be receptive to voices from the past, I have no idea. But I believe that some of them will. That will be an era I would like to live to see.

And Deering’s Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were,
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

My apologies for the extended absence. My return from a trip found new work responsibilities, and other complications. I will be posting again soon.

…on a trip that will keep me away from the Intenet for the next 10 days or so, so won’t be posting or replying to comments and emails.

The Heritage American is now more than one year old, having officially started, after a couple of test runs, on July 4, 2008 (the previous entries were tests). While our political situation is, on the surface, more discouraging than ever, my feeling has only grown that the truth is making its way to the surface. With this will come new hope and new possibilities.

To those readers who have stuck with this blog (those who haven’t won’t be reading, I suppose!), I offer my deepest gratitude.

See you in September.

One of the iconic images of the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952) is the photograph of General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito taken at MacArthur’s headquarters. The photograph is a striking symbol of American dominance and Japanese submission, a brilliant propaganda move by MacArthur. The 44-year-old emperor, previously rarely photographed or seen by the public, appears nervous and awkward next to the 65-year-old MacArthur, who seems to tower above him and deliberately strikes a casual pose in his open-necked khaki shirt. Further, it was the emperor who paid audience to MacArthur, and not vice versa. Hirohito did have reason to be nervous: the Occupation authorities were in the midst of deciding whether to retain the imperial institution, or whether to have Hirohito tried as a war criminal and quite possibly executed, something that much of the American public and many of Japan’s other enemies were quite in favor of.

Historian John Dower writes in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1), that “Rigid royalists like the [Japanese] Home Ministry’s censors immediately saw the photo as an appalling sort of lese majesty” (p.293). Nevertheless, it was published, serving as a demonstration of American-style freedom of the press as well as as a reminder of the Japanese defeat.

And yet, the photograph was not as injurious to the emperor as it might seem. Writes Dower: “The photograph is often said to mark the moment when it really came home to most Japanese that they had been vanquished and the Americans were in charge. At the same time – and this is what the censors and the more overwrought superpatriots missed – it also made it plain that SCAP [Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers] was hospitable to the emperor, and would stand by him” (293). MacArthur’s audience with the Emperor was followed by a campaign, engineered by General Bonner Fellers and strongly supported by MacArthur, to prevent the criminal prosecution of the emperor. The preservation of the imperial household of Japan as a national symbol of a democratic nation came to be accepted by the Americans and by most Japanese.

I couldn’t help seeing the ironic resemblance of a recent photo containing similar elements, but taken and published under very different circumstances:

While the height difference between the white man and the Asian man is the same, the other important elements have been reversed, and the American – a former president, no less – is the subordinate and the one being made a fool of. Of course, the photos differ completely in their particulars. The first shows a moment in history when America, having decisively defeated Japan in a total war that culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, commenced an occupation with a firm sense of her own rightness. The second incident is infinitely trivial by comparison: Asian-American female journalists put themselves in harm’s way and were nabbed by the enemy; the Obama administration decided to allow Kim his desired PR coup by providing him with a real U.S. president (and, Charles Krauthammer thinks, other forms of aid) in exchange for the release of the hostages. It is just one of the sharper illustrations of the results of a fifty-year breakdown of the American sense of identity and national interest.

It is easy, from a position of safety, to make fun of Kim Jong-Il, (yes, I think the linked video is funny) and Clinton’s own history has inevitably led to to jokes about the incident. However, the reality is not funny. I have no solution to propose for our relationship with the Koreas, but the permanent posting of 28,000 troops in the South to protect it from the North, even as the South becomes increasingly anti-American, is unacceptable. As is any policy, whether regarding North Korea or Iran or the admission of Muslims as graduate students in the sciences, that does not put as its highest priority, and minimum acceptable outcome, the prevention of a nuclear attack against the United States.

There are other intriguing threads between the two pictures. In both cases the possession of nuclear weapons is the source of the victor’s power. Another link is the figure of MacArthur himself, who became the commander of UN forces during the Korean War, and was dismissed by Truman for insubordinate behavior. He seems to have been both more aggressive and more idealistic than his administration in his Korea policy. And the occupation of Japan that he headed, while by any standard a historically unique and massive success, set the precedent for the U.S. policy of trying to help and democratize other countries, including our defeated enemies. The liberal universalist rationale of the American occupation has become standard in all our foreign military activities, and continues to distort our understanding of the Korean situation. Finally, the contrast between America’s wartime propaganda against the emperor and the eager fraternization of occupation authorities with Japanese court circles (described by Dower) gives pause for thought.

MacArthur’s America was strong, though flawed. Today, America “no longer exists,” as Lawrence Auster put it in his commentary on the reason for our tepid response to the Chinese capture of the personnel of a U.S. spy plane in 2001. That is, we have lost a sense of being part of a larger national entity whose identity transcends that of the individuals who belong to it. As a result, when a hostile nation like North Korea commits an act of aggression against us as a nation, we respond solely in terms of the welfare of individuals. From this point of view, Clinton’s mission to North Korea was a resounding success, praised even by Republicans like Douglas Paal, who in an opinion piece for the New York Times, supports the Clinton visit. His approval is based on the simple belief that Clinton’s visit was the only way to free the journalists, mixed with some wishful thinking that Kim “may be ready now to turn a more cooperative face to the outside world.” Lee and Ling themselves have expressed emotional thanks to the U.S. government and the individuals who supported them, but don’t appear to be conscious of the considerable burden they placed upon their nation.

Meanwhile, the palpable humiliation of America, in the person of our former president, is recorded on film for posterity, quite visible to the rest of the world and to the North Koreans, though suppressed from the consciousness of most Americans. There is no way to escape the daily humiliations and increasing threats to our physical safety until we recover a historically rooted sense of who we are as Americans.

Notes

(1) John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.

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I spent some time looking through the New York Times today (to be precise, the Friday, August 7 issue). Conservatives, of course, are deeply suspicious of the Times. Its left-wing bias goes way back, well before 1969 when its editors showed their lack of happiness at the successful Apollo moon landing. Still, it remains in my mind the newspaper. Nowadays it is available everywhere, and even given out free on college campuses.

When I was growing up in the Midwest, the Times was hard to get hold of. You had to go to a larger town to get the Sunday edition, or get it by mail subscription. For practical purposes you could only read it at the library. I remember going to visit my grandparents in the New York area in my early teens, and being impressed at how they had the Times delivered to their home every day. On July 4, the paper would always reprint the Declaration of Independence. I suppose they probably still do. When I went to college, I made a point of subscribing to the Times at a discount through the student agency. I felt I had “arrived” as a student.

Nowadays, I doubt many students read newspapers at all. Those I have talked to say that the news is all bad anyway, or that they get their news from the Internet. I am like them in that last respect. And yet I still feel one should read a newspaper, just as one should write real letters to people (I don’t do much of that either). They should be our bread and butter for understanding society; not a final authority, but a fundamental source. That’s what my father said.

I might still read the Times regularly if its only problem were liberal bias. After all, you can still get useful information from a biased source. But it has fallen far below that. If you are a person who still believes in some of the traditional American values – say, limited government; personal responsibility; national identity; national interest – the Times is almost unreadable. Its stories and editorials adhere to “scripts” that reduce every issue to simplistic liberal paradigms. There is less variety of perspective, I imagine, than there was even in Communist publications during the Cold War; the only advantage the Times has over those is its sense of style – which probably makes it the more dangerous of the two.

What a strange, grim world is portrayed on those pages! It reminds me of something I have said before, that the one thing conservatives and liberals in America have in common is a deep sense of foreboding about the future. No one could read this paper day in and day out and come out with any sense of optimism for the future.

The headlines this particular day:

Headline: Senate Confirms Sotomayor for the Supreme Court: First Hispanic Is Approved by 68-31 Vote. Comment: Justices in our highest court are now chosen based on an ethnic spoils system. Americans: from now on you will see more and more “Hispanics” presiding over you. Did anyone ever ask you if you wanted this?

The Times sees this as a “resounding victory” for their side. I have to admire the brazenness of the photograph of the victorious Justice “returning to her Manhattan home,” with graffiti on the brick wall in the background. Seems to symbolize the third-worldization her confirmation represents.

Headline: Economists See A Limited Lift From Stimulus: Jobs Report Due Today – Outlook Murky. Comment: The “economists” seem to belong to the Obama administration. They and a few “private analysts” think they see a teensy benefit from the massive “stimulus” expenditures. The Times writer hopes this is the case, because when higher unemployment figures are released today, this will provide “Republicans and conservative economists new ammunition to argue that the stimulus has been a waste of taxpayer money.” This seems to leave out the possibility that the stimulus actually has been a waste of taxpayer money….

Headline: A New Battle of Vieques, Over Navy’s Cleanup. Comment: A Puerto Rico story, obviously paired with the Sotomayor confirmation. The Navy used this island of 9,300 residents for military training from World War II to 2003. They are now cleaning up unexploded munitions, with residents unhappy with the possible health effects of detonating munitions to clean them up. It appears to be the usual give and take between the U.S. government and the locals that one would expect, which the Hispanic author of the article attempts to spin as a major incident.

Headline: For Iraqis Released by the U.S., Little Hope and Plenty of Suspicion. Comment: The Times must have published hundreds of stories following this template. The poor Iraqis, detained for trying to attack us! When they get out, they find there are no jobs, so they’re likely to join the insurgency again. Apparently, America needs to create jobs for all of them, or let them immigrate to America. And of course, people are always “suspicious.” We just need to try harder, and spend more, to win their hearts and minds!

Headline: ANOTHER HURDLE FOR THE JOBLESS: CREDIT INQUIRIES. DISCRIMINATION FEARED. Employers Defending a Practice Some states Seek to Restrict. Comment: Poor Juan Ochoa! He thought he had a job lined up as a data entry clerk. “Before he could do much more, though, the firm checked his credit history. The interest vanished. There were too many collections claims against him, the firm said.”

Actually, I am not comfortable with the enormous significance credit ratings are taking on in our society, and the regularity of credit checks in daily life. But if this guy has a bunch of unpaid debts…but the author didn’t think it important to fill us in on those details.

Headline: High-Risk Drug Is in Spotlight In Wake of High-Profile Death. Comment: Propofol, the drug that may have killed Michael Jackson, is being abused by some people. The article discusses an anesthesiologist from Nebraska who supposedly got to the point of injecting himself with the drug 15 times in one night, and another medical professional who used it 100 times a day. A serious problem, if this is so, but the Times writer does not choose to question the character of this anesthesiologist, obviously a seriously irresponsible, out-of-control person, who apparently is now back on the job after several months of rehab.

The Times, and its cousins, provide daily intellectual fodder for our elites in all fields. Presumably they read it to stay “informed” in ways relevant to their work and lives. But what do they learn? The theme is always the same. The economy, the health industry, foreign relations, war, unemployment – in each realm discontented people, usually foreign or minority, present a problem to government or other authorities, with their grievances, dysfunctions, or illnesses. To solve these problems, “experts” must conduct studies and the government must then attempt solutions based on their findings, using public money. But like the heads of the Hydra, the problems multiply endlessly, while there is never even a fraction of the money available that those experts insist is needed. With no concept of the larger, timeless truths that form the foundation for the social order and teach the limitations of what man can accomplish on earth, all you can do is rely on hope – in the person of figures like Obama and Sotomayor, who have no conception of the Good but do believe in Change, Change, Change.

I have long been disillusioned with our liberal media, but I still miss the days when I could take pleasure in reading the New York Times.