Maggie's Farm

Very Scary

If one were to believe the hyped-up silliness going on at Capitol Hill, you'd be very very afraid of this dweeby nice fellow with his minivan and good looking family.

At the risk of saying what everyone already knows, Alioto Alito will be confirmed. What has been going on has been red meat and pandering to the Dem base, thus Alito is being smeared with implications of the usual racist, anti-environment, fascist, corrupt, plutocrat-lover, child-hater, woman-hater, etc. etc. The lack of respect is beyond belief, and I am not surprised Alito's wife had enough of it. If anyone takes this seriously, they are in la la land.

Law Clinics

Excerpted from Heather MacDonald at City Journal:

"Democratic senators have repeatedly questioned whether Samuel Alito is in the legal "mainstream" during the opening days of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. To see what the "mainstream" means for the legal elites in the Democratic party, look no further than the law school "clinic." These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and advocacy for 30 years. Though law schools claim that the clinics teach students the basics of law practice while providing crucial representation to poor people, in fact they routinely neither inculcate lawyering skills nor serve the poor. They do, however, offer the legal professoriate a way to engage in political activism--almost never of a conservative cast. A survey of the clinical universe makes clear how politically one-sided law schools--and the legal ideology they inculcate--are.

In the last few years, law school clinics have put the Berkeley, Calif., school system under judicial supervision for disciplining black and Hispanic students disproportionately to their population (yes, that's Berkeley, the most racially sensitive spot on earth); sued the New York City Police Department for its conduct during the 2004 Republican National Convention; fought "gentrification" (read: economic revitalization) in urban "neighborhoods of color"; sued the Bush administration for virtually every aspect of its conduct of the war on terror; and lobbied for more restrictive "tobacco control" laws. Over their history, clinics can claim credit for making New Jersey pay for abortions for the poor; blocking job-providing industrial facilities; setting up needle exchanges for drug addicts in residential neighborhoods; and preventing New Jersey libraries from ejecting foul-smelling vagrants who are disturbing library users."

Read entire. 

"Reduction to the absurd," or "reduction to the impossible." This handy fallacious technique of disputation can be effective in making any logical argument appear ridiculous, when it may not be, by stretching it to an extreme which goes far beyond the body or intent or scope of the argument. 

It was a favorite bugaboo of Aristotle, and, in mathematics, Euclid was fond of its usefulness in that realm in which abstract consistency is expected, but unattainable thus far. It works well as a basis for satire, too and, like all fallacies, it works wonders with impressionable and uneducated juries in places like Alabama and Indiana: just try telling them that they have been subjected to a "reductio ad absurdum" argument and see how far that gets you.

Example:

A. The Civil War was wrong. The Federal government does not have the power to enforce, with arms, a union which was entered into voluntarily and which ought to be able to be undone voluntarily.

B. Oh, so you want to see slavery re-instituted in the US, you racist pig?

Example:

A. I believe that access to abortion should be decided by states or localities, and not imposed by an unelected Supreme Court on a whim with no legislative or voter input.

B. Oh, so you want thousands of 15 year-old innocent boy-crazy girls bleeding to death in back alleys from coat-hanger abortions?

Example:

A. The federal government ought to be able to wiretap Al Quaida phone and internet communications with people in America.

B. Oh, so it's OK with you for anonymous fed spooks to listen to your conversation with your wife saying "Dick, I know you're there at the Springfield Holiday Inn with that homewrecker bitch Sandy, but if you aren't home in 20 minutes I will cut your tiny balls off the next time you fall asleep in front of the TV and chop them up and serve them to you for breakfast in your scrambled eggs, you lousy bum."

Example:

A. In America, citizens have the right to bear arms.

B. Oh, so it's OK with you for hundreds of innocent kids to be killed each year with unregistered handguns?

Example:

A. Everyone in a free country ought to be able to live according to their own religious beliefs.

B. Oh, so it's OK for Wicca witches to dig up bodies to cut out gall bladders for ingredients for their magic potions?

See how easy it is? You can do this with any argument. It's a piece of cake to do, and it makes an impression. After a reductio ad absurdum has been dealt to you, it can be hard to scramble back to reason, because you have been put on the defensive and made to look ridiculous. A favorite of talk-show hosts, because it is quick and easy. As you can see, it is a close relative to the "Slippery Slope Fallacy," which we will address later on.

(Sorry if comments were blocked to this piece. Can't figure out how that occurred.)

JFK

I see Mr. Kelly fantasizing about what might have happened in the wake of the JFK assassination, if info about Cuba's possible involvement had come out. (Pres. Goldwater)

A President Goldwater would have been fine with me. Dylan, after all, thought he was great.

I have often fantasized about what would have happened if Kennedy had survived. The country would be in much better shape today without Lyndon Johnson. JFK was a natural conservative, a tax-reducer, pro civil rights and confident about America's role in the world. A damn shame.

(Are you old enough to remember this scene in the photo? I am. Robert Frost read a poem..."The Land was ours before we were the land's...")

The Mark Steyn Piece - Responses

Blogs and talk shows have been all over Steyn's provocative piece in the WSJ this week, which we noted here. It's rare for a columnist to create such a stir. Here are a few reactions I felt were interesting:

 A quote from Smith at American Thinker:

As I read Steyn’s words, I recalled the conclusion of agnostic Charles Murray in his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Science 800 BC to 1950. In the last chapter Murray discusses the role of transcendental goods in creating an environment for human accomplishment, the declining rate of accomplishment over the last 150 years when compared to population growth and the apparent lack of great art, music and literature in the 20th Century.

Confucianism and Aristotelianism along with the great religions in the world were for grownups, requiring mature contemplation of truth, beauty, and the good.  Cultures in which the creative elite are not engaged in that kind of mature contemplation don’t produce great art.

Steyn demonstrates that in Europe’s case, a culture that dwells only upon the here and now can’t seem to produce much of anything, much less works of art, music and literature to transcend the ages.  Writing solely of future artistic and scientific accomplishment, Murray is far more optimistic. He likens the period from the Enlightenment to the end of the 20th century as a sort of adolescence of the human race from which the elite will soon emerge with the adult realization that their parents were smarter than they ever thought they were.

Auster put some time into a serious rebuttal of Steyn, in a series of comments. One quote:

First, notice that Steyn is no longer making Western decadence, statism, PC, and lack of confidence the source of the crisis. Now he’s saying that Muslims themselves, opposed to the modern world, and expanding rapidly both in their home countries and in the West (“the fastest-breeding group on the planet”) are enough to destroy our civilization. And he's saying that there’s nothing we can do about this, unless he means to suggest that the only way we can survive the Muslim challenge is not by merely restoring a healthy native fertility level, but by surpassing the Muslims’ extremely high fertility rate and becoming the “fastest-breeding” group on the planet ourselves. Since the idea of Westerners breeding like Muslims is absurd, Steyn’s argument comes down, once again, to pure defeatism.

YARGB, reacting to the Auster piece, asks:

"do we have a right to expect more from writers like Steyn, by way of specific ideas about how Europe can save itself from welfarism and economic and demographic decline? Is it good enough to write despairing articles saying it's time to write-off Europe? Do we not owe Europeans, not only recognition of their great problems, but also a spirit of willingness to help them save themselves, if they emerge from present crises willing to throw off the current elites and the insanity of the bureaucratic monoliths they are presently building? Finally, can we North Americans hope to maintain our culture without the trans-Atlantic ties that have always been integral to who we are?"

And, finally, in a Letter to the Europeans by Hanson:

The world is becoming a more dangerous place, despite your new protocols of childlessness, pacifism, socialism, and hedonism. Islamic radicalism, an ascendant Communist China, a growing new collectivism in Latin America, perhaps a neo-czarist Russia as well, in addition to the famine and savagery in Africa, all that and more threaten the promise of the West.

So criticize us for our sins; lend us your advice; impart to America the wealth of your greater experience — but as a partner and an equal in a war, not as an inferior or envious neutral on the sidelines. History is unforgiving. None of us receives exemption simply by reason of the fumes of past glory.

Climate: Our Current Ice Age

I always had thought that we were living in an inter-glacial. Technically, no. Ice on the poles signifies a glacial period, and we are just fortunate enough to experience a minor retreat of the fluctuating glacier over the past ten thousand years. When the next glacial advance begins is a matter of debate, but it will turn New England back into a polar environment, buried under a mile of ice, when it decides to return. With dire results for our property values.

And now it turns out that greenhouse gasses may not protect us from that fate. Carbon dioxide may cause global cooling. Oh, man - not yet another reason for the enviro-anarchists to return us to the stone age.

Logical fallacies are the sins of the world of reason. Just as with sin in the world of morality, in the world of reason we all fall into fallaciousness sometimes - whether by accident or on purpose. And, like sin, logical fallacy can "work" in the interpersonal world, but it fails against harder realities every time.

The study of logical fallacy is the interesting, backdoor approach to thinking about logic and reasoning. It is difficult for us amateurs to define "logical" except to say that it exists where there is no illogicality - which is a Circular Fallacy. In a rational universe, none of us should be permitted to offer an opinion on anything without first making a study of logical fallacy.

Everyone seems to have their favorite bugaboo fallacies, and everyone also seems to have their favorite fallacies to use in debate, manipulation, persuasion, and discussion. (In politics, outright lying seems often to be the preferred mode of disputation, but we are dealing here with subtler matters: errors of which the user is often not aware, but also the deliberate abuse of logical errors to score points, to persuade, or to bamboozle.)

Here are some of my favorite bugaboos:

1. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Named after the guy who shoots at the barn wall, then draws a target circle around the hole. A favorite of ambulance-chasers and of the statistically-ignorant. You first locate a random cluster, then seek a "cause" for it. The fact is that patterns can occur randomly, and often do. Known as "data-mining" when done by unscrupulous academic researchers: They throw a ton of data into the computer and ask it to find any correlations it can. That ain't science.

2. The Gambler's Fallacy: If you coin-toss four heads in a row, the odds are higher that the next toss will be a tails. Wrong: Lady Luck has no memory. Still waiting for my Tech stocks to bounce back...eventually they have to, right?

3. Retrospective Determinism: The fallacious notion that because something did happen, it was bound to happen. "9-11 was inevitable because..." Colloquially known as 20/20 hindsight.

4. Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Mistaking correlation for causation, or even for a direct relationship. Eg, broccoli-eaters have less cancer, therefore broccoli prevents cancer. Another one of my favorite examples was the government study of hospitals which revealed that the great teaching hospitals had some of the poorest outcomes for open heart surgery. The reason, of course, was that they took on the cases no-one else would or could deal with. Thus the best hospitals had the lowest grades, rendering the entire costly, multi-year project ridiculous.

5. The Fallacy of the Single Cause: The fantasy that events have simple or single  "causes." Eg, "What was the cause of World War One?"

6. Ipse Dixit: Argument from authority rather than from data. Eg, "The New York Times says..." Logically permissible only when God, George Orwell, or G. K. Chesterton is speaking.

All of the above, and many more, can be found in more detail on the links below. I often feel that the most effective fallacious arguments can be made by combining or sequencing two or more fallacies, thus overwhelming the logical capacities and scrambling the brains of your helpless victim. Indeed, they rarely occur in pure form anyway. Sad to say, sometimes one must use fallacies for persuasion - even when cogent logic is on your side - because fallacies can often be more persuasive than fact or logic to the uninitiated (such as jurors, voters, and newspaper readers). Hence the lowly reputations of politicians and lawyers.

Aristotle may have been the first (no surprise there - he was the first to organize everything - an obsessional genius) to list logical fallacies in his Sophistical Refutations, in which he listed thirteen. The delightful website The Fallacy Files is a fine source, and Wikipedia has an exhaustive list, with many pretty good definitions, here. 

"Was Mann Weiss, Mann Sieht." I find that identifying fallacies can be good fun and, once one learns their names, it can be as amusing as bird-watching to silently identify the ones you see and hear everyday. It is more fun to notice the ones others use, but the real trick is to to identify the ones we find ourselves using. Self-deception is a great sin.

War vs. Law Enforcement

It is simple. Either we are at war with Jihadist Moslems who have proven that killing Jews and Christians, and destroying Western Civilization, is their goal, or we are facing a simple law enforcement problem.

The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, should have put us on adequate notice, because that was the Pearl Harbor of the Jihadists: it was a declaration of war by an organized enemy which was stateless, but supported by a number of states and tolerated by a number of witless European states. Thanks to America's pathetically lax and undemanding citizenship or immigration policies, we now have countless Jihadists, and Jihad supporters, in the US who would be delighted to see millions of us infidels die horrible deaths.

To deny that, or to ignore that, is suicidal. I don't even know why the Jihadists which have been caught are facing criminal charges. They should be in military tribunals and, if they are US citizens, should be charged with treason. As should the Washington leakers, even if they are Senators.

All or most Americans are criminals in big or small ways - whether caught or uncaught, we have all screwed up, driven drunk, had a bar fight, finessed a tax item, exercised bad judgement, or gone totally to the dark side, as every cop knows. But still loyal Americans, mainly, who would be happy to take up an M16 on our shores to repel invaders. We all have some basic values, even if we mess up due to personal weakness.

Treason to country is an entirely different deal. As is being an enemy of our country. That's why we have firing squads. And that is why we have to track them down. The Founding Fathers never really anticipated this kind of enemy: they lived in an age of Honor, but traitors to the Crown - all of the Founding Fathers - knew, and accepted, that hanging would be their fate if they lost the war. That was part of the deal. Our modern-time traitors need to know this too, and be confronted with the hangman. It's not a joke, even in a free country. Freedom is not free. And may I repeat another cliche: the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

If you are a US citizen, and supporting or assisting US enemies in a war (regardless of how you may feel about it), you are a traitor.

If you hate us, move to France or South Africa or Saudi Arabia or Russia. Please. You will find happiness there.

(Image from a painting by Pisanello)

Ya Gotta Laugh or Cry

Media seeks "truthiness." It's bigger than facts. Owner's Manual

"Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism"

From the review in The Telegraph:

"Who wrote this? That's right. It's P J O'Rourke, letting another poor booby tire himself out by bouncing pompously around the ring until such time as our man deems it fitting to deliver one of his knockout, two-syllable blows. No big words for P J. And never a great notion: "America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?' "

That's as good a definition of conservatism as I know, and funnier than anything you'll come across in Reflections on the Revolution in France. You could say the same of every sentence in O'Rourke's latest book, Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism (Picador, £7.99), a never less than provocative collection of his occasional pieces on wars and the "poultry with BMWs" who don't want to get involved in them any more. He may disparage the idea of ideas, but O'Rourke does have a pretty big idea of his own: everything is up for grabs as fuel for the great engine of his comedy."

Read entire entertaining piece/

Gotcha Games, and a Fecal  Election Strategy

With the Left and the press playing all of their gotcha games with the Administration, something is missing.  No-one, that I am aware of, has called for a cessation of wiretapping Al Quaida connections, and no-one has called for a cessation of hunting for nukes.

And, of course, none of those folks have made a stink about leaking NSA secrets, which is a truly serious matter compared to the trumped-up Plame silliness.

So it is clear to me that the Dem/press alliance has a strategy of sorts for the 2006 elections - keep throwing fecal matter against the wall hoping that some will stick - regardless of honor and regardless of the nation's interest. One problem with that strategy is that your hands get filthy.

Ho Hum. Another election in Iraq.

I am not the only one who is puzzled by the low-key press coverage of Iraq's election. I guess it means that peaceful, high-turnout elections for democratic governments in Iraq are now routine. Which means Mission Accomplished.

And one hell of a mission, too. No-one predicted all of these lunatics streaming in to try to prevent democracy and freedom and human rights, or Syria behaving in such a hostile manner. Or the US press and the "loyal" opposition behaving in such a hostile and negative manner to our providing human rights, political freedom, and women's rights to a place where sadistic state terrorism reigned under the jackboot of a destructive, anti-American, Hitler-worshipping, megalomaniacal thug. And a greaseball scumbag, too, who truly earned the exclusive services of someone like Ramsey Clark.

It is time, America, for us to give ourselves, our tough soldiers, our President, and our allies a big pat on the back for sticking with a nasty situation and creating a major opportunity for freedom and for American interests in an ugly, treacherous, and backward, but important, part of the world. 

Iraq has been given a great and costly gift. It is going to be up to them to hold it and keep it. I pray that they will, and that someday soon I can visit Iraq and see the great marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the ancient ruins of the first cities on the planet, and a free people treasuring their gift, purchased with the blood of many American, Brit, Allied, and Iraqi heroes of human dignity.

Christianity, Capitalism, and Technology

Stark's piece in Chronicle of Higher Education Review addresses the question of how and why technology and thus prosperity developed in Europe. One selection:

The most convincing answer to those questions attributes Western dominance to the rise of capitalism, which took place only in Europe. Even the most militant enemies of capitalism credit it with creating previously undreamed of productivity and progress. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that before the rise of capitalism, humans engaged "in the most slothful indolence"; the capitalist system was "the first to show what man's activity can bring about." Capitalism achieved that miracle through regular reinvestment to increase productivity, either to create greater capacity or improve technology, and by motivating both management and labor through ever-rising payoffs.

Supposing that capitalism did produce Europe's own "great leap forward," it remains to be explained why capitalism developed only in Europe. Some writers have found the roots of capitalism in the Protestant Reformation; others have traced it back to various political circumstances. But, if one digs deeper, it becomes clear that the truly fundamental basis not only for capitalism, but for the rise of the West, was an extraordinary faith in reason.

Read entire.

Right now, in southern New England. Dang point-and-shoot camera is too slow to catch the beauty of the flakes falling heavily this morning. The first good snowfall is always magical. If you don't have 4WD this morning, you'll have a bad day. Looks like about 8". If Danny doesn't show up to plow the driveway and the front of the barn in about ten minutes, I'll do it myself with the tractor, if I can get it started. I kind of hate to head off to Hartford without cleaning things up first. For the little wifie, you know? She has horses to care for. Not that a little snow slows her down.

Refresh your education, on line, at home in your spare time, for free! And no exams.

This is an early Christmas gift to our readers, from me. Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History by Steven Kreis.

It's really a survey, but with plenty of good links to dig deeper. It doesn't read the original sources for you, but it's highly enjoyable and informative, and it will bring back everything you once heard, or should have heard, in college, especially if you went to the great University of Chicago, or Columbia. Trouble is, they do the original sources but don't have the patience to tie it all together. That's why we appreciate real teacher guys like Kreis.

I am doing one lecture per day, but I will have to do it twice because of my ADD and the distraction of our short-skirted young receptionist who is the current cause of my Adult ADD. (Billable hours? Well, you know how hard we barristers work when we aren't drinking, reading the papers, surfing online, jousting on eBay, sighting in our muskets and bows,  hunting, dining, emailing, ordering books and movies and toys on Amazon, or looking at gals.)

From Abelard to the certifiably insane Nietzsche, Kreis does an excellent job of putting everything in historical context. I hope his fortunate but doubtless oatmeal-and- Budweiser-brained students appreciate what he does - his enthusiasm and his thoughtfulness. It is a true delight, for which I am grateful.

So, so tired of the Jesus-haters

How can anyone hate Jesus, whose message of love transformed, and challenged, the world?

Every year we go through this, and it is wearing me out. But I guess that's what the ACLU and their ilk intend to do: to attack the culture on multiple fronts with their endless supply of lawyers, and wear us down, break our hearts, and fill us with despair. Instapundit found this open declaration of war on Christmas.

Our Bird Dog did a gentle defense of Christmas the other day, which I appreciated. Do the haters know anything about Jesus, or what he preached to us all, Jews and gentiles alike? Why not find out? The American Princess has this to say:

"If we want to show respect for other religions as a society, we need to acknowledge outrightly the traditions and honor of their cultures, not simply try to homogenize the society into an atheistic or secular banner. Give them their due, their 2%--don't force us into a conglomeration of non-descript individuals.

Of course, conformity is central to liberalism. The idea that we are all the same and should all be exactly the same is the foundational principle of the Workers movment. Its the second verse in Imagine, and its scary.

Time to take Christmas back."

Hear hear. But the strongest words come from Paul at Powerline, in a piece entitled Jewish Leaders Freak Out:

"As Feder suggests, it is not the "religious right" that is seeking to transform this country. In the America to which Jews flocked, homosexuals could not marry one another, the Ten Commandments were publicly displayed, and our coins said "In God We Trust." If liberal Jews wish to reverse all of this, it's their right to try -- that's one of the things that makes our country great. But to demonize those who want to preserve the traditional social, moral, and religious arrangements strikes me as vicious and not very smart."

Paul didn't quite say "Love it or leave it," but almost. Would I move to Israel and tell them to remove their menorahs, and to shut up about Moses? Or to Uganda and tell them to get rid of their god and all of his strange minions so we aren't "offended"?  Let's get a little "tolerant" and respectful here.

As the Princess points out, Christian niceness and tolerance and accommodation makes Christians relatively easy to roll over, manipulate, and get the better of. We are taught to turn the other cheek. To all of you Jesus-phobics and Christian-haters, I beg you to find some other place to create an atheistic, tradition-killing paradise. Maybe Russia - woops, that didn't quite work out - maybe consider Saudi Arabia, Uganda, France or Mongolia. Or is the anglophone world the weakest in spine, the most tolerant, and thus the best target for your plans?

And thank you heartless souls for leaving us alone in the future. We've had enough.  The ankle-biting is just too intolerant and cruel, and just plain annoying. A push-back should not be necessary, but we have had it with lions in the Colosseum. Been there, done that. Enough with the lions.

I have a better idea: learn about Christ and his message to the world, and understand and respect this powerful message, even if you don't accept it. If you have a better and more holy message, lucky you. Cling to it, but leave me alone.

And, no - I don't care what Bush has on his Christmas card this year.

And yet another book

Another good Christmas book: The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by Basil Mahon. It's on my list.

Leave it to the Italians

Italian researchers have discovered a nerve growth factor, (NGF), which correlates with falling in love.

Is it news to any of us who have been young and in love that requited passion fades within a year? (Or that unrequited or unconsumated desire can last a long time?)

This NCG normalizes within a year of a love relationship. But is it cause or effect? Regardless, it is definitely "chemistry." And real life definitely, inevitably, but sadly, runs counter to this chemical bliss.

Time Lines

Without a mental time line, or, preferably, a visual time line, I have a tough time getting a good grip on history. While one can learn the most from making one yourself (I've always wanted to make one on the upstairs hallway with magic markers), there are good ones you can buy. Hyperhistory has an online World History timeline, and you can push Hard Copy to buy one. Good Christmas present for history buffs.

Guy Stuff

I will refer our readers to three sites today which cater to outdoorsmen and hunters/shooters. Santa knows very well that guys like gear.

First is Filson. Some of their stuff is more rugged than anyone ever needs - except for lumberjacks - but so are SUVs. Their famous heavy-duty waxed cotton "tin pants" trousers not only stand up by themselves, but they will hold you up too. Their unfashionable stuff is good for one or two lifetimes.

The second is Griffin & Howe. Like Kevin's, they cater to the gentleman sportsman. They have very nice stuff, and will make you (or your wife or girlfriend) a very nice custom shotgun - and they are very good to our conservation charity.

Fascinating Piece on France

I guess it should go without saying that, since why would I post an unedifying article? But this review of five books by TNR's Paul Berman is a tour de force, and an excellent example of why I have never abandoned TNR: they always have smart people, even if you don't always agree with them.

One quote:

"France's domestic achievements were genuine, even if the achievements never did penetrate into the suburban housing projects. And from this angle, too, from the perspective of France's domestic peace, the America of George Bush seemed a little worrisome. In America, Christianity had not been pushed out of political life. On the contrary, Christianity in America seemed to have gone insane, with the evangelical sects as principal evidence. Nor was the welfare state looking too healthy in America. The welfare state was shrinking. Nor was capital punishment at an end, in its American version. America seemed poised to execute Mumia Abu-Jumal, who was regarded in France as a famous black leader--a martyr awaiting his martyrdom. 

Now, this particular view of American conditions might have looked a little different if the French had kept in mind the peculiarities of American history. In the United States, evangelical sects have always been insane. ("Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States," Tocqueville wisely observed.) Even so, Christianity in America has by and large served as democracy's foundation, and not its enemy--which was another of Tocqueville's points. Nor has capital punishment ever played the kind of political role in America that it used to play in France. ("North America," Tocqueville went on to say, "is, I believe, the only region on earth where not a single citizen has been deprived of his life for a political offense for the past fifty years.") As for the welfare state, the French critics had a point, though perhaps it could be argued that jobs, too, have a virtue, and not just jobless benefits.  

In any case, instead of looking at these matters from the vantage point of American history, the French observers tended to adopt the vantage point of French history and concluded that America was retreating into the Middle Ages, even if America had never been in the Middle Ages. And since Bush in his vigor and naïveté seemed to be in a missionary mood, the danger arose, or seemed to arise, that America's clericalism, its state violence, and its anti-proletarian biases might, like McDonald's, end up spreading to the European continent, and France's achievements might get undone, and the miserable French past might turn out to be the miserable future."  

Read entire. It is a damn good piece of writing, even if you are sick of thinking about France.

Yet another book to mention

Must be getting close to Christmas. By John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: City of Falling Angels.

From the interesting Amazon review: "I was not terribly surprised when he (the author) later told me, "Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say."

C.S. Lewis

Gopnik in The New Yorker takes a fresh look at the complicated life of the beloved (at least in the US) story-teller, medieval literature scholar, and Christian apologist extraordinaire:

"The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end."

Was he a prig, a sensualist, a saint, or a mensch? A fantasist constricted by dogma? An everyday neurotic, mixed-up writer?  I'd guess the latter. Read the whole thing if you are at all interested in this brilliant and fascinating fellow who was transformed by earthly love, and then loss, late in his life.

A brief bio of Lewis here. There are lots of C.S. Lewis websites. Here's one.

By the way, Disney's (!) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes out Dec. 9. Can Disney possibly do it justice?

And finally, if you ever wondered in which order the Chronicles of Narnia ought to be read, here's the website on that important subject. (I read them out of order.)

Heartwarming

From AOL news: "He looked dirt poor," said his friend Jim McDermand. But the frugal old bachelor had an estate upward of $3 million when he died in 1997 at 88. And it turned out that the curmudgeon secretly had a benevolent side.

The Great Falls farmer directed in his will that his money be used to buy up land and donate it to the state for use by hunters."

Bless your heart, LeRoy.