Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture » August 2007

The President’s Painted Corner

Srdja Trifkovic — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:15:55 +0000

A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered the war in 1917 because Woodrow Wilson wanted to do so (rightly or wrongly), not because he had to do so.

A mature power will never allow its promises to foreigners to entail risks of conflict that exceed the benefits of discretion. Bismarck would have been appalled at the manner in which his inept successors had committed Wilhelmine Germany to upholding and defending the moribund Habsburg Empire, come what may. The end result was the death of both; but, without that carte blanche from Berlin, Austria could have behaved more responsibly in July 1914, possibly saving Europe from self-destruction.

A sensible power will not allow its weaker overseas protégés to call the shots. Algérie Française was not a colony but an integral part of metropolitan France inhabited by millions of non-Arab French citizens who believed that they were owed open-ended protection. De Gaulle told the pieds-noirs that he “understood” them; then, he promptly cut Algeria off when he decided that the cost of keeping her exceeded any possible benefits. This painful act enabled the Fifth Republic to embark on an economic and political recovery that halted half a century of decline.

A rational power will not create new hotbeds of instability while the old ones remain unresolved. Mussolini’s unprovoked attack on Greece in October 1940, while his forces in North Africa were at grave risk from the British, was a madness repeated on a grand scale in June 1941, when Hitler unleashed the Barbarossa even though England remained undefeated.

And finally, a responsible power will avoid foreign entanglements that violate its moral and cultural norms. The Crimean War was a crime; the Eastern Question, its punishment. Supporting jihadists against Christians in Bosnia in the 1990’s has yielded scores of Bosnian-trained or -connected jihad-terrorists.

Washington’s Kosovo policy violates all five principles.

It is not prudent for the United States to insist that Kosovo should and will become independent—as President George W. Bush did in Tirana last June, followed by similar sermons from Dr. Rice and her aides on an almost daily basis—even as it is obvious that Russia will veto any attempt to achieve that goal through the U.N. Security Council, and even as the European Union is increasingly reluctant to participate in any scheme to bypass the United Nations. Statements by U.S. officials that Kosovo’s independence is “inevitable” are a classic case of irresponsible policymakers painting themselves into a corner on a peripheral issue, and then claiming that the issue had morphed into a test of American resolve.

A mature, self-confident and globally hegemonistic “hyperpower” would never allow Kosovo to become such a test for three reasons.

Quite apart from its historic, cultural, moral, and legal aspects, the issue of who controls the southern Serbian province is perfectly irrelevant to American interests. It is a small, land-locked piece of real estate, of dubious “objective” value, away from all major Balkan transit corridors, and not nearly as rich in natural resources as both Serbs and Albanians like to imagine. If Kosovo were to disappear tomorrow, no ordinary American would be able to tell the difference.

The change of Kosovo’s status against the will of Belgrade, in addition to being a clear violation of international law, would set a precedent potentially detrimental to U.S. interests. To enable an ethnic minority to secede from an internationally recognized state on the grounds of that minority’s numerical preponderance in a given locale would open a Pandora’s box of claims all over the world, not least among Russian speakers in the Crimea, parts of Estonia and Latvia, northern Kazakhstan, and eastern Ukraine. It could also affect the future of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and perhaps even California, when Mexicans achieve a simple majority in those states. (The question is indeed “when,” not “if.”) State Department officials Nicholas Burns and Daniel Fried still insist that no precedent would be set by creating an independent Kosovo, but they cannot control reality, and their assurances are nonsensical.

The Muslim world will not be appeased by Kosovo today any more than it was appeased by Bosnia a decade ago. America will not earn any brownie points among the world’s “Jihadists of all color and hue” (to borrow a phrase from Rep. Tom Lantos) for creating a new Muslim state in the heart of Europe. Albanian “gratitude” would prove as valuable to America today as it has, over the years, to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China. On the other hand, the failure to create an independent, internationally recognized Kosovo would be yet another sign that Emperor Bush has no clothes and that America has no sureness of touch. Furthermore, favoring the imposition of a “solution” from the outside against the will of one of the parties could set a dangerous long-term precedent for Israel.

Our policy is not sensible. It panders to the aspirations of a small and primitive, yet shrewdly opportunistic, polity with territorial pretensions against all of her neighbors. President George W. Bush declared in Tirana last June that America is committed to Kosovo’s independence, and he was greeted almost as enthusiastically as Benito Mussolini, Nikita Khrushchev, and Chou En-Lai had been greeted by the Albanians over the decades. As Nicholas Stavrou noted in the National Herald, Mr. Bush reflects the Albanians’ talent for choosing patrons who fulfill three criteria: They must be big enough, far enough, and willing to offend the interests of Albania’s neighbors:

President Bush’s venture into the Balkan tinderbox is nothing short of a blatant provocation aimed at two nations that stood side by side with the United States in two wars, Serbia and Greece. It is part and parcel of a neo-conservative agenda, formulated by the same gang that produced the Iraq war . . . and threatens to engulf the Middle East into a regional conflagration. The ultimate goal, of course, is the conversion of Russia into a first class enemy. The new Cold War warriors view the Balkans as a “logical extension of the Middle East” that ought to be part of a new arrangement that would facilitate integration of Islamic and non-Islamic cultures. Russia, in their view, cannot be trusted with any role in their nefarious schemes to “modernize” Islam and redefine the Middle East as a “region that starts in the Persian Gulf and ends in Sarajevo.”

It is plainly irrational to insist on Kosovo’s independence, with all the risks such a policy entails, while the United States faces so much other “unfinished business” around the globe. The list is well known and depressing. Iraq is a disaster, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Afghanistan is a lesser calamity only when compared with Iraq. Any solution to the challenge presented by Iran will depend on Washington’s ability to have Russia on its side as a partner, which is impossible if Moscow’s concerns over Kosovo are treated as illegitimate. Russia is also an essential partner in helping control Kim Jong Il and devising a sustainable long-term energy policy for the Western world.

Far from being deterred by Washington’s apparent commitment to Kosovo’s independence, Russian President Vladimir Putin sees it as a golden opportunity to embarrass Mr. Bush and show the world that Russia can no longer be treated with the disdainful arrogance she endured under Boris Yeltsin. With the Bush administration’s options diminishing, Putin’s are increasing.

On the diplomatic front, Russia can and will veto any resolution presented to the Security Council that is based on Ahtisaari’s moribund plan and that assumes independence as the final outcome. Resolution 1244 cannot be legally bypassed, and it is unequivocal concerning Serbia’s sovereignty. If the European Union (under American pressure) tries to bypass the United Nations, however, Putin can retaliate by playing his energy card. According to Russian and global-affairs analyst George Friedman of Stratfor,

The Russians would cut supplies if provoked. Kosovo really is that big of an issue to them. If they gave in on this, all of Putin’s efforts to re-establish Russia as a great power would be undermined. Putin wants to remind Germany in particular—but also other former Soviet satellites—that thwarting Russia carries a price. If the European Union were to unilaterally [sic] act against Russian wishes, Putin would have to choose between appearing as if he is all talk and no action, and acting. Putin would choose the latter.

According to the same source, Putin also has a military option. Contrary to popular belief, the Russian military retains an excellent core, particularly in its airborne regiments. Moscow could fly a regiment of troops to Belgrade, use Serbian trucks to move to the administrative line dividing Kosovo from the rest of Serbia, and threaten to move into Kosovo to take their place in KFOR:

To do this, they would have to fly through Romanian or Hungarian airspace. They might be denied over-flight privileges, but the Russians might not ask permission and [the Rumanians and Hungarians] have no appetite for that kind of confrontation. Assume, then, that the troops reached the Kosovo border and crossed over. Would KFOR troops open fire on them?

Of course not. Western Europe is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, and it cannot afford to follow Washington into an open-ended confrontation over a peripheral issue. Signals from Moscow indicate that challenging Kosovo’s independence militarily would prompt Russia to call NATO defense capabilities into question, which could leave the Europeans even more fractured. “Do not assume that the Russians would not dare try such a move,” the Russian source insists:

The Russians are itching for an opportunity to confront the West—and win. In the case of Kosovo, should they choose to make an issue of it, they have the diplomatic, economic and military options to force the West to back down. Condoleezza Rice has said that Kosovo will never be returned to Serbian rule. Putin would love to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter what the U.S. secretary of state wants.

In short, Kosovo is an asymmetric issue. Mr. Bush cares about it only as it relates to U.S. “credibility.” The second greatest blunder of his presidency may result from his willingness to accept the assurances of inherited Clintonite bureaucrats of Mr. Burns’ ilk, who have insisted that the Serbs will cave in and that the Russians will budge.

If push comes to shove, Mr. Bush will face Moscow all alone. There is a great deal of dissent in Europe, from Madrid to Athens to Bucharest and Bratislava, but not even those Europeans who are nominally pro-independence—notably, the Germans—would sacrifice a single day’s supply of natural gas over Albanian claims. By contrast, this is, for Serbia, an existential issue and, for Russia, a litmus test of her ability to be a great power once again.

The most important reason the United States should not support Kosovo’s independence is and always has been cultural and civilizational; but trying to explain that to the chief executive who is fanatically supportive of a blanket amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens in the United States is as futile as trying to reform Islam.

George W. Bush has painted himself into a tight corner in the Balkans, and he will get a bloody nose if he does not relent. That is bad news for the church-burning Albanian Muslims of Kosovo, and bad news for their heroin-financed lobby in Washington, but it is very good news for America and the civilized world.

Srdja Trifkovic is Chronicles' foreign-affairs editor.

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of Culture.

Liberality, the Basis of Culture

Fr. Hugh Barbour — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:54:08 +0000

The Ultimate Homeschool.

“ . . . redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”
—Ephesians 5:15

“Go day, come day. Lord, send Sunday.” My paternal grandmother could be counted on to say these words at least once per week. Whether burdened with some mundane task or confronted with the evidence of human frailty, the prospect of the day of worship and witness, of rest and reading, of visiting and victuals was a precious consolation to her. Sunday reigned sovereign over the other days of the week, and the breach of its observance, whether by absence from church or by skimping on dinner or by mowing the lawn, was proof not only of infidelity, but of incivility. When local authorities began to permit Sunday openings, she saw through their pretense and predicted dire effects. “They think that they can steal time from the Almighty and that He won’t notice. But He’s the One who said ‘Six days shalt thou labor, and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God.’ Soon enough and they’ll begin to think that they’re almighty themselves, but He’ll show them who’s the King.”

My grandmother was surely not a philosopher and even less a theologian. (Her best effort at showing some little appreciation of her grandson’s Catholicity was when she said, “The Roman religion is just too deep for me.”) Even so, her approach to time and work and worship was in line with the deepest of insights, in particular with those of the great German Thomist Josef Pieper, who, in the summer of 1947, presented a paper in Bonn entitled “Musse und Kult” (“Leisure and Worship”), known in English as Leisure, the Basis of Culture. The American edition of this conference, with a splendid Introduction by T.S. Eliot—a fine piece in its own right—was first published in 1952. Ever since, it has set the standard for contemporary treatments of the meaning of culture as cult—that is, as founded in the celebration of divine worship.

Pieper’s study hinges on several telling etymologies from which are to be unpacked all the implications of his theory of the essential form of human society. One is the Greek schole, which means “leisure”; from this word is derived the Latin schola and, hence, the English school, as well as its equivalents in all the Romance and Germanic languages. Regarding the leisure necessary for contemplation, Pieper writes:

“We work in order to have leisure.” . . . That maxim is not . . . an illustration invented for the sake of clarifying this thesis: it is a quotation from Aristotle; and the fact that it expresses the view of a cool-headed workaday realist (as he is supposed to have been) gives it all the more weight. Literally, the Greek says “we are unleisurely in order to have leisure.” “To be unleisurely”—that is the word the Greeks used not only for the daily toil and moil of life, but for ordinary everyday work.

“Greek,” Pieper points out, “only has a negative”—a-scholia—“just as Latin has neg-otium.” Another word is cultus, to which is related cultura and, evidently, culture and all its equivalents in other European languages. In his Preface to the American translation, Pieper points out:

The word “cult” in English is used exclusively, or almost exclusively, in a derivative sense. But here it is used, along with worship, in its primary sense. It means something else than, and something more than, religion. It really means fulfilling the ritual of public sacrifice. That is a notion which contemporary “modern” man associates almost exclusively and unconsciously with uncivilized, primitive peoples and with classical antiquity. For that very reason it is of the first importance to see that the cultus, now as in the distant past, is the primary source of man’s freedom, independence and immunity within society. Suppress that last sphere of freedom, and freedom itself, and all our liberties, will in the end vanish into thin air.

This characterization of freedom and liberty as the fruits of right worship directs our attention to a third telling etymology, that of the artes liberales, the “liberal arts.” Pieper clarifies the notion for us with arguments from great authorities, ancient and modern:

What are the liberal arts? In his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas gives this definition: “Only those are called liberal or free which are concerned with knowledge; those which are concerned with utilitarian ends that are attained through activity, however, are called servile.” “I know well,” Newman says, “that knowledge may resolve itself into an art, and seminate in a mechanical process and in tangible fruit; but it may also fall back upon that Reason, which informs it, and resolve itself into Philosophy. For in one case it is called Useful Knowledge, in the other Liberal.” The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves; the servile arts are those which have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.

This third consideration, of the meaning of liberal, will shortly lead us to some progress in thought even beyond Pieper’s little—klein aber fein—masterpiece, but wholly in line with it. First, however, let us sum up his teaching: A true human society, a genuine culture, is based on those activities that are ends in themselves, which do not serve any purpose other than knowledge and love. Among these contemplative activities of free men possessing leisure time, the highest place, the one most formally determining of culture, is common worship, the celebration of the cultus of the Divinity, the sacrifice of praise, surely the most self-sufficient of human and social activities. The preeminent cultural form is, thus, the feast, the holy day, the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, which, because of the Christian dispensation, in fact becomes every day, since on every day this worship is offered. Pieper sums up his high point:

The Christian cultus, unlike any other, is at once a sacrifice and a sacrament. Insofar as the Christian cultus is a sacrifice held in the midst of creation which is affirmed by the sacrifice of the God-man—every day is a feast day; and in fact the liturgy knows only feast days, even working days being feria . . . We hope . . . that in the performance of [Christian worship] man, “who is born to work” may be truly “transported” out of the weariness of daily labor into an unending holiday, carried away out of the straitness of the workaday world into the heart of the universe.

The grandeur of Pieper’s vision of human existence in society can hardly be overstated. He has pointed out the key to the sublimation of all our activities—not only of the necessarily servile arts that serve the others but of the sciences and philosophy—into an act of worship, which contains the praise of the whole creation under God. Even so, his vision can be transcended, for there is a more fundamental sense of the “liberal” of the utterly free and at ease, which underlies the whole, and goes beyond mere culture and even creaturely worship, by reaching the Source of all things whatsoever and indicating the attribute most characteristic, most proper to Him. In discussing whether God can be said to have the moral virtues that issue forth in action, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us in his Summa contra Gentiles I:xciii:

The ultimate end for which God wills all things in no way depends on the things that exist for the sake of that end, either in regard to being or to some particular perfection. Hence, He does not will to give someone His goodness so that thereby something may accrue to Himself, but because for Him to make such a gift befits Him as the fount of goodness. But to give something not for the sake of some benefit expected from the giving, but because of the goodness and appropriateness of the giving, is an act of liberality, as appears from the Philosopher in Ethics iv. God, therefore, is supremely liberal, and as Avicenna says, He alone can be properly called liberal, for every agent other than God acquires some good from his action, which is the intended end. Scripture sets forth the liberality of God, saying in a psalm “When thou openest thy hand, they shall all be filled with good” and in James “Who giveth to all men abundantly and upbraideth not.”

“God alone is supremely liberal . . . He alone can be properly, proprie, called liberal.” Quite simply, it is impossible for a creature to perform any good action, even the most lofty, without some kind of product—namely, the hitherto unattained end intended and gained by his action. Even if it is an end in itself, the action of one who—unlike God—is not identical with his own good brings about his own perfection and happiness, not to mention the merit that claims a reward in justice. But God acts without the least increase in His own perfection or happiness, gaining nothing, solely out of goodness, and so He alone is truly and properly, fully and perfectly free, liberal.

Aristotle already had a shadowy hint of an understanding of the ultimate sense of the service God’s intelligent creatures owe Him when, in the crowning considerations of his Metaphysics, he explains that the powers of heaven are drawn by the contemplation of the Supreme Good and Ultimate Final Cause of all things to the imitation of His causality, each having its own proper effect on the beings lower in the hierarchy of the cosmos. Aquinas, commenting on this passage, describes the purpose of their activity as one of assimilation, of becoming like the Good, by imitating His self-diffusive generosity ut assimilentur ei in causando. They become like Him by doing as He does, pouring out their inner riches of mind and will on those beneath them. In the Christian era, this office has not been left merely (what a bold “merely” that is!) to the angels, but has been extended through the Incarnation of God to men. They become “sharers in the divine nature” and form a nation of priests, prophets, and kings. Becoming images and likenesses of the divine liberality, the free and easy beneficence of God, then, is the end of those who contemplate in leisure the higher things and who, in worship, not only praise as creatures but pour out as priests the “good things to come.” There is a kind of paradox here, which, upon examination, is only a recapitulation on a higher level: The final perfection of contemplative leisure is an action, a work of generous liberality. Saint Paul reminds us of the words of Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Here is his meaning.

“It is better to give light than merely to burn.” This is Aquinas’ tag to introduce his rationale for the life of the apostle being higher in dignity than that of the mere contemplative, since the apostle not only gazes lovingly at the Good but bestows it on others. This is not the banal activism of the bored humanitarian; it is the intense, contemplative drive of one who has become like the One Whom he has contemplated in worship. As our Western world becomes more and more clearly the place of the sunset of all that is leisurely, free, and pious, it is this effect of the Christian cultus that must stand out more clearly: the love of neighbor as the visible sign of the love of God. We ourselves must give others the time, the liberty, and the sacred precinct to possess with us “the power to become the sons of God.” This is the needful liberality that must be the basis of culture. And all the more because it will only come about in those places where we ourselves undertake so great a work on so small a scale. The great workaday world is not going to do it for us. It will be for a time (please excuse the macaronic pun) the ultimate “home-schole”—and not only for children, but for our neighbors and friends; and not only for worship, but for everything human. Grandmother’s house on Sunday may be the very statio orbis for which we are looking.

There is a final caveat. Having contemplated the Good, and now returning to enlighten our fellow men, we may share the fate of the one who returned to the darkness of the Platonic cave to free those who know only shadows and who confuse words with realities. But then, did He not say, “and if I be lifted up from the earth I will draw all men unto Myself”? And is this not why our Sunday is a feast?

Fr. Hugh is prior of St. Michael’s Abbey in Trabuco Canyon, California.

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Jekyll and Hyde in a Box

George McCartney — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:56:41 +0000

Mr. Brooks

Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
Directed by Bruce A. Evans
Screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon

Last month, the Wall Street Journal gleefully doted on billionaire wonderboy Stephen Schwarzman of the aptly named Blackstone Group, a firm dealing in private equities and leveraged buyouts. Schwarzman, George W. Bush’s roommate at Yale and Skull and Bones brother, wished to inform all who cared that, when he pursues a deal, he wants to “inflict pain” and “kill off” his rivals. So there we have it. In American business today, it pays to have murder in your heart. Who can doubt the wisdom of Schwarzman’s lethal intent? He’s a billionaire seven times over. Can’t argue with that.

There is some collateral damage, however: It’s not just rivals who must go to the chopping block. The American public also must feel pain so that Schwarzman and his kind may enjoy the success they so richly deserve. American workers must watch their jobs disappear as they are replaced by illegal immigrants here or by slave labor in China. If this leaves Americans scrambling for enough to support their families, and strips them of health insurance and pensions—well, too bad. And so what if Chinese manufacturers use lead paint on the toys American children play with or sweeten cough medicine with toxins? These are the costs of doing business, and the business of business is giving the business to the weak so the rich can live safely within their gated communities.

In his new film, Mr. Brooks, Bruce A. Evans takes Schwarzman’s business philosophy to its logical conclusion. The eponymous protagonist, Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner), is a self-made man who owns a fabulously profitable box factory in Portland. In one scene, we see him making a deal with Chinese executives. We are left to assume that he is undercutting the American workforce with cheap Asian labor, but nothing is said explicitly. (It wouldn’t do to offend the Asian market.) Economic murder, however, doesn’t fully satisfy Mr. Brooks’ needs. It’s not enough to inflict mortal misery on losers. He must step outside his corporate box (get it?) and kill them, literally. This he does with a CEO’s meticulous care for neatness and efficiency, choosing strangers on whom he can impose his deadly upper-class will. At one point, he has occasion to caution a pesky wannabe who has the nerve to try to get in on his action. This scruffy lower-class loser thinks he can blackmail Brooks into helping him kill one of his enemies. With the measured patience of an executive fully expert in dealing with underling upstarts, he quietly replies, “We could, but then we wouldn’t be in control.”

Evans seems to have wanted to invoke and perhaps satirize the dirty little secret of American movies: class warfare. As a mass medium, film has traditionally flattered the little people by portraying the swells as insufferable snobs, hopelessly inept buffoons, or sadistic bullies. As different as they were, the films of King Vidor, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, and Frank Capra had this in common: The wealthy were not to be trusted. The villain of the Alien franchise, to take another example, is not really the glistening monster with the famously metal chompers. After all, the poor creature can’t really help itself. The real monster is the nameless company who keeps sending Sigourney Weaver into deep space so that—against her will, of course—she can bring back a live specimen of an organism that may prove beneficial to the arms industry. More recently, Syriana suggested that it’s not the Islamists or even Al Qaeda who need killing but the honchos at Mobil and Exxon; after all, they’re the ones who are economically murdering Americans at the gas pump while bloodily disposing of emirs who long to use their oil leverage to help their own people.

With Mr. Brooks, Evans tries to up the ante but then bluffs his hand either incompetently or cynically. Although the screenplay he wrote with Raynold Gideon seems to take sardonic aim at class conflict, it seems to have been blunted by several script conferences too many. One of its major subplots ties itself up in knots, trying to parallel the film’s main line of action but without ever committing itself to reinforcing the film’s suppressed theme. It concerns Brooks’ personal Javert, the frozen-faced Demi Moore, playing Tracy Atwood, a homicide detective. (Is it possible to trust a story that features a woman named Tracy?) She indulges a passion that complements Mr. Brooks’: tracking and, if possible, murdering lesser beings. And, wouldn’t you know it, by virtue of her daddy’s will, she’s even richer than Mr. Brooks. You’re wondering why a woman in possession of a fortune computed to be in excess of $60 million would stalk Portland’s mean streets, armed and ferociously dangerous? Please, get with the program. This woman enjoys taking down class-challenged killers, especially if they come pierced, tattooed, and brain-dead from their underclass slums. By having her pursue Mr. Brooks, the film indulges in irony. Tracy has no idea that her current prey is one of the entitled. She assumes that he is one of the impoverished goons. Fortunately, she still has time to push around some little people and, even better, blow away a couple of dirt-bag losers. But only twice, in muted asides, does Evans draw our attention to her class affinity with Mr. Brooks. And Moore never shares a frame with Costner. We do learn that he admires Tracy’s decision to do what she’s good at, despite having enough to live on perpetual holiday, jetting from St. Croix to Paris to New York. Sort of like himself, you see. They are committed to keeping the little people in their place—six feet under their own.

This would have been a promising premise, had Evans and Gideon not decided to tart up the film with sordid graphics. I can just hear the script conferences, the voices of the producers (one of whom is Mr. Costner) alternately wheedling and threatening as they demand more action, more gore, more sex, and less—much less—of anything that could be deemed offensive to any interest group whatsoever. Of course, there is one acceptable target: the terminally scruffy, those who lack both the means to purchase the kind of clothing that Mr. Brooks wears and, probably, the ten bucks to get into a showing of the film. It’s Filmmaking Economics 101: Ensure the box office, and damn the theme. So, after an intriguing opening, the film caves in to what American producers claim the public craves.

After receiving his man-of-the-year award, Brooks returns home with his lovely wife. On the way, Marshall (William Hurt) mysteriously appears in the back seat. He is Brooks’ sinister hidden self. Marshall leans forward, a knowing smile spreading over his lugubriously pale face. “You deserve a treat,” he murmurs. A treat? He means another murder. Brooks resists. He has been on the wagon from murder for two years, thanks to weekly Alcoholic Anonymous meetings where he proclaims himself an addict, prudently leaving out what he is addicted to. But the “thirst has returned,” the narrator tells us, adding that “it never really left.” So, when Marshall pleadingly insists, Brooks descends to his basement, where he opens a huge closet in which hang, Batman like, about a dozen identical black Gore-Tex suits. He dons one, slips on black army boots, and slinks into the night, as Marshall nudges him on seductively. Spotting a couple in a dance studio, he follows them home. With no trouble at all, he enters their apartment and catches them in flagrante delicto. Their lovemaking is at once enthusiastically athletic and yet carefully posed for the camera. Evans wants to make sure the men in the audience have a good view of the woman, whose body looks to be barely that of a teenager’s. Curiously, we get no such shots of the fellow. Even when Brooks pulls out his big black gun and shoots the couple repeatedly, it’s the young lady who is posed for maximum scrutiny. And afterward, to satisfy his obsession, Brooks himself arranges her limp limbs to ogling advantage. Marshall then counsels him to go home and make love to his beautiful wife. Does this make Evans a necrophiliac voyeur? Not necessarily. Far more likely, he’s just a businessman protecting his investment by giving his customers an added incentive to part with their money.

This lurid scene comes early in the film, and, though nothing so explicit follows, it’s enough to put paid to any pretense that Evans might have made to storytelling integrity. The sequence has no other purpose than to create remunerative sensation. As with all such pandering to prurient curiosity, it does not contribute to the film’s theme. Instead, it throws us out of the story altogether, forcing us to wonder, among much else, how Costner and the naked actors felt about being in such sweaty proximity to one another. And why did Evans choose to use an actress with the body of a 14-year-old? Is popular culture exploring new limits? Is pedophilia headed for the big screen? A couple of months ago, I wrote about the Squirm Index. See this scene (I heartily recommend you do not) with the wrong relative, or with any relative at all, and you will not only squirm but churn with embarrassment—unless, of course, you’ve been entirely inured to such sights by daily doses of HBO’s more mature offerings. For me, the film never recovered from this sordid spectacle.

Evans also indulges a sense of humor that can only be called odious.

When Brooks’ daughter unexpectedly returns from college to tell her parents that she is pregnant, the CEO daddy summons all his executive gravitas to issue this directive: “There’ll be no abortion.” What a lark! This serial killer is pro-life! When daughter and wife stiffen in disapproval of his edict, he tacks like the seasoned executive he is. “A grandchild will be a wonderful gift,” he explains by way of mollifying the wayward miss. Later, he discovers that she may be implicated in an ax murder in Palo Alto. Does she have the serial-killer gene? he wonders. Of course she does. Although we never find out whether she has slaughtered anyone, it’s dollars to doughnuts that, if she did, the victim would have owned a Corolla rather than a Porsche. Here again, the script’s apparent original intention peeks out. The killer gene is a metaphor. It stands for economic privilege. Though carrying a child, the young lady tellingly urges dad to retire and let her run the company. She can’t wait to push the lowly workers around.

The only thing interesting about this film is the interplay between Costner and Hurt. They make an intriguing Jekyll and Hyde pairing. Hurt, an actor I never cared for in the past, has become a compelling presence in his recent outings. In A History of Violence, he played an Irish-American crime boss with an unnerving mixture of charm and menace. Here, he comes across as a cajoling, insinuating Hyde intent on luring Costner’s upright Jekyll back to the pleasures of taking life. “Why do you fight it, Earl?” he pleads with a needling, ironic whine. And when Brooks begins to come around, Marshall fairly sings out, “I love what you’re thinking,” sweeping away any lingering doubts about the wisdom of yielding to his overmastering passion. Costner seems to have responded to Hurt’s sinuous energy with a particularly artful portrayal of a man hemmed but not suffocated by prudence. When this Hyde and Jekyll fully commit to their murderous intentions, they cannot help wallowing in the moment. Heads thrown back, they yield to fits of maniacal laughter. You’d think they had just hatched an especially profitable downsizing scheme in the board room.

Such scenes give an indication of what this film could have been, had Evans and its producers not betrayed their audience as cynically as any rapacious outsourcer betrays American workers.

George McCartney is Chronicles' film editor.

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns

Egon Richard Tausch — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:20:17 +0000

As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are totally ignorant of their own histories, differences, and contributions to the larger groups, until, eventually, everyone wears the same garb (lederhosen, feathered hats, kilts, identical regalia), employs the same false architecture, adopts the same fake accent, sings the same pseudo folk songs, dances the only folk dance he knows, and claims the same beliefs and ideologies. Or they just die out altogether. I don’t know whom this hurts worse—the larger “empire” or the enclaves. It certainly makes the world a duller place. And contrary to the philosophers, knowledge of history is its own virtue.

I first discovered this as a child. After living in Washington, D.C., for several years, my parents and I had returned to the Texas ranch that had been in our family since 1845. The culture clash between the East and Southwest was not as great as I had expected; too much time had passed. But I had been taught by my family, as well as by mounds of books, that we were Texas Germans, as was the entire Hill Country of the state, including the towns and cities of New Braunfels, Boerne, Fredericksburg, Dickinson, Seguin, Austin, San Antonio, Castroville, Hondo, up to what we still thought of as the western frontier—indeed, all of South-Central Texas.

Most of the Germans had arrived in Texas when it was still a republic, under the guidance of the Adelsverein (“The Noblemen’s Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas”), led by Prince Karl von Solms-Braunfels (though he didn’t stay). It was not long before over one third of all Texans were German. Before the invention of barbed wire (1875), the Texas economy was based on cotton, so the Texas Germans raised it and owned slaves, though not as many as the East Texans did. As late as the eve of U.S. entry into World War I, a rally for the kaiser was held in Boerne among the (mostly) still German-speaking blacks, with the rallying cry: “Ve Chermans haff got to schtick togedder!”

The Texas Germans went on to fight valiantly for the United States after we entered the war, despite the closing of our schools and violent harassment by groups of drunken Anglo teenagers from San Antonio. I lost two uncles to gas attacks on the Western Front.

As late as the 1950’s, one could not buy groceries or feed in the small town nearest our ranch without knowing German. My grandfather founded New Braunfels High School, and almost all the textbooks were in German (though Greek and Latin—and English—were also taught). He was also the editor of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, our first newspaper (since the 1850’s), and cofounder of our first bank (the Guaranty State Bank). This whole section of Texas was closely knit. After all, the Germans arrived in the 1830’s and 40’s not knowing whether they were immigrating to Mexico, an independent Texas republic, or the United States.

Differences among groups of Texas Germans were common. The influential founders of New Braunfels were largely Prussian, atheist (“freethinkers”), and townspeople; Fredericksburg was founded by Bavarians and other southern Germans, Roman Catholics, and country folk; the German towns to the east were largely Lutheran (Evangelisch) and from all parts of Germany and all occupations. In addition, there were the Forty-Eighters.

The only question that had interested children back in Washington, D.C., was whether they were Southerners or Northerners. After all, Washington had been a Southern city for most of its history, was the center of the War Between the States, and the mid-to-late 1950’s was the height of regional rivalry.

As soon as my family returned to Comal County, Texas, we ran into a similar conflict. I met the other descendants of the War Between the States. Every kid would announce that, although his own ancestors had fought for the Confederacy, everyone knew that the other Texas Germans had fought for the Union. About the time I concluded that the tooth fairy was a myth, I began to suspect that this Texas-Confederate history didn’t make sense. If every German-American Texan I met had Confederate soldier ancestors, including three progenitors of mine, how could this ethnic group have been so pro-Union?

At the University of Texas-Austin, I studied Texas history, and, for my master’s thesis, I decided to unravel the myth of German Unionism. This proved to be a hopeless task. Every textbook of Texas history I could find simply stated, without footnotes, details, or any other support, that the Texas Germans were pro-Union and were either neutral or fought for the North during the War. The only evidence given was a mention of the Nueces Massacre. The books I found on the involvement of Texas in the Confederacy produced the same scant evidence and cited only earlier general histories, which used almost the same words (and often had the same typographical errors). Those books concerning only the Texas Germans simply skipped the crisis of the South in which the Texas Germans played so great a part.

Several years ago, the myth of German Unionism reached its climax in a series of newspaper columns by the late Maury Maverick, Jr., in the San Antonio Express. Maverick was a left-wing columnist and the lawyer son of an equally left-wing mayor of San Antonio in the 1930’s; both devoted their lives to atoning for the sins of the patriarch of the clan, Sam Maverick, while keeping his money. Sam was not only a notorious cattleman (whence cometh the word maverick, which first meant “found” or stolen or rebranded cattle) but a Confederate officer and an anti-German, upon whose livestock he preyed. As a result, Maury Jr. defended Vietnam draft dodgers for a living and insisted that the Texas Germans shared his left-wing views. He began the series by stating that the Texas Germans fought for the North during the War Between the States and that “over a hundred German Unionists were lynched during the War and lived under a reign of terror.” (This would have been a surprise to Adm. Chester Nimitz of World War II fame, about whom Maury Jr. always wrote admiringly, since the admiral’s father, Capt. Charles Nimitz, had been the highest-ranking Confederate officer in the German area and was, indeed, the Confederate recruiting officer in charge of maintaining order.)

Several dozen Texas Germans challenged the series by Mr. Maverick on his allegations. After a lot of shilly-shallying, Maverick retreated to one mysterious nighttime murder, by unknown persons, for unknown reasons.

When presented with the facts and the statistics, most believers in the myth, including at one time even the New Braunfels Zeitung-Herald (successor to the Zeitung), merely declared that the Texas Germans must have been trying to “blend in” with the Anglo Confederates, an absurd proposition when one considers that there were among Anglos proportionately more Unionists than among the Germans. Germans overwhelmingly voted for secession, and pre-draft enlistment

figures bear this out. It is far more likely that some modern Texas Germans are trying to “blend in” with political correctness. It strains credulity to argue that the same Texas Germans praised by Maury Maverick, Jr., for their courage, the same people who produced Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower, would be so cowardly as to vote against their principles in secret ballot, fail to speak out publicly or join the Union Army, and even join the Confederate Army (before the draft) to shoot and be shot by Yankees—all out of fear of offending Anglo citizens.

While researching my thesis, I had to perfect my German in order to read the dozen German-language newspapers circulating in Texas before and during the war. I discovered that no one had ever read any of these archives between that time and mine. I also read every

German diary and private letter available, every letter to the Confederate and Reconstruction governors and legislatures in the State Archives, countless enlistment and unit rosters, and every published or unpublished primary source concerning the Texas Germans available at that time. My conclusions echoed those of John Arkas Hawgood in his 1940 book The Tragedy of German America:

So many fallacious statements have been made concerning the Germans in Texas during the late 1840’s, the 50’s, and the early 60’s, that perhaps it is wise here to express quite clearly . . . that the Germans were not . . . Abolitionists, . . . that they believed in states[’] rights, and that . . . a majority of them were loyal to the Confederate cause, many fought for it, and quite a number died for it.

These Germans came over to Texas in response to emigration propaganda in Germany, all of which stressed that, if you were an abolitionist or of the political left, you should go to New York City; if you were neutral or undecided, go to Missouri; if you were a conservative, go to New Orleans or Texas. Ferdinand Roemer’s Texas, which was widely read in Germany and distributed by the Adelsverein, warned those who were radical or opposed to slavery to avoid Texas.

In addition, Germany at that time was a loose confederation of autonomous states, similar to the United States under the Articles of Confederation. Those Germans were used to a system that respected states’ rights, and most were very leery of strong central government.

After 1850, Texas began receiving a trickle of refugees from the German Revolution of 1848—“die Gruene,” who were sometimes both radical and nationalistic. These new arrivals were not well received by the Germans who had come under the Adelsverein or before. Some of these Forty-Eighters formed the communistic Bettina Colony under the leadership of Gustav Schleicher, a friend of Friedrich Engels. The collective failed within two years, and Schleicher soon became the leader of the conservative and pro-states’-rights element in the Texas legislature.

The Democratic Party (then conservative and pro-states’ rights) won the enthusiastic allegiance of the Texas Germans thanks to the sudden growth of the anti-immigrant Nativist Party, the Know-Nothings. As the Know-Nothing Party became identified with nationalism, Unionism, and abolitionism, the Germans became more states’-rights and conservatively oriented.

There were occasional outbursts of radical sentiments (mostly on economic issues) among a few Forty-Eighters after that; a few singing societies were founded for political purposes; and one German newspaper editor, Adolf Douai, was chased out of San Antonio by the other Germans because of his abolitionist views. Even he did not believe that the federal government had any business meddling with slavery in the states.

German social life centered on the Turnvereine (athletic clubs). When the National Turnvereine denounced the South in 1859, all Texas Turnvereine immediately seceded, anticipating the Confederacy by two years.

The most influential German newspaper, the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, was edited by Dr. Ferdinand Lindheimer. According to R.L. Biesele—the first, and greatest, Texas German historian—Dr. Lindheimer was “the political barometer of the Germans in Texas.” His newspaper’s support for states’ rights, secession, and (through four difficult years) the Confederate war effort mirrored that of the Texas German population.

The first test of Texas German loyalty to the South was in the presidential election of 1860. It was a four-way race, with John C. Breckenridge representing the Southern Democrats and supported by secessionists; John Bell representing the Constitutional Union party, which hoped to hold North and South together by retaining states’ rights; Stephen A. Douglas representing the regular and Northern Democrats; and Abraham Lincoln for the Republicans.

No Texas German voted for Lincoln. Of the ten Texas counties that gave Bell and/or Douglas at least 40 percent of the vote, only one—Gillespie—had a substantial German population. Gillespie County voted against the secession candidate by only 52 percent. The other 17 heavily German counties, including Comal (which was the most populous and most German one), voted almost entirely for Breckenridge. For that matter, the least secessionist area, western Gillespie County, gave a larger percentage of its votes to Breckenridge than did any non-German western county. A fear, common in all the western counties, of frontier isolation in the face of savage Indians accounts for its hesitation toward secession.

Upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, Comal and Gillespie Counties called for a state convention to discuss secession, as did the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, which reminded Germans that, just as they had renounced their allegiance to European despots, they should do the same to Yankee ones. All other German newspapers called for secession, except for one, the smallest, which called for caution and deliberation before such a step. Every German delegate at the Texas Convention voted for immediate secession.

On February 23, 1861, the question went to the citizens of Texas. Of the 17 German counties, only five voted against secession. Five of them favored it by 90 percent. Comal County—again, the most populous and most German—did so by 73 percent. In Fayette County, which had a large Anglo Unionist element and a Unionist newspaper, only 10 of the 400 German voters voted against secession. Of the 29 Texas counties that had a substantial unionist vote, only 5 had any German population to speak of.

Once the war broke out, Texas Germans joined the Confederate Army in droves. As early as December 1860, Lindheimer had urged the Germans to organize military companies of minutemen to “protect the rights of the South.” By the middle of July, two volunteer infantry and two cavalry companies had been formed in New Braunfels—one led by the mayor, Gustav Hoffman, a former Prussian officer. Before the military draft was instituted, two thirds of the enfranchised population of Comal County were armed and in the field.

Gustav Schleicher organized units that would fight nobly in the Red River Campaign. Many of the first companies in Galveston were German to a man. The first Houston company to appear in the field was German. Most of their flags were embroidered “Fuer die Constitution” and “Gott Mit Uns.”

Fayette County formed a company of Germans that joined and fought with the famed Terry’s Texas Rangers in all of its battles, including Perryville, where Colonel Terry was killed. The last commander of Terry’s Texas Rangers was one of these Germans.

German units formed important parts of the New Mexico Campaign, the Battle of Galveston, the Red River Campaign, and even served in Hood’s Texas Brigade under General Lee in Virginia.

The ladies of German towns formed Southern Aid Societies, raising funds and making provisions for the troops. One such group in Fredericksburg alone raised over $5,000 for the cause and made countless uniforms and bandages.

There were, of course, some who were disloyal to the Confederate cause in Ger man as well as Anglo counties. In Fredericksburg, the aforementioned Capt. Charles Nimitz was physically attacked and put in danger of his life by an Anglo-American bandit leader because some of his men had been drafted. In the later suppression of Unionists, Confederate German troops were often sent to arrest disaffected Anglo citizens.

Maury Maverick, Jr., cited Duff’s Partisan Rangers as the greatest terror of Texas Unionists. August Siemering, a German of Fredericksburg who had formerly been a Unionist, was Duff’s lieutenant. R.H. Williams’ firsthand account of Duff’s partisans, With the Border Ruffians, recounts that even Duff’s fanatic scouring for Unionists in Gillespie County could only turn up “four or five men, and eight women with their little ones.”

This brings us back to the aforementioned Nueces Massacre. On August 1, 1862, 61 men met in Kerr County, with the intention of leaving Texas. Most of them were Germans and very recent arrivals in the State; some were Anglos, and a handful were Mexicans. Ted Fehrenbach, in Lone Star, his definitive history of Texas, and many other historians have pointed out that this group had no particular ideology and no intention of joining the federal forces; they just wanted to avoid a war of which they’d had no advance notice. Upon reaching the Nueces River, they were attacked by Duff’s Partisan Rangers, who were guided by a German, Charles Bergmann of Fredericksburg. In the fight that followed, 19 of the refugees were killed, and 9 were wounded. Several witnesses later reported that the wounded were murdered. Thirty-three refugees escaped, of whom eight were killed later while attempting to cross the Rio Grande. None of the survivors ever chose to join the federals after entering Mexico, where they were met by Union forces.

It is not excusing such barbaric, behind-the-lines persecution to point out that this murderous slaughter of harmless, multiethnic draft evaders has no bearing on the question of whether Germans were, as a group, enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy. But, somehow, an inscribed monument was recently built in Comfort, Texas, which honors these victims as being “Loyal to the Union.” A novel, Rebels in Blue, was even written about them, ignoring the refugees’ equal avoidance of both the Blue and the Gray.

It is often forgotten that Texas was under martial law throughout most of the war. This constitutional atrocity has turned out to be a windfall for historians, because my old mentor, Dr. H. Bailey Carroll of the University of Texas, managed to turn up the court-martial records of civilians, which accompany martial law.

The court-martial trials were convened in San Antonio, beginning on July 2, 1862, continuing through the greatest Unionist activity, and concluding after the Nueces Massacre. The court tried all those arrested in the Hill Country and Bexar County. Seventeen Anglo-Americans were tried, and over two thirds were found guilty of disloyalty. Only 12 Germans were prosecuted, and of these, only 5 were found guilty. Their punishment was imprisonment for the duration of the war. Prominent Germans testified for both the defense and the prosecution. In most of the cases, the evidence was all hearsay, and even that was nebulous. Julius Schlickum was accused of singing a Yankee song while drunk. In one case against a German, the charge of disloyalty rested on the accusation that the defendant appeared happy upon reading of a Confederate defeat. His accuser could not remember having heard the defendant actually say anything; instead, he judged by the latter’s facial expression. One German was charged with having had a New York German newspaper at his store. He answered that his customers could read no English, and local German papers had no European news. Another German, accused of having spoken only of Confederate defeats, explained that, during the week the witness knew him, the South had had no victories.

Again, it is no defense of such police-state tactics to point out that these trials show less disloyalty to the Confederacy among Germans than among Anglos—insofar as they show anything, save that no government should really be trusted. It should, in fairness to Confederate authorities, be mentioned that such arrests and trials were much more common in the North. President Lincoln managed to arrest the legislature of Maryland, and Northern prisons were full of suspected Copperheads, who enjoyed no right of habeas corpus (it was suspended by Lincoln), let alone a hearing of any sort, military or otherwise.

Before, during, and after these trials in San Antonio, hundreds of Texas Anglos fled Texas to join the Union Army. They were not so unfortunate as the group caught on the Nueces River, however, so they have been largely forgotten. I would welcome any evidence that one Texas German ever wore the Blue.

Once, when a former member of the Know-Nothing Party made a slighting reference to Germans, the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung replied that, proportionately, German-speaking soldiers were more numerous than any other language group among Confederate Texans and urged that a survey be made to determine German participation in and support for the Confederacy in order to prove their loyalty forever. Unfortunately, no such survey was ever conducted—a fact that might be the only one that matters for modern Americans, who are accustomed to weekly polls of the population on every question or opinion imaginable. However, at the time, there was a war going on.

The privation suffered during wartime had no relation to nationality, and the German families left behind while their men were off fighting had their share. In some areas, the women did all the farm work; in others, German families had to depend on the charity of their neighbors to survive. The well-known thrift of German families was ineffectual in the face of a rapidly depreciating currency. Indian depredations and bandit raids increased dramatically during the war, and many German soldiers who went to war to protect their homes against the Yankees returned to find their homes burned and livestock stolen by Indians or thieves.

As late as the close of May 1865, Ferdinand Lindheimer was still writing editorials in the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung urging greater sacrifices for the survival of the Confederacy. Finally, on June 2, 1865, he printed a letter in German that he had received from a Lieutenant Bitter, CSA. In translation, it states:

As you should know, our company F, 32 Texas Cavalry is coming back home today. It is true we are not coming back as everybody wished, as victors in the cause for which the county sent us, but our conscience is clear that we have done at every occasion our full duty, and that our behavior and good German honor gave us the respect of all our war companions, as of the citizens in that part of the country in which we have been. We have earned this honor and still hold it. Even in the last time of common demoralization of the Army, every citizen felt protected as long as Company “F” was near.

He closed the letter with the slogan inscribed on his battle flag: “Gott mit uns.” God be with us.

Egon Richard Tausch is an attorney in San Antonio, Texas.

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Social Security’s War on Families: A Current Crisis and a Coming Disaster

Doug Bandow — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:42:19 +0000

The war in Iraq has left many casualties; Social Security reform is one of them. For so long, Democrats surrounded the issue with demagoguery. And now that the Democrats control Capitol Hill, Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront, Social Security’s impending financial collapse.

And yet the need to confront the problem has never been greater. The coming retirement of roughly 78 million baby boomers threatens to wreck the U.S. Treasury and, perhaps, the economy. Social Security spent $461 billion last year, which made it the largest domestic outlay and a rival of the military budget for biggest federal expense overall. Despite the efforts of the would-be empire builders, who would like to devote the entire U.S. economy to the military, outlays for Social Security will eventually exceed defense spending. (At $406 billion last year, Medicare is gaining even faster and will soon outpace both the military and Social Security.) And Social Security is weakening more than the U.S. economy; it also undermines personal and family responsibility, encouraging early retirement and shifting the duty to care for the elderly to the government.

Social Security is built upon a lie. The system purports to maintain a trust fund, with “assets” of two trillion dollars in net present-value terms, which is supposed to cover benefits from 2017, when program outgo starts exceeding inflow, to 2041. This fund, however, is an accounting fiction. It contains no money; rather, it consists of a pile of federal paper IOUs that have no market value, in a file cabinet in a government office in West Virginia. Paying for benefits will require either tax hikes or spending cuts—the same as if there were no “trust fund.”

The U.S. population is aging: Life expectancy is up; fertility rates are down. The number of elderly is growing, and the elderly are living longer. As a result, Social Security operates like a large-scale Ponzi scheme rather than an insurance system. One estimate (from the 2007 Trustees Report) concludes that, over the next 75 years, the program faces an unfunded liability of $6.8 trillion (in net present-value terms). Other estimates, which are highly sensitive to economic projections, run to nine trillion dollars or more.

Combine Social Security with Medicare, and you get a financial tsunami. Jagadeesh Gokhale, now at the Cato Institute, and Kent Smetters, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, propose a measure of Fiscal Imbalance (FI) with an infinite time horizon. Their 2003 FI estimate for Social Security was seven trillion dollars; today, that number would be higher. (Medicare was even worse, with an FI of $36.6 trillion. The rest of the federal government ran just $0.5 trillion.)

Unfortunately, the FI worsens over time. At $44.2 trillion in 2003, the combined FI is set to grow “by about $1.6 trillion per year to about $54 trillion by just 2008 unless corrective policies are implemented before then,” explain Gokhale and Smetters. Long-term estimates obviously are sensitive to economic assumptions: The FI could be “only” $29 trillion if we are lucky, or $64 trillion if we are not. And these estimates do not include the cost of the new drug benefit, which had not been passed when Gokhale and Smetters completed their analysis. That program adds somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 trillion to Uncle Sam’s unfunded liabilities.

To put this into perspective, the federal government spends less than $3 trillion per year; the entire public debt is $4.6 trillion; America’s annual GDP is about $12 trillion; and Americans’ total personal financial net worth is about $35 trillion. Comptroller General David M. Walker has warned: “The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt. The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina.”

Having created an enormous unfunded liability, the Social Security system exacerbates the financial burden by discouraging private savings, an important factor in spurring economic growth. By soaking up money ($642 billion in taxes collected last year), the federal government diverts income that otherwise could be invested in economically productive private activities; and, by promising retirement benefits, Social Security also makes private saving seem less necessary. The program’s net impact is to diminish investment, economic productivity, and overall growth. It will be difficult enough to come up with as much as $80 trillion to pay future benefits without inadvertently slowing the economy.

The burgeoning fiscal crisis is reason enough for reform, but, no matter how you slice it, the necessary reforms will be unpleasant. The only way to reduce costs is to cut benefits; and the only way to preserve benefits is to raise taxes. Beneficiaries already receive an awful rate of return on their “investment.” A combination of higher taxes and lower benefits would make the program an even worse deal.

Economist Martin Feldstein compares the average growth of real wages since 1960, which he considers to be a good proxy for Social Security’s rate of return, to the real pretax return on nonfinancial corporate capital (essentially, profits plus net interest paid). The difference is alarming:

Consider an employee who contributes $1,000 to Social Security at age 50 to buy benefits to be paid at age 75. With a 2.6 percent yield, the $1,000 grows to $1,900 after the 25 years. In contrast, a yield of 9.3 percent would allow the individual to buy the same $1,900 retirement income for only $206. Thus, forcing individuals to use the unfunded system dramatically increases their cost of buying retirement income. In the example, a funded plan would permit the individual to buy the same retirement income with a 2.5 percent contribution instead of the 12 percent payroll tax. The 9.5 percent difference is a pure real tax for which the individual gets nothing in return.

Attempting to choose between benefit reductions and tax hikes is likely to trigger an ugly generational battle. Certainly, no young person should count on Social Security for his retirement.

The problem with Social Security is not merely fiscal, but cultural and social. Though Social Security is presented as helping lower-income people and the disadvantaged, the system works against the interests of women and minorities. The rules, developed for two-parent, single-earner households, penalize an ever-larger share of the population: single workers, dual-earner couples, and early divorcées. Groups with shorter life expectancies, such as African-Americans, receive less back in benefits. Although poor people receive a boost—the benefit calculation is modestly progressive—they also tend to die sooner than their wealthier neighbors, so they collect less overall.

Social Security encourages earlier retirement. A study by the National Center for Policy Analysis noted that the percentage of men over 65 who work has dropped by half, to about 20 percent, despite the fact that Americans are living longer. (Roughly, the percentage of women working has stayed constant.) Work participation fell as a larger percentage of men were covered by Social Security and as benefits rose to a larger share of their previous incomes.

Social Security also reduces the incentive to save for one’s retirement. For instance, though Social Security recipients have long been told that they should not rely on the program as their sole source of retirement income—the system provides only 42.4 percent of the preretirement income of average workers—today, Social Security benefits account for more than 90 percent of retiree incomes for one quarter of America’s elderly. Social Security provides more than half of the income of at least half of today’s retirees.

The impact, though it is difficult to measure, is significant. Writes Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute:

For example, Martin Feldstein of Harvard University and Anthony Pellechio of the National Bureau for Economic Research have found that households reduce their private savings by nearly one dollar for every dollar of the present value of expected future Social Security benefits. Other studies have put the amount of substitution somewhat lower but still indicate a substantial offset. Even two researchers for the Social Security Administration, Dean Leimer and David Richardson, have conceded that “a dollar of Social Security wealth substitutes for about three-fifths of a dollar of fungible assets.”

Feldstein reviews the issue from another direction. For an average retiree today, Social Security “benefits replace more than 80 percent of peak preretirement after-tax income. Common sense and casual observation suggest that individuals who can expect such a high replacement rate will do little saving for their retirement.” He found median financial assets per household do not provide more than six months of income. Assuming a one-to-one replacement of Social Security benefits for private wealth, Feldstein calculates that “the annual loss of real income would be 6.7 percent of the $9 trillion of Social Security wealth—an amount equal to $600 billion or 8 percent of total GDP.” The actual lost savings almost certainly is less, but even a 50-percent replacement would yield a substantial economic hit.

Obviously, people can retire whenever they wish. However, it makes no sense for the government to encourage them to do so earlier than otherwise, especially when the system is financially unsound. By quitting work sooner, they will be less able to save for their own retirements and will more quickly be dependent on public pension benefits. Both factors increase the public’s burden and decrease the beneficiary’s independence.

Social Security directly discourages employment in other ways. First, payroll taxes act as a direct levy on employment, discouraging job creation. All taxes affect behavior. However, payroll levies have a particularly pernicious economic impact, since they simultaneously raise the cost of an employee to his employer and reduce the benefits received by the employee in compensation for his work.

Feldstein describes the “distorting effect of this tax.” For a typical family, he figures that Social Security “raises the total marginal tax rate to more than 40 percent and substantially exacerbates the distortions and waste caused by the income tax.” Companies will hire fewer workers and, as a result, people will work less.

But there is more. In a recent study for the Cato Institute, Feldstein points out that

The combination of the income tax and the payroll tax distorts not only the number of hours that individuals work but also other dimensions of labor supply like occupational choice, location, and effort. It also distorts the form in which compensation is taken, shifting taxable cash into untaxed fringe benefits, nicer working conditions, etc.

The employment effect creates a particularly perverse incentive for a government pension system funded through employment. Penalizing workers means that people will work and save less, and seek pension benefits sooner. Thus, there will be fewer workers to support current retirees. Since the principal reason Social Security is rapidly approaching collapse is the dramatic reduction in the ratio between workers and retirees—soon, there will be just two workers for every beneficiary—reducing that ratio even more by pushing more people out of the workforce makes no sense.

Social Security shifts the responsibility for caring for the elderly from individuals and families to the state, and, in most people’s minds, turns government into the principal agent to guarantee one’s retirement security. Recipients consider their benefits to be “earned,” a genuine investment or form of insurance. In fact, the Supreme Court has declared that people have no legal right to their benefits; moreover, today’s retirees have received far more than they have paid in.

The program has also changed attitudes among adult children and other family members. Since retirees are eligible for Social Security, they seem less needing, and deserving, of family support. In fact, through payroll taxes, young workers are already helping to finance their retired elders. And many of them are aware of the fact that the rising Social Security tax burden makes it harder for them to put money aside for themselves.

Indeed, Social Security, by dramatically lowering the rate of return on this form of “forced savings,” makes two generations more dependent on government. Tanner notes that

Social Security’s rate of return has been steadily declining since the program’s inception and is now far lower than the return on private capital investment. According to the Social Security Administration, workers born after 1973 will receive rates of return ranging from 3.7 percent for a low-wage, single-income couple to just 0.4 percent for a high-wage-earning single male.

Some studies have found that, for those born in this century, the average rate of return is falling to one percent—and below zero for some workers. They are actually losing money.

From 1926 to today, the average annual rate of return of the U.S. stock market is 7.7 percent. That includes the Great Depression, multiple recessions, and wars. Tanner points out that the average annual real return on corporate bonds (a much safer investment) is over four percent.

The numbers are astounding. According to Tanner,

A single-earner couple, whose wage earner is 30 years old in 2000 and earning $24,000 per year, can expect to pay more than $134,000 in Social Security taxes over their lifetimes and receive $292,320 in lifetime Social Security benefits (including spousal benefits), assuming that both husband and wife live to normally expected ages. However, had they been able to invest privately, they would have received $875,280. That means the current Social Security system is depriving them of more than half a million dollars.

Transferring responsibility for the care of the elderly has had significant, deleterious social consequences. Caring for different generations within a family can be difficult. Yet the care of one’s parents and relatives is a moral necessity, no matter how unpleasant. Social Security allows adult children to pretend that government has magically eliminated the financial pressures and psychological challenges of dealing with aging relatives.

Intergenerational ties bind communities together. Social Security weakens these links and makes it hard for a family to offer better care for its more vulnerable members. Across the generations, the family may provide imperfect care, but it offers a mix of love and knowledge that is, by definition, lacking in any public program. And it discourages the extra effort that characterizes family relationships.

Thomas Jefferson argued that “Dependence begets subservience and venality.” Tanner puts it just as provocatively: “In essence, it reduces American seniors to supplicants, robbing them of their dignity and control over their own lives.”

Social Security is in desperate need of reform, and, given the damage that is being done already and the disaster that looms ahead, we cannot settle for temporary palliatives. Middling tax hikes and benefit cuts would reduce the government’s net financial obligations—but only by placing more of a burden on today’s workers. Such a solution does nothing to counteract the program’s dependency-inducing characteristics.

The best approach would be to establish some form of private accounts, turning both the resources and the responsibility for retirement over to retirees themselves. As Tanner puts it, “Instead of saving Social Security, we should begin the transition to a new and better retirement system based on individually owned, privately invested accounts.”

The economic benefits would be huge. “Conservative assumptions,” Martin Feldstein writes,

imply that Social Security privatization would increase the economic well-being of future generations by an amount equal to 5 percent of GDP each year as long as the system lasts. Although the transition to a funded system would involve economic as well as political costs, the net present value of the gain would be enormous—as much as $10-20 trillion.

Such a gain would dramatically enhance the ability of families to care for one another—a moral benefit that outweighs even the considerable economic benefits of throwing off the shackles of government.

Doug Bandow, a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, is vice president for policy of Citizen Outreach and the author of Leviathan Unchained: Washington’s Bipartisan Big Government Consensus (forthcoming from Xulon Press).

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Wall of Sound: Noise as the Basis of Culture

Aaron D. Wolf — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:31:23 +0000

“And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted,
he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.”
—Exodus 32:17

Poor Phil Spector. He may be a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the producer of a string of hits from “Be My Baby” (The Ronettes) to “The Long and Winding Road” (The Beatles). But now, thanks to Court TV, it looks as if he will be remembered chiefly for owning the “castle” in which B-movie actress Lana Clarkson was found dead, with a bullet in her head. (That he had made a habit of making death threats, and that, around the time of the killing, he had told the Telegraph that he is “relatively insane,” and that, immediately after the killing, he reportedly told police, “I think I killed somebody” may not have helped his case.)

Before his arrest and trial, Spector was most famous for his production technique, the “Wall of Sound.” To achieve it, he piled layer upon layer of superfluous sound onto each recording, ornamenting lead vocals with near constant background vocals, choirs oohing and ahhing, strings, horns, two basses, several guitars, and a host of echo and doubling effects. His treatment of “Long and Winding Road” provided The Beatles with their last number-one single, but it so angered Paul McCartney, who had written—and, so far as he knew, recorded—a simple piano ballad, that Sir Paul cited it as one of his non-Yoko reasons for the band’s breakup.

Spector considers himself another Wagner, but he was more of a musical Hitler. For him, the Wall of Sound was about control. By eliminating any hint of silence in a recording, he forced the listener to be completely passive, free from that moment of anticipation that permits the mind to fill in the next blank. To listen to a Spector production is to be “immersed” in Phil. Of this sonic self-projection, one of his colleagues said, in an interview, “if you listen to [Spector’s] records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in[,] and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song . . . just listen to those strings. I want more musicians; it’s me.”

Spector’s influence on American pop music has been significant. Brian Wilson was inspired by him (and by the coke that controlled his brain), and you can hear the Wall of Sound on Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ groundbreaking album. It’s there on countless other non-Spector-produced records as well, from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” And even though funk, reggae, and the “unplugged” movement were something of a reaction against the Wall of Sound, today’s pop music is haunted by Phil Spector.

On a broader level, we live in Spector’s Wall of Sound. Not a single second of our lives is meant for silence. We have our iPods, cellphones, TVs, web browsers, and radios. And everyone else has his, too. The car in the next lane has its subwoofer, as does the kid down the street. Outside the window at work, the sound of RPMs rising and falling continues throughout the day. Inside the office, the hard drive spins and the cooling fan whirs, the landline rings and the copier turns. The mouse clicks, the keys click, and we click through the pages on the web browser, filled with embedded commercials, songs, audio clips from films. Then these sounds follow us home. And even at night, when the sound of passing engines and mufflers is less frequent, we can hear the click of the thermostat, the furnace lighting, the fan springing to life. Our Wall of Sound culture delivers noise at such a decibel level that, even in our few quiet moments, the reverberations of songs (“I can’t get that tune out of my head”) fill our quiet moments. Yet we crave sound so much that we purchase noise machines to help us sleep.

At the store, we hear Muzak, interrupted by the latest Blue Light Special, a celebrity reading copy for an as-seen-on-TV sale, a manager calling for more cashiers up front. At the ballpark, each inning has a musical segue—either bass-pounding hip-hop or heavy-metal guitar licks. At church, the liturgist or cantor or priest or pastor is armed with a lapel mic, which is necessary, since not everyone pays attention during announcements or sees the admonition in the bulletin:

Good morning! The deacons at PCPC would like to remind you that there is a cry-room for all mothers of small children. This room is equipped with a changing table and a speaker, so you can hear the service. Also, out of respect for our visitors, please turn off your cellphone or put it on “vibrate.”

A great deal of church music is designed to echo the Wall of Sound. In some places, this takes the form of a “praise band,” complete with drums, guitars, keyboards, and one each of the SATB singers—all of which (or whom) require amplification. (Even drums have to be flanked by screens or “shields” to keep the kick and the snare from interfering with everyone else’s mic and monitor, which means that, of course, the drums must have their own mics. This also helps with the mix for the radio broadcast.) While the ATB leads the congregation in a chorus, the S caterwauls, Mariah-style, over the ends of the measures.

Even for those of us in traditional churches, there is little space for quietness in our worship. We like a tight service that proceeds at a certain pace, with no excessive lingering during segues. We prefer the full orchestra. We want a lively sermon that keeps our attention, not a dogmatic exposition that requires us to pay attention. And, if nothing else, the organist should play something.

What we do not want is silence. Silence is awkward—makes for awkward pauses. And we are comfortable enough with our Wall of Sound that we assume this has no effect on our ability to hear.

“Leisure is a form of silence,” wrote Josef Pieper, “of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality . . . ” Today, we think of leisure as the time we spend away from work seeking sensate pleasure, escaping reality. (A Google image search for “leisure” yields lots of pictures of people on beaches, or on jet skis, or at resorts, or wearing a certain type of suit while worshiping the Golden Calf at Studio 54.) But neither that fantasy nor the plainness of everyday life is the reality of which Pieper speaks—namely, the reality created and sustained by the living Word of God, which is often contrary to sight. To listen—and, thus, to “apprehend reality”—we have to close our eyes and our mouths. Thus, true leisure, in a Christian sense, is “the time in which only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.”

The mere absence of sound is not enough.

Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean “dumbness” or “noiselessness”; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to “answer” to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.

Thus, the goal of silence is not merely to eliminate noise: It is to hear the voice of God. And in order to hear, we have to have “ears to hear.” After slaughtering the prophets of Baal by calling down fire from Heaven, the prophet Elijah fled from Ahab and Jezebel. Gripped by fear, he tried to find God in noise and chaos:

And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

God was not in the spectacle, nor was He in the noise: His voice was heard in the stillness.

The culture of Christendom was a culture of leisure, because Christianity is a religion first of sound, and then of sight—of word before image. This is no iconoclasm: It is only to say that, in the economy of grace, the image serves the word. For all of their splendor and majesty, the great cathedrals of the West are designed chiefly to evoke silence and, thus, focus the attention of the hearer on the Gospel. (Visit Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, then compare the noise level with that of a megachurch, or even a church-in-the-round.) Silence is at the heart of Christian worship, for “faith cometh by hearing,” and “blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it,” and “blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe.” In his commentary on Saint Luke’s Gospel, Saint Ambrose writes that “Sight is often deceived; hearing serves as guarantee.” In this fallen world, what we see—the shadows of the world spoken into existence by the Logos—is often deceiving. Can this bread that we bless really be the Body of Christ? Is this Church, so rocked by scandal, really His spotless Bride? Is this crucified Man “truly the son of God”? The “King of the Jews”? Well, “he said . . . ”

Yes, He said. But are we listening? Or are we conforming reality to what we see, or think we see, or want to see?

Oral traditions are bound by place, an incarnational quality that demands a certain level of silence. (“Hush, I can’t hear.”) Our media culture, flanked on all sides by the Wall of Sound, is only bound by the limits of its own technology and the perversity of those who use it. And our noisy technology has gone to great lengths to eliminate the natural barriers of place from every aspect of life. It allows Western man to be the naked individual, alone in his chamber with his television, his eyes trained on the screen, his ears listening to something (Geraldo Rivera, Bill O’Reilly) other than the still small voice.

The naked individual lives in a fantasy world in which he is free from all outside influence. Our noisy machines make us independent of others by doing their work. And we assert our own individuality, our “creativity,” through our little blogs and by consuming the noisome individuality of others:

RIVERA: It’s not an illegal alien story, Bill. It’s a drunk driving story.
(CROSSTALK)
O’REILLY: Here’s why you’re wrong.
RIVERA: And I think you owe that poor lady mayor an apology.
(CROSSTALK)
O’REILLY: No. No.
RIVERA: She doesn’t enforce immigration policy.
O’REILLY: She has set up a system in her city knowingly . . .
RIVERA: No, she hasn’t, Bill.
(CROSSTALK)

Of course, asserting one’s independence today means wearing the same jeans that Paris Hilton and (thus) a million others are wearing, speaking the same ebonics (“Dog, that Fred Thompson is dope!”) as every other white middle-class gangsta wannabe, and believing the same lies (“We can all at least agree that it’s good that the Iraqis are now able to have democratic elections”) as everyone else in the empire.

Yet that independence remains a mere illusion. For with the loss of “oral culture” (please refrain from googling that) came the loss of memory, of place, of identity. We exchanged mediators for media. We must now trust people whom we will never see, whose real voices we will never hear, to tell us what’s important; they discern for us the signs of the times. They fill our ears with words, which only adds to the noise.

Silence shatters the illusion of independence, breaking down our Wall of Sound that protects us from Reality. When our souls are still, we can no longer drown out the voice of conscience or, more importantly, of the Logos. Yes, grace is required for us to answer the call of God; but we have to turn down the TV to hear the telephone ringing.

I do wonder, though: If our culture is surrounded by a Wall of Sound, who is our Phil Spector? Who are we taking our cues from? Surely, it must be someone who is desperate for us not to hear, or believe, the voice of God. Someone who wishes to immerse us in himself. Someone who wants us to be altogether passive, easier to control. Someone who would say, “It’s not about the Song, it’s about me.” That sounds like the one who said in the beginning, “Did God really say?” and “You will not surely die” and “Your eyes will be opened” and “I think I killed somebody.”

Aaron D. Wolf is the associate editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

White Sprinters

Roger D. McGrath — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:17:50 +0000

For several years now, professional baseball has been pouring millions of dollars into developing black players. Evidently, the number of black players, at least American blacks, has been in decline. NASCAR is funding programs to develop black drivers after fielding complaints that the sport is too white. Similarly, the NHL now has a “Diversity Program” designed to put more blacks on the ice. I can only imagine the outcry if the 75-percent-black NBA funded development programs for white players. Since I ran the 100 and 220, though, I’m rooting for the “White Sprinter Project.”

Unknown to many today, whites dominated the sprints and accounted for nearly all of the world records until the 1960’s. During all those years of white-sprinting prowess, blacks were competing also, even winning American championships and gold medals in the Olympics. It was not as if blacks were prohibited from competing. Nearly everyone knows that Jesse Owens captured the 100 and 200 at Berlin in 1936, and Owens was only one of many black sprinters America produced. But America also produced white sprinters. So, too, did the nations of Europe. Whites scorched the tracks of both hemispheres. There was even an Australian, Hec Hogan, who tied the world record in the 100-yard dash in 1954 and put the Southern Hemisphere on the sprinting map. If blacks had once dominated a sport and had since nearly disappeared, every black child in America would be made aware of that fact in school, and there would be a heavily funded national effort to bring blacks back to predominance.

Jeremy Wariner stands out today, not only because he won the 400 meters at the tender age of 19 in the 2004 Olympics, but because he is white. Since then, he has been unbeatable in the 400 and is poised to break the world record. After Wariner destroyed a stellar field in the 400 at a meet in Southern California in May, a black coach said that the sport needed more like him. When questioned further, the coach said, “More white sprinters would really help track.”

When I was growing up, I never saw a track meet without fast white sprinters—and California had the finest track meets in the world: The Coliseum Relays, the Modesto Relays, the Compton Relays, and the West Coast Relays were legendary. For nearly a half-century, the world record in the 100-yard dash was owned by Southern Californians: Charley Paddock, Frank Wykoff, and Mel Patton. Paddock ran a 9.5 (seconds) in the early 1920’s; Wykoff, a 9.4 in 1930; and Patton, a 9.3 in 1948. Patton’s record stood until 1962. Patton and the others ran on dirt tracks and without the aid of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone. I suspect they would have run at least two-tenths faster on the springy, rubberized-asphalt tracks of today.
“Pell-Mel” Patton led the University High Warriors to the Los Angeles city prep-track championship in 1943. After World War II, he attended Southern Cal (or simply SC—nobody called the school USC in those days). As a Trojan, the splendid sprinter—six-feet tall and 150 pounds—was smoking tracks and opponents in dash after dash. He tied Frank Wykoff’s record of 9.4 twice in 1947 and won the NCAA championship, then broke the 100 record with a 9.3 in 1948 and won both sprints in the NCAA championship.

In 1948, he was the favorite for the Olympic dashes in London, but on a cold, blustery, wet day, the half-frozen Patton, who appeared to have minus body fat, tied up badly in the 100. The World’s Fastest Human finished a shocking fifth. Devastated, he stood in front of his blocks for the 200 final two days later thinking that he would be lucky to place. More than 100,000 Wembley Stadium spectators were silent as the runners took their marks. Suddenly, someone in the crowd yelled, “Go Uni! Uni High Warriors!” Patton felt a rush of adrenaline course through his body like never before. At the report of the starter’s pistol, he exploded from the blocks and led from start to finish. He later anchored the U.S. 4x100 relay team to victory.

As a senior at SC in 1949, Patton ran a mind-boggling 9.0—some watches read 8.9—but a tailwind was fractionally above the limit. Most observers, including my older brother, who was then running the sprints as a sophomore at Uni, thought the wind was of only small advantage. Patton later broke the world record in the 220 with a blazing 20.2. He finished his collegiate career by wining both dashes at the NCAA championship and anchoring the SC 4x220 relay team to a world record.

White-sprinting dominance continued throughout the 50’s. Larry Remigino won the 100 in the 1952 Olympics, and Dave Sime and Bobby Morrow ruled the rest of the decade. After breaking Patton’s record in the 220 with a 20.0 and twice tying Patton’s 9.3 in the 100, Sime, a Duke sophomore, was expected to star in the 1956 Olympics. An injury put him on the sideline, though, and, at Melbourne, Abilene Christian sophomore Bobby Morrow won both dashes and anchored the U.S. 4x100 relay team to victory and a world record. By the time Morrow finished running, he had won 80 of 88 races, tied world records in both sprints, and anchored two world-record relays.
Recovered from injury, Dave Sime ran a 9.3 again in 1957. He graduated from Duke a year later, leaving behind nine school records—two still stand—and entered medical school. Despite little time for training, he made the Olympic team in 1960 in the 100. At Rome, a terrible start left him dead last, but he closed dramatically and hit the tape in a photo finish with Armin Hary of Germany. Hary got the nod, but both runners broke the Olympic record. With Peter Radford of Britain finishing third, white sprinters had swept the 100 again as they had at Melbourne when American Thane Baker and Aussie Hec Hogan followed Bobby Morrow to the finish line.

World records. Olympic sweeps. The World’s Fastest Human. Where is the White Sprinter Project?

Roger D. McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes.

This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

LEISURE, THE BASIS OF CULTURE: August 2007

Chronicles — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:29:38 +0000

PERSPECTIVE

Connoisseur of Chaos
by Thomas Fleming

Worth doing badly.

VIEWS

Liberality, the Basis of Culture
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

The ultimate homeschool.

Wall of Sound
by Aaron D. Wolf

Noise as the basis of culture.

Social Security's War on Families
by Doug Bandow

A current crisis and a coming disaster.

REVIEWS

A Humble Love
by Derek Turner

A.N. Wilson: Betjeman: A Life

plus

Joseph Pearce on The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney, eds.

Srdja Trifkovic on John O'Sullivan's The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World

Clyde Wilson on Anne Farrow's, Joel Lang's, and Jennifer Frank's Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery

Catharine Savage Brosman on Pierre Corneille's The Theatre of Illusion, Richard Wilbur, trans.

Jonathan Ellis on Jake Halpern's Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns
by Egon Richard Tausch

Letter From a Monastery: Engulfed in Solitude
by Michael J. Sauter

VITAL SIGNS

CONSERVATISM: The Enigmatic Professor Strauss, Part II
by Claude Polin

THE MEDIA: The Theater of the Mind, R.I.P.
by Robert Lurie

COMMONWEAL: A National Championship for Duke
by John Willson

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION
by Roger D. McGrath

LETTER TO THE BISHOP
by Joe Ecclesia

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Mr. Brooks
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

On Clearing Land and The Old Workbench
by Eric Sellin

ON THE COVER

Cover by George McCartney, Jr. Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.