We talk about the weather, too, because it tells us something about the state of our gardens.  We’ve had too much rain; they haven’t had enough.  The hot, dry weather, ironically, has made for the best watermelons in years, because they grow like wildfire and send down amazing taproots.  The last frost was early, and it looks like the first frost will be late; this may be the longest growing season in years.  Some of our fruit trees bloomed too early, however, because we had a stretch of warm weather before that last frost, so we’ll have no plums or mountain ash berries this year.

We never talk, though, about “the environment” or “global warming” or “greenhouse gases” or “carbon emissions.”  More often than not, the people who chatter on endlessly about such things would have to answer “How’s your garden doing this year?” with “I don’t have a garden.”  Too busy worrying about “the environment” while spending most of their day engaged in activities that increase carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, they do not have any time left to spend with, and in, nature.  They have never consciously reduced nature to the abstraction of “the environment”; the very structure of their lives has done it for them.

When I was younger, talking about our gardens was a common activity among most of the people I knew.  Now, I rarely hold such conversations with anyone other than family or coworkers.  Partly, that’s because I grew up in a small village along a river that flowed through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  Our yards were large; our soil, fertile; and families had plenty of children to send out to weed and water and harvest.

Now, though, I live in a mid-sized city, which surrounds a river that flows through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  City folk today are less likely to plant a garden (at least a vegetable garden), but you can still see, especially in certain older neighborhoods, where gardens and home orchards used to be.  Raised beds and terraced sections of back yards are covered with grass.  Apple trees, beechnuts, mulberries, edible crab apples go unharvested except by birds and bugs and squirrels, while the homeowners purchase unripe pears from California and Chile, hazelnuts imported from Turkey, and gigantic but tasteless Mexican-grown raspberries at $3.99 a pint.

There’s an inverse relationship between the rising cost of industrially raised fruit and vegetables and their declining flavor and quality.  You simply cannot ship a ripe tomato to Rockford from Mexico or California, so they are picked green and artificially ripened in the trucks on the way here.  (Any that ripen on the vine are sold to canners for tomato juice or paste or sauce.)  For the dubious pleasure of eating a bland and often mealy tomato, we pay for the cost of transportation and [...]]]> “How’s your garden doing this year?”  It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it.  I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time of year, one of the related questions: “So, are you going to put out a garden this year?” and “How did your garden do?”To the outside observer, the question might seem like idle chit-chat, the kind of thing you say when you don’t know what else to talk about—like asking about the weather.  But listen a little longer, and you realize that there’s more to it; the question is only the beginning of the conversation, because they each have gardens, too.  How many tomato plants did you put out?  What varieties of peppers?  The melons are doing well, but the squash failed early in the season.  It’s been a great year for okra.  You grow everything in raised beds, don’t you?

We talk about the weather, too, because it tells us something about the state of our gardens.  We’ve had too much rain; they haven’t had enough.  The hot, dry weather, ironically, has made for the best watermelons in years, because they grow like wildfire and send down amazing taproots.  The last frost was early, and it looks like the first frost will be late; this may be the longest growing season in years.  Some of our fruit trees bloomed too early, however, because we had a stretch of warm weather before that last frost, so we’ll have no plums or mountain ash berries this year.

We never talk, though, about “the environment” or “global warming” or “greenhouse gases” or “carbon emissions.”  More often than not, the people who chatter on endlessly about such things would have to answer “How’s your garden doing this year?” with “I don’t have a garden.”  Too busy worrying about “the environment” while spending most of their day engaged in activities that increase carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, they do not have any time left to spend with, and in, nature.  They have never consciously reduced nature to the abstraction of “the environment”; the very structure of their lives has done it for them.

When I was younger, talking about our gardens was a common activity among most of the people I knew.  Now, I rarely hold such conversations with anyone other than family or coworkers.  Partly, that’s because I grew up in a small village along a river that flowed through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  Our yards were large; our soil, fertile; and families had plenty of children to send out to weed and water and harvest.

Now, though, I live in a mid-sized city, which surrounds a river that flows through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  City folk today are less likely to plant a garden (at least a vegetable garden), but you can still see, especially in certain older neighborhoods, where gardens and home orchards used to be.  Raised beds and terraced sections of back yards are covered with grass.  Apple trees, beechnuts, mulberries, edible crab apples go unharvested except by birds and bugs and squirrels, while the homeowners purchase unripe pears from California and Chile, hazelnuts imported from Turkey, and gigantic but tasteless Mexican-grown raspberries at $3.99 a pint.

There’s an inverse relationship between the rising cost of industrially raised fruit and vegetables and their declining flavor and quality.  You simply cannot ship a ripe tomato to Rockford from Mexico or California, so they are picked green and artificially ripened in the trucks on the way here.  (Any that ripen on the vine are sold to canners for tomato juice or paste or sauce.)  For the dubious pleasure of eating a bland and often mealy tomato, we pay for the cost of transportation and of the ripening agent.  As late as a decade or two ago, most people purchased such produce only in the winter, because even chain supermarkets bought what fruit and vegetables they could locally during the growing season.  Now, you can’t find a naturally ripened tomato or peach in a Rockford supermarket in August.  In part, that’s because there’s less and less locally grown produce for stores to buy; but sadly, it’s also often a conscious decision based on corporate logistics and supply lines, as well as a desire to provide “consumers” with a consistent “product” throughout the year—even if it’s consistently bad.

When the “fresh” produce that’s available is so unappealing, is it any wonder that people turn to processed foods that at least have flavor, however artificial and unattractive that flavor might be to anyone with even a slightly refined palate?  But processed foods, of course, require more energy and more chemicals and travel farther between field and plate than even raw industrial produce does.

In the end, it all takes its toll—on “the environment,” on our culture, our neighborhoods, our families, our health.  Congress and the United Nations spend time and resources debating the causes of global warming and environmental degradation and negotiating treaties and laws to set standards and goals and restrictions, and taxpayers pay—both monetarily and in loss of freedom—to implement it all.  Of course, we also pay taxes to support federally subsidized industrial agriculture and state and local tax breaks for the national chains that contribute so much to the very phenomena that Congress and the United Nations wish to eradicate.

How much, I wonder, could carbon emissions and greenhouse gases be reduced if all those who could devoted a little corner of their yard to a garden, and bought other produce at their local farmers’ market or through a CSA (community-supported agriculture) or coop, and patronized, when possible, those locally owned grocery stores that still try to purchase produce nearby?  What if people lived the way that people used to live, instead of neglecting their own responsibilities and clamoring for legislation to deal with the consequences?

One thing is certain: Children would grow up once again knowing what a tomato really tastes like.  And they would have something to talk about the next time their grandmother calls.

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.This article first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

It is difficult to know if conservatives were primarily concerned with the sheer magnitude of immigrants or with the threat of terrorism. Both problems would have been exacerbated by the S.1348 amnesty, which could have resulted in as many as 100 million more immigrants, as estimated by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. After being double-crossed by the immigration acts of 1965, 1986, and 1996, our dissident conservatives seem to be saying, “What’s wrong with taking control of our borders by enforcing the laws we already have?”

Among its key proposals, S.1348 offered a virtual fence to monitor our Southern border, presumably as a replacement for the physical fence ordered by both houses last year, which remains unconstructed. It also proposed the use of biometric IDs in visa-entry, monitoring, and exit procedures, which would be administered by the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the most important way to reduce the chief incentive for illegal immigration—restricting employment to legally approved aliens—is already provided for by present law. That law simply is not enforced with reasonable policing, a conclusion that is supported by the fact that there were only 718 employer arrests in 2006, despite estimates that more than half of the 13 million illegal aliens here are employed. The amnesty of 1996 only served to swell the flood of illegal aliens and increased pressure for additional legal immigration of relatives (who account for 83 percent of those naturalized every year). These figures validate conservative concerns about the prospects of yet another (and greater) flood tide.

In Washington, the political pressure for increases in immigration allowances is, first and foremost, a matter of supply and demand for cheap labor (both salaried and hourly). As of 2003, foreign-born workers made up one sixth of the U.S. civilian workforce. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, real compensation per unit of output (including fringe benefits) for workers in the private sector declined by one quarter, while real paycheck earnings per unit of output declined by one half. Before 1965, however, earnings and compensation per unit of output were relatively stable, so it is not difficult to conclude that immigration has had a negative effect on returns to labor. Admittedly, in the medical and high-tech fields, immigration has helped relieve inflationary shortages. In general, however, the massive flow of migrants has depressed middle-class wages. In addition, immigration enables employers to risk less capital in exchange for more return. Yes, as the mantra goes, the immigrants “are doing the jobs Americans won’t do”—but that is because Americans want reasonable living wages. The historically low U.S. unemployment rate (4.5 percent), which is regularly cited as proof that the current demand for labor is unsatisfied, does not reflect declines in both female and male workforce participation: 17 percent of American males, ages 16 to 26, refuse to take jobs that pay less than babysitting, but, when combined with welfare benefits, those jobs look good to unskilled immigrants. American workers—who, since Colonial times, were among the highest-paid laborers in the world—are being marginalized by the globalists’ manipulation of immigration and trade.

Why shouldn’t Americans at least take advantage of the bargain-priced services offered by unskilled aliens? The answer [...]]]> The most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of this battle were the usually silent majority of conservative Americans who rose to protest the next wave of illegal-alien invasion, which would have followed the amnesty proposed by S.1348. The subsequent resignation of Bush’s senior Machiavellian, Karl Rove, was not surprising.

It is difficult to know if conservatives were primarily concerned with the sheer magnitude of immigrants or with the threat of terrorism. Both problems would have been exacerbated by the S.1348 amnesty, which could have resulted in as many as 100 million more immigrants, as estimated by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. After being double-crossed by the immigration acts of 1965, 1986, and 1996, our dissident conservatives seem to be saying, “What’s wrong with taking control of our borders by enforcing the laws we already have?”

Among its key proposals, S.1348 offered a virtual fence to monitor our Southern border, presumably as a replacement for the physical fence ordered by both houses last year, which remains unconstructed. It also proposed the use of biometric IDs in visa-entry, monitoring, and exit procedures, which would be administered by the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the most important way to reduce the chief incentive for illegal immigration—restricting employment to legally approved aliens—is already provided for by present law. That law simply is not enforced with reasonable policing, a conclusion that is supported by the fact that there were only 718 employer arrests in 2006, despite estimates that more than half of the 13 million illegal aliens here are employed. The amnesty of 1996 only served to swell the flood of illegal aliens and increased pressure for additional legal immigration of relatives (who account for 83 percent of those naturalized every year). These figures validate conservative concerns about the prospects of yet another (and greater) flood tide.

In Washington, the political pressure for increases in immigration allowances is, first and foremost, a matter of supply and demand for cheap labor (both salaried and hourly). As of 2003, foreign-born workers made up one sixth of the U.S. civilian workforce. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, real compensation per unit of output (including fringe benefits) for workers in the private sector declined by one quarter, while real paycheck earnings per unit of output declined by one half. Before 1965, however, earnings and compensation per unit of output were relatively stable, so it is not difficult to conclude that immigration has had a negative effect on returns to labor. Admittedly, in the medical and high-tech fields, immigration has helped relieve inflationary shortages. In general, however, the massive flow of migrants has depressed middle-class wages. In addition, immigration enables employers to risk less capital in exchange for more return. Yes, as the mantra goes, the immigrants “are doing the jobs Americans won’t do”—but that is because Americans want reasonable living wages. The historically low U.S. unemployment rate (4.5 percent), which is regularly cited as proof that the current demand for labor is unsatisfied, does not reflect declines in both female and male workforce participation: 17 percent of American males, ages 16 to 26, refuse to take jobs that pay less than babysitting, but, when combined with welfare benefits, those jobs look good to unskilled immigrants. American workers—who, since Colonial times, were among the highest-paid laborers in the world—are being marginalized by the globalists’ manipulation of immigration and trade.

Why shouldn’t Americans at least take advantage of the bargain-priced services offered by unskilled aliens? The answer is simple: The immigrants and their employers may be better off for getting the business, but only at the expense of the average working and tax-paying citizen. The low-income aliens pay little or no income or FICA taxes, either by taking advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit or by avoiding paying taxes altogether. On average, these aliens have double the poverty rate and criminality of the rest of the population, and they secure substantial welfare benefits from both legal and illegal sources, including free medical care and education, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Eventually, many of them become citizens and then qualify for Social Security and Medicare at a total net cost to taxpayers of over $150,000 per family (after comparing taxes paid to benefits accrued or received).

The fury of the grassroots at the soaring numbers of illegal aliens is warranted, but somewhat misdirected. After all, it is hard to blame aliens when they walk through an open door and help themselves to a better standard of living—and when it is obvious to them that the immigration police could not care less. The traffickers who locate and deliver them, those who employ them illicitly, and the border patrol and the federal overseers who do not enforce the law are at least as guilty as the aliens—perhaps more so.

Of equal or greater importance is the loss of the successful American way of life. For decades, conservatives have warned that excessive immigration would result in the loss of traditional communities, on which American success has been built; now these predictions are becoming realities. Michael Barone, in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (“The Realignment of America”), shows that masses of native-born Americans are migrating from the East and West Coast cities to the cities of the Heartland. The population loss on both coasts is being driven and replaced by immigrants. It would appear that the prospects for the “pursuit of happiness” by native-born Americans—who have seen their former communities increasingly overrun by immigrant strangers—have deteriorated to such an extent that it warranted seeking new communities where they could live among other native-born Americans. In another Wall Street Journal op-ed, Daniel Henninger records the findings of Prof. Robert Putnam of Harvard University, who studied the effects of “diversity” by conducting 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities: “Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don’t want to have much of anything to do with each other. ‘Social capital’ erodes. Diversity has a downside.” Putnam’s composite findings are perturbing:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

It appears that the vaunted “diversity” provided by increased immigration has proved no friend either to American communities or to America’s middle class, which has been the pride of our republic since its founding. Low-wage illegal-alien workers and their welfare subsidies are really subsidies to their U.S. employers—subsidies that drive up profits while depressing middle-class earnings.

The Christian churches of America, particularly the traditional denominations, represent the potential swing vote of the electorate, which could restore limited immigration. The leaders of these denominations have been purveyors of socialism and globalism for over a century. As a result, their congregations have been brainwashed into believing that taking in the world’s poor through an open-borders policy is the requirement of a good Samaritan. But consider the sobering picture painted by Peter Brimelow, in his comprehensive overview of immigration, Alien Nation: The Census Bureau predicts that, by 2050, the U.S. population will be 392 million; Leon Bouvier of Tulane University estimates that 139 million of them will be post-1970 immigrants and their descendants; and, David A. Coleman of Oxford University estimates that, currently, 60 million people wish to emigrate from the Third World to the United States. Should each of them be followed by seven relatives, as is the present trend, the result of our de facto open-borders policy could be an influx of as many as 480 million new arrivals—quite a burden for America’s good Samaritans. At some point, these good Samaritans will have to wake up to the fact that open borders mean putting their incomes, standards of living, culture, governance, and even law and order at risk. No country has ever survived when its citizens have given charity to mankind priority over the wellbeing of their families, friends, and neighbors.

Realistically, the 13 million illegal aliens who are currently residing in the United States cannot be abruptly returned to their native countries en masse. Their status should be resolved by our adoption of the temporary legal categories of alien-labor quotas proposed in S.1348, in agriculture, high-tech, and services, but not on the terms proposed by S.1348—that is, not by amnesty. Present illegal employees who “surrender” should be allowed to apply for these temporary jobs. Their employment should be contracted on an annual basis, and, after each year, they should be required to return home. Temporary residency should be monitored by biometric IDs. Alien workers’ wages and their numbers should be regulated to prevent any further depression of domestic compensation levels. Aliens without criminal records (other than border violations) who are granted temporary employment should be allowed to apply for naturalization, but with no promises and with no priority placed on their applications. Naturalization should require not only proficiency in English, civics, and history but a high-school degree or the completion of a GED taken in English. The Constitution should be amended so that citizenship is not automatically extended to those born to noncitizens in the United States, and so that English is established as the national language. As employers of illegal aliens are identified when their illegal employees surrender, they should be convicted and fined or incarcerated, as required by law. Hereafter, no illegal alien should be allowed employment in the United States or given any other basis for staying.

The Democratic and Republican parties have been content to use the immigration invasion to their political benefit, providing empty rhetoric to their respective bases, without regard for the tragic consequences for America and Americans. The Bush Republican machine has pandered to Central Americans and Mexicans, the principal source of illegal immigrants, with offers of bilingual education and citizenship, an approach that promises to turn the American Southwest into Kosovo. After all, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico has all but endorsed a reconquista by declaring that “Mexico does not end at its borders.” Meanwhile, the Democrats have worked toward a broad expansion of Third World immigration, in order to increase their voting base and thereby displace the Bush Republican regime. The rebellion of congressional Republicans in response to the demands of their core electorate could signal a movement toward sound immigration reform that would protect American communities and workers. Such a movement might even be joined by Democratic rebels intent on returning their party to its populist roots. Unfortunately, it is more likely that both parties, financed by corporate and Wall Street greed, will continue to profit from excessive immigration, making a mockery of the American experiment and its once optimistic prospects—both for Americans and, by example, for the rest of the world.

David A. Hartman, a retired banker, is the chairman of The Rockford Institute's board of directors and a contributor to Immigration and the American Future.

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

My fundamental inability to regard a foreign capital as either a gigantic museum or a superuniversity is related no doubt to my having grown up in a great American city, New York. Residing in Manhattan, my family, and our friends and acquaintances, were scarcely in awe of the place in its aspect as a cornucopia of learning and culture. My sister, brother, and I received our educations from the Spence, Buckley, and Trinity Schools, not from the School of New York, the metropolis itself. While retaining the impression of having grown up at the Metropolitan Opera to which my parents had subscription tickets, I have probably visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art no more than a dozen times in my life, and the Museum of Modern Art perhaps once (and that once was more than enough). I was up in the Statue of Liberty on one occasion; the Empire State Building, once also. Fortunately, New York is not rich in historic buildings, or, indeed, in any architecture worthy of the name, so there were no great cultural opportunities missed in that respect. Most Saturdays when we remained in town over the weekend, my father and I taxied to the North River Piers and went through one of the berthed North Atlantic liners for several hours before sailing time. Afterward, we watched from pier’s end as she was nudged into the river and headed downstream by tugs. (Thanks to my father’s passion for ships and the sea, I have been aboard all the great liners of the middle part of the 20th century, including the old Europa—a German ship confiscated by the French after the war and rechristened Liberté—the first Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, Mauretania, America, Andrea Doria, Cristoforo Colombo, Ile de France, United States, and France. And most of them were architecture, incidentally.)

My experience of London was quite different, the year I spent in England with my family when in my middle teens. My father, an Anglophile who was doing research at the British Museum at the time and for many years taught a two-semester graduate-level course on the history of the British Empire at Columbia, ruthlessly dragged my sister and me (and my mother and infant brother) around the city and its environs each weekend on what he, mischievously, called “culture tours.” We greatly resented these “CTs” (or thought we did, or maybe just pretended to) but we saw a prodigious number of marvelous things in a year and learned a great deal as well—mostly from my father but also, of course, from the various professional tour guides who took [...]]]> The Eternal City is home to many eternal things—or, rather, their representatives, among them St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitoline Hill, and the Forum. Nevertheless, on recent travels to Rome, my wife’s and my first visit has been to none of these things, but, instead, to our good friends Asha and Bellamy, who reside on the north side of the Villa Borghese gardens two streets over from Il Ristorante The Meeting—an establishment which, though heavily patronized by Americans and Britons on account of its proximity to the U.S. Embassy on Via Veneto, offers a superb Italian menu and wine list. Our friends are hardly Roman notables or intellectuals, and this estimable restaurant in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood is not listed in any guidebook I know of. Rather, they belong to the quotidian society of the great city they inhabit, away from the worn track beaten by the paparazzi and the guidebooks, in which the foreign and the familiar merge invitingly. In such company, we experience Rome as living Romans experience it—as a vital modern metropolis, not a dead historical one. The Eternal City can wait 24 hours. Our first day in Rome, we are more than content with the contemporary one.

My fundamental inability to regard a foreign capital as either a gigantic museum or a superuniversity is related no doubt to my having grown up in a great American city, New York. Residing in Manhattan, my family, and our friends and acquaintances, were scarcely in awe of the place in its aspect as a cornucopia of learning and culture. My sister, brother, and I received our educations from the Spence, Buckley, and Trinity Schools, not from the School of New York, the metropolis itself. While retaining the impression of having grown up at the Metropolitan Opera to which my parents had subscription tickets, I have probably visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art no more than a dozen times in my life, and the Museum of Modern Art perhaps once (and that once was more than enough). I was up in the Statue of Liberty on one occasion; the Empire State Building, once also. Fortunately, New York is not rich in historic buildings, or, indeed, in any architecture worthy of the name, so there were no great cultural opportunities missed in that respect. Most Saturdays when we remained in town over the weekend, my father and I taxied to the North River Piers and went through one of the berthed North Atlantic liners for several hours before sailing time. Afterward, we watched from pier’s end as she was nudged into the river and headed downstream by tugs. (Thanks to my father’s passion for ships and the sea, I have been aboard all the great liners of the middle part of the 20th century, including the old Europa—a German ship confiscated by the French after the war and rechristened Liberté—the first Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, Mauretania, America, Andrea Doria, Cristoforo Colombo, Ile de France, United States, and France. And most of them were architecture, incidentally.)

My experience of London was quite different, the year I spent in England with my family when in my middle teens. My father, an Anglophile who was doing research at the British Museum at the time and for many years taught a two-semester graduate-level course on the history of the British Empire at Columbia, ruthlessly dragged my sister and me (and my mother and infant brother) around the city and its environs each weekend on what he, mischievously, called “culture tours.” We greatly resented these “CTs” (or thought we did, or maybe just pretended to) but we saw a prodigious number of marvelous things in a year and learned a great deal as well—mostly from my father but also, of course, from the various professional tour guides who took us about the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court Palace, Chiswick House, the Tate Gallery, and the rest.

Unfortunately, Trinity did not offer a course in British history until the following year, so that much of what my father taught fell into no comprehensive context and was, therefore, to some extent wasted; had we visited England two years later, all of what I saw and learned would have had far more meaning for me. As it was, my memories of London (and of Cornwall, where we rented an 11th-century farmhouse near the hamlet of Marhamchurch for two weeks in April and, later, the month of August) remain, more than four decades afterward, intense and indelible. And yet the basis of memory is less—far less—of the monuments, the cathedrals, the paintings, the formal 18th-century gardens than of the homely reality of English town and country life. My sister and I went every day to school in London (she, to St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith; I, to a tutorial establishment based in Knightsbridge, since Trinity perversely refused credit for a year at the Haberdasher School where I had been admitted), and otherwise made ourselves as free of the place as we had of New York. London, to us, was not a monument to the past but a living city—the more so since my grandfather Philpotts, a native-born Londoner, was still around in those days. I think I should have been thrilled far more to see Evelyn Waugh (who died only four years later) emerge unsteadily from White’s than by a view of the Tower room in which St. Thomas More was imprisoned.

Still, background aside, it seems to me that my approach to foreign travel would be fundamentally different were I less of a novelist and narrative writer and more of a scholar and critic. My immediate interest, as I have said, in traveling abroad is to observe how foreign peoples live today and to share their experience insofar as I am capable of doing (which, of course, is ridiculously little). The history—political, social, religious, and cultural—behind that experience is not so much secondary in value as it is in the temporal sense: I am too impatient to hold back from seizing immediately on what is directly apprehensible, while understanding that the past usually means more to me when fixed in the context of the known and felt present; and so I prefer to investigate the present first, and move on to the past after that.

My chief preparation before going abroad is always to learn as much of the language of the place I am traveling to as I can, language being for me, a man of words, at once my natural milieu and my sole defense. Not having language as a traveler for me is at once an inordinate inconvenience, a humiliation, and a scandal. In France and Italy, whose languages I have studied, I would rather keep my mouth shut than attempt, in extremis, to communicate in English—since, speaking English, I might as well never have left home. Once on foreign soil, my immediate, overwhelming, and lasting impulse is to set out on foot and almost in random direction, carrying with me a guidebook, it is true, but mainly as an orienteering reference and for its maps. Museums are wonderful places—and so are the streets, the mean and commonplace just as much as the elegant and historic. To walk all day across Rome, poking into this and that, stopping in at a wine bar to sit with La Reppublica over espresso and a cornetto or a glass of wine, consuming a three-course Roman lunch lasting two hours and chatting afterward with the waiter, dropping into a neighborhood church to hear part of a Mass being said, taking a walk in the park or the Bioparco and warming up afterward with a martini at Harry’s Bar at the top of the Veneto across from the Porta Piciana before going on to a performance at the Rome Opera—finally, at the end of the day, to catch a cab or ride a crowded bus back to the hotel through medieval byways, past the lighted windows of elegant shops where, earlier in the day, one bought an elegant silk necktie, a pair of fine leather gloves, or a well-printed and strongly bound messale—these things, for me, come even before investigation of the magnificent buildings, museums, and galleries. Living in Rome for a week or two, I live much as I lived in New York for 30 years, although on an unimaginably grander scale.

In New York, too, I was a walker, mainly on the weekends and especially in late fall (mid-October to the beginning of December) which is always the best time of year in the city. Often on a Saturday, I would walk from my apartment on East 93rd Street down Madison Avenue as far as Greenwich Village and back again up Fifth Avenue, looking into shop windows and ducking inside secondhand bookstores and tobacconist shops, eating lunch in some cheap but excellent neighborhood restaurant, admiring the beautiful, well-dressed women who were still to be seen around town in the 70’s. The canyoned streets of New York are justly famous, yet nothing can make up, in my mind, for the city’s lack of a natural eminence from which the entirety of the metropolis can be taken in at a glance. New York has the Empire State Building as Paris has the Eiffel Tower and London, the Tower and the column on Fish Street commemorating the Great Fire. But these are artificial vantages, with no mediating ground between the foot and the spire. Paris has also, of course, the hill of Montmartre, affording a splendid view of the city below to which the eye descends by degrees. But not even Montmartre compares with Rome’s Gianicolo, the long, partly wooded ridge extending south of Vatican City to Trastevere from which Garibaldi defied the French troops in 1848. The Gianicolo is dominated by the impressive Garibaldi monument and the Villa Farnesina, which I have not visited but expect to look into some day. A crest of umbrellaed Roman pines surmounts the ridge, decorated on its eastern slopes by a number of elegant villas, some of them surrounded by vegetable gardens and even a modest vineyard or two. For years, I had wanted to climb the Gianicolo and take in the city from the summit. On a recent trip, when we lodged in a convent at the foot of the hill, I decided to make the ascent without further procrastination.

In fact, I climbed up three times over a period of twelve days, the view on the first morning having been obscured by clouds and rain squalls. In the end, I beheld the Eternal City from the heights at three different times of day and in three wholly different kinds of weather. Most enchanting by far was the third and last time, toward sunset on a short January day, with the sun low at my back behind the great pines and the snowfields glinting on the blue indistinct Apeninne Mountains 70 kilometers (or so I judged the distance) to the east. The spoking, obtuse rays illumined the city in a golden glow and picked out its every salient feature—San Giovanni in Laterno, Santa Maria Maggiore, the Forum, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Castel Sant’Angelo (the dome of San Pietro was out of sight around the wooded shoulder of the Gianicolo), and, behind the Villa Medici, the emerald expanse and dark green canopy of the Villa Borghese stretching to the northeast suburbs. (I thought of the lovers at the conclusion of Gianni Schicchi, regarding Florence from a balcony: “Fiorenze è bella . . . ” At that moment, I felt that I possessed Rome.) We had our farewells yet to make to Bellamy and Asha before the impending departure two days later.

The gardens of the Villa Borghese lay shrouded in a misty rain next morning, silent and peaceful as an English estate park, as my wife and I passed through the ivied Porta Piciana from the bus stop at the head of the Veneto. It is a 10- or 15-minute walk along the broad gravel path of the Viale S. Paolo de Brasile to the aviary, and on to the Bioparco. On account of the rain, there was no one ahead of us at the ticket window that stands to the left of the tall, stone-columned iron gates surmounted by a pair of statuary lions. At the gate, we surrendered our tickets to a pleasant young woman to whom we were by now familiar and went round past the elephant exhibit to an enclosed yard surrounded by a wall whose three wide observation windows gave upon the lush Indian rainforest beyond.

Bellamy reclined close by the lowest window with his left paw and chin resting meditatively on a short log. Behind him at a distance, Asha had just emerged from a dense grove of tropical foliage at the back of the extensive yard. On seeing us, the black brush at the end of her tail waved gracefully, and she started forward on her great, silent, well-sprung, deliberate paws, but Bellamy continued to doze with his amber eyes closed, insensible as yet of our presence, his mane beaded with droplets of moisture.

Asha and Bellamy, our great friends, are a gift from the government of India to the Italian government. As only 300 Asian lions remain in the wild on the Island of Gir, and these few are greatly endangered, they are fortunate to have had the good luck to end up in Italy, where they are making great progress with the language. The four of us—Bellamy, Asha, my wife, and I—chatted for a time in broken Italian before falling silent ahead of the arrival of a pair of keepers. The keepers confirmed for us that, indeed, there are as yet no cuccioli leoncini, but that the zoo is hoping for a blessed event some time in the next year or so. Perhaps, on our next visit to Rome, we shall find confirmation of the divine primeval truth that one and one indeed make three, or even four or five.

Chilton Williamson, Jr., is Chronicles' senior editor for books and the editor of Immigration and the American Future.

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

Parris, a self-described unbeliever, is much exercised over the healing of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre of Parkinson’s disease, which is currently under investigation by the Catholic Church. According to CNN, the 46-year-old nun “was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2001. Her symptoms worsened with time: Driving became practically impossible, she had difficulty walking, and her left arm hung limply at her side.” Then she prayed for the intercession of Pope John Paul II:

Her cure came on the night of June 2, 2005, exactly two months after the pontiff’s death, she said. In her room after evening prayers, she said an inner voice urged her to take up her pen and write. She did, and was surprised to see that her handwriting—which had grown illegible because of her illness—was clear. She said she then went to bed, and woke early the next morning feeling “completely transformed.”

She had written John Paul’s name.

Parris’s response to all of this is a textbook example of a dogmatist who dislikes being confused by facts and evidence. He begins by linking the story with an absolute and complete irrelevancy, with the declaration that

one determinant of US foreign policy towards Israel is the belief, widely held on the Religious Right, that before the prophecy of the Second Coming and the end of the world can be fulfilled, the Israelites must be given their Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria.

What on God’s green earth that has to do with the claim of a miracle by the good nun is never explained. We are simply to understand that any claim of the miraculous automatically puts the one who believes it in the class of a fundamentalist with some crazy dispensationalist notion about the Rapture (which, for fundamentalists, is distinct from the Second Coming).

After this sample of lucidity, Parris then calls for “intelligent Christians” to voice their “righteous anger” and “contempt” for this “nonsense” (apparently meaning “any belief in the supernatural”). Cool, impartial consideration of the evidence, that. He speaks mysteriously of the “excesses of Lourdes” and of “the woeful confusion of faith with superstition.” He suggests that “this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter.” He frets that, even worse, it may be that the bishops of the Church are stupid enough to “honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.” He concludes this dispassionate consideration of the evidence with the following dogmatic declaration:

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

And to shut down all criticism of this farrago of non sequiturs, evidence-free claims, baseless dogmatism and insults, he preemptively denies that he is doing what he is, in fact, doing: “Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded.”

Precisely. You [...]]]> We all know that religious believers are fools who will tell themselves anything to prop up their preconceived notions, while atheists are hard-headed rationalists who look the evidence in the face and follow the Truth no matter the cost. Still, one’s faith in this common narrative of the chattering classes is shaken from time to time. Consider the case of Matthew Parris, a columnist for the London Times who demonstrates the fact that some allegedly rational people are every bit as bull-headedly resistant to the blandishments of empirical evidence as the most hermetically closed-minded geocentrist or six-day creationist.

Parris, a self-described unbeliever, is much exercised over the healing of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre of Parkinson’s disease, which is currently under investigation by the Catholic Church. According to CNN, the 46-year-old nun “was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2001. Her symptoms worsened with time: Driving became practically impossible, she had difficulty walking, and her left arm hung limply at her side.” Then she prayed for the intercession of Pope John Paul II:

Her cure came on the night of June 2, 2005, exactly two months after the pontiff’s death, she said. In her room after evening prayers, she said an inner voice urged her to take up her pen and write. She did, and was surprised to see that her handwriting—which had grown illegible because of her illness—was clear. She said she then went to bed, and woke early the next morning feeling “completely transformed.”

She had written John Paul’s name.

Parris’s response to all of this is a textbook example of a dogmatist who dislikes being confused by facts and evidence. He begins by linking the story with an absolute and complete irrelevancy, with the declaration that

one determinant of US foreign policy towards Israel is the belief, widely held on the Religious Right, that before the prophecy of the Second Coming and the end of the world can be fulfilled, the Israelites must be given their Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria.

What on God’s green earth that has to do with the claim of a miracle by the good nun is never explained. We are simply to understand that any claim of the miraculous automatically puts the one who believes it in the class of a fundamentalist with some crazy dispensationalist notion about the Rapture (which, for fundamentalists, is distinct from the Second Coming).

After this sample of lucidity, Parris then calls for “intelligent Christians” to voice their “righteous anger” and “contempt” for this “nonsense” (apparently meaning “any belief in the supernatural”). Cool, impartial consideration of the evidence, that. He speaks mysteriously of the “excesses of Lourdes” and of “the woeful confusion of faith with superstition.” He suggests that “this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter.” He frets that, even worse, it may be that the bishops of the Church are stupid enough to “honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.” He concludes this dispassionate consideration of the evidence with the following dogmatic declaration:

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

And to shut down all criticism of this farrago of non sequiturs, evidence-free claims, baseless dogmatism and insults, he preemptively denies that he is doing what he is, in fact, doing: “Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded.”

Precisely. You are arrogant, dogmatic, and close-minded, Mr. Parris. You have a theory of materialism, and you are radically uninterested in considering anything inconvenient to that theory. So you dogmatically declare that it could not happen without, like, seeing if the nun was in fact inexplicably cured of Parkinson’s disease after prayer to John Paul II.

Parris demonstrates clearly that, despite the common cultural narrative mentioned above, the atheist, when faced with stories like that of the good nun, really only has two choices: He can maintain his ignorant bigotry by simply refusing even to look at her story, or he can entertain the possibility that his All-Explaining Theory of Everything might have some holes in it.

Parris takes the former route, fulfilling to an exacting degree the words of the Prophet Chesterton:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. . . . It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

The great disadvantage under which the atheist materialist invariably places himself is that, in despising the supernatural, he refuses to look and see if it does, in fact, occur. Instead, he fools himself with self-deluding sleight-of-hand. He points to the false miracle and pretends that it stands for all miracles. Or he adopts a mocking tone of voice and pretends that it substitutes for a rational argument. Or he links an honest nun with a crazy fundamentalist political theory. Or, in this case, he simply clamps his eyes shut, plugs his ears and screams “Noooooo!” at the top of his voice while declaring that he is the cool rationalist who follows the evidence wherever it leads.

Meanwhile, the nun who no longer has Parkinson’s continues to exist and praise God for her healing, in defiance of the loudest shouts of some ignorant dogmatic scribbler that “He didn’t!”

Mark Shea blogs at Catholic and Enjoying It!

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

Planet-worshiping environmentalists.

Agrarians, Greenies, and Goreites
by Tom Landess

To the next generation.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
by Tobias Lanz

The high environmental cost of too much freedom.

Edward Abbey
by Gregory McNamee

Conservative conservationist—and controversialist.

Reflections on Immigration Reform
by David A. Hartman

The battle for America's communities.

A Democrat of the Head
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Hugh Brogan: Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life

plus

Daniel Larison on Colin Wells' Sailing From Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Changed the World

Mary Anne O'Neil on Catharine Savage Brosman's Range of Light

James O. Tate on Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis

Letter From Russia: Iran, Russia, and Debt by Andrea Crandall

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: The End of the Balkan Interlude? by Ted Galen Carpenter

CHRISTIANITY: Materialist Dogmatism by Mark Shea

THE BARE BODKIN by Joseph Sobran

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
3:10 to Yuma, The Nanny Diaries
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Woodrow Wilson, 1917 and
John Brown Canonized by Robert Beum

Cover by Sandy Faulkner.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.