In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas.  My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War Against Christmas Competition that I analyzed in The American Conservative in Christmas 2003.  The Columbus, Ohio, schools banned a performance of Handel’s Messiah, which for the previous nine years had been the highlight of the year at a specialized school for the arts.  The performance would have violated the district’s religious-music policy, which came into being as the result of an ACLU lawsuit.

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The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington.  It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended.  Washington simply shifted focus to the newly independent Russian Federation and continued its Cold War policy of “containment.”  Because of Russia’s size, both geographic and demographic, and her natural resources and nuclear weapons, Washington believed that Russia had to be kept politically and economically weak through containment or she would again emerge as America’s rival and a constraint on U.S. foreign policy.  The Soviet regime had translated containment as strangulation.  Given the nature of the policies pursued by the Bush administration toward Russia over the last seven years, the latter is perhaps a more appropriate term.

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A 1992 Wisconsin law limits the revenue a school district can raise through property taxes.  When operating costs exceed that limit, districts have to ask voters to make up the difference.  The idea behind the law was to control skyrocketing teacher salaries and benefits by holding annual increases to 3.8 percent per year.  The state would also kick in money to hold down property taxes.  The unintended consequence of this scheme was rising salaries for other district employees (janitors, administrators, cooks, bus drivers), while the revenue caps never grew with the rate of inflation.  At the same time, state money is allocated based on enrollment rather than need, so poorer rural and inner-city school districts that are declining in student population have lost out again.

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“The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault: You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it,” I wrote in the print issue of Chronicles seven months ago (“Waiting for the Big One,” March 2008). “When a tremor occurs, you often fear it could be the Big One and sometimes panic,” I went on, “but then, when the dust settles, you sigh with relief to find yourself alive and the Golden State still above the ocean.” Well, the Big One is nigh; and here’s the rest of that old column in which I argue that, in the end, the meltdown may be all for the best…

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PERSPECTIVE

Chinese Monkeys on Our Backs
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

Beginning With History
by Clyde Wilson
Revisions and deviations.

David Hume: Historian
by Donald W. Livingston
The core of the bookshelf.

The Dean of Western Historians
by Roger D. McGrath
Billington and the frontier culture.

BIOGRAPHY

George Garrett
by Fred Chappell
1929-2008.

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