He was well liked by some, but despised by others. Very few people had a neutral opinion, and even some of those who liked him and supported him in his rise to power were disturbed by his odd, self-centered behavior. He seemed unable to show much human emotion for those around him.

Whatever else anyone might have thought of him, he was a masterful politician, attacking corruption while engaging in inside deals that helped him both politically and personally. Unhappy with the location of the Illinois capitol, he essentially moved it to where he was living. But his ambitions extended beyond Illinois, and he needed money and backing to fulfill his dream of rising from his modest roots to the highest office in the land. Washington beckoned, and nothing would stand in his way.

Or, at least, that is what Gov. Milorad “Rod” Blagojevich thought right up until the phone rang at 6 a.m. on December 9, 2008, waking him at his home on Chicago’s North Side, which he had transformed into the de facto capitol of the state of Illinois. That same phone had been his undoing, and at a press conference later that morning, federal investigators outlined a 76-page indictment filed in U.S. district court, which detailed numerous calls made to and from that phone.

In selections from the transcripts of those calls, Governor Blago­jevich repeatedly instructed aides to hold up $8 million in state funds for a children’s hospital until the head of the hospital coughed up a $50,000 donation to Friends of Blago­jevich; discussed using $1.8 billion in state funds as a reward to a public contractor, a road builder, if only he would raise a half-million dollars for the governor’s war chest by the end of 2008, when new campaign-finance rules would go into effect; and tried to tie state assistance to the struggling Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, to the firing of a writer for the Tribune who had penned editorials critical of Blago­jevich’s conduct as governor.

The press conference was conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who had successfully prosecuted Blagojevich’s predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan, on 18 counts of racketeering and fraud. Ryan had had the good sense to decline to run for reelection as the feds closed the net about him, and so he, like felonious former Democratic governors Dan Walker and Otto Kerner, avoided indictment while still in office.

Blagojevich not only ran for reelection in 2006 knowing that he was being investigated but as late as the day before his arrest declared to reporters that investigators were free to listen to his conversations because he had nothing to hide. Still, the transcripts showed that he was looking for a way out of the governor’s office so that he could rehabilitate his reputation—for a run for the presidency in 2016.

Milorad was probably too busy getting his trademark Serbian gangster hairdo coiffed for court that afternoon, but if he had a chance to listen to Fitzgerald’s press conference, the man who had consciously modeled himself on Honest Abe was likely cut to the bone when Fitzgerald declared, “The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.” Of course, Rod shares more with Abe than the Brooklyn-born Fitzgerald would like to think. The railmen who bankrolled Lincoln could teach today’s blacktop bosses of Illinois a thing or two. And as President, Lincoln didn’t need to use financial persuasion to halt criticisms of his conduct; he could—and did—simply sign an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of “the editors, proprietors, and publishers” of newspapers and prohibit “any further publication therefrom.”

No, if Lincoln was doing anything in his grave on December 9, 2008, he was probably thanking the God he didn’t believe in that Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t invented the telephone until 12 years after his last Good Friday.

Most of Governor Blagojevich’s transgressions were politics as usual here in the Land of Lincoln, but Fitzgerald was compelled to act when it became clear that Blago was attempting to sell Barack Obama’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But what about our new President himself? Time will tell, but some of us in Illinois could not help but chuckle when the President-elect—another politician who modeled himself on Honest Abe—announced that the centerpiece of his New New Deal would be the biggest load of asphalt since the construction of the Interstate Highway System. One thing is certain: The appointment of outgoing Illinois congressman Ray LaHood (R-Blacktop) as transportation secretary had little to do with bipartisanship.

You can take the boy out of Illinois, but you can’t take Illinois out of the boy.

This article was first published in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Cheating “Honest” Men
by Thomas Fleming

views

Putting America Back to Work
by Tom Pauken

Bringing Back the Old Economy
by Tom Piatak

news

Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

reviews

Brush the Distance
by John Freeman

[Catharine Savage Brosman, Breakwater: Poems]

Dark Age to Dark Age
by Thomas Fleming

[Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell]

A Man of One Idea
by Andrei Navrozov

[Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II]

Love Is a Decision
by Nicole M. Kooistra

[Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America]

correspondence

The Center Cannot Hold
by Christie Davies

When We Were Kings
by John O’Neill

vital signs

Igor Stravinsky
by Christopher Sandford

It’s the Jobs
by John Willson

columns

Between the Lines
by Justin Raimondo

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

In the Dark
The Edge of Darkness
by George McCartney

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

“Iscariot” and “Elijah”
by William Baer

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium

Cultural Revolutions

At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war.  Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation to preach (Lions for Lambs) or taken aim at the wrong targets (In the Valley of Elah and Redacted).  The Hurt Locker takes an entirely different tack.  Putting aside sermons and accusations—well aimed or not—it plunges us into the war with all the fervor of an obsessed documentarian and lets events speak for themselves.  It does what FOX News pretends to do: It reports and lets us decide.  Only the title expresses a political position, and it’s quite indirect at that, since the term hurt locker is never spoken in the film.  It’s a slang expression, meaning to put someone in a painful situation from which there’s no immediate escape.  “If you don’t stop harassing me, I’m going to put you in the hurt locker.”  It serves director Kathryn Bigelow’s purpose perfectly.  By pursuing our gratuitous Middle East adventure, she suggests, we have allowed ourselves to be put in a hurt locker, and now we’re stuck there.

I use the first-person plural we, but that’s only to say that we have all been implicated in this war, not that we’ve all shared equally in its hurt.  Still, most of us have at the very least experienced the anxiety of knowing young people who have gone to Iraq.  They’re the ones, of course, who have really been slammed into this locker.  Bigelow doesn’t bother to say why they have been put there.  Her film has no big revelatory declamations, no angry denunciations of political deceit.  All of that goes unspoken.  Maybe she thinks that, if we can’t crack the locker’s combination of shameless mendacity and scurrilous manipulation perpetrated by our domestic living-room warriors, we deserve to stay locked up a while longer.

Bigelow is known for her well-made but ditzy action adventures, including Point Break.  But here she’s put aside cheesiness and chosen to work with dedicated journalist Mark Boal, who had joined a group of exceptional young soldiers on their Baghdad missions in 2004.  These were members of the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), tasked with disarming roadside bombs or, as the Army has it, IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices.  (The Army is nothing if not dispassionately Latinate and antiseptically acronymic in its refusal to say directly what’s at issue.)  These men are supposed to find and defuse bombs hidden in the dirt roads, in abandoned cars, under piles of seemingly stray litter, and sometimes sewn into the body cavities of the dead, bombs set to be detonated by timers, cellphones, tripwires, or the simple bad luck of a thoughtless misstep.  Protect the innocent from the fanatically demented—that’s what the EOD is supposed to do on its IED hunts.

By focusing on a team of three EOD volunteers, Bigelow and Boal have been able to bring the war into pointed focus.  From the moment we invaded, all of Iraq became one big IED, with an ever renewable charge.  It’s blown up again and again despite our troops’ best efforts to defuse it.  It’s killed 4,300 Americans, and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  And the real hell of it is that many Iraqis seem to accept the situation.  They live in a culture that continues to think it honorable to kill over a dispute regarding the caliphate succession dating to Muhammad’s death in A.D. 632.  When Muslims haven’t been enthusiastically enslaving and slaughtering Jews and Christians, they have followed the commands of their religion of peace and thoroughly enjoyed putting one another, Shia and Sunni, to the sword.  Or IED.  And now because of the historical illiteracy of the Bush administration, we have deployed innocent young Americans to protect these people from their own imbecilic ferocity.  Furthermore, even as our troops go about their work, they’re being targeted by the people they’re trying to save.  Hurt lockers don’t come more painful than this.

Coming abruptly into the war in media res, Bigelow’s camera introduces us to the EOD squad patrolling Baghdad’s shattered streets.  There’s Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), Sp. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), and their new leader, SSgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) who has come to replace the squad’s late leader, a casualty of an IED that went off before he could get away from it.  (All the actors are relatively unknown, which helps them be all the more convincing.  It doesn’t hurt either that each is quite talented, especially Renner, who seems to have been born for his role.)  James is the kind of soldier that commanders love and colleagues loathe.  He’s utterly fearless in the execution of his job.  He’s done it so often—Boal has reported that EOD squads defuse ten to twelve bombs per day—that he’s become recklessly self-assured.  There’s no bomb he won’t approach, no tangle of detonator wires he won’t pick apart.  While the others maintain anxious surveillance, he goes about his precarious work with a big can-do American smile.  He’s undoubtedly skilful and has the aplomb to think clearly under enormous pressure.  What’s more, he thoroughly enjoys tinkering with the bombs as if they were particularly ingenious puzzles.  But his men know that the only reason he’s still breathing is his seemingly inexhaustible fund of dumb luck.  Coming upon a car laden with hundreds of pounds of explosives wired to two detonators, a decoy and the real thing, he takes off his padded protective gear.  “If I’m going to die,” he quips, “I’m going to die comfortable.”  Left unsaid but obvious is that there’s no amount of padding that could save him or his subordinates should the bomb go off.  His men look at one another in dismay, the black Sanborn clearly thinking that this cracker is going to get them all killed.  As Sanborn and Eldridge pull back to patrol the perimeter, James takes off the headphones that are supposed to keep him in contact with his men in case they need to warn him of an impending insurgent attack or a cellphone detonation.  He wants to concentrate.  Afterward, the thoroughly frazzled Sanborn takes the liberty of punching James in the jaw to make his displeasure known.  James takes the insubordination in stride.  Rather than bringing Sanborn up on charges, he satisfies himself later that night by engaging Sanborn in a stomach-punching contest, which he wins handily.  James knows he’s a trial to others, but he’s not going to change.  He keeps a box of detonators he’s taken from the bombs he’s defused to remind him of the many times he’s escaped death.  There’s only one device from which he has not fully escaped: the legal document he also keeps in his box of switches and wires.  It proclaims his divorce from the woman who nevertheless continues to live with him when he’s home, along with their infant son.  This man, so intimate with death, has real difficulties with living.

By naming this cheerful bomb technician William James, Boal seems to be signaling that he’s the pragmatist’s pragmatist.  He doesn’t consider why, only how.  When Sanborn asks him why he keeps risking his life, James can only answer, “I don’t know; I don’t think about it.”  His commanding officer loves his attitude.  “You’re a wild man, soldier.  A wild man,” he chortles.  In response, James just beams with aw-shucks pride.  This guy could hardly be more useful to those in charge.  Draft-dodger Dick Cheney would love him to death, if not beyond.

The Hurt Locker doesn’t need to give us the big speech about the futility of war.  Its details say it all.  The film’s climax comes when the squad penetrates an insurgents’ lair.  In the claustrophobic warren of rooms, there are shelves of chemicals and ordnance, a video camera on a tripod evidently to film suicide bombers professing the purity of their motives, and the corpse of an Iraqi boy whom James recognizes.  He had been the feisty kid who was selling pirated DVDs at the American base, a 12-year-old with whom James occasionally kicked a soccer ball about.  What he discovers next and what he does about it will stay with me for a bad long while.

As my friends and acquaintances will energetically attest, I am not a sentimental man.  Nevertheless, there were moments in this film when my eyes smarted with sorrow and anger.  I felt profoundly embarrassed to be an American whose taxes support this wretched enterprise.  Bigelow moves us not with Hollywood heroics but with a series of quietly harrowing scenes that feel incontestably authentic.  Her slow pacing and close observation of ordinary men performing extraordinarily painstaking operations couldn’t be more compelling.  Even her explosions seem utterly convincing—not Hollywood fireballs but ground-shuddering dirt eruptions accompanied by slowly rippling car roofs that shatter and fling paint flecks into the hazy Iraq air.  Filming in Jordan, she took the opportunity to hire actors from among the Iraqi refugees living there.  This film is scrupulously faithful to things as they are.  Even its depiction of American civilian life is impressive.  There’s a simply rendered scene near the end in which James, on leave, takes his not-quite-ex-wife to a gargantuan supermarket with their baby.  He wanders into the cereal aisle, where he stares dazedly at the improbable seven-foot-high wall of candy-colored boxed selections that runs from the front to the back of the store.  It’s this wondrous American opulence for which he’s been fighting, a bright display of absolutely non-nutritious freedom of choice.

My only complaint about The Hurt Locker is that it hasn’t been put into wide release.  But perhaps that’s coming.  I think it could draw large audiences.  As well as being a minutely executed autopsy of our misguided Iraq mission, it’s a riveting adventure of brave men putting their lives on the line for their country and one another.  Everyone needs to see this movie.

I wonder if the usual blowhards—Bill O’Reilly and John Podhoretz and their kind—will try to kill Bigelow’s film, denouncing it as a bomb, their favorite trope when discussing all the other Iraq war movies that have incurred their shabbily scripted and perhaps well-paid displeasure.  Or will they dare?  Doing so this time might bring them too close to ordnance that is likely to explode in their comfortable, well-fed faces.

Recently, the New York Times ran a front-page story by Benedict Carey, recounting an incident in Mosul.  An American patrol had come upon a parked car in the 120-degree heat.  Two kindergarten-age boys were looking at the Americans through its back window.  When one of the soldiers requested permission to give the boys some water, Sfc. Edward Tierney instinctively commanded his men to fall back.  Seconds later the car exploded.  Shrapnel hit the would-be Samaritan in the face, and shock waves knocked the rest to the ground.  Fortunately, none of the soldiers died, and the Samaritan’s wounds were not that severe.  The boys, however, were gone, almost surely unwitting martyrs to the cause of jihad.  One can only imagine their adult handlers’ grief and anger.  After all, they had failed to lure the ridiculously sentimental Americans into a fatal trap.  Our leaders, thankfully, have no time for tears.  They are too busy selling this war to the public as a peacekeeping necessity.  Some peace.

This article first appeared in the September 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

When pro-life activist James Pouillon was murdered in Owosso, Michigan, on September 11, I read a few dozen accounts from both national and Michigan news sources and quickly decided I had a handle on the story.  Harlan Drake, the man who has admitted to murdering Pouillon, seems deeply disturbed, and he had murdered another man and pursued a third.  While neither of Drake’s other targets was publicly involved in pro-life activities, the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department and the prosecutor’s office both confirmed that Drake had told authorities that he had targeted Pouillon for his “pro-life stance.”

In a short piece for the About.com Catholicism GuideSite, I talked less about Pouillon, Drake, or the murder, and more about the disparity in reactions between pro-life and pro-abortion groups to the murders of Pouillon and late-term abortionist George Tiller.  While pro-life groups had been quick to condemn Tiller’s murder, with few or no equivocations, pro-abortion groups were much slower to issue statements about Pouillon’s murder, and when NARAL did, the statement had a “you got one of ours; we got one of yours; let’s call it even” feel.

After publishing the piece, I noticed that a number of articles about Pouillon’s murder had quotes from residents of Owosso referring to him as “the sign guy.”  I did some digging and found that, for about a decade, Pouillon had used graphic posters of aborted children in his protests, many of which (as on the day he was murdered) took place across the street from Owosso High School.  The use of such posters is controversial even among pro-lifers, and I have written before about why I oppose them.  Still, while their use may have contributed to Drake’s rage, it neither justifies murder nor mitigates Drake’s responsibility.

By the end of the day, however, I was contacted by a resident of Owosso who knew Pouillon and his activities, and who explained that the story was much more complex.  In their (our?) rush to score political points, pro-life groups had begun referring to Pouillon as a “peaceful” man and a “martyr” to the cause of life.  The inevitable comparisons with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., followed.

Yet pro-life activists in Owosso had a different story to tell, and my contact directed me to the website of the Argus-Press, where residents of Owosso were discussing their experiences with Pouillon.  Even local admirers admitted that he seemed to thrive on confrontation and had told several of them that he expected—indeed, hoped—to be killed one day while protesting.

All of this had been ignored by outside news agencies.  Even the Argus-Press, while it should be commended for providing a forum in which a fuller picture emerged, shied away from discussing the details in its news stories.  That is why so many of us thought that we knew everything, when in fact we knew only the barest details.

In a follow-up story published in the September 24 issue of The Wanderer and reprinted on the About.com Catholicism GuideSite, I explored the implications of Pouillon’s activities and his murder in greater depth, and questioned whether such confrontational tactics are either appropriate or useful.  What did Pouillon’s death actually accomplish, other than to tear apart the community of Owosso?  By the time the piece appeared, however, the damage had been done, and readers responded to the attempt to paint a fuller picture of James Pouillon’s activities and murder by repeating the myth.

Over the past nine years of writing The Rockford Files, and several more years before that covering the Rockford school-desegregation case and eminent-domain land grabs by local government, I have seen many situations where the reporting of outside news agencies simply did not reflect the reality of events here in Rockford.  The Rockford desegregation case, for instance, was about the closing of a neighborhood high school before a greedy Chicago lawyer, brought in by the mostly white plaintiffs, turned it into a racial class-action suit.  (Many of the original plaintiffs spent years fighting the very lawyer they had hired.)  The Chicago Tribune, the Rockford Register-Star, and the weekly Rock River Times all printed glowing profiles of the local Muslim school before two editors from a small monthly magazine actually spent an entire day at the school, interviewed students, teachers, and administrators, and came away with a very different story of a library stocked with radical Islamic books and videotapes, young children singing rap songs glorifying jihad, and a school-board chairman who touted the virtues of sharia and Osama bin Laden.

In other words, I should have known better.  Life at the local level is always much more complex than what even a good, unbiased, hard-working reporter can capture in a few hundred words for a wire story or a 90-second segment on the six o’clock news.  And a reporter from outside a community will always have trouble placing an event such as Pouillon’s murder in the context of that community’s history.  That is why local news is more important than ever, even as the internet threatens to put the last truly local newspapers and radio and TV stations out of business.

And that, too, is why readers need to take everything they read with a grain of salt—even when it comes from someone they trust.

This article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Would that it were.  Instead, for the last quarter of a century, it has been the home of the Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic—the antiseptic-sounding name for Rockford’s only abortuary.

It has another name, too.  The building’s current owner, Wayne Webster, dubbed it “Fort Turner,” but its walls offer no protection—certainly not to the children whose lives end there, but neither to the mothers who may spend the rest of their lives in regret over having sacrificed their daughters on the altar of “women’s rights,” nor to the fathers who pay for the ritual murder of their sons.

And if the antics of Wayne Webster over the years—dressing up like the devil to harass pro-lifers praying the rosary on the sidewalk outside the clinic; trying to drown out their prayers by shouting obscenities over loudspeakers he has mounted on the exterior walls; hanging rubber chickens (including one mounted on a crucifix) and obscene signs and pictures in the windows—are any indication, the walls of Fort Turner (where Webster also lives) have not protected him from spiritual attack.  But then demons, like vampires, are always looking for an invitation to enter in, and they may well have taken up residence inside Fort Turner when the first abortion was performed there a quarter-century ago.

As if providing a location for an average of 35 murders each week is not enough, over the years Webster has hung signs in the windows of Fort Turner mocking the Christian beliefs of the pro-lifers: “Jesus loves these braindead a—holes,” “These Bible-thumpers suffer from lack-o-nookie,” “God bless these horny old sweat-hogs,” “NIWC 50,000, JC 50” (that is, by the time the abortuary reached 50,000 children killed, Jesus Christ had saved only 50).  But Webster’s latest outrage crossed from mockery into blasphemy, when, in late summer, he hung up a sign with the inscription “Even Jesus Hates You,” under an image of Christ extending the middle finger of His right hand.

The Rockford Pro-Life Initiative, a coalition of pro-life activists founded in 2008 to “eliminate abortion in the Rockford area through Christian, non-confrontational means,” including “Prayer, Fasting, Education and Personal Sacrifice,” asked Rockford police to enforce city ordinances against the offensive use of property by ordering Webster to remove the image.  When a police sergeant refused, saying that the sign was not offensive, a veteran pro-life activist, Kevin Rilott, received permission to address the Rockford City Council.  Pro-lifers showed up at the meeting with small devotional pictures of Christ, and Rilott implored the council to take action—to no avail.

The Rockford ordinances state that it is illegal to “disturb or destroy the peace of the neighborhood in which such building or premises are situated.”  While it is by no means certain that a court would agree that Webster’s blasphemous sign violates the ordinances, many of his other actions—especially the blasting of rock music and the shouting of obscenities over the loudspeakers mounted on the outside of Fort Turner—clearly do.  Yet there is no record of Webster or the clinic being issued a citation.

A few weeks after Webster hung the “Even Jesus Hates You” sign, Rilott was praying outside of Fort Turner, in the same spot where he has stood for a decade.  Webster’s security guard asked him to move, and when Rilott refused, he called in the police.  An officer on the scene asked Rilott to pick up a large painting of Christ that he had propped up next to him; when Rilott refused, the officer called in the same police sergeant who had refused to take action on Webster’s sign.  After ordering the pro-life protesters to turn off their video cameras, the sergeant confiscated the painting on the grounds that it was “unattended” and threw it in the back of his squad car.

So, pictures of Our Lord giving the finger to faithful Christians are acceptable; “unattended” paintings of Christ are not.  (As video footage of the incident shows, Rilott was never more than two or three feet away from the painting at any time.)

When pro-lifers use graphic images of aborted children in their protests, the media views such actions as provocation (which, in some cases, such as that of the recently murdered James Pouillon, it may well be).  But you will look in vain for equivalent treatment of Webster’s blasphemy (or similar actions at abortuaries around the country).

Pro-lifers’ use of graphic images, I have argued, is counterproductive at best; but while they do not show us the truth, they at least portray reality.  Webster’s sign does neither—though it may give us a glimpse into the depths of his soul and of the sleepless nights he spends guarding the gates of Hell.

The reporter or journalist almost always responds that the student should say and submit (for four years!) whatever the professor wants and graduate to the real world with his honors degree. Such a course of action leads to self-deception and, gradually, sincere conversion—or to lying throughout one’s postgraduate career. At minimum, it leaves less independent students in that class thinking that everything the professor teaches must be true, or someone would have spoken up. Many parents, if they knew all this, would bankrupt themselves to send their child to one of the handful of honest, scholarly, military or religious colleges and universities in America, or refuse to pay a cent for “higher education” and probably doom their child, however academically gifted, to a career in fast-food restaurants or garages, while the colleges swing further leftward.

I faced this same dilemma for many years, three postgraduate degrees and two successful careers ago. The choice was especially difficult for me because I had a double major: English and history, both playgrounds for the left. To make things more difficult I had little time to write in subtle double-meanings, because I worked my way through university with full-time jobs. Scholarships (outside of sports) were almost unheard of, and my boarding prep school had nearly bankrupted my parents. I did, however, find enough time (usually by sleeping during select classes) to found my university’s first chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, which had about 200 nominal members, of which about 30 were very active. It was in self-defense, as the commons were ruled by the Trotskyite “Students for a Democratic Society.” (So much for the myth that the left wasn’t active on campuses until the late 60’s.)

I quickly learned what my professors demanded and spewed it back. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I began to learn tactics to pacify my conscience. In history, for example, the professor would assign a term paper requiring that we prove that the United States would be better under an extremely centralized “Hamiltonian” system but toward ridiculously “Jeffersonian” ends; “Interpret these Founders as we [I] did in class.” I wrote a sophisticated paper according to the instructions, parroting my professor’s lectures, while simultaneously writing a contrary thesis. I handed in only the former. Our grades were posted on the bulletin board after being turned in to the administration. I then visited the professor in his artfully book-strewn office and told him I had made a mistake, and could I please still turn in the paper that I actually wanted graded, handing him the one that truly reflected history. He told me that it was not possible to change my grade (the highest in the class) this late, but he would truly enjoy reading a paper of mine that I considered even better. The next I heard of the matter, he was fruitlessly begging the dean to let him flunk me. So I guess he read it. But all that was too much work for me, with minimal results.

After a few false starts I found a partial solution that will work from Yale to Podunk Junior College, so long as the school contains a committed leftist professor whose classes consist of his opinions and 30 or so students.

At our university I would get as many conservatives together as I could, usually many more than the average classroom would hold. We would wander into registration, held in the basketball gym, ahead of time. We would already have chosen the worst of the worst among the professors. We’d find the table with his course and its grad-student registrar, line up at it, and sign in until the class was overfull. It was delightful to see the smile on the professor’s face if he happened to be in the building and looking at his table. So crowded, and by 9 a.m.!

Usually, the professor would begin with his inanities or lies at the class’s first meeting. One or two of us would raise our hands, attempt to reason with him and, after failure, walk out. The next meeting went the same. Within a week or two the classroom was empty but for a bewildered professor. We still had time to add or drop courses, according to the rules. We dropped that course and added another if we hadn’t already signed up for an extra, better course in advance.

I do not know what happened to the aged propagandists when they realized they had to teach to empty classrooms for a semester, and I don’t really care. I do remember hearing that the worst one we targeted had begun teaching at what we considered a far lesser school. Of course, there were always other bad teachers, so compromise was necessary. But even limited trials provide self-respect. Every school has some sort of conservative club. If it can publish an alternative newspaper, the student right can certainly do what we did. If enough students followed our example, administrations would have to begin selecting their faculties more carefully, and tenure would be rarer. (Incidentally, one of my careers was as a professor, but I taught my most controversial courses honestly and fairly.)

The absence of student rebellions explains why we face today a population of “educated” men and women lacking principles and honor, with whom one cannot hold a reasonable conversation and not encounter attention deficit disorder, and who possess nothing that would pass in Europe as an education. In America they head up corporations, law firms, and hospitals; professional schools provide no escape. After 30 years practicing law in a large city I have not met a single attorney who admits to having read a book cover to cover since college—not even since law school, because cases are selected from “casebooks.” Blackstone, Grotius, even Cicero or other writers touching on jurisprudence are unavailable and discouraged, as is questioning professors in class. I was forcibly reminded by the other students that they go to get a piece of paper, not to learn law. Other “learned” boot camps are the same.

Students who conform for a grade should keep in mind that lip service is often the most valuable service one can provide, and stifling what one knows to be the truth only gives one four full years of practicing deceit for selfish reasons. There is a rule that the Soviet Union as well as the United States had to learn: Moles often turn, intentionally or not. Over the years I have run into several conservative classmates for whom I once had great hope, but who had preferred to knuckle under “just for awhile.” Years later, they had become brainless sycophants.

This article first appeared in the October 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes.  “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.”  The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter.

Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of salt.  Most of us will look for certain signs: Is the guilty man able to articulate his repentance in something other than self-serving terms?  With God’s help I have been able to forgive myself just doesn’t cut it.  Also, has the guilty man embraced the justice meted out by the court system?  Or does his conversion conveniently coincide with an appeal?  Furthermore, is the guilty man faithful, both in his confession and his conduct, and for how long?

This will be the prisoner’s 38th Christmas behind bars.  In 1975 he became a Christian, and in 1980 he founded Abounding Love Ministries, preaching the Gospel on the inside and sharing his faith through books and his monthly newsletter.

“If justice would’ve been served, I would’ve gotten the death penalty,” says the prisoner.  “I hope that in no way have I ever given the impression that I blame anything on my parents or drugs . . . I take full responsibility.”

Over the years, the prisoner has received stacks of mail from women—some curious, some bizarre, some out of Christian love.  Some 20 years ago, he began corresponding with a woman named Susan LaBerge.  She identified herself as a new Christian who was reaching out to him with the love and forgiveness of Christ.  He began sending her his newsletter and personal letters of thanks for her encouragement.  Susan said that as she read his letters her chest pounded, and she “cried and cried, realizing he’d come to the Lord, and I’ve come to the Lord.”

After a year of correspondence, the prisoner was surprised to read that Susan wanted to visit him in person.  Letters are one thing, but you just never know what sort of person you’re going to find in the visiting room.  Anyone can fake the lingo of Christianity in a letter.  What was she up to?

When Susan arrived at the Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, she seemed pleasant, peaceful.  They talked for some time, sharing with each other about their faith, how it was that they had become Christians.  As it turned out, Susan had grown up in the area where the prisoner had committed his crimes at age 23.  She had been 21 years old at the time.

There was more.  She hadn’t been sure whether she would say it, but his faith seemed genuine.  “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said, and he braced himself.  Was this the moment he’d dreaded?  Or worse, was she a member of the Family, come to try to work some sort of spell on him?

“My mother was Rosemary LaBianca,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” he said, stunned.

“I’m not kidding.”

They sat and wept.  In fact, he weeps again, retelling the story.

On August 10, 1969, Charles “Tex” Watson, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed Susan’s mother 41 times in her bedroom.  They killed her stepfather, Leno, in the living room in a similarly gruesome manner and, on the orders of Charles Manson, “left something witchy” behind: the words “Death to pigs” and “Rise” written in Leno’s blood on the wall, and “War” carved into his abdomen.  The night before, the man who claimed to be Jesus Christ had told Tex to round up the girls and begin “Helter Skelter,” an apocalyptic black uprising against whites.  Manson thought “blackie was too ignorant” to get the ball rolling, so he sent out his drug-addled apostles.  Before butchering a pregnant Sharon Tate and her friends, Watson told them, “I am the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”

Charles Watson was, in fact, given the death penalty, along with Manson and all of the women who participated in those crimes, but the state of California outlawed the death penalty in 1972, which commuted all of their sentences to life in prison.

On the evening of August 10, 1969, Susan, her boyfriend, and her 15-year-old brother entered the kitchen of the LaBianca residence and were greeted by the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” written in blood on the refrigerator.

“All I felt from Susan,” said the prisoner, “was love.”  He calls it a miracle.

Susan LaBerge testified at a parole hearing that Charles Watson had changed.  This enraged Sharon Tate’s mother, nerves still raw, and she called Susan a “stupid sh-t.”  Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi commented that, when it comes to parole, it doesn’t matter whether Watson has changed.  To let him out would be a miscarriage of justice.  Indeed, as Bugliosi and Watson have both said, justice requires the death penalty.  Watson knows he’ll never be a free man, not in this life.

Another Manson Family member will spend this Christmas free for the first time in 34 years.  Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, convicted in 1975 of attempting to assassinate President Ford, was released from prison in August.  In interviews over the years, she maintained her love for the Jesus-of-Death-Valley, who “gave me everything.”

Back in Mule Creek, the prisoner will be celebrating the birth of the Child Who gave him everything, including forgiveness undeserved.

This article first appeared in the December 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Going Through the Motions
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

Recovering the Dignity of Truth
by William Murchison
Episcopalians and/or Anglicans.

Fighting for Orthodoxy Among the Methodists
by Mark Tooley
Some good news.

A Tale of Two Subversives
by Srdja Trifkovic
Battling Christophobia in California and Serbia.

NEWS

Government-Managed Business
by Stephen B. Presser
As Silent Cal spins . . .

REVIEWS

Waiting for Charles the Second
by Matthew A. Roberts

Christopher Caldwell: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

plus

W. James Antle III on William Murchison’s Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity

Andrei Navrozov on Józef Mackiewicz’s The Triumph 
of Provocation

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From the Upper Midwest: Forgotten Corners
by Sean Scallon

VITAL SIGNS

The New Republic: Fairabia
by R. Cort Kirkwood

Film: Twice-Baked and Twice as Bad
by Robert Dean Lurie

COLUMNS

Growing Up in America
by Paul Craig Roberts

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

Between the Lines
by Justin Raimondo

In the Dark
A Serious Man
by George McCartney

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

Polemics & Exchanges
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS
CONTRASTS

POETRY
An Inmate Gang and
Green Water
by Jack Butler

ON THE COVER

Cover photo by the monks of Clear Creek.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

Something to Remember
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

Race and Racism
by Tom Landess
A brief history.

Saving French in Quebec
by Luc Gagnon
Why language isn’t enough.

NEWS

Social Security’s Coming Crash
by Doug Bandow
The certain end of entitlement.

REVIEWS

It’s the Culture, Stupid!
by Tom Piatak

Paul M. Weyrich: The Next Conservatism

plus

William J. Quirk on Theresa Amato’s Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Thomas Schaaf, Sr., on James Scott’s The Attack 
on the Liberty

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Jon Meacham’s
 American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Quebec: Quebec’s New State Religion
by Jean Morse-Chevrier

Letter From Scotland: Scottish Weakness and Muslim Impudence
by Christie Davies

VITAL SIGNS

The Media: On the Death of Newspapers
by Clay Reynolds

The New Republic: Father Abraham: Conservative?
by John M. Vella

Political Theory: Pulling the Wool Over Their Eyes:
A Straussian Memoir
by Kenneth Zaretzke

Law: Who Are You?  The Law of Status
by Gerald Russello

COLUMNS

Sins of Omission
by Roger D. McGrath

Western Stories
by Paul Craig Roberts

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

Between the Lines
by Justin Raimondo

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

In the Dark
The Informant!
by George McCartney

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
The Ransoming of Hector and
Bellerophon
by James Graves

ON THE COVER

Cover/illustration photo by Christophe Finot.
Inside illustration by Melanie Anderson.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson clearly believed in white supremacy.  In a segment of Notes on the State of Virginia often cited as an illustration of his opposition to slavery, he wrote,

Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

Abraham Lincoln took great care in his ongoing quarrel with Stephen Douglas to suggest the ways in which he believed blacks to be inferior to whites.  In 1857, in a speech criticizing the Dred Scott decision, he said,

I think the authors of [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.  They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.  They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In 1858, he said the following during the first Lincoln-Douglas debate:

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.  There is a physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

This statement should come as no surprise to students of history.  Lincoln was a man of his time and place.  Just five years earlier, Illinois had passed legislation prohibiting any black immigration into the state.  It was the third such Illinois statute directed against blacks per se.  These laws, motivated by intense racial animosity, were common in the territories and newer states.

By the turn of the next century, much of the comment on race came from the South.  In 1900, Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman—whose statue, a gift in part of the South Carolina Democratic Party, broods over the State House in Columbia—said in a speech to the U.S. Senate,

We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.  We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.  I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.

All three men believed blacks were less intelligent than whites.  All three advocated shipping blacks back to Africa rather than allowing them to remain among whites to “amalgamate” or “mongrelize” the races.  And all three accepted without question the same stereotypical view of blacks—one that, until the second half of the 20th century, supported de jure segregation in the South and parts of the North, de facto segregation elsewhere.

While Tillman presumed to speak for white Southerners in his diatribe, throughout the body of the speech he suggested that senators representing the rest of the country shared the same prejudices.  Indeed, he made this point with a smug sense of superiority, as if to say, “We are open and honest about our racial attitudes.  You aren’t.”

In fact, when the second Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915, Northern states led the nation in recruitment.  Here are the top five states in number of members, as reported in Kenneth T. Jackson’s The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930, the period in which the Klan was at the height of its political power: Indiana, 240,000; Ohio, 195,000; Texas, 190,000; Pennsylvania, 150,000; and Illinois, 95,000.  (In 2009, estimates of Klan membership hover around 5,000.)

Today, no senator, Northern or Southern, would admit to membership in an overtly racist organization or publicly endorse white supremacy.  If he did, he might well be expelled from the Senate.  Indeed, racism is now the greatest of all political sins, and the N-word has replaced the F-word as the most obscene utterance in the language.

The foundation for this change was laid in 1948, when a group of liberal Democrats captured their party’s national convention and, with a series of high-decibel speeches, made civil rights the focal issue of the campaign.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., of New York; Blair Moody of Michigan; and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota led the charge, excoriating the South for its racism and Jim Crow laws, capturing the high ground for the liberal wing of the party.

Strom Thurmond, then the Democratic governor of South Carolina, led 35 Southern delegates out of the convention and formed a third party, known by its nickname, the Dixiecrats.  Seeing a fragmented Democratic Party, the far left formed yet a fourth party, the Progressives, and nominated former Vice President Henry Wallace, called Old Bubblehead because of his dreamy vision of a socialist America.  Harry Truman, who fell into the None of the Above category, ran on the civil-rights platform the convention had handed him—and won, to the surprise of just about everybody.  Thus, the 1948 convention may well have signaled a new era, one in which the charge of “racism” played an increasingly important role in the political debate.

As Americans entered the second half of the 20th century, some Southern politicians were still defending de jure segregation, arguing that whites should not be forced to attend school with blacks, sit next to them in buses, drink out of the same water fountain, and eat at the same lunch counters.  The implication of these Jim Crow laws was clear to both races: The law was affirming the superiority, and therefore the supremacy, of the white race.  In that sense, legalized segregation may have been more mean-spirited than slavery, since it mandated an artificial separation of the races to protect the sensibilities of white folks.

It is interesting to note that, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tom’s second benevolent Southern master, Augustine St. Clare, defends the institution of slavery but reproves Ophelia, his New England abolitionist cousin, for her aversion to blacks, which is so strong that she feels uncomfortable in their presence and avoids their touch.  In Mrs. Stowe’s novel, then, it is the Yankee whose sensibilities are offended.  Stowe was not the last writer to take the measure of Northern racism.  (By the way, Simon Legree was a transplanted Northerner.)

The second and more important change in racial politics occurred when Congress passed the 1964 Voting Rights Act, which effectively ended the Democrats’ disenfranchisement of blacks in the South.  Suddenly, they were allowed to vote in the primary where “nomination was tantamount to election”—and with the Department of Justice standing behind them, pistols cocked.

A lot of Southern politicians were caught off base.  Those who had ritualistically demonized “nigras” and “niggers” saw the Democratic precincts flooded with black voters.  Like Old Pharaoh, many politicians got drownded.  Others, like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, turned on a dime and began to reach out to the black community—hiring black staff members and delivering sides of pork to black constituents.  Within a nanosecond of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic Party in the South began denouncing Republicans as the party of racism and reaction.  At last, Northern and Southern Democrats were on the same page again, singing as one harmonious choir for the first time since 1895.

And it worked.  Sort of.  Blacks flocked to the Democratic Party, despite the fact that between 1876 and 1964 the GOP had been the welcome wagon of Southern blacks, who were the beneficiaries of what little patronage Republicans had to offer.

However, the change ultimately proved an electoral setback for the Democrats.  The essentially conservative nature of the Republican Party, coupled with the fierce anti-Southern rhetoric of Northern Democrats—which impugned the moral integrity of every man, woman, and newborn baby in the region—drove millions of white voters into the ranks of the GOP, once hated by Southerners as the architect of Reconstruction.

Liberal Democrats saw this shift as proof that Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy was an appeal to the South’s immitigable racism—the true motive, they argued, for every conservative dissent to the inevitable march of America toward statism.  Thus, criticism of Obama has become for left-leaning ideologues an expression of racial bigotry, whatever the stated motive.

Actress Janeane Garofalo, appearing on Keith Olbermann’s show, called those who demonstrated against Obama’s agenda “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” and then added that “this is about hating a black man in the White House.  This is racism straight up.”

Colbert King, a Washington Post columnist, wrote, “There’s something loose in the land, an ugliness and hatred directed toward Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president, that takes the breath away.”

And Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, said of Rep. Joe Wilson’s now-famous outburst,

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys—a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club—Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! . . .

This president is the ultimate civil rights figure—a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For generations, genteel Southerners would bow their heads in shame at accusations of this sort.  Today, many of them, examining such extravagant illogic, have come to reject the stereotyping of their region and its citizens—and to regard Garofalo, King, and Dowd as irrelevant airheads, not because the South is free of racism, but because it is more so than other parts of the country.

In addition, black scholars, like Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who recently complained about racism in Boston), have questioned the myth of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and of the North as the savior of the black race—as did Frederick Douglass more than 100 years ago.  Suddenly, the history of the question has become more complicated—and, consequently, a little less important.

More to the point, tens of thousands of blacks who have little contact with formal history are expressing their own dissent in opinion and in behavior.  Several years ago a Gallup Poll found that in only one region did a majority of blacks believe they were treated equally: the South.  A Harvard study reported that in only one region did a majority of white children attend integrated schools: the South.  And the 2000 Census revealed that, in recent decades, more blacks have moved into the South than out of the South, while the reverse is true in all other regions.  If you had only facts to guide you, you might well conclude that the Northeast is the citadel of racism in America—and you might be right.

Thus will it be increasingly difficult for leftist Democrats to sustain the myth of rampant Southern racism and to explain electoral losses in the region on this factor.

In the recent past, it has been relatively easy to play the race card.  Here are some fresh comments gleaned from the airways by Rush Limbaugh:

CAMPBELL BROWN: (music) . . . vicious, racist imagery attacking our first African-American president.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: (newsroom noise) Gentleman Joe Wilson has done much to make the racist history of South Carolina jump back into our present consciousness.

CANDY CROWLEY: (b-roll) Critics think this is about resistance to a black man as president.

JAMES CARVILLE: People are upset with President Obama because of the color of his skin. Who cannot believe that?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Could there be a refusal to accept the legitimacy of Barack Obama as president because of his race?

WOLF BLITZER: A small but disturbing minority within the tea party movement is also blatantly anti-black.

JOHN RIDLEY: When you talk about racial image, this is not just standard debate.

ELAINE QUIJANO: (b-roll) A small but passionate minority is also voicing what some see as racist rhetoric.

JOHN AVLON: Hitler.  Communism.  Racism.  All this ugliness is bubbling up.

ANDERSON COOPER: There is an undercurrent of racism in some of the criticism of the president.

And remember that Trent Lott lost his position as Senate majority leader because, at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, he paid the old man a meaningless compliment:

I want to say this about my state.  When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.  We’re proud of it.  And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.

Lott was no segregationist.  He wasn’t even a strong defender of his state’s cultural conservatism.  In the House and Senate he was a trimmer—a dealmaker who could reach across the aisle when principle was on the block.  He was the last person to suggest that segregation was anything but wicked.  As a Mississippian, he knew better.  If, in his little speech, he meant anything at all, he was referring to Thurmond’s fiscal conservatism and his support of a strong military.  Lott’s fellow senators and President Bush knew what kind of cautious animal he was.  Yet they forced him to surrender his leadership post anyway—because a charge of racism, however farfetched, was still the hydrogen bomb of political warfare.

Despite these frantic accusations the charge of racism is bound to lose its power to wound and destroy in the years immediately ahead.  After all, Americans have elected a black president, so the nation can’t be too racist, can it?  And if—like a pair of French fops in the court of Louis XIV—the Reverend Jesse and the Reverend Al continue to make a profession of getting their feelings hurt, then it will be easier and easier to brush them off like a couple of houseflies.  We may even be approaching a time when charges of racism will seem as bland and dull as unsalted oatmeal, when even the New York Times will read Maureen Dowd’s name-calling, clear the phlegm from its magisterial throat, and yawn.

But we’re not there yet.

This article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.