No, I’m not talking about poor Governor Rod, whose peers sent him up the river, or poor Governor Ryan, who is still up spit creek and being denied parole.  I’m talking about love.

We don’t live in a theocracy, mister.  This ain’t the Dark Ages.  You should be free to love whomever you want to love.  America is about equality.  They used to lynch black people at picnics.

As reported in these pages last month, thanks to the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, a man can union a man, a woman can union a woman, and, just to be fair, a woman can union a man.  (The “religious freedom” part means churches, synagogues, mosques, and Indians are free to choose whether or not to solemnize such unions.  Illinois is very tolerant.)  No, it’s not same-sex “marriage,” according to the state’s Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, for that would be “contrary to the public policy of this State.”  You may not use the m-word.

But the fact is, the bill Governor Quinn signed (with the exquisite short title CIV PRO-DEATH OF PARTY) provides that, for all Land of Lincoln purposes, a civil union means “the obligations, responsibilities, protections, and benefits afforded or recognized by the law of Illinois to spouses.”  Furthermore, when it comes to dissolving one of them, CIV PRO-DEATH simply refers the reader or lawyer to the Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, “Sections 401 through 413.”

So close it is in substance to the m-word that CIV PRO-DEATH’s indefatigable author and sponsor, State Rep. Greg “Crocodile Rock” Harris (D-Chicago), says he doesn’t have plans to pursue further “marriage equality” legislation.  Bo and Roscoe can union each other, pass on the General Lee or Flash one to the other without a will upon a partner’s death, and visit each other in the Hazzard Co. Hospital, no matter what Uncle Jesse or Boss Hogg says.

But folks, the discrimination has not ended.  Because the fact remains that Bo and Luke cannot be together—not the way two of Cupid’s victims of the same or opposite sex can, who don’t suffer from the new Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.  I refer, of course, to cousin incest.

But wait, you say!  That’s disgusting.  Well, may I remind you that homosexuality was once thought unspeakable?  That the day-before-yesterday’s taboos are yesterday’s hot topics on The View and today’s subjects for public-school kindergartners?

Indeed, why do you find it disgusting?  Because that’s not your preference?  Do you think that, given our puritanical society’s history of discrimination, lynching, and homocide, two male cousins would just choose to be attracted sexually to each other?  Are you really going to say to another free, consenting adult that he could just as easily find another member of his own sex who is not a relative to love?  Or send him to some brainwashing camp, Ted Haggard style, so they can suppress his natural desire and turn him into a suicidal alcoholic?

It’s shocking, but there it is, in black and white, in this so-called victory legislation for “marriage equality,” under Section 25.  “The following civil unions are prohibited: [A] civil union between first cousins.”

So, Bo and Daisy, too.

In fact, for a certain courageous, persecuted minority, this bill is a step backward.  Why?  Because it’s even more stringent than Illinois law governing . . . marriage!  After all, the current m-word statute provides that, while your average first cousins may not marry, they may tie the knot when they turn 50, or if either Bo or Daisy provides “a certificate signed by a licensed physician” confirming that one of them “is permanently and irreversibly sterile.”

But when it comes to civil unions, which give couples the benefits “afforded spouses,” there is no provision, no exception whatsoever, for first cousins—of the same or opposite sex.

Now, the puritans will argue that the marriage law makes sense: We don’t want to burden the state with the mutant offspring of Bo and Daisy.  Fine.  (Though even that should be enough to tweak the tentacles of a Planned Parenthood apologist, as it ever so subtly suggests that the purpose of marriage, at least before menopause, is the bearing of children.)

But what about Bo and Luke?

I mean, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to know that neither of those fruits, er, neither of those trees will bear fruit.  So what does it hurt anybody?

That’s just not what a civil union is, you say.  That is unnatural.  Everyone knows that’s wrong.

Well, may I remind you that Bo and Luke don’t think it’s wrong, nor countless other same-sex cousins who are trembling in their closets, afraid of the lynch mob.  And if you say homosexual-cousin incest is unnatural, then what is your standard for “natural”?  Reason?  Sociology?  Yesterday’s consensus on what a “family” should look like?  What gives you the right to define marriage, or virtual marriage, as something that excludes first cousins?  Tradition?  Your claim that truth is objective?  Your narrow-minded, historical Christianity?

—Aaron D. Wolf

This article was first published in the September 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Henceforth, the Department of Homeland Security would focus on deporting illegal aliens who are violent criminals, convicted felons, or repeat immigration-law violators.  Those priorities would be fine and dandy if the secretary weren’t willing to leave the remainder—that is, the majority—of the illegal population alone.

Napolitano also indicated that federal immigration authorities aren’t going to do anything about illegal immigrants who would have benefited from the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), a targeted amnesty that according to one estimate would have legalized 1.3 million people (not counting the parents of those the bill would have amnestied).  That would be the same DREAM Act Congress specifically declined to pass, under both Democratic and Republican majorities.

“The President has said on numerous occasions that it makes no sense to expend our enforcement resources on low-priority cases,” Napolitano wrote.  She also informed the sympathetic group of senators that the administration was going to review 300,000 illegal immigrants already in deportation proceedings to make sure that their cases are in line with these new, more lenient guidelines.

What Napolitano is discussing is essentially amnesty by executive fiat.  While the brazenness of this end run around Congress may be shocking, the handwriting has been on the wall for some time.  In leaked memos and unguarded public pronouncements, the political appointees tasked with enforcing our immigration laws have demonstrated that they are more interested in finding exceptions to the rules.

In June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief John Morton sent out a memo highlighting all of the factors that should be taken into consideration when exercising “prosecutorial discretion” in immigration cases.  The document was a not-too-thinly-veiled invitation to stop enforcing the law against whole categories of illegal aliens and to use necessary administrative leeway to effect policy changes that lack support in Congress.  (It is not surprising that unions representing border-patrol and customs agents have repeatedly passed “no confidence votes” against Morton.)

Last year, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) obtained a memo being circulated within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), kicking around the idea of “administrative alternatives” to “comprehensive immigration reform.”  Like Morton’s manifesto, USCIS sought to use its own discretion in individual hardship cases effectively to amnesty large numbers of illegal immigrants.  Humanitarian parole, deferred action in deportation proceedings, and parole in place were all floated as ways to achieve amnesty without Congress.

“In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, CIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations,” claimed the 11-page document, which was prepared by four senior officials from different parts of USCIS for the agency’s director.  Two of the memo’s authors were Obama appointees.  One of the suggestions was simply to stop serving illegal immigrants with notices to appear at deportation hearings unless they had “significant negative immigration or criminal history.”

The Obama administration dismissed this as a mere brainstorming session with no policy impact.  Grassley, however, complained that “This memo gives credence to our concerns that the administration will go to great lengths to circumvent Congress and unilaterally execute a back door amnesty plan.”

About a month later, there emerged a draft memo from within the catacombs of DHS proposing a “bold” program “using administrative measures to sidestep the current state of Congressional gridlock and inertia.”  The Homeland Security scribblers—whose handiwork, sources told me, went all the way up to Napolitano’s desk—discussed whether their generosity should be bestowed upon “the current unauthorized population or selected subsets.”

After all, they speculated, they could come up with loopholes to benefit “the entire potential legalization population” with exceptions for “individuals who pose a security risk.”  Alternatively, DHS could come up with something “narrowly tailored” and only extended to “individuals eligible for relief under the DREAM Act, AgJOBS, or other specifically defined subcategories.”  AgJOBS (Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security), like DREAM, is a targeted amnesty that Congress declined to pass on more than one occasion.

Unlike their pals at USCIS and ICE, the DHS staffers were at least worried about the potential political fallout: “Even many who have supported a legislated legalization program may question the legitimacy of trying to accomplish the same end via administrative action, particularly after five years in which the two parties have treated this as a matter to be decided by Congress.”

“The Secretary would face criticism that she is abdicating her charge to enforce the immigration laws,” the memo’s authors fretted.  “Internal complaints of this type from career DHS officers are likely and may also be used in the press to bolster the criticism.”  Annoying voters, irritating elected officials, and obnoxious people who have put their lives on the line enforcing immigration laws!  “Opponents of the registration program will characterize it as ‘amnesty,’” they continued, and protest that it is “being proposed to pander to Latino voters.”

All of those objections would have the benefit of actually being true, unlike the self-aggrandizing spin the memorandum offers as arguments for an unprecedented immigration power grab.  The document contains speculation that the President and Democratic congressmen will “be viewed as breaking through the Washington gridlock in an effort to solve tough problems.  Giving nervous Members of Congress something tough to vote for while providing Latino voters with something they can support will be a win-win for us all.”

Except, you know, Americans.  When the second of the amnesty memos came out, the most the administration would publicly promise was this: “To be clear, DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”  Napolitano used similar language in arguing that Congress should still pass the DREAM Act even after administrative amnesty, as the new policy “will not provide categorical relief for any group.”

What a categorical relief!

The move comes as Hispanic leaders are becoming increasingly angry at President Obama for failing to win approval for amnesty legislation and for bragging to swing voters about “record deportations.”  (There is some evidence, such as a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey, that suggests rank-and-file Hispanic voters are more concerned about jobs and the dismal economy.  But they don’t give liberal quotations in perfect English to the New York Times, so their views don’t matter.)

Speaking to the National Council of La Raza in July, Obama told the frustrated crowd that he was constitutionally bound to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and that he couldn’t change them without congressional approval.  They shouted in response, “Yes, you can!  Yes, you can!”  Obama was apparently convinced by a clever twist on his own campaign slogan.

Interestingly, Obama is at loggerheads with Hispanic activists over a policy designed to make amnesty more palatable.  The President has continued the Bush administration’s Secure Communities program, which identifies illegal immigrants already in state and local custody.  This has helped boost deportation statistics by putting criminal aliens on a fast track out of the country while leaving most run-of-the-mill illegals alone.

Many liberal jurisdictions are starting to opt out of Secure Communities, because even this limited immigration enforcement is too much for them.  But just like the Bush administration that cooked up this program, the Obama administration is using selective enforcement to sell amnesty down the road.  That’s why Obama can support Secure Communities, on the one hand, and then file lawsuits against Arizona, which wants to use local law enforcement against illegal immigration in general.  Unlike La Raza, the pro-amnesty political professionals are taking the long view.

With the 2012 presidential election fast approaching, Team Obama is shrinking from the long view a little bit.  Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and even North Carolina all have significant Hispanic populations, and these are the states that will determine who wins the White House.  Redolent of the Clinton administration’s naturalization of a large number of immigrants right before the 1996 election, Obama needs to reshape immigration policy in a way that gets out the Latino vote even if Congress won’t go along.

Thus ICE, USCIS, and DHS talk about a leniency you will never read about in memos distributed within the IRS.  Who knows how many people will benefit from administrative amnesty now that illegal immigration by itself is frequently no longer treated as if it is illegal?  The administration is pursuing these ends through the highly technical means of memorandum mumbo-jumbo, so as to avoid the kind of backlash that annually sank the McCain-Kennedy amnesties under Bush.  They hope voters will turn a blind eye to Janet Napolitano as she turns a blind eye to vast numbers of illegal immigrants who simply aren’t an enforcement priority anymore.

W. James Antle, III is associate editor of  The American Spectator.

This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.”  A lack of rebelliousness among the people would demonstrate “a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

The “rebellion” in Massachusetts had alarmed many, especially the masters of that commonwealth, who were imbued with a Puritan longing for regulated behavior and saw the tax revolt of Capt. Daniel Shays and his farmers as a threat to their control.  In Jefferson’s perspective, the “rebels” were merely adhering to good American practice.  What, indeed, had the recent War of Independence amounted to but resistance to heavy-handed government?  And such rebellions against unsatisfactory government officials and policies had been a regular occurrence during the long colonial history of the Americans, especially in the Southern colonies.

Persistent misrepresentation of Jefferson’s words here and elsewhere by later generations has obscured what he meant.  A dangerous radical?  A chronic upsetter of social order?  No.  Jefferson does not call for an overturn of society and its reconstruction according to some abstract plan.  Think of the root meaning of the term revolution.  Jefferson, in fact, is mostly satisfied with his society (Virginia), although he is interested in a few small reforms that might broaden its base.  So are his followers satisfied with their portions of America.  That is why they support him.  Despite the hysterical and sometimes insincere denunciations of the New England clergy, the Virginia planter is no Jacobin.  As he sees things, any government, with the passage of time and the accretion of abuses and bad precedents, becomes corrupted.  It needs to be revolved back to its original principles.

This is not a radical program but a deeply reactionary one.  What Jefferson fundamentally wants to tell us is that the people should never fear the government, but the government should always fear the people.  This is not the battle cry of a movement with a radical agenda.  President Jefferson comes to the White House with no agenda except to preserve the joint independence of the States United and their separate rights as “the best bulwark of our liberties.”  To carry out this agenda requires a rollback of the economic and judicial corruptions introduced by the Hamilton/Adams innovators.

For the Jeffersonian democrats, Americans were fortunate to enjoy widespread property ownership, with a large body of independent citizens, and to be free of the class hegemony and conflict of the Old World, thankfully an ocean away.  There is no French or Russian revolutionary fantasy here.  The government is not to be used as a sledgehammer to destroy and rebuild society.  In this way of thinking, the greatest enemy of society and of individual liberty is government itself.  The tendency of power is everywhere and forever toward concentration.  As a popular Jeffersonian saying has it, “Power is always stealing from the many to the few.”

It is this basic orientation that separates Jeffersonian democrats from “conservatives” of Jefferson’s own time and later.  It explains the curious phenomenon that throughout American history the people have been “conservative,” and revolutionary changes have always come from the top down.

My point is illuminated by the argument between John Adams in his A Defense of the Constitutions of the United States and John Taylor of Caroline, the systematic philosopher of Jeffersonian democracy, in his Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated.  Adams’ view of history was that the popular majority always had a tendency to envy the wealth of its betters and use the government to appropriate it, and that this tendency was the chief source of destruction of a free regime.

He hoped to avoid the subversion of American republicanism by various devices that would dilute and delay an unwise popular majority: a bicameral legislature with an upper house remote from popular opinion, an executive veto, and an independent judiciary.  All Adams’ devices have catastrophically failed to limit government and to preserve freedom, as Taylor plainly predicted.

For Taylor, Adams had got his history wrong.  The people, in a society like that of Americans, were not dangerous.  Most of the time they went quietly about their own business and demanded nothing—unless they were intolerably provoked by abuses of government.  It was the “court party” that was the enemy of liberty and that would subvert the free commonwealth.  History showed that there were always self-seeking minorities, would-be elites, ready to use the machinery of government to live off the labor of the majority.  Sometimes this was done by force, and sometimes by fraud, as in the Hamiltonian maxim “a public debt is a public blessing.”  The remedy was not to erect artificial “checks and balances” but to make sure power was widely dispersed, limited, and amenable to recall.

The Jeffersonian Constitution has been misrepresented as much as or more than Jeffersonian philosophy.  It was not “strict construction,” a nonstarter, nor even states’ rights.  It was state sovereignty.  Jefferson (and Madison, too) may be quoted ad infinitum to this effect.  The Virginia and Kentucky documents of 1798-1800 spell out beyond any doubt that the final defense of freedom in the American system is the people acting in their only constitution-making identity, that of their sovereign states.  The states were the legitimate and peaceful resort to protect the liberties of their citizens and themselves as communities from federal encroachment.

Years after leaving the White House, Jefferson writes to an inquisitive foreigner,

But the true barriers of our liberty in this country are our State governments; and the wisest conservative power ever contrived by man, is that of which our Revolution and present government found us possessed.  Seventeen distinct States, amalgamated into one as to their foreign concerns, but single and independent as to their internal administration.

In the last months of his life Jefferson suggested to influential Virginians that it was time once again to consider interposing the sovereignty of the state against unconstitutional federal legislation.  Never for a day in his life did Jefferson doubt that the people of a state could exercise their sovereignty by leaving the Union, though it was not something to be encouraged rashly.  He rather expected that the expanding country would break up into two or more confederacies.  That was fine, if it was what the people wanted.  Americans were rightly joined together by fellow feeling—shared blood and sacrifice—not by the armed force of Washington City.

Commentators have twisted themselves into incredible acrobatic postures and wholesaled semiplausible lies to assert that Jefferson did not really mean the plain language of what he said.  Others have “explained” that Jeffersonian states’ rights was only a temporary and expedient device to defend liberty, a device now made unnecessary by the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union.  They miss the point, unwelcome to all adherents of elitist agendas and centralized power—for Jefferson, individual liberty and state sovereignty were indivisible.  Properly rebellious free men defended themselves and their communities from Leviathan.

The eclipse of the Jeffersonian preference for limited power and economic freedom had less to do with politics than it did with changes in the spirit of society as the 19th century progressed.  Almost from the first days of the United States, New England leadership undertook to establish the New England way as the true and only American way.  This was carried out in politics, religion, education, literature, historical writing, and even in lexicography, with vigor and persistence.  This is a subject worthy of a multivolume study of a phenomenon that is unrecognized today, although it was a decisive event in our history and clearly understood while it was taking place.  Louis Auchincloss, in The Winthrop Covenant, gives a surface account of the persistence of this Puritan mission throughout American history.

The Puritan conquest of the North was not as easy as has been thought, but was accomplished by about 1850.  James Fenimore Cooper in his Littlepage trilogy describes and laments how the unique Anglo-Dutch society of old New York was transformed by the swarm of immigrants from east of the Hudson.  Meanwhile, Emerson went to Europe and absorbed the Germanized version of the French Revolution, which was really just going back to his Puritan roots.  He came home a Unitarian.  The mission was changed, but the intensity of the need to correct the world to conform to the New England plan remained the same.  It soon brought to heel the West and the unruly Catholic immigrants.

The South was a different matter.  It had developed from a different base and in a different way.  Southerners were proud and determined to do it their way, individually and as a people.  The South could not be converted or subverted, so it had to be destroyed, the grapes of wrath had to be trampled out.  A 30-year campaign of slander and hatred, combined with economic developments, finally brought on in 1861 the circumstances in which this could be accomplished.  Americans like to think that their campaign for the abolition of slavery was all about benevolence and liberty.  A bit of genuine historical research into what they actually said at the time paints a different picture.  The Yankees hated slavery because the slaves were a non-Anglo-Saxon element who had, in their view, hopelessly corrupted white Southerners.  In the slaveholding society, white men had far too much liberty and independent power.  Such liberty offended puritan sensibilities and created an evil disposition to thwart New England economic and cultural hegemony.  It was not that the black man had too little liberty; it was that the Southern white man had far too much.

That crusade pretty well finished off Jeffersonian democracy.  As Gen. R.E. Lee wrote to Lord Acton the year after his surrender, “the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home,” was the precursor of American ruin.  Lincoln rightly remains the truly representative American.  He is the symbol of the highly successful synthesis of capitalist oligarchy, puritan conformity, and perpetual social revolution from the top down that is the mainstream of American life.  There are many who find that synthesis beautiful, though most often they do not really understand what it is, identifying with one or another of the elements and not with the combination itself.  Money rules and permits a politics that consists almost entirely of sham battles between the old puritans, the “conservatives,” and the secular ones, the “liberals.”  From time to time they all join together in a messianic war to destroy the latest menace to Lincoln’s vision: the South, the kaiser, the Red Menace, drugs, terror, etc.

They share the sense that the meaning of “America” is a mission to bring the abstract ideals of the American standard to all mankind.  The only difference is that the “conservatives” want to do it by force, and the “liberals” by welfare.  A Jeffersonian, if any still existed, would insist that Americans are not here to be used for anybody’s mission, and the proper point of reference is what is good for them.

The Jeffersonian spirit survived for a while underground, and now and then a weak and confused revival occurred, as in the days of William Jennings Bryan and populism.  The last significant appearance was perhaps the agrarian, non-Marxist critique of capitalism in the 1930’s.  Nowhere to be seen now are the old Jeffersonians, once a major American type, rebellious men who dared defend the rights of themselves and their communities from outside impositions.  But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile spark.

Clyde Wilson proudly reports that one of his ancestors took part in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.

This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Steve Jobs, the 55-year-old cofounder of Apple, Inc., who resigned as the company’s CEO on August 24, has never hidden his political views.  A vegan Buddhist who supported Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama and extended spousal benefits to the “domestic partners” of Apple employees, Jobs—in violation of contemporary business wisdom—has even inserted his political views into Apple’s advertising.  (Think of the grammatically incorrect “Think Different” campaign, which featured such liberal icons as Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, and Mahatma Gandhi.)  Reportedly a voracious reader, Jobs would probably not find much in Chronicles to his liking.  Yet for almost 25 years, every issue of this magazine has benefited greatly from technologies developed by Jobs at Apple and NeXT, the computer company he founded after leaving Apple in 1985.

Lest you dismiss these remarks as the ravings of an Apple “fanboy,” let me illustrate briefly what I mean.

Before Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, Chronicles was put together the way most magazines were.  Authors sent their typewritten manuscripts (with corrections often handwritten in pencil or ink) by mail to our editorial office.  The manuscripts had to be retyped (incorporating the authors’ corrections) before they were edited, and after every round of editing.  To lay out the magazine, the text had to be typeset into galley form, and then cut and pasted (with scissors and glue) onto the page, and waxed to hold everything in place (and hide the cut edges).  The pages were sent to a prepress house, which tidied them up, inserted images and ads, and took pictures of the composed page (one piece of film for each color on the page).  “Bluelines” (essentially mimeographed proofs) were created from those negatives and returned to our offices.  Any necessary corrections to the bluelines entailed recomposing the entire page, shooting new film, and running new bluelines.  When the bluelines were finally approved, the negatives were shipped to our printer, where they were transferred to printing plates.  Any problems discovered by the printer on any of the plates required returning to square one on that plate.  (And each plate contained either four or eight pages of the magazine, so a problem on one page affected several others as well.)  The printer would provide the first hard copies in about ten business days after delivery of the final, problem-free negatives.

All of that began to change in 1984.  The Macintosh’s graphical user interface allowed programmers to create a “WYSIWYG” environment—“What You See Is What You Get.”  That, along with Apple’s LaserWriter printer (which accurately reproduced what you saw on screen), set the stage in 1985 for desktop publishing.

Today, authors send us their text as e-mail attachments (an innovative feature of Jobs’ NeXTSTEP operating system), mostly written in Microsoft Word (which made its first appearance as a WYSIWYG word processor when it was ported to the Macintosh in 1985).  Many of our writers now own a Mac, but some still use a PC running Windows, which got its start as an imitation of the Macintosh operating system, bolted on top of MS-DOS.

Aaron Wolf imports the text directly into Adobe InDesign and exports it for editing onscreen in Adobe InCopy.  Adobe’s first big break came in 1985, when Apple licensed Adobe’s PostScript language for use in the LaserWriter.  Aaron and I edit each article twice onscreen (30-inch Apple Cinema Displays connected to Mac Pros), before Aaron sends the galleys (as PDFs, via e-mail) to each author.  Aaron enters any corrections received from the author, Dr. Fleming, and proofreaders  into InDesign.  Along the way, he inserts images and ads directly into the layout.  George McCartney, Jr., who provides many of our covers, creates them on a Mac and sends them through e-mail and the web.

After a final reading of page proofs and the entering of any last-minute corrections, we export each page as a separate PDF (perhaps ten minutes’ work total, the time it took to wax a couple of pages) and upload them through the internet to our printer in Michigan.  The printer immediately provides a digital proof of the entire issue, and we approve it onscreen.  It goes into production the very next morning, and the printer provides hard copies after four business days.  The production process for a single issue has gone from almost three months to less than a month.  And a reader near the top of the mailstream can now read words written as late as one week before the issue arrived at his house, compared with six weeks or more in 1984.

So many of the advances that make our current production process possible happened so gradually that we sometimes lose sight of the revolution that took place in publishing over the last 25 years.  And Steve Jobs was there at every step of the way, through both Apple and NeXT.  Not only did the NeXTSTEP operating system become the basis for Mac OS X (and thus also iOS, which powers the iPod, iPhone, and iPad), it spurred the creation of Adobe’s PDF format (after NeXT adopted Adobe’s Display PostScript for its windowing system), the widespread adoption of e-mail (built into NeXTSTEP at the system level), and the rise of the World Wide Web, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on December 25, 1990, on a NeXT computer.

Without any one of these things, Chronicles as we know it today would be a different type of magazine.

Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf wax the final pages of the March 2006 issue on a PowerMac G5.

And it would be a much more expensive magazine, too.  Or rather, it might well have folded at several points in the past 25 years, had it not been for the reductions in cost occasioned by technologies that trace their roots back to Steve Jobs and Apple and NeXT.  Chronicles’ staff is a fraction of what it was in 1984: fewer editors; no typists and typesetters; no dedicated designer and layout person.  (At one point in 1999, even before all of these advances had made it to Chronicles, Dr. Fleming and I put out several issues without any additional in-house production staff.)  Hand-composed pages, film, and bluelines, along with the prepress services that they required, are things of the past; the PDFs that we send to the printer are now imposed directly on the plates.  Chronicles’ direct costs today are about 40 percent lower than they were when I became assistant editor back in September 1997 (and they were already much reduced then from 1984).

There are many more stories I could share, such as how the e-mail and PDF-viewing capabilities of the first iPhone allowed me to take my family on a much-needed vacation in August 2007, while still managing to supervise the production of three separate Chronicles Press books and make sure that they would arrive in Washington, D.C., in September in time for the John Randolph Club—a feat made possible by print-on-demand technologies that rely on the same advances that have made their way into Chronicles’ production process.  But I think you get the point: Whether you use a MacBook Air and an iPhone and an iPad or a Dell laptop and a Verizon Droid and an HP TouchPad, if you’re reading Chronicles, you’ve benefited from Steve Jobs’ efforts.  In a mere quarter of a century, he has revolutionized the publishing industry in a way not seen since the rise of moveable type.

I don’t mean to downplay the contributions of the tens of thousands of employees of Apple and NeXT (and Adobe and Microsoft) who acted as foot soldiers in this revolution—indeed, quite the opposite.  Over the last few years, as it became increasingly obvious that the day was coming when Steve Jobs would have to step aside as Apple’s CEO, Wall Street analysts cried doom and gloom, and institutional investors sold Apple short on every piece of bad news concerning its CEO’s health.

But those of us who rely on Apple products every day, and pay a bit more attention to the internal operations of Apple than the average person does, haven’t been overly worried.  Steve Jobs’ famed attention to detail and his desire for perfection did not stop with Apple’s products but extended to the company itself.  He was, as many ex-employees of Apple attest, a hell of a man to work for.  But those who continued to work for him, who were loyal to both the man and his vision, who recognized that his mercurial temper went hand-in-hand with his brilliance—those employees were indelibly shaped by him.  They have risen to the top ranks in Apple, and they took over the day-to-day operations on the world’s largest and most successful corporation long before Jobs stepped aside.  Thus, for those who rely on Apple products, there is nothing to fear, because Jobs’ faithful lieutenants have as little desire to change the company that Steve Jobs built as those of us who have dedicated our lives to Chronicles have to change this magazine.  As tech columnist John Gruber wrote on DaringFireball.net,

The company itself is Apple-like.  The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product.  It is Apple itself.

When the news of Steve Jobs’ resignation was announced on the evening of August 24, Apple’s stock immediately dropped seven percent in after-hours trading.  As I write this the next morning, it is down just a little over one percent from yesterday’s high, in line with the overall market.  That indicates institutional investors and Wall Street analysts are finally realizing what some of us small investors have long known: Apple succeeded because of Steve Jobs, but the company’s success no longer depends primarily on him.

In a world that too often values quick profits and “rock star” fame above solid products and hard work and loyalty, the fact that Steve Jobs could pull off such an orderly succession may, in the end, prove to be his greatest success.

This article first appeared in the October 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. On October 5, Steve Jobs passed away, at the age of 56.

Deforming Education
by Thomas Fleming

views

U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy
by R. Clay Reynolds

Tarzan’s Way
by Andrei Navrozov

news

September 11: Ten Years After
by John C. Seiler, Jr.

reviews

The Monism of Perfection
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
by Kenneth Minogue

Bungalow Minds
by Derek Turner

The Freedoms of Suburbia
by Paul Barker

Limited Hangout
by George W. Liebmann

Known and Unknown: A Memoir
by Donald Rumsfeld

correspondence

Remember the (Unrevised) Alamo!
by Egon Richard Tausch

A Gentleman and a Scholar
by Wayne Allensworth

stories

Mrs. Pyle and the Japs
by Tom Landess

vital signs

Faith of Our Forepeople
by William Murchison

Thomas Wolfe
by Jeff Minick

columns

Bohemians in the Redwoods
by Justin Raimondo

Contradiction and Collapse
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Running in Circles
by Scott P. Richert

Arabian Fall
by Srdja Trifkovic

Under an Honorable Spell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
by George McCartney

A Magical September
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

Life Bird
The Videographer’s Beethoven
by Maryann Corbett

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium

Cultural Revolutions

Home Rule
by Thomas Fleming

views

Secure of Private Right
by Catharine Savage Brosman

Are We Still Entitled to Some Privacy?
by Claude Polin

news

China’s Future: Ascendency or Fragmentation?
by Joseph E. Fallon

reviews

White Like Me
by Jack Trotter

White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
by Jared Taylor

Calvinism Without God
by Tobias Lanz

The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America
by Robert H. Nelson

Anglo-Saxon Reality
by Ray Olson
The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation
edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto

correspondence

Ron Sims
by Christopher Sandford

vital signs

Reviving the West: The Case for Europe
by Ronald J. Granieri