—Ian Hay, Housemaster

Being a man is tough.  Becoming a man is tougher.

In the last decade, numerous articles, books, and online commentaries have addressed the subject of the adolescent male adult.  Physically and legally, he is a man; he can grow a beard, buy whiskey, join the Army, and make babies.  He can lay pipe, wield a hammer, deal in stocks, sell real estate, and manage a restaurant.  He can do all these things and more, yet in some key respects he remains a teenager.  He still regards himself as the center of the world, primarily concerned with his own wants and desires.  When not working, he dresses as he did in high school.  His love of toys and amusements is little changed from the time he was 12.  He defines commitment to marriage and children as obligations to be avoided.  Duty is not a word in his dictionary.

Concurrent with this social trend are the dismal statistics regarding male education.  Males now make up only 43 percent of our nation’s college students, with the balance in some universities having become so lopsided that admissions officers quietly recruit male applicants.  With the exception of engineering and mathematics, females dominate graduate-school enrollment.  The National Center for Education Statistics recently noted that for the last 27 years the number of female graduate students has exceeded the number of males.  Nearly 50 percent of the students admitted to medical and law school are female.

That boys have fallen behind girls in elementary and secondary schools is common knowledge.  In 2010 the Center on Education Policy released data showing boys reading at a level ten-percent below that of girls.  In the same year the Department of Education concluded that, while all student reading scores are falling, for the last 30 years boys have scored worse on these tests than girls in every age group, every year.

That we are failing to educate boys is apparent to all but the most doctrinaire feminists.  In May 2008, when the American Association of University Women disputed any “boys crisis” in education, parents and teachers alike reacted with caustic incredulity.  Even at the AAUW’s own website, the report aroused a negative reaction.  Typical was the response of Adrianne, a self-described “sad and mad professor and mom,” who summed up the report as “stunningly short-sighted, myopic, and irresponsible.”  (U.S. prison administrators, directors of the world’s most populous penal system, would have choked with laughter at the AAUW’s claims, as 1 of every 73 American males is currently incarcerated.)

This decline in male learning and maturity is the result of a 50-year assault on the old virtues of manhood.  Uncle Sam has been vanquished by Aunt Samantha and her “nanny state,” whereby government has infantilized both men and women.  The widespread use of the Pill and other contraceptives have freed men from the obligations once associated with fatherhood.  Forty years of high divorce rates have damaged marriage and created millions of matriarchal households, allowing fathers to evade their duties while simultaneously stripping young men of the example of masculinity and fatherhood.  A heavy emphasis on female education, brought about by fears that girls were being denied opportunities available to boys, has made classrooms less friendly to boys, ended most all-male educational institutions, and brought about an attitude of reverse chauvinism.  Television and movies—think Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, Community, Dumb and Dumber, and the like—have made the bumbling father and adult teenagers models of manhood.

Some academics and writers contend that the alterations in the definition of manhood simply reflect the sea change in our culture.  The code of manliness—how antiquated that word sounds, even to those who treasure it—is, these critics argue, superfluous.  The manly virtues that once carried men across oceans in tiny ships, and soldiers into battle, no longer serve a purpose.  Technology, social safety nets, sexual equality, a kinder and gentler society: These are replacing the masculine attributes of independence, hard work, courage, duty, and honor.  These same critics make their prophecies self-fulfilling by brushing aside what they view as patriarchal alternatives in education: bringing back trade and vocational classes to high schools, teaching boys in all-male classes or schools, restoring discipline to the classroom.

On a grand scale, the outcome of this war on tradition and manhood looks bleak.  The flags come down these days without a shot being fired.  You want to open a public school in Detroit for young black males, a campus stressing discipline and hard work?  No way.  You’re discriminating against females.  Want to fill the need of young boys for more physical activity?  No can do.  Insurance costs for playgrounds are prohibitive.  Besides, recess takes away the opportunity to teach students that the environment is going to hell and that George Washington was an oppressor.

Having spent 50 years educating boys as if they were girls, we now gape in wonder at their failure, their frustration, and their anger.

Yet we must remember that ours is the age of little wars, guerilla wars, and it is by becoming guerilla fighters ourselves that we may find our hope.  We can refuse the blandishments of certain educators and the government, the solecisms that pass for truth, the culture working to make males second-class learners and citizens.  We—mothers and fathers, grandparents, teachers, mentors—can do battle against these enemies of manhood and give boys the tools they need to grow up.

We begin by teaching boys from an early age the romance and adventure of life.  How did the adolescent who played a high-minded knight-errant evolve into a sullen, nihilistic teenager?  How did that same adolescent become the 30-year-old who wears his baseball cap backward, plays more video games than the teenager, and lives with his parents?  Boys who come of age watching sex and violence in movies, or the cynicism offered by most television comedies, who listen to loveless music drenched in ugliness and despair, who possess no sense of responsibility or consequence, will likely join Peter Pan’s tribe of Lost Boys.  To buck this trend, we must keep a vigilant watch on the culture.  To grow men, we must teach our boys heroism, taking our models from literature, movies, and living examples.

We must also raise our expectations of boys.  Here in Asheville I offer seminars in Latin, literature, and history to homeschooled students.  Faced with sons whose academic performances have fallen behind their sisters or their female peers, and taught by experts that boys develop more slowly than girls, some parents I know buy into the excuse that “boys will be boys,” and that they mustn’t be pushed too hard.  The same mother who urges her daughters to excel and who delights in their accomplishments will excuse her sons’ lack of diligence because “they are boys.”

These lowered expectations cause enormous and unnecessary damage.  The game is lost before it begins.  Imagine a basketball coach saying to his team, “All right, guys.  We’re playing Central today.  They’re bigger, tougher, and better than we are.  Just go out on the court, and I’ll be proud of you.”  That coach should earn the contempt of every young man under his charge.  They look to him to light a fire in their bellies, and he gives them a bucketful of water.  It is one thing to recognize that most boys do indeed learn at a different pace than girls in some subjects.  It is quite another to diminish our expectations to the point of guaranteeing failure.

Here we need to remember that boys often require a sharper discipline than girls.  Because my son played basketball for the Trailblazers, our local homeschool team, I have spent a good amount of time watching various teams at practice and at play.  This past year, the coaches of both the girls’ and boys’ varsity teams were male.  The girls’ coach, whose chief problems on the team were bickering and personality conflicts, rarely raised his voice and spent much time soothing hurt feelings.  The boys’ coach, confronted by a lack of discipline and a spirit of rebellion on the part of a few players, had no difficulty shouting at the players, yanking them from the floor if they wouldn’t listen, and running the entire team through suicide drills for infractions.  The boys grumbled, but gave him their respect.  And like the girls, they won games.

Boys require this same fire and sense of discipline from their parents and teachers in their academic work.  They must be pushed to excel in their studies just as we push them to win games on the soccer field or basketball court.  It is useful to understand, and to point out to them, that their competitors aren’t girls, of course, or even other boys, but themselves and their own ignorance.

Finally, boys must be brought to books.  They must be lured, cajoled, pushed—if necessary, shoved—into becoming readers.  Poorly developed reading skills torpedo a student’s chance for success in the classroom and in life.  For two years I taught GED classes in a state prison.  When asked, my prison students recalled losing interest in school in the third or fourth grade, those same years when reading and writing become vital to a student’s classroom success.

Our current abuse of technology, a plague that has killed off more readers than the Black Death killed souls in Europe, deserves special mention.  It is no coincidence that the 30-year decline in boys’ reading scores begins in the 1980’s, when home video games first became popular among adolescent males.  From their inception, these games appealed almost exclusively to boys—that’s why Nintendo marketed a Game Boy—and even during that digital stone-age teachers were complaining about the nefarious influence of such entertainments on reading skills.  When I first offered my seminars in Asheville in 1998, not one of my students owned a cellphone.  No one arrived in class plugged in to an iPod.  Several lacked access to a computer.  Facebook and texting had yet to enter either the language or the marketplace.  Computer games existed, of course, but these were played almost exclusively by male students.

The last decade has radically changed this situation.  Many of my students are now on Facebook, all have iPods, all text with their cellphones.  Games for boys remain a high priority.  My middle-school writing students keep a journal.  With each passing year, more boys write about their gaming exploits while at the same time confessing to the page how far behind they are in their schoolwork.  Never in these journals has a female student mentioned computer gaming except when at a party and in the company of males.

If nothing else, this conflict between electronics and print becomes a question of time management.  The equation is simple: The hours spent watching television, texting, or blowing away bad guys with electronic weapons means fewer hours available for reading books.  The remedy for such a situation is simple in concept and difficult in execution.  To make better readers of boys, parents and guardians must bring under control the firestorm of electronic entertainment that surrounds all of us today.

Whenever possible, the books selected for adolescents and teenage males should provide models of manly behavior.  In their attempt to attract male readers, some pragmatic educators and publishers have pushed books that do well in the marketplace but offer little to lift the hearts and minds of readers.  The worst of these books focus on bodily functions—farts, burps, and so on.  Sales are up for these “grossology” books, and even a distinguished publisher like Penguin offers such titles as Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger.

Advocates of Sir Fartsalot or the Captain Underpants series claim that it makes no difference what a boy reads, as long as he is reading.  Yet what would we think of a parent who said of her son that “whatever he eats is good as long as he is eating”?  And where is the payoff?  At what point does the adolescent male magically segue from The Day My Butt Went Psycho to The Yearling or Sounder or Treasure Island?  And what does it say about a boy in the 21st century that he must be lured to reading by such squalid stuff?  In an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “How to Raise Boys That Read,” Thomas Spence, president of Spence Publishing Company and a father of boys, wisely remarked that, “if you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.”

Parents can help their sons strive for this level of excellence by providing books worthy of them.  For elementary-school readers, books like Calvin and Hobbes and the TinTin series contain extensive vocabularies and attract the interest of most boys.  Authors such as Richard Scarry and Roald Dahl remain perpetually in vogue.  Books from the Landmark Series and from the Childhood of Famous Americans series can lead boys into deeper reading of history and biography.  Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, the Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the Westerns of Louis L’Amour, the fantasies of the Lightning Thief mythologies or the Harry Potter stories: These can pull readers to classics like The Red Badge of Courage, Johnny Tremain, and The Count of Monte Cristo.  Certain magazines, too, can appeal to boys.  The feature stories in Sports Illustrated, for example, contain some of the finest writing done in magazines today.

Reading does more than prepare students for academics.  Great literature of all kinds as well as the best of movies—Master and Commander, Secondhand Lions, and others—teach lessons for real life.  To learn to love, to learn to stand up for what is right, to learn to suffer—these are the lessons of manhood and require real-life experience, but boys can use literature and history as the training grounds for these battles.

You want to rear a boy properly?  Limit his time with games and gadgets.  Provide him with good books.  Push him to excel.  Guide him with a firm hand.  Cast a vigilant eye on what he sees and does outside the home.  These will require great effort and willpower on your part, but in the end you’ll have not only a reader, but a student.  Maybe even a man.

Jeff Minick writes from Asheville, North Carolina.

This article first appeared in the September 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Books that refer in their titles to “the making of America” should generally be avoided.  The phrase is meaningless, except in the realm of nationalistic mysticism.  “America” was not made—she grew.  She certainly was not “made” by James Madison, who only officiously tinkered with her surface.  And which “America” is meant?  There have existed a number of different versions.  Used in such a way, the term can only mean an imaginary America of vague sentimentality, which has never really existed.

I wish Gutzman’s book had been simply titled James Madison: A Biography, for it is a better work of historianship than its hokey title suggests.  Kevin Gutzman is one of the abler young historians of the day.  He is steeped in the primary sources of the Founding and early national periods, sees things that have been missed by generations of celebrity historians, and writes well, with a light touch.  His biography is being billed as the new standard on its subject.  There is justice in this judgment.  The work is rich in context and detail, tells us all we will ever really want to know about “Little Jimmy” Madison, and is a moderate and balanced account of the subject and his times.  The author understands the Virginia context, and therefore Madison, better than anyone has in a long time.  The book is doubtless also a good career move, raising the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution to establishment respectability.  In a way that is too bad, because Madison is a waste of his talents.

One of the advance endorsements of the book tells us that Madison is one of the most interesting of the Founding Fathers.  That is total bosh.  Little Jimmy is the least interesting of them.  He is a colossal bore.  If his father had not been one of the largest land and slave owners in his part of Virginia, we would never have heard of him.  A tireless scribbler, his learning and understanding were pedestrian, that of a pedant, and not remotely in a class with Jefferson or John Adams or many another of the Founding Fathers.  Pedestrian thinkers and pedants have elevated him to “Father of the Constitution” because his writings contribute to a false nationalistic interpretation of the Founding.  In fact, Madison, who was of very junior standing among the delegates at Philadelphia, arrived with grandiose plans that were quickly shot down.  He lost more votes than he won in the Convention.  Pedants love him for his speculations in The Federalist, which was a partisan and disingenuous treatise that was never ratified by the people or anybody else, does not discuss the Constitution that was actually ratified as opposed to the one that was proposed, and has absolutely no legitimate standing for constitutional interpretation.  Madison himself said that the Constitution should be interpreted solely by the state ratifications, which alone gave it authority.

Jefferson befriended him and used him as a sounding board, perhaps because he realized that Madison was more in touch with everyday opinion, but it was a sad day when the Democratic Republican caucus narrowly chose Little Jimmy as Jefferson’s successor over James Monroe, a far better man.  Unlike Madison, Monroe was a man of sound judgment with executive, military, and diplomatic experience.  Madison never went abroad, and, despite the fact that his health in his 20’s was allegedly too feeble to allow him to fight in the War of Independence, he lived into his 80’s.  Most people found him dull company.

He was no great shakes as secretary of state, and as president failed completely in multiple ways.  Not until George W. Bush did we have another chief executive so weak and incompetent as to allow foreigners to attack the capital while he fled to safety.  Madison was always jumping back and forth.  He encouraged Congress to draw up a plan of internal improvements, and then on his last day in office vetoed it.  Having come into prominence opposing the first national bank, he sponsored the second one.  A mere 30 years after he and Jefferson asserted the right of state interposition against unconstitutional federal acts, Madison claimed that South Carolina’s action against the tariff was not the same thing.  This, as Gutzman previously has pointed out in a signal article, was a lie.  (He puts it a little more politely.)

Madison’s political speculations (like the “extended republic,” the ludicrous notion of “divided sovereignty,” and the argument that the federal judiciary could never pose a problem of usurpation) are abstract and invariably have been proved wrong.  His thinking is that of a professor rather than a statesman.  Second-string “political philosophers” and “constitutional scholars” identify with Madison’s scribbling and fancy themselves sharing in Deep Thoughts about government.  When read closely, Gutzman’s work is actually less worshipful and more realistic than most other treatments of Madison.  But then, who is going to read closely?  “Scholars” these days don’t read and react to books.  They just find out what is fashionable to think about them and repeat it.

Clyde Wilson, since retiring as a professor of history, has been striving to be an actual historian.

This review first appeared in the August 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Do you look on the unfortunate as your brothers, in temporary distress, or do you see in them objects of charity?  Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served?  If by a miracle they should get on their feet, would you have lost your career?

Those questions caused me to think about the movie The Help.  No, I have not read the book.  The film’s most obvious biases were the usual ones: Southerners have historically mistreated Negroes, have underpaid them, have insulted them, have abused them, have even sometimes killed them.  Nonetheless, colored maids, cooks, and nurses raised and loved the white children in the homes where The Help were employed.  There are essentially two groups of women in the movie: the spoiled, beautiful, idle, well-to-do, and insensitive white women; and the hard-working, underpaid, loyal, loving, and sensitive uniformed colored women.  Given that lineup, the story is simply one about the hardships and travails of The Help at the hands of the privileged young matrons.  Ordinarily, such a tale would hardly qualify for a ten-minute, one-act, high-school play.  However, that test is not applied to efforts to lambaste Southern whites for their never-ending offenses against blacks.  The self-styled “good people” just can’t get enough Rebel-rousing.  And neither can the book, magazine, and newspaper publishers and the TV and movie producers.  Discrimination and diatribes against Southern whites are greatly encouraged.  We are often reduced to the nation’s N-word.  We are the objects but not the subjects of sensitivity training.

Apparently, the story takes place in the 1960’s, and would not be applicable to the present day—not because white Southerners have improved that much, but because very few of us have help anymore.  Some years ago, I read a remarkable account of a black woman who worked for a wealthy family in Chicago.  For many years she was exposed to the good manners, good taste, and good educational standards of the family.  She and her husband had several children of their own, and she instilled in them the values she had learned in her workplace.  Every one of their many children graduated from college, and several of them earned graduate degrees.  She attributed what she had passed on to her children to what she had learned from those for whom she worked.  She was not resentful; she was very grateful, but then she wasn’t in the South, and maybe she wasn’t referred to as The Help.  Also, everyone knows there’s no racial discrimination in Chicago.

Many years ago, when I was young, we had servants.  In my family’s modest home we had a maid five days a week, and a laundress one day a week.  However, my maternal grandparents had three full-time servants: a chauffeur and butler, a cook, and a maid.  Without dwelling on it, I’ll assume the servants needed to work in order to support themselves.  You may not believe it, and frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn if you don’t, but each of the servants was treated as part of the family.  They may not have been integrated round and about town, but in our homes they were much cared about as human beings.  In fact, I was always much closer to my grandmother’s chauffeur, Joseph Augustus, than I ever was to my own father.  Joseph even called me “Son.”  And throughout our long relationships, we learned many valuable lessons from our servants, and they from us.  Of course, in addition to having us, they had families of their own.  And guess what, Scarlett, photographs of their children and grandchildren were displayed along with those of our own family.

Furthermore, their families were, with very few exceptions, law abiding, hardworking, respectful, and respectable.  They did not commit crimes.  They did not use drugs.  They had no tattoos or piercings.  The boys didn’t wear earrings and necklaces.  They were always neatly and well dressed.  Perhaps the professional do-gooders will say “they were afraid not to conduct themselves in those ways.”  Just try to imagine the brutality involved in encouraging people not to commit crimes and use drugs!  How fortunate we are to have overcome setting such examples.

The fact is that in spite of the many past instances and customs of racial discrimination, the two races have never been further apart from each other than they are now.  There are no bonds, no connections of mutual benefit.  We are all committed to that brilliant system established by the Great Society, “diversity without differences.”  We are forced to acknowledge and respect different cultures without being able to discuss the differences.  Oh, how insensitive sensitivity can be.  And how very absurd.

There may no longer be any beneficial bonds between the races, but many destructive and detrimental influences continue.  Consider the ways black music, dress, language, slang, jewelry, etc., have influenced white kids.  You may not mind; I do.  And consider the awful effects selfish and greedy politicians and “businessmen” have had on black society in efforts to get votes and to sell goods.  Elected officials use taxpayer dollars to provide funds for black people to use to buy products.  Under our current economic system, more and more consumers are sought, and it doesn’t matter how their purchasing power is provided.  Public money for private sales is not only permissible; it is aided and abetted.

We’re on to something radical.  Essentially, it has to do with the creation of a welfare society to maintain and sustain people as consumers.  Every government program created by the Great Society made it possible for the unemployed to become consumers.  Therefore, one must question whether big business is really opposed to the welfare state.  This is a form of government capitalism, even though the terms would seem contradictory.  Because such a domestic system is inadequate for unlimited sales, the emphasis is then put on worldwide free trade in order to have access to consumers everywhere.

So the Southern whites no longer have help, and the Southern blacks no longer have jobs.  Government now provides what “benefits” the less-educated and less-prosperous people have.  Poverty has been redefined.  It can now mean an apartment instead of a private home; only two television sets and three cellphones; only one good car; and several pairs of hundred-dollar Nikes.  Sadly, it can also mean graduating from high school and not being able to read and write above a fifth-grade level.  It can easily involve a life of crime, drug use, and imprisonment.

It seems as if many aspects of the bad old days were much better than those of the good new days.  Can we really take any comfort from the knowledge that the close and mutually beneficial relationships between the races that once existed have been torn apart and destroyed?

A strong case can be made that The Help was actually two groups, both the employers and the employees.  There was a time in the South when most people, black and white, were servants who served one another in many helpful ways.  Government has deprived us of that relationship.  We must now be satisfied to cheer impersonally for our athletes.  But little has changed for our New England acquaintances, who still sit in their yacht clubs in their lily-white towns and harshly judge those who have never owned a slave and who have worked to better the condition of those who were never slaves.  How sad it is that The Help are now solely dependent on the government for help.  To answer John Erskine, everyone’s function is to serve.  Thus, they can never lose their careers.  We have lost ours.

Ben C. Toledano is an author and a lawyer.

This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Inspired by President Obama’s slash-and-burn tactics on his opponents, Democrats, radical labor, and left-liberal activists have begun full Saul Alinsky-Bill Ayres-style assaults on conservative and libertarian groups.  Media Matters for America is the barking brigade leading the charge.  A battalion in the war is another website called Color of Change.

Both have received major funding from leftist moneybags George Soros.  As usual, Soros’s Open Society Foundations fund efforts to close debate.  And the New York Times reported on May 7, “[M]ajor liberal donors including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million into independent groups to aid Democrats’ chances this fall.”

Media Matters is run by David Brock, the outed homosexual and former conservative journalist who hates his old political friends on the right.  In February, the Daily Caller exposed Media Matters’ tight working relationship with the Obama White House, Brock’s erratic lifestyle, and what one witness called Brock’s “viciously mean” assaults on employees.  And although he’s a major supporter of gun control, Brock employs a bodyguard who illegally carried a concealed firearm in Washington, D.C.

At the top of the left’s enemies list: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  They’ve been one of my top sources in more than 35 years in journalism.  Many times, a quick call under a deadline produced the needed perspective on a bill in the California legislature or a resolution by a city council.  And their annual “Rich States, Poor States” ranking, produced with economist Arthur Laffer, provides crucial data on which states are friendly, and which are toxic, to business and job creation.

Most conservatives are concerned about the arguably more important issues of national tax policy or foreign relations.  (Your local city council doesn’t have nuclear weapons.)  But it’s really at the local level that key policies are set and political cadres are trained.  It’s in the trenches of state and local government that ALEC has been so successful, ever since it was started in 1973 by conservative activists and reformist state legislators from both major parties.

Two of ALEC’s founders were great men, recently departed from us.  Paul Weyrich was an unsung conservative hero who had a knack for starting conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation.  Rep. Henry Hyde so enraged the left that actor Alec Baldwin shouted on a national TV show,

I’m thinking to myself if we were in other countries, we would all, right now, all of us together . . . would go down to Washington and . . . We would stone Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to [conservatives’] homes and we’d kill their wives and their children.  We would kill their families.

Today, ALEC is facing a political stoning from the left.  This year, Color of Change launched boycotts of ALEC’s corporate sponsors, beginning with the Coca-Cola Company.  Coke was not “the real thing” this time: It chickened out and ended its funding.  So did Pepsi, Mars, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut).  (That provides a convenient excuse for me to boycott their high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden poisons.)

Other frightened sponsors included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is just as well; the foundation’s main purpose is to spend Bill’s billions on population control, including abortion.  Another was Intuit Inc., whose crummy finance software crashes my computer.

Why is the left upset?  The chief reason is that ALEC has been especially effective in crafting “model legislation” that can be adapted to a specific state situation.  About 200 ALEC-inspired state-level bills are passed each year across the country.

The February killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin by Hispanic insurance salesman George Zimmerman provided an excuse to attack ALEC.  The group has helped many states write Stand Your Ground legislation—what Media Matters disingenuously brands as “Kill At Will laws.”

The Martin killing proved a rallying point for the left to bring up a long-dormant obsession: gun control.  It also rankled the left that gun sales have soared under their beloved president.  Some firearms enthusiasts have dubbed Obama “Salesman of the Year.”  It’s about his only economic success story in three depressing years.

Gun control has been dormant for the left because, in the mid-1990’s, Bill Clinton and others determined that Democrats were losing elections because gun control turned off rural and blue-collar hunters, many of them lifelong Democrats, in such battleground states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.  Studies by such scholars as John Lott and David Kopel also provided conclusive evidence that, as the title of one of Lott’s books put it, More Guns, Less Crime.

But recent polls indicate that working-class whites—the main opponents of gun control—simply aren’t going to re-up with Obama, no matter what.  So Democrats might as well go back to gun-grabbing, and the left put ALEC in the crosshairs.

Another ALEC outrage was its model law for voter-ID cards, passed in various forms by 30 states.  As much as I dislike government snooping and controlling, I can see nothing wrong with the government requiring a government ID for a government election.  If you don’t want to provide the ID and keep your privacy, then don’t register to vote.

The Obama Justice Department is working to overturn voter-ID laws in South Carolina and Texas.  In a May 6 speech before the Detroit NAACP, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder mentioned his department’s involvement in the Trayvon Martin case, then implicitly linked it to voter ID by saying, “We’ve taken decisive action to vigorously [sic] enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act, our nation’s most important civil rights statute, by challenging attempts to disenfranchise many of our fellow citizens.”

The real reason for attacking voter ID is to allow as much illicit voting as possible, especially by noncitizen immigrants.  Practically all of those illicit votes would go to Obama and other Democrats.  Of course, a picture ID is required to enter major government buildings, including the White House and Holder’s Department of Justice.

Another ALEC outrage was its provision of help to states writing laws to curb the immense powers of government-worker unions at a time when retirees’ pensions are busting state budgets.  These aren’t private-sector union workers, who make something and must compete in the marketplace; these are government workers.  In the November 2010 election, one lower-level union boss accidentally let the truth out.  California School Employees Association Chapter 224 head Ronda Walen said of a local referendum, “This is our opportunity to elect our own bosses.”

That’s it.  Who in the private sector gets to pick his own boss?  No wonder governments have overspent, overborrowed, and overpromised, especially on worker pensions.  And no wonder the unions, and close allies such as Media Matters, are boiling mad at ALEC.

Piling on to the assault, in April the misnamed activist organization Common Cause filed papers with the IRS demanding that ALEC’s nonprofit, tax-exempt status be pulled for alleged political advocacy.  But what about Media Matters, a nonprofit as close to the White House as Ennis was to Jack on Brokeback Mountain?

Common Cause was a major force behind the farcical 1974 post-Watergate election “reforms,” which made campaign finance so complex that only professionals—or rich people—can run for office.  Regular Joes no longer have a chance.  And Common Cause now complains that elections are dominated by the rich and corporations!

There are many other assaults on ALEC from a left organized online like a teenage flash mob.  The Daily Kos, the most popular leftist blog, is edited by Democratic activist Markos Moulitsas.  It has called for abolishing ALEC because it has “contributed to the destruction of our democracy.”  And National Public Radio, the taxpayer-funded Obama propaganda network, has run stories attacking ALEC.

Unfortunately but understandably, on April 17 David Frizzell, an Indiana state representative and ALEC’s national chairman, announced on behalf of its Legislative Board of Directors,

We are refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles, and have made changes internally to reflect this renewed focus.

We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy.

In states without Stand Your Ground laws, you’re supposed to retreat as far as you can before you start firing in self-defense at your assailants.  I hope that’s the case with ALEC—that they retreat, regroup, and soon reengage on issues that really are more important than just the economic ones.  I hope they’re waiting for the Obama tyranny finally to be swept from the scene.  Let ALEC’s wounds heal.  We need them back in action at the front.

John C. Seiler, Jr., is managing editor of CalWatchDog.com.

This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Horace’s tagline is generally cited to illustrate the American cliché that, wherever you may go, you cannot run away from yourself.  In a country where divorce is more common than marriage, where millions every year move from one state to another, and where half the population spends more than $1,500 on an annual vacation, escaping from ourselves is not so much a national obsession as a way of life.

Horace knew that human beings cannot really escape the lives they have lived.  He also realized, following Heraclitus, that character is destiny.  However, in making his skeptical observation on the benefits of travel, he had something rather different in mind.  The poet had traveled, for study, war, and diplomacy, both within Italy and in the Greek East.  He was far from being immune to the glories of Athens or the beauties of Aegean islands.  His point is not that we should never go anywhere, but that we should be content wherever we are.  We can, as he says, sing the praises of a Greek island from the security of a house in Rome, whether Rome, Georgia; Rome, New York; or even Rome, Lazio.  The discomforts of travel distort our perspective.  Journeys can be wet and wearying and yet, while, enjoying the comforts of a hotel’s bath and bread, a wise man would not conclude that the summum bonum of human life is to spend his life in an hotel.  To rush about in fast cars and luxurious boats is to miss the point: Strenua non exercet inertia.  The fast-paced pursuit of pleasure does not cultivate our better qualities.  What you seek, you can more easily find at home.

It is good advice, especially for those who live in Horace’s Rome, Dante’s Florence, or Henry Timrod’s Charleston.  But what if your fate is to dwell in Rockford in the age of GateHouse Media newspapers, Friday’s, and the FOX networks—fast-food sitcoms and fast-food political commentary joined at the hip by Tony Blair’s Australian pal whose NewsCorp hacked into the private lives of grief-stricken parents in search of cheap gossip to steal and sell?  Who would not wish to escape a global empire dominated by Murdochs and Buffetts and Madoffs?

It’s a small world after all, so small you cannot escape it by touring the Aegean on a Holland America cruise ship or at the Casa Magna Marriott in Cancun.  Everywhere is everyotherwhere.  The inanities of USA Today are deposited “free of charge” at hotel-room doors around the country, and there is no escape from CNN.  Airports used to be boring, arid places, where one’s reading was disturbed only by flight announcements.  Now the TSA’s endlessly repeated dictates—“Remember, three-one-one”—have to compete with the simpering platitudes of an androgynous ex-model whose family tree is a reminder of how quickly our country went to hell: a robber-baron war profiteer (Commodore Vanderbilt), an incompetent war criminal (James Judson Kilpatrick), and a blue-jean designing floozy (mother Gloria Vanderbilt).  CNN is one of the best reasons I know for not owning a television set, but airports around the world beam these images of lies and hate at weary travelers, as if to remind us that we are trapped in Henry Miller’s air-conditioned nightmare from which there is no escape.

I knew all this before deciding to extend a little conference in Georgia to a tour of the Carolinas.  We are, most of us, taken in by our own prolonged childhoods, and in getting ready for the trip I could not keep from humming the James Taylor song that has become de rigeur at UNC basketball games: “Dark and silent late last night, / I think I might have heard the highway calling. / Geese in flight and dogs that bite. / And signs that might be omens say / I’m goin’, goin’, I’m gone to Carolina in my mind.”

Carolina—the university, not the state—now exists only in the mind, and if we wanted to visit the Carolina that Mr. Taylor’s father served as dean of the medical school, we might better have stayed home than return to Chapel Hill.  Seeing old friends after so many years was a great joy, naturally.  Our elder daughter’s godmother and namesake was virtually unchanged—a mind and character formed on Jane Austen is impervious to the degradations of modern life—and our old classmate Cecil, now retiring as chairman of our old department, had the same old exuberance, tempered only by the wisdom of experience.

Nearly everyone I met or even heard of was considering the possible options for retirement.  One former friend and quondam Chronicles writer had already moved into a retirement village—apparently because a turnkey “home” made travel easier.  I can almost understand the attitude.  If I were living in that uglified, modernized, Yankeefied suburb, I’d be on the road more than I am now.  And since the old village has been replaced by high-rise apartments and shopping malls pandering to luxury consumers, we might well prefer a few years of rest and relaxation on a green lawn with helpful nurses keeping us docile with regular tranqs—“Come now, dears, time for your nice pills.  Don’t worry, it will all be over soon.”

Yes, and thank heaven.  In the meantime, though, we still prefer drinks to tranqs and Agrigento to Carolina Meadows or Fearington Village.  I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I’d rather be one of those fierce old men that people try to avoid—Robert Duvall, for example, in Get Low or Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.  I used to laugh when a friend of ours spoke of moving to a shack at the end of a mountain road where he could shoot the Yankee tourists before they reached his house.  I no longer laugh, but why, I wonder, should I limit myself to Yankees or tourists?  It’s a small world, after all, and the jerks we keep on running into might just as well be Italian fashion designers, English soccer louts, or New South p.r. flacks in Columbia.

How far do you have to go to escape the endless strip malls that have eroded the landscape and drained the inhabitants of every distinctive quality?  We were discussing this point with friends in Charleston, when one of them pointed out ruefully that people used to light out for Alaska or Australia, but anyone who has caught a glimpse of Sarah Palin’s TV world or watched a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard knows that escape is impossible.  Would you want to live in a country run by such a person?  Of course not, but we already do, which is why moving to Australia would be a futile gesture.

I share the American longing to escape to the wilderness of the frontier, which may be why as a boy I loved science fiction, but the illusion is no longer sustainable.  I can imagine some noble family, saving for years for their cottage in the Yukon or in the Everglades, only to find, when they arrive, that their paradise has been overtaken by development.  The older and more corrupt a place is, the greater the chance it has of preserving its character, particularly if it is a bit rundown and dirty.  Our friend Navrozov, in his endless search for a refuge from progress, went from London to Rome and Rome to Venice before lighting upon Palermo, whose political corruption, criminal violence, poor sanitation, and decrepit buildings have few rivals, though Naples is, in fact, dirtier, and parts of Genova more intimidating.

One does not have to go to the Russian extreme.  Venice and Florence may be too overrun, but cities like Rome are quite large enough to accommodate both the swarm of tourists that leave their droppings on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel monument and several million people leading normal lives.  In Charleston, Mayor Joe Riley has done his best to turn the downtown into a developer’s bordello into which cruise ships now routinely disgorge their herds of budget-minded travelers, but less than a mile from Market Street there are pleasant neighborhoods where a few travelers but no tourists set foot.

A really happy man in the Aristotelian sense would probably not need to travel very much except to see old friends.  It would be enough to lead a useful life in company with family and friends within a community worth defending and even worth dying for.  A little travel in one’s youth is often instructive, and, if a reader takes delight in the novels of Anthony Trollope or the poetry of Dante, an occasional excursion to Hampshire or Tuscany is a source of pleasure.  But why would a perfectly contented man in his 60’s be willing to endure all the discomforts of travel just to drag himself from one vacation spot to another?

The only obvious answer is that far from being happy or contented, he is profoundly dissatisfied with the life he has created for himself.  Rather than spend time with his children and grandchildren, he prefers to risk melanoma, lying out in the sun in some seniors’ paradise; instead of assuming the role of the cracker-barrel philosopher in his hometown, he rushes off to Disney World or Vegas—the two destinations one can always reach by direct flights from Rockford.  Instead of finding beauty and meaning in the hills of Arkansas or the plains of Iowa, he takes a cruise around the world without ever leaving Arkansas or Iowa behind.  Caelum non animum mutant, indeed.

Like any other serious pleasure, travel requires a bit of work and study to make it enjoyable.  Without learning something of the language and history, the tourist can only find evidence to bolster his prejudices.  Foreigners are dirty and rude, my sister told me after a trip to Paris 50 years ago.  Did she really have to spend a day in a propeller plane to find out what she already “knew”?  A rich friend of mine has traveled all over the world, only to discover that Hong Kong is rich and that ancient Knossos had air conditioning, or was it a Roman villa in Britain that had central heat?

This past winter I ran into a Chinese girl snapping forbidden flash pictures in the archaeological museum in Agrigento.  Pointing to the display cases filled with Greek vases, she asked me, “No mummies?”  I was charmed.  The ugly Japanese tourists that replaced the ugly American tourists have been replaced by the ugly Chinese tourists who swarm over Piazza Santa Croce in Florence in an endless search for discount-priced leather goods—probably knockoffs shipped in from China.  Navrozov turns out to be wrong.  The human race is making progress.

In the feebleness of that excuse lies a sad significance: The destruction of British education is complete. Brits know that a long time ago, there were Greeks and Romans, and Greek and Roman gods; but they know nothing of who they were or what they did. And the nation is disconnected not only from world history, but from its own past. English schools now turn out youngsters for whom Nelson is an ex-president of South Africa, and Wellington the mere name of a boot. We are living in an age in which a television journalist can describe a hat worn by the Duchess of Cambridge at the recent Jubilee celebrations as “made by Lockes, who made Nelson’s hat for the battle of Waterloo.” Most viewers will have nodded approvingly, impressed.

A land in which history is a blur is a good place to stage the contemporary Olympics, for it provides an audience easily taken in by its invented myths. Television commentary on the Olympic flame-lighting ceremony was delivered with the hush and awe appropriate to an act of timeless solemnity; viewers were not troubled by the knowledge that this neopagan nonsense was only inserted into the modern Olympics in 1928. A BBC radio journalist describing the start of the torch relay told an audience that knew no better that he was describing an “ancient tradition” founded “centuries” ago. The ritual was invented for the Führer in 1936.

But it wasn’t ignorance that won the Olympics for London; other places are at least its equal in that. No: London got the Games through gamesmanship. One way it beat Paris in the 2005 race to win the venue was by using performance-enhancing technology. When members of the International Olympic Committee visited the city to give it the once-over, quite astonishing steps were taken to prevent them from experiencing the gridlock that is London traffic. Every inch of their car journeys was tracked by satellites and CCTV cameras; every time they approached a traffic light, it was switched to green. To be fair—and fairness was once an English characteristic—the traffic concealed from the grands fromages olympiques seven years ago will not trouble their chauffeur-driven limos in London this summer. The same trick will be played, but they have been told about it. Indeed, they have been promised it, along with 250 miles of lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and officials, so that—like the Politburo in Soviet Moscow—no ordinary mortal can impede their progress. Promises like these were made to persuade the IOC to opt for London rather than Paris. These promises, at least, will be kept.

The same cannot be said for the assurance our politicians made in 2005, when they looked us in the eye and said the games would cost £2.4 billion. We knew they were lying, just as they did. When two years later they had to admit that the cost had almost quadrupled, to £9.3 billion, they did so brazenly, though their tone was less haughty when they conceded that private-sector contributions had fallen to a tiny two percent. The latest estimate, using figures disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, puts the final bill at £24 billion—precisely ten times the figure originally claimed.

How did that happen? Through dishonesty. I am not talking about corruption and backhanders—though on a project of this size it is unlikely that there hasn’t been some, at least, of both. The dishonesty I am talking about is self-deception: There are no lies more costly than the lies one tells oneself. The big one is that the whole enterprise is so noble that no expense should be spared in honoring it, and the embodiment of this deferential delusion is the London Olympics logo. It cost £400,000 to design, and any reader of this magazine would make a better job of it. But when it was unveiled in 2007, it was greeted by a display of synchronized grinning. Officials told us and one another that it was “dynamic” and “vibrant,” and the president of the IOC called it “a truly innovative brand” that would appeal to the young. The truth is that it is none of these things. It is an embarrassment. It is incoherent. It is a dud. And it cost a bomb.

Allow me to describe it to you—though I could not do so from memory, for it is so artistically disjointed and iconographically illiterate that it is impossible to hold it in the mind. It is an arrangement of five asymmetrical polygonal shapes. None contains a right angle. The middle one is much smaller than the other four. One has to be told that the four big ones represent the figures 2, 0, 1, and 2—not least because the 0 has no characteristic of roundness, the 1 is like a lopsided, straight-edged boomerang, and the 2’s have dissimilar shapes. The small, central shape is inexplicable. The top left shape contains the word london, italicized, with a lower-case l. The shape to the right of it contains the five interlinked Olympic rings. By 10:00 a.m. on the day following the launch of the logo, 16,000 people had signed an online petition to have it scrapped. The design critic Stephen Bayley called it “a puerile mess, an artistic flop and a commercial scandal.” But those who had commissioned it had no choice but to persuade themselves otherwise, because they could not admit they had wasted £400,000.

The reason I have described the logo rather than ask the editor to print a picture of it is that I wouldn’t want to risk getting him into trouble. All things Olympic are subject to copyright that is aggressively defended, under new laws that prohibit any kind of visual or verbal representation that suggests association with the London games. Among the hundreds of victims of its recent enforcement are a provincial florist who was made to take down five tissue paper rings with which she had sportingly decorated her shop window, and a hotel chain that could not use the words London and Olympics together when advertising accommodation for visitors to an event that I dare to refer to as the London Olympics.

All this is to make sure that the only businesses that can make any financial gain from the Olympics are its sponsors. We haven’t seen trade restriction like that here since Elizabeth I and James VI & I created monopolies in salt and paper. Cash machines that take cards other than those of official “worldwide Olympic partner” Visa have been removed from games venues, and only Visa cards can be used to buy Olympic tickets. Spectators can buy any lager they like, so long as it is Heine­ken—and they will have to pay the equivalent of $11.36 for a pint of it. They are not allowed to wear clothes, carry water bottles, or push pushchairs bearing nonsponsors’ logos “larger than 12cm,” and there is even a ban on planes bearing nonsponsor branding flying through the Olympic sky.

To the delusion that such commercialism can be reconciled with sportsmanship we must add the notion that the games are worthy of religious respect. When the neopagan flame-lighting ceremony was televised, the commentary was delivered with reverence worthy of a state funeral. The event was more Benny Hill than Westminster Abbey, but as a gaggle of girlish ninnies skipped about on a hilltop while an actress playing the part of a priestess harnessed the power of the sun to bring the spirit of the games alight, there was no laughter—even when the wind blew out the flame. 
A more expensive expression of pseudoreligious self-importance is in public statuary, upon which millions of pounds have been spent. The largest and most costly example is the £22 million ArcelorMittal Orbit, which has been erected beside the Olympic stadium itself. Its lopsided reality is as ugly as its name suggests. It looks like two huge industrial cranes attempting an act of vertical copulation, having drink taken. Another Olympic “sculpture” has been put up in Weymouth, at a cost of £335,000 to the public purse. It is 17 sandstone boulders, each on an eight-foot stainless-steel pole. Given that it could hardly be explained as a thing of beauty, those who spot it in a puddle on the ring road, between a roundabout and an electricity pylon, can only wonder what it might signify or represent. Steps forth the regional director of Arts Council England: “When people arrive in Weymouth for the 2012 Olympic sailing events, this sculpture will welcome them and connect the vibrant and creative place it is now with the geology and prehistory of its past.” Taurocoprology, it would appear, is an art as well as a science.

This self-imposed suspension of sensibilities extends to every expression of the London Olympics. I cannot bring myself to describe the awfulness of the misconceived London 2012 mascots, or even to name them. Suffice it to say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed mascot is king. British athletes will look marginally less ridiculous, in livery of a design that defies belief. We have a national flag that most people in the world recognize, and you might think our kit, designed by Stella McCartney, daughter of Sir Paul, would display it or its three colors. But it won’t—with the exception of the Baywatch volleyball team, who have a tiny Union Jack sewn onto their bikini-bottom seats. Keep your eye on the ball, and there is no chance of noticing it—which is not to say it won’t be seen. Britain’s other athletes have been put into kit that is just, well, weird—and the 8,000-strong army of Olympic volunteers have a pink and purple uniform so hideous that, when some of them modeled it in the presence of London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, he couldn’t stop himself saying to them, “I hope you don’t feel too ridiculous.”

Somewhere under all this ugliness, under the security drones, surveillance cameras, and police sniper posts, among more soldiers than Britain has serving in Afghanistan and an even greater number of civilian security guards, watched by almost all 3,800 members of MI5 and patrolled by 12,000 policemen, events of genuine sportsmanship will take place. The last time London hosted the Olympics, such sportsmanship was to the fore. The 1948 Games were altogether more honest. Then as now, we were living in an age of austerity, but then, we knew it—and our schoolchildren knew the difference between Romans and Greeks.

The 2012 Olympic coin set costs £10,500, by the way. What better way to commemorate an expensive mistake?

Michael McMahon is a freelance writer who lives in Norfolk, England.

This article first appeared in the August 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

As a boy, Ray Bradbury began “time traveling” (as Douglas Spaulding called it in Dandelion Wine), committing to memory the stories told by his grandfather on warm summer evenings in his native Waukegan, Illinois, a town he never really left, reproduced as “Green Town” in his stories.  Young Ray memorized his favorite fantasy stories as well, reciting them to all who would listen, later dismissing the notion that he was a science-fiction writer, calling himself a spinner of fables, fantasy, and myth.  Bradbury was less an author than a bard, a storyteller like an ancient poet, his books oral history in mythic form.  And the myths he spun were truer than the literal truth, as all myths worthy of the name are.  His Green Town was quintessentially American, capturing something about that America and her people that could not be encapsulated in formal history.  The Waukegan of memory was transformed into the Green Town of fantasy (Dark Carnival; Something Wicked This Way Comes) and of myth (Dandelion Wine).

Bradbury described the process of writing as one of “surprise,” an exercise in word association and memory: “First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night from my childhood . . . Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to find words for all that . . . ”

Bradbury never lost his sense of wonder, and it showed in every story, whether set in Green Town or along the canals of Mars.  In spinning his tales, he wove together his grand theme of remembrance of things past with warnings about the future, for the three principal thematic strands in his stories are memory (and the dangers of its loss), wonder (and the deadening of imagination and the human spirit without it), and warning (that modern technology blunted both memory and the sense of wonder).  For despite—or maybe because of—his fascination with rockets, space travel, and all the imagined possibilities of mid-20th-century America, Bradbury foresaw a damaged future, anticipating not only the impact of television, but the sterile electronically wired and bookless world of iPods, cellphones, interactive video games, and “reality” TV.  As Bradbury himself said, he did not write to predict the future, but to prevent it.

In Bradbury’s stories, a wired culture is no culture at all, but a commercial enterprise that deadens the faculty of retention, making the wired-in recipients of the electronic product, with their degraded attention spans and addiction to constant stimulation, more malleable and less free.  The flip side of technological totalitarianism is smothering bureaucracy, and, as related in some of his stories (especially The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451), the philistine mind-set of an aggressive egalitarian ideology, the jackboot masked by a smiley-face decal, approved by the majority.

In his 1953 short story “The Murderer,” for instance, the title character is judged insane by the powers that be for committing the unthinkable crime of destroying technology.  A psychiatrist is assigned to treat the patient’s illness.  He visits the self-styled “murderer’s” cell, where Albert Brock destroys the analyst’s “wrist radio,” then begins his “therapy” with the story of his first “murders”—the telephone, then the television, and the interoffice communication system, as his “solitary revolution” to “deliver man from certain ‘conveniences’” continues.  His next “murder” is on a mass scale, as Brock uses a “portable diathermy machine” to short-circuit the electronic devices of a bus full of commuters, bringing on “pandemonium, riot, and chaos,” as the people are de-wired.  Brock is tuning out, as it were, by gleefully wrecking the electronic hum around him, driven to action as he is driven to distraction by an all-encompassing electronic tyranny—one, he is reminded, that is accepted by the majority and is, therefore, good.

Fahrenheit 451 is not so much a story about censorship imposed from above, but book burning (and willful destruction of memory) endorsed from below by a shallow majority that pacifies itself with the equivalent of reality TV and prescription medications.  As Paul A. Trout wrote in the April 1994 issue of Chronicles, in Bradbury’s novel aggrieved minorities, abetted by a passive or an indifferent majority, have pressed for the destruction of books, as the state strives to make everyone “happy”: “The people,” wrote Trout, “got what they wanted: a happy-faced culture in which nobody would have their exquisitely sensitive feelings offended by idea or word.”  Bradbury, in his reflection on Trout’s article (printed in that same issue), concluded that “I did not, 40 years ago, predict.  I observed tendencies or wrote doubts.  Today, there is no fear of book burners, only nonteachers and nonreaders, which means no need of books and so no burning.”  Books, and our heritage, are being “burned” by the technological world we have embraced (as well as degraded and altered by the aggrieved minorities Bradbury foresaw).  We are not so much the firemen of Fahrenheit 451 as the coarse space troopers of The Martian Chronicles, trashing the accumulated wisdom of an ancient civilization—in effect, paving over paradise to build a parking lot.

Ray Bradbury is gone, leaving behind a treasure trove of wisdom, remembrance, and warning that a remnant, the book people of tomorrow, can carry into the future.  He was a self-educated writer who loved his craft, pounding out stories on a ten cent per half hour typewriter in a library basement; a latter-day Edgar Allen Poe, lover of strange tales; and creator of some very memorable literary characters.  In Mr. Dark, he pointed to the existence of a malevolent force in the universe, of temptation and sin, and in Will Holloway, his father, Charles, and Jim Nightshade, the possibility of redemption.  And we should remember him for writing beautifully:

Dandelion wine.

The words were summer on the tongue.  The wine was summer caught and stoppered.  And now that Douglas knew, he really knew he was alive, and moved turning through the world to touch and see it all, it was only right and proper that some of that new knowledge, some of this special vintage day would be sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks or months and perhaps some of the miracle by then forgotten and in need of renewal.

—Wayne Allensworth

This article first appeared in the August 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Washington will lose the ability to project its power not only directly across the world but indirectly through Third World client states, particularly those in Latin America.  With no existing power—not Russia, China, India, Japan, or the European Union—capable of adequately replacing U.S. political, military, and economic assistance to sustain the governments of such states, an opportunity may emerge for indigenous nations in Mexico and Central America to regain their political independence.

The American Empire, however, is still formidable and will resist this as long as possible.

The U.S. government has approximately 6,000 military bases and/or warehouses located within U.S. territory, and another 737 military bases in 63 countries.  Unofficially, the number of overseas bases is thought to exceed 1,000.  This gives the U.S. Defense Department control of a vast extent of territory—over 30 million acres of land worldwide conservatively valued at $658.1 billion.  Its manpower consists of 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, another 1.1 million in the National Guard and Reserves, 718,000 civil-service personnel, and approximately 200,000 local hires.  Over 450,000 military personnel, their dependents, and Defense Department civilian officials are stationed in 156 countries.  Often, they are exempt from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by immunity agreements negotiated by Washington with host governments.

As Chalmers Johnson noted in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets—almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898.  The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD [sic] required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia.  Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

Washington’s drive for empire can be seen in its partition of the world into six regional Unified Combatant Commands for more effective management: Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Pacific Command, Northern Command, and Southern Command.  It is the Southern Command that will be the principal arena of conflict as Washington seeks to maintain its empire.  The purpose of this command is to continue a foreign policy toward Mexico and Central America established in the 19th century.  The objective is to suppress indigenous nations and ensure that political and economic power in these colonial-settler republics remains in the hands of Spanish speakers.

Washington has often intervened to enlarge, not just preserve, these Spanish-speaking client states by assisting them in dispossessing indigenous nations.  In some cases, these indigenous nations constituted the majority population.  What unites American and Hispanic imperialisms are two beliefs: Indigenous cultures are incapable of economic development as defined by the West; and economic growth, therefore, requires that the nonindigenous rule the indigenous.  Four examples of this phenomenon of symbiotic imperialisms are the Miskito Kingdom (1850), Yucatán (1901), Kuna Indians (1925), and Guatemala (1953-present).

In the cases of the Miskito Kingdom and the Yucatán, U.S. foreign policy supported Hispanic states invading and annexing de jure or de facto independent indigenous states.  On the 1840 map of Central America by Heinrich Berghaus, the page titled Die Vulkanreihe von Guatemala, die Landengen von Tehuantepec, Nicaragua und Panama, und die Central Vulkane der Sud See shows the Miskito Kingdom encompassed significant territory.  It was larger than either Nicaragua or Honduras.  The de facto independent Mayan states of the Yucatán do not appear on the map because they did not achieve independence until the Caste War of 1847.  However, the map does show British Honduras, now Belize, to be larger than her current territorial size.

With the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of April 19, 1850, between Washington and London, the United States, the weaker power with no territorial possessions in the Caribbean, sought to advance her growing economic and political interests by ensuring that a proposed interoceanic canal across Nicaragua was not controlled by the British.  Since any canal had to pass through the Miskito Kingdom, a British protectorate, Washington’s objective was to abolish that political entity.  This conformed to overall U.S. foreign policy, which was anti-British and engaged in sabre-rattling as it sought to reduce, if not replace, London’s influence in the Western Hemisphere whenever possible.  In 1848, Washington, which disputed the legitimacy of London’s protectorate over the Miskito Kingdom, went to the brink of war with the British over the Miskito Kingdom’s control of the port of Greytown.  Later, the U.S. government was able to exploit the advantages obtained in its treaties with Nicaragua and Honduras to persuade London to have the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty include the “neutralization” of the Miskito Kingdom.

This was set forth in Article I:

The governments of the United States and Great Britain hereby declare, that neither the one nor the other will ever obtain or maintain for itself any exclusive control over the said ship canal; agreeing that neither will ever erect or maintain any fortifications commanding the same or in the vicinity thereof, or occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito coast [the Miskito Kingdom], or any part of Central America . . .

Depriving the Miskito Kingdom of British legal and military protection was a first step in its eventual partition and annexation by Nicaragua and Honduras.  The next step came on January 28, 1860, when the Miskito Kingdom’s independence was terminated by a British-Nicaraguan treaty whereby it became part of Nicaragua, but with broad autonomy.  The end came on November 20, 1894, when Nicaragua abolished that autonomy and officially annexed the Miskito Kingdom.  In 1960, the International Court of Justice awarded the northern part of the Miskito Kingdom to Honduras.  That land forms much of the Honduran province of Gracias a Dios.  During the Nicaraguan civil war of the 1980’s, Washington exploited Miskito, Sumo, and Rama grievances against the ruling Marxist Sandinistas for propaganda purposes but opposed any restoration of an independent Miskito Kingdom.  Yet it supported the restoration of the independence of other countries from Marxist rule: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the Soviet Union; Slovakia from Czechoslovakia; and Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia.

The Maya of the Yucatán achieved de facto independence in the Caste War of 1847.  As a result of a Maya uprising, Spanish-speaking colonists in the Yucatán, who had earlier declared independence from Mexico, abandoned most of the peninsula and fled to the safety of the cities of Mérida and Campeche along the Gulf of Mexico.  With the $15 million it received from the government of the United States as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War, the government of Mexico rearmed and, in 1848-50, attempted to reannex the Yucatán.  It succeeded in securing only the west coast of the peninsula.  The rest of the Yucatán remained in the hands of independent Mayan states, the largest being Chan Santa Cruz, whose de facto independence was recognized by London.

By 1893, tensions with Washington over Alaska’s boundary with Canada, U.S. sympathy for republican rebellions in Canada, and attempted invasions of Canada from U.S. territory by Irish nationalists led London to seek to counter U.S. interference in Canadian affairs by improving British ties with Mexico.  To do that, London abandoned the Maya, signing a treaty that recognized Mexico’s claim to the Yucatán.  Mexico invaded Chan Santa Cruz in 1901, but did not gain complete control of the Mayan Yucatán until 1915.  Throughout the 20th century, Washington supported Mexico’s claim to the Yucatán and opposed political movements in Mexico it perceived to be pro-indigenous, such as the Zapatistas in neighboring Chiapas.

In the cases of Panama and Guatemala, no de jure or de facto independent indigenous states existed to obstruct U.S. political and economic interests.  On the contrary, Washington intervened specifically to prevent the possible emergence of any such independent indigenous states.  It intervened in Panama to prevent secession by the Kuna Indians, and in Guatemala to prevent decolonization and any emergence of an indigenous Mayan state.

In 1925, the Kuna seceded from Panama, declaring their independence as the Republic of Tule.  Since Panama is a country Washington created in 1903 so it could build, own, and operate the Panama Canal, and the Republic of Tule bordered the strategically important Canal Zone, the U.S. government intervened and suppressed Kuna independence.  Washington facilitated a compromise whereby the Kuna would possess political and cultural autonomy within Panama.  Following the Roman adage “divide et impera,” the Kuna were divided into three comarcas, or indigenous regions.  Kuna Yala has provincial status, while each of the other two comarcas, Kuna de Madugandí and Kuna de Wargandí, have subprovincial status.  As a means of “legally” dispossessing an indigenous people, these comarcas bear a resemblance to the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa.  In April 2003, the government of Panama, with the apparent approval of Washington, rejected a Kuna petition requesting their three adjoining comarcas be unified into one.

In 1954, Washington accused the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán of Guatemala of being pro-communist and a “Soviet beachhead” for, among other reasons, expropriating 400,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by the United Fruit Company, a major U.S. corporation.  The Árbenz government offered compensation.  It would pay the United Fruit Company the same amount for the land that the company had publicly declared the real estate was worth on its corporate taxes.  The U.S. State Department demanded that United Fruit be paid millions of dollars more.  When the Guatemalan government refused, the CIA staged a successful military coup that overthrew President Árbenz.

The oddity is that the political left in Guatemala, as represented by Árbenz, is just as dedicated to preserving Guatemala as an Hispanic colonial-settler republic, and preventing decolonization and Mayan majority rule, as is the political right in Guatemala.  The overthrow of Árbenz unleashed a half-century of political instability, military coups, civil wars, and genocide against the majority Mayan population.  During the 1970’s and 80’s, various Guatemalan regimes pursued a race war against the indigenous population, attempting to eradicate all traces of Mayan identity from Guatemala—language, culture, religion, and symbols.  Even Spanish words for Indian were officially outlawed.  It has been estimated by the Guatemala Commission for Historical Clarification that during those decades 200,000 Maya were killed, and another 250,000 were made refugees.  These figures may be conservative.  Guatemala embodies the adage “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”  The 1996 Peace Accord replaced military regimes with civilian governments that continue to represent the interests of the same constituency, the Spanish-speaking minority.  The Maya endure, but remain, as American and Hispanic politicians desire, a dispossessed majority.  They are, in the lexicon of the former Soviet Union, an “unpeople.”

Modern empires are ephemeral, if for no other reason than they are financially unsustainable.  The American Empire is no exception.  Financially, militarily, politically, and psychologically, it is at the breaking point.  Soon it will be unable to preserve the territorial integrity of its client states.  And as the Southern Command unravels, world maps may have to be redrawn, yet again, to include the Miskito Kingdom, Chan Santa Cruz, and the Republic of Tule.

Joseph E. Fallon writes from Rye, New York.

This article first appeared in the June 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.

Agitators are using the Martin shooting to push for the repeal of state Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws.  “When Rosa Parks was arrested, if we had focused on the bus driver and not on the states’ rights law, we would have missed the point,” lectured Jesse Jackson.  “We must not just settle for Zimmerman, we must repeal the Stand Your Ground law.”  New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg describes Stand Your Ground statutes as “shoot first laws . . .  [that] have undermined the integrity of the justice system and done serious harm to public safety.”  He is leading a national campaign to repeal the 25 state laws that permit the use of deadly force if the person being attacked is in a place where he has a lawful right to be and he reasonably believes such force is necessary to prevent death or serious bodily injury.

The efforts to distort and repeal Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws are misguided.  The current campaign is actually an attempt to turn back the clock on a sensible development in American common and statutory law.  In England during the Middle Ages, because the king claimed a monopoly on the use of force within his kingdom, homicide could be justified only if the perpetrator was executing the king’s writ or when custom permitted (e.g., the taking of an outlaw without a warrant).  In all other cases, including self-defense, conviction was required so long as the prosecution could prove that the defendant took a life.  The defendant could apply for a pardon after conviction, but he had no legal defense.  Later, the chancellor issued pardons in cases of self-defense as a matter of course, but the wait for a pardon was hardly a comfortable situation for the convicted felon who, say, had used deadly force to fight off a highwayman attacking his home or family.

As English law continued to develop it recognized a right of self-defense, but this was circumscribed by the duty to retreat.  If a man was in the forest cutting wood (for his cottage) and got into a fight with a knife-wielding neighbor, the woodcutter had a duty to run away before using his ax to repel the neighbor.  The woodcutter had to ensure that no reasonable means of escape existed before he struck the armed enemy with the ax.  The law acknowledged one exception to this general duty to retreat: the Castle Doctrine.  If an aggressor entered the woodcutter’s home, the woodcutter possessed the right to use deadly force to defend against an attack without having to “retreat to the wall.”

The Castle Doctrine recognizes that, when in the home, one has, in essence, retreated as far as possible.  Requiring further retreat, such as fleeing from the kitchen area where the hypothetical bandit entered to the sleeping quarters, makes little sense.  The Castle Doctrine also affirms that the home should be a sanctuary.  A man’s home is his castle, as the adage goes, and requiring retreat degrades the sanctity of the home and encourages felonious conduct.

In America, state and federal common law, for the most part, has rejected the duty of retreat found in English law.  The “True Man Doctrine” became the rule in a number of American jurisdictions, although some states still adhere to the duty to retreat.  Under the True Man Doctrine, a person without fault does not have to retreat from an actual or threatened attack if he is in a place where he has a right to be and he has a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury.

A seminal case explaining the True Man Doctrine is Beard v. United States (1895).  Beard was a farmer whose life had been threatened by one Will Jones.  Jones and his brothers claimed that a cow in Beard’s possession rightly belonged to them.  They armed themselves and went to Beard’s property.  Beard ejected them from the property, forbade them to come back, and explained that he would let them have the cow only if a court of law recognized their claim.  Jones informed townspeople that he would kill Beard to get the cow and returned to the property armed with a pistol.  Beard, returning from town (where he had learned about Jones’ threats), was armed with a shotgun and saw Jones and his brothers arguing with Beard’s wife over the cow.  Beard approached the group and directed Jones to leave the premises.  Jones refused to leave.  He then marched toward Beard and reached into his pocket where a pistol was secreted.  Beard used the butt of the shotgun to crack Jones’ skull.  Jones later died from this injury.

Beard was indicted for manslaughter and tried.  During the jury charge, the judge instructed that Beard had a duty to retreat from Jones unless the attack occurred in Beard’s home.  Based on this instruction, the jury found Beard guilty, and he was sentenced to eight years in prison.  On appeal, the Supreme Court reversed.  In finding fault with the charge, the Court noted that “the accused was [not] under any greater obligation when on his own premises, near his dwelling house, to retreat or run away from his assailant, than he would have been if attacked within his dwelling house.”  Observing that the English duty to retreat had been modified in most American jurisdictions, the Court averred that “the tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed, to avoid chastisement, or even to save a human life.”  Because of the error in the jury charge, the Supreme Court overturned Beard’s conviction.

Twenty-six years later, the Court again rejected the duty to retreat in Brown v. United States (1921).  Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described the duty to retreat as inconsistent with human nature.  An internal debate on whether retreat would lead to escape is not required when a man is faced with a potentially life-threatening circumstance.  “Detached reflection,” Holmes wrote, “cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”   If a man reasonably believes his life is in danger, “he may stand his ground” and kill the attacker if necessary.

Twenty-five states have enacted laws to clarify and solidify the True Man and Castle Doctrines.  Legislators believed that statutory action was necessary for a variety of reasons.  For instance, in modern society, an automobile is practically an extension of the person.  Hence, many states have extended the Castle Doctrine to an occupied vehicle.  If a carjacker seeks to gain entry to your vehicle, there is no duty to retreat, and deadly force may be used to halt the attack.

Many of the statutes also circumscribe civil litigation if a person lawfully uses force in self-defense against an aggressor.  These provisions appreciate the litigiousness of modern America.  If a criminal court finds that a person acted reasonably in self-defense and thus the homicide was justified, the estate of the attacker should not be able to bring a civil case and hope to extort money from the person defending himself or his home.  If the estate or another individual does bring suit, many of the laws contain fee-shifting provisions so the civil defendant may recover costs and attorneys’ fees incurred in defending the claim.

Legislators also understand that courts can be fickle institutions.  Just as courts have “discovered” rights to homosexual marriage in state constitutions, it would not be surprising for modern jurists to discover that Justice Holmes had it wrong and that the common law imposes a duty to retreat even if the victim has a reasonable fear of death or bodily injury.  Statutes on the books were needed to protect the people from backsliding judges with little or no accountability to the electorate.

Opponents of the Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine statutes portray these laws as relics of Southern honor codes or Wild West vigilante justice.  They paint the supporters of the laws as gun-toting rednecks (or maybe “white Hispanics”) looking for a fight—especially with minorities.  Thanks to these statutes, white trash has been given a green light to shoot first and ask questions later.

It’s interesting that the recent Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws have little or no relevance to the highly publicized deaths that the usual suspects are exploiting to demand repeal.  In the Martin shooting, Stand Your Ground does not apply, whether one believes Zimmerman’s version or that of Martin’s partisans.

If we believe Zimmerman, he shadowed Martin, eventually caught up with him, started to leave the area, was knocked to the ground, and had his head slammed into the concrete multiple times.  He says he shot Martin because he feared for his life.  Taking this as the truth, the duty to retreat is irrelevant because Zimmerman had his back to the wall (i.e., the ground) and had to shoot to save himself.

If we believe Martin’s allies, then Zimmerman was the aggressor the entire time and shot Martin in cold blood.  As the aggressor, Zimmerman cannot take advantage of Stand Your Ground and clearly committed an unjustified homicide.

Similarly, opponents of Wisconsin’s Castle Doctrine statute say that it permitted Adam Kind to “execute” Bo Morrison.  On March 3, Morrison was attending a drinking party next door to Kind’s home in the small village of Slinger in Washington County.  Kind confronted some of the partiers about noise and then called police.  The police came, but the drunken juveniles barricaded themselves in a garage and refused to surrender.  Once the police relocated down the street, Morrison and some of the others made a run for it.  Morrison, who was out on bail for a list of charges, including battery and resisting or obstructing an officer, and whose blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit, entered the three-season porch of Kind’s home and hid.  Kind heard noise, feared for the safety of his wife and children, retrieved a pistol, and went to investigate.  He encountered Morrison, who made a move toward him.  Kind fired one round and killed the 20-year-old black male.

Washington County District Attorney Mark Bensen declined to press charges.  Under the state’s recently enacted statute, the prosecutor concluded that Kind was entitled to a statutory presumption that force was necessary to protect himself and his family.  Even without this statutory presumption, the prosecution found that there was no common-law duty to retreat because Kind had actually walked past Morrison before he discovered him.  To retreat effectively, Kind would have had to run from the porch to the yard, leaving Morrison inside with Kind’s wife and children.  Wisconsin’s common law imposes no duty to abandon one’s loved ones in such a situation.  Consequently, even without the Castle Doctrine statute, the prosecutor determined that a case could not go forward.

Opponents of the Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws are wrong to argue that “true man” principles are relics of the 19th century.  At the beginning of the 20th century, over 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas.  Today, only 16 percent of Americans live in a rural environment.  If 19th-century Americans could stand their ground when an enemy living around the bend in the creek attacked, how much more the necessity today when the enemy lives on top of you in an apartment building?  Communal dwelling means a greater proximity to danger and a greater need for laws permitting self-defense.  Thus, the Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine statutes are more suited for modern circumstances than for 19th-century life.

The Sharptons and Jacksons also ignore that most home invasions generally take place in low-income urban areas that are disproportionately inhabited by minorities.  It is not a stretch to assume that police response times might be much longer in these neighborhoods than in privileged areas of the community.  Hence, the laws under assault actually offer more protection to the law-abiding minority folks whom the “civil rights” establishment claims it is defending.

The families of Martin and Morrison understandably grieve for lost love ones.  But the repeal of the Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws would not resurrect these young men or make similar incidents less likely.

Repeal would place the right to protect our persons and property on dubious ground.  While crime rates have fallen in recent years, we are a far cry from mid-20th-century America, when citizens could leave front doors unlocked at night and permit children to play outside without supervision.  Our precarious urbanized existence requires some legal security for citizens who use force when confronted with a home invader or who reasonably fear for their safety in places where they have a lawful right to be.

Surely the “tendency of the American mind” described in Beard has not been so warped that a general duty of retreat will replace Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws.  If so, this will mark a further decay in our society.  Like the medieval English woodcutter facing a robber in the forest, we will be forced to flee from aggressors until all avenues of escape are blocked.  And if we do use deadly force to save ourselves or our families, we can only hope there arises an American chancellor to issue a pardon.

William J. Watkins, Jr., is the author of Judicial Monarchs: The Case for Restoring Popular Sovereignty in the  United States (McFarland & Co.).

This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.