2B  Coherence and Casuistry

Most conservative movements and initiatives fail and fail badly...

Failure is often the result of betrayal, either by the self-declared leaders or by the rank-and-file who are generally so confused and illogical that they follow corrupt leaders over the cliff.  Eager for the conservative equivalent of "40 acres and a mule," conservatives pursue phantoms like a right-to-live amendment or a constitutional limitation on terms of office, without stopping to wonder if such legal and political reforms are possible or even desirable.

In their confusion, conservatives often pursue contradictory dreams.  The same conservatives who say they long to restore the old republic turn into statist authoritarians when they think they have a chance to turn their dreams into reality.  Howie Philipps, founder of what became the Constitution Party, was once asked how, if he were elected president, he would make abortion illegal if Congress rejected his legislation.  He answered that he would impose a ban on abortion by executive fiat, a statement reminiscent of the ultra-left Shirley Chisolm who had earlier made an equally Quixotic bid for the White House.

It was almost amusing to listen to conservatives defending George W. Bush's ruinous military adventures.  These people had spent their lives prating about balanced budgets and fiscal restraints, but, with "one of ours" in the White House, they threw all caution to the winds.  Amazingly, they blame Obama entirely for Bush's gross malfeasance, without pausing a moment to look at the voting record of their heroes, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

If you accept a principle as fundamental, you also must accept the policies it entails.  "He who says A," observed Lenin, "must say B."  If, to take a very minor example, you regard the Department of Education as unconstitutional and pernicious, you cannot rejoice when a neoconservative bully is put in charge or when an uneducated Republican President wants to impose some new program such as No Child Left Behind.  Instead, most conservatives, when their candidate gets elected, turn out to be merely Republicans.

For decades, conservatives had argued that the Congress was constitutionally empowered to take a major part in foreign policy decisions.  This was a point relentlessly hammered by James Burnham, the most important conservative at NR.  With the election of Ronald Reagan we learned that Congress had no authority in questions of war and peace.  In the 1980's Sam Francis and I were constantly running into old-guard conservative leaders who claimed not even to remember when they advocated any level of congressional responsibility in foreign policy.  It was about then that we began to hear the President referred to constantly as the "commander-in-chief," as if he were a military dictator authorized to rule us all under martial law.

There are more basic principles that are far more significant than Congressional powers, but here too conservatives are typically confused and illogical.  They say marriage is an institution ordained by God, but then they push for governmental regulation of marriage; they say they believe that governments, like households, must balance their budgets, then in a panic vote for unlimited spending on the US war machine; they say they believe in states rights, but turn on a dime to support federal projects that deprive the states of the power to govern themselves.  He who says A must say B, and if he does not, he must be prepared to be defeated, constantly, by political enemies who can see beyond the end of their noses.  Let us call this the principle of coherence.

Principles must be distinguished from simplifying ideologies that reduce all the complex interactions of human life to a few clichés like "power to the people" or "free markets and free minds." Ideologues, whether Marxist or libertarian,  think that all the [...]]]> This added section, which goes between the discussion of Machiavelli and the discussion of reason and tradition, is intended to sketch out a few operating rules for how conservatives should approach a question.

2B  Coherence and Casuistry

Most conservative movements and initiatives fail and fail badly...

Failure is often the result of betrayal, either by the self-declared leaders or by the rank-and-file who are generally so confused and illogical that they follow corrupt leaders over the cliff.  Eager for the conservative equivalent of "40 acres and a mule," conservatives pursue phantoms like a right-to-live amendment or a constitutional limitation on terms of office, without stopping to wonder if such legal and political reforms are possible or even desirable.

In their confusion, conservatives often pursue contradictory dreams.  The same conservatives who say they long to restore the old republic turn into statist authoritarians when they think they have a chance to turn their dreams into reality.  Howie Philipps, founder of what became the Constitution Party, was once asked how, if he were elected president, he would make abortion illegal if Congress rejected his legislation.  He answered that he would impose a ban on abortion by executive fiat, a statement reminiscent of the ultra-left Shirley Chisolm who had earlier made an equally Quixotic bid for the White House.

It was almost amusing to listen to conservatives defending George W. Bush's ruinous military adventures.  These people had spent their lives prating about balanced budgets and fiscal restraints, but, with "one of ours" in the White House, they threw all caution to the winds.  Amazingly, they blame Obama entirely for Bush's gross malfeasance, without pausing a moment to look at the voting record of their heroes, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

If you accept a principle as fundamental, you also must accept the policies it entails.  "He who says A," observed Lenin, "must say B."  If, to take a very minor example, you regard the Department of Education as unconstitutional and pernicious, you cannot rejoice when a neoconservative bully is put in charge or when an uneducated Republican President wants to impose some new program such as No Child Left Behind.  Instead, most conservatives, when their candidate gets elected, turn out to be merely Republicans.

For decades, conservatives had argued that the Congress was constitutionally empowered to take a major part in foreign policy decisions.  This was a point relentlessly hammered by James Burnham, the most important conservative at NR.  With the election of Ronald Reagan we learned that Congress had no authority in questions of war and peace.  In the 1980's Sam Francis and I were constantly running into old-guard conservative leaders who claimed not even to remember when they advocated any level of congressional responsibility in foreign policy.  It was about then that we began to hear the President referred to constantly as the "commander-in-chief," as if he were a military dictator authorized to rule us all under martial law.

There are more basic principles that are far more significant than Congressional powers, but here too conservatives are typically confused and illogical.  They say marriage is an institution ordained by God, but then they push for governmental regulation of marriage; they say they believe that governments, like households, must balance their budgets, then in a panic vote for unlimited spending on the US war machine; they say they believe in states rights, but turn on a dime to support federal projects that deprive the states of the power to govern themselves.  He who says A must say B, and if he does not, he must be prepared to be defeated, constantly, by political enemies who can see beyond the end of their noses.  Let us call this the principle of coherence.

Principles must be distinguished from simplifying ideologies that reduce all the complex interactions of human life to a few clichés like "power to the people" or "free markets and free minds." Ideologues, whether Marxist or libertarian,  think that all the problems of our society will be solved if only the principles of Karl Marx or Ludwig von Mises are enacted into law.  In fact, there is a vast and complex array of principles and assumptions that are mostly true most of the time, but reconciling conflict among these principles requires three other operating rules:  hierarchy, relevance, and casuistry.

For the sake of this discussion, it is not important whether we agree with any of the principles I am going to bring up.  Let us suppose, as most conservatives do, that freedom of religion is a basic principle guaranteed by the Constitution.  (It goes without saying that as a principle this is nonsense, though as a matter of prudence it is often useful.)  What about religions that practice cannibalism, human sacrifice, or the burning alive of a dead man's wives?  Well, those things are obviously illegal and disgusting.  Take the offensiveness down a notch:  What about polygamous religions (Islam and traditional Judaism) or religions that require public sacrifice of animals, female circumcision, the use of psychotropic drugs, ritual prostitution, acts of terrorism.  At the lowest level, what about a religion that permits cows to wander the streets without being molested?

If there are aspects to most of "the world's great religions" that so offend our sensibilities that we wish to ban them, religious freedom cannot be an absolute or ultimate principle. Then, you will ask, is religious freedom a bad thing?  Not necessarily, but even if it is a good thing, it is a lesser good than other principles, such as "Thou shalt do no murder."  There is, thus, a hierarchy of principle.

Let me take a frivolous example.  I have a good Catholic friend whose car sports a bumper sticker, "Life is too short to drink bad wine."  But this same lady would probably drink pretty poor wine, if the only alternative were jumping on the water wagon.  My friend is rather elderly and lives on a limited budget.  She is as generous as she can be to her Church and her family.  If she really pushed the No Bad Wine principle to the limit, she would spend too much money at the wine store or, as I do, at Wine.com.  Obviously the importance of wine comes second to Church and family, but is it so far down on the list that she is sinful if she wastes money on a drinkable  bottle of Bogle cabernet?

The obvious answer is no, because we do not all devote all our resources to family and the Church.  We have to eat and dress ourselves, and part of being human is to like wine, music, and poetry.  The Church is superior to all these lesser goods, but it cannot monopolize all our energies and money.  In deciding this question, we have to consider relevance.  We used to have an ex-Moonie working for us in fund-raising and public relations.  When I asked him why, in describing our programs in a brochure, he put the most recent program, the Center on Religion and Society, first, he answered that religion trumps both the family and culture.  Ultimately, it does, but one can get carried away.  The Center, run by Richard John Neuhaus, was on the periphery of our interests and often at odds with the older, more significant programs.  The oldest program and the one that absorbed the largest share of the budget was and is Chronicles.

Religion may be the most important part of our lives, but it cannot teach us science or feed our family.  A farmer or shopkeeper who spends his time like a monk will surely fail, and a think tank that does not properly base its priorities on its stated purposes and the bottom line of budget, will end up very confused.

There is a tendency for many conservative Christians, when confronted with a problem, to ask, "What would Jesus do."  Now, the Imitatio Christi is an important part of a religious life, but it is not always relevant.  For example, if by pious friend ran out of wine at a party and asked the "what would Jesus do" question, the answer would be "turn the water into wine."  She would face similar problems if she applied the same question to a food shortage or the need to leave a ship.  We cannot all walk on water, and we cannot always go directly to God for solutions to life's petty problems.

Jesus knew all this, of course, and it is easy to see in the Gospels that He was perfectly willing to rely on ordinary means when they were appropriate, such as picking grain on the Sabbath, kicking the bankers out of the temple, and advising his disciples to self a second garment and use the money to buy a sword for self-defense.  Sects and heresies have been founded on a refusal to read the Bible in toto, rather than picking out selected passages on which to base a new religion.

We can turn to more serious questions.  Obviously, Christians regard fornication and therefore prostitution as a bad thing, but is a Christian commonwealth therefore required to ban prostitution?  In the Christian Age (from Constantine to the Renaissance), for the most part, rulers were content to restrict or regulate commercial sex.

The most obvious counter-argument to moralistic rigor  is that of prudence:  Puritanical legislation encourages both contempt for law and the abuse of power by an ever-expanding government.  But there is another principle, one that I regard as deeper, and that was summed up by St. Thomas in his principle that the commonwealth does not exist to force people to be virtuous but to foster conditions that are propitious to the cultivation of virtue.  A giant state determined to crack down on erotic passion is probably the very opposite of a virtue-encouraging commonwealth.

In the Christian Age (otherwise known as the Middle Ages) a routine distinction was made between the authority of the Church and the authority of secular rulers.  It was deemed inappropriate for a king or emperor to have much to do with regulating morals, marriage, and family.  That was the job of the Church.  On the other hand, war and statecraft were the province of the ruler.  So, just as the bishop and his priests presided over marriage, they routinely acknowledged the secular ruler's right to defend the kingdom and punish criminals.  Even heretics, once condemned by the Inquisition, were turned over to the secular power for punishment.

At the extremes, the division was clear, but there was a very fuzzy area at the center:  When bishops received secular wealth and authority from the emperor, surely he should play some part in their selection and elevation?  On the other side, the Pope was head of the Catholic Church but he was also the ruler of what became known as The Republic of St. Peter.  Long before Popes routinely donned armor and personally led armies into battle, they were the commanders-in-chief of armies, which they sent into battle.

Conflicts between the two swords, of Church and Empire, were frequent, but at lower levels we continue to face conflicts of principle.  Some may be easily settled by the principles of hierarchy and relevance, but some are far more complicated.  Suppose a young husband with a pregnant wife has enlisted in the army.  He now owes obedience to the King or country, but what if his home is threatened.  Is he justified in deserting in order to protect his wife and child?  At first glance, most of us would probably agree that the circumstances justify desertion.  But what if he is not only a soldier but a commander and that the fate of the kingdom rests on his shoulders.  Suppose the Turks are at the gates of Constantinople or Vienna.  What, then?  Remember, he has embraced the career and code of ethics of the professional soldier, sworn loyalty to his king.  It is not so easy, and I should never presume to make the disastrous error preached by Immanuel Kant, that there is always a higher duty that one is bound to follow.

In the older tradition, going back to St. Thomas, Cicero, and at least to Aristotle, these complications were more seriously evaluated, and it was understood that they had to be evaluated, case by case, taking account, first, of the general moral principles involved, and second, of the peculiar circumstances.  Because these dilemmas are special cases, the moral reasoning is known as casuistry.  While casuistry can be misused, it is an important and necessary corrective to the "terrible simplifiers" who would have us believe that a few ideals, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity, are sufficient to guide us in making moral, social, and political decisions.

We seem to have gone far afield from the subject at hand, but actually not.  While my friend Sam Francis would have sneered at the word casuistry, he was nothing if not a political casuist, weighing the consequences of legislation and policies in an effort to find pragmatic, least-bad alternatives.

Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, palaeoconservatives might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality.  Instead, they are more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition and for their rejection of the "science" of politics preached by the highly unscientific followers of Leo Strauss and other foreign-born political gurus.

Following the insights of profound political thinkers from Aristotle to Michael Oakshott, we distinguish between subjects that are the proper subject of entirely rational analysis, e.g., mathematics, logic, physics, astronomy, and most of the natural sciences, and subjects that involve the complexities of the human person and the vagaries of the human will, such as art, literature, ethics, and politics.  In the latter case, reason is constrained to work on material that is neither abstract nor entirely subject to rational analysis.

In this vein, I have written several times of "irrational rationality," the attempt that has been made (since Descartes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment) to reduce the organic and complicated affairs of human life down to the level of universal rules and to a "moral algebra" in which all persons (P) are required to behave toward all other persons (P 1.2.3.4.5…..) according to formulas x, y, and z, without any consideration of the relationship that holds between the two persons.  I wish I were making this nonsense up, but the concept of moral algebra can be found in Leibniz and Locke and worked out in absurd detail in the works of the otherwise sensible Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, but the granddaddy of this style of thinking is René Descartes.

There is nothing authentically rational about reducing the variables of human existence to simplistic formulas that are as scientific as phrenology or the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.  It is highly irrational to pretend that I owe the same duties to my wife as I owe to my children and still more irrational to pretend that what I owe to my family I owe to families in China.  Families matter, and so do communities, nations, ethnicities, religions, and cultural traditions.  To sort out one's duties to all these is not a simple task, and to pretend that it is only dampens our willingness to take care of our own family or defend the interests of our country.

But that pretense is at the heart of all liberal political thinking, and in this important respect, there is no significant difference between classical liberals—whom we now think of as conservative—and Marxists.  Human nature being what it is, not all liberals and leftists have been completely insane.  One can learn a great deal from philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, from Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith—but it is important to keep an eye out, because liberals like Smith (especially in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) start from entirely false premises.  Talking about practical things, such liberals often have useful things to say, but you should never trust them not to slip some dangerous nonsense into their argument.  They are like talented cooks who like to slip in a little arsenic for flavoring.

What philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment sometimes referred to as moral sentiments are part of the outfit of toolkit we use in everyday life.  No one can think his way, rationally, through every conflict of duty or interest.  We have to rely on natural impulses and affections—the desire for food and sex, a man's reaction to defend himself--and the lessons we learned at our mother's knee, from Sunday School, and from our mentors.     Those who wish to change the conditions human life and launch revolutions against human nature, describe these lessons as irrational prejudices, but it is by means of such prejudices, such as not playing with a loaded gun or walking backward into the street while talking on a cell phone or sticking pins into an electrical socket, that parents teach their children to [...]]]> 3. Reason, Sentiment, and Tradition

Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, palaeoconservatives might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality.  Instead, they are more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition and for their rejection of the "science" of politics preached by the highly unscientific followers of Leo Strauss and other foreign-born political gurus.

Following the insights of profound political thinkers from Aristotle to Michael Oakshott, we distinguish between subjects that are the proper subject of entirely rational analysis, e.g., mathematics, logic, physics, astronomy, and most of the natural sciences, and subjects that involve the complexities of the human person and the vagaries of the human will, such as art, literature, ethics, and politics.  In the latter case, reason is constrained to work on material that is neither abstract nor entirely subject to rational analysis.

In this vein, I have written several times of "irrational rationality," the attempt that has been made (since Descartes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment) to reduce the organic and complicated affairs of human life down to the level of universal rules and to a "moral algebra" in which all persons (P) are required to behave toward all other persons (P 1.2.3.4.5…..) according to formulas x, y, and z, without any consideration of the relationship that holds between the two persons.  I wish I were making this nonsense up, but the concept of moral algebra can be found in Leibniz and Locke and worked out in absurd detail in the works of the otherwise sensible Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, but the granddaddy of this style of thinking is René Descartes.

There is nothing authentically rational about reducing the variables of human existence to simplistic formulas that are as scientific as phrenology or the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.  It is highly irrational to pretend that I owe the same duties to my wife as I owe to my children and still more irrational to pretend that what I owe to my family I owe to families in China.  Families matter, and so do communities, nations, ethnicities, religions, and cultural traditions.  To sort out one's duties to all these is not a simple task, and to pretend that it is only dampens our willingness to take care of our own family or defend the interests of our country.

But that pretense is at the heart of all liberal political thinking, and in this important respect, there is no significant difference between classical liberals—whom we now think of as conservative—and Marxists.  Human nature being what it is, not all liberals and leftists have been completely insane.  One can learn a great deal from philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, from Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith—but it is important to keep an eye out, because liberals like Smith (especially in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) start from entirely false premises.  Talking about practical things, such liberals often have useful things to say, but you should never trust them not to slip some dangerous nonsense into their argument.  They are like talented cooks who like to slip in a little arsenic for flavoring.

What philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment sometimes referred to as moral sentiments are part of the outfit of toolkit we use in everyday life.  No one can think his way, rationally, through every conflict of duty or interest.  We have to rely on natural impulses and affections—the desire for food and sex, a man's reaction to defend himself--and the lessons we learned at our mother's knee, from Sunday School, and from our mentors.     Those who wish to change the conditions human life and launch revolutions against human nature, describe these lessons as irrational prejudices, but it is by means of such prejudices, such as not playing with a loaded gun or walking backward into the street while talking on a cell phone or sticking pins into an electrical socket, that parents teach their children to stay alive until they can begin to think rationally—if they ever do.

If a tradition goes back far enough, it is generally likely to be more or less true.  Steve Goldberg once wrote a good essay in Chronicles, arguing that ethnic stereotypes were statistically accurate.  Speaking of his own background, he said many gentiles regard Jews as pushy, while Jews tend to think of themselves more as merely enterprising, but whichever word we prefer, the phenomenon is the same.  Of course, not all Jews are enterprising—some are as lazy and unambitious as I am—but the stereotype, which was arrived at after centuries, even millennia of experience, is a good basis for predicting future behavior.

Some traditions that we accept without reflection are of fairly recent, though they are taught as revealed wisdom in school.  This is, more or less, the whole body of liberal thought:  Human beings are basically good; men are all the same everywhere and racial and ethnic differences are trivial, though (paradoxically) there are many cultures where marriage does not exist and female chastity is not admired much less enforced; religion encourages ignorance, bigotry, and violence; the Western traditions of male dominance, free enterprise, and personal responsibility are inherently and uniquely evil.

Where it turns out such "traditional" lessons are wrong or immoral, as is the case of much of what we have been taught in school, we can, of course, correct the mistakes by turning both to higher authorities (the Bible, the great classics of our literature) and to our own observation of human life.  No matter how many times Marxists might try to convince us that private property, monogamy, and the family are evil inventions of patriarchal males, we can look around the world and see that they are wrong.  No matter how many times that Libertarians tell us we are all free individuals, we can look at real human beings and conclude they are more likely to be slaves.

No single human being can find out everything important on his own.  Even in matters of science, we take most of what we think we know on faith.  We think, for example, that we know that the spheroid earth goes around the sun, but, prisoners of older traditions, we continue, doggedly, to say that the sun rises in the East, and we often refer to the four corners of the world.  This is harmless enough, because as valuable as the advances in science and mathematics have been, they affect our lives only indirectly through science and technology.  When I was headmaster of a private school, I used to ask the teachers questions like this:  If one and a half bottles of wine contain 38 ounces, how many ounces are in a body of wine?  Left with pencil and paper for 10 minutes, they could gradually figure it out, but they had forgotten the simple formula they had been taught in sixth grade:  If 3/2= 38, then 1=2/3 of 38.  An Alexandrian shopkeeper 200 years ago could do the math more rapidly than most educated Americans.

We are forever saying things like, "according to scientists…," because in fact, rather few of us would know how to go about proving that our world is a globular planet of roughly 25,000 miles in circumference, though we are taught to laugh at the churchmen who told Columbus that he could never reach China before running out of food and water, because the earth is too big.  Churchmen had to be wrong because they accepted an ancient scientific tradition (going back to Eratosthenes) as true, while Columbus had to be right because in the liberal legend, he was a bold individualist who challenged authority.

We typically take things as Darwinian evolution, the Big Bang and the expanding universe, and the structure—or even the existence--of DNA on faith.  They are handed down by a tradition that goes back, sometimes only to a generation ago but sometimes all the way back to the ancient world, as in the case of Eratosthenes' brilliant calculation of the earth's circumference.  According to some scientists, by the way, a majority of the medical studies cited in the press are bogus.  It is better not to read anything than to read an AP article on a study of the dangers—or benefits—of drinking coffee.

But if science depends on the acceptance of tradition, then how much more do we depend on the traditions of our culture to tell us our moral and social responsibilities.  A brilliant man might devote his life to moral philosophy without contributing one sound or irrefutable idea that people can use in their daily lives.  The obscure terminology and improbable theories of academic philosophers do not constitute an advance in human wisdom, and if we were tempted to believe they did, we have only to look at the miserable lives led by so many academic philosophers.  But even when a brilliant moral philosopher makes a break-through, he is only building on a far greater tradition of wisdom handed down by his predecessors......

With a nod to your comments on the confiscatory (theft) aspect of State administered welfare, it's powerful reinforcement of dependency (sloth - or a seven day sabbath?), the observations of the Saints, and Christian obligations.  To other incompatibilities. 

First, one of my favorites, the State subsidizes murder and calls it abortion.  I could argue that State sponsored welfare, in effect and intent, elevates the State to the status of a false God.  I would modestly suggest that the whole subsidized contraceptive program is an endorsement of adultery.  It may be that welfare recipients covet their neighbor's ass, or at least the contents of their wallets.  This might could be the flip side of the stealing thing mentioned above.  Does the welfare program honor mothers and fathers?  Since it rewards and even sometimes requires recipients not to be part of complete families, this one is a slam dunk.  So yes, there are certain inconsistencies between State welfare and some of the Christian ethical 'suggestions'.  Or, so I would argue.

These are all sound Machiavellian insights, that is, they evince an understanding that pursuit of power is the basis of most government policy.  There is a finite amount of power and authority in any society, distributed among human persons, families, corporate associations (churches, burial societies, colleges, etc.), and government(s).  When national governments grow, it must be at the expense either of lower level governments, e.g. of states, provinces, cities, or non-governmental  institutions such as the family, or both.   When governments decide to "help" women and children, they are really seizing power from husbands, fathers, and kin-groups.  This is not an unintended consequence or side-effect of the policy but an anticipated and welcome result.

Here are a few sonnets: 

Full well I know - my friends - ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead -
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy -
Yet have I sung of maidens newly wed
And I have wished that hearts too sharply bled
Should throb with less of pain, and heave more free
By my endeavor. Still alone I sit
Counting each thought as miser counts a penny,
Wishing to spend my pennyworth of wit
On antic wheel of fortune like a zany:
You love me for my sire, to you unknown,
Revere me for his sake, and love me for my own.

No Life  Vain

Let me not deem that I was made in vain,
Or that my being was an accident,
Which fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain
Hath its own mission, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent
'Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.
The very shadow of an insect's wing,
For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,
Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,
Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?

A Sonnet

If I have sinned in act, I may repent;
If I have erred in thought, I may disclaim
My silent error, and yet feel no shame ;
But if my sou], big with an ill intent,
Guilty in will, by fate be innocent,
Or being bad, yet murmurs at the curse
And incapacity of being worse,
That makes my hungry passion still keep Lent
In keen expectance of a Carnival;
Where, in all worlds, that round the sun revolve
And shed their influence on this passive ball,
Abides a power that can my soul absolve?
Could any sin survive and be forgiven,
One sinful wish would make a hell of heaven!

Christmas Day

Was it a fancy, bred of vagrant guess,
Or well-remember'd fact, that He was born
When half the world was wintry and forlorn,
In Nature's utmost season of distress?
And did the simple earth indeed confess
Its destitution and its craving need,
Wearing the white and penitential weed,
Meet symbol of judicial barrenness?
So be it; for in truth 'tis ever so,
That when the winter of the soul is bare,
The seed of heaven at first begins to grow,
Peeping abroad in desert of despair.
Full many a floweret, good, and sweet, and fair,
Is kindly wrapp'd in coverlet of snow.

People who only know what they read in the papers or see on television or learn by tweeting are, nonetheless, all too willing to make sweeping judgments.  For weeks, nearly everyone in America knows that George Zimmerman, a paranoid white bigot who obsessively calls 911 to voice his suspicions, brutally murdered  a harmless "little boy" named Trayvon Martin.  Zimmerman, whose claim to be a neighborhood watchman is suspect, was explicitly ordered by the police not to follow Martin.  He persisted, and though the harmless child was armed only with a pack of skittles, Zimmerman attacked him and either shot him in cold blood or in the course of a struggle that he initiated.

At least one 911 call includes the sound of someone screaming in panic, and members of Trayvon's family claim that we are hearing the voice of a young man facing death.

The fact that Zimmerman was not arrested just goes to show how racist the Florida cops still are, and, since Zimmerman pursued the unarmed boy against police orders and accosted him, he cannot claim protection under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" statute.   "He should have called 911 instead of going after Trayvon."

That is pretty much the story put out by Big Media, but in the mouth of the Revs Jackson and Sharpton and Farrakhan, the shooting of Trayvon Martin is metaphor for black/white relations in America.  When Farrakhan came to Rockford to stir up anger and violence over a case in which police shot a fugitive, he declared that it is open season on black men in America.

Even the President of the United States could not resist sticking his oar in:

“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this,” Mr. Obama said. “All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen.

 “Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” Mr. Obama said, his face grim. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

 “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Mr. Obama said, pausing for a moment. “I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

If we unpack his flabby rhetoric, Mr. Obama is saying, first, that he knows the facts of the case enough to know that a brutal murder has been committed and that, second, his sympathies are engaged because the victim is black.

When on our Friday radio show Paul Youngblood and I tried to raise questions about the official media account of the case, caller after caller angrily demanded why we were defending a murderer.  When we pointed out that nearly everything the callers were saying was incorrect, their response was to say, "You guys are sick."

The New Black Panthers say they are so convinced of the facts in the case that they are offering a $10,000 bounty for the "capture" of George Zimmerman.

Some white nationalists, it goes without saying, are happy the young man was shot.  His skin color by itself is proof [...]]]> "I only know what I read in the papers."  Will Rogers was a master ironist, and when he made and repeated this assertion, he seemed to be saying several things.  As a friend of the powerful and famous, he was frequently asked serious political questions, which this modest reply deflected.  But also, by implication, anyone who relied on the press or-- as we would now say--the media for news really knew nothing.  Only the people who write, edit, and publish the stories are in a position to know whether or not they are telling the truth, and even the press lords and their lackeys are remarkably indifferent to the facts.

People who only know what they read in the papers or see on television or learn by tweeting are, nonetheless, all too willing to make sweeping judgments.  For weeks, nearly everyone in America knows that George Zimmerman, a paranoid white bigot who obsessively calls 911 to voice his suspicions, brutally murdered  a harmless "little boy" named Trayvon Martin.  Zimmerman, whose claim to be a neighborhood watchman is suspect, was explicitly ordered by the police not to follow Martin.  He persisted, and though the harmless child was armed only with a pack of skittles, Zimmerman attacked him and either shot him in cold blood or in the course of a struggle that he initiated.

At least one 911 call includes the sound of someone screaming in panic, and members of Trayvon's family claim that we are hearing the voice of a young man facing death.

The fact that Zimmerman was not arrested just goes to show how racist the Florida cops still are, and, since Zimmerman pursued the unarmed boy against police orders and accosted him, he cannot claim protection under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" statute.   "He should have called 911 instead of going after Trayvon."

That is pretty much the story put out by Big Media, but in the mouth of the Revs Jackson and Sharpton and Farrakhan, the shooting of Trayvon Martin is metaphor for black/white relations in America.  When Farrakhan came to Rockford to stir up anger and violence over a case in which police shot a fugitive, he declared that it is open season on black men in America.

Even the President of the United States could not resist sticking his oar in:

“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this,” Mr. Obama said. “All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen.

 “Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” Mr. Obama said, his face grim. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

 “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Mr. Obama said, pausing for a moment. “I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

If we unpack his flabby rhetoric, Mr. Obama is saying, first, that he knows the facts of the case enough to know that a brutal murder has been committed and that, second, his sympathies are engaged because the victim is black.

When on our Friday radio show Paul Youngblood and I tried to raise questions about the official media account of the case, caller after caller angrily demanded why we were defending a murderer.  When we pointed out that nearly everything the callers were saying was incorrect, their response was to say, "You guys are sick."

The New Black Panthers say they are so convinced of the facts in the case that they are offering a $10,000 bounty for the "capture" of George Zimmerman.

Some white nationalists, it goes without saying, are happy the young man was shot.  His skin color by itself is proof of guilt.  How such people are any different from the Sharptons and Farrakhans, I simply do not know.  They are, however, proof that skin color is not everything.

Let us start with a few basic facts in the case.

1.  George Zimmerman is a member of his neighborhood watch association and regularly patrols the streets.  For this reason he has frequently called 911 to report burglaries and suspicious persons.  The mere fact that his group does not belong to this or that consortium of neighborhood associations.  The neighborhood has, in fact, been plagued by burglaries, and the neighborhood association advised people to call the police first and then George Zimmerman:

"If you've been the victim of a crime within the community, after calling the police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman ... so we can be aware and help address the issue with other residents," the newsletter said. It added that the neighborhood watch group was looking for more participants at its monthly meetings."

That is what he did on February 26.  When the 911 dispatcher learned that George was following the suspect, he advised him": "We don't need you to do that."  In other words, it was a suggestion and it did not come from the police.  If you listen to other calls made that night, you hear similar advice being given people who witnessed the fatal struggle.  "We don't need you to go outside," advised one dispatcher.  Obviously, the intent is to protect the person being spoken to--and to absolve 911 from any responsibility for what might happen.

2.  Zimmerman is not a white bigot, but a half-Hispanic.  His father says they have black relatives by marriage.  George is praised by a neighbor, Samantha Leigh Hamilton, who told the local television news that "she once left her garage door up and Zimmerman noticed it while out walking his dog. He notified another neighbor, who let Hamilton know.

" 'The only impression I have of George Zimmerman is a good one,'" Hamilton said Wednesday.

"Hamilton said another neighbor, a black woman, would regularly inform Zimmerman when she was out of town so that he could keep an eye on her place. Hamilton said that when she moved into the middle-class, racially mixed community of about 250 identical townhouses, the black neighbor told her, "Hey, if you need anything, you picked a really good area, since George is part of our neighborhood watch."

Hamilton said there had been several break-ins in the past year, including one three doors away in which burglars took a TV and laptops.

"When I hear about him calling the police constantly, it kind of makes sense to me because we had so many break-ins recently," she said.

One of Zimmerman's friends, Joe Oliver, is a formed news anchorman.  As a black man, he says, he never perceived any racism on Zimmerman's part.  In fact, Zimmerman and his wife have "mentored" a black family whose members are very grateful for their help.

Much has been made of two criminal charges against Zimmerman.  In one case, he touched a policeman who was arresting a friend; in the other, his girlfriend or wife made a domestic battery complaint that faded away into the mists of "he said/she said" marital squabbles.  If, as is alleged, the woman in question is his current wife, it was obviously not very serious.

3.  Trayvon Martin is 6'3" and a former football player.  Nearly all the pictures being circulated show a smiling young kid, but they are several years out of date.  More recent pictures show a sullen young man in a gangsta hoodie, definitely not good PR material.  Family members described Trayvon as a good student; friends are more likely to use the word average.  He had been suspended from school for 10 days, which is why he was staying with his father's girlfriend.  According to the police in an Orlando Sentinel story, he was suspended for possession of an emptied marijuana baggie and a pipe.

If we can believe researchers who have gone over Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to Trayvon and his friends, he already had two tatoos, a gold tooth, and a reputation as someone to supply dope.  His handle is interesting: @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA.  For this and other possibly relevant details, see this unverified story.  His friends, by the way, assume that he was giving George Zimmerman a beating when he was shot, and one refers to an alleged attack made by Trayvon on a busdriver.

All in all, the evidence of his social networking paints a picture of a budding thug.  That by no means indicates any guilt on his part--we do not have a right to shoot young black males who have adopted a gangsta style--but it does begin to suggest a rather different possible scenario.

4.  Let us look at the incident itself.  When George calls the 911 number, he sounds calm and unaggressive though naturally concerned: "This guy looks like he is up to no good. He is on drugs or something." He added that the person had his hand in his waistband, was holding something in his other hand, and was walking around slowly in the rain looking at houses.

While he is giving directions for the police, George apparently thinks the guy has spotted him:  "He's coming to check me out."  He is probably correct, since Trayvon then heads into the backyard of a house.

What happens in the next minute or two is not entirely clear.  George had left his SUV and was trying to discover the whereabouts of the suspicious person.  He may have been following him or even accosted him, but we do not know.  What Zimmerman told the police, though, is that as he was returning to his car, he was approached by the young man.  Let me quote directly from the Orlando Sentinel:

"Zimmerman told them he lost sight of Trayvon and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from the left rear, and they exchanged words.

Trayvon asked Zimmerman if he had a problem. Zimmerman said no and reached for his cell phone, he told police. Trayvon then said, "Well, you do now" or something similar and punched Zimmerman in the nose, according to the account he gave police.

Zimmerman fell to the ground and Trayvon got on top of him and began slamming his head into the sidewalk, he told police.

Zimmerman began yelling for help.

Several witnesses heard those cries, and there has been a dispute about whether they came from Zimmerman or Trayvon.

Lawyers for Trayvon's family say it was Trayvon, but police say their evidence indicates it was Zimmerman.

One witness, who has since talked to local television news reporters, told police he saw Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon on top, pounding him — and was unequivocal that it was Zimmerman who was crying for help.

Zimmerman then shot Trayvon once in the chest at very close range, according to authorities.

When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head."

No witnesses have yet confirmed or disputed Zimmerman's account of the beginning of the encounter, but, as you have read, one witness has confirmed his description of being beaten by Trayvon.  Another detail it would be good to clear up is whether Zimmerman drew his gun and shot or the gun went off in the course of the struggle, as the interview with Joe Oliver seems to indicate.

Much More to Come

Even used in the broadest sense, satire is not comic parody or even mere raillery.  Satire has a serious purpose--to hold up to ridicule the foibles and follies of the time and to cause the reader to use the satire as a mirror in which to glimpse his own foolishness.  I am not, at least at this time, to bore you by tracing the history of Satire back to Juvenal, Horace, Lucilius, and their Greek inspirations (though the Romans did quite rightly claim the genre as wholly their own).  Let us instead go to a satiric poem that is not really a satire in the strict sense.

This is Lady Psyche's song, from Gilbert's Princess Ida, in which she expounds both Darwinism and feminism.  When E.C. Kopff and I once attended a performance in Boulder, the program advised us that the work was only being performed as an historical artifact because they were committed to producing all the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.  Under no circumstances was anyone to find it funny.  I fear we both laughed so hard we almost got ejected.

A Lady fair, of lineage high,

Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by.

The Maid was radiant as the sun,

The Ape was a most unsightly one –

So it would not do –

His scheme fell through,

For the Maid, when his love took formal shape,

Expressed such terror

At his monstrous error,

That he stammered an apology and made his ’scape,

The picture of a disconcerted Ape.

With a view to rise in the social scale,

He shaved his bristles and he docked his tail,

He grew mustachios, and he took his tub,

And he paid a guinea to a toilet club –

But it would not do,

The scheme fell through –

For the Maid was Beauty’s fairest Queen,

With golden tresses,

Like a real princess’s,

While the Ape, despite his razor keen,

Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,

He crammed his feet into bright tight boots –

And to start in life on a brand-new plan,

He christened himself Darwinian Man!

But it would not do,

The scheme fell through –

For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved,

Was a radiant Being,

With brain far-seeing –

While Darwinian Man, though well-behaved,2

At best is only a monkey shaved!