October 2004
Smearpolitik
After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace George W. Bush in the White House. Amazingly, it was none other than the forgotten Robert Dole—himself something of a war hero from World War II and whose wounds were far more serious than any Mr. Kerry has even claimed to have suffered—who seems to have been the only man in the GOP to grasp that point.
America: From Village to Empire—October 2004
PERSPECTIVE
The Call of Blood
by Thomas Fleming
Old Europe versus the New World Order.
VIEWS
There Once Was a New England
by John Willson
Timothy Dwight’s New England catechism.
Tocqueville’s America and America Today
by Claude Polin
Liberty, Equality, Materialism.
The Enemy of the Nation
Not long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev was still in power and I was an editorial writer at the Washington Times, a bunch of Soviet “journalists” came to lunch at the newspaper. At that time, I was still sufficiently in good graces with the paper’s management to be invited and to listen to the editors explain to the communists what a terrific paper the Times was. (The ostensible purpose of these “editorial lunches” was to interview whatever VIP’s would accept an invitation to the city’s “Moonie paper,” but the real purpose was to show off the Times to the guests and impress them with how mainstream we were.) The Times had the largely justified reputation of being an “anticommunist” newspaper, and one of the main things the visiting reds wanted to know was what it meant to be “anticommunist,” a term and concept that seemed to offend them deeply.
The Call of Blood
We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths. Rooted in no one place, our corporate aristocrats move as frequently as Roman military officers or Methodist preachers, and, while we may take pride in our own wealth and accomplishments, we are often inclined to minimize the legacy we have received from our ancestors. I remember a New Yorker cartoon I saw as a child. Two men are sitting at their club and looking at a third. “There’s young Smedley, a self-made man. Started with only two million and look where he is today.” Those were the days when two million bucks were two million bucks.
Carpetbagging
Alan Keyes, like the proverbial white knight, has ridden across the country from his castle in Maryland to save the Republican Party of Illinois from itself—at least, that’s the way his supporters would like to portray Keyes’ run for junior U.S. senator from Illinois. More likely, this ridiculous whirlwind campaign—the result of the convergence of Republican desperation in the wake of Democratic senate nominee Barack Obama’s well-received speech at the Democratic National Convention and Keyes’ seemingly limitless personal ambition—will drive the final nail into the coffin of the state party, the only inmate on Death Row whose sentence was not commuted by corrupt former Republican governor George Ryan. (In Illinois, “corrupt Republican governor” is just short of redundant. So, for that matter, is “corrupt Republican.”)
The Big Bore of Arkansas
Ric Flair: To Be the Man
by Ric Flair
New York: Pocket Books;
332 pp., $26.00
American Evita: Hillary
Clinton’s Path to Power
by Christopher Andersen
New York: William Morrow;
292 pp., $29.95
Rewriting History
by Dick Morris with Eileen McGann
New York: ReganBooks;
304 pp., $24.95
My Life
by Bill Clinton
New York: Alfred A. Knopf;
957 pp., $35.00
Now, the first book I want to mention, which is also the best book I scanned, has merits beyond its own intrinsic and immediate appeal. Ric Flair’s To Be the Man tells the story of a boy from Memphis (just across the Big Muddy from Arkansas) who will never find out with certainty who his biological parents were. He was adopted in corrupt circumstances by kind and cultured Minnesotans but could not relate to the demands of conventional life, and his parents had the wisdom to let him go his own way. By coincidence, he soon found himself in the world of professional wrestling, and Richard Morgan Fliehr became Ric Flair, the Nature Boy, one of the greatest stars of that flamboyant form of folk theater.
Let Freedom Reign
The Olympics have come and gone, having returned to Athens for the 28th installment of the modern games. Besides being an occasion for the inglorious introduction of women’s wrestling, the defiant proclamation of Soviet superiority by a defeated Russian gymnast, and the (welcome) assurance that the overpaid NBA players will no longer be referred to as the “Dream Team,” they served as a fine kickoff for what President George W. Bush, during his speech at the Republican National Convention, dubbed the “Liberty Century.” And could there be a better symbol of the Liberty Century, thought the President, than the Iraqi soccer team, which, after unexpectedly advancing to the quarter-finals, became the Cinderella story of the games?
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