September 2004
Holding the Pass
It has been ten years since the death, at his home in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and one of the main spokesmen for organized American conservatism as it was known throughout his life. While there were other architects of conservatism who were Kirk’s contemporaries, almost all of them have faded from the conservative memory—in part, I think, for the simple reason that several simply died at an early age before the conservative movement acquired the resources to be able to institutionalize them and their memories sufficiently and in part, also, because conservatives themselves are not disposed to remember most of them anyway. Kirk’s fate was perhaps more fortunate since he lived well into the years when conservatism supposedly had “triumphed,” if you believe its court historians. Kirk himself did not believe them then and would not believe them today if he were alive to read them.
Fighting Among the Hedgerows
As a young college student, I accepted implicitly all the goals of the Civil Rights revolution. I believed firmly that schools should be integrated, even though the nearest thing to integration I had ever experienced was going to school with a part-Ojibwe in Superior, Wisconsin, a lily-white town in which black people were not allowed to reside. Imagine the comeuppance I received when an intelligent and sincere black radical, with whom I was having lunch, informed me that he really did not need anything from white people and that he thought integration was, to some extent, a delusion. What makes you think, he asked defiantly, that black children can’t learn, unless they are rubbing elbows with white children?
This black “nationalist” (for want of a better word) did not hate white people, and he was hardly a radical; indeed, he went on to a distinguished career in public life. But the question he asked never left me.
Children—Our Future or Our Past?—September 2004
PERSPECTIVE
Fighting Among the Hedgerows
by Thomas Fleming
Reracination.
VIEWS
Blindsided By Education’s Leftists
by B.K. Eakman
Republicans assure their own marginalization.
There’s No Place Like Home
by Michael McMahon
Simon says, “Go to school.”
Instinct for the Capillaries: The 9-11 Commission Report
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9-11 Commission) released its report to much media fanfare in late July. Although the commissioners labored mightily, they have given birth to a mouse. The report is safe, cautious, and eminently bipartisan. In other words, it largely avoids discussing the most serious issues surrounding the threat that radical Islamic terrorism poses to America.
Much of the document deals with the failures of the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies to anticipate and thwart the devastating attacks launched on September 11, 2001. Some of the criticisms (the lack of communication between key agencies, the absence of effective screening mechanisms at the borders, and the missing of key clues) are warranted. Others are classic exercises in 20-20 hindsight.
Gentlemen Prefer C’s
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many small ones, among which the modern education rat race ranks high. It seems prudent, therefore, for the rest of us to listen up and pay attention to what they have to say.
Thomas Fleming and Mother Teresa: Undoubted Motives in the Morality of Everyday Life
The Morality of Everyday Life:
Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition
by Thomas Fleming
Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press; 270 pp., $44.95
Too bad that, since 1966, they are no longer adding titles to the Index of Prohibited Books. My more than ten years as diocesan censor librorum—was it this past distinction that gained me the happy task of writing this review?—would lead me to grant Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition an imprimatur after a few nugatory adjustments, but what a book such as this really needs is a condemnation. Let me explain. A place on the Inquisition’s Index would recommend this text to three groups of potential readers. The first are readers who already are in sympathy with the author’s sound principles. They would compare him to the soon-to-be-Blessed (imagine the Church of the 22nd century giving this honor to Dr. Fleming! Stranger things have happened since Pentecost A.D. 33) Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, whose Five Wounds of Holy Church, a work of similar courage and good sense, was later removed from the list of offending texts.
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