When pro-life activist James Pouillon was murdered in Owosso, Michigan, on September 11, I read a few dozen accounts from both national and Michigan news sources and quickly decided I had a handle on the story.  Harlan Drake, the man who has admitted to murdering Pouillon, seems deeply disturbed, and he had murdered another man and pursued a third.  While neither of Drake’s other targets was publicly involved in pro-life activities, the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department and the prosecutor’s office both confirmed that Drake had told authorities that he had targeted Pouillon for his “pro-life stance.”

In a short piece for the About.com Catholicism GuideSite, I talked less about Pouillon, Drake, or the murder, and more about the disparity in reactions between pro-life and pro-abortion groups to the murders of Pouillon and late-term abortionist George Tiller.  While pro-life groups had been quick to condemn Tiller’s murder, with few or no equivocations, pro-abortion groups were much slower to issue statements about Pouillon’s murder, and when NARAL did, the statement had a “you got one of ours; we got one of yours; let’s call it even” feel.

After publishing the piece, I noticed that a number of articles about Pouillon’s murder had quotes from residents of Owosso referring to him as “the sign guy.”  I did some digging and found that, for about a decade, Pouillon had used graphic posters of aborted children in his protests, many of which (as on the day he was murdered) took place across the street from Owosso High School.  The use of such posters is controversial even among pro-lifers, and I have written before about why I oppose them.  Still, while their use may have contributed to Drake’s rage, it neither justifies murder nor mitigates Drake’s responsibility.

By the end of the day, however, I was contacted by a resident of Owosso who knew Pouillon and his activities, and who explained that the story was much more complex.  In their (our?) rush to score political points, pro-life groups had begun referring to Pouillon as a “peaceful” man and a “martyr” to the cause of life.  The inevitable comparisons with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., followed.

Yet pro-life activists in Owosso had a different story to tell, and my contact directed me to the website of the Argus-Press, where residents of Owosso were discussing their experiences with Pouillon.  Even local admirers admitted that he seemed to thrive on confrontation and had told several of them that he expected—indeed, hoped—to be killed one day while protesting.

All of this had been ignored by outside news agencies.  Even the Argus-Press, while it should be commended for providing a forum in which a fuller picture emerged, shied away from discussing the details in its news stories.  That is why so many of us thought that we knew everything, when in fact we knew only the barest details.

In a follow-up story published in the September 24 issue of The Wanderer and reprinted on the About.com Catholicism GuideSite, I explored the implications of Pouillon’s activities and his murder in greater depth, and questioned whether such confrontational tactics are either appropriate or useful.  What did Pouillon’s death actually accomplish, other than to tear apart the community of Owosso?  By the time the piece appeared, however, the damage had been done, and readers responded to the attempt to paint a fuller picture of James Pouillon’s activities and murder by repeating the myth.

Over the past nine years of writing The Rockford Files, and several more years before that covering the Rockford school-desegregation case and eminent-domain land grabs by local government, I have seen many situations where the reporting of outside news agencies simply did not reflect the reality of events here in Rockford.  The Rockford desegregation case, for instance, was about the closing of a neighborhood high school before a greedy Chicago lawyer, brought in by the mostly white plaintiffs, turned it into a racial class-action suit.  (Many of the original plaintiffs spent years fighting the very lawyer they had hired.)  The Chicago Tribune, the Rockford Register-Star, and the weekly Rock River Times all printed glowing profiles of the local Muslim school before two editors from a small monthly magazine actually spent an entire day at the school, interviewed students, teachers, and administrators, and came away with a very different story of a library stocked with radical Islamic books and videotapes, young children singing rap songs glorifying jihad, and a school-board chairman who touted the virtues of sharia and Osama bin Laden.

In other words, I should have known better.  Life at the local level is always much more complex than what even a good, unbiased, hard-working reporter can capture in a few hundred words for a wire story or a 90-second segment on the six o’clock news.  And a reporter from outside a community will always have trouble placing an event such as Pouillon’s murder in the context of that community’s history.  That is why local news is more important than ever, even as the internet threatens to put the last truly local newspapers and radio and TV stations out of business.

And that, too, is why readers need to take everything they read with a grain of salt—even when it comes from someone they trust.

This article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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Would that it were.  Instead, for the last quarter of a century, it has been the home of the Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic—the antiseptic-sounding name for Rockford’s only abortuary.

It has another name, too.  The building’s current owner, Wayne Webster, dubbed it “Fort Turner,” but its walls offer no protection—certainly not to the children whose lives end there, but neither to the mothers who may spend the rest of their lives in regret over having sacrificed their daughters on the altar of “women’s rights,” nor to the fathers who pay for the ritual murder of their sons.

And if the antics of Wayne Webster over the years—dressing up like the devil to harass pro-lifers praying the rosary on the sidewalk outside the clinic; trying to drown out their prayers by shouting obscenities over loudspeakers he has mounted on the exterior walls; hanging rubber chickens (including one mounted on a crucifix) and obscene signs and pictures in the windows—are any indication, the walls of Fort Turner (where Webster also lives) have not protected him from spiritual attack.  But then demons, like vampires, are always looking for an invitation to enter in, and they may well have taken up residence inside Fort Turner when the first abortion was performed there a quarter-century ago.

As if providing a location for an average of 35 murders each week is not enough, over the years Webster has hung signs in the windows of Fort Turner mocking the Christian beliefs of the pro-lifers: “Jesus loves these braindead a—holes,” “These Bible-thumpers suffer from lack-o-nookie,” “God bless these horny old sweat-hogs,” “NIWC 50,000, JC 50” (that is, by the time the abortuary reached 50,000 children killed, Jesus Christ had saved only 50).  But Webster’s latest outrage crossed from mockery into blasphemy, when, in late summer, he hung up a sign with the inscription “Even Jesus Hates You,” under an image of Christ extending the middle finger of His right hand.

The Rockford Pro-Life Initiative, a coalition of pro-life activists founded in 2008 to “eliminate abortion in the Rockford area through Christian, non-confrontational means,” including “Prayer, Fasting, Education and Personal Sacrifice,” asked Rockford police to enforce city ordinances against the offensive use of property by ordering Webster to remove the image.  When a police sergeant refused, saying that the sign was not offensive, a veteran pro-life activist, Kevin Rilott, received permission to address the Rockford City Council.  Pro-lifers showed up at the meeting with small devotional pictures of Christ, and Rilott implored the council to take action—to no avail.

The Rockford ordinances state that it is illegal to “disturb or destroy the peace of the neighborhood in which such building or premises are situated.”  While it is by no means certain that a court would agree that Webster’s blasphemous sign violates the ordinances, many of his other actions—especially the blasting of rock music and the shouting of obscenities over the loudspeakers mounted on the outside of Fort Turner—clearly do.  Yet there is no record of Webster or the clinic being issued a citation.

A few weeks after Webster hung the “Even Jesus Hates You” sign, Rilott was praying outside of Fort Turner, in the same spot where he has stood for a decade.  Webster’s security guard asked him to move, and when Rilott refused, he called in the police.  An officer on the scene asked Rilott to pick up a large painting of Christ that he had propped up next to him; when Rilott refused, the officer called in the same police sergeant who had refused to take action on Webster’s sign.  After ordering the pro-life protesters to turn off their video cameras, the sergeant confiscated the painting on the grounds that it was “unattended” and threw it in the back of his squad car.

So, pictures of Our Lord giving the finger to faithful Christians are acceptable; “unattended” paintings of Christ are not.  (As video footage of the incident shows, Rilott was never more than two or three feet away from the painting at any time.)

When pro-lifers use graphic images of aborted children in their protests, the media views such actions as provocation (which, in some cases, such as that of the recently murdered James Pouillon, it may well be).  But you will look in vain for equivalent treatment of Webster’s blasphemy (or similar actions at abortuaries around the country).

Pro-lifers’ use of graphic images, I have argued, is counterproductive at best; but while they do not show us the truth, they at least portray reality.  Webster’s sign does neither—though it may give us a glimpse into the depths of his soul and of the sleepless nights he spends guarding the gates of Hell.

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Family traditions often get started by accident—especially, perhaps, those that center on food. On the second New Year’s Eve after we were married, my wife and I found ourselves trapped in our apartment in Vienna, Virginia, victims of a freak snow and ice storm that made the Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., streets downright dangerous, especially since no one in the area knew how to drive in such conditions. While we both had weathered far worse growing up in Michigan, we decided not to risk our lives but someone else’s, and so we ordered Chinese delivery. (To salve our consciences, we tipped very well.) At the end of the meal, one of us conceived the sappy idea of breaking our fortune cookies open at midnight, and by 12:01 A.M. (disappointing fortunes notwithstanding), it was probably inevitable that we would do it all again the next year.

And so, when we arrived in Rockford two years later, on December 27, 1995, one of my first tasks was to locate a Chinese restaurant. In a dingy strip mall on North Main Street, around the corner from our apartment, I found a little hole in the wall with six or seven tables. I guess it will do, I thought. By next year, we’ll have located the best Chinese restaurant in town. Little did I know that we already had.

The food we ate that New Year’s Eve—crab rangoon, fried rice, and black bean and garlic chicken with green peppers and onions—was not the best Chinese I have ever had, but few restaurants I have dined at have ever topped it (most notably, a Chinese restaurant on Long Island whose name I can’t recall, where I first enjoyed General Tso’s chicken—delightfully crunchy-chewy, with fiery little peppers and the lightest of sauces—and my personal favorite, the Sichuan Pavilion, on K Street in Washington, D.C.). Over the next five or so years, I enjoyed innumerable lunches and dinners with family and colleagues at the place we all came to know simply as “Mrs. Lee’s”—Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, immortalized in the small ads that we placed in Chronicles as a token of our gratitude for the many kindnesses that Mrs. Lee and her husband, Al, bestowed upon us.

A decade earlier, Tom Fleming had also eaten one of his first meals in Rockford at Mrs. Lee’s, when Chronicles’ founding editor Leopold Tyrmand took him there to sample the wonton soup—the best in Rockford, Tyrmand claimed. And it was, though I always preferred the hot and sour. (If you’re ever in D.C., try the best of both worlds: Sichuan Pavilion’s hot and sour wonton soup, a sublime—and spicy—dish I have never seen anywhere else.) My children always said that no one could make white rice quite like Mrs. Lee—whose real name was Ann Wang and whose unrelenting cheerfulness and good nature are reflected in the fact that it took her almost five years to correct us.

In mid-size Midwestern towns such as Rockford, small ethnic restaurants come and go, which made Mrs. Lee’s 20-some-year run little short of a miracle. While such places might survive for generations in New York City or San Francisco, the normal pattern here is for small restaurants (often run by first- or second-generation immigrants) to blaze the way, introducing adventurous Midwesterners to an interesting new cuisine, which is then picked up by a larger restaurant (often a chain), which ditches all of the sparkle and originality of the cuisine in order to make it more palatable to a broader range of American diners. And, of course, it never hurts to make up for the loss of quality by increasing the quantity, preferably by putting the food on an all-you-can-eat buffet. (Rockford now has a Chinese-Japanese-American buffet featuring sushi—a risky proposition if ever there was one. Nine eighty-nine, no doggie bags—something for which Rover can be thankful.)

This dynamic is more proof that, to the extent that any assimilation has actually occurred in the “Great Melting Pot,” it has largely been destructive, stripping immigrants and their food of their distinctiveness and reducing them to the lowest common denominator. If there were still a true American cuisine, it could adopt the best foods and techniques and spices from other cultures and make them its own, the way that, say, Poles, Lebanese, and Vietnamese did with French cuisine. Instead, American chain restaurants and agribusiness conglomerates take other cultures’ food and try to make it taste like a TV dinner. And, unfortunately, they usually succeed.

Mrs. Lee’s has been gone for almost two years now, and with it not only the crab rangoon, wonton soup, and beef kow but Mrs. Lee’s insights into the local public schools and the mayor and her tips about Brazilian telephone stocks. Ann and Al were not forced out of business by their competition but chose to retire rather than battle their landlord, who wanted them to make thousands of dollars worth of improvements to their space before he would offer them another lease. The forces of homogenization, however, were closing in—a local Chinese restaurant chain, predictably named “Happy Wok,” had opened on the corner, and a Chinese buffet, predictably named “China Buffet” and featuring such traditional Asian dishes as frozen pizza and boxed mashed potatoes with canned gravy, had taken up residence in the next mall to the north. Still, I’d like to think that Mrs. Lee could have withstood the competition, perhaps less because of the quality of her food than the loyalty of her patrons and her loyalty to them—though, in the end, “the quality of her food” and “her loyalty to her patrons” may simply be different ways of saying the same thing.

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Of course, we should note that, unlike the “Octomom” whom Mandolyna rightly excoriates, the Gosselins did not engage in in vitro fertilization but in fertility treatments, which resulted in the release of multiple eggs, with their subsequent fertilization through entirely natural means. The only way to “select” a single embryo, then, would have been through the abortion of the other five.

Read the rest of the article here.

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That leads to certain anomalies.  For instance, our “All Local” station features a host who lives in, and broadcasts from, Wisconsin—and not just across the border, but about as far away as Chicago is from Rockford.  He is a good host, having actually once lived here, and he is quite willing to talk about Rockford news and controversies.  Yet there is still something odd about the idea of a “local” show originating from someplace that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called “local.”

Most of the discussion of the potential demise of local newspapers and other local media has blamed their decline on the rise of the internet.  There may be some truth to such assessments, but not in the way in which they are usually framed—namely, that the internet somehow magically provides us with up-to-the-minute news about everything we need to know.  In all but the largest cities, it is still hard to find local news on the internet—and, in the largest cities, it is equally hard to find useful news on a scale that could reasonably be called local (i.e., at the level of the extended neighborhood).

Rather, even most self-billed “local” news sites feature a high proportion of national and international news, much of it obtained from wire services.  Why go to the website of my local newspaper or TV station to read about Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush-administration torture memos, when I can find everything I need to know on the front page of Google News or the Drudge Report?

Worse yet, why bother watching the “local” news or listening to “local” talk radio or reading a “local” newspaper when much of the content is neither local nor fresh, having been available online for many hours before the program started or the issue went to press (much less showed up on my doorstep)?  It is hard to see a bright future for a business model that depends on a customer base that has limited access to the internet (or, at best, limited interest in accessing the internet), since that audience is shrinking every day.

This is the point at which all the “local media is dying” reports claim that the problem is insoluble, that the newspaper is finished, that local TV stations would be better off showing Seinfeld reruns at 6:00 p.m. and local talk radio should give way to the prepackaged musings of Rush Limbaugh or Ed Schultz.  Sometimes they halfheartedly suggest one alternative: Local newspapers can transform themselves into online-only publications, and thus compete with Google News for pageviews and, more importantly, the ad impressions that bring in revenue.

All of these assessments are based on the idea that there is no market for anything that is truly local.  And when we look around at the homogenization of entertainment and food and everything else under the sun, that argument seems almost unassailable.  Almost.

Until we consider the possibility that people aren’t interested in local news sources because there is nothing really local about them.  To take just one recent—local!—case in point: On Friday, April 3, Hassan Abujihaad, a former U.S. Navy signalman and a convert to Islam, was sentenced to ten years in prison for revealing classified information on ship movements in the Persian Gulf to the operators of a jihadist website in Great Britain.  The local media here in Rockford picked up the story from the newswires and ran it on their websites.  For them, it was just another national news story.

Except that it wasn’t.  It should have been on the front page of the next day’s Rockford Register Star, and it should have received top billing on the six o’clock news that evening.  Why?  Because, as longtime readers of Chronicles and this column know, the story depended on a local connection.  Abujihaad was at one time the roommate of Derrick Shareef, the local jihadist who hatched a plot in 2006 to toss grenades into the midst of crowds of Christmas shoppers at the largest mall in the Rockford area.

Shareef’s arrest was made possible through the efforts of an FBI informant, and that same informant was able to leverage the fact of the arrest to get Abujihaad to provide, on tape, key evidence that led to the latter’s arrest.

In other words, without the Rockford connection, Abujihaad would likely still be a free man.  Rockfordians might well have found that of interest—certainly of more interest than the sentencing alone, which is how all but one local news outlet reported it.

That outlet, TV station WQRF (FOX 39), is to be commended for discussing the local connection, but even they confined it to a two-minute segment on the evening news that aired right before the local sports.

There is a business model for local news, but until newspapers and radio and TV stations take seriously the motto “All Local. All Day,” they will continue to struggle—and to fail.

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John F. Kennedy’s court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., popularized (though he did not invent) the phrase “the imperial presidency” in his book of the same name.  Yet a decade and a half before Schlesinger published his partisan attack, masquerading as political history, on Kennedy’s old foe Richard M. Nixon, a more serious student of the American political tradition, James Burnham, had already written everything that Schlesinger got right, and much more that Schlesinger got wrong.

Burnham’s 1959 book Congress and the American Tradition is his most conservative, and most consistently underrated, work.  Asked by publisher Henry Regnery, in the wake of the McCarthy hearings, to write a defense of Congress’s investigatory powers (which are never mentioned in the Constitution), Burnham gave Regnery much more: a serious work of political history that revives the Framers’ understanding of the nature and role of Congress and places that understanding within the Anglo-American (and more broadly European) political tradition.

What Burnham saw, and what Schlesinger and so many others later failed (and continue to fail) to see, is that the legislative power of Congress is as much (if not more) a constituent part of federalism as it is of the separation of powers.  Burnham makes a persuasive argument that the structure of the legislative branch, as the Framers conceived it, was intended to prevent the sovereignty of the several states from being subsumed into the sovereignty of the federal government—which, he rightly recognized, meant the power of the executive branch: the imperial presidency.

The federal executive was never meant to be a national office in the sense that we find it today.  The president was to act as the head of state when one was required, but more importantly, he was to ensure the faithful execution of the laws passed by the states in Congress assembled: that is, the laws that the representatives of each state agreed were in the common interest of all of their states.

But the evolution (or devolution) of the American constitutional system—both through formal amendments, such as the 17th, which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators, and through the growth of the population beyond the bounds that could be foreseen by the Framers and the destruction of traditional culture—has destroyed the understanding of Congress as an assembly of states gathered to create legislation in their common interest and, consequently, allowed the executive branch to usurp, not only the powers of Congress, but of the states themselves, and of their citizens.

There is a way back, but it requires senators and congressmen to forget everything they think they know about the role of Congress.  As long as Congress is regarded as an assembly of individual legislators and simply one of three branches of a national government, the centralization of power in the executive will continue, because the very aim of Congress is wrong.

Should each state delegation begin approaching legislation with an eye toward the good of its state, however, perhaps something of the original understanding could be recovered.  Rather than look to Republican legislators to thwart the plans of Democratic presidents (and vice versa), states that began to approach federal legislation as South Carolinians or Illinoisans or Arizonans might begin to question whether such legislation is really in the interest of the people they represent.  Such patriotism, it is true, seems unlikely; but the current economic crisis and a massive federal debt that will never be repaid may open up opportunities.  In the near future, all federal mandates are likely to become unfunded federal mandates, increasing the burden on the states at the very moment when they are least able to bear it.

In normal circumstances, economic self-interest is a poor substitute for the ties of kith and kin, but in an age when the latter are denigrated, perhaps the former stands a better chance of bringing about change we can believe in.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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The unease did not abate as Aaron Wolf and I watched a webcast later that morning of the press conference held by U.S. District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.  The assembled reporters danced around the obvious questions, and Fitzgerald followed their lead.  What is the actual federal crime of which Blagojevich is accused?  Is there one?  Aren’t Blagojevich’s transgressions, both those named in the criminal complaint and those for which he will probably never be indicted, state matters?  Isn’t this a bit like prosecuting Al Capone for income-tax evasion, the main difference being that income-tax evasion was a federal crime, and Capone was guilty of it?

If there were an actual federal crime involved, that might be one thing; but the two counts leveled against Blagojevich stretch federal law so far as to make it meaningless.  Or, rather, they stretch it so far as to make it absolute—any crime committed by an elected official of a state, and virtually any crime committed by a mere citizen, could be covered under their penumbra.

The first count alleges that Blagojevich and John Harris, his chief of staff, “did, [sic] conspire with each other and with others to devise and participate in a scheme to defraud the State of Illinois and the people of the State of Illinois, of the honest services” of Blagojevich and Harris.  It is easy to see how this could be a state matter, but it only becomes a federal crime through a subordinate clause: “in furtherance of which the mails and interstate wire communications would be used,” in violation of various sections of Title 18 of the United States Code.

The second count alleges that the governor and his chief of staff “corruptly solicited and demanded a thing of value, namely, the firing of certain Chicago Tribune editorial members responsible for widely-circulated editorials critical of” the governor, in exchange for which they allegedly intended to provide

millions of dollars in financial assistance by the State of Illinois, including through the Illinois Finance Authority, an agency of the State of Illinois, to the Tribune Company involving the Wrigley Field baseball stadium.

This is certainly worthy of state prosecution, but why should it be considered a federal crime?  Because Blagojevich and Harris are

agents of the State of Illinois, a State government which during a one-year period, beginning January 1, 2008 and continuing to the present, received federal benefits in excess of $10,000.

In a line sure to send a chill down the spines of evangelical dispensationalists and rad-trad Catholics, this second count notes that these actions violate “Title 18, United States Code, Sections 666(a)(1)(B) and 2.”

In the end, though, the Blagojevich arrest and indictment present a more mundane, yet perhaps more far-reaching, concern than the coming of the end times and the rise of the Antichrist.  As contributing editor Clyde Wilson noted on the Chronicles website, “the idea of the FBI arresting a governor is disturbing” and “a very bad precedent.”  The U.S. Constitution has long been a dead letter; federalism exists today in name only; yet it is hard not to sense that a broader principle even than the traditions of the American political system has been violated here.

In the Catholic tradition, we call that principle subsidiarity—the idea that a larger, higher, or more centralized authority should not usurp the rightful duties and responsibilities of a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.  The framers of both the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution did not use the term, but the systems of federalism established under both documents adhered to the principle, each in its own way.

Subsidiarity is poorly understood.  Many Catholics who claim to support the principle characterize it as the idea that higher authorities should never step in unless lower authorities fail to fulfill their responsibilities.  I once had a debate with a Catholic traditionalist who argued that, under subsidiarity, overturning Roe v. Wade was not good enough, because some states would fail to protect the unborn.  Therefore, nothing short of a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution was acceptable.  Similarly, leaving the regulation of marriage to the states was out of the question, now that some states have legalized “gay marriage.”  Their failure to exercise their responsibilities in accordance with Christian teaching on marriage meant that the federal government not only could step in, but must step in.

Since vocal Catholic “defenders” of subsidiarity make such arguments, it is not surprising that another common misconception, especially among those who are skeptical of the influence of the Catholic Church on politics, is that (in the recent words of one European journalist) subsidiarity means “that the power rests at the top . . . but the power at the top will let some of it trickle down as it sees fit.”

Both sides are wrong.  The most cogent summary of the principle of subsidiarity is found in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo anno.  Building on the work of his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum novarum (1891), Pope Pius writes (paragraph 79):

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations.  Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.  For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

Phrases such as “fixed and unshaken,” “gravely wrong,” “injustice,” “grave evil,” and “disturbance of right order” do not allow for a whole lot of wiggle room.  Even more important, however, is the Holy Father’s choice of verb to describe the responsibilities of subsidiary organizations: He speaks of what they “can do,” without qualification.  He does not go on to say that if they deliberately fail to do that which they can do, it is no longer “a grave evil and disturbance of right order” for a larger, higher, or more centralized authority to usurp the power that rightly belongs to a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.

This isn’t sloppiness on Pius XI’s part, nor is it a deliberate attempt to hide some dark Catholic belief that power flows from the center and is held by families and local governments and other intermediary institutions only at the whim of the centralized state, which owes its power to the Supreme Pontiff.  Rather, it is a classic statement of the traditional Christian understanding of moral and social order: There is a place for everything, and everything in its place.

The proper authorities in the state of Illinois could have handled the Blagojevich problem, as the impeachment proceedings in the Illinois General Assembly prove.  They chose not to.  And the citizens of Illinois, who could have demanded that their elected officials fulfill their sworn responsibilities to uphold the Illinois constitution, chose to look the other way, too.  Neither failure represents an inability to carry out their responsibilities, and thus neither justifies the “grave evil and disturbance of right order” of a federal intervention.

Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo anno at a time of unprecedented centralization and destruction of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” that are “the first principle . . . of public affections . . . the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”  Today, to quote the typically pithy assessment of Burke’s latter-day disciple Russell Kirk, the situation is “much worse.”  Subsidiarity, Pius XI saw, was the key to the return to right order, which would mean the limitation rather than the expansion of the centralized state:

When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State.  This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.

Should Governor Hot Rod be convicted on federal charges, I won’t shed a tear for him—he deserves far worse than a few years lounging around a federal country club, with a weekly “Get Out of Jail Free” card to meet his family and political cronies on Saturday morning at a local restaurant for breakfast.  But the successful prosecution of a governor who was indicted while still in office would set, as Dr. Wilson rightly stated, a very bad precedent.

While the American constitutional order may have all but crumbled into dust, subsidiarity, as a broader principle, still stands—for the moment.  Defending it, even in—or perhaps, especially in—distasteful situations such as the strange case of Milorad Blagojevich, is the first step toward restoring a sane political order in the United States.

And think of the delicious irony if a reinvigorated federal system were to spring forth from the Land of Lincoln.

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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As a result of private research, more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist.  They were created from embryos that have already been destroyed, and they have the ability to regenerate themselves indefinitely, creating ongoing opportunities for research.  I have concluded that we should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines, where the life and death decision has already been made.

Leading scientists tell me research on these 60 lines has great promise that could lead to breakthrough therapies and cures.  This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing a fundamental moral line, by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life.

The President’s speech was widely hailed as an acceptable compromise by both advocates of research and pro-life leaders, although there were some notable voices of dissent (the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and Judie Brown’s American Life League most prominent among them). Almost two years later, however, a number of questions remain unaddressed, not least of which is whether the President’s “compromise” has actually restricted the use of government funds to embryos destroyed before 9:00 P.M. EDT on August 9, 2001. Moreover, recent research is calling into question the basic assumption of the President’s speech itself: that embryonic-stem-cell research is likely to provide greater advances in the fight against disease than research using adult stem cells.

What Are Stem Cells?

Stem cells may be a source of therapies for a variety of diseases, including diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease. The National Institutes of Health’s primer on stem cells defines them as undifferentiated cells that can renew themselves and can mature into a variety of other cell types, depending on the stimuli to which the cells are exposed. Embryonic stem cells are derived from three-to-five-day-old embryos that have been “conceived” through in vitro fertilization. They are pluripotent, which means that they can become any type of cell in the body. Adult stem cells are found in a variety of tissues but are most often derived from bone marrow. These cells are multipotent, which means that they can develop into a limited number of cell types. Until recently, researchers believed that an adult stem cell derived from a specific tissue could only differentiate into cells of that same tissue; in other words, a neural stem cell could only make brain cells, while a liver stem cell could only make liver cells. New studies, however, have demonstrated that adult stem cells can mature into a wide variety of cell types.

Stem cells work by three known mechanisms. They can be introduced into tissue and grow into cells of that tissue type. Alternatively, they can be differentiated in cell culture and then introduced into the target tissue, where they function as a cell of that organ. Finally, researchers have recently discovered that stem cells can migrate to an injured organ and fuse with damaged cells there, regenerating the organ. All three mechanisms are potentially of clinical use.

The Practical Limitations of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Beyond the moral issue of producing embryos and destroying them in order to harvest embryonic stem cells, there are practical limitations to the clinical use of these cells. Scientists have not yet demonstrated that they can control the differentiation of embryonic stem cells. Moreover, as in a heart or lung transplant, embryonic stem cells may be rejected by a patient, since the cells come from a different person. Finally, if all of the embryonic stem cells implanted into a patient do not mature, tumors may develop. Adult stem cells, on the other hand, do not cause rejection, but researchers have been less interested in them because they are found in very small quantities in most tissues, making them harder to isolate and purify. Also, adult stem cells have not been identified for every tissue. They do not multiply as readily, and, as NIH points out, they could have DNA abnormalities from the environment or genetic disease.

Embryonic stem cells were first isolated from mouse embryos in the early 1980’s. They were not isolated from human embryos or fetuses until 1998. To date, no clinical studies have been conducted with embryo-derived stem cells because researchers cannot control their development into various tissue types or prevent rejection.

Adult stem cells, on the other hand, have been used for almost 30 years in bone-marrow transplantation. As early as 1976, reports indicated that bone-marrow-derived cells could be differentiated into bone, cartilage, and fat cells and that these new cells were transplantable. Unfortunately, these observations never became the focus of research, and, by 1999, only a year after they were first isolated from human embryos, more was known about embryonic stem cells than adult stem cells. Recent research on adult stem cells, however, suggests that they may be of more clinical benefit than embryonic stem cells.

In fact, studies indicate adult bone marrow may contain a pluripotent stem-cell population that could potentially repair all of the tissues of the body. These stem cells, called side population cells, are also found within umbilical cords and in adult blood and other tissues. A relatively abundant source of stem cells is fat obtained through liposuction: Fatty tissue can yield up to 200,000 undifferentiated cells per gram.

The Promise of Adult Stem Cell Research

While researchers cannot control the development of embryonic stem cells into particular tissue types, they have recently demonstrated that adult stem cells derived from one tissue can differentiate into cells of another tissue. Cells derived from skin have been grown into neurons and glial cells, smooth muscle cells, or fat cells, depending on the conditions under which the cells are cultured. An abundant supply of these cells can be obtained through skin biopsies. Bone-marrow cells have been differentiated into cardiac, esophageal, stomach, small and large intestine, kidney, neural, bone, and lung cells in both humans and rodents. Neural stem cells can mature into liver, intestine, kidney, and bone-marrow cells, while pancreatic stem cells can become liver cells. These studies indicate that the ability of adult stem cells to repopulate a variety of tissues may be equal to, or even better than, that of embryonic stem cells.

Doctors at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, isolated stem cells from the bone marrow of a 16-year-old boy and introduced them through his aorta into his heart muscle, which had been damaged when he was shot with a nail gun while working on his home. The boy’s heart regained a significant amount of function after treatment. Moreover, there was no potential for rejection, since the donor cells were his own. In a similar study at the Texas Heart Institute, heart function in patients suffering from congestive heart failure significantly improved after bone-marrow-derived stem cells were injected into their heart muscle.

A 1999 Nature Medicine article reported that stem cells derived from bone marrow were differentiated into bone cells and used to treat three children suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes short stature and brittle bones. The children’s condition improved dramatically, and they suffered fewer fractures. At the 2001 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, P. Sanberg reported that stem cells isolated from umbilical-cord blood can be developed in culture into healthy brain cells. When these cells are injected into the bloodstream of rats with brain injury, the cells migrate to the area of injury and repopulate it. In a study of rats who had suffered a stroke, 80 percent of those treated with these differentiated cells recovered, compared with 20 percent of untreated rats. If the procedure works as well in humans, one to two umbilical cords may be enough to treat one stroke victim. This approach may be used to treat stroke patients within two years.

While the usefulness of embryonic stem cells remains unproved, these studies demonstrate the potential of adult stem cells for treating disease. Since there has been less focus on adult-stem-cell research, much is still not known about how adult stem cells function, but, even at this early stage, it seems likely that adult stem cells will be more readily adaptable to cure disease.

Loopholes in President Bush’s “Compromise”

The remarkable advances in adult-stem-cell research over the past two years make the potential loopholes in President Bush’s “compromise” all the more disturbing. While government funding of embryonic-stem-cell research is supposed to be confined to cell lines derived from embryos destroyed before President Bush began his speech, NIH’s implementation of the President’s directive potentially broadens the scope. In a statement released on August 27, 2001, NIH announced that “Such research is now eligible for federal funding as long as the derivation process (which begins with the destruction of the embryo) was initiated prior to 9:00 p.m. EDT on August 9, 2001.” Knowing what was coming—as many labs undoubtedly did, since they were approached by NIH before the President’s speech to determine whether they had eligible lines—labs may well have decided to keep their options open by engaging in mass destruction of embryos before the President went on TV. Already, of the 11 embryonic-stem-cell lines listed in NIH’s Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry (escr.nih.gov), five are held by ES Cell International, a research lab that had no stem-cell lines listed among the original 64 that NIH had said would be eligible for funding.

Moreover, NIH’s implementation relies entirely on the honesty of grant-seeking researchers. The only proof required to make a line eligible for federal funding is a signed affidavit stating that the destruction of the embryo began before the President’s speech did. No documentation (such as certified lab notes) is required to support the affidavit, nor is any penalty prescribed for submitting a false affidavit. In other words, the only conditions preventing an embryonic-stem-cell line derived from an embryo destroyed after the speech from becoming a publicly funded line are the integrity of the person signing the affidavit and NIH’s willingness to look beyond the affidavit to official research records, which NIH is not required to do.

Of course, these loopholes may be largely irrelevant anyway. By choosing to implement his “compromise” by executive order rather than through legislation, President Bush left the door wide open to its repeal by a future administration—or, for that matter, by his own, if research on the initial pool of embryonic stem cells does not bear the predicted fruit.

The Brave New World of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

As this article goes to press, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that embryonic stem cells from mice have spontaneously transformed into eggs, before developing into parthenogenic embryos. (Parthenogenesis is a process by which embryos develop from an unfertilized egg. Such embryos do not have a complete set of chromosomes and, therefore, are usually not viable.) Hans R. Scholer of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine declared to the Associated Press his desire “to use these oocytes as a basis for therapeutic cloning and hope that our results can be replicated with human embryonic stem cells.” Other news stories indicate that researchers may eventually use this form of human cloning to allow homosexual couples to “conceive” children—eggs made from the stem cells of one male would be combined with the sperm of the other. Welcome to the brave new world of embryonic-stem-cell research, funded by your tax dollars.

Monica M. Richert is a research scientist in cell and molecular biology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences center. Her brother, Scott P. Richert, is the executive editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the June 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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And that points to another difference: Despite his many failings, Ronald Reagan at least understood that, unless a country makes things, it has no economic independence. That’s why he was willing to act pragmatically, despite his own stated commitment to free-trade ideology.

Those who claim his mantle today, however, are not simply ideologues on free trade; they have become convinced that money can breed money—and, moreover, that it’s a good thing for it to do so. The only kind of manufacturing they want is the manufacturing of ever-higher stock prices.

But there are other reasons to think that 1982 isn’t a proper historical analogy. This just came across the CNN Breaking News wire:

U.S. employers cut 533,000 jobs in November — the most in 34 years — as unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

Let’s see—2008-34 gives us? That’s right: 1974. And despite the brief period of deflation in the last two months, the inflation rate has been hovering between four and five percent this year. High inflation plus high unemployment sounds awfully familiar, even to a mere boy like me. Yes, both are lower than they were in 1974 (or in 1982, for that matter). But the snapshot matters less than the direction, and in 1982, the economy was already beginning to turn the corner.

So, 1974 it is. Unless, of course, it’s 1929.

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In other words, the extension of $25 to $50 billion in loans may be the cheapest way out of this mess. Predictably, though, the same people who declared that we had to bail out Wall Street have drawn the line at Midwestern Main Streets.

Tom’s thoughtful, reasoned, and fact-filled post drew a response from Richard Spencer, modestly titled “A Modest Proposal.” Alas, there’s nothing Swiftian about Richard’s post. His modest proposal comes down to this: “Give every Big Three worker a direct cash handout of $100,000, and then cease all bailouts.” He offers this alternative to loans to the Big Three because, as he writes, “arguments for saving the Big Three are arguments for saving jobs and helping out the good people who work for these massively unionized and horribly mismanaged companies.” So why not just give the money to the workers and be done with it? (And save as much as $25 billion to boot!)

Since Richard doesn’t really support this idea, it’s perhaps a bit unfair to point out what his proposal reveals about his knowledge of the economic impact of the American automobile industry and of manufacturing generally, but I’ll do it anyway. Like a good individualist, Richard instinctively assumes that all jobs and companies and industries are interchangeable. Individual wages and profits tell the entire economic story.

But they don’t. This passage in Tom’s post should have alerted Richard to that point: “The November 3 issue of Crain’s Cleveland Business reports that in greater Cleveland, where I live, 26,800 people work in the transportation equipment sector, and 100,000 jobs depend on that sector, directly or indirectly.” Here in Rockford, as recently as three years ago, 23 percent of jobs were still in manufacturing, but another 23 percent of all jobs in the area depended on the manufacturing jobs.

That’s why, even though Richard finds in Wikipedia that “there are around 240,000 people working in the American auto industry,” Tom notes that “The Center for Automotive Research has estimated that a collapse of GM, Ford, and Chrysler would cost nearly three million jobs.” Different types of occupations have different effects on the economy. Industrial manufacturing has a relatively high multiplier effect; internet punditry (to pick an example out of the air) does not.

None of this, of course, necessarily means that the proposed loans are a good idea. I, for one, would like to see a serious debate in Congress before such loans are approved–far more serious than the one held before the Wall Street bailout. (Financial services, by the way, also have a rather low multiplier effect on the economy.) And I’m heartened by the fact that some commenters at Takimag–especially Evan McLaren, “Eagle,” John Médaille, Derek Leaberry, Sean Scallon, and Red Phillips (among others)–clearly understand the issues at hand. (Others, unfortunately, cannot avoid bleating out “one size fits all” libertarian talking points.)

Some of the commenters, including McLaren and Leaberry, note the irony that paleoconservatives now find themselves in the position of trying to save America from deindustrialization, even though industrialization had many very anticonservative effects. This was a subject of one of my Rockford Files columns over five years ago. In light of this debate, that column seems relevant again, and so I present it below.

* * *

Giving the Devil His Due

Early in the morning factory whistle blows,
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,
It’s the working, the working, just the working life . . .

One of the oddest ironies of our postindustrial age is that conservatives—true conservatives, not the various utopian progressivists who call themselves by that name—find themselves defending the remnants of the industrial system, the onset of which their intellectual and spiritual forebears viewed with dread. It is not that the crazy mystic William Blake was wrong when he wrote of the destruction of the English countryside by “these dark satanic mills”; still less Robert Burns, in his “Impromptu on Carron Iron Works”:

We cam na here to view your warks,
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to hell,
It may be nae surprise . . .

Rather, conservatives, knowing that Jacobin optimism is more dangerous politically (and, possibly, even more destructive spiritually) than despair (you can, after all, repent of despair), see all too clearly that, whatever the damage wrought by industrialism, the emerging postindustrial “service” or “technology” economy bodes far worse for society.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain,
I see my daddy walking through those factory gates in the rain,
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,
The working, the working, just the working life . . .

“Factory gives him life”: Can the same be said of the job at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s or even the relatively high-paying technology positions at WorldCom or Enron? Libertarians and neoconservatives may long for the day when subsistence farming and manual labor disappear completely from the American scene, but what kind of a life can you build for your family if your continued employment—let alone the continued existence of your employer—is always in doubt?

These questions have an added urgency here in Rockford, now that Ingersoll Milling Machine has closed its doors after 112 years and filed for bankruptcy, and one of the largest private employers, Hamilton Sundstrand, is sending signals (perhaps unintentionally) that the days of its factory in southeast Rockford are numbered. (After months of negotiations, Sundstrand’s management gave the union less than a day to examine a six-inch-thick contract proposal; when the union asked for more time to examine the details, Sundstrand locked the employees out.)

Shortly after Ingersoll gave its 300 employees two hours to clear out and locked its doors forever, the local Gannett paper’s token Republican columnist opined that “Some doomsayers will predict that Ingersoll’s failure signals the end of manufacturing in the Rock River Valley.” I’ll take the bait: Yes, manufacturing is leaving Rockford—20 percent of local manufacturing jobs have been lost over the past three years. And, unlike in my hometown in Michigan—which, in the recession of the early 1980’s, successfully exploited its access to Lake Michigan to move to a tourist economy—nothing is replacing it: Unemployment in Rockford is back in double digits—its highest rate since that earlier recession. Rockford is more like Flint, post-GM, struggling to avoid bankruptcy. The major difference is that the political, media, and civic leaders in Flint acknowledge the problem.

When Bruce Springsteen wrote the final verse of “Factory,” he was describing the pain and anger of men who would return to their jobs the next morning, when the factory whistle blew once again:

End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes,
And you just better believe boy,
somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight
It’s the working, the working, just the working life.

That pain and anger, however, is nothing compared to the social disruption caused by the loss of those jobs. Over the past year, I’ve watched marriages end—good marriages, loving marriages, with young children—as the financial strain of unemployment, compounded by the loss of healthcare just when it is needed most, pulls families apart. Homes are lost, and the financial effects of factory closings cascade through the local economy as small businesses—from sandwich shops to metal-working and packaging plants—find themselves without customers. What does a father do when he can’t find a new job within six months, or nine months, or a year? He can “retrain” in one of the “hot new fields,” the democratic capitalist replies—but that assumes that companies in those fields are opening up in Rockford. (They aren’t.) Then he can uproot his family and move where the action is, the libertarian smugly answers. (The market has spoken.) But at what cost to his family and to Rockford? And where? And when his family arrives in the Promised Land, what guarantee will the father have that his new job won’t head south, or to China, or to India?

Yes, life involves certain risks, and most of us are here in the United States because our ancestors suffered similar economic “dislocations,” but there is a difference in kind, not simply in degree, between the farmer in 1832 who left one subsistence existence in Alsace for another in the fertile fields of Southern Indiana and the engineer in Rockford in 2003 who may eventually—and, in all likelihood, far from his hometown—find work that will pay him wages that the subsistence farmer would never see. After all, that engineer will always know the uncertainty that comes from earning your livelihood at the mercy of another man.

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