First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.”

“For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, “Israel is the heart. . . . Israel is the light. . . . Israel is the hope.”

Meeting Shimon Peres the next day, Joe confessed that when he first visited at age 29, “Israel captured my heart.”

In Peres’ guestbook, he wrote, “The bond between our two nations has been and remains unshakeable.”

He then told Peres and the world, “There is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”

As Peres spoke, Biden took notes. When Peres called him “a friend,” Joe gushed, “It’s good to be home.”

Even at AIPAC, they must have been gagging.

Walking around the corner to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office, Joe called him by his nickname, “Bibi,” declared him a “real” friend and said the U.S. relationship with Israel “has been and will continue to be the centerpiece of our policy.”

Then the sandbag hit.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced construction of 1,600 new apartment units in Arab East Jerusalem. Stunned and humiliated, Biden issued a statement saying he “condemned” the decision.

He then retaliated by coming late to dinner at Bibi’s house.

Netanyahu has apologized for the timing, but they are going ahead with the apartments. What are the Americans going to do about it? At this point, nothing but bluster.

Indeed, a day later, at Tel Aviv University, Joe was back at it: “(T)he U.S. has no better friend . . . than Israel.”

On his departure for Jordan, Ha’aretz reported that Israel plans to build 50,000 new homes in East Jerusalem over the next few years.

Biden may feel he was played for a fool, and Americans may feel jilted, but we got what grovelers deserve. And if we wish to understand why the Arabs who once respected us now seem contemptuous of us, consider that battered-spouse response to a public slap across the face.

Consider also the most remarkable statement of Biden’s first 24 hours.

“Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel.”

Biden is saying we are a more effective force for Mideast peace in a region where Arabs outnumber Israelis 50 to one if everyone knows we sing from the same song sheet as Israel and have no policy independent of Israel’s.

How can America be seen as an honest broker between Arabs and Israelis if there is “no space” between America and Israel?

Even with the closest ally in our history, Britain in World War II, there was space between Winston Churchill and FDR on where to invade—North Africa, Italy, France, the Balkans?—whether to beat Stalin to Berlin, Prague and Vienna, who should be supreme allied commander, even whether the British Empire should survive.

Israel keeps its own interests foremost in mind, and when these dictate actions inimical to U.S. interests, Israel acts unilaterally. David Ben-Gurion did not seek Dwight Eisenhower’s permission to attack Egypt in collusion with the French and British in 1956, enraging Ike.

Israel did not consult JFK on whether it could steal enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania for its atom bomb program.

Israel did not consult us on whether it could attack the USS Liberty in the Six-Day War, or suborn Jonathan Pollard to loot our security secrets, or transfer our weapons technology to China. They went ahead and did it, knowing the Americans would swallow hard and take it.

Ehud Olmert did not consult President-elect Obama on whether to launch a war on Gaza and kill 1,400 Palestinians. Nor did Netanyahu consult us before Mossad took down the Hamas minister in Dubai.

What Netanyahu and Yishai are telling Obama with their decision to keep building on occupied land is, “When it comes to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, we decide, not you.”

And if Netanyahu has jolted Joe and others out of their romantic reveries about Israel, good. At least now we no longer see as through a glass darkly.

Israeli and U.S. interests often run parallel, but they are not the same. Israel is concerned with a neighborhood. We are concerned with a world of 300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims. Our policies cannot be the same.

If they are, we will end up with all of Israel’s enemies, who are legion, and only Israel’s friends, who are few.

And if our policy and Israel’s are one and the same, the Arab perception will be what it is today—that America cannot stand up to Israel, even when her national interests command it.

Joe’s performance before he got the wet mitten across the face only underscored the point: The mighty superpower is a poodle of Israel.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

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By week’s end, the president and his minions hope to have bought, embarrassed or intimidated enough fellow Democrats into passing, at long last, health care “reform.” In the meantime, the White House lets us know it wants action on new national approaches to educational improvement. It just never seems to stop, this business of bringing the whole business of the United States under federal supervision.

Given President Obama’s habit of imputing to George W. Bush responsibility for most of what’s wrong today, it’s interesting to note how Obama deals with the No Child Left Behind Act, whose approval Bush procured. He sees the act’s impending expiration not as goodbye to a political delusion but rather as an opportunity to put his personal stamp on that delusion. One can hardly wait.

What Obama wants is, by his lights, more creative approaches to educational “improvement.” Specifically, he calls for new ways of measuring academic improvement in America’s public schools. States would be ordered to categorize their schools as high-performing, failing or in-between, with emphasis moved from the testing of math and reading to the shaping of incentives and rewards for schools that turn out college- or career-ready graduates.

It is not that many would call the original, now-expiring, No Child Left Behind Act a pearl beyond price, gleaming and untouchable by mortal hands. The act seems to have resulted in, among other things, a philosophy among educators of “teaching to the test” in math and reading, to the impairment of such disciplines as art and music. Nor does its stated goal of boosting every child to proficiency in math and reading seem remotely in sight: not when tests can be dumbed down and results manipulated.

Couldn’t we, in consequence, as children used to say on the playground swing, just “let the cat die”—let NCLB just go away? Not with the political appetite for top-down control continuing to build under Obama. We’re not about to try not letting the federal government try anymore. We’re getting ready, if the administration has its way, to devise better top-down methods.

Can such methods work? The health care fracas should have given us some sense of how many obstacles stand in the way of getting one top-down program just right for the needs of 300 million-plus Americans. Even with T-shirts, one size never fits all. As government says, shut up and put the thing on anyway, doubts rightly multiply as to the possibility of even Harvard Law School graduates’ figuring out what the rest of us need.

Time was when the states, which theoretically own the public schools and theoretically scratch statewide educational itches, addressed on their own the requirements of educational excellence. Then, starting in 1965 with the Great Society, came the era of federal “aid” and No Child Left Behind. Former President Bush’s own state of Texas could no longer do what it wanted, having drunk with everyone else the Kool-Aid of top-downism.

Most of the Founding Fathers would gaze in horror at the idea of the central government’s telling states how to run their schools, but no one today seems much to care for what a bunch of dead white men in wigs would have thought. Not with all that money rolling in from Washington!

I predict that on the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, the U.S. government will still be focused on how to get a handle on the problem of education quality and how to make sure, by gum, everybody gets the same share, whatever it costs.

The founders, being wiser, knew that Big Government was less likely to make things happen than were ordinary people, plugged into their own understandings of means and ends. The necessity of strengthening communities and families to encourage motivation and performance—what White House adviser would think of such a thing? I can certainly think of a few who should.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

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You probably think an attack on cliches—images worn down like a mill stone—is about to ensue. Not today. That’s for later. I want instead to say a few words about words that don’t exactly match each other when linked, theoretically, in image form.

“Mixed metaphor” is the generic form. Let’s sample a few.

One of my favorites dates back to a Texas gubernatorial campaign in the late 1970s. Of one candidate the other said, with sustained depreciation: “If he thinks this is going to be a cakewalk, he’s got hold of a hot enchilada.”

Burp. Consider what goes on here—sort of a verbal food fight; cake against enchiladas. It doesn’t work for one minute or even less. An image requires, shall we say, internal compatibility. A cakewalk is in fact a kind of early 20th century dance. Think music; think movement. An enchilada is, well, an enchilada. I guess you could eat an enchilada while cakewalking, but what would the point be? Wouldn’t you rather do it to mariachi strains?

Here’s another example from recent politics: “The right hand’s not talking to the left hand.” Yes. Tell me another one. Hands don’t talk at all, do they? There’s a kind of precedent in the phrase, “The right hand knoweth not what the left doth.” The pairing of two thinking, cogitating hands works mainly because we’re accustomed to it. We don’t need to liven up the experience at this late date with a pair of talking hands: sort of sock puppets with button eyes, I imagine.

A recent account of medical criticisms lodged against a popular prescription drug has “unleashed,” it seems, “a wave of anxiety.”

I’m using my imagination. I still can’t visualize the wave—made of water—with some kind of leash around it, but that’s what the writer invites us to picture. The metaphor is badly mixed. Let’s see how we might fix this. What starts waves waving? Ignore the physics; no one cares for present purposes. You could say, simply “The news caused (or precipitated) a wave of anxiety”—a little dull but at least proper. I am tempted to break my earlier promise and say a word about this watery cliche, but I won’t succumb. Just bear in mind the need for internal compatibility.

Speaking of water, here’s something from National Review Online: “The Republicans won in an easy trot against an ocean of money.” Suddenly racehorses are gamboling in the tides. The metaphor, my friends, is all wet.

Do we talk so fast these days that we don’t think through the things we compare to each other? Could be, could be. We should work to stop it, even so. When trying to persuade or inform, we shouldn’t relish from readers the old horselaugh, directed our way when we get something conspicuously wrong.

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Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America’s industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers.

Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market.

Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has compiled, in 44 pages of charts and graphs, the results of two decades of this Bush-Clinton experiment in globalization. His compilation might be titled, “Indices of the Industrial Decline and Fall of the United States.”

From 2000 to 2009, industrial production declined here for the first time since the 1930s. Gross domestic product also fell, and we actually lost jobs.

In traded goods alone, we ran up $6.2 trillion in deficits—$3.8 trillion of that in manufactured goods.

Things that we once made in America—indeed, we made everything—we now buy from abroad with money that we borrow from abroad.

Over this Lost Decade, 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, one of every three we had in Y2K, disappeared. That unprecedented job loss was partly made up by adding 1.9 million government workers.

The last decade was the first in history where government employed more workers than manufacturing, a stunning development to those of us who remember an America where nearly one-third of the U.S. labor force was producing almost all of our goods and much of the world’s, as well.

Not to worry, we hear, the foreign products we buy are toys and low-tech goods. We keep the high-tech jobs here in the U.S.A.

Sorry. U.S. trade surpluses in advanced technology products ended in Bush’s first term. The last three years we have run annual trade deficits in ATP of nearly $70 billion with China alone.

About our dependency on Mideast oil we hear endless wailing.

Yet most of our imported oil comes from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and Angola. And for every dollar we send abroad for oil or gas, we send $4.20 abroad for manufactured goods. Why is a dependency on the Persian Gulf for a fraction of the oil we consume more of a danger than a huge growing dependency on China for the necessities of our national life?

How great is that dependency?

China accounts for 83 percent of the U.S. global trade deficit in manufactures and 84 percent of our global trade deficit in electronics and machinery.

Over the last decade, our total trade deficit with China in manufactured goods was $1.75 trillion, which explains why China, its cash reserves approaching $3 trillion, holds the mortgage on America.

This week came a report that Detroit, forge and furnace of the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, is considering razing a fourth of the city and turning it into farm and pastureland. Did the $1.2 trillion trade deficit we ran in autos and parts last decade help kill Detroit?

And if our purpose with NAFTA was to assist our neighbor Mexico, consider. Textile and apparel imports from China are now five times the dollar value of those imports from Mexico and Canada combined.

As exports are added to a nation’s GDP, and a trade deficit subtracted, the U.S. trade deficits that have averaged $500 billion to $600 billion a year for 10 years represent the single greatest factor pulling the United States down and raising China up into a rival for world power.

Yet, what is as astonishing as these indices of American decline is the indifference, the insouciance of our political class. Do they care?

How can one explain it?

Ignorance of history is surely one explanation. How many know that every modern nation that rose to world power did so by sheltering and nurturing its manufacturing and industrial base—from Britain under the Acts of Navigation to 1850, to protectionist America from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, to Bismarck’s Germany before World War I, to Stalin’s Russia, to postwar Japan, to China today?

No nation rose to world power on free trade. From Britain after 1860 to America after 1960, free trade has been the policy of powers that put consumption before production and today before tomorrow.

Nations rise on economic nationalism; they descend on free trade.

Ideology is another explanation. Even a (Milton) Friedmanite free-trader should be able to see the disaster all around us and ask: What benefit does America receive from these mountains of imported goods to justify the terrible damage done to our country and countrymen?

Can they not see the correlation between the trade deficits and relative decline?

Republicans seem certain to benefit from the nation’s economic crisis this November. But is there any evidence they have learned anything about economics from the disastrous Bush decade?

Do they have any ideas for a wholesale restructuring of U.S. trade and tax policy, for a course correction to prevent America’s continuing decline?

Has anyone seen any evidence of it?

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

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It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given the traditional welcome—a pledge by Israel to build more settlements, plus adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.

At least Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of spit, like Vice President Nixon back in 1958, but she did get a couple of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, rejecting Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela and call for tougher action towards Iran. Amid detailed news reports of butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Latin Americans and even some Democratic members of the U.S. Congress listened incredulously to Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly peaceful election of Honduras’ new, U.S.-sanctioned President Lobo in a process to which both the Organization of American States and the European Union refused to lend the sanction of official observers.

Meanwhile, China signals its displeasure with the U.S. with stentorian protests about Obama’s friendliness towards the Dalai Lama. The PRC continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast position in U.S. Treasury bonds.

The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a vote in a U.S. congressional committee to recognize the massacre of the Armenians in 1916 as “genocide.” Russia signals its grave displeasure with Clinton’s rejection, in a speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a new security pact for Europe. “We object to any spheres of influence claimed in Europe in which one country seeks to control another’s future,” she said. Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland announced that the U.S. would deploy Patriot missiles on its territory, less than 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

Is this partial list a reflection of incompetence, or a registration that, with a minor hiccup or two, U.S. foreign policy under Obama is moving purposively forward in its basic enterprise: to restore U.S. credibility in the world theater as the world’s premier power after eight years of poor management?

Consider the situation that this Democratic president inherited. In January 2009, the world was reeling amid violent economic contraction. Obituaries for the American Century were a dime a dozen. The U.S. dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency was written off with shouts of contempt. Imperial adventuring, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, were routinely denounced as fit only for Kipling buffs. The progressives who voted Obama in were flushed with triumph and expectation.

Not much more than a year later, Obama has smoothed off the rough edges of Bush-era foreign policy, while preserving and indeed widening its goals, those in place through the entire postwar era since 1945.

Latin America? Enough of talk about a new era, led by Chavez of Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia and other progressive leaders. So far as Uncle Sam is concerned, this is still his backyard. On the campaign trail in 2008, it was Republican John McCain who was reviled as the lobbyist for Colombia’s death squad patron, Uribe. Today, it’s Obama who presides over an adamantly pro-Uribe policy, supervising a widening of U.S. military basing facilities in Colombia. As an early signal of continuity, Honduras’ impertinent president Zelaya, guilty of populist thoughts, was briskly evicted with U.S. approval and behind-the-scenes stage management.

If ever there was a nation for whose enduring misery the U.S. bears irrefutable responsibility (along with France), it is Haiti. The hovels that fell down in the earthquake were those of people rendered destitute by U.S. policies since Jefferson, and most notably by the man to whom Obama is most often compared, another Nobel Peace Prize-winning U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson. The houses that did not fall down in such numbers were those of the affluent elites, most recently protected by Bill Clinton, who was second only to Wilson in the horrors he sponsored in Haiti. Yet under Obama, the U.S. is hailed as a merciful and generous provider for the stricken nation, even though it has been Cuba and Venezuela who have been the stalwarts, with doctors (in the case of Cuba) and total debt forgiveness (in the case of Venezuela). The U.S. refused such debt relief.

Israel? Not one substantive twitch has discommoded the benign patronage of Israel by its patron, even though Obama stepped into power amidst Israel’s methodical war crimes—later enumerated by Judge Goldstone for the U.N.—in Gaza. Consistent U.S. policy has been to advocate a couple of mini-Bantustans for the Palestinians, and under Obama, the U.S. has endured no substantive opposition to this plan from its major allies.

With Iran, there is absolute continuity with the Bush years, sans the noisy braggadocio of Cheney: assiduous and generally successful diplomatic efforts to secure international agreement for deepening sanctions; disinformation campaigns about Iran’s adherence to international treaties, very much in the Bush style of 2002. In the interests of overall U.S. strategy in the region, Israel is held on a leash.

No need to labor the obvious about Afghanistan: an enlarged US expeditionary force engineered with one laughable pledge—earnestly brandished by the progressives—that the troops will be home in time for the elections of 2012. The U.S. and, indeed, world antiwar movements live only in memory. Congressional Democrats in the House could barely muster 60 votes against the Afghan War, earlier this week.

Russia? Biden excited the foreign policy commentariat with talk of a “reset” in posture toward Russia. There’s no substantive reset—merely continuation of U.S. policy since the post-Soviet collapse. Last October, Biden emphasized that the U.S. “will not tolerate” any “spheres of influence,” nor Russia’s “veto power” on the eastward expansion of NATO. The U.S. is involved in retraining the Georgian army.

China may thunder about the Dalai Lama and Taiwan—but on the larger stage, the Middle Kingdom’s world heft is much exaggerated. The astute China-watcher Peter Lee hit the mark when he wrote recently in Asia Times that “the U.S. is cannily framing and choosing fights that unite the U.S., the EU, and significant resource producers, and isolate China and force it to defend unpopular positions alone. By my reading, China is pretty much a one-trick pony in international affairs. It offers economic partnership and cash. What it doesn’t have is what the U.S. has: military reach, moral leadership, heft in the global financial markets (Beijing’s immense overexposure to U.S. government securities is, I think, becoming less of an advantage and more of a liability), or a large slate of loyal and effective allies in international organization.”

The United States, as Lee points out, is also making “good progress in pursuing the most destabilizing initiative of the next twenty years: encouragement of India’s rise from Afghanistan through to Myanmar as a rival and distraction to China.”

All of this is scarcely a catalog of bumbledom. Obama is just what the Empire needed. Plagued though it may be by deep structural problems, he has improved its malign potential for harm—the first duty of all presidents of whatever imagined political stripe.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

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In the letter Archbishop Alemany deals quickly with divorce, which, like generous bankruptcy protection, was easily obtainable in California from its earliest days as a state.  Then he moves on to dueling, which was outlawed in the first state constitution of 1849.  Significantly, in contrast to divorce, he says, “We deprecate still more the unparalleled disaster of a duel, which no Christian or rational mind can countenance.”

Even so, the duel had become so common in frontier California that the very politicians who had been eager to outlaw it at the state’s first constitutional convention were later constrained to become duelists themselves.  Assemblyman George Johnston (1858), U.S. Sen. William Gwin (1853), and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California David Terry (1859) all engaged in famous duels, even though each of them had favored the proscription of the practice.

The Church’s proscription of the duel is very ancient, going back to the First Lateran Council (1170) and continuing all the way to the letter Pastoralis officii of Leo XIII (1891).  In 1917 it was included in the first Code of Canon Law (although it is nowhere to be found in the present code of 1982, in which all the penalties for dueling have been abrogated).  The duelists, their seconds, spectators, advisors, attending physicians, and clergy were all struck with excommunication reserved to the Holy See.  The duelists were to suffer infamia iuris, legal disgrace causing the loss of privileges (such as being a godfather or best man) and, before the 19th century, the confiscation of goods and the denial of Church burial.

The morality of the duel is evaluated in tradition by two principles.  The first is moderamen inculpatae tutelae, or the standard of guiltless self-defense, meaning that one is justified in using lethal means to defend one’s life against an unjust aggressor.  But the duel, which takes place ex convicto (by agreement) does not satisfy this criterion because, at the time the lethal force is to be taken, the “aggressor’s” action has been agreed upon by the offended party, and so he is not then and there an actual aggressor.  The second is that of the media apta, or apt means for repairing an injustice.  The loss of honor or reputation, which is ordinarily the reason for a duel, cannot be repaired by lethal combat, but must be repaired by other legal means.  The outcome of the combat itself cannot determine the injustice of the offense.  Consequently, the duel is both an unjust exposure of one’s own life and an intentional homicide of one who is not, at the point of the duel, a true, unjust aggressor but, rather, an accomplice in a crime.  Very different would be the case of one who is set upon by an opponent who says, “Take this saber or pistol and defend yourself like a man, for I am going to kill you now.”  In this scenario, a man would be justified in taking the offered weapon and defending himself.

In his letter, Archbishop Alemany writes,

Let us be permitted unhesitatingly to denounce the deadly contest, by which men laying claim to Christianity and refined manners, but acting as the red men of the forest, whose mental eye has never yet seen the least glimpse of civilization, divest themselves of all sense of duties which they owe to kindred or to society, and sacrifice, perhaps forever[,] the honor and welfare of parents, wife, or children . . . Deaf to every friendly advice, and thirsting after human blood, they go like beasts into the field to decide by brute force or impious chance who is right and who is wrong.  We pity the poor Indians whose want of mental culture leads them to determine right from wrong with the bow and arrow.  But what can exculpate the man who boasts of his civilization and intellectual refinement, yet who has not the strength of mind to discern that powder is not the standard of right!

In place of the traditional argument is an argument from urbanity.  Here we are confronted with an instructive example of what becomes progressively more common as a justification for Christian morality: the superior culture of modern men versus that of the savage, an argument from moral progress instead of a rational judgment of the injustice endured and the legitimate means to overcome it.  This is a rhetorical argument—not a presentation of the principles of natural law, but an appeal to human respect.

Family feeling, far from being violated by the duel, is precisely what justifies the duel in a man’s mind in the first place—a sense of identity and manly dignity that must be defended as a possession more valuable than life, just as a woman may kill a man seeking to violate her, even though such a violation would not take her life.  Its malice is not a primitive sense of honor but the illegitimate exposure of one’s life and that of another as a means to repair a wrong that cannot be repaired by force.  William Gwin’s 1853 duel provides a perfect example of this.  The senator from California faced U.S. Rep. J.W. McCorkle with rifles at 30 paces, wheeling at word and firing, which, in the signed account of the witness, “the two gentlemen did three times without harming each other, when the affair was brought to termination by the friends of the parties, having discovered that their principals were fighting under a misapprehension of the facts.”  McCorkle apologized to Gwin, and that was it.  In the meantime, the matter was relayed to Gwin’s wife.  After the first shot she said, “Let us thank God”; after the second, “Praise be”; after the third and the news of the apology, she expressed her disappointment in her spouse and his opponent: “There’s been some mighty poor shooting today!”  Family feeling might have something to do with the motive of the duelist.

All along, though, the Holy See continued to show that one may recognize the sounder instincts that were used as a pretext for an immoral practice.  In answering dubia proposed by the bishops of Central Europe as late as 1947, the Holy See pronounced on the question of going before a “tribunal of honor” to determine whether an offense equal to a duel had occurred.  Would doing so incur the penalties of canon law against dueling?  The answer, wisely, was no, as long as the parties did not intend to proceed to a duel but were only determining the cause of the contest to be resolved by other, morally legitimate means.  Even the greatest of practical moralists, St. Alphonsus Liguori, did not regard certain extenuating reasons for dueling as morally improbable—for example, a loss of honor before one’s military peers sufficient to ruin one’s livelihood—until Pope Benedict XIV forbade any dueling under any circumstances whatsoever.  A sense of honor based on a man’s name, or title, or profession, or even his physical strength has a very sound natural foundation, and this foundation ultimately is based on his family, present or future.  This is something that civilized Christians may have in common with savages, and without which they may become inferior to them.

A personalist, rhetorical defense of traditional morality can lead to the destruction of the most basic moral sense in modern people, who are so easily prey to ethical deracination.  A key example would be the understanding of marriage and marital relations as a remedy for concupiscence.  Teach young men and women in our coeducational age that only the highest spiritual motives can adequately account for married love, and you will have them refusing simply on account of their feelings the legitimate advances of their spouses.  The “marriage debt” can be much, much more, but it remains a debt and a duty without which men can be emasculated, not even able serenely to request a most basic right of marriage, and women can be doomed to perpetual suspicion of not being truly loved at all, because they are not loved perfectly here and now.  And so there is the vicious cycle in which the progressive moral account ends up rendering impossible the very love it so exalts.  That this approach and a mentality that is very open to divorce are aligned is clear.  So yes, a civilized Christian husband and a savage red man have a basic human value in common, and of this he must not be ashamed, but only of sin and infidelity.

In a society in which every standard is viewed as subject to a notion of progress that is, at root, technological and material, it can be dangerous to characterize fundamental human impulses as primitive or barbarous.  Even if they are impulses corrupted by fallen nature, by concupiscence and pride, they remain rooted in our nature and are meant for the good.  Drawing traditional moral conclusions from arguments based on social progress can utterly undermine and obscure the moral truths that those traditional conclusions imply.  Dueling is wrong, but not because an Indian brave might do the same thing and for the same reasons, and not because it is violent, but because the power to coerce is a property of law, and if there is no implicit threat of force, either moral or physical, then there can be no law.  At its most grave, this can be seen in John Paul II’s affirmation that the threat of an eternal Hell is a necessary guarantee of a fixed standard of morality.

Nowhere is the danger of the argumentum ad hominem rubrum more apparent than in the bishop’s use of divorce and the duel as a metaphor for civil war.  The conditions under which a defensive or an offensive war may be fought are clear.  In his letter he does not address them but merely describes war again as a descent into tribal barbarism.  But a war is not justly fought at all unless it is fought for the sake of one’s family and native common good.  We now live in a society in which fighting for one’s own people is precisely the only kind of war that is considered unjust.  Every interest, refined (oil!) and technological and financial, may excuse, but war for the sake of tribe, religion, or territory is deemed not only barbarism but terrorism.  (One nation is exempt from this contemporary prohibition, though, and it is not the United States.)  The Christian Croat or Serb, or the Palestinian, is a would-be war criminal, since he only seems to care about something as primitive as his own country.  Thus, wars will increase, because there is no motive limited to truly human goods which can restrain them.  Ideology at the service of plutocracy is the new order of things.  We now have “smart bombs,” after all.

And yet the good archbishop was in the right, in spite of himself.  In a very important passage of his encyclical Veritatis splendor John Paul II pointed out that theologians who reflect on the moral law are bound by the conclusions of the magisterium, but not by the arguments evinced for them, which they are free to replace with others that they find more sound or cogent.  To this we respond with a lusty “Q.E.D.”

The course of the last century and a half is instructive.  Those who have the duty of teaching in the Church and in civil society must always offer the genuine reasons for human conduct and use the rhetorical and odious comparison very sparingly.  Otherwise, the just who love family and honor may be relegated to the special reservations of the Brave New World, where we will all be red Indians.

This article first appeared in the February 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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All of Rome, ancient and modern, from the former Appian Way with the ruins of its tombs and its aqueducts as far as the magnificent Garden of Pincio built by the French, spreads itself in view.

Lost in reverie, Brulard finds the modern metropolis supplanted in mind by the ancient city and its historical memories.  “This place is unique in the world,” he tells himself.

Not only has Rome, the seat of the greatest empire the world ever saw, been a dead empire for 1,500 years, but she has, for many centuries now, stood as the symbol of and monument to all dead empires, almost for mortality itself.  Yet Rome lives, and her empires live within her, because they are dead, and therefore beyond the hand of time, all revenge and revision, at peace with history.  Stendahl seems not to have grasped the fact on earlier visits to Rome, owing in part to his youthful antipathy to the “dead” religion that also has its seat there; but his historical imagination was too strong to allow him to overlook it forever, and his highly eccentric but enormously fascinating Walks in Rome is a result of his eventual enlightenment.

Modern Rome, so marvelously alive today, is the ancient empire’s reward, as sainthood for the soul in Heaven is reward for a well-lived life in the body.  Everyone who reads and loves history knows that one of its delights is that, in history, we have the whole story, we know how past finite events came out.  More importantly still, perhaps, this story lies beyond the pain of partisanship, of having a horse of one’s own in the race.  That, indeed, is why we can love history.  Only liberals, socialists, atheists, and other unhappy people have an ax to grind in reading history; while, for healthy people, a “dead” city like Rome is a profoundly relaxing and comfortable place which we are at leave to enjoy on its own terms and where, as Michel Crouzet has written, “the tourist must become an artist.”  Rome, like the rest of Italy, is threatened by invasion from the Third World, that is true; but Italy has never had a clear ethnic or racial identity, as England had until recently and France to a lesser degree had also—a fact well known to, and accepted by, the Italian nationalists of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi included.

The French empire, a flimsy modern arrangement of almost ludicrously short duration by comparison with her Roman predecessor, nevertheless has far to travel before making her own escape from history.  The shipwreck remains, the flotsam constantly stirred by historical conflicts, passions, hatreds, and prejudices, all very much in the present and all dangerously alive.  Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a fictional tour de force about the invasion of France by hordes of refugees arriving on a fleet of rusting hulks from India, owes its power to being at once a futuristic and a realistic story; the novel was published almost four decades ago now.  Today, France has more Muslims than any other country in Europe.  The mass intrusion of immigrants from its former colonies and elsewhere strains the historic French identity, threatens the classic French culture, overburdens the national budget, and incites religious and social conflict throughout France, including rioting in the ethnic banlieue and faubourgs that ring the big French cities, those of the capital especially.

My wife and I had last visited Paris three years ago, en route to and from northeastern France.  We returned three months ago, in the fall of 2009, and put up for a week in a local hotel in the eighth arrondissement, at a close distance from the Gare St. Lazare.  I had not spent so long in town since my first visit in 1972, and recent reports from friends abroad had not been encouraging.  We feared the worst; but we did not find it.

It is possible that what follows is a wholly personal and quite superficial impression.  I am acquainted with one Frenchman, a resident of the Left Bank with whom I agree on absolutely every matter of importance (politics, food, and drink), who would (and probably will) be the first to contradict it.  Anyway, my impression is this: Paris—Paris centre, I mean—seems substantially to have cheated its historical fate as the former center of a fallen empire, no matter the condition of the rest of France, its own suburbs included.  In 1972, the place had appealed to me as shabby, the streets dirty, the citoyens polite but not friendly, the women lacking in the proverbial chic that every Frenchwoman is supposed to possess.  They were not even, I thought, particularly attractive, but vaguely unhealthy and unhappy looking.  In retrospect, I suspect the Paris of 40 years ago had not fully recovered from the war: London, when I lived there in the early 60’s, had the same aspect, only more so.

Revisiting Paris in 2009, I felt a delight and relief that acquired in the course of the week the force of a juggernaut that nearly bowled me over in the street among the café tables and book and sheet-music stands.  Compared with London, New York, even Rome, the Paris of today retains, for me at least, its unparalleled urbanity.  Architecturally speaking, Paris is a 19th-century town, and Parisian urbanity is a species of the urbanity of the haute bourgeoisie of that era.  (On the trip, I read La Dame aux camélias, in French, and found the Paris of Dumas fils to be perfectly recognizable in the present day.)  The wealthy bourgeois insisted upon, and was attentive to, detail, precision, and completeness, not just abundance and superfluity.  This attentiveness is a part of civilization, and it continues to prevail in the daily life of Paris in the 21st century: in the markets, the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the brasseries, bistros, and bars.  The city throngs with lovely women, well dressed and elegant even in relatively casual attire.  There is the bourgeois taste for spaciousness in Napoleon III’s plan for the capital that has hardly been compromised in a century and a half; the streets, save in a few neighborhoods, are clean; the historic buildings and monuments, carefully preserved and displayed to effect and with taste.  I do not believe that Napoleon, on the whole, would be disappointed by Paris could he return there today.  So far, the headscarves have not won in Paris (we saw surprisingly few), and Paris today remains very much a French city.

The established, though recently challenged, explanation for the collapse of the Roman Empire is that the barbarians from the north and east, having invaded and settled within its boundaries, in time destroyed the empire from within.  In the case of France and Great Britain, the imperial nation formally surrendered her empire, only to discover that the empire refused to surrender her.  The results to both countries are innumerable, but of all these the most dramatic and dreadful is the fate of London Town—the home of Boadicea, the outpost of Caesar, the capital of Elizabeth I, Charles I, the Georges, Queen Victoria, and Edward VII—in the 21st century.

My wife and I took the Eurostar from Gare du Nord in Paris, and until I stepped from the train onto the platform at St. Pancras Station I had not set foot in England for 47 years, except to change planes at Heathrow.  We stayed at a small hotel at Inverness Terrace north of the Bayswater Road, a 15-minute walk from Portsea Place, where I lived for a year with my family in the 1960’s.  For the first 12 hours of our stay, we heard hardly a word of English spoken in what I remembered as an upper-middle-class neighborhood inhabited by Englishwomen in tweeds taking their dogs for a run in Hyde Park, and men with rolled umbrellas catching buses and taxis to work in the City, where my own grandfather worked.  Today, the lovely row houses are flophouses for Turkish immigrants, and the neighborhood pubs have been supplanted by Third World restaurants serving poor imitations of exotic fare.  Tony Blair has bought a townhouse on Connaught Square, round the corner from Portsea Row, but that was small compensation for the Arab cafés on the Edgeware Road whose sidewalk tables were mounted with three-foot-tall hookahs (not the feminine sort); the burqas and headscarves; the Oriental markets; and the pathos of the stray red-faced Britisher in his tailored suit and plaid cap, gripping his umbrella and briefcase as he dashed round the Marble Arch with his head down, lost in a sea of dusky faces and looking as if he’d just stepped from Wells’ time machine.

I was devastated.  We had seen nothing remotely to compare with this in Paris.  London has lost its urbanity along with its identity, save in the best neighborhoods—the City, West End, Westminster, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Mayfair; we attended Mass at Farm Street Church near Berkeley Square, where Evelyn Waugh had been converted and married.  In these last redoubts, the old town lives on.  Here London is still recognizable, despite the madding crowds of Asians (east and west) and of Continental tourists, beneficiaries of the exchange rates, crowding its narrow sidewalks and its monuments.  Outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, we observed a Pakistani photographing his small boy waving the Paki flag in front of a sentry box.  I looked round for a big blue policeman nearby, hoping to see the pair of them arrested.

God save the Queen!  But for how long?  History is not through with the British Empire, yet.

This article first appeared in the February 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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Now, I’m no scientist, but I’m old enough to remember “global cooling,” an idea that was popular in the 1970’s.  A 1975 Newsweek story, “The Cooling World,” reported “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change,” highlighting “a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.”  The article trumpeted the “truth” of the moment: “The evidence in support of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”  Only massive government intervention could head off disaster: “The longer the planners (politicians) delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”

Three decades later, Newsweek published a “correction,” admitting it had been “spectacularly wrong”—but this was no reason to take their future weather predictions with a very large grain of salt, because “in fact, the story wasn’t ‘wrong’ in the journalistic sense of ‘inaccurate.’”  After all, Newsweek was just uncritically regurgitating the unfounded alarmism of some scientists.

Today, if you so much as look cross-eyed at the “official” party line, you’re deemed a “denialist”—a bit of linguistic abuse that underscores how desperate these people are to crush any and all opposition to their agenda.  If you don’t accept their “science”—and plenty of reputable scientists don’t—you’re a moral monster on a par with a holocaust denier.

What accounts for this intensity?  Why did the world’s leaders gather in Copenhagen recently and solemnly pledge to take unspecified “action” to fight this latest augur of worldwide doom?

Here in the United States, there’s one inflexible principle: When in doubt, follow the money.  And the money trail leads to . . . Goldman Sachs, the Obama administration’s favorite investment-banking house and the chief beneficiary of the economic “reforms” and bank bailouts that have swelled Wall Street’s coffers and provoked the biggest and most unedifying spectacle of public piggery since the subprime mortgage boom.

The machinery of the “cap-and-trade” scam is a simple and fail-safe way for Goldman Sachs to create an entire market based on a government mandate.  As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, “Goldman won’t even have to rig the game.  It will be rigged in advance.”  With limits on the amount of pollution a given company can emit, it will be possible for it to buy “carbon credits” from other outfits that haven’t used up their government-mandated allotments.  The “cap” on emissions will be constantly lowered, which means that these carbon credits will become scarcer—and more valuable—as time goes by.

The market for carbon credits is conservatively estimated at a trillion dollars, all made possible by government regulation of the sort one might expect the private sector to resist.  But not Goldman Sachs, which has been in the vanguard of calling for radical regulation.  When former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was head of the firm, he took a personal interest in writing the bank’s environmentalist manifesto, arguing that “voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem.”  Voluntary action is something Goldman Sachs cannot depend on to ensure its gargantuan profit margins, especially not in the age of crony “capitalism.”  As Taibbi trenchantly puts it, the cap-and-trade scam

is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues.  Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme.

The bank bailout enriched them beyond the dreams of avarice, but that wasn’t enough for Goldman Sachs.  They want to replace the imploded derivatives market, and the “credit swap” and sub-prime scams, with a new rip-off.  “Go green,” they exhort us—because it’s the color of money.

This article first appeared in the February 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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If there’s time, that is, after Congress and the president force the public to take a deal on health care that only a distinct minority seems to want.

What the average Democrat thinks of public opinion these days seems to depend on which big government measure is on the table.

Financial regulation? Can’t let it die—the public wouldn’t forgive! Health—um, well, you know, people will love this thing once it gets done, never mind what they say now.

In other words, never mind that in the latest Rasmussen poll 44 percent want Obamacare and 52 percent don’t. Gallup situates the division at 42 percent favorable, 49 against. An ABC News/Washington Post poll gives the Pelosi and Reid bills their closest (if still losing) margin—46 for, 49 against. Says Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute: “I can’t think of any other big piece of legislation that had so much opposition” before passing.

Somehow, in the counsels of the Democratic Party, none of this seems to matter. Open your mouths, folks; watch the spoon; take a big swallow and you’ll love it.

Such is the Democrats’ anti-populist approach on health care. We’re to do it in spite of public opinion. On financial reform, the opposite view obtains. Can’t deny the popular will, can we? Oh, no—only when it suits our purpose to deny the popular will.

Accusing a politician of hypocrisy is akin to blaming a size-five shoe for pinching a size-10 foot. A considerably more useful reaction is caution. Maybe the polls on health care—as Democrats insist—show little more than a foul public mood on this particular issue. Very well. When the public has such a mood, what is the right political approach—to say, “Shut up, you jerks,” or to draw back for further consideration and the annealing of large aggravations and anxieties? The former, snaps Madam Speaker Pelosi. Shut up, America! Take your medicine!

The danger in this approach is of course twofold. First, the public could be right: The bill might really be a poorly thought-out and ill-digested one, a candidate for thoughtful improvement.

Second, telling voters—even the relatively small number who talk to pollsters—to proceed immediately to the hot place savors of arrogance. Arrogance contrary to democratic theory, be it noted.

No bill should pass solely because polls call it unpopular; nor should one pass solely because polls say the public wants it now. Public opinion, so called, can change in a few instants, as Barack Obama, once the nation’s hero, now its main lecturer and finger-wagger, can surely attest. When the bloom is off the rose—health care is surely an instance of that—the sensible, as opposed to the frivolous, politician will ask how come and what ought to be done about it.

The need for caution extends to financial regulation, a nebulous term that can mean a million different things to a million different people. Strong support for the whole concept is waning—down 13 points in a year (according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll), with opposition 12 points higher.

Public disenchantment with Obamanism seems to grow daily. Which shows you what goes on, doesn’t it? By golly, if people are going to quit loving the new regime, the regime is going to pop it to those same people while time remains. Rahm Emanuel must have had something of the sort in mind when he delivered his famous epigram about never letting a crisis go to waste. No, sir—not if mere voters (what do they know anyway?) might change their mind about you. More and more dangerous the Washington power games look every minute.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

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In their own minds, this is certainly the case, but if we take a very brief look at the way property has been conceived throughout history, we shall soon discover that the liberal/libertarian view of property as an individual right is at the root of the erosion of both our civil property rights and of the deeper understanding of property that characterized the civilizations that came before us.

Property is a difficult political onion to peel, more complicated even than marriage, and I shall have to oversimplify a great many complex historical issues.  I invited (but did not receive) questions on the history of marriage, but perhaps this more difficult set of institutions will be more provocative.

First off, there is the unfortunate word property itself.  It it is an abstract noun formed from the adjective “proprius,” own’s own.  Thus property is whatever one owns, whether it is personal property, such as a hairbrush or a sword or real property, such as a house or land.  Marxists and other egalitarian theorists–including some Christian theologians–have argued  that property is not natural to man either because it was invented (according to Engels) by the same patriarchal males who usurped power and created the state, or because in a natural or Edenic state man owned nothing.

Since the book of Genesis is a rather brief  sketch  on which to base so broad and fundamental and argument,  some thinkers have turned to the most “primitive” societies, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Pygmies, or the Eskimos as evidence for a state of natural equality.  But in all such “primitive” societies–the quotation marks are a nod to the reality that all peoples have been around more or less the same time on earth and there is no proof that the crudest societies are indeed the most natural–men and men do have possessions of their own, if only a cooking pot or a throwing stick.  Yes, say the egalitarians, but they do not have rights over real property, that is to say, land.

If we actually could agree that real estate is the most important form of property, we should have made some progress in distinguishing property from, for example, money or other forms of wealth.  One can live quite comfortably in a small undeveloped society without money or with only a primitive system of exchange.  How well can one live as an individual or in  a small group without a roof over one’s head or a bit of land to cultivate and defend?  Naturally, in a complex international economy, where other people do all the heavy lifting to grow our wheat, raise our beef, and distribute them to the markets, we can pretend we are self-sufficient, but if we are going, at least for a few minutes, to entertain the fantasy of natural rights, we have to think of life in something closer to the state of nature than a co-op apartment in Manhattan.

In pre-modern societies, then, everyone or nearly everyone has to have some kind of real property, and in the most simple conditions, this real property with a house on it is indispensable to our existence.  If we leave the theoretical world and enter a world described by anthropologists and historians,the reality becomes  more complicated.  In all the primitive societies about which I have read, the social group–whether a band of kinsmen or a larger tribe–has superior claims to certain hunting grounds or, especially, water holes.  Thus, if there are no individual rights to real property, there are communal rights.

The rights of the community, typically of  kindreds, are prior to the rights of the “individual.”  Again the quotation marks are to indicate a conventional term for which there is no corresponding reality, at least not in any universal sense.  In the ancient world–let us speak only now of Greeks, Jews, and Romans–rights to property generally have to do with the inheritance rules that stipulate who in the family becomes temporary master of the estate, that is, the proprietor in his lifetime.  Without going into the details, it is enough to say that ancestral property was not ordinarily bought or sold.  There are arguments about when and under what circumstances it might be sold–for example, for debt–but the primary qualities of the most important type of real estate that more or less defined property are, 1) that it was passed down from generation according, 2) according to rules going back to time immemorial, and 3) could not be seized by a third party or the commonwealth except in the most extreme circumstances, e.g. crimes (such as treason) that caused the exile of the proprietor and his kin.

Roman property law was the most developed in the ancient world.  Their word, dominium, conveyed a wealth of rights and duties.  A man who had full dominium had the right to use and to bestow his property to his heirs.  He could not be exappropriated for back taxes or for the greater good of the community.  When the Emperor Augustus–a man of enormous power but who maintained Roman law–wished to build a large forum for genuine public needs, he had to be content with smaller dimensions when some proprietors refused to sell.

There were other kinds of ownership, for example, land acquired by conquest and leased out/sold to  private citizens who held it in perpetuity and may eventually have converted their rights to dominium.  Abandoned land that was taken and improved for a certain period of time might also be held by right of usucapio, which might then also be upgraded.   The ideal form,however, was dominium, which could be alienated only under very limited conditions.

When the barbarians took over western Europe, much of the land was taken by Frankish or Gothic or Lombard royal thugs who granted it to followers on condition of service.  Earlier generations of Medieval historians typically wrote as if such a feudal agreement was the basis for all or most property, but their conclusions were much too sweeping.  In the first place, older Roman property rights persisted in the South of France, and in the second, some Germanic warriors–notably the Anglo-Saxons–seized and held land in their own right.  More significantly, though kings were always trying to centralize their power over property, the counter-tendency against centralization was often stronger.  Counts usurped the rights of kings, knights the rights of counts, etc.

It was only in the Renaissance when jurists combined the language of Roman law with the increasingly centralized claims of kings to produce the theory of Eminent Domain, according to which the sovereign is the ultimate ruler of everything and only grants property rights on certain conditions.  Such rights can be revoked when the sovereign or his deputies decide that it is in the public interest to to strengthen fortifications or create a park.  This right of eminent domain was exercised not only against the weak but against noblemen and most especially against the Church–and not just in Protestant countries.

With these developments as a backdrop, we can begin to understand the counter-claim of  liberal or proto-liberal intellectuals who wished to defend the property rights of the rich merchants and large proprietors whose interests they were defending.  Locke, whatever else he might have done, was a Whig propagandist.

Thus the liberal theoreticians spoke of individuals and their rights to property, which in a more mercantile age referred not so much to inheritance rights as to the right to buy and sell.  But if the right to buy and sell is definitive, one should not care too much if the king or a governor decides to buy it.  Naturally their will be a good deal of haggling over price and terms, but no distinction is made between property I acquired for investment purposes yesterday and property my family inherited over the generations and whose rights go back to a royal land grant that antedates the invention of the United States.

This simplistic liberal theory of property rights, then, has many obvious flaws:  First, it is an historical invention of comparatively recent times whose claims to universality will not stand much scrutiny; second, it does not at all distinguish between property with which my social identify is bound and property treated as a mere commodity; third, it is part of a general theory of rights for which there is no evidence whatsoever, either in nature or reason or revelation; and, finally and perhaps most decisively, it is part of a generalized program of individualism that pits the naked and helpless individual against the almost all-powerful state.  A great corporation or labor union, with its vast resources,may sometimes beat the state, the individual hardly ever, unless his cause can be fitted into some larger socialist agenda (feminist, environmentalist, etc.).

Neither liberty nor property can be successfully defended (except in exceptional circumstances) from aggressive and predatory governments and the constituents they represent.  Liberalism, in eliminating the rights of classes, churches, and corporate bodies, has exposed individuals to the full force of state power against which they cannot contend.  Thus any talk of property as an individual right–much less Richard Weaver’s nonsense about property as “the last metaphysical right”–is subversive of authentic and historical property rights.

Libertarians will respond that local governments are corrupt and small-minded, imposing zoning restrictions that are nobody’s business and preventing business development.  This is undoubtedly true but irrelevant, because the libertarian solution is to invoke the might and majesty of the Federal courts, which make matters much worse.  If you can’t fight city hall, what makes them think they can fight the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court?   In the case of property, as in the case of marriage and of every other important institution, libertarians are a major part of the problem, and their simplistic ideas, if taken seriously (as they almost never are by anyone in power), would only make us more powerless.  At one point in modern history, liberal/libertarians might have played a useful role in standing up to the power of the central state, but in inserting  the poison of individual rights into our political consciousness, they  did a harm that their own false theories can never ameliorate.

PS If anyone wants a further discussion of Greek, Roman, or Medieval conceptions of property, I shall supply further information.

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