The Roots of the World

G. K. Chesterton's observations about the attempt to uproot religion are just as relevant to the attempt to uproot our civilization:

The Roots of the World

by G.K. Chesterton

Daily News, August 17, 1907

Once upon a time a little boy lived in a garden in which he was permitted to pick the flowers but forbidden to pull them up by the roots. There was, however, one particular plant, insignificant, somewhat thorny, with a small, star-like flower, which he very much wanted to pull up by the roots.  His tutors and guardians, who lived in the house with him, were worthy, formal people, and they gave him reasons why he should not pull it up.  They were silly reasons as a rule. But none of the reasons against doing the thing were quite so silly as the little boy's reason for wanting to do it; for his reason was that Truth demanded that he should pull the thing up by the roots to see how it was growing.  Still it was a sleepy, thoughtless kind of house, and nobody gave him the real answer to his argument, which was that it would kill the plant, and that there is no more Truth about a dead plant than about a live one. So one dark night, when clouds sealed the moon like a secret too good or too bad to be told, the little boy came down the old creaking stairs of his farmhouse and crept into the garden in his nightgown. He told himself repeatedly that there was no more reason against his pulling this plant off the garden than against his knocking off a thistle top idly in a lane.  Yet the darkness which he had chosen contradicted him, and also his own throbbing pulse, for he told himself continually that next morning he might be crucified as the blasphemer who had tom up the sacred tree.

Perhaps he might have been so crucified if he had so torn it up. I cannot say.  But he did not tear it up; and it was not for want of trying.  For when he laid hold of the little plant in the garden he tugged and tugged, and found the thing held as if clamped to the earth with iron.  And when he strained himself a third time there came a frightful noise behind him, and either nerves or (which he would have denied) conscience made him leap back and stagger and stare around.  The house he lived in was a mere bulk of blackness against a sky almost as black. Yet after staring long he saw that the very outline had grown unfamiliar, for the great chimney of the kitchen had fallen crooked and calamitous. Desperately he gave another pull at the plant, and heard far off the roof of the stables fall in and the horses shriek and plunge. Then he ran into the house and rolled himself in the bedclothes. Next morning found the kitchen ruined, the day's food destroyed, two horses dead, and three broken loose and lost.  But the boy still kept a furious curiosity, and a little while after, when a fog from the sea had hidden home and garden, he dragged again at the roots of the indestructible plant.  He hung on to it like a boy on the rope of a tug of war, but it did not give.  Only through the grey sea-fog came choking and panic-stricken cries; they cried that the King's castle had fallen, that the towers guarding the coast were gone; that half the great sea-city had split away and slid into the sea. Then the boy was frightened for a little while, and said no more about the plant, but when he had come to a strong and careless manhood, and the destruction in the district had been slowly repaired, he said openly before the people, "Let us have done with the riddle of this irrational weed.  In the name of Truth let us drag it up." And he gathered a great company of strong men, like an army to meet invaders, and they all laid hold of the little plant and they tugged night and day.  And the Great Wall fell down in China for forty miles.  And the Pyramids were split up into jagged stones. And the Eiffel Tower in Paris went over like a ninepin, killing half the Parisians; and the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour fell forward suddenly and smashed the American fleet; and St. Paul's Cathedral killed all the journalists in Fleetstreet, and Japan had a record series of earthquakes and then sank into the sea. Some have declared that these last two incidents were not calamities properly so called; but into that I will not enter. The point, was that when they had tugged for about twenty-four hours the strong men of that country had pulled down about half of the civilized world, but had not pulled up the plant. I will not weary the reader with the full facts of this realistic story, with how they used first elephants and then steam engines to tear up the flower, and how the only result was that the flower stuck fast, but that the moon began to be agitated and even the sun was a bit dicky. At last the human race interfered, as it always does at last, by means of a revolution.  But long before that the boy, or man, who is the hero of this tale had thrown up the business, merely saying to his pastors and masters, "You gave me a number of elaborate and idle reasons why I should not pull up this shrub. Why did you not give me the two good reasons:  first, that I can't; second, that I should damage everything else if I even tried it on?"

All those who have sought in the name of science to uproot religion seem to me very like the little boy in the garden. Skeptics do not succeed in pulling up the roots of Christianity; but they do succeed in pulling up the roots of every man's ordinary vine and fig tree, of every man's garden and every man's kitchen garden. Secularists have not succeeded in wrecking divine things; but Secularists have succeeded in wrecking secular things. A religion cannot be shown to be monstrous at the last; a religion is monstrous from the beginning.  It announces itself as extraordinary. It offers itself as extravagant.  The sceptics at the most can only ask us to reject our creed as something wild.  And we have accepted it as something wild.  So far one would think there would be a mere impasse, a block between us and those who cannot feel as we do. But then follows the curious practical experience which has ratified religion in our reason for ever.  For the enemies of religion cannot leave it alone.  They laboriously attempt to smash religion. They cannot smash religion; but they do smash everything else.  With your queries and dilemmas you have made no havoc in faith,: from the first it was a transcendental conviction; it cannot be made any more transcendental than it was.  But you have (if that is any comfort to you) made a certain havoc in common morals and common sense.

The opponents of our religion do not commit us to accepting their axioms; our axioms remain what they were before; but they do commit themselves to every doctrine of insanity and despair.  They do not hit us, but they do plunge past us into the marsh and the abyss. Mr. Blatchford cannot commit us to the comment that man is not the image of his maker for that statement is as dogmatic as its denial. But he can and does commit himself to the statement, humanly ludicrous and intolerable, that I must not blame a bully or praise the man who knocks him down.  Evolutionists cannot drive us, because of the nameless gradation in Nature, to deny the personality of God, for a personal God might as well work by gradations as in any other way; but they do drive themselves, through those gradations, to deny the existence of a personal Mr. Jones, because he is within the scope of evolution and his edges are rubbed away. The  evolutionists uproot the world, but not the flowers. The Titans never scaled heaven, but they laid waste the earth.

This Just In From the Cultural Authorities: "Civilization" a Bad Word

A new update of Kenneth Clark's famous "Civilization" mini-series turns Clark upside down.

Kenneth Clark's "Civilization" mini-series, produced by the BBC and aired on American public television in 1969, celebrated the Western art and culture it depicted and explained. The show was one of the most widely watched and re-aired shows of its kind at the time, and is still discussed today, almost fifty years after its television debut.

In fact Clark, the famous British art critic who hosted the original show, was unambiguous about why he was doing the show in the first place. According to Eric Gibson, who reviewed public television's new update of the show, Clark "developed his series as a response—even a rebuke—to those 'advanced thinkers [of his time]…who have begun to question if civilization is worth preserving."

One wonders what he would say of the new show.

Called "Civilizations" (note the additional 's' in the title), the new program isn't nearly as keen as Clark was on the civilization on which it purports to be describing. Rather than focus on Western civilization, which apparently fallen into disrepute by the cultural philistines who run things like public television, the new show takes a "global approach."

Says Gibson, the very word "civilization" is now politically charged, "implying as it does hierarchies of achievement and value judgments, not to mention its opposite: barbarism."

That someone would say that our culture is better than any other or that some other culture is deficient in some way is the kind of thing that causes fainting spells among our intellectual class. They have reached such a high level of cultural sophistication that they can now declare that all cultures are good--except the one they live in.

But this is the thing about those who pretend to be value-neutral: The very moment after congratulating themselves on the fact they they don't make judgments, the contradict themselves.

"But there is one respect in which “Civilizations” is decidedly not value-free," says Gibson, "and that is in its attitude toward the West. If there are any barbarians in this series, they are the denizens of Europe, who are nearly always depicted as racists, conquerors, looters, slave owners, colonialists and originators of the lurid 'male gaze' in art."

No viewpoint is better than any other (except your own). There are no barbarians (except the people you don't like).

And as we might expect from the postmodernist cultural elites, there is a bias against traditional religion: "The history of Christianity is recounted variously as propaganda or 'a blood sacrifice' along the lines—and I’m not making this up—of the Aztecs’ ritual practices."

Are we supposed to take that as a slight on Christianity, which these people hate? Or as a PR upgrade for the Aztecs who, being indigenous Americans, are a privileged race? It is hard to tell.

As Gibson points out, all fifteen episodes of the original "Civilization" series are on Youtube. If you want an account of our civilization by someone who is on the side of civilization, you'd best go there.

Deport Hollywood, Not Hispanics

This year's Enemys—er, excuse me, Emmys—reminds me once again that I don't know why we're talking about deporting a bunch of Hispanics. They're hardworking, family-oriented, and, according to statistics, generally stay out of trouble. And they've got an awesome culture that can only enrich our own.

It would make far better sense to talking about deporting the entire Hollywood entertainment caste that, far from enriching our culture, seems bent on degrading it. These people have not only been trivializing and degrading our entertainment media, but systematically dismantling the values this country built on and are now part of the movement promoting the persecution of people who mostly want to be left alone to believe the things they've always believed.

Imagine no Barbara Streisand

It's easy if you try

No George Clooney in front of us

Above us only sky

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Is the LGBT Revolution eating its young?

In the Age of Revolution we are in, in which every convention, every custom, every fixture of traditional culture is being swept away, you begin to wonder what will be left to rebel against once we have done away with every good thing.

The answer? Once every traditional boundary and every ancient landmark is gone, the revolutionaries start to fight among themselves. 

The Revolution is always followed by the Counter-Revolution, the original revolutionaries are always followed by their more ideological and patricidal children, everyone is equal--until the people who proclaim that everyone is equal take control, in which case the people who proclaim that everyone is equal begin to consider themselves more equal than others.

The LGBT movement, which is take its place at the head of the revolutionary mob, seems to be experiencing just this.

From Pink News (via Rod Dreher's blog at the American Conservative), we have the following from what appears to be the LGBT version of Animal Farm: 

The National Union of Students’ LGBT Campaign has passed a motion calling for the abolition of representatives for gay men – because they “don’t face oppression” in the LGBT community.

At the event, delegates passed a motion that blames “cis gay men” for “misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia”.

It says: “Misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia are often present in LGBT+ societies. This is unfortunately more likely to occur when the society is dominated by white cis gay men.”

Yes, the LGBT revolution is now eating its young. 

ISIS is not the cause of our civilizational crisis. We are.

I got an e-mail today from National Review magazine (a promotional one, I'm sure) with a letter from John Bolton about the danger from ISIS. The subject line read, "Our role in the civilizational crisis."

But one of the ways we know we are in a civilizational crisis is that we don't know the civilizational crisis we're in—as evidenced by Bolton's letter.

ISIS is not the cause of our civilizational crisis. In fact our civilizational crisis is not external at all, but internal. The threat of ISIS is insignificant compared to the threat constituted by many of the people who point to ISIS as our problem.

The biggest threat to our civilization is that, while we bemoan the threats to it, we ourselves have abandoned it. 

George Steiner called it "planned amnesia." It is the process we have been engaged in over the last 100 years of failing to pass on the ideals and values of our culture to the next generation. We have counted on our schools to do it, but not only has it become evident that they are not doing it, it has become very clear that they are undermining it altogether. And it is a testimony to how effectively they have done it that we don't even realize how effective they have been.

One would think conservatives would realize this, but they have submitted to the public school-administered cultural lobotomies as quietly as have the liberals they claim to oppose. They talk about how little our children know, but they don't know themselves exactly what it is our children should know.

The great cultural catastrophe of our time is almost entirely self-inflicted. It is our own disregard of the importance of the Western civilization and the Christianity that undergirds it and our neglect in teaching it to our own children. It is the greatest achievement of world history and it is dying (to use T. S. Eliot's words) with a whimper.

We'll enjoy the benefits of it for another generation or two if we're lucky. And then—like all civilizations that abandon the heritage from which they were formed and are sustained—we'll go the same way as the Babylonians, and Egyptians, and Greeks, and Romans.

Some day another civilization will be founded on the ashes of this one. They'll eventually sort through the debris and they'll marvel at the lack of insight we had about what our problem really was. They'll have to conclude that any people as short-sighted as we are to our own condition and as blind to the solution staring them in the face deserved what they got.

Have a nice day.

The college president who criticized campus protesters actually knows what education is

Here is Everett Piper, President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University in Tulsa, explaining his questioning of the adult status of recent college campus protesters.

Imagine: A college administrator who actually knows what education is. He's talking about the liberal arts, he's using words like "Truth," "Goodness," and "Beauty"--he even quotes Chesterton.

 Does anyone know where we can find any more like him?

Multicultural Follies: #Politicalcorrectness and the narrowing of the American mind

The Cultural Authorities still don't get the irony inherent in their use of terms like 'Tolerance' and 'Diversity', terms they use to counteract the very attitudes they purport to champion. They are used as cultural bullying words to beat unsuspecting Americans into compliance with their narrow left-wing program of tearing down every traditional cultural convention.

These are just two of the words that now pass for wisdom among American educators--educators who apparently think that political sloganeering constitutes an acceptable substitute for things like knowledge and understanding.

I remember when the Ayatollah Khomeini unseated the Shah of Iran and so-called "students" (of which, it was later revealed, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the now former prime minister of Iran, was one) took over the American embassy in Tehran and held its occupants hostage.

I remember thinking, do these "students," I don't know, study between their assigned hostage-keeping hours? Do they patrol the embassy with their machine guns from 8:00 to 4:00 and then go prepare for mid-terms in the evening? In fact, I don't remember any of the many news images from the time showing these "students" actually doing any school work. All they ever did was wave guns and chant slogans in the street.

For the political left, education is seen as inherently political. Rather than use them to pass on a culture from one generation to the next, schools are now simply vehicles for political or social reform. Today's "students" don't wave guns around or march through the streets (Americans, fortunately, are too lazy for that), but the term 'Diversity' in particular seems to be a part of every piece of propaganda pushed by the people who run our schools.

There is another word used to accomplish the same purpose: 'multiculturalism'. This word, in fact, was probably the first of the bully words to enter our modern political lexicon, becoming a sacred part of the secular theocratic rite that we have seen instituted over the last two or three decades.

Like the other terms we constantly hear chanted by the supporters of our modern Liberal Caliphate, the secular theocrats don't see the hypocrisy in their use of the term.

I was reminded of all this when I read the essay by British philosopher Roger Scruton at one of the best blogs going: The Imaginative Conservative. Scruton rightly diagnoses multiculturalism—and the whole tolerance regime, although the terms 'tolerance' and 'diversity' had not yet assumed their prominent place in our lexicon when this article was written in 1994—as the narrow-minded program it is and contrasts it with the truly multicultural traditional curriculum:

The word “culture” is used in many senses. Advocates of the multicultural curriculum cheerfully assume that they and their readers know exactly what is meant by such a thing, and that all would agree in recognizing the “monocultural” nature of our traditional education. A typical “multicultural” curriculum will concentrate on the lore, language, and literature of the modern pro­ letariat; on the history and “struggles” of minorities; and on the lowest and most popular forms of music, art, and entertainment. This monotonous study of ephemera can be encountered everywhere in America, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Scandinavia. I would be tempted to describe it as “monocultural,” were I convinced that it is capable of imparting any culture at all. By contrast, our grandparents studied the languages, religions, and literature of ancient Palestine, Greece, and Rome; they were brought up on the fairy tales of Arabia, the folklore and music of Germany, the art and architecture of the Mediterranean, and the history of the world. If the word “multicultural” means anything, then it should certainly be applied to their curriculum. It is precisely this openness toward culture in all its forms that is the essence of European civilization.

Liberals, who wouldn't even be allowed under other cultures, love every culture but their own. It's part and parcel of the Liberal Death Wish--the subconscious, nihilistic impulse to destroy the very culture that makes them possible. 

The agenda that goes under the multicultural label is really the worst kind of cultural jingoism. On the one hand, it sees every other culture through the distorted lens of the modern secular liberal mindset, making them merely the delusional mirror image of itself. On the other hand, it wants to impose its own uniquely secular technocratic attitude on cultures which, in reality, aren't really what liberals think they are.

If liberals are going to hate on the Christian West (and that's what Western civilization really is—the Christian West—which is why liberals hate it so much), then they're going to have to do things that liberals themselves hate. If they're going to embrace non-Western cultures—particularly those in the underdeveloped world that liberals pretend to value, then they're going to have to teach racism, sexism, cannibalism, human sacrifice, "classism," "homophobia," and every other "ism" and phobia—real and imaginary—the left fears and hates because they are rampant in the cultures of what used to be called the "third world."

They couldn't produce enough sensitivity trainers in a hundred years to address the problems they would encounter in just one corner of one non-Western country in one week.

But of course teaching what real non-Western countries believe will never happen. These people will continue to cling to their comforting delusion that non-Western world is exclusively the projection of their own non-smoking, gender-bending, radical egalitarian political and social selves.

But the left can't even hear these criticisms. That's the beauty of being a liberal: If there is something you don't want to hear, you just chant your slogans louder.

Saving Western Civilization, starring Tom Cruise

The following is my "Letter from the Editor" in the new Classical Teacher magazine:

About a year ago, Universal Pictures released the movie "Oblivion," starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. It is about a man and a woman (Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) stationed on a post-apocalyptic earth. They are charged with maintaining the drones which protect a number of orbiting installations, mining water for the human encampment now situated on one of Jupiter's moons.

Earth's moon has been blown up, devastating the earth, which is now barely livable. Cruise plays "Jack," who tries to keep the defensive drones operational in the face of constant attacks from roving bands of alien invaders called "scavs" (short for "scavengers"). Jack has had a memory wipe as a security precaution.

But one day while repairing a damaged drone, Jack is captured and knocked unconscious by the scavs. He wakes up tied to a chair under an intense light. A voice comes from out of the darkness:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods.

Jack knows these words because on one of his missions he has discovered an old library, from which he has taken several books (in apparent violation of policy). One of them is Horatius at the Bridge, by Lord Macaulay. The scavs have seen him do this.

From the direction of the voice, we hear the lighting of a match, and we see the face of a man, the light of the match reflected in his goggles. It is Beech (played by Morgan Freeman). "We've been watching you, Jack," he says.

Far from being aliens, Beech explains, the scavs are really human survivors of the alien invasion. They tell the at-first-unbelieving Jack the real story of what has happened to the earth, and allow him to leave their encampment to find out for himself.

As the story progresses, we, along with Jack, find out that he is just one of many Jacks patrolling various parts of the earth, all seemingly identical clones, unaware of the others. The scavs were telling him the truth: Earth was taken over by aliens who are bleeding it dry of its resources. The only humans left are the scavs, who are huddled in caves in the earth, protecting what is left of humanity.

Jack has been fighting for the wrong side.

Beech has let him live because he knows of Jack's secret passion for these books and suspects that they have awoken something inside him. In reading them, Jack has been transformed from a memoryless copy of himself, unquestioningly following the orders of what he now knows to be the very creatures who have destroyed his civilization. A man who was the servant of machines has become a master of his own soul.

In the end, the now fully humanized Jack sacrifices himself in defense of the scavs, uttering Macauley's lines as he does so.

We are now in the process of producing a whole race of Jacks. If you doubt the truth of this charge, go look at the recent federal social studies standards, which include no historical content whatsoever.
We have been taken over by cultural aliens. We are producing memoryless copies of ourselves.

Lost in the mindless devotion to so-called "critical thinking skills" and "college and career readiness"—not to mention our servitude to machines—are the ancient stories and venerable truths that schools once taught as a matter of course—ideas and values that made us human, not just cogs in an economic machine.

Classical education's purpose is not to teach job skills or to reform society, although without aiming at these goals it achieves them better than these other methods do. Classical education is about passing on our culture. If we don't do it, we risk a world as culturally desolate as the physical world Jack sacrifices himself to save.

This is Your Culture on PC: Abortions for men

It gets weirder and weirder:

A Texas pro-abortion organization, Fund Texas Women, has announced that it is changing its name to Fund Texas Choice.  This is because the reference to “women” excludes trans-sexual individuals who now identify as “men” but who still have female reproductive organs and who may thus get pregnant and “need” an abortion.  This is from the announcement

HT: Gene Veith

Since males and females are now interchangeable, surely men have some kind of right to abortion too.

Piers Morgan undergoes reality reassignment surgery on his own show

I get home from work and I turn on the television. There is not much on, so I flip the channels around. I end up on CNN watching Piers Morgan.

Don't try this at home.

There he is. Piers, who, after indiscriminately lavishing approval on anyone who questions or confounds traditional gender roles, ended up personum non gratum (not correct Latin, but it looks so stylishly neuter) with the very transgendered person whose trans, it turns out, he had insensitively gendered just the day before.

Piers had apparently identified Janet Mock, the author of Redefining Realness as having had a sex change operation and as someone who, having had a sex change operation and now being a woman, had once been a man.

Which, in my simplistic mind, is kinda why you have a sex change operation: To change your sex.

But Mock, Piers found out over the succeeding 24 hours, was miffed at Piers for this inappropriate language and had Tweeted about it, causing him (the one who was still a him) to be "viciously abused" on Twitter by the "trangender community" for having "misgendered trans women." So he got her back on his show to find out why she was angry at him simply for pointing out that she had once been a he, and why, since she had written a whole book about this very important pronoun change, she (who had once been a he) was mad at him―particularly since he supported her and went to the trouble of promoting her and her book on his show just the previous day.

There then ensued a surreal discussion in which Piers asked why, after he had so dutifully prostrated himself before the postmodern sexual totem, she was mad him for saying that she had had a sex change operation when, in fact, as she had pointed out in her book, she had had one.

So Mock goes on to lament the fact that, for transgendered people, "so much of our lives are open to dissection and illegitimacy and investigation."

Now I'm thinking at this point that if you don't want your life as a "transgendered" person to be dissected and investigated, it's probably not a good idea to write a book about your life as a transgendered person and sell it to the public so they can dissect and investigate your life. But there must be some part of Redefining Realness I don't get.

So I continue watching.

Mock went on making absolutely no sense at all and saying that transgendered people should be "given space to tell their own story," at which point Piers exploded, pointing out that that's why "I had you on the show, that's why I promoted your book, that's why I told people to go read the **** thing!"

And I'm sorry, but at this point I have to press the pause button on my TV remote which I am having trouble manipulating because I am laughing so hard. After regaining my composure, I press the "play" button.

"What did I do wrong?" Piers asked, to which Mock responded that he had said that she was a "woman who had formerly been a man." So Piers asked why that would upset her when she had written an article in Marie Clair magazine titled, "I was Born a Boy," to which Mock responded that she disagreed with the article.

Which she wrote.

I have to pause it again to fully appropriate this thought. That and to clean the part of my drink that I have spilled on myself. I am past amusement and wondering what reaction I should be having to what I am hearing.

I press play again.

So Mock explained that, although she had been born a boy, she had actually not been born. As a boy. She had been born as who she was. And then had defined herself when she was a young girl. And she had defined herself as who she was, which was the way she was born (which was a boy).

Which was before she had gender reassignment surgery which, she argued, didn't change her sex.

Now what I want for my birthday this year is a picture of the look on Piers Morgans face when Mock explained this. I want to put it up on the wall in my office so I can see it at every possible opportunity because of the intense pleasure it will give me.

So Mock proceeded to explain that we all have a sex that is assigned at birth which "none of us has control over." I guess proof of this statement is that you can't even change it with a sex change operation.

Now I'm thinking at this point that this discussion (which, by the way, should be outlawed as soon as possible) should be about over. Where could it possibly go from here? The question is quickly answered.

"Do you dispute that you were born a boy?" asks Piers.

"I was born," she says, "a baby ..."

I pause my TV again. But this time so that I can rewind it and hear her say this again. Several times.

I let it play.

"...who was assigned 'male' at birth. I did not identify or live my life as a boy. As soon as I had enough agency in my life to grow up, I became who I am ... That's a lot of nuance and it's hard to communicate that in 30 seconds or even in a 140-character tweet."

You can say that again.

Piers goes back to the article that made Mock famous: The "I Was Born a Boy" article in Marie Claire. The one that has her name on the byline and is written in the first person. The article, points out Piers, "repeatedly in your own words says you were born a boy."

"I did not write that article Piers."

This statement is spoken by Mock on Piers Morgan's show. In the first person. I'm wondering if she really said it. Possibly, she might deny it later. But only by undergoing truth reassignment surgery.

Anything is possible.

So Piers, still completely confused by what he has heard, explains that he is supportive of gay rights and same-sex marriage rights and transgender rights and every cause involving any exotic sexual practice he can think of and that he supports Mock and everything she stands for, at which point, after a few more comments by Mock bringing into question exactly what planet she is from, the interview ends.

I am at this point lying on the floor looking at the TV upside down, in the hope that it will make more sense that way.

After a commercial break, there ensues a discussion involving a panel of people of unknown expertise to advise Piers on whether Mock, who wrote a book about changing her sex, was a man who became a woman.

They cannot decide.

The show ends. I turn the TV off. Still on the floor, I am pondering the uncertainty of the universe and questioning whether anything is real. After a while everything stops spinning and I am able to stand up.

I solace myself with the thought that, tomorrow, everything will return to normal and Piers will return to his usual programming in which he tells gun rights advocates that he can't agree with them because they don't make any sense.

Fly Barf Art: Louisville Museum taken in by practical joke

If you ever end up having to puke in a museum, don't be surprised if the curator wants to put it on display.



The Speed Art Museum in Louisville is abuzz with talk of its new exhibition which includes two artists who are now undoubtedly high-fiving each other over what they convinced a reputable museum to accept as "art."

The intention of the exhibit, reports WFPL, a Louisville public radio station, was designed to examine some "big themes" in American Art and includes the work of five alleged "artists," selected by Lexington-based artist and curator Aaron Skolnik, a man who one would think should probably not quit his day job if the day job he apparently has wasn't the problem in the first place.

Here is Speed's interim chief curator Scott Erbes, explaining some of the "big themes" in the exhibit once it is hatched:

Aaron really wanted to give each work some space to breathe and to really encourage people to stop and look, rather than the habit even I get into, which is going from work to work to work when they’re lined up on a wall.

It is probably a good thing, it turns out, that the exhibits will not be so easily viewable given what the museum is going to disgorge upon the public:

John Knuth is one of the show's five artists. He's based in Los Angeles, and he uses an unusual tool to create his paintings – flies.  A video explaining Knuth's process is on display along with two paintings.  Knuth breeds the flies specifically for his project, feeds them a mixture of sugar water and pigment, and encloses them in a space that includes canvas. Their regurgitated pigmented water on canvas creates the work.

If I was a museum curator, I would probably want to give this man's work a little space too. Lots of it. I'm thinking of some of the larger landfills in the Jefferson County vicinity, for example.

Erbes, apparently unaware of the joke that has been perpetrated on him, waxes eloquent about the display of emetic art. It "sounds curious," he says:

"but he’s interested in the idea of the artists’ control over materials and giving up that control," says Erbes. "It also deals with ideas of our attempts to control other species and the idea that you really can’t do that entirely. He’s also talked about his work being almost metaphors for urban life in the 21st century, just chaos, things moving around, thousands of individuals each doing different things, and that’s playing into the work as well."

Fly barf philosophy, care of the art establishment. Someone might now want to put on an exhibit of some visual representation of the control over materials by museum curators and what happens when that control is given up.

And if fly barf art is not quite to the visitor's taste, he can avail himself of the art of Lexington-based Louis Zoellar Bickett (which he can take in without an airsickness bag ... or, maybe not). Bickett's final exhibit piece is his 1999 sculpture "Family Grave Dirt," a piece which, as it turns out, is already a part of Speed's collection. "Bickett collected dirt from the graves of family members and people of personal significance," reports WFPL, "into canning jars, which he tagged and lined up on a shelf."

The imaginative Erbes will now explain its significance:

We are all the sum of many parts, of many identities that shape each of us. With this work, you see his interest in taking an archivist’s approach to the creation of works of art. 

There are some of us, of course, who will consider the contents of Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans a little bit more appetizing.

I'm wondering: Could the act of hoodwinking a museum by luring it into accepting some completely preposterous piece purporting to be "art" itself be an example of performance art? Would it be accepted by a museum?

As of this printing,  Erbes and the Speed Museum are still unaware that they are victims of a hoax.

Lou Reed and the art of being bad

Whenever a popular culture icon dies, we're all supposed to stop and take notice. Even if the popular culture icon was not very popular.

Lou Reed died last Sunday, and so now the people who we have given the job of telling us who is popular are telling us that Lou Reed was popular even though he demonstrably wasn't.

Lou Reed was never popular, however much the idea of Lou Reed was.

Lou Reed, in case you didn't know, was a rock 'n roll star. His most famous song was "Take a Walk on the Wild Side." It was also his best song, as measured in relative terms by all his other songs, most of which were much worse.

He started out his musical career with the band the Velvet Underground, a cult band whose popularity defied, ... well, their popularity. The people who have heard of the Velvet Underground far exceeds the people who have actually heard the Velvet Underground, which for these latter people is (probably unbeknownst to them) a good thing. Its members wore black leather, played long interminable songs about sex and drugs, and generally made a cultural nuisance of themselves.

Reed himself played guitar only passably, and sang mostly off key. He said he learned to play the guitar from listening to the radio. I think we can safely assume the the radio from which her learned to sing and play didn't have very good reception.

Since he was not very good, his mourners have had to resort to saying things like, "He was prophetic," although exactly why he was prophetic or what he was prophetic of remains a mystery.

Reed's publicist Bill Bentley claims that the reason no major label would sign the Velvet Underground was because their songs were seven minutes long, rather than three. Maybe. On the other hand, maybe they couldn't get signed because they stunk--not that I would have complained if we could have subtracted four minutes of bad music from the world.

Lou Reed was a musician we were all supposed to like. Which accounts for all of the Twitter eulogies coming from celebrities, most of whom probably never heard more than a song or two from him, if that, but know that it's just one of the things you're expected to say to be thought fashionable in the world they inhabit--a world that, unfortunately inhabits many of us.

I mean, Miley Cyrus (who tweeted, on Reed's death, "noooooooooo notttttttttt LOU REED")? Really? She probably thinks her music is good too.

Reed once said of his album Metal Machine Music, which even his admirers admitted was really bad, "No one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive." But he underestimated the bad taste of his admirers and the depths to which they would descend in order to retain their avante garde cultural status.

Oh, and, by the way, in case you did't notice, he didn't survive after all. That's why we're talking about him right now.

Or maybe it wasn't just bad taste. No. He was one of those cultural heroes who gets more popular the worse he is. Badness is a quality greatly valued by those who those who don't have any real aesthetic standards think have them. They can't do it themselves quite as well and admire anyone who can. If you can sing badly, write bad songs, flaunt your homosexuality (at a time when it is not celebrated like it is now), take drugs and write songs about how good it is and get away with it all, then you can take the final step to pop cultural apotheosis and insult the people who admire you for doing it.

That's what really throws them into an ecstatic frenzy. Just look at the life of J. D. Salinger.

Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air" did an adulatory show on Reed earlier this week. She admitted that she had no past recordings of Reed on her show because the one time he was scheduled to be her guest, he walked off after several minutes because he didn't like her questions. Gross said the incident did not detract from her admiration for his music, but you've got to know it probably only increased it (something other than the music itself just has to account for anyone's admiration of it). Such is the masochistic tendency of those R. Emmett Tyrrell once termed the "chi chi intelligentsia."

Ah, yes. Masochism. Did I mention that the title of Lou Reed's biography was Please Kill Me?

Lou Reed wasn't nice to people and said and did a bunch of bad things, including being rude and selfish, walking out of interviews, and once held a gun to his military superior's head (for which he got kicked out of ROTC at Syracuse University).

But, said one of his cultural entourage, that was "just Lou."

Here is an excerpt from Terry Gross' interview with Mary Woronov, who did the "whip dance" in the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable," a series of multimedia musical performances thought up by Andy Warhol, featuring the Velvet Underground in the late 1960s (And, by the way, were the 1960s really necessary?):

There was tremendous antagonism between New York and L.A. L. A. was, you know, um, full of color, full of acid, full of hippies, and we were not like that.

No way. They (Mary Woronov and her friends) had, you know, standards. They were, um ...

... dressed in black and white, uh, we did not like free love, we liked, uh, S&M, real, uh, restraint, uh, perversion too, um, we took amphetamines. We took LSD, They were, you know, sort of loving and happy, and, uh, we weren't, uh, really evil, we were more intellectual, more about art.

Mmhmm. Intellectual. About art. I think I see the problem now.

In his interview with Terry Gross, Bentley says that Reed was "tortured." She could have pointed out that, if you want to talk about being tortured, you should try to listen to Reed's music. But it apparently didn't occur to her.

But being tortured is also a good thing to be if you aspire to occupy a spot in the pop cultural pantheon. They said this about Johnny Cash too--who, if he hadn't been a "tortured soul," would have been way too Christian to have gotten any attention from those who tell us who we should give attention to. Of course Cash was, by his own account, tortured by the Devil. Reed didn't need the Devil to torture him: He had himself.

I hope he found some kind of peace in the end. Death isn't the kind of place you want to be walking on the wild side of.

PRESS RELEASE: United Way of the Bluegrass pulls support from Boy Scouts

LEXINGTON, KY—The Family Foundation today said the United Way of the Bluegrass should be engaging in charity, not politics. The group responded to reports that the United Way was pulling funding of the local chapter of the Boys Scouts because of the organization's policy against hiring gay scoutmasters.

"This is the first time to our knowledge that the United Way of the Bluegrass has targeted a group for persecution because it didn't hold a particular political position," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation.

The group said it was trying to find out if the action was taken unilaterally by United Way's president, Bill Farmer, or whether the United Way board voted on the action. "If this was a board decision, we would like to know which of the local banks and insurance agencies and computer companies who are represented on their board want the Boy Scouts de-funded." Cothran said his group will try to determine how the decision was made and by whom.

"The United Way should be a politically non-partisan organization," said Cothran. "Now it seems to be moving in a more political direction. Instead of trying to intimidate the nonprofit organizations it supports into following its increasingly liberal political agenda, it should be trying to help its member groups. This is a disservice to the community and we think it hurts United Way's credibility."

Cothran said his group is urging United Way donors to send the money they would otherwise give the United Way to the local chapter of the Boy Scouts of America instead. "That way it will go to help children, not support liberal political causes."

###

T. S. Eliot's comment on the U. S. Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling

"The world is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserve alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."

—T. S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, 1931

The Triumph of the Will: First they came for the bathrooms ...

The slowly heating cultural water is approaching a boil and still the frogs haven't noticed.

Here's Time Magazine on the new frontier in gay rights:

What do you call it when a person enters a bathroom but the sign outside doesn’t match the sex listed on his or her birth certificate? Disorderly conduct, according to a bill offered earlier this month by Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh. But the measure sparked outrage in the LGBT community, which saw discrimination against transgender citizens. Kavanagh responded with a revamped, more limited version, which protects businesses that bar such practices from civil or criminal liability. After a contentious seven-hour hearing on Wednesday dominated by opposition to the proposal, a House panel voted along party lines to approve it.

Apparently the next step in the gay rights agenda is letting people decide what sex they are, regardless of what it actually is. This is the logical outcome of the exotic idea that has been propounded by "scholars" in "gender studies" that sex and gender are not the same thing.

But it doesn't stop at bathrooms:

A Democrat-backed California proposal would allow students to take part in sex-segregated school programs based on their gender identity, irrespective of the sex on their records. So, a student born male but who identifies as female could play on the girls’ tennis team and use the girls’ locker room.

Coming soon to a school near you: Deciding what race you are regardless of what it actually is.

Same-sex marriage, crotch-grabbing, and Glenn Beck

I heard about Glenn Beck caving on the issue of same-sex marriage at the very moment that I was pondering a news report saying that, at his recent concerts, Justin Bieber had begun to grab his crotch. I began to wonder if this was entirely a coincidence and, after a moment's reflection, decided that it was not.

Beck's change of position on same-sex marriage is the political equivalent of grabbing your crotch: It has immediate news appeal, it gives the impression that you are culturally relevant, and it communicates to your admirers that you have moved on from something--in Justin's case, boyish innocence; in Beck's case, conservatism.

Now I admit that the mental image of Glenn Beck grabbing his crotch is not a pleasant one. But it is necessary in order to fully comprehend the imbecility of his change of position.

I should first point out that the words "Glenn" and "Beck," in close conjunction, have been banned on this blog until this post--and after I finish it, the ban will go back into effect. I have never been able to watch the man. Not even for a moment.

Once, a couple of years ago, I was waiting to see a legislator in a Republican office at the State Capitol and they had Fox News on the office monitor and I had to sit there and listen to him for about half an hour. I was tempted to just get up and leave before I went into some kind of convulsions. It would have been bad if the legislator I was waiting to see came out and found me in the fetal position, quivering and in a cold sweat, right there in the waiting room, Beck's voice blaring from the monitor.

Anyway, what I was originally going to say about Justin--before my son sent me the link for the Beck story-- was that when my boys were young and they danced around holding their crotch, we would tell them to stop holding their crotch and go use the bathroom. And that I hoped Justin's mom would just suddenly show up at one of his concerts, walk out onstage in mid-crotch grab, and yell, for all the crowd to hear: "Stop holding your crotch and go use the bathroom!"

Beck is, at this very moment, in mid-political crotch grab. Where's his mom? 

The Tyranny of Liberalism

Just so we all understand what is happening to us and why, we'll be running occasional excerpts from James Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism, perhaps the best book published in recent years on Tolerance Regime that is now consolidating its power.

Pay attention you conservatives out there who don't even realize you're liberals but really are. With each step liberals take to dismantle traditional society as we have known it, you can turn to the appropriate page and have Kalb's explain to you why this is.

Here is Kalb's description of the general problem with what he calls the "politically correct managerial liberal regime" :

In a society that claims to be base don free speech and reason, intelligent discussion of many aspects of life has become all but impossible. Such a state of affairs is no passing fluke but a serious matter resulting from basic principles. It is the outcome of rationalizing and egalitarian trends that over time have become ever more self-conscious and all-embracing until they now make normal informal distinctions--for example, those between the sexes--seem intolerably arbitrary and unfair. Those trends have led to the politically correct managerial liberal regime that now dominates Western public life and makes demands that more and more people find unreasonable and even incomprehensible. 

What defines that regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs. sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. To implement such a program of social transformation an extensive system of controls over social life has grown up, somethings public and sometimes formally private, that appeals for its justification to expertise, equity, safety, security, and the need to modify social attitudes and relationships in order to eliminate discrimination and intolerance. 

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. "Discrimination and intolerance" are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties--sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings--on which independent, informal, traditional, and non-market institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure. 

Because such arrangements operate on principles that are regarded as irrational, and because they are difficult to supervise and control in the interest of rationality and equal freedom, they have no place in advanced liberal society and are edged out as the social order progresses.

Get your copy form ISI Books now.

The Decline and Fall of the Book: Why the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica means the end of Western civilization

There was the Great Flood. There were the Ten Plagues of Egypt. There was the Fall of Rome. There was the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the Fall of Constantinople. And now this.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print.

While the Simpsons just celebrated its 500th show, the world's greatest learned publication couldn't even make it to its 250th anniversary. Will the last person who even knows what Western civilization is please turn out the lights?

I submit that this is the most significant cultural event of the last fifty years. No. Make that a hundred. The New Dark Ages are upon us.

T. S. Eliot ended his poem, "The Hollow Men," with the words:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The sing-song rhythm of the first three lines evokes a child's careless playground chant, as if Eliot meant to say that the end of the world would be attended with a general lack of awareness that anything significant was really happening--and that, when it did happen, it might go unremarked or even unnoticed.

If you want proof that our own culture is experiencing this very kind of end, just look at the malaise with which we have greeted the Britannica announcement. Note the general cultural yawn directed toward the announcement that they will be suspending their print edition.

The best anyone could do was to give the glib assurance that there was nothing to worry about, since Britannica will continue in an electronic edition.

If someone important to you died, would you find comfort from being told that he or she would continue on in a digital form? No. Encyclopedia Britannica is dead. We now have only its electronic ghost.

Our cultural landscape is fast becoming welter and waste. Before the barbarian onslaught of the computer, one would go to a place and read a thing. There was a library, and it had books, and one went there to read them. Go into a library now, and look to the right, where there are rows of shelves of books, but no people. Then look to the left, where there are rows and rows of people--sitting at computers.

Soon the shelves will be gone, the books sold, leaving only the people, staring mesmerized at their screens. They won't even notice that the books have been taken away.

Every technological revolution has its benefits--and its casualties. The invention of writing was itself a technological  revolution. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato tells a story about the old god Theuth, the inventor of many arts, including arithmetic and geometry. But his greatest discovery, said Plato, "was the use of letters." He came one day to Thamus, the Egyptian god-king, who dwelt in Thebes. Theuth presented his great invention, writing, to the king. "This," said Theuth," will make the Egyptians wiser. It will increase their memory and improve their wit." But the Egyptian king was not impressed.

"Because these letters are like your own offspring," he said, "you are blind to their faults. This discovery of yours will only create forgetfulness in the learner's soul because he will no longer need to use his memory. He will trust to the written characters instead of his memory, and will not remember them himself. These letters of yours may help in reminiscence, but they are not an aid to memory. Your hearers will become, not disciples of the truth, but of a semblance of truth only. They will be hearers of many things, but they will learn nothing."

This seems a harsh judgment to us today, and yet there is truth in it. Writing brought about many improvements, but it would be false to think that, in moving away from an oral culture where memorization was the primary method of learning, something was not lost.

The invention of letters was followed more than two millenia later by the invention of movable type, a revolution without which the Renaissance and the Reformation would not even have been possible. But with the increase in the availability of the written word, there have been losses once again. For every work of Shakespeare put between covers, there were twenty cheap romance novels. For every book designed to teach an intelligent public, there are fifty newspapers distorting events. And for every learned tome, there are an hundred volumes of pornography.

But over the last twenty years, we have been taking another step. What Marshall McCluhan called the "Guttenburg Galaxy" displaced the Parchment Planet. But as we have moved into the Electronic Era, we find that the actual universe itself cannot contain it.

The material on which we would now inscribe our thoughts and our dreams is not material at all. For at least two millenia we have seen the physical act of writing as a kind of embodiment. Our thoughts were somehow rendered complete by being made incarnate on the written page.

They became flesh and dwelt among us.

The digital revolution comes at us with a kind of Gnostic pretense. Far from any kind of embodiment, it promises to liberate us from the physical altogether. Just listen to the justifications from those who have abandoned their books for Kindles or Nooks or iPads:

The "delivery method is convenient." Amazon.com delivers my books right to my home. And if I go to a bookstore (which is something I do, not as a chore, but because I actually like to do it), I have this trick I perform with my arm whereby I lift it vertically in the air, grasp the book on the shelf in my hand and bring my arm (in another intricate movement) back down again.

After a while you get pretty good at it.

"iPads and Kindles are good for the environment." Is that before or after we found out that the manufacturing plants discharge toxic metals that can cause birth defects into nearby streams in China? Producing books may involve killing trees, but you can grow more trees. But if you're born with three noses because of toxic chemicals in your ground water from the nearby iPhone plant, growing another one won't do you much good.

You "don't have to carry fifty pounds of books everywhere." Neither do I. If I have fifty pounds of books, I'm carrying too many books. Who needs to carry around fifty pounds of books? Some students say they have to carry around fifty pounds of books, but that's probably more a function of inefficient study practices than anything else. And if you really have to spend a day at school and you're a commuter and you have to carry around fifty pounds of books, the get a travel bag with wheels.

I will admit that my wife accuses me of carrying around fifty pounds of books, but I deny it. I only carry around, oh, I don't know, about thirty pounds of books. And I really don't need them all. I tell my wife I bring them with me for the same reason I bring her: because I take comfort from having them there.

"You can highlight things in a kindle that can be easily erased" and "make notes." Look folks, GET A PENCIL.

My books have a number of distinct advantages over your iPad.

When the stewardess comes around and tells everyone to turn off their electronic devices, I just look around and laugh an evil laugh as all of these people with iPads and Nooks have to stop reading until we reach the right altitude. I, on the other hand, go on reading. The next time I'm on a plane and the stewardess gives this command, I'm going to flag her down and tell her that I can't find the on/off switch for my print copy of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy and so what should I do?

She may call TSA on me, but it will have been worth it.

And when I get old and die, I can hand on my books to my children. If I have a Kindle, what am I going to do? Hand down an old Kindle that will undoubtedly be completely obsolete by them?

Each one of my books has a history. Some of them are previously owned books. The other day a student's paper fell out of the pages of one old book I had. It had the teacher's marks and the student's own amusing responses. It was from the 1950s. I don't remember anything falling out of any digital device I have ever owned that did not render it inoperable.

I can sometimes tell something about the previous owner of a book. I have a small set of philosophy books I bought once and I can tell that the man who owned them was a smoker. I have imagined that maybe it was a priest, sitting in his study, reading about Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics.

And if they do not have my own marks and notes, they have the marks and notes of others who owned them before. I buy a lot of used books, and a couple of years ago I bought a used copy of The Idea of Nature, by R. G. Collingwood, online. When I received it, I opened the cover and beheld a bookplate with the name Richard Niebuhr. Niebuhr had marked the book extensively, and so what I had received in the mail was not just a good book, but the thoughts about the book from one of the great Christian thinkers of the 20th century.

A book can almost have a personality. It was written by somebody, and it is about something. Neither of these things can be said of a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad. They are not written at all and are not about anything.

After libraries have all closed down or become free computer centers, there will still be people like me, feeling like monks in monasteries preserving books in their own private libraries.

The Southern Critics: An Anthology

My favorite publisher is ISI Books. ISI itself (the "Intercollegiate Studies Institute") has manned the barricades in the defense of Western civilization with more enthusiasm than just about any other single entity, and ISI Books, their publishing arm, is probably the single most solid and stalwart publisher in what sometimes seems a losing fight. Their journals too are one of the things that makes my daily trip to the mailbox exciting. Modern Age, and the Intercollegiate Review are among the five or six journals I get that I depend upon for intellectual satisfaction.

I have several reviews in various stages of completion I need to post of their books, but rather than wait till I read them, I am going to start posting the publishers blurbs to these books as they are published until I finish the full reviews of some of them.

The thing that has provoked me to this is their latest release: The Southern Critics: An Anthology. Since reading At War with the Word, by R. V. Young (now editor of modern age), I have had an insatiable interest in the role of Southern writers in the history of literary criticism. One of the implicit themes in Young's book was the significant involvement of southern writers in the New Criticism of the early and mid-20th century.

The New Criticism refocused criticism on literary works themselves, away from what one new critic, W. K. Wimsatt, called the affective fallacy--that a literary work should be judged according to its subjective effect on the reader--and the intentional fallacy--that a works should be judged according the intention of the author. A work, they said, should be judged on its own merits, apart from these other considerations. A few of the New Critics took these ideas too far, but the movement as a whole resided squarely within the tradition of Western literature and still serves as a bane the postmodernist critics in our universities who, disdainful of Western culture in general, still can't totally stamp it out.

Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransome, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, southerners all, were at the center of the New Criticism--in fact, were a necessary part of it.

Just go back and look at the influence just two of these had on English teaching: Brooks & Warren. The wrote what seem like countless textbooks on how to teach literature. Indeed, one wonders what other way there is to effectively teach literature than the way they did it. It certainly beats the current way of teaching literature, which consists primarily of doing something else.

Here is the publisher's blurb on this book:

In the early 1920s a collection of young Southerners at Vanderbilt University formed the literary group known as the Fugitives. Over the next few decades they and their followers would exert an enormous influence on the study of literature. Indeed, the "Southern Critics" included some of the most important American writers and critics of the twentieth century: Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, to name just a few.

In The Southern Critics: An Anthology, editor Glenn C. Arbery gathers the most penetrating essays by these and other writers, bringing their significant contribution back into focus. Arbery’s enlightening commentary allows us to understand how the Southern Critics' concern for the history and culture of the South informed all their work—not just the landmark Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930) but even their writings on literature and poetry, including their revolutionary "New Criticism."

Remarkably, the essays collected here speak to our time as much as to the Southern Critics' own. In the twenty-first century we recognize the prescience of their warnings about what would happen to art, leisure, and time itself when everything fell under the sway of the industrial model.

Do yourself a favor and visit ISI's books page.

Will the federal courts rewrite the Constitution on same-sex marriage?

This just in from the Decline of Western Civilization desk:

SAN FRANCISCO -- The first federal trial to determine if the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from outlawing same-sex marriage gets under way Monday, and the two gay couples on whose behalf the case was brought will be among the first witnesses.

And we all know, of course, what the Constitution says about same-sex marriage. Why there's that passage in Article ... let's see ... I thought I saw it here. Well, regardless of that, it says in the section toward the end ... hmmm ... try to find it ... Shoot. I could have swore it was there.

Oh, nevermind.