The Funeral of a Great Man: Antonin #Scalia and the possibility of greatness

When Ronald Reagan's funeral was held in 2004, I said that it was the last hero's funeral we would see in our lifetimes—and perhaps for a lot longer than that.

I was wrong.

I was right in thinking that our time is not conducive to heroes. Our modern society is not conducive to heroism at all. Heroism requires a sense of greatness that we seemingly lack. We hesitate to say that someone is "great" because we question the very idea of greatness.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in the fourth of his five arguments for the existence of God, argued that, when we that one thing is "better" than another, in other words (or "worse" for that matter), we assume the existence of the Best. Saying something has a degree of some perfection is to assume the existence of the perfect ideal of that perfection--as well as its complete absence. Unless we believe this, then the various degrees of these ideas we attribute to things makes no sense--words like "kinder," "happier," "nobler," are mere nonsense words.

But we do use these words. We can't seem to help using superlatives and comparatives that assume such a perfection despite our modern nominalist mindset that denies the existence of the perfection that makes the ideas behind such words possible at all.

We can't seem to shake greatness.

And every once in a while, someone comes along who we can't help but attribute to. Justice Scalia was one of these. 

If you watched today's funeral, you saw once again that heroism is still possible, and that when it appears in some high degree, even those who purport to reject the perfection of which the person is an approximation have to acknowledge it.

All such greatness requires is courage in the face of falsity and evil. Again and again, Scalia wrote in defense of truth and goodness. He did it intelligently, unapologetically—and joyously. Scalia was everything that a conservative should be.

Scalia's achievement as a great conservative stands in stark contrast to those who wilted in the face of political pressure on issues like marriage, afraid that someone might call them names. The abject abandonment of principle that has characterized the conservative movement in recent years on social issues underscores just how significant Scalia's achievement was.

Today's mass for Justice Antonin Scalia was a stirring and beautiful acknowledgment of this achievement.

There are still heroes. Greatness is still possible. All it takes is for one man--a man who knows the Perfection of which he is an approximation—to embody it.

Watch this video of Scalia's son Paul. A great eulogy for a great man.

Did David Bowie have a soul?

I remember years ago, when the Queen Mary ocean liner was finally retired in Long Beach, California, the owners of the celebrity ship (now just a public spectacle) decided to have it refurbished. This involved repainting the ship's three magnificent smokestacks which were part of the visual allure of this, one of the greatest of boats. But in the process of repainting them, they fell apart. As it turned out, the metal inside had long ago rusted out. The smokestacks, in fact, were all paint.

I always felt sorry for David Bowie. You could tell that he thrived on public attention. In fact, that seemed to be his whole purpose in life, and he was very good at it. He was good at other things too: He was a great songwriter, and a dynamic performer. But it was all in the service of his public image.

Sometimes you wondered if there really was anything underneath the image he had so carefully crafted. Was there anyone really there under all the makeup? Or was he all paint?

The ego is a strange thing: It seeks to gather everything to itself, but it is never filled. It paints itself over again and again into what it wants to be to the point where you begin to wonder if there is still any self left there. I imagine this is why so many celebrities are miserable in their private lives. I always wondered if Bowie suffered from this malady so typical of the pop star. Was there unhappiness under the glitter? If there was, he was too good at cultivating his image to ever let us see it.

It seems almost irrelevant to ask of Bowie what we should ask of anyone who takes the trouble to live a life: the question of whether the life he lived was a good life. We don't like to ask this question of pop culture figures because the question seems irrelevant.

You judge something on the basis of whether it achieves its purpose. But the purpose of a celebrity is not to be good; The purpose of a celebrity is to be interesting. That, at least, is what we seem to assume.

While we are fascinated by the gap between how celebrities appear and what they are in their private lives (this is the whole allure of People magazine, E! Television, and the National Enquirer), we do not expect the twain to meet. This is why we are so forgiving when they die: Not because we are so gracious, but because to be morally good people was never what we expected of them. That was not their role. Their role was to play roles: We never expected them to be the way they portrayed themselves to be. 

Bowie certainly benefited from this tendency to look the other way when it came to his personal life. He was, by the account of his first wife, narcissistic and sexually indiscriminate.

His ability to transform himself—to take off one mask and put on another—made David Bowie seem the quintessential postmodernist celebrity. Postmodernist writers have always been fascinated with people who seem to reinvent themselves. It underscores their belief that we are not created in any particular way, with any particular nature; instead, we create ourselves—we determine our own nature.

This is why postmodernists have always been fascinated with Madonna. If you read postmodernist literature (I'm not advising it, I'm only saying, if you do), her name pops up again and again. Why? Because she is constantly recreating her public self. Once she gets tired of one persona, she just goes into her personality closet and chooses another one. 

Of course, the ability to create necessarily requires a good imagination, and most of us don't have the requisite imagination to create much of anything, let alone ourselves. Maybe that's why so many of us seem dull: We don't have the requisite imagination we need to create a very interesting self.

But Bowie had an imagination. 

This was at the root of his androgynous pose. In the same way he became Ziggy Stardust, Alladin Sane, the Thin White Duke, he became female, male, male/female, neither. In fact, it is astounding to think back on how he managed to make androgyny cool—even among people who would have reviled homosexuality if you had asked them openly about it. Today you are given bonus points for sexual unconventiality—and extra bonus points the farther out your gender orbit is from your natural heterosexuality. But how could someone who was openly androgynous in a time when the culture still widely adhered to traditional gender ideas have become so popular? 

Only the protean Bowie could have pulled it off. He was the human chameleon.

But there is something about the gender mirror show he put on that tells us something about Bowie that it is easy to miss, and it is this: As much as he appeared the examplar of the postmodern self— fluid, ever-changing, impermanent—and despite the fact that much of what he did actually promoted this idea, Bowie was, in fact, a counter-example.

How do we know this? Because he said so himself. Although his androgynous poses certainly gave the appearance of promoting the idea of gender fluidity, Bowie himself knew it was all just an act. He knew the difference between being able to actually transform yourself and simply putting on another mask. This is why he denied being gay and said that his one-time announcement that he was bisexual was "the biggest mistake" he ever made. The androgyny was no revelation of who Bowie really was, it was just one more role he had decided to play—for whatever reason: shock value, fame, whatever. To him, it was a beautiful lie, a lie he openly admitted.

One clue we get about this is the lyrics to his songs. Notice that Bowie almost never talked about personal feelings in his songs. Bowie writes about "Panic in Detroit, and "1984," and "Spiders from Mars." His lyrics chart the universe, but they never delve the soul.

Compare this to another great pop songwriter, Tom Petty, who always stays close to earth, writing about how he doesn't want anyone "Draggin' my Heart Around." "Don't Do Me Like That," "You Wreck Me," "The Waiting," "Refugee"—these songs have the same personal sensibility you find in country music, which is where, rather than purely popular music, Petty finds his roots. They are about personal relationships, anger, love, loss, resentment—all the things each one of us experiences every day. In fact, notice how many of Petty's songs are addressed personally to someone else. They are every bit as morally relaxed as Bowie's songs, but at least they have a beating heart.

You never see this in Bowie. To talk this way would allow us to see behind the mask.

This is why, in the end, Bowie should be anathema to the postmodern gender theorists, who mistake the masks for reality. They, unlike Bowie himself, can't tell the act from the real thing. To them being gay or bisexual, or whatever other invented gender category they give a name to, is "who you are." Bowie didn't go in for this. Bowie's problem was just the opposite: He considered his actions to be completely disconnected from who he was.

Bowie knew he was playing a role. All the same, there a those who are so good in playing somebody else that they have a hard time returning to reality. Sometimes there's so much paint that if there is something there, it's hard, even for the person himself, to figure out what or who it is.

So now Bowie has undergone the final transformation, only this one doesn't involve another role. The mask is off. I would love to know, when they took off all the paint, what they found underneath.

Shirley Temple: A life that deserves to be remembered

It is a measure of how short our cultural memory has become that the death of Shirley Temple went by with so little remark. I'm trying to remember when the death of a movie star who was as popular as she was in her heyday attracted so little public attention.

I heard in a radio interview a couple of years ago of a famous disc jockey who said that the normal span of popularity of a hip hop song was about a week. After that, he said, it was largely forgotten. It made me think of the fact that the Beatles "Hey Jude" spent 9 weeks as the number one song in 1968 and many more weeks than that on the charts. Of course, that wasn't normal, but it was not uncommon twenty or thirty years ago for songs to be popular for months.

Maybe this is a cultural anomaly, but I suspect it's not.

This extreme form of presentism seems more and more to characterize our culture. Not only the past, but even the future is a victim. Douglas Rushkoff calls it the "New Now" in a book subtitled, "When everything happens now."

What will future generations have nostalgia for if they can remember no past?

Many people who are immersed in the culture of today, where popularity waxes and wanes on a weekly or sometimes daily cycle, have a hard time understanding the longevity of older movie stars and musicians. They don't comprehend that before the digital revolution there were cultural trends that lasted, not weeks, not months, but even decades.

People of my generation had—and still have—longer cultural memories, and when we hear news like that of Shirley Temple having died, we get all nostalgic and start thinking about how the culture that our generation valued and the movie stars that we thought were so good and the musicians that we thought were worth listening to and literature that was so important to us is ignored and that pretty soon it will forgotten altogether because it won't be too many years now and all of us will have died and no one will remember us and our culture at all.

Have a nice day.

But back to Shirley Temple. She was probably the greatest child star, not only of her generation, but of any generation. She was not just popular, she was phenomenally, outrageously popular. No one hadn't heard of her. Of course, her popularity was at its height in the 1930s. But as someone growing up in the 1960s as I did she was still—despite the fact that she gave up acting early in her life—familiar to everyone and her movies were still frequently aired on television (which, those of us with cultural memories know, was the only way one could see old movies).

Shirley Temple was, of course, almost unbearably cute. But she perpetrated her cuteness on a nation at a time when it was okay to be cute—and innocent. We have forgotten that there was a time when simple innocence was not considered abnormal. It was taken for granted that innocence was a desirable thing. There was a time when people actually thought well of good people and wanted to be like them and our culture didn't conspire to undermine these sentiments.

Today such a person would be lampooned into oblivion on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. "Animal Crackers in my Soup" would be turned into a striptease act on Saturday Night Live so we could all laugh at the naiveté of anyone who could perform such a routine with a straight face.

Our present culture just can't tolerate what appears to be pure, unadulterated goodness. Our literature (where books are still read) and our cinema invite us to tear down our heroes. We are taught by our culture to suspect anything that appears to be good, and so we are conditioned to look behind the veil of innocence that we know must hide an ugly reality underneath.

This is why modern storytellers have such trouble portraying a good character. I read somewhere that contemporary Disney animators had a much harder time making good characters more attractive than bad ones. This is not an entirely new problem, of course. Milton was criticized for the fact that, in Paradise Lost, his Satan was more compelling than any of the good characters. But the criticism Milton endured was precisely because this was the exception, not the rule.

It is now the rule.

We now think that we are not looking reality in the face if we think that goodness should be more attractive than ugliness. Evil and ugliness are somehow more real than goodness and beauty and not to comprehend this is seen as hopelessly naive. If you appreciate a simple story where the good guys win and the bad guys lose you must be some kind of rube just fallen off the turnip truck.

We now wander a cultural wasteland having to settle for television dramas like "Breaking Bad" or "Mad Men" or "The Sopranos" in which, compelling as they are in their own right, the good, when it is seen at all, is only seen apophatically: that is, through its opposite. We are becoming the moral equivalent of cave fish, with our moral vision still there, except it's not functional. We now spend so much time in the cultural dark that we have no tolerance of the light.

We are fast producing a generation in which cynicism and irony are the only recognizable modes of cultural cognition.

Of course none of Shirley Temple's movies are going to be mistaken for great cinema. But her early films were made during the Depression, when people who faced day-to-day hardships that we today could not even comprehend would go to movies to see something that would relieve their wretchedness, if only for an hour or two. And watching a wholesome, perky little girl sing and dance was like water from a cold well on a sweltering summer day.

They did it in droves.

They led lives of impossible poverty—and hungered for just a little goodness and innocence to lighten up a dark time. We lead lives of historically unheard of luxury and comfort--and watch cynical dramas that examine and sometimes exalt the underbelly of society.

There was a time when men were strong enough not to be repelled by innocence.

And there is an irony to our modern ironic nature that comes into play with cultural figures like Shirley Temple and it's this: That the goodness and innocence that we automatically want to see behind was actually genuine. Temple, as it turns out, not only portrayed a good and innocent little girl on the screen, but actually was one. And this person who was good and innocent as a child star grew up to be a good person in real life.

We find such a thing hard to believe in a time when our entertainment industry is dominated by the toxic likes Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus, but it's true.

I am reminded of the story Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, about a young girl, Winnie Foster, who, discontented with her family, slips away from home one day in the late 19th century, and in a wood close by her house meets a young boy at a little pool of water at the foot of a giant elm. He looks young, but he is actually 104 years old. He has been drinking from the pool which contains water that will keep him young forever. Not only him, but his whole family, who take her away with them.

Winnie and the seemingly young boy fall in love, and he asks her to wait until she is 17 and drink the water too so they can be together—and seventeen, forever. Through circumstances, she is taken back home. But when he and his family, eternally young, return to her town years later to find her, they discover she has led a normal, happy life. They visit the cemetery and find a gravestone, carved with the words, "In Loving Memory, Winifred Foster Jackson, Dear Wife, Dear Mother, 1870-1948."

She was a good person who lived a good life, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Shirley Temple was almost trapped in her own way by her massive stardom as a child. But she couldn't remain young forever. She left Hollywood at the age of 21. She married (at the age of 17), but the marriage ultimately failed. Later, she married Charles Alden Black in a marriage that lasted 54 years. She became a businesswoman and a diplomat known to a later generation as Shirley Temple Black. She had children by both marriages, and ultimately grandchildren and great grandchildren.

She was a good person who lived a good life, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Her life deserves remembering—all of it, not just its beginning, even by those of us today who worship at the fountain of youth.

Judging Nelson Mandela

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the tithoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg into the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them the mountains if Ingeli and the East Griqualand.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it, and man is destroyed.

These are the opening words of Cry, The Beloved Country. It is a book that will strike you dumb with its beauty—and it will tear your heart out with the tragedy that was and is South Africa. In the process, it will give you a profound and intimate picture of the heart of this rich and tortured country.

No one has any business either praising or maligning Nelson Mandela until he has read it.

The land it speaks of is a metaphor for the souls of South Africa's people which, like the land itself, were once naturally rich and well-tended but have since been both exploited and neglected.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, too many fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The tithoya does not cry here anymore.

The book is the story of two brothers. Stephen Kumalo is an elderly Black Anglican minister who in the course of the story sees the fate of his country in his own experiences. He leaves his rural Ndotsheni to go to Johannesburg—a sort of industrial Babylon that lures the people from their rural villages to look for jobs that aren't there—to find his sister, Gertrude, and his son, the appropriately-named Absalom Kumalo.

But Stephen is robbed at the bus station when he gets there and finds that his sister has become a drug-addicted prostitute. He finally discovers that his son, who had left the village and hadn't been heard from for two years has killed a white man during the burglary of a home—a white man who, ironically, is a spokesman for the cause of South African Blacks—and is being hunted by the police.

Johannesburg has also done its work on Kumalo's brother, John, who has become a powerful political leader who preaches revolution. John Kumalo has also left his native village of Indotsheni and gained his freedom from the tribal chief, but he has now enslaved himself to political ideology. It is John Kumalo's son who has helped to corrupt his cousin, Absalom.

In one of the most moving scenes in literature, Stephen Kumalo, old and weak, must go to the home of James Jarvis, the rich white father of the man whom Kumalo's son has killed. He is there on other business, and doesn't expect to find Jarvis at home, but he is there, and Kumalo is stricken with fear. Jarvis, who doesn't know who Kumalo is, asks him why he is afraid.

"There is something between you and me," says Jarvis to Kumalo, "but I do not know what it is."
"It is true umnumzana. You do not know what it is."
"I do not know, but I desire to know."
"... this thing which is the heaviest thing of all my years," says Kumalo, "is the heaviest thing of all your years also, ... It is my son that killed your son."

Jarvis is rendered speechless: Despite this disturbing reminder of the loss of his son, he looks at Kumalo and sees a broken and weak old man. Kumalo, a Christian minister, has never had any anger for the wealthy White men whom Jarvis represents (and whom his brother John is so eager to divest of their power, if not their lives), and Jarvis, seeing Kumalo in all his humanity, has pity on him. Later in the book, Jarvis will help Kumalo to rebuild Ndotsheni.

Paton's story is not a vindictive tale meant as an indictment against those who exploited its land and abused its people. There are good Whites and bad Blacks—and bad Whites and good Blacks. He makes us see and understand both sides, but through this we, the reader, see the requirements of justice--and mercy.

The hills above Ixopo, Stephen Kumalo's village, symbolize what South Africa once was, and Johannesburg what it has become. And Stephen and John Kumalo represent the two paths that could have been taken in the reformation of South Africa after the demise of apartheid.

It is ironic that Nelson Mandela began his political career in this same Johannesburg, where, after beginning peacefully, he learned his violent politics. But he transformed himself into a forgiving and peaceful leader: He entered jail in 1962 as John Kumalo, and came out in 1990 as Stephen Kumalo.

A plowshare that had been beaten into a sword was fashioned back into a plowshare.

"There is a new thing growing here," John Kumalo tells his skeptical Christian brother when Stephen finds him in Johannesburg. "Stronger than any church or chief. You will see it one day," he says, threateningly. Thanks to Mandela, South Africa has not seen the fate John Kumalo predicted for it and it has so far avoided the worst effects which have attended the handing over of power from Whites to Blacks in other African countries.

When Paton gave a lecture in America after writing Cry, the Beloved Country in 1948, he clearly believed that South Africa could and would grow out of its racial problems. He believed this because he believed the country could not continue to live with its racism. Why? Because, he said, South Africa was a Christian nation—a Christian nation with a Christian conscience that would not leave it in peace until it came to terms with how it treated its own people.

The secular media claims that Mandela was not religious, but others have pointed to his education in Methodist schools and his explicitly Christian remarks at several religious gatherings in the 1990s. I am skeptical of both of these claims. But we do know this: Whether he was a Christian or not when he left his cell in 1990, he acted like one, and for that he should be praised.

Liberals are hailing Mandela as a saint and emphasizing what he was transformed into, while many conservatives are calling him a sinner and emphasizing what he was transformed from. Nelson Mandela was a true representative of his country because he was both these things. He deserved the punishment he received because of his terrorists acts. But he also deserves the praise he's receiving now.

Mandela leaves a country that, thanks in large part to him, has dealt successfully with its past. But many of those in the ANC who came to power under Mandela's leadership do not share his integrity or his essentially Christian vision. The ANC-led government has been charged with widespread corruption, and whites are leaving the country in droves.

Mandela's death is to be mourned. But what we should mourn even more is that the man who led the country out of its past will not be there to help it as it faces its future.

Žižek's leftist tribute to Thatcher

The always interesting Slavoj Žižek, writing in the New Stateman about Margaret Thatcher, whose funeral was last week:

In the last pages of his monumental Second World War, Winston Churchill ponders on the enigma of a military decision: after the specialists (economic and military analysts, psychologists, meteorologists) propose their analysis, somebody must assume the simple and for that very reason most difficult act of transposing this complex multitude into a simple "Yes" or "No". We shall attack, we continue to wait... This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision.

Read the rest here.

An American Hero: George McGovern, RIP

To the conservatives of my generation--those who held Ronald Reagan in high regard well before it became fashionable to do so--the great embodiment of liberalism was George McGovern. The public had not really heard of him until the 1972 presidential campaign. What people remember about him is that he ran against the Vietnam War, won the Democratic nomination, and lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

That Nixon was the conservative face of the era seems strange today in the post-Reagan political world, but that McGovern should have been its liberal face does not seem strange at all. In fact, McGovern defined modern liberalism and continues to do so, even though our memory of the man himself has receded into the mists of the political past.

I grew up in a family of conservative Democrats who were increasingly at odds with their party, and who mostly abandoned it on election day in November of 1972 to vote for Nixon (and who, ironically, would have voted for George Wallace if Wallace hadn't been shot before the California primary). They voted for the crook: it was important. None of them liked McGovern's politics, a dislike that overshadowed anything they felt about him as a man. His personality was lost in the distaste for his political positions.

But there were two things that later rehabilitated him in my mind, and brought me to an appreciation of him that has stayed with me ever since. The first was seeing him speak when I was in college. He co-taught a class at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the early 1980's. As part of that class he gave a lecture at Campbell Hall which my girlfriend (who was later to become my wife) and I went to see. The stereotypes that I had formed over the years were exploded when I saw a man who was incredibly intelligent, witty, and well-informed. This was not the political demon I had been raised to revile. We attended a number of lectures during my junior and senior years, and the three that stood out as truly outstanding were those by Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, Jr., and George McGovern.

The second was a book I read about 5 years ago; it was a book that anyone who wants to make a judgment of George McGovern (the man) should read. I began reading The Wild Blue, by Steven Ambrose with no idea who it was about. Its subtitle, The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45, gave no hint that it concerned anyone other than a group of mostly unknown men. Ambrose tells the story of a number of B-24 pilots, but, in fact, much of the book is about McGovern.

I had no idea (and don't remember it ever being discussed during the '72 presidential campaign although I'm sure it must have come up) that George McGovern was a war hero.

McGovern became a B-24 pilot when he was only 22. He was a member of the 741st bomber squadron which was based in Cerignola, Italy. He flew 35 missions over Germany and every mission was a journey into Hell. Flying a B-24 was like flying a large metal chicken coup, and the pilots maneuvered them through harrowingly intense anti-aircraft fire from German batteries that resulted in gruesome casualties for those who were hit. They returned back to their bases to land, having to put all their strength into manipulating the primitive manual controls in order not to suffer the fate they had just avoided over Germany. So difficult was it to manage these planes that the pilots were often drenched in sweat when they got to the ground, despite cockpit temperatures that could reach as low as 50 below zero.

The 35 missions that George McGovern flew were the maximum number a pilot could fly. After 35, you were done: They sent you home. Very few reached that number. When I read this, I thought back on his opposition to the Vietnam War, a position I strongly disagreed with as a very confident but fairly ignorant adolescent. It took on a completely different color. A man who flew 35 missions in a B-24 over Germany, I concluded, has won the right to say anything he wants to about war and he has earned the right to be listened to.

Ambrose's book doesn't stop at the events of the war, it tells the story of McGovern's courtship, marriage, and later life. Out of this story comes the picture of a fundamentally decent and religiously devout man who cared deeply for his family and his country.

I have said before that the problem with liberals is not that they're evil; the problem is that they are good, too good. They are so good they are a danger to themselves and others. As a true liberal, McGovern possessed the fault characteristic of his political tribe: he projected his goodness onto his fellow men and assumed that they would do what he would do under the same circumstances. Modern American liberalism (messianic, meliorist, and utopian) fundamentally rejects the Christian doctrine of original sin, and premises its policies on human beings that do not exist. Liberalism is a prelapsarian political philosophy for a postlapsarian world.

We forgive dead men for their badness. Can we forgive them for their goodness?

One story about McGovern from the book particularly struck me. On one of their missions, they had to turn back from their target without releasing their load of bombs. So McGovern turned the plane out into the Italian countryside to drop their load of explosives in order to allow them to land the plane. When they thought they had gotten to a safe place where they could release the bombs without harming anyone, McGovern gave the command to release them. But just as the last bomb had left the bomb bay, McGovern looked down and realized there was a farmhouse right in the path of the explosives. There was nothing he could do.

After washing up from the mission, a downcast McGovern entered the canteen, where he found one of his crew members laughing about the farmhouse they had just destroyed. I can't remember exactly what McGovern did, but as I recall that he grabbed the airman's collar and slugged him. If he didn't, he should have. In any case, the guy got the message, and everyone in the canteen saw the righteous indignation of a good man.

McGovern carried that guilt for years.

Then, decades later, McGovern and his wife visited Europe, where, in the midst of sightseeing, he appeared on a radio show where they discussed his service flying B-24s. He told the story of the farmhouse, and expressed his sorrow to no one in particular for a family he never intended to harm. A few minutes later, a man called in: It was the owner of the farmhouse the bombs had destroyed. The man explained that he and his family had heard the plane coming and had sought shelter in a nearby ditch. When the bombs hit and destroyed the house, the family was safe. They had survived. Not only was the man not angry, he said he hated the Nazis, and that, though his house was destroyed, he would gladly give it up in order to see the destruction of the Nazis and what they stood for.

George McGovern was not only a hero: He was one of the greatest men of this country's Greatest Generation. May he rest in peace.

Ten Ways to Die Ungracefully: Helen Gurley Brown, RIP

Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and the author of the 1964 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, has died at the age of 90. She famously refused to grow old gracefully, having procured a nose job, breast "augmentation," silicone and fat injections, eye lifts, and multiple face lifts. She also wore a miniskirt well into her 80s, under the apparent impression that it would make her look younger.

She was basically the female Hugh Hefner, sharing with with Hefner the distinction of pressing the sexual revolution to new depths. The sexual revolution was the social movement the goal of which was to free people to have as much sex as they wanted, but resulted instead (if the number of advertisements are any indication) in an epidemic of Erectile Dysfunction.

Thanks to people like Brown, people now have the social freedom to do what they no longer seem physically capable of doing.

I hope she confessed before she died. She needed to.

Ray Bradbury, RIP

Ray Bradbury died last Tuesday. Bradbury wrote science fiction, but he was always less about science than he was about fiction. Although he wrote many stories set in the technologically advanced future, his themes transcended the futurism and technological glamour that characterized the work of science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, some of his greatest writings were not futuristic at all. A story like Something Wicked This Way Comes didn't need to be futuristic to be a great novel.

Of the many things to like about Bradbury was his attitude toward learning. As the New York Times obituary recounts, Bradbury attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college: "Instead, he read everything he could get his hands on: Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway . He paid homage to them in 1971 in the essay 'How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.'"

You gotta love it.

Why Steve Jobs was significant

Steve Jobs died yesterday. There has been a lot of talk about his legacy, but his chief contribution to culture was that he produced things no one thought they needed but which ended up becoming indispensable.

RIP.

Bob Sexton, RIP

I just heard about the death of Bob Sexton, the head of the Prichard Committee. Bob and I locked horns many times on education issues, since he was probably the leading advocate of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 and I was probably its loudest critic. But you could never question his sincerity, and whatever you think of the correctness of someone's positions, you've got to think that sincerity and dedication count for something, and Bob had these virtues in spades.

I don't know what Bob's spiritual state was when he died, but you pray in these cases the same thing you pray for yourself: that God might be merciful. And He is.

Requiescat in pace.

Did J. D. Salinger go to Heaven?

J. D. Salinger is dead at 91. He is most famous for Catcher in the Rye, a book about teenage angst and alienation. Several commentators have said it is also about the protagonist's "loss of innocence," but that is clearly an overstatement, since there seemed little room in Holden Caulfield's personality for anything but cynicism and self-consciousness.

It's always hard to determine how much a cultural artifact influences the culture and how much it is influenced by the culture. Catcher in the Rye, like so many other things, seemed to share in both. There was obviously an audience for it, although one wonders how much of its support was confined to the intellectual elites who spend the time they occupy in our important cultural institutions undermining the authority of the institutions from which they draw their livelihood. For such people, Holden Caulfield is a hero, rather than a cautionary example.

That would at least explain why the New York Times thought so highly of it when it came out.

Whatever it is that produced the book, it obviously had some influence on the rest of us. I remember someone once pointing out--I think it was George F. Will--that the first time anyone ever appeared before the public (albeit in Caulfield's case it was in the textual mode) with a baseball cap worn backwards was Holden Caulfield. It was a fitting expression of the alienated arrogance that characterized Caulfield--and those who now gush effusively in appreciation to Salinger for creating him.

I don't think I have ever heard anyone I knew say they actually liked the book. I didn't like it when I read it in high school, and I don't remember any of my classmates who did either. But it was a work which has taken its place in the canon of literature maintained by those who don't believe in canons of literature. In fact, the very idea that Holden Caulfield, a scourge of the adult establishment, should be idolized by the very adult establishment he railed against is an irony too delicious not to take notice of.

Leave it to the Onion to capture this irony perfectly:

CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of ******** thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

Maybe that's why Salinger became a recluse, spurning the literary establishment that lauded him. If so, maybe he made it to Heaven. Hell for him was here, having to listen to these people.

Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

Richard John Neuhaus died last week. He was most famous as the editor of First Things Magazine, which dealt with the issue religion in the public square. It was one of the truly vibrant intellectual journals of recent times. The joke has always been that everyone read the magazine from the back, since that's where Neuhaus wrote his own running account the wide range of issues that came under the rubric of the magazine.

We should perhaps remind ourselves of something that many have forgotten: that First Things was the successor to two other publications Neuhaus edited: This World and The Religion & Society Report. This World contained longer scholarly articles on religion and culture, while The Religion & Society Report contained Neuhaus's own shorter observations about religion and culture. This latter was the basis for the "back of the magazine" in First Things. I was a charter subscriber to both, but they were short-lived as a result of a falling out between the more neo-conservative Neuhaus and the more paleo-conservative Rockford Institute, which published the two periodicals. Neuhaus quickly founded First Things, and it became one of the most influential voices in what is left of Christendom.

I never met Neuhaus, but, like many, I felt like I knew him because I knew his thoughts on the same issues that I was thinking about, thoughts that he gave eloquent expression. He was apparently celibate, before and after becoming a Catholic, a choice that allowed him to read voraciously and do the rest of us the very important favor of letting us know what was important in what he encountered there.

Like many, I wonder what now will become of First Things. It is surely a work worth furthering, and yet it was so much the work of Neuhaus himself it is hard to think of it without him. For what it's worth, I hope the attempt isn't made to mimic Neuhaus. Whoever takes it over could easily preserve the first part of the magazine intact, but put their own stamp on the back of the magazine.

For those who never became acquanted with Neuhaus, here is his article from the inaugural edition. It is a sort of declaration for what Neuhaus and his magazine stood for--and what many of his readers, like myself, believe about the relationship between Christianity, culture, and politics.

It is a tribute to Neuhaus's selflessness in the cause of truth that so many eulogies like this one focus on his works, rather than his person: that is the way, I am sure, he would have wanted it.

Solzhenitsyn is dead: Long live Aldous Huxley

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. He was a real life Winston Smith, George Orwell's character in 1984 who committed thought crimes against the Party. Only Solzhenitsyn, unlike the fictional Smith, actually got away with broadcasting the atrocities of totalitarianism and lived to see the demise of the Party.

While Winston Smith became a martyr, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a prophet.

But with the death of communism, it is no longer Orwell's vision that casts a shadow on humanity; rather, it is the vision of another writer who wrote his dystopia 16 years earlier than Orwell whose prophecies are now being fulfilled.

Writing a few years earlier than Orwell, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, wrote of a future world far different from that of 1984. As Neil Postman once observed, Orwell's world was one in which people were enslaved by the things they hate, while Huxley's was one in which people were enslaved by the things they love. In Huxley's world people are not ordered by any Big Brother to do things they don't like: they're merely expected to do all the things they do like--without restraint. They are to have all their desires satiated. No pleasure is to go unhad.

In fact, Solzhenitsyn had a few things to say about this himself.

The old Orwellian world of communist totalitarianism needed a Gulag to imprison people. The new Huxleyan world needs no prison camps: the slavery is evident anywhere there is a television, or a computer, or a cellphone.

Where is its prophet?

Lenny Bruce is dead. Again.

On Bob Dylan's album "Shot of Love," there is a song called "Lenny Bruce is Dead":

Lenny Bruce is dead,
But his ghost lives on and on.
Never did get any Golden Globe award,
Never made it to Synanon.
He was an outlaw,
That's for sure,
More of an outlaw than you ever were.
Lenny Bruce is gone
But his spirit's livin' on and on.

George Carlin is gone now too, and his spirit's livin' on and on. It was, in fact, the same spirit as Lenny Bruce's. But it's hard to be Lenny Bruce, particularly when you're not actually him.

As John Wohlstetter points out, Carlin didn't start out channeling Bruce:

Carlin's childhood ambition was to become his generation's Danny Kaye. Anyone who saw his 60s routines could see the resemblance. Carlin was funny, expressive, creative and clean. "There'll be a massacre at the fort at 9 PM tonight; White Eagle will lead...." Carlin even satirized the counter-culture he later embraced ("This is Al Sleet, your hippy-dippy weatherman....").

But, as Time Magazine points out all of this changed when Carlin saw Bruce perform:

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.

"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

Despite Carlin's Brucian pose, there was a big difference between the two comics. For one thing, Bruce was more of an outlaw than Carlin ever was: Carlin didn't get any Golden Globe Award either, but he did win the "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the American Comedy Awards. Bruce appeared on network television only six times, while Carlin ended up a familiar face on the tube. Like Bruce, Carlin employed obscenities in his act, but while Bruce attracted persecution for it, Carlin could only garner accolades. Bruce died young, of a drug overdose; Carlin lived to 71, on the wagon.

Carlin's attempt to take up Bruce's mantle as the revolutionary, underground, anti-establishment comic ultimately didn't work. As hard as he tried, Carlin just couldn't get in as much trouble as Bruce. Every attempt to be bad was met, not with outrage, but with applause. Carlin could never be Bruce because he arrived too late on the cultural scene.

Revolution only lasts about one generation, and then the next generation has to settle for wearing the t-shirts.

By the time Carlin came around, most of the barriers had been broken. He did his best to outrage people with the obscenities and the drug jokes and the atheism, but by that time no one was much interested in arresting people for such things--or even being outraged by them. We were too busy cheering them.

It was the very anti-establishment nature of Bruce that made him funny. But Carlin, like so many other modern comedians unable to distinguish themselves among the crowd of rebels, got less funny the more political and socially conscious he became. In an age when the heretics have the pulpit, it's hard for them to strike the heretical pose and still be funny: just look at Bill Maher and Al Franken.

It's too bad Carlin tried so hard to be Bruce. He could have just been Carlin and been just as funny, maybe even funnier.

He Was Legend: Charlton Heston, R.I.P.

I was discussing movies with a friend recently, and he told me the story of Lawrence Olivier's remark to Dustin Hoffman on "method acting" on the set of Marathon Man. Method acting is the idea that an actor should internalize the persona of the character he is playing in order the play that character more effectively. Marlon Brando is one of the most famous of the method actors, along with Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and Robert DeNiro. It originated at the Group Theatre in 1930s New York, and was furthered by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in later decades.

Hoffman was supposed to play a character who was tired and worn out, so he stayed up all the previous night. When Hoffman explained to Olivier, his costar in the movie who had a distaste for method acting, why he was so exhausted, Olivier allegedly quipped, "Try acting sometime."

Charlton Heston, who died Sunday at the age of 83, tried acting sometime. He was definitely of an older school, and once said of method acting, "If you get tied up with your own psyche, digging into your own belly button, you may learn something about yourself, but I'm not convinced you're going to find significant creative truth about some other character."

Heston, like other classical actors, didn't rely on channeling the emotions of the character; instead, he mastered the craft of acting. If you want to see this on display with another actor of this more traditional school, pop in a DVD of the Ten Commandments some time, and watch the scenes in which Yul Brunner, another practitioner of the craft of acting, and Heston played opposite each other. This was true acting by men who had mastered their art. They didn't need to feel what their characters felt: they knew how to act.

In today's cinema, you see the product of the increasingly advanced technology, which can make up for an actor's weaknesses. Today's actor does not have to pay as much attention to where he is facing or how he moves in a scene. The camera and fx people can take care of that. Actors like Heston, trained classically on the stage, needed no special effects or inventive camera work to do the job for them. They made the scene all by themselves.

Heston thrived in a cinematic era tailor-made for the square-jawed, athletic actor: the age of the epic. Who else could play Moses and improve on him? (Moses stuttered) The movies Heston made could not be done today. Although of all the forms of media movies are the least prone to the postmodernist denial of the grand metanarratives (those box office receipts do have their allure), such movies as Heston is best known for are an endangered species: historical epics in which the hero fights for the Good--and wins. We still have epics today, but for some reason filmmakers feel constrained either to place them in a fantasy setting, or, if they attempt history, they seem to feel obligated to pollute it with ludicrous politically correct anachronisms. You get either the Lord of the Rings (for which, let me make clear, I am sincerely thankful), in which heroes live--in another world, or The Kingdom of Heaven, in which you get Orlando Bloom making a speech to the besieged residents of Jerusalem which sounds less like a rallying cry and more like Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech.

There are exceptions to this generalization, the most remarkable of them being Gladiator, which, ironically, was produced by the same director as The Kingdom of God.

Ben Hur was probably Heston's best film, and was one of the best films of any era. I saw it again recently, and was struck by the power of every aspect of the film. I showed it for some of my students at our monthly "Classic Movie Theatre" at Highlands Latin School, and although it was long, there wasn't a student in the room (and I shouldn't need even to mention how tough a crowd modern students can be) who wasn't riveted by it.

He also became an unlikely star of the science fiction genre, playing the lead in one of the best science fiction films ever made: The Planet of the Apes. He also starred in Soylent Green and the Omega Man (based on the same book as was Will Smith's I am Legend), both of which are classics of the genre.

Heston was a conservative in a Hollywood dominated by the political left. In the 1980s, at the height of the scare over a "nuclear winter" (one in a long series of scares which includs global cooling, but the most recent example of which is global warming), Paul Newman took it upon himself to preach the nuclear winter gospel around the country. Heston hit the road to follow Newman, giving the other side at Newman's every stop. The controversy was consummated in a live television debate between Heston and Newman which turned out to be the most informative and articulate expression of both sides of the issue that had yet been seen.

Heston's death comes within a few weeks of that of his friend William F. Buckley. But is wasn't only their conservatism that united them. Heston read one of Buckley's columns on a matter of mutual interest: "Here I'd thought all along that it was your prose that impressed me," he told Buckley, in a letter that ran in the June 12, 1981 edition of Buckley's National Review Magazine, "or your magazine, or even your wry and disheveled urbanity." He continued:

Not so, I now perceive. Our bond is far deeper and more instinctual: we are Brothers in Peanut Butter. Think of the happy hours we can spend debating the merits of Skippy versus Deaf Smith County. When you add peanuts to commercial blends, should they be dry-roasted or salted? Does cashew butter count? ... Why do hotels laugh when you order peanut butter from room service? (Because they are knaves and fools, that's why. You must carry your own in a plastic container, Bill, surely you know that.) In any event, I see our relationship has entered a new dimension. I look forward to exploring it.

He was, in other words, in addition to being a famous actor, a normal person--a very extraordinary normal person. It says something about him that, in a Hollywood famous for its serial relationships, he was married to his wife Lydia for 64 years.

Heston narrated a popular recording of the New Testament. But he not only read it: he believed it. He was a confessing Christian, and now that he is dead, he has undoubtedly met Someone who looks more like God than he did.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: The superfluous man

Somebody, I think it was G. K. Chesterton, said that a man is never truly successful until he becomes superfluous. If this is the measure of success, then William F. Buckley, Jr. was truly a successful man.

William F. Buckley died today. Buckley was probably the most influential conservative of the 20th century. His influence was made manifest through both his magazine, National Review, which he founded in 1955, and his television program "Firing Line", a nationally syndicated interview program that ran for 23 years. Through his writing and his voice--always curious because of its accent which was impossible to identify but hard to resist--Buckley literally changed the course of modern American politics.

It would be fair to say that, without him, there would have been no Barry Goldwater, no Ronald Reagan, and no modern conservative movement. Oh, and no Rush Limbaugh. Depending on who you are, that will come as a commendation or a critique.

I remember snooping around one day in 1979 in the periodicals section of the University of California at Santa Barbara Library, and coming across a copy of National Review magazine. I opened it and was immediately charmed by the cheeky sense of humor and the iconoclastic attitude toward the liberal establishment that ruled without opposition in those days. I remember taking out the subscription card and sending it in, with what then seemed a good hunk of the meager balance in my bank account at the time (oh, the life of a poor college student!). I proceeded to read every issue--letters and all--for 8 straight years.

It was my education in politics and culture. In those days, it was one of only a small handful of conservative magazines, with a circulation under 10,000--small as magazines go. It addressed not only policy questions but literature and the arts. Its scope put to shame the narrow policy wonkishness of modern conservative literature with its shallow slogans and cultural tunnel vision. It had a samizdat air to it. You felt you were a part of an underground movement. Forget Che Guevara, he was mainstream (still is).

At that time conservatives were in the catacombs--only we were armed.

Buckley made his mark as scourge of a liberalism that had grown fat on taxpayer dollars and intellectually lazy by having gone intellectually unchallenged for so long. It simply didn't know what to make of Buckley, whose quick wit and formidable vocabulary placed him outside of any of the stereotypes liberals had of conservatives.

Buckley once told William Rusher, then the publisher of National Review, that he didn't consider himself all that brilliant: it was the quickness, not the depth of his intellect that had stood him in such good stead in his confrontations with the left. Here, as in so many other things, he was exactly on target.

In his many confrontations with the cultural Philistines he was seldom without a sense of humor, and indeed his amicability with those he crossed swords with could even rankle his friends. Rusher said he once upbraided him because every time he debated John Kenneth Galbraith, the left-wing economist (which he frequently did), the discussion often ended in good natured ribbing. Rusher wanted victories: Buckley wanted converts.

People have forgotten the political world before the 1980's. The media at the time was completely controlled by the left in every respect. Conservative publications were few and far between, talk radio had yet to come of age at all, and conservative commentators in the mainstream media were virtually non-existent--except for Buckley. How "Firing Line" ever got syndicated by PBS is still mystery to me.

A lot of people talk about how communism was the great uniting force for conservatism in those days, and there is something to be said for that. But I think for the most part that the grease that kept the wheels of conservatism going in those days was the revolutionary nature of the movement. Conservatives had a remnant mentality: They had to stick together.

With a few exceptions, such as organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a handful of others, today's conservative movement has split into factions which don't even necessarily talk to each other any more except when they have to see each other at the local polling place where they are probably still voting for the same candidates.

The economic libertarians have embraced a sort of economic utilitarianism that sacrifices everything else to the bottom line. And religious conservatives have considered their political obligations as ending in few specific social issues beyond which they simply consider it impious to go. But both of these factions share a common malady: they are no longer intellectually serious. There has indeed been what R. Emmett Tyrell (whose American Spectator was another fixture of the old, intellectually vibrant conservatism) called, the "conservative crack-up."

There was a time when Buckley could say (and did) that "all the philosophical action is on the right." It would be hard to say that today.

In its prime, National Review bestrode all these factions and kept them talking to each other--even if it was only to disagree. Conservative intellectuals didn't only debate the left: they debated each other--in the National Review. Today, sniping and backbiting has replaced debate among conservatives, and it happens between conservative institutions and organs of opinion, not within them.

National Review was largely Republican in its party allegiances, but it wasn't, like so many conservative entities today, out merely to get its people elected: it was out to change a culture. And it did.

Buckley was never one to wear his religious beliefs on his sleeve--it didn't fit his blue blood manner to do so. But his favorite episode of "Firing Line" seemed to be his interview with Malcolm Muggeridge on the issue of religious faith. He replayed it again and again to the point of tiresomeness. Muggeridge was a Christian convert, and an articulate one. Muggeridge's intellectual approach to religion obviously appealed to Buckley, and he dubbed him "St. Mug." One hopes that he valued Muggeridge's belief more than his delivery.

In my favorite of all Buckley's many newspaper columns, "Pitcairn Lives," about the descendants of the mutiny on the Bounty, who now inhabit one of the world's most secluded islands, Buckley recounted how a friend of his had wanted to visit Pitcairn Island all his life, and finally did, spending "a rapt couple of days" there. The tourist ships come into the harbor, and the natives rowed out their longboat to visit and sell trinkets:

     On bidding an Islander who had befriended him good-bye, he said: "Maybe I'll see you next year."
     "No," the Islander replied, sadly but fatefully. "People only come to Pitcairn once. Good-bye."
     ...At high-tea time they are all back on board, four generations of Islanders. They spend three happy hours, communicating their cheer. And, after sunset, they board their longboat--80 per cent of Pitcairn's population--and sing out their happy/melancholy farewell songs.
     "In the sweet by and by/In the beautiful land beyond the sky . . ./We shall part never more, when we meet/On the be-yoo-tee-fool shore . . ."

People like Buckley only come once, and then you have to say goodbye.

Bergman

The only two consistent views of the world are Christianity or existentialism. Everything else is playing pretend.

Ingmar Bergman, a partisan of the latter view, died this last week. One of the Swedish filmaker's predominant themes was the consequences of the non-existence of God. You can see it on full display in what is perhaps his greatest film, The Seventh Seal. It is a stark and frightening movie.

Unlike the new atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, Bergman, along with existentialist writers like Nietzsche and Sartre, faced their atheism honestly and squarely. The new atheists try to hang on to some sort of absolute morality or meaning in the world despite the fact that the only rational grounding these beliefs can possibly have is God.

Bergman and his fellow existentialists knew that there are two alternatives available to men: a world in which God exists and there is meaning, or one in which he does not exist and everything is absurd. Take your pick.

I don't agree with the existentialists, but at least they are intellectually consistent, which is more than can be said of the new atheists.