Yankee Doodle
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (“bay-bay baxwell”) [the Beatles]
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Bouncing Around the Room [Phish]
Lie in Our Graves (“splish splash”) [the Dave Matthews Band]
Walk On [U2]
Here Comes the Sun (“comes a sun”) [the Beatles]
In a Little While (“Mommy’s song”) [U2]
Amazing Grace
Rock-a-Bye Baby
Proudest Monkey (“monkey song”) [Dave Matthews]
Indiana [The Samples]

I wonder with mild despair when the filth of our culture will trespass upon her idyllic life, which filth my wife and I will then resist at the risk of being called assorted names that people employ to avoid thinking. I read somewhere that the average first exposure of American children to pornography is five years old —- statistic that I cannot at the moment verify but which does not seem implausible considering the ubiquity of porn on the internet, and the contemptible little tricks used by pornographers to redirect web surfers to their sites (explore what happens when you mistakenly enter whitehouse.com into your browser instead of whitehouse.gov).

I cannot think of a class of people more singularly loathsome than professional pornographers. They would, leaning on the facile complacence of the cultural elite, destroy human sexuality, replacing it with a predatory barbarism more akin to that of most of the animal world.

And what can we do about it? Well, nothing, say the First Amendment absolutists; our society is an open society; all questions are open questions, and cannot be subject to restriction by the state. (Although we should always remember what Willmoore Kendall observed: when the absolutists say, “all questions are open questions,” they really mean, “all questions are open questions except for the question of whether all questions are open questions”; that question is closed.) And why would you want to do anything about pornography anyway? they continue: pornography, like any other media, has no effect of behavior. Intelligent people know the difference between reality and artificial media.

It strikes me as illuminating that only the First Amendment can be respectably absolutized in this manner in public discourse. If someone advanced an absolutist interpretation of, say, the Second Amendment, arguing that the right to keep and bear arms included a right to own a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an M1 Battle Tank, he would be laughed out of the room, and quite rightly. But with respect to the First, absolutism carries the debate without even deploying real arguments. One day we will overcome this mindless cant, this puritanism of the depraved; whether it will be in time to recover an authentic human sexuality is another matter.

That a call for dialogue would lead to violence should be no surprise. The notion that offering concessions can defuse Middle Eastern conflicts is one of the most destructive myths of American foreign policy . . . Dialogue may work among democracies, but dictatorships at best interpret engagement as a go-ahead for business as usual, and at worst see a weakness to exploit.

Mr. Hanson:

While [Europeans] will be the first to criticize us should we stumble, there is nevertheless a general feeling that the temperamental, half-crazed Americans are now going to be unleashed to settle accounts for the Western world in general.

But Europe is gripped by lurking trepidation about the clarifying effect a certain black day last September had for its ally across the Atlantic:

They fear now that [it] was a macabre liberating experience for Americans, and realize that we don't much care about European carping when our greatest buildings and best citizens are vaporized. Yet, when you tell a European precisely that —- and as politely as possible —- he is either shocked or genuinely hurt.

It won’t do, of course, to demand that the State Department abandon its charter as our diplomatic face to the world, to demand, in other words, that it abjure prudence; nor will it do to castigate Europe for voicing its anxieties. But it should also be realized that the priorities of both the State Department and Europe are not necessarily ordered rightly, that is, with the protection of American citizens as the unchallenged vital principle.

Arthritis, various operations and Parkinson's disease have transformed the vigorous man who visited Canada last in 1985 into a shuffling, quivering wreck. Parkinson's freezes the muscles, bends the back, stifles the voice and makes ordinary movements an exhausting battle. The strength of will it must take to travel all this way and then deliver an address to a throng in the summer heat is unimaginable.

Yet he does it, and with joy . . . [His] smiles brought tears to many who saw them; he so plainly wanted to be there, spending the last measures of his failing strength to inspire others.

An Ottawa Citizen columnist remarks on the young people who came to see him:

They came here because they are Catholics and this is their Pope. They came because he is not merely Pope, but an extraordinary man, a real man, in a world of straw men, victims, and cowards.

And Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, in a powerful essay, marvels at the hope which he conveys and inspires:

In October 1978, in his first homily as Pope, John Paul repeatedly declared, "Be not afraid." That phrase —- echoing the words of the risen Christ to his despairing disciples —- has been the constant refrain of his pontificate. In a world in which there is so much to fear, some have been led to say that John Paul is an optimist. He is not an optimist but a man of irrepressible hope. Optimism is a disposition to see what we want to see and not see what we don't want to see. Optimism is a matter of optics, a form of selective blindness. Hope looks at reality unblinkingly, seeing all that is fearful but insisting that we finally have not a right and have not a reason to despair.

John Paul II is a very great man. We shall not forget his contribution to God’s Creation.

Update: Here is the full text of the Holy Father's homily yesterday.

But the overriding question —- the one that dwarfs everything else —- is what to do about the huge tax cut that Bush pushed through Congress back when those mythical budget surpluses were still clouding most people's vision.

“Dwarfs everything else”? The gravest physical attack in American history; a problematic, multifaceted, global war; cyclical retrenchment of an overwrought economy; a series of record-shattering corporate bankruptcies; hardly a prominent public institution untouched by debilitating scandal and concomitant distrust; all these things impinging upon the framework of American society in rapid, violent staccato, and Mr. Broder, that fount of wisdom and temperance, blames a measly little tax cut, the effects of which will not be felt in full for nearly a decade. Please.

I say again: Thank goodness for that defamed and careworn little tax cut —- it is our only ballast against the kind of encroachment by the state upon the prerogatives of the individual not seen in such breadth since the New Deal; an encroachment, in one of history’s delightful ironies, shepherded by an administration noteworthy for its commitment to conservative principles. (For a sharp exegesis of Mr. Broder’s whole article, see blogger Christopher Badeaux.)

“As far as I can remember, this has always been our family's breadbasket,” [shop-owner Arnold] Rubin says. “I think it's atrocious that for the sake of a private corporation like The New York Times, somebody has the right to take it away from us.” He might understand if the block were being condemned for a city road or hospital. “But no one has explained to me why they have to do this so The New York Times can have a big new skyscraper here.”

Two other groups of property owners are challenging the condemnation under both the U.S. Constitution and the New York state constitution. Their chances are considered slim. New York has a long tradition of using eminent domain aggressively . . . and in this case the landowners are arrayed against the combined forces of City Hall, a leading developer, and the country's most powerful newspaper.

As long as you say the right things, utter the right pieties to signal your deep sympathy for the less fortunate, you can basically act any way you wish with impunity.

For those who love liberty, “land reform” is among the most fearsome phrases in the English language; for what is almost invariably denoted by it is the systematic expropriation by the state of the property of individuals, usually under the auspices of egalitarian sympathy for the peasants or some such grandiloquent rumination; and thus what is also denoted, more broadly, is the weakening and even obliteration of property rights, a cornerstone of the rule of law. “Land reform” is Robert Mugabe’s euphemism in Zimbabwe for organized plunder of some of the choice farmland in Africa, which, on account of its ownership by whites, makes a vulnerable target for state-sponsored theft on a vast scale, and which, on account of its unproductiveness in the hands of the new, unskilled owners, is now contributing to a horrible famine. It was Stalin’s mantra, as it was Mao’s, when they unleashed egalitarian barbarism to occasion two of history’s greatest man-made catastrophes, both also famines. Less obvious calamities were perpetrated by benighted land-reformers Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and the Shah of Iran in the 1960s, both on plans and formulations concocted by abstraction-inebriated intellectuals from the West; both of which insidiously set their respective nations on the path of chaos, misery and ultimately tyranny.

It is truly astonishing to reflect on the extent to which the security of private ownership is treated with indifference if not outright contempt by the world’s educated elites, despite its demonstrated indispensability to a functioning economy and social order. The insecurity of property in the Third World may be the single most important factor in explaining the state of squalor which persists in the face of so much well-meaning activity to alleviate it. The pulverizing essence of it is this: Once the state has shown a disposition to plunder the property of some, whatever soothing platitudes are offered justify it, there is no reason to trust that it will not do so again, and again, and again. Tom Bethell examined the ruinous record of land reform in a penetrated essay back in 1985:

[In some places] it turned out that new owners could not sell their land for thirty years. This was intended to prevent them from selling it back to those from whom it had been taken. The effect was to weaken property rights considerably, because those who cannot realize the value of what they own cannot really be said to own it, and will certainly be deterred from improving it . . . Moreover, the new owners weren’t allowed to rent out “their” land either, because if they did they would become… absentee landlords! And subject to expropriation in turn. This destructive and tyrannical provision . . . effectively returns a country to serfdom.

Even in the United States, this bastion of free enterprise and rule of law, property rights are looked on askance by a great many elites. Leftists and liberals from here to The Nation who profess a heartfelt commitment to personal privacy nonetheless countenance with perfect equanimity the annual violation of privacy that comes with the Sixteenth Amendment (national income tax), in accord with which every income-earning American citizen must lay bare in exquisite detail all his economic activity for the previous year, with the burden of proof in any dispute resting on him not the state.

This economic inquisition is so multifarious, its instruments so cacophonous that it has generated entire industries dedicated exclusively to mitigating the burden of tax disclosure and compliance. There is perhaps a melancholy delight to be had in this fact: that human enterprise is so irrepressible as to develop profitable and respected professions parasitically coupled to the state’s rapaciousness. But the melancholy does not abide delight for long.

A man’s urge to produce pornographic material using the likeness of children; a woman’s license to abort her child as it descends the birth canal; a student’s desire not to be even mildly offended in public debate —- these things our intellectual elite regard serenely as civil rights. But not the right to security of private ownership of property; that remains controversial even in principle.

A Lightning Rod is designed to attract and absorb the energy of a lightning strike, preventing houses from being damaged. So when people say that Attorney General John Ashcroft is a lightning rod, they're right. That's exactly what he's supposed to be —- attracting all of the rancor of the left, keeping the rest of the administration free from attacks. It's a perfect role for Ashcroft —- a stubborn yet ultimately humble man —- and one more reason why his appointment was the smartest administrative move of this administration thus far.

For those interested, Jay Nordlinger wrote a good sympotic piece on the intemperance and hysteria provoked among liberal elites by Ashcroft.

His response interests me here to the extent that it helps illuminate the lineaments of this question: What does it mean to confess candidly that one cannot conceive of the reasons behind another man’s thought? There is a narrowness of intellect, characteristic of modern man, which needs addressing; a straitening of perspective; a refusal to take seriously on their own terms the ideas of others, and in particular the ideas of those who came before us. This is not garden-variety disagreement: “I can see what you mean; but I cannot think that way myself because I genuinely think this way.” No, we are talking here about the much more appalling statement: “Your thought is alien to me.” To which I am tempted to oppose the luminous remark of Terence —- “I am man; nothing human is alien to me” —- but that seems facile and incomplete.

Nevertheless, it is quite true that I can conceive of, at least intellectually, the reasoning (such as it is) and thought behind even those whom I find most repugnant. The Fascist in his visceral rejection of Christendom has seized upon human will as his pagan deity, through which he anticipates a violent overthrow of the decadent bourgeois order he so despises. The Communist arrives at his dark conclusions via the path of despair, bludgeoned as he is by the unspeakable injustice of that same bourgeois order; which order, he concurs with the Fascist, must be overturned, violently if necessary. His despair generates an adamantine ideology, once referred to as dialectical materialism, by which everything is subordinated to the goal of Revolution. Both of these monomanias are reactionary movements, in the literal and precise sense that they are reactions to something; in this case, reactions to the order of bourgeois liberalism which surged forth from the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment to encompass the Western world under its subsidiaries Capitalism and Democracy.

So if these monomanias, which produced such unparalleled misery, can be approached and ultimately assimilated by those whose opposition to them is unquestioned, what does it mean that some not insubstantial portion of people, including my friend, record the stunning fact that to them the citizen’s desire that treason be punished severely is simply incomprehensible? Or that a society’s right to demand loyalty from its citizens, and limit the tolerance it extends to disloyalty, is also incomprehensible? Not just wrong, mind you, but incomprehensible. We must assume, based on the principle augured, that any sympathy for the Athenian Assembly when it executed the agitator Socrates is equally incomprehensible. And this despite Socrates’ own respect for said Assembly, evident in his unwillingness to attempt escape and stoic resignation to his fate.

That Socrates himself is a sympathetic figure is self-evident; but whence came this narrowness of mind which renders the Assembly utterly unsympathetic? Modern man has conceived of Plato’s dialogues as a full, unqualified endorsement of the open society, with ramifying and unlimited rights extended to the individual; but he has very infrequently considered the reciprocal duties of the individual to society. And now we must face squarely the charge by modern man that the very assertion of those duties is incomprehensible.

As I've pointed out, nearly every problem that Nader identifies is due not just to the corruption of big businessmen, but equally or more so to the size and scope of government itself. His argument boils down to this: “Government has sold its soul to big business; therefore, government should be given more power to investigate big business's influence.” Why not this: “Government has sold its soul to big business; therefore, we the citizens should ask why the government has so much power and money that it had anything of use to big business in the first place.”

The essence of the problem here is the concentration of power, a trend which is almost always more salient a feature of the state than of any individual corporation or cohort of corporations. Virtually every corporate abuse eliciting howls of outrage among politicians has its own doppelganger in the practice of politicians in their function as caretakers of the modern state.

Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and to hold public office. Nearly one-10th of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is Arab; there is even a mosque in the Knesset building for those who are Muslim. One of the justices of Israel's Supreme Court is an Arab; so is a minister in Ariel Sharon's Cabinet. Arabs are active in Israeli commerce, media, education, and law. A few years ago, a young Arab woman was even named Miss Israel.

Meanwhile, as Jay Nordlinger often remarks, “In Muslim nations, Jewish members of the parliament . . . ah, that’s right: There aren’t any.”

Aside from economic incentives for remaining moderate, the form of Islam practiced in Algeria seems to be relatively reasonable. Unlike some other Arab countries, women can vote in Algeria, hold office, and engage in business. They can enter into contracts and pursue the professions. In fact, there are Algerian women in both houses of Parliament and they compose 25% of the judiciary. Obviously with such achievements to their credit women have similar access to education as men.

Mr. Tyrrell reports that the State Department is also full of admiration for Algeria’s “tenacious and faithful” efforts in resisting terrorism.

Success for moderate, pluralist Islam in Algeria could mark a important triumph for the forces of reason, not only as a human victory for the Algerians, but also as a strategic victory for America:

Algeria is situated in northwest Africa along the Mediterranean in an area accessible by geography and trade to Western Europe and, for that matter, to the Americas, as shipping goes that way. Algeria's economic relationship to the United States is strong. It is the United States' fifth-largest market in the Middle East and North Africa. Algeria exports $3 billion in petroleum and liquid natural gas to the United States. Its daily export of 4 million barrels of oil to the United States is scheduled to increase to 5 million shortly.

It strikes me as altogether unfathomable that so few seem to be paying any attention, among journalists, strategists, and politicians. (Let us not forget, among the exceptions, the indomitable Glenn Reynolds.)

Nevertheless, the thing is a persistent feature of our politics. And it seems impervious to empirical evidence —- evidence, say, from countless studies which demonstrate the potential efficacy of a flat tax of around 20%, paid via a postcard, to sustain current obligations levied by our legitimate representatives on the state.

The average tax burden in America usually fluctuates between 40 – 50%, which means in effect that many of us have just recently, in June or July, begun working for ourselves and our families, rather than the state. Assume that a large portion of that burden is indeed dedicated to necessary functions of various levels of government; am I to still acquiesce in the injunction that several months out of my year’s income should taken to support a welfare state of nameless and faceless (to me) poor people? That acquiescence, for the socialist, indicates my personal compassion, even though there is precisely nothing personal about it.

The dominance of this thunderous fait accompli is predicated on its controlling the form, rather than the substance of the debate; so that opponents of progressive taxation must exert fierce rhetorical and intellectual energy merely to correct unexamined assumptions in order to have their substantive arguments taken seriously. Most have not the time or energy; and are left whispering in dark, smoky rooms that maybe, just maybe, there would be greater compassion in allowing a man to keep his income that he may support and educate his children while simultaneously caring for his elderly mother and father.

And from that position of obscurity and public opprobrium, that same man must endure the preening self-congratulations of the socialists as they celebrate the compassionate taxation regime through which they expiate their spiritual guilt by redistributing the property of one man to another, both of whom are little more than inhuman abstractions in socialist mind.

With the same detachment, it is not hard to discern a surrogate notion of Calvinist Predestination in the fusing of evolutionary science to the materialist philosophy, which then together posit the reality of an unassailable chain of cause and effect in the development of the universe. The ugliness in this intellectual revivalism consists in the deracinated arrogance of the contemporary world pouring its contempt on the foundations of its own boastful ideas and ideals. Today’s Puritans hurl the world “puritan” adjectivally at their adversaries as a term of abuse, plainly without reflecting on the very methods they employ. And the materialists seize upon the rich patrimony of Predestination to assail their enemies among the believers, blissfully insensate to the solid fact that this selfsame battle was fought out inconclusively within Christianity four and a half centuries ago.

What the good Senator and his fellow inquisitors ought to be more concerned about; what is far more damaging to a democratic republic than the “appearance” of corruption among politicians, or even the real thing; what condition may actually threaten us with serious political debasement —- is corrupt voters. The source of power in a republican system of government is —- remember? —- the people. The voter is the central public official. If he becomes irretrievably debased then the system cannot function.

I mean, of course, a large mass of voters; individuals of a corrupt nature are with us always and everywhere, irrespective of the political system in place about them; but here I speak of the of a large and influential block of voters who are corrupt. How do voters become corrupt? Well, consider this: The issue shaping up to be among the more contentious in the legislative effort by President Bush to consolidate a host of governmental functions into one federal agency devoted to domestic security is the ease with which employees in the proposed agency can be dismissed for incompetence. Right now, it is virtually impossible to fire federal employees. On March 11, exactly six months after the 9/11 attacks, the INS sent letters to a Florida flight school notifying it that student visas had been approved for two of the hijackers. Soon after, reports revealed that the four employees responsible for this pathetic ineptitude were neither dismissed nor even subjected to disciplinary action. A few other facts: (1) there are an estimated 180 separate race and gender preference formulas which govern the hiring of federal employees; (2) there are four independent agencies available for dismissed federal employees to appeal their dismissal, which agencies are utilized for discrimination claims at ten times the rate of similar mechanisms in the private sector; (3) in a recent study, out of a pool of over 100,000 federal employees identified as poor performers, only 3 percent were removed, while 88 percent were given raises; and (4) the entire pay schedule for federal employees is entirely based on seniority, totally obliterating any incentives for individual achievement or excellence.

And the mere suggestion that this regime of ironclad job security should be reformed has certain legislators bristling. Now, to trace the genesis of this reaction is not at all difficult, for most of the angry legislators are those with large constituencies of unionized federal employees; and most are Democrats, a substantial portion of whose electoral base is public employees.

So we have this enervating state of squalor, where incompetence is rewarded and enterprise punished mercilessly; and a detached observer would be forgiven for pronouncing our democratic system based to an astonishing degree on little more than bribery of voters. Could the peril of this bureaucratic mindset be any more obvious than in the case of the FBI, where unquantifiable human talents like intuition and prescience —- precisely the talents indispensable for investigative work in the murky world of international terrorism —- were dampened by an overarching culture of careerist caution and conformity?

John Stuart Mill, the great nineteenth century theorist of liberalism, declared it to be self-evident that when any voter receives financial relief from the state, he should be disfranchised, so as to prevent the use of the state for personal gain. The application of such a principle to political reality would probably put the Democratic Party out of business; but it would also put a great number of publicly-subsidized businesses out of business: welfarism is a disease with both individual and corporate symptoms.

State largess, distributed lavishly to those who vote the right way, inevitably, of course, assumes for its beneficiaries the mantle of entitlement; and then, to paraphrase Burke, the politicians and interest groups are driven to defend their error as if it were their inheritance. We should always remember as well that our regime of entitlements depends for its very existence on the confiscation of a portion of the property of our society’s most productive citizens. When the mob bribes someone, at least it uses its own money.

In the future when we go to this store, I’m putting a small piece of merchandise in [my two-year-old daughter’s] pants, so she sets off the alarm if she passes through the security gate.

That is a great idea!

It seems that our more serious men in Washington want to bolster the rule of law by strengthening the incentive to choose right from wrong. Incentives matter. If you tax something more you get less of it. If you tax something less you get more of it. A ten-year jail term for rotten corporate apples — or their accountants — is a huge legal tax on wrongful actions.

Mr. Kudlow is a noted champion of what is known as the investor class, the inspiring result of several decades of economic brilliance which produced a vast democratization of corporate investment, spreading wealth more broadly than ever before in the history of the free enterprise system.

In no uncertain terms, this new political movement is forcing Washington to renew the rule of law, strengthen accounting and financial standards across the board, and restore a proper incentive system that will return Adam Smith’s ethical epicenter to the greatest wealth-creating machine in all of history. The days of egocentric and corrupt Soviet-style corporatism have come to an end. In the stock market, moral amnesia is dead.

I am less inclined to share Mr. Kudlow’s optimism, but it is infectious, and, one hopes, well-founded.

Some Determinists fancy that Christianity invented a dogma like free will for fun —- a mere contradiction. This is absurd. You have the contradiction whatever you are. Determinists tell me, with a degree of truth, that Determinism makes no difference to daily life. That means —- that although the Determinist knows men have no free will, yet he goes on treating them as if they had.

The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.

The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic.

It is not a question between mysticism and rationality. It is a question between mysticism and madness. For mysticism, and mysticism alone, has kept men sane from the beginning of the world. All the straight roads of logic lead to some Bedlam, to Anarchism or to passive obedience, to treating the universe as a clockwork of matter or else as a delusion of mind. It is only the Mystic, the man who accepts the contradictions, who can laugh and walk easily through the world.

Well said.

For what it’s worth, I greet this news with a mix of excitement and deep apprehension. Hollywood’s approach to history has traditionally been, shall we say, less than scrupulous in its rendering of facts. Indeed, one of the reported directors under consideration for an Alexander project is Oliver Stone, a man who despite his unquestionable talent has sadly made a career out of shrewdly falsifying history. Will Hollywood even approach offering something serious and worthwhile in its depiction of the tremendous struggle between Carthage and Rome? There may be in a purely historical sense no subject more deserving of seriousness than this, for in this we enter the cradle of our civilization, and the struggle which would decide its fate. Will Hollywood show it and other touchstones in Western history the respect they merit?

The elected representatives of the people should be publicly debating this radical assertion of executive power, and whether some sort of preventive detention policy is necessary, and how to guard against error and abuse. At the same time, Congress should be open to giving the president any new investigative powers he really needs, and perhaps creating a special federal court to handle the cases of suspected international terrorists arrested on the domestic front. Instead, Congress has been largely passive.

Mr. Taylor is especially percipient when he notes that the squalid practice of gerrymandering congressional districts to insure near unchallengeable single-party dominance, which commands the quiet connivance of both national parties, bears a substantial burden of blame for the decline of legislative authority. A polarized House of Representatives precludes hardheaded compromise, and therefore undermines the republican nature of the body. Meanwhile, the Senate’s supermajority requirement transforms that body into little more than “an obstacle course” when swiftness and agility are called on to draft law.

Into the vacuum left by the decline of Congress has rushed the eager avarice of the other branches of government, with the Supreme Court turning to legislative divination about death penalty consensus and the executive branch essentially writing a new legal system on its own. Congress must act; must assert its constitutionally-granted supremacy in legislation; and must finally renew the republican nature of a republic at war.

The specter of Australia outlawing various things deemed offensive including the video game Grand Theft Auto 3, and the fear of a boarder Western effort to restrict “anything that smacks of fun,” has elicited howls of irritation from many libertarians. Now, indubitably, the impulse to restrict the offensive, be it art, music, or even the most debased of dissipations can and does on occasion overturn common sense. Infuse that impulse with the emasculating influence of political correctness and one risks overturning reason and indeed threatening liberty. It is unmistakably damaging to American children when crusading educrats ban, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it includes the dreaded n-word; it may even be in a certain sense ridiculous to ban a video game. Very well; but this boilerplate does precisely nothing to illuminate the real question here, which is at base a question of political philosophy: where do we draw the line, that is, when is the state justified in deploying coercive force to silence cultural effusions reckoned to be beyond toleration?

The ideological libertarians will reply, with perhaps minor qualifications, “never”; and their position bespeaks of a kind of polished consistency that has much to commend to it. Moreover, it benefits from an ally of immense advantage in the form of contemporary First Amendment jurisprudence, which has produced an interpretation of said Amendment essentially absolutist in character.

This advantage —- the advantage of popular perceptions of the First Amendment —- is a very difficult challenge to answer; indeed, the only real answer to it is to say simply that these popular perceptions, and the jurisprudence upon which they rest, are wrong. And there is abundant evidence to support the assertion that modern First Amendment interpretation is in error, a mere two examples of which I will adumbrate here:

(1) Why is the First Amendment to the Constitution just that: an amendment, rather than an integral part of the basic document? Did the Framers somehow forget about the critical issues later comprising the Amendment? No indeed: they took up a proposal for a Bill of Rights, including such articulation of free speech, press, etc. as now appears in the First Amendment, at the original Philadelphia Convention of 1787 —- took it up and unanimously rejected it. And they rejected it for reasons not immediately clear to our modern, enlightened minds. They rejected it because they feared that such constitutional provision, so sweeping in its scope, would ultimately become an instrument for federal aggrandizement against a most important guarantor of the people’s liberty, namely, the states. Which brings us to the second piece of evidence:

(2) The language in the First Amendment most routinely neglected by today’s commentariat happens to be precisely that language which was most crucial in the minds of the Framers: Specifically, I am referring to a single word, the first word of the Bill of Rights: “Congress.” It is Congress which “shall make no law”; Congress which is restrained from legislating to abridge the freedom of speech, press, assembly, petition; Congress which feels the sting of rebuke in the blunt language of the Amendment. And by inference, those aspects of republican governance thus removed from the purview of Congress are deferred to the several states. This principle is reinforced by the Tenth Amendment, which reads simply: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

What is lost in all our contemporary debates over censorship is the crucial, one might even say singular element of the political philosophy of the American Founding Fathers which manifests their true genius: the principle of federalism. The poverty of modern ideas has been a recurring theme on this weblog, and here we encounter it again: that the American people are generally unfamiliar with the essence of the genius of their political system. American federalism is an experiment in self-government, and depends as much on separate, overlapping and competing levels of government as it does on separate, overlapping and competing branches; all of which serve to provide angles of approach for we, the people to guide and direct our government.

Would it be too horrible to bear that culturally-conservative Georgia might outlaw a certain video game while liberal California refrain from doing so? Is it too much an offense to our homogenous sensibilities, or are we too habituated to the crude application of power, that cosmopolitan New York might sustain generous opportunities for decadent music and art that traditionalist Utah would restrict vigorously? The array of issues to which federalism should apply is appalling when one considers how few it actually does apply. Abortion, pornography, marijuana, firearms, even video games and hip hop music. What is preserved by this principle, delicately, with little fanfare, is the ultimate right of exit. Move to Connecticut if you do not like New Jersey’s obscenity laws: the commute to Manhattan is hardly any longer. What is also preserved, as a mathematical certainty, is the influence of the individual citizen vis-à-vis the legal regime of his community. Lobbying state legislatures or city councils or school broads is less difficult and intimidating than taking on the professional lobbyists of Capitol Hill. And so what is more broadly preserved is the principle of self-government.

Now the ideological libertarians —- the thoughtful ones —- have already heard all these arguments, and have repudiated them, asseverating instead that America was founded as an open society and that no level of government can justifiably restrict a citizen’s speech. They admire federalism, just not when it comes to the First Amendment. I disagree with their reading of American political philosophy; but at least they are taking seriously the philosophy itself. For those thoughtless absolutists, those glib denouncers of anyone who suggests that producers should exhibit a modicum of respect for basic decency in their products; for those with extravagant claims about the slippery slope between banning Eminem and banning Shakespeare; for those who declare obdurately that any work of art, no matter how offensive, deserves a place of honor at publicly-financed museums; for them I confess to having very little patience. It is a mark yet again of the impoverishment of public discourse that the burden of proof in this rests on those who affirm the principle that what a man puts into his mind will have an effect on what comes out, rather than on those who say that what he sees and hears is utterly irrelevant to what he thinks and how he behaves. And I must also confess to doubting that the latter folks have ever given much thought to the logical consequences of their beliefs. How does the vast edifice of propaganda in the history of the modern nation-state square with their epistemological theory? The constant infusion of the public square in the Islamic world with images and messages glorifying the death cult of martyrdom is unrelated, one must assume from their theory, to the horrifying phenomenon of suicide bombers.

Where these romancers of materialism make their most grievous error is with their conception of the human mind —- a conception which rigidly subordinates mind to matter. It is only through the manipulative alchemy of this conceit that they can get away with claiming that the ideas and images which penetrate a culture have no influence on what is produced by that culture. In fact the ideas and images are near-total in their influence, a verity which has been marching inexorably through the realms of intellect ever since Einstein deposed the Newtonian permanence of matter.

From what does a man so fervently desire liberation? From what must he be emancipated? In my view the answer is quite plain in objective reality; its apparent obscurity consists in the choking haze which has descended upon Western minds in their modern state of implacable reaction against the cradle of their youth.

The Western intellectual who bodies forth from the revolutions of modernity cannot even for a moment think or speak objectively about Christianity. For so long he has achieved psychological repose, miserably inadequate though it may be, in a sort of perpetual rebellion against the Church of his fathers that he can no longer even approach it with basic human detachment. He is like the teenager whose rebellion from his parents is so all-consuming and ill-considered that he is incapable of conceiving them as human beings with experiences not unlike his own. The intellectual has dehumanized the Church, just as the teenager dehumanizes his mother and father, makes of them abstract, alien figures of intense but uncertain and in a sense insincere disdain.

Therefore the Western intellectual has chosen to deify emancipation, to make it his object of worship; even though, in a kind of consummate irony, only in the Church can he find true emancipation –- emancipation from that which enslaves all human beings: the poison of sin. The primal terror with which mankind recoils from his sins is no more or less definitive than it was two thousand years ago when Jesus Christ offered the Truth which will set men free; and for that was tortured to death.

And yet law enforcement officials, all the way up to the White House, have dedicated an astonishing amount of public relations energy to downplaying the clear terrorism implications. The FBI’s notion of terrorism seems to hinge on a strange fixation with “known terrorist organizations,” as if a terrorist could not plausibly act alone, as if the FBI’s own incessant talk of “sleeper cells” and so forth was all so much vapor for public consumption with no anchoring in reality at all. Their sand-pounding stupidity is infuriating, and I think it reveals the nearly insuperable damage done by political correctness, which has infused those pledged to protect us with a paralyzing fear of the accusation of racial profiling.

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yasser Arafat's al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened “to strike at Zionist and American interests and installations” throughout the world, a cute little example of profiling in its own right. Now I have no reason other than coincidence to believe that these two things are related, but it is worth remembering that it is in the nature of the sleeper cell to remain hidden for months or even years before rising in response to a coded message to strike at the very society in which he has moved.

Israel, quite sensibly, is treating the shooting as an act of terrorism; why are we so resistant to the label? Andrew Sullivan airs some righteous anger, and offers a bit of clarifying perspective: “Can you imagine if a white supremacist had shown up at an African airline counter and killed blacks? Would anyone be ‘puzzled’ about the motive?”

Update: A Israeli source, citing an Arab newspaper reports that the LAX gunman had al-Qaeda ties, and that he met with a bin Laden deputy twice.

Pink Pistols chapters hold monthly meetings and frequent competitions at shooting ranges, to promote marksmanship and camaraderie. It also endorses candidates who “support the Second Amendment as well as the rights of consenting adults to love each other however they wish.” . . . Most intriguing is how straight conservatives respond to [them]. “I know of absolutely no conservatives who have attacked us,” says Washington lobbyist Austin Fulk. He often joins the group's Northern Virginia chapter for target practice at the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, with which Pink Pistols has collaborated on issue advocacy before California's state legislature.

Self-defense and by extension self-government is what animates this unusual organization, which found its impetus in the story of two men who defended themselves from a roving band of gay-bashing thugs in San Jose, California —- defended themselves with a handgun.

Along the same lines, there was Jonah Goldberg’s post some weeks back about gay conservatives at The Corner: “We’re Here! We’re Queer! We Want Lowers Taxes!” Gays thinking for themselves on political matters, rather than absorbing the tired old radicalism of the Left, has struck a nerve, as evidenced by this sounding of the alarum by a prominent gay socialist. No one can deny the unique torment gays have suffered where their neighbors despise them, but I think the marginalization bemoaned here is more a function of distaste for frenzied radicalism than of deeper odium and intolerance. Americans are a charitable people, despite the declamations so often heard. And by contriving to smother the dissenters from radical politics (“Fighting the Gay Right” is the title of the above article after all), the gay Left is insuring its own alienation from wider American society –- which is perhaps precisely its goal, for what quality more nearly and succinctly characterizes the Left than a constricting orthodoxy of alienation?

Whatever the pathologies of the Left, it is refreshing to see thoughtful independence and the dissolution of rigid voting blocks, the adhesive of which has largely been militant identity politics.

Meanwhile, James Bowman uncovers another revealing little episode, this one of such wanton ugliness that one has difficulty imagining the intellectual ruin that would inspire it. The article discusses an upcoming conference on the late socialist philosopher Sidney Hook. Now Hook, importantly, despite his left-wing inclinations, ultimately became an indefatigable cold warrior, recognizing the Communist enterprise as nothing more than organized inhumanity. Emily Eakin, the reporter, reports:

A protégé of John Dewey who distinguished himself early in his career with an important study of Karl Marx, Hook became increasingly disenchanted with the left, emerging after World War II as an ardent anti-Stalinist and hard-line cold warrior. Hook's reputation as a turncoat was cemented in 1985, four years before he died, when Ronald Reagan awarded him the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Wait, wait. Back up. “Turncoat”!? Excuse me? The facility with which a Times reporter (and of course the editors who cleared that sentence) can equate “anti-Stalinist” with “turncoat” speaks of a miseducation which, as I say, beggars the imagination. How about we push this logic a wee bit further: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, traitors; Whittaker Chambers, turncoat; Anne Frank, spy, betrayer. Black is white. Up is down. When the rhetorical violence of the totalitarians has become a commonplace among the educated elites of a free people, I think we can safely say that decadence has set in. With great and sad irony I remark the motto of The New York Times: all the news that’s fit to print.

Iran hurtles toward chaos, and we are still dithering. July 9 will mark the third anniversary of the student uprising at Tehran University, and the capital is girding for new demonstrations against the increasingly unpopular and insecure regime of Ayatollah Khamenei.

It was Ledeen, almost completely alone among our journalists, who reported the widespread pro-American demonstrations last fall in Iran. I recall reading his words with jaw-dropping astonishment: there, in Iran, the genesis of modern militant Islam, people were taking to the streets in defiance of their tyrant overlords to express their solidarity with America! The report seemed almost comically implausible. But no: it was verified. And then they cheered the President’s truculent State of the Union address, an address which distressed Democrats, Europeans, and Arabists alike –- the Iranians cheered it, many of them. “And in Washington,” Mr. Ledeen continues in yesterday’s article

[There is] silence, as the appeasers in the Department of State ponder their next round of secret contacts with the regime. They do this despite the president's luminously clear statements that we are at war with tyrannical terror sponsors, and despite State's own repeated finding that Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. That they continue to sabotage the president's policy is a real problem, and no doubt it is only a matter of time before the president lays down the law to them, but delay is bad for us and confusion undermines our power.

Now, Mr. Ledeen is not demanding military action; he is merely demanding a cold shoulder to the Iranian regime, and a steady issuance of solidarity with the Iranian people –- a concentrated effort, in other words, to make that crucial distinction between regime and people which constitutes a central component of our intellectual struggle in this war. The Iranians, he says, edge toward a revolutionary timbre, which is perhaps revealed best in the extraordinary measures contemplated by the regime to crush democratic agitation. He raises the specter of Tiananmen Square.

With words alone we could aid this thing; with words alone we could score crippling blows against militant Islam. “Faster, please.”

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

God bless America, my home sweet home.

Even within the U.S. there are some head-scratchers: Seattle is farther north than anywhere out East, save perhaps the tip of Maine; Honolulu is south of Havana, Cuba; and Denver is at roughly a latitude equal to Washington, D.C.

If, as the anthropologists tell us, mankind has been around for some 30,000 years, then he was largely unaware of the earth’s lineaments, and completely unaware of its curvature, for about 98 percent of his existence; and as I sit and look upon this globe, I reflect on the palpable fact that I am glazing upon one of the grandest achievements in all of the history of human civilization; an achievement which in importance and profundity surpasses, say, the television by several orders of magnitude. My impression is that the natural inversion represented by the undeniable disparity in importance between these two things, globe and television, in our society reflects the basic poverty of our ideas. Standing on the shoulders of genius, modern man declares himself the tallest. We would be an unquestionably wiser, more patient, less self-absorbed and more interesting people who redirected one tenth of our attention paid to the television toward a casual and amateur study of the globe. I emphasize that I use the term amateur here divested of its implication of talentless or unskilled; but rather merely as opposed to professional, as in done for income or monetary profit. Would that we were all amateur globe-studiers; the superiority of our human intellect would be readily apparent.

Somewhere, someone is laughing at what seems the foolishness of staring at a globe for anything more than a moment of complacent diversion. The only obvious riposte is: No, it is not foolishness; what is foolishness is to be consumed by fabricated events delivered through the medium of an optical illusion; almost by definition it is foolishness, because the essence of television is a facsimile which fools the brain into seeing what is not actually there. The cynic replies in all seriousness that all vision itself is illusion; indeed, that all human perception is illusion. Very well, let him take that dark path, for if we follow that logic to its terminus we discover only suicide: and I, for one, will not follow him even a single step. The cynic who asserts that all reality is an illusion must contend with the horror of waking to an illusion every day, and of accepting that illusion every day. He has integrated insoluble contradiction into the very fabric of his being, and thus confronts insanity as a way of life.

Let us leave the cynic and his tenebrous philosophy behind with only this final thought: that here again is yet another reflection of the poverty of our ideas -- the temper of the cynic is the fashion of our age. A more generous, a more august and confident temper would be that of the navigator, whose life, when not spent traveling by the light of the stars, was spent hunched over maps, and if he was lucky, globes. His vocation was to chart God’s Creation. Ours is to forget it exists.

There is surely moral paralysis in our culture’s casual celebration of pornography. It is not merely the ubiquity of it, nor our indifference to it, but moreover our resolute celebration of it which betrays paralysis; for what is celebrated is not, as we are conditioned to think, an enlightened understanding of human sexuality, but a diminution of it –- a profanation of the human form. What pornographers aim at is not authentic sexuality; they aim at the commodification of pleasure. The landscape of human sexuality is beautiful, imposing, mysterious, ineffable, and the pornographer looks on it as the rapacious industrialist of the environmentalist’s nightmare does a pristine natural landscape rich in resources: he looks on it as a mine to be plundered for short-term gain and then discarded as a scar on the countryside.

Do we recognize a distinction between the erotic and the pornographic? Between a majestic, precious, human thing and its dehumanized, fatal excess? Or do we stand, bereft of moral vitality, and watch in quiet desperation as the latter mutilates the former? That is paralysis.