The general’s claim to fame is that he bombed Serbia back to the industrial stone age in response to the Serbians’ ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanians.

Leaving aside the question of whether Clark's feat of dispatching American jets to sink Belgrade’s bridges into the Danube ranks up there in military difficulty with Eisenhower's feat of managing the D-Day landings, one problem with this claim is that it’s not true.

I don’t know how many times —- starting about a year after the actual events, when precise memories had faded under the tidal wave of rhetoric —- have I read that our attack was a response to their big ethnic cleansing. Bollocks. That’s exactly backwards. The reality is that we started the war, and the Serbs, with nothing left to lose (they were being attacked by NATO, the most powerful military alliance in history), responded by beginning the massive ethnic cleansing that everyone remembers so vividly.

Before we pulled our international observers out so that we could start the bombing, there had been anti-rebel fighting in Kosovo, of course, but of the kind we're engaged in Iraq at present —- not full scale ethnic cleansing. Of course, Kosovo was internationally recognized as belonging to Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, giving Belgrade the presumptive legal right to put down a rebellion, as Abraham Lincoln had, or as NATO-member Turkey had just finished doing in Turkish Kurdistan at a cost of 37,000 lives.

The war briefly satiated a lot of the blood-lust that had been building up in elite Washington circles (but nowhere else in the country) for some time. The outcome of Clark’s War on the ground, however, was that the ethnic cleansing was simply reversed and the Albanians cleansed most of the Serbs, and the Gypsies as well, from Kosovo, except for a some well-armed pockets. The whole pointless, bloody mess could have been semi-peacefully resolved with some creativity, as I outlined in this essay of mine in Toronto’s National Post.

See also Mr. Sailer’s incisive commentary on the influence of the late Edward Said.

All that is preparation for saying this: Virginia has the most natural beauty of all the states I have seen. In its astonishing variety; its easy rolling hills, crisp air, bountiful farmland and quaint little towns, sublime blue mountains, meandering rivers, quiet fields, mixed forests —- in all these things and more she may well be the most beautiful state in the Union.

I know that some of my readers —- Bill Luse, for example —- have logged plenty of hours behind the wheel. I’d be interested to hear any objections or qualifications to my judgment here. Let’s try to keep it objective, though. Every sane and normal man loves his home, and is biased in its favor; in my instance, I think that Colorado, where I was born and raised, can make a strong claim, based mainly on the awesome majesty of the Rockies, to this distinction —- but for her eastern half, as desolate a land as man has ever laid eyes on. I also lived for four years in North Carolina, and she is a beautiful state, but she lacks Virginia’s variety, particularly of climate. And I’ll offer this qualification already: I have not seen enough of California for inclusion here. That fact changes the context of my judgment to some degree, for I have heard it said that only the dreadful combination of unbridled capitalism and dreary leftism could spoil so beautiful a land.

Note: The dearth of posts this last week was due to my family’s travels, which, wonder of wonders, included extended time driving in Virginia (and North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.)

Prof. Arnhart advises us not to worry, “human nature is here to stay”; but you see, that is precisely the problem. The arrogance of Science, as it brushes aside the objections of everything but its jejune utilitarian ideology, tries the forbearance of good and moral men; but our beef is emphatically with men, not things.

One theme [of the Ric Burns PBS documentary] stood out: the Twin Towers were uniformly reviled as works of architecture per se. Two commentators in particular were unsparing in their scorn: Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine. (The redoubtable Ada Louise Huxtable, critic emeritus of The New York Times was not hot on them either). The towers were variously labeled banal, grandiose, boring, dreary, grim, vacuous gross abstractions, and objects of extreme hubris. Goldberger said that the windswept plaza at the base —- “a cement football field” —- was never peopled during the buildings’ entire thirty year lifespan, noting that the place even looked dead when the movie musical The Wiz was filmed there. Many people who worked there, they said, never felt comfortable. There weren’t even any good views out of it because the structural steel beams that bore all the buildings’ weight were so close together that the windows were like narrow slits. The site plan destroyed a fine-grained network of downtown streets, leaving a poorly-connected superblock and erasing scores of historic buildings. The two towers cast immense shadows that blocked sunlight to thousands of other buildings downtown and darkened streets. They turned out to be the last sheer behemoths of their kind in New York City, and a few scant years later even their record height was surpassed by a building in Chicago. [. . .]

The WTC was obsolete before it was finished, the talking heads said. It horribly skewed real estate valuations in all of lower Manhattan by adding 10 million square feet of rentable space to the district at a time when Wall Street was already drowning in vacant offices. Since it was owned by the Port Authority, the WTC was tax-exempt and contributed nothing to the city treasury. By the time it was finished, most of the finger piers along Manhattan’s West Side were crumbling, and New York’s function as a shipping port was surrendered completely to New Jersey. The towers were not fully leased up until the 1990s, when a dubious financial boom based on Dot.com public offerings, Enron scams, and other hallucinated business schemes, sent the money industry into a toxic transport.

But he hardly prefers the proposed monument/redesign:

[I]t seems to me that the proposed re-design for the site by architect Daniel Liebeskind is perhaps even more horrible, more misconceived, more arrogant, and more foolish, and perhaps more evil than the original Twin Towers themselves. Liebeskind proposes a set of skewed, warped, tortured, and torqued glass boxes, offset by a decorative tower even taller than the two that fell down. The “monument” to the dead is nothing more than the excavated “tub” of the original retaining walls of the foundation.

Mr. Kunstler is a fulminator, all right, but he’s my kind of fulminator. Check out his monthly feature “Eyesore of the Month,” a mordant chronicle of architectural madness. (Warning: his website includes a health dose of profanity.)

By paragraph five he is really heating up.

The enemy’s strengths should not be underestimated. He has a historical memory far superior to that of the West, which has forgotten its thousand-year war with Islamic civilization. Islamic civilization has not forgotten, however, having been for centuries mainly on the losing side. Its memory is clear, bitter, and a spur to action. And it dovetails with a spiritual sense of time far different from that of the West, where impatience is measured in seconds, for the enemy believes that a thousand years, measured against the eternity he is taught to contemplate and accept, is nothing. Closely related to his empowering sense of time are his spiritual sense of mission, which must never be underestimated, and Islam’s traditional embrace of martyrdom.

There follows a very lucid and detailed strategic analysis, based on a penetrating appraisal of history and Arab culture, which I cannot summarize here without butchering. The article must be read in its entirety. But perhaps some sampling will entice the reader. “In the West, success is everything, but in the Arab Middle East honor is everything, and can coexist perfectly well with failure.” Similarly, “though wanting victory, [the enemy is] equally magnetized by defeat, for [he] understand[s], as we used to in the West, that the defeated are the closest to God.” Strategic blunders are surveyed with acuity: “we were wiling to alienate the entire world so as to thrust ourselves into a difficult situation in Iraq, but unwilling to achieve a commanding position in Saudi Arabia for fear of alienating the House of Saud.”

Mr. Helprin’s judgment is essentially two-fold: 1) a weakness of will in the West — something so obvious that the clear-headed can hardly deny it, though huge numbers of prominent people in fact do deny it, which says something about our collective clarity; and 2) a failure of strategic imagination, which is far less obvious, but perhaps more enervating.

The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over.

But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.

UPDATE: Mr. Cash collaborated with U2 to produce a tremendous song, called “The Wanderer,” which was released on their much-derided 1993 album Zooropa. Here are lyrics:

I went out walking through streets paved with gold
Lifted some stones, saw the skin and bones
Of a city without a soul
I went out walking under an atomic sky
Where the ground won't turn and the rain it burns
Like the tears when I said goodbye.

Yeah, I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you.
I went wandering.

I went drifting through the capitals of tin
Where men can't walk or freely talk
And sons turn their fathers in.
I stopped outside a church house
Where the citizens like to sit.
They say they want the kingdom
But they don't want God in it.

I went out riding down that old eight-lane
I passed a thousand signs looking for my own name.
I went with nothing but the thought you'd be there too,
Looking for you.

I went out there in search of experience
To taste and to touch and to feel as much
As a man can before he repents.

I went out searching, looking for one good man
A spirit who would not bend or break
Who would sit at his father's right hand.
I went out walking with a bible and a gun
The word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one.
Now Jesus, don't you wait up, Jesus I'll be home soon.
Yeah, I went out for the papers, told her I'd be back by noon.
Yeah, I left with nothing but the thought you'd be there too
Looking for you.
Yeah, I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you.
I went wandering.

• Whither the Nation-State?

• “Power Attracts the Corruptible”

• Optimists and Conservatism, part 1 and part 2

• A Hitch on the Right

• Ideological Patriots

• To Defend Democracy

Of course, one has to bear in mind that East Europeans, in the eyes of the “civilized West,” always were expendable; after all they were less “enlightened,” clean, constructive, level-headed, literate, technologically-minded than the liberal and “progressive” nations of the North. They were simply “Bohunks.” Neither in Britain nor in the United States would public opinion ever have tolerated the Soviet Union’s dealing with a Nordic country in the same summary way as with Poland. And the Hungarians, like the Poles, on top of it all were notorious for not being sufficiently “democratically minded.” At the end of World War Two a certain propaganda with White House ties denounced them as “aristocratic-fascist,” while at the same time limitless praise was heaped upon the Czechs and their allegedly shrewd and great leader, Dr. Benes, a vain nitwit who at the first opportunity sold his nation into Red servitude. It is quite true that there is an aristocratic aspect of the Polish and Hungarian character, an aspect to be found in all classes, which prompts these nations rather to die than be slaves and to put chivalry and liberty above mere physical survival.

Invigorating, isn’t it? Note that the censure came during a Republican administration. Note that it cares little for, is almost disdainful of, grandiose locutions about democracy. Note further the real admiration for something that is emphatically not American or derivative of things American. Compare this with today’s cover stories laden with cumbersome polling data; with capitulations to the drift of elite opinion; with bizarre unappealing complacency about principle; with flashes of tedious triumphalism. It is not my intention to harshly denigrate National Review in its contemporary manifestation, for the magazine is still unquestionably valuable. My intention is rather to call NR home, as it were; for my fear is that this venerable institution, with its genesis in the furnace of principled reaction to all the madness of modernity, is falling victim to its own success, and perceives itself as yet resisting that madness, when in fact it often lends its strength to it. To put it another way: while National Review at its inception was regarded as an almost ridiculous article — an anachronism from the benighted past — at some later point it became “mainstream.” Perhaps it was the ‘90s, more likely it was with Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s: Whenever it was, the achievement of respectability initiated a decline or enervation, restricting the freedom to publish bold, even scathing opinions; hardening, by a dependence on the finances of a political party, a climate of faction — so much so that this summer it was widely controversial when NR’s editors mused, in a sensible editorial, that conservatives might find it necessary to declare their independence from the G.O.P.

Now it should be obvious that conservatives and Republicans are not the same. The G.O.P. is a political party: today, the party of the Right. Conservatism, however diffuse, is a philosophy. The former is primarily about acquiring and wielding power; and only secondarily about implementing a philosophy. I wonder if it would even be admitted, in this partisan age, that a philosophy can never be the same as a party — anymore than a creed can be the same as a trade or vocation. Carpentry is a trade; it is not a creed. While there could conceivably be a Carpenters Party, it is merely absurd to imagine a creed of carpentry guiding and inspiring the lives of men. Conservatism as political philosophy primarily posits a role for government in human life: and I cannot see how a philosophy of small, limited government can continue in alliance with the party of government, if the G.O.P. becomes, as many predict, the dominant governing party.

A historical parallel may illuminate the important distinction I am trying to tease out here. In England of the late eighteenth century, the Whigs were the “liberal” party — the party of progress and rationalism and skepticism. Yet the greatest Whig was Edmund Burke, who proved to be perhaps the most prophetic opponent of the religion of Progress, and the father of modern conservatism. Burke’s confrontation with the French Revolution (during which, as Lord Acton profoundly records, he transformed himself from being the leader of a party to a “teacher of mankind”) alienated him from his party so bitterly that many thought he had fallen into madness in his later years. The striking thing is that, with the perspective of history, Burke stands tall and his detractors (excepting Thomas Paine and a few others) are largely forgotten. Some of them indeed, like James Mackintosh, ultimately repudiated their earlier attacks, pronouncing his work a pillar of wisdom. Burke had quite plainly transcended party, and his inspiration was to correct philosophy, refine it, and cleanse it of the cancerous excesses of heady Enlightenment rationalism. This burden of instruction rent asunder party and philosophy.

I hope I am not taken to be fulminating against political parties; for they undoubtedly have their place, and are honorable in that place. But it should also be clear that philosophy is superior to party, even if philosophy aims at securing an instrument of implementation, that is, a party operating in alliance with it. It is a degradation for a journal dedicated to propounding a philosophy, and prompting a conversation about that philosophy, to become a mere party organ. Such is the vulnerability to which National Review is right now most subject.

I quote now Frank Meyer, in 1957, leveling a profound criticism against rationalism as an ideology:

With scientism, which attempts completely to destroy man’s awareness of a divine purpose and meaning to his existence, the process reached its culmination. The proper consciousness now is swept clean of the unconditioned, the mysterious, the absolute. Everything is relative, useful, instrumental. But there seems to be a law of compensation in the psyche that forbids such violence being done to the structure of reality. Men cannot live in an antiseptic universe, inhabited only by gadgets and by human beings who are nothing but particularly clever gadgets. So, as if this vacuum of meaning had called into existence myths to furnish out the dry emptiness of a soulless universe, the age of rationalism and scientism has been at the same time the age of the deification of the forces of History.

How much more serious this is compared to Jonah Goldberg’s columns of semantic fastidiousness or David Frum’s strange fancies of decadence! For here we encounter a man’s attempt to grasp hold of the nature of the dissolution around him. Meyer goes on:

From Hegel to Marx, and on to Spengler and Toynbee, powerful minds, rejecting the inspiration of their tradition but unable to believe in the meaninglessness of human life, have created these myths. They differ immensely among themselves, both in the distance of their removal from the integral tradition of the West and in the intensity of their impact upon the practical. But they have in common a double act of denial: to individual men, the denial of innate being and freedom of will; to God, the denial of transcendent being. History subordinates men to its being and replaces God, or drags Him down to a vague immanent “principle.”

In fairness, the trends and pressures of journalism today are not particularly conducive to sober reflection: and their effect on writers can be seen rather vividly in the fact that both the men I have just cited unflatteringly are capable of producing high-quality work when they put their minds to it (though no one will confuse them with Frank Meyer). And there is another factor here, which I suggested above, and which we might call the complacency of success, that should not be overlooked. The contributors to the original NR were beleaguered men and women. There was little cause for optimism. John Dos Passos, once a darling novelist of the Left, did his career no favors when began writing for National Review. Russell Kirk wanted to call his most famous book “The Conservative Rout,” Richard Weaver, his “The Fearful Descent”; Whittaker Chambers, in abandoning the Communist Party, was convinced that he had left the winning side for the losers; F. A. Hayek’s clarion call of a book was called The Road to Serfdom; James Burnham penned a meticulous jeremiad entitled Suicide of the West. These books were not greeted warmly. An edition of William F. Buckley’s own early work Up From Liberalism reproduces on its back cover the amusing litany of abuse with which it was received, all quotes from reviews of the book containing vituperation of truly palpable rancor. Lionel Trilling’s dismissive remark perhaps sums up the reaction: to him conservatives were characterized by mere “irritable mental gestures” and nothing more.

In short, they were “outside the mainstream,” as the phrase goes today. And thus they were not the kind of people prone to consternation about whom they might offend with their opinions. Their polemical skills were honed to that sharpness and proficiency which comes only with frequent and frantic use; and their learning and intelligence always had to proven, was never assumed.

It is to the great credit of National Review, and the host of disciples it acquired, that conservatism in America did indeed become respectable, by virtue of its forcefulness which translated ultimately into political success. The fruits of this success are evidenced by some watershed victories for a philosophy that was once seen as declining into oblivion. But the success carried a price. Part of the price consists in the clear reluctance to criticize the Party. More broadly it consists in the understandable human hesitation to jeopardize one’s social station, or to alienate one’s peers; which is another way of saying it consists in a certain capitulation to regnant dogma.

What is to be feared, and vigorously resisted, is that the price of respectability will ultimately include the betrayal of principle — the principle in question being limited government, or what was once referred to as constitutional government of enumerated powers. In this age of the modern, limitless State, a truly conservative party cannot also be a party of government. And conservatives must indeed declare their independence from a party of government if they are to retain their principles.

The correlation of liberties and duties may seem nothing more than common sense, but that is what natural law is: Common moral sense, cleansed of evasions, elevated and brought into systematic order. Unfortunately, the contemporary way of thinking about liberty denies common moral sense. For example in 1992, when the United States Supreme Court declared that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” it was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such so-called liberty has infinite breadth but zero depth. A right is a power to make a moral claim upon me. If I could “define” your claims into nonexistence — as the Court said I could “define” the unborn child’s — that power would be destroyed, and true liberty would be destroyed along with it.

(Via Mere Comments).

Now by modern education I mean what is normally achieved at American universities by young men and women who achieve it without any real idea why they should, or what should be included in it. They might be better described as half-educated, which I do not mean as a term of derisive abuse. Everyone feels that they must matriculate through college, though few know why. There is a vague but ubiquitous social pressure to arrive at this destination, with hardly any explanation of why the journey is worth taking or how a man might discern that he has indeed arrived at it. And as a matter of plain fact, a striking number serious men who decline to indulge this propaganda (for that it what it is: and behind it lies a very solid, if somewhat sordid, financial interest), end up successful, often founding small businesses or entering into fruitful trades.

Resistance to propaganda consists in that sophistication of the intellect which allows one to develop in one’s mind a mental picture which inoculates by providing an alternative. That is to say, I see an old Communist Party recruitment video, replete with joyous worker-owners laboring in satisfaction at collective farms or factories —- and in my mind’s eye I conceive of the soul-crushing Gulag, the Famine, and great men who write their memoirs on toilet paper amidst starving fellow slaves. By this image, the propaganda is checked and defeated. The antidote to untruth is not skeptical disbelief, a purely negative impulse, but the affirmation of truth, an act of positive vigor.

Modern education provides only the negative impulse, the impulse to distrust, an unfledged cynicism full of bluster but empty of real substance. This impulse is as treacherous as it sounds, and cunning propaganda will readily conquer it; for the skepticism inculcated by modern education will rarely include a distrust of one’s own emotions, the doctrine of original sin having been discarded, which is precisely the organ at which propaganda aims its contrivances. Moreover, to leave discontented the human hunger for belief in something, to provide no armor against the poison of despair, is simply to make vulnerable young minds. It is no accident that Nazism began as a student movement in an age of disillusionment; or that the ideologists of what Burke so memorably called “armed doctrines,” together the greatest of modern scourges, bled the ground red with the blood of young “idealists.”

It almost seems a truism to say that wicked ideas are not resisted by skepticism but by good ideas. Skepticism by itself is aimless and emasculated; and it is only by the light of principle that skepticism is armed. It is precisely because I know courage to be a great virtue that I am skeptical of any attempt to denigrate courage revealed. It is because of the doctrine of original sin, which I see so plainly to be true in myself, that I know that power can never be trusted in human hands. By the light of doctrine, of principle, the world is illuminated; and skepticism is, if I may use the phrase, baptized. I do not disparage skepticism in toto; I do revile skepticism unhinged.

Another way of saying this is that imagination, or the cultivation of the rightly-ordered intellect, not skepticism, is the only effective treatment against propaganda. Modern education teaches an ersatz method of treatment, by encouraging students to distrust, not merely the chaff of propaganda, but everything of the wheat, including the grain. The intellect is not cultivated, it is deprecated; discernment is not encouraged, nor wisdom, nor discrimination. Indiscriminate scornfulness is instead favored. What appears and is marketed as prudence and worldliness is revealed as mere poltroonery. And a great host of bewildered minds ambles about, confident of its hollowed out defenses, trusting in its dull rusting weapons.

It is fashionable in conservative circles to vilify the University; but as a fact the thing predates what passes today as conservatism by a great many decades. In fact, most conservatives today, for all their harangues against leftist academics, have largely bought into the philosophy from which this blunder I have just described descends. That philosophy goes by the name Utility; and they are with Locke and Bentham against John Henry Newman. Locke contemned the classical liberal education on the very familiar grounds that it failed the test of usefulness: “Can there be any thing more ridiculous than that a father should waste his money, and his son’s time, in setting him to learn the Roman language?” Bentham enlarged the objection into an entire philosophy. And the modern critics of academe hardly offer a refutation. They denounce our schools on essentially utilitarian grounds; that is, they interrogate about practical results, but do not question ends. They charge the schools with failing to achieve their own ideals, and they disclose many instances where professors replaced useful fact with useless cant. The universities are mistrusted because there are now failing to even lay a foundation of utilitarian information and method. This jeremiad, about the politicized university peddling ridiculous ideological gibberish, is all for the good as far as it goes; but it does not go to the heart of the matter. To the decline of the University, the critics of today answer that it does not pass the test of utility or practical usefulness. They do not answer as Newman did, resoundingly, that health of the intellect, like bodily health, is useful because it is good.

“Good” indeed means one thing, and “useful” means another; but I lay it down as a principle, which will save us a great deal of anxiety, that, though the useful is not always good, the good is always useful. Good is not only good, but reproductive of good; this is one of its attributes; nothing is excellent, beautiful, perfect, desirable for its own sake, but it overflows, and spreads the likeness of itself all around it. Good is prolific; it is not only good to the eye, but to the taste; it not only attracts us, but it communicates itself; it excites first our admiration and love, then our desire and our gratitude, and that, in proportion to its intenseness and fulness in particular instances. A great good will impart great good. If then the intellect is so excellent a portion of us, and its cultivation so excellent, it is not only beautiful, perfect, admirable, and noble in itself, but in a true and high sense it must be useful to the possessor and to all around him; not useful in any low, mechanical, mercantile sense, but as diffusing good, or as a blessing, or a gift, or power, or a treasure, first to the owner, then through him to the world. I say then, if a liberal education be good, it must necessarily be useful too.

But the whole edifice of modern education, to which, by and large, most conservatives have conceded, is debased by the utilitarian ethos; this, in part, because our shared ideas about the Good and the True have fragmented, leaving only worldly success as the standard. If men cannot agree on what is good, at least they can agree on what is profitable or successful. The University thinks in forms relating to usefulness even when it employs older phraseology; and when faced with a bold assertion of worth or goodness, in other words, a judgment about value, the institution shows its unease.

There is no utilitarian method of resistance against propaganda short of the cultivation of the intellect. There is no easy formula. That resistance must be active and individual; it cannot be passive and general. When people are told blithely that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal revived the American economy from the Depression, they must have ready in their minds the contrary fact that it did little of the sort; that, rather, it was not until the War began that any sustained revival occurred. But when they elsewhere told that war is a positive good for a nation’s economy, they must have ready the contrary fact that no enterprise dedicated to massive destruction can possibly be the cause of a growth of wealth.* The work of propaganda is too multifarious, too subtle, too ubiquitous to tolerate neat shorthand methods of inoculation. And abetting it is a whole educational apparatus all its own, along with the huge imperious marketing and advertising industry. To defy this empire of influence requires vigorous, ably-trained intellects.

Now it is not my view that men have all become automatons beneath the crushing weight of modern propaganda; my vision is not so darkened by gloom, despite what some readers may conclude. But it is my contention that, in our media age, the approach to the minds of men is unimpeded by external barriers — the family, the church or parish, the local community, etc. — to a degree largely unparalleled in history. We are truly as mass society, and many of us are indeed mass men. It follows that to resist propaganda is a responsibility left to the individual alone, largely unassisted by the old resources of community; and in our atomized society, I worry that individual minds are not being trained as they should be repel the onslaught.

__________________

*This latter is the famous “broken windows” theory, of which Henry Hazlitt observed that if adopted on a smaller scale would recommend the economic advantages of breaking random windows, that we might thus make business for some glazier, whose new business would multiply throughout the local economy. “The smashed window,” Hazlitt writes is his remarkable little book Economics in One Lesson, “will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be . . . that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.”

The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know. By means of art we are sometimes sent—dimly, briefly—revelations unattainable by reason. Like that mirror in the fairy tales—look into it, and you will see not yourself but, for a moment, that which passeth understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly. And for which the soul begins to ache.