ANTHEMS

1. One I had not heard of until recently. Evidently used as a national anthem before The Star Spangled Banner was adopted.

2. Per Anthony Esolen, song in popular culture is not the product of professional entertainers, but of what people themselves sing (or play).

3. Some of the lyrics are de trop, but the tune is exceptional.

OUR COUNTRY

Over at The American Catholic, a discussion is ongoing concerning whether or not the Revolutionary War did nor did not meet the criteria for a 'just war' as the Church teaches. I am far too indolent to review the commentary and am resistant to devoting too much thought to an academic question such as this. My country is; it was a palpable reality before, during, and after the Revolution. Civic obligations, such as they are, are derived from that, not from the justice or prudence of the Patriot cause. Retrospectively, I have long found the Loyalist cause the more appealing (though I enjoyed 1776 and Johnny Tremain as much as The American Catholics's principal, and found Oliver Wiswell wanting as literature), perhaps out of contrariness or perhaps having been perturbed by the Patriots habit of dunking their opponents in concoctions of tar and feathers or perhaps not thinking excise taxes worth the bother or perhaps having spent so many years of my life in the company of German Baptist Brethren whose ancestors thought the whole mess none of their business. However, the Mother Country conceded in 1783, and that is that.

Among all the others, the question posed in such a discussion is that of what is the appropriate locus of sovereignty; derived from that question is an observation about a vexed question in political theory. 'Ere you decide what are the rights of the people, you have to decide who are 'the people'. One ought be skeptical that anyone has ever derived satisfying normative criteria which answer this question. We can can have, with clarity of mind, a discussion of justice or its absence within extant political communities; we cannot, I think, about what justice indicates are the appropriate geographic boundaries of said community. Is this perhaps because that question is not best understood through discourse on 'justice'? (Search me).

The question of the justice of secessionist movements aside, it is not readily disputable that multi-ethnic states have their signature dysfunctions, and that the manufacture and maintenance of them is prudently avoided. (Can we please seal our southern border?)

If we contemplate the American Revolution, we cannot but be impressed at the neuralgic response of the colonists to some fairly banal measures (excises on paint and paper and tea) by the imperial government. The end game was an insurrection that continued for six-and-a-half years and resulted in a death toll that exceeded (proportionately) American losses in the First World War. Given the outrages perpetrated in our time by a domestic political class which our populace seems to regard with cud chewing indifference, one must be impressed as well by the gulf which separates the latter-day American from his colonial forebear. One also must notice that the colonists came, over a period of many decades, to understand themselves as a people apart from the country from which they came. Coming to an understanding of that colonial society and the men who comprised it would seem our first task, 'ere we evaluate the justice of their cause.

A society dominated by freemen and for which the most salient strata were classes (of affluent and poor, of master and journeyman and apprentice) rather than orders of clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasants was atypical in Europe. (I will beg off on how to characterize the United Netherlands or the Hanseatic towns, but they may have been properly described as societies of classes and not orders). Government by elective and deliberative assemblies was hardly a novelty. It did, however, manage to prosper in the American colonies (and hold its own in Britain) during a period of occidental history in which it tended to fall into abeyance except in the governance of localities (and merchant republics that scarcely exceeded the boundaries of a locality). The erection of a territorial state composed of a federation of small republics may not have been a novelty (one thinks of the Swiss Confederation or the United Netherlands), but the erection of one at a discrete moment by a conscious act of the will (not the will of an ambitious monarch but the will of contrary burgesses and planters) certainly had scant precedent. Perhaps that is how best to understand the American Revolution: 1.) a commercial and agararian element conjoined to each other render themselves masters of their political destiny; and 2.) a populace comes rapidly to understand themselves as a particular community distinct from all other communities and so in a sort of fraternity rather than as subjects with a common fealty; and 3.) all is accomplished in a fairly orderly fashion (France has enacted eleven constitutions since 1789; Chile has enacted eight; we have the same one, dysfunctional though it is).

Donald McClarey, The American Catholic's ringmaster, allows as how he reads the Declaration of Independence to his family each year. That is all very well and good. The Fourth of July is in remembrance of that event; pace the Postal Workers' Union and the VFW and Coretta Scott King's brood, you only really need one National Day (and one can say our local communities only readily sustain celebrations of one nowadays). A crank like your's truly might wish we commemorated the actual founding of this country (on or about 14 May 1607) rather than its intervening secession from the British Empire, but that would be a contrivance. An element of our popular culture, of the celebrations people undertake on their own without being hectored by others with their hobby horses, is parades and cookouts and fireworks on the Fourth of July.

That was a specifically political event. However, I must offer some regret about how this may sustain a misconception promoted by some in our chattering classes, that we are as a people understood as bearers of political institutions and political ideas. No, we are not. The political culture and political institutions and political history are only an aspect of who a people are. Thomas Jefferson et al. were not the Founders of this country in the true sense; they were the artificers of its sovereignty and of political institutions they derived from extant forms. Pace Mr. Hertzberg, we are not going to disappear as a people if we replace our extant constitution with one modeled on that of Australia. Pace Dr. Rao, it is not peculiarly difficult to be thoughtful or spiritual or committed in this country (and certainly not made difficult due to fanciful constructs like an 'Ideology of America'), nor can H.L. Mencken's conceits substitute for a serious social psychology. Pace Mr. Wattenberg, we are not 'universal', but peculiarly ourselves.

Political and military history are important; learning the discrete events therein has an ancillary use in that it provides a chronology which functions as points of reference for the history of this country most properly understood. I have had a couple of good teachers in this. One was Stanley Engerman, whose metier is economic history and cliometrics. The other is Stuart Bolger, the founding director of the Genesee Country Village and Museum (Jack Wehle of the Genesee Brewing Company provided the funds and some part of the vision. Stuart Bolger provided the expertise and a good deal of the sweat equity). I have not heard Stuart Bolger discourse on the subject of historiography (he is rather taciturn); however, his vocational life has been dedicated to making history palpable, and to reminding people that their history can be understood through material culture. (He is actually a man good to know for reasons quite apart from that, about which more anon). We are a free people? Aye, we are a people of women who make cheese and men who trade in dry goods.

Good history is historical geography and sociology: when an area was settled; how, over time, its inhabitants have made their living; how, over time, have the polarities and conflicts among them played out. We are Americans because we live in the world they made and are making ourselves; we are Americans because we recognize an affinity for eachother we do not have for others. We also have a constitutional government, but, pace Mr. Derbyshire, that is not all that uncommon in today's world, was not unknown in Early Modern Europe, has been modal in continental Europe for 150 years, and has been a feature of some locales outside the Anglo-Saxon world for centuries.

So, we are who we are. Any community composed of human beings has a history of defects and failures in addition to all the other elements of its history. There are figures, both august and scruffy, who find this flattering to themselves. For gosh sakes, improve your surroundings as you profess to see them by planting your ass elsewhere; more barbecue for the rest of us.

THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

Memo to Daniel Nichols.

TOWARD A RHETORIC OF REACTION

Another fellow who appears to see his function as agreeably adjusting to the will and designs of women around him is Dr. Joseph Knippenberg of Ashland University, the moderator of the blog No Left Turns. I have had occasion of late to offer an assessment of the manners and moral reasoning of his distaff blogger. Neither she nor her defenders mounted much of a response. Dr. Knippenberg's response was to ban me. Easy come, easy go.

Nevertheless, I shall offer several assertions:

1. It is often said that correllation does not establish causality. It is also true that spatial or temporal juxtapostion do not establish it either.

2. When a man has lost three fingers in an industrial accident, it is sickly bad form to appear in the emergency room and berate him for failing to shower and shave that morning.

3. A municipal government which refuses to inquire into (much less punish) wrongdoing by its officers cannot legitimately complain the aggrieved seek to have the truth laid bare in discovery proceedings.

4. People are educated in correct conduct incrementally in the course of their daily interactions; principles of correct conduct may be fairly stable and discernable through reflection; enforcement of correct conduct may be mitigated in degree but seldom will compreshensive dispensations be offered; an assessment of performance in the realm of correct conduct is properly undertaken with reference to the education the subject has had up to this point; the severity of sanctions are properly proportionate to performance; education in good conduct begins at the point of departure of what the student has learned thus far; education may incorporate rebukes, but it does not commence with them.

5. The essence of a person can be understood as a gemstone: its attributes are what emerges from the acts and dispositions undertaken or entertained throughout each moment of a person's life. Each facet is an act, and whether it be (for all time) transparent or opaque is indicative of the state of grace (or its absence). Because we live in time and those we observe live in time (and living in time means always changing), a person's essence is necessarily obscure. We seldom if ever need allude to it.

Discuss.

JUNO

I have seen fragments of discussion of this film in recent weeks. I hadn't much interest but was offered up without my consent to take an elderly relation to a Sunday matinee. (Commercial transactions on Sunday are usually matters for the confessional).

The last movie I was compelled to watch (by a host whom I like quite a lot and whose hospitality is extended far beyond what I might merit) was a kid-flick called Night at the Museum, which left me checking my watch throughout. Not so Juno, which is at least engaging and not a waste of one's time. Much of the teen dialogue in the first third is grating, but this problem dissipates as the story advances. I gather the score and the fictional protagonist's disposition toward contemporary music are a cause of irritation to some, go figure. There has been much discussion of how it treats certain contemporary issues with a salutary ambiguity or fails to treat them in a manner which advances the critic's social thought (if that is what it can be called). Well, works of imaginative literature are not tracts. There is nothing wrong with tracts, but they are not art.

That having been said, for all that various characters could be affecting, I have to say I came away with a mild irritation about the degree to which the characterization is congruent with a certain sort of social imagination. The author creates three male characters (the father of the protagonist, the friend who inadvertantly sired the protagonist's unborn child, and the husband of the couple who aspire to adopt the child). All three in the first instance, and two of the three throughout, are manifestations of a feminist conception of the masculine vocation: their business is agreeably adjusting to the will and designs of the women around them. The protagonist's father earns half the household's living as an independent contractor installing HVAC systems, assures his daughter of his 'support', and cedes the guidance of his daugther and the governance of his home to his wife, who is a rude and argumentative sage to her stepdaughter but is not truly the girl's mistress. The youth who fathers the bastard child (while appealing) is ethereal and lost and nearly speechless throughout, emerging toward the close of the film to provide tender affection (more 'support'). The aspirant adoptive father supplements his wife's ample earnings (her occupation is evidently steady and lucrative but unstated) by composing commercial advertising jingles on his home computer. (He allows to the main character that the missus dislikes discovering that he has sat around all day not 'contributing'). He is along for the ride on his wife's quest for motherhood. Or rather, he is along until such time as he declares to his wife that he is leaving her and is unready for fatherhood. His dishonor, his puerile character, and his declaration of independence from his wife's will are all incorporated into one tapestry.

The main character is initially devastated by this last turn of events, but fortified with a pep talk from her father (more 'support') on the making of durable relationships, delivers the child on birth to the arms of the aspirant adoptive mother. The film concludes with the protagonist and the baby's father, once second-drawer friends and now lovers, seated on the steps of his family's home and with each singing, playing the guitar, and gazing into the eyes of the other. (The advent an growth of whatever it is between these two is never depicted). Flannery O'Connor said that literature trafficks in the possible, not the probable, and the possibilities most prominent in the screenwriter's mind are those in which mothers and step-mothers are interchangeable parts, husbands and fathers are ultimately dispensable, and heroes and patriarchs are nowhere to be seen. (Women are industrious and savvy without fail and have no need of such things in any case).

You have to wonder if our creative types can imagine any other world, or could bring themselves to put it to paper if they did so imagine.

.

A MEANDER ON IMMIGRATION

[The following was composed as part of a discussion on the World Magazine Blog. That discussion can be viewed here. I have placed it here rather than there as, at the end of the day, it seemed too verbose and too much a statement of thoughts extraneous to that discussion. It retains some references to other participants, however.]

It appears all the participants on the thread are agreed that the moderator's question about the electoral implications of hispanic immigration are not worth discussing and the value of that immigration is.

One ought take exception to commenter Bob Buckles suggestion that a guest worker program be erected. This is simply socially corrupting, inasmuch as a foreseeable if not certain result will to create an unintegrated and permanent servant class. This has been the result of guest worker programs in Germany and Switzerland, and it is not a desirable social destination. If we maintain one principle, it ought to be that in this country, we do our own work. (A corrollary of which is that - in whatever numbers - people are invited to settle here, not merely to work here).

The economic benefits of immigration have been alluded to by others here, and are predicted by certain neo-classical models of the labor market. The economist George Borjas has attempted to quantify the benefits to the extant population of immigration flows given current welfare policy. I am working from memory, but as I recall, they amounted to about 0.1% of Gross Domestic Product per year. One might suspect that the net benefit is thus rather sensitive to adjustments in public benefit levels. Dr. Borjas was (and may still be) an advocate of immigration policies designed to favor applicants who bring a certain quanta of human capital with them (comparatively common among East Indian immigrants, but not Mexican immigrants).

Commenter "CoyoteBlue" makes reference to the antiquity and priority of Mexican settlement in this country, but it is difficult to see that as salient. The sum of Mexican peninsulares, criollos, mestizos, and mission indians resident in Texas at the time it seceded from Mexico in 1836 amounted to 3,000 people. There were, by contrast, about 10,000 settlers from the United States. The quantum of Mexican settlement in California may have been higher, but the situation was not qualitatively different. Those territories we seized in 1846/48 were home to an aboriginal population unintegrated into Mexican or American society, and Mexican 'possession' of that territory was largely a diplomatic courtesy, not a palpable political reality. The number of hispanics in this country predominantly descended from this small Mexican settler population likely approaches nil.

Commenter Nick Peters has refused thus far to credit Latin American societies for their actual achievements, most especially over the last quarter century. "CoyoteBlue" wishes to lay responsibility for Central America's woes at the feet of the United States. Both are in error. These societies, which have been sovereign for more than 180 years and were in formation for 300 years prior to that, have their own internal social dynamic and institutional arrangements. Central American land tenures, educational systems, military cultures, and elite attitudes have been what they have been. For the United States to have altered them substantially at any time since we achieved a sort of hegemonic position in this hemisphere (ca. 1898) would have required occupying these countries and imposing a sort of 'MacArthur regency' upon them, a recommendation that would sit rather ill with the usual complaint the American foreign policy has been too intrusive in Latin America.

Nick Peters' animus aside, in making immigration policy, we are considering the effects of the movements of large numbers of people and, in describing these effects, cannot avoid the use of aggregate statistics. The posited benefit to productivity noted above is one such statistic. The differential in crime rates between the longstanding population and a selection of immigrant groups is another (and I would refer commenter "DC Lawyer" to Heather MacDonald's articles on this question in City Journal on this point). You could posit that the unhappy social statistics in question arise not from an abiding disposition within the immigrant population in question, but from factors correllated with those which induce people to migrate, or arise from some aspect of the interaction between immigrants and host societies; however, unless the aetiology of the problem is such that it can be neutralized by effective social policy in the receiving country, social pathology among immigrants and their children is a cost that will have to be weighed in assessing immigration policy.

That is, unless it be your contention that it is illegitimate to do so. Contemporary political etiquette has it that one cannot properly make certain sorts of actuarial calculations based on certain sorts of data; that one must refine one's categories of inspection. If one concedes this, one could properly insist on two provisos:

• 
  1. That such a principle applies both to data favorable to and data unfavorable to what Thomas Sowell has called the "mascot groups" of the intelligentsia;
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  2. That all acknowledge that the more refined and rococo a public policy is, the more difficult it is to implement with regularity.

Defenders of a liberal immigration regime are commonly dismissive of enforcement efforts. However, if the civil service is to be deemed incapable of doing something fairly crude (such as building along the Rio Grande a high cement wall topped with razor wire), it is difficult to see how consular officials and others will be able to do something as refined as reliably discern whether applicant x will or will not be an asset to the country (never mind the folks who cannot be bothered to apply within the law). Alternately, advocates can simply deny the social pathology (and various other considerations), deny the legitimacy of discussing these, or offer that the onus for the problems is on the host country who must accept the problem like a dose of salts (or generate yet more jobs for aspirant social workers in the course of various schemes at amelioration).

The question has been posed as to what social problems (bar labor recruitment in a modest selection of industries) are ameliorated by immigration. That in turn depends on what is your understanding of just what constitutes a social problem.

Some years ago, Michael Lind (a journalist favorable to the Democratic Party but skeptical of immigration) reported that he had had a discussion with a Democratic Party strategist where the man had revealed his conception of what was a social problem: the failure of the Democratic Party to mobilize a sufficient fraction of the (caucasian) working class, for which the solution was building a base among hispanics (by importing more hispanics). You have also extraparliamentary politicians and educational and social-service apparatchiks who could do with a larger constitutency.

Apart from these, you have folk for whom mass immigration may have certain psychological benefits, either in the aesthetic realm (think of people who speak of 'gorgeous mosaics') or in allowing them to think well of themselves (most particularly if the segmentation of labor markets and urban settlements makes of it that others pay any bills which may come due).

I may be in error, but I cannot shake the impression that common norms and common celebrations are frequently done away with or diluted with the excuse that "In our increasingly diverse society, we can no longer insist that....", etc.; that our immigrant populations are being used as an excuse or as infantry in a domestic kulturkampf in which they themselves have no true stake; and that many in our word-merchant sector, if carefully questioned, would reveal that as far as they are concerned the problem in this country is the vernacular culture and social attitudes of the large mass of Americans of the working class and the common-and-garden bourgeoisie who have no strong ethnic consciousness. The problem, baby, is you.

For my own part, I wish to live and die in a country that is content simply to be, composed of those born here and those who settle here to be with us as we are a people with whom they feel an affinity; not an ideological construct ("first universal nation"), nor a toy theatre for the fulfillment of someone's social fantasies, but a country, content simply to be.

A BEND IN THE RIVER

Some months back I happened upon this site, which is devoted to debunking the pronouncements of a collection of (largely academic) eccentrics devoted to propagating the notion that the World Trade Center and portions of the Pentagon were destroyed as a consequence of a government conspiracy (whose means and methods are a matter of dispute among members of this collection). The principal of this collection is a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota whose previous avocation was research on the Kennedy assassination. The more sober and seasoned among that particular subculture have found his work therein something of an embarrassment to the guild; he appears to be maintaining his usual standards.

This Prof. Fetzer from Minnesota has had occasion to extol the scholarly heft of his crew, but as it happens they include among them just three people with much in the way of scientific or technical expertise. One is a physicist who specializes in an odd department of electrochemical research, another a mechanical engineer whose beat is research in the service of the optimal design of dentures, and a third an aerospace engineer formerly of the U.S. Air Force. The first of these teaches at Brigham Young University, the second at Clemson University, and the third has been retired for some time.

I must admit upon examining Robert M. Bowman's advertisments for himself, I suspected him a fantasist whose biography was composed of much fabrication. He claimed to have received a doctoral degree from Caltech, to have directed the Air Force's missile defense research before such programs were made public, to have held teaching or administrative posts at five different colleges, to have chaired eight international conferences, and to have spoken before the House of Lords (while having seen combat in VietNam as well).

A search of Dissertation Absracts International reveals that the California Institute of Technology did in fact award a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering to a Robert Marcus Bowman, in 1966. Unless the man is a far more talented forger than he is a webmaster, he is approximately who he says he is, albeit laden with some trumpery. During 22 years in the military, was an instructor at the Air Force Institute of Technology (if no other place he cares to specify), did a brief tour in VietNam, and was stationed in England for six or seven years while assigned to a research and development corps within the Air Force known as the Air Force Systems Command (which agency he curiously refers to as the "Air Force Space Division"). Subsequent to his retirement from the military was employed by commercial corporations for a time, among them General Dyanamics and the Space Communications Company, which last was a joint venture of Western Union and Fairchild Industries (among others). As can be seen, he was a participant in a number of technical and professional conferences as well.

In July 1982, his employment with the Space Communications Company ceased and Dr. Bowman departed the world of vocational achievement he had occupied for the previous thirty years. Subsequent to that he founded the "Institute for Space and Security Studies", which has been variously located in Potomac, Maryland and around about Melbourne, Florida (but one suspects always atop the desk in his den). The Institute issues a newsletter, Space & Security News, which Dr. Bowman describes thus: "Fiercely independent, S&SN has angered many liberals by defending the Cassini space probe with its plutonium heat source. It has alienated conservatives by its opposition to the B-2, nuclear testing, and weapons in space." There are two (2) libraries in the English-speaking world which advertise that they have a scatter of issues in and amongst their dead inventory, angering and alienating whomever. He is also "Vice President" of the "Millennium III Corporation", of which what you see is about what you get. He appears to have had something of a road show ca. 1985, and gone on tour again several times in the last seven years. Did I mention he is a bishop?

The executive or engineer who loses his job well into middle age and is thereafter foresaken by employers is a commonplace (and there were many such displaced bourgeois in 1982). Well, if no one is hiring, your technical skills are a wasting, and your military pension provides an adequate income, one might as well construct an alternate reality for oneself. Perhaps that assumes too much, but the contrast between one period and another may allow one to surmise that a crisis of some sort presented itself in his 49th year, the resolution of which you see before you. At least his wife stuck by him.

All the gifts we have we hold contingently.

THE CURRENT'S GOT HIM

I have in the last year or so allowed to lapse my membership in the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There was a distinct reason for this. The Trust expended $6.7 million dollars of its members' contributions for the purchase of a piece of contemporary architecture: a fifty-some year-old house in rural Illinois which sports features that render any resident deficient in privacy, which suffers from condensation problems, and which is aesthetically banal. The tale of it is told in E. Michael Jones' Living Machines. It was of interest to Dr. Jones for the same reason the Trust's director, Richard Moe, fancies it ought to be of interest to him: it was designed by Mies van der Rohe (for a lady physician who by some accounts later concluded she had been taken for a ride financially, and, perhaps, erotically). Mr. Moe offered in announcing the purchase that the Trust had been criticised for being lax in the preservation of gems of contemporary architecture and he aimed to rectify that. However Mr. Moe understands the organization's institutional mission, suckers like me were sending cheques to the Trust every year because we perceived the following: that public and commercial architecture of sufficient age that it embodied a sense of aesthetics was in danger from the common-and-garden workings of the real estate market; that the ordinary workings of that same market were such that old architecture was being replaced with artifacts of inferior aesthetic quality; and that thus we would subvene the haphazard efforts of eelomosynaries to preserve some fragments of heritage in lieu of more reliable means. Niggardly philistine that I am, I shall not be sending any more contributions to the Trust for a good while.

That has not stopped them from sending me copies of their magazine. This is a lesser publication than it was a dozen years ago, but is still satisfactory. I have finally gotten around to reading a critique therein of the New Urbanism written by Sudip Bose and appearing in their September/October 2005 issue. If you find the commercial strips common to suburban townships coarse and find the full assembly of residential and commercial construction a habitat for automobiles bearing human cargo rather than a habitat for man, you might be pleased that the agreeable aspects of city living (foot traffic and proximity to neighbors and local merchants) are being attempted in suburban development after a hiatus of about six decades. Well, Mr. Bose is not impressed with the Kentlands, Maryland, where he used to live. Mr. Bose moved there reluctantly. He got lost jogging shortly after moving in. The neighborhood is too neat, too clean, and too planned. The architectural mix is inauthentic: "All those federal revival houses, with their picket fences...Would residents avoid mingling on the common green if the houses that enclosed it were built, say, of glass and steel?" (Do you know of any neighborhoods constructed of glass and steel townhouses? Neither do I. Neither, I suspect, does Mr. Bose. Might consumer resistance be a reason for that? The sort of resistance the Trust did not display when it bought Mies' hunk-o'-junk?). He continues:

I couldn't help thinking -- naively, I admit -- that the lack of physical imperfection suggested that life inside those clean, neat houses was smooth-edged, too, that husbands who inhabited those spaces didn't cheat on their wives, that children didn't get suspended from school, that four vodka martinis weren't being desperately downed with the evening meal by couples who had nothing to talk about anymore. That's the problem with all this old-timey, feel-good architecture: It offers an illusion, and how can a person feel rooted in or connected to an illusion?

From 17 years of city living, I can assure Mr. Bose that the peeling paint on the facades of the buildings and the cracks on the sidewalks grant one few insights into the marital problems of the residents therein. Mr. Bose offers he would prefer that Kentlands had grown organically like Carbondale, Illinois or Ithaca, New York. Sad to say, the interaction of market forces and local politics has not been generating communities with that sort of morphology. (With our without the tincture of crime and vagrancy that Mr. Bose finds in Ithaca and thinks optimal). The New Urbanism is a practical attempt by planners and developers to give people an alternative to the usual suburban mess. In any case, the paint in the Kentlands will have ample time to peel and the sidewalks ample time to crack in the coming years.

Making the good the enemy of the satisfactory may strike one as contrived (especially when Mr. Bose adds to the bill of particulars a complaint that the developers were unable to dictate to the D.C. transit authority a bus schedule agreeable to him). Toward what end? Well...

I am more convinced, as I prepare to move out of the Kentlands, that the perfect, happy, small American town might never have been, but for our nostalgia and imagination.

Somehow I suspect that the phrase "our nostalgia and imagination" does not, in his mind, truly encompass him or that friend whom he takes around town and who sneers at the place 'cynically'. (Can we call his use the possessive 'inauthentic'?) It refers to his neighbors (who happily live in an 'illusion') or to nameless others in times present or past who lack the sophistication to find the Kentlands distasteful. Nothing is adduced in his article to indicate that his neighbors or the broad strata of the population past and present think or have thought that the consequences of original sin were in abeyance in small towns in New Jersey circa 1925. It is something he chooses to impute to them.


Whatever Mr. Moe or Mr. Bose fancy they're up to, they are doing a dandy job of persuading the more dyspeptic among the Trust's contributors that the mission of same will with their ministrations come to conform to that of educational and cultural institutions generally: a hustle in the service of self-congratulation, complete with the misapplication of seven-figure sums of money.

SENSIBILITIES

One of the local colleges (there are four) boasts a newspaper which students publish weekly during the academic year. The issue in question, which was distributed to sojourners on the campus about two weeks ago and to which meticulous copy editors have affixed the dates "September 2, 2005" to the cover and "January 28, 2005" to the inside pages, has graced its readers with a column by a Miss Elisa Benson. It will likely be displayed to the world's internet users (including, presumably, Miss Benson's father) 'ere long.

One might allow for the possibility that the column is intended to be satirical, in which case one might wish to instruct the paper's editors that the sensible experience of mirth is qualitatively distinct from that of the mixture of fascination and dismay that tends to ensue when a toilet backs up and floods the bathroom floor.

Miss Benson has some advice to those, two or three years her junior, who have recently arrived at the college:

First things first: kick to the to the curb your high school luvuh. [The village government's automated street sweepers take care of the litter.] Do it now, before you find yourself in the inevitable process of mentally redefining what constitutes cheating.... Even if you and your sig-other stay loyal, you're both cheating yourself out of new people and new opportunities....Here, you'll hook up sooner (like, this weekend), fall in love [?] faster, and definitely have more kinky sex than you did at seventeen. [You owe it to yourself. Act now. Call 1-800-BLOWJOB.]

College also provides tremendous opportunities for sexual exploration. [See the brochures at our visitors' center.] For some people this means making out with their roommate at a frat party, but for others, its a chance to... take advantage of the LGBTQ support groups on campus. [Some...others...which suggests that the college's housing apparat has billeted your daughter in the same room with...] Or, for some, its a first chance for physical and emotional intimacy. [Do you suppose princess might be unclear on the concept, Mr. Benson?]

...[you] should keep condoms on hand if you're sexually active, regardless of your gender. (If you're sexually adventurous, stockpile a variety of colors/flavors/textures). [As would any informed consumer.]

...people who say Colgate students don't have relationships are only bitter because they've been unattached, and probably drunk, for most of their time here...Colgate is whatever kind of place you want it to be, sexually and otherwise. Take advantage of it. [Your 40K @ work, Mr. Benson.]

The poet Philip Larkin was a meticulous diarist. His journals were said by one of the few to have examined them to have been filled with the spew of his more impure and unappealing cogitations. He had them burned at the time of his death in 1983. That was then. Miss Benson penned the foregoing and turned it over to a student editor by the name of Fein, who in turn also disregarded what conscience owes to taste and what taste owes to conscience and made use of it to fill his idle column inches. To date, public remarks upon it have been limited to what you see. The subsequent issue contains another dispatch from Miss Benson, this time of mechanical advice. The substance is Alex Comfort's, the diction, Moon Unit Zappa's. It also contains two letters of complaint, both concerning a tasteless pun in a headline on the front page of the issue of 2 September, which the letter writers' conceived of as insulting to one of the institution's sugar daddies. Perhaps we can take heart by assuming that no one reads her godforsaken column.

Leaving aside the question of the actual nocturnal activities of Miss Benson and her peers, one has to ask what it says about that dimension of morals that is manners, such as it is at this time. The mode by which one interacts with people is in part an outgrowth of the self to which one aspires and influences the quality of the human relations formed. Here we can see what Miss Benson is willing to say (which is to say, how she wishes to appear), how that is implicitly evaluated by her readers, and pose the question of what that says about the dynamic of social relations in her milieu (and perhaps ours).

John McWhorter recently gave an interview to the Mars Hill Audio Journal the burden of which was that formal speech had largely disappeared in this country in the last forty years. He quoted from a letter composed about a century ago by a young man to his love, a diary entry of sorts in which the young man told of his small activities of the day and also how much he had thought of her. Dr. McWhorter offered that a young man of our own time who wrote thus would likely end his days as a bachelor, as he would be offering something unpalatable to contemporary women, something to be regarded as risible. In place of the refined meanings that might be conveyed with strata of formal and informal speech, and with categories of poetic and prosaic speech, we have what we have. The campus in question is shot through with young women who are terrible motormouths but are scarcely able to utter an unclutterd and grammatically well-constructed sentance; who are distasteful to listen to even when they are not discussing fruit-flavored condoms. We are right to suspect that there is much they cannot think or say that might have been commonly uttered sixty years ago.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury presented to his readers a quasi-dystopian vision of a society of people who were given over to amusing themselves to such a degree (and evading any disputation or grief) that they could appreciate neither the sublime nor the mundane. Some aspects of the latter (e.g. family conversation or an after-dinner walk) perplex the inhabitants of this world and make them suspicious; manifestations of the former are met with incomprehension or are experienced as acutely painful. Matters of heart and mind are actively avoided and seldom experienced, with the consequence that the social relations which are nurtured by them exist only in vestigial form. There are still people referred to as husbands, wives, mothers, sons, friends, and neighbors, but the sensible aspects of these relations have been drained away. Those who have retained some capacity to appreciate what makes life worth living are an odd, semi-clandestine, and self-consiously counter-cultural minority.

And what of the tragic? Bradbury offers a scene of a pair of medical technicians attending to a woman who has attempted suicide bantering with her husband. "Got to clean 'em out both ways...No use getting the stomach if you don't clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple thousand times and the brain just gives up...W'ere done...That's fifty bucks...We get these cases nine or ten a night....We gotta go..." Not far from that campus is a funeral parlor which generally has calling hours or services several times a week This summer happening by I saw something that I am not sure I had ever seen before. There was a gathering there, with people lined up outside the building. A great many of those 'mourners' were in golf shirts and shorts.