People wishing to post comments should instead send me an email at tmsandefur@gmail.com and I may post pertinent comments with replies. I won't use your name unless you say otherwise.
I’m anti-monarchy, of course. But I love the Queen of England, and I wish her and her people all the best for the Diamond Jubilee. To me, one moment in particular will stick in my memory whenever I think of Queen Elizabeth. That came on September 13, 2001, when Her Majesty specifically asked that the guards at Buckingham Palace perform “The Star Spangled Banner,” the first and only time that a foreign national anthem was performed during the famous Changing of the Guards Ceremony. A few days later, she asked that it be played again at the memorial service convened at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that was, I think, the most beautiful performance of the song I have yet heard.
It was a small gesture—especially in the face of such horror. But it moved me then, and it moves me now. As an individual citizen, it seems a little absurd to say that I was personally touched by the diplomatic act of a foreign head of state. But I was. And it seems a little extreme to say that an international alliance matters to me personally. But it does. Thank goodness for Great Britain and the Commonwealth, their beautiful and brilliant people, and their noble monarch.
I was recently reminded of this marvelous poem by Miller Williams.The sestina is usually a little too intellectualized for me to get into, but this one is so powerful, and done with such seemingly effortless grace, it’s deservedly a classic:
Somewhere in everyone’s head something points toward home, a dashboard’s floating compass, turning all the time to keep from turning. It doesn’t matter how we come to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes the way it went once, where nothing holds fast to where it belongs, or what you’ve risen or fallen to.
What the bubble always points to, whether we notice it or not, is home. It may be true that if you move fast everything fades away, that given time and noise enough, every memory goes into the blackness, and if new ones come--
small, mole-like memories that come to live in the furry dark--they, too, curl up and die. But Carol goes to high school now. John works at home what days he can to spend some time with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.
Ellen won’t eat her breakfast. Your sister was going to come but didn’t have the time. Some mornings at one or two or three I want you home a lot, but then it goes.
It all goes. Hold on fast to thoughts of home when they come. They’re going to less with time.
Time goes too fast. Come home.
Forgive me that. One time it wasn’t fast. A myth goes that when the years come then you will, too. Me, I’ll still be home.
You’ve probably seen this amusing poster somewhere or other; a bookstore near my house has it displayed on the wall. It’s often cited as an example of Cold War hysteria—the evils of McCarthyism—how foolish our grandparents were, that they would believe such silliness! They must have been really backwards.
And yet….
I recently got suspicious about the origins of this poster, and decided to see if I could track down the original. My suspicion was that it was fake, put together by someone who, for ideological reasons, wanted to downplay the reality of the Soviet threat during the Cold War. Heaven knows, there are many such people, who seek to characterize the United States as either the villain in the Cold War, or at best paranoid in its fear of communism. Such people overemphasize the importance of Joseph McCarthy, and breeze past the real incidents of Soviet espionage and propaganda that occurred during that period; they portray communist propagandistsas martyrs, and American leaders as insidious or as the bumbling offspring of the John Birchers and the Keystone Kops.
My skepticism was increased by the fact that the original is nowhere to be found on the Internet. Most pictures of the ad are entirely unattributed. And other sources point out that it ran in Mad Magazine sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s. In the 1970s, a Los Angeles-based left-wing group called NAM distributed copies of the ad as a poster for fundraising purposes, attributing it to Time Magazine in 1932. But it keeps being repeated uncritically; no authentic sourcing ever seems to have been done.
Still, there’s only one way to be sure, so I went to the libraries at Cal. State Sacramento and U.C. Davis, both of which have Time Magazine back issues, and I went through them. What I found was more interesting, I think, than outright fraud.
Fake libertarian Ron Paul is seen here speaking before the Confederate battle flag about his view of the Civil War, where he explains why he agrees with (a view he attributes to--see below) Lysander Spooner, that “the south was on the right side of the issue.” (HT:John Barr.)
I’ve been enjoying the new Sherlocka lot. It’s stylish and fun, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have really helped the show to have its own identity. But Cumberbatch’s Holmes—like Hugh Laurie’s House—is so persistently rude, and even cruel, that it really makes the show less enjoyable. Why is it that filmmakers think geniuses are best portrayed as unpleasant?
House being an original creation, it’s more excusable that he be a prick than that Sherlock Holmes be cast in that light. Compare Cumberbatch to the inimitable Jeremy Brett—far and away the greatest Holmes ever filmed, and a contender for the greatest dramatic portrayal ever of a literary character. Brett actually introduced a lot of the quirkiness of the character that is not present in the Conan Doyle stories, and I suspect Cumberbatch has imitated these to some degree. But for all his occasional sharpness and brief fits of temper, he’s never just purposely cruel. The contrary for Cumberbatch’s Holmes. It’s impossible to imagine the new Holmes letting Captain Croker go at the end of “The Abbey Grange,” for example—which Holmes does from tenderness and honor. Conan Doyle says in “The Solitary Cyclist” that Holmes interrupted important research to receive a potential client because although he “loved above all things precision and concentration of thought,” and “resented anything which distracted his attention from the matter in hand,” could not turn her away “without harshness which was foreign to his nature.” Conan Doyle’s and Brett’s Holmes is a gentleman through and through; an elegant, intellectual James Bond. To the degree that Cumberbatch portays Holmes as a man suffering from Asperger’s, he does violence to the character.
I’m delighted to think that “Geek Chic” and “smart is sexy,” are really taking off, but I suspect what we’re actually seeing is “Geeksploitation” instead. Smart folks aren’t being appreciatively or fairly portrayed on screen—they’re either being exploited and laughed at,* or, what is almost as bad, smart folks themselves are enjoying these shows because the characters are being cruel to the less intelligent in ways that viewers wish they had the guts to do. To some audiences, I suspect, Sherlock’s rudeness is the nerd version of Falling Down—an expression of repressed rage. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: on the contrary, drama and literature exist to make certain statements that people feel they cannot say in real life. But it’s worrisome that there’s a market for such feelings, and it’s worse if smart people imagine Geek Chic as liberating when in reality it’s condescending and isolating. Regarding intelligence as a mental disorder may not be (how to put it?) the smart move.
One final thing. It may be that geniuses are portrayed as mean because to non-geniuses, they appear that way. This is often the case, for example, with religious people, who are sometimes bewildered or even offended by the very existence of non-believers. For you to regard the central myth of their lives as a fiction, even a harmful fiction, stirs a sort of resentment—and they often misinterpret your skepticism as cynicism. At the same time, the non-religious are often tempted into saying condescending and nasty things. The result is what H.L. Mencken so well described:
One of the most curious human delusions lies in the theory that cynics are unhappy men—that cynicism makes for general biliousness and malaise. It is a false deduction, I believe, from the obvious fact that cynics make other men unhappy. But they are themselves the most comfortable and serene of mammals; perhaps only bishops, pet dogs and actors are happier. For what a cynic believes, though it may be too dreadful to put into formal words, at least usually has the merit of being true—and truth is ever a rock, hard and harsh, but solid under the feet. A cynic is chronically in the position of a wedding guest who has known the bride for nine years, and has had her confidence. He is a great deal less happy, theoretically, than the bridegroom. The bridegroom, beautifully barbered and arrayed, is about to launch into the honeymoon. But the cynic looks ahead two weeks, two months, two years. Such, to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Eliot, are the durable satisfactions of life.
It would be healthier for our society if geniuses and skeptics were portrayed as, on the whole, happier than the average. Which, in reality, I think they are.
*-Actually, I think Big Bang Theory laughs with, most of the time, and that is a good thing.
Prof. Samuelson has a thorough response to my post about John Adams and individual liberty. While it’s true I’m not a great admirer of Adams (I’m much fonder of his son), my point was not biographical or historical, but philosophical: democracy is an instrumental good, one that is valuable only insofar as it protects the primary value of individual liberty. As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, the individual’s right to freedom is primary, and government power is secondary. Liberty is what justifies and limits the power of the majority to make the rules. Where I disagree with Prof. Samuelson is in his apparent belief that the individual’s right to freedom should be considered equally valuable or equally justified as the right of the majority to govern. Not only is that wrong, it’s also contrary to the Declaration of Independence.
My article, “Insiders, Outsiders, And The American Dream,” has been published in the latest issue of the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy.You can read it online here. The article deals with Certificate of Necessity laws—rules that bar a business from starting operations unless it can prove that there’s a “public need” for a new business of that sort. I argue that these laws aren’t just unwise as an economic matter, but that they violate basic ethical principles that underlie our constitutional and social order. Protections for the right to earn a living are a critical part of the promise of citizenship. Here’s a taste:
In 2007, college student entrepreneur Adam Sweet and his brother co-founded a moving company called 2 Brothers Moving in Portland, Oregon. What they did not know at the time was that to get the mandatory state license, they would first be required essentially to get permission from the state’s existing moving companies. Under a seventy-year-old state law, whenever a person applied for a license, the Oregon Department of Transportation (“ODOT”) would notify existing movers of the application and give them the opportunity to object to the issuing of a license. Once the inevitable objection was filed, Sweet would be forced to prove to ODOT that there was a “public need” for a new moving company…. Sadly, Sweet’s situation is typical of a type of licensing restriction called the “certificate of necessity” or “certificate of need” (“CON”) requirement. Unlike traditional occupational licenses, CON laws are not meant to protect consumers or the general public by requiring practitioners of a trade to demonstrate expertise or education. Instead, these laws exist to restrict competition and to boost the prices that established companies can charge. This cartel system…restrict[s] economic opportunity for entrepreneurs and raise[s] costs for products and services that consumers need, simply to protect existing businesses against legitimate economic competition. They have accordingly been subject to powerful economic critiques…[but] I want to discuss the deleterious effects that CON restrictions have on citizenship values and social philosophy…. [T]he use of CON laws in these competitive, entry level industries imposes major social and moral costs—infringing the individual liberty of, and denying economic opportunity to, precisely those people who most need meaningful constitutional protection
There is a dire need today for a liberalism which is truly liberal. What we are witnessing today in so many northern communities is a sort of quasi-liberalism which is based on the principle of looking sympathetically at all sides. It is a liberalism so bent on seeing all sides, that it fails to become committed to either side. It is a liberalism that is so objectively analytical that it is not subjectively committed. It is a liberalism which is neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm. We call for a liberalism from the North which will be thoroughly committed to the ideal of racial justice and will not be deterred by the propaganda and subtle words of those who say: "Slow up for a while; you're pushing too fast."
Eliminating the "fiction" from law often means only substituting dead metaphors for live ones. One sees an example of this in the following quotation: "'Consensual' contracts, or some better term, should be used to designate those contracts where there is a real 'meeting,' i.e., coincidence, of the minds of the parties." "Meeting" was felt as a metaphor, and required quotation marks accordingly. "Coincidence" (= falling on) was a dead metaphor and could stand unadorned.... Those who contend that "corporate personality" is and must be a fiction should be reminded that the word "person" originally meant "mask"; that its application to human brings was at first metaphorical. They would not contend that it is a fiction to say that Bill Smith is a person; their contention that "corporate personality" must necessarily involve a fiction must be based ultimately on the notion that the word "person" has reached the legitimate end of its evolution and that it ought to be pinned down where it now is.
If you don't subscribe to B.J. Harrison's excellent Classic Tales Podcast, you really should. He's an unusually talented reader, and he produces a ton of great stuff. His P.G. Wodehouse readings are particularly good, but he recently did all of Tom Sawyer, Hamlet, and Ivanhoe. His reading of Ayn Rand's Anthem was first rate. He's having a pledge drive now, too, so consider buying one of his dirt cheap audio books. I listen to a lot of audio books, and Harrison is among the best readers I've ever heard. Way cheaper than Audible.com, and guaranteed high quality (unlike some of the readers at Audible; David Case, a.k.a. Frederick Davidson, should never have been let within a mile of a microphone...)
This is my personal blog. The opinions expressed here are my own, and in no way represent those of the staff, management, or clients of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Cato Institute, or the McGeorge School of Law.
