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Remembering Sam Francis
 Now
that Barack Obama has all but thrown his halo
into the ring, we could use a little skepticism. He makes an awfully good first
impression, like a champion high-school orator, but what has he done to
excite such
messianic  hopes
in so many people — especially journalists?
His outstanding
quality is his lack of experience. Other politicians have given experience a bad
name, and here is a liberal without baggage — neither a Bush nor a
Clinton. That’s all it takes to make journalists swoon like Iowa matrons
having their hands kissed by Cary Grant. At the moment, he’s the
Tiger Woods of American politics, a one-man diversity roster, of rather
indeterminate race, religion, ideology, and style.
What this calls
for is a Sam Francis. Unfortunately, Sam died two years ago, leaving no
successor among skeptics. Nobody was so thoroughly immune to liberal
enthusiasm as Sam. He was a prize-winning editorial writer for the
Washington Times, until he proved too conservative for that
allegedly conservative paper and was given the boot.
I am happy to
say that some of Sam’s writings — more than 300 pages of
them — are now available again in Shots Fired: Sam Francis on
America’s Culture War, edited by Peter B. Gemma (FGF
Books; www.shotsfired.us).
Sam was
severely allergic to phony conservatives, especially the neoconservatives,
which made him uneasy with the Republican Party. He spoke of “the
neocon mafia” and referred to the GOP as “the stupid
party”; his sardonic mention of “neoconservative sex god Irving
Kristol” gives you some idea of how he would have described the
current adulation of Obama (an Obamination, perhaps?).
To Sam,
democratic politics was “the high art and science of fooling some of
the people some of the time.” His attitude toward racial
“diversity” is succinctly expressed in his comment on a local
high school: “the school becomes more ‘diverse,’ the
school declines in academic performance, and the whites leave.”
Everything liberalism regards as “progressive,” Sam tended to
see as decadent: “The final and unpredictable irony of our history may
be that we were more civilized at the beginning of it than at the end of
it.”
Like his
philosophical mentor James Burnham, Sam was inclined to pessimism, though
he would call it realism; for him, optimism was usually an illusion. His aversion
to the Republican Party went back to its origins: Despite his contempt for
the Bushes, father and son, he argued that Abraham Lincoln was “an
ill-prepared man who has a strong claim to being the most incompetent
president in American history.” Lincoln was a
“mediocrity” whose presidency was a “disaster,”
not only for his own generation but for posterity as well.
![[Breaker quote for Remembering Sam Francis: The one and only]](2007breakers/070118.gif) For
Sam, the Civil War was still a live
issue. A cause wasn’t sanctified merely because it had prevailed by
force, or discredited because it had been defeated. In history, the bad guys
often win. It has been observed that the American mind is averse to the very
idea of tragedy; in that sense, Sam was un-American.
His mind, in
fact, was wide-ranging and well-stocked. After his death I learned that he
was steeped in English poetry, as well as European history. No wonder he was
so resistant to fads. His manner was dour, as a rule, but it could also be jolly.
He couldn’t stay cynical; he enjoyed the ironies of things too much.
When most of the world took one side, you could count on Sam to take the
other; he was a natural reactionary, aware that everything has its obverse.
Sam was willing
to take a position even if he was the only one taking it; he never ran with the
pack. It was this solitary character that made him interesting and,
paradoxically, won him devoted readers.
But such a man
is bound to antagonize those who do run in packs, and the neocons had it in
for him. They did much to hurt his career and keep him isolated. It says much
for Sam’s determination that he kept writing in his uncompromising
way to the end. He never wrote a word he didn’t mean.
We could use
more like him. But there was only one Sam Francis.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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