Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
Bonus Issue 2000
(published December 1999)
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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The columns reprinted on pages 3-12 are reprinted with
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The Apotheosis of the Lie
(pages 1-2)
"I cannot tell a lie," the mythical little George
Washington told his father. Parson Weems seems to have
invented this edifying tale, and it summed up the old
American assumption that republican rulers should be
virtuous men, with honesty chief among their virtues.
The apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln included the popular
myth of "Honest Abe."
These myths made a deep impression on
generations of Americans. I know, because they made a
deep impression on me. I still vividly remember reading
children's biographies of Washington and Lincoln in the
second grade in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a small
classroom where the Ten Commandments were also posted on
the bulletin board. After reading that Lincoln had
walked miles to pay a few pennies to a customer he had
(inadvertently) shortchanged, I made a point of
admitting my own faults whenever possible. It always
made me feel good.
It was a chief tenet of our patriotism that
American presidents should be virtuous -- or, as we were
more likely to say, "godly." That attitude persisted
through the Vietnam War, when one of the chief charges
of the war's critics was that Presidents Johnson and
Nixon were "lying to the American people." It seemed a
serious charge at the time, so serious that I could
hardly believe it even of Johnson, much as I disliked
him. Could a liar even get into the White House? Surely
our system was designed to weed out ungodly men before
they achieved power! For the same reason I was reluctant
to believe the charges brought against Nixon during the
Watergate scandal. The idea of a mendacious president
was simply unbearable to me. And not only to me: in 1959
the American public was deeply shocked to learn that
Dwight Eisenhower had lied when he denied that a U-2
pilot shot down over Russia had been on an espionage
mission.
Well, as Sam Goldwyn once observed, "We have
all passed a lot of water since then." I was very naive
well into my adult years, but my trust was in keeping
with the decorum of the time, including its reticence
about sex. Even the sophisticated pundit Walter
Lippmann, when he accused Johnson of lying about
Vietnam, used the ironic euphemism "credibility gap."
We've heard all too much about the "lessons" of
Vietnam and Watergate, but those two debacles did
destroy the old decorum. They both proved that
presidents could not only lie, but lie with disastrous
results. We should have known this all along. Some of us
did, but many of us (including me) really didn't. Even
when, throwing off my family's loyalty to the Democratic
Party in my early twenties, I came to despise Franklin
Roosevelt, I was made uneasy by conservatives who
insisted that he'd lied to get us into World War II. I
still preferred to think of liberalism in general as an
honest mistake.
That gets harder and harder with the years.
After a while, even honest mistakes lose their innocence
and have to be sustained by ignoring and, eventually,
falsifying the facts. Today I find many of the same
people who roasted Johnson and Nixon for lying defending
the lies and perjuries of Bill Clinton.
Worse yet, liberals -- and their
neoconservative cousins -- have developed a new
tradition of actually *praising* certain presidential
lies. It has become a dogma of the progressive elements
among us that Franklin Roosevelt, faced with the threat
of Hitler, had no choice but to lie to the public, which
was in an "isolationist" mood. So it was actually
*virtuous* of FDR to deceive, mislead, and withhold
vital information from the American people when they
went to the polls. So much for democracy and the well-
informed citizenry.
Roosevelt didn't just lie on one crucial
occasion. He was a totally devious man, as close
students of his life have always known. His defenders
admit that he "misjudged" Stalin, but insist that he was
forced to make a wartime alliance with him. Actually,
Roosevelt's beneficence to Uncle Joe began in 1933, when
he extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union
despite the well-publicized Soviet "agricultural policy"
of starving millions of Ukrainian peasants for resisting
forced collectivization. Roosevelt knew a fellow
collectivist when he saw one, and he recognized a
natural ally in the Soviet dictator. He even defended
the Soviet constitution, assuring Americans that it,
like our own Constitution, guaranteed religious freedom.
He praised his own ambassador Joseph Davies's absurd
book, MISSION TO MOSCOW, which justified even the
Moscow show trials, and urged Warner Brothers to make a
major motion picture of it. In fact, Roosevelt trusted
Stalin more than he trusted Winston Churchill (not that
Churchill warranted anyone's trust either). Official
wartime propaganda portrayed the cunning monster as
"Uncle Joe," our democratic ally against the Axis
dictators.
Yet a recent article in THE NEW REPUBLIC
distinguished between Roosevelt's "noble" lie that drew
America into World War II and Lyndon Johnson's wicked
lies that drew America into Vietnam. Such defenses of
FDR have become standard. They show that sophisticated
liberals now have no objection to lying in anything they
regard as a good cause. We've come a long way from
Honest Abe.
As a matter of fact, Honest Abe himself has
undergone revisionism. His myth has been undermined not
by Confederate sympathizers, but by one of his chief
contemporary worshippers: Garry Wills. In his 1992 book
LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG: THE WORDS THAT REMADE AMERICA,
Wills argues that Lincoln's sternest critics have had a
point. One contemporary newspaper accused Lincoln of
"misstat[ing] the cause for which [the Union soldiers]
died," namely, "to uphold [the] Constitution," not to
free slaves. Wills doesn't disagree.
The Gettysburg Address did indeed mislead
Americans about the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution; except that Wills
argues that this "giant (if benign) swindle" was all to
the good. At Gettysburg, Lincoln subtly "corrected" the
Constitution. He "performed one of the most daring acts
of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the
unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands
was having his or her intellectual pocket picked."
Wills agrees with conservatives like M.E.
Bradford and Willmoore Kendall who regard the Gettysburg
speech as (in his words) a "clever assault upon the
constitutional past," a "stunning verbal coup," even "a
new founding of the nation." Indeed he gloats that
Lincoln got away with this "swindle," which has made
possible the centralization of power the Framers of the
Constitution had tried to prevent. Wills acknowledges
that Lincoln was "subverting the Constitution," but he
thinks it deserved to be subverted.
It's a curious transformation -- not only of
Honest Abe, but also of Garry Wills, who, thirty years
ago, was writing acidly about Richard Nixon's lies. But
his praise of Lincoln's "swindle" has been warmly
received by liberal opinion; it actually won a Pulitzer
Prize for history! Something has changed in the American
ethos, and we shouldn't marvel that the elites are so
forgiving of more recent presidential swindles.
Abortion and Hatred
(page 12)
(reprinted from Celebrate Life, September-October 1999,
with permission)
According to a recent article in the NEW YORK TIMES,
scientists have found that the frolicsome dolphin, the
most intelligent and beloved of marine mammals, has "an
unexplained darker side": it kills members of its own
species for no apparent reason. Dead porpoises and young
dolphins have washed up on shore bearing the teeth marks
of adult dolphins. Dolphins have even been known to bite
humans. "We have such a benign image of dolphins," says
Dr. Dale J. Dunn, a veterinary pathologist. "So finding
evidence of violence is disturbing."
The interesting question is why dolphins kill their
young; it's still unclear whether the young are killed by
their own mothers, their fathers, or by other adult males
who want to mate with their mothers and resent earlier
offspring. "Infanticide is common in nature," the article
notes. "Females kill their young when food is scarce and
male lions and bears, for example, sometimes kill the
young of a female taken as a new mate, giving them a
reproductive and evolutionary edge."
It's amusing that the concept of evolution, which
was supposed to make the concept of divine purpose in
nature unnecessary, has mutated into a concept of purpose
immanent in nature itself -- as if animals could somehow
sense that their genetic destiny is at stake when they
mate. Or have male mammals read Darwin?
Be that as it may, many animals, male and female, do
kill their own young and sometimes eat them. No matter
how this fact is explained, it still strikes us as
"unnatural," in the old sense of contrary to the general
principle of nature that causes beasts -- and humans --
to love and nurture their own offspring. Otherwise gentle
animals, such as gerbils, will also kill other members of
their species they feel are invading their living space.
Hatred is very much a part of nature, and it finds
its ultimate expression in killing. The reasons may
sometimes be obscure, but the fact is plain enough. There
is no reason to suppose it serves any higher or
"evolutionary" purpose.
We shouldn't shrink from recognizing the same thing
in human nature. Those who oppose abortion often speak of
mothers who abort their children as victims -- the idea
being that a young girl has gotten pregnant by an
irresponsible man, and that she goes to an abortionist
only because she has no clear concept of what abortion
is.
This is a sentimental notion. Women who abort are
unable to love the children they carry; and many of them
know very well what they are doing. The desire to end an
inconvenient life is a form of hatred.
In many cultures, from ancient Greece and Rome to
modern China, infanticide has been accepted. Parents kill
their newborn children or abandon them in places where
they are exposed them to starvation and wild animals.
Even in our liberal (but formerly Christian) culture,
this still seems well-nigh incomprehensible.
But infanticide is beginning to find its defenders
among us -- defenders who appeal to the logic of
abortion, which says that nobody should be burdened with
an unwanted child. They differ from most abortion
supporters only in consistency: they don't pretend that a
human being isn't being destroyed.
Like abortion, infanticide has always occurred even
when illegal. The law can never eliminate such evils
entirely, for the simple reason that parents often hate
and resent their children, as witness the phenomenon of
child abuse. I know of one woman who wanted to get an
abortion, was discouraged from doing so, and years later
told the child: "I wish I'd aborted you."
Being self-centered leads inevitably to hating
others who are obstacles to selfish desires. What is
"natural" in fallen human nature easily descends to the
diabolical. And our modern, post-Christian, liberal
culture treats the self-centered life as normal,
rejecting abortion laws as tyrannical impositions on what
has been called "the imperial self." Most of those who
favor legal abortion now support even "partial-birth"
abortion.
To paraphrase Our Lord, greater hatred hath no
parent than to kill the child. No false compassion should
be allowed to create illusions about this terrifying fact
of human nature.
(Reprinted from Celebrate Life, September-October 1999).
NUGGETS
AT LAST: The twentieth century is finally closing, an
era of stupendous material progress accompanied by
equally stupendous evil. The worst of it is that the
evil was often confused with progress, as when Western
intellectuals credited Stalin with ushering in a
"Renaissance" in Russian culture. In retrospect, the
whole century seems to me a succession of silly crazes,
large and small. Morals, politics, art, and psychology
were all dominated and warped by a passionate denial of
the obvious, an exaltation of the ugly and abnormal.
(page 5)
REDEMING QUALITY: One of the best things about this
sorry century is that its technology has made the fruits
of so many earlier ages available to us. You can watch
Shakespeare, listen to a Handel oratorio, and savor
Titian in your own home. Beethoven could have heard only
a few of Haydn's hundred-odd symphonies; we can hear
them all. (page 7)
SWEET SWEDES: Loveliest Woman of the Century? Garbo,
of course. An untouchable combination of beauty and
depth. But I've always found the young Ingrid Bergman
nearly as enchanting. Unfortunately, her chaste lustrous
beauty was prematurely coarsened by time and her
scandalous life. (page 8)
THE CHAMP: The twentieth century won't technically end
for another year, but in my opinion one title is already
secure: Cary Grant is definitely the Coolest Guy of the
Century, if not the Millennium. Sure, honorable mention
to Fred Astaire and Laurence Olivier, but it's not
really close. Less cool guys can only marvel at Grant's
superbly dimpled face, his suave wit, his indefinably
elegant accent, his exquisite dress, his bodily grace,
his perpetually perfect tan, even his haircut (self-
administered!): the total package of masculine charm.
Grant wrapped up the title so long ago that nobody even
bothers trying to emulate him anymore. One might as well
try to be another Shakespeare or Mozart. (page 10)
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Here are three items,
selected at random, from the Department of Veterans
Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, and
Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, 2000:
"$1,500,000 for West Virginia University to develop the
plastics recycling component of the Green Exchange, in
cooperation with the Polymer Alliance Zone and the
National Electronics Recycling Project, and in
consultation with the Office of Information and Resource
Management"; "$400,000 for Small Public Water Systems
Technology Assistance Center at the University of
AlaskaSitka"; "$1,000,000 for the Animal Waste
Management Consortium through the University of
Missouri, acting with Iowa State University, North
Carolina State University, Michigan State University,
Oklahoma State University, and Purdue University to
supplement ongoing research, demonstration, and outreach
projects associated with animal waste management." (page
11)
INSIGHT OF THE CENTURY: I often think that in our
time the Devil has finally gotten his act together.
After dabbling with huge wars and monstrous tyrannies --
very successful but short-lived in their violence -- he
has found a stabler long-term strategy: the more
peaceful tyranny of the appetites in a mass society,
catered to by mediocre rulers like Bill Clinton. In C.S.
Lewis's classic The Screwtape Letters, the senior devil
counsels his younger colleague that for purposes of
damnation, murder may be no better than playing cards,
if cards will do the trick. From that point of view,
Stalin may be no better than Clinton. (page 12)
Reprinted Columns (pages 3-12)
* The Argument from Status (January 19, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990119.shtml
* Change This Document (February 4, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990204.shtml
* Reading Old Books (April 6, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990406.shtml
* Abortion and Authoritarianism (May 18, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990518.shtml
* The Dark Side of Dolphins (July 6, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990706.shtml
* Debating Shakespeare (July 8, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990708.shtml
* Constitutional Amnesia (July 20, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990720.shtml
* You Know Harry (July 27, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990727.shtml
* Summer Thoughts (August 19, 1999)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/990819.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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