Sobran's -- The Real News of the Month September 2000 Volume 7, No. 9 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $59.95 per year; $100 for 2 years; trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues). E-mail subscriptions: $59.95 for 1 year ($25 with a 12- month subscription to the print edition); $100 for 2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print edition). Payment should be made to The Vere Company. Address: Sobran's, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-493-3348. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue Features THE MOVING PICTURE (pages 1-2) Compassionate conservatism, as encapsulated in a NEW YORK TIMES headline: "Cheney Says Church-Based Charities Deserve Federal Support." * * * At a convention featuring lots of women and minorities, Republican-style -- that is to say, Colin Powell and Bo Derek -- Junior Bush has formally received his party's nomination, and I admit he is distinctly preferable to Junior Gore, in the sense that a chest cold is preferable to lung cancer. The worst that can be said of him is that liberals don't find him threatening; they know he won't undo -- or even try to undo -- their achievements. In his own compassionate way, he'll even enlarge the role of the state in our lives. * * * Bush did say that nobody should be taxed above a third of his income. So far this incendiary proposal has failed to ignite riots. * * * Bush and Gore will be debating how to "fix" Social Security and Medicare. Neither will mention the correct answer: abolish these programs, which have no constitutional authorization (and are wrong in principle anyway). In Federalist No. 83, Alexander Hamilton reminds us that the powers of the federal government are specifically listed for a reason: "This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority was intended." But Congress's "general authority" -- i.e., to legislate on all matters whatsoever, with or without specific grants of power -- is now taken for granted by both major parties. That's one thing they *never* debate. * * * Exclusive to the electronic version (one entry only): The Democratic convention was Al Gore's bar mitzvah. He came of age, announcing himself "his own man," with a Jewish running mate to lend him the "gravitas" of adulthood. He also kissed his wife at some length. All this to dissociate himself symbolically from one of the greatest presidents in our history! * * * Gore's choice of Joe Lieberman as his running mate was a shrewd move. Unlike Bill Clinton and Gore himself, Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, really fools people; his seeming authenticity makes him the Democrats' answer to John McCain. Eight years of Clinton have left us hungry for moral authority and men who transcend the vile contemporary culture; and Lieberman struck a memorable pose in 1998 when he became the first major Democrat to call Clinton's behavior in the Oval Office "immoral" and "intolerable." Never mind that he followed up by voting for acquittal; a star was born. He will take the edge off Republican jibes at Clinton's morals. But his Old Testament "gravitas" is somewhat compromised by his support for abortion, infanticide, and sodomy. If he didn't put his party ahead of his religion, he wouldn't be on the Democratic ticket. * * * The selection of Lieberman has been universally seen as an attempt by Gore to dissociate himself from Bill Clinton's disgrace. But it's only one sign of tension between Gore and Clinton. Clinton has been hogging the spotlight by throwing his own barbs at George Bush; and on the eve of the Democrats' convention in Los Angeles, he allowed Barbra Streisand to hold a Malibu fundraiser for his presidential library, upstaging Gore's big moment and siphoning off a lot of Hollywood money -- about $10 million -- that might have gone to the Gore campaign. Proceeds from a second tribute to Clinton that same weekend in L.A., with an expected purse of $4 million, were to go toward Hillary's New York Senate race. Gore might echo the Duke of Buckingham's bitter words about Richard III: "Rewards he my deep services with such contempt?" * * * Twenty years ago, liberals worried about Ronald Reagan, whom they called, in a favorite putdown of that time, "simplistic." This meant that Reagan had clear ideas of what were, and what were not, proper functions of government; the danger was that he might try to repeal the improper functions. Which is why conservatives loved him. Alas, liberal fears proved as exaggerated as conservative hopes. He turned out to be much less simplistic than he seemed. The huge welter of federal programs continued to grow throughout his two terms in office. (I note with misgivings that nobody is calling G.W. Bush simplistic.) * * * David Broder of the WASHINGTON POST, a liberal of moderate demeanor, sneers that Republicans are "hung up on sex" because they favor promoting chastity, oppose condom distribution in schools, and loathe abortion. They "also want to turn back the clock on sex education," he adds. The weary clock metaphor should be retired; turning back the clock is often the best reform. The Sexual Revolution has been an utter disaster; society was healthy when it was governed by sexual hangups. Today's kids, having grown up in a swamp, may not remember, but it's irresponsible for someone of Broder's age not to remind them. That would be the truest kind of sex education. * * * The Century of the Common Man, when you stop to think about it, has been pretty tough on the common man. In the days when kings didn't pretend to rule in the name of The People, tyranny, though it surrounded itself with pomp and ceremony, was relatively modest. It was only when rulers began speaking and acting on behalf of The People that universal terror and systematic plunder became the norm. We who have survived the departing century in safety and prosperity should always remember those who didn't -- the millions who perished in wars, forced labor camps, and state-made famine -- and how easily we too could have met their fate. * * * What do you call prejudice against homeless people? Hobophobia, of course! * * * After some bitter semi-public infighting, Al Gore successfully pressured Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez to scrap her scheduled fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion. Of course Gore himself has long accepted campaign donations from Hugh Hefner, and he has been properly charged with hypocrisy. But the real point is that pornographers like Hefner and Larry Flynt have correctly recognized Democrats like Clinton and Gore as deserving of their support. That should tell us something even if the Democrats rejected their money. * * * "Never, in times so complex and chaotic as these, have we faced two contenders who are so boring and insipid," says Fidel Castro. Sure, he's a fine one to talk, but he took the words right out of my mouth. What does it say about our two- party system that the forty-year dictator of a one-party state thinks it doesn't offer much of a choice? TWO GREAT HERETICS (pages 3-6) My Shakespeare studies have recently driven me back to the English Reformation, with special attention to King Henry VIII (1491-1547) and the great Puritan poet John Milton (1608-74). The two men, who lived a century apart, could hardly have been more different; and yet, in a way, Milton seems to me a natural result of Henry. Henry, who by denying papal supremacy created the Church of England, with himself as its head, wasn't a heretic by nature; his refutation of Lutheran doctrine caused Pope Leo X to dub him "Defender of the Faith," a title British monarchs still boast. Even when he broke with Rome over the Pope's refusal to dissolve his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he remained in many respects theologically conservative. To the end of his life he attended mass and insisted on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. His quarrel with the papacy centered on his own claim to be, in effect, England's Pope; he dealt sternly with Protestant tendencies in his own church. When Henry died in 1547 and was succeeded by his nine- year-old son, Edward VI, the men around the boy king faced a problem: What form should English Christianity take? "Above all," writes the historian Christopher Morris, "could the social and religious revolution stand still? Was it inevitable that there should be either conservative reaction or else further moves in a revolutionary direction? This last point Henry himself had decided. He had preferred to let the revolution proceed rather than have his work undone." (Hilaire Belloc later argued that but for Henry's break with Rome, Protestantism would have died out in Europe.) The "new men" around Henry and, later, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth were keenly aware of what a restoration of Catholicism in England would mean for them: they owed their wealth, position, and power to the massive expropriations of church properties. There would be no going back. For William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, the greatest statesman of the Elizabethan era (and father-in-law of a certain Earl of Oxford), the Roman Church was always *the* enemy and his constant endeavor was to prevent, at all costs, the Catholic powers, chiefly France, Spain, and Scotland, from uniting against England. He followed a cunning policy of gradually crushing Catholicism in England; and considering that about half of the common people still adhered to the old religion when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, he succeeded brilliantly. Though personally lukewarm in religion, Cecil would always favor Protestants and Puritans against Catholics. English piracy, actively encouraged despite official denials, provoked Spain, and when the English beheaded the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586, Catholic Europe was outraged. Two years later the great Spanish Armada attacked England but was defeated by an enormous storm, which English nationalism interpreted as a sign from heaven, rebuking popish enemies. The event was a turning point in English religion as well as politics. When, in 1605, the authorities discovered a Jesuit-led conspiracy to blow up Parliament and King James I together, English sentiment against Catholicism hardened and the Puritan forces were strengthened. By 1642 the Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell, were powerful enough to depose James's son Charles I; in 1649 they beheaded him. It was against this background that John Milton was born in London in 1608. His father was a scrivener who had been disowned by his own Catholic father for becoming a Protestant. The young Milton was a precocious, headstrong student who attended Cambridge University (where he suffered a brief expulsion). By his twenties he was extremely learned, reading and writing poetry in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French. Of his genius there was no doubt. He wrote several of his short masterpieces before he was 30. Milton was a passionate Protestant. Though he is usually described as a Puritan, this is a loose label for his idiosyncratic views. He was always outspoken; during his tour of Italy in 1638 he courted trouble by animadverting against Catholicism. (He visited the imprisoned Galileo, whom he admired.) He interrupted his journey and returned home when he heard the news of impending civil war; he was determined to play a role on the Puritan side, against the royalist forces and the Church of England, which still savored too much of popery for him. For the next few years Milton delayed his cherished plan to write a great poem -- he was undecided between epic and tragedy, Latin and English; possible subjects included the legend of King Arthur and the Fall of Adam. Meanwhile he wrote prose pamphlets, in Latin and English. With great eloquence and fierce invective, he argued for freedom of the press (for Protestants), for liberalized divorce (he had married unhappily), for educational reform (while earning a living as a tutor), and for regicide (defending the execution of Charles I). His talents as a controversialist recommended him to Cromwell, who appointed him his Latin Secretary. His chief duty was the defense of Cromwell's regime in a succession of responses to Europeans who had been horrified by Charles's beheading. Milton is often accused of inconsistency in his libertarianism, since he made exceptions for "popery and open superstition" when it came to freedom of the press; but as Willmoore Kendall has pointed out in a brilliant essay, Milton was no John Stuart Mill. He believed that liberty was a condition proper only to those who had cast off popery and idolatry: Protestants could be tolerant of each other's "neighboring differences," but not of differences he saw as downright evil. In his ideal Protestant commonwealth, Catholics and pagans simply had no legitimate place. In that sense, as Kendall notes, Milton was no liberal. His politics were always theological, never merely secular. Samuel Johnson, Tory monarchist, later described Milton as "an acrimonious and surly republican" whose politics were "founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance, impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority.... He felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority." Proud he certainly was, but he appears to have disbelieved in certain kinds of authority -- especially royal and episcopal -- on principle. His belief in liberty of conscience, however misguided, was sincere. During the 1640s Milton's unhappy marriage was resolved by the death of his wife; a second wife soon died, and he eventually married again. Only his second marriage seems to have been happy, perhaps because it was brief. He ruled his wives and three daughters with extreme rigor; Johnson would comment that Milton "thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion" (an echo, perhaps, of PARADISE LOST, in which Adam and Eve form a small hierarchy: "He for God only, she for God in him"). It's an interesting detail that Milton, like Henry VIII, should have broken with Christian tradition on the question of divorce; sex and heresy often keep company. His divorce pamphlet -- which argued for divorce strictly as a husband's prerogative, not a wife's -- caused considerable scandal. During his years in Cromwell's service, Milton went blind. The loss of his sight didn't prevent him from continuing to write, by dictating to his daughters, who, being poorly educated, hardly understood the words they were taking down. They also had to read aloud to him books in foreign languages which they knew only phonetically. He was a severe man, demanding on himself as well as his unhappy children. The Restoration of 1660, with the ascension of Charles II to the throne, exposed Milton to possible execution for treason. But his great reputation protected him, and Charles was lenient by nature. Milton, though impenitent about his role in the revolution, was allowed to live in peace (though he was heavily fined and his books were burnt), and he began writing his epic at last. PARADISE LOST, published in 1667, is a tremendous poem, but a forbidding one. After praising it adoringly for several pages, Johnson abruptly adds a hilariously deflating comment: "PARADISE LOST is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." One pictures the Milton girls nodding vigorously. I have always found the poem strangely arid, impressively thunderous but seldom captivating, less poetical than polemical; Milton always seems to be grinding an ax. William Blake made the famous observation that "Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it." I don't agree, but I understand why Blake said it; Milton's Satan is more truly diabolical than his God is divine. Milton's Hell may be unpleasant, but his Heaven isn't much more attractive. There is more charm in Dante's Inferno than in Milton's Heaven. Flashes of delight occur only in his Eden, as when the animals entertain Adam and Eve: th' unwieldy Elephant, To make them mirth, us'd all his might and wreathd His Lithe Proboscis. I should add that my feeling about PARADISE LOST isn't shared by some of the supreme critics of English literature: Coleridge, C.S. Lewis, Northrop Frye, and Dr. Johnson himself have held the poem in the highest esteem. Yet there has always been a minority view, and it too has eloquent spokesmen. Mark Van Doren says of Milton's God's self-exculpation, when he denies that his foreknowledge of Adam's fall makes him in any way responsible for it: "This is what a theologian should say about God, but not what God should say about himself." Milton's warrior-Christ is "an abysmal failure in the role of Redeemer." Milton habitually commits the "blunder of trying to make us see what cannot be seen." As for Milton's famous diction, it is "starched with latinity, as if Milton did not trust his own language, falling into which might mean falling from the high horse of his style." All this seems to me right on the money. Milton's explicit aim is to "justifie the wayes of God to men." But, as Van Doren says, God himself does too much of the justifying, and it sounds awfully pompous, not at all divine. C.S. Lewis may have had a point when he quipped that some people say they dislike Milton's God when they really mean they dislike God; yet I find it pretty hard to believe that Milton's God ever brought any reader closer to God. He may well bring some readers closer to Milton, whose mouthpiece he so plainly is -- as in fact so many of Milton's characters are. If his Satan is more attractive than his divinities and angels, it may be precisely because, contrary to Blake's notion, Satan has a life and will of his own and does not necessarily speak for the management. In PARADISE REGAINED (1671), Christ is tempted by Satan but triumphantly resists. The poem is a long and tedious debate, with little of Milton's grandeur; even his Satan is no longer his old self, and his Christ says nothing remotely worthy of the Christ of the Gospels. It was a foolish and arrogant artistic blunder on Milton's part to attempt to put words in Christ's mouth; in such an endeavor even the greatest human genius must fall far short. Paradise is "regained" not by suffering on the Cross, but by winning an argument with Miltonic dialectics. Everyone agrees that the poem is a failure, but Milton resented any suggestion that it was inferior to PARADISE LOST. This may have been more than mere vanity on his part. In 1825 a lost work of Milton's was discovered: a theological treatise he never finished. It reveals him a far more radical Protestant than had previously been suspected; readers (including even the shrewd Johnson) had assumed that PARADISE LOST was essentially orthodox. It was not. Milton didn't believe in the Trinity, the Redemption, or the soul's immortality. His version of Christianity was all his own -- and a very dessicated one, devoid of sacrament, ritual, and most of the doctrines that even Protestants share with Catholics. Yet Milton did believe in Heaven and Hell, in the existence of Satan, and in an active Providence. As I gather, he really believed that the Puritan revolution was a new moment in sacred history, leading to a Protestant Utopia in England; he believed that the English were a Chosen People, that "God speaks first to his Englishmen." He espoused a sort of supernatural nationalism. And he must have been crushed when the revolution fizzled, bringing back the kings and bishops he despised. The new epoch he had hoped for turned out to be a historical blip. It's tempting to see Milton himself in his Satan, whom we meet just at the moment when his rebellion is defeated, and who must rally the spirits of his fallen confederates with proud talk of the mind being "its own place," which "in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." That does sound like Milton's own defiant attitude toward his vanquishers. But Milton didn't see Charles II as God, or even as God's anointed deputy on earth, but as an unholy pretender. It's more plausible to see Milton as Samson -- blind, defeated, the captive of his enemies, yet conscious of his own power -- in his closet drama SAMSON AGONISTES. Unfortunately for this appealing view, modern scholars suspect that the play was written long before the Cromwell regime fell, perhaps even before Milton was completely blind. If it has any autobiographical echoes, they may reflect his marital problems, in the dialogue between Samson and Dalila (accented on the first syllable), who comes to seek Samson's forgiveness for her betrayal, only to be rebuffed when Samson discerns that she isn't truly penitent. Like most of Milton's highly doctrinaire women, Dalila might leave the reader who didn't know better wondering whether her author had ever met an actual woman. Her speeches have nothing of the feminine about them; perhaps only Milton's Samson could have been seduced by Milton's Dalila. The spritely wit of Shakespeare's heroines is utterly alien to Milton's women, who are all burdened with (I wish there were a nice way to say it) Miltonic personalities. All this may suggest that I am deaf to Milton's genius. I don't think so; but I think his most inspired productions are his shorter early works: COMUS, L'ALLEGRO, IL PENSEROSO, ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY, several of the sonnets. Some of these have a Shakespearean sweetness and splendor, and Shakespeare's influence is obvious in them. The young Milton had not yet become an argumentative poet. Johnson's witticisms about the length of PARADISE LOST have a serious point. I think the poem belongs to the category of perishable classics -- works that are held in the highest esteem for a while, sometimes for generations, even centuries, but eventually lose their power over the imagination. Joseph Addison's play CATO, revered throughout the eighteenth century (the American Founding Fathers loved it), but now forgotten, is another mortal classic. Milton, as they say, no longer speaks to us. The feebleness of PARADISE REGAINED seems to me to expose the essential fault of PARADISE LOST. Both are the products of the same poetic mind, a mind too abstract for real poetry. It lacks an earthy capacity for observation and delight, for seeing, savoring, and laughing at simple things. "The want of human interest is always felt," as Johnson says. Milton relies too exclusively on lofty language, which all too often fails to achieve its desired effect; he shrinks from the common touch. Despite his mighty aspiration to perform "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," Milton simply doesn't belong in the company of the great European poets -- Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Milton awed English readers for more than two centuries; he was long considered superior to Shakespeare as a poet. The quality for which he was most praised was "sublimity" rather than piety; his effect was never very religious. But such was his prestige that few readers dared to admit they found his grand manner tedious and priggish. Milton's mature version of Christianity is so odd that few could ever have believed in it, and it seems strange that even he could have held it so passionately. It has little connection to traditional Christianity, and is nearly as remote from Lutheranism as from Catholicism. It's really no more than Milton's personal creed, tailored to his own extreme individualism, and it has had little influence. One can't imagine it as the faith of a whole nation of ordinary human beings, not even Englishmen. Milton's religion died out with Milton. Yet his religion was a natural terminus, in its way, for the tendency Henry VIII had set in motion. The word "heresy" of course, comes from the Greek word for "choose." Once Henry had set the example by picking and choosing among doctrines, English Christianity became a process of elimination. In his eccentric way, Milton "reformed" Christianity until little of it remained. And today the ordinary Englishman -- and perhaps the ordinary Anglican bishop -- believes in even less of Christianity than Milton did. Both Henry Tudor and John Milton made their own religions; and in both cases their religions were nothing more than reflections of their own personalities. These weren't religions other men could possibly adopt, because there was no stable core of truth in them. Others could follow Henry and Milton only in an analogical way; that is, by making up their own religions too, collecting doctrines that suited them and discarding the rest. This practice has become a modern tradition; it's probably what most people mean by "freedom of religion," the supposed right of rolling your own creed. We now use the telling phrase "religious preference" and are embarrassed by the suggestion that one religion may actually be *true.* Yet Henry and Milton would insist that their one-man religions were true, true for all men. The obvious vanity of their creeds may seem obvious now, but it wasn't obvious to them. Henry had an advantage over Milton in that he had the power to impose his creed on others, and men who possess such power, even by accident of birth, are rarely humble enough to ask whether they deserve it; Henry thought that Providence had blessed England by endowing the crown on the one man who was capable of setting the Church straight, namely himself. Once the king realized the previously unsuspected truth that the king should rule the Church -- an idea that would have been laughed at as eccentric if proposed by anyone but the king -- it achieved immediate popularity with his courtiers (with such annoying exceptions as Sir Thomas More). Lacking such power, Milton, as far as I know, never managed to convince a single soul that his religion was true, though his pride was no less than Henry's. Yet these two eccentrics -- one distinguished by might, the other by eloquence -- may be regarded as exemplars of what modern man understands as religious freedom: the right to take God on one's own terms. Nuggets BONSOIR, MON PERE: The obituaries of Alec Guinness (see page 12) said nothing about his devotion to the Catholic Church; but he described his own conversion beautifully in his memoir, BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE. His hostility to the Church began to melt away once when he played a priest in a movie being filmed in Burgundy. At the end of a day's shooting, still in costume, he was walking back to his quarters when a small boy greeted him as "mon pere," seized his hand, and walked with him, chattering happily until their paths parted. Then the boy bowed slightly, saying, "Bonsoir, mon pere," and darting through a hedge. Guinness was impressed by "a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable." (page 6) THE GOOD OLD DAYS: Just as a rule of thumb, a tyrant in ermine is preferable to a tyrant in fatigues. And ordinary people sense this, as witness their nostalgia for royalty. After centuries of anti-monarchical propaganda, the denizens of democracy still sense that life was better, and nobler, under kings. It's significant that in the Age of Democracy, "politician" has become a dirty word for those who allegedly represent The People. (page 9) WHAT'S MORE: Guinness also quotes one of my favorite lines from G.K. Chesterton: "The Church is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time." If there is one thing I dread being, it's a child of my own time. And isn't that really why we recoil from a man like Clinton -- because he is so much at home in this age, so perfectly adapted to it, so happily at one with its attitudes and prejudices and assumptions? (page 10) SERVICE WITH A SMILE: The NEW YORK TIMES reports that the first 830 complaints against the Internal Revenue Service under recent anti-harassment legislation have been deemed to be without merit. Of course we have to take into account that the IRS itself makes this judgment. But the problem isn't putative IRS "excesses"; it's the IRS's *normal* powers and activities. These are the inevitable corollaries of a limitless state whose chief business is using an unrestricted taxing power to force one part of the populace to support another part. This parasitic economy is both unconstitutional and intrinsically criminal. And it depends on having an agency to collect from its victims. (page 11) IF ONLY: In 1965, while running for mayor of New York City, Bill Buckley made the most sublime campaign promise of all time. Among other things, he offered the voters "the internal composure that comes of knowing that there are rational limits to politics." Since then there has hardly been a candidate for any office, anywhere, who would understand those words, let alone endorse them. (page 12) Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12) * Government and Greed (July 11, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000711.shtml * Wanted: A Juvenal (July 13, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000713.shtml * Hillary's Manners (July 18, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000718.shtml * Home-Run Inflation (July 20, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000720.shtml * History's Yes-Man (July 25, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000725.shtml * Blessings in Disguise August 8, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000808.shtml All articles are written by Joe Sobran Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved. SOBRAN'S is distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate (fran@griffnews.com). Individuals may now subscribe to an e-mail version of Joe Sobran's columns and newsletter. For more information contact fran@griffnews.com or call 800-493-9989. [ENDS]