SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
June 2003
Volume 10, Number 6
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
Subscription Rates.
Print version: $44.95 per year; $85 for 2 years;
trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues).
E-mail subscriptions: $39.95 for 1 year ($25 with a
12-month subscription to the print edition); $65 for
2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print
edition).
Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383
Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com
Publisher's Office: 703-281-1609 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 1-800-513-5053. Allow
4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue.
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks around
the emphasized words.}}
CONTENTS
Features
-> Free Will and Freedom
-> The Moving Picture (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> Bush and History
-> Forgotten Prophet
-> Homosexual Love and Literature
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks around
the emphasized words.}
Free Will and Freedom
In one of his typically incisive essays in FREEDOM
DAILY, Sheldon Richman examines some fashionable
arguments that human beings can't help what they do. We
are predisposed to obesity, alcoholism, and other ills by
our genes, of which we are the helpless playthings. Such
arguments imply that we have no free will and can't be
held responsible for our own choices; consciousness and
rationality are mere illusions, epiphenomena, that don't
really control our decisions. We are mere products of a
mechanistic physical universe.
These arguments are, as Richman notes, "congenial to
the would-be dictator." They are also self-evidently
false, though new variations on them constantly occur
with scientific and technological advances: DNA and the
computer have bred a new generation of them. As Samuel
Johnson told Boswell, "Sir, we *know* the will is free,
and there's an end on't." We are directly conscious of
consciousness itself, of our reason, and of our freedom
to choose one course of action or another.
The fallacy of determinism has been refuted many
times. If it were true that thought itself is the
helpless product of irrational forces, how can the
determinist himself claim truth for his own position? By
his own logic, he can't help believing in determinism any
more than his opponents can help believing in free will.
Why are his epiphenomena preferable to anyone else's? Is
he an exception to his own universal iron laws of
causation?
{{ True, people do have habits and temptations, some
idiosyncratic, many of them shared with other people,
making them individually and collectively predictable.
Social scientists, pollsters, and market researchers look
for these massive patterns of behavior. But the patterns
don't disprove what we know from immediate experiences:
the individual person is free. In a moment of crisis, the
person decides whether to be a saint or a sinner, a
martyr or a coward. Moral experience would be meaningless
if all choices were reduced to compulsions. There would
be no need for reflection, indecision, or guilt. }}
But why should this style of thought appeal to the
would-be dictator? Because it reduces his subjects to
pawns of their environment, which he is all too ready to
shape for them. But again, the peculiar blindness of the
determinist-dictator is that he never applies his
universal laws to himself.
If all human beings are passive before outside
forces (including inner compulsions of which they are
unaware), mustn't this be true of society as a whole,
including its rulers? Why should we suppose that they are
any more rational and responsible than the rest of us?
Metaphysician, heal thyself!
Abstractly, determinism is a philosophy. But in
practice, it functions as the ideology of a class of
people seeking power over others. Its votaries usually
turn out to have a curiously tenacious faith in the
State. They imply that the state is somehow endowed with
all the faculties of free will, rationality,
responsibility, self-control and self-comprehension,
impartiality, benevolence, and even immortality that they
deny to the individual. As man shrinks to nothingness,
the State rises to superhuman dimensions.
In the real world, dictators like determinism, and
determinists like dictatorship. Often this takes the form
of passionate, almost religious devotion to a single
charismatic dictator -- a Stalin, a Mao, a Castro, even a
Franklin Roosevelt; a cult of personality that sits ill
with the philosophy itself. For are these rulers any more
rational than those they rule? How can they be?
{{ The more we learn about our actual rulers, the
more comical it seems that they should be presumed
uniquely rational, let alone impartial and benevolent.
They are driven by their craving for power, which they
will acquire and augment by any means. And this drive for
power, far from making society as a whole more rationally
organized, only complicates the life of society by
imposing burdens and obstacles on the ruled. Supporting
the State becomes the chief duty of the subject.
Promising to pursue the common weal, the State itself
becomes the common woe. }}
THE MOVING PICTURE
(page 2)
What was the war on Iraq all about? Oh yes,
democracy and so forth. But what was the casus belli?
Weapons of mass destruction? Well, the UN inspectors
couldn't find them, Saddam Hussein didn't use them when
he needed them, and now the victors still can't seem to
locate them. President Bush insists they are out there
somewhere and will soon show up to prove he was right. A
grim alternative possibility is that Saddam managed to
give them away, and they are now in the clutches of
al-Qaeda. So either Bush is wrong, or the war on
terrorism has backfired.
* * *
Speaking of terrorism, how about New York City's
Mayor Michael Bloomberg? He's cracking down on ... life
in general. He has raised property taxes 18.5 per cent,
and his fanatical anti-smoking drive is ruining the
city's bar and restaurant business. (Imagine a smoke-free
Toots Shor's!) He also pledges to use his administrative
powers to make abortion "training" mandatory in the
city's hospitals. Bloomberg is not only evil; he's
annoying to boot. Regime change can't come soon enough in
the Big Apple.
* * *
Historian Robert Dallek's new biography of John F.
Kennedy, AN UNFINISHED LIFE, reveals that JFK had his own
Monica -- a 19-year-old White House intern who filled
idle moments in the presidential schedule. But don't
worry. Mindful of today's stern moral code, Dallek
assures us that Kennedy never let this amour interfere
with the duties of his office: "The real question is: Did
it distract him from his job as president? I think it
really didn't." Sounds more like the presidency didn't
distract him from his real interest.
* * *
Lean pickin's for liberals these days. They are
reduced to finding irony -- and scandal, and hypocrisy --
in the revelation that Bill (THE BOOK OF VIRTUES) Bennett
is a high-rolling gambler who has blown a staggering
$8 million in Las Vegas over the past decade. Even if we
concede, arguendo, that gambling is a terrible vice, so
what? An honest man may define and recommend virtue
without claiming to embody it. As far as I know, Bennett
has never pretended to be anything but a sinner in need
of God's grace. Where does it say that only saints may
praise sanctity?
* * *
Maybe what Dallek would call "the real question" is
whether Bennett's gambling habit ever distracted him from
his (unconstitutional) jobs as drug czar and secretary of
education.
* * *
Then again, Bennett is said to receive a lot of help
on his books. Let's at least hold the brickbats until we
know more about the personal life of his ghostwriter.
* * *
I understand that Florida public schools are now
required to teach Holocaust studies from kindergarten
through twelfth grade. Doesn't anyone see where this must
inevitably lead? Soon Florida's college students will
have to take *remedial* Holocaust studies.
* * *
Please tell your friends about SOBRAN'S!
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Nothing so vividly shows the trivialization of
conservatism as the proposed constitutional amendment to
outlaw flag-burning. Supposing the gravity of the
offense, when was the last time you even *heard* of
anyone burning the American flag? How often would it have
to happen in order to warrant a change in the fundamental
law of the land? While we're at it, how about an
amendment to ban hippies? Or to forbid Bill Clinton to
commit adultery?
* * *
Reviewing a book about translations of the Bible,
the atheist Christopher Hitchens jeers that William
Tyndale, who was burnt at the stake, "had been especially
hounded by 'Saint' Thomas More, that persecutor for all
seasons." Funny how broad-minded twentieth-century
liberals always blame people in other ages for not having
been broad-minded twentieth-century liberals, a habit
still going strong in the twenty-first century.
Bush and History
(Page 3)
Poor Bill Clinton. He spent eight years trying to
establish a "legacy" -- some achievement that would mark
his administration as a milestone in American history. He
even wished that he could have been a "war president," a
surefire way to take one's place beside such giants of
the office as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
and George Herbert Walker Bush.
But, alas, history didn't oblige Clinton with a real
war. He was able to use military action only as an
occasional weapon of mass distraction from the things he
*will* be remembered for: his cruddy Oval Office amours
with what's-her-name, now, as we go to press, a rather
plump television star. Well, at least the public has lost
interest in how Vincent Foster died.
Now a new President Bush has emerged to step in
where his father left off. History (which he majored in
at Yale) has favored him with a chance to become a sure-
enough war president, and he has grabbed the opportunity
with both hands. Though far less colorful than Clinton
(as who isn't?), Bush has, as they say, "restored
dignity" to the presidency and "moral clarity" to foreign
policy, replacing Arkansas sleaze with Texan integrity.
Using the national hysteria provoked by 9/11, Bush
has resumed his father's war on Iraq. His chief
justification for the war was that Saddam Hussein
illegally possessed "weapons of mass destruction" which
he might use against the United States or "our allies"
(guess who?), or hand off to terrorist groups. Also,
Hussein was a cruel tyrant who had committed terrible
atrocities against "his own people." The WMDs never
turned up, of course, but Bush, even after an easy
military victory, still insists they are there somewhere,
apparently so well hidden that Hussein couldn't find them
when he needed them to save his own skin. The terrorist
links were never proved either.
{{ By the way, a great puzzle remains. Immediately
after 9/11, the government, the media, and the public
were obsessed with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The "war
on terrorism" was focused on them, and it was expected
that they would show up again before, during, or after
the war on Iraq. Some of us thought they would even
welcome the war, which would polarize the Arab-Muslim
world and bring them countless new recruits. Yet, apart
from one purported bin Laden audiotaped message, they
haven't been heard from, in word or deed. Nobody seems to
have an explanation. }}
But who cares now? Victory justifies itself. The
people who wanted this war long before 9/11 -- Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Zionist cabal -- got
what they were after. So what if the reasons given for
the war turned out to be as empty as skeptics had
suspected all along? So what if the menacing Saddam
Hussein turned out to be utterly unable to secure his own
country against invasion? All that matters is that the
Iraqi people have been "liberated" -- a late afterthought
among the many justifications for the war.
So it wasn't about defending America after all. Or
rather, we are now told that establishing democracy in
Iraq will make everyone safer. But in the early days of
the occupation, the victors have already announced that
any Iraqi democracy must be on American terms -- no
Islamic theocracy will be permitted, no matter how many
Iraqis want it. The United States wants democracy, yes,
but only as long as it controls the results. This is more
or less like the conception of Polish democracy Joseph
Stalin brought to Yalta. Bush is determined to avoid the
mistake the United States made (as we have recently
learned) with the ungrateful French: Why give these
people freedom if they are only going to abuse it by
disobeying us?
Much of the American press is seriously debating
whether the Arabs can "handle" freedom and self-
government. So much for the quaint idea that these are
unalienable rights, rather than imperially granted
privileges, held on a short leash.
True, there were some civilian casualties in the
war, but they were few by modern standards and history
won't hold them they won't be held against the victor.
They were far fewer, after all, than the numbers claimed
by the elder Bush's war and subsequent sanctions;
besides, they were all Saddam Hussein's fault, like the
war itself.
But history may take a dimmer view of the
destruction and looting of Iraq's ancient cultural
treasures, which the U.S. forces, though forewarned, did
nothing to prevent. When all the official pretexts for
this war have been forgotten, it will be remembered that
American barbarism allowed the obliteration of some of
the earliest and most irreplaceable records of human
civilization, which had survived 7,000 years of
successive tyrannies but could not withstand
"liberation."
That may be Bush's lasting legacy. Quite a feat for
a history major to boast. But how was he to know? Maybe
he cut class the day they covered Mesopotamia. And after
all, his grasp of American history is hardly better.
Forgotten Prophet
(pages 4-5)
As some readers may recall, I have once or twice
written about a formative intellectual moment in my life
that occurred at a gas station in June 1965. I was
reading an old reprint of Frederic Bastiat's tract THE
LAW, when a single sentence struck me like a bolt of
lightning. It eventually changed my whole political
philosophy, though its full implications took years to
sink in. In brief, it said that the moral test of a law
was whether it did for Paul at Peter's expense what it
would be criminal for Paul to do to Peter himself.
Robbery is still robbery when the state does it for you.
Simple, but I was stunned by the self-evident. If Bastiat
was right, the U.S. Government was already terribly
corrupt. My patriotism couldn't yet accept such a damning
conclusion.
I had a similar experience about 20 years later,
while staying late at the office of NATIONAL REVIEW. I
happened to be reading a John Birch Society reprint of
THE PEOPLE'S POTTAGE by Garet Garrett, a writer I'd never
heard of. (He'd died in 1954, I learned later.)
The first of the book's three essays, "The
Revolution Was," was a withering attack on the New Deal.
Many conservatives had argued that the New Deal would
lead logically to revolution; Garrett argued that the New
Deal was a revolution -- the sort of coup d'etat under
constitutional formalities that Aristotle had warned
against millennia ago. Garrett called this "revolution
within the form."
I was thrilled by Garrett's insight and logic. It
was the most incisive and penetrating critique of
Franklin Roosevelt I had ever read. Even such fierce
Roosevelt critics as John T. Flynn and H.L. Mencken had
never said it better, or even nearly as well.
But this part was easy for me to accept. It was
consistent with the Bill Buckley conservatism I'd
espoused. The next two essays were another matter.
Garrett went on to argue that America's foreign
policy of military intervention abroad had changed the
country from a constitutional republic to an empire. The
Cold War, which I had always supported in principle, was
only an extension of Roosevelt's overweening intervention
in World War II. Garrett had been an isolationist,
opposed to U.S. involvement in that war. But though anti-
Communist (as well as anti-Nazi), he had stuck to his
principles when Stalin replaced Hitler as the alleged
threat to America. Interventionism, he insisted, was
deadly to the very things America must conserve.
For me this was a wholly new kind of conservatism.
I'd always been convinced, without the need of argument,
that conservatism meant, among other things, militant
anti-Communism. First we had to stop the Soviet threat;
then we had to get back to the business of repealing the
New Deal. But (by my Buckley-inspired logic) the
overriding imperative of national survival required that
we accept the welfare state until the Soviet threat was
disposed of. We had a long road ahead of us, and
conservatives, to make things worse, were already coming
to terms with the New Deal. Even Ronald Reagan was not
about to touch Social Security.
Garrett, like Bastiat before him, struck a nerve and
shook me out of my dogmatic slumber. But if he was right,
what was I doing at NATIONAL REVIEW, where the Cold War
was considered the very essence of American conservatism?
Again, I needed years to absorb this (to me) shocking new
idea.
The years passed, and I found that Garrett had been
right. With the end of the Cold War, conservatives didn't
pause to enjoy peace, didn't try to restore
constitutional government, didn't even think about
rolling back the New Deal. Instead they favored more
military intervention abroad -- first against the bogus
"threat" of Manuel Noriega in Panama, then against the
hardly more plausible "threat" of Iraq. Big Government
was fine, it seemed, as long as nominal conservatives
like the elder Bush were running it.
Garrett had spent some years writing editorials for
the SATURDAY EVENING POST just before World War II. Bruce
Ramsey has now gathered many of his editorials into a
book, DEFEND AMERICA FIRST (Caxton Press). They throw
brilliant light on how Roosevelt maneuvered the United
States into war while pretending to be doing the
opposite. Ramsey supplies helpful comments and notes.
The old fox never fooled Garrett for a moment.
Garrett not only saw what he was up to, but instantly
understood what it meant: an extension of FDR's
revolutionary coup. Instead of letting Congress perform
its role of deciding whether to go to war, Roosevelt
subtly usurped its powers for the executive branch and
foreclosed the option of peace. Foreign policy came to
mean his policy. He negotiated, often secretly, with
Churchill and Stalin, and persuaded Congress to give him
discretionary power to take what he called "measures
short of war" to aid the Allies against the Axis.
These measures culminated in the Lend-Lease Act of
March 1941, enabling Roosevelt to supply the Allies with
arms. Ostensibly the purpose was to stop Germany without
directly involving America in the war. But Garrett saw
what it really signified: America was now in the war and
there would be no going back. Only one direction was now
possible. Garrett was writing this many months before
Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, Roosevelt tried to provoke naval
clashes with Germany on the Atlantic, while choking off
Japan's access to oil and other resources.
Until Pearl Harbor, Americans overwhelmingly opposed
getting into another world war. They were still bitterly
disillusioned about the first one, with its subsequent
disasters. But, like Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Roosevelt,
who had been Wilson's secretary of the Navy, campaigned
on a promise to avoid war while secretly doing the
opposite. Wendell Willkie, his Republican opponent in
1940, was also an interventionist. Garrett noted that the
voters had no candidate who shared their view that this
was not America's war. Never had the ruling elite been so
united against the American people, yet so disingenuous
about its real intentions.
Garrett was a keen and relentless critic of
propaganda and what he called "engineered emotion."
Roosevelt, he charged, had "systematically violated [the
Neutrality Act] with acts of intervention that were, in
fact, acts of war." In foreign as in domestic policy,
Roosevelt had gained primacy for "the executive will,"
usurping the constitutional powers of the people's
elected representatives in Congress "by indirection, by
subterfuge, by cleverness, by beating the law,
uncontrollably pursuing [his] own will."
Not only were vast new powers claimed by the Federal
Government, which was bad enough in itself; these powers
were concentrated in the executive branch. And Garrett
was shrewd enough to see that Roosevelt himself was
saying as much when he said, "In the hands of a people's
government this power is wholesome and proper [but in the
wrong hands it] would provide shackles for the liberties
of people."
"He is saying," Garrett translated, "that he alone
is the people's government. He alone can be trusted to
exercise that power. He is saying that he accepts the
nomination for a third term because he [has] a duty to
keep the government from passing to other hands. The
power is too much to lay down. It may be abused. It may
be used to provide shackles for the liberties of people."
Roosevelt didn't realize that anyone would study his
words so closely; he probably didn't even realize what he
was saying -- that he was claiming dictatorial power, and
that he alone was fit to be America's dictator. Congress,
Garrett said, had cooperated with him by "abdicating."
As you review the steps by which Roosevelt drew the
country into war, you are struck by the familiarity of
the technique: demagogy, faits accomplis, the waging of
undeclared war, the personalizing of policy, the
arrogation of unconstitutional powers, even preemptive
"defense" -- the view that, in Garrett's words, "to
defend itself democracy dare not wait for the aggressor
to come," but must strike first. The chief difference
between Roosevelt and George W. Bush was that Roosevelt
could not yet wage open war without a declaration of war
by Congress. There were still some constitutional
restraints.
And of course Bush lacks Roosevelt's cunning and
eloquence. But then, these are no longer necessary. The
precedents having been created, any warlike presidential
action can now be justified by the very fact that
Roosevelt did it in the war against Hitler. All criticism
of Roosevelt, however cogent, has been forgotten. After
all, he won his war. We have inherited his legacy of
arbitrary executive power.
Garrett, a great and valiant journalist, has been
long forgotten. I discovered him by chance. Not long
after Pearl Harbor, his cause lost, he was forced to
resign from the SATURDAY EVENING POST, to take such
employment as he could find. He died in obscurity.
Fifty years later, Roosevelt is revered for doing
precisely the things Garrett had accused him of doing.
Homosexual Love and Literature
(page 6)
Andrew Sullivan, an English emigre, is one of our
few pundits who manages to pass for a conservative while
advocating the cause of homosexual "rights," including
same-sex marriage. He has lately written an essay titled
"We're All Sodomites Now."
Briefly, he argues that "sodomy" used to refer to
many sexual practices that were believed deviant;
homosexuality was only one among many of these. {{ So far
he is correct. }} He points out that "sodomy" could also
refer to many heterosexual practices {{ that are }} now
common among married couples, notably contraception.
Maybe not "all" of us are sodomites by this definition,
but the great majority {{ -- upwards of 95 per cent of us
-- }} seem to qualify. So why is homosexuality singled
out for "discrimination"?
Sullivan has a point. The sexual revolution has
legitimated the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own
sake, even within marriage; procreation is now considered
an option, not a duty. "Be fruitful and multiply" is old
hat. If fornication and abortion are acceptable, why not
homosexuality?
On the other hand, if procreative marriage is no
longer the paradigm of sexual good behavior, if it is
neither sacramental nor even special, why should
homosexuals covet the empty shell of matrimony to give
their unions respectability? As some wag has quipped,
only two classes of people want to bother getting married
anymore: Catholic priests and homosexuals. And, one might
add, there seems to be considerable overlap between these
two classes.
Still, there is undeniably a deep and persistent
stigma attached to homosexuality. It is considered ugly,
unsanitary, unmanly, and simply ridiculous. Though "gay
rights" and "gay pride" marches are familiar as public
collective events, it remains true that in private life
and at the individual level, homosexuality is seldom
asserted with pride.
Homosexuality is also typically promiscuous; that is
why it presents so many objective health problems. Since
by definition it can never be procreative, how can it be
fulfilled in monogamy? There is a whiff of absurdity
about the very idea of "gay marriage."
As we are forever reminded, homosexuality has been
around for a long time; the ancient Greeks and Romans,
among many other cultures, have tolerated it. All very
true, though the specific form of accepted homosexuality
was usually pederasty, the sexual liaison between man and
youth rather than between two mature men. Even so, we
must not suppose that even pagan tolerance meant
unqualified approval: the satirist Juvenal describes
Rome's homosexuals with obscene scorn.
But this in itself raises a question. Why is there
no great literature or mythology of sodomy (however
defined)? The great legendary lovers have always been men
and women. Their stories may be romantic, comic, tragic,
even grotesque or adulterous or violent {{ -- Jason and
Medea, Aeneas and Dido, Antony and Cleopatra, Paolo and
Francesca, Tristan and Isolde, Troilus and Cressida,
Romeo and Juliet, and so on -- }} but they are always
heterosexual. The millennia have yet to produce a
memorable myth of homosexual lovers.
Consider Shakespeare. His Sonnets record his
evidently romantic ardor for his "lovely boy," and it is
now widely accepted that he was either homosexual or
bisexual. {{ (I pass over the tangled authorship problem
for the moment.) }} Yet his plays betray little or
nothing of such inclinations. They are absorbed by the
love of men and women. Evidently even his genius could
only conceive of a great love in heterosexual terms.
Why is this? For the simplest of reasons. Only
heterosexual love can have a future. Sodomy, on the other
hand, is fruitless. It offers few possibilities. It can
make no permanent appeal to the imagination. And in this
respect the homosexual's imagination is the same as
everyone else's.
One telling illustration is Denis de Rougemont's
panoramic study LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD. In its vast
survey of the varieties of love in Western literature
since Plato, it makes no mention of homosexuality (or
lesbianism). It does not treat the subject with contempt
or "homophobia"; it does not treat it at all. {{ It is
simply not there. }} It is of no interest. It never
occurs to the author that it is significant enough to
warrant a place in his considerations.
This speaks volumes about the false prominence and
forced analogies homosexuality has acquired in the
contemporary world. The West has always regarded it as a
minor deviation, perhaps sinful or even criminal, perhaps
not, but in any case not an essential or even important
category of human experience.
What is peculiar in our own time is not that
homosexuality has become important, but that it has
become so self-important. The "gay" movement produces
propaganda that is false to history even when it invokes
history. For the homosexuals of the past have never
imagined that their proclivities were, or could be, very
interesting to other people, let alone that they were
victimized by social disapproval. They took for granted
that, whatever the legal status of deviations,
procreative love was -- necessarily -- the model of
sexual conduct. For this we have the testimony even of
homosexual artists, poets, and musicians.
NUGGETS
SURPRISE: Our victory in the War on Terrorism has already
been greeted by terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and
Algeria, claiming dozens of lives. (page 10)
NOTORIOUS: I'm getting a naughty reputation all over the
place. An article in NATIONAL REVIEW names me among
"unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate their country." A
new book about Shakespeare calls my arguments for the
Earl of Oxford's authorship "unreliable." And my
favorite: the European newspaper THE INDEPENDENT says
I've been seen "flirting outrageously" with a gorgeous
international model. Heck, there are some lies I hardly
even *want* to correct. (page 11).
Exclusive to the electronic version:
POURQUOI? THE CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE has dropped my
column and announced that it will also carry Charley
Reese's column less frequently. Why? Well, in my case it
cites readers' "many, many" complaints that I "insult"
the people I write about. The only example it offers is
my reference to the Pope as "dope-smoking" (see "The Big
Peacenik," column of February 25, 2003; www.sobran.com/
columns/2003/030225.shtml). I admit it's rude to accuse
the Pope of smoking dope, and I retract the charge.
However, only the readers of THE CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE
seem to have thought I was serious; I was joking about
the War Party's habit of portraying opponents of the war
as dope-smoking Sixties hippies. (Like the Holy Father?)
But I suspect the real reason for cracking down on Reese
and me is that we are among the few anti-war conservative
columnists.
MIDEAST MIRACLE: Never thought I'd see the day. Not only
has Ariel Sharon's cabinet accepted the Bush "roadmap" to
peace, which includes a Palestinian state; Sharon himself
has, for the first time, acknowledged that the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an "occupation."
"We don't like the word," he told his Likud Party, "but
this is occupation. To keep 3.5 million Palestinians
under occupation is bad for Israel and the
Palestinians.... This cannot continue forever." The
Palestinians will applaud, the Likud may grudgingly
accept the deal; but will the fundamentalist Protestants
put up with it?
STILL KICKING: The old conservative movement, it seems,
has not yet been completely swallowed up by
neoconservatism. Donald Devine, vice chairman of the
American Conservative Union, whom I've always liked and
respected, has challenged the neocons, saying that their
desire for "empire" is incompatible with the principle of
limited government. He wants the question debated. Ramesh
Ponnuru, of the formerly conservative NATIONAL REVIEW,
says, in the measured language of the juniorcons, that
Devine's proposal is "cracked." As I observed a couple of
years ago, Ponnuru's idea of limited government is a
state confined to two essential functions: paving the
streets and ruling the world.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* What Young People Don't Know (April 29, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030429.shtml
* War and Dramaturgy (May 6, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030506.shtml
* Conservatism as Exorcism (May 8, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030508.shtml
* The One and Only (May 13, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030513.shtml
* Patriotism, Mom, and the Bums (May 15, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030515.shtml
* Titus and Lucrece (May 20, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030520.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
You may forward this newsletter if you include the
following subscription and copyright information:
Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package.
See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml
or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples
or call 800-513-5053.
Copyright (c) 2003 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com.
All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate
www.griffnews.com with permission.
[ENDS]