SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
October 2004
Volume 11, Number 10
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Welles Precedent
-> Election Season Notes (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> Tom Wolfe
-> Two Conservatives
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of "equals" signs
around the emphasized words.}}
The Welles Precedent
(page 1)
On his 23rd birthday, May 6, 1938, Orson Welles
appeared on the cover of TIME, having already established
himself as the Boy Wonder of the American theater: an
actor, director, and producer. He combined a love of
Shakespeare with the promotional gift of a P.T. Barnum,
as witness his modern-dress staging of JULIUS CAESAR as
an allegory of Fascism -- a critical and popular hit.
Such gimmickry was typical of his art, as CITIZEN KANE
would later show. {{ He also had an amazingly resonant
voice for such a young man; if the Grand Canyon could
talk, it would sound like Welles. }}
But he achieved worldwide fame only in October of
that year, with his Halloween radio adaptation of H.G.
Wells's science-fiction novel THE WAR OF THE WORLDS,
which set off a nationwide panic. According to Barbara
Leaming's 1985 biography, ORSON WELLES, the weekly show
had been getting poor ratings against the extremely
popular competition of the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and
his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, when Welles got the
inspiration for this "corny" drama.
Many people tuned in late and, missing the opening
explanation that it was only a story, believed they were
hearing actual live news bulletins of a Martian invasion
in New Jersey. Countless Americans rushed into the
streets looking for the creatures the "reporter" on the
scene described as "wriggling out of the shadow [of the
spaceship] like a gray snake," with tentacles, "large as
a bear and it glistens like wet leather.... The eyes are
black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of
V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that
seem to quiver and pulsate." Many listeners called the
police to report that they too had seen these terrible
aliens.
Welles himself played an eminent astronomer who
witnessed the incineration of several onlookers,
including the "reporter," with a strange weapon. "Of
their destructive instrument," he boomed, "I might
venture some conjectural explanation. For want of a
better term, I shall refer to the mysterious weapon as a
heat-ray. It's all too evident that these creatures have
scientific knowledge far in advance of our own."
That did it. Much of America freaked out. It was
hours later that the public was reassured that there had
been no invasion from Mars. The next morning, everyone
was laughing and Welles was on the front pages. {{ (One
listener later sued him for $2000, blaming the broadcast
for causing his recently cured stutter to return.) }}
Leaming sees THE WAR OF THE WORLDS as a milestone of
the media age. It was that, and it was more: an omen of
American warrior politics. Welles, announcing to a
credulous public that the Martians possessed, as it were,
weapons of mass destruction, had found the panic button
George W. Bush would later press to terrific effect.
The broadcast also foreshadowed other panics.
Franklin Roosevelt would soon scare Americans into
believing that the possibility of a Japanese invasion --
a military absurdity -- was so imminent that
Japanese-Americans should be herded into concentration
camps. In 1960 John F. Kennedy would frighten voters with
a nonexistent "missile gap."
America hasn't altogether changed since the
Halloween of 1938. {{ In Barnum's famous formula,
"There's a sucker born every minute." }} But at least
Welles corrected the impression he'd made; the Bush
administration has never retracted its preposterous
warning that Saddam Hussein's "smoking gun" might be "a
mushroom cloud."
ELECTION SEASON NOTES
(page 2)
As the 2004 election campaign headed into its final
weeks, President Bush enjoyed a solid lead, and the
pundits were preoccupied with John Kerry's failure to
capitalize on Bush's vulnerabilities. I fail to see the
mystery. Another dull Massachusetts liberal, with no
personal charm, magnetism, or symbolism, who entered the
race as a has-been? Whose every misstep -- and there have
been plenty -- has been swiftly played for advantage, and
laughs, by the Republicans? Who signaled his desperation
by shaking up his inner circle late in the race? Kerry is
as befuddled as a color-blind chameleon, or a marionette
trying to work its own strings.
* * *
The best argument conservatives have made for
supporting George W. Bush this year is that he is likely
to appoint better -- well, less egregious -- Federal
justices than John Kerry. At least these conservatives
are keeping their eyes on the ball: in the long run, the
courts decide how much power the Federal Government shall
have. But given Bush's own sorry record of contempt for
constitutional limits, the argument is odd. As our reader
Mr. Paul Kirchner puts it, "We are reduced to hoping Bush
will appoint justices conservative enough to strike down
laws he supports."
* * *
Kerry has most conspicuously failed to capitalize on
Bush's misconceived war on terrorism. He can't get a
handle on it, partly because he still more or less
supports the Iraq war. Three years ago all attention was
on Osama bin Laden; not knowing what to do about him, and
preferring the neocons' war on Iraq, Bush picked Saddam
Hussein as a proxy enemy, which didn't solve the problem
but only aggravated it. It's understandable that Bush
should want to avoid all mention of bin Laden; but why --
at least until the first "debate" -- has Kerry been
letting him drop Osama down the Memory Hole?
* * *
The neocons have coined a clumsy neologism for the
supposed enemy: "Islamo-fascism." They also describe this
weird hybrid as "totalitarian." Apparently they've
forgotten the distinction between authoritarian and
totalitarian rulers. The former (Franco, Chiang) tolerate
no political opposition, but don't aspire to
revolutionize whole cultures; the latter (Lenin, Mao,
Castro) claim authority over religion, art, education,
even family life -- and are, of course, far bloodier. No
Muslim regime can claim authority over Allah or the right
to change his law. The neocons are merely indulging in
some fancy but incoherent name-calling.
* * *
The McCain-Feingold restrictions on free speech have
of course generated a new strategy, the so-called 527
attack ads, typified by the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth. The Duopoly naturally finds these outrageous --
"slime" and "mud" produced by "shadowy" and
"unaccountable" groups who "evade" the law through a
"loophole" and shouldn't be "allowed." In other words,
free speech. Further steps must be taken. Actually, the
attacks on Bush and Kerry don't approach the scurrility
of the attacks on Thomas Jefferson in 1800. As the target
of unregulated libel, Jefferson thought the solution to
free speech was free speech. How quaint.
* * *
And what "loophole" was it that "allowed" Dan Rather
to broadcast a story about Bush's National Guard service
based on forged documents?
Exclusive to electronic media:
When the Novus Ordo Mass was introduced in the wake
of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic laity were
invited to judge its success. Michael Davies respectfully
accepted the invitation. In a series of learned and lucid
books and pamphlets, notably his trilogy LITURGICAL
REVOLUTION, he argued that "Pope Paul's new Mass" was not
only a failure but a disaster for the entire Church. Mass
attendance had plunged, the sacraments were being abused,
Catholic teaching had been obscured. The beauty and
dignity of the Tridentine rite, which Davies eloquently
loved, had been abandoned to no purpose. Now we must
mourn this heroic scholar, whom a heart attack has
claimed at 69.
Tom Wolfe
(pages 3-4)
Tom Wolfe has a good claim to be both the most
original journalist and the funniest satirist of our
time. He acquired the title of founding father of the New
Journalism nearly forty years ago, when, barely 30 years
old, he created a new style of reportage, flamboyantly
adopting techniques of the novel in his magazine pieces
-- dramatic narrative, interior monologue, realistic
dialogue, shifting viewpoints, and so forth. He
completely abandoned the detached objective pose of
traditional reporting.
What's more, you could recognize a Wolfe piece by
its punctuation alone. Ellipses, exclamation marks,
italics, interjections ("=Mmmmmmmm="), multiple
consecutive colons, capital letters ("YOU ARE HERESY
EMPOWERED::::::::::"): The page seemed to howl at you. He
was capturing the life of our time in a whole new way,
openly relishing the hilarity of it all. Nor was he
self-effacing, as good journalists were taught to be. His
own personality was part of his style, and his dress --
especially his famous white suits -- was as colorful as
his prose. Actually, to call it colorful hardly does it
justice; it was often described as "neon."
It was all an act, of sorts. In person, he was a
soft-spoken Virginian, smiling wrily at the foibles he
observed. He made fun of his subjects and sympathized
with them at the same time: race car drivers,
intellectuals, fighter pilots, artists, ad men,
strippers, surfers, bohemians, astronauts, even other
journalists (including lowlife gossip publishers). He
explored their little worlds, taking, as far as possible,
their point of view.
He even had a theory to explain his mission. The New
Journalism, he announced, was doing the social
observation the novel had once done but had ceased to do.
His literary heroes were the great realistic novelists:
Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Zola -- writers who
not only told stories, but actually =reported= on the
social systems of their times. Why, they'd actually done
=research= before creating their ambitious fictions of
status competition!
Contemporary novelists scorned such social curiosity
as old-fashioned. To Wolfe this seemed a dereliction of
duty, and the New Journalism was using the methods of
fiction to do the job the novelists were no longer doing.
Status was the key to it all. In Wolfe's view, the
drive for status was a basic human motive, and post-World
War II America was abounding in spontaneous new status
systems -- self-enclosed hierarchies, really -- that
demanded attention. He intended to give it to them. From
his brilliantly slangy style, no one would guess his
seriousness, let alone suspect he'd taken a Ph.D. in
American studies at Yale. He was mistaken, at first, for
a clever fop. His flamboyance was a disguise. Making
himself conspicuous, superficially observable, disarmed
any suspicion that =he= was doing the observing. Thinking
he was a mere oddball, his subjects opened up to him.
In the new America, Wolfe saw fashion and
consumption as eloquent indices of status and its
pursuit. What metaphors are to Shakespeare, brand names
were to Wolfe. His pages were dizzyingly studded with
names of products used by his subjects. It was his
particular form of erudition.
On top of all this, Wolfe was a marvelously witty
phrase-maker. He gave the language "the Me Decade," "the
Right Stuff," and of course "Radical Chic." The latter
was the title of a famous 1970 article, later a small
book, that first appeared in NEW YORK MAGAZINE, hitting
the city, as a friend of mine recalled (I wasn't there at
the time), with the force of a nuclear weapon. Overnight,
in the very Mecca of liberalism, Wolfe had achieved the
astounding feat of making liberalism seem silly.
How did he do it? As it happens, I once got the
chance to ask him.
The article was about Leonard and Felicia
Bernstein's famous, or rather notorious, 1969 fundraising
party for the Black Panthers, attended, in Bernstein's
own posh Park Avenue apartment, by dozens of New York's
most beautiful rich liberals. Wolfe was there too,
watching the others make glorious fools of themselves;
but nobody suspected the presence of an ironical
observer, taking notes in shorthand. (Later the others
accused him of smuggling in a tape recorder, thereby
vouching for the accuracy of his account.)
The party won instant notoriety long before Wolfe
published RADICAL CHIC. This was the result of a
society-page report in the NEW YORK TIMES, followed by a
stern editorial scolding the Bernsteins for their
frivolity. But it took Wolfe's long article to capture
the full, resonant comedy of the event. It's a work of
genius that has lost none of its hilarity, and remains
the crowning moment of the New Journalism.
I became friendly with Wolfe -- Tom, as I feel
entitled to call him -- a decade later, and he invited me
to spend a night and a day with him to observe the huge
1981 nuclear-freeze rally in Central Park. Naturally I
jumped at the chance to enjoy the company of my favorite
living writer and maybe pry some secrets of his success
from him.
I wasn't disappointed. In fact I was happily
surprised. Tom proved a kind host, an unassuming man, and
just as fun-loving an observer as one would expect. He
was also very well read in the history of the American
Left.
{{ We passed the hot day watching the hordes of Old
and New Left protestors, Tom pointing out to me such
veterans as the playwright Arthur Miller and recounting
stories of leftist sects I'd never heard of. I wish I'd
emulated him by taking notes. I also neglected to ask him
what fabric his bright yellow suit was made of. }}
As for his trade secrets, he was glad to share them.
Later in the day I asked him how he'd come to write
RADICAL CHIC.
He said he'd first heard the Bernsteins were giving
their Panther party, as it came to be known, while
"hanging around" the office of HARPER'S MAGAZINE. He
noticed an invitation addressed to the reporter David
Halberstam. He instantly sensed possibilities for a story
pregnant with both comic and serious social import. He
asked the editor, Lewis Lapham, if he might use the
invitation, Halberstam being in Vietnam that season.
Then, in keeping with the code of the New
Journalism, he started doing his research. Lots of it.
And here's where he showed his subtlety.
He found that Felicia Bernstein, nee Cohn, came from
a leftist family. Her father had been a high official in
the U.S. Communist Party.
Eureka! A red-hot datum if there ever was one!
And Tom decided not to mention it. It never appears
in RADICAL CHIC!
Why not? Because Tom realized, as he explained to
me, that it would destroy the tone he wanted. To expose
the Bernsteins' roots in the Old Left would sound so --
well, Birchite, McCarthyite, that everything else he
wanted to say would be upstaged, dismissed.
Far more effective, he saw, would be to contrast the
luxuries of the Bernsteins' Park Avenue lifestyle -- the
hors d'oeuvres, the servants, the precious furniture
(every brand name meticulously listed) with the funky
thrilling menace of the Panthers (every ghetto obscenity
meticulously recorded).
Those hors d'oeuvres became famous: "Wonder what the
Panthers eat here on the hors d'oeuvre trail? Do the
Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in
crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise
dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which
are at this very moment being offered to them on
gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with
hand-ironed white aprons ... The butler will bring them
their drinks ... Deny it if you wish to, but such are the
pensees metaphysiques that rush through one's head on
these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York."
Then there is Felicia, with her "rare burnished
beauty" and "Mary Astor voice," shaking hands with a huge
Panther, "the one with the black leather coat and the
dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy
Wuzzy-scale, in fact." Oh, the "giddy counterpoint"! As
for those servants, they are white -- and Wolfe includes
an account of the Bernsteins' quest for =white= servants,
since black ones ministering to black revolutionaries
("Would you care for a drink, sir?") would be just =so=
inappropriate for the occasion: "So the current wave of
Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search
for white servants." Even now, I can't quote all this
without laughing.
Not only could nobody else on earth have topped
this, nobody else could even have conceived it, catching
every angle of irony and absurdity in the situation of
slumming as a form of social climbing. What's more, part
of the comedy is that these liberals are quite sincere!
Wolfe doesn't take the obvious route of calling them
hypocrites. He treats them with his trademark mocking
sympathy, which is not without real sympathy. It's all
part of Balzac's comedie humaine, isn't it? (Wolfe also
knows that these French phrases sound funniest when
couched amid English words.)
What makes it so perfect is Wolfe's consummate
sophistication. He knows the significance of every
detail, but he is too canny to hit the Bernsteins with
everything he has; in fact, he admires them in some ways.
His prose, like the Bernsteins' Roquefort cheese morsels,
achieves its effect by mixing flavors unexpectedly. He
has no need to belittle his subjects; Lenny is a great
musician, and a well-meaning man. But his stature only
adds to the humor of the scene.
Bernstein was so enraged by that humor that he would
leave a room at the mere mention of RADICAL CHIC. Too
bad, but understandable. He'd worked all his life to
become one of the world's most famous conductors, only to
become best known as the target of one of the greatest
satires of the twentieth century.
Two Conservatives
(pages 5-6)
Two of America's most prominent conservatives have
just published new books that vividly illustrate the
differences between them. William F. Buckley Jr. has
written a sort of memoir, MILES GONE BY (Regnery), while
Patrick J. Buchanan has produced another of his ardent
polemics, WHERE THE RIGHT WENT WRONG: HOW
NEOCONSERVATIVES SUBVERTED THE REAGAN REVOLUTION AND
HIJACKED THE BUSH PRESIDENCY (Thomas Dunne Books, St.
Martin's Press).
The Buckley book is 594 handsomely produced pages of
rehash, including pieces he wrote as long ago as 1958,
surveying, mostly in anecdotes, everything from his
childhood through his career in journalism. There are
lovely fragments, especially about his family and
friends, but the book has little form or continuity, and
anyone looking for fresh material about the conservative
movement, or Buckley's role in it, will be disappointed.
Very disappointed.
To call these anecdotes twice-told tales would be a
serious understatement. Buckley has written many of them
several times (and told them, I can attest, many more
times). Readers who have never encountered them before
will find them charming, but may be puzzled about how
Buckley ever achieved his former stature as a public
figure.
Among the pieces reprinted here is a long
introduction to the 1977 edition of his first book, GOD
AND MAN AT YALE, first published in 1952. It's hard to
recall the furor this book caused at its appearance: its
thesis that Yale taught atheism and socialism to the sons
of God-fearing, capitalist alumni hardly seems
controversial today. But it's worth being reminded that
liberals, then as now, were disingenuously outraged when
their doings were exposed to the public; Buckley was
roundly cursed in respectable liberal journals for saying
the obvious -- indeed, the undeniable. "Fascist" was one
of the epithets most frequently hurled at him. The
reaction his first book stirred is more interesting than
the book itself, as is this introduction.
Approaching 80, Buckley says little about his
subsequent career; he seems to remember his first big
uproar far more vividly than any of the subsequent ones.
In fact the rest of them hardly show up at all, except
for a brief reference to his 1962 dustup with the John
Birch Society, of which he remains inordinately proud. He
got the better of the poor Birchers, partly because for
once he had liberal opinion on his side. Enlisting
liberal opinion against other conservatives was to become
a standard Buckley strategy, as I would learn to my cost.
In his later years Buckley's most interesting and
significant flap sprang from his decision to cast his lot
with a set of Jewish liberals, those who called
themselves "neoconservatives." To this end, he abetted
smears of other conservatives, notably Buchanan, as
anti-Semites. He once told the WASHINGTON POST that the
proudest achievement of his entire career had been
purging the conservative movement of anti-Semitism!
Oddly, he had gone most of that career without
noticing, or mentioning, this problem. It didn't exist.
What did exist, by 1990, was a sect of neocons who
used the charge of anti-Semitism to smear honorable
conservatives. In 1986, for example, Midge Decter accused
Russell Kirk, the most venerable conservative in the
movement, of anti-Semitism. (He'd made the Hitlerian quip
that many of the neoconservatives seemed to think Tel
Aviv was the center of Western civilization.)
Decter's libel was the biggest news in conservative
circles that season, but Buckley and NATIONAL REVIEW not
only failed to defend Kirk, who had been a regular
contributor to the magazine since its founding; they
failed even to report the incident to their readers.
Decter was actually welcome thereafter in the magazine's
pages; Kirk died in total disgust with Buckley.
In 1991 Buckley made his biggest splash ever by
insinuating that Buchanan was anti-Semitic (while
carefully adding that he "probably" was not). This won
him the applause he craved -- from liberals. He was
praised, for the first time in his life, in a lead
editorial of the NEW YORK TIMES. Verily, he had his
reward.
Since Buckley called this shameful episode his
proudest achievement, it's curious that he makes no
mention of it, or of anti-Semitism, in MILES GONE BY.
Buchanan appears briefly, but only as "the talented
author, columnist, and polemicist" in a long chapter
devoted to a televised debate on the Panama Canal
treaties (speaking of forgotten issues).
What's most notable about this book is its pervasive
vanity. This leads Buckley to dwell on little things he
is proud of and to forget bigger things he is, well, less
proud of. I remember his glee at anticipating the storm
his attack on Buchanan would cause among conservatives;
but I suspect that when it actually came, he was ashamed
of the pain he'd caused and shaken by the anger he'd
provoked. This book consigns such moments to oblivion.
It's all about the author's nice, self-flattering
memories of a long life.
Buchanan's new book, on the other hand, isn't about
Buchanan. His mind, as ever, is in the real world, and
he's not striking fine poses but trying to understand
events. Buckley appears briefly in his book too, and it's
only to make a brief observation: that Buckley's magazine
has called a dozen conservatives, many of whom used to
write for it, traitors and America-haters for opposing
the Iraq war (which Buckley himself now calls a
mistake!).
What has happened to the conservative movement? The
subtitle tells the story: The neocons have "hijacked" it.
Using conservative and patriotic rhetoric, they have
pushed for a war that actually serves the interests of
the state of Israel rather than America. In fact this war
is contrary to American interests, and they want to
expand it into "World War IV" -- an endless campaign to
destroy all of Israel's enemies.
Buchanan reviews their machinations and imprudent
self-revelations with damning thoroughness, leaving them
nowhere to hide and no doubt about their motives. These
bogus patriots have put their Likud ties on the record so
amply that any denial of their alien loyalties is
incredible. And Buchanan has been carefully keeping
score.
But he doesn't stop there. The book is far more
wide-ranging than its title suggests. Buchanan sees
trouble ahead. One chapter sums up Islam's long and
troubled relations with the Christian West, but argues
that this need not doom us to war now. In an especially
trenchant chapter on China, he argues that George W.
Bush's imperial foreign policy can only look menacing to
the Chinese rulers, who, old as they are, are looking to
the future far more than American politicians do. In fact
there is good reason for the world to fear the United
States as long as the U.S. Government assumes the right
of global hegemony. Buchanan contrasts Bush with Ronald
Reagan, who condemned Communism morally but cautiously
avoided armed conflict with the Soviets and China. These
chapters display, in their brisk and decisive prose, real
historical wisdom.
Buchanan's most alarming forecast has little to do
with war or foreign policy; the worst dangers to the
United States are internal. Under Bush, the welfare state
has become "unsustainable," with a monstrous expansion of
Medicare that will add trillions to Federal spending and
debt. Bush's abandonment of conservative and
constitutional tradition almost certainly means we are
headed for a disaster, maybe gradual, that will dwarf the
foreign evils he claims to be protecting us from.
In recent years Buchanan has made almost a second
career as an apostle of economic nationalism and an enemy
of free trade, which he calls "the serial killer of
American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of world
government." His chapter on "Economic Treason" makes a
powerful case for his position, but I don't find it
entirely convincing.
The key term is "nationalism." Buchanan is a
disciple of Alexander Hamilton, "master architect of the
United States," which puts him in the strange company of
the neocons, who favor centralized government. He says a
Hamiltonian policy of using tariffs against foreign
competition, while maintaining free trade among the
United States, was designed to keep us out of European
wars. Maybe so, though there is room for argument as to
whether that policy worked; and in any case, Buchanan
acknowledges that tariffs, by punishing the Southern
states worse than any foreign power, led to the worst war
in our history, our own civil war, in which more
Americans died than in all other wars combined.
Buchanan sees Lincoln and McKinley, two warrior
presidents, as "conservatives." He apparently rejects the
Jeffersonian view of most presidents before Lincoln that
the integrity of the =Federal= union depended on the
sovereignty of the "free and independent states," which
included the ultimate right to withdraw. Since Buchanan
has sometimes avowed his sympathy for the Confederacy,
all this is hard to understand. The Northern victory over
the South has made possible nearly all the
unconstitutional usurpations of power -- from the New
Deal to Roe v. Wade -- that conservatives deplore.
Hamilton's nationalism, adopted from the start by
the Republican Party, has led to tyranny. In fact, he
proposed to the Constitutional Convention, where he was
easily the most radical delegate, that the state
governments be effectively abolished! This is why his
liberal and neocon admirers, much as he might detest
them, still celebrate him. Lincoln's admirers likewise
praise Lincoln as a revolutionary; and it's hardly
questionable that he radically changed the nature of the
Union he said he was merely "preserving."
Despite this grave flaw, WHERE THE RIGHT WENT WRONG
is an invigorating summary, detailed yet farsighted, of
the conservative case against Bush and the other
"conservative impersonators" who have encouraged him in
his calamitous course. Buchanan hopes the Republican
Party can still be recalled to the principles of
Coolidge, the elder Robert Taft, Goldwater, and Reagan;
but on his own showing the prospects for such a
renaissance are bleak, verging on black.
NUGGETS
THEN AND NOW: In his book GIVE ME A BREAK, the newsman
John Stossel notes that in 1789, the Federal Government
"cost every citizen $20 (in today's money) per year.
Taxes rose during wars, but for most of the life of
America, spending never exceeded a few hundred dollars
per person. During World War II, government got much
bigger. It was supposed to shrink again after the war but
never did. Instead, it just kept growing. Now the Federal
Government costs every man, woman, and child an average
of $10,000 per year." (page 8)
I DARE YOU TO LOOK: On page 131 of Stossel's book you'll
find a chart of Federal spending that is, at a mere
glance, terrifying. It looks like an L lying on its back.
(page 10)
Exclusive to electronic media:
TODAY'S MONEY, YESTERDAY'S LANGUAGE: Note, by the way,
that in 1789, and long afterward, Americans didn't use
the expression "in today's money." A dollar wasn't a
piece of paper; it was a fixed amount of silver. Maybe,
in the interest of honesty, our unit of currency should
be renamed the neodollar.
ASK ANY KID: British psychologists report that even the
youngest infants can distinguish pretty faces from ugly
ones. What a comment on modernist aesthetics, which
disdains our simple, natural tastes and indeed the very
idea of beauty. Beauty is =real,= not "subjective" or
"conventional." The news should rock the art world.
Somewhere, Titian and Raphael are smiling.
BUT OF COURSE: The neocons are blaming the latest FBI
investigation of possible Israeli spying against the
United States on, yes, "anti-Semitism." Maybe it should
be blamed on the neocons' demands for tightened national
security.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* The Threat of Religion (August 17, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040817.shtml
* The New Rules of the Game (August 26, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040826.shtml
* Reliable Ally Strikes Again (August 31, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040831.shtml
* "Government at Its Best"? (September 2, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040902.shtml
* The Kerry Ferry (September 7, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040907.shtml
* The Real Issue (September 9, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040909.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]