SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
March 2005
Volume 12, Number 3
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> War and Etiquette
-> The Moving Picture
-> The Spirit and the Screen
-> The Hypocrisy of Henry V
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
War and Etiquette
(page 1)
{{ MATERIAL DROPPED 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. }}
When Jim Mattis, a Marine general, caused an uproar
by saying he found it "a hell of a lot of fun to shoot
some people," offering as an example Afghan Muslims who
slap their wives around for neglecting to wear their
veils, he found ready defenders in the media,
particularly right-wing talk radio. It wasn't surprising.
More than ever before, it seems, Americans in high places
glory in crudity.
Whether Mattis actually metes out summary death
penalties for slapping is doubtful -- I'm skeptical
myself -- but his braggadoccio reflects an attitude
shared by others: not only President Bush, but Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales (as well as
the interrogators of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo). All
these people seem to regard what used to be called acts
of torture as minor breaches of etiquette.
We needn't call Mattis's remarks Nazi, fascist, or
genocidal -- the overworked thermonuclear epithets of our
time -- but they do seem a trifle, well, unmannerly.
Would the women on whose behalf Mattis professed to act
really thank him for his chivalry when their husbands
were dead? Would he care? {{ You get the impression that
he's the sort of man whose dinnertable conversation might
be overbearing and who would belch loudly while others
were still eating. And he speaks, and burps, for many.
We didn't hear such talk from people in positions of
responsibility during the Vietnam War. Both the Johnson
and Nixon administrations tried to give the impression
that their conduct of that war observed the
internationally accepted rules of warfare. If there were
violations, we were given to understand, they were rare
and unauthorized. Robert McNamara, then secretary of
defense, shared Rumsfeld's arrogance but none of his
bravado. War was an ugly business, of course, but you
weren't supposed to be enjoying it. Even if atrocities
were committed, decorum was publicly respected. }}
During the Sixties, a lot of Americans chafed at the
very idea of a "limited" war, just as they chafed at
court-imposed restriction on police at home. In Hollywood
terms, the good guys were being handcuffed. The double
backlash that came in the next decade was naturally
registered in movies, when Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry
and Charles Bronson's DEATH WISH series glorified the
vigilante; soon afterward, Sylvester Stallone, as Rambo,
did the same for the soldier, showing how the Vietnam war
=should= have been fought: maniacally. All these films
had huge visceral appeal to mass audiences.
Seated in those audiences were young people who
would soon be presidential speechwriters. I knew several
of them well. During the Reagan and (first) Bush
administrations, they delighted in peppering their
bosses' speeches with the macho rhetoric and postures of
Dirty Harry and Rambo. "Go ahead: Make my day." "Read my
lips: No new taxes." The more liberals hated it, the more
conservatives loved it. That includes me, I confess,
though it's understandable that others might feel qualms
about the chief law-enforcement officer of the U.S.
Government playing the vigilante.
This recent Republican tradition, abandoned by Bill
Clinton, has been resumed by the younger Bush. He too
loves the gestures that thrill his base and enrage
liberals ("Bring it on!"), even if they also alarm the
rest of the world. Bush wants it understood that he is
prepared to act unilaterally, without the approval of
Europe or the United Nations.
Bush and his rooters see legal restraints much as
Dirty Harry sees civil liberties and legality itself: as
pantywaist politesse that only gets in the way of real
justice. In their view, America alone knows what needs to
be done, and to hell with the quavering, quivering Emily
Posts who would prevent our mission from being
accomplished. For them, the United States is the global
vigilante, and they don't worry about where this may yet
lead us.
The Moving Picture
(page 2)
Our (and my) old friend and fellow writer Sam
Francis died in February at 57, two weeks after emergency
heart surgery. A target of neoconservative smears and
ostracism, Sam carried on bravely, detached from the
Republican Party and the apostate conservative movement
in which he'd never been quite at home. In 1995 he was
fired from the WASHINGTON TIMES, despite his
award-winning editorials for that dismal newspaper. May
he rest in eternal peace.
* * *
To nobody's great surprise, North Korea has
announced that it has nukes, making it official that Kim
Jong Il is now de facto head of the Axis of Evil. He's
not averse to selling nuclear materials abroad, either,
and Osama bin Laden is ready to bid. There's no telling
how many other countries will soon have these weapons of
mass murder, and this is a good time to remind ourselves
that they're another legacy of Franklin Roosevelt. (Harry
Truman, the first man to use them, didn't even know of
the Manhattan Project until he became president.) FDR
either never stopped to think or, more likely, didn't
really care that he was launching an age of terror
without precedent in the world's history. May his name be
accursed.
* * *
Adding yet another mite to the horrors of Communism,
ex-smoker Fidel Castro has imposed U.S.-style limits on
the public consumption of tobacco. If he's now emulating
America, is this country still the Land of the Free, or
has it become the Socialist Motherland?
* * *
At home, meanwhile, the Federal Government continues
to grow. George Will captures a symptom with this fine
observation: "Today's president, the first since John
Adams to serve a full term without vetoing anything, last
week announced the limit of his tolerance: He vowed to
veto a spending decrease. That is the unmistakable
meaning of his statement that he would brook no changes
in his prescription drug entitlement that by itself has
an unfunded liability twice as large as the entire Social
Security deficit."
* * *
So it has come to this. The Archbishop of Canterbury
has given Prince Charles permission to wed Camilla Parker
Bowles. This apparently means that the next head of the
Church of England will be married to a divorced Catholic
woman. It all started when Henry VIII couldn't even get a
lousy annulment.
* * *
Obituaries for playwright Arthur Miller, 89, and
actor Ossie Davis, 87, stressed their courage in opposing
"McCarthyism," but (natch) glossed over their Communist
affiliations during Stalin's rule. Obituaries for boxer
Max Schmeling, 99, dwelt at length on his relations with
Hitler.
* * *
The daughter of conservative pundit, orator, and
recent Illinois Senate candidate Alan Keyes has come
forth as a lesbian activist, precipitating a painful
break with her parents -- and, of course, gaining
solicitous attention in the NEW YORK TIMES and the
WASHINGTON POST. Do you notice a pattern? Conservatives
seem to merit media coverage only when their children
announce themselves as homosexuals.
The Spirit and the Screen
(pages 3-4)
{{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS"
SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}
Religion, which concerns invisible realities, has
always posed special difficulties for the movies, a
medium of the visible. Hollywood has often met this
challenge head-on: with eye-popping spectacle. It has
made (and, in the sound era, sometimes remade) such huge
productions as THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, BEN-HUR, QUO VADIS?,
THE ROBE, KING OF KINGS, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD,
and THE BIBLE, but by the Sixties the genre, which peaked
in the Fifties, suddenly seemed to have run its course.
Crowds drew crowds. One of these movies' selling
points was their staggering crowd scenes: "With a cast of
thousands!" The computer-generated crowd still lay in the
remote future. Roman and Egyptian armies and mobs had to
be played by real people. (The fiercely anti-religious
Ayn Rand once worked as an extra in the silent version of
one of these epics.)
Most of these movies were hardly religious at all.
God was used as a sort of plot device, like what Alfred
Hitchcock called the "McGuffin" -- the unexplained spring
of the story (the secret formula for a bomb, say) whose
value is posited just to make things happen. In QUO
VADIS? the biggest box-office hit of 1951, Robert Taylor
and Deborah Kerr play early Christians facing the
prospect of becoming Roman catfood. But any spirituality
is easily upstaged by the lions and by Peter Ustinov's
corpulent, whining, funny, scary Nero. Ustinov, Charles
Laughton, and Robert Morley doubtless inspired Jimmy
Cannon's observation, "England has the best fat actors."
That was before Orson Welles and Marlon Brando reached
middle age.
It's surprising to recall that Brando himself
appeared in one film with religious overtones: ON THE
WATERFRONT featured him as Terry Malloy, a young
dockworker in moral and spiritual turmoil, with a tough
priest (Karl Malden) speaking for his better angel. In
those days religion, especially Catholicism, was a
reliable symbol and source of virtue in movies. Brando
won an Oscar for that performance, and another for a
later movie that also made use of Catholic symbolism, THE
GODFATHER.
Charlton Heston made dozens of films, chiefly
Westerns, but he'll be remembered forever for two roles:
Moses and Ben-Hur. Admittedly he didn't exactly radiate
holiness; still, when he was made up to look like
Michelangelo's statue, you could accept him as the
Almighty's go-to guy.
Though he's not greatly respected as an actor,
Heston deserves credit for a screen presence
authoritative enough to make these Biblical epics
convincing. It's a pitiful oddity of film history that
this great star's last appearance in a movie was as the
target of Michael Moore's taunting interview in BOWLING
FOR COLUMBINE. (I wince to recall that when I first met
him I told him how much I'd enjoyed the thrilling chariot
race, not reflecting that I'd mostly been watching a
stunt man; but Heston accepted this goofy compliment
graciously. He must have heard it a thousand times, poor
man.)
The supreme difficulty for movies, of course, is to
portray Christ plausibly. In KING OF KINGS (1962) Jeffrey
Hunter, a fine, handsome actor who died young, never has
a chance against the pseudo-Jamesian (that's King James,
not Henry) dialogue. Even the superb Max von Sydow, in
THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (1965), doesn't begin to
convey Jesus' personality; his looks are all wrong, and
his portrayal of the Son of God suggests a decent
Scandinavian clergyman, probably Unitarian. Robert
Powell, in Franco Zefferelli's 1977 made-for-TV JESUS OF
NAZARETH, never offends, but he lacks real force. (Willem
Dafoe, in Martin Scorsese's misconceived 1988 film of THE
LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, manages to turn Jesus into a
nonentity nobody would bother crucifying.)
But the role would probably defeat any actor, and
Mel Gibson, in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, avoided the
difficulty by concentrating on Calvary and showing Jesus
(Jim Caviezel) chiefly in the passive role of victim,
with little dialogue (and even that in Aramaic). The
critics outdid the mob in frenzied screaming, accusing
Gibson of "sadism" and "masochism" and using these terms,
for once, with disapproval. To Hollywood's dismay, the
film reached an enormous audience, who found it a
powerful depiction of what the Savior endured for us.
By sticking closely to the Gospel accounts and using
ancient tongues, Gibson spared himself the hopeless task
of creating worthy dialogue. He also avoided conventional
cliches of movie piety: upturned eyes, angelic soundtrack
choirs, jaw-dropping miracles, quasi-liturgical diction.
He simply showed, as faithfully as possible, how the
Romans put a criminal to death. When people in New
Testament times heard the word "crucified," they didn't
have to ask for an explanation. The word hadn't yet been
dignified by association with anything holy: It meant the
very opposite of holiness -- a death too grim to imagine.
Gibson, using all the resources of film, has renewed the
word. Now we've seen what it meant.
Before Hollywood became antagonistic to
Christianity, and when it wasn't budgeting for thousands
of extras, it also made more modest exercises in piety.
THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (1943), with Jennifer Jones as the
saint of Lourdes, and THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA
(1952) both deal with Marian apparitions -- a subject
remote from today's Hollywood, to say the least. Both,
though flawed by naivete, hold up surprisingly well.
Their most dramatic and moving moments occur when the
characters who have seen visions of the Virgin meet
skepticism and even hostility within the Church itself.
Robert Bresson's 1950 film THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY
PRIEST, based on Georges Bernanos's novel, is an
acknowledged classic of French cinema. Using unknown
actors and an almost documentary style, Bresson, film's
greatest Catholic director, shows the sickly young
priest's spiritual struggle with an uncompromising
bleakness that has been described as Jansenist. Devout as
he is, the priest can never feel that he is serving God
worthily. Is he a saint? To me, at least, he seems too
self-absorbed to be truly holy. But Bresson doesn't ask
or even invite our opinions, let alone disclose answers.
This is a powerful film, but not a pleasant one. Yet the
severe movie critic David Thomson is positively rapturous
about Bresson's genius.
One of the finest films ever made about a saint is
another French one, MONSIEUR VINCENT (1947). The
excellent Pierre Fresnay, best known here as an army
officer in Jean Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION, plays St.
Vincent de Paul, the great seventeenth-century champion
of the poor. Vincent is neither a martyr nor a miracle
worker, merely a priest trying to serve Jesus. He arrives
in a small town that hasn't seen a priest in ten years
and saves a little girl (whose mother has just died) from
starving; at her mother's burial, he chastises the gaping
townspeople for their neglect. This is the beginning of
his mission. Soon he is serving bread and soup to
thousands of poor people in Paris, hectoring the
reluctant rich to help. One wealthy matron asks whether
the poor babies abandoned on church steps in the winter
are even worth saving; after all, they are the fruits of
fornication!
Vincent is a practical man with a job to do. He
finally faces death feeling he has done far too little.
His severe self-judgment is no pose; if he has a halo, we
never see it and he is unaware of it. The film has no
saccharine piety; the poor can be as selfish and
ungrateful as the rich. That doesn't change Vincent's
duty, as he sees it. Near the end of the film he tells a
young nun, with a last fading twinkle in his eye, "We
must serve the poor with love. If we don't love them,
they'll never forgive us for giving them bread."
Fresnay makes you love Vincent without acting
lovable. He expresses affection sparingly, imparting a
powerful personality without visible histrionics. The
film wisely concentrates on a few episodes in Vincent's
life; it doesn't try to cover the entire, awesome career
of its historical subject, a titan of organized charity
who enlisted popes and kings in his work. Instead it
shows his personal charity, a quiet persistent energy
that refuses to be discouraged.
This modest focus gives the film a power that would
have been dissipated by an epic treatment of Vincent's
epic works. MONSIEUR VINCENT succeeds because it =avoids=
spectacle. It shows less of its subject's inner life than
THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST does, but Vincent is a
transparent man who doesn't need to be revealed in
soliloquies. We get to know him through his actions.
It's a commonplace of criticism that wicked
characters are easier to create, and believe, than holy
ones, because we understand their motives better. This
may be a comment on our fallen nature; Milton's Satan is
notoriously more convincing than Milton's Christ. Still,
it's a pity that films have so rarely tried to portray
saints. Real saints, after all, are usually vivid, even
fiery personalities: think of St. Francis of Assisi, St.
Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, whose lives abounded in
drama and colorful incident. Saints have more personality
than most of us; only in the movies do they have less.
One of the few saints to be the subject of a popular
film is St. Thomas More, played by Paul Scofield in Fred
Zinneman's 1967 treatment of A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS.
Despite Scofield's subtle intelligence in the role, I've
always felt that the film turns More into a champion of a
liberal cause -- freedom of conscience. The real More was
quite willing to punish heresy with death. The film's
hero, in Robert Bolt's script, is more preoccupied with
his own conscience than with his faith. In the end his
martyrdom seems rather flat. It would be a stretch even
to call this a religious movie.
Apart from Gibson, few if any of today's filmmakers
have the faintest interest in groping with religious
themes; even the colossal success of THE PASSION OF THE
CHRIST doesn't seem to have started a trend. A handful of
great films have shown what movies can achieve. But we
may wait a long time before somebody makes the attempt
again.
The Hypocrisy of Henry V
(pages 5-6)
{{ MATERIAL DROPPED 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. }}
In the churches I attend, both Catholic, we pray
briefly every Sunday for the American troops in Iraq. For
some reason we don't pray for the Iraqis. I suspect
others in the pews notice this omission too.
Throughout the Iraq war I've longed to hear
Americans (other than opponents of the war) express
concern for the people on the other side, the ones who
are allegedly being liberated by the American forces.
Tens of thousands of them -- we don't get real numbers or
even official estimates -- have been killed or maimed.
Americans typically keep their psychic distance from
the countries where "our boys" (or, as we now say, "our
brave men and women") are fighting. They rarely
acknowledge that our boys are doing anything but
defending us, or defending freedom, however inapplicable
these formulas may be to the situation at hand. When
forced to confront "civilian casualties," now known (even
more euphemistically) as "collateral damage," they tend
to shrug them off as regrettable but inevitable effects
of any war, accidental and guilt-free. War just happens;
it always has. The conscience needn't be seriously
disturbed about it.
As it happens, Shakespeare has something to say
about this. In the first act of HENRY V, the new king --
a playboy turned serious monarch, to everyone's
wonderment -- reveals that he is contemplating war with
France. The reason is neither defense nor freedom; France
poses no threat at all to England. But Henry claims that
=he= is the rightful king of France, and he appeals to
the Archbishop of Canterbury to judge his title.
That title, musty, obscure, and legalistic, hardly
seems an urgent reason for bloodletting. Moreover, Henry
knows very well what horrors a war would mean for the
French, and he solemnly urges Canterbury to keep the
innocents in mind as he delivers his verdict:
For God doth know how many now in health
Shall drop their blood in approbation
Of what your reverence shall incite us to.
Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake the sleeping sword of war;
We charge you, in the name of God, take heed;
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood; whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
'Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto the swords
That make such waste in brief mortality.
And so on, with pious eloquence. An unjustified war means
=mass murder,= so Henry wants the justice of his cause
certified by the authority of the Church. It's hard to
imagine a modern ruler, particularly an American
president, showing such sensitivity to the innocent
victims of a prospective war. We've certainly heard
nothing like this lately.
{{ It would be nice to leave the matter here, with
an edifying contrast between the good old days of
chivalrous warfare and our own decadent age. Imagine a
time when a king's decision about war could depend on a
churchman's conscientious judgment! If only it were so
simple. }}
Unfortunately, Henry has already made up his mind --
and the corrupt Canterbury, who is in a weak position to
oppose the king anyway, well knows this as he supports
Henry's flimsy claim to the French crown. He explains, at
tedious length, that the French king's title has
descended through the female line and is thus somehow
invalid, whereas Henry's title ... Well, Harold Goddard,
one of the few scholars who has closely studied
Canterbury's argument, says it's self-contradictory.
In any case, it's hardly a reason for unleashing the
dogs of war on the peaceful French. But Henry also has
designs on the Church's wealth in England, so Canterbury
has already offered to help pay for war in the hope of
buying him off. Now Canterbury officially assures him
that his claim to France is good. {{ The fix is in; the
war is on. }}
Still, Henry has given himself a moral escape hatch:
By cautioning Canterbury to be careful of what he shall
"incite us to," he subtly shifts responsibility for the
war to the churchman.
At this point, the French ambassador arrives with a
gift for Henry from the Dauphin (France's crown prince):
tennis balls! A mock at his wild youth. Enraged, Henry
threatens to avenge the insult by ravaging France:
And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones; and his soul
Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful
vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many a thousand
widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear
husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons; mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's
scorn!
Henry is so furious about this tweak that he forgets
all about his supposed title. Now a few tennis balls are
the casus belli. But this time the responsibility lies
not with the archbishop, but with the Dauphin.
Suddenly Henry remembers himself, calms down, and
gets back into his sanctimonious vein:
But this lies all within the will of God,
To whom I do appeal; and in whose name
Tell you the Dauphin I am coming on,
To venge me as I may and to put forth
My rightful hand in a well-hallow'd cause.
God, widows, bereaved mothers, vengeance -- a
well-hallowed cause, all right. This war will have nearly
as many reasons as victims.
A few scenes later, before Harfleur, Henry warns the
city's governor to surrender "Whiles yet my soldiers are
in my command":
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking
daughters,
Your fathers taken by the silver beards
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroy'd?
"Guilty in defense." Just as those widows would all be
charged to the Dauphin's soul, now the violated girls and
skewered babies will be the fault of those who refused to
surrender. Henry's French title is indeed a well-hallowed
cause. (And once again the awful violence against the
innocent is blamed on someone else.)
For generations HENRY V was taken as a simple
celebration of an English national hero who had won a
great victory on the fields of Agincourt. That's what it
seems to be on the surface. The Chorus keeps praising
Henry as "the mirror of all Christian kings," and nearly
everyone in the play seems to agree. The former pal of
Falstaff and the London lowlifes has astounded everyone
by casting off his old comrades and achieving a splendid
maturity.
Laurence Olivier fully accepted this conventional
view of Henry's heroism when he filmed the play in
splendid color during World War II. He persuaded Winston
Churchill to support the project with the argument that
it would serve to bolster wartime morale in England.
Churchill's government underwrote the movie, which was
immediately hailed as a classic in England and America.
"The movies have produced one of their rare great works
of art," began TIME's cover story, written by James Agee.
{{ In truth, the movies had produced a beautiful
monument of jingoism. I grew up loving it myself, chiefly
for Olivier's clarion-voiced readings of Henry's battle
speeches. These were available on a long-playing record,
with excerpts from his Hamlet film on the other side. I
memorized every syllable of it. }}
Goddard, whose book THE MEANING OF SHAKESPEARE was
published posthumously in 1951, was the first commentator
to see the play's deep irony about its central character.
The Chorus doesn't speak for the author; he voices
popular opinion, and his cloying praise is undermined by
everything Henry actually does -- such as ordering that
his prisoners' throats be cut. (This and other unheroic
details were omitted in Olivier's film.) Only his rousing
speeches suggest heroism; Shakespeare never shows Henry
doing any fighting (though Olivier does; his battle
scenes are wonderful cinema, but they aren't in the
play).
Goddard stands all earlier criticism on its head. He
sees Henry not as Shakespeare's ideal ruler, but as
Machiavelli's. Henry is a consummate manipulator -- of
law, religion, passion, force, and of course language. He
can pull the secret wires or stir the blood, as occasion
demands. He outdoes his conniving father, Henry IV, whose
dying advice was to "Busy giddy minds With foreign
quarrels" -- counsel adopted by countless statesmen
since. One of these was Churchill.
Shakespeare shows the depths of Henry's self-blind
hypocrisy in a long soliloquy on the eve of the great
battle. Henry has just visited his common soldiers in
disguise, and has found them disenchanted with his war.
Like his father ("Uneasy lies the head that wears a
crown"), he reflects on the difficult responsibilities of
kingship, in contrast to the carefree life of the
subject:
The slave, a member of the country's peace,
Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots
What watch the king keeps to maintain the
peace ...
Consumed with self-pity, Henry forgets where he is. He
hasn't come to Agincourt to "maintain the peace."
Here is Shakespeare's most profound study of the
psychology of rulers. Henry is by no means the last mass
murderer to congratulate himself on laboring to protect
the peace of his subjects.
NUGGETS
{{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS"
SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}
AT LEAST IT'S NOT A SACRAMENT. YET: In keeping with its
ancient tradition of following the Wave of the Future,
Britain has legalized same-sex civil unions. That is
=so= twentieth century, isn't it? If Henry VIII could
only see -- but I've already said that. (page 7)
REASSURANCE: Visiting Europe to mend fences, President
Bush ridiculed the suggestion that the United States is
preparing to attack Iran. But he didn't rule it out,
either. All our options are "still on the table," he said
pointedly. (page 9)
DOING THE MATH: We're often told that the average
American works until May or so to pay his taxes. Query:
How much of his time does he work to pay interest on the
national debt? (page 9)
ADIEU: Hunter S. ("Fear and Loathing") Thompson has shot
himself, cutting off a spectacular journalistic career at
age 67. He was said to be despondent about his failing
health and the Republican ascendancy -- understandable
concerns both, poor fellow. He'd reached the point, as we
all must, where drugs and booze could no longer ensure
felicity. I guess that leaves me the last surviving gonzo
journalist. (page 11)
Exclusive to electronic media:
SO SORRY: As Harvard's president Lawrence Summers
continues to apologize for suggesting that there are
"innate differences" between the sexes, the "gay
community" is demanding to know why Susan Sontag's huge
obituary in the NEW YORK TIMES made no mention of her
long-time lesbian "relationship" with photographer Annie
Leibovitz.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* America the Frightful (February 8, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050208.shtml
* The Baker Street Shakespeareans (February 10, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050210.shtml
* The Anti-Eulogy: An Apologia (February 15, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050215.shtml
* America, Shouting (February 17, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050217.shtml
* The War on Norms (February 22, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050222.shtml
* Interests and Friendships (February 24, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050224.shtml
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