SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
September 2005
Volume 12, Number 9
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Word No Liberal Knows
-> After the Flood (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> Sorry, Wrong Numbers
-> Huck and His Conscience
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
The Word No Liberal Knows
(page 1)
Given its lead time, this journal generally avoids
weather reports, but I can't help noticing that, if the
mainstream news media are to be trusted, the Gulf Coast
has had difficulties with the elements of late. Allowing
for some exaggeration, verging on sensationalism, let us
provisionally concede these reports a core of truth.
Liberals, until now frustrated in their desire to
discredit President Bush with the American public, have
pounced on the chance to blame him for the alleged
disaster in New Orleans. They haven't actually accused
him of causing Hurricane Katrina, but they charge him
with having failed to prepare for her, with responding
inadequately, and with indifference to the plight of her
victims, especially the poor black ones.
Now I'd be happy to see Bush impeached, but not for
this. He has plenty of other things to answer for, so
many I've lost count. He has sworn to uphold the U.S.
Constitution twice now, and he hardly seems to grasp what
this entails; but I can't find any clause in my copy of
the document assigning to the executive, or to any branch
of the Federal Government, responsibility for the
weather.
Not that that's going to stop liberals, who want
government at every level to take responsibility (with
appropriate power) for everything, from global warming to
individual health. People may laugh or cringe when it
begins to wage war on obesity, but why not? It's a
perfectly logical extension of what the Superstate is
already doing.
Liberals don't read Aristotle, so they never ask
themselves whether there is an optimum degree of
government power, a Golden Mean beyond which it must not
go. The word no liberal uses is "enough." There is no
such thing as too much government. There is no point at
which, say, Ted Kennedy will ever sigh with satisfaction
and say, "Well, we've made it. We've finally reached our
goal. At long last we have all the government we need,
and we don't need any more. Even one more law or
regulation, in fact, might be excessive. We are
approaching the bursting point." Not that liberals don't
oppose some laws -- they certainly do, but never on
grounds of excess.
In the Aristotelian spirit, the conservative
philosopher Michael Oakeshott calls governing "a specific
and limited activity"; that is, limited =because= it is
specific. Such talk is alien to the idiom of liberalism,
with its boundless faith in power, its flamboyantly
reckless idealism, its aversion to definition. Those who
resist the expansion of the state are said to "oppose
change," to "lack compassion," to be "mean-spirited."
It's all so simple. The liberal coin has no obverse. On
all occasions, at every contingency or opportunity, state
power must grow.
That's the real trouble with Bush: he's a liberal
too. Despite his abrupt and anomalous conservative
gestures (whose meaning is, as he might say,
misoverestimated), he buys the major premise: state power
must grow.
When liberalism results in predictable harms --
social chaos, cultural decay, waste, inflation, colossal
self-compounding public debt -- the only remedy is more
liberalism. No se habla el aristotelianismo aqui.
The Moving Picture
(page 2)
After the Flood
As the Forces of Evil (alias Progress) were trying
to build some sort of case against confirming John
Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William
Rehnquist's long career ended forever. He'd done what he
could, over more than three decades, to curb the Court's
liberalism, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, during which
period Roberts had served as one of his clerks. President
Bush took the unprecedented (I think) step of promoting
Roberts's nomination from associate to chief justice. The
plot thickens.
* * *
And with another vacancy to be filled, the Court's
new session begins with Sandra Day O'Connor temporarily
returning from what we'd hoped was her retirement. Well,
the libs have been demanding another O'Connor, and now
they've got the original Swingin' Sandy back, at least
for a spell. Let's hope all those glowing obituaries
haven't gone to her head.
* * *
New Orleans continues to wash up toxic notions.
George Will draws the moral that it proves the
"conservative" case for government, viz., that "the first
business of government, on which =everything= depends, is
security." (His emphasis.) Oddly, Will quotes Hobbes
rather than Burke to make his point. And he also says
Katrina makes the "liberal" case for government, viz.,
"the indispensability, and dignity, of the public
sector." Would that include the city's notoriously
crooked politicians?
* * *
THE NEW YORK TIMES rushed to the defense of --
surprise, surprise! -- the mostly poor, black looters. In
such dire circumstances, looting shouldn't be a crime,
should it? Well, nobody is likely to be shot, much less
prosecuted, for taking food. But televisions? (With no
place to plug them in, the looters should be shot for
stupidity.) Such defenders are only helping confirm the
racial stereotypes they're forever deploring. Why do
white liberals love black criminals so much? The sort of
black who was once called "a credit to his race" can
expect the TIMES to ignore him; the sort once said to
"give the whole group a bad name" gets the front page.
* * *
Katrina has put Bush in a strange position. She has
almost totally -- and, it would seem, permanently --
eclipsed the Iraq war on which he has staked his hopes
for a lasting legacy. He will be remembered chiefly for
being the guy in the White House when two terrible
disasters struck, both finding him surprised and
unprepared. The 9/11 attacks and Katrina occurred almost
exactly four years apart, one early in his first term,
the other early in his second. And just as the one
allowed him to create the illusion of mastery for a time,
the second has exposed him as helpless in the face of
events.
* * *
THE WEEKLY STANDARD is already -- is it possible? --
ten years old! The neocon mag is saluted by Peter Carlson
of the WASHINGTON POST for its "excellent" writing, and
for being "America's funniest right-wing magazine,
although there is not, alas, much competition for that
title." So much for Bill Buckley's NATIONAL REVIEW, which
turns 50 this year, if anybody cares.
Exclusive to electronic media:
Reviewing a biography of the great literary critic
Edmund Wilson, Jonathan Yardley of the POST cites his
many faults. Wilson was "arrogant, demanding,
self-centered, priapic, alcoholic, abusive." He had a
fearful temper, cheated on all four of his wives, may
also have beaten them, turned venomously on his friends,
mooched off his mother, and -- crowning infamy! --
"declined to pay taxes for many years until the IRS
finally caught up with him." Just when I was beginning to
like him.
Sorry, Wrong Numbers
(pages 3-4)
Major league baseball is widely assumed to exemplify
economic determinism. Big money buys big talent, and the
Yankees and Braves win most of the pennants; George
Steinbrenner routinely shells out enough millions to get
players like Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez, and Randy
Johnson. In short, money wins. An unedifying moral,
except maybe to Steinbrenner and Ted Turner.
But in recent years there has been a notable
exception: the penurious Oakland A's have been winning
with front-office brains instead of stars on the field.
Unlike chess, a stronghold for kooky geniuses,
baseball has inspired little creative thinking (though a
lot of literature, most of it pretty bad). True,
intellectuals love it ostentatiously, but it typically
finds its fullest expression in cliches and statistics
that don't leave much room for irony. But suddenly the
stolid game is changing. Thinking has invaded baseball.
There have even been nuance sightings in this unlikely
precinct.
Baseball isn't a total stranger to high
intelligence, however. From time to time, players,
scientists, and ordinary fans have proposed new
approaches to its basic situations. You might not think a
game based on a simple skill -- hitting a sphere with a
cylinder -- would offer much room for either subtlety or
error, but it does.
Between his retirement and his decapitation, Ted
(.406) Williams wrote an excellent little book called THE
SCIENCE OF HITTING. And it really did reduce hitting a
baseball to a science. For instance, he calculated that a
batter who swings at pitches even a single inch outside
the strike zone dramatically enlarges the area of the
pitcher's target by a precisely quantifiable ratio. Do
the math.
Around the same time, a Johns Hopkins professor
named Earnshaw Cook used statistics to show the
inefficiency of some hallowed baseball tactics. The stats
showed, for example, that the sacrifice bunt was a bad
deal: the out wasn't justified by the chance of gaining a
run. Cook also argued that managers should plan on using
three pitchers per game, so that they would bat as seldom
as possible (this was before the designated hitter). He
reckoned that a pitcher was usually at his best for no
more than about five innings anyway.
In 1977 Bill James made his debut in print (or
mimeograph, anyway) with an iconoclastic approach to the
stats that eventually led to a practical revolution in
the game on the field. The standard stats were
misleading, he argued. Batting averages were poor
measures of a hitter's offensive value, because they gave
no credit for drawing walks; it was as if the base on
balls were nothing more than a pitcher's mistake.
Fielding averages were perverse, since they gave
excessive importance to errors; after all, a shortstop
quick enough to reach balls slower shortstops would miss
entirely would be penalized by an "average" that gave him
no credit for range. James may have been the first fan to
find irony in stats after all. Michael Lewis, a popular
financial writer sums up his central insight: "The many
little injustices and misunderstandings embedded in the
game's records spawned exotic inefficiencies. Baseball
strategies were often wrongheaded and baseball players
were systematically misunderstood." Faulty statistics
finally produced, from James's perspective, "the greatest
accounting scandal in professional sports."
Such theorizing about baseball is no longer just the
preoccupation of nerds. In his bestseller MONEYBALL: THE
ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME (Norton), Lewis tells the
gripping story of how the Oakland A's have confounded
financial determinism, beating far richer teams by
putting radical ideas to work. Besides theoretical acumen
of a high order, Lewis narrates this strange eventful
history with delicious anecdotes, character studies, and
hilarity. He tells it as a business story, in which the
avatars of financial determinism come up against a man
who knows how to exploit "market inefficiencies."
Oakland's young general manager Billy Beane was
quick to see the implications of Bill James's studies.
They led to a whole new way of evaluating players. A team
didn't need big (and expensive) stars; it needed players
with skills that were underrated, skills the traditional
stats didn't usually capture.
Beane looked for guys who could do simple things
like patiently drawing walks. Walks meant runs; and a
lineup that took a lot of pitches would not only score a
lot of runs, it would also wear down opposing pitchers.
Throwing a hundred pitches in two hours is, after all,
hard work. Beane would eagerly trade away big-name
players (with big contracts) to get unknown players
cheap. He saw promise where nobody else did, because he
realized that the more spectacular players were overrated
-- and overpaid. He packed the A's with young players who
were stunned to discover that any major league team would
want them.
Even the team's owners were wary. They
understandably didn't want to bet too much money on
bizarre theories contradicting everything they "knew."
Only Beane's assistant Paul DePodesta grasped what he was
up to and fully supported him.
A soft-spoken eccentric named Chad Bradford had been
a mediocre pitcher since high school in Mississippi,
where his own coach had seen no particular talent in him;
Beane grabbed him when he'd nearly given up on a baseball
career, and he became a star with an 84-mile-an-hour
fastball. His submarine delivery looked odd, but just try
hitting a home run off it. If you really connected with
his fastball -- if that's the word for the pitiful thing
-- you might get a hard groundout. But as the great lefty
Warren Spahn used to say, "Hitting is timing. Pitching is
upsetting timing." After Bradford set up hitters with his
69-mile-an-hour changeup, he could confound them with
that 84-mile-an-hour blazer.
Beane put a premium on temperament. He learned about
that the hard way. He had been a young player of
astonishing talent; in college and the minor leagues, he
already looked destined for the Hall of Fame. He awed
scouts and coaches with his hitting, power, fielding,
even pitching; you name it, he could do it incomparably.
Even in the majors, he had his moments, as when he went
5 for 5 against the Yankees' great lefty Ron Guidry, one
of his hits a home run. But he went hitless in his next
two games and was removed from the lineup; soon he was
back in the minors. Every failure made him play worse; he
pressed too hard, and barely hit .200 at any level, until
he quit in frustration. If ever a player showed
"promise," it was Billy Beane. But he was outperformed by
mediocre teammates who could shrug off failure with their
confidence in themselves unimpaired. If he'd been able to
do that, he'd be in Cooperstown today. But despite his
talent and maybe because of his intensity, he fell apart.
His own experience taught Beane that promise meant
nothing; performance was everything. And he learned to
define performance in unconventional ways. He could
glance at a kid's statistics and pick up things the
scouts who'd studied him up close for months hadn't
noticed, because they hadn't known what to look for.
Often, Lewis reports, the scouts would dismiss a prospect
because he didn't "look like" a ballplayer -- too short,
too slight, too fat. Beane might grab him anyway, if the
numbers showed he got on base. Beane became a connoisseur
of seeming mediocrities.
Ted Williams, by the way, had never despised the
base on balls. In a war-shortened career he'd drawn
almost as many walks as Babe Ruth, and his lifetime
on-base average remains the highest in baseball history.
He wouldn't chase a bad pitch on the chance of hitting a
homer (though he was also a great power hitter). Beane,
by contrast, had badly hurt his career by swinging at bad
pitches and had drawn few walks.
But Bean's counterintuitive methods of assessing
players -- the less they resemble him, the better he
seems to like them -- are still winning. Just this year,
the A's were slumping badly; then Beane traded away two
All-Star pitchers, and the team shot to the top of the
standings. Organized baseball now understands that
on-base and slugging averages are better measures of
offensive ability than batting averages; but otherwise it
hasn't caught up with Beane, whom many front-office
honchos still regard as a flake and a fluke.
Still, he has succeeded often enough that other
general managers have learned to be very cautious when
Beane takes an interest in one of their players,
especially players of no apparent distinction. What's he
seeing in these guys that everyone else is missing? Lewis
has a dizzying, funny chapter on Beane's frenetic but
cunning approach to trading, which he usually does by
cell phone.
Lewis never even mentions the biggest scandal in
baseball today: steroid use. But he might have. That
problem has resulted from baseball's obsession with
power, the 500-foot home run and the 100-mile-an-hour
fastball. These things attract fans, and therefore
tycoons offering fat contracts, because you don't have to
savor the fine points of the game to appreciate a moon
shot. Admittedly the blood doesn't thrill much to see a
skinny second baseman lay off bad pitches and trot to
first base, and it's hardly more exciting to see the
shortstop single him home for what will later prove the
winning run.
MONEYBALL could easily have been written as a
sententious treatise on the virtues of (yawn) delayed
gratification. Instead, Lewis tells the tale of how Billy
Beane became the tortoise who whipped all the hares.
Huck and His Conscience
(pages 5-6)
I remember my fourth-grade teacher pretty well,
except for her name. I think it started with an M. Miss
Moran? That sounds about right. Anyway, she was a very
refined and kind-hearted young woman who'd come up to
Michigan from down South, so innocent that she didn't
understand (or at least pretended she didn't) an
extremely naughty word, "turd," when the class clown,
Bobby Turner, made a joke about it. "Turd?" she repeated,
somewhat mystified. "I don't believe I know that one,
Robert." We all felt very wicked as we snickered.
All of which makes it seem strange, now, that she
could do what she did for many consecutive days: she read
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN aloud to the class. In
her gently honeyed accent, she spoke the word "nigger"
without the least compunction. Where she came from, it
was a harmless colloquialism, though my mother had taught
me it was rude. (My Dad used it as freely as Huck's Pap.)
But we were a bunch of little white kids, and it didn't
affect us.
Today, it goes without saying, Miss Moran would lose
her job in a flash. I'm lucky I knew her when I did, back
when you could enjoy Mark Twain without facing legal
repercussions. And when she read him to us, in her
expressive voice, so perfect for Huck and Pap and Jim and
Miss Watson and the Duke and the King, I was in a state
of bliss that today's children are carefully protected
from.
Floating down a mighty river on a raft! With one
good friend and no parents! It was a boy's vision of
heaven. Most of Twain's humor went over my head; but the
sheer adventure enthralled me. I loved the book so much
that I went home and read it through for myself, then
read it again and again and again. My mother would make
me popcorn as I sprawled on the carpet with my book. At
age 10 I wanted to be a writer. I wrote stories about
boys running away from home and having adventures, though
they tended to peter out after a few pages.
Having also read THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, I
thought Twain was just writing for boys, so I was later
surprised to learn that HUCK FINN was regarded as a
serious classic. When in my teens I went through my
Hemingway phase, I found that Hemingway himself had
called the book the fountainhead of all subsequent
American fiction. When my first son was about 10, I read
part of it aloud to him, and was delighted when he
laughed at parts I'd seen no humor in at his age. He
thought Pap's boozy railing about "that nigger" was a
riot; I didn't have to explain to him what irony was.
Twain couldn't have predicted today's
state-sponsored touchiness about the N-word; but he knew
that the cunning use of regional American English, even
in the mouth of an unschooled, naive, superstitious boy
who has never questioned the prejudices of his time and
place, could say more about morality than any sermon
could. One morning, far down the Mississippi, Huck finds
Jim in a sad mood: "He was thinking about his wife and
his children, away up yonder, and he was low and
homesick; because he hadn't ever been away from home in
his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his
people as white folk do for their'n. It don't seem
natural, but I reckon it's so." Then, instead of reaching
a universal moral about the human race, Huck draws the
only lesson he can: "He was a mighty good nigger, Jim
was."
Despite its improbabilities, HUCK FINN is convincing
because Huck's own voice always rings true, even when
Twain is inviting us to laugh at him. Huck is only a boy,
but he describes calm nights, mournful sounds, and
violent storms on the Mississippi with vivid, evocative
eloquence:
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to
thunder and lighten; ... Directly it begun to
rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I
never seen the wind blow so. It was one of
these regular summer storms. It would get so
dark that it looked all blue-black outside,
and lovely; and the rain would thrash along
by so thick that the trees off a little ways
looked dim and spider-webby; and here would
come a blast of wind that would bend the
trees down and turn up the pale underside of
the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a
gust would follow along and set the branches
to tossing their arms as if they was just
wild; and next, when it was just about the
bluest and blackest -- fst! It was as bright
as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of
treetops a-plunging about a way off yonder in
the storm, hundreds of yards further than you
could see before; dark as sin again in a
second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go
with an awful crash, and then go rumbling,
grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the
under side of the world, like rolling empty
barrels down-stairs -- where it's long stairs
and they bounce a good deal, you know.
I never saw the river until middle age, but I felt
I'd known it all my life. It's hardly necessary to
mention Twain's mastery of dialect and dialogue.
Huck's affection for Jim, his only friend, sets his
heart against everything he has ever been taught. He
recognizes that helping a runaway slave escape is "a
low-down thing" that could give him a bad name and
forfeit his soul as well; he imagines his own conscience
demanding, "What had poor Miss Watson done to you that
you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and
never say one single word? What did that poor old woman
do to you that you could treat her so mean?" Jim speaks
of saving enough money to buy his wife and children from
their current owner; or, if he refused to sell, of having
an Abolitionist steal them for him. Huck comments, "It
most froze me to hear such talk.... Here was this nigger,
which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right
out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children --
children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man
that hadn't ever done me no harm." (Huck's novel
application of the Golden Rule shows again when he
decides against leaving the murderers to drown: "I says
to myself, there ain't no telling but I might come to be
a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it?")
But in the end, personal friendship and gratitude to
Jim for countless kindnesses prevail over morality, as he
understands it; and in the book's most famous sentence,
he shocks himself with his decision: "All right, then,
I'll =go= to hell." An act of charity makes him feel like
Macbeth. He has a clear duty to betray his only friend.
Twain's alertness to religious humbug colors the
whole book. His satiric eye and ear are never sharper
than when the fraudulent King and Duke feign piety to
raise money. These two frontier sharpsters provide some
of the funniest episodes in a book that is all episodes;
in his author's notice to the reader, Twain warns that
"persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
And so far, nobody has found one.
We see such incidents as Huck's escape from his Pap;
his faking his own death; his meeting with Jim, Miss
Watson's fugitive slave; his disguising himself as a
girl; his discovery and prevention of a planned murder;
the mysterious floating House of Death; the mad feud
between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords; the
pseudo-Shakespearean production of the King and Duke;
their unruffled effrontery even when their absurd frauds
are detected; their near-lynching; Huck's crafty efforts
to outwit them and protect their intended victims; the
shooting of the drunken Boggs by the magnificent
misanthrope Colonel Sherburn, who then faces down a lynch
mob. All these are unforgettable, with many brilliant
character sketches.
Finally comes the climactic episode that Hemingway
rightly called a "cheat." Huck arrives at a farm where
Jim has been captured, the mistress of which just happens
to be Tom Sawyer's aunt. She just happens to be expecting
a visit from Tom, she mistakes Huck for him, and Huck
allows her to think so. Tom just happens to arrive at a
convenient moment, and he goes along with the deception
as he hatches a romantic and needlessly elaborate plan to
free Jim. In the end Jim is rescued not by this scheme,
but by Miss Watson back home in Missouri, who we learn
just happens to have set him free before her death.
It's all quite unbelievable, breaking the realistic
tone of the whole novel. I've never understood why Twain
thinks Tom Sawyer is so funny; more important, Tom as a
character is far less interesting than Huck. We've gotten
to know Huck's deepest thoughts and feelings, and he is
real to us in a way Tom can never be.
Twain should have realized this. For all his
piercing wit, he shows Huck and Jim with great
tenderness, and he violates their dignity when he makes
them subordinate figures in a farce. The book is much
better, and far funnier, when he allows them to converse
alone on the raft on the great river.
* * *
Like Walt Whitman and Henry James, Twain was a
Shakespeare skeptic, scornful of the idea that the son of
Stratford could have written the plays. His keen ear for
regional language was probably one of the reasons; he had
traversed the gap between Huck's Missouri dialect -- the
language of his own boyhood -- and the fancy literary
lingo of the Northeast he'd migrated to and achieved fame
in, and he must have noticed that Mr. Shakspere had
failed to make a similar linguistic ascent from Stratford
to literary London.
It could only have amused him that the poet famed
for his "fine-filed lines" in London should have been
supposed to have retired to Stratford, where his Muse
could inspire nothing but the crude doggerel inscribed on
his gravestone, ending, "And curst be he that moves my
bones."
=This= is the last verse composed by the greatest
English poet of all time? Twain knew a fraud when he saw
one.
NUGGETS
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: During the two years I studied
Latin in high school, I never figured out how little
Roman children could make split-second decisions about
whether to use the dative or the ablative case. It always
took me about half a minute to choose. But I really threw
in the towel on my Classical studies when I learned that
Greek kids had known how to use the aorist tense. Damn
brats. (page 8)
COMMENDATION: If you want to dope out the debate on
Darwinism without getting into technicalities, you can
hardly do better than to read C.S. Lewis's little book
MIRACLES: A PRELIMINARY STUDY. Lewis refined his argument
and revised the book after being bruised, if not exactly
defeated, in a famous debate with the philosopher
G.E.M. Anscombe. (page 9)
THE P-WORD: The John Roberts confirmation hearings have
made one thing abundantly clear: debasing yet another
good old word, liberals have turned "privacy" into a
euphemism for sodomy and abortion. Meanwhile, they want
the state to violate every kind of privacy worth having.
Exclusive to electronic media:
PRESIDENTIAL PICKLE: Early in his first term, President
Bush was able to handle the 9/11 attacks by declaring
war. But early in his second term, almost exactly four
years later, Hurricane Katrina has caught him
flat-footed. You can't declare war on Mother Nature, so
he's in a real pickle. Let's see how Karl Rove gets him
out of this one.
BEST NEWS OF THE MONTH: All is not lost. Low-priced boxed
sets of Astaire-Rodgers musicals and Alec Guinness
comedies, five DVDs each, are now available.
BEYOND PENUMBRAL EMANATIONS: Neocon Charles Krauthammer
predicts, approvingly, that Chief Justice Roberts won't
vote to overturn Roe v. Wade because it would be just too
darned disruptive at this point. That was exactly the
reasoning of Sandra O'Connor and the Swingers in Planned
Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, as they upheld Roe for the
sake of social stability -- and the Court's own prestige.
In fact, that's an excellent argument against returning
to the Constitution in general. Why, just imagine the
huge dislocations that would ensue if the U.S. Government
observed its own fundamental law!
REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 7-12)
* Disasters, Natural and Political (December 28, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041228.shtml
* The Queer Bard? (August 30, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050830.shtml
* The Case of the "Randy Rector" (September 1, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050901.shtml
* Michael Oakeshott and New Orleans (September 6, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050906.shtml
* Hamnet's Father (September 13, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050913.shtml
* The Era of Bad Feelings, Cont'd. (September 15, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050915.shtml
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