SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
December 2005
Volume 12, Number 12
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Content of His Character
-> Snapshots (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> Publisher's Note
-> Presidential Worship
-> 11th Anniversary Celebration of SOBRAN'S
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
{{ 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. }}
The Content of His Character
(page 1)
For me, winter reaches its nadir with January 15,
when the cold is coldest and the United States observes
its most dubious holiday: the birthday of Martin Luther
King Jr. If he were alive today, he would be 77.
Even in my teens, I was put off by King's bombastic
grandiloquence. I never found it eloquent or inspiring.
On the contrary, it struck me as embarrassingly gauche.
He wanted his children judged "not by the color of their
skin, but by the content of their character"? Does
character have "content"? And was race only a matter of
"skin"? It was all so superficial. Even vulgar.
I sympathized with the civil rights movement as long
as it settled for legal equality; it lost me when it
became a demand for special treatment, government power,
and the abridgment of the rights of property and
association. King led the way in conflating all these
things as "freedom." When he led crowds in chanting
"Freedom now!" I cringed.
King's Marxist views and rumored Communist links --
later confirmed by his biographers -- didn't help. His
preaching of Gandhi-style "nonviolence," accompanied by
annual dark warnings of "a long, hot summer," sounded
more menacing than reassuring. I preferred the candor of
Malcolm X, whose blunt autobiography fascinated me and
won my admiration. With King I smelled hypocrisy.
King's murder in 1968 was greeted with rioting and
looting in the big cities. That seemed to me an odd way
to mourn, but it also had a certain fitness: he had
nurtured racial grievance, and his violent death was the
trigger for revenge on the white man among blacks who'd
been told they were deprived. They honored his memory by
collecting on what he'd taught them America owed them.
After his death, we learned more about the content
of King's own character. While studying for the ministry,
he had plagiarized (or as his admirers put it,
"borrowed") others' writings for one of his theses. His
friends revealed that he'd been a frenetic adulterer,
sometimes bedding two women at once. (As a young
preacher, suddenly famous, in demand, and on the road, he
had found ample opportunities for playing around.) One
admiring biographer quoted a bitterly obscene joke he'd
made about John and Jacqueline Kennedy (which might have
earned a guffaw from Larry Flynt) while watching the
president's televised funeral in 1963. Such were the
sides of King hidden from the public while he lived.
Many such unedifying details had already transpired
by the time the U.S. Congress took up the question of
canonizing him with a national holiday. They were well
known, but anyone who adverted to them risked being
branded a bigot. King's noble "legacy" was all that
counted. His shady personal life was off-limits. (It's
interesting to note that his widow never wrote her
memoirs.)
And what was his legacy? An ill-defined drive for
"racial justice," meaning official racial favoritism,
which, unlike older concepts of justice, knew no limits.
It entailed "affirmative action," race quotas, and other
political spoils. Only conservatives still pretend that
King stood for color-blind equality.
{{ King has found a worthy successor in his disciple
Jesse Jackson, who also combines libidinal energy with
wearisome sanctimony. Today even so preposterous a figure
as Al Sharpton can pass himself off as a "civil rights
leader." These parodies of King are another facet of
King's legacy. }}
The Moving Picture
(page 2)
In mid December, Iraq held another free election,
defined as one conducted under American auspices. Days
later, Vice President Cheney paid the country a surprise
visit. You know your country's really liberated when Dick
Cheney shows up to offer his congratulations.
* * *
Don't ask me how, but I just *knew* Charles
Krauthammer wouldn't like this guy. Iran's president,
Mahmoud Ahmnidejad, says the state of Israel should be
wiped off the map (or at least relocated to Europe),
denies there was a Holocaust, and wants nuclear weapons.
And sure enough, Krauthammer wrote a column rather
unfavorable to him, calling for more military action. Too
bad he and his friends shot their wad on Saddam Hussein.
Now they have an even worse villain, and the country's
not in the mood for another neocon war for the time
being.
* * *
Like most people now, I guess, I see movies far more
often on video than at the cinema. That's how I caught
Danny Boyle's MILLIONS, which I might easily have
mistaken for one of those ghastly "heart-warming movies
the whole family can enjoy" -- despite Boyle's grim
previous work in 28 DAYS LATER and TRAINSPOTTING. It's
about a little boy (Alex Etel, a near-ringer for my own
twin grandsons) who, after his mother's death, finds a
seemingly miraculous fortune and tries to give it away,
only to discover where the loot really came from. Along
the way he has visions of saints and gives other signs of
eccentricity. Oh, what a lovely film! If the whole family
doesn't like it, just face the fact that they're no good
and cut them out of your will.
Exclusive to electronic media:
Democrats keep digging up dark secrets from Judge
Samuel Alito's wild youth, such as his criticism of the
U.S. Supreme Court's reapportionment ruling in Baker v.
Carr back in 1962. I'm getting to like this guy. That
ruling was a big step toward the final destruction of the
states by means of the accursed Fourteenth Amendment. By
its reasoning, "the equal protection of the laws" would
require the abolition of the U.S. Senate. Then again, by
1962 the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments had already
pretty much taken care of that, reducing Jefferson's
"Free and Independent States" to a mere legal fiction.
Publisher's Note
(page 2)
Dear Loyal Subscriber,
In this issue, we are publishing a collage of photos
from our 11th Anniversary Charter Subscribers' luncheon.
Do you wish you could have joined us? Just send $1,000
one time and you'll get a lifetime subscription in
addition to yearly invitations to a free party!
Is $1,000 too much for you? You can accomplish the
same thing by making payments of just $83.33 per month
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www.sobran.com/charter.shtml on our webpage.
INSERTS
Yes I know. The inserts are a nuisance so you never
look at them. But these enclosures provide valuable
information, such as whether your subscription is about
to expire, items for sale from SOBRAN'S (including books,
CDs, tapes, back issues), and this month ... another
party invitation!
That's right. It's closing in on Joe's 60th birthday
and we are having an informal party in a hall in Falls
Church, Virginia, on February 23. The details are on a
flyer enclosed. Would you like to have your name on a
card to Joe? Or would you care to donate an item for our
silent auction? If so, you need to act fast as the
February 17 deadline is approaching quickly.
FOUNDATION NEWS
FGF Books, the publishing imprint of the Fitzgerald
Griffin Foundation, is nearing the publication date of
its first book, SHOTS FIRED: SAM FRANCIS ON AMERICA'S
CULTURE WAR. Joe Sobran has written a beautiful
afterword. Watch the enclosures in upcoming issues for
opportunities to purchase the book.
In addition, the Foundation hopes to showcase some
writing of resident scholar Joe Sobran this year. Contact
the Foundation at P.O. Box 270, Vienna, VA 22183,
703-242-0058, or at FGFoundation@vacoxmail.com for more
information.
Wishing you many blessings in this new year!
Fran Griffin
Publisher
Presidential Worship
(pages 3-5)
"God speaks first to his Englishmen," John Milton
wrote; and if so learned a man could utter such naive
nationalism, maybe we shouldn't be surprised by American
exceptionalism. If George W. Bush achieves nothing else,
he may lay to rest the faith that the Almighty supplies
the United States with great leaders at critical moments
in the nation's history.
But the old faith in the messianic presidency
survives in the works of the historian Doris Kearns
Goodwin, celebrant of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, and, now, Abraham Lincoln. In the past
she has been accused (and convicted) of minor plagiarism,
but such charges don't affect the thrust of her work: the
belief that a divinely ordained leader can redeem a
nation. When she says Lincoln "saved" the Union, she
means it.
Maybe Goodwin's earlier books relied somewhat on
research assistants and passages borrowed from others'
books, not exactly the scholarly methods of Edward
Gibbon, but if she read and signed her name to the
finished products, they are still her works in the sense
that really matters. Others have done the same; Winston
Churchill's huge history of World War II incorporated,
verbatim, substantial passages written by others. What's
troubling about Goodwin's work is that it's derivative in
a more fundamental way: in its liberal optimism about
political power.
TEAM OF RIVALS (Simon & Schuster) is her new Lincoln
book, a 951-page narrative of the Union's salvation.
Goodwin faces a difficulty that hampers most historians
who tackle Lincoln: his terseness. In an age when
politicians produced daunting bodies of documents --
garrulous orations, memoirs, letters, and diaries --
Lincoln's writings were precious few. Which is to say,
they were both precious and few. His concise eloquence
defines him so well that you can get his essence from a
mere handful of his most famous speeches, none of which
were very long. Unlike most politicians of his day, he
rarely wasted a word. A long book about Lincoln requires
the author to supply some bombast.
Goodwin surmounts this difficulty by concentrating on
his cabinet, men of more satisfying amplitude. Several of
them had been Lincoln's Republican rivals for the
presidency, William Henry Seward, Edward Bates, Edwin
Stanton, Salmon Chase, Montgomery Blair. Lincoln knew
they shared a low opinion of him, but he didn't resent
this; as a novice in Washington (he'd served only one
term in Congress, many years earlier), he was wise enough
to know he needed their political talents, and he was
magnanimous enough to forgive their slights and overlook
their contempt. As he once told a querulous young army
officer, "No man resolved to make the most of himself,
can spare time for personal contention." This was a
lesson of his own youth: he was notable for seeking
reconciliation with former enemies, including James
Shields, who'd once challenged him to a duel. (Lincoln
made Shields a brigadier general in the Union army.) His
humility and magnanimity were real practical assets.
Goodwin argues that he displayed his true political
genius by welding these fractious men into a successful
"team."
Lincoln was a remarkably undistracted man. As we now
say, he always kept his eye on the ball. Unfortunately,
Goodwin doesn't. Like all Lincoln's worshippers, she
never examines his premise for the war on the South.
Lincoln almost monotonously appealed to the
Declaration of Independence, which he called the source
of his own political principles and the lodestar of
American self-government. But while he harped on "the
proposition that all men are created equal," he ignored
some of its other key phrases.
One was "the consent of the governed," which the
Southern states had formally withdrawn from the Federal
Government by the act of seceding, exactly as the
colonies had officially withdrawn their consent from the
king of Great Britain.
Another point Lincoln chose to ignore was the very
thing that the Declaration had declared: that the 13
American colonies "are, and of Right ought to be, Free
and Independent States." This point was often underlined
by the additional word "sovereign," which appeared in,
for example, the 1783 Treaty of Paris successfully
concluding the American Revolution (the British
recognizing, by name, the 13 "free, Sovereign, and
Independent States") and again in the Articles of
Confederation, which begins by affirming, "Each state
retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and
every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this
confederation expressly delegated to the United States,
in Congress assembled."
The Articles had thus reiterated the Declaration: the
former colonies were now states, not only independent of
Britain but also mutually independent. And this was the
very point Lincoln had to deny, and did deny, as when he
said flatly that the states had never been independent of
each other, that they had never been sovereign, and, most
famously, that what "our fathers brought forth" in 1776
was not 13 free and independent political entities but a
single "new nation." The Declaration never even uses the
term "nation"; Lincoln used it five times at Gettysburg
alone.
In this way Lincoln effected what the Princeton
historian James M. MacPherson, another of his admirers,
calls "the second American Revolution," though it may
also be called the American Counterrevolution, a virtual
reversal of the 1776 Revolution. (Lincoln himself charged
that Southern secession was "revolutionary.")
The War Between the States is still called a
sectional war between North and South, and so it was, but
it was also more than that. It was a fight over what a
"state" was. The war on the South was essentially a war
on *all* the states. Were they still the "Free and
Independent" -- that is, sovereign -- bodies of 1776? Or
were they, as Lincoln said, mere subdivisions of a larger
sovereignty, a permanent Union from which there could be
no legal withdrawal, regardless of whether it still
enjoyed the consent of the governed?
These had long been lively questions for Americans,
with Thomas Jefferson and John Calhoun powerfully
upholding the priority of the states' independence and
Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster denying it (while
insisting on strict constitutional limits on the powers
of the Federal Government). During the debate over
ratification of the Constitution (a debate of which
Lincoln was largely ignorant), both sides had agreed in
principle that a "consolidated" government was to be
abhorred and that the Union should continue to be an
essentially voluntary confederation; even Lincoln had
sometimes spoken of the Union as "this great
confederacy." But the Union he "saved" was no longer the
original one; it was a radically different thing, in
which the states had lost their ultimate defense against
Federal tyranny.
Though the war took a sectional form, millions in the
North believed, even after Fort Sumter had given Lincoln
the pretext (a la Pearl Harbor, the Lusitania, or
"Remember the Maine") he needed to rally the North for a
full invasion of the South, that the states were still
sovereign, with the right to go their own way. Even when
persecuted, this view persisted and smoldered throughout
the war. It was strong enough to fuel a desire for peace
that threatened Lincoln's reelection in 1864, when George
McClellan, proposing conciliation with the South,
challenged him.
Lincoln keenly understood the power of public
opinion: "Public opinion in this country is everything."
It was "dangerous to disregard" -- and therefore
necessary to control, especially when it had been
influenced (or "debauched," as he put it) by Southern
advocates.
Lincoln's hostility to freedom of speech and press --
like that of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt after
him -- seems not to disturb Goodwin, MacPherson, or his
other defenders. If he thought suppressing it was
necessary in order to save the Union, well, the great end
of "saving the Union" justified whatever means he saw
fit. His many violations of the Constitution and
usurpations of congressional powers were excused by the
loyal Republican Congress that remained after the
Southern Democrats left (an underrated consequence of
secession, though foreseen by sober Southerners).
So he cracked down hard on dissenters against his
war, even within the Union, where the Bill of Rights
became a dead letter. While promising "a new birth of
freedom," he suspended habeas corpus and authorized tens
of thousands of arrests and the closing of hundreds of
newspapers; among those jailed were elected state
legislators (as in Maryland, where they'd condemned the
invasion of the states and were on the verge of voting to
secede), the mayor of Baltimore, and an Ohio congressman
(who was exiled to Canada). Elections were effectively
rigged, with the aid of supervising soldiers. Given
Lincoln's frequent advertence to the Declaration, it can
be startling to reflect that its author, Jefferson, would
have been eligible for summary imprisonment under
Lincoln. Yet he could say that with a Northern defeat,
self-government would "perish from the earth."
It's surprising that this deep division of opinion
and sentiment within the North has been forgotten. The
Union victory and Lincoln's assassination have, to this
day, given partisan Northern propaganda the status of
virtual history. Even Lincoln's most extreme rhetoric is
now taken for granted as simple fact: that secession was
"rebellion," "aggression," and "treason," that disunion
would mean the "immediate dissolution," "national
destruction," or even "conquest" of the United States as
a whole. By this logic, the Declaration was a threat to
conquer Britain and abolish the monarchy.
Usually Lincoln's words were more carefully measured;
but for a man who rejected Christianity, he had a strange
tendency to become apocalyptic. It's astonishing to
compare his two inaugural speeches -- the first oozing
persuasion, the second roaring hellfire. (The first shows
you why Lincoln had been such a disarming courtroom
lawyer.)
Once you accept Lincoln as the national savior, it's
a short step to idolizing his ambitious successors too,
as Goodwin does. After all, he barely began the great
project of centralizing political power in the American
Republic; it has been left to others to complete it.
After the North's victory, the Republican Party
continued to dominate American politics until the New
Deal, when the Democrats took their place as the
centralizing party. As a result, the Jeffersonian
philosophy went into eclipse. It found its last great
expression in the postwar writings of the two chief
Confederate leaders, Jefferson Davis and his vice
president, Alexander Stephens. The Southern Democrats who
continued to pursue Jeffersonian politics are now
extinct.
In his memoirs, Davis cited Jefferson, as Calhoun
had, to justify secession. So, in his voluminous postwar
writings, did Stephens, stressing the words "free and
independent states." Both men defended slavery, but they
also made powerful independent arguments for state
sovereignty as the very basis of the U.S. Constitution.
This was the indispensable presupposition shared by all
the Founders, not just Jefferson; Davis and Stephens
could quote George Washington, and even Alexander
Hamilton, to clinch their case. They still used the old
language of the Founders, charging the North with seeking
"consolidation."
During their days in Congress, Stephens had been a
particular friend of Lincoln; the two men liked and
esteemed each other. Stephens is nearly forgotten today,
but Edmund Wilson devoted a respectful chapter to him in
PATRIOTIC GORE: STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN
CIVIL WAR (1962). Wilson is one of the few liberals who
have tried to see the Southern position as something more
than regional special pleading. He likens Lincoln to
Bismarck and Lenin as a centralizer of power who laid the
groundwork for the great wars of the twentieth century.
(Those wars were fought among the German, Russian,
American, British, and eventually the Japanese empires.)
Again in contrast to most liberals, Wilson finds
parallels between the United States and Soviet Russia in
the way both have managed to bury the real past under
propaganda.
Lincoln's worshippers hate such analogies, but
America's warrior presidents have claimed his mantle ever
since his death; apostles of constitutional government,
on the other hand, seldom appeal to Lincoln. And Goodwin
is far from the only historian to rank him with Franklin
Roosevelt as America's two greatest leaders. In their
different ways, both men did more than violate the
Constitution; they destroyed all previous limits on
Federal power. The simplest evidence for this is an
Orwellian reversal of meaning: "Federal" has become a
synonym, instead of an antonym, of "centralized."
"The United States" has also become a singular noun,
an "it"; the Founders used the plural "they," as does the
Constitution itself. Garry Wills offers this pronoun
shift as a measure of Lincoln's achievement; and so it
is, in a sense. A "new nation" is an "it"; "Free and
Independent States" are "they."
As for those states, they are now mere provinces,
with only the merest residue of sovereignty. Few
Americans today are aware that their nation was ever
essentially different. They've been taught that a single,
simple tradition -- "American democracy" -- unites their
presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the
Roosevelts, Wilson, Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan. Many
liberals would prefer to think that, say, Richard Nixon
and George W. Bush don't belong in this line, but it's an
awkward point to argue when both have notably increased
the size, scope, and power of the Federal Government.
The great fact remains that Lincoln was a *sectional*
president. He was elected in 1860 in a four-way race
against three Democrats, winning only about 40 per cent
of the votes cast, nearly all of them in the North; he
got not a single electoral vote in the South. The North
was sharply divided about secession; the South was not.
Yet though Lincoln had to crush dissent in the Union, and
to violate the Constitution he said he was trying to
preserve, he claimed to represent the whole "nation."
That claim is still honored.
His fraud goes marching on. The history profession
has seen to that. And Doris Kearns Goodwin isn't one to
set the record straight.
11th Anniversary Celebration of SOBRAN'S
(pages 6-7)
Photos can be viewed at:
http://www.sobran.com/11th_anniv/page1.shtml
and http://www.sobran.com/11th_anniv/page2.shtml.
These files take a long time to open if you are using a
dial-up account to access the Internet.
NUGGETS
THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT: Now we've seen everything. Elusive,
reclusive Bob Dylan has signed on to host a weekly
hour-long radio show. (page 5)
TAKE THE MONKEY AND RUN: Yet another remake of KING KONG,
twice as long as the original, this one by Peter (LORD OF
THE RINGS) Jackson, and it looks to be filling the
theaters for months. Sounds like fun, but why do all the
reviewers have to give away the ending? (page 11)
RECOMMENDED: FAITH AND CERTITUDE (Ignatius), by Father
Thomas Dubay, S.M., was originally published in 1985, but
I've only just caught up with it. I hesitate to call it
profound, because the word suggests difficulty and
abstruseness, whereas this book is a wise, readable,
reflective study of the justification for religious
belief -- with pointed comments on the obstacles of
self-delusion. It bears comparison with C.S. Lewis's
classic MIRACLES. (page 12)
Exclusive to electronic media:
LORD OF THE BOARDS: Terry Coleman's OLIVIER (Henry Holt),
though the authorized biography of the great actor, is
startlingly frank and full of fresh material, especially
about his stormy marriage to Vivien Leigh. Much as I
enjoyed the gossip, I hoped for more insight about his
art, and Coleman doesn't offer much; neither did
Olivier's own two books. Any reader looking for depth
will be disappointed. Still, lots of his performances are
available on video, among them his terrific cameo as a
fanatic Arab in KHARTOUM (1966), which steals the film
from Charlton Heston. Olivier's acting style is already
looking a bit old-fashioned, but gems like that leave no
doubt of his genius.
SO THEY SAY ... : President Bush must be listening to
talk radio. I don't know where else he could have gotten
the idea that he has the authority to suspend the
Constitution in time of war.
REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 8-12)
* Reflections of a Conspirator (December 15, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051215.shtml
* None Dare Call It Hypothetical (December 20, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051220.shtml
* Darwinian Graffiti (December 27, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051227.shtml
* Is Darwin Holy? (December 29, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051229.shtml
* Bush's Alpha Male (January 5, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060105.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]