SOBRAN'S -- The Real News of the Month March 2006 Volume 13, Number 3 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $44.95 for six months; $72 per year; $144 for 2 years. For special discounted subscription offers and e-mail subscriptions see www.sobran.com, or call the publisher's office. Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue. CONTENTS Features -> Gray November, Coming Up -> Spring Fevers -> Comedy: A Manifesto -> Looking for Truth 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. }} Gray November, Coming Up (page 1) This is what we call a midterm election year, and it may be the most convulsive one since 1994. President Bush and his party, who barely a year ago had it all, have plunged to their lowest level of popularity ever, and the Democrats are hoping to regain at least one house of Congress, maybe both, this fall. Bush's conduct is widely seen as incompetent, illegal, and even unconstitutional. His staunchest supporters don't show much enthusiasm anymore, and some Democrats are murmuring about everything from censure to impeachment. Unlikely, but no longer unthinkable. The pundits agree that neither party has found a compelling theme, but the Democrats may not need one. Disgust with the Republicans may be such a seismic force that the voters won't be very particular about reasons for chucking them out at the first opportunity. My old friend Fred Barnes (we used to be neighbors) has written a book praising Bush for "redefining" American conservatism. Well, if that's an achievement, let's give credit where credit is due. Certainly Bush has left conservatism, as popularly understood, unrecognizable. After repudiating "nation-building" during the 2000 campaign, Bush adopted it with a vengeance after 9/11: his presidency has been defined by his announced mission of "global democratic revolution." Such talk used to make conservatives shudder. Even his father was willing to settle for a "new world order" -- a comparatively minor adjustment, involving little bloodshed. Old Bush, it's true, did agree to raise new taxes, but this was because he realized that Big Government had to be paid for eventually, and, unlike his son, he didn't favor INFINITE Government. It's not that I want the Democrats in power. But there is no longer much reason to prefer the Republicans, and a return to "gridlock" -- the mutual frustration that is all we can pray for in a two-party system -- looks like the last, if not exactly best, hope for democracy. Unfortunately, our Constitution makes no provision for a military coup; so much for the vaunted wisdom of the Framers. (Should we be grateful that our generals don't see the Constitution as a living document?) The pressing issue this year is the Iraq war. The Democrats are divided about it, but despite growing opposition to it among their base, they don't oppose it in principle; both parties agree that "world leadership" -- a sunny euphemism for global empire -- is America's vocation. They have tactical differences (mostly opportunistic) about what this historic role requires here and now, and of course the Democrats are glad to exploit Bush's "quagmire" now that the public is disillusioned with it. As usual, the question this fall will be not whether we'll get bigger government -- that's a given -- but which brand of tyranny we're likely to get and how much. "Faith, there's small choice among rotten apples." Spring Fevers (page 2) Peter Beinart of THE NEW REPUBLIC, one of the wisest young liberals around, says it's time for one of Bush's friends to tell him, "Your presidency isn't hanging by a thread. Your presidency is over. You bet it on the war in Iraq, and you lost." With his own party deserting him, any domestic agenda he had is dead too. So, says Beinart, why not just act honorably from here on out? * * * TIME magazine is freaking out about global warming. It isn't just coming -- it's here! The debate is over! Moral: The government must take immediate action to save the planet! Funny, wasn't that the same moral we drew when the population explosion happened a generation ago? The real danger isn't these notional crises, but the government's responses to them. Unless we reduce the power of government =immediately,= we face the certainty of even =more= government. * * * Two distinguished professors have published a long article critical of the Israel lobby, and you'll =never= guess what they're being accused of. Hint: What is Hitler best remembered for? Right. Judging by the frequency of these charges, far greater than in Hitler's heyday, I can conclude only that this must be the Golden Age of Anti-Semitism. * * * Baseball fans are getting set to boo their lungs out when Barry Bonds breaks the lifetime home-run records of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. In the hearts of those who love the game, Bonds will never be a hero, but, shall we say, a walking asterisk. He still insists he has never taken steroids -- knowingly, that is. He can't help it if someone slipped them into his Vaseline, can he? Maybe it depends what your definition of "steroids" is. * * * Anyway, Sadaharu Oh's record still appears a long way off. * * * Some are talking about a Rice versus Clinton race in 2008, but Condi says she's not running. So, after eight years of George W. Bush, what eligible Republican might beat Hillary? I see only one: Laura Bush. Think how dramatic a Bush versus Clinton race could be! Two first ladies. But Laura is better looking, she's less abrasive, and she has the indispensable training our next president will need: She's used to cleaning up after George. * * * My least favorite spectator sport is college basketball, and I was one of the very few Virginians untouched by the mania for George Mason University's amazing team this year. But in the end, even I succumbed and watched the big game against Florida with passion. Why? Because GMU's sudden fame may inspire curiosity about who the great George Mason was, and because a championship would boost the school's excellent economics department. Of course GMU was flattened. * * * As I observed last year, Americans who think America should behave like other countries are called "isolationists," whereas other countries that behave like America are called "rogue nations." Though I disagree with those who want Bush to nuke Mecca, they can't reasonably be accused of isolationism. Comedy: A Manifesto (pages 3-5) "The world is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think," said Horace Walpole. Or is it the other way around? Or was it Robert Walpole? In any case, I endorse the general idea. At age 60, I've done about enough feeling for one lifetime. My deepest emotions are pretty well worn out, and by now I'm ready to leave the sterner sentiments to the younger generation. Sin, war, abortion, politics, official lies -- in my time I've gotten suitably indignant about them all, and I think I may now consider my duty done, as regards them. Not that I've changed my mind about these things, but let the kids tackle them now. From here on out, it's comedy for me. Robert McCrum's excellent new biography of P.G. Wodehouse, WODEHOUSE: A LIFE (Norton), made up my mind. Wodehouse, maybe the greatest comic novelist in the English language, seems to have known all along what I've only just come to realize. If you can't change the world, you may as well just learn to enjoy it. Wodehouse enjoyed it to the end, dying at 93 after writing about a book a year. In the "unfallen" world of his fiction, as Evelyn Waugh admiringly called it, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Lord Emsworth and his pigs, Mr. Mulliner, Ukridge, Psmith, and dozens of others inhabit a realm, vaguely Edwardian, that stands as an eternal gentle rebuke to contemporary life. To the charge that his world no longer existed, Wodehouse genially turned the tables by pleading guilty: "I am a historical novelist, like Sabatini." In person, Wodehouse wasn't particularly funny or witty, but shy, though all agreed that he was extremely good-natured. His friendships, like his only marriage, were durable and unruffled. He seemed incapable of making enemies. Apart from writing, his delights were his dogs and golf. Later in life, he loved televised soap operas. He was widely read, but indefatigably shallow, sticking to the amusing surfaces of things. If he ever had a deep thought in his life, he kept it to himself. McCrum offers an interesting surmise as to why sexual themes never appear in Wodehouse's fiction. He notes that a generation of English writers came of age in the shadow of Oscar Wilde's sensational sodomy trial and thinks Wodehouse drew the lesson that "intimacy could be dangerous, even fatal." He was prudish by nature anyway, and this extreme reaction would have been in character. Relations between the sexes in his stories are chaste to the point of absurdity. Like most of his characters, Wodehouse was quite harmless, rather dotty, as well as reclusive and utterly apolitical. In fact his complete indifference to politics nearly cost him his life. A warning to us all. Trotsky could have told him: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." And World War II turned out to have a special interest in P.G. Wodehouse. In 1940 Wodehouse and his wife were staying in France (they had settled in New York) when the German army arrived. He'd been paying no attention to the war between Germany and his native England, and he didn't see why it should concern him, so he'd made no effort to flee. The Germans interned him and soon, discovering that he was a famous writer, asked him to do a few radio interviews. He obligingly consented. What harm could there be? Here his inability to make enemies became his downfall. The interviews were innocuous, but the Germans figured their catch would have propaganda value if he said he was being humanely treated, as he genially agreed he was. Since this contradicted British propaganda about the Nazis, it didn't go over well in England. Not at all. A fury exploded in his native land. He was denounced as a "traitor" in the newspapers and Parliament. There were passionate demands for his execution, and an official investigation of his conduct ensued. He was eventually cleared of all charges, but the official report was kept secret until long after his death in 1974. Meanwhile, Wodehouse also had passionate defenders, who not only loved his work but saw the horrible absurdity of the accusations and threats against him. His champions, fittingly, included George Orwell and Malcolm Muggeridge, both of whom, of course, stood out in their age for their resistance to the regnant political hysteria. The atmosphere may be judged by a memorandum about Wodehouse's case by Winston Churchill in late 1944: "We would prefer not ever to hear from him again.... His name stinks here, but he would not be sent to prison. However, if there is no other resort, he should be sent [from France] over here [to England] and if there is no other charge against him, he can live secluded in some place or go to hell as soon as there is a vacant passage." Today such brutal contempt for pacific neutrality is considered exemplary. Accursed were the peacemakers! And P.G. Wodehouse was born to make peace. Though Wodehouse escaped any legal punishment, the cloud of having momentarily cooperated with his captors remained over his subsequent career. Wodehouse himself expressed contrition: "I made an ass of myself, and must pay the penalty." Even the sympathetic liberal McCrum thinks Wodehouse did something seriously wrong, and he marvels sadly that his subject always remained puzzled by the uproar. After the war, the Wodehouses moved to Long Island with their many pets and never returned to England again. Today, 66 years after Wodehouse's internment, the anti-Nazi hysteria has only partly abated, as witness the frenzy over "Holocaust denial," the imprisonment of the historian David Irving, and the never-ending extraditions of various octogenarians on ex post facto charges. I have to keep reminding myself that it's all a comedy to those who think. All of which just goes to show that in our age, even the light touch may face an uphill fight. You joke at your own risk. The Humor Police are out there, ever vigilant. No matter how funny something is, it may face the ruinous charge of being "offensive." No matter if what offends one man leaves a hundred others convulsed with laughter. What I'd like to know is, who gave the killjoy this veto power over human fun? The columns I have the most fun writing often provoke angry mail. It's not always because certain readers don't get my jokes; often they understand them well enough, but they =disapprove= of them. They feel =victimized= by them. I've tried to understand this, on the principle that "nihil humanum a me alienum est," but humorlessness is the one thing I've never been able to bear for long. I just can't stand people who squinch their noses and say, "I don't see anything funny about that." Or "How can you joke about that?" Or "This is no laughing matter." For me, =everything= is potentially a laughing matter. Tom Wolfe has proved that. Of course humor is sometimes deeply inappropriate. That's usually when it's funniest, if you ask me. I've known it to liven up some otherwise gloomy funerals, and I've been to funerals, like that of my pal Phil Nicolaides, where the deceased himself would have welcomed a touch of mirth amid the blubbering. Without his saying a word, Phil's facial expressions could bring down the house. I was almost expecting him to pop his eyes open and indicate comic surprise at all the fuss we were making over him. When he didn't, I knew he was really gone. Tragedy is more prestigious than comedy, and I agree that it's all right in its place. But taking nothing away from Sophocles -- one of the best, in my book -- whenever I see OEDIPUS REX, I can't help thinking what Wodehouse might have done with material like that. He was at his best when dealing with men in embarrassing situations, and if learning you've killed your father and then gone and married your own mother isn't embarrassing, what would be? It perhaps calls for a lighter touch than I'm afraid Sophocles had. Then again, Wodehouse tended to steer away from themes like violence, incest, and self-mutilation. That's where I part company with Wodehouse. I like a bit of rough stuff in my comedy. In my forthcoming novel about Shakespeare, the historical material constrains me to deal with sexual and other passions, and I see no point in shrinking from frank language. For this I have already been reproached in some quarters. But I think nothing is to be gained by turning Shakespeare into a milquetoast, or by strewing my pages with unsightly dashes and asterisks. And though I may depict sin unsparingly -- not only lust, but wrath, avarice, gluttony, and, yes, even sloth -- I in no way condone it. Like our heavenly Creator himself, I give my creations free will, and I can assume no responsibility when they abuse it. If they sometimes use coarse words, coarser than I might use in their place, well, that's their business. Of course, that's fiction. I'm not retiring from political commentary, but there too the comic spirit will come in handy. Politics should be viewed as farce. All right, a deadly farce at times -- I don't deny it -- but still farce. A strangely goofy man just happens to be president of the United States. And I think that history will see him in that light, assuming history ever comes to its senses. {{ After all, some pretty weird characters have been Roman emperors too, if half of what Suetonius tells us is true. }} {{ I don't think the George W. Bush story could be properly told in Latin. The Latin tongue dignifies everything too much, if only because its slang now sounds formal to us, like chiseled inscriptions on marble monuments; and this story can't do without slang. }} Every cause for alarm can also be cause for a laugh. That's the way I look at it. When God became man, he also joined the fun of being human. Looking for Truth (pages 5-6) I never get over how far people will go to shun the truth. Apart from personal life, it's a human trait you run up against in religion, in politics, in history, and many other areas, such as my own special field of interest, Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare excites conflicting pieties. Everyone who loves the Bard's work knows he has put more words in our mouths than any other author in the English language; his only rival is the entire King James Bible, a translation of many books by many men that draws on the work of many predecessors. We quote the Bard helplessly. He has given us our very household words, including the expression "household words" (HENRY V). We owe him honor, almost as we owe honor to our parents. Our souls are in his debt. To people who feel no debt to him, trying to establish his identity may appear an eccentric preoccupation, and the "authorship question" mere idle speculation. Such people are apt to feel the same way about theology, which explores the most important questions the human soul can deal with. "Theological" is often used dismissively, to mean vain and empty. You'd think people might be naturally curious about God, heaven, and hell, but many aren't. I just read a book about Jesus that vigorously and intelligently affirmed his divinity, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, but it hardly mentioned hell, except when quoting the early creeds. It even suggested generously that Judas Iscariot wasn't damned. I wanted to ask the author, as gently as possible, "Just what do you think the Savior was saving us from?" A rather basic question, I think. Yet it's been a long time since I last heard a sermon on hell. The Good News is that salvation is now offered to us, not that damnation has been abolished. The whole New Testament is rather emphatic about that. The Shakespeare debate is comparatively trivial, but for all that it's important to some of us who appreciate language as a divine gift. To whom do we owe these wonderful words and the astounding fictions they constitute? Why, when I read Falstaff and Iago, do I feel I'm recognizing people I know, in their infinite joviality and cunning malice? One is the very Soul of Joy, the other the mortal Enemy of Joy. "Poison his delights!" Everyone has known "honest Iago." The debate also has its funny side. To put it simply, Shakespeare keeps contradicting his own biographers! His self-description in his sonnets is so much at variance with the painstaking portrait the academic scholars have assembled that they've never reached a consensus on whether his sonnets are fact or fiction! Yet even this doesn't cause them to suspect that they may be writing books about the wrong guy. They insist on letting sleeping dogmas lie, even if it means the Bard himself is lying. For example, the Bard describes himself as "lame" (in Sonnet 38, and again in Sonnet 87). If this is a fiction, it's a very odd one to introduce abruptly into love poems. John Milton wrote a sonnet about his blindness, for the simple reason that he'd actually gone blind; nobody thinks =that's= a fiction. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, described himself as "a lame man" in 1595. Is this coincidence, or a telling parallel with Milton, who also wrote sonnets about his dead wife, his friend Cyriack Skinner, and religious warfare? Again, the Bard keeps complaining about his age and disgrace, his ruin, poverty, and approaching death. He is apparently bisexual, and he worries about his "name," which he expects to be "buried" and "forgotten" -- at a time when "Shakespeare" was being wildly praised. Isn't that his real name? I've written lots about this -- nearly three books so far, as well as countless short pieces. And I never cease marveling at the scholars' determination to avoid basic questions. The case for Oxford's authorship was made persuasively by John Thomas Looney in 1920, and additional confirming evidence has kept turning up ever since. Yes, Looney's name has been much ridiculed, which shows you the level at which some people debate. (In fact, it rhymes with "boney," not with "Suni.") But nobody has really answered his argument. So why do the scholars stubbornly reject his conclusion to this day? For the same reason. I suppose, that an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, three years after Kitty Hawk, insisted that the airplane was a "hoax" perpetrated by a pair of "bicycle mechanics." By then Wilbur and Orville Wright had made flights of up to a half hour, covering 24 miles, but no newspaper would send reporters or photographers. Most people didn't know -- and didn't care to believe -- that a momentous new era in human history had arrived. They said it couldn't be done! So then, naturally, they had to say it =hadn't= been done! Likewise, the Shakespeare scholars resist evidence showing that they've been barking up the wrong tree for their entire careers. This isn't exactly a mysterious motive. An amusing example comes to mind. "I'd be =delighted= if it could be proved that the Earl of Oxford wrote these plays," the late Professor Samuel Schoenbaum, head of the Folger Shakespeare Library, once told me. "=Sure= you would, Sam," I wanted to say. "You'd get a =big= kick out of going from the pinnacle of your profession to being its laughingstock." But I didn't say it, for fear of losing the interview I was requesting. In that interview, the next day, Schoenbaum wasn't quite such a good sport about the idea that Oxford was the Bard. His life's work at stake, he kept insisting icily that Oxford's claim was "undocumented." Well, yes. That was the question: Are there deceptions in the documents we have? Have they been misinterpreted? But only an affidavit swearing that Oxford was the author would satisfy the professor. After all, professors deal in documented Fact. If you can't prove it, ignore it. This was a rigid and old-fashioned position, being steadily undermined by deconstruction and other approaches that found formerly unsuspected fluidity, or "ambiguity" and "instability," in old texts. A factor as simple as a pen name can be enough to wreck all the "methodology" of a Schoenbaum, which begins by taking documents at face value. And this methodology has little room for laughing at oneself. As soon as you lie, you put pressure on yourself to keep lying, while concealing or playing down anything that contradicts you. The scholars aren't consciously lying about who the Bard was, of course, but about something subtler: their own certitude. They insist there is no room for doubt, though the doubters have included men of literary genius -- Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, John Galsworthy, Vladimir Nabokov -- who could spot a fraud and who weren't up for tenure in an English department. A modern university is, or is at least very like, a bureaucracy, where organization tends to trump personality and individuality. The organization has a mind of its own, a slow, bulky thing, reacting dully but decisively against any very basic change, even when change is warranted. If its rules are irrational, the members are apt to say, "I only work here; I don't make the rules." The literary bureaucracy, so to speak, still resists the reform entailed by Looney's discovery of Oxford. A man who belongs to such an institution will naturally find it hard to think disinterestedly, because he has both material interests -- things as crude as income or more abstract, like social status -- and moral interests in it. His moral interests are things like pride, belief in his own wisdom and virtue, faith that the institution hasn't deceived him, and so on. He is like a soldier who needs to feel that he can rely on the chain of command without compromising himself; that whatever he is ordered to do, however disagreeable, he can do in good conscience. The Folger Shakespeare Library is such an institution -- a sort of Shakespeare Bureaucracy. Schoenbaum saw himself, and was seen by others, as the curator of an unshakable body of knowledge about the Bard, defending it against presumptuous ignoramuses in revolt against authority. In rejecting the institutional knowledge and trying to discover the truth about the Bard on their own, the Shakespeare heretics were refusing to go through the proper channels. This was anarchy! Similarly, the political powers that be, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, have decided that just about anything the U.S. Government does is in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, no matter how remote from, or even opposed to, the "original" understanding, and plain meaning, of the Constitution. The whole legal system is constructed to reinforce the official interpretation. So the Constitution has become a subject of bureaucratized "knowledge," like the Bard's identity, and you're wasting your time if you try to insist that the government is obviously exceeding its allotted constitutional powers, just as I wasted my time trying to show Sam Schoenbaum, may he rest in peace, the error of his ways. Sociologists of knowledge speak of "the social construction of reality," and I think I'm finally beginning to understand what they mean. Real knowledge is always personal, however much you depend on what other people say. In the end, you have to find the truth for yourself, even if it leaves you feeling all alone sometimes. Some people can't accept anything as truth unless it makes them feel they're in good company. But the only really good company is Jesus. When you're with him, why would you need anyone else? NUGGETS {{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }} REISSUED: By Encounter Books, DARWINIAN FAIRYTALES, by the late David Stove, a brilliant Australian philosopher. An atheist, he had great respect for Darwin somehow, but he thought Darwin's account of the origin of =our= species was absurd, a priori: "a ridiculous slander on human beings," as he put it. If you thrill to fearless common sense and deadly wit, scornful of scientific pretensions, this book is for you. (page 7) SUGGESTION: Come December, the Bush administration could recoup its flagging ratings, offer a warmer image, and reach out to minorities with a televised holiday special, KWANZAA WITH CONDOLEEZZA. (page 8) THE CASE FOR UNCLE JOE: Would anarchy work? Well, it always has; usually, anyway. The real question is why people still believe in the State -- organized force. I guess they think the State is necessary to "prevent anarchy." Better Stalin than that, as Hobbes would say. (page 10) POOR RICHARD'S AFTERTHOUGHTS: A penny saved is a penny that rapidly depreciates. (page 11) CITOYEN LAVOISIER: Like many other scientists, the great chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier went to the guillotine during the French Revolution. The sentencing judge explained, "The Revolution has no need of chemists." Funny how little we hear of this, compared with the endless reminders of the Church's cruel persecution of Galileo, who, poor devil, was given a few months of house arrest. (page 12) Exclusive to electronic media: YOU SAY YOU WANT A WHAT? "Leave your mind alone," James Thurber wisely counseled, and we used to be able to rely on VANITY FAIR to dish the dirt and leave our minds alone. Now, alas, the mag is determined to raise our consciousness about child sex abuse, war, and global warming. Julia Roberts and George Clooney, on a recent cover, called for a "new American revolution." It's come to that. SEQUEL: Last summer, you'll recall, the New York gutter press had a week-long laff riot when Monsignor Eugene Clark, of St. Patrick's Cathedral, was named as co-respondent in his secretary's ugly divorce case. He denied everything, but nobody cared. Well, it transpires that the husband, under oath in court, retracted his lies. I heard this through a priest friend who has followed the case. Not a word about it in the press. REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian") (pages 7-12) * We the Sheep (March 7, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060307.shtml * "Too Goyish" (March 9, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060309.shtml * Battle Cries (March 14, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060314.shtml * A Quagmire of Ideas (March 16, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060316.shtml * Bush's Latest Idea (March 21, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060321.shtml * Bush's Intelligence (March 28, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060328.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All articles are written by Joe Sobran. You may forward this newsletter if you include the following subscription and copyright information: Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package. See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples or call 800-513-5053. Copyright (c) 2006 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com. All rights reserved. Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate www.griffnews.com with permission. [ENDS]