Another Buckley

Forty years of "Notes & Asides" from my favorite fortnightly National Review distilled into one profanely titled volume. Admittedly it's never been my favorite part of the magazine, but occasionally something really hits home.

Like this:

"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice -- all the odious qualities -- which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew, his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and the good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement."

--p. 143 (quoting Evelyn Waugh's 1961 book review in NR of Garry Wills's book on G.K. Chesterton, "Chesterton: Man and Mask"; published following a correspondence between Buckley and Waugh that was featured in Notes & Asides).

Beware the "Hipness Unto Death"

The title quote is from Mark Crispin Miller, and is intended to capture the end result of, in Ken Myers' words, the "dispiriting blend of sensation and ennui" generated by a steady diet of pop culture. Mark Andrejevik has explored the "reality" behind reality television along these lines:

In its very format, reality TV caters to the savvy awareness that reality itself is contrived. The recent phenomenal success of professional wrestling testifies to the power of this appeal. It highlights and concedes the contrived nature of sports as entertainment. Rather than inviting viewers to suspend their skepticism and lose themselves naively in the game, it frees them up to lose themselves in the action precisely because they don't have to drop their skepticism. This time of reflexivity seems increasingly prevalent, not just on television but in film and advertising. It thematizes and exploits the decline of the big Other by catering to the canny skepticism of the viewers. . . . This is the paradox of reality television, even as it promises access to the real, it facilitates the process of derealization.

--from Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2005)

At Least He Didn't Call It "Das Capital"

That is what he was going to call it, according to the introduction.

Yes, it's really narrative texts for four walking tours of Washington, D.C. Not my standard reading material. But then, Christopher Buckley (only son of the author of my last selection, the funniest writer active today, and editor of Forbes FYI) isn't your typical travel/tour writer.

A friend is headed to DC with his family for their first trip ever to the nation's capital next week; they'll hit the mall for the Independence Day fireworks, among other things. Quite the experience, I'm sure, with two hundred thousand of your closest friends. But not what it once was -- at the first celebration in 1801, featured attractions included gunfire, cockfights and dogfights. (Walk Three, Page 125.) At least my friend will have Christopher Buckley to guide him.

And Great Was Its Fall

Rarely in history are the battle lines so clearly drawn for so long, the opposing philosophies so much in tension, and the defenses so simultaneously practical and metaphorical. Buckley's account, at 192 pages, gives a readable, succinct account of the rise, as well as the fall, of one of the strangest walls in the history of defensive works -- a wall designed to keep people in instead of out. He includes some interesting history of Berlin and post-WWII Germany as well, mostly for context. That history includes plenty of colorful characters, like Wolfgang "Tunnel" Fuchs, who spent thirteen years of his life as a full-time "escape helper" assisting East Germans trying to get across (or under, or through) the wall into freedom. Whether it was forged identity cards, routes through the sewer systems, or his numerous successful tunnels, he was determined to bring his countrymen on the other side into freedom. The high water table meant there was always mud, but that just lent color to the already mythic moment of escape. As Fuchs put it:

I must say that the most beautiful feeling was for me to see when the people came crawling out of the tunnel, on their knees from East Berlin like mice. I can never forget. The marks of their kneeprints in the tunnel floor looked like the ripples on a beach left behind by the receding tide. It does not matter what may become of me, I will never forget that. That is beautiful and that is happiness.

--pages 98-99.

Before his "retirement", Fuchs perfected one more method of ferrying refugees from the east:

Fuch's last effort was the "Supercar." Its secret has not been revealed, but . . . it was "a large American vehicle that could be subjected to the most rigorous search including virtual demolition at a frontier post." Its hiding place "was most uncomfortable and cramped for the person within." The car made a number of successful runs before it and its owner both retired. Fatigue and material necessity. The Superman Escape Angel put the car away in an undisclosed location in West Germany and took up the trade of pharmacist to make a living for his family, looking, for once, to his own concerns.

--pages 100-101.

But tyranny finds it hard to hang on, and at last the wall came down, yeilding "to a human spirit that took a half century but, finally, effected the liberation of the whole of that part of Germany that made its way from the Democratic Republic of Germany, to the democratic republic of Germany." Page 192.

Oh, So That's What That Was All About

I don't know if I really buy this or not, but it certainly fits my "somewhat suspicious of the modern secular state that wants to control everything" patterns of thought.

William Cavanaugh maintains that the standard accounts concerning modern tolerance are wrongheaded. We have been taught that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century "wars of religion" required the state to intervene among the fighting Christians, and thus to take matters of religious doctrine and practice out of the public realm lest all of Europe be bathed in blood. Cavanaugh shows, on the contrary, that the alleged religious wars were the birthpangs of the sovereign modern state, the centralizing power that has "a monopoly on violence within a defined territory." Public discourse was secularized during the Enlightenment, Cavanaugh argues, in order the save the state from the threat it feared from the church: "Christianity produces divisions within the state body precisely because it pretends to be a body which transcends state boundaries." Even law itself becomes a thing to be "'made' or legislated by the state rather than 'disclosed' from its divine source through the workings of custom and tradition."

--Chapter 7, page 233

Never, Never, Never, Never Give In

"[N]ever give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

--Winston Churchill, October 29, 1941, Address at The Harrow School

On Letting the Inmates Run the Asylum

"Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning. . . . In other ages, the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers [John] Hersey to [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, his taste must prevail. . . . And if the student finds that [Hawthorne, for example] is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."

--Chapter 7, note 16 (excerpt from letter from O'Connor).

Mason Tarwater's Implicit Augustinianism

In The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O'Connor's second novel, the main character, Mason Tarwater, is a decidedly independent prophetic figure with a history of kidnapping child relatives to preach to them. Not your best example of a good pastor. But he did understand something about baptism:

As a lone prophet who belongs to no visible church, the proclaimer of a radically communal kingdom appears to be a contradiction in terms. Yet he recognizes that, unlike any benefit the world might bestow, the baptism of his two nephews will make them members of the universal Christian family, his kinsmen in faith far more than blood. Just as one does not elect one's parents, neither can one choose God as the ultimate parent. The triune Lord sovereignly wills not to confine his communal life within the Godhead but to gather a people unto himself. Even when baptism is a freely chosen deed rather than the decision of parents and godparents, it signifies much more than one's own decision to follow Jesus. Baptism is for Christians what circumcision is for Jews: a public sign that the universal God of Israel and Christ and the church has claimed believers for life in a particular community that lives by its outward and visible practices. Baptism is thus a political act through and through: it is a radical transfer of allegiance and citizenship from one regime to another, from a polity that is corrupt and perishing to the only one that is being redeemed and shall stand forever. Not even the gates of hell will be able to prevail against its onrushing power. Baptism is a sacramental and regenerative rite precisely because it is not a merely human choice; it is God's own adoption of his people into his community.

St. Augustine learned this difficult truth in the summer of 382, after he had embraced a neo-Platonic kind of Christianity but remained undecided about his baptism. He recalled the story of two friends who had disputed this very question. Victorinus had mastered the Scriptures and studied all the Christian books, yet Simplicianus insisted that he would not consider him a Christian until he was baptized into Christ's body. "Then do walls make Christians?" Victorinus impatiently and perhaps mockingly asked. The popular assumption of our time, shared by many Catholics no less than most Protestants, is that the answer is negative. The future bishop of Hippo, by contrast, remembered this story because he knew that Simplicianus required a positive response. The walls of the church -- a metaphor for Christ's visible and earthly body -- do in fact make Christians.

--from Chapter 7 -- Vocation: The Divine Summons to Drastic Witness

What's a University For?

"[T]he true business of a University is to train liberty into responsibility, to teach a young man to think for himself, yet so as he remembers he is a citizen, and of no mean city."

--Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944), Cornish writer, Cambridge professor

Sgt. York on Courage

"The fear of God makes a hero; the fear of man makes a coward."

--Alvin York to his son

Obama Wants LINCOLN-DOUGLAS debates?

The AP reports today that David Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager, initially responded to John McCain's proposal for a series of 10 "town hall" style meetings with voters and the two candidates by saying the Obama campaign would prefer (in the AP reporter's words) "a less-structured, lengthier exchange more in line with the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates" (emphasis added).

Who is he kidding here? As the AP story notes, "[i]n the Lincoln-Douglas debates, held seven times during Abraham Lincoln's losing Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in Illinois in 1858, a candidate spoke for an hour, the other for an hour and a half, and the first candidate was allowed a half-hour rebuttal." Neil Postman used these debates as a prime example to illustrate the change from a word-based culture to an image-based culture that we have experienced primarily as a result of . . . television. His 1985 book is "Amusing Ourselves to Death", and you should definitely turn off the TV and pick it up if you haven't already.

Postman's focus on television brings us smack up against what's wrong with Plouffe's comments: can you even begin to IMAGINE a THREE HOUR presidential debate with only two breaks/speaker transitions? Senator Obama gives a fantastic speech; in my view, as good as anyone we've seen in national politics since Ronald Reagan. But A FULL HOUR? TELEVISED? Granted, he would probably outperform Senator McCain, who understandably prefers the "town hall" format given his lack of ability standing behind a lecturn, but most Americans would switch the channel or plug in their ipods after about twenty minutes at most.

As to the Lincoln-Douglas format being "less-structured", I don't know what to make of that other than to chalk it up to historical ignorance.

So skip the presidential debates and read Neil Postman instead!