As many readers of Taki’s Mag know, America has recently experienced a nasty outbreak of white racism. While the hate-mongering culprits have been duly punished, it is clear that this stamp-out-the-brushfire approach is hardly a long-term solution. At best, white racism merely crawls underground and gestates; at worst it migrates elsewhere. Especially exasperating is that for nearly a half-century, America has tried to eliminate this pox, and even draconian measures such as compulsory sensitivity training have failed. Clearly, some fresh approaches are required.
I suggest two modest (and, I daresay, innovative) proposals.
It is well-known that conservatives are especially racism-prone, though few will publicly confess their sin. As Charles Murray observes in Coming Apart, these types live in all-white, often gated communities, send their children to schools that are at least 90% white, and otherwise avoid any contact with African Americans”especially of the Trayvon Martin variety.
It is equally obvious, as any social-science professor will explain, that racial separatism encourages dangerous stereotypes. So how can we get these closet racists to better understand socially disadvantaged youths? I don”t mean some superficial encounter as one might have at a charity banquet where shaking hands with carefully selected youngsters is the only contact”I mean full interaction in a confined space for an extended period.
Here’s my solution. Conservative magazines such as National Review should be forced to regularly sponsor cruises in which a thousand or more socially disadvantaged and numerically underrepresented fellow travelers are rewarded the opportunity to rub elbows with in-house political pundits. These cruises usually last a week to ten days, and since everybody is in close quarters, socializing is almost 24/7.
Surely some foundation, or even the federal government itself, can sponsor 100 inner-city youths for these cruises. By social-engineering standards, the cost would be cheap”$250,000 would cover everything, including a few hundred in spending money. This is a 100% win-win arrangement: National Review raises extra money and the cruise line adds “paying” customers. Most importantly, a week is ample time to demolish dangerous stereotypes. Imagine the attitude transformation when, say, a small-town Iowa lawyer encounters an inner-city youth from Newark at the swimming pool or bar. The initial interaction might be a bit awkward, but surely after a week of drinking together and sharing chitchat about this and that, our lawyer will think twice about prejudging these youngsters. Meanwhile, this youth will gain a new appreciation for white Middle America. Both may bond when they discover that each feels “the system” exploits them, though this exploitation takes radically different forms.
My second modest proposal attempts to broaden the anti-racism war by pushing it beyond the usual blog-based condemnations and into the population more generally. The solution: a new reality show modeled after the highly rated American Idol called Who Wants to Be America’s Foremost Conservative Anti-Racist?
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Although I don’t have a distinct memory of Apollo 11, I do remember watching—at home, at my grandparents’, and at school—Saturn Vs lifting off from the Florida coast, astronauts walking and riding on the moon, and astronauts splashing down in the Pacific after returning to earth. I was mildly interested, but I was hardly an aficionado of the space program. In a way, it all seemed perfectly normal: of course Americans were accomplishing things no one had ever done. Isn’t that what Americans always did? Isn’t that what we would always do?
I was reminded of those feelings when business took me near Cape Canaveral over a year ago. Having time to spare, I visited the portion of the Visitor Center at the Kennedy Space Center devoted to the lunar landings, which features a Saturn V, a recreation of mission control at Cape Kennedy featuring the consoles and other equipment used in 1969, and large reproductions of the logos of each of the Apollo missions hanging proudly from the ceiling. It’s a wonderful monument to American achievement. Unexpectedly, I found myself moved and wishing we could recover some of what we had in 1969, when American achievement seemed so natural.
Although Americans are still capable of great achievements, they no longer seem part of our birthright. How many watching as Armstrong took his famous step would have believed that, 40 years later, America would essentially be broke, deeply in debt to a country whose citizens spent 1969 adulating history’s greatest mass murderer and actively trying to destroy their country’s traditions and culture? And one of the reasons for this stunning reversal of fortune is the American cultural revolution that was raging even as the Apollo astronauts were landing on the moon.
Those men grew up in a country that believed that most obstacles could be overcome, and that those that could not be overcome should be accepted with quiet dignity; that valued excellence; and that saw its own history as preeminently a story of achievement. All of this was called into question in the ‘60s. The contrast between the stoicism and resolve of the Apollo astronauts, and the tawdry emotionalism so prevalent today, could not be more stark: those men were interested in solving problems, not in getting in touch with their feelings. Since then, we have seen a lowering of standards across the board, from grade inflation and the dumbing down of tests and curricula in schools to a widespread acceptance of low standards, loose morals, coarse manners, slovenly dress, and trashy entertainment.
They were selected to go into space for the simple reason that they were the best men for the job, a criterion that today is often no longer enough, as Frank Ricci discovered. Today’s NASA seems as interested in trumpeting its commitment to multiculturalism and diversity as in the exploration of space, a commitment that would have struck the men who actually planned and achieved multiple landings on the moon as simply irrelevant to what they were doing.
It is also unlikely that the Apollo astronauts would have come up with a list of famous Americans bearing much resemblance to the list compiled by today’s students, if they had been asked to compile one. American history as taught today is often an exercise in shame and victimology. It is all to the good that we acknowledge the obvious heroism of a Frederick Douglass or a Chief Joseph, but America is about far more than slavery and slaughter. The American story is in fact a remarkable one, from the way Americans tamed this continent to the way we created a Constitution that become a model to the world and an economy that provided greater prosperity to more people than any other country had ever done to the way we blazed the trail in so many technical fields. And if we want our story to continue being a remarkable one, we need to revive the values that helped make those achievements possible, including the remarkable feat we will be remembering this July.
]]>Such an assertion would have stunned Russell Kirk, to whose masterpiece The Conservative Mind Hartz’s book was widely seen as a response. It would also have drawn an objection from James Burnham, whose Suicide of the West not only famously described liberalism as “the ideology of western suicide” but also identified countervailing tendencies shared, at least in part, by millions of Americans. Mel Bradford, too, would have been shocked, as made clear in his famous article “The Heresy of Equality.”
Bradford, in particular, is worth revisiting here. His article begins by noting that “Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself . . . is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.” While noting “the spectre of Locke,” whom Bradford agrees was “an authority to some of the revolutionary gentlemen, but read loosely” and in light of earlier Whig writers, he asserts that “Edmund Burke is our best guide to the main-line of Whig thought: not Locke or Paine, or even Harrington, but Burke.” Burke, of course, was skeptical of abstract philosophical principles, a defender of tradition, and a vehement opponent of the French Revolution, as a result of which many English Whigs”the “Old Whigs” with whom Bradford identified himself”became Tories. Even though Gutzman tells us that “Kopff’s invocation of [Willmoore] Kendall and [George] Carey really will not do,” Bradford writes, “Kendall and Carey do define the true American political tradition as both conservative and hostile to Equality.” Professor Gutzman will have to forgive those of us who chose to rely upon the teacher rather than the student.
Although Gutzman notes that the concepts of Left and Right derive from the French Revolution, he fails to note that many Americans who favored our Revolution felt a Burkean revulsion for the French Revolution, including Alexander Hamilton, who saw the French Revolution as threatening what Hamilton frankly termed “Christian civilization,” a civilization of which America has always been a part. Even apart from the enormous significance of “Christian civilization” to America, large chapters in American history cannot be explained by recourse to Lockean precepts. Our bloodiest conflict was defined at least in part by a Northern desire to impose Union rule on the South and a Southern desire to defend a hierarchical society, including the practice of slavery. From the earliest days, Americans” imaginations were captured by the frontier, the expansion of which had more in common with the remedy advocated by Burnham in Suicide of the West“”the pre-liberal conviction that Western civilization … is both different from and superior in quality to other civilizations and non-civilizations””than anything dreamed of by Locke’s intellectual heirs.
Nor have such non-Lockean passions died down. The ability of the Republican Party to control the White House for all but twelve years from 1968 through 2008 rested in significant part on the GOP’s ability to attract voters opposed to the many social and cultural upheavals wrought in the name of egalitarianism since the 1960s. George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 because he carried my home state of Ohio on the basis of his social conservatism, and the GOP was helped in many states that year by widespread opposition to the prospect of “gay marriage.” Whatever else may be said about such opposition, it would be hard for anyone to characterize it as springing from a sense that “gay marriage” violates “our Lockean precept.”
The Left would love to limit political contests to issues that fit within a “Lockean consensus,” with elections decided solely on the basis of whether voters prefer an economic policy informed by classical liberal, libertarian principles or an economic policy informed by social democratic principles, because such a contest would leave conservative voters, and conservative ideas, out in the cold. It would also pave the way for the continued drift of America to the left. As Bradford noted in his article, “hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition.” Sam Francis made the same point: “Nor is it surprising that the political left is enchanted by this redefinition of the right in universalist terms, since the redefinition promises a right that is philosophically indistinguishable from the left itself, a right that can sooner or later (probably sooner) be pushed to the same political conclusions that the left has reached from the same premises, at which point there will be no serious opposition to the left and its dominance at all.”
As a practical matter, Lockean liberalism is both an unsuccessful and uneven opponent of modern leftism. Parties founded on classical liberal ideas tend, over time, to become parties of the contemporary left, as happened to both the Democratic Party in the United States and the Liberal Party in England, which was eclipsed by the Labour Party even though the Liberal Party had embraced social security legislation under Herbert Asquith and Lloyd George. Rather than seeing a fundamental conflict between classical liberalism and contemporary leftism, many on the Left have seen a continuity, just as Louis Hartz argued that the New Deal was consistent with the Democratic Party’s past and German socialist Eduard Bernstein, according to Thomas Fleming, “understood that socialism, rather than being in conflict with basic liberal principles, could be seen as an extension of them. Liberals had worked to end restrictions imposed by religion and aristocracy. What remained was to end the oppression based on wealth, and this could only be done by gradual and democratic means.”
Those who follow the dictum of Locke’s philosophical successor, John Stuart Mill, that “the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement” are, at best, uneven defenders of such prime targets of contemporary leftists as the family, tradition, and religion. Indeed, many of those who claim to draw on the Lockean liberal tradition, such as the prolific libertarian blogger Will Wilkinson and the editors of Reason magazine, are unremittingly hostile to traditional morality.
If Lockean liberals are uneven opponents of cultural Marxism, they are full-fledged allies in the Marxist war against the nation-state. Marx and Engels saw free trade as the first step toward the elimination of the nation-state, a view shared by liberal thinker Frederic Bastiat, who wrote that free trade would lead to the “peaceful, ecumenical, and indissoluble union of the peoples of the world.” Friedrich Hayek, too, shared the classical liberal aversion to national borders: “It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle [it] to a share of the cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.” In practical terms, America is being subjected to free trade and mass immigration, despite the skepticism of the general populace, because the heirs of both Marx and Hayek are in agreement that national borders are artificial and undesirable. If the American right allows itself to be defined by a “Lockean consensus,” America’s submersion into globalism is only a matter of time.
There is a final problem with arguing that our only political tradition is Lockean. Whittaker Chambers asked of Kirk’s Conservative Mind: “Would you charge the beach at Tarawa for that conservative position?” Chambers” question is less a criticism of Kirk than a profound observation of the fact that what generally causes men to fight is not the abstract, but the concrete. This is certainly true of combat, where many have noted that the greatest motivator for men at war ends up being the desire to defend the comrades with whom they are fighting. It is no less true of politics, where conservative-minded people are often motivated by a desire to defend their own families, their own communities, their own traditions, and their own ways of life. Not all such defenses deserve support. But a conservatism worthy of the name should respect these motives, not look askance at them because they cannot be fit into a supposed “Lockean consensus.”
]]>The Second Vatican Council defines abortion as an “unspeakable crime.” Not so Notre Dame. Father Jenkins’ effusive introduction of Obama never hinted that abortion is an “unspeakable crime.” According to Father Jenkins, nothing is “unspeakable” because what matters is that we have a “dialogue,” even though “Difference must be acknowledged, and in some cases even cherished.” Amazingly, he praised Obama’s supposed courage in coming to a place that showered him with applause, that vigorously arrested all pro-life demonstrators coming onto campus, and that provided him with a photo opportunity more effective than millions of dollars spent on campaign ads in demonstrating to Catholics that they need not worry about a candidate’s support for abortion in deciding how to vote: “Most of the debate has centered on Notre Dame’s decision to invite and honor the President. Less attention has been focused on the President’s decision to accept. President Obama has come to Notre Dame, though he knows well that we are fully supportive of Church teaching on the sancity of human life, and we oppose his policies on abortion and embryonic stem cell research.” How Notre Dame opposed Obama’s policies was not described. In fact, it is not at all clear from Notre Dame’s own statements that it does oppose Obama’s policies on abortion and stem cell research. Notre Dame’s official press release on the commencement noted that Obama’s “stance on abortion was likely unacceptable to some” at Notre Dame. And Father Jenkins could not even bring himself to say that the policies Obama supports are wrong, much less evil. Describing things as they are would apparently interfere with the “dialogue” Father Jenkins is so excited about.
Any politician watching today’s spectacle would have to conclude that the worst risk he runs from such as Notre Dame in supporting abortion is that he will be given an honorary degree, applauded, and told that it is important to “dialogue.” This lesson is especially harmful to the dwindling band of pro-life Democrats. Given the national Democratic party’s ironclad support for abortion, pro-life Democrats take a stance that prevents them from aspiring to their party’s presidential nomination. And, if such politicians take a pro-life stance for fear of Catholic opposition, Notre Dame sent a powerful signal today that they limit their ambitions for no good reason.
Obama has not been reticent in voicing his support for the “unspeakable crime” of abortion. Obama does not even claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion. Instead, he said during the campaign that he would not want his daughters “punished” with a baby if they engaged in premarital sex. His unstinting advocacy for abortion is a matter of public record, and he did not retreat from it at all at Notre Dame. Instead, he indicated in his speech that he has already learned that he has nothing to fear from Catholic prelates eager for “dialogue.” His praise for the late Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago obscured the salient point that nothing Bernardin said or did caused Obama to modify in any way his support for abortion. Even some of the Obama lines that drew applause at Notre Dame at least hinted at his opposition to Catholic teaching. Obama drew applause when he called for “reducing unintended pregnancies”—a likely reference to the federal funding for artificial contraception that Obama supports—and when he called for “health care policies” with “respect for the quality of life”—the same terminology used by those advocating for euthanasia.
It should not have been like this at a Catholic university, particularly at a Catholic university as inextricably intertwined with the American Catholic identity as Notre Dame. As John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, “But today, in many people’s consciences, the perception of [abortion’s] gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behaviour and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception.” By awarding Obama an honorary degree and showering him with applause and praise, Notre Dame has assisted mightily in obscuring the gravity of abortion. And, when Obama appoints the next pro-abortion justice to the Supreme Court, signs a law providing for the federal funding of abortion, or signs the Freedom of Choice Act—all things he is committed to doing—he will be able to say, with some justice, that he is doing so with the imprimatur of Fr. Jenkins and the nihil obstat of the Notre Dame Board of Trustees.
]]>Even though our current economic problems were caused in part by the delusion that we could be even more prosperous with a “service economy” than we were with an economy based on making things, our elites remain at best indifferent to the fate of American manufacturing and the jobs supported by American manufacturing. One would never know, from the scorn heaped on GM from all across the political spectrum, that Buick was just ranked in the top spot in JD Powers vehicle dependability survey, even as new GM products continue receiving rave reviews in an automotive press that has long been as hostile to American cars as the broader media culture is hostile to American traditions and values. In fact, industry observer Peter DeLorenzo, who blogs as the Auto Extremist, has written that, under the tenure of Rick Wagoner—asked to step down by the Obama Administration—“GM saw its greatest design, engineering and product era since its glory days of the 60s.”
A good example of leftist disdain for the American auto industry was this weekend’s column by one-time drama critic and long-time drama queen Frank Rich. Rich, of course, was scathing in his criticism of a company that had “doubled down on sure-to-be obsolete S.U.V.s and trucks to serve a market transitorily in thrall with them.” But what particularly irked Rich was the suggestion, made forcefully by country singer John Rich (no relation to Frank, I’m sure) in his song “Shuttin’ Detroit Down,” that there is a moral distinction to be made between manufacturing and finance, between Detroit and Wall Street. One would think that John Rich’s view was simply common sense, since not even the most zealous of Detroit’s critics have suggested that it is responsible for the economic collapse that has wiped out trillions in paper assets since last year. But viewing manufacturing as different from finance is a “romantic view” and a “sentimental illusion,” according to Frank Rich, at odds with the “new economic order” that Obama is trying to usher in, which so far has focused on “green jobs, health care, education, new financial regulation, infrastructure spending and all the rest.” (Looking at this list, it is no wonder that, even as the rest of the country is mired in recession, Moody’s projects that the economy of the DC metro area will grow by 2.5% from mid-2008 through mid-2010).
Notably absent from Rich’s list are private sector manufacturing jobs. They seem absent from Obama’s list, too. Just before he announced he was giving GM 60 days to get its house in order and Chrysler 30 days to merge with Fiat, Obama told CBS News that his goal was an American auto industry that was “much more lean, mean and competitive than it currently is.” As anyone remotely familiar with corporate buzzwords knows, “lean” and “mean” mean job losses, which seems a strange thing for a president supposedly in the pocket of organized labor to want. But Obama knows that the environmentalist faction in the Democratic Party is more powerful than manufacturing unions, and his major interest in the auto industry seems to be environmental. As he announced in his speech on the auto industry, “I am absolutely committed to working with Congress and the auto companies to meet one goal: The United States of America will lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars.” Indeed, his Administration has announced plans to increase federal auto fuel efficiency standards, known as CAFE standards, even though Obama’s auto task force found that “GM’s product portfolio is more vulnerable to CAFE standard increases than many of its competitors.” (Obama’s task force also continued the venerable Washington practice of praising foreign auto companies and denigrating American ones, claiming that “GM is at least one generation behind Toyota on advanced, ‘green’ powertrain development,” an assertion auto industry expert James Harbour says is flatly untrue, and criticizing the Chevy Volt as being unprofitable, even though it is widely believed, for example, that Toyota loses money on every Prius it sells, no matter how much the leftist elite loves that car). Thus, it appears that Obama is using the loans to GM and Chrysler to try to force them to make “green cars,” even though such a strategy is likely to make things worse for American carmakers. Also revealing is the fact that neither Obama nor Bush ever suggested using the loans to GM and Chrysler to encourage, much less require, the auto companies to shutter foreign plants rather than American ones, or to stop using foreign suppliers for parts, even though the only sensible reason for the loans is to attempt to preserve American manufacturing and American jobs and avoid the great social and fiscal costs that accompany their decline.
It did not need to be like this. The loan to Chrysler in the late ‘70s was intended simply to help the company weather tough economic times, not to change the type of cars Chrysler built. And Nicolas Sarkozy of France has indicated that, in view of the French government’s willingness to help the French car industry, engineering jobs should stay in France and any needed job cuts should take place at factories outside France. Unfortunately, American politicians, both on Capitol Hill and the White House, have used the auto industry’s travails as an excuse not only to tell Detroit what type of cars to build, but to unleash a torrent of ill-informed criticism whose only practical effect is likely to be a further erosion of American car sales. This is particularly unfortunate in Obama’s case, since he is well-positioned—perhaps uniquely positioned—to help Detroit regain lost market share. Obama is idolized in many of the parts of American society that are least likely to buy American cars. Japanese cars are most dominant in the big cities on the East and West coasts, the areas where Obama racked up his biggest margins last fall. Indeed, owning a foreign car is virtually a class marker for the upper middle class liberals who were a bedrock of the Obama campaign from the beginning. (An anecdote to bring this point home: a friend recently went to a birthday party for a niece being raised by his sister and her lesbian “partner” in suburban DC, and then to church in rural Maryland on the drive home from DC. Anyone who cannot guess which event was attended by people driving imports, and which event was attended by people driving American cars, hasn’t been paying attention). Given these demographic realities, if Obama made an impassioned plea for people to consider buying an American car, it might actually help Detroit. But Obama has not been willing to do this, and a plea to buy American made by anyone but Obama would likely be dismissed by the media as atavistic, reactionary, and perhaps even racist.
Among those most likely to sneer at any suggestion that Americans should buy American cars—or indeed at any statement not critical of the American auto industry—are the mainstream conservative media. Ever since the Congressional hearings on the auto loans last fall, such outlets as the Wall Street Journal and National Review have run piece after piece damning the American auto companies and praising their foreign competitors. Indeed, the mainstream right often takes umbrage at any suggestion that Toyota and Honda are not part of the American auto industry. Stephen Spruiell at NRO, speaking on behalf of the “100,000-plus Americans working for good pay in a foreign-owned automotive assembly plant in Indiana, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, etc,” voiced his outrage at UAW president Ron Gettelfinger’s “characterization of the foreign brands as something separate from and hostile to ‘our industry.’” And the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial lauding the foreign plants in America as “America’s Other Auto Industry,” while clucking, “There’s no natural law that America must have a Detroit automotive industry, any more than steel had to be made for all time in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or textiles in New England.” (In fact, other than financial journalism, it’s hard to find any job the Journal thinks needs to be performed here).
But the facts cited by the Journal in its editorial show why Gettelfinger was right to view foreign automakers as separate from, and even hostile to, the American auto industry, and why Americans should be concerned about the demise of that industry. As the Journal notes, “for every job created by the transplant producers, Detroit shed 6.1 jobs in the U. S., 2.8 of them in Michigan.” So much for the Japanese creating jobs here. And those dependent on the American auto industry include far more than current employees: “for every UAW member working at a U. S. car maker today, three retirees collect benefits; at GM, the ratio is 4.6 to one.” These figures not only belie the notion that what the Japanese have invested in America is comparable to what the Big Three have invested, they are a reminder that, if GM and Chrysler are forced into bankruptcy, the taxpayer is likely to pick up the cost of at least some of these retiree benefits.
Perhaps most significantly, the Journal admits that the foreign plants were lured here in part by “tax breaks” and that, for the foreign automakers, “strategic decisions are taken and much of the value-added engineering and design is done back home.” In fact, state governments have lavished some $3.6 billion on foreign automakers, and Senators from those states were the most implacable in their opposition to loans for the Big Three, with Jim DeMint of South Carolina even voicing concern that foreign automakers would be “disadvantaged” by loans to Detroit. Some have even advocated dealing with the collapse of American carmakers by giving more tax breaks to the Japanese, in order to entice them to hire displaced Americans. There is a word for countries that bribe foreign countries to set up manufacturing within their borders, while allowing the engineering work to be done abroad. We call such countries “Third World.” Indeed, our failure to protect the domestic manufacturing sector on which engineering depends, while simultaneously importing foreign engineers under the H1b visa program to depress engineering wages, combine to create a powerful incentive for Americans talented enough to be engineers to choose other professions. As a high school friend who is a research chemist wrote in response to my initial piece on the auto bailout, “I have been seeing highly skilled research positions leave this country and put very qualified and educated people on the unemployment line all because they want to improve the bottom line. So they send these jobs to other companies overseas. The American Chemical Society is worried about the lack of interest in science in America and the decreasing enrollment in colleges. Is it that difficult to see why the most intelligent youths of our country would skirt science and engineering when those industries seem to have no future here? If we lose our manufacturing and all that it supports – research, engineering, skilled labor and teamwork – we lose what made us the greatest country in the world.”
All such concerns are pooh-poohed by those cheering for the auto industry’s demise, just as they pooh-poohed concerns over America’s embrace of a global free trade system that has been instrumental in decimating the auto industry and the rest of our manufacturing base. GM, Ford, and Chrysler rose to dominance in a national market system, the system advocated by the founders. The difficulties American manufacturing has experienced in a global market system should be seen as a warning that globalism is destructive of American prosperity, not as a call for Americans to leave behind manufacturing and engineering and embrace the Brave New World of the “service economy” where we will all grow rich by flipping houses and swapping debt. As long as we continue to embrace global free trade, assurances that the demise of old line manufacturing firms will be followed by something better through the process of “creative destruction” ring hollow. As Pat Buchanan used to quip in the 1992 campaign: when the first George Bush promised he would create 3,000,000 new jobs, he never told us they would all be in Guangdong Province, China. In a lifetime spent in the industrial Midwest, I have seen plenty of metaphorical ashes from the ruins of old factories, but I’ve yet to see a phoenix.
It is true that it is already late in the day, and that much damage has already been done. The American auto industry has been hemorrhaging jobs for years, leaving many devastated communities in its wake. Just last week, the Detroit News ran an article highlighting the social and human costs associated with the massive outmigration from Michigan, a state that has had a net population loss of 465,000 since 2001. The auto industry was foolish to assume it could ride out the tsunami of globalization that swamped so many smaller industries, just as the scribblers at National Review and the Wall Street Journal are foolish in continuing to insist that globalization is leading us to the best of all possible worlds.
It is not too late, though, to learn from what has happened. One way of doing this is thinking again about the issues raised by the late John Attarian, the socially conservative economist who wrote, nearly 20 years ago, that “America presents the disheartening spectacle of a nation seemingly hell bent on committing suicide through free trade and immigration.” At the heart of our national death wish Attarian detected what he termed “economism,” the belief that economic considerations, even short-term economic considerations, should always control, and that “noneconomic phenomena, such as national sovereignty, autonomy, identity, cultural continuity, or even maintaining one’s way of life undisturbed, are far less important, or even nefarious.” Attarian’s argument was that such noneconomic phenomena were in fact of critical importance, and that “the best economic system is one which provides widespread opportunity for men to support families, enabling mothers to stay home, rear the children, supervise their activities, and see to their soulcraft.” The manufacturing firms being destroyed by globalization provided such opportunities, in addition to the possibility of living a life rooted in a community. Obviously, I do not know what Attarian would have thought of federal loans to aid the American auto industry. But I do know that the elites of both Left and Right, in voicing their disdain for the American auto industry, have once again revealed their opposition to an economy ordered to provide for the values Attarian rightly identified as paramount.
]]>By long custom, each state picks two historical figures to act as its permanent representatives on Capitol Hill, where they are commemorated by a statue. The composition of this collection is one clue that the new atheists have greatly underestimated the impact Christianity has had on America from our earliest days. Of course, virtually all the figures represented in Statuary Hall were practicing Christians. Even more striking, a large number of them were clergymen. In addition to the statue of Damien, visitors to Capitol Hill will find statues of such Protestant ministers as Roger Williams, John Peter Muhlenberg, Jason Lee, and Marcus Whitman, and such Catholic priests as Junipero Serra, Jacques Marquette, and Eusebio Kino, as well as Mother Joseph, a nun who was a missionary in Washington. Lee, Whitman, Serra, Marquette, and Kino were also missionaries, meaning that a calling that is quite out of favor with the new atheists is particularly well represented in Statuary Hall.
That Damien was chosen to represent Hawaii on Capitol Hill is no surprise. Although he worked in Hawaii before it became part of the United States, he has long been a hero to Hawaiians of all religious backgrounds. In the mid 19th century, Hawaii saw a large outbreak of leprosy, and the Hawaiian authorities responded by creating a leper colony at Kalaupapa on remote Molokai. Although this was not the intention of the Hawaiian government, the leper colony on Molokai soon became little more than a place people went to die, in isolation and poverty and a condition approaching anarchy. When the Bishop of Honolulu asked for a volunteer to go to Molokai to minister to the lepers for a few months, Damien went, and stayed for the rest of his 16 years. Damien cared for the lepers in every aspect of their being, cleansing their wounds and bandaging their sores, building coffins so they could have a decent burial (he built some 2,000 by hand), offering Mass and hearing their confessions, and attempting to model for them the love of Christ. He also brought some much needed order, building a home for children and organizing a variety of activities that helped bring hope and purpose to the people exiled on Kalaupapa. Damien identified completely with those in his care, referring to “we lepers” in his sermons long before he contracted leprosy himself. Damien’s example attracted other volunteers and more advanced medical care, so that slowly Kalaupapa was transformed for the benefit of those who lived there.
Damien did have detractors, including Rev. Hyde, a Presbyterian clergyman in Honolulu who wrote to a colleague in Australia following Damien’s death dismissing him as a “coarse, dirty man, head-strong and bigoted.” After Hyde’s remarks were published by his colleague in Australia, Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited both Hyde in his comfortable Honolulu home and Molokai after Damien’s death, and who was also a Presbyterian, wrote a masterful open letter refuting each of Hyde’s charges and defending the dead priest: “But, sir, when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour – the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat – some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.” Stevenson accurately predicted to Rev. Hyde that “if that world at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.” Stevenson also precisely delineated the point that separated him from Hyde: “you are one of those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind.” Indeed it is. One wishes that Christopher Hitchens had pondered Stevenson’s words before he embarked on his journalistic jihad against Mother Teresa, who, like Damien, won the respect of the country in which she worked by caring for lepers. One wishes the new atheists would ponder those words today, as they set about attempting to tear down what Christianity has contributed to our civilization.
In fact, it is clear that what motivated Damien to do what no one else was willing to do was his desire to emulate Christ. The definitive biography of Damien is Gavan Daws’ Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai. Daws describes Damien as “an ordinary man who made the most extraordinary moral choices again and again and again.” When asked by a PBS interviewer about writing the book, Daws noted that he had come to believe that Damien was a saint, even though “I”m not a practicing Christian, and I”m by definition not a Catholic.” But, Daws added, “look what he did. Time and time again, he does things that nobody else is prepared to do, at the risk of his physical life, in the interest of what he always called the imitation of Christ. That’s what he did.” And that’s why all Americans can be glad that there soon will be a saint on Capitol Hill.
]]>Lefebvre, the former archbishop of Dakar, Senegal, became increasingly disenchanted by the doctrinal confusion that followed in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Lefebvre attracted a number of like-minded priests to join his Society of St. Pius X, and he consecrated four of these priests as bishops after he decided to back away from a deal with the Vatican that would have reconciled him and his followers to the papacy. One of the principal Vatican negotiators for that deal was the man who became Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger was one of the few Vatican officials to win the trust of the Lefebvrites, because he shared their fondness for the traditional Latin Mass of St. Pius V that virtually disappeared in the wake of Vatican II, and because he expressed criticism of how Vatican II was being interpreted by some as a dramatic rupture with the Catholic past. Since the time of those failed negotiations, Cardinal Ratzinger continued both to hope for reconciliation with the followers of Lefebvre and to work for recovery of traditional forms of worship, including the Latin Mass. In 2007, Benedict XVI issued a decree, Summorum Pontificum, restoring the Mass of Pius V throughout the Church, alongside the Mass promulgated by Pope Paul VI after Vatican II. With this decree, Benedict XVI both advanced his own ideas on worship and made a gesture calculated to further the prospect of reconciliation with the Lefebvrites. This was the background to the lifting of the excommunications, and this should have been the focus of news reports on that topic.
Instead, of course, the media focus became the repellent comments on the Holocaust made by one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, in an interview he gave to Swedish television some months ago, but that wasn’t aired until after news of the lifting of the excommunications had leaked out, in a clear effort to embarrass the Pope. In story after story, the Pope was portrayed as somehow endorsing Williamson’s views, even though Williamson had not been excommunicated for his views on the Holocaust, and the lifting of the excommunication of Williamson and his confreres had nothing to do with Williamson’s views on the Holocaust, views which no rational person can impute to Benedict XVI. Indeed, in 2006, Benedict visited Auschwitz and said this: “To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible—and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany. In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence—a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this? In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.” But facts do not matter to the modern wolves in the media, who prefer to use a mixture of lies, half-truths, innuendo, and guilt by association to intimidate any public figure who violates, or threatens to violate, the leftist consensus. Benedict is such a figure. The AFP story not only described Benedict’s action as the “rehabilitation of a bishop who denied the Holocaust,” but noted that “Since becoming the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics in 2005, Benedict has offended Muslims, women, native Indians, Poles, gays and scientists but his latest move is fast snowballing into his most damaging.” Naturally, the AP story mentioned Benedict’s membership as a teenager in the Hitler Youth, a common theme in articles about Benedict even though membership in the Hitler Youth was compulsory in Germany, Benedict did not attend meetings, and his father was a staunch opponent of the Nazis, in part because a relative was murdered as part of the Nazis’ euthanasia program.
The media firestorm has been worst in the Pope’s native Germany, a land that has replaced the dangerous hypernationalism of the Nazis with an unhealthy avoidance of normal expressions of national pride. German chancellor Angela Merkel sought to score political points by attacking Benedict, declaring that the lifting of the excommunications could not be allowed to pass “without consequences” and pompously declaring that Vatican statements pointing out the obvious differences between Benedict’s views of the Holocaust and Williamson’s “have, in my opinion, not yet been sufficient.” Although a Lutheran, Merkel heads a party, the Christian Democratic Union, founded by Catholics, including Konrad Adenauer, a party that has always depended on the support of the Christian Social Union, a related party also founded by Catholics and based in Bavaria, the home province of Benedict XVI and Germany’s Catholic heartland. Despite this background, Germany’s Catholic politicians have largely avoided criticizing Merkel for her attack on the world’s most famous German and Catholic. Instead, Benedict’s staunchest German defender has been his elder brother Georg Ratzinger, who expressed his anger at “how unjust and badly informed the people who are attacking [the Pope] are” and noted that “We always speak about an informed society, when in reality it is uninformed.”
Those with the principal duty of informing the uninformed described by Georg Ratzinger are Germany’s Catholic bishops. Unfortunately, too many of them have proven as supine as Germany’s Catholic politicians. Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz described the Pope’s actions as a “disaster” for Holocaust survivors and said “There must also be consequences for those who are responsible for this.” Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky of Berlin said that the Pope’s actions were not “right” and that the Vatican should apologize. Cardinals wear red to symbolize their vow to shed their blood in defense of the Church if necessary; Cardinals Lehmann and Sterzinsky leave the unfortunate impression that they are not even willing to endure a few unfavorable news cycles for the defense of the Church.
By all accounts, Benedict is a kindly, gentle man. His clear explanations of Christian belief have impressed many. But Benedict was right to pray for protection from the wolves. These wolves do not shrink from attacking someone whose office would have largely insulated him from criticism not so very long ago. And any traditionalist conservative who becomes prominent can expect these wolves to eventually attack him, using the same methods now being used against the Pope.
]]>One reason is that, owing to America’s longtime financial and military support for Israel, including providing Israel with the weapons used to subdue Gaza and with more foreign aid than we give to any other country, America is often blamed in the Islamic world for the actions of Israel. When Islamists inevitably seek to avenge Gaza, they might try to kill Americans as well as Israelis, although Hamas itself has never attacked American targets. It is therefore reasonable for Americans to be concerned over the fallout from Israeli use of force against Arabs. Indeed, serious arguments have been made both that our attachment to Israel helped fuel the hatred that found murderous expression on 9/11, and that our invasion of Iraq was prompted in part by a belief that destoying Saddam Hussein’s regime would benefit Israel. At the very least, our close ties with Israel complicate our relations with the countries that control the only item of vital importance to the United States in the Middle East, oil. America pays a high price for our unquestioning support of Israel.
Israel has benefited greatly from the military, economic, and diplomatic support of the United States. Indeed, Richard Nixon’s airlift to Israel during the 1973 war arguably saved Israel from being overrun by the Arab armies attacking her. Although advocates of our unswerving support for Israel like to say that in return Israel has been America’s closest ally, it is hard to find the evidence for that assertion. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, America has fought four major wars alongside our allies, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, and the Second Gulf War, including the invasion of Afghanistan. Great Britain fought at our side in each of these wars except Vietnam, sending 63,000 troops to Korea, 43,000 troops to the Persian Gulf in the First Gulf War, and 45,000 troops to Iraq in the Second Gulf War. Australia has fought at our side during each of these wars, sending 17,000 troops to Korea, nearly 50,000 troops to Vietnam, 1,800 troops to the Persian Gulf in the First Gulf War, and 2,000 troops to Iraq in the Second Gulf War. Currently, there are 8,745 British and 1,050 Australian troops deployed in Afghanistan, and an Australian serving in Afghanistan just won the Victoria Cross. The British and Australian politicians who committed their troops to fight at our side have sometimes paid a significant political price: Tony Blair essentially lost control of his party over Iraq, and opposition to Australian involvement in Vietnam helped propel the Australian Labor Party to its first electoral victory. Other countries, too, have sometimes made surprisingly large contributions to our war efforts: nearly 5,000 South Korean troops were killed and over 10,000 were wounded fighting at our side in Vietnam. The number of troops Israel sent to Korea, Vietnam, the First Gulf War, and the Second Gulf War is zero. Of course, it is not surprising that Israel was not part of either coalition America assembled in the Gulf, since Israeli involvement in either Gulf War would have been disastrous, undermining our efforts to recruit Arab and Moslem allies and aiding the Islamists in their efforts to recruit new people to kill Americans.
Even worse, the Israelis have sometimes repaid American support with arrogance and contempt. Recently, Ehud Olmert boasted of how he telephoned George Bush in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condoleeza Rice to have the United States abstain from voting on a Security Council resolution we had helped draft. In the ‘90s and into this decade, Israel sold sensitive military technology to Red China, and in the ‘80s Israel recruited Jonathan Pollard to spy against us, with some of the information Pollard stole from us quite likely ending up in the hands of the Soviet Union. At first, Israel denied any involvement with Pollard, but Israel eventually admitted that Pollard was in fact an Israeli agent, not a rogue operative, even though Israel has ignored our requests to account for everything Pollard took. In a way, though, it is hard to blame the Israelis for their contempt for American politicians. In 1967, Israeli airmen and sailors killed 33 American sailors and one civilian during the attack on the USS Liberty, and wounded another 171 American sailors. Even though the Secretary of State, the CIA Director, and many at the National Security Agency all believed the Israeli attack on the Liberty was deliberate, not a mistake, a view confirmed, according to a 2007 Chicago Tribune article, by several former American military and intelligence personnel who had access to NSA intercepts of communications to the Israeli pilots attacking the Liberty, Israel paid no political price. Indeed, Washington ordered the recall of planes sent by the USS America to defend the Liberty, and none of the citations awarded the survivors of the Liberty, including the Medal of Honor won by her captain, even mentioned the identity of the nation that attacked the ship. It is hard not to have contempt for America when we behave like that.
Unfortunately, paleoconservatives are almost the only ones on the right who seem willing to voice concerns about such affronts to American honor from Israel. During the 2008 campaign, at a forum sponsored by a pro-Israel group, veteran Democratic operative Ann Lewis, who was advising Hillary Clinton, disagreed with an Obama adviser who had suggested that the United States might wish to distance itself from certain policies of Israel’s Likud party: “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.” Lewis was applauded by those in attendance, and the representative of the McCain campaign at the forum did not criticize Lewis for suggesting that the role of the president is to act as a rubber stamp for the Knesset. Most American conservatives seem incapable of offering anything except the most tepid criticism of Israel or her zealous supporters. NRO was silent about Olmert’s recent outburst, and I do not recall much criticism of Ann Lewis’ strange interpretation of Article II of the Constitution on the right. Deroy Murdock criticized the effort to secure the release of Jonathan Pollard because it “foolishly reinforces the anti-Semitic stereotype that American Jews share dual loyalties between the United States and Israel,” and Jonah Goldberg opposed Pollard’s release, which was being demanded by the Israel government, because “Pollard disgraced himself, America, and Israel by spying on the US,” which is rather like saying that the reason Alger Hiss deserved to be imprisoned was because he disgraced the USSR. Of course, the real reason to oppose releasing Pollard has nothing to do with stereotypes or the disgrace he brought on Israel. Pollard should not be released because he betrayed America and compromised our national security at the behest of a foreign power, namely Israel.
The refusal to criticize behavior that would be criticized if engaged in by any other country is just one sign that America has formed the type of “passionate attachment” to Israel that our first and greatest president warned against in his Farewell Address. Indeed, Fred Barnes recently wrote in the Weekly Standard that one of Bush’s greatest achievements was that he surpassed Ronald Reagan as being “Israel’s best friend in the White House.” I suspect millions of Americans who support Israel and view the Farewell Address as a dead letter would agree with Barnes about that. And, as Americans, they have every right to that belief. But Ilana Mercer should not expect paleoconservatives, who tend to take seriously the Founders’ prescriptions for foreign policy, and who are generally wary of foreign influence and foreign entanglements, to be among those praising American politicians for uncritical support of any foreign country, even Israel.
]]>Catholic schools and the men and women religious and lay teachers who staff them still do enormous good in America. But the particular world depicted by Shanley—the parish church and school at the center of a cohesive neighborhood, where well-dressed neighbors who know each other well walk to a Mass unchanged for centuries—has largely disappeared. At the center of that world was the parish school, staffed by nuns. Despite the universality of Catholicism, this particular world was largely an American creation. The American bishops determined that their flock would not be lost to the Faith, and mandated that each church have a grade school. And so people who had been peasants in Europe managed to create the largest private school system in the world, entirely by their own efforts. It was a remarkable achievement, and Shanley depicts the fruit of their efforts with considerable affection. As Michael Tueth, S. J. notes in the liberal Catholic magazine America, “Catholics of a certain age might be tempted toward nostalgia by the film’s opening shots, showing a quiet Sunday morning in this Irish-American neighborhood. The altar boys prepare the cruets of water and wine and negotiate which one of them will light the charcoal for the incense and which will ring the altar chimes for the consecration in this pre-Vatican II Sunday Mass. The working-class parishioners, nicely dressed, with the women all wearing the prescribed head-coverings, gently greet each other as they walk to church. Maybe Sister Aloysius has a point. Catholic life seemed simpler and more reliable then, with none of the questions and changes that the Vatican Council and all the other forces of the 1960s would bring to the Church.”
Doubt is set in 1964, just as the changes brought by Vatican II are beginning to be felt within the Church and America as a whole is starting to feel the winds of change. John XXIII famously said that, in calling Vatican II, he was hoping to “throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in.” But wind is not always a benign force. Margaret Mitchell said of another vanished American civilization that it was “gone with the wind,” and the wind is always blowing in Doubt. In one scene, Sister Aloysius is shown gathering the papers strewn all over her office after Fr. Flynn left the windows open. In another, she is talking with the parish handyman after a storm had brought down tree branches all around the convent: “The world is crashing, Michael. I’ve never known a wind like it. The wind has changed.”
Indeed it had. And Sister Aloysius knows that what is on the wind is not good. She tells Sister James, the young, kindly nun modeled after Shanley’s first grade teacher, “Always the easy way out these days. Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow. Mark my words.” Since that time, we have changed from a society marked by discipline, duty, self-restraint, and delayed gratification to one marked by license, desire, self-indulgence, and instant gratification, as Americans have consistently taken the “easy way out,” choosing cohabitation over marriage, debt over savings, and slovenly dress and coarse speech and manners over decorous dress and decent speech and manners. We have all become very good at making excuses for ourselves. These changes have affected all of us, in part because figures like Sister Aloysius, a stern disciplinarian who brooks no nonsense, have largely disappeared from the American scene. And when a character like Sister Aloysius shows up in our books and movies, it is generally as an object of horror or a figure of fun.
Sister Aloysius is neither. Although the first time we see Sister Aloysius she is disciplining children for not paying attention at Sunday Mass, and some of her concerns seem petty, we slowly begin to learn that Sister Aloysius’ behavior is motivated by a genuine concern for those in her care. She is protective of an elderly nun who is going blind, because she fears that if the priests who run St. Nicholas learn of the nun’s blindness she will be sent away. She asks Sister James if anyone has hit Donald Miller, the school’s first black pupil, and instructs Sister James, “when that happens, send them right down to me.” The viewer knows that Sister Aloysius will make sure the first time Donald Miller is hit will be the last. When a frustrated Sister James at one point compares the school to a prison, Sister Aloysius asks if she is serious. Sister James says, “No. Actually, they all seem fairly happy. But they’re all uniformly terrified of you!” To which Sister Aloysius replies, “Yes. That’s how it works.” Sister Aloysius shows both the depth of her concern for those in her charge, and the usefulness of her formidable mien, when she confronts Father Flynn over what she believes to be his abuse of Donald Miller.
Shanley dedicates the movie to Sister James, now Sister Margaret McEntee, who is still teaching as a Sister of Charity. The dedication of the play was broader: “To the many orders of Catholic nuns who devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes. Though they have been much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?” As he told one interviewer about the women who taught him, “It was evident from the way that they talked that they were not engaged in a popularity contest; they were not trying to charm their students, and they were not interested in being adored. That’s something I saw a great deal of later on in various educational settings, where the teacher wanted to be loved. It takes a real adult to teach the way that the Sisters of Charity taught, which was very selfless. It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about getting the work done.” So it is no surprise to read Shanley say of Sister Aloysius, “I love Sister Aloysius. And I think she’s right about a tremendous amount … And I agree with her that something beautiful is lost in these kind of changes.”
Shanley is not a conservative, but, in the midst of addressing the broader philosophical issues that interest him, he has done a magnificent job of showing what was lost in the tumult of the ‘60s. Thankfully, we have not forgotten how to appreciate the Sister Jameses of this world. And if Father Flynn is innocent, we know how to value his friendliness and openness. But we have forgotten the value of someone like Sister Aloysius. Come back, Sister Aloysius. America needs your kind again.
]]>My Eastern European forebears were typical of the Ellis Island immigrants who came from that part of the world: they remembered Europe as a place of poverty, and their children wanted nothing more than to become Americans. My grandparents made a conscious decision not to pass along their parents’ language, and I can remember older relatives telling me, “We live in America so we speak American.” In fact, they seemed to prize only two things the family had brought over from Europe: their Faith, and Christmas.
I grew up enjoying all facets of the American Christmas, from the trees to the lights to the presents to food to the music. Part of what I enjoyed was the fact that Christmas is preeminently a time for tradition. What other time of year do popular radio stations ever play music from the 16th century, such as The First Noel? But what also helped drive home the importance of this great feast were the activities most other Americans did not share. The highlight of Christmas for me was not opening presents under the tree on Christmas morning, as great as that was, but the dinner we had the night before, beginning with the sharing of oplatki—rectangular pieces of unleavened bread very much like those used for Communion, decorated with scenes of Christmas—and followed by a meal similar to the one the Piataks and the Kowalskis had been having on that night for centuries. (Although the Piataks came from Slovakia and considered themselves Slovaks, they came from a village close enough to the Polish border that its dialect was a mixture of Slovak and Polish and the Christmas Eve dinner was the same as the one observed north of the Tatras). The impression I received, from my earliest years, was that this was the most important night of the year, an impression I recall whenever I hear one of the Polish carols I first heard on Christmas Eve.
One of my Grandma’s early memories was of singing those carols to her mother on Christmas Eve. She was the one who played Li’l Wally’s Christmas record, and explained to me what the songs were about. I couldn’t understand the words, and still don’t, except for a very few. But what clearly came across in that record was heartfelt joy at the Incarnation. By and large, the authors of these songs are unknown, and many are clearly folk compositions. This is music of the people. Indeed, in Poland, villagers would go door to door singing these carols, and families would sing them at Christmas Eve dinner, just as my grandmother had sung those songs to her mother on that night. Despite their astonishing variety, these songs are largely unknown here, except for Infant Holy, Infant Lowly (W Zlobie Lezy in Polish), and perhaps Lulajze Jezuniu, the beautiful Christmas lullaby Chopin used in his Scherzo in B Minor. However, those exposed to this music often love it. My Mom, who has zero Polish ancestry, grew up singing these carols at St. Stanislaus Kostka grade school in Youngstown, and shares my fondness for them. And despite the middling quality of much music in such venues as YouTube, it is possible to get a small sense of the beauty, joy, and exuberance of much of this music from what is available on the Internet.
Of course, Poland was hardly unique in its efforts to bring beauty to Christmas. Such efforts were replicated throughout all of Christendom. As the conductor said at a Christmas concert I attended the other night, more music has been written for Christmas than any other event. And all of us have different memories of Christmas, and different ways of helping to remember what Christmas means. My hope is that all of you have been able to remember Christmas Past in such a way as to enliven Christmas Present and connect you with that first Christmas, whose hope has never been extinguished and never will be. Merry Christmas! Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia!
]]>Saying “yes” to loans to Wall Street but “no” to loans to Detroit makes little sense, especially since the loans to Wall Street now total over two trillion dollars, if the actions of the Federal Reserve are included, with AIG alone receiving $150 billion, far more than Detroit is requesting. And there can be little doubt that the demise of the Big Three would have devastating consequences, both short and long term. The Center for Automotive Research has estimated that a collapse of GM, Ford, and Chrysler would cost nearly three million jobs. (The Novemebr 3 issue of Crain’s Cleveland Business reports that in greater Cleveland, where I live, 26,800 people work in the transportation equipment sector, and 100,000 jobs depend on that sector, directly or indirectly). The government tax loss from such a catastrophe would be over $150 billion over three years. Then there are the American retirees who receive pension and medical benefits from the Big Three—some 432,000 GM retirees, 300,000 Ford retirees, and 124,900 Chrysler retirees. Should those companies fail, taxpayers would step in to assume at least some of this liability through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Then there is the long term cost of losing so much manufacturing capacity and expertise, national assets that can be of vital importance, as we found out in World War II when the plants that used to make Chevrolets and Fords were quickly converted to making planes and tanks, using much of the same skilled, patriotic work force.
But won’t foreign car makers simply pick up the slack? Not likely. The major reason foreign car makers have plants in the United States is political, to hedge against the possibility of American protectionism. Once the threat of American protectionism is dead, because the American auto industry is dead, why would foreign car manufactuers keep building plants here, or even keep operating the plants they’ve built? Last summer, the Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed Toyota executive as saying, “It’s much, much more profitable to produce cars in Japan and ship them all to the U. S. right now, if it wasn”t for the political problems that might cause.” Once there is no possibility of “political problems,” what would restrain Toyota from pulling all its production back to Japan, or shifting it to such low wage countries as Mexico?
Nor is the Japanese investment in the US at all comparable to the Big Three’s, even setting aside the nearly million retired Americans who depend on the Big Three for their retirement benefits and health care. General Motors alone employs more Americans than all the foreign automakers put together, and Ford runs nearly as many assembly lines in the United States as do Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, and VW put together. The Big Three buy 80% of the car parts manufactured in the United States, and their cars average 79% domestic content, compared to 35% domestic content for foreign cars sold here. And the Big Three employ the vast bulk of their engineers, designers, and managers in the United States, unlike their foreign competitors, which keep most such work in Japan or Germany, which is also where the profits they make from selling cars here wind up. In fact, the Big Three spend more each year in America on R & D than does the pharmaceutical industry, employing 65,000 skilled workers on research and development in Michigan alone.
But doesn’t Detroit deserve to die, for making such terrible cars? Not really. The initial quality surveys conducted by J D Power show that American cars are as good as anything the Japanese and Germans have to offer. Last year, that survey saw a Ford product get the number one ranking in five different product segments, more than any other company. And the award for the best plant in terms of overall quality worldwide went to a Ford plant in Michigan. This year, JD Power rated the Chevrolet Malibu as the best car in the mid-size car category, and the Pontiac Grand Prix as the best car in the large car category. Even Consumer Reports, long a fierce critic of Detroit (and the publication of an organization that was deemed subversive by the House Un-American Activities Committee) recently admitted that, with the exception of a few truck-based designs, “Ford’s reliability is now on par with good Japanese automakers.”
Despite all this, there is no doubt the GM, Ford, and Chrysler are now in a precarious state, having been hit by rising gas prices and a collapsing credit market at the same time. But there is good reason to believe that they will be able to pay back the loans they receive and become profitable again, even as Chrysler paid back the loan it received from the federal government in 1979 and became profitable again. The new UAW contract contains substantial concessions, largely eliminating the labor cost differential between the Big Three and the Japanese, and GM and Ford are poised to introduce new fuel efficient cars such as the Chevrolet Cruze and the Ford Fiesta. But even if the attempt to save the Big Three ultimately fails, both prudence and patriotism suggest that it is worth trying.
No doubt Lowry’s arguments will find an appreciative audience among those who take delight in denigrating American industry and American workers. But I have noticed something about Lowry and most of the other vocal critics of the prospect of loans for Detroit. They don’t live in the industrial Midwest, and they don’t give a damn about those of us who do. Although David Brooks’ argument that the GOP “cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West coasts” is getting a respectful hearing at NR, none of the “conservative movement’s” gurus seems particularly interested in figuring out why McCain lost every state in the industrial Midwest, even though those states are filled with social conservatives of the type who have been voting Republican since Nixon. All my life, I have seen tax dollars flow out of the industrial Midwest, to pay for water projects so people can live in the desert, agricultural subsidies, the myriad of military installations generations of Southern congressmen succeeded in spreading around the Sunbelt, not to mention the S & L bailout, which was concentrated in the Sunbelt, and now the massive Wall Street bailout, which, not coincidentally, has been especially helpful to the city National Review calls home. The notion that America can afford all that, but cannot afford a $25-50 billion dollar loan to help preserve the industry vital to the industrial Midwest, is laughable, and a cruel joke to those of us who live here. But if Republicans want the joke to be on them, they can listen to Lowry, line up to damn the American auto industry, and look forward to losing the Great Lakes states year after year after year.
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Today’s elite class certaintly encompasses the neocons, who concocted the foolish idea that America should spend its blood and treasure forcibly imposing democracy on the Middle East, in addition to the “idiots” in Wall Street and Washington who created the current financial debacle through a combination of greed, arrogance, stupidity, reckless deregulation, and adherence to multiculturalist doctrine. Their credentials are paper-thin, earned at schools notorious for grade inflation. As a class, they have achieved nothing, having generally spent their lives being cosseted and pampered, having no beliefs more substantial than the strange preferences strung together in “Stuff White People Like,” and having no ambitions higher than lives of wealth and ease. Yet, they have a strange sense of entitlement, believing that their facility on standardized tests means that the privileges they enjoy are merited, unlike the privileges enjoyed by historical aristocracies which, despite their flaws, generally expected at least a period of military service from their members, an exercise famously avoided by our meritocratic elite beginning in Vietnam and continuing through all our subsequent wars.
Then there are the poisonous beliefs that are inextricably linked to membership in the elite class, including multiculturalism and globalism, ideologies that prefer the interests of foreigners and immigrants to those of native born Americans. Thus, the widespread elite support for free trade, mass immigration, and affirmative action. That is what those going through the Ivy League credentialing process learn, and that is what most of them continue to believe. Of course, it is possible for someone to go through the Ivy League credentialing process and reject such beliefs, but such an individual is rejecting his class as thoroughly as FDR rejected his by advocating the New Deal.
The problem is not with populist resentment of our elites, but with the type of content-free populism offered up by the McCain campaign, which advocates the globalism and mass immigration that is working the economic and demographic displacement of the very people who are supporting the campaign. The task for conservatives is to channel the justified resentment of our current elite toward conservative ends, and to use it to help replace that elite with a leadership class interested in preserving the American nation.
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According to Kroto, the fundamental problem with Reiss is that “He, together with all religious people—whether they like it or not, whether they accept it or not—fall at the first hurdle of the main requirement for honest scientific discussion because they accept unfounded dogma as having fundamental significance.” Any belief that God had any role in the creation of the universe is an “irrational unsubstantiated claim of no fundamental validity.” And while Kroto generously allows that “I do not have a particularly big problem with scientists who may have some personal mystical beliefs,” he does have a “problem with an ordained minister as Director of Science Education” because “An ordained minister must have accepted that there was a creator.” In other words, only atheists can teach science, and only atheists, or those whose “personal mystical beliefs” do not entail belief in a creator, may really practice science. Indeed, Kroto warned against Reiss’ appointment in the first place because of his religious views.
Kroto apparently has little knowledge or understanding of the history of Western civilization. The scientific enterprise to which Kroto has contributed in his work was begun by believers and the most distinguished historical contributors to the scientific enterprise have been believers. In his study of human accomplishment, Charles Murray lists the ten most important figures in the category of general science as Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, Kepler, Lavoisier, Descartes, Huygens, Laplace, Einstein, and Faraday, only one of whom, Einstein, was likely an atheist. (There is some doubt about Laplace’s views, but he received the Last Sacrament and was buried in his parish church). And the only figure on this list whose principal achievements were in Kroto’s discipline of chemistry, Lavoisier, wrote to an English colleague who defended religion, “You have done a noble thing in upholding revelation and the authenticity of the Holy Scripture, and it is remarkable that you are using for the defence precisely the same weapons which were once used for the attack.” In what way did these scientists’ belief in God impede them from advancing human understanding?
Even more problematic for Kroto is the existence of distinguished scientists who were also clergymen, including Gregor Mendel, who was both the father of genetics and the abbot of the monastery where he conducted his experiments, and Geroges Lemaitre, the Belgian priest-scientist credited with the discovery of the Big Bang. Some 35 features on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians, and Jesuits (and other Western missionaries) were instrumental in spreading science throughout the world. Would Kroto deign to have students taught science by the likes of Mendel and Lemaitre?
Then there are the inconsistencies in Kroto’s own views. Kroto dismisses persons with religious belief as irrational because the existence of God cannot be demonstrated using the scientific method; indeed, he writes that “only those questions that can be formulated in such a way that they can be subjected to detailed disinterested examination, and when so subjected reveal unequivocally and ubiquitously accepted data, may be significant.” Yet he frets about ways in which “our democratic freedoms are undermined” and asks that Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation be used to form the basis of sermons at church, so that “perhaps some of their flock may understand what intellectual intergrity and true humanity actually involve.” Is Kroto also irrational for giving weight to such concepts as “our democratic freedoms,” “intellectual integrity,” and “true humanity,” none of which are subject to the sort of scientific inquiry Kroto sets up as the sole basis of rationality? Using the criteria for rationality set up by Kroto, how could he hope to convince others to give importance to such concepts? And what would Kroto say of people who share his belief in “democratic freedoms” and “true humanity” on the basis of their own religious beliefs, beliefs that helped to create Western civilization, whether Kroto wishes to acknowledge that fact or not? The campaign of the new atheists against religion is both short-sighted and foolish, as Harry Kroto has once again proven.
]]>There is no reason why America and a non-Communist Russia should be enemies. If America has a potential strategic rival, it is China, a nation that might someday wish to grab large chunks of Siberia, which is as underpopulated as it is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Those filled with a burning desire to kill Americans tend to live in the Islamic world, which is also filled with rage at Russia over Chechnya. One would think that it would be relatively easy to reach a modus vivendi with the Russians.
But rather than “move on from the Cold War” and shrink our international military presence to a level necessary to defend America rather than police the globe, our leaders sought instead to entrech the institutions that were created to fight a war that was over. Preeminent among these was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which should have disbanded in 1991 but instead has been expanded to cover virtually all of Europe. George H. W. Bush told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded to the frontiers of Russia, but his successors have done just that, with the neocons even urging that NATO be expanded to include Georgia, as pointless a provocation of Russia as a Chinese-Mexican mutual security pact would be of us.
Regrettably, but predictably, the neocons have reacted to the Russian invasion of Georgia with a mixture of Russophobia and democracy worship. Neither emotion is a sound basis for American foreign policy. One gets the impression that some neocons will never forgive the Russians for having mistreated their great-grandparents. The Russians were not nice to my great-grandparents, either. But the question Americans need to consider when evaluating our relations with Russia is not what the Cossacks did to great-grandmother, but whether friendship with a nation that faces some of the same challenges we do and still commands a formidable nuclear arsenal is a more sensible arrangement than the alternative.
I am glad that Georgia has a democracy, but commiting America to defend every democracy on the planet from its neighbors is a sure road to national ruin. The only reason to enter an alliance is because it enhances the security of the United States, and it is hard to see how a formal commitment to defend Georgia would enhance American security. And, shocking as it may sound, the leaders who ordered Russian troops into Georgia were elected by the Russian people, and are genuinely popular in Russia. Converting every nation in the world into a democracy would not ensure that all countries would be friendly toward America, nor that they would pursue policies consistent with ours. We should stop trying to run the planet, and recognize that the surest way of creating something like another Cold War is to act as if the Soviet Union never fell and pretend that Russia today is seeking to dominate the world rather than maintain some influence over countries whose fate, for good or ill, has been entwined with Russia’s for centuries.
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One of the few programs in recent years that managed to offer quality entertainment while also suggesting that the Left might not be right was “The X-Files.” The series went off the air in 2002 after a nine-year run, but is still being rerun and might gain a new generation of fans through the release this Friday of the second “X-Files” movie, “I Want to Believe,” which I am eagerly looking forward to. I only regret that I will not be able to hear the thoughtful analysis of the film from a man I had the pleasure of discussing many of the show’s episodes with, and who would always ask to borrow the tape I made of any installment he happened to miss, the great conservative writer and thinker Sam Francis.
Sam was a knowledgeable fan of science fiction and horror, and he recognized “The X-Files” as a superior example of the genre. The show was consistently well acted, and featured intelligent, well-written stories, and production values equivalent to those of most feature films. The series’s central characters, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (played by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson), were attractive, intelligent, enterprising, and likable, and the supporting cast was superb as well. These were the principal virtues of the series, which could be enjoyed by people of all political persuasions.
But there were hints in “The X-Files” of a worldview far closer to paleoconservatism than is generally found in anything emanating from Hollywood. Sam had in fact been put off by the liberal plot lines he found in other fine examples of television science fiction, such as the “Twilight Zone” or the original “Star Trek.” Unlike those series, “The X-Files” had a certain conservative sensibility, offering no vision of “utopia” or even progress in the human condition. It’s telling that the first “X-Files” movie bore the reactionary title “Fight the Future.”
Rather than guiding the way to a brighter tomorrow, Mulder and Scully face the same fundamental problems human beings have always faced, including the persistence of evil. The aliens and monsters who appeared in so many episodes were not benevolent or even misunderstood but implacable foes who needed to be stopped. There was no hint of moral relativism: The serial killer Donnie Pfaster is shown morphing into a demon or other serial killers as he goes about his work, and those who misunderstand the nature of evil get what they deserve. In the first season episode “Tooms,” a social worker accepts a serial killer’s claim that Mulder had brutalized him, and then attempts to befriend him, only to become the killer’s next victim. And almost every episode featured the tagline “The Truth Is Out There,” meaning not only that the truth might be found in unusual places but that there was in fact an objective truth that could be found, despite what the postmodernists want us to believe.
A recurrent theme of the show was that the government can not be trusted. Mulder and Scully weren’t just chasing dangerous aliens but aliens in league with a conspiracy in the federal government and United Nations. The conspiracy is willing to do anything to further its objectives, including killing, lying, and engaging in massive surveillance of the American people. “The X-Files” gave new meaning to the derisive slogan, “We”re from the government, and we”re here to help.” There were episodes devoted to government attempts at mind control, government use of bioweapons against its own citizens, and government medical experiments on unwitting Americans.
As Scott Richert put it in “Us vs. Them,” from Chronicles in “97, “The X-Files” achieved success “not because of any popular fascination with aliens, but because, after Ruby Ridge, Waco, Whitewater, Vince Foster, Mena, NAFTA, and GATT, Americans have every reason to believe that their government is being run with a callous disregard for their rights and welfare and for the enrichment of an entrenched ruling class.” In fact, as Richert noted in that article, the show even featured an episode, “Unrequited,” that showed the members of a right-wing militia as being both heroic”they had rescued MIAs left behind in southeast Asia by the government”and truthful”the militia leader is the only one who tells Mulder and Scully about the assassin who’s killing the military officers who had signed off on the decision to abandon him and his comrades in Vietnam. How many other TV shows ever cast a militiaman in a positive light?
Bill Clinton once affirmed that you could not both love your country and hate your government, a remark Sam observed was worthy of Brezhnev. It’s obvious why Sam was such fan of “The X-Files.”
However distrustful Mulder and Scully were of the government for which they worked, they never lost faith in America. Scully was the dutiful daughter of a Navy officer, and the boss and protector of Mulder and Scully at the FBI, Walter Skinner, was a proud Marine veteran of Vietnam. (Sam thought it significant that Mulder and Scully worked for the FBI, a bastion of Middle America, rather than the far more elitist CIA). That there is no contradiction between distrusting the government and loving America was brought home in “Jump the Shark,” the final episode featuring the Lone Gunmen, three freelance conspiracy theorists who kept tabs on government misdeeds and often aided Mulder and Scully.
In “Jump the Shark,” the three freely sacrifice their lives to stop a terrorist intent on unleashing a biological weapon and killing thousands of innocent people, causing one of their former adversaries who had worked with the conspiracy to describe them as “patriots” and prompting Skinner to “pull some strings” and get the trio buried at Arlington. As Scully observes at the burial, “like everyone buried here, the world’s a better place for their having been in it.” The love for America evident in those lines is as genuine as the distrust of the government.
“The X-Files” was also largely (though not entirely) devoid of the leftist themes that regularly appear in so much popular entertainment, such as a focus on the glories of multiculturalism and the evils of discrimination. In fact, the show eschewed the de rigueur multiculturalism which dictates that every scene (except ones depicting villains) be carefully integrated and that minorities show up as computer geniuses and the like in vastly greater numbers than in the real world. In many, perhaps most, of the show’s episodes all the characters were white, the minority characters who appeared in the show, just like the white characters, ranged the gamut from the morally ambiguous (Deputy Director Kersh, Mulder’s informant “X”) to the heroic (Agent Reyes), and there were no anguished discussions about race or discrimination.
What the series showed in terms of encounters between the established American culture and immigrant cultures also deviated from the standard multiculturalist script in which Americans are either oppressing immigrants or being enriched by them. In “Hell Money,” a Chinese doctor exploits his fellow immigrants by running a rigged lottery in which no one ever wins, but the losers end up being operated on and eventually killed so that their organs can be sold for profit. Even when the lottery is exposed as a fraud, the doctor evades justice because none of the immigrants are willing to testify against him. And a very sympathetic immigrant who has participated in the lottery in the hopes of earning money to treat his daughter’s leukemia (and loses an eye for his efforts) asks his daughter, “Do our ancestors scorn us for leaving our home? Is that why you are sick now?”
Although the immigrant father in “Hell Money” stays in Chinatown, other “X-Files” immigrants do indeed defy standard Hollywood protocol and decide to return home. In “Fresh Bones,” the problem is caused by a Marine colonel overseeing a refugee camp for Haitians. The colonel fully embraces multiculturalism to the point of becoming a practitioner of voodoo and actually holds the Haitians in North Carolina against their will until the leading priest reveals all his secrets. The problem is solved when the Haitians return to Haiti, after the colonel loses a voodoo contest with the Haitians” leader and ends up buried alive.
In “El Mundo Gira,” Eladio Buente, a Mexican farmworker in California is exposed to an extraterrestrial enzyme and begins to spread a disease that kills on contact. He is ostracized by his fellow illegal immigrants as “El Chupacabra,” a Mexican monster in which the immigrants fervently believe. For most of the episode, Buente is also being pursued by a brother seeking vengeance for Buente’s first victim, a woman loved by both men. None of his fellow immigrants is willing to protect him from his brother”even an ostensibly assimilated Mexican-American INS agent”because they all believe that “God curses a man who stands between two brothers.” Like the Haitians in “Fresh Bones,” Buente sees his salvation in returning to his homeland for good. “Diversity is strength,” as we all know, but it’s also clannishness and suspicion of outsiders, voodoo and superstition, and blood feuds.
“The X-Files” was largely silent on the hot button issues of the culture wars, but there were intriguing hints that once again the show’s sympathies were not with the Left. In “Colony,” Mulder and Scully investigate the deaths of abortionists who are not being killed by radical pro-lifers but by an alien bounty hunter. The aliens are using the fetal tissue gathered in this grisly trade to attempt to create an alien-human hybrid that will further their plans to colonize the Earth. The conspiracy, too, is working on creating transhuman hybrids, and for this reason one of its leading members is shown in “Redux II” watching with approval as Iowa Democratic Senator Tom Harkin describes as futile any effort to stop human cloning.
Then there’s the subject of sex, sex, sex”a topic to which much of our popular entertainment devotes endless hours and which “The X-Files” virtually ignored. The friendship between Mulder and Scully did not become a physical relationship until they had worked side by side with each other for many years, and even then the exact nature of their relationship was somewhat mysterious. It was as if each character was on a quest for the truth, and nothing else could take precedence”a chivalric ideal within a culture of “if it feels good, do it!”
This ideal was in fact realized in the case of the Lone Gunmen. In the episode “Three of a Kind,” their leader, John Fitzgerald Byers, is shown dreaming about what life would be like if he were married to Susanne Modeski, a woman he has fantasized about since meeting her nearly a decade before. At the end of the episode, Byers is given the chance to go off with Modeski but, fearing that he would endanger Modeski and not wanting to abandon his friends and their own quest for the truth, he declines to follow the woman he loves, a kind of choice that would have made perfect sense to a member of the Templars or the Hospitallers but that is exceedingly rare in today’s culture.
Perhaps the clearest conservative themes in “The X-Files” emerged in connection with religion. Scully’s Catholicism was the focus of several episodes, and she was depicted as a woman of sincere faith, if not a consistent churchgoer. Two episodes show Scully in the confessional, once after saving a boy who is a stigmatic from a man who was in league with the devil, and again after helping to thwart the devil from taking the souls of four teenage girls, whom Scully comes to believe had been sired by an angel. It’s doubtful a leftist show would ever feature the devil as a real character. It’s even less likely it would depict him occupying the professions he did when he appeared on “The X-Files”: a high school biology teacher (“Die Hand Die Verletzt”), a social worker (“All Souls”), and a liberal Protestant minister who advocates tolerance and opposes fundamentalism (“Signs & Wonders”).
“Signs & Wonders” might be the most reactionary episode in the entire series. Mulder and Scully go to rural Tennessee to investigate a murder, and they immediately begin to suspect Enoch O”Connor, a snake-handling fundamentalist preacher who expelled his daughter and her boyfriend from his congregation when she became pregnant. (Interestingly, in addition to sharing the same last name as the great Southern writer Flannery O”Connor, Enoch has the same first name as a character in O”Connor’s novel Wise Blood and wears old-fashioned glasses reminiscent of the type worn by the writer). When Scully complains to Mulder about O”Connor’s “intolerance,” he replies, “Sometimes a little intolerance can be a welcome thing. Clear cut right and wrong, hard and fast rules, no shades of gray.“
O”Connor’s opponent in the town is a liberal Protestant minister, whose church encourages members to “think for themselves” and “live [their lives] the way [they] want,” and which offers an “open and modern way . . .of looking at God.” Despite the attractiveness of the liberal minister and the rough edges of his fundamentalist counterpart, Mulder and Scully learn in the end that the murders have been committed by the liberal minister to discredit his fundamentalist rival, and the viewer learns that the liberal minister”who disappeared from Tennessee only to become the pastor of a church in liberal Connecticut”is the devil. Sam felt that no other series on TV would have produced an episode that so perfectly transgressed the norms of the liberal Zeitgeist, in which “tolerance” is the supreme good and any Christian who takes the traditions of his own faith too seriously is treated with suspicion at best or hostility at worse.
The religious theme became more explicit in “The Truth,” the final episode of the series. The series ends with Mulder and Scully on the run from the conspiracy and its friends in the government, hiding in a hotel room in New Mexico. These are the final lines spoken in the series:
Scully: “You”ve always said that you want to believe. But believe in what Mulder? If this is the truth that you”ve been looking for, then what is there to believe in?
Mulder: “I want to believe that the dead are not lost to us. That they speak to us as part of something greater than us”greater than any alien force. And if you and I are powerless now, I want to believe that if we listen, to what’s speaking, it can give us the power to save ourselves.”
Scully: “Then we believe the same thing.”
Mulder: “Maybe there’s hope.”
Lest the viewer have any doubt about what is being discussed, the camera zooms in on the tiny gold cross Scully has worn throughout the series. In discussing this ending with Sam, he told me that it contained the most pro-Christian sentiment he had seen in a mainstream television show in some years. “The X-Files” was hardly an apology for orthodox Christianity, and it explored many ways of believing, but its respect for belief certainly encompassed the Western traditions.
It appears that “I Want to Believe” may delve into some of these same themes. The tagline for the movie in its theatrical trailer is “To find the truth you must believe,” which is not that different from Anselm’s credo ut intelligam. But even if my guess about the movie is wrong, and Mulder and Scully end up embracing every leftist shibboleth imaginable, the original series will still continue rewarding intelligent viewers who give it a try, particularly those viewers who believe that the truth is out there, somewhere off to the right.
Tom Piatak is a contributing editor to Taki’s Magazine.
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