Egypt

About the rapidly cursive hand presently writing the history of Egypt, two observations.

The first is that if current reports are accurate, once again our President has shown himself entirely wrong in a crisis. If it is true that he threatened to suspend or seriously curtail foreign aid to Egypt if Hosni Mubarak responded with much force to the uprising, then President Obama is in some measure responsible for kicking the chair out from under the precariously situated leader. In a country which in the past two weeks has seen serious anti-Christian rioting on the part of Muslims, a country in which the Muslim Brotherhood is said to be ideologically powerful, that blow to Mubarak, possibly decisive, could have the effect of bringing a rigidly Islamic regime to power. If that happens, a very important ally of the United States--the one that controls the Suez Canal--becomes an enemy, and Israel will now contend not with a neutral country but a hostile power on its southern border.

The second is that TMH finds it very strange that President Obama, who could find no words of support for the those who rose two summers ago against the Iranian regime now seems to be aiding the protestors (revolutionaries?) in Egypt. The common thread seems to be that if the revolution might result in the institutionalization of Islamic extremism the President is for it, while if the revolution might threaten such a regime, he is opposed to it.

Finally (we at TMH can't count), one thinks back with less than equanimity to other revolutions. In history, these have not often been portents of good. They were for the best in Eastern Europe in 1989; other revolutions have been less reassuring. The French Revolution, the Russian, the Cuban, and the Iranian all ended with regimes far worse than those they replaced; only the American Revolution led to a happier situation, and as Burke argued, 1776 was not so much a revolution, a great change, as it was an attempt to restore the liberties that the colonists had held in the days of salutary neglect before the accession of George III. What is unfolding in Egypt now may be a good thing, but if historical example is statistically reliable, it is more likely to be very messy indeed. In the long term, Hegel (and Fukuyama) may be right. In the short term, this momentous change may not work out well for western democracy and for the United States, which is still the primary guarantor of peace and stability where it may still be found in this troubled world.

My Kingdom

The shooting two weeks ago of Rep. Giffords has once again, though in a convoluted way, focused national attention on illegal immigration. The connection supposedly lies in an association of ideas: just as violent rhetoric by conservatives led to the attempted assassination, so the generally violent rhetoric about defending our borders seems to have a particular place in the intemperate political atmosphere of Arizona. But if rhetoric on cable news shows housed in New York can animate response in the Southwest, repressive laws in the Southwest can suggest action elsewhere; the Mississippi State Senate, for example, passed just two days ago a law-enforcement bill very similar to the controversial law that went into effect last year in (where else?) Arizona.

To believe the arguments given above takes a great leap of blind faith: most obviously this argument about rhetoric and violence assumes that people act badly because of opinion they hear expressed in the media. (The even larger practical matter is that the shooter was, if anything, not conservative but left wing--but let that pass, since we are speaking theoretically here.) The liberals making this claim, however, are the same people who have for decades fervently asserted as a central pillar of their faith that offensive programming in media does not affect people's behavior. Despite the fact that children are more impressionable than the 23-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, hours and hours of Real World, Tila Tequila, Skins, and Jersey Shore have no effect at all on adolescent behavior. The inconsistency is startling; it casts great suspicion on those who now want to claim that a single phrase or electoral map by Sarah Palin would be responsible for an act of violence.

But since we are speaking of tenuous connections, we should look again at the matter of illegal immigration. (I should point out, with great modesty, that my second post at this blog outlines what I still think is the only reasonable solution to the problem of illegl immigration--a solution both just, sane, and compassionate.) In particular, I would like to look at the arguments made by the Catholic Church on the matter. It is possible that the Church has a practical vested interest in the matter, since so many American Catholics are now Hispanic: a large percentge of the local Catholic population in the neighborhood of Meridian Heat, for example, consists of illegal immigrants. (Once again, to illustrate the complexity of this blog's views of the matter, the writer of TMH is godfather to a child born here to parents who immigrated illegally.) At any rate, the Church speaks frequently on the matter, and it often speaks on the matter by saying that since Scripture commands us to be generous and hospitable, so the United States should be hospitable to illegal immigrants. At least in the local Catholic press, however, I have never seen such assumptions themselves examined.

Like all assumptions, however, they need to be examined carefully before we adopt them as principles of action. Many in the Catholic Church seem to argue that since the Bible commands a certain action, our nation should follow it. The New Testament, however, says little about what nations should do: what it commands, it commands of individuals, and it is not at all clear that what it commands of individuals it commands of nations. One example that springs readily to mind is the commandment in the Sermon on the Mount that we should turn the other cheek when someone has hurt us. Obviously Christ was talking at that point about relations between individuals: if someone has treated you unjustly, you shouldn't strive to retaliate but to diffuse the situation with kindness and model the same sacrifical love that Christ did when He died for us. But to lift that commandment out of its context and apply it to nations would obviously lead to preposterous results. Did the Japanese commit an immoral attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941? No matter: turn the other cheek. Perhaps if we refuse to retaliate, they will learn that they, too, should lay down their arms. Sadaam Hussein invade and take over an ally? I think that we should turn the other cheek. Certainly we shouldn't respond in kind to Al-Quaeda's attacks on 9-11.

Such a misapplication of the Scriptural principle is obviously inane; less obvious is an injunction of the type that Christ gave to the rich young ruler to sell all he had and give it to the poor. If the United States, as a nation, were to follow this injunction, there would be chaos in our streets. To take all the nation's wealth and transfer it to such poor nations as Zimbabwe or Tanzania would do nothing for the starving in those nations and would extinguish all the lights in that shining city on the hill that has done more to inspire human excellence and goodness than all the foreign aid in history. Nevertheless, such passages have been used in the past by Church officials to promote certain left-wing policies of a socialist nature. But do these passages apply to nations as a whole? Are they not rather directed at individuals who ask Christ such questions as "What must I do to be saved?" And is not Christ's response about what the individual must do to be saved? While the Old Testament sometimes suggests that nations can achieve salvation, the New Testament seems to teach much more clearly that salvation is a matter of individual, not national, standing. The Church Herself teaches that at the end of time individuals will be judged for their actions; it doesn't seem clear that nations as a whole can achieve salvation.

Christ Himself on several occasions seems to say that He came to earth to deal with individuals, not nations. When he was asked about the payment of taxes, His response indicates that the things of God are directed more at individuals than they are at nations, which last fall under the rubric of the things of Caesar. And when brought before Pilate, who understandably worries that Christ's teaching may have a social dimension that would upset the tenuous political arrangement in first-century Palestine, Christ says, "Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo" ("My kingdom is not of this world"). Finally, when the crowd following Jesus wanted to institutionalize His teaching, as it were, and make Him a political ruler, He fled from them, presumably because reading His commandments in political terms would obscure the fact that they aren't supposed to be carried out for us vicariously by people on Capitol Hill but that they are meant to transform our lives, individually, by getting us to make the hard changes to our souls necessary to fulfill His will.

I don't, however, wish by any means in this post to repeat the old shibboleth of "separation of Church and State." What I mean to say is this: the argument that our nation must pursue a policy BECAUSE Christ enjoins that practice in the Gospels is fallacious. To call something a fallacy doesn't necessarily say of it that its conclusion is wrong. It does, however, say that the argument just given doesn't support the conclusion. In the case of illegal immigration, there may be very good reason to allow complete amnesty to all those who cross into the United States from Mexico, but if there is it will be for reasons other than Christ telling us individually to love our neighbors. Too many in the Church seem to think that if they can find in a passage of the Bible a keyword that belongs also to the compassionate side in a political debate then they have shown that we must also take that side of the political argument. But that isn't necessarily true at all. It is very likely that what Christ says in a given passage He says to individuals, and individuals, even all of them together in a particular place and time, are not the same thing as a nation, which is greater than the sum of its parts. As shown by the example of turning the other cheek, what is good for one is not necessarily good for all together, and to claim as a matter of course that it is can lead to something even worse than sloppy thinking.

Bays

As the winter nights come upon us early, descending on all around with chill and a darkness deepened by the cold, one thinks back to warmer days--especially those of the almost perfect autumn just past. Not just because of the vivid yellows and reds of the leaves, autumn was well-night perfect this year also because of news from Oslo that the Nobel Prize in literature had been awarded to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

It was commonplace to decry last year's bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize upon Barack Obama, just as many had ridiculed the decision to give it to Al Gore in 2007, but it is well to remember that the Peace Prize occasionally goes to those who richly deserve it. One thinks, for instance, of Aung San Suu Kyii; and Liu Xiaobo, who won the award this year, certainly deserves the award if anyone does, since he, like Aung, has risked his life in his attempt to bring greater freedom to his countrymen (and thereby also to the world at large, which means, dear reader, to you and me). If the Peace Prize has has an ideologically spotty record, the Prize in Literature recently has been well bestowed. Despite what the fashionable critics say about the irrelevance of the writer's life to his work, it is good to see the occasional writer live out the principles he enjoins in his work--for this reason, it was gratifying that Orhan Pamuk, who has had to leave his native Turkey and beloved Istanbul because of remarks he has made about his countrymen's historic slaughter of Armenians, won the Prize in 2008. Not only does he write impressively, but he has had to pay a price for his views. And last year the prize went to Herta Mueller, a writer who suffered a great deal in her native Romania for speaking out, as much as was possible, against Nikolai Caucescu's brutal regime.

Although he has been to some extent ostracized for his lack of adherence to left-wing dogma, Vargas Llosa hasn't had to suffer as Mueller and perhaps Pamuk have. He does, however, certainly live his beliefs. Early on, he was a devoted Marxist, but as he has grown older his views have moved rightward, and while he is no George W. Bush or Sarah Palin (no one who thinks of himself as a citizen of the world can ever be that), he has felt the pressure because of his views from those among the international intelligentsia with whom he consorts. A number, particularly in Europe, have found his views so far beyond the pale that they have in very strong terms denounced his receiving the Nobel, but to show just how small their pale is, one need only remember that the supposedly reactionary Vargas Llosa espouses essentially unrestricted immigration from poor countries to wealthier ones. (See his essay "Los inmigrantes" in his volume of essays entitled El lenguaje de la pasion, an essay that begins, appropriately enough for so quixotic a thesis, by recounting an experience he had while visiting some friends in La Mancha.)

No, Vargas Llosa's conservativism, which he with reason calls neo-liberalism--in the old nineteenth-century British sense of open trade and general democracy--is a generous thing, born of a large spirit that seems to relish the physical delights of daily existence and move with a genuine concern for the good of his fellow human beings, particularly those in Latin America who because of corruption and kleptocracy have been cheated of a standard of life that might otherwise have been theirs. Over time he has seen again and again how the seductive promises of one Messianic leader after another have deceived the poorly-educated Latin American voter into thinking that there is a short and easy way to national prosperity, with the result that everyone suffers, everyone, that is, except for the Messianic leader. Anyone who thinks that the caricature is a thing of a dimly-remembered past inhabited by Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito need look no further than Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is hardly more sophisticated than the Caudillo in the 1970s film The In-Laws. But the cast of extras in Venezuela doesn't get to go home at the end of the day--they get to live the movie week after week, month after month, as their economy implodes, their institutions crack up, and foreign investment slips away with the tide. This conviction that real people suffer for the sins of egomaniacs paving their own success with the misery of their countrymen is what seems to have motivated Vargas Llosa's growing conviction, and it certifies his humanity along with his integrity, since it is based not on concern for himself but on concern for those whose potential is often squandered by others who take the easy way to their own material success.

I see, however, that this present essay does what Vargas Llosa's never do, and that is stry much beyond the concrete and particular, so herewith some specific observations. Perhaps his longest essay is his magical memoir El Pez en El Agua, in which he recounts his early life and education in the Peru of the 1950s and, in alternating chapters, his run for the presidency of that country in 1990. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, the early life and education was spectacularly fruitful. It contains a wonderfully rich experience of life in Bolivia and Peru, as a student, a denizen of the bars of Lima, an occasion patron of brothels, as a student of distinguished Peruvian historians, as a cub reporter, aspiring playwright, and, most colorfully of all, husband of a woman sufficiently older and closely enough related to him to be called his "Aunt Julia." He writes about all this with the what he elsewhere attributes to the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz--the language of passion, a writing that clearly delights in the remembrance of the rich fabric as he turns it over in the image-house of memory. This delight comes out very well in the ironic detachment and good humor with which he writes about his own naivete and false steps. And he manages it all in a Spanish whose clarity is such that the beginner in Spanish can relish the entire pageant.

But delightful as this romantic narrative is, the other narrative, the one in which he recounts the presidential campaign of 1990, contains the essential political vision. The narrative glistens with veins of ore like those in the fabled Peruvian silver mines. There are his observations on the dangers of Alain Garcia's nationalization of the private sector over the course of the 1980s: perhaps the greatest cautionary tale is about what happened when the government nationalized the banks. Over time it apparently became difficult for those who didn't support the government to take out the large loans necessary to start businesses. (This produced a particularly striking impression when I read it in the early days of the Obama presidency as the Federal government was bailing out the investment banks. If they government would eventually become a major partner in a major bank, would it--because of separation of Church and State--begin to deny funds for, say, the construction of a large downtown church building? Never mind that now: as we learn this week, the government of New York City is actively engaged in making the controversial case for the construction of the mosque close to Ground Zero.) Another rich insight comes in the chapter entitled "El intelectual barato" ("The cheap intellectual") about those who congratulate themselves on their liberal credentials while being bought off by precisely those corrupt politicos who destroy the very freedoms that these writers claim to cherish. It is the best meditation I know on the subject, one with obvious relevance in our own day when we hear--rather, do not hear--everywhere those who claim to be the boldest for women's rights say nothing, nothing at all, about the almost unimaginable suffering of women in some of the Islamic regimes around the world, nay, some of the Islamic enclaves in Western Europe.

But we are back to where we started. Although he is a first-rate novelist, essayist, and literary critic (his study of Les Miserables is one of the best pieces of criticism I know), he will live enduringly in part because all of this writing flows from the hand and mind of one who believes enough in what he says to have lived the ideals he presses, however self-effacingly, on others.

Don't Blame Us for the Culture Wars

The news is plain: the lame-duck Congress, far more ambitious after its historical chastisement by the voters than it ever seemed before, is on the verge of one of the greatest social innovations in living memory. It will shortly repeal the Clinton-era policy of Don't Ask Don't Tell, thereby allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. military. What social liberals hail as a great step forward for civil rights, however, may be seen as something else entirely.

One notes, first, that the gain was not entirely honest. Like that other huge innovation in social change--Roe v. Wade--this action is not nearly so forthright as one would wish such sweeping change to be. Long after the fact, we learned that the central fact of Roe v. Wade was a lie: Ms "Roe" had not been raped, as she claimed, but at the time that claim was absolutely necessary to impart to the case a sense of emotional urgency and illustrate the gross injustice of anti-abortion laws. But the fact that the major claim turns out to have been a fabrication has left opponents of abortion bitterly dissatisfied with the ruling of the court and all the more sure of the rightness of their opposition to it.

Something similar will be true in the case of this repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. For the central fact of this case is that it is being enacted by a Congress whose partisan liberalism was soundly repudiated in the last election: the only decent thing to do would be for this Congress to do as little as possible in deference to the overwhelming decision to strip it of its power to do anything. It is as it were a technicality that the Congress has the power at this moment to do anything at all. As they showed yesterday in the matter of the Continuing Resolution, the defeat in November should leave them with very little room to legislate, which is why they abandoned their grandiose plans and left it to the next Congress to produce a budget to fuel our government. With social engineering, however, the stakes are so high that the liberals will take their gains any way they can, even if the gains are tainted by illegitimacy. And so, rather than wait for the slow but more solid progress that would almost certainly have come their way in the wake of changing social attitudes, the social revolutionaries have once again grasped the chance of the moment in order to cause a change that society just at the moment seems not to want.

What is worse, as we have seen again and again in the legal sphere, such change will have very large consequences, which may well be one reason for passing this bill. With repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the pro-homosexual rights lobby has gained immense momentum for the cause of homosexual marriage. The cry will shortly go up that if homosexuals are able to serve--indeed, to die for--their country, the country cannot possibly deny them their right to marry. They will now have legal standing in the most visible, honorable, and effective branch of the Federal Government, and so there can be no logic to any other branch of government, Federal or local, denying them full legal right to marry. So, as with abortion, this enormous change in social policy will be effected by technical maneuvres, not by what would be far better for the nation--a hard won and organically developed social consensus.

The sense of alienation produced in conservatives will be strengthened by the sense that compomise with other side is impossible. We would do well to remember that Don't Ask Don't Tell was itself the grand compromise. Traditionalists did not want to change the long-standing ban on homosexuals in the military; homosexuals wanted to overturn it. Don't Ask Don't Tell was a compromise that allowed both sides to split the difference: homosexuals could serve, so long as they didn't flaunt their status. That was the compromise, but the compromise for the past few years has been denounced as immoral. The only alternative, then, is not to allow compromise--to let one camp have its way entirely while the other is left with nothing. Those liberals who decry the partisan spirit in Washington would do well to remember who it was that in this instance repudiated and destroyed the compromise. They now have the policy they wanted, but they have gained it at the cost of alienating very many people who in the past had shown themselves able to work toward shared solutions. On this issue at least, it is not the traditionalists who have shown inflexibility.

Years ago, when at the 1992 Republican National Convention Pat Buchanan called for sending the National Guard to help suppress the rioting in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodny King verdict, I was stunned to hear the liberal news anchors say that Buchanan was calling for a culture war. In truth, Buchanan (with whom Meridian Heat disagrees on any number of issues) was firing one round in a war that had been declared by the social liberals back in the 1960s, when they began vigorously to pursue policies that they knew would provoke, upset, and incite bitter reaction in the majority of the American people. Once again we witness such a move. Months from now, however, the liberal elite in the media will point out that the fault lies with those who resent the ruse; and those who, in a thoroughly discredited Congress acting on a technicality decided to pass a highly controversial bill that will have very large social consequences will be spoken of as entirely blameless. Those who object to this manner of making sausages will be dismissed as the provocateurs, while the sausage makers will wonder how anyone could possibly object to the process. As always, irony abounds in democratic politics. Sometimes, however, it is well to point those ironies out.

Islam and Pluralism

"The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."--W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

A recent email controversy with a friend about the possibility of whether moderate Muslims in Western countries will truly accept the pluralism of democratic societies has set me wondering about what exactly pluralism is and whence it comes.

Pluralism seems to be an Enlightenment ideal, most obviously informing such late-eighteenth-century documents as the Constitution or the Universal Declaration of the Rights of man. In part, pluralism surely arises from the conviction that--as the Declaration of Independence states--all men are created equal and therefore, as the Declaration goes on to imply, any given person does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others. Strictly speaking, however, the Declaration enumerates in what ways we are equal: in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here the Declaration does not speak so much of religious or philosophical pluralism, and even where the Constitution does address this matter, it does so only by limiting the power of the Federal government in this area.

One wonders, however, if that is the entire story. We allow a variety of faiths to exist in our society because we do not believe that a believer in one has greater legal standing than a believer in another, but perhaps we allow this variety for another, less positive, reason. In fact, I wonder whether pluralism does not also (and paradoxically) stem from skepticism. Skepticism as a mainstream philosophy arises in the West during the Renaissance, and two well-known skeptics will illustrate the point very well. Both the French essayist Montaigne and the English essayist and statesman Francis Bacon were skeptics, in that they believed that human reason was a flawed thing that tended often to misprision and error. They believed that much of the what in the Middle Ages had been accepted as certain had to be subjected to careful scrutiny and that since it is difficult for man to know things, he may well know less than he traditionally thought he did.

Such skepticism, of course, is essential for scientific progress, and it is no coincidence that Bacon is seen as one of the great Renaissance prophets of science in Europe. Skepticism grew in influence over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in England (at least) such writers as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume asserted that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, thereby practically denying Divine revelation as a means to knowledge. What skepticism gained for science, however, it began to lose for faith, and long before Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach" in the early 1850s, the Sea of Faith had begun its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."

In just such a climate--in which enlightened opinion was losing the medieval certainty about religion--the modern nation-state was born. This nation-state was populated, to be sure, by passionate believers, but while most of these believers were Christians, they included also some Christians of a rather unorthodox variety, such as Quakers, and others, like Deists, who were not strictly speaking Christians at all. It seems entirely plausible that the system of pluralism that marks the American founding or the birth of the modern European nation state rests upon a skeptical foundation--i.e., since it was difficult to be certain of fundamental truth, we shouldn't privilege one conviction over another, and so all faiths were welcome that (whatever their internal claims to certainty) at least respected this climate of pluralism based on a certain intellectual humility.

Islam, however, has never doubted itself. While it has tolerated the existence of other faiths, it has relegated them to a clearly second-place position, the philosophical basis for which is that Islam is the one right path and that others are wrong, though Islam agrees that as a matter of historical fact some groups still cling to these erroneous faiths. The Islam that seems to be projecting itself around the world seems not to be infected with the skeptical self-doubt that has infected Western thought and has produced a climate in which since Western man is uncertain about matters of faith he will accept all as equally certain (or uncertain). Into this scheme Islam does not readily fit, since it seems not fundamentally to question itself.

From this, what follows? First, the skepticism of the West is both a good thing and a bad thing. It allows a plurality of philosophical belief, but it does in the end privilege skepticism itself. To the effect that skepticism is more closely allied to science, materialism, and agnosticism, the West tends to privilege these positions over Christian belief, as witness Supreme Court rulings on what may and may not be taught in the public schools. And the certainty of Islam is likewise good and bad. It is good in the sense that it animates Muslim faith and bad because so much of the energy inherent in Islam manifests itself by destroying those who oppose it. If, however, the narrative of West has for the past several centuries been in large part a narrative of skepticism, then Islam, by definition, will have great difficulty fitting in and may in fact pose an existential threat.

Corruption

If one begins, as Aristotle recommends, with a definition, then we might define corruption as the a person in a group or organization making decisions (i.e., using his power) for his own benefit rather than for the benefit of the whole. Corrupt behavior, therefore, which sacrifices the good others to one's own interests, is considered craven and contemptible. The opposite of corruption is heroism, since the hero is almost defined as one who sacrifices his own good--sometimes to the point of his life--for the good of others. One need only look at the roots of our culture to see how much Western society values the heroic and despises the opportunistic: from the self-serving behavior of Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad, which causes a complicated skein of bitterness and tragedy, to the heroic, sacrificial love of Christ which resolves the central problem of humanity, Western society has always valued the hero and despised the corrupt. One might observe a paradox in this matter: Western society is indeed individualistic, but the individualism that we seem most to value is that which distinguishes the individual who gives the most to the most.

American society, more than perhaps any other, seems to disdain corruption. If the definition of corruption offered above is accurate, then the Declaration of Independence is not only primarily a denunciation of corruption--a long list of the tyrannical decisions made by King George for his own benefit rather than the benefit of the colonists--but also an assertion of heroic self-sacrifice since at the end despite all odds the signers pledge to give up all they personally value to the point of their lives in order to end this corruption. And if the Constitution, as has often been observed, is a document that prevents the accumulation of power in the hands of a few individuals by encouraging decentralization and at times conflict, then what is that document but a great plan to make corruption as difficult as possible?

Earlier in modern history, the accumulation of power that made corruption possible (nay, even likely, though not inevitable) was aided by a virtually monolithic news media that was relatively left wing. (I have often been amused by how very quickly those who told me in the 1980s that there was no such thing as media bias have claimed with horror that Fox News is biased.) But with increasing rapidity, the new media (this is such a commonplace that I yawn writing it) have decentralized the production and distribution of news, and the American people now have multiple sources of information, which allows them to make more informed decisions about politics--and in particular allows them to see when an individual, group, or organization is corrupt, i.e., acting primarily in their own interest, rather than in the interest of others.

And this ability to interrogate those in power has made corruption less possible in recent years. As the sheer power of the government grows and therefore the temptation to corruption increases, simultaneously the risk of corrupt behavior becomes more pronounced. It is now difficult to remember, but the elections of 1994, which swept Republicans into power in the House of Representatives for the first time in half a century, was a response to the massive corruption, epitomized by the House Post Office scandal. And people heard about this corruption through the new medium of talk radio, which mercilessly flogged the issue of Democrat corruption. Republicans themselves grew so used to Congressional power that they in turn grew corrupt. The practice of earmarks, for example, is a precise example of corruption--the spending of money primarily to further the career of the person casting the vote to spend the money--and such spending, along with other examples of corruption, such as the sexual misbehavior of powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill, met condign reproof in the elections of 2006.

Now, in 2010, we have many pundits and prognosticators who explain to us the various psychological reasons why voters are moving in droves towards the Republican Party. But it is not possible to believe that we have a massive ideological shift in two short years. The reasons are complex, of course, but surely a major (if not the major) reason for the current polls is that Americans have grown impatient with the corruption they see in Democratic Washington. When legislators routinely refused to listen to the expressed will of the people and voted for health-care reform in a patently corrupt process in which special favors were given to some representatives to secure their votes and assure victory, people saw it as an abuse of power. When people hear Candidate Obama decrying holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and then see him continue the practice, or speak of the immorality of rendition and then continue (if not increase) the practice, they begin to get the feeling that this man who seemed during the campaign to use words to heal, transcend, inspire (in short to use language for the benefit of others) was in fact using words simply to increase his own power.

The fitting end to such corruption is that power be taken away from the corrupt who use it for their own benefit. This is the real meaning of the Tea Party. It is a manifestly anticorrupt movement. It has no individual or group of individuals who benefit from its power: it elects unlikely people who are expected to govern not in their own interest but for the good of those who elected them. This is why the Tea Partiers prefer candidates who pledge to eschew earmarks. This is why the ancestors of the Tea Partiers liked term limits: because those too prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of the few. And, finally, this is why the watchword of the season is "the Constitution." That is short-hand for promoting a system that limits corruption and encourages genuine, heroic statesmanship that sacrifices personal advantage to the good of the governed.

I'm Back

After almost two months of lassitude--induced no doubt by this (blasted) Meridian heat--I have returned. Not because it's any cooler (it isn't: it might as well be mid-July around here) but because conscience has pricked me into action. That and the withering example of the early Rudyard Kipling, whose correspondence I have been reading in the excellent edition of Thomas Pinney, recently published. So when he worked in what is now Lahore, Pakistan in the 1880s, Kipling would regularly complain to his correspondents that on such and such a summer's day he would have plied his trade as a journalist for 10 or 12 hours that day, when temperatures were 115 degrees, with a low the previous evening of 90. So if he can do that without ice or airconditioning, a far lesser mortal with all the comfortable advantages of technology can, well, do far less but at the very least do something.

And so, rather than merely thinking about such matters as the success of Sara Palin in picking winners in Republican primaries across the country or President Obama telling us that Muslims have the Constitutional right to build a mosque at Ground Zero without telling us also that Molly Norris, the Seattle journalist now in hiding because of death threats stemming from her asking readers to draw cartoons of Mohammed, has the Constitutional right to live free from such molestation--rather, I say, than merely thinking about such things, I have resolved once again to think about these things with fingertips on keys, as it were, and inform the desperately waiting world just what I think about these matters.

But first things first. Since I have been a sluggard, and since too quick exercise after a lull is bad for the body, I will conclude today with a poem by the later Kipling. Although he wrote it when some say he was past his prime, it is a poem that bears very careful reading, not least because so many of the sentiments it contains can profitably be applied to our own elitists who decry the achievements of the United States in securing liberty for others around the globe. Enjoy.

Memories
1930

"The eradication of memories of the Great War. -SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT ORGAN

The Socialist Government speaks:
THOUGH all the Dead were all forgot
And razed were every tomb,
The Worm-the Worm that dieth not
Compels Us to our doom.
Though all which once was England stands
Subservient to Our will,
The Dead of whom we washed Our hands,
They have observance still.

We laid no finger to Their load.
We multiplied Their woes.
We used Their dearly-opened road
To traffic with Their foes:
And yet to Them men turn their eyes,
To Them are vows renewed
Of Faith, Obedience, Sacrifice,
Honour and Fortitude!

Which things must perish. But Our hour
Comes not by staves or swords
So much as, subtly, through the power
Of small corroding words.
No need to make the plot more plain
By any open thrust;
But-see Their memory is slain
Long ere Their bones are dust!

Wisely, but yearly, filch some wreath-
Lay some proud rite aside-
And daily tarnish with Our breath
The ends for which They died.
Distract, deride, decry, confuse-
(Or-if it serves Us-pray!)
So presently We break the use
And meaning of Their day!