Buckaroo
I mentioned a while ago that the 20th of June is a major celebration around here, for various reasons. This year, my wife decided to get me a dog. We haven't had a pet in years, due to lease restrictions -- we move so often that we've just rented and not owned a house. While I was in Iraq, however, she convinced our landlord that she needed a dog for protection, and they altered the lease to permit one dog. However, she never actually got around to getting one.
It took almost a month, but we found the right one after much searching at area shelters. His name is Buck -- short for Buckaroo -- and I see no reason to change it.
I think he'll be happy here.
Eucharist Desecration
Cassandra is doing ethics today. I love ethics -- it is one of the most interesting branches of philosophy. Studying it, though, does require that you spend a few hours, or years, challenging things that might otherwise be bedrock principles of your life:
Well, in fairness, if you put people into an ethics class, you are asking them to try using their minds to challenge ethical teachings. The concept is to reaffirm ethics by teaching them not just what is wrong, but why it is wrong.Still, as the discussion shows, the momentary idiocy kept in the class can lead to a better, truer understanding of ethics to guide you through the rest of your life. That's the whole point of teaching the class.
That means they have to pose challenges to the principles. You're supposed to try to see if there are ways around the principle at work: then, if there aren't, you've found something solid.
A lot of students grasp that they're supposed to try to challenge the principles -- that's the point of the class -- but lack the background or understanding to pose a real challenge. They end up sounding like idiots, but they really are doing what students are supposed to do.
This is the work of philosophy, though, which can lead you to refine what you had thought was a precisely formulated ethical principle.
If a student of ethics says something foolish, then, cut him some slack. If a professor of ethics says something horrible in class, he is probably trying to challenge the students in the other direction -- to challenge the principles they hold true, to force them to find a way to defend them. That, also, leads to a deeper understanding of the principles.
A professor of biology will have a harder time justifying himself.
Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:I gather from his reply (at the link) that he considers himself a sort of counter-Crusader, boldly standing against religion in the... well, against religion. He objects to Catholics trying to get him fired for using a University-owned computer and server to try and organize an attack on their faith. (Actually, being only an associate professor, he's probably in some real danger of getting fired over the matter.)“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”
So, let's do ethics here. What is the ethical principle the professor is using to justify his behavior? Can it, in fact, be justified? Are the Catholics wrong to respond as they are doing, by trying to get him fired for this behavior? If so, why? If not, why not?
UPDATE: There appears to be some confusion about the server's ownership: I'm now seeing reports that actually it's a private server, to which the University's webpages simply link. Does that change the moral issues at work? Is it wrong to try to fire the man his private conduct? Is the fact that the University links to the blog (assuming it proves out that it is privately owned) important, or irrelevant?
Heros in Hollywood
James Bowman has penned a confused critique of Hollywood that nevertheless contains a large kernel of truth: Hollywood has largely quit portraying American heroism in its traditional fashion.
American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia.The confusion he experiences arises later in the piece, and seems to have two causes. First, he wants to say that Hollywood has changed recently, but finds roots for all the problems he cites going back through the 1930s, and especially in the postwar. This problem is easy to dispose of: it used to be that Hollywood could explore both genuine heroism and these other models; but now, it rarely attempts genuine heroism.
The second problem is larger, and odd given his profession. He misunderstands at least two critical examples: one that he uses at length, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and one he fails to cite where it is most necessary, Open Range.
Open Range is something I cited in a piece on this topic in 2005.
In some respects, Open Range is almost a reversal of High Noon: the entire town comes out with rifles, unasked, to defend strangers they really aren't sure about; and in the end, the ability of one of those strangers to do violence for justice is enough to win him a place in their hearts. Where Gary Cooper left in disgust, Kevin Costner found a home and the respect of a people.In the context of Bowman's piece, Open Range is even more important. Boss Spearman, played by Robert Duvall, is exactly a hero of the type he says that Hollywood doesn't do anymore:
But it is “3:10 to Yuma” that offers the most interesting contrast between the old-fashioned sort of Western and the new breed. It was a remake of a movie first made in 1957, directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. Like so many other Westerns of the period, it was a parable of the heroism of the ordinary people who brought civilization, peace, and prosperity to the Wild West. Heflin’s character, Dan Evans, is a simple farmer in danger of losing his farm to drought who, for the $200 it would take to pay the mortgage, accepts the task of escorting Ford’s Ben Wade, a dangerous killer, to catch the eponymous train to trial. At a moment when it looks as if he is sure to die in the attempt, Evans explains to his wife that he is no longer escorting the prisoner for the money but as a civic duty. “The town drunk gave his life because he thought people should be able to live in peace and decency together,” he said. “Can I do less?”There is in Open Range. While Kevin Costner's character, Charlie Waite, qualifies as a 'victim hero' of the type Bowman describes, Boss Spearman is a genuine hero. He is a decent, honest, hardworking man. He tries to help others who need it, including the boy they have taken in from starvation to train as a cowboy until they can find him other work. People respond to his example, like the troubled Waite, who has followed him for ten years just because he sees in Spearman's example a way to overcome his past and live a decent life in spite of his dark impulses.
Needless to say, there is no comparable line in the remake.
He is finally roused to full battle over the same principle Evans cites: a fury at a rancher who will not allow people to live in peace and decency. After a murderous attack on his small band, who were only passing through, he comes to town to settle up.
We got a warrant sworn for attempted murder for them that tried to kill the boy who's laying over there at the doc's. Swore out another one for them that murdered the big fellow you had in your cell. Only ours ain't writ by no tin star bought and paid for, Marshal.... Baxter's men bushwhacked our friend and shot him dead. Shot a 15-year-old boy, too. And clubbed him so hard, he might not live. Tried to take our cattle. Your marshal here ain't gonna do nothing about it.... A man's got a right to protect his property and his life.As noted above, what is so inspiring about the movie is how -- once someone finally stands up to the tyrant rancher -- the townsfolk increasingly start to side with the embattled cattlemen, finally coming out in full. It is the reverse of High Noon in another thing too: at the end of the movie, the town embraces them. The two cattlemen enter into a partnership to run the saloon in town, and Waite -- finally relieved of so much of his fear and loneliness -- falls in love with and marries the sister of the town's doctor.
Bowman is not wrong to say that such movies are rare. Nevertheless, the abscence of Open Range is a critical failing in a piece devoted to this topic.
Meanwhile, his concept of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is simply wrong.
The subtext of films featuring the whistle-blower hero, the cartoon hero, and the victim hero is that heroism—heroism of the, say, Gary Cooper type—belongs to the public and communal sphere, now universally supposed to be cruel and corrupt, and therefore is really no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable.Tom Doniphon does reject "a larger civic responsibility" in the early parts of the movie, but not nearly so emphatically as Mr. Bowman describes -- and not at all for the reason he suggests. First of all, Doniphon does help Ransom Stoddard in several ways: rescuing him on the trail, arranging to feed him until he can get back on his feet, and protecting him when Liberty Valance bullies him at the steakhouse. Because there is a code of honor at work, he must find a pretense to step in: the one he chooses is the steak lost when Stoddard is tripped by Liberty, which was Tom's own steak. In addition, he has a role in civic responsibility -- he helps to run the meeting to appoint delegates to the territorial convention.
That seems to have been the point of the great John Ford film of 1962 called “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” In it, John Wayne plays rancher Tom Doniphon in the Wild West town of Shinbone, which is still part of a territory not admitted to statehood and has only a comically feckless Andy Devine resembling anything like a duly constituted authority. Shinbone is terrorized by an outlaw named Liberty Valance, played by the great Lee Marvin. An idealistic lawyer named Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) comes to town to practice his profession only to find that there is no law there. In fact, he himself is robbed by Liberty on his way into town, yet he can find no one there who thinks that this is any of his business, or that it is even possible for this outlaw to be brought to justice. The law is helpless where there is no law enforcement. As Doniphon advises the newcomer, “Out here men take care of their own problems.”
Doniphon is the only man in town capable of standing up to Liberty, but as he himself hasn’t been robbed he doesn’t quite see why anyone else being robbed, let alone this geeky stranger, should be any business of his. Eventually, the idea of a larger civic responsibility begins to sink in—and, with it, a sense that it has become incumbent on him to do what no one else can do. Yet it can only be done outside the law, which remains powerless. This puts Doniphon and Liberty (the name is of course significant) on the same side. Both are outlaws whose would-be heroic struggle has no place in a civilized community. When Wayne triumphs, a way must be found for the townspeople to pretend that it is the law which has rid them of the depredations of Liberty and his gang, and a way duly is found. Stoddard is hailed as a hero and Doniphon, the real hero, is forgotten.
Ford’s film was a parable less of the coming of civilization to the West than of the cultural transformation that was taking place in the postwar period in America and elsewhere—a transformation which resulted in an early but unmistakable foreshadowing of the death of the hero in the 1970s.
What Doniphon does in terms of rejection is not done out of a sense of being 'on the same side as Liberty Valance,' that is, the side that is against law. He participates in the attempts to bring law to the territory. He just has other plans for himself, as he says plainly when turning down a nomination to be one of the delegates: and those plans are made crystal clear by the film. He loves Haley, has been building a home for her, plans to marry her, and wants only to live on his ranch with her in peace. What he does by way of rejecting a larger role in civic authority is done out of that love and that desire.
This is also why he is destroyed by the killing of Valance: not because it brings law to the territory, but because it loses him Haley forever. She had been moving increasingly into Stoddard's orbit, and in her reaction to Stoddard's survival and apparent victory against Liberty, Doniphon sees that he has lost everything he ever wanted. He destroys his home, never rebuilds it, and dies eventually in miserable poverty. Without her, he found nothing in life worth wanting.
It is also entirely wrong to say that "a way must be found for the townspeople to pretend that it is the law" that rid them of Liberty. The townspeople don't have to pretend: they have no idea that it wasn't Stoddard who did it. More, they aren't pretending that "the law" had anything to do with it: they love him for shooting Liberty in the street (as they believe that he did). And yet still more, it is absolutely plain that they loved Doniphon just as much -- he was their first choice for delegate, to a roaring approval from the crowd. Had he stepped out into the light and gunned down Liberty, in the name of stopping him from tormenting the people of the town any further, he would have been just as honored for the act as was Stoddard.
I don't wish to be too critical, because Bowman's larger point is well taken. Hollywood does need to do genuine heroism more often. They don't do it well very often at all anymore: Open Range stands, not quite alone, but in small company. The Western is too often overlooked, today: and our modern war movies are unspeakably terrible as a rule.
By the same token, Hollywood has long been able to do darker works, and there is much that can be valuable in it. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as well as some of the other pieces he cites -- The Maltese Falcon, for example -- are wonderful movies that bear repeated viewing. Human nature has both bright and dark sides. We can profit greatly from reflection.
Buns & Guns
I'm not sure I think much of this Lebanon concept restaurant, except for one thing: I have to admit that the sandbagging surrounding the outside tables really appeals to me. (You can see it in picture 12, among others.)
I think that's an excellent idea for restaurants in the Middle East.
BB Guns
I kind of understand this story, except for this part:
Now, the simple unlawful possession of any firearm can bring mandatory penalties for anyone who pleads guilty to or is convicted of that crime alone.OK, but how is a BB gun "a firearm"? They sell them in the toy department around here.
Neither Narciso, nor his father knew they broke the law by having the gun without a firearms registration card, both men said.Seriously, what? You need a license to own a BB gun in New Jersey?
"If we knew it was illegal, my dad never would have gotten it," Narciso said.
And it proved ineffective in controlling the problem in the attic, they said.
"That gun couldn't even kill a squirrel," the father, Emiliano Narciso, said.
This isn't a 2nd Amendment issue to my way of thinking, because BB guns don't rise to the level of "arms." Still, is this really a case of "reasonable restriction"?
The Great Backlash
We all knew the day would come.
Probably the fellow did just what I saw a guy do at a bar in Charlotte, NC once. When speaking to one of the local ladies, he said, "Look, b@$$@, I'm from the Bronx and..."
(I'm not sure what meant to say after "and," since he was removed from the premises rather suddenly. I'm sure it would have been inspiring.)
Anyway, of course we regret the need for vigilante violence, even against the Yankee scourge, but...
Wait a minute: dateline Massachusetts?
What's going on here?
(H/t: Hot Air.)
Public/private
There was an interesting article on Yahoo/Flickr today, which touches on a topic that interests me. To what degree is the Internet "public" space? On the one hand, there's nothing to stop anyone at all from coming to visit; on the other, no part of it that citizens can use to express themselves is "public" in the traditional sense of the term. It is privately owned.
There are legal consequences to that, but those don't interest me particularly -- what interests me are the normative questions. In other words, I am interested not in what the law currently says, but rather in the question of what the law ought to say.
We increasingly live on the internet: don't we want some of these public-space protections for our speech? What is the tradeoff for getting them? We can make the law say what we want, assuming Congress can be convinced to go along: so what should it say?
Aristotle and Martial Arts: 10s
I have a post at Winds of Change on free will, Aristotle, and answering a problem posed by some new research into consciousness.
Lily Pad
2008: Floating Lily Pad cities!
1930: Torpedo cars travel 120 mph through New York!
Of course, we have advanced computer modeling now.
Bob Krumm has a report of 1,215 soldiers reenlisting this day in Iraq.
This country is lucky to have such citizens. They make it possible that, as Washington wrote to Moses Seixas, "...everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."
Enjoy the day, yourselves, your family and your country. Have a fig. And remember.
Independence Day
We've just finished talking about patriotism, so I won't discuss that again today. I will just link to a few worthy things, and then get on with celebrating myself. We will be having a cookout down at the horse ranch today.
In Baghdad, they're celebrating differently: with the largest reenlistment ceremony in history.
While most Americans probably slept, 1,215 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines raised their right hands and committed to a combined 5,500 years of additional service during the largest reenlistment ceremony in the history of the American military. Beneath a large American flag which dwarfed even the enormous chandelier that Saddam Hussein had built for the Al Faw Palace, members of all services, representing all 50 states took the oath administered by Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of Multi-National Forces Iraq.I attended such a ceremony in February. Words don't really convey it: it is a deeply moving experience to stand there in Baghdad, in that palace, and hear hundreds take the oath.
BlackFive recommends a tradition of his: rereading Bill Whittle's Freedom.
Cassandra has written a love letter to her country.
Who are we to think that Freedom is ours to spread, Ignatieff asks?The flame right here is going to be roasting hot dogs: but there are other fires in other places. To those who tend them, all the best. This is your day first of all.
We were the First. We are the guardians of the flame.
BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian spies tricked leftist rebels into handing over kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors Wednesday in a daring helicopter rescue so successful that not a single shot was fired.
President Uribe and Columbia can be justly proud of their military of late.
Looking Abroad
I take notice of this study on blog readers, which suggests that liberals are more likely than conservatives to read opposing blogs -- though alll blog readers show strong identification (compared with those who get news chiefly from television) with a political pole.
Johnathan Chait says this means liberals are more open minded, but I suspect it may have something to do with a basic difference in approach. Liberalism is and always has been about applying theory in an attempt to change reality, and often radically; conservatism is about defending what is best in current reality, with suggested changes apt to be slow and incremental.
As a result, it is easy for a liberal to understand a conservative position if he cares to do so: changes being proposed are normally small and slow, and to the extent that any theory is invoked, it is a familiar theory -- we talk often about Aristotle, as men have talked about him for two thousand years. Debates are about history and its lessons.
Liberalism as an approach favors theories that require a fair amount of buy-in from any reader. For example, consider this piece on parental rights, which feels it necessary to explain, in depth, two hundred years of the development of feminist theory in order to begin making its point.
The point is actually a pretty good one, when you get there: but you're going to lose a whole lot of readers along the way. Many people will get as far as the invocation of Engles and stop, figuring communism for a discredited ideology; some will get farther, to the mention-without-irony of hunter gatherer society as "primitive communism" (true only in that the murder rate in such societies has only been approached by modern Communism); others will simply lose interest in trying to understand the difference between "culture feminism," "equality feminism," "victim feminism," "lesbian separatism," and so forth, all of which must be soldiered through to get to the point; others will recoil at the communist concept that the family exists to prop up capitalist society, which the author eventually rejects, but you have to read through the full theory before you get to the rejection; and on, and on, and on.
But you finally get here:
When it comes to parents, however, the ‘right’ to exercise one’s identity – eat what you want to eat, drink what you want to drink, raise your kids how you see fit – is denied by virtue of the fact that, as parents, any ‘rights’ you may have are subordinate to those bestowed upon your child by the official child-rearing orthodoxy.That's a good point, and a concept that is fairly useful. The conservative who did soldier through all of it to get there will be rewarded with that useful concept -- only briefly undermined afterwards by a renewed attack on the "joyless" nature of family life, and a reassertion that Engles was right and "the family still sucks." On the other hand, you learned quite a bit about the conceptual development of feminist theory on the way to getting to 'we should trust parents to look after their families, and not the state.'
The assumption that parents’ rights conflict with children’s rights leads to the policy perspective that, in order to preserve children’s rights to a healthy, wholesome, high-achieving life, parents have a duty to put their own quest for self-identity on hold, and ‘for the sake of the children’ bow to the dictates of the state.
From the bizarre sledgehammer rule that parents must not take their children on holiday in term-time to the insidious attempts to use schools, doctors and TV chefs to determine the content of the family meal to the endless Parliamentary discussions about whether parents should be able to smack their children and if so, how hard, to the tacit encouragement that fathers, like mothers, should not have full-time careers but instead make do with tricky ‘flexible working’ arrangements, the clear trajectory of policy is to use the children to exercise increasing amounts of control over the minutiae of their parents’ lives.
This is a deeply repressive and divisive shift. By setting parents apart from non-parents one clearly-defined section of society that cannot pursue its quest for self-fulfilment, we can see a version of women’s oppression being played out again, with all the bitterness and obfuscation that this caused. And by seeking to manage the relationships of family life, the therapeutic state is setting parents against each other and making them resentful of their children, while encouraging children to disregard their parents’ authority and seek recognition from outside the home: the heartless therapeutic state.
A conservative, who did not feel it was necessary to defend a defense of the family against 200 years of theoretical attacks on the family as an institution, could have said the same thing more quickly.
But that is not the point. The point is that it was worth reading through, because it points to an area of commonality between ourselves and our neighbors. You might not have looked for it, but here is a starting point for a moment of unity and common interest. We both want to defend the family against the incursions of the "heartless theraputic state," at least right at this moment; we want to defend the right of parents to order their families so that they might "pursue happiness" as well as unmarried or childless persons.
Surely it is necessary to do so, because we need to continue to reproduce our civilization. Parents shouldn't be punished for performing that necessary duty.
Personally, I find family life highly rewarding, and I wouldn't say it "sucks" at all. There are certainly sacrifices, but there are also great rewards and meaning. Yet let's let that lie. The point is that, yes, liberals are hard to understand by comparison to conservatives, but it can be worth taking the time.
Vroom
From The New Yorker:
Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November.Some further speculation:
Last month, the Center for a New American Security, which has become something like Obama’s foreign-policy think tank, released a report that argued against a timetable for withdrawal, regardless of the state of the war, and in favor of “conditional engagement,” declaring, “Under this strategy, the United States would not withdraw its forces based on a firm unilateral schedule. Rather, the time horizon for redeployment would be negotiated with the Iraqi government and nested within a more assertive approach to regional diplomacy. The United States would make it clear that Iraq and America share a common interest in achieving sustainable stability in Iraq, and that the United States is willing to help support the Iraqi government and build its security and governance capacity over the long term, but only so long as Iraqis continue to make meaningful political progress.” It’s impossible to know if this persuasive document mirrors Obama’s current thinking, but here’s a clue: it was co-written by one of his Iraq advisers, Colin Kahl.That plan sounds rather like another plan: the one the US military and State Department is actually pursuing. In other words, the advisor of the candidate of "Change" says, 'Let's not change anything!'
The only question in the mind of the author is, will Obama admit that he really won't be changing anything before the election?
The piece is not anti-Obama, though it assumes duplicity from him as a "shrewd politician." Indeed, I think the author may have personally disproven psychology's theory of "cognitive dissonance," in that he not only praises Obama's "shrewdness" in betraying an outright promise on taking public money, and his potential for dancing to November on a deception, but adds:
"Obama has shown, with his speech on race, that he has a talent for candor. One can imagine him speaking more honestly on Iraq."
Yes, we can! We can imagine it.
Patriotism in Time
I have written more about patriotism in these pages than is easy even to link to; all of you know how to use Google if you are curious about what has been said. Still, I note with some pleasure this piece by Peter Beinart in Time Magazine. It attempts to compare what he calls liberal and conservative ideas about patriotism, but finally asserts that the conservatives are right -- as long as they don't go too far with it.
Actually, conservatives are right absolutely on this particular matter. "Patriotism" is a word with an etymology, as we discussed very recently, while debating just the same question Beinart treats this week. The meaning of the thing is encoded in the word itself.
If America is a woman, she is your mother.Beinart quotes JFK in citing Faust:
You should love her because she bore you into the world, and gave you every chance you had as a youth. You should love her because she defended you, nursed you while you were weak, and gave you a chance to grow strong. You should love her without failing because it is your duty, and because no man can hate his mother without destroying a part of himself.
Of course, "patriotism" is from the Latin patria, in turn derived from Pater, which means "Father." Still, it is usual to think of America as being a woman, in part because the name takes a feminine form. Whether you love her as a mother or as a father, however, love her that way.
He liked to cite Goethe, who "tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.'" Americans risked a similar fate, Kennedy warned, "if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress ... Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future."But this is a misreading of Faust. Faust was damned on the point only because he had the arrogance to claim that nothing could be good enough for him. Like the modern antipatriot, judging America as too flawed to merit his loyalty, it was his arrogance that doomed him. He believed he could see all the possibilities of creation, as the antipatriot believes he understands fully all the issues he judges from America's history: neither allows doubt that they could be mistaken. Demons work on such pride.
It was not the love of the moment that doomed Faust, but his arrogance in believing that creation could not make a thing or a moment that could merit that love. And yet you may find love like that in the street. Look at Chesterton's poem, Femina contra Mundum, in which he describes the words of a man called to Judgment; and the man has looked on a woman through a cottage door left carelessly open, and weighed the stars and mountains worth less than her:
'For I had weighed the mountains in a balance,That is the love that pays this debt, this debt for everything you are or could have been; the debt for nurturing you in your weakness, giving you whatever strength you have, whatever wisdom. If you will not recognize your personal liability for that debt, you are not a patriot.
And the skies in a scale,
I come to sell the stars -- old lamps for new --
Old stars for sale.'
Then a calm voice fell all the thunder through,
A tone less rough:
'Thou hast begun to love one of my works
Almost enough.'
You could still be right -- George Washington had many virtues, and was surely correct in his undertakings, but one thing he cannot claim is to have lived as a patriot of his king and country. We do not esteem him less for that. If a nation sets aside the natural rights of mankind, it becomes a tyranny, and not patriotism but separation or destruction is the duty of its citizens. This view is the birthright of Americans, and it is a longstanding complaint of mine against our hard left that they will not accept it. If America is as bad as they so often claim, they have duties beyond mere complaint. If she is evil, fight her. If she is not, fight for her.
Those who whine on the sidelines are the ones I detest. Even William Ayers at least fought, in his way. I wish he had been hanged for it, but I respect him ten times as much as I do any number of beardless men I have met who did nothing but snark about 'America's sins,' as if they too had lived two hundred years, and could judge her as a peer. At least Ayers had courage enough to fight as well as talk, and that redeems him somewhat.
America is a fighting faith. Beinart gets that right:
So is wearing the flag pin good or bad? It is both; it all depends on where and why. If you're going to a Young Americans for Freedom meeting, where people think patriotism means "my country right or wrong," leave it at home and tell them about Frederick Douglass, who wouldn't celebrate the Fourth of July while his fellow Americans were in bondage. And if you're going to a meeting of the cultural-studies department at Left-Wing U., where patriotism often means "my country wrong and wronger," slap it on, and tell them about Mike Christian, who lay half-dead in a North Vietnamese jail, stitching an American flag.With that, I have no argument at all. A true patriot must love his country enough to want to leave it to his sons as he got it from his fathers, pure, with its ideals as well as its physical attributes intact. If anything, he should wish to perfect it, extend it, and make it ever purer.
What I like best about his formulation is that it puts the actor in an eternal fight for his nation. When he goes here, he should fight this way for her; when he goes there, fight for her that way.
That's the thing, the real thing. It is the love that stands off the world.
Death of Uga VI
Attention, fellow Georgians: if you have not already seen the news, I am sad to report that Uga VI has died. We will miss him.
Long live Uga VII.
Banner
My beloved and faithful wife has given me a gift: she has sewn a large cloth banner in the colors of my heraldry.
I've decided to replace the poor, computer generated image with a small photograph of the beautiful banner. I truly have the finest wife in the land, the fairest and most wonderful.
Dave Kopel believes it most important that the Heller decision considered the right to self-defense a natural right, pre-existing the Constitution. This gives the rights protected by the 2nd Amendment even greater stature than if they were "merely" Constitutional: one can amend away a protection that isn't a natural right by adjusting the Constitution, but a state that gives away your natural rights is a tyranny that justly provokes rebellion.
Since we are talking about Catholic moral history this week, follow this link to Kopel's piece on the Medieval Catholic development of a notion of a right to resist tyranny. As he correctly points out, Aristotle and the Greeks had a clear notion of this right, but it faded as Classical learning faded. By 1000, it had to be rediscovered by the Church.
However, he overstates the degree to which the right was lost in the Dark Ages. Scholars in the Church may have needed to rediscover it, but it was a felt and living tradition outside the monk's cell.
For example, Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (approx. 805-881 A.D.), an important advisor to King Charles the Bald of France, wrote a pair of treatises distinguishing a king (who assumed power legitimately and who promoted justice) from a tyrant (who did the opposite). Yet even Hincmar argued that even tyrants must be obeyed unquestioningly."Even Hincmar" may have done so, but it was not the standard understanding of the folk of the Early Middle Ages. Þorgnýr the Lawspeaker made the point clear when speaking to King Olof the Swede in 1018. He spoke to the King as the head of the common folk of Sweden, and made clear what Dark Age Swedes thought of tyranny:
But if thou wilt not do as we desire, we will now attack thee, and put thee to death; for we will no longer suffer law and peace to be disturbed. So our forefathers went to work when they drowned five kings in a morass at the Mula-thing, and they were filled with the same insupportable pride thou hast shown towards us. Now tell us, in all haste, what resolution thou wilt take.Emphasis added. The point being, this wasn't a one-time threat made in 1018: it was a threat with a resonant history. Nor was this pagan Sweden: Olof had been baptised in 1008, and remained Christian to his death. He was married to a Christian girl, and married his daughter to Yaroslav I of Russia, the son of St. Vladimir the Great.
So, when Kopel points to 1187 as a relevant date, he's vastly overstating the case.
As Glanvill’s famous 1187 treatise on English law explained, when a lord broke his obligations, the vassal was released from feudal service. If a party violated his duties under an oath, and the other party suffered serious harm as a result, the feudal relationship could be dissolved diffidatio (withdrawal of faith).What Ranulf de Glanvill's 1187 piece cites is an understanding well-established in the Anglo Saxon law, if not the Norman one. As Glanvill was attempting to codify the "common law" developing around the courts of Norman England, he was doubtless encountering traditional English concepts as well as imported ones. The Anglo-Saxons certainly understood removal of bad kings, and the Witan -- the counsel of elders, the great men of the kingdom -- did so twice, in 757 and 774 A.D. Yet the Anglo-Saxons were also in the habit of consulting with the Pope when it was advantageous:
Historian Friedrich Heer explains that the diffidatio “marked a cardinal point in the political, social, and legal development of Europe. The whole idea of a right of resistance is inherent in this notion of a contract between the governor and the governed, between higher and lower.”
In the early years of Coenwulf's reign he had to deal with a revolt in Kent, which had been under Offa's control. Eadberht Præn returned from exile in Francia to claim the Kentish throne and Coenwulf was forced to wait for papal support before he could intervene. When Pope Leo agreed to anathematize Eadberht, Coenwulf invaded and retook the kingdom; Eadberht was taken prisoner, and was blinded and had his hands cut off.Eadberht Præn was in exile at Charlemagne's court during the time he was out of Kent. The Pope appears to have taken Coenwulf's side not out of a sense that his claim to Kent was superior -- it had belonged to the Præns before -- but because Præn was a former priest.
In any event, when William the Bastard in 1066 went to the Pope for the right to rule England, there was precedent. But when the Witan selected Harold Goodwinson instead, there was also precedent. The question was resolved by force of arms at Hastings and elsewhere, and by the erection of powerful castles that could assert control of the land. By 1187, law had replaced force in many cases, and we can see that there was enough of a body of workable precedents arising across the land to need codification. (In addition to which service, Ranulf de Glanvill provided remarkable service as a fighting man, capturing the knightly king William the Lion of Scotland, serving as Sheriff of Yorkshire, and eventually dying on Crusade.)
In any event, Kopel makes a worthy and interesting argument. But when the Catholic Church went looking for ideas on the right to resist tyrants, they had more to draw upon than Aristotle. It is a natural right indeed, one well recognized by the folk of the Dark Ages. If it was occasionally denied by some tyrant kings, and sometimes by some of their allies in the Church, it was nevertheless deeply felt by the folk of Europe.
Congrats Steyn
I see that Mark Steyn has been vindicated by a kangaroo "human rights" court that previously had a 100% conviction rate. Not too shabby, mate.