Sobran's -- The Real News of the Month July 2000 Volume 7, No. 7 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $59.95 per year; $100 for 2 years; trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues). E-mail subscriptions: $59.95 for 1 year ($25 with a 12- month subscription to the print edition); $100 for 2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print edition). Payment should be made to The Vere Company. Address: Sobran's, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-493-3348. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue Features THE MOVING PICTURE (pages 1-2) Jeff MacNelly has died, only 52, of lymphoma. He was the most brilliant political cartoonist of our time. Every cartoon he drew was full of energy, and all his caricatures had real *character.* He was never trite; with inexhaustible inspiration, he always seemed to have a unique, and hilarious, conception to express the ever-new absurdities of politics. His work was both technically perfect and superbly alive. Jeff was a dear fellow with a smile so healthily boyish that it's hard to believe he could leave us so early, and he's taken a lot of fun out of this world with him. * * * So you think today's clergy are too spineless to defend any orthodoxy, do you? Well, the Very Reverend Todd Donatelli, the dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Asheville, North Carolina, has excommunicated one Lewis Green. Green had repeatedly criticized the church for welcoming active homosexuals. Refusing to recant, Green said: "I don't look at this as a church. It's a liberal Democrat precinct." * * * Social critic John Rocker was briefly sent down to the minor leagues after some erratic pitching and a shouting match with the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED reporter who quoted his "bigoted" remarks (uttered, by the way, as Rocker was driving to speak at a charity event for children). And the press is still hounding him. Ray Lewis, the (black) football player who just plea-bargained his way out of a trial for a double murder, is getting much gentler treatment: he may be a killer, but at least he's not a redneck. * * * The gun control debate is so dishonest because nobody wants to discuss the racial angle. Liberals are fond of saying that America is a "violent nation," but if you point out that this is due to the crime rates of racial minorities, you're ... well, a Rocker. Crime by American whites is as low as the Japanese and Swiss rates, if you factor out the Clinton administration. * * * Having protected so many children from Waco to Miami, Janet Reno has now successfully protected us from the predatory Bill Gates. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has ordered Microsoft to break up, as punishment and remedy for its "monopolistic" practices (i.e., exercise of property rights). The true monopoly here is the federal government's monopoly of power, in profound and continuous violation of the U.S. Constitution. But don't look for antitrust action anytime soon. * * * Richard Epstein, the brilliant law prof at the University of Chicago, points out that Judge Jackson's "solution" has wrought chaos in the market it was supposed to be protecting. He writes in the WALL STREET JOURNAL: "For starters, the current hullabaloo over Microsoft has resulted in a sharp downturn in the value not only of its stock, but also of the stock of its suppliers and competitors, which are supposed to benefit from curbing this dreaded monopolist." Enumerating other possible harms to third parties, he adds: "In the end, my great fear as a consumer is that government and judicial hubris will generate vast dislocations for little discernible benefit." Except, of course, to the real predators: lawyers and politicians. * * * Bill Gates proved himself a short-sighted capitalist by neglecting to make a prudent investment some years ago: he didn't buy off Clinton with huge campaign donations. Without that insurance, lightning was bound to strike. * * * In a huge embarrassment for state education, the three top finalists in this year's National Spelling Bee were all home-schooled. The champions of educational tyranny were quick to disparage this as a meaningless fluke. How are we going to make everybody equal if some kids' parents insist on making them excellent? Can't Janet Reno do something? * * * Exclusive to the electronic version (one entry only): Democrats, in the same anti-parental spirit, opposed a Republican proposal to abolish the estate tax; Clinton promises to veto it as "a tax break for the rich." In the eyes of tyranny, your final gift to your children is an impermissible affront to Equality. * * * Not again! Juanita Broaddrick, who says Clinton raped her in 1978 (and is believed by Al Gore, among many others), is now being audited by the IRS, as Paula Jones and Elizabeth Ward Gracen have been. Clinton ought to choose his women more carefully. Every time he hits on one, she turns out to be a tax cheat. * * * In the wake of the Elian Gonzalez uproar, Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles and a big donor to the Democratic Party, has pledged not to sign players who have defected from Cuba. Let's hope Fidel is properly grateful to his Democratic allies. Who says the Cold War is over? * * * China now has a unique distinction among (nominally) Communist countries: it's being invaded by illegal immigrants -- as many as 200,000 so far, according to the NEW YORK TIMES. How can this be? The refugees are coming from North Korea, one of the world's few remaining *seriously* Communist countries, which has kept the Marxist-Leninist faith so stoutly that there is nothing to eat there. Many of them are blending into China successfully, but they're probably ineligible to play for the Orioles. * * * Elian Gonzalez, his father, his stepmother, and five of his classmates have signed a Father's Day message to Fidel: "On this Father's Day, we want to send an affectionate greeting, and a well-deserved kiss, to all of you, especially to one father whom we love dearly for his unrivaled teachings and his infinite love for us, our Commander-in-Chief." No comment yet from those who accused the Miami relatives of exploiting Elian for political reasons. Or maybe they assume these are Elian's real feelings -- a case of psychological projection. * * * Speaking of dishonesty about race: During and after the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York, nonwhite punks, blandly described as "youths" by the media, attacked dozens of women, mostly white, stripping, fondling, and robbing them. All the massive press coverage played down the racial angle, though the race of the assailants and victims would seem to be as pertinent as their sex. As one wag wrote to the NEW YORK POST: "It just goes to show how wrong John Rocker was about New York." THEY MADE ME A REACTIONARY (pages 3-6) When I was in my teens, I discovered in myself dark and disreputable feelings which I dared confess to nobody. My elders in respectable society would have been shocked to learn of them in one so young; so I was forced to keep them to myself. I was embarrassed by them, but not guilt-ridden. I didn't think they were anything I should feel guilty about. Just because prevailing social prejudices condemned them didn't necessarily mean they were wrong. In short, I was a reactionary. I realized this at the movies. In such films as SPARTACUS, THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE, and THE TRAIN, the heroes, played by American hunks like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, had little appeal for me; I loved the villains, who were played by British actors like Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield. It was a convention of Hollywood movies that villains in class warfare should be British. This was supposed to appeal to the audience's deep-rooted feelings tracing back to 1776. Though I was reasonably patriotic, this didn't stop me from sympathizing with the Brits. Even such Commie screenwriters as Dalton Trumbo, whose script for SPARTACUS was based on the Commie Howard Fast's novel (and most of THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE was taken straight from Bernard Shaw's play), couldn't resist giving them the best -- that is, the devilishly witty -- lines, at the expense of liberal pieties. In the same way, the scholars tell us, the character of Vice -- perhaps the ancestor of Falstaff -- usually got the best lines in the medieval morality plays. I also loved such Shakespearean misanthropes as Richard III, played on film by Olivier, and Coriolanus, as played, on a recording, by Richard Burton. Burton had played Coriolanus in the early 1950s to great acclaim, and even his recorded performance was thrilling: his voice alone was a lethal instrument, mowing down the plebeians and their craven tribunes with overpowering contempt. All these characters had one thing in common: they were enemies of Democracy and the Common Man. True, they were also enemies of basic human decency, but I was willing to make allowances. At least they weren't liberals! I was a teenager, and the last thing I wanted to grow up to be was the Common Man. In high school I became the Coriolanus of the student council. I voted against *everything.* My classmate Larry Brose and I were usually the only two nays on any proposal before the council. But Larry, the center on the basketball team, was a Republican, I was an out-and-out *reactionary.* Not that the other members were anything that could be called "liberal," but high school is nothing but fads, and I hated fads. When the council voted to have a homecoming queen, pretty much on grounds that every other high school had a homecoming queen, I voted no. I'm not even sure whether Larry voted with me on that one; he probably did, but I don't remember. All I know is that I was sure it would produce bitter racial differences, pitting black kids against white, and that's exactly what happened. Anyway, it was silly. We didn't need it. I gravely underestimated the yearning of half the girls in the senior class to be homecoming queen. It was a shallow adolescent vanity -- unlike my own yearning to look like Olivier and sound like Burton. I'd also become a Catholic, and this appealed to, and aggravated, my reactionary instincts. The Catholic doctrine that held the deepest attraction for me was the Natural Law -- a permanent moral law, known independently of revelation but consistent with it, ancient and eternal and resistant to every modern fad. I read St. Thomas Aquinas with deep joy (though limited understanding); I loved the Aristotelian discipline of his thought. The modern world was careening toward a new order that struck me as absolutely bogus -- worse than unnecessary. Even as a naive boy I sensed that all the liberal enthusiasms were unhealthy for everything that was permanent in man. Shakespeare was my touchstone: if the society he loved, imagined, and portrayed didn't need something -- free love and the welfare state, say -- why did we? His conception of society was feudal and Catholic, and it struck me as beautifully sufficient, even essentially Thomistic. Whatever evils might beset Shakespearean man, he was never confused about what was normal. I hated the twentieth-century cant of "new" moralities. To me this suggested -- though I couldn't spell it out at the time -- that morality could become the mere instrument of whoever happened to hold power at any given moment. Despite how all this must sound, I wasn't a disagreeable kid; I was friendly and polite, popular with my classmates (I got elected, didn't I?) and dangerously near to being the pet of my teachers. In fact I was ingratiating to a fault. It was just that I finally got in touch with my inner Coriolanus. It was my version of adolescent rebellion, I suppose: a rebellion against liberal authority. This inevitably led me to right-wing politics. By my freshman year in college I idolized William F. Buckley Jr., who struck me as a Catholic Coriolanus during his quixotic (the word everyone used) 1965 campaign for mayor of New York City. He was openly disdainful of politics and its attendant corruption and demagogy, and he was literate and witty to a degree that seemed, in that environment, miraculous. Even lots of liberals agreed that he was the only candidate who brought any fun and style to the race. At the same time I became fascinated with Ayn Rand, despite her ugly atheism. What I liked about her was less that she was a libertarian (a label she avoided) than that she was an Aristotelian. She insisted on defining the natures of things. I was prevented from becoming a more ardent Rand- worshipper by her bad taste; she uttered dogmas about music and literature that were semi-mandatory for her followers. I could forgive her, though just barely, for preferring Rachmaninov to Beethoven; I could even pardon her for calling Mickey Spillane the greatest living writer (I hadn't read him yet); but I couldn't excuse her idiotic remarks about Shakespeare. Still, she had compelling things to say about politics and herd-thinking. But I had my real epiphany in June 1965 (at a gas station, as it happened). I was 19 years old and I was sitting in my battered Ford reading Frederic Bastiat's pamphlet THE LAW, when I came upon his axiom that the moral test of a law is whether it "performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime." I was stunned. It seemed obvious, basic, unanswerable. But it meant that our "democracy" was, in essence, organized crime -- or in Bastiat's phrase, "organized plunder." Much as I already hated the legacy of the New Deal, and sickened as I was by all the new Great Society programs Lyndon Johnson was superadding to it every day, my patriotism couldn't bear to go as far as Bastiat's axiom would force me to go. In spite of everything, I still wanted to believe that America was essentially the Land of the Free. But Bastiat stuck in my craw. I reflected endlessly on his words. If he was right ... and I saw no way out of it ... horrors! Yet it wasn't so radical, after all. St. Augustine had said that a state without justice is nothing but a band of robbers. Aquinas had said that any positive law that is contrary to the Natural Law is void. If, as the Declaration of Independence says, government derives its "just Powers" from "the Consent of the Governed," the people in the aggregate have no right to delegate the power to rob, since they have no individual right to rob. Shortly afterward I read another little classic of free- market thought, Henry Hazlitt's ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON. Hazlitt, a Bastiat disciple, confined himself to arguing that, as a practical matter, you can't cheat the market; there are always hidden costs. He accepted police and military forces as a necessity -- the overhead, so to speak, of a productive society -- but he pointed out that they produce nothing themselves; they merely protect the productive from violence and fraud. But it followed that they should be kept to a minimum. From this I reasoned that if the Cold War ever ended, the huge military budget would evaporate and the federal government could (and therefore would) slash taxes. Then we could get on with the business of dismantling the welfare state, and the federal government and taxes would dwindle toward the vanishing point. (It hasn't yet quite worked out that way.) A little book that helped complete my formation as a reactionary was C.S. Lewis's ABOLITION OF MAN. Lewis argued that there is no such thing as a "new" morality; there is only the eternal one, sometimes called the Natural Law, though he used the Chinese term "the Tao," or "the Way," probably to avoid sounding narrowly Christian. Whatever name we give it, the Tao is universal. Any attempt to abandon the Tao, or "improve" on it, was bound to have one result: releasing rulers, especially political rulers, from traditional moral obligations and freeing them to be tyrants. Writing during World War II, Lewis saw that the process was already well under way; and though he refrained from criticizing the Allied governments directly, he gently implied that they might turn out to be as tyrannical as the Axis regimes if the Tao was lost. It's a safe bet that Lewis never heard of Bastiat, but he was driving at the same principle: that rulers in every generation must be strictly bound by the common rules of morality. Moral innovation is the way to political tyranny. As a Classical scholar and Medievalist (he denied that the Renaissance ever occurred!), Lewis was keenly aware that the modern world was based on some dubious but unquestioned assumptions. He thought a chief value and purpose of education was to free the mind of its immediate environment and to fortify it against the political manipulations of the present. In his view, Roosevelt and Hitler didn't represent opposite principles, as they imagined; they were warring sectarians whose basic creed, at bottom, was the same. Both believed, though confusedly, that the state was outside the Tao. The real problem wasn't that the rulers thought this: it was that nearly all ordinary people, in practice, accepted the same assumption. In THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, Lewis wrote: "It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker [Richard Hooker, 1554?-1600, Anglican divine], and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion (reached, I think, by Paley) that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it -- that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right." Will, even God's will, can never be the ultimate ground of right. Neither, of course, can man's will. But this, according to Lewis (in ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY), is what "the modern theory of sovereignty" affirms: that the state can make right and wrong by sheer act of will. "On this view, total freedom to make what laws it pleases, superiority to law because it is the source of law, is the characteristic of every state; of democratic states no less than of monarchical. That doctrine has proved so popular that it now seems to many a mere tautology. We conceive with difficulty that it was ever new because we imagine with difficulty how political life can ever have gone on without it. We take it for granted that the highest power in the State, whether that power is a despot or a democratically elected assembly, will be wholly free to legislate and incessantly engaged in legislation." I can never reread this passage without wanting to shout "Bravo!" at seeing an idea so perfectly expressed. The modern state is "incessantly engaged in legislation" because there is no longer any such thing as Enough. Positive law that merely reflects the Natural Law can't satisfy the insatiable will of the sovereign state; it must keep devising new rules, schemes, programs, services, departments, agencies, bureaucracies, until no corner of private life remains. And one of the state's most ominous features is its claim to authority over education: every child's mind is its property, and it will decide how that mind shall be formed, what "attitudes" shall be implanted and eradicated, for its own purposes, without respect to the Tao. As Lewis succinctly put it, "Rulers have become owners." He added: "We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives *are* their business." As the state offers us less and less protection, "at the same time it demands from us more and more. We seldom had fewer rights and liberties nor more burdens: and we get less security in return. *While our obligations increase their moral ground is taken away"* (my emphasis). Bastiat would have sympathized with Lewis's deep aversion to state education: "I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer?" The New Society was creating "membership in a debased modern sense -- a massing together of persons as if they were pennies or counters." It was "trying to drag the featureless repetition of the collective into the fuller and more concrete world of the family." The family itself would continue to exist only as the lowest administrative unit of the state, with no moral right to exist independently. Lewis would have been shocked, but not really surprised, to find the state blessing fornication, contraception, sodomy, and abortion. On reflection he would have quickly realized that it was headed in this direction all along. The claim that the state is morally neutral about these things is sheer nonsense. My reactionary formation was completed by such writers as Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Michael Oakeshott, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and too many others to name here. Through them all, and by studying the writings of the enemy as well, I came to see that the essence of the "progressive" spirit, which I'd loathed before I knew exactly what it was, was a restless alienation from normal and natural human life. Chesterton caught it in a phrase: "the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal." The modern state begins by condemning the normal life of the market -- the free exchange of property, which is alleged to offend "social justice" -- and ends by condemning the normal life of the family. It aspires to "build a new society" by destroying the very bases of normal, natural, and traditional society. From the time of my first interest in politics, I felt what I now think of as an Aristotelian passion to define the state and its purpose and to confine it to its proper functions. I always loathed the way the modern state was becoming an all-absorbing blob, spreading over all of life with false benevolence. In contrast to Oakeshott's view of governing as "a specific and limited activity," the modern state -- Lyndon Johnson, proprietor -- was an open-ended affair, always looking for new objects on which to lavish its concern and resources. Incredible as it now seems, even to me, I had some notion that politicians like Johnson must have meditated on first principles and had formed some guiding philosophy. I could hardly believe that a man would enter into a political career without first having studied Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other Great Thinkers. I recently heard one of Johnson's old cronies say in a television interview that he'd never known Johnson to read a book; by then I wasn't surprised. His boorish indifference to principle didn't stop him from assuming the role of author and central director of the Great Society. He really thought he was just the man to lead a renaissance. His Great Society would be a catalogue of his own successive enthusiasms: eliminating poverty, outlawing discrimination, subsidizing the elderly, teaching pre- schoolers to read, providing housing, succoring the elderly, supporting the arts, what have you. It's one of the curious traits of the modern mind that it so seldom reflects that the talents required to acquire power have no relation whatever to the wisdom and virtue required to exercise it properly. Such wisdom and virtue may even be handicaps in acquiring it. Maybe this is the basis of monarchism and aristocracy: if somebody must rule, at least it should be someone who didn't have to achieve power by his own efforts, even if his ancestors did. But those who do achieve power, like Johnson, are always certain that they have done so by merit rather than by low cunning, and that they are specially endowed with royal abilities. The utopian mind is forced to have faith that power will naturally accrue to the man who deserves it, and will only reluctantly come to admit that perhaps Joseph Stalin is not that man. And liberals who scoff at the idea of divine providence still regard Franklin Roosevelt's administration as a veritable "rendezvous with destiny." At critical moments, they believe, democracy will mysteriously produce the heroes it needs -- Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt. (Liberals don't regard a belief in miracles as superstitious, as long as it doesn't involve God.) But liberalism hasn't built a Great Society. Far from it. What it has given us is the Ignoble Society, a world totally unfit for, unworthy of, and insulting to Shakespearean man -- man with a soul. I think that's what I've been reacting against ever since I was a boy. I don't mean to deny my own debt to various conservatives, including Bill Buckley, but today's conservatism has come to seem a sadly watered-down affair -- a philosophy of what Thoreau called "quiet desperation." When Buckley founded NATIONAL REVIEW, with its famous pledge to "stand athwart History yelling 'Stop!'" the magazine was a magnet for unabashed reactionaries, the sort of people who wanted to roll back everything since William of Ockham. (Richard Weaver, the famous anti-Ockhamite, was a frequent contributor.) It went without saying that the legacy of the New Deal was evil, that the United States should have stayed out of World War II, and that Woodrow Wilson was a damned fool. It was nearly as certain that the wrong side had won the Civil War. But by the 1970s, after Buckley had repudiated the John Birch Society and endorsed Richard Nixon, conservatism was making its peace with the modern world. No longer was it standing athwart History; it wanted to feel that History was on its side. Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Newt Gingrich represented a New Deal-friendly version of conservatism, with Gingrich praising Franklin Roosevelt as "the greatest president of the twentieth century"! Gone was the old divine discontent, the apocalyptic pessimism, the sense of precious things lost (but worth remembering and fighting, against all odds, to restore). In spite of its surface optimism, conservatism became literally hopeless: it had forgotten what to hope for. Its highest aspiration was Republican hegemony, with tax cuts and "privatization" of federal welfare programs. And after countless concessions to liberalism, it tried, unconvincingly, to treat every election as a crucial trial of conservative principle. It even adopted such liberal devil-terms as "isolationism" and "McCarthyism." Young conservatives no longer remembered what the previous generation had stood for; they'd become indistinguishable from neoconservatives. The central tenet of the neoconservative creed is that everything was fine until the 1960s. Bill and Hillary Clinton are bad because they represent "Sixties values," and defeating them -- that is, replacing them with Republicans -- is all- important. How dismaying that conservatism should have come to embody the great American affliction: historical amnesia. Nuggets PLAYING HARDBALL: Bill Clinton has let it be known that if Arkansas disbars him as a lawyer, he may move his presidential library elsewhere -- perhaps to Georgetown University, his alma mater. [Omitted from print version: (I have a sinking feeling that in such a case, Georgetown would accept the honor.)] "How could he move his library and go against his word?" asks a Little Rock real estate developer. "It would be a mark against his integrity." You'd think the home folks would know him by now. (page 7) THAT'S PROGRESS: In case you missed it, June was Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, by proclamation of our president (late on a Friday afternoon, to attract minimal publicity). He spoke of a "crusade to outlaw discriminatory laws and practices ..." Huh? To outlaw laws? Does he mean that new federal legislation should supersede state and local laws? By what authority? That of the "living" Constitution, apparently. In the name of "civil rights" -- which treat race, "gender," and "sexual orientation" as if they were parallel categories -- the freedom of association will continue its course toward gradual extinction. (page 9) NOMENCLATURE NOTES: The media continue to refer to North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Il as a "leader." Since he's never won, or bothered holding, an election -- having succeeded his father Kim Il Sung, he's the world's first hereditary Communist ruler -- it appears that you can be a leader without having any followers to speak of. Kim is now making nice with South Korea, perhaps in the hope of getting U.S. aid. (page 11) NICE NEWS: Given all the ugly incidents and surly attitudes that mar professional sports these days, it's a sweet surprise to find an athlete talking like this: "Too many good things have been happening in my life lately for it to be a coincidence. I put everything in God's hands. I don't have any fears." Thus tennis player Mary Pierce, devout Catholic, after winning the French Open. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED notes that she wears "an immense crucifix," along with a rosary, even on the tennis court. (page 11) YOU MAY ALREADY BE A WINNER: The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled -- surprise! -- that even student-led prayers before public-school football games are an unconstitutional breach of the Wall of Separation. The Anti-Defamation League has declared the decision "a victory for Americans of all religions." I'm never more suspicious than when I'm told that the government has ruled in everyone's favor. Then why was the case contested, if even the losers were bound to win? (page 12) Exclusive to the electronic version: AH, LIBERATION! Two decades ago, the scandal of white rule ended in Rhodesia. It became Zimbabwe, ruled by the enlightened black Marxist Robert Mugabe. Today Zimbabwe has reverted to savagery, with Mugabe openly egging on a race war against white farmers. As elsewhere in Africa, the black man has adopted one of the white man's worst institutions -- the state -- while forsaking one of the best -- the rule of law. And some people still assume the two are synonymous. But as usual, black tyranny doesn't scandalize Western liberals. THE DEBATE DRONES ON: George W. Bush is taking heat for the frequency with which Texas inflicts the death penalty. Critics of capital punishment now stress the problem of uncertainty. They say that many are executed in flawed procedures: inept defense lawyers, evidence suppressed by prosecutors, inadequate DNA testing that might clear the accused. Fine; I don't think the state should kill anyone. But the grounds on which we discuss the question, as C.S. Lewis once observed, are as important as the conclusion we reach. And the critics keep dodging the issue of *desert:* to hear them talk, you'd get the impression that Death Row is populated by innocents. If you're a serious opponent of the death penalty, you have to be prepared to say that even the monster who, beyond doubt, rapes and murders children should be spared -- even if his execution would deter others. The proper reason is not that he deserves to live, but that the state has no right to kill. Sentimental, sociological, and utilitarian reasons are worthless. Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12) * Courage and Fashion (May 4, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000504.shtml * Can Dr. Laura Be Tolerated (May 11, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000511.shtml * The Rivals (May 23, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000523.shtml * Hate Crimes and Love Crimes (May 25, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000525.shtml * You'll Never Know (May 30, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000530.shtml * The Real Al Gore (June 1, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000601.shtml All articles are written by Joe Sobran SOBRAN'S is distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate (fran@griffnews.com). Copyright (c) 2000. 2000. All rights reserved. [ENDS]