SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
October 2001
Volume 8, No. 10
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Reaping the Whirlwind
-> Buckley, Rand, and Me
Letters to the Editor
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
Reaping the Whirlwind
(page 1)
With the astonishing attacks on the Pentagon and
World Trade Center, the United States has had an
experience almost unique in its history, though common
enough in foreign lands: it has been attacked on its own
soil. I've expected something like this since the 1991
Gulf War; as the phrase goes, I was shocked, but not
surprised.
The shock has already, and inevitably, been compared
to that of Pearl Harbor. There is one difference: on
December 7, 1941, there was no doubt who the enemy was.
The United States immediately declared war on Japan. This
time, for the moment, no return address has been found.
President Bush has been reduced to blustering that "those
responsible" will be "hunted down," and "punished." But
how do you retaliate for suicide attacks, when those most
directly responsible have killed themselves with their
victims? No doubt they had support from others, but
identifying those others may not be possible. The simple
and tempting response is to blame someone arbitrarily,
strike him, and call it justice. In this case, Osama bin
Laden, wealthy patron of Muslim guerrillas, is the
natural target for bogus vengeance.
One thing is only too clear: most Americans have no
conception of the depth of hatred harbored against this
country in large parts of the world. This is no longer
the ideological anti-Americanism of the Soviet era; it's
much more personal and bitter, in large part because of
the personal harm inflicted by U.S. bombs, sanctions, and
"reliable allies," from the Middle East to the Balkans.
Millions of Iraqis, Serbs, and Palestinians hold this
country responsible for the deaths of their family
members. We may have forgotten yesteryear's fleeting
headlines of remote places we'd barely heard of; they
remember living through scenes as horrible as those of
the World Trade Center.
The U.S. Government takes no responsibility for a
bullying foreign policy, including unstinting support of
a bullying Israel, that has made this country loathed
abroad and endangered its people, both abroad and at
home. It has responded to the attack with pompous and
irrelevant abstractions about "terrorism," "freedom," and
"democracy." These are worse than useless: they show that
our ruling elite is determined to learn nothing from this
terrible experience.
No sensible man will bait a wild animal, and it is
not to excuse or defend such awful crimes to say that the
U.S. Government has been tormenting explosive passions
for many years. Its attitude has been not only self-
righteous but cavalier. Few of those it antagonizes have
the strength, means, or will to fight back; those who are
desperate enough to use unsavory methods are dismissed as
"terrorists." (Methods authorized by governments, such as
bombing refugee camps, are not considered unsavory.) Just
how *are* the victims of U.S. foreign policy supposed to
get our government's attention?
Our rulers are already making it clear that they
will not respond to the September 11 attack with any
measure of introspection and self-criticism; instead,
they will, as usual, make it an occasion of further self-
aggrandizement. They will continue making us enemies
abroad, while "protecting" us at home by curtailing our
remaining liberties.
Buckley, Rand, and Me
Like many young conservatives of the Sixties, I was
drawn to -- and torn between -- two leading figures of
the "right wing" of American political opinion. One, whom
I later wound up working for, was Bill Buckley; the
other, whom I never met, was Ayn Rand.
In those days it was customary to describe Buckley
as an "enfant terrible" and a "gadfly." What I remember
-- and what is hard to explain to young conservatives
now, who see only the aged Buckley -- is that he was
*fun,* the way Muhammad Ali was fun: quick, surprising,
deadly to his opponents. A brilliant, fearless tease,
taunting and defying liberalism. Never at a loss. A rich,
reactionary Catholic who, at the height of the War on
Poverty, took pride in his yachts. He seemed to sum up a
tradition that ran from Aquinas to Belloc and Waugh, if
there was such a tradition. Liberals hated him and tried
to portray him as a Nazi.
By the time I went to work for him at NATIONAL
REVIEW, in 1972, Buckley had begun to charm liberals and
endear himself to them; but also to make certain
concessions to them. For my part I found him not only a
sweet boss but wonderful company for more than 20 years,
though the last few years were marred by differences that
led to my quitting. (I was, strictly speaking, fired, but
I can't say I didn't provoke it.)
At the same time I'd discovered Buckley, as a
college kid in 1965, I'd begun reading Ayn Rand. She had
no sense of fun to speak of, but she was strangely
magnetic. Whereas Buckley could joke about having come
"up from liberalism," Rand solemnly attacked
"collectivism." She found little to joke about. She wrote
with iron logic, or at least a tone of it. Her premise
was that no man owed anything to "society," let alone the
state, and all her politics derived from that. Her
demolitions of liberal dogma were less amusing than
Buckley's, but more electrifying. Her exaltation of
"capitalism" made Buckley seem timid by comparison.
Unlike Buckley, Rand was an atheist, and a militant
one. She blamed collectivism on "mysticism" -- her word
for religion, especially Christianity -- even though
Communism was itself militantly atheistic. Buckley wasn't
a systematic thinker, but he savored all the colors of
life, as even his rich vocabulary showed; whereas Rand
took a starkly rationalist approach and prized
philosophical consistency. In Isaiah Berlin's terms,
Buckley was a fox, Rand a hedgehog.
Rand called her philosophy Objectivism -- an amalgam
of Aristotelian logic, laissez-faire economics, and
individualist ethics. One collection of her essays was
titled THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS. Unlike most atheists,
she insisted that there are absolute standards of
morality. That was what made her fascinating to me, at a
time when I'd lost my Catholic faith; she offered at
least a bleak connection to Aristotle. (I was pleased
that she had at least a few good words for Aquinas.)
Rand was born in tsarist Russia to a prosperous,
secularized Jewish family in 1905. After the Communist
Revolution she migrated to America and apparently never
looked back; family ties meant little to her. Moving to
California, determined to become a writer, she took odd
jobs in Hollywood and married Frank O'Connor, a handsome,
ineffectual young man she met when they were both extras
in a movie. He was the sort of fellow everyone likes and
nobody respects, but she would insist that he was the
model for the independent-minded heroes of her novels.
Rand loved America for its tradition of individual
liberty and accordingly hated the New Deal. Later she
would testify before Congress about Communist
infiltration of Hollywood. In 1964 she even endorsed
Barry Goldwater.
Her first successful novel was THE FOUNTAINHEAD,
which was poorly received by the critics in 1943 but
became a sensational hit by word of mouth. "Howard Roark
laughed," it began. "He stood naked on the edge of a
cliff ..." Roark is a young architect of utterly original
genius who rejects all the conventions of Western
architecture and refuses to compromise his own standards.
At the climax of the book he is tried as a criminal for
blowing up a public-housing project he designed himself.
He shows that the builders departed from his plan,
violating the terms of his agreement, and argues that he
had the right to destroy the deformity that resulted. His
defense is the philosophical principle that the
individual owes nothing to "society." Not only is he
acquitted; he wins the girl, Dominique Francon, whom he
had raped early in the book. (She'd enjoyed it, of
course.)
In 1957 Rand published her magnum opus, the
thousand-page novel ATLAS SHRUGGED. In this amazing
story, America's "men of the mind" go on strike in
protest against collectivism. They form a secret society
of their own in the Rocky Mountains, while their
secession brings the American economy to ruins. Their
shadowy leader, John Galt, broadcasts a sixty-page radio
address explicating the philosophy of Objectivism. The
country's desperate collectivist rulers capture Galt and
try to force him to save the country by acting as
dictator, a role he refuses under torture. As the book
closes, the "men of the mind" end their strike and
freedom has at least a chance of survival. The book's
heroine, Dagny Taggart, has amours with several of its
capitalist heroes before settling into Galt's embrace.
With the appearance of ATLAS SHRUGGED Rand became a
bona fide cult figure. Objectivist clubs sprouted around
the country, and THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER made its
debut. Rand propagated her strong opinions on many
subjects, from metaphysics to movies. Even her aesthetic
tastes became tenets of the Objectivist creed:
Rachmaninov was greater than Beethoven, Victor Hugo was
the greatest of novelists, Mickey Spillane was the
greatest *living* novelist, Marilyn Monroe was a great
actress. Nor was Rand shy about putting down cultural
icons: she disparaged not only Beethoven but Shakespeare,
Mozart, and Tolstoy, irrationalists all, who belittled
man's capacity for heroism. (Never mind the Eroica
Symphony.)
As these views suggest, Rand's own personality was
dictatorial. For all her cant of rationality, she
confused her most arbitrary feelings with reasoned
judgments and expected others to accept them on her
authority. While exalting individualism and independence,
she demanded total submission from her young disciples;
she could be cruelly humiliating even to those who were
pathetically eager to please her. She scorned "second-
handers" -- people of derivative opinions -- but her
following consisted largely of people who aped her. She
broke bitterly with those who did their own thinking,
notably Murray Rothbard, one of the most original minds
of his generation. And despite her wide areas of
political agreement with Buckley, she never forgave him
for publishing Whittaker Chambers's scathing review of
ATLAS SHRUGGED.
Rand's chief disciples and anointed successors were
a young Canadian couple, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden.
Nathaniel was handsome, intelligent, smooth-talking, and
Objectivistically orthodox; Barbara wrote an authorized
biography-cum-explication of Rand. Things got sticky when
Rand fell in love with Nathaniel and announced to their
spouses that she and he were going to be lovers; such was
her authority over her inner circle that both spouses
agreed to this humiliation, though O'Connor began to
drink heavily. Rand was as uninhibited -- as randy -- as
the heroines of her novels.
The affair continued for a decade. It ended in 1968
when Rand got wind of a terrible betrayal: Branden was
having an affair with another woman, a stunning young
Objectivist. Why Rand, on her own principles, should have
expected fidelity in an adulterous affair is anyone's
guess, but, being a woman, she did. There is no
chivalrous way to describe her looks, and Branden's
attraction to youth and beauty, however repugnant to
Objectivist principles, can astonish no impartial student
of human nature. Making love to his mentor may have been
his duty according to Rand's rationalist philosophy, but,
to put it delicately, *le coeur a ses raisons.*
To say the least, Rand displayed little acquaintance
with, or affinity for, Pascal, LaRochefoucauld, and their
ilk. She was aware of such paradoxes of human psychology
as the irrational male preference for young flesh over
philosophical cogency, but nothing prepared her for the
inevitable day when it was brought home to her. It's
doubtful that even so articulate an exponent of
Objectivism as Branden could have explained the situation
to her satisfaction.
So greatly did the Brandens fear Rand's wrath that
Barbara, who knew of her husband's latest amour, tried to
help him conceal it from Rand. When Barbara finally told
her, the explosion dwarfed Krakatoa. Branden was fired,
excommunicated, and then some -- Rand even hoped he would
be rendered impotent -- and his name was expunged from
all official Objectivist publications and products. She
went so far as to change the dedication of subsequent
printings of ATLAS SHRUGGED, which she had originally
dedicated to him and O'Connor as her joint heroes.
Not since Stalin and Trotsky had there been such a
falling out. The Objectivist Movement was never the same.
The Brandens' marriage broke up too, he moving from
Manhattan to California to remarry and make a new life as
a psychotherapist. Rand stayed with O'Connor, who sank
into alcoholism and senility; she tried to cure his
faltering mind by doing exercises in logic with him. Her
conception of "reason" was remarkably rigid and naive.
It was Rand's rigidity that always repelled me. Even
as a college student I found her pronouncements about
Shakespeare silly in their dogmatism. She accused him of
a sort of determinism: of believing that man was doomed
by "tragic flaws" over which he has no control. This was
a drab and second-hand opinion, drawn not from reading
Shakespeare but from bad literary criticism. And it could
apply, at most, only to his tragedies, not to his other
works.
Besides, I was surprised that anyone so intelligent
could fail to be thrilled by Shakespeare's genius (though
Tolstoy had an even lower opinion of him). Without
knowing anything of her personal flaws, I felt that Rand
was blind to any part of life that lay beyond her
intellectual scheme. There were more things in heaven and
earth than were dreamt of in Objectivism.
When I met Buckley, I was surprised to learn that he
also found Shakespeare baffling. A diligent self-
improver, he had even listened to tapes of the
Shakespeare plays in his limousine, hoping to comprehend
this mighty genius; but nothing seemed to help. This
amazed me, not only because I'd loved Shakespeare since
boyhood, but because I assumed that anyone with Bill
Buckley's command of English and delight in the fine-
filed phrase would have no trouble with the greatest
phrasemaker in the language. On the contrary, I supposed
that, like many highly literate men, he'd acquired his
love of language from Shakespeare himself, and even owed
something of his own great gift of phrase to that supreme
poet.
Unlike Rand, Buckley had no doctrinaire objections
to Shakespeare. He was open to so many aesthetic
pleasures, including composers as diverse as Bach and
Scriabin. Why should Shakespeare, of all writers, elude
him, of all readers?
I still don't know. I record it only as an odd fact.
And the crucial difference between Buckley and Rand is
that when he couldn't understand Shakespeare, he didn't
think it must be Shakespeare's fault. He had the humility
to realize that he was dealing with something larger than
himself.
It was a large part of Buckley's charm that he never
thought he had all the answers to everything. He could
admit error and laugh at himself. He had wide and urbane
tastes, and his circle included many original thinkers;
he surrounded himself with superior intellects, never
trying to be the big frog in the little pond. Among
NATIONAL REVIEW's early contributors were Chambers
(still, in my opinion, an underrated mind), James
Burnham, Max Eastman, Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk,
Brent Bozell, Frank Meyer, Frank Chodorov, Richard
Weaver, Henry Hazlitt, Thomas Molnar, John Lukacs, Ernest
van den Haag, and the young Garry Wills.
Buckley deferred to these men, most of whom were his
elders; he was content to be their point man, a role his
brilliance as a debater suited him for. He didn't pretend
to be an original thinker. He could quote Edmund Burke,
Michael Oakeshott, and Albert Jay Nock (a friend of his
father's whom he'd known as a boy); that was enough. He
reveled in his intellectual "patrimony" -- one of his
favorite words. He had no impulse to reduce that
abundance to a single sovereign truth, as Rand would. But
if he avoided political dogmatism, he also risked trying
to carry more than he could handle. His conservatism,
unlike Objectivism, defied definition and courted
confusion. At times he seemed almost to glory in being
unable to say just what conservatism was.
The role of conservatism, as NATIONAL REVIEW
announced in its first issue, was "to stand athwart
history yelling *Stop*!" An arresting phrase, but what
did it mean? Conservatism generally meant contentment
with the status quo, but that clearly wasn't what Buckley
and his allies had in mind: for them the status quo --
Eisenhower Republicanism -- was precisely the problem.
What *would* they be content with?
That early NATIONAL REVIEW set was a wonderfully
brassy lot, whose charms included mutual suspicions of
heresy: they not only debated first principles in the
pages of the magazine itself, but sometimes came close to
accusing each other of treason. They all agreed that the
modern world had gone horribly wrong, but they couldn't
always agree on the root of the trouble. Philosophical
differences were compounded by personalities: Kendall
could turn any debate into a bitter quarrel, and the
cool, subtle Burnham loved to bait the irascible Meyer.
What all these men shared was a readiness to appear
reactionary -- to shock liberal opinion by rejecting its
deepest axioms, on race, religion, democracy, what have
you. Their reactionary iconoclasm made the magazine
consistently refreshing and often exciting to read. Today
it's a much slicker magazine, but rarely stimulating. It
has forgotten its own glorious past, which even Buckley
himself hardly seems to remember.
It was getting that way by the time I left in 1993.
One thing Buckley had in common with Rand was a lack of
interest in American history. In her case the reason was
that her principles were so abstract and universal that
she felt she had no need of historical specifics to
validate them. But it was a strange attitude for a
conservative to share. For Buckley, as for most
conservatives of those days, history began with the New
Deal; later he seemed to think it began even later, with
the Cold War. Under Kendall's influence (I never met him,
but I loved his work) I began to look further back -- to
THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, or even 1776.
Over the years I'd very slowly learned to do my own
thinking, and neither Rand's Objectivism nor Buckley's
conservatism satisfied me. I had read Garet Garrett's
radically conservative tract THE REVOLUTION WAS. and I
was forced to ask myself the stunned question, "If
Garrett is right, what on earth am I doing here?"
When some conservatives feared that the New Deal
would lead to revolution, Garrett argued that the New
Deal *was* the revolution. This was where I'd come in.
In 1965 conservatives still agreed on a broad agenda:
stopping Communism abroad, and then repealing the New
Deal at home. Garrett, John Flynn, and others taught me
that anti-Communism had been perverted into an occasion
for creating an American empire, which would finish off
the American Republic. Sadly I yielded to their tragic
patriotism.
Today Communism, as a global going concern, is gone.
But the New Deal and the American Empire appear to be
here to stay. The conservatism Buckley represents,
blindsided by a history it never comprehended, has made
its peace with both, unaware of a fatal compromise. By
the simple step of joining the winning side, it has made
itself feel victorious. Never mind why it came into
existence in the first place. What happened to the
principles of 1955?
If you'll read any recent issue of NATIONAL REVIEW
you may agree that making feeble excuses for the latest
Republican administration is a far cry from standing
athwart history yelling *Stop*! In the old days the
magazine drew its energy from a sense of danger. You
couldn't read it without feeling that civilization was at
stake. Today it seems cheerfully unaware of any danger;
or maybe it's just cheerfully reconciled to the decline
of the West. (Hey, it's not too late to party!)
The original Buckley gang had a great sense of fun.
Everyone I talked to remembered Kendall as hilarious;
surprisingly, even Chambers, who wrote some of the
gloomiest prose of the century, was described as "always
laughing." (This becomes less surprising when you read
his nonpolitical journalism.) The magazine was small and
cheaply produced, but it packed a wallop. On the one
hand, it was apocalyptic; on the other, it found lots of
humor in the situation, much of it in the fact that the
captain (Eisenhower) didn't realize that the ship was
sinking. Now it's NATIONAL REVIEW itself that seems to
represent insensate optimism.
Not that it happened overnight, or recently. If you
can mark a real turning point, it was the 1980 election.
I'll never forget the astonished joy the editors (I among
them) felt when Ronald Reagan won the presidency. Reagan
was "one of us," an old subscriber and pal of Bill
Buckley's, and Bill knew better than anyone how utterly
improbable this would have seemed in 1955. It was as if
our best boyhood buddy had been elected president.
But it also put NATIONAL REVIEW in an odd and
awkward position, though we didn't fully perceive this.
It had been conceived in opposition to the powers that
be, and now it suddenly had a friend at court -- the king
himself!
After bashing one president after another for a
quarter of a century, we found ourselves implicitly
dedicated to the proposition that the king could do no
wrong. It wasn't just philosophical; it was social. Bill
Buckley and his socialite wife Pat were close to both Ron
and Nancy Reagan, and nothing in the magazine would
threaten their cozy relations. Bill once spiked
(apologetically, I must say) an editorial I wrote
criticizing Mrs. Reagan. He explained that he didn't want
to risk losing "our access" to the White House. He meant
his own welcome, of course. He tended to confuse his
personal success with the triumph of conservative
principles.
If that makes Buckley sound rather silly, consider
that another of the magazine's senior editors literally
wept with joy when Reagan was inaugurated in January
1981, believing that liberalism was finally finished. I
now acknowledge that my rejoicing was slightly premature.
When Soviet Communism finally collapsed in 1991,
NATIONAL REVIEW felt that its mission was accomplished.
It didn't notice that the America it had set out to save
from Communism no longer existed. Say what you will about
Ayn Rand, I can't imagine her making such a mistake.
Letter to the Editor
(page 2)
(TEXT OMITTED FROM THE PRINT EDITION BECAUSE OF
SPACE LIMITATIONS IS INCLUDED HERE IN DOUBLE
BRACKETS [[ thus ]].)
Mr. Sobran -- During the past few weeks I have been
researching the history of citizenship in Illinois for my
dissertation. I spent a very interesting day in the law
library here at Northern Illinois University reading the
early copies there of the Illinois Revised Statutes. The
earliest one we have in 1827, and it was rather moldy and
tired. [[ Still, it was fascinating to be holding a book
that had been printed on a hand press in Vandalia,
Illinois, when that was the state capital. It had been in
the library of at least one law firm, and was published
by the state's designated printer. ]]
The reason for this note is that I was re-reading
your essay "The Imaginary Abe: A Reply to Harry Jaffa's
'In Re Jack Kemp v. Joe Sobran'" [an Internet exclusive:
see "http://www.sobran.com/replyJaffa.shtml"] this
morning at breakfast, and noted your comments that
Lincoln may never have read the Federalist Papers. I
realized that a frontier lawyer, such as Lincoln would
chiefly have been occupied with books such as the one I
had held. Realizing that Illinois was a wild and poverty-
stricken frontier state in those days, the amount of
printing it could afford to do was pretty slim. Those
early Revised Statutes made up only a single volume and
were of fewer than 500 pages. As I recall, the 1827
edition did not even have the state constitution of 1818
in it. It may have had the Declaration of Independence.
Some of the ones from the 1830s had the Declaration, the
Articles, and the U.S. Constitution in them. I think one
may have even had the Northwest Ordinance. None had
anything like THE FEDERALIST PAPERS. [[ The first edition
we had large enough to be in two volumes was the 1853
edition. I was mainly interested in the Negro Code and
other laws bearing on citizenship, so I did not take
great note of other contents. ]]
My thought is that someone could be a very good
lawyer in Illinois, and have negligible understanding of
the Founding Documents and controversies. This is not
surprising, since most modern attorneys do not have much
of a clue on these things either. You might want to take
a look at the really early Illinois Revised Statutes to
get an idea on this.
Steve Berg
DeKalb, Illinois
REPLY
Mr. Berg makes an interesting point. We are apt to
forget that Lincoln still lived, as men had always
lived, in an era of scarcity we find it hard to imagine.
At times he was forced to share beds with other men, a
fact which has recently given rise to the absurd and
anachronistic inference that he was homosexual.
Mr. Berg rightly reminds us that the same scarcity
applied to books. These things are so abundant now that
anyone can pick up a paperback copy of THE FEDERALIST
PAPERS, and it's easy to overlook the rather obvious
fact that most Americans in Lincoln's day not only never
saw the book but were unaware of its existence.
[[ In studying Lincoln's speeches and writings for
the last few years, I have come to realize that ]]
Lincoln himself shows only the barest familiarity with
the thought of the American Founders. He quotes the
Declaration of Independence constantly, and of course he
knew the text of the U.S. Constitution; but these are
the two documents that would have been easily available
to him. He also seems to have read Jefferson on the
desirability of freeing and deporting Negro slaves.
But otherwise, I find no evidence that Lincoln knew
the debates that framed the Constitution, particularly
the all-important debate over the tension between
"confederation" and "consolidation." He came of age in
the era of rising nationalism, dominated by Jackson,
Webster, and Clay (Lincoln's own hero), and he accepted
their arguments for a powerful central government which
did not permit secession.
Like many self-educated men, Lincoln was brilliant
but not well-rounded. He applied what he knew superbly;
but he was unaware of how much he didn't know. [[ He
exemplifies Whately's aphorism: "He who is unaware of
his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge." ]]
By contrast, Jefferson Davis was deeply read in the
Founders' writings.
JS
NUGGETS
WE'RE OUTA HERE: The UN Conference against Racism and
Other Bad Stuff convened in South Africa, where black
African delegates inveighed against the white man,
ignoring the persecution of whites in neighboring
Zimbabwe and the enslavement of blacks elsewhere in
Africa. The U.S. delegation left in a huff -- not because
of the anti-white animus, of course, but because Israel
was accused of racism. (page 6)
BIG DADDY: To nobody's great surprise, Jesse Jackson
has jumped on the racial reparations bandwagon. He points
out that blacks are disproportionately poor, arrested,
imprisoned, discriminated against, victimized by crime,
and so forth. He somehow contrives to omit the biggest
social problem of all, the prevalence of black
illegitimacy, to which he has made his own little
contribution. (page 8)
EXCULPATION: I guess we can't pin this one on Janet
Reno. She would never attack a government building with
no kids in it. (page 9)
THE ONLY SOLUTION: What to do about immigration? At
this point, all I can suggest is that we rename the
country -- West Zimbabwe, perhaps. (page 9)
QUERY: Why are nonwhites always pouring into our racist
white societies? You'd think the traffic would be in the
other direction, yet they never seem to leave. (page 10)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
WITNESS: A few years ago Christopher Hitchens wrote a
book assailing Mother Teresa, tastefully titled THE
MISSIONARY POSITION. Guess what? Now that she is being
considered for canonization, the Vatican has invited
Hitchens to testify against her, in the tradition of the
Devil's Advocate. He recounts his interview in the
October issue of VANITY FAIR; suffice it to say that he
doesn't make much of a case. But he supplies enough
sneers to allow VANITY FAIR's smug readers to feel
superior to a woman who devoted her life to serving the
poor. One of his complaints is that she was guilty of
"proselytizing" among the dying; that is, treating them
as if they had souls.
ANNOUNCEMENT: There's a new page on the website you won't
want to miss -- "http://www.sobran.com/cynosure.shtml". I
call it SOBRAN'S CYNOSURE, a page on which I will list
those definitions Joe comes up with that we all wish we
had thought up ourselves. Most of the ones listed now
came from an old issue of NATIONAL REVIEW; others will be
added. They are *not* the same items that were included
in the book ANYTHING CALLED A "PROGRAM" IS
UNCONSTITUTIONAL, though they may find their way into one
of its sequels later. -- Website Manager
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Great Mistakes and Great Men (August 23, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010823.shtml
* Sharon's War on Terrorism (August 28, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010828.shtml
* What's in a Nickname? (August 30, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010830.shtml
* Labels and Libels (September 4, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010904.shtml
* The Mother of Tragedy (September 6, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010906.shtml
* The Unknown Enemy (September 11, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010911.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]