SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month

July 2002
Volume 9, No. 7

Editor: Joe Sobran
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CONTENTS
Features
  -> Conspiracy, Blackmail, and Politics
  -> Wartime Journal
  -> We the State
  -> Convenient Thinking
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted



FEATURES

Conspiracy, Blackmail, and Politics
(page 1)

     Robert Caro's heroic biography of Lyndon Johnson 
(MASTER OF THE SENATE, the third of four scheduled 
volumes, has just appeared, at 1,167 pages) tells many 
stories and offers many lessons, including one that seems 
to go over its own author's head. True, Caro realizes 
that Johnson was a scheming monster who amassed power in 
large part by gathering dirt on his colleagues; but it 
doesn't occur to him that this throws a strange light not 
just on Johnson, but on democratic government itself.

     Now, a generation after Johnson's death, we learn, 
thanks to Caro, what was going on behind the scenes: 
government by blackmail. We shouldn't have had to wait so 
long for this insight, if the myths of democracy are 
true. But that's a very big "if." In the nature of the 
case, we can never know how large a part secret crimes -- 
blackmail, extortion, bribery -- play in public affairs; 
but it must be a far larger part than we usually assume. 
Most politicians, being human, have something to hide, 
and they can be controlled by anyone who finds it out.

     Bob Dole avoided raising the "character issue" 
against Bill Clinton during the 1996 presidential 
campaign; later we learned that Dole himself had once had 
an adulterous liaison, and that others knew about it. 
Either the Clinton people or the press or both had gotten 
wind of it. We now know too that during the 1940 campaign 
Franklin Roosevelt got word to Wendell Willkie that he 
knew about Willkie's mistress; that may explain why 
Willkie waged a feeble campaign. Roosevelt knew how to 
use the FBI and the IRS against his opponents.

     Though governments actually budget for "covert 
operations," we are constantly warned against "conspiracy 
theories." The public learns only belatedly of some of 
the underhanded doings that shape political events, and 
these revelations never seem to have any relevance for 
the present: nobody seems to ask whether such things are 
still happening today, though they surely are. The public 
always votes in the dark. It never really knows who 
controls the men it elects. It *can't* know. It will be 
lucky if a significant part of the truth comes out 
decades after the election, and much will remain hidden 
anyway. Even so, we know some of the crimes of Presidents 
Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton. (Some 
would add Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, and the first Bush to 
this list.)

     And this doesn't begin to address the crimes of all 
the politicians and government agents who operate below 
the radar. We know only that what we call "public 
service" attracts a lot of criminal personalities and 
serves as a front for an incalculable amount of criminal 
behavior. The state itself thrives on activities we 
consider crimes in ordinary life: murder ("defense"), 
robbery and extortion ("taxation"), counterfeiting 
("inflation"), bribery ("entitlements"), and so forth. 
And these are the things it does *openly.* What is it 
doing behind the curtain?

     Even under the most limited government, the powers 
of the state are bound to be abused in ways the public 
rarely suspects or discovers. All the more reason for 
those powers to be as few as possible.



Wartime Journal
(page 2)

     Let's not be conspiracy-minded, but isn't it 
remarkable that an administration of oilmen should be so 
eager to fight Evil in such oil-drenched countries as 
Iraq and Iran -- as well as Afghanistan, such an apt 
route for a pipeline to the oil-rich lands of central 
Asia?

*          *          *

     George W. Bush, like his father, aspires to be 
remembered as an Education President. As a strict 
constructionist, he might begin by showing us where the 
Constitution authorizes the president, or the Federal 
Government, to meddle with schools in any way. He also 
raised questions about his own aptness for the role when 
he asked Brazil's president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 
"Do you have blacks too?"

*          *          *

     Post-9/11 security measures have been hobbled by 
scruples about racial profiling. This is one of those 
phony conundrums that bedevil American public discourse. 
The solution is obvious. If (say) you own an airline, 
it's perfectly sensible for you to be wary of any 
category of people whom the U.S. Government has provoked 
to hate Americans. If the government has a history of 
annoying Arabs, you'd better keep an eye on Arabs. That's 
a perfectly rational form of discrimination, and it's no 
reflection on Arabs; rather on our own rulers. 
Discrimination is only wrong when it's indiscriminate.

*          *          *

     Some years ago Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor 
of FIRST THINGS, accused me of "flirting" with anti-
Semitism -- an insinuation he also made against a number 
of other conservatives he had fallen out with as he 
ingratiated himself with wealthy Jewish neoconservatives. 
Well, Father Neuhaus himself is now having his turn in 
the dock: an article in the June issue of COMMENTARY, 
"Israel and the Anti-Semites," by Gabriel Schoenfeld, 
cites his "tortuous rationalizations" as an end-product 
of "worldwide anti-Semitism." His offense? Mildly 
critical remarks about Israel.

*          *          *

     Michael Skakel, Ted Kennedy's kinsman, has finally 
been convicted of murdering Martha Moxley when both were 
teenagers. He probably did it, but after a quarter of a 
century, could his guilt really be proved beyond a 
reasonable doubt? At any rate, his conviction shows that 
the Kennedy connection no longer protects the guilty, and 
may even bring suspicion on the innocent.

*          *          *

     Don't say they aren't making great movies anymore 
before you've caught up with today's computer-animated 
films. TOY STORY (and its sequel), A BUG'S LIFE, and 
SHREK, to name but three of many, are not only visually 
astounding; their dialogue and actors' voices are 
wittier, and funnier, than those of any live-action films 
I've seen in years. Genius turns up in the oddest places.

*          *          *

     In answer to your many queries, yes, my grandson Joe 
is still playing baseball. He's no longer the tiny boy on 
the field, but a strapping 15-year-old who can throw a 
fastball nearly 80 miles per hour and hit 350-foot home 
runs. In his first appearance as a rookie in a league for 
15- to 16-year-olds, he pitched a two-hitter with 11 
strikeouts, getting two hits himself in a 7-2 victory. 
And no, he swears he's not taking steroids.



We the State
(pages 3-4)

     In October 1945, only two months after the nuclear 
attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George Orwell wrote an 
essay titled "You and the Atom Bomb." He noted that 
"curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, 
about the question that is of most urgent interest to all 
of us, namely: 'How difficult are these things to 
manufacture?'"

     At that time it was still widely believed that a 
lone scientist might be able to make an A-bomb in his own 
laboratory; but Orwell surmised, from some remarks of 
Harry Truman and other officials, that "the bomb is 
fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands 
an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four 
countries in the world are capable of making. This point 
is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the 
discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing 
history, will simply intensify the trends which have been 
apparent for a dozen years past."

     This led Orwell to an interesting distinction. 
Starting with the adage that "the history of civilization 
is largely the history of weapons," he offered a general 
rule: "that ages in which the dominant weapon is 
expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of 
despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and 
simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for 
example, tanks, battleships, and bombing planes are 
inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, 
long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic 
weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, 
while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to 
it -- gives claws to the weak."

     He added, "Had the atomic bomb turned out to be 
something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle 
or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back 
into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have 
meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-
centralized police state." But since only a few 
centralized states could produce the bomb, he predicted 
that these states -- probably the United States and the 
Soviet Union -- would divide the world between them in a 
frigid peace. (Here, as so often, Orwell's essays 
foreshadow NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.)

     Until September 11, Orwell's prediction seemed to 
stand up pretty well. He hadn't foreseen the collapse of 
the Soviet Union, but he had been right in principle: the 
United States stood alone as the global superpower 
because of its huge superiority in military technology.

     But on that astounding day we realized that we were 
vulnerable to a new kind of enemy: one who didn't have to 
win on the battlefield, or conquer or occupy or destroy 
or otherwise subdue us -- an enemy who, with modest 
weapons of his own, was content to disrupt. Even 
"terrorism" doesn't capture it.

     Nobody knows what to expect of this ill-defined 
enemy, or even who he is (or, if Osama bin Laden is the 
key figure, whether he is still alive). The first attack 
was a brilliant stroke, using minimal means. Even after 
billions of dollars have been spent devastating his 
suspected lairs in Afghanistan, nobody knows whether this 
has crippled or even hurt his capacity for destruction -- 
though the Bush administration, for no clear reason, 
wants to extend the war to Iraq. What that would have to 
do with "defeating terrorism" is anyone's guess, but 
President Bush has redefined the struggle as a war on 
"evil." Bin Laden is already all but forgotten.

     The great worry now is one Orwell couldn't have 
foreseen: that the shadowy enemy will smuggle nuclear 
devices into the United States, causing destruction and 
disruption immeasurably worse than last September's. A 
bin Laden doesn't have to manufacture nukes; he just has 
to buy one of the thousands that have already been 
stockpiled since 1945. He doesn't even need to detonate 
it; merely releasing its radiation with conventional 
explosives could effectively depopulate a major city and 
ruin this country economically.

     The administration doesn't know what to do. Three of 
its top officials have now admitted as much. Vice 
President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller, and 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld now say that more 
terrorist attacks, possibly with nuclear weapons, are 
"inevitable." They also admit that they can't do their 
job, the supposed raison d'etre of any state: to protect 
the population.

     In a nutshell, the almighty U.S. Government has made 
an enemy it can't handle. It has involved this country in 
the endless Middle East War with no plan, purpose, or 
goal. It makes blustering threats it can't carry out.

     George W. Bush radiates inadequacy. Even in terms of 
conventional statecraft, he is incompetent; in a crisis 
he is simply hopeless. He is neither a thinker nor a re-
thinker. You can't imagine him asking the basic and 
obvious questions that need to be addressed right now; 
instead he leans on all the wearisome "lessons" of World 
War II, taking his guidance from the dubious examples of 
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with Ariel 
Sharon as his Stalin. He has learned nothing from history 
except how the vulgar press expects a "great wartime 
leader" to behave, and this war is like no other. For 
Bush, common sense means cliche, and heroism means 
overstatement.

     The Middle East War is an unholy mess, in some 
respects like World War I with its unpredictable 
alliances and tangled tripwires. In large part this war 
is a legacy of British imperialism, which left unstable 
borders and unresolved disputes all over the place, from 
Palestine to Kuwait. No single principle or American 
interest is at stake, but the U.S. Government has meddled 
its way into it aimlessly, with the usual slogans about 
democracy and freedom -- the sort of official talk that 
disgusted Orwell.

     This has been going on for decades; September 11 
merely served notice that the Middle East War will also 
be fought on American soil. This caught the U.S. 
Government by surprise, though it shouldn't have, and the 
American reaction was not to ask whether all this 
intervention was worth the price, but to redouble the 
intervention, even at risk of redoubling the price as 
well.

     Now the truth that has been obvious all along has 
been confirmed at the highest levels: the U.S. Government 
has exposed the American people to terrible dangers, and 
despite its enormous and stupendously costly "defense" 
system, it doesn't know how to defend us against the 
enmity it has provoked.

     "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a 
constant struggle," as Orwell wrote elsewhere. (Compare 
Chesterton: "Men can always be blind to a thing, so long 
as it is big enough.")

     In more than one sense, the enemy is already within 
the gates. We don't know how many Islamic fanatics are in 
this country, plotting further attacks; but the Bush 
administration has secured easy passage of a "USA PATRIOT 
Act" that greatly increases the arbitrary and 
unconstitutional powers of the government. These powers 
are said to be aimed at terrorists, but since a terrorist 
isn't likely to be self-identified or easily detectable, 
they may be used against anyone. In order to frustrate a 
handful of criminals, the rights of a quarter of a 
billion Americans have been abridged. Our rulers are 
better at curtailing our freedom than at protecting it.

     And of course -- to return to Orwell's point -- the 
government's weaponry, nuclear and "conventional," has 
reached a level of potency and complexity inconceivable 
in 1945. Meanwhile, the government has been whittling 
away "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." The 
chief reason this right was acknowledged in the 
Constitution was to ensure that the people would possess 
the means of resisting tyranny. Even the statist 
Alexander Hamilton called the right of self-defense 
"paramount to all [other rights]."

     But times have changed. In 1861 Southern Americans 
could still believe they could secure their liberty with 
rifles; a mistake, as it turned out, but they did hold 
out for four years. Today that belief would be sheer 
fantasy. Imagine Lincoln with modern tanks, helicopters, 
jets, and nukes taking on the state militias.

     Meanwhile, the government claims and spends more and 
more of the wealth people produce; and more and more 
people depend on others' taxes for their income. Both 
classes, the taxed and the tax-consuming, are at the 
mercy of the government. And nearly everyone accepts this 
as a normal condition rather than a tyrannical perversion 
of government.

     So the disproportion between the government and the 
individual has increased tremendously since Orwell's day. 
At the same time, fewer and fewer people realize this or 
find it alarming. Education, also provided by the 
government, gives its pupils neither the historical 
memory nor the power of analysis needed to appreciate the 
political facts of life. When education means state 
propaganda, the "citizen" becomes a product of the state 
-- a system of coercion he feels all around him, but 
can't comprehend.

     According to our official mythology, "We the People" 
create the government. The truth is that the government 
is now creating the people. That is, it creates the kind 
of people it wants: ignorant, docile, weak, dependent. 
The kind Orwell noticed around him: Winston Smiths, who, 
far from seeing the state as their enemy, identify 
themselves with it.



Convenient Thinking
(pages 5-6)

     In public debates I'm often struck by the prevalence 
of a special form of wishful thinking -- what I call 
"convenient thinking." This occurs when people assume 
that all the facts are on their side, or try to make them 
appear so. Convenient thinking spares them the trouble of 
facing and sorting out complications.

     We see this in the endless quarreling in the Middle 
East, when Jews and Arabs hurl grievances at each other, 
while ignoring each other's grievances. To the impartial 
eye it's obvious that plenty of crimes have been 
committed on both sides. What has this to do with the 
question of who has a right to the land?

     One absolutist position, held by many Christians as 
well as some Jews, holds that God gave the land to the 
Jews, forever, in the time of Moses. If so, it is 
irrelevant which side has committed more crimes. Even if 
the Jews had committed all the crimes, and the Arabs 
none, the land would still belong to the Jews. Yet such 
absolutists as Cal Thomas insist on enumerating Arab 
crimes and ignoring Jewish ones, as if this fortified 
their case. But why pile on the grievances? Isn't the 
divine donation sufficient?

     Not only that, but it seems that America must 
support Israel to the hilt. Here the reason is not so 
clear, since God, as far as we know, didn't command Harry 
Truman to do this. Some absolutists -- presumably 
including Thomas -- would say it's America's duty to save 
the Chosen People, citing God's promise to bless those 
who bless the Jews. (Never mind the U.S. Constitution, 
which doesn't authorize foreign aid of any kind.)

     But this is not enough: the absolutists argue that 
Israel is also a valuable asset to the United States, 
ignoring much evidence to the contrary. Again, why does 
this matter? Do you count costs when doing your duty to 
the Almighty? It should be possible to hold that the 
United States must support Israel *regardless* of the 
costs and dangers such support brings on this country. 
Even if U.S. policy toward Israel helped provoke the 9/11 
attacks -- and everyone knows it did -- it would be 
America's duty to stand by Israel.

     Then there is the George Will position, which makes 
no appeal to the supernatural, yet somehow always finds 
that the facts happen to be 100 per cent in Israel's 
favor. Will, in all the years I have read him, has never 
found Israel at fault, has never mentioned Palestinian 
rights, and has never noticed any tension between 
American and Israeli interests. How you account for this 
remarkable coincidence of justification without believing 
in divine providence is beyond me.

     Of course Israel's partisans, religious and secular, 
insist that 9/11 was completely unrelated to Israel. This 
tacitly admits that if the truth were otherwise, some 
second thoughts about Israel just might be in order. This 
problem is averted by the simple denial of the obvious 
relation between U.S. policy and Arab hostility to the 
United States. Nobody dares to say, "Yes, the 9/11 
attacks were, unfortunately, brought on by U.S. policy 
toward Israel. But that policy is still, on balance, well 
worth the price."

     It seems rather improbable to hold at once that (1) 
the Jews have every right to exclusive possession of the 
Holy Land; (2) all the wrongs have been on the Arab side; 
and (3) the U.S. Government's favoritism to Israel in the 
bitter conflict yields pure profit to Americans. This is 
an example of what I mean by convenient thinking. It's 
all too good to be true. (I pass over the further 
reinforcing assertions, such as that Israel is a 
democracy and that the Arabs want to exterminate all 
Jews.)

     A more complicated but realistic position might hold 
that even if the Jews' claim to the land is justified, 
there is no particular reason for the U.S. Government to 
enforce that claim, especially considering the problems 
it raises for this country. Or one could even argue that 
the Jews have no special claim to the land, but that the 
U.S. gains more than it loses by taking Israel's side 
anyway.

     Another sort of convenient thinking may be found in 
those who see nothing but evil in Israel. Now it's far 
from an ideal state (if any state can be "ideal"); it has 
blood on its hands; it treats its minorities shamefully; 
yet it doesn't approach the world's many worse tyrannies 
in scale of evil, and it's unfair to exaggerate its 
crimes and to condemn it without a due sense of 
proportion. My main objection to it is that it has been a 
terribly costly *client* -- alias "ally" -- of this 
country, as witness 9/11. Moreover, far from feeling 
grateful for American support, it has behaved 
treacherously to its only benefactor, from the 1954 Lavon 
affair to the 1967 assault on the Liberty to the 1985 
Pollard spy case (and these are only a few famous 
highlights of its scandalous record).

     There is an obvious way to resolve the Jewish-Arab 
dispute, but few are willing to accept it. The solution 
is property rights. No group can claim the land as a 
whole, but everyone has the right to settle there 
peacefully, including Norwegians and Tahitians if they so 
desire. No state has the right to exclude anyone from the 
land or to drive people from their homes. That is, under 
a system of property rights there would be neither a 
Jewish nor a Palestinian state. Instead, alas, both sides 
assume that there must be one state or the other, and 
this assumption leads inevitably to convenient thinking.

     This mentality is typical of victim politics, but 
other situations also generate similar thinking. In the 
debate on the death penalty, the two chief positions 
assume a happy convergence between principle and the 
facts of experience. One side holds that (1) capital 
punishment is justified, and (2) it "works" -- that is, 
it deters crime. But surely you could argue that even if 
it doesn't "work" in this sense, it's morally justified, 
even imperative. Yet few advocates seem willing to admit 
the possibility that killing criminals doesn't affect the 
crime rate.

     By the same token, opponents always seem to hold 
that (1) the death penalty is barbaric, and (2) it 
doesn't deter crime anyway. They seldom face the obvious 
question: Would it be justified if it *did* deter? That 
is, if every execution of a murderer resulted in fewer 
murder victims, isn't it unjust to potential victims not 
to kill killers?

     A grimly amusing story. A few years ago the 
WASHINGTON POST reported that the D.C. government was 
finding it hard to prosecute drug dealers because people 
were afraid to testify against them after several recent 
witnesses had been shot dead.

     A few days later, Richard Cohen, the POST's chief 
liberal pundit (in recent years, I'm happy to add, his 
lucid intervals have become more frequent), who 
apparently hadn't been reading his own paper, wrote his 
standard column denouncing the death penalty as legalized 
murder or whatever, adding that all the evidence shows 
that it has no deterrent effect anyway.

     Well, I thought, Mr. Cohen should have a chat with 
the drug dealers. *They* seem to think it has a 
deterrent effect -- at least on witnesses. This may be an 
area where the criminals are wiser than the 
criminologists.

     Obviously, death threats have *some* effect. As the 
old saying goes, you can get a lot further with a kind 
word and a gun than you can with just a kind word. Why do 
people make *any* threats? You might as well argue that 
fear plays no role in social life.

     Needless to say, a threat must be serious to achieve 
its purpose. A drug dealer who may shoot you tomorrow is 
more credible than a state that may someday, years hence, 
get around to strapping you into the chair. In the old 
days, a criminal might be tried, convicted, and hanged 
within a week of his crime.

     Having said all that, I should state my own view. I 
think many criminals richly deserve to die. For that 
matter, some of them deserve lingering torture. And I'm 
sure that if promptly administered, these punishments 
would deter a great deal of crime. But I don't think the 
state should have the power to inflict them, for the 
simple reason that I doubt that the state should exist at 
all.

     Apart from that small reservation, it seems to me 
monstrous to hire men to perform such acts -- to pay them 
to kill or torture other men who have done them no 
personal injury. Personal revenge I can understand; 
though it has obvious dangers, it's natural and often 
justified. But what sort of man could make a living 
avenging wrongs he knows only by report?

     Debates over historical questions tend to succumb to 
convenient thinking. To hear the partisans quarrel over 
the Civil War, either Lincoln was a saint and slavery a 
diabolical evil, or he was a tyrant and slavery a humane 
system. Any complications of these happily simple views 
are unwelcome.

     Yet all such simplifications deny the whole texture 
of life, with its puzzles, rough edges, surprises, and 
general messiness; in which horrible deeds are done in 
good causes and men who are tragically wrong rise to 
nobility and heroism. It's the willingness to face all 
the facts without flinching that makes Orwell so 
refreshing, and even oddly consoling.



NUGGETS

CANINE CIVIL SERVANT IN TROUBLE: A German shepherd police 
dog in McKee's Rocks, Pennsylvania, may be executed for 
racism. It seems that the dog, trained to sniff drugs, 
has been attacking black people, several of whom were 
found not to be in possession of illegal substances. 
Apparently the dog was merely guilty of inductive 
reasoning via his nose and had innocently drawn the wrong 
conclusion from his olfactory experience. But one of the 
town's councilwomen is demanding his death for 
unauthorized racial profiling. Well, fair is fair: with 
animal rights come animal responsibilities. (page 6)

HOLD THE MILLSTONES: The U.S. Catholic bishops have 
adopted a semi-tough policy toward priests who prey 
sexually on young people. Many laymen find the retention 
of such priests, even those who have repented and 
reformed, unconscionable. We can differ on that. What I 
find most disturbing is that the bishops still haven't 
confronted the real problem: the homosexual network in 
the American clergy. Nor has the Vatican. (page 8)

PREDICTION: President Bush's "war on terrorism" will 
match the triumph of his father's "war on drugs." 
(page 9)

GRUDGING CONCESSION: Mirabile dictu, even some 
neoconservatives are admitting that it's sort of, well, 
irregular for the U.S. Government to detain a U.S. 
citizen -- Abdullah al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla -- 
indefinitely and without trial as an "enemy combatant," 
even though the United States isn't formally at war. The 
Bush administration, says one neocon pundit, is "playing 
into the hands of its most hysterical and malicious 
critics" -- by which I guess he means folks who read the 
Constitution. (page 11)


Exclusive to the electronic version:

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGES: In his best-seller, BODY OF 
SECRETS: ANATOMY OF THE ULTRA-SECRET NATIONAL SECURITY 
AGENCY (Doubleday), James Bamford describes some hair-
raising secret schemes by the NSA under Presidents 
Eisenhower and Kennedy, unknown to the public until now, 
which might easily have led to war, even nuclear war. 
I'll discuss this more fully in the near future. Without 
judging the accuracy of Bamford's claims, we can say at 
least that he tends to confirm one awful fact: that the 
executive branch no longer regards itself as subordinate 
to Congress or the laws on the books, and feels justified 
in usurping power without informing anyone. 

WHAT'S MORE: President Bush now claims the right of "hot 
pre-emption" -- first strikes against evildoers suspected 
of, you know, planning to make "weapons of mass 
destruction." No need to let the Constitution get in the 
way, of course. The good news is that such first strikes 
will be authorized only in self-defense. The bad news is 
that the perpetrators will define self-defense. 

NEXT: Sir Ozzy? Days after the jubilee of Queen 
Elizabeth II, during which Her Majesty was celebrated by 
such certified creeps as Ozzy Osbourne, Buckingham Palace 
knighted the original bad-boy rocker, Mick Jagger. So, 50 
years after her coronation, the British monarch is 
heaping honors on entertainers whose acts would have 
landed them in prison when her reign began. 

A KINDER, GENTLER CANNIBAL: After much bluster about 
eating children, crushing testicles, and fornicating with 
female interviewers, former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson 
was finally destroyed by incumbent Lennox Lewis. Lewis's 
piston-like jab frustrated and bloodied Tyson until the 
eighth round, when a crushing right cross finished the 
job. Tyson was so pathetically humble in defeat as to 
excite suspicions of brain damage. If a good whipping can 
change a man's personality within a half hour, maybe 
boxing should be abolished. 



REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)

* Lowering Our Guard (May 14, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020514.shtml

* Your Friend, the State (May 16, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020516.shtml

* The Giant Problem-Solver (May 21, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020521.shtml

* Citing Scripture (May 23, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020523.shtml

* A Common Languatge? (May 28, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020528.shtml

* Minor Atrocities (May 30, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020530.shtml

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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