SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month

March 2006
Volume 13, Number 3

Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
  -> Gray November, Coming Up
  -> Spring Fevers
  -> Comedy: A Manifesto
  -> Looking for Truth
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue



FEATURES

{{ MATERIAL DROPPED OR CHANGED SOLELY FOR REASONS OF 
SPACE APPEARS IN DOUBLE CURLY BRACKETS. EMPHASIS IS 
INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" SIGNS AROUND THE 
EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}

Gray November, Coming Up
(page 1)

     This is what we call a midterm election year, and it 
may be the most convulsive one since 1994. President Bush 
and his party, who barely a year ago had it all, have 
plunged to their lowest level of popularity ever, and the 
Democrats are hoping to regain at least one house of 
Congress, maybe both, this fall. Bush's conduct is widely 
seen as incompetent, illegal, and even unconstitutional. 
His staunchest supporters don't show much enthusiasm 
anymore, and some Democrats are murmuring about 
everything from censure to impeachment. Unlikely, but no 
longer unthinkable.

     The pundits agree that neither party has found a 
compelling theme, but the Democrats may not need one. 
Disgust with the Republicans may be such a seismic force 
that the voters won't be very particular about reasons 
for chucking them out at the first opportunity. My old 
friend Fred Barnes (we used to be neighbors) has written 
a book praising Bush for "redefining" American 
conservatism. Well, if that's an achievement, let's give 
credit where credit is due. Certainly Bush has left 
conservatism, as popularly understood, unrecognizable.

     After repudiating "nation-building" during the 2000 
campaign, Bush adopted it with a vengeance after 9/11: 
his presidency has been defined by his announced mission 
of "global democratic revolution." Such talk used to make 
conservatives shudder. Even his father was willing to 
settle for a "new world order" -- a comparatively minor 
adjustment, involving little bloodshed. Old Bush, it's 
true, did agree to raise new taxes, but this was because 
he realized that Big Government had to be paid for 
eventually, and, unlike his son, he didn't favor INFINITE 
Government.

     It's not that I want the Democrats in power. But 
there is no longer much reason to prefer the Republicans, 
and a return to "gridlock" -- the mutual frustration that 
is all we can pray for in a two-party system -- looks 
like the last, if not exactly best, hope for democracy. 
Unfortunately, our Constitution makes no provision for a 
military coup; so much for the vaunted wisdom of the 
Framers. (Should we be grateful that our generals don't 
see the Constitution as a living document?)

     The pressing issue this year is the Iraq war. The 
Democrats are divided about it, but despite growing 
opposition to it among their base, they don't oppose it 
in principle; both parties agree that "world leadership" 
-- a sunny euphemism for global empire -- is America's 
vocation. They have tactical differences (mostly 
opportunistic) about what this historic role requires 
here and now, and of course the Democrats are glad to 
exploit Bush's "quagmire" now that the public is 
disillusioned with it.

     As usual, the question this fall will be not whether 
we'll get bigger government -- that's a given -- but 
which brand of tyranny we're likely to get and how much. 
"Faith, there's small choice among rotten apples."



Spring Fevers
(page 2)

     Peter Beinart of THE NEW REPUBLIC, one of the wisest 
young liberals around, says it's time for one of Bush's 
friends to tell him, "Your presidency isn't hanging by a 
thread. Your presidency is over. You bet it on the war in 
Iraq, and you lost." With his own party deserting him, 
any domestic agenda he had is dead too. So, says Beinart, 
why not just act honorably from here on out?

*          *          *

     TIME magazine is freaking out about global warming. 
It isn't just coming -- it's here! The debate is over! 
Moral: The government must take immediate action to save 
the planet! Funny, wasn't that the same moral we drew 
when the population explosion happened a generation ago? 
The real danger isn't these notional crises, but the 
government's responses to them. Unless we reduce the 
power of government =immediately,= we face the certainty 
of even =more= government.

*          *          *

     Two distinguished professors have published a long 
article critical of the Israel lobby, and you'll =never= 
guess what they're being accused of. Hint: What is Hitler 
best remembered for? Right. Judging by the frequency of 
these charges, far greater than in Hitler's heyday, I can 
conclude only that this must be the Golden Age of 
Anti-Semitism.

*          *          *

     Baseball fans are getting set to boo their lungs out 
when Barry Bonds breaks the lifetime home-run records of 
Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. In the hearts of those who love 
the game, Bonds will never be a hero, but, shall we say, 
a walking asterisk. He still insists he has never taken 
steroids -- knowingly, that is. He can't help it if 
someone slipped them into his Vaseline, can he? Maybe it 
depends what your definition of "steroids" is.

*          *          *

     Anyway, Sadaharu Oh's record still appears a long 
way off.

*          *          *

     Some are talking about a Rice versus Clinton race in 
2008, but Condi says she's not running. So, after eight 
years of George W. Bush, what eligible Republican might 
beat Hillary? I see only one: Laura Bush. Think how 
dramatic a Bush versus Clinton race could be! Two first 
ladies. But Laura is better looking, she's less abrasive, 
and she has the indispensable training our next president 
will need: She's used to cleaning up after George.

*          *          *

     My least favorite spectator sport is college 
basketball, and I was one of the very few Virginians 
untouched by the mania for George Mason University's 
amazing team this year. But in the end, even I succumbed 
and watched the big game against Florida with passion. 
Why? Because GMU's sudden fame may inspire curiosity 
about who the great George Mason was, and because a 
championship would boost the school's excellent economics 
department. Of course GMU was flattened.

*          *          *

     As I observed last year, Americans who think America 
should behave like other countries are called 
"isolationists," whereas other countries that behave like 
America are called "rogue nations." Though I disagree 
with those who want Bush to nuke Mecca, they can't 
reasonably be accused of isolationism.



Comedy: A Manifesto
(pages 3-5)

     "The world is a tragedy to those who feel, and a 
comedy to those who think," said Horace Walpole. Or is it 
the other way around? Or was it Robert Walpole?

     In any case, I endorse the general idea. At age 60, 
I've done about enough feeling for one lifetime. My 
deepest emotions are pretty well worn out, and by now I'm 
ready to leave the sterner sentiments to the younger 
generation. Sin, war, abortion, politics, official lies 
-- in my time I've gotten suitably indignant about them 
all, and I think I may now consider my duty done, as 
regards them. Not that I've changed my mind about these 
things, but let the kids tackle them now. From here on 
out, it's comedy for me.

     Robert McCrum's excellent new biography of P.G. 
Wodehouse, WODEHOUSE: A LIFE (Norton), made up my mind. 
Wodehouse, maybe the greatest comic novelist in the 
English language, seems to have known all along what I've 
only just come to realize. If you can't change the world, 
you may as well just learn to enjoy it.

     Wodehouse enjoyed it to the end, dying at 93 after 
writing about a book a year. In the "unfallen" world of 
his fiction, as Evelyn Waugh admiringly called it, Bertie 
Wooster and Jeeves, Lord Emsworth and his pigs, 
Mr. Mulliner, Ukridge, Psmith, and dozens of others 
inhabit a realm, vaguely Edwardian, that stands as an 
eternal gentle rebuke to contemporary life. To the charge 
that his world no longer existed, Wodehouse genially 
turned the tables by pleading guilty: "I am a historical 
novelist, like Sabatini."

     In person, Wodehouse wasn't particularly funny or 
witty, but shy, though all agreed that he was extremely 
good-natured. His friendships, like his only marriage, 
were durable and unruffled. He seemed incapable of making 
enemies. Apart from writing, his delights were his dogs 
and golf. Later in life, he loved televised soap operas. 
He was widely read, but indefatigably shallow, sticking 
to the amusing surfaces of things. If he ever had a deep 
thought in his life, he kept it to himself.

     McCrum offers an interesting surmise as to why 
sexual themes never appear in Wodehouse's fiction. He 
notes that a generation of English writers came of age in 
the shadow of Oscar Wilde's sensational sodomy trial and 
thinks Wodehouse drew the lesson that "intimacy could be 
dangerous, even fatal." He was prudish by nature anyway, 
and this extreme reaction would have been in character. 
Relations between the sexes in his stories are chaste to 
the point of absurdity.

     Like most of his characters, Wodehouse was quite 
harmless, rather dotty, as well as reclusive and utterly 
apolitical. In fact his complete indifference to politics 
nearly cost him his life. A warning to us all. Trotsky 
could have told him: "You may not be interested in war, 
but war is interested in you." And World War II turned 
out to have a special interest in P.G. Wodehouse.

     In 1940 Wodehouse and his wife were staying in 
France (they had settled in New York) when the German 
army arrived. He'd been paying no attention to the war 
between Germany and his native England, and he didn't see 
why it should concern him, so he'd made no effort to 
flee.

     The Germans interned him and soon, discovering that 
he was a famous writer, asked him to do a few radio 
interviews. He obligingly consented. What harm could 
there be? Here his inability to make enemies became his 
downfall.

     The interviews were innocuous, but the Germans 
figured their catch would have propaganda value if he 
said he was being humanely treated, as he genially agreed 
he was. Since this contradicted British propaganda about 
the Nazis, it didn't go over well in England. Not at all.

     A fury exploded in his native land. He was denounced 
as a "traitor" in the newspapers and Parliament. There 
were passionate demands for his execution, and an 
official investigation of his conduct ensued. He was 
eventually cleared of all charges, but the official 
report was kept secret until long after his death in 
1974.

     Meanwhile, Wodehouse also had passionate defenders, 
who not only loved his work but saw the horrible 
absurdity of the accusations and threats against him. His 
champions, fittingly, included George Orwell and Malcolm 
Muggeridge, both of whom, of course, stood out in their 
age for their resistance to the regnant political 
hysteria. The atmosphere may be judged by a memorandum 
about Wodehouse's case by Winston Churchill in late 1944: 
"We would prefer not ever to hear from him again.... His 
name stinks here, but he would not be sent to prison. 
However, if there is no other resort, he should be sent 
[from France] over here [to England] and if there is no 
other charge against him, he can live secluded in some 
place or go to hell as soon as there is a vacant 
passage." Today such brutal contempt for pacific 
neutrality is considered exemplary. Accursed were the 
peacemakers! And P.G. Wodehouse was born to make peace.

     Though Wodehouse escaped any legal punishment, the 
cloud of having momentarily cooperated with his captors 
remained over his subsequent career. Wodehouse himself 
expressed contrition: "I made an ass of myself, and must 
pay the penalty." Even the sympathetic liberal McCrum 
thinks Wodehouse did something seriously wrong, and he 
marvels sadly that his subject always remained puzzled by 
the uproar. After the war, the Wodehouses moved to Long 
Island with their many pets and never returned to England 
again.

     Today, 66 years after Wodehouse's internment, the 
anti-Nazi hysteria has only partly abated, as witness the 
frenzy over "Holocaust denial," the imprisonment of the 
historian David Irving, and the never-ending extraditions 
of various octogenarians on ex post facto charges. I have 
to keep reminding myself that it's all a comedy to those 
who think.

     All of which just goes to show that in our age, even 
the light touch may face an uphill fight. You joke at 
your own risk. The Humor Police are out there, ever 
vigilant. No matter how funny something is, it may face 
the ruinous charge of being "offensive." No matter if 
what offends one man leaves a hundred others convulsed 
with laughter. What I'd like to know is, who gave the 
killjoy this veto power over human fun?

     The columns I have the most fun writing often 
provoke angry mail. It's not always because certain 
readers don't get my jokes; often they understand them 
well enough, but they =disapprove= of them. They feel 
=victimized= by them. I've tried to understand this, on 
the principle that "nihil humanum a me alienum est," but 
humorlessness is the one thing I've never been able to 
bear for long. I just can't stand people who squinch 
their noses and say, "I don't see anything funny about 
that." Or "How can you joke about that?" Or "This is no 
laughing matter." For me, =everything= is potentially a 
laughing matter. Tom Wolfe has proved that.

     Of course humor is sometimes deeply inappropriate. 
That's usually when it's funniest, if you ask me. I've 
known it to liven up some otherwise gloomy funerals, and 
I've been to funerals, like that of my pal Phil 
Nicolaides, where the deceased himself would have 
welcomed a touch of mirth amid the blubbering. Without 
his saying a word, Phil's facial expressions could bring 
down the house. I was almost expecting him to pop his 
eyes open and indicate comic surprise at all the fuss we 
were making over him. When he didn't, I knew he was 
really gone.

     Tragedy is more prestigious than comedy, and I agree 
that it's all right in its place. But taking nothing away 
from Sophocles -- one of the best, in my book -- whenever 
I see OEDIPUS REX, I can't help thinking what Wodehouse 
might have done with material like that. He was at his 
best when dealing with men in embarrassing situations, 
and if learning you've killed your father and then gone 
and married your own mother isn't embarrassing, what 
would be? It perhaps calls for a lighter touch than I'm 
afraid Sophocles had. Then again, Wodehouse tended to 
steer away from themes like violence, incest, and 
self-mutilation.

     That's where I part company with Wodehouse. I like a 
bit of rough stuff in my comedy. In my forthcoming novel 
about Shakespeare, the historical material constrains me 
to deal with sexual and other passions, and I see no 
point in shrinking from frank language. For this I have 
already been reproached in some quarters. But I think 
nothing is to be gained by turning Shakespeare into a 
milquetoast, or by strewing my pages with unsightly 
dashes and asterisks. And though I may depict sin 
unsparingly -- not only lust, but wrath, avarice, 
gluttony, and, yes, even sloth -- I in no way condone it. 
Like our heavenly Creator himself, I give my creations 
free will, and I can assume no responsibility when they 
abuse it. If they sometimes use coarse words, coarser 
than I might use in their place, well, that's their 
business.

     Of course, that's fiction. I'm not retiring from 
political commentary, but there too the comic spirit will 
come in handy. Politics should be viewed as farce. All 
right, a deadly farce at times -- I don't deny it -- but 
still farce. A strangely goofy man just happens to be 
president of the United States. And I think that history 
will see him in that light, assuming history ever comes 
to its senses. {{ After all, some pretty weird characters 
have been Roman emperors too, if half of what Suetonius 
tells us is true. }}

     {{ I don't think the George W. Bush story could be 
properly told in Latin. The Latin tongue dignifies 
everything too much, if only because its slang now sounds 
formal to us, like chiseled inscriptions on marble 
monuments; and this story can't do without slang. }}

     Every cause for alarm can also be cause for a laugh. 
That's the way I look at it. When God became man, he also 
joined the fun of being human.



Looking for Truth
(pages 5-6)

     I never get over how far people will go to shun the 
truth. Apart from personal life, it's a human trait you 
run up against in religion, in politics, in history, and 
many other areas, such as my own special field of 
interest, Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare excites 
conflicting pieties. Everyone who loves the Bard's work 
knows he has put more words in our mouths than any other 
author in the English language; his only rival is the 
entire King James Bible, a translation of many books by 
many men that draws on the work of many predecessors.

     We quote the Bard helplessly. He has given us our 
very household words, including the expression "household 
words" (HENRY V). We owe him honor, almost as we owe 
honor to our parents. Our souls are in his debt.

     To people who feel no debt to him, trying to 
establish his identity may appear an eccentric 
preoccupation, and the "authorship question" mere idle 
speculation. Such people are apt to feel the same way 
about theology, which explores the most important 
questions the human soul can deal with. "Theological" is 
often used dismissively, to mean vain and empty. You'd 
think people might be naturally curious about God, 
heaven, and hell, but many aren't.

     I just read a book about Jesus that vigorously and 
intelligently affirmed his divinity, the Crucifixion, and 
the Resurrection, but it hardly mentioned hell, except 
when quoting the early creeds. It even suggested 
generously that Judas Iscariot wasn't damned. I wanted to 
ask the author, as gently as possible, "Just what do you 
think the Savior was saving us from?" A rather basic 
question, I think. Yet it's been a long time since I last 
heard a sermon on hell. The Good News is that salvation 
is now offered to us, not that damnation has been 
abolished. The whole New Testament is rather emphatic 
about that.

     The Shakespeare debate is comparatively trivial, but 
for all that it's important to some of us who appreciate 
language as a divine gift. To whom do we owe these 
wonderful words and the astounding fictions they 
constitute? Why, when I read Falstaff and Iago, do I feel 
I'm recognizing people I know, in their infinite 
joviality and cunning malice? One is the very Soul of 
Joy, the other the mortal Enemy of Joy. "Poison his 
delights!" Everyone has known "honest Iago."

     The debate also has its funny side. To put it 
simply, Shakespeare keeps contradicting his own 
biographers! His self-description in his sonnets is so 
much at variance with the painstaking portrait the 
academic scholars have assembled that they've never 
reached a consensus on whether his sonnets are fact or 
fiction! Yet even this doesn't cause them to suspect that 
they may be writing books about the wrong guy. They 
insist on letting sleeping dogmas lie, even if it means 
the Bard himself is lying.

     For example, the Bard describes himself as "lame" 
(in Sonnet 38, and again in Sonnet 87). If this is a 
fiction, it's a very odd one to introduce abruptly into 
love poems. John Milton wrote a sonnet about his 
blindness, for the simple reason that he'd actually gone 
blind; nobody thinks =that's= a fiction. Edward de Vere, 
Earl of Oxford, described himself as "a lame man" in 
1595. Is this coincidence, or a telling parallel with 
Milton, who also wrote sonnets about his dead wife, his 
friend Cyriack Skinner, and religious warfare?

     Again, the Bard keeps complaining about his age and 
disgrace, his ruin, poverty, and approaching death. He is 
apparently bisexual, and he worries about his "name," 
which he expects to be "buried" and "forgotten" -- at a 
time when "Shakespeare" was being wildly praised. Isn't 
that his real name? I've written lots about this -- 
nearly three books so far, as well as countless short 
pieces. And I never cease marveling at the scholars' 
determination to avoid basic questions.

     The case for Oxford's authorship was made 
persuasively by John Thomas Looney in 1920, and 
additional confirming evidence has kept turning up ever 
since. Yes, Looney's name has been much ridiculed, which 
shows you the level at which some people debate. (In 
fact, it rhymes with "boney," not with "Suni.") But 
nobody has really answered his argument. So why do the 
scholars stubbornly reject his conclusion to this day?

     For the same reason. I suppose, that an article in 
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, three years after Kitty Hawk, 
insisted that the airplane was a "hoax" perpetrated by a 
pair of "bicycle mechanics." By then Wilbur and Orville 
Wright had made flights of up to a half hour, covering 
24 miles, but no newspaper would send reporters or 
photographers. Most people didn't know -- and didn't care 
to believe -- that a momentous new era in human history 
had arrived. They said it couldn't be done! So then, 
naturally, they had to say it =hadn't= been done!

     Likewise, the Shakespeare scholars resist evidence 
showing that they've been barking up the wrong tree for 
their entire careers. This isn't exactly a mysterious 
motive. An amusing example comes to mind.

     "I'd be =delighted= if it could be proved that the 
Earl of Oxford wrote these plays," the late Professor 
Samuel Schoenbaum, head of the Folger Shakespeare 
Library, once told me. "=Sure= you would, Sam," I wanted 
to say. "You'd get a =big= kick out of going from the 
pinnacle of your profession to being its laughingstock." 
But I didn't say it, for fear of losing the interview I 
was requesting.

     In that interview, the next day, Schoenbaum wasn't 
quite such a good sport about the idea that Oxford was 
the Bard. His life's work at stake, he kept insisting 
icily that Oxford's claim was "undocumented." Well, yes. 
That was the question: Are there deceptions in the 
documents we have? Have they been misinterpreted? But 
only an affidavit swearing that Oxford was the author 
would satisfy the professor. After all, professors deal 
in documented Fact. If you can't prove it, ignore it.

     This was a rigid and old-fashioned position, being 
steadily undermined by deconstruction and other 
approaches that found formerly unsuspected fluidity, or 
"ambiguity" and "instability," in old texts. A factor as 
simple as a pen name can be enough to wreck all the 
"methodology" of a Schoenbaum, which begins by taking 
documents at face value. And this methodology has little 
room for laughing at oneself.

     As soon as you lie, you put pressure on yourself to 
keep lying, while concealing or playing down anything 
that contradicts you. The scholars aren't consciously 
lying about who the Bard was, of course, but about 
something subtler: their own certitude. They insist there 
is no room for doubt, though the doubters have included 
men of literary genius -- Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark 
Twain, John Galsworthy, Vladimir Nabokov -- who could 
spot a fraud and who weren't up for tenure in an English 
department.

     A modern university is, or is at least very like, a 
bureaucracy, where organization tends to trump 
personality and individuality. The organization has a 
mind of its own, a slow, bulky thing, reacting dully but 
decisively against any very basic change, even when 
change is warranted. If its rules are irrational, the 
members are apt to say, "I only work here; I don't make 
the rules." The literary bureaucracy, so to speak, still 
resists the reform entailed by Looney's discovery of 
Oxford.

     A man who belongs to such an institution will 
naturally find it hard to think disinterestedly, because 
he has both material interests -- things as crude as 
income or more abstract, like social status -- and moral 
interests in it. His moral interests are things like 
pride, belief in his own wisdom and virtue, faith that 
the institution hasn't deceived him, and so on. He is 
like a soldier who needs to feel that he can rely on the 
chain of command without compromising himself; that 
whatever he is ordered to do, however disagreeable, he 
can do in good conscience.

     The Folger Shakespeare Library is such an 
institution -- a sort of Shakespeare Bureaucracy. 
Schoenbaum saw himself, and was seen by others, as the 
curator of an unshakable body of knowledge about the 
Bard, defending it against presumptuous ignoramuses in 
revolt against authority. In rejecting the institutional 
knowledge and trying to discover the truth about the Bard 
on their own, the Shakespeare heretics were refusing to 
go through the proper channels. This was anarchy!

     Similarly, the political powers that be, such as the 
U.S. Supreme Court, have decided that just about anything 
the U.S. Government does is in accordance with the U.S. 
Constitution, no matter how remote from, or even opposed 
to, the "original" understanding, and plain meaning, of 
the Constitution. The whole legal system is constructed 
to reinforce the official interpretation. So the 
Constitution has become a subject of bureaucratized 
"knowledge," like the Bard's identity, and you're wasting 
your time if you try to insist that the government is 
obviously exceeding its allotted constitutional powers, 
just as I wasted my time trying to show Sam Schoenbaum, 
may he rest in peace, the error of his ways.

     Sociologists of knowledge speak of "the social 
construction of reality," and I think I'm finally 
beginning to understand what they mean. Real knowledge is 
always personal, however much you depend on what other 
people say. In the end, you have to find the truth for 
yourself, even if it leaves you feeling all alone 
sometimes. Some people can't accept anything as truth 
unless it makes them feel they're in good company. But 
the only really good company is Jesus. When you're with 
him, why would you need anyone else?



NUGGETS

{{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" 
SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}

REISSUED: By Encounter Books, DARWINIAN FAIRYTALES, by 
the late David Stove, a brilliant Australian philosopher. 
An atheist, he had great respect for Darwin somehow, but 
he thought Darwin's account of the origin of =our= 
species was absurd, a priori: "a ridiculous slander on 
human beings," as he put it. If you thrill to fearless 
common sense and deadly wit, scornful of scientific 
pretensions, this book is for you. (page 7)

SUGGESTION: Come December, the Bush administration could 
recoup its flagging ratings, offer a warmer image, and 
reach out to minorities with a televised holiday special, 
KWANZAA WITH CONDOLEEZZA. (page 8)

THE CASE FOR UNCLE JOE: Would anarchy work? Well, it 
always has; usually, anyway. The real question is why 
people still believe in the State -- organized force. I 
guess they think the State is necessary to "prevent 
anarchy." Better Stalin than that, as Hobbes would say. 
(page 10)

POOR RICHARD'S AFTERTHOUGHTS: A penny saved is a penny 
that rapidly depreciates. (page 11)

CITOYEN LAVOISIER: Like many other scientists, the great 
chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier went to the guillotine 
during the French Revolution. The sentencing judge 
explained, "The Revolution has no need of chemists."  
Funny how little we hear of this, compared with the 
endless reminders of the Church's cruel persecution of 
Galileo, who, poor devil, was given a few months of house 
arrest. (page 12)


Exclusive to electronic media:

YOU SAY YOU WANT A WHAT? "Leave your mind alone," James 
Thurber wisely counseled, and we used to be able to rely 
on VANITY FAIR to dish the dirt and leave our minds 
alone. Now, alas, the mag is determined to raise our 
consciousness about child sex abuse, war, and global 
warming. Julia Roberts and George Clooney, on a recent 
cover, called for a "new American revolution." It's come 
to that.

SEQUEL: Last summer, you'll recall, the New York gutter 
press had a week-long laff riot when Monsignor Eugene 
Clark, of St. Patrick's Cathedral, was named as 
co-respondent in his secretary's ugly divorce case. He 
denied everything, but nobody cared. Well, it transpires 
that the husband, under oath in court, retracted his 
lies. I heard this through a priest friend who has 
followed the case. Not a word about it in the press.



REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 7-12)

* We the Sheep (March 7, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060307.shtml

* "Too Goyish" (March 9, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060309.shtml

* Battle Cries (March 14, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060314.shtml

* A Quagmire of Ideas (March 16, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060316.shtml

* Bush's Latest Idea (March 21, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060321.shtml

* Bush's Intelligence (March 28, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060328.shtml

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

All articles are written by Joe Sobran.

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