SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
May 2007
Volume 14, Number 5
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
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CONTENTS
Features
-> American Idols
-> Editor's Note: Will You Help Us Continue?
-> Since Publius
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
American Idols
(page 1)
How can this country survive much longer, when the
younger generation is so appallingly ignorant? Only half
of them can name the first book of the Bible, or any of
the four Gospels.
Worse yet, in a way, I'm not sure they can even read
the NEW YORK POST! They all know who the current American
Idol is, but a shocking number are unable to identify Amy
Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco. No use trying to converse
intelligently with such people about Antony and
Cleopatra.
I have my own problem with the POST. My eyes are so
weak now that without my reading glasses I can't tell
whether it still supports Israel. I'll have to start
getting the Braille edition, I guess.
Today's atheists baffle me too. If they don't
believe God exists, why do they hate him so much? That
doesn't figure for me.
I mean, I don't believe in Zeus, myself. But for
that very reason, I don't hate him. (Or, to be safe, Him
-- some people in this multicultural society of ours are
pretty sensitive about capitalizing pronouns.)
I've always found it hard to hold grudges against
deities that don't even exist. When, as a kid, I didn't
believe, I couldn't even work up a head of steam against
the one wise people tried to tell me did exist.
A tolerant fellow Christian just told me he thinks
atheists are entitled to their opinions. I told him I
think they're entitled to my opinions; I've heard enough
of theirs! Don't even get me started on the subject of
that fool Darwin. The world would be a lot better off if
he'd taken up astrology, like Attila the Hun.
At least astrology is a science with a long and
respectable pedigree. Not that it can't do a lot of harm
in the wrong hands, I suppose. But so can physics. It
wasn't astrologers who gave the world the atomic bomb.
Why don't the atheists get angry at Zoroastrians, by
the way? Talk about troublemakers. I used to live next
door to one of those people. Never again. Of course, with
the Internet, you can't get away from them now. And they
always seem to know how to find Yours Truly. I guess
that's what I get for answering their messages.
One of the pretty clear lessons of history is that
Zoroastrianism tends to lead to war in the Middle East.
It's so obvious that I'm surprised that the atheists
still haven't caught on to it. Why do they always give
Ahura Mazda a pass when they're inveighing against gentle
Jesus? Do they assume nobody will notice? Well, some of
us are keeping score.
They accuse us Christians of being Manicheans, for
example, but they seldom say a word against the actual
Manicheans. How fair is that? If you ask me, it's the
same old tired story: atheism talks, polytheism walks.
Watch the treatment of the Catholic Church on public
television, and you'll see what I mean. I've had it up to
here with these people.
I wish I could say I don't have a god in this fight,
but I do: the only one today's atheists seem to care
about, the only one they can never forgive. Read the
Psalms, listen to Handel: he is the king of glory. The
hatred of the atheists bears perverse witness to him. So
does their persecution of his believers, which is so
unlike their indifference to the old pagan gods and
idols.
Atheism is tolerant, they say. Maybe I'm missing
something. We never seem to hear about the sins of
organized irreligion, still active in China and Cuba. In
the West it's called "separation of church and state."
As Charles Baudelaire observed, "Satan's cleverest
wile is to make us think he doesn't exist." It has come
to sound quaint to speak of the diabolical, no matter how
evident it is.
Most atheists now prefer to call themselves
agnostics, meaning that even if there is a bare
possibility that some sort of God exists, he can't speak
to his own creatures, so we should ignore any messages
from him.
And religion is all right, they say, as long as it
makes you feel good. Just don't try to impose it on
others by acting as if it's really true.
Editor's Note: Will You Help Us Continue?
(page 2)
Dear Loyal Subscriber,
Last month, I enclosed a letter with your copy of
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Since Publius
(page 3)
Why do we joke about Monopoly money? The Milton
Bradley board game dates back to 1932. I played it as a
child, then with my own kids as a young father, then with
my grandson; and today, I understand, you can still buy
Park Place for a mere $2000. A steal!
In short, Monopoly money has kept its value much
better than the "real" money churned out by that huge
counterfeiting ring, the Federal Reserve System. That's
because, as a friend quips, it's backed by the full faith
and credit of the Milton Bradley Company.
If you instinctively get indignant about what the
government does to money, you are felt to be a crank.
Well, that's me, I guess. The U.S. Constitution
authorizes the government to "coin" money, not to "print"
the stuff, let alone delegate the printing to another
agency. I'm literal-minded that way -- a real misfit in
this era of the Living Constitution.
You needn't believe in the original Constitution to
see what a shell game it has become, a plaything of the
powerful. Read the FEDERALIST PAPERS with care, and
you'll realize what revolutions have taken place under
our noses. In Federalist 62, Publius (James Madison, in
this case) offers a prophetic short warning against
modern democracy:
It will be of little avail to the people that
the laws are made by men of their own choice,
if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot
be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be
understood; if they be repealed or revised
before they are promulg[at]ed, or undergo such
incessant changes that no man who knows what
the law is to-day can guess what it will be
to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of
action; but how can that be a rule, which is
little known and less fixed?
Throughout history, republics have proved highly
perishable. How to create a durable one, in spite of
"popular fluctuations"? That is the problem Publius
confronts. He argues confidently that the proposed
Constitution can solve it. The careful constitutional
design enables legislation while making it sufficiently
difficult to impede impetuous and venal laws.
Publius is obsessed with the problem of "faction,"
by which he means any special interest (as we now say)
opposed to the interest of the whole community, even if
that faction happens to be a majority at a given time, as
was the War Party that plunged us into Iraq. He may be
thinking more of religious factions than of economic
ones. He is an unabashed conspiracy theorist, speaking
readily of "cabal," "intrigue," and "the vicious arts by
which elections are too often carried." The idea that
conspiracies are alien to politics is a supremely silly
idea. Politicians have been known to have things to hide.
Since the tendency to faction can never be
eradicated from human nature, Publius says it must be
controlled as far as possible by "obstacles." Chief among
these, under the Constitution, will be the division of
the legislative power between two dissimilar bodies: a
popularly elected House of Representatives and a Senate
selected by state legislatures. If a factional law
manages to pass both bodies, it may still meet an
executive "negative," or veto. Finally, the courts may
deem it unconstitutional. (Publius failed to foresee the
problem of a factional judiciary usurping legislative
power.) The Seventeenth Amendment, requiring popular
election of senators, defeated the whole purpose of the
Senate as a separate body and an impediment to pure
democracy.
If he were here today, then, Publius would not be
moaning about "gridlock." That was the whole idea of
constitutional government! Nor would he deplore "partisan
bickering in Washington" -- not if the alternative were a
superfaction, two major parties acting in concert against
the public good (to save the unconstitutional welfare
state, for example, violating the rights of property and
passing enormous debt on to posterity).
Whatever the purposes of the other late (post-1865)
amendments, their actual effects, aside from ending
chattel slavery, have been largely baneful. The
Fourteenth Amendment, illegally ratified under duress,
has virtually repealed the original Constitution and the
Tenth Amendment, putting all state laws at the mercy of
the Federal Government; the Sixteenth Amendment has
effectively made all Americans slaves of the U.S.
Government; the Eighteenth Amendment monstrously expanded
Federal power.
Publius might be especially bemused by the
Twenty-Second Amendment. Under the original Constitution,
the executive branch was so weak that there would have
been no point in limiting a president to two terms, and
impeachment was a ready remedy for any usurpation of
power. But by 1951 the presidency, with its
bureaucracies, had swollen far beyond traditional
monarchical proportions; impeachment was a dead letter;
the Electoral College Publius describes had become a
joke. The amendment was a desperate, tardy, and futile
stopgap against the danger of tyranny.
That tyranny, which has grown far more oppressive
since 1951, is immeasurably worse than any American could
have imagined in 1787.
CARTOONS (Baloo)
http://www.sobran.com/issue_cartoons/2007-05/2007-05-
cartoons.shtml
REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 7-12)
* The Fadsters (April 23, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070423.shtml
* Defending the "Procedure" (April 26, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070426.shtml
* A Great American Actor (May 1, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070501.shtml
* The Sanctimony of the Atheists (May 8, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070508.shtml
* Giuliani, the Pope, and Aristotle (May 11, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070511.shtml
* My Cane (May 15, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070515.shtml
* You Must Remember This (May 17, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070517.shtml
* Special Edition (May 22, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070522.shtml
* The Great American Fascist (May 29, 2007)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070529.shtml
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