Category: Culture

This has nothing to do with the University of Wisconsin, despite the title.

It has to do with what some call the “culture war” on which conservatives are one side, and about which Stephen M. Klugiewicz writes:

Conservative intellectuals tend to be a dismal sort. By natural disposition we are pessimistic people. We cannot really be blamed for this, when one considers the history of mankind and particularly the sorry history of human governance. From starting unnecessary wars to enslaving whole peoples to reducing the masses to poverty through excessive taxation, man, when clothed with the right to rule others, has shown himself to be a tyrant-in-waiting.

Moreover, we conservatives realize that human nature is intrinsically inclined to do evil, that utopias are unachievable and their pursuit dangerous, and that we are apt, over time, to lose our moorings to the commandments of God and His laws of nature. We thus tend to hold out little hope for the future.

As justification for our inherent pessimism we need only to look at the peculiar and sorry times in which we live: an era in which the Founding Fathers are considered “dead white men,” but in which the Constitution they made is held to be living; a time in which political compromise is valued as a priority but commitment to principle is reviled as naïve, quixotic; an age in which any kind of perverse speech or lifestyle is celebrated in the name of freedom, but in which free enterprise is stifled in the names of equality and compassion; a time in which information reigns supreme, but in which logical thinking is scarce; an era in which we have attained the greatest technological know-how but in which we have the least understanding of beauty, goodness, and truth.

Added to all this is our conservative tendency to revel in the nobility of lost causes. This in itself is not a bad thing at all—quite the opposite in fact. As T.S. Eliot said:

“We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

But we have not taken Eliot’s words to heart. We mistakenly look for permanent victories, political and cultural, and when they do not come, we despair. We seem not to realize that it is not permanent victories that we should seek but rather the preservation of “the permanent things,” which is victory enough.

Keeping alive the flame, however, does not mean hiding its light. After all, a flame that is not open to the air will be snuffed out. Like Isaiah we are under the Divine injunction to be “a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind.” This means that conservative thinkers should not talk exclusively amongst themselves, as we are prone to do. (One might recall that perennial philosophical question: “If an intellectual presents a paper at an academic conference, does it make a sound?”) Instead, we need to shine forth the light of truth, goodness, and beauty through the best available means that can reach the masses; today that means the internet, and specifically online journals like The Imaginative Conservative.

As Sam Gamgee says in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “There’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

In fighting our worthy battle, American conservatives can position their forces on the ramparts of certain premises: that the Founding Fathers, despite their flaws, still have much to teach us today; that the Constitution is actually dead, in the sense that its actual written words need to be taken seriously; that free enterprise is inextricably linked to political freedom and ordered liberty; that inquiry, to be free, must be grounded in reason and must be directed to the ascertainment of truth; and that information and technology are not goods in themselves unless they serve the good and the beautiful. …

Western Civilization is undeniably in decline and indeed its very existence is in doubt. Yet these thoughts ought not to drag us conservatives down into a morass of defeatism. Sadly, though, some conservatives are indeed calling for retreat. They say that the hour is too late, that a remnant must run to the barricades and shield itself and whatever is left of Western Civilization from the barbarians at the gates. Like Tolkien’s King Theoden, they seek a Helm’s Deep in a desperate attempt to preserve the world of men from the hour of the Orc. But I call on conservatives to refuse to cede the current hour to darkness, and I join with the Aragorn of Tolkien and Peter Jackson in declaring:

A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship; but it is not this day! An hour of woe, and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes crashing down; but it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”

As a non-intellectual, I’m not sure conservative intellectuals should be dismal at all. Klugiewicz’s history of mankind (which also proves the importance of religion, because without it we would surely devolve into a dog-eat-dog world that would make Somalia look like Utopia in comparison) demonstrates that we should be pessimists, but because pessimists are either proven right, or things go better than they should. (Concept stolen from George Will.) The only way the fight ends is when you’re dead, and the only thing John Maynard Keynes said that made any sense at all is that in the long run we are all dead.

Ive called politics like sports except that the season never ends. Politics is definitely a zero-sum game — one side wins, which means the other side loses. There is no final victory, but you have to keep winning. Unless, that is, you don’t think the future of your children is important.

Stratford Caldecott reflects on something that in this house is ready while I am still clinically dead — that is, before the alarm goes off:

I was introduced to great-tasting coffee a long time ago in Vermont, by a man who brewed it in test-tubes and fed it through an enormous filtering machine to make sure every molecule was just right. I know coffee is important in England too, but the differences are significant. The Scientific Revolution was partly founded on coffee, not tea. Both came from overseas, as valued imports traded across an evolving colonial landscape, but tea flourished in the intimate domestic setting of the upper classes, who could afford imported china to drink it from, whereas coffee was an urban and intellectual drink.

The first English coffee houses were opened in the seventeenth century in London and Oxford. By 1675 there were more than 3,000 of them around the country. Members of the Royal Society would sit around, vibrating with caffeine, and discover steam engines and gravity. Well, not quite like that—in the case of gravity it was more that a coffee-house conversation between Hooke, Halley, and Wren failed to solve the problem, and led them to send a letter to Isaac Newton, which got him working on the problem at home. But it has been said that the coffee-houses served a similar function to the internet today—a social network making possible the accelerated exchange of ideas (a network that the government of the time tried, and failed, to control). …

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia. From Mocha, coffee spread to Egypt and North Africa, and by the sixteenth century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, and Turkey. From the Middle East, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas. …

If we take coffee as a symbol for the mysticism of love, we might say that it is even more necessary than tea. A society that is not permeated by mysticism—which I take to be the inner dimension of religion—will inevitably fragment, and this begins with a schism between Left and Right, between the two types of practical atheism, of secular humanism; the collectivist and individualist types. Everything in such a society tends to be given a political interpretation. …

But is such a “mystical turn” in the cards? During the hippy movement of the 1960s it almost seemed so–at least to the hippies, who seemed to think sex, drugs, and music held the key to world peace and cosmic consciousness. Not any more. Most of the hippies have cut their hair and settled down. As for Christians in general, the robust statistics for churchgoing and religious activism render the need for mysticism invisible.

In any case genuine mysticism is not as superficial as it seemed in the 60s and 70s. It cannot be detached from particular religious traditions. Intoxication with the love of God cannot be imbibed through a pipe or ingested with mushrooms. It lies beyond the rational intellect (that part is true), but it isn’t anti-rational. The cultivation of the intuitive intellect is a precise science. Pope John Paul II promoted it most strongly in his encyclical on philosophy, Fides et Ratio. There he insisted that Catholic priests should be trained in a philosophy “of genuinely metaphysical range” (n. 83), a “philosophy of being” (n. 97). Mysticism is not metaphysics, but complements it. …

Look deep into your cup of coffee and see in its mysterious depths the fate of America. Ask yourself, is there a home here for mysticism or metaphysics, or only a culture war between mad men, rationalists whose philosophical assumptions confine them to a world of politics and economics, seeking material comfort rather than divine wisdom?

Today is the 50th anniversary of the funeral of John F. Kennedy.

Michael J. Toro goes back almost 53 years, to Kennedy’s inauguration:

On the day of John F. Kennedy‘s inauguration (January 20, 1961), the Northeast was paralyzed beneath 1-2 feet of snow. The president’s speech was carried on the heels of fierce winds and biting cold.  Most people were relatively more optimistic in those days (oftentimes against their better judgment) and somewhat more trustful of government; if anything, they were more or less respectful (however reluctantly) towards the Office of President of the United States. The beneficent visions and/ or illusions of the Kennedy era would become frozen amid the dim light of a harsher reality on November 22, 1963 and beyond. A re-imagined Camelot became a peculiarly eternal, because somehow enthusiastic, dream of yesteryear for at least two generations of Americans.

In 1961, America was fighting the Cold War: that uncertain battleground where a clouded alignment of real, imagined or contrived threats suspended reason and modified talk. Both America and Russia were acquiring stockpiles of nuclear weapons with the potential to blow the world up twenty times over. The Soviet Union’s breakthroughs in space exploration (or first-strike capability), with Sputnik and manned-orbital flight, increased the stakes.

While America’s economy had been declining for two years, Russia’s had been growing and causing us political embarrassment. The Soviet Union was also gaining increased strength with more countries (especially former Asian and African colonies) looking to it for leadership and alliance…with Cuba in the lead. The United States, for the first time since 1812, felt vulnerable to invasion. …

Because Kennedy was relatively young and dynamic-looking (actually, he was in extremely poor health), his untimely death leaves an eternal “What If?” imprinted on history and in the imagination. The character and charisma he (and certainly his wife Jackie) exuded, more than the handful of goals that JFK achieved, played a crucial part in JFK’s presidency and served as a dazzling smokescreen to his administration’s less appealing side. Yet, even more than Lincoln or FDR, Kennedy stood as the role model for aspiring political leaders. (To paraphrase critic Greil Marcus: JFK’s reputation is too much to live up to and too much to escape.) The fact that he and especially his brother, Robert, would be seen as politically conservative by today’s standards is lost in the myth and romance of JFK’s legacy.

While it’s often forgotten that the well-publicized dreams and presumed ambitions of Kennedy were, in fact, carried out by his successor Lyndon Johnson (his Great Society, ironically, a primary factor that led to his downfall), JFK’s martyrdom earned him the glory. No one remembers whether or not Kennedy balanced the budget (at best, it was stabilized) or that he was often reluctant to take a direct stand on civil rights issues.  Whether or not the war in Vietnam would have escalated if he had lived (Kennedy often acceded to war hawks) is still a matter of speculation. Indeed, the overall importance of his presidency is debatable. Unfortunately, he’s best remembered as being the tragic victim of an assassination that ranks as one of the most perplexing events in world history. …

But I, along with many of my Baby Boom contemporaries, spent the past 50 years engaged in this psycho-therapeutic nostalgia; alas, I’ll most likely spend the remainder of my life engaged in it. I wish it were otherwise, but the 50-year-old list of presidential hacks and frauds helped to make this nostalgia terribly addictive. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to recover from such a lengthy period of political sentimentality, where a once and future yesteryear glimmers ceaselessly along a hopeful horizon of possibility.

William Prochnau delivers a more sympathetic portrait and an interesting story:

Within an hour after President John F. Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, Washington became a ghost town.

It was still early on a Friday afternoon but, except in hidden security centers, no one in this power-centric, workaholic town had any idea what to do. The phones overloaded and stopped working periodically. Almost all government stopped working, too.

I was a 26-year-old rookie reporter from Seattle. Two of the country’s most powerful senators came from my state, including Senator Henry M. Jackson, who had been Robert F. Kennedy’s choice over Lyndon B. Johnson to be his brother’s running mate in 1960.

So it was natural that I would be drawn to the Old Senate Office Building — the Old S.O.B, we called it, for the acronym and the pun but mainly because it housed the expansive empires of the senior senators of the day. Usually bustling with power-brokers, lobbyists and favor-seekers, the hallways were empty except for a cluster of staffers in front of Jackson’s office.

By the time I got to the Capitol, the Senate and House of Representatives had adjourned and most senators and congressmen had closed their offices and gone home. Jackson, however, remained. His wife, Helen, was out of town, and he dreaded going alone to their Washington apartment. So his staff stayed with him in the Old S.O.B., talking in clutches outside in the marble hallway. For me, two moments resonate as clearly today as they did in 1963.

After a few minutes Jackson emerged from his office and asked me, “Do you want to take a walk?” Of course I wanted to walk with Jackson. A Cold Warrior like Kennedy, a good friend if not a Hyannisport buddy, who had joined in his roughhouse Georgetown softball games when both were still among Washington’s most eligible bachelors, Jackson was as close to Kennedy as anyone I would find that day in the psychologically blitzed capital.

It turned out to be a peculiar walk — one that showed he was as discombobulated as the rest of us. We went to the Senate payroll office, where Jackson corrected a $6 error in his paycheck. Despite my efforts, he didn’t want to talk about the assassination or what might have been. Jackson was as spun out of his orbit as the rest of us and I was simply his foil to level life out for a few minutes.

The second moment occurred back at his office where, like everyone, Brian Corcoran, Jackson’s press secretary, tried to assess the day’s impact. “The real tragedy is that Kennedy will barely be remembered 50 years from now,” Corcoran said. “His presidency was cut too short and he didn’t have time to accomplish anything.”

To be sure, at the time of Kennedy’s death, most of his landmark New Frontier legislation, including the Civil Rights Act, was bogged down in a Congress dominated by Southerners — who did not look kindly on Kennedy or his program. He will never go down as one of America’s great presidents. …

What made the Kennedy legacy such a powerful and lasting American obsession? Theodore H. White, who wrote the classic Making of the President 1960, argued that Kennedy believed that heroes made history — and cast himself in that role.

To my generation, he was undeniably a hero, albeit a flawed one. The youngest man ever elected president (at 43), he was a phenom — modern, handsome and princely, given to heroic words and gestures. Glamorous, he was doubly so alongside his wife, Jacqueline, who turned the White House into an American version of the court at Versailles for parties honoring the literati. He was a celebrity president made for television before television itself quite knew what it was made for.

The twin pillars that keep the Kennedy saga alive — Camelot and conspiracy — were embedded in Washington’s marble within days after JFK’s death. Together, they transformed the story into a Shakespearian tragedy: a young nobleman cut down at the apex of his and his empire’s power, with his slaying forever muddled by a cast of powerful and shady characters that prevents the facts of the crime from ever truly being resolved.

Almost immediately after his death, in a remarkable and manipulative effort, Jackie Kennedy planted the-young-prince-in-Camelot imagery so deep that it has held up for a half-century, despite the onslaught of contradictions about JFK, the flawed man, that emerged in later years.

Camelot, a hit Broadway musical about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, played through most of his presidency. But it never was attached to Kennedy’s name before he died — a lesson in how legends are made.

Jackie, trying to head off assessments of her man by what she called “bitter people,” made certain it became the romantic theme of their time in the White House. Seven days after her husband was shot, she called Theodore White, journalist, historian and — most important — a friend, to Hyannisport for an exclusive four-hour interview. There she wove the myth of Camelot into the “reality” of the Kennedy years, even hovering over White to edit his story back on to the Camelot track, as he phoned it to his editors at Life magazine.

On December 6, 1963, Life published the essay with its emphasis on the Camelot years and the lyrics that Jackie said her husband played on his old Victrola almost every night before going to sleep:

“Don’t let it be forgot,

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

It was a heroic, if somewhat childlike, view of a president who inspired a nation with his youth and vigor. (That too was a myth because he and his troupe hid his debilitating Addison’s disease and assorted other ailments.) At the time of the assassination, Kennedy’s approval rating was 70 percent, and it remains the highest in the history of presidential polling.

He was the first and still is the most compelling of the media presidents. He simply romanced the little black-and-white tube, arguably winning office by beating Richard M. Nixon in the first televised presidential debate and keeping his critics at bay with wit and charm in regular televised press conferences. Politicians, Democrat and Republican, have learned to use the medium since, but none more effectively. Americans took Kennedy into their homes — and liked him.

The Camelot image has suffered over the years since, as serious historians examined the downsides to his presidency — he essentially began our long Vietnam nightmare. Others looked at the anti-heroism of his compulsive, almost serial womanizing. Even White corrected the story he and Jackie had created in Hyannisport. By 1978, White said he had misread history somewhat.

“The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed,” White wrote in his book, In Search of History.

Yet there was something to the concoction — because “one brief shining moment” still stands as the metaphor for Kennedy’s brief presidency. Camelot represented optimism and possibility. Kennedy created the Peace Corps, he aspired to send a man to the moon. Government was not the enemy. Forever frozen in his prime, he harkens to a simpler time, before the events that complicated America’s place in the world after his death: the tumultuous ‘60s, the quagmire that Vietnam became, Watergate, terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the endless, deadlocked power struggle and destructiveness that has become de rigueur in Washington political life.

Kennedy gave Americans the idea that we could do better. That we could believe in something. Robert Dallek, the presidential historian and author of the new Kennedy biography, Camelot’s Court, summed it up succinctly in the New York Times: Americans admire presidents who give them hope.

The opposing view comes from Gregory Dennis:

Fifty years later, reading and watching the rehashes of the Kennedy assassination and the tumultuous career that preceded it, we are still trying to make sense of JFK’s life and death. …

Watching the lengthy PBS profile about John Kennedy’s life leading up to the 1960 election, I was struck by how diminished the myth has become.

Kennedy essentially lived a lie. And for many years during and after his presidency, we believed that lie.

He was a courageous war hero, it’s true, and he was indisputably good looking, charming, hardworking and funny. He inspired confidence and made America believe in a new generation of leaders.

But as the numerous histories and TV shows make clear, the public was fed — and bought — a steady series of untruths about the rest of his life.

We can see now how recklessly he lived. We may never know if that recklessness led to his death. But it surely put the country in more peril.

Kennedy didn’t write most of Profiles in Courage, the book that brought him so much acclaim. He was a lazy legislator as a congressman and senator. Depicted as vigorous and the picture of health, he suffered for much of his life from colitis, a debilitating intestinal disorder. The powerful steroids used to treat the disease eroded his spine and left him in constant pain.

He also developed Addison’s disease, a life-threatening disorder of the adrenal glands. The steroids used to treat that disease further debilitated him and left his skin a darkening yellow. His handlers passed it off as a perpetual tan.

To deal with the severe back pain and fatigue, Kennedy had his own Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobsen, inject him dozens of times with a mixture reported to contain amphetamines, bone marrow, human placenta, painkillers, steroids and multivitamins. (“I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” the president was said to remark. “It works.”)

His marriage to Jackie was portrayed by the press as a storybook fable, marred only by miscarriages. But behind the Camelot curtain, he was a compulsive womanizer. He seduced White House interns and slept with a parade of other women, probably including Marilyn Monroe and definitely including Judith Campbell Exner. He used Exner to carry messages and perhaps payoffs to mobsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli.

It’s well beyond me and this space to summarize the JFK legacy. But I’m reminded of a line from a song Dylan wrote not long after Jack Kennedy’s death: “Don’t follow leaders.”

We need leaders, of course. But for those of us who lived through JFK’s presidency — and who have since then watched the gradual dismantling of the Camelot myth — our view of every would-be leader will always be filtered through an extra dose of skepticism.

I’m not sure I agree completely with Patrick Buchanan, but he raises interesting points:

Had there been no Dallas, there would have been no Camelot.

There would have been no John F. Kennedy as brilliant statesman cut off in his prime, had it not been for those riveting days from Dealey Plaza to Arlington and the lighting of the Eternal Flame.

Along with the unsleeping labors of an idolatrous press and the propagandists who control America’s popular culture, those four days created and sustained the Kennedy Myth.

But, over 50 years, the effect has begun to wear off.

The New York Times reports that in the ranking of presidents, Kennedy has fallen further and faster than any. Ronald Reagan has replaced him as No. 1, and JFK is a fading fourth.

Kennedy is increasingly perceived today as he was 50 years ago, before word came that shots had been fired in Dallas.

That he was popular, inspirational, charismatic, no one denied. But no one would then have called him great or near great. His report card had too many C’s, F’s and Incompletes.

His great legislative victory had been the passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. His tax cut bill was buried on the Hill.

His triumph had been forcing a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. But we would learn this was done by a secret deal for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and a secret pledge not to invade Cuba.

And after the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy pushed the CIA to eliminate Castro, eliciting a warning from Fidel that two could play this game. Lyndon Johnson said that under the Kennedys, the CIA had been running “a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

What caused Nikita Khrushchev to think he could get away with putting rockets in Cuba? His perception that JFK was a weak president.

Kennedy had denied air cover for the Cuban patriots at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in the worst debacle of the Cold War. He was then berated and humiliated by Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June 1961.

In August, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sat paralyzed.

In September, Khrushchev smashed the three-year-old nuclear test-ban moratorium with a series of explosions featuring, at Novaya Zemlya, a 57-megaton “Tsar Bomba,” the largest man-made blast ever.

“Less profile, more courage,” the placards read.

In Southeast Asia, JFK had Averell Harriman negotiate a treaty for neutralizing Laos, resulting in Hanoi’s virtual annexation of the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos into South Vietnam.

Where Eisenhower had 600 advisers in Vietnam, JFK increased it to 16,000 and gave his blessing to a generals’ coup in which our ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated.

Then and there, Vietnam became America’s war.

Kennedy had made a famous phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King during the 1960 campaign when her husband had been arrested. Yet, he kept his administration away from the March on Washington and directed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King to learn of his associations with Communists.

Since his death, Kennedy’s reputation has been ravaged by revelations of assignations and mistresses from Marilyn Monroe to Mafia molls to White House interns from Miss Porter’s School.

All of this was covered up by his courtier journalists who would collaborate in perpetuating the Kennedy myth and collude in destroying their great hate object, Richard Nixon. …

The mythologizing of JFK and demonization of Nixon tell us less about respective accomplishments than the moral character of an establishment, which, though it had lost America by ‘72, still controlled the culture, media, bureaucracy and Congress.

And as they brought down Nixon with Watergate, they would seek to bring down Reagan with Iran-Contra. But that coup failed.