(Display Name not set)April 2006 Archives

Andrew Sullivan is right: the bipartisan demagoguery on the Hill over gas prices is shameful to both parties. I guess it's predictable, but jeez, this is leadership? Both sides are an embarrassment, and in particular, watching Pelosi swan around with her cheap and opportunistic rhetoric makes me fear for the country if she should ever become House speaker. As you know, I've been hell on Exxon Mobil for its lavish retirement package for Lee Raymond, but the price of gas today is not the fault of the oil companies, or of Washington. Here's Andrew:

[L]et the market show people that there are costs to things. This president has never let reality intrude on his conversations with the American public on energy, war, or much else for that matter; so maybe reality will have to speak for itself. Maybe the only way people will stop using SUVs is when they actually have to pay for their ecological destruction and energy inefficiency.

One simple conclusion: conservative government really is dead, isn't it? A
conservative government would simply say: we have no control over global oil prices; consumers reap what they sow; companies should be left alone; and if your wallet is empty because of all that gas in your SUV, you've learned a useful lesson in self-government. If only Margaret Thatcher were around to punctuate that lecture with a swipe of her handbag.

Andrew, by the way, is fuming at Ramesh Ponnuru over his new book "The Party of Death," about abortion culture in the US. Andrew thinks it's a slander against the Democrats. The subtitle of the book, though, indicates that Ramesh is criticizing not just the Dems, but the media, the judiciary and all the forces in our society that denigrate human life (Amy, who has read the book, explains this point.)

The editors of Touchstone took grief for titling a piece I did for them a few years ago "The Godless Party." It was an essay based on that widely-circulated Bolce & De Maio study examining survey data and media accounts to show that a) the Democratic Party is as heavily influenced by militant secularists as the GOP is by religious believers, and b) that the media completely missed the secularization of the Democratic Party, probably (the social scientists postulate) because the MSM is so overwhelmingly secular-liberal that they literally couldn't see what was happening to the Dems -- it struck the media as normative. The title of the Public Interest essay in which the scholars presented their findings was titled "Our Secularist Democratic Party." Which is a nicer way of saying, "The Godless Democratic Party." Right?

That's not to say that all Democrats are godless, any more than it is to say that because you might fairly call Republicans "The God Party" -- and mean it cynically -- that all GOPers are religious. Still, it would do the Democrats good to think about why so many people of faith want nothing to do with them. It is not good for people of faith, either, to feel that they have nowhere to go but to the GOP. A lot of us religious folks sympathize with the Dems on some issues, but vote Republican precisely because of the bedrock issues Ramesh talks about in his book.

A few years back, I read an exciting essay in The American Enterprise that explored the neorealist trend in modern painting. Turns out that Jacob Collins, one of the artists featured in the piece, ran his atelier not far from where I lived in Brooklyn. I went one cold winter afternoon over there with some friends to see the work of Collins and his students. The atelier was dark and cold, but the work these students were doing was phenomenally beautiful. I could hardly bear to leave it, but in truth, it was so frigid that we couldn't handle staying. I left thinking: these people are relatively poor, but they know what beauty is. This is a good place, I thought.

Back on the street level, a friend who was with me was attracted by the warm glow from the windows of an art gallery next door. It was posh and inviting, so we went in. The art was grotesque, horrifying. One of the main pieces was an installation involving dismembered baby dolls with bloodstained dresses and rubber body parts. Despite the light, there was so much darkness. This is an evil place, I thought. We couldn't wait to get out of there.

I got to thinking about all that just now when I saw that Roger Kimball of The New Criterion discovered a similar atelier in Harlem, and gave a talk there the other day. He reproduces it on the mag's blog. Well worth reading. Here's a quote:

The serious art of today tends to be a quiet affair. It takes place not at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, not in the Chelsea or TriBeCa galleries, but off to one side, out of the limelight--at The Harlem Studio, for example. This is because real art tends to involve not the latest thing, but permanent things. Permanent things can be new; they can be old; but their relevance is measured less by the buzz they create than by the silences they inspire. In other words, the future of our artistic culture is not in the hands of today's taste makers, but those whose talent, patience, and perseverance will ultimately render them the taste makers of tomorrow. I mean, of course, that the future is up to artists like those who congregate around the Harlem Studio and other such outposts of civilization.

I gave a talk last night at St. Peter's Classical School in Fort Worth, and met some great folks before and after the talk. I got this e-mail this morning from one of them, a Southern Baptist. In it, he alludes to the house Julie and I bought a couple of years ago near downtown Dallas -- a small 1914 Craftsman cottage in a gentrifying neighborhood. We got it for next to nothing in part because people in Dallas strongly prefer to live in the suburbs, or at least in newer, bigger dwellings. (That, plus the fact that the public schools in Dallas aren't great). But since we bought it, our part of town has become hot, and with the price of gas going up, there seems to be the beginnings of a migration back to the city center. We couldn't afford to buy our little house today. Anyway, this guy makes some great points, and I can't wait to read what the rest of you think about them:

Your comments struck a strong chord in my wife and me. As you said, we have generally found that evangelicals are pretty good in identifying worldliness in the church with regard to sexual issues: adultery, fornication, pornography, divorce and the vulgarity of the media. The sin of lust is well recognized and condemned. But with regard to the worldliness of consumerism there is near silence. The sins of greed and envy are virtually ignored. There are prayers for "financial freedom" but this is understood as "God, give us more money so we can pay for all our stuff."

This may be so because it is such a struggle to get our bearings; if we are not Amish or monastics we are just lost at sea in such a capitalist/consumerist world . Like you, we would like to live close to downtown in a smaller house with sidewalks and trees,
but find that these have been bid up to where they are now quite expensive and
"objects of desire" in their own right, with polished hardwood floors and granite and stainless steel kitchens. We would like to buy the small, frayed, 1930's rental house we live in now, but it is in a "tear down" neighborhood close to the cultural district. It will soon be sold by our landlord for 300K plus and replaced by a million dollar, zero lot line house. The "new urbanism" developments are also expensive, so
the houses that are affordable for ordinary people are in the decaying 1960's suburbs, ranch houses with no sidewalks, no front porches and fenced backyards, or in the new, desolate, crackerbox subdivisions far out of the city.

Tim Keller, a wonderful preacher and teacher at a PCA church in New York, Redeemer Presbyterian, has a theory on why dealing with our own greed always escapes us in America. He says that no matter how much money we make, or how rich and indulgent our lifestyle, we always have friends who have more and better possessions than we do, so in comparison we feel we aren't and can't be the greedy ones. People who make 60K, have nice used cars and a 3/2 in the suburbs have friends who make 100K, have new cars and a 4/3 with a pool out back. People who make 400K and have a million dollar home in Plano know people who make 900K and have a two million dollar home in Highland Park, as well as posh vacation homes at the lake and in the mountains. And so it goes, on up the ladder.

It seems to me that the competitive instincts of men have been almost totally corralled by this race for success and acquisition in western, corporate culture. This may be preferable to having these instincts gathered for war, as in the Crusades for example, but still not ideal. (It seems that militant Islam has decided that war is preferable to capitalist modernity as the employment of male competitive energy. That is why we need to fear them; they will be a formidable enemy for a long time. We have the wealth and technology, but they have the will, the patience, and the bodies to sacrifice.)

I don't know if these instincts can be marshaled in a quest for virtue or holiness in the culture at large; maybe this can only been done in a monastic or small sub-culture setting. In Jefferson's and Kirk's rural world, in the world of the southern agrarians--Tate, Percy, Ransom and Berry--it may have been easier for these instincts to be tamed on behalf of family and community (although, as you know, real and perceived racism has always plagued this vision.) It may be only Jesus who was able to value his own local, particular, tribal world and still be universal in his love for those who were different.

Wish that David Brooks' column today wasn't behind the New York Times firewall. It's an important one. He writes about how ever so slowly, the Democratic Party is eking its way to saving liberalism. He points out that all the spark has gone out of the Dems' 1990s obsessions, all having to do with multiculturalism and identity politics. What's happening now, Brooks argues, citing a Michael Tomasky essay in The American Prospect, is that some smart liberals are starting to realize that interest-group politics are a dead end ... and that liberals need to start thinking and talking about the common good. As Brooks puts it, "Goodbye, Jesse Jackson. Goodbye, Gloria Steinem. Hello, Harry Truman."

Well, I sure hope so. It might give conservatives like me a real choice in some elections. And even if I never do vote for a Democrat, anything that gets us away from this Balkanized social model extolled as virtuous by the left for a generation is a huge step forward.

The Tomasky essay is a must-read, because it's one of the first things I've seen that suggests that the really creative political thinking is, for the first time in ages, going on among liberals, not conservatives. I have had real trouble even wanting to read liberal political writing over the past few years, because it's often so whiny and self-absorbed. Tomasky says in his piece that the Democratic left wants to think it's still 1968, and the Democratic center wants to relive 1992 again. But this is 2006, says Tomasky, and something else is required. Harry Truman-style civic republicanism, perhaps?

I remember watching the 2004 Democratic convention and listening to that race-hustling fraud Al Sharpton deliver a "forever Selma" speech--the kind of greatest-hits talk that could have been handed down from the podium at any Democratic convention since 1968. It was all grievance, all backward-looking.

But Barack Obama, now that man gave one hell of a speech. It was about, yes, civic republicanism, and what unites us as Americans. It was inspiring, it was fresh, it was just terrific --and I thought, you know, it might be heresy to think this, but I could see voting for a Democrat with a vision like that. But I'd rather vote for a Republican with that kind of civic-republican vision. Do we have any?

A bipartisan Senate panel says FEMA is so screwed up that it cannot be saved in its present form, and ought to be abolished. Maybe that's true. But I can't help wondering to what extent the Bush administration bears direct...

Here's a story to knock you back: The Rev. James Moran, a Catholic priest in DC, has resigned (and been removed from) active ministry to protest the U.S. Catholic bishops' disgraceful handling of the priest sex-abuse scandal. Here is his...

Are you planning to see "United 93"? David Beamer, the father of Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer, says that we should all see it, if only to be reminded of the kind of enemy we face.This seems right to me,...

An interesting observation in this Bruce Bartlett column alleging that the GOP and George W. Bush are a drag on the conservative movement:In his new book, "The Making of the Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times" (ISI Books), [Jeffrey]...

Last night I went to a big 'do awarding the $50,000 Hiett Prize in the Humanities to Hillaire Kallendorf, a Princeton Ph.D. who teaches literature and Hispanic studies at Texas A&M. She's an altogether extraordinary woman. She's only 31, and...

On the First Things blog, Jody Bottum flacks Gilbert Meilaender's long trashing of "Crunchy Cons" in the current issue of the magazine. I don't subscribe to FT, so I haven't seen the review -- I've asked a friend to fax...

I happen to think it was a pretty great move by the White House to make Tony Snow the press secretary. He's an actual media professional, someone who knows how the media work. He's quite personable and will be infinitely...

In yesterday's Dallas Morning News, we published an editorial that, among other things, asked where is the outrage and activism from the world's Muslims over the genocide that Sudanese Arab Muslims are committing against the black Muslims of Darfur? Honestly,...

In my book "Crunchy Cons," I make a big deal out of Joel Salatin, a conservative Evangelical free-range farmer in the Shenandoah Valley. According to the NYT Book Review, he's also a star of Michael Pollan's new book, "The Omnivore's...

Jane Jacobs has died. She was a heroic figure who dared to stand athwart the urban planning history of the 20th century and yell, "Stop!" She stared down Robert Moses, the man who bulldozed many vital New York City neighborhoods...

A few more words about crunchy conservatism, and where I'm coming from with all this.My conservatism is of the traditionalist kind. I am religious. I favor social tradition as a reliable guide to conduct (but not as something that should...

Spengler has a bracing column up this week. In it, he eyes without pity the fate of the poor New Orleanians who were displaced by Katrina. He notes a recent NYT story in which diaspora blacks talk about how being...

A Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, NJ, writes:Dear Crunchy Con,For a conservative, you sure sound like a liberal. You are a nervous nellie about the environment, you complain about what you consider capitalist excess, you moan ceaselessly about the...

Can public school teachers read a gay fairy tale to seven-year-olds without first asking permission of their parents? That's at issue in a Massachusetts case.Of course, this is about normalizing homosexuality in the minds of children, a strategy that has...

I wish it weren't so, but Alan Dershowitz, writing in the Spectator (reg. req.), says that Iran's march toward nuclear weaponry is all but unstoppable.In a nutshell, he offers three reasons:1. The "international community" cannot and will not get its...

Remember the controversy over the alleged Syrian musicians behaving strangely aboard Northwest flight 327? Remember how Annie Jacobsen wrote about it, and the bizarre way the government handled the situation? Well, the official government investigation has now been completed and...

Here I was all ready to blast the Norwegian Lutherans for the deadly bomb attacks in Egypt today, but a retired Egyptian general suggests that the Mossad might have been behind it. Well, that clears that up. What would we...

I'm reading "Cobra II," the much-praised Michael Gordon/Bernard Trainor history of the Iraq War, and I'm telling you, a cold fury creeps over me with each passing page. It's not a polemical book, but the details about how Defense Secretary...

You'll be hard-pressed to find a more thoughtful and enthusiastic defender of capitalism than Clive Crook, which is one reason why his latest National Journal column is so important. He argues that the rash of outrageous examples of executive pay...

I flew on Friday down to Louisiana to give a talk at the LSU journalism school, of which I'm an alumnus. I had a lot of fun and ate really well, naturellement. My folks picked me up from the airport...

Do you know that phrase? It's French for "the spirit of the staircase"--what you wish you had said in the moment, but it only occurs to you to say later, after you've turned away and headed back up the stairs.Well,...

One way that Dallas differs from other cities I've lived in is that in Dallas, even the liberals go to church. My city is home to the "St. Mychal Judge Liberal Catholic Church," which appears to be agay pseudo-Catholic congregation....

Some right-wing Bible-thumping loon has a USA Today op-ed out today claiming that Christian conservatives ought to be greener,, and the environmental movement ought to be more open to them. Where do they get these people?...

Can you imagine the meeting at which the people who run the museum at the Majdanek concentration camp decided it'd be cool to stage "Jesus Christ Superstar" on the site of a mass slaughter of Jews? What on earth is...

Beginning April 21, this is the new and improved home of "Crunchy Con." Read Rod Dreher's previous posts by clicking here....

I was thinking tonight about the Bush administration and its conduct of the war in Iraq. Specifically, I was thinking about why it planned for a war that it wanted to fight, rather than preparing for the war that some...