The Bosque Boys

Valerie Plame sues over leak. Captain's Quarters has a must read account of Joe Wilson's track record on truth. Read here. Having Plame and Wilson under oath could be fun.

I refuse to push the panic button on the economy, and I hate Vietnam parallels, but a growing chain of events gives me cause for concern.

The stagflation and misery of the 1970s arrived, in part, as a result of the belief that we could have "guns and butter" without sacrifice. During an extended and expensive overseas military expedition, the US attempted to leverage the Vietnam War and the Great Society with little concern for revenue. At the same time, American manufactures suffered from an increased period of competition from emerging industrial nations. And, finally, the American economy, heavily dependent on foreign oil, suffered mightily from the rise of OPEC, which attempted to punish the United States for its support of Israel.

I firmly believe that history does not repeat itself--but sometimes the present is eerily reminiscent of the past.

We are in the midst of a protracted and expensive military engagement, a huge event on which we are divided but strangely detached. We continue to run-up budget deficits to pay for the war and our pampered national lifestyle. Our manufacturers are in much worse shape than thirty-five years ago, evidenced by our ever-increasing trade deficits and changing labor reality. Add Israel and oil to this equation, during a time when we are more dependent on foreign fuel than ever before, and there are serious reasons for concern.

You have heard my numerous exhortations in the past to stay the course in Iraq. I am not backing away from that line of thinking. But there is real danger ahead. Although the President's approval ratings in general (and on Iraq specifically) have turned dismal, his initiative in the Middle East has moved forward despite its diminishing popularity (mainly because Iraq seems disturbing but peripheral to most Americans).

But an economic crisis would end all that. A deep recession would completely break America's will for war. The Iraq commitment survives precariously on the crest of this fortuitous economic wave. If this economy is as fragile as some have speculated, then the support for the war is just that tenuous.

Peggy Noonan has a great, thoughtful essay today (no surprise) on the impossible demands currently being made on the politicians in Congress to decide every sort of difficult issue, from international to local. In part at least, this barrage of complexity enables those who want bigger government to slip through increases in government size and responsibility. She points out that demanding a Congress full of Platos, Solomons and Socrates's is ridiculous. It is a great essay in favor of small government. Read it here.

One of the basic underlying ideas to her essay is that human beings have limits. We are finite. Asking finite beings for infinite wisdom will result in tragedy, or if we are lucky, farce. The ancient Greeks understood the nature of human limits: humans are between gods and animals. To act like a god, that is to act as though one had no limits, was called hubris. Engaging in hubris was understood to bring tragedy. Think of the myth of Icarus, the fellow whose father made wings to fly away and escape from imprisonment. Not heeding his father's warnings he flew too near the sun, the wax in his wings melted, and he plummeted to his death. He forget his limitations, tried to act like a god, and his end was destruction. In the words of a famous American philisopher--A man's got to know his limitations.

The liberal push for bigger and bigger government, controlling more and more of human life, is a recipe for tragedy. Humans cannot succeed at controlling everything. Especially not one elite governing group. In the Christian world-view, we have a similar idea to hubris--sin. Only God has the omni's: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. A state claiming omnicompetence is reaching for forbidden fruit, trying to attain the status of God. We know how that story ends.

This lesson is hard for Americans to learn. We like to think in terms of infinite possibilities. Some years ago Michael Crighton wrote a decent novel using the plot of Greek tragedy--Jurassic Park. In the novel the Theme Park creator tried to be a god by bringing extinct creatures back to living in the present. He was punished for his hubris, eaten by his creatures, after causing much suffering. In order to appeal to a popular American audience, when made into a movie the tragedy of hubris was removed, and a happy ending inserted. In real life we do not always get to rewrite.

Arguably the turning point in the American Civil War occured during the first few days of July 1863 with the fall of Vicksburg to Union forces and the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. Today's Wall Street Journal Editorial Page online has a list of the 5 best books on the Battle of Gettysburg with brief descriptions.

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Excerpts from a recent essay on "the American character" by one of my American history survey students (C. Buzbee, with her permission):

"If a colonist from the 1700’s visited the United States today he would be astounded. Cars of all makes and models rush along endless highways, skyscrapers line the horizon, cities go on for miles, communication of all forms literally instantaneous, all manner of electrical gadgetry available upon demand. Food abundant, travel magical, military force impressive and formidable, and everyone he would have met would have never known anything but life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A little over 200 years ago, early Americans, poorly equipped, made all this and more possible at great sacrifice to themselves. Somehow in that long ago time, this great country of ours, the richest, freest, most powerful nation on earth was born. How exactly it happened is a long and winding story, full of complexities and ironies but in the end a tale of victory against overwhelming odds. The story of freedom should be familiar to all Americans as it lends illumination and a special appreciation for all the privileges and freedoms that belong to us simply for being an American."

"The end then, we all know, was the beginning. It started with a Constitution, a Presidency, a flag, and an unshakable belief in that all men are created equal and that we have a right to be able to choose our profession, the fabric of our lives, our religion, all ideas that embody democracy. The infant government would continue to experience lows and highs, numerous internal battles (ironing out the kinks) for years to come, and several more wars to live through to obtain the true freedom and working democratic society, the model of the world over that it is today. And still the battle goes on with global issues in which modern patriots who will ever strive to emulate our society in lands far from here. It is our duty, our destiny, the price we pay for the freedom so hard won long ago, to spread the idea so that others can say ‘We the people’."

Over the past few weeks, we have discussed the tension between Christianity and citizenship, sometimes obliquely (the same-sex marriage threads) and sometimes directly (Okie Gardener's brief essay: Christianity and Patriotism).

Rod Dreher speaks to the same question in one of his posts today (although he uses it as a vehicle to go in another direction). Feel free to follow his thread, but I want to pursue the question more directly in this post.

Before I pose the question, another hat tip to Rod D. for resurrecting a great ten-year-old thread (recommended reading) from First Things: The End of Democracy?

Concluding that thread is this collection of "Thoughts" (required reading) on the question of primary loyalty, from primary sources Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and William Lloyd Garrison.

The question: Can American Christians submit to a secular consensus that promotes the profane over the sacred?

Quoting Rod D. quoting Ross Douthat (in full here):

"To oversimplify egregiously but not, I think, inaccurately, the modern Anglo-American political tradition came into being because Christians were willing to accept the Christianity-lite political settlement offered by social-contract liberalism - and they were willing to accept it because its major premise, that man was endowed with natural and inalienable rights by Nature's God, was broadly congruent with Christian tradition. In a Lockean-liberal society, the law might not do everything that some Christians would like it to do - compel belief, for instance - but neither would it directly violate basic Christian principles."

Summarizing Douthat: Because secularists have abandoned the common ground of Lockean theory (natural rights conferred by Nature's God), the compromise is seriously threatened (see issues like abortion--or our thread on same-sex marriage).

Summarizing Dreher: Liberal Democracy is in its last throes in America.

Any thoughts?

Powerline today, on the anniversary of D-Day, offers some provocative thoughts on whether or not we honor our WW2 veterans. The article is prompted by, and links to, this essay in the Opinion Journal.

The Opinion Journal editorial by David Gelernter, written in 2004, argues that if we were truly to honor our WW2 vets we would teach in our schools, at a minimum 1. The Major Battles of the War, 2. The bestiality of the Japanese, 3. The attitude of the intellectuals. 4. The Veterans' Neglected Voice (allowing vets to speak and enabling them publish and record). (cont.)

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Wizbang has this posting in rememberance of Ronald Reagan who died on June 5, 2004. There are links to several of Reagan's speeches, and links to other sites on the web remembering the Great Communicator. One of the quotes posted is

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
Ronald Reagan

I have always admired Hubert Humphrey. This morning Powerline has a post on Humphrey's role in expelling the communists from his party in Minnesota. Who will be the Democrat to stand up for America today?

On May 15, 1916, a frenzied crowd of white Waco citizens surged into the 54th District Court and seized Jesse Washington. Moments earlier, a jury had convicted the seventeen-year-old African American male of murdering a white Robinson woman, Lucy Fryer. The mob, convinced that Washington had also raped Fryer, tortured, hanged, burned him alive and then dragged his mutilated corpse through town. A huge crowd of spectators (15,000 by some estimates) looked on with glee, while storied local photographer, Fred Gildersleeve, recorded the event in gruesome detail.

We note that the brutal murder of Mrs. Fryer was a tragic event for her family, and we are mindful that the slaying lingers as a painful legacy for her descendants.

Washington had confessed to the crime. The prosecution presented evidence. After four minutes of deliberation, seven days after his arrest, the jury of twelve white men found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

Notwithstanding, based on the trial record and what we know about justice for African Americans in the Jim-Crow South, we cannot make a conclusive finding of guilt or innocence in this 90-year-old case.

Wholly apart from that unanswerable question, clearly the community of Waco, Texas, grievously violated Jesse Washington's fundamental rights to due process under the Constitution of the United States. The preemptive actions of the mob, and their exhorters, clearly deprived an American citizen of his right to appeal to a higher court and short-circuited the legal process. The events of May 15, 1916 sting with inequity and disgrace.

Even worse, we know that the grotesque inhumanity of the Washington lynching was emblematic of a period in which our community regularly denied our African American neighbors basic human rights. The "Waco Horror," as it came to be known to the world, was not an isolated case; egregious abuses and humiliations were far too prevalent in Central Texas and throughout the South during our long, dark period of racial segregation and mistreatment.

Inarguably, we are the product of our collective past. We are a people, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “connected by the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart” and home in our community. We do well to celebrate the blessings we inherited from our ancestors, who lived in a time that we cannot fully comprehend.

However, we do ourselves a grave disservice when we attempt to evade or ignore the less than heroic chapters in our history. Wacoans of 1916 committed a gross act of barbarity. As a result of that heinous act, and many others, present Waco inherited a history laden with exploitation and mined with racial mistrust.

The present-day community of Waco, Texas, and McLennan County profoundly regrets and fervently renounces the Jesse Washington atrocity. Our community extends our deepest sympathies to the myriad victims of those tragically dehumanizing times. While we cannot change the past, we find it absolutely necessary to confront and condemn our reprehensible heritage of racial inequality and brutality.

We also believe that it is appropriate for us to extend forgiveness to our ancestral community.

We forgive those who have failed us, just as we seek forgiveness for our failures. We come together, preserving a painful communal memory, in order to commit ourselves to justice. Learning from our past and calling upon the better angels of our nature, we dedicate ourselves to fostering a community at peace with itself.