Thus far, I have withheld comment on the recent doings at the Supreme Court--largely because I’ve simply not had enough information about the newest nominee to the court to make much of a judgment one way or the other. Apparently, I am not alone. My dear friend Rod Martin, Chairman of Vanguard PAC, one of America's leading conservative groups, released a press briefing, which expressed extreme disappointment in President Bush's choice of Harriet Miers to replace the retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
“No one is more grateful for the President’s leadership and conservatism than I am,” said Martin, editor and co-author of last year’s Thank You President Bush: Reflections on the War on Terror, Defense of the Family and Revival of the Economy. “But this appointment is an enormous disappointment, and while we won’t oppose it, we can’t support it.”
Martin went on to assert, “For twenty years, conservatives have waited for this moment to really change the course of the court. They’ve organized, they’ve convinced America, and they’ve won majorities at every level of government. And conservative legal minds have slaved away to become truly exceptional, and our appeals courts are filled with them, in part thanks to George Bush. Now, at the very moment when one of those truly tremendous judges could finally ratify America's elective will--someone we could count on, someone with a track record known to anyone outside the White House inner circle--the President instead appoints someone who’s never been a judge, never left a paper trail, and never given any of us the slightest reason to believe she’ll be the kind of judge who’s worth fighting for.”
He concluded, “I trust George Bush. I believe in George Bush. And I won’t oppose his nominee. But we won’t back her, at least right now; and we call on all conservatives to keep their powder dry until someone gives us at least some reason to do otherwise.”
Interestingly, Martin and Vanguard PAC mobilized tens of thousands of activists across America in support of Chief Justice Roberts’ confirmation, and Martin had last week publicly promised to greatly intensify those efforts in support of what he called “a serious conservative nominee like Scalia or Thomas.” At this point, it appears that Harriet Miers is not such a nominee.
Monday, October 10
Notable and Quotable
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence--it is force.” George Washington
“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain bad laws.” G.K. Chesterton
“The essence of government is force: whatever its end, its means is compulsion. Government forces people to do what they would not otherwise choose to do, or it forces them to refrain from doing what they would otherwise do. So, when we say ‘government should do x,’ we are really saying, ‘people should be forced to do x.’ It should be obvious that force should be used only for the most serious reasons, such as preventing and punishing violence. The frivolous, improper, or excessive use of force is wrong. We used to call it tyranny. Unfortunately, too many people think that calling for the government to do x is merely a way of saying that x is desirable. And so we are increasingly forced to do things that are not genuine social duties but merely good ideas. The result is that the role of state coercion in our lives grows greater and greater.” Joseph Sobran
“The worst thing in the world, next to anarchy, is government.” Henry Ward Beecher
“Two characteristics of government are that it cannot do anything quickly, and that it never knows when to quit.” George Stigler
“When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” G.K. Chesterton
“Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.” Calvin Coolidge
“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.” Daniel Webster
“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” Albert Einstein
“No party is as bad as its leaders.” Will Rogers
“Government does not produce wealth: it consumes it, squanders it, and redistributes it. Ultimately, that is still theft even if it’s done in broad daylight, in elegant surroundings, by majority vote.” Howard Phillips
“If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” Harry Truman
“You can’t even trust the dogs in this town.” Clarence Thomas
“I belong to no organized political party--I’m a Democrat.” Will Rogers
“Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.” Robert Heinlein
“The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan
“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely expressed for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent busybodies.” C.S. Lewis
“We must beware of reducing society to the state or the state to society. For the state to take over the tasks of society and of the family is outside its jurisdiction and competency.” Abraham Kuyper
“There is no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.” Will Rogers
“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain bad laws.” G.K. Chesterton
“The essence of government is force: whatever its end, its means is compulsion. Government forces people to do what they would not otherwise choose to do, or it forces them to refrain from doing what they would otherwise do. So, when we say ‘government should do x,’ we are really saying, ‘people should be forced to do x.’ It should be obvious that force should be used only for the most serious reasons, such as preventing and punishing violence. The frivolous, improper, or excessive use of force is wrong. We used to call it tyranny. Unfortunately, too many people think that calling for the government to do x is merely a way of saying that x is desirable. And so we are increasingly forced to do things that are not genuine social duties but merely good ideas. The result is that the role of state coercion in our lives grows greater and greater.” Joseph Sobran
“The worst thing in the world, next to anarchy, is government.” Henry Ward Beecher
“Two characteristics of government are that it cannot do anything quickly, and that it never knows when to quit.” George Stigler
“When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” G.K. Chesterton
“Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.” Calvin Coolidge
“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.” Daniel Webster
“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” Albert Einstein
“No party is as bad as its leaders.” Will Rogers
“Government does not produce wealth: it consumes it, squanders it, and redistributes it. Ultimately, that is still theft even if it’s done in broad daylight, in elegant surroundings, by majority vote.” Howard Phillips
“If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” Harry Truman
“You can’t even trust the dogs in this town.” Clarence Thomas
“I belong to no organized political party--I’m a Democrat.” Will Rogers
“Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.” Robert Heinlein
“The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan
“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely expressed for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent busybodies.” C.S. Lewis
“We must beware of reducing society to the state or the state to society. For the state to take over the tasks of society and of the family is outside its jurisdiction and competency.” Abraham Kuyper
“There is no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.” Will Rogers
American Exceptionalism
“Government is but a tool. If ever we come to the place where our tools determine what jobs we can or cannot do, and by what means, then nary a fortnight shall pass in which new freedoms shall be wrested from us straightway. Societal problems are solved by families and communities as they carefully and discriminately use a variety of tools." Henry Cabot Lodge"The Constitution is not an instrument for government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government--lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” Patrick Henry
“The principles of the Constitution form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.” Thomas Jefferson
“Every word of the Constitution ultimately decides a question between power and liberty.” James Madison
The English pundit G.K. Chesterton once quipped, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” Other nations find their identity and cohesion in ethnicity, or geography, or partisan ideology, or cultural tradition. But America was founded on certain ideas—ideas about freedom, about human dignity, and about social responsibility. They are objective ideas—as must be the case if they are to take the form of a creed—codified in a sovereign standard of law, a constitution.
It was this profound peculiarity in the affairs of men and nations that most struck Alexis de Tocqueville during his famous visit to this land at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He called it “American exceptionalism.” Sir Henry Maine, the renowned British historian simply called it “the evident genius of the American Constitution.”
No other instrument of government—ancient or modern—produced such stability, offered such freedom, enjoyed such prosperity, or conveyed such hope as this one document. And amazingly, during more than two centuries of social, cultural, political, and technological revolution throughout the entire world, this Constitution has endured, fundamentally unchanged.
All the other European social contracts, manifestos, national charters, and constitutions of the eighteenth century have long since been consigned to the dust bin of history. The lofty ambitions ensconced in the constitutions of Latin America drawn up in the halcyon days of their new-found independence have all vanished. All the nationalist declarations drawn up in the heady days following the First World War are likewise gone. Those constitutions promulgated at the end of the Second World War have hardly fared better. And there is little doubt that the same fate yet awaits the emerging democracies that have begun dotting the maps of Europe, Asia, and Africa following the collapse of Communism.
Through it all, the American Constitution has flourished. It is a creed that has withstood every test.
Drawing on a great wealth of sage knowledge and practical experience, the Founding Fathers codified in their national charter a whole host of carefully wrought provisions designed to preserve the freedoms and liberties of the people. They designed the government with a series of interlocking checks and balances—not only were the executive, legislative, and judicial branches given spheres of authority over which the others could not interfere, localities, regions, states, and even individuals were afforded certain hedges against the imposition of tyranny. Powers were carefully separated. Authorities were circumspectly delineated. Rights were vigilantly secured.
Rather than yield to the inherent weaknesses of pure democracy, absolute monarchy, elitist oligarchy, radical republicanism, or haughty aristocracy, the Founders created the Constitution as a bastion of a kind of mixed government known as Federalism. It was to be a confederation of accountable spheres and covenantal sovereignties. It provided the nation with a government of laws, not rulers. It established a legacy of limited government, as Jefferson asserted, “laced up straitly within enumerated powers.”
History has proven the brilliance of the plan. Hardly the fruit of an antiquarian system meant for an agrarian people, the Constitution’s genius is that it is, as president Calvin Coolidge once asserted, “grounded upon a firm foundation of enduring principles, applicable to any society for any time.” It is a creed. It is the very quintessence of American exceptionalism.
Thursday, October 6
Quacks and Conycatchers
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I ran across this little blurb from something I wrote fifteen years ago:
"Sozzled with preposterous false expectations and bedazzled by a ceaseless chatter of well meant platitudes, the media has told the truth about the falsehood that they tell. Like all the other quacks and conycatchers now crowding the public trough in Washington, their suppositions drift ethereally above normal logical processes and pass into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. Such is to be expected. That is their job. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether or not the rest of us will be willing to give up our lackadaisical political canoodling and simply take up the difficult task of restoring the standards of justice, mercy, and truth in our land."
Hmmm. Nuff said. Still.
"Sozzled with preposterous false expectations and bedazzled by a ceaseless chatter of well meant platitudes, the media has told the truth about the falsehood that they tell. Like all the other quacks and conycatchers now crowding the public trough in Washington, their suppositions drift ethereally above normal logical processes and pass into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. Such is to be expected. That is their job. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether or not the rest of us will be willing to give up our lackadaisical political canoodling and simply take up the difficult task of restoring the standards of justice, mercy, and truth in our land."
Hmmm. Nuff said. Still.
More
And now abide faith, hope, and politics, these three; but the greatest of these is politics. Or so it seems. Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the smothering influence of ideological politics is everywhere evident. It has all too evidently wrested control of every academic discipline, of every cultural trend, of every intellectual impulse, even of every religious revival in our time. From Nazism and Stalinism to Pluralism and Multiculturalism, from Liberalism and Conservatism to Monopolism and Socialism, the modern era has been an epoch of movements beguiled by the temporal seductions of ideological politics.
Nearly every question, every issue, every social dilemma has been and continues to be translated into legal, juridical, or mechanical terms. They are supplied with bureaucratic, mathematical, or systemic solutions. If there is something wrong with the economy then government must fix it. If family values are absent then government must supply them. If health care provision is inefficient then government must rectify the situation. If education is in disarray then government must reorder the system. If a fierce storm brings devastation to a community then government must restore the possessions, rebuild the homes, and stabilize the economy--in addition to rescuing the stranded, relocating the displaced, reestablishing law and order, and reconstructing the infrastructure. Whatever the problem, it seems that government is the solution.
Virtually all social historians agree that this is indeed the most distinctive aspect of our age: the subsuming of all other concerns to the rise of political mass movements based upon comprehensive, secular, closed-universe, and millenarian intellectual systems. Thus, at one time of another, Henry David Aiken, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Isaac Kraminick, Frederick Watkins, Barbara Tuchman, Antonia Fraser, Paul Johnson, Russell Kirk, and Murray Rothbard have all dubbed this the "Age of Ideology."
The name of the ideological game is power. With all the cool detachment of wintry witchery every other consideration is relegated to a piratical humbug. G.K. Chesterton observes, “There is, as a ruling element in modern life, a blind and asinine appetite for mere power. There is a spirit abroad among the nations of the earth which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy.”
According to philosopher Eric Voegelin, this awful tendency "is essentially the politics of spiritual revolt.” It is, he says, a kind of a "psychic disorientation," a "metastatic faith," a "modern promethianism," a "secular parousianism," or, perhaps most accurately, a "dominion of pneumapathological consciousness."
Elaborating on those notions, political scientist Michael Franz has said, "Ideological consciousness is typified by a turning-away from the transcendent ground in revolt against the tension of contingent existence. In the modern era this revolt has taken many forms, all of which are expressive of dissatisfaction with the degree of certainty afforded by faith, trust, and hope as sources of knowledge and existential orientation. The great ideologists seek to displace Christian revelation by misplacing the transcendent ground within an immanent hierarchy of being, identifying the essence of human existence as productive relations, historical progress, racial compensation, libidinous drives, scientific rationality, or the will to power. Within the intellectual systems constructed around these misplacements of the ground, humanity appears as an autonomous, self-created species capable of assuming control of its destiny through the self-conscious application of new forms of knowledge."
In short, ideological politics is little more than a revived Gnosticism, an abiding Humanism rooted in the naked Politicalization of every detail of life. It is a worldview as thorough and as dominating in our time as was the Faith during the epoch of Christendom.
Thus Jane Addams, the radical urban social reformer during the uproarious teens and twenties, was hardly exaggerating when she said, “Ideology is the modern ecology. It is the landscape we see, the sound we hear, the food we eat, the air we breathe. It is the incarnation of truth for us and the emblem and impress of earthly harmony. It is the essence of modern beauty.”
But this modern notion is a far cry from the kind of worldview the American founders and pioneers maintained. They shared a profound distrust of central governments to solve the grave problems that afflicted individuals, communities, and societies. Certainly they believed in a strong and active civil authority--but only in its proper place. Thus, every brand of Statist ideology was abhorred by them.
Thomas Jefferson warned against the danger of "reducing the society to the state or the state to society." Patrick Henry argued, "The contention that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error." Gouverneur Morris insisted that the everyday affairs of society should be designed to avoid what he called the "interference of the state beyond its competence. While Henry Cabot Lodge insisted, “Government is but a tool. If ever we come to the place where our tools determine what jobs we can or cannot do, and by what means, then nary a fortnight shall pass in which new freedoms shall be wrested from us straightaway. Societal problems are solved by families and communities as they carefully and discriminately use a variety of tools.”
If anything, our modern politicians represent a paradigm lost. In the minds of the new elite, the dilemmas of the modern age are simply too grave to trust to free markets, free communities, and free institutions. The foundations of this great experiment in liberty are no longer sufficient. Instead they insist right along with the mob, "Government must do more."
Nearly every question, every issue, every social dilemma has been and continues to be translated into legal, juridical, or mechanical terms. They are supplied with bureaucratic, mathematical, or systemic solutions. If there is something wrong with the economy then government must fix it. If family values are absent then government must supply them. If health care provision is inefficient then government must rectify the situation. If education is in disarray then government must reorder the system. If a fierce storm brings devastation to a community then government must restore the possessions, rebuild the homes, and stabilize the economy--in addition to rescuing the stranded, relocating the displaced, reestablishing law and order, and reconstructing the infrastructure. Whatever the problem, it seems that government is the solution.
Virtually all social historians agree that this is indeed the most distinctive aspect of our age: the subsuming of all other concerns to the rise of political mass movements based upon comprehensive, secular, closed-universe, and millenarian intellectual systems. Thus, at one time of another, Henry David Aiken, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Isaac Kraminick, Frederick Watkins, Barbara Tuchman, Antonia Fraser, Paul Johnson, Russell Kirk, and Murray Rothbard have all dubbed this the "Age of Ideology."
The name of the ideological game is power. With all the cool detachment of wintry witchery every other consideration is relegated to a piratical humbug. G.K. Chesterton observes, “There is, as a ruling element in modern life, a blind and asinine appetite for mere power. There is a spirit abroad among the nations of the earth which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy.”
According to philosopher Eric Voegelin, this awful tendency "is essentially the politics of spiritual revolt.” It is, he says, a kind of a "psychic disorientation," a "metastatic faith," a "modern promethianism," a "secular parousianism," or, perhaps most accurately, a "dominion of pneumapathological consciousness."
Elaborating on those notions, political scientist Michael Franz has said, "Ideological consciousness is typified by a turning-away from the transcendent ground in revolt against the tension of contingent existence. In the modern era this revolt has taken many forms, all of which are expressive of dissatisfaction with the degree of certainty afforded by faith, trust, and hope as sources of knowledge and existential orientation. The great ideologists seek to displace Christian revelation by misplacing the transcendent ground within an immanent hierarchy of being, identifying the essence of human existence as productive relations, historical progress, racial compensation, libidinous drives, scientific rationality, or the will to power. Within the intellectual systems constructed around these misplacements of the ground, humanity appears as an autonomous, self-created species capable of assuming control of its destiny through the self-conscious application of new forms of knowledge."
In short, ideological politics is little more than a revived Gnosticism, an abiding Humanism rooted in the naked Politicalization of every detail of life. It is a worldview as thorough and as dominating in our time as was the Faith during the epoch of Christendom.
Thus Jane Addams, the radical urban social reformer during the uproarious teens and twenties, was hardly exaggerating when she said, “Ideology is the modern ecology. It is the landscape we see, the sound we hear, the food we eat, the air we breathe. It is the incarnation of truth for us and the emblem and impress of earthly harmony. It is the essence of modern beauty.”
But this modern notion is a far cry from the kind of worldview the American founders and pioneers maintained. They shared a profound distrust of central governments to solve the grave problems that afflicted individuals, communities, and societies. Certainly they believed in a strong and active civil authority--but only in its proper place. Thus, every brand of Statist ideology was abhorred by them.
Thomas Jefferson warned against the danger of "reducing the society to the state or the state to society." Patrick Henry argued, "The contention that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error." Gouverneur Morris insisted that the everyday affairs of society should be designed to avoid what he called the "interference of the state beyond its competence. While Henry Cabot Lodge insisted, “Government is but a tool. If ever we come to the place where our tools determine what jobs we can or cannot do, and by what means, then nary a fortnight shall pass in which new freedoms shall be wrested from us straightaway. Societal problems are solved by families and communities as they carefully and discriminately use a variety of tools.”
If anything, our modern politicians represent a paradigm lost. In the minds of the new elite, the dilemmas of the modern age are simply too grave to trust to free markets, free communities, and free institutions. The foundations of this great experiment in liberty are no longer sufficient. Instead they insist right along with the mob, "Government must do more."
Wednesday, October 5
Welcome Katie
Katherine Noel Shurden was born yesterday, October 4th at 10:09 AM, weighing 7.7 pounds and measuring 21¼ inches long. She is absolutely gorgeous, rivaled only by her two-year old big sister. Mom and Katie are happy, healthy, and due to head home with Dad sometime tomorow. Congratulations!
A Quixotic Journey
While incarcerated in a grim Spanish gaol for embezzlement, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra--a weathered old soldier then in service to the Spanish crown as a tax collector--conceived the story of a lunatic knight errant and his peasant squire. Enduring all manner of hardships and setbacks, he set the semi-autobiographical story to paper and thus was born not only a masterpiece of comic writing but the prototype of the modern novel as well.
That first edition of Don Quixote, published in Madrid on this day in 1605, was a huge popular success. In fact, it was such a blockbuster that a spurious sequel quickly appeared by an unidentified author. Undaunted, Cervantes demonstrated his inventive genius by turning disaster into a source of comedy; he published his own sequel writing the interloper into the plot, making fact into fiction just as his hero tried to make fiction into fact. Again, his efforts were rewarded by the wild acclaim of the reading public.
There was little about the life and the career of Cervantes that would have indicated a predilection to a successful literary career--in fact there was little that would have indicated a predilection to any kind of success whatsoever. He was born in 1547 in the Hapsburg domains of the kingdom of Castile, that vast Iberian tableland that would before long be united with the crowns of Aragon, Leon, Catalonia, Valencia Andalusia, Galicia, Asturias, Navarre, and Murcia to become the modern multi-national confederation we call “Spain.” His family had once been proud and influential but had fallen on hard times. Though his childhood was apparently fraught with difficulty, he was able to obtain an excellent education that filled him with aspirations to restore his family’s fortunes. The young Cervantes chose the life of a professional soldier--the surest and quickest path to fame, glory, riches, and royal favor.
Service to the king of Castile led him into the fierce conflict between Christendom and Islam, still raging after nearly a millennium. His participation in the great Battle of Lepanto, in which the allied forces of Austria, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal, Venice, Lombardy, Genoa, Naples, and Rome surprisingly crushed the naval superiority of the Ottomans, marked him as a skilled and courageous warrior. During the fierce fighting he was severely wounded, permanently losing the use of his left arm. He was rewarded for his heroism and sent to Naples to recover.
It was there in the warm climes of the Italian renaissance, surrounded by vibrant academies, passionate salons, and literary cenacles, that the young soldier steeped himself in the writing of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, and Aretino. He also became familiar with the innovative chivalric chapbooks written by Boiardo and Ariosto, whose style that would greatly influence him later in life. Once he had regained his full strength, Cervantes was assigned minor administrative duties that allowed him to continue to drink deeply from those cultural wells.
Sadly, this refreshing period of his life was cut short when he was captured by Islamic pirates and then sold into slavery in Algiers. For the next five years he was to suffer unmentionable tortures and atrocities in the Saracen prisons. Once again, he displayed exemplary courage throughout the ordeal: he escaped four times and became the tacit leader of the Christian detainees.
When at long last he was freed, he returned to a distressingly inhospitable Castile. His soldiering days were over and so he floated from one odd job to another, never able to stay more than a few steps ahead of the bill collectors. He spent a few years in Madrid and tried to make a living as a playwright. He clearly aspired to the literary life. Failing at that though, he pled the crown for some sort of appointment. It was all for naught. Finally, in desperation he accepted the noxious task of a roving commissary, or auxiliary tax collector. Apparently, Cervantes was entirely unsuited for the task. His accounting was indecipherable, his work habits were inconsistent, and his diligence was suspect. In other words, he was a frustrated writer caught in a dead-end job. When his ledgers failed to add up, he was arrested and charged with fraud. But what was obviously a personal calamity for him turned out to be a cultural accretion for the world.
With time on his hands, Cervantes began to explore life's confrontation between illusion and reality, ambition and satisfaction, romance and rejection, chivalry and economy, achievement and reward, style and substance--all themes that had haunted his long and frustrated life. Woven into the fabric of the tragi-comic tale of the hapless and mad Don Quixote, those themes spring to life into a universal quest for truth, justice, and honor.
The plot of the book is as erratic and as desultory as sixteenth century life itself. Thus, Don Quixote and his faithful sidekick, Sancho, meet with a whole series of unrelated chance encounters, intrigues, and challenges. The adventures--like those in the popular chivalric romances that Cervantes was deliberately parodying--tend to be repetitive and ritualistic in form, involving the hero’s hallucinatory heraldic world, fed by amorous reminiscences, but with sad realities that only others can see. The result is a collage of hilarious ambiguities and side-splitting conundrums.
Interestingly though, unlike so many modern works of comic cynicism--as in the fiction of, say, Woody Allen, Christopher Buckley, or P.J. O’Rourke--the book’s real literary stock-in-trade is not despair. Rather, the deep Christian faith of Cervantes leads him to find order behind the apparent disorder of a fallen world and sanity behind the apparent madness of a fallen race--as in the fiction of, say, Flannery O’Connor, P.G. Wodehouse, or G.K. Chesterton.
The achievement of Cervantes is stunning. With Don Quixote, he changed the shape of literature the world over. When he died in 1616--presumably the same year that William Shakespeare expired--he left a huge void in Spanish letters that has never been entirely filled.
The most accessible translation of this great classic is probably J.M. Cohen’s Penguin Classics edition--although it often over-simplifies complexities in the text, thereby losing a sense of the weight of the novel. For strict and accurate fidelity, the Oxford edition of John Ormsby’s 1885 translation is to be preferred--unfortunately the Victorian phrasing may be a bit awkward for some readers.
Whichever translation you choose however, you’re sure to savor many an hour delving into the glorious enterprises of that intrepid man of La Mancha.
That first edition of Don Quixote, published in Madrid on this day in 1605, was a huge popular success. In fact, it was such a blockbuster that a spurious sequel quickly appeared by an unidentified author. Undaunted, Cervantes demonstrated his inventive genius by turning disaster into a source of comedy; he published his own sequel writing the interloper into the plot, making fact into fiction just as his hero tried to make fiction into fact. Again, his efforts were rewarded by the wild acclaim of the reading public.
There was little about the life and the career of Cervantes that would have indicated a predilection to a successful literary career--in fact there was little that would have indicated a predilection to any kind of success whatsoever. He was born in 1547 in the Hapsburg domains of the kingdom of Castile, that vast Iberian tableland that would before long be united with the crowns of Aragon, Leon, Catalonia, Valencia Andalusia, Galicia, Asturias, Navarre, and Murcia to become the modern multi-national confederation we call “Spain.” His family had once been proud and influential but had fallen on hard times. Though his childhood was apparently fraught with difficulty, he was able to obtain an excellent education that filled him with aspirations to restore his family’s fortunes. The young Cervantes chose the life of a professional soldier--the surest and quickest path to fame, glory, riches, and royal favor.
Service to the king of Castile led him into the fierce conflict between Christendom and Islam, still raging after nearly a millennium. His participation in the great Battle of Lepanto, in which the allied forces of Austria, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal, Venice, Lombardy, Genoa, Naples, and Rome surprisingly crushed the naval superiority of the Ottomans, marked him as a skilled and courageous warrior. During the fierce fighting he was severely wounded, permanently losing the use of his left arm. He was rewarded for his heroism and sent to Naples to recover.
It was there in the warm climes of the Italian renaissance, surrounded by vibrant academies, passionate salons, and literary cenacles, that the young soldier steeped himself in the writing of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, and Aretino. He also became familiar with the innovative chivalric chapbooks written by Boiardo and Ariosto, whose style that would greatly influence him later in life. Once he had regained his full strength, Cervantes was assigned minor administrative duties that allowed him to continue to drink deeply from those cultural wells.
Sadly, this refreshing period of his life was cut short when he was captured by Islamic pirates and then sold into slavery in Algiers. For the next five years he was to suffer unmentionable tortures and atrocities in the Saracen prisons. Once again, he displayed exemplary courage throughout the ordeal: he escaped four times and became the tacit leader of the Christian detainees.
When at long last he was freed, he returned to a distressingly inhospitable Castile. His soldiering days were over and so he floated from one odd job to another, never able to stay more than a few steps ahead of the bill collectors. He spent a few years in Madrid and tried to make a living as a playwright. He clearly aspired to the literary life. Failing at that though, he pled the crown for some sort of appointment. It was all for naught. Finally, in desperation he accepted the noxious task of a roving commissary, or auxiliary tax collector. Apparently, Cervantes was entirely unsuited for the task. His accounting was indecipherable, his work habits were inconsistent, and his diligence was suspect. In other words, he was a frustrated writer caught in a dead-end job. When his ledgers failed to add up, he was arrested and charged with fraud. But what was obviously a personal calamity for him turned out to be a cultural accretion for the world.
With time on his hands, Cervantes began to explore life's confrontation between illusion and reality, ambition and satisfaction, romance and rejection, chivalry and economy, achievement and reward, style and substance--all themes that had haunted his long and frustrated life. Woven into the fabric of the tragi-comic tale of the hapless and mad Don Quixote, those themes spring to life into a universal quest for truth, justice, and honor.
The plot of the book is as erratic and as desultory as sixteenth century life itself. Thus, Don Quixote and his faithful sidekick, Sancho, meet with a whole series of unrelated chance encounters, intrigues, and challenges. The adventures--like those in the popular chivalric romances that Cervantes was deliberately parodying--tend to be repetitive and ritualistic in form, involving the hero’s hallucinatory heraldic world, fed by amorous reminiscences, but with sad realities that only others can see. The result is a collage of hilarious ambiguities and side-splitting conundrums.
Interestingly though, unlike so many modern works of comic cynicism--as in the fiction of, say, Woody Allen, Christopher Buckley, or P.J. O’Rourke--the book’s real literary stock-in-trade is not despair. Rather, the deep Christian faith of Cervantes leads him to find order behind the apparent disorder of a fallen world and sanity behind the apparent madness of a fallen race--as in the fiction of, say, Flannery O’Connor, P.G. Wodehouse, or G.K. Chesterton.
The achievement of Cervantes is stunning. With Don Quixote, he changed the shape of literature the world over. When he died in 1616--presumably the same year that William Shakespeare expired--he left a huge void in Spanish letters that has never been entirely filled.
The most accessible translation of this great classic is probably J.M. Cohen’s Penguin Classics edition--although it often over-simplifies complexities in the text, thereby losing a sense of the weight of the novel. For strict and accurate fidelity, the Oxford edition of John Ormsby’s 1885 translation is to be preferred--unfortunately the Victorian phrasing may be a bit awkward for some readers.
Whichever translation you choose however, you’re sure to savor many an hour delving into the glorious enterprises of that intrepid man of La Mancha.
Monday, October 3
Current Events
West and East Germany became one nation on October 3, 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell and European Communism was relegated to the dust heap of history. Amid the initial euphoria, there was a general realization that creating a unified Germany would be a long and difficult process. Exactly fifteen years later, that long and difficult process continues--as evidenced by the election deadlock that has gripped the nation for the past two weeks due to the lack of a mandate by either the opposition Christian Democrats or the ruling Socialists.In the "Unity Day" speeches given today by both the marginal electoral winner, Angela Merkel, and the outgoing Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, the "extreme difficulty" in building "national consensus" out of the "bitter divisions Germany faces" was emphasized.
Interestingly, the great nationalist poet, playwright, historian, and philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) made that very same dilemma the central theme of William Tell, his final, and arguably his greatest work--published almost exactly two hundred years ago.
There is indeed, "nothing new under the sun." Not even in the most current of current events.
Marburg
The Colloquy of Marburg—the first major council of Protestant Christians—began in earnest on this day in 1529 after two days of pleasantries and preliminaries. A number of prominent theologians and pastors had agreed to meet in an attempt to resolve controversies that had arisen between the two Reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther. Strong disagreement had arisen in particular over the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. The Roman Church taught that in the ceremony of the mass, the bread and wine were transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ. Neither Zwingli nor Luther found that view Scripturally supportable or acceptable. But while Luther held that Christ was actually and spiritually present in the bread and wine, Zwingli believed the whole ceremony of communion was a memorial of Christ's death for us, but that Christ was not actually present in the elements, either physically or spiritually (I know, I know, this is a gross oversimplification of the two postitions, but a simple explanation will have to suffice for the present circumstances).
In any case, neither Zwingli nor Luther could accept the other's viewpoint, and the debate often became harsh and unpleasant. Philip of Hesse, one of the German princes, had invited the Reformers to come to his territory to resolve their differences. Behind Philip's desire for peace between Zwingli and Luther was the hope that a political alliance of the Protestant states might eventually be made, thus weakening the Catholic Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Peace was not to be had, however. Though the reformers could agree on the doctrines of the Trinity, the person of Christ, his death and resurrection, original sin, justification by faith, the Holy Spirit, and the sacraments, they could not agree on the nature of communion.
Martin Bucer, who had attempted to mediate between the two great Reformers (and who held to a yet another view of the Lord's Supper, later taken up by his disciple John Calvin), bitterly complained afterward, “Protestants might well face severe tumults for many years to come” if such “intransigence” were “left unchecked.” Never was he more the prophet.
In any case, neither Zwingli nor Luther could accept the other's viewpoint, and the debate often became harsh and unpleasant. Philip of Hesse, one of the German princes, had invited the Reformers to come to his territory to resolve their differences. Behind Philip's desire for peace between Zwingli and Luther was the hope that a political alliance of the Protestant states might eventually be made, thus weakening the Catholic Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Peace was not to be had, however. Though the reformers could agree on the doctrines of the Trinity, the person of Christ, his death and resurrection, original sin, justification by faith, the Holy Spirit, and the sacraments, they could not agree on the nature of communion.
Martin Bucer, who had attempted to mediate between the two great Reformers (and who held to a yet another view of the Lord's Supper, later taken up by his disciple John Calvin), bitterly complained afterward, “Protestants might well face severe tumults for many years to come” if such “intransigence” were “left unchecked.” Never was he more the prophet.
Banner Day
October 3 has seen a number of notable historical events besides those aforementioned--including the death of St. Francis of Assisi in 1226 and his canonization just two years later in 1228. It was on this day in 1637 that Ben Jonson died--while he was a prominent poet and playwright himself, he would be best known as the man who purportedly identified the presumed author of Shakespeare's plays. It was also on this day that first Washington and then later Lincoln made Thanksgiving Day proclamations. It was on this day in 1929 that the hodge-podge kingdoms of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were officially unified and cobbled together into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. But, in addition to all these bellwether historical events, in 1960, this day also saw the premiere of The Andy Griffith Show. That first episode, "The New Housekeeper," was aired by CBS on a Monday evening in prime time. While Aunt Bea won the heart of Opie after she came to live with her widowed nephew and his son, the whole cast of characters who inhabited Mayberry won the heart of America. The show went on to become a undisputed cultural icon.
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