In the recent issue of The City, the fine journal that comes out of Houston Baptist University, Wilfred McClay reflects on what cities mean for our souls ("The Soul and the City;" it's not accessible online but you can and should subscribe for free). Large urban centers are not unambiguously good things, but they are also far from unmitigated evils, or what Benjamin Rush compared to, "abscesses on the human body," which is to say, "reservoirs of all the impurities of a community." After first reflecting on the shape of our surroundings which not only we have shaped, but which then have shaped us in turn, he backs up and asks a fundamental question: Never mind cities; why do we bother with each other all?

Our reflections need to begin, then, with a consideration of what cities are, and are for, what they accomplish that can be accomplished no other way. Indeed, given the strong emphasis on the individual in our times, we would do well to begin with an even more fundamental question. Do we really need to dwell together?

That's easy: Yes, we do. It's a fundamental part of our nature. Aristotle argued that man is by nature a political animal, and that a man who lives outside of the city is either a beast or a god. For Christians, this emphasis on relationship is at the very foundation of things, because God Himself is, in the Trinitarian understanding, defined by relationship in his fundamental being. The Bible consistently relies on our human and natural relations to explain God's nature to us: as Father and Son, for example. Or as in the act of marriage, as laid out rather mysteriously in the Letter to the Ephesians, which explains and is explained by Christ's relationship with His Church, which is also His body, or the body of which He is the head. For our purposes, what this means is that relationship with others is not something we do but something we are--we may shape our relationships, but we are more fundamentally shaped by the need for them, and we cannot understand ourselves without reference to them (pp. 8-9).

Americans are individualists to their core, and, it seems, always will be. But that does not mean we are, or have always been, simply individualistic. Just as America has always been a mix of classical, Christian, and modern Enlightenment influences, though, as the United States, we were formed primarily by Enlightenment thought (Bacon, Locke, Montesquieu etc.), so too we have always thought and acted for the most part as self-reliant individuals, but humanized and civilized by Christian charity and classical notions of honor. As we have, on the one hand, thrown off Christianity, and on the other hand forgotten how to blush, our life together has become ever more unmanageably individualistic, resulting in both socially pathological solipsism and slavish submission to statism. Individualism needs the covenant life of Christianity as well as the ancient aesthetic appreciation for noble deeds and revulsion at what is shameful in order to correct it excesses and make its virtues sustainable.

Strangely, David Brooks wrote on the same topic in his column yesterday, "The Power of Posterity." Prodded by a blog he likes to read (Marginal Revolution), he attempts to think through the consequences of an imaginary pulse from the sun that sterilizes one side of the planet (let's assume it's our side). Essentially, it's nothing much at first, but with no hope of another generation to follow your children (if you have children), he reasonably projects that people would start living for the moment, i.e., for themselves. They would become ever more radically individualistic and for that reason unambitious. (We generally think for the most ambitious people being the most individualistic. But it's not simply so.)

Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.

If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.

There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled.

Aristotle gave classic expression to that organic view of the meaning of the life we live together. After more than 2,300 years, we continue to see sage insight in his statement that,

[I]t is evident, then, that the city (polis, political community) exists among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city through nature rather than chance is either a mean sort or superior to man....For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city....One who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of a city, and so is either a beast or a god (The Politics, 1253a1-28).

Passing from general revelation through the mind of the philosopher to the special revelation that God gave through his Apostles, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth regarding how the covenant community of Christians, God's redeemed community of new humanity, is to view the life of the body politic in Christ.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

The seventeenth century poet, John Donne, wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" ("Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions").

Conservatives understand (I mean genuine conservatives, not just the surviving classical liberals among us) that if American individualism is not to undermine and defeat itself, then, as the Founders of our nation understood, we need to give proper attention to our natural and spiritual ties with one another, supplementing the commercial spirit and the concern for simple self-interest with biblical love for God and noble love for country.

Harold Kildow writes: Mary Catherine Hamm over at the Weekly Standard caught this exchange on--what else? the health care legislation hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles. Paul Ryan, an exceptional young Republican Congressman more than holds his own--and our own--against the two administration propagandists posing as MSNBC hosts. This media absorption into the democrat party is a serious problem converging on a bad joke.

My favorite is Katrina vanden Heuvel, whose family fortune has allowed her to, like William F. Buckley, helm a national magazine without having to make a living at it. She however uses her wealth to make sure no one else ever attains such filthy lucre, while posing as one of the "little people." She is owner and editor of that beacon of international socialism, The Nation. And like every other committed leftist, she and her magazine do not let bourgeois notions like facts deter their narrative. Not even leg-tingling Chris Matthews, another MS-LSD host, could allow her outright deceit going out over his air: while making a point about "understanding the poor", she validated it by saying she lived in Harlem. Matthews, in a moment of journalistic integrity, interjected that she lives in a multimillion dollar townhouse in ultra-tony Morningside Heights. No doubt she watches--and understands--from her upper story veranda through binoculars as the poor shuffle around gathering what ever it is they gather in those shopping carts.

In this segment with Congressman Ryan, vanden Heuval has the utter audacity--and mendacity--to attempt to argue (along with the president, by the way) that a "public option"--i.e., Medicare for everyone--would be good for the insurance industry because it would foster competition, and wouldn't you agree Congressman Ryan that competition is the American Way? If only every Republican were as quick on his feet as Ryan. Vanden Heuval, the consummate progressive/socialist/communist, trying to pass herself off as someone concerned for traditional American values like free markets and competition, is directly refuted by Ryan--much as Chris Matthews would not allow her Harlem dwelling lie. Someone needs to do the same with Obama, who has been a Saul Alinski poseur from the beginning.

-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

Harold Kildow writes: The sagebrush rebellion of some years ago is flickering back to life, as the Tenth Amendment is being rediscovered in the face of the serious ramp-up of the Democratic party's decades old assault on the Constitution. Bob Dole's hapless candidacy against Bill Clinton in 1996 had as one its main slogans something like, "Return to the 10th Amendment!" It fell so flat no one even heard it. It has taken Obama's audacity of hope to reignite the brush fire that has been smoldering out West.

Rick Perry, governor of Texas and one of the leading lights of the resurgent conservative wing of the Republican party, came out swinging on Obama's socialized health care boondoggle. Perry is willing to go to court using the Tenth Amendment's guarantee of state sovereignty against the imposition of any such program. He also suggests in this Star Telegram piece, "Perry Raises Possibility of State's Rights Showdown with White House over Health care that several other governors are also prepared to stand up against the federal leviathan on this issue.

Good on 'em. It's late in the day to only just begin to bring our political order back into line with our fundamental law, but certainly better late than never. Governors and state legislatures have tremendous power to wield against the central government--it is one of the fundamental protections the Founders built into the constitution to prevent the dangerous side road we took throughout the 20th century in being talked into discarding the "antique" document our benighted forebears tried to saddle us with and taking up with the modern "progressive" ideas of scientific management and rule by experts.

Anyone who thinks he's smarter than James Madison along political science lines automatically signals with that very thought his inferiority. And somewhere there is a whole raft of anti-Federalists watching the encroachment on the States by the federal government saying, "We told you so." Maybe someone in the Republican party can suggest a new anti-Federalism as a way forward. We have a decent start with this 10th Amendment movement springing up.

-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham University) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

Harold Kildow writes: Allow me to take the part of the Governor over against the oleaginous and unctuous Peggy Noonan. Sarah Palin was thrown into the imperial snakepit before her time, no question about that. But the only people that have any chance to survive that trial by slander, rumor, and humiliation are those who grew up with the boys and girls in that little club and are thus just like them. The savaging she has endured from the best and the brightest is unprecedented, and she has had zero--ZERO--support from the heroic elected Republicans inside the Beltway. In fact, some of the most outrageous attacks have come from the little backstabbing bedwetters inside the McCain campaign itself. As far as supportive pundits or journalists, I think it reduces to Bill Kristol and a couple of others at the Weekly Standard. (See Victor Davis Hanson's thoughtful reflections in "What is Wisdom? Sarah Palin and her Critics" ) With only support from the great unwashed, she has held her ground. And I don't know where this charge that she doesn't know anything comes from--aside from beltway ambush interviews.

While being a mother of five, she dominated multi-party, multi-million dollar negotiations on a giant pipeline deal that had been mired for decades in the corrupt good old boy network and got a deal done. How did that happen? I notice hers is one of the few states in the Union that is in good fiscal condition--a veritable petro state awash in petro dollars, which few politicos would be able to keep their hands off of. She has, and the state of Alaska is positioned to be a leading economic factor when grownups get back in control of the national economy and energy policy.

Oh, and as far as not being thoughtful, how about leading a meaningful reassertion of the Tenth Amendment as part of the conservative resurgence of constitutionalism among state legislatures and governors? This is just the first of many moves she will be making. She may not be destined for the presidency, but she will galvanize the conservative movement in ways Noonan never has or ever will, a factor that ought not to be overlooked when judging Noonan's analysis.

And lets face it--it doesn't matter whose face is associated with conservatism, he or she is portrayed as either stupid or evil or both--e.g., Gingrich, Reagan, Thatcher. Besides, the left is brimming with really smart people who think they know how to run everyone's lives, and where has that ever worked out? Self-organized, bottom up structures such as political self-rule and free markets rest more on practical wisdom than the imperial court craftiness and scientific management principles the left prefer for their scheme to rule every last detail of our lives.

I don't think the left's attempts to hang Palin around our necks as some kind talisman of stupid is going to succeed, despite all of Peggy Noonan's good work. And regarding the Time magazine cover above (I agree with your assessment of what they are attempting), Palin will be around long after Time and Newsweek have died from lack of circulation. George W. Bush, the dumbest president ever, ran circles around them for most of eight years despite their shameless derogation of him. And remember that even Reagan was just an "amiable dunce" to these geniuses. Which leads me to a final thought.

What would Noonan's old boss think of Sarah Palin? I'm guessing he would be her biggest supporter, and would be disappointed at Noonan's slide into lust for the cocktail party circuit at the expense of conservatism. I think Peggy Noonan left the reservation long ago, and I never read her anymore--not since she was caught on an open mic disparaging the rank and file of the party--something Ronaldus Magnus would never have done, or accepted.

-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham University) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

History will praise this beautiful woman who became one of the most thoughtful leaders of the American conservative movement. Now, what single word in that statement alerts you that I am not talking about Sarah Palin? In fact, I'm speaking of Peggy Noonan who recently wrote an essay on Alaska governor that might just as well have been entitled, "The Emperor Has No Depth" ("A Farewell to Harms," Wall Street Journal, July 11-12, 2009).

She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful....She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough.

The notion that she is going to spend the next few years in research and reflection is naive and an example of tragically pitiful wishful thinking. "But she is a ponder-free zone," says Noonan. "She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan."

Looking more broadly to the genuine leadership needs of the Republican Party, Noonan states the truth for out time: "This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think." This is not only true on account of the great international dangers that surround us, but also because of the overwhelming surge of charming statism that is flooding the nation and suffocating liberty.

William Buckley died in February of last year, just months before John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate and everyone went ga-ga over her cutely stated conservative affirmations. The liberals went apoplectic with indignation and so we reveled in the wisdom of our nomination. But not only is Palin "no Bill Buckley," she is a caricature of the sort of conservative that Buckley managed to discredit within the GOP and replace with principled people devoted to the timeless truths that provide the indispensable intellectual foundation of the great American political experiment.

That is why, now that they have won the election and are vacuuming up power and control from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, liberals are lavishing attention on Sarah Palin with lots of flattering photographs, and celebrating her as the great hope of the Republican Party. (Time ran a cover story, calling her The Renegade.) But they're just baiting the elephant trap. says Noonan, "She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated."

It is interesting that Sarah Palin is an Evangelical Christian, a group that secular liberals consider stupid and easily manipulated. If conservatives and Evangelicals are going to be helpful to their country, we have to be more than right. We have to be thoughtful. We have to got beyond talking points and zingers, and return once again to a principled and persuasive understanding of the nature and foundations of political, economic, and spiritual liberty.

I saw a commercial for Bing.com today, the new Microsoft search engine. (It also bills itself as a "decision engine," which horrified me. But since I have some decisions to make, I went there immediately.)

"Bing" is a good choice of name. Everyone likes Bing Crosby. It's a name people warm to, no matter who has it. And it can easily become a transitive verb, as the name "Google" did, but as Yahoo did not.

The first thing I did was a video search. I wondered, will it come up with YouTube, and nothing else? Here is my first search result. It is Harvey Mansfield explaining his discovery of the thought of Leo Strauss and of the joys of ancient political philosophy. He explains the difference between the ancients and the moderns. "The modern political philosophers--even those like, say, John Locke who look rather conservative to us today--were all fundamentally revolutionaries."

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Harvey+Mansfield&qs=n&docid=884465795117&mid=CBD66E67094150C7E302CBD66E67094150C7E302&FORM=VIVR5

Yes, this is a YouTube video (I found no embedding), but there are also videos from AmericanAcademy.de, Boston College, and Comedy Central (I kid you not).

The photo is that of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), German émigré, University of Chicago professor, and the political philosopher who rediscovered the careful reading of great books, and radically confronted the problem of modernity.

Harold Kildow writes: Hayek's classic treatment of the titanic struggle between government control and human liberty resonates more truly every sad day of this era of Hope and Change. (How's that working out for you, by the way?) I'm thinking we should call it what it is--an era of Coercion and Tyranny by would-be despots.

Give a listen to this PAC ad for a startling rendering of the facts we now face in this struggle over how we are to be governed. If we don't change course, we will soon have no say in anything that comes down from on high, except to ratify it after the fact. Our lords and masters will simply dictate to us, in the manner of Latin American dictators or Iranian mullahs. And hasn't Obama been inordinately deferential to these guys by the way?



-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham Univ.) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

Listen to this conversation between a guy disputing his Verizon bill with a Verizon rep AND then the Verizon supervisor. The Verizon people simply cannot understand the difference between 0.002 cents and $0.002, thus they charged him 100x what they should have. In the end, the supervisor calls it a "difference of opinion"(!).



How can the republic--and our liberties along with it--survive with this sort of thing going on?

Remember Pareto's Principle, or the 80/20 rule. This rule is that a minority of input produces the majority of results. I suspect that 20% of the population is carrying the other 80%. Twenty per cent work hard. 20% are competent. 20% pay almost all of the taxes.

That is not what made America great.

Global warming, if it exists at all, may be a big, inescapable black hole of apocalyptic fate. It seems that even using the Internet is warming the planet at an alarming rate.

In "Greening the Internet," CNN reports that,

Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing...estimates every second someone spends browsing a simple web site generates roughly 20 milligrams of C02. Whether downloading a song, sending an email or streaming a video, almost every single activity that takes place in the virtual environment has an impact on the real one....

A 2007 report from research firm Gartner, for example, estimates the manufacturing, use and disposal of information and communications technology generates about two percent of the world's greenhouse gases -- similar to the level produced by the entire aviation industry. Anti-virus software firm McAfee reports that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam emails sent annually equals the amount required to power over two million homes in the United States while producing the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as more than three million cars.

"Most people don't appreciate that the computer on your desk is contributing to global warming and that if its electricity comes from a coal power plant it produces as much C02 as a sports utility vehicle," said Bill St. Arnaud of Canarie, a Canada-based internet development organization. "Some studies estimate the internet will be producing 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gases in a decade. That is clearly the wrong direction. That is clearly unsustainable," added St. Arnaud.

People who read this and who are ecologically concerned and climatologically devoted must come to feel like young, Roman Catholic Martin Luther in the confessional. He was tormented by his inability not to sin. "I sin (produce carbon emissions) every moment of every day; I sin (produce carbon emissions) in thought, word, and deed; I cannot stop sinning (producing carbon emissions)."

At what point will these preachers of ecological doom utterly despair? Of course, when Luther despaired of his own efforts to overcome and correct his sin, he could turn to a savior: the crucified, risen, and reigning Christ who is offered in the gospel. But crusaders against global warming who find they are themselves warming the globe whichever way they turn, inescapably and ever increasingly, have no choice but suicide and to recommend the same to others.

If we see Al Gore leading streams of people to Jonestown, Guyana, it's time for intervention.

Harold Kildow writes: In these days of Hope and Change, which are increasingly short on hope but scarily long on change, and that not for the better; in these days of change, those of us obtuse enough to prefer the virtues and distinctions of a better, vanished country are feeling nostalgic for a robust America, sure of itself, and not in need of an Apologist in Chief to go round to our enemies talking softly, throwing away the stick we once wielded, and attempting to emplace a therapeutic state to anesthetize the nation's pain. There are many ways to tabulate our decline as a nation, many of which have found their way onto this blog, it being the habit, I suppose, of conservatives not only to desire to conserve what has been hard won, but perhaps to be overly suspicious of the new. David and I attempt to point out here what is worth keeping of the old (much), and what is worth accepting of the new (not much).


It is an interesting paradox then, or perhaps a mere irony, that a nation unhealthily in love with the New, the Next, and the Novel, has at the same time become increasingly averse to risk, seeking primarily through the magic of legislation to remove the possibility of all sorts of harms, from manufactured items to services offered, from environmental catastrophes to man-caused disasters, in the words of one of our foremost Ministers of Risk Aversion.


This month of July marks an anniversary of one of the most spectacular--perhaps the most spectacular example of risk taking by an America unafraid of risk, and this year marks a generation-defining 40th anniversary of that event. I speak of the lunar landing of July 16, 1969, prior to the birth of most of you reading this. America was a different country then than the one you know, even though most of the social and cultural pathologies we struggle with today had their genesis in the '60's. What we still had then that was superior, that has not been passed down like most of the rest of the patrimony of self indulgence bequeathed by the baby boom generation (my generation) was the confidence--and the absolute courage in the face of enormous, incalculable risk--to proclaim to the world that we would put a man on the moon before the decade was out.


In a joint session of Congress in 1961, President Kennedy announced it in these words: ‘First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.’ He went on to say, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, that "we choose not to go to the moon and the other things we are doing because they are easy, but because they are hard."


That was electrifying then, and electrifying now. We demonstrated to the world--most especially the bellicose Soviets--that our achievement potential far exceeded anything they or anyone else in the world could hope to attain. The American way--ordered liberty under law, free markets and capitalism, and the largest possible scope for individual achievement, made us the indisputable hegemon of the globe, one which could be trusted for enlightened leadership not only politically but technologically. It is one of the accomplishments that will forever define America at the height of it powers, able to lead humanity and advance human history, and only the most purblind critics dismiss the value of the space program to America's sense of itself.

I remember that July night 40 years ago when the Apollo 11 mission touched down on the moon, a gripping historical event for a teenage boy just awakening to the wider world. My authoritarian father, never one to waffle on bedtimes, or much of anything else for that matter, let me stay up to watch the epochal event on television. We could hardly believe it, floundering for words adequate to what unfolded so agonizingly slowly through the night. I understood my father in a different way after that night, having shared a first ever event in the history of mankind, watching as he showed outwardly the same pride, astonishment, and philosophical reserve I was feeling myself. The whole nation knew it was touch and go, that any number of catastrophic failures could render the transmission mute, the staticy black and white picture dark.



I was thus taken by the nostalgic and elegiac "Monochrome" (listen here, track 24), a song by a ninety's era band, The Sundays, which describes another man's youthful experience of America's greatness and history's advance in July of 1969. David Gavurin, the writer, even titled the album "Static and Silence", pointing to Monochrome as the important track on a cd mostly comprised of the usual Brit pop inanities (albeit nicely styled inanities).

It's four in the morning, July of '69
me and my sister
crept down like shadows
they're trying to bring the moon down to our sitting room
static and silence, and a monochrome vision

They're dancing around
slow puppets, silver ground
and the world is watching with joy
we hear a voice from above and it's history
and we stayed awake, all night

And something is said and the whole room laughs aloud
me and my sister, looking like shadows
the end of an age as we watched them walk in a glow
lost in space, and I don't know where it is

They're dancing around
slow puppets, silver ground
and the stars and stripes in the sand
we hear a voice and it's history
and we stayed up all night

They're dancing around
it sends a shiver down my spine
and I run to look in the sky and
I half expect to hear them asking to come down

Oh, will they fly or will they fall?
to be excited by a long late night.

Give a listen to this song, and get a feel for what America was capable of when she was confident, on the move, leading the world and history--and able to inspire people the world over.
Will America ever surpass this achievement? Not with leaders stuck in a "post" mentality--postmodern, post-Christian, post-America-as-world-leader. Parodoxically, or perhaps merely ironically, it will require a renunciation of progressivism and a resurgence of conservatism to make America a risk taker again, by reverting to the past virtues that made the true audacity of a moon landing possible.

-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham Univ.) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

***********
Innes adds:

This clip includes Kennedy's moon challenge before the joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, but also the image of the moon landing that Harold saw on TV. Read the text of it here.



"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there."

-- John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961

Here is Kennedy's 1962 "We Choose To Go To The Moon" Speech:



"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there.' Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."

-- John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962

My wife, Jessica, recently posted this question to her Facebook friends in her "status update" regarding the effect of electronic social networking on relationships.

Do these constant updates meaningfully communicate to the people we love, or are they narcissistic compulsions brought on by an increasingly detached and disconnected society in which real life is being submerged under a weighty flow of chat, IM, email, twitter, and other forms of virtual reality?

Her colleague at the school, Jesse Clements, gave what I thought was a wise response.

As long as one primarily recognizes the playful superficiality of this type of discourse and does not mistake it for "meaningful" communication (as so many teens do), then it is harmless and even useful. But as I begin to notice kids who think simulating the symptoms of Tourette's at each other is adequate conversation, I have to wonder whether Facebook has completely erased any sense of entire personality that, say, a letter requires one to put forth. Given my virtual nostalgia for the epistolary age, I am enticed by this new kind of exchange but find it an inadequate, fragmented reincarnation. Letters were also vehicles for the creation of persona but at least one needed to be responsible for that creation and follow up on it. The new format provides too many opportunities for teens especially to hide behind broken or borrowed signposts as they do their clothes. When they see their friends at school, no one demands--it isn't even expected--that there be a correlation of selves.

Jessica Innes (B.A., Grove City College) teaches humanities at Grace Christian Academy, a classical Christian school in Merrick, NY, on Long Island. Jesse Clements (B.A., New York University) teaches humanities and Latin. Both have graciously given me permission to post the exchange.

It is sad that it takes a woman these days to tell a man how he ought to behave. Dorothy Rabinowitz tells us "What Sanford Should Have Said" (Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009).

"I come before you in what is clearly a predicament, but without, I hope any pretense. There's no pretense in having an affair -- affairs are real, very compellingly so. There are lies, yes -- to one's wife and family and staff -- but that's a different story. And while I'm on the subject, let me say the only apology I plan to offer in public is to the members of my staff I left in confusion about my whereabouts with nonsense about hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

"I have no intention of babbling about mistakes, or about problems of exhaustion and stress that could have led to my affair -- and no intention of standing here, like so many dolts before me, looking vacant and miserable, as though I'd just come through some kind of punishment camp that left me brainwashed.

"I had an affair, not an overnight encounter -- and an affair, as you ladies and gentlemen of the media know -- is about falling for someone in a way that makes you forget about everything and everyone else. It's true for men, it's true for women.

"I knew what I was doing, and, yes, I loved it, and all its pains, too. That is an affair. It works till its over, and the price can be high. I don't expect to allow that price to include talking about this to the media, or answering their idiotic questions about how my wife feels, or whether I've talked to my children, or whether I can still imagine myself a contender for the presidency.

"Furthermore, I've seen too many breast-beaters in my situation deliver public apologies to their wives and children before crowds of reporters. I have no intention of taking part in any such bizarre -- not to mention shameless -- spectacle. A man who apologizes to his wife and children, who holds forth tearfully about having betrayed them, for media consumption, is, anyway, too lacking in dignity to hold public office of any kind.

"So let's understand this. I plan to straighten my tie, button my jacket, maybe buy a new suit, and go forward to do what I have to do. Life's complicated, ladies and gentlemen, but there's work to be done. I'll have nothing further on this, count on it.

"All the best."

Rabinowitz knows what a manly response to the situation would be because, as a woman, she knows what a woman admires in manliness.

Now that Hillary Clinton has fired off her last round, are there any men left to take command in America? Let's not look to Sarah Palin to save us.

Another Dominion Day has come and gone. It is what foolish people tell us we should now call "Canada Day." The folks at The New York Times who wish that Canada would absorb America, and not the reverse, featured statements on their op-ed page from eleven Canadians on what they miss about their country ("Our True North"). Most of it is grumping about America by politically leftist Canadian expats.

Rick Moranis simply despises everything associated with whatever remains of British North America.

David Rakoff, an author, misses all the free stuff from the government. Perhaps I misread him. Perhaps it’s the moral superiority of having a government that treats its citizens like men who still live at home, and whose mothers still cook and clean for them. The generous welfare state. Other than that, he misses a particular mint that you can’t get here. A great nation indeed.

Sarah McNally, a bookstore owner, misses Canadian literature (which of course she can read in the United States). She says there is a national conversation in CanLit that you don’t see in American lit. But that's because Americans know who they are. Canadians are constantly in anguish about their identity. But if you reject your founding principle, i.e. British North America as a unique and noble project, an interminable identity crisis is sure to follow. It is interesting that, despite the superior worth of this literature and its importance to Canadians as a people (supposedly), she says that it “probably wouldn’t exist without government support.” What does that indicate about the sustainability, or even the reality, of Canada as one people? All the same, the government tells Canadians who they are supposed to be and what they’re supposed to like. I don’t miss that.

In a likely unintended political faux pas, Lisa Naftolin, a creative director, expresses her fondness for a Britishism, the “u” in color. She likely understands holding onto that "u" as an act of defying American cultural imperialism. What she doesn't see is that for the last fifty years and into the foreseeable future, Canada has three, and only three, models from which to choose for its identity: America North, British North America, or post-modern Euro-North America. Led by its left-wing intellectuals, Canada has chosen the Euro-model, and so is following (though not mirroring) Europe in its economic, moral, spiritual, and demographic problems.

Musician Melissa Auf der Maur, after mentioning cheese and pâté, recalls fondly the Canadian cultural mosaic in contrast to the evil American melting pot. The concept of the cultural mosaic as a national virtue was invented by the Trudeau government as a way of defusing the French-English conflict. In the 1970s, my high school taught us this like a catechism. They told us that we are not two nations, but a blend of many nations. As result, however, we became no nation. Americans are more of a melting pot because they have noble and ennobling principles worthy of embracing: political, economic, and religious liberty. It has nothing to do with ethnic food, traditional clothing, and folk music all of which people are free to cultivate and, much to everyone's enjoyment, they do.

Sean Cullen, a comedian, misses hockey highlights, “the height of civilization.” It is said that Canadian culture can be summarized in two words: hockey and beer. Perhaps an overstatement.

Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker (I should have known that a man named Malcolm could not have been born in the U.S.A.) misses the “true” account of the American regime and it’s founding history. According to this view, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and John Adams were just “ungrateful tax cheats.” The revolution had nothing to do with the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence. Isn't it strange that such a hoax could produce such an energetic and world-transforming nation?

Kim Cattrall’s career as an actress is finished. All she did was remember childhood games on beached logs, and failed to make any political point about global warming, acid rain, American economic imperialism, or anything like that.

Tim Long, a writer for “The Simpsons,” misses Canadian snow, but he has to throw in a jab at American health care (which people travel from around the world to use, by the way). In the end, he has one of the best reflections.

When I was a child, it wasn’t unusual for my 15-minute walk home from school to begin under clear skies and end in a blizzard. I remember once, when I was 8 years old, stumbling into my house, my hair covered in powder and my eyelashes frozen together, and screaming, “Why do we live here?!” My mother took my face in her warm hands and said, “Because it’s where people love you.”

Bruce McCall, a writer and illustrator, and A.C. Newman, a musician, miss certain foods. For Newman, it is Dai Ching bean curd or bean sprout chow mein, unobtainable in their familiar perfection outside Vancouver. McCall misses the Coffee Crisp chocolate bar, and he supplies a delightful appreciation and history of the confection. These are honest men. Aside from friends and family and particular terrains, food is what people really miss from their homelands. The rest is mostly political trumpeting, which in this article is all from the left.

I see my family from time to time. My friends have grown up, become family men, and set off on divergent paths. The familiar places have all changed. Toronto's downtown is more crowded, and the University Theatre where I worked as a blue-jacketed boy is gone. Georgetown isn't 1971 anymore. There's no going back.

But I miss Toronto fish and chips. Tender, flaky Halibut encased in thick, crisp, golden batter. Greasy, floppy fries. Also fresh, baked Whitefish from Lake Huron. Yum. Heaven, though its glory and chief delight is Christ himself, is nonetheless described as a banquet. I pray that the feast involves these Canadian delicacies.

But as for this world, with eyes turned now toward the fourth of July, I am grateful to be in the land of liberty and I would not have it any other way.