The Unkindest Cut

“I am not orator . . . / But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, / That love my friend; and that they know full well / That gave me public leave to speak of him: / For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, / Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech. . . .”¹

Marc Antony’s assessment of his oratorical powers while eulogizing Julius Caesar could easily apply to Rocco Landesman’s (the Obama Administration chief of the National Endowment of the Art) October 21, 2009, speech to the Grantmakers in the Arts. It was . . . neither witty nor worthy. What caught my attention, and the attention of others, however, was one idiotic, illogical, and ignorant paragraph.

There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.²

Where does one begin with such mind-boggling nonsense? There were exactly eighteen presidents since Teddy Roosevelt, include Obama. Does Landesman really believe that not a one of these men had actually written their own books? He should of at least been able to recall that Jimmy Carter, a man of the left who supported Obama, had at least written one of his twenty-three books (including works of poetry). But when one has fallen under the spell of the “Artist in Chief,” little things like historic accuracy are simply inconveniences. Just to set the record straight here are a few historical facts of presidential authors since TR:

• Calvin Coolidge—granted didn’t write a book, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless—translated Dante’s Divine Comedy purely for personal pleasure.
• Herbert Hoover wrote twenty-five books, including two renowned works: one on mining and another on fishing.
• John F. Kennedy wrote two books and won a Pulitzer for one of them (though debate still rages as to whether Profiles in Courage was ghosted by Ted Sorensen).
• Richard Nixon wrote eight books.
• Jimmy Carter, as already mentioned, wrote twenty-three.
• Ronald Reagan wrote enough radio spots in his own hand to fill a book. Wait, there is a book of these manuscripts called Reagan: In His Own Hand.

Oh, by the way, Lincoln never wrote a book.

He clearly shows himself to be no logician. Just because Obama is the president of the “most powerful country in the world,” as was Caesar during his day, how does that make Obama the most “powerful writer since” JC? Do I hear a collective, “Say what?” Time will tell, I suppose, but I’m betting that Obama’s two books just might fall short of Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography, which is considered a national treasure. And that’s if we only compare Obama the writer to his fellow presidential club members.

But here is the fun part. Thinking about Obama being the “most powerful writer since Julius Caesar,” I was perusing the shelves in my library and wondering how these writers would stack up to Obama’s literary genius. Here’s my assessment—and I think Landesman would agree:

• J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—Pour that man another drink.
• Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man in the Sea—A dead fish.
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird—It’ll never sing.
• Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind—Hot air.
• Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—Throw it back.
• Hariet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—It’ll never make it out the door.
• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—All wet.
• Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—It missed the boat.

How about some non-American writers? How “powerful” is Obama compared to them? Miguel de Cervantes is tipping at windmills. Victor Hugo might as well stay in the Paris sewers. Aldous Huxley lives in a cowardly world. Fyodor Dostoevsky should never leave the monastery. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should stay locked up in the gulag. And Winston Churchill? A pansy.

The unkindest cut of all is that none of these accomplished writers, to say nothing of Thucydides, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, any of the biblical writers, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Dumas, George Orwell, or a thousand other writers I could think of, come close to the “powerful” literary pen of Baraka Obama.

In all this idiocy and stupidity we can at least be grateful that Rocco Landesman isn’t heading the Department of Education.

1. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.219-24, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works (New York: Barnes and Nobel, 1994), 599.
2. Rocco Landesman, “We Know Art Works,” October 21, 2009, Brooklyn, New York, http://www.arts.gov/artworks/?p=13#more-13 (accessed October 30, 2009).

The Nobel Prize for Irony

Discovering intriguing ironies are one of the joys of studying history. The serendipities of times and events are a historian’s delight, even if the subject is not delightful. For example, it was ironic that Abraham Lincoln, who was seen as the savior of the Union and the savior of the black race from slavery, was assassinated on Good Friday, shot by an actor in a theater. It was ironic that the body of John F. Kennedy was being carried from the White House, placed on a cortege, marched to the Capitol to lay in state, while the body of his assassin was being carried out of the Dallas Police Department’s garage, after being fatally shot himself, placed in an ambulance, and rushed to the same hospital in which JFK received treatment for the gunshot wound that took his life.

Just recently, history has given us another irony. While not nearly as consequential as the assassinations of sitting United States Presidents—in fact, it’s almost downright silly—it does offers insights into human folly. I’m speaking of the Nobel Peace Prize that was award to Barack Obama on October 9, 2009.

Much tongue wagging has occurred over the surprise award and many have written about it. Some have commented on the premature nature of the award. What, after all, has Obama actually done—after only nine months in office—to bring about peace and receive the award? Almost everyone agrees, both on the political right and left that the answer is: clearly nothing. It used to be you actually had to accomplish something worthwhile to win an award as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, not any more. Others wrote about how awarding the prize to one who hasn’t literally done anything of note diminishes the prize. Fair enough, but the prize lost much of it luster in 1994 when the Nobel committee awarded the prize to Yasser Arafat. And still others worried that the prize could be seen as influence peddling, particularly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on climate change—meddling by liberal, elitist Europeans to persuade a liberal, elitist European-style American President to adopt a liberal, elitist European mindset in American foreign policy. I’m not so sure the Nobel Peace Prize is all that persuasive in this regard; it seems like its just preaching to the choir. While others cry foul and call it simply anti-Bush: “Obama won the prize because he isn’t George W. Bush.” That he isn’t. And then there are the wonkish types who either say the prize could turn into a political plus for Obama and America (especially if it gives him/us credibility in leveraging Russia and China on Iran’s nuclear ambitions), or be a political albatross (if it is seen like Obama is giving in to or agreeing with Europe’s naiveté about how the real world works, or it appears that he is continuing the “Apology Tour”).

I don’t want to trivialize the potential implications of the award, but I find the announcement of Obama as the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates ironic. The Saturday evening before the announcement Saturday Night Live performed a skit in which Obama was grading his accomplishments thus far. On global warming, gays in the military, immigration reform, limits on executive power, and torture prosecutions the total score was “Not Done.” Less than a week later, the Nobel committee awarded Obama the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strength international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The juxtaposition of the SNL skit and the language of the Nobel committee’s statement is rich—“Not Done” and “extraordinary efforts”; the two are oxymorons. Extraordinary efforts usually produce results, accomplishments, “dones,” not “Not Done[s].” The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland took pains to justify the award by saying that Obama has “created a new international climate, [one in which he has] given hope for a better future [based on] values and attitudes shared by the majority of the world’s population.” In other words, Obama was awarded the prize for not being George W. Bush and for preaching hope of accomplishing some utopian vision that somehow encapsulates the majority of the world’s values and attitudes. Now that is an audacious hope if there every was one!

Obviously, to the committee, Obama is enlightened, and with his enlightenment the world will become more civil, and with our renewed civility we’ll become more tolerant of each others’ values and attitudes, and with our worldwide majority expressions of tolerance we can now engage in one giant group hug.

But the world is a big place, with many divergent peoples, religions, values, and attitudes. Yet, somehow (without actually doing anything in office), Obama has captured the hope and dreams of the majority of the world’s population. Ironic, isn’t it that the very day of the announcement he had a scheduled meeting with the cabinet to discuss whether more troops were needed in the war in Afghanistan? I wonder what the world’s values and attitudes are regarding American military power on display in a foreign country? To say nothing of the fact that the prize was for peace.

Oh, well. What are you going do? Let’s all gather round for a group hug, what’d ya say?

On Greek Tragedy

Sixteen months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his brother, Robert traveled to the Caribbean island of Antigua. Grief-worn, Robert was becoming a shell of a man. The former first lady, Jackie, and others, accompanied him on the trip. Jackie took a book, which she gave to Robert that became a catalyst of courage, propelling him out of his depression. The book was Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way.

Hamilton’s book is a lively written summary of Greek thought, as captured in their history and literature, particularly in the plays of tragedy. Robert Kennedy’s biographer, Evan Thomas wrote of Kennedy’s attachment to to Hamilton’s book and especially the tragedies.

The saving grace for Kennedy was the exaltation Greeks found in suffering. “In agony learn wisdom!” cries the herald in Aeschylus’ Prometheus. The Greeks understood that “injustice was the nature of things,” but that the awfulness of fate could be borne and redeemed through pain. By reading the great tragedies, Kennedy could find meaning (and relief) because “tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry,” Hamilton writes. “Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly.” Few souls ever felt more than Robert Kennedy’s. He committed to memory, and often quoted, the last passage from Hamilton’s chapter on Aeschylus. The author has been describing Agamemnon’s accursed fate, and the fate of the House of Atreus, to “visit upon the children the sins of the father.” But “pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps on the ladder of knowledge,” writes Hamilton, quoting Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”¹

What Kennedy found in reading Hamilton’s descriptions of the Greeks and in reading their plays many others have also found. There is a powerful and personal pull in tragedies, which is particular to the Greeks, who conceived it and perfected it. Greek tragedy endures because the Greek mind had the capacity to see the world without compromise. They faced evil and suffering unflinchingly. And even in the midst of terrible evils they could see beauty and truth in the world. In other words, the Greeks were realists when it came to the sorrows and joys of human life.

After the age of Homer, the epic poet who penned The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Greeks began to think deeply about human life, and started to perceive that it was bound up with evil and suffering, and that injustice was the nature of things. The Greeks wrote songs and stories of beauty before the age of the tragic play, but now they wanted to know why there was evil and suffering in the world along with beauty and truth; they wanted to explain the apparent contradiction. Their attempts at wrestling with this contradiction in a dramatic manner became know as “tragedy.”

As an art form, tragedy has a very narrow history and an exclusive club of authors. The greatest tragic plays were only produced during two periods of literary history. The first period was in the Athens of Pericles, often called the “Golden Age,” from 450–429 bc. The second period was in Elizabethan England, from ad 1558–1603. These two periods had at least five things in common. First, both nation states were at the height of political power. In Greece, the Athenians had defeated the invasion of the Persians at Marathon (489 bc) and Salamis (480 bc), and England ruled the seas with the sinking of the Spanish armada in ad 1588. Second, heroes abounded and heroism stirred the hearts of ordinary men. Third, civilians in both nation states were secure, peaceful, and prosperous. Fourth, freedom to think and create flourished. And fifth, both the age of Pericles and the Elizabethan era were passionate times. With such a constricted period of time in which great tragedy was written, there are really only four great tragic authors—three Greeks and one Englishman. The first, and perhaps the greatest, tragic author was Aeschylus. The other two Greeks were Sophocles and Euripides. And the British playwright, obviously, was Shakespeare.

Tragedy is the transcending art of living with passion and purpose, to find truth and beauty, in the face of evil, pain, and death. According to the Greeks, the opposite of tragedy was not joy, it was timidity and apathy. Hamilton wrote, “When humanity is seen as devoid of dignity and significance, trivial, mean, and sunk in dreary hopelessness, then the spirit of tragedy departs.”² Only the poet can write tragedy, for only the poet can create a meal out of the strange mixture of pain and pleasure, ugliness and beauty, falsehood and truth. Tragedy “is nothing less than pain and pleasure transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry” Hamilton asserted.³ A sense of mystery shrouds the tragedy. It’s not merely pain, sorrow, or disaster—these leave the audience depressed. The mystery in tragedy is its ability to transcend pain into pleasure, what we might call “Tragic Pleasure,” which Aristotle described as, “Pity and awe, and a sense of emotion purged and purified thereby.”⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche described this “tragic pleasure” as, “The reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed.”⁵

But not any play that stirs the emotions can be consider tragedy. Every tragedy must meet at least five essential elements. First, tragedies must deal with suffering. “It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows [Matthew 10:29-31]. Endow them with a greater or as great a potentiality of pain and our foremost place in the world would no longer be undisputed. Deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being, we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer so terribly. . . . Tragedy’s preoccupation is with suffering.”⁶

Second, tragedies must create characters with greatness of soul. Tragedy’s one requirement is a soul that can feel greatly. As Hamilton wrote, “The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly—that and only that, is tragedy.”⁷ The small soul can never know tragedy—sorrow or heartbreak, yes, but not the passion of tragedy.

Third, tragedies must call forth transcendence. Tragedy is something that reaches above and beyond the pit of pain. Suffering in of itself is not tragedy, not even undeserved suffering of the innocent. Nor is death necessarily tragic. Tragedy is the ability to call forth redemptive sympathy. This ability to call forth transcendence is found in the spiritual struggle, not the physical struggle.

Fourth, tragedies must concern themselves with the dignity and significance of humanity. Hamilton said, “The dignity and significance of human life—of these, and of these alone, tragedy will never let go. Without them there is no tragedy. To answer the question, what makes a tragedy, is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance of life, what the dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis.”⁸ The tragic writer must concern himself with the significance of life. The comic writer, in contrast, is primarily concerned with the surface of life. What do outside trappings have to do with tragedy? Nothing.

Finally, tragedies must delineate a purpose in suffering. For the Greeks, the purpose of suffering was to teach men the truth. Just as Robert Kennedy memorized: “‘God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’”⁹ The Greeks saw their suffering as a means of hope for others who suffer, to point them to the truth. Quoting from Euripdides, Hamilton recorded, “Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows.”¹⁰

One can see why Robert Kennedy found solace, paradoxically, in the tragedies of the Greeks. He came to some answer to Hamilton’s question: “Why is the death of the ordinary man a wretched, chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of the hero, always tragic, warms us with a sense of quickened life? Answer this question and the enigma of tragic pleasure is solved.”¹¹ I don’t know whether Kennedy came to fully understand or accept the greatest tragic story of all, but the good news for the Christian reader of tragedy is the fact that the tragic suffering and death of Jesus answers Hamilton’s question and fulfills the essential elements of a tragedy, finding its ultimate purpose in the resurrection.

1. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 287.
2. Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), 232.
3. Aristotle, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 229.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 230.
5. Hamilton, The Greek Way, 230.
6. Hamilton, The Greek Way, 233–34.
7. Hamilton, The Greek Way, 235.
8. Hamilton, The Greek Way, 233.
9. Aeschylus, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 257.
10. Euripides, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 237.
11. Hamilton, The Greek Way, 237.

A Spiritual Black Hole: What Is Evil?

In 1964, Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart was struggling to define obscenity in his concurrent opinion that “obscenity”—with the expect of “hard-core pornography”—was protected by the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment. He wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that short-hand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”¹

Trying to define evil, particularly in our day and age, is a kin to Justice Stewart trying to define obscenity—its more difficult than it seems. But unlike Justice Stewart, many of our leaders and neighbors don’t even know evil when they see it, much less call it what it is or condemn it when they do. The reason for this commitment to non-condemnation is chilling: We live in a culture where judging evil is a greater evil than actually doing evil. The watchword for our time? “Thou shalt not judge.”

Somewhere in the course of human history a drastic shift has taken place, where the line between good and evil has become blurred, and in some cases erased all together, making it difficult for us to both recognize and to judge evil. Of course, recognizing and judging evil requires us first to define evil. So why is that so difficult to do today?

The short answer to this question is quite simple: In our relativistic, individualistic, and multicultural society we no longer have an agreed upon opinion of good and evil. Ethicists and Princeton professor, Peter Singer offers a stark illustration of our current cultural confusion about evil. On his website Singer answers some questions regarding his utilitarian approach to ethics.

Q. If you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire, with no time to save them both, wouldn’t you save the human being?

A. Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a matter of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t morally significant [which he calls speciesism]. . . . The qualities that are ethically significant are, firstly, a capacity to experience something—that is, a capacity to feel pain, or to have any kind of feelings. That’s really basic, and it’s something that a mouse shares with us. But when it comes to a question of taking life, or allowing life to end, it matters whether a being is the kind who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future. Such a being has more to lose than a being incapable of understand[ing] this. Any normal human being past infancy will have such a sense of existing over time. I’m not sure that mice do, and if they do, their time frame is probably much more limited. So normally, the death of a human being is a greater loss to the human being than the death of a mouse is to the mouse. . . . That’s why, in general, it would be right to save the human, and not the mouse, from the burning building, if one could not save both. But this depends on the qualities and characteristics that the human being has, if, for example, the human being had suffered brain damage so severe as to be in an irreversible state of unconsciousness, then it might not be better to save the human.²

It was answers like the one Singer gave that prompted H. L. Mencken, skeptic extraordinaire, to write: “Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”³ Singer would have been better off if he as stopped after the first word of his answer—“Yes,” it’s better to save a human being from a burning building than to save a mouse.

Answering another question on his website, Singer wrote, “I use the term ‘person’ to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. . . . I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” He’s quick to affirm, however, “That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do [—to kill a newborn]. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.”⁴ Is it any wonder then he entered the healthcare debate and wrote in The New York Times Magazine “that saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds”?⁵ To Singer, human life has no intrinsic value because he doesn’t believe that humans posses the imgo Dei—the image of God; their humanity is only based on their usefulness. In Singer’s philosophy human beings are mere machines—composites of chemicals, tissues, and bone—whose only purpose is to produce. If the machine proves useless, either through defective or worn out parts, then to discard the machine is in no way evil; it is a positive good for the society.

But such gerrymandering with the idea of evil hasn’t always been true. Traditionally, classically, and biblically evil was seen as active in the world and intended to cause suffering, and should be fought on every front. Suffering was considered passive, the consequence of evil, which might result in some good or beneficial end. Joseph declared to his brothers that what he suffered from their hands may have been intended for evil, but God intended it for good, resulting in the salvation of many (Genesis 50:20).

Unfortunately, the culture in which we live, by and large, has abandoned the traditional view of evil and suffering. Our contemporary, postmodern, and sophisticated view denies that evil has any objective reality as a source of suffering. But in a kind of schizophrenic twist of irony, suffering itself is now considered evil. This idea makes us victims of some non-reality, of fate. And if by some law we could stretch such an illogical conclusion into logic, where does that leave us? The only answer is hopelessness, because suffering is beyond having a redeemable purpose because it is evil. Shakespeare may have affirmed that “There is some soul of goodness in things evil,”⁶ but evil itself is unredeemable, as is sin. “Sin is an evil force in the world today; and a holy God must hate [it]. God can transform suffering into glory, but He cannot transform sin. He must judge it, and that is what He did on the cross.”⁷

No wonder we cannot agree on what evil is, even if we were to see it with our own eyes. But unlike Singer and others who struggle with nailing down evil, defining it is not at all difficult. Henry David Thoreau understood something of evil when he wrote, “There is no odour so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.”⁸ That is about the best definition of evil I’ve read. Simply put, evil is the absence of goodness. Evil is blindness, goodness is sight; evil is darkness, goodness is light; evil is hunger; goodness is plenty; evil is death, goodness is life. Evil is a parasite needing a host upon which to feed—and the host is goodness. God doesn’t need evil, but evil needs God; God can do without Satan, but Satan can’t do without God.

Others have defined evil as “steresis agathou or privatio boni, a privation of the good, a purely parasitic corruption of created reality, possessing no essence or nature of its own.”⁹ “Evil is the force of anti-creation, anti-life,” N. T. Wright wrote, “the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world of space, time and matter, and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures. . . . Evil is then the moral and spiritual equivalent of a black hole.”¹⁰

On January 30, 1933, Adolph Hitler became the German Chancellor. Shortly after his rise to power, pastor Martin Niemöller sent a telegram congratulating Hitler. Within a year, however, Niemöller became an outspoken opponent of Hitler’s Nazi party, until he was finally arrested in 1937 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and then, eventually, to Dachau, where he survived the war.

In what has become Niemöller’s most famous saying, he justified his early cowardice in remaining silent to the rounding up of Germany’s undesirables by Hitler’s jack-booted thugs: “In Germany they came first for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionists. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”¹¹

Until the day comes when Christ will set all things right and establish His goodness on earth, evil will continue to permeate our society. So, what will we do until that glorious day comes? Will we speak out against the evil we see in our day? Or are we so callous to the atrocities that bombard us through our television screens or the allurements that tempt us through our computer screens that we shrug our shoulders and blithely go about our business?

It has been said that “He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is in action—not in thought.”¹² Mere knowledge is never enough to face down evil and champion goodness; what is required is action—the courage and passion to unmuzzle your mouth and expose evil for what it is, the foul stench of goodness gone rancid.

1. Associate Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U. S. 184, 197 (1964).
2. Peter Singer, “FAQ,” www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html (accessed August 20, 2009).
3. H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, #57 (New York: Knopf, 1956), 48.
4. Singer, “FAQ.”
5. Singer, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” The New York Times Magazine, July 19, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?_r=1&sq=peter%20singer&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted (accessed August 16, 2009).
6. William Shakespeare, King Henry the Fifth, 4.1.4, in Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994), 503.
7. Warren W. Wiersbe, Why Us? When Bad Things Happen to God’s People (Old Tappen, NJ: Revell, 1984), 94.
8. Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 65.
9. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 73.
10. N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 89, 113.
11. Martin Niemöller, quoted in Os Guinness, “This Too Shall Pass,” Unriddling Out Times: Reflections on the Gathering Cultural Crisis, ed. Os Guinness (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 114.
12. F. W. Robertson, quoted in Wiersbe, Why Us?, 15.

On the Day That They Died

On the day that they died

The morning was beautiful and everyone sighed;

Not knowing that ugliness would come before noontide

Turning morning into mourning . . . on the day that they died.

On the day that they died

Husband’s kissed their wives and they all good-byed;

Not knowing of the tears that they had cried

For lovers lost . . . on the day that they died.

On the day that they died

Fathers and mothers left a child’s sleeping bedside;

Not knowing that they would be forever denied

A goodnight kiss . . . on the day that they died.

On the day that they died

Life was a dream and a glorious joyride;

Not knowing that life is a violent riptide

Sweeping them away . . . on the day that they died.

On the day that they died

America was united and patriotic—statewide;

No knowing that too soon we would again divide

And hardly remember . . . the day that they died.

To Read or Not To Read, Now That Is the Question

A quiet revolution is taking place in American education these days, specifically in Middle School literature classes. A growing number of school districts are no longer assigning required reading from a list of age appropriate classics. Instead, students are allowed to select their own books and thereby satisfy the requirements of a literary education—at least for 12, 13, and 14 year-olds. The rationale for such a change is as old as the first time a child had to read a book on his own: If children read that which interests them they’ll enjoy reading, and in the process become better readers and learn more. Of course, as the advocates of this argument are quick to point out, these children will pick up the classics later. Of course such logic has worked well with the subjects of mathematics and science. Why teach students calculus or chemistry, they’ll pick those up later?

Apparently the progenitors of such creative logic are undeterred by Mark Twain’s oft quoted definition of a classic: “‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.”¹

I have no stamp of approval as an educator—not even from a mail order institution—yet I’m more apt to believe that Twain is closer to the truth than the champions of literary abolition. To be fair, I rather doubt that the literary and educational experts would say that a book like The Adventures of Captain Underpants is equivalent to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; however their actions speak volumes as to their opinion of the equal merits of Captain Underpants with Huckleberry Finn, if they allow a child to choose Captain Underpants over Huckleberry Finn. In other words, isn’t one just as good as the other as long as the child enjoys it? But just because a book is made up of words on paper, and paper bound between two covers doesn’t mean that every book is made the same. Obviously this is true, and its hard to imagine any literature teacher disagreeing. Nevertheless, if the collected wisdom of these school districts is to expect little Johnny and Susie Middle School student to wisely choose their own educational literature then these educational experts have stumbled down the rabbit hole and are consulting with the Mad Hatter.

As the argument goes, better to have a child read and enjoy a book like Captain Underpants and learn something (though I know not what) than have a child endure the boredom of a Huckleberry Finn and learn nothing. This claim, however, misses the central point of reading. Yes, reading can be pleasurable and educational—and frankly, I prefer that it is—but the true purpose in reading is to discover beauty and truth; it is to discover wisdom. We read not merely for utilitarian and individualistic joy and know-how; we read to become wise, to wrestle with the great questions that confront humanity so that we might learn how to live adeptly. Read what literary critic Harold Bloom had to say about reading’s purpose: “We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. I cannot regard reading as a vice, but then also it is not a virtue. Thinking in Hegel is one thing; in Goethe, it is quite another. Hegel is not a wisdom writer; Goethe is. The deepest motive for reading has to be the quest for wisdom.”² Perhaps there is wisdom in books like Captain Underpants; I know there is wisdom in books like Huckleberry Finn. Yet, if our educators will not point our students to where wisdom can be found—and many parents certainly will not—then we will continue down the road of what Bloom called “the death-in-life of the dumbing down in which America now leads the world.”³ How much further will we persist on traveling such a foolish path?

Let’s suppose, however, for the sake of the argument, that these students who choose Captain Underpants in Middle School will someday pick up Huckleberry Finn. Will they find this classic, and others like it, enjoyable and educational? Or will they put it down before finishing because the going was too tough? Classics assume that their readers possess certain core knowledge about metaphors, similes, and allusions to the Bible, to mythology, to other classic stories, and to history; they trust that the reader understands figures of speech and has a grasp on basic foreign words and phrase. Classics are not for wimps and sissies, nor for intellectual pygmies, who, through no fault of their own, were stunted in their literary development in Middle School by experts who merely want them to enjoy their reading. Think of it like this: in a culture of clipped communication, as a result of texting, Facebooking, and Tweeting, and an educational system that would tolerate the literature of Captain Underpants and the like, our students are feasting on a diet of hot dogs and Coke. This is poor preparation for a diet of lobster and Perrier, which undoubtedly will prove too rich for their more simple palettes—both in the students’ sensibilities and in the expense of mental acumen and time to digest such weighty fair.

We assign classic literature to students because the classics haven’t finished saying what they have to say. Classics endure, obviously because they are well written, but also because they deal with the realities of life, with the struggles men and women have always had—with good and evil, love and hate, sacrifice and selfishness. For a teacher to assign a classic book and to help a student see how timely its timeless themes apply to his or her life is to see lightening strike in the mind and the soul . . . and few things, for both student and teacher, are more enjoyable and educational than seeing that spark of wisdom ignite.

1. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (Stilwell, KS: Digireads, 2008), 109.
2. Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), 101.
3. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 278.

Constitution? What Constitution?

Sitting on one end of my desk is a medallion commemorating the bicentennial of American independence. Across the top is the simple, but profound, word, “Freedom”; and across the bottom are the dates “1776–1976.” In the center is an image of the Liberty Bell. I bought I this when the family and I were on our Great American History Tour and we stopped in Philadelphia to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Sitting on the other side of my desk is a iron casting of Uncle Sam. Made as a doorstop, he sits on my desk because I don’t want the strips of his red and white pants to lose their paint. He wears a blue morning jacket, a white vest, red bow tie, and a top hat with a blue band with stars around it. Sam carries an American flag in his right hand.

Such patriotic symbolism I suppose is hokey, especially for a grown man—but I don’t really care. I love my country and am grateful that God allowed me to be born an American. And these little nick-knacks, as well as the American flag that stands in my office (and other Americana bric-a-brac), serve as a reminder that individual American liberty is not to be taken for granted.

Our freedom has been much on my mind lately, as news reports flood the airwaves about the “Cash for Clunkers” program, in which the federal government guarantees payment of $4,500 to new car deals for citizens who bring in their old cars and buy a more fuel efficient new car, and about the ever increasing heated debates about healthcare reform. Both of these subjects have led to a myriad of questions: Why should taxpayers subsidize someone else’s purchase of a new car? Could the billions of dollars set aside for the “Cash for Clunkers” program have been better spent on other environmental initiatives? Where is the money coming from to pay for the “Cash for Clunkers” program—I though we were already running up an astronomical about of debt and the deficit is already mind-numbing? How can we afford universal, government run healthcare when the best estimates put the cost in the trillion dollar range over ten years? Should we, or should we not, have a public opinion in health reform? What exactly is the single payer system? The United States Government is notorious for budget overruns and inefficiency, what makes anyone think that universal healthcare will stay on budget and run smoothly—just look at Medicare and Medicaid? Will universal healthcare look like Canada’s or Great Britain’s?

And on, and on, and on the questions go; there are as many questions as their are citizens in the United States. But, the one question I’ve yet to hear anyone ask, including our members of Congress, is the most important question of all—is it Constitutional? What is the constitutionality of the “Cash for Clunkers” program or of universal healthcare?

On September 7, 1803, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas, regarding the purchase of Louisiana from France.

Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no other than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives. It specifies & delineates the operations permitted to the federal government, and gives all the powers necessary to carry these into execution. Whatever of these enumerated objects is proper for a law, Congress may make the law; whatever is proper to be executed by way of a treaty, the President & Senate may enter into the treaty; whatever is to be done by a judicial sentence, the judges may pass the sentence.¹

It seems to me that we no longer listen to men such as Jefferson, and are more apt to listen to men like FDR, who reportedly stated after the inaugural ceremony in 1937, “When the Chief Justice read me the oath and came to the words ‘support the Constitution of the United States’ I felt like saying: ‘Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy—not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.’”² And yet, after listening to town hall debates regarding healthcare and watching reports on the “Cash for Clunkers program I wonder whether the Constitution ever enters anyone’s mind—whether the strict reading of Jefferson or the “flexible” reading of Roosevelt. But if we cannot debate on Constitutional grounds—on the written Constitution, and not a made up one depending on who is in power—then what security do we, as free citizens, have? All the questions that have swirled in the hot air of this summer are completely off point; they are practical and utilitarian but have missed the critical center: What does the Constitution say? What has been asked and answered is the proverbial questions of whether we want the deck chairs over here or over there while the ship is sinking. Who cares? We are losing our country and no one is is bothering to ask why the ship is sinking, or how we can prevent the ship from sinking, or how was can patch the ship and pump out the bilges.

All of this (and more) has brought me to the conclusion that virtually all of our members of Congress and certainly our President, and most of he members of the media, as well as much of the American public would respond to an actual Constitutional question with a dumbfounding lilt in their voices and inquire: “Constitution? What Constitution?”

1. Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Cary Nicholas, September 7, 1803, in Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Charlottesville, Va.: F. Carr and Co., 1829), 3.
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in Marvin Olasky, The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 225.