Much ado is being made that John Lennon has been gone for 30 years.
Almost as important as Elvis and Chuck Berry, John Lennon revolutionized popular music. The Beatles transformed the music scene, turned the world of popular music on its ear. The colossal impact of the Beatles still reverberates strongly throughout the musical world. No doubt that John Lennon was a musical genius who inspired all of us who picked up an electric guitar ands enriched the lives of mankind beyond description.
I remember hanging my head in sorrow on the evening of December 8, 1980 when he was gunned down in New York City by terminal psycho whackjob Mark David Chapman.
John Lennon should be remembered for his musical genius, but his memory should not ever eclipse that of true heroes – the 2,400 brave men who paid the ultimate sacrifice on December 7, 1941, a date that President Roosevelt said would “live in infamy.”
I have been reminded for over a week on both radio and television that John Lennon will be gone for 30 years tomorrow, December 8. Alternatively, I have not read or heard a word in the previous week or two that 2,400 sailors lost their lives and 1,200 more were wounded 69 years ago today, December 7th.
The priorities of our media befuddle me.
There are few days in America's history that are critically important. December 7, 1941 is one of those days. It is a day to be remembered, revered and honored. It is as important as July 4, 1776; June 6, 1944; or September 11, 2001. December 7, 1941 matters.
December 7, 1941 is not only pivotal in the annals of American history but also in the history of the world. It was on this date that America entered WWII and began the long, bloody, four year struggle to save the world from Japanese and German brutality, tyranny and oppression.
Had the Greatest Generation failed to crush such abject evil, the world would look much different today. Quite possibly, there would have been no Beatles' music, no Strawberry Fields Forever, no John Lennon to immortalize.
Many of the sailors who perished 69 years ago today still rest beneath shallow waters in Pearl Harbor. Their tomb is the USS Arizona. Small droplets of oil from the fuel tanks of the USS Arizona still float lazily to the surface. These droplets of oil serve as a reminder of the Greatest Generation heroes who rest just beneath the surface of the water.
The USS Arizona memorial is a solemn, quiet place. The boats of talkative tourists become quiet as the boat approaches the memorial. When I was on the memorial years ago, few words were spoken by the tourists. Few cameras clicked though everyone had a camera.
Today, the mighty USS Missouri floats near the USS Arizona memorial. The USS Missouri is the retired battleship where the Japanese signed the surrender terms in Tokyo Harbor in August, 1945. May the USS Missouri stand guard forever over the USS Arizona and its sailors.
There are a few sailors left who were there that terrible Sunday morning 69 years ago when so many of their fellow sailors lost their lives and so many others wounded and permanently maimed. They should be honored at the Kennedy Center by the president.
The world has changed much in the last 69 years, but what will never change in the hearts and minds of Americans who care is that December 7th is a day that will forever live in infamy.
God bless all the warriors of Pearl Harbor. They will matter forever.
- Rock legend Ted Nugent is noted for his conservative political views and his vocal pro-hunting and Second Amendment activism. His smash bestseller Ted, White & Blue: The Nugent Manifesto, is now available at www.amazon.com. Nugent also maintains the Official Ted Nugent Site at www.TedNugent.com.
Portland — On the night of November 26, a 19-year-old Oregon State University engineering student named Mohamed Mohamud (pictured above) drove a van packed with what he believed to be explosives to Pioneer Courthouse Square, a downtown plaza known to locals as “Portland’s Living Room.” There, thousands of residents had gathered to light Portland’s Christmas tree as part of an annual holiday celebration.
Fortunately, the bomb Mohamud carried was a dummy: The supposed jihadist sympathizers from whom he had procured the weapon were in fact undercover FBI agents. When he tried to detonate the bomb, Mohamud was promptly arrested and charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
Many Portlanders like to see their city as a place somewhat apart from the rest of America: a “greener,” more tolerant, more progressive burg, a city untouched by some of the uglier trends in global politics. Indeed, Portland withdrew from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force some five years ago over civil-liberties concerns. Thus, the revelation that Portland was the target of a murderous jihadi has come as a profound shock to many residents.
Yet perhaps equally shocking has been the reaction of Portland’s ruling liberal establishment to this attempted mass murder.
It began the morning after Mohamud’s plot unraveled, when Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, took to his blog to issue a stern warning to the citizens he governs. “I trust in Portlanders’ sense of fairness,” he wrote, before demonstrating the exact opposite. “Bad actions by one member of any group does [sic] not and should not be generalized or applied more widely to other members of that same group,” he lectured. “Otherwise, as part of the biggest racial group in Portland, European-Americans, producing many crimes daily, would be in deep trouble.” A day later, Adams fretted publicly about the danger of “knuckle-headed retribution.”
But it was not only Portland’s mayor who focused more on Oregonians’ supposed bigotry than on the fact that a terrorist had tried to murder thousands. Elisabeth Gern, a social-services coordinator at Catholic Charities, said publicly that she thought Somalis would be “attacked.” The Willamette Week, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Portland-based newspaper, worried about the “disconcerting effect on the Somali community.” Imam Mikal Shabazz, the president of the Oregon Islamic Chaplains Organization and Portland’s most prominent Muslim spokesman, said that “innocent Muslim-Americans are exposed to retaliation.”
Yet there has been only one apparently anti-Muslim crime: A fire was set in the middle of the night in the office of a mosque where Mohamud sometimes prayed as a student. (The FBI is investigating this act of vandalism and offering a cash reward for assistance.) Otherwise, Oregonians have shown marked support for the Muslim and Somali communities here. Hundreds of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists marched in solidarity with Oregon’s Islamic community after the mosque was vandalized. Hundreds more held a vigil on the campus of Oregon State University to show support for Muslim students there in the wake of Mohamud’s arrest. So far, despite the histrionics, this has proved to be the backlash that wasn’t.
Other political and media elites here have taken to attacking the terror sting operation, the very foundation of the case against Mohamud. In the Portland Mercury, a popular weekly newspaper, journalist Denis C. Theriault asked, “Is it really a terrorist plot if no one was ever in danger and the men you’re plotting with — the handlers giving you cash, driving you around, and even building your bomb — are all (whoops!) government agents?” (The article was headlined “No One Was Going to Die.”)[1] On a blog on the paper’s website, the same writer said that “we have to wonder how else [terror stings] might be used — and what other kinds of crimes government agents will be asked to encourage Americans to try to commit before arresting them.”[2] Pat Birmingham, a prominent local defense attorney, said, “There’s a big question whether he had the mental makeup to do it on his own.” This line of argument has been picked up by some in the national media, most notably Glenn Greenwald of Salon.
Of course, the question of whether the FBI’s involvement crossed the line of entrapment will need to be examined during the trial. Yet arguments like the Mercury’s veer too far into the territory of exonerating the perpetrator.
According to the FBI’s affidavit on the case, Mohamud was once cautioned by an undercover agent that “a lot of children” would be attending the Christmas-tree lighting. “Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’m looking for,” he replied. Regardless of whether his bomb went off, Mohamud wanted to kill thousands.
But when faced with this man, the city’s liberal establishment worried mainly about vilifying Oregonians and perhaps exculpating the would-be bomber. Portland’s public officials and media figures do its residents a disservice by acting this way, especially now that it’s clear the city is not immune to the threat of terrorism.
— Ethan Epstein, a writer based in Portland, has written for the Weekly Standard, Slate, the American Spectator, and a variety of other publications.
This article appeared in The Richomd Times-Dispatch on November 29, 2010.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in economics and an influential New York Times columnist, also has a blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal." On ABC's This Week (Nov. 14), during a discussion on balancing the federal budget against alarming deficits, he proclaimed the way to solve this problem is through deeply cost-effective health care rationing.
"Some years down the pike," he said, "we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes." That would mean the U.S. Debt Reduction Commission "should have endorsed the panel that was part of the [Obama] health care reform."
Sarah Palin was one of the first, and the most resounding, to warn us of the coming of government panels to decide which of us — especially, but not exclusively, toward the end of life — would cost too much to survive.
She was mocked, scorned from sea to shining sea, including by the eminent Paul Krugman for being, he said, among those spreading "the death penalty lie" as part of "the lunatic fringe." (Summarized in "Krugman Wants 'Death Panels,'" Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Nov. 15.)
Soon after he had left the ABC studio, someone must have alerted Krugman that — gee whiz — he had publicly rooted for death panels!
Swiftly, on his blog, Krugman admitted he had indeed said those dreaded words, but:
"What I meant is that health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they're willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we're willing to spend for extreme care."
"Extreme care," Professor Krugman? To be defined by government commissions, right?
Noel Sheppard of media watchdog Newsbusters was not fooled by the professor's attempt to extricate himself from embarrassment.
"As the government has deep budgetary problems," Sheppard reminded Krugman, "the cost-benefit analysis will naturally morph toward financial restraint thereby further limiting a patient's options and therefore his or her rights."
Are these Obamacare cost-benefit boards and commissions — for example, the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board penetratingly judging Medicare's cost-effectiveness (without judicial review) — not going to determine whether certain Americans are going to continue living?
'Fess up, Krugman, you owe Sarah Palin an apology for so often scandal-mongering her. Also, professor, aside from the abortion wars, don't most Americans agree that the most fundamental of all our rights is the right to life? Not the government's right to our lives.
When you said "death panels" on that Sunday morning, you knew and meant what you were saying. As an economist dedicated to deficit-reduction you were not lamenting the coming of death panels. Clearly, you were affirming their inevitability under President Obama's determination to prevent government subsidization of "extreme care."
As you said on ABC, this is "reality therapy."
Wesley Smith, who has been the Paul Revere of investigating and documenting the radical root of Obamacare — government's invasion of the doctor-patient relationship — has revealed how far Obama's Medicare czar, Dr. Donald Berwick, intends to go in order to foreclose the great majority of our visits to our doctors' offices.
In his regular fact-based commentary ("Secondhand Smoke," Nov. 16), Smith's headline is: "Berwick Wants to Do Away With 80% of 'Dinosaur' Patient/Doctor Office Calls."
He reports that in Berwick's Escape Fire: Lessons for the Future of Health Care — which he wrote in his former role as head of the Institute for Health Care Improvement — Berwick promised us that "healing relationships ... can be fashioned in many new and wonderful forms if we suspend the old ways of making sense of care."
Huh? Which "old ways?" You may not have realized it, but, he emphasized, "the health care encounter as a face-to-face visit is a dinosaur." In the wondrous new world of immediate health care for everyone in need, Berwick writes, "I think it rarely means ... reliance on face-to-face meetings between patients, doctors, and nurses."
Have your computer ready, folks.
What's next, a death-clock countdown for your desktop?
"Tackled well," President Obama's cost-efficient physician-in-chief foresees, "this new framework will gradually reveal that half or more of such of our encounters — maybe as many as 80 percent of them — are neither wanted by patients nor deeply believed in by professionals ... ."
Am I a dinosaur in my apprehensiveness about troubling symptoms — and odds of survival — because I feel I need to talk face-to-face with another human being whose calling is diagnosis? As Wesley Smith says, speaking for me and, I expect, many of us:
"Doctors use face-to-face meetings for more than exams. Sometimes, a doctor [not a computer] can take one look at a longtime patient [or not longtime] and tell that something is amiss."
Because President Obama did not want Dr. Berwick to be subjected to probing questions at a congressional hearing, this czar of the future is a recess appointment, but he finally was inconsequentially heard. Will Obama, in 2012, turn out to be a recess president, in considerable part because of his messianic, unyielding devotion to Obamacare? Then, if he's in distress, when he's out of office, maybe Berwick will consent to care for him privately.
Presidents retain their health insurance for life, so Berwick will be appropriately compensated without being limited by Medicare rates. But will the next president and Congress rescue us from Obamacare?
- Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
By Hal G.P. Colebatch on 12.6.10 @ 6:07AM The American Spectator http://spectator.org/
Political correctness has now raised its head is what one would have thought a stronghold of traditional Christianity -- the work of C.S. Lewis. To be precise, the new film of his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the best-selling "Narnia" series of children's books.
The Dawn Treader is a revival of an old Irish form, the Immram, telling of a ship voyaging among islands, with the crew learning some lesson at each stopping place.
The imaginary world of Narnia is, of course, under the rule of kings who acknowledge the rule of its Creator, the good lion Aslan, an attempt by Lewis to make the idea of Christ accessible to modern children.
However, actor Liam Neeson, who provides the voice of the lion in the Dawn Treader, has claimed it is also based on other religious leaders such as Mohammed and Buddha.
In fact there is not the slightest doubt about Aslan's identity. In the first Narnia story, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan takes on the burden of guild and punishment for another, undergoes a kind of crucifixion and rises from the dead. Neither Islam nor Buddhism have remotely comparable episodes.
Following Lewis's conversion, the entire body of his writing apart from his purely scholarly work consisted of Christian apologetics of one kind or another.
He said on more than one occasion that his purpose behind writing the Narnia books was to introduce children to Christianity and to get the Christian message to them "past the watchful dragons" of modern secularism. He wrote of Aslan:
He is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, "What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?"
Neeson was quoted as saying "he [Aslan] also symbolises for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries. That's who Aslan stands for as well as a mentor figure for kids -- that's what he means for me."
Walter Hooper, Lewis's former secretary and a trustee of his estate, was quoted as saying the author would have been outraged: "It is nothing whatever to do with Islam. Lewis would have simply denied that. He wrote that the 'whole Narnian story is about Christ.' Lewis could not have been clearer."
Conservative Christian William Oddie, a former editor of the Catholic Herald, accused Neeson of "a betrayal of Lewis's intention and a shameful distortion."[1]
Although there are wicked witches and other supernatural evil creatures threatening the good kingdom of Narnia, the chief political and military threat to it is Calormene, the great and cruel empire to the south.
Lewis did not make the Calormenes identical with Muslims. It is probable that he deliberately made them different in important ways so the books would not be regarded as simply anti-Muslim tracts: the Calormenes worship a vulture-headed god called Tash and, unlike any Muslims, conduct human sacrifices. Their city has statues, which are forbidden in Islam.
However, it is equally obvious and quite unmistakable that they are meant to be Muslim-like: they are warlike, live in the hot, desert-like country, are swarthy, wear turbans and run the slave-trade. Their ruler, the Tisroc, practices polygamy and his prime minister is known as a chief vizier. The women live is harem-like seclusion.
The Calormenes government is Oriental despotism. The Tisroc is a capricious and merciless tyrant. ("Call back the pardon we wrote for the third cook. I feel manifest within me the prognostics of indigestion.") Insulting the Tisroc results, for one of his subjects, in a short life and a slow death. There are no Christian values in government.
The Tisroc, who regards "our subjects" as "vile," in The Horse and His Boy plots the death of his eldest son before the son can assassinate him, remarking: "I have eighteen other sons and Rabadash, in the manner of the eldest sons of kings, was beginning to be dangerous. More than five Tisrocs in Tashban have died before their time because their eldest sons, enlightened princes, grew tired of waiting for their throne."
The state of Calormene law is indicated by the fact that "there is only one traffic regulation, which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important." The Narnians, by contrast, though we do not hear much about their organized religion, try to live by Christian-like values and an idealized version of medieval chivalry, and to revere the Lordship of Aslan in actions as well as words.
The Calormenes regard peace with the Narnians as no more than temporary truces, are always trying to conquer Narnia and in the end, in The Last Battle, succeed. The Calormen names, such as Arsheesh, Ahoshta, Lasaraleen and Rabadash, are not specifically Muslim but have a kind of Arabic sound to them.
C.S. Lewis at work in his study at The Kilns, Oxford (The Marion E. Wade Center)
As Narnia represents the Christian and classical heritage of Europe (it has beings from classical pagan mythology such as fauns and dryads as well as "northern" fairy-tale creatures and talking animals), so Calormen represents perpetual the infidel threat to it. Buddhism, incidentally, is simply not mentioned in the stories at all (I am at least grateful that writing this has given me a chance to re-read them).
Further, it is made clear that Aslan-Christ is, under the Emperor-Over-Sea (God the Father), the only good God. No syncretism is possible. In The Last Battle a phony syncretic religion, running together Aslan and Task is concocted by Calormene crooks and slave-traders. A bewildered and exploited donkey wearing a lion-skin is presented as "Tashlan" to fool the Narnian animals into obeying the Calormenes. It is seen as a sign, literally, the "End Times" of terminal degeneration and decay ushering in the end of not just Narnia but Calormene and the whole Narnian-created universe.
The good Calormenes are saved at the end in The Last Battle not because Tash who they sincerely worshipped had any aspects of goodness, or identity with Aslan but because Aslan claims that any good action, even if done in another's name, is his own. Lewis made the same point in The Screwtape Letters, in which the demon Screwtape complained that God saved the souls of men who died in a bad cause "on the monstrously sophistical grounds that they were serving the best cause they knew." This is about as far from syncretism as it is possible to get.
Hal G.P. Colebatch's "Immram," Counterstrike, is being published by Australian publisher Imaginites.
By Tim Cowlishaw The Dallas Morning News http://www.dallasnews.com/ Posted at 10:48 AM on Mon., Dec. 6, 2010
When my father moved from New Jersey to Richardson in 1963, our family traded in occasional trips to Yankee Stadium to see the best baseball team on the planet for Sunday afternoon jaunts to the Cotton Bowl to see...well, the only big league sports team in town.
Watching from the bleachers at the opposite end of the players' tunnel, we watched the Cowboys grow into the most entertaining team -- if not quite the best -- of the '60s. And if part of it was based on the original "Doomsday Defense," the rest was all about Don Meredith throwing footballs to Bob Hayes.
Both are gone now. Hayes died before he was enshrined later than he should have been in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Meredith died this morning after a lengthy bout with emphysema. He was 72.
I first learned about the sometimes uneasy relationship between pro athletes and fans and the media through Meredith. Despite his prowess at the fact he was a homegrown star from Mt. Vernon High School and then SMU, Meredith always had his detractors in Dallas.
For years, some favored Eddie LeBaron at the end of his playing days over Meredith at the beginning of his. The club drafted Jerry Rhome out of Tulsa in the late rounds of 1964 and then Craig Morton of Cal with the sixth pick in 1965.
Surely, Coach Tom Landry would turn the reigns over to one of these two instead of Meredith, many critics thought. And Landry surely tried.
When Meredith played well and the team won, all was fine. When the team lost, it was almost always on Meredith. And the "boobirds'' could be heard loud and clear at the Cotton Bowl.
But the arrival of Hayes in 1965 set Meredith's career on a different track. The Cowboys became winners. They went to back-to-back NFL title games against Green Bay after the '66 and '67 seasons but came up short.
After Meredith played poorly, throwing three interceptions in a playoff loss to Cleveland in '68, that was it. Fed up with the criticism, the crushing playoff defeats, he just up and quit.
Imagine that. At almost the same age down to the month that Tony Romo is now, Meredith retired from pro football.
But two years later, he entered into a new career that made him more famous on a national stage than he had ever been as a Cowboy. As part of the three-man booth in ABC's new "Monday Night Football," Meredith became a legendary figure and a highly popular one for trading barbs with a man considered unlikable by so many, broadcaster Howard Cosell.
I was in the Cotton Bowl stands during that 1970 season when the Cowboys were in the process of losing a totally humiliating 38-0 game to the St. Louis Cardinals. In the second half, fans in the upper deck under the press box turned and shouted for Meredith to come play for Dallas.
'I'm not going down there,'' Meredith said.
As time has passed, the Cowboys quarterback position has come to be defined by its two Super Bowl winners -- Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman. And there's no question that their achievements stand highest above the rest.
But before they came along, Meredith wrote his name all over the Cowboys' record book and helped establish Bob Hayes as the greatest deep threat of his era and one of the best of all time.
His accomplishments in nine seasons with an expansion franchise have not been diminished even more than 40 years after he walked away from the game.
Dandy Don Meredith all "southern charm, folksy humor and good-ol-boy charisma"
Don Meredith, who died on Dec. 5 at the age of 72, was one of the first celebrity athletes, a prototype for a role that has since become a standard in the pop culture pantheon.
He was the Dallas Cowboys first star quarterback, playing from 1960-68. It's hard to imagine a more powerful platform to launch a celebrity career: leading what would become one of the most successful franchises in sports history on its way to becoming America's team through a decade marked by cultural revolution. And he had the all-American good looks and outsized personality to match the opportunity.
It presents a perfect snapshot of a moment in Americana to recall the two breakout media stars of that generation of NFL football: Dandy Don and Broadway Joe. Joe Namath, the playboy quarterback of the upstart New York Jets presented the flipside of celebrity manhood to Meredith's. Meredith was all southern charm, folksy humor and good-ol-boy charisma. Namath was a big-city bad boy through and through. They were tale of the country mouse and the city mouse brought to life and played out in the sports sections, magazine spreads and televisions of America.
Meredith never quite became the TV and movie star he seemed destined to become. Maybe the most important reason for this is that the starmaking system wasn't yet in place to facilitate such a transistion. There were no powerhouse agencies devoted to turning their athlete clients into entertainment superstars. There were no multimedia lifestyle brands like Nike ready to spend millions on cross-promotional campaigns to turn their athlete pitchmen into inescapable personalities. And with only three TV networks and a Hollywood studio system no longer the star-making machine it had been and not yet the free-agency system it would become, there were no trails blazed, no ready-made way for an high-profile NFL player to become a bankable entertainment brand.
So Meredith made do, did what was available: He was part of the classic Monday night triumvirate with Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford -- where Dandy Don made famous his classic bit of singing "Turn out the Lights, the Party's Over" when some turning-point play seemed to decide a game's outcome. He starred in some, mostly forgettable, made-for-TV movies (such as Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) and guest-starred on a procession of TV series through the 70s, most notably a recurring role as Det. Bert Jameson on Police Story.
But his most successful role was as himself, Dandy Don, the slow-talking but quick-witted country boy who became a big-city success story, and in so doing helped paved the way for the generations of athlete-celebrities who followed him.
50 years later, Don Meredith still has a song in his heart
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally ran on Thursday, November 26, 2009
SANTA FE, N.M. – Smiling, he rises from his chair. His hair is gray and his legs are creaky, but there's no mistaking it.
It's Don Meredith.
"Hello, hello!" the supposedly reclusive ex-Cowboys quarterback bellows to his invited guest, a reporter no less.
So many questions beg, but Meredith, 71, just wants to be himself. Share witticisms. Croon country tunes. Raise his Snapple to offer a, well, colorful toast.
Don Meredith and his wife, Susan, photographed at home in Santa Fe on Oct. 28, 2009. (Brad Townsend/DMN)
Football doesn't enter the banter until Meredith is told of a nearing anniversary. On Nov. 28, 1959, he signed a personal services contract to play for a proposed NFL team that had no nickname, no coach and no other players.
From this seed sprouted the Dallas Cowboys.
"Son of a gun," Meredith chuckles. "I didn't know what 50 years felt like, but now I do."
In that other lifetime he was Dandy Don, the captivating SMU All-American from nearby Mount Vernon. He led the Cowboys to the 1966 and 1967 NFL Championship games, then rather inexplicably retired in 1969, at age 31.
Next he was Monday Night Football 's "Irrepressible One," as booth-mate Howard Cosell called him. Millions tuned in to hear Meredith needle Cosell, rhapsodize about parents Jeff and Hazel and Mount Vernon and belt "The Party's Over."
But after the 1984 season, he virtually vanished to Santa Fe and semi-retirement with his wife, Susan. He since has given few interviews, adding mystery and intrigue to an already compelling Texas folk tale.
But for Don and Susan, now married 37 years, the mystery is why anyone would begrudge them a normal life after Don's high-profile careers.
"After he retired from Monday Night, we took up tennis and golf, maybe watched a few Super Bowls because we had parties," Susan says. "Football kind of went away."
Ex-teammates don't seem surprised. Meredith was the guy who sang in huddles, read Hemingway, shot mid-70s in golf and strummed and sipped with Willie Nelson.
Over the decades, teammates grew used to his sporadic attendance at alumni functions, but his most recent absence was conspicuous. Meredith was the only living Ring of Honor member unable to attend the Sept. 20 christening of Cowboys Stadium.
He has emphysema. Oxygen therapy makes it difficult to leave home, so he sits in his den, conquering backgammon challengers. On this day he tests his visitor by playing a country song on his laptop.
"Know who that is?"
Who?
"That's Jeff and Hazel's baby boy."
The tune is "Travelin' Man," one of two that Meredith recorded in 1965. Laughing, he taps his feet and sings duet with his 27-year-old self.
I'm a travelin' man
Just a rollin' stone
These wanderin' feet
Have got to roam ...
Joseph Donald Meredith's adventurous path traces to April 10, 1938, the day he was born in Mount Vernon, 100 miles northeast of Dallas.
At 2,700, the town's population has doubled since Joe Don and older brother Billy Jack starred for the Tigers in the '50s. Hazel died in 1988, Jeff in 1991, but the family presence remains.
"Don Meredith Boyhood Home" reads a curbside sign at 616 S. Kaufman, where Hazel swung a tire from a pecan tree so her boys could hone their passing.
Town square fixture Meredith Dry Goods was where Jeff perched 6-year-old Don near the door and taught him to greet every customer by name.
Two billboards direct Interstate 30 motorists to the Don Meredith Exhibit, in the former fire station. The museum's 2006 opening coincided with Don's 50th high school reunion.
"He sat here on a tall stool for a good two hours, signing autographs," Mayor J.D. Baumgardner says. "Had 'em three-deep clear out to the curb."
Museum visitors learn that Meredith was salutatorian, acted in the school play and probably was most skilled in basketball.
As a 6-3 junior, he scorched Dallas' 1954 Dr Pepper Tournament with records of 52 points against Adamson and 164 points in five games. Mount Vernon toppled big-city Crozier Tech and Woodrow Wilson en route to the title.
In football, Don wore No. 88 like Billy Jack, who went on to play at TCU. Don's jersey, letter jacket, ABC blazer and 1971 sportscasting Emmy are among the exhibit's many artifacts. For decades, Don had kept most of them in storage.
That love I've had
Has set me free
And a travelin' man
It's made out of me ...
Contrary to perception, the Merediths don't live in a steel fortress guarded by a moat and Dobermans.
They reside in a two-story adobe in southern Santa Fe. Toy poodle Moses and spaniel-poodle mix Beau briefly sniff newcomers' shoes.
The home has little evidence of Don's playing days. The only photo of him in his No. 17 Cowboys uniform hangs in the master bedroom, above one of Susan during her modeling days.
"We were both 23, though we didn't know each other," says Susan, adding with a laugh, "That's better than we look now. Holy moly."
Don shows no inclination to talk sports until his visitor pulls out a folder full of 1950s and '60s newspaper stories. Thumbing through the pages, Meredith reads the headlines aloud.
"Brings back some old memories, boy I'm telling you," he says. "It does, it does. I thank you, thank you."
After noting Don's thin necktie in a photo of him signing with SMU, Susan exclaims: "Look, that's your real nose! You hadn't had 14 nose breaks." To which Don cracks: "I was almost too pretty to be a boy. That's what my mother said."
Dallas might have daunted some small-town kids, but for the thespian quarterback it was center stage.
The city had no major professional teams, sportswriters showered superlatives and "Southern Meredith University" regularly drew 50,000 fans to the Cotton Bowl.
And would you believe it? During Meredith's senior season, word came that Dallas might get pro football. Not just one team, but two.
SMU alumnus Lamar Hunt was forming the American Football League and would own the Dallas Texans. Dallasites Clint Murchison Jr. and Bedford Wynne applied for an NFL expansion team.
Naturally, both organizations coveted Meredith as a cornerstone and box-office draw. On Nov. 22, 1959, six days before Meredith's college finale at TCU, the Texans made him their No. 1 draft pick.
Meredith was engaged to Mustangs cheerleader Lynne Shamburger and had been accepted to SMU law school. Hunt invited Don and Billy Jack to his mansion for barbecued burgers.
Oops. Hunt forgot starter fluid, so he had the Meredith boys gather mimosa leaves. The backyard soiree failed to kindle Don's interest in the Texans.
Shortly before midnight on Nov. 28, hours after losing to TCU, Meredith signed a five-year, $150,000 personal services deal with Murchison.
"The contract read, 'If we get a National Football League franchise, we'd like for you to play quarterback,' " Meredith recalls. "I couldn't understand pro football, the idea that they were going to pay you money to play."
Indeed, times were simpler. The News ' story on the Dec. 20 Meredith-Shamburger wedding said the couple would honeymoon in Hawaii and live at 6617 Preston Road.
When Tom Landry was hired as the proposed team's coach on Dec. 28, he quipped, "All we've got is a coach and a pitcher, but that's a start."
When the sun goes down
And the shadows fall
The night winds howl
A lonesome call ...
On Jan. 28, 1960, NFL owners awarded Dallas its franchise. The $600,000 expansion fee was just four times what was owed the quarterback.
Heck, Meredith would even get to play home games in the familiar, friendly Cotton Bowl.
But on the first day of training camp, wide-eyed Meredith found the Cowboys' roster mostly composed of fellow rookies and other teams' scarred and tattooed castoffs. Cigarettes and alcohol were prevalent.
"I'd never tried either," he says. "I was introduced and really happy with both."
He remains grateful to veteran quarterback Eddie LeBaron, who tutored Meredith and took the brunt of punishment during the 0-11-1 first season: "Old Eddie. In some ways, he was more my coach than Coach Landry."
Gradually, Meredith earned playing time, not all of it valuable. In a 1962 home game, Pittsburgh's 6-6, 305-pound Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb mashed Meredith's right ankle like an accordion.
Asked about the injury today, Meredith lifts his pants leg. His ankle bone is golf ball-sized. Susan says he has had multiple ankle and toe surgeries.
"It really wasn't that bad; it just didn't get any better," Don says. "It isn't in pain now, so I'm happy about that."
Meredith with former Cowboys' coach Tom Landry
He became starter in 1963, a year that also brought his first divorce, cascades of boos and a 4-10 finish.
Edgy Dallas no longer was just a college sports town. Perhaps some fans found entitlement in the flasks they snuck in. Some construed Meredith's easy nature as apathy.
"I can take boos for a bad game," Meredith told The News in 1964. "But I hate to think they're booing me because they think I'm dogging it."
Meredith quelled critics by earning NFL Player of the Year honors in 1966 and taking the Cowboys to the '66 and '67 title games. But losing to Green Bay by seven and four points, respectively, tormented the Dallas organization.
Then Cleveland upset the Cowboys in the first round of the 1968 playoffs, with Landry benching Meredith after two costly third-quarter interceptions.
Still, Meredith's July 5, 1969, retirement shocked many in Dallas, the city that once unconditionally adored him.
That day he said he no longer was fully committed and didn't want to shortchange anyone. But for 40 years, many have wondered whether the Meredith-Landry relationship soured, or whether Meredith simply tired of public criticism.
Neither was the decisive factor, Meredith says now. He says his second marriage was failing and he had three young children.
"All sorts of things were going around on my personal life. It just wasn't working, so I decided, 'Hell, I might as well try something else.' "
He tried working as a stockbroker until the Monday Night opportunity came in 1970, but it is little known that Meredith approached Cowboys president Tex Schramm about a comeback. He says he was surprised and hurt by Schramm's unenthusiastic response.
I'm up at dawn
Be on my way
Mister travelin' man
Where you gonna be today? ...
Meredith says he harbors no what-ifs about his Cowboys career. But it remains a painful subject for some of his teammates.
"He took too much of the blame, and I think the press blamed him way too much," says Lee Roy Jordan, a Cowboys Ring of Honor linebacker from 1963 to 1976.
"I'm disappointed that we – the coaching staff and all of us other players – didn't take a more responsible role in taking on some of that negative press."
Jordan contends that if Meredith had played longer, the transition would have been smoother for quarterbacks Craig Morton and Roger Staubach.
Jordan says he means no disrespect to Morton, but he believes that with Meredith, Dallas would have won the 1970 season's Super Bowl.
Instead, Baltimore prevailed in that infamous "Stupor Bowl" V, 16-13, despite committing seven turnovers to the Cowboys' four.
"Oh, yeah," concurs Staubach. "Meredith would have won Super Bowls eventually, if he had stayed."
Staubach was finishing his Navy service when he learned of Meredith's retirement. Weeks earlier, Meredith had invited Staubach to his house during a Cowboys quarterback camp. Staubach played behind Morton in 1969 and most of 1970 before leading Dallas to the '71 Super Bowl title. Even then, he felt he had inherited Meredith's era.
"Literally, I almost felt guilty being the quarterback," Staubach says. "That's how much the team admired him. Those guys, to a man, loved Don Meredith."
Yes, he was free-spirited, nocturnal and favored J&B Scotch, much like his NFL hero Bobby Layne . But former Cowboys running back Walt Garrison calls Meredith a shrewd play-caller and uncanny leader.
"People are so stupid," Garrison says. "Meredith took us to the big game twice, with not the best talent. We had great players, but we didn't have the nucleus Staubach had when he came in."
Jordan says Landry appointed him as Meredith's road roommate, bodyguard and chaperon from 1965 through '68. He is proud that Meredith still calls him "Roomie."
The only drawback, Jordan says, is the all-too-vivid memory of Meredith enduring broken ribs, a collapsed lung, at least two concussions – and jeers.
"He got beat up bad, man. He was the toughest son of a gun I've ever seen, and I think I've seen a lot of them."
Their careers didn't cross, but Staubach says Meredith often encouraged him. As the man who glamorized the Cowboys quarterback position, Meredith knew its burdens, perhaps more so than any of his successors. In August, Staubach offered to fly Don and Susan to late-Cowboys receiver Bob Hayes' Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony. They regretfully declined.
"I was going to have him on stage," Staubach says. "I was going to point to him and say, 'This is the guy who really should be up here for Bob.' "
In hindsight, Jordan says Meredith's retirement "probably ended up being the right step for him at that time of his life."
It allowed Meredith to join Monday Night Football and meet Susan a year later.
"The brightest ray of sunshine that you could have in a guy's life, she has been it for him," Jordan says. "She has stabilized Don's life, guided and helped him."
Last month, Jordan and his wife, Biddie, traveled to Santa Fe to visit and ask a favor.
Would Don consent to being honored next April 28 in Dallas, at a luncheon benefiting the Greater Dallas Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association? Meredith, who has had family and friends afflicted with the disease, agreed.
Jordan says "A Tribute to Don Meredith: An American Champion" has had an outpouring of commitments from Cowboys spanning the franchise's half-century.
"It's going to be a tribute like you've never seen," says Jordan, voice cracking. "I love that guy so much.
He has been such an important part of my life."
I walk alone
Under windswept skies
For a travelin' man
Alone till he dies
The song's last verse evokes an "aw" from Susan. Don laughs.
His recall is patchy these days, but he can describe the moment and date, April 17, 1971, of first seeing Susan, walking along New York's Third Avenue.
"I thought I was seeing a miracle. Then, after we met, I wondered where she'd been when I really needed her." They since have spent only 24 nights apart.
Of the 914 men who have worn a Cowboys uniform, there have been more acclaimed players than The Original. But none have been more well-known, eclectic or enigmatic.
Troy Aikman is having a solid broadcasting career, but Meredith attained cult status during 170 Monday Night episodes, plus the '75, '77 and '85 Super Bowls.
Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin have danced with the stars, but Meredith is the only known Dallas Cowboy to guest-host The Tonight Show, on July 30, 1975.
Don and Susan joke that he tanked the monologue because reading cue cards wasn't his nature.
He saved face by trading barbs with guest and pal Burt Reynolds.
In those days, the Merediths spent more time in their second home, in Palm Springs, Calif. Next-door neighbor Dinah Shore had him co-host her show for a year.
He endorsed Lipton tea, had a recurring role in TV's Police Story and starred in the '76 movie Banjo Hackett: Roamin' Free.
Of course, Garrison likes to tease that the flick wasn't actually released. It escaped.
Meredith hasn't conversed with many sportswriters in the last quarter-century, but he did perform Neil Simon's Odd Couple on stage with Monday Night partner Frank Gifford. Along the way, Don and Susan took up painting and traveled the world.
It's been quite a journey for Jeff and Hazel's baby boy. Meredith, wearing his Mount Vernon class ring, retrieves a photo of his parents from a bookcase.
"Isn't that a great picture? I'm very thankful. I'm very thankful about where I'm from and who I am."
Though he has been somewhat homebound since his minor stroke five years ago, he channels his competitiveness into FreeCell, a computer-based card game similar to solitaire.
The statistics show that Meredith has won 18,339 of 21,959 attempts, or 83 percent. Not to brag, mind you, but his top winning streak is 40 games.
The visitor asks if the Merediths would mind posing for a photo.
"Only if she'll sit on my lap," Don says.
At interview's end, Meredith asks for the reporter's notebook.
He draws a flower, sings "Yellow Rose of Texas" and signs his handiwork.
One last thing. Susan asks Don to play the song from the other side of his 45 rpm record. It is more cheery, she notes. More like him.
Meredith melody, past and present, again fills the room.
When 2005's The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe—the first film in the Chronicles of Narnia series—was being filmed in Prague, the American ambassador to the Czech Republic visited the set. Producer Mark Johnson introduced the man to co-producer Douglas Gresham, the stepson of C. S. Lewis who had the task of ensuring filmmakers got everything right. He was essentially his stepfather's eyes and ears on the project.
When the diplomat asked Johnson about Gresham's role, Johnson quipped, "Oh, he's to blame." They all had a good laugh, but Gresham knew it was absolutely true: "That just about sums it up," he says today. When Narnia fans complain about how the films—Prince Caspian released in 2008, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader hits theaters on at midnight on December 9—have strayed from the books, Gresham is their first target.
We spoke with him recently about playing that role.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - NOVEMBER 30: Douglas Gresham attends the Royal World Premiere of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader held at The Odeon Leicester Square on November 30, 2010 in London, United Kingdom (Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images)
Some fans think you've allowed the filmmakers to stray too far from the books.
Well, I do my very best. I don't always win my battles, and I fight a lot of them. Some I win, some I lose, some I compromise. It's not an easy job. I'm not always diplomatic; sometimes I'm pretty blunt. Sometimes I get up people's noses and make a real nuisance of myself. But there are things I will insist on.
Like what?
It's often to do with the theological or moral messages. I'm not saying that Hollywood people want to take them out, but often they just don't see it or understand the significance. Jack [Lewis] was very conscious of the fact that in the twentieth century, Western societies had decided in their infinite stupidity to dispense with the great nineteenth century values that were so important—personal responsibility, commitment, courage, chivalry, courtesy. The Narnian Chronicles teach such things, so I fight for those fairly hard.
What have you fought for on Dawn Treader?
I'm not going to tell you, because that wouldn't be fair to the people who fought with me! But I will say this: Dawn Treader is all about what happens when you commit your life to Christ and how the Devil gets at you. It's about temptation and what you do about it.
There were early rumors that Eustace, after he becomes a dragon, would fight with the sea serpent. That's not in the book.
Some folks were attracted by the idea that the dragon—Eustace—would earn his redemption by having a huge fight with the sea serpent. But I don't think that earning one's redemption is possible. It's a free gift from Jesus. So that scene is not in the movie. That was a nonnegotiable point for me. [Since this interview, CT has seen the film, and would contest Gresham's assertion that the dragon Eustace doesn't have a "huge fight with the sea serpent." Looked pretty huge from our seat.]
Filmmakers look at making a movie entirely from a filmmaker's viewpoint. I have to be both filmmaker and Narnia watchdog, and balance the two. It's not easy; it's a lot of pressure. People rely on me to do everything I can as a Narnian purist to keep these movies accurate—and to keep them Narnian. And when I make mistakes, they let me know about it. It's me who copes with the flack, but that's what I'm here for.
What's been the biggest complaint about the films?
There are people who don't believe anything should be in the movie that's not actually in the book—including set design, scripting, anything you can think of. This is on the same level, to a certain extent, as people who say you shouldn't go to McDonald's because there are no hamburgers in the Bible. People take it to extremes.
Can you give an example?
There was a rumor [before Prince Caspian released] that Caspian was going to have a huge romance with Susan. We rejected that idea early on, but it really got people worried on the Narnia fan sites. Somebody finally asked me, "What's happening here?" I said, "Look, there are important things to worry about, like global warming. I suggest you pay more attention to them than whether there's going to be a romance between Caspian and Susan." I knew there wasn't going to be a romance, but I wasn't going to say so.
Well, they did make eyes at each other, and they kissed at the end …
Look. You've got a beautiful woman and a handsome guy in an adventure together. Let's face it: They are going to make eyes at each other. And of course they kiss goodbye in the last scene, because here's this woman that Caspian's become attached to and he's never going to see her again. End of story. I don't regard that as a romance. I agree that it shouldn't have been in the movie; I think it was nonsense. But it wasn't something I was going to dig my heels in and scream and bite the carpet about.
Because it wasn't one of the bigger themes, or a theology issue?
Exactly. It did annoy a lot of Narnian purists that these two teenagers should actually be the least bit attracted to each other. I think the purists were just as out of line as the people who put that scene in, which I think was unnecessary and rather silly.
You're being diplomatic in calling them "Narnia purists." Others have called them the Narnia police.
Well, I'm the Narnia policeman.
Some are concerned that a professing agnostic, Michael Apted, directed Dawn Treader.
Why would one be concerned? When Tony Hopkins played C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands, he had just played Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. He said, "Playing C. S. Lewis did not make me want to become a Christian anymore than playing Hannibal Lecter made me want to become a cannibal." So why shouldn't an agnostic direct this? The temptation for a Christian director would be to put his own Christian beliefs to the forefront. An agnostic is probably a good choice in that he doesn't really believe that there is a God, but he doesn't really have an antagonistic agenda either. If the man was a rabid atheist, we might have more problems.
What are your hopes for people who see Dawn Treader?
I would like them to walk out of the theater delighted with the movie they've seen, and with a deeper understanding of temptation and how to deal with it.
Our review of the film will post on Thursday, Dec. 9.
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908. By William Oddie. Oxford University Press. 401 pages. $50.
In Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, William Oddie retraces G.K. Chesterton’s journey from heresy to orthodoxy. It’s hard to believe, but Chesterton was raised a Unitarian and, in 1896, at age 22, still didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Yet only a few years later, at age 29, he confessed his belief in Christianity in public. And in 1908, at age 34, he published Orthodoxy, a work about “the nature of his faith and the origins of his own beliefs,” a work clearly in “the Catholic tradition — rather than some version of basic or ‘mere’ Christianity.” It would be fourteen years before he entered the Catholic Church, but at this point he had already “completed the intellectual and spiritual armoury with which he was to wage a one-man anti-modernist counter-revolution for the rest of his life.”
This book is a milestone in Chesterton studies, which are still in their infancy. Oddie displays an impressive mastery not just of GKC’s printed works, but also of his manuscripts in the British Library, catalogued by R.A. Christophers and first published in 2001. This catalog, Oddie remarks, has established a new foundation for all future GKC scholarship.
Chesterton’s childhood (1874-1883) was a happy one, filled with the “white light of wonder,” but it was George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, a fairytale about faith, that made the deepest impression on him. This tale, in which a princess in a castle is attacked from below by goblins and uses a magic thread as her guide, made “all experience a fairy-tale” and gave Chesterton a vision of things that his conversion later confirmed.
At St. Paul’s School (1883-1892) he was found to be “unusually unreceptive to instruction.” Yet there he made lifelong friends and founded the Junior Debating Club and its journal, The Debater, to which he was the “most prolific contributor.” In 1892 he won a school prize for an anti-Catholic poem on the supposed failure of St. Francis Xavier’s mission to the Indies. Half of the twelve poems he published in The Debater were about religion and were of the same bias. When Chesterton’s family attended Sunday services, they went to hear the Rev. Stopford Brooke preach a religion of love unhampered by creeds, dogmas, and Church authority — all of which Brooke denounced as the roots of intolerance and superstition.
Yet, strange to say, side by side with the anti-popery he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, Chesterton developed a devotion to the Virgin Mary and an admiration for the Middle Ages that would last all his life. In 1892, at age 18, he wrote in defense of Dante and of the belief in the communion of saints. The next year, in “Ave Maria,” his last published poem in The Debater, he addressed the Middle Ages as “O dead worlds of valour and faith, O brave hearts that strove hard to be pure,” and invoked the Virgin as “thou blessed among women, great pureness and motherhood hail!” The emphasis on purity is notable here. His friends later recalled that GKC was an “exemplar” of purity for them. When the club and journal ended in 1893, so did GKC’s “happy and extraordinarily creative boyhood.”
In the next part of his odyssey (1892-1894), GKC wrestled with the devil at the Slade School of Art. The enemy appeared to him in the form of the “decadent” movement — a morally subversive aestheticism that put the highest value on subjective experience and wallowed in pessimism. This movement also fostered “homoerotic sexual behavior,” which GKC said twisted “even decent sin to shapes not to be named.” In his revulsion at the turpitude around him, he came close to a nervous breakdown, but he learned from this that it was necessary to engage in combat with the devil. Later he recalled that, at the time, “huge devils hid the stars.”
And so Chesterton’s turn to orthodoxy was triggered by “a vision of positive evil.” As he put it, “I dug quite low enough to discover the devil…. Perhaps, when I eventually emerged as a sort of theorist, and was described as an Optimist, it was because I was one of the few people in that world of diabolism who really believed in devils.” In “The Diabolist,” a story he wrote later about his time at Slade, he remarked that he was “becoming orthodox” because he had arrived at “the old belief that heresy is worse than sin.”
In these “silent years,” he wrote a lot in his notebooks but published nothing. He was observing the world around him, “the creation of that liberal philosophy in which he had been trained,” and he perceived that this philosophy was powerless against evil. He regained his joy when he embraced the doctrine of creation, along with the gratitude it inspired. He now saw that the purpose of life was “to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man might suddenly understand that he was alive, and be happy.”
From 1894 to late 1896 he continued to regard Jesus Christ as simply the “perfection of Mankind.” His anti-popery continued, a component of his religious liberalism and the French republican tradition he had embraced. But at the end of 1896, Oddie finds a great turning point in the manuscripts — “an affirmation that this Son of Man, though indeed the greatest of all Mankind, was also something very much more.” By this time, Chesterton had met his future wife, Frances, a woman raised in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent. Soon after they met, he began to shift toward orthodoxy. When they were engaged in 1898, he wrote: “Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.” They married in 1901, and, though unable to have children, they enjoyed an enduring relationship “of the mind as much as of the heart.”
In 1900 GKC became part of an Anglo-Catholic clerical group that included Charles Gore, later bishop of Birmingham and founder of Pusey House, and Henry Scott Holland, founder (in 1889) of the Christian Social Union. That year he also met Hilaire Belloc and was impressed by his “dazzling abilities as a public speaker” and “original reflections on history and character.” In this year, he privately embraced not only the dogma of Christ’s divinity, but also the belief in miracles. He spoke of the “error of dogmatising against dogma.” When his book reviews for The Speaker were collected and published at the end of 1901, one critic attacked him for his use of paradox. GKC replied that paradox could be equated with common sense because “there really is a strand of contradiction running through the universe,” for example, that goodness involves the power to do evil.
The year 1903 was a landmark year for Chesterton. For the first time, he “publicly, persistently, and sometimes aggressively confessed his faith.” Taking the role of “a committed apologist,” he engaged in a “pitched battle” about Christianity with the founder and editor of The Clarion newspaper, Robert Blatchford. In an essay titled “The Return of the Angels,” which Oddie considers a key document for understanding GKC’s intellectual and spiritual journey, he wrote a “personal manifesto” about “his former loss of faith in, and his commitment to, the Christian religion.” He defended the faith as “a hypothesis which, once tested, can become a means of perception, making sense of what was previously obscure.” Since faith is a way of seeing, the only thing to argue about is what is visible to a man who is blind and to a man who can see. When they refuse to experience faith, rationalists refuse to “test it.”
By the time this controversy ended in 1904, Chesterton had defended creation, Christ’s divinity, the Incarnation, free will, original sin, and miracles. He already saw Protestantism “as being in a kind of alliance with the unbelief of Huxley and Blatchford.” There are also hints that he believed in the sacraments. Although his defense of Christianity seemed lighthearted, it would later prove “massively influential over such intellectual heavyweights as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.” GKC had now realized “not only the extent to which disbelief in the Christian religion had become endemic in English culture; but, much closer to home, he had come to understand how much he had now isolated himself from the presuppositions of nearly everyone in the literary and journalistic world of which he was now a recognized part.” He had committed the unpardonable sin in that age of having declared that something could be “absolutely true.”
In 1905, in a chapter of his book Heretics titled “The Importance of Being Orthodox,” Chesterton wrote that while modern educators tried to implement religious liberty without defining the nature of religion and liberty, “the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion [i.e., the doctrine that Jesus was ‘of one substance with the Father’] were far more sensible…. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy.”
Finally, in 1908, Chesterton reached the apex of his spiritual ascent. He published Orthodoxy, a work inviting comparison to John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua; a work designed to show “that Christian dogma is the very opposite of a constriction of the human spirit, [and] to set the Christian creeds flying in the wind like great banners above a conquering army of liberation.” In this work, consisting of an “intensely visual sequence of almost cinematic images,” GKC plays the part of Everyman: “Only a mind whose horizons were so unbounded, a mind, too, so entirely and instinctively prompted by natural humility, could so naturally and so convincingly have assumed the role of Everyman.” Here he argues that Christian doctrine is not forced on reality, but is the key that unlocks “life’s real meaning” and leads to truths like original sin: “There had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck.”
In the chapter “Paradoxes of Christianity,” we come to “the intellectual and dramatic summit of the book.” Here Chesterton explains how truth is “cumulative,” and “spiritual certitude is a matter of the accumulation of inferences rather than of direct rational proof.” He tells us about the thrilling romance of orthodoxy, how through two millennia of history the Church kept a dynamic “equipoise” between opposites. She couldn’t “swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful.” There had never been “anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” It is easy to be a madman, a heretic, or a modernist: “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” He now envisioned the chariot of the Church flying through the centuries, “the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” Orthodoxy had never been “a static principle denying growth,” but rather “a dynamic principle defending sanity.”
Also in the year 1908 GKC wrote “The House of Christmas,” one more poem expressing his devotion to the Virgin Mary. His antipathy to Rome was now gone, for as he observed in Orthodoxy, “the very word ‘romance’ has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome.”
- Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the seventeenth century.
Show me where in the Constitution it says the government — created by the people in order to serve the people — is empowered to mandate that those selfsame people buy health insurance as a condition of living and breathing in the United States.
That was the pointed demand put to Democrats during the Obamacare debate. You remember those months: threats and bribes for every wavering moderate on their side of the aisle, while Republican opposition was steamrolled with accounting voodoo and parliamentary tricks that would have made Saul Alinksy blush. And what was their answer on the Constitution? Why, it was right there in the preamble, they told us. It expressly says, in black and white, that it is government’s job to “promote the general Welfare.”
This was absurd, of course. The preamble? Never had it been understood to have the meaning ascribed by Obamacare proponents, nor to have such potent force. Preambles are just hortatory and self-justifying, right? It is the subsequent articles, terms, and conditions that have the force of law. Oh no, countered Democrats: The preamble is basic, foundational to our understanding of everything that follows — and “promote the general Welfare” couldn’t be clearer. It was the license, we were to believe, for Leviathan to take over one-sixth of the private economy.
So, now comes the ludicrous strategic arms–reduction treaty (“New START”) with Russia that President Obama is curiously desperate to ratify before more Republican senators arrive on the scene next month. What does the president say about the treaty language that clearly straitjackets U.S. missile defense, holding our security in an ever more threatening world hostage to Soviet — er, sorry, I mean Russian — offensive capabilities?
He tells you, Don’t worry about it: That’s just the preamble. Doesn’t mean anything.
With his own credibility in tatters, the president has taken to channeling Ronald Reagan as he campaigns for New START. In that spirit, we should note that there are countless good reasons, substantive national-security reasons, for the senate to Just Say No. But how about we go with just two basic points, neither of which requires you to be an expert in telemetry or to know your ICBMs from your AMRAAMs? Let’s just focus on credibility and competence.
On New START, as on many other matters, the Obama administration has demonstrated that it is not to be trusted. That’s bad — no matter who the president is, we want to be able to credit him on vital issues of national defense. Nevertheless, when we hear these incessant Democratic invocations of the Gipper’s bon mot, “Trust but verify,” we ought to be thinking Barack Obama, not Vladimir Putin.
Trusting the Russian strongman is out of the question — wasn’t it only about ten minutes ago that President Bush was wiping egg off his face as the “strategic partner” whose soul he thought he had peered into rolled Red Army tanks into the heart of Georgia? But if we are going to trust Obama, we have to verify. The president notoriously says whatever he thinks he needs to say to achieve his objectives, and, with START in particular, the administration’s behavior has been abominable.
There is, as noted, the topsy-turvy matter of preambles. As National Review’s editors have pointed out, the New START preamble plainly touts “the interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms.” It further purports to cement for all time the current posture of this purported interrelationship, asserting that “current strategic defensive arms do not undermine” stability, and that the “interrelationship” between missile offense and missile defense “will become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced.” That is, the more we shrink our inventory of strategic nukes — the point of New START — the less latitude we will have to beef up our defense against missile attacks.
Let’s leave aside the patent stupidity of this theory, shown by (to take just a few examples) the fact that we will face far more worrisome nuclear threats than Russia in the future, the ample historical experience proving that reductions in U.S. missile levels do not (as Mr. Obama insists) discourage rogue governments from developing their own nukes, and the obvious conclusion that there is no necessary interrelationship between Russia’s offensive capabilities and our defensive needs (for ourselves and for the protection of our allies, a problem Russia doesn’t have) — which is why, former UN ambassador John Bolton recalls, the Bush administration wisely decoupled these considerations. Let’s even ignore for the moment the flat-out lunacy of agreeing that our future security somehow hinges on maintaining Russia’s ability to attack us. Quite apart from all that, there remains the simple matter of the treaty’s text.[1]
For the Russians, this is the ballgame. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov issued an unambiguous statement at the time the treaty was signed pronouncing the limitations on U.S. missile defense to be “clearly spelled out in the treaty” and “legally binding.” And why not? Besides the preamble, the treaty expressly prohibits offensive-missile launchers from being converted into defensive-missile interceptors. Moreover, beyond START’s own language, the Heritage Foundation’s Baker Spring observes that, in its February 2010 report on ballistic-missile defense, the Obama administration explicitly limited the program in order to maintain the strategic balance not only with Russia but with China, too. [2]
In the face of all this evidence, the Obama State Department counters that New START imposes “no constraints on deploying the most effective missile defenses possible.” This just mulishly repeats the absurd denials of Ellen Tauscher, State’s big mahoff on arms control, which are captured in former Defense Department official Keith Payne’s recent NRO essay: “The treaty does nothing to constrain missile defenses…this treaty is about offensive strategic weapons”; “There is no limit or constraint on what the United States can do with its missile defense system”; and “There are no constraints to missile defense.” No, of course not…and the voice in the back of my head keeps chanting, “If you like your health insurance, you get to keep your health insurance!” [3]
It’s a tad late in the day for the president to argue that he’s still your honey, so never mind what your lyin’ eyes and ears are telling you. But even if that weren’t true, the Obama administration never disappoints when it comes to your worst suspicions. Despite serial denials, some issued in congressional testimony by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Washington Times’s Bill Gertz reports that an internal State Department memo documents — surprise! — extensive secret talks between the Obama administration and the Russians regarding missile defense. Turns out the administration even proposed a draft treaty on missile-defense cooperation, notwithstanding its assurances that no such deal was in the works.
Which is all to say that Obama administration posturing cannot be taken at face value. That would probably be true in any case. It is especially true when (a) the stakes involve national security; (b) the language of the treaty cuts against the posturing; (c) the administration has already been caught playing fast and loose with pertinent facts; (d) Obama not only is philosophically opposed to robust missile defense but has actually reneged on missile-defense commitments the nation made to Poland and the Czech Republic; and (e) the other party to New START is publicly insisting on an interpretation of treaty terms that flies in the face of the administration’s stated construction.
Russia’s contradiction of the administration brings us to the second basic problem with New START: the failure to meet the minimal demands of competence. A treaty is like a contract between two parties that happen to be sovereign nations. A contract is a meeting of the minds on essential terms. When contracts get breached, it is usually because the parties thought they understood each side’s obligations when they signed, but some latent ambiguity unexpectedly led them to construe their obligations differently and defy each other’s expectations. That’s when the lawyers start getting sued for malpractice, for failing to make sure the terms were crystal clear.
Contrast that situation with New START, which is unratified — meaning it’s not a contract yet, just a proposal. We don’t have to wait for a breach: We already know there is galactic disagreement between what Russia and the Obama administration say the treaty portends for missile defense.
So here’s a question for Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and other lawyer-senators who are said to support ratification: If it would be malpractice to counsel a client to sign an ambiguous contract that unexpectedly leads to a messy breach, what word should we use for the incompetence involved in counseling a country to enter a treaty about which we know, going in, that there are irreconcilable differences on the key point? Inexplicable? Reckless? Disbarment material?
If the Obama administration’s representations about New START’s benign treatment of missile defense are true, what could possibly be the problem with telling the president to go back to the Russians with a codicil that says exactly what the State Department has been telling us? You know: “Mr. Medvedev, just sign this piece of paper that says there are absolutely no limitations on U.S. missile defense and that you have no idea what Mr. Lavrov had been drinking when he said otherwise.”
At a minimum, the Senate ought to demand searching testimony and every iota of the negotiation record. Our security would be important enough to demand that in any event. What could possibly be the reluctance to demand it in a case where the parties are already at odds and the administration has a sorry history of making misrepresentations and stonewalling the inquiries that inevitably follow?
There is no reason to rush New START. It is an unnecessary treaty, and that which is unnecessary to do is even less necessary to do hastily.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
“Never mind.” That, in a nutshell, is the White House’s new position on domestic oil exploration. In March, President Obama announced that he would allow — or at least entertain the possibility of — some new oil development off the Atlantic Coast and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. This week he reversed himself, saying such exploration is now off the table for at least five years.
President Barack Obama tours the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Fla. in 2009. (Photo by Gerald Herbert ./ AP)
Only the most black-hearted cynics among us would even contemplate the notion that Obama had his reelection prospects in, say, Florida in mind when he made his decision. Then again, some believed that Obama’s initial decision to consider expanded oil exploration was a political pander, too. So let’s assume sincerity all the way down the decision tree.
The real problem with the White House’s attitude toward oil, and energy generally, is how deeply ideological it is. Few presidents have talked a bigger game about pragmatism while pursuing a dogmatic agenda.
To be fair, the White House is hardly as radical as many of the greens descending on Cancun this week for the next round of fruitless climate-change talks. For instance, Kevin Anderson, director of Britain’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, recently authored a paper in which he argued that Western nations should use WWII-style rationing to simply halt economic growth for the next 20 years in order to curb greenhouse-gas production. There’s a winning political agenda!
Obama doesn’t advocate anything so stark, but that’s not necessarily a point in his favor. Radicals like Anderson are honest about the trade-offs between climate-change policies and economic growth. To listen to Obama, however, dismantling our fossil-fuel industries would be an unalloyed economic boon, generating countless lavish, rewarding green jobs that would replace those dirty, icky carbon-intensive jobs. It’s not just an argument for a free lunch; it’s an argument for a magic free lunch.
Obama admits he has no idea how to get to this Brigadoon-like green economy, and his energy secretary has conceded it will take quite a few Nobel Prize–worthy scientific breakthroughs to even get close. Details, details.
The only detail missing is the evidence. A friend of mine ran a painting service in college whose unofficial motto was “We may be slow, but we’re expensive.” That’s the story of Europe’s pursuit of green jobs. They’re inefficient, producing meager amounts of energy at high costs.
It wasn’t supposed to work like this. According to Al Gore, we were going to have an energy version of Moore’s Law. (Although it is not actually a scientific law, Moore’s Law refers to the trend of computers to get twice as powerful every 18 months.) Gore argued that solar cells and wind power would get drastically more efficient very quickly. Nothing like that has happened or is likely to happen, as the University of Manitoba’s Vaclav Smil has demonstrated at great length. Transitions from one form of energy to another, Smil writes, are “inherently protracted affairs” requiring “decades, not years.” And let’s remember that Gore once insisted that ethanol subsidies were a fast track to a green economy. He said, in effect, “Never mind” about that last month.
Obama won’t admit it, but his moratorium is simply supply-side rationing. America should deny itself economic growth despite the fact that it has potentially massive oil reserves. Democrats uniformly insist they are fixated on creating good jobs that cannot be shipped overseas. But they’re actually intent on killing oil-industry jobs, which by definition cannot be sent overseas and also pay twice the national average.
Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that the U.S. could be the Saudi Arabia of cleaner-burning natural gas, with an estimated 100-year supply of the stuff (and possibly more). And yet roadblocks to natural-gas development grow by the day. We could make realistic progress on reducing our carbon emissions if we set about replacing coal with natural gas. (At minimum we could and should phase out mountaintop-removal coal mining, a change that, among other things, would make natural gas more competitive.)
Of course, greens say that climate change trumps such considerations, and that’s a principled argument — flawed in my view but principled. But mainstream politicians and pundits with the courage to make the principled case for rationing are hard to come by.
I’d have a lot more respect for Obama if he came out and said, “You know all that stuff I said about doing everything possible to create good jobs here at home and get this economy moving again? Well, never mind.”
In this Nov. 4 file photo, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange takes his seat during a news conference at the Geneva press club in Geneva, Switzerland. (Martial Trezzini/AP Photo/Keystone/File)
It is understandable for the administration to underplay the significance of the WikiLeaks State Department cables. But while it is wise not to go into a public panic, it is delusional to think that this is merely embarrassing gossip and indiscretion. The leaks have done major damage.
First, quite specific damage to our war-fighting capacity. Take just one revelation among hundreds: The Yemeni president and deputy prime minister are quoted as saying that they're letting the United States bomb al-Qaeda in their country, while claiming that the bombing is the government's doing. Well, that cover is pretty well blown. And given the unpopularity of the Sanaa government's tenuous cooperation with us in the war against al-Qaeda, this will undoubtedly limit our freedom of action against its Yemeni branch, identified by the CIA as the most urgent terrorist threat to U.S. security.
Second, we've suffered a major blow to our ability to collect information. Talking candidly to a U.S. diplomat can now earn you headlines around the world, reprisals at home, or worse. Success in the war on terror depends on being trusted with other countries' secrets. Who's going to trust us now?
Third, this makes us look bad, very bad. But not in the way Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied in her cringe-inducing apology speech in which she scolded these awful leakers for having done a disservice to "the international community," and plaintively deplored how this hampers U.S. attempts to bring about a better world.
She sounded like a cross between an exasperated school principal and a Miss America contestant professing world peace to be her fondest wish. The problem is not that the purloined cables exposed U.S. hypocrisy or double-dealing. Good God, that's the essence of diplomacy. That's what we do; that's what everyone does. Hence the famous aphorism that a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.
Nothing new here. What is notable, indeed shocking, is the administration's torpid and passive response to the leaks. What's appalling is the helplessness of a superpower that not only cannot protect its own secrets but shows the world that if you violate its secrets - massively, wantonly and maliciously - there are no consequences.
The cat is out of the bag. The cables are public. Deploring them or trying to explain them away, a la Clinton, is merely pathetic. It's time to show a little steel. To show that such miscreants don't get to walk away.
At a Monday news conference, Attorney General Eric Holder assured the nation that his people are diligently looking into possible legal action against WikiLeaks. Where has Holder been? The WikiLeaks exposure of Afghan war documents occurred five months ago. Holder is looking now at possible indictments? This is a country where a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Months after the first leak, Justice's thousands of lawyers have yet to prepare charges against Julian Assange and his confederates?
Throw the Espionage Act of 1917 at them. And if that is not adequate, if that law has been too constrained and watered down by subsequent Supreme Court rulings, then why hasn't the administration prepared new legislation adapted to these kinds of Internet-age violations of U.S. security? It's not as if we didn't know more leaks were coming. And that more leaks are coming still.
Think creatively. The WikiLeaks document dump is sabotage, however quaint that term may seem. We are at war - a hot war in Afghanistan where six Americans were killed just this past Monday, and a shadowy world war where enemies from Yemen to Portland, Ore., are planning holy terror. Franklin Roosevelt had German saboteurs tried by military tribunal and shot. Assange has done more damage to the United States than all six of those Germans combined. Putting U.S. secrets on the Internet, a medium of universal dissemination new in human history, requires a reconceptualization of sabotage and espionage - and the laws to punish and prevent them. Where is the Justice Department?
And where are the intelligence agencies on which we lavish $80 billion a year? Assange has gone missing. Well, he's no cave-dwelling jihadi ascetic. Find him. Start with every five-star hotel in England and work your way down.
Want to prevent this from happening again? Let the world see a man who can't sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights, who fears the long arm of American justice. I'm not advocating that we bring out of retirement the KGB proxy who, on a London street, killed a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella tip. But it would be nice if people like Assange were made to worry every time they go out in the rain.
Much ado is being made that John Lennon has been gone for 30 years.
Had the Greatest Generation failed to crush such abject evil, the world would look much different today. Quite possibly, there would have been no Beatles' music, no Strawberry Fields Forever, no John Lennon to immortalize.
