Monday, February 07, 2011
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Dangerously underestimating the Muslim Brotherhood
By DAVID HOROVITZ
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/
06/02/2011
Analysis: The Islamists’ tactical absence from the protests has been widely misread as proof of their lack of ambition and marginality.
An Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood supporter holds a banner reading in Arabic "Martyrs for Islam", Sept. 22, 2006, Cairo.
The precedents are fresh and obvious. Yet the US government seems intent on ignoring them.
In Iran in 1979, leftist and other secular forces, central to the rising pressure that ousted the Shah, were duped and then outflanked by Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, who took power and have cemented it for 32 years since. The Islamists achieved this despite having constituted only the most marginal of forces just a couple of years earlier.
In the Palestinian territories in 2006, the US insisted on pressing ahead with elections that, in part because of Fatah’s corruption and disorganization, saw the underestimated Islamist Hamas terror group gain a parliamentary majority, which it then exploited to violently take over the Gaza Strip a year later.
In Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Iranianinspired, controlled and financed Hizbullah outmaneuvered the hapless prime minister Saad Hariri, to complete what amounts to a gradual, highly sophisticated takeover of the country.
In Turkey in recent years, confidence that such secular bulwarks as the army and the judiciary would prevent growing Islamic domination of the national agenda has proved increasingly misplaced, again via the subtle and protracted marginalization of these former establishment pillars. Turkey, champion of Hamas, nemesis of Israel, is now drifting inexorably out of the western orbit.
Washington’s apparent disinclination, as it now tries to influence the process of Hosni Mubarak’s replacement, to internalize the dangers highlighted by the Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and Turkey disasters, and thus do everything in its power to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood presiding over a similar process in Egypt, is incomprehensible.
And it could prove immensely threatening for Israel.
For all President Barack Obama’s declared intent to usher in a new partnership between the US and the Muslim world, what he termed “a new beginning” in his 2009 speech in Cairo, his diplomats did not deliver significant diplomatic pressure on Mubarak to reform his regime in the past two years. This was most starkly confirmed by December’s vigorously fraudulent parliamentary elections, which featured mass arrests of opposition supporters and the firm muzzling of critical media, and in which the Muslim Brotherhood’s 88-seat share of theprevious 454-member parliament descended to zero because of the regime’s machinations.
Washington evidently failed to foresee that embittered Egyptians might then resort to the massed protests of the past two weeks, and it abandoned Mubarak with alacrity as it scrambled to avoid being caught on the wrong side of a largely spontaneous people’s push for freedom and democracy.
But however one gauges the realpolitik involved in that dramatic recoil from a 30-year ally, the White House’s subsequent reported moves to legitimate Egypt’s Islamists – whose outlook conflicts utterly with the democratic agenda – make no sense, and suggest a frighteningly superficial understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood’s intentions and potential achievements.
Far from learning the lessons of the Islamists’ skilled subversion of other pro-democracy movements, working with potential leaders of an Egyptian transition to minimize the risk of such a process recurring, and making publicly plain that there will be no ongoing American alliance with an Egypt in which an unreformed Islamist movement has even a marginal role in government, the White House seems to be actively encouraging a transitional outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood.
National Security Council official Dan Shapiro told Jewish leaders on a conference call Wednesday that the administration would not deal with the Brotherhood. But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had two days earlier urged the inclusion of “important non-secular actors” in a more democratic Egypt – a statement that was widely seen as relating to the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Administration’s proposal for the immediate transfer of power calls for the transitional government to include the Muslim Brotherhood, the New York Times reported Friday.
As things stand, of course, the longer Mubarak hangs on, the greater the instability and the anger, and the more for the Islamists to build upon.
But why would the US assist them? The administration may in part be motivated by the president’s seeming conviction, as David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post last week, “that change is a matter for Egyptians, not Americans, and that too heavy an American hand would be counterproductive.”
In addition, numerous “experts” in both the US print and electronic media over the past week have been concertedly representing the Muslim Brotherhood as benign, hapless, not particularly popular, or all three of the above.
Far from benign, the Brotherhood is committed to death-cult jihad in the cause of widened Islamist rule, was the progenitor of Hamas and central to Islamist radicalization among the Palestinians. And its popularity was evident in that impressive 2005 parliamentary performance, achieved, it should be stressed, despite the Mubarak-orchestrated unfavorable circumstances.
Yet readers of the New York Times on Thursday, for instance, were treated to a page-leading op-ed article headlined “Egypt’s Bumbling Brotherhood,” which depicted the Islamists as a veritable Keystone Kops rabble of incompetents who have “botched every opportunity” for 83 years to revive Islamic power. Their purported 20-30 percent support, according to author Scott Atran, “is less a matter of true attachment than an accident of circumstances.”
Tony Blair’s warning that the Islamists could take the unfolding Egyptian revolution in the wrong direction was blithely dismissed by the author with the assertion that the Brotherhood’s “failure to support the initial uprising… has made it marginal to the spirit of revolt now spreading through the Arab world.”
On CNN that same day, scholars Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan, while not entirely deriding the notion of Islamist influence, nevertheless scathingly marginalized the threat, with Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, citing the centrality and dependability of the secular Egyptian military and judiciary as though Turkey’s seismic shift had not been unfolding before our very eyes in recent years.
Some commentators made much of the fact that the Brotherhood kept a low profile early in the uprising, interpreting this as evidence of disorganization and/or a lack of ambition. But the restraints have come off since then: Islamist rhetoric has become more prominent, and Brotherhood spokesmen are now ubiquitous in the media.
Experiences elsewhere have demonstrated the patience that Islamist organizations can exercise, building and gaining power and influence over years, over decades. Yet the absence of the Brotherhood from the protest frontlines for a matter of mere days – an astute tactic to ensure the watching world was not alienated and to maximize domestic support for the uprising – was apparently widely misread as proof of its irrelevance.
A much-cited – though not always accurately – Pew Research Center of Muslim attitudes, published only two months ago, indicates how frighteningly fertile the ground is for the Islamists in Egypt: 82% of Egyptian Muslims favor stoning people who commit adultery; 77% favor whipping/ cutting off of hands for theft and robbery; and 84% favor the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion, it found. By way of comparison, the comparable percentages in Turkey, even as it submits to growing Islamist influence, were just 16%, 13% and 5% respectively.
The same survey found that among Egyptian Muslims who see a struggle between those who want to modernize their country and Islamic fundamentalists, a striking 59% side with the fundamentalists and only 27% with the modernizers.
Pew also found that 54% of Egyptian Muslims believe suicide bombings can be justified often (8%), sometimes (12%) or rarely (34%), as against 46% who said they could never be justified.
The Pew poll did not ask a follow-up question about precisely when such bombings could be justified, but a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman from Cairo, also interviewed on CNN, offered an insight in this context.
Mohamed Morsy, who in the course of the conversation on Thursday refused to commit his movement to maintenance of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty or to recognition of Israel, and stressed its opposition to Zionism, insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the use of violence. Without missing a beat, however, he went on to say that what was going on in Palestine was “resistance.” And “resistance,” he said, “is acceptable by all mankind. It is the right of people to resist imperialism.”
In the New York Times “Bumbling Brotherhood” op-ed, another such spokesman, Dr. Essam el-Erian, was quoted as saying, “Israel must know that it is not welcome by the people in this region.” And writer Atran acknowledged that the Brotherhood “wants power,” and allowed that “its positions, notably its stance against Israel, are problematic for American interests.”
The current regional uprising has reemphasized Israel’s unique centrality to America as the region’s only truly dependable ally, because the partnership is not tactical or even strategic, but a function of shared interests and values that genuinely resonate throughout society. Why, then, Israel’s leaders must surely be asking their American counterparts in their current frantic consultations, would the US government help legitimate, on yet another of our newly unstable frontiers, a bleak, benighted movement that can be guaranteed to use any influence it accrues to undermine those shared interests and values?
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/
06/02/2011
Analysis: The Islamists’ tactical absence from the protests has been widely misread as proof of their lack of ambition and marginality.
An Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood supporter holds a banner reading in Arabic "Martyrs for Islam", Sept. 22, 2006, Cairo.The precedents are fresh and obvious. Yet the US government seems intent on ignoring them.
In Iran in 1979, leftist and other secular forces, central to the rising pressure that ousted the Shah, were duped and then outflanked by Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, who took power and have cemented it for 32 years since. The Islamists achieved this despite having constituted only the most marginal of forces just a couple of years earlier.
In the Palestinian territories in 2006, the US insisted on pressing ahead with elections that, in part because of Fatah’s corruption and disorganization, saw the underestimated Islamist Hamas terror group gain a parliamentary majority, which it then exploited to violently take over the Gaza Strip a year later.
In Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Iranianinspired, controlled and financed Hizbullah outmaneuvered the hapless prime minister Saad Hariri, to complete what amounts to a gradual, highly sophisticated takeover of the country.
In Turkey in recent years, confidence that such secular bulwarks as the army and the judiciary would prevent growing Islamic domination of the national agenda has proved increasingly misplaced, again via the subtle and protracted marginalization of these former establishment pillars. Turkey, champion of Hamas, nemesis of Israel, is now drifting inexorably out of the western orbit.
Washington’s apparent disinclination, as it now tries to influence the process of Hosni Mubarak’s replacement, to internalize the dangers highlighted by the Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and Turkey disasters, and thus do everything in its power to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood presiding over a similar process in Egypt, is incomprehensible.
And it could prove immensely threatening for Israel.
For all President Barack Obama’s declared intent to usher in a new partnership between the US and the Muslim world, what he termed “a new beginning” in his 2009 speech in Cairo, his diplomats did not deliver significant diplomatic pressure on Mubarak to reform his regime in the past two years. This was most starkly confirmed by December’s vigorously fraudulent parliamentary elections, which featured mass arrests of opposition supporters and the firm muzzling of critical media, and in which the Muslim Brotherhood’s 88-seat share of theprevious 454-member parliament descended to zero because of the regime’s machinations.
Washington evidently failed to foresee that embittered Egyptians might then resort to the massed protests of the past two weeks, and it abandoned Mubarak with alacrity as it scrambled to avoid being caught on the wrong side of a largely spontaneous people’s push for freedom and democracy.
But however one gauges the realpolitik involved in that dramatic recoil from a 30-year ally, the White House’s subsequent reported moves to legitimate Egypt’s Islamists – whose outlook conflicts utterly with the democratic agenda – make no sense, and suggest a frighteningly superficial understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood’s intentions and potential achievements.
Far from learning the lessons of the Islamists’ skilled subversion of other pro-democracy movements, working with potential leaders of an Egyptian transition to minimize the risk of such a process recurring, and making publicly plain that there will be no ongoing American alliance with an Egypt in which an unreformed Islamist movement has even a marginal role in government, the White House seems to be actively encouraging a transitional outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood.
National Security Council official Dan Shapiro told Jewish leaders on a conference call Wednesday that the administration would not deal with the Brotherhood. But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had two days earlier urged the inclusion of “important non-secular actors” in a more democratic Egypt – a statement that was widely seen as relating to the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Administration’s proposal for the immediate transfer of power calls for the transitional government to include the Muslim Brotherhood, the New York Times reported Friday.
As things stand, of course, the longer Mubarak hangs on, the greater the instability and the anger, and the more for the Islamists to build upon.
But why would the US assist them? The administration may in part be motivated by the president’s seeming conviction, as David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post last week, “that change is a matter for Egyptians, not Americans, and that too heavy an American hand would be counterproductive.”
In addition, numerous “experts” in both the US print and electronic media over the past week have been concertedly representing the Muslim Brotherhood as benign, hapless, not particularly popular, or all three of the above.
Far from benign, the Brotherhood is committed to death-cult jihad in the cause of widened Islamist rule, was the progenitor of Hamas and central to Islamist radicalization among the Palestinians. And its popularity was evident in that impressive 2005 parliamentary performance, achieved, it should be stressed, despite the Mubarak-orchestrated unfavorable circumstances.
Yet readers of the New York Times on Thursday, for instance, were treated to a page-leading op-ed article headlined “Egypt’s Bumbling Brotherhood,” which depicted the Islamists as a veritable Keystone Kops rabble of incompetents who have “botched every opportunity” for 83 years to revive Islamic power. Their purported 20-30 percent support, according to author Scott Atran, “is less a matter of true attachment than an accident of circumstances.”
Tony Blair’s warning that the Islamists could take the unfolding Egyptian revolution in the wrong direction was blithely dismissed by the author with the assertion that the Brotherhood’s “failure to support the initial uprising… has made it marginal to the spirit of revolt now spreading through the Arab world.”
On CNN that same day, scholars Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan, while not entirely deriding the notion of Islamist influence, nevertheless scathingly marginalized the threat, with Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, citing the centrality and dependability of the secular Egyptian military and judiciary as though Turkey’s seismic shift had not been unfolding before our very eyes in recent years.
Some commentators made much of the fact that the Brotherhood kept a low profile early in the uprising, interpreting this as evidence of disorganization and/or a lack of ambition. But the restraints have come off since then: Islamist rhetoric has become more prominent, and Brotherhood spokesmen are now ubiquitous in the media.
Experiences elsewhere have demonstrated the patience that Islamist organizations can exercise, building and gaining power and influence over years, over decades. Yet the absence of the Brotherhood from the protest frontlines for a matter of mere days – an astute tactic to ensure the watching world was not alienated and to maximize domestic support for the uprising – was apparently widely misread as proof of its irrelevance.
A much-cited – though not always accurately – Pew Research Center of Muslim attitudes, published only two months ago, indicates how frighteningly fertile the ground is for the Islamists in Egypt: 82% of Egyptian Muslims favor stoning people who commit adultery; 77% favor whipping/ cutting off of hands for theft and robbery; and 84% favor the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion, it found. By way of comparison, the comparable percentages in Turkey, even as it submits to growing Islamist influence, were just 16%, 13% and 5% respectively.
The same survey found that among Egyptian Muslims who see a struggle between those who want to modernize their country and Islamic fundamentalists, a striking 59% side with the fundamentalists and only 27% with the modernizers.
Pew also found that 54% of Egyptian Muslims believe suicide bombings can be justified often (8%), sometimes (12%) or rarely (34%), as against 46% who said they could never be justified.
The Pew poll did not ask a follow-up question about precisely when such bombings could be justified, but a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman from Cairo, also interviewed on CNN, offered an insight in this context.
Mohamed Morsy, who in the course of the conversation on Thursday refused to commit his movement to maintenance of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty or to recognition of Israel, and stressed its opposition to Zionism, insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the use of violence. Without missing a beat, however, he went on to say that what was going on in Palestine was “resistance.” And “resistance,” he said, “is acceptable by all mankind. It is the right of people to resist imperialism.”
In the New York Times “Bumbling Brotherhood” op-ed, another such spokesman, Dr. Essam el-Erian, was quoted as saying, “Israel must know that it is not welcome by the people in this region.” And writer Atran acknowledged that the Brotherhood “wants power,” and allowed that “its positions, notably its stance against Israel, are problematic for American interests.”
The current regional uprising has reemphasized Israel’s unique centrality to America as the region’s only truly dependable ally, because the partnership is not tactical or even strategic, but a function of shared interests and values that genuinely resonate throughout society. Why, then, Israel’s leaders must surely be asking their American counterparts in their current frantic consultations, would the US government help legitimate, on yet another of our newly unstable frontiers, a bleak, benighted movement that can be guaranteed to use any influence it accrues to undermine those shared interests and values?
Why 33 rounds makes sense in a defensive weapon
By Stephen Hunter
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Sleek, its lines rakishly tilted to boost the ergonomics that index grip placement to barrel, this automatic pistol has but one function: to eliminate human beings easily. That sinister intent is expressed most eloquently in the extended magazine that reaches far beneath the pistol grip, easily tripling the amount of ammunition available to the killer.
It's the Colt Super .38 automatic pistol, customized into a machine pistol by an underworld gunsmith so that Babyface Nelson could use it to kill an FBI agent outside Little Bohemia, Wis., in 1934. Maybe you saw the movie.
Even if you didn't, you can still see the point: There's nothing really new when it comes to guns. To the contrary, the extended magazine that Jared Loughner allegedly carried in his Glock 19 (pictured at right with extended magazine) the day he is accused of having fatally shot six people outside Tucson and wounding 13 others, and that President Obama is likely to suggest banning in an upcoming speech, may be traced way back.
During World War I, American armorers tried to adapt the 1903 Springfield into a counter-sniper "periscope rifle" by, among other things, installing a 25-round magazine. The Germans tried to turn the Luger pistol into a "trench broom" by devising a 32-round "snail drum" magazine (it fired the same round as the Glock 19). The Texas Ranger Frank Hamer carried a Remington Model 8 with an extended magazine in his hunt for Bonnie and Clyde in 1934. The Thompson submachine gun of World War II and the M-16 of Vietnam were improved by extending their magazine from 20 to 30 rounds. In 1957, the U.S. Army adopted the M-14 rifle, which was hardly more than an M-1 Garand rifle with an extended magazine. And who wouldn't want our soldiers, Marines and law officers to benefit from extended magazines?
Guns were the software of the 19th century; the most dynamic age of development was roughly 1870 to 1900, when the modern forms were perfected. Two primary operating systems emerged for handguns: the revolver, usually holding six cartridges and manipulated by the muscle energy of the hand, and the semiautomatic, harnessing the explosively released energy of the burning powder to cock and reload itself. Since then, design and engineering improvements have been not to lethality but to ease of maintenance and manufacture, or weight reduction. A Glock is "better" than a Luger because you don't need a PhD to take it apart, nor a fleet of machinists to produce the myriad pins, levers, springs and chunks of steel that make it go bang. Moreover, you can lose a Glock in a flood and find it six months later in the mud, and it still will shoot perfectly, while the Luger would have become a nice paperweight.
What nobody has been able to improve on since the 1870s is the cartridge. It is an extraordinary mechanism that safely stores volatile chemical energy until needed. It is cheap to manufacture, easy to transport and largely impervious to the elements.
What's often lost amid activists' carping is that the effect of the notorious extended magazine does little to improve the pistol's lethality except in extraordinary circumstances, such as Tucson. Neither Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, nor the alleged Fort Hood killer used extended magazines in their rampages. America's first gun mass murder, when Howard Unruh killed 13 people in 1949, was committed with a Luger.
In fact, the extended magazine actually vitiates the pistol's usefulness as a weapon for most needs, legitimate or illegitimate. The magazine destroys the pistol's essence; it is no longer concealable. Loughner allegedly wrapped the clumsy package in a coat for a short distance, but he could not have worn it in a belt or concealed it for an extended period. It had really ceased to be a pistol.
That's why extended magazines are rarely featured in crime - and that awkwardness spells out the magazine's primary legitimate usage. It may have some utility for competitive shooting by cutting down on reloading time, or for tactical police officers on raids, but for those who are not hard-core gun folks it's an ideal solution for home defense, which is probably why hundreds of thousands of Glocks have been sold in this country.
Particularly in rural Arizona, given the upsurge in border violence, it's likely that residents feel the need to defend themselves against drug predators, coyote gunmen or others. Yes, they can use semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, protected by the Second Amendment and unlikely to be banned by local law, but women generally don't care to put in the training needed to master them. Nor can the elderly handle them adeptly.
For them, the Glock with a 33-round magazine is the weapon of maximum utility. You can load it on Sunday and shoot it all month. (Nobody wants to reload a gun while being shot at.) It's light and easy to control. You don't have to carry it or conceal it; it's under the bed or in the drawer until needed. When the question arises of who needs an extended magazine, the answer is: the most defenseless of the defenseless.
Those who would ban extended magazines, will say that although hundreds of thousands are in circulation and thousands more will surely be sold before a ban is enacted, it will be worth it if it saves just one life. But the other half of that question must be asked, too: Is it worth it if it costs just one life?
Stephen Hunter, a former chief film critic of The Post, is the author of "Dead Zero."
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Sleek, its lines rakishly tilted to boost the ergonomics that index grip placement to barrel, this automatic pistol has but one function: to eliminate human beings easily. That sinister intent is expressed most eloquently in the extended magazine that reaches far beneath the pistol grip, easily tripling the amount of ammunition available to the killer.It's the Colt Super .38 automatic pistol, customized into a machine pistol by an underworld gunsmith so that Babyface Nelson could use it to kill an FBI agent outside Little Bohemia, Wis., in 1934. Maybe you saw the movie.
Even if you didn't, you can still see the point: There's nothing really new when it comes to guns. To the contrary, the extended magazine that Jared Loughner allegedly carried in his Glock 19 (pictured at right with extended magazine) the day he is accused of having fatally shot six people outside Tucson and wounding 13 others, and that President Obama is likely to suggest banning in an upcoming speech, may be traced way back.
During World War I, American armorers tried to adapt the 1903 Springfield into a counter-sniper "periscope rifle" by, among other things, installing a 25-round magazine. The Germans tried to turn the Luger pistol into a "trench broom" by devising a 32-round "snail drum" magazine (it fired the same round as the Glock 19). The Texas Ranger Frank Hamer carried a Remington Model 8 with an extended magazine in his hunt for Bonnie and Clyde in 1934. The Thompson submachine gun of World War II and the M-16 of Vietnam were improved by extending their magazine from 20 to 30 rounds. In 1957, the U.S. Army adopted the M-14 rifle, which was hardly more than an M-1 Garand rifle with an extended magazine. And who wouldn't want our soldiers, Marines and law officers to benefit from extended magazines?
Guns were the software of the 19th century; the most dynamic age of development was roughly 1870 to 1900, when the modern forms were perfected. Two primary operating systems emerged for handguns: the revolver, usually holding six cartridges and manipulated by the muscle energy of the hand, and the semiautomatic, harnessing the explosively released energy of the burning powder to cock and reload itself. Since then, design and engineering improvements have been not to lethality but to ease of maintenance and manufacture, or weight reduction. A Glock is "better" than a Luger because you don't need a PhD to take it apart, nor a fleet of machinists to produce the myriad pins, levers, springs and chunks of steel that make it go bang. Moreover, you can lose a Glock in a flood and find it six months later in the mud, and it still will shoot perfectly, while the Luger would have become a nice paperweight.
What nobody has been able to improve on since the 1870s is the cartridge. It is an extraordinary mechanism that safely stores volatile chemical energy until needed. It is cheap to manufacture, easy to transport and largely impervious to the elements.
What's often lost amid activists' carping is that the effect of the notorious extended magazine does little to improve the pistol's lethality except in extraordinary circumstances, such as Tucson. Neither Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, nor the alleged Fort Hood killer used extended magazines in their rampages. America's first gun mass murder, when Howard Unruh killed 13 people in 1949, was committed with a Luger.
In fact, the extended magazine actually vitiates the pistol's usefulness as a weapon for most needs, legitimate or illegitimate. The magazine destroys the pistol's essence; it is no longer concealable. Loughner allegedly wrapped the clumsy package in a coat for a short distance, but he could not have worn it in a belt or concealed it for an extended period. It had really ceased to be a pistol.
That's why extended magazines are rarely featured in crime - and that awkwardness spells out the magazine's primary legitimate usage. It may have some utility for competitive shooting by cutting down on reloading time, or for tactical police officers on raids, but for those who are not hard-core gun folks it's an ideal solution for home defense, which is probably why hundreds of thousands of Glocks have been sold in this country.
Particularly in rural Arizona, given the upsurge in border violence, it's likely that residents feel the need to defend themselves against drug predators, coyote gunmen or others. Yes, they can use semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, protected by the Second Amendment and unlikely to be banned by local law, but women generally don't care to put in the training needed to master them. Nor can the elderly handle them adeptly.
For them, the Glock with a 33-round magazine is the weapon of maximum utility. You can load it on Sunday and shoot it all month. (Nobody wants to reload a gun while being shot at.) It's light and easy to control. You don't have to carry it or conceal it; it's under the bed or in the drawer until needed. When the question arises of who needs an extended magazine, the answer is: the most defenseless of the defenseless.
Those who would ban extended magazines, will say that although hundreds of thousands are in circulation and thousands more will surely be sold before a ban is enacted, it will be worth it if it saves just one life. But the other half of that question must be asked, too: Is it worth it if it costs just one life?
Stephen Hunter, a former chief film critic of The Post, is the author of "Dead Zero."
Reagan vs. the Progressives
By Paul Kengor on 2.4.11 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
23 Oct 1947, Washington, DC, USA --- Ronald Reagan testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
America this week marks the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth. Born February 6, 1911, Reagan lived a remarkable life, with a presidency of utmost consequence, winning, among other things, 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984, plus a Cold War against a truly Evil Empire. Oh, yes, he also won a long battle -- less recognized -- against progressives. It was a crucial battle -- even less understood -- that began for Reagan, with fascinating twists, back in Hollywood. The Reagan centennial is a golden opportunity to consider what happened there and to draw lessons for what America faces with progressives today.
In the 1980s, the progressives Reagan faced called themselves "liberals." In the 1940s, when Reagan first encountered them, as a liberal himself, they weren't shy about calling themselves progressives. More telling, Reagan was shocked to find that many of those spearheading "progressive" groups and causes weren't really progressives but were communists exploiting progressives, their labels, and their organizations. Understanding this is no mere historical curiosity; no, for Reagan, it was a life-changing wake-up call, initiating a personal-political transformation that, ultimately, and dramatically, led to the presidency and victory in the Cold War. That path included Reagan handing the progressives their biggest setback since the founding of their movement -- a setback they're striving to "change" and "reform" right now.
Before considering Reagan's conversion, it's key to understand what was happening with Hollywood's progressives in this period. Many "progressives," especially following the surge by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the Great Depression, were actually closet communists lifting the progressive label to dupe progressives. This was done quite cynically and successfully, whether ordered and orchestrated from CPUSA headquarters in New York, from CPUSA's branch office in Los Angeles, or from Comintern headquarters in Moscow. It's fascinating, and would be hilarious if not so sad, that the Soviets even referred to Joe Stalin as a progressive. The Soviet Ministry of Education framed Stalin as "the great leader of the Soviet people and of all progressive mankind."
Similarly, in Washington, some self-proclaimed "progressives" serving President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were actually communists penetrating and influencing the administration: Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Harold Glasser, Alger Hiss. Even FDR's most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins, may have been a closet communist masquerading as a progressive. That's the conclusion of some experts who have dissected the Venona transcripts.
The communist pilfering of the "progressive" label was evident in a major Congressional report in December 1961, the most in-depth investigation of communist front groups ever done. Titled, "Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications," the investigation went back to the early 20th century. Probably the most popular title listing in the 994-page cumulative index is the word "progressive."
That brings me to Hollywood, where the exploitation of the progressive label was especially rich, and where communists truly desired to hijack the motion-picture industry. Progressives would be central to that plan.
Consider the group, Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which was thoroughly penetrated. One liberal actor exploited was the great Gene Kelly, a pleasant, patriotic American. Kelly was enlisted as a progressive prop to stand in front of a giant American flag and lead the Pledge of Allegiance. He rallied the progressives in reverential renditions of "America." In one sorry display, the all-American boy was cast to provide the introduction at PCA's initial meeting in Los Angeles on February 11, 1947. The evening's theme was established before Kelly spoke, as a large screen flashed photographs of bombed Hiroshima, with rolling footage of the dead and maimed. That evening, PCA board members would be elected. On the ballot were secret hard-line Hollywood communists like John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, as well as non-communist liberals like Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Lena Horne, and Melvyn Douglas.
Take another sorry case, where Katharine Hepburn was the opening speaker at a May 19, 1947 Progressive Party Rally at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Draped in a long, flame-red dress, the liberal New Englander read a speech scripted by Trumbo -- and so admired by People's Daily World that it reprinted the entire text.
This manipulation was old hat for the comrades, who found no shortage of progressives to do the bidding of Stalin.
Alas, into this waded an actor named Ronald Reagan, mid-30s, politically passionate. As a committed FDR liberal, Reagan was susceptible to the conniving of communists. He was targeted immediately after World War II, a quick victim of several front-groups. He was very "naïve," Reagan admitted later, "blindly and busily" joining "every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world." He was "an active" but unwitting participant "in what now and then turned out to be communist causes." The deceived Reagan assumed these folks were "liberals, and being liberals ourselves, [we] bedded down with them."
Most redeeming about Ronald Reagan is that when he learned, he really learned. By October 1947, he was testifying before Congress on communist infiltration. Later still, he would explain: "The communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple. It was merely to take over the motion picture business … [as] a grand world-wide propaganda base." Before TV and mass production of foreign films, said Reagan, American movies dominated 95% of the world's screens, with an audience of "500,000,000 souls" around the globe. "Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a communist gristmill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies."
In Reagan's view, those were the stakes, prodded by a "master scheme" to "line up big-name dupes to collect money and create prestige." Progressives were central to the plan. Even at the height of party membership, CPUSA never had more than about 100,000 members; it couldn't advance without progressives.
Americans needed to wake up, as had Reagan.
Of course, the rest is history. Reagan began a historic march to the presidency that, by the 1980s, threatened to squash the progressive long march that preceded him. He had splendid success, but one thing about progressives -- which Reagan understood -- is their patient ability to work slowly, incrementally, with victories not necessarily at the ballot box but in other influential facets of American life, like education. They waited and waited, until, in November 2008, enough oblivious Americans, especially moderates and independents, were duped like Reagan once had been -- and voted into office a progressive-in-chief campaigning under the banner of "change." Some things never change.
We must learn what Ronald Reagan learned: The progressive left isn't going away, ever-awaiting the next step in the evolutionary chain. It's an ebb and flow, but always creeping toward centralization; or, what Reagan called "creeping socialism." We must awaken, providing progressives with more setbacks. Most of all, we must not to be fooled, misled, duped, certainly not more than once. Ronald Reagan's life, and path, is a history and life lesson for all of us.
Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
23 Oct 1947, Washington, DC, USA --- Ronald Reagan testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBISAmerica this week marks the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth. Born February 6, 1911, Reagan lived a remarkable life, with a presidency of utmost consequence, winning, among other things, 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984, plus a Cold War against a truly Evil Empire. Oh, yes, he also won a long battle -- less recognized -- against progressives. It was a crucial battle -- even less understood -- that began for Reagan, with fascinating twists, back in Hollywood. The Reagan centennial is a golden opportunity to consider what happened there and to draw lessons for what America faces with progressives today.
In the 1980s, the progressives Reagan faced called themselves "liberals." In the 1940s, when Reagan first encountered them, as a liberal himself, they weren't shy about calling themselves progressives. More telling, Reagan was shocked to find that many of those spearheading "progressive" groups and causes weren't really progressives but were communists exploiting progressives, their labels, and their organizations. Understanding this is no mere historical curiosity; no, for Reagan, it was a life-changing wake-up call, initiating a personal-political transformation that, ultimately, and dramatically, led to the presidency and victory in the Cold War. That path included Reagan handing the progressives their biggest setback since the founding of their movement -- a setback they're striving to "change" and "reform" right now.
Before considering Reagan's conversion, it's key to understand what was happening with Hollywood's progressives in this period. Many "progressives," especially following the surge by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the Great Depression, were actually closet communists lifting the progressive label to dupe progressives. This was done quite cynically and successfully, whether ordered and orchestrated from CPUSA headquarters in New York, from CPUSA's branch office in Los Angeles, or from Comintern headquarters in Moscow. It's fascinating, and would be hilarious if not so sad, that the Soviets even referred to Joe Stalin as a progressive. The Soviet Ministry of Education framed Stalin as "the great leader of the Soviet people and of all progressive mankind."
Similarly, in Washington, some self-proclaimed "progressives" serving President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were actually communists penetrating and influencing the administration: Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Harold Glasser, Alger Hiss. Even FDR's most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins, may have been a closet communist masquerading as a progressive. That's the conclusion of some experts who have dissected the Venona transcripts.
The communist pilfering of the "progressive" label was evident in a major Congressional report in December 1961, the most in-depth investigation of communist front groups ever done. Titled, "Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications," the investigation went back to the early 20th century. Probably the most popular title listing in the 994-page cumulative index is the word "progressive."
That brings me to Hollywood, where the exploitation of the progressive label was especially rich, and where communists truly desired to hijack the motion-picture industry. Progressives would be central to that plan.
Consider the group, Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which was thoroughly penetrated. One liberal actor exploited was the great Gene Kelly, a pleasant, patriotic American. Kelly was enlisted as a progressive prop to stand in front of a giant American flag and lead the Pledge of Allegiance. He rallied the progressives in reverential renditions of "America." In one sorry display, the all-American boy was cast to provide the introduction at PCA's initial meeting in Los Angeles on February 11, 1947. The evening's theme was established before Kelly spoke, as a large screen flashed photographs of bombed Hiroshima, with rolling footage of the dead and maimed. That evening, PCA board members would be elected. On the ballot were secret hard-line Hollywood communists like John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, as well as non-communist liberals like Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Lena Horne, and Melvyn Douglas.
Take another sorry case, where Katharine Hepburn was the opening speaker at a May 19, 1947 Progressive Party Rally at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Draped in a long, flame-red dress, the liberal New Englander read a speech scripted by Trumbo -- and so admired by People's Daily World that it reprinted the entire text.
This manipulation was old hat for the comrades, who found no shortage of progressives to do the bidding of Stalin.
Alas, into this waded an actor named Ronald Reagan, mid-30s, politically passionate. As a committed FDR liberal, Reagan was susceptible to the conniving of communists. He was targeted immediately after World War II, a quick victim of several front-groups. He was very "naïve," Reagan admitted later, "blindly and busily" joining "every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world." He was "an active" but unwitting participant "in what now and then turned out to be communist causes." The deceived Reagan assumed these folks were "liberals, and being liberals ourselves, [we] bedded down with them."
Most redeeming about Ronald Reagan is that when he learned, he really learned. By October 1947, he was testifying before Congress on communist infiltration. Later still, he would explain: "The communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple. It was merely to take over the motion picture business … [as] a grand world-wide propaganda base." Before TV and mass production of foreign films, said Reagan, American movies dominated 95% of the world's screens, with an audience of "500,000,000 souls" around the globe. "Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a communist gristmill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies."
In Reagan's view, those were the stakes, prodded by a "master scheme" to "line up big-name dupes to collect money and create prestige." Progressives were central to the plan. Even at the height of party membership, CPUSA never had more than about 100,000 members; it couldn't advance without progressives.
Americans needed to wake up, as had Reagan.
Of course, the rest is history. Reagan began a historic march to the presidency that, by the 1980s, threatened to squash the progressive long march that preceded him. He had splendid success, but one thing about progressives -- which Reagan understood -- is their patient ability to work slowly, incrementally, with victories not necessarily at the ballot box but in other influential facets of American life, like education. They waited and waited, until, in November 2008, enough oblivious Americans, especially moderates and independents, were duped like Reagan once had been -- and voted into office a progressive-in-chief campaigning under the banner of "change." Some things never change.
We must learn what Ronald Reagan learned: The progressive left isn't going away, ever-awaiting the next step in the evolutionary chain. It's an ebb and flow, but always creeping toward centralization; or, what Reagan called "creeping socialism." We must awaken, providing progressives with more setbacks. Most of all, we must not to be fooled, misled, duped, certainly not more than once. Ronald Reagan's life, and path, is a history and life lesson for all of us.
Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Reagan Reclaimed
By Steven F. Hayward
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 4, 2011 4:00 A.M
From the February 7, 2011, issue of National Review.
The news that President Obama decided to read a biography of Ronald Reagan during his Christmas holiday in Hawaii might be taken as a sign that Reagan’s triumph over liberals is complete. Can anyone imagine John F. Kennedy admitting he was reading a biography of Calvin Coolidge, or Jimmy Carter taking in lessons from Dwight Eisenhower? This represents the culmination of a remarkable turnabout in Reagan’s reputation, most notably among liberals, who might have been expected to do to Reagan what an earlier generation of partisan historians did to Coolidge. Instead, we have seen a raft of books from liberal grandees such as Richard Reeves and Sean Wilentz giving Reagan his due.
But while conservatives should pocket these unexpected concessions, they should also note that the admiration of Reagan in the media-academic complex is highly qualified and mostly limited to his role in the Cold War. (And even this story they get wrong.) About the domestic-policy Reagan, liberals are currently engaging in a clever two-step — either excoriating Reagan with recycled 1980s clichés (favors the rich, hates the poor and minorities, reckless deregulation, and so forth), or making him out to be a crypto-liberal who tacitly set out to shore up the welfare state while cloaking himself in anti-big-government rhetoric. Ever so slowly, liberals are attempting a subtle revisionism. This revisionism is alarming not simply as an offense against historical accuracy, but also because the Liberal Revised Standard Version of Reagan will be used against the Tea Party and congressional Republicans in the months and years to come. We can expect to hear (and have already heard once or twice) that even Reagan didn’t attack entitlements the way Paul Ryan and today’s radical House Republicans propose to do.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Left has pulled off a historical Brinks job on a Republican whose achievements and popularity could not be destroyed with a direct attack. A hundred years ago, the leading Progressives appropriated Abraham Lincoln for their cause, even as they explicitly attacked Lincoln’s (and the Founders’) central political philosophy of natural rights. It culminated in the chutzpah of Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration in 1929 that “it is time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own,” and in the early 1990s with New York’s ultra-liberal governor, Mario Cuomo, ostentatiously embracing Lincoln because “he’s reassuring to politicians like me.”
The liberal revision of Reagan has been unfolding for a while now, and at the center of it is the effort to separate him from his conservative beliefs. Joshua Green wrote in The Washington Monthly in January 2003 that “many of [Reagan’s] actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.” He raised taxes! He talked to the Soviets and reached arms agreements! Green’s article was provocatively adorned with a cartoon rendering of Reagan as FDR, complete with upturned cigarette holder. The late John Patrick Diggins, an unorthodox liberal who was a close friend of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s, argued in his 2007 book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History that Reagan deserves to be considered one of the four greatest American presidents, alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. His Upper West Side neighbors are still picking up their jaws off the floor. However, Diggins makes Reagan into a crypto-liberal: “Far from being a conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo.…Reagan’s relation to liberalism may illuminate modern America more than his relation to conservatism.”
Jonathan Rauch offers the most complete case for Reagan as a crypto-liberal pragmatist. In a 2009 National Journal article entitled “Republicans Have Reagan All Wrong,” Rauch asserts that Reagan was not a Reaganite. He builds a purely circumstantial case. Reagan cut Washington’s share of GDP by only 1 percent, raised taxes several times, ran up huge deficits, and backed away from cutting Social Security and Medicare. The last item on Rauch’s list — entitlements — is his strongest. In 1986 Reagan abandoned Senate Republicans after they had passed cuts to Social Security and Medicare with great difficulty, and Rauch takes this as a sign that Reagan never wanted to cut the welfare state in any serious way. This overlooks that fact that Reagan did make a run at Social Security in 1981, got his head handed to him, and several months later had to be talked out of making a prime-time TV address to the nation to push the idea again. He expressed disappointment in his diary in 1983 when the Greenspan commission on Social Security came in with a conventional tax-hiking plan to keep the system alive. Under pressure in the 1984 campaign, Reagan promised not to touch Social Security, and part of his decision not to back Senate Republicans in 1986 stemmed from the simple belief that he ought to live up to that promise.
Reagan said after leaving office that his largest disappointment was not being able to control spending growth more effectively, and his budget record might have been better if he’d gotten more GOP support on Capitol Hill for several of his vetoes of big spending bills. He vetoed pork-laden water and transportation bills in 1987, but was overridden by a handful of GOP defectors. Reagan expressed scorn for timid Hill Republicans in his diary, often complaining more about them — “We had rabbits when we needed tigers” — than about Democrats. (One Republican who especially disappointed him on spending restraint was first-term senator Mitch McConnell.)
There is something passing strange about the way in which liberals now claim to understand Reagan better than today’s conservatives do, yet somehow were unable to make him out when he was right in front of them. And nothing belies the current liberal revisionism more than the trope that the Reagan years were a model of comity compared with today’s polarized climate. To be sure, Reagan could clink glasses and swap Irish jokes with Tip O’Neill, but they often argued bluntly in public and in private. We have forgotten, for example, this O’Neill attack on Reagan: “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.”
It should never be forgotten that the Left hated Reagan just as lustily as they hated George W. Bush, and with some of the same venomous affectations, such as the reductio ad Hitlerum. The key difference is that in Reagan’s years there was no Internet with which to magnify these derangements, and the 24-hour cable-news cycle was in its infancy. But the signs were certainly abundant. In 1982, the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London held a vote for the most hated people of all time, with the result being: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula. Democratic congressman William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was trying to replace “the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” A desperate Jimmy Carter charged that Reagan was engaging in “stirrings of hate” in the 1980 campaign. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (now a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.” In The Nation, Alan Wolfe wrote: “The United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”
And in discussing Reagan’s greatest acknowledged achievement — ending the Cold War — liberals conveniently omit that they opposed him at every turn. Who can forget the relentless scorn heaped on Reagan for the “evil empire” speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative? Historian Henry Steele Commager said the “evil empire” speech “was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.” “What is the world to think,” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote, “when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology?”
There’s a larger point here for which liberals need to be held to account. The substantive criticism liberals made of Reagan’s foreign policy was that his confrontational approach to the Soviet Union would reinforce the Kremlin’s hard-line “hawks,” undermine liberal reformers, and maybe even lead to war. Reagan and his key aides (especially his second national-security adviser, William Clark) perceived the opposite to be the case, and were vindicated when the confused reformer Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Liberals who now laud Reagan’s Cold War statecraft should be made to explain why they were wrong and Reagan right, for it gets directly to liberalism’s sentimental view of human affairs — which affects current policy, from the War on Terror to crime and the welfare state. More broadly, they should be made to explain why they appreciate the virtues of conservatives only after they are gone from the scene (as we have also seen with Goldwater, Eisenhower, and even Nixon to some extent).
To be sure, Reagan’s political practices were idiosyncratic, and his conservatism was not fully recognized by many on the right who wish to emulate him today. This conservatism was not the “stand athwart history” kind, as is evident in Reagan’s love for a quotation that drives many conservative intellectuals slightly batty. As George Will put it, “[Reagan] is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Any time, any place, that is nonsense.”
Reagan’s invocation of Paine, as well as his quotation of John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon, expresses the core of his optimism and belief in the dynamism of American society, a dynamism that can have unconservative effects. But he explained his use of Paine in conservative terms way back in his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? “The classic liberal,” Reagan wrote, “used to be the man who believed the individual was, and should be forever, the master of his destiny. That is now the conservative position. The liberal used to believe in freedom under law. He now takes the ancient feudal position that power is everything. He believes in a stronger and stronger central government, in the philosophy that control is better than freedom. The conservative now quotes Thomas Paine, a longtime refuge of the liberals: ‘Government is a necessary evil; let us have as little of it as possible.’”
Reagan’s mixture of the revolutionary or progressive Paine with the Jeffersonian limited-government Paine is a potent formula in American politics that liberals have abandoned. Regardless of the tensions in Reagan’s version, it exposed liberalism as a pessimistic and increasingly reactionary faction. It was telling that the Democratic party didn’t play FDR’s anthem “Happy Days Are Here Again” at its 1984 convention, not wanting to credit Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme. Rep. Richard Gephardt expressed their mood when he said, “It’s getting closer and closer to midnight.”
Above all, Reagan’s conservatism was rooted in constitutionalism, which is the aspect most closely connecting it with the Tea Party movement and the conservative challenge to Obama. Reagan understood that many of our problems descended from the decay of the Constitution’s restraints on the centralization of power in Washington. In one of his private letters, from 1979, Reagan wrote to a friend that “the permanent structure of our government with its power to pass regulations has eroded if not in effect repealed portions of our Constitution.”
The story of the Reagan administration’s attempts to revive constitutional limits on government power is too complicated to summarize briefly, but one aspect of it deserves notice today: the second-term initiative of Attorney General Edwin Meese to start a controversy over originalism and the Constitution. In launching this controversy in such a high-profile manner, Meese reopened a fundamental quarrel that liberals had thought was more or less closed. No prominent Republican had seriously advanced such an argument since Calvin Coolidge. The public fight Meese started over original intent, legal scholar Johnathan O’Neill wrote in 2005, “constituted the most direct constitutional debate between the executive branch and the Court since the New Deal.” Meese and his Justice Department compatriots were attempting nothing less than to wrest the Constitution away from the legal elite and return it to the people. The reaction of not only the usual suspects such as the New York Times editorial page but also two sitting Supreme Court justices and many prominent voices in the legal academy ensured that this issue would not wilt like a spring flower, and indeed it is still with us. It was a de facto declaration of war on the Left, and it contributed to the defeat of Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in 1987. It looks in retrospect to be one of the most significant initiatives of the Reagan years, especially given the emergence of the Tea Party movement.
Mark Twain is credited with saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Reagan’s ascent coincided with the “tax revolt” of the late 1970s, and the tax revolt looks similar to today’s Tea Party protests. Liberals attacked the tax revolt in the same terms they use to attack today’s Tea Party. Sen. George McGovern worried that the tax revolt had “undertones of racism.” Byron Dorgan, then North Dakota tax commissioner and later a senator, said that a vote for California’s Proposition 13 (a property-tax cap the state’s voters enacted in 1978) was “a vote for latent prejudice.” The Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson said the measure was an “exhibition of widespread public mean-spiritedness.”
In the 1970s, Reagan spoke often of a populist “prairie fire” of resistance to big government, and he saw the tax revolt as the match igniting the fire that swept him to office in 1980. Yet the Tea Party makes the “prairie fire” of the tax revolt look like a small campfire by comparison. It is distinct from and superior to the tax revolt precisely to the extent that it represents a populist constitutional movement, challenging out-of-control government in a way that goes beyond arguments about tax rates.
It is exactly on this point that Reagan’s far-sightedness and his legacy become relevant. During the 1980s, there was little popular ferment behind Reagan and Meese’s campaign to revive constitutional originalism, but they pursued it anyway. When today’s liberals disingenuously invoke Reagan against the Tea Party or Republican attempts in Congress to restrain the government, Reagan’s constitutional views should be thrown in their faces. The tea partiers might well be considered Reagan’s children.
Several pundits suggested that the 1994 election, which delivered the first GOP House majority in 40 years, should be thought of as “Reagan’s third landslide.” If so, November 2 of last year could be regarded as his fourth. And if conservatives remain faithful to Ronald Reagan’s principles and practices, it won’t be the last. Happy 100th birthday, Mr. President.
— Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980–1989. This article originally appeared in the February 7, 2011, issue of National Review.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 4, 2011 4:00 A.M
From the February 7, 2011, issue of National Review.
The news that President Obama decided to read a biography of Ronald Reagan during his Christmas holiday in Hawaii might be taken as a sign that Reagan’s triumph over liberals is complete. Can anyone imagine John F. Kennedy admitting he was reading a biography of Calvin Coolidge, or Jimmy Carter taking in lessons from Dwight Eisenhower? This represents the culmination of a remarkable turnabout in Reagan’s reputation, most notably among liberals, who might have been expected to do to Reagan what an earlier generation of partisan historians did to Coolidge. Instead, we have seen a raft of books from liberal grandees such as Richard Reeves and Sean Wilentz giving Reagan his due.
But while conservatives should pocket these unexpected concessions, they should also note that the admiration of Reagan in the media-academic complex is highly qualified and mostly limited to his role in the Cold War. (And even this story they get wrong.) About the domestic-policy Reagan, liberals are currently engaging in a clever two-step — either excoriating Reagan with recycled 1980s clichés (favors the rich, hates the poor and minorities, reckless deregulation, and so forth), or making him out to be a crypto-liberal who tacitly set out to shore up the welfare state while cloaking himself in anti-big-government rhetoric. Ever so slowly, liberals are attempting a subtle revisionism. This revisionism is alarming not simply as an offense against historical accuracy, but also because the Liberal Revised Standard Version of Reagan will be used against the Tea Party and congressional Republicans in the months and years to come. We can expect to hear (and have already heard once or twice) that even Reagan didn’t attack entitlements the way Paul Ryan and today’s radical House Republicans propose to do.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Left has pulled off a historical Brinks job on a Republican whose achievements and popularity could not be destroyed with a direct attack. A hundred years ago, the leading Progressives appropriated Abraham Lincoln for their cause, even as they explicitly attacked Lincoln’s (and the Founders’) central political philosophy of natural rights. It culminated in the chutzpah of Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration in 1929 that “it is time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own,” and in the early 1990s with New York’s ultra-liberal governor, Mario Cuomo, ostentatiously embracing Lincoln because “he’s reassuring to politicians like me.”
The liberal revision of Reagan has been unfolding for a while now, and at the center of it is the effort to separate him from his conservative beliefs. Joshua Green wrote in The Washington Monthly in January 2003 that “many of [Reagan’s] actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.” He raised taxes! He talked to the Soviets and reached arms agreements! Green’s article was provocatively adorned with a cartoon rendering of Reagan as FDR, complete with upturned cigarette holder. The late John Patrick Diggins, an unorthodox liberal who was a close friend of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s, argued in his 2007 book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History that Reagan deserves to be considered one of the four greatest American presidents, alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. His Upper West Side neighbors are still picking up their jaws off the floor. However, Diggins makes Reagan into a crypto-liberal: “Far from being a conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo.…Reagan’s relation to liberalism may illuminate modern America more than his relation to conservatism.”Jonathan Rauch offers the most complete case for Reagan as a crypto-liberal pragmatist. In a 2009 National Journal article entitled “Republicans Have Reagan All Wrong,” Rauch asserts that Reagan was not a Reaganite. He builds a purely circumstantial case. Reagan cut Washington’s share of GDP by only 1 percent, raised taxes several times, ran up huge deficits, and backed away from cutting Social Security and Medicare. The last item on Rauch’s list — entitlements — is his strongest. In 1986 Reagan abandoned Senate Republicans after they had passed cuts to Social Security and Medicare with great difficulty, and Rauch takes this as a sign that Reagan never wanted to cut the welfare state in any serious way. This overlooks that fact that Reagan did make a run at Social Security in 1981, got his head handed to him, and several months later had to be talked out of making a prime-time TV address to the nation to push the idea again. He expressed disappointment in his diary in 1983 when the Greenspan commission on Social Security came in with a conventional tax-hiking plan to keep the system alive. Under pressure in the 1984 campaign, Reagan promised not to touch Social Security, and part of his decision not to back Senate Republicans in 1986 stemmed from the simple belief that he ought to live up to that promise.
Reagan said after leaving office that his largest disappointment was not being able to control spending growth more effectively, and his budget record might have been better if he’d gotten more GOP support on Capitol Hill for several of his vetoes of big spending bills. He vetoed pork-laden water and transportation bills in 1987, but was overridden by a handful of GOP defectors. Reagan expressed scorn for timid Hill Republicans in his diary, often complaining more about them — “We had rabbits when we needed tigers” — than about Democrats. (One Republican who especially disappointed him on spending restraint was first-term senator Mitch McConnell.)
There is something passing strange about the way in which liberals now claim to understand Reagan better than today’s conservatives do, yet somehow were unable to make him out when he was right in front of them. And nothing belies the current liberal revisionism more than the trope that the Reagan years were a model of comity compared with today’s polarized climate. To be sure, Reagan could clink glasses and swap Irish jokes with Tip O’Neill, but they often argued bluntly in public and in private. We have forgotten, for example, this O’Neill attack on Reagan: “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.”
It should never be forgotten that the Left hated Reagan just as lustily as they hated George W. Bush, and with some of the same venomous affectations, such as the reductio ad Hitlerum. The key difference is that in Reagan’s years there was no Internet with which to magnify these derangements, and the 24-hour cable-news cycle was in its infancy. But the signs were certainly abundant. In 1982, the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London held a vote for the most hated people of all time, with the result being: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula. Democratic congressman William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was trying to replace “the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” A desperate Jimmy Carter charged that Reagan was engaging in “stirrings of hate” in the 1980 campaign. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (now a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.” In The Nation, Alan Wolfe wrote: “The United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”
And in discussing Reagan’s greatest acknowledged achievement — ending the Cold War — liberals conveniently omit that they opposed him at every turn. Who can forget the relentless scorn heaped on Reagan for the “evil empire” speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative? Historian Henry Steele Commager said the “evil empire” speech “was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.” “What is the world to think,” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote, “when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology?”
There’s a larger point here for which liberals need to be held to account. The substantive criticism liberals made of Reagan’s foreign policy was that his confrontational approach to the Soviet Union would reinforce the Kremlin’s hard-line “hawks,” undermine liberal reformers, and maybe even lead to war. Reagan and his key aides (especially his second national-security adviser, William Clark) perceived the opposite to be the case, and were vindicated when the confused reformer Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Liberals who now laud Reagan’s Cold War statecraft should be made to explain why they were wrong and Reagan right, for it gets directly to liberalism’s sentimental view of human affairs — which affects current policy, from the War on Terror to crime and the welfare state. More broadly, they should be made to explain why they appreciate the virtues of conservatives only after they are gone from the scene (as we have also seen with Goldwater, Eisenhower, and even Nixon to some extent).
To be sure, Reagan’s political practices were idiosyncratic, and his conservatism was not fully recognized by many on the right who wish to emulate him today. This conservatism was not the “stand athwart history” kind, as is evident in Reagan’s love for a quotation that drives many conservative intellectuals slightly batty. As George Will put it, “[Reagan] is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Any time, any place, that is nonsense.”Reagan’s invocation of Paine, as well as his quotation of John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon, expresses the core of his optimism and belief in the dynamism of American society, a dynamism that can have unconservative effects. But he explained his use of Paine in conservative terms way back in his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? “The classic liberal,” Reagan wrote, “used to be the man who believed the individual was, and should be forever, the master of his destiny. That is now the conservative position. The liberal used to believe in freedom under law. He now takes the ancient feudal position that power is everything. He believes in a stronger and stronger central government, in the philosophy that control is better than freedom. The conservative now quotes Thomas Paine, a longtime refuge of the liberals: ‘Government is a necessary evil; let us have as little of it as possible.’”
Reagan’s mixture of the revolutionary or progressive Paine with the Jeffersonian limited-government Paine is a potent formula in American politics that liberals have abandoned. Regardless of the tensions in Reagan’s version, it exposed liberalism as a pessimistic and increasingly reactionary faction. It was telling that the Democratic party didn’t play FDR’s anthem “Happy Days Are Here Again” at its 1984 convention, not wanting to credit Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme. Rep. Richard Gephardt expressed their mood when he said, “It’s getting closer and closer to midnight.”
Above all, Reagan’s conservatism was rooted in constitutionalism, which is the aspect most closely connecting it with the Tea Party movement and the conservative challenge to Obama. Reagan understood that many of our problems descended from the decay of the Constitution’s restraints on the centralization of power in Washington. In one of his private letters, from 1979, Reagan wrote to a friend that “the permanent structure of our government with its power to pass regulations has eroded if not in effect repealed portions of our Constitution.”
The story of the Reagan administration’s attempts to revive constitutional limits on government power is too complicated to summarize briefly, but one aspect of it deserves notice today: the second-term initiative of Attorney General Edwin Meese to start a controversy over originalism and the Constitution. In launching this controversy in such a high-profile manner, Meese reopened a fundamental quarrel that liberals had thought was more or less closed. No prominent Republican had seriously advanced such an argument since Calvin Coolidge. The public fight Meese started over original intent, legal scholar Johnathan O’Neill wrote in 2005, “constituted the most direct constitutional debate between the executive branch and the Court since the New Deal.” Meese and his Justice Department compatriots were attempting nothing less than to wrest the Constitution away from the legal elite and return it to the people. The reaction of not only the usual suspects such as the New York Times editorial page but also two sitting Supreme Court justices and many prominent voices in the legal academy ensured that this issue would not wilt like a spring flower, and indeed it is still with us. It was a de facto declaration of war on the Left, and it contributed to the defeat of Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in 1987. It looks in retrospect to be one of the most significant initiatives of the Reagan years, especially given the emergence of the Tea Party movement.
Mark Twain is credited with saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Reagan’s ascent coincided with the “tax revolt” of the late 1970s, and the tax revolt looks similar to today’s Tea Party protests. Liberals attacked the tax revolt in the same terms they use to attack today’s Tea Party. Sen. George McGovern worried that the tax revolt had “undertones of racism.” Byron Dorgan, then North Dakota tax commissioner and later a senator, said that a vote for California’s Proposition 13 (a property-tax cap the state’s voters enacted in 1978) was “a vote for latent prejudice.” The Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson said the measure was an “exhibition of widespread public mean-spiritedness.”In the 1970s, Reagan spoke often of a populist “prairie fire” of resistance to big government, and he saw the tax revolt as the match igniting the fire that swept him to office in 1980. Yet the Tea Party makes the “prairie fire” of the tax revolt look like a small campfire by comparison. It is distinct from and superior to the tax revolt precisely to the extent that it represents a populist constitutional movement, challenging out-of-control government in a way that goes beyond arguments about tax rates.
It is exactly on this point that Reagan’s far-sightedness and his legacy become relevant. During the 1980s, there was little popular ferment behind Reagan and Meese’s campaign to revive constitutional originalism, but they pursued it anyway. When today’s liberals disingenuously invoke Reagan against the Tea Party or Republican attempts in Congress to restrain the government, Reagan’s constitutional views should be thrown in their faces. The tea partiers might well be considered Reagan’s children.
Several pundits suggested that the 1994 election, which delivered the first GOP House majority in 40 years, should be thought of as “Reagan’s third landslide.” If so, November 2 of last year could be regarded as his fourth. And if conservatives remain faithful to Ronald Reagan’s principles and practices, it won’t be the last. Happy 100th birthday, Mr. President.
— Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980–1989. This article originally appeared in the February 7, 2011, issue of National Review.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Toward a Soft Landing in Egypt
The key is the military.
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com
February 4, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Mohamed ElBaradei talks to the media during a joint press conference with Saad al-Katatni, the parliamentary leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, after their meeting in Cairo on June 5, 2010.
Who doesn’t love a democratic revolution? Who is not moved by the renunciation of fear and the reclamation of dignity in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria?
The worldwide euphoria that has greeted the Egyptian uprising is understandable. All revolutions are blissful in the first days. The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.
The Egyptian awakening carries promise and hope and of course merits our support. But only a child can believe that a democratic outcome is inevitable. And only a blinkered optimist can believe that it is even the most likely outcome.
Yes, the Egyptian revolution is broad-based. But so were the French and the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. Indeed in Iran, the revolution only succeeded — the shah was long opposed by the mullahs — when the merchants, the housewives, the students, and the secularists joined to bring him down.
And who ended up in control? The most disciplined, ruthless, and ideologically committed — the radical Islamists.
This is why our paramount moral and strategic interest in Egypt is real democracy in which power does not devolve to those who believe in one man, one vote, one time. That would be Egypt’s fate should the Muslim Brotherhood prevail. That was the fate of Gaza, now under the brutal thumb of Hamas, a Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood (see article 2 of Hamas’s founding covenant).
We are told by sage Western analysts not to worry about the Brotherhood because it probably commands only about 30 percent of the vote. This is reassurance? In a country where the secular democratic opposition is weak and fractured after decades of persecution, any Islamist party commanding a third of the vote rules the country.
Elections will be held. The primary U.S. objective is to guide a transition period that gives secular democrats a chance.
The House of Mubarak is no more. He is 82, reviled, and not running for reelection. The only question is who fills the vacuum. There are two principal possibilities: a provisional government of opposition forces, possibly led by Mohamed ElBaradei, or an interim government led by the military.
ElBaradei would be a disaster. As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he did more than anyone to make an Iranian nuclear bomb possible, covering for the mullahs for years. (As soon as he left, the IAEA issued a strikingly tough, unvarnished report about the program.)
Worse, ElBaradei has allied himself with the Muslim Brotherhood. Such an alliance is grossly unequal. The Brotherhood has organization, discipline, and widespread support. In 2005, it won approximately 20 percent of parliamentary seats. ElBaradei has no constituency of his own, no political base, no political history within Egypt at all.
He has lived abroad for decades. He has less of a residency claim to Egypt than Rahm Emanuel has to Chicago. A man with no constituency allied with a highly organized and powerful political party is nothing but a mouthpiece and a figurehead, a useful idiot whom the Brotherhood will dispense with when it ceases to have need of a cosmopolitan frontman.
The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 “Free Officers Movement” that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.
The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months. Whether it does so with Mubarak at the top, or with Vice President Omar Suleiman, or perhaps with some technocrat who arouses no ire among the demonstrators, matters not to us. If the army calculates that sacrificing Mubarak (through exile) will satisfy the opposition and end the unrest, so be it.
The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The U.S. should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife — and then guarantee — what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 the Washington Post Writers Group.
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com
February 4, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Mohamed ElBaradei talks to the media during a joint press conference with Saad al-Katatni, the parliamentary leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, after their meeting in Cairo on June 5, 2010.Who doesn’t love a democratic revolution? Who is not moved by the renunciation of fear and the reclamation of dignity in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria?
The worldwide euphoria that has greeted the Egyptian uprising is understandable. All revolutions are blissful in the first days. The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.
The Egyptian awakening carries promise and hope and of course merits our support. But only a child can believe that a democratic outcome is inevitable. And only a blinkered optimist can believe that it is even the most likely outcome.
Yes, the Egyptian revolution is broad-based. But so were the French and the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. Indeed in Iran, the revolution only succeeded — the shah was long opposed by the mullahs — when the merchants, the housewives, the students, and the secularists joined to bring him down.
And who ended up in control? The most disciplined, ruthless, and ideologically committed — the radical Islamists.
This is why our paramount moral and strategic interest in Egypt is real democracy in which power does not devolve to those who believe in one man, one vote, one time. That would be Egypt’s fate should the Muslim Brotherhood prevail. That was the fate of Gaza, now under the brutal thumb of Hamas, a Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood (see article 2 of Hamas’s founding covenant).
We are told by sage Western analysts not to worry about the Brotherhood because it probably commands only about 30 percent of the vote. This is reassurance? In a country where the secular democratic opposition is weak and fractured after decades of persecution, any Islamist party commanding a third of the vote rules the country.
Elections will be held. The primary U.S. objective is to guide a transition period that gives secular democrats a chance.
The House of Mubarak is no more. He is 82, reviled, and not running for reelection. The only question is who fills the vacuum. There are two principal possibilities: a provisional government of opposition forces, possibly led by Mohamed ElBaradei, or an interim government led by the military.
ElBaradei would be a disaster. As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he did more than anyone to make an Iranian nuclear bomb possible, covering for the mullahs for years. (As soon as he left, the IAEA issued a strikingly tough, unvarnished report about the program.)
Worse, ElBaradei has allied himself with the Muslim Brotherhood. Such an alliance is grossly unequal. The Brotherhood has organization, discipline, and widespread support. In 2005, it won approximately 20 percent of parliamentary seats. ElBaradei has no constituency of his own, no political base, no political history within Egypt at all.
He has lived abroad for decades. He has less of a residency claim to Egypt than Rahm Emanuel has to Chicago. A man with no constituency allied with a highly organized and powerful political party is nothing but a mouthpiece and a figurehead, a useful idiot whom the Brotherhood will dispense with when it ceases to have need of a cosmopolitan frontman.
The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 “Free Officers Movement” that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.
The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months. Whether it does so with Mubarak at the top, or with Vice President Omar Suleiman, or perhaps with some technocrat who arouses no ire among the demonstrators, matters not to us. If the army calculates that sacrificing Mubarak (through exile) will satisfy the opposition and end the unrest, so be it.
The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The U.S. should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife — and then guarantee — what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 the Washington Post Writers Group.
After 16 Seasons, Goodbye to a Gamer
By TYLER KEPNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 3, 2011
(Barton Silverman/The New York Times)
Andy Pettitte before Game 3 of last year’s American League division series against the Twins. His postseason record was 19-10 with a 3.83 earned run average.
Free agency is supposed to be the ultimate perk for a player, the chance to choose where to make your next fortune. Andy Pettitte hated it. He never wanted to let people down.
But then, Pettitte was always a little different, so sincere in his eagerness to please. He retired on Thursday after 16 seasons, all but three with the Yankees. He will hold a news conference at Yankee Stadium on Friday morning for the formal announcement. Knowing Pettitte, there will be tears.
Pettitte told the Yankees when the off-season started that they should not count on him to return. But he waited more than three months to make it official, suggesting the decision was hard. Pettitte lives in Deer Park, Tex., with his wife and four children, but staying there means disappointing the Yankees, who desperately wanted him — needed him — for their thin rotation. Surely that has gnawed at him.
Pettitte left the Yankees once before, after the 2003 season, when he chose his hometown Houston Astros as a free agent. The Yankees had made a lukewarm pursuit, but Pettitte still agonized over leaving. More than most, he recognized the downside of his decisions and performances. And he knew the inherent physical risks of his job.
The threat of a major elbow injury haunted Pettitte, who has said it was always in the back of his mind. Three times in his career, he was placed on the disabled list with elbow problems. Twice, he has acknowledged, he used human growth hormone to speed his recovery.
As it turned out, a groin injury ultimately knocked out Pettitte last season, spoiling an All-Star summer. He made one start after the break, left in the third inning and missed the next two months. The idea that he might have to repeat the tedium of rehabilitation could not have been enticing for Pettitte. He turns 39 in June and knows he could always be injured again.
(Suzy Allman for The New York Times)
Andy Pettitte starred for the Yankees for 13 seasons. “He’s a special guy,” General Manager Brian Cashman said.
Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, doubted all along that Pettitte would return. But Pettitte was always welcome, because his arm is still sound. He was 11-3 last season, and his 3.28 earned run average was his best since 2005. And while Cashman can be bloodless with Yankee player royalty — the bitter parting with Bernie Williams comes to mind — he understood what Pettitte means.
“He’s a special guy,” Cashman said last week. “I think the bottom line is that people don’t want to let him go.”
That is especially true now, with the Yankees’ patchwork rotation. They could not sign Cliff Lee, who took a lesser offer from the Philadelphia Phillies, and will choose from Bartolo Colon, Freddy Garcia, Sergio Mitre and Ivan Nova for the last two spots in their rotation.
The Yankees would have given Pettitte perhaps $12 million or more to return. But he has made more than $125 million in his career, and it is hard to believe money matters much to him now.
Likewise, Pettitte has never seemed to care about building Hall of Fame credentials. His case is borderline. Voters would have to emphasize his postseason impact and his win/loss record, while playing down his H.G.H. admission, his E.R.A. (3.88, which would be the highest in Cooperstown), and his relatively low ranking in wins above replacement, where he places below Dave Stieb and Rick Reuschel, neither of whom is in Cooperstown.
Still, only seven others can match Pettitte for victories (240) and winning percentage (.635). They are Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Lefty Grove, Jim Palmer, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina. It is an impressive group, despite one complicated name.
That would be Clemens, Pettitte’s former workout partner and guru. Pettitte’s coming calendar includes an uncomfortable distraction in July, when Clemens’s perjury trial is scheduled to begin in Washington. Prosecutors plan to call Pettitte as a witness against Clemens, who has denied using performance-enhancing drugs.
Pettitte’s entanglement with Clemens and their former trainer, Brian McNamee, is a sticky part of his legacy. More important to Yankees fans are his five championship rings and reputation for coming through in the clutch.
(Al Bello/Getty Images)
Pettitte with, from left, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter in 2008 after the last regular-season game at the old Yankee Stadium
In that way, Pettitte is a lot like Derek Jeter: he played so many postseason games that his October performance mirrors his play in the regular season. Pettitte was 19-10 with a 3.83 E.R.A. in the postseason, a few clunkers mixed in with the classics.
The effort that might resonate most was not especially pretty. It was a rainy Halloween night in Philadelphia, after the Yankees and the Phillies had split the first two games of the 2009 World Series. The Phillies blitzed Pettitte for three runs in the second inning: a homer, a double, a bunt single, a bases-loaded walk to Jimmy Rollins. Pettitte was scrambling, yet somehow, he found a way.
Pettitte toyed with the Phillies’ left-handed hitters, and overcame an error, another home run and three walks. He even smacked a curveball for the game-tying single off Cole Hamels, and scored the go-ahead run. He lasted six innings and won.
It was tempting to think Pettitte’s experience helped him, willing him through a game he had no business winning. But that was not quite right.
“It’s hard to draw on, you know, past success or whatever, when you’re standing out on that mound and the ball is not going where you want it to,” Pettitte said after the game. “When Jimmy was up there, I was trying to throw the ball on the outside corner, and it just wasn’t going there. You know, it’s a grind when you’re out there and you’re by yourself. There’s not a whole lot of anything that can help you.”
The only thing to do, Pettitte said, was to keep battling, keep searching, keep trying. It was a simple game plan for an earnest man who knew how to execute it over and over. It is probably how Pettitte would like to be remembered.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 3, 2011
(Barton Silverman/The New York Times)Andy Pettitte before Game 3 of last year’s American League division series against the Twins. His postseason record was 19-10 with a 3.83 earned run average.
Free agency is supposed to be the ultimate perk for a player, the chance to choose where to make your next fortune. Andy Pettitte hated it. He never wanted to let people down.
But then, Pettitte was always a little different, so sincere in his eagerness to please. He retired on Thursday after 16 seasons, all but three with the Yankees. He will hold a news conference at Yankee Stadium on Friday morning for the formal announcement. Knowing Pettitte, there will be tears.
Pettitte told the Yankees when the off-season started that they should not count on him to return. But he waited more than three months to make it official, suggesting the decision was hard. Pettitte lives in Deer Park, Tex., with his wife and four children, but staying there means disappointing the Yankees, who desperately wanted him — needed him — for their thin rotation. Surely that has gnawed at him.
Pettitte left the Yankees once before, after the 2003 season, when he chose his hometown Houston Astros as a free agent. The Yankees had made a lukewarm pursuit, but Pettitte still agonized over leaving. More than most, he recognized the downside of his decisions and performances. And he knew the inherent physical risks of his job.
The threat of a major elbow injury haunted Pettitte, who has said it was always in the back of his mind. Three times in his career, he was placed on the disabled list with elbow problems. Twice, he has acknowledged, he used human growth hormone to speed his recovery.
As it turned out, a groin injury ultimately knocked out Pettitte last season, spoiling an All-Star summer. He made one start after the break, left in the third inning and missed the next two months. The idea that he might have to repeat the tedium of rehabilitation could not have been enticing for Pettitte. He turns 39 in June and knows he could always be injured again.
(Suzy Allman for The New York Times)Andy Pettitte starred for the Yankees for 13 seasons. “He’s a special guy,” General Manager Brian Cashman said.
Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, doubted all along that Pettitte would return. But Pettitte was always welcome, because his arm is still sound. He was 11-3 last season, and his 3.28 earned run average was his best since 2005. And while Cashman can be bloodless with Yankee player royalty — the bitter parting with Bernie Williams comes to mind — he understood what Pettitte means.
“He’s a special guy,” Cashman said last week. “I think the bottom line is that people don’t want to let him go.”
That is especially true now, with the Yankees’ patchwork rotation. They could not sign Cliff Lee, who took a lesser offer from the Philadelphia Phillies, and will choose from Bartolo Colon, Freddy Garcia, Sergio Mitre and Ivan Nova for the last two spots in their rotation.
The Yankees would have given Pettitte perhaps $12 million or more to return. But he has made more than $125 million in his career, and it is hard to believe money matters much to him now.
Likewise, Pettitte has never seemed to care about building Hall of Fame credentials. His case is borderline. Voters would have to emphasize his postseason impact and his win/loss record, while playing down his H.G.H. admission, his E.R.A. (3.88, which would be the highest in Cooperstown), and his relatively low ranking in wins above replacement, where he places below Dave Stieb and Rick Reuschel, neither of whom is in Cooperstown.
Still, only seven others can match Pettitte for victories (240) and winning percentage (.635). They are Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Lefty Grove, Jim Palmer, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina. It is an impressive group, despite one complicated name.
That would be Clemens, Pettitte’s former workout partner and guru. Pettitte’s coming calendar includes an uncomfortable distraction in July, when Clemens’s perjury trial is scheduled to begin in Washington. Prosecutors plan to call Pettitte as a witness against Clemens, who has denied using performance-enhancing drugs.
Pettitte’s entanglement with Clemens and their former trainer, Brian McNamee, is a sticky part of his legacy. More important to Yankees fans are his five championship rings and reputation for coming through in the clutch.
(Al Bello/Getty Images)Pettitte with, from left, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter in 2008 after the last regular-season game at the old Yankee Stadium
In that way, Pettitte is a lot like Derek Jeter: he played so many postseason games that his October performance mirrors his play in the regular season. Pettitte was 19-10 with a 3.83 E.R.A. in the postseason, a few clunkers mixed in with the classics.
The effort that might resonate most was not especially pretty. It was a rainy Halloween night in Philadelphia, after the Yankees and the Phillies had split the first two games of the 2009 World Series. The Phillies blitzed Pettitte for three runs in the second inning: a homer, a double, a bunt single, a bases-loaded walk to Jimmy Rollins. Pettitte was scrambling, yet somehow, he found a way.
Pettitte toyed with the Phillies’ left-handed hitters, and overcame an error, another home run and three walks. He even smacked a curveball for the game-tying single off Cole Hamels, and scored the go-ahead run. He lasted six innings and won.
It was tempting to think Pettitte’s experience helped him, willing him through a game he had no business winning. But that was not quite right.
“It’s hard to draw on, you know, past success or whatever, when you’re standing out on that mound and the ball is not going where you want it to,” Pettitte said after the game. “When Jimmy was up there, I was trying to throw the ball on the outside corner, and it just wasn’t going there. You know, it’s a grind when you’re out there and you’re by yourself. There’s not a whole lot of anything that can help you.”
The only thing to do, Pettitte said, was to keep battling, keep searching, keep trying. It was a simple game plan for an earnest man who knew how to execute it over and over. It is probably how Pettitte would like to be remembered.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
WHAT LIBERALS DON'T KNOW ABOUT GUNS, CHAPTER 217
By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
February 2, 2011
Scene at Tucson shooting. Photo: AP
Fresh off of blaming Jared Loughner's killing spree in the Tucson mall on Sarah Palin, liberals are now blaming it on high-capacity magazines. They might as well imprison everyone named "Jared" to prevent a crime like this from ever happening again.
During the presidential campaign, Obama said: "I don't know of any self-respecting hunter that needs 19 rounds of anything. You don't shoot 19 rounds at a deer, and if you do, you shouldn't be hunting." It would have been more accurate for him to end that sentence after the word "hunter."
It's so adorable when people who wouldn't know a high-capacity magazine from Vanity Fair start telling gun owners what they should want and need.
In fact, high-capacity mags put a predator like Loughner at a disadvantage because they are so long, unwieldy and difficult to conceal. This may be why the Tucson shooting appears to be the first spree killing involving a high-capacity magazine. It would have been easier for Loughner to bring two guns.
On the other hand, for a homeowner who is a poor marksman, a large-capacity clip could be a lifesaver.
But after every multiple murder, liberals come up with some crackpot idea to "do something" that invariably involves infringing on some aspect of our Second Amendment rights.
The ACLU won't let us put nuts in mental hospitals and Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik wouldn't lock up Loughner even after he had broken the law several times.
In an open society that includes Sheriff Dumbnik and the ACLU, deranged individuals may explode into murder and mayhem now and then. The best we can do is enact policies that will reduce the death toll when these acts of carnage occur.
There's only one policy of any kind that has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws. In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the highly regarded economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect.
And the effect was not small. States that allowed citizens to carry concealed handguns reduced multiple-shooting attacks by 60 percent and reduced the death and injury from these attacks by nearly 80 percent.
When there are no armed citizens to stop mass murderers, the killers are able to shoot unabated, even pausing to reload their weapons, until they get bored and stop. Some stop only when their trigger fingers develop carpal tunnel syndrome.
Consider just the school shootings -- popular sites for mass murder because so many schools are "gun-free zones." Or, as mass murderers call them, "free-fire zones."
At Columbine High School, two students killed 13 people before ending the carnage themselves by committing suicide. They didn't need high-capacity magazines because they were able to stop and reload.
At the Amish school shooting in 2006 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the deranged killer murdered five little girls and then committed suicide.
In 1998, two students in Craighead County, Arkansas, killed five people, including four little girls, before the killers decided to stop and attempt an escape.
And in 2007, a deranged student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech -- 30 of them in a very short period of time in one building. He didn't need high-capacity magazines because he had two guns and reloaded.
There was no one to stop him.
School shootings that have been halted were almost always stopped by the happenstance of an armed citizen on school property.
In 2002, an immigrant in Virginia started shooting his classmates at the Appalachian Law School in Grundy. Two of his classmates retrieved guns from their cars, forcing the killer to drop his weapon and allowing a third classmate to tackle him.
Three dead.
In Santee, Calif., in 2001, when a student began shooting his classmates, the school activated its "safe school plan" -- as the principal later told CNN -- by sending a "trained campus supervisor" to stop the killer.
Possibly not realizing that he was in a gun-free zone, the killer responded by shooting the trained campus supervisor three times. Fortunately, an armed off-duty San Diego policeman happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day. With a gun, he stopped the killer and held him at bay until more police could arrive.
Two dead.
In 1997, a student at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss., had already shot several people at his high school and was headed for the junior high school when assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a .45 pistol from his car and pointed it at the gunman's head, ending the slaughter.
Two dead.
In 1998, a student attending a junior high school dance at a restaurant in Edinboro, Pa., started shooting, whereupon the restaurant owner pulled out his shotgun, chased the gunman from the restaurant and captured him for the police.
One dead.
See the pattern?
In response to Columbine, schools adopted "anti-bullying" policies; in response to Virginia Tech, eBay ceased selling magazines online; in response to the Tucson shooting, liberals want to ban the particular magazine Loughner used.
And then the next killer will come along with a different arsenal and a different motive, and the only way to stop him will be with an armed citizen with a gun.
COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
http://www.anncoulter.com/
February 2, 2011
Scene at Tucson shooting. Photo: APFresh off of blaming Jared Loughner's killing spree in the Tucson mall on Sarah Palin, liberals are now blaming it on high-capacity magazines. They might as well imprison everyone named "Jared" to prevent a crime like this from ever happening again.
During the presidential campaign, Obama said: "I don't know of any self-respecting hunter that needs 19 rounds of anything. You don't shoot 19 rounds at a deer, and if you do, you shouldn't be hunting." It would have been more accurate for him to end that sentence after the word "hunter."
It's so adorable when people who wouldn't know a high-capacity magazine from Vanity Fair start telling gun owners what they should want and need.
In fact, high-capacity mags put a predator like Loughner at a disadvantage because they are so long, unwieldy and difficult to conceal. This may be why the Tucson shooting appears to be the first spree killing involving a high-capacity magazine. It would have been easier for Loughner to bring two guns.
On the other hand, for a homeowner who is a poor marksman, a large-capacity clip could be a lifesaver.
But after every multiple murder, liberals come up with some crackpot idea to "do something" that invariably involves infringing on some aspect of our Second Amendment rights.
The ACLU won't let us put nuts in mental hospitals and Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik wouldn't lock up Loughner even after he had broken the law several times.
In an open society that includes Sheriff Dumbnik and the ACLU, deranged individuals may explode into murder and mayhem now and then. The best we can do is enact policies that will reduce the death toll when these acts of carnage occur.
There's only one policy of any kind that has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws. In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the highly regarded economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect.
And the effect was not small. States that allowed citizens to carry concealed handguns reduced multiple-shooting attacks by 60 percent and reduced the death and injury from these attacks by nearly 80 percent.
When there are no armed citizens to stop mass murderers, the killers are able to shoot unabated, even pausing to reload their weapons, until they get bored and stop. Some stop only when their trigger fingers develop carpal tunnel syndrome.
Consider just the school shootings -- popular sites for mass murder because so many schools are "gun-free zones." Or, as mass murderers call them, "free-fire zones."
At Columbine High School, two students killed 13 people before ending the carnage themselves by committing suicide. They didn't need high-capacity magazines because they were able to stop and reload.
At the Amish school shooting in 2006 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the deranged killer murdered five little girls and then committed suicide.
In 1998, two students in Craighead County, Arkansas, killed five people, including four little girls, before the killers decided to stop and attempt an escape.
And in 2007, a deranged student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech -- 30 of them in a very short period of time in one building. He didn't need high-capacity magazines because he had two guns and reloaded.There was no one to stop him.
School shootings that have been halted were almost always stopped by the happenstance of an armed citizen on school property.
In 2002, an immigrant in Virginia started shooting his classmates at the Appalachian Law School in Grundy. Two of his classmates retrieved guns from their cars, forcing the killer to drop his weapon and allowing a third classmate to tackle him.
Three dead.
In Santee, Calif., in 2001, when a student began shooting his classmates, the school activated its "safe school plan" -- as the principal later told CNN -- by sending a "trained campus supervisor" to stop the killer.
Possibly not realizing that he was in a gun-free zone, the killer responded by shooting the trained campus supervisor three times. Fortunately, an armed off-duty San Diego policeman happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day. With a gun, he stopped the killer and held him at bay until more police could arrive.
Two dead.
In 1997, a student at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss., had already shot several people at his high school and was headed for the junior high school when assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a .45 pistol from his car and pointed it at the gunman's head, ending the slaughter.
Two dead.
In 1998, a student attending a junior high school dance at a restaurant in Edinboro, Pa., started shooting, whereupon the restaurant owner pulled out his shotgun, chased the gunman from the restaurant and captured him for the police.
One dead.
See the pattern?
In response to Columbine, schools adopted "anti-bullying" policies; in response to Virginia Tech, eBay ceased selling magazines online; in response to the Tucson shooting, liberals want to ban the particular magazine Loughner used.
And then the next killer will come along with a different arsenal and a different motive, and the only way to stop him will be with an armed citizen with a gun.
COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
Barack Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood
By Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com
February 3, 2011
Now that Barack Obama has given a green light to Muslim Brotherhood participation in a new Egyptian government, it is unlikely that the organization will be kept out of power. And since the Brotherhood is the largest and most ideologically committed group in Egyptian politics, most likely it will end up in the driver’s seat in any new regime, and set the nation on course toward becoming an Islamic state.
Obama almost certainly knows all this, and yet approved of Brotherhood involvement anyway. A look at some of his appointments, associations and activities shows that this should come as no surprise.
Starting in the earliest days of his administration, Obama showed an intense desire to establish friendly ties with the Islamic world, while showing little or no interest in examining his chosen partners in dialogue and targets for attempts at rapprochement for ties to jihad terrorism or Islamic supremacism. His uncritical stance toward Islamic organizations included American groups with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the Brotherhood’s stated goal of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.”
Obama’s first attempt at outreach to Muslims came when he chose the head of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to give a prayer during his inauguration ceremonies. Ingrid Mattson, who was then president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), offered this prayer at the National Cathedral on Obama’s Inauguration Day – despite the fact that the previous summer, federal prosecutors rejected a request from ISNA to remove its unindicted co-conspirator status.
There is no record of Obama ever asking Mattson to explain ISNA’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. On the contrary: he sent his Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett to be the keynote speaker at ISNA’s national convention in 2009.
Even worse, in April 2009, Obama appointed Arif Alikhan, the deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security. Just two weeks before he received this appointment, Alikhan (who once called the jihad terror group Hizballah a “liberation movement”) participated in a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Like ISNA, MPAC has links to the Muslim Brotherhood. In a book entitled In Fraternity: A Message to Muslims in America, coauthor Hassan Hathout, a former MPAC president, is identified as “a close disciple of the late Hassan al-Banna of Egypt.” The MPAC-linked magazine The Minaret spoke of Hassan Hathout’s closeness to al-Banna in a 1997 article: “My father would tell me that Hassan Hathout was a companion of Hassan al-Banna….Hassan Hathout would speak of al-Banna with such love and adoration; he would speak of a relationship not guided by politics or law but by a basic sense of human decency.”
Al-Banna, of course, was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Terror researcher Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project has documented MPAC’s indefatigable and consistent opposition to virtually every domestic anti-terror initiative; its magazine The Minaret has dismissed key counterterror operations as part of “[t]he American crusade against Islam and Muslims.” For his part, while Alikhan was deputy mayor of Los Angeles, he blocked a Los Angeles Police Department project to assemble data about the ethnic makeup of mosques in the Los Angeles area. This was not an attempt to conduct surveillance of the mosques or monitor them in any way. LAPD Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing explained that it was actually an outreach program: “We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities.” But Alikhan and other Muslim leaders claimed that the project manifested racism and “Islamophobia,” and the LAPD ultimately discarded all plans to study the mosques.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a pro-Sharia group; and Obama’s chief adviser on Islamic affairs, Dalia Mogahed, is a pro-Sharia Muslim. In their Gallup survey published under the hubristic title Who Speaks for Islam? What A Billion Muslims Really Think, Mogahed and Saudi-funded dhimmi pseudo-academic John Esposito cooked their data to increase the number of Muslim “moderates,” counting as “moderate” Muslims who wanted Sharia rule, hated America, supported jihad-martyrdom suicide bombing, and opposed equality of rights for women. Mogahed also defended Sharia on a British TV show, saying it amounted to “gender justice.”
Mogahed’s defense of Sharia came on a show hosted by a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international organization that is banned as a terrorist group in many nations worldwide. Hizb ut-Tahrir is openly dedicated to working toward the imposition of Sharia and the destruction of all governments around the world that are constituted according to any other political philosophy — including Constitutional republics.
In light of all this, it is no accident that Obama specifically invited representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his notorious speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009. Nor should it come as any surprise that he is taking a sanguine view of the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking part in a new Egyptian government.
After all, Brotherhood operatives are in the American government and working closely with it, thanks to Barack Obama. Why shouldn’t the same situation prevail in Egypt?
http://www.frontpagemag.com
February 3, 2011
Now that Barack Obama has given a green light to Muslim Brotherhood participation in a new Egyptian government, it is unlikely that the organization will be kept out of power. And since the Brotherhood is the largest and most ideologically committed group in Egyptian politics, most likely it will end up in the driver’s seat in any new regime, and set the nation on course toward becoming an Islamic state.Obama almost certainly knows all this, and yet approved of Brotherhood involvement anyway. A look at some of his appointments, associations and activities shows that this should come as no surprise.
Starting in the earliest days of his administration, Obama showed an intense desire to establish friendly ties with the Islamic world, while showing little or no interest in examining his chosen partners in dialogue and targets for attempts at rapprochement for ties to jihad terrorism or Islamic supremacism. His uncritical stance toward Islamic organizations included American groups with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the Brotherhood’s stated goal of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.”
Obama’s first attempt at outreach to Muslims came when he chose the head of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to give a prayer during his inauguration ceremonies. Ingrid Mattson, who was then president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), offered this prayer at the National Cathedral on Obama’s Inauguration Day – despite the fact that the previous summer, federal prosecutors rejected a request from ISNA to remove its unindicted co-conspirator status.
There is no record of Obama ever asking Mattson to explain ISNA’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. On the contrary: he sent his Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett to be the keynote speaker at ISNA’s national convention in 2009.
Even worse, in April 2009, Obama appointed Arif Alikhan, the deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security. Just two weeks before he received this appointment, Alikhan (who once called the jihad terror group Hizballah a “liberation movement”) participated in a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Like ISNA, MPAC has links to the Muslim Brotherhood. In a book entitled In Fraternity: A Message to Muslims in America, coauthor Hassan Hathout, a former MPAC president, is identified as “a close disciple of the late Hassan al-Banna of Egypt.” The MPAC-linked magazine The Minaret spoke of Hassan Hathout’s closeness to al-Banna in a 1997 article: “My father would tell me that Hassan Hathout was a companion of Hassan al-Banna….Hassan Hathout would speak of al-Banna with such love and adoration; he would speak of a relationship not guided by politics or law but by a basic sense of human decency.”
Al-Banna, of course, was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Terror researcher Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project has documented MPAC’s indefatigable and consistent opposition to virtually every domestic anti-terror initiative; its magazine The Minaret has dismissed key counterterror operations as part of “[t]he American crusade against Islam and Muslims.” For his part, while Alikhan was deputy mayor of Los Angeles, he blocked a Los Angeles Police Department project to assemble data about the ethnic makeup of mosques in the Los Angeles area. This was not an attempt to conduct surveillance of the mosques or monitor them in any way. LAPD Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing explained that it was actually an outreach program: “We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities.” But Alikhan and other Muslim leaders claimed that the project manifested racism and “Islamophobia,” and the LAPD ultimately discarded all plans to study the mosques.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a pro-Sharia group; and Obama’s chief adviser on Islamic affairs, Dalia Mogahed, is a pro-Sharia Muslim. In their Gallup survey published under the hubristic title Who Speaks for Islam? What A Billion Muslims Really Think, Mogahed and Saudi-funded dhimmi pseudo-academic John Esposito cooked their data to increase the number of Muslim “moderates,” counting as “moderate” Muslims who wanted Sharia rule, hated America, supported jihad-martyrdom suicide bombing, and opposed equality of rights for women. Mogahed also defended Sharia on a British TV show, saying it amounted to “gender justice.”
Mogahed’s defense of Sharia came on a show hosted by a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international organization that is banned as a terrorist group in many nations worldwide. Hizb ut-Tahrir is openly dedicated to working toward the imposition of Sharia and the destruction of all governments around the world that are constituted according to any other political philosophy — including Constitutional republics.
In light of all this, it is no accident that Obama specifically invited representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his notorious speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009. Nor should it come as any surprise that he is taking a sanguine view of the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking part in a new Egyptian government.
After all, Brotherhood operatives are in the American government and working closely with it, thanks to Barack Obama. Why shouldn’t the same situation prevail in Egypt?
Book Review: Looking for the King - An Inklings Novel
By Pieter Collier
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/
5 November 2010
Title: Looking for the King - An Inklings Novel
Author: David C. Downing
Publisher: Ignatius
Publication Date: October 30, 2010
Type: hardback, 285 pages
ISBN-10: 1586175149
ISBN-13: 978-1586175146
Most readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books end up reading about the man himself. For some, and I am for sure one of them, the author ends up at least as interesting as the books that flowed out of his hands. Once you deepen yourself in the subject sooner or later you end up reading about the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group of which Tolkien was a member. You learn about the other remarkable persons that made part of the group like C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson and cannot but imagine how it must have been to follow their courses, how their meetings at the Bird & Baby must have been and how it would be to actually speak with them.
In the past I used to say that for me it would have been a better idea to make a movie about J.R.R. Tolkien and best to have left his works for people to imagine. Now I have to admit that I was wrong, not about adapting Tolkien’s books to film, but about making a film about J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Probably because next to J.R.R. Tolkien and books about him I nearly do not find the time to read much lately, and most of the time when I do I get deeply disappointed by the books I end up reading. So I had never thought of a book where Tolkien would take part, especially since I believed it would be impossible to recreate the atmosphere of lectures or meetings with any of the Inklings. Of course I have heard of the books by James A. Owen, fantasy novels where Tolkien, Williams and Lewis are protagonists - or so I have understood - but never felt the urge to read them. Then I received a review copy of Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel by David C. Downing and for one or another reason immediately felt invited to work myself through it. Maybe it was the cover image, maybe the subtitle, maybe the blurb, or even a combination of the three but within an hour of receiving the book I started reading.
What happened next was a big surprise - and this had not happened for a very long time - I was unable to put this book down and had to read until the end (despite of the fact that I should have been sleeping and that I had to work the next day). And now I know… it is not only possible to visit J.R.R. Tolkien, talk to C.S. Lewis and go to an Inklings meeting but you can also smell, feel and taste the atmosphere of Oxford in the 40’s. Now I believe that no movie would have been able to re-create the world I walked into and once again well written words triggered my imagination better then any moving image could. I can only say, thank you David C. Downing…
In Looking for the King we follow the American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, who is doing research on King Arthur and hopes to discover some historical evidence for the legendary king. Right in the beginning of the book he meets a girl called Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying in Oxford, who has been having mysterious dreams and visions that relate to the subject of research of Tom and so he hires her as his assistant. Aided by the Inklings they set out on a treasure hunt and leads in the end to much more then Tom and Laura were initially looking for.
In this amazing novel we follow Tom McCord on a visit to Tolkien’s house, to a course of Charles Williams, to a meeting with the inklings, a walk with C.S Lewis along the Thames (probably one of the most moving scenes in the book), a visit to numerous sites all across England, a treasure hunt for the Spear of Destiny, the search for the sleeping king in Laura’s dreams, the quest for faith and love. All this comes together in a very well written book that must be read by any person who likes J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams or a extremely good book!
To end my review of this book I just want to say that is one of the best books I have read in a very long time and I would give it a 5 star rating on Amazon and no I would advise anyone to read it. Wow... it was a long long time ago that I read a book that was so amazing that I could not put it down and that means something! To write this book the author David C. Downing must have done a lot of research and must be a brilliant academic (all quotes and references are added at the end of the book, which is a very good extra for those who want to learn more about the Inklings); but on the other hand he must have an amazing amount of fantasy and imagination to be able to make all these famous persons like Lewis and Tolkien come to live and see the countryside and buildings as they were 70 years ago; and next to that he is a remarkable writer who is able to describe it all so well: charachters, feelings & emotions and places. It all comes together in this wonderful book. The only sad thing was that the story ended after only 266 pages!
http://www.ignatius.com/promotions/looking-for-the-king/
Catholic Novels: Looking for the King
By Dr. Jeff Mirus
http://www.catholicculture.org/
December 07, 2010 5:43 PM
Picture of the corner of the Eagle and Child pub, en Oxford (England), where the Inklings met (1930-1950).
Joseph Pearce describes it as a “superbly gripping novel”. This is blatant hyperbole from a fellow Ignatius Press author, but the rest of his cover blurb is more accurate: “Lewis and Tolkien come alive.” So too says Thomas Howard: “All Inklings lovers will be highly delighted!” And Peter J. Shakel: “Fans of Lewis and Tolkien will love it.” All of this is praise for David C. Downing’s new novel, Looking for the King.
But why all this talk of Lewis and Tolkien and their informal club of literary giants, the Inklings? It turns out that Downing has given us “An Inklings Novel”, a story in which the hero and heroine discuss their mid-twentieth century quest for the relics of kings Arthur and Alfred with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and other Inklings, and so come away with a deeper understanding not only of history and myth, but of religion and life.
The action revolves around two Americans, Tom McCord, a doctoral candidate looking for evidence to prove King Arthur was a real historic figure, and Laura Hartman, a recent college graduate visiting England to figure out a series of strange, repetitive dreams. The dreams revolve around King Alfred (he of Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse) and the Lance of Longinus which pierced the side of Christ. Inevitably, the two team up (both archeologically and romantically) in a quest to unravel Laura’s dreams and Tom’s motives in attempting to build his academic reputation.
Almost immediately, Tom finds that there are mysterious adversaries who don’t want him searching for history-changing artifacts. Meanwhile, in the normal course of his studies, Tom consults C. S. Lewis, who arranges a meeting with the Inklings generally. So here we have a classic mystery involving history, myth, archeology and contemporary thugs; and a classic romance in the midst of adventure; and it is all interwoven with the wisdom of the giants of twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic literature: Lewis, Tolkien and Williams.
Given this mix, it takes no imagination to see how this book could have been a colossal flop. The key to such an effort is that the author must not take himself too seriously. The plot is frankly constructed of stock elements, from its storied artifacts to its German villains. Overplaying the plot would have resulted in a very bad Indiana Jones story. Moreover, the injection of a Christian point of view through the Inklings must not be self-conscious or forced. Any overplaying here would have produced a sermon with very poor subject matter. No, everything must unfold naturally, with just a touch of authorial self-deprecation, and without controlling or contriving the story to fit things in.
Fortunately, Downing is very capable of keeping things light. The reader is aware of the standard plot elements, just as he is aware of the author’s purpose in making the mystery “an Inklings novel”. But the bar is not set too high, the main characters are well-drawn and engaging, and the Inklings themselves are as quirky in print as they must have been in life. Throughout the course of the novel, they even speak, effortlessly and in context, using words they actually wrote. On the whole, this is a deft package which successfully avoids the one thing most calculated to ruin it: pretension.
I don’t want to make out Looking for the King to be more than it is. It is not great literature, but it doesn’t try to be. The book succeeds because it unfolds very comfortably within its own constraints, relying on attractive characters, English history, and the fondness of its intended Catholic readers for the Inklings to move things along in a warm and congenial way. Perhaps the biggest weakness is that the recurring dreams of the heroine are critical to the plot; here the author succumbs a bit to the contemporary temptation to inject fantastic elements into an otherwise real-world setting. But Downing does put a possible explanation for the dreams on the lips of Charles Williams and, after all, these are dreams. We’ve all had them, and explaining them however one wants does not require a novel-wrecking suspension of disbelief.
David Downing is an English professor who has written several award-winning books on C. S. Lewis, but he has kept this first novel blessedly free of academic clutter. At the same time, he has perhaps failed to make the dangers of the quest quite as intense as one might like. But here again the book is simply comfortable with itself. From the almost comic villainy of the German agent-turned-treasure-hunter to the subtle but significant transformation of the hero from agnosticism to faith, Downing lets his characters rule the story. The results are best described as natural, unaffected and endearing.
In the end, Looking for the King works. If the author has exposed some deficiencies of craftsmanship, I would like to suggest that he remedy them through practice. Let him write a sequel.
Q&A with David Downing, author of "Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel"
by Nancy Piccione
http://catholicbookgroup.blogspot.com/
Sunday, December 12, 2010
I was delighted to get the opportunity to interview David Downing, as his new novel, Looking for the King is one of my book recommendations in my Catholic Post column this month. For any fans of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Arthurian Legend, this book is intriguing and a fun read.
Q. I really enjoyed the book and the characters. How did you get the idea for the novel, and including the “Inklings” authors as characters?
My wife and I visited Somerset and Cornwall in 2005, and we were fascinated by all the Arthurian sites, the stories that Joseph of Arimathea came to England, perhaps bringing with him the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus. Around Glastonbury, one meets people who talk about "Old Joe" or "Big Joe" as if they just spoken with Joseph of Arimathea in a pub last week!
The following year I read Matthew Pearl's literary detective novel THE DANTE CLUB, in which a circle of American poets and scholars (Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell) help the local police solve a series of Dante-esque murders occurring in 19th century Boston. I enjoyed the unusual combination of mystery and literary biography, and I thought the Inklings would make an even livelier group to help some young adventurers on their elusive quest.
Q. Is this your first work of fiction? Can you tell me about your other books?
I have published short fiction before, but this is my first novel. Most of my other books are about C. S. Lewis:
PLANETS IN PERIL: A CRITICAL STUDY OF C. S. LEWIS'S RANSOM TRILOGY (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992)
THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: C. S. LEWIS'S JOURNEY TO FAITH (InterVarsity, 2002)
INTO THE REGION OF AWE: MYSTICISM IN C. S. LEWIS (InterVarsity, 2005)
INTO THE WARDROBE: C. S. LEWIS AND THE NARNIA CHRONICLES (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
Just to keep from getting into too much of a rut, I have also written a book on misconceptions and misquotations concerning the Bible (WHAT YOU KNOW MIGHT NOT BE SO) and a book on the Civil War (A SOUTH DIVIDED).
Q. What is your favorite of the three “Inklings” in this book & why?
I am going to have to beg off this question; I’m afraid it is a little like asking parents which one is their favorite child!
I will say that what I admire most about Tolkien is his epic imagination, as well as his equal devotion to work and to family, as he was very much involved in raising his three sons and daughter.
What I admire about Lewis is his versatility—not just his classic Narnia stories, but also his renowned literary scholarship, his Christian apologetics, science fiction, and even poetry. Yet in Lewis all these diverse literary interests and talents are united in service to his Christian faith and values.
For Williams, I am impressed by his intellectual energy and earnestness, his ability to combine intellect with Spirit, so much so that some of his friends considered him to be almost a living saint. Lewis said that Williams looked something like a monkey when you first met him; but when he began speaking, his face radiated so much joy and love, you felt as if you were listening to an angel.
Q. I’ve only recently learned about author Charles Williams (when our family made a trip to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College). What would you recommend for the first thing to read by this author?
Williams was a prolific writer, producing nearly a book a year—novels, plays, poem cycles, histories, biographies, and books on theology. I think he is most remembered for his “supernatural thrillers,” novels in which characters come to learn that their everyday world is surrounded by a whole other dimension—what Williams like to call the “Arch-natural” world. Williams’ two best novels, or at least the easiest to understand, are probably War in Heaven (1930) and Descent into Hell (1937). Personally, my two favorite books of his are his short introductions to Christian theology and church history: He Came Down from Heaven (1938) and The Descent of the Dove (1939).
Q. What is your favorite work of the other two authors, and why? (C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien)
This question is easier to answer for Tolkien. His great masterpiece is his epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think any of his other works compare to the project to which he devoted almost twenty years of his life. I think Tolkien’s most under-read and under-rated story is “Leaf by Niggle,” a charming self-portrait with allegorical overtones that suggests most directly Tolkien’s devotion to his Catholic faith.
For Lewis, I’m afraid I am going to have to “plead the Fifth.” He was such a gifted and versatile writer that asking me to pick out one favorite is like asking me whether I prefer chocolate or springtime. How does one compare?
I would once again like to nominate a book as under-rated and under-read, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. This was the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and so it is his “last word” on many of the topics he touched upon so often in his writings—grief and hope, faith and doubt, and, above all, love. The book also explores the role of prayer in shaping our lives in this world and preparing us for the next.
Q. What do you think of the movies made of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and currently the Chronicles of Narnia series? (with the newest one, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, due out this Friday)
I was skeptical about both projects, as earlier attempts to adapt Tolkien and Lewis for films and television have been consistently disappointing. But I was pleasantly surprised by Peter’s Jackson’s LOTR trilogy. He has an amazing knack for casting characters and portraying scenes as if they are projections from our own imaginations as we read The Lord of the Rings.
So far I have enjoyed the Narnia films, but I don’t think they have become classics in their own right, apart from the books that inspired them, the way Peter Jackson’s movies have. But I have faith in Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, as guardian of Lewis’s literary legacy. So I am hoping that the Narnia films will just keep getting better and better.
Q. Do you plan a sequel or another “Inklings” novel of any kind?
Yes, I am already at work on a sequel. If you look at the end of LOOKING OF THE KING, you will notice that Tom McCord thinks he might be returning to England in uniform. And Laura Hartman wishes she could enroll in one of the women's colleges at Oxford. So, yes, I believe Tom and Laura will be reunited in a sequel, facing new dangers and again needing to call upon Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams for assistance!
I just discovered recently that female students were sometimes allowed to attend Thursday evening Inklings meetings to hear Tolkien read his unfolding Lord of the Rings epic. I am very optimistic that Laura will be granted that privilege!
Q. Anything else you would like to add?
I just wanted to mention the novel website, http://www.lookingfortheking.com/, which goes into more depth about the Inklings. It also includes a video trailer about the novel which is a work of art in itself!
There is a Facebook page, Looking for the King, with more articles and features about Lewis, Tolkien, and their friends. This site will also provide a forum for me to interact
A Look at David C. Downing’s New Novel "Looking for the King"
by Devin Brown
http://booksbycslewis.blogspot.com/
1.26.2011
Anglophiles, mystery lovers (particularly those who prefer the brainy rather than the bloody type), and Inkling fans everywhere are sure to find something to truly enjoy in Looking for the King, the recent novel written by Lewis scholar David Downing.
Here’s how the description on the jacket flap begins:
“It is 1940, and American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur. There he meets perky and intuitive Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying with her aunt in Oxford, and the two of them team up for an even more ambitious and dangerous quest. Aided by the Inklings—that illustrious circle of scholars and writers made famous by its two most prolific members, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien—Tom and Laura begin to suspect that the fabled Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross, is hidden somewhere in England.”
Downing weaves a romance (of sorts), a mystery, and a quest with a series of conversations with Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams and throws in a spiritual journey along with the mix. For anyone who ever wished they could have been a fly on the wall of the Eagle and Child during a meeting of the Inklings, Downing masterfully recreates what one of their gathering must have been like by using real quotes from their letters and essays as the basis for his dialogue.
Picture of the facade of the Eagle and Child pub, en Oxford (England), where the Inklings met (1930-1950).
I recently and had the chance to ask David a few questions about his delightful “Inklings novel.”
Brown: It’s probably safe to assume that most readers of Looking for the King will be Inklings fans. Still, there may be some for whom your book serves as their first introduction to this distinguished group of friends and writers. How did you first encounter these figures, and what was your own reaction?
Downing: I first read both Lewis and Tolkien during my college years. Someone recommended the Narnia Chronicles to me in high school, but I thought I was far too sophisticated and mature at the age of eighteen to be reading "kid stuff"! When I finally dipped into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe one summer, I was so captivated that I read all seven Chronicles in a month. Then I sat down and re-read all seven of them again the next month. I casually picked The Lord of the Rings one afternoon during my junior year of college. I must confess, I neglected my homework for at least a week or ten days, because I couldn't put it down. I recall reading in bed one night about 2 a.m. when Gandalf was pulled into the abyss by the Balrog. I almost had an anxiety attack, thinking, "Now we'll never find our way out of the mines of Moria!" Later in the story, when Gandalf reappears, I had a sense of relief and elation that seemed some small tincture of the joy of that first Easter morning.
Lewis said that Charles Williams had a special gift for portraying good characters. But I think that is equally true of Lewis himself and also of Tolkien. So many contemporary novelists excel in their portrayals of troubled people—selfish, neurotic, brutish, and downright depraved. But only a handful of twentieth century novelists, including the Inklings, have the power to show us what good people look like—characters with integrity, compassion, courage, and a willingness to sacrifice for others. I'm sure this ability to portray good characters convincingly is derived from their Christian worldview, a sense that ultimately, it is not evil or chaos, but Goodness that reigns in the universe.
Brown: Your cover tells us this is “an Inklings novel.” We quickly discover that (1) the Inklings themselves appear as characters, and (2) you drew upon their actual words in shaping their dialogue. Your character Laura Hartman, while not sharing the developmental arc we see in Jane Studdock or Pauline Anstruther, does have the visionary dreams they do. Are there other aspects of your novel which show this homage to the Inklings?
Downing: I think those are the most important dimensions of the story which make it “an Inklings novel.” Of course, the notion that the Spear of Destiny might be hidden somewhere in England calls to mind Williams’ War in Heaven, in which the Holy Grail turns up in an obscure country church north of London.
The character of Tom McCord suggests Mark Studdock somewhat, in that his worldly ambitions lead him to embark on a spiritual journey which he had not anticipated. Tom’s movement from spiritual lethargy to an awakening of faith is also intended to echo Lewis’s own pilgrimage in his teens and twenties. No one has commented on it yet, but I also embedded a hidden pattern in the names of several key characters in the story. That may or may not be in the style of an Inklings story, depending upon which critics you read!
Brown: How did you first come up with the overall concept for Looking for the King?
Downing: My wife and I visited Somerset and Cornwall in 2005, and we were fascinated by all the legends that Joseph of Arimathea (the rich merchant mentioned in the Gospels) had traveled all the way to England in the first century, perhaps bringing with him the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus (the traditional name of the Roman soldier who thrust his lance into Christ's side). Around Glastonbury, one meets people who talk about "Old Joe" or "Big Joe" as if they just spoken with Joseph of Arimathea in a pub last week!
That same summer I was re-reading the letters of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and thinking how often their perceptive observations and witty remarks in their correspondence would make for great dialog in a novel. Soon afterwords, I read Matthew Pearl's literary detective novel, The Dante Club, in which a circle of American poets and scholars (Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell) help the local police solve a series of Dante-esque murders occurring in 19th century Boston. I enjoyed the unusual combination of mystery and literary biography, and I thought the Inklings would make an even livelier group to help some young adventurers on their quest. So my interest in the Spear and my interest in the Inklings merged into one storyline.
Brown: You have stated that half the fun of writing this novel was looking through the primary documents for elements to use in creating the dialogue. What did you learn in your research that was new to you?
Downing: I had read all the standard biographies and collections of letters before. But my earlier readings had focused on the Inklings as thinkers and writers more than as people. Instead of looking this time at Charles Williams as an author, I began to pick up on details such as that he lectured so energetically you could hear the coins clinking in his pocket as he paced back and forth. And that when he waxed philosophical, he would look off into space, as if gazing at something beyond the screen of the physical world.
For Tolkien, I had forgotten that he was an expert horseman in his youth, breaking untamed beasts that no one else was willing to mount. (No wonder his portrait of the Riders of Rohan is so sympathetic and so convincing!)
For Lewis, the main thing I noticed this time around was his robust sense of humor. Lewis’s lifelong friend Owen Barfield says that too many critics overlook Lewis’s ever-present sense of fun, his ready wit and love of hearty laughter. I think it is easier to bring out that side of Lewis in a novel than in studying him as a “literary artist” or as a “man of ideas.” Lewis’s letters are full of one-liners that you could almost turn into a stand-up comedy routine if you had a mind to. (Though I don’t have a mind to! Lewis’s humor usually bubbled over during serious discussions, not simply to provoke a guffaw for its own sake.)
Brown: As the author of a number of scholarly books about Lewis, you have had to deal with the problem of including extensive quotations from his original works. Were there any permissions issues with using so many actual words of the Inklings, and, if not, how do you get around them?
Downing: Just to be on the safe side, I did vet this project with both the C. S. Lewis Company and the Tolkien estate. My actual quotations from Lewis, Tolkien, and others fall well within the limits of “fair use,” borrowing only a small fraction of quoted material from any one book. Both of these authors’ representatives are very concerned about novelizations that might invent new details or episodes far beyond the known facts as set down in their biographies. So I portray the Inklings mainly as consultants and mentors to my young adventurers. You won’t find Tolkien or Lewis themselves out hunting for lost relics or trying to elude Nazi spies.
Brown: You have said elsewhere that tensions among the Inklings are often overstated. This is a position which Douglas Gresham has also repeatedly taken. To what extent does your novel help set the record straight on this issue?
Downing: My novel is set in the spring and summer of 1940, which I believe was the beginning of the “golden age” for the Inklings. A few years later, Tolkien began to feel that he was being overshadowed somewhat by Charles Williams, whose encyclopedic knowledge, quicksilver mind, and saintly demeanor clearly made a deep impression on Lewis. But Williams was always a great supporter of Tolkien’s unfolding Rings epic, and Tolkien sometimes consulted with Williams on his own, apart from meetings when Lewis was present. So I wanted to portray the prevailing good will among these men, not to magnify this issue or that one.
In sensationalized journalism, the saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” That is, anything to do with controversy or conflict takes precedence over dull stories about friendship, lively conversation, or a community of shared faith and values. I think an imaginary scene, such as may be found in a novel, can sometimes offer a more authentic picture of a historical moment than the “factual” reconstructions of a biography or article that was written by someone with a tabloid mentality.
Brown: Finally, can you say something about the critical and commercial reception your novel has received; about what, if anything, you have been surprised by; and about your plans for a sequel or other future book projects?
Downing: Both my publisher, Ignatius, and I have been very pleased with the response to Looking for the King. The novel has received generous reviews, and it has nearly gone through its first printing in less than three months. Its Facebook site attracted over 2000 followers in just a few weeks. I think readers must enjoy imaginatively climbing into a time machine and getting a sense of what it might have been like to meet Lewis and Tolkien back in the early 1940s or to be a “fly on the wall” at an Inklings meeting.
As I was writing this novel, I began to get ideas for a follow-up story, so I made sure to leave room for a sequel. Near the end of the story, Tom McCord says that if he returns to England, he will probably be in uniform. And Laura Hartman says she hopes to pursue at masters degree, perhaps at one of the women’s colleges in Oxford.
I have already started working on a sequel, a tale in which Tom and Laura are reunited in Oxford, but are again menaced by sinister and secretive foes. Once again they must enlist the aid and counsel of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. I just discovered recently that Lewis sometimes sponsored informal discussion groups in his rooms at Magdalen College, occasionally inviting both men and women to attend. I am very optimistic that Laura Hartman will be granted that privilege!
I also have in mind a rousing debate between C. S. Lewis and a acid-tongued atheist at a meeting of the Socratic Club. But as Treebeard might say, “There, there. Let us not be hasty . . .”
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Devin Brown is a Lilly Scholar and a Professor of English at Asbury University where he teaches a class on Lewis. He is the author of Inside Narnia (2005), Inside Prince Caspian (2008), and Inside the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
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David C. Downing is the R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Downing has written four books on C. S. Lewis: Planets in Peril, The Most Reluctant Convert, Into the Wardrobe, and Into the Region of Awe. He serves as a consulting editor on Lewis for Christian Scholars Review, Christianity and Literature, and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. Downing's most recent book is Looking for the King, a historical quest novel in which Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams figure prominently as characters. Visit Downing's college website (http://users.etown.edu/d/downindc/).
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/
5 November 2010
Title: Looking for the King - An Inklings NovelAuthor: David C. Downing
Publisher: Ignatius
Publication Date: October 30, 2010
Type: hardback, 285 pages
ISBN-10: 1586175149
ISBN-13: 978-1586175146
Most readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books end up reading about the man himself. For some, and I am for sure one of them, the author ends up at least as interesting as the books that flowed out of his hands. Once you deepen yourself in the subject sooner or later you end up reading about the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group of which Tolkien was a member. You learn about the other remarkable persons that made part of the group like C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson and cannot but imagine how it must have been to follow their courses, how their meetings at the Bird & Baby must have been and how it would be to actually speak with them.
In the past I used to say that for me it would have been a better idea to make a movie about J.R.R. Tolkien and best to have left his works for people to imagine. Now I have to admit that I was wrong, not about adapting Tolkien’s books to film, but about making a film about J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Probably because next to J.R.R. Tolkien and books about him I nearly do not find the time to read much lately, and most of the time when I do I get deeply disappointed by the books I end up reading. So I had never thought of a book where Tolkien would take part, especially since I believed it would be impossible to recreate the atmosphere of lectures or meetings with any of the Inklings. Of course I have heard of the books by James A. Owen, fantasy novels where Tolkien, Williams and Lewis are protagonists - or so I have understood - but never felt the urge to read them. Then I received a review copy of Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel by David C. Downing and for one or another reason immediately felt invited to work myself through it. Maybe it was the cover image, maybe the subtitle, maybe the blurb, or even a combination of the three but within an hour of receiving the book I started reading.
What happened next was a big surprise - and this had not happened for a very long time - I was unable to put this book down and had to read until the end (despite of the fact that I should have been sleeping and that I had to work the next day). And now I know… it is not only possible to visit J.R.R. Tolkien, talk to C.S. Lewis and go to an Inklings meeting but you can also smell, feel and taste the atmosphere of Oxford in the 40’s. Now I believe that no movie would have been able to re-create the world I walked into and once again well written words triggered my imagination better then any moving image could. I can only say, thank you David C. Downing…
In Looking for the King we follow the American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, who is doing research on King Arthur and hopes to discover some historical evidence for the legendary king. Right in the beginning of the book he meets a girl called Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying in Oxford, who has been having mysterious dreams and visions that relate to the subject of research of Tom and so he hires her as his assistant. Aided by the Inklings they set out on a treasure hunt and leads in the end to much more then Tom and Laura were initially looking for.
In this amazing novel we follow Tom McCord on a visit to Tolkien’s house, to a course of Charles Williams, to a meeting with the inklings, a walk with C.S Lewis along the Thames (probably one of the most moving scenes in the book), a visit to numerous sites all across England, a treasure hunt for the Spear of Destiny, the search for the sleeping king in Laura’s dreams, the quest for faith and love. All this comes together in a very well written book that must be read by any person who likes J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams or a extremely good book!
To end my review of this book I just want to say that is one of the best books I have read in a very long time and I would give it a 5 star rating on Amazon and no I would advise anyone to read it. Wow... it was a long long time ago that I read a book that was so amazing that I could not put it down and that means something! To write this book the author David C. Downing must have done a lot of research and must be a brilliant academic (all quotes and references are added at the end of the book, which is a very good extra for those who want to learn more about the Inklings); but on the other hand he must have an amazing amount of fantasy and imagination to be able to make all these famous persons like Lewis and Tolkien come to live and see the countryside and buildings as they were 70 years ago; and next to that he is a remarkable writer who is able to describe it all so well: charachters, feelings & emotions and places. It all comes together in this wonderful book. The only sad thing was that the story ended after only 266 pages!
http://www.ignatius.com/promotions/looking-for-the-king/
Catholic Novels: Looking for the King
By Dr. Jeff Mirus
http://www.catholicculture.org/
December 07, 2010 5:43 PM
Picture of the corner of the Eagle and Child pub, en Oxford (England), where the Inklings met (1930-1950).Joseph Pearce describes it as a “superbly gripping novel”. This is blatant hyperbole from a fellow Ignatius Press author, but the rest of his cover blurb is more accurate: “Lewis and Tolkien come alive.” So too says Thomas Howard: “All Inklings lovers will be highly delighted!” And Peter J. Shakel: “Fans of Lewis and Tolkien will love it.” All of this is praise for David C. Downing’s new novel, Looking for the King.
But why all this talk of Lewis and Tolkien and their informal club of literary giants, the Inklings? It turns out that Downing has given us “An Inklings Novel”, a story in which the hero and heroine discuss their mid-twentieth century quest for the relics of kings Arthur and Alfred with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and other Inklings, and so come away with a deeper understanding not only of history and myth, but of religion and life.
The action revolves around two Americans, Tom McCord, a doctoral candidate looking for evidence to prove King Arthur was a real historic figure, and Laura Hartman, a recent college graduate visiting England to figure out a series of strange, repetitive dreams. The dreams revolve around King Alfred (he of Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse) and the Lance of Longinus which pierced the side of Christ. Inevitably, the two team up (both archeologically and romantically) in a quest to unravel Laura’s dreams and Tom’s motives in attempting to build his academic reputation.
Almost immediately, Tom finds that there are mysterious adversaries who don’t want him searching for history-changing artifacts. Meanwhile, in the normal course of his studies, Tom consults C. S. Lewis, who arranges a meeting with the Inklings generally. So here we have a classic mystery involving history, myth, archeology and contemporary thugs; and a classic romance in the midst of adventure; and it is all interwoven with the wisdom of the giants of twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic literature: Lewis, Tolkien and Williams.
Given this mix, it takes no imagination to see how this book could have been a colossal flop. The key to such an effort is that the author must not take himself too seriously. The plot is frankly constructed of stock elements, from its storied artifacts to its German villains. Overplaying the plot would have resulted in a very bad Indiana Jones story. Moreover, the injection of a Christian point of view through the Inklings must not be self-conscious or forced. Any overplaying here would have produced a sermon with very poor subject matter. No, everything must unfold naturally, with just a touch of authorial self-deprecation, and without controlling or contriving the story to fit things in.
Fortunately, Downing is very capable of keeping things light. The reader is aware of the standard plot elements, just as he is aware of the author’s purpose in making the mystery “an Inklings novel”. But the bar is not set too high, the main characters are well-drawn and engaging, and the Inklings themselves are as quirky in print as they must have been in life. Throughout the course of the novel, they even speak, effortlessly and in context, using words they actually wrote. On the whole, this is a deft package which successfully avoids the one thing most calculated to ruin it: pretension.
I don’t want to make out Looking for the King to be more than it is. It is not great literature, but it doesn’t try to be. The book succeeds because it unfolds very comfortably within its own constraints, relying on attractive characters, English history, and the fondness of its intended Catholic readers for the Inklings to move things along in a warm and congenial way. Perhaps the biggest weakness is that the recurring dreams of the heroine are critical to the plot; here the author succumbs a bit to the contemporary temptation to inject fantastic elements into an otherwise real-world setting. But Downing does put a possible explanation for the dreams on the lips of Charles Williams and, after all, these are dreams. We’ve all had them, and explaining them however one wants does not require a novel-wrecking suspension of disbelief.
David Downing is an English professor who has written several award-winning books on C. S. Lewis, but he has kept this first novel blessedly free of academic clutter. At the same time, he has perhaps failed to make the dangers of the quest quite as intense as one might like. But here again the book is simply comfortable with itself. From the almost comic villainy of the German agent-turned-treasure-hunter to the subtle but significant transformation of the hero from agnosticism to faith, Downing lets his characters rule the story. The results are best described as natural, unaffected and endearing.
In the end, Looking for the King works. If the author has exposed some deficiencies of craftsmanship, I would like to suggest that he remedy them through practice. Let him write a sequel.
Q&A with David Downing, author of "Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel"
by Nancy Piccione
http://catholicbookgroup.blogspot.com/
Sunday, December 12, 2010
I was delighted to get the opportunity to interview David Downing, as his new novel, Looking for the King is one of my book recommendations in my Catholic Post column this month. For any fans of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Arthurian Legend, this book is intriguing and a fun read.Q. I really enjoyed the book and the characters. How did you get the idea for the novel, and including the “Inklings” authors as characters?
My wife and I visited Somerset and Cornwall in 2005, and we were fascinated by all the Arthurian sites, the stories that Joseph of Arimathea came to England, perhaps bringing with him the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus. Around Glastonbury, one meets people who talk about "Old Joe" or "Big Joe" as if they just spoken with Joseph of Arimathea in a pub last week!
The following year I read Matthew Pearl's literary detective novel THE DANTE CLUB, in which a circle of American poets and scholars (Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell) help the local police solve a series of Dante-esque murders occurring in 19th century Boston. I enjoyed the unusual combination of mystery and literary biography, and I thought the Inklings would make an even livelier group to help some young adventurers on their elusive quest.
Q. Is this your first work of fiction? Can you tell me about your other books?
I have published short fiction before, but this is my first novel. Most of my other books are about C. S. Lewis:
PLANETS IN PERIL: A CRITICAL STUDY OF C. S. LEWIS'S RANSOM TRILOGY (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992)
THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: C. S. LEWIS'S JOURNEY TO FAITH (InterVarsity, 2002)
INTO THE REGION OF AWE: MYSTICISM IN C. S. LEWIS (InterVarsity, 2005)
INTO THE WARDROBE: C. S. LEWIS AND THE NARNIA CHRONICLES (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
Just to keep from getting into too much of a rut, I have also written a book on misconceptions and misquotations concerning the Bible (WHAT YOU KNOW MIGHT NOT BE SO) and a book on the Civil War (A SOUTH DIVIDED).
Q. What is your favorite of the three “Inklings” in this book & why?
I am going to have to beg off this question; I’m afraid it is a little like asking parents which one is their favorite child!
I will say that what I admire most about Tolkien is his epic imagination, as well as his equal devotion to work and to family, as he was very much involved in raising his three sons and daughter.
What I admire about Lewis is his versatility—not just his classic Narnia stories, but also his renowned literary scholarship, his Christian apologetics, science fiction, and even poetry. Yet in Lewis all these diverse literary interests and talents are united in service to his Christian faith and values.
For Williams, I am impressed by his intellectual energy and earnestness, his ability to combine intellect with Spirit, so much so that some of his friends considered him to be almost a living saint. Lewis said that Williams looked something like a monkey when you first met him; but when he began speaking, his face radiated so much joy and love, you felt as if you were listening to an angel.
Q. I’ve only recently learned about author Charles Williams (when our family made a trip to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College). What would you recommend for the first thing to read by this author?
Williams was a prolific writer, producing nearly a book a year—novels, plays, poem cycles, histories, biographies, and books on theology. I think he is most remembered for his “supernatural thrillers,” novels in which characters come to learn that their everyday world is surrounded by a whole other dimension—what Williams like to call the “Arch-natural” world. Williams’ two best novels, or at least the easiest to understand, are probably War in Heaven (1930) and Descent into Hell (1937). Personally, my two favorite books of his are his short introductions to Christian theology and church history: He Came Down from Heaven (1938) and The Descent of the Dove (1939).
Q. What is your favorite work of the other two authors, and why? (C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien)
This question is easier to answer for Tolkien. His great masterpiece is his epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think any of his other works compare to the project to which he devoted almost twenty years of his life. I think Tolkien’s most under-read and under-rated story is “Leaf by Niggle,” a charming self-portrait with allegorical overtones that suggests most directly Tolkien’s devotion to his Catholic faith.
For Lewis, I’m afraid I am going to have to “plead the Fifth.” He was such a gifted and versatile writer that asking me to pick out one favorite is like asking me whether I prefer chocolate or springtime. How does one compare?
I would once again like to nominate a book as under-rated and under-read, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. This was the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and so it is his “last word” on many of the topics he touched upon so often in his writings—grief and hope, faith and doubt, and, above all, love. The book also explores the role of prayer in shaping our lives in this world and preparing us for the next.
Q. What do you think of the movies made of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and currently the Chronicles of Narnia series? (with the newest one, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, due out this Friday)
I was skeptical about both projects, as earlier attempts to adapt Tolkien and Lewis for films and television have been consistently disappointing. But I was pleasantly surprised by Peter’s Jackson’s LOTR trilogy. He has an amazing knack for casting characters and portraying scenes as if they are projections from our own imaginations as we read The Lord of the Rings.
So far I have enjoyed the Narnia films, but I don’t think they have become classics in their own right, apart from the books that inspired them, the way Peter Jackson’s movies have. But I have faith in Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, as guardian of Lewis’s literary legacy. So I am hoping that the Narnia films will just keep getting better and better.
Q. Do you plan a sequel or another “Inklings” novel of any kind?
Yes, I am already at work on a sequel. If you look at the end of LOOKING OF THE KING, you will notice that Tom McCord thinks he might be returning to England in uniform. And Laura Hartman wishes she could enroll in one of the women's colleges at Oxford. So, yes, I believe Tom and Laura will be reunited in a sequel, facing new dangers and again needing to call upon Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams for assistance!
I just discovered recently that female students were sometimes allowed to attend Thursday evening Inklings meetings to hear Tolkien read his unfolding Lord of the Rings epic. I am very optimistic that Laura will be granted that privilege!
Q. Anything else you would like to add?
I just wanted to mention the novel website, http://www.lookingfortheking.com/, which goes into more depth about the Inklings. It also includes a video trailer about the novel which is a work of art in itself!
There is a Facebook page, Looking for the King, with more articles and features about Lewis, Tolkien, and their friends. This site will also provide a forum for me to interact
A Look at David C. Downing’s New Novel "Looking for the King"
by Devin Brown
http://booksbycslewis.blogspot.com/
1.26.2011
Anglophiles, mystery lovers (particularly those who prefer the brainy rather than the bloody type), and Inkling fans everywhere are sure to find something to truly enjoy in Looking for the King, the recent novel written by Lewis scholar David Downing.
Here’s how the description on the jacket flap begins:
“It is 1940, and American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur. There he meets perky and intuitive Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying with her aunt in Oxford, and the two of them team up for an even more ambitious and dangerous quest. Aided by the Inklings—that illustrious circle of scholars and writers made famous by its two most prolific members, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien—Tom and Laura begin to suspect that the fabled Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross, is hidden somewhere in England.”
Downing weaves a romance (of sorts), a mystery, and a quest with a series of conversations with Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams and throws in a spiritual journey along with the mix. For anyone who ever wished they could have been a fly on the wall of the Eagle and Child during a meeting of the Inklings, Downing masterfully recreates what one of their gathering must have been like by using real quotes from their letters and essays as the basis for his dialogue.
Picture of the facade of the Eagle and Child pub, en Oxford (England), where the Inklings met (1930-1950).I recently and had the chance to ask David a few questions about his delightful “Inklings novel.”
Brown: It’s probably safe to assume that most readers of Looking for the King will be Inklings fans. Still, there may be some for whom your book serves as their first introduction to this distinguished group of friends and writers. How did you first encounter these figures, and what was your own reaction?
Downing: I first read both Lewis and Tolkien during my college years. Someone recommended the Narnia Chronicles to me in high school, but I thought I was far too sophisticated and mature at the age of eighteen to be reading "kid stuff"! When I finally dipped into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe one summer, I was so captivated that I read all seven Chronicles in a month. Then I sat down and re-read all seven of them again the next month. I casually picked The Lord of the Rings one afternoon during my junior year of college. I must confess, I neglected my homework for at least a week or ten days, because I couldn't put it down. I recall reading in bed one night about 2 a.m. when Gandalf was pulled into the abyss by the Balrog. I almost had an anxiety attack, thinking, "Now we'll never find our way out of the mines of Moria!" Later in the story, when Gandalf reappears, I had a sense of relief and elation that seemed some small tincture of the joy of that first Easter morning.
Lewis said that Charles Williams had a special gift for portraying good characters. But I think that is equally true of Lewis himself and also of Tolkien. So many contemporary novelists excel in their portrayals of troubled people—selfish, neurotic, brutish, and downright depraved. But only a handful of twentieth century novelists, including the Inklings, have the power to show us what good people look like—characters with integrity, compassion, courage, and a willingness to sacrifice for others. I'm sure this ability to portray good characters convincingly is derived from their Christian worldview, a sense that ultimately, it is not evil or chaos, but Goodness that reigns in the universe.
Brown: Your cover tells us this is “an Inklings novel.” We quickly discover that (1) the Inklings themselves appear as characters, and (2) you drew upon their actual words in shaping their dialogue. Your character Laura Hartman, while not sharing the developmental arc we see in Jane Studdock or Pauline Anstruther, does have the visionary dreams they do. Are there other aspects of your novel which show this homage to the Inklings?
Downing: I think those are the most important dimensions of the story which make it “an Inklings novel.” Of course, the notion that the Spear of Destiny might be hidden somewhere in England calls to mind Williams’ War in Heaven, in which the Holy Grail turns up in an obscure country church north of London.
The character of Tom McCord suggests Mark Studdock somewhat, in that his worldly ambitions lead him to embark on a spiritual journey which he had not anticipated. Tom’s movement from spiritual lethargy to an awakening of faith is also intended to echo Lewis’s own pilgrimage in his teens and twenties. No one has commented on it yet, but I also embedded a hidden pattern in the names of several key characters in the story. That may or may not be in the style of an Inklings story, depending upon which critics you read!
Brown: How did you first come up with the overall concept for Looking for the King?
Downing: My wife and I visited Somerset and Cornwall in 2005, and we were fascinated by all the legends that Joseph of Arimathea (the rich merchant mentioned in the Gospels) had traveled all the way to England in the first century, perhaps bringing with him the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus (the traditional name of the Roman soldier who thrust his lance into Christ's side). Around Glastonbury, one meets people who talk about "Old Joe" or "Big Joe" as if they just spoken with Joseph of Arimathea in a pub last week!
That same summer I was re-reading the letters of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and thinking how often their perceptive observations and witty remarks in their correspondence would make for great dialog in a novel. Soon afterwords, I read Matthew Pearl's literary detective novel, The Dante Club, in which a circle of American poets and scholars (Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell) help the local police solve a series of Dante-esque murders occurring in 19th century Boston. I enjoyed the unusual combination of mystery and literary biography, and I thought the Inklings would make an even livelier group to help some young adventurers on their quest. So my interest in the Spear and my interest in the Inklings merged into one storyline.
Brown: You have stated that half the fun of writing this novel was looking through the primary documents for elements to use in creating the dialogue. What did you learn in your research that was new to you?
Downing: I had read all the standard biographies and collections of letters before. But my earlier readings had focused on the Inklings as thinkers and writers more than as people. Instead of looking this time at Charles Williams as an author, I began to pick up on details such as that he lectured so energetically you could hear the coins clinking in his pocket as he paced back and forth. And that when he waxed philosophical, he would look off into space, as if gazing at something beyond the screen of the physical world.
For Tolkien, I had forgotten that he was an expert horseman in his youth, breaking untamed beasts that no one else was willing to mount. (No wonder his portrait of the Riders of Rohan is so sympathetic and so convincing!)
For Lewis, the main thing I noticed this time around was his robust sense of humor. Lewis’s lifelong friend Owen Barfield says that too many critics overlook Lewis’s ever-present sense of fun, his ready wit and love of hearty laughter. I think it is easier to bring out that side of Lewis in a novel than in studying him as a “literary artist” or as a “man of ideas.” Lewis’s letters are full of one-liners that you could almost turn into a stand-up comedy routine if you had a mind to. (Though I don’t have a mind to! Lewis’s humor usually bubbled over during serious discussions, not simply to provoke a guffaw for its own sake.)
Brown: As the author of a number of scholarly books about Lewis, you have had to deal with the problem of including extensive quotations from his original works. Were there any permissions issues with using so many actual words of the Inklings, and, if not, how do you get around them?
Downing: Just to be on the safe side, I did vet this project with both the C. S. Lewis Company and the Tolkien estate. My actual quotations from Lewis, Tolkien, and others fall well within the limits of “fair use,” borrowing only a small fraction of quoted material from any one book. Both of these authors’ representatives are very concerned about novelizations that might invent new details or episodes far beyond the known facts as set down in their biographies. So I portray the Inklings mainly as consultants and mentors to my young adventurers. You won’t find Tolkien or Lewis themselves out hunting for lost relics or trying to elude Nazi spies.
Brown: You have said elsewhere that tensions among the Inklings are often overstated. This is a position which Douglas Gresham has also repeatedly taken. To what extent does your novel help set the record straight on this issue?Downing: My novel is set in the spring and summer of 1940, which I believe was the beginning of the “golden age” for the Inklings. A few years later, Tolkien began to feel that he was being overshadowed somewhat by Charles Williams, whose encyclopedic knowledge, quicksilver mind, and saintly demeanor clearly made a deep impression on Lewis. But Williams was always a great supporter of Tolkien’s unfolding Rings epic, and Tolkien sometimes consulted with Williams on his own, apart from meetings when Lewis was present. So I wanted to portray the prevailing good will among these men, not to magnify this issue or that one.
In sensationalized journalism, the saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” That is, anything to do with controversy or conflict takes precedence over dull stories about friendship, lively conversation, or a community of shared faith and values. I think an imaginary scene, such as may be found in a novel, can sometimes offer a more authentic picture of a historical moment than the “factual” reconstructions of a biography or article that was written by someone with a tabloid mentality.
Brown: Finally, can you say something about the critical and commercial reception your novel has received; about what, if anything, you have been surprised by; and about your plans for a sequel or other future book projects?
Downing: Both my publisher, Ignatius, and I have been very pleased with the response to Looking for the King. The novel has received generous reviews, and it has nearly gone through its first printing in less than three months. Its Facebook site attracted over 2000 followers in just a few weeks. I think readers must enjoy imaginatively climbing into a time machine and getting a sense of what it might have been like to meet Lewis and Tolkien back in the early 1940s or to be a “fly on the wall” at an Inklings meeting.
As I was writing this novel, I began to get ideas for a follow-up story, so I made sure to leave room for a sequel. Near the end of the story, Tom McCord says that if he returns to England, he will probably be in uniform. And Laura Hartman says she hopes to pursue at masters degree, perhaps at one of the women’s colleges in Oxford.
I have already started working on a sequel, a tale in which Tom and Laura are reunited in Oxford, but are again menaced by sinister and secretive foes. Once again they must enlist the aid and counsel of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. I just discovered recently that Lewis sometimes sponsored informal discussion groups in his rooms at Magdalen College, occasionally inviting both men and women to attend. I am very optimistic that Laura Hartman will be granted that privilege!
I also have in mind a rousing debate between C. S. Lewis and a acid-tongued atheist at a meeting of the Socratic Club. But as Treebeard might say, “There, there. Let us not be hasty . . .”
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Devin Brown is a Lilly Scholar and a Professor of English at Asbury University where he teaches a class on Lewis. He is the author of Inside Narnia (2005), Inside Prince Caspian (2008), and Inside the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
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David C. Downing is the R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Downing has written four books on C. S. Lewis: Planets in Peril, The Most Reluctant Convert, Into the Wardrobe, and Into the Region of Awe. He serves as a consulting editor on Lewis for Christian Scholars Review, Christianity and Literature, and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. Downing's most recent book is Looking for the King, a historical quest novel in which Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams figure prominently as characters. Visit Downing's college website (http://users.etown.edu/d/downindc/).
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