Archive for Hurricane

Stories of prominent persons on the Hollywood scene who were persecuted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and then blacklisted are easy to come by.  Quite a number of careers were ruined, perhaps most of them undeservedly.  Whether some of the persons in question really were dangerous in terms of their un-American activities is a moot point at present.  Where does Hollywood come off, though, in its own long-term blacklisting of anyone who refuses to go along with its leftist line?  I mean, it was decades ago when a certain superstar told John Wayne he was thinking of working for the Republican Party in an election.  Wayne’s response was, “Well, that’s okay, ______.  You can do that, but don’t expect to work in Hollywood for a couple of years.”  Of course, it’s a different matter if the person in question is so big a star that the powers that be wouldn’t want to let go of that person’s moneymaking potential.  John Wayne was a major example of that.

Another of those stars too big to be squashed is Mel Gibson.  Remember when he announced that he was going to make The Passion and fund it himself?  The Hollywood establishment said he would fall on his face and lose millions.  When the film turned out to bring in more millions than anyone could count, the word was, “Gibson did it for the money.”  Now, that is hypocrisy.

Gibson’s own hypocritical actions are grist for another post.

A friend told me this morning that during the Vietnam War he and his wife were in a dinner theater in Las Vegas to hear a singing star from Hollywood.  When she came in she sat down on a stool and launched into a long left-wing harangue.  The only good thing, he said, was that the manager didn’t argue when he asked for his money back.

Dream Factory indeed.  Oh, yes; the films themselves, when they’re not vying with each other to be the most cynical in their portrayal of exacerbated hatred, revenge and up-close slaughter, to say nothing of gratuitous sex, sometimes provide the stuff that dreams are made of.  But what goes on behind the scenes?  I’ve had the dubious privilege of getting to know a number of people who have been immersed in the Hollywood scene, and only two of them escaped without being seriously traumatized.  It’s a cliché, but no less true for it, that Hollywood uses people and then throws them away.

I should add, however, that there are some truly admirable people in Hollywood.  Back in the 60s I had a friend who was kind of a gofer for Jack Warner, as the person who carried urgent messages back and forth from Warner’s office to the sound stages.  Some ailment caused him to lose one of his legs, and he told me he assumed that he was going to have some real difficulty finding a new line of work.  Jack Warner called him in, though, and told him he had been too loyal and efficient an employee to be cast off, so he was finding a new job for him.

For that matter, Frank Sinatra, who never had the most stellar of reputations for high moral standards, was noted for sometimes mobilizing his high-profile friends on the spur of the moment to go and put on impromptu shows to raise money for friends who were the victims of calamities.

Perhaps the real danger in Hollywood’s general attitude, though, lies in the fact of its immense influence, not only here but in the world at large.  I recall a survey that was taken to find what percentage of Americans believed that UFOs were really interplanetary spacecraft.  (I hate that question, “Do you believe in UFOs?”  Since the term means “unidentified flying objects,” not necessarily spacecraft manipulated by little green men, I feel like answering that I do, since everyone agrees that there are flying objects that haven’t been identified, but then I’d be  misunderstood.)  Then the survey was taken again some weeks after Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, and the percentage was much higher.  There is some dangerous power there, and it’s a pity that it’s so often used recklessly.

A few days ago I had the distinct privilege of visiting the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where I learned a few things, as I always do at great museums.  I was puzzled by Goya’s painting of St.  Jerome as an ascetic in the desert, because he depicts that intellectual giant as something of a demented fanatic.  But I was also struck by the description accompanying a 19th-century painting of some peasants.  It pointed out that artists of that period often portrayed peasants because of the notion, current at that time, that the common people possessed some special wisdom.

That idea no doubt had its most immediate roots in the “noble savage” motif of the previous century, and of course with Romanticism came the theme of humankind in its relationship with nature.  The peasant was in closer contact with nature than the elite city dweller in the nature of the case, and nature for the Romantics was something alive and revelatory.  Just think of the “pathetic fallacy,” according to which nature could suffer or rejoice with people.  “It was a dark and stormy night . . . .”

But the theme goes back much farther than that.  Moses spends forty years in the sophisticated court of the Pharaoh, but comes into contact with Yahweh only in the wilderness after forty years as a shepherd.  David is called to be king as a young shepherd who has gleaned great wisdom in the fields around Bethlehem, which is where the New Testament then says the Savior was born, and that to a simple artisan and his wife.  To see what the New Testament thinks of the wisdom of simple folks, just look at Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55.  It is a masterpiece of literary form, and I would dearly love to see it in what was probably the original Aramaic.  The first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel read as if they were translated from Aramaic or Hebrew, and some serious scholars theorize that Mary wrote them and handed them to Luke.  After that, Luke begins writing the polished Greek that one would expect of a more conventionally learned person.

Nor did the idea of peasant wisdom escape the artists of the Baroque and Counter Reformation periods.  In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes presented us with Don Quixote’s armor bearer, Sancho Panza, who has been called one of the greatest men created by man.  Don Quixote admits that he envies Sancho’s ability to recite the Spanish proverbs that encapsulate the wisdom of the ages for the illiterate (as has been well described by the great Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella), and near the end of his adventures Don Quixote himself utters the famous line, “There are no birds this year in the nests of yesteryear.”

In the United States we have our own tradition of the unlearned but wise thinker.  Abraham Lincoln, among other presidents, came from simple and undistinguished stock, and it wasn’t so long ago that Eric Sevareid brought to our attention our “longshoreman philosopher,” Eric Hoffer, whose ideas I find immensely useful in analyzing today’s sociopolitical situation.

One of my favorite stories I cannot document, but I am assured that it is true.  It has to do with the University of Chicago Divinity School’s annual Baptist Appreciation Day.  One year it featured a picnic on the grass with the great theologian Paul Tillich as speaker.  Tillich, as I understand it, spent two hours proving that it is foolish to believe in the divinity of Christ.  When he was finished, he asked for questions from members of the clergy and their families below him.  An elderly black man stood up munching an apple and asked, “Mr.  Tillich, this apple I’m eating—can you tell me whether it’s bitter or sweet?”

“Of course I can’t,” retorted Tillich.  “I haven’t tasted your apple.”

“Uh, huh.  (Crunch, crunch.)  And neither have you tasted my sweet Jesus.”  The old man received an ovation and Tillich beat a hasty retreat.

It occurs to me, though, that our society may have come up with a dangerous twist on this issue.  A large percentage of the population distrusts, and even holds in contempt, the learning of the universities, and embraces instead whatever comes from the mouths of celebrities.  In one of his superb novels, Christopher Buckley has his protagonist’s car being passed on the beltway by limos occupied by the ambassadors of a couple of Hollywood stars, on their way to advise the president on foreign policy.  So much for peasant wisdom.

Even worse, in my opinion, is the tendency to “dress down,” with that phenomenon’s accompanying behavior, to the point that the young men in television commercials often look and act like blithering idiots who must have been found face down in the gutter in a pool of vomit.  In fact, I have called the tendency “gutter chic” for many years now.  If a man in a commercial, or in a popular sitcom, doesn’t look at least like an escaped convict, I suppose he isn’t credible.  At the same time, the same kind of people claim something like aristocratic status.  How about the T-shirts proclaiming that some uncouth person or group “rules”?  Just a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?

Someone remarked a couple of decades ago that the United States represents the first entertainment culture since the fall of the Roman Empire.  We’re familiar with the way the Romans looted the empire in order to provide free grain for the inhabitants of the capital city, offering them plenty of increasingly bloody entertainment into the bargain.  “Bread and circus” was the catchphrase, and the assumption was that if they were fed and entertained they wouldn’t be inclined to revolt.  If the people loved to see exotic animals slaughtered, bring them in from Africa.  If they wanted to watch people die, bring in the gladiators, or have condemned criminals executed in public, sometimes by large, hungry predators.  (I understand it’s an open question whether Christians were actually killed in the Roman Coliseum as they were elsewhere in the empire.)

So how does our society compare with that one?  About a year ago, it seems the most popular of all television shows was WWF wrestling, and now I notice that “extreme cagefighting” is quite prominent, not to mention boxing.  I recently saw some footage of Mohammed Ali; he has paid the price.  Oh, yes, and remember when “reality TV” meant people on stage baiting their relatives or other acquaintances, at which point the latter would come onto the stage and start a major fistfight?

I recall taking a date to the midget auto races.  (We were nothing if not pure class on our dates).  Soon the young lady informed me that she was bored out of her skull.  Then the left front wheel of one car ran up onto the right rear wheel of another, causing the first car to flip upside down on an embankment.  My concern was that those phony headrests on the midgets were for appearance only, since they only came up to the middle of the drivers’ backs, so I was sure the driver had a broken neck or worse.  I asked my date whether she was finally happy, and she answered enthusiastically that she was.  (The driver walked away without major injuries.  I don’t recall her reaction to that.)

Decades back we were already deploring sex and violence on television, and with the advance in special effects techniques things have only worsened, at least in the case of violence.  A sure-fire formula for a successful film is non-stop violent action with some sleazy sex thrown in for good measure.  Mention a beautiful, poetic film such as Babette’s Feast or Love Comes Softly and see what kind of response you get.  People don’t even bother to say, “Bo-ring” anymore.  They just look at you as if you had brought a skunk into the room.

Sports play a major role in our entertainment culture.  Leaving aside the “enforcer” in hockey matches, whose role is to start fights to keep the customers stimulated enough to return to their hotel rooms and trash them, we still have sportscasters who praise players to the skies for engaging in “smash-mouth football,” and last weekend there was a series of short videos of college players in boxing poses, feinting blows at the camera.  A few years ago a lot of effusive praise was heaped upon a former player at a Texas school for orphans who had been especially proficient at a move taught by his coach that involved catching an opponent under his chin with one’s helmet and jerking it up sharply.  This was guaranteed to knock the opponent out cold.

And then there are the salaries.  In case anyone doesn’t think this is, after all, an entertainment culture, how about a baseball team that offers a player who goes one-for-three upwards of 27 million dollars per year on a five-year contract, and he and his agent have to think it over?  Let’s face it; we pay for what we value the most, and just this morning I heard people moaning about public school teachers who receive salaries in the mid five figures.  I mean, these sports stars’ salaries are in eight figures.  Then there are those rock stars with the mind of a fern and the morals of an alleycat who make 130 million dollars a year.

Well, what about the bread aspect?  Did you see the woman who was interviewed after Barack Obama’s victory was announced, who was overjoyed because she thought all her living expenses would now be paid for by the government?  Richard Cochrane calls that “salvation without effort.”  Yes, Virginia, there are plenty of people who would love to have a socialist government installed, but who would never, ever consider the cost of it.  After all, there must be someone else out there who will foot the bill, right?  The Roman Empire found a source of bread and circus outside Rome.

And then they paid the price when those barbarians came crashing in and spoiled the party.  We hypocrites had better take a lesson here or we may repeat it.

It’s was always a bit startling to me to hear a student from Oxford or Cambridge say, “I’m reading ancient history” or “I’m reading Victorian literature.”  A statement of that kind is light years away from the basic orientation of the typical student in an American college or university.  There one hears, “I’m majoring in recreation management.”  (“Majoring”; another noun turned into a verb.)  The image that springs to mind is that of one of those semi-professional athletes managing to take a little time away from the football field to go to the gym and practice blowing a whistle and yelling, “Hey, listen up, you guys!”  I happen to know that one superstar running back, when he was at a Pennsylvania university (not Penn State; Joe Paterno still has standards, I hear), never attended a class in his four years there.  The arrangement was that his profs would give him Cs, but that he would not graduate.  When he arrived in the NFL he had to have tutors to help him learn the playbook.

When I began attempting to teach at what was then considered one of the three best Christian liberal arts colleges in the country, and was immediately in trouble essentially for trying to impose some academic standards in my courses, an older colleague pointed out, “This is a student-driven institution, and you’re expected to mollycoddle them.”  Another colleague remarked, “Don’t lower your standards.  Just lower your expectations,” but I knew that if I followed that advice I’d give all Fs.

At the end of the academic year the vice president for academic affairs (whatever happened to “dean”?)  called me to his office to explain that the tide of student opinion was running so strongly against me that he felt I should look for another position.  He explained that I was a scholar, and that this was a teaching institution, so I didn’t belong there.

What was that again?

Here is the sort of thing that was happening:  I was teaching second-year Spanish, and one day I called on a student to do a simple transformation during a drill.  He asked, “What kind of word is that second one there?”

I answered him, “That’s an adjective.  You do know what an adjective is, don’t you?”  I almost felt as if it were unkind to ask such an insulting question; mollycoddling, you understand.  He admitted that he didn’t know one part of speech from another because he had never studied English grammar.  My head was swimming at that point, because the next topic in the textbook was “Uses of the Imperfect Subjunctive in Adverbial Clauses of Purpose and Proviso.”

When I expressed my surprise, he said, “I’ll bet almost no one in the class has studied English grammar.”  I called for a show of hands, and virtually all of them went up.  The image of a flight school for pigs sprang to mind.  My job was to teach Spanish to students who had no clue about how English works.  Oh, yes, and to teach Hispanic literatures to students who were barely capable of reading Dick and Jane.

On another day, an alleged student asked me what tense a verb in his sentence was in.  I told him and then reminded him that he had, after all, studied that tense the previous semester.  He retorted sharply that he could not be held responsible for anything presented in a previous semester.  I told him to try that one on the Math Department and then come back so we could talk about it.  In other words, the concept of actually learning something was foreign to him.

Back to those Oxbridge people.  When they said they were “reading” in the various areas, they meant that they were expected to prepare themselves, under the guidance of their tutors, for some tough final examinations.  The fundamental way to accomplish this was to do copious readings of the pertinent texts.  Lectures on the various topics would be made available by professors who were first of all research-oriented scholars.  In the beginning, a university was a place where scholars got together to offer guidance to young men, and later women as well, who wanted to become educated.  (And yes, I’m well aware of the wild partying that went on the Middle Ages too.)

Actually, I believe it was Socrates who said education was a student on one end of a log and a student on the other.  So much for billion-dollar campuses.

Become educated?  What an antiquated notion.  In chapel at the above-mentioned college, one speaker asked the seniors in the front rows why they were there.  To a person they answered, “To get a degree.”  I was assured by a more experienced faculty member that anyone answering, “To get an education” would have been disgraced.

As a corollary, faculty members are expected to be oriented towards getting passing grades from their students in the form of evaluations.  At a university where I taught, I was on the Promotion and Tenure Committee when a friend of mine came up for promotion.  His student evaluations were stellar, but another professor, who had taken over a popular linguistics course of his, pointed out that his course was set up so that the students could cheat, and that he gave all A’s.  Ironically, the professor who pointed that out had a course of her own that ran on a point system weighted so heavily in favor of class attendance that someone noticed that a dog could be enrolled and, if it wandered into the classroom each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, would pass the course.

I can’t confirm it, but I have read twice of a study in which it was determined that only 30% of US college graduates can even read a label and understand what it says.  Surprised?  Come, now; these are the future leaders of America?  Or are they the present leaders?  Maybe this explains why our Congress gets a satisfaction rating of 9% and some of us wonder how it got that high.

It is highly hypocritical of us even to keep calling these diploma mills “institutions of higher learning.”  The reason we were instructed to mollycoddle those synthetic students at that student-driven institution was that if we didn’t they would go to another school where they would be mollycoddled, and take their parents’ money with them.  Our school would fold and we would be out of a job.  And that’s the bottom line.

I retired early.

“Calvinist by Free Choice” is a sign illustrating my last entry at this website. It’s a clever little piece of tomfoolery, because everyone knows Calvinists don’t believe in free choice, right?

Wrong.

As the conundrum is expounded by Jonathan Edwards, whom many even in the secular world hold to have been the greatest of all American philosophers, we humans have freedom, but not free will.

Got that? Think it’s double-talk? I once angered a hyper-Calvinist pastor by challenging his statement, “You don’t have any choice about whether you’re saved or not.” The fact that John Calvin was abundantly clear on the biblical doctrine that “whosoever will may come” failed to move him.

In any case, Calvin only wrote about a page and a half in his Institutes of the Christian Religion on predestination, which comes as a shock to many who, never having read him, take him to be the ogre of determinism. Calvinism might be the most misunderstood ideology in the world. Calvin’s view, as expounded by Edwards in his masterful Freedom of the Will, holds that every person has the ability to make choices, in other words, possesses the freedom to choose, but that each choice is determined by all the influences working on that person.

John Calvin, who had been expected to become one of the greats of French jurisprudence, laid down a principle for winning an argument:  Determine the most essential point of the issue under dispute and hammer away at it until your opponent has nowhere left to stand. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards does exactly that. The entire text consists of a close examination of a single act of the will. Edwards asks whether the person in question can be said to choose A or B without anything influencing that choice. In other words, is that will absolutely free to choose either alternative, without being moved in one direction or the other by anything at all, internal or external? He attempts to demonstrate that an affirmative answer is patently absurd because the free will advocate is postulating an effect without a cause. It is fairly obvious to most of us that any decision is moved by all the factors within the chooser’s psychological makeup.
Nevertheless, the person facing a choice is free to make that choice, and as such is responsible for it. Yes, says Edwards, this leaves us in an unresolvable mystery involving how a person can be condemned for making a choice determined by all the factors that have influenced his or her tendencies, but any other approach to the problem leads to difficulties which are as bad or worse.
Recently an individual with apparently solid credentials as an American historian made the statement that Calvinists are the most insecure of people because they believe it is impossible for anyone to know whether he or she is among the elect.  Curiously, Roman Catholics have traditionally faulted Calvinists for believing the exact opposite. To the Catholic it appears that the true Calvinist is arrogant in declaring his or her assurance of salvation. The truth is that Calvin taught that the appropriation of salvation by faith on the part of an individual constitutes proof that the individual is among the elect. Furthermore, he answered his Catholic critics, there is no arrogance to the acceptance of such an assurance, because the believer has done absolutely nothing to merit that salvation.
Still, the truth is that in colonial times in America the Calvinism that the Puritans and Separatists had brought from England decayed into what we call hyper-Calvinism, in which people really did believe they had no choice, and that no one could know who was among the elect. They came to believe that one had to prove one’s election to oneself and the community by being a diligent, hard-working person. Since such an attitude normally led to a certain affluence, that theory in turn deteriorated into a belief that the rich were good and the poor were bad. Needless to say, an enormous amount of damage was done by this ideology, because many came to believe the poor were unworthy of being helped or even treated with dignity.
Ironically, Marxism eventually crept into American thinking by degrees, with the result that quite often we are confronted with the idea that the poor are good and the rich are bad. The film Titanic is an excellent example. About the only upper class individual who is viewed in a positive light is the one who symbolically descends to steerage and dances and celebrates with the pure and innocent proletariat.
Neither of these extremes is anything but false and dangerous, of course, and Calvinism in its genuine form rejects them. I recall my first sight of a Presbyterian church in Bristol, Tennessee, a traditional one in that its membership was largely upper middle class. As I drove up I noticed that a very poorly dressed man was walking up the stairs. He was warmly welcomed and ushered in, as I recall, by the vice mayor, a judge and the CEO of the local Coca Cola bottling plant. That is genuine Calvinism in practice.
As an Orthodox Presbyterian friend wrote yesterday, “I’m thankful that God chose me and then freed me and empowered me to choose him.”

In the Middle Egyptian language there is one verb that means “to fare upstream” or “to fare southward,” and another bears the meaning, “to fare downstream” or “to fare northward.”  Those verbs worked perfectly well in the vicinity of the Nile, but when an Egyptian general issued an order using one of them as his troops were deployed next to the Jordan River, they didn’t know which way to go, since the Jordan flows south.  Military operations require unequivocal language.

The demise of the League of Nations was caused in part by the mistranslation of an expression from French into English.  The original stated that “la France demande . . . ,” which was translated as “France demands . . . .”  Many Americans felt that if, after we had bailed them out in World War I, the French were inclined to make demands, we weren’t interested in obliging them.  Demander in French actually means “to request.”

These are just a couple of examples of foulups in language that have made some difference in world history.  It should go without saying that great civilizations must take great care with their languages, using them with precision.  In fact, it has been noted that great civilizations tend to have complex languages—the Russians, the English and the Americans, for example.  The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges remarked that he would have preferred to write in English because, with both Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots, it lends itself to more subtlety of expression than does Spanish.

But at the present time it appears that precision in language is strictly optional.  The problem with this is that language structures thought, and if language is illogical or otherwise sloppy, thought too becomes chaotic.  I’ve noticed that the phase “just might” is almost always inverted today.  “Charlie might just wear a tie to the dance” has quite different connotations than “Charlie just might wear a tie to the dance.”  Or what about the tendency, perhaps based on the song, Nobody Does It Better, to say, “No gasoline cleans your car’s engine better than Chevron with Techron”?  That leaves open the possibility that every other gasoline on the market does it just as well.  “No other gasoline cleans your car’s engine as well . . . ” is not the same thing.

And then there are those lovely dependent clauses floating in space, looking for something to hang onto.  The best one I’ve come across was in a program on Russian rocketry.  In speaking of a particular rocket, the narrator said, “Launched into space three times, the factory that built it still exists.”

“Man, oh, man!,” I said to myself.  “Those Russian factories are formidable.”

Political correctness has also polluted the language, so that singular and plural become mixed up:  “Every person has their own viewpoint.”  Again I submit that when language becomes that dull, the thought expressed in it is not likely to be any sharper.  This goofiness has gone so far that the grammatical error in question is used even when there is no PC purpose for it:  “Each individual species has their own way of dealing with this challenge.”

Oh, but it gets better.  Sometimes an egregious error is made in an attempt to sound sophisticated.  I heard a college president with a Ph.D. in English begin a speech with “This has been an interesting summer for my wife and I.”

That is about as bad as a classic I heard uttered by a first grade teacher:  “Me and her was gonna do that.”  There are four errors in the first four words.

Then there’s my personal favorite:  “these kinds of things” when “things of this kind” would be appropriate.  I get tired of shouting at the TV screen, “How many kinds of things are you referring to, idiot?”

Or how about what I call chain-link sentences?:  “That’s the problem with this team is that it has no running game.”

Many books have been sent to me with requests that I review them for one journal or another.  Some of them have interested me a great deal.  I recall one in particular, produced by a Jewish writer about the experience of his people in Colombia in the 1930s, when that country was one of two in the Americas that had concordats with the Vatican pledging that they would be purely and perpetually Roman Catholic.  I started reading the book with relish.  One image stuck out.  The narrator told of the Jews’ being so poor that the children were admitted free to a movie theater—but were only allowed to sit behind the screen.  This was their reality, the reverse of the accepted point of view in Colombia.

The problem with the book was that, despite the fact that the author was a native speaker of Spanish and held a Ph.D. degree in that language from an Ivy League university, the book contained thousands of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation.  At one point a character wants to deny something, and says, “No, es verdad” (No, it’s true) instead of “No es verdad” (It’s not true).  I stopped reading and sent the book back to the book review editor of the journal in question.  Still, when I took a book manuscript of mine to a highly recommended typist and she introduced several thousand errors of the same kind (those kinds of errors?)  I began wondering whether that had happened to the Colombian writer as well.  But if so, where was the copy editor in all this?  Someone should have edited those errors out of the book.

Ours is an age when it seems accuracy is optional.  If “Me and her was gonna do that” gets the thought across, it’s acceptable—except in the business world, that is.  One growth industry is straightening up executives’ English usage.  Perhaps it’s time for primary school teachers to stop telling their pupils that grammar, punctuation and spelling don’t matter, that what matters is that they express themselves.  And it may also be time for university professors of English to stop claiming that there is no such thing as standard English.  Are we really to believe that “Me and her was gonna do that” is as correct as “She and I were going to do that”?  Just try speaking that way in your interview for a position in a serious business firm.

And, if I may be permitted just one business cliché, the bottom line here is that sloppy language does tend to reflect sloppy thinking.  We can’t afford that in a world of this kind.

Feel free to pick my little essays apart in search of errors in English usage.  However, if you find that I’ve ended a sentence with a preposition and call me on it, I’ll quote Winston Churchill:  “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

The celebrated Colombian poet and novelist Alvaro Mutis once received a wild ovation from a university crowd in Puerto Rico by announcing, “I want you to know that I support the separation of Puerto Rico from the United States.”  When the applause and cheering settled down, he continued, “ . . . so that it may be returned to its rightful owner, the King of Spain.”  Mutis is a monarchist and, while he freely admits that myriad abominations have come out of the monarchies of history, he also maintains that they are far fewer and have caused far less harm to the common people than those of the dictatorships that have often replaced them.  “Who,” he asks, “would replace a Czar Nicholas with a Joseph Stalin?”

Untold gallons of ink have been spilled over the question of what to do with countries that manage to rid themselves of pernicious governments but are clearly not ready for democracy.  At one point in the nineteenth century, Mexico, having gained its independence from the Spanish monarchy, felt it wasn’t happy about US-style democracy and wanted to install another king.  The resulting sad case of Maximilian and Carlotta is well known, and Mexico went from bad to worse and from worse to terrible.  Even the dictator Porfirio Díaz lamented, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”  Following its revolution, the country ended up with the cockeyed absurdity of rule by the “Institutional Revolutionary Party.”

Is Mutis right about this, that the world was too quick to toss aside its monarchies?  Someone has commented that France’s government still consists of monarchy punctuated by strikes.  (Another  opinion has it that California’s government consists of apathy punctuated by petitions).  An application of Hegel’s dialectic may be instructive.  Let’s say monarchy is the thesis and some form of government by the people is the antithesis.  What has been happening in many countries is that the synthesis turns out to be a form of absolute, king-like rule by a dictator sprung from the people.  Think of Mussolini.  One would be hard-pressed to summon up a more revolting image of vulgarity than that stock footage of him finishing a speech, crossing his arms and thrusting his chin and lower lip forward in a gesture of swinish arrogance.

Russia under the Bolsheviks, of course, was supposed to implement the Marxist dialectic:  capitalism as t

he thesis, the communist state as the antithesis, and the final synthesis being the withering-away of the state, leaving the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  What happened in practice was a move directly from a monarchy into the monstrous dictatorship of a new Soviet elite.

In contrast to the Mussolini phenomenon, I had the privilege of being present when Alvaro Mutis was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in historic Oviedo, Spain.  As a student of Spanish history, I sat in amazed wonderment at the sight of the handsome and elegant Crown Prince Felipe, the future Philip IV, presenting Yehudi Menuhin with the prize for music.  (Mstislav Rostropovich received one on that occasion as well.)  To be sure, Felipe’s ancestors, Ferdinand and Isabella, had expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, at least in part in order to take possession of the property of many of them.  Christopher Columbus is said to have stood at the port of Seville watching them leave, knowing that their departure would finance his trip to the west.  But now, 505 years later, the crown prince of Spain made it up to a representative of the Jewish race, at least in some small measure, as Queen Sofía, a good friend of Menuhin’s, sat in the balcony beaming.

One thinks too of St. Louis, king of France.  On his deathbed in the home of a compassionate Muslim scribe, his last words were reported as “Beau Sire Dieu, gardez-moi ma gent” (roughly, “Good Father God, take care of my people for me”).  Not “Oh, Lord, am I good enough to go to heaven?” or “Lord God, cut short my time in purgatory,” but “Take care of my people for me.”

I don’t know of anyone who believes it is possible any longer to restore the institution of absolute monarchy anywhere in the world, even though we love our monarchies as a symbol of the good that used to be in them.  On being told that the queen mother of Denmark walked out of the palace grounds every day to buy fresh flowers, travel writer Bill Bryson asked in surprise, “Well, who watches out for her?”

The Dane whom he was talking with answered, “Why, we all do.”

What sort of solution might there be in all this?  George Washington firmly rejected what would have been the irony of his having defeated King George of England only to become King George of America.  However, even as he was very open to receiving the common people into his presence, he was insistent that the president must be treated with the utmost respect.  Perhaps his was the best synthesis.  Perhaps the new dialectic is this one:  Thesis:  monarchy; antithesis:  democracy; synthesis:  democratic government with the dignity of a monarchy.

This solution, though, leaves open the question of what would be best for a people who have just been freed from an unjust form of government.  Many feel it would be a benevolent dictatorship, but those are hard to come by simply because, with few exceptions, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  I’ve been told to choose my battles wisely, and frankly, I don’t have an opinion I’d feel comfortable fighting for.