Sunday Night Journal — May 30, 2004

Many years ago I read the following passage from John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and it permanently affected my view of the military vocation. Ruskin is considering “the general lowness of estimate in which the profession of commerce is held, as compared with that of arms”—that is to say, why we honor the soldier more than the businessman.

Philosophically, it does not, at first sight, appear reasonable (many writers have endeavoured to prove it unreasonable) that a peaceable and rational person, whose trade is buying and selling, should be held in less honor than an unpeaceable and often irrational person, whose trade is slaying. Nevertheless, the consent of mankind has always, in spite of the philosophers, given precedence to the soldier.

And this is right.

For the soldier’s trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being slain. This, without well knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for. A bravo’s trade is slaying; but the world has never respected bravos more than merchants: the reason it honours the soldier is, because he holds his life at the service of the State. Reckless he maybe—fond of pleasure or of dventure—all kinds of bye-motives and mean impulses may have determined the choice of his profession, and may affect (to all appearance exclusively) his daily conduct in it; but our estimate of him is based on this ultimate fact—of which we are well assured—that, put him in a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the world behind him, and only death and his duty in front of him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows that this choice may be put to him at any moment—and has beforehand taken his part—virtually takes such part continually—does, in reality, die daily.

In Memoriam: my father, Donelson Branch Horton, June 2, 1925-September 13, 2001. Wounded in action in a forest somewhere in Czechoslovakia a few days after VE Day (May 7, 1945) and a few weeks shy of his 20^th birthday.

Memorial Day: The Soldier’s Trade

Many years ago I read the following passage from John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and it permanently affected my view of the military vocation. Ruskin is considering “the general lowness of estimate in which the profession of commerce is held, as compared with that of arms”—that is to say, why we honor the soldier more than the businessman.

Philosophically, it does not, at first sight, appear reasonable (many writers have endeavoured to prove it unreasonable) that a peaceable and rational person, whose trade is buying and selling, should be held in less honor than an unpeaceable and often irrational person, whose trade is slaying. Nevertheless, the consent of mankind has always, in spite of the philosophers, given precedence to the soldier.

And this is right.

For the soldier’s trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being slain. This, without well knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for. A bravo’s trade is slaying; but the world has never respected bravos more than merchants: the reason it honours the soldier is, because he holds his life at the service of the State. Reckless he may be—fond of pleasure or of adventure—all kinds of bye-motives and mean impulses may have determined the choice of his profession, and may affect (to all appearance exclusively) his daily conduct in it; but our estimate of him is based on this ultimate fact—of which we are well assured—that, put him in a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the world behind him, and only death and his duty in front of him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows that this choice may be put to him at any moment—and has beforehand taken his part—virtually takes such part continually—does, in reality, die daily.

In Memoriam: Donelson Branch Horton, June 2, 1925-September 13, 2001. Wounded in action in a forest somewhere in Czechoslovakia a few days after VE Day (May 7, 1945) and a few weeks shy of his 20^th birthday.

The Progressive Steamroller

Once the bandwagon for homosexual marriage got rolling at a really good clip, it occurred to me that if it became thoroughly established the result would be bad for heterosexual women. Why? (A): most women want to marry and have children, while most men are at least hesitant about, and at worst determinedly hostile to, domesticity; (B) homosexual marriage will undermine real at-least-potentially-procreative marriage.

Point A above is beyond rational dispute, and I think attempts to deny at are made less frequently than they were twenty or thirty years ago.

Point B is more debatable, but in my opinion it is very likely. The reasons for expecting this have been widely discussed and I won’t go into them now, except to point out that one of the first male homosexual couples to be “married” in Massachusetts made it plain that they do not take marriage very seriously at all.

I am embarrassed to admit that I’m an habitual reader of Dear Abby. An inordinate number of the letters she publishes are from unhappy women complaining about the men who won’t marry them. Many of these women already have children, either by a previous man to whom they may or may not have been married, or by the man they are currently trying to interest in “commitment,” which seems to be a euphemism for marriage. Almost all of them have made themselves sexually available to the man in question. Sometimes the couple has “been together,” which seems to mean living together, for a number of years. Frequently they are thoroughly entangled financially, perhaps having bought a house together. Sometimes (and these are the most depressing) the woman supports the man. The question usually addressed to Abby is “Should I give up on him?” and the implied question is “Are my odds of marriage better if I wait on him or if I look elsewhere?” In one recent Dear Abby, if my memory is correct, every one of the day'sletters were in this vein. The women who write this kind of letter are unhappy and seem to live with a deep fundamental anxiety.

It's safe to assume that there are more women in this situation than there were thirty years ago, and that the general decline in respect for marriage is a significant part of the reason for it. If it is indeed the case that homosexual marriage will undermine respect for the institution, there will be even more women who desperately want to marry but cannot find husbands. These women, like those who want to be stay-at-home mothers but have found themselves pushed, by an unholy alliance of feminism and business, into jobs they never wanted and don’t like, will join the ranks of those whose lives have been made worse by the steamroller of “progressive” social change. Whether or not this effect on women really occurs remains to be seen (and it would be a hard case to prove), but one thing can be said with near-certainty: those who brought the change about will not accept any responsibility for its negative consequences.

Every progressive success has its victims, to acknowledge whom is the height of bad taste. As far as I know very few opponents of the Vietnam war have ever expressed any misgivings about their role in allowing Communism and its accompanying death and hardship to sweep over Southeast Asia after the Communists took power. They may have deplored it, but they did not regret their small part in bringing it about—it was as if these calamities were natural forces that nobody could have foreseen or prevented. Women who regret having abortions are generally treated as enemies by the abortion rights movement (the existence of the aborted children is simply denied outright). The apostles of drugs, sexual liberation, quick divorce, and all the other terrible ideas of the 1960s now regard the wreckage which their propaganda helped to encourage as evidence that society is even more messed up than they had thought.

I wonder if this phenomenon, which seems stronger than is accounted for by the natural human reluctance to admit mistakes, is an effect of faith in an essentially benign forward movement of history from darkness and oppression to light and freedom. The very dark view of the future which one sometimes finds among progressives is not a loss of this faith but a fear that the forces of reaction may stop or turn back the forces of progress. But to acknowledge that a successful change thought to be progressive has been in fact for the worse would raise questions about the fundamentals. These are generally more difficult to face than the prospect of defeat.

It's a shame. There might be more of a market, so to speak, in electoral terms, for many elements of the progressive agenda if they did not come as part of a package that includes utopian redefinition of a crucial institution like marriage.

Writing Division Into Law

It appears that tomorrow will see the beginning of legally recognized “marriage” between persons of the same sex. If this arrangement is given the force of law throughout the country, it may very well be seen by history as the point where the deep and bitter division in American society which we call the culture war became once and for all irreconcilable. Or perhaps I should say recognized as irreconcilable, for it may already be so. This will be a tragedy, and like all tragedies all the deeper for having been preventable. The thing which might yet prevent it is federalism. If the Supreme Court acts prudently and declines to enforce the requirement that same-sex unions be recognized in all fifty states, a tenable live-and-let-live compromise may be effected. If not, the more conservative segment of the population, which believes that marriage is by definition impossible between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, and which is in the majority by a significant margin, may find it difficult ever again to look at law in the same way.

Much of this has already come to pass, of course, in the abortion debate. Had the Supreme Court been willing to allow a federalist solution in that case, a conflict barely less severe than that of the Civil War would never have divided the nation so deeply. For Christians and others who believe in certain moral definitions held by most people fifty years ago and now deemed obsolete to find themselves subject once again to a new law which they believe to be fundamentally unjust will have a corrosive and poisonous effect. The lukewarm will eventually go over to the other side. The committed, who are also in general the most loyally patriotic people in the country, will find themselves still trying to pledge allegiance to a flag which represents a nation increasingly difficult for them to respect. What will come of that, who knows?

If moral traditionalists may not look at law in the same way, it is also likely that the law will not look at them in the same way. I have been saying for years that the logical extrapolation of certain social and legal trends is that the profession of Christian moral teachings would eventually be seen as “hate speech.” Incidents of this sort have already been reported in England and Canada. Perhaps our mania for free speech will prevent this repressive impulse from gaining the force of law here, but I wouldn’t bet my house on it. But even so, marriage is such a public institution that no one will be able to escape legal entanglement. This division may be even more deeply felt than the one over abortion. The act of abortion is a worse evil, but it remains a specific act, either to be allowed or disallowed, and, as abortion-rights advocates are always pointing out, those who are opposed need not get involved. (They may feel a duty to get involved in preventing a wrongful death, but that’s a different question.) “Marriage” between two people of the same sex will eventually involve everybody to the extent that one will have no legal right to deny that they are married.

Perhaps saddest of all is that live-and-let-live is in fact what most of the more conservative population believe. Contrary to propaganda, very few conservative Christians have any desire to persecute homosexuals—unless “persecution” is defined as the denial of approbation. Live and let live is precisely the view of most of them. It is certainly mine. Individuals on both sides of the culture wars can and do get along reasonably well, even if it means declaring certain topics off-limits for conversation (if this list grows too long, of course, conversation may become difficult). But when an attempt is made to resolve a dispute about fundamental principles by resort to a law which is applicable to all and has behind it the invasive force and presence of the modern state, differences harden, lines must be drawn, and peaceful co-existence becomes difficult or impossible.

Most Christians, and most conservatives whether Christian or not, recognize that life is not an orderly business, that it often places people in difficult and unfair situations, and that not everything that is immoral should be illegal. But marriage is a state into which only individuals of opposite sexes may enter; moreover, for over two thousand years it has been, in Western traditions including the Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian, one into which only one man and one woman may enter. We are now asked to believe that this was mere bigotry and superstition, a mistake and a crime. No matter what the state says, I cannot admit that two men, or two women, or any assortment of number and sex other than one man and one woman, are in fact married, although I may be forced to pretend that they are. I adapt the words of the impolitic vicar of Wakefield: “...nor will I allow him now to be an husband, or her a wife, either de jure, de facto, or in any sense of the expression.”

A Nightmare

In the beginning of the dream it was as if I was watching a movie. It seemed to be a crime drama sort of thing, taking place in a run-down littered urban neighborhood. Colors had the washed-out look that you see in a lot of films from the ‘70s. A big car of a steely gray color pulled up beside a smaller car of some vague color that was sitting by the curb or at a stop sign. Two men jumped out of the gray car, dragged a man from the other car, and began beating him. All three of them looked something like movie gangsters, the two new arrivals in coats and ties and the victim in a shabby and dingy white shirt. He sank to the ground almost immediately beneath their fists and kicks.

Almost immediately a police car arrived. I felt relieved that help had appeared so quickly. At the same time a crowd had begun to gather. A man wearing a suit and sunglasses jumped out of the police car and began berating the two men who were doing the beating, yelling at them, pulling them away and shoving them aside. The beaten man got up and eased off into the crowd. The crowd, glad at first to see the police arrive, grew quiet when they understood that the man in the suit was saying “That’s not the right guy.” It became clear that the two assailants were not criminals being stopped in mid-crime by the policeman in the suit, but rather his subordinates, and that beating people was their job; the only problem was that they had muffed this assignment.

At about this point the dream changed somehow so that it was no longer something I was watching as if on a screen. I became part of the crowd, which aside from me and a few others was mostly young people. We grew first angry and then frightened as it dawned on us that the man in the suit was not a thug posing as a policeman but in fact an actual thug. Somehow it became clear to me and to the whole crowd that there was no distinction between the two. The man had all the apparatus of the law at his disposal but there was no law, only his whim, or perhaps the whim of someone from whom he took orders.

The crowd began to murmur against him. He turned to us. His cold face seemed a little familiar to me, no doubt in my dream based on some movie villain. He glared at us, smiled a little, reached into the crowd, and dragged from among us a young woman. She was very pretty, with long thick hair of a dark auburn color, and she wore a pale blue suit of an old style, something from the ‘40s or ‘50s.

He held her by the upper arm and with his other hand he pulled a pistol from his coat, a small semi-automatic, not really a policeman’s gun but one that might be used by an assassin who expected to have his victim at close range. He said “This is Amy. She went to Radcliffe. She’s going to study nuclear physics.” And he seemed to find this last very funny; I think he said it a second time. It was the mirth with which we watch Harpo Marx make a fool of a pompous official, the pleasure of seeing pretensions deflated: it amused him to see the disparity between her expectations—nuclear physics, indeed!—and her real situation.

Then he began to walk along the sidewalk, dragging the girl, Amy, along with him—and by this time it seemed to all the rest of us that she was someone we knew—and haranguing the crowd. None of his words seemed intelligible yet we knew that their general import was that we needed to understand that he was in charge. We followed along but none of us had the courage to challenge him Then he stopped abruptly, held Amy, who was planning to study nuclear physics, at arm’s length, and shot her in the temple. Blood and bone fragments sprayed from the other side of her head, her body crumpled, and he let her drop.

After this there was a gap, a sense that time had lurched forward a few minutes. The man in the suit was gone, the dead girl had been dragged away (somehow I knew she had been dragged, with a deliberate indifference, to emphasize her inconsequence). Most of the crowd was gone but a few of us remained, filled with fear and an enormous heartbreak. I was standing on the sidewalk looking down. Dark blood, almost the color of the girl’s hair, ran from a pool on the sidewalk into the sad little strip of struggling grass, cigarette butts, and litter like the ones that lie between the sidewalks and the streets of so many cities.

I woke up in the pure anguish of dreams. As I tried to free my mind from it I comforted myself, as one does, with the knowledge that the world does not really operate as it did in my nightmare. Then I realized with renewed horror that there are societies that really do operate that way, where the will of evil and powerful men is the only law.

Such a society was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Such things could and did happen there, and far worse things: in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq young women could be taken from the streets and then raped and tortured before being shot. And there was no law to which appeal for help or redress could be made. The thugs and the police were one and the same.

As we consider with dismay the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, we need to keep some perspective. In the rule of abstract law which we are now trying to help the Iraqi people achieve, such things are defects and aberrations which provoke shock and correction, not the normal mode of governing. Our sins do not constitute a moral equivalence between the rule of law and the rule of a tyrant’s will.

History will judge, perhaps inconclusively for some time yet, whether our conquest of the Hussein regime in Iraq was right or prudent. But no sound moral judgment of our actions can be made without giving serious weight to the evil that was being done, and it has often seemed to me that opponents of the war fail to do that. What we are attempting is to institute a new order which is not that of my nightmare. This effort deserves to succeed. And if we give up now it will certainly fail.

Sunday Night Journal — May 2, 2004

I had planned to write about the lack of leisure in modern life this week, but I didn’t have time.

A nice line, and one which occurred to me on Saturday morning as a way of making short work of this week’s journal, but things rarely happen as I plan. It turned out that I had a very leisurely afternoon and evening. My wife and I, very uncharacteristically, left off our various weekend chores in mid-afternoon and went to Mobile, first to Mass at the Cathedral and then to dinner and a small-scale arts festival in Cathedral Square. The Cathedral is newly and beautifully renovated. I am a little less enthusiastic about the renovation than it may deserve, as the general color scheme has gone from dark and muted to very bright, with a lot of red and gold. The older one was a little more to my taste, but it had deteriorated quite a bit, and the new interior is impressive to my naïve eye. I have never had a great deal of interest in or appreciation for the visual arts, and am notoriously unobservant of my surroundings. At this moment, with eyes closed, I cannot call up in any detail the new interior of the cathedral, much less the old one. The only thing I can say for sure is that the new one has more red and gold, and the old one more green and blue. The one specific thing I can recall about the old one, and whose absence I regret, is that it had tiny lights that looked like stars in the dark green ceiling.

In visiting the art shows in and around the square after Mass, I was more than a little surprised at the number of works I liked. I have not been on friendly terms with art for some time. A year or two ago I looked in at the art gallery at the small college where I work. The work or works on display consisted of big lumpy things scattered about the room, having shapes and colors that made one think of oversized internal organs, along with tubing that suggested blood vessels. The most numerous of the lumpy things were pinkish-yellow and wrinkled, looking to me somewhat like brains. Perhaps they were intended to; at any rate I was not the only one to think that, as a couple of the housekeeping crew came in while I was there and I heard one of them say “We supposed to get them brains out of here tomorrow.” The effect they produced in me was faint disgust, soon overpowered by irritation. There was a page or two of solemn verbiage from the artist on a table. I don’t remember what it said, but I read it, looked around again at the brains, and thought, spontaneously and sincerely, “I hate art.”

The phrase has presented itself to me a number of times since then, when I read of some particularly repellent deed by an “artist.” There’s no need for me to belabor this. I think anyone who has his feet on the ground and isn’t caught up in art fashion can see that much of what goes on in today’s art world is far beyond the reach of any satirist in its combination of ugliness and self-congratulation. But I was pleased, even delighted, to find on my viewing of several exhibits in this small city that there are still artists who approach the visible world with interest and intelligence and affection and who seem to want, and to have the skill, to communicate this interest to others. There were works there that I could imagine paying money for, if I had the money and a place to put them, so that I could look at them over and over again. I usually find it tedious to read descriptions of art, and so I won’t bore you with my clumsy attempts at it. But I have a couple of pictures which Karen took with her new digital camera. I’m not sure whether it’s entirely legitimate for me to post these. I hope the artists would see it as a tribute of free advertising.

Here is an amazingly graceful fish constructed out of odds and ends by Fairhope artist Bruce Larsen:

Karen was much taken with this. Mr. Larsen also won first price in the juried show, with a basset or blood hound constructed of similar junk. Its ears were the two halves of a posthole digger. I liked it more than the fish, but we don’t have a picture of it.

And here is a work by Annie Tolliver, of Montgomery, apparently a folk or primitive or naive (whatever the currently accepted term is) artist, which bears a title something like Childhood with ten people in a two-room house:

The way they lived in their two-room house, apparently, was to live outside when they could. I love the exuberance of this picture, the way the figures all appear to be dancing or almost dancing. Having grown up in the rural South and being only a little older than Ms. Tolliver I recognize something in this picture, even though I grew up white and affluent while she grew up black and poor. I doubt that either one of us would want to minimize the harshness of the life she and her family lived, but if her picture is to be believed it was possible in that life to experience joy.

There was a certain amount of noxious and trivial stuff in these exhibits, and naturally a lot that didn’t seem (in my very untrained opinion) to be all that well done, but I left with something of the enlivened feeling that follows a good conversation about something that matters. Apparently I don’t hate art after all, which is good to know.