after all, flies are a major threat to world peace

a
b
c

What they did before the internets

From Buckley's Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription:

February 11, 1969
Dear Mr. Buckley:
I am a sixteen-year-old High School Junior who is going, slowly but inexorably, out of his mind. I have come to the conclusion that you are the only person on the face of the earth who can save my sanity. My problem, briefly, is this: for the past year I have been trying, without avail, to discover just what, in God's name, the phrase "to immanentize the eschaton" means.
I heard you speak the phrase once on Firing Line and immediately made a valiant attempt to look it up. Upon discovering that my dictionary did not list the words I instantly resolved to ask one of my teachers in the morning.
When I tried this course I drew another blank. I would ask a teacher the question, whereupon he would have me repeat it a dozen or so times and then plead ignorance. I would then be asked: "Where'd you hear it?" When I informed him that you had used it the night before he would generally give me a forlorn look, mumble something like, "Oh him eh?," and express his innermost conviction, i.e., that you had probably invented the words. I'm sure you'll be thrilled to know, Mr. Buckley, that I had faith in you. I knew you hadn't invented those words. And, sure enough, when I was reading your book The Unmaking of a Mayor I came across a passage which revealed a Mr. Eric Voegelin as the author of the phrase. Jubilant, I raced to our school library and asked the librarian for everything written by Mr. Voegelin. "Never heard of him," the woman answered. As I left, ruminating upon the intrinsic failings of the public schools, I encountered the teacher to whom I had put the original question. When I explained the matter to him he expressed the conviction that, not only did you make up the phrase, but you also contrived Mr. Voegelin!
Now, Mr. Buckley, more than anything else in the world I would like to know what that phrase means. I really think you should tell me because: 1) I have watched every one of your TV shows and have read all of your newspaper columns ever since I first heard of you. And 2) I've read all of your books (save only the last one, The Jeweler's Eye, which, curse my parsimonious soul, costs a small fortune. I'll wait 'til it comes out in paperback). Also 3) I subscribe to National Review and even read all of those silly renewal notices I keep getting.
If all of this evidence of my fidelity isn't enough then I promise you that, if you somehow communicate to me the definition, I will upon receipt of it: a) instantly proceed to use it on any and all occasions and thereby spread your fame far and wide (I make it generally known to my friends that you are the source of my esoteric bits of verbiage) and b) I will renew my subscription to NR the very next notice I get (which will, no doubt, be Valentine's Day) instead of when the thing expires as is logical.
Furthermore, I shall c) badger my school librarian until she finally breaks down and puts NR on the school subscription list. After all, if the school can subscribe to such egregious rags as The Nation and The New Republic they can at least give your fine journal equal time. Thanking you for your time in reading this
I remain

Sincerely yours,
Edward H. Vazquez
Old Bridge, N.J.

New Palin Blog

Palin for President, a more relevant blog than previously realized, has been launched: http://Palin2012.blogspot.com

On Obama and Liberal Condescension

This is a good post.

The problem for me is that I'm a Vulgar Marxist too. I've always believed that people need to eat, and want to get ahead and prosper. If you give them an avenue that lets them do that, they aren't going to let their religion, their music, their sexual habits, their families or their educational system stand in their way for long. The two most obvious contemporary applications of this economic determinism are 1) China (when the Chinese have a capitalist economy they won't be able to have a Communist government, Vulgar Marxists would say) and 2) the Muslim world (if Islam needs a Reformation in order to prosper in a global market, then Islam will eventually get a Reformation). I agree with both of those propositions.

Does that mean I'm condescending too? It's hard to avoid the charge. If a Chinese Communist Party Official somehow came to me and declared that, no, China would out-compete the West while maintaining Mao-era control over free inquiry, I'd think 'You poor deluded fool. Just wait.' I support Western policies of bringing China into the global marketplace in large part because I think that means Chinese Communism will collapse even if the Chinese Communists don't realize it. Same with fundamentalist Muslims--e.g. Pakistan, when prosperous, will no longer be such a breeding ground of jihadist fanatics. They'll be too busy making money to blow up the world. My attitude toward Pakistan is roughly parallel to Obama's attitude toward rural Pennsylvanians: if the economy really delivered for them, they'd stop clinging to their God. And their guns.

I'm especially appalled by the possibility that I'm as much of a snob as Obama because I've made a big deal about social equality--how treating people as equals, rather than redistributing income, is the essential goal of liberal politics. Condescension, needless to say, is not treating people like equals. (Obama himself seemed to be quite aware of the problem, in his 2004 Charlie Rose interview, when trotting out his "What's the Matter With Kansas" homilies:

"If we don't have plausible answers on the economic front, and we appear to be condescending towards those traditions that are giving their lives some stability, then they're gonna opt for at least that party that seems to be speaking to the things that are giving--that still provide them some solace." [E.A.]

Of course, he sounded a bit condescending when saying that. .....

Read the whole thing, but keep in mind that only a squishy liberal would be bothered by condescension toward primitive Muslim terrorists.

quote of the month

Democracy and Idolatry:

This was no ordinary love. The proof was in the posters—specifically, influential “street artist” Shephard Fairey’s iconic images of Barack Obama, which proved a huge hit at campaign rallies. Rendered in blood red and gray, with his face in silk-screened, Warholian black, the presidential hopeful gazes out toward some distant point, confident and contemplative at once. Only one word was emblazoned across the bottom, in large, block letters: “Hope,” or “Progress.” Fairey describes his work as propaganda engineering and explained that, as a staunch opponent of the Iraq War, making art about Obama, who had spoken out against the war from the start, was for him “like making art for peace.” Peace, however, is not the zeitgeist of this particular graphic style. On the contrary, it recalls Bolshevist propaganda in particular, and Third World revolutionary politics in general; it is power as spectacle, power in whose name millions have been oppressed. As Lisa Wedeen writes in her 1999 study of the cult of Bashar Assad, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, such idealized, heroic portraits are meant to construct “an original founding moment that signals a new golden age and an end to the miseries of the past.” Judging by the posters raised by the ecstatic masses, the campaign was not just about Obama the Democratic presidential candidate. It was about Obama, America’s long-awaited Beloved Leader.

read the whole thing.

I'm not sure how I missed this nor how I came across it now, but the award for the best column on the torturous Obama torture debate goes to Rich Lowry here. For bonus points, the article is equally applicable to all Obama speeches ever given, even returning from Cairo bringing world peace.

caption contest

Hot Air:“Uh, Sir, that’s not the King of Saudi Arabia.”
and here's the runner up.

(One of the) stupidest quotes of the day

AP comparing barack the great to palin the pitiful, and how the latter must write a book despite her universally acknowledged illiteracy:

A memoir (or two) have become a virtual requirement for White House seekers, especially after Obama's "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father" established him as a stylist and storyteller with a vast following.

that's right. remember how in the elections of 2012 and 2016 everyone had written three memoirs so that they could have a chance of appearing like the greatest president ever? in fact, presidents nowadays in the twenty second century only write memoirs, following in the footsteps of the first memoirist in chief

Quote of the Day

Don't let anyone tell you that Joe Klein can't outdo himself:

Said TIME's Joe Klein: "comedy is by definition inappropriate. I mean, this is just comedy. And we're talking about a guy in Rush Limbaugh who is inappropriate half the time I hear him on the radio."

"He describes himself as an entertainer," said Klein. "Wanda Sykes -- entertainer. This is entertainment."

For a guy named Joeklein, he has a surprisingly inaccurate definition of comedy. Actually, comedy is defined as "something funny," by which Syke's comments manifestly fail.

Klein living up to his reputation is as newsworthy as "pigs still not flying" but James Taranto does a good job of providing some insight into the mindset which considers this humor:

By contrast, lots of left-wing bloggers are cheering Sykes on, and the president of the United States was visibly amused by her joke. So the question is this: Why do liberals find this joke funny when they should find it embarrassing?

The answer, it seems clear, is that this is an example of shock humor: a genre that relies on the frisson of violating taboos. By our count, Sykes runs afoul of five taboos in her Limbaugh joke: She equates dissent with treason. She likens a domestic political opponent to a foreign enemy. She makes fun of the disabled (Limbaugh's past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act). She makes light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture. And she wishes somebody dead.

Except for the last one, these are all taboos that liberals promote and enforce with especial vigor. If a conservative violated any one of them, he would be on the inside track to be named "Worst Person in the World" by that NBC blowhard (as indeed Feherty was).

What makes Sykes's joke funny to a liberal, then, is the sense of danger that accompanies her risky themes, combined with the secure knowledge that since the joke is at the expense of a liberal hate figure, the usual rules do not apply. It's the same reason people on the left evince particular glee when they attack Clarence Thomas or Michael Steele in expressly racist terms, or when they use antigay innuendo against their political opponents (regardless of the latter's sexual orientation).

Elmo Auditions for MSNBC Post

irony watch

from cnn's report on arlen specter's defection & rush limbaugh:

Earlier this month, Specter said Limbaugh did have a tendency to make "provocative" statements, but told radio host Howard Stern he didn't have a problem with the conservative talker. "Do I like Limbaugh?… yeah, I like him," he said then.

something Haredim would do well to ponder

Robert D. Kaplan explains why the Palestinians would prefer statelessness:

Grygiel explains that it is now “highly desirable” not to have a state—for a state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action. A group like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the author notes, could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Why would it want responsibility for providing safety and services to all Lebanese? Why would it want to provide the Israelis with so many tempting targets of reprisal? Statelessness offers a level of “impunity” from retaliation.

But the most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space.

Quote of the Day

You know, the longer this drags on, the easier it is to believe The One really wasn’t in church during some of Rev. Wright’s greatest hits after all.

view of a liberal limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh's cousin writes about what it's like:

Then there are the questions. What's he like? Do you know him? Is he an a**hole?

Well, he's the relative you don't see much, who shows up on Christmas Eve on his own plane with an anchor lady you didn't know he was dating until your friend's dad told you the night before. He's fairly loud, but all the Limbaughs are. He's that one over there with the cousins singing rowdy Christmas carols around the piano. Yeah, the one with the cochlear implant, the guy holding a humidor. He's Cousin Rusty, and he's OK.

Sometimes he invites you to his house for Thanksgiving, you and every single one of your relatives, all expenses paid, and he puts you up in a resort that makes you feel like a movie star. He gives you a room key that doubles as his credit card and you can't help but charge Chanel sunglasses on it for everything he did the previous year that had made your job as a new teacher in a liberal high school any harder.

He's the guy who puts "March of the Penguins" on his home movie theater screen for the little cousins to watch and makes sure his candy bowls are filled with jelly beans and doesn't swear when my nephew tries to throw his antiques down the stairs. He's the guy who came from nothing to something and knows what it feels like to miss Missouri.

One Thanksgiving he stands in front of all us relatives in his Versailles-looking living room, and before my grandpa prays over our meal, Cousin Rusty apologizes. He says he's afraid he has made it tough to be a Limbaugh this past year, and his voice breaks like I have never heard it do before. Cousin Rusty is OK.

about the bias she faces as an (albeit liberal) limbaugh:

And a year later I find myself talking to my mentor the first day of the school year -- my first day as a high-school teacher. I ask my mentor if she thinks my last name will be a problem with the students or parents because the district the school is in tends to be very liberal. She looks surprised at my question and asks, "Why would it be a problem?"

"I don't know," I say, feeling silly. "It just sometimes is." And as we're talking, she walks me to the main office to show me the mailboxes and to introduce me to the secretary. Upon introduction, the secretary says, "So, do you do drugs too?" and I try not to look upset, but I also don't want to laugh it off, because I don't think what she said is funny.

Then I am standing at the ticket counter at LaGuardia Airport, trying to get on another airplane because my flight to Chicago has been canceled. The man behind the counter tells me, "You're out of luck because I'm the biggest Democrat you'll ever meet." And instead of sputtering and fuming with indignation, I sputter and fume with shame because as I walk away, I say over my shoulder, "I didn't even say I was related." Not too proud of my last name? Not too proud of my family?

Even though our ideologies do not align, I have always admired Rush for his humor and savvy. I would like to believe that he has created a semi-tongue-in-cheek persona for entertainment's sake, a self-aware self-parody, the original Stephen Colbert. While his haters have always been too busy running in angry frenetic circles to notice the irony, Rush Limbaugh, the caricature, has had the time of his life; and there's something to admire in he who gets the last laugh.

Rush once told me, "The only way to make millions is for half the nation to hate you." He told me this at his mom's funeral when I was 13, and I think the reason he was talking business was because he was trying not to look so sad. It's funny how the subject of half the nation hating him could effectively lighten his mood.

Is Gibbs Really That Dumb

or is he just pretending? from his interview with the washington post:

Romano: Should you be taking on the Rush Limbaughs of the world from the podium?

Gibbs: I'm happy to begin to ignore questions that I don't want to answer. I'm not sure the press would think that's a good idea. . . . Look, inherent in my job is that I don't get to choose what questions I'm asked.

Does Gibbs really think that the interviewer was referring to the many "Rush Limbaughs" in the press asking him questions, or is he uncomfortable defending his practice of answering every question with an attack on Rush? Either way, I'm sure he has the president's complete confidence.

msm lets the secret out

Politico:

By trade if not by choice, I have become something of a Barack Obama aficionado. POLITICO’s Mike Allen wrote last week that I have “probably listened to more President Obama speeches than any human besides [White House spokesman Robert] Gibbs.” Working at the Republican National Committee last year, I closely watched every public appearance by Obama. And I learned a lot about our new president along the way.

...
I’ve concluded that much of the conventional wisdom about Obama is wrong. Here are five of the biggest misconceptions:

1. Obama is bold. Actually, he is overly cautious. It’s no coincidence the first bills he signed into law were the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, two populist favorites. Signing these bills was not an act of courage any more than attacking lobbyists or selecting Joe Biden as a running mate. In fact, Obama’s entire agenda is cautious (sometimes to a fault, in the case of his housing and banking bailouts). Are the numbers in his proposed budget eye-popping? Yes. But eye-popping budgets are well within the Democratic mainstream now.

2. Obama is a great communicator. Cut away the soaring rhetoric in his speeches, and the resulting policy statements are often vague, lawyerly and confusing. He is not plain-spoken: He parses his language so much that a casual listener will miss important caveats. That’s in part why he uses teleprompters for routine policy statements: He chooses his words carefully, relying heavily on ill-defined terms like “deficit reduction” (which means tax increases, rather than actual “savings”) and “combat troops” (as opposed to “all troops in harm’s way”).

3. Obamaland is a team of rivals. Obama earned the label “No-Drama Obama” for a reason. His closest advisers — those who actually shape his thinking, strategy and policies — are loyal and, by all accounts, like-minded. Obviously, they regularly disagree with each other, as any group of smart individuals does. But reading the (many) profiles of Obama aides written since the election, it’s striking that there are no anecdotes of serious disputes inside Obamaland. Obama does try to bring political foes into the fold when it’s convenient, but his team is primarily made up of political friends.

4. Obama is smooth. Despite being deliberate, Obama is surprisingly gaffe-prone. Reporters on my e-mail lists last year know he consistently mispronounced, misnamed or altogether forgot where he was. (In one typical gaffe in Sioux Falls, S.D., he started his speech with an enthusiastic “Thank you, Sioux City!”) His geographic gaffes are not just at routine rallies but at major events, including the Democratic National Convention and his first address to Congress. Any politician occasionally misspeaks, but the frequency of Obama’s flubs is notable.

5. Obama has a good relationship with the media. Working with the hundreds of reporters who covered the Obama campaign last year, I was struck by how many of them would quietly complain about Obama’s borderline disdain for the press. Sometimes it is readily visible — like when he scolded a reporter for asking a question during a presidential visit to the White House briefing room. Other times it’s more passive, like long gaps between press conferences, or it’s reflected in his staff’s attitude.

Obama breaks his oath of office

and only two months in! (according to obama's own definition of defending the constitution of the united states)

as predicted on immanent eschaton

douthat reports:

As Marc is reporting (amid many undeserved compliments), I'll be leaving the Atlantic to join the New York Times next month. I'll have more to say on this front soon, but for now the only thing to say is thanks - to the Atlantic, for everything and then some; to my readers for, well, reading me; and to the Times, for taking an awfully big chance.

we predicted this ages ago

I wonder who she's talking about

NYTimes interviews Ann Coulter. Final question:

*Do you consider yourself as speaking for the conservative movement, or just someone who has attracted many conservative fans? Something else?

I THINK I SPEAK FOR ALL AMERICANS WHO THINK NEWSPAPER EDITORS WHO PRINT THE DETAILS OF TOP-SECRET ANTI-TERRORIST INTELLIGENCE GATHERING PROGRAMS ON PAGEONE IN WARTIME SHOULD BE EXECUTED FOR TREASON.

Jew vs. (self-hating) Jew

Jonathan Chait delivers knockout blow

The problem with making arguments primarily about motives is that it creates a stupid and poisonous public dialogue. Yglesias, without specifically citing it, is responding to my argument against Stephen Walt, the co-author of "The Israel Lobby." So let me explain what happened here, because there's something larger going on. Walt wrote an over-the-top blog post insisting that Freeman was being "smeared" without linking to the arguments made by the alleged smearers or even saying what Freeman was being smeared as. Indeed, my op-ed explicitly argued that Freeman's Israel views are not the cental issue, so Walt simply told his readers that my op-ed made the opposite case. When I pointed this out, Walt asserted that everybody knows what these people really care about.

Of course that assumption isn't true. Foreign policy idealists tend to believe in the value of supporting democracies versus dictatorships, and opposing genocide, even if this doesn't advance narrow economic or foreign policy interests. Realists disagree, which is fine. But the problem is that some realists not only disagree, but have defined the entire idealist worldview as being about Israel. In fact, foreign policy idealists have spent a lot of time defending, say, Taiwan. Not as much time as defending Israel, but of course Taiwan's citizens aren't actually under military attack from China the way Israel's have been from Hamas and Hezbollah. Now, it's true that a lot of Jews are idealists, and that foreign policy idealism is a good justification for the U.S.-Israel alliance. I'd argue that Jewish history before 1948 has more to do with Jewish belief in an ideology that elevates moral considerations over power politics and rejects the notions that a state can deal with its internal population as it sees fit.

And even if you suppose this entire world view is merely a construct to justify support for Israel, there are arguments to be dealt with. Walt refuses to defend Freeman on his ties to Saudi Arabia and extreme defense of China, thinking he can wave it all away by shouting "Israel-lover!" at the critics in the hopes that this will rally liberals to Freeman's side. The method of Walt's argument is vastly more distrurbing than the substance. Walt is arguing that any Jewish-American who does not roughly share his views on Israel (which, of course, disqualifies the vast majority) is presumptively acting out of dual loyalty, is probably coordinating their actions in secret, and should thus be dismissed out of hand. I think Walt has come to this conclusion on the basis of his foreign policy worldview rather than out of animus against Jewish people. But it's a paranoid analysis whose consequence is to make the debate about Israel much more stupid and mired in attacks on motive.

You can see why Jews who do share Walt's beliefs about Israel policy find his methods useful -- it disqualifies a vast swath of their ideological rivals from the conversation, and it elevates their role, as the special minority of good Jews who are able to see past the blinders of their ethnicity.Yet what Walt's promoting is an ugly and deeply illiberal form of discourse. Yes, there are people who shout "anti-Semite" at any criticism of Israel, but this doesn't justify errors of the opposite extreme.

(For the background on this story, read Chait's earlier takedown of Walt.)

quote of day

"The president compared the stock market to a tracking poll the other day. Somehow I think that if his tracking polls had slipped as much as the market has, he would be a bit more concerned."

after the death of the media, look forward to the death of the liberal arts universities. the nytimes is always writing about this, ironically, but here is andrew ferguson:

For behind the president's proposal is a contradiction set deep in the American understanding of things--deep in American democracy itself.

On one hand, the president takes the purely utilitarian view of what higher education is for: You get a degree so you can get a good job, and, as you work, you make the country more prosperous. On the other hand, by including traditional four-year liberal arts colleges and universities in his plan, he implicitly endorses the opposite view: Higher education is for spiritual advancement, the development of character, and the refinement of the mind, and it must be, moreover, accessible to everyone. It is the collision of American practicality and American romanticism. The second view considers the first crudely materialistic, the reduction of education to mere training; the first sees the second as .  .  . well, nice, I suppose, but pretty much beside the point. Haven't you heard about that global economy?

The idea that the two views can be reconciled is why the restaurants of our great country are overrun by art history majors spilling osso bucco on disgruntled customers; these delicate souls have been trained for everything but work. It's also why more than half of students who enroll in traditional four-year schools never finish; they didn't want be trained for everything but work. They wanted to be trained for work. It has also inspired a multi-billion dollar industry designed to help teenagers get into a four-year college whether or not they really want to go.

When he included four-year schools in his list of higher-ed options, the president was being very generous. (Why wouldn't he be? It's not his money.) But the traditional college was only one of four options. In practice the three others--postsecondary education understood as job training--will be where the action is and, if we're lucky, where the students are.

The democratic ideal of outfitting everyone with a liberal arts degree has always been vaguely unrealistic, and now the lack of realism is becoming unavoidable. Whether intentionally or not, the effect of pursuing the president's goal will be to reconfirm the utilitarian view and slowly -render the traditional view irrelevant--an overpriced indulgence that the country can no longer afford. For traditional colleges, this is a Day of Reckoning the president didn't mention.

Disillusionment Begins

In no less than Andrew Sullivan himself

Quote For The Day

"Change is not running up even bigger deficits that George Bush did," - Rep. Gene Taylor (D).

Agreed, but look: you don't expect a Democrat to act like a Republican, especially after the Republican, on spending, acted like a liberal Democrat. And I didn't expect the Obama administration to be the Ron Paul administration. I did expect more than what now looks like deceptive rhetoric on fiscal sanity in the long run. If the president thinks fiscal conservatives will be satisfied by hiking Medicare premiums for the very rich and a proposal to end ag subsidies that may be dead on arrival in Congress, he's mistaken.

But it's the Democrats' government now. And I think I see why Judd Gregg couldn't handle this. I couldn't either. There's a difference between patriotically supporting a new president inheriting some goddawful problems and betraying every fiscal principle you ever had.

smart Jews

Dead media attempts relevance, fails

If you find this compelling, subscribe to Time! if not, wait patiently.

If the election of Barack Obama truly signals a "post-partisan" America, then Andrew Sullivan should be appointed the country's blogger-in-chief. Sullivan was defying political labels long before it became fashionable. He describes himself as being "of no party or clique," and his blog — reliably conservative on military matters and the role of government, aggressively liberal when it comes to gay marriage and the legalization of soft drugs — is daily proof of his stance. In a blogosphere choking on its own partisan entrees, The Daily Dish is a welcome meal that's good for you.

That's right, no partisanship here. And Time is objective, too.

25 Best Conservative Movies, part II

National Review finishes the list:
1. The Lives of Others (2007): “I think that this is the best movie I ever saw,” said William F. Buckley Jr. upon leaving the theater (according to his column on the film). The tale, set in East Germany in 1984, is one part romantic drama, one part political thriller. It chronicles life under a totalitarian regime as the Stasi secretly monitors the activities of a playwright who is suspected of harboring doubts about Communism. Critics showered the movie with praise and it won an Oscar for best foreign-language film (it’s in German). More Buckley: “The tension mounts to heart-stopping pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.”

— John J. Miller


2. The Incredibles (2004): This animated film skips pop-culture references and gross jokes in favor of a story that celebrates marriage, courage, responsibility, and high achievement. A family of superheroes — Mr. Incredible, his wife Elastigirl, and their children — are living an anonymous life in the suburbs, thanks to a society that doesn’t appreciate their unique talents. Then it comes to need them. In one scene, son Dash, a super-speedy runner, wants to try out for track. Mom claims it wouldn’t be fair. “Dad says our powers make us special!” Dash objects. “Everyone is special,” Mom demurs, to which Dash mutters, “Which means nobody is.”

— Frederica Mathewes-Greene writes for Beliefnet.com.


3. Metropolitan (1990): Whit Stillman’s Oscar-nominated debut takes a red-headed outsider into the luxurious drawing rooms and debutante balls of New York’s Upper East Side elite. One character, a committed socialist, falls for the discreet charm of the urban haute bourgeoisie. Another plaintively theorizes the inevitable doom of his class. A reader of Jane Austen wonders what’s wrong with a novel’s having a virtuous heroine. And a roguish defender of standards and detachable collars delivers more sophisticated conservative one-liners than a year’s worth of Yale Party of the Right debates. With mocking affection, gentle irony, and a blizzard of witty dialogue, Stillman manages the impossible: He brings us to see what is admirable and necessary in the customs and conventions of America’s upper class.

— Mark Henrie is the editor of Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman.


4. Forrest Gump (1994): It won an Oscar for best picture — beating Pulp Fiction, a movie that’s far more expressive of Hollywood’s worldview. Tom Hanks plays the title character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s. The love of his life, wonderfully played by Robin Wright Penn, chooses a different path; she becomes a drug-addled hippie, with disastrous results. Forrest’s IQ may be room temperature, but he serves as an unexpected font of wisdom. Put ’em on a Whitman’s Sampler, but Mama Gump’s famous words about life’s being like a box of chocolates ring true.

— Charlotte Hays is co-author of Somebody Is Going to Die If Lilly Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet.


Warner Bros.


5. 300 (2007): During the Bush years, Hollywood neglected the heroism of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan — but it did release this action film about martial honor, unflinching courage, and the oft-ignored truth that freedom isn’t free. Beneath a layer of egregious non-history — including goblin-like creatures that belong in a fantasy epic — is a stylized story about the ancient battle of Thermopylae and the Spartan defense of the West’s fledgling institutions. It contrasts a small band of Spartans, motivated by their convictions and a commitment to the law, with a Persian horde that is driven forward by whips. In the words recorded by the real-life Herodotus: “Law is their master, which they fear more than your men[, Xerxes,] fear you.”

— Michael Poliakoff, a classicist, is vice president for academic affairs at the University of Colorado.

Sony Pictures

6. Groundhog Day (1993): This putatively wacky comedy about Bill Murray as an obnoxious weatherman cursed to relive the same day over and over in a small Pennsylvania town, perhaps for eternity, is in fact a sophisticated commentary on the good and true. Theologians and philosophers across the ideological spectrum have embraced it. For the conservative, the moral of the tale is that redemption and meaning are derived not from indulging your “authentic” instincts and drives, but from striving to live up to external and timeless ideals. Murray begins the film as an irony-soaked narcissist, contemptuous of beauty, art, and commitment. His journey of self-discovery leads him to understand that the fads of modernity are no substitute for the permanent things.

— Jonah Goldberg


7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006): Based on the life of self-made millionaire Chris Gardner (Will Smith), this film provides the perfect antidote to Wall Street and other Hollywood diatribes depicting the world of finance as filled with nothing but greed. After his wife leaves him, Gardner can barely pay the rent. He accepts an unpaid internship at a San Francisco brokerage, with the promise of a real job if he outperforms the other interns and passes his exams. Gardner never succumbs to self-pity, even when he and his young son take refuge in a homeless shelter. They’re black, but there’s no racial undertone or subtext. Gardner is just an incredibly hard-working, ambitious, and smart man who wants to do better for himself and his son.

— Linda Chavez is chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity.


8. Juno (2007): The best pro-life movies reach beyond the church choirs and influence the wider public. Juno was a critical and commercial success. It didn’t set out to deliver a message on abortion, but much of its audience discovered one anyway. The story revolves around a 16-year-old who finds a home for her unplanned baby. The film has its faults, including a number of crass moments and a pregnant high-school student with an unrealistic level of self-confidence. Yet it also exposes a broken culture in which teen sex is dehumanizing, girls struggle with “choice,” and boys aimlessly try — and sometimes downright fail — to become men. The movie doesn’t glamorize much of anything but leaves audiences with an open-ended chance for redemption.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez


9. Blast from the Past (1999): Revolutionary Road is only the latest big-screen portrayal of 1950s America as boring, conformist, repressive, and soul-destroying. A decade ago, Hugh Wilson’s Blast from the Past defied the party line, seeing the values, customs, manners, and even music of the period with nostalgic longing. Brendan Fraser plays an innocent who has grown up in a fallout shelter and doesn’t know the era of Sputnik and Perry Como is over. Alicia Silverstone is a post-feminist woman who learns from him that pre-feminist women had some things going for them. Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek as Fraser’s parents are comic gems.

— James Bowman is a movie critic.


10. Ghostbusters (1984): This comedy might not get Russell Kirk’s endorsement as a worthy treatment of the supernatural, but you have to like a movie in which the bad guy (William Atherton at his loathsome best) is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector. This last fact is the other reason to love Ghostbusters: When Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) gets kicked out of the university lab and ponders pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities, a nervous Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) replies: “I don’t know about that. I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results!”

— Steven F. Hayward is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

New Line Productions

11. The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003): Author J. R. R. Tolkien was deeply conservative, so it’s no surprise that the trilogy of movies based on his masterwork is as well. Largely filmed before 9/11, they seemed perfectly pitched for the post-9/11 world. The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War. (Think of Wormtongue as Keith Olbermann.) When Frodo sighs, “I wish none of this had happened,” Gandalf’s response speaks to us, too: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

— Andrew Leigh is a screenwriter and producer in Los Angeles.


12. The Dark Knight (2008): This film gives us a portrait of the hero as a man reviled. In his fight against the terrorist Joker, Batman has to devise new means of surveillance, push the limits of the law, and accept the hatred of the press and public. If that sounds reminiscent of a certain former president — whose stubborn integrity kept the nation safe and turned the tide of war — don’t mention it to the mainstream media. Our journalists know that good men are often despised by the mob; it just never seems to occur to them that they might be the mob themselves.

— Andrew Klavan is the author of Empire of Lies.


13. Braveheart (1995): Forget the travesty this soaring action film makes of the historical record. Braveheart raised its hero, medieval Scottish warrior William Wallace, to the level of myth and won five Oscars, including best director for Mel Gibson, who played Wallace as he led a spirited revolt against English tyranny. Braveheart taught that freedom is not just worth dying for, but also worth killing for, in defense of hearth and homeland. Six years later, amid the ruins of the Twin Towers, Gibson’s message resonated with a generation of American youth who signed up to fight terrorists, instead of inviting them to join a “constructive dialogue.” Liberals have never forgiven Gibson since.

— Arthur Herman is the author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World.


14. A Simple Plan (1998): A defining insight of conservatism is that whatever transcendent inspiration there may be to moral principles, there is also the humble fact that morality works. Moral institutions and customs endure because they allow civilization to proceed. Sam Raimi’s gripping A Simple Plan illustrates this truth. Bill Paxton plays a decent family man who lives by the book in every way. But when he’s cajoled into breaking the rules to get rich quick, he falls under the jurisdiction of the law of unintended consequences and discovers that simple morality is not simplistic, and that a seductively simple plan is a siren song if it runs against the grain of what is right.

— Jonah Goldberg


15. Red Dawn (1984): From the safe, familiar environment of a classroom, we watch countless parachutes drop from the sky and into the heart of America. Oh, no: invading Commies! Laugh if you want — many do — but Red Dawn has survived countless more acclaimed films because Father Time has always been our most reliable film critic. The essence of timelessness is more than beauty. It’s also truth, and the truth that America is a place and an idea worth fighting and dying for will not be denied, not under a pile of left-wing critiques or even Red Dawn’s own melodramatic flaws. Released at the midpoint of Reagan’s presidential showdown with the Soviet Union, this story of what was at stake in the Cold War endures.

— John Nolte blogs at BigHollywood.Breitbart.com.

Maureen Dowd is worried about Joe Biden's feelings:

Mr. Biden’s stream of consciousness can be impolitic. Politico’s Glenn Thrush refers to “the human political polygraph that is Joseph Robinette Biden.” It can also be bracingly honest.

Joe is nothing if not loyal. And the president should return that quality, and not leave his lieutenant vulnerable to “Odd Couple” parodies.

On a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit, Jason Sudeikis’s Biden leaned over Fred Armisen’s Obama, to tell Americans: “Look, I know $819 billion sounds like a lot of money. But it’s just a tip of the iceberg.”

Armisen’s clenched Obama murmurs: “Couldn’t pick Hillary. I just couldn’t.”

Gawker, a media gossip blog, translated Monday’s Garrett-Obama exchange this way:

“Uh, Mr. President, Joe Biden said something yesterday about how you two will eventually destroy the world, forever. Care to comment?”

“Oh, that’s just the vice president. We all know he’s mentally unbalanced, right, guys? Ha ha ha ha. But seriously: He’s nuts, please keep him away from sharp objects.”

Obama LIES!!!!

"They seem to have narrowed it down to a labradoodle or a Portuguese water hound ... medium-sized dog, and so, we're now going to start looking at shelters to see when one of those dogs might come up."

"So, you're closing in on it?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"We're closing in on it. This has been tougher than finding a commerce secretary," the President-elect said.

I want to see Andrew Sullivan to start counting.

Obama Prays Biden has Tax Problem

VP forces Jake Tapper to reconsider policy toward loquacious blue hen:

"The president and I were talking about something yesterday in the Oval Office — which, to the press here, I'll not suggest what it was — but the response was to the folks that were in the office with us — was, you know, if we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, we stand up there and we make really tough decisions, there's still a 30-percent chance we're going to get it wrong," Mr. Biden told attendees of a House Democratic retreat.

Last night, our friend Fox News' Major Garrett asked the President about Biden's remarks.

"Since the Vice President brought it up, can you tell the American people, sir, what you were talking about?" Garrett asled. "And if not, can you at least reassure them it wasn't the stimulus bill or the bank rescue plan, and if in general, you agree with that ratio of success, 30 percent failure, 70 percent success?"

Responded the president: "You know, I don't remember exactly what Joe was referring to. Not surprisingly."

It is tempting to look at Obama's vice presidential choice as part of a larger emerging trend of presidential decision making. But remember, Obama picked someone with such a serious, adult attitude, and sacrificed himself for the sake of the country.

Twenty Five Best Conservative Movies

of the last twenty five years, according to the Corner. Last ten:
16. Master and Commander (2003): corner
17. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2005): corner
18. The Edge (1997): corner
19. We Were Soldiers (2002): corner
20. Gattaca (1997): corner
21. Heartbreak Ridge (1986): corner
22. Brazil (1985): corner
23. United 93 (2006): corner
24. Team America: World Police (2004): corner
25. Gran Torino (2008): corner

Good News News

all news is bad news, but bad news about the news is good news, no?
Martin Peretz:

I sat with one of these authoritatives last night and she was giving me
news, future news about the news. She was credible, having been the first to
suggest to me that the print edition of Mort Zuckerman's U.S. News and World
Report was going under and would be supplanted by its website. She was correct.

What other tidings did she have? That Newsweek was also going to the web
exclusively. And that the March of Time would make Time a monthly. Less Time, I
guess.

Then we had a long and inconclusive conversation about The New York Times
Company. One of its properties, the Boston Globe, is now so thin that there's
now pretending it abides by the oath pledged on the front page of the Times
itself every day: "All the News That's Fit to Print." In the emaciated Globe,
there's hardly room to print anything. If it were to vanish only the sports fans
would notice.

And as for the future of the Times itself: let us pray.

He doesn't say which way to pray, but I assume it's obvious.

Obama for President!

Oh, wait. Oh well. Obama gives up governing, goes back to campaigning.
Update: he can't even make up new content:

President Obama Recycles Old McCain Housing Slam as he Returns to Campaign Mode for Stimulus

February 09, 2009 3:56 PM

Just as the president has recently been using some of the language he used to assail the ideas of his erstwhile campaign opponent, 72-years-young Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- deriding opponents' ideas as "old" and "worn out," as he did during the campaign -- he today in Elkhart, Ind., slipped comfortably back into his criticism of the multi-aboded McCain.

Jake Tapper's the Man

but he should probably be watching for his life.
Update: Michael Goldfarb's looking like a pretty good spokesman right now.

Is Darling-Hammond Going to Be Duncan's Deputy? asks TNR:

Remember the controversy over Linda Darling-Hammond, Obama's campaign and transition adviser on education? Well, she's back. Rumor has it that Darling-Hammond might be getting the deputy secretary position at the Department of Education, which, as this graph shows, wields great power. "That's the person that really runs the agency," one education expert and reformer told me. It's a scenario that reformers, who favor tough new approaches to changing education and see Darling-Hammond as a traditionalist, had hoped wouldn't happen. "I guess we lost on this one," the reformer told me.

Calls to several education policy experts confirmed that word is circulating in the community that she might be tapped as second-in-command under Arne Duncan. "She's made the rounds talking to people, doing the kinds of things you do if you're expecting to stay in Washington," said Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank in D.C. He noted that, if she's not about to get the deputy gig, she could be getting another department position, perhaps one focusing on teacher quality.

In my conversations with them, education policy folks also said they've heard that Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, of which Darling-Hammond isn't a big fan, turned down an administration job. Michael Johnston, an Obama campaign adviser, TFA alum, and school principal who's working in the senior staffing process for the education department, declined to comment on who's getting which posts. "The team will be tremendous," he said in an e-mail, noting that an announcement about senior staff could come any day now.

Reformers are crossing their fingers that Darling-Hammond won't be named the No. 2.

--Seyward Darby

from an otherwise interesting profile of the new white house dress code:

Mr. Obama has also brought a more relaxed sensibility to his public appearances. David Gergen, an adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents, said Mr. Obama seemed to exude an “Aloha Zen,” a kind of comfortable calm that, Mr. Gergen said, reflects a man who “seems easy going, not so full of himself.”

Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that he is the Hawaiian Buddha?

Ross Douthat complains about the Narnia movies lack of overly explicit Christian symbolism:

If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and renewal-Aslan resurrected, and spring cracking the ice of an enchanted winter-then Prince Caspian is fundamentally a story about re-enchantment, and the glorious return of the supernatural forces that the Telmarines have repressed. Little of this survives in Adamson's adaptation; it's been pruned away to make room for battles and arguments and longing glances and one-liners. The book's climax, in which the trees and rivers come to life and a wild pagan rout overruns the sterile secularism of Telmarine society, is reduced to a brief battlefield intervention that rips off not one but two scenes in Lord of the Rings. Aslan, too, is reduced to a walk-on role, sweeping in once the body count has climbed and the CGI budget been exhausted to roar a halt to the proceedings. He murmurs about faith, in the voice of Liam Neeson, but he feels less a Christ figure than a strikingly flimsy plot device: Leo ex machina.

The bad news for Narniaphiles is that this may be the only way that C. S. Lewis can plausibly be adapted, given the economics (and biases) of contemporary Hollywood-with the metaphysics downplayed and the Generic Epic elements accentuated, the better to justify the price tag that comes attached to any fantasy film ... But judging from Caspian's middling box-office showing to date, it might be worth considering something different for Voyage of the Dawn Treader and (one hopes) its sequels: half the budget, perhaps, and a little more fidelity to the elements of theme and plot that make Narnia something more than an entertaining but two-dimensional imitation of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

So the Chronicles of Narnia movies added an entire additional dimension to Tolkien, and that's still not good enough?

School for the Gifted

(Explanation here)

 

what republican obliteration looks like

 

can you even name someone from the other side anymore?

Before praising Obama for his moderation, wait a few days

The difficulty in praising Obama's decisions is that when they're good it's usually just because he hasn't got around to changing them yet. Take, for example, this comment by David Brooks:

He’s done some big things right — hiring people like Dennis Ross and Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. He’s also done some less obvious things right. For example, the other day, I read that he rehired Mark Dybul as his Global AIDS Coordinator.
Dybul is one of those heroes one meets too rarely in government. He worked as an AIDS doctor in San Francisco in the 1980s and when the worst effects of the plague migrated to Africa, he did too. Then George W. Bush hired him to run the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program before promoting him to Global AIDS Coordinator.
It must have sometimes been difficult for a gay man to work in the Bush administration, but Dybul handled it all with exceptional grace and super-human competence. I traveled through Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique with him once and was incredibly impressed.
My point is that there must be many people in the Democratic orbit who would like the job Dybul holds. There are no political rewards for rehiring someone from a past administration. But Obama bypassed them for the sake of the program. It was a pure merit choice, and typical of a lot of the moves he has made.

This lasted for a few days. Then Obama heard from those "people in the Democratic orbit." Or, Another example:

In the current issue of Time, Joe Klein writes a paean to President Obama, saying in part:

[Obama] could have planted solar panels and a wind turbine on the White House roof or blasted the Bush Administration as he signed an Executive Order banning torture or lacerated the bankers who got us into the economic mess. But that's not his style, apparently. He has reversed the tactical, win-the-news-cycle sensibility of recent presidencies. During his first week in office, at least, he opted for strategy and substance over showbiz.

What unfortunate timing. In today's New York Times we read this:

President Obama branded Wall Street bankers "shameful" on Thursday . . . It was a pointed - if calculated - flash of anger from the president, who frequently railed against excesses in executive compensation on the campaign trails. Mr. Obama was reacting to a report by the New York State comptroller that found financial executives had received an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008. "That is the height of irresponsibility," Mr. Obama said. It is shameful."

For good measure, Vice President Biden added, "I'd like to throw these guys in the brig."

Of course, Joe Klein is such an idiot that his list of things of things proving Obama's greatness will probably take a little longer for Obama to reverse himself. So celebrate Obama's substance in that he hasn't turned the White House into a wind turbine. In fact, on this issue, Obama has reached the pinnacle of substance over style: hypocrisy.

What a moderate, substance-over-style guy Obama is. Also, Joe Klein is such an intellectual force. Maybe when Obama is done not putting solar panels on the roof, he can award Joe Klein something. That would show what a great man Obama is.

Who should replace Bill Kristol?

asks Poliltico.
Answer: it depends. If the nytimes is looking for someone (like Kristol) who won't be threatening to lefties, Peggy Noonan is a good idea. If on the other hand, they want someone who writes good columns, Ross is obvious choice, or Lowry. David Frum, Christopher Caldwell also good, plus they both hate Palin. If they're looking for neocon like Kristol more than "full spectrum" conservative, Max Boot, or Seth Lipsky.
my hunch is it might be Douthat who wrote a secret essay for them here

Did Rachel Appear in Gaza?

David Hazony - 01.25.2009 - 1:37 PM

For weeks now, we have been hearing rumors about a mysterious woman who appeared before Israeli troops in the thick of the Gaza battles. Not just any woman, mind you, but the biblical Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob, matriarch of Israel. (My nine-year-old daughter gave me an excellent speech about the pluses and minuses of believing these rumors.) Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu, announced that he himself had sent her. And now another former chief rabbi and Shas spiritual leader, Ovadiah Yosef, has confirmed these reports.

This is the point where I’m supposed to say how ridiculous it is. A hoax, or a superstition, or something. But I’m not gonna’ do it.

I don’t care if you call the appearance of Rachel a metaphor or a miracle. There is a point in rabbinic discourse where miracles and metaphors all mingle together, where the word “literally” loses its meaning, making room for midrash — the art of saying something illiteral and literary. To say that Rachel was with our soldiers, that our matriarch was protecting her boys, is a deeper statement than anything that can be made by a professional reporter with a camera.

Let’s give the religious spinmasters the benefit of the doubt. Of course she wasn’t there. But, of course, she was.

After a dissapointing showing for McCain among Jewish voters:

The question now is whether Republicans have any hope of winning the Jewish vote at any point in the future. The answer is: Perhaps. In a generation. If certain demographic trends hold firm. In November, the Orthodox Union compiled a list of precincts “with high-concentrations of Orthodox Jewish voters,” from which it was clear that the Orthodox tend to vote Republican in much higher numbers than the Jewish community overall. Indeed, it is even possible that the Orthodox constitute a majority of the Jews who vote Republican. Given that the Orthodox are younger than the Jewish average, and are proportionally growing much faster, over time one might expect the share of Jews who vote Republican to increase.

On a related note, what do you make of this?

i pledge

if you haven't seen the latest obama vid, in which hollywood exceeds itself, you should at least watch part & skip to the end. then read the transcript
MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge

again, i urge you to read the transcript.

Gnostic Immanentist Eschatology and the Divinization of Man

Now to get back to the Gnostics:

The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith, will afford; and Gnostic experiences offer this firmer grip in so far as they are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man. This expansion will engage the various human faculties; and, hence, it is possible to distinguish a range of Gnostic varieties according to the faculty which predominates in the operation of getting this grip on God. Gnosis may be primarily intellectual and assume the form of speculative penetration of the mystery of creation and existence, as, for instance, in the contemplative Gnosis of Hegel or Schelling. Or it may be primarily emotional and assume the form of an indwelling of divine substance in the human soul, as, for instance, in paracletic sectarian leaders. Or it may be primarily volitional and assume the form of activist redemption of man and society, as in the instance of revolutionary activists like Comte, Marx, or Hitler. These Gnostic experiences, in the amplitude of their variety, are the core of the re-divinization of society, for the men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense.

A clear understanding of these experiences as the active core of imanentist eschatology is necessary, because otherwise the inner logic of the Western political development from medieval immanentism through humanism, enlightenment, progressivism, liberalism, positivism, into Marxism will be obscured. The intellectual symbols developed by the various types of immanentists will frequently be in conflict with one another, and the various types of Gnostics will oppose one another. One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism. It will not be superfluous, therefore, to recall the principle that the substance of history is to be found on the level of experiences, not on the level of ideas. Secularism could be defined as a radicalization of the earlier forms of paracletic immanentism, because the experiential divinization of man is more radical in the secularist case. Feuerbach and Marx, for instance, interpreted the transcendent God as the projection of what is best in man into a hypostatic beyond; for them the great turning point of history, therefore, would come when man draws his projection back into himself, when he becomes conscious that he himself is God, when as a consequence man is transfigured into superman.

And last, a not wholly unconnected video:

Maybe She Should Campaign for John Kerry's Seat

nytimes:

In a dramatic and confusing turn of events, Caroline Kennedy informed Gov. David A. Paterson on Wednesday that she would withdraw from consideration for the vacant Senate seat in New York, only to hours later signal that she may be interested in the seat after all.

After all, she was in favor of getting the seat before she retracted her opposition to getting it.

Immanentizing the eschaton in context

Providing some context for Voegelin: The two figures he discusses are Augustine and Joachim (of Fiore). Augustine distinguished between the "City of God" and the "City of Man." History progresses towards the eschaton only in the City of God, but not in the City of Man. For Joachim however a transcendental eschaton was not enough. Joachim saw history within the temporal realm as moving toward perfection, and as such, immanentized the eschaton:

The Joachitic eschatology is, by its subject matter, a speculation on the meaning of history. In order to define its special character, it must be set off against the Christian philosophy of history that was traditional at the time, that is, against Augustinian speculation. Into the traditional speculation had entered the Jewish-Christian idea of an end of history in the sense of an intelligible state of perfection. History no longer moved in cycles, as it did with Plato and Aristotle, but acquired direction and destination. Beyond Jewish messianism in the strict sense the specifically Christian conception of history had advanced toward the understanidng of the end as a transcendental fulfilment. In his elaboration of this theoretical insight St. Augustine distinguished between a profane sphere of history which culminates in the appearance of Christ and the establishment of the church. He, furthermore, imbedded sacred history in a transcendental history of the civitas Dei which includes the events in the angelic sphere as well as the transcendental eternal sabbath. Only transcendental history, including the earthly pilgrimage of the church, has direction toward its eschatological fulfilment. Profane history, on the other hand has no such direction; it is a waiting for the end; its present mode of being is that of a saeculum sensescens, of an age that grows old.
By the time of Joachim, Western civilization was growing strongly; and an age that began to feel its muscles would not easily bear the Augustinian defeatism with regard to the mundane sphere of existence. The Joachitic speculation was an attempt to endow the immanent course of history with a meaning that was not provided in the Augustinian conception. And for this purpose Joachim used what he had at hand, that is, the meaning of transcendental history. In this first Western attempt at an immanentization of meaning the connection with Christianity was not lost. The new age of Joachim would bring an increase of fulfilment within history, but the increase would not be due to an immanent eruption; it would come through a new transcendental irruption of the spirit. The idea of a radically immanent fulfilment grew rathre slowly, in a long process that roughly may be called "from humanism to enlightenment"; only in the eighteenh century, with the idea of progress, had the increase of meaning in history become a completely intramundane phenomenon, without transcendental irruptions. This second phase of immaentization shall be called "secularization."
From the Joachitic immanentization a theoretical problem arises which occurs neither in classic antiquty nor in orthodox Christianity, that is, the problem of an eidos of history. In Hellenic speculation, to be sure, we also have a problem of essence in politics; the polis has an eidos both for Plato and for Aristotle. But the acualization of thsi essence is governed by the rhythm of growth and decay, and the rhythmical embodiment and disembodiment of essence in political reality is the mystery of existence; it is not an additional eidos. The soteriological truth of Christianity, then, breaks with the rhythm of existence; beyond temporal successes and reverses lies the supernatural destiny of man, the perfection through grace in the beyond. Man and mankind now have fulfilment, but it lies beyond nature. Again there is no eidos of history, becuase the eschatological supernature is not a nature in the philosophical, immanent sense. The problem of an eidos in history, therefore, arises only when Christian transcendental fulfilment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitrary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future. The meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience.

Now you are probably wondering, "But what does all this have to do with the Gnostics?" To be continued...