Future anthropologists, pouring over the ruins of our civilization, are going to come up with some curious hieroglyphics. Consider what is happening at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Clark, as anyone who has visited it knows, is a fetching small museum set in a picture-perfect New England town. It has a handful of important pictures and quite a few agreeable if second-rate ones. Alas, like most other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting the cultural patrimony of our civilization, it now operates as a sort of wrecking ball. Consider this bulletin about an upcoming event at the Clark:

March 13, 2008

CLARK CONVERSATION,
“HOW QUEER IS ART HISTORY,”

APRIL 5 AT THE CLARK
For Immediate Release

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA- The complex and controversial subject of the relationship between homosexuality, queer theory and queer studies, and the discipline of art history will be discussed at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute on Saturday, April 5, at 5:30 pm, during the Clark Conversation “How Queer is Art History?”. Admission to the conversation is free.

In recent years, queer theory has challenged some basic premises of the humanities. A group of scholars who are pioneers of thinking about how sexual identity influences the way people write about art history and the way art is made and understood have met during a two-day colloquium to discuss these topics. This public conversation will be a summary of scholars’ findings.

There you have it, folks: the cream of our great nation’s scholarly talent in art history, conjuring with the important question, “How Queer is Art History?” The world waits with breath bated for the answer to this pressing interrogation. After learning about the “findings” of these “scholars” I hope someone will propound the equally challenging question, namely “How Long Will the Public Put Up With Such Rubbish Masquerading as Serious Inquiry?” That is a conversation I would dearly like to hear.

Meanwhile, here is the press contact for the Clark: shoffman@clarkart.edu or (413) 458-0471: give ‘em a buzz and let them know what you think this “controversial subject.”

Over at Armavirumque, James Piereson has a fascinating roundup of some recent literary hoaxes. One unifying trait of the contemporary literary hoax is that it is focussed downwards, towards the depths of society. It used to be that a poor chap, born on the wrong side of the tracks, would dream of better things and, if he was of a fabricating literary bent, would frame a story of some grandeur for himself. Today, we find middle- or upper-middle-class folk who think it is chic (because, it is chic from a commercial perspective) to invent lives of squalor for themselves. Hence what Piereson aptly describes as the “cavalcade” of fake memoirs about drug addicts, concentration camp survivors, etc., etc. Fragments, by one Binjamin Wilkomirski, recounts “how he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan in a Nazi concentration camp”–only he did because he was never there; Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, “depicts her life as a Jewish child on the run from the Nazis during the war and in search of her parents,” but really she was born a Catholic in Belgium and just made up the story; Sarah, by J. T. Leroy, was supposedly about “the son of a West Virginia truck stop prostitute,” but it was really by Laura Albert, a 42-year-old white woman living in San Francisco. And on it goes. A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, was about the life of an addict. Oprah loved it–until it was shown that Frey had made it all up. This literary exercise in nostalgie de la boue tells us a lot about our culture. As Piereson notes,

It is more than a little interesting that contemporary novelists, when they stoop to such fabrications, invariably come up with harrowing stories about addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse, family dysfunction, prostitution, gang wars, and life on the run or among the down and out. One rarely hears of fabrications from the poor (or even by the rich) about life in the suburbs, boardrooms, or country clubs. Our novelists, even when they lie or especially when they lie, reveal what sells among publishers, reviewers, and contemporary readers.

It is sometimes said that what artists esteem is a sign of what is valued in a society. If that is so, then we may be more trouble than we think.

As Charles Murray noted in another context, what we are witnessing is “the proletarianization of the dominant minority.” Drawing on some pregnant observations about the distingration of cultures in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Murray notes that “one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites–Toynbee’s ‘dominant minority’–begin to imitate those at the bottom of society.” Murray minutes a host of examples, from the language we use to the way we dress, from public displays of sex to family relations, to show how that where Americans once looked up the social scale for their ideals, many now look to the gutter. “The collapse of old codes,” Murray observes,

leaves a vacuum that must be filled. Within the elites, the replacement has been tenets, broadly accepted by people across the political spectrum, that tell us to treat people equally regardless of gender, race, or sexual preference, to be against poverty and war, and to be for fairness and diversity. These are not bad things to be against and for, respectively, but the new code, which I will call ecumenical niceness, has a crucial flaw. The code of the elites is supposed to set the standard for the society, but ecumenical niceness has a hold only on those people whom the elites are willing to judge–namely, one another. One of the chief tenets of ecumenical niceness is not to be judgmental about the underclass.

Within the underclass, the vacuum has been filled by a distinctive, separate code. Call it thug code: Take what you want, respond violently to anyone who antagonizes you, gloat when you win, despise courtesy as weakness, treat women as receptacles, take pride in cheating, deceiving, or exploiting successfully. The world of hip-hop is where the code is openly embraced. But hip-hop is only an expression of the code, not its source. It amounts to the hitherto inarticulate values of underclass males from time immemorial, now made articulate with the collaboration of some of America’s best creative and merchandising talent.

It is, as Piereson laments, sobering to witness the values implicit in so much of what that “creative talent” celebrates today. It has always been that case, as he notes, that what we esteem tells a lot about who we are. What do we esteem today?

I had always assumed that the playwright David Mamet was, as he describes himself, “a brain-dead liberal.” But, lo! it is the season of Easter, miracles are abroad, and Mamet, in the pages of The Village Voice no less, reveals himself to have undergone a political metanoia. Describing the plot of his new play, November, now at the Barrymore Theater in New York, Mamet notes that it revolves around politics, “which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.” The play, you’ll understand from this characterization, is a comedy.

Mamet’s account of his achievement of what a friend of mine calls “political maturity” is noteworthy. It is a chrysalis-to-butterfly evolution I’ve witnessed often in intelligent people of good will and sound instincts. “I took the liberal view for many decades,” Mamet admits, “but I believe I have changed my mind.”

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

How often I have felt that smile-tightening, fist-clenching, epithet-spouting anger rising up when confronted with NPR. (The New York Times has a similar effect on me: it’s gotten to the point where even its typeface sets me on edge; a glimpse of their logo is enough to make me change seats on the train.) What is it about NPR? I’ve often wondered. Do they send their commentators to a special elocution class where they learn to inject an emetic combination of smugness and pseudo-concern into every syllable? Does anyone really enjoy listening to the non-dulcet strains of Robert Siegel or Noah Adams or Cokie Roberts? Just typing the names makes me break out in a slight sweat as that horrible jingle that accompanies “All Things Considered” starts echoing in my memory.

In fact, the sound effects of the show, from the timbre of the announcers’ voices on down, are one of the most repellent things about it (apart from the content). Particularly loathsome, I’ve always thought, is NPR’s method of treating the exotic. You know, they send a reporter and sound crew to some godforsaken country where Something Bad Has Happened (usually, we’re meant to understand, because of something the United States is alleged to have done, or failed to do) and start recording the chickens and goats running around in the village where 85 percent of the population under 15 has just been massacred or something. Your hear the chickens and goats in the background, then the NPR reporter comes on, explaining that Geewampimubba is a 37-year-old unemployed cripple whose . . . well, you know. That’s bad enough. But the fiendishly horrible bit is yet to come. For the next thing you know, the poor fellow is chattering on in his native language while, with a few seconds’ delay, an NPR translator give it to you in English. Even thinking about it makes me feel sick.

So I know what Mr. Mamet means about NPR. Here’s a quick association-test. I say: “Garrison Keillor.” Admit it: the very name makes you feel queasy, doesn’t it? It does me. That cringe-making folksiness; dulcimers; powder-milk biscuits. . . . Stop! They don’t do this in Gitmo: why is the American public subjected to such torture every week?

But I digress. NPR does that to me. But David Mamet’s political maturation involves more than NPR. By his own account, it has involved a revolution in the way he regards–well, just about everything, including the United States and its place in the world.

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

And remember, you’re reading this from the pages of The Village Voice. Will it, I wonder, be the last time David Mamet appears in its pages? Mamet’s awakening brought him to a new clarity about other matters, too: about “corporations,” for example, “hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live,” or the “‘Bad, Bad Military’ of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world,” or the free market: “I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them.”

It’s an amazing, a heartening, apologia. It gives one faith in human nature. It may not, this side of paradise, be perfectible, but it is educable.

Wait, this is good: “Clinton-backer Ferraro: Obama Where He Is Because He’s Black.” You might be tempted to say, with Henry Higgins, “By George, I think she’s got it!” But no, no: she wasn’t being funny. She wasn’t even being truthful.

Let’s see, why was Geraldine Ferraro once a vice-presidential candidate (choose one):

1. Because of her sterling qualifications.

2. Because she would bring deep and valuable experience to the office of the vice-President.

3. Because she was a woman.

Why was Hillary Clinton elected Senator for New York and why was she considered a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for President until Obama got into the act (choose two):

1. Because of her sterling qualifications.

2. Because she would bring deep and valuable experience to the office of the President.

3. Because she and her husband built a ruthless campaign machine that will stop at nothing to further their political careers.

4. Because she is a woman.

OK, class, time’s up. You all know the answers: how did you do?

The funniest part of Geraldine Ferraro’s little snit was when she complained that the media is “sexist.” Yes, Gerry, it is: it’s racist, too. That’s why a white male doesn’t stand a chance in the court of media opinion. It’s too bad that the ideology of sex victimization has been trumped by racial victimization in the scramble for the Democratic nomination, but really is unseemly (though as I say, quite amusing) for someone whose entire career has been fueled by pandering to the former to complain when the latter gets a look-in.

Having just learned the news about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s expensive taste in tarts, a friend emailed to ask me what was the fancy word was that meant taking malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others: “Spitzer?” he suggested.

I have never liked Mr. Spitzer and his intrusive, rogue-prosecutorial ways. I take it amiss that even in his disgrace we are all going to be subjected to a non-stop Spitzerfest for the next 48-72 hours. Why can’t he simply disappear? I am already more than sated on the stories of The Emperor’s Club, whose experts earn nearly as much as a successful law partner. Still, there have been a few gems to emerge from the glee. My favorite so far was highlighted by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit: “Prostitute Admits Link to Eliott Spitzer; Resigns From Escort Service in Disgrace.” Pretty good, eh?

There have also been a spate–no, a cataract–of reflections about hypocrisy, including an amusing passel at Protein Wisdom. My own feeling is that there are so many reasons to dislike Eliot Spitzer that I would hate the issue of hypocrisy to obscure his many other, more heinous faults. In fact, I am not entirely sure Mr. Spitzer rises to the level of the genuine hypocrite.

Some readers may recall the sad story of George Roche III, the former president of Hillsdale College who was alleged to have had an affair with his son’s wife. It was a sordid, unhappy story: the woman committed suicide. Mr. Roche resigned but always, so far as I know, protested his innocence.

I wrote a brief piece about the case. I was not so much interested in defending Mr. Roche–as I said at the time, about his guilt or innocence I knew exactly as much as my readers, namely nothing–but in reflecting about the oft-made charge of hypocrisy.

When I was in college, I recalled, there was a story going around about the German philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928). Scheler was known for inspiring ethical meditations with titles like “On Man’s Place in the Cosmos.” He was also, according to this story, known for his energetic philandering. A distraught admirer approached him about this discrepancy: how could he write all those noble, morally uplifting works and yet lead such a discreditable personal life? The response attributed to Scheler is illuminating. The sign that points to Boston, he said, doesn’t have to go there.

In effect, I noted, Scheler was defending hypocrisy. He was saying that the ideals he articulated were more important than his personal failure to achieve them. When the story of Bill Clinton’s liaison with Monica Lewinsky became public, there was plenty of condemnation, but almost nobody talked about hypocrisy: lying, yes; moral turpitude, by all means; but not hypocrisy. That is because hypocrisy is essentially an aristocratic failing. It extols “the best” even if the best is generally unattainable.

This indeed is one reason that hypocrisy, among all the vices, is regarded with particular disdain and horror by egaliatarians. A hypocrite publicly upholds noble values and standards of behavior even though he knows he may sometimes fall short of the conduct they require. He does this because he recognizes that those values are worthy of support and commendation even if he cannot always embody them.

La Rochefoucauld’s observation that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue” will doubtless be trotted out early and often when in the case of Eliot Spitzer and the girls. It is a famous, though often misinterpreted, observation. The epigram has generally been presented as meaning–in the words of one journalist–that “the loudest moralizers may be most suspect.” But I believe that La Rochefoucauld meant to suggest that hypocrisy was an implicit acknowledgment of the claims of virtue. Otherwise, why bother with dissimulation?

There are, as I say, many reasons to dislike Eliot Spitzer. I, too, hope he goes away, and quickly. The music critic Tim Page, referring to an unpleasant and pretentious college president, observed that he was the sort of chap that gave “pseudo-intellectuality a bad name.” I feel similarly about Eliot Spitzer and hypocrisy. His behavior gives that ambiguous vice a bad name. What’s wrong with Eliot Spitzer is not so much that he praised good things and did bad ones. Most of the items he championed in his various moral campaigns were, when you looked behind the rhetoric, of dubious value. Really, he was a power-hungry, regulation-crazed functionary whose chief sin was to harness the power of the state to destroy his enemies and aggrandize himself. Had he been a little more hypocritical he might have been less dangerous.

Pat Condell, whose Wikipedia entry describes him as an “English stand up comedian, writer, playwright, secularist and atheist,” has produced several short but brilliantly acerb videos in the last couple of years about the mounting threat of radical Islam. His most recent installment, which I believe was released just a couple of days ago (it’s available on the weblog Little Green Footballs here) scales new heights of articulate outrage. Take a look: a more thoroughgoing, not to say entertaining, condemnation of hypocritical multiculturalism would be hard to find. Condell divides his ire equally between Islamic fanatics, who would destroy Western civilization, and those connoisseurs of abasement who would capitulate to any demand in order to preserve their sense of politically correct liberal election.

As always, Condell’s address is refreshing for its forthrightness: “What we need,” he observes, “is not more respect for Islam but less respect for Islam and more respect for ourselves.” The culture of Islam, he argues, is not equal, “it’s inferior” to European civilization. “It encourages violence against women, against Jews and homosexuals. It sanctions polygamy and marrying old men to young children in a disgusting travesty of human relations.” Condell also makes a point I have often insisted upon, namely that “Islamophobia” is a misnomer: a phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing the depredations of radical Islam. On the contrary. If you want to indulge in phobia-speak, far better to natter on about Islamophobia-phobia: the irrational fear of Islamophobia, which has reached epidemic proportions in Europe and wherever politically correct intellectuals congregate.

As for freedom, Condell makes the crucial point that it is only won by sacrifice and can only be preserved by constant vigilance. We in the West, such conspicuous beneficiaries of other people’s sacrifices for our freedom, are tempted to forget that. We do so at our peril–and not only our own peril, of course, for the next generation is growing up fast to take our place. What sort of place will we leave for them? Freedom is hard won; it takes constant effort to preserve; but it is easy, all too easy, to lose. And as Condell notes, there is an important sense in which our freedom, and the institutions that embody and protect it, are not ours absolutely but ours only in trust: “we don’t own it,” as Condell says, “we’re custodians of it. It’s not our to give away.” Would that his final adjuration–”Show a little backbone for once, just once”–could be graven upon the lintels of the West’s legislatures and universities.

I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that the word “democracy” has become a semantically challenged, often mendacious, epithet, liberally applied whenever a cosmetic rhetorical boost is needed. The word has, for those susceptible to the drug, agreeable egalitarian, or at least non-elitist, connotations, and what began in the realm of political deliberation has gradually oozed outward to infect all manner of social activity. Whitman spoke of “Democratic Vistas”; today, we have “democratic education” (i.e., low standards), democratic motorcycle racing, even democratic footwear.

But I digress. Behind (quite far behind) the promiscuous application of the adjective “democratic” to mean “activities or objects I endorse” lies a deep political desideratum, which revolves around tempering power with accountability and promulgating the rule of law (as distinct from the rule of the lawgivers, also known as “whim”). One of the most depressing aspects of the rise of the Leviathan that is the EU bureaucracy is spectacle of arbitrary, unaccountable power on the march. It is, as yet, a soft march, more of a shuffle, really, but it is underway everywhere, trudged out not by by self-proclaimed dictators, as in days of old, but by self-appointed functionaries in the best bureaucratic tradition.

Back in December, I wrote in this space about the Lisbon treaty, the cynical reprise of the ignominiously defeated EU constitution that, since the EU masters could not entice enough people to vote for it, was simply renamed and shoved down the people’s collective gullet by fiat. Today in the London Times, under the splendid title “And for our next lie . . . the great EU betrayal,” William Rees Mogg ponders the “relatively simple” but “deeply disturbing” facts surrounding the adoption of the Lisbon Treat. In the wake of the defeat of the EU Constitution, various governments, including Great Britain, promised that a referendum would be held on any future European constitutional treaty. Pollsters showed that any such referendum would bring a crushing defeat. Solution: skip the referendum. That, anyway, is what Gordon Brown’s government did. Rees Mogg quotes Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, former President of France, who proudly described how the process works: “Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly . . . all the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.”

You have to admire the accuracy even if you deplore underhandedness. Giscard d’Estaing was describing to a “T” the EU’s standard operating procedure–a procedure that exudes contempt for the democratic process and, even more, contempt for the former voters over whom functionaries like Giscard d’Estaing aim to rule.

Iain Duncan Smith may have been a strikingly ineffective leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, but in retirement he has shown himself a canny observer of the political process that led to the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty. “I do not know why we dance around as though this were a silly game,” Duncan Smith said.

The truth is that the heads of state and governments of all the countries that negotiated the constitutional treaty have said to each other, ‘We have got in a real mess over this. We allowed the public and politicians who are not responsible members of the government to play a part.’ European bureaucrats have known for years that the way to get things done is never to ask the public . . . because the answer will inevitably be no.”

So: the bureaucrats cannot get what they want from the people, ergo they circumvent the people and rule by diktat.

Query: what species of existential anaesthetic have they introduced into the water that the vast majority of people accept such usurpations of their prerogatives with indifference?

We all know about Dolly, the cloned sheep. Has some nefarious political scientist gone a step further and contrived a sort of ovigenerating potion that transforms men into wool-free sheep?

Rees Mogg warns–or promises: I am not sure which–that the actions described by Giscard (proudly) and Duncan Smith (disgustedly) threaten to alienate British voters. “If the EU cannot trust the people,” he concludes, “the people cannot trust the EU.” He is assuredly correct about that: the people cannot trust the EU. Two questions remain, however: 1) are the people really aware of this fundamental perfidy? And, if so, 2) what are they going to do about it? A few months ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown traded away large areas of British sovereignty. Result: a few editorials by chaps like Rees Mogg. Meanwhile, Giscard is serving as president of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, an EU boondoggle. The top marginal income tax rate in Britain is nearly 50 percent. Guess how much Giscard pays?

Everyone knows that John McCain has the reputation for being thin-skinned. The therapy-speak people talk about his “having a problem with anger,” and generally trot out something about the trauma of spending so much time incarcerated in a North Vietnamese prison. Leaving aside the sick-making “problem with anger” rhetoric, I have always suspected there might be something to this. So I was pleasantly surprised to see Mr. McCain handle himself with maturity and aplomb when taxed by the inanities of a reporter from The New York Times (pardon the pleonasm). The headlines reporting the incident catered to the clichés: “McCain Flashes Temper at NY TIMES Reporter,” said the Drudge report, which linked to a piece by Michael Calderone on Politico:

John McCain became hostile with the N.Y. Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller on the campaign’s plane today, after the reporter questioned him about a 2004 meeting with John F. Kerry . . .

Calderone links to a video clip of the episode: take of look here. What do you think? I thought McCain was a model of restraint, especially given the hectoring purport and whiny tone of Ms. Bumiller, who I think must have gone to the same elocutionist as Hillary Clinton and Big Nurse.

EB: Okay. Can I ask you about your (pause) Why you’re so angry?

McCain: Pardon me?

EB: Nevermind, nevermind.

Why do candidates put up with this stuff? Anyway, to his credit, Michael Calderone supplied this update to his post:

Readers have fairly noted McCain’s reaction isn’t exactly “hostile,” which I wrote before audio and video were available. It would be more accurate to say he became irritated or annoyed, perhaps.

Quite right. I would only add that the irritation or annoyance were eminently justified by smarmy “gotcha” psychobabble of Ms. E.B.

Well, I suppose the Times is still smarting from its grotesque effort to smear McCain by publishing a front-page story about the affair that the presumptive Republican nominee for President might, just possibly, have had with a lobbyist 8 years ago. McCain and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, instantly denied the allegation. In fact, Ms. Iseman had already denied it in the original Times story, thus rendering the entire exercise completely pointless, but, hey, why let a little thing like the distinction between malicious rumor and actual news bear upon what you put on the front page of your newspaper? On balance, I am happy the Times ran the story: it was so quickly and so widely held up to contempt that I have to feel that some public good came of it.

Our newspaper of record is clearly happy to devote consider resources to discover whom John McCain did not have affair with in the year 2000 or what he didn’t say to John Kerry in 2004. But it betrays a notable lack of curiosity about the friends of Barack Hussein Obama (I know, I know, you aren’t supposed to mention his middle name, but I just can’t help it). Investor’s Business Daily is much livelier on this subject. Just yesterday, for example it published an editorial called “Obama And FARC,” which posed the interesting question why Mr. B. Hussein Obama’s name should turn up on the hard drive of a laptop computer belonging to Raul Reyes, the Colombian warlord and second-in-command of the Marxist-Leninist terror group FARC (short for “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia“), who was shot in a raid by the Colombian army on March 1. Quite a few interesting tidbits have emerged from that hard drive, including the fact that the group had been attempting to obtain uranium and that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had siphoned some $300 million to them. What caught the eye of the editorialist for IBD was place that B. Hussein O. occupies in the plans and fantasy life of FARC. “In a Feb. 28 letter,” IBD notes,”

FARC chieftain Raul Reyes cheerily reported to his inner circle that he met “two gringos” who assured him “the new president of their country will be Obama and that they are interested in your compatriots. Obama will not support ‘Plan Colombia’ nor will he sign the TLC (Free Trade Agreement).”

The Victorian travel writer Alexander Kinglake once proposed affixing the notice “Interesting if true” to churches in England. I feel similarly about Mr. Reyes’s “two gringos” and his apparent familiarity with the voting proclivities of BHO. IDB pursues the question further:

Obama hasn’t said a whole lot about Colombia other than to criticize President Bush’s good relations with President Uribe. With this correspondence suggesting that FARC knows what he thinks, maybe the American voters have a right to know what he thinks, too. Five questions come to mind:

1. Is it true Obama would cut off Plan Colombia military aid to our ally, which would serve the terrorist group FARC’s interests?

2. Does Obama still oppose a free trade agreement for Colombia, even though that puts him on the same side as FARC in the debate?

3. Does Obama know or care that one of his staffers or supporters is claiming to disclose his positions in secret meetings with FARC terrorists outside government channels?

4. Can he tell us why his supporters would pass on such information to terrorists, and what he or she could gain from it?

5. Will Obama, as president, treat FARC as the serious terrorists they are, given that they still hold three Americans hostage?

These aren’t idle “gotcha” questions, by the way. Based on his campaign so far, Obama favors meeting and negotiating with rogue leaders without preconditions, passing secret messages to foreign countries at odds with his public positions and tolerating Che-flag wielding leftists among his supporters who advance a radical agenda in his name.

Now that FARC seems to have an inside line to Obama’s campaign, maybe he ought to come tell voters what he really stands for.

I wonder why such interesting questions haven’t occurred to the editors of The New York Times. Why is John McCain’s non-affair with a lobbyist 8 years ago worth a front-page story while a possible link between a Colombia warlord and B.H. Obama is not even worth a mention on page B27? Isn’t that news that’s “fit to print”? Just asking.

[Update: as an awake reader points out, I meant "Colombia" not "Columbia." Bonus Homerus dormitat.]

Will wonders never cease? This just in from the left, I mean West, coast: people studying English as a second language learn it more effectively when they are taught grammar.

I too am flabbergasted. But there it is. Under the splendid headline “English as a proficient language,” The Oregonian reports that some 9,000 students passed the state English examination last year, up from 4,000 the year before. Why the dramatic improvement? Because, say “educators” (don’t you love that word?), “a new way of teaching that has swept Oregon” classrooms teaching English as a Second Language. The novelty? “Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don’t miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.”

What an innovation! Imagine, actually teaching grammar and all that old-hat stuff that your mother (or your grandmother, anyway) used to learn. “For a long time,” said one “educator,” “we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do.” No doubt it took a large, multi-year government grant to figure out that, if you want to teach most people a language, you actually have to teach them the language. What a revolution in pedagogy. Possibly at the end of another huge tax-payer subsidized study, educators will discover that learning history makes for better-informed citizens–extraordinary!–or that memorizing poems and such is not only good training for a student’s memory but also gives students the gift of possessing those works–their rhythms and emotional weather–at their fingertips. What an idea, that learning “by heart” means expanding and tempering your imaginative response to life’s vicissitudes. Where, I wonder, will it end? Perhaps, in the fullness of time, educators will also discover that the best way to teach math is by teaching math–beginning with such hoary devices as the times tables and fractions and division. Someday, a long way from now, after many more research projects and expensive educational experiments, it may even be discovered that Aristotle, that old Greek, was right when he said that a proper education involves educating the emotions. Only a blockhead, he said in the Nicomachean Ethics, doesn’t believe that character is formed by behavior.

But all that is for an advanced course. For now, we should render thanks for the pioneering discovery that if you wish to teach someone a language, your best bet is to teach them the language. What an insight!

In December, I wrote a column in this space called “Conrad Black and Saint-Just“, about the vendetta conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice against Conrad Black, former proprietor of the London Telegraph, The Spectator, and sundry other media properties. As I wrote at the time, Black’s case marked “not only a private tragedy but also a dangerous public judicial trend.”

Today, when Lord Black is required to report to a federal prison in Florida to begin serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence, we are reminded just how dangerous to liberty that judicial trend can be. Lord Black has appealed his sentence, but just last week the Court ruled that he must begin serving his sentence before the appeal is decided, even though allowed two co-defendants to remain at liberty pending their appeals.

Throughout these disgusting proceedings, Black has comported himself with extraordinary dignity (and astonishing good humor), pursuing a variety of important literary projects even as he battled to clear his name. Today, The New York Sun publishes “My Faith in American Justice,” Lord Black’s eloquent summary of the case the far and what it tells us about the state of the American judiciary. It says a lot about the character of this besieged man that, hours before his incarceration, he should conclude his piece with an affirmation of faith in American justice.

My faith in the United States has inspired me to persevere, despite what I believe has been the prosecution’s insufficient respect for the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment guarantees of due process, of the grand jury as an assurance against capricious prosecution, of no seizure of assets without just compensation, of speedy justice, access to counsel, and reasonable bail. I have been besieged by various agencies of the U.S. government for over four years, and I know of only one higher bond in U.S. history than the $38 million I have been posting.

Thoreau wrote: “Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.” These charges and the actions leading up to them have been unjust. Most of them have already been found to be unjust. I cherish my liberty as all people do, but I am unafraid. I have faith in American justice.