Tomorrow will be a banner day for English cultural journalism. Standpoint, a new monthly review of politics and culture, will make its debut with contributions by Michael Burleigh, Tim Congdon, Robert Conquest, Clive James, Douglas Murray, Andrew Roberts, Mark Steyn, and others. Judging by its first issue, it will amply live up to its promise “to celebrate and defend Western civilization, its achievements and its values.”

Edited by the distinguished journalist and historian Daniel Johnson, Standpoint eschews both the politically correct pieties that have insinuated themselves disastrously into so much serious cultural journalism over the past few decades as well as the tawdry commercialism that has rendered many hitherto vital periodicals indistinguishable from inflight magazines. There has been nothing as vibrant and engaging in English journalism since Encounter closed some two decades ago. “Give me a point on which to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” Welcome to Standpoint, which I expect will move and inform the world of cultural controversy and opinion. Click here to subscribe to Standpoint.

Responding to my post yesterday about Google’s decision to leave Memorial Day uncommemorated, a friend reminded me about Gerard Manley Hopkins’s moving poem “The Solider.”

YES. Why do we áll, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless
Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,
But frail clay, nay but foul clay. Here it is: the heart,
Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess
That, hopes that, makesbelieve, the men must be no less;
It fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art;
And fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,
And scarlet wear the spirit of wár thére express.

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;
He of all can handle a rope best. There he bides in bliss
Now, and séeing somewhére some mán do all that man can do,
For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry ‘O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
Were I come o’er again’ cries Christ ‘it should be this’.

How odd that one of the best poetic reflections about why we pay homage–and why we ought to pay homage–to men at arms should come from a reclusive Jesuit priest. Hopkins is perhaps the deepest, and certainly the lushest, of the Victorian poets. His corpus is small. But his work bristles with novel melodies, what he calls in another poem (”Spring and Fall“–one of my favorites) “fresh thoughts.” Poetry in general is a medium at odds with the voracious emphemeralities of the blogosphere, in which the self-consuming “Now!” is king. Hopkins’s linguistic convolutions and densities–those odd stresses, that knotted syntax–seem especially out of place in a world that puts a premium on instant comprehension. More even than most poets, he needs to be read slowly, to be savored, to be appreciated or even understood. His music works on us with a strange immediacy, but his meaning blossoms with the magisterial deliberateness of a rose. Quoting Hopkins in a blog post must there seem quixotic, or at least pointless. Who in the hurly-burly of the news-news-news cycle will pause to read, really to read, him? Well, Ezra Pound said that poetry is news that stays news. So perhaps quoting Hopkins is not so strange after all.

Anyone who uses a computer these days uses Google, and anyone who uses Google will have noticed that they can’t let a holiday go by without fancifully embroidering their logo. On Halloween you’ll have pumpkins and witches and spiders, on Christmas, Frosty or some other certified all-purpose generic marker. Ditto for Thanksgiving and just about every other special day that the calendar affords. I seem to recall, but can not swear, that even “earth day” got the logo make over.

Well, here we are on Memorial Day, the one day of the year we set aside to thank the men and women who served in the armed forces and whose labors helped keep those holidays coming for us Americans, including, of course, the engineers at Google who have been hauling in the cash at a stupendous rate on account of America’s institutions of free enterprise. How does Google commemorate the service, the sacrifice, of the men and women who have borne arms to protect us and our freedoms? Here it is:

In other words, they completely ignored Memorial Day. In a recent post, I quoted from Kipling’s poem “Tommy.” Google’s pointed, and disgusting, neglect of the men and women who make it possible for them to make and enjoy their millions prompts me to quote from it again:

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.

  Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

Here’s a bet: that the geniuses at Google will be turning out en masse for Obama, assuming he gets the nomination. Any takers?

UPDATE: Little Green Footballs has the back story. Bottom line? “What’s the excuse this year?”

More than a decade ago, the philosopher Harvey Mansfield noted that “environmentlaism is school prayer for liberals.” The scientist Freeman Dyson would not, I’d wager, agree with Harvey Mansfield about much, but he recognizes Mansfield’s point about the nature of environmentalism: “There is a worldwide secular religion,” Dyson wrote in a recent review about the “global warming” (my scare quotes),

which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

There is a lot to conjure with in those paragraphs from the conclusion of Dyson’s review essay. My own view is that 1) Dyson is right that environmentalism really is a secular religion, more particularly a species of paganism but 2) that the “moral high ground” he identifies is an illusory elevation achieved by a gaseous mixture of self-righteousness and political correctness. Yes, waste is bad; yes, we are stewards not only of the earth, but also of civilization, and it is incumbent upon us to regard both with just solicitude. Attending to both may sometimes pull us in different directions: it is a sign of maturity to ignore neither. But something profoundly damaging occurs when habits of regard harden into ideological animus. We then move for intelligent regard for the environment–three cheers for that–to environmentalism. And as with most isms, this hankering after utopia is as eager to identify and segregate heretics as it is impervious to suasion by facts. Environmentalism is the new opiate of the intellectuals.

From Reuters: “House passes bill to sue OPEC over oil prices”

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

And if OPEC says “Go soak your collective head”? What then, O legislators?

Poor Kermit. He lived too soon. Had he waited a few years, he would have found it all-too-easy, indeed almost mandatory to be green. “Environmentalism,” as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed years ago, “is school prayer for liberals.” It has that Award-Winning, Never-Fail, Left-Liberal combination of 1) providing its exponents with an ever renewable (and hence environmentally sound) source of self satisfaction (”I recycle/drive a hybrid/don’t use plastic/only bathe weekly . . . Do you?”) and 2) it is infinitely elastic: you can never be green enough. There are always new prohibitions to impose, new causes to espouse, new ways to demonstrate your moral superiority over your neighbor. What great religion! The Green shall inherit the earth . . . .

The always-sensible Thomas Sowell makes a further pertinent point about the new Kermits of the world. “At one time,” Sowell observes, “to call someone ‘green’ was to disparage them as inexperienced or immature. Today, to call someone green is to exalt them as one of the environmentalist saviors of the planet. But it is amazing how many people are green in both senses.” Indeed.

Barack Hussein Obama, May 2008: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”

James Earl Carter, July 1979: “I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing. . . . And I’m asking you for your good and for your Nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”

We have been here before. Do we really want to go back there again?

The New York Times really makes you think. Consider, for example, its editorial “The President Goes Negative.” It made me think, and think hard, that the editors of that formerly august organ must have a very low opinion indeed of their readers’ intelligence.

The piece opens with an attack on President’s Bush’s supposed “penchant for slash-and-burn politics.” Leave aside the question of whether the President exhibits any such penchant. Suppress the desire to point out the many ways in which the Bush administration has ostentatiously fulfilled the (to my mind dubious) promise of promulgating “compassionate conservatism.” For moment, simply take on board the Times’s description of the President’s approach to politics as “unseemly” at home and “shameful” and “damaging for the country” when practiced abroad.

“Slash-and-burn politics,” “unseemly,” “shameful,” “damaging to the country”: Pretty bad, eh? And it’s all the more derogatory because the President is said to have learned his trade “at the feet of Karl Rove and the late Lee Atwater.” (Is that any worse, you might wonder, than learning from James Carville, Hendrick Hertzberg, or Sidney Blumenthal, conspicuous tutors of the Clintons?)

Exhibit A in the Times’s indictment was President Bush’s warning, in a speech honoring Israel’s 60th anniversary, that dealing with “terrorists and radicals”–read Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria–was tantamount to “appeasement.” The Times was not alone in understanding this as a “barely veiled attack against Senator Barack Obama.” Maybe it was, since Obama has publicly declared his intention, as the Times put it in another piece, “to talk to Iran without preconditions.” (According to the Times, Obama believes that, even if Iran has been acting “irresponsibly,” its behavior “reflected its anxiety over the Bush administration’s policies in the region.” Got that? Iran helps kill American soliders in Iraq and is busy developing nuclear weapons and it’s our fault.)

But maybe, as spokesmen for the Bush administration suggested, the President meant us to think not of Obama but Jimmy Carter, who has just returned from a nice parley with Hamas and a side trip to lay a wreath at the grave of his fellow Nobel Peace-Prize laureate, the terrorist Yassir Arafat? Or maybe he meant for us to think of both, or neither? Maybe he was just making the general point that appeasing bullies is, as history has amply illustrated, a bad because a bootless policy. (”Britain and France,” Churchill observed “had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.”)

This is exactly what the Times wants to distract you from thinking. They find it egregious that the President should mention “appeasement” when speaking before the Israeli Parliament because “there are few words more fraught than ‘appeasement’ and no place where they carry more emotional weight than in Israel.”

Well, yes. But why is that a reason to avoid the word or the reality behind the word–the reality that dealing with “terrorists and radicals” is generally a dangerous form of appeasement? Why should the President not say that in a speech honoring Israel’s 60th anniversary? Because it reflects poorly on Barrack Obama? We all know that the Times ♥ Obama. But should its infatuation with a left-wing, astonishingly inexperienced politician absolve it of an elementary respect for the facts?

Of course, the Times is only partly motivated by infatuation with Obama. It is also powerfully motivated by BDS–Bush Derangement Syndrome. It is axiomatic for those suffering from this malady that the President is simultaneously a hapless puppet (Rove, Atwater) and a sort of evil genius whose every action is fraught with malignancy.

My favorite part of “The President Goes Negative” is the end. The second to last paragraph is a splendid instance of PTS–Pompous Times Speech: “Diplomacy is simply good sense”–you don’t say. I am sure President Bush will read that and say to himself, “Gosh, I never thought of that!” I suspect the Times really believes something like. The editorial castigates the President’s “refusal to talk” to regimes like Iran, Syria, and North Korea. But a quick Google search will show that the Bush administration has made countless diplomatic initiatives to those regimes. It’s just that it has accompanied its carrots with the prudent stick of conditions and, where necessary, the threat of sanctions.

Was this wrong? Was it ineffective? Did that great diplomat Jimmy Carter do better in his handling of Iran? Did Bill Clinton do better in his handling of regimes friendly to terrorism? (Here’s an interesting parlor game: how many terrorist attacks against US interests occurred during the Clinton administration? How many have occurred since September 11, 2001?)

The very best part of “The President Goes Negative” is still to come. Remember how the piece opened: “Slash-and-burn politics” that are “unseemly,” “shameful,” and “damaging to the country.” Then we have a rhetorical peripeteia: “Diplomacy is simply good sense.” Now that we are on the high road, full of PTS, we can forget about “the politics of personal destruction“, accusing people of “slash-and-burn politics,” etc., and say instead that “We also yearn for a more civilized and respectful political dialogue. That is essential for a healthy democracy. It is also essential for regaining the world’s respect.”

Can you beat that? How stupid does the Times think you are? From “slash-and-burn politics” to calls for “a more civilized and respectful political dialogue” all in the space a few hundred words. And the concluding appoggiaturas are especially rich: that such exercises in civility are “essential to a healthy democracy” and necessary for “regaining the world’s respect.” Translation: 1) democracy is only “healthy” when it follows a left-liberal line; otherwise it is in extremis. 2) “The world’s respect” means pandering to left-liberal, anti-American interests the world over.

The Times, like so many “progressive” institutions, confuses “respect” with “being liked.” Dr. Spock thought that way, and helped blight child-rearing for a generation. Neville Chamberlain thought that way, too, and we all know what happened as a result of his diplomatic efforts.

If California didn’t exist, some wicked parodist would have to invent it. I have always loved those little labels on various cosmetics, food stuffs, and children’s toys advising the public that said item “is known to the state of California” to cause cancer, rickets, or whatever. A long, lazy afternoon might be spent pondering the onion-like mendacity of the word “known” on those labels. What it really means is something closer to “asserted without evidence.” But there haven’t been many long, lazy afternoons lately. Besides, California is a state that keeps the rest of us on our toes. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which presides over California, Hawaii, and other Western fastnesses, is a reliable source of loony-left judgments on matters ranging from the Pledge of Allegiance (the judges find the phrase “under God” deeply upsetting) to the Patriot Act (they don’t like that, either).

Now we have the California Supreme Court weighing in on the subject of marriage. My dictionary defines “marriage” as “the legal union of a man and a woman as husband and wife.” Probably, yours does, too. Perhaps the California Supreme Court’s next trick will be to confiscate those antiquated documents and supply everyone with updated, politically correct reference works. In any event, on Thursday, the Court overruled, 4 votes to 3, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. There is a lot that could be said about this decision. Depending on where you stand on the issue of so-called “gay marriage” you might be tempted to applaud or decry the ruling. But I believe that, quite apart from the specific issue of how we should define “marriage,” anyone who cares about democratic rule and the separation of powers should be profoundly disturbed by California’s ruling. Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a vocal opponent of “gay marriage,” got to the nub of the issue in one of his “end-of-day” email reflections:

The ruling, by four unelected robed radicals, invalidated the overwhelming majority opinion of California’s citizens, who voted to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. It was an egregious exercise in judicial activism - of judges wielding raw political power to redefine our most basic values. But that is how the Left has succeeded. It cannot achieve its goals through the democratic process via the elected legislatures, so it ignores the people and goes to the courts, where it relies on political activists cloaked in black who answer to no one. The Left succeeds by using the most undemocratic methods possible.

I would like to think that Bauer’s point would resonate with thinking people across the political spectrum. Today’s hot-button issue is the definition of marriage. Tomorrow’s issue will revolve around some other controversy. The overarching question is how we will decide: lawfully, through established legislative procedures? Or by judicial fiat, investing the power to determine how we live in the hands of a few unelected, and essentially unaccountable, individuals?

When it comes to near-term Republican prospects, the punditocracy is divided. On the Left, it is doom, gloom, and gloat, as E. J. Dionne illustrates in a piece arguing that the G.O.P. is a “brand on the run.” On the right, it is doom, gloom, and gripe, as Peggy Noonan illustrates in a piece lamenting that Republicans are “busy dying.” “The brightest of them,” she writes, “see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.”

What should we think of all these distress calls? I confess I disapprove of them. In the first place, I do not think they’re at all justified. What Victor Davis Hanson called “the echo chamber” has taken over. One creditable–or at least listened to–pundit or politician opines in a way the media likes and, presto, a new bit of conventional “wisdom” is born–or at least reinforced. A mere opinion, often ill-informed, frequently at wide variance with the truth, is repeated often enough, and it suddenly acquires the carapace of general currency that, at a distance, can easily be mistaken for fact.

Hanson was writing about the conventional “wisdom” on the war in Iraq, but the echo chamber is at work on other issues as well. One conspicuous example, I believe, is the fate of conservatism. More than two decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan ruefully noted that Republicans had become “the party of ideas.” He was right about that, as recent American political history amply attests on issues from welfare and taxes to free markets and national security. But in the last couple of years, conservatives, especially conservatives in America and Europe, have seen their prospects fed into the echo chamber. Everywhere one looks, it seems, the fortunes of conservatism are–or are said to be–on the ebb. You can hardly open a newspaper or tune into a television news show without being warned (or, more often, without hearing celebratory shouts) that now, finally, at last, the forces of enlightenment and progress are once again on the ascendant, that conservative ideas and the people promulgating them are in rout. One saw this, for example, in the the aura of supposed inevitability–now conspicuously dissipated–that attended the campaign of Hillary Clinton a few months ago. People from every political persuasion simply took it for granted that the Presidency was hers for the asking. Why?

I have recently begun keeping a folder marked “Conservative Gloominess.” It is full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about who the next occupant of the White House will be, harrowing descriptions of disarray among conservatives, despairing portraits of U.S. or European society. What’s odd, or at least uncharacteristic about these bulletins from the abyss is not their substance–to be candid, I have written plenty of items that could justly be filed there–but their tone and what we might call their existential orientation. From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land. Nevertheless, by habit and disposition conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than–than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since they are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works. Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal. In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called–perhaps John Fonte’s marvellous coinage “transnational progressives” is best–they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor. The English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quota of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine. On the contrary. Conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a personal moral affront. Being realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings. This is why the miasmic gloominess emanating from many conservative circles today is so dispiriting. It goes against the grain of what it means to be conservative. It is dampening, and I for one hope it will prove to be a quickly passing phenomenon. Among other things, this recent access of personal gloominess makes the practice of professional gloominess–the robust deployment of satire, ridicule, and so on–much more difficult and less satisfying.

This brings me to the issue of truth. Conservatives are realists. They like to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade, unless it is explicitly outlawed, just as they prefer to call “affirmative action” “discrimination according to race or sex,” taxation “government-mandated income redistribution,” and “Islamophobia” a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible “multiculturalists” colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists.

Towards the end of his thoughtful new book Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again, David Frum gently takes issue with Russell Kirk’s invocation of “the permanent things.” “How few of those there really are!” Frum writes. “The fact of change is the great fact of human life,” he says, pleading with conservatives to “adapt” to change and retake the intellectual and political initiative. Some such rhetoric might be required on the hustings. But I confess to having mixed feelings about that exhortation, if for no other reason than that I believe change to be not the but a great fact of human life. An equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one “adapts” more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, “it is necessary not to change.”

I recognize that “change,” like its conceptual cousin “innovation,” is one of the great watchwords of the modern age. But William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of National Reviewin November 1955, that a large part of the magazine’s mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” It’s rare that you hear someone quote that famous line without a smile, the smile meaning “he wasn’t against change, innovation, etc., etc.” But I believe Mr. Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that made National Review unzeitgemasse, “untimely” in the highest sense of the word. The Review, Mr. Buckley wrote, “is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and The New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.”

The Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In “Why You Should Be a Conservative,” which deserves to be better known than it is, he rehearses the familiar scenario:

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a “reform” proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, “reform.”

Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that “reform” so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed. The great Victorian Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating “remnant” of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them–but so did that enabling remnant. Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a “saving remnant” large and vital enough to become “an actual” power that could stem the tide of anarchy. I hope that he was right.