A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Happy New Year. Will it be?
This missive hopes to focus on the cultural more than the political, and the need for society to be civil in order to be civil society. So you will forgive if herein is expressed concern that chunks of the political right, which, broadly, has (had?!) been intolerant of the political left’s embrace of antisemitism, can now be found dissing our Brothers and Sisters in Abraham—whose numbers include one Jesus of Nazareth—for specious reasons and in sneaky ways.
We are all aware of this ongoing drama, some of which may have to do with the modern political thrill of “ownership.” As in, “owning the libs,” now refocused on “owning the RINOS” or others who are cast as fake conservatives. Sigh. Cue the grenade-rolling (and the bucks-rolling . . . in from Qatar).
Amigo Victor Davis Hanson sees the brewing dysfunction and shakes his wise head—and then contemplates the outcome. He foresees what he calls “An Open Season on Jews.” Really, when the forensics are analyzed, should conservative fingerprints be among the crime-scene evidence gathered? Victor put his concerns on paper—you can read them here.
And then maybe, if you need one, have an Epiphany. Speaking of which, in a season marked by traditions of wise men from the East, it is good to know we have one out West.
Lords A-Leapin’, Maids A-Milkin’, Excerpts A-Exemplifyin’
1. At Law & Liberty, Emina Melonic visits The Shop Around the Corner and finds evidence of the early silver-screen allure of Jimmy Stewart. From the reflection:
Yet this search for something deeper, especially on Christmas Eve, is at the center of The Shop Around the Corner. Stewart, in particular, has a unique knack for creating a balanced and unusual blend of propriety and the erotic atmosphere. He is the everyman, and one of the main reasons why the film’s geographic specificity is transcended. He loves and feels deeply and fully, and we see here the glimpses of melancholy that become part of Stewart’s personality and oeuvre after World War II, beginning with Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
This is not to downplay Margaret Sullavan’s contribution. Her playfulness and earnestness melt away Kralik’s honorable pretense and occasional steely resolve. The great finale, when Kralik reveals to Klara that he is the man in the letters, is one of the most honest and loving, if not erotic, moments in cinema. In some ways, both Lubitsch and Stewart have unintentionally created a dignified eros that goes beyond the physicality. Stewart’s mere presence affirms the notion that love and eros require both intimacy and privacy. Even when Kralik and Klara embrace and kiss at the end, they are standing, alone, in the middle of the shop. The lights are off, and those that are on are quite dim, in the warm glow of the Christmas tree. There is no public display of bravado. Rather, the moment highlights the authenticity and sacredness of love.
Lubitch’s The Shop Around the Corner offers a closer look at the interior lives of men and women, often forgotten. By making Kralik and Klara centers of this interiority, Lubitsch is saying that there is nothing ordinary about love. If a man and a woman open their eyes, the Beloved is just around the corner.
2. More Melonic, More Movies: At Civitas Outlook, Emina targets another silver-screen icon, John Wayne, and his role in John Ford’s 1948 classic, 3 Godfathers. From the article:
There is no explicit liturgy in 3 Godfathers, but spiritual and religious overtones are always present in Ford’s films. The film’s movement follows a particular journey –one from darkness to light, and we could even go as far as to say that Ford is a theological cowboy. Alluding to Psalm 126, Ford shows (but never tells!) that the spiritual harvest will only be good if we sow seeds of goodness. Wayne’s Bob Hightower has not only redeemed himself by honoring the dying woman’s promise but also pleasantly discovered that he belongs to a community. He went from a man who tossed the Bible into the desert’s cruel air and sand to being "surprised by joy,” to use C. S. Lewis’ phrase.
This is a story of uniquely American redemption. 3 Godfathers may dwell slightly in spiritual sentimentality. Darkness has been defeated here, unlike in other Ford films. Why not accept this reality as well–that darkness does not have to dwell within us, but that God can extinguish it? Isn’t this exactly what Bob Hightower ultimately accepted? Here, more than in other Ford films, we see a miracle of Being, especially in a child. It is the child who breaks the cycle of darkness and leads Bob Hightower out of his history of violence and into the future of creation.
3. At Public Discourse, Devorah Goldman recounts how President Calvin Coolidge fought Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic hostility. From the article:
Coolidge does not directly address the conspiracies about Jews endemic at the time he offered these remarks: the idea that worldwide Jewry conspired to start World War I, for example, or to assassinate President William McKinley in 1901. Descendants of these theories abound today, as “Zionists” are blamed for the Iraq War or the assassination of JFK or Charlie Kirk. Coolidge notes instead that Jews living in America’s capital city have passed “beyond the need for any other benevolence” and are prepared to continue contributing “to the national life, fully worthy of the traditions they had inherited.”
The speech is also not highly political; it does not deal with questions of the then-young modern Zionist movement, for example. It instead recalls the “broadening lines” of the American idea of pluralism, present at the country’s earliest stages. Jews belong to this project too, he insists: “Made up of so many diverse elements, our country must cling to those fundamentals that have been tried and proved as buttresses of national solidarity.” These fundamentals, to Coolidge, include the lessons of Jewish history, both in the Bible and the events recorded since. Jews have learned to adapt, Coolidge argues, without “sacrifice of essentials.”
Coolidge admits the challenge to the “spiritual unification of America” he pleads for in this speech: “Despite all experience, society continues to engender the hatreds and jealousies whereof are born domestic strife and international conflicts.” He notes that “there is no straight and smooth and posted highway into the vast, dim realm of the tomorrows. There are bogs and morasses, blind roads and bad detours. No philosophy of history has ever succeeded in charting accurately the future.”
4. At The Free Press, Martin Shaw tells of his project—to take twilight walks in the woods for 101 days. On the last day, something happened. From the article:
Confronted with the question of how to approach the second half of life, I went to the wilds again. It wasn’t God I was seeking exactly in the forest vigil; I was out there hoping for wisdom. In this time of infinite distractions, I wanted to develop a greater sense of fidelity to something. I wanted to keep my word.
I would often go into the woods in that hinge time between dusk and darkness, and watch the shadows lengthen. Often, I was just quiet, even praying—though to what, I wasn’t quite sure. Sometimes I asked myself what I was doing. Owls would hoot, a bush may rustle with a fox, but not much else happened. I had a rather sentimental notion that after awhile, the woods had got used to me, tolerated me even.
Then one day, something miraculous happened.
It was a very chill January evening, and I had finally come to the final day of my vigil. That last night would be a journey to the very center of the forest, to an Iron Age hill fort, where I would sit up all night. With a full belly and mug of tea drunk, I set out from my cottage up the path into the trees.
5. At The American Spectator, Josh Hammer ponders: What does the political right actually stand for? From the article:
What is called for at this perilous moment for the Right’s leaders is not to casually hand-wave away all disagreement as part of the proverbial marketplace of ideas, but to show basic decency and judgment in discerning what is and is not part of the Right as it steels itself for the many battles ahead. In many other contexts, this inquiry is simple. Take “post-birth abortion”—i.e., infanticide. That’s obviously not part of team civilizational sanity. Should tax dollars go toward genital mutilation “surgeries” for minors? Beyond the pale. In no context can these views, and the individuals who espouse them, be considered part of the Right’s effort to preserve the United States—and, by extension, the broader West.
Honest leaders must apply the same logic toward viewpoints and individuals that, for their past work or for any other reason, are viewed as “right”-coded. Owens supporting medieval-style blood libel about Jews and accusing Erika Kirk of complicity in her husband’s assassination? In no sense is such psychotic bigotry and induced brain rot part of the Right’s mission. Carlson offering apologia for sharia law and criticizing famed World War II martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a personal hero of Charlie Kirk’s, as a lousy Christian? That is insane—and directly opposed to the solemn task of Western civilization preservation.
6. At The Wall Street Journal, Mike Kerrigan reveals his muse—it’s an amateur one. From the piece:
In Greek mythology, the Muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who presided over the arts, sciences and literature. These goddesses of inspiration are invoked as allegorical figures by Dante Alighieri. But the 13th-century Italian poet also summoned both his medieval love Beatrice and, reaching further into history, the Augustan poet Virgil for genius. These two personal muses appeared as heavenly inspiration in Alighieri’s magnum opus “The Divine Comedy.”
But I’m happy to report that you need not be a great writer to have your own muse. Mine is Gary Green.
7. At Work Shift, edu-guru Bruno Manno spotlights Workforce Pell. From the article:
For decades, federal student aid has been organized around the rhythms of higher education: 15-week semesters, credit hours, and degree pathways that move at an academic pace even when the labor market demands speed.
Workforce Pell brings Pell Grants into a different world, one of short, job-focused programs designed to turn training into wages quickly, often for adults who can’t afford to wait.
But speed is the easy part. The hard part is building credibility by protecting students and taxpayers without smothering the innovation Workforce Pell should unlock. If the new Pell option is too loose, it risks financing low-value programs, replaying the worst chapters of short-term training. If it’s too rigid, it buries legitimate pathways under paperwork and delay.
That’s why the U.S. Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking process and its proposed regulations mattered. That process convened representatives from across higher education and workforce systems to try to agree on the rules for program implementation. The group reached a rare outcome—consensus, which doesn’t guarantee a perfect result.
8. At National Review, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney checks out Charles Murray’s new book about his faith journey. From the review:
At the heart of Murray’s argument are two points that I find particularly compelling. Like Cardinal Newman and C. S. Lewis (from whom Murray draws abundantly), Murray believes that there is a nonarbitrary “Moral Law” manifest in human conscience that reveals the nature of good and evil and encourages us to “do the right thing.” With Lewis’s help, Murray sees through facile moral and cultural relativism. Even in the midst of genuine diversity of mores and practices, what Lewis called “the Tao” can still be seen. Where on earth have an entire people or culture esteemed in principle faithlessness over loyalty, murder over the obligation not to kill, falsehood over truth, cowardice over courage, rank selfishness over the common good? No, all human cultures at their core see themselves as morally bound and morally guided.
The second decisive argument has to do with the historicity and reliability of the Gospels. Following the powerful 2007 book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, by the respected New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, Murray argues, in agreement with the patristic authorities and against fashionable academic “form critics,” that the four Gospels provide remarkably early and accurate eyewitness accounts of the life, teaching, deeds, and person of Jesus Christ. These eyewitnesses “might reasonably be expected to have memorized Jesus’s core teachings” and done their best to faithfully pass them on. In a substantial sense, we have access to the “Jesus of history” through the Gospels and are not dependent on later church “memories” or scholarly reconstructions.
9. At Claremont Review of Books, Helen Andrews laments the murder of Charlie Kirk. From the essay:
It was unsettling to see how many people reacted to the most dramatic assassination in American politics in over 50 years by shrugging it off, making excuses, or implying it was justified. A very simple House resolution condemning the killing and honoring Kirk’s life received 58 nay votes from congressional Democrats. Masha Gessen in The New York Times compared the killing to Herschel Grynszpan’s assassination of the Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath in 1938: Grynszpan “decided to kill someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones. If the information released by the Utah investigators so far proves accurate, Tyler Robinson might have felt a similar desperate fury.”
Sometimes assassinations weaken the killer’s cause by making people ashamed of it. Québécois separatists kidnapped and killed an innocent provincial politician, Pierre Laporte, in 1970, destroying the cause of Quebec independence for a generation. That is not what we see now. There is a regular anti-Trump protest on a street near me every Friday afternoon. Usually the Boomers there hold signs saying “NO KINGS” and “IMPEACH.” Shortly after the Kirk assassination, for the first time I saw one of them waving a trans flag.
10. At The European Conservative, Hélène de Lauzun ponders a question intéressante et bizarre: Can a statue be a victim of sexual assault? From the article:
This is a very serious question that recently stirred up Parisians for several weeks. In the heart of Montmartre, the famous hill where artists and lovers of Paris have gathered for nearly two centuries, stands a bust of the Egyptian-born singer Dalida, known to the French for several immortal songs that have become part of the national musical heritage. . . .
On the small square that bears her name, a bust by the sculptor Aslan was erected in her honour in 1997, on the tenth anniversary of her death. Passersby and tourists brush against it and touch it. Tradition has it that she brings good luck in love. People take photos of themselves next to Dalida, smiling, while caressing her generous curves. The gesture is so frequent that the metal has changed colour, and the singer now seems to be wearing a strange golden bustier where the bronze has been polished and re-polished.
How many millions have touched her? Considering that Montmartre is one of the most popular tourist districts in Paris, the numbers are certainly staggering. That makes for a lot of culprits. Because it is indeed a crime to caress the star so voluptuously. And every crime calls for punishment.
11. At Providence Magazine, Walter Russell Mead explores each of Christmas’s “Twelve Days.” Here, on what is the “Feast of the Holy Innocents,” is a profile of the Fourth:
God could have made a world without Herods—if He had made a world without real moral actors and autonomous beings. He could have made a G-rated, namby-pamby world like Teletubbies where nothing really bad ever happens. But it would be a toy world, not a real place with real people in it. God chose to make us real; we use our freedom as we do, and the result is the history we all read about and the cruelties, hypocrisies, and moral failures that we all see and know.
But if God must take our choices seriously, He did not and does not have to let it end there. God, Christians believe, did not abandon us to the consequences of the choices that we and other human beings have made. Instead, He determined to engage with us even more deeply, to enter history Himself and to transform it from within. Christians believe that God launched a complex, multi-generational rescue operation, one that is still going on today. He will not renege on His commitment to make us free and intelligent co-creators of the world, but He is also determined not to let evil and ignorance have the last word. He will not allow our mistakes, our shortcomings, and even our crimes and our atrocities to separate us from His love if there is any way at all He can reach us.
The Christmas story is the moment when the rescue operation shifts into high gear. God leaves His throne, leaves heaven, and enters the world as a baby, entering the historical process Himself as a human being to be shaped by human culture with all its shortcomings and limits; to share the joys, sorrows, and temptations of human life in all their bewildering complexity; and to share the vulnerability of humans to betrayal, injustice, torment, and, finally, death.
12. At The National Interest, Eric Lies sends out an APB on the sorry state of U.S. shipbuilding, and proposes that “influencers” are part of the problem’s solution. From the analysis:
Most of the country has no insight into the field: the 153,000 shipbuilders comprise just over 0.07 percent of the total US workforce, materially affecting retention. I spent a third of my naval career in shipyards, and two factors made the difference between smooth repair periods and a nightmare of delays and morale issues: expectation management and pride in the work. Both hinge on understanding the nature of the work to come and how it fits into the bigger picture. Strict stowage and damage control rules seem absurd until incidents like the fire on the USS Bonhomme Richard occur.
Contextualizing and explaining what the job will be like helps counter potential culture shock. Setting expectations is vital to psychological resilience and identifying opportunities. Efforts are being made here, such as union outreach to high schools, but more needs to be done to meet the new generation of yard workers where they are. Enter the influencers.
The youngest workers’ top concerns center on work-life balance and enjoying work. This flows on from the need for purpose and seeing how work contributes to that purpose. Working with those already in the industry to develop authentic social media outreach would help show how being part of the team building the nation’s navy is vital. They’re the best positioned to show how the job can be rough, but that there are opportunities to grow, economic value, and even fun to be had. Grassroots engagement has another beneficial side effect: functioning as informal polling. As people engage with content, they provide an up-to-date pulse on their priorities, perceptions of current initiatives, and the public’s mindset regarding shipbuilding.
Lucky 13. At The Spectator US, Garrison Keillor (apparently defying his having been canceled) tells an octogenarian tale. From the piece:
My life spans a dramatic era. I spent time on Grandma’s farm, read by a kerosene lamp, ate her bread baked in a woodstove, used an outhouse, rode in a wagon towed by Prince and Ned. But I lived into the era of open-heart surgery so the family heart-valve problem I inherited got fixed by Dr. Orszulak the way you’d mend an old shoe, which has given me a couple bonus decades of life beyond what two uncles and an aunt got. So I do not complain about old age, I’m grateful for all of it, hearing loss, neuropathy, arrhythmia, the whole ball game.
I am grateful for the cellphone, which keeps my family in touch when I’m on the road, and for the laptop computer. I am one of the last living American writers to have pounded out a full-length novel on a manual Underwood, all three drafts, and I am not nostalgic for that, not even slightly.
Bonus. At Financial Times, Chloe Fox recounts the happiness and heartache of opening a bookstore. From the piece:
“A bookshop?” says the solicitor we have instructed with the conveyancing of the purchase. “Lovely, romantic idea. You’ll go under in a year.”
He has a point. At last count, the UK’s independent bookshops, or “Indies”, as they are affectionately known in the trade, numbered a meagre 1,052. Thanks to a certain bookselling billionaire whose name is whispered but never spoken, they have been in slow and steady decline since 1995. “By 2016, we’d bottomed out at 867 shops in the UK and Ireland, and things were looking pretty dire,” remembers Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association (BA). “And then the pandemic hit and I thought we were done for. But, unexpectedly, the numbers started to go up, not down. By the beginning of 2021, there were 15 per cent more independent bookshops than there had been before the pandemic.”
Which isn’t to say the knocks didn’t keep coming. With notoriously low margins, bookselling is a challenging financial proposition at the best of times. And then, in 2024, the government, in its infinite wisdom, reduced rate reliefs and increased National Insurance contributions, and what was already hard got even harder. Add to that the fact that, in the US, daily reading for pleasure has declined by an estimated 40 per cent in the past 20 years and you’ve got yourself quite a punchy proposition for a new midlife career. “It’ll be great,” I say, beaming my most performative smile as I leave the solicitor’s office and glance, somewhat trepidatiously, at the three arched windows that I’ve just bet my entire savings on. Perhaps a trip to the casino would have been a smarter idea?
Bonus Bonus. At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Liza Libes argues that postmodernism has killed great literature. From the piece:
After years of studying the great classics, I have learned precisely the opposite: Good literature should have a lasting moral message. The reason we still read Anna Karenina is not (only) that Tolstoy is a master of Russian prose or that the plot keeps readers on the edges of their seats but because the novel teaches us about that which is right and that which is wrong. We root for Levin not because he is “relatable,” as today’s literary agents insist characters be, but because he undergoes a redemption arc. He learns, through trial and error and several epiphanies, that there is nothing more important than maintaining a stable, loving family—that he will not live forever and that he must therefore imbue his life with meaning in some way. He chooses to marry Kitty—and, indeed, Kitty eventually chooses him—because he knows that blessing her with the gift of children will create more meaning in both of their lives than did his previous hedonistic lifestyle. Similarly, we watch Anna’s life gradually unravel because she has traded loyalty, love, and duty for empty pleasure. In the end, she commits suicide because, in the absence of children and family, her life has lost all meaning.
That is precisely what is missing from literature today—a plea for meaning. Today, the publishing industry churns out writing that fundamentally resists meaning, from Sally Rooney’s one-dimensional characters stewing in political ennui to Ben Lerner’s autofictional stand-ins who never manage to articulate a single moral stance. These books will fade into oblivion in the next decade while great novels with moral messages—Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, East of Eden—will stay with us even after we leave this earth, for they are not only well-written but also meaningful.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. Nonprofit worker bees should find themselves on Thursday, January 29th, between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 p.m. (Eastern), on Zoom taking the critical Center for Civil Society Master Class on direct-response fundraising. Why? Because that’s where you’ll learn how and why implementing offline and online fundraising techniques can boost your development program, how direct response should play a role in overall fundraising strategy, how to prioritize your mail and digital efforts to build donor relationships and balance costs, and much more. Get complete information and register right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Jacob Wolf considers why participating in institutions matters to the well-being of our society. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why was the printer playing music?
A: Because it was jamming.
A Dios
Call it déjà view—the thought that you may have already ranted about a matter (or, as Helen Forrest beautifully sang, It seems to me I’ve heard that song before, it’s from an old familiar score . . . ). This particular kvetch (apologies if it’s a repeat) concerns an Epistle reading (from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians) in Catholic churches last Sunday, on the Feast of the Holy Family. Here’s how we papists roll: When an approved reading (as determined by the national bishops) is lengthy, a formal option is occasionally given to exempt reading text that is bracketed—which does (or does not) happen based on the desire of the local pastor. Welp, in the aforementioned reading, which by the way is rather short, that passage that craw-sticks for so many today—Colossians 3:18: “Wives, submit to your husbands . . . Children, obey your parents . . .”—got the old bracket exemption. And of course, it went unread. This seems to have become annual de rigueur. What upsets is a sense of hubris—or is editing the discomfiting passages of the Word of God not prideful? That Paul of Tarsus—so un-hep . . . feel free to ignore!
May We Resolve to Seek Wisdom and Humility,
Jack Fowler, who contemplates his own disobedient ways at jfowler@amphil.com.
