Rocket Man

Dear Intelligent American,

Mrs. Fox was a widow and quite old, at least by elementary school standards in 1969—she may have been all of 70. Who knows; it would have been rude to ask. She was a nice lady and the go-to substitute teacher at St. Barnabas Elementary School. By coincidence, she lived down the block on East 235th Street—making her a near neighbor.

Of greater interest, though, was that Mrs. Fox grew up in Massachusetts and as a young lady knew Robert Goddard, the rocketeer from Worcester. How lucky we were: two degrees of separation from the famous inventor! Indeed, we knew (admired!) who he was—hey, don’t all kids know the man who invented the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket?

Have you stopped chuckling? By Professor Goddard’s account, the momentous moment of first flight was just that—all of two-and-a-half seconds duration. Elevation of forty-one feet was achieved. Alas, Earth’s surly bonds were not slipped: The historical first ended in the cabbage patch on Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn.

All this happened a century ago next week.

A century since, more-modern rockets still fly. Many. And these ballistic descendants of “Goddard 1” bring destruction—some fueled not only by liquid propellants but by the intention of maliciousness and revenge, bearing names like “Fath” and “Ra’ad” and “Shahab,” and traveling at speeds measured in Machs, while others of staggering destructive potential arc in reply with the fiery, satellite-guided hope of precluding worse heaven-reining catastrophe—of the fission kind.

Who to blame? Lucifer, perhaps? Yes. Goddard? No. And: shall we celebrate his achievement’s centennial? Perhaps—by praying for a conclusion to the current combat by the swift demise of civilization’s madmen.

 

A Constellation of Recommendations Herewith

 

1. At Cluny Journal, Stephen Adubato expounds on his favorite sin—gossip. From the reflection:

I once asked my grandma why we gossip so much. She said that we weren’t gossiping, we were just making conversation. Gossip was a way to pass the time together. We didn’t give much thought to it; it was second nature. More often than not, it was done for sport. This form of gossip can be incredibly pernicious. When you’re engaging in malicious gossip, you can at least know you’re sinning and feel bad about it at some point. But this blasé kind of gossip requires no engagement of the heart or the mind. It’s most common among those who are accustomed to looking not up at the cosmos or into the eyes of the other, but down at the ground. Gossip of this sort fulfills the same function as other forms of algorithmically-regulated background noise like streaming services, AI, doomscrolling: it’s slop that distracts from the existential dread.

 

This apathetic, low-labor intensive form of gossip has followed in the direction of celebrity gossip: innovations in technology and media have moved us past the sensationalism of the paparazzi era, when tabloid photographers put their—and celebrities’—lives on the line in order to snap a shot that would get people around the world talking. Gone are the days of the paparazzi harassing Britney and Paris as they stumbled out of the club, and chasing Lady Di down the tunnel to her ultimate demise. The dawn of social media—where celebrities can determine which images of themselves get projected out into the ether—has taken the edge off the sensationalism of celebrity gossip. The sheer overload of information we’re barraged with has made it so that even the most scandalous image or story is quickly forgotten in a matter of days—or hours—as newer, more sensational stories make their way into the news cycle.

 

2. At City Journal, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe detail “influencer” Nick Fuentes’s consequence of wreckage. From the investigation:

From one perspective, we might be tempted to dismiss Fuentes as a hyperreal spectacle. His Groyper movement relates to politics the same way pornography relates to sex: stripped of meaning, flattened into an image, sensationalized for personal gain.

 

But hyperreality does not mean unreal, and, like pornography, it can often intrude on reality in ugly and unexpected ways. Conservatives who care about the future of the movement should understand that Fuentes is corrosive. Despite his self-mythology as the most right-wing pundit in America, he is, in a real sense, a tool of the Left. Progressive activists have spent the past decade pushing the narrative that conservatives are Nazis and Donald Trump is Hitler. In Fuentes, they have finally found their man.

 

The spectacle moreover is not only politically corrosive, but personally corrosive to its participants. At heart, the Fuentes phenomenon is not about ideas, or ideology, or power; it is about an angry, broken young man leading other angry, broken young men down a digital trail that ends in ruin.

 

Don’t Cry! There’s Still Time . . .

Those nonprofit leaders and trustees who are contemplating a strategic plan—an actual one, or just the mere concept of such—should attend the free via-Zoom webinar that’s coming up fast. In fact, it’s taking place this Tuesday, March 10, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern). The Center for Civil Society is the sponsor, Yours Truly will host, and the objective will be to mine wisdom from strategic gurus James Davenport and Jason Lloyd. Want more information? Want to register? Of course you do: find all info, and sign up, right here.

Happy? Good. Now, We Return to a Bounty of Suggestions . . .

 

3. At The Road to the American Revolution on Substack, Keith Whitaker commends the “uncommon sense” of Thomas Paine, patriot pamphleteer. From the article:

Paine’s argument in Common Sense is simple. He begins at the beginning. Human beings devise government to restrain and punish men’s vices in society. (“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.”) A king who serves himself has no place in any but the rudest times. In particular, the British monarchy lacks legitimacy and serves no useful purpose, even for England. As for America, England has betrayed her. Americans want only peace and commerce; nature itself militates against England ruling the American continent any longer. Nor is reconciliation an honorable or reasonable option. Now is the time—in terms of population, wealth, and material strength—to seize independence. There is no going back.

 

Today’s readers may find it surprising that Paine spends the first third of Common Sense producing scriptural and historical arguments trashing the British monarchy. But he knew what he was doing. In the eight months since the “shot heard round the world,” many Americans had railed against Parliament and the King’s Ministry, but almost all had spoken deferentially of the King himself. Paine, in contrast, joked that hereditary monarchy was an offense against nature, which rewards it by often “giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION.” Of the origins of the British monarchy in particular, he says:

 

A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.

 

4. At Chris Arnade Walks the World on Substack, Mr. Arnade shares his take on what keeps America together. From the reflection:

Of all of these non-credentialed forms of meaning, place (and your culture) is the hardest for highly educated elites (front-row in my book) to see as meaningful, because we are so transient. We are cultural chameleons, whose primary identity is tied to our openness to the new and our resumes, so we cycle through physical locations like steps on a ladder. They are something to advance us, not define us.

 

That includes me, since I am a member of the front-row, and so it took me hundreds of interviews of people who had stayed for a lifetime in a town in open decay, that was crumbling around them, that by all I could measure had treated them badly, to understand how significant place can be.

 

When I asked them, “Why haven’t you moved?” the answers I received were a look of confusion, then a shake of the head that indicated that I was the one who was confused, and then a simple, “Because it is home.” If pushed more, they would then launch into an ode to the mountains in the distance, or the sandy beach on the curve in the river everyone parties at on weekend nights, or the barbershop down the block everyone hangs in, or some local restaurant that offered some local dish, or the high school teams, or their grandma’s garden, or their parents’ health, and so on. Why would I give up all that? I’m a Yooper. I’m a fourth-generation Hoosier. I’m an X, where X is a term once coined to make fun of the town, but that the locals now embrace because there is no greater flex than being proud of what your enemies call you.

 

5. At Plough Quarterly, Ersun Augustinus Kayra recommends boundaries when helping those in crisis. From the piece:

In our culture today, there are two prevailing scripts for how we should live with and care for other people.

 

One script says: Be available. Be there for your friends. Open your home. “Do life together.” In Christian circles, this often comes wrapped in beautiful terms: radical hospitality, Christlike compassion, the feast in the kingdom of God, universal brotherhood. We share our bread with the hungry, and our homes with strangers. Sometimes, if we are honest, it also comes with a heroic fantasy: I will be the one who always picks up, who always has a spare bed, who never turns anyone away.

 

The other script sounds very different. It speaks in a language we know as “therapy-speak”: bandwidth, emotional labor, toxic people, cutting off, self-care. It says: Protect yourself. Don’t let anyone drain you. This is not your responsibility. Say no. Set firm boundaries. Guard your energy.

 

Therapy and the language around it can be real gifts. Good counselors and clear limits have helped many of us survive situations that might otherwise have crushed us. The problem is not that these words exist, but that they can quietly replace an older vocabulary of communal care—neighborly duty, mercy, and covenant. “Bandwidth” is a useful concept for machines, but a poor substitute for covenant love among people.

 

6. At The European Conservative, Carmen C. Lopez finds the EU may be pulling back from pro-abortion madness. From the beginning of the report:

On Thursday this week, the European Commission announced its support for the “My Voice, My Choice” European Citizens’ Initiative, while confirming that it will not allocate additional EU financial resources to facilitate cross-border abortion.

 

The Commission’s decision not to attach new funding mechanisms to this initiative is a welcome acknowledgement of the limits of EU competence. It signals an awareness that abortion policy remains outside the Union’s legislative authority and within the remit of member states. That restraint matters. Nevertheless, the support the Commission expressed for this pro-abortion initiative reveals biased political activism. Any efforts to promote abortion at the EU level violate its constitutional boundaries.

 

Attempts to advance an EU-wide abortion regime fall squarely outside the Union’s legislative competence. The EU may act only within the limits of powers conferred by the member states, and abortion liberalization is certainly not among them. The principle of subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to citizens, particularly in areas of profound moral and constitutional significance—is not a technicality but core to the European Project.

 

7. At National Review, Andrew Roberts decries the desecration of Winston Churchill memorials. From the article:

The latest assault on the statue was allegedly undertaken by a 38-year-old Dutchman, who spray-painted “Free Palestine,” “Zionist War Criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” and “Never Again—Now” on the bronze statue and its stone plinth. The last of these blitheringly idiotic and unhistorical slogans is a reference to the Holocaust—against which the world has always said “Never Again”—but which the spray-painter seems to want repeated now. The inverted red triangle symbol of Hamas was also left on the statue in Palestinian activists’ trademark red paint, in case we were in any doubt as to who is more than willing and ready to carry out a second Holocaust.

 

This was therefore by no means just a vicious act of ideological vandalism; it was a cold-bloodedly hateful and specifically antisemitic act, and it was intended to be recognized as such.

 

Of course, in one of his phrases, the perpetrator was half correct: Churchill was indeed a Zionist, although certainly not a war criminal. Since long before the rise of Hitler, as long ago as the earliest days of the 20th century, Churchill believed passionately in the creation of a nation-state for Jews in the Holy Land, a tiny part of the Near East where they had lived for millennia and where hopefully they could finally find safety from murderous persecution. Churchill was a member of the government that promulgated the noble and statesmanlike Balfour Declaration, 16 years before Adolf Hitler came to power.

 

8. At Tablet Magazine, Henry Gao looks at China and sees a paper dragon. From the analysis:

Rattner also praises what he calls China’s “model of state-directed capitalism,” presenting it as the secret sauce of the country’s rise and even suggesting that the United States create its own. That proposition faces two fundamental difficulties—one institutional, the other economic.

 

First, the Chinese system is not modular. It cannot be disassembled into attractive policy components and selectively transplanted elsewhere. Its operation depends on comprehensive integration under the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, whose control spans across the industrial and financial sectors to cyberspace. Each pillar reinforces the others. Credit discipline depends on political authority; industrial policy depends on financial control; regulatory enforcement depends on top-down governance. Remove or dilute any of these elements, and the system no longer functions as designed.

 

In other words, one cannot import industrial policies without centralized authority. The relevant question, then, is not whether particular policies appear effective in isolation, but whether a society is willing to accept the institutional structure that makes those policies operational. Are Americans prepared to accept an all-encompassing ruling party—with authority extending across political, economic, and social life—as the price of “winning” strategic competition?

 

9. At Brussels Signal, Ralph Schoellhammer worries about the lethargy/rage crisis enveloping Europe’s young men. From the piece:

The crisis runs deeper than politics. Approximately 47,000 Europeans die by suicide each year, and the gender ratio is staggering: Across the EU, men are three to four times more likely to kill themselves than women. In Latvia and Poland, the ratio exceeds seven to one. Drug-induced mortality rates are three to four times higher among men, with opioid overdoses accounting for the majority of the more than 6,000 drug-related deaths recorded annually. And Europe may be on the cusp of something worse: The European Drug Agency warns that potent synthetic opioids like nitazenes are spreading, with poisoning outbreaks in Ireland, France, and Germany in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, 13 per cent of Europeans report feeling lonely most or all of the time, with loneliness increasing most sharply among those under 30. The EU’s Joint Research Centre now treats loneliness as a public health crisis.

 

Before one thinks this is some form of cosmic justice for centuries of male dominance, think again. Ambitionless men are not good for women either. Louise Perry, the British author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, makes the convincing case that the sexual revolution in its most contemporary form only seems liberating for women, when in fact it forces them to adapt to the preferred sexual behaviour of men. What are Europe’s idle young men doing with their time? A lot of them are watching porn, and the consequences are not merely cultural but neurological. The neuroscientist Bruce Wexler has shown that environmental inputs physically reshape the brain during critical developmental periods – meaning that hours of daily pornography consumption during adolescence rewires the neural architecture responsible for motivation, intimacy, and attachment. The side effects, from erectile dysfunction to distorted expectations of real partners, are well documented.

 

10. At Shaka’s Substack, Shaka Mitchell pays tribute to education-reform hero Howard Fuller. From the article:

In 1991, Fuller became superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. It was a pivotal moment. Urban districts across America were grappling with declining performance, middle-class flight, and growing frustration from families whose children were trapped in underperforming schools.

 

Milwaukee would soon become the epicenter of a radical policy experiment: the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, launched through bi-partisan effort in 1990 as the nation’s first modern school voucher initiative. The program allowed low-income families to use public funds to attend participating private schools.

 

Fuller did something that remains rare in education politics: he supported it.

 

To many in the traditional public education establishment, this was heresy. How could a Black superintendent—a man shaped by civil rights struggles—support allowing families to leave the district system?

 

Fuller’s answer was simple and morally clear: the system exists for children, not the other way around.

 

11. At Cana Academy, Andrew J. Ellison makes the case for teaching Greek as part of a classical curriculum. From the piece:

I have written elsewhere about the need for contemporary classical schools to be serious about the study of Latin—to give it adequate class time (an hour per day), to avoid attractive but often misleading fashions in curricula, to eschew games and songs and art projects and costumed feasts for the hard work of drilling, parsing, composing, and construing—above all, not to settle for a self-congratulatory , dilettantish “Hey, we’re doing Latin! Look at us! We’re classical!” Latin is serious stuff, and only by approaching it seriously can students derive the intellectual benefits from it that classical schools promise.

 

I wish here to make the case for serious Greek studies in the modern classical school as well. Make no mistake, Latin is the central classical tongue uniting the high culture of the West for the last 2000 years, studied from Constantinople to Reykjavik in a way Greek never was, and its study should have pride of place in the contemporary classical school. But the Greek language—not just Parthenon posters and Homer in translation—must have a solid presence in classical education as well. From what I have observed, two approaches that fall far short of this are common, and both must be addressed.

 

By far the most common approach to classical language in contemporary classical schools is to teach Latin only, to cultivate a kind of monoglot-classicism. In some environments, there is a competing commitment to teaching modern languages as well, so Greek must be forgone; in others, Latin is taught with only moderate intensity and thus spread out over 6, 7, or even 13 continuous years of students’ K-12 schooling, leaving no place for Greek: “We have no time because it’s hard enough getting the kids to learn Latin.” Even in the absence of those other pressures, competent teachers of Greek who want to work with high school students can be hard to find.

 

12. At Law & Liberty, Joshua Katz savors the Declaration of Independence and the musicality of its prose. From the article:

Take one of the most celebrated phrases in American English, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is (almost) all Jefferson—unchanged from the original draft aside from capitalization, a deleted comma, and a deleted ampersand. And it is a paradigmatic instance of what rhetoricians call an “ascending tricolon,” where the second element in the structure “X, Y, and Z” is longer than the first (in this case, a three-syllable word rather than a monosyllable) and the third element is substantially longer still (seven syllables across a four-word phrase).

 

Jefferson’s appreciation of triads is well known. Consider, for example, the final words of the Declaration before the signatures, which are also (almost) all Jefferson: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives [two words, two syllables], our Fortunes [two words, three syllables] and our sacred Honor [three words, five syllables].” The psycho-rhetorical principle known as the “rule of three,” by which material is presented in tripartite form for maximal impact, covers much more than the ascending tricolon (for the legally minded, I recommend a charming 2018 paper by Patrick Barry of the University of Michigan Law School), but accounts usually mention Jefferson—and Steve Jobs, whose adherence to triads of all kinds at Apple was legendary.

 

Lucky 13. The staff at The Weirton Daily Times reports on an annual Ohio fundraiser to support an impactful local youth center. From the story:

“$203,000. Let that number sink in,” [Executive Director Bobbyjon] Bauman told the crowd. “That is the approximate annual cost to house one juvenile in a detention facility in the State of Ohio—nearly $600 per day, per child. At Sycamore, we are working every single day to keep our community from ever having to pay that price.”

 

He described Sycamore’s focus on serving “children on the edges”—students who may not be involved in sports or extracurricular activities, whose families cannot afford private lessons, or who face transportation and family challenges.

 

Sycamore offers 64 free after-school classes to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. All programming, meals and camps are provided at no cost to families.

 

“We are not just keeping kids busy,” Bauman said. “We are building futures.”

 

According to Bauman, the organization has grown from serving just a dozen children eight years ago to now welcoming more than 500 students each week.

 

Bonus. At The Spectator, Bill Kauffman reflects on his dying friend, Karl Zinmeister. From the column:

In recent weeks he has ceased chemo and immunotherapy due to “too many noxious side effects. I knew right from my initial diagnosis at Stage 4 that I was not going to beat my cancer. Now that I’ve stopped the chemicals I’m actually feeling OK most of the time. But I know it’s a calm before the storm. I don’t really look forward to the endgame of lung cancer, but that’s when you have to dig up some courage.”

 

He has that in spades. “All I can do is thank God that He grabbed me by the ear when I was 30 and told me to start thinking seriously about my place in the universe. Because I’ve had 36 years to cobble together some understanding of God and myself, I feel very peaceful and calm about reaching life’s end and meeting my maker. Gratitude is my main emotion. I’ve had so much goodness in my life, much more than my share.

 

“I’m particularly grateful I don’t feel existential angst or any spiritual crisis – which plagued a few people I loved at the close of their lives. At the moment I’m trying to foster among my very young grandchildren, through twice-weekly homeschool teaching, some confident and brave faith in God, so they might have a wall they can lean against when they hit storms.”

 

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Claudia Cummings comes to the defense of donor advised funds. Read it here.

Due. More PD: Giovanni del Piero alerts nonprofits to five key giving trends. Read it here.

Tre. Even more PD: Spencer Kashmanian puts you on notice: G.K. Chesterton wants you to stick to your nonprofit’s mission. Read it here.

 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Why did the Sun go to the bank?

A: To check on his daylight savings.

 

A Dios

The Transfiguration—which was the Gospel reading at church last weekend—has always intrigued a bit. “And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with Him”—just where were Moses and Elijah, the Resurrection not having yet occurred, nor the descent to Hell? What was it like in “Abraham’s Bosom,” awaiting the entry to Paradise—and how temporal was the awaiting? Alas, we have some things metaphysical to dwell upon, and will, if only to distract from the distress of our losing an hour of sleep this weekend.

May We See the Peacemakers Ascendant,

Jack Fowler, who ponders the course of human history at jfowler@amphil.com.

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