A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Yes, we dearly love our pooches. This past weekend several members of la famiglia traveled hither and yon, and the left-behind canines remained in the care (or, “care”) of Yours Truly (YT), whose casa mia abides by the doctrine that “god” spelled backwards is “dog,” but holds the concept of “pet parent” in contempt—that is, after all, for many, an excuse for fertility delayed and denied.
(An aside: Two of YT’s five offspring own homes featuring cats—how could this have come to pass?)
Our pup (“George,” a reserved, middle-aged hound), son John’s (“Holly,” a spunky, diminutive, torpedo-shaped butterball mix of who knows what), and daughter Mary’s (“Sadie,” a smart, loveable, Rottweiler runt who is quite the baby despite being a canine senior citizen) spent four fireworks-spooked nights in manhandled harmony—the Alpha Dog demanding and achieving civility in bowser civil society.
An anecdote, for the heck of it: On Sunday afternoon, after listening to YT record an episode of Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words (by the way, if you don’t listen or watch, what is wrong with you?!), Sadie started whining and motioning to the family room, expecting YT to follow her. Message received: We proceeded to find naughty Holly pulling the stuffing out of a dog bed. Caught red-handed, or maybe red-pawed. What was fascinating was that Sadie had consciously ratted out her cousin! This is a family newsletter, so please pardon this language, but we believed the standard, even for dogs, was Bitches Before Snitches. No mas.
Still, they are blessed, these pooches: Neither worms nor clams nor even llamas (or cats!), superior to all things that walk, crawl, hop, swim. One cannot help but wonder: What goes on in the brains and consciences and souls (?!) of Man’s Best Friends? Or wonder this: Shouldn’t the catechism have some proviso for their souls? Baptism maybe?
Surely the Creator intended an exceptional relationship for man and pup—Moses and Jesus and Thomas Aquinas must have had their own trusty bowsers (un-fun fact: there is not a single positive reference to dogs in the Bible).
Well, all that spewed, this missive is being crafted on the first days of America’s next quarter millennium, and while Your Intrepid Author will not live to see any Tricentennial, he hopes and prays that when it comes to pass, there will be an Old Glory flying, and a Declaration and Constitution beloved, and an America that has more deeply embraced its legacy as a nation of joiners and voluntary associations and merit.
And lots and lots of dogs.
Let Us Get Down to the Business of This Enterprise
1. At Institute for Family Studies, Wendy Wang explores the data behind America’s fertility fall. From the piece:
In fact, motherhood is shrinking quickly in the United States. By 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, nearly 1 in 5 women reaching the end of their childbearing years (18.8%) had never given birth, approaching the record high set in 2006. In an earlier study tracking fertility trends, I first identified this uptick in childlessness: in 2020, just four years earlier, the share was 1 in 6 (16.5%).
Some may argue that modern reproductive technology, such as IVF or egg freezing, may reverse this trend. It is true that modern reproductive technology has enabled many older women who wanted children to become mothers. Between 2006 and 2016, childlessness among women ages 40 to 44 dropped sharply (from 20.4% to 14.4%). There is a good reason to believe that technology contributed to this decline: in 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the “experimental” label from egg freezing, making IVF and egg preservation more mainstream and accessible. That timing speaks volumes.
2. At UnHerd, novelist Michel Houellebecq decries the West’s suicide by euthanasia. From the essay:
One need only examine the arguments put forward by advocates of euthanasia to be overcome with disgust—and for that disgust to mutate into moral insurrection. In reality, all such arguments boil down to a single argument —dignity. But the word has been used so often, and in such a perverse way, that it has become difficult to grasp what it actually means.
For supporters of euthanasia, the dying person’s desire for dignity—according to those close to them—is generally expressed in phrases like: “He would have hated being a vegetable.” The statement would be more convincing if they were able to complete it as follows: “He would have hated being a vegetable—he would have preferred to be a corpse.” We should also note that the vegetable metaphor reflects a painfully utilitarian idea of a human being. Ideally, a human should move, accomplish things, lead an active life. And if that proves impossible, then they should at the very least communicate, that is, they should be capable of interacting—if only through speech—with the rest of society. Humans are thus reduced to their use-value—that is, their initial value minus a depreciation coefficient. It is hard to imagine a more direct contradiction of Immanuel Kant’s insistence that humanity, whether within oneself or in others, must always be treated as an end in itself and never merely as a means. The first corruption along these lines occurred, sadly, during the entirely justified battle against animal cruelty. The “anti-speciesists” contrived to fight this battle in the name of “animal rights”, always a dubious notion. It would have been enough to listen to the eternal voice of compassion, modest but incandescent. With euthanasia, however, we are no longer dealing in distortions. We are plunging into the abyss.
3. At Law & Liberty, Paul Seaton explains why America is a new and different kind of state. From the essay:
The most explicit statement concerning States is the best starting point for reflection. In the final paragraph declaring independence, we are told that “as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” One is struck by a number of things. War and peace have a certain primacy and prominence in the work of States. While war is mentioned first, that does not necessarily mean the State is a war-making machine: “concluding peace” balances “levying war,” while “contracting alliances” is part of the calculus of war and peace, one aimed to help ward off or win war and maintain or restore peace.
The prominence given here to war and peace, while intrinsic to the nature and work of the State, also has what one could call a circumstantial reason, a function of the purpose of the document itself. The king has withdrawn his protection from the colonies, has declared, and now wages “War” against them, so they must reciprocate in kind. War and peace belong (chiefly, although not exclusively) to State actors. This function of the State is paramount in at-war American minds.
4. At Civitas Outlook, Jonathan Adler argues that the Supreme Court’s birthright decision will not end the birthright debate. From the beginning of the piece:
There was never much doubt that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara would be issued at the very end of the Court’s term, or that Chief Justice Roberts would save the opinion-writing duties for himself. Nor was there much serious doubt that the Court would reject President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to redefine birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. What was not expected, however, was that the Court would issue a short-yet-sweeping constitutional opinion that only captured five votes. The Court largely neglected the statutory arguments against the Trump EO, and four justices spurned the conventional academic account of birthright citizenship. In the end, an opinion meant to settle the debate over birthright citizenship may have instead kindled a new one.
The question presented in Barbara was whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States. Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment provides “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” According to the Trump Administration, such language may guarantee birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, but does not extend to the children of illegal aliens or foreign tourists.
5. At National Review, Brian Allen shares his love for Mount Rushmore. From the article:
Rushmore, which I thought might be kitsch, is magnificent. That’s a result of the artist’s vision, nature’s prudence, persistence, of course, and running out of money. Is it, though, a great work of art? Yes, I know, good things come in small packages, but given its craftsmanship, pliancy of meaning, originality, spartan look, and depth, I’d say it is. At 60 feet each, the heads are taller than the Sphinx. When deemed finished in 1941, the collective colossus was the biggest sculpture anywhere in the world.
Everyone recognizes Rushmore. but here are the basics. The artist is Idaho-born Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941), the son of Danish immigrants and a student of Rodin. He was well known in the 1920s for monumental sculpture like the giant marble head of Lincoln in the crypt of the U.S. Capitol and the Stone Mountain monument to Confederate heroes. He was gutsy and bull-headed, a dreamer, a ham, and a human megaphone when it came to what he called the Mountain.
6. Batter up: At Plough Quarterly, David Bentley Hart makes the case for baseball’s “redemptive form of memory.” From the piece:
This is no easy feat; to dwell in history, which may be our unique curse as a species, is to dwell in exile from the eternal. But, so long as we remain true both to the richness and to the poverty of our humanity, we yearn to reconcile the fragmented and seemingly aimless diachrony of life in the world with the abiding truth of the world; and, given the limitations of our imaginative resources, our best way of accomplishing this, and of making the temporal as transparent as possible to the eternal, is under the form of faithfully repeated cycles. And this is why, as far as American society as a whole is concerned, in all its diversity, there is only one truly redemptive form of memory available: baseball.
Yes, of course, as individuals and as distinct communities, we have our various religious and cultural mediations between time and eternity. All human culture, at least of the kind that emerges naturally over generations and epochs, is a structure of cyclic repetitions and returns, dramaturgical and narrative recapitulations of history and myth and the timeless origin of all things, interweaving and inflecting one another and drawing us out of the barren banality of mere sequential time. But I am talking not about individual Americans or discrete ethnic factions or elective affinities; rather, I mean America as a civic totality, and there the situation is either grave or ridiculous by turns. On the whole, religion inevitably fails in this country. We may have the greatest number of religious adherents, at least per capita, of any “developed” nation, but there is something about American culture that is relentlessly corrosive of genuinely spiritual values. . . . Only one institution stands out in public life that is more or less innocent of these evils but also capable of bearing the full weight of a people’s need for the sacred integration of personal, historical, mythic, and timeless memory: again, baseball (even when played with the designated hitter).
7. At The European Conservative, Rafael Pinto Borges reports from the front lines of the Continent’s air-conditioning wars. From the article:
What about Brussels? The EU establishment has long been a pitiless adversary of air conditioning. In the climate religion professed by the Union’s officials, cooling is the deadliest of deadly sins: it is a symbol of the developed world’s profligacy, of its wastefulness and hedonism. To those initiated in the sect, air conditioning is a powerful symbol of our collective naughtiness, an eloquent demonstration of all that is wrong in our relationship with nature. With narrative coherence on the line, Europe’s overlords knew they could have the EU publicly succumb to the tempting apple of artificial cooling. Ursula von der Leyen therefore ordered air conditioning switched off in the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters—but only on floors one to seven, where ordinary staff work. On floors 8 to 13, where she and her fellow commissioners have their offices, the air conditioning remained blissfully on.
It would perhaps be uncharitable to call this hypocritical. Von der Leyen, after all, is no ordinary woman. Together with her commissioners, she is, after all, the great helmswoman of the mighty European ship. As a leader, her time and comfort are precious; only if properly cooled can the Commission president adequately serve the people—and, by extension, the environment. If not for her gargantuan efforts and the piles of regulation produced by the Berlaymont, air conditioning would likely be far easier and cheaper to obtain by hundreds of millions of Europeans. Perhaps more than the current 20% of European homes (compared to 90% in the United States or almost 80% in China) would be equipped with the devices. In a way, ensuring air-conditioned indulgence for von der Leyen guarantees that millions of Europeans boil in the hot months, all to the glory of Mother Gaia. It’s the definition of efficiency.
8. At The Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce explains what Chesterton saw when he visited America. From the article:
One aspect of America which Chesterton saw and which we still see is the cult of bigness and the cult of sameness: “Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it, which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from each other as the capitals of European empires.” Speaking of his first impression of a skyscraping American hotel, Chesterton mixed the wit and wisdom which is so much the secret of his brilliance: “When I first went into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression was certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered how many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had built less.”
The tragedy of America, which has become the tragedy of the globalized world in the century since Chesterton wrote, is that quality has been sacrificed to the cult of quantity. Today, every strip mall looks the same across the whole vastness of the United States; the same fast food is produced in the same chain restaurants, each with an identical menu; the same chain stores, chained to each other and to the same global supply chain, sell the same mass-produced trash to a trivialized culture. Chesterton foresaw all this a century ago, prophesying that the “coming peril” was “standardization by a low standard”. What he foresaw, we now see. He is the prophet, ours is the loss.
9. At The Wall Street Journal, James Meigs trashes Howard Zinn’s horrible history of America. From the piece:
With periodic updates over the decades, Zinn’s opus ballooned to more than 700 pages. But its message could be summarized in two words: America stinks. The author believed most history textbooks offered only a whitewashed “nationalist glorification of country,” he told the New York Times. In response, he oversimplified the story in the opposite direction. America’s Founding Fathers? Just wealthy white men guarding their fortunes. Abraham Lincoln? A half-hearted abolitionist who was concerned about protecting “the interests of the very rich.” World War II? Sure, the Nazis were bad, Zinn concedes, but the U.S. and her allies didn’t really “represent something significantly different.”
“A People’s History” reads like a cross between a children’s book and a prosecutor’s brief. America’s downtrodden masses are uniformly brave and heroic; its leaders are one-dimensional villains. The author catalogs our nation’s every moral failure and unfulfilled promise. Every American should know about the evils of slavery and other stains on our past. But Zinn’s indictment scrupulously avoids the positive parts of the story. Other historians, including many on the left, slammed the book’s lack of context or nuance. “A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions,” wrote historian Michael Kazin. “What he did was take all the guys in white hats and put them in black hats, and vice versa,” added Princeton’s Sean Wilentz after Zinn’s death in 2010.
10. At The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, George Leef explains two new reports on higher-ed decline. From the analysis:
Has scholarship been corrupted by political agendas? The report finds that, in many fields, it has. It states, “Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic views, especially those concerning truth, evidence, and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge. . . .”
The report scrutinized several fields in the humanities, concluding that to some extent they all show a deterioration of academic standards because they have substituted political criteria for long-standing standards of rigor and objectivity.
Anthropology comes in for the most severe criticism. The report quotes prominent members of the discipline who proudly proclaim that its “political project is to challenge the cultural domination of capitalist consumerism.” While individual scholars may have personal agendas like that, a scholarly field should not embrace any political project—it should seek to understand and explain reality, not to challenge or change the world.
11. At National Affairs, Henry Olsen projects a new kind of conservative fusionism. From the piece:
The task then is to establish a new set of policies that accommodates all of these factions while tying them together in a principled view of America that draws on but does not simply replicate the traditional conservative views. That’s easier said than done, but what follows is a sketch of what that might look like.
The New Republican Party’s economic policies will have to respect the genius of entrepreneurs and businesspersons while ensuring that the gains to productivity and invention flow as much to American workers as they do to American investors. That has not happened in the past 45 years. A February Wall Street Journal report showed that the share of gross domestic income that goes to corporate profits—and hence to increased share prices—has almost doubled since 1980, from 7% to 12%. The share that goes to labor compensation has declined by six points, from 58% to 52%.
That decline lies behind much of middle America's economic malaise—as does the fact that crucial components of household consumption—home prices, health-care costs, and higher-education tuition—have risen much faster than inflation since 1980. The result: Retirement plans look flush, if households have them, while monthly budgets grow tighter.
12. At The Catholic Thing, Fran Maier reflects on eternal consequences. From the article:
“Vero” is wheelchair bound. She was born severely disabled. She can’t speak. She can’t feed or clean herself. Yet beneath those burdens is a being with a distinct personality, a young woman with a forever purpose in the mind of God, conscious of the world, with her own likes and dislikes, joys and frustrations. Now 21, her smile can light up the room. Her displeasure can be equally vivid. But she knows that she’s loved, and watching the everyday devotion—the unapplauded heroism—of her parents is a master class in what it means to be human for anyone who enters the family’s orbit.
These things are much on my mind lately thanks to the young influencer couple who aborted their unborn child with Down syndrome and shared the whole experience online. It’s hard to imagine what they were thinking, or even if they were thinking—and perhaps that shallowness counts in their favor.
In the real world, the world beyond our digital fantasyland, they killed an unborn human life, a unique and irreplaceable imago Dei. But they also killed something precious and godly in themselves. And actions have consequences: They’ve already faced ample criticism. They now have plenty of time to consider (or ignore) the gravity of what they did. Influencers, like actors, have a short shelf life. Mistakes don’t.
Lucky 13. At the Branford Patch, Ellyn Santiago reports on a wildly successful Connecticut fundraiser—the “Braffle”—for the local Rotary. From the story:
"As the largest fundraiser for the town, Braffle has quickly become an institution in Branford, and we are grateful and proud that so many people in town and the surrounding area want to help their neighbors in need," Branford Rotary president Tery Elton said. "And hey, they can help themselves, too. $100 gift cards to 55 restaurants? That’s kind of insane."
And the gift cards do not expire.
"Even before I won, I thought Braffle was the greatest thing ever," 2024 Braffle winner Vincent Valentino said. "I still haven’t gotten through all the restaurants. I’ve taken friends out to dinner, and I’ve given some away, but there are so many."
Bonus. At City Journal, old amigo Johnny Hirschauer recalls The King’s greatest concert and its triumphant trilogy of American songs. From the piece:
On January 14, 1973, Presley strode out on stage wearing a white jumpsuit bejeweled with red, blue, and gold. His belt featured golden eagles surrounded by stars and stripes. The Honolulu International Center Arena was packed to the teeth. More than half of American households tuned in when it aired in the United States.
The defining performance of the show, and perhaps of Presley’s career, came in the show’s third-to-last number. “An American Trilogy” is a three-part ballad first arranged by Mickey Newbury. It had been a modest commercial success. Newbury combined three songs—“Dixie,” the controversial Southern folk song; “All My Trials,” a protest spiritual; and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—to tell in one song the fractured but ultimately united history of America.
Presley, a son of the American South, had made the song part of his regular tour routine. In Hawaii, he was surrounded on stage by a team of background singers: the Sweet Inspirations, a quartet of black women, and the Stamps, a four-man gospel group. The song begins with Presley—lei around his neck and jewelry all over his hands—facing his guitarist, who spins out the opening riff.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. On Thursday, August 13th, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern), Yours Truly will be the host of a free webinar on year-end fundraising, the planning for which must begin now. Learn more about this must event for nonprofit worker bees, and register, right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Marie Enzaldo spotlights a Colorado charity that bellies up to the corporal work of mercy of feeding the hungry. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why was the terrible husband angry at his wife for looking through the window during the hurricane?
A: Because he had to let her in.
A Dios
This July 4th witnessed a little something (political!) emanating from the White House: A not-tiny report (160-plus pages) from the Domestic Policy Council on how the leadership of the National Museum of American History has used the institution as a platform for ideology—as opposed to telling the country’s glorious story, warts and all. Warts exclusive seem to be the fixation of the Smithsonian (but then much of the whole industry seems DEI besotted). If thundering is permitted: Museums are important parts of civil society and national heritage—they should not be playthings for agendas. Read the report here.
May This Next Quarter Millenium Embrace the Endower of Unalienable Rights,
Jack Fowler, who contemplates self-evident truths at jfowler@amphil.com.
