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" This year, a great institution celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding, by another great institution who celebrated the 80th anniversary of his own founding. I'm honored to be a part of William F Buckley Jr's National Review, and hope to be so for many years to come. Here's the piece I wrote for December's 50th birthday issue:
A few months before the debut of National Review, the film White Christmas was released, in the course of which Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby find themselves sitting around a floundering Vermont inn wondering what they can do to save it. Kaye proposes bringing in some kind of novelty act.
Crosby: What do you think would be a novelty up here in Vermont?
Kaye: Who knows? Maybe we could dig up a Democrat.
Crosby: They’d stone him.
A lot can change in 50 years – and it would be a rash man who’d bet on the political map of America in another half-century. Indeed, political representation is itself a lagging indicator. Vermont may now be America’s leading Canadian province, yet Patrick Leahy is still, technically, a Danny Kaye novelty: the only Green Mountain Democrat ever to be elected to the US Senate and only the second Democrat Vermonters have ever sent to Washington.
That said, thumbing through National Review’s first issue, the 2005 reader will find many features of the landscape distressingly familiar: the warnings against “the growth of government – the dominant social feature of this century” and “the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias”. But these old battles don’t seem quite as epic today as they did back in November 1955. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the government’s still big; it’s the big picture that’s got small. The utopian progressivism of the left is a shriveled parochial thing these days.
Half a century ago, Leahy’s Senate seat was held by George Aiken, a Republican and the soi-disant “wise old owl” famous for advising LBJ on Vietnam, “Declare victory and come home.” Today’s Democratic line on Iraq seems to be: Declare defeat and come home to Vermont. It’s not just that Vermont has been Democratized, but that the Democratic Party has been Vermontified – a process encapsulated in Howard Dean’s explanation to CNN as to why he left the church he was raised in and became a Congregationalist:
I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path.
He had a “big fight” over a bike path? Apparently so. “I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens’ group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting – for a bike path. Dean’s church had strayed from the gently undulating and narrow. The road to hell is paved, whereas the shared-use trail to hell has attractive wood chips. And so Dean quit the Burlington Episcopalians and took up with the UCC. In the same week the Governor re-lived his profound doctrinal struggle over the bike path, he’d also professed himself utterly indifferent to the question of whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in a US court or at the Hague. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me,” he sighed, stifling his yawns, fighting vainly the old ennui. War? What is it good for? The Dems can’t even stay awake for it. ......"
The Chicago Sun-Times, November 17th 2002
Document copyright Steynonline.com. All rights reserved.
http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=21//
" This year, a great institution celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding, by another great institution who celebrated the 80th anniversary of his own founding. I'm honored to be a part of William F Buckley Jr's National Review, and hope to be so for many years to come. Here's the piece I wrote for December's 50th birthday issue:
A few months before the debut of National Review, the film White Christmas was released, in the course of which Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby find themselves sitting around a floundering Vermont inn wondering what they can do to save it. Kaye proposes bringing in some kind of novelty act.
Crosby: What do you think would be a novelty up here in Vermont?
Kaye: Who knows? Maybe we could dig up a Democrat.
Crosby: They’d stone him.
A lot can change in 50 years – and it would be a rash man who’d bet on the political map of America in another half-century. Indeed, political representation is itself a lagging indicator. Vermont may now be America’s leading Canadian province, yet Patrick Leahy is still, technically, a Danny Kaye novelty: the only Green Mountain Democrat ever to be elected to the US Senate and only the second Democrat Vermonters have ever sent to Washington.
That said, thumbing through National Review’s first issue, the 2005 reader will find many features of the landscape distressingly familiar: the warnings against “the growth of government – the dominant social feature of this century” and “the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias”. But these old battles don’t seem quite as epic today as they did back in November 1955. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the government’s still big; it’s the big picture that’s got small. The utopian progressivism of the left is a shriveled parochial thing these days.
Half a century ago, Leahy’s Senate seat was held by George Aiken, a Republican and the soi-disant “wise old owl” famous for advising LBJ on Vietnam, “Declare victory and come home.” Today’s Democratic line on Iraq seems to be: Declare defeat and come home to Vermont. It’s not just that Vermont has been Democratized, but that the Democratic Party has been Vermontified – a process encapsulated in Howard Dean’s explanation to CNN as to why he left the church he was raised in and became a Congregationalist:
I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path.
He had a “big fight” over a bike path? Apparently so. “I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens’ group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting – for a bike path. Dean’s church had strayed from the gently undulating and narrow. The road to hell is paved, whereas the shared-use trail to hell has attractive wood chips. And so Dean quit the Burlington Episcopalians and took up with the UCC. In the same week the Governor re-lived his profound doctrinal struggle over the bike path, he’d also professed himself utterly indifferent to the question of whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in a US court or at the Hague. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me,” he sighed, stifling his yawns, fighting vainly the old ennui. War? What is it good for? The Dems can’t even stay awake for it. ......"
The Chicago Sun-Times, November 17th 2002
Document copyright Steynonline.com. All rights reserved.
http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=21//
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