Month: August 2007

Hitch On Lilla

He’s more bullish on the ability of the human mind and soul to forgo the political temptations of religion. But that’s a mood for Hitch; he’s written elsewhere of its astounding and resilient power. I found Mark’s book an enormous relief – a relief that I’m not as isolated as I feared in respecting both faith and secularism, and not so perverse in believing that the Western experiment in secular politics is a terribly fragile one. It takes a willful ignorance of history to believe otherwise – or mere political opportunism. But there’s plenty of both to go around.

The Blight Of Provincetown

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Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the biggest eye-sore on Cape Cod: the hideous, ungainly, Italianate monstrosity that has blighted the sky-line of Provincetown for almost a century. Andy Towle has a lovely photo of a sun pillar synching with it a few years ago. Well, the sun is lovely. Here’s the Cape Cod Times piece and the Boston Herald piece. Why do I hate it so? The architecture so glaringly out of tune with the Cape and utterly alien to the Pilgrims it’s supposed to commemmorate; the silliness of trying to claim the Pilgrims, when they had the good sense to move on to Plymouth pronto; the waste of money (it was a government project, of course); and the whole civic uplift that accompanied its Teddy Roosevelt beginnings. Yes, I loathe "national greatness conservatism." A great country needn’t build some stupid Siena knock-off to remind itself of its origins. The one saving grace is that if you look at it with its side straight on, the top of the tower looks like Donald Duck. My only regret is that they didn’t take the 100th anniversary to blow the thing up. Alas, it’s here to stay.

Bush and Charles I

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Well, he won’t have his head chopped off, but the parallels are interesting. A reader writes:

Of course, historical analogies can be very treacherous and they never hold at every point. That said, like you and Horton I have been struck by the many resemblances between George W. Bush and Charles I. Neither man was stupid in the ordinary sense of the word, but neither had the intellectual capacity required by the position in which fate placed him. Both were genuinely devoted to, and determined to protect, their respective countries and both inflicted frightful harm on the principles that made their countries worthy of that devotion. Both were menaced by actual danger from malevolent enemies. Both had wise advisers whom they ignored or marginalized. Both clung doggedly to policies that everyone else could see had failed. And neither was capable of even the mildest self-criticism. "It would be unjust to deny," says Macaulay,

"that Charles had some of the qualities of a good and even of a great prince … Faithlessness was the cause of his disasters, and is the chief stain on his memory. He was, in truth, impelled by an incurable propensity to dark and crooked ways. It may seem strange that his conscience, which, on occasions of little moment, was sufficiently sensitive, should never have reproached him with this great vice. But there is reason to believe that he was perfidious, not only from constitution and from habit, but also on principle. He seems to have learned from the theologians he most esteemed … that he could not, even if he would, divest himself of his despotic authority; and that, in every promise which he made, there was an implied reservation that such promise might be broken in case of necessity, and that of the necessity he was the sole judge."

Add "lawyers" to "theologians" and much of what we have seen over the past six years is right there – signing statements, illegal surveillance, dismissal of the insufficiently servile, the rule of law displaced by his naked will, and all of this accompanied by the willingness to tar those opposed to his designs as traitors. And unlike England in the 1640’s, we have no Hampdens and Pyms in our parliament.