J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.
Congressional Black Caucus holds up Pamunkey tribal recognition because of a probably-inoperative part of their tribal law forbidding miscegenation with black people. (A big part of the story of why it’s taken so long is the Pamunkey initially negotiated its treaties with the Crown.)
Is there gonna come a time when we can just look and go, ‘we did bad things. We shouldn’t have done those bad things. We better make sure these bad things don’t happen again, because, as Ronald Reagan said, we’re a shining city on a hill. We’re America, we don’t torture.
Good ol’ Shep has just transgressed against the civil religion. In Reagan’s conception of the shining city on a hill phrase, it might be said that America is great, therefore America can torture. We’re an exceptional nation, favored by God, so we can do what we want, including conducting extraordinary renditions, operating black sites, rectally feeding detainees, lying to Congress, and so on, in the name of preserving our exceptionality.
This use of the phrase — a shining city as implying the right to meddle in the affairs of other nations because of our supposed moral superiority — is totally unmoored from any conception of the phrase prior to John F. Kennedy. In fact, in the original document by John Winthrop, it’s not even a very important one, and if anything is an exhortation that the new nation beware, for it would be judged by both God and the world for its failings. And that’s what Shep seems to be implying here.
Richard Gamble wrote an excellent book on this forgotten history, so I sent this clip to him. He replied:
Smith did capture the older, weightier sense of humility and moral character — that the American people have a responsibility to be an example of right conduct in the world, a nation of integrity and self-respect where the means do matter and not just the ends. That older ideal is a far cry from the “arrogance of power.”
More from Christopher Lasch, in The True And Only Heaven:
When the Jews referred to themselves as the chosen people, they meant that they had agreed to submit to a uniquely demanding set of ethical standards, not that they were destined to rule the world or to enjoy special favors from heaven. The seventeenth-century Puritan settlers of New England, much indebted to the Old Testament for their conception of a collective identity, understood their mission in the same way. From this point of view, history mattered because it was under divine judgment, not because it led inevitably to the promised land. Whether the chosen people wold prove themselves worthy of the blessings arbitrarily bestowed on them was an open question, not a foregone conclusion; and the prophetic tradition, central to Judaism, to Augustinian Catholicism, and to early Protestantism, served to recall them, again and again, to a painful awareness of their own shortcomings. Prophecy made history much more the record of moral failure than a promise of ultimate triumph.
There is one version of the history of modern media that is a story primarily about a drug, developed to make its users feel anger with delightful intensity. Refinement of this drug has made some great leaps in a very short time — it used to be you had to wait until a certain time of day to get it. Then you had to deal with having it mixed in with a lot of filler material. Now you can go straight to the social media site of your choice, where you and your fellow junkies can trade images of victims overlayed with condemning quotes, or infographics which expose injustice in striking bar and pie charts. And now the shared experience of other people’s outrage has become part of the concoction, and it is immeasurably more potent as a result.
Like actual chemically-induced pleasures, in excess this anger is a sickness. It consumes your waking thoughts, and takes your vitality with you when it leaves. When the dose is administered, an extreme form of tunnel vision sets in. You get sucked into a monomaniacal focus on the object of some injustice, far away from you or anyone you know, and are temporarily unable to see anything that is actually a part of your life. You lose sight of vulgar morality, the stuff that really matters, and succumb to the siren song of telescopic morality. You rage at things you cannot control at the expense of time you could be investing improving the state of affairs around you, for your family, your community. The long term effect of mainlining telescopic morality is utter hollowness; ethical triviality.
… the dirty little secret is that the elites and the protesters operate like a protection racket against a common enemy: America’s middle class. In Ferguson, mobs smash and burn middle-class businesses, while the organs of elite media advise in columns and editorials that you’d better give them what they’re asking for.
With that in mind, protesters should beware that the middle class will only stomach so many delayed commutes. And “direct democracy,” from their perspective, would mean running the protesters over with a truck.
When, marshaled on the nightly plain,
The glittering hosts bestud the sky,
One star alone of all the train
Can fix the sinner’s wandering eye.
Hark! hark! to God the chorus breaks,
From every host, from every gem;
But one alone the Savior speaks,
It is the Star of Bethlehem.
Once on the raging seas I rode,
The storm was loud, the night was dark,
The ocean yawned, and rudely blowed
The wind that tossed my foundering bark.
Deep horror then my vitals froze,
Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem;
When suddenly a star arose,
It was the Star of Bethlehem.
It was my guide, my light, my all;
It bade my dark forebodings cease;
And through the storm and danger’s thrall,
It led me to the port of peace.
Now safely, moored, my perils o’er
I’ll sing, first in night’s diadem,
Forever and forevermore,
The star! The Star of Bethlehem!
Not technically in the Sacred Harp, but it’s a Christmas-themed shape note carol. This recording is from a Christmas album by the Tudor Choir. Go buy it, it’s great!
The tune is usually set to lyrics by Robert Burns:
Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon
How ye can bloom so fresh and fair
How can ye chant ye little birds
And I sae weary fu’ o’ care
Ye’ll break my heart ye warbling birds
That wantons thro’ the flowering thorn
Ye mind me o’ departed joys
Departed never to return
Oft hae I rov’d by bonnie Doon
To see the rose and woodbine twine
And ilka bird sang o’ its love
And fondly sae did I o’ mine
Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose
Fu’ sweet upon its thorny tree
But my false lover stole my rose
But ah! She left the thorn wi’ me
I trolled Anil Dash on Friday after he fretted about journalists calling the New Republic purge a “massacre” and other tropes that suggest “violence.” Here’s what he, uh, learned from the experience:
I was trying to understand why a Daily Caller editor told me to delete my Twitter account after I criticized hyperbolic reactions about @TNR
