Self-governing from the first, the colonists asked only that they continue to posses the rights of all Englishmen, secured in Britain by the constitution. To be taxed only with the consent of their parliamentary representatives was the key to all other English political rights. The colonies having no members in Parliament, was it not reasonable that they should be taxed only by their own colonial representative assemblies?

In short, from the earliest times in America the colonial people had been a people separate from the British people, though linked to the British by willing ties of culture and friendship, and by common allegiance to a king. Rather than pulling down a government, the Patriots were defending their own prescriptive government against what had become an alien government. In their act of separating from Britain, Americans did no more than reassert a political autonomy, or independence, rooted in the North American continent ever since the landings at Jamestown and Plymouth.

Not to fight for something new, but rather to defend something old. In other words: We are all conservatives. Some of us just don’t realize it, yet.

Happy American Independence, everyone.

Photograph by Leah Bartholomay.

Picture taken this past weekend.

I wanted to let you all know that Small Comforts, my most recently completed short film, will screen at the San Diego International Children’s Film Festival.

Saturday, August 23 @ 1:30pm at the San Diego Central Library in downtown.

A little bit of kismet since Aug 23 is Isadora & Oona’s first birthday!

So, if you happy to be in sunny San Diego in August…pop in for the screening (or tell any San Diego friends to do so)!

More on the fest here.

Love,
Hannah

p.s. This was the first festival into which I entered Small Comforts, and I’ve entered it into several more that I won’t find out about for several weeks or months. Fingers crossed Small Comforts plays in a festival near you!

p.p.s. I’ve also updated my website — but please pardon the pixie dust!

PRINCETON, NJ — When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

[T]he wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself, he trusts nothing to fortune, his own goods are secure, since he is content with virtue, which needs no gift from change, and which, therefore, can neither be increased nor diminished. For that which has come to the full has no room for further growth, and Fortune can snatch away only what she herself has given. But virtue she does not give; therefore she cannot take it away. Virtue is free, inviolable, unmoved, unshaken, so steeled against the blows of chance that she cannot be bent, much less broken. Facing the instruments of torture she holds her gaze unflinching, her expression changes not at all, whether a hard or a happy lot is shown her. There the wise man will lose nothing which he will be able to regard as loss; for the only possession he has is virtue, and of this he can never be robbed. Of all else he has merely the use on sufferance. Who, however, is moved by the loss of that which is not his own? But if injury can do no harm to anything that a wise man owns, since if his virtue is safe his possessions are safe, then no injury can happen to the wise man.

Well, then.

No matter how much the arguments in … Heller are dressed up in originalist garb, they show us that that living constitutionalism is alive and well.

It just goes to show you that intelligence as recognized and decorated by academia (Balkin is a professor at Yale law) doesn’t necessarily translate to common sense outside of academia. He says (technically, he asserts) that the decision to find that the 2nd Amendment means individuals have the right to own a gun is “judicial activism” and evidence that the U.S. Constitution is “living” (as term used as praise by progressives and as derision by conservatives).

Rubbish.

As Justice Scalia points out in his decision, “Nine state constitutional provisions written in the 18th century or the first two decades of the 19th … enshrined a right of citizens to “bear arms in defense of themselves and the state”. And the very nature of the language of the 2nd Amendment — “shall not be infringed”, akin to “shall make no law against” — shows again that the Amendment sought to protect a right that predates the Constitution itself. Else why insist to make no law?

The strategy of people like Balkin is common to progressives: take a complaint lodged by their opponents against their views, and pretend it cuts both ways. It is not liberal judges who practice judical activism. No, it’s all of them! Ha ha!

Again, rubbish. Judical activism, in the case of Supreme Court justices, means the making of laws through opinions untethered by both reasonable justification in the historical meaning of the words of the Constitution and the intended role of the Court as determined by the Constitution. Boiled down, judicial activism is making laws, per se, instead of merely interpreting the laws using the Constitution as a guide. Roe v Wade is classic judicial activism, since the Constitution says nothing about abortion, pro or against. Whereas Heller clearly is not making new laws, but interpreting the words of the Constitution, to clarify existing law with respect to owning guns.

The main thing is, it is impossible for justices who practice originalism and textualism to practice judicial activism. Unless you distort the meaning and import of “judicial activism” to suit your assertions, as Balkin does.

Update: More Balkin-like arguments from E.J. Dionne, which Ed Whelan completely knocks down.

I confess that I was one of the Second Amendment scholars who doubted that there were five votes on the high court to support an individual-right view of the Second Amendment.

I’m happy to be wrong about that, but there were only five such votes - demonstrating how narrow the margin was, and how out of touch the court is with the American public, which believes the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms by a 3-1 margin.

If, as some have been calling for, we had a “Supreme Court that looks like America,” this case wouldn’t even have been close. Ordinary Americans have generally believed that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” applied to, you know, the people.

It takes politicians, law professors (and, it turns out, four Supreme Court justices) to believe that a “right of the people” somehow actually doesn’t belong to the people at all.

Self-defense, including owning a gun, has everything to do with the relationship between Citizen and State. No one who claims to be in favor of individual empowerment can logically be against citizens owning a gun for purposes of self-defense, and family-defense.

In 17 remarkable pages of crystalline logic, Scalia destroys this argument, and in a most novel way — by arguing against the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, which follows it. And in a tribute to one of the West’s great logicians, Scalia makes continual and pointed reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s examination of the way arguments over the use language can be used to obfuscate rather than enlighten. Alice, our stand-in, is forever seeing through the silliness of the world around her by commenting on how nonsensical it is. So, too, Scalia:

Logic demands that there be a link between the stated purpose and the command. The Second Amendment would be nonsensical if it read, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to petition for redress of grievances shall not be infringed.”

You cannot, in other words, you cannot use the words of the first half of the Second Amendment to change the meaning of the second half — that prefatory clause can only clarify what follows it. It cannot logically reverse it.

All you can do is use well-meaning, but no less impulse-driven or irrational, incredulous exhortations like Chicago Mayor Daley: “Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?” If people so choose, Mr. Elitist, then, why yes it might. Such is the result of the so-awful thing we know as “liberty”. We are all so sorry if it makes you less powerful feeling. I shall shed a tear at some point maybe.

I decided to read Seneca because having absorbed more of Marshall McLuhan’s doctoral dissertation for Cambridge University, called The Classical Trivium, a tract that persuasively argues that the arena of the Humanities, past and present, would greatly benefit from complete overhaul in favor of a system that sees it as one of arguments between Grammarians, Dialecticians, and Rhetoricians (and a system sympatico with ancient wisdom and learning), it was clear that Seneca’s works are simply must-know material. Which would surprise no one with even a passing familiarity with Seneca.

And see here, how the first of his Moral Essays is called “On Providence” and takes up the problem of why bad things happen to good people. I immediately think of The Book of Job, and connect immediately that it and Seneca’s first essay are in conversation. If there isn’t a high school or college Humanities course that close-reads both works, and compares their insights and arguments, there damn well should be. But, if not, who needs college when we can do this ourselves on our own time. And, as fine artists, do up something aesthetic of what we find and reflect.

Hat tip Bill Harryman. Also added to the Americana channel of The Cathode Ray.

John McCain has fielded the unlikeliest of endorsements — from his former captor in the Vietnam War.

Tran Trong Duyet, who was in charge of the so-called “Hanoi Hilton” where McCain was imprisoned for more than five years after his plane was shot down in 1967, told the British Broadcasting Corporation that he now considers McCain his “friend” and that if he had the chance he would vote for him for president.

“If I were American, I’d vote for John McCain,” Duyet, now 75, told the BBC. “I think he’d make a very capable president. He’s done so much to improve relations between our two countries.”

Duyet, who called McCain “very conservative” and “very loyal to his country,” said he has followed the Arizona senator’s career since he left the prison.

“I wish him success in the presidential election,” he said.

Duyet said that while McCain was imprisoned the two used to argue over the war, but he now wants to “leave the past behind.”

Liberalism promises an Apple government. One that is seamless, smooth-running, sleek, chic and aesthetically uplifting. It is a world of Deweyan positive liberty, where the government takes so many of the hassles out of life that it liberates you to be all you can be. That’s why liberals think the extra money is worth it. And frankly, if government could be an Apple government, I think the money would be worth it.

But Apple government, call it MacTopia,  is fool’s gold. It will always be a PC government, because that’s what government is: a bunch of perpetually outmoded parts that have trouble talking to each other. It  sells itself as the cheap fix but ultimately costs you more because of its constant system errors, freeze-ups, and faulty patches that only kick problems down the road. It is a system of impenetrable jargon designed not to improve efficiencies but to empower the bureaucrat-technicians who wield a gnostic-like power over the rest of us simply because they know what gets plugged in where and what an alt-dot-sys-bat file is. Citizens must take their word for what we need because the PC government system is rigged to keep us in perpetual stupefaction about how the system works.

If there is a MacWorld (aside from the magazine), it is the private sector.  Consumers matter more in the private sector than citizens do in the public one. The private sector is set up so that the people are happy with what they get. In the public sector the system is set up so that people have no choice but to stick with it (just look at school choice where liberals want to take scholarships from poor black kids for the good of the public school system). The government can — and sometimes does — borrow good ideas from MacWorld, but it cannot be MacWorld because the incentives are different.

I particularly liked what I emphasized in bold. The fact that any new federal government intrusion — say, in Obama’s proposed medical care takeover — resists efforts to ever remove it means we should treat VERY LIGHTLY when it comes to proposed new federal programs/agencies. Just look at the federal government and the sectors of education and agriculture (which, along with medical care, are the only fields that cooperate with nature). The federal government is currently entrenched in both to such a degree that one wonders if either will ever be free of the feds. The ability to innovate, be flexible, and be experimental are what are lost when the federal government gets involved. Once the behemoth that is the federal government moves into your house, it never moves away.

That the American idea of government relegated relatively little to the federal government was one of its most monumental achievements. Every single bit of growth of the federal government’s reach and involvement chips away at what millions thought, fought, and died for across the ages. That well-intentioned Left/liberals don’t understand this is tragic.

It is worth considering the main problem that Adler addresses in this book. He frames it this way:

Let us take, for example, Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, which is housed in a museum of its own, annexed to the Prado in Madrid. There can be no doubt of its relevance to the Great Idea of war.

Let us supposed that Picasso had said in words what we can suppose he meant about war in that famous painting. Would it have been much more than General William Tecumsah Sherman’s famous dictum that war is hell?

Here is a JPG of the painting.

He goes on to say that Guernica does in fact say more than war is hell, but does so in a nonverbal way. Which is to say that our sensitive faculties rather than our intellectual faculties receive the messaging. The Great Books conduct their great conversation primarily through conceptuality, whereas nonverbal works of art do so perceptually (for more on this discussion, see this post by Dan). And further, Adler points out that no matter the depth of perceptual insight a work of nonverbal fine art might offer one’s perception, by the very nature of percept versus concept, the pursuit of truth (to the extent this pursuit is driven by questions of true or false, logic and fact) is not actually or measurably impacted by wordless music, sculpture, architecture, painting, nor the rest. Beauty, thus, is not truth, nor truth beauty — at least in the common definitions of truth and beauty. And of course none of this is to in any way undercut our subjective reactions to works of nonverbal fine art, as deep as those reactions may go.

I basically agree with Adler in these points. I do think one could say far more about Guernica that just “war is hell”. Those words work as apt summary, but even a first-level plain meaning reading of what is depicted in the painting would yield assertions on the nature of war more than its hellaciousness. War is dismemberment, psychologically dislocating, astonishingly confusing, imagination destroying, and so on. I suppose these can be viewed as just elaborations of the idea of “hell”.

But, then, what is “hell”? Certainly the average adult would be able to give a guttural sort of definition of the word — hell “really sucks” — and, accordingly, few people have no idea whatsoever what the word means. But there are, of course, far more articulate, artful, nuanced, and poetic ways to understand what hell is. There in fact is a Great Discussion about hell, throughout the Humanities. People wildly disagree about its nature. And, for that matter, what is “war”? Because people disagree about that, as well.

And, so, where do Picasso’s more particular assertions-through-color/shape fall in this debate? — would be one way I would begin to, if not disagree with Adler, at least modify his view. In doing so, it is clear that I’m interpreting the painting using concepts, and not just percepts. Certainly some kind of nonverbal works of art allow us to do so, and some do not, without really harming or reducing the perceptual beauty. These kinds of works have been produced, I think, by the artist who has completely digested an idea in such a way that the work is not subservient to the idea, but rather the idea is subservient to the work. Upon which one meditates, so one makes, in a sense. Experience leads, by means of its discrete logic.

Left unsaid in Adler’s great book (and it is great, in ways I’m not touching on here) is what goes into the aesthetic choices fine artists make in their work. Why that color? Why that shape? Why that phrasing, and not another? These are the questions attentive nonverbal fine artists ask, whether consciously or more intuitively. These and related questions are what is meant when we say an artist is “listening” to their work, as it is being made.

There is constant interplay, is there not, in a fine artist’s awareness, between percepts and concepts. This relationship is different depending on individuals, but the interplay in general occurs in wildly complicated fashion. Likewise and on a larger scale, there is a wildly complicated interplay between perceptual (nonverbal) and conceptual (verbal) works of fine art. And the disciplines proper (if we were to group on one side the perceptual disciplines, and on the other, the conceptual disciplines) continue to demonstrate this interplay. Musicians are inspired by works of poetry. Playwrights are inspired by paintings. Choreographers are inspired by works of philosophy. And so forth and so on.

After all, it is not as if verbal works of fine art do not evoke our emotions. Perceptual awareness is not off limits to literature and poetry. It is just, as Adler even reminds us, with these kinds of works we must “first go through the process of interpreting them conceptually before they move us emotionally”. Or, in a word, verbal fine art must first be construed.

It is here, with the notion of construing works of verbal art, that a useful connection between the verbal works of art and the nonverbal works of art emerges, beyond the enlightening distinctions Adler unpacks. It is this: we don’t just construe verbal works of art, but we construe nonverbal works of art as well. We read them, according to the language (broadly defined) of the work of fine art. Works of music, architecture, adornment, dance speak to us, and we speak back — communication occurs. Words are commonly called “transcendental entities”, but tones, shapes, gestures, movements, and forms are transcendental entities, too. Nonverbal fine art tends to impact our awareness “all at once”. But the processing and sorting through of that impact, through rumination and repeated immersions, naturally occurs if we allow the time and space necessary.

The good news is that not all works of nonverbal art bear construing. The great majority do not. But then again, the great majority of pieces of music, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, and the rest won’t endure or be considered “great”, either. Those works that do in fact endure (for reasons having to do with inherent greatness marked by repeated anecdotal evidence in countless audience members or fine art lovers over many years if not decades, to say nothing of centuries), can be construed, and should be construed, by the current generation of fine artists in training. There is too much to learn from these works to not do so. Classic works by nonverbal composers as far back as Hildegard von Bingen, by sculptors from the earlier phases of Nude sculpture and including of course Michelangelo and others, by architects from ancient Greece and Roman Empire. And on and on. Through repeated study and close, detailed examinations of the smallest of parts and their relationship to the whole, fine works at this level not only bear beauty, but bear bountiful conceptual knowledge. Understanding how a Bach fugue works, as a kind of musical architecture, offers education and insight that can be applied to non-music disciplines. Same goes for the value of understanding the principles behind the Nude tradition, or concepts like the Golden Ratio at work in enduring architecture.

Boiled down, a general education for fine artists should involve rigorous interdisciplinary learning. This means close study of syntax (i.e., study of form) of both verbal and nonverbal works of fine art. Especially, this means if yours is a verbal discipline, then study form of nonverbal classics; and if your is a nonverbal discipline, study form of verbal classics. But of course the reality is that a traditional liberal arts education, which however embattled and reduced is still the operate path of learning that children start with, means that we receive the most training in learning how to read. Because of the fundamental place reading has in all learning, this means we in fact “read” nonverbal works of fine art, or can if we learn how. When we learn how to “live with” nonverbal works of fine art, we likely start to “read them” whether we try to or not. Something like a verbal language, but basic ingredients other than words (whether these are notes, shapes, markings, etc.) develops the longer our relationship with works of art persists.

The world at large has traditionally been “read” in the sense of being interpreted for various meaning to our lives (the “Book of Nature”), and works of nonverbal fine art, being of course of the world, can likewise be “read”. Whether people feel the desire to plumb these kind of perceptual/conceptual depths is, of course, another matter altogether. But some of us don’t feel like we have a choice, for doing so is merely how we live the good life.

And, again, for the record, I am likely voting for McCain in November, but I’m not really that big a fan of his politics (as I explain here). I still have to figure out how much my loathing of hype, like exists around Obama, figures into the equation, but my hunch is that it does in more than a small way, though not overly huge either. My opposition to Obama is more principled than that.