Home again!

 the old: Aspendos  aqueduct

East, West, home’s best.  That’s what I was taught in my childhood and am still inclined to believe, even if the belief is less certain than it once was in my schooldays, when we had to memorize Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Collosus”, the poem now adorning the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: 

           

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"                                   

            I know a good deal more about “Greek fame” than I did when I set out three weeks ago.  The archaeological sites of Anatolia are stupendous.  In fact I found Turkey so remarkable in so many ways that it will take some serious rumination before I would ever attempt to write anything very serious about it.  But I do have a few reflections concerning the homecoming itself.

            There was a certain amount of grumbling among the Delta SkyMiles Medallion Program members (Gold, Platinum, and now even a Diamond division) jockeying for position around the gate for Flight 25 (Istanbul’s Atatürk to New York’s JFK) when the first passengers allowed to board were a gaggle of swarthy nondescripts, including several startled-looking children who seemed unlikely to be so much as Pewter-Card holders.  The word “allowed” is actually inappropriate.  These people were being herded.  They were, we were told, “an immigration group,” none of whom had ever before been on an airplane and as a consequence needed a brief introduction to seat belts, tray-tables, and seat backs in their original upright position.

            Most of the rest of us were returning after sun-drenched days or weeks among Turkish delights—cultural, topographic, gastronomic, commercial, or sybaritic.  I very much hope that those bright-eyed strangers will find a light held high beside the golden door.  However, finding a door of any kind at the Delta terminal at JFK is no easy thing.  The place is under construction, though the affect is much more of a place under siege.  Large signs promise wonders beginning in May, 2013.  At the moment you have to be bused about a quarter of a mile just to get to the entrance of the plywood tunnels that debouch into what might be a large air-raid shelter or abandoned bowling alley.  The terminal looks more ruinous than many of the fantastic archaeological sites we visited in Turkey—only far less evocative and romantic.  Passport control is expeditious enough, at least for those in the American citizens line—I lost sight of the “immigration group”.  Baggage claim, on the other hand, is nightmarish for all.  Is there any other country in the world where it costs five dollars to get a luggage trolley?  The little carts are held captive by a mechanical device that yields only to cold cash.  They actually have a coin slot on the wretched thing, apparently assuming that arriving visitors will have their twenty quarters at the ready.

            The Lares and Penates of your wretched refuse may be so meager as to render irrelevant any question of baggage trolleys, but your average native-born or naturalized septuagenarian, even when traveling light, might legitimately hope for some fixed-axle relief after a ten-hour flight.  Never mind.  There was one customs agent, tacitly encouraged by three uniformed but neutral onlookers, to “examine” the baggage of a couple of hundred passengers.  He demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to be perfunctory without in any way compromising ponderousness.

            Yet despite such ambiguities, we were soon enough at our daughter’s Greenwich Village apartment hanging out with our delightful granddaughters.  Thus refreshed, your bloguiste proposes to return to his regular pattern of postings next week.

and the new: Delta terminal at JFK
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Tooting a Golden Horn

I have noticed in the national press that the temporary suspension of a newspaper column is generally announced with the chaste editorial note that “Benjamin Blogger is on vacation.”  But what if the editor was on vacation too?

            On the second of June in the year of grace one thousand, nine hundred, and sixty-two, in the Lady Chapel of Trinity Church in Princeton, New Jersey, your bloguiste married Joan Elizabeth Newman.  Though even at the time it seemed a momentous event, I realize in retrospect that I had but the vaguest idea of just how momentous.  To be sure we have been a little casual about celebrating our anniversaries.  On more than one occasion, if truth must out, we both forgot the date altogether.  We forgive ourselves according to the possibly spurious principle that it is more important to live life than to memorialize it.  But things got better before too long, as our children reached the age of sentience and began reminding us out of self-imposed filial duty.

            A fiftieth wedding anniversary, however, is an event of sufficient solemnity to command our undivided attention.  We decided some time ago that we would celebrate it by making it the occasion of a trip to some attractive place we had never been but always wanted to go.  We swiftly agreed on the most desirable venue.  On Friday Joan and I are flying to Istanbul.  We shall spend the better part of three weeks in Turkey, visiting especially classical and early Christian archaeological sites, but allowing for plenty of time simply to wander about the countryside—and the cityscape of Constantine’s ancient capital, now a treasury of beautiful Ottoman mosques.           

            We are hoping to travel light.  In particular this is not the kind of journey likely to be enhanced by schlepping around my customary impedimenta: a pile of ungraded papers, proofsheets, manuscripts edited or unedited, or even the most portable of portable computers.  So in its continuing pursuit of a more perfect union, “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” grants its readers a temporary remission until the first week of June, when bloguiste and editor may very well return to take up a fifty-first year of collaboration.

"The Golden Horn" by Alice Schille (1869–1955).

Bright Twilight of the Elders

 Rhine Maidens on a slippery slope

Only during the brief period of heedless youth, when most people unconsciously assume an attitude of immortality, do we really think we are likely to achieve all our “goals.”  As serious age advances the realization of life’s impossibilities becomes articulate and acute.  That is one of the several not so nice things about aging.  It is all the more wonderful to discover, therefore, that among all the things you hoped to do but never will there turn out to be a fair number of delightful experiences for which you never before had the time, money, or opportunity to explore.  One such, which I will touch upon next week, will interrupt the thus-far reasonably disciplined schedule of this blog.  A second will provide this week’s subject: Richard Wagner's Ring of the Niebelung.

            As I write we are half way through it.  The Rheingold was on Saturday.  Last night’s performance of The Valkyries (part two of the four of the whole work) has three acts, each a mini-opera of its own.  The Metropolitan’s production began at 6:30.  We were still applauding the singers at twenty minutes before midnight.  If you can imagine an experience that combines the leg pain of a tourist class flight to Heathrow and the tachycardia of a long Alpine ski slope with the ethical exaltation of Paradise Lost—well, if you can do that, you can do more than I can do.  I have a day to recover before Siegfried (tonight) and then, on Saturday, the marathon finale of The Twilight of the Gods.

            You almost certainly know more about Wagner’s Ring cycle than I do, and if you don’t, I could never offer even my infant appreciation in a few hundred words.  It has to be among the most audacious artistic creations the human spirit has yet attempted.  The excess is staggering.  The length is daunting.  It calls for dramaturgical resources unavailable in Wagner’s day.  It requires a vocal range and stamina that surely only a few singers in any generation can command.  Its narrative vehicle is an arcane phantasmagoria of early Germanic mythology and heroic legend.  Most grand opera goes over the top at cardinal moments.  The Ring begins there and hardly descends, except when the Valkyries came galloping, as over the crest of the globe, on their equine planks.

The Valkyries ride the rails

            The old theology, though prehistoric, is almost post-modern.  The gods have created the human race; but the destiny of divinity is to be supplanted by its creature.  The ethic—far from being Hitlerian or Nietzschean as I have been endlessly told by cultural historians—is classical, humanistic, indeed Christian.  It is a plea for the superiority of the spiritual over the material.

            Chaucer’s Pardoner preached always on a single biblical text: Radix malorum est cupiditas.  That’s the one translated in the Authorized Version as “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  An inordinate lust for the golden ring of the Niebelung, and by extension for the power the possession of gold wields, animates the hugeness of the entire tragedy.  Whether beneath the waters of the Rhine, as in Wagner, or beneath the earth’s surface, as in the Boethian tradition, gold is naturally hellish.

            “Let none admire [writes Milton in Paradise Lost]

            That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best

            Deserve the precious bane”

That is a great old English word, bane.  It means a thing or person that kills.  Radix malorum est cupiditas.

            Naturally I was generally familiar with the Ring as an item of cultural literacy, but its concentrated viewing is something else.  The current Met production is directed by Robert Lepage, the founder of Ex Machina, a production company made up chiefly of Quebecois cybergeniuses who specialize in transforming the proscenium arch into a computer game field.  I thought it was fabulous, but it is evident that controversy swirls about Wagnerian opera when presented with the production values of Star Wars.  Traditionalists groan.  Our own tickets became available for purchase only because some friends of friends who had them by subscription were preemptively disgusted by the very idea.  Yet however numerous, the naysayers, having voted with their feet, left the field to the majoritarian enthusiasts.  In the half hour before the curtain rises the large plaza in front of the Met rather resembles the pit of the Stock Exchange, as musical junkies, gesticulating like bond brokers, desperately search for a seller among the surging throng.  I saw no takers and, within the hall, no empty seats.

            But I myself must eschew an excess of Arnoldian high seriousness of my own.  The Ring Cycle may be a masterpiece of musical high thinking, but it would appear no less to be the Rocky Horror Picture Show of the aesthetic classes.  This is an opera with fans.  Our own excellent friend Susan, through whom we got our tickets, was seeing the cycle for the fifth time.  Opera is exhibition, and over-the-top opera enthusiasts at times do not stop short of exhibitionism.There were around us in the dress circle a few hard-core fans who had complemented their glitzy attire of tuxedo or ball gown with those horned helmets that since the nineteenth century have become the headgear de rigueur for most imaginary medieval warriors north of the Olive Oil Line.*  The idea that a man in his mid-seventies can come upon this for the first time with the freshness of a child is rather thrilling.

                                


                                                                   A genius larger than life...

*On this topic I recommend the indispensable article of my learned friend Professor Roberta Frank, “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet”.

Past and Present

Though in retirement I have left behind many of the professional activities of my old professional life, I have been surprised to find that one feature of that life—invitations to give lectures, informal talks, or after dinner speeches—has not gone away.  And since I enjoy talking to people, I accept whenever possible.  Thus it was that I found myself last Friday evening offering informal remarks to the annual dinner of something called the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati.  My supposed topic was “The Uses of History” or some such, but it was I who received tuition on that topic.

            Like many Americans, I have become rather casual, if not actually cynical, concerning the greatness of our nation’s founders, beginning with George Washington.  Yet to examine almost any aspect of Washington is to reveal greatness of a kind sadly unimaginable in our current political leaders and aspirants.  His role as first General President of the Societies of the Cincinnati is but one small feather in a lavishly plumed cap.

            The eighteenth-century squirearchy loved reading classical literature, and imitated classical history whenever possible.  Thomas Jefferson for a time tried to use Virgil’s Georgics as a practical handbook of animal husbandry.  The great seal of the State of Virginia bears the motto Sic semper tyrannis—words supposedly uttered by Brutus as he stabbed Julius Cæsar and actually uttered by John Wilkes Booth as he shot Lincoln.  (Instances of the bad uses of history greatly outnumber the good.)

            Among the heroes of legendary Roman history was the farmer Cincinnatus.  He was plowing a field when a delegation of importunate citizens arrived to beg him to assume the dictatorship of the infant city, then threatened by hostile neighbors.  Though he much preferred his agrarian life, he submitted to duty’s demands, left his farm, assumed the leadership of the city, organized its defense, and defeated its enemies.  But the biographical punch line is what he did next—resigned the dictatorship, went back to his farm, and continued plowing.

Coming to terms with term limits

            For the American revolutionaries Cincinnatus was the perfect historical model for so much of the officer corps of the Continental Army, and most obviously for its supreme general officer, Washington.  For modern Washington—the city as metonymy for the congressional body and its whirling satellites—Cincinnatus is an historical indictment of career politicians.  The Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783, was a group of former army officers committed to the “immutable principles” of the fellowship that had given the Society birth.   Needless to say these do not include the one immutable principle of our contemporary political class—the acquisition and retention of political office by any means possible.

            There are actually fourteen affiliated societies—one for each of the original states, and one for France.  These were the allies who had prevailed against a great—perhaps the greatest—European military power.   New Jersey was not then a ganglion of superhighways, but the battlefield of such decisive action as that at Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth.  The founding of the Society was contemporaneous with the establishment of a promising settlement on the Ohio River, which was given its name by a proud veteran.  Membership now is by lineal descent, and is parsimoniously granted. 

Washington’s personal decoration of the Cincinnati went after his death to General Lafayette in France.  In 2011 Lafayette’s distant heirs succumbed to Mammon and consigned the relic to a Sotheby’s auction, thus vindicating Burke: “The age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe  is extinguished forever.”  It fetched $5,300,000.
 

            I knew none of this when I agreed to give my little talk.  On the same day I gave it, a squabble broke out in our capital city concerning bragging rights for assassinating Osama bin Laden.  This episode began in unseemliness, and has not become more salubrious as days have passed.  I expect soon to hear from one of the candidates not only that he did or certainly would have done it, but that it would have been a good idea to attach Osama’s body to a Chevy Volt and drag it seven times around CIA headquarters.

            They built in marble; we continue in cinder block.  Everybody knows that.  For that first crucial decade of our Republic we survived not only without an FCC or a Securities and Exchange Commission, we survived without an army or a police force!  What protected us in our extraordinary vulnerabilities were certain ideas about citizenship, not yet turned to irony, inhabiting the hearts and minds of certain idealists.

            As we enter a presidential campaign likely to excite discouragement and perhaps even revulsion in the minds of thoughtful citizens, we can perhaps turn again to antique history and classical myth in hopes of finding at least aesthetic comfort.  Various ancient authorities report the existence of a monstrous race called the Pygmaei, a tribe of very little people who lived—and here the authorities vary—either in little subterranean burrows or in houses made of eggshells.  The Pygmies lived in the back of beyond, on the edge of nowhere.  Periodically they did battle with their ancestral enemies, a race of birds of approximately their own stature, usually identified as storks.  The dubious battle betwixt Pygmies and Storks is a not infrequent subject in classical art.  The grotesquerie of it all must have been considered diverting.  Indeed it does seems a more amusing pairing than donkeys and elephants.

George and Me--and Ann Marie

            I spent my entire professional life among Ivy League adolescents in transition to young adulthood, and I know a thing or two about the mores of today’s fast-paced, hard-driving, no nonsense young professional class.  When they communicate, they communicate.  Thus, when the message at the very top of my e-pile yesterday morning addressed me briskly with the solid, no-frills, naked monosyllable of my Christian name, I sat up and took notice.

            I am of an older generation.  I also happen to have a Christian name that denotes (a) a toilet, and (b) a prostitute’s customer.  Under these circumstances I must confess to preferring something a little more formal and traditional:  “Dear Doctor Fleming,” for example, or maybe something along the lines of “Egregio Professore,” “Your Serene Highness,” or “Stupor Mundi”.  But beggars can’t be choosers.  When it’s coming from the White House, you’re lucky to be getting anything at all.  Here was a message with a banner headline: “Obama, Clooney, and You”.

John -- I have some advice for the two people who will be selected to go to a party for the President at George Clooney's house: Choose your guest wisely. Whoever you pick to join you is going to owe you big time. Think about it -- and chip in $75 or whatever you can today to be automatically entered: https://donate.barackobama.com/Obama-Clooney-and-You - Ann Marie Wow!  Only seventy-five bucks?  Why you can spend that on half a shopping cart-load of house brand groceries.  “Ann Marie” puzzled me for a moment.  I do have an eminent colleague and friend named Ann Marie, who is probably an Obama supporter.  But I didn’t know she was a movie fan.  Then there is Ann Marie, sister of one of my kids’ friends in Middle School.  She’s been living in California for the last thirty years, and California is a blue state.  Also, Hollywood is in California.  Still—little Ann Marie from next door?...I read further. It soon turned out that Ann Marie, with whom I was not previously on first-name terms, actually, is a certain Ann Marie Habershaw, the COO of “Obama for America”.  So we now have one presidential candidate who declares corporations to be persons squaring off against an incumbent person who declares himself to be a corporation.  It’s all somewhat confusing. I do readily admit, though, that Ann Marie Habershaw is one classy name, right up there with Julianna Smoot, my other penpal in the Obama campaign—along with Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and occasionally the President himself.  Most days of the week I get an email from one of these people, but this is the first one to invite me to dinner at George Clooney’s house.  Sort of. There was some small print.  The invitation was not actually an invitation to dinner.  It was an invitation to buy a sweepstakes ticket.  In order to be eligible to go to George Clooney’s party I had to be at least eighteen (“or of majority under applicable law”).  I had to be a legal resident of the United States.  I passed that test with flying colors, but there was still a hitch: “Odds of winning depend on number of entries received”.  I hadn’t considered that.  So there was more to Ann Marie’s letter than met the eye!  Not only must I, in selecting an escort to George’s party, choose wisely—I must construct, and on the basis of a crucial unknown, an algorithm to assess the odds of actually being invited in the first place.  My instinct probably would be to invite my wife to go with me.  Same old same old.  But where had I heard that phrase—choose wisely—where had I heard it before?  It came to me in a flash: Indiana Jones, last Crusade, Holy Grail!   Well, we no longer live in an Age of Faith.  Dinner with George Clooney is probably about as close to the Holy Grail as it gets.  I must choose wisely. But first, apparently, I had to help George Clooney figure out where he lives.  Ann Marie was offering a “party for the President at George Clooney’s house.”  But the small print promises only “round-trip tickets for winner and a guest from within the fifty U.S. States, DC, or Puerto Rico to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor (approximate retail value of all prizes $3,200).” Remember, John, choose wisely.  There are imponderables here.  You have no idea of the scope of the competition.  Furthermore, the location of Mr. Clooney’s house may not yet have been determined by the Sponsor—and note the sinister capital letter on that word Sponsor.  Hmmm.  Choose wisely.  The only solid clues are the numbers with the dollar signs.  You cannot determine the odds of winning, but you can calculate, and calculate precisely, the potential return on investment—investment being one of the President’s favorite terms of art.  Now if you divide 3,200  by 75—well, do the math.  What you will get is forty-two followed by a decimal trail of six-six-six!  It’s the Habershaw Code! P.S.  When I went to my Google account to mount this post, I find that I have yet another message, this one from the President himself.  Its subject line reads “Clooney and Me”.  Dare I open it?  I must choose wisely.

Soon, Whenever....

            A theoretical advantage of the electronic revolution, and especially of the Internet,  is that it creates the conditions for instant global debate of a rapid-fire kind, in which the intellectual thrust and parry of the old Dominican theological faculties or the Oxford Union in its heyday is thrown open to the whole wide world—at warp speed.  Thus some obscure person named Hilary Rosen gains fame and infamy in the same instant with a single four-second sentence about Ann Romney uttered on national television; but within an hour Ms. Romney has riposted with the Tweet heard round the Echo Chamber.  So Google is now prepared to lead you to “about” 75,100,000 places you can find some electrons dedicated to the episode.

            The phenomenon, however, seems to be selective.  The intellectual ferment effected by “Gladly Lerne” seems to work at the rate of a fine old brandy, if not that of the construction of Salisbury Cathedral.  A couple of months ago I wrote a little essay about optimism and pessimism viewed from the macro-historical point of perspective.  The general question raised was the following.  Are we better off than we were—not four years ago, but four aeons?  It attracted zero public comments, but slowly a few private emails drifted in, and I sense a need to defend pessimism.

            I believe that it was Chesterton who remarked that the doctrine of Original Sin is unique among the dogmas of Christian theology is that it is empirically demonstrable.   Any medievalist is likely to engage at some point or another with Saint Augustine; but I only appreciated the full extent of the man’s genius when I became a father.   According to the Romantic Wordsworth “… trailing clouds of glory do we come/  From God, who is our home”: but the poet doesn’t mention the booming thunder in the clouds.  Look dispassionately at any newborn infant and you will see the pure distillate of egoism, its very quintessence.  It is three in the morning.  The baby wants to be fed, so the baby yells bloody murder.

            The screaming child gives no thought, none, to its mother’s exhaustion.  The father’s need for restorative sleep sufficient for the successful execution of his arduous work has never entered the child’s mind.  The baby knows only the immediacy of its own desire.   To expect to find in the situation the slightest suggestion of the postponement of gratification would be absurd.  The postponement of gratification is the product of socialization and coercion that free spirits like the Wife of Bath, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the gurus of modern educational theory have ever lamented.  Medieval political theorists, drawing on Aristotle as well as Augustine, saw in the necessary coercions (the criminal law, marriage, and whipping schoolboys for instance) sad memorials to a debased human nature. 

            We recognize the single-mindedness of infantile desire when we accuse others of “acting like a baby”, a form of behavior widely practiced by babes of all ages.  Certainly anyone long associated with a college campus will have seen many “demonstrations” at which a “student leader” in brief political liturgy shouts out two questions to assembled fellow “activists,” to which the crowd bellows in prescribed reply.

            Q: “Whadda we want?”

            A:  “Justice!/Disinvestment!/Free condoms!/Whatever!” [pick one ad libitum]

            Q:  “When do we want it?”

            A: “NOW!”

            But the distance between the vehemence with which the human race demands instant gratification and the lethargy with which it achieves useful aims is evident in a few revelatory facts of linguistic history.  Latin mane meant “the morning”, and especially “first thing in the morning,” but already in classical time it had begun its slide of procrastination seen in its Germanic (morgen, morrow, etc.) and Romance (demain, mañana, etc.) relatives, where it refers to the day after.  Forget Poor Richard’s Almanack; the principle by which people really live is “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow”.   There is by no means anything essentially Hispanic about the “mañana mentality.”  At least in Spanish one meaning of mañana remains “morning”.  In English morrow (without its prefatory to) simply withered on the vine of innate human indolence.

            That isn’t all.  In Old English the adverb sóna meant “immediately,” “right now”.  By Chaucer’s time a few centuries later there was definite slippage.  The word soon had taken on the rather indefinite if still hopeful meaning we tend to look for in it today.  Yet few things are less convincing than the telephone message from the contractor who tells you that his men will be by to complete the job “soon”.  It isn’t exactly a lie.  Describe it as the creative exploitation of rapid semantic development.

from the Christian Science Monitor

            An even more flagrant display of adverbial decay is evidenced by presently.  This word manifestly has to mean in the present, now, as opposed to in the past or in the future.  The chances are eight to three, however, that the next time you are sitting in a waiting room and the receptionist tells you that Whoever It Is will be with you “presently,” you will still have time for a couple of games of chess.  I have a lot more to say on this subject, and I’ll return to it presently.

Hate Crimes

         The System of Dante's Hell

I was for several years the master of an undergraduate residential college, so that I am not unaware that college roommates sometimes treat each other in vile ways demanding redress. Even so, a recent criminal trial just up the road at New Brunswick (NJ), which ended in the conviction of a Rutgers undergraduate (Dharun Ravi) for his serious mistreatment of his roommate, has drawn my attention to the relatively new legal category of “hate crime”.  Ravi grossly abused his roommate’s privacy by spying on him, and by encouraging others to view his secretly recorded sexual activities.  The roommate later committed suicide, and though the prosecution neither claimed nor demonstrated a causal connection, many have drawn the inference; and the gravity of the circumstance probably contributed to Ravi’s conviction of the crime of “bias intimidation”, which is a “hate crime” that might lead to lengthy imprisonment.

            I appear to be in a minority in my disquiet at the very concept of a “hate crime”.  I entertain doubts that a jury could accurately isolate “hate” as the principal motive force behind complex and ambiguous social actions.  (I shall reserve for another day a yet more fundamental objection:  so what if they could?)  But mostly, the confidence with which the press and remote observers diagnose “hate” alarms me. 

             Several weeks ago in Florida a man named George Zimmerman shot and killed a youth named Trayvon Martin.  I cannot imagine that anyone reading this blog is unaware of this appalling affair.  Even on the basis of sketchy and contested details it is very hard, prima facie, to imagine circumstances under which this killing was not stupid and abominable.  It is slightly more conceivable, barely--in light of the possible breadth of a recently instituted “stand-your-ground law” of which I had never before heard--that the act was not illegal.  

            Even as I have been writing this, the latest Newsweek came in the mail.  It documents in statistical detail the dramatically different ways in which black Americans and white Americans are inclined to interpret the episode.  But in fact as yet we simply do not know enough to draw safe conclusions concerning the “objective” facts of the episode, let alone conclusions concerning the mind of George Zimmerman.  Inclination in the absence of factual knowledge is just another, and nicer, term for prejudice.  Nevertheless dozens of pundits, several prominent news personalities, and even some elected members of Congress have felt perfectly confident in identifying this ghastly episode as a “hate crime.”

            That there are gradations of crime seems too obvious to require argument.  Certainly no medievalist is likely to deny the principle.  Most people are familiar with the so-called “six questions of journalism”.  A good reporter ill make clear to the reader the what of a story, its who, when, where, why, and how.  Yet how many people know the origin of these questions?  They derive from what were called the “circumstances” of sin as detailed in the confessional manuals of the later Middle Ages.  Incest was always a no-no, but it was worse to sleep with your aunt than with your cousin, and worse to sleep with your sister than with your aunt.  One of the great lines in world literature comes when the hero of Tom Jones arrives at the (mistaken) conclusion that Mrs. Waters is actually his Mum: “O good Heavens!  Incest—with a mother!”  The stroke of genius there is the indefinite article.  Tom is echoing the casuistry of a printed consanguinity table of an old prayer book!

            Our secular law has long recognized the concept of aggravating and mitigating circumstances in the commission of illegal acts.  The guy who kills somebody to take his sneakers and the guy who kills his aged wife because he cannot stand to see her descend yet further into Alzheimer’s are both killers; but few of us would be content to leave it at that.  Yet it would be a very risky business to start a taxonomy of “sneaker crimes,” “Alzheimer crimes,” etc.  If you feel confident about what a “hate crime” is you ought to feel equally confident about a “love crime”.  I don’t feel so confident.

            The system of Dante’s hell, based in the ancient Aristotelian ethical scheme, presents a tripartite hierarchy of dereliction.  All mortal sin will get you into hell, but the carnal obsessions that nearly monopolize our tabloid newspapers—the general Aristotelian category being incontinence—are of a primitive nature.  Worse in Dante’s eyes are the sins of violence.  The naughty lovers Paolo and Francesca are in a relatively high rent district of hell when compared with the abode of the jealous husband who murdered them.  But the worst category is fraud, which involves not merely the indulgence of appetite or the unleashing of irascible passions, but the actual perversion of the reason.  But applying human reason to evil ends is not thought crime.

            In my view “hate crime” is.  In an effort to purge ourselves of all taint of “prejudice,” we presume it virtuous to punish people for what they think–or what we think they think. So far as I am concerned punishing people for what they think is not a slippery slope, but the ski jump at Chamonix.  When I was researching and writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos I had occasion to meditate on the principles of Marxist jurisprudence (aka “revolutionary justice”) that founded the gulag state under Lenin and by the late Thirties under Stalin populated it by the millions.

            The Soviet authorities did not call these wretches “hate criminals”.  They called them “counter-revolutionaries”.  But the only crimes of the counter-revolutionaries were their thoughts, and usually only their thoughts as fabricated or imagined by their enemies.  The fictive and fantastic deeds to which they were often forced to confess flowed naturally from the fictive thoughts attributed to them.  We are still a long way from the gulag mentality, but I regard our “hate crime” legislation as a false step in the wrong direction.