Balmy


Late in the year, November 23, so brought a sweater and neck scarf out onto the downstairs front porch to watch and wait for Linda’s PCNH. Don’t need either one, it’s that -- balmy is the word, 66F and 83%. The carrier throws the newspaper on the back driveway unless there’s a substitute, in which case it may get thrown on the walk down front. The car rolls by slowly in silence, usually here long before now, four a.m. One morning a few years ago there was no paper because the carrier had had a heart attack, pray all is well this morning.

Newspaper thrown from a car by someone old enough to fear a heart attack: this must not be Grovers Corners anymore. It was when I grew up here. Doesn’t matter, Joe Crowell, Jr. is gone either way, age or war.

There’s the rolling car, pause and get the paper, don’t like Linda going out in the dark.

Headlines include GAME DAY. BCS team #2 paying $900,000 to play the Idaho Vandals who are 1-9 this season and were 1-11 last year. They must be saving up for a new stadium. Make that colosseum. This is championship football? 

21st century newspapers are becoming not PCNH but HuffPost and The Daily Beast.

Yesterday The Daily Beast ran James Kirchick’s review of Josef Joffe’s book The Myth of America’s Decline -- Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies. Dorian Gray comes to mind. A high intellectual not to be dismissed, Joffe is a professor driven to publish like any other professor, publish and sell books; and although it makes a marketable title, as a Jew he should but doesn’t seem to know that false prophets are not disproved in their own time but over generations even centuries. And his premise, judging by his extended title and by Kirchick’s review -- I have enough books to read and am not going to read Joffe -- is politics and economics, not cultural, national ethics, moral character. Surprising, considering the nature of Die Zeit that he currently edits. Yet even liberal has a fancy fringe. Still --


Economic, industrial, military strength, entrepreneurship and all that, we live in an unprecedentedly wealthy, wonderful seemingly free country that in our time has risen as lone ranger international superman. We can run two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, at the same time. The U.S. Navy is greater than the next forty navies of the world combined. We have forbearance not to use our nuclear might in justified fury in response to 9/11. We could order Iran to cease and desist a nuclear program that Israel also should not be allowed to have as neither should India nor Pakistan, and can enforce our will economically, militarily if pressed. We meant well by our own standards in Vietnam and elsewhere, and who thinks we were right in Vietnam must watch "Good Morning, Vietnam." We always mean well and we are always certain. We saved the world in response to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich; but we have taken it to our heads, and in the space of two generations have come to be resented, despised throughout the world as few other powers in history, all demised or diminished. Of our offenses, we excuse ourselves and march on. A former president and his retired administration initiated war crimes and crimes against humanity that, were we weaker instead of strongest, international tribunal would have had them on the gallows. We account to no one, least of all ourselves. 

Confident, certain, self-righteous and sure, we can’t even look back seventy years and understand 9/11, and Joffe would never understand it. We would rather pay to invade sovereign nations and wage decades of war on them than pay for the medical care of our own American children whom we didn’t want aborted. We are no longer, and less and less, governed by government of laws whom we elected but by administrators and regulations run amok, ever and oppressively more costly and burdensome, unanswerable and uncontrollable. Divided and dividing, hated and hating, we are a religious people of absolutes without reason, a litigious people of rights without responsibilities. Joffe is good, and his newspaper is good, born a Polish Jew, he is a German who knows America as well as any American, but patting us reassuringly on the head, he pats a body not a soul.  

No prophet of doom wants America to fall, including those Kircher and Joffe deride. But Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah and Jeremiah are alive and well in our time, and they are not false prophets. Economics given, there are declines and there are declines and even the strongest nation will not forever abide universally hated and without a soul. An intellectual’s intellectual, Josef Joffe nevertheless has background, baggage and agenda no less than any writer, including Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, Mohandas K. Gandhi, those five doomsday prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Joffe’s “false prophets,” Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Gary Trudeau.

Which to press: Publish or Delete?