Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

Book reviews in the conservative press (or any press, for that matter) are very uneven, largely because editors generally regard "the back of the book," as it is called, as less important than the articles and editorials up front. Exceptions are cultural magazines (New Criteron) and magazines devoted mainly to reviews, like Claremont Review of Books, but even in those precincts the careful reader must tread warily. We do not ask much of a review, only that it give an honest account of the book as well as a critical assessment.

We certainly get that in William Tucker's review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart in the April American Spectator. We have seen other reviews of this book, and Tucker's, one of the best, is clear and straightforward.

But, it's a big "but,'" sometimes reviewers transcend the usual limits and give us something extraordinary, a review that enlarges on its subject to expound in a short space more wisdom than the rest of the magazine. Such a review, by Yuval Levin of Murray's book, was published in the 3/19 The Weekly Standard. For the benefit of our readers who are not acquainted with the book, we summarize: the subject is the increasing gap between our elite and lower classes, the unraveling of our common "self-confident culture, defined by strong families, faith in God, untiring industriousness." The first part of the book describes how an elite is "forming an isolated and cohesive subculture of high achievement and bourgeois virtues," with little exposure to the lives of ordinary Americans. The virtues - marriage, religion, work, lawfulness - have declined somewhat since the early 1960s (Murray's benchmark), but not precipitately, whereas among the lower class there has been "cataclysmic cultural disintegration." Levin here criticizes Murray for implying that the problem is the gap between the classes, while Levin thinks the real problem is the lower-class mess.

As for the chances of a cultural revival, Levin points out renewal may be related to the "particular cultural high-point" Murray has chosen for his benchmark: the postwar era:

. . . [a] time of cultural cohesion, economic dynamism, and government activism all at once, and thus a time that both liberals and conservatives can look back to with approval.

But as Levin points out, post-war American was made possible by the war which had destroyed or maimed all other major economies, an "utterly unrepeatable set of circumstances." We were united as never before and we had a "series of economic booms" that created a broad middle class on an unprecedented scale. Levin thinks we have to find other ways "to achieve broadly shared prosperity and cultural vitality."

Then he goes on to make a point that impressed us most: not only was the postwar era unique, but it can't be projected back in time, as Murray seems to imply. Any acquaintance with our history tells us that Americans have endured agonizing times of social strain and economic upheaval - think of the 1850s and the bloody war in Kansas, or the 1870s and the huge labor strikes with troops firing on strikers, think of the election of 1896 when Williams Jennings Bryan's election would have been analogous to a second Obama term. As Levin says, renewing the American ethic is a "mighty challenge," but it's "of a type (and perhaps even a scale) that America has undertaken before."

We found this analysis exhilarating; it broke us out of our cocoon of presentism and made us see our problem in the long perspective of our history. Certainly those of us of a certain age see the post-war era as an Eden; our mistake was to think America had always been so before the dread 1960s. Candid examination of our history shows us times as desperate as our own. What Levin's perceptive review did was to free our minds to think, without the feeling of apocalyptic dread, constructively about our current problems.

The next review, of The Union War by Gary Gallagher, was written by the Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame in the winter issue of Claremont Review of Books. The book demonstrates that Northerners (and loyal Southerners) regarded the Civil War as a struggle to "save the union and thereby to vindicate free government." Gallagher thus confounds the "regnant progressive school of American biography," as Burlingame puts it. The book isn't long, but the author has made deep researches into contemporary writings, letters, newspapers, diaries, and so on. As our own reading has shown, the idea of the union was almost a mystic idea for Americans of the time. It is a great pleasure to learn of a book on our history that condemns writing that looks "through analytical prisms of current social and cultural norms."

So much for books and their reviews. In the same issue of the Weekly Standard that contains Levin's review, Andrew Ferguson has an article, "Declaring War on Newborns" about a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics called "After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" that advocates killing newborns on this basis:

When circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

When news of the article reached the public and there was an outraged response, this was the authors' apology:

The article was supposed to be read by other fellow ethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments . . . this debate has been going on for 40 years.

As Ferguson points out, the article performed a useful service by revealing the sinister farce of medical ethics as well as the logical path of the pro-abortion position.

It seems we can't get away from Andrew Ferguson. He has a first-rate essay in the 2/27 issue of The Weekly Standard called "The Big Creep" about the attempt to rehabilitate Bill Clinton. We hope we do not need to review Clinton's career for our readers, but if anyone wants to refresh his memory, we recommend this relentless essay.

Finally, we have three articles about different aspects of cultural decadence, illuminating essays about a neglected subject. In the April American Spectator Roger Scruton writes a thorough condemnation of the celebrated architects of the day in "Monumental Egos," pointing out that celebrity architects like Frank Gehry are interested only in glorifying themselves as they design "transgressive" public structures.

We must begin to look for those more modest architects and sculptors, and to reject the celebrity culture on which the great egos rely for their commissions.

Written in Scruton's usual clear, unpretentious style.

Fred Siegel's "How Highbrows Killed Culture" (April Commentary) tells how the cultural elite, beginning after World War I, full of contempt for what they regarded as "mass culture produced by democracy and capitalism" (when you see "mass" or "masses" you are in trouble), scorned ordinary Americans as they aspired to better themselves, not only materially, but also intellectually and culturally, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. Siegel relentlessly traces this poisonous condescension through the decades, quoting savants like H. L. Mencken, Aldous Huxley, Jos Ortega y Gasset, Herbert Marcuse, and Dwight MacDonald. His theory, that the middle class drive for cultural uplift was undercut in the 1960s by Susan Sontag's theory of "camp," is silly, I think, but what is important about the article is that conservatives, belatedly recognizing cultural decadence, are now identifying the figures responsible, once highly regarded as modernist champions.

The most significant essay of the three, in the 2/27 issue of The Weekly Standard, "The Great American Novel - Will There Ever Be Another?" is by Roger Kimball and therein lies its significance, because he is the editor of The New Criterion, a staunch defender of modernism, the movement that killed art and literature and culture. A statement like that, of course, is much too simple, because while modernism, a movement that began in the late 19th century and lasted into the early 1960s, was both a movement in itself of destruction, and was also a consequence thrown up by the deeper forces of decadence. Although Roger Kimball never uses the word, it was the belief, the force driving the savants of the cultural elite, animating their contempt for those not swinging with the zeitgeist.

As an essay, it's rambling, confused, and inconsequential, partly because it obviously began life as a speech and was poorly adapted, partly because Kimball's modernist allegiance prevents clarity of vision. He begins by expressing disgust at contemporary fiction, spending four paragraphs on it without ever defining what disgusts him. Instinctively, however, he gropes in the right direction, citing Matthew Arnold, who

. . . looked to literature, to culture generally, to provide the civilizing and spiritually invigorating function that religion had provided for earlier ages.

That belief, pathetic as we now know it to be, was one of the impulses behind the high art celebrated by modernism - first Henry James and Joseph Conrad, later T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Kimball has vague intimations of this, but the latter part of the essay is thoroughly confused and inconclusive. A sure sign of his bafflement is his resort to quotations from Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling, like the octopus with his ink cloud, an indication of intellectual obfuscation.

If we may quote a colleague, Jigs Gardner has something to say about this in his essay on Joseph Conrad, 7 in the series "Writers for Conservatives":

. . . As a creative phenomenon High Art lasted from the 1890s into the 1920s, and as a critical conception it was still the reigning orthodoxy as late as the early 1960s, but it must have been swept away in the general wave of destruction we know as "the 60s."I see no trace of it now, but of course there is no literature and no criticism of the sort we associate with the heyday of that practice. It seems strange that literature should reach an apogee of self-consciousness and then quickly dwindle to nothing, but after all, literature is not separate from its culture. Perhaps when an activity like literature becomes fully self-conscious it has reached the end of its present incarnation and then must descend into decadence and nullity so long as destructive social forces remain dominant, arising in new forms only when society itself is reborn. . . . I cannot say why, and of course my observations may be quite wrong, but it seems to me that when art is seen in almost a religious light, and when the artist becomes self-consciously an instrument of Truth, it's a sign that the lights are about to be dimmed.

Nevertheless, it is a significant event when a modernist like Roger Kimball sees the decadence of its product. *

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

There is a special quality about spring in northern New England that makes me value it more than springs I have known in both warmer and cooler climes. Farther south, the season lacks impact; the transition from mild winter seems effortless, almost commonplace, while much farther north there is no spring at all, only a dreary, sodden, shivering interval between snow and haying time. But on our hillside spring was a signal event, a deliverance that seemed almost miraculous after the long, dark, cold months of winter, when the frozen silence gave way to sound, movement, light, color, warmth. Spring's career, from its first signs in mid-April to the end of May, when maple leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, moved and exhilarated us, and not solely because of the contrast with winter. Its essence was a paradoxical fusion of power and fragility, of swelling force and tenuous delicacy. Looking out our front windows at the woods falling away from us steeply down the hillside, we saw, against the bare gray crowns of beech and maple, and deep green almost black spruce, we saw at first a slight green, yellow-green lighter than chartreuse, the beginning of the leafing-out of the poplars, tall and slender, scattered by twos and threes on the lower reaches of the hill. A haze about the branches, then patches of color, then a growing mass, retarded or quickened by the weather, precarious, tender, but with the strength of a flame burning across the hillside. It was all like that, light colors, evanescent, tentative, every advance stealthy, moving so slowly that each moment was savored, but not so slowly (as farther north) as to be imperceptible. Beneath all phenomena, cold days as well as warm, cautious tendrils and subdued hues, there throbbed the current of life, the driving force of spring.

Corbin's [the former owner of the farmstead] tiny garden, which I easily spaded up while the children extracted the roots of weeds, was just below the old barn site, and having absorbed the stable drainage for decades, the soil was deep and dark. But that was only a small part of the southward-sloping land, protected on the north by the stone wall of the terrace on which the barn was built. The rest, untouched for years, was heavy sod stiff with clumps of orchard grass. It would have to be plowed, along with a potato plot out in the Big Meadow.

In some way that I can no longer recall, I learned that a man named Eldon, who lived a few miles away on a road as remote as ours, might do the plowing. Somehow I also knew that he was a "little simple," which could mean anything, and could certainly be applied to myself. So, on a cool gray morning in the first week of May I set off with Seth and Jesse, back on their old school bus route, down the steep hill to the highway, a rollicking trip, scattering the gravel as we ran. After the bus came, I walked along the road past Toonerville, a settlement off the road, a few houses in a field, and then I crossed the highway and turned onto the road to Eldon's, so little traveled that it was spared the muddy ruts of the season. After more than a mile I came to fields, then a barn, and finally a small, unpainted farmhouse, its warped clapboards weathered to shades of gray. When I turned the corner of the house, there was Eldon tinkering with his tractor, one of those small Fords so popular after the war. After the usual wary greetings and formulaic remarks about the weather, we admired the tractor, a model I knew from my first farm job in New Jersey when I was fourteen. I could see that Eldon was proud of it and pleased with my praise. He was in his thirties, tall and gangling with long arms and large hard hands, a chin receding into a prominent Adam's apple, pale blue eyes behind rimless glasses, and thick brown hair recently trimmed by the bowl and scissors method. His face and hands looked raw, roughened and chapped by weather, but the general effect was softened by his ready, shy smile, the only visible sign, I suppose, of his simplicity. I may say here that Eldon's limited intelligence was never a problem in any of my dealings with him over the years - he worked for me, I worked for him, and we both worked together for a local farmer - but his speech, ah, that was another story. Perhaps because he lived in a remote area where he saw few people, he had an extremely thick Vermont accent, the strongest I ever heard. Being practically toothless didn't help his articulation. And he spoke in short, rapid phrases, so if you weren't on the qui vive and missed the first words, you were lost, just getting up to speed as the last garbled sounds flashed by. I might understand half of what he said. I was always a little uneasy when I said "yes" to anything; to what was I assenting? Usually I said only "Arr" in a noncommital, sagacious manner and hoped for the best.

He took fright when I told him what I wanted, shying away, rolling his eyes. It wasn't much, I said, pacing off an area, plus a potato patch. He mulled it over, looking down at his boots. He said something I couldn't make out, but the way he said it led me to venture "ten dollars." Now he scratched his jaw. Then he fired off something else in which I made out "potatoes," so that must be about the patch out in the field, maybe whether it was included in the ten dollars. "Yes," I said firmly. He smiled and nodded decisively. He'd be by at the end of the week if it didn't rain.

If you have never done it, you can have no idea how difficult it can be to do really fine plowing. I didn't know myself until I began doing it with a team in the 1970s. Assuming the plow is basically all right, the most crucial aspect is the setting, the adjustment of the depth and angle of the plow so that it always turns the sod over evenly at the correct angle. Nothing in farming can be so heartbreaking as bad plowing, especially if you've tried everything to make it right, and nothing can be so satisfying when it goes well. Small as the job was, Eldon took some thorough hours over it, positioning the plow precisely for each furrow, anxiously watching the ribbon of dark sod emerging behind the moldboard, turning the tractor carefully in the confined space. The potato patch went faster because the soil was lighter and there was plenty of turning space. Just as conscientious about discing, he went over the ground again and again until it was a fine tilth. I helped him load the plow on top of the disc when he was done, and then I counted ten one dollar bills into his hand. Folding them meticulously, he tucked them into one of those little snap purses that country people of both sexes used to carry. That was a lot to pay in 1963 for a job like that, but he had to travel eight miles all told and he put in five hours of first-rate work. I was well pleased and told him so. Settling himself in the tractor seat, Eldon smiled at me and repeated that rushing jumble of sounds with "potatoes' in it that he had uttered when we struck the bargain. I caught more this time but not enough. I cupped my hand to my ear. Again, I said. "And once more?" Which is how I learned that I had agreed to go to his place on the morrow to help him plant potatoes. Concealing my astonishment, I acted as if it were an understood thing. Oh yes, yes, of course, see you tomorrow morning. I felt like an ass.

Willie turned up in the evening and we went out to look at the job. The garden was a fine sight, but the potato patch, lying out in the wide expanse of the Big Meadow, surrounded by last year's weeds, everything dull and grayish in the twilight, the potato patch was startling, a sudden dark wantonness, inviting, suggestive, rich with promise. We walked around the edges, careful not to trample the fine soil; we kicked gingerly at the dirt, we crumbled it in our hands. Willie was impressed. He asked me what I paid, and when I told him he was sharply annoyed. It was greenhorn idiots from downcountry like me, lavishly throwing money around, who drove up local labor costs and made life difficult for real farmers like Willie who were trying to make a living here. Now Eldon and people like him would expect ten dollar bills to be showered on them every they lifted a finger, etc., etc. By the time he was done exposing the consequences of my feckless behavior I was sheepish, nearly as disgusted with myself as Willie was. Those with more sense than I about worldly matters, and that's practically the entire human race, always make me feel like a fool. Thank God I hadn't told him about the potato planting.

The next day, sunny and warm, I walked down the hill and went along to Eldon's. We sat on the porch steps, a bag of potatoes between us, two empty bushel baskets at our feet, and cut potatoes into pieces, each one with a couple of eyes. It is hard to believe - or at least it was to me - how large a part potatoes play in the diets of old-fashioned country folk. Fred Brown, telling me once of the calamity when his family home burned down, especially bemoaned the loss of their entire potato supply, which seemed odd to me, until he added that it was a hundred and fifty bushels.

Eldon's mother (a fine lady with all her wits about her) had tied some doughnuts to strings suspended from the porch eaves, and chickadees came and went, hanging upside-down, pecking energetically. Eldon talked to them in a crooning voice, "Snow bird, snow bird."

We planted in a field that sloped down to the road across from the house, shadowed by bare-branched apple trees along one edge, working steadily up one row and down another, Eldon dropping the potatoes while I followed, pressing them into the soil with my boot, hoeing dirt over them. It was one of those satisfying tasks completed in one movement - when we were done, we were done. The straight rows, evenly spaced along the rising ground, dimpled with the small hills I had made, came as close as reality ever can to the ideal lines of a Grant Wood pastoral scene, and Eldon and I stood in the dust of the road and looked on our work with great contentment. Walking homeward, I thought I might not be such a fool after all.

The half-mile of road from our house out to the road that ran over the hill to the village was impassable from mid-April into May, so bad that the mail driver couldn't make it in his jeep and we had to put up our mailbox at the end of the road. Even in May, after traffic was resumed, there remained some danger spots, traps for the unwary, and several cars got stuck. Two were memorable. The children had made themselves a playhouse in the woods where they had tea parties (a place they recalled, with great nostalgia, for years), and one Saturday afternoon they came running to report a car stuck in the road with a man asleep in it! And so it was - but he was dead drunk. I got the car out and left it parked farther on, beyond any mud holes. The driver never stirred, but he revived by the end of the afternoon, because I saw the car go rattling by the house and down the hill. Who he was I had no idea, but it was another one of those seemingly trivial encounters with someone, like Otis and Mrs. B, who would later play a significant part in our life.

I was working in the garden one afternoon a few days after the plowing when an old acquaintance appeared. He was a traveling salesman, and since he was in the area he thought he'd pay us a call - but his car was stuck down the road. I told him to visit with Jo Ann while I dug out the car. Two hours later I gave up and went home to milk Aster. At least he had towing insurance so he could get the garageman in town to pull him out in the morning, and he had planned to spend the night with us anyway. After a delicious spring supper of dandelion salad - dandelion greens wilted in a pan with chopped boiled eggs, bacon, and potatoes - and after we put the children to bed, Jo Ann and Jack and I walked up to the farm at the top of the hill, where Jack made his arrangement with the garageman over the phone and also called his wife. He had been very anxious about the call, insisting that she'd be distraught if she didn't hear from him. What he actually said, and he said it many times, was that she'd "go ape." Now, I thought, as we strolled homeward in the deepening dusk, anxieties are soothed and all will be well. The air was cool, but not too cold to silence the tree frogs, the only sound in the stillness that enveloped the hillside. It was a lovely time for a leisurely walk. But Jack was uneasy. The darkness and silence, which he remarked several times, bothered him so much that he made it seem not merely unusual but amazing and unnatural, perhaps even frightening. We stopped beside the car while Jack touched it here and there, caressing it I might say, and I assured him again and again that the road was rarely used. I didn't tell him (I wouldn't be so cruel) that virtually its only patrons were drunks on the way to and from Toonerville. We put out safety reflectors and went back to the house. My plan was to sedate Jack with home brew, and I did my best, but he kept rising from his chair to peer out the windows at the darkness, averring that he couldn't get over it, that his wife wouldn't believe him, and so on. Next morning he could hardly sit still enough to eat breakfast, and he was out of the house, pacing up and down the road, a full hour before the tow truck came.

Poor Jack, we said to ourselves as we waved goodbye. How his visit revealed the gap between our present life and the middleclass ways of our old friends! For every daffy sentimentalist who went gaga over our Beautiful Simple Country Life there must be many more who, if they could but catch a glimpse of it, would be as appalled as Jack. And how insensibly we had come to accept this life! A year ago, we, too, would have been intimidated by the absence of bustling human activity, and now we were taken aback by Jack's reaction, and contemptuous, too: his visit made us smug. We weren't in love with a car; we didn't need the comfort of the surrounding herd. This sanctimonious theme runs through all Simple Living books, including Walden, and I can only say that despite the insights given us unwittingly by Willie and the Woodwrights, despite our growing skepticism about the Simple Life, we were still dupes of the myth and the attitudes it engenders. Granted Jack's foolishness - that didn't make us morally superior.

I don't suppose it will be a surprise to my readers to learn that my ignorance about Aster was not confined to the technique of milking. I knew she was not a youngster but her age meant nothing to me even when, as I eventually learned, she was at least thirteen. Cows that old are often hard to breed. They come in heat all right, and they can be inseminated, but they don't settle (i.e., conceive). Bob Woodwright had paid the breeding fee of three dollars, for which I got two more tries. The long-suffering inseminator came out five times, and on the last occasion in April he said firmly that he wouldn't come again until we had the vet examine her. But she fooled us; that time she settled. We could look forward to a calf next February.

We took down the sap buckets, pulled the taps, scrubbed everything, boiled the taps in soapy water, dried everything in the sun and stored it all in the barn. The fireplace materials I stacked in the woods for next year. In mid-May I finally hooked up the water to the sink in the house. On May 25 two things told me summer was at hand: we saw Otis's truck parked at his place, and there was enough grass to put Aster out on a tether.

Although there were still frosts in early June, the garden was planted and thriving in rich soil sheltered by the barn terrace wall. The loamy soil warmed up rapidly, encouraging quick growth from the start, important in the ninety-day season of northern Vermont. I've never seen a better garden spot, with handy small conveniences: a shed beside the garden for tools, a cold frame, and attached to the print shop, a tiny greenhouse about five feet square. Kneeling by the door in the shop wall, I could reach in to cultivate my flats of seedlings, started in the house. Heated only by the sun, sufficient in such a small structure, it was covered by a blanket at night, and there I produced healthy, stocky plants that transplanted with no setbacks.

Thinking it would be a treat for the children, I built bunks along one wall in the hayloft, lined them with grain bags stuffed with hay, and there they slept all summer.

After the Christmas jam sale, my next pathetic money-making scheme was to advertise on a bulletin board at Tweedy my services as a tutor for the summer, but the only taker was a former student of mine, Paul Farrar, a frequent weekend visitor during the year. When he drove up in his station wagon in late June, he had with him another student, Morris, known as Momo, a scholarship boy who had ingratiated himself with his rich classmates at Tweedy by playing a variety of knowing roles novel in that preppy milieu - the cool, streetwise guy from New York, the inside dopester, the sardonic comedian. There was an initial pretense that he would be a student on the same footing as Paul, but it soon became clear that he had no money and was only looking for a place to sponge for awhile. We were a little taken aback, but after all he could work for his room and board as Paul was doing and forego the tutoring.

Unfortunately, the Simple Life was only one of my stupidities, and not the worst, either. I discovered in Corbin's study a miscellaneous collection of the writings of Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, and a hodgepodge of Lefty periodical literature of the 1930s. It would be nice now to claim that I was corrupted by books, but it was not so - I was already a Lefty of sorts, very unfocussed. What Corbin's library did was to accelerate and concentrate my development. At that time the very faintest hints of radicalism were just being whispered at Tweedy, and Paul, along with a few others, was infected. We thought of ourselves as anti-Communists, Marxists of the pre-1917 variety, and we read the then scanty Lefty press with what we imagined to be a knowledgeable eye, eagerly following news of the just emerging New Left.

The morning after the boys arrived I took Momo on a tour of the farm, winding up at the top of the Big Meadow, where we stood for a moment, surveying the panorama. Knowing what I've just told you, you will understand why I was not flabbergasted, not so flabbergasted as you might have been in June 1963, when Momo announced out of the corner of his mouth that it would be a good place for guerilla training. I have to admit, though, that I was a little startled.

"Guerilla training?"

"Yeah. I know some of the top cats in Progressive Labor who'd really dig this joint for maneuvers."

Only of course he didn't say "Progressive Labor," he said "PL," and of course I understood him. That he knew some of the top cats was a revelation. I might have accepted that and even the possibility of digging fox holes in the garden (If I could swallow Marx, why balk at that?), but Momo's demeanor during this small scene was too palpably phony: peering warily over the topography, piggy eyes narrowed, jaw set grimly, General Patton surveying the Siegfried Line. He had been flexing his poses for an undiscerning audience of college boys, hence a tendency to over-act. So, instead of resting content with his performance on the hilltop, he staged another, even stagier routine as we were walking back through the woods. Frowning, biting his lip, and staring down at the ground, he told me about his "dilemma": should he, or should he not, come the imminent revolution, shoot his parents, who were, as he finely phrased it, "petty bourgeois to their fingertips"? I tried to dodge the subject by saying that it was a delicate personal matter, but he was having none of that.

"It's not personal,'" he pointed out sternly, "It's a matter of revolutionary justice!"

This haunted Momo for several days, or rather, it haunted us as Momo thoughtfully placed himself in our line of vision, scratching his head, chewing his fingernails, furrowing his brow, staring out the window. The Yiddish theater, reborn in northern Vermont. Finally Jo Ann sensibly told him to go ahead and shoot the old folks and stop agonizing about it. That produced massive sulks, a regular reaction whenever he suspected we weren't taking his ridiculous routines seriously. Thus we learned, for the sake of peace, to keep our smart aleck remarks to ourselves. *

John Ingraham

John Ingraham writes from Bouquet, New York.

On of the best things about the Review is the way its contents provoke thought. A detail in an essay will start a line of thinking, carrying the reader on to new ideas and fresh insights. So it was when I read Herbert London's "A Word From London" in the April issue wherein he discusses the problem of exorbitant college tuition as well as the inflated liberal arts curriculum, concluding:

Colleges and universities won't die, but they will be obliged to define and justify their missions. That is a task both necessary and desirable for a nation that puts a premium on education and for an institution that has seemingly lost its way.

It is not Dr. London's intention to write a detailed analysis of collegiate difficulties today, nor is he proposing a concrete program of reform; he is merely pointing to a couple of egregious problems. I think any reader, especially one acquainted with the academic world, would immediately think of how hard it would be to change colleges today because they are products of our culture, and that would have to change before college could be reformed. So we throw up our hands in despair. But further thought tells us that although colleges are products of our culture, they are also makers of culture; there is a feedback loop here. So attempts at reform are not quixotic, and we do not have to wait for a cultural revolution to rebuild our institutions of higher learning; by struggling to rescue colleges we will be striving to improve our culture at the same time.

Another thought was generated by Dr. London's musings. I graduated from a small liberal arts college (1000 students) 50 years ago, and at the time, aside from the president, the treasurer, and the admissions director, the only administrators dealing directly with students were the dean of the college and the freshman dean. That was it. The students organized themselves into fraternities and a commons club, managing their own social affairs. Put it another way, they were relatively autonomous. Today, that same college, now grown to 2000 students, has a huge staff of administrators, deans and provosts and facilitators and monitors and coordinators, and the social life of students is tightly controlled. Fraternities have been abolished, programs and campaigns of political correctness are constantly promoted, and autonomy is gone.

On the other hand, the curriculum is a riot of indulgence. Fifty years ago, students were socially autonomous, but their courses of study were closely controlled by the faculty; today just the opposite is true. If the trashy curriculum is a problem, as it certainly is, I submit that the combination of curricular chaos and loss of autonomy is a disaster, part of the general, society-wide restriction of autonomy that has been going on for some time in America. Our colleges mirror our society, and our task must be to change them both. *

Barry MacDonald - Editorial

Rules for Radicals, by Saul D. Alinsky. Vintage Books Edition, 196 pp., Copyright 1971, ISBN 0-679-72113-4.

Saul Alinsky's "Primer for Realistic Radicals," bears comparison with two other books: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who lived 2,500 years ago; and The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, writing of the warring principalities of Renaissance Italy. All were men of action, with formidable intellects, capable of putting a finger on first-principles of human behavior.

Saul Alinsky was a man of wide learning, familiar with America's Founding Fathers, and drawing lessons from Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. He was born in Chicago in 1909, did graduate study in criminology, and hung out with the Al Capone gang. In the late 1930s he began his organizing career in the Back of the Yards area of Chicago. He organized black ghettos and Mexican American barrios, and started a training institute for "organizers." He was in the middle of the 1960s turbulence. He died in 1972.

Sun Tzu's book is the slenderest of the three, he wrote exclusively of warfare, and seems the most straightforward and "moral." He writes:

The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected.

The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat.

Sun Tzu wrote of tactics:

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever be seen.

In battle, however, there are not more than two methods of attack - the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers. The direct and the indirect lead on to each other in turn. It is like moving in a circle - you never come to an end.

Saul Alinsky writes of tactics:

There can be no prescriptions for particular situations because the same situation rarely recurs, any more than history repeats itself. People, pressures, and patterns of power are variables, and a particular combination exists only in a particular time - even then the variables are constantly in a state of flux. Tactics must be understood as specific applications of the rules and principles that I have listed above. It is the principles that the organizer must carry with him in battle. To these he applies his imagination, and he relates them tactically to specific situations.

Saul Alinsky often begins a section of writing with a definition or statement of purpose. He begins Rules for Radicals:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

A good example of Saul Alinsky's technique is his battle with Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, and with the city, which he called "Smugtown, U.S.A." The beef was over Kodak's hiring policy, and over the city's administration of education, housing, and municipal services. There had been a bloody race riot with burnings, injuries, and deaths in 1964, and the National Guard suppressed the uprising.

Saul Alinsky was invited to organize the black ghetto in Rochester by white, liberal, church pastors, but he insisted on being asked in by the blacks. His national renown filled executives and city officials with such dread that they vilified him on the radio and in newsprint, as if he were "the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan." The uproar boosted his stature in the eyes of the blacks, overcame their hesitation, and the blacks themselves invited him in, one of his requirements, and it would not have happened but for the panic and anger of the establishment.

The following proposed tactic was never used, as other methods brought concessions after months of conflict, but the suggested action shows Alinsky's brilliance and audacity. The action would have been directed at the Rochester Philharmonic, the city's and Kodak's crown jewel. The blacks didn't have money or the police power, but they had mass numbers of bodies.

Saul Alinsky suggested that they select a concert with quiet music and buy 100 tickets for 100 blacks. Before the concert they would have a three-hour pre-concert dinner of only lots of baked beans, with obvious consequences to follow. Alinsky wrote: "Imagine the scene . . . the concert would be over before the first movement!"

Here is the cunning use of Alinsky's principles and tactics: First, the disturbance would be utterly outside the experience of the establishment. Instead of the expected picket lines there was a shock attack on the famed symphony orchestra. Second, the action would ridicule, make a farce of, the law, as there can be no law banning natural physical functions. Stink bombs are illegal and cause for arrest, but not so natural stink bombs. The police, the ushers, and any other servants of the establishment would be paralyzed, pointing up another principle: use the power of the law by making the establishment obey its own rules.

The design of the operation included inevitable fallout. It would make the Rochester Symphony look ridiculous; people would double up in laughter nationwide. Another principle: the enemy can accept being threatened and denounced, but it is intolerable, insufferable, to be laughed at. The retelling would never end.

Also, the establishment would lie awake at night in fear that such tactics will recur: the threat is more terrifying than the tactic itself. Alinsky writes:

. . . such talk would destroy the future of the symphony season. Imagine the tension at the opening of any concert! Imagine the feeling of the conductor as he raised the baton!

On the following morning he anticipates the Kodak executives being confronted by the "matrons," their wives:

John, we are not going to have our symphony season ruined by those people! I don't know what they want but whatever it is, something has got to be done, and this kind of thing has to be stopped!

Here's another principle: Keep the pressure on. The constant threat of new actions would wear Kodak down.

The action applied two related principles: one, go outside the experience of the enemy to induce confusion and fear; two, avoid going outside the experience of your own people to shield them from confusion and fear. Once in the symphony hall the blacks would find themselves for the first time in their lives surrounded by a mass of whites in formal dress, a situation outside their experience. The use of beans and the inescapable consequence would compel the blacks to go through with the plan, in spite of possible embarrassment.

And lastly, a most important principle: the people must enjoy the tactic. The laughter and joy of the ghetto blacks as the idea was introduced showed Alinsky it was within their experience and it connected to their hatred of "Whitey" - they were eager for such revenge.

Alinsky's thirteenth rule is: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. He writes:

One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on the one side and all the devils on the other.

Polarization was the intent. His people were 100 percent positive, and the enemy 100 percent negative. His mentor, John L. Lewis, union organizer in the 1930s, didn't attack General Motors, he tarred its president, Alfred "Icewater-in-His Veins" Sloan. Lewis didn't attack the Republic Steel Corporation, he branded its president "Bloodied Hands" Tom Girdler.

Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals will not be erased from our cultural heritage. Its principles are a reliable resource for anyone who wishes to attack the power arrangements of a free society. It is important to understand the nature of Saul Alinsky's arsenal of weapons - his weapons are only effective in a free and open society. The point is to frame the issue, brand the villains, empower the powerless, and stampede majority opinion. A public spectacle serves to shame the opposition and force surrender.

As Alinsky is a warrior of the Left, I expected to find admiration for the Communists in his books, but not so. If the establishment is strong enough come to your home in the middle of the night and make you disappear, then only covert and armed resistance works. Alinsky professed to believe in

. . . equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life . . . those rights and values propounded by Judeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition. Democracy is not an end but the best means toward achieving these values. This is my credo for which I live and, if need be, die.

While the Jim Crow laws were in force in the South, it was not unreasonable to dwell on the racial injustice of America. Much of Rules for Radicals concerns Saul Alinsky's ministering to demoralized and defeated people in the ghetto, inspiring them, forging them together, giving them self-respect, and marching them toward achievable goals.

But Saul Alinsky failed to appreciate a free economy. He often quotes Adam Smith but ignores his most valuable insights. Wouldn't it be better to organize demoralized people by finding a useful economic purpose for them? Instead of pitting groups against each other wouldn't it be better to promote enterprise and productivity? His enemies were almost always corporations.

As with all Leftists, Alinsky challenges, insults, agitates, discredits, stirs unrest, rubs resentments raw, and enflames. He believes the only way to rescue the Have-Nots is to skewer the Haves. And he resorts to the terminology of warfare. For Alinsky ours is "a world of angles, not angels."

It would have been better to instill some measure of faith in angels, than to whip up the furious power of hatred, and hurl it into the future - which is his legacy. After Saul Alinsky the name of the game in politics (at all levels) and in culture (as practiced by Hollywood) is polarization and demonization. It is unclear how long a free society can bear a constant barrage of Alinsky-style attacks and remain free and open. How much hatred floating around society we can tolerate?

Saul Alinsky has marshaled and perpetuated forces of hatred. Co-existing with the penetrating intelligence of Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Alinksy has always been a search for meaning and succor in God, as the world's shrines, temples, and churches attest. Man's need for God is far deeper than Alinksy's cleverness.

The prominent inheritors of his tradition are the Reverends Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakan, purportedly men of God. Al Sharpton is responsible for a trail of scandals involving slander and incitement leading to riots and death. Where Alinsky was careful to operate within the law, and thus turn the tables on the opposition, Al Sharpton has broken the law and diminished his stature. To listen to Louis Farrakan is to hear the expression of full-throated hatred.

There was the shooting recently of Trayvon Martin (who is black) by George Zimmerman (who is half Hispanic and half white) in Sanford, Florida. The facts at this date are slowly emerging; the question is whether George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin justifiably in self-defense or not - there needs to be a trial.

Jesse Jackson hopped a jet to Sanford to give a speech at a town hall meeting. He said:

Trayvon is a martyr, he's not coming back, he's a martyr, murdered and martyred . . . Blacks are under attack . . . targeting, arresting, convicting blacks, and ultimately killing us is big business.

Saul Alinksy would have framed an issue and made demands.

Maybe Jesse Jackson has earned the stature to automatically assume the role of "spokesperson," because he's black, and a civil rights "authority." Alinsky would not have assumed that role. Jesse Jackson has no connection to the local people. He has no idea where justice resides in this case. He has no plan of action. If he's using principles and tactics they are crude. His program does not include reconciliation. He's stirred up hatred and broadcast it nationwide. It is impossible to measure how much damage this behavior does to race relations in America. Jackson cements blacks in hostility.

The Reverends Jackson, Sharpton, and Farrakan are not capable of the calculation and sophistication of Saul Alinksy. In none of their actions is even the trace of humor. None of these three bothers to promote reconciliation or peace, or tries to ennoble the human spirit; each has weighted down blacks with endless bitterness.

Alinsky wrote:

We must never forget that so long as there is no opportunity or method to make changes, it is senseless to get people agitated or angry, leaving them no course of action except to blow their tops.

I believe Alinsky would have been ashamed of Jackson's stupidity.

It is ironic that the most worthy inheritor of Saul Alinksy's genius is a man he could never have agreed with. No one is better at picking a target, freezing it, personalizing, polarizing, and ridiculing than Rush Limbaugh. Humor is his daily and deadly tool. How much more powerful Rush is, and what a better legacy he will leave because Rush values a free economy and "real" moral principles, he loves America, and he knows he is not God. And Rush reaches more people every day than Alinsky could ever have dreamed of. *

The following is a summary of the February, 2012, issue of The St. Croix Review.

In "Angus MacDonald - Rebel and Intellectual, 1923 to 2011," Barry MacDonald writes about Angus' formative years, his extraordinary character, and the America that he loved.

Mike Swisher, in "Angus MacDonald," relates his impressions of Angus from the 1960s: Angus loved America as immigrants often do, and he founded the St. Croix Review to defend America from the religious Left.

Angus MacDonald, in "Singing Stones," presents the meaning of Palm Sunday.

In "The Sympathetic Samaritan," Larry Christenson has a new take on an old tale.

Allan Brownfeld, in "Narrow Political Partisanship Obscures the Fact that Institutional Corruption Distorts Our Political Life," shows how both Democrats and Republicans enrich themselves legally through practices that would land ordinary citizens in jail; in "Is It Really 'Racist' to Insist that Voters Identify Themselves at the Polls?" he asks why the Justice Department is blocking state laws requiring photo ID; in "In an Increasingly Post-Racial Society, the Realization Is Growing that Not All Black Americans Think Alike," he says the suppression of dissent and differences within the black community for the sake of "unity" is beginning to weaken.

Herbert London, in "The Romney Hatchet Job," counters a recent profile of Romney by the New York Times; in "The End of the European Union?" he says that we are seeing the failure of well-meaning ideas, and now the Europeans need to roll up their sleeves and get to work; in "Israel and the Existential Threat," he describes the international and domestic political situation; in "Having Holder Resign," he makes the case why U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder should go; in "Is the College Experience Worth It?" he believes a consensus is forming that a college education is no guarantee for higher wages, and may not be worth going into debt for; in "The Vanishing Western Tradition," he laments that colleges are no longer offering courses on Western Civilization, and he makes the case for preserving our civic culture and the historical memory of our civilization.

Paul Kengor, in "On Vaclav Havel - and Chris Hitchens," writes about the Cold War hero and the intellectual on the occasion of their deaths; in "A Kim-Less Christmas," he writes about the tyrant on the occasion of his death; "Two Septembers: When Wall Street Erupted," he compares the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement with a bombing on Wall Street almost a century ago - both happened on the same date; in "Deer Season a Half-Century Ago," he recaptures a time when life was simpler.

Mark Hendrickson, in "China's 'Superior' Economic Model?" responds to a former American Union Boss' lavish praise of the Chinese Communists' economic system; in "When Clarence Thomas Came for a Visit," he relates the uplifting experience of meeting Clarence Thomas at Grove City College; in "Barry and the Babe," he praises Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth.

Jigs Gardner, in "Versed in Country Things - the Test of Winter," relates the day his cow ran off, the first slaughtering of a pig, and the dissolving of friendships due to his separation from their world.

Cornelia Wynne launches a new series in the St. Croix Review: "The American Pantry - Exploring Melting Pot Cookery," that aims to honor our culture by tracing how our various immigrants have merged their ethnic heritage with ours. The first recipe is Mike Swisher's Dutch pie crust.

In "Greenism Anatomized," Jigs Gardner reviews. Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, by Steve Millory.

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin, in "Conservative Magazines, A Survey - Post Mortems on 9/11," are about a few articles in three magazines that focus on our interactions with Muslims at home and abroad.

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

We were flabbergasted when, having asked a reader how he liked this column, he replied that he never looked at it because he didn't read the magazines discussed. "But that was the whole point!" we screamed, wrestling him to the ground and reaching for his throat. We are trying to acquaint readers with the universe of conservative thought, trying to enrich their knowledge. After all, we don't have a monopoly of conservative ideas, and it never hurt anyone to know more. We stopped strangling the reader after he promised to read the column, and now we shall try to fulfill our promise by writing at length about only a few articles in three magazines, rather than covering several publications superficially.

The Claremont Review of Books (a magazine that's steadily improving) prints two essays in its fall issue under the collective title: "Ten Years After 9/11, the Burden of Failed Strategy." The first, by Mark Helprin, "The Central Proposition," is built around that idea - that we could transform the Arab Middle East. In the first few paragraphs he summarizes the history of the last 10 years: initial military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by the decision to reform them; the worsening of the situation under President Obama; jettisoning allies and appeasing enemies; concluding that [the goal of] "transformation, nation-building, enlightenment - rests upon a negligent and superficial interpretation of history." Since the post-1945 transformations of Germany and Japan are often invoked, Helprin shows that they were totally and stunningly defeated, occupied by millions of troops, quite without allies or friendly borders. If colonial history is invoked, he points out that this was conditioned by advanced technology, organization, and discipline, "surging with the confidence of newly ascendant nations . . . white hot while the rest of the world was at rest." Of course, that is not the case today, far from it. He shows at some length the hostility and intractability of Islam. His own prescription: we should have attacked Iraq with much more power, installed compliant officials after a quick victory, turned on Syria, installed another compliant regime, and retreated to our secure Saudi base where we could keep a watchful eye on the region. He ends with a warning of a greater danger: China.

Anthony Codevilla's essay, "The Lost Decade," is longer, more comprehensive, and much more deeply critical, indicting what he calls the bipartisan ruling class for the same delusion Helprin cites: that we could transform the Arab Middle East, and failing to make the basic foreign policy distinction between regimes respectful of American interests and those antagonistic to us. So we appease China and Russia, inviting their open scorn, so we allow Iranians to kill our soldiers in Iraq, showing our impotence, and we have allowed Arab countries since the 1970s to "run educational and media systems that demonize America," insisting that we should have held those regimes responsible for the actions of their citizens, with the veiled threat of our overthrowing them if they failed to comply. He indicts the Homeland Security regime, based as it is on the assumption that it is "impossible to distinguish ordinary Americans from terrorists," just as the ruling class "went out of its way to appease the most unfriendly parts of America's tiny Islamic population . . . forcing ordinary Americans to wonder if the ruling class is on its side." There is more, but we have shown enough to make readers understand the author's argument.

Both essays seem intelligent and plausible to us, but the question of their realism bothers us. Take, for example, Codevilla's point about our tolerance of the anti-Americanism of Arab regimes: we have been reading analyses and denunciations of this policy for over 30 years, a policy epitomized by President Obama's antagonism toward Israel and partiality to its enemies, policy so wrongheaded as to be simply astounding, but nothing changes, no one in government admits how stupid our policy is and has been for years. Perhaps Codevilla's vehemence and passion is a gauge of his frustration at a situation that seems irremediable. Can any of us imagine the government pursing the course Helprin or Codevilla recommend? It is a failure of perception that is breathtaking. To read these essays, to understand their sense, is to see how far we were from taking the right steps over the past decade, and this is very depressing news indeed. But it is something we need to know.

National Affairs continues to confound us with its ups and downs. Its fall issue is largely ho-hum, but there's a piece by Peter Skerry, "The Muslim American Muddle," that's not only first-rate, but is, so far as we know, unique in conservative publications. Nowhere have we read such a thorough, nuanced description and analysis of Muslim organizations in America. Avoiding both the innocuous gloss put on by the right-thinking people and their media minions, as well as the alarmist views of some populist zealots, Skerry, who has evidently spent years researching the subject, sketches a complex picture of these groups. The first point is the populations' diversity, with religious, racial, and ethnic differences so widespread as to make speaking of a typical Muslim-American community absurd. Then there is the issue of the varying degrees of assimilation of the different groups. Skerry explains dilemmas faced by Muslims who are urged to stay close to the Muslim way of life at the same time that they must get on in the wider American world. Various Muslim organizations, their beliefs and practices, their evolution are described. The varying fortunes of overseas influence are examined. His analysis of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the strongest, most influential Muslim organization, and certainly the most dangerous, is detailed and judicious.

Skerry's conclusion is that the basic problem is not disloyalty but their reluctance to face the "implications of Islamism" that have been pushed by their leaders. This means real engagement with Muslims, which means in turn that we need to know much more, and we

. . . must overcome the populist paranoia, fueled by the evasivenessof our elites [emphasis ours] . . . We don't have the luxury of time to allow Muslims to sort out their loyalty to America. We - and they - must face the challenge now.

We cannot praise this essay highly enough, and we hope our summary will give our readers some idea of its importance.

The last essay we want to call our reader's attention to is "The Suicidal Passion" by Ruth Wisse in the 11/21 issue of The Weekly Standard, another magazine of uneven performance. But this, however, is one of the strongest, most searching essays about anti- Semitism we have ever read. Early on, the author states a proposition, unproven until the essay's end:

Arab leaders do not yet acknowledge that they sealed the doom of their societies in 1948 when they organized their politics against the Jewish state rather than toward the improvement of their countries.

After quoting various Arabs attesting to that truth, she moves on to discuss anti-Semitism as it functions in international politics as "a political instrument - a strategy, an ideology, sometimes a movement that organizes politics against the Jews." This insight becomes significant as she describes the history of the ideology in late 19th century Germany, just as modernism and liberal democracy were beginning to develop, when "anti-Semitism became a catchall for a politics of grievance and blame, associated with the strains of these new developments." We see the continuation of this in the way Arabs used the Jews to subvert the UN:

Ignored as a parochial issue, the Arab war against Israel safely violated the liberal ideals of the UN by appearing to oppose only Jews . . . they flaunted contempt for the liberal democratic culture of the West that Israel embodied.

As for the 1975 Zionism Is Racism UN resolution, it can be said that by accusing Jews of their own crimes, their own violations of UN human rights principles, they "enjoyed their symbolic political victory over the only liberal democracy in the Middle East." The larger target behind Israel, of course, is the U.S.

At the end, Wisse shows the proof of her initial proposition when she points out that anti-Semitism

. . . attributes real problems to a phony cause, and strategies of blame . . . eventually cause societies that resort to them to collapse under the weight of their negativity.

We think all our readers will be interested by our summaries of these three essays that give us much to ponder. Curiosity is the mother of knowledge. *

Cornelia Wynne

Cornelia Wynne's lifelong interest in cooking was inspired by growing up on a farm in the midwest where her family raised most of their food. After the death of her mother, she took over the household chores, raising and feeding the family. She raised 8 children of her own, and in recent years ran a boarding house in New Jersey, famed for its robust American menu.

As FDR once reminded Americans, "All of us are descended from immigrants," though not, of course, the Indian peoples who were already here (more on that later). And despite what the culture czars of multi-culturalism and political correctness proclaim to the contrary, we are still a melting pot nation, a place where people of all races and creeds come to pursue their lives in freedom and in the process become what we think of as Americans, imbibing our defining values: independence, resourcefulness, and a can-do spirit. Immigrants may leave their countries of origin behind, but something of their ethnic heritage is preserved, often in foods. We can trace these influences throughout our cuisine from Irish stew to Asian stir-fry, from Mexican salsas to Middle Eastern pita bread. The current enthusiasm for Greek yogurt is the result of an enterprising Greek-American by the name of Chobani who started a modest yogurt factory using a family recipe. Even on Thanksgiving, the ultimate American holiday when we pay tribute to the Pilgrims with a traditional turkey dinner, across this land the meal is often embellished with other immigrant traditions such as red spaghetti (to be featured). That's what's so great about our country, we make room for other cultures.

All of which is an introduction to this new series, which I am pleased to say is inaugurated by Mike Swisher's Dutch pie crust recipe. I know it works because it has been tested by my husband (the pie maker) in our own kitchen. Mike, as you may know, is Chairman of the Board of Religion and Society, the educational foundation that publishes The St. Croix Review, and he owns Bayport Printing House, Inc., that prints The St. Croix Review.

A little background: The Swishers came to this country in the first half of the 18th century, departing from Amsterdam and arriving in Philadelphia. The name "Swisher" was originally spelt "Switser," which suggests a remote Swiss ancestry, but Mike says that his forebears lived in Holland as far back as the middle of the 17th century and his family has always regarded them as being Dutch. His particular ancestors settled in the northern part of the valley of Virginia where they were fruit growers, a typical activity of the Dutch settlers. The large, sweet, white-fleshed clingstone peaches they grew are a local specialty. Ripe from the tree, Mike describes them as being as large as softballs and very juicy. If you can find or grow such peaches ("Belle of Georgia" is a similar but freestone, pink-fleshed variety) make a pie with them using Mike's unique family recipe. "It's as easy as pie" is a Swisher family slogan.

Swisher Family Pie Crust

Be sure to have the butter and water as cold as possible, get the butter well-blended with the flour, and then add the flour and water paste. It should come together into a roll-able dough rather quickly (it did in our trial).

2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted / 1 teaspoon salt / 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, chilled / 1/4 cup water, iced

Reserve 1/3 cup flour and mix with the 1/4 cup water to make a paste. Blend butter with remainder of flour. When blended with butter completely, add the flour paste and stir with a fork or work in with fingers. Work dough only until it coheres - as little as possible.

Form dough into a ball. Mike recommends chilling dough in the icebox while you prepare the filling (or chill for a couple of hours as my husband did). Cut dough in half and roll out bottom crust. Fill pie, roll out top crust, close pie and bake at 400 F for 10 minutes, then at 350 F for about 45 minutes or until filling is bubbling.

If you have a family recipe and history to share, email your material to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or mail to the editor at The American Pantry, St. Croix Review, PO Box 244, Stillwater, Minnesota 55082

Next time: Chippewa Venison Chile. *

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Looking back over my forty-five year career with animals like pigs and cows and horses, I think it very unwise for anyone to undertake their care who has not been raised to it from his earliest years, because only then will he have imprinted in his brain (and deeper than that) the precautionary attitudes that will keep him from making dreadful mistakes that often bring harm to his animals. Once you are as old as I was (twenty-nine) it's too late, then wariness is no more than muttered admonitions when they must be instinctive, not thought over but acted upon unconsciously and instantly. So on a warmish afternoon in late November with a bit of sun, when the snow was then enough for patches of grass to show here and there, I turned Aster into the pasture behind the house at noon, thinking she'd like a break from the stable, a sentimental thought. It is an axiom that I eventually learned that you never turn an animal into a pasture without first thinking about the fencing, running over it in your mind, probing for weak spots, but then I didn't give a thought to the leaning posts and sagging wires in front of me. I went into the house, ate lunch, did some reading, and then turned to churning butter. I forgot all about Aster. Even when the sky darkened and snow began I didn't think of her. It was only when the boys came home from school late in the afternoon that I remembered. "Oh boys, bring in the cow, will you? She's in the pasture."

When they came running back to tell me she was gone, my heart sank, not because I realized how stupid I had been, but because I hardly knew what to do, never having faced such a situation. The three of us ran out to search the pasture until we found her tracks heading right through the broken fence and up into the darkening woods. A grim prospect. Running back to the stable, I got the lantern and, leaving Jesse to go back to the house, Seth and I set off, following the tracks up through the woods, down through a brushy meadow, and out into the road. She was headed away from home, over the hill toward the village. Snowflakes hissed against the lantern. We had not gone far when a pickup truck, coming towards us, stopped.

"Your cow's over to my barn. C'mon."

We climbed in, he turned the truck, and we started over the hill. I did not know him, nor where his farm was, and I had trouble understanding him, but I made out something about it being a bad day to leave a cow out.

I lied from shame. "I just let her out to get some exercise, and before I knew it, she was gone."

We had driven over the hill and started down the other side before he spoke again. It sounded like a question. "What?" This time I heard the syllables clearly but couldn't make sense of them. It sounded like "Wutchee-buln." I just nodded, said "Yep," and hoped for the best. He said nothing. We drove a long way down the hill toward the village, then along a side road before we stopped at a large barn beside the road. There were lights in the stable and we could hear what sounded like a lot of cows. The farmer led us around the corner of the barn and there was Aster, tied to the wheel of a manure spreader.

"Got a rope?"

"A rope?" I stared stupidly at him.

He untied the rope from the wheel and handed the end to me. "Y'can have that; it ain't but a piece."

I started to thank him, but I was yanked away in an instant as Aster tore off around the barn. As I was dragged along, I heard the farmer yell, "Hang on there!" and I thought I heard him laugh. When I got back to where I had started, the farmer was gone but Seth was waiting with the lantern. As we walked beside the barn, we could hear the clatter of milking machines and the sound of voices. I was relieved when we got on the road. We had not gone far when Aster tried to go back, and it was all I could do to turn her. Then she wouldn't go at all. Seth twisted her tail, I tugged on the rope, and finally we got her moving, very reluctantly, in the right direction. It was not until we turned the corner into the main road that she gave up the struggle and walked willingly along with us. "Why did she do that?" I wondered.

"Maybe she's lonely," Seth said. I thought about that. I had bought her out of a herd. Would she miss her stable mates? I knew nothing.

Now our way was all uphill, a steep climb for half a mile. The wind was in our faces, and snow blew down our necks as we bent our heads and plodded on. The snowfall thinned and then stopped just as we reached the top and started down the other side. I was tired, and I didn't like to think about Seth, only seven years old, who had walked a mile and a half home from school to start with. The syllables I hadn't comprehended - "wutchee-buln" - kept sounding in my head until I began to form them with my lips, whispering them at first, finally chanting them aloud to entertain Seth, until the two of us were shouting "wutchee-buln" at the top of our voices.

"That's it! That's it! That's what he said; "What's she, bullin?" I stopped in the road and laughed, pleased that I had solved the puzzle. But what did it mean? It didn't take long to figure it out. Holding the lantern close, I could plainly see some clear mucus under Aster's tail.

"Well, Seth, you were right: Aster was lonely. She's in heat, which means she didn't settle when she was bred, so she's not going to have a calf next spring. Now we'll have to see about getting her bred again." That was a great disappointment. We had all been looking forward to our first calf.

As we turned into the side road leading to our house, the sky was suddenly, brilliantly clear. "Look at the stars!" I cried. They brightly studded the black sky. We walked on within our small circle of yellow lantern light, looking up at the stars. Aster stared ahead, her brown eyes gleaming darkly in the swaying circle of light. The Pleiades was in the center of the view, and I pointed it out to Seth and told him the story. The idea of stars having names and stories was a strange novelty, and he wanted to see Orion, but I told him he hadn't risen yet; I would take him out after supper and he could see the constellation then. The last quarter mile seemed very long as we trudged on in silence, the only sounds our muffled steps and Aster's breathing.

As I milked, sitting on the stool with the lantern on the floor throwing a warm, mellow light around the stable - on the looming cow, the whitewashed walls, the chickens on the roost, the yellow straw on the floor - as I gazed around at all these now familiar things, unknown three months ago, I told myself that I should be content: I had brought the cow home and all was well. But I knew that I had been unbelievably stupid and negligent. Of course I had known of my ignorance from the beginning, but vaguely, even flatteringly, because I could see how I had learned one thing after another: how to milk a cow and churn butter, how to fell a tree, how to feed a pig and so many other things. Now, however, my easy optimism about my capacities was disturbed. I hung up the milking stool and bent to pick up the lantern. In the act, looking down at the warm circle of light at my feet, I was aware, suddenly, of the stars above the cow, above the hayloft, the barn roof, over the hill, millions and millions of miles above the earth, whirling and burning in the night of space colder and darker than any northern winter night could be, with their human names and human stories.

There was no one to tell me how to slaughter a pig (Willie had his done for him), so I wrote to the Government Printing Office to ask if there were a publication that would tell me how to slaughter and process one pig, in other words, not a large-scale commercial operation. I promptly received a booklet, Slaughtering, Cutting, and Processing Pork on the Farm. That was just what I wanted, and it cost only twenty cents. The cover is long gone. Years ago I made another from the heavy stock used for file folders, and that's worn and greasy, the title nearly effaced. As I turn its tattered, stained pages, I am reminded of that seamanship book cherished by the Russian trader in The Heart of Darkness, the book of which the narrator says,

You could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages . . . luminous with another than a professional light.

This is the epigraph:

Success in preparing meat depends on strict attention to the methods used. None of the details of these methods is difficult, but all are important.

And it is absolutely true, as is everything else in the booklet. It is a masterpiece of practical truth presented simply and directly. But there is something else going on here, as the copious illustrations reveal. The man in most of the photos in the first section, the one on slaughtering, is a paragon of neatness and cleanliness. Hair carefully combed, spotless work clothes unrumpled, everything about him shipshape, he epitomized not merely the firm, unruffled efficiency of the whole operation, but also the Platonic essence of the booklet, which represents in its pages the Type of pig slaughtering, the Ideal towards which we can and should strive, but which we can only approximate, as I know too well. Over the last nearly fifty years that I have slaughtered pigs, my own and others, with somewhere around one-hundred and fifty individuals, I can find no one, when I search the images in my memory, who is not dirty and disheveled, splashed with water and blood, stuck all over with bits of pig hair, and if, as is almost always the case, we've been heating the water by burning tires, smeared with soot, too. But I did not know that yet - those slaughterings lay in the future. Right now in mid-December, Clay's food supply was about exhausted: all the beets and carrots and turnips and cabbages scavenged from gardens, all the apple pomace, all the boxes of stale cornflakes sent up by a grocer friend in Tweedyville, all the few bags of feed we had bought, everything Clay had ingested, and now I must kill him and make him into ham, bacon, chops, spareribs, sausage, and lard.

We had a reunion of some of the friends who had helped us move in September, Walt and Mary and two or three others, and the night before the job I wrote an abstract of the slaughtering and butchering sections of the booklet. Sitting at the table by the lamp, so intent on the task that I was oblivious to the festive goings on about me, I wrote a precis of each step on little pieces of paper that I could carry in my pocket next day, testimony to my anxiety as well as to the value of book learning: without any experience (I had never killed any farm animal, not even a chicken) I was able to read a description of the technique, understand it well enough to make an abstract, and finally reduce that to notes of instruction. When Jo Ann and I did the job on Cape Breton years later - slaughtering, removing the hair, gutting, splitting the carcass - it took about an hour, and next day, having hung the carcass overnight to cool, I would butcher it alone in another hour. That day four of us took the whole day to do the job.

My only blunder occurred at the start when I failed to stun Clay with the .22. It is never easy to hit the precise spot between and above the eyes, and I was so nervous I'm surprised I didn't shoot one of the helpers. There was nothing for it but to catch him and hold him down while I stuck the knife in to sever the carotid artery. It was ten below and getting colder all the time so it took forever to get the water hot enough to remove the hair. Unfamiliarity with what we were doing was the main problem. It is one thing to make an abstract of words on paper, but quite another to make one's muscles work quickly and deftly in obedience to those words. Book learning is brought to completion by experience. And I was such a perfectionist, determined to follow the directions exactly, to produce a sleek, clean carcass like the one in the booklet! It was, I think, the best pig job I ever did. But picture me standing in the snow, peering at those little slips of paper, trying to decide if Step Twenty-Nine is done properly so we can move on to Step Thirty! Because it was so cold - twenty-five below by the end of the afternoon - the carcass was firm enough to butcher in the mudroom after lunch. While we were cutting up the carcass, Jo Ann and Mary were rendering the suet into lard and cracklings, that wonderful byproduct hitherto unknown to us. We even ground the sausage then, and I would have mixed the cure for bacons and hams, too, but the simple calculations eluded my tired mind. Working the entire day in extreme cold while concentrating intently on a strange task would be tiring enough, but there was something else, as I eventually learned from other slaughtering jobs: the killing of an animal is never a trivial act, and it sends a shock all though your mind and body.

Walt and Mary stayed on into January, after everyone else went home for Christmas, helping to give us another lesson in the arts of the Simple Life when, going upstairs one night in the dark, Mary tripped and crashed into the stovepipe, which ran from the kitchen range across the living room ceiling and up into the bedroom above, where it finally entered the chimney. I was sitting at the table, reading; in an instant, even as the lengths of pipe were tumbling about me, the page darkened, covered with a film of soot. The air was filled with a fine black dust. I picked up a piece of pipe and looked inside - it was stiff with soot, almost entirely closed. Now I knew why we were having so much trouble with the smokey range. What a horror faced us next morning! The entire room, the most important one in the house, was covered in soot, whose chief characteristic, from the point of view of cleaning it up, is its greasiness. No casual dusting works; that just smears it. Everything must be thoroughly cleaned. It took us all day. After that, when I cleaned the chimney every month I also took down all the stovepipe and cleaned that, too.

Now the snow was over a foot deep, and since the road up and over the hill from the village was only plowed as far as our place, the boys could no longer make the trek down the hill to the bus. The school board's decision was for the boys to walk two and a half miles over the hill to the village, a route already ruled out for a bus as being too dangerous in winter. After a brief struggle, the board relented to the extent that a smaller bus now going partway up the hill, would continue to the top but no farther, three quarters of a mile from Corbin's, and there the boys would meet it until spring, when we would revert to the initial arrangement. The board was determined not to send a bus to our door. We did not know it, but our children were the only ones in town who did any walking at all.

For years I had been making all our jams and jellies, jar after jar of wild grape, apple, chokecherry, elderberry, raspberry, blackberry, cranberry, red currant, strawberry, mint, enough to give plenty to our friends, and now I conceived what I thought was a brilliant idea: I would suggest to our friends that they buy those wonderful preserves as Christmas gifts for their friends. A friend who had a home printing press made up postcards with our price list, and early in November I mailed them to twenty-five people. What was the result? One couple, needy graduate students, ordered two jars, and another couple generously ordered jam for a number of friends. I must have expected more than that, but probably not much more, because I remember clearly how pleased I was as I wrapped and addressed the packages. What was disappointing was the lack of response, the utter silence from twenty-three out of twenty-five. In time I realized that the jelly card, seemingly so insignificant, had been that last straw and I was never going to hear from most of my friends again. There had been indications for some time that they were not pleased with our move, as a few had not been shy about telling us, but this was too much, a brazen act of effrontery, trying to exploit my friends for money. Keep in mind that this was some years before the pose of the Simple Life, first enacted by the herd of hippie homesteaders, would be applauded by all right-thinking citizens.

With our academic friends, things were a little less straightforward. From the beginning, from the previous spring when our plans became known, I was made to feel, not that I was doing something stupid (a wholly justified criticism), but that it was momentous: "You're quitting Civilization," "You can't run away from Life," and there was a resentful tone to their accusations, as if I were challenging them in some way. It took a long time and many ruminative sessions on the milking stool before I put enough distance between myself and my old life, with all its mental habits and associations, to enable me to understand their reaction. Most of the instructors (and a good many of the higher-ups) at a pretentious second-rate college like Tweedy were insecure toadies, men who could actually and unashamedly say, "Wait until I get tenure, then I'll take off the mask." They might be pleasant, sometimes even intelligent, but they were fearful conformists of shallow culture and narrow interests. I am not sure of the exact notion that formed in their minds when I said we were going to live on a small farm on a remote hillside in northern Vermont, but I think they imagined that I was escaping the clutches of their world to do something that, despite its drawbacks (no New York Times on Sundays, no endless coffee drinking in the Student Union), was mythically masculine, earthy, and independent. Their resentment had its source in a sort of sneaking envy. They hoped that I would fail, that the whole thing would turn out to be a humiliating fiasco, proving to their relief and satisfaction that the choices they had made, the demeaning expedients of the careers they were anxiously pursuing were indeed good and just and correct. The jelly cards, evidence of my degradation, were their vindication. I had dropped out of their caste, and now out of their class - and good riddance. From a worldly point of view, they were quite right, and I say that without sarcasm.

But let us not end this Christmas account on such a solemn note. With my propensity for tactlessness, my talent for simultaneously amusing myself and offending everyone else, there was the matter of the greeting cards. A former student, knowing my wayward sense of humor, had sent me a magazine devoted to photos of effete-looking young men in studied poses wearing suntan oil and jock straps: "Mark and Peter take time out to folic at the beach." Mark was also selling greeting cards featuring pictures of himself in various attitudes, and I, having thoughtfully selected my favorite, squandered a few of our dwindling dollars on a couple of dozen. Mark, simpering suggestively, is pictured leaping gracefully out of a large gift box, his outstretched arms holding a banner that doubles as a fig leaf and a proclamation: "Seasons's Greetings!" Mark's appearance among the Christmas mail of my friends must have been the QED of my erratic course, an appalling example of bad taste at a time when shame, if nothing else, should have dictated a mien of sobriety and humility. *

Larry Christenson

Larry Christenson is the author of numerous books, including The Renewed Mind, and The Christian Family. He writes from Northfield, Minnesota.

A sympathetic Samaritan came upon a man who had fallen among thieves on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. They had beaten and robbed the man and left him for dead. The sympathetic Samaritan watched from the side of the road for some time. A priest happened along, but he passed by on the other side and did not help the poor man. A Levite came along, but he passed by on the other side also.

The sympathetic Samaritan sat in a ditch on the other side of the road. The longer he sat there the angrier he became. "This is not right," he fumed.

That poor man ought to be helped. That priest should have helped. That Levite, too. There ought to be a law . . .

The sympathetic Samaritan leaped suddenly to his feet. Of course! Why hadn't he thought of it before? That was the answer: there ought to be a law!

He raced back to Jerusalem and formed a Committee to Promote Legislation for the Help of Unfortunate Travelers Who Fall Among Thieves. The local rabbi, a charitably inclined man, gave support. The widow of the former high priest lent her prestige to form a Women's Auxiliary of the CTPLFTHOUTWFAT. The director of the synagogue school wrote a scroll attacking mean-spirited Priests and Levites. Students at the College of Scribes held a placard-carrying demonstration in front of the Temple.

Unfortunate Travelers Deserve Compassion!/Fairness and equality for unfortunate travelers./Tithes for travelers, or feasts for priests?/Unfortunate travelers are everybody's concern./Priests and Levites must pay their fair share!

The pressure of popular opinion swayed the Sanhedrin. A measure was introduced to levy a graduated tithe to provide Aid For Unfortunate Travelers on the Road Between Jericho and Jerusalem.

Some Sadducees voiced the opinion that this would violate the Commandment against theft. Reasoned their spokesman:

People are free to help Unfortunate Travelers as much as they please, but if we confiscate shekels from those who do not share a concern for Unfortunate Travelers - who prefer to help, let us say, widows and orphans - we cross a line that leads to legalized theft.

"If we left it up to voluntary giving," shouted a Pharisee, "Unfortunate Travelers would never get the help they need!"

"Perhaps," the Sadducee agreed, "but theft remains theft whether for a good cause or a base one."

A young Pharisee from the Negev leaped to his feet:

A priest and a Levite passed by this unfortunate traveler without lifting a finger to help. Such neglect cannot be tolerated.

Are we, or are we not, our brother's keeper?

"The law gives you no right to force a man to help Unfortunate Travelers," replied the Sadducee.

This, in fact, crosses another line - the commandment against coveting. Those advocating help for unfortunate travelers are not content to do the helping themselves. They cast greedy eyes on the wealth of others and seek to confiscate it in support of their project. There may be people on whom God has laid no concern for this particular project.

I am more concerned for the heart-rending plight of unfortunate travelers than for the luxury of priests and Levites.

Retorted a Pharisee loftily. "They can easily enough spare the tithe . . . will have plenty left over!"

The Sadducee rolled out a scroll.

The law says: "You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great." The rights of a man under the law cannot be set aside by the Sanhedrin or by popular opinion. You can no more steal the property of a rich man than you can breach the right of a poor man to speak freely in the Gate. The fact that a man is unfortunate does not give you the right to steal or covet on his behalf.

The arguments of the Sadducees fell on deaf ears. The statute to Aid Unfortunate Travelers On The Road Between Jericho and Jerusalem was added to the law. The Sanhedrin appointed a 32-man commission to see to the needs of unfortunate travelers. The tithe collectors began their rounds to see that every citizen contributed his fair share to help unfortunate travelers.

When word of the law drifted northward to Galilee, people in Cana began to pressure their Pharisee to provide Emergency Assistance For Bridegrooms Whose Wine Runs Out Before The End Of The Wedding Feast. Pharisees in Capernaum drafted a proposal to Provide Bread And Fish For Large Crowds Who Find Themselves Short Of Provisions In The Desert Near Sundown.

In Samaria the sympathetic Samaritan was feted by his friends, who had trumpeted the cause of unfortunate travelers for some years past. "If we extend this to other projects in small doses," they exulted, "we will soon have enough power to move the capital from Jerusalem to Samaria!" *

Angus MacDonald (1923-2011)

Angus MacDonald founded the St. Croix Review, then called Religion and Society, in 1968.

Jesus turned toward Jerusalem. On the way, He told His disciples He would be taken captive and handed to the Roman government for trial. They knew Him well and were devoted to Him, but what happened to the leader could well be the fate of His followers. That He admitted He would be captured seemed a confession of defeat. His disciples were afraid, and they wished themselves elsewhere.

The reason Jesus decided to make a triumphal entry into Jerusalem was because of His impending capture. He believed in His mission, and His disciples believed in Him: that He was God's appointed messiah. He would give His disciples something to remember in the lonely days that lay ahead, something dramatic which they could look back on, and on which they could feast their minds with remembrance. He would make a public declaration of His messiahship, ride into the holy city as God's Chosen One, in the traditional fashion, and He would allow the people to acclaim Him. He would give His disciples one bold moment to infuse courage into their fears.

If we were to follow the same route as Jesus, we would take the turn of the path around the hill, and great Mosque towers would suddenly rise before us; beside the towers would be the vast enclosures of the Musselman sanctuary; beyond this imposing center the city would stretch out of sight. When Jesus took that turn, the magnificent, sprawling city lay before Him, as magnificent in the first century as today. The temple was in the center, surrounded by gardens, and beyond, as far as the eye could see, were the homes of the people. The valley of Kedron met the valley of Hinnon, and Jerusalem rose from the abyss.

Jesus rode beyond the turn of the road, and the great metropolis lay before Him, the city He had loved and which was so full of history, sin, and glory. He wept. "If thou hadst known," He said, "even thou, at least in this thy day, the things that belong to thy peace! But they are hid from thine eyes."

Jesus entered the city with triumph, but He may not have made the stir we sometimes imagine. Though of significance for us, when one thinks of the size of the city and the number of the inhabitants, it was probably a thing done in a corner. Hundreds of men, many of them fanatics, only some of them worthy, every year claimed to be prophets. As the various disciples acclaimed their leaders, the crowd, with good humor, would join in the excitement. When Jesus entered and His disciples cried, "Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!" - the people who were in a carnival mood would take up the cry until hundreds and perhaps thousands joined the procession; but their sentiment was of good humor rather than of agreement.

The meaning of the triumphal entry was greater to the disciples who worshipped their Lord and to the evangelist who told the story than to the casual wayfarer. To us who live a long time after the event and who know what Jesus has meant in our lives and what He has meant to our civilization for two thousand years, the triumphal entry means He truly was the son of God, the savior of the world sent to announce salvation. If it be true that it was only a single, bold moment, a flash of light in a sea of tragedy, a bright flame quickly snuffed, a beautiful, delicate growth soon to be crushed by the authorities, we believe that the flame which men put out may yet be the flame to which we must repair and that the announcement made that day was by the Son of God, a divine proclamation by One who may and must conquer the world.

I saw the Conquerors riding by/With trampling feet of horse and men/Empire on empire like the tide/Flooded the world and ebbed again.

A thousand banners caught the sun,/And cities smoked along the plain,/And laden down with silk and gold/And heaped-up spillage groaned the wain.

I saw the Conquerors riding by,/Splashing through loathsome floods of war -/The Crescent leaning o'er its hosts,/And the barbaric scimitar -

And continents of moving spears,/And storms of arrows in the sky,/And all the instruments sought out/By cunning men that men may die!

I saw the Conquerors riding by/With cruel lips and faces wan:/Musing on kingdoms sacked and burned/There rode the Mongol Genghis Khan;

And Alexander, like a god,/Who sought to weld the world in one;/And Caesar with his laurel wreath;/And like a thing from Hell, the Hun;

And leading, like a star, the van,/Heedless of upstretched arm and groan,/Inscrutable Napoleon went,/Dreaming of empire, and alone. . . .

Then all they perished from the earth/As fleeing shadows from a glass,/And, conquering down the centuries,/Came Christ, the Swordless, on an ass!*

For all that the triumphal entry was done in a corner, Jesus did gain popularity, and this caused the displeasure of the religious leaders. "You are too popular," they said. "Silence the crowd and return to oblivion." "I tell you," Jesus replied, "if these people are silent, the very stones would cry out."

This was an interesting figure of speech: the very stones would cry out. Why did He not say: "The trees will talk," or "The ass will speak"? A tree has life, which a stone does not. An animal can move, which a stone does not. A stone lies inert. If it falls, it cannot move of itself but must first be moved by something outside of itself. Though it is true there is a romance to the history of stones and geologists tell us exciting stories about their age and composition, they perform a humble service. A stone is one of the least forms of matter. On the other hand, stones have sung - even as Jesus said they would. We measure our civilization in no small part by the temples that are built of stone, and the greatest testaments of our culture are monuments erected in the name of Jesus. I wonder if we still build them. We build many churches. But do we want the cross of Christ to be higher than the tallest building? I wonder if the picture of a perfect city is that of a church, its spire pointing to the heavens, surrounded by neat cottages - or an ugly megalopolis. When a young man in Melbourne, Australia, I recall one of the elders of our brotherhood standing in a public meeting to say "I want the cross of Christ on our church to stand higher than the roof of the Melbourne Hospital." He was not speaking of literal height, as the Melbourne Hospital was many stories high, but he was using a rhetorical expression to indicate what he believed to be most important. If our song is not of Him, time will ensure that there will be no song.

The Scriptures speak of God Himself as a stone. "The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge." Jesus referred to Himself as a stone: "Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall." When the apostle Peter, whose name means a stone, called Jesus the living stone of our faith, he said that the followers of Jesus were also to be living stones: "Come to him, that living stone, rejected by men, but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones by yourself built into a spiritual house."

In the year 1827, in a small fishing village of Japan, a little waif was born whose name was Manjiro. One of his greatest loves, as he grew into a teen-age boy, was to go fishing; but one day his boat was blown out to sea and he was stranded for six months on a deserted island. He became emaciated. Sailors from an American whaling boat eventually found him and took him home with them to New London, Connecticut. Wanting to make his living in the same way as his guardians, young Manjiro studied mathematics, astronomy, and navigation. The years passed slowly, but a great day came when he had his own ship. He returned to the waters where he was found many years earlier, and he went beyond those waters into the harbors of Japan - at the peril of his life. Japan was isolated from the world, and chance callers were often killed. But Manjiro felt a mission to be a singing stone to tell his people of a good world beyond their shores of which they need not be afraid. Largely due to Manjiro, the doors of Japan were opened. He could have lived in America. He need not have endangered his life by entering the Japanese port. He could have lain inert, doing nothing, content with making a living. He became a singing stone.

The apostle Peter was a rock who learned to sing, but it took time. He was an uncouth fisherman when Jesus called him. Loud of talk and big of heart, he seemed to change in the presence of the Lord; but his change was more apparent than real. His behavior was from the inspiration and the guidance of the Master rather than from inward character. He failed at the first temptation. When the crisis came and Jesus was captured, Peter denied his Lord. In the third denial, his vehemence was so strong and his language so crude and vulgar that even the soldiers were shocked. He was not yet a singing stone but one of those inert pebbles that are bounced by the current, incapable of inward direction.

But the life of Peter did not end with denial, and he became a singing stone. He saw Jesus after the crucifixion. For each time Peter had denied Him, Jesus gave three pledges of love. Three times Jesus asked him "Simon Peter, lovest thou me. . . . Lovest thou me. . . . Lovest thou me?" Three times came the answer: "Feed my lambs. . . . Feed my sheep. . . . Feed my sheep." Peter's heart was broken, and because of the admittance of shame, he became the rock of history. The sinner became the saint, the saint became the witness: a pillar of strength to the brethren and the apostle of the ages.

Something like this is meant by Palm Sunday and the statement of Jesus: "Silence these people and the very stones will cry out." We are to be singing stones.

*Harry Kemp, "The Conquerors." *