The Snow On Sunday
was the kind of snow that’s no good for packing into snowmen but when it’s fresh and clean and the sunlight hits it just right it looks like a giant perfect quilt studded with diamonds.
The thousands of cards and letters I’ve received in the past week tell me the John Witherspoon piece was a big hit. I’m glad. I think there’s at least two points to be made there. One: Man! Even the lesser-known Founding Fathers were really impressive guys, more worthy of our respect than most of the bright lights of today. Two: the USA does have a rich and fascinating heritage, and like it or not, it is very much a Judeo-Christian heritage. Don’t fall for that old line about the Founding Fathers being Deists. Even the Founding Fathers who weren’t good practicing Christians–like Washington–admired Christianity and its salutary effects that they firmly believed could be achieved via no other means, and the ideas of the Declaration of Independence trace their lineage back to Christian ideas and thinkers. Look for example at the previously mentioned Samuel Rutherford and his Lex Rex, or Henry de Bracton. Bracton in the English judge who wrote De Legibus et Consuetudinibus around 1250. Inspired by the character and actions of Christ, he came to the incendiary conclusion that, in society and in law, justice and not power must be pre-eminent. Far from being divine, earthly regents were under the same laws as the rest of us. Certainly, Thomas Jefferson was a Deist and not a Christian. But, as Perry Miller put it in Nature’s Nation: “Actually, European deism was an exotic plant in America, which never struck roots in the soil. ‘Rationalism’ was never so widespread as liberal historians, or those fascinated by Jefferson, have imagined. The basic fact is that the Revolution had been preached to the masses as a religious revival, and had the astounding fortune to succeed.” Calling the Founding Fathers Deists because of Thomas Jefferson is a little like a historian two centuries hence reading a book by Richard Rorty and concluding that late 20th century America was brimming with post-modern deconstructionists.
Here’s a nice piece by George F. Will in praise of the Golden Arches. I like it when he says “McDonald’s exemplifies the role of small businesses in Americans’ upward mobility. The company is largely a confederation of small businesses: 85 percent of its U.S. restaurants — average annual sales, $2.2 million — are owned by franchisees. McDonald’s has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.” This confirms, yet again, that despite what morons like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore might say, Big Bad Corporate America is the best friend ‘the poor’ ever had.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/26/AR2007122601485.html
Here’s a piece by Salim Mansur about the nasty Mr. Elmasry. See the previous entry about our Human Rights Commission for Mr. Elmasry’s back story. Scary.
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2008/01/19/4781891.php
Here’s Lawrence Solomon on the coming carbon economy. Scary!
http://www.financialpost.com/money/taxes/Story.html?id=232092&p=1
And here’s a close-up–maybe TOO close–look at Hillary Clinton. SCARY!
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/hillarys_oedipal_problem.html
And just so I don’t leave you with a downer, here’s the great Jimmie Rodgers, waiting on a train. If anyone out there has any vid of Jimmie singing ‘Away Out On The Mountain,’ send it my way. If you do, I promise I’ll be your friend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbzc77Tz6PA
Man, that’s sweet.