The Obama Administration is off to a lightning-fast start passing legislation on everything from financial system bailouts to corporate acquisitions.  Despite criticism from many conservatives, the truth is that these bills are just modest first steps.  We really won’t see anything bold until the second Obama term, when the logic of the first-term ideas really takes hold.  Here’s a peek:

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On Friday government officials from the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela raided the offices of Globovision, the only remaining television broadcaster in the country that openly criticizes Chavez.  The pretext for the raid has something to do with the station’s news reporting on an earthquake in Venezuela in early May, which asserted that the government had been slow to report on the incident.   According to press reports and comments from worried United Nations officials, Globovision stands to lose its license, which would mean the end of the last media outlet that dares to disagree with Chavez or his increasingly oligarchic powers.  Interestingly, Venezuelan government officials characterized the Globovision report as “hate speech” that risked alarming the country and “destabilizing” the populace. Government’s facile use of such expressions is reason for alarm.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.

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Sunday’s speech and the reaction of the Notre Dame community, and Catholics and others worldwide, will be the subject of much comment in the coming days.  Some quick thoughts and first impressions:

Without doubt, Obama was eloquent, charming, and seemingly at ease.  He had the advantage (a faculty and administration behind him, and the media framing it as the man of reason versus the rabble in the street, with, obligingly, Randall Terry performing that role as if on cue), and he seemed once again to know it.  The students, who prepare for this day with years of labor and the love (and labor and cash) of their families behind them, were respectful and, as students tend to be around our rock-star President, wowed by his skill with words, his symbolic meaning in transcending our historic racial divide, and his graceful humor.

As for his speech, it was un-Barackesque in one sense – he came down from Olympus, where pay grades are seldom referred to at all, and made it plain that on the issue of human life, he does in fact disagree with those who stand for its sanctity.   But he was Barackesque in striving to minimize those differences, in implying that there is “demonization” of opponents afoot (not from him, of course, just unnamed others), and suggesting that, to borrow an irritating catchphrase from a recent era in U.S. Catholic politics, he is all about “dialogue” with those who disagree with him.

There is the rub.  Obama is a man of many mellifluous words, but he is also a man of many unambiguous actions, and every action he has taken to date has been a forthright dismantling of the culture of life and the wall of separation that has existed between taxpayers and abortion.  A complete list would include all of his key personnel in White House domestic policy, HHS, State and the Justice Department.  His policy enactments include rescinding the Mexico City policy that kept the international abortion industry out of the federal Treasury, rescinding the Bush conscience regulations designed to protect medical and health research personnel from having to participate in or facilitate abortion, eliminating all but a smidgeon of abstinence funding for the pregnancy centers that deal directly with women in need, lifting the ban on the use of District of Columbia funds to pay for abortion in his proposed budget, providing federal funding for experiments that rely on killing embryonic humans in fertility clients, and sending Planned Parenthood an additional $10 million federal love note, matching what they spent to elect him last year.

The President’s efforts to spur “dialogue” involve a low-level White House meeting where groups — including, for the record, FRC — are asked to come in and help craft a plan to “reduce the need for abortion.”  To be credible, that plan would have to begin with reversing every decision Obama has made on abortion to date.  But note the phraseology, which suggests a fundamental disagreement.  Who speaks of a “need for child abuse”?  Or a need for white collar crime?  Or a need for bribery of public officials?  If there is a need for something, just how wrong is it?  Planned Parenthood and its allies secured this language in the Democratic Platform last year because they did not want any suggestion from their party that the act of abortion is a moral wrong.  But if it is not a moral wrong, then it is hardly something that needs to be reduced, particularly if, as Planned Parenthood insists, it is physically safe and negligible in its mental health implications.

President Obama and his administration have extraordinary message discipline when it comes to these matters.  That discipline will be on display again soon in the health care debate when the Democrats on the Hill insist that they are deferring that question to some other body (likely an HHS commission that will likewise pronounce itself for “dialogue”) for resolution.  Is there any chance that an Obama-endorsed, government-financed health plan will exclude abortion and taxpayer participation in it?  As a state legislator, Obama stood out as a man so concerned about protecting abortion in all circumstances that he led opposed laws to provide care for infants who survive the procedure.

Yesterday Notre Dame gave a high honor to such a man.  He spoke eloquently.  But the Jesuit fathers who taught me in high school and even a few of the Holy Cross priests who taught me at Notre Dame impressed on me to pay attention to what men do, not just what they say.  They cited the Good Book on knowing people by their fruits.  With Obama, that begins with what is being done to the fruit of the womb.

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Pat Buchanan’s latest column tracks the impact of values voters in 2008. He reports on a new book by MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who chronicles the woes the GOP faces among the fastest-growing portions of the electorate: African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and the young (single women, in particular). While the news is bleak, there is an aperture of light for the GOP, much like the narrow windows in the Tower of London. First, the largest segment of voters in 2008’s presidential election based their decision on change — a theme that helped Obama then but will be stronger for his opponent in 2012. And the second strongest motivator was values, where, as Buchanan notes, McCain beat Obama two-to-one:

Among values voters, fully 30 percent of the electorate, McCain won 65 percent to 32 percent, or by two to one.

What these numbers demonstrate is that liberals and neocons instructing the GOP to dump the social, moral and cultural issues are counseling Republicide. When African-Americans, who gave McCain 4 percent of their votes in California, gave Proposition 8, prohibiting gay marriage, 70 percent of their votes, why would the GOP give up one of its trump cards — not only in Middle America but among minorities?

A conservative who could have sharpened the social, moral and cultural differences might, from the exit polls, have done far better.

McCain’s diffidence on life, affirmative action and gay rights, his embrace of amnesty and NAFTA, all help explain the enthusiasm gap.

As we know all too well, the GOP is all too prone to dumping trump cards. Buchanan calls this tendency “Republicide.” It could be taken as referring both to the GOP and the future of the Republic. The latter deserves the first priority. Will the GOP be part of it — and will conservative Democrats make the same commitment? If they are listening to voters, yes.

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One thing can be said for President Obama is that he doesn’t sneak up on his targets. And another thing that can be said for this liberal administration is that it is not in the least embarrassed about its inclinations. To buy into this left-of-center government is to have gotten what one bargained for. Yesterday Obama made it clear that he wants to see retiring Justice David Souter (he who ignored the erstwhile tradition of justices allowing a president of the party that appointed him to nominate his successor) replaced by October – and by an individual who has “empathy” and is “about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” These are indeed fine characteristics, but they are finest in legislators and not in judges, and in judges they are finer in trial judges than in appellate and Supreme Court judges whose “empathy” may or may not be a reliable yardstick of, well – quaint concept – justice or due process.

President Obama also suggested that some (unspecified) Americans need Supreme Court judges who will use their empathy to assure that they feel “welcome in their own nation.” Is Obama referring to judges who will enforce duly enacted civil rights laws? To homosexual couples desiring to “marry” and have the U.S. Constitution traduced to their cause? To Mormons and Christians who are being assaulted in their churches or on the street for their participation in our democracy? To legal immigrants? Illegal immigrants?

In the realm of feeling, any answer is possible. But in the realm of leftwing jurisprudence, only one answer to each of these questions is likely. The empathy that matters is in the eye of the office-holder.

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Talk show host and author Tavis Smiley has written a new book called Accountable, which attempts to navigate the difficult waters swirling around the success or failure of Obama’s presidency. Smiley, who is African American, is quoted in the Washington Post today as saying that if Obama fails, “it may be another 400 years before we get another African-American president.” Smiley is at the center of a raging debate among African-American leaders about the limits of tough questioning of the new president and his policies, a debate in which Smiley has been in the minority as an advocate for treating Obama as a man and not merely a milestone. Smiley is on the right side of this debate, in my view, but his apocalyptic opinion that Obama holds the fortunes of African-American politicians in his hands only feeds into the mantra of those who regard Obama as an untouchable symbol. A failure of Obama’s policies would and should damage only those policies – massive expansion of government, nationalization of various parts of the U.S. industrial sector, international naiveté, and radical social liberalism – but that failure should merely pave the way for the election of someone of opposing views. There are a number of conservative African Americans of stature who have that resume, and the country could well elect one of them president before 4 — and not 400 — years have passed.

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A U.S. Senator talks of honorable suicide for well-heeled executives who have received company bonuses and then benefited from bailout money from the taxpayers. Armed guards are posted outside the insurance giant AIG to protect its employees from an angry public. The President declares himself outraged at corporate excess. Larry Summers, the Obama Administration’s top economic adviser, says the same. Thus our national economy is fast transforming into a giant kabuki play, or more precisely a sewa-mono, a domestic drama in which theft and suicide are classic themes.

What is becoming of this nation if it is not the puppeteering of what should be an economy of risk and reward where, with reasonable regulation for health, consumer disclosure, and mitigation of monopolies, the government steps back and allows customers and investors to act on opportunity and react to failure? The greed of some private sector actors is real enough, but the umbrage of many political actors rings hollow. Can we recover the bonuses paid to executives who could not keep their businesses profitable? Why, government has made unprofitability the test of whether certain businesses, like certain mortgagees, get aid.

Here is a simpler idea: anyone who receives government bailout aid, direct or indirect, or benefits from a no-bid government contract of any kind, forfeits their right as individuals to donate to federal political campaigns for a period of five years. That would have some genuine impact on this Kabuki cycle

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This morning’s Washington Post brings news of what should be the Obama Administration’s high-water attack on the sanctity of human life, and what should be for the pro-life cause our Dunkirk. Routed at the polls, pummeled on forced funding of the international population magnates, threatened with compulsory tax funding of the domestic abortion industry, we now face an Obama repeal of the Bush Administration’s conscience protections for health care workers who decline to participate in abortions.

It’s time to send out a call for the dinghies, the tugboats, the fishing trawlers — anything that floats or may float — and make it clear that in its lurch toward the Culture of Death the Obama Administration will be unable to dragoon people of conscience into their ranks or drum them out of their professions. The purest joy of an evildoer is to draw others — especially people of highest character – into their work and thereby drain their moral capital and sully their reputations. All this is happening because the evidence suggests that the ranks of medical personnel committed to abortion as their stock-and-trade is small and, shall we say, not drawn from the elites of the profession. In communities from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Midland, Texas, the local abortionist is a drive-by doc, who visits for the day to conduct his ministrations of destruction upon the population. The dearth of death-dealers makes the crushing of conscience a social value for the Left.

Moreover, it is a sign of their own bad conscience. If so many good people will not perform abortions or hesitate to thrust a cycle of pills at a 15-year-old girl who really needs a wise adult offering her a better way than feeling compelled to submit to sexual exploitation by a boyfriend or adult man, then maybe, just maybe, there is something amiss with those health personnel who seem to hesitate at nothing. For the pro-life community right now, a Mrs. Miniver moment is the right thing. We’ve long upheld the rose as our symbol. Let’s go down to the sea in ships.

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Reading George Orwell’s masterpiece all over again provides fresh insights into the natural rebellion of the human will, frail as it is, against totalitarianism of every stripe. It also reminds one how many different stripes the totalitarian tiger wears. The United States at the present day is a long way from a totalitarian reality, but Orwell’s novel is a healthy reminder that one thing every impulse to total power has in common is a consummate skill at evoking the existence of a permanent enemy or crisis. The benefit of all-encompassing power is security purchased at the price of liberty.

In the polarized lens of the Left, this permanent enemy as evoked by conservatives was the war on terror. For the new cultural Left now in power, the “enemy” is capital and the imminent crisis or “catastrophe” is economic disaster. There are many ways to get to overweening government control. In one scene late in 1984 between Orwell’s hero, Winston, and his nemesis in “the Party,” O’Brien (English novelists always liked Irish-surnamed villains), this exchange occurs:

Winston: “But how can you [the Party] control matter? You don’t even control the climate or the law of gravity? And there are disease, pain, death . . . “

O’Brien silenced him with a movement of the hand. “We control matter because we control the mind.”

Today’s champions of unlimited government, oddly enough, do claim they can control the climate and they have plenty of access to young minds, which begs the question, if government could control the climate, would one wish it to?

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Earlier this week we took a look at Planned Parenthood’s burgeoning abortion industry. While the nation’s overall induced abortion count is declining, Planned Parenthood’s is soaring. The chart below adds two more trend lines, the number of “emergency contraceptive” kits (a.k.a. Plan B, morning after pills) distributed and the number of adoption referrals made each year by all Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide. Plan B distribution is brisk, even soaring, and if abortions are being averted by this lucrative tactic, it has yet to show up in the agency’s own clinical data.

As you can see regarding the adoption referrals, you can hardly see the adoption referrals. The bright yellow line that crawls along the x axis of the graph is Planned Parenthood’s minuscule involvement in this life-giving option. Roughly 120 babies die in their perimeter for every one that gets a chance at adoption placement. Families are unplanned, not formed, through this agency.

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Planned Parenthood, the nation’s premier supplier of birth control, is also the nation’s top deliverer of the undelivered – human lives that are ended by induced abortion. The chart below shows the regular, decades-long increase in abortions carried out in the U.S. by the agency that styles itself as focused on reducing the “need” for abortion.

Planned Parenthood has doubled its abortion count (and the figures exclude early abortions carried out through abortifacient means in the first minutes or days after conception) in the last 13 years alone. Federal (taxpayer) money for the group has also grown during this period. Money to Planned Parenthood is apparently a “stimulus” affording the group more access to women who are abortion vulnerable.

UPDATE: Todd, a commenter below, asks a good question: what is the source of these figures? Answer: they are published yearly in Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports.

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President Obama released his first official statement on abortion as an occupant of the Oval Office today: 

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.

While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work; and to have no limits on their dreams. That is what I want for women everywhere

On first blush, it is nothing new – it follows a pattern in these statements from defenders of Roe v. Wade and its progeny in that it: 1) makes no effort to establish that the Supreme Court was and is properly vested with the power to create and enforce such a “right”; 2) uses the catchphrase “right to choose” without specifying what is being chosen, why there is a right to it, and especially why there is a right to choose something that should not be chosen so often; and 3) links this spurious right with things that most Americans do agree are right and good, particularly equal opportunity for women.

The statement’s “equality” language is meant to dress a mean act of destruction with the high fashion of principle.  The reality of tension and conflict between men and women at all levels is real and serious, within every venue of life.  As to why the ability to abandon the life the two sexes have created to the tender mercies of the abortionist is a guarantor of equality, rather than an abdication of responsibility, the statement does not say.  The small body of a child rests lifeless in this struggle between the sexes.  It is so sad and unnecessary, as the lives of millions of accomplished men and women who both faced their responsibilities and fulfilled their careers attest.  This does not mean the feminist struggle lacks import in the area of reproduction; it surely does.  It only means that abortion is not the answer.  More likely, it is a major part of a very wrong answer.

Where Mr. Obama’s statement is notable is that he repeats the latest of the catchphrases, “the need for abortion,” which was offered up in the 2008 Democratic platform.  It becomes his phrase in a new way now.  For one, it means this issue is not above his pay grade anymore.  There is a “need for abortion.”  If that is so, this practice is in every way distinct from something morally objectionable or inherently wrong.  Who would speak of a “need for human trafficking”?  A “need for child abuse”?  A “need for prostitution”?  There are indeed many sorrows in this Vale of Tears that the law, for prudential reasons, does not address.  Non-obscene pornography for one, perhaps.  But no one but the most radical people speaks of these evils as things for which there is a “need.”

President Obama says he wants to reduce the need for abortion.  But if it is essential to women’s equality, why reduce it?  His policies, deferred today for a few hours, weeks, or – we hope – months, will certainly promote and increase the abortion rate.  Today’s statement says that “we are united in our determination . . . to support women and families in the choices they make” on this issue, irrespective of “our views.”  Either that is a very presumptive editorial “we” or a very elastic use of the word “support.”  It probably means public funding for both maternity care and abortion.  But most Americans oppose tax funding of abortion.  We as a nation are not “united” in this matter, though President Obama may seek to force a new unity upon us with the chains of appropriations law. 

The best hope is that this portion of his statement is rhetoric.  That he, or other Democrats in Congress who retain some respect for the Hyde Amendment and similar provisions that have kept a wall of conscience between the citizenry and this bloody trade, may yet have a change of heart and allow only those who will death, Planned Parenthood and its friends, to fund death.  Common ground so blood-soaked is not a place where men and women can stand together.  Virtues die in such soil.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald is renowned for having written the most famous American novel, The Great Gatsby, which closes with one of literature’s best-known lines, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the boat becomes a man becomes a trope, the story of a human being who is born old and who lives his life in reverse, moving through old age, to maturity, to the prime of life, to adolescence, to childhood, and finally to infancy. Benjamin is literally borne back ceaselessly into what for everyone else would be the past. It’s an extraordinary concept, but does it make an extraordinary film?

For Fitzgerald, the futility of holding on to romance, to beauty, to life itself is implicit in every word and gesture. Moments of exquisite beauty fade instantly as they occur and their fatal aura only sharpens the impressions they leave upon the senses. Southern light lends itself to such uses and the decadent — that is, decaying – atmosphere of New Orleans in the 1920s and ’30s is overripe for such a story (Fitzgerald’s original was published in 1921, and the film bears little relation to it other than the title). Cinematically, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button captures that evanescent beauty in almost every scene; it is a visually sensual movie that recreates its time in nearly every frame.

For all of that beauty, however, the film is an empty vessel, and Benjamin himself is the reason why. Were it not for the fantastic trajectory of his existence, it is altogether unclear why we should care about his life and not altogether clear that he cares about it either. His very being is the work of an artist’s imagination, but he himself seems to lack an imaginative core. He not only experiences life in reverse, he experiences it passively, whether it is piano lessons, his first sexual experience, his first job as a tugboat hand, the second world war, his first real love, fatherhood, and finally, as an infant, death itself.

The film’s recurring phrase, “You never know what is coming for you,” is apt in a manner the movie may not intend. Things happen to Benjamin, but he is not one to go out to meet them. He passes the lives of others in the night, heading the other way. There is occasional poignancy in this passageway, but it is seldom truly evocative. The performances by the leads, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, contribute to this quality. Blanchett’s porcelain features and royal bearing reinforce a coolness that contrasts starkly with the vibrancy of the film’s black characters, who alone seem real. Benjamin’s own coolness at the death of his adoptive mother, Queenie, played with power by Taraji Henson, seems merely odd. He behaves like a visitor at her funeral, not like a son.

The narrative flashback form used in the film has been done elsewhere, and better, most notably in another tall tale filled with picaresque Southern elegance, Tim Burton’s Big Fish. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s framing story, like that of Big Fish, features parent-child tension and death-bed revelations, but the stakes in Burton’s film seem far higher and relate integrally to the movie’s meaning. Peter Finch’s character in Big Fish makes his experiences larger-than-life and those experiences mystically grow to assume the size of his telling; Benjamin Button renders his larger-than-life experiences in a way that seems to diminish them, and he follows them into shrinking significance as the film flows on, like Heraclitus’s river.

Take Burton and its genuine romance, over Button and its curious ennui.

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On Saturday this reviewer had the opportunity to be the only unaccompanied adult in a theater full of parents and tots to see the new Universal release The Tale of Despereaux. The movie is an adaptation of the book by Kate DiCamillo, which came highly recommended by my almost 15-year-old son, who had warm memories of it from his youth but who was, apparently, concerned about being seen in a theater filled with children small enough to have to peep at the screen over the back of the seats in front of them.  I had no such concern, which tells you something about me.  Having not read the book or seen any comments from Ms. DiCamillo before writing my own, I cannot do any comparisons of the experiences of reading and viewing this family fare.  First of all, the film is indeed family fare, having no scatological moments and being blissfully free of any references to bodily functions as substitutes for actual wit.

As regards wit, this animated film is strong on both a visual and verbal level, spinning its interest around the trope of a young mouse whose intention to be anything but mousy turns his fear-driven world upside down.  Young Despereaux Tilling, the swashbuckling rodent, is physically the most delicate creature in the movie, possessed of both absurdly outsized ears and a romantically outsized nature.  He is driven to take on a “quest” that, while executed within the confines of a single castle, has all the scope of Arthurian legend: a lost item of great value (prize soup, in this case), an abject King mourning the loss of his beloved queen, a beautiful princess (voiced by Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame) who waits sadly for the return of both sunlight and rain to her indifferent world, and plotters and villains by the score, including the malevolent and ravenous denizens of “Ratworld,” who despise (and relish, with relish) all things mouse-like.

The film is built on the steady virtues of its heroic characters (in addition to Despereaux, there is the morally conflicted rat, Roscuro, heir to a long line of fairy tale figures whose actions result in unintended harm to the established order and unjust banishment) and the destructive ambitions of a jealous servant girl, Miggity Sow, who, it can be charitably said, yearns for a princess-hood that lies beyond her natural endowment.  This superbly animated film includes some scenes of genuine menace (cat takes the hindmost) that younger children will remember in their dreams, genuine pathos (the servant girl is handed over as a baby to a mean life that wounds her heart and spurs her acts of cruelty), and genuine tenderness (a princess’s gentle kiss) that lingers in the mind.

The voices are supplied by a Hollywood and United Kingdom A-list of talent, and the music, while derivative of other orchestral work, is both professional and appropriate.  Sigourney Weaver provides a wry narration that contains much of the film’s humor, as do the sequences of Despereaux’s fretful parents, who worry that their tiny son’s lack of cravenness will undo the pact of timidity that has become their way of life (in this the movie has relevance to elements of our risk-avoidant culture that would ban such things as kickball in the schoolyard).  Finally, Despereaux is a reader, and he finds his inspiration in tales of courage and selflessness, written in glorious script with bold illustrations in the style of N.C Wyeth that echo in Despereaux’s mind’s eye.  A film that calls viewers back to the written word, and to what those words can do to evoke images, stir courage and instill virtue, is on the right path to a timeless message.

The Tale of Despereaux contains nothing offensive, is rated G, and has no specific religious content.  It opens Friday, December 19 nationwide.

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John Adams’ Pointed Prayer
By Robert G. Morrison

The great popularity of the recent HBO series, John Adams, is well deserved. The movie, unlike the fine David McCullough book, shows how good old honest John got himself in a peck of trouble as the first Vice President. He took up six weeks of the time of the first Senate with long and tedious lectures on titles. David McCullough, when he spoke at the National Press Club in 2000, airily dismissed Adams’ disastrous misstep. “Oh, he was a good, thrifty New Englander. He didn’t want to make the titles hereditary. But he knew everyone loves distinction and he thought titles would be cheap.” The HBO series shows the revulsion of many of the senators at the very idea. Adams wanted the President to be titled: “His high Mightiness, President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” Behind Adams’ back, the senators snickered at the portly, balding Vice President, calling him “His Rotundity.”

The series shows Adams in the best of lights, and he deserves much good light. Even when he’s wrong, even when he’s vain and prone to temper tantrums, we see the human toll of his brave labors for Independence. His son Charles dies of alcoholism. His beloved daughter Nabbie dies of breast cancer. Our hearts go out to him and to his beloved Abigail. McCullough told the National Press Club that the correspondence between John and Abigail is on microfiche–and the indelible record of their fidelity and love is five miles long!

When I take the Witherspoon Fellows to Monticello, I always speak of my reverence for Mr. Jefferson, that great defender of religious and civil liberty. But I always disagree with George Will. Will famously wrote that “Thomas Jefferson lived as a free man should live.” No, John Adams lived as a free man should live; he never freed his slaves because he never had any!

My favorite John Adams story dates to the year 2000. Then, Bill Clinton occupied the Oval Office. That December, the Clintons invited their nearest and dearest friends to celebrate the two hundred years that the White House had been the Executive Mansion. They asked David McCullough to come and read from his wonderful biography of John Adams.

As the liberal Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory reported, McCullough ended with John Adams’ famous prayer, the one FDR had had engraved in the mantle in the State Dining Room:

“I pray Heaven to bestow the best blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

Miss McGrory wrote that when the prayer was read, all of Bill Clinton’s best friends looked at their shoes in embarrassment. Honest John Adams had crafted that inspiring petition in 1800. He hurled it like a javelin two centuries into the future and he punctured Bill Clinton’s pretensions with his pointed prayer. God bless John Adams!

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At one level it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I regularly watch movies based on comic books. I’m 56 and my youngest is 14, so it’s at least a semi-voluntary endeavor. Nonetheless, I grew up with subscriptions to DC Comics, the “Justice League of America,” “Classics Illustrated,” and an obscure favorite called “Metal Men.” These readings did not replace literature for my siblings and me; they supplemented it, and, with “Classics” especially, helped to pique interest in the real (and even unabridged) thing. It’s hard even now to describe the imaginative windows opened by just a handful of N.C. Wyeth illustrations in the editions we craved as children.

Thus, an invitation to watch a full-fledged Batman movie with today’s technological accomplishment is no bow to my teenage son, it’s irresistible. The new feature, The Dark Knight, is engrossing and visually spectacular. Unlike the comic books, however, it also has psychological depth and is almost unremittingly dark. It is good v. evil, certainly, but it is a troubled good confronting, in the character of the calculating Joker played by the late Heath Ledger, an almost-explicable evil.

The intense scenes of the Joker wielding knives in the face of his victims are stomach-churning to watch (at least one hopes that audiences have not become used to scenes like this that, in Roman Polanski’s 1970’s film noir Chinatown, became an iconic image of sadistic criminality), but it is during these scenes that the character explicates his personal history. He is the tormented product, he seems to imply, of his father’s wanton cruelty to his mother, just as much as Batman, played by Christian Bale, is the product of his father’s heroic effort to save his mother. Role reversals abound in the movie, and the public’s need for heroes it can both treasure and revile supplies the broad dramatic tension, but good fathers clearly matter.

Among the twisted ethical dilemmas the Joker poses to Gotham City involves two ferry boats full of passengers who are challenged to a potentially mutually fatal decision. One boat is full of criminals, the other ordinary citizens, so it is not a “Sophie’s Choice” that is presented. The scene is played out to an extraordinary conclusion. In the murky moral swamp into which Gotham City has sunk, this depiction of “lifeboat ethics” leaves plenty of room for thought. The Dark Knight is overlong and the violence exceeds its prequel, Batman Begins, and there are instances of implied sexuality and some language.

Finally, the film redefines the Batcycle just as Batman Begins redefined the Batmobile. At least a few things in Gotham City have gotten definite upgrades. Now if only my mother hadn’t thrown out a half million dollars’ worth of comics . . .

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In Washington one meets a handful of people who are almost universally liked and respected. So much is at stake in the partisan battles in the capital that having the admiration of political friend and foe alike is unusual. Tim Russert achieved that and so did Tony Snow.

Tony spoke at the FRC Action Values Voter Summit in 2006 and described with relish his experience at the White House with a mix of professionalism and amazement that was endearing and all-American. He knew, appreciated, and communicated how lucky he was to have been born in the U.S. of A., grown up in the Midwest, and been given a chance to work in hallways and places he had dreamed of as a kid. That youthfulness, and the bedrock values that fueled him, never faded, whether at the peak of his success or in the throes of his illness. The proximity of those two things, the peak and the throes coming at once, and the way he handled both with wit and verve only underscored how grounded he was. He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

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Pixar’s newest movie Wall-E is a gem. Technically brilliant to a degree even the excellent Finding Nemo and Toy Story movies did not achieve, this nearly silent film offers more food for thought than most adult fare, and it does so with a romantic heart that is never cloying. It may be a sign of our times that machines like the waste collection robot-hero Wall-E and a space probe (her name is Eve) in search of greenery-on-Earth exhibit more genuine emotion than most human actors. Then again this duo, who populate an empty planet with little going for it, sense their need for each other (Wall-E is inspired by a battered video of Hello Dolly he has preserved among his trash-trove and watches obsessively) without a hint of vulgarity or, it goes without saying, carnality. They are literally hard-wired for connection.

As for the movie’s politics, it transcends polarization while remaining decidedly pro-green, pro-life (babies abound), and pro-romantic love between opposite sexes capable of regenerating a blighted Earth. Rank consumption has never been skewered better, or with a gentler touch that bemoans how far humanity has sunk but does not succumb to self-loathing. These soft, slothful creatures are still “us” and still capable of renewal, which, opening themselves to intimacy and to, well, infants, they achieve. John Lasseter and his Pixar team have made some of the top feature films of the last 15 years, and Wall-E may be the best of them all. The score, crucial to the almost wordless atmosphere of the movie, is tremendous too.

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