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Correspondence

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Under Investigation

In his highly enjoyable “Bill and Me at Georgetown” in the September 2008 issue, the eminent Mr. Tyrrell wonders how “let the researcher beware” would be translated into Latin. It is, very simply, Caveat investigator. (The complementary noun for investigation, or “looking into,” is investigati-o-onis and the verb for “to look into or search after” is investigare.) Keep up the good work.

(MOST REV.) LOUIS W. FALK
Clive, Iowa

To the Naked Buckeye

I appreciated W. James Antle III’s piece on the Ohio Republican Party (“What’s the Matter with Ohio?” TAS, June 2008), particularly his concession at the end of the piece that 2006 Republican gubernatorial nominee J. Kenneth Blackwell, despite striking all the right conservative notes, was swamped by his opponent, Democrat Ted Strickland. I would direct Antle, and your readers, to political scientist John Fenton’s 1960s book Midwest Politics, which branded Ohio’s politics as “issueless.” Blackwell ran an issues campaign: he talked about a constitutional amendment that would have limited state spending growth— that is, before the state’s sane moderate wing persuaded him to throw it out because it was disastrously worded—and leasing the state turnpike. Strickland, meanwhile, ran on a platform that supported grandma, apple pie, and the American Way. Throw out the Democratic tidal wave in 2006; Blackwell never would have won modern Ohio, which, as Fenton noted, likes bland politicians who don’t rock the boat. Politicians who, as legendary Ohio GOP chairman Ray Bliss put it, keep issues out of campaigns. Despite sending two bedrock conservatives, John W. Bricker and Robert Taft, to the Senate in the middle of the last century, the leaders of the Ohio GOP since the 1960s have largely been moderate. Four-term Gov. James A. Rhodes loved big bond issues; George Voinovich and Mike DeWine, Ohio’s two recent GOP senators, were decried as “RINOs”— Republicans In Name Only—by their conservative detractors in Ohio.

Better a RINO in Ohio, because, here, “true conservative” is a euphemism for “loser.”

KYLE KONDIK
Lakewood, Ohio

The Art of Clarity

Two things came to mind when I read “The Legacy of 1968” (Roger Scruton, TAS, September 2008). First was a comment made by a crusty old geologist who complimented me, in the late 1960s, on speaking lucidly. He went on to tell me he was unable to carry on a meaningful conversation with his own son, who was about 20 years old at the time. Second is a list of words my brother acquired on the University of Arizona campus, around 1966. A brief instruction attached to the list stated all you had to do to sound learned and intelligent was to make up sentences using words from the different columns in the list (see table below). Here are two examples:

1. We must use balanced, management options. 2. It had been synchronized, so transitional hardware was not needed.

The great 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper was a big proponent of clarity and a big opponent of obscurity. He stated, “Clarity is an intellectual value in itself.” He went on to say that the intellectual owes to his fellows his ideas presented as clearly and modestly as he can. “The worst thing that intellectuals can do—the cardinal sin— is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies.”

SCOTT MANSFIELD
San Gabriel, California

I knew there was a particular reason why I enjoy Roger Scruton’s writings so much.

COL. ROBERT J. POWERS, USAF (RET.)
Boston University CLA, X’50
Shreveport, Louisiana