The thinkers who put mind to pen for The American Spectator are such legends that President Trump has given this team a name. He calls it the “reflecting pool,” which has been lately in the news.
On Tuesday evening, these writers joined editors, readers, subscribers, and donors for a special party to celebrate the independence of our country. The gathering was held in Alexandria, Virginia, in the magazine’s offices. The food was good, the drink was better, and the company was the best. The clarion call of freedom was ringing loudly, and those who heard it could be nowhere else.
Through the grace of God, Bob (R. Emmett) Tyrrell and Wlady Pleczszynski, founders of the publication lo, these many (250?) years ago, were on site representing the Ageless of Reason. Paul Kengor, Grover Norquist, and Blanquita Cullum, et al, were in the house, but let us drop the name-dropping… a good time was had by all.
Doctor Kengor, the current editor, took the greatest risk of all at any party, running the party game. As it turned out, no one muffed anything, no one suffered public humiliation, because the crowd was so broadly knowledgeable. The object of the game was to identify Declaration of Independence trivia, the what and when of the phrasing. I confess that I knew less than the crowd, and was particularly enlightened by the teaching that God appears 4 times in the document, in various formulations. Nature’s God, the Creator, Supreme Judge of the World, and divine Providence.
Of all the ologies I might have expected at a political magazine, theology was a pleasant surprise.
The American Spectator changed my life in my early 20s, circa 1980, along with the lives of innumerable others. It was the first to master the art of confident mockery against the Left. To turn their own weapon against them, undercut their head start in the modern arena of religion and politics. Iconoclasm needs the jiujitsu of the icon’s weight. They need to be approachably funny where the religion is immovable, inflexible.
It’s like an eternal boxing match, and if you stand in one place and allow your opponent to bob and weave, you will eventually collapse. This is the great irony for bearers of eternal truth, of immutable fact, of irrefutable logic. You can’t let your own solidity slow you down.
The Talmud (Megilla 25b) says that mockery is forbidden, except for mockery of idolatry. It is detrimental to be an underminer and a belittler in all areas of life. Better to be respectful, to see the goodness in what is and the virtue in what is accomplished. Yet the sharp edge of the needle is needed when going after the false icons.
Part of the temptation for the 20th-century intellectuals was the abundance of bathwater. All the world was moving into modernity, from indoor plumbing to refrigerators to freezers (still less than 100 years old!) to cars to planes to rockets to spaceships to mainframe computers to personal computers to telephones to iPhones. When throwing out so much, it becomes easy enough to throw out the baby with the bathwater, then God Himself, the composer with the compost.
The American Spectator has always moved with modernity, but with God on its shoulder. Laughing at the shallow, at the phony, at the pretentious twit who says, “I have a computer, why do I need God?”, that is the cutting edge. It is God Who made the computer, you twit! It took you thousands of years to even find that God had put it into Nature for you, what the Hell are you so proud about? Did you bring it from some other world, made it from moon rocks perhaps?
So here we stand, 250 years into this grand experiment. We continue to produce people of high skill and inspire them to lives of high virtue. Sure, we have a lot of garbage to be hauled out to the dumpster, but at least we recognize it when we see it, and we know where it needs to be dumped.
Live on, O American Spectator, continue the work of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln! Recognize the men and women of loyalty and genius, give them a platform, and fight the good fight. Unless Elon Musk has some potion coming down the pike, I suspect that you and I will not be here for the 500th. But our children will and, we pray, so will The American Spectator….
