Image fires Gregory Wolfe: The statement from the Board of Directors cites “lapses” in leadership, hostile work environment, and harassment.
The British are obsessed with the contamination of English by Americanisms. The problem is, Lionel Shriver writes in a review of Lynne Murphy’s The Prodigal Tongue, many supposed Americanisms originated in Britain: “The much reviled ‘gotten’ is a British word that Americans revived. The term ‘quotation mark’ originated in Britain, where it only became an ‘inverted comma’ in 1839; after a disagreeable era of the yucky-sounding ‘speech mark’ taught in British schools in the 1970s and 80s, younger Britons who now say ‘quotation mark’ are merely returning to national form. The English invented the word ‘sidewalk’ in the early seventeenth century. In Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, the season when leaves drop off was ‘fall’. More, the default British assumption that every new linguistic trend is necessarily from the United States is often incorrect. BBC listeners who objected to presenters’ use of the Americanism ‘It’s a big ask’ did not do their homework. The expression hails from Australia.”
Matthew Reising reviews The Landmark Julius Caesar: “This new work is comprehensive, including all the trademarks of the series that readers have come to know and love. Each page is lavishly adorned with footnotes, detailing important historical, geographical, and political insights about the work. For example, there is additional information given on the nature of rivers and how they presented obstacles to armies, the nature of weapons used in combat, or the political connections of Caesar’s movements to Roman politics. Also among the pages are illustrations of battles plans, maps of army movements, images of Roman weaponry, depictions of ancient coins, and photographs of various stone reliefs or other Roman art such as tablets or busts.”
People say and do the strangest things: European arts organizations claim that music is a human right. Google refuses to sell ad space to Lutheran publishing house Concordia because it refers to the Bible on its webpage.
Is pottery art? “A friend of mine once owned a vase by the potter Hans Coper — until, that is, her teenage son had his friends around for a party. It wasn’t clear who knocked it off the shelf, but it was an expensive accident; a similar Coper pot sold last month at auction for almost £400,000. But then the tricky thing about studio pottery is where to put it — in more senses than one. It isn’t just whether it will be safer on the mantelpiece or in a cupboard. There is also the problem of how to categorise the stuff: is it art or is it craft, and what’s the difference? Such conundrums perplexed me as I walked around Things of Beauty Growing at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.”
The poet Thomas Merton was a big Bob Dylan fan. When the elderly French scholar Jacques Maritain visited Merton in 1966, he couldn’t help spinning “Mr. Tambourine Man” for his visitor: “Maritain and Merton, long friends, celebrate Mass and, with the others, settle around a fireplace, drinking coffee. The request soon comes for Merton to read some of his writing. He pulls out what will become Cables—followed hard by an earnest commendation of Dylan, whom he describes to Maritain—no mean aesthetician—as ‘a modern American Villon,’ a reference to the wandering, path-breaking fifteenth-century French poet. But Merton doesn’t stop there. He fetches the abbey’s portable record player and spins some choice selections, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘The Gates of Eden’ among them—all for a man born in 1882! One of those present recounted that ‘played at full volume, the Dylan songs blasted the still atmosphere of Trappist lands with the wang-wang of guitars and voice at high amplification.’”
Essay of the Day:
William J. Luther defends cash in Reason. It is not as expensive to maintain as its critics claim, and it allows citizens to act privately if they wish:
“The case for cash presumes that we should be free to go about our lives so long as our actions do not harm others. It maintains that governments are not entitled to the intimate details of people’s lives.
“Whether they realize it or not, Rogoff and other demonetization advocates hold a progressive view of government. They think that existing laws and regulations have been rationally constructed by enlightened experts or are the product of an enlightened electorate. Adjust the requisite policy levers and one can fine-tune the social system.
“Demonetization advocates are not utopian, to be sure. They understand that the world is complicated, that bad rules are occasionally adopted and once-good rules can persist long after their usefulness ends. But that just means a little more adjusting is in order. Eliminating cash, in their view, patches the hole in an otherwise well-designed system.
“There is, of course, an alternative view of government—one that is skeptical that laws and regulations are so rationally designed. It maintains that they are far more likely to be a hodgepodge passed down and amended over time. Some of these rules do promote just conduct between individuals. But others merely reflect existing power structures: They were constructed to benefit some at the expense of others or to bolster a set of values that are not universally shared.
“Classical liberals believe an individual has the right to pursue her own ends up to the point where her actions violate the rights of another. In general, therefore, they think the power of the state should be limited. Sure, governments might be used for good. But both theory and experience show that they will not always make the right choices. It is more important to limit the harm such a powerful institution might cause.
“It is easy to see how these two views can lead to opposite conclusions regarding the desirability of cash. Physical currency enables one to disobey the government. If the government is a force for good, efforts to circumvent its orders are generally bad for society. On the other hand, if the government must have a compelling interest before it can justifiably interfere in people’s lives, a blanket ban on cash is too broad. Individuals should be more or less free to act privately. And governments should only invade those private spaces if there is sufficient reason to believe someone is being harmed by someone else. Call it a moral presumption of liberty.
“Importantly, this argument for cash is not merely a defense of crime and tax evasion, as some on the other side might have you believe. It is a case for due process and financial privacy—bedrock jurisprudential principles in the West.”
Video: New York, 1911
Poem: G.C. Waldrep, “On the Recently Re-Instituted Memorial of Our Lady of Walsingham”
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