X-Ray Vision

...His bitchy lese majesty mined him...

...I AN KELLY HAS PRODUCED such an evocative portrait of a man and an age that we almost sneeze whenever Brummell takes snuff from the elegant little boxes he designed...

...vid Horowitz, or (who can forget...

...Instead of honor's public emphasis, Christianity was about the inner qualities of the individual...

...There is so much to digest here it is dizzying...

...The syphilis attacked his muscles, causing stroke-like spasms that pulled his mouth permanently open...

...All his mucous membranes became ulcerated and his tongue swelled up and turned black...

...Bowman sketches some cultural shifts necessary for honor's rebirth, which range from ambitious 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTE~BER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW to virtually unthinkable, and he acknowledges how steep a mountain we will have to climb...

...And to hear James Bowman tell it, our long-term survival may depend on a new birth of honor...

...Setting aside the Confessions cover defining a Dittohead as someone with "the uncanny ability to deny any information or 'facts' that contradict their worldview," right-wing radio regulars hardly seem to be Derych's target audience when he christens Limbaugh "the chubby, drugaddicted, matrimonially challenged elephant that resides in the living room of my political past...

...The firemen, like members of the military, exist within the remnants of what James Bowman calls Western honor culture, a code of conduct that evolved over many centuries before ebbing in the century just past to the point that we can barely recognize it anymore-except when someone does something so stunningly, obviously honorable that we are reawakened to the majesty of old-fashioned virtues like courage and sacrifice...

...B OWMAN DATES THE BEGINNING ofhonor's decline to the First World War...

...He became incontinent and fouled his room so often that the staff, unable to bear touching him, hosed him down from a distance...

...Bowman believes this brought tragic consequences during the Second World War, when the Allies committed what he calls the 20th century's "original sin": civilian bombing on a massive scale...

...When people see through things," writes Bowman, "the first thing they see through is honor, whose essence is the preservation of appearances...

...These were the firemen of New York, who went into the smoldering World Trade Center towers with a good idea that they would not be coming back out...

...As near a thing to a cultural constant as has ever existed," he writes, honor is "the good opinion of the people who matter to us...

...Early in the book, when describing the cynicism of returning World War I veterans, Bowman refers to their "X-ray vision," but the phrase applies rather well to his own work...

...Something like this recognition occurred in the early days after the September l l t h attacks, but the glow inevitably faded...

...Only crazy people, we reason, think that anything could be more important than self-preservation...

...The modern idea of seeing the sham underneath official messages helped create what C.S...

...Does Derych envision a stadium of "larvalstage human beings" suddenly cheering him on as if he's Balboa in Siberia with the Dittohead masses turning on Limbaugh like the Soviet proletariat turned on Russkie ubermensch Ivan Drago in Rocky IV...

...when he spooned up his soup it spilled back out again, until the manager of his little French hotel told him he was disgusting the other patrons and asked him not to use the dining room...

...Large tumors formed on his scrotum...

...Honor was about externals...

...In its early form in the West, honor wasn't terribly different from what 21st-century Islamicists practice now, but the West is the only honor culture to have evolved beyond this primitive model...

...There were certain things a gentleman would not do, even on the battlefield, especially with the echoes of Christ's counsel-however distant-in his ears...

...From this cultural pinnacle, however, the West gradually turned its back on the idea of honor, to the point where we now have what Bowman calls an antihonor culture...

...Before embarking on their brave and sacred mission, some even asked for absolution from the department chaplain, who would himself be killed that day...

...Inevitably, this line of thinking bred cynicism...

...They might also say that failing to do so would be dishonorable...

...That the perfection of manly grace could come to this makes a superbly entertaining book one with a moral as well...

...Not so long Paul Beston is a writer in New York...

...And so Markos Moulitsas, founder of the insistent liberal weblog Daily Kos where Derych got his start, breathlessly blurbs, "At a time when political persuasion consists of little more than hurled epithets, Jim Derych gifts progressives with a lucid manual for rescuing their fellow Americans from the clutches of the Right...

...Reputation, which could be founded on deceit, clashed with the ChristJan emphasis on ethical integrity, which served as no guarantor of reputation and in fact often worked against it...

...It did this, Bowman believes, largely as a result of its colliSEPTEP~ER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 BOOKS IN REVIEW sion with Christianity, a competing value system at odds with honor in almost every respect...

...might leave some with the impression that this isn't about engagement at all but, rather, currying favor with the other kids on the left-wing digital playground...

...Despite his heavy losses he was safe from his creditors as long as he remained friends with the Prince, but his self-destructive streak caused a final break between them...

...Yet on that same day we were astonished by the deeds of other men who also set self-preservation aside, though they did so in the service of goals very different from the homicidal and suicidal ideology of the terrorists...

...He manages a tone of enlightened skepticism while never quite resorting to despair...

...His simple opening sentence-"On June 7, 1778, a fair-haired boy was born in Downing Street, London"-is as effective as BmmDespite his heavy losses he was safe from his creditors as long as he remained friends with the Prince, but his self-destructive streak caused a final break between them...

...Notwithstanding the moral ambiguity of civilian bombing, World War II was soon enshrined as the Good War, and Bowman believes this has had the effect of making our subsequent wars Bad Wars, conflicts whose aims cannot be justified in comparison with a fight to save humanity...

...Preposterous...

...Conservative readers are likely to find this the most controversial assertion in the book...

...The British Consul in Calais arranged for him to be placed in an insane asylum in Caen...

...A WAY FROM THE FIELDS OF WAR and foreign policy, honor's decline had other far-reaching effects...

...One night at a ball, the Prince, who by now was Prince Regent and so overweight that he resembled a featherbed, greeted Lord Alvaney but ignored Brummell...

...Yet we somehow retain a hunger for the old virtues, even as we make war on the language that describes them and the attachments that make them possible...

...The progressive tide turned in favor of individual autonomy, private psychological reality, and utopian political movements...

...His sources range from military and political history to psychology and religion, from the pages of Sir Walter Scott to the latest barbarism uttered by Madonna...

...When the Bush administration's legalistic WMD rationale fell apart, there was no anchoring principle to explain the invasion of Iraq...

...Three hundred and forty-three of them perished...

...Christ's teaching to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us planted a seed in Western civilization that would make its honor culture more advanced and humane than any other...

...This, too, Bowman links to the aftermath of the First World War, when soldier poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, among other influences, taught a generation that the claims made by nations, governments, armies, and churches were only veils for the corruption at their core...

...IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH...

...Lewis once called "men without chests," who believe that "peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers" Ultimately such thinking devolved into postmodernism, which sees sham at the heart of everything, even itself...

...evolution of Western honor culminates for Bowman in the Victorian-era Christian gentleman, who upheld the traditional martial virtues while also extolling fair play, whether in sports (beginning to take their modern form in 19th-century England) or in the affairs of the world...

...A century earlier, honor would have supplied it...

...He escaped England one step ahead of his creditors and spent the last 25 years of his life in France...

...Readers not yet un-chested by relativism will erabrace Bowman's masterful scholarship while deciding for themselves whether honor plays the central role he ascribes to it in the history of the last 100 years...

...A1vaney," asked the Beau in a loud voice, "who's your fat friend...

...You will read much in these pages about my transformation from 'dittohead,' or 'larval-stage Confessions of a Former Dittohead by Jim Derych (IG PUBLISHING, 200 PAGES, $13,95 PAPER) Proud to Be a Liberal Edited by Elizabeth Clementson and Robert Lasner (IG PUBLISHING, 208 PAGES, $12.95 PAPER) Reviewed by Shawn Macomber human being,'" Derych writes, "into the majestic progressive butterfly that flits before you on these pages...

...He can take apart a romantic comedy or a crime drama in a way that leaves the reader wondering about manners, history, the roles of men and women, and other subjects not normally on the marquee at multiplexes...

...A NYONE WHO HAS READ Bowman's film reviews (he is TAS's film critic) knows that he specializes in identifying deep-seated cultural assumptions beneath the surface of even the most innocent-seeming popular fare...

...Honor came to be widely viewed as a cause of the bloodshed, an outdated code incompatible with modernity...

...If these men could speak to us, they would likely not say that they loved death more than they loved Honor: A History by James Bowman (ENCOUNTER BOOKS, 381 PAGES, $25.95) Reviewed by Paul Beston life, but rather that some things were worth risking and even losing one's life for-rescuing people in danger, for example...

...FREEDOM IS SLAVERY...

...His spinal nerves gave way, causing a stumbling, zigzag walk that people assumed was drunkenness...

...David Brock could no doubt tell you...

...Yet this is the sort of ruse that must be sustained ifa piece of political defection literature is to be useful, or, it might as well be noted, profitable, as Zell Miller, DaShawn Macomber is a 2006 Phillips Foundation Journalism fellow...

...And at the end, "the brain itself shrank away from the insides of the skull and granulated...

...Once the culture of fair play and Christian mercy had leveled whole cities, it handed an effective rhetorical weapon to practitioners of terror, who could point to the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and justify their own infinitely less worthy ends...

...This apparent vacuum of moral purpose played an important role, he believes, in the government's struggles to explain our wars in both Vietnam and Iraq...

...Often, the assumptions he exposes have to do with the idea of honor...

...k X-Ray Vision N EARLY FIVE YEARS AGO, o n a clear Tuesday morning, the United States was attacked by men who claimed to "love death more than you love life," a sentiment so alien to our ears that even now, no matter how many times we have heard it or variants of it repeated, we seem unable to grasp its implications...

...N OW, TO BE CLEAR, I harbor no ill will towards those whose political/philosophical outlook undergoes a shift, tectonic or otherwise...

...Where it applies to individuals, the term has always denoted courage for men and chastity for women, and it carried with it certain expectations: When a man was slandered or otherwise wronged, he had to strike back, lest he lose the good opinion of those he valued...

...With its epic scale of killing, along with concurrent social developments such as feminism and psychotherapy, the war was instrumental in discrediting the honor ideal...

...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW ago, the West valued honor just as highly, if differently...

...liberal readers will be assaulted by outrages on nearly every page...

...It meant essentially one's reputation, quite apart from whether that reputation was warranted...

...In his new book, Honor: A History, he crafts an intricate scholarly argument that takes the decline of Western honor far beyond a phenomenon of changing manners into an underlying force of much of 20th-century history, as well as a crucial signpost on the road ahead...

...With the discrediting of the honor culture, though, its civilizing aspects fell by the wayside as well...

...The new supremacy of the individual psyche helped create the inward-looking antihero, an individualist who stands outside institutional loyalties whenever possible...

...mell's less-is-more sartorial taste, so that it sticks in the mind and infuses a tragic story with qualities of purity and pathos that shine through even in the passages describing his terrible death...

...Likewise, using a phrase such as "Orwellian wet dream" to describe modern conservatism and distilling its tenets to shorthand of "WAR IS PEACE...

...Charity has its limits, however, and no matter how many disclaimers Derych crams into the nooks SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...

...Nor can they be explained by appealing to an abandoned sense of national honor...

...The World War II was soon enshrined as the Good War, and Bowman believes this has had the effect of making our subsequent wars Bad Wars...

...Reading Honor is something like examining X-rays of a thousand cultural injuries, only to discover they are all broken in the same place...

...The issue for Bowman is not whether the Allies had justification for doing what they d i d - h e seems to concede them t h a t - b u t the impact of the deeds...

...Such a mentality leaves us ill equipped to understand the motives of those enemies, who conduct themselves according to a primitive code of honor that is nearly synonymous with murder...

...I attempt to avoidsometimes, I'll admit, unsuccessfully-what iconoclastic leftist Paul Berman described in Power and the Idealists as the tendency to personally attack anyone who "displays the mental alertness to change his mind now and then...

...In a culture less overrun by fashion, his book would be on the reading tables of all the people whose good opinion still matters, k, Breaking Away A S WITH MOST ACCOUNTS of political conversions, Jim Derych's Confessions of a Former Dittohead-a not-quite-magnum opus retracing the steps of a 13-year journey from mindless automaton controlled by Rush Limbaugh to mindless automaton controlled by AI Franken-spends a lot of time pretending to be one thing when it's quite another...

...Derych keeps the jig up, intoning piously early on that "hate only gets you so far" and "[w]e're not going to win a lot of converts [among conservatives] by out-hating them...

...The culture soon reasserted itself, more comfortable celebrating victims than heroes, let alone targeting enemies...