Correspondence
Correspondence ALEXIS DE NOVAK In "Michael Novak's Patriotism: How Christian is America?" (May 13), Robert P Kraynak faults Michael Novak for failing to provide a "complete account of the...
...My respect, incidentally, for Powell was markedly diminished by his performance when he visited the Middle East...
...Hibbs makes a nice point that the Methodist Church does not recognize her priesthood either, but that is a disputed matter in Methodism...
...they seem to consider the goods of the world as important although secondary objects...
...Suffice it to say that Paula and I continue to give thanks for the many Catholics who claim us as friends and sustain our attempt to live as Christians...
...of how to live as a citizen of two worlds while giving to each its proper love and devotion...
...ROBERT STACY MCCAIN Assistant National Editor Washington Times Washington, DC...
...GERARD V SCHNEYER III Staten Island, NY THANKS FOR THE WIT IT SEEMS the Parody page generates little in the way of reader mail—at least the mail that appears in the weekly Correspondence section—so I would like to congratulate THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the excellent Parody that appeared in the April 22 issue...
...citizens in order to get green cards...
...There is one thing about which I'm sure Hibbs is right: Whatever I have done, the best thing that has been done through me is the students who have made me better than I am...
...Why do people line up at 4 a.m outside our embassies to submit visa applications...
...My mother and I were liberated by the Canadians at the end of the Second World War, and my father was liberated by the Americans in Germany, where he was forced to work in slavery...
...And Bork, bourgeois to his very fingertips, was doing battle with Ted Kennedy when David Brooks was but a pup...
...I guess that these miseducators forgot to inform the rest of the world that living in America is "nothing special...
...servicemen who, when they realized that death in combat was inevitable, opted to take several of the bad guys with them by, say, crashing a plane into a Japanese ship...
...Lasch, though a liberal, defended traditional bourgeois social norms against the onslaught of hedonism and nihilism in the wake of the cultural revolution of the 1960s...
...Far from bringing out how these are divided and contrary, they rather apply themselves to finding the spot at which they touch and are bound to each other" (emphasis mine...
...As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, II, 5.44.: "Another remark is applicable to the clergy of all communions: American priests do not try to attract and fix all the attentions of man on the future life...
...In 1986, Professor John Dower, then of the University of California, San Diego, published a book entitled War Without Pity: Race and Power in the Pacific War...
...The book, however, is nothing more than several hundred pages of moral equivalence...
...It is all nonsense of course, and odious nonsense at that...
...In a wide-ranging survey, Bloom saw the roots of student apathy in the 1980s in the riptide of divorce that had introduced a new measure of insecurity and deracination to American home life...
...citizens...
...First, Dower attempts to explain away all Japanese "idiosyncrasies" in the conduct of the war...
...He does, however generalize a little too much: The United States has many, many friends in Europe and in my country, the Netherlands...
...As for the representative of the Palestinian people, what has he done for these people over the last thirty years but subject them to repeated and protracted waves of poverty, murder, and upheaval, even after receiving millions of dollars from not only the United States but his so-called Arab friends as well...
...of course, since I am a Texan, I have a number of expressions that some might regard as too "colorful" for a theologian...
...Second, he uses spurious comparisons to claim that we did the same thing...
...J.L...
...Hibbs is right that my current marriage to the Rev...
...But it hasn't stopped him from being the expert of choice to explain things Japanese on PBS, etc...
...Not everybody here thinks badly of Israel and of the Jews, although I admit that if the Palestinians told us that they were socialists, the left-wingers in the Netherlands would start to support them...
...MITCHELL HICKS Cincinnati, OH In reading "Anti-Social Studies" about the failing of the National Council for Social Studies, I realized how little I actually know about the lessons of America, lessons that I'm slowly learning now...
...As Hymowitz implies, these misedu-cators apparently cannot tell the difference between the freedoms of the United States and the lack thereof in such "tolerant" regimes as China, Sudan, and Iraq...
...KRIZSA Tucson, AZ HAUERWAS ON HAUERWAS PAUL RAMSEY, commenting on a book just published on his work, once said to me, "What really bothers me is not that they got me wrong, but they made me sound so damn boring...
...STANLEY HAUERWAS Duke Divinity School Durham, NC A VERY SPECIAL PLACE AS A DOCTORAL CANDIDATE in clinical psychology and (!) a conservative, I think I know more about history and civics than those in the National Council for Social Studies who are certified to teach them ("Anti-Social Studies," Kay S. Hymowitz, May 6...
...My students are holding me to that resolution...
...they willingly abandon a part of his heart to present cares...
...Perhaps David Brooks has confused the two halves of his famous "Bobo" thesis...
...Social conservatism may be anti-bohemian, but it is not anti-bourgeois...
...But if being an American is "nothing special," then why is it that so many "global citizens" from other countries are trying to get here...
...Finally, I have been known to swear like a bricklayer because I am a bricklayer...
...It is true that when I taught at Notre Dame, I did begin instruction for discerning whether I should become a Catholic...
...It registered, for me, all the anger and frustration I feel at having to listen to figures from Foggy Bottom—especially Secretary of State Colin Powell—repeat-edly tell us that a criminal and terrorist— one Yasser Arafat—is the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and call the Israelis's response to terror an "incursion...
...Will we never learn that Arafat is nothing more than a terrorist, a criminal, and a genuine thug...
...May 13), Robert P Kraynak faults Michael Novak for failing to provide a "complete account of the converging and conflicting demands...
...But my wife at the time took violent exception, and I did not continue the process...
...Actually, such a project has been underway for some good time...
...A principal part of this is his attempt to equate the kamikaze with the actions of U.S...
...I am, therefore, gratified that Thomas Hibbs not only got me right, but also did so in an entertaining manner ("Stanley Hauer-was's Pacifism," May 13...
...Please note that only those people with the loudest voices—leftist ones, of course—here receive the attention of the international press...
...That intersection, that spot, has been the touchstone for Michael Novak's brilliant intellectual labors over nearly half a century...
...Why do people get on barely seaworthy boats to flee Cuba...
...And, presto, the United States behaved no differently than the Japanese...
...American soldiers came from afar to grant us the same freedom they had at home, and many of them died on our fields toward that end...
...The Netherlands backed the United States when it fought in vietnam and the Middle East...
...This will never be forgotten by my generation, and we tell it to our children and grandchildren...
...The bad news is that there is nothing new to this...
...Why are full-term pregnant women from Mexico crossing the Rio Grande in hopes of having their children born as U.S...
...MICHAEL S. JOYCE Phoenix, AZ DOWER DISTORTIONS THE SCRAPBOOK takes justifiable umbrage ("Slandering Captain Kelly," May 13) at Pete McCloskey's shabby attempt to equate the death of Colin Kelly to those of young Palestinian suicide bombers...
...I had to write in, because when The Weekly Standard opines about the Europeans, it also means me, my family, and my people...
...If these places are "no different" from America, I would support their emigration to these fine destinations...
...Our fami-ly—and it is the same for thousands of European families—has been raised to appreciate the United States for what it did to ensure our freedom...
...In truth, I had begun not because I wanted to become a Catholic in some general sense, but rather because my son Adam's life and mine were sustained during that dark time by the people we worshipped with at Sacred Heart at Notre Dame...
...I regret having to make up for the NCSS's deficiency on my own time...
...We have always had special ties with the United States, and I am sure we will have those in the future...
...Why are people willing to "marry" U.S...
...The piece satirizes very neatly President Bush's recent waffling on Palestinian terror in the Middle East—a far cry from his with-us-or-against-us decree to the joint session of Congress on September 20...
...Hibbs, however, has confused two stories...
...For many leftist types, this remains the interpretative text of the war in the Pacific in World War II...
...Kay S. Hymowitz's description of the current curriculum was right out of my own classes during junior high and high school...
...Paula Gilbert means I find it difficult now to become a Catholic, but that is not because of any objections from her, but because of my own concerns about Catholic recognition of her priesthood...
...and the greater part of our domestic journalists also claim to be leftists...
...WILLIAM H. VANDERSTEK Netherlands EXCUSE MY CONFUSION, but why does David Brooks include in "Among the Bourgeoisophobes" a list of "bourgeoiso-phobe" authors and their books—a list that includes Eldrige Cleaver's hate-soaked Soul on Ice, Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah...
...JOE MURRAY Round Rock, TX EUROPE TALKS BACK I HAVE READ DAVID BROOKS's "Among the Bourgeoisophobes" (April 6), and I must admit that he is right about a lot of the attitudes in Europe...
...After an article in Lingua Franca made much of me as a foul-mouthed theologian, however, I swore never again to use two common swear words...
...if they do not associate themselves with industry, they are at least interested in its progress and applaud it, and while constantly showing to the faithful the other world as the great object of their hopes and fears, they do not forbid them from honestly searching for well-being in this one...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 36
