Advice to War Presidents

Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft by Angelo M Codevilla, 280 pages

Theodore Roosevelt famously summarized his approach to foreign relations: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."  According to Angelo Codevilla, however, since TR left office administrations of both parties have tended to wield the stick clumsily at best.  Worse, their speech ("soft" in a sense very different from Roosevelt's) has been used to obfuscate inconvenient realities rather than to provide clear statements of principles and intent.  Unfortunately, both respect, the key to good foreign relations, and unity, the key to good domestic relations, depend upon clarity.  The studied ambiguity of the establishment, whether Liberal Internationalist, Realist, or Neoconservative, has thus denied America any chance at real peace or real victory, not in spite of but precisely because of their aversion to conflict.

A book on this subject might be expected to be of limited interest to anyone not directly involved, or hoping one day to be involved, in the making of American diplomacy, but Codevilla's most trenchant observations come when he considers the roots of the problems that are his focus.  In his view, the fundamental issue is that the opinions of the establishment proceed from a flawed anthropology (and therefore, one might infer, a flawed theology) which imagines that human beings are motivated almost entirely by material needs and desires, and that war is therefore always a regrettable interruption in the collective pursuit of prosperity.  To deracinated American elites, the idea that men might be inspired to struggle by love of tribe or religion is almost entirely foreign, and therefore such motivations, the highest in the human experience, are considered only as the cover for baser drives, and thus irrelevant.  This irrational presumption, it seems, may be the cause of much of our modern political and social dysfunction.

New Philistines

The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts by Sohrab Ahmari, 104 pages

The New Philistines is Sohrab Ahmari's lament for the current state of the arts - a genre he is well aware is already well-established.  Yet he is convinced that something has gone uniquely wrong in the past few decades, a period during which Western cultural elites have had their worldviews narrowed by their embrace of identity politics.  The result has been the wholesale abandonment of aesthetic standards in favor of a propagandistic political statements, which has not only further impoverished the art of today and led to a triumph of spectacle and cliche, but has deprived many of the ability to appreciate the great works of the past.

Ahmari is a journalist, and The New Philistines is journalism in the formerly archaic but once again popular sense, a journal of personal encounters and experiences, in this case disappointing ones with the elite art world.  As such, it is accessible but not particularly deep, though keenly observed.

Once an Eagle

Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer, 817 pages

Once an Eagle is the story of Sam Damon, a square-jawed Nebraskan with an unerring instinct for the right thing.  When the US enters the First World War shortly after he has managed to secure a place at West Point, Sam enlists as a common soldier.  Through intelligence, luck, and courage he wins a commission and the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Then follow his marriage to the spirited general's daughter Tommy, the long, slow, difficult interwar years, and the long, fast Hell of the Pacific Theater of World War II.  Throughout, his career is paralleled by that of Courtney Massengale, a Machiavel who understands only power and disdains Sam's values of obligation, sacrifice, and love.  Together, they represent opposing forces in the American military, government, and society - Sam's personal virtue against Massengale's careless self-aggrandizement.

Anton Myrer does not write with the sweep of Herman Wouk or the battlefield intensity of Harold Coyle, and, as a result, is less engaging than either.  This is true despite having a length sufficient for one of Wouk's soap opera epics.  One of the themes of the novel's central third is the tedium of peacetime military service - unfortunately, it proves tedious for the reader as well.

Devil's Share

The Devil's Share by Denis de Rougemont, translated by Haakon Chevalier, 189 pages

"Over dessert we agreed: what democracies in general, and America in particular, most lack is belief in the Devil."  This is, according to Denis de Rougemont, a serious problem, since the Devil is the Prince of Lies and therefore Lord of Unreality, and he begins his seduction by making himself seem unreal.  De Rougemont observes that in the modern West sin, like everything else, is mass-produced.  The gigantism of modern society allows for the efficient escape of the individual from responsibility.  Thus, by careful gradualism, Satan reduces persons to damned things.

As the book was written in France in the 1940s, it is not surprising that Hitler features prominently - it is more surprising that de Rougemont recognizes the peril in using Hitler's evil to deny our own.  Indeed, it is precisely in his recognition of the connection between the Germans' "necessary" desire for Lebensraum and the romantic's surrender to the "vital" demands of his own passions that he has proven most prescient.

Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, 269 pages

It is free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's contention that Western (and especially American) society has developed profound misunderstandings of human realities which are not only empirically false but positively harmful.  They condense these into three great untruths - that adversity is psychologically damaging, that feelings are the most reliable guide to what is right, and that people can be sorted into those who are fundamentally good-intentioned and their enemies.  As a consequence, young people are being encouraged to remain emotionally fragile, irrational adolescents who view anyone who disagrees with them as irredeemably evil.  Not only does this tend to reduce public discourse to grievance-fueled shouting matches, it also produces a mass of disconnected, immature, desperately unhappy individuals who lack even the basic resources necessary to understand the causes of their unhappiness.

The greatest risk for a book of this sort is that it will only contribute to, rather than ameliorate, the culture of outrage.  Thankfully, Lukianoff and Haidt are not partisan firebrands, and while readers of every political persuasion will likely find cause for anger in their analysis, they should also find reasons for self-reflection on their own complicity in our anti-cultural spiral into unreality, which extends far beyond the gloomy groves of academe.

The Loved One

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, 164 pages

Although Dennis Barlow initially came to Los Angeles to write for the movies, he soon found a more tasteful job working at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery.  Then his host kills himself and the funeral arrangements fall to him, bringing him to Whispering Glades, the human cemetery, where he quickly becomes the third leg of a mortifying love triangle.

Waugh's satirical work often centers around his hatred of the vulgar, and given his estimation of America as the empire of vulgarity and Hollywood as its capital, it is no surprise that his usual grotesques are even more grotesque than usual here.  Yet it is the Englishman who comes off worst in the end - his mention of Henry James is neither accidental nor superfluous.

God Is Not Nice

God Is Not Nice: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For by Ulrich L Lehner, 136 pages

In this short book, Ulrich Lehner observes that the polite, safe god worshiped in homes and churches across America (and around the world) is not the God of the Bible, of the creeds, or of the saints.  The true Jesus Christ is not a therapist, focused on making His devotees feel better about themselves, but the refiner's fire of Absolute Love who painfully burns away all that is impure.   This is the God of Scripture and Tradition, a God who is our happiness rather than a god who merely enables happiness, a God of sacrifice rather than sentimentality, "not someone who wants to give us a nice hug but one who expects us to become holy."

Ultimately, Lehner's God is a challenging God precisely because He is a personal God.  In a world where we have outsourced our love of neighbor to bureaucracies, it is easy to imagine that God's love is likewise impersonal and detached, omnipresent and objective.  This organized philanthropy is not the way of the love of God, the charity with which and to which he calls us - that is the passionate, frightening desire of a Bridegroom for His bride.

Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, 381 pages

As a young student at Oxford, Charles Ryder chances into a love affair with the eccentric, captivating Sebastian Flyte, younger son of Lord and Lady Marchmain.  In time, Ryder is introduced to the rest of the family, and to a world of values he had never imagined existed.

There are many arguments against Brideshead Revisited being considered Waugh's masterpiece.  Some maintain (absurdly) that the positive, albeit tragic, vision of the novel neuters the satire, and prefer his earlier works.  Others maintain that the Sword of Honor trilogy is more mature, thematically beginning where Brideshead ends.  Waugh himself declared Helena to be his best novel, but few agree with him.  Yet Brideshead has a power of attraction unique to itself which explains why, whether or not it is Waugh's best-written, it is certainly his best-loved.

Scoop

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, 321 pages

William Boot is not a reporter, rather, he writes the nature column "Lush Places" for the Daily Beast.  It is only through a misunderstanding that he is dispatched to the obscure African nation of Ishmaelia, where the Fascist Blacks are fighting the Communist Reds, except that in this case the Blacks call themselves the Whites and the Reds call themselves the Blacks and there seems to be more fighting among the foreign press corps than among the native people.

Waugh's breezy satire of the self-referential world of the press will not cease to amuse as long as reporters and politicians remain.

Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 308 pages

A Handful of Dust is an emotionally devastating, wickedly funny novel of shameless self-interest.  Tony and Brenda Last have found a measure of peace and comfort in Tony's spacious but unfashionable ancestral home, seemingly insulated from both the ordinary vicissitudes of life and the treacherous jungle of London society.  All that crumbles with stunning speed, however, sending Tony fleeing into the relatively safer confines of the Amazon.

The title is an allusion to The Waste Land, and the book shares the same moral universe as Eliot's early poetry - a heap of broken images inhabited by genteel savages.  The writing is executed with Waugh's renowned wit and light touch, all in service to a tale of moral despair, resulting in a novel that masterfully manages to be both dreadful and amusing.