Hysterics at Dartmouth

Yesterday I posted a Convocation speech given by Noah Riner '06, Dartmouth's student-body president, to the class of '09. In it he stated that we are not perfect as humans and cited Jesus' message of redemption for solace and to show us the way ahead. Well, you can guess what happenned next. Ivy league overreaction is an understatement. See Stefan Beck's commentary. As for those hysterics, there but for the grace of God go my kids!

September 27, 2005, 8:12 a.m.
“God Fearing” Dartmouth
Ivy overreaction.

By Stefan Beck

It's become a truism that student government is the bailiwick of shallow, egotistical resume-padders. Tracy Flick, the junior-varsity Lady Macbeth of the 1999 movie Election, was instantly recognizable, as was her nemesis, Tammy Metzler. Remember Tammy's speech? "The same pathetic charade happens every year, and everyone makes the same pathetic promises just so they can put it on their transcripts to get into college." Hard to argue with that. The odd thing is that sometimes the Tracy Flicks go off to college and do it all over again.

A few days ago, a friend of mine pointed me to a Convocation speech given by Noah Riner '06, Dartmouth's student-body president, to the class of '09. I scanned the page, a pastiche of quotes by Martin Luther King Jr., Shakespeare, Bono. Why had my friend given me this? "It mentions Jesus," he explained. "People will go berserk."

So it does. It mentions Jesus, and then Bono mentions Jesus, and then Riner passes the baton to Dr. King — perhaps thinking nobody will wise up to the Lord's presence. I confess that at this point, I thought my friend was indulging a bit of right-wing paranoia. Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things.

As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" — perish the thought — and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

The Student Assembly's vice president for student life (savor that deliciously Orwellian title), Kaelin Goulet '07, resigned immediately. "I consider his choice of topic for the Convocation speech reprehensible and an abuse of power," she said. Addressing Riner directly, she wrote: "Your first opportunity to represent Student Assembly to the incoming freshmen was appalling. You embarrass the organization; you embarrass yourself. . . . I pity the freshmen in Leede Arena yesterday."

Got all that? Pity is something you feel for hurricane refugees, not for the "victims" of a convocation speech. Woe betide the student who hears Christ's name in an "inappropriate forum"! It's almost as though Goulet saw Riner as Father Karas and the freshmen as a host of demons, writhing in agony beneath a spray of verbal holy water. This is condescension distilled to its essence. Usually it's the college acting in loco parentis, not the other students. What we are witnessing here is trickle-down ideology, with students employed as a sort of Securitate for their administrative overseers.

Could Goulet really have felt anything like the outrage and disappointment on display in her letters? Let's examine Riner's sole reference to Jesus:

Jesus' message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn't have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God's love: Jesus on the cross, for us.

It may be unusual for a student speech, but the Edict of Worms it is not.

Another Student Assembly member, Tim Andreadis '07, complained that Riner "did not clearly label his religiously charged comments as reflecting his own beliefs." A lack of clear labels — that's the real problem, isn't it? Just as Andreadis doubtless expects his plastic baggies to be clearly labeled a choking hazard, so he expects every word out of a fellow student's mouth to be accompanied by an explicit disclaimer. Who needs in loco parentis when so many students are big enough to pull their own Huggies on?

And let's not leave out Paul Heintz '06, whose crudely hieroglyphic "Guy & Fellow" comic strip "parodied" Riner's speech. In the strip, a stick figure with Riner's head says, "Jesus, together you and I shall rule the world and vanquish all those infidels and looters and rioters." Pot-smoking Jesus replies, "Yo, chill out, dawg. Take a hit of this sh** and chill the f*** out." Pot-smoking Jesus! How marvelously transgressive! Now have a gingersnap and back to the nursery with you.

As responses to the speech go, this had at least the merit of being too demotic to match the self-righteousness of all those pompous op-eds and public resignations. Of course, this made it no less embarrassing.

Is it worth training the Doppler radar on this teacup tempest? Higher education will always have its dull speeches, its Tracy Flicks, its outsize outrage. After a while, most students will forget about this and go on to something useful. But none of that is the real story. The fascinating — and disappointing — thing is that something as ordinary and blameless as religious belief should seem such a terrifying menace to college students. And what delicate little Hummels those students have become: They use tepid terms like "community" and "inappropriate" and "alienating" and then congratulate themselves for their sensitivity. I pray they never have to face something more trying than words — but I certainly wouldn't count on it.

— Stefan Beck is assistant editor of the New Criterion.

Marshall: For Whom the Bell Tolled

By George F. Will
Sunday, September 25, 2005; B07

A nation's identity consists of braided memories that are nourished by diligence at civic commemorations. It is, therefore, disappointing that at this moment of keen interest in the Supreme Court and the office of chief justice, scant attention has been paid to the 250th anniversary of the birth of the nation's greatest jurist, Chief Justice John Marshall.

The oldest of the family's 15 children, he was born Sept. 24, 1755, into Virginia rusticity where women pinned their blouses with thorns. Yet he developed the most urbane and subtle mind of that era of remarkable statecraft. He was a member of Virginia's ratifying convention, and in nearly 35 years as chief justice he founded American constitutional law. That kind of legal reasoning by Supreme Court justices is a continuous exegesis of the Constitution and is sometimes not easily distinguished from a continuing writing of the document.

Marshall is the most important American never to have been president. Because of his shaping effect on the soft wax of the young republic, his historic importance is greater than that of all but two presidents -- Washington and Lincoln. Without Marshall's landmark opinions defining the national government's powers, the government Washington founded might not have acquired competencies -- and society might not have developed the economic sinews -- sufficient to enable Lincoln to preserve the Union.

Article I, Section 8, enumerates Congress's powers, and then empowers Congress "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Marshall's capacious construction of the "necessary and proper" clause shaped the law and the nation's consciousness of itself.

Did Congress have the power -- unenumerated but implied -- to charter a national bank? In 1819, 42 years before Lincoln grappled with unprecedented exigencies, Marshall ruled:

"Throughout this vast republic, from the St. Croix to the Gulph of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, revenue is to be collected and expended, armies are to be marched and supported. The exigencies of the nation may require that the treasure raised in the north should be transported to the south. . . . Is that construction of the constitution to be preferred which would render these operations difficult, hazardous, and expensive?"

Two years later he held that "we are one people" in war, in making peace and -- third, but not of tertiary importance -- in "all commercial regulations." The Framers' fundamental task was to create a federal government with powers impervious to encroachments by the states. The Framers had been frightened by the states' excesses in using political power on behalf of debtors against creditors and to limit competition by mercantilistic practices such as granting monopolies. Marshall made constitutional law a bulwark of the sanctity of contracts, the bedrock of America's enterprise culture. And by protecting the private rights essential to aspirational individualism, Marshall's court legitimized an inequality -- not of opportunity but of outcomes -- compatible with a republic's values.

When in 1801 Marshall was nominated to be chief justice -- one of the last things, and much the best thing, President John Adams did -- the nation still largely had an Articles of Confederation mentality. Formally, it was a nation; emotionally -- hence, actually -- it was still in many ways many countries, most states being older than and more warmly embraced than the nation. Marshall's jurisprudence built the bridge to 1862, the year it became clear that many men would have to die in a protracted conflict to preserve the Union and that many would be willing to do so.

Marshall had been willing to die to help midwife the nation's birth, seeing much hard action during the Revolutionary War. Amiably sociable and broadly tolerant, he had friends of vastly different political persuasions, and the only adversary he seems to have steadily disliked was a second cousin named Thomas Jefferson, in part because of Jefferson's partisan criticisms of Washington, whom Marshall celebrated, in an immense biography, as the symbol of a national identity transcending state loyalties.

Among the many recent fine biographies of America's Founders, none is finer than Jean Edward Smith's 1996 book "John Marshall: Definer of a Nation." Smith locates Marshall's greatness in this fact: Unlike Britain's constitutional documents, which are political documents that it is Parliament's prerogative to construe, the U.S. Constitution is a legal document construed by courts, not Congress. When judicial supervision of our democracy seems tiresome, consider the alternative.

Marshall's life of strong, consequential prose had, Smith writes, a poetic coda. Marshall died in Philadelphia, birthplace of the Constitution into which he breathed so much strength and meaning. The Liberty Bell, while tolling his death, cracked. It never rang again.

Grisham: The Coast Will "Not Merely Endure"

From the New York Times...True.

September 25, 2005
The Gulf Will Rise Again
By JOHN GRISHAM
Biloxi, Miss.

ON Aug. 17, 1969, Hurricane Camille roared onto the Gulf Coast with winds of more than 200 miles an hour, only the second Category 5 storm to hit the mainland United States. It killed 143 people in Mississippi, and 201 more in flooding in central Virginia.

Over the years, Hurricane Camille's legend grew, and it was not uncommon when I was a child and student in Mississippi to hear horrific tales from coast residents who had survived it. I myself was sleeping in a Boy Scout pup tent 200 miles inland when the storm swept through. Our losses were minimal - the tents, sleeping bags, some food - but over time I managed to spice up the adventure and add a little danger to it.

For almost 40 years, it was a well-established belief that the Gulf Coast had taken nature's mightiest blow, picked itself up, learned some lessons and survived rather well. There could simply never be another storm like Hurricane Camille.

After walking the flattened streets of Biloxi, though, I suspect that Hurricane Camille will soon be downgraded to an April shower. The devastation from Hurricane Katrina, a storm surge 80 miles wide and close to 30 feet high, is incomprehensible. North from the beach for a half a mile, virtually every house has been reduced to kindling and debris. At least 100,000 people in Jackson County - poor, middle-class, wealthy - are homeless.

I search for a friend's home, a grand old place with a long wide porch where we'd sit and gaze at the ocean, and find nothing but rubble. Mary Mahoney's, the venerable French restaurant and my favorite place to eat on the coast, is standing, but gutted. It's built of stone and survived many storms but had seen nothing like Hurricane Katrina.

Even without Hurricane Rita chewing its way across the region, the notion of starting again is nearly impossible to grasp. Some areas will have no electricity for months. The schools, churches, libraries and offices lucky enough to be standing can't open for weeks. Those not standing will be scooped up in the rubble, then rebuilt. But where, and at what cost?

So much has disappeared - highways, streets, bridges, treatment plants, docks, ports. The next seafood harvest is years away, and the shrimpers have lost their boats. The bustling casino business - 14,000 jobs and $500,000 a day in tax revenues - will be closed for months and may take years to recover. Lawyer friends of mine lost not only their homes and offices, but their records and their courthouses.

At least half of the homes and businesses destroyed were not insured against flood losses. For decades, developers, builders, real estate and insurance agents have been telling people: "Don't worry, Camille didn't touch this area. It'll never flood." This advice was not ill intentioned; it simply reflected what most people believed. Now, those who listened to it and built anyway are facing bankruptcy.

As dark as these days are, though, there is hope. It doesn't come from handouts or legislation, and it certainly doesn't come from speeches promising rosy days ahead. Folks dependent on donated groceries are completely unmoved by campaign-style predictions of a glorious future. It's much too early for such talk.

Hope here comes from the people and their remarkable belief that, if we all stick together, we'll survive. The residents of the Gulf Coast have an enormous pride in their ability to take a punch, even a knockout blow, and stagger gamely back into the center of the ring. Their parents survived Camille, and Betsy and Frederic, and they are determined to get the best of this latest legend.

Those who've lost everything have nothing to give but their courage and sweat, and there is an abundance of both along the coast these days. At a school in the small town of De Lisle, the superintendent, who's living in the parking lot, gives a quick tour of the gymnasium, which is now a makeshift food dispensary where everything is free and volunteers hurriedly unpack supplies. Two nearby schools have vanished, so in three weeks she plans to open doors to any student who can get to her school. Temporary trailers have been ordered and she hopes they're on the way. Ninety-five percent of her teachers are homeless but nonetheless eager to return to the classrooms.

Though she is uncertain where she'll find the money to pay the teachers, rent the trailers and buy gas for the buses, she and her staff are excited about reopening. It's important for her students to touch and feel something normal. She's lost her home, but her primary concern is for the children. "Could you send us some books?" she asks me. Choking back tears, my wife and I say, "Yes, we certainly could."

Normalcy is the key, and the people cling to anything that's familiar - the school, a church, a routine, but especially to one another. Flying low in a Black Hawk over the devastated beach towns, the National Guard general who is our host says, "What this place needs is a good football game." And he's right. It's Friday, and a few lucky schools are gearing up for the big games, all of which have been rescheduled out of town. Signs of normal life are slowly emerging.

The task of rebuilding is monumental and disheartening to the outsider. But to the battle-scarred survivors of the Gulf Coast, today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow something good will happen.

When William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950, he said, in part: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance."

Today, Faulkner would find in his native state a resilient spirit that is amazing to behold. The people here will sacrifice and give and give until one day this storm will be behind them, and they will look back, like their parents and grandparents, and quietly say, "We prevailed."

Wah-Hoo-Wah Ole Dartmouth

Hello all! It's been a couple of weeks since I posted. Things are busy here as I begin the transition to my successor, lucky chap. In the meantine, only one item stood out that I wish to post.

Are you an employer? Want to hire a future CEO to take over the reigns? Dartmouth College is a beacon of conservatism amidst the cesspool of academia. Follows is the speech Student Body President Noah Riner ‘06 gave to the incoming class of ‘09 at the September 20 convocation:

By Noah Riner

You’ve been told that you are a special class. A quick look at the statistics confirms that claim: quite simply, you are the smartest and most diverse group of freshmen to set foot on the Dartmouth campus. You have more potential than all of the other classes. You really are special.

But it isn’t enough to be special. It isn’t enough to be talented, to be beautiful, to be smart. Generations of amazing students have come before you, and have sat in your seats. Some have been good, some have been bad. All have been special.

In fact, there’s quite a long list of very special, very corrupt people who have graduated from Dartmouth. William Walter Remington, Class of 1939, started out as a Boy Scout and a choirboy and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He ended up as a Soviet spy, was convicted of perjury and beaten to death in prison.

Daniel Mason ‘93 was just about to graduate from Boston Medical School when he shot two men – killing one – after a parking dispute.

Just a few weeks ago, I read in the D about PJ Halas, Class of 1998. His great uncle George founded the Chicago Bears, and PJ lived up to the family name, co-captaining the basketball team his senior year at Dartmouth and coaching at a high school team following graduation. He was also a history teacher, and, this summer, he was arrested for sexually assualting a 15-year-old student.

These stories demonstrate that it takes more than a Dartmouth degree to build character.

As former Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey said, at Dartmouth our business is learning. And I’ll have to agree with the motto of Faber College, featured in the movie Animal House, “Knowledge is Good.” But if all we get from this place is knowledge, we’ve missed something. There’s one subject that you won’t learn about in class, one topic that orientation didn’t cover, and that your UGA won’t mention: character.

What is the purpose of our education? Why are we at Dartmouth?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

“But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society…. We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

We hear very little about character in our classrooms, yet, as Dr. King suggests, the real problem in the world is not a lack of education.

For example, in the past few weeks we’ve seen some pretty revealing things happening on the Gulf Coast in the wake of hurricane Katrina. We’ve seen acts of selfless heroism and millions around the country have united to help the refugees.

On the other hand, we’ve been disgusted by the looting, violence, and raping that took place even in the supposed refuge areas. In a time of crisis and death, people were paddling around in rafts, stealing TV’s and VCR’s. How could Americans go so low?

My purpose in mentioning the horrible things done by certain people on the Gulf Coast isn’t to condemn just them; rather it’s to condemn all of us. Supposedly, character is what you do when no one is looking, but I’m afraid to say all the things I’ve done when no one was looking. Cheating, stealing, lusting, you name it - How different are we? It’s easy to say that we’ve never gone that far: never stolen that much; never lusted so much that we’d rape; and the people we’ve cheated, they were rich anyway.

Let’s be honest, the differences are in degree. We have the same flaws as the individuals who pillaged New Orleans. Ours haven’t been given such free range, but they exist and are part of us all the same.

The Times of London once asked readers for comments on what was wrong with the world. British author, G. K. Chesterton responded simply: “Dear Sir, I am.”

Not many of us have the same clarity that Chesterton had. Just days after Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast, politicians and pundits were distributing more blame than aid. It’s so easy to see the faults of others, but so difficult to see our own. In the words of Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “the fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus. In the Garden of Gethsemane, just hours before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That’s character.

Jesus is a good example of character, but He’s also much more than that. He is the solution to flawed people like corrupt Dartmouth alums, looters, and me.

It’s so easy to focus on the defects of others and ignore my own. But I need saving as much as they do.

Jesus’ message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn’t have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God’s love: Jesus on the cross, for us.

In the words of Bono:

[I]f only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. …When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my s—- and everybody else’s. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that’s the question.

You want the best undergraduate education in the world, and you’ve come to the right place to get that. But there’s more to college than achievement. With Martin Luther King, we must dream of a nation – and a college – where people are not judged by the superficial, “but by the content of their character.”

Thus, as you begin your four years here, you’ve got to come to some conclusions about your own character because you won’t get it by just going to class. What is the content of your character? Who are you? And how will you become what you need to be?

Bravo Zulu SK2 Lucinda Brunk!!

One of my favorite unit members, SK2 Lucinda Brunk, was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for outstanding service to DDYJ1, Sioux Falls, SD. She is a tireless worker in support of more charaties than I can count AND she gets the mail there on time as well!

BZ, SK2 Brunk, well deserved. CDR Chris "Moose" Rossing, Commanding Officer, Navy Reserve Center, Sioux Falls, SD, presided.

LCDR B.

This Song's For You, Gentle Annie

The picture above is of Annie on "smoke break" as we ascended Mount Hawaiiloa Ridge, just winward of Waikiki, this summer. (She normally doesn't like the pictures of her I like best!)

Gentle Annie ("on this rock I will build my my family...") has assumed here master hostess role. The burden she bears in all of this: me gone, Katrina, etc., will significantly "reduce her time in pergatory" (an inside joke). God help the one's who don't appreciate what she is going through. For Annie is wisest once the going gets tough.

On top of that, we both know I will be commuting to work once I do return. But we've agreed to maintain the homestead here in Mississippi while the kids are still in proximity.

This song's for you, hon, my Gentle Annie, very much alive: Click Here

Oye! Oye! Back to Business

Random thoughts...as the lights are turned back on in New Orleans. The picture above is from the West Bank, and looks to me to be from about where NSA New Orleans is.

Hurricane Katrina has zapped my desire to post anything related to New Orleans or the Coast. But, seeing my family beginning to rebound eases the frustration of being here and not there.

Tim, Laura, Ashley and Pepper, as well as my dad, have moved in...Julie and Brad are relocating to New Mexico. Davey has flown off to his new job with SAIC. As for my chilren', Master Director and Bon Vivant Trip will move in with the Achords (Annie's parents) to make our upstairs more roomy. So, Dice Pictures will emanate from Castlewoods for a while. Sweet Emily will assume her studies and usual coed chores at Ole Miss (where looks meet gentility), but this year she adds the school dance team to her list of slayed dragons.

I wanted to post the following WSJ article about President Bush. He does effortlessly what all of us (affected by Katrina) need to do: Keep out eyes in the ball, our goals and objctives, relegating Madame Katrina to her rightful place as nothing more than a speed bump, albeit a large, ill-designed one!

Back to Business
President Bush had a rough summer. That doesn't mean he's in for a fall.

BY FRED BARNES
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 12:01 a.m.

This summer hasn't been kind to President Bush. Persistent terrorism in Iraq continued to drive up the toll of American dead. The media transformed Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain soldier, into an anti-Bush celebrity. On top of soaring gas prices, devastation from Hurricane Katrina gave the president a huge, new crisis and a deluge of criticism to deal with. Naturally, his job approval rating, measured relentlessly in polls, sank to a new low. Yet two things remain true about the Bush presidency.

Mr. Bush knows how to win elections. And he knows how to drive his agenda, especially in Congress. Last winter, bills curbing class-action lawsuits and reforming bankruptcy law--both favorites of Mr. Bush--were enacted. Then, during a two-week span in July and August, he won congressional approval of the controversial Central America Free Trade Agreement, overdue energy legislation and a highway bill slimmed down to meet his specifications. The day Cafta passed, thanks to aggressive lobbying by Mr. Bush himself, his job rating was at 44% in the Gallup Poll, the lowest point of his presidency.

Now, as Congress returns for its fall session, Mr. Bush has reason to feel burdened but still optimistic. He's been politically bruised by his administration's response to Katrina but hardly crippled. He promptly named the conservative he'd already nominated for the Supreme Court, John Roberts, to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died Saturday. Judge Roberts is likely to be confirmed in time for the court's opening day in October. That leaves the seat of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who resigned in June, still vacant. If the president follows his instincts, picks another conservative, and gains confirmation, he will have succeeded in tilting the ideological balance of the court to the right.
Meanwhile, prospects for eliminating or slashing the federal estate tax, or death tax, took a hit when Majority Leader Bill Frist postponed a vote so the Senate can concentrate on Katrina-related legislation. But the estate tax remains a ripe target. At the end of September, Mr. Bush's tax commission will recommend a tax reform plan that will allow him to embrace--or at least to elevate--the tax issue, always a winner for Republicans. And his proposal to bring immigrants to the United States as "guest workers" looks to win passage as part of a broader bill to curb illegal immigration.

Mr. Bush's management of the recovery from Katrina is a wild card. His critics--mostly Democrats, the media and Louisiana officials shifting the blame from their own shortcomings--accuse him of failing to respond with the urgency and strong presidential leadership he showed after 9/11. They're right. But Katrina, though a catastrophe, isn't 9/11. Louisiana and Mississippi weren't attacked by enemy forces. Americans break along normal partisan lines in judging Mr. Bush's performance in coping with Katrina, an ABC News poll found. Only a minority (44%) fault him personally. Even so, his approval rating may slip a bit.

But the simple fact of governing in Washington is that popularity is not a measure of power. In the late '90s, President Clinton's approval rating stayed well above 60%, even after he was impeached. But Mr. Clinton had almost no clout. True, this was partly because he faced a Republican Congress. A Bush aide was accurate (if self-serving) in drawing the distinction this way: "The difference is between polls in the 40s and changing history and being in the 60s and twiddling your thumbs. We'll take the 40s. That's our motto."

Despite weak poll numbers, Mr. Bush insisted on nominating a conservative to replace Justice O'Connor rather than appease Democrats by picking a moderate. And while under fire for Katrina, he promptly selected the same conservative to succeed Rehnquist. Now he is being urged to find a consensus nominee for the second court vacancy. This, we're told, would rally America post-Katrina. Such calls are typical fodder from the party out of power, and it would be out of character for Mr. Bush to go along, thus abandoning his promise to name conservative judges.

Democrats haven't given up on blocking Judge Roberts. But his confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, find them divided and confused. Mr. Bush's choice of Judge Roberts, a man of quiet conservatism and amiable demeanor, has proved to be disarming. Some Democrats fear belligerent opposition would harm them, not the president. What's more significant is that Mr. Bush's dip in popularity has had no effect on the Republican coalition. It hasn't splintered. With few exceptions, Republican senators are enthusiastically pro-Roberts.

Wiping out the estate tax is another cherished conservative goal that Mr. Bush has not balked at pursuing. This fall, the Senate may decide whether to abolish it permanently. The House has already voted to do so. If elimination fails in the Senate, Mr. Bush and his allies, led by Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, have a fallback position that appeals to moderate Democrats. It would repeal the tax for estates of less than $5 million and cut the rate to 15% from 55%.

Later this month, Mr. Bush's tax panel will report its recommendations on reforming the tax code. Those familiar with the panel, headed by former Sens. John Breaux of Louisiana and Connie Mack of Florida, expect it to urge the replacement of the federal income tax with some kind of consumption or value-added tax. The president has instructed the panel only that it must preserve the home mortgage and charitable deductions. Whatever it comes up with, Republicans hope it will spark a national debate on tax reform, leading to legislation next year.

Immigration is the most troublesome issue for Mr. Bush because he is at odds with many Republicans. He is passionately pro-immigrant, while they are fixated on securing America's southern border. The president has little influence on Republicans on immigration and wouldn't have it even if his approval rating were 20 points higher. Instead, congressional Republicans are responding to grassroots pressure to stop the flow of illegal aliens.
There's a solution. By joining his guest-worker plan with beefing up border protection, Mr. Bush and Republicans have a good chance of enacting an immigration bill. In this case, a bipartisan measure supported by Sen. Edward Kennedy could emerge. Sens. Kennedy and John McCain are co-sponsors of an immigration bill that may be closer to Mr. Bush's thinking than a rival bill authored by Sen. Kyl and Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

Compromising with Democrats is not a Bush habit. His doggedness in sticking to his own agenda has contributed to political polarization in Washington and to his tumble in popularity. After Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, Democrats expected him to seek their input. He hasn't. And this, in turn, has exacerbated Democratic hostility, frozen partisan feelings and caused his polls numbers to fade.

It's a trade-off that Mr. Bush readily accepted. Republicans have bucked him only once on a significant issue. They've stayed away in droves from his Social Security reform proposal. This year, he's begun cleaning out the cupboard of stored-up legislation and frustrated goals. The bankruptcy bill had been stalled for nine years, the energy bill for four, the creation of a more conservative Supreme Court for decades. Now Mr. Bush intends to continue that job this fall and the odds on success, Katrina notwithstanding, are in his favor.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

Memories of New Orleans and the Coast

As you can tell, I haven't posted since Monday, when first indications were that Katrina was going to destroy both of my home towns, New Orleans and Bay-Waveland. My post then was too cute by half. Katrina, turned out to be an all-time bitch whose destruction is brutish, nasty and short.

Below: Bay St. Louis, MS. Dad's apartment was near the beach between the Bay Bridge to the north and the RR Bridge to the south.



I spoke with Boots and Trish at Di's in Plaquemines: All family is accounted for and safe. But most have lost their homes and many their livelyhood. My father lost his apartment, though Davey and Julie were able to walk over mounds of debris to collect some of his clothes. His apartment on Demontluzin Avenue in Bay St Louis is at the very highest point of Bay St Louis, just north of downtown. His apartment is on the second floor. The surge rose to the eight step. That means to me that the surge was at least forty feet. At the foot of Demontluzin at the beach, if you remember, it is at least 25 feet down to the waterline. Dad's apartment is a long block from the beach.

Below: Dad's view of the train bridge



Where we have lived in Bay St Louis (the Lambs, two houses from the Bay bridge, Boardman Ave, Cedar Point) are flat marsh lands now. In Waveland (on Pine Ridge Drive), including Mimi & Poppy's house on Vacation Lane, are all flat marsh lands now. I saw a video of St Stanislaus and Our Lady of the Gulf. Both were still standing. OLG has survived the hurricanes of 49, 69 (Camille), 64 (Betsy), 65 (Hilda), several others the dates of which I can't recall, and now Katrina.

I haven't heard from any of the Fausts but I understand all are safe. Susie and Don are staying with Mug and Penny in Atlanta.

Below: View of New Orleans from Uptown



As for my siblings, Tim and Laura still don't know about their house n Kenner. They are staying with Stu and his family in Lafayette. Julie and Brad will likely relocate for now to Brad's hometown in New Mexico. I understand St Tammany Parish School District will pay their teachers 65%. So, with that and the fact that Julie is a certified elementary ed teacher, they should land OK in the Land of Enchanment. Davey, as you may know, worked for Lockeed in Slidell. Good news, he landed immediately with SAIC and will consult on DLA projects. That's my gaining command. He's worked hard transitioning into IT from geology and with back to back hires at Lockeed and SAIC, he's rolling.

Annie and I have a decision to make soon. I've been offered good IT positions with federal agencies in Philly and Northern Virginia...to move or commute, that is the question...or stay active duty and seek work closer to Jackson. Trip and Emmy, in their own humerous way, have told us, enjoy xx, we're not moving!

Below: an Uptown style that's likely lost forever.



The devastation in New Orleans and the coast has uprooted so many people that many other southern cities will be impacted. Good impacts and bad impacts. One bad impact is that New Orleans' drug and crime wave will ripple over these southern cites, Jackson included.

REMEMBERING NEW ORLEANS...I remember riding bikes down the old Tulane Stadium ramps...walking into the Superdome for the first time...jogging on St Charles (in fact, as a high school trackster, I "made" paths on St Charles before the jogging fad started)...playing football at Tad Gormley and baseball at Larry Gilbert for Jesuit and Odeco Drillers during the summer...Having my first trifecta at Pat O'Briens and not remembering bringing my date home...Walking to Holy Name before sun up to serve mass, then over to Loyola for eggs and bacon, a free perk for altar boys...I remember one of my dogs (Rebel) following me on my paper route only to give its life to a Sunbeam truck (I dumped all of the papers on the street and placed Rebel into the basket and drove her home for proper burial in our back yard)...I remember one summer jogging from our house on Audubon Street, through Tulane, around Audubon Park and the Riverwalk, and back, every day - six miles - after shoveling asphalt from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM on Airline Highway...I remember taking four buses to Jesuit for school, hoping a few Dominican girls would be on board...I remember Tulane beating LSU after a 25 year drought...I remember my summer as a Please Escort during Meg Farris's debut...I remember doing the waltz badly in front of all of Mardi Gras at the Comus ball (Dr Simon Ward's daughter's date).

I haven't lived in New Orleans since 1981. But this tragedy brings to mind how many good times and memories we had. The Big Easy is gone, but so was Chigago, Galveston, Washington DC, Atlanta, etc. New Orleans will be back, but won't be the same. Like Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can never go home.

Below: The old Archie Manning homestead in the Garden District (between uptown and the CBD).

In New Orleans, our lives were defined by water

This is a New Orleans guy who writes for the Tribune. He describes perfectly what it is that gets under your skin and makes you adore New Orleans, particularly if you grew up there, and your parents grew up there...

By Kerry Luft
Tribune foreign editor

The house where I grew up sits on a New Orleans street called Tchoupitoulas, a Native American term that means "people who live by the river."

My mother grew up in the house next door. So did her mother. My father's boyhood home is on the same street, five blocks away.

You could see the wharves that line the Mississippi River from our front door, the steam stacks of the freighter boats soaring far above the warehouse walls. We heard their horns blare in the night as they queued to fill their holds with grain and headed back down the river to the sea.

It never occurred to us how odd it was that those giant ships sailed on water that flowed above our heads, on the other side of a levee that held back the mighty river that gave the city life and its reason for existence. Nor did it seem strange that every year or so, we spent a late-summer night behind boarded-up windows with kerosene lanterns and flashlights at the ready, watching the track of a hurricane that always skidded past.

Our lives were defined by water.

When you grew up in New Orleans, you abandoned the conventional directions of north, south, east and west. Instead you went "uptown," meaning upstream; or "towards the lake" or "back to the river." For vacation you went "across the lake." You fished and swam in Lake Pontchartrain, you ate boiled crabs and fried shrimp in restaurants built on piers jutting over the same lake, and you kissed your first girlfriend at the top of the levee, looking out over the river from your bicycle at the end of what was perhaps the first truly perfect day in your life.

Now the water has defined our lives again, in a way we sometimes thought about but never anticipated, and those of us who grew up in New Orleans wonder whether there will ever be another truly perfect day.

The New Orleans that the tourist knows is different from the one I love. There are some common elements between the two, like the mysterious romance of the French Quarter, the briny tang of a cold raw oyster, and the miracles that can be achieved through the confluence of fresh seafood, a dusting of spices and far too much butter.

But my New Orleans, the one where I grew up, is more about a corner bar with terrific po' boy sandwiches than a linen tablecloth and fine wines, more about homes filled with laughing, generous people than bars packed with drunken conventioneers, and more about quiet side streets with leafy playgrounds and parks than raucous Bourbon Street and its tawdry sideshows.

When the terrible news began to emerge last week, I realized that it was this New Orleans, the one where the people lived and the tourists never went, that was most in danger.

I turned to the Internet and its blogs, frantically searching for news of the nursing home where my mother rode out the storm in her wheelchair, her mind lost in the mists of Alzheimer's disease. I pored over every news report, which may have been a mistake. Every photograph seemed to be of a spot I knew, every bulletin a touchstone. I knew too much, and my knowledge haunted me.

The water is rising in Carrollton, where I played baseball as a boy.

The floodwaters have reached City Park Avenue, near the lagoon where I caught my first bass.

The 17th Street Canal has breached the levee, near the spot where one of my scoutmasters lived, and I am certain that I saw the eaves of his house poking out above the water during a television report.

Looters raided a nursing home, right around the corner from my father's house and across the street from the store where I bought my first bicycle.

I read that many of the giant, gnarled oak trees that line historic St. Charles Avenue and other Uptown streets had toppled in the wind, and I thought of how my father has walked beneath them every Mardi Gras for 55 years as a member of his beloved marching club. I walked alongside him as a little boy, and I punish myself now for not walking beside him in this year's parade, when he was the grand marshal. He may march again down those streets, but it will not, cannot be the same.

A bridge I drove across hundreds of times in my youth is gone too, washed into the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain. On the other side was the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where my family had a little cabin not far from the beach in a sleepy town called Bay St. Louis, where quail chirped their liquid song in the early morning and the clean smell of the sea washed ashore on the night breeze. For a little boy who loved to fish and wander in the woods, it was magic.

Bay St. Louis is no longer there.

Yet that awful fact reminds me that I am lucky. My father and brother evacuated to Memphis before Katrina arrived, and they are now with me in my Evanston home. My mother's nursing home survived the storm, and she is in Houston under the care of people who can help her far more than we can, as painful as that thought might be.

Other people lost everything. Too many of them had almost nothing in the first place.

The wrenching video and photographs that flashed around the world last week revealed a secret truth about New Orleans. It is one of the nation's poorest cities, and in an especially cruel twist, much of the catastrophic flooding affected the poorest of the poor. I am certain that most of the people who took refuge in the darkened, steamy Superdome never had stepped inside the building before, unless they had hawked beer and peanuts at a Super Bowl or Final Four.

The French Quarter may make it. Reports indicated that the flooding was not so bad there, though it is unclear whether the foundations of 200-year-old buildings can withstand such a soaking. So, too, might the hotels, because they are backed by billion-dollar corporations with insurance policies. Beloved restaurants like Commander's Palace or Emeril's may survive too, because after all, it is New Orleans.

But the people who worked at those hotels and restaurants, who lugged suitcases upstairs and cleaned rooms and waited on tables ... so many of them lived in those houses now under several feet of fetid, toxic water. There may be jobs for them when they return, if they return, but where will they live?

My father will probably return to his sturdy brick house by the docks. In one of the greatest ironies of New Orleans, the land nearest the river is the highest in the city, and so his home likely was spared. Yet as I give thanks for that, I cannot help but think about the night we drove down Tchoupitoulas Street, bringing a friend of mine home for dinner.

As we rode, my friend peered out the window at the wharves and the ships, so close you could throw a stone and hit them. "Just how close do you live to the river?" he asked.

My father paused. "Some years, four blocks," he said. "Other years, two blocks."

I have repeated that line many times as a perfect example of my father's bone-dry wit and the laissez-faire, what-me-worry attitude of the native New Orleanian. Today it is a painful memory, a hollow joke that I will never tell again.

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune