The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Welcome to Modern Journalism!

The mop and pail are in the back closet:

The New Criterion seeks an outgoing and highly motivated individual to join its development and editorial team as Assistant Editor. The Assistant Editor is responsible for overseeing the Friends of The New Criterion, a group of readers who donate their time, effort, and money to support the magazine. The Assistant Editor will plan regular Friends events including cocktail receptions, panel discussions, dinners, and book releases; recruit new members through personalized outreach; and prepare the annual Friends Report for publication.

So in what sense will the successful applicant be, you know, editing? Isn't this really just a donor relations gig? I also love the traditional job posting entree of "seeks an outgoing and highly motivated individual." In all these years I've yet to see a job board notice that begins with "seeks a disgruntled and embittered hack to bring down company morale and clog up the photocopier." Such a posting might as well say: "Hey Publius, apply here!" 

In defence of the New Criterion their resume call does include this shaft of heavenly light and hope:

The extent to which the Assistant Editor will write, edit, and format articles in the magazine will be commensurate with his or her interest and experience. 

Ah. "Interest and experience." Gotcha. Kinda like those lectures where the MC announces that the distinguished speaker will take questions from the audience - time allowing. Whenever you see that last qualifier you can bet they'll be a twenty minute tangential rant about how the airline broke the aforementioned distinguished speaker's iPad. Oops. Sorry. Got a meet and greet at the Faculty Lounge in...

The twist of the knife, however, is this:

Salary will be based on experience and includes an excellent benefits package.

The salary is peanuts and the benefits are all the peanut butter you can carry.

Look, I'm not picking on the New Criterion. I've been a subscriber for years and they're one of the best conservative magazines in print today. A conservative intellectual and literary publication is a near oxymoron in our bottom-half of the IQ distribution defined culture. The editors - the real ones - and publishers of the New Criterion deserve the cultural equivalent of the Victoria Cross for their three decades of effort. Magazine publishing has always been brutal. Magazine publishing post-internet is the Battle of the Somme without the quiet and repose. I can't completely blame them for dressing up a low-level flunky job as something special. It says more about the state of serious culture in modern North America than it does about the fine people at the New Criterion.

 

Wednesday Night - William F Buckley

1989

William F Buckley's November 10, 1989, "On the Right" column.

When the news came in, President Bush sat quietly in his large chair in the Oval Office and said in grave tones that we must not overreact . He is absolutely right about this. JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE ALL THE WAYYYY! It is proper to deem it a historical development, but its significance must not affect our judgment. OH WHAT A BEAU-TI-FUL MORN-ING! OH WHAT A BEAU-TI-FUL DAY!!! After all, there is tomorrow to think about in Germany. GERMANY?!?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, `GERMANY'? YOU MEAN WEST GERMANY OR YOU MEAN EAST GERMANY? — the score allows for many variations. Calmness is in order.

With Athiests Like These

Dear Richard Dawkins,

On behalf of the atheists of the world, please shut up.  You are embarrassing all of us.

Regards,

Publius

A fund-raising drive for the promotion, carrying the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life", raised more than £140,000.

The campaign, which will also feature on the Tube, is backed by the British Humanist Association and prominent atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins.

Edward Michael George has some fun.

I don't know about you, by my mind has officially been blown.

I mean, it's so ingenious and yet so simple! Probably!

How is it that nobody has ever thought of this before? How is it that not a single person down the ages has dared to question the existence of God? How is it that, since time immemorial, there haven't been some men who believed and some who didn't? How is it, furthermore, that for those who weren't quite willing to commit either way, there wasn't something like a "wager" that people made; a "wager" that some non-existent historical personage devised--let's call him Pascal shall we, just for the sake of argument--that might explain their continuing belief in the face of so decisive a doubt: probably?

How is it that this debate isn't already very old, very tired, and very clichéd?

It's crazy, man!

According to legend, Ayn Rand once asked WIlliam F Buckley how someone so intelligent could believe in God.  This is a common error among atheists, including ones far less illustrious than Rand.  It's not a matter of intelligence, or fear or repression, it's belief.  That something is inexplicable to you, doesn't mean it's a product of madness on the part of someone else.  Dawkins has declared more than once that religion doesn't want people to think.  What exactly is a theologian then?  No defense is better than so bad a defense.

William F. Buckley on Kennan - 1978

From the National Review Online:

Henry Kissinger remarked privately, 20 years ago, that the premier ambiguists in public life in America were Adlai Stevenson and George Kennan. Mind you, this was said about Kennan only ten years after he wrote his famous article, signed only "X", which articulated the doctrine of containment . That article became the spinal column of western policy.

It is now his thesis, though that may be too formal a word for it, that at this moment in history the world is bedeviled not so much by the Soviet Union as by the adamancy of some of its critics, notably Americans. And he speaks not of the Curtis LeMay school of foreign policy ("bomb them back to the stone age"). Although he did not mention any names, he is really speaking about such men as Paul Nitze, and George Ball, and Henry Jackson — what one might think of as the Dean Acheson school of foreign policy.

These men and others like them, reasons Kennan, are responsible for a sclerotic mind set in the formation of foreign policy. If it were not that we continue to think of the Soviet Union as Stalin's country, we would move with greater spontaneity in our relations with it. We would recognize that the present leaders of Russia are truly conservative men, that the old revolutionary elan is gone, and that our programmed reflexes are quite simply ill-considered, inappropriate to the task of bold experimentation with the view to taking the opportunities at hand.

George Kennan seems to feel that the moment has come for demarche. What will he say if in the next period the conservatives in the Kremlin get in the way of a settlement in the Mideast, practice a little irredentism in Yugoslavia, and crank up the war machine in North Korea? That the United States failed in its great opportunity to grow weaker faster?