Professor D.G. Myers has been writing for Commentary magazine for many years, and for the past 18 months he has been under contract for their literary blog. Last week, he was told to stop writing for a while. Editor John Podhoretz emailed him after seeing a post on Commentary’s literary blog which Podhoretz did not consider literary. It was policial.

Podhoretz expalins, “I told David that he could write at will on his blog without editorial supervision, as long as he stayed within the confines of the literary. … [With the post, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage”] David had decided unilaterally to convert Literary Commentary into a sociopolitical blog without a moment’s consultation. This I considered an uncollegial and insubordinate act,and I’m afraid it was not the first of these.”

Myers says, “I did not conceive of my post as political; it was, to my mind, a literary and philosophical defense of gay marriage, derived from my reading, utterly silent on questions of public policy.” And he praises Podhoretz for being a great editor.

Many Internet voices have reacted to this news, accusing the Commentary editor of being the very old white guy they say Republicans need to shove out of the lifeboat. Podhoretz reminds them that he and other editors had approved a post Myers wrote for their main political blog in support of gay marriage, so the subject of Myers’ post on the literary blog was not the issue. Continue reading Commentary’s Podhoretz, Myers Split →

Mark Binelli has a list of ten novels that have distinctive depictions of cities in them, pushing them beyond the role of setting to something closer to a supporting cast. One example:

Davis has written extensively, and brilliantly, about Los Angeles, but City of Quartz, for my money, is his greatest book about one of my favorite American cities. As simultaneously visionary and paranoid as a Philip K. Dick novel, populated with an eccentric cast of characters ranging from L. Ron Hubbard to Ornette Coleman.

In all the vortex of commentary in the aftermath of the election, one argument in particular seems to me both plausible and troubling. I keep hearing people say, “The Republican Party has to go libertarian. Enough with social conservatism. Nobody wants it anymore. Christian America is dead and gone. We’ve got to promote an ideology of freedom, where the government just keeps its hands off all private matters, whether marriage or abortion or drugs or anything else. That will attract the younger voters.”

It’s conceivable, but I have a lot of trouble with it. Those who promote homosexual marriage have very poor track record of leaving alone the people who refuse to recognize it. They’re awfully prone to use laws to force acquiescence from businesspeople, or even churches, who don’t want to play that game. And I, personally, think that a society needs to privilege man-woman marriage in order to make it worthwhile for men to enter into marriages. Otherwise, men are congenitally inclined to wander away, and then the wife falls into the arms of the welfare state, which grows government, the very thing libertarianism wants to reduce.

I will never donate to a party that promotes abortion. And I consider drugs a societal danger. You may consider Amsterdam a paradise on earth, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Still, a libertarian regime might be more tolerant of Christians, all in all, than the socialist one we seem to headed to.

In either case, the old republic as we knew it is gone, it would seem.

1. “Hymns” by William Cowper
2. “Lincoln’s Little Girl” by Cecelia Holland, a Kindle non-fiction single
3. Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots by J.C. Ryle

I started thinking up something to write today, but I decided at last that it was too depressing and demoralizing to inflict on you. Judging by my behavior over at Facebook, I’m not fit for company.