The bulls have been slaughtered and their entrails carefully examined by the meteorological priesthood. The shamans declare that we are entering into a period of heat and drought. This isn’t a tough call in Minnesota in July, but we always hope we might catch a break, and it’s their job to dash that hope.

I plan to potter around Blithering Heights on Saturday, staying indoors as much as possible. On Saturday I shall imprudently join the Viking Age Club & Society for an encampment at Minnehaha Park (it’s the annual Norway Day celebration). Stop by if you’re in the area. (I actually have a strong suspicion that I’m our only reader in the Minneapolis area.)

I always enjoy our events at Minnehaha Park, having lived in that part of town, off and on, for several years in the aggregate, sometime back around the time when Minnehaha Falls was brand new.

Here’s what I’m worrying about today:

As you’ve noted, I worry about everything. And I’m confident that everything I worry about will happen, even though several of them are mutually contradictory. I operate on the theory that just because the guy on my right has punched me, that doesn’t mean the guy on my left can’t follow up with a kick to the kneecap.

Anyway, I was worrying today.

Here’s what’s bothering me. Back when the American Founding Fathers were hammering out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they were working off a shared, common world view. You frequently hear people insisting that “all the Founders were Deists.” This is a) a considerable exaggeration, and b) irrelevant in a sense. Because for all the theological differences between the Deists and the Christians, they shared a basic agreement on the operation of reason and the nature of truth. They believed that if A is larger than B, and B is equal to C, then A must also be larger than C. They took it for granted that reasonable men would always agree on such things. It was an honorable thing, a sign of great-mindedness, to yield to the weight of logic.

This was a primary reason for their insistence on freedom of speech. It wasn’t (regardless of what you may have heard) because of their concern that pornography should always be freely available, but because they believed that if all the facts were stated, and all opinions heard, Reason would force all men of good will to agree in the end on the correct solution. Because Reason had objective existence, and followed scientific laws.

This is not believed much anymore.

Today, you have one side screaming its own set of facts, and the other side screaming its set of facts, and these sets of facts bear no relation to one another. The Iraq War that I follow in the news is nothing like the Iraq War that most Democrats follow in the news, for instance.

And there’s no place in our culture for the two sides to find common ground. We both suspect everything the other side says—because we’ve all been lied to too often, and we’ve come to suspect that any “fact” or news report we disagree with was probably doctored. And in the case of the Left, many of them doubt that there is such a thing as objective reality in any case.

We face a situation where the Left and the Right live in entirely different worlds, and can hardly communicate. And it’s not just a matter of Left and Right. There are an infinity of positions out there (this is one of the things that makes the Fairness Doctrine unworkable), and each opinion builds, as it were, its own self-contained universe.

I don’t see any solution for this problem.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Apparently, if you want to argue that your country needs a radical makeover, a complete rebuild from the source code, then you will want to write intellectual books describing the horrid genocide by the country’s founders even if it didn’t actually happen. That’s what Theodore Dalrymple suggests in article on a skirmish in Australia over that nation’s history.

“There is nothing much more attention-grabbing than the claim that your current happiness and good fortunes is founded on a pile of bones,” he writes. “With a bit of luck, this claim will even turn people neurotic and increase the need for therapists.” And praise you for shining the light on the historic darkness and need for change. Let us be one nation, victimized, divisible, with liberty and justice for those who deserve it. (via Books, Inq.)

I’m reading Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact right now. I picked it up because I’d heard Hunter interviewed on the radio, and he described himself as “libertarian/conservative.” So far I’m enjoying it quite a lot. I’ll probably review it when I’m done. That’s not what I want to talk about tonight, though. I want to talk about the movie they made from the book. A movie I haven’t seen, and have no plans to see.

The main character in the book is Bob Lee Swagger, a grizzled, taciturn, moderately crippled Vietnam veteran. In the war he was the second top U.S. sniper. Now he lives alone in a shack in the western Arkansas hills, subsisting on his military pension, maintaining a precarious sobriety, tuning his guns and keeping his shooting skills sharp. There are three people in the world he talks to (plus his dog), and he keeps out of the way of the rest of mankind.

So when Hollywood decided to turn this book into a movie, whom did they cast to carry this interesting character role?

Mark Wahlberg.

Think about that for a moment. Ponder the genius of the mind that made such decision.

Isn’t obvious to the meanest intelligence (which, needless to say, puts it beyond the reach of most of Hollywood) that a role like that simply screams for Sam Elliot?

Sam Elliot can’t carry a major motion picture, you say? He’s too old to play a lead, you say?

I say that kind of thinking is what’s wrong with America today.

I say that if Hollywood had a lick of sense, they’d be turning out a string of big Sam Elliot movies. These movies would be like the films John Wayne made at the end—improbable action flicks about big old men (Elliot even has the advantage of not having gotten fat) who buffalo the young punks and charm the ladies, who never lie or say die, and by thunder they get the job done.

If they added a little jingoistic Americanism that wouldn’t hurt either. (I don’t know what Elliot’s politics are, but if he knew his best interests he’d do the lines and take the money.)

That would get me back into the theaters.

But will anyone listen? Ha!

I try to help. I really try.

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern impassion’d stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness.

America! America!

God mend thine ev’ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law.

That’s the verse we should be singing today, though the first verse is good too.

Here’s Red Skelton’s tribute to our country and the Pledge of Allegiance.

I’m in no position to tell you what to do, but I’d like to go on record as saying I’m flying my flag today. And if you’re an American, I urge you to do the same. Dennis Prager’s column on the need for an “American seder” pretty much sums up my views.

Someone recently sent me a quotation I’ve read before, and like very much. It’s attributed to a scholar named Sir Alex Fraser, and it goes like this:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

An excellent sentiment and (I think) indisputably true. Unfortunately, according to both Snopes.com and truthorfiction.com, the statement cannot be found in any of Sir Alexander Fraser (Tyler)’s writings.

Which is very odd. It would appear that somebody came up with this extremely perceptive statement, and instead of taking credit for it himself, distributed it under the name of a long-dead scholar. Which shows admirable humility, but doesn’t really do much to promote his purposes, since once the false attribution is known, the whole thing loses credibility.

Or maybe somebody just remembered wrong.

I’ll leave that puzzle in its knot, and close with one of my favorite quotations from John Adams, our second president and one of our most brilliant and amusing, if not the most likeable:

“We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” (Address to the military, Oct. 11, 1798)

Which is essentially the same point, I think.