Blithe Spirit

MICKEY KAUS: “Labor costs–and specifically work rules–are part of what’s killing all the unionized auto manufacturers while their non-unionized competitors thrive.” Work rules, I think, are more damaging than pay issues because they cost flexibility and make it harder to introduce new technology.

— from the very helpful Instapundit, which most mornings beats your daily newspaper, or at least is more rewarding (except for obits, and local crime, politics, teams).

This retrogressive, feet-dug-in unionism, I fear, is the problem.  What Walter Reuther the Socialist got his arm broken for in 30s picketing v. Big Capital became a millstone around neck of the masses, who profit most from growing productivity.  Life’s a B, ain’t it?

“Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?” [Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney]

“No, I don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a Democrat.”

Truth Detector: Drive-By Hysterics Over Cheney Interview.

In fact, I was saying that very thing just the other day . . .

* U.S. southern novelist Walker Percy was a medical doctor.

* Longfellow is the most put to music of English-language poets.

(Items from Times [of London] Literary Supplement, hereafter TLS)

* The idiosyncrasy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry may be explained by the “constraint” of Jesuit life.  Toeing the line in all else, he broke out in his verse.  (You could say he sprang out with his rhythm.)  Indeed, the tension he experienced — conflict between vocation and creativity — may have been productive.  (Simon Humphries, “A Eunuch for God,” TLS 12/22&29/06)

* In Honor: a History (Encounter), James Bowman (no relation) displays “a propensity to be judgemental and didactic.”  (Ditto Harvey C. Mansfield in Manliness [Yale].)  Thus reviewer George Feaver, retired poly sci prof at U. of British Columbia and this year at UT-Austin, who was left with “nagging suspicions” about Bowman’s judgment of U.S. military decisions, having read to the end of his “dense, discursive account of the alleged ‘decline and fall’ of Western honour.”

In this and other matters, Bowman offers a “gloomy reading” of history, “overly selective” in Feaver’s view, as in its ignoring the civil rights revolution of the ‘60s and “real-life heroes” such as Martin Luther King and the New York firefighters on 9/11.  Feaver closes with commendation of both books, “despite their shortcomings [for reminding us] of the importance of remembering the past, and standing up for beliefs central to the achievement of our civilization.” (“Limp Responses,” TLS 12/22&29/06)

* Reviewing Patrick Wyse Jackson’s The Chronologer’s Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge), John North says J. has “useful things to say,” albeit with “a weakness for discursive irrelevance.” 

Whether J. displayed this weakness or not, I do not know, nor do I know if other reviewers’ comments are well-aimed, but I do find that phrase helpful.  May writing teachers and editors everywhere hold discursive irrelevance to be a weakness not a strength. (TLS 1/12/07)