Changed one or two words in the last post. Too many pots and empty vessels. On to better things.
Or not:
"I am the Chief... "The Military Chief."
"I am not interested in politics. The president is the legal president, so we follow his orders."
---

"His account of the Communists shows in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists- the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was a knave or a fool. You see the same in some Catholics and some of the 'Drys' apropos of the 18th amendment. I detest a man who knows that he knows."

I'm enjoying reading Terry Teachout for more reasons than I should. As I've said, the value of conservatism is in its defense of the idea of systems as such. I've quoted the founder of the Philadelphia ACLU as saying the ACLU was and is "a conservative organization."

It's a pleasure to read a blog by someone who understands, as any critic should, the importance to observation of infinitesimal gradations of sense. Politics is a coarse business and coarsens what it touches. But that's as it should be, so the quote above from Oliver Wendell Holmes isn't something I'd refer to, as Teachout does, without comment. History has declared the abolitionists necessary irritants, and the Drys not. Fanaticism is a problem but not always one that can be solved by its lack.
On that note, I made it somewhere into the first paragraph of David Brooks this morning before having to fight an urge to puke.

Colin DeLand has been dead a year. I just brought the laundry back from the dryer down the street, and now I'm off to a party in his memory.