There have been a couple of comments about my post on Jodi Kantor’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times that take issue with my use of the word “badly.” “What if,” I wrote, “some harm comes to the junior McCain? Would she [i.e., Ms. Kantor] feel badly about that?” One tutelary spirit wrote in to observe en passant (and ungrammatically) that “More correctly, the question would be ‘Would she feel bad . . .’” (The chap should have written something like “It would have been correct to say that . . .”) “Davis,” another would-be benefactor, followed suit with this: “By the way, it’s ‘feel bad,’ not ‘feel badly.’ You’re a bad writer because you write badly, but I don’t feel sadly about it.”

Well, “Davis” should feel sadly, and badly, about it.

I always endeavor to instruct as well as delight, so allow me to introduce these public-spirited individuals–and any readers they may have misled–to the adverb, a part of speech that paradigmatically answers the question how, as in: “How was she feeling?” “Not well. Badly, in fact.” As the American Heritage Dictionary points out, “The use of bad and good as adverbs, while common in informal speech, should be avoided in writing. Formal usage requires: “My tooth hurts badly not bad.”

Update: I should have noted, as several friends have been quick to point out, that, though “badly” is correct, “feel” is a linking verb and therefore the modifier is properly a predicate adjective. John Edwards (remember him?) inadvertently illustrated this in the theme song chosen to accompany the world’s most famous campaign haircut. Watch and listen to it it here.

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Yesterday, The New York Times published another of its non-stories about John McCain. (Remember the front-page story announcing that Mr. McCain was not having an affair with a lobbyist?) The latest contribution to malicious journalistic non-entity dilated on the fact Mr. McCain says very little publicly about his son’s service in the United States Marines.

It’s really not too complicated. As Jodi Kantor, the author of “Vocal on War, McCain Is Silent on Son’s Service,” noted in the course of her story, Mr. McCain has refrained from mentioning his son’s service with the Marines 1) because he did not want to be seen to be using it for political gain and 2) he wished “to protect him from becoming a prize target.”

You might think that even the Times would applaud number 1, but Jodi manages to cast a miasma of suspicion over even that aspect of Mr. McCain’s behavior, writing that he “has largely maintained a code of silence about his son.” What she means is that he hasn’t said much about it. But only dodgy people–you know, mafiosi, army generals, and Republican politicians–maintain “codes of silence,” i.e., they have something to hide, something that the public-spirited people at The New York Times want you to know, who cares if it comprises national security or endangers the lives of American servicemen?

And speaking of endangering American military personnel, I wonder how Ms. Kantor and her editors feel about the second reason Mr. McCain gave for not talking publicly about his son’s service? Ms. Kantor notes that “The McCains declined to be interviewed for this article, which the campaign requested not be published.” But she published it anyway. What if, God forbid, some harm comes to the junior McCain? Would she feel badly about that? Would she think, “Gee, perhaps I should not have published details about the military service of a son of a prominent politician?” I doubt it. After all, to the Left, Mr. McCain is a “warmonger,” or anyway a Republican which for the Times is pretty much the same thing, and warmongers deserve what they get.

I have been reading a good deal of Kipling recently. Jodi Kantor’s odious tapestry of innuendo reminded me once again how pertinent that great observer of humanity is to our current situation. Now, as in Kipling’s day, “makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep” is a liberal’s delight. After all, we’re talking about The New York Times here, the paper whose publisher observed during the Vietnam war that if a North Vietnamese soldier ran into an American soldier, he’d rather see the American soldier shot. It’s useful to keep such comments in mind as you make your way through the anti-American pabulum that our former paper of record offers up as news these days.

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According to the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol was the nearest thing to a “philosophical genius” that twentieth-century art produced. Why? Because he helped complete the assault–begun by Marcel Duchamp in the early years of the 20th century–on the traditional understanding of art as a distinctive, and distinctively valuable, realm of experience. Whether that activity is best understood as “philosophical” I will leave to one side. It certainly did a lot to change, not to say undermine, practice of art in the later part of the twentieth century. I have always felt that Warhol’s chief talent was not philosophical but promotional. The man had an uncanny talent–genius, even–for publicity. For me, his remark that “Art is what you can get away with” takes us close to the center of his achievement–not, I believe, an aesthetic achievement, or even a philosophical one, but assuredly something special in the annals of shameless cultural hucksterism.

Warholism is not the only perspective determining the shape of the art world today, but it is a strong, perhaps a dominant, force. Among the vital counter forces, one of the most potent was represented by Larry Salander and the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York. The galleries reside at 22 E. 71st St., but don’t bother trying to go there: the place is currently in receivership, its doors closed, future very much in doubt. The story of what happened to Salander is told this week in New York magazine by James Panero, my colleague at The New Criterion. It’s a long, complex tale. Why do silkscreens by Andy Warhol fetch tens of millions while great art from the past can hardly be given away? Salander, Panero notes,

came to believe that the very survival of great art was at stake. By 2005, he had determined to be the first dealer to do something about it. He would risk his gallery’s established reputation as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century house by investing heavily in old-master and Renaissance art. He would make some money and, if his plan worked, save the contemporary market from itself.

Note the word “if.” The plan failed failed spectacularly, but that doesn’t mean Larry Salander wasn’t on to something important. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal when the 71st Street gallery opened in 2005,

If Mr. Salander’s aesthetic fervor bubbles over, so does his contempt for the aesthetically meretricious. His tastes range widely but his standards are exacting. “Quality” is a word that often falls from his lips. Matthew Barney? Awful. Jeff Koons? Don’t get him started. A unique polychrome terra cotta by Della Robbia at Salander-O’Reilly doesn’t come cheap. But this Renaissance work will fetch a small fraction of the $5 million-plus that a Koons sculpture draws. Mr. Koons famously does not fabricate his work, but leaves it, as Mr. Salander bitingly observed, to “fine Italian craftsmen, none of whom is Jeff Koons.”

It is still possible that Larry Salander will emerge from his financial dégringolade to carry on his campaign for great art. I hope he does.

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The American Enterprise Institute has just announced publication of a new book on Religion and the American Future, edited by Christopher Demuth and Yuval Levin.
Here’s the official description:

“Religious belief is thriving in America today, even though it seems under assault as seldom before–attacked by secularists, scientists, and increasingly vocal atheists; constrained by judges and civil libertarians; mocked by contemporary artists; and treated pragmatically, if not cynically, by politicians seeking votes. This book explores the enduring strength of religion in American life. Faith and religious observance are not obsolete or incompatible with modern society; on the contrary, the religious principles that guided the Founders continue to bind the nation and justify human endeavor.”

That already sounds good, but wait until you see the list of contributors (ahem)! You can order it direct from AEI here.

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