On a trip to London a few years ago, my wife and I were having dinner at the Garrick Club with an eminent political philosopher and his wife. We had walked out on some horrible West End play after the first act and, having quickly gotten outside a bottle of wine, were finally beginning to enjoy the evening. Our hosts felt badly about the awfulness of the play — it was their suggestion to us out-of-towners — and to make up for the lack of drama on the stage my friend posed the following dramatic thought experiment: Let’s pretend, he said, that some mad scientist has figured out a way to bring peace, prosperity, and general happiness to the whole world.

There was just one catch: this brave new world required the yearly sacrifice of one innocent person, chosen at random. Supposing this scheme were perfected: would it be moral to close with the offer and subscribe universal happiness at the cost of one innocent life per annum?

Well, why not?

Think of all the billions of people there are in the world. Scads of innocent people die all the time. Why not spread happiness and reduce the death toll at the same time? Hard cheese on the appointed victim, of course. But he (or she) would at least have the consolation of dying for the good of society.

This is the sort of argument you might get from the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the father of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism defines the good as the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Utilitarianism, especially in its undoctrinaire forms, has a lot of appeal. Most of us are at least intermittent utilitarians. At least, we expect those running society to act on broadly utilitarian principles, to “maximize” goods and services (read “happiness”) for as many people as possible.

It is interesting, then, that everyone to whom I have presented my friend’s thought-experiment has recoiled. Some people say, “That’s just silly,” and change the subject. Some say, “What a horrible idea,” and change the subject. Hardly anyone says, “That would be wrong because . . .” and then supplies a reason.

I think that the uneasiness that most people feel about this utilitarian fantasy is a good thing. I also think that the reluctance on the part of most people to provide a reason for their uneasiness is troubling. For one thing, it suggests that for many people, moral intuitions are unsupported by articulate moral principles. It also suggests that, acting more or less like utilitarians in our daily lives, we are poorly equipped to challenge utilitarian proposals when they go too far.

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In 1859, two revolutionary books were published. One was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The other was John Stuart Mill’s pamphlet On Liberty. Darwin’s book revolutionized biology and fundamentally altered the debate between science and religion. Mill’s book revolutionized the way we think about innovation in social and moral life.

What is your opinion of innovation? Do you think it is a good thing? Of course you do. You may or may not have read Mill on the subject, but you have absorbed his lessons. What about established opinion, customary ways of doing things? Do you suspect that they should be challenged and probably changed? Odds are that you do. Mill has taught you that, too, even if you have never read a line of On Liberty.

Mill’s essay was ostensibly about the relation between individual freedom and society. Mill famously argued that the only grounds on which society was justified in exercising control over its members, whether that control be in the form of “legal penalties” or simply “the moral coercion of public opinion,” was to “prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

This part of Mill’s argument quickly attracted searching criticism. The British judge James Fitzjames Stephen, for example, went to the heart of the problem when he observed that Mill assumed that “some acts regard the agent only, and that some regard other people. In fact, by far the most important part of our conduct regards both ourselves and others.” As for withholding “the moral coercion of public opinion,” Stephen observed that “the custom of looking upon certain courses of conduct with aversion is the essence of morality.”

Stephen’s criticisms of Mill were published in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which appeared about a decade after On Liberty. Many of the criticisms are devastating. Intellectually, Stephen made mincemeat of Mill. But that has hardly mattered. Mill’s doctrines have taken the world by storm, while Stephen has receded to become a footnote in intellectual history.

Why? One reason is that Mill said things that people wanted to hear. Mill seemed to be giving people a permanent vacation from the moral dictates of society. How often have you heard the argument “It’s not hurting anyone else” put forward as a justification for self-indulgence?

But it was not simply what he said about the relation between individual freedom and social control that made On Liberty such an influential tract. Much more important was the attitude, the emotional weather, of the book.

On Liberty is only incidentally a defense of individual freedom. Its deeper purpose is to transform the way we regard established morality and conventional behavior as such. In brief, Mill taught us to be suspicious of established morality not because what it says is wrong (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t) but simply because it is established.

Think about that. The tradition that Mill opposed celebrated custom and established morality precisely because they had prevailed and given good service through the vicissitudes of time and change; their longevity was an important token of their worthiness.

Mill overturned this traditional view. Henceforth, the customary, the conventional was suspect not because it had failed but simply because if was customary and conventional. Consider, to take but one example, what has happened to the word “prejudice.” When was the last time you heard it used in a neutral or positive sense? And yet originally “prejudice” simply meant to prejudge something according to conventional wisdom. It was in this sense, for example, that Edmund Burke extolled prejudice, writing that “prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”

Mill was instrumental in getting us to associate “prejudice” indelibly with “bigotry.” He wanted to take the wisdom out of the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He repeatedly argued against the “despotism of custom” — not because it was despotic, but simply because it was customary. According to Mill, the “greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history because the sway of custom has been complete.” It was against custom — a.k.a. conventional behavior, tradition, established moral and religious practice — that Mill opposed originality, individuality, eccentricity, what he famously referred to as “experiments in living.” (A phrase that really came into its own 100 years after Mill, in the 1960s and 1970s.)

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Here’s a stocking-stuffer for your politically mature friends and relatives: The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris, an historian and  former Director of the Conservative Research Department.  (It was he who in the Thatcher years hired David Cameron:  does that augur prescience or recklessness?) Anyone interested in the evolution and essential nature of English Toryism will want to read this book. And as a salutary prolegomenon, I recommend the long and brilliant review by John O’Sullivan at ConservativeHome.  Harris begins his story with Burke and Pitt the Younger, but I suspect that many readers will be most absorbed by his account of the sad  fate of the Conservatives in recent years. As O’Sullivan notes:

the more Cameron modernization is explained, the less anyone understands it. There is something elusive and will o’ the wisp about it. Initially, it defined itself negatively as a movement opposed to the unreconstructed Thatcherite Tories. It proudly announced that there was such a thing as society. It renounced any foolish intention of “banging on” about crime, immigration, Europe, or other supposed obsessions of more traditional Tories. Its adherents were constantly looking for a “Clause Four moment” when they could demonstrate their distance from the “Nasty” past by dissing a prominent Die-Hard. But there is a strictly limited appeal in not being Norman Tebbit. Only those who follow politics closely would even realize that a dramatic gesture of ideological revolution was being bravely made. (Sorry, Norman.) Something more positive was required.

What followed was a series of photo-ops and exercises in gesture politics – the windmill on the roof, the bicycle to work, the dash to the Pole. This development of the Cameron project was a sort of cultural make-over — “the Dianification of Toryism” as I have argued elsewhere—to render the Tories an entirely different party, one of socially liberal herbivores, acceptable to its critics in Metroland. Cultural make-overs are notoriously hard to pull-off, however, since those being culturally transformed notice the process more quickly than anyone else. And they don’t always like it. The main result of this make-over, visible in the 2010 election results, was to strengthen UKIP by driving dissed-off Tories towards it. It made only modest inroads in the voting bloc of Liberal centrists who had many other suitors.

Indeed.  The extent to which conservatives, by betraying their principles (including the principle of patriotism), abet right-wing alternatives that are anathema to genuine conservatism is a phenomenon that is not sufficiently appreciated. More generally,  conservatives, in the United States as well as in the UK, do not win elections by pretending to be liberals, but this seems to be a lesson that is difficult for conservatives to absorb. O’Sullivan continues with some additional sage observations:

The 2008 financial crisis made these cultural gestures look frivolous—as well as shocking the Tory leadership which had rooted the Cameron project in the assumption that economic growth would continue smooth and uninterrupted under New Labour. That was a curious assumption to start with: every previous Labour government had ended in economic crisis—why should this one be different? If the crisis embarrassed Cameron and Osborne, however, it also rescued them by imposing a more realistic economic policy upon the party—and by giving them a serious purpose in office. They have to save the British economy by public spending cuts that eventually reduce the deficit. That political commitment is now fully half of the Cameron project.

Not going bankrupt is, however, a very inadequate political philosophy. It is an aim shared by all parties (even if their methods for achieving solvency differ) and it does little more than lay the groundwork for positive policies. . . .  Other signature Cameron issues, such as his ultra-Green commitment to carbon reduction, look both doomed and embarrassing as their costs become apparent. Yet those issues on which the Cameron modernizers had imposed a vow of silence on the party — immigration, Europe, and crime — now constitute the main topics of public debate as they spiral downwards in a series of crises. Those crises — especially the crisis over the Euro — would represent welcome political opportunities for almost any imaginable Conservative party. But these opportunities drive the Cameron Tories into silence and paralysis — and not simply because they are in a coalition with Lib-Dems. Cameron modernization, as originally conceived, has run into a dead end.

That is not really surprising if, as Dr. Harris mordantly and (in my view) correctly remarks, there is no such thing as a new political idea. The best we can do is to mine our political tradition for old ideas whose time has come round again (as Thatcher did). Neophiliac Tories determined on new ideas will therefore find themselves either borrowing ideas from other political traditions (as Heath and Macmillan did) or indulging in empty gestures that disintegrate on coming into contact with harsh political reality.

These are wise words, well worth pondering by conservatives as well as Conservatives on both sides of the pond that divides and unites America and the U.K.

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November 24, Thanksgiving this year, was Bill Buckley’s birthday.  Born in 1925, he would have turned 86 that day. It doesn’t seem possible that he died at the end of February 2008, nearly four years ago. Where have those months gone? It’s as if the company that delivers time blundered, supplying only half the expected number of hours, days, and months these last several years. Yet another illustration, I suppose, of the mysterious fact that life seems to speed up as you get older.

I often think about, and even more often miss, Bill Buckley. He and his wife Pat were dear friends of ours, and propinquity, the fact that we lived quite close to each other, helped cement the bond. It was rare, in the last few years of his life, that we didn’t see him at least once a week and we “spoke” by email (Bill loved email) much oftener. A veteran observer of world affairs, Bill was ostentatiously well-informed about the controversies of the day. I never thought I had pondered a contentious issue thoroughly until I had discussed it with him.

Bill died before the burlesque that is Barack Hussein Obama really got going. As I recall, he wrote about Obama only once, early in 2008, just a few weeks before he died. Linda Bridges, Bill’s long-time assistant, and I include the column in  our recent anthology of Bill’s political and polemical writings, Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations: A William F. Buckley Jr Omnibus. There was little Bill didn’t know about the folly of government intervention, and his connoisseur’s nose for socialist encroachment masquerading as community-based altruism instantly revealed Obama as the redistributionist that he has turned out to be. Thus Bill described as “mischievous” candidate Obama’s suggestion that increased government intervention in our lives would increase the chance that “every American child” would benefit from the riches produced by the mighty engine of American capitalism. It was, Bill observed, a mendacious suggestion, a false promise that would “foster frustration and stimulate disillusion.

“Fostering frustration and stimulating disillusion”: that’s a pretty accurate summary of Obama’s net effect on the body politic of this great county. The title “Athwart History,” as many readers will doubtless already know, comes from the famous publisher’s statement introducing the inaugural issue of National Review, on November 19, 1955. “National Review is out of place,” that bulletin declared, “in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation.”

This brash new magazine had arrived with its brash young editor to cast a cold, skeptical,  and inquisitive light upon that presumption. The magazine “stands athwart history,” Bill announced, “yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

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Ever since I came of age, Thanksgiving has been one of my favorite holidays. At first, it was for the food and fellowship. Here was a holiday to which we invited a few good friends to share some delectable food and drink. Since I have a special interest in wine, I always try to include at least a couple people who know what (e.g.) Bollinger récemment dégorgé is and why it is superior to (e.g.) Lanson or Cold Duck (remember that?). Continuing with the wine theme, Thanksgiving is one of a handful of yearly occasions in which we indulge in vintage port, and it is nice to have at least one or two people on hand who enjoy the stuff and understand that it is different from (e.g.) that horrible Bailey’s concoction.

Beyond the pleasures of the table, however — pleasures, I should note, that conspicuously include conversation as well as caloric intake — Thanksgiving has become a favorite holiday for other reasons. For the last decade or so, we have begun our Thanksgiving and Easter celebrations with an informal musicale. One or two of our guests play a couple of short pieces on the piano or harpsichord, as does my wife. I do not play myself, but my wife occasionally conspires to find a piece that is within my competence, e.g., the left-hand part of the Polka Stravinsky wrote for his friend Sergei Diaghilev and himself (my part was just “plonk, plonk”). Sometimes we include a group effort of something like Ernst Toch’s Geographical Fugue, always a crowd pleaser. And as the children get older, they have taken to reciting some short poem (last year James, aetat 12, declaimed “The Charge of the Light Brigade”).

The music and recitation only takes fifteen or twenty minutes, but we find it a jolly praeludium. Perhaps the deepest pleasure I take in Thanksgiving, however, has to do with the first syllable of the name of the holiday: “thanks.” I am fond of observing that Aristotle may or may not have been correct that man is the rational animal, but he would certainly have been correct had he said man was the ungrateful animal. That is particularly true for those of us who have most to be grateful for, those, I mean, who have been lucky enough in the lottery of life to have been born in the United States in the last century. What ever slings and arrows they may have to contend with — and we all have some — they were born into the richest, the mightiest, and most secure polity in the history of the world. It is still, despite some significant erosions, among the most free as well. Yes, yes: Obama and his regiment of “expert” bureaucrats aim to change all that, but they haven’t quite managed that, not yet, and I have my doubts that they ever will.

The curious thing is that my pause for gratitude is a fairly recent phenomenon: I don’t think I went in for it much before a decade ago. That was about the same time that I started paying attention to other quotidian miracles, e.g., the blooming of flowers in spring time. I always approved of flowers, more or less, but it was only a decade or so ago that I began remarking their special poignancy: such extreme, delicate beauty tightly bound up with evanescence. You didn’t get one without the other.

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How many people still remember The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French philosopher Raymond Aron’s masterpiece? First published in France in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, L’Opium des intellectuels was an immediate sensation. It caused something of a sensation in the United States, too, when an English translation was published in 1957. Writing in The New York Times, the historian Crane Brinton spoke for many when he said that the book was “a kind of running commentary on the Western world today.”

Unaccountably the book was been out of print for many years. It was therefore welcome news indeed that Transaction Publishers brought out a new edition of Opium in 2001. The deformations that Aron analyzed are still very much with us, even if the figures that represent them have changed.

Aron’s subject is the bewitchment — the moral and intellectual disordering — that comes with adherence to certain ideologies. Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”?

Aron’s title is an inversion of Marx’s contemptuous remark that religion is “the opium of the people.” He quotes the French writer Simone Weil’s sly reversal of Marx: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. . . . [I]t has been continually used . . . as an opiate for the people.”

In fact, Weil got it only partly right.

Marxism and kindred forms of thought never really became the people’s narcotic. But they certainly became — and in essentials they still are — the drug of choice for the group that Aron anatomized: the intellectuals. The Opium of the Intellectuals is a seminal book of the twentieth century, an indispensable contribution to the literature of intellectual disabusement.

Aron, who died in 1983 in his late seventies, is a half-forgotten colossus of twentieth-century intellectual life. Part philosopher, part sociologist, part journalist, he was above all a spokesman for that rarest form of idealism, the idealism of common sense. Aron was, Allan Bloom wrote shortly after the philosopher’s death, “the man who for fifty years . . . had been right about the political alternatives actually available to us. . . . [H]e was right about Hitler, right about Stalin, and right that our Western regimes, with all their flaws, are the best and only hope of mankind.”

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, Aron was regularly calumniated by the radical Left — by his erstwhile friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for starters, but also by their many epigoni and intellectual heirs. In 1963, for example, Susan Sontag dismissed Aron as “a man deranged by German philosophy belatedly converting to Anglo-Saxon empiricism and common sense under the name of `Mediterranean’ virtue.”

In fact, it would be difficult to find anyone at once more knowledgeable about and less “deranged” by German philosophy than Raymond Aron. His was a sober and penetrating intelligence, sufficiently curious to take on Hegel, sufficiently robust to escape uncorrupted by the encounter. The fact that Aron was hated by the Left does not mean that he was a partisan of the Right. On the contrary, he always to some extent considered himself a man of the Left, but (in later years anyway) it was the pre-Marxist Left of high liberalism.

As the sociologist Edward Shils noted in an affectionate memoir of his friend, Aron moved from being a declared socialist in his youth to becoming “the most persistent, the most severe, and the most learned critic of Marxism and of the socialist — or more precisely Communist — order of society” in the twentieth century. Shils spoke of Aron’s “discriminating devotion to the ideals of the Enlightenment.”

The ideals in question prominently featured faith in the power of reason. Aron’s discrimination showed itself in his recognition that reason’s power is always limited. That is to say, if Aron was a faithful child of the Enlightenment — its secularism, its humanism, its opposition of reason to superstition — he also in many respects remained a faithful grandchild of the traditional society that many Enlightenment thinkers professed to despise.

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Call Mr. Jackson. Who? Mr. Jackson. He was the critic Michael Dirda’s fifth-grade teacher. Judging from Dirda’s sketch of his activities in his new book On Conan Doyle (modest subtitle: Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling), Mr. Jackson understood a couple of critical things about the interplay of enthusiasm and the mastery of reading.

Dirda, who for many years has graced the book review pages of The Washington Post, is, along with his colleague Jonathan Yardley at the Post, one of our most engaging book critics. The secret of their success? They like books. They appreciate good stories, well told. They admire a deftly turned sentence, an elegantly expressed argument, an ingenious plot. This habit of appreciation is everywhere in Dirda’s short, intelligent book on Doyle.

There is a species of critic for whom writers like Doyle, Ryder Haggard, James Hilton, Geoffrey Household, Rafael Sabatini, even R. L. Stevenson occupy a somewhat dubious neighborhood in the literary imperium. They are not quite serious, you see, they trade in ripping yarns that merely grip and thrill the (usually young) reader. Dirda is not a member of that dismissive critical fraternity, and neither, clearly, was Mr. Jackson. They would seem to belong to the school of the once-well-known critic and novelist Vincent Starrett, who said: “I like the kind of fiction in which things happen, and then keep on happening.”

Dirda recalls that it was while under Mr. Jackson’s tutelage that he read his first “grown up” book. It was was The Hound of the Baskervilles, a late Sherlock Holmes novel and (in my opinion) one of the best in the oeuvre. Here’s how it happened. Mr. Jackson’s fifth-grade class belonged to an elementary school book club. Each month Mr. Jackson would pass out a four-page newsletter describing several dozen paperbacks available for purchase. “Lying on my bed at home,” Drida recalls, “I lingered for hours over these news print catalogues, carefully making my final selections.”

The care was dictated in part by the budget imposed by Dirda’s mother, who stipulated a monthly budget of no more than 4 of the 25-35-cent books. Each month, Mr. Jackson sent in the class order. “Then in the middle of some dull afternoon, … a teacher’s aide would open the clasroom door and silently drop off a big, heavily taped parcel. … Sometimes we would be made to wait an entire day, especially if the package had been delievered close to the three o’clock bell when school let out.”

But sooner or later, the swag was distributed and then Dirda, like his classmates, would

methodically appraise each volume’s art work, read and reread its back cover, carefully investigate the delicate line of glue at the top edge of the perfect bound spines. … To this day I can more or less recall the newsletter’s capsule summary that compelled me to buy The Hound of the Baskervilles. … “What was it that emerged from the moor at night to spread terror and violent death?” What else, of course, but a monstrous hound from the bowels of hell?

One day soon thereafter, Dirda’s parents announced that they would be visiting some relatives that evening, taking his sisters in tow. Michael pedaled down to the local drugstore, stocked up on a few candy bars, a box of Cracker Jack, and a bottle of orange crush, and prepared to meet the Hound. “I dragged a blanket from my bed,” Dirda reported,

spread it on the reclining chair next to the living room’s brass floor lamp, carefully arranged my provisions near to hand, turned off all the other nights in the house, and crawled expectantly under the covers with my paperback of The Hound — just as the heavens began to boom with thunder and the rain to thumps against the curtained windows.

Most readers will remember the plot: Charles Baskerville has been found dead, apparently running away from the safety of his house. Near the body were footprints. A man’s or woman’s prints? “Mr Holmes,” came the chilling reply, “they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

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Regular readers of this column know that I am not a paid-up member of the New York Times Book Review fan club. Quite the contrary. But, every now and then, that once-mighty organ manages to hit one out of the park, and “The Age of Kennan,” the long, exquisitely thoughtful review of John Gaddis’s new biography of George Kennan by Henry Kissinger is a case in point. Secretary Kissinger’s essay is more more than a review, it is a masterpiece of intellectual and historical compression, illuminating in a few thousand words, the complex and sometimes contradictory edifice that was George Kennan’s strategic thought.

Kissinger brings a rare suppleness of mind, to say nothing of a unique fund of high-level diplomatic experience, to the task of exploring Kennan’s importance in the history of post-War American diplomacy. Kennan’s signal place in defining the strategic concept of Containment, fraught as it was with second thoughts, paralyzing qualifications, and revisionist byways, stands as a masterpiece of strategic thinking. “The debate in America between idealism and realism, ” Kissinger notes, “which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.” As Kissinger notes later in his essay, “The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its people’s commitment to a better world.”

This is one of those reviews whose analytical power and historical pertinence combine to lift it out of the purlieus of the ephemeral medium in which it was born and, rather like Kennan’s famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, catapult it into the realm of the must read. Congratulations to the Times on a superb piece.

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Bob Dole did not run a very good campaign in 1996, but he asked the best question: “Where’s the outrage?”

It’s a question I’d like to pose now. Here’s the story, which I first saw reported yesterday on Instapundit:

A nearly $500-million no-bid contract for an experimental drug of dubious value was awarded to a company controlled by Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world richest men and a huge donor to Democratic causes, including Barack Obama.

Data points to absorb: 1. No-bid contract; 2. Huge Democratic donor is the beneficiary.

In other words, the Obama administration has just taken nearly half-a-billion of your money and handed it over to a company controlled by a chap who helped elect it.

That’s not all. The Obama administration also said no one else could even compete for the dough: it all belonged to Ronnie.

Not only that, it’s not even clear that the money is being used for any worthwhile purpose: it’s for an experimental smallpox drug but no one knows whether it works.

The Los Angeles Times has details:

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.

When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.

Siga’s drug costs about $255 per dose — somewhat more than the $3 per dose for the vaccine the U.S. government already has stockpiled.

According to the LA Times, “The government’s pursuit of Siga’s product raises the question: Should the U.S. buy an unproven drug for such a nebulous threat?” But, that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

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I’ve been hors de combat for the last week, lingering in one of those establishments Hans Castorp inhabited for so many months in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

I exaggerate slightly. I had’t been sleeping out under the stars with our unhygienic friends at OccupyFatuousness, so I haven’t come down with TB, “Zucotti Lung,” or any of the other maladies to which carelessness, ridiculous political posturing, and bad sanitation are heir to.

No it was an ordinary case of appendicitis–well, not entirely ordinary, since the blasted thing had ruptured before I sat down for a free and frank discussion with the pleasant doctor from a local emergency room. He, scrutinizing the Kimball interior as portrayed by a CAT scan, was quick to introduce me to his good friend, the surgeon, before resuming his search for the victims of motorcycle accidents, drug overdoses, and whatever else emergency-room doctors do to beguile an idle hour.

I speak lightly, but it would be paltering with the truth to say that I have been at my chirpiest this past week. I won’t burden you with the details. It should indeed be a guide to aspiring novelists and other romantics that there are plenty of things that may be vividly present to your experience which, when worked up into narrative shape, bore the pants off your audience. Beach the Butler, of Blandings Castle fame, found this to be incontrovertibly true whenever he collared a guest and began on the saga of the lining of his stomach. The story failed to grip, and it wasn’t two minutes before even the most sympathetic soul was shuffling his feet and wondering how he could contrive to be elsewhere.

Anyway, Beach, though a sensitive soul, dilated on the physical or material side of the plight. The Engineer Hans Castorp embodied one of the signal spiritual coefficients of protracted illness. It has to do with the experience of time. An hour, a morning, seems to take forever to battle through. Could an afternoon take longer to drain away? But suddenly days, weeks, months have slipped by without anyone’s have noticed. I’m home now. And I wasn’t cooped up anywhere near as long as Hans Castorp was. But already after several days the curious dispensation of illness, leaved by a compact of boredom and debility, has given a strange sponginess to my experience of the day’s unfolding.

Not that I was beyond noticing things. The GOP debates, for example. Or Herman Cain’s women trouble. Or sudden shift upwards in the political fortunes of Newt Gingrich. Back on November 4, I emailed a pal suggesting that I was almost ready to embrace Newt as the “sole plausible possibility.” The next day, Byron York reported that Newt had “won big” in Iowa. On November 9, Dorothy Rabinowitz explained in The Wall Street Street Journal “Why Gingrich Could Win.” “I think I can represent American exceptionalism, free enterprise, the rights of private property and the Constitution,” Gingrich said, describing the sort of debates he looked forward to if he were the nominee, “better than [Obama] can represent class warfare, bureaucratic socialism, weakness in foreign policy, and total confusion in the economy.”

Others are thinking so, too. Also on November 9, Steven Hayward weighed in on Powerline with “The Case for Newt.”

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