A great editorial by (college classmate) Bret Stephens on the wide gap between today’s celebrity culture and the older, more austere values of yesteryear which characterized the brave and humble men of the space program:
That this should seem at all peculiar tells us something about the age. Codes of personal conduct were once what Americans—great ones, at least—were all about. In his superb book “American Heroes,” Yale historian Edmund S. Morgan writes about Benjamin Franklin and George Washington that “both men cared enormously about their reputations, about their honor. Their deliberate refusals to do things, employed to great advantage in serving their country, originated in a personal ambition to gain honor and reputation of a higher order than most people aspired to.”
This is not the way we live now. Modern culture has severed many of the remaining links between merit and celebrity. We make a fetish of uninteresting, detestable, loud or unaccomplished people: Paris Hilton, Princess Di, Keith Olbermann, Michael Jackson. Disgrace can be a ticket for even greater celebrity, particularly when mixed with confession. Stoicism, on the other hand, is regarded as a form of denial, meaning borderline lunacy.
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Well worth reading.
I’ve never been in the military, much less the space program, but years ago, I did read a book of reminiscences by Vietnam veterans. One of them, who’d been a lieutenant, commented that you could never really tell how people would hold up in battle until you’d actually been in combat with them. The guy who was garroulous, boastful, and full of himself might well freeze up; the guy who seemed a quiet non-entity might, in extermis, suddenly take charge.
Since so much of what passes for nerve these days is really more theatrical than life or death, I think a lot of people no longer appreciate the distinction. My sister-in-law’s step father was one of those nice as hell, self-effacing, salt of the earth Midwesterners. You never would have guessed that, in WW II, he was the most highly decorated veteran from the state of Missouri. (He never told me this, of course, my sister-in-law did.)
I would say, finally, that those who find this editorial sympathetic would do well to visit the archives of Theodore Dalrymple’s writings. No one is more perceptive on the vacuity of celebrity culture, and the concomitant loss of dignity and reserve.
This is why I was dismayed by all the commentary from paleos on Mark Sanford’s personal business not affecting his job.
Sanford has forfeited every last shred of dignity with his actions and his subsequent performance. Even if getting rid of him means that we lose an effective conservative politician, it is worth it in order to preserve the idea that a leader should live up to some standard of personal integrity and honor. Conservatives are the one group of people who should understand this.
I didn’t no many paleos defended him. I find hiom an undignified mess. Forgivable and all too human, perhaps, but not appropriate in a leader.
Ben Franklin was a member of the Hellfire Club in his London days and a notorious rake.