American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 First Edition. Edition George F. Will Available Any Format
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The essays in this collection originally appeared in The Washington Post, with the exception of “Will
It Be 1972 Forever?,” “The Pathology of Climatology,” “Where Is the Pencil Czar?,” “German
Resistance: Neither Negligible nor Contemptible,” and “George McGovern: He Came by the Horror
of War Honorably,” which originally appeared in Newsweek; and “Philipp Blom’s Nature’s Mutiny: An
Exemplary Book of 2019,” which originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
Image Credits: “Falling Soldier” by Robert Capa © International Center of Photography. “Jon Will at
Forty” © Victoria Will.
Copyright © 2021 by G.F.W. Inc.
Cover design by Terri Sirma
Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose
of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our
culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s
intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for
review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the
author’s rights.
Hachette Books
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10104
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First Edition: September 2021
Published by Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book
Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out
more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-0-306-92441-5 (hardcover); 978-0-306-92440-8 (ebook)
E320210823-DC-SIG-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Section 1: The Path to the Present
From Runnymede to Stelle’s Hotel
A Nation Not Made by Flimsy People
News Bulletin: The American Revolutionary War Was Violent
U. S. Grant, and the Writing of History, Rescued
Frederick Douglass, A Classical Liberal Born at Sixteen
An Illinois Pogrom
Let Us Now Praise President Taft
America’s Dark Home front during World War I
The Somme: The Hinge of World War I, and Hence of Modern
History
Prohibition’s Unintended Consequences
When America Reached Peak Stupidity
“Tell That to Mrs. Coolidge”
1940: When the Republican Establishment Mattered
America’s Last Mass Lynching
A Year in U.S. History as Disruptive as 2020
The Perverse Fecundity ofa Perfect Failure
The Transformation of a Murder, and of Liberalism
JFK: Not So Elusive
Vietnam: Squandered Valor
Not an Illness, a Vaccine
Haunted by Hue
Apollo 11: A Cap Tossed over the Wall
The Thunderclap of Ocean Venture ’81
“This Is Going to Be Difficult”
Home to Henry Wright’s Farm
Looking Backward Through Rose-Tinted Glasses
Section 2: Politics and Policies
Crises and the Collectivist Temptation
The Announcement of a Presidential Candidacy You Will Never
Hear
The Awful State of the State of the Union Address
How Not to Select Presidential Candidates
Socialism: A Classification that No Longer Classifies
American Socialists: Half Right
Anti-Capitalist Conservatives versus Progressives: The
Narcissism of Small Differences
Better Never Means Better for Everyone
The Extravagant Faith of Market Skeptics
Nikki Haley against “Hyphenated Capitalism”
Data Confounds the Cassandra Caucus
Worse Can Be Better
Lear Raging on His Twitter-Heath
“Baumol’s Disease” Is the Public Sector’s Health
Defining Efficiency Down
America, Dated by “Rule Stupor”
Larry Summers’s Epiphany
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Adaptive Evolution
Ignorance of the Law Is… Inevitable
The Catholic Crime Wave
Bootleggers and Baptists, Together Yet Again
Overcriminalization Killed Eric Garner
Drug Policy and the “Balloon Effect”
Rethinking the Drug Control Triad
Injustices in the Criminal Justice System
Coercive Plea Bargaining Is a National Embarrassment
How the Right to a Trial Is Nullified
Disenfranchising Felons: Why?
Human Reclamation through Bricklaying
Sing Sing: “Not a Landfill but a Recycling Center”
Section 3: Justice. More or Less. Sometimes.
Aristotle and the Bikini-Clad Baristas
The Recurring Evil of the “One Drop” Rule
“Judicial Engagement” against the Administrative State
Legal Logic versus Judicial Labels
Public Sector Unions: FDR Was Right
The Court’s Correct Correction
Social Sciences, Brain Science, and the Eighth Amendment
“Depravity” and the Eighth Amendment
When Vernon Madison Was Not “Competent to Be Executed”
Will It Be 1972 Forever? The High Court’s Misplaced Modesty
Philadelphia’s “Room 101”
“What Country Are We In?”
Do Fish Perform Pedicures?
“Shut Up!”: North Carolina Explained
A Cake and “Animus” in Colorado
A Victory (Only) for the Baker
Supreme Court to the Prickly Plaintiffs of Greece, New York:
Lighten Up
Cranky Secularists Have Their Cross to Bear
Resuscitating the Rights of National Citizenship
Korematsu v. United States, Repudiated
The Court and the Politics of Politics
Litigating Through a Fog of Euphemisms
Section 4: Excursions into Science
Mapping the Universe Between Our Ears
Medicalizing Character Flaws
A Telescope as History Teacher
“Take a Sun and Put It in a Box”
The Pathology of Climatology
The MWP, LIA, and the Climate Change Debate
A Note on Violins and Climate Change
You Are Not a Teetering Contraption
The Coronavirus’s Disturbing Lesson
Section 5: Thinking Economically
A Pessimist’s Fatal Conceit
“Creative Destruction”: More the Former than the Latter
The Accelerated Churning
The Great Enrichment, the Great Flinch, and the Complacent
Class
Pope Francis’s Fact-Free Sanctimony
Peak Nonsense about Scarcities
The Not at All Dismal Science
“Where Is the Pencil Czar?”
Section 6: Skirmishes in the Culture War
The Ideological Ax-Grinding of the 1619 Project
“Is Food the New Sex?”
About that Snake in the Center Seat…
Sanitizing Names Is Steady Work
Ban “Oklahoma”?
A Raised Eyebrow about “Redskins”
Slants, Redskins, and Other Insensitivities
What Is the Matter with Oregon?
Progressivism at Oregon’s Gas Pumps
Oregon Engineers Another Embarrassment
The 1960s Echo: The Politics of Reciprocal Resentment
The “Hometown-Gym-on-a-Friday-Night” Feeling
An Endangered Species: The American Adult
The Plight of Princeton Women
Anti-Elitism and the “Meteorologist Fallacy”
The Problem with “Parental Determinism”
Free-Range Parenting
The Damage Done by Too Much Parental Praise
“Advantage Hoarding” in Cognitively Stratified America
Awesome Children and Difficult Food Choices in Gentrified
Brooklyn
Section 7: Peculiar Goings-On in the Groves of Academe
36,000 Valedictorians: “They Can’t All Go to Brown.”
The First Amendment Amended: Freedom from Speech
The First Amendment in the “Free Speech Gazebo”
The “Surveillance State” in Ann Arbor
Salutary Ludicrousness
The Campus “Rape Culture” and the Death of Due Process
All Right Then, What an Unreasonable Person Finds Offensive
The College Degree as Status Marker
Yale and Other Incubators
Another Yale Burlesque, “Contextualized”
Diversity: In Everything but Thought
Mandatory Political Participation in California
“Sustainability” as Theology
The Consequences of Academia’s Kudzu-like Bureaucracies
The High Cost of Oberlin’s “Core Values”
Academic Supply Meets Diminishing Demand
Taxing Independent Excellence
Harvard’s Problem Is America’s, Too
About Harvard: Three Hard Questions
The SAT and the Privilege, If Such It Is, of Transmitted
Advantages
Meritocracy and the SAT’s “Adversity Index”
The Surplus of Intellectual Emptiness
A Hymn to Impracticability
Section 8: Matters of Life and Death
Brittany Maynard: Death on Her Terms
Abortion: Who Are the Extremists?
The Wholesome Provocations of “Heartbeat Bills”
“America’s Biggest Serial Killer”
“Inappropriate”
Iceland’s Final Solution to the Down Syndrome “Problem”
Jon Will at Forty
Section 9: Darkness Remembered
German Resistance: Neither Negligible nor Contemptible
Eichmann: Not “Terrifyingly Normal”
The 442nd
“Into Eternity, Vilma”
“It Happened. Therefore It Can Happen Again.”
The Politics of Memory
“Falling Soldier”: A Well-Intended Falsification
China: Churchill’s Foreboding, Redux
Faint Echoes of Fascism
Authoritarianism and the Politics of Emotion
Section 10: Complaints and Appreciations
The Plague of Denim
Drowning in a River of Public Words
Hobbes at Whole Foods
A Car under a Cloud of Smug
Frank Sinatra’s Reminder
Appropriation Indignation: Elvis, How Could You!
Bob Dylan’s Two Propositions
The Beach Boys and the Boomers’ Music-Cued Nostalgia
Downton Abbey and Nostalgia Gluttony
Truth Decay and Healthy Distrust
In Praise of Binge Reading
Section 11: Games
Are You Ready for Some Autopsies?
The Morality of Enjoying Football
Super Bowl Sunday: A Roman Holiday
Rally ’Round the Math Class!
College Football and the Question of Cookie Corruption
The Wages of Amateurism
March Madness After All
Cooperstown: Museum or Shrine?
Baseball’s Common Law
Autumn for Some Boys of Long Ago Summers
Vin Scully, Craftsman
Section 12: Farewells, Mostly Fond
“The Smartest Man in the United States”
The Roman Candle Jurist
William F. Buckley’s High-Spirited Romp
The Twentieth Century’s Most Consequential Journalist
Charles Krauthammer: “First, You Go to Medical School”
The Catcher at Dago Hill
Fidel Castro and Utopianism, Both Dead
Billy Graham: Neither Prophet nor Theologian
George McGovern: He Came by the Horror of War Honorably
Gerald Ford: The Benevolent Accident
George H. W. Bush: “I Am Not a Mystic”
“Then Along Came Nancy”
“The Eyes of Caligula and the Lips of Marilyn Monroe”
The Last Doughboy
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Walton
Discover More
Acknowledgments
Also by George F. Will
For Sarah Walton
To whom I am indebted for her many years
of indispensable assistance.
And to whom the nation is indebted.
(see this page)
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
“In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man
meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the
fortress of his will.”
—José Ortega y Gasset
B
torrent, knows that this is not amenable to being mastered.
That is what it means to be unruly. Besides, the enjoyment of
life is inseparable from life’s surprises, and hence from its
contingencies. Surprises and contingencies have propelled this
columnist through a happy half century of arriving at his office each
morning impatient to get on with the pleasure of immersion in the
torrent.
For a third of a century my office has been in a narrow, three-
story townhouse built in 1810 in what is now Washington’s
Georgetown section. It was here in 1814 when marauding British
troops burned the White House and part of the Capitol. I purchased
the building in 1987 from a small, sprightly, sparrow-like woman,
then in her nineties, who had lived there since her childhood. She
said that her parents recalled seeing Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert
walk past the house on his way to the corner saloon to purchase a
pail of beer. This is plausible. Back then, beer was often sold in pails.
And Robert, although frail at age seventy-eight, haltingly made his
way up the steps of the memorial to his father at the dedication of it
on May 30, 1922.
Because of where I live and work, the continuity of America’s
institutions and arguments is never far from my mind, as is the truth
of William Faulkner’s statement that “the past is not dead. It is not
even past.” That is why this book begins with some writings about
American history. Were I a benevolent dictator, I would make history
the only permissible college major in order to equip the public with
the stock of knowledge required for thinking clearly about how we
arrived at this point in our national narrative.
The poet E. E. Cummings—or as he’s remembered, e.e. cummings
—wrote of a “footprint in the sand of was.” As a Washingtonian, I
live immersed in was—in history. I have spent almost all of my adult
life in Washington and still am stirred by its grand vistas and
monuments. And by the fact that the bricks of Georgetown’s
sidewalks have been trod by politicians, jurists, and statesmen who
have made American principles vivid and the American project
successful.
I have now completed five decades as a columnist, and a few
readers might be interested in learning how someone could have the
good fortune to tumble into such a delightful career. In September
1958, four months after my seventeenth birthday, I came out of the
Illinois wilderness to matriculate at Trinity College in Hartford. Soon
thereafter I did what a young man from Central Illinois would
naturally do: I took the train to New York City. Arriving in the
splendor of Grand Central Terminal, I plunked down a nickel for a
New York tabloid in order to see what was going on in Gotham. This
purchase of a New York Post was a life-changing event because in it
I found a column by Murray Kempton.
I do not remember what his subject was that day, but his subjects
generally were of secondary importance to his style, which reflected
his refined mind and his penchant for understated passion,
mordantly expressed. Here, for example, is a sentence from his
October 26, 1956, report on President Dwight David Eisenhower
campaigning for re-election:
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