A River Runs Through It

David Brooks once offered an explanation for an editorial job he held¯one of those jobs where you arrive in the morning to find twenty faxes, fifty phone messages, and a hundred emails already waiting for you. It was, he said, like camping beside a raging river. Every morning you pack up your canoe, push out into the stream, and paddle against the current as fast as you can. And if you work hard enough all day, you’re able to pull back to shore in the evening exactly where you left in the morning. I love river metaphors. They flow past everywhere you look, bobbing on the steam, drifting into the backwaters, swirling in the current, shooting the rapids, fighting their way up the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfalls. O to break loose, like the chinook / salmon jumping and falling back , as Robert Lowell once called. And then to clear the top on the last try, / alive enough to spawn and die . The literary critic Mark Bauerlein told me yesterday he’s writing a book on the insidious effects of online culture¯the MySpace/Facebook world of the endless revelation, explication, and exploitation of the self. We’re drowning in this stuff, he said. It’s like a river, and my students tell me constantly how tired they are all the time¯but what they mean is that they’re busy answering emails, posting about themselves, reading their friends’ postings, trolling the Internet: flinging themselves from bridges to drown in the endless stream. Maybe. Certainly it’s better just to stay untroubled on the bank and watch it all flow by. To sit apart and see the driftwood drifting by, to mark the swirl around the stones, to spend the daylight hours calmly on shore and at night to slip gently down into the quiet waters of sleep.

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But not today. Today there’s work to plunge into. You’ll see much writing over the next few days about the news that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has died . He was a curious artifact of liberal history¯a talented historian of the whiggish persuasion, believing that historical truth and the great liberal agenda were one and the same. But what had been an easy assumption for his father’s generation became harder for his own generation, and he was, as courtier for Democratic-party princes, increasingly forced to lies. Still, the next generation would have it even worse. Schlesinger’s modern equivalent would be someone like Sidney Blumenthal, and, faced with that choice, I’ll take a Schlesinger any day. Meanwhile, have you been feeling a little "censorship envy" these days? I think it was the legal blogger Eugene Volokh who coined the phrase, and it captures something about the way cultural tides run: If we have to live in a world in which Muslims get to ban unflattering representations of their religion, then we ought to live in a world in which Christians get to ban unflattering representations of their religion. YouTube.com recently banned a popular lefty blogger who had posted a video that quoted¯accurately¯ unpleasant passages from the Qur’an . This, of course, while truly vicious mockery of Christianity is allowed to pass unchecked. The reasons are obvious and hardly need repeating. But think, for a moment, about the lesson taught by this sort of thing. It seems to prove that the powers-that-be are not really defenders of free speech¯indeed, that they’re not even really opposed to some vague entanglement with religion. They just don’t like Christianity. Worse, it seems to prove that threats of violence work. This is a very bad lesson to teach the American public, for out on the edges of any group there are those who will take it to heart. Finally, the newspapers here in New York have been carrying stories about the closing of local parishes. "Cardinal Sin: Tricky Egan Locks Up Priest’s Church" ran the headline in the New York Post . "Edward Cardinal Egan pulled a fast one on a lower Manhattan parish pastor yesterday, summoning the priest to meet with him¯then dispatching security guards to permanently lock the cleric’s church doors," the Post reported. "The priest returned to Our Lady of Vilnius to find himself locked out¯a brusque Egan move that left parishioners stunned and saddened." There’s probably no way to close parishes without making someone unhappy, but surely there’s a way to do it without making everyone unhappy.