argh... New comments on David Brooks's latest column, "The Next Culture War," are no longer being accepted, so I'll have to vent here. Many readers have correctly pointed out that Brooks fails to put any blame for our current "decadence, corruption, and decline" on Ronald Reagan and his followers, that he fails to credit Roosevelt and the New Deal for our erstwhile restraint, and that past bubbles were also caused by lack of regulations, and others have noted the odious American exceptionalism of his introduction (as if working hard were a peculiarly American trait!). What struck me was this:

Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence.

Brooks ignores the fact that big government was born with Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive effort to "restore balance." In other words, the limited government Brooks praises in one sentence is exactly the opposite of the "crackdown on financial self-indulgence" that he also praises in the next sentence. It's symptomatic of Brooks's authoritarian sympathies that he disdains our elected government but instinctively admires the "ruling establishment."

For a while my father received frequent visits from Jehovah's witnesses. Often he wouldn't answer — he claimed he had learned to recognize the way they rang the bell — but sometimes he would invite them in, offer them tea, and chat with them about the Bible. One story he often brought up was the sacrifice of Isaac. "I cannot — I cannot believe in a God who makes such a monstrous request. If God came to me and told me to sacrifice my daughter to him I would tell him to get lost!" My mother often enough makes the obvious point that God is merely testing Abraham's faith, which does not assuage my father. But he was intrigued by the explanation that the Jehovah's witnesses offered: God had promised to multiply Abraham's seed, so Abraham had to know that God was bluffing. (Of course this explanation doesn't take Ishmael into account.)

I've always been interested in myths about the end of human sacrifice (for example, Iphigenia in Tauris). This is one I read today:

Jupiter demands human sacrifice from Numa Pompilius, Romulus's successor as king of Rome. Specifically, he wants a human head. Numa is shocked and dismayed by the unspeakable request. He thinks long and hard about what he should do. The day for the ceremony comes. The city (or more likely: village of mud huts) is all decked out, the ritual reaches its climax, and Numa offers Jupiter — an enormous onion. Jupiter's reaction? He laughs. He claps Numa on the back. He likes the joke.

James Wood writes, in The Irresponsible Self, that the laughter of the gods is crude and cruel, viz. they laugh at limping Hephaestus, they laugh at Ares and Aphrodite caught in a net in adulterous embrace. Jupiter's laugh in this Roman myth seems a good counterexample with its mixture of shame, appreciation, and forgiveness.