Summary

With Will's signature erudition and wry wit always on display, "One Man's America" chronicles a spectacular, eclectic procession of figures who have shaped the cultural landscape--from Hugh Hefner to William F. Buckley Jr.

Author Biography

GEORGE F. WILL writes a twice-weekly column that is syndicated in more than 450 newspapers, as well as a back-page column in Newsweek that runs biweekly. He also appears each Sunday on the ABC News program This Week. The author of twelve other books, Will is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary and the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

From the Hardcover edition.

Introduction	p. 1
People
The Fun of	p. 9
Buckley: A Life Athwart History	p. 11
Proud Anachronism	p. 13
"Cheerful Malcontent"	p. 15
Thoughts on Death	p. 23
The Tamarack Tree of American Politics	p. 25
What George McGovern Made	p. 28
The Senate's Sisyphus	p. 30
Galbraith's Liberalism as Condescension	p. 32
Ebullient Master of the Dismal Science	p. 35
High-Achieving Minimalist	p. 37
The Not-at-All Dull	p. 40
George Washington's Long Journey Home	p. 42
The Most Important American Never to Have Been President	p. 44
Well, Yes, of Course	p. 46
Longfellow: A Forgotten Founder	p. 49
The Steel Behind the Smile	p. 52
Reagan and the Vicissitudes of Historical Judgments	p. 54
"A Flame Rescued from Dry Wood"	p. 57
An Enlightenment Fundamentalist	p. 59
Tuning Fork of American Fantasies	p. 61
The Emeritus Beat as Tourist Attraction	p. 63
Buck Owens's Bakersfield Sound	p. 65
Seventy-nine-Pound Master of Tourette Syndrome	p. 68
Simeon Wright's Grace	p. 70
Paths To The Present
The Most Important American War You Know Next-to-Nothing About	p. 75
The Amazing Banality of Flight	p. 77
The Price of Misreading the Prairie Sky	p. 79
"A Range of Mountains on the Move"	p. 81
The Emblematic Novel of the 1930s (No, It Is Not About the Joads)	p. 84
All Quiet at the Overpass	p. 86
FDR's Transformation of Liberalism	p. 88
Retailers Give Thanks for Thanksgiving (and FDR)	p. 91
FDR's Christmas Guest from Hell	p. 93
"My Place Is with My Shipmates"	p. 95
An Anthem of American Optimism-in 1943	p. 97
When War Was the Answer	p. 100
Catching Up to Captain Philip	p. 102
The Most Fateful Heart Attack in American History	p. 104
How Ike's Highways Helped Heal Civil War Wounds	p. 107
The Short, Unhappy Life of the Edsel	p. 109
The Fifties in Our Rearview Mirror	p. 111
2002: Superstitions Are Bad Luck	p. 114
2003: Lingerie and Duct Tape	p. 116
2004: The Passion of the Christ and The Passions of the Faculty Clubs	p. 118
2005: "In Lieu of Flowers, Please Send Acerbic Letters to Republicans"	p. 121
2006: "Go Ahead, We Will Get into One of the Other Boats"	p. 123
2007: Ready, Fire, Aim	p. 126
Governing
The Two Americas: Hard and Soft	p. 131
Angela Jobe's Resilience	p. 133
Conservatism's Infrastructure	p. 135
Against "National Greatness Conservatism"	p. 138
Summa Contra Reagan Nostalgia	p. 140
The Left's Plea for Materialistic Politics	p. 142
Constitutional Monomania	p. 145
Judicial Activism, Wise and Not	p. 147
The Hard Truth About "Soft Rights"	p. 149
Oologah's-and America's-Slide	p. 151
A Fraudulent "Fairness"	p. 154
Policing Speech in Oakland	p. 156
Liberalism's Itch in Minneapolis	p. 159
Chicago: From the White City to the Green City	p. 161
Our Moralizing Tax Code	p. 164
"Electronic Morphine" on the Ohio River	p. 166
Prohibition II: Interestingly Selective	p. 168
Being Green at Ben &c Jerry's	p. 171
The Tyranny of the Small Picture	p. 174
Draining the Reservoir of Reverence	p. 176
United 93: "We've Got to Do It Ourselves"	p. 178
Nothing Changes Everything	p. 181
Sensibilities And Sensitivities
Narcissism as News	p. 187
The Speciesism of Featherless Bipeds	p. 189
What We Owe to What We Eat	p. 191
The Holocaust: Handcrafted	p. 194
The "Daring" of the Avant-Garde Yet Again	p. 196
Anti-Semitism Across the Political Spectrum	p. 199
When Harry Remet Hanne	p. 201
Cars as Mobile Sculpture	p. 203
Hog Heaven: Happy One Hundredth, Harley	p. 206
Restoration at 346 Madison	p. 208
Starbucks, Nail Salons, and the Aesthetic Imperative	p. 210
Manners vs. Social Autism	p. 213
A Punctuation Vigilante	p. 215
America's Literature of Regret	p. 217
Chief Illiniwek and the Indignation Industry	p. 220
Christmas at Our Throats	p. 222
Learning
National Amnesia and Planting Cut Flowers	p. 227
A Sensory Blitzkrieg of Surfaces	p. 229
"Philosophy Teaching by Examples"	p. 231
Fascinating Contingencies	p. 233
Ed Schools vs. Education	p. 235
This Just In from the Professors: Conservatism Is a Mental Illness	p. 238
The Law of Group Polarization in Academia	p. 240
Antioch College's Epitaph	p. 243
A Scholar's Malfeasance Gunned Down	p. 245
Juggling Scarves in the Therapeutic Nation	p. 247
Nature, Nurture, and Larry Summers's Sin	p. 250
AP Harry Applies to College	p. 252
Teaching Minnows the Pleasure of Precision	p. 255
Games
Raising Michael Oher	p. 261
The Man from Moro Bottom	p. 266
"Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer!"	p. 268
Randy Shannon's Realism	p. 270
The NFL: An Intensification of Reality	p. 272
Speaking Sports Centerese	p. 275
The Movie, and the Truth, About Texas Western	p. 277
The Game
"Remember 1908!"	p. 283
The Possible and the Inevitable	p. 286
"I Can't Stand It, I'm So Good"	p. 288
"We Think He Can Hit"	p. 291
"Watch This-the First-Base Coach May Be Going to the Hospital"	p. 294
Take Me Out to the Metric	p. 296
Elias Knows Everything	p. 299
The Game's Gifted Eccentrics	p. 301
Don't Beat a Dead Horse in the Mouth	p. 305
The Golden Age	p. 307
Always Hustling	p. 310
The Precious, Precarious Equipoise	p. 312
Enhanced and Devalued	p. 314
The Methodical	p. 319
Realism Among the RiverDogs	p. 321
Striving for Motel Years	p. 323
Seeking Anonymous Perfection	p. 326
"Where Baseball?"	p. 328
Wondering
Incest at "a Genetically Discreet Remove"	p. 333
An Intellectual Hijacking	p. 335
From Dayton, Tennessee, to Rhode Island's Committee on Fish and Game	p. 339
Earth: Not Altogether Intelligently Designed	p. 341
Intelligent Design and Unintelligent Movies	p. 344
The Pope, the Neurosurgeon, and the Ghost in the Machine	p. 346
How Biology Buttresses Moratality, Which Conforms to...Biology	p. 348
The Space Program's Search for...Us	p. 351
Nuclear Waste: That's Us	p. 353
The Loudest Sound in Human Experience	p. 355
L = BB + pw + BC/BF	p. 358
Wonder What We Are For? Wondering	p. 360
Matters Of Life And Death
Golly, What Did Jon Do?	p. 365
The Long Dying of Louise Will	p. 367
Acknowledgments	p. 370
Permissions	p. 371
Index	p. 373
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

Introduction

Among the shortcomings of the current administration of the universe is the fact that Alistair Cooke is gone. The British-born journalist, who died in 2004 at age ninety-five, was one of the scarce bits of evidence that there really is an Intelligent Designer of the universe. Cooke lived in this country for sixty-seven years, producing a body of work of unrivaled perceptiveness, affectionateness, and elegance. One of his books, published in 1952, was titledOne Man’s America.The title of the book you are holding is one man’s homage to Cooke.

Living in Manhattan and traveling around the forty-eight, and then the fifty, states, Cooke developed a thoroughly American sensibility– cheerful, inquisitive, egalitarian, droll, and enthralled without being uncritical. His delicate sensibility was apparent in his description of Harold Ross, founder ofThe New Yorkerin 1925 and editor of it until his death in 1951, as a man “who winced for a living.” Cooke was so well-disposed toward America, and so utterly at home and so exquisitely well-mannered, that he did not wince promiscuously or ostentatiously. Still, wincing is, inevitably, what conscientious social commentators often do, not only in America, but especially in America.
Matthew Arnold, for example, was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance (Robert Louis Stevenson, no less) said: “Poor Matt, he’s gone to Heaven, no doubt–but he won’t like God.” American social critics wince when this country, in its rambunctious freedom, falls short, as inevitably it does, of the uniquely high standards it has set for itself. But different things make different people wince, because sensibilities differ. And nearly four decades of observing American politics and culture have convinced me that, in both, sensibility is fundamental.

That is, people embrace a conservative (or liberal) agenda or ideology, or develop a liberal (or conservative) political and social philosophy, largely because of something basic to their nature–their temperament, as shaped by education and other experiences. Broadly–verybroadly– speaking, there are, I believe, conservative and liberal stances toward life, conservative and liberal assumptions about how history unfolds, and conservative and liberal expectations about how the world works. This is one reason why we have political categories like “liberal” and “conservative”: People tend to cluster. That is one reason why we have political parties.

This collection of my writings is not designed to recapitulate the large events of recent years. Consider this volume an almost entirely Iraq-free zone. Rather, it is intended to illustrate, regarding smaller (but not necessarily minor) matters, how one conservative’s sensibility responds to myriad provocations and pleasures. At a moment when there is considerable doubt and rancor about what it means to be a conservative, perhaps this collection will provide a useful example.

Time flies when you’re having fun, and also when you’re not. Time is, of course, magnificently indifferent to whether or not people enjoy what occurs as it passes. The first years of the twenty-first century have not been, on balance, enjoyable for Americans. These have been years characterized by a miasma of anxiety about a new and shadowy terrorist threat to security, and a torrent of acrimony about the dubious inception and incompetent conduct of a war that became perhaps the worst foreign policy debacle in the nation’s history. (Well, I said this book would be analmostentirely Iraq-free zone.)

Lucretius (as translated by Dryden) wrote about the enjoyment people sometimes derive from watching other people in peril:
’Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore, The rolling ship, and hear

Excerpted from One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation by George Will
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.