The Long View 2007-03-02: Restoration; McCain; Solar Warming

I still remember reading this post, and the associated First Things article, because it was where I learned that Episcopalians of the early American era shunned public display of the cross. It was much later I learned that the cross wasn’t a symbol of Christians in general until about the fourth century AD or so. Until the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the symbolism was a little too fresh.

Restoration; McCain; Solar Warming

My condominium association is tormented day and night by the municipal Historic Preservation Commission. They make us take down things on the facade of the buildings that are necessary for safety or security; they refuse to let us make necessary improvements or even repairs, because there is no way to do than at reasonable cost that would be consistent with the condition of the buildings in 1930.

The condominium consists of two slum apartment buildings that were restored at the end of the 1980s; the restoration was possible only because the Historic Preservation Commission had not yet been established. So, I know from personal experience that there is more to sane restoration than historical fidelity. Even so, however, I am not sure what to make of this restoration controversy to which Meredith Henne at First Things brings our attention:

In October of 2006, William & Mary’s new college president, Gene R. Nichol, ordered the altar cross removed from the university’s colonial-era Wren Chapel. His goal was to make the chapel “less of a faith-specific space, and to make it more welcoming to . . . visitors of all faiths.” The eighteen-inch-high brass cross, a gift from neighboring Bruton Parish Church in the 1930s, had been on display unless guests using the chapel requested its removal, according to previous policy....For more than two hundred of its 274 years, a cross was not displayed on the Wren Chapel’s communion table. Episcopal chapels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shunned crosses as “popish” trappings....This dilemma, faced by the staff at William & Mary, is a standard consideration in historical restoration projects. “Historically accurate” architecture often means that a building or interior reflects the time of founding or origin, the point at which the most illustrious tenant resided there, or the years when a particularly significant event occurred.

The fatuous multiculturalism that seems to have been the real reason for the removal of the cross needs to be combatted. However, it seems to me that a chapel that was not built with a cross in mind probably should not add one later: the room will lack a proper focus for it.

* * *

John McCain has been openly running for president in 2008 for some time. However, his latest announcement to that effect, this time on late-night television, did not go well:

Republican presidential contender John McCain...a staunch backer of the Iraq war but critic of how President Bush has waged it, said U.S. lives had been "wasted" in the four-year-old conflict...McCain, who repeated his assertion that U.S. troops must remain in Iraq rather than withdrawing early, made the "wasted" remark after confirming to Letterman what has been clear for at least a year or more — that he's in the running for the 2008 Republican nomination.

And what can one say of the prospects of a candidacy that has been discountenanced by such great statesfolk as former-senator Rick Santorum:

“The only one I wouldn't support is McCain,” Santorum said during an interview in his office at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where he is a senior fellow.

“I don’t agree with him on hardly any issues,’’ Santorum said. “I don’t think he has the temperament and leadership ability to move the country in the right direction.”

Let him whose tongue has never been tied in public cast the first stone at the ambiguity of "don't agree...on hardly any..." The disturbing thing about that remark is this "anyone but" business. That smacks too much of the saying on the French Right during the 1930s about the socialist premier: "Better Hitler than Blum." Actually, it also sounds like a saying from the final generation of the Byzantine Empire: "Better the sultan's turban than the pope's tiara."

Even McCain's great supporter, Peggy Noonan, had some rather obituary comments today about McCain's candidacy:

But Americans don't elect résumés, they elect men. Here some aspects of Mr. McCain's highly individualistic nature hurt him. He is funny, quick, brave, colorful. He is emotional, has a temper, carries grudges, harbors resentments. If the latter set of traits were not true, the former set would have won the Washington political establishment. As it is he has a portion of it, but many were hired, for money, as political advisers. This is a traditional, but at this point old-fashioned, way to spend money.

Better the family retainers of the Bushes, I suppose, than the humorless (and usually idealess) governments-in-waiting that tend to collect around ambitious senators. McCain did not need those people in 2000, and neither did Bill Clinton in 1992. Both McCain and Hillary Clinton need them now because, though they both have fans, neither has enthusiasts.

Noonan puts her finger on what I think is the key to McCain's popularity:

I suspect Mr. McCain knew no one could question his life, that it showed who he was, and so he could do what he wanted in terms of policy and not jeopardize his support.

That was certainly my attitude in 2000, when I endorsed Senator McCain here. On that page I explained that I did not much care about his views on campaign-finance reform. If he had any ideas about education, I would have been content if he kept them to himself. As for why I did support him, my views may not have been prescient, but they do seem to have been relevant to subsequent events:

It is not enough just to examine each foreign affairs and defense issue as it comes up. Policy has to be set within a larger understanding of how the world works and of the position of the United States in the society of nations. John McCain has this understanding. He knows and respects the existing system of international institutions within which the United States must operate. He is familiar with the military, and can be trusted not to work it to death or to use it as a theater for the prosecution of the culture wars. More intangibly, he has a sense of geopolitics, of how one area of the world affects another. These are not the sort of qualifications that pollsters are looking for in 2000, but they are what the American president needs.

Would happy birds now be chirping in every tree if McCain had been elected in 2000? Perhaps not. McCain, like Colin Powell, belong to the conciliatory generation that lies between the Babyboomers and Gen-xers. They are given to compromise through the elaboration of new procedures: a fine instinct, most of the time, but they are less likely than Babyboomers to see when discontinuity with the past is necessary. The McCain Administration would have invaded Iraq after 911. We should recall that McCain was the neocon favorite, the apple of the eye of The Weekly Standard; George Bush was the anti-interventionist alternative. Nonetheless, I suspect that the McCain occupation policy would not have been as Wilsonian as Bush's. Rather, there would have been a rapid installation of a neo-Baathist regime. The US, withdrawing quickly to a few small bases, would have turned a blind eye to how that regime secured its position. Iran and the human-rights industry would have been outraged. By now, the American electorate would be asking if the war had been worth the effort.

Would some things have been different? Yes. We can be certain that the McCain Administration would not have confined its case for the war to a monotone repetition of the "weapons of mass destruction" talking-point. The federal budget would be balanced again by now. However, the collapse of immigration control would have been even worse. Similarly with the healthcare system: McCain's instinct would have been to bolster a system that should be dismantled. In a way, the Bush Administration's neglect has been better than that.

And what about 2008? McCain is my default candidate. However, I don't see how anyone now running could be elected.

* * *

Global warming is not confined to Earth, as many commentators (including me) have observed. In any case, here's the idea again. Instapundit reports that National Geographic reports that one Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, reports:

[T]he Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said. Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets.

Maybe, though I had understood that the most recent climate models had been corrected for changes in solar output. In any case, even if all the changes in global temperature were explicable from astronomical causes, that does not let us completely off the hook. A warmer world means endangered beachfront property and shifting agricultural regions. The difference is that there would be less we could do alter the climate ourselves.

Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly

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