"The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano. That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure."

I suspect they won’t. Why? Part of the reason is that Fannie and Freddie have political cover. They are, in effect, government run businesses. Their boards and management are largely composed of politicians and politically connected people. Why does that save them attacks? In part it has to do with the passions at play in the current financial crisis. John Adams noted long ago that the basic political passion is the "spectemer agendo"--the desire to be seen in action. When the market produces billionaires regularly, and those billionaires look down upon politicians, the politicians come to want their pound of flesh. Why are they in politics in the first place if not to gratify their desire to be loved? By tearing down businessmen, they are trying to block the competition.

This will fill your Ipod and help put in its place amusement such as this: The old tv series Gunsmoke and Perry Mason explain the core of Strauss's political teaching.

UPDATE: I'm told by a scholar editing some of these courses that transcripts will also be produced.

To echo Steve Hayward’s faux conspiratorial speculation from a couple weeks ago . . . it almost makes you wonder if Obama really is an evil genius.

Kudos to Will Jordan and Matt Oberrieder (the organizers and co-directors of Mercer’s new center), and their very interesting group of colleagues at Mercer. I predict great things.

SPOKANE, Wash. — The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don’t work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation’s strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.

As Shapiro notes, Obama has dubbed the choice between capitalism and a government-run economy a false choice. The gulf between those who favor government funding of embryonic stem-cell research and those who see moral complications with either the funding or with the research in general is also proclaimed to be a "false choice." We face similar false choices with regard to the protection of the environment and with respect to national security. If we can’t all just get along, Obama would have us believe, it is because we are caught up in these silly disputes over false choices. We don’t have to be like that anymore and politics needn’t be so hard and full of that nasty shouting anymore. If we want to escape it, we can look to him; Obama, our new philosopher king. He will tell us why we need not trouble our hearts . . . he has the answer. He will end the argument by winning it and, on top of that, he is happy to let you think that you didn’t really lose. After all . . . it was only a false choice that troubled you. Good thing he was there to show us the truth.

Medvedev concludes his otherwise saccharine WaPo op-ed by affirming gthe truthh of Alexis de Tocquevillefs words predicting ga great future for our two nations.h Tocquevillefs actual words are sobering. At the conclusion of volume I of Democracy in America he predicted (in 1835) that Russia and America each seemed destined to ghold the destinies of half the world in its hands one day.h His conclusion emphasizes the dramatic differences between the nations, then and now:

g[T]hus the conquests of the American are made with the plowshare of the laborer, those of the Russian with the sword of the soldier.

gTo attain his goal, the first relies on personal interest and allows the force and reason of individuals to act without directing them.

gThe second in a way concentrates all the power of society in one man.

gThe one has freedom for his principal means of action; the other servitude.h

Does Obama realize "the truth" of these distinctions? Medvedev asks that Russia and the U.S. should "work together" and thus renounce their specific characters. With his latest actions Obama seems to be meeting him more than half-way.

I will also be speaking at the meeting of the Pennsylvania Association of Scholars at Duquesne tomorrow at 4 p.m. on something like Berry College and academic freedom.

Here’s my take on that Kronman book mentioned below: I actually see a lot good in the idea of liberal education as the display of the best arguments for and poetic presentations of a variety of forms of human excellence--such as the saint, the poet, the philosopher, the inventor, the artist, the statesman, and even the agrarian gentleman. But the way Kronman tells the story, this sort of education is "secular humanism" because it depends on the obvious untruth of religious dogma (which is usually all about the tyannical, "supernatural" God). One limitation of that view is that it’s obviously contrary to the self-understandings of many great men and women, past and even present. Kronman presents the choice for religion or a personal God as obviously a choice against the truth about the responsibilities given to self-conscious mortals; all "real religion" is fundamentalism to him, and one goal of college, for him, is to get over that sort of thing. All "humanism" and so the humanities are secular. That view can hardly make the study of the humanities attractive to our evangelical and orthodox believers. But before we’re too critical of Kronman, we have to think about how many defenders of liberal education today more or less agree with him. One Christian criticism of his approach would be its inability to even search for dignity or even holiness in ordinary life; not all virtue is about greatness.

Our own Dr. Pat delivered the keynote and wove together a number of themes centering on our multiple crises, among which (and perhaps near the center of which) is a crisis in higher education. In a nutshell (and he can clarify and correct me on this), he argued that many of our crises can be traced to a failure to appreciate and respect our limits, a failure of which "the new science" (that is, Baconian science) is the cause. The contemporary university is in some sense the central institution housing the new science and celebrating the self-fashioning which is its most common expression. (Readers of C.S. Lewis might regard it as a N.I.C.E. place.)

We also had an interesting discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of Anthony Kronman's recent pretty good book on Education's End, which covers some of this terrain, albeit not nearly as well, in large part because he can't bring himself to admit that to counterpose (or indeed oppose) the humanities to religion (or to the possibility of religious truth) is to deprive them of a principal source of their vitality. He treats religion as essentially "fundamentalist" and anti-intellectual and thinks that one can contemplate life's big questions without taking seriously religious alternatives. I suspect that it's closer to the truth to argue that Kronman's "secular humanism" (which isn't too far from the kind of conversation across the ages that someone like Allan Bloom would have suggested) must collapse into Baconian self-fashioning if it rejects out of hand (as Kronman seems to) the possibility of religious truth.

Many thanks to all the conference attendees (among them three of Lawler's students who made the trek down from Berry and an assiduous reader of Dr. Pat's blog) and to its various sponsors, including ISI.