"The irony is that people in foreign countries often possess Shakespeare to a greater extent than we do, since they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language that they speak. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris or Moscow can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. A friend of mine has told me that first time he truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when he saw one in French!"

There is some sense to this. Yet, it must be noted that the best native poets (say of Hungary) learned enough English just to translate the Bard and the Hungarian Shakespeare is not modern, but, rather, as my father might have said, better than the original!

Hat tip to the great Peter Robinson, who loaned me his Forbes.com column space this week while he’s on vacation.

P.S. I almost forgot: Have you ordered your copy yet?

Amusingly enough two hours after I received the book, I was in a furniture store in Mansfield (OH) browsing when a salesman came up to introduce himself. We had met about five years back and--he said--I had given him Hayward’s first volume on Reagan, The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, and he had just now finished reading it! Although he said he enjoyed it very much, I thought I detected a groan when I told him about the new volume!

Danielle Allen's op-ed this morning. Discussing the insistence of some that health-care reform will result in rationing and death panels, Allen chides those who respond with an accurate description of the legislation. "One can't answer them by saying: 'These policies won't ration; there will be no death panels,'" she writes. Instead, reformers must detail the "institutional checks that will prevent the emergence" of death panels and rationing.

In other words, the questions reformers have to answer is not "when did you stop beating your wife?" It's "what will prevent you from beating your wife?" Given that there is no such thing as a "death panel," nor any policy provision that would establish such a thing, it is hard to explain the institutional checks that would prevent a "death panel" from coming into being. When you have to explain why your bill won't create death panels, and what will make sure that it doesn't, you've pretty much lost the argument.

This argument raises interesting questions about how to think about legislation. As I understand him, Klein is looking strictly at the text of the bill, and thinking about what the bill is designed to do.

By contrast, Allen is thinking about the likely consequences of the bill:

These activists do not claim that the proposed reforms include policies whose explicit purpose is to ration, nor do the more careful among them claim that the policies will establish panels to help people decide when to die. They are not arguing about the semantic content of the policies; that is, they are not arguing about the meaning of the words that are actually in the relevant drafts of bills. Instead, they are considering, as the pragmatist philosopher William James put it, "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the [policy] may involve -- what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare."

Quite often the rancor in public debate turns on this distinction between a narrow and broad reading of legislation, with the result that each side thinks the other is arguing in bad faith. Thus it long has been, and probably ever must be.

Tim Fitterer
Paul Mitchell
Peter Riebling
Kelly Sparrow
George Alecusan

Thanks to all who entered. An email has been sent to the winners. If you are listed as a winner and did not receive an email, contact Ben Kunkel. If you didn’t win this month, enter August’s drawing.

Ross mentions in passing the great comedic filmaker John Hughes, who just died and richly deserves a column’s sustained attention. My question to you: Which of Hughes’ great movies is the greatest--SIXTEEN CANDLES, FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, or PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES? John Candy, of course, towers over Sandler and Rogen as a genuinely funny, sad man on the screen (although apparently a very happy family guy in real life).

For no Man, or Society of Men, having a Power to deliver up their Preservation, or consequently the means of it, to the Absolute Will and arbitrary Dominion of another; whenever any one shall go about to bring them into such a Slavish Condition, they will always have a right to preserve what they have not a Power to part with; and to rid themselves of those who invade this Fundamental, Sacred, and unalterable Law of Self-Preservation, for which they enter’d into Society.

But if we take Locke seriously, what are its implications? If they cover essental care, Rahm Emanuel’s brother’s comment run contrary to Locke:

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.

It’s much easier simply to follow the Progressives and dismiss all that as passe, of course. And, in the mean time, we can be thankful that, under current US law, such rationing is not legal. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The most fatuous assessment of Woodstock belongs to Time magazine, which wrote in 1969: "Woodstock may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age. . . [T]he revolution it preaches, implicitly or explicitly, is essentially moral; it is the proclamation of a new set of values. . . With a surprising ease and a cool sense of authority, the children of plenty have voiced an intention to live by a different ethical standard than their parents accepted. The pleasure principle has been elevated over the Puritan ethic of work. To do one’s own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen. Personal freedom in the midst of squalor is more liberating than social conformity with the trappings of wealth. Now that youth takes abundance for granted, it can afford to reject materialism." They must have been smoking a lot of dope in Time’s newsroom that weekend.

Not to be outdone, lefty Andrew Kopkind wrote that Woodstock represented "a new culture of opposition. It grows out of the disintegration of old forms, the vinyl and aerosol institutions that carry all the inane and destructive values of privatism, competition, commercialism, profitability and elitism. . . For people who had never glimpsed the intense communitarian closeness of a militant struggle—People’s Park or Paris in the month of May or Cuba—Woodstock must always be their model of how good we will all feel after the revolution. . . [P]olitical radicals have to see the cultural revolution as a sea in which they can swim." At least Kopkind wrote in the magazine High Times, which means this can be safely read a self-parody.

I rather liked the comic--I think it was Jay Leno--who joked about the 20th anniversary that aging baby boomers who went back to the scene would likely need to bring LSD suppositories.