George Will, Virginia rednecks, and more.

Books, Books, and More Books

Last week, THE SCRAPBOOK noted (with quasi-parental pride) books on war and history newly published by some of our distinguished contributors. Here--with equal pride, we hasten to assure both sets of contributors--is the second installment of new books from our extended editorial family.

Contributing editor Joseph Epstein, whose productivity is both goad and inspiration to THE SCRAPBOOK, is about to grace us with an elegant contribution to HarperCollins's "Eminent Lives" series. Who is more eminent than Alexis de Tocqueville? And what better guide to Tocqueville--"Democracy's Guide"--than Epstein?

Contributor Larry Miller (we think of him for his peerless DAILY STANDARD meditations--others might know him from TV and movies) is out with Spoiled Rotten America--a series of beautifully crafted, penetrating and funny, essays. Goes with Epstein like port goes with Stilton.

More on America: The AEI Press, our upstairs neighbors, give us Walter Berns's Democracy and the Constitution, a series of learned and trenchant essays from one of our leading constitutional thinkers--actually, one of our leading thinkers, period.

Nicholas Antongiavanni's The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style, is a suitable tribute to Machiavelli. "Antongiovanni" is the pen name of Michael Anton, a valued contributor to this magazine before stints of government service, during which he found time to craft this deft commentary on Machiavelli's Prince, which is also a useful guide to how to dress!

Frequent contributor Stephen Schwartz meanwhile asks, Is It Good for the Jews? (always of interest to THE SCRAPBOOK, some of whose best friends ...) and provides an interesting, idiosyncratic discussion of the American Jewish community and its political affiliations and lobbying efforts.

More on the Jews: Drew Friedman, creator of some of the finest illustrations to have graced these pages, sends us a charming and whimsical collection of illustrations of Old Jewish Comedians. This is a unique book. If, like THE SCRAPBOOK, you're a fan of, say, Rodney Dangerfield--né Jacob Cohen--go out and buy it. And if you're not? Go out and buy it anyway.

Your holiday shopping should now be complete--wait, throw in the paperback edition of The Weekly Standard: A Reader, some of the best of our first ten years, and you'll have everything a reader could want.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Soulcraft

Here is a telling sign of how disenchanted with the Republican party some conservatives have grown. Conservative elder statesman George F. "Statecraft as Soulcraft" Will threw a hissy fit in his Newsweek column last week over the (arguably redundant) legislation passed by the 109th Congress banning most Internet gambling. Those wacky Republicans on Capitol Hill, he sniffed, were advancing a "mother-hen agenda" that he termed "Prohibition II." How preposterous!

"Granted," he wrote,

some people gamble too much. And some people eat too many cheeseburgers. But who wants to live in a society that protects the weak-willed by criminalizing cheeseburgers? Besides, the problems . . . of criminal involvement in gambling, and of underage and addictive gamblers, can be best dealt with by legalization and regulation. . . . Furthermore, taxation of online poker and other gambling could generate billions for governments.

All in all, a more-than-competent exposition of the libertarian point of view--although from that same point of view those billions for governments! might be considered a mixed blessing. But there's an older, deeper view of this subject that deserves a hearing. It was once ably expounded by another conservative columnist:

If life is, as a poet said, a sum of habits disturbed by a few thoughts, we should think clearly about those habits we deliberately develop. Consider the rapid spread of legal gambling. . . . Are there social costs from all this? Lots, beginning with the ruinous--to health, work and families--excesses of compulsive gamblers. . . . Gambling can be a benign entertainment, but it can become, for individuals and perhaps for a society, a way of attempting to evade the stern fact that (as Henry James said) "life is effort, unremittingly repeated." Gambling inflames the lust for wealth without work, weakening a perishable American belief--that the moral worth of a person is gauged not by how much money he makes but by how he makes his money. . . . With a deepening dependency of individuals and governments on gambling, we are gambling with our national character, forgetting that character is destiny.

Okay, that wasn't technically another columnist. Max Beerbohm would have termed this "the young self meets the old self." The latter passage is from George F. Will, circa 1993.