F.Z.

E.B. e-mails to point out that L.G.F. reminds us of the birthday: an outrageously overlooked guitarist (undisputed champion of the wah-wah), the H. L. Mencken of rock music (scattershot critical mastery, in time and tune), the George S. Patton of band-leaders (commanded whole armies of virtuosity); prolific and terrific, overnite sensational:

Thank you, Frank. You were completely superb. The past ten years have lacked something quite special, but you can bet I burn "Roxy" to the bone, to this day and beyond. I'm glad I lived in the time that you did.

Yes

Cosh is correct, at least in my own jaundiced view. This is a very subtle idea, which very few are qualified to grasp. I stand behind none on my natural ability to glow at the sight of someone else made happy, but nobody does that better than me when I get to do it on my own. And while I have no principled complaint against The Thing here, it is true that I generally resent The Push, and always breathe with far greater ease along about the 27th or 28th.

Compare

Here is a test. Observe the two excerpts following, and connect each with its author:

A) --

"If, following Latour's and Descombes' suggestions, we were to start writing narratives of overlapping campaigns and careers which were not broken up into chapters with titles like 'The Enlightenment,' 'Romanticism,' 'Literary Modernism,' or 'Late Capitalism,' we would lose dramatic intensity. But we might help to immunize ourselves against the passion of the infinite. If we dropped reference to movements, we could settle for telling a story about how the human beings in the neighborhood of the North Atlantic made their futures different from their pasts at a constantly accelerating pace. We could still, like Hegel and Acton, tell this story as a story of increasing freedom. But we could drop, along with any sense of inevitable progress, any sense of immanent teleology. We could drop any attempt to capitalize History, to view it as something as big and strong as Nature of God.

Such narratives of overlapping campaigns and careers would contain no hint whatever that a career could be judged by its success at aligning itself with the movement of history. Both political and cultural history would be seen as a tissue of chances, mischances, and lost chances -- a tissue from which occasionally and briefly, beauty flashes forth, but to which sublimnity is entirely irrelevant."

B) --

"What [Michael Oakeshott] wants to theorize is a succession of events which are both unique and related to each other, and he wants to do this without an understanding of luck, causation, similarity, correlation, or analogy. Think about that. He's basically denying himself the ability to link one historical event with one that follows it, almost every single mode of criticism or analysis that human beings have ever used to understand why one thing happens after another.

His solution, in his essay on The Theoretical Understanding of Human Conduct, is merely to restate the problem. He writes, 'A contingent relationship in the full sense, however, is a sequential relationship of intelligent individual occurrences where what comes after is recognized to be conditional on what went before not merely because before-and-after cannot be reversed, nor, of course, because what went before is recognized as a causal condition, or because they're functionally related, but because they touch and, in touching, identify themselves as belonging together and as composing an intelligible continuity of conditionally dependent occurrences.'

The key concept here, alive with skepticism, is 'contingency,' the notion that any human event can produce any other human event, and the freedom or autonomy of individual human beings to make the world anew. 'Touch' here means the absence of interval, or the lack of any intermediary which is not itself an occurrence, such as a law or a function. And there's also no priority in the way such events encounter each other. There's no teleology, no pattern, no destination. 'Contingency' is thus defined as the space between events. It's a vacuum."

This is not a difficult test. The experienced reader will at once connect Richard Rorty with his own words (1997), and Andrew Sullivan with his (2000). Slightly more challenging will be the matter of comparing (not contrasting) the position of a leading leftist intellectual with that of a prominent "neo-conservative" "controversialist", both of whom laud the conceptual disintegration of the "More Ecstatic Modes Of Living" (borrowed from another prominent thinker of the day) view of history.

This is something deeply horrifying.

It is instructive to note that it was spoken before the American Enterprise Institute.