Note on the origins of the manuscript:
Yesterday I was working on a manuscript related to Plato’s view of time and eternity in Timaeus. My daughter was playing Christmas music in the other room just as I was translating the odd section on numbers that puzzled even A.E. Taylor. Mary Kate hit a chord . . . just as I was puzzling aloud about the text. As I spoke the following letter appeared on my computer screen. I don’t know what to think of it . . . and pass it on to you. I have not been able to duplicate the convergence that produced it . . . and so I assume that the proximate time and relationship to the winter solstice may have helped produce the result. We shall see next year.
I found much of it interesting in the light of a recent discussion between Hugh Hewitt and some chums at Torrey Honors.
Saint Anne’s
La Mirada, California
21/12/2035
Dear Sam,
Thanks for asking about my health. The arrhythmia is not life threatening and, if I slow down, not a problem. Hope is well . . . though it is unfair to be married to a woman who never looks older!
You can imagine our interest in the up-coming California Republican primary. I am no politician, but my friends that are say that if you win the nomination then in all probability the Presidency (!) will be yours. (I still cannot get over the disappearance of the rump of the Democrat party and the relegation of the Greens to a permanent third of the vote.)
Imagine following John Thune as the second Biola grad to occupy the White House . . . and the first Torrey grad! Of course, as Plato pointed out people are unpredictable, but things are looking good.
You asked for ethical advice and I will try to give it. My bottom line: your war service matters and it is not wrong to stress it.
Modesty is a good thing, but it is not imodest to give your parents and faith, and yes perhaps Biola (!), credit for making you the kind of man who served. When you were driving over an IED, most men your age were agonizing over getting the Wii. (Remember it?)
You expressed worry about running ads emphasizing your own service in the War on Terror and in the establishment of a democratic Iraq. You point out that many business leaders in Iraq are eager to support your campaign . . . and that even the new President of the United Confederacy of Iraq and Kurdistan wants to cut a commercial thanking you! Who would not want an ad from our best ally other than Britain and Israel?
As the first vet from their war of liberation to be this close to power he is eager to pay back your generation. Let him. The world, after all, is still a dangerous place!
You are not wrong to emphasize that you did your duty. I remember what it cost you. While others were earning money, you were in the Battle of Baghdad. While others were blogging about their personal needs, you were sending back reports from the front. Now let a grateful nation thank you. It is not humility to refuse thanks . . . don’t be boorish enough to fail to let us applaud one of our heroes in the name of humility.
You will quibble about the “hero” phrase . . . saying doing ones duty does not make a hero. And you are right that in normal wholesome times duty-doing is not heroic, but the early twentieth-first century, following the Me Nineties were not normal times. Clinton-ethics made it a time when it was hard to do one’s duty. It was heroic to do your duty then . . . just as conventional morality for that brief moment became almost saintly! (How glad I am to have out-lived those times!)
It is funny that the new Victorianism (coming from good King William of all people!) should have not been anticipated . . . when it was obvious that all those home-school kids were going to start voting! You are benefiting from that as well . . . a state like California where Governor Menendez just got done tightening divorce laws . . . loves the fact that you were always part of the moral majority!
There is an appeal to a man who did his duty. There is an attractive quality to you, young Sam, heading off in your desert fatigues to a War that most with your education and promise avoided. The good man, the solid man, the family man . . . is always under assault, but always by some new vice. He endures and we instinctively look to him to lead.
Senator Simon says he is sorry he missed the Great War, but it is too late for that. You don’t have to be sorry, you were there.
I remember Hugh Hewitt, (by the way you can count on his vocal support), speaking to you at God-Blog II (how quaint that sounds!) about this very topic. Hugh saw plainly that not serving would not do for a Republican. He wrote about it at the time . . . you choose the hard path of duty . . . and Senator Simon chose law school.
Your opponent was warned. Let him have it! You say polls show it is fatal for a Republican not to have served, even one as fine as Senator Simon. But remember: when people were abandoning President Bush (how funny that seems now!), you as a young man had the sense to see he was the Truman of our age. He left office a bit scorned, even by his own party, but his stock has risen just as Give ‘Em Hell Harry’s did . . . and now, with his recent passing, the statues are going up everywhere.
As a young man you were not just right about the great issue of that era, but you put your convictions to the test by service. People were in danger then . . . and are safer now for what you (and so many millions) did as volunteers. You did not have to go and went. Most college students chose vocal self-interest . . . I know it is not “fair” to use the anti-war blogging Simon did at Berkeley, but he was an adult, wrote it, and now must live with it.
In 2006, you wrote, “I support President Bush and the War.” He nattered about the “missing weapons of mass destruction” right before the Iranian incident of 2007. Even if we had lost the War (and thank God we did not), Republicans would not now be supporting someone who did not “get it.”
Where would Israel be if your generation had not served? The present “Peace of Palestine” was made possible by you: the greatest generation. Folk my age had no chance to make such a difference . . . and bluntly we were not morally fit to handle it if we had. We voted for Clinton after all!
Whatever his errors, George W. Bush understood that the War with Radical Islam was the great struggle of his time. Even if his plan in Iraq had not worked so magnificently over a decade of struggle (thank God Mitt finished the job he started!) . . . it was still a try with hope in the future and in humankind. His foes were banking on the laziness and selfishness of the American people.
And your generation proved them wrong!
Hope and I will always think of you as the best of chums.
The campus in Compton has become a hotbed of activity for your campaign (you can count on carrying Compton, but then when has that not been true of a Republican in the last decade!) and we are hoping that some of the entrepreneurs from Sikora Films based there will help us start a campus in Newport. It is sad to see how missing the future cost them prosperity, but again they were warned.
Paul and Fred send greetings. Fred just finished his systematic theology (volume five at last!) . . . and Paul is demanding that the Anaheim school district revise their great books reading list to include more Lewis! Thank God for the Robert’s court!
Under the Mercy,
John Mark
J.M.N. Reynolds Ph.D.
Director Emeritus
Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University