Dr. Bruce Smith

Freedom of Speech for Dummies

Sometimes it helps to review the basics, and it doesn’t get any more basic than this. Here is the wording of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To edit this so we address only freedom of speech, try this:

It’s Probably Not About What They Say It’s About

T here’s a terrific comedian who has a routine where every setup line is followed by the same phrase: ‘. . . then you might be a redneck.’ It’s brilliant, and he can go on for hours with every line getting a laugh. I could never be half as funny as this person is, but I’d like to borrow the technique.

In the last years we have heard many justifications for taking away our constitutional freedoms, for giving unwarranted power to politicians, bureaucrats, globalists, and the intelligence community, and for reinventing the country in various ways. Every time I hear one of these justifications, I think to myself,

To get to the heart of any matter, one must first define the terms

There was a wonderful professor of geography at Indiana University named Thomas Frank Barton, and it was my privilege to sit in his class on the geography of Southeast Asia. He had traveled widely and came to IU after the war to teach knowledge-thirsty students, and he was still there when I arrived in the 1970s. He was quite the character.

He had come from a poor family in Saline County, Illinois, and knew the value of work. In the 1920s he had done road construction with a Fresno scraper, a horse-drawn device that looked something like a wheelbarrow, but without wheels. It had a steel handle on it so it could be guided into piles of dirt and stone like a huge scoop. When loaded, the horse would pull the load to where it was needed, where it could be dumped. It probably wasn’t much fun for either the operator or the horse.

Western Civilization III

The earliest features of Western Civilization derived from the Bible and from great civilizations of the past. That heritage delivered an age of faith crowned by the great gothic cathedrals of Europe of the 12th and 13th Centuries. In the middle of the Fourteenth Century, however, the arrival of the Plague in southern Europe shook the foundations of Western Civilization. Over the 150 year period that followed, the population of Europe declined by a third or more. The Catholic Church, at the peak of power and prestige after 1000 years of growth was severely weakened, and the Medieval social order was largely destroyed. Over the course of just a few years as it spread northward from Mediterranean port cities, the old ways of understanding how the world worked fell apart.

Western Civilization II

The Old Testament Christian traditions gave us a foundation for Western Civilizations. The Western part of it came from its Old Testament origins in the ancient Middle East. From there it expanded westward to Greece and to Rome. From the Classical civilizations it grew into Northern and Western Europe. Later on it crossed the waters going westward to the Americas. We call it Western Civilization because that is the direction it has spread. It did not spread to the east. Different patterns, forms, and philosophies emerged there. In many ways this east-west division can be drawn on a map along the dividing line between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. East of the line the primary faith was based on the Eastern Orthodox Church, centered at Constantinople. West of the line it was the Catholic Church, centered in Rome, which dominated life in the Medieval period and beyond.

What’s Worth Defending? Western Civilization Part I: We must work to save the Western tradition. We must save it or be buried under its rubble for al

Call it the Culture War, protecting what the Founders created, or just plain national survival, we are in a war that must be won. On one side are the Marxist critical theory people in their many variations. They seek to weaken and undermine the West. They find imperfections, most of them corrected long ago, and use them to characterize the Western way of life as fatally flawed and requiring destruction. They shriek that Western society is racist and homophobic and hegemonic and stifling. They condemn and cancel any counterargument as racist and homophobic. The latest weapon is to declare anything they don’t like as ‘white supremacy’. In their world a differing opinion, whether informed or not, cannot be tolerated. They want to win at all costs. We must make sure they do not.

The Definition of Fair

This term gets tossed around quite a bit these days. Maybe it’s time to talk about what it means.

What a delight it is when there’s a working occasion to crack open one of the hefty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition! With four regular pages on each of its more than 4,000 9x12 pages in two volumes, it comes with its own powerful magnifying glass. It must be set in something like a #2 font. Or maybe even #1. Either way, unless you’re between ages of about 8 and 14, you’ll definitely need the magnifying glass. Like seeing Hooke’s flea for the first time, picking up the magnifier reveals a whole new world in miniature.

Some Ideas For a Winter’s Midday Meal

It being January, it’s time to remember that eating helps to keep us warm. Eat, stay warm. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me. I’m in! So there’s your basic staying inside until lunch time and your basic working outside in the cold until lunch time. Either way, careful planning will pay off. If staying inside, one only need look ahead to the options. Anything is possible, whether it takes a few minutes or all morning. If there’s bread (whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel?) and sliced or block cheese available, then all kinds of grilled sandwiches are possible. (American cheese doesn’t count because it isn’t real cheese, whether it’s white or has color added.) If there’s also leftover ham, roast beef, or sliced deli meats, the options multiply. On the fridge door there is an assortment of mustards, salad dressing, ketchup, pickles, relish, chow chow, proper mayo, etc.

Eyewitness To History

Most of the time historical events must age for quite a while, years even, before we can know they were truly significant. They don’t often generate their own instant meaning. History books are full of old stuff. The further back it happened, the more agreement there is about whether it was important or not. Recent history, being more recent, hasn’t mellowed or gained the perspective required for people to agree on it. It seems that recent history attracts a wider variety of interpretations and is more likely to show the ideological biases of people who write about them. Historic events are pretty common and often predictable. There’s an historic swearing in ceremony for the president every four years. The State of the Union address is an historic event we see every year. There are historic storms and floods. Usually a member of congress becomes speaker of the House of Representatives in a predictable election at the beginning of each new congress. Every two years, in January, nominations and a vote result in the selection of a speaker.

Seed catalogs

It's January, so now is a good time to hole up, hibernate, stay home, and linger in a warm bed for just a few more minutes until it's a more reasonable time to get up. In other words, one might as well sleep in later than usual. After all, it's going to be dark for three more hours. Time to turn over on the good side one more time and hope to drift off again until 4:30. That occasional thirty minutes of self-indulgence, as the droll Dorcas Lane character says in Lark Rise, is my one weakness.

Feed the Birds

In May of 1972, I went to Europe for a three-week stint. I was just a year into an eye-opening run as a double history major at Indiana University. For years I had read widely, feasting on the literature and history of Europe, with a particular focus on England, every native speaker’s cornucopia of language and heritage. There were the usual things to check off my must see list. I wanted to go to sites where my reading had taken me like Victoria Station, Baker Street, and the Old Bailey of Sherlock Holmes and Dickens. There was the Tower of London and Tower Bridge along the Thames and the National Portrait Gallery on Trafalgar Square. I went to see the Ardabil Carpet at the Victoria and Albert Museum after discovering it in Dr. Martin’s Islamic Civilization class freshman year.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

My world in 1958 teetered on the boundary between a small Midwest industrial town and the fields and pastures of the farm. I was the fifth member of our family to come along. My two older brothers and I and our parents lived in a ranch house our dad had built in 1951. The folks had gone to high school in the town and had been married there, at the Baptist parsonage on South Main, in ’43. Our parents had lived there all or nearly all the thirty or so years of their lives, except when they had gone to California during the war. When my dad shipped out to Europe early in ’44, my mother returned to the town to wait for him. He came back in December ’45. They settled into a rented house with their son, who was 16 months old when my dad returned from the war to his home town. The farm was the home of my paternal grandparents. In the middle of Henry County, Indiana, it was a modest farm of 81 acres with a 1920s farmhouse, a barn, a corncrib, and chicken houses. The house where we lived had been built on a lot that had been part of the farm when my grandparents purchased it in 1950. Our house was on the boundary between the industrial town and the farm.

Fine Things on a Cold Winter Morning

Winter officially arrives this week on December 21. Winter has always been a favorite of mine, although there's no topping a well-timed golden autumn. Having taken many years to study the best ways to spend a winter's day, I thought, why not share some of these insights with you, Dear Reader? It helps to start the day early in a dwelling that cooled overnight. A proper winter morning requires at least three layers inside: tee shirt, flannel shirt, fleece. You'll need warm socks. If you're really roughing it and your hair isn't as thick as it used to be, a hat is nice, too. When you first wake up, frost anywhere inside the house indicates you might want to feed the fire during the night or choose a higher thermostat setting. 

Fight or Flight

We have instincts that have served us well over the past few thousand years. We’re adaptable creatures, capable of evaluating situations, adjusting them or adjusting to them, or fleeing them. There must have been a cave-dwelling ancestor who opened one eye on a Thursday morning and began to evaluate the noise he could hear outside the entrance. Maybe these were his thoughts: “How big a stick was it that snapped? Can I hear it breathing? Was it something we sometimes eat, or that sometimes tries to eat us? Where’s that stone axe? I wonder if Dug over in 4A heard it? Maybe Dug is out early? Is everybody from our clan still inside? Durn fire burned down again. Did I bring firewood in last night? Where’s the spear? If it’s a saber tooth tiger, we’ll have to make a stand here where we’re protected on three sides. If it’s a hungry saber tooth tiger, we’ll run a goat out into the brush, then run like the wind to shelter with the folks over at the big camp on the river. If it’s nothing, I’ve got to work on a better supply of hatchets and rocks. Maybe I should think about just moving over to the river camp anyway.”

We Can’t See What We Can’t Name

One of my favorite anthropological themes is that we can’t see what we can’t name. In other words, we look at our surroundings through the lens of our experiences. Once we’re familiar enough with it to give it a name we can see it every time. Take Ezekiel and the wheel. He didn’t know what was up there in the sky, but he knew what it resembled. He lived in a culture that had invented the wheel and used it daily. Old Ezekiel looked up, rubbed his eyes, then said to himself, ‘Hmmm. It’s a circle with something that looks like a hub in the middle, and I see spokes going from the hub to the outer rim. I see what looks like eyes around the outside of the rim, and they’re all different colors! It doesn’t roll like a wheel, but just goes off into the distance on a straight line, pretty darn fast, too. Wait. There are two outer rims, so it looks like a wheel inside a wheel. Way up in the middle of the air! There’s a song for it!

Seek a Message in the Quiet

The day begins before 4:30 AM most days. It will be an hour before the light begins to creep into the woods. A fire has begun blazing through the semi-opaque glass door in the stove. I step out onto the porch in the dark to fetch more firewood about 4:45. It’s Thanksgiving morning and I notice something slightly different right away, but I’m not sure what it is. What do I usually sense that time of the morning? My ancestors always noted the weather first. It is damp, with a temperature that must be upper 20s. It’s a little frosty but not a bone-chilling cold, not even close to that. It isn’t the shocking cold in the nose and lungs that will be here soon enough.

A Season to be Grateful

Over the years, two harvest hymns gradually became my favorites. In the Baptist church I was compelled to attend every Sunday for my first eighteen years, these hymns and a few others came up in the rotation every November. When golden autumn leaves began to fall and corn turned tan and dry, these hymns would ring out across the hard pews from our ancient organist on the big Allen organ. There were hymn characteristics that I came to associate with certain times of the year. Harvest and Thanksgiving hymns were in minor keys, reminding me of the approaching winter, corn in shocks, and pumpkins. Christmas hymns were sad, too, reminding us of poor people traveling to be taxed, towns so full of people that it was necessary to sleep in stables, and harsh Roman rule. In the springtime, hymns written in major keys celebrated the crucifixion and resurrection in sync with the glories of spring. There were even patriotic hymns for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

The Snowbirds Have Arrived for the Winter

There might have been one on Wednesday, November 9 in the driveway, but I couldn’t be sure because the goldfinches were about as well, dull in their duns and greens. Maybe there was the light streak along the tail, but it was a fleeting glance. I had to keep watching and waiting.  Here in the Heartland it has been unusually warm for more than a week, so it must be Indian Summer with the sunshine and busy squirrels. It was Wednesday we saw the six-point buck walking hopefully uphill through the woods with his nose to the ground. I heard him before I saw him.

Musical Perfection: A Whiter Shade of Pale

It has been a tumultuous past few weeks here in the Heartland and across North America. The mid-term elections are coming up, there’s a new PM in Britain, there are wars and rumors of war, and the rhetoric has become shrill. Perhaps it’s time for some musical therapy. I know I could use some about now. The selection this week is very nostalgic for me, but I want to offer this to people of all ages who may or may not have heard it before. I’ll post the first version for those who may not be familiar with it. This is the studio organ version of the melody from the song. After playing the melody, it switches to background and harmony for the lyrics in the original, but this cut is instrumental only. Consider listening in the dark, or with the screen covered, or with eyes closed.

Even more ways to produce and save heat

These days there are even more chilly temps to remind us that the heating season is nearly upon us. The following are just a few more ways to produce, capture, and conserve heat on a daily basis. Major sources of heat these days from utilities and retailers are electricity, oil, and natural gas. Alternatives to these suppliers are wood, propane, geothermal, and direct solar. Alternate fuels offer many ways to keep a lid on heating costs. When the cost of one source of heat goes up, others may lag behind. Those that rise more slowly or not at all become the way to go.