DOMA

Revulsion to the cynicism of President Obama's announcement that his administration will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the federal courts is entirely appropriate. He is trying to have it both ways: registering approval with his base – the preponderance of which supports gay marriage – without alienating the majority of Americans who still oppose it.

(A man whose self-regard is such that he fancies himself on par with the Wisdom of Solomon has nonetheless elected to split the baby.)

Politics aside, there are constitutional concerns with DOMA that bring its validity into question – not that these played any role at all in the president's decision. These concerns are found in the Full Faith & Credit Clause of the US Constitution (Article IV, Section 1), which mandates that "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."

At first glance, the legal import of DOMA runs directly counter to this, immunizing the states from having to recognize a gay marriage – something that is a public act, record, and judicial proceeding – legally created and recognized in another.

This is a credible argument at least – one to which there are certainly credible rebuttals.

If, for example, a state does not recognize the institution itself – marriage between individuals of the same sex – can the relevant constitutional text be understood to compel it to recognize and make provision for it in the same way it would have to a driver's license issued in another state, an institution which every single state in the Union makes provision for?

Without question there are other arguments beyond this – arguments that will be fleshed out and deployed in the inevitable legal challenges to come.

The President & Libya

Republican leadership has universally criticized the president for tardiness in his decision to intervene in Libya and in his subsequent inability to define America's specific mission.

Both failures (they are certainly failures) go hand-in-hand and find their genesis in a single cause: the president does not want to do this.

To describe him as passive before his decision would be technically true (and characteristic of him as chief executive), but only thus.  He was active -- actively going out of his way to wrap his arms around American power and death-grip it from ever being used to influence the course of events.  It was only after lesser powers such as the French and British, followed by the Arab League, had called for intervention before America stood to be the only relevant actor refusing to act.

The president's continued distaste for American participation is manifesting itself still.  Ostentatiously unwilling to do what he has finally done, the president has done the bare minimum a commander-in-chief authorizing the use of force can do.  Orders were given, a statement was made to the American people -- and then nothing.  No subsequent declarations of the ultimate mission or, more specifically, whether coalition forces are simply trying to hem Qaddafi in or actually influence his ouster.

All anyone has really been given are assertions that America is going to "shape the battlefield" and then step back and let other components of the coalition take the lead.

President Obama did not want to be here in the first place and now that he is here he is leaving the impression that he is looking to get America out just as soon as it was in.

The Best of Styles, the Worst of Styles

Dickens' Tale of Two Cities is renowned most for its beginning dichotomy ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). Fortuitously enough, a similar device can be used to evaluate Dickens' manner of prose.

Indeed, it is the best of forms; it is the worst of forms.

Beneficially, his sentences are layered dissections of his subject. Foreign to the present Twitter generation that demands its literary material (and everything else) condensed and microwaveable, the bard of the Victorian Age slow-roasts his prose, dedicating time and ink to every nuance of the matter at hand. Take for example his description of the French peasantry at the time of the Revolution's outbreak, ground into misery and want by the aristocracy. Dickens portrays these poor masses as a

people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill… The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off… (Two Cities, 64, NOOKbook)

Dickens goes for sentences, paragraphs and pages more on the same train. The peasants of France were poor and miserable and he does not move on from this point until he has described each and every detail that makes it so.

This advantageously illuminates his subject for the reader in its complete totality while also penetrating it with a microscopic lens, revealing to them every nook and nuance therein. He does everything for the reader. The flow and course of events of the plot are given a firm foundation because he takes the time to illuminate the salient details that cause them. In Two Cities nothing can explain the extremely arbitrary and wanton brutality of the Revolution as well as the meticulous portrait Dickens paints of the equally extreme hunger, oppression and misery that precursors it.

Indeed, Dickens portrays the victims of revolutionary-French society in terms equally as pathetic as he portrays those of pre-revolutionary society. Witness his tragic description of the prisoners of La Force and the contrast between their present (low) and past (high) state:

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! the ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming there. (282)

The mill that had ground the French peasantry into squalor and death had been given new grist, achieving the same result. Extreme circumstances bred extreme circumstances; Dickens masterfully depicts both.

There is a Paris to this London though. In dedicating such copious amounts of prose to totality and dissection, Dickens commits the occasional folly of dedicating copious amounts of prose to minimal expanses of plot. For this I have in mind the third chapter of Book the First in which Dickens digresses into philosophical ruminations about the secrets and mystery that each human life represents to each other. After this he moves on to the Tellson's messenger and his journey after he delivers his message to Mr. Lorry – the relation between the two being that since each human life is a mystery to each other "the messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London" (47).

This is all well and good but non- germane to the plot of Two Cities. To travel so deeply down this dead-end, and away from the central flow of Dickens' scintillating plot, is as frustrating as it would have been had Shakespeare followed the soothsayer after Caesar's boast that "The Ides of March are come" (Act 3, Scene 1) and not followed Caesar himself, directly documenting the fate that awaited him.

At the very least such lateral movement is ungenerous to all but the most patient, devoted reader who is willing to indulge Dickens' in his reflective flights of fancy.

If he is to be credited for doing everything for his reader, as he must be, Dickens must also then be debited for perhaps doing too much.

No ‘Unity’

In response to President Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to cede power after losing elections in the Ivory Coast, the editors of the Economist warn against the African Union trying to foster a "unity" government to diffuse the crisis. "It is essential that Africa as a whole gets used to the idea that ruling parties bow out when they are rejected at the ballot box. So-called unity governments, installed with the apparently good intention of preventing further chaos after blood has already been shed, are as likely to lead to paralysis and patronage as to creative compromise."

Correct as far as this analysis goes, condoning such government "compromises" proliferates pernicious fruits. Praying on the naiveté and good-intentions of external influences, despots booted from power by the vox populii can cling to that power through the effusion of blood in the full expectation that it will make those influences so desperate to end the carnage that they will permit them to retain at least some semblance of the place in government they have lost any rightful claim to.

The upshot is bad precedent and the inception of a vicious cycle. Seeing that one entity booted from power by plebiscite was able to retain that power through this method, other entities are all the more likely to employ the same method – shedding the blood of their people – when placed in the same predicament.

Additionally, as the Economist begins to hint at, "unity" governments confound representative government in the sense that they terminate in utero the development of the norms and habits an organic society needs to internalize to ultimately become both ordered and free. Giving thugs like Gbagbo a free pass to disregard election results only makes the people of the Ivory Coast and Africa at large accustomed to government by those willing and able to utilize power in the bloody suppression of the masses.

The Wages of Self-Immolating Pretence

The atrocities transpiring in Libya have been permitted to do so through the Obama Administration's pretence that the United States is just another member of the society of nations; no more special or important than any other.

Quite contrary to this affectation, America is and has long been – if not the only, then certainly the major – bulwark of international security. In scores of examples since the end of World War II, America's global reach has been dispositive in influencing events away from economic, social and/or political catastrophe and towards human liberty.

Such a catastrophe is presently escalating in Libya, and despite the unique power to serve the role America has traditionally fulfilled, the administration has instead elected to do nothing. Libyans standing up to the despotism of an insane autocrat are thus subject to the airborne slaughter of his warplanes.

In moments such as these the notion that America is a destabilizing force in the world is demonstrated to be the utter nonsense it always has been.

The United States is the world's lone superpower. Not only is it almost exclusively responsible for underwriting the security of the free world, but it is (still) the last and only hope for mankind's eternal quest for freedom. People already free can rest secure in the preservation of that happy state only in the global involvement of the United States – people yearning for freedom must place their aspirations in the same thing.

As more of these oppressed multitudes fall beneath the sword of Muammar Gadaffi this truth becomes increasingly evident. When the United States shrinks from its role in the world not only does the world become less safe, but the shining flame of liberty becomes dimmer to every desperate life seeking to grasp it.

If the United States has the ability to preserve human life and further its quest for freedom it cannot stand down because of some pathetic and misplaced humility. It must act.