Words Edgewise

Without bothering the selection committee, I have taken it upon myself to award the 2024 Lysenko Prize to Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Trofim Lysenko, you will recall, was the Soviet biologist who, after dismissing a century’s worth of advancing research in genetics, proved to Stalin’s satisfaction that what appeared to be famine was, in fact, abundance.

• The next time somebody tells you that, here in America, diversity is our strength, it may be important to determine whether you’re dealing with a fool or a knave.

• My father, a chauvinistic alumnus, became apoplectic when his son declined an offer of admission to Harvard University. My father would have been proud that his great-grandchildren have chosen to go elsewhere.

• National Review senior editor William Rickenbacker would have been heartbroken by recent developments. For Rick, the Ivy League was Harvard and the Seven Dwarves.

• You should never underestimate the power of incumbency. The Federal Reserve’s 180-degree change on interest rates may have been bad economic policy, but the positive effects on retirement and investment accounts will start showing up on year-end statements just about . . . now. Can a bump in the polls for Bidenomics be far behind?

• You should never skip the run-through before the press conference. After our ownership group bought the National Hockey League’s Quebec Nordiques and moved them to Denver, we took a poll and confirmed our suspicion that nobody in the State of Colorado knew, or would care to find out, what a “Nordique” might be. We held a quickie naming contest and, following the announcement of the winner, I was cornered by a gaggle of media types. One of their number, pen poised above pad, mused, “The Colorado Avalanche. Nice name, Mr. Freeman. Just wondering . . . is that singular or plural”? I, the semi-famous newspaper editor, stared blankly at the man. I had never heard our new name used in a sentence. (For the morbidly curious: I then did what any marginally public figure would have done in such a moment. I served up an unintelligible word-salad followed by a high-pitched cackle.)

• For the historical record, I should note that community usage settled quickly on “the Avalanche are coming to town.” Up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains, “the avalanche is coming to town” means that a massive snowpack has broken loose and may soon engulf a covey of startled skiers or, more likely, a parking lot full of midsized Subarus.

• Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “William F. Buckley Jr. is a friend of mine. Ours is a New York friendship. A New York friendship is a friendship with a person you have met at least once.” With New York friendships, who needs strangers?

• To Ron and Casey DeSantis: On behalf of an ungrateful nation, I apologize for the fact that so many of our countrymen got sucked into the narrative that you were running not to replace Joe Biden but Pat Sajak.

• In my own reckoning, it ought not to be a disqualifying moment when a presidential candidate cannot immediately find the conversational sweet spot with a corndog-consuming local at the county fair.

• Enough with the monument toppling! Victorious armies have for millennia honored the bravery of defeated foes as a way of beginning the long process of reconciliation. The winners will need the losers to help rebuild a broken society.

• Leftists pretend to believe that southern cities erected statues of Robert E. Lee as a way of saying that, after giving the matter much thought, they had concluded that slavery was a damn-fine idea.

• Being conservative means having to say you’re sorry. When you really are, that is.

• One of the many things I admired about my friend Buckley was the way he stepped up to admit his mistakes. Clearing some old files the other day, I came across the trial record of Edgar Smith, who had been convicted of murdering a teenaged girl. WFB asked me to read the file and then, if I agreed that Smith had been wrongly convicted, to join a campaign to free Smith from death row. I spent a weekend with the dauntingly thick file and concluded, at least tentatively, that Smith had killed the girl. WFB gave me a pass on the campaign. A full decade later — after WFB’s brilliant advocacy had sprung Smith from prison, and after Smith had published his own self-exonerating memoir, and, finally, after Smith had been arrested on a new murder charge — WFB called, deeply shaken, to report the terrible news and to apologize for trying to involve me in his ill-starred crusade.

• Context may not be everything, as the (now-former) president of Harvard once famously claimed, but it’s not nothing. We puffed with pride when we first heard Stephen Decatur’s galvanizing words, but recoiled in horror when we saw them carved above a wooden gate at Buchenwald — Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland.

• In the digital era, you should assume that everybody knows everything. (As with so many things in contemporary life, Luke had told us somewhat earlier that it would be so: “For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.” Ch. 12, v. 2.)

• Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge funder from Connecticut, says the tipping point will be when the U.S. government has to borrow money to pay the interest on its debt. For me, the non-billionaire investor from Florida, it will be when India settles its trade deals in the yuan. Dalio’s point just tipped, mine’s close.

• But look on the bright side. The raided union pension plans got bailed out and the non-starting green companies got started and the student loans for lawyers got paid off.

• In those terrifying moments when you feel your spiritual strength may be unequal to the challenge, and you are sorely in need of a restorative, ask YouTube to prescribe a full, adult dosage of Fulton J. Sheen. And if mine leaves you unconvinced, consider this testimonial from the most skeptical human being God ever made. A convert to Rome, Clare Boothe Luce once declared that (then) Monsignor Sheen had presented church doctrine “in a form that [had] the solidity of a pyramid, the progression of a symphony, and the inevitability of a mathematical equation.” (The woman could blurb.)

• Can any bully on the world stage long avoid a confrontation with our man Jay Nordlinger? Cherish that man.

• Back in the Nineties, when Japan was thought to be on the cusp of global economic dominance, shoddy goods frequently carried the label “Made in Japan.” Today, shoddy goods frequently carry the label “Made in China.” I forget. Did Japan ever achieve global economic dominance?

Be well and do good.