John Fund compares the case of Terri Schiavo to Elian Gonzalez in today’s OpinionJournal.com.

Clive James reviews Camile Paglia’s new new book which anthologizes 43 short works in verse. The review is long, but worth a read because it is about poetry (and Paglia). James: "This book is the latest shot in her campaign to save culture from theory." This is her attempt to get people (and students) to like poetry. James: "My own prescription for making poetry popular in the schools would be to ban it -- with possession treated as a serious misdemeanor, and dealing as a felony -- but failing that, a book like this is probably the next best thing." James reminds us of something Paglia said a few years back in reflecting how students know nothing except images and are thus cut off from the "mothership of culture." Paglia: "The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words." Although, Longfellow’s "Endymion" is not mentioned, read it here.

Well, if you’re talking about Rome, Georgia, not quite, but there is reason to find your way there this Thursday, March 31st. This is why: John Seery, with commentary from Gayle McKeen (Sewanee), Will Jordan (Mercer), Carl Scott (Fordham) and Michael Papazian (Berry), at 2 p.m. Next up will be Naomi Schaefer Riley at 4 p.m., with comments from Marc Guerra (Ave Maria University), Dale McConkey (Berry), and Paul Seaton (Fordham University). Then there’s "da Main Event," Galston vs. Mansfield at 7 p.m.

The New York Times has an article on the movement among religious conservatives to influence the Ohio Republican Party, called the Ohio Restoration Project. As the piece makes clear, the immediate purpose is to elect Ken Blackwell to the governor’s office in 2006; but the long-term goal is the return of the party to conservative principles.

Now, this is interesting, with references to Aristotle and Descartes, among others. This could have been a story on the self-destruction of the Enlightenment, on how the self-owned right to life has turned into the right to determine the terms of one’s own existence, on how the pursuit of power to be like God(s) has left us at the mercy of those who actually wield the power. But it is instead an alleged account of the self-destruction of evangelical reformism:

The evangelical revival of the 18th and 19th centuries produced the abolition movement, which gave rise to the women’s suffrage movement, which inspired the civil rights movement, which led to the patient’s rights movement. But now the patient’s rights movement faces off with many 21st-century evangelical Christians in the Schiavo case.

There’s something to this narrative, but it misses one of the big points in dispute here. If Terri Schiavo had actually had a living will, it’s unlikely that many people would be worked up about this. Her wishes would have been known and, presumably, honored.

Under those circumstances, I can imagine a conversation about who’s improperly "playing God," the person who refuses "heroic measures" or doesn’t want to be kept alive in a "persistent vegetative state," or those who wish to use the full scope of human power to keep everyone alive as long as possible.

To put it another way, the preciousness of human life has always been understood to be consistent with human finitude. Our current dilemma stems from the fact that we increasingly regard finitude as "optional." Are we precious because we’re created in God’s image or because we ourselves are value-giving gods?

Ken Masugi has some interesting reflections on this column about the flourishing of Christianity outside the developed West.

Our friends at Powerline wrote several weeks back about how the unctuous Bill Moyers had slandered Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt by recycling the canard that "Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.’"

Watt never said any such thing, and though this urban legend has been knocked down for more than 20 years, as the Moyers article shows it lives on. Moyers had to issue a public apology to Watt, as did the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where Moyers article appeared. (He also made the same charge in a speech at Harvard.) So, too, the environmental website Grist.org issued an apology and retraction (it had been Moyers’ source for the quote): "Grist has been unable to substantiate that Watt made this statement. We would like to extend our sincere apologies to Watt and to our readers for this error."

All of this is prologue for considering what is likely an equally spurious quotation, if not in fact a fabrication, that appears in the pages of Jared Diamond’s new best-seller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a particularly frothy passage on page 462 attacking mining companies, Diamond writes: “Civilization as we know it would be impossible without oil, farm food, wood, or books, but oil executives, farmers, loggers, and book publishers nevertheless don’t cling to that quasi-religious fundamentalism of mine executives: ‘God put those metals there for the benefit of mankind, to be mined.’”

The “mine executive” who supposedly said this is not identified, nor the name of her company. (There are no footnotes or source notes for this quote, or any other in the book.) It is not clear from Diamond’s prose whether this is meant to be a verbatim quotation, or a stylized characterization, The doubt about the authenticity of this quote is deepened by the immediate sequel: "

The CEO and most officers of one of the major American mining companies are members of a church that teaches that God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway."

Again, Diamond identifies neither the mining company nor the denomination in question here. These things matter. Precisely because Diamond is a bestselling author of considerable reputation, his distortion or invention of ridiculous quotations threatens to inject them into wider circulation. In fact, it has already started.

Reviewing Collapse in Science magazine, Tim Flannery writes of “the CEO of an American mining company who believes that ‘God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway.’” Suddenly we’ve gone from executives who attend an unidentified congregation that believes this to an unnamed CEO who “believes” this. The next short step will be directly attributing this non-quotation to the unnamed CEO.

This report in the London Guardian about the possibility of having something like charter schools (they call them academies) in Britain is revealing. Note this paragraph:

Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the academies’ programme would be a priority at the union’s conference. He described the initiative as "immoral" and said the union planned to set up local campaign groups to oppose each new school. "This is an experiment in children’s education," he said. "It is creating a situation in which the academies become schools that are more attractive to parents who have higher aspirations and more skills to find their way round the education system."

Mark Steyn reflects on the important things, and ends up with "it’s the demography, stupid."

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia’s population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria’s by 36 per cent, Italy’s by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?

Peter F. Drucker is almost the only economist I like to read, and that is because, of course, he isn’t an economist. In this essay for The National Interest, Drucker maintains that the U.S. is no longer the world’s single dominant economy.

The emerging world economy is a pluralist one, with a substantial number of economic "blocs." Eventually there may be six or seven blocs, of which the U.S.-dominated NAFTA is likely to be only one, coexisting and competing with the European Union (EU), MERCOSUR in Latin America, ASEAN in the Far East, and nation-states that are blocs by themselves, China and India. These blocs are neither "free trade" nor "protectionist", but both at the same time.

Even more novel is that what is emerging is not one but four world economies: a world economy of information; of money; of multinationals (one no longer dominated by American enterprises); and a mercantilist world economy of goods, services and trade. These world economies overlap and interact with one another. But each is distinct with different members, a different scope, different values and different institutions.

Michael S. Malone, and old newspaperman, bids farewell to newspapers. They are dying. He tells the story of how and why he stopped reading them.

The last redoubt for the survival of newspaper was, in my mind, accessibility. Hopping from section to section, story lead to story jump, just seemed so much easier than crawling through a long story on a computer screen. Then I saw the first links embedded in blogs. There was simply nothing in the physical world that could ever hope to match the ability to leap through cyberspace from story to story, file to file, with almost infinite extension. Looking back, it was then that I stopped reading print newspapers.

Needless to say, I still read the news, much of it coming from the newspapers I used to religiously read. But I am not reading the "paper," either literally or figuratively, that the publishers want me to read. Throughout the day, I construct my own newspaper in cyberspace, a real-time assemblage of wire service stories, newspaper features, blogs, bulletin boards, columns, etc. I suspect most of you do, too.

Bill Bennett and Brian Kennedy of ’The Claremont Institute’ argue that Governor Jeb Bush should take action to secure the life of Terri Schiavo in this article.

Bennett and Kennedy argue that Governor Bush ought not defer to the judicial branch on this Constitutional question. The Governor ought to uphold his Constitutional oath as he understands it. As a co-equal branch of government, the Executive should risk impeachment in order to prevent the starvation of Terri Schiavo.