A Star, Dawn Treader, Best Films - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

I do not wonder that God chose a star
To be the sign
For heralding the advent of our Lord;
The still, white shine
Of any star holds something in its heart
Of the Divine.

He chose a star with its clean silver fire,
Its brilliancy,
Its exaltation, and its steadfastness --
Its purity:
The one sign that the shepherds and the kings
Alike, could see.

As the editor and publisher of an online poetry magazine (http://www.strongverse.org ), I sometimes despair of finding any contemporary poets who know how to write lines that scan and make sense in English. It seems to be a lost gift. But this poet obviously has command of the language, and so I looked her up with some hope.

The poet is Grace Noll Crowell, and to my surprise she was once widely regarded as America's most popular and beloved poet. Poet laureate of the state of Texas, she was widely published in the 1940s and 1950s, and people still pass along her poems, especially those dating from World War II, when she published many remarkable poems that deal with grief and loss.

Next week I'll introduce you to more of her work, because it's completely out of print yet does not deserve to be forgotten. I'm going to link it with a discussion of a great contemporary poet who is the leader of the movement toward poetry that is designed to communicate -- what I call public poetry.

Meanwhile, I also ran across a website -- Internet Monk -- that offered Chaplain Mike's choice for favorite Christmas poet. He calls attention to the work of Christina Rossetti, many of whose verses have been set to music. Most of us have heard and loved the incantatory words of "In the Bleak Midwinter," with its beautiful melody and the depiction of "snow on snow on snow."

What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him --
Give my heart.

I'm not really an expert on C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, though I do teach a class on the fiction of Tolkien and Lewis. Still, I know the books well enough to admire the work of screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely in adapting them faithfully and effectively into films.

For the newest installment, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, they added writer Michael Petroni to the team. Michael Apted was also brought in as the director. This is the man who directed Nell, Amazing Grace, Gorillas in the Mist, and one of my all-time favorite films, Coal Miner's Daughter.

While director Andrew Adamson did a fine job on the first two films, Apted's work with the child actors got far better performances from them. This may be because the two repeat actors -- Georgie Henley as Lucy and Skandar Keynes as Edmund -- now have more maturity and experience. It's not surprising that they have become quite good.

What Apted did so brilliantly was direct young Will Poulter in the very difficult role of Eustace Scrubb. The way C.S. Lewis uses Scrubb in the series makes him a nightmare for casting, because he spends most of Dawn Treader as a priggish, obnoxious twit, but then learns both courage and tolerance, setting him up to be the hero of the next film!

Hollywood casts by type. How do you find an actor to be the cowardly twit in one movie, and then, playing the same character, to be the decent, courageous hero of the next? Imagine casting the same actor to play Eddie Haskell in one movie, and then Harry Potter in the next, and you'll have some idea of the problem.

But with Will Poulter, they nailed it. He is utterly convincing as the self-righteous jerk of a cousin who torments the Pevensies in the house where they are taking refuge from the dangers of England in World War II. His unreasonable insistence on rationality in an irrational world, coupled with his cowardice, makes him completely obnoxious -- yet in a rather likeable way.

The movie doesn't cheat -- it doesn't make him ugly and sneering. We see that he's quite sincere in his panic at being forced to rethink his whole understanding of the way the universe works.

But Poulter's real achievement as an actor comes after his character learns courage from Reepicheep and is redeemed from the consequences of his folly by Aslan. Suddenly, Poulter smiles and a completely new person emerges -- someone genuine, generous, likeable.

How much of this is the talent or skill of the actor, and how much is a happy confluence of facial features, is impossible to tell in an actor so young -- but I hope it's talent and skill, because then we can expect more excellent work from him in the future. It certainly would bode well for the next Narnia film.

The Book Voyage of the Dawn Treader is episodic and disjointed, not a problem in a novel but a terrible one in a film. The writers do a fine job of reshaping it into a single coherent story, though, as always in this series, it does help if you've read the book, even if you only vaguely remember it. Certainly you should come to it having seen the previous films, so you already know who Aslan, Caspian, and the Pevensies are.

They make only two mistakes, in my opinion. First, they opted to show us Aslan's healing of Eustace without any explanation of what was actually going on. Where the book has Aslan dig his claws directly into Eustace's dragon-skin, peeling it off very painfully, I'm sure the filmmakers thought this would be too disturbing for children to see. Instead, they have Aslan claw at the sand and show the marks of the claws on Eustace's body. This certainly improves the film's ability to be viewed by children without giving them nightmares.

The problem is that their metaphor is far weaker than Lewis's, and it is weakened further by the fact that we don't find out what it all meant until Eustace describes it later. In the book, we know what's happening while we see the scene; that is a far more effective way. But, given the limitations of the genre, I think the writers were quite resourceful in coming up with a second-best solution.

The real irritation for me -- and it's not a small one -- is that the makers of this film are far more evangelical than Lewis was. Lewis was a mere-Christianity proponent, and absolutely not a Calvinist of the irresistible grace, faith-without-works school.

The filmmakers, however, have characters urge others to "have faith" and "believe" without any expression of what they're supposed to have faith in and believe in. It is certainly terrible advice to urge anyone to "believe" in general -- they will end up spending a lot of money helping Nigerian princes get their funds and aiding friends they've never met who've had their money stolen in London.

Lewis's faith was quite specific: Only Christ, or the Christ-figure Aslan, is to be believed in, and nothing else. Yet there is nothing in Dawn Treader as written to tell us why these children should believe that Aslan will step in to save them from temporal danger. Lewis clearly shows that Aslan only steps in to help people learn from their mistakes and to preserve them from spiritual or moral danger.

Death hardly worries Aslan, since he will see the dead later in his own country, if they're good people. It's not death but sin that takes them away from him.

So when Lucy urges a frightened child to "believe" and "have faith" when Aslan has not promised to save anyone from shipwreck or drowning, and never would, it all begins to take on a very non-Lewis evangelical feeling. It's as if the filmmakers, being fervent believers in a certain kind of Christianity, want to kidnap Lewis's characters and put them to work in service of a branch of Christianity that Lewis specifically deplored.

These moments will make non-evangelicals who actually understand doctrinal differences quite uncomfortable -- this is not the religion of Lewis's Narnia.

These moments are rare enough, however, that you can overlook them if you choose. I chose to, in order to enjoy the rest of the movie, which is true to Lewis in making this a rollicking good adventure story.

Lewis intended audiences to be able to read the Narnia books without ever being forced to interpret them allegorically -- in other words, readers were able to miss all the Christian references and still love the stories.

Having the Christian allusions forced on you ruins the reading of the books. I've heard this from many students whose parents gave them the books to read but then spoiled everything by insisting they immediately see all the Christian references. They're only fun when you can come to the realizations yourself.

Aslan should be loved for himself, and not because we keep seeing the cross whenever he comes onscreen.

I hope the writers and producers restrain themselves in future, and stay more faithful to Lewis's less-restrictive, less-Calvinist brand of Christianity. Irresistible grace has no place in films based on Lewis's stories; nor do general admonitions to "believe" and "have faith."

Please, though -- don't allow these quibbles of mine to keep you from seeing and enjoying the films. They are fine achievements in storytelling, and I should be so lucky as to have a film adaptation of any book of mine that is as faithful to the story, the characters, and the philosophy of the original. Heck, I'd just be glad to see a screenplay of one of my books that actually includes an occasional scene or line of dialogue that I wrote -- so far, I haven't been very lucky on that point.

So if Lewis himself should appear to me in a dream, complaining about the cavalier way that the Calvinists have coopted his religion, I'll try to reassure him that compared to what Hollywood normally does to books, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is practically a miracle.

As usual, I went to the Internet Movie Data Base -- IMDB Pro -- as a resource in writing this review. But apparently IMDB has added a new feature. Every time I passed the mouse near someone's name, a big box popped up with their picture and bio. It blocked out half the surrounding information. So in getting the names of the writers, for instance, the popup box about the first one blocked the names of the other two!

If it had gone away quickly, or if it had had a little X in the upper right corner so I could close it manually, it would have been tolerable. But there was no such X and it would not go away. Even when I clicked on a name and read the filmography, when I returned to the first page the popup was still there! It was maddening.

I've been to sites where such popups were annoying, but never to one where they were so maddeningly counterproductive. What bad design! Especially because the popups contain absolutely none of the information I'm trying to look up.

It's like visiting a library where a "helpful" librarian won't stop leaning over me, telling me things I don't care about while I'm trying to read the reference book I actually came for.

Here at the end of the year, the Oscar buzz abounds. As a member of the Writers Guild, I'm getting DVDs and scripts of movies that the studios think have a chance of being nominated for writing awards. I have yet to see some of the most-touted films.

But the fact is the touting merely depresses me, because what seems to make a movie praiseworthy inside the industry seems to be mostly bleakness, hostility to traditional values, and anti-audience artiness. Having grown up and left my artistic adolescence behind me, those things don't impress me at all, because they're so cheap and easy to do, and so meaningless when you do them.

Fortunately, there have been some good films this year, even though only a few of them are actually being pushed for awards. So far my top five movies, in no particular order, are:

Three of these are animated. It's odd, isn't it, that the most emotionally affecting, the most human movies this year were made by animators. But perhaps that's because the primary audience for animation is still considered to be children and families, which means that it's commercial suicide to make them dirty, unpleasant, bleak, or vague.

Animation is expensive. But animation that people love makes money by the boatload. So Hollywood still makes great animated features -- and then shunts them into an Oscar category apart, so they can't interfere with giving too many Oscar nominations to sad undergraduate-quality screenwriting that is so conformist in its supposed nonconformity that you've already seen the films before you ever see them.

Mao's Last Dancer does a brilliant job of handling a tough story, yet it does so honestly and without having to fake it up in order to juice the ending, the way Spielberg did in the phony Schindler's List. It helps your enjoyment of the film if you already love ballet. I didn't and don't -- but I still loved it.

Inception is brilliant until the very last second, when a cheap-trick cut gives the director arty-points but convicts him of contempt for the audience. Too bad -- otherwise it might have been my clear first-choice pick, a prize that everyone in Hollywood covets. (In my dreams, of course.)

Brilliant and beautiful as Toy Story 3 was, and as delightful, moving, funny, and understated as was How to Train Your Dragon, I'm leaning right now toward Tangled as my choice for best movie of the year. But I can't trust my own feelings right now -- I saw the other movies too long ago, Tangled too recently.

We'll be lucky if the Oscars offer us a flashback of the year's movies that's half as good as this one. Evocative, funny, clever, moody, nostalgic, sweet, scary -- it makes 2010 look like a far better movie year than it actually was.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

The Fed, the Y, and the Holidays

Thursday, Dec. 23 -- Federal Reserve Day

The Federal Reserve System was established on this day in 1913. "The Fed" serves as America's central bank. By influencing the lending and investing activities of commercial banks and the cost and availability of money and credit, its purpose is to keep America's currency strong and its economy vigorous and secure.

For many years, the Fed is part of the reason why America has been able to weather many financial storms and emerge with the dollar as the world's absolutely dominant currency (regardless of fluctuations in its value relative to other currencies).

However, this past year the Fed, in collusion with or under the influence of the Obama administration (something that is never supposed to happen), has tried to deal with our depressed economy by injecting it with a dose of fantasy money -- half a trillion dollars invented out of thin air.

Supposedly this is a "stimulus," but it really amounts to a debasement of our currency. Just as new stock issues dilute the value of existing stock, and putting a few gallons of water into a stew makes each serving more watery and less nutritious, so the printing of fantasy money dilutes the value of existing money.

Everyone who has bought U.S. dollars was, in effect, robbed of a certain portion of that investment. The reason this is bad is that except for agriculture and the arts, we are no longer much of a producing economy -- we're a "service economy," which means that we're actually living off the money that savers in other nations have invested in our currency.

If they refuse to fund our debt by investing in dollars, our credit will dry up and the crash of 2008 will look like a bout of acne compared to the cancer that will attack our economy. Inflating our currency is the dumbest, most dangerous move that the Fed could possibly take at a time when world financial markets are still reeling from the shock of 2008.

Though it might paste a momentary bandaid on our economic wounds (though I doubt it will even do that), in the long run it will eat us alive. Better to produce our way out of our economic woes than to try to cheat our way out of them.

Our cohabitators in the global economy are not deceived. They know now that they're married to an unfaithful master of the global economic house, and they are already looking for another place to put their trust. When they find it, we are toast, unless we reverse course by renouncing this action and pledging to honor everyone's investment in the dollar by keeping it real.

Joseph Smith, Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), was born on this day in 1805, in the town of Sharon, Vermont. His followers believe he translated the Book of Mormon from ancient records by divine aid, and received many other doctrines and instructions by revelation.

While all his teachings revolved around the divine redemptive mission of Jesus Christ, they also entirely removed all of the neo-Platonic philosophy that replaced original Christian beliefs in the second century a.d. (Most historians of religion recognize both the neo-Platonic influence on Christianity and the Mormon rejection of it; this is the basis of the often-heard claim that Mormons are not Christians. In fact, they -- we, for I am a Mormon -- are merely non-neo-Platonists.)

For this and other obnoxious beliefs and practices, in 1844 he was assassinated by an armed mob, which consisted partly of the Illinois militiamen assigned to protect him. His murderers assumed that his religious movement would die with him; instead, it has become one of the strongest and fastest-growing religious movements in modern history.

Today in 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Barttain, and William Shockley of Bell Labratories unveiled the transistor, which replaced the much larger, more fragile, and hotter-running vacuum tube. They shared the 1956 Nobel prize in recognition of the way the transistor made the miniaturization of electronics possible.

Because of transistors, home and office computers today have so much memory that there aren't buildings enough in all the world to hold the equivalent in vacuum tubes.

Friday, Dec. 24 -- Christmas Eve

Twenty years ago, on Christmas Eve in 1990, the bells of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow rang for the first time since the death of Lenin in 1924. Since that day of the restoration of religious freedom in Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church has conspired with the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in a corrupt bargain in which the Church doesn't criticize or resist the government, and the Russian government cooperates in suppressing non-Russian Orthodox churches.

It's so easy to forget that when you allow government to oppress other religions, it's only a matter of time until they either oppress or control your own. Whether it's Putin or a later successor to his dictatorial power, we will see the dictator of Russia controlling the selection of patriarchs and priests in a state religion that has becoming an instrument of secular power.

The price of state support for a church has always been and will always be state control of that church, and amen to the legitimacy of such a religion as an expression of the faith of the people.

Saturday, Dec. 25 -- Christmas

That's right. I said it. "Christmas," not "the holidays."

But let's keep focused here. The problem is not with people who say "Happy holidays." There are, in fact, several holidays in rapid succession: Chanukah, Kwaanza, Christmas, New Year's, Epiphany.

If you want, you can add in Sinterklaas Day, Boxing Day, and Islamic Ashura, and maybe even Pearl Harbor Day, Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Islamic New Year, and the Winter Solstice.

Wish me happy holidays, and I'll take it as it's intended -- a generous, all-encompassing wish.

It's only a problem when corporate or school policy declares that one may speak only of "the holidays" and not of "Christmas," lest some non-Christian be offended.

December 25^th is Christmas whether you are Christian or not. And there is simply no reason at all why Christians -- or Americans who celebrate the festival whether they believe in Christ or not -- should tiptoe around about what holiday they're celebrating.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend was standing in a checkout line at Target. A woman wearing a Muslim-style headscarf finished with her purchase at the front of the line -- then stalked to the female employee checking people out two counters over, and tore into her with a stream of verbal abuse.

"I've had all of this I'm going to take! I put up with my husband, but I don't have to take it from you!" The rage was shocking to the other people in line. No one said anything as she stormed out of the store.

No one could imagine what had set this woman off. Her reference to her own husband was incomprehensible -- was she so narcissistic she thought that everyone knew her and her family? She had had no earlier interaction with the checker she attacked.

And then it dawned on them all that this particular checker had been singing little snatches of Christmas carols to people as she checked them out.

The best anyone could figure was that this presumably Muslim woman had taken umbrage at a store employee daring to express any kind of personal enjoyment of a Christian holiday by "afflicting" people with the obnoxious sound of Christmas carols as they stood in a checkout line.

One could simply take this is another manifestation of the double standard of some outspoken Muslims -- they demand that everyone treat their beliefs and practices with absolute respect, while showing no respect to anyone else's customs or beliefs in return.

America isn't a "Christian nation" -- our Constitution goes to some pains to forbid the establishment of any religion. But it also forbids government to interfere with the free exercise of religion. And no one can argue that American is not a Christmas nation.

We took the British and Dutch customs surrounding Christmas and made them into a holiday so important that our entire retail year revolves around the gift-giving that celebrates it.

You don't have to be Christian to celebrate Christmas. But if you're living in America at Christmastime, have respect for a holiday celebrated by several hundred million Americans, at least! Enjoy the songs and the symbols, even if the religious ones are not from your own religion. Be tolerant, even indulgent: "Oh, those Americans and their Christmas!"

But don't you dare take any kind of personal or generic offense at any individual or group that celebrates any part of this vast, all-encompassing national holiday. We are a Christmas country, and you can keep your Bah! Humbug! to yourself, thank you very much.

Few things are more irritating than having your birthday fall on Christmas. Careful friends and family go to great pains to keep that birthday from getting swallowed up in Christmas.

For instance, never wrap a birthday gift in Christmas paper unless you're actually giving it to someone named Jesus or Santa.

Many families celebrate a Christmas child's half-birthday in June, so that their day of festivity is completely separate from all the Christmas rituals, with a smaller remembrance on the day itself.

And this often applies to children with birthdays in the days just before or after Christmas.

One Christmas birthday is that of Clara Barton, born in 1821 (when Christmas was not quite such a national obsession). This American nurse and philanthropist was founder of the American Red Cross.

Actor Humphrey Bogart was also born on Christmas day, in 1899. Among his best-remembered films are The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Sabrina, and Key Largo.

George Washington led his troops across the Delaware River on Christmas morning in 1776. After a string of defeats and retreats, American morale was at a low ebb when Washington led 2400 soldiers in a surprise attack on an encampment of Hessian mercenary troops at Trenton, New Jersey.

The Hessians were used because of the reluctance of some British troops to fire on Americans, whom they saw as fellow Englishmen. Since George III was of the house of Hanover, a German principality, he trusted in the loyalty of the Hessian troops.

But by then they had too much contempt for the "Continental Army" of George Washington to worry about keeping watch on such a bitterly cold and snowy Christmas Eve and morning. (Remember that 1776 was still in the midst of the "Little Ice Age" -- before a natural global warming cycle commenced in 1850, winters were much more bitter.)

Washington took them by complete strategic and tactical surprise; his victory made the continuation of the war possible, as American rebel hopes were revived.

Sunday, Dec. 26 -- Thank You Note Day

It's still nice to send actual thank-you notes, written by hand on paper and sent through the U.S. mail.

For wedding gifts, there is simply no substitute -- the recent custom of including thank-you notes with the invitation or handing out generic "thank you for your gift" notes to anyone who brings a wedding gift to the actual reception is so barbaric that people who employ it must send individual apology notes, written by hand on paper, before they can be accepted again into polite society.

For birthday and Christmas gifts, however, the requirement of handwriting and paper is giving way to emails. But if you're using email to thank someone, it must be a real, personal, chatty email, not a spam-like generic mass mailing. "Dearest One, I, an exiled Ugandan prince, thank you for your gift/cash/certificate" just doesn't cut it.

Christmas gifts, alas, are so taken for granted that many people postpone sending thank-you notes indefinitely, or simply never think of sending them at all.

And I speak, not as a good example, but as a particularly horrible one. I always mean to send thank-you notes. I really am grateful. But I postpone and postpone until now I simply accept the fact that I am a vile barbarian unworthy of civilized company.

I owe so many unsent thank-you notes now that it will take me a few hundred years in hell before even the devil will deign to give me a glass of water.

No one should ever give me any kind of Christmas gift. I don't deserve it. The fact that there are millions of other non-thankers like me does not make me feel less shame. Being the equal of others with loathsome manners does not make me any more deserving of forgiveness.

On Christmas day in 1898, French scientists Pierre and Marie Curie discovered the element radium, for which they later won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Before the ill effects of radiation poisoning were understood, radium cost the lives of many who painted the numbers on wristwatches, using glow-in-the-dark radium-laced paint. But, as if to make up for this, radium has since saved many lives in its use as a cancer-killing and diagnostic agent.

Monday, Dec. 27 -- World Science Day

The Howdy Doody Show premiered on TV on this day in 1947. The first popular children's show, brought to TV by Bob Smith, was one of the first regular NBC shows to be broadcast in color.

It was set in the circus town of "Doodyville." Children sat in the bleachers in the "Peanut Gallery." Human characters included Buffalo Bob (Bob Smith), the silent clown Clarabell (Bob Keeshan, Bobby Nicholson, and Lew Anderson), storekeeper Cornelius Cobb (Nicholson again), Chief Thunderthud (Bill LeCornec), Princess Summerfall Winterspring (Judy Tyler and Linda Marsh), Bison Bill (Ted Brown), and wrestler Ugly Sam (Dayton Allen).

Puppet costars included Howdy Doody, Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally, Fub-a-Dub, Captain Scuttlebutt, Double Doody and Heidi Doody. The filmed adventures of Gumby were also featured. In the final episode, Clarabell broke his long silence to say, "Goodbye, kids." Then he shot himself.

No, no, that was a terrible joke. I'm so sorry. I don't know what came over me. I guess it's just that as a child I found the show disturbing. The human "characters" were less believable than the puppets, and the puppets were frightening. Clarabell was downright terrifying -- an unspeaking monster. I watched in horrified fascination, wondering what torments awaited the poor children trapped in the peanut gallery.

When Bob Keeshan graduated from the Clarabell suit to become Captain Kangaroo, I found him almost as scary. I confused him with Frank Morgan, who played the wizard and the flim-flam man in The Wizard of Oz. Whenever I saw him as a child, something in my mind warned me: Don't trust this man. Don't take his candy. Don't get in his car.

December 27^th was an amazingly fruitful day in the world of science.

It was the birthday in 1822 of Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and bacteriologist who proved the "germ theory" of disease -- the idea, which now seems obvious, that many diseases are caused by tiny animals that invade the human body. If you think about it, that was an astonishing claim that no one in their right mind could possibly believe -- but until he made them believe it, curing most diseases remained impossible.

American child psychologist Lee Salk was born on this day in 1927. He became well known for proving the calming effects of a mother's heartbeat on a newborn infant. His warning during the 1970s that women should not abandon fill-time child rearing was met with wide opposition from believers in the religion of Feminism, which persists in propounding dogmas (like the social-influence theory of the origin of all behavioral sex differences) that are repeatedly disproven by scientific evidence as well as common sense.

Scientists today who come up against political correct dogmas quickly discover that the persecution of science didn't end with the Catholic church's attempts to silence Copernican and Galilean astronomy. Just ask Freeman Dyson, already known to be one of our most brilliant scientists, what happened to him when he openly stated that there was no convincing evidence of a human cause for whatever global warming might or might not be happening.

Johannes Kepler was born near Stuttgart, Germany, on this day in 1571. The father of modern astronomy, Kepler observed the Great Comet of 1577 at the age of six, and then, at age nine, a lunar eclipse. But because of childhood smallpox that left him with weak vision and crippled hands, astronomical observation became very difficult for him.

Kepler became a defender and champion of the Copernican model of the solar system, in which the Earth and all the planets rotate around the Sun, with only the Moon revolving around the Earth. Throughout his life, he remained convinced that by discovering the true workings of the solar system, he was uncovering God's design of the universe. He supported Galileo's work in an era when it was unsafe to do so.

Though he was skeptical of astrology as a means of foretelling the future, it was part of an astronomer's job in those days. Because of the precision of his astronomical work, he was trusted by kings and politicians who sought his astrological advice. That may have been why he always had the support of governments and was never personally persecuted for his then-unorthodox views.

His mother, however, was tried (which included torture) for witchcraft, partly because Kepler wrote a science fiction novel in which his first-person narrator travels through space via potions brewed by the character's mother. Unable to comprehend that fiction is not reality (still a common problem in literary criticism), rumors of this since-lost manuscript were applied to the real woman. Kepler's detailed defense helped save her life.

Real scientists have been rejected and persecuted in every age. But rejection and persecution are not proof that someone is a real scientist. Nor are petitions or votes or endorsements. The only proof of scientific ability is the publication and replication of experiments, and successful prediction of future findings, and there is no such thing in science as a final answer or absolute truth.

Those "scientists" who claim that theirs is the final answer, that "discussion is over," are the enemies of science as surely as anyone who ever threatened to burn a scientist as a heretic.

Tuesday, Dec. 28 -- Poor Richard Day

The Pledge of Allegiance, composed in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, was nationally recognized on this day in 1945. The U.S. Congress urged that it be recited frequently in America's schools. In 1954, the Catholic Knights of Columbus persuaded Congress to add the words "under God" to the pledge. The Supreme Court rejected a lower court's attempt to declare this wording to be unconstitutional in 2002.

As a child, I found the words to be incomprehensible, and by the time I comprehended them I found it to be ridiculous for children to be compelled to recite them. A pledge to a flag?

That's like religious fervor about the cross instead of devotion to Christ -- confusing the emblem with the thing itself is a mischievous mistake. I far prefer the oath our soldiers take -- as adults who know what they're saying:

"I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter."

This is a pledge that places the loyalty and obligation of the soldier, not to his superior officers, not to the President, and not to the flag -- it's the Constitution itself, the founding document of a way of organizing a government of, by, and for the people, that he will uphold.

This is the oath that guarantees that no one -- neither a President nor any officer -- can issue an unconstitutional order to American troops and have any reason to hope that it will be obeyed. The people who take that oath know that their lives are their collateral to fulfil it. If anyone wants to pledge allegiance, take that oath.

As for making children recite a foolish pledge to a flag, which makes less sense to them than a nursery rhyme, I'm against it, precisely because it shows young Americans that loyalty to their country is an empty ritual which they will outgrow. Ditto with state-mandated "prayers."

In my opinion, such affliction of children does the opposite of what well-meaning adults intend. Forcing children to recite does not have anything to do with what they will eventually believe or do. It's merely a tool for the tawdriest of demagogues, who seek their own political advantage at the expense of young children.

Poor Richard's Almanack was first advertised in The Pennsylvania Gazette on this day in 1732. The first annual issue of the Almanack, which was written by Benjamin Franklin under the pen name of Richard Saunders, appeared in 1733. The advertisement promised "many pleasant and witty verses, jests and sayings . . . new fashions, games for kisses . . . means and melons . . . breakfast in bed, &c."

It was published through the year 1758 and has been imitated many times since. Most imitators have discovered that imitating the form of great writing does not make writing great.

Most people think Spiro Agnew was the first American Vice President to resign his office, but John C. Calhoun, who had served as Vice President of the United States under two different presidents (John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson), resigned the office in 1832 because of his growing disagreements with President Jackson.

A former Secretary of War, he spent most of his subsequent political life as a U.S. senator from South Carolina, championing the right of states to permit white people to own black people as their personal property. Calhoun was the author of the infamous "gag rule," which automatically tabled any anti-slavery resolution proposed in the Senate, thus forbidding discussion of the issue.

After all, people who think slavery is all right are hardly going to balk at preventing others from speaking freely. Fervent purveyors of idiotic ideas today follow the same practice, of doing all they can to prevent their opponents from speaking out. In my opinion, any effort to silence your opposition should be taken as a confession that the person knows his arguments are so feeble they cannot withstand public examination.

Wednesday, Dec. 29

Andrew Johnson, the first President to be impeached, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on this day in 1808. Lincoln chose him as his Vice President in the election of 1864 because he was a southerner loyal to the union -- he was the U.S. Senator from Tennessee when the state was kidnapped by secessionists.

When he succeeded to the presidency after Lincoln's death, Johnson tried to pursue a reasonable and conciliatory attitude toward the defeated South, as Lincoln himself would have done. His attempt to organize a National Union Party failed.

The radical Republicans that ruled Congress, who wanted to punish the secessionists and protect the interests of newly-freed blacks, had other ideas, and when Johnson stood in their way, they impeached him. He was acquitted by a single vote and served out his term. On Christmas Day 1868, as he was about to leave office, he issued an unconditional amnesty to all Confederates.

Afterward, Johnson was vindicated to some degree by his election to the U.S. Senate from Tennessee in 1874. He died of a stroke less than four months into his term.

The first U.S. branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was organized in Boston in 1851. It was modeled on an organization begun in London in 1844.

While the organization's name and early practices definitely excluded Jews and other non-Christians, the evangelical Christian founders made sure that by the standards of the day it was extraordinarily liberal and egalitarian, with membership open to men of every social class.

As founder George Williams said, when someone asked him how he would respond to a young man who said that he had lost his belief in Jesus, "My first act would be to see that the young man had dinner."

In 1853, the first YMCA for African-Americans was founded in Washington, D.C. -- where slavery was still legal. Over the years, YMCAs ran missionary operations, helped support troops in wartime, operated boys' camps and other character-building and welfare projects.

As political correctness became the state religion of America, government support for YMCAs dried up. But the YMCA persisted in supporting "character building" rather than "values clarification," with a commitment to specific pro-social virtues. The organization remains committed to promoting individual health and family and community strength.