Wilma Edens, 1924-2005

My grandmother, Wilma Edens, passed away on last Sunday. I was honored to give the following eulogy at her funeral earlier today:

When I think of my Grandma Edens, I can’t help but notice the high esteem in which she was held by all those who knew her. Just as we saw last night, when literally hundreds of people came out to view her, here was a lady gentle in spirit, yet firm in character.

This is a time to mourn her passing, but also to celebrate a life that was rich in joy, and love, and family.

Grandma was many things to many people, but I learned very early in life that one of her best roles was that of disciplinarian. I’ll tell this next story using some of Grandma’s favorite sayings, to add flavor. One day when I was around 7 years old, my cousin Jeffrey and I had the brilliant idea to build a little building of our very own where we could work our mischief. All we needed was the perfect spot. So we searched all over, until we found the perfect place behind Jeff’s building. There were some vines in the way, but we cut them off and threw them aside; we figured they couldn’t be important. After a day of hard work, our architectural masterpiece was complete.

Only later that evening did we learn that there was war in the camp, and we were going to supply the blood. It turns out that those vines we thought nothing of were actually Grandma’s grapevines, and she about kicked over the slop bucket when she found out her ornery little grandsons had cut them up. She was so angry that for a while I thought she might take back her often-repeated promise to dance at my wedding. She made us look into her beady eyes until we had no doubt about what was coming next.

Now, Grandma’s favorite punishment was to use switches on us. And to make it even worse, she always made us pick our own switches, which is like a condemned man choosing his own prison cell. I think she would always look to see how big the switch we brought back was as a way to test our character. Well, every time, we showed we had no character, so she always ended up using a switch of her choosing. And we always learned our lesson.

I last saw Grandma in September, when I made a surprise visit home. She had long since forgiven me for the whole grapevine thing, and she was very happy to see me. The last thing I remember saying to her was that I loved her, and I’d see her at Thanksgiving.

This Thanksgiving, I’m especially reminded of what I have to be thankful for. My grandma was a remarkable, saintly lady of unshakeable faith and uncommon wisdom. She had an artist’s eye for beauty, a Christian’s eye for truth, and, unfortunately for Jeffrey and me on a few occasions, a grandmother’s eye for mischief. We should all remember her as she was: A devoted lady who lived to see five generations, but who still managed to love each member of her family individually. She poured her life into us, and gave me memories that I’ll cherish for a lifetime. Hers was truly a life well-lived, and I am thankful that I was able to be a part of it.

American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis

Of all the Founding Fathers, none were so enigmatic or mysterious as Thomas Jefferson, and yet none, save George Washington, have been so universally revered throughout American history. Today both parties claim Jefferson as one of their ideological lodestars, and, remarkably, they are both right, which shows just how varied and sometimes contradictory Jefferson's thinking was. Americans today view Jefferson as more myth than man, a figure forever engraved in marble and granite, serenely surveying the nation he helped found.

But who was Jefferson, really? As the noted historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson was a man of immense talent, but also of massive contradiction: The idealistic visionary who penned the most powerful defense of human freedom ever written, and yet bought and sold other human beings; the austere fiscal conservative who privately spent lavishly and died deeply in debt; the agrarian aristocrat who skewered his working-class foes as elitist; the party leader who constantly lamented the power of political parties. Jefferson was, in short, a hard man to know, even for himself.

Any student of history should not be too quick to uproot men from the past and judge them by the shifting standards of our day. But even during his own lifetime, Jefferson was fiercely criticized as a hypocritical, paranoid, untrustworthy man, captivated by fanciful--even dangerous--utopian fantasies. His critics were mostly right.

Jefferson's fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between the American and French revolutions (the first was a rebellion against governmental tyranny, the second was a rebellion against civilization itself) provides a prime example of how his ideology of freedom without outward constraints trumped everything else. Even as the American ambassador to France, where he was able to see the atrocities and excesses of the French Revolution firsthand, he minimized and excused the bloodbath, believing that the violence was justified, if regrettable, because it served the higher good of the cause. In this case, the cause was ostensibly liberty (more accurately, it was vengeance), but this morally shifting rationale was no different than the fanatical devotion later employed by Marxist and Fascist revolutionaries during the 19th and 20th centuries. Jefferson lacked the philosophical balance of men like Adams and Washington, who saw liberty flourishing only within the carefully prescribed confines of law and order.

Mr. Ellis' book includes an appendix, detailing the arguments for and against a charge that has dogged Jefferson biographers for two centuries: The allegation that Jefferson fathered several children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. The accusation first publicly surfaced when James Callender, a partisan hatchet-man formerly employed by Jefferson to savage the reputations of his political opponents, suddenly betrayed Jefferson, and wrote a lurid account of the plantation owner's ongoing affair with his own slave. There is no record of Jefferson ever publicly responding to the charge. Mr. Ellis, based on his analysis of Jefferson's almost spiritual view of women, concluded that the charges were probably false. But Mr. Ellis had the misfortune of publishing his book in 1996, only a year before DNA tests confirmed that Jefferson was almost certainly the father of Sally's children. Tucked away in my copy of American Sphinx (I bought it at a used bookstore) is a letter Mr. Ellis wrote to the New Yorker in 1999, after the magazine published an article on Jefferson's secret life. "I used to think that Jefferson was living a paradox," Mr. Ellis wrote, referring to Jefferson's capacity for massive self-deception. "Now I think he was living a lie."

On the whole, American Sphinx is not the stinging indictment of Jefferson that this book review has turned out to be. Obviously, Jefferson is by far my least favorite of all the Founders. If you read such respected and well-researched works as Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, John Adams by David McCullough, and Joseph Ellis' American Sphinx, Founding Brothers, and His Excellency, Jefferson will probably become your least favorite Founder as well.

The European Quagmire

When the riots that have swept France first began nearly two weeks ago, I was surprised only that something like this had not happened sooner. I have written several times on the woes facing Europe, and none of these quandaries are more intractable or more potentially disastrous than the continent's deepening immigration crisis. All across the urban centers of Europe, Muslim immigrants and their descendants have isolated themselves in ghettoes, partly due to being shunned by Europeans, but mostly due to their own religious beliefs mandating separation from an infidel society. In these ghettoes, unemployment among youths can run as high as forty percent, and Muslims find themselves accepting social welfare payments from the very societies their imans command them to reject. These isolated but rapidly expanding communities have become a cauldron of resentment, alienation, humiliation, poverty, and Islamic extremism.

Columnist Mark Steyn, writing in the London Telegraph, calls the unrest in France "an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war." That characterization seems a bit alarmist to me--at this point, the riots seem more spontaneous than orchestrated-- but there is no disputing the fact that Europe faces a crisis that will only worsen in the years ahead. Demographically, old Europe is dying. But as the last few days have shown, its death may not be a peaceful one.

A Disaster in the Making

(AP) -- New doubts arose yesterday over the success of a new constitution after delegates from one province boycotted the proceedings. Delegates fear that the proposed constitution would undermine the autonomy of local provinces.

"If this constitution is ratified, we will break away," said one delegate who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We did not overthrow one tyranny to replace it with another."

The boycott is the latest in a series of setbacks that have threatened to derail the constitutional process and plunge the fledgling republic into civil war. Nearly thirty percent of the original delegates have abandoned the convention, calling into the question the legitimacy of any document that is eventually submitted.

Of the remaining delegates, many are thought to be sympathetic, if not outright supportive, of the former regime. Human rights advocates fear the constitution will erode protections of free speech, free assembly, and freedom of religion.

Violence continues in the western provinces, as insurgents have launched a massive uprising against the new government's authority. Experts say the insurgents enjoy the support of the local population, and that the violence may become more widespread as dissatisfaction with the constitution grows.

Critics blast the government for failing to plan for the insurgency. "After the old regime was overthrown, we assumed all the dominoes would fall into place, and that democracy would flourish." said one security expert. "We are paying the price for that mistake now."

To some, civil war seems inevitable. "How can you throw all these disparate groups together and expect to have a unified country?" one dismayed constitutional delegate asked. "You can't expect to create a functioning government in such conditions."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But the byline for the above article isn't Baghdad, 2005; it is Philadelphia, 1787 (the "boycotting province" is Rhode Island, and the armed uprising is Shay's Rebellion). Amid the media's incessant hand-wringing and reports of impending doom, we would do well to keep things in perspective, and be thankful that the New York Times wasn't around to report on our own Constitutional Convention and tell us how hopeless things were.