Wood Movement

Here is a photo of a bread board end on a cherry table. It is a table made by Timothy Clark, furniture maker. Notice the grain directions on the two boards are at 90 degrees to one another. Notice also the end board is proud of the top itself. What? He can't make them flush? Yes, he, and we can. But wood moves; it expands and contracts across the grain with changes in humidity and temperature. (I have a table whose drawer fits too tight in the summer, but loosens up in the winter. I made the tolerances are too tight. It sticks.) Here, he made the breadboard end a little extra bit proud for looks. I expect it flushes out in the summer. Build it flush in the summer, and in the winter the top is wider than the ends. Who has asked yet, "Why are these pieces moving? Aren't they glued together? " Nope. They are not. Bad idea,if they were glued together the breadboard end would constrain the table top from its normal seasonal expansion and contraction. As a result, it would split, lengthwise. I've seen cracks almost 1/4" wide. There are tenons on the table fitted into mortises on the breadboard. Glue is used only in the center 8" or so of the joint. The outside joints are pinned with dowels. See the small holes up there? Also, the holes in the tenon we do not see are elliptical so the tenon can move about. And they are usually draw bored. The holes for the dowel pins are offset from each other so that tapping in the dowel aligns the holes, and pulls the joint tight.

Boards with grain at 90 degrees to each other is called a cross grain situation. When 30" & 40" diameter trees could be logged, (colonial times), tables could be made using a single board. However, in addition to expanding and contracting across the grain, boards of this size tended to cup and bow. Breadboard ends were used to control this cupping. ( I presume those with glued-on ends survived as kindling.) Even though the tables we now make no longer cup, as they are made to width from several smaller boards, breadboard ends are still used. They look nice. The little pegs look nice. I make mine from contrasting woods with square heads, and leave them slightly proud. On the sideboard of mine(below) the curved up edges are pinned breadboard ends.

Tabletops. This is another place to avoid a cross grain situation, attaching a tabletop to the apron and legs beneath it. They are never glued on. Now, you understand why. S-shaped clips can be bought commercially to attach tabletops. One end is fitted into shallow grooves cut into the aprons, 1/8" high, 1/2" wide, 3/4" inches deep. Fit the clip into the groove and screw it to the underside of the table top. The top is held down, but can still move with the weather. I attach mine with wooden 'buttons' made from scraps of tropical hardwood. (I just don't have photos of everything!) I have also seen tables from the old days attached using screws. The screws fit into little pockets made on the table aprons using a brace and bit, and chisels. (The tables I've seen this on were made in the 1880's.)

Frame & Panel. Referring again to the sideboard below, look at the doors. This sort of door is called a frame and panel. The frame is made of stiles, the vertical board, and rails, the horizontal boards. Rails and stiles fit together with mortise and tenon joints. Around the inside perimeter of the rails and stiles a groove has been cut. The panel is let into the groove. Frame and panel doors solve two problems at once. They avoid cross-grain situations, and cover lots of area without having to use all solid boards. I use frame and panel construction on the backs of all my cabinets. (Instead of 1/4" plywood.) One can vary the widths and thickness of the frame members, beads can be cut in the stiles, etc. The left hand panel below, as an etc.,is not made of a single board, but five glued up to get the pattern I wanted. (In person you can't tell either.) Frame and panel construction is beautiful.

Sheet Goods, Veneers, Thicknesses

This photo is a piece of Camphor Burl Veneer from the nice folks at Certainly Wood of East Aurora, NY. This piece's actual size is about 13" x 20". Priced by the square foot, at $8.95 this veneer is moderately high priced. By comparison, Amboyna burl veneer, very rare, is $25/sq. ft. Crotch Mahogany veneer, for appearance no slouch compared to either, sells at around $6.00 per square foot. Other quite stunning species can be very low priced, $2.95 per square foot. See Certainly Wood's Designer veneers. I like the Makore veneer, and plan to use it on my now both unfinished, and unedged kitchen cabinets. When I first began my day job, for thirty days in a row I was assigned to work on the same/or similar large cabinets. The company was sub-contracted to build these for another firm west of Minneapolis. The other company provided the sheet goods, quarter-sawn ash-veneer plywood with MDF cores. (At the completion of the job I scrounged what was going to be thrown out, about 14-20" and 32" by 96" pieces. All my kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors are made of this ply. It will take veneer wonderfully. Read on.) Sheet good? MDF? What, you say. Sheet goods are commonly called plywood. But more accurately, all plywood is a sheet good, though not all sheet goods are plywood. Particle board, particle board core melamines, compressed masonite, MDO, MDF et. al. are all sheet goods. There are lots of sheet goods. The hardwood plywoods alone come in all the northern (temperate zone) species, and lots of exotic (tropical) species. The standard sheet size is 4x8, feet. Common thicknesses are 1/4", 1/2", 11/16" and 3/4". (Watch yourself here though; we work with 3/4" stuff that sometimes is 11/16", and 11/16" +. Spoken aloud, read that plus sign as "strong", and understand by strong I mean 1/32". To me/us, the words strong and shy are nomenclature for 1/32". It 's easier to say, "32 and 13/16th's strong", than 32 and 27/32nds.) "With MDF cores..." MDF stands for medium density fiberboard; it's a sheet good made from compressed cellulose. And by God it is compressed! Four by eight sheets of3/4" MDF weigh eighty pounds. What's it good for? When I had 2000 sq. feet of shop space in Montana, and in St. Louis I made 4x8 workbenches for my students using a piece of MDF on top of a piece of laminate grade particle board. (Forty pounds/sheet.) I used 4x4's for legs and 2x6's for stretchers, and mounted a vice at two opposite corners. I addition to weight, MDF is very,very flat, and exceedingly impact resistant. If one intended to build a home work bench for general home use, MDF on top is very nice. Screw it down with screws intended for deck construction, the square-head screws that look light green. Countersink them so the heads are below the surface. If you ever need to move the bench, the top can be easily removed. It's eight pounds, remember. Avoid the gold and/or black drywall/sheet rock screws as the heads can be easily snapped off. The "Oh sh*t" feeling comes .3 seconds after the snapping sound. Not a heh. (If this happen with sheet goods, one can often pry things loose. But avoiding it is preferred.) MDF, because it is so flat, makes an excellent substrate to which to apply veneers. (Substrate: the board(s) to which veneers are glued. Before sheet goods, joiners and cabinetmakers had to make their own substrates from solid lumbers. A tricky proposition at best because of our next topic, "Wood Movement". Stay tuned.) The better hardwood plywoods have plywood cores with a thin (@5/16") layer of MDF to which the veneer is attached. At this writing, fair hardwood plywoods in the common species of red oak, birch and hard maple can be had at your local Home-Men-Lowe-Depot-ard-'s for about $60 per 4x8 sheet. It's OK stuff, not lousy, not premium. For better quality expect to pay $140 per sheet or so. The lower priced goods will not be flat, but bowed, some by 1-2" over four feet. This can cause problems if one is making some sort of door. We like these sorts of thing to be flat. But for rough and better bookshelves etc., the $60 stuff is OK. Build your kitchen cabinets from the good stuff.

One last word about the thickness of veneers. At Certainly Wood's 'thicker veneers' page, the thicker stuff is (!): 1/32nd, 1/20th, 1/16th, 1/10th. How thick/thin then is the 'not thicker' veneer? Very thin: 1/42nd of an inch. Veneer is cut from logs using either rotary cutters or large slicers. When veneers were hand sawn from logs, stumps and burls, the thicknesses were about 1/10th to 1/8th of an inch. Some contemporary furniture makers in small shops will cut their own veneers. We are, to be sure, limited to small boards or logs, but can then obtain thicker stock. Why does this matter? Appearance. I do not think there is enough wood thickness on sheet goods to do justice to any finish except the film finishes, and they are best applied by spraying. My preferred finish is a fast-dry, thinned wiping varnish. Thinner materials do not, to my, do justice to their species. Curiously though, the veneers not already glued to sheets goods behave somewhat more like their thicker kinfolk. Also, I usually double layer my veneers, applying first plain cherry or mahogany, $1.25-1.75/ sq. ft. I believe the improvement in thickness translates to improved appearance.

One more last word. Why use veneers at all? The log goes further. All the Brazilian Rosewood veneer currently on the market, (the cutting of Brazilian Rosewood has been banned since about 1992), comes from logs cut and/or harvested before the ban. It starts at about $12/sq. ft. But it is beautiful stuff. I'll show you sometime.

A Primer on Furniture & Terms

Why would you commission me to build furniture? With some notable exceptions, contemporary factory made furniture is tawdry. The designs 'sort of' replicate what they seem to be imitating, but really are copies of derivatives of interpretations. Xeroxes of xeroxes, muzaked elevator furniture.

The joinery is not joinery, but a variety of fastening systems: screws, staples, pin nails and so forth. These fasteners function as little clamps, holding various components in place until the glue sets. Traditional furniture is held together with mortise and tenon joints, square tongues fitted into a square holes, the well known dovetail joint, in its two incarnations, half-blind and through, and permutations of these two- scarf joints, through tenons, tusk tenons, mitered mortise and tenon and so on. Rarely, dowel joints. Factory furniture too often has resorted to dowel joints, especially that factory furniture from the 30's to 60's. ( Dowels have their place. But when dowels are used parallel to-, rather than 90 degrees to the sheering forces playing on them, they will fail. A common failure I've seen is the 'sort-of-Duncan-Phyfe' table. This table has a vertical center pedestal, or pedestals, and curved, quarter-of-a-circle legs fastened to the pedestal. The weight of the table top eventually works the dowels out of the pedestal. The proper joint to connect a curved leg to a central pedestal is the sliding dovetail. An elongated triangular cut is made in the pedestal, and corresponding triangular tongue cut in the leg. The joints lock and cannot fail, even if the glue loosens. The well known Shaker three legged table used sliding dovetails, cut, of course, by hand. They had great skill. The repair for these failed dowels is dicey as best. The joinery used was incorrect to begin with. And by the way, despite the name, with rare exceptions, certain table leaves, the sliding dovetail is not a moving joint.)

Another quarrel I have, the finishes. Very broadly there are two categories of finishes, film finishes and penetrating finishes. Film finishes, as the name suggests, sit on the surface of the wood. Varnishes, lacquers and shellacs are film finishes, in all their polyurethane, acrylic, solvent based and/or water clean-up flavors. Industry favors lacquers for three or four reasons. Lacquers spray wonderfully, dry virtually instantly and are very tough, especially the catalyzed lacquers. And lacquers will carry color. It is this last feature which, in my opinion, and to my aesthetic, brings grief. A walnut colored lacquer sprayed onto a soft larch, tulip poplar and gum wood sideboard, with two square feet of walnut burl veneer, is passed off as "Walnut sideboard". If you want dark wood, use dark wood. With rare exception, I do not use stains. (What are the exceptions? Some woods take stain horribly, hard maple for instance. It has small pore that fill with color and immediately look blotchy. If you insist on changing the color of hard maple, us a dye stain. Dye stains dissolve in their carrying medium. Others take stain very well, red oak notably, and mahogany. Poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera, takes stain very,very well. I knew someone who described it as, and used it for 'poor man's cherry'. However, it has no particular beauty by itself. On the other hand, tulip machines beautifully, and makes excellent molding and trim. And as it takes stain well, it takes paint very well. Look at your baseboards.)

What do I do? First understand the nature of working with solid wood. Apprentices used to do all the tedious work. Now, machines have replaced apprentices. Hardwood dealers have replaced men with pit saws. And in the factory, machines have replaced the skilled hand and eye of experience and tradition. When materials were expensive, labor was cheap. Now materials are cheap, and labor is expensive. I am expensive. I am very good at what I do, and I expect to be well paid. Let's go back to that whatever, that whichever overseas or wherever furniture factory manufactured. You'll never see it on The Road Show. It will not improve with age. Your children will never fight over it. It may eventually be thrown out, after passing through several households and second-hand shops. Sure, it was functional and useful and...was it beautiful? Was it a delight to open and close the drawers? Dis you marvel at the skill and eye of the maker? Could you see the person behind the work?You see where I am going here.

About the photos. There are two drawers in this sideboard. They, and the panels in the doors are made of a wood from Mexico called goncalo alves. (Pronounce the 'c' as an 's', gon-salo.) The shaped legs, the figured wood panels on the back and the top are Honduran mahogany. (By the way, each leg took an entire day to shape using planes, files, rasps and a spokeshave. Tedious, but worth it. I think they are beautiful. The owner of this piece, a physician in St. Louis, put it in the center of a room so the back was visible. Makes my day.) The wood around the panels, the frames, is cherry. (Two of the pieces from a tree cut down by my father. Special to me.) When I can jpeg some more photos, I'll post the drawers so you can see the dovetails. Comments? Questions on woodworking are welcome. Orders?

Changes to this Blog

The Smoothing Plane is going to change. From now forward, all posts here will be about woodwork, furniture making, veneers, and the associated tools and processes of woodworking. (I am one of those fussy, cut dovetails by hand guys. ) Until I can determine a better way to post them, pictures of my previous work will be displayed at the bottom of the page. Any writing on current events, character and virtue, words and rhetoric, books I'm reading etc. will be posted at my other blog, Where are the Isotopes I Ordered?
http://isotope37.blogspot.com/ Some recent posts from the Smoothing Plane have already been transported. Thanks.

"Valor"

It is altogether fitting this man's courage is honored.

Often the citation includes the phrase, "Conspicuous gallantry..."

They sounds like words from another age. For such men as this one, thank God that they are not.

Nobel Peace Prize Winners, 1901-2006

The list of winners is here. (One winner, Fridtjof Nansen, I'd heard of for the first time.) My cursory glance showed many prizes given to representatives from or for organizations with talking skills, advocates for this, or proposals for that. I may be wrong to presume ineptness. Maybe the League of Nations was terrific. Or the 1927 Kellogg-Briand pact winners, the "TREATY PROVIDING FOR THE RENUNCIATION OF WAR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF NATIONAL POLICY ", spectucularly successful. I notice there was no Great War after the Great War, well, at least until 1939. They meant well. I suggest the Peace Prize be renamed as the "We Hope This Will Work This Time" Prize. Of the integrity of Albert Schwweitzer, Norman Borlaug , Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa or Elie Wiesel, I have no doubts. But for "as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me", no prize is needed.

Yasser Arafat Freezes Over

From Nobel Prize dot org, (gag me!):

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2007
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace
Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.
for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made
climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to
counteract such change.

Here are a few funny one-liners, italics mine:

Indications of changes in the earth's future
climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds.

Thousands of scientists and officials from over one
hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater
certainty as to the scale of the warming.

Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians.

His strong commitment... has strengthened the struggle against climate change.

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the
IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a
sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to
protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the
security of mankind.

Action is necessary now, before climate change
moves beyond man’s control.

What is the precautionary principle? Is it "We don't have any evidence for this, but nevertheless..." ? Is it like Boyle's Law? Warning label on fireworks, "Award prize and get away fast!", or hair driers, "Do not use underwater" ? Did the Nobel Committee follow the precautionary principle in awarding the Peace Prize to Albert Schweitzer? Norman Borlaug? Yasser Arafat?

"Collaborated to achieve greater certainty"...conspired to fix the evidence? When found out, ought we shave their heads?

"Leading environmentalist politicians"... sounds like some of our soldiers' descriptions of meals ready to eat," MRE's,three lies in one".

"Struggle against climate change..." I thought Algore was struggling with peronal issues, not climate change.

Who better to sharpen the appearance on the focus for the decisions necessry for the process to the strengthing of the constributions...than Algore?

"Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control." How can it possibly do that? If it moves beyond man's control, what moved it beyond man's control? Parts of it are not yet in our control, so we must do something with the parts we do control, to keep the other parts from escaping our control and careening into catastrophe?

I am certain of two things. Albert and Yasser will never bump into one another. And Yasser is hoping The Next Great Ice Age reaches the underworld.

One Woman, No Vote

This quote from Michael Yon's Under Distant Stars,

"Once back in America, the quality of care is apparently not as consistently excellent or compassionate. I get frequent and disturbing reports from veterans that the strained if not broken system tends to be uncaring and often is just
flat incompetent. It seems counterintuitive that the system would break down,
not under the stress of combat conditions, but back there on stable American
soil. Yet, I hear versions of this same scenario all the time."

replies to a certain Madame Mao...

Universal Health Care: the VA for all!

School 'Security' Guards

The 'Security Guard' at the Red Lake School (shooting) was armed...with a telephone. If a school security guard armed only with a telephone sees someone approaching, armed, "With a sack full of guns and bullets", who does he phone for help? Someone packing a sack full of telephones, wearing a bandoleer of spare batteries? Uh uh. Nope.

He calls for someone who is armed.

Tit for Tat for Turkey

The House Foreign Affairs committee votes 27-21 to condemn as a genocide the 1915 killings of Armenians.

Here are the last three paragraphs of the opening statement by committee chair Tom Lantos:

All eight living former secretaries of state recently cautioned Congress on this matter. And I quote, “It is our view,” write former Secretaries Albright, Baker, Christopher, Eagleburger, Haig, Kissinger, Powell and Shultz, “that passage of this resolution … could endanger our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and damage efforts to promote reconciliation between Armenia and Turkey.”

Three former secretaries of defense – Carlucci, Cohen and Perry – this
week advised Congress that passage of this resolution, and I quote again, “would
have a direct, detrimental effect on the operational capabilities, safety and
well being of our armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan.”

Members of this committee have a sobering choice to make. We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people and to condemn this historic nightmare through the use of the word “genocide” against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying. This is a vote of conscience, and the Committee will work its will.

Lantos' last sentence translated: "If the troops get caught in the crossfire between us and the President, screw 'em!"

Turkey should pass a resolution condemning the 1975 Democrat Congress vote cutting off funding for the Republic of South Vietnam as genocide.

"But words will never hurt me"

As an experiment, over the past two days, I visited every site from the 'Liberal Links' sidebar at Michael Brodkorb's Minnesota Democrats Exposed. This is something I have never done before. I will stipulate the limitations of the sample size. All were Minnesota sites, and that may be the only statistically valid conclusion. I didn't click through similar lists of links at any of the sites I visited. Perhaps if I had, and noted which sites were commonly linked from different locations, other patterns might have appeared. As is surely common throughout the blogosphere, present site not exempted, many got only a glance. What I wanted to find was genuine thoughtfulness; if this, then that, to "then surely it must follow as the night does the day" reasoning. Only The Loyal Opposition sufficed. Here is an entire post, from July 8th:


In order to get beyond rhetoric…
08Jul07
Then:
“In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” - Justice Harry Blackmun (in Bakke)
Now:
“The only way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.” - Chief Justice John Roberts (in Parents
It’s about time the Supreme Court actually got to interpreting the Constitution. The Democratic candidates, to their disgrace, do not like the equal protection clause, and can’t differentiate between de jure and de facto segregation.

"As the night must follow the day...."

At the other extreme, concatenated enthymemes, serious and therefore not to be taken seriously at all, name calling...mud wrapped in cooked cabbage leaves, garnished with dog dew, flung without reason, with extra exclamation points. Wherever I find this, I cannot shake the mud from my shoes and leave quickly enough. But I've thought about this irrationality. It is, I think, an argument for the validity of the position or issue from an appeal to superior virtue. (Note I do not say the validity of the idea; I cannot cite the missing.) What do I mean by this? The clearest example may racism; imagine post Civil War, reconstruction era racism. Blacks of that era got no respect; their full character was known, defined and confined into a single, starts with 'n-' word. All injustice, hatred, contempt, unfairness etc. would have been winked at. Just the 'darkeys', right? Or "Those damn wingnuts", eh? "They don't care, but we do! They want to deny...". Fill in your own diatribe.

When the political opposition is defined, de facto, as deranged, evil, uncompassionate, lying, what must one needs to but dismiss them with contempt, smears, slanders and libels? After all, the dignity and honor of "Suthen' white wimmen"shall not be smirched. Insisting on this position, no assertion need be defended logically. Instead of truth, that absolute defense, virtue pinch hits. This is false. The claim that ones ideas are valid bacause of some moral superiority is objectively false. It can be falsified, shown to fail, by asking this question- on the basis of what, does the left, or anyone, oppose any moral vice, pedophilia for example? "You don't care about...the poor, the homeless, the transgendered multi-cultured litany of victims of oppression" would never be offered up to excuse the pedophile by knighting him as a victim, or to condemn the behavior as reprehensible. Such behavior exists outside of "those damn nigra's" or "those damn right-wing nuts". Can it be the left will admit to right and wrong?

In an Alabama accent, "The Wahr"

In the opening minutes of the last installment of Ken Burns' documentary (docu-person-tary?), The War, the Marine Pilot says, "There is evil in the world". I took his comments to be Burns' opinion; perhaps they are not. But if he meant evil derives from "specific historical sources", Niebuhr disagrees.

"The inclination of modern man to find the source of evil in his life in some particular event in history or some specific historical corruption is a natural consequence of his view of himself in a simple one-dimensional history. But this modern error merely accentuates a perennial tendency of the human heart to attribute wrong-doing to temptation and thus to escape responsibility for it. Every man has at some time or other repeated the excuse of the first man: 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat.' ...In the eighteenth century human evil was variously attributed to the corrupting influence of religion or to tyrannical governents and ignorant legislators who had disturbed the harmony of nature. In the nineteenth century Marx traced the self-alienation of man from his true essence to the rise of the class organization in society. Each of these explanations has the virtue of throwing light upon the character of particular social evils and may point the way to their mitigation of elimination. But none of them explain how an evil which does not exist in nature could have arisen in human history."

In the historical timeline, 1945, the ending of WWII 62 years ago is a mere slip of tissue paper. We believe we can see the past far behind us; its evils safely trussed in footage and bound up in books. The past, as the classical Greeks would remind us, is not behind but always before us. The future is hidden.

Niebuhr, "The fact that modern man has been able to preserve such a good opinion of himself, despite all the obvious refutations of his optimism, particularly in his own history, leads to the conclusion that there is a very stubborn source of resistance in man to the acceptance of the most obvious and irrefutable evidence about his moral qualities. This source of resistance is not primarily modern but generally human. The final sim of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner. (Smoothing Plane, "I feel you wincing at the screen again.") The significant contribution of modern culture to this perennial human inclination lies in the number of plausible reasons which it was able to adduce in suport of man's good opinion of himself. The fact that many of these reasons stand in contradiction to each other did not shatter modern man's confidence in them; for he could always persuade himself of the truth of at least one of them and it never occurred to him that they might all be false. "

"Yet they were all false. Whether they found the path from chaos to order to lead from nature to reason of from reason to nature, whether they regarded the nrmony of nature of the coherence of mind as the final realm of redemption, they failed to understand the human spirit in its full dimension of freedom. Both the majesty and the tragedy of human life exceed the dimension within which modern culture seeks to comprehend human existence. The human spirit cannot be held within the bounds of either natural necessity or rational pridence. In its yearning toward the infinite lies the source of both human creativity and human sin."

Remember that phrase, "The end of history"? History has not ended. We are not outside history, looking either in or back. We are astride history. And we are trapped and freed in our inclinations to freedom and desire. There is no vantge point from which we can transcend and escape the corruptions of self-interest.

A Slogan for the Progressives v. Rush

"Support free speech! Censor Rush Limbaugh!!"

... makes as much sense as the other signs.

Burnt to Death in Waco

The Gifford Lectures were given by Niebuhr at The University of Edinburgh in 1938 & 1939, and later published in two volumes. Volume one, from which I quote was published by Scribner & Sons in 1941. (Note that in 1938, Edinburgh invited Niebuhr, not Goebbels to speak.) Niebuhr's learned, astute observations on human nature still breathe. From chapter IV, The Easy Conscience of Modern Man:

"Our introductory analysis of modern views of human nature has established the complacent conscience of modern man as the one unifying force amidst a wide variety of anthropological conceptions. In the words of T.E. Hulme: 'All thought since the Renaissance, in spite of its apparent variety, forms one coherent whole...It all rests on the same conception of the nature of man and all exhibits the same inability to recognize the meaning of the dogma of original sin. (Smoothing Plane- I can feel you wincing at the screen. Hark! More wincing approacheth!) In this period not only have its philosophy, its literature and its ethics been based upon this new conception of man as fundamentally good, as sufficient, as the measure of things; but a good case can be made out for regarding many of its characteristic economic features as springing entirely from this central abstract conception.' " (Hulme quote ends, Niebuhr continues.)

"The most surprising aspect of the modern man's good conscience is that he asserts and justifies it in terms of the most varied and even contradictory metaphysical theories and social philosophies. The idealist Hegel and he materialist Marx agree in their fundamental confidence in human virtue, disagreeing only in their conception of the period and the social circumstances in which and the method by which his essential good is, or is to be, realized. The romantic naturalist Rousseau agrees with the rationalistic naturalists of the French enlightenment, though in the one case the seat of virtue is found in natural impulse unspoiled by rational disciplines (Smoothing Plane: These are the 'Breasts not bombs' topless activists protesters et. al.) and in the other case it is reason which guarantees virtue....

The whole Christian drama of salvation is rejected ostensibily because of the incredible character of the myths of Creation, Fall, Atonement, etc., in which it is expressed. But the typical modern is actually more certain of the complete irrelevance of these doctrines than of their incredibilty. (emphasis, Smoothing Plane) He is naturally not inclined to take dubious religious myths seriously, since he finds no relation between the ethos which informs them and his own sense of security and complacency. The sense of guilt expressed in them is to him a mere vestigial remnant of primitive fears of higher powers, of which he is happily emancipated. The sense of sin is, in the phrase of a particualarly vapid modern social scientist, 'a pshcyopathic aspect of adolescent mentality.' "

Today our 'secular, progressive, humanist, responsible for other peoples' feelings, superior moralists' might say, "happily e-person-cipated". Niebuhr continues, comments upon the tyranny of the Marxists in Russia and notes other "Contemporary...manifestations of man's hysterias and furies...evidences of his daemonic capacity and inclination to break the harmonies of nature and defy the prudent canons of rational restraint." He then says:

"Yet no cumulation of contradictory evidence seems to disturb modern man's good opinion of himsself. He considers himself the victim of corrupting institutions which he is about to destroy or reconstruct, or of the confisions of ignorance which an adequate education is about to overcome. Yet he continues to regard himself as esentially harmless and virtuous. the question therefore arises how modern man arrived at, and by what means he maintains, as estimate of his virtue in such pathetic contradiction with the obvious facts of his history."

"Yet this brute, he is an honorable man". I suggest this quote plays light on our denial, "Hey, I had nothin' to do with that. You'll have to ask Janet Reno."

Unworthy by any other name

When one abandons the notion of perfecting human nature, and by that is usually meant perfecting it in others, focus ought rightly to return to one's own nature, perhaps the only healthy self-absorbsion, and one's own imperfectability. A counter to the self absorbtion at riot in the modern consciousness. Schemes for changing the world, by changing all those pesky "others" ought to recede like the tide, and 'calls to action', and 'campaigns' for this or that "Universal at long, last final answer!" to the beam in the eye, replaced by prayers for humility and wisdom.

The Coming Eden

Why does all this matter? Who really thinks any longer about human nature; or if there is such a creature? If you cannot get your mind around that term, try 'human spirit'. What persisted through the horrors of Dachau or the Bataan death march or Stalin's Gulags if not the human spirit? Was it something learned that drove survival? Or an innate quality? Say yes to the latter, and reason will force you to agree that, though men can behave as animals, we are something more than creatures of Nature. The revulsion we feel at the left's celebration of things carnal, the elevation of homosexuality to a virtue for example, the celebrate diversity nonsense, which equates humanity with skin culture or tribalism, etc. We are revulsed not by the acts or flawed ideas, but by the lowering of the spirit of humanity to mere animal urges.

When these flawed ideas are directed towards changing the political foundations of the United States of America, they portend anarchy and tyranny. Why change America from the 'Land of Opportunity' to the land of the special accomodation? If one disagrees that this country is unique, what other country in the world can one emigrate to, and become, say, Chinese, or French, or...Saudi? Do you know there are countries in Africa where one cannot own property? Countries where the government considers your money in the bank to be theirs, and one needs their permission to withdraw more than certain amounts? 19th century European peasants flocked to America because here they could do what they could not in Europe, buy and own farmland. America is the only country in which citizenship is based upon an idea. Not tribal identities, nor skin color, nor any other purely animal-out-of-nature characteristic. Equality under the law, i.e. justice. Religious freedom. Free expression. The utopian leftist schemes to change the political system of America are founded, (albeit I think unconsciously) on the notion of the perfectibility of man. All it will take, at last, after all the failures of the last two centuries, the 1000 year Reich, the Great Leaps Forward, various worker's paradises and Mullahocracies, stretching back to the founders of this urge, the Jacobins, are the right people in charge.

If you can't see this, you just don't care about people.