Things that matter : three decades of passions, pastimes, and politics

From America's preeminent columnist, named by the Financial Times the most influential commentator in the nation, the long-awaited collection of Charles Krauthammer's essential, timeless writings

A brilliant stylist known for an uncompromising honesty that challenges conventional wisdom at every turn, Krauthammer has for decades daz-zled readers with his keen insight into politics and government. His weekly column is a must-read in Washington and across the country. Now, finally, the best of Krauthammer's intelligence, erudition and wit are collected in one volume.

Readers will find here not only the country's leading conservative thinker offering a pas-sionate defense of limited government, but also a highly independent mind whose views-on feminism, evolution and the death penalty, for example-defy ideological convention. Things That Matter also features several of Krautham-mer's major path-breaking essays-on bioeth-ics, on Jewish destiny and on America's role as the world's superpower-that have pro-foundly influenced the nation's thoughts and policies. And finally, the collection presents a trove of always penetrating, often bemused re-flections on everything from border collies to Halley's Comet, from Woody Allen to Win-ston Churchill, from the punishing pleasures of speed chess to the elegance of the perfectly thrown outfield assist.

With a special, highly autobiographical in-troduction in which Krauthammer reflects on the events that shaped his career and political philosophy, this indispensible chronicle takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the fashions and follies, the tragedies and triumphs, of the last three decades of American life.

• Introduction p. 1
• Part 1 Personal p. 17
• Chapter 1 The Good and the Great p. 19
• Marcel, My Brother p. 19
• Winston Churchill: The Indispensable Man p. 22
• Paul Erdos: Sweet Genius p. 25
• Rick Ankiel: Return of the Natural p. 28
• Christopher Columbus: Dead White Male p. 31
• Hermann Lisco: Man for All Seasons p. 34
• Chapter 2 Manners p. 37
• No Dancing in the End Zone p. 37
• "Women and Children." Still? p. 40
• Don't Touch My Junk p. 43
• Accents and Affectations p. 46
• The Appeal of Ordeal p. 49
• Chapter 3 Pride and Prejudices p. 55
• The Pariah Chess Club p. 55
• Of Dogs and Men p. 58
• In Defense of the F-Word p. 61
• The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics p. 64
• Krauthammer's First Law p. 67
• Chapter 4 Follies p. 71
• Save the Border Collie p. 71
• Bush Derangement Syndrome p. 74
• Life by Manual p. 77
• From People Power to Polenta p. 80
• Annals of "Art" p. 83
• "Natural" Childbirth p. 87
• The Inner Man? Who Cares p. 90
• The Mirror-Image Fallacy p. 93
• Chapter 5 Passions and Pastimes p. 99
• The Joy of Losing p. 99
• Beauty, Truth and Hitchcock p. 102
• Fermat Solved p. 105
• Be Afraid p. 108
• The Best Show in Town p. 112
• Chapter 6 Heaven and Earth p. 115
• Your Only Halley's p. 115
• Humbled by the Hayden p. 118
• Lit Up for Liftoff? p. 121
• Farewell, the New Frontier p. 124
• Are We Alone in the Universe? p. 127
• Part 2 Political p. 131
• Chapter 7 Citizen and State p. 133
• Reflections on the Revolution in France p. 133
• Did the State Make You Great? p. 136
• Constitutionalism p. 139
• Myth of the Angry White Male p. 142
• Going Negative p. 145
• The Tirana Index p. 148
• Chapter 8 Conundrums p. 151
• Without the Noose, Without the Gag p. 151
• Motherhood Missed p. 154
• Ambiguity and Affirmative Action p. 157
• Massacre at Newtown p. 160
• Pandora and Polygamy p. 163
• Empathy or Right? p. 166
• First a Wall--Then Amnesty p. 169
• In Plain English-Let's Make It Official p. 172
• Of Course It's a Ponzi Scheme p. 175
• The Church of Global Warming p. 178
• Chapter 9 Body and Soul p. 181
• The Dutch Example p. 181
• Stem Cells and Fairy Tales p. 184
• The Truth About End-of-Life Counseling p. 187
• Mass Murder, Medicalized p. 190
• The Double Tragedy of a Stolen Death p. 193
• Essay: On the Ethics of Embryonic Research p. 196
• Chapter 10 Man and God p. 209
• The Real Message of Creationism p. 209
• God vs. Caesar p. 212
• Body Worship p. 215
• Chernenko and the Case Against Atheism p. 218
• Chapter 11 Memory and Monuments p. 221
• Sweet Land of Liberty p. 221
• Holocaust Museum p. 224
• Sacrilege at Ground Zero p. 227
• FDR: The Dignity of Denial p. 230
• Martin Luther King in Word and Stone p. 233
• Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility p. 236
• Part 3 Historical p. 239
• Chapter 12 The Jewish Question, Again p. 241
• Those Troublesome Jews p. 241
• Land Without Peace p. 245
• Borat the Fearful p. 248
• Judging Israel p. 251
• Essay: Zionism and the Fate of the Jews p. 258
• Chapter 13 The Golden Age p. 275
• The '80s: Revival p. 275
• The '90s: Serenity p. 278
• Cold War Nostalgia p. 281
• Chapter 14 The Age of Holy Terror p. 285
• September 11, 2001 p. 285
• When Imagination Fails p. 288
• "The Borders of Islam Are Bloody" p. 290
• To War or Not to War? p. 293
• The Surge, Denied p. 296
• Who Lost Iraq? p. 299
• From Freedom Agenda to Freedom Doctrine p. 302
• Language and Leadership p. 305
• Chapter 15 The Age to Come p. 309
• Hyperproliferation: Can We Survive It? p. 309
• Death by Drone p. 312
• No Hiding from History p. 315
• Part 4 Global p. 319
• Chapter 16 Three Essays on America and the World p. 321
• The Unipolar Moment (1990) p. 321
• Democratic Realism (2004) p. 333
• Decline Is a Choice (2009) p. 352
• Acknowledgments p. 367
• Index p. 370

introduction I. THE BOOK What matters? Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies and the finer uses of the F-word. What matters? Manners and habits, curiosities and conundrums social and ethical: Is a doctor ever permitted to kill a patient wishing to die? Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase "women and children"? How many lies is one allowed to tell to advance stem cell research? What matters? Occam's razor, Fermat's last theorem, the Fermi paradox in which the great man asks: With so many habitable planets out there, why in God's name have we never heard a word from a single one of them? These are the things that most engage me. They fill my days, some trouble my nights. They give me pause, pleasure, wonder. They make me grateful for the gift of consciousness. And for three decades they have occupied my mind and commanded my pen. I don't claim these things matter to everyone. Nor should they. I have my eccentricities. I've driven from Washington to New York to watch a chess match. Twice. I've read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time . Also twice, though here as a public service--to reassure my readers that this most unread bestseller is indeed as inscrutable as they thought. And perhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics. Accordingly, this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. Working title: There's More to Life than Politics. But in the end I couldn't. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics. Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything--high and low and, most especially, high--lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats-- poet, romantic, early 19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to come--kept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics-- because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither. This is no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material. We saw it in China's Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest achievements of five millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan, which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old Buddhas lest they--like kite flying and music and other things lovely--disturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.  Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe's senseless self-inflicted devastation forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly--to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state--that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry. The only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Nature's God. Santorini was a thriving island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end. And yet even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man--more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power. Which in its day-to-day conduct tends not to be the most elevated of human enterprises. Machiavelli gave it an air of grandeur and glory, but Disraeli's mordant exultation "I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole," best captured its quotidian essence--grubby, grasping, manipulative, demagogic, cynical. The most considered and balanced statement of politics' place in the hierarchy of human disciplines came, naturally, from an American. "I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams, "that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That's politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams' double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecture--a hybrid discipline of war, commerce and science--before the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake. The most optimistic implication of Adams' dictum is that once the first generation gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future. Yet he himself once said that "there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Jefferson was even less sanguine about the durability of liberty. He wrote that a constitutional revolution might be needed every 20 years. Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation. To which I have devoted much of my life. And which I do not disdain by any means. Indeed, I intend to write a book on foreign policy and, if nature (or God or Nature's God) gives me leave, to write yet one more on domestic policy. But this book is intended at least as much for other things. Things that for me, as for Adams, shine most brightly. Excerpted from Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics by Charles Krauthammer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.