Dr. Bruce Smith

In Every Little Village

I've seen them. In every little village across England and Scotland, they’re there. They’re found across Canada from the Maritimes to the Prairies to British Columbia. Sometimes they are at the crossroads where they can’t be missed, and sometimes they’re off to the side, shielded from the traffic and the bustle. When you know what they are, they become irresistible. When I see one, I have to stop, then approach in reverence. The names are usually toward the bottom where the monument is wider, and often they are on every side. In some towns the list is shockingly long, but in others there may be only a dozen or so. There’s a solemn irony for you. From this tiny village of perhaps three-score houses only a dozen were killed.

Nostalgic Spring Beauty

A wise history professor once told me “Things have not always been as they are today.” This is true in many ways. Certainly the technology is different. We live lives of comparative ease and travel much more than was possible not so long ago.

Our aesthetic notions have changed, too. Animal and plant breeding have brought us many improvements that have changed our lives for the better. Sometimes the world gets better year to year.

Sometimes We Just Need To Raise The Drawbridge

Let’s face it. The world looks like it’s going to hell in a handbasket. We don’t have to embellish daily events to be brought to such a conclusion. Whether one has been watching world events for a long time or only a few months, it surely looks like we’re circling the drain these days.

It’s important to stay informed but it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by events beyond our control. Even when our outlook is rosy, we can feel weighed down by work, relationships, responsibilities, and arbitrary routines. When any kind of an opening occurs, or when our surroundings are closing in on us, it’s important to retreat a ways, pull up the drawbridge, and just enjoy some peace.

Reminds Me Of October ’73, But Only A Little

Those were heady days in October, 1973. I was a junior at Indiana University, back in the dorm, and I had just begun to implement my new strategy for academic success. There was a full load of tough classes, heavily tilted toward upper level history. There was Modern Germany, Eastern Europe, genetics, education. I was in a history honors seminar with my new academic mentor, and every meeting was like opening King Tut’s tomb. What days they were, always to be savored and remembered with a glowing heart.

Musical perfection The Dave Clark Five

Dave Clark’s band came on strong as part of the British Invasion of the early 1960s. For a while, there was speculation about whether they or the Beatles would be the bigger act. Their first big hit, Glad All Over, took over the Number One spot on the British charts from The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand when it came out in 1964. Because was originally released in Britain as the B side of Can’t You See That She’s Mine? in 1964. Clark insisted that it be released as the A side of a single in the US that year. It peaked at No. 3 on the US charts in September and also reached No. 3 in Canada. It was the band’s fifth single to sell over a million copies in the US.

They appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show just a month after The Beatles debuted there, and they played for Ed Sullivan a total of eighteen times, more than any other British band.

Reverence For the Past, or The Wonders of an Attic

Sometimes it’s a struggle to understand why everyone doesn’t have a reverence for the past. How could it be? Things weren’t always as easy as they are now, at least that’s the way I look at it. Knowing what life was like way back when helps us understand our own times better.

My family was a study in contrasts in the same small town in the Heartland. One side had come from Tennessee coal mines and had struggled during the depression of the 1930s. From 1932 until the end of their lives they were staunch Democrats, but couldn’t really tell anyone why, except to say that Hoover had made their little girls starve. They worshipped FDR. They looked at the world cynically and with much pessimism.

Show Them How It’s Done

Many of these columns are frankly nostalgic. I enjoy going back in my memory to golden moments and those brief videos of the mind where people I knew flit across the screen for a few seconds, alive again so I can savor their lessons.

I go back to these memories because they’re meaningful to me and because I have lots of them. They influenced me and made me who I am. Some of those moments struck me as they happened and have stayed with me ever since. For example, I clearly remember the moment when I first noticed that my dad deeply loved his mother. No words were exchanged. We had arrived at the house for a visit in the cold weather.

Well, There’s Something You Don’t See Every Day!

One of the best things we can do to improve our ability to see and notice the things around us is to learn to use a real SLR camera. I had a Mamiya Sekor 1000DTL. There was no auto button. The camera only did what I made it do with the meter, aperture, shutter speed, focus, strobe, and filters I had chosen. Push the shutter button and whatever the result, good or bad, it was my fault. What a real camera taught me to do was to look at everything inside the frame. The meter only reads the average light, so it’s important to notice if there are light or dark places. Is the subject backlit? Are the shadows too dark? Is it cloudy? Is it diffused light? When you get the print, the credit and the blame are only your own. Nobody else pushed the button.

Give Us This Day Our Occasional Near Miss

There’s an old saying, ‘once bitten, twice shy.’ It means that when we encounter something unpleasant or hurtful, we tend to avoid it in the future. Think of these occasional near misses as unsolicited gifts. Sometimes we don’t appreciate them, especially when they land too close, but they can teach us a great deal.

There have been a steady supply of these over the years.

Musical Perfection: Dimitri Tiomkin

Dimitri Tiomkin was born in Tsarist Russia in 1894. He trained in classical music in St. Petersburg before the revolution, then moved to Berlin in the 1920s. Shortly thereafter, he moved to the United States and then to Hollywood after the crash of 1929. Director Frank Capra asked him to write the score for the film Lost Horizon in 1937. This was his big break into composing for movies.

Doing justice to Dimitri Tiomkin’s music in just one column would be impossible, so this time I will mention and list a few of his works. Some of them you will find familiar, but others may be new to you. We know him best from film scores from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Freedom of Speech for Dummies

Sometimes it helps to review the basics, and it doesn’t get any more basic than this. Here is the wording of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To edit this so we address only freedom of speech, try this:

It’s Probably Not About What They Say It’s About

T here’s a terrific comedian who has a routine where every setup line is followed by the same phrase: ‘. . . then you might be a redneck.’ It’s brilliant, and he can go on for hours with every line getting a laugh. I could never be half as funny as this person is, but I’d like to borrow the technique.

In the last years we have heard many justifications for taking away our constitutional freedoms, for giving unwarranted power to politicians, bureaucrats, globalists, and the intelligence community, and for reinventing the country in various ways. Every time I hear one of these justifications, I think to myself,

To get to the heart of any matter, one must first define the terms

There was a wonderful professor of geography at Indiana University named Thomas Frank Barton, and it was my privilege to sit in his class on the geography of Southeast Asia. He had traveled widely and came to IU after the war to teach knowledge-thirsty students, and he was still there when I arrived in the 1970s. He was quite the character.

He had come from a poor family in Saline County, Illinois, and knew the value of work. In the 1920s he had done road construction with a Fresno scraper, a horse-drawn device that looked something like a wheelbarrow, but without wheels. It had a steel handle on it so it could be guided into piles of dirt and stone like a huge scoop. When loaded, the horse would pull the load to where it was needed, where it could be dumped. It probably wasn’t much fun for either the operator or the horse.

Western Civilization III

The earliest features of Western Civilization derived from the Bible and from great civilizations of the past. That heritage delivered an age of faith crowned by the great gothic cathedrals of Europe of the 12th and 13th Centuries. In the middle of the Fourteenth Century, however, the arrival of the Plague in southern Europe shook the foundations of Western Civilization. Over the 150 year period that followed, the population of Europe declined by a third or more. The Catholic Church, at the peak of power and prestige after 1000 years of growth was severely weakened, and the Medieval social order was largely destroyed. Over the course of just a few years as it spread northward from Mediterranean port cities, the old ways of understanding how the world worked fell apart.

Western Civilization II

The Old Testament Christian traditions gave us a foundation for Western Civilizations. The Western part of it came from its Old Testament origins in the ancient Middle East. From there it expanded westward to Greece and to Rome. From the Classical civilizations it grew into Northern and Western Europe. Later on it crossed the waters going westward to the Americas. We call it Western Civilization because that is the direction it has spread. It did not spread to the east. Different patterns, forms, and philosophies emerged there. In many ways this east-west division can be drawn on a map along the dividing line between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. East of the line the primary faith was based on the Eastern Orthodox Church, centered at Constantinople. West of the line it was the Catholic Church, centered in Rome, which dominated life in the Medieval period and beyond.

What’s Worth Defending? Western Civilization Part I: We must work to save the Western tradition. We must save it or be buried under its rubble for al

Call it the Culture War, protecting what the Founders created, or just plain national survival, we are in a war that must be won. On one side are the Marxist critical theory people in their many variations. They seek to weaken and undermine the West. They find imperfections, most of them corrected long ago, and use them to characterize the Western way of life as fatally flawed and requiring destruction. They shriek that Western society is racist and homophobic and hegemonic and stifling. They condemn and cancel any counterargument as racist and homophobic. The latest weapon is to declare anything they don’t like as ‘white supremacy’. In their world a differing opinion, whether informed or not, cannot be tolerated. They want to win at all costs. We must make sure they do not.

The Definition of Fair

This term gets tossed around quite a bit these days. Maybe it’s time to talk about what it means.

What a delight it is when there’s a working occasion to crack open one of the hefty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition! With four regular pages on each of its more than 4,000 9x12 pages in two volumes, it comes with its own powerful magnifying glass. It must be set in something like a #2 font. Or maybe even #1. Either way, unless you’re between ages of about 8 and 14, you’ll definitely need the magnifying glass. Like seeing Hooke’s flea for the first time, picking up the magnifier reveals a whole new world in miniature.

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