Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics Charles Krauthammer Crown Forum, 2013.This Charles Krauthammer tells us, originally going to be collection of my writings about but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. There's much of that sort in book, but he discovered that was impossible to leave politics out of it, because he found that everything lives or dies by politics... Get your politics wrong, and stands to be swept away. The result is that Things That Matter, collection of his columns (and five somewhat longer essays) spanning more than three decades, gives readers fully representative window into his long intellectual journey.Krauthammer will hardly need an introduction to readers in United States, to whom his columns have been available in number of media for more than three decades. They will recognize his writing as combination of frequently sharp insight, Mark Twain- or Tom Wolfe-like facility for acute perception of his fellow man, independence of thinking, and refusal to bend to demands of ideological conformity (presently called correctness) - sprinkled with occasional lapses into tunnel vision and unquestioning conventionality. When his columns are put together in one place, as they are here, result is book with multiple rewards. The style often provokes chuckle, and substance is almost always provocative.Even for American readers, however, will be helpful to review Krauthammer's varied background. Born to Belgian mother and French father comprising Jewish-immigrant household, he spent much of his childhood in Montreal. He studied political philosophy at Oxford before going on to medical school, where he became psychiatrist who favored empirical rather than Freudian psychology. His penchant for writing led to articles in The New Republic, speechwriting for Vice President Walter Mondale, regular back- page essay for Time, and column in Washington Post since 1984. These associations illustrate Krauthammer's early social-democratic orientation and explain his life-long affiliation with Democratic Party, but any such categorizing is insufficient. His thinking, rather than remaining static, has evolved. He says he was always Cold War liberal, which was one given to assertion of American power in defense of non-Communist world, and that he gave up on on foreign policy issues when during Reagan administration they adopted foreign policy of retreat. Whereas Democrats left him, as he sees it, on those issues, was he who left them on domestic matters. Explaining that I'm open to empirical evidence, he says the results of Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for its good intentions, War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to very communities was designed to help. From that realization it was but short distance to philosophy of restrained, free-market governance... vision of limited government that, while providing for helpless, is committed above to guaranteeing individual liberty.The insightful perceptions and acute Mark Twain-like observations appear frequently in columns. Take, for example, passage in which he comments on how ridiculous is for genetic engineering to eliminate unique traits of dogs of various types, such as cocker spaniels, bulldogs and Boston Terriers, to mold them into better show dogs. We can almost hear voice of Samuel Clemens (i.e., Mark Twain) when Krauthammer says a society that grieves for accidental demise of snail darter... should not easily acquiesce to deliberate destruction of unique breed of animals. Pointing to high intelligence of border collies, he asks Must we ruin this too? Reduce to imbecility in name of prettiness? Another example is when he takes on platitude that all people are basically alike. …

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