Saturday seems a good day to review the letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. There are two today that struck me as being representative of the truly outstanding thinking and writing that often go into these letters. Here are the two I especially liked today (the emphasis is mine).
Dorothy Rabinowitz's eloquent "Obama Blames America" (op-ed, April 22) points up a recurring presidential theme: forsaking the national rule book, our Constitution.
On rectitude of presidential performances abroad, opinions abound. Does he apologize too much? Opinions are one matter but duties are another. President Barack Obama swore the oath to faithfully "execute the Office of the President of the United States."
Our president represents the collective gravitas of this union of sovereign states. He speaks and acts as the figurehead for our common capacity to preserve, protect and defend what we hold dear. To denigrate our military posture, our moral composition, our decisions, or our history is to do what no officer would ever do: defame his chain of command. The message this conveys to fellow participants in the global theater is not elevation, but duplicity and confusion. In a word, weakness.
The Constitution is simple gravity holding this republic together. Without it we fly apart, and the courage so long ago that declared us free and independent states, to do what acts and things all free and independent states do, slips into the murk of history.
Karen Taylor
Reno, Nev.
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Anti-Shakespearian elitists such as Justice John Paul Stevens have been singing the same tune now for more than a century, but the lyrics keep changing ("Justice Stevens Renders an Opinion on Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays," page one, April 18). Their motley crew of candidates-du-jour to the Shakespearian throne includes Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex -- and now, the Earl of Oxford.
We autodidacts wish that the media wouldn't give print space to Oxfordian elitists who can't shed their contumely and prejudice against those of us who, like Shakespeare, were primarily self-educated and masters of intellectual material. We are an illustrious bunch, us: Thomas Edison, George Bernard Shaw, Steven Spielberg, Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, etc. (Remember Mark Twain's immortal line: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.")
We find knowledge not to be an ivory sport or dusty rationalism. We took a kernel of learning, as Shakespeare did, and grew it exponentially along pathways of volition and a hardscrabble life. We sought not artificial curricula or artifice. We understand Shakespeare viscerally and came to him naturally. We love him for the making of himself and for what he made.
This doesn't mean we dismissed contention that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. Instead, we probed and delved with the solitary power of independent minds and found the elitists' positions wanting and evasive.
David Elmore
Roswell, Ga.
