The greatest men make the greatest mistakes. One thinks of the late John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American historian who claimed that the age of the book is at an end. That is far from being the case, the electronic book having failed to drive the print version to extinction as enthusiasts had predicted. Indeed, the continuing flood of printed and bound books remains among the greatest threat to books today — good books, that is, books worth an intelligent man’s time.
As a piss-poor Catholic I am about the last person who should express an opinion of the propriety of President Biden receiving Holy Communion, but as a native of the county whose nineteenth-century women’s college (Ingham University) employed the chancellor whose phrase “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” may have flipped the 1884 presidential election to Grover Cleveland — how’s that for a tenuous connection? — I feel it within my competence to say a word about anti-papism in American politics. I had a bibulous lunch with Senator Pat Moynihan, my long-ago boss, several months before his death in 2003. Over more Pinot Grigios than I can remember, Moynihan said that he was disturbed by rising anti-Catholicism in the Democratic Party.
Rothbury, Michigan exists in a similarly strange duality to the small towns of Woodstock in New York and Glastonbury in Somerset on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a village of little consequence once you separate it from the famous music festival associated with it. But when the electronic dance music (EDM) extravaganza Electric Forest happens, Rothbury — 432 inhabitants, according to the 2010 Census — gets its annual day in the sun. The hatchet-faced Michigan state troopers, standing to mark the turnoff from the main road through the village toward the festival didn’t return our eager waves from the car. But the smoldering opprobrium of The Man was soon forgotten amid the fields and woodlands of the Double JJ Resort that braves hosting the festival.
