2026

THE GREATEST PUNCH LINE IN HUMAN HISTORY?:

Russell Kirk’s Tragic Sense of Life : Far from unthinkingly celebrating an illusory “golden age,” conservatism at its best always recognizes the tragic sense of life. (Miles Smith IV, 2/03/26, Law & Liberty)

Conservatives, Kirk knew, had to live with tragedy more than golden ages, and it was that knowledge of tragedy that made someone truly conservative. MAGA seems too blinded by acquisitiveness and economic neo-mercantilism to be aware that this moment, too, will come to an end, most likely with tragedy rather than a golden age. In the foreword to the seventh edition of his opus The Conservative Mind, Kirk warned that modern humanity, “enslaved by our readily gratified lusts, reduced to fatuity by our own ingenious toys,” ignored to its peril “the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin upon our wall.” Kirk understood that, paradoxically, only a conservatism aware that it too will inevitably fail might stand a chance of lasting through the ages.

Since the American Revolution, conservatives in the United States have embraced the inevitability, or at least probability, of tragedy both in their literature and politics. The nineteenth century golden age of American literature, interestingly enough, was predicated on tragedy. Melville in Moby Dick posited that “all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” The very idea of greatness, in Melville’s literary economy, was a disease.

Tragedy and tragic figures, in fact, marked American literature more than golden ages or heroes did. Hester Prynn and Dimsdale, Captain Ahab, Billy Budd, Poe’s Roderick Usher, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, Ethan Frome, Jay Gatbsy, Faulkner’s Quintin Compson, Llewelyn Moss of No Country for Old Men, and others inform the American literary psyche and have historically affected how Americans understood their place in the world. Seventeenth century Puritan New Englanders, no strangers to the effect of letters both sacred and secular on their political order, spurred themselves to action by hanging over their heads the fear that they would serve as a tragic lesson in civil and moral disobedience. John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” did not portray the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a golden city on a hill, prosperous and well, and a beacon to the world’s hopeless, but a Christian commonwealth whose failures would be placed on a pillar for all the world to see. That politics and society might be tragic did not mean that life was not without levity. Mid-twentieth-century science fiction luminary Philip K. Dick quipped that “It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.” American composer Steve Allen smilingly suggested that “humor is tragedy plus time.”

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

BREVITY…:

Covering the Cops: The world of Miami’s top crime reporter. (Calvin Trillin, February 10, 1986, The New Yorker)

In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald—there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her—and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

All connoisseurs would agree, I think, that the classic Edna lead would have to include one staple of crime reporting—the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt. The question is where the jolt should be. There’s a lot to be said for starting right out with it. I’m rather partial to the Edna lead on a story last year about a woman about to go on trial for a murder conspiracy: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.” On the other hand, I can understand the preference that others have for the device of beginning a crime story with a more or less conventional sentence or two, then snapping the reader back in his chair with an abbreviated sentence that is used like a blunt instrument. One student of the form at the Herald refers to that device as the Miller Chop. The reference is to Gene Miller, now a Herald editor, who, in a remarkable reporting career that concentrated on the felonious, won the Pulitzer Prize twice for stories that resulted in the release of people in prison for murder. Miller likes short sentences in general—it is sometimes said at the Herald that he writes as if he were paid by the period—and he particularly likes to use a short sentence after a couple of rather long ones. Some years ago, Gene Miller and Edna Buchanan did a story together on the murder of a high-living Miami lawyer who was shot to death on a day he had planned to while away on the golf course of La Gorce Country Club, and the lead said, “. . . he had his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. He didn’t.”

These days, Miller sometimes edits the longer pieces that Edna Buchanan does for the Herald, and she often uses the Miller Chop—as in a piece about a lovers’ spat: “The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ he asked, and handed her a gun. ‘Here, kill me,’ he challenged. She did.”

Now that I think of it, that may be the classic Edna lead.