Culture Yours Cordially When fan mail mattered. Credit: Rene Sandoval Jr/Shutterstock Ours is an age in which human interactions often take place through emails and text messages, but I remain attached to the tried-and-true technique of putting pen to paper—or, at least, fingers to keyboard, and keyboard to computer, and computer to printer. Yes, the messages we transmit over the internet or by phone presumably exist forever in our recipients’ devices, but no one scans ancient emails with wistfulness. On the other hand, many of us old enough to write and receive letters have taken out a letter from a departed or seldom-heard-from correspondent and experienced a jolt of sadness or some similar Proustian emotion. Web- and phone-based communications are too instantaneous. When an answer is proffered quickly (and therefore too hastily), we are denied the pleasure of waiting—sometimes eagerly, sometimes desperately—for an answer to wend its way through the inscrutable U.S. mail system. This is especially true in the matter of fan mail, which, I confess, I have been an intermittent sender of since the early 1990s. No newfangled technology can replicate the thrill of placing a fan letter in the mailbox or the anticipation of waiting weeks—or forever—for a reply. At the inexplicable age of nine, I wrote a fan letter to the horror novelist Stephen King—whose books I enjoyed in theory but never actually read in full because, despite my best efforts, I was not a fan of the genre. Nonetheless, I wrote a missive to King, and lo and behold, I received a reply in the form of a pre-printed card explaining that he no longer had the time to answer the volumes of fan mail he received. This was not exactly a personal answer, but I remember being thrilled that the card included King’s (pre-printed) signature. Sometimes I wonder whether King still has the occasion to make use of that pre-printed card or if it has gone the way of the transcripts that were once offered to viewers at the end of Meet the Press. Remember those? “For a printed transcript of Meet the Press, send one dollar and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to…” A few years later, by then convinced that I wanted to become a newspaper cartoonist, I enjoyed a more fruitful correspondence with Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. I sent him some samples of my cartoons, and he replied—on beautifully embossed ecru stationary—with great encouragement and reassuring specificity: There was no chance I was reading a form letter, even a slightly rewritten one, since Trudeau talked about my cartoons in detail. Sometimes I wonder whether the intensely left-wing Trudeau remembers my name and, if he happens upon my column in the American Conservative, asks himself, “What on earth happened to my protégé?” To which I might reply: “Well, Garry, I became a conservative as soon as I was old enough to think rationally about the issues…” In the spring of 1999, by then in a position to take advantage of the internet in furtherance of my fan mail habit, I wrote an email to Little, Brown asking whether the publisher still forwarded letters to J.D. Salinger. To my surprise, the publicist answered—and, to my greater surprise, she said that they did! I would like to take this opportunity to thank the unknown publicist for humoring my 16-year-old self that the author of The Catcher in the Rye would read and conceivably answer my letter. (It never happened.) My last big effort in fan mail came in the mid-2000s, when, in the nascent years of my own writing career, my letters became more thoughtful. I wrote a long letter to Ray Bradbury, a man far worthier of my admiration than some of my earlier objects of hero worship. I told Bradbury that I was working on a book on Orson Welles, and, as I once described in this publication, he answered with unusual interest. He had worked with Welles, and he said he still thought that Citizen Kane was the greatest of all movies. He signed off in such a way that suggested that he had taken note of my literary dreams and did not consider it out of the question that they might be fulfilled: “I wish you all the best in the months and years ahead, Ray Bradbury.” Equally satisfying was a letter I received from William F. Buckley Jr., who, I suspect, answered me because the question I posed him was so specific: I had read that he once participated in a documentary about the Sistine Chapel for which Malcolm Muggeridge, Grace Kelly, and Charlton Heston were also interviewed.  I asked him whatever became of this project, and he answered, on National Review stationary, forthrightly: “Alas, the documentary was never released—it just wasn’t good enough.” His was the only letter I ever received that ended with the phrase “Yours cordially.” Happily, Buckley’s uncommon politeness to me was vindicated when, several years after his death in 2008, I began contributing to National Review. Far less gratifying was my correspondence with the filmmaker Robert Mulligan, director of To Kill a Mockingbird, Summer of ’42, The Man in the Moon, and other classic films. After getting ahold of his home address through someone who had worked with him decades earlier, I sent several letters in which I insisted on his greatness and on my unique capacity to explicate his greatness.  In short, I wanted to interview him for an article or maybe a book. He twice answered me, and because the letters came on ecru stationery—shades of Garry Trudeau—and he signed his name with a blue fountain pen, I allowed myself to be momentarily hopeful before reading what he had to say. Alas, Mulligan did not want to talk about his career—period, end of story, full stop. He spent two whole letters explaining why. Perhaps because there are fewer and fewer public figures worthy of my fandom each year, I no longer write much fan mail.  That leaves me with fewer letters to send in general—except, that is, at Christmas. After all, who doesn’t prefer receiving a Christmas card rather than a Christmas email? The post Yours Cordially appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture The Suicide of Britain Legalized suicide is not a matter of mere moral preference, but an attack on central principles of Anglo-American law. Credit: Anthony Stericker/Shutterstock The British are of late more than usually intent on self-destruction. The Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer, having swept to power on an anemic numerical vote with the mandate to be something, anything but the Tories, has set to with admirable gusto, taking up consideration of whether the people it notionally represents should in fact literally go kill themselves. Kim Leadbeater, the member of Parliament for Spen Valley, in October proposed a private member’s bill legalizing “medical assistance in dying”—that is, doctor-abetted suicide—and this proposal looks set to become law.  The internal affairs of distant nations are not our usual hat, but occasionally diseases of the body politic are catching. And there are many fascinating and appalling aspects to this twist of law. Our learned friend Daniel Hitchens has admirably chronicled and written against the many merely human perversities of the bill just passed, including its lack of provisions for the undeniably mentally ill. The Canadian iteration of MAiD has in purely empirical terms been a catastrophe—that is, if you think the state should not be addressed toward killing its own citizens: Physician-assisted deaths accounted for 4.1 percent of all deaths in Canada in 2022.  Leadbeater has insisted that her law for killing people is far better than the colonials’. “The model being proposed here,” she argued Friday, “is nothing like what happens in Belgium. It is nothing like what happens in Canada. There are strict, stringent criteria, and if the House chooses to pass the Bill, those criteria cannot be changed.” Hitchens the younger has noted that there are reasons to doubt her assertions, not least of which is that notionally friendly legislators seem to be a bit spooked by the bill’s wording as it stands. As ever, a crux is that highly subjective standards—the patient’s feelings—may be used to justify MAiD. These are all correct and pertinent observations, but to my mind almost beside the point. If the state can pass such laws, and the people support them—as they do by a wide margin, it appears—it seems like the whole business of civilization is wrapped up. The peculiar symptoms of our times—state officers’ refusal to enforce existing laws, the collapse of territorial sovereignty, the rise of human rights theory over traditional conceptions of citizenship and subjecthood, the devolution of state functions to private or quasi-private entities, the transfer of policy-making from political figures to unelected technocrats—are united in their degradation of the political state’s sovereignty.  Legalization of suicide, in any form, is of a piece with this; it devolves the most important aspect of imperium, the power of life and death, from the traditional authorities in which it resides. Under the common law, felo de se was counted in the same genus as treason or rebellion, and its perpetrator’s properties and estates were subject to special legal scrutiny after his decease—as one of the jurists Kantorowicz cites in The King’s Two Bodies argues, suicide is a crime, not just against the natural law and the divine law, but “against the King in that hereby he has lost a Subject, and (as Brown termed it) he being the head has lost one of his mystic Members.” (This is distinct from the Roman law, which did not consider punishments for suicide unless committed to escape the consequences of a crime.) An additional kink in this beast’s tail is added by the fact that Britain’s (and Canada’s) doctors are state employees. The state monopoly on violence is the single gold-plated principle of the Anglo-American legal tradition, and, after some fairly hairy experiences with state power from the Tudor period through about, oh, 1776, the American branch of things has been deeply concerned with limiting and delineating the appropriate applications of that monopoly—that bundle of safeguards known as due process. (This is why, for all the best efforts of the newly moderate GOP, the abortion question will always be reduced to a personhood question—is the unborn baby someone to whom due process is owed?) In the current version of the British bill, the decision to approve a request for medically assisted suicide is handed off to a miniature Star Chamber of two doctors.  This boggles the mind—ten centuries of careful legal construction blown away, and for what? So the British can turn their figurative national suicide into a literal one? (We blandly note that this bill is going through at the same time that the British immigration crisis rages. It is almost as if the powers that be are trying to kill off an existing population and intend to make up the deficits by replacing it with another.) To borrow an utterance used in another time for different issues in a different place, “This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die.” Some 70 percent of Britons fear that people will be coerced into medically assisted suicide, and 62 percent think more information is needed about the bill under consideration; yet 60 percent still support the idea in theory. If we accept the premise that, in fact, suicide is bad, if only because it attacks the core of the Western legal system (as I have argued here), it is not clear how to remedy this through representative government.  There is one theoretical recourse in the UK. Even the post-1688 settlement of parliamentary supremacy acknowledges that the British commonwealth is constituted by the Crown in Parliament. It is perhaps time for the head to assert its control over the members—and what else is Charles III doing these days, anyway? I think living up to his regnal name would be more fun than whatever climate activism he is up to these days. But short of this high-flying fantasy, Britain appears set on suicide. The post The Suicide of Britain appeared first on The American Conservative.

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