Mitch Townsend

From the easternmost suburbs of Chicago:

The problem with stereotypes is that there is often a bit of truth to them. It has been said that conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are mean. Here’s a little illustration of the bit of truth in the lefty stereotype. Two of the intellectual lights of the left videotaped themselves spray-painting PC slogans on a McDonalds and defacing a statue of Columbus with red paint and the word “murderer.” They were caught by the police in the midst of their revolutionary artistry with the tape still rolling.

Big surprise that one of them, Walid/Waleed Zaiter, is on the staff of a far-left “education” organization called Social Justice Education. Prominent on their website is a picture of what looks like Zaiter in a ski mask, holding a spray can. His staff biography lists his profession as “self-taught video artist” and graffiti art as one of his interests. But I guess that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

Joseph Schumpeter is not one of the Chicago Boyz, but we can be magnanimous and overlook that. He was an Austrian, but not part of the Austrian School (Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek of sainted memory). His best-known work for the general public is Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). It is well worth the effort of reading, if only to enjoy his courteous nineteenth-century prose style, with its direct addresses to the reader. His work is instructive as well as pleasurable, in that he contributed two very useful concepts to economic thought: creative destruction and the struggle between intellectuals and capitalists. In the latter case, I think he backed the wrong horse, but we’ll come to that later. This entry will address the former.

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It’s been a while since I cleaned my office, that’s for sure. I remember buying these off a Belgian guy in the 1930’s. Do you suppose they’re worth anything?

It’s a bright late-summer day in Boston, only the lightest puffs of cloud for decoration. A perfect day.

Three years ago, I was working in the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The word came out in fragments. First, we heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I immediately thought it was a small private plane, one of those that seem to crash around the small airstrips here every few weeks. That quickly became a large passenger plane, a hideous accident. I though of the B-25 that had crashed into the Empire State Building in fog, but it was a bright late-summer day. Then another hit, and it was no accident. We clustered around the few desks with radios; some went back to their desks, tried to work, tried to bring up the Internet, and returned to the radio. We heard Logan Airport had closed down. From the east side of the building, we could see the approach path to Logan and a bit of the runway. That sky is almost never empty, but now it was. We were told to evacuate our tower.

No one close to me died that day three years ago, but in those years, I have over and over stumbled into the holes they left. Twice, on this anniversary and last year, the client I visit has shut down for a memorial service for someone who died that day, someone whose successor I am meeting. Another missed Flight 11 and lived. Another lost a brother. Tragedy invades the ordinary. I was far from the center of death; the holes merge into an abyss at the center.

There are those who wish to bring the whole world down into that abyss, that image of the darkness that God’s absence has left in their hearts. We will never let it happen.

You won’t believe what I found when I went through some old files. It’s the actual first draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s own handwriting. Alert the press – call CBS News first. Here is a partial image:

Update Sept. 12, 2004:

If you think I’m lucky in my discoveries, go look at what Jim Treacher found. In the interest of preserving the last crumbly bits of decorum on this blog, I will not describe what he unearthed.