Counsel for a college freshman

A young friend of mine started at Hillsdale College this week, and his dad, with whom I attend church, gave the new freshman a unique gift. The father asked a couple dozen people whom he respects to email our thoughts on two questions, for inclusion in a virtual scrapbook that will accompany the Class of 2012 entrant to campus. Those questions, and my answers to each, were as follows: 1. What is one thing that you did (or wished you had done) to make your college experience great?

My years at a Midwest liberal arts college with high ideals and a small student body, picturesque rural campus (much like Hillsdale in all those ways), were golden in part because I was led to (a) take the smaller, more challenging classes where I could get full benefit of personal tutoring from the professor and (b) participate to the fullest in many extracurricular activities, which often provided me better learning experiences and more lifelong friendships than the academic side of college.

2. What is one "truth" (adage or scripture or quote) that was important to you back then or today?

Very early in college I came across the Latin motto, "Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse est." It was the by-word of explorers setting out from Europe into distant unknown oceans centuries ago. The translation is roughly, "To sail is imperative, to live or merely survive is not." In other words, risk it! Aim high, go beyond your limits, follow your star. That served me well as a undergrad and ever since.

Endnote: If you want to feel ancient, try confronting the fact that it's been 46 years since you were in this young guy's shoes, diving into college with all the excitement and trepidation that includes. For me that meant August 1962, heading off to my parents' alma mater, Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. The dad's question about "what made your college experience great" was on target in my case; those turned out to be four of the best years of my life. Two decades later, as it happened, I had another great four years working as a vice president at Hillsdale, to which I must regretfully give the edge over my beloved Principia in terms of conservative principles and fidelity to biblical truth.

American Hope 2050: A Manifesto

With conservatives heavy-hearted all across the country about their choices and chances in the 2008 campaign, we in Colorado can relate. Our lean times started several years ago. The answer lies in looking not just to next November, but to a longer horizon: even to mid-century. Will America remain the hope of the world as these decades unfold? Conservatives tend to believe it will; liberals dissent. Long before hope became a cheap thing, a racket on the left, it was a noble thing on the right, as Lincoln and Washington well knew. The latter wrote: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” That’s the real meaning of hope in our tradition. CHARTING THE CONSERVATIVE COURSE TO 2050 By John Andrews Chairman, Backbone America Former President, Colorado Senate

Contents..........

Hope: Cheap or Noble? A Senator's House of Cards Yesterday: The Colorado Comedown Today: On Borrowed Time Tomorrow: On Tiptoe for the Future The Pole Star: American Hope 2050 The Passport: Contrast and Cohesion The Course: Protective, Confident, Proud The Compass: Strong Accountability Nobly Save or Meanly Lose?

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” – Lincoln

“Be always ready to account for the hope that is in you.” – St. Peter

With conservatives heavy-hearted all across the country about their choices and chances in the 2008 campaign, we in Colorado can relate. Our lean times started several years ago. I’ve concluded the answer lies in looking not just to next November, but to a longer horizon: even to mid-century. Will America remain the hope of the world as these decades unfold? Conservatives tend to believe it will; liberals dissent.

This essay draws lessons from the Colorado comedown and proposes as our new beacon: “American Hope 2050.” I conceived it when Barack Obama hadn’t yet debased the word with his phenomenal but ultimately phony campaign.

Long before hope became a cheap thing, a racket on the left, it was a noble thing on the right, as Lincoln and Washington well knew. The latter wrote: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” That’s the real meaning of hope in our tradition.

Winning in politics and public policy involves four “I’s.” You need ideas, individuals committed to them, institutions to project them, and issues as a vehicle of change. I’ve limited this discussion to the first element, ideas. Get those right and the rest will follow. Get them wrong and nothing else matters.

A Senator’s House of Cards

Smart cards, coded with magnetic data strips, not only can pay your bills or unlock your hotel room. They now also serve as keys to legislative power in Washington. Congressmen use them to access voting machines on the floor.

Such technology isn’t yet used at the Colorado General Assembly. But one day in 2003, all 99 of my fellow legislators were presented with a “voting smart card” anyway, compliments of Senate President John Andrews. On the front were our state flag and the vision statement: “A Better Colorado for the 21st Century: Freedom, Responsibility, and Opportunity.”

On the back, instead of a magnetic strip, was my five-point test for good legislation: less government, lower taxes, personal responsibility, individual freedom, and stronger families.

Essential for gaining the Senate President’s support for your bill, I told colleagues, would be its fidelity to these criteria:

(1) Does the bill reduce the size of government, lessen regulations, or elimi-nate unnecessary programs?

(2) Does the bill promote individual responsibility in spending, or reduce taxes or fees?

(3) Does the bill encourage responsible behavior by individuals and families and encourage them to provide for their health, safety, education, moral fortitude, or general welfare?

(4) Does the bill increase opportunities for individuals or families to decide, without hindrance or coercion from government, how to conduct their own lives and make personal choices?

(5) Does the bill enhance the traditional American family and its power to rear children without excessive interference from government?

We borrowed the card idea from former Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney, who’s now in Congress. Our Colorado version drew appreciation from Republicans, offset by Democratic leader Joan Fitz-Gerald, who grouched to reporters: “Why would I care?”

Yesterday: The Colorado Comedown

That year and next, before term limits retired me, our legislature in partnership with Gov. Bill Owens accomplished much for the conservative agenda. We curbed health care mandates and union power, expanded charter schools, controlled spending, passed parental notification, enacted education vouchers, and drew permanent congressional districts.

An activist state Supreme Court struck down the last two, however. And Republican defections blocked passage of judicial reform, right to work, curbs on eminent domain, restraints against illegal immigration, a color-blind civil rights act, and an academic freedom bill. The smart card message was sadly lost upon some on my side of the aisle.

Then abruptly our time was up. The 2004 elections saw a Democratic legislative sweep for the first time in 40 years. In 2006 Democrats took the governorship as well. Colorado went from red to blue overnight, shattering the complacent assumption among conservatives in our state that there’s always next year. Now our policy gains are being erased week by week.

Other states have since had the same rude awakening. So have Republicans in Washington. The seduction of power, family feuds, short horizons, a tactical mindset, and nostalgia for bygone glory days – for the GOP these have proved to be not the makings of that permanent majority so recently dreamt of, but the recipe for a political comedown.

Now my Senate gavel gathers dust, and our smart card, that little conscience for the politician’s pocket, is just a souvenir. A season out of power distills humility and sharpens concentration. To get back in the game, I believe conservatives need to cut the nostalgia, quit feuding, recover our principles, and see the far horizon again. We can then connect anew with the American people on that basis – the basis a Madison or a Lincoln could approve, the basis of a confident, capable New World conservatism.

Today: On Borrowed Time?

That heady time we remember as the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, with its second wave, the Gingrich revolution of the 1990s, was an era of huge electoral victories and remarkable policy achieve ments, mixed with plenty of disappointments, betrayals, and failures. It was also a time of many goals unreached and reforms unrealized.

To complete Reagan’s revolution is a worthy aim for conservatives in coming decades. But we stand no chance of doing so while looking in the rearview mirror. Talk of “finding the next Reagan” is fantasy. We must work on finding our own soul as persons and patriots, and our bearings as a conservative movement. From this will come the needed impetus, including statesmen equal to the hour, for reviving the Reagan revolution and completing it.

The old age that overtakes nations and pulls them down should concern us. Weariness, softness, self-indulgence, self-importance, arrogance, smugness, a sense of entitlement, dull habit, overweight, laziness and boredom, grievance and complaint, the blurring of imagination and memory -- everything we deplore in someone over the hill is equally a danger to societies as the years mount.

Well into her third century, how is the United States of America doing? Has she seen her best days? Are we on borrowed time against the societal and political entropy observable in history elsewhere? Perpetuity is not guaranteed for the “empire of liberty” foreseen by the Founders. It will fade unless we conservatives conserve it.

Tomorrow: On Tiptoe for the Future

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and all of America’s founders understood this. They looked to the far horizon, built and prepared accordingly. So did Abraham Lincoln, the seer of distant danger and promise in his greatest moments from the Lyceum speech to the Second Inaugural. So did Ronald Reagan, prophet of the shining city on a hill whose best days he insisted are not behind her. Those heroes will none of them come again, but what is that to us? Our task is to follow their example and live up to their legacy.

For us to keep faith with America as they did means being grounded in yesterday, the best of timeless truth and historical experience, as well as being on tiptoe for tomorrow, the still unseen possibilities of discovery and the human spirit. A conservative movement that meets this standard will both advance politically and hold its integrity. Conservatives who settle for less will neither win the people’s trust nor deserve it.

Americans in this century confront decisions and dangers unimaginable to earlier generations. Implacable enemies, impatient rivals, multiculturalism, secularism, globalization, and technology present tough new challenges for the United States in the coming decades.

We’ll need more than precepts on a pocket card if we are to succeed. Navigating our way forward will require four essentials. I’ll call them a pole star, a passport, a course, and a compass. Consider each and see if you agree.

The Pole Star: American Hope 2050

Conservatives must have one bright political beacon, high, fixed, and clear, in order to stay on course and bring majorities with us. We could do worse than to take for our pole star the idea of “American Hope 2050.”

In that simple phrase is packed a lot of evocative power. To begin with, the very mention of America now poses a stark litmus test between left and right. They are not sure at all about America’s goodness, and we are sure. So let’s assert that goodness.

America as the hope of mankind was an article of faith from the Founders through Lincoln to Reagan. Today it too is stridently denied, not only by demagogues abroad, but also by intellectual elites in our own country.

Now is our chance to identify the conservative movement with that spirit of hope. We do so not in the gauzy sentimentality of progressivism, Obama-style, but in fidelity to America’s founding principles as embodied in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Let our pole star be the practical hope of a better life for all, achieved the American way and across the span of this new American century, shared generously with all peoples of the earth who wish America well, guarded prudently against the depredations of any who wish us ill. The mid-century dateline, 2050, sets a long horizon and speaks of sturdy optimism, stewardship for the needs of America’s children and grandchildren, foresight to a hopeful future. Political success in the present is a by-product.

American Hope 2050 is the right fight for us to be in. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth,” said Lincoln. That stark choice confronts our generation as it did his. Which will it be?

The Passport: Contrast and Cohesion

Thinking about the passport we’ll carry as conservatives in the new century means sorting out our identity, our credo: what we stand for and who we are. In Colorado the past few years, working to recover our morale and mend the rifts after a series of bruising defeats, I have found it helpful to first set a sharp contrast between the prevailing notions of progressivism and the wiser “small R” republican worldview. The latter still enjoys a natural majority, even amid the flux of trendy attitudes in a state that is now politically purple at best.

My next step in defining the passport is then to remind “big R” Republicans just how easy it is (or should be) for us to remain unified as a party, despite all our intramural disagreements.

One version of the contrast exercise goes this way: Conservatives favor reason, liberals favor feelings. We favor experience, they favor theory. We favor theology, they favor sociology. We tend to realism, they tend to utopianism. We favor the personal, they favor the collective. We favor the family, they favor the state. We favor the market, they favor the government.

Conservatives favor freedom, liberals favor equality. We emphasize responsibility, they emphasize excuses. We trust elected legislators, they trust appointed judges. We favor the United States, they favor the United Nations. We favor human beings, they favor the earth. (After a reporter asked me for ten points, I jotted this list of twelve; it could easily have been 112.)

The unity exercise grew urgent after the Colorado GOP split bitterly over a 2005 tax increase. My list this time was 20 points – too long to reproduce here, but aimed at showing fellow Republicans how many reasons there were apart from taxes (No. 21) to prefer our party rather than the Democrats running state government.

Our shared beliefs on issue after issue – from rights and law to free enterprise and private property, from defense and sovereignty to education and morality, from health and welfare to energy and environment – all make it imperative, I pleaded, that we not cede power through disunity over any one issue to opponents who reject our beliefs entirely. In a two-party system, better to stick with the party that agrees with me 80% of the time than to dump them for spite and be saddled with the others who agree me none of the time. The logic was unassailable; even so our side lost the next election. This passport problem still needs a lot of work.

Course: Protective, Confident, Proud

The course we present to voters is what charts the way toward American Hope 2050. It follows logically from the passport and the pole star. Let’s make the case to our fellow citizens that in these troubled times, where you stand politically is a function of where you stand on America – and we believe that after looking at the alternatives you will stand with us. The alternatives are sharp. Time and again in political contests for a generation past, and today more than ever:

** One side, ours, is more protective of America in a dangerous world.

** One side is more confident in the American people to use freedom responsibly, and

** One side is more proud of America without apologies.

This is true hands down. The evidence is overwhelming. We as conservatives, mobilized politically through the Republican Party, hold this huge advantage over the liberals and the Democrats. If we’ll just map the future in these terms when candidates face off or policies are debated, the future is ours.

Do you agree (our side should ask) that enemies are out there, evil is real, many wish us ill, and government’s first job is to protect its people against those threats? Then follow our course: we’re the side that is consistently stronger on defense abroad and tougher against crime at home.

Do you agree that individuals and families are mostly capable of making their own decisions, that enterprise and voluntary association are usually the best problem-solvers, that taxes and regulation should be minimal, that centralized power is suspect? Then come with us: we know you’re not children; we honor your dignity.

Do you agree, finally, that America is noble and good, self-improving though imperfect, special in history, the hope of the world? Then follow our course: we feel no embarrassment for God and country, faith and flag.

Protective against enemies, confident in liberty, proud and patriotic – ask if the liberal is okay with that course heading, and then watch how he squirms, how quickly the qualifiers cloud his answer. I usually encounter a “but” in the first ten words of a liberal’s reply. The left will not, cannot, take our line. A solid majority of Americans will.

The Compass: Strong Accountability

The same entropy that ages a person or a society can stall out a political movement or an administration. Ask ex-Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Ask President Bush or any second-term White House. My lesson in how circumstance or expediency can subvert good intentions came as a young Nixon staffer 35 years ago.

The republic is disserved when conservatives split the difference with liberals in the name of “governing.” We fail our trust when losing-more-slowly gets redefined as “winning.”

Without a steady compass, in other words, the beacon ahead and the map in hand aren’t enough.

Suppose, then, we were to stipulate that a human community (nation, state, or city) that is genuinely and vibrantly conservative is one that has…

** A constitutional politics

** A market economy and

** A social order balanced between duty and liberty.

And one that also is…

** Culturally cohesive and confident

** Morally rigorous and

** Religiously devout.

I call these the conservative leading indicators. Let them be our standard by which to measure policy in the moment, and by which to hold ourselves accountable over time.

Will the accountability hurt sometimes? Yes, that’s the benefit of it.

Nobly Save or Meanly Lose?

This politico’s perspective on American Hope 2050 obviously differs from what a political scientist or political philosopher might offer.

My unacademic metaphor of pole star and passport, course and compass, reflects a lifetime of stump speeches and a naval boyhood. Middlebrow and practical, nothing pretentious.

Yet scholar and politician alike can remember Goldwater and the landmark year of 1964. That was 40-some years ago, a generation plus. Intrepid conservatives navigated us from then to now.

From here to 2050 will be another 40-some years, one more eventful generation. Much is entrusted to us. May we warrant a “well done” from our descendants at mid-century.

Campos & CU vs. McCain & TR

Clearly, the price of war is horrendous. The Civil War cost 600,000 lives. Worth the cost to emancipate a few slaves? Editor: So says Fran Miller in reply to "McCain's Dangerous Belief," a Paul Campos column in the Rocky on 4/24. Dave Crater tags on his impressions of Campos as a law school professor. Here are both pieces.

War? Why Bother?

(By Fran Miller) Paul Campos has sparked an important conversation that many will want to pursue. If we dispense with the glorification of past battles won and lost and focus on the merits of war it will inform our actions in the future.

Is the drafting of millions of men and resocializing them to get them to a point psychologically where they can kill or be killed worth doing? What, to liberate people like the French and British who will be ungrateful anyway.

And what about the Jews in those camps? Wasn't that a local problem on its way to being solved locally? Deposing dictators? Retaliating for the World Trade Center bombing? Aren't more people killed on our streets in a couple of months than were killed in New York?

Wouldn't the Russians have eventually won WWII? Couldn't we have sacrificed a few islands in the Pacific, trusting that the Chinese would have eventually taken care of the Japanese?

Clearly, the price of war is horrendous and its scars leave blemishes on the skin and mind of soldiers and civilian collaterals for a lifetime. I really didn't appreciate getting drafted in 1971 and being forced to put on combat boots.

My father and father in law both served in WWII and were never the same afterwards. The Civil War cost 600,000 lives and 2 to 3 million wounded. Worth the cost to emancipate a few slaves?

Discussing the merits of war as against the consequences of not fighting is a valid debate in a free society. But where I draw the line is Paul Campos's outrageous insinuation that the men who step forward when their nation demands are war-mongering sociopaths.

He is not fit to eat the droppings that fall off Teddy Roosevelt's mess kit. What Mr. Campos does really well, though, is act as the symbolic spokesman for the Colorado Bar, the University of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain News. He's your man. I'll keep TR as mine.

Who says 2 + 2 = 4?

(By Dave Crater) Fran, I had Campos for a class on legislation last semester at CU law school. It was not really a class in legislation, but one in literary, linguistic, and legal deconstruction.

We spent one entire class period discussing whether the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 actually describes the universe we live in or is just an arbitrary social and linguistic construct produced by humans.

I raised my hand and said, "With all due respect, the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 accurately describes the universe for all people, at all times, in all places." There was an awkward silence of a few seconds, then Campos said, "And how do you know this?"

He is as cynical and liberal as they come - a real moral and political disaster. As Fran hints, there are many reasons to not be excited about McCain, but his support for the Iraq war is not one of them.

Editor: Here are some key passages of the Campos column...

War is a form of mass psychosis, during which horrifying acts are transformed into heroic deeds, through the magical moral disinfectant of state sanction. .... When historians look back on the Iraq catastrophe, I suspect they'll discover a significant factor in this latest outbreak of mass psychosis was a kind of warrior envy, as reflected in recent popular culture. Books like The Greatest Generation, movies like Saving Private Ryan and television series like Band of Brothers are, despite some gestures toward moral ambiguity, essentially glorifications of war. .... Indeed, some of the support for the Iraq war came from the belief that war builds character by subjecting the pampered citizens of the modern state to a beneficial dose of suffering in the service of a great cause. The most famous American exponent of this view was Teddy Roosevelt, who believed in "muscular Christianity" and manly self-sacrifice, and who advocated militaristic imperialism as a kind of bloody outdoor adventure program, for a nation he feared was becoming soft and decadent. For anyone who considers this view both absurd and dangerous, Republican presidential candidate John McCain's evident affection for it is a cause for great concern.... There can be no better reason to vote against him.

My experience with black liberation theology

What kind of Christianity did Wright teach Obama, that this man can believe a politician can be a Christian by tolerating hatred and endorsing abortion? The two men are part of an international, godless, socialist worldview, anti-free-society and anti-American. Editor: Hilmar von Campe, onetime member of the Hitler Youth, now a US citizen and Alabama resident, author of several books including the forthcoming "Defeating the Lie," wrote this piece for his website, voncampe.com.

The senior pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. stated that his theology “is based upon the systemized liberation theology that started 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone’s book, ‘Black Power and Black Theology’”. He explains on his website that he has a church the theological perspective of which starts from the vantage point of black liberation theology. With ‘systemized” he means that his theology integrates centuries of similar theological movements.

Black theology, however, is not the beginning of modern liberation theology it is a local version of the Latin American original which is aimed at Catholics. Black theology is aimed at Africans, for instance in South Africa, and African-Americans. There are other versions for American Natives, Asians and Women. The liberation they are talking about is not the teaching of liberation from selfishness and sin through Jesus Christ but of economic exploitation by capitalists, whites or males respectively. The message is divisive and subversive. “We are agents of change for God,” says the mission statement of Obama’s church, “who is not pleased with America’s economic mal-distribution.” Maybe they listen to Satan and not to God. They are no agents of God.

Reading or listening to the explanations of what liberation in this context means by their Spanish- German-, English speaking professionals you notice the same line of argument – abundant Christian language, themes and apologetics but underneath a subtle shift to liberation as an economic criteria. We are dealing here with fake Christians, a class war being waged against their specific different “oppressors”, which in America is disguised as race issue.

I spent a great part of my adult life in various countries of Latin America. That’s where I came across liberation theology. In my first book “Cowardice and Appeasement” which was published 1989 in Germany I have a whole chapter about it. I had read their literature and listened to their leaders like the Brazilian Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff, visited the priest Gustavo Gutierrez in his home in Peru, and discussed this theology in UNAM, the state university of Mexico, with the German Theology Professor Johann B. Metz. I counted 18 books he had written but it could be more. The ideas in his book “Political Theology” led to the articulation of the liberation theology. During this discussion in Mexico the Argentine Enrique Dussel named Communist leader Che Guevara and the top Sandinista Thomas Borge as the new types of man for the society of tomorrow. This event, like many others, served as instrument to attack “American Imperialism” and make Soviet agents acceptable to Catholics,

Gustavo Gutierrez is acknowledged as founder of the theology of liberation. He made a good impression on me. He lived a great part of his life as a priest among the very poor in Peru, in other words, he had his heart where his mouth was. His concern was how to make the poor into a power for economic change through political and social liberation. He had a list of priorities but unfortunately the liberation from selfishness came at the end of it. The Vatican sanctioned Boff and many others because of heresy but not Gutierrez as they most likely had the same impression as I had.

What happened then, I believe, was that Marxists without interest in the liberation from selfishness picked up the idea of social and political liberation and pushed the movement to the left into the global establishment of class war but without getting rid of the religious label. It is now a political leftwing movement, not a serious theology. Julio Giradi defined: “Christian love only is a historical force if it takes up class warfare.” That of course is complete nonsense. I have been in many of these “favelas”, the living areas of the poor in Latin America. It is true, that they live in sub-human conditions and your heart goes out to them. But morally they are no different from the “rich”. They steal and lie as Western politicians do. In Rio de Janeiro I was in the home of the leader of such a settlement. From the outside his “house” looked as terrible as all the others. But inside it was a normal comfortable home. He was rich compared to the poor since he took a cut for himself from the collections he was authorized to make for the payment of electricity, garbage removal etc. It is like Congress taking our payment to Social Security for their re-election. In Sao Paulo I was with the Communist leaders of the Port Workers Union. Their wives were not hungry but resented their husbands having other women besides them – a vice also very popular in this country - and were unhappy in their marriage and their lives. That changed as the husbands realized that the new world order they were promoting did not even work in their own families. They changed.

Barack Hussein Obama has been a member of the Trinity Church of Christ church for 20 years. He was baptized and got married there. I have seen and read about its liberation fundamentals: hatred and class war. It is more than doubtful that he as an extraordinary intelligent person has not become aware in 20 years of the ideological orientation of his church. In an interview in the “Hannity & Colmes” show of Fox News on March 2, 2007 the Rev. Wright expressed himself as a trained ideologist and not as a pastor. The video with a “sermon” he made in another church is even worse. He must have a strange view of God’s commandments. Obama’s explanation that he does not agree with everything that Wright says is no explanation at all. We are not talking about occasional anger but about the moral and religious fundament of a church. To escape into a racial issue and throw the ball into the camp of the whites is a brilliant attempt to fool everybody. His and Wright’s ideology is socialist world power.

What kind of Christianity did Wright teach Obama that this man can believe that a politician can be a Christian by tolerating hatred and at the same time endorsing abortion to his voters? His voting record is morally as terrible as Wright’s communications. Most likely, it seems to me, that the two men are part of an international godless Socialist world view, which is anti free-society and also anti-American. It presents itself as Christian, like the “German Christians” movement under the Nazis who promoted Nazi philosophy with a religious label. Barack Obama has a hidden agenda.

Reviving the art of conversation

I’ve found that when a thread of conversation has developed, some patients have surprised themselves by realizing they’ve actually had a good time at the dental office. I never cease to be amazed at how well patients can talk through the impedimenta of four-handed dentistry. Editor: So asserts Dr. Matt Dunn DDS, a dentist by vocation, who makes time for such avocations as year-round extreme mountaineering on Saturdays and helping me on the radio most Sundays. Whatever you say, Matt; but personally, I never cease to be amazed at my hygenist's assumption that anyone could possibly reply to her questions with all those freaking impedimenta in their mouth. Dunn wrote this piece, with much obvious relevance to the art of talk radio, in his capacity as editor of the Articulator, magazine of the Metro Denver Dental Society. Here's the article in full:

Sitting in the chair at the barber shop the other morning, wearing a blue smock with a tight neck-band, I noticed my barber and I had to work a little harder at our usual leisurely conversation. We encountered newfound interference, in the form of a television screen blaring forth from the center of the shop.

Raising our voices a notch, we managed to discuss some sports, some politics, some updates on our respective families. Glancing left and right, I noticed most of the other patrons weren’t having too much to say as they absorbed the morning newscast. Scissors were moving, mandibles were not.

It was to be a day of catching up on things – sundry tasks, errands and appointments.

Standing in line at the bank, I counted two TV screens along the pathway towards the tellers, and two others anchored elsewhere across the lobby, all flashing headline news. Again, except for a customer on a cell phone, I didn’t observe anyone actually talking.

Later on, moving through the aisles of a big-box chain store, I noticed I was seldom out of reach of a flat-panel screen transmitting snappy music and promotional messaging.

Then, stepping into a sandwich shop, I had to chuckle over a red-lettered sign that encouraged patrons to get off of their cell phones while ordering their sandwiches.

A routine day in America – a series of banal observations. But threaded together, perhaps they raise the provoking question: What is the state of conversation in America today?

As our lives become more surrounded by the virtual, ever more infiltrated by portable media devices, by endless flat-panels and sound systems, with increasing opportunities to email and text message and generally avoid face-to-face dialogue – are we obliged to count such as social progress?

Moreover, in this sea of virtuality, where does dentistry fit in?

I like to think that dentistry remains one of the last bastions of genuine communication in American life today. No matter how much technology may have changed our lives, the dental office is still a place where people can have real conversations, and where they may find themselves looking forward to them beforehand, and feeling good about them afterwards.

Though we may suffuse our operatories with computer monitors and our reception areas with satellite sound, there is still no getting around the fundamental fact that there must be direct, personal communication with our patients – often over comparatively lengthy periods of time.

Patients cannot multitask their way through an appointment, and neither can we. Meanwhile, there’s no such thing as ersatz dentistry.

I aver that these are good tidings, and that they can make for some of the most rewarding moments in our lives as practitioners. Though the lion’s share of our discussion with patients will tend to be about oral health considerations, there will generally be time left over for free-ranging, open-ended, spontaneous conversation. As we get to know our patients, they get to know us.

When Dick Cavett once asked Jack Paar about the secrets of his successful television talk show, Paar said: “Don’t make it an interview, kid. Make it a conversation.” Paar, the forbear to Johnny Carson, was known to be a great listener and practitioner of the art of conversation.

In days gone by the “art of conversation” formed a part of our educational curricula, and the character attribute of being a “good conversationalist” was regarded as a worthy aspiration. It was assumed that it took some study, that it wasn’t an altogether natural process to arrive at the polished result. It involved the proper blend of give and take, politeness and raillery, humor and empathy.

Though conversation as an art may now be in decline in America – as Stephen Miller persuasively argues in his recent book titled Conversation – we dentists are in a position where conversation must necessarily occupy a portion of our daily activity, and where we may take advantage of what Jonathan Swift called “the greatest, the most lasting, and the most innocent, as well as useful pleasure of life.”

I’ve found that during some of the longer dental procedures, when a thread of conversation has developed and advanced around the treatment room, some patients have surprised themselves by realizing they’ve actually had a good time at the dental office. I never cease to be amazed at how well patients can talk through the impedimenta of four-handed dentistry.

Towards the end of a procedure, when we find we’re still conversing, we may be assured that all has gone well. And we know we can pick up where we left off at the next appointment.

Concerned about the limiting sphere of social interaction in modern society, philosopher Michael Oakeshott has addressed the need “to rescue conversation.” Surrounded as we are by multifarious obstacles to conversation, the dental profession may be partaking in just such an effort.

On whatever fractional scale, as we work to rescue teeth in our daily lives, we may also, without necessarily realizing it, be working to rescue conversation. A healthy enterprise, on many levels – and something that will never become another faceless errand in the American routine.

“To my taste, the most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind is conversation. I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives.” --Michel de Montaigne