You’ve probably noticed that innovative rights seem to pop up these days like rodents in a game of Whac-a-Mole. One of these vermin that took me by surprise not long ago is “the right to linguistic justice,” and it means that no one who doesn’t want to shall be required to speak or write properly. It means having permission to remain illiterate and go out into the world well-credentialed and stoopid.
Is it any wonder that stuffy types, we readers of aulde bokes, yawn and get heavy-lidded at the mere mention of politics and yet wonder why politics won’t leave us be?
In one essay included in the new collection How Do You Do It?, the late Gerald Russello provided a fairly plain answer: “Today,” he wrote, “when liberalism has morphed into an extreme individualism, with ‘choice’ at its center, politics is inescapable. For the new liberalism needs the state to protect the ever-expanding list of individual rights.”
“Inescapable”? Curses! Foiled again!
But of course this makes sense, and we Clerk-of-Oxenford types must try to remember it the next time the Linguistic Justice Brigade is after us. (Not that we are entirely useless, for the state “always needs an enemy which it can condemn as reactionary and against which it must wage an eternal fight.”)
It is good to have had the likes of Russello around: In a review of Christian Legal Thought, a book by Patrick M. Brennan and William S. Brewbake III that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to read, Russello asked, “Does Christianity have a place in the law?” This is a question I would like to know the answer to or at least get some guidance on without having to go to the tedious trouble of reading law or getting a law degree, which, from what I hear, probably wouldn’t help anyway. Most answers I’m likely to find and those likely to proffer them are about as trustworthy as adders fanged. (Forget your crisis of confidence in the media or government; it’s the experts that scare me.)
But Russello, in his usual clear prose, reminded us that the legal system we have reflects perforce the Christianity of the Founding generation and that of the legal system it imported, “not as a protected class of beliefs but as part of the architecture of the legal system itself.” And then, in a pageant of examples from the early nineteenth century on, he demonstrated how Christianity has served the law as “tool, mirror, [and] goad,” as his title of this review puts it.
Reading the reviews and essays in this volume will show you that Russello had a knack for stating plain truths that he surely knew would raise the majority and (no doubt) pierced or tattooed eyebrow. This is only to say that Russello had, has, and I think always will have an appeal to a certain kind of reader, an appeal not merely to the expert in whatever area Russello happened to be justifiably venturing into but also to those who, disinclined to bust their heads about the outside world or (for that matter) read newspapers, are not ungrateful to hear now and again a sensible judgment: so far as the law goes, Christianity “encapsulates a lot of what people like about secular legal culture. There is room, in a[n] [Orestes] Brownsonian fashion, to find common ground with believers of different faiths, or of none, in a way that liberalism, in its current woke form, does not permit.”
How Do You Do It? is at times a pretty good source for recommended reading, and it leaves no doubt that Russello, though limited by his commitments like the rest of us, was widely read.
He even spoke of the “drier areas of the law such as property.” So even law has degrees of dryness? And here I thought it was all aridity through and through! What a fine thing it is to see some humor breaking in. And there’s more: Russello felicitously calls the tendency of Americans to kowtow to the Courts “subservience to nine unelected officials.” Of Virgil’s Aeneid, a “pro-imperial epic that praised Roman arms and Rome’s success in bringing law and civilization to the barbarians”: “Not the sort of thing … to garner support at an MLA meeting.” (For that you need unshapely legs and a pair of Birkenstocks.) And in a Law & Liberty review of Melvin I. Urofsky’s soporifically titled book, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court’s History and the Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue, Russello found himself underwhelmed: “Unfortunately, this book gives us only a vision of liberalism admiring itself,” which, to be fair to liberalism, is one thing it has always been good at.
Excellent. I don’t have to read that book either.
Gerald J. Russello was born July 27, 1971, and died betimes in November of 2021 at the age of fifty. Cancer was the offender, and it was about the only thing that could slow him down. As a boy he was a scholarship student at Regis High School in Manhattan, where the Jesuits introduced him to the humanities, in particular to Latin (“We had a sense that Latin still had something to say to us,” Russello wrote) and to “the treasures of Western Civilization that [Russello] would later defend with his pen.” So says David G. Bonagura Jr. in his introduction to How Do You Do It? The Selected Works of Gerald Russello, which he also compiled and edited.
After Regis High School, Russello attended Georgetown University, where as a classics major he was a student of George Carey and Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. From there he went to New York University to study law. This led to various clerkships, a stint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and finally a career as a lawyer, editor of The University Bookman, and adjunct professor of law. He was also a catechist in his local parish and a fellow at the Chesterton Institute.
The principal influences on Russello were the British Catholic historian Christopher Dawson and the Michigander Russell Kirk, localist (like Russello) and, as some would have it, the very face of American conservatism. Russello edited a collection of Dawson’s essays, Christianity and European Culture: Selected Essays from the Work of Christopher Dawson, and he wrote a critical study of Kirk, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk.
Russello, not shy about declaring himself, wrote extensively on conservatism and Catholicism. He believed that “conservatism cannot be separated from Christianity, because of its doctrine that original sin clouds our reasons and our passions.” He “followed Kirk,” writes Bonagura, “in advocating for social conservatism rooted in local and regional traditions while opposing both military adventures abroad and unbridled capitalism.” This was about the time, late in the previous century, when “the fusion of three types of conservatives that coalesced after World War II—cold warriors, social conservatives, and laissez-faire capitalists—began to unravel.”
How Do You Do It? ranges widely, as indeed it must: Russello himself ranged widely. Part V of the book, titled “The Catholic Thing,” touches on subsidiarity, Catholic social thought, economics, and the state of the Catholic novel. But by this point in the book, Russello has already taken us through the thought and work of, among others, Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton, Russell Kirk, Orestes Brownson, G. K. Chesterton, Dietrich von Hildebrand, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, Jacques Barzun, and Christopher Dawson. (The little-known David Jones is a pleasant surprise.) Most of the pieces collected in this book are reviews—it is a form Russello excelled at—and the erudition in these reviews persuades you convincingly that Russello was never operating at the edge of his knowledge. Indeed, How Do You Do It? is at times a pretty good source for recommended reading, and it leaves no doubt that Russello, though limited by his commitments like the rest of us, was widely read.
There follows a section on law, a piece from which I have already quoted, and another section titled “Lingua Latina No Mortua Est,” which opens with a review of the HBO series Rome, a “pro-Christian show” that “did not have a single Christian character in it.” Rome, Russello said, “turned out to be a surprising affirmation of the Western religious tradition. While it is packed with sex and violence, its message—intended or no—is that the Roman world was desperate for Christianity.” He went on in another review to opine on the 2004 film Alexander, which featured Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Val Kilmer, and Captain Von Trapp (!) as Aristotle: “truly awful”—this in a review for The New Criterion of The Theban Plays of Sophocles, translated by David Slavitt.
What else could Russello turn his pen to? The answer might surprise you. The book ends with sections titled “America the Beautiful” and “Understanding the Culture.” Here are fourteen pieces that alone are worth the cost of the book. Russello, in consideration of the Founding and its documents, touches on what he rightly insists were the colonists’ non-Lockean “small-town Calvinist Protestantism and a strong sense of the heritage of English liberty. This tradition undergirded the founding generations and continued long after the War of Independence.” The Federalist comes up for discussion, as does baseball, civil religion, and even John Witherspoon. “Who now remembers John Witherspoon?” Russello asks, reminding us that he was “the soul cleric to sign the Declaration of Independence.” Did I know this? I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
There’s a review not to be dispensed with of a book likewise not to be dispensed with: Land and Liberty: The Best of Free America, edited by Allan C. Carlson. And I would be remiss not to mention a review of Bill Kauffman’s excellent short biography of Luther Martin, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet. “Martin and his generation get the full Kauffman treatment,” Russello writes. It is a line to make any reader of Kauffman’s work—and here you can pretty much take your pick of it—smile wryly. Martin, you may recall, was a sober-minded inebriate, a voice crying in the wilderness, railing against everything he feared would—and then did—happen. He was an anti-federalist, which is to say a true federalist, and a loser, as Russello says, “in the constitutional battle when the Constitution was taken on the road for ratification.” Martin opposed six-year terms for senators, claiming correctly that a sinecure of that length would mean senators going to the place “where the government shall be fixed” and making it their home, and then their “future views and prospects will center in the favours and emoluments … of the general government.”
“Paging Senator … well, almost any of them,” Russello writes.
All told, How Do You Do It? collects 78 pieces from 23 different sources, including two of Russello’s scholarly essays and one interview (with John J. Miller for National Review). There are personal essays that give us a glimpse of the author himself and the places he was a mindful citizen of.
Russello maintained affection for and devotion to the local while abominating the meddlesomeness of the globalists.
The book has a few unfortunate production issues. It was proofread only tolerably, not expertly, and a second printing by the good people at Cluny Media might include a couple dozen or more corrections. The lack of an index is also lamentable but sufferable, and the book could be shorter: the favorite quotations from the likes of Burke and Kirk get unavoidably recycled a bit—that’s in the nature of a collection like this—but I expect Bonagura in his role as editor had a difficult time cutting anything. And I think I understand why: No one who has never edited a book can fully understand what a challenge it is to choose brevity over comprehensiveness.
Finally, I always hope the self-styled and committed conservatives will enumerate what exactly it is they’re conserving, and I always hope that their conservatism extends to the diminishing funds of both nature and culture: to topsoil and groundwater, to rural places and rural ways in all their particularity, to old methods and means of living, to small farmers and farm communities and small shops and businesses. I always hope there will be measurable suspicion of the “political conservatives” and especially of the bizarre conflation of conservatism and the Republican party, a party that, mostly ignorant of the available intellectual tradition, never seems to be chastened by the likes of Burke, or even Kirk, and is as indifferent as any self-styled progressive to the actual country—the country not as an abstraction, not as a sum total, not as a monoculture of corn, soybeans, Home Depots, and Applebee’s, but as an infinitely varied patchwork of real places worth loving, defending, and conserving. I say nothing of a party that, pretending to be conservative, doesn’t hesitate to move at lightning revolutionary speed, throwing suspicion of change and concern for unintended consequences to the wind as if they were caution itself.
This is too much to ask of a collection that consists mostly of reviews, and it bears repeating that Russello maintained affection for and devotion to the local while abominating the meddlesomeness of the globalists. But I register this tiny dissent because it seems to me there is no point in being a conservative if you’re going to be a half-buttocksed conservative.
And I would reiterate that the book is a boon companion and a trove of recommended reading. I should add that Russello was a founding board member of Cluny Media, a Catholic press committed to recovering old books and keeping them in print. All proceeds from the sale of this book are going right back to Cluny.
And it is a testament to this book and the mind animating it that it can sustain the interest of a reader such as the one I described at the beginning: myself. I have kept company with (and feigned interest in) both conservatives and liberals; I’ve looked at my watch and listened to the things they insist on talking about, and I have done so without ever, so far as I know, permitting myself to be transfixed by either label, both of which seem to me to be about as unreliable as any two words we’ve got. And anyway, I’m allergic to labels. I won’t go so far as to say, as some have, that I’m going to erupt the next time I hear the phrase “little platoons,” as overused as it might be, for in fact it still means something to such men as Russello, who, holding on to the good inheritance he received and was subtle-minded enough to recognize, knew better than to be sucked into the juggernaut of Big Things, Big Movements, Big Ideas, and Big Plans, which have done enough to desecrate all the small distinctive places this perishing republic was once composed of (if the Republic isn’t already a full-blown empire). But insofar as Russello could declare himself and stand by his declarations, and insofar as he could give intelligent and eloquent defense to all that he stood for—which, to be plain, is worth standing for, naysayers be damned—I don’t mind accounting myself an ally.
