California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joins Rudy Giuliani as another “moderate” Republican to back John McCain. Drudge is also reporting that Nancy Reagan privately supports McCain’s presidential bid.

And did you see the debate from the Reagan Library last night? Was it just me, or did they all look like they were sitting behind too-small, elementary school–size desks?

Warning!  This is a post about art, not politics.  Philippe de Montebello is the current and longest-serving (30 years) director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He is native of France, a graduate of Harvard, and a man who does not worship the passing fads of art and culture.  He is, in short, a conservative.  De Montebello is retiring this fall, and so there’s been a deluge of stories about him.  He’s an anamoly in the art world. 

At a time when museums pander to get visitors, either by flogging, yet again, the long-dead Impressionist horse or by selling their souls to popular culture with exhibitions of motorcycles or electric guitars, the Met has drawn in its public the old-fashioned way — routinely offering it intellectually substantial fare.

In a commencement speech I heard him deliver last year, he said that art should not be self-absorbed, that it should be important to the larger world, that it should be technically excellent.   

Of late, rather than making contemporary art one element among many in its programming, one museum after another has mortgaged its identity to new works, handing over to them disproportionately large swaths of staff time, financial resources and exhibition space. Worse, as did Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Gallery last year, some museums have recklessly sold off prize portions of their collections of older art to purchase still-wet canvases whose value has been determined by the fads of the moment rather than the test of time.

De Montebello was a conservative in the world of art and culture, and he earned the respect of his critics by defending his decisions and beliefs with intellectual ferocity, and with dignity.

I don’t mean to linger on Starbucks, I really don’t.  But the company - from opening two stores on opposite sides of the street, to its prominence in films - really is a weird metaphor for American culture.  It’s a corporate monster that we corporately loathe and worship.  It represents the best, and the worst, in America.  You’ve already read here recently about the incipient $1 bottomless cup (that may be coming to a Starbucks near you) and the relative merits of the Waffle House.  Starbucks is getting a lot of attention these days, and not necessarily the kind it likes.  Take this story, which starts off all too familiarly, but with a whole new end:

When a Starbucks moved in next door, the coffee fanatics who run the Broadway Cafe [in St. Louis] trembled. Sure, they roasted their own beans and served up handmade espresso drinks to a loyal clientele. But would it be enough to fight off a corporate behemoth?  That was nearly 10 years ago, and now the results are in: the Starbucks is about to shut down.

This is less the triumph of a small, authentic (read: puritan) coffee house versus the giant, hydra-headed beast of Starbucks and more about the triumph of the free market.

The American Academy of Pediatrics had hoped to stop the premiere episode of a new ABC legal drama that it says could undermine children’s vaccinations. In the opening story line of “Eli Stone,” the mother of an autistic child is awarded $5.2 million in damages after it is revealed that the CEO of a vaccine maker kept his daughter from getting the company’s mercury-based vaccine.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics fired off a letter to network executives urging them to cancel the show. ABC refused, but agreed to air a disclaimer and a link to the CDC’s autism site.

The show’s producers say it is “even-handed” and presents both sides. They say they never intended to suggest that children should not be vaccinated and argue that viewers do not look to fiction for medical information.

But can we really deny that even fictional media–created purely for entertainment–still influence people? After all, isn’t that part of the point of all those fun Super Bowl commercials we will see this Sunday?

Many schools try to keep students moving on conveyor belts to good careers. Sure, kids fight in the corridors at some places, terrorizing teachers and each other, but most affluent suburban schools function without regular incidents of this sort. They generally give students the tools to get ahead, and fill their heads with all kinds of information and propaganda.

And yet, much of what happens in school could be summarized in the title of a book by the late Neal Postman about education and other aspects of popular culture: Amusing Ourselves to Death. Many “good” schools typically get kids thinking about everything except what is truly important: our relationship to God. They try to turn kids into happy chimpanzees, capable and desirous of following the rules, grinning and gobbling down the bananas offered as rewards.

Christian schools that are up against top-flight public schools are likely to lose, because they typically don’t have as many bananas to offer. Christian schools rarely have expensive but well-oiled bureaucracies. They often don’t have the clubs and activities that keep kids busy after school. But they can compete because, apart from learning about God in the context of learning about His creation, all of the bells and whistles are worthless. They may seem pleasant rather than destructive physically, but in the end they are destructive morally and theologically.

Christian schools should teach children to resist superficial happiness, the kind that comes too easily. They should want their graduates to be restless selves rather than diverted selves – to be, as Walker Percy says, dislocated humans rather than happy chimps. They should recognize that a lack of self-esteem can hurt, but unearned self-esteem can hurt even more. They should help students to locate themselves spiritually.

One other thing: Christian schools should teach children that it is good to give and fine to receive. The left wants a world where no one serves anyone else, where people are not dependent on others because they have entitlements from government. But that deprives us of part of our humanity. We begin our lives completely dependent on people. We maintain them with partial dependence. We are always completely dependent on God. Charity and service to others makes us less brutish, more giving. They help us to locate ourselves throughout our lives.

byFaith magazine writes about philosopher and theologian Paul Helm, who “looks at global warming through the lens of Pascal.”

Pascal’s argument was that if the evidence for God’s existence is no stronger than the evidence against, you should wager on the side of faith-that was what seemed reasonable to him,” said Helm. “As a philosopher, I am redeploying Pascal’s wager argument to think about global warming. We should adopt forms of action that are sensible, whether it is determined that mankind is responsible for global warming or not.”

If you go to byFaith, you can see some contrary comments against this kind of thinking, and some for it.  What do you think about “Helm’s wager”?

I received a “special greeting,” only to open it and find about fifty other addressees besides me. Not feeling so “special” anymore, I moved on to the next email.

My assumption, as I reflected on it later, was that love’s intensity is diluted when it’s stretched fifty ways. For the same reason, I would not like to be a Mormon of the old school, and competitor for my husband’s affections.

But then I started thinking of people I know who have loved me well. They have generally been people who loved others well too. There was Marge, who opened her house to many a stray hippie in Hyannis. There was Lyn, who had scores of friends, but took me to Quebec the summer my husband died.

The quality of the love, and not the number of people it alights on, is the thing. I have noticed that if a person has this kind of love, she is able to hold more people in her embrace than another person who is capable of letting in only one or two. My arithmetic was too earthly.

I need to disabuse myself of this prejudice regarding God. I have been thinking He can’t possibly love me well if he is so promiscuous with his affections. But that’s like an ant trying to fathom the sea. “The weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

What do Hillary Clinton and actress Reese Witherspoon have in common? Well, not much–but you might be amused by how much Witherspoon’s character, Tracy Flick, in Election resembles Clinton. As Slate V drolly illustrates, “Don’t you just hate when some upstart comes along and threatens your best-laid plans?”

So I’ve got this adorable 8th-grader, right? A blond, blue-eyed rough-and-tumble boy who’s very smart, but only reads books under threat of house arrest. Jacob makes good grades, but only because doing so is less painful in the Vincent household than the alternative. The kid is just not big on academics. Thus, it is a curse to this boy of ours that he is an ace speller.

He can’t help it. This first manifested itself in 3rd grade, when Jacob unwittingly advanced to the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) district-level spelling bee, took second place (after a grueling spell-down with a cute Asian girl), and was thrilled that was as far as he could go at age eight. In subsequent years, he was careful not to study for the impromptu school-level bees that lead to further, more formalized torture — and also careful not to let us know when the grade-level bees were coming, lest we make him study.

But this year, the unthinkable happened: Jacob messed up and won.

I guess the words this time were too easy for him to credibly take a dive. So he won the 8th grade bee at school. Then, last week, he won at the district level. Now the poor kid is going to Pasadena for regionals in February. If he wins there, he’ll have to go to Washington, D.C.!

Truth be told, Jacob was kind of excited when he found out about that. Now, he’s actually studying. Which brings me to our Something Light topic for today: Have you seen the ACSI 8th grade spelling word list?!

As a writer, I thought I knew a lot of words. Now, I find that thousands of 8th graders are learning words that I not only don’t know, but never even heard of!

So here’s our Something Light challenge: I’m going to give you a selection of 8th grade spelling-bee words from the official, published ACSI list that Jacob is studying every day. You must define as many of the words as you can, without looking them up. (We’ll be relying on the honor system.) Guessing is perfectly okay.

We’ll have two different kinds of winners:

1. Most words correctly defined without looking them up (one winner, unless there’s a tie).

2. Funniest made-up definitions (potentially lots of winners.)

Each winner will receive a digital laurel wreath and a hearty virtual handshake. Click “more” below for the word list and we will soon learn the answer to my topic question: Are you smarter than my 8th grader?

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Good morning!

Today’s quote is from a poet: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”