Wednesday, February 11, 2026
1905 Pope Pius X publishes the encyclical Vehementer nos
In bed at 9:10, up at 7. 26/14/35/25.
Morning meds at 9 a.m.
Wasted much of the day watching the Pam Bondi hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.
Anniversary thought. My favorite quote from any papal encyclical is from Vehementer Nos:
It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.
Long after he served as secretary of defense, Robert McNamara carried the memory of Vietnam around like a cross, simultaneously punishing and redeeming himself through his statements on the war. Yet the limits of his reexamination help explain why America is now enduring a blend of the authoritarianism and imperialism that it once deployed abroad: McNamara—like the country he served, under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—could acknowledge mistakes in Vietnam, but he never questioned the American exceptionalism that put us there in the first place. . .
What McNamara could not seem to challenge was why the United States was involved in Vietnam in the first place. What led men like him into rooms where they made decisions regarding a country they knew nothing about? How could American officials so devalue the lives of the Vietnamese relative to our own, killing more than three million Vietnamese people before our chaotic exit? What innate confidence in our own special character leads the US government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy? . . .
There is nothing complex about the Vietnam War: it was wrong for the United States to be there in the first place. McNamara hid behind a story about complexity to avoid this full reckoning, which let his successors off the hook. By the time I saw the film, [Errol Morris' The Fog of War], the US political and national security establishment had internalized the idea that Americans were suffering from “Vietnam syndrome”—an aversion to fighting wars overseas because of the outcome in Vietnam. This was seen by elites as an irrational response to trauma: the mistakes were made in the way power was used, not in its use in the first place.
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