Helprin's scene and his description of the effect of the gradual rise of a full moon on the darkened landscape bring the National Lawyers Association to mind. The NLA intends to provide the light by which the utter desolation of American law and the American legal profession might be observed. If so, then the law and the legal fession might resuscitate.

If this occurs then again we might know the social stability, the civility, and the harmony that once supported extraordinary American communities, whether towns or cities. In those places a spontaneous creativity occurred in families and among persons. This established a culture that was one of the world's strongest and most durable. It was this culture, precisely, that sustained the United States in the great crises of the 20th Century. These crises were the European Wars, and the Pacific Wars, also known as World War I, and World War II and its continued wars in Korea and Indochina, including Viet Nam, the Depression, and the terrible "isms" whether German Socialism, or Soviet Communism, or Japanese or Italian Fascism. Although they were overcome or endured until their collapse, they deposited an assortment of smaller monsters, in the form of a savage and warring states around the globe.

Much worse, in America they and their supporting philosophers and editors assembled utterly destructive ideas that became dogmas, the identify of which are always denied by their creators and their surrogates, or are hidden in a darkened landscape under some epithet associated with the words "rights" or "equality," or "justice" or "freedom,"

When left to fester, the dogmas infect the academic community, or the hot little brain of a new law clerk in a higher or the highest court. They foment wanton politics in a bar association section, a judicial appointment-reviewing committee, or a law school accreditation committee. From this setting, a fuming ideology assails social stability and civility as they are converted into flash points. Law becomes anti-law, rights become anti-rights, harmony is disharmony, welfare is anti-welfare, protecting the meek and the poor destroys the meek and the poor, to fear the police officer means freeing the felon, reality is unreality, to Deconstruct is to construct, to affirm is to deny.

To protect life, a smiling American President supports sucking the brains from a new child. His televised display occurs among an assortment of committed faces. This commitment shows they are very concerned about "rights" and they are totally-dedicated, compassionate persons. Ah yes, very, very compassionate persons.

There are others who would be President, or support one who might be. They are determined to cut all taxes by 15 percent, or cut capital-gains, or establish "enterprise zones" because "future generations of Americans" they tell us, will not be able to pay the rising public/governmental debt.

It seems not to occur to these debt-reducers that the future generations they would protect from debt are dead. Perhaps they mean that in future generations life with heavy debt is worse than death itself.

Meanwhile, a once magnificent social order and culture is awash in blood and parts of small bodies superimposed by a court's decree -- er, well, how should one say this, "a court's declaration of a fundamental right to privacy." Yes, that's it. This is a court that says it sits, as law students are taught and lawyers of every stripe pontificate, "to protect rights and equality, and freedom and justice."

If we leave the beautiful 50 year recollections of Mark Helprin's principal character to the darkness above Rome, if we return to real time and place, we ask several questions? How did this happen? Why does it continue? Why do persons who hold powerful political office defend this killing in deep and solemn voice, as they inveigh against smoking a cigarette that is harmful to health?

Is it that we construct museums and replicas of the National Socialist (Nazis) Holocaust (which the English-speaking armies and navies of the Judeo-Christian West stopped, cold) in Washington, not because 8 million persons died but because the Socialist death camps were large, conspicuous, and accompanied by many pictures?

Have we learned more from the Japanese than their cars or tape recorders teach? The Japanese did almost as much as the National Socialists, their overseas killing destroyed millions of persons, but they did it in smaller places, and in smaller camps. The Japanese death camp at Cabanatuan was as deadly as the death camps at Buchenwald orAuschwitz, but its size was very much smaller and it destroyed fewer persons.

In America perhaps it is the smallness of all those places, the "abortion clinics" with their piles of green or brown plastic trash bags waiting in back for next-day pickup. Maybe this is why the killing continues. Unlike Buchenwald, Auschwitz, or other Socialist or Communist death camps, there are no pictures to record 45 million dead. Like Cabanatuan, the places are smaller and just as deadly.

In America and in Germany, today's academic fashion asks how many persons assisted the Death Head Squads or the Waffen-SS Officers? Could it be, the thought runs, that ordinary persons, such a clerks and secretaries were involved in or directly supported that butchery? Did German lawyers, judges, and courts participate? Surely not. Not lawyers, judges, and courts. Not the legal profession, not major bar associations, not the law schools, not CLE programs, not law day speakers, many financed by cash-rich foundations. Surely, not these.

It is better to return, like Helprin's character, to those beautiful recollections that one has of American law of 40 years ago. It is better to know that this can be again. A full moon might rise and give light to a vast wasteland and inspiration to a wasted profession. I am honored to serve as a Trustee of the National Lawyers Association because I believe that its members want to redeem American law, and they want to resuscitate the American legal profession, and its contribution to the American social order. Of all that I am capable, I will give to this effort.