Author’s note: We’re back, baby.

Welcome to the weekend!

Just when I thought I was out . . . The birds sound as if they’ve commenced an impeachment hearing in the boughs of the legislature’s silver maple — something about suet-backed currencies and false promises. The crow parliamentarians and the knotted worms think this is their time to push for constitutional and soil amendments . . . all very interesting to viewers of Flocks News.

Setting aside the politics of small-statured nature for a moment, today’s short story is Mark Twain’s “Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup.” Written in 1871, the story is brilliant in its simplicity and deadpan in its humor. A tale of a domestic campaign against tranquility in the name of the same, there are connections to our modern politics that will come to mind. If those parallels fail to emerge for you, never fear; I’ll force the issue just as Mrs. McWilliams does.

Twain writes:

[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.]

WELL, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup, was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called Mrs. McWilliams’s attention to little Penelope and said:

“Darling, I wouldn’t let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were you.”

“Precious, where is the harm in it?” said she, but at the same time preparingto take away the stick—for women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women.

I replied:

“Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a child can eat.”

You can read the rest here (10 minutes) or listen to it here.

Assuming you’ve read the piece [spoilers ahead], the closing line, “Very few married men have such an experience as McWilliams’s, and so the author of this book thought that maybe the novelty of it would give it a passing interest to the reader,” is such a timeworn joke packaged in a masterfully constructed sentence.

Like Norm MacDonald and his “battleaxe” of a wife, the classics find new life in the minds of the talented comics.

The most pointed part of ‘Membranous Croup’ is its observation of human nature and how we spend thousands of times more energy fixing things that we should never have done in the first place. Chesterton’s fence, the Proverbs, and T.S. Eliot’s Phlebas the Phoenician (a fortnight dead) all intimate measured consideration’s necessity.

Listening to Jonah Goldberg’s Fourth of July podcast, he makes mention of Reagan’s observation that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.” Universal liberty, rationality, and patience are not natural to children — they are taught by parents and bloody experience.

Politically, we rarely achieve more than childishness — which is why the American Revolution’s manacled government is the rare beautiful exception to other revolutions’ failure to do more than swap forms of despotism — and that works here because the Founders knew themselves — and us.

As Madison writes in Federalist No. 10:

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

Rage and ill-considered acts — leftists attacking federal buildings, populists rumbling through the Capitol — achieved nothing except condemnation and backlash because our system accommodates outbursts and ugly faction. Incapable of proscribing the liberty of others or convincing enough of one another to overthrow the status quo, we expend storehouses of energy to effect minuscule change, and that’s the point, the design. That the Supreme Court is reaffirming the need for broad legislation to be the province of the glacial legislature is especially warming.

Wearied after a week of raging and invective, I look up and watch rabbits meet at the diner stools that are the raised garden beds while the birds table their debate. I sit on the porch of a house provided cheap electricity and endless fresh water on a continent secured against foes and want. The warring stops when the laptop lid closes — how good it is to be an American where our altercations are ephemeral and our Constitution enduring. As the kids say, we’re built different. If the country has a piece of low-grade construction timber lodged in its throat, our wackadoo ministrations will eventually succeed through failure, as the country rejects the whole mess in one go and keeps on keepin’ on — Hilux-like.

Best of all, on Monday, we can check in with Brittany Bernstein’s exhaustively researched “Forgotten Fact-Checks” to remember what had us bothered the week before — leaving the weekends open for recalling how to put the dock back in the lake and putting the plug in before backing up the boat.

Here’s Venezuelan immigrant and professional harpist and backhoe operator Larry Bellorín plucking the strings on his lunch break in Raleigh, North Carolina — only in America:

Author’s note: If there’s a short story or novella you’d like to see discussed in the coming months, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com. Thank you all for making the “Weekend Short” a delight to write.