The career of Steve Jobs exemplifies the American dream.

It is jarring that death strikes Jobs at a point so young – at 56, he barely had half the professional years of Edison, Ford, and Carnegie, who all died in their eighties. It means the world will miss out on the latter days of career, whether he would’ve stretched out for more incredible goals, or turned to more philanthropic pursuits. In his time, he touched so many areas of cultural life, not just through consumer products, his effect on communication and education, but also the creation of some of the best films of the past decade. So much work in such a compressed period of time. In the beginning, he seemed so young.  And at the end, he seemed old beyond his years.

Jobs was and will remain a cult-like figure, the confrontational counterculturalist, the turtlenecked Buddhist who lived in empty mansions. His products bore his imprint in incredible ways – the original iPods had volume and gain problems almost entirely due to Jobs’ personal hearing loss – and his ruthless expectation for perfection in design is evident – that things should not just look beautiful, but work beautifully. This came at a premium, of course, but it also planted the flag for others to follow and broaden the impact. Sometimes you need a $500 iPad before you have a $200 Kindle Fire.

The Apple fanbase, in recent years, insulated Jobs from the kind of criticism targeted at other prominent CEOs. The genius was all his, the failures the fault of an insufficient apostle. There was major blowback online when the New York Times reported recently that there was no public record of Jobs ever donating to charity.  In this, he was consistent with other progressives (charitable tracking statistics illustrate that those who favor government-mandated income redistribution are statistically far less giving with their own funds, and vice versa). But who knows if that would have changed in time. Carnegie’s dictum is that you spend the first third of your life learning, the second earning, the third giving what you’ve earned away. Jobs, of course, only got the first two.

Yet what Jobs gave the world was something far more fascinating and eye-opening than another museum wing. He was the rare inventor who did not lose sight of the ultimate marketplace for invention – remaining profoundly and tangibly consumer-focused. There have been few leaders of industry throughout the Twentieth Century who had comparable impact on this scale. Most didn’t have a pedigree that said they could change the world. They were tinkerers, dreamers, and visionaries. The risks they took didn’t all pay off. But oh, when they did…

Before the announcement came down yesterday, I’d planned to write something critical about this Peter Thiel essay, and Neal Stephenson’s too, both of whom write about what they view as an untimely end to American technological innovation. They raise some good points. But their pessimism just doesn’t ring true to me. And in Jobs’ death, I think I understand why.

Here’s the thing. The really brilliant ones – the ones who truly advance culture and technology and communication – change the things they touch in such a way that the barriers they break are thoroughly demolished. Afterwards, disenchantment sets in. These barriers are broken, yes, but what next? And time and again, the dust left behind becomes fertile soil for the ingenuity of our children and theirs.

The essence of American optimism is founded in a belief that the world we pass on can exceed the one we inherited. We are not prisoners of an all-encompassing destiny, and neither are our children. This is not a uniquely American inclination, mind you, but a human one – but not all cultures acknowledge or honor it. It was here in America where such an experience was uniquely understood from our inception in our creed. We create, as we were created, and know all who are created have worth. So they have an equal claim to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit. And the fruits of this pursuit are passed on via free enterprise to the new generation, who see in this device or invention not a crowning achievement or barrier buster or an endpoint, but the seed for new ideas, the foundation for new creations, the starting point for a boundless flood of imagination.

We break walls so they can step through. We take them so far, and they take themselves farther. We pass on principles gained, and they apply them. The old begets the new.

So Ray, the milkshake-mixer salesman, the son of Czech immigrants who lied about his age to fight in the First World War, invents fast food. And Bob, third son of a midwestern Congregational reverend, who built an airplane in the garage when he was 12, invents the microchip. And Steve, an Arab-American kid born out of wedlock, adopted son of a machinist and an accountant, drops out of college, starts a company in his garage, and invents something that puts the whole world in the palm of your hand.

It’s happened before. It will happen again. Until it does: Go west, old man, and grow young with the country.

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The talented and under-appreciated Kenny Edwards, a great American singer/songwriter, passed away this week. Edwards wasn’t a recognizable name for a lot of folks, but you’d recognize his music and his style if you heard it — in fact, you probably already have.

Two years ago, I heard a snatch of music played over a commercial. A lot of unknown acts and working musicians who can’t sell their music to the radio conglomerates can make a good buck selling it for use in commercials, and sites like AdTunes have sprung up to help people track down who recorded what. I figured out that Edwards had recorded this snatch guitar and mandolin, but I couldn’t find it anywhere to purchase. I eventually dug up Edwards personal site, and sent an email to the contact listing.

Who should write back but Edwards himself, surprised at the way I’d found his music (the ad had run late at night on Cartoon Network). We corresponded over email over a couple of days — he said the song, “Take Me Home,” wasn’t publicly available, but that he’d be happy to send it my way. I thanked him by ordering his album from his site. Two discs showed up the next week, his album and a burned copy of a couple of instrumentals, all of them excellent. He’d signed the album with a nice note.

It was only later that I discovered who Edwards really was, that as a teenager, along with Bobby Kimmel and Linda Ronstadt, he’d formed the Stone Poneys back in the Sixties. Ronstadt eulogized Edwards in the L.A. Times in a way that tells you how much she valued him: “He didn’t really have an arc in his career, he just kept getting better and better.”

R.I.P.

I have been asked by many who knew that I went up to New York City for the events to share an account of Father Neuhaus’s wake and funeral, and so here it is.  Excuse the rambling nature of it – there was too much shared over these two days to recall it all, and my memory isn’t as good as it used to be.

On Monday night at Father Neuhaus’s wake at Immaculate Conception in New York City, there were (by my estimate) roughly 1,200 people in a church that could hold about 800. I arrived far too early and not wanting to conflict with the evening service, went across the street to wait in one of the thousand dirty basement Irish bars there seem to be in that city, listening to the Brooklyn vowels of some angry Jets fans discussing personnel moves made and unmade.  New York is such an odd place.

After it got really packed I let an old woman have my seat and stood in the back.  The church was packed to the brim and every New York Catholic of note was there, it seemed like, interspersed with people who just knew him as “Father Richard, who baptized my son or my daughter,” and had no knowledge of his other work.  They seemed amazed to learn what he had achieved.

There were three eulogies after the homily. George Weigel’s was good, Jody Bottum’s was powerfully personal, and Robert Louis Wilken’s was inspired.  Of the three, Jody’s was the most political – at one point noting that, when the regime of abortion in America is finally ended, Father Neuhaus will be hailed rightly as a mighty champion for the cause of life, without whom it could never be achieved.  There were letters from the President, and not just of this country, and hundreds from around the world, filled with sorrow and prayer.

There were stories of his time at the church he described as “St. John the Mundane.”  There were stories of his conversion from Lutheran to Catholic, from liberal to conservative, but in both cases, it seemed more that the world turned around him than that he changed.  There were recitations of his favorite quotations – perhaps one of his favorite being one of Alexander Hamilton’s remarks, that “I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided.” There were notations on his favorite words – “Winsome.” “Egregious.” And favorite of all, “Convivium.”

When invited to “Convivium” at Fr. Neuhaus’s house, one was expected to arrive promptly by seven PM, in order to stand together and sing the evening prayer.  The discussions over his dinner table, usually surrounded by young Catholic men and women, were the stuff of legend.  His house was always a mess, but a mess with unique stories hidden in it, and some excellent wine.  Perhaps the oddest furnishing was his bathroom wall that was papered with photographs of all these young people, so that he could see them while he shaved, and be reminded to pray for them as he walked – or jaywalked, which he was famous for, with a Calvinists’ sense that those cars would do what they would do – during the day.

There were many, many tales of his addiction to cheap liquor (Jack Daniels at its finest) and good cigars (two a day on average), and more tales of his long friendship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who would always stay with him once a year. Rabbi Heschel always said that he would bring the liquor if Father Neuhaus brought the opinions, but in truth, he brought both.  Neuhaus called him “Father Heschel” – and Heschel called him “Rabbi Neuhaus.”

He made terrible coffee, but it motivated him to stay up later and talk more, so everyone always encouraged him to make it.  He wrote 12,000 words a month for print, on average, and near the end, confided from his deathbed that he only wished he had the time to write more. He was motivated always by a longing for “prudence, justice, courage, wisdom, holiness,” and his mantra of “fidelity, fidelity, fidelity.”

Father Neuhaus once confided that the secret to his prodigious ability was to make sure he said his morning prayer every day before he read the newspaper.  Putting God first, he could get to the work God asked of him with a mind set to the right purpose.

The next morning, the day of the funeral mass, the church was even more packed – I would estimate as many as 1,600.  I stood in the back behind what seemed like the entire editorial board of National Review, First Things, and the bevy of priests who were there.  I missed a small amount of the mass, as there was an elderly woman who had come out with a cane who I ended up helping around quite a bit.  But I heard the whole of the homily first, by Father Raymond de Souza.  Fr. de Souza began by saying “Cardinal Ratzinger once said…” and had a quote that seemed relatively minor.  He then explained that he thought Fr. Neuhaus would have approved of any funeral homily that began, “Cardinal Ratzinger said,” because it was one of his favorite things to begin any conversation with in life.

Fr. de Souza’s remarks focused on this verse from Isaiah, one of my personal favorites which apparently was one of Fr. Neuhaus’s favorites as well, and its description of what he called “the eternal Convivium” of believers.  It is the Convivium that begins at the Altar, and ends in the Kingdom of God.

We recited the RSV translation instead of the NAB (to avoid, they said, setting the Father to spinning before he was in the grave):

The loss of Fr. Neuhaus, Hadley Arkes said, “For his friends this is the kind of loss that tilts the world on its axis; for so many things marking the world around just cannot be the same.”  But having been to this vigil and this mass, I feel like this is not true.  It may seem the case to us – it may seem wrong, unjust, unfair.  But I think now that it is right, and good, and the way things ought to be.

He once wrote of the cross: “This is the axis mundi, the center upon which the cosmos turns.”  He liked that phrase.  And now he knows it in full.  I have no doubt of that.

For this is the way the story should end: a sinner becomes a man of God, a man of God becomes a great warrior for God, and a warrior for God, triumphant in his work, goes now to be with God – welcomed as a champion.