The salient difference between Cinderella and her sisters, unfortunately for all you defenders and upholders of the Protestant work ethic out there, is not that she eats her bread in the sweat of her brow while they eat sweetmeats, try on varicolored gowns, and loaf about. The salient difference between them is that Cinderella is...
Month: March 2013
Post
Second-Time Charms
Second-term U.S. presidents tend to focus more on world affairs than on domestic issues, for good or for ill. In January 1957, Dwight Eisenhower authorized the commitment of U.S. forces “to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence” of any nation that requested help against communist aggression. Ronald Reagan, after his reelection in...
Post
The Last Thing on Anyone’s Mind
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live, high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One, a German, is straight out of central casting of a Panzer commander; the other, an Englishman, more P.G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both...
Post
Facts and Opinions
“I think it’s been very hard for Speaker Boehner and Republican Leader McConnell to accept the fact that taxes on the wealthiest Americans should go up a little bit, as part of an overall deficit reduction package.” This haplessly phrased bit of Obamaspeak is one out of many illustrations of a confusion between fact and...
Post
That Hideous Absolutism
To the modern mind, religion and magic are related. Both are based on superstition, and both have been proved false by science. C.S. Lewis thought otherwise: Magic is more closely related to science. Both function as alternatives to religion, both lack skepticism, and, most importantly, both desire to control the world. Science, not religion, is...
Post
Granny and Jesus
Granny had been brought up in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and went to church once every two or three years, usually on Mother’s Day, hoping my father would join her and learn to appreciate her innumerable virtues. He never went. On Sunday mornings, he worshiped God at the Bobby Jones Golf Course—no exceptions. ...
Post
Fiscal Miffed
The House of Representatives, at 10:57 p.m. on January 1, passed the Fiscal Cliff bill, with Republicans voting 2 to 1 against it. Speaker Boehner’s negotiations with President Obama had been a disaster. The President’s only concession was his definition of rich, which he raised from $200,000–$250,000 per year to $400,000–$450,000. Other than that, nothing—no...
Post
A Debt-Free Country?
There “does not exist an engine so corruptive,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1821, “of the government and so demoralizing of the nation as a public debt. It will bring on us more ruin at home than all the enemies from abroad . . . ” Jefferson left Paris in 1790 three years before the French...
Post
Liberty, Justice, and Abortion For All
Last June, the Supreme Court decided that the ObamaCare individual mandate passed constitutional muster under Congress’s taxing power. It left undecided a host of other issues that are now being litigated in the lower courts. Under the HHS mandate that followed ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer health-insurance coverage for sterilization...
Post
Beautygate!
Here’s an opinion that might as well be a fact of life: Men of all ages find beauty queens to be attractive. Yes, I know, it’s quite a newsflash. Remember, you read it here first. Yet judging by the media’s reaction when longtime sports play-by-play man Brent Musburger paid a compliment to Katherine Webb, the...
Post
Ugly Realities
I was thrilled to see that Aaron D. Wolf was poised to address the “ugly reality” behind the murder-suicide perpetrated by Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher (“Handgun Culture, Cultural Revolutions, January). Unfortunately, instead of confronting the real problem, Mr. Wolf went on a puritanical tirade against cohabitation. The “ugly reality” that the mainstream media...
Post
The (Mis)Information Economy
From digital broadcasts that allow TV stations to report more quickly from the scene of breaking news, to websites that can distribute information to tens of thousands of readers in mere seconds, to Facebook and Twitter and other social media that provide a “crowdsourcing” element, quickly able to detect and correct mistakes, the rise of...
Post
Neocons in the Dock
The nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense has sparked a firestorm of opposition from Israel’s fifth column in the United States. It is a useful example of just how the Jewish state’s parasitic relationship with America works. Israel cannot stand alone: She is a European colony in the midst of an Arab sea...
Post
Democracy and the Golden Mean
A naive visitor arriving in the United States from abroad might conclude from the popular emphasis on “moderation” in contemporary American political discourse that Americans live under a government that represents a moderate theory of the appropriate scope and power of the state and harbors only modest political ambitions. If he happens to be a...
Post
Frost/Nixon
David Frost is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the Atlantic ocean. When he’s at home in England, Sir David, as he’s known, fronts daytime-television panels and gives splendid summer parties at the country home he shares with his wife, Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard. For many years, he also hosted a Sunday-morning interview hour in which,...
Post
The Press: Hidden Persuasion or Sign of the Times?
Modern Western societies are commonly called industrial or democratic societies. They might just as well be named mass-communication societies, for the average citizen is supposed to be informed about what goes on in and around the city whose welfare and leadership he is supposed to assume. As the medium through which comes the data about...
Post
Getting the Scoop
“All we want are the facts, ma’am.” —Sgt. Joe Friday Not long ago I was sorting through old papers for disposal. I came across a clipping saved for some forgotten reason. On the reverse was this headline: “NAACP Chief Says More Assistance Needed.” This headline might have appeared in my hometown paper today (though I...
Post
Home Truths on Ecology
The relationship between Greens and Conservatives in England is notoriously fractious. Many conservatives see Greens as sub-Marxist semibeatniks, and many Greens see conservatives as military-industrial Morlocks. Yet etymology alone suggests that conservatism and conservationism should shade into each other, just as blue blends into green and back again in the color spectrum. And even if...
Post
Unspoken Promises
Promised Land Produced by Focus Features and Image Nation Directed by Gus Van Sant Screenplay by Matt Damon and John Krasinski from a story by David Eggers Distributed by Focus Features I thoroughly enjoyed Matt Damon’s latest movie, Promised Land. It channels Frank Capra’s spirit, featuring little people caught in the toils of corporate...
Post
Mr. Eliot’s Double Life
These two massive volumes—the first published originally in 1988, the second now joining it with much fanfare—chronicle the period during which T.S. Eliot developed from the scion of a prosperous Midwestern family to the poet of The Waste Land and “Prufrock,” but also to a banker and one-man editorial staff of a fledgling new journal...
Post
In God We Fail
The recent flood of secession petitions in the wake of the re-election of President Barack Obama has raised secession to something more than the curiosity or esoteric joke that it has been heretofore. In the 1990’s an occasional newspaper article appeared about the League of the South or the Vermont independence movement, treating them as...
Post
Surviving the Budget Crisis
My dear Hobson, The bleak tone of your email has distressed me. You report waking on the morning of November 7 convinced that a vast majority of politicians—Republicans and Democrats—are certifiable lunatics. According to your somewhat incoherent letter—were you inebriated, or are all those sentence fragments and dangling prepositions the dismal product of your recently...
Post
The Rise and Death of the Disinformation Media
Americans can now pick from a welter of news outlets on the internet and from such independent sources as this magazine. Yet most Americans still get their news from the usual disinformation sources: the major newspapers and broadcast and cable TV. This became clear to me in 2012. After resisting for decades, in July 2012...
Issue