Let me second Tom Piatak. I think the best way to start appreciating Ella is by getting (off iTunes, for example) the various songbooks she recorded–Cole Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart. In these she sings mainly straight without a lot of jazzing around. My wife generally dislikes most jazz (except George Shearing and a...
Year: 2013
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A Neocon Anniversary
OK, the tenth anniversary of the worst foreign blunder Uncle Sam has ever committed has come and gone, but the post-anniversary headlines remain the same: “Explosions in Baghdad kill dozens and wound scores” (International Herald Tribune, March 20); “For Iraqis, no time for reflection, only desperation” (op. cit., March 19); “Iraq War Intelligence Was a...
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Obama, Relationship Therapist
The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, and did it very well. W.S. Gilbert’s lines from Iolanthe seem applicable to President Barack Obama’s four-day Middle East trip, which ended on March 23. The tour was a “diplomatic triumph,” according to Reuters. “Obama returns . . . with diplomatic victory,” declared CNN. ...
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Excessive Misery
I’m miserable. But if you paid attention to the national news or dialed up the Drudge Report in late February, you probably knew that already. How could I not be, sitting here in my office in downtown Rockford, Illinois? After all, according to Forbes, Rockford is the third most miserable city in the United States....
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A Sticker in Kentucky
Called by its sponsor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities,” the annual Jefferson Lecture has been delivered by such a variety of historians, scholars, novelists, and poets as to frustrate all efforts to descry a party line among them,...
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Blood Will Tell
In Tom Wolfe’s America the Northern WASP elite is shallow and cowardly, the most sacrosanct minority groups seethe with ingratitude toward the majority and snarl at one another, culture is dominated by the conspicuous vulgarity of new and ill-gotten wealth, and manners and morals are in a catastrophic nosedive in which the relation of man...
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Sexualizing Children: NBA Edition
The national celebration of sodomy continues thanks to Sports Illustrated’s new cover story featuring the first “major sport” athlete to come out of the closet while still an active player. Jason Collins, a seven-foot-tall black man, writes his own “coming out” story in the current number of SI, along with several other pieces by writers who see...
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More Random Home Truths
America has a severe educational problem: It is full of people, many of them in prominent positions, who have been educated beyond their intelligence. In fact, such people are more prominent as leaders in most American institutions than people of knowledge and character. Another educational problem: several million people who have been made unemployable...
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Google Gets One Right
Google often gets grief over the events and people it chooses to honor. Much of this criticism is justified. But sometimes Google gets one right, as it did today, when it honored Ella Fitzgerald. Here is Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, recorded in 1956. Popular music does not get any better than this–the finest vocal...
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Chechen Surprise
Last night’s shoot-out in Boston must have brought as much joy to the Kremlin as it has dampened the spirits of the White House. Thrilled with the announcement that the primary suspects in the Boston Marathon Massacre were white, anti-American leftists were hoping for the big score, another Tim McVeigh to prove that Tea...
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Kosovo, a Frozen Conflict
Until a week ago it appeared that the government in Belgrade would give up the last vestiges of its claim to Kosovo for the sake of some indeterminate date in the future when Serbia may join the European Union. A series of unreciprocated concessions over the past few months have encouraged the KLA regime’s...
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Butchery in Philadelphia
Several commenters have decried the lack of media coverage of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia. Gosnell is charged with the deaths of one pregnant woman and seven children who were born after botched abortions; those children were killed by having their spinal cords severed. Witnesses have testified that many more babies were also...
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A Misnamed Magazine
The American Conservative has had dozens of articles and posts on gay marriage. The general tenor has ranged from arguing that gay marriage is inevitable to criticizing opponents of gay marriage to arguing that support for gay marriage is the conservative position. What has largely been absent is any opposition to gay marriage. There is, of course, nothing conservative about support...
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A Storm in a Korean Teacup
On April 4 the Pentagon announced that it was sending a mobile missile defense system to Guam as a “precautionary move” to protect the island from the potential threat from North Korea. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) comprises ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, as well as naval vessels capable of shooting down...
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Gay Marriage: A Tale of Two Parliaments
By a curious coincidence, bills to legalize gay marriage are passing through the British and French parliaments almost simultaneously. While other countries like Spain and Portugal legalized gay marriage years ago, London and Paris are acting together on this—rather as they have done in Libya, Syria, and now Mali. The British and French bills were...
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Maya at Half-Past Midnight
Zero Dark Thirty Produced by Columbia and Annapurna Pictures Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Screenplay Mark Boal Distributed by Columbia and Sony Pictures Those who read this column may recall how impressed I was by The Hurt Locker five years ago. As directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, it still is the...
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Sex Matters
Rarely have I read in so few pages a book as thought-provoking and compelling as J. Budziszewski’s On the Meaning of Sex. Budziszewski, a Yale Ph.D. and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, has grappled for years with the sad effects of our era’s shallow understanding of sex on the lives...
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America’s First and Best Economist
Practice free trade. Avoid government debt. Keep the government and the banking system separate from each other. These quaint and long-rejected policies were Condy Raguet’s prescription for American peace and prosperity. Now largely forgotten, Raguet (1784-1842) was one of our earliest and best political economists. Unlike some later advocates of a free economy, Raguet was...
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America the Redeemer
Jesus’ words to his followers about the city on a hill, coming between references to salt without savor and the futility of hiding a light under a bushel, are admonitory, not congratulatory. Those upon whom the light has been bestowed are not to regard themselves as elevated, nor are they instructed to build a city. ...
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Never See His Kind Again
My father, Sefton Sandford, died last November 11, which somehow appropriately was Veterans Day. He was 87. Any child’s judgment is apt to be subjective on these occasions, but I remain stubbornly of the opinion that he was a great man, and certainly one who answered Wordsworth’s question, “Who is the happy warrior? Who is...
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Die Industrie
The title of the most famous book published in the 19th century is in fact a misnomer. Das Kapital should really be Die Industrie. It is true that in Volume One, Chapter 1, Karl Marx begins with a discussion of money as having originated not as capital but simply as a means of exchange. Money,...
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Immigration Deform
I suppose there’s no point in writing in advance about “comprehensive immigration reform,” since by the time this magazine reaches your hands the point may be moot. The Gang of Eight may well have tossed Congress the perfect bipartisan plan, and President Obama may have run down Pennsylvania Avenue, pen in hand and surrounded by...
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A Yanqui Doodle Dandy
Henry Adams published his eponymous autobiography in the early years of the last century. Now, just about a hundred years after The Education of Henry Adams, we have The Education of Héctor Villa. America is center stage in both, but they are two very different Americas. The one Adams portrayed was on the rise and...
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Professions and Professors
You know what you hardly see around anymore? Professions. Professors—hell, yes, one sees professors around, even in backward Italy, pinched, untidy, jealous of beauty, suspicious as cuckolds in Molière, speaking with the forked tongues of p.c. texts. But surely “professor” is a title or rank, not a profession or vocation. At the dawn of the...
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Forgetting Prisoner X
In the early months of 2010, a prisoner was brought to one of Israel’s most secure prisons, the Ayalon facility in Ramla, and put in a cell designed to hold the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin. None of the prison personnel were told so much as his name, nor was anything known about his alleged crime. ...
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The Military’s War on Nature
If the Beltway right has any confidence it can win the culture war, the latest news from River City should shatter that illusion. Departing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has declared war on nature. Military women will now serve in combat. “Valor knows no gender,” President Obama said, as if whether a woman can be physically...
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From Mothers to Killers
There’s no way a man can sidestep trouble writing about the prospect of women as combat troops. You know, mowing the enemy down with machine guns; blowing up things, not to mention people; cutting, slicing, jabbing, stabbing, whatever it takes. For such is war, the elements little different in a high-tech age from those prevalent...
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Giving Up, Giving In
“But what if Juárez is not a failure? What if it is closer to the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cocoons?” —Charles Bowden, Murder City On September 30, 2010, David Hartley and his wife, Tiffany, were jet-skiing on Falcon Lake along the Texas-Mexico border when a speedboat approached...
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The Quiet of Easter
In recent decades, the public profile of Easter in the United States has diminished. Americans now spend more on Halloween than on Easter, and the public attention Easter receives is largely negative. Google observed Easter Sunday by celebrating Cesar Chavez’s birthday, and public references to Easter are often excised, just as “Christmas” is often replaced...
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Fiat Values
I have never spent much time thinking about money, perhaps because I have never had enough to worry about keeping or losing it. Ignorance, however, is no serious obstacle to the hardened pontificator, who, armed only with coffee, tobacco, and access to the errors of Wikipedia, feels up to tackling any subject. The American publishing...
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Bearded Hollywood
I’ve been writing a lot about Hollywood lately, what with yet another version of The Great Gatsby coming out, this time with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role of James Gatz. The best Gatsby until now was Alan Ladd, in a 40’s black-and-white movie I saw 50 years ago. Perhaps it was my youth, but...
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In Praise of Nuclear Proliferation
Much nonsense has been spewed following North Korea’s third nuclear test on February 12. Outgoing Pentagon chief Leon Panetta declared that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are a “serious threat” to the United States. “I don’t know how you come up with a more dangerous scenario than this,” Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse...
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Coming Home
It’s 10:01 p.m. in Florence, and seven hours earlier in Chicago. According to the live map on the back of the headrest in front of me, we’re somewhere over Canada, making a beeline for Sault Ste. Marie, still in the daylight, but rapidly losing ground. As we turn ever more to the south, the darkness...
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Tiburcio Vásquez
During the last four decades, California has been proving that demography is indeed destiny. At an ever-accelerating rate the state is becoming Mexifornia. So many Mexicans have flooded into California, nearly all illegally, that instead of the new arrivals assimilating to American culture they are Hispanicizing the state. This means far more than ballots in...
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Stealth Candidates
I have no desire to defend President George H.W. Bush or his execrable appointment of David Souter to the Supreme Court, but I was confused by the chronology of the Turnock v. Ragsdale case laid out by Scott P. Richert in the February issue (“Robert Bork, R.I.P.,” Cultural Revolutions). In December 1989, when that case...
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Conservatives Back Gay Marriage
A great deal of ink is being spilled on the two Supreme Court cases taking up same-sex marriage, but the effect is rather like the ink released by a cuttlefish to cloud the vision of its enemies. To anticipate my conclusion, let me go on record as saying that family-values conservatives have done vastly...
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The Cowboys and Wyatt Earp
Arrayed against the Earps in Tombstone was a loose and constantly shifting set of alliances known as “The Cowboys.” Eastern journalists, looking for sensational material, followed the Cowboys’ enemies and rivals in describing them as an organized gang, but no one could quite figure out who the gang’s leader was—Ike Clanton, Bill Brocius, or...
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RSO: Antidote to Rockford’s Misery
On Saturday night, my wife and I were guests of our friends Jim and Betsy Easton, at a performance of Handel’s Messiah. The concert was a joint production of the Rockford Symphony Orchestra and the Mendelssohn Club chorus. The four professional soloists from out of town sang beautifully, but it was the orchestra and chorus that made greatest...
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The EU’s Iffy Eastern Partners
One variant of a well-known law of bureaucracy says that the amount of time spent discussing a budgetary decision is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the budget in question. Judging by what I witnessed on March 20 at the European Parliament—at the Committee on Budgets’ hearing on the “Financing of the Eastern Partnership”—the...
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Immer Drummer
Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance. Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song: Illegitimum non carborundum that...
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Unpatriotic Liars
Here is poor David Frum pretending to have second thoughts about the Iraq War for which he shilled. Obviously, the only people who are capable of having second thoughts had to have first thoughts, and there is no sign that Frum has ever done anything but pound a keyboard and recycle other people’s lies....
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Wyatt Earp Turns 165
Wyatt Earp, saloonkeeper, professional gambler, profligate, and alleged procurer of women, was for all his faults a great American hero. Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, home of Monmouth College, the alma mater of our friend and colleague, the late James Stockdale. Living in Iowa he was repeatedly in trouble, principally for keeping a...
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Was Iraq Worth It?
Ten years ago today, U.S. air, sea and land forces attacked Iraq. And the great goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us or transfer to al-Qaida for use against the U.S. homeland. Exact retribution for Saddam’s complicity in 9/11 after we learned...
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The Sick Man on the Senne
Contrary to popular belief, Brussels is not the only major European capital which is away from the seacoast as well as devoid of a river. The Senne is a far cry from the similar-sounding Seine further south, however: it is a nasty, brutish, mercifully short waterway. By the mid-1800’s it had become so putrid and unstable that the city elders decided to cover...
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Pope Francis
Many of us non-RC traditionalist all over the world had awaited the news from Rome with some trepidation. In the end it turned out to be rather good. Pope Francis, the first non-European Bishop of Rome since Gregory III (d. 741), is universally described as “modest” and “moderate”—which is much preferred to the dreaded...
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Who Speaks Now for the GOP?
Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to declare a filibuster and pledge he would not sit down until either he could speak no longer or got an answer to his question about Barack Obama’s war powers. Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the absence of an imminent threat,...
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Neocon 101: Art of the Pooh-Pooh
That stalwart set at National Review known as “The Editors” has done what it always does to a genuinely conservative display in the halls of power. Far from a radical denunciation, which may invite a more thoughtful reading of events and sentences, they’ve taken to light pooh-poohing. Rand Paul is providing “great entertainment,” and “We salute his...
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Breaking the Syrian Stalemate
Two years after the beginning of the Syrian insurgency, three facts are clear: The rebels are unable to bring down the government of President Bashar al-Assad, foreign political support and military supplies notwithstanding; Bashar’s forces are unable to defeat the rebels and reestablish control over the entire country; and continued third-party advocacy of either...
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Some Things to Think About
Morally responsible people sacrifice in the present to invest in the future. Irresponsible people impoverish the future to enjoy more of the present. Which describes the United States today? Voting decides nothing. It does not prove that the people rule. It merely makes a selection of which politicians will get the opportunity to pursue...
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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...