“Congratulations! It’s a boy!” Does that sound like hate speech to you? No? Well, obviously, you’re a cisgender bigot. That’s how Slate’s C.S. Milloy sees it . . . Wait, you don’t know what a “cis” is? What’s wrong with you? In today’s gender-studies-enriched society, a “cis” is a “you,” or “your wife,” or all...
Month: August 2014
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Neocon Nightmare
I have a recurring nightmare in which the war criminals who lied us into Iraq reappear to mock the hundreds of thousands they murdered in cold blood, repeating the same lies, the same rationalizations, the same mindless slogans that lured us into that hellhole to begin with. Bill Kristol, the Kagan clan, the Israel Firsters,...
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Chinese Exclusion
Five years ago, the California state legislature voted to apologize to the Chinese for former laws that discriminated against them, including the federal government’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which California congressmen championed. The apology bill was sponsored by state assembly members Paul Fong and Kevin de León. Fong said he was not planning on...
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A Joint Criminal Conspiracy
The Great War started 100 years ago this August. The most tragic event in human history, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A prosperous and well-ordered world was shattered forever. New killing machines that only a generation earlier did not exist were deployed on a massive scale: airplanes, tanks, poison gases, submarines. The...
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Football Mafia
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
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And All Shall Equal Be
This is our annual summer vacation issue, which means I am free to ramble on like an old lizard soaking up gin and sunshine at the beach and telling stories that all begin, “Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ” Did I ever tell you about the time I first...
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Buy American: Compelling Reasons
For years, the media and Hollywood have sent the message that anyone who wants to be fashionable should eschew American products and buy foreign ones. Recently, Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, put a different message on Facebook: “If you want to live in a country that builds things, you have to buy things...
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Silver or Lead: The Reverse Assimilation of the Southwest
Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbot committed what is commonly called a political gaffe earlier this year when he said what every thinking person this side of the Rio Grande already knew: Mass immigration from Mexico means the importation of Mexican corruption and the steady erosion of law and social trust that too...
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Recess Games
“Supreme Court sharply limits presidential power on recess appointments.” Thus read the headline in the Los Angeles Times after the High Court’s decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning. Applying its spin to the decision, National Review opined that “the Court rejected the administration’s power grab on recess appointments” and clarified when a recess...
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Reading Poe
While he is to be complimented on an absorbing essay, Egon Richard Tausch (“The Writer and the Lawyers,” Vital Signs, May) goes too far in claiming that Poe “despised” the New England poets and “proved without [sic] a doubt” that Longfellow, in particular, was “a pathological plagiarist, poem by poem.” More than once in his...
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The May Issue
I was delighted to see that the May issue was focused on Ukraine, the largest European country. While there is no point in polemicizing with those of your contributors who believe in an amoral Realpolitik—after all, if force trumps ideas, what is the point of words?—most of their analyses of Ukraine merit a response. I...
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The Fruits of Fraud
The worst thing about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion in all 50 states and U.S. territories has not been the 55 million—and counting—dead babies, as horrible as that has been, but the damage it has caused to the rule of law, specifically the U.S. Constitution. In his dissent, Justice Byron White branded...
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Country
Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. That is not it. That is not it! Proximo: Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus! —from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Every time I watch the above scene from Gladiator, that powerful movie about the decadence of...
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Something With Pages
Some thoughtful soul, not I, would perhaps have some positive words about the present volume, and not without some justification. There is much to be said in praise of the Library of America and the quality of its volumes in various categories of presentation, and in the past I not only have acknowledged such manifest...
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Whens, Ifs, and Buts
When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on Germany. A Russian...
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Carry On
The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with liberalism and conservatism, right and left. Modern...
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Some More Memories
One of my history department chairmen had the habit of hiring at whim as instructors various unqualified people, lacking appropriate degrees and without the vetting that was usually done. A new, more professional chairman decided, rightly, to get rid of them. One was a radical African-American preacher, notorious for complaints and a cavalier attitude toward...
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Diversity Where It Counts
A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge. Discouragingly, a majority of academic books that have bounced across my desk in recent years either regurgitate what was told better long ago, or are the distorted remnants of...
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Too Quiet Flows the Don
The stone head from the Iron Age glowers out of its glass case as if outraged by the indignity of imprisonment, its relegation from totem to tourist attraction. Not that there are ever many tourists in Doncaster Museum, especially on a unseasonably warm day when the sun-punished town seems full of the grit and stink...
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Vocation and the Humane Economy
I once sat on the honors orals of an economics major who had applied a standard mathematical model to immigration. The mathematics and data collection were well done, but the thesis was premised on the assumption we can understand immigration by analyzing a sufficiently large sample of economic data with a reputable mathematical model. Were...
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No Free Lunch
This summer, as U.K. schoolchildren go on vacation, their school buildings will become hives of activity. Construction workers will descend in droves to overhaul kitchens and dining halls. These need to be refitted for a major new purpose. Starting in September, state primary schools will be serving free hot lunches to all pupils in their...
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Unshattered
Admittedly, I approached Amanda Bell with a degree of caution. I am, to say the least, wary of fiction, especially fiction centered around a female protagonist who is on a path of self-understanding and realization. The soppy novels of an Emily Giffin or a Helen Fielding come to mind. But rest assured, Jeff Minick’s first...
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Songs of Innocence and Experience
Ida Produced by Canal + Polska Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski Screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz Distributed by Music Box Films The personal is the political: This 1960’s catchphrase defiantly bandied by leftists and feminists has always seemed to me childishly peevish. It’s as if, in a fit of collective pique, those on the...
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Practical Distributism
Distributism is a Catholic social philosophy that, as Thomas Storck writes, “seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life.” Unfortunately, distributism is frequently debated or discussed in terms of macroeconomics—a national economic system. But the more important activity is already occurring at...
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