The American billionaire Elon Musk, lately much in the news on account of his ambition to send apple pie, solar energy, PayPal, and Ninja Turtles to other planets in our galaxy, was once a cash-strapped college student. The experience, as he boasted to the Los Angeles Times, had taught him frugality: “I tried various experiments...
Month: March 2014
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Suicide State
“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
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Never-Ending War: An Economic Policy
Contrary to the assertion of official historians, April 1865, which saw the fall of the Confederate States of America, was not the month in which the “Union” was saved or a “nation” was forged. It was the month that saw the transformation of the republic into an oligarchy, and the expansion of government subsidies into...
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The Russians Are Coming!
When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union imploded shortly afterward, the world breathed a sigh of relief—except in the faculty lounges of our more exclusive universities, the last bastion of Marxism in the developed world. But these hothouse exotics weren’t the only losers. Their opposite numbers, the professional anticommunists, had far more to...
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In Praise of Geopolitics
The noun geopolitics and the adjective geopolitical are increasingly present in media discourse on world affairs. In principle, this is a good thing. Relating political power to the immutable imperatives of space and resources is essential to an analysis of world affairs that is free from the ideological baggage of American exceptionalism, whether Wilsonian or...
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Did You Hear the One About Syria?
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
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In Search of the Bourgeoisie
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
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Upstarts Like Shakespeare
I’ve no more desire than the next Anglophile with a framed colored engraving of the queen-empress on his office wall to pull down the aristocracy; to take away their estates and paintings and seats in the Lords and ancient Rollses resting on blocks in stables where the racing stud used to breed. And yet I...
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Polemics on Polemics
When I delivered Liberty: The God That Failed into the hands of my publisher, I did so with no little trepidation. Supported entirely by Protestant, secular academic, and other non-Catholic sources, including the work of numerous historians of the first rank, its detailed, 700-page counternarrative of the rise and fall of what the moderns call...
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Light From Elsewhere
In the beginning, the poetic birth of the city becomes visible in the Iliad in the warrior camp of the Achaeans, in what Pierre Manent calls—in one of his most striking formulations—the “republic of quarrelsome persuasion.” We are not, of course, concerned here with the city as defined by, say, urbanology or archaeology, but with...
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A Corrupt Bargain
Careful readers have long suspected that the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was about something more sinister than bureaucratic ineptitude and Department of Justice stonewalling. The ATF allowed arms dealers in Arizona and New Mexico to sell weapons to individuals working for Mexican drug cartels in order, the DOJ claimed, to trace the movement of...
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The Way of Perfection
Paradoxically, Westerners of every faith and political opinion seem perennially unhappy with Western society, despite the West’s assurance that it is the best, most fair, most free, most enlightened, and most humane way of life in human history. The left faults Western institutions because they seem to it insufficiently fair and progressive, too much influenced...
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Muslim Murder in London
Last May, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two Muslim converts, both Christian apostates, deliberately ran down an off-duty British soldier, Lee Rigby, in their automobile on a main street in the London suburb of Woolwich. In front of eyewitnesses, they then repeatedly stabbed him and tried to behead him with a machete. Their trial and...
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Middle-Class Pretensions
When I was growing up in England 50 years ago, the newspapers still periodically caused a certain amount of mirth by “outing” a national figure as not some impeccably Eton-reared patrician, as his public image seemed to imply, but a horny-handed son of the soil who had gone to the local state school and taken...
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True Tar-Heel Tales
Uncle Bud “Now take this here Trayvion business,” said Uncle Bud. He stopped and took a sip, just like he always done before delivering his wisdom. Uncle Bud worn’t axtually my uncle. In fact, he worn’t no blood kin at all. He had once been married to Mama’s cousin. She had run off with a...
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Leftist Culture, Leftist Memory
This book’s lugubrious title, Franco’s Crypt, indicates its partiality. Written in a fluid style befitting its author, who has published in the New York Times Book Review and served as editor for The Times Literary Supplement, the book draws on multiple sources, including necrology, photography, monuments, museums, art, literature, memoirs, histories, and school curricula. The...
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Hating Your Own
Last May, an unnamed friend of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron was quoted referring to the Conservative Party’s base as “mad, swivel-eyed loons.” This extraordinary outburst illustrates the extent of the rift between Cameron and a large section of his party. Cameron and his progressive followers have never been a good fit for the Conservative...
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The Poet Malgré Lui
Over 30 years ago, when I was a seminarian in Rome, one of my professors exclaimed, “John Ford is the Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century.” Fortunately, at Columbia University I had studied under Andrew Sarris, the famed “auteur” film critic, so I knew the context. In any case, Ford’s reputation as certainly one of...
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Pregnant With Meaning
Her Produced by Annapurna Pictures Written and directed by Spike Jonze Distributed by Warner Brothers Inside Llewyn Davis Produced by StudioCanal and Anton Capital Entertainment Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by CBS Films Her is directed by Spike Jonze, the inscrutable nom de cinema Adam Spiegel has adopted for himself. Set...
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