As readers of this column may have noted, I hardly ever comment on events in Moscow. Since 1984, when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in Russia, I have taken the view that the clever understand what transpires there without need for fresh explanations, while the daft, no matter how ingenious one’s explanations or persuasive one’s reasoning,...
Month: April 2014
Post
Bear Flag Revolt
Most Americans have no idea that California was once an independent republic and came into the Union, like Texas, without going through a territorial stage. This is symbolized by California’s state seal, which features Minerva, who sprang from Jupiter’s head fully formed. During the 1950’s we Golden State schoolchildren were taught all about our Bear...
Post
Eastern Approaches
In April 1904, Scottish geographer Halford Mackinder gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. His paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” caused a sensation and marked the birth of geopolitics as an autonomous discipline. According to Mackinder, control over the Eurasian “World-Island” is the key to global hegemony. At its core is the “pivot...
Post
Little Yellow Bastards
One of life’s safest bets is that, following a visit by a Japanese premier to the shrine that honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese megacrooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion over here will echo them. ...
Post
National Debtors
The United States is a nation of debtors. Whatever sources you consult or trust, our per capita debt is extraordinarily high. The money geeks at NerdWallet.com, after analyzing statistics from the Federal Reserve, offer the following profile of American households: Average credit-card debt: $15,270 Average mortgage debt: $149,925 Average student-loan debt: $32,258 I shall not...
Post
Eugenio Corti, R.I.P.
With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters. Corti is best known as the author of Il Cavallo Rosso (The Red Horse), a book that wedded the narrative skills of the European novel to an uncomplicated Christian Faith that belonged to a different age...
Post
Restoring the Earth to the Living
When speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, Jehovah gave explicit instructions on the Year of Jubilee. Once the people came into the Promised Land, every 50 years they were to observe the Jubilee. Loans were to be written off, slaves freed, and land that had been sold returned to the original owner. Those who had...
Post
Lies, Damn Lies, and RFRA
The headline in the New York Times trumpeted the paper’s approval: “Arizona Governor vetoes bill on refusal of services to gays.” Had Jan Brewer not done the right thing, the nefarious bill passed by the Arizona legislature “would have given business owners the right to refuse services to gay men, lesbians, and other people on...
Post
Macmillan’s Legacy
In “That Special Relationship” (Vital Signs, February), Christopher Sandford compares British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s attitudes toward communism with those of President John F. Kennedy. I hope that Mr. Sandford’s upcoming book on the subject will provide some crucial historical context by discussing Macmillan’s role in the forced repatriation of Slovenian freedom fighters (Domobranci) to...
Post
Final Thoughts
Catholics and Protestants sometimes remind me of Captain Quint and Chief Brody on board the Orca. While they are at odds with each other, a monstrous thing is circling their beat-up old boat and threatening to swallow them whole, to paraphrase Quint. Pretty soon we mackerel-snappers and our Protestant brethren may very well find ourselves in...
Post
Repudiating the Debt
In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to...
Post
Why Has the Land Turned on Me?
I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living. Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count. But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...
Post
The Person Is Always Becoming
Everyone in the Western world writes from left to right, so Michael Novak’s title is more cute than revealing. The subtitle, on the other hand, makes a claim: that he moved from at one point in his life being a liberal to an admission that, sometime before he reached his present octogenarian state, he was...
Post
The World Goes Its Way
A French writer argues that “humanity” has become the accepted “version of the universal” in contemporary Western thought, functioning as the “action” of modern democratic polity. While Pierre Manent’s thesis is a convincing one, political and social occurrences in the past decade seem to indicate that the West’s humanitarian “version” is becoming discredited at an...
Post
Memories: Glimpses of Notables
In my senior year I was editor of the high-school newspaper. (We even won a prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism.) What I remember most is the literary progeny on my staff. It included the daughter of Burke Davis, a well-known writer of the time; the daughter of the historian Richard N. Current;...
Post
Flyover Math
In January, George Mason University published a survey of the financial solvency of our country’s 50 states. Illinois came in at 48th place, just in front of Connecticut and New Jersey. The Land of Lincoln caught a bit of a break, it seems. Perhaps the extent of Illinois’s legacy pension and healthcare costs was not...
Post
The Most Truly Conservative Person . . .
When Margaret Thatcher died last April, the obsequies were at times almost drowned by vitriolic voices celebrating her demise. There were howls of joy from old enemies, street parties, and a puerile campaign to make the Wizard of Oz song “Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead!” the top-selling pop single. (It failed, narrowly.) The extravagant...
Post
A Guiding Presence
Bruno Gentili passed away in Rome on January 8. He was Italy’s most distinguished scholar of ancient Greek language and literature. His contributions ranged from composing a popular textbook of Greek lyric poetry and the basic introduction to Greek meter for Italy’s classical high schools to editing scholarly editions of the texts of the Greek...
Post
Truth on a Diet
Now that Matthew McConaughey has won his loudly preordained Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, it’s time we asked how he did it. The answer is simple. He pulled off a canny trifecta: First, he made himself an LGBT wet dream by playing a heterosexual who gets AIDS; second,...
Post
The Uses of American Government
That the republic has degenerated from a Protestant-inflected localized republic to a centralized bureaucratic imperial state is something most conservatives take for granted. The reason for such a transformation, however, sometimes becomes more assumed than proved. This compounds the difficulty of convincing liberals, and even some “conservatives,” that such a transformation has occurred. The secular...
Post
California Surfs Toward Bankruptcy
Beach Blanket Bankruptcy would be a great name for a 1960’s-style surf movie about California’s state and local finances. Alas, although Frankie Avalon still is with us, the beauteous Annette has gone the way of fiscal solvency. Already in recent years, four Golden State cities have declared bankruptcy: Vallejo in 2008, and Stockton, San Bernardino,...
Post
Bathroom Break
Imagine this. You send your 13-year-old daughter to her first day of high school. She goes into the school bathroom, and standing there is a 6′ 2″, 19-year-old male student. She screams. But instead of school officials expelling the boy from school and turning him over to the police, your daughter is arrested for committing...
Issue