The biggest mystery and conundrum of our time is not whether Stalin died a natural death, or why the CIA had Kennedy killed, but the difference between the types of individual that rise socially in the West and, respectively, in Russia or China. In the 1980’s my father wrote extensively of the problem of the...
Month: February 2015
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Justice for All
Five years before Michael Brown and Eric Garner would become household names, there was Mark Barmore. On August 24, 2009, Rockford, Illinois, police officers Oda Poole and Stan North were patrolling in a prisoner-transport van when they received a notice from a dispatcher that 23-year-old Mark Anthony Barmore was wanted for questioning in a domestic...
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Putin’s Uneasy Balancing Act
“Putin, the master of the game, controls all the pieces on the chessboard and carefully divides up the areas of power,” writes influential French columnist Christine Ockrent in her most recent book, Les Oligarques. Her view is shared by most Western analysts and media commentators, regardless of their position on the person and policies of...
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Up From Sharpton
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
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A Different Drum
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the south at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than ten percent.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your...
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Blame Bushmaster
The families of nine of the 26 people killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. The killings were carried out by Adam Lanza, a mentally disturbed 20-year-old living with his mother, Nancy. On the morning of the incident, Lanza shot his mother while she slept, took various unsecured...
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Education Reform
I enjoyed Christopher Sandford’s “It’s a Drag” (Cultural Revolutions, December). With memories of a teaching career beginning in 1960 in Zion, Illinois, and continuing through Montana, Indiana, Manitoba, Washington, and ending in New Hampshire in 2001, including secondary and elementary school and a passel of college English classes, I have a slightly different take on...
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Wealth Transfer
I just finished reading Claude Polin’s “The Quintessential Democratic Politician” (Vital Signs, November), and it was a gem. Yet even in this brilliant analysis of politics in a democracy the author brings up the Robin Hood chestnut, that in a democracy the numerous poor can rob the wealth that the rich have worked so hard...
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Rolling Stone Gathered No Facts
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
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LBJeb
You knew Jeb Bush was going to run for president; after all, assuming the worst is really the essence of conservatism. And, sure enough, he’s “actively exploring the possibility”—a half-measure that prefigures the weakness and tepidity of another Bush presidency. Conservatives tempted to glom onto an alleged winner might want to contemplate the wisdom of...
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Epiphanies of Grace
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” —Oscar Wilde, from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde wrote several first-rate plays, on which his literary reputation principally rests, and a number of mostly...
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Everyman’s Poet
Jared Carter, who has retired from a career in publishing, is a Midwestern poet of stature. He won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Poets’ Prize; he has had a Guggenheim fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is profiled in the Dictionary of...
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The Way of All Flesh
The Confidence Trap is a book that, in spite of its many penetrating insights, peripheral as well as central to its thesis, on further examination is less striking and original than it promised to be. Runciman begins with an introductory chapter about Alexis de Tocqueville’s early contribution to understanding how democratic nations cope with crises...
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Idealists Without Illusions
Like all relationships, the special transatlantic one is in a state of constant flux—warmer or cooler at different times, enhanced by empathy, marred by misunderstandings, riven by reality—but always affected by the personal qualities of the incumbents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. For a short but eventful span between January 1961 and...
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Dealing With the Devil
Ralph Sarchie exudes an aura of intense strength when he walks into a room. A fit, middle-aged man with heavily tattooed arms (pictures of his daughters and tough cop tattoos, like one that reads New York Untouchables) and a buzz cut, who speaks with a Queens accent straight out of Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas, Sarchie has...
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Baying for Broken Glass
The December 4 issue of Rolling Stone includes an article entitled “A Rape on Campus,” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Miss Erdely tells us about a University of Virginia coed (“Jackie”) who claims to have been raped by seven fraternity boys two years ago. The piece could hardly be more urgent, inflammatory, and, under closer investigation,...
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Groovy Solipsism
Inherent Vice Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon Birdman Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed and written by Alejandro González Iñárritu Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures You never know what you’ll learn at the movies. Watching the two films under review this...
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Mongrels All! or, Slaves With New Masters
Of late, our demographic soothsayers have been assuring us that by 2040 or thereabouts America will no longer be a Caucasian-majority country, and that with the eclipse of the white majority there will be, to belabor the obvious, no majority culture. For many this is cause for celebration. Among minorities, or at least those who...
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The Future of Minority Culture(s)
Two challenging words of the title of this essay stand somehow between us and ourselves, so that we will have to get around the distortions unnecessarily presented by minority and culture in order to see the freedom and even the substance that is closer than we are ordinarily able to perceive. The lesser is minority,...
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