What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images . . . —T.S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead,” The Waste Land The body of the hapless American missionary John Chau has...
Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated. In it, he fingered long-standing economic policies pushed by Swamp residents and their donors for the benefit of a rootless...
Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast. The voice is the same, the tone is the same; so is the manner. Then, almost imperceptibly, you find yourself slipping—or rather being slipped—from...
Because of the Internet, old-fashioned travel agents are nearly as obsolete as ocean-going passenger liners. In their place a new sort of agent is arising: the migrant or asylum agent, formerly known as the people smuggler. The phenomenon has recently become a well-known one in Europe especially, as smugglers respond to the desires of their...
As the new Congress was sworn in early in January, the Republican Party unveiled a plan for its own assisted suicide. In fact, Mitt Romney got started before he was even seated as the latest senator from Utah. On January 1, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he accused President Trump...
Embracing both, and rejecting the United States of Now. Allen Tate, in 1952, argued that the first duty of the man of letters in the postwar world was to purify the language from the corruptions introduced by ideology and the destruction, more than physical, wrought by the recent world war. He was not the only...
One of the root problems facing our beleaguered world is that many of our contemporaries are belaboring the past as a burden, believing that the legacy and traditions of Western Civilization are a millstone around modernity’s neck. Cast off the shackles of the past, with its outmoded morality and outdated way of doing things, and...
What you might find on a long walk, a determined walk, a walk of exploration, you never know, of course, until you take the next step. And the next; and the next—in Rory Stewart’s case, across the constantly revelatory terrain of the borderlands shared since Roman times by England and Scotland. To what end? Do...
