A better class of illegal immigrant. A good three-dollar cigar. A Presidential contender who has once in his life done something that is truly worthwhile, notable, patriotic, or unselfish. Fewer people who know what is best for other people. (This may require giving the Deep North back to Canada.) A Presidential candidate who is...
Author: William Murchison (William Murchison)
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The Filthy Rich
I haven’t investigated, but I’m sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don’t know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something like, “You bet! Go...
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The Filthy Rich
I haven't investigated, but I'm sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don't know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something ...
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Teachers and Parents
Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current ...
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Teachers and Parents
Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current traumas of education proceed...
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Organized Coercion
The more it changes, the more it’s the same, hmmm? In this present instance, meaning our country’s seemingly fresh-scented wrangle over union power. The scent isn’t fresh at all, nor is the wrangle. The arguments are old, the question at stake is old: namely, when is the public interest served by giving organized coercion...
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Organized Coercion
The more it changes, the more it's the same, hmmm? In this present instance, meaning our country's seemingly fresh-scented wrangle over union power. The scent isn't fresh at all, nor is the wrangle. The arguments are old, the question at stake is old: namely, when is the public interest served ...
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Health Care Debate—At Last
A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won’t it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off? Nope. To Obamacare’s...
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Health Care Debate—At Last
A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won't it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off?
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A Role Model for Boehner
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away, and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in speakership annals standing beside the honored likes of...
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A Role Model for Boehner
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away, and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in speakership annals standing beside ...
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At War With the Military
The motive behind the proposed repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is, hmmm … what, exactly? A stronger military? Better projection of American might in tight corners like Afghanistan and South Korea? Well, not precisely any of that. The whole idea of opening military enlistment to professed gays is the furtherance...
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Those Whom the God Would Destroy…
As life in the 21st century gets loopier and loopier, the truly deranged come out of the woodwork, passing themselves off as benefactors of mankind, candidates for sainthood, etc. Maybe—who knows—candidates for another Pulitzer Prize: something The New York Times hardly needs, but self-inflicted moral grandeur can do odd things ...
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Those Whom the God Would Destroy…
As life in the 21st century gets loopier and loopier, the truly deranged come out of the woodwork, passing themselves off as benefactors of mankind, candidates for sainthood, etc. Maybe—who knows—candidates for another Pulitzer Prize: something The New York Times hardly needs, but self-inflicted moral grandeur can do odd things to you. The New York Times‘...
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Top—Heavy Schools
It was another day, you know—back when President James A. Garfield could define a university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” Which was to say, a great teacher—Hopkins being the renowned president of Williams College—needed only the opportunity to sit down, unencumbered, and teach. You know,...
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The Palin Perplexity
Sarah Palin is the best thing that’s happened lately to the right and the left, both at the same time. Much of the right pays her obeisance for mobilizing the troops and smart-alecking the left—which in turn loves her for splitting (so the left hopes) the right over her personality and track record. The...
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The Palin Perplexity
Sarah Palin is the best thing that's happened lately to the right and the left, both at the same time. Much of the right pays her obeisance for mobilizing the troops and smart-alecking the left—which in turn loves her for splitting (so the left hopes) the right over her personality ...
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The Tax Rate Racket
The flap over whether to extend present tax rates for the rich finds its center in a cultural proposition: Liberals, including rich liberals, either don’t like the rich or feel obliged to pretend they don’t. The argument official Washington will have this month over tax rates—Republicans on one side, President Obama on the other...
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The Tax Rate Racket
The flap over whether to extend present tax rates for the rich finds its center in a cultural proposition: Liberals, including rich liberals, either don't like the rich or feel obliged to pretend they don't. The argument official Washington will have this month over tax rates—Republicans on one side, President ...
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Collegiate Bread and Circuses
Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror! All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics gives the past a certain golden glow. You know what I’m talking about if you recall...
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A Nation Starting (Maybe) to Turn
A nation of 300 million souls—richest and most powerful in the world, for all its messes and perturbations—needs a turning radius wide as the future. But you know what—realization precedes intellectual assent, which precedes needed action. There's much to be hopeful about as the nation goes in for its electoral ...
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Atheism: What a Joke
Assuming, no doubt, our anxious world could use a good laugh, Stephen Hawking undertakes to provide one. He says the universe created itself. The theory itself isn’t the joke. The joke is the dogged persistence of atheists trying in the face of common sense to persuade the world as to the wisdom they see...
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I Spit on Your Grave
Flamboyant William Stewart Simkins, during his professorial heyday at the University of Texas a century ago and more, was known for his long, white mane and his charisma as a teacher of law. He wrote standard textbooks on equity, contracts, and estates. But, dadgum, he took pride all his life (1842-1929) in helping, as an...
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Secularism and the Mosque Flap
Let's say the mosque (you know what mosque) gets built, as it certainly might, public opinion notwithstanding. What's the next theological concession America's Christian churches get to make in the name of brotherhood, sisterhood, pluralism, world peace and amity, the reconstruction of America's image, etc., etc.? First it's one thing, ...
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Insulting Our Intelligence
What a good thing, from the Democratic perspective, so many of America's schools are in such miserable shape. It means, apparently, Democrats think they can insult voters' intelligence right and left and get away with it, at least until Election Day. After which, they'll think of some other way to ...
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Paul Ryan and the Perils of Realism
We've gone as a nation, in less than two years, from Hope and Change to
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Let’s Hear it for Free Speech
The media chitchat these days is of the media itself, and of, Lordy, how'd things ever get this way! You know what way I mean—the way it is now, with right-wing extremists (centered on Fox News and the Breitbart blogs) injecting lies and fables into the national bloodstream and the ...
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The Fate of the Book
Back in ye olden tyme, when graybeards would dismiss supposed ephemera like safety razors and indoor plumbing, the wise and knowing liked to dismiss the dismissers. They would recollect the days when urchins barked,
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Franky, Ma’am
You know someone is old enough to remember, let’s say, the Kennedy assassination when he shudders as some lout on TV giggles out a laugh-line that substitutes ass for the body part known in quainter times as the derrière or the behind. Without a beg-your-pardon, ma’am. It’s a wonderful new age, to be sure—one marked...
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Good For You, Joe Barton
Say it's not so, Joe—that you're actually sorry for mussing up the Obama administration over its treatment of BP. Congressman Barton, sir, never mind what the party leaders made you say in riposte to your own verbal thrust last week. You were right the first time—right to call out the White ...
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Adopting Indecency
A sentence from a recent New York Times Magazine profile clings to the mind, like lint. The profile is of Scott Brown, whose sudden ascent to the U.S. Senate fascinated America a few months back. In 2001, the story relates, when a colleague of Brown’s, a lesbian state senator in Massachusetts, “announced that she and...
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Recovering the Dignity of Truth
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
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The Fort Hood Massacre
It makes no sense to see Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as represented in at least one family account, as the victim of
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Comeback Time for Christians
The Holy Father—Pope Benedict XVI—offers to let Episcopalians and other Anglicans of Catholic disposition join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining characteristics of their Anglican identity. And who in the booming pagan market cares a flying broomstick what the pope does about anything? Not the Wiccans, an estimated 340,000 strong. ...
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Clink, Clank, Clunker
You can't make this stuff up. First, the name of the program—Cash for Clunkers. Then the origin, the fountainhead—to wit, the U.S. Congress. Then the results: unexpected demand for participation, unanticipated shortages of cash, bureaucratic unresponsiveness, public and congressional consternation. Many of the politicians who designed Cash for Clunkers want now ...
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The Gospel, Anyone?
Not that the secular world walks the floor at night worrying over the Episcopal Church and its waning influence over the minds of all decent and honorable Americans. The secular world lost this decent and honorable habit years ago and likely won't get it back, especially with Episcopalians themselves acting ...
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Mainline Marital Mélange
We know the stereotype, do we not? Eyes like marbles, jaw clinched tight as a bear trap; icy baritone voice; accusatory finger slashing the air. Yea, brothers and sisters, hear the word of the Lord, Who condemns . . . For some wacko reason, popular culture (you know what I mean—talk shows, movies, plain old...
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Thanksgiving 2008
Thankful for … what?! The question is bound to surface the moment heads incline in reverence at the Thanksgiving table, over pre-dinner drinks, post-dinner drinks, kitchen clean up, trash take out. Answers will vary. What won't vary is the ...
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Calling Things By Their Right Names
The placard in the photo of a recent rally favoring gay marriage asks, bluntly, “Family. Isn’t It About Love?” Well, hmm. You might indeed incline to such a view. Then, again, you might wish to broaden the perspective, in keeping with normative modes for understanding the foundational human structure we call family. You’d want to...
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Running Afoul
William “Hootie” Johnson, age 71, poor man, has fallen afoul of public opinion and sensibilities, for which the consequences thus far were entirely predictable: the scorn of the best newspapers; hospitalization for a coronary-artery bypass, an aortic aneurism repair, and an aortic valve replacement; now, news of restlessness on the part of the natives. Might...
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Archbishops of Canterbury
Archbishops of Canterbury, for all their essential powerlessness in worldly terms, are never as inconsequential as might be supposed. How about those great English accents, for instance? How elegantly the archbishop of the hour undertakes to speak for and to an Anglican Communion increasingly disunited in theological outlook, joined by habit and custom as much...
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Southern Gastronomical Unity
Why don’t y’all try to guess—go ahead—which American region, in its unofficial anthem, celebrates food. Answer? The South. Permit me, Suh: Dar’s buckwheat cakes and Injun batter, Makes you fat or a little fatter, Look away! Look, away! Look away! Dixieland. You see? We have been in the eating business a long time down here,...
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A Topic of Concern
Public-school finance, as a topic of concern, reminds us that the egalitarian impulse lives on imperishably. Mankind must be hard-wired to scratch the ears of the perceived—generally self-defined—underdog, before siccing him on the perceived top dog. Public schools, financed with public monies, were probably overdue their share of the action; but, boy, are they catching...
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A Politically Incorrect University
Texas A & M, founded in 1876, is one of those educational entities a certain kind of Texan recoils from praising too lavishly—the kind of Texan who went to the rival University of Texas and grew up deriding the Aggies as abrasive bumpkins. Traditions, masticated like a chaw of first-rate ’baccy, are hard to put...
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Changing Attitudes
Big government—is it back? Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But September 11 has demonstrably changed, and may continue to change, some attitudes regarding the exercise of government power. Bombing the hell out of Afghanistan may be one of those enterprises for which Americans value the services of the national government. (There may...
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Unconditional Surrender?
Amnesty for undocumented (as we nowadays politely say) workers from Mexico? It’s just another trial balloon, and the nice thing about trial balloons is that you can shoot them down. Ready, aim, fire. I do think this one, suitably ventilated, will flutter down to earth. I fancy the Bush administration, however kindly disposed toward Vicente...
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We Say Grace, We Say Ma’am . . .
The news descended with crushing force: I must be getting really old. Rising from the dinner table, I had pulled back my wife’s chair, and our waiter complimented me. He complimented me for the kind of civil and reflexive action to which my generation was bred in the post-World War II years? Ah, yes; he...