If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word democracy where Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life. (Just kidding: I shall wait for the...
Category: Columns
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Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
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Of Rats and Men
There are people, in all likelihood a majority, who are by nature obedient. Their lot is to play Sid Sawyer to whatever Aunt Polly comes along, whether the authority in question is a democratically elected leader or an up-to-his-elbows-in-blood dictator. As though stuck in some epochal centrifuge, they go with the flow, tirelessly, unwaveringly, always...
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Heartless Irony
What Maisie Knew Produced by Red Crown Productions Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel Screenplay by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright Distributed by Millennium Entertainment Some people should not have children. This is one way to read Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew. Another way, the way James preferred, is to marvel...
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Syria: Avoiding Another Quagmire
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned of the potential consequences of U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict. It could hinder humanitarian relief operations, he said, embroil the United States in a significant, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment, and strain relationships around the world. “And finally,” he...
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Halcyon Summer
Why is it that summers used to last so much longer back then? School would be out in early June, and by the time horrid September rolled around, it seemed three years had passed. What fun it was to be young, and for it to be summer! No homework, no need to stay in shape,...
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Goodbye to All What?
As far back as I can remember, I had the feeling that I had been born some time after the end of everything that mattered. Yes, there was still an abundance of material comforts and some vestiges of marriage and religion, but vanishing before our eyes—like the stars in the sky faded by street lights—were...
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The Culture War Crosses the Atlantic
The course of 2013 in France, Ireland, and Britain provides important lessons for those resisting the left’s attempt to remove Christian influence from public life in America. On April 23, the Socialist government of François Hollande succeeded in making France the 14th country to legalize gay marriage, something he had promised to do during his...
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A Fine Kettle of Fish
If you thought comedy was dead, think again. There’s always John Podhoretz, the ferociously bellicose neocon who makes Patton and Rommel sound like popinjays when he thunders away, urging Uncle Sam to attack and crush his enemies wherever they might be hiding. Beating the war drums is very old hat here in the good old...
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A Modest Proposal for Speech Control
Can we be adult about this? Can we finally say publicly what so many people believe privately—namely, that the whole Bill of Rights thing was a nice idea in its day, but it’s time to move on? Now, before you take offense, let’s think practically about this. Yes, the Bill of Rights has all these...
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A Vast, Vulgar, Meretricious Beauty
The Great Gatsby Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Baz Luhrmann Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce Why do studios keep trying to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a film? Fitzgerald’s extraordinarily vivid prose and his unmatched descriptive powers would seem to make it a natural choice,...
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A Scandalous Presidency
“Unfortunately you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all of our problems,” President Barack Obama told students at Ohio State on May 5. Some of these same voices do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that...
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Boston and the Big Lie
I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers—starting with the New York Times, of course—as typical American teenagers. Some Americans, is all that comes to mind. Why is it that after every outrage family members and friends of the perpetrators are...
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Music That Stirs the Soul
A favorite time for me at John Randolph Club annual meetings is the songfest. Invariably, there is someone in attendance who can sit down at the piano and play all the great, old American tunes that were once familiar to several generations of Americans. The melodies stir my soul. The accompanying lyrics evoke memories of...
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Time and Tide
I should like to live in a different time. Not in the sense of being corporeally present in an earlier epoch, with all its physical plant, its local color, and a bustling mise en scène, but in that metaphysical sense, akin to tempo in music, which previous epochs never neglected to set. Our own time...
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Oblivious
Oblivion Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski from his graphic novel The Company You Keep Produced by Voltage Pictures Directed by Robert Redford Screenplay by Lem Dobbs from the novel by Neil Gordon Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Oblivion seems to me an experiment in form following function. ...
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Topsy-Turvy
Titles shall ennoble, then, All the common councilmen . . . Peers shall teem in Christendom, And a Duke’s exalted station Be attainable by competitive examination. “Oh, horror!” cry the addlepated young noblemen in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Horror, indeed. Their world will be turned upside down if the Queen of the Fairies carries...
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Obama, Relationship Therapist
The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, and did it very well. W.S. Gilbert’s lines from Iolanthe seem applicable to President Barack Obama’s four-day Middle East trip, which ended on March 23. The tour was a “diplomatic triumph,” according to Reuters. “Obama returns . . . with diplomatic victory,” declared CNN. ...
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The Long Take
Beyond the Hills Produced by Canal+ Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by Sundance Selects Beyond the Hills is Cristian Mungiu’s fictionalized account of the widely reported story of an exorcism performed at a Rumanian Orthodox monastery near Tanacu in 2005. A disturbed young woman who had been living there had become violently...
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Classical Christian Marriage
You can almost always rely on conservative politicians to surrender their principles, even before the first shot is fired. Within a month of President Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were already selling out on the marriage issue. When the GOP leadership contrived the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), I said at the time that in making...
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A Neocon Anniversary
OK, the tenth anniversary of the worst foreign blunder Uncle Sam has ever committed has come and gone, but the post-anniversary headlines remain the same: “Explosions in Baghdad kill dozens and wound scores” (International Herald Tribune, March 20); “For Iraqis, no time for reflection, only desperation” (op. cit., March 19); “Iraq War Intelligence Was a...
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The Honest State
In the shadow of St. Peter’s in Zurich, a beautiful church with the largest clock face in Europe, I found myself chatting with a German tourist. Curious to hear that I lived in Sicily, he asked me what I thought of Zurich. “I love it,” I said. “I feel so at home here. It’s just...
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The Revolution of Greed
Do you remember Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street proclaiming that “Greed is good”? Unwittingly, he may have formulated a law about how religions rise and fall. Worldwide, the churches that succeed and boom, that win and retain members, tend to be the “greedy groups”—greedy, above all, for your time and commitment. They don’t...
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Excessive Misery
I’m miserable. But if you paid attention to the national news or dialed up the Drudge Report in late February, you probably knew that already. How could I not be, sitting here in my office in downtown Rockford, Illinois? After all, according to Forbes, Rockford is the third most miserable city in the United States....
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Coming Home
It’s 10:01 p.m. in Florence, and seven hours earlier in Chicago. According to the live map on the back of the headrest in front of me, we’re somewhere over Canada, making a beeline for Sault Ste. Marie, still in the daylight, but rapidly losing ground. As we turn ever more to the south, the darkness...
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In Praise of Nuclear Proliferation
Much nonsense has been spewed following North Korea’s third nuclear test on February 12. Outgoing Pentagon chief Leon Panetta declared that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are a “serious threat” to the United States. “I don’t know how you come up with a more dangerous scenario than this,” Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse...
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Bearded Hollywood
I’ve been writing a lot about Hollywood lately, what with yet another version of The Great Gatsby coming out, this time with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role of James Gatz. The best Gatsby until now was Alan Ladd, in a 40’s black-and-white movie I saw 50 years ago. Perhaps it was my youth, but...
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Tiburcio Vásquez
During the last four decades, California has been proving that demography is indeed destiny. At an ever-accelerating rate the state is becoming Mexifornia. So many Mexicans have flooded into California, nearly all illegally, that instead of the new arrivals assimilating to American culture they are Hispanicizing the state. This means far more than ballots in...
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Professions and Professors
You know what you hardly see around anymore? Professions. Professors—hell, yes, one sees professors around, even in backward Italy, pinched, untidy, jealous of beauty, suspicious as cuckolds in Molière, speaking with the forked tongues of p.c. texts. But surely “professor” is a title or rank, not a profession or vocation. At the dawn of the...
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Unspoken Promises
Promised Land Produced by Focus Features and Image Nation Directed by Gus Van Sant Screenplay by Matt Damon and John Krasinski from a story by David Eggers Distributed by Focus Features I thoroughly enjoyed Matt Damon’s latest movie, Promised Land. It channels Frank Capra’s spirit, featuring little people caught in the toils of corporate...
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Facts and Opinions
“I think it’s been very hard for Speaker Boehner and Republican Leader McConnell to accept the fact that taxes on the wealthiest Americans should go up a little bit, as part of an overall deficit reduction package.” This haplessly phrased bit of Obamaspeak is one out of many illustrations of a confusion between fact and...
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Second-Time Charms
Second-term U.S. presidents tend to focus more on world affairs than on domestic issues, for good or for ill. In January 1957, Dwight Eisenhower authorized the commitment of U.S. forces “to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence” of any nation that requested help against communist aggression. Ronald Reagan, after his reelection in...
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The Last Thing on Anyone’s Mind
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live, high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One, a German, is straight out of central casting of a Panzer commander; the other, an Englishman, more P.G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both...
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The (Mis)Information Economy
From digital broadcasts that allow TV stations to report more quickly from the scene of breaking news, to websites that can distribute information to tens of thousands of readers in mere seconds, to Facebook and Twitter and other social media that provide a “crowdsourcing” element, quickly able to detect and correct mistakes, the rise of...
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The New Cinderella
The salient difference between Cinderella and her sisters, unfortunately for all you defenders and upholders of the Protestant work ethic out there, is not that she eats her bread in the sweat of her brow while they eat sweetmeats, try on varicolored gowns, and loaf about. The salient difference between them is that Cinderella is...
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A Little Education
Wife’s away, and so, as befits children and bachelors, I sit at the breakfast table reading labels. Here in Europe, labels are quite entertaining for someone with a semantic cast of mind, as many are printed in all the languages of the Community states, plus a few odd ones, just in case some of these...
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Mercy Is Courage
The Hobbit Produced by New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Wingnut Films Directed by Peter Jackson Written by Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures For this month’s column, I’ve enlisted my son Liam to write the review, since he knows far more than I do about J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s film...
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Thoroughly Modern Millies
So I spurred my mule, and I went riding on down the road Minding my own business, ’n’ I wasn’t bothering a soul. So finally I rode into town, And I seed the man standing at the window, pulling off his clothes. Every time he’d pull off a piece, he threw it out the window....
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Managing the Quagmire
Twenty years ago Leon Hadar published Quagmire: America in the Middle East, an eloquent plea for U.S. disengagement from the region. He warned that American leaders had neither the knowledge nor the power to manage long-standing disputes involving faraway people of whom we know little. Attempts at meddling, he wrote, invariably made the various actors...
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Movie Czar
The latest school massacre has all the do-gooders crying for more gun control, yet few have touched upon the blood-splattering, shoot-’em-up electronic games that the unhinged nerd who murdered 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, played. His favorite was Call of Duty, a first-person-shooter game where participants use assault rifles, machine guns, and other weapons to...
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The Patton You Didn’t Know
Thanks to the movie, most Americans are familiar with George Patton—the crusty, outspoken, and brilliantly aggressive general of World War II fame. Yet few know of his exploits as a young officer. There is nothing about Patton’s early career in any of our standard history textbooks, an omission that is unfortunate. At one time we...
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A Penny for Your Chomsky
“O chom kolonka?” asked my son on the telephone. We’ve always spoken Russian to each other, he and I, even though Nikolai was born in London and never so much as visited the country of his father’s birth. “What’s your column going to be about?” I must admit I hadn’t known the answer till he’d...
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Enemies
Skyfall Produced by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Eon Productions Directed by Sam Mendes Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan Distributed by Columbia Pictures Lincoln Produced by 20th Century Fox and Dreamworks Pictures Directed by Steven Spielberg Written by Tony Kushner Distributed by Touchstone Pictures No less an authority than Vatican City’s daily newspaper,...
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Dead Souls
Barack Obama’s second presidential triumph has left many American conservatives feeling stranded. It is as if they have become aliens in their native land. Are conservatives simply sore losers, or does their sense of alienation correspond to a seismic disturbance in America’s political terrain? It is hard to say, but this much seems clear: When...
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One Crisis Averted
Barack Obama’s re-election, while socially, culturally, and morally disastrous for the country, may prove the lesser of two evils when it comes to foreign policy, according to some pundits. Perhaps, but only because Obama’s primary focus is on irreversibly changing the character and ethnic composition of the United States. Republicans, in the meantime, learn nothing...
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Cops on Camels
This is the best news I’ve had since both the governor of the state of New York and a congressman from the depraved city of New York had to resign because of sex scandals. The latest good news is that Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer. Unfortunately, the kicking...
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Predators
In an earlier phase of my career, I researched the subject of serial murder. What struck me repeatedly was how many of the cases defied the common stereotype of the lone Jack the Ripper figure, always a white male. In fact, multiple homicide is an equal-opportunity career: Many offenders are female, and all ethnic groups...
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To Call a Rose a Rose
Political correctness is a politically correct name for hypocrisy, but I have long noted that its practitioners share one peculiar characteristic: They don’t know what to call themselves. Political correctors? To put it somewhat allusively, theirs is an hypocrisy that dare not speak its name. Since what seems like time immemorial, homosexuals have described themselves—and...
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Poisonous Intoxicants
The Master Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company, together with Annapurna Pictures Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson The Master is another travesty by the supposed wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson. In 2005 he gave us his rendition of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil in There Will Be Blood. Unfortunately, he left out...
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Freedom From Religion
As the presidential campaign came to a close, religious questions sneaked surreptitiously into the national debate. The Democrats had an easy target: Governor Romney’s unusual religious affiliation, though since few Democrats know anything about any religion, particularly Christianity, they found it difficult to distinguish Mormonism from other not-quite-so-strange semi-Christian sects. Watching national commentators fumbling for...